All posts by Nichole

Family matters

My dad’s summer with the Boy Scouts

Today’s Summertime Rewind guest writer is more of a guest speaker, because it’s the only way I could get my dad to share a summertime story with us. I dragged this one out of him while he made potstickers to go with our leftovers from Forbidden City last week.

“You could write about riding the bus all over town,” I suggest. My grandma was a city bus driver, and my dad and his siblings used her passes to traverse the town.

Dad doesn’t like that idea, though.

“That’s the highlight of my childhood?” he says. “Riding the bus?”

“It doesn’t have to be a highlight,” I say. “Just a memory. What about the time you hitchhiked to Florida?”

“That was Easter.”

“Didn’t you do anything during the summer?”

And then the big reveal: “I broke my leg one summer.”

“That’s a good story!” I say. And one I don’t think I’ve heard before.

“That’s not a good story,” he protests.

“But it’s a story,” I tell him, and he finally agrees to share it.

“I was in the Boy Scouts,” he says. “The Boy Scouts was a traumatic experience. I was a Boy Scout for one summer. Maybe a year. In the wintertime I went on a ‘polar bear’ …”

“What’s a ‘polar bear’?” I ask.

“I slept outside in the winter in a tent,” he says. “And then in the summertime we went on a canoe trip and I spent the rest of eternity selling cookies and working at pancake suppers and trying to raise money to go to camp for two weeks. And the week before I went to camp? I broke my leg riding my bicycle down the soapbox derby hill. So I couldn’t go to camp. And I spent my summer in a cast.”

“That’s a sad story,” I say.

“They’re all sad stories,” he says.

And then we sit down to a dinner of leftovers, pot stickers and corn nuggets. Which is a strange combination but not a sad story at all.

On the Road

To the best of my knowledge, I will not be spending time in an RV this July

I’m taking a break from blogging this month and sharing some words from friends, some posts from the past and other assorted bric-a-brac. This was originally published on July 29, 2011, as “Now I know where to find great T-shirts in central Alabama” during that time when I was traveling the Deep South with Jenna on her All Thrifty States tour.

We spent Monday night at the home of Jenna’s friend Cecelia and her husband, Ryan. Before we all crashed, we ordered pizza and watched the “Breaking Bad” pilot. I’ve only been on the road with Jenna for a few days, and it was so nice to return to “normal” life. Jenna has been on the road for 30-plus days; I can’t imagine how welcome these little in-home oases are for her!

I woke up Tuesday to the rain gently falling against the window, with a soft light streaming through the trees. I pulled myself out of bed and got ready to face the day, only to snuggle back into our hosts’ couch to finish my book. I’ll take that every morning, please. After finishing “The Selected Works of Whimsical cat is whimsical.T.S. Spivet” — which was weird but compelling, although I didn’t really find the end all that satisfying — I ate a few pieces of leftover cheese bread from Papa John’s and begged Jenna for some ibuprofen. Despite the day’s delightful beginnings, I’d woken up with a hoopendoodle of a headache.

The ibuprofen started to work its magic, and we headed out to visit the Goodwill store in Montgomery, Alabama. Goodwill is sponsoring Jenna’s trip, so she’s trying to visit as many of the shops as she can along her route. Like the Buckhead Goodwill, the Montgomery store was spacious, clean and well-organized. Many years ago I overheard a kid at a thrift store complaining to his mom that the shop smelled “like broccoli and old ladies.” Maybe Jenna just has a knack for choosing the best stores, but I’m thinking maybe thrift stores in general have cleaned up their act a bit. That is to say: I’ve been impressed at how tidy the stores we’ve visited have been.

The Montgomery Goodwill gets my vote for both Best T-Shirts and Most Wonderful Book Section so far this trip. They had a vast array of N’Sync t-shirts, as well as a host of goofy slogans such as “I (heart) hot moms” and I (cheeseburger) cows.” Their book section was actually its own room, which could have functioned as a small used book store. The lack of organization in there made me a little twitchy — the “Dune” books should all be together, for one, and I spied four copies of Robert James Waller’s “Puerto Vallarta Squeeze” and a variety of Paul Reiser tomes scatter wily-nily across the bookshelves — but they had an impressive selection. I bought a copy of Tom Wolfe’s “A Man in Full,” a circa-1964 cookbook from Brennan’s restaurant and a set of flip-through explorer cards for the kids.

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We started the drive to Mobile, Alabama, after Jenna finished a few interviews with the local media, and we made it about halfway there before HaRVey politely requested an oil change. His little dashboard notification system said, “Pardon me, miss, but I could use a spot of oil. Pip-pip, cheerio!” OK, well maybe it wasn’t that, verbatim, but it was along those lines. So we made a brief pitstop, then carried on our way.

The sky was ominously dark in the distance for the rest of the drive, but we forged ahead anyway, with a song in our hearts and Nutella-graham snacks in our hands. The skies were clear when we arrived at our campsite, and Jenna made us some Butternut Squash Ravioli for dinner. It was delicious, but it made me miss my Poppy something ferocious. The clear skies seemed to be giving way to more rain as I typed this, and there was enough thunder to make me a little nervous. Let’s hope it isn’t a night like the one Jenna experienced in Iowa!

Lessons learned on Day Four

  • Toasted almonds and garlic are a genius addition to butternut squash ravioli.
  • Getting the oil changed in an RV is expensive.
    • Social Media

    On cancer and quitting, hidden things and life well-lived

    In the past I’ve put links to posts and articles I particularly enjoyed in the sidebar, under the “In Brief” heading. In the spirit of Change and Redesign, Etc., I’m doing away with that. And I’m going to compile them into a Friday Links post. Which was something I did when I very first had a website, back in 19diggity9 or so. And I “designed” a graphic to go along with it. With dancing sausages on it. Because of course that’s what I’d do.

    Anyway, here are some things that caught my eye this week.

    1. Eden Riley so perfectly captures the confusion and helplessness of having a loved one with a terminal illness in her heartbreaking post “Half the Moon is Gone.”

      They still couldn’t take Jim. Don’t they understand what kind of guy he is? How hard he’s worked? Send me somebody to blame, Universe. It feels nice when there’s people to blame. I drove around town for heat packs while his biopsy got cancelled again and it’s the end of the world as we know it but people still honk when I drive too slow.

    2. We have a rather large quitting of things in our past, and so Katherine Stone’s “On Why Quitters Do Win” resonated with me Something Fierce. As trying and kind of terrible as that time was, I don’t think we could’ve gotten where we are now without first going through that.

      You don’t have to check off all of the boxes, or be a renaissance woman (or man). You don’t have to carry out every creative parenting idea you’ve ever seen mentioned on Pinterest. … And as for all those things you can’t stand but are making yourself do right now because you saw it on morning TV or Twitter, quit. Quit right this second.

    3. I hope this, too.
    4. Natalie Dee gets me. She just like gets me, you know?
    5. Count Robert de la Rochefoucauld’s obituary is the most exciting obituary I’ve ever read. And I’ve read a lot of obituaries. (via kottke.org)

      En route to his execution in Auxerre, La Rochefoucauld made a break, leaping from the back of the truck carrying him to his doom, and dodging the bullets fired by his two guards. Sprinting through the empty streets, he found himself in front of the Gestapo’s headquarters, where a chauffeur was pacing near a limousine bearing the swastika flag. Spotting the key in the ignition, La Rochefoucauld jumped in and roared off, following the Route Nationale past the prison he had left an hour earlier.