By Chuck Woodbury
ROADSIDE JOURNAL
Bless her heart, my significant other’s kindness. I’m only an hour away from wrapping up this week’s RVtravel.com newsletter but I must tell you what just happened only moments ago.
Gail walked into my office with a shopping bag. “Guess what I got for you?” she asked. I was hoping it was tapioca pudding, which I love and crave, but that was not it.
“I know how you always talk about how disappointed you are that you are too old to go to Mars,” she said. And I said, yes, because that’s true. I want to go to Mars very badly. In fact, it drives me semi-crazy to see photos from the rovers of the Red Planet, but not be able to go there. Truth be told, I’d really like to travel even farther away to another galaxy. I have been all around Earth, and, frankly, there is no place I could not go on this planet if I really wanted to. It frustrates me beyond words to not be able to visit other worlds. I know that with millions and millions of other planets out there, there are some very interesting creatures to meet.
I bet people born 100 years from now will be able to do that! I hope I come back in my next life as an astronaut, but I’m thinking I’ve had such a good life this round that I’ll probably come back as a house fly — justice in the big scheme of things for the thousands I have killed in my day.
Back to my story. . .
So Gail said, “I have something for you that you will like,” to which I replied, “You got me a ticket to Mars?” Of course, that couldn’t possibly be it. Well, the suspense was just too much, and I still had a couple of stories to write, so I asked her to just tell me what she got.
She reached into her bag and asked me to close my eyes, which I did, with no cheating. And then she said, “Open your eyes.”
And there it was, something very amazing. It was clothing, but not ordinary clothing. Actually, it was underwear, but I won’t use it for that, but for sleeping attire. The present was a pair of boxer shorts with the NASA logo and drawings of Space Shuttles. It’s not nearly as good as a trip to Mars, but it’s pretty good for a Friday afternoon.
They are very nice boxer shorts, totally unexpected, and getting them as a surprise present made me very happy. These will now replace my current sleeping attire, which I purchased in Austin, Minnesota, at the Spam Museum — boxer shorts with glow in the dark Spam logos. They will now become backups when my new outer-space boxers are in the laundry basket.
Okay. Got to get back to work. I just had to tell you about this.
P.S. I just noticed when I went back to look over this article for mistakes, that both Google and Amazon have placed ads for boxer shorts on this page. That is so funny! You may see other ads, but I bet at least some of you are seeing ads for underwear.
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