I’m having extreme difficulty achieving re-entry into the blogosphere, following a fine Thanksgiving week. Is it possible to dwell in a trytophan lethargy for days at a time?
But I press on, dear friends, for you; such is the depth of my devotion, and my desire to avoid doing anything truly useful for a while longer.
Our actual Thanksgiving observance was somewhat subdued, coming less than two months after the unexpected death of my wife’s mother. No one was strong enough to speak of her directly at our family dinner, but she was on everyone’s mind. We did give thanks for the grace and peace that God gives us to get through times like this, and for the renewed strengthening of bonds among family members still remaining, as we realize how tenuous those bonds truly are.
Nevertheless, the fellowship was sweet and the food was, well, sinful. Joyfully sinful. Ecstatically sinful. Hours-and-hours-on-the-treadmill-doing-penance sinful.
Friday was perhaps even better than Thanksgiving Day (with one large exception). Nine of us — everyone but my mom — headed out to my brother’s place to do some target shooting. We had a dozen or so firearms in an amazing variety of flavors: .44 and .357 Magnums, a .410, an old M1 with a folding stock, a 9mm pistol, a couple of .38 Specials with 2″ barrels and several varieties of .22LR, including the new rifle I bought the previous week for my nephew.
None of us are very good marksmen, but we all had a great time. The nephew was in hog heaven…I think he shot everything except the .44, and I know he can’t wait to tell his high school freshman ROTC buddies about the experience when he goes back to school tomorrow. Even our 16 year old niece enjoyed the time. OK…it’s a given that she would have preferred to be loitering in the street with the cute neighbor boy, but he had other plans, so we were an acceptable second choice.
My wife and her sister both decided that in the event of a confrontation with a bad guy, they would be better off just throwing the gun at him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone miss a target from 5 yards with every shot, but they managed to do it.
Earlier in the day, I took the kids up to the high school parking lot and let them drive the Durango. They get a big kick out of tooling around the big lot, practicing their cruising moves. The niece is actually old enough to take driver’s ed, but that’s not in the cards for her just yet.
Anyway, I think I’m quite a bit more mellow than their mom as a driving instructor, although I’ll confess to putting a pretty good indentation in the passenger’s side floorboard as I attempted to help with the braking on a couple of occasions.
My dad’s 80th birthday was on Friday. We celebrated by going out for Tex-Mex that evening. Nothing like some asado de puerco to relegate the turkey and dressing to distant memory status. The only downer for the day was the A&M-UT football game, which, if truth be told, has ruined more Thanksgivings over the years than I care to recall. My dad’s a die-hard Aggie… not a 2-percenter like his sons and daughter-in-law… so he was a bit, um, miffed at the [not unexpected] lousy performance put on by the Aggies. But, as we’re good at saying, wait ’til next year.
If that’s all the sorrow we have to endure each year, then we are blessed beyond measure. And, looking back, I’d have to say that’s the case.
Hope yours was good, too!