FILLING IN THE BLANKS

As I mentioned last week, Friday I met several of the Elders for a very adult lunch (one in which at least I went home after only three hours leaving 3 of them standing outside a "hukka" bar about to go in and investigate). A couple of them stayed on until after dark (yes it starts as lunch, it always does!) but they had fun and that's all that mattered.

It's funny when you are with people you have known for years and years and you find things out about them that you have never known. Aunt Cracker told us a story of her and her sister always having turtles around the house and her mom finally cracked down and said no more turtles in the house. So the next turtle they snuck in and ended up putting it in a bag in a drawer where I suppose it was forgotten until their mom started looking through the house for what was smelling awful....and found the deceased turtle in the bag.

I've known Aunt Cracker for 30+ years and this was the first time I heard this story. So many things about each other that we have yet to find out about. A reason we women tend to lead long lives, we just need more time to get it all out.

I told some stories about some family vacations our mother used to drag us on---to Washington, D.C. when we were way too young to appreciate it and all we wanted to do was hang at the hotel and swim in the pool. And camping in Colorado in the mountains....in the snow and playing cards with my brother for days on end, refusing to leave our sleeping bags or the tent because it was too cold outside. My cat stayed in the bottom of my sleeping bag most of the time and our dog lived in my brother's bag. The only time we would leave our bags was to go down the mountain with our mother to shop. Down the mountains where the towns were hot and sunny (like in a normal summer day vs. our days in the mountains in the snow). Again, we would try our hardest to talk our mother into checking us into a hotel so we could while away our time swimming in a hotel pool. I'm starting to sense a theme from my childhood....we were deprived a pool!

I've tried a few family vacations with my current bunch and failed miserably (in my opinion)maybe they think differently--I know Papa agrees with me pretty much, I have to beg him to go on some trips with me. I've decided when Perfect and Precious and any others get older, I'll just vacation with the babies. A guy I work with has several grandchildren (9 I believe) and every summer they have "Grandma Camp" where his wife takes one of the grandkids at a time to a special place, like Chicago and the American Girl store with one granddaughter, while an older grandson wanted to go to the beach. She spends a week with each grandchild doing whatever that child chooses, just the two of them.

I guess along with feeling wonderful (like Tina Turner--you must keep up with the blogs!), I'm going to aspire to run a Grandma Camp, although of course, mine will be Grammy Camp but first I need to figure out how to or who is to sponser this endeavour of mine.

So until next time....and please if you feel the need to sponsor a cause, think "GRAMMY CAMP".