Travels With Becky

Good enough!

A family story: Not my family. This was told to me at the Lane Library in Hampton. Hampton loves stories, hearing them and telling them.

During the days of gas rationing, Mother Beatrice Ayer (of the Boston Brahmin Ayer family) was able to transport herself to church each Sunday in a donkey cart.

One Sunday a black limousine pulled up behind the cart, and an Auntie sniffed: “My deah, is that any way for an Ayer to go to church?”

Beatrice replied: “If it is good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for me.”

And drove on.

Little John of Nottingham

Wa’n’t I excited!  Saturday, listening to my favorite radio show, "Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me," the caller playing the Bluff the Listener game was none other than Steve Soreff of Nottingham, NH, my favorite punster.

Peter Sagel said hi to Steve, then asked if Nottingham had a sheriff  (like we haven’t heard that one before!).  Steve says, “No, but I call my outhouse Little John.”

Doin’ us proud, Steve.  

In other news, Olive was proud of her little girl, Alice, and how quickly she was learning the Lord’s Prayer.  Yup, Alice recited it back to her, word perfect, until the line, “and deliver us from eagles.”

If you’ve ever seen an eagle up close on the branch of a pine tree,  turning its beady eye on your Shih Tzu, you know what Alice was talking about.

Not Fair!

In Nova Scotia on a road trip, Ma, Dad and the kids passed a cemetery.  Dad lamented that the folks who lived in the house across the road from the cemetery couldn’t be buried there.

“Why not?” the kids wanted to know.

“They’re not dead.”

Decades later, that old family joke is remembered and passed on.

In a (perhaps) related story, a fella told me the neatest road name he knew was, “That’s It Road.”  Must be a dead end.  With a cemetery.

You Might Not Know You Need It Until It’s Gone

Nancy in Danville confirmed that mine is not the only family that saves everything.   She and her husband were helping her father-in-law organize his stuff, i.e., maybe get rid of a few things.  The mosquito netting hats couldn’t go -- he might need them all.  Nancy found a neat old shoe shine box with brushes and polish.  The polish, a mud brown, was dried and cracked.  So she tossed it -- without consulting Dad.

Sure enough, next time she saw him, he announced he was looking for his shoe polish.  It was, evidently, a “very special color.”  Nancy didn’t fess up until years later, when, for Christmas, she presented him with a new tin of shoe polish, as mud brown as she could find.  

My theory: He knew darned well what she’d done all along and was biding his time until her conscience got the best of her.  And, he didn’t even have a pair of shoes that color.