Two Barns and a Silo

When you reach OilMan's age, high school reunions are actually quite entertaining. Nobody cares about impressing anybody anymore. (Many were happy that they were still standing.) We weren't wildly enthusiastic about going, but OilMan had promised so off we went. Traffic was bad in all the usual places and set OilMan's brain to recalculating the route for the trip home.

When we arrived at the same country club venue where we had attended a memorial service for one of the classmate several months ago, we were given name tags and a card that said either pot roast, salmon or chicken which we were to place beside our plate to both claim our seats and tell the servers which entree we had ordered weeks ago. The tables were beautifully set with red and white, the school colors of San Rafael High School, but it amused me that those of us who didn't go there were identified only as pot roast, or salmon. The others had a picture taken from the high school yearbook on their name tag*...not one person was recognizable from the high school picture and it was a good thing they had name tags....

OilMan immediately disappeared off into the crowd leaving me to look around for a likely person to talk to. As luck would have it, she was sitting right next to me, also by herself and also without an identifying picture on her name tag. We hit it off and found plenty to talk about during the meal.

I was quite surprised to see that one of the few people there who I actually remembered from the early days of our marriage was still married to the same woman. I would not have predicted it back in 1964. I walked over and said hello to both of them. He was very cordial. She said hello, turned her back on me and totally ignored me. You win a few, you lose a few.

As we left, OilMan said, "I had a really good time." I think it was because a woman named Barbara hijacked him, saying that she thought he was the smartest person in their class and she had always admired him. I had to go reclaim him from her table after a suitable period of time had elapsed....

Because of the traffic on the way down, OIlMan had plotted an entirely new route home. It took longer than the trip through the traffic on the way down, but was much more scenic and entirely new to me. The detour around the Indy car races at the Sonoma Speedway and the marshland at the head of the San Francisco Bay took us through farmland with beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and wonderful juxtapositions of power lines, solar panels and cows. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a good shot of them, but I do now have a whole new supply of old barns, which I like to photograph.

*Meet OilMan, circa 1958