Leftovers

Here’s a few scattered thoughts – some Thanksgiving leftovers if you will – as I still dream about that amazing turkey (cooked in a crock pot!) that my niece made for Thanksgiving ...

W hen was the last time you ran around on a playground?

Thankfully my kids are young enough to still embrace the promise of a good playground, so by extension I still find myself on a swing or a slide every once in a while.

And La Grange is blessed to have some great playgrounds from White Rock Park to Kruschel Park to the one in front of the library.

La Grange elementary got its sparkling new playground this week.

Monday was the first day the kids got to play on it.

As I eyed it Tuesday morning during drop-off I asked our nine-year-old what was his favorite part.

His response was, “I’m not sure, we’re still exploring it.”

I did notice that there is a very small merry-go-round that’s part of the new complex.

That’s good news for the safety of La Grange elementary kids.

The new one is nothing like the monstrosity that generations of us older La Grange students gambled our lives on.

That beast is immortalized, now in stationary form, in front of the old high school.

I’m not sure if this is a scientific fact, but it seems to me that the larger a merry-goround the faster it can spin.

With a bunch of us hanging on and running as fast as we could, we’d get that old merry-go-round (which has been retired for decades now) going so fast kids would fly all over the place.

They’d hit the dirt, make sure nothing was broken, dust themselves off and run back for another round – a fitting lesson to learn in, or in this case, out, of the classroom.

I n

the aftermath of my column a few weeks ago about listening to Matthew McConaughey’s talk in Austin, I got a nice call from Norma Bowman of La Grange wanting to share her experience of running into Matthew at a UT/OU football game a few years ago at The Cotton Bowl. She saw him in the stands, got his attention and she said they had a nice conversation. He remembered her name, and never felt like he was being inconvenienced by talking to her.

I also finished McConaughey’s book “Greenlights” the other day and it was great. I highly recommend it. My big takeway from it – don’t let challenges be excuses, but rather let them fuel you.

S peaking of books, I found myself in The Painted Porch Bookstore in old downtown Bastrop last week. It was wonderful – and it was amazing to see people lined up like crazy buying books like it was the 1990s or something.

It’s on 912 Main Street. Check it out.

T he second funniest thing I ever remember happening in church occurred over the weekend.

We were at Saturday night Mass at Hostyn and as Father Eddie finished up his homily he started to go take his seat when somebody’s smart phone cried out, “I’m sorry I didn’t catch that.”

Anyone who has ever used a smartphone’s voice commands will recognize that robotic declaration. As the red-faced owner of the phone furiously tried to silence it, without missing a beat Father Eddie said to the entire congregation, “I’m not going to repeat myself.”

Everyone got a good laugh.

So if that was the second funniest thing that ever happened at church, what was the first, you ask? That time the altar boy fell asleep and his father walked up to the altar and shook him awake.

A fter church the wife, kids and I went to Jay Dee’z Sports Grill here in La Grange to watch the UT/Texas A&M game.

I’ve never had a particular allegiance to either school, but now that my daughter is a Longhorn student I was certainly pulling for UT.

I figured with the stakes high in this historic resurrection of this rivalry, the place would be packed.

There were a lot of people, but we were able to get a table.

It was a great environment to watch the game with the pockets of UT and A&M fans reacting to nearly every play.

See The food was awesome too, and the kids loved playing pool. We’re lucky to have a place like that in town.

S peaking of being thankful, on the drive to Houston for Thanksgiving at my niece’s house, our conversation turned to what we were all thankful for.

And the problem with that is that the answers are always the ‘big’ things – health, family, etc. So we eventually got around to trying to all say little things we are really thankful for and kinda overlook.

It was a neat exercise in gratitude.

Among the “small things” I’m thankful for are:

• That it took me 46 years to break my first bone.

• Living in Fayette County means you almost never encounter traffic

• That Spam Singles were invented (think what you will about Spam, the canned meat, it is truly one of my favorite foods but I know it’s not very healthy so the Spam Single is the perfect serving size)

• That La Grange has an HEB and a Walmart

• That I get to drive over the Colorado River every day on the way to work

• That more things don’t break more often. Sure it’s frustrating when the dishwasher breaks or we have a dead battery, but when you consider how often we use “stuff’ on a daily basis, it is amazing how reliable everything seems

• That The Fayette County Record provides us free coffee at work

• That we live far enough from the county road that our dogs and cats are not in danger of being run over (this was not the case when I was a kid)

• If the fuses burn out because you plugged way too many strands of Christmas Lights together, it’s pretty easy to fix them.