Wheatzie

Growing up, I was not necessarily an “outdoorsy” type. Sure, my siblings and I swam at the public pool for a good 8 hours a day each summer while my mom nursed her hangover.   Lest I sound bitter, I’m not:   We had so much fun at that pool, and I became a great swimmer.   Sometimes I visit my sisters, who still live in our hometown, and we take all of our kids back to that same pool to swim.   The kids marvel at the fact that it used to be a simple concrete rectangle as opposed to what it is now: a waterpark complete with four water slides, a climbing wall, and a ninja warrior course. “You had… fun …in just a big square full of water?” my boys will ask me. “Yep,” I’ll respond, nodding my head definitively.   “It only cost a dollar to get in, and guess how much money Grandma would send us with for snacks? Fifty cents.   FOR THE WHOLE DAY.” They’ll gasp and ask what fifty cents could possibly have bought back then, and it’s usually at this point in ...

I once had a friend from Ireland who cocked his head and shot me a not unkind side-eyed glance.   “I sure wish I had a pair of those rose-colored glasses you walk around wearing all the time,” he said. “What rose-colored glasses?” I asked, feeling the top of my head to see if I had forgotten that I had pushed some sunglasses up there.  I also had a different friend who, when I said something stupid, would shake his head and give me a gentle smile and a light pat on the head and go, “Oh, Lisa…,” and I think that would have been a really appropriate gesture in the above moment.  Side note: The head-patting friend was a really great-looking guy, a tall, dark, and handsome strapping specimen who literally—I watched it happen on at least a few different occasions—turned heads whenever he walked into any room. He was meeting me and another friend of mine at a baseball game one summer, and my friend had never met him and had no idea what he looked like.  “Just watc...