Destination: Mount Airy

A five hundred and fifty-three mile round trip in the silver bullet took Connie and me to visit Mom and spend a little time together.  The bullet has more than 200 thousand miles on her, but she still runs like a Timex Watch.

It was a lot colder in Mount Airy than it was here in Augusta, but it wasn't that bad.  This morning, you could see a little snow on the south slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  You needed a heavy jacket and some gloves.  But the weather was very tolerable for this time of year.  Our trip had been planned for almost a month, and it was always conditional upon the weather.  There have been a lot of mid-January's where snow and ice hampered travel up and down I-77 in the northern part of North Carolina.  But this trip was trouble free.  Worse thing that happened was Connie spilled coffee all in the front seat ... because I ran over a curb exiting Starbucks in York, SC on the way home.



Mom was doing well.  We could tell she'd done an awful lot of work -- inside and outside.  She didn't want us to do anything while we were there but visit with her.

We got into a conversation the first night there and discovered that Mom seemed confused about how old she was.  She kept saying that she was 77.  Where she got that idea, I don't know.  She said somebody told her, but she wasn't sure about it ... not sure (or wouldn't tell us) who told her, and not sure at all about the 77 years.  She said she felt much older than that!  So we got out some scratch paper and I showed her, mathematically, how she was 72 years, 4 months, and 13 days.  This seemed to put her mind right at ease.  Connie said to her that this trip was already worth it because it took five years off Mom's life.

Mom's mailbox

Saturday morning, following John's tradition, we went to Ocie's for breakfast.  Mom was sort of noncommittal about going, so Connie went with me and we got there a little past 8 o'clock.  We saw Paul and Don and Bob and Ralph, an unfamiliar face named Carroll, and Larry.  Edd, we learned, had had surgery recently, so obviously he couldn't come.  These were guys John always had breakfast with.  John had taken me to Ocie's with him several times, and we always sat the group.  They were his friends.  Now, since John died, they're my friends, too.  As usual, the group started to file to the cash register about nine to pay their tabs and say good-bye.  I elbowed Connie indicating that we should be going, but she said to hold on, that Mom might be coming yet.  No way, I said, it's already past nine.  So I got up and paid.  Then Connie and I were in a conversation that lingered into the parking lot and we sat in the car for a few more minutes watching everyone drive off.  Connie told me we shouldn't leave just yet.  She said she had a feeling that Mom might still show up.  Sure enough, as I put the silver bullet into gear, in putters Mom's little green Toyota into a parking space.  So Connie and I went back inside for breakfast number two.

We left Ocie's about ten and decided to go to the new museum on Main Street.  We stopped at Rite Aid along the way for Connie to get something for a headache ... and some peppermint sticks for later.  The museum was a two-hour semi-bore.  Three stories of it!  The most interesting thing I saw was up on the second floor, where they had a couple of old cars from the 1920s parked.  There was a button their on the rail that you could push and it was supposed to make sound like the cars' horns.  But it didn't work.  Good thing they had chairs here and there to rest a spell.  By noon, all I was wanting to do was take a nap.  But Connie and Mom decided we should go eat lunch!

Still full from breakfast, I trudged in to Pandowdy's with the ladies.  Pandowdy's is a little place on Main Street that serves German fare.  Each of us ordered one of the soups of the day and fruit platter to share.  Good thing, because there was no way I could have eaten an entree.  Both the food and the service were excellent.  While we dined, the proprietor came over to talk with us.  When he learned that I had lived in Germany for almost ten years, we swapped a few stories about some of the places we had been ... Bad K, Worms, Baumholder.  Eventually it came time to leave.

It was almost two o'clock in the afternoon when we got home.  I wanted to watch the UNC-FSU basketball  game, which came on at two, but Mom had let her Dish Network subscription lapse.  I thought about listening to the game on the radio.  It would have been great to hear a game called by Woody Durham.  Haven't listed to a Carolina game like that in years.  I mentioned it to Connie, but she flat wasn't interested.  About fifteen minutes before tip-off, I got so tired that I decided to forego the game and take a nap.  This was Providential.  The Tar Heels received a 33-point shellacking.  Instead of me getting all work up into a bad state over such a bad loss, I rested peacefully for two and half hours.

When I got up, the ladies told me they had decided we were going out for sea food.  I couldn't believe we were going to eat yet again.  Our destination was to be the Libby Hill Seafood restaurant on US 52 Bypass, near the Mayberry Mall.  I had eaten there with Mom on recent trip and wasn't very impressed.  This visit confirmed that impression.  Just awful.  Poor service ... the waitress couldn't give Mom straight answers to her questions about whether certain dishes were prepared with our without flour.  Amazingly, she even indicated there was not there to even ask.  The kitchen was slow to get our orders out.  The waitress kept "forgetting" small requests we made -- like for extra napkins.  I had to get them myself.  I asked for some A-1 Sauce for my steak (it wasn't bad), but instead of an A-1 bottle that you'd be given in any reputable restaurant, the waitress brought me a little plastic to-go container with about a tablespoon of A-1 Sauce in it.  Of course, I got it all over my fingers when I opened it.  Besides, the very idea!  Overall, the food was about a D+.  My fries were served almost cold.  Mom's baked potato looked as if it had been baking all day.  Half  the space on my plate was taken up by a piece of lettuce with and orange slice atop.  My schrimp came wrapped in aluminum foil.  The restaurant was trashed, the bathrooms were filthy.  While we were there, one waitress cleaned off a nearby table then dumped all the dirty dishes and uneaten food right out on the carpet.  Waitresses were running those carpet cleaners everywhere ... excuse me, pardon me ... like they were preparing for the store's closing ... and it was only seven-thirty!  The men's room was a disaster.  The whole place is in a rather general state of disrepair.  Why on Earth would anyone ever want to go back there for a second time?  But I kept my mouth shut about it.

We visited with Mom for a while after returning to the house, but we were too full to even think about a cup of tea before retiring to bed.  I was, however, successful in getting Mom to turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees.  This helped us rest a little better that we did the first night.  The result was that we slept about an hour later this morning.

We left about nine-thirty and got home about three in the afternoon.  A nice week-end excursion with the Mrs.  Now, I've got a good day's work ahead of me before going back to the office on Tuesday.

It never stops.