Thursday, May 12, 2016

The Social Security Club

The sibs may not have this one from '95 out at Perfect North in Lawrenceburg, Indiana.


My ol' Dad is on the far left.  Where else would you expect to find him.

He was seventy-two at this time.  He already had one major heart attack and one major stroke, possibly some silent strokes as well which, at first, demolished him.   This is after one hell of a lot of hard as flaming hell therapy.

He tried to get out skiing every day and for quite a while my ol' Mother drove him.  There's another somewhere in which he is surrounded by kids and grandkids out there.  My ol' Mother isn't in it because she hated having a camera pointed at her.

At some point she stopped driving him out there because she said, nope, my vision is not good enough; I will not drive again.  She was so beautifully pragmatic about it and, man, she was such a tough ol' bird.  There's no point in fighting this one so I accept it and let's move along.  Dayum!

She was tougher than he and, get this, he knew it.  She never whimpered and that was true all the way through to the end.  Absolutely highest respect.

(Ed:  so what's funny?)

That they did this, man!  She was some years older than he and still they did it.  They did this sort of thing until physical circumstances made it impossible.  Check him out as he's slim, trim, and ready to ski.

I will take a slightly-humble bow on this one as all of them laughed and laughed when I started skiing in Ohio.  This state is flat, you buffoon!  Will you put motors on your skis?  How about a jet pack?

Yep, they laughed and laughed but eventually almost every single one of them was doing it except maybe one.


Perfect North is a lovely place with a highly-familial feeling and it's a great place to keep up your chops until when you can get out to Colorado or someplace with some adequate altitude.  In the circumstances of most of the family, maybe getting out to Colorado for two weeks once a year was possible ... but we could go out to Perfect North every day.  Of course we went out there!

Frasers make lousy spectators because all we think when we see someone do something cool is, well, I think I might like to try that.  Eventually all of them did and hat tip to the whole crew.  The laughing just makes me laugh now but it's cool because I see what came of it.

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