Yay November!

It’s my favorite time of year. My birthday is this month. The weather is starting to get cold. And I get to complain about how much I hate the holidays and pumpkin spice. (While secretly and begrudgingly enjoying both.)

Quick tip – if you’re on the thick-middled and assless side of the hourglass spectrum and your jeans are a bit tighter in the waist than you’d like in order to not sag in the butt, you can run a small rubber band through the button hole and loop it over the button and give yourself an extra inch or so of waist and a little extra stretch.

So, I had an interesting weekend. We drove the long way out to Piqua to have burgers at what is supposed to be the best burger place in Piqua, but I’m now doubting the advice of Yelp! as the place appears to be permanently closed. We ended up having burgers at Rally’s. I haven’t eaten at a Rally’s in over 20 years and I was disappointed. They used to be so good. But I got a sad, dried up little burger on a stale bun. Bummer.

Piqua is an historic town in the northern Dayton metro area. (How pretentious is THAT bit of grammar – “an historic”?) It dates back to the French and Indian War (which was NOT between the French and the Indians, which is the only thing I remember about it from 11^th grade history) as a village that grew outside of a battle fort. The downtown area is adorable with quaint storefronts (that are actually fronting viable businesses) and houses that are regal and gorgeously weathered.

Piqua is also where my grandfather ran to when he ran off with my aunt’s English teacher in the early 70’s.  I wasn’t born yet, but I can only imagine that was a bit of an awkward time, particularly since my aunt was attending a very conservative religious high school in western North Carolina. I remember my mom coming up here a few times to visit my grandfather, but I never came along. It was weird walking around town Saturday, wondering if my grandfather had ever eaten at that diner, or gotten his hair cut at that barber’s. I wonder if he ever had burgers at that supposedly really great place that is out of business.

It was during the divorce that my grandmother found out some odd details about the man she married. My grandfather was an engineer of some sort at a manufacturing plant of some sort – the details have always been kind of vague – and met my grandmother during the lead-up to WW2. She was a factory floor worker at the time. He enlisted and spent the bulk of the war as an engineer, mostly digging latrines in the Philippines. When he got back, they bought a little farm and he continued to work in some sort of manufacturing facility in some engineering capacity. I’m sure he paid the major bills, but my grandmother raised goats and chickens and sold milk and eggs and also babysat for a little extra house-running money. My mom grew up thinking they were a working class family at best.

And then the divorce. Dude was a millionaire. Mostly inherited. His father, as it turns, was very successful and, although charming and gracious, apparently on the frugal side, and probably good with investments and such. I would imagine that my grandfather was raised have the idea that “we don’t always do what we want just because we can” heavily reinforced. I mean, one doesn’t get rich and stay rich by spending all of one’s money. And my grandfather, it would seem, took this quite to heart in his quirky, introverted way, and was a miser with his wife and children.

My grandmother, on the other hand, grew up in a subsistence farming family, the youngest of 15 children, and probably was told she couldn’t have everything she wanted because it simply wasn’t possible. When she got her half of the wad in the settlement, she finally COULD have everything she wanted and blew through close to a million bucks over the next 15-20 years on trips all over the world, winters in Florida, and an eclectic collection of doodads that would make anyone on Hoarders proud. (She had an insane collection of cigar boxes. And she was very much anti-smoking. Whatever.)

So, now we know where I don’t get my sense of fiscal responsibility, and possibly where I get my lack of same. I can blow through some money like you wouldn’t believe. At least that’s one thing I have/had in common with my grandmother.

We hightailed it back home on the interstate to watch the livestream of PHC on YouTube, but there was no livestream, only audio, which we could have listened to in the car. I was sorely disappointed and Grumpy was, well, grumpy. It was still an awesome episode. 

It has been interesting, taking these drives through the Midwestern countryside over the past year, watching the cycle of life – farmers out planting, seedlings shooting through the dirt, talk stalks of corn and bushy green soybean plants thriving, and then maturing and turning brown, and finally farmers out on their tractors harvesting.

I was thinking about how idyllic it all seems, what with these little farming communities seeming so healthy and prosperous, until it occurred to me that I was seeing fields of future high fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, and whatever byproducts used in animal feed. Basically, we have spent the last year admiring picturesque fields of diabetes and heart disease.

I feel deflated.