I am still reeling from the phone call yesterday with my college roomie! That was sixty years ago, and he is doing just fine living in Encinitas.
In college, on fraternity row, we had a “Chariot Race.” All the fraternities built their chariots and were to run two blocks down 28th Street. Joe and I had another idea! We rented a REAL chariot from the Ben-Hur movie and trucked it down to the fraternity house. We are talking about a 500-pound vehicle! Our girlfriends decorated it up with flowers, and we entered. Being the “nerds,” everyone laughed at us! They shouted, amongst other things, “No way, José.” Weblissfully ignored their chanting and got this hulking beast to the starting line!
The race started; the other fraternities’ rigs were off like rocket ships. Our group started solving this beast, slowly, with Joe Tracy riding in the chariot, yelling directions. Once we got up to speed, nothing could stop us. Joe was wearing a wreath and a rather flimsy toga, which the ladies seemed to like for some reason. His sheets were flapping in the breeze.
The wooden steel-rimmed wheels made an amazing sound, something like a stagecoach coming down the blacktop-paved street!! While the other fraternity’s vehicles (they were made of old bicycles, red wagons, baby strollers, etc.) came apart at the seams, tipping over, losing wheels, crashing into the sidewalk, etc., our trusty behemoth rattled to the finish line, leaving a trail of broken dreams behind us! It took us 200′ to slow the thing down! The “jocks” (aka Sigma Chi) were destroyed by us “nerds”. Brains over brawn wins again!!
A bunch of us took the chariot over to 28th Street Market and got two kegs of beer to celebrate! The chariot became a beer wagon! Oh, the simplicities of life in college.
We had a lot of fun post-college, and I remember Joe coming to my new house to help me put up ham radio antennas and redesign the patio. My son Joe was named after Joe Tracy!
Oh my, what a day!!! We started with the gym, stopped by a garden supply store, dropped off several items at Goodwill, went to the dry cleaners, went to Girls’ Night Out, and then went home via CVS!
At The Elks, we did some serious weekend coordination and set up a plan for cake/table decorations for Saturday. Sunday is Bob’s 80th birthday! He is just a whippersnapper!
Will and Iris were not here today; Iris was out of sorts. We did have a visitor; Sydney joined us today! Sandee showed up just before we had to leave for the doctor’s appointment.
We departed the Elks around 1:30 pm to make it to the kidney doctor’s office for a report at 2:00 pm. The results were good, as the kidneys are functioning pretty well for an old fart! The outside temperature was 94 degrees with a slight breeze. We stopped by CVS on the way home and then headed to the office.
Back home again, Mary pushed pills for another 45 minutes. At CVS, I saw a coffee can, and it reminded me of when I was young and what we did with all those cans (back when plastic wasn’t popular).
We spent the afternoon in the office taking care of bills and other household duties. We did NOT need dinner as lunch was still doing a good job! At 7:50 pm, we headed to the pool and swam around like a pair of ducks for an hour before going back inside.
We watched a movie entitled “Orphan Train” — a 1979 TV movie— based on the real-life orphan train program, in which children believed to be orphaned or abandoned were sent by train from eastern cities to families in the Midwest and West. In this movie, their Union Army officer/father was believed dead, his children were sent away on an orphan train, and his search to find and reunite with them began.
We began another movie, but at 11:00 pm our eyes began to shut, so we scurried to bed!
