Tuesday, March 6, 2012

NASCAR Mama

It's late spring in Charleston.  Azaleas are blooming.  Colorful window boxes filled with geraniums, lobelias and petunias are everywhere.  What a beautiful time to visit.  We are here  again!    

We are staying at our favorite bed and breakfast.  One of the reasons I love visiting here is because they have a double decker porch and the guest rooms all have doors to access it.  Often while Jerry is at work I will sit on the deck and type, enjoying the breeze. 

I also like to chat with whoever else shows up.  I am quite gregarious, as most of you know first-hand, and I never met a stranger.  Yesterday I was in my own little world, typing away and when I looked up, a couple was sitting at the end of the porch.  I wandered over and struck up a conversation.

We exchanged pleasantries and they told me they are from up north.  I mentioned that we used to live near Cleveland but moved to Charlotte two years ago.  At this point I saw that they were drinking beer which is, no doubt, delightful if you are a beer drinker which I am not.  The woman mentioned that they had a few left in the cooler from the trip and wanted to finish them up before switching to the wine that the inn serves for happy hour. 

Now I personally don't carry a cooler of beer in my car when I go on road trips (or ever, for that matter) but I won't pass judgement on people who do because I don't know the circumstances.  Maybe they only pop open a couple of cold ones after they reach their destination for the night, I just don't know.  What I do know is that these folks seemed pretty happy and my guess is that these were not their first brewskies of the evening. 

About this time, the guy asked me how long it takes to drive from Cleveland to Charlotte, to which I replied, "Eight hours door to door but my husband is like a race car driver."  The lady, however, being in a bit of an altered state mentally from her aforementioned activities, got all excited and started jumping up and down. 

"Race car driver!  I can't wait to tell our son that I met the wife of a race car driver!" 

She clearly had not absorbed the little words (like a) and was so excited that she didn't hear when I tried to straighten her out.  Her enthusiasm at the idea was so impressive that finally I decided to allow her to continue believing this fantasy.  After all, Charlotte is the home of NASCAR, and Jerry could be a race car driver.  He certainly drives fast enough to be a qualifier if he chose to. Is it so wrong to let her think she had had a brush with the wife of someone famous? 

If you see us walking down the street in Charleston this week, just pretend my husband "drives the 18 car" and call him Kyle Bush.

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