Category Archives: Opinion

The Southland Life

Luncheon meetings in the Southland Life dining room bored William Gatesworth Gordon III to distraction. Yet another corporation tried to convince Gordon and his fellow members of First Bank Corporation Board of Directors to invest millions in its latest project. The top floor of the tallest building in Dallas did not impress him one bit. After all, it was 1975, and everything impressive had already been built years ago.
This food was not going to impress him. The strawberries were not any plumper or fresher than the fruits served by his own kitchen staff at his estate on White Rock Lake in Highland Park, which at one time was considered the most exclusive neighborhood in Dallas. Then that peasant oilman H.L. Hunt built his gaudy replica of Mount Vernon and brought housing values down.
The giant shrimp cocktail was tough and not quite the right shade of pink.
Now, on top of everything else, he was seated next to this gawky young man with an ill-fitting suit coat that did not match his trousers. One could only hope he would have the good manners not to engage him in conversation. No such luck. Before he could take another bite Gordon found a pale scrawny hand stuck in his face.
“I’m filling in today for Al Altwig, business editor of the Dallas Morning News. He was called away at the last minute. He left me his coat to wear which, I’m afraid, is a bit too large for me.”
After a brief handshake which Gordon used as an excuse to push the young man’s arm out of his food, the banker returned his attention to his shrimp and strawberries.
“I’m afraid I’m not fully aware of the details of the Georgia Pacific proposal to First Bank. I was only told about the meeting about thirty minutes ago.”
“They want our money. That’s about the extent of it.” Gordon sipped his Bloody Mary and found it inadequate. He looked around for the waiter who was attending to another suited gentleman two tables away. “Excuse me. Could you get me a fresher stalk of celery?”
“All I know is that it’s for a project centered in a small town in northern Georgia,” the young man added nervously. “It would create a lot of jobs, which would be a good thing, don’t you think?”
Gordon grimaced as he took another sip of his cocktail, thinking a new stalk of celery would not help the taste of his drink. “I think people should be responsible for finding their own jobs. No one ever handed me a job. I had to work for it. Business administration master’s degree from Southern Methodist University. Internship at First Bank and then vice-president.”
“That’s very impressive. Your parents must be very proud.”
“Of course they are.”
“Their investment in your education paid off well.”
“Of course it did.”
“And they provided you with the best pediatric care as a child. You attended the best schools and were always assured that your best efforts would always be rewarded generously.”
Gordon slowly turned his head to stare at the impertinent young newsman. “And what exactly are your duties at the Dallas Morning News?”
“I open the mail addressed to the business news page, edit stories and write headlines.”
“And they allowed you to attend this very important function?” Gordon raised his left eyebrow.
“As I told you, it was an emergency.”
“Hmph, I didn’t realize the Dallas News was employing socialists now.”

And Just When I Thought All the Scars Had Healed

2 Replies

The other day the telephone rang. I didn’t recognize the number so I figured it was someone else trying to sell me something I didn’t need.
“Is Janet Cowling there?” a woman’s voice asked.
This is one of those button pushing questions that sends me through the roof because my wife Janet died three years ago.
“My wife died three years ago! Why don’t you people go to the trouble of updating your call lists? Have you no shame? Have you no decency? What are you trying to sell me anyway?”
The woman’s voice became tiny. “I’m not trying to sell anything. I worked with Janet in the probation office in Belton, Texas, thirty years. I was her secretary. I was just thinking about her recently and wanted to talk to her.”
All of a sudden I was reduced to the size of a piss ant. No, piss ants towered over me.
“Oh my goodness,” I gushed. “I’m so sorry. It’s just I get these calls asking for her and that make me angry.”
“I get those too and I get angry too.” She was being very nice to me, and I felt like a heel. “It hurts me to hear that she is gone.”
“She had breast cancer,” I explained. “She went through chemotherapy, double mastectomy and radiation treatments. She had about two weeks she felt well enough to drive herself to go Christmas shopping. She came hope and wrapped presents. She kept saying, ‘This is so much fun. This is so much fun.’ The next morning she awoke with a blinding headache and dizziness. She couldn’t even stand up. I took her to the doctor and found the cancer had metastasized to her brain. She died three weeks later.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. She was so sweet to everybody. Another girl in the office, Lorena, had asked about her too.”
As a side note, Janet always thought Lorena hated her because she gave her so many probation reports to type.
“I remember one time we had lunch at our desks,” the woman continued, “and we decided to go down to the candy machine and get a chocolate bar. It was so good we decided to get two more. We ended up eating a total of six chocolate bars!”
That sounded just like my Janet. Even though she was an officer she never had any pretense of adhering to some unwritten rule that officers couldn’t be friends with the secretaries. And she loved her chocolate bars.
“I thought it was awful the way some people treated her,” the woman continued. “But she never got upset.”
This was true also. There was a lot of office politics over who would get the next promotion. Janet had the best skills so she became the butt of jokes to make her look worse. Sure, she would be disappointed but she never let it get her down nor did she take it out on anyone.
Of course, I felt a need to apologize again. She was very gracious. After she hung up, I realized why my temper had such a short fuse that day. Recently, my 18-year-old Chihuahua Tootz died. She was the last pet Janet and I had. Each evening when Janet came home from work Tootz would sleep on her lap. We brought her to bed with us, and she always snuggled up next to Janet.
Tootz’ death was just one more connection to my wife of 44 years that was gone. Grieving came back for a short visit. My main weapon fighting the mourning process is to remember there can be no grieving without great, deep longstanding love and joy. And I would not give up one moment of love and joy to avoid the grief.

It Was The World Back Then

Leave a reply

Recently I was going through some old files and found this nostalgia piece I wrote in the early 1970s, about 50 years:

It was the world back then. A garden to be tilled, a home for rabbits and chickens and dogs. Oh yes, cats too.
That backyard was long and wider than I had the breath to run past. But, of course, I was always a puny kid.
Half of it for many years was a garden—corn in the back, then okra, many rows of potatoes and tomatoes, then radishes, cabbage and onions. Sometimes a few petunias if my mother was in the mood. They made adequate trumpets, I recall.
To keep the garden alive during those scorching, drought-tinged Texas summers of the mid-fifties, my father and mother put the garden house at the end of a row and let it run.
Much to their chagrin, I often decided to dam up the works and create a lake, with branches seeping from one row to another. This also provided plenty of mud for various products like mud pies. It also substituted for blood for my re-enactment of the Saturday war movie.
Then the hose was turned on me before I was allowed in the house.
But the garden isn’t there anymore. Not since my mother died.
The other half of the yard was for play—with my dogs. I always had a couple; then when one was run over and killed—which seemed altogether too common an occurrence—I still had one.
They would chase me, nipping at my heels, until I would fall down and cover my head. They would lick at my neck and I would squeal with delight.
I learned the facts of life from the cats. Kittens were as common as the rain wasn’t in those days. I can think of no better education than the excitement of gingerly crawling under the house, softly calling out the mother cat’s name and have her return with a pleasant meow. As I crawled closer, she would proudly roll over to show me her babies, their eyes still closed. If I dared pick them up too much they would not be there the next day. The mother would move them.
My father built a hutch in the back and tried raising rabbits once. But that was a futile venture because he wanted to eat them, and I wanted them as pets. Bantam chickens were safer, we both agreed only to eat the eggs. One day, however, I came home to find dead chickens over all the yard. One of the dogs acted sheepishly. I cried and then decided to grant amnesty. The law of the backyard was based on mercy.
And the playhouse. I could never forget that. It began as one small room with tin Royal Crown Cola signs for sides and roof. That didn’t seem large enough so I added another room and a wooden roof and a second floor.
To celebrate the expansion I invited a friend over to spend the night in the house with my brother and me. We watched “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and drank a concoction of mine made of Nehi orange, grape and strawberry and Upper Teen.
Then we ventured out for the night. The sky was clear and the moon full. It was joyous. We danced and frolicked in our underwear at midnight. My friend’s shorts had monkeys on them. I teased him, but secretly I was envious.
Somehow two rooms and a second floor didn’t seem enough. I doubled the bottom, had more lumber for roofing and even had a perch on top of the second floor.
A few years later my interest waned, and my father wanted me to tear it down, but I didn’t have the heart. He relented and tore it down himself. At one point he pushed apart two main posts and bore a strange resemblance to Sampson, I thought.
Now I come home occasionally and the yard has changed. As I said, there is no garden. It is now an expanse of grass. I only vaguely spot where the rabbit hutch and the wonderful playhouse sat.
The only things that are the same are the honeysuckle vines and mimosa trees I planted for my mother many years ago. The trees are quite stout now.
It makes me feel old.
The smell of the honeysuckle is still sweet and brings back the memories, though. I have honeysuckle growing outside the door of the home I share with my wife and son. It makes me feel good.
I want a large yard for my son to have adventures in, to learn responsibility in, a nice place to grow up.
But this yard, for all the world events that transpired within its reaches, seems so small now.

Fifty years later, I have to admit the yard was not always that wonderful. In fact, some memories are best kept where they belong—in the past. And as for the yard seeming so small, to this old man the world has grown much too large.

My First Flight

Leave a reply

Companies don’t do this anymore, but a Tennessee newspaper flew me up from Texas for a job interview in 1970. The job only paid $135 a week. At the time I was making $125 a week at the Paris News. This was the first time I ever flew on an airliner.
A buddy in college had taken me up in a Piper Cub one time. We flew around the campus and to the next town. At one point he handed the steering column over to me. It was kinda neat and not too scary. As long as I could see the cows in the fields below me I knew I wasn’t really that high up.
I had to work until midnight Saturday, had Sunday off and then worked Monday morning then had the afternoon off. I asked to switch it to Monday afternoon without explanation, and my boss was nice enough not to ask any questions.
Sunday morning I drove out to tiny Paris airfield, climbed the steps to a commuter plane that didn’t look much bigger than the Piper Cub and took off, following the highways, to Dallas Love Field. I got a slightly larger plane and connected to Nashville then to Tri-Cities Airport located between Kingsport, Bristol and Johnson City, Tennessee.
The managing editor picked me up and drove me to the newspaper office. It was a second story rat hole, but he said a new, ultramodern building was under construction.
Then he mentioned my letter to him in which I revealed I had never flown commercially so I didn’t know if the plane ticket was in the right price range. Instead of being impressed with my concern to save the newspaper money, he lectured me on being too honest about my naiveté.
“Never let anyone know how inexperienced I was in the ways of the world,” he said. “If anyone asks you if you’ve traveled much, lie,” he continued, “and say you’ve been around the globe.”
It should have been a warning sign that the man who was about to hire me to report the facts was urging me to lie. But what did I know? I was just a country kid from Texas.
He awed me with a dinner at the Holiday Inn and then sent me back to my motel. It was clean and had a television in it. Like I said I was just a country kid from Texas and easily impressed.
I flew out Monday morning. At one of the airports a flight attendant stopped me at the plane’s door, informing me I had not gotten the proper boarding pass. The engines were revving up and I didn’t have time to return to the terminal. I wasn’t going to make it back to the Paris News by one o’clock so I’d lose my job. The Kingsport paper would decide not to hire me because I was too naïve, and then I would be unemployed.
Another flight attendant walked up and said, “What difference does it make? Let him on.”
So I took my seat on the plane and arrived back at the Texas newspaper on time. In a couple of weeks the Kingsport editor called announcing I had the job. He then asked how soon could I be there.
First time to do things is fun. You get an adrenaline rush. You get challenged over the way you think about the world. You get scared to death. You sigh with relief and tell yourself, “Well, I lived through that.”
I still look forward to doing things for the first time. I need the excitement to keep my heart pumping.

The Trouble with Computers

Leave a reply

I am the first to admit I am computer illiterate. I can point and click. I can use it like a typewriter and save simple documents, but that’s just about it.
I got my first computer more than 20 years ago. I could only see half of the page at a time which made it very inconvenient when composing a story, letter or a play. My short term memory has always been a bit chancy so at the beginning I back spaced a lot to see how I had started the sentence. Then there was the printer. It worked on some heat process which I never understood. I had to punch three keys—I don’t remember which ones—to send command to print. I could never get my fingers to hit them in the right cadence, like playing the piano, which I could never do either.
My next computer was easier to use and the printer was cooperative. I had to buy several different programs which were very expensive to make it worthwhile, and each one had its own peculiar way of working.
Then came the internet. I was first aware of the internet through these commercials of a little girl in a woolen coat and a beret of a matching color. She was standing on a rock in the middle of a stream and then instantly was on another rock and then another. She was talking about being here, there and everywhere all at the same time. It didn’t make much sense. But that is what the internet is, after all, being here, there and everywhere all at the same time.
The first time I connected to the internet I thought I had done something dreadfully wrong and the computer was about to explode—that awful screeching noise of dial up. I could imagine someone instantly popping the power button off before the contraption burst. There were certain evenings, Mondays and Tuesdays, when I couldn’t get a connection. Everyone, it seemed, didn’t have anything better to do on those nights than go online. Downloading sites took forever.
Now I’m spoiled. Instant connection and downloading and it’s fast. Where I used to have to go to libraries, order books from catalogues and go on field trips to learn background for my stories I now have access to every university library, every museum and every national historic site in the world. Of course, I had to learn some sites weren’t what they were cracked up to be. For instance, Flash Mountain is not the same as Splash Mountain at DisneyWorld.
My only fear now about computers and the internet is that all our knowledge is on line. On the one hand it’s very convenient, at least for those who have computers. We must realize we do live in a world where some people still can’t afford computers. That’s a perception gap that must be closed.
The real problem, however, is that all our knowledge is on computers, computers that are run by electricity. If, for whatever cataclysmic reason, the world loses its electrical power, there goes our knowledge. It’s in a computer that’s now an inert box. We are in a new Dark Ages.
One day, when we are gone and our cities are covered in vines, someone will find these little boxes and maybe figure out how to start them again. They will find the discs with a set amount of gigabytes of information on them. Perhaps they will decide that we were predicting the end of the world because the boxes held only a certain number of gigabytes.

Inoculations Against Fears

Leave a reply

All of this debate about childhood inoculations recently brings back memories from about 55 years ago. If there was a shot available I got it. My eldest brother had died of who knows what six years before I was born, so my mother wasn’t taking any chances.
Back then we even got shots at school for polio. They lined us up in the cafeteria and stuck all of us with the same old dull needle, but it was all right because we got ice cream afterwards. Some years later Dr. Sabin came out with polio vaccine on a sugar cube. This time they just said anyone who wanted it could get it for free at the local community center. Yep, I took that one too.
Nobody got more disturbed about small children catching a disease that could kill them than me. I don’t like to watch the 1940s movie Little Women because Margaret O’Brian dies after visiting a sick friend. This latest round of debate has me totally confused. One group will swear that children who got measles inoculations ended up dying or developing something terrible like autism. The other side swears that inoculated children caught the measles from uninoculated kids. That’s a lot of swearing going around, and it makes me nervous because I can’t decide which side is right. Maybe they’re both wrong or both right.
I have a sneaking suspicion that all the preservatives and chemicals our children ingest everyday might have an adverse reaction to all those serums and antibiotics doctors prescribe. My paranoid side whispers to me that corporations which buy elections for our representatives control what government eventually will decide which side is right. There’s a lot of money riding on that decision. Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m just a guy who likes to go out on the street and tell stories to anybody who stops to listen.
I do have to chuckle a bit that we Americans were all in a dither every month or so about a disease that is killing everyone. Well, it usually doesn’t, and we have to look for a new disease to worry about. Be patient. By this time next month we’ll be biting our fingernails over another disease which we absolutely have no idea how to control.
Perhaps that is the real issue here. We do have the ability to address issues like poisoning our water supply, proper labelling for our factory processed food, and proper preventive health care for all our children, no matter what their parents have done to provide for them. Let’s stop the war between religion and science. It doesn’t get us anywhere.
Maybe we could follow the example of Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower who started free lunches for our poorest children. He discovered that many of the young men enlisting to fight in World War II were malnourished. He instigated the interstate highway system to provide easy and fast routes for the transfer of the properly nourished soldiers. Incidental to his initial reason for better highways was the boon to the transportation of goods around the country. By the way, Eisenhower oversaw the desegregation of schools and was the reason all of us kids got stuck by those dull needles.
Perhaps it’s too scary to discuss projects for the greater good of all citizens which eventually enhance the quality of the United States as a whole. It’s easier to worry about the disease of the month.

Green

Leave a reply

Green is my favorite color. It goes back to the fifties and the Davy Crockett craze—movies, songs, television shows, coonskin caps, the whole bit.
I’m the great-great-great grandson of Crockett so all that attention was like it was for me. There was a skip in my step every time I heard, “Born on a mountain top in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free.”
I may have been born in Texas, which was the biggest state at that time, but my heart was in the greenest state. Any time I had a choice in clothing, food, you name it, I picked green, spinach, lettuce, lime sherbet, and a lot of green shirts. After I graduated from college and I could live anywhere I wanted I bought a green Ford Torino and drove to Tennessee and fell in love with the trees, the mountains and my wife. She was actually from Virginia but her last name was Hawkins, the same as the county in Tennessee where Crockett’s grandparents are buried.
My bedroom has always been painted green. It’s really a restful color to look at as I close my eyes in sleep. Green represents good things too—serenity, ecology, renewal, hope, guacamole, pistachios, Jolly Green Giant, Kermit the Frog, Green Eggs and Ham, freshly mowed grass which smells like watermelon, also green, and the best traffic light, green which means let’s go.
Nothing reduces my blood pressure better than a drive down a road with tall trees whose branches hover over the pavement with green leaves in all shades from chartreuse to forest, and everything in between, olive, celery, sage, parsley and Kelly. The green trees are filled with life, squirrels, birds, insects and tiny microbes.
Christmas trees are green, and what can be better than Christmas trees? They have presents underneath them. Children gather around them to giggle and play. And when the children go to bed, parents can sit by the Christmas tree to kiss and cuddle.
Green goes well with other colors too. Who doesn’t like to see a blue sky peeking through the trees? And at night, when the sky is black and speckled with tiny white lights, green tones down its shade to blend in. Green with orange in the fall says it’s time for harvest, and green with red means it’s time for Santa Claus. Green with yellow is the time of spring. Green with purple means it’s time to have the color adjusted on the television.
And, of course, green is the color of money. Who doesn’t like money? Getting a check is nice. Checking the bank account and seeing new deposits is great. But nothing beats seeing green bills being handed over, lots of them with pictures of Jackson, Grant and Franklin. It would be fun to jump into a pool filled with green bills, especially if I knew all those bills were mine.
The nicest thing about green is that it doesn’t have to be money to make you happy. Green leaves work just as well, which is good because it’s easier to be surrounded by leaves than dollar bills. Green food, like guacamole and lime sherbet tastes better than dollar bills too. I haven’t tried it but common sense tells me money tastes terrible and has little nutritional value.
As they say, the best things in life are free. And many of those things are green.

Janet’s Advice

Leave a reply

My wife Janet died of cancer almost three years ago, but I keep finding her words of wisdom as I go through all of our old stuff. I recently found this and thought it very important for this election. Now you can read her own words:
Former Chicago mobster Al Capone was once quoted as saying, “Vote early and vote often.”
When I hear that statement I always think of my grandmother and her visit from the Secret Service. Why would they visit an old day, you ask? Voter fraud, of course. Grandma lived in a small town in southwestern Virginia and was not in good health. She left home only to go to the doctor or to the hospital. This very nice man from one of the local political parties visited her and offered to help her fill out and mail her mail-in ballot. Needless to say grandma was very flattered that this man cared enough to help her out.
Several weeks later grandma was in the hospital and a nurse informed her that she had two visitors. You can imagine her surprise when two men walked in and identified themselves as Secret Service agents. They had questions how her ballot had been filled out and by whom. Apparently there was some evidence of “volunteers” filling out mail-in ballots to help their party but not necessarily according to the voter’s wishes. Grandma was fit to be tied when they left her room. She told everyone who would listen that she would never trust that man again even if he was the town banker.
This was not unusual in my part of the country, at least according to my family. My mother said she had her own voting experience many years before grandma’s experience. One year a cousin of my mom’s was running for a local office, and she wanted very much to vote for him.
My parents went to vote early in the morning on Election Day, and Dad was informed that he had not paid his poll tax. Mom knew that she paid both at the same time, but had not brought their receipts with her. The poll workers told her that she had paid hers and she could vote. At first she refused if Dad didn’t get to, but he reminded her they had to go to work so she voted. Mom said she was so angry that she voted a straight Party B ticket for the first time in her life.
The next day she ran into a cousin who had been in charge of the polling place the day before. He was angry and demanded to know why she had voted Party B. Since the ballot was supposed to be secret my mother inquired as to how he knew how she voted.
His answer was, “I didn’t let any Party Bs vote yesterday and there was one vote in my precinct so it had to be you.” Mom always said it served him right.
As you can see, there is a pattern to voter fraud, and that pattern is you have to be in charge to make it work. Kentucky writer Jesse Stuart wrote several short stories about politics in his native Kentucky and although they were fiction I always felt they were more history than fiction considering the nature of voting in my hometown.
When I turned 21 I wanted to register to vote. Virginia did not have supervisors of elections at that time. Mom called a Party A friend, and she wouldn’t give her the name of the local person charged with registering voters. So I wound up at the home of a Party B friend and while he and my mother sat in lawn charges down by the river bank talking politics I filled out my registration card.
Because I was in college I request a mail-in ballot. It arrived at my school the same day it needed to be placed in the mail in order to be counted. I walked 18 blocks to get my ballot notarized and back in the mail on time. A friend of my parents was present when the ballots were counted and made sure mine was. She said the people in charge kept putting my ballot on the bottom, and she kept putting it back on top until they counted it. I voted Party B, but Mom said I have probably voted Party A ever since I married and left the state as there is no guarantee that my name was ever removed from the voter rolls.
The funny thing is I have a tendency to vote Party A now anyway. Please remember to vote, and don’t vote often. After all, it is illegal.

The Last Halloween

Leave a reply

I was in the sixth grade when I celebrated my last Halloween. That is to say, the last Halloween as a child who enjoyed the Halloween Festival at school and trick-or-treating.
Each classroom was transformed into a special treat. One was a haunted house, another a cake walk, a fishing pond, white elephant sale and many more, each costing a dime or quarter to participate. At the end of the evening was a variety show put on by the parents who all acted very silly. The kids loved it. All the proceeds went to the PTA.
When I was selected as one of five boys to be the “spook” in a Hit the Spook with a Marshmallow game I was thrilled. My mother drove me downtown to a five-and-dime to buy a mask. She stayed in the car while I went in to get something to protect my face from all the marshmallows that were going to be thrown at me. When I reached the big table in the middle of the store with the Halloween masks, I froze.
My mother had a way of criticizing every purchase I ever made. I picked up a mask that I liked but put it back because it cost too much. I looked for something really cheap but they looked like something a first grader would wear. Finally I picked out a face paint kit that cost very little. Pleased that I was going to escape my mother’s wrath for wasting money, I ran out to the car where my mother had been waiting.
“Where have you been?” Her tone was withering. “I thought I was about to die in this heat. (author’s note: we lived in Texas which is still very hot even in the last week of October) I thought you were going to just run in, grab something and be right back out! How long does it take to buy a silly Halloween mask anyway?”
I showed her the makeup kit and tried to explain how cheap it was when she interrupted me.
“Now how is that going to protect your face from those marshmallows? I thought the whole idea of getting a mask was to protect yourself.”
Back home I sewed together some old sheets into what I thought looked like a ghost costume. I use the term sewing very loosely. I used an old treadle machine which my mother and threaded for me. At Halloween sunset my mother told me she was too tired to drive me back to school and I would have to walk. It wasn’t that far so I didn’t mind.
Halfway there, however, I remembered I had not brought my money which I had carefully put aside for the past month just for spending at the festival. It was too late to go back home to get it and be at the school on time.
When I did arrive I found out none of the other boys had shown up so I had to be the only “spook” getting pelted by marshmallows. It was that night that I realized I really wasn’t that popular at school. Too many of the boys were way too thrilled in throwing marshmallows at me. This went on for an hour.
Finally the teacher closed down the attraction and said I could go enjoy the rest of the festival. Only I couldn’t. I didn’t have any money to pay to play. I couldn’t even see the variety show.
One woman—I can’t remember if it were a teacher or a parent—who asked me what I was dressed up as. “Are you supposed to be a little girl.”
“No,” I responded weakly. “A ghost.”
“Well, you look more like a little girl.”
When I walked home I didn’t even feel like trick-or-tricking at the neighbors’ houses. The bloom was off the pumpkin, so to speak.
The next time I remember having a good time at Halloween was when I had small children and chaperoned them around trick-or-treating. We decorated the house with fake cobwebs and jack-o-lanterns. Now the kids are grown and the local parents sent out emails asking if everyone was participating in trick or treating. I’m old and tired so I replied no.
Ah, but in the early years, that was fun, before the last Halloween came along.

The Baby Shower Part Five

Leave a reply

We were home from the baby shower only a couple of weeks we received a phone call from my proud and happy son-in-law. It seems all those kicks in the womb meant Liam Anthony wanted to come out—right now. So on Sunday September 16, he came out, all seven pounds thirteen ounces, twenty inches of him, including, 10 fingers and 10 toes.
Both mom and the baby were in good condition, and I could tell dad was ecstatic. They were home within a couple of days, and then the real work began, all those nightly feedings. My wife chose to bottle feed our children so I was able to take my turn. But with breastfeeding, my daughter has to handle it on her own. And he’s a very hungry little boy.
At the two-week checkup he was already over eight pounds and had grown another inch. My daughter, on the other hand, was worn out, just all all mothers. That’s why they get a special day every day. Sometimes I wonder why fathers get a day. The moms do all the work. But I better shut up because I enjoy my Father’s Day presents too much to lose them.
My granddaughter is a very helpful big sister, and I knew she would be. But I’m a biased grandpa so what do you expect?
As for the baby shower delivery day pool, everyone missed it because he decided to arrive early. My daughter checked the chart to see who came closest and it turned out to be a dear friend and coworker. Her friend she’s going to spend the money on Liam’s first Christmas present, so all turned out well.
Speaking of Christmas, my son and I already have our plane tickets to go up to New York in December. Liam will be three months by then and who knows how big he will be. Now all we have to do is pay off the credit card bills before we plan any trips to see the grandchildren in the new year.