Northampton Street Connexions Gallery Garden "Put yourself first. I've had a lot of loss in my life. I lost my father young, I lost my brother young, and you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of other people."
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Sing opened Plum House up on Cattell Street eight months ago. He prides himself on how healthful his food is. "We opened on College Hill because here there are nice people and rich people and Lafayette College is here." "Is this the first restaurant that you've owned?" "No. I owned before a couple restaurants. I have almost twenty-three years serving." "What's it like to run a restaurant? Is it easy? Difficult?" "For right now difficult because the economy is down. Maybe the economy is going to be at least ten years before it goes up. It's a tough business--it's gonna take a little while to run the business." "If people were going to eat here, what would you recommend?" "What I recommend usually depends. Old people come in here, we want them to be healthy because my sauce, we don't use chicken broth, we don't use salt, and no MSG and it's more healthy food for them. Totally we use organic--everything. So most people come here, anybody eats it, they stay." This is Debra from The Posey Peddler on Cattell Street. Her favorite flower is something fragrant: "I love when there's a flower in the room and you know it right away." Me: "What's the coolest part about being located on College Hill?" Her: "The ebb and flow of the college. It's all exciting in September because it just gets going again, and then we go through Christmas break, and then they're gone and they come back in January, and in May there's all that excitement for graduation. So, it really kind of rejuvenates you every single year because there's a new class every year. We have students that live upstairs and there's always a new group, so it's fun. I just like the ebb and flow." Me: "What's the coolest part about working with flowers?" Her: "Ohhh, flowers make you feel awesome! It's neat to be able to give that *to* somebody. You know, to take a beautiful creation and hand it to somebody and see them smile. It's wonderful." Northampton Street Connexions Gallery Garden "I met my significant other on a blind date, through a mutual friend who kept telling me that I needed to meet this friend of hers, and I asked her about him and she said, 'He's a musician. He's fantastic.' I was like, 'No. I don't want to be with a musician and I never want to date a musician.' And three months later she kept hounding me, hounding me, hounding me, I met Mike and we've been married for almost eight years now. Oh, and it was love at first sight… for him!" I got a lesson in how to cane a piece of furniture and then he told me his story as he kept on weaving strands of cane... "When I was fourteen, my mother and father had an antique repair business down in Bethlehem, and that's how I got into furniture repair, with my parents. I'm fifty-eight years old now." -"And you love what you do?" "Yes I do, and I'm totally blind. I wasn't always totally blind. I was visually impaired as a youngster and into the teens, and finally I did have a light sensitive eye problem. When I was thirty-two years old, the retina detached in my good eye and it blinded me. I had surgeries at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, and Dr. Freeman got some back for a couple of years, and then it went out again. We tried again the next year and I could see lights in the ceiling and neon in the window at night, but I couldn't see anything else." -"How has being blind affected your work?" "It really has not. I'm also a massage therapist besides this. A musician too. I play piano, keyboard, guitar. My father played saxophone; he was a blind saxophonist. I inherited his alto saxophone and I've been looking into teaching. I want to take a blind student on." "My choice of my career has defined who I am. Right now I'm in IT." -"How has that defined who you are?" "It's actually all about if you like what you are doing. I work with many people and get to meet new people in all of my projects and I get to know them and their new cultures, since I am going to other countries, too." Easton Farmers' Market, Weyerbacher Wednesday "Never underestimate your own strength. Never underestimate your own power as a human being. You can do great things, and it's not so much believing in yourself but believing in what you want to do with it. Every day is trying to figure out how to be a better person, how to have courage and get up and do the things you have to do. It's really believing that you can make the difference." -"Who gave you this philosophy?" "My grandmother. She brought us up to live that way, and Easton's the first community I've come to that I've been able to understand that and live that every single day." Easton Farmers' Market, Weyerbacher Wednesday "As we go around in our little lives, we forget about the bigger picture in the world, and the bigger picture is that we're all human beings. We all deserve to be loved. And what seems so important and so powerful one day could be meaningless the next day and I think that people tend to get too caught up in the minutia of things and we forget why were here. It's about love. And that's a hard lesson for a lot of people to learn: it's not about money, it's not about who has the most oil or land, or who's the most famous or who has the prettiest clothes. It all goes back to love. I'm still learning that lesson; I'm trying to buy a house this summer, and I'm actually going to be on my third house, trying to go through the inspections and stuff and I just got turned down on an offer I made, and they didn't tell me their other offers. But, you just figure everything happens for a reason, it's not that big a deal, it's not the end of the world. It's a lesson I'm still learning and I'm still trying to live that, you know? West Berwick Street, South Side "If you could live anywhere, where would it be?" "Probably in Texas. I took a trip across country when I was five to California to visit my relatives out there and I remember going through all of the big long tunnels in Western Pennsylvania. We went through Joplin, Missouri, and actually, the car broke down and we had to get a new motor, so we stayed over for two or three days there. Things that stick out in my mind are going through the Mojave Desert and seeing dust devils, and lots and lots of farmland everywhere going through the midwest. Stopping at Teepee Towns that you get souvenirs and they have, like, snakes and all kinds of reptiles. Lots of wild horses were in the desert at that time; I remember them. And I remember the Pacific Ocean--it felt weird being on the left side instead of on the right with the Atlantic." "So, after all that, you've settled on Texas…" "Because I like cowboys, and I like rodeo, and I like horses, and I like that Southern hospitality... That's Texas." Ky opened up Dreyus Kids, a clothing store for children, a couple of months ago. Here's what makes her so drawn to making kids happy: Third Street "My son, he gave me a real eye-opener. he's eight and already has his own way of wearing things. At two, he used to come down the stairs every Saturday morning dressing hisself up with a cowboy hat, a chain, some shades, some shorts and some rain boots. So it's about letting children express theirselves and I like that. I like the freedom; I like that they don't think about what anybody else feels about them. I want each child to feel royal." Centre Square "I decided a long time ago that I would be a novelist and I decided one day to sit down and start writing a book. That kinda set my whole career path in motion and what I want to do with my life. I've been reading books for a long, long time and I love literature and the art, so I decided I would contribute to it. The book is a fantasy novel about huge, epic wars between elves and humans and wizards and demons that are trying to destroy their world. It still has a lot of work to go." -"When's the projected finishing time?" "I wanna at least go for about two more years and work on it until it's absolutely flawless." His friend, off camera said, "Tell him what you were contemplating three minutes ago," so I asked him, "What were you contemplating three minutes ago?" Him: "Ha! I was contemplating identity development, moratorium, diffusion, foreclosure, and achievement in the context of higher education and how digital media influences the experiences that people have who go to college for the first time. I'm curious how this technology affects experience." How you look at something from the beginning generally determines the outcome of it, if you come in positively oriented and open-minded, willing to accept what happens instead of having an expectation of it. It's something that I've sort learned along the way and I've just kind of melded into my traditional routine; you know, go into work every day knowing that it's going to be a great day. If you hit a big challenge or a big problem with a positive mindset and a conquering ideal, you're gonna win in the end." Centre Square "I hiked the Appalachian Trail. There were definitely times I wanted to give up." -"You hiked the entire thing?" "I did half of it, and my girlfriend got sick, so we wound up having to get off. It was awesome. I woke up next to a bear--I slept in a hammock tent and just woke up and the bear was sniffing me, and I yelled and it ran away. But it was kind of freaky having a bear next to ya." W. Berwick Street, South Side Spring Garden Children's Center "What made you decide to become a teacher?" "A little two-year-old girl taking my hand, walked me over to her book corner and asked me to read her a story, and I wasn't even an employee yet at Spring Garden. I guess I always wanted to see what children could bring out into the world, and when I started working with Spring Garden, I started at the young pre-toddler, and went to school age, and I just loved their interest and curiosity about everything, and I loved to have them share their ideas and their stories; just their excitement, because when they get excited, I get excited. And that helps me build a strong educational program with children actually learning and enjoying. I have a story for you: I had a boy who I could not get out of block corner; all he did was play in block corner. He graduated with a degree in engineering from the University of Florida. One of his first projects was rebuilding the World Trade Center. When the Towers crashed, he helped build the Freedom Tower. Hey, all!
Sunday, August 3rd will begin our BlinkPix retro week. We're posting the best of BlinkPix each day on our Facebook site at Facebook.com/BlinkPix. If you haven't liked us yet on Facebook, go do that now, and tell your friends to do the same! We'll be back to posting new content on Sunday, August 10th after we've tweaked up the site. Thanks for the past five months of support, and here's to many more! --Kev Northampton Street "I moved to Texas for awhile. I went down there and I found out I was a pretty good writer. Since then, things have really blown up. I met awesome people, did awesome things and continue to do those things now. Right now I'm writing a series of short stories and I eventually want to move up to writing scripts, but right now it's short stories until I get some things down and learn a little bit more. See, I had gone over my buddy's house and there were people filming on his property. We hung out, and it was cool being on the porch watching him. Well, come the end of the day, the director came up to me. He said, 'I heard you talking all day.' He said, 'You're crazy, man. You ever think about writing?' I said, 'No.' He said, 'You want a job working on this movie we're doing?' He brought me on as a set designer that day. I moved back here a couple of weeks ago and continue to email him back and forth. It was awesome." |
These are the stories of the people of Easton, PA Archives
August 2018
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