Norman, OK We got an apartment! Even better news… Berck got his student pilot certificate! All around, today was a pretty productive day, I’d say. We got started off right with breakfast with the Wolfes, then headed straight for Airman Flight School at the airport. We got shown around and put in contact with Dr. Lynn, the physician who does medicals for everyone at the flight school. In fact, doing medicals for flight students is all Dr. Clyde Lynn does. He’s 84 and has an office in his son’s house’s ground floor. He’s a slight man with a white beard…
Memphis, TN We spent last night in Memphis with Berck’s Aunt Robin. She fed us fillet minion from her boyfriend’s restaurant. Berck’s grandmother Ida took us to breakfast to Perkins for pancakes in the morning. Then we were off for Oklahoma. It got pretty cold overnight. I bought some long underwear back in north Georgia, but I couldn’t find any men’s for Berck. When we stopped for gas this morning, I told Berck to park next to the pump that was in the sunshine. Even so, there were still blue ice crystals clinging to the squeegee I used to clean…
Knoxville, TN After taking a detour north, we’re finally heading west. Memphis is tonight’s stop (and the last chance for Krystals). I-40 our home for today and tomorrow. We left the Schwarzbarts’ this morning (well, a bit after noon). Visiting them is always interesting, particularly because they keep a kosher kitchen. Food becomes a major production because we can’t help or clean up after ourselves. As Arnold put it the first time I visited them, cleaning up incorrectly makes life a lot more complicated for them, “So just let us do it.” Keeping kosher means not eating meat (beef, chicken,…
Knoxville, TN I’m celebrating my first Jewish Sabbath. I really shouldn’t be typing on the Sabbath because that’s work, but we went driving around all last night and today, so it’s probably okay. That and I’m not Jewish. Mary Linda and Arnold Swarzbart live in Knoxville, Tennessee and are pillars of the Jewish community, so since we arrived on a Friday afternoon, we attended Shabbos dinner with them at their friends’ house. Then we attended services at their synagogue this morning. Apparently, the service lasted a lot longer than usual because they didn’t have a reader for the Torah reading,…
Young Harris, GA We spent last night in Young Harris, Georgia with old friends of Berck’s family, Dave and Beth Brackin. They took us to the Yacht Club for Mexican Night (or, more importantly, the $3 margaritas). I put on my nicest flannel shirt for the affair, but as I discovered, in north Georgia, you don’t have to dress up to go to the local yacht clubs. The Brackins have a very cool house that overlooks the lake (which is 10 feet low, leaving all the floating docks lying on dry clay). The entire front of the house is a…