One of our favorite past times when we visited Grampa Epi & Gramma Alice up in Santa Fe was to get one of those thick catalogs from their study which was lined wall to wall with books from the classics, childrens books, books about south west history, sets of encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs and a host of other reference books in addition to family albums. So we'd grab a Sears, JCPenny, Montgomery Wards or Speigal, whatever looked the freshest and we would sit comfortably on the sofa with half of the catalog resting on me and half resting on you. The idea was to pick one thing you would like from each page, only one thing. We'd spend hours it seems like combing the pages, skip the clothes and have crazy fun deciding which camping equipment, ring, bike, toy, appliance, lamp, tool or musical instrument would best suit our mood & needs a jour. It was a harmless way to kill time and enjoy a few grins and giggles as we got lost in our wish lists and youthful reverie.Another time Sophie, Marcie, Chris & Gramma Alice were playing Scrabble, sitting around a card table, Grampa was reading the paper or maybe wathcing Gun Smoke on TV. Whatever he was doing he and the Scrabble players were oblivious to the somewhat rowdy game of chase we had going on throughout the house. We'd hide from each other and then come out and basically scare the shit out of the other person. One of us got the bright idea to hide under the card table where the Scrabble board sat almost filled with the square wooden letters. I believe I came up from behind you unbeknownst to you and scared you silly. You jumped up in the air cat-like and the table flipped over, Scrabble board & wooden letters went flying all over the living room. It was not pretty and that was one of the only times I can remember Grampa getting upset with us. We were run off to our respective sleeping quarters trying to repress our laughter in the wake of the recent turn of events that ended a perfectly civilized game of Scrabble. Everyone was a little bit ahh put-off by our raucous and scrappy nincompoopy shenanigans.
