Category: Your Pal Drew

Preface: As we shelter-in-place to weather the spread of Covid-19, I was reminded of our family’s tragic history with a different type of outbreak, back in the 1920s. Your first thought might be the Spanish Flu, but that pandemic had largely passed by the time this happened.

This morning I had a conversation with my mom and my Aunt Dee about their Aunt Mamie, who died before either of them was born. The story that was passed down to them is that Aunt Mamie’s husband William had died from an illness that was passing through that region of South Georgia, in the summer of 1921.

Several years later Aunt Mamie pulled an old rug out of storage and took it outside and beat the dust out of it before setting it up in their front room. The rug had previously been in the old house that her husband William had died in. Not long after, Mamie took ill and died from the same illness in November of 1924 – more than 3 years after her husband.

I saw a few people posting a chain letter around Facebook designed to memorialize today for them to find again in the future. It was pretty good, but it was terse and general. I decided to make a custom version for my blog. So here goes.

RELAX.

When I was a kid I had my tonsils removed. It was a pretty awful experience because surgery in the 70s was less refined, so the first few days of recovery were miserable. Plus, the hospital folks lied to me about getting to eat as much ice cream as I wanted after the operation. It wasn’t ice cream at all! It was banana-flavored popsicles, and they only had a few.

But the worst thing about the experience was the long recovery at home, because the television commercials taunted me with delicious pizzas and burgers and steaks that I was weeks away from being able to eat.

That’s kind of what it’s been like for the past few days with all these wonderful old commercials depicting Life Before Plague; images of a fallen world where zany things happened to entire families at restaurants filled with singing animals.

The thing you JUST DON’T TELL PEOPLE is that you made a terrible mistake and bought five new pairs of boxers ONE SIZE TOO LARGE and that today’s AWESOME LOOKING BLUE MADRAS boxers have been slipping WAY DOWN INSIDE of your britches, trying to slide DOWN TO YOUR KNEES through two different pants legs, which just means that they are BUNCHING UP AT YOUR CROTCH in a most unusual manner.