When you were a kid, was a trip to the grocery store fun for you?

Oh man, it was for me.

People who know me know that I still like a reasonable amount of store stops. There’s something appealing in checking out grocery stores, department stores, big box stores, little locally owned shops, the whole enchilada. I like seeing what’s new. I am always startled by the mid-July return to stores of back-to-school supplies but I love all those fresh notebooks and folders and pencils. I love the onset of Halloween season and could spend hours looking at every possible variation on masks and decorations.

But even grocery shopping is fine with me and has been since I was a kid.

I spent a lot of time going to grocery stores with my dad. He was the primary grocery shopper in my family. In fact, I have almost no memory of my mom in the supermarket. She wasn’t a big shopper in any way. Clothes shopping just about pushed her over the edge.

My trips to the store with my dad, however, were real treats for me.

I have only vague memories of Marshall Carter’s Madison Street Market. It seemed big to me at the time, but judging by the KFC now occupying its former location it must not have been all that big. My only distinct memory of it was that it seemed to be built on two levels. It seems like you had to step down to get to the rear of the store.

I loved going to Jack Gommel’s butcher shop. (I love seeing Mr. Gommel behind the butcher counter at Marsh these days too.) My dad and I would start at one end of the L-shaped butcher counter, buying baloney and bacon (when we didn’t have a supply from our own hogs) and hamburger (when we didn’t have a supply from our own cows) and the like. We made our way, shuffling along the butcher case with the other shoppers, from beginning to end, then ducked down the aisles to pick up the random canned or packaged good.

Dad and I often went to Marsh or Wise or Ross too, but Gommel’s stands out in my memory, as does the Eavey’s grocery store just off South Madison Street. Eavey’s was a favorite stop for me because of the magazine rack near the elevated office at the front corner of the store. I would peruse the magazines and comics there while Dad wheeled his cart around the store.

The magazine memory, of course, is somewhat unrelated to grocery shopping and more closely connected to the glimpse of the forbidden that Eavey’s magazine rack offered. Because there, on an upper row, were the kind of men’s magazines that most boys wanted to get a look at. They had names like “True” and “Man’s Life” and usually featured stories about hardy men surviving bear attacks and blizzards and brutal Pacific islands during World War II.

I spent most of my time at Eavey’s with my head whipping back and forth from the magazines to the aisle nearest me to make sure my dad wasn’t walking up behind me.

That’s because, in addition to grizzly mauling stories, the magazines featured cheesecake photos of models. The bikinis the women wore were probably modest compared to what we see today.

But take my word for it: They represented something you didn’t see every day in Cowan or Stick City. Even though Playboy and its imitators were in existence even then, those were beyond my grasp and my expectations.

The men’s magazines – and monster magazine and comics – in the rack at Eavey’s, however, were just an added bonus that helped ensure that any time my dad headed toward his pickup and asked if I wanted to go to the grocery, I was ready.

Other than a tendency to waste an entire weekend watching a “Real World” marathon when my family was out of town, I haven’t watched MTV in a while. I still catch a few minutes of the channel’s annual movie awards show, which is silly fun, now and then. I might try “Teen Wolf,” which looks intriguing, when I have a spare minute. But the reality TV genre that “The Real World” spawned doesn’t appeal much.

And there doesn’t seem to be much on MTV these days besides reality shows. Same for VH1, which used to be a showcase for the videos that MTV had already abandoned but is now consumed with shows about celebrity wannabes and never-gonna-bes.

But the purpose of this blog entry isn’t to criticize MTV today but to remember MTV back then.

After all, the channel’s 30th anniversary is upon us.

Okay, let’s think about that for a minute. Thirty years.

Holy crap, we’re getting old.

I still remember vividly the heyday of music videos in the 1980s. Like every young adult at the time, I turned in to see every lame and cool video that premiered. My friend Brian and I practically raced to his apartment to watch the premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video in 1983.

And the VJs. I loved the VJs. How cool was J.J. Jackson? How cute was Martha Quinn? How amazing was it to realize Nina Blackwood appeared in Playboy?

Although some of the videos are painful to watch now, they seemed like milestones at the time. How cool it was to see some of the biggest hits of the day come to life. Oh, and the David Lee Roth videos too.

While I enjoyed MTV, I think I liked the overnight videos show that aired on TBS even better. For five or six hours, the channel showed back-to-back-to-back videos interrupted only occasionally by commercials.

I stuck with MTV for years, even after videos were being replaced by programming. I loved the game show “Remote Control,” loved Jon Stewart’s show and the aforementioned “Real World.”

Of course, it seems like a million years ago now. But it’s been only 30 years.

Only 30.

I really like my iPhone, even though it’s not the newest generation and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. It lets me check email and Facebook and Twitter and, oh yeah, text and make phone calls.

And while it might be too much to expect that a complicated collection of plastic parts that does all those things also takes good pictures, the iPhone takes pretty good ones. Maybe nearly as good as a standard digital camera.

Here’s a couple I’ve taken this summer. One is of Chinese terra cotta warrior replicas at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and the other is of the interior of the Grove Arcade in Asheville, North Carolina.

If you’re in Asheville – a very cool city – you should check out the Grove Arcade. It’s a monument to how the best-laid plans etc., etc. In the 1920s, Asheville millionaire E.W. Grove wanted to construct “the most elegant building in America.” It was to be a 14-story tower and one of the largest buildings in North Carolina. But Grove died and the tower was never completed. In fact, only the base, a couple or three stories high, was completed.

Most of the tenants were evicted and the building was taken over by government offices during World War II, then the building sat empty for decades until it was finally restored and reopened with shops and offices in 2002. This photo shows the building’s main atrium.

There’s a subset of the mystery genre called the “cozy” that features genteel detectives and killers and then there’s the type of mystery I like to call a “crusty.” These stories feature a cop or investigator – usually middle-aged or older – who would rather be hunting or fishing and drinking a couple of beers than solving crimes. These guys are often loners, maybe even misanthropes, but often have a small group of cohorts on whom they can depend. They’re usually softies at heart but show it only through their affection for their grown children or dogs.

There might be no better representative of the crusty right now than Walt Longmire, the Wyoming sheriff who is the central character in a series of mysteries written by Craig Johnson. The first is “The Cold Dish” and the latest is “Hell is Empty.”

Longmire is sheriff in the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else’s business but rarely sticks their nose in it. He’s no spring chicken. The series is set in the present day but Longmire is a Vietnam vet, and at least one of the mysteries springs from his time as an investigator there.

Although he’s a loner – living in house mostly unfinished since the death of his wife – Longmire has friends, including Henry Standing Bear and Victoria, his big-city born deputy and sometime love interest. His daughter and his dog further humanize him.

Johnson, who lives in a town of 25 in Wyoming, writes clear and concise stories that draw you in immediately. While they’re crime novels not unlike those that Robert B. Parker wrote, there’s enough of the feel of a western to them to appeal to fans of that genre.

Inspired, no doubt, by the success of the Elmore Leonard-based crime drama “Justified” on FX, the A&E cable network is making a “Longmire” movie starring Robert Taylor as Longmire, “Battlestar Galactica” star Katee Sackhoff as Vic – inspired casting there – and Lou Diamond Phillips as Henry.

They’ve de-aged the characters a bit for the movie but if they hit the kind of solemn tone that CBS has found with its adaptations of Parker’s Jesse Stone books, they could have a winner. I’ll be watching and I’ll be reading Johnson’s terrific series of books.

My family ate out tonight at a Muncie restaurant and had a perfectly fine experience. We like to patronize both local and chain restaurants, mixing it up when we go out to eat. A favorite is a favorite, whether homegrown or the bright idea of somebody elsewhere, but we feel good when we’re patronizing locally-owned eateries.

While we – like a lot of people – have been eating lunch and dinner at home more in the past couple of years in large part because of the economy, eating out is still a part of our lives.

But I’m startled sometimes to remember how little my family went out to restaurants when I was a kid.

It’s not uncommon for us now to eat dinner out two or three times a week, but going to a restaurant was a rare thing when I was a kid. I’m not even talking about special occasion-type dining out. Maybe it was because my dad – a factory worker and farmer – was the sole wage-earner in the house and money seemed dear if not tight. There were not a lot of special occasions that involved an expensive meal out.

But maybe it was because there just weren’t that many restaurants back then.

Is that possible? I know there were restaurants around Muncie – several downtown, including the Rivoli diner and the Chinese restaurant, among others – and several on the southside, where we lived, including the Pixie Diner, Jimmy Carter’s Skyline, the near-downtown Big Wheel and a smattering of others.

But I honestly can’t recall a restaurant my family patronized on a regular basis … except for McDonald’s. I still vividly remember my dad driving into town to get hamburgers and French Fries at McDonald’s on the occasional Friday night. He would bring home the sack and my brothers and I would fall on it like wolves.

And my mom, bless her, would hold back a hamburger to offer me late that night when “Sammy Terry” was on Channel 4. I really wanted to watch Sammy’s old movie offerings but it was hard for me to stay up that late. So mom would offer me a nearly-midnight-snack of a McDonald’s burger as a waker-upper. I will forever associate McDonald’s burgers with my mom and Sammy Terry.

My parents ate out a lot more after I was an adult, partly because they felt like they could afford to and partly because my mom in particular felt like she had cooked enough for one lifetime.

But my dad was still inclined to cast a skeptical glance at the prices on the menu, even when he wasn’t picking up the check. I think growing up during the Depression, scratching for a living and putting in long hours in a hot factory for most of his life left him less inclined to throw a lot of money around in restaurants. Except for the occasional bag of burgers from McDonald’s.

I’ve just finished reading “I Am Not a Serial Killer” by Dan Wells and enjoyed it a lot.

I didn’t know quite what to expect when I started it, even though I got a hint from looking at the dust jacked for the latest in the series about teenager John Wayne Cleaver. The cover blurbs suggest that Cleaver, 15 in the first book, is a sociopath and serial killer who, like Dexter in that book and TV series, turns his murderous attentions to victims who deserve to die.

There’s a bit more to it than that, however, and I’m not going to spoil it for you by spelling it out.

Suffice it to say that if you remember those darker episodes of the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in which the authorities believe that Buffy is a psychotic killer when, really, all she’s doing is destroying demons and monsters … well, this book will resonate with you.

Wells is a clever writer. He maintains a propulsive momentum and very appealing characters. I could totally imagine this book being adapted as a TV series despite John’s graphic homicidal tendencies.

Besides, what teenager hasn’t imagined committing a gruesome murder or two?

Wells, like steampunk writer Cherie Priest, also maintains an interesting and varied blog if you want to check it out.

I’m switching up my reading and going into the next installment of Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire book series, but I’m looking forward to starting Wells’ next John Wayne Cleaver book soon.

I wrote the other day about my history with Captain America: Discovering the character when I was in elementary school and an older neighbor gave me some of his comics; admiring Cap and feeling some kinship to him because he fought in World War II, like my dad.

So the “Captain America” movie that came out Friday was kind of like seeing a comic book geek circle completed. Someone – everyone – else has rightly pointed out that the little kids we were back then certainly never expected to see the comic characters and stories we knew and loved turned into big-budget, big-time movies.

Seeing “Captain America” last night I found myself experiencing that same sense of disbelief. To see characters like Captain America, Bucky Barnes, the Red Skull, Dum Dum Dugan and (spoiler) Nick Fury on the big screen makes it seem as if the geeks have truly inherited the earth.

The movie’s a lot of fun. What happens after the end credits is even more fun.

Most fun of all, however, was watching the movie with my son. He’s not as big a comics fan as I was at his age. How can a modern-day kid possibly be, with other interests – video games, the Internet, his own phone for criminy sake – at hand? But he knows the characters and enjoyed the movie. And he enjoys the opportunity to tease me about my geeky interests.

I told him when I tucked him in last night that I never thought, when I was a little kid, that I would be taking my little kid to take to a Captain America movie.

“A little kid?” he responded. “I’m not a little kid.”

I’ve been to the Delaware County Fair here in Muncie three times so far this week. Twice was for work and once was to take my son and one of his friends so they could ride the Screamer and Freak Out and all the other rides.

I still enjoy the fair, but I’m saddened by how small and ordinary it seems now. I know my memories of the fair in the past are filtered through the haze of years, but I swear the midway was bigger and everything seemed more … dangerous in the old days.

By dangerous I don’t mean the possibility that a fight will break out between various groups of young toughs. Frankly, most of the young toughs seem to be pushing strollers these days. Parents seem younger and more tattooed these days than in years past. And while you’re at it, get off my lawn.

But there seemed to be an aura of danger and the forbidden about the fair back then. As recently as the 80s or 90s there was a sideshow that featured performers who could drive nails up their noses – even if there were no two-headed calves.

Casting back even further, I dimly remember attending the fair with my family and glimpsing, over in the distance, what appeared to be women dancing in backlit windows on a carnival facade. Even as a kid I had the impression that there was something taboo about that attraction. I dimly remember some of my more adventurous older male relatives peeling off from our group and heading in that direction. I also remember being herded away from it by my mom.

I still remember vividly a caustic clown in a dunk tank taunting my family members as they went past. Of course, he was just trying to get some of us to come over to pay to throw balls in an effort to soak him. To accomplish that, he called out, “Look at those hillbillies! It looks like they don’t get a lot of practice walking on flat ground.”

Can you imagine the fair offering an attraction like that these days? As much as we might joke about carnies and their propensity for annoying male fairgoers and hitting on females – one year at a local fair a female friend of mine was encouraged by a game operator to pack her bags and join him in his trailer – the modern-day fair is not only smaller but blander. The freaks, geeks and weirdos are gone and the sideshow has been relegated to a pop culture museum.

… as is obvious to those seeing my photographic work.

Nonetheless, I like to take pictures. I take ’em with my phone and point-and-shoot cameras and whatever is handy.

This is one of my favorites, taken in 2009, a few months after BorgWarner closed its transmission plant in Muncie. An auction of tools, equipment and what-have-you was held and I got to go into the plant to look around. And take pictures.

The enormity of the plant – 1.2 million square feet and a half-mile long – is amazing but can be hard to communicate in pictures. Here’s one anyway.

If you’ve been near a TV or movie theater this summer, you might be aware that “Captain America: The First Avenger” opens Friday. The movie adaptation of the classic Marvel Comics character is intended to introduce the patriotic warrior – introduced in the 1940s, revived in the 1960s and a staple of comics ever since – to moviegoers. The character will be a main player in “The Avengers,” a big-screen movie of the Marvel superhero group that opens next May.

While I reviewed and wrote about movies from 1978 to 1990 (first movie reviewed: “Animal House.” last: “The Two Jakes.”) and sometimes got to see them in advance, any inside track I had on movies – other than insight from some friends – is long gone. I haven’t seen “Captain America” and don’t know if it’s good or not.

I hope it is (and early word of mouth appears to be good) in part because Cap – Marvel’s writers and editors were adept at creating an intimacy among themselves, their characters and their readers – was always one of my favorite characters.

When Cap was reintroduced in the 1960s – found frozen in ice and thawed out by Iron Man, Thor and the other Avengers – I was an early comics reader. Even at a young age, I found the character appealing. Like my dad, Cap had been a U.S. soldier in World War II. The war was less than 20 years gone by that point and to many of us seemed like just yesterday.

But the comics, which were often melancholy, established Cap and his alter ego, Steve Rogers, as a man outside of time. Twenty years out of date – now 70 years! – Rogers awoke to find that most of his associates were long gone and that society had changed. Rogers was not a flag-waving stick-in-the-mud – there was a period in the 1970s when, disillusioned by government corruption, Rogers even gave up the Captain America identity and became a man without a country – but he was a man of honor who stood up for his beliefs.

He was an outsider but a leader of men and women, a symbolic figure who disavowed jingoism (for the most part; it was the early 1960s, after all) and a heroic figure who, if he didn’t always know exactly what to do, figured it out.

Cap was a prominent player in one of my earliest comic book memories. An older neighbor, Mike, gave me his copy of Avengers #4, in which Cap is reborn into the then-modern world. I don’t have that comic anymore – boy I wish I did – but I still think about it. It helped introduce me to a world of the fantastic leavened by real, everyday concerns and cares.

If the movie evokes some of those memories, it’ll be a success for me.