1. For much of the day, we just couldn't bring ourselves to leave the house. I sat in a rocking chair in our nearly empty living room and watched the snow fall fast oh fast and drank cup after cup of French Roast coffee with whole milk.
At one point, I decided to purchase a Bose wireless speaker and an Echo dot to go with it as birthday gifts for the Deke and me. I thought I'd help out my purchase by using some money remaining on an Amazon gift card we'd received a year ago.
I went online to check the balance and Amazon's site showed zero. That didn't seem right. I dug around some more, kept getting the same answer, and gave up.
When it came time to make my purchase, I thought what the hell -- I'll enter the gift card code and see if anything good happens. Well, ha!, something awesome happened. I hadn't used the gift card. Somehow, back in October when I purchased our new printer and a cartridge -- and I thought I used this gift card -- I made the purchase with our debit card. I looked at our bank statement. It confirmed that I made the purchase with the debit card.
So, I had the pleasure of thinking I'd be using up some small sum leftover on this gift card and, instead, discovered the full two hundred bucks was still on it.
I laughed.
I still don't understand the mixup. I still don't understand why my investigation said the card had no balance. I no longer care.
The gift card covered almost the whole birthday purchase. When sales tax got added in, that's all we had to cover.
I'm laughing again.
I was so tickled I bought myself a Kindle edition of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City. You can read more about the book, here.
Sometimes the fact that I'm a dufus pays me off with fun surprises.
2. I went out and knocked the snow of the Sube and the Deke and I went to Hill St. Depot where we split a pork burrito and I had a cup of taco chili.
Our plan was to finish dinner and go up to the Inland Lounge and have a drink and come home.
So much for plans.
Not long after arriving at the Lounge, an avalanche of revelers, including Santa Claus, rolled in. They were on a bar to bar "sleigh ride". I think the "sleigh" was actually some kind of truck, but this boisterous bunch was spreading holiday cheer from one joint to the next. They even sang a loud and slurred Christmas song.
Before I knew it, this group swallowed up the Deke. She left me at the bar and joined a knot of her recent acquaintances at a table and then returned to the bar and told me she was jumping on the sleigh. She thought she'd be back at the Hill St. Depot, and told me, "I don't have my phone but if I need to reach you, I'll figure it out."
My face lit up. The Deke is weaving herself right into the Kellogg fabric.
So, away she went along with the rest of the merry boozers and carolers and I turned my attention to the Zags' game and guarded Julie Crnkovitch's purse with my life while she went to ladies room.
I also talked about the good old days in DeMolay with Pat Kenyon and how the rituals were so serious, but we Kellogg guys really weren't. We were in DeMolay to have fun with other guys, to put on dances, do some community service, and to take wild trips to other parts of the state for Conclave -- not to mention, to show boys from around the state a wild time in the Silver Valley when our chapter hosted Conclave back in the spring of 1970.
Julie returned to her purse. Earlier in the day, Julie had been cooking across the street at the Elks Club for the annual Silver Valley Christmas Dinner and Toy Program where about three hundred people enjoyed a free and generous dinner and children went home with bicycles, tricycles, stuffed animals, and all kinds of other gifts.
Julie was at the bar now, still in her kitchen apron, drinking her signature cocktail: a pint glass filled with Scotch and water and ice.
She returned to her seat and we got to yakkin' about trips she took to Lake Tahoe when she drove Johnny Barnett's Cadillac and she and Johnny's wife, Mary Lou sat in the front seat while Julie's husband, Frankie, sat with Johnny and drank gin in the back seat and they all laughed and told stories and powered their way from Kellogg to Tahoe.
Julie is the only surviving member of that Tahoe in a Cadillac group. Now Julie helps out with Meals on Wheels, cooks at the Elks, takes care of her ailing younger sister in her condo, and chain smokes Camel filters over her pint glasses of Scotch and water on the rocks at the Inland Lounge.
While the Deke partied with the younger Kellogg crowd, I listened to Julie talk about the old timers in town and in the Valley, some still with us, others gone: Georgine, John Ernie, Mac, Seavy, Barney, and others who worked at the Water District. We talked about when she and Frankie ran Sam's until Frankie died and she kept it going for another few years and then sold it.
After a while, I decided I'd better go down to the Hill St. Depot and search for the Deke.
3. I found the Deke.
Right away.
She was enjoying a pint-sized red Solo Party Cup of Firestone Walker's Luponic Distortion and was yakkin' with County Commissioner and proud grandpa, Mike Fitzgerald. I joined them, ordered a Captain Morgan and Coke, and soon Mike's wife, Deanne, joined us.
Now I got to spend time with those the Deke and I refer to as members of the 21st century Kellogg. Deanne helps run the Silver Bee Community Garden along the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes in Kellogg. Mike came to Kellogg to work on the Milo Creek project in the late 90s and stayed. We got to talking about the number of people younger than the Deke and me who live in Kellogg and telecommute, have started new businesses (like the Hill St. Depot and Radio Brewing), work on jobs in other places, but live in Kellogg. Like Chip. Chip dropped by our table and we learned that he's an inspector who takes on jobs across the country, many for the federal government, but lives here.
The people on the sleigh ride? There were both young Kellogg natives on board and non-natives, people like Sarah and Becky and Ashley and Fred and Ron who care a lot about Kellogg's present and its future, but aren't from here and love their work and this town and are doing all they can to add to the fun of living here.
Because it starts getting dark in Kellogg at about 3:30 in the afternoon, and because the temperatures have fallen into the 20s, when we left the Hill St. Depot, it seemed like it was about midnight -- but it was not long past 9:00 or so when we headed back home and stopped off at Christy and Everett's for a nightcap and more great conversation about life in Kellogg and our lives before we moved here.
What a great Saturday evening we had -- old friends, new friends, family, great conversations, great memories, and some lousy memories, too.
Mostly, we enjoyed the good cheer of a great variety of people living here in Kellogg and the Silver Valley.
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