Conversations-with-Mike-3

Yes the cow sink strainer! When it arrived several years ago we laughed heartily – recently it had gotten rusty and we sent it to strainer heaven.

By the way – I knew what you meant when you first mentioned the thermos – but alas, neither of us drink – although I do think Holly likes morphine, as least she still raves about the one time they gave it to her in 2001 for kidney stones. I guess the junk addict searches the rest of their life to find that first fix again – at least that’s what ‘they’ say.

Here’s a story you might not have heard about the old man (succinctly put lol). Ok he was on a return leg from a Caribbean scuba diving trip and had a stop-over in Houston that lasted several hours. Holly and I met him at the airport in the rain – actually Holly went in while I waited idling in the car. The security guards made me move the car because they thought I was a suicide bomber - neither Holly or I had a cell phone so your father’s visit was a near disaster until Holly happened to walk out of the wrong door by mistake and there I was.

It was too far to drive back to our house, so we drove into Houston. We took your father to the prestigious Contemporary Art Museum which is FREE and of course I like art. The museum is a stop-over for world-traveling art shows and features only the ‘best’ living artists. The show that month featured large wooden cabinets filled with hay. Your father picked up one of the brochures and started reading the usual artistic nonsense they write to explain the work – he was reading it aloud and came upon the word ‘juxtaposition’ – and the rest of the day was filled with uses for that word. For instance when we returned to the airport to drop him off, we noticed how people on the sidewalk were ‘juxtaposed’ to their baggage.

Suffice to say it was a memorable couple hours in Houston with your father, and I had to look up the word when we got home.

A year after that visit, Holly and I were at the hobby store and I saw some tiny wood cabinets made for doll houses. Then I found some stringy wood shavings off a display case – and after a few coats of stain and varnish, I created a miniature juxtaposition and mailed it to your father. And the thing remains on his knick-knack shelf today.

Not realizing how important the ‘juxtaposition cabinet’ plus the genuine cow head were to your father, I off-handedly mentioned that his 60th birthday gift would rival either gift. He wrote back that my gift had some big shoes to fill – however the gift had already been chosen and he may be in for a surprise. We’ll see.

Remind me at the party to tell you another story about your father from when Holly and I got married.


Gene Haynes