One Wedding and a Turkey

Ah, Athens, Ohio in July for an outdoor wedding weekend romp filled with sweat, food, liquor, sweat, chocolate fountains, beautiful newlyweds, sweat and dancing to a great band at the reception. Oh yeah, did I mention %$#*&ing SWEAT???
If it's a wedding in Athens that means that some poor couple, er, I mean lucky couple is going to tie the knot somewhere within the friendly confines of the Ohio University campus. It seems this is the summer for testing hot air tolerances normally practiced by geothermal scientists and members of congress. Only hotter! I have been sauteed in Jonesville, Virginia, fried at Lake Templene in Michigan and reduced to carbon cinders in Athens. But it was all worth it. The chance to get together with former Bobcat alums, eat too much, drink too much and generally make idiots out of ourselves whilst not winding up on the front page of The Enquirer is too good to pass up.
The weekend started innocently enough on Friday with a few adult beverages and dinner at Casa Nueva, a Mexican restaurant owned and operated by its employees. Casa is popular with my vegetarian daughter, Melanie who is loathe to see harm come to anything further up the Darwinian scale than a potato. More on this later. The dinner was pleasant (it was air conditioned) and things were going smoothly until, toward the end of the meal, my son in law politely asked the waitress if he could purchase 8 tons of black bean sauce which evidently, they are a might fond of and which you cannot purchase legally in Chicago. I was just thankful they had their own room.
After we got back to the OU Inn, and had a few more refreshments, and someone (I blame Cathy B of death march fame) had the brilliant idea to take a "walk" to the Ridges, which is what the old insane asylum is called. Somehow lately, all my walks anywhere seem to be straight up. We bumped into some folks there for the wedding on our way out and they decided it would be "fun" to join us. A common but disastrous mistake. Popular legend has it that the Ridges is haunted by pissed off ghosts of the asylum inmates, except for those that had lobotomies and came back as
democrats. It was a clear, moonlit walk with only one tiny drawback. The humidity was about 250% so I was literally dripping sweat before we got out of the Inn parking lot.
We made it to the cemetary where the inmates were buried, and spent awhile dodging chiggers and snakes traipsing through the overgrown cemetary, periodically stubbing our toes on hidden headstones or slipping on the damp weeds.
We strolled around the rest of the grounds peaking through the lower level darkened windows hoping to see the restraints they used or maybe the ghost of Republican who never took a bribe, er, sorry, I mean "campaign contribution." A couple of times I actually went (by myself, mind you) onto the darkened staircases and porches of various spooky looking buildings (cue Twilight Zone theme), where I found old furniture, empty filing cabinets and, I swear I am not making this up, the front bumper and grill of an ancient car. Nothing scarier than the skeletal remains of a once living, breathing automobile. Needless to say, scared crapless, I led the charge back to the Inn, startling several curious but annoyed deer into the forest.
Then came "wedding day" and God decided to turn the thermostat up a "notch" into the mid 90s. I don't want to say it was unbearably hot, but it has been noted that several OU summer school students spent the day in their air conditioned rooms or the library, forsaking the various happy hours at the local taverns, and (I know this is hard to believe), actually STUDYING!
But the bride, groom and families were gorgeous, and the ceremony mercifully, fairly short. We had a couple of hours to kill before the reception so we did so in true OU style by drinking beer and eating wings at "The Pub". It was during this little interlude that I discovered a fascinating side of my daughter, you remember, the vegetarian animal lover. She had mysteriously separated from the rest of us and with her husband slipped off to make a "major purchase". So the rest of us sat around the bar guessing what that purchase might be, and I can safely say that for the life of us we would never have guessed that they were buying a stuffed turkey. Not a stuffed turkey as in Thanksgiving, but stuffed as in taxidermy. As I said my vegetarian daughter would no more eat or in any way have anything to do with the demise of any creature that didn't survive with gills, so it came as quite a shock that she and my vegetarian son in law would engage in activity facillitating a burgeoning market in stuffed turkeys. They explained that they paid $60 for it, and that it was trendy and could be sold for $200 minimum in Chicago, although I personally think it was so my son in law could torture his dogs with it. Not that he is childish or anything.
After "priming the pumps" at The Pub it was on to hors d'oerves and drinks at the by now, kiln that the Inn called their "patio". We managed to last about 35 seconds in the heat before heading inside to meet "Doug" (the major purchase has a name)and air conditioning. It would have been about 10 seconds but for the bacon wrapped scallops being served and we didn't want so gauche as to gulp and gallop.
The evening was capped by a wonderful reception in which there was much toasting of the bride and groom and their parents, their siblings, their grandparents, their nieces and nephews, their 3rd and 4th cousins, dining, dancing, reminiscing and much, much more toasting.
After the reception, Craig motto: "I would definitely choose actual breathing over fried chicken skins, but only after much consideration and gnashing of teeth", had the brilliant idea to "go uptown for a burrito" which always makes sense at 1:00 a.m. An Athens tradition that is as much an institution as kegs, porch sofas, riots and back alley projectile vomiting, this seemed like a fine idea. As no one could possibly drive in our condition, except maybe a Kennedy, we had to walk UPtown. I figure the weekend caught up to us at about the Convo. But we slogged onward, such was our mania for spicy rolled up beef in a flour tortilla purveyed from a wagon beanery with all the hygenic safeguards of a septic tank. After downing our burritos in about 3 seconds, we went in search of potables. We sat down in a place called Jackie O's, ordered beers (water for the namby pamby women) and came to the realization that if we didn't leave after our one beer, we might die of exhaustion in our chairs, which technically can hurt business. So we slogged back to the Inn and died there.
A word or two about the newlyweds and their families. First of all, Valerie's parents need to come out of their shells. As a matter of fact, so does Val. They are way too shy and reserved and need to be more outgoing and gregarious. Speaking of the Doudicans, Mike you really need to control your stress!! I know that being a PE teacher can be very demanding, leading to premature gray hair, surliness and an incredible desire to tell everyone to take a lap. And Susan, please, for God's sake no more baths in the chocolate fountain.
Lastly a word about the groomsmen.
I wouldn't even know where to begin!

My regards to Doug,

Love
Dad

He Ain't Heavy's (although he used to be), He's My Barbecue Chef.

This is the summer of "No Moss for Sandy and Bob." I say that because we will be on the go traveling to the ends of the earth visiting relatives, attending weddings and generally annoying all of our acquaintences. We kicked off the summer with our annual California soiree' (see my last post) followed closely by our annual Jonesville/Ewing trip. There was not so much Jonesville this year as my Uncle Tom, now 88 years old, had some medical issues this past year and moved in with his sister in Ewing. Now Uncle Tom was never one with whom you could rap about the subtleties of nuclear physics or Euclidean geometry , but this medical episode essentially reduced his mental faclities to that of most congressman. No wait, that's not fair to Uncle Tom.

Most of the rest of our time was spent largely on sitting around the sweltering patio (they have air conditioning, but my relatives being over 65, are allergic to temperatures below 120 degrees, so they don't turn it on) rehashing family lore that has been heard several thousand times and listening to Uncle Tom remind us that "the tree across the way, was trimmed and is now beautiful. He reminded us roughly every 90 seconds during the course of Tuesday and Wednesday (we suspect mild dementia setting in).

The countryside is as picturesque as anywhere and the food so good that you tend to forget the poverty, oppressive summer heat and lack of anything remotely entertaining to do, short of sweating gum drops and making the occaisional trip into the booming metropolis that is Middlesboro, KY to spend the day shopping at the WalMart (buying nothing) cruising their "mall" and dining at the gourmet KFC it boasts. Also Ewing has finally entered the "cyber age". Yes, if you go down to the local "Pizza Plus" restaurant, motto "Sure we have WiFi. You just need to sit by that one window booth there and you can get the funeral parlors connection from up the hill!", you can surf the internet while enjoying pizza or the plus.

Also, we spent the better part of 2 years, er, um hours, in a place where what passes for "social networking" is something called the Tazewell Flea Market. You really haven't lived until you've spent the better part of a sweltering, fetid and odiferous day, scouring the effluvia of hillbilly life for what my relatives call "a good buy." Picture if you will, about 6 hundred wooden shacks and shanties more or less in rows, crammed into a half-acre of pure Tennessee dirt and made of rotting wood, filthy tar paper and maybe a roof made from the discarded metal of an 1948 Buick. Crank up the temperature to about 180 degrees with humidity to match, populate the area with several thousand clones of Junior Samples, Jethro Bodine and Minnie Pearl, toss in the odd goat, sheep or miscellaneous fowl and one porta potty for the lot, and voila, you have truly the most depressing congregation of God's creatures ever assembled. To complete the experience you pick your way through the rows of shanty stalls surveying everything from bootleg DVDs to used underwear, autographed by Willis Mumford, complete with skid marks, serenaded all the while by crying infants, braying goats and Merle Haggard. I never thought I'd say this but the experience is absolutely worse than "a sharp stick in the eye."

As bad as all that was, it was more than made up for by lunch at a place on the Powell River named "Heavy's" that serves some of the best barbecued ribs I have ever had. The place is named after the owner and chef, who is no longer heavy though he used to be according to the history lesson we were given by the waitress, Daisy Mae something or other. To get there you have to drive roughly 5 miles through the set of "Deliverance" until you come to what looks like something excommunicated from the Flea Market for being a little too uppity (it has actual indoor plumbing). It is essentially a wooden cabin, with a kitchen and patio overlooking the sluggish, brown Powell River. On the various walls of the place are stapled dollar bills in various stages of decay, which have been autographed by patrons and hung for posterity. Why? I'll never know. After tasting the ribs, I knew why so many people would hazard the 5mile journey for a taste (Have you noticed that all of our trips seem to center around food? I blame Sandy).

Speaking of Sandy, she and I, on a more adventurous day, decided to try and take a short walk on a trail in the mountains. It was early morning and my sister Cheryl having sensibly declined exploration of any kind, decided to give our little adventure a miss. It was on this trek, straight up for the most part until it went straight down, looking for a place called the Sand Cave, that I discovered a heretofore little known fact about my spouse of 35 years. Somewhere along the line, probably as a preschool teacher, she has become an officienado of poop. This obsession turned into a blessing as it cut our climb short, as Sandy keenly went into "unusual poop spotting" mode. Seeing an unusual dropping on the trail (smallish and containing what appeared to be berry seeds) she became convinced, based on her vast experience of rabbit, deer, coyote and various other wildlife waste products, that these were "bear droppings." She was very sure of this because in the course of her career, she hadn't encountered this kind of dropping before and ergo, it must be bear crap, proving once and for all and very scientifically, bears do indeed shit in the woods (bet you didn't see that coming from a mile away)!

It was at this point we decided, discretion being the better part of total lunacy and idiotic foolhardiness to cut our "walk in the woods" short and return to an area of relative safety. Sandy then shifted gears into "I'm scared out of my mind, so I'm going to pick up this twig to defend myself from any bears weighing less than 4 ounces that might attack while we scurry back to our car and singing in a loud clear voice so as not to surprise any of the furry carnivores, the theme song from 'Shaft'" mode. It was then that I knew any jury on the planet would have acquitted any bear (even one with priors) or myself for justifiable homicide.

Obviously we escaped with our hides and the rest of the visit was pretty uneventful. So if you want to see God's Country I highly recommend you give Southwestern Virginia a visit. Just remember your Merle Haggard CD's and a portable defibrilator.

Love
Dad