A lighthouse is romance; it guides a sea captain to safety with it’s gentle prism of light, almost like the hand of god. It guides as a soulmate guides his love; protecting her from the jagged edges of the shore , protecting her from the storm . Her beacon of light , her beacon of hope. her North Star.
Jlozier
Yours is the light by which my spirit’s born: – you are my sun, my moon, and all my stars.
e. e. cummings
Photo by JLozier
Love and Happiness Jloz
It was a thursday morning and I had alot to do. The dishwasher was broke and the water heater was broke. The weeds were growing and the floors needed mopping. Even though Kaos was happening I lay awake thinking I need an adventure. Usually when I need an adventure but have limeted time and gas money I have to have a close adventure. I decided to take a drive, of course camera in tow looking for something fun! Well as I drove thru the country side through the rolling hills of Pa, through farm land and small country towns I was amazed at the beauty of it all. I found incredible views and horses grazing and incredible houses and structures but I kept driving. I was in a town called East Berlin and I saw a really cool country cafe which I made a mental note I need to return. The town of East Berlin was Named after Berlin Germany. Then I saw a sign for Biglerville, Pennsylvania. That was the town I wanted because I read there was a country store there that was 100 years old and Dwight D. Eisenhower had visited there!.
Biglerville is a borough in Adams County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 1,200 at the 2010 census. The National Apple Museum is located on West Hanover St. in Biglerville.[1] The borough is served by the Upper Adams School District and is home to Biglerville High School.
As I entered Biglerville I started to get excited to find this famous Country Store. Ok so there it was; I had arrived. Surrounded by small town store fronts this business surely stood out. Right out front was a sign stating that this was the famous country store you had read about in all the newspapers and magazines across the country!! 100 YEARS OF FUN! The Thomas Brothers Store!
Check out the sign!
As I entered the store there was a little old lady sitting on some boxes opening some new merchandise for the store. Her name was Marion, my middle name! She had on bright gold specialty shoes, a bright salmon colored shirt with a big pink hairbow in her hair. Right away she informed me that she spray painted her shoes herself. She welcomed me to the store but she was on the phone talking to a vendor or customer or publisher. She is having a book published about her and her business. I didnt find out why but the store is run by her and her sister Jean but yet it is called the Thomas Brothers Store. I thought that was a coincidence since my name is Jeanne Marion. Anyway, she welcomed me as she finished her phone call. I started to walk around trying to wrap my eyes around all the differnent nooks and cranny’s of this very old and disorganized country store and Museum. Marion inforrmed me later that she went to NYU to study fashion so the store is part fashion show, part vintage and general goods and part museum peppered with photos of history of the store and nearby Gettysburg and presidents etc. You can tell Marion’s Love of Fashion in her front window.
Here is Marion’s love of Fashion!
I forgot to mention the wonderful music playing from the 30’s and 40’s that you hear as soon as you walk in. Pop Standards were playing which in this day and age would be thought of as Jazz standards. It immediately got me in the mood for a vintage treasure hunt. She got off the phone and I asked her if I could take some pictures and she said as long as they were good. Ha! Marion has a sense of humor but I guess I already knew that when I saw her spraypainted blinged out specialty shoes. I decided to ask her if I could take a picuture of her. She said yes but as I started to focus she said I have a better place you can take my picture so help me up! I said Ok are you sure it’s not too much trouble and she said no. So I helped her up and we shuffeled over to her counter. She said this way I can get a picture of her and the pictures in the background of her Daddy with the President when he visited the store back in 1960. There was also a picture of President Lincoln and her one and only husband. Marion told me that the president really loved country stores and he liked thier store so much that he gave her father and her a very expensive gift which is located in the nearby Library that Marion owns in Biglerville.
Here is Marion, in the background you can see her father and Dwight Eisnehower who visited there in 1960.
She told me that she went to NYU for Fashion and she met he husband ; her love there. They were married and he died very young at 22. I asked her if she ever married again and she said no. I said why, your so pretty and she said they all wanted to boss me. The didnt think I knew anything. I said who they and she said all the men. She said she never met a man she liked; loved as much as her first husband. You can see a picture of him in this photo, the handsome fellow with the pipe.
I walked around one more time and came across some more pictures in the Museum part of the store. I definatley want to go back at Christmas time. She then showed me the merchandise she was opening and I fell in Love with it. I just found the perfect present for my mother for Christmas!! I can’t share that picture until after Christmas!
After I was done looking I told her I would come back another time. She wanted to know what I did and where I was from. She asked what I did for work and she asked me to sign her visitors book. She said she met so many people that she couldnt keep track and I should write details of myslef under my name. We talked about her book coming out and she told me she wished she could buy regular shoes but she had problem feet and she only has that one pair of shoes. Ok, by now I realized it was getting quite late so I paid her “CASH ONLY” No credit cards taken for the perfect Christmas gift for my mom. I told her I had to get back home to make dinner. She handed me a flyer about the store and she then instruced me where to get myself a bag behind the counter. I told he I would come back and she grabbed my hand to hold it and said please dont forget to come back. I said Of course I won’t forget , how could I forget. I said you will see us around Christmas Time and she said ok as long as you promise. What a sweetie. I had a great time but now I had to get back quick; time was tic tocking away! This was just what I needed to refresh my creative juices and get my Retro Fix. So if your ever in Biglerville; five miles from Historic Gettsburg take some time to smell the roses and meet Marion in a 100 year old Country Store. Maybe you will find the perfect gift too!
Love and Happiness, Jloz
Just Sharing ….Here are a few of the songs that mattered to me over the years… and the musicians who made them. Songs I never forgot.
Bonnie Raitt
Right Down the Line
Julie Driscoll
If you should ever leave me
Solomon Burke
Don’t Give Up on Me
O.V. Wright
Nobody but you
Nat King Cole
Nature Boy
Curtis Mayfield
Your so Good to Me
Love and Happiness,
Jloz
Today was like an early morning cry kind of day. Like when you wake up and the first thing you do is cry. That used to be a routine for me. A habit almost. Realizing another day is to take place and the overwhelming and all encompassing strength it will take to get out of bed and get thru it all. So first a cry. I don’t do that much anymore. 
pic credit: JLozier
It was like that today. It was a grey and gloomy day. It rained all day. I drove in that rain all day and listened to Billie Holiday . It was the right music to go with the mood. It almost made it like a soundtrack to a sad and dreary movie drama. I felt like I was in my own movie. A little bit of out of body experience today. I had to take some pictures as I drove.
I can’t help but get emotional when Billie sings. She embodied Heartbreak, every pore on her body oozed with heartbreak. She shared it with us in small doses of three, four and five minute songs. Just enough to always leave us wanting more.
Pic credit by google.
Here’s some of the songs that shattered me today.
“If the Moon turned green”
“You Better Go Now” was always one of my favorites.
“You’ve Changed”:
Yeah it was a Billie Day. Gloomy Thursday. Everything I saw looked gloomy and with the back drop of Lady Day Singing everything was that much deeper.
Here is a picture of a Alter I took today in Paterson NJ. I call it ” Paterson Life” for obvious reasons. I was making up stories all day about this alter trying to fill in the blanks about why it was there and what young soul it was for. Very Sad 😢
pic credit : JLozier
Here is a picture I took today of a Red House with a graveyard peeping out the back. I wonder who lives there? Newark NJ 
pic credit : JLozier
Here is a picture of a pair of birds on the waters edge, are they mates? I think so. Then a single black bird in flight while all his friends sit perched in the nearby tree filling in the bare branches. These two pictures were from Haverstraw, New York.
pic credit : JLozier
I’m not sure what the forecast calls for tomorrow but maybe the sun will be shining. One can hope but beauty and joy can be found in the gloomy days as well. There is beauty in the tears and heartbreak, in the solitude of lost souls that are no longer on this earth. In the naked cold wet earth and bare lines of nature before spring blooms. The beauty Is always all around us.
Love and Happiness
Jloz
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
I love you.Love and Happiness,
Jloz.
Just a short little note to my fellow bloggers today. Merry Christmas! I also wanted to thank all my angels out there. You all know who you are. The holidays wouldn’t be special if we couldn’t tell the ones we love how much we love and treasure them. I hope you all have a Very Merry Christmas and I appreciate you all who follow this blog.
I hope you all enjoy a healthy and happy day with your family and friends and if your alone then I hope you take comfort in your solitude because that can be a beautiful gift in itself. And please don’t ever forget ” every time a bell rings an Angel gets his wings”
Image by google.
Love and Happiness and Merry Christmas.
Jloz 
Coney Island is and always will be ‘the people’s playground.’ It’s a place where people of all backgrounds come to have a good time. ~Harold Feinstein
There is no rule book about this.
Look , if your going to read my blog and hate me for it at least take the time to understand what I am actually saying. I have all these white guys who are very angry at me because of my blog ” but it’s tradition ” about the advertisement world in the fifties. When I said men were king of the castles and advertisements catered to white men wasn’t a dig against white men. It was the truth about the ad world during that time. I mean there weren’t a ton of ads on TV that were targeting blacks or Hispanic or any other minority that I noticed growing up. I was not saying white men were bad, or sexist or any of that. I was saying the ad world was targeting the mostly white male market and rarely targeted the white woman in the fifties!. I am not talking about now. I am also not saying white men were sexist but things were different back then. I also know that people all over the world have been discriminated against somewhere at sometime by somebody. Everyone. I also know that all kinds of men can be sexist just as not all men are sexist. There are no blanket statements here. I was once in a convenient store where an older black woman was harassing the Indian cashier saying he wasn’t an American. She looked at me and said right right ? We are american but HE is not. I kindly said to her that I think she was wrong and I want no part of this. The cashier was very upset and very embarrassed by this event. So see I understand that anyone can harass or degrade anyone else. There is no one group of persons that holds the market on degradation. I am not hating on white men. If you think that your not reading the blog correctly or you’re not Understanding my Intent. I mean my father is a white man and he was everything to me. How can I hate white men when my most significant role model was a kind, loving and honest white man. If you disagree with me and want to hate on me that is fine but please read it and really understand what I am really saying . That’s why there are pictures of old advertisements from the fifties in the blog. I’m sorry if I upset people but I really thought it was clear what I was trying to convey. I don’t hate any one group of people. That would go against everything I believe in and have believed in since I was a child. I love everyone. I’m not a hater of any one group or persons. Peace.
Love and Happiness,
Jloz
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.- Charlie “Bird” Parker
I’m a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration- joy and pain sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll. – Cornel West.
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