Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

For Father's Day weekend, the Gryphon and I visited my dad in central Pennsylvania. We started out Saturday morning, planning to be there by mid-afternoon, when he'd be done making his rounds.

And we would have been there between 2 and 3, as promised, except that we got stuck behind a massive amount of traffic on Route 80, due to some paving.

I could swear this was the same stretch of road they've been tying up with paving every summer for a couple years now. Maybe they only do a little bit at a time. I don't know.

We were still more or less on time. The plan, as suggested by Dad, was that we would go out to dinner and then view the monthly car shown downtown. Afterwards we would rent a video.

We had some time to kill before dinner. While the Gryphon napped, Dad showed me some family photos he'd found going through the boxes of things he'd been keeping in a storage room since my grandmother died. He's currently trying to clear out that room so that it can serve as a guest bedroom when my brother and his wife, now pregnant, visit.

The photos included some really cute pictures of my grandmother as a little girl, as well as pictures of my biological grandfather as a young man, none of which I'd seen before.

We found some color portrait shots, taken in 1971 of my grandmother, apparently in her apartment. I said, "It looks like she's in love with the person who took this photo." It was something about her eyes.

Sure enough, the next photos in the album were pictures of her with the man I knew as my grandfather, who was actually my step-grandfather.

He also gave me a copy of a book written by my great-great-aunt, my great-grandfather's sister, Lydia Marshall Green, a meticulous botanical book detailing the plants in a specific garden, which used to be at the Newcomen Society in Exton, Chester County, Pennsylvania.

My dad, who clearly admired his Great Aunt Lydia, told me that she typed the entire book, despite failing eyesight due to cataracts, laboriously in front of an old manual typewriter. He also mentioned that one of our ancestors, Humphrey Marshall, wrote the first botanical book published in North America, ARBUSTUM AMERICANUM, The American Grove. I'm sure they would be pleased with the name of my literary magazine, Wild Violet.

For dinner we went to Ruby Tuesday's. The most interesting thing about this was that the menu now has calories listed for each menu item. I was shocked but not entirely surprised to discover some of the entrees would have exhausted or exceeded my entire daily allowance of calories. For example, a burger and fry combination that would have come to more than 1,600 calories.

I opted for a healthier wrap, which came to abut 472, leaving room, I felt, for ice cream later.

The car show was fun. I was fascinated by the details: hood ornaments and headlights and the fancy, gaudy chrome on the old cars. I took pictures, many of which were close-ups of abstract or interesting elements. There are some intentional and some unintentional self-portraits in the shiny surfaces of these cars. And even a red convertible similar to the one I dreamt about a week ago.

Behind each car, in a few folding chairs, were two or three owners of the cars. Very few of them talked to us, perhaps able to spot that we were not part of the classic car scene: merely gawkers and tourists. It reminded me of a reverse parade, where the classic cars sat still while people walked by.

My dad let me choose the DVD. I chose American Splendor. On the way back, we stopped for hand dipped ice cream, at my suggestion. Dad warned me that the place was under new management, and I didn't know what to expect, but they still sold the same great ice cream. They had expanded it from merely a counter space for orders to a small interior seating area, with tables. Colorful painting and artwork brightened the small space.

Without realizing it, the Gryphon and I each ordered two scoops: one chocolate marshmallow and one peanut-butter cup. My dad talked to a guy at the counter who had his classic convertible out in the parking lot. It turns out he was also a former patient of my dad's, and he apologized that he couldn't come to him any more because his insurance had changed. My dad informed him that he know takes that insurance, too, leaving the guy without an excuse. He went back to licking his cone, quietly.

American Splendor was a great movie. I could, and will, talk about it for days. It's about the comic book writer Harvey Pekar, the story of how he began to write comics about his life for other people to illustrate in intriguing, reality based stories.

I really identified with him to some degree, the extent of personal commitment he has for his creative work, despite many years of financial struggles, as well as his desire to portray the people around him, with an eye for their quirks but without being mean spirited.

They went back and forth between the film version of the movie, showing some actual frames from the comics, and documentary style interviews with some of the people featured in his comics. A fascinating mix.

Afterwards, Ghostbusters was on TV, and I drifted off on the couch. One of the last things I remember thinking was how the hellbeast special effects look so crude and disappointing today. CGI has ruined it for us all.

More from this Father's Day Weekend:

June 22, 2004 - Scaled Down Father's Day

Tales from another Father's Day:

June 16, 2003 - Painting Party

Copyright 2004 by Alyce Wilson

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