California Dreamin’

We are back home and after two weeks of being back in Texas and back with grandkids, family and friends, even though it was hard to say goodbye, the younger (sorry, but I refuse to say, “getting older”) we get, the better feeling it becomes to just get back to your own bed, your own bathroom and your routine. I remember my parents and inlaws always saying that they were always so glad to get back home after always being gone for vacations and I always wondered why. In my season of life back then, it was always just a dream to be able to travel and stay in hotels and eatting out and getting away from routine. But, I have found that, like them, I am now admitting that they knew what they were talking about. Because we stayed at our kids house, we were introduced to remembering what our households were like years ago, the cartoons always in the background, lunches of macaroni and cheese or frozen pizza, toys spread over the entire house, training potty’s, kids running in and out the doors with screams from parents saying, “shut the door behind you”. Yes, we were taken back to our days of what it used to be like, but we remembered it quite differently. Were our memories of how we ran our houses, really like we remembered them, or had our memories failed us? We remembered our houses as actually pretty quiet and that our children had been pretty perfect,always shutting the door without being reminded, with their perfect friends and that they had always said “yes mam and no mam” and that our kids had sat and talked with us about the meaning of life and that they enjoyed us telling them about our childhood each night at the dinner table. Were these memories of ours real, or fantasies?
As I boarded the plane to come home, humming to myself, “Sponge Bob Square Pants, Sponge Bob Square Pants”, noticing the man in front of me looking at me like I was crazy, I remembered that going home did have it’s rewards of quietness and normal routine, but there is nothing quite like having a grandchild come over and crawl up in your lap and share their fruit loop with you as you hear them scream, “turn up the tv, this is when Sponge Bob and Patrick work for all the crab patties they can eat….” Now there is a memory that will never fade. Think I will turn on cartoons this afternoon, just for old time sake.