Home again, home again......whooptie-frakkin-do!

The flights home were OK and I would always opt for the red-eye as I got to sleep most of the way. The only thing that sucks is that I lost my MP3 player. I had that danged thing loaded to the limit with a two foot tall pile of my music.

For the trip I had tried to listen to "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole. I have heard about this book since moving to Florida and listening to the Love Doctors, a local radio talk show unlike any other. (If you're not from Florida, give them a listen sometime. You can listen online!) The host, Rich Dickerson, has been touting this book as one of the best ever written but I have never gotten past the 3rd chapter. It is supposed to be loaded with satire and humor but all it has ever done is put me to sleep. I figured that, with all the flying time, I would be able to make a dent in it in the audio version. That put me to sleep even faster.

One story I left out in my earlier posts was one of the funniest. It was on our trip to Bruce Lee's gravesite. The cemetery is smack dab in the middle of a cute residential neighborhood. This is where we had found a playground for the kids to burn off some energy. There was also a drained wading pool waiting for warmer weather and, at the top of the hill, a botanical garden. I'm sure, if we had more time, the white frosted glass of the hothouse was filled with some really beautiful plants and flowers.

First, you have to understand the Berry youngsters obsession with flowers. Both Sarah and Benjamin grab at anything with a colored bud on it. Any flower or plant within reach is their bounty. A dandelion becomes more beautiful than a rose in their hands. Flowering hedges, creeping vines or weeds, as long as there is a colorful flower of some kind, is as beautiful as any $100 bouquet from a florist.

Sarah, apparently, didn't have to go inside to enjoy the flowers. As we continued to walk past the gardens looking for the entrance to the cemetery I felt a tug on my pants leg.

"Here, Jack, this is for you."

In Sarah's hand was the beautiful bud of a full grown, newly blossomed, tulip. I looked from her hand to her big three year old eyes to the bed of tulips right in front of the Botanical Gardens. Standing there.amongst the full bed of gorgeous flowers, were three headless stems wobbling in the breeze.

As Sarah handed one of the other buds to her father I crammed mine in my pocket and tried explaining to her, as I hurried us further away from the scene of the crime, the concept of a public funded garden and how not only the workers in the garden but the local police might be upset that she had picked them.

I did, at least, put the contraband to good use as I left the tulip bud on Bruce's headstone.