Dictionary.com has chosen ‘67’ (pronounced six seven) as their word of the year. I wondered how steep the competition was for this dubious honor, so I went to the internet. Were there any words of the classical sense – you know, words that weren’t digits? Yes, there were, but they didn’t win, and some would not be considered a word but a phrase. So, I guess if you’re dictionary.com, the field is wide open.
According to Bing, the words ‘67’ competed against were agentic (having to do with AI technologies), aura farming (cultivating one’s style for online attention – kind of like what I do here), Gen Z stare (think aloof or disengaged), and overtourism (which I can understand since I live in Central Florida.)
But evidently none of them could hold a candle to ’67.’ If you would like to impress or embarrass your teenager and try to work it into a sentence, I will provide a definition for you. SPOILER ALERT: It won’t be of much help, but here goes:
Definitions range from the height of a basketball player to an exclamation to so-so. (I told you it wouldn’t be helpful.)
Dictionary.com says, “Because of its murky and shifting usage, it’s an example of brain-rot slang and is intended to be nonsensical and playfully absurd.” Yes, even dictionary.com appears to have problems defining the… I want to say word, but I just can’t. It’s more like a meme, which is something that is usually funny and spreads quickly through the internet. Like ’67!’
This is why everyone should use Merriam-Webster. I’m confident they would not use brain-rot slang as the word of the year.
ABC News refers to it as a cultural inside joke. I think that sums it up nicely.
A few months ago, Bob and I were visiting our North Carolina kids and grandchildren. Our 17- (pronounced seventeen) year-old grandson, Jett, commented ‘67’ to something that was said, and the conversation went on for ten minutes as we tried to figure out if he was punking us. Eventually, we just rolled with it and threw it into the conversation whenever we deemed it appropriate. At those times Jett rolled with it, too, or at least his eyes did. An eye roll or a groan is as good as applause from a teenager, so we had fun with it.
The positive thing about ‘67’ is that it isn’t derogatory, as far as I can tell. So, I’ll try not to act my age (69) and smile at the nonsensicalness of it all. I would have had a lot more fun with it two years ago.
Our youngest grandsons came for a visit, and I was prepared, except for the part where I wasn’t. I pulled out a few of our saved toys and placed the Brio train set where there was plenty of room for them to spread out and build a train village. And then it happened. Felix, our ten-year-old, wasn’t interested at all, but Oliver, who is six, sat right down and started creating. He put several tracks together and glided the trains around them. It took me back to earlier days when I’d watched his dad play with those very tracks. It was sweet, and after about fifteen minutes, it was over. I didn’t even get a picture!
When I say over, I mean the beloved train set which my children and older grandchildren had spent hours of enjoyment playing with, no longer was needed in our home. It was the end of the line. Our grands are so used to playing games on phones that these old relics didn’t cut it anymore. I began to notice the transition several years ago with our now 13-year-old granddaughter Layna. The five grands before her were more used to floor play and actual toys, but when they started to use video/computer games more, her interest in traditional toys waned as well. Felix and Oliver followed suit. That is the state of things. I shudder to think of creativity lost, plus the art of bartering for the favorite train. These were foundational play opportunities.
Hello? Is anybody there or are you already on your phone? I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to time on the stupid cell phone. But I didn’t see this coming, which happens more often when your grandkids don’t live near you. You lose track of what they’re into at any given time. But for me, this was not only the end of the line – it was the end of an era.
Perhaps I could have prolonged the termination of our train set if I could have gotten down on the floor and played with Oliver. That is what I typically would have done, but my current knee issues have already derailed anything that requires floor time. Since my recent knee surgery, I didn’t think it wise to put my caboose on the floor and play lest I needed an engine (or in my case an engineer) to help me back up.
At the end of the visit, the train was up for grabs. I always thought I’d give it to the youngest grandkids, but they are not interested, and I am okay with that. That train has left the station, albeit all too soon for this grandmother. But, with only one text, it has been rescued from the certain uncertainty of Good Will by my daughter-in-law Dacia who is only too happy to keep it on hand for when her boys have boys and girls of their own. Success!
These boys are in their late teens now, but I love this picture of them.
I sat on the couch with Felix and watched him play some kind of card game on his phone. He wanted to teach me, but my meager capacity to keep all those numbers and cards straight was more than I wanted to admit to him. I told him I’d learn it by watching him; he could teach me that way. It didn’t take. Now I knew how Oliver felt after fifteen minutes of the trains. It was enough. I’m beaten on both fronts.
It’s a good thing we have a pool. The boys don’t have easy access to one from their North Carolina home, so it makes up for a lot. I did play Marco Polo with them, though I don’t move as fast as I’d like. They didn’t care. We had great fun.
Any time with our kids and grandkids is special and I’ll play whatever they want me to play, except for Felix’s crazy card game or Clue. I do have limits. If I’ve never mentioned it before, my brain doesn’t work during the game of Clue. My kids took us to an escape room and my brain melted down like I was captive in that board game, trying to keep a good attitude when everyone was writing stuff on their stupid little clue sheets and I was making a grocery list on mine. Maybe that is why I never won.
I don’t like to come off as overly dramatic, but Bob does. I also don’t typically like to throw my husband under the bus, but if I did, he would insist it was a greyhound and not a school bus. It makes for a better story.
We’ve been together almost forever, but I can still remember the first time we went to the beach and I saw a big scar on his chest. He explained it was from a knife fight. That was hard to believe, but Bob assured me that the kid up the street from them made it a point to try to beat him up as many days a week as he could. Thankfully, Bob was quick – speed can really be a help to little guys like Bob who were on the skinny side as a kid. I was horrified that he would have to grow up defending himself to the neighborhood bully, especially one that wielded a knife. Bob took it in stride. I was reminded of a definition of comedy – tragedy plus time equals humor, but this wasn’t funny.
I’m not sure if it was one of his sisters or his mom who gave more insight into this scar years later, but the truth came out that the alleged knife wound came from going over the handlebars on his bike. The handlebars were missing their hand grips so that rough metal pipe sliced his chest open.
I will barely mention the scar on his hand that resulted from another knife fight. This one was with a pumpkin that he was carving for Halloween, but it was another story worth embellishing. Pumpkins can be aggressive.
Flash forward about 50 years and I hear Bob telling the story of someone with whom he had an encounter. It was a rough day because the other man had actually slit Bob’s throat. He pointed to the scar while the wide-eyed listener must have been wondering who would do that to a senior citizen. The answer was a surgeon during a disk fusion.
This all adds up to why Bob is fine with going to the doctor, though he’s not as fanatical about it as his father was. Those visits can yield good stories, and that is the sort of fodder that people of a certain age need to relate with their peer group and confuse their grandchildren.
Bob making a big splash for our grandsons.
Speaking of his father – Bob will never catch up with that man when it comes to wanting to go to the doctor. When Dale was ninety, we were returning from a dermatology appointment. (I took him to his appointments back then because he lived in an assisted living facility and Bob was still working.) He told me that he believed it was time for his colonoscopy.
I looked at this blind man who also had mobility issues and said, “Dad, I don’t think you could handle the prep.”
As he began to lodge a protest, I added, “You know, something’s got to kill you. You’re not getting a colonoscopy.” He gave in on that one, but only because he couldn’t make his own appointments.
I think about caring for our parents and hope it will help me when I’m in their shoes. Bob’s mother died suddenly in her mid-eighties. As for the other three of our parents – two out of three did not always make it easy on us as their care-givers. They weren’t too bad, and I know they were grateful, but it was hard for them to receive help and, therefore, challenging for us to give it. We want to learn from that. Aging is hard – very hard. Let’s try to do it gracefully like one out of every three parents. (Thanks, Mom!)
My favorite book series that I have ever read is The No. One Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. This charming series features a traditionally built lady who lives in Botswana. She is ready to begin life over and starts a detective agency. Mma Ramotswe has no credentials for being a detective, but she is wise and kind and helpful. Those three qualities along with her hiring of a quirky woman who boasts 97 percent on her graduation tests from a secretarial school, are all that is needed for this agency to take root.
From the very first book, the love of these characters and their home in Botswana also took root in me. Mma Ramotswe lives a quiet life, and she is endearing and traditional of all things Botswana. She drives a little white van, which she loves dearly and which her mechanic husband manages to hold together in response to her repeated protests when he suggests she buy a new vehicle. I just finished the 25th book in the series, and that little white van is still going.
I drive a little white car – not a van but an SUV. I remember back in 2014 when Bob suggested that it was time to look for a new car for me. At that time, I drove a 2002 white Ford Explorer. I loved that car because it had a third row, and I had space to corral grandchildren in it. Alas, he talked me into upgrading it to a 2014 Ford Escape.
This car had so many new features. It even would parallel park on its own (pretty much – I had to pull up near the parking spot correctly and man the brake). It also had heated seats, which was a new thing for me that I even took advantage of down here in Florida. The best feature was the ability to remotely start the car so the air conditioning could engage before we opened the door on a hot day and not be knocked over by the heat whooshing out the doors. I loved this car and never looked back on my former Ford.
When Bob and I recently began a conversation about upgrading my car, I was all in. Actually, it was my idea. We have several family members that would love a good used car that’s lived in a garage and was driven by a grandmother. That’s good marketing, but I had my sights on our 19-year-old granddaughter who wants to go back to college. Sometimes God lays out a direction so clearly. I love it when that happens.
I’ll cut through the details here. Ella is now the owner of my sweet ride, and I am driving something that is altogether different from my first car – a 1974 Toyota Celica. If I had thought about this car back then, I could have written sci-fi books. It is that different. My standard-shift Toyota didn’t even have AC as a standard feature. My new Kia Sportage has air-conditioned seats. And that’s not evening mentioning all the cameras around it. It’s like having paparazzi monitoring my every move. Honestly, it’s a little intimidating, but I’ll adjust.
The night before my Escape went to Ella, I was a little anxious and didn’t sleep well. It took me a minute to figure out that I was sad to say goodbye to my faithful Ford. When I finally figured that out, my first thought was – that’s ridiculous. My next thought – but not unexpected.
Goodbye, old friend.
The first night that the car was in Ella’s possession, I dreamt about Ella driving my little white car and hitting a deer. Oh dear! What’s wrong with me? Emotional about a car? As it turns out, yes.
Then I thought about Mma Ramotswe. I know in the future there will be a book written about her having to replace her little white van. When I read that book, I know that I will understand her inner turmoil and the sadness of losing a four-cylinder friend. There will be no judgement from me, and I will shed a tear with her as she sends it off into the sunset.
At 15 years of age, I was not yet allowed to go on a proper date, but Bob could come to our house and hang out. That was the set-up for double dating with my grandparents, who lived with us at the time.
I had long observed the fun my parents and grandparents had while playing that weird card game with the funny name, pinochle. Not only did the deck consist of 48 rather than the standard 52 cards, but they only spanned from nine to ace, and there were two of each. There was bidding involved, after which they would put down and count their meld (the cards that were shown on the table before taking tricks). Counting meld values was not like anything I had seen before – 2, 6, 21, 28. Not too educational and above my head as a kid. Then they’d pick up the meld, place it back in their playing hand, and start the trick-taking part of the game. Points would be counted and then they’d see if they “made” their bid.
For my parents and grandparents, it was their “thing.” My siblings and I were never allowed to play, but I can remember standing next to my grandfather (the kindest man in the world) and watching. I remember laughter – lots of it. Now and then I heard my feisty grandmother accuse the guys of cheating when she and mom would lose a hand. (The ladies always teamed up against the men.) Sometimes she would get up and walk around her chair to change the outcome of a game if she and my mom were losing. You do what you can!
Mom and Dad never offered to teach me to play, and I get that. It’s a little complicated and this game was a way of relaxing for them. Teaching teenagers a challenging game at the end of a workday would not be relaxing; but when Bob started hanging around our house, my grandparents taught us. This is my best example of how grandparents, having more time on their hands than parents, can be more patient and long-suffering with kids and, frankly, give the poor exhausted parents a little break. We had a blast with them.
Bob was not around his grandparents much when he was a kid, so my grandparents became his. My grandfather loved Bob, and years later when Bob asked me to marry him, he got the blessing of my grandfather who told me that Bob was a good man. When Grandpop’s health began to fade and it was time to pass things along or throw things away, he gave Bob his “office.” This consisted of the desk that Grandpop sat at to pay his bills and do correspondence. It was a cheap old thing but packed with meaning.
In 2014 my daughter, Dena, and I chalk painted the desk and it has new life at her house. With four children, you can always use an extra desk.
My children watched Bob and I play pinochle with my parents their entire childhood. When they started dating seriously, they asked us to teach them. At least I think they asked, Bob and I may have forced it upon them. Playing cards is a great way of spending time getting to know each other. Also, if you can’t hold your own playing a game with us, you really should know that before becoming part of our family. They needed to go into marriage with eyes wide open. I’m not saying we’re competitive, but our friends would.
We play pinochle regularly with three out of four of our children. Perhaps we were too worn out to teach the youngest to play. I do remember offering when he was engaged to be married, but that was a time when all kinds of new-fangled games were coming onto the scene, and somehow, we never pressed it. Thankfully, we have other games to play with them, so the day is saved!
Our daughter’s children have asked if they can learn to play, and she has told them that will come when they have an intended spouse. It’s either a rite of passage for them, or Dena and her husband are waiting for Bob and me to teach them. It’s hard to say.
I’m not sure I’m ready for that because since those days of playing single deck (48 cards) with my parents and teaching our children, we have upped the difficulty by playing double deck – that’s 80 cards. The nines are removed and now there are four of each card jack to ace. You have 20 cards to hold in your hand at the beginning and that’s challenging in itself. The bidding is competitive instead of one bid per person. I confess to loving this game even more than the original, but my hands get tired and it’s challenging to shuffle all those cards, Still – worth it!
My first and only time getting quadruple pinochle back in 2017. That’s my “take that” look as Dena and I collected the 150 points for the quadruple pinochle plus an additional eight for double marriage in trump. If you don’t play the game, you may be getting an idea of how complicated it is.*
Just last week Bob and I were at our son, Jesse’s, house playing with him and his wife. Dacia and I always team up against the men, just like my grandparents and parents did before us. The guys won the first game (we play to 350), but it was relatively quick, so we played another. Dacia and I were losing badly when I got the hand. THE HAND! I could not tell my partner, of course, but I was ready to bid all night.
You may know nothing about pinochle but let me tell you that when I got a double run (150 points) with other meld to boot, we went from the cellar to the ceiling and won the game in style. Take that! Yes, gloating is an important part of this game. It is expected and tolerated, because if it’s not your turn to gloat this time, there’s always the next game. And I mean always.
*We have found variations of scoring in different websites, but as with so many friendly games, we use established house rules. That’s to keep us kind.
One of the many ways that I’ve probably damaged my kids has to do with Halloween. When I was a kid growing up in Maryland, I liked it quite a lot, unless it was cold, and my mom made me wear a jacket over my costume. I would have rather frozen to death than wear a coat. What was she thinking?
In those days, Halloween involved going through our own neighborhood and knocking on the doors of people we knew. Mrs. Harrington was my favorite as she would give out home-made, hand-decorated cookies. You could not get away with that kind of love in today’s climate. One time as I went through my bounty, I discovered that, like Charlie Brown, I had received a rock – and not the kind of rock that I enjoy today. Unlike him, though, I had plenty of candy. Sometimes it even lasted until Christmas!
Fast forward to having children of my own. By this time, I had become a Christian and was increasingly sensitive to the darkness of Halloween. It seemed the days of mostly cute and fun costumes had shifted to an abundance of costumes and billboards that emphasized evil and scariness. I hated taking our kids out to restaurants and stores where the decorations were scary. I didn’t like subjecting them to that.
When our oldest two were little, we took them trick or treating (one time, as far as I can remember). They donned store-bought costumes and those horrible plastic masks that make your face sweat, and we hit a few houses. It didn’t seem like a big deal, but every year I grew more uncomfortable with it. I didn’t like frightening creatures coming to our front door either. How does one protect their children from all of this darkness? That was our dilemma, and let me tell you, we didn’t handle it particularly well.
Who are those masked children?
We couldn’t take the kids out of the house to avoid the unknown quantities arriving at our front door, because there were so many everywhere. In my head, it was like a zombie apocalypse married Freddy Krueger – a regular nightmare for me. Of course, I may have been a tad over dramatic. I knew that the Bible taught to abstain from all forms of evil, but parts of Halloween were cute – though those parts weren’t as prevalent anymore, plus I wasn’t sure that should matter. So, every year we wrestled in our minds with what to do. One year we even turned on the sprinklers thinking that would keep things quiet, but our neighbor called and told us they were on. She thought it was by accident instead of by design. Sigh.
My best-ever Halloween involved our small group from our church gathering at our house for an evangelistic outreach for our neighborhood. We shoved all our furniture to one side of the house and invited the neighborhood in for a magic show. My dad, who was a magician, came and performed for the kids (and their parents). He had a unique way of weaving the gospel story into his show. Also, that night it rained, so we were packed to the gills.
So, sorry kids. I hope this is the worst way we’ve messed you up. Some of you have pointed out that it was okay for us to take grandchildren around, but you were denied the pleasure. Yep, you are not wrong; that’s inconsistent, too. Though, that’s really on the parents, not the grandparents. We were simply serving while remaining wishy-washy on our Halloween stance.
This was the year that our daughter and her family were briefly living with us while getting ready to move out-of-state. Bob and I had purchased a Hashtag the Bear costume for a church program and Bob put it to use to hang out with the grandkids as they wandered our neighborhood on what may have been the hottest October 31st ever.
I know that most, if not all our kids and their families, like to participate in Halloween trick-or-treating. Even though I have no credibility in this area, I’ll still offer advice to try to keep the kids more focused on Jesus every day and less influenced by the things of this world, including Halloween. And do what your conscience allows. No guilt.
To sum things up: I don’t like Halloween. I was sometimes an inconsistent though well-meaning parent who in a lot of ways was growing right alongside our children. Grandparenting is easier. Now I can buy all the candy we want and get it 70 percent off the day after Halloween. The prices are much less scary.
You never know what you’ll bring home from traveling. I’m not talking about the occasional cold or COVID, which we have brought home on a few occasions. I’m talking about memories, which tend to inevitably fade or morph a bit over time. It helps to recount those stories to keep from losing them altogether. We also bring home journals, photographs, and souvenirs, all in an effort to remember. It has been our practice to collect small items which we can display in a printers letter tray which has hung on our wall for longer than I can remember. At least it did until two years ago when we turned our home office into a guest room. At that point the letter tray was stuffed into a closet and all its contents wrapped and placed into a box.
You might not think it from my prior statement, but this letter tray is special to us. It was part of my father-in-law’s printing business, which was housed in their basement in Maryland. It’s probably an antique – maybe not when he bought it though. When he stopped using the trays, he gave a few of them to us. We kept one and gave a couple of them to friends. That brings me to our Scandinavian cruise which we took in July with two of those friends, Mike and Moggie.
As Moggie and I perused the Scandinavian shops, she pointed out a few things that would fit in the letter tray. Apparently, I had stuffed the memory of it in the closet with the tray itself; but Moggie awakened the idea of filling it anew with things from this trip. We had a great time together searching out small items. By the time we got home, I had quite the collection.
As we went through our stash of stuff, I showed Bob all the treasures which would go in the letter tray. He was very (read – moderately) excited and asked me where I would like to hang the tray and did I even know where it was. Of course, I knew, I told him. I was pretty sure anyway.
I would not put it in the guest room because some of our guests are young and it would be too tempting for them to completely rearrange things and/or break them in the process. The hallway seemed to be the right place. Yes, the hall. Only thing, I’ve been wanting to repaint the hall. We have been in our house for eight years now and down that hall we had hung a decent number of pictures of our kids growing up. I was ready to make the change from these 30- to 40-year-old pictures, which was kind of a big deal for me.
To be clear, I don’t paint. I have tried that in the past and I am stunningly bad at it. So bad that it is far easier for Bob to paint than it would be for him to fix the mess that I would make with a paint brush and live with me while I attempted the job. He was happy to paint the hall, but the rest was on me. I was fine with that arrangement.
I took down the pictures – over 20 of them. Most of them were 8×10. I didn’t want to rehang them, but I didn’t want to pitch them either. A trip to Hobby Lobby yielded a photo album with pages I could slip my 8x10s into without having to agonize over them. One larger picture I simply photographed with my phone and then threw it away. I was on a roll!
I chose my favorite paint color – Universal Khaki, aka taupe. By now the paint job had grown into our foyer area, but in a couple of days, Bob had it looking great. It took me two weeks to finish my part. We had company coming in and I couldn’t have my dining room looking like this when they arrived. That gave me a helpful deadline.
I wanted fresh pictures on display. The section of the foyer wall with our grandchildren’s pictures was also pitifully dated, so that had to change. My idea was to hang a variety of pictures which would warm my heart when I looked at them. They didn’t have to be professional quality. They just had to make me smile and there had to be a representation of all of our kids and grands.
On one of my many trips to Hobby Lobby, I took the original artwork for the cover of my book, Always Look for the Magic. They were very helpful in picking out a mat and the perfect frame to display this prize that had been in my drawer for five years.
In addition to trips to Home Goods to buy new frames, I also pulled out several frames which I had purchased over the years with the good intentions of filling them with pictures. Some of these frames had made the move from our old house and I decided it was use them or lose them. So, while I was at it, I made collages of Bob and me in our travels for our bedroom walls.
In another closet were shelves that a few years ago Bob and our friend, Al, had fixed up for me to display some of the painted rocks from the Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive. Somehow, I remembered them and now they are part of my hallway display. After all was said and done, I had redone pictures in seven rooms in our house.
When the grandkids came to visit, they all liked finding themselves on display down the hallways, even if they didn’t necessarily love the photo choices I made. I asked them which ones they didn’t like and assured them with a smile that I would not be making any changes for another eight years at least. They really didn’t mind. They are the best.
One of the toughest parts of this project was getting the letter tray, which started the entire process, hung in the proper place. Funny thing, after all the painting, shopping, agonizing, and framing, it seemed the hall was not the best place for it. I ended up hanging it in the living room. Bob didn’t say a word.
True Confession: I love the Marvel movies. Unless you think me immature, no, I wouldn’t marry them. I’ve been married to my favorite engineer for going on 48 years, so clearly, he ranks above Marvel.
My grandchildren like the franchise, and I love anything that brings me on to the same plane as them. I have one grandchild who stands head and shoulders over the rest in her love for Marvel – Ella, it’s her picture from 12 years ago that is on my blog header. She is my go-to for all questions Marvel, and I must admit she is more than a little obsessed. I love that about her! As a former collector of various useless things, I get her obsession and try to live vicariously through it whenever possible.
Marvel mixes action, adventure, and sci-fi with enough humor to lighten the load of explosions and annihilations. As you may have guessed, they had me at humor. At the top of my list of humor-adding characters is Thor, Antman, Drax, Peter Quill aka Star-Lord, Rocket, and Groot. The last four star in Guardians of the Galaxy 3, which was released to theaters last week.
I perused the internet to see if there would be any promotions going on at the theaters during opening week. The best I could come up with was a commemorative ticket available only on Sunday, May 7. We made on-line purchases for our tickets for that day, showed up at the theater, showed them our digital ticket, and they gave us a paper one. How is that for a weird turn of events?
I never would have expected to see any of the actors from the movie at our local Altamonte Springs theater, but there he was, poking out of a brick pillar – Groot! This is the first celebrity with whom I’ve ever had my picture taken. I’m glad I was dressed appropriately. I must say I blushed a little when he said, “I am Groot!” He’s quite the charmer.
I’ll give the movie 5 stars. Plus, I love the music from Guardians. My toe is constantly tapping out the tunes from Peter’s awesome mixes. You can’t sit still in your seat – it’s that good. I was sad to see the end of the franchise, but one never knows when the Guardians will show up in a universe as crazy as Marvel.
Meanwhile, Groot continues to make me smile. He graces my Christmas tree every year and hangs around my house with little plants popping out of his head. Sometimes when I don’t know what to say to Bob about a subject, I just say, “I am Groot.” That seems to cover it.
One of my favorite scripture verses is Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
My thoughts on that verse have changed from when I was a young Christian. My emphasis initially was on him giving me the desires of my heart. That sounded like a great deal, but truthfully, I had no idea what it meant to delight in him or what I should desire, and I was often guided by my emotions or felt needs.
In later years I realized that as I got to know Jesus, he changed my heart’s desires and gave me new ones that would bring me closer to him and actually be good for me – unlike some of the weird things I had asked for in the past, most of which I cannot even remember.
Today is my blogging anniversary. When I started this blog 12 years ago, my desire was to highlight the lighter side of life, which of course includes at the top of the list – Jesus. He is the light of the world. I also wanted to make people smile or laugh – lighten their load for a moment. I wanted to offer something fun, humorous, or interesting and definitely non-sad. (Is that a word?)
Not long before I launched my blog, I went to Honolulu to visit my daughter and her family who were working there for several months. (My sweet husband was moved to send me there when he saw how much I missed them all. As grandparents, you do what you have to do!)
The kids took me to beautiful Hanauma Bay for a day of sunshine and snorkeling. I was captivated. I took lots of pictures that day, but one stood out to me as the embodiment of pure delight. That was my five-year-old granddaughter Ella enjoying the day while floating in her pink inflatable ring. I needed a picture for my blog header and this one filled the bill for me.
Now Ella is 17 and getting ready to graduate from high school. She is no longer that carefree girl but a lovely young woman. Among her senior pictures was a shot of her in her happy place – on the horse that she loves. It took me back to that little girl over a decade earlier because the face was the same – pure delight. It brightened my day and I am sharing it with you as I mark 12 years of blogging.
Thanks for reading. My blog has changed over the years, but so has my life. When I began, I had no idea Bob and I would travel so much, so it has come to include my travel diary. (There will be more of that in the future, too.) We’ve increased from 5 to 8 grandchildren. We’ve moved from the house where we raised our family for over 30 years, and now my mom and sister live with us. We’ve been through happy times and sad times, but Jesus has been faithful through it all. I appreciate each of you and hope you’ll keep following my journey and even have a chuckle or two.
It had been ages since we left Florida for Christmas but missing our grandchildren in Virginia was a force we could not fight. They are eight and four—more perfect ages of Christmas wonderment cannot be found. When Bob and I realized that the window of Christmas morning amazement through their young eyes is not going to be open much longer, we decided to venture north. North to the cold. North to the potential of snow. North to where you need socks every day. That is the pull of grandchildren.
Our other grands all lived close-by when they were young, so holidays were easy. This year we would celebrate four different days in order to encompass our whole family, beginning with the youngest grands and their parents on Christmas morning.
We headed north on I-95, which is always a treat. We chose to leave on the Wednesday before Christmas and take two days to drive there. We quickly discovered that we weren’t the only ones hitting the road. It was crazy crowded with a lot of stop-and-go. We reminisced about making the trip from Orlando to Maryland when we were raising our four kids. We would do it in one long shot just to avoid checking into a hotel. We have concluded that not only were we younger then, but there were less cars on the road – or is that our age talking? We can’t be sure.
We had a hotel reservation in Florence, SC, which should have been about a seven-hour trip. It took us ten. Side note: What is wrong with the South Carolina interstate road system? Everyone else has more than two lanes. Get with the program!
You never know what you will encounter on a road trip. We sure didn’t expect to find a Quincy’s Family Steakhouse across the highway from our South Carolina hotel. The last one in the Orlando area closed in the 1990s. Our memories of taking our children there were as sweet as honey butter, so resistance was futile. (Plus, they were the only open restaurant on the strip.) The big draw was their yeast rolls. I swear mouth memory clicked in as soon as I saw their sign. As we parked our car, I began to salivate. Would they still have those fluffy sweet rolls and honey butter? Are the steaks still mediocre? Does my mouth have a memory? Enquiring minds and hungry tummies had to know.
It looked exactly like the Florida ones of 30 years ago.
Quincy’s was a welcome beacon in Florence, which we guessed was a city that was on nobody’s foodie travel list. It was a restaurant that time and HGTV had forgotten. I was giddy with nostalgic delight.
The crowd was light, and technically not a crowd.
They advertised a Wednesday special, steak strips and peppers and onions, but they were out of it. The only steak they had was a ribeye, so that’s what I got. It was the skinniest ribeye that I had ever seen, but you pour A-1 Sauce on it, and you’ve really got something. A mouth full of memories. I haven’t poured sauce on a steak in years, but here in Florence, it was the right thing to do. So when in Rome, or Florence, ask for the A-1.
Yummy yeast rolls – worth it!
I think we beat the crowd or perhaps the crowd had come and gone and eaten most of the steaks before we arrived. Either way, we had a blast—a blast from the past—and great yeast rolls and a skinny steak. The staff was friendly in that Southern way that you can’t help but love, no matter how much you had to smother your steak in A-1.
That night as we slept in our warm hotel bed, the sky opened up and rain came down in torrents, which continued for the first five hours of our drive. We were grateful when it gave way to a light rain, but it turned our 5.5 hour trip into 8 hours. But four or five hours along the way came another restaurant surprise just in time for lunch.
We got off the road at Colonial Heights, VA, ready for fast food and needing to get out of the car. Chick-fil-A was out of the question. The line was looped around the building and intersecting in three different points with Walmart pre-Christmas crowds. This was far more dangerous than driving the interstate in rain.
We exited that line fast, and that’s when we saw it—another beacon of light in the form of fast-food delight. Arby’s. And not just your regular, run-of-the-mill Arby’s—the world’s largest Arby’s!
There was plenty of parking and practically no line inside, begging the question, why is everyone at Chick-fil-A when you can sit in a ski lodge setting with a hot roast beef sandwich? Granted, we waited in the short line nearly as long as we usually wait at the Chick-fil-A, but why wouldn’t we?
Check out the size of the dining room. This is only part of it.
Bob waiting in a short line that probably took as long as the Chick-fil-A line. But the roast beef and curly fries were yummy.
Yes, they even have a fire place. All us chilly Floridians wished it was burning.
Finally we reached our destination and were reunited with our son and his family. Warm hugs were all we needed at that point, that is until the temperatures plummeted and the pipes froze and I remembered why we moved to Florida. I had not experienced single digit temperatures in a very long time, not to mention the -15-degree wind-chill factor, which kept me from entertaining the idea of leaving their house. I’m pretty sure I went into a hibernation stupor that was only relieved by my son and sweet daughter-in-law providing me with a wearable blanket for the day and an electric blanket for night.
But it was worth it to see those faces Christmas morning.
We are so blessed with our children and their excellent choices for spouses and amazing children, but maybe next Christmas they can come to Florida.
Life on the Lighter Side 