I took a week off from writing to vacation in Nashville with my husband and my parents. Even though this vacation was special, I don’t have anything special to write about, other than the high cost and low availability of gasoline. After all, just about everyone’s been on vacation somewhere. Millions of people have already been to Nashville. Who needs to hear about my visit to the Stingray Reef at the Opry Mills Mall where I fed overpriced shrimp to huge stingrays that splashed water all over me? I also rode on a carousel at the Stingray Reef since it was included in the price and I like carousels. And I did the usual Nashville tourist things—attended a country music performance at the Grand Ole Opry, toured the Country Music Hall of Fame, visited a plantation, walked around Centennial Park and the Parthenon replica, and took an afternoon cruise on the General Jackson Showboat. Those are the types of things that everyone visiting Nashville does--fun, but not especially newsworthy.
What makes this vacation special is that it may be the last time my father gets to join us on our annual road trip. Dad is eighty-four-years old now. He’s a disabled World War II vet and it’s getting harder and harder for him to get around. He says he may not be able to make the drive from Florida to North Carolina next year. I hope he’s wrong.
My father is a born story-teller, so I’ve got a lot of his stories warehoused in my memory for when he can’t tell them anymore. The family has been after me for years to write down and publish some of Dad’s stories and I probably will--someday. But not now, not yet.