New Years 2008-2009
The plans here for me and Mrs. Tony usually involve going out to dinner with good friends, hanging around at various art shows and stuff and getting to one of our homes by midnight.
Those friends are no longer around us (it's a real long story) so we normally go to dinner, and fritter away the rest of the night here watching movies, or visiting friends or family.
This year, though, our daughter invited us to her place down the road to celebrate with her family and her in-laws. I immediately got sick. I don't mean it that way, but I got a terrible cold, cough and stuff, and here we stay at home. I have convinced my daughter that I did not catch the cold deliberately. She will tell her father-in-law.
Mysteriously after we had a houseful of people over Christmas, a couple DVDs appeared, left behind by my very sneaky cousin. They were videos discs he converted from my dad's 8 mm movies, the ones that are always shaky and jiggly, people walking this way like Charlie Chaplin then walking that way with the 8 mm movie wobble. Or they stop and wave.
There was a lot of footage of the young Tony racing soapbox derbys, so much footage, in fact, that you would never know I did anything else, except wobble this way then that way. I never waved. I was above such pedestrian action.
The movies had shots of both my grandfathers, grandmothers and a host of related mechanics and some questionable relatives, with their faces mostly obscured behind newspapers. Or hankies. They seemed to blow their noses a lot back then.
It turned out to be a very warm evening here in the cold north. I got to see my parents and grandparents again.
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