Hodgepodge

Linking up with Joyce for the Hodgepodge

1. What gives you energy? What takes it away? 

Exercise gives me energy. By that I mean moderate exercise, not excessive exercising like running for hours. Excessive exercise takes energy away. But just going on a normal walk or run gives me energy.

What takes it away are most activities that are outside my comfort zone. Things like being in large groups of people, traveling to an unknown place, etc.

2. How often do you shop for clothes? What accessory do you always wear? 

A combination of getting older (just not caring as much as I used to about "outside" adornment) and the ease of online shopping has rendered me someone to not shop often for clothes (in person anyway). Since I know I can do it more easily (online), that's my preferred way of shopping. 

I always wear my wedding ring and usually my watch.

3. What's something free that you feel grateful for? 

When someone shows undeserved kindness to me and when someone has the courage to say truthful things, not what's popular in certain circles.

I'm grateful for God's forgiveness of my sins and Jesus death on the cross for me. 

4. Breakfast, lunch, dinner...which meal of the day do you enjoy most? What's your go-to comfort food? 

Dinner is what I enjoy most since I almost always eat it with Donnie. Lunch is almost always eaten by myself. And I hardly ever eat breakfast. 

Mac & cheese is nice and comforting. A pot roast would be high on the list as well.

5. This week the world remembers the tragic events of 9/11. Do you mark the day in any way? How do historical events shape your perspective on your personal challenges? 

I don't mark the day in any way except that I read articles about 9/11 so that I don't forget the magnitude of the horror of it. 

The second question is a good one and I can't think of a good answer for it. 

6. Insert your own random thought here. 

Ok, so here's a very long very random thought with a lot of backstory:

When I was growing up in rural Indiana, one of my mom's good friends was a lady named Lee. My parents had no relatives who lived near us (save my elderly grandma) so church and neighbor friends of my parents comprised the people in our quite small social circle.

Lee was not only my mom's friend-  she also babysat my siblings and me when mom had to take one of my brothers to the closest children's hospital to us (which was by no means close to us) to see doctors there due to a disease that he had. The doctor visit days were long due to the hospital being far from our house and I did not like those days. Lee was a woman of unwavering faith, a ready smile, and an infectious laugh but she was quite strict. Mom, no pushover herself, gave Lee free reign to punish us as she would her own children when we were in her care. We received no "breaks" for not being Lee's kids. Let's just say poor choices with regard to behavior were rarely made twice. (Perhaps those who don't believe the idea that  "crime is a choice" have never had a Lee-esqe parent or babysitter.) I distinctly remember liking Lee a lot more when we no longer needed to be babysat and she was just my mom's friend.

Like us, Lee was poor. But Lee had it even worse than us. She'd married quite young and had at least two children by the age of twenty. And an abusive husband. By the time I knew her, her husband was no longer in the picture. He paid no child support for the five kids they had before Lee left him and he never saw the kids. (Lee was a cautionary tale in being very careful about the man one took up with and about the dangers of alcohol as he had been an abusive alcoholic.)

One day when I was a child, mom and I were talking about Lee. Mom mentioned Lee's money problems but said that Lee was lucky because she had a rich sister who was generous with Lee and Lee's kids. I had never met the sister because she lived out of state a few hours away but I believed my mom and was thankful, along with my mom, that Lee had a wealthy relative who helped her out from time to time. The source of the wealth was a business that Lee's sister owned with her husband- a root beer stand... To probably anybody middle class and higher, owning a root beer stand would not generate the kind of money that most would consider rich. But by our standards and Lee's, the sister and husband were rich. My mom mentioned the name of the town where the root beer stand was and it was one of those random facts that stayed with me (both the name of the town and the business ownership). The town was in Ohio called Piqua. Piqua is about thirty miles north of Dayton. 

Years later when I was out of law school, I worked for a large information technology company located in a suburb south of Dayton, Ohio. It was one of two  companies that competed with each other for lucrative law firm deals- some firms paid multiple millions of dollars per year for unlimited access to the information on our site. The need to continually improve the product to stay ahead of our competitor was high and I worked on project after project that added features to the site, I mean value to our customers. 

One product manager I worked with was an affable, voluble middle age guy named Tom. I knew Tom lived north of town due to his voluble nature. I knew a lot about Tom. He was always chewing the fat as my dad used to say. (For every one fact he knew about me, I probably knew fifteen about him!) One day either before or after a meeting, he was talking to someone and he mentioned something about his wife's parents owning a root beer stand. In Piqua. Ohio. A memory sitting in the deep recesses of my mind rose to the forefront- Piqua, Ohio; root beer stand; Lee's sister and her husband owning one. Could Tom's in laws be related to Lee? Or were there multiple root beer stands in Piqua? Did I remember correctly the conversation with my mom about Lee's rich sister??

I thought about it and realized that Tom's wife would be Lee's niece if it was Lee's family who owned the stand. So I sent Tom an email saying I had kind of an odd question and that was whether or not Tom's wife had an aunt in Indiana named Lee. Sure enough! He responded that his wife did have an aunt named Lee in Indiana. I emailed back with my maiden name and asked if perchance when he talked to his in laws or wife, my maiden name would ring a bell due to my mom's friendship with Lee. As it turned out, without even talking to her parents (who would have been closer to Lee), Tom's wife said she knew us. She remembers meeting my mom one time and she knew about my sick brother. Her parents provided a few more memories- they knew who my siblings and I were due to Lee talking about spending time with us including babysitting us. 

I realize that people likely have associations with others that they sometimes find out about coincidentally. What's striking to me is how small my family's circle was. There were very few people about whom my mom would have been able to give me a fairly random piece of information about extended family. Then there's the very large company that I worked for, the locus of which was hours away from where I grew up in Indiana near Lee. (I believe the company had 2000+ employees at just our location (we were the world headquarters for the company at one point before a giant corp bought us out).) That Tom and I worked together occasionally and that he happened to mention his in laws' root beer stand when I was there to hear it and that I remembered, after all those years, the knowledge of the ownership of a root beer stand in Piqua, are things that don't seem likely to have happened and yet they did!

My oldest brother moved to northern Ohio about a year ago and sometimes we meet in towns in between our two cities for lunch. One such town is Piqua. A couple of weeks ago, we met at a Red Lobster there; that must have reminded my brother of Long John Silver's where he likes to eat so he suggested we meet at LJS's when we met again. Piqua has a LJS so we planned to meet there. When I looked up the location on my GPS, I saw that the LJS was connected to an A&W ROOT BEER STAND. Could this be the stand? Lee's family's stand?

I arrived at the LJS/A&W (they were in the same building) before my brother and I asked a worker if the A&W had been there for a while. She said yes but then mentioned something about another root beer stand that was downtown. (There were two root beer stands in Piqua.) I knew then in my heart of hearts that it was the downtown one that Lee's sister owned, not the one attached to a LJS. While waiting on my brother to arrive, I looked up information about the downtown root beer stand. It was a franchise known as BK Root Beer stand and at its heyday, there were 238 BK Root Beer stands. The first one, coincidentally, was in the small town in IN where I was born. 

So of course after we ate LJS, we drove to the BK Root Beer stand. I asked a lady who came to our car to take our order (a root beer float for my brother) if she knew the owner. She said yes and then I said something to the effect that the ownership would have changed from when I may have known the owner. I said Tom's name and she instantly knew who I was talking about. She said that Tom's wife's family were the original owners of the stand and that ownership had changed two times since then.

Well, my brother and I know where we will eat the next time we meet for lunch! I mean it will be in our car since there's no in restaurant seating. But the food we will be eating is BK Root Beer stand food. According to reviews that I read, several menu options are quite good. I think I'll have the tenderloin sandwich. You know one of the oddest things about the whole thing is that I am one of the biggest pop fans around and I don't even like root beer. What are the odds that I have an almost lifelong connection (albeit tenuous) to a pop adjacent business and I don't like the type of pop that it is. Seriously, WHAT ARE THE ODDS??

Here is a picture of the first root beer stand that my brother and I went to yesterday:

I like how you can see the Piqua water tower in the background

Here's the root beer stand that Lee's sister and her husband used to own, the BK Root Beer stand in Piqua