"That's Summers With An "O", He Exclaimed!"

Nothing To Say?

 Good "Sunny" Friday Morning, y'all.

How 'bout that!

About a month ago, I started a friendship with a local restauranteur in order to be able to paint his fruit truck, Plein Air style. Since that time, something has always come up to frustrate my efforts. The one thing that hasn't come up is the sun, but today the forecast says a full day of sun. We'll see about all of that.

On Thursday, I sketched this man slouched in a chair with his iPad, cinnamon roll and coffee. The man's wife sat across from him and said not one word to each other with the exception of the woman's report of severe weather on Friday.

An entire half hour was spent in silence as I sketched away. The husband barely moved until a friend of mine squeezed himself between the coffee table, the sofa and me. Dennis Ackerson, a native of Iowa, I believe, started up a conversation between chomps on his blueberry scone and hot tea.

And man, it was on.

Apparently, the couple, from Missouri, visited their daughter who's a neurosurgeon in New Orleans with acreage on the Northshore for a week, They were planning to return home when Dennis mentioned alternate routes taken from New Orleans to Iowa and the Midwest by by-passing I-55 to the north.

From that point on, the quiet couple touched on such subjects as varied as digging up Jesse James's grave to the J-35 Lightning II.

Apparently, historians had to prove that indeed it was Jesse James, that was buried just outside his mother's window only to find it was the real Jesse James. They re-interred him with his brother Frank outside the James Museum in Kearney, MO.

"You know, the woman said, we've been to Europe many times and if you ask someone there to name five great Americans, Jesse's name always pops up!"

"Maybe, we should refigure Mount Rushmore to include him," I said with a smirk.

And then, what sparked my interest was talk about T-38's, F-16's and the J-35 which their son now flies as an instructor out of Spangelham, AFB in Germany. After being reinstated in the Air Force as a reservist, their son went from a job flying with American Airlines to teaching recruits to fly the T-38 Talon in Texas. Somehow, the son ended up flying in Afghanistan in

F-16's... Say what?

"We followed him along the runway in an official Air Force vehicle until he waved his wings and took off," mom proudly said.

Well, an entire hour of conversation ended with a story of a supposedly six story crane that sits out abandoned in the plains. "It has become a tourist attraction, of sorts."

"Yeh, people go there and climb all over it!"

I looked at Dennis and laughed, saying, "Kinda like a Midwestern Eiffel Tower, ya know?"

We all got up to see them off out of Giddy Up. They introduced us, finally, as the Summers, Pat and Vicki.

"That's Summers with an "O" he exclaimed as they left.

All I can say is "birds of a feather", ya know?

No cups yet!

Copyright2023/Ben Bensen III