Tag: Grindrod

While many are already back in school, I’m not, as this year marks the 20th anniversary since I last addressed a class of 17-year-olds with the intent to make them better practitioners of the language they inherited at birth.

On our final Wyoming morning on a national-parks vacation, Lady Jane and I packed up, ready for another 500-plus-mile driving day to get to West Glacier, Montana, and Glacier National Park.

When many people hear the word “Yellowstone,” the first thing that comes to mind is the wildly popular TV series that has starred Kevin Costner for the first four seasons as John Dutton, the patriarchal figure of a ranch in Montana by the same name, one estimated to be just shy of 800,000 acres.

For my lady Jane and me, travel, both here and abroad, has helped to bond us together for these past 23 years. So, it was after a pretty rough last 18 months for me that Jane and I both thought the best way to celebrate what I hope is my good health following some cancer scares was to take a national-parks road trip.

During these final weeks of summer’s last full month, I’m in the mood to talk about trips, starting with one from my friend Michelle Rice that details a 2014 trip that she, husband Jason, and their daughters Cameron and Avery, then 15 and 13 respectively, took. Michelle told me the tale after she asked me about my summer travel plans late last May while we were visiting our friend, Joyce Zerante, a resident of The Greens at Lima Convalescent Home. When I told Michelle of my intention to see three national parks in a week’s time on a 4,200-mile driving trip in mid-June, one of which was Yellowstone that would necessitate a two-night stay in Cody, Wyoming, the closest town to the east entry point to the massive park, it triggered her memory.

There are comedy clubs that have achieved legendary status, clubs which have hosted the elite in the comedy world, such as The Comedy Cellar in Manahattan, The Comedy Store in LA and Second City in my birth town of Chicago.

As a creative kid growing up in a time when technology stopped at console Zeniths and RCAs with cabinets on each side of the screen that actually were larger than the screen, my pals and I were pretty good at inventing our own games.

There’s something about watching others working around the yard that motivates me to do the same. As for the most common and oft-repeated duties of the yard, well, of course, that would be mowing. Every time one of my neighbors pulls the cord on that mower and begins the back-and-forth process, I have an almost uncontrollable urge to follow suit.

The large man with the mud-caked work boots sat just a few feet away from me in a McDonald’s in Rio Grande in the far southeastern region of the Heart of It All. Seated with him was a teenage boy and, based on the hand-holding that I spied, the boy’s girlfriend made it a threesome. The man said to the boy, “Listen, you’re 18. Let me tell you what your grandpa told me when I was your age about what needs to be done before applying for a job.”

If you’ve ever wondered just how many of us there are who participate in the affairs of the living at any moment in time, there’s actually a website, worldometers.info, which provides a ticker with a rolling count. There are 8,111,304,849 of us, although those last three digits bounce up and down constantly, depending on who’s winning the ongoing competition between joyous birth and sorrowful death.