Standing in line behind a 30-something couple…

He: What are you having?

She: I don’t know. What are you having?

He: A caramel frappucino.

She: What should I get?

He: Whatever you want.

She: But I can’t decide. You pick something for me.

He: But I don’t know what you’re in the mood for.

She: I don’t either, so you just pick something for me.

He: Are you sure?

She: Yes. Whatever you pick is fine.

He: Okay, I’ll order you a caramel frappucino, too.

She: But I don’t want one of those…

I went to dinner with “Boots” Mead last night. He’s the main character in a story I wrote several years ago titled “The Meaning of A,” a story about learning one of life’s great lessons from one of life’s great teachers.

He’s 91 years old. He moves a little slower these days, but he’s as enthusiastically engaged in living as anybody I know. He’s vitally interested in almost everything and still cares deeply for “his students” as he calls them—legions of students spanning 6 decades of his teaching, all still devoted to dear “Boots.”

He’s a great friend and still my teacher.

Several years ago, I semi-retired. A few days later, Annie announced that she was semi-retiring, too. She said she was semi-retiring from cooking.

“What are we going to eat?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’ll have to learn to cook. Otherwise we’ll starve.”

“Me? Learn to cook? Are you kidding?”

“Think about it,” she said. “Cooking will keep your fidgety hands out of the devil’s workshop. You might enjoy it. Lots of men do. And it’s something you should do so I won’t have to. Think of it as a modest down payment on thirty years of marital bliss.”

She didn’t stop there.

“I can see it like in a dream,” she said. “I’ll come in from my farm work and find a place at the dinner table set nice and pretty for me. There’ll be a little salad of baby lettuce with a drizzle of olive oil and a crumble of blue cheese. You’ll pour me a glass of good Walla Walla wine. And when I’ve finished my salad you’ll be there to serve me a steaming hot plate of spaghetti and meatballs. And while I linger over my spaghetti, you’ll play the guitar and sing love songs to me.”

“What? I don’t play the guitar or sing,” I interrupted.

“Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” she said. “You can learn. And after dinner we’ll dance in front of a crackling fire.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said. “In thirty years of blissful marriage, I can’t remember one time when you did all that for me.”

“Well, of course not,” Annie said. “You’ll learn to cook and serve and sing and dance way better than I could ever do it. You’ll want to show me up—prove your male superiority and all that. You’ll be awesome.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Good point.”

So, I read a bunch of cookbooks. I watched folks cook on TV. And then I went into the kitchen and made a big mess.

Annie and the girls took the brunt of early screw-ups. They told the stories of my cooking mishaps over and over again. At first, the stories bothered me. But then I thought about my legacy. What was it that I, Samuel Archibald McLeod, would be remembered for? Unfortunately there wasn’t much to remember except my kitchen debacles.

“It’s better to be remembered as a mess than not be remembered at all,” Annie said.

Back in the spring, when our daughters were home for a visit, I got it in my head I could make a simple potato gnocchi dish—cloud-like little potato dumplings dressed in a homemade tomato sauce sprinkled with freshly grated parmesan cheese. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

I watched a fancy chef make potato gnocchi on TV. I went to his website and printed the recipe. I made a special trip to the market to buy the very best, freshest ingredients. The chunk of parmigiano reggiano cost me a day’s wages.

I set the dish on the table. It looked good. Annie and the girls ooh’d and aah’d over it.

Then Annie took a bite of one of my little cloud-like dumplings and chewed and chewed and chewed with a strained smile on her face. She managed to swallow but came close to testing what we remembered about the Heimlich maneuver.

Jolie, our middle child, was unabashed in her praise, “These taste almost as good as the gnocchi from the market, Dad.” (The gnocchi she was talking about come molded into plastic containers like garden tools—the kind of plastic packaging you can’t open without a screwdriver.)

Our youngest daughter, Marshall, said my gnocchi tasted like Elmer’s glue. I wondered how she knew what Elmer’s glue tastes like.

Summer, our eldest, sneaked a few gnocchi under the table to Yoda, the Corgi with the giganto ears—the dog who’ll eat anything including his own poo. He sniffed the gnocchi, looked them over carefully, and walked away.

Then the girls got in the car and went to get us a pizza.

So now, at every family gathering, one of our girls tells the story about my gnocchi and how Yoda wouldn’t eat them.

My legacy is written. Makes me proud.

We haven’t had rain for several months now, so we’re upgrading our stock. Meet Fred…

I picked up my box set (stereo) yesterday at Hot Poop here in Walla Walla. Happened onto a happening as local band Penrose Lane played 2 hours of Beatles music in front of the store. Cool…

Here’s Annie’s latest creation. She poured the wine for the picture. Guess we’ll have to drink it now…

Annie’s now making a new bread every day and, of course, I have to eat it. I can’t say, “Beautiful bread, dear, but I’m not having any. Watching my figure and all that.” No, I have to eat it. It’s a duty—something a husband has to do to keep up the marital bliss. Oh, the sacrifices I make…

I was on “hiatus” last week. I’m told it’s the new word for a modern-day vacation—a vacation full of learning and do-gooding. I didn’t do the learning and do-gooding parts, but I’d like folks to think I did, so I’m telling everybody I was on hiatus.

I took my hiatus in Wyoming where I spent a good bit of time fly-fishing and even more time sitting on a stream bank untangling my line. From a hiatus perspective, I was communing with nature.

Here’s something I noticed on my hiatus: There weren’t many people in Wyoming.

The people who were there were mostly 50-something guys riding Harleys. They wore knotted kerchiefs over their bald heads, tromped around in their leathers, and revved their cycles—swaggering around like teenaged boys hopped up on testosterone. From a hiatus perspective, they were getting in touch with their inner children and that sort of thing.

“Maybe that’s why there aren’t many other people in Wyoming,” I thought.

When I got back to Walla Walla, I sat down in my office here in town and faced the mountain of mail Annie had piled up for me.

“I figured it could wait until you got back,” she said.

After I finished paying the bills, I glanced at my watch. It was four o’clock. I thought I’d drive on home, but looked out the window.

“Oh my,” I said to myself. “The traffic’s terrible. Where did all these people come from?”

I pretended to work another fifteen minutes.

“There,” I thought. “Looks like the rush is over. Walla Walla sure is getting crowded.”

Twenty minutes later I was back here on the porch at the farm, looking out across the valley toward the mountains. Cows were mooing in the distance.

“There,” I thought again. “Now I can breathe.”

I’m guessing that short string of thoughts doesn’t strike you as odd or even interesting, but it was interesting to me. It was a lesson in how I perceive the world around me. On the heels of time in remotest Wyoming, Walla Walla seemed crowded.

A little over ten years ago, Annie and I moved, with three daughters, to Seattle from Virginia. We’d been in Seattle maybe three months when I found myself in the kitchen with Marshall, our youngest. I took the opportunity to ask her what she liked and didn’t like about her new home.”

“Well,” she said. “I like my new friends and my diving team and school’s okay but there are too many people in Seattle. We shouldn’t let anybody else move here.”

“Hah,” I said. “So we’re in. We should close the door behind us.”

“Can we do that?” she asked.

Not long thereafter I started traveling to San Francisco where I’d rent a car at the airport and drive to Palo Alto down Highway 101. It wasn’t a rush of traffic; it was more of a crush. Sometimes it took me a couple of hours to drive the 20 miles.

“This is ridiculous,” I thought. “Somebody’s got to get a grip on population growth. This place is out of control.”

And now, writing books and all, I go to New York occasionally. Our daughter, Jolie, lives there. Recently we rode the subway over to Queens—actually Jackson Heights—where dinner was exceptional but the sea of humanity was smothering. I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t wait to get back to Walla Walla.

And now I sit on the porch, marveling at how, over the last few years, I sometimes think Walla Walla’s crowded.

A little while ago, Annie came out on the porch to sit with me. We’re drinking a glass of good Walla Walla wine and eating a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. It’s Annie’s favorite meal. We’re watching the light change as the sun goes down.

Annie just noticed some new lights on the ridge south of us and got the binoculars.

“Another dern house,” she said. “Lordy, Lordy, Lordy. We moved out here on the prairie to get away from the crowds and here folks come, moving in around us. We might have to move further out if this keeps up.”

“Hmm,” I thought. “That’s interesting.”

As the crow flies that new house is at least three miles from here. We can’t see it without the binoculars.

Our new puppy, Bear, is showing his intelligence.