"Sunday Morning Coming Down"

Today is the 6-month mark since I lost Wayne. In some ways it might as well have been 6 years. I think of all he's missed in that 6 months. A lot of it has happened right here, in what was supposed to be our retirement home. All the things he hoped for us here have come to pass, and it makes me sorry he hasn't been here to realize it along with me. Even more than me, he was excited about moving here, to the Hill Country, in this smaller home where he, especially, felt he could relax, meeting new people, forming a social network that we hadn't had since we left the mountains. I was still holding onto the Oregon dream. Right up until the week before he died, I was still looking at places online there, in our dream town of Florence, Oregon. On reflection, with all that has transpired, I'm glad we didn't throw all our eggs into that one basket. The house in Yoakum is about to close, which means we would have still been waiting to make that big move, because it would have taken everything to live there. And I have made some great friends here, so I treasure the thought of knowing he was right about coming here. 

I've gotten to a stage now where I am trying to let him go. Not in my heart and memory, but in the physical, functioning world he left to me. I've replaced some of the things he brought into our relationship with things that feel like mine, now. It's not easy to find a meaningful path forward, but I'm working on it. 

Still not writing. I'm thinking about it, though, trying to formulate a story idea, but it seems like such a huge effort to start another novel. And I'm still not certain of my ability to give it the concentration it requires. There have been other times in my life -- in the last 20 years -- when I have felt I would never write anything new. I do have a novel coming out at the end of this year, but it was finished last summer, before the move and that life-shattering night, so it reality doesn't count as new new. The reprint of Looking After Lily has been out for a month and I haven't done much in the way of promotion. It's another thing that feels like more effort than I want to give.

Looking forward, I have a trip to Hawaii with my boys on the agenda. That's something great to anticipate. I've been trying to come up with a solo trip idea between now and then, just haven't settled on anything definite yet. I'm enjoying my kittens, missing my Sam -- he left me too soon, too. Bella and Rowdy are both sweet and loving, and are coming along with their "training," which mostly consists of keeping them off the kitchen counters and the eating tables. They're pretty good about not scratching anything but their posts and scratch pads. They've brought me a lot of joy and laughter. 

Sundays are still the hardest because it was our day, which leaves me with nothing but sorrow for the traditions we made, of watching CBS Sunday Morning with our coffee, afterwards our big Sunday breakfast, and then whatever home-time project we had planned together. I miss the conversation the most. We never stopped talking, for all the years we were together. We solved the world's problems, rehashed scientific discoveries, relished learning some new bit of history together. We had different tastes in music, in books, in movies, in style, but on the important things, the things that matter, we were sympatico. 

As Kris Kristopherson wrote in the song Johnny Cash made famous, 

"There's somethin' in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone..."

Onward ....

Hill Country Cafe, A Time Warp

 This morning I went into the doctor at 8:00 am for my yearly Medicare physical. I had to stop eating 12 hours before, so by the time I got up at 6:30 this morning my stomach was already complaining. So I got Sam-cat squared away, looked longingly at the coffee pot, took a shower, and got on my way to the clinic. It was pretty chilly this morning. I really didn't want to get out so early. I don't know what it is, but right now at this time of year here in the Texas Hill Country, the sunlight is absolutely blinding. I drove all the way there with my hand up blocking the brightness, because the sun was too low for my car visor to keep it out of my face.

They got me right in. Asked all those questions about cognitive stuff—like Trump's "Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV" bit, except mine was "Sylvia Lopez, 22 Wolf Cave Road, Hunt, Texas." Weird. I don't even know if such a woman exists, but I aced it. Ha ha! Make me a bumper sticker!

So by 9:00 I am let loose from the probing and pricking, and I decide since I'm close to downtown Kerrville, I will have breakfast at the Hill Country Cafe. Now, this is kind of a Kerrville landmark, having been the location of the very first HEB grocery store. So small, you can't even imagine it. I suppose it was one of those groceries like you see on Gunsmoke where the customer comes in, asks for a dime's worth of flour, and the grocer goes to some canisters behind the counter and measures out the amount. It could not have been much more than that because this place is TINY for a grocery store.

I park beside the Kerr County Courthouse and walk the half block, expecting from the look of all the cars parked in front of the cafe, to have a wait. But lo and behold there is one, small open table with two chairs in the middle of the cafe and I take it. Immediately my waitress sees me and brings a menu. She asks if I want coffee. Oh, yes, I sure do, please, more than anything in this world. And I ask could she make it half caf/half reg. Apparently that is not an unusual ask. She takes it in stride. 

She is friendly, completely bald like she has just recently undergone chemo. She's wearing cowboy boots, blue jeans, a baggy black T-shirt that reads, "Gosh, being a princess is exhausting." She has on big round acrylic glasses, a chunky man's watch on her arm, long silver dangle earrings with crosses swinging back and forth. She also has a big open smile. We chat a bit.

There's another waitress bustling around the place. She's wearing combat boots, skin-tight blue jeans, a gray bling blouse, and a ballcap that says "Jesus." I think I know the way the message on the cap is intended but my mind goes to the word as an exclamation of exasperation. Jesus! She hollers out a welcome at every person that comes in, often by their first name, and says, "Have a great day!" to everyone who exits. This would have been Wayne's kind of place. He loved a homey old diner-style cafe with saucy waitresses and plain old comfort food. And the coffee is absolutely outstanding!

While I'm waiting for my food, the cook or owner or who knows, catches my eye over the saloon style door separating the eating part of the cafe from the kitchen. He mouths the words "Good morning" at me, and smiles. I feel like a regular, like I have been welcomed into the fold of this "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" cafe. It makes me want to get up early every morning and drive downtown to eat here. On a wall to my left is a little sign that says: "Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway." Reading that, tears spring to my eyes. I have to blink a lot to force them to retreat. That is just the sort of sign that Wayne would have hanging by his side of the bed, or in the bathroom, or out in his "man cave." Maybe that's why it touches me so much, or maybe it's just the message. It amplifies everything I have been feeling for the past three months.

I can't even begin to describe how delicious my breakfast is: two eggs over medium, fried to perfection. Crispy around the edges. Deep dark yellow yolks. No runny white. The bacon (my god there are four slices!) are well-browned but with still just a little chewy along with the crisp, good pork flavor; smoky. The grits are creamy and full of butter. The toast is white bread done just right, with strawberry jam on the side. The tomato juice seems like it's fresh, too. I eat like I've been on a starvation diet. I leave maybe a tablespoon of grits, maybe a corner of a half-slice of toast. I drink down four cups of the medium-strong, well-roasted coffee. I am as full as a tick when I get up to pay my bill, which my waitress has silently left on the opposite corner of my table on one of her many pass-bys. Both waitresses are bustling around the place, busy busy. It's no wonder they are both willowy thin. 

I go up to the front to pay and eye two sky-high meringue pies in a cupboard behind the counter: one coconut, one chocolate. They must be 8 inches tall and look delicious. There are also huge cinnamon rolls back there, slathered in buttery glaze pooling onto their individual saucers. The cashier gives me my change, says, "You come back, hon." And I walk out, feeling like I have just emerged from the 1960s, days of my youth when places like this were on every corner. It gives me a glow that lasts the entire day. 

This blog-post was not meant as some kind of advertisement for this cafe, or a promo or anything like that, although I would recommend it for breakfast without hesitation. It just felt like a memory to me, and it felt like I had Wayne across the table, enjoying the quaintness of this kind of old-time, small town cafe that is disappearing as fast as a cloud. 

I remember thinking when I was a younger person that my generation would not experience the enormous changes that our parents or grandparents had experienced in their lifetimes. My opinion on that has changed. Eating at this little cafe today, brought that fact back to me in full force. 

Onward....

COVID - Ugh! How I Do Hate Thee

 So Wayne's Celebration of Life memorial was on December 8 and it was a success, if you can use that word to describe that sort of an event. About sixty people came, but not all stayed to the end, which was the best part, at least for me, where we raised a tiny glass of Crown Royal and said Farewell. It was the part where I involuntarily cried. Speeches and memories were shared, some prepared, some not. They were all touching. Old friends of Wayne's, and now mine, took care of most of the arrangements including a lot of food that didn't get eaten. But anyway, that's done and over now, and I supposed there should be some closure as a result, but I don't really feel it yet. Frankly, I was on auto-pilot through the entire thing, just like I was during my mom's funeral, and Daddy's. It's like some fog machine kicks in, and all your hostess training starts making sure you keep circulating, say hi to everybody, accept the hugs, visit with them for a while. Everyone wanted to know some of the details of what happened to Wayne. I tried to give the short version. Some of the people I hadn't seen in years. So, yes, lots of hugging.

Which probably goes a long way to explaining why a couple of days later—COVID! I have heard from people who were at the Celebration and there are others who now have the virus. I actually worried about it, and tested on Thursday before leaving the next day for the event. And I had my fifth booster on November 6, also in preparation for being around that many people, all the hugs and kisses, etc. (Insert a "Waynism" right here—"You can make a plan but don't plan the outcome.") Neither my worries nor my caution kept me from exposure. And now I'm sitting at home, sick, sick, sick, taking a sack-load of medicine, and not feeling appreciably better with each passing day.

Wayne and I quarantined during the Pandemic. We isolated more than most of the people we knew. It was mainly Wayne who insisted on it. He had seen me go through several serious bouts of bronchitis and lung infections. It was, in fact, what caused us to leave the mountains—my breathing trouble. I guess he was worried the virus would go hard on me. So for 15 months we didn't go anywhere or see anybody. And we stayed well—until last September 2022, on a trip back from Oregon when we got delayed in a too-crowded airport. Even though we wore our masks we caught COVID anyway. You can never say for certain, but we felt like all those people at that airport caused it.

So as soon as we tested positive, we called the doctor, did a tele-medical and she prescribed  Paxlovid. It worked, almost too well. It left a terrible taste in our mouths, but it kept the symptoms at bay. We both had one bad day and the rest was about like having a summer cold. Within a week, we were back to fighting strength and testing negative.

Flash forward to now. Paxlovid might as well be a box of M&Ms. It is doing nothing or next to nothing, other than giving me that bad taste lingering in my mouth. I started taking it on Sunday, four days ago now. Monday was rougher than Sunday. And then Tuesday I thought I might be feeling a bit better. However Wednesday came and I woke up with a burning chest and a deep unproductive cough that caused shooting pains in my lungs. And I'm like "what the hell?" I did a tele-medical with my current provider and a few hours later a huge sack of medications arrived at my door. So now, in addition to Paxlovid, I am taking an antibiotic to keep my lungs from developing something worse, like pneumonia for instance; I'm doing a nebulizer inhaler three times a day; and I've got some codeine cough syrup to suppress this painful cough. Then this morning I read an online article from Bloomberg that said Paxlovid is now only 37% effective against the COVID mutations. Duh! I could have told them that.

So I'm hoping I will be better by Christmas.  Yes, I'm thinking that far ahead since the daily improvements are, at this point, miniscule. I don't want my "boys" to have to cancel their flights to come here. And I don't want to further ruin a Christmas that has already been ruined by the death of my beloved. All in all, I just want COVID to go to hell—straight to Hell—where it belongs!

Stay well, friends. And Merry Christmas!

Onward....

Forty-Nine Days and Still Counting

We came to each other later in life. I was 54; he was 60. We had both just been through unusually bad times, me a divorce that sucked the self-esteem out of me. He had won a intense battle with cancer. We were road-weary and searching for peace and quiet, a night out for dinner, a movie in a walk-in theater, companionship. We did not expect to fall in love. That part came as a surprise. Maybe it shouldn't have. Maybe that first date with not enough minutes to get everything said ... maybe that should have held a clue. Maybe the phonecall afterwards, to finish the conversations started over dinner ... maybe that should have been another clue. He was still traveling, making his living, with a myriad of phonecalls throughout my day ... from East Texas, then the Panhandle, then the Valley, then the Hill Country, they came from Denver, Bozeman, Cheyenne, Albuquerque. We never talked long, ten minutes, but we talked often, four or five times a day. He shared things he saw on the road, white-out conditions on mountain passes, elk in a field far from the highway, a herd of palamino horses in a snowy meadow. As soon as he was back at home base, we would rush together, at his place or mine, talking, talking, talking, walking the dog, playing with the kitty. He came with a chainsaw the day a rogue wind knocked a big pecan limb down onto my fence. He laughed and talked while he cut the limb into logs. Later, after the wood had cured, he cooked pecan-smoked steaks over his open firepit one cold starry night at his land. 

Ten months after our first date, we moved in together. My house was too small; his too ramshackle. We bought a house on three acres, nestled under a motte of live oaks, just outside town. The house had been abused, so we started right in fixing it up, new floors, new carpets, new appliances, new paint. He joked that it was too big of a house for him. "I could be happy in a teepee," he said. I bought a ceiling fan with a teepee light fixture to replace the broken fan in our bedroom. He bought a hot tub. We gave everything names, the place was the Buffalo Wallow because a buffalo had been a recent resident, eaten every blade of grass and left tufts of buffalo fur hanging in the fences. The Tropical Room was the enclosed sun porch, the first room he decorated by himself with wicker furniture he bought arranged around all my house plants. The Banishment Room was the extra room off the garage with its own bathroom where guests could stay and feel, as his son once said, "Banished from the main house." My son called it the "Bonmyers B&B."

Years went by, and as they did, we grew closer. Each new milestone, each tragedy, closed any gaps we may have still had between us. Trust is sometimes the hardest part of a new relationship, especially when you're older, and road-weary. As we went through life trials together—the loss of his son, the loss of my dad, his mother, a close aunt, my brother, our dog—our trust in each other became complete.

We talked about getting married. The subject was broached many times. But we didn't want to ruin what we had. He said we were "Happily unmarried." He said that to everyone. He had failed three times at marriage, and I had failed twice. Five failed marriages was not a good track record. We were better at what we had, better at being married in our hearts than on paper. After 16 years, we were soulmates, lovers, best friends, companions, confidantes. Our families were melded in our minds, too. We loved them all, on both sides. 

When I think back now that he's gone, I realize we rescued each other. One of his childhood friends sent me a note the other day, thanking me for making Wayne happy, finally, for the last years of his life. He did the same for me. He was my ballast and my anchor, my cheerleader and my protector, my helpmate and my north star. He often talked me off the ledge when I was overly stressed. He took care of me when I was sick. He doctored my wounds and gave me generous back rubs. He made me laugh, and he made me think. He was my intellectual equal and I loved that so much. We finished each other's sentences. 

It shouldn't have worked. He was a country boy, a cowboy, and I was a definite city girl. But there was enough of me in him and him in me, that somehow it did work. Most of the time it was effortless. We liked nothing better than to sit out on our deck with a pet nearby, coffee in the morning, watching the birds on the feeders, listening to the day come awake—the quiet times we had both needed when we first met. We said from time to time, we'd had enough drama in our lives to last us forever. We didn't need more.

I think of him now encouraging me to go do things, to make changes to the house, to get out in the world, to continue on without him. I remember him saying during hard times when life had dealt its blows, "There's no finish line. You just have to soldier on." And so 49 days in,
this is me soldiering, grateful to have had him in my life.

Onward ... (somehow)

Twenty-Four Days In

 In 1988 I lost my grandmother. From my earliest memory until I started school, my mom dropped me off at my grandmother and grandfather's house. Every day. And sometimes on the weekend. For the rest of her life, my grandmother was an important person to me. Even after I was an adult, I called her weekly, and stopped in to see her whenever I was in the town where she lived. It was pretty much the same with my grandfather (We all called him Pop) until he died in 1992. The loss of these wonderful people hit me hard. I remember I couldn't sleep the nights they died, and grieved for them for months.

In 1994, my mother was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. Her decline was difficult to watch. My mother and I had butt heads for most of my teenaged years and into my young adulthood. She had trouble with high expectations and often found it hard to accept the people around her weren't perfect. When she went on Hospice, I moved in to help my dad take care of her. It was one of the most depressing times of my life, watching my tall, beautiful, healthy mother become unable to take care of her own most basic needs. She died in February 1995. Her death was both a relief and a tragedy. I sleepwalked through the funeral arrangements, and did what I could to help Daddy through those first days. I know now it wasn't enough. For weeks after Mother died I had night terrors. The way she died haunted me and caused mild PTSD.

Daddy outlived Mother by 18 years. He moved closer to me and we saw each other several times a week. He was there for me, my rock, my north star, through the erosion and dissolution of my 34-year marriage. He listened to my rantings, gave me words of encouragement, and when I met Wayne, he gave me his seal of approval without me having to ask. I adored my dad. He was always my champion. When he died in 2013, I was devastated. It took me years to recover from that loss. I'm still recovering from it. And then in 2018 I lost my brother, my only sibling, to cancer, and again I grieved.

In between all these important people in my life, I've lost cats and dogs I adored and grieved for. I've lost friends who died too young. I've had close relations and in-laws I respected and wept over when they passed. But put all those losses, parents, grandparents, sibling, pets, friends, in-laws—put them altogether and they cannot begin to compare to the indescribable grief I feel for the loss of my beloved soulmate, my Ol' Darlin' Wayne. 

One of the things that has become crystal clear through these past weeks is how much more compassion and care I could've and should've shown to others in my life who lost their soulmates. I remember my Pop sitting in his chair, a crumpled old man with tears in his eyes and my grandmother's photograph on the table beside him. I didn't commiserate with him enough through that. I remember my Dad marching from the funeral home to the gravesite after Mother's death, grief marring his face despite his bravest efforts to put one foot in front of the other. I didn't help him through that enough, either. I left him alone far too much in those first weeks. And the same goes for all the others. I realize all that now as I stumble through this landscape of grief, wanting to find the easiest way out. 

Each day brings some new obstacle whether it's dealing with the world, the frustrations of settling his affairs: credit cards to notify, a will to probate, a memorial to contemplate, what to do with all his belongings, who should receive what momento of his life. And then there's the self-care aspect, the brain fog, starting one project only to abandon it to another, forgetting to eat, to shower, to wash clothes, to pet poor Sam, who is also grieving in his feline way. I make lists of things to do, then lose the list. My Echo Dot and Alexa have become my personal secretary. There literally are not enough hours in the day. I wake up wondering, will I ever get through this first part? 

Maybe the worst thing is losing interest in things like reading, sitting out on the deck, having a glass of wine, all the things we liked to do together. We never missed Jeopardy and I think the DVR is still recording it. All those episodes to eventually erase. Buying wine, a thing we both relished and enjoyed. We made a game out of it—"You pick three and I'll pick three." Buying wine has just become another job, like filling a prescription because I need that glass or two of wine so I can sleep. The deck sits out there unused, almost the entire reason we chose to buy this house, that deck. All the plans I had for it, gone. Who do I cook for? Who do I clean the house for? 

When I went through my first divorce, my wise grandmother told me, as she stoked my hair off my forehead, "In a year you will look back and realize you are doing better." She was correct. In a year I had met my soon-to-be second husband. A year after that marriage ended in divorce, I had met Wayne. So I know a year can make a difference, but when I was 20 a year wasn't such a big bite out of my life. Now, at 70, a year is a big sacrifice. It's a year I'll never get back, but if in a year I will believe in the future again, it's a year I will gladly give. 

Onward....

STOP ALL THE CLOCKS

 He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought love would last forever: I was wrong

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good. 

                                    - W.H Auden -

The last two stanzas of Auden's "Stop All the Clocks" have always moved me, but not as much as today when they speak words I can't. My North, my South, my East, my West died suddenly last night. I'm devastated, and this is all I can put on Facebook right now. 

The happiest 16 years of my life were with Richard Wayne Myers (August 30, 1947 to October 7, 2023).

Goodnight my sweet prince........

Ode to My Brother

 My brother, Ray, would have turned 75 today—if his life hadn't been interrupted by cancer, as so many have been. Too many. Cancer is the scourge of our times. The last coherent conversation I had with him he told me he was hoping to make it to age 70. He missed it by three months. And he said he did not want to die while Donald Trump was president. Unhappily, he did. 

When I was a little girl, my brother was my everything. He was five years older. He looked out for me, took my side against Mother and Dad, as I did his, and held my hand when we went off on our adventures together. And we had many many adventures. Once he got into junior hight school (7th, 8th, and 9th grades in my hometown), he was given permission to ride the city bus downtown, and I was allowed to go with him. We walked the three blocks to the end of our street where the bus stopped. Ray always gave me my fare so I could drop the coins into the meter beside the bus driver. Then we took seats all the way at the back of the bus, because we were going what we considered a long way to the downtown library. Now, it doesn't seem like such a long way, but back then the bus stopped at a lot of corners. It took thirty or so minutes to get downtown. 

The stop beside the library was a hub where several bus lines converged. I don't remember which line was ours—that was Ray's job to keep up with—but we looked at the time table signs and decided how long we had to "fool around" downtown. Our fooling around consisted of lots of time at the library, and almost always a movie at the Centre or Ritz theaters, both of them nearby. The library was the old La Retama Library, not the new one that stands up on the hill in Corpus Christi now. The old one was three stories with an elevator to the third floor but if you just wanted the second floor, there was a beautiful, wide, curved freestanding staircase you could climb, and climb it I did, pretending I was a princess in a castle. Ray was always busy doing some sort of movie research in the microfilm department. I never then or now knew what he was researching. It seems we came from a family of researchers. I have myself spent many hours in the microfilm departments of a library.

The third floor of the La Retama Library was the children's section. There was usually almost no one up there but me, which suited me fine. I could continue my princess pretend game uninterrupted. I gathered an armload of picture books and sat at the low round table with child-sized chairs and spread all those books out in front of me, making up my mind which ones I would check out that day. You could only have three at a time. I liked the ones with lots of colorful pictures, but not too baby-ish. There had to be a lot of words to read, too. And I wanted stories about real people, not animals which probably explains why I never read The Velveteen Rabbit until I was an adult. I had no guidance. No one to tell me which books I should pick, the ones that might be good for me, or the ones that might be classics. Nobody ever told me about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, although I did see the movie on television. We were not a fancy, academic, or even well-read family. We didn't have a lot of books in our house: a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and maybe a couple of other old books. My parents were accountants, not scholars. But at least there was the wonderful library downtown. 

We also had a Bookmobile that came to the end of our street. Again, it was Ray who somehow found out about it, and dragged me by the hand down there where we got our first library cards. After a foray downtown to the big library, I could then turn in my three books at the Bookmobile when it came every other Thursday. I loved the Bookmobile, too. It was dark and cramped and smelled of books, and there were little cushioned benches where you could sit and paw through the pages before you checked out a book. The woman who drove the Bookmobile always sat up front knitting and never bothered or even spoke to anyone until they had books for her to stamp the due date on a flap inside the cover. It was another great adventure, rushing down to the Bookmobile after school for more books to read.

So whether he ever realized it or not, my brother was directly responsible for putting books in front of me and giving me my lifelong habit of reading, and later writing. When I wrote my first terrible (and forever unpublished) novel, thinking it was the greatest thing I had ever done, I gave it to Ray to read. It was about 300 manuscript pages, and he read maybe eight of them before he handed it back to me and said, (kindly for him), "It's not ready to publish." I was crushed but he was right, it wasn't. By then he had his degree in Radio/TV Journalism so I trusted what he said. But still, I was crushed. He never told me, later after I had a novel or two published, but I think he was proud of me. He always came to any event I had anywhere near where he lived. 

As the years went on and we grew up, we stopped seeing so much of each other. Lives get busy and diverge, but we never EVER failed to give each other a call on our birthdays. We usually talked for an hour or more, about all the things that were going on in our lives, about members of our family we had heard from, plays he was in, books I was writing, TV shows we were watching. We talked about our parents, our dogs and cats, our houses, cars. A lot of it nonsense, just keeping in touch. My-my, how I miss those phone calls. 

There's a memory I have that keeps coming to me. I tried to remind him of it when he was lying in the hospice hospital in Austin, but he was far too close to death to listen or care. It's a memory of the two of us climbing up on the roof of our house, something we were NEVER supposed to do. Capital punishment would follow if we were caught. But we sat up there one summer night when the parents were off somewhere playing cards, perched right at the peak, side by side, his arm around my shoulders to keep me from falling, peering over all the other roofs of the houses in our neighborhood, watching from a distance of maybe a half-mile, the screen at the drive-in theater out on the highway. We couldn't hear what the actors were saying, of course, but we didn't need to, we had already seen the movie downtown at the Centre or Ritz and knew the storyline. I remember it as a cool star-studded night, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's just my imagination embellishing it, but it was so much fun, sitting there with my brother, that it has stuck in my memory all these years. 

Onward...