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Men! Do you have one arm like Popeye’s and the other shamefully normal? Did you decide late in the game to grow out your hair like all your friends? Do you have a club foot problem we could gently work around? Do you have an indeterminate number of fingers on one hand?
If so, where are you from, because we’re never going there.
Also, would you like to be in our ad? We’ll give you the cuff discount. Get 2.5 inches, but pay for 1!
Don’t let the aircraft carrier lapels or the elephantiasis of the collar or the four-inch wide cuffs or the polyester fool you. Those sunglasses are hideous. How did anyone get a date in 1973?
He wasn’t sure what the reason was, but ever since he started shopping at Budd’s he had no problem catching a lady’s eye. It seems 1973 was a year for wild experimentation around the midriff.
I spent lunch with my mother and grandparents. Visited my great-grandmother before church and spent last night with my other grandmother.
Not too long after I arrived, though, my cousin brought her three boys over for a visit. They have three children, four and under. The youngest is only eight-months old, content to take it all in. The oldest are big fans of drag racing and toy cars were required to move at high speeds, and volume, across my grandmother’s coffee table.
She didn’t mind. She was holding the baby, and was content to ignore the chaos.
The deeper into the drag racing we went the louder the cars became. You’d think they’d get hoarse, but no.
Old cars I played with as a child are seeing use again.
I remembered details about a lot of the cars — there is a full case of them. The one on the left was the General Lee before I scrapped all the paint off of it. (The guy in Hazzard didn’t do a decent paint job, apparently. In one of my demolition derbies it began to flake away.) The jeep didn’t roll well. I liked that plastic Thunderbird because it always soared off ramps well. Also my grandfather had two sitting outside. The Mercedes was always handled with care for some reason. Even then the value of a brand was apparent, I suppose. The truck, there are two or three just like it, doesn’t haul very well. They were, however, quite successful in the demolition derby.
So that was last afternoon and into the evening. My grandmother and I visited for a while and then I found my way into one of her extra bedrooms. It has been one of those days where I could never get ahead of being tired, so it was an early night.
She made pancakes this morning. And then her sister-in-law came over to go to town with her. That woman is a whirlwind of chaos and compliments and walked in the door ready to fuss over this and that and do this and that. It is nice to see, and I understand the sentiment, but I also agree with my grandmother.
“It’s a wonder I ever got along before these people came to take care of me.”
My grandmother is one of the most completely giving, unassuming people I know. She’s fiercely independent and more than capable of doing her own dishes or getting her own umbrella or any of the other things we all try to do. We know it, too. We’re just trying to be helpful, of course. She just laughs at us.
So I drove back across the county for lunch with my mother and other grandparents. We went to Trowbridge’s.
Trowbridge's in downtown Florence, Ala., since 1918.
It seems that in 1917 Paul Trowbridge of Texas passed through on his way to a dairy farmer’s convention in North Carolina. The next year, after purchasing property, he started a creamery and ice cream shop. Somewhere along the way they started selling food. During World War II they added their famous chili. Breakfast was added to the menu some time later. There’s a painting on the back wall of Trowbridge’s a generation ago. It looks almost identical to what you see today.
The chilidog isn’t what it used to be, but the straws still float in the Coke bottles and the ice cream is still delicious. I haven’t been in years, but I snapped a few pictures. You can see them, along with a few shots from Mother’s Day, in the May photo gallery.
After lunch I pointed the car back toward home. There was some library time to be had, then a delicious spaghetti dinner with The Yankee. We watched 24, which might have given us the most crazy hour of television in that show’s history. We knew enough to eat early. Something about that upcoming interrogation just made us think torches applied to skin wouldn’t go over well alongside a nice meat sauce.
That was a good choice.
And that was a guy Jack Bauer didn’t even care about. This show may go and redeem itself altogether in the final few hours. I expect the write in revival campaign will begin accordingly.
Anyway. Check out the photo gallery. Speaking of pictures you might have noticed the new banner across the top of this page, neatly wrapping up the neon from Las Vegas. There’s a new picture on the main page, showing off a handsome view from my grandmother’s home. Tomorrow the Tumblr will return, alongside various random things on Twitter. One of my classes has their final tomorrow. I’ll wind down this and that as the semester comes to a close. We’re really in the home stretch now.
Oh. That headline? Entirely true.
