Thursday the 13th, Part 1

Today I spent a wonderful late-morning and early-afternoon with my best ol' ex-teaching buddy, Mabel. We met at a restaurant in her town, where I enjoyed a delicious repast, not caring all that much about making a wise choice. Maybe more on that at a later time. Maybe not. The Length In Blogging Law prevents me from going into it now.

We got there around 10:50, so close to my old school lunch time of 10:53 that it was uncanny. I chose the first table as we went in, because that's where we sat last time, and it's kind of away from the rest of the dining room, and there's a line of sight to the bathroom area, and I figured that with a giant table suitable for a feast in a medieval castle next to us, we would be pretty much on our own, without prying ears. Because what large group goes out to eat en masse on a Thursday morning at 10:50?

Apparently, old ladies like us!

We had scarcely given our order (after asking for LUNCH menus instead of the breakfast menus we were automatically provided) when The Society of Little Old Ladies Who Lunch Loudly began to arrive. It's not like they were wearing red hats and got a private room. Nope! A few trickled in and staked out their territory, which was of course the long table right next to ours. The whole rest of the dining room was open. Only a couple of other customers were there, sitting at the bar. EATING! Not drinking! It was 10:50 a.m., by cracky! Even though it was no doubt 4:50 p.m. somewhere. Maybe a better term would be counter. But it sure was set up like a bar. Even though the actual bar is next door, on the other side of the bathrooms.

The Society of Little Old Ladies Who Lunch Loudly kept a-comin'. Three here. Five there. A pair. I would have sworn there was a clown car parked in the handicapped spot, so steady was the trickle of new Old Ladies! When that table was full, with one perched at one end, and two doubling up down at the other end...I counted 17 Old Ladies! I'm thinking they all got separate bills, because I saw them going to the bar counter to pay. Which I didn't have to do, because my best ol' ex-teaching buddy, Mabel, picked up the tab! She ROCKS!

I'll tell you what else ROCKS, and that is Mabel's house! We went there after not even wearing out our welcome this time at the restaurant. I think of it as The House That Retirement Built, because Mabel was working on it during the year before she retired. Not that she told any of us she was retiring, of course, until after the fact. Not MY style! I couldn't shut up about my own retirement. I would have shouted it from the rooftops had I been able to get my knees up a ladder.

Anyhoo...Mabel was working on her house--I was going to say, *it's not like she was swinging the hammer, pounding home the nail--but she kind of was! Mabel and her mister did a LOT of work on their house, and did I mention that it's beautiful? For those of you clamoring, "Pictures or it didn't happen!" I do have pictures, but I don't know if Mabel wants her abode flashed all over the innernets, even without identifying details. So I'm not putting one here at this time. Besides, I haven't been to town since taking them, and to send myself a picture from my phone, to put in viable form for posting, I have to be in town, not in this black hole of airwave reception. Amelia Earhart had a better chance of getting a message out.

The point is, I had a wonderful day with a wonderful friend, AND I have at least one more story to mine from it! Thanks, Mabel! The next one is on me. But don't expect a tour of the house that Hick built. You can watch Hoarders if you want a visual.

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*Song lyric reference. Remember back when I shared that Alabama video with you, "40 Hour Week (For a Living)," where the Deeetroit au-toe workers danced so joyously to their lyric on the assembly line, back before a unibrow on a lead singer was not a bad thing?

Here it is again.