Oh hi.
Yes! I am still among the living.
See, it's like this. Last Sunday I drove two hundred miles west to McDonough, Georgia, to spend the week with Erica.
You may remember she teaches fifth grade here.
Next year she'll be teaching high school math. I did not excel at math in school so let's move along.
Suffice it to say our third girl obtained the math gene from her twice-cursed pirate father because you can be dead sure it didn't come from me.
In my own defense I do believe I more than compensate for my deficiencies in math with my strengths in language.
Not to mention my Internet savvy. Savvy?
Be all of that as it may, when I got here one of the first things I said to Erica was: "You got the wireless Internet hooked up; right?"
This was Sunday evening and my daughter looked right at me and told what she hoped was the truth (I don't want to say she lied) but had to have known in her heart of hearts was never going to happen.
"Tomorrow," she said, watching my face for the moue of dismay that would inevitably cloud it.
But I took it relatively well. I could wait until Monday morning to blog and tweet and check emails and so forth and so on, you know the drill.
However it became obvious that my child was allowing herself to live in a fantasy world because see, where her little ducks should have been lined up neatly they had all wandered off the reservation and were touring the next county.
As in, she didn't call AT&T to arrange for Internet service until the day before my visit. And I don't mean to overly harsh my girl but only a complete nebbish would think AT&T was going to accomplish by Monday what you asked them to do on Saturday.
In all fairness to the Boo, the person she spoke with on Saturday misled her, causing her to believe everything would be taken care of by Monday morning.
But on Monday they told her it would be Wednesday before anyone elevated a digit to restore wireless Internet to her residence. And that was the expedited date.
Perhaps I should explain at this juncture that until recently, Erica had wireless Internet at her house. When TG and I were here last November I effortlessly blogged from her living room.
But in December AT&T did something unforgivably nefarious to the "pay this amount" line of her account statement and Erica became ... uhm, shall we say a trifle upset and told them to ... well. She no longer had wireless Internet as of that day.
Fast forward and back up a few hours to yesterday afternoon when, glancing out of a window at the rear of Erica's house, I happened to spot an AT&T van trundling down the long drive to another house situated about a hundred yards behind the Boo's abode. This is semi-rural living, you understand.
When I saw the van this thought came to me: That guy doesn't know where he's going.
I watched as he slowly parked, slowly exited the van, slowly placed not one, not two, but three orange cones at the front of the van (even though there was not another house within comfortable shouting distance and not a single human being in evidence, only woods behind him), slowly affixed a busy-looking tool belt to himself, slowly shambled down the walk and up the steps to the front porch of the wrong house, and with an attitude of indifference so pronounced I could interpret it clearly even from where I stood far away and behind a window, knocked on the door.
And waited.
I know who lives there and I knew they weren't home.
I stepped out onto Erica's back deck and waved and yoo-hooed to the AT&T guy, who slowly swiveled his head in my direction. I got his attention. He hollered something about the address and I gestured that this here was the house where he was needed.
He slowly walked down the steps off the porch and down the walk to his van, where he slowly put the three orange cones away before slowly driving back up the drive, where he slowly got out and slowly put the cones back in place.
?????
Little wonder it takes AT&T four days to send someone out to mash a button, flip a switch, whatever they do to restore suspended service. The speed of their "workers" makes geriatric snails look like Olympic distance runners.
At any rate it took him nearly an hour to do what he had to do and then we had to wait several more hours before Erica could jump through about twenty-five additional hoops and get us online.
By then it was so late last night I didn't have the energy to compose a blog post. It was all I could do to eke out a few tweets about pink slime.
For example this one: It's only a matter of time before pink slime is one of the mystery basket ingredients on #Chopped.
But I digress.
Erica and I have been having a wonderful time. On Monday and Tuesday we visited two cemeteries together and I combed another all by me onesie.
I have been fortunate enough to do a great deal of graving in recent days, both in Columbia as well as in North Carolina and Georgia. And I've noticed so many children who lived less than a year, or one year, or a few days or months more than a year.
The burial plots of two families in particular caused me to stand and stare and read and pore over tombstone data more than usual.
There was the little Brown clan at Belleview Cemetery in Lenoir, North Carolina, which family apparently consisted partly of a lady who died in 1944 at the age of thirty-six.
Although her marker pointedly identifies her as Miss Goldie Frances Brown, the graves of two children sharing her last name lie on either side of her and I believe she was their mother.
Little Clyde Ernest Brown was born and passed away on the same day in May of 1943, sixteen months before the demise of Goldie Frances.
His sister, Baby Lillian Frances, was born on September 2, 1944, exactly one week before the death of her mother. She survived only a few months after Goldie Frances passed on.
I grieved for them and wondered at their situation, which seems to have been unorthodox for the time in which they lived. But not by today's standards! Today Goldie Frances would be that paragon of all virtues and valiant selfless endurer of every conceivable hardship, the sainted single mother.
That is, if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly. Just go with me on this.
At Memorial Cemetery in McDonough this past Monday, Erica and I marveled at the Lemon family graves.
According to her monument which features an elaborate statue of a woman holding an infant, Eudora Lemon passed away on June 4, 1901, at the age of forty-one.
Her epitaph is simple but glowing: Thy life was but a crystal stream / Of virtue, grace and beauty / On whose bright surface ever gleamed / The smiling face of duty.
Buried near Eudora are her two daughters: Erma and Mary Elizabeth.
Erma was born on April 15, 1893 and died on June 4, 1901, the same day as her mother. She was eight.
Eudora and Erma died one day before the fortieth birthday of Alex, their husband and father.
Mary Elizabeth was born on June 6, 1900 (one day after her father's thirty-ninth birthday) and died on July 18, 1901, six weeks after the passing of her mother and big sister, at the age of eleven months.
Alex Lemon hung in there until 1904, when he died -- heartbroken, I have no doubt -- at the young age of forty-two.
All of which makes me realize once again that, wireless Internet or pink slime or no, I am very blessed.
And so are you.
That is all.
Happy Thursday!
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My baby turns twenty-three today.
