SOME of the sayings I’ve been wearing out with the granddaughters are starting to feel like old hat, indeed. Hell, some I started using 40 years ago when their mom and her sisters were little girls.
“It was a happy day when you were born,” “You’re my hope for the future,” and when they were tucked in for the night, “Have a happy dream.” Vintage lines like that.
With D1D1 and D1D2, ages 9 and 5, respectively, I think I’m getting near the end of the line with, “It makes my heart feel good when I see you.” That usually draws a nonchalant “Thanks,” or a “You always say that.” Before we get to the eye-roll phase I think I need to get on to some new material.
My other increasingly shopworn aphorisms: “You have a bright future,” “I like the person you’re growing up to be,” and the Swiss army knife of aphorisms, adjustable for all occasions: “Guess who my favorite (artist, gymnast, swimmer, softball player) is?”
Told Chris Whitney, a friend in Maryland, about this gem yesterday:
A few days ago the 5-year-old girl says to me, “Tone… you have hair on your ears.” I said, well, yes, as men get older sometimes we grow hair on our ears. She’s looking, looking, inspects one then the other; then she pronounces her final word on the matter: “Monkey ears.”
Kids are straight with you, have you noticed that?
Our friend Bob made it across the deep south in these dog days after his stop here in Rhode Island. He held up for a few days at Pagosa Springs, Colorado, the home of Gale Tuggle, an old friend of his from Valemount, British Columbia. Tug was a high school teacher there, I believe. And if I’m not mistaken, he was in his 80s when he rode his motorcycle to Alaska the last time—with his wife on the passenger seat!
Guys like that make me think I have to have more Alaska in me yet. It would be ridiculous not to.
Here are the GPS pins Bob dropped on his journey east, south and west. Janey tells me he was in Utah very near the Wyoming line at day’s end yesterday. At this writing, he must be about 1,200 miles out from his home in BC.
A good stretch of dry, hot country ahead. Our friend Robyn was haying yesterday in Wheatland County, Montana, where it’s drier than dry. All summer, it seems, we’ve had everybody else’s rain here in soggy, muggy New England.
Will close here with two funny things Pam said recently, funny along exactly the same lines. She’s innocently generous with the laughs she doesn’t see coming until the words are hanging out there in the air.
In this first one I’ll tell you, she was trying to transfer a file off her computer to someone else, via email I guess. “It says I can zip it but I haven’t figured out how to zip it yet.”
Color me hip, babe.
And this line popped out when she got a perfect score on Strands, a New York Times word game she plays on her phone every morning. She really is a brilliant puzzle solver; the more a puzzle defies solving the better she likes it. Giving up is never an option.
Well, she won the game—as always—without having to resort to a cheat they offer: if you’re stumped, you can press the “hint” button and the game will prompt you in the right direction.
She’s not having any of that. She sticks with it, finally wins the game on her own wits yet again, then declares, loudly, proudly—“I have NEVER TAKEN A HINT!”
As if after 52 years I don’t know this.
Tony DePaul, July 19, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
