Tuesdays with Gindy. Driving Mrs. Crazy

There are some people in this world who do not make good passengers.  My mother is one of them. No, I do not really think my mother is crazy.  I just thought that the title was a good play on the title Driving Miss Daisy.

When my sister went off to college and I was still in high school, it was normal that my mother and I would drive down and move my sister into her dorm at the beginning of a semester.  When the semester was over, we would move her out.

A side note here is that no one in my family has ever helped me move anywhere.  When I moved in to my trailer in Spartanburg, South Carolina, my friend Phil Brown helped me move in.

My dog, Abby, and I moved all by ourselves from the trailer to the house on Burnett Street in Spartanburg.  My girlfriend and now child-bride Suzanne, along with our friends Roger and Debbie, helped me move out of the Spartanburg house.

At the beginning of one semester, I drove the truck from Iva to Columbia to move my

sister into her dorm at the University of South Carolina.  All along the way, my mother had comments about my driving.  “You are following too close.”  Or, “You are braking too hard.”  Finally, I stopped the truck in the middle of the road and asked my mother, “Do you want to drive?”  She responded, “No, you are doing just fine.”

We spent a couple of hours unloading the truck and carrying the crates, refrigerator, television, etc., up the elevator at my sister’s dorm.  Of course, all of this entailed enduring snippy comments from her suitemates and other residents of her floor.  I don’t make a great presentation when I am hot, sweaty, and forced to endure stupid and rude.

My mother and I climbed back in the truck and proceeded to go to my Grandmother Ruby’s house in Johnston, South Carolina.  We were going to move some of her stuff back to our place in Iva because my Grandmother Ruby was moving there.

My mother has a way of making work much harder than it has to be.  Rather than letting a person proceed in a way that makes sense, she attacks it all at one time. 

She started taking things apart and hauling them to the front porch. I had to work around all this clutter to load the truck with the larger, heavier stuff on the bottom.

I finally got the truck loaded with the stuff and everything tied down.  I gave my Grandma Ruby a goodbye hug and off my mother and I went for the longest 76 mile drive ever taken.

The posted speed limit along most of the route was 55 miles per hour.  Every time I would get the truck above 35 miles per hour, my mother would get on to me about driving so fast.

Every time I would try to move the truck away from the center line of the road, my mother would tell me I was getting way too close to the edge of the road and that I was going to run off in the ditch.

Due to the slow speed, cars were piling up behind us.  Sometimes one would pass, but not often.  About halfway home, our ever-increasing line of cars was joined by the most welcomed man of the hour, Super Trooper.

Super Trooper lit me up.  That is the rolling blue lights came on and I was pulled over.

Super Trooper had me step out of the truck and to the back of it.  He asked me how much I had to drink that night.  I told him I had not touched a drop, but I would be happy to go to jail for DUI if he would just get me out of there.

Super Trooper then asked if there was something wrong with the truck.  I told him, “Mechanically, the truck is running perfectly.”  He asked me why I was driving so slowly.  I told him that every time I approached 35 miles per hour my mother would yell at me to slow down.

Super Trooper then asked if I was having trouble with the steering.  I told him that the truck had this problem that every time I moved away from the center of the road, this alarm would go off to tell me I was getting too close to the edge of the road and that I was going to run us in the ditch. 

Super Trooper said, “I guess that alarm is your mother?”  I told him yes.  I told him I was fully capable of driving the truck home without any intervention from my mother and that the last half hour of the journey had just about driven me crazy.

Super Trooper went to my mother’s door and asked her to step to the rear of the truck.  He told her he was issuing her a warning.  He told her that she was not to tell me to slow down, speed up, or otherwise tell me how to drive.

He further told her that he was going to follow us to the county line to make sure his orders were followed.  He also indicated he would radio ahead to make sure the troopers between where we were and our house were alerted to the situation.

We climbed back in the truck and my mother said, “I’m sorry.”  In fact, she repeated that every time we crossed a county line.  Every time we passed a county line, there was a trooper or deputy somewhere just past it.

We made it home.  We did not lose one single item.  To this day, I have never lost anything off the back of a truck.  It is a source of pride for me. And, to this day, I will not let my mother forget about this little adventure.

What about you?  Do you have a driving story you would like to share with us?

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McClendon Studios Presents: Driving Mrs. Crazy

Happy Birthday Nana

McClendon Studios Presents:
Driving Mrs. Crazy

There are some people in this world who do not make good passengers.  My mother is one of them. No, I do not really think my mother is crazy.  I just thought that the title was a good play on the title Driving Miss Daisy.

When my sister went off to college and I was still in high school, it was normal that my mother and I would drive down and move my sister into her dorm at the beginning of a semester.  When the semester was over, we would move her out.

A side note here is that no one in my family has ever helped me move anywhere.  When I moved in to my trailer in Spartanburg, South Carolina, my friend Phil Brown helped me move in.

My dog, Abby, and I moved all by ourselves from the trailer to the house on Burnett Street in Spartanburg.  My girlfriend and now child-bride Suzanne, along with our friends Roger and Debbie, helped me move out of the Spartanburg house.

At the beginning of one semester, I drove the truck from Iva to Columbia to move my sister into her dorm at the University of South Carolina.  All along the way, my mother had comments about my driving.  “You are following too close.”  Or, “You are braking too hard.”  Finally, I stopped the truck in the middle of the road and asked my mother, “Do you want to drive?”  She responded, “No, you are doing just fine.”

We spent a couple of hours unloading the truck and carrying the crates, refrigerator, television, etc., up the elevator at my sister’s dorm.  Of course, all of this entailed enduring snippy comments from her suitemates and other residents of her floor.  I don’t make a great presentation when I am hot, sweaty, and forced to endure stupid and rude.

My mother and I climbed back in the truck and proceeded to go to my Grandmother Ruby’s house in Johnston, South Carolina.  We were going to move some of her stuff back to our place in Iva because my Grandmother Ruby was moving there.

My mother has a way of making work much harder than it has to be.  Rather than letting a person proceed in a way that makes sense, she attacks it all at one time. 

She started taking things apart and hauling them to the front porch. I had to work around all this clutter to load the truck with the larger, heavier stuff on the bottom.

I finally got the truck loaded with the stuff and everything tied down.  I gave my Grandma Ruby a goodbye hug and off my mother and I went for the longest 76 mile drive ever taken.

The posted speed limit along most of the route was 55 miles per hour.  Every time I would get the truck above 35 miles per hour, my mother would get on to me about driving so fast.

Every time I would try to move the truck away from the center line of the road, my mother would tell me I was getting way too close to the edge of the road and that I was going to run off in the ditch.

Due to the slow speed, cars were piling up behind us.  Sometimes one would pass, but not often.  About halfway home, our ever-increasing line of cars was joined by the most welcomed man of the hour, Super Trooper.

Super Trooper lit me up.  That is the rolling blue lights came on and I was pulled over.

Super Trooper had me step out of the truck and to the back of it.  He asked me how much I had to drink that night.  I told him I had not touched a drop, but I would be happy to go to jail for DUI if he would just get me out of there.

Super Trooper then asked if there was something wrong with the truck.  I told him, “Mechanically, the truck is running perfectly.”  He asked me why I was driving so slowly.  I told him that every time I approached 35 miles per hour my mother would yell at me to slow down.

Super Trooper then asked if I was having trouble with the steering.  I told him that the truck had this problem that every time I moved away from the center of the road, this alarm would go off to tell me I was getting too close to the edge of the road and that I was going to run us in the ditch. 

Super Trooper said, “I guess that alarm is your mother?”  I told him yes.  I told him I was fully capable of driving the truck home without any intervention from my mother and that the last half hour of the journey had just about driven me crazy.

Super Trooper went to my mother’s door and asked her to step to the rear of the truck.  He told her he was issuing her a warning.  He told her that she was not to tell me to slow down, speed up, or otherwise tell me how to drive.

He further told her that he was going to follow us to the county line to make sure his orders were followed.  He also indicated he would radio ahead to make sure the troopers between where we were and our house were alerted to the situation.

We climbed back in the truck and my mother said, “I’m sorry.”  In fact, she repeated that every time we crossed a county line.  Every time we passed a county line, there was a trooper or deputy somewhere just past it.

We made it home.  We did not lose one single item.  To this day, I have never lost anything off the back of a truck.  It is a source of pride for me. And, to this day, I will not let my mother forget about this little adventure.

What about you?  Do you have a driving story you would like to share with us?

 

Visit My Child-Bride Suzanne’s Blog 

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Wednesday Hodge Podge

Wednesday Hodgepodge

Each week the folks over at This Side of The Pond post a list of blogging prompts to help clueless bloggers, like me, find things to write about.  This is my first post using those prompts.

1. What's something fun you're looking forward to on your May calendar? 

Mothers’ Day and our youngest son's (the Marine) birthday.  He will be 22 this year.  My beautiful child bride Suzanne will celebrate her 30^th Mother’s Day this year.  Okay, the first year was with our oldest son, Jared, on the inside but that is not important.  What is important is that she has been a great mother to these young’uns for a long time.

Suzanne Pregnant with David, Jr.

2. What are some images that come to mind when you hear the word mother? 

I am not really an abstract thinker.   It is hard for me to think in terms of images coming to mind.  However, when I think of the word mother I think of seeing Suzanne holding our little ones with a smile on her face.  

My mother with me

3. What's something beautiful you own or have seen that's made of glass? 

Perhaps the most special glass thing that comes to mind is the top to our wedding cake.  It was hand-blown in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, just a few months before our wedding. 

4. Was today typical?  If not, what made it unusual? 

Although retirement is supposed to mean you slow down, it seems we haven’t.  There is no such thing as typical or usual around here.  There is always something going on, as Paul Overstreet says in his song "All the Fun".

However, today would be a little less ordinary that usual.  Suzanne and I try to do our shopping in the middle of the night at Walmart.  I need a handicapped cart because of my foot and it is practically impossible to get one during the day.  So, we went to do some shopping.

When we shop, we shop in two parts. The first part we buy the phone cards we need to buy. We have found that we save over $150 per month by using prepaid GoPhones  rather than the contract plan. You have to checkout through a live, human cashier.

Since most cashiers we know wipe their runny noses on their hands and then proceed to checkout our items, we choose to take our actual food items to a self-checkout.

Well, to make a short story long as I am apt to do, we finished with the non-food items and took them to the car.  I had Suzanne’s keys in my pocket and unlocked the car with them.

We finished putting the stuff in the car and I locked the car with Suzanne’s keys.

We went back in the store and bought our food.  After we checked out, we headed to the car.  I looked in my pocket and had my keys but not hers.

We went back to the register we had checked out at and looked for the keys. They weren’t there.  We took the groceries to the car and locked it with my keys and then went back inside to look for the keys.

Back inside the store, we looked everywhere.  We asked several employees and they stopped what they were doing to help us.  The assistant manager asked everyone that could to help us find them. We went through the store at least four times and then decided to go home and unpack the groceries on the outside chance that I had put them in a bag.  Since Suzanne had packed all but one bag of the groceries, this was highly unlikely.

We went through all the bags and did not find them.  Suzanne frisked me.  Nothing.  I took off my clothes and looked very carefully through the pockets for the keys.  Nothing. 

We went back to Walmart to look again.  The morning shift was coming on, so we asked every employee we saw to keep an eye out for them.  We gave them our business card and asked them to call us if they found them.

Finally, we gave up.  For some reason Suzanne had the idea to look in her purse and there they were.  We know I had them.  We know that she drove to the store with them.  This was not possible.

But as the saying goes, once you eliminate the impossible everything that remains, no matter how improbable it is, is possible.

5. What is a quality you wish you could have more of?

Judging from the story above, brevity.

6. What's the next major purchase you need to make? Will it happen in the month of May?

We have no money to purchase anything at the time.  We need so many major things though.  I would like to say a house of our own in the middle of nowhere.

7. What responsibility/job/work did you dislike while growing up but has proved helpful to you as an adult?

I really cannot think of an answer to this question.  Our family owned a small business.  This meant that everyone had a job to do except my younger brother. No matter how old he was, he was always “too young’ to do anything.

As children, my sister and I were expected to take care of the yard work from about the time I was eight and she was ten.  It was work, but it was fun. 

Today my child-bride and I still enjoy working in the yard when we can. 

8. Insert your own random thought here. 

Mothers’ Day brings many memories.  The year my child-bride Suzanne celebrated her first Mothers’ Day with a baby outside of her was the year my father died just two days after Mothers’ Day.

Here is a special thank you to all you mothers out there.  We husbands and children might not say thank you as often as we should, but we are thankful for all that you do.

Please visit my child-bride, Suzanne's Hodgepodge Post

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Getting a Spanking with Hot Wheels

There is something completely sadistic about a mother who would give you a present that was intended to be used for discipline. I am, of course, talking about those Hot Wheels Racing Sets I used to get every Christmas.

It started out innocent enough. I saw Hot Wheels advertised on television and I just had to have some. The next Christmas my mother made sure there was a set under the tree. Bless her heart.


I don’t know what gave her the idea, but one day she discovered that the orange pieces of track made a great tool to beat my little butt with. I don’t remember the first time she used one, but I do remember that it hurt much worse than any belt ever did.


It wasn’t that I got a lot of spankings growing up. But I did get my fair share. The thing about it was all but two of those spankings weren’t my fault. I did nothing, other than be a victim, to get them.

One of the two times that I mentioned was when I was about eight years old. Several of the neighborhood kids were sitting on our family picnic table and one of the kids said she needed a little more room to sit. I reached forward and tried to move the girl sitting in the front up a little. She fell off the table and everyone thought I pushed her off intentionally.

The other spanking was because I did not do my homework. For whatever reason when I was in the fourth grade I could not make myself do my homework. I would sit and stare for hours at my books but could not will myself to do it.

My father was in the hospital having surgery at the time. This little girl in my class thought that my family needed to know that I had not done my homework. So, she told my big sister. My sister told my mother.

My mother had spent the day at the hospital with my father and she made it home late that night. I had gone to bed already. She decided to wait until the next morning to whip me. Bright and early the next morning, she woke me up and sent me downstairs. She told me to get woke up good so she could beat me.

When I was awake, she started in with a belt. She wore herself, and me, out. Then she sat down to rest. After a few minutes of rest she got up, found some Hot Wheels track, and lit into me again.

Years later I was talking to my college roommate Derrek Walker. He said, “You, too?” For years I went around thinking I was made by Mattel. I had their logo on my butt.”

We talked about how as soon as we got that dreaded Hot Wheels set at Christmas, we started “losing” the tracks. They would have to be cut to make special layouts and things like that.

He told me that one day he got the bright idea to put the track in the freezer. He said that it made it brittle. When his mother went to beat him, the track shattered into a million pieces. I wish I had thought of that.

I never bought my kids any Hot Wheels track. I love the little cars but I can’t stand the sight of that bright orange roadway.

Did you ever get a toy just so your mother could beat you with it?