All Around Pennsauken

By Bob Wagner, AAP Columnist

I am frequently faced with scratching out a column, due in minutes. I sit, staring at a blank page, and nothing comes popping out. Not so this month! I am forced to reign in my enthusiasm and try desperately to separate the cascading thoughts pouring out of my feverish brain.

I have just returned from the garage. The cold is coming! I feel it in my old bones when I sit in my favorite camp chair, the better to gaze at my collection of debris. I need to prepare my snow removal equipment for the winter attack. Doing so early would be the smart thing to do. It’s probably why I never do it. But here is where the brain starts to pump out ideas. If all of you readers rush to the place where you store your snow removal stuff, and prepare early against winter’s onslaught, it will never snow! Nothing bad ever happens when you are prepared. Go! Run! Don’t walk. Clean those spark plugs. Check the salt supply. Find the snow shovels, windshield cleaners, and ice chippers. Dig out boots, scarves, gloves, and heavy socks. If you all prepare today, it follows that the snow and ice will go somewhere else. And I can sit here in my favorite camp chair, sipping on a semi-adult beverage, ignoring my own buried winter equipment.

Which leads me to my newest commercial venture: I’m thinking of putting out a line of products that will be popular 12 months of the year, never have a slowdown, or deal with that seasonal thing. Sales rooms won’t have to redecorate, replacing one season’s product with another. It’s genius. It’s POLAR!

Polar stuff will keep you warm while shoveling the snow – the snow came because you didn’t go out and get ready like I asked – then there will be polar products to keep your adult beverages icy cold. Yeah, that’s it. One image, all seasons. Picture a big hairy white polar bear, and a simple slogan that says, “Buy Polar.” That says it all.

The idea came to me while sitting in my favorite camp chair in the garage, listening to the radio. I heard someone talking about buying “polar,” and that started me off. I could be rich!

And lastly, I sit wondering why these lovely folding canvas and aluminum chairs are called “camp chairs.” I do not camp. I have no tents. I enjoy flush toilets, microwaves, air conditioning, electricity, and a general bug free environment. Yet my little fold up chair is called a camp chair. Why?

For some time, the garage held leftover stuffed furniture from the houses of my friends and my own. In short time, the furniture acquired a certain dusty, mildewy, messy sort of ambiance. This required moving and disposing: two things I am not good at. Hence, the nice little folding chair. Light weight, wide bodied, with a cute little cup holder in the arm; it even has a place for a trash bag on the side. Lordy, Lordy, if it flushed, I’d never have to get up. Wait! This could be another “Buy Polar” product. Put on your fleece, slide into your warm and toasty boots, and then plop down in your polar camp chair with a nice cold beverage. You can have it all. Remember, you heard it here first. “Buy Polar” works for me.