A New Generation

Our family has a new generation. I just got back last night from a weekend visit with my nephew, his wife, and their new baby boy. That makes me a great aunt. How can this be? I’m not nearly old enough to be a great anything. He is a precious little thing and truly a blessing to our family.

The whole weekend was pretty special. We left our men folks at home and my mother and I struck out for Georgia. Our plan was to stay at my brother’s house in Macon and commute to Perry (a little farther south on I-75) to visit with my nephew. We wanted to get an early start on Friday morning, so Gene dropped me off at my parent’s house at 7 AM. We were going in her car and she was loaded and ready to go when we got there. Gene opened the trunk to put my little overnight bag in and found no room. Her trunk was full and that is saying something since hers is the largest trunk of any car manufactured in the free world. My mother has a reputation of taking more than she needs on any trip. We still tease her about those 27 pairs of shoes she took on a trip some 40 years ago. It’s just her way. Her philosophy is to be prepared for any circumstance and there is no such thing as “too much”. But what turned out to be in her trunk was not clothes and shoes, but food.

We planned to take some food because we knew the new mom wouldn’t have time to fool with meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking for a gang of people. Mother had called the new dad, Ben, to see what he would like for her to bring. He thought he would enjoy a little shrimp Creole. We never go down there without taking cookies so I had baked a big batch. Even though we had planned to take food, I was still shocked to see 2 large coolers in her trunk. Besides the gallon of Creole, there was a smoked turkey breast, 2 pounds of Whitt’s barbeque, a couple packages of deli ham, a loaf of apricot bread and a tub of cream cheese. Then she felt bad taking all that food to one grandson and not the other, so she made a double batch of homemade spaghetti sauce for her son and the other grandson. I put my little bag and camera in the back seat, my dad stuck the GPS on the windshield and we pulled out of the driveway very near 7 AM. According to my brother, Mike, that in itself is pretty much a miracle.

We didn’t program our destination into the GPS at the start of our trip. We knew how to get where we were going until we turned off the interstate in Macon. Well, I know how to get to my brother’s house as well as both my nephew’s homes. Gene and I don’t have a GPS and rely on MapQuest for directions. I had those directions on the seat beside me. When we got through Atlanta, mother decided it was time to let the GPS guide our way. I was flying down the highway at 70 mph, trying my best to make some headway on this trip. We were, by this time, way behind schedule so I left her to the programming of the new technology. Her hands shake pretty badly these days and her fingers are gnarled with arthritis so she touched every command on the little screen until she got to a point of no return. At least not one she could figure out. I was no help since I am unfamiliar with the device plus I had to have my eyes on the road. The best way to solve this problem is to turn the thing off and start all over. In the end, she got the GPS to display the map correctly and there were written directions on the screen, but no Ms GPS telling us where to go. She pressed a few more buttons to no avail, so she decided to call my dad. He didn’t answer the phone (when the cats away... and all that, I guess). When we were getting pretty close to Macon, she called again. This time he answered and she tried to explain the problem of the mute GPS. This was a difficult conversation. As with all of us, sometimes she can’t think of the word she wants to use. Most of the time, she can carry on an intelligent conversation, but this was one of those times when the words, particularly nouns, just wouldn’t come. It was probably partly due to the fact that she is 83 and unfamiliar with the GPS technology. On the other end of the line, my dad is very hard of hearing. He apparently instructed her to restart the GPS in order to get back to the main menu. Then he was asking her what was displayed on the screen. She would say what she saw, he wouldn’t be able to hear what she said, she would accidentally touch something, the screen would change and she would tell him something else which he couldn’t hear. This went on for some time until they finally gave up. She sat with the GPS in her lap for a while just pushing and touching. All of a sudden, Ms GPS began to speak.

That’s all for now. More on this trip tomorrow.