You'll be sad to know that the Seymour Community Center no longer thinks that senior citizens are our most valuable national resource, since this poster (which I fell in love with last summer at a similar gathering) was missing:
So if any of you reading this blog consider yourself to be an 'older American', apparently you're not worth as much as you used to be!
Anyway, the gathering was as much fun as can be expected. My brother and I shared a moment of abject horror when the woman who had been my grandma's maid of honor asked us, 'Where's Eleanor?' -- but luckily, she was just accidentally calling my mom by the wrong name, rather than demonstrating senility by asking for a woman who has been gone for almost four years. I also had a poignant wish that I had known my maternal grandpa, who died before I was born; Leila's scrapbooks contained a one-paragraph WWII clipping about 'Lt. Harold Holder', who was stationed at Guadalcanal after being the first on the beach on one of the Marshall Islands. While he probably wouldn't have told me anything about his war experience (which was likely unpleasant, to put it mildly, given the battles he was in), it still would have been nice to have known him.
Michael and I escaped in time to briefly see Aunt Becky and her scandalous fiance before they left for Des Moines. I then had to help my grandma put in her earrings (her fingers are too twisted from arthritis to do it herself), and because she had left them out for several days, I ended up drawing blood, which made me feel bad.
The rest of the evening was pretty relaxed -- I'm sitting in my room, sucking on the remnants of a stick of honey that I picked up at the local apiary last week. Supposedly, eating local honey will help to improve one's pollen-based allergies. Honey sticks are great, but I forgot to look for raw honeycomb -- that's even better, and I haven't had it in at least a decade. Now, though, I'm going to go to bed so that I can go to Des Moines tomorrow and attempt to write. Goodnight!
2 comments:
It's times when I read about people like the Austrian guy who fathered 7 kids with his daughter and kept them in the basement that I miss you the most. Think about the awesome time we could be having making fun (in the most un-pc, macabre manner) of them. While cramming dim sum down our throats, of course. -tz
tz - I thought of you too. Now if only the kids had names like 'Bottle', 'Box', 'Pitcher,' etc., we could speculate that our mutual friend Can was actually a product of that messed-up family. Of course, such speculation is much easier to do when we're fueled by shrimp families and flat Coke.
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