Detour

Returning from Wichita today, Howard said, "I want to get off the interstate and go through Wellington." O-kay, since he had mentioned that many times on previous trips but never turned off, I didn't protest. He wanted to look up old friends of ours he had heard lived there.

Not only that, but from an address he had procured, he was convinced they lived in the house where his grandparents had lived when he was growing up. I sat in the car while he knocked at the door of the modest bungalow where, as a teenager, I had gone with him and his family on several Sunday afternoon visits.

No one answered his knock, but that didn't deter my determined husband. He knocked at the next house with no response, then at two houses across the street. At the last house, someone finally came to the door, and I could hear an animated conversation going on on the porch.

"Did he know where they live?" I asked as Howard got back in the car, to which he answered, "No, but he remembered Grandma and Grandpa. He has lived there since 1946." Howard was intent on re-discovering the neighborhood he remembered so well from his childhood.

"Oh, look," he exclaimed, "there's the park my brother and I used to walk to when we came to visit. But the Ferris wheel is gone!" he marveled. Well, it had been some 65 years ago! "And this is the street where my mom and grandmother would walk with us to town," he continued as we drove down the quiet street. That would have been many blocks, I realized. "And that was the neighborhood store I always went to with Grandpa!" he pointed out in pleased surprise at what was now expanded into a construction company.

Howard reminisced that his grandfather used to drive a city bus. "I would go with him and ride the entire route," he remembered, describing the passengers for me. I could just see him as a small boy absorbing all the new sights and sounds. He told me that there used to be a bus from his home in Oklahoma to Wellington, and for 65 cents he would ride the 35 miles with his mother to see her mom. "Sometimes we would stay overnight and go back the next day," he went on.

"And there's the street where one of my dad's sisters and her husband lived," he said with a note of excitement. "Aunt Rosie baked bread, and would put it in a wagon and pull it along the streets and sell it for 10 cents a loaf. She saved enough dimes to buy a house!" he recalled with wonder. "My uncle worked for a florist, and there it is!" he fairly chortled.

We finally found the way out of town by a back road, and were soon wending our way home on a two-lane highway. "I remember this when my dad would drive us up here on this road," Howard said, "He always drove 35 miles an hour." I think the long, tiresome trip was made more attractive by the thoughts of the ice-cream cone he would get at the local creamery where he would stroll with his grandfather.

Howard may not have located our friends, but by the time we left Wellington, we felt as if we'd had a family visit!