Day: June 6, 2019

Class Reunion

Fandango4 Comments

4DCB1E25-0562-4E30-A118-9FFD797DE69F“Hello,” the woman at the reception table said. “Welcome to the Class of 1999 twenty-year reunion. May I have your name, please?”

“Elizabeth, don’t you recognize me?” Aaron asked. “We were classmates. And surely you remember that night when we….”

Elizabeth cut off the man standing in front of her and then looked carefully him. “Oh my God. Is that you, Aaron? Look at you. You were such a nerd back in our ivy-covered campus days. Now you’re a hot.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Aaron said, a smile on his face. “You’re looking pretty good, yourself, Elizabeth.”

“So what have you been up to for the past two decades, Aaron?”

“I’m a stock broker, never married, and I dabble in a few other areas of personal interest,” Aaron said. “What about you?”

“I’m divorced, have two beautiful kids, and work as an oxygen therapist,” Elizabeth said.

“Well, I don’t know what that is, but it sounds important,” Aaron said. “I imagine it must be rewarding for you to nurture your children.”

“You clearly don’t have any children,” Elizabeth said, with a little laugh. “I’m convinced that having your own kids is like paying penance for the hell we put our own parents through when we were kids.”

“I hear ya’,” Aaron said as he reached down to sign the reunion registry. “I think this pen is out of ink. Do you have another?”

“I’m sure we have a plenty of pens here,” Elizabeth said, “And I’m sure we’re in for a plenitude of new memories at this twenty-year reunion.” She winked at Aaron.

“I’m up for making some great new memories with you tonight, Elizabeth,” Aaron said. “And are you sure you don’t remember that night….”

“Oh yes,” Elizabeth interrupted. “I remember it quite well.”

Written for the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver prompt where the topic is “reunion.” Also for Paula Light’s Three Things Challenge where the three things are “ink,” “oxygen,” and “ivy.” And finally, for these daily prompts: The Daily Spur (night), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (dabble), Ragtag Daily Prompt (nurture), Word of the Day Challenge (penance), and Your Daily Word Prompt (plenitude).

Idle Minds

Fandango13 Comments

I’m laid up today with a sore back and I was sitting on my couch watching TV when I saw a banner come across the bottom of the screen advertising a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the Kansas City Royals. Suddenly I had a flashback to my youth.

I was just a kid back in the mid-fifties when my love for baseball began. And back in the mid-fifties, Kansas City’s major league baseball team was the Athletics, not the Royals. Back then there were only 16 major league baseball teams, eight in each league. Today, there are 30 MLB teams, 15 in each league.

I was curious about how many teams of the original 16 had moved to different cities, so I googled “1957 major league baseball teams” and I got a list of the final standings of the 1957 season.01A8CFC2-84BC-4427-9B8C-A1919C616AD05BAA7F93-814E-421A-9D1A-09E854E6162BWhat I noticed was that, in addition to the Kansas City A’s now being the Oakland A’s, the Milwaukee Braves are now the Atlanta Braves, the Brooklyn Dodgers are now the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the New York Giants are now the San Francisco Giants.

In addition, my then hometown team, the Washington Senators, moved to Minneapolis and became the Minnesota Twins. A few years later, the “New” Washington Senators moved to North Texas and became the Texas Rangers. The current Washington team, the Nationals, are the relocated Montreal Expos.

And for a fascinating bit of baseball trivia, the Cincinnati Reds were known as the Redlegs back in the mid-fifties because America was going through a “red scare” at the time. In 1954, the team’s name was changed from the Reds to the Redlegs due to the word “red” having a political connotation related to Soviet communism. In 1959 the team reverted back to the Reds.

So this is what happens when an otherwise articulate and erudite person becomes housebound due to a minor back injury. You know what they say about idle minds, right?

Oh My Aching Back

Fandango26 Comments

F3577DEF-2A44-4D0B-BAB7-6C424BB7512DMost days I don’t feel my age. But most days are not like yesterday. I spent five hours on our deck and patio doing a long-overdue spring cleaning. I swept and vacuumed the deck, washed down all of our deck furniture — chairs and tables — removed all of the accumulated spider webs from the wood siding, and pressure-washed the deck flooring, which is due for re-staining. Then I went to our patio on the ground floor and did the same things down there.

Little did I know that those five hours would be such backbreaking work. Within a few hours of completing the clean-up, I was popping Advil tablets like Tic Tacs and sitting on the couch, an ice pack wedged between my lower back and the couch’s back cushion.

I was hoping that when I woke up this morning, I would no longer be afflicted by lower back pain. No such luck. More Advil, more ice packs. More bellyaching about my backache.

Maybe by tomorrow I will recapture my youthful vim and vigor, whatever “vim” is.

 

FOWC with Fandango — Dabble

Fandango21 Comments

FOWCWelcome to June 6, 2019 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). It’s designed to fill the void after WordPress bailed on its daily one-word prompt.

I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (US).

Today’s word is “dabble.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.