She left without her blankie

My sister Debbie came to visit -- I didn't take a single picture -- and arrived late on Sunday night. She and Jim (her husband) were dog tired when they got to our place, so we didn't really get a chance to talk much.

Debbie always brings her blankie and her small pillow when she comes here. I, too, carry a blankie and a pillow with me whenever I travel. I don't know where this blankie/pillow thing came from. I just know that I've been taking my own pillow with me since shortly after I was married when a pillow at the hotel where we stayed was worthless in the pillow department. So, I started carrying my own. The blankie bit -- I started doing that when we were going back and forth to Arkansas because I just never knew when I was going to have to be sleeping on a sofa in a waiting room.

I have to thank Lynn Jolly for a quillow she made especially for Alan when he first got sick. We took that to waiting rooms all over UAMS (University of Arkansas Medical Sciences Center) and actually wore it out. That quillow became the blankie, and the armrests of the various sofas were the pillows. Not exactly the most comfortable pillow in the world, but you make do with what you have.

Back to Debbie's blankie. Frankly, I didn't even realize she had brought it in from the car. But shortly after she left early this afternoon -- again not much chance for talking -- I got a phone call asking me if she had left her blankie and her pillow. I found it in the bedroom, right where she had put it.

I will box it up and send it off to her so that if she goes somewhere before I see her next month, she'll have her blankie and pillow.

This traveling with a blanket and pillow leads me to reminisce about the "old" days. We Drexlers didn't travel, so we had no need for blankies and pillows. In fact, the only places I had been were camp, camp, or camp, and one week in Ocean City with my cousin Alberta. I personally went to camp Haluwasa for a summer where I was both a camper and a cousellor. Mostly, I was a counsellor, but they had a teen age week, and I was a camper that week.

Before that I went to camp at Sandy Cove in Maryland for a week. I hated that week. I was 9 years old, and I was so very homesick. Also, my parents didn't know they were to give me some money for craft supplies and snacks. And that made my life even more miserable at camp.

And the final "camping" blow came when I was a junior at college and all of us in a teacher program of some sort had to go to Stokes State Forest -- and rough it for a week. I never understood how that experience would help me become a better teacher. I didn't understand the reason I had to do it, but do it I did. And after the deed was done, I really didn't understand why the week of torture was necessary nor how it improved my ability to teach mathematics to high school students. I still don't understand that. I learned nothing at all that week, except how to NOT keep warm in a cabin (well, four poles and roof) with no heat, and foraging for food in the winter. I didn't like it. But I did have a blankie and a pillow for comfort.

Enough rambling for today.