ne me daigne des maus, qu'ai por li,
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Saturday, Grandma Combs and Mom were to take Frances and Linnea to the pirate-themed cornfield maze in Godfrey, Illinois. It was the same maze they had visited three or four years before after dropping by the haunted bookstore.
And Carrie and Lucia were headed down to the city for the Walk to Cure Autism – a busy day to do it, for the Cardinal’s had just returned to St. Louis to play the Mets for the next three days.
Apparently the autumn bonfire for the twenty or so seniors had gone well, with the last of the crowd mingling till midnight. Something of some intellectual significance must have occurred because, according to Mom, Joe at one point ran inside to grab his Bible. Collette only hoped that they hadn’t set Jims Mormon, the only Mormon in the group, in the center of a ring, trying to convert him to Christianity.
Diana was busy that day. Her grandparents were in town that weekend just as she was getting back for the wedding rehearsal. She had run a 5K with Tor that morning and the wedding was the next day. But she had left her violin in Wheaton, not realizing that she was also supposed to play for the ceremony as well as act the maid of honor. So OLeif and Collette dropped off OLeif’s violin for her to borrow at the Ernie’s where Diana was getting her bridesmaid’s dress re-hemmed before she was to meet her family at Culpepper’s for lunch at 1:30…
“Aaaaaah!” She exclaimed on the phone. “How is everything so busy? I mean it’s good, but so busy!”
Meanwhile, Collette spent most of her day reading Grandma Snicketts’ auto-biography. She had such a humorous way of wording her experiences and Collette shared several chuckles with OLeif over various passages:
One day, while visiting Dad and Mom in Arizona, they had visited a restaurant at Great-Aunt Mildred’s suggestion: Bobby Moore. Grandma Snicketts continued the narrative:
“It was good food and for a novelty idea they served all their drinks in miniature lavatories, sinks, and potties, so you had a souvenir too. I carried one of each home in my suitcase. I had them until I moved to Gamble Gardens. I gave them to Adelaide. But I’m sure, knowing Martin, they have been pitched by now.”
Grandma was a trooper, visiting Hawaii, Amsterdam (where she brought back tulip bulbs to share), Vienna, Munich, the Holy Land (where soldiers had machine guns trained on her and her companions while picking up their luggage from the airport), Jordan, Hawaii again, and Alaska (where she visited with trappers and prospectors) over a period of several years, even with a good amount of knee pain. While in Israel, she could not allow them to stamp her passport, or she would not have been given access into Jordan. And so she did as suggested, and had the agent stamp a piece of paper sitting over her passport page. Apparently this was a common occurrence. The lady two places in front of her didn’t get away with it.
It was amazing the places she saw while abroad: Petra, The Mediterranean, Dead Sea, Sea of Galilee, Jordan River (where several of her tour buddies were baptized), Bethlehem, Golgotha, the Upper Room, the Garden of Gethsemane (where she had communion in the garden near the legendary site of Jesus’ tomb), Capernaum, the Wailing Wall, and the Qumran (near the caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls). She even took the ski lift half-way up Masada and climbed the other half in weather over 100 degrees.
Collette continued to read and chuckle and remember things over a hot ham and cheese sandwich and fries for lunch while OLeif giggled over various computer clips.
Come evening, they left for the hayride and hot dog roast at church while Joe and Rose attended the Fall Fiesta at the Milk’s house.