When someone recommends a restaurant so highly that they give you $40 cash to get you started, you tend to make it a priority.
Shannon and I dropped by my local in-laws’ place to leave our dog with them prior to our spontaneous overnight excursion. Her stepfather, away at the golf course, had left money and directions for a restaurant that he, Shannon’s mother, and other family happened upon accidentally on a recent road trip.
After Benjamin finished wallering around with the Girl Scouts, I noticed that the bed in the miniature truck was full of fossils. As I called him to take a look, State Park Lady came over and provided detailed descriptions of various extinct Nautilus ancestors, trilobytes, fossilized coral and sea worms.
“The parrotfish lives in the coral reef, and it bites the sea anemone to eat off the algae,” Benjamin said. My eyes widened a bit. Despite my asking him what he learns at school each day, he reveals nothing until it’s relevant, and he never stops surprising me.
I wasn’t surprised that his attention wavered when State Park Lady explained how petrification is different from fossilization, using phrases like, “at the cellular level.” Lady, he may have sounded great with that parrotfish stuff, but they haven’t quite covered cells in his first-grade science curriculum.
(video clip and pics after the jump)
He set his tiny feet on the first rock and wobbled against the water rushing over his knees. I stepped onto the downstream side of the same rock and braced against the cold and the current. Standing firm but paralyzed, he turned his head and looked up at me, but his words weren’t needed.
After our first day at Dinosaur Valley State Park, when I could no longer resist my somnolence in the face of the awful Battlefield Earth, I lifted the sleeping boy from next to his mother and tucked him into the pallet we had made on the floor, then climbed into the hotel bed.
Despite the time change overnight, Benjamin woke me in his usual 6-7 a.m. range asking, “Daddy, will you play with me?”
I got dressed and took him downstairs to scope out the coffee situation. The breakfast buffet, a $10.95 “convenience” easily skipped, did not distract me from the free coffee (despite its inferiority to the fresh-ground I brew at home).
Opportunity. She knocks, yet too many don’t bother looking through the peephole, and spontaneity isn’t even given a chance.
And to think, they could have walked in the footsteps of dinosaurs.
At 8:30 on Saturday morning, Benjamin and I had spent about an hour and a half building with Wedgits, eating breakfast, and just hanging out.
“Would you like to go hike a trail?” I said. It began innocently enough.
“Yes.”
“Please go tell your mommy it’s 8:30.”
Benjamin enjoys his backyard slide on Christmas Day 2009. (click any pic to enlarge)
I always thought building gingerbread houses was for an evil old lady trying to lure innocent youngsters to her lair. On Christmas Eve morning, after driving a friend to the airport, my wife and our son opened up a kit to make our own. Gingerbread house, not lair.
Maybe a lair would have been easier.
As Shannon pulled the two roof pieces from the package, they broke in the same place along a diagonal line. She was ready to call it quits.
“Maybe we can make our own gingerbread to replace those,” I said.
“We can’t do that. Sometimes you say things without thinking first,” she said.
“Just brainstorming, dear.” Admittedly, it wasn’t a very brainy suggestion.
I tried repairing the broken pieces with tape, but it wouldn’t stick. Then Shannon came out with the hot glue gun and did a beautiful job.
If only the icing had worked nearly as well during construction, we might have had an “after” photo. I was working from home, so I couldn’t dedicate a large chunk of time to the effort, and Shannon’s patience by that time was gone.
Benjamin, who by that time had decorated and gobbled down the gingerbread man, was content decorating the remaining pieces without making a house of them.
Then the snow piled up to cover the grass and turned everything brilliant white, promising a Texas Christmas just as white as the wall Benjamin decorated for Shannon.
A photographic round-up of the Silver Dollar City Christmas train ride. (as usual, click a pic to enlarge it)
My mom tries to finish off a piece of fudge while the rest of our crew poses. My brother was sober, I assure you.
I cropped the following pictures. Hey, I get to cheat a little while I’m stuck in a train seat, right? I also turned the old storyteller black and white, because the light shining on him made him look like a Smurf.
The next morning, our first day in what some call “Las Vegas without the casinos,” Shannon said there was no way she could walk anywhere, much less on hilly terrain. “Maybe I’ll just stay here while you guys go,” she said.
“No, we’ll figure out something,” I said.
I called Silver Dollar City and found out that they have wheelchairs available, but no guarantee we would get one. I got on the phone to medical supply places and found one to rent, delivered to our front door.
About a half hour before we were to leave, I took Benjamin and his cousin to the local playground. Quickly bored with the equipment, they wrestled, pushing each other against the surrounding iron fence. Less than a minute after they moved a few feet away from it, Benjamin fell backward and his head clanged against the fence.
Crying ensued, as did our departure from the playground. Just inside the condo’s front door, Shannon’s chariot — the rented wheelchair — welcomed us.
I waited to post this because the photos would have given away something Shannon preferred to keep a secret.
How many times does something recur before it is considered tradition? For the third year in a row, my folks planned a winter trip to Branson, Missouri, for fun at Silver Dollar City and other area attractions. We weren’t able to attend the first year, but, as I wrote in my ill-named “Things to Do in Branson When You’re Alive” series, in 2008 we had great fun.
Instead of using the weekend our family celebrates Christmas, this year we used the Thanksgiving break. Unlike last year, this time around we had to keep moving or tuck ourselves into rarely available corners to keep from getting trampled.
Thanksgiving morning at my parents’ house, Shannon awoke with pain in her left ankle, but after undergoing physical therapy for illiotibial band tendinitis, she was determined not to fall farther behind in training for December’s Dallas White Rock Marathon relay. She didn’t want to let down her team, she said.
She decided to walk instead of running, and while hanging out with my family I occasionally caught a glimpse of her bundled form striding valiantly past the driveway on the rural blacktop. At the appointed time, I called her mobile phone to let her know it was time for her to come in. I got no answer. A moment later she again came into view and I called again. She didn’t react.
At least she was getting good use from the second generation iPod Shuffle I bought her from Apple’s refurb department.
“Guess I’ll have to run out there and get her,” I said.
I asked her how her ankle felt. “It hurts a lot,” she said.
Visions of Shannon hobbling around steeply-graded Silver Dollar City danced in my head. Although I had never tried one, I was sure sugar plums would have been better.
We had a great time with visiting family and copious food, and then loaded up in three vehicles for the three-hour drive to Branson. Before anyone asks, we all would be going significantly divergent ways after that, so carpooling didn’t make sense.
“If your ankle hurts that much, then maybe we should go back for Mom and Dad’s wheelchair,” I said about 10 minutes into the drive. “They said we could bring it.”
“No, I don’t want to do that,” Shannon said. She was trying not to focus any more attention on her plight, and hoped that by morning her ankle would feel better.
Instead, it got much worse.
(to be continued)
Since 2005 I have used my blog to share what’s happening in our lives. Four days from when this publishes, I begin the final year of my 30’s. What better time to look back on what my 30’s brought before I started a public journal?
I turned 30 in the dreaded year 2000. By the time my birthday arrived, it was fairly clear that the world was not going to end as a result of the rollover from 1999. It also was fairly clear that Prince’s song “1999″ would never be the same.
We had moved to northwest Arkansas in 1999 so I finally could leave information technology and follow my dream of writing for a living, for exactly half the pay I had been earning. The funniest thing about that was the number of people who asked me, “Is your wife going with you?”
That was only the beginning of a period that can be summed up by that overused word, “change.”
