An Answer to a 33-Year Old Mystery (and Happy Thanksgiving)

It got up to 70 degrees in Baltimore today. People were jogging shorts. And we decided it made sense to walk over to Roland Park Place, rather than drive. It's a short walk and, more importantly, others would need the relatively few parking places there more than us. Thanksgiving is a big day at a retirement home, particularly a high class one like this. While there are certainly such homes where people are never visited, at RPP there were many large extended families celebrating the holiday on campus. The guard was indeed saying, as we got there, "the parking lot is full." And that was before noon.

We actually saw our first "tourist" place on the trip, the Lacrosse Museum, on the campus of Johns Hopkins University and therefore direcdtly across the street from our hotel. Quite reluctantly, Marjorie and Phil posed for this picture.

The trees were simply perfect during the walk. Bright sunshine and vivid color.

Even the family was smiling in the sunshine. I shouldn't say "even the family, but you try to get them to pose in the cold sometime.

The rest of the day was pretty restful, reading, talking, resting.


Thanksgiving dinner, courtesy of Roland Park Place, was quite good. Mary had suggested that we get some dark meat along with the white meat, and it turned out the dark meat was quite moist and tasty. The squash soup was as good as we remembered from last year, and Mary took the last of the sweet potatoes and spooned out the last of the brown sugar syrup at the bottom.

Then Marjorie took out some photos that Mary had found, and ultimately a scrap book from when she was in seventh through ninth grades in Chapin. There were some photographs, some postcards, and then some really weird stuff. Weird as in "this was news in 1932?" For instance, Mary had spent some time in the summer with some relatives in St. Charles, Illinois. During this time, she had taken a girls' swimming class. And the St. Charles newspaper duly reported the names of all the girls who were taking the class.

Quite fun was learning about her acting career. She had programs from a large number of shows. Now mind you, there were twenty people in her high school class, and everyone in town knew everyone else. But it was fun to see her name in the program and then trace that she had in fact sung a solo and two duets in a musical, or had had the lead in a show.

We did find a script to "The Importance of Being Earnest." Mary explained that she wasn't in the show, but was made to join the show to replace someone, during which she had played one of the male servants. Which one, I asked? Jack's servant Merriman, she replied.

Phil, of course, had played Jack in the same play in high school. But more to the point, I had played Merriman in "Ernest in Love," the musical version of "The Importance of Being Earnest." Don't look it up, by the way; they had actually added the role to the musical just to give me a part.

More interesting, to me, was what was at the end of the book. Mary had pasted in a bunch of magazine photographs of opera singes, and amongst them was a large collection of photographs of Nelson Eddy. Nelson Eddy was a movie star and operetta singer, but the more important thing was that my mother had a cruch on him. Oh, heck, he's been dead forever, but my mother still has a cruch on him. And so, apparently, does Mary. This answers the 33 year old question, which is what Marjorie's and my moms have in common. Our dads had a lot in common: Jews raised in urban poverty who had terrible relations with their fathers and had broken a cycle of violence and raised themselves up by their bootstraps. But our moms came from such disparate backgrounds: Mary from a small town in Illinois, well-educated, with roots dating back to the earliest white settlements on this continett; Ruthe the child of immigrants, high school educated. But both loved their Nelson. Who knew? It's so nice Mary had that scrapbook!

Afterward, we decidd to go to the doorbuster sale at CompUSA, which opened at 9. I'm not saying this was a huge event, but it did have TV coverage.

We were glad of the items we bought, and got a chance to call Carol during the time we spent in line, but my God. The place was a zoo. There were people in line everywhere. We had shown up at 9:15, and they were already out of one of the advertised items. And the staff was about as badly trained as possible. Some lines moved and others didn't. We changed lines, and it was a huge mistake, because it appeared they changed the cashier right afterward. The guy we had could charitably be called inexperienced. Uncharitably: brain dead. He had a deer in the headlights look. Sometimes there were three people at the desk helping him, other times, no one at all. Right in front of us, there were five Asian boys with one cart. They ended up having four transactions amongst them, and each one involved rebate slips and arguments over wheher the items they had matched the ones in the ads. Nothing was marked with a price, so it was anyone's argument. Meanwhile, Phil had gone to stand in another line, but his line didn't seem to move either. But the logjam in his line seemed to end all at once.

Our own transaction took less than a minute. I knew the prices, the price we were asked to pay matched it, and I paid cash. We saved $50 and paid less than $40, so it was worth it, but afterward, Marjorie was beat. She said "Too bad there's nowhere I can get a latte in Baltimore this late."

I drove her to Dunkin Donuts and bought her a latte.