Happy Birthday to Rich!

The other day, when we were at the park with Alex, I started to remember when I was 10 and took my first big trip out of the state. The man behind us needed to go to Denver for some reason, and I was invited to go along with the family, Buffy (Elizabeth) 7.5, Joey 6, and the little boy whose name I've forgotten. My Mom gave me a couple of dollars to spend, and we piled into their car. (No seatbelts, don't forget. Back in my day, sonny, we were TOUGH!)

No Interstates either. We drove down highway 287 and had a break in Fort Collins. They had this wonderful park with a slide with a bump in it. It was still metal, but hey, there's not so much sun that they get all that hot. I'd never been on such an exciting slide. There was a merry-go-round, too, and swings. (I miss wooden-seat swings!) This playground stuck in my memory as Nirvana for a long time. I just now realized this was pre-Disneyland, too.

And then there was Denver!! We went into a store with revolving doors! And, oh my word, an escalator! I'd never seen either of these things. There was one building in downtown Laramie with an elevator all the way to the second floor, and I'd been in it a couple of times, but the escalator was scary. Would I fall off? Would it eat my shoes?

We were allowed to buy toys, and I got a couple of dinosaurs, a tyrannosaur and a triceratops, made out of a fish meal. (I can only surmise, as when they started to deteriorate some years later, that's what it smelled like.) This was the beginning of my dinosaur collection. They were, I believe, 50 cents each.

I didn't get back to Denver till I was in high school. By that time we had a car, and lived with my grandfather, and he would go to Fitzsimmons Hospital in Aurora. Then I went to the museum of Natural History and to the zoo, but nothing will ever compare to the sheer astonishment of the first time. The grandchildren, for that matter, the children, didn't get this, because they had seen it all and done it all by the time they were ten and they were jaded.

There's no change in my weight. I did start work on the round robin, and I've been good at cleaning, though I couldn't find the Zoo key today.

Lileks says Patrick Stewart jumped the shark. I admit I'm disappointed.