I really don’t have anything funny or profound or even mundane to write about today, but I just wanted to check back in and ease myself back into writing.
Category Archives: The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse
This post is to remind us here
Because it is so necessary; because the Hun is at the door; because apparently God ran out of locusts.
We need entertainment
Having watched our way through tons of movies and documentaries during the virus slowdown, we need new entertainment here at the PBC&R; we are thinking minions. Minions who tell jokes, do dance lines, sing, get everyone laughing in a crazy giggling chorus would add much festivity to the atmosphere.
I don’t know – maybe the Minions could re-enact movies, such as Casablanca. Or, possibly not. If no Minions are available, I may have to bring in a group of Tickle Me Elmos. They are so cute when the fall down laughing and bang the floor with their arms.
Jeez, it’s going to be a long four years.
Veteran’s Day 2020
One hundred and two years ago, WWI ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Add one day to that and you will have tomorrow, my father’s birthday. His middle name is Pershing, after the general who led the AEF in Europe. I could write more, but some things are just feelings without words.
Biden
Van Jones cried about Biden’s character. I would as well, but in reference to the incidents below
We have been given a mandate
That’s why we’re more than ready to provide Peanut Butter Foldovers and our rustic ambiance to all. Oh, by the way, you don’t need a reservation, and, in fact, we don’t take mail in reservations at all. And any time “that man” has a “date” with with a microphone, we’ll be changing the station.
We have re-opened
Because it is so necessary; because the Hun is at the door; because apparently God ran out of locusts.
Recurring thoughts
I have no real idea why I started to think of of the late basketball coach Jimmy Valvano, but I did; for that matter I have been doing so for the last few days. I remember walking out of the kitchen decades ago and meeting my father coming the other way; he was laughing and relating how a winning coach had run around looking for someone to celebrate with and had wound up beening kissed by the Athletic Director. I think I though, “Okaaaaay.”
I didn’t think of it as a touchstone back then, but I realize now that most weekends there would be a sports event on the TV. I’m from Indiana – Hoosiers Indiana – and I went to basketball games at little unconsolidated schools before I have any memory of going. In fact, one of my bedtime stories from before the time I was five was about the night my cousin, who was considerably older, broke his arm playing during a high school game. I remember the story; I don’t remember it happening. My mother once remarked that my dad had gone with his nephew and brother-in-law to the hospital and she and I had come on home with my grandparents.
Basketball was such a part of small town Indiana life that decades later my father would remember some occasion he and and his family attended by starting his sentence with: “I had an 8th grade basketball game that night . . .”
I have let nostalgia get in the way of my little story here. The coach who got kissed was Jimmy Valvano and he would later die of an aggressive cancer. Shortly before his death, he was asked to receive The Arthur Ashe Courage & Humanitarian Award. I doubt the awarding committee realized how incapacitated he was, but, after some consideration, he traveled to accept it . . . and make a speech. And what a speech it was. It’s on YouTube and maybe once a year I listen to it. If you want, you can take the 11 minutes to watch it, and if you do, I think you’ll be glad you did.
Lordy, password hell
AUUUUUGGGGHHHH. My site did not automatically renew because I had to replace the payment card and all the information did not get uploaded. Then the contact email somehow waltzed over to a dormant mail account and after this headache abates, I am going to revamp this entire email thing.
Resting my head now.
Memorial Day (Decoration Day) 2020
Operation Memorial Day Flower was completed yesterday with a trip down to Kingman. I drove; the geraniums napped. This was the 21st Memorial Day for Daddy; it seems like yesterday we were looking at the just-placed headstone on that first Memorial Day trip.
My cousins met me at the cemetery – one of them lives a quarter mile (or maybe 1 1/4) from the rural cemetery. Their parents are buried there, as are our grandparents and great-grandparents, and who knows whatever relatives.
We had a little lunch at a picnic table at “The Oasis” in Kingman. It’s the type of place that you hear about in the song “Americana.”
There are little factoids that you hear and remember in life. Here’s one: For some reason, I know the man who taught my father to play Euchre, an Indiana tradition before video games, is buried very close to him. When I was at IU, it seems we all played Euchre – a different era, I suppose.
Between two cemeteries visited on Saturday and the one yesterday, more than one era was included. I’m talking horse and buggy times and hundreds of little stories I heard from my grandparents while knee-high. Everything from Grandma coming home from teaching in a horse and buggy and her father waiting at the end of the drive with a lantern to Great Uncle Roy dying at 12 when Grandpa was four to my great-grandfather’s picture in Civil War blue above the bed where I would sleep when in Kingman.
Daddy was born in 1918 in a pandemic (my grandmother was suffering from it when he was born) and in another pandemic we remembered those who have gone before.