Aren't Saturday's amazing? I don't work on Saturdays. I get up whenever I want, usually early and spend my morning writing and doing the kind of tech chores I enjoy: curating photographs, adding entries to Day One Journal, perusing my saved articles on Pocket and via RSS and scrolling through the feeds of my favorite people on Mastodon and Bluesky.

After a couple of hours of that this morning, Wonder Woman and I made a drive across town to pick up the only three of our grandchildren who live close by: 12-year-old Forrest, 10-year-old Harper and 7-year-old Tristen. Despite their age, we still collectively refer to them as "The Babies." When we arrived, they came busting out the front door before our car even came to a complete stop. Obviously, all three of them were standing by the front window just waiting for us to get there. Their Mom came out to say goodbye and then the rest of us were off.

The first stop was Zorba's, our neighborhood diner, which the kids call "The Pancakes," after one of their favorite breakfast choices. Tristen is mostly just a little carnivore, though. When the waitress asked him what he wanted, he looked here in the eye and said "Sausage." She asked if he wanted any grits or eggs to go with it. He thought for a minute and said, "Bacon." That's what he got, too.

We only live a couple of blocks away, so we were home immediately after we ate.Forrest teases me because my preferred perch on the couch is well-worn and obvious. All my electronic gear is on the table beside where I sit, along with coffee cups, screen wipes, and other items he relates to me. Every once in a while, he will jokingly try to climb into my spot, which generally prompts me to ask him if he's lost his mind.

We all just hung out in the living room and talked for a few hours. They told us about school, their Dad's new puppy, and who had been mean to who lately. All of them aspire to be Internet superstars and content creators. Harper already has a private TikTok channel which is shared with just us and a couple of friends. She makes videos of herself doing random things. She disappeared for a while later in the day, and we all assumed she was off in another room making a video.

In a couple of hours they were hungry again, wanting Mexican for lunch, which I was delighted to oblige. I have to work a little on Tristen's cultural sensitivity. Not only does he order chicken fingers and fries, he also complained today because the music was in Spanish and he couldn't understand it. He likes the Latino kids he goes to school with and can correctly use the Spanish pronunciation of their names, so I don't think he has ant budding MAGA tendencies, thank God.

After lunch, we went to see Mufasa: the Lion King, as promised. You have to pass a huge candy store on the way to the theater's front door, and we did not even try to skip past it. We let them get a grab bag and put it in the car before the movie started. We still got popcorn too! The kids all tease me about my proclivity for frequent naps, which I take any time at any place. I didn't know that today they'd already told their Mom they thought I'd fall asleep in the theater with it's soft reclining seats. They were right, or course. Wonder Woman punched me so many times for snoring that my shoulder is sore.

By the time the movie was over, they were ready to go back and see their Mom, who they all adore. We do too. As we pulled into their neighborhood, they pointed to houses for sale and suggested point-blank that we buy one of them because obviously, we want to live closer to them, right? Wonder Woman and I have only been back home for a couple of hours, and I am already looking forward to the next time we can go see The Babies again.

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The Remains of Ashmont School Where My Mother Went in the 1950s

If you live in Europe, I'd like for you to read this post without laughing at me or immediately going on social media to mock me. I'm going to talk about old stuff. Yes, I know I live in the United States and that we don't really have any old man-made artifacts here. Many of you in Ireland, England and on the continent live in houses that would be museums and tourist attractions if they were transported here. I was in Leeds in the UK a few years back and my host stopped by Kirkstall Abbey on a whim and didn't make a big deal out of it. The place was built in 11152. It blew my mind, but to him, it was just a place on the edge of town.

I live in North Carolina. The First Nations people who lived here when the first English settlers landed included the Cherokee, Tuscarora, Catawba, Lumbee, and various Siouxan tribes like the Occaneechi, Haliwa-Saponi, Waccamaw Siouan, Meherrin, and Coharie. We still have a sizable Native population. One county over from where I live, there are between 40K-50K members of the Lumbee tribe. There are ancient burial mounds in my county located near the Cape Fear River.

There are no remnants of the state's most famous early settlers, known as the lost colony. A group of 117 English men and women landed on Roanoke Island, a few miles inland from site where several hundred years later the world's first airplane flight would occur. All of these settlers disappeared in a three-year period when the organizers of the colony returned to England. Included in the missing was Virginia Dare, the first child of English descent born in the new world. Today, Roanoke Island is home to the community of Manteo, a nice place to visit on the way to the Outer Banks.

We were one of the 13 colonies that declared independence from Great Britain in 1776. There are historical markers a few miles from my neighborhood where the British Army encamped on the way to get their asses handed to them at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge. I could walk to the spot where the state ratified the constitution from my driveway. Because of numerous fires through the years only a couple of pre-revolutionary buildings still exist in town, fittingly, the largest of them was a once a tavern.

My paternal lineage, meaning my ancestors with the same last name that I have, came to the US around 1800. The first of us listed in a US census stated that his father's birthplace was France. I suspect he may have been the son of an English soldier, born to a camp follower. Whatever. I have no real way of knowing the exact story. What I do know that is we've been hanging around this same county now for 225 years.

I am not one of those Southerners with any sort of positive attachment to my heritage connected to the Civil War. Numerous ancestors from all branches of my family were in the Confederate Army, some drafted, some volunteered. One died of disease before ever going into battle at a giant unsanitary recruitment center located on what is now the grounds of the veterinary school for NC State University. Another was wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia. My favorite was an extremely reluctant soldier who served at three different times but only for very short periods. He kept trying to get out of it and come back home. Good for him.

Another branch of the family were Quakers. They didn't participate in the economy of enslaved people, nor did they serve in the Army. They farmed and worked in cotton mills and generally minded their own business.

For you Outlander fans, part of my family were Highland Scots who came here after the Battle of Culloden which ended the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and placed it firmly under English rule. The family name is McFadyen and they were good Presbyterians who farmed the land on southeastern NC into the 20th century. One of them, my grandmother's brother died in Italy fighting Nazis during World War Two.

Even though we are deep into the 21st century now, there are still signs of the past all around, if you know where to look. There are tobacco barns built from logs and chinked with mud on various farms. That type of tobacco production was last practiced in the 70s. I have hiked all the way through the NC mountains from our border with Georgia all the way to Virginia. Some of the trails today's hikers follow are the same routes Native Americans were using when we got here, I am always amazed when I am following a difficult mountain trail and I come to a stone fence or giant stone piles and I realize that at one time the thickly forested Appalachian mountainsides were clearcut and hardscrabble mountain folks planted crops there and plowed the fields with mules.

I am not a flag waving patriot in the traditional sense. I am not proud to be from where I'm from. I'm not ashamed of it either. We all have a history and I just happen to know mine because I'm curious and sought the information. That information gives me a connection to the past I would not otherwise have.

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Mick and Keef wrote "Mother's Little Helper," a song about a pill addled Mom a whopping fifty-nine years ago. The line that resonates with me is "What a drag it is getting old." For me, the drag is the physical part of aging, much more so than the accumulated years, which in themselves are kind of cool.

Sports scientists estimate that men reach their physical peak somewhere between 26 and 30, That is so patently messed up because it means that you spend the majority of your life slowly deteriorating. In the major spectator sports, it's the rare athlete who can compete past the age of 40. This doesn't mean that you can't be active, though. In my twenties and thirties, my kids were young and I was trying to get established in my career. Sports and hobbies took a back seat. My most physically active year were my 40s. I was 48 when I hiked the AT.

Wonder Woman is 58 and still running ultramarathons. She's a bit of a mutant, though. We have a physical performance lab at the university where we work. They asked her to come in for a study a few years back. In her early fifties, she was tested as having a fitness level compatible to that of a college athlete in their early 20s. During her first year competing in ultras, at age 52, she ran in and won races at the distances of 50K, 50 miles, 100K and 100 miles. Just for a lark, she ran one road marathon with no special training and placed in the top 10 among thousands of entrants. She also completed a 100-mile bike ride after only very light training over a couple of weekends.

My parents were young when I was born, so even though I'm almost 60, I've still got both of them. My mom also has mutant genes, having walked all the way across Scotland in her early 70s and then completing the Camino de Santiago across Spain just a couple of years later. Dad enjoyed a little too much bourbon and Salem cigarettes for too many years to have maintained much fitness, and today walks with a cane.

I feel like I'm kind of wearing out prematurely myself. After dealing with painful arthritis in both knees for years, a drag physically and psychologically, I had them replaced five years ago. Although ai still have my hair, it turned white within the last decade. Wonder Woman insists I need a hearing aid. At least, I think that's what she said. This year, I finally reached the point where I can't function without glasses. Throw in the other aggravations of male aging, like getting up to pee three or four times a night, and it's no wonder that the trope of grumpy old man seems to fit so well on some days.

On the other hand, having lots of life experience is remarkable. I've lived in seven decades and seen 11 US presidents leave office. I'm in the oldest cohort of Generation X so I can be old without suffering the indignity of being a boomer. Not only that, but I've pumped regular gasoline, used a rotary dial phone and bought vinyl records not to be trendy but because there was no other choice. I saw VCRs and DVD players come and go. I had AOL dial up and a fiber connection to the Internet.

I hope to last a few more years. I want to around when Wonder Woman retires. We're probably won't have any more grandchildren. Thirteen is plenty. In a few more years, though, great-grandchildren should start coming along. I definitely want to be here for that. I also would like to see America come to its senses before I'm gone because I bet Jimmy Carter was pissed having to live out his last months after the 2024 election.

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