The title does not refer to the soap opera that ran for my entire childhood, or one of the many other television shows of the same name.

I’m talking about my sister and her husband. She’s a Ph.D. English professor and he is a psychiatrist. Peggy and I refer to them as the doctors.

My sister and her husband met as freshmen in college, and Peggy and I began dating in high school. So, the four of us have known each other as couples since 1980. We love to do things together, and once their youngest son went to college we began inviting them to travel with us. In recent years inviting has turned to harassing…

They finally agreed to travel this year. My sister wanted to do it over her Spring Break, so we told them to pick a place. We knew that the psychiatrist had a conference the following week in Atlanta, so we were fully prepared for the choice to be Charleston, Savannah, or any of several other cool coastal locales. When the suggestion came back to go to Cleveland, we had to be careful. We did not want to go to Cleveland, but neither did we want to scare off the baby deer making its first foray into traveling with us. I suggested that perhaps Cleveland was a better choice in October rather than in winter. When the next option came back as Memphis, we jumped at it!

Memphis is cool and reasonably close — notwithstanding our eleven hour journey to get here. Lots of stuff to do and decent weather in March. Blues and barbecue. Thank you, thank you very much.

Today will be our first day to venture out since arriving late last night. I’m really looking forward to walking without the boot I’ve been wearing for several weeks (I brought it just in case). Let’s get this show on the road!

I am writing tonight from Memphis.

We left Baton Rouge this morning and drove to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to meet my sister and her husband. Then we began the trip to Memphis.

Now, if the point of the trip was to get to Memphis, we would have taken the interstate and arrived in Memphis at about 4:00 in the afternoon. Not the point.

My grandmother died when I was very young, so my grandfather was a fairly young widower. When he would go on trips I would travel with him to keep him company. I would bring my ukulele or guitar and we would sing in the car as we traveled. And we would stop at anything that looked interesting. Or if we got hungry. Or if I had to go to the bathroom. Or because it had been an hour since we last stopped. 

It took forever to get anywhere, but we always had a blast. My father used to refer to this as “traveling like Ike.”

Today we reveled in traveling like Ike. We drove the “Blues Trail” up highway 61. We left at noon and stopped an hour north of Vicksburg to eat lunch at the Onward Store. We saw the (alleged) birthplace of Muddy Waters. We saw the Ground Zero Blues Club and went to the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksville, MS. We even stopped again for dinner at the “famous” Como Steakhouse in Como, MS (it really is famous and it really is good!).

We finally rolled into Memphis about 11:00. In the snow.

It was the perfect end to a perfect day of traveling like Ike.

I’ve got a secret.

Actually, I’ve had a secret for almost two months now, after a Christmas conversation that took place as I lay recuperating in my bed. But now I can talk about it.

I’m going to be a grandfather.

My son and his wife are expecting their first child. They came to the house this weekend for us to take pictures of them for their announcement. I did not know such a thing exists, but it was fun.

When Peggy got pregnant with Mike we picked up the phone and told people about it. Well, not immediately, but you know what I mean.

Things have changed. At least we won’t have the indignity of a big gender reveal, since Mike and Caitie do not want to know the gender. I think that is really cool. We did not want to know Mike’s gender in advance, either, but I was watching the ultrasound when it became apparent. That’s my boy…

We have been looking forward to grandparenting for quite some time now. When Mike waited until 26 to get married I joked that he had ruined our opportunity to be the youngest grandparents on the block. He’ll be almost 29 when the baby is born. At least Peggy will still look like the youngest grandparent on the block.

I have to admit, such news promotes reflection.

What kind of grandparent will I be? I’m not going to be strict — that defeats the whole purpose of being a grand — but will I have the opportunity to be involved in the daily life of my grandbaby? They don’t live in Baton Rouge, so are we going to have to be in Kenner (bruh) all the time to spend time with what will certainly be OUR baby?

I’m not too worried about it. I was a good Daddy because I had a good Daddy. I feel confident that it’s genetic. Peggy’s going to be absolutely ridiculous, too.

Do we really have to wait until August?

We’ve had a great day here in Las Vegas. Celebrating a holiday like Thanksgiving away from your family is always a little odd, but we celebrated with my son and his wife on Tuesday before we left. This also frees them to spend Thanksgiving with her family and makes us look very magnanimous. Wins all around.

Hopefully we will have some wins while we are here, too. We got a huge one tonight as LSU beat Texas A&M. We watched the game while eating a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner in one of the hotel restaurants. Absolutely the best of both worlds.

We walked all over the city today in the perfect weather. Found my favorite slot game and won $300 in about twenty minutes. I was smart enough to quit. Had a couple of great meals. After the LSU game ended we walked down to the Bellagio and watched the dancing waters. All the required Vegas stuff.

I hope each of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your families. Tomorrow the Christmas decoration season begins in earnest, so I’m going to bed now.

Every once in a while when I sit down at the computer I will get a reminder of pictures from the past. I usually ignore them because the dates are frequently inaccurate. Some fun ones popped up today. While the dates were not accurate, they were all taken in a similar timeframe, and they were all from ten years ago.

There is something about ten years that piques my interest. Life changes so much in that span of time, but you really don’t notice it until you look back at pictures or events.

Every year Peggy and I go to Colorado during the summer. With everything that happened in Baton Rouge this summer I really did not write anything about the annual trip. So it was interesting today when pictures from our Colorado trip in 2006 showed up today.

That was a great trip. Mike was about to be a senior in high school, so we really weren’t sure if it would be the last time he made the trip with us. We did all of our favorite things with a little extra vigor for that reason.

When Mike would go with us we would spend a day in Breckenridge to ride the Alpine Slide and ride the lift up to the top of Peak 8. We would stay longer in Vail because he wanted to see every single knife in every single shop to determine if he wanted to add to his collection. We spent more time in Copper Mountain to see what cool new stuff they had added to their summer recreation portfolio.

But mostly we spent time as a family with a boy who seemed to genuinely enjoy the company of his parents.

He is married now and working hard to get ahead on his own. Someday he will bring his own family along when we go to Colorado. But we will always have memories of taking him with us and enjoying family time on vacation.

Since we moved to Baton Rouge we spend every Father’s Day in Destin, Florida.

This is not a Father’s Day tradition, at least not on purpose. I attend a work event in Destin that begins on the Monday after Father’s Day and lasts most of the week, so Peggy and I go in a couple of days early and enjoy the beach before the event begins.

Peggy was not a beach person when I met her. She grew up going to the mountains for her family vacations. My family really didn’t take vacations when I was growing up because we owned a camp on a creek outside the town where my parents were raised. That was our vacation, and I loved it.

I think Peggy is enjoying the beach now. Maybe our time on the lake in Austin has impacted her opinion some. Or maybe she has just realized how good she looks in a bathing suit. Or maybe as we are getting older she is appreciating a little warmth.

It is weird being out of town on every Father’s Day, but there is one added benefit. My father lives between Baton Rouge and Destin, so we see him each time we make the trip (both coming and going). So he gets two Father’s Day visits every year.

The conference will be pretty busy through Wednesday, but tonight we got to enjoy a quiet dinner together to celebrate. We saw several people we know and said hello. But I didn’t invite anyone to join us.

Hey, it’s my Father’s Day. I’m spending it with the person I want to be with. I’ll see the other folks all week long.

Happy Father’s Day!

The past month has been hectic on many levels, so tonight we just wanted to go out, have a good time and relax a little. It is not something we do often enough.

We had our usual leisurely Friday evening dinner, then instead of going home we decided to go to L’Auberge and hang out. We went upstairs to the player’s club and got some drinks then went back down to the floor to play a little.

It is a joy to watch my wife do just about anything, but it is hilarious to watch her play slots. She attracts a crowd wherever she is because she celebrates her own wins and the wins of everyone around her. The part of the casino she is in always looks and sounds like the most exciting place in the joint. They should pay her to play there. Wait, they kind of do…

She won some money tonight and then convinced me to play. I found a machine called “Howling Wolf” or something like that. It howls when you hit the bonus and then pays you for however many wolves you get on the spin. I hit a few times and howled along with the wolves.

When I looked around me we were surrounded by people watching me play. More correctly, we were surrounded by people watching Peggy cheer. I loved every minute of it.

And I will likely play the game again.

As long as she is cheering for me, I can’t lose. 

It’s been a very busy few weeks — Peggy’s Mama died, travel to Dallas for the funeral, a heart episode while in Dallas hospitalized my Dad, outrunning floods to get back home, Peggy’s first speaking role — and before all that occurred we had offered to host the entire family for Easter. Peggy said “bring it on”!

An old Alabama song says, “If you’re gonna play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band.” The Louisiana corollary is, “If you’re gonna have Easter in Louisiana, you gotta have crawfish.” Not really a toe-tapper, but you get the idea…

We became the central location for family get-togethers when we moved here. Family in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, so it works, and Peggy loves it. This weekend we have twelve people here. If you have a large crowd at your house at Easter that means one thing…

Crawfish.

My Dallas girl had to learn about crawfish. My company hosts 10-12 crawfish boils each season, so she’s had a bit of a crash course in the 18 months since we moved here. Still, I was a little surprised when she looked at me and said, “We need to do crawfish on Saturday.”

All is right with the world. I serve a risen Savior and we had crawfish to celebrate. I’m pretty sure I heard God say, “Yeah, you right!”

We realized something was wrong when we went to her house and saw a few months’ worth of bills laying on the desk. This is only significant if you know that she spent many years running a pediatrician’s office, and every bill that came in was filed as soon as it was paid. She’s wicked smart and incredibly social, so on our too-brief visits to see her she had fooled us fairly easily. However, when she traveled with us over the holidays we had our first glimpse of her away from her home turf. The unpaid bills were now evidence of the journey that was just beginning.

Though we no longer lived in Dallas, Peggy still lived closest of the children — it’s a lot easier to get to Dallas from Houston or Austin than from Tucson or Seattle. It didn’t take the doctors too long to give us the news we did not want to hear. Alzheimer’s is never what you want to hear.

What followed is what so many families have already gone through. Finding a place for her to live that met our picky standards and had a great quality of care. Cleaning out a family home of nearly fifty years, then fixing it up to sell. Watching Peggy battle tirelessly to qualify for the VA benefit that her father earned serving in World War II. The friends asking why we are doing this “to” Mary.

Finally, the deterioration got to the point where Mary no longer could live in her own apartment, even in a memory care facility. We made the decision to move her to a wonderful place here in Baton Rouge so Peggy could be with her every day. We jokingly referred to it as “South Dallas” since Peggy’s mother has never lived anywhere else in her life. Enduring the physical struggles that mirror the mental deterioration, but always with the same sweet spirit. And always recognizing Peggy. And me.

Once she turned the corner on loving me she was all in. And until the day she died she loved me with all her heart.

I sang at her funeral today, and for the first time I could not get through the song I have sung countless times. I was overcome with the thought that this wonderful lady was now fully healed and hanging out with her blessed savior. Fortunately, the congregation knew the words and sang for me when I could not. It was the kind of moment Mary would have loved. No, it was a moment Mary did love. And I loved her.

When Peggy and I started dating, well, let’s just be generous and say that Peggy’s mother did not like me very much. I never really understood why, and I was just arrogant enough not to be too bothered by it. I always figured it was because I was a year older (that seems to matter more when you are 16 and 17) and because Peggy was her family’s golden child.

The longer we stayed together the worse it got. I’ve heard people talk about being treated with disdain by in-laws. Disdain would have been a giant step up in class — seething dislike is more accurate.

I thought it would improve when we got engaged, but the feelings just ramped up at that point. At the church on the day of our wedding, Peggy’s Mama begged her not to go through with it. Fortunately for me Peggy had made up her mind. Anyone who knows her knows what that means.

Our wedded bliss did nothing to soften her feelings toward me. I was always respectful and polite, but I can be forgiven for not being overly demonstrative towards the family. After a little over two years of marriage, we found out Peggy was pregnant. Everyone was predictably excited, especially as Peggy had a very smooth pregnancy (the summer electricity bill in our tiny house is a subject for another time). When we went to the hospital we decided to wait until we had something to tell before we started notifying people.

As stress-free as Peggy’s pregnancy was, the delivery was the exact opposite. She was in labor for more than twenty-four hours before her water broke. We called her parents then and told them we were at Presbyterian Hospital.

Nine hours later the doctor came in and told us that the baby was in distress and we needed to do an emergency caesarean section. We did not have time to tell Peggy’s parents what was happening but asked the nurse to go let them know. Thirty minutes later our son was born and both he and Peggy were healthy.

When I walked out into the waiting room to share the news with Peggy’s mother and father, I hugged them both and shared what had happened. I will never know exactly what happened, but something about that moment finally melted Mary’s resistance. From that day forward she became the greatest mother-in-law that a man could ever have.

Since that day, she has literally spent more than twenty-eight years apologizing to me for the way she acted, and I have spent the same amount of time asking her to not worry about it.

Mary, Peggy’s Mama, went home yesterday.

Over the next few days I will have more to say about this remarkable woman and the remarkable woman she gave to me.

Today I can only think about one thing — she won’t feel the need to apologize anymore.