A good time

So, the other evening I’m over at the Kids’ house.

Their son, my Grandson, was his usual happily bouncing ball of irrepressible enjoyment. He had recently turned five and I’d brought along a back-ordered birthday gift, a 60-second timer designed as an educational tool for youngsters. He loved it, setting and re-setting the device, applying the timer to any and every domestic event of the evening and taking extended pleasure in the brief alarm bell at their culminations.

For the last couple years my Grandson has displayed a penchant for the mechanical and I figured he’d like the timer, plus his parents could use it to help him learn time management as he approached the kindergarten milestone. It was successful well beyond my imagining.

All around, I could not possibly think of a better way to occupy myself than being with the three of them.

I take a deep pleasure in spending time with my daughter and her husband. She is a joy to my heart and he is one of the most even-tempered, hard-working and dependable guys I’ve known. My Grandson, of course…well, if you’re a grandparent, you know what I mean.

Afterward, driving back to the RV park, a half hour run up I-10, I was thinking about a story I’d told the kids, about some family events from my past. You know the kind of story; typically it begins with something like, “I remember when…,” or, “Have I ever told you about the time…?”

But it wasn’t the story itself that occupied my thoughts; it was just one more of dozens I’d told them. In fact, I’m quite certain I’d told them this particular anecdote numerous times before—hence the glassy look in their eyes when I was telling it again. Rather, I was reflecting on the fact that I knew I’d related these particular events to them before and I went ahead and did it again anyway.

Used to be that I figured older people repeated a story because they didn’t realize they’d told you that particular tale before. Now I know that’s not the case. No, those stories are re-told just for the sheer pleasure of the re-telling, the rekindling, the re-living of cherished memories and significant emotions. It simply helps to have an audience.

Too bad, Kids. Looks like you’ll be hearing it again..

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Here comes the sun

Probably my least favorite part of the “full-time” RV experience is the heat.

The sun-baked RV experience.

If you can bring to mind the POW labor camp depicted in the motion picture The Bridge on the River Kwai, or the fenced rural prison enclosure in Cool Hand Luke, you may also recall the cramped punishment boxes that were features of those—as well as staples of many other—prison movies. In those cast iron or roofing-metal coffers the recalcitrant prisoner was slow-roasted day after day in the unmerciful sun until he saw the error of his ways.

Alec Guinness being assisted from his overheated

dressing room trailer on location for the filming of

The Bridge on the River Kwai.

The RV experience—baking in a metal box fully exposed to the intense radiation of a million-mile-wide nuclear furnace only nine minutes away (as the photon flies)—can be similar. Especially if one is too cheap to turn on the roof-mounted air conditioner that is an almost-standard feature of such recliner-, shower- and refrigerator-equipped sarcophagi.

So life in an RV park is not all potlucks, pinochle and swimming pools; there’s a great deal of self-inflicted punishment as well.

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Not really