Rainy-day visiting

Looks like a dry day today. My sisters and I are planning to take our horses to Farragut State Park for a leisurely trail ride. They did their usual Sunday grocery shopping yesterday while I spent my day visiting.

I haven't "just visited" for a long, long time. At the end of the day (what a cliche!), I figured I need to do so more often. My visits extending from the coffee cult to my sisters' normal Sunday turned Saturday visit, to my blurker friend's home with tomatoes, to Jean Crouse's memorial reception to a subsequent family gathering yielded an abundance of good thoughts far beyond my 2008 tomato count.

The coffee cult had a small turn-out yesterday. "High Maintenance,"as we lovingly call Penny Armstrong, Alice Coldsnow, Sue Austin and Jo Robbins expressed a bit of shock at seeing me show up. Gaps between appearances, however, mean nothing at the coffee cult. Once a member, always a member.

Conversations tend to be a bit fragmented cuz everyone has so much on their mind, and because we're all getting to that point where sometimes our thoughts waiting on the on-ramp for the green light to spit 'em out can get fragmented before the stop-talking-it's-my-turn light turns red again.

At one point, one member of the group, eager to throw in her two cents forgot what the two cents happened to be, so rather than allowing a little dead air---hardly a commodity at the coffee cult---she directed the group to just "talk on."

I can't remember if she ever remembered what she had remembered to bring up but then forgot. Can anybody out there identify with such moments. I know I can.

We talked about our lives, each other, our families, and our friends who weren't there. Alice and I interspersed the visit with thoughts about our upcoming gig for Leadership Sandpoint. We have to take the group around downtown and tell 'em how it used to be when there were a lot more stores and more reasons for locals to go downtown.

Alice and I have a twofold problem with this assignment. For one thing, we discovered last year that it's just too damn noisy to take a group down First Avenue and explain to them what used to be in that real estate office which just joined forces with that other real estate office around the corner cuz real estate firms are suffering so much these days.

The names of the businesses downtown tend to change a lot in a year's time, so we get confused as to which store front used to be Jennestad's or the Copper Penney Cafe. Alice and I are gonna work on this.

We still don't know what to do about the noisy cow and hog trucks still rolling through "tourist town USA," drowning out our voices. Maybe, until that bypass gets built, we can get microphones and equip all the Leadership Sandpoint classmates with those ear devices for old people who can't hear what's going on in church, let alone on First Avenue.

Coffee cult was its usual fun time yesterday, and the rain continued. I ran to the car and drove home. I was bent over with the shop vac sucking up cat hairballs in the cat shop when I saw a pair of feet appear at the roll-up door. Then, the door rolled up, and there stood Bill, two sisters and four dogs in the rain, of course.

I finished the hairball job and invited them in---not the wet dogs, though. We talked, horse, politics and school news. Then, we made plans for today's ride, and Barbara and Laurie went on their way.

Later, I took tomatoes to Mary Margaret, my outed blurker, and her lovely daughter Cathy/Kate from Issaquah. I also met Peggy, Mary Margaret's niece and the family nurse practitioner. It was so good to visit with them, as Cathy caught me up with the lives of a few Ponderettes from the 1970s when "Smile" was a big part of all our vocabularies.

A small tapestry of old-time Sandpoint showed up at the Presbyterian Church, in the rain, for Jean Eakin Crouse's memorial. Talk about reconnecting. I hadn't seen Nancy or Ann Eakin for a couple of decades, at least. The reception after revived many good memories and oodles of associations, including my first-grade classmate Don Hadley. It was the second time Chuck Heath (Sarah Palin's dad) had been mentioned during the day.

First at the coffee cult, Alice had told me about a photo she has of Chuck and her arm-in-arm from their high school days at Sandpoint High. Later, Don mentioned his shock of watching TV after the initial Sarah announcement and seeing his old teacher Chuck. There's definitely a lot of Sarah talk in Sandpoint these days, and her dad gets his share of the headlines.

The day was capped off with a relaxing visit at the Crouse farm, just a couple of miles down Selle Road from us. Instead of sound bites, we enjoyed full paragraphs of conversation and nostalgia from the good ol' days when our parents were guiding us and our lives lay ahead. It struck me that we're now those parents filled with excitement about the lives our own grown children are leading.

The best impression coming out of this visit-filled day is the tie that binds all humans who have, at some time, experienced profound connections within their lives. Those connections remain permanently fixed, making life and visiting a lot of fun.