Author: Steve

We’ll be back in the 90s any day now.  (We’re the second line, Edinburg.)  (That’s not feels-like temperatures, that’s actual thermometer readings.  Feels-like in the area were as high as 125.)  (We have air conditioning.)

May is a good time to be heading north, away from the extreme heat of South Texas in summer, and normally we’d have done that by now, but this year is not normal.  We have determined how we’re going to travel next but have not yet achieved the means. our newest freedom machine, the Transit Van.  It has not been built yet, but we checked on the tracking website and it is still scheduled for the week of May 13^th.

That’s close.  Like next week close!  It’s a six-step process and we’re told that the production phase will take from one to three weeks.  Even when it’s delivered, we still have some things to do before we’re really ready to travel, so it’s going to be a late, and warm, start to our summer travels.

It’s warming up.

Fifty years of marriage.  That has such a nice ring to it.  A Golden anniversary.  We had a great celebration then and relish it every day.

Now we’ve been married 50 years and 2,920 days.  We’re starting our 59^th year.  Of course, we’ve been together longer than that.  Altogether, we’ve been a “thing” for 61 years.  For our big day, we’re spending it at home.  No appointments or errands today.  We’re eschewing a loud and expensive dinner for something simple right here.  It’s a good day.

Morality plays.  Character studies.  Life-lessons.  We watched a television episode of Wagon Train from the early 60s.  My head is still spinning.

The story wasn’t told in this order, but this is what it was about.  Two youngsters, squeezing bleeding hands together, swearing “blood brothers”.  Later in life, one losing his sight, they both fell in love with the same woman.  The discord resulted in a gunfight in the woman’s room, and she was shot and killed.  The hero of the story was so true to his blood-brother commitment that he didn’t tell his going-blind friend that he hadn’t even drawn his gun.  The woman was killed by a ricochet off a brass bed post from the going-blind guy’s gun when he shot and missed.  The good guy didn’t tell his friend, who turned out to be the bad guy, so he, the friend, wouldn’t feel bad.  He was that devoted a blood brother.

The result is that the other guy continued to go blind and spent the rest of his life searching for, and plotting revenge against, the blood brother who killed his woman.  In the final confrontation, years later, wouldn’t you know, the good guy never pulled his gun and the bad blind guy shot at him, missed, and got killed by his own ricochet off a rock.

And the moral is…