Consider This

By LC Van Savage

       “The Thundering Herd,” was a phrase started by author Zane Grey (or Gray, no one seems to know for sure) as one of his book’s titles referring to buffalo herd noise, and also used as a football phrase back in the day. In my life however, it applies to our children and grandchildren. When they’re in our home. And they are. A lot. OMG.

      Be honest here folks. The Gloriosky Maine Summer is getting a little old, am I right? I mean in terms of the visiting jackals. We all love summer, yearn for it, relish and wallow in it, dream about it, make paintings of it, play in it, and yet as September slides way too slowly toward us, we’re not awfully overwhelmed with sadness that summer is ending, am I right? School will soon be starting and we really all should bow down secretly in worship to the person who invented it. Don’t deny it. Let’s all offer up thanks to the one who proclaimed that summer should end and school should start around Labor Day. Enough already.

      In our family, someone sneaked growing pills into the diets of all the pregnant ladies. Our three sons are all over 6 ft. tall but they somehow have managed to create giants. One young grandson is 6’ 6” and his sister is going to be close to six feet. Two nieces are 6’ tall and their brother is 6’5”. Another teen-aged grandson is 6’ 6” and his sister is 6’ at 14. Another boy at 14 has job security as a pro wrestler if he decides to go that route. This kid is a house! The earth moves when he strolls. Another girl at 16 is 5’10” and growing, and is working toward being an actress. Another is well on her way to “eating soup off our heads,” as the French say.

       I have no idea which or what genes went awry in all this procreation stuff. Our sons were a healthy 9 lbs. at birth, Mongo is 6’ 3”, well he was when we met in 1957, I used to be 5’5” and am a study in stubbiness--- too short arms, legs, neck, ditto my parents, so where did all these multiple inched offspring come from? But my point is that schools will soon be in session and while I love having The Thundering Herd (of giants) in our home, (henceforth to be called TTH) eating like starving wolves, stripping our cupboards bare, increasing our water bill by 100%, borrowing the car and always saying, “ooops, I forgot to put gas in it, sorry---“ when they return the keys which they don’t, stomping about like two legged tsunamis, leaving their size 18 shoes in every pathway in our home, always needing money, staring constantly at their electronic gadgets even when I have made it a strict rule they park them at the door, (they don’t,) constantly starting every bellow with “Hey Gramma, do you know where my XXXs are?” (even when I do, I refuse to help), dropping small wads of food as they traverse through the house in case they forget to find their ways back to the kitchen, and the list goes on, hey, I won’t cry when they leave. I shall exhale. I love TTH, truly I do, deeply, dearly and forever, but even though I tell them Hawaii is nice this time of year, so’s Alaska, Paris and Bermuda, they keep coming back to Maine absolutely all the time, all months of the year. We must be doing something right. Or wrong.

       Someday TTH will all go off to college and then I’ll be really sorry. Or maybe not, because I’m pretty sure they’ll all come thundering back over vacations. So folks, I really think we should all bow down and give thanks to the School gods, because TTH will soon go there in the mornings, and we can enjoy the last of summer days in our quiet homes, at least until 3 or 4 PM. What’s your TH doing these days? Hang in there, folks, stay strong. It’s almost September.