Ain't it grand?

Life is grand, isn't it? We can type away on a silly blog and then go back and read what we typed as if someone else had typed it. The old memory is going so we can amuse ourselves. I just read the previous month of posts and each was so enjoyable because it was like reading a book for the first time. I had no idea what was going to come next. Really.

But I reread the Mayday post from 5/2, a day late for our May 1 anniversary. And in that post I promised an anniversary flashback. That post described our antics on the parkway solving the problem of our minivan being out of gas. The whole zany story reminded me at the time of another inane series of events which were probably equally dangerous on another local highway.

It was 26 years ago but probably later in May because it involved our wedding photos, so it would have had to have been after our return from our honeymoon in the Florida Keys.

We had sorted through all the professional photos, back in those primitive days before digital photography. My wife had the stack of them in her hand and we were cruising down I-91 to the photographer's studio to inform them of our choices. It was a warm sunny day and the windows were down. We both have always preferred fresh air to A/C.

As we were flying along, a bug landed on my wife's right forearm. She instinctively went to flick it off with her left hand and turned to stick her arm out the window so the insect intruder would be back outside the car where it belonged. However, she forgot that she was holding the photos in her right hand.

Poof! The photos vanished from her hand. She yelled and I hit the brakes. I remember the image in the rearview mirror of dozens of photos fluttering down on the highway like autumn leaves. I don't remember what day it was or what time. I'm pretty sure it was evening. I do remember that there were hardly any vehicles on the road. So I pulled over and we both got out and began picking up the photos. We could see a good distance back on the highway and would dart out and grab a few and get back before the next speeding vehicle would whiz by, generally causing several of the remaining photos to dance farther down the highway.

The photos were numbered and I'm pretty sure we recovered every last one of them. When we arrived at the photographer's and recounted the story of our adventure, he informed us that he had the negatives and we had the list of numbers of the photos we wanted so we had unnecessarily risked our lives.

We had been younger and more foolish back then but it struck me as we gambled with our lives along the parkway this year that we're still crazy after all these years.