Columnists
Space, Jelly Beans and other Delights
Well, it’s Jelly Bean Sunday! There would have been a lot more jelly beans in our house had there not been a very obvious jelly bean deficiency at local retailers. Thank goodness the LCBO was well stocked for the holiday weekend. Yeah, yeah, I bought wine. It’s part of how I celebrate. Most of what we purchased was locally produced. I can’t say the same for the precious few jelly beans I managed to snag before the hoarding of holiday treats started.
So, here we are. We found ourselves celebrating a long weekend without turning our family and friends time into a heated debate about all of the bad stuff happening around the world. But, “Please pass the dinner rolls”, it had to happen. I noticed we carefully avoided any words that might conjure up a bout of political diarrhea and then I opened my big mouth and mentioned the Great Jelly Bean Shortage. The trigger words should have been “jelly bean”, but it was “shortage”. Then I tried to steer the chatter away from shortages and toward what we’re going to plant in our raised garden beds. Again, the conversation drifted and food shortages continued to be the focus. Someone wondered aloud about where all the eggs had gone and someone else started yapping about food crops rotting in fields because of a lack of migrant farm labour. Suddenly the wine in my glass became the focus of the meal for me. But that’s what a family gathering is all about. Am I right? Of course I am. Five hours of preparing a meal for the family and eight hours of laughter, agreeing to disagree, a bit of music, lots of treats and a smoke alarm sounding as if to bring us all back into focus. How could a group of people, especially my family, ever think of getting together without a bit of argybargy over politics, the cost of living, the Great Jelly Bean Shortage, civil liberties, banned books, Federal Elections and “Is Gayle King really an astronaut?”. Seriously! We’ve had some pretty funny, and high temperature, discussions over many festive meals. But who would have thought “a space ride” would be so controversial!? In the end, “Who really cares about Gayle King, or Katy Perry, for that matter?”. And, no one was physically harmed in any of the space discussion. Although we did decide on “payload” over “astronaut” and while coming to that conclusion we did manage to do some serious damage to the dessert tray.
All in all, it’s been a fun weekend. We had lots of good food. We visited with almost all of our favourite people. In the last few days we managed to see all of our children, their children and my brother. We watched a couple or three really cheesy, over-acted, Easter holiday-like movies. We yapped about spring and when it might happen. We compared our “yard bird” sightings and chatted about how to keep squirrels out of the feeders. The fixy-fixies everyone seems to be doing around their homes got a bit of air. The parent-types spoke of how the kids are doing at school. The school-attending types were less impressed with school talk and more impressed with Made Right, Right Here cookies. Then we made some loose plans for a family gathering to celebrate a bunch of summer birthdays. I say, if waking up on a “holiday” Monday morning with leftover wine, chocolate, baked ham, a cup of coffee and a clean kitchen is a bad thing, then I’m all about being the bad person who enjoys it all.
Still, the burning question remains, “Space Travel or Space Mountain”? To quote Tracee Chapman, “I genuinely think it’s cool that they went to space. If that’s how you want to spend your money, go for it. Just don’t land back on Earth acting like you’ve changed the world or made history for women. You didn’t. You just had a really expensive day trip.”
I might need more coffee and one of the cookies I managed to hide away for just such an occasion.
Comments (0)