(From _The Cosmopolitan_)
Mother says that when I start talking I never know when to stop. But
I tell her the only time I get a chance is when she ain’t around, so
I have to make the most of it. I guess the fact is neither one of us
would be welcome in a Quaker meeting, but as I tell Mother, what did
God give us tongues for if He didn’t want we should use them? Only
she says He didn’t give them to us to say the same thing over and
over again, like I do, and repeat myself. But I say:
“Well, Mother,” I say, “when people is like you and I and been
married fifty years, do you expect everything I say will be something
you ain’t heard me say before? But it may be new to others, as they
ain’t nobody else lived with me as long as you have.”
So she says:
“You can bet they ain’t, as they couldn’t nobody else stand you that
long.”
“Well,” I tell her, “you look pretty healthy.”
“Maybe I do,” she will say, “but I looked even healthier before I
married you.”
You can’t get ahead of Mother.
Yes, sir, we was married just fifty years ago the seventeenth day of
last December and my daughter and son-in-law was over from Trenton
to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding. My son-in-law is John H.
Kramer, the real estate man. He made $12,000 one year and is pretty
well thought of around Trenton; a good, steady, hard worker. The
Rotarians was after him a long time to join, but he kept telling
them his home was his club. But Edie finally made him join. That’s my
daughter.
Well, anyway, they come over to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding
and it was pretty crimpy weather and the furnace don’t seem to heat
up no more like it used to and Mother made the remark that she hoped
this winter wouldn’t be as cold as the last, referring to the winter
previous. So Edie said if she was us, and nothing to keep us home,
she certainly wouldn’t spend no more winters up here and why didn’t
we just shut off the water and close up the house and go down to
Tampa, Florida? You know we was there four winters ago and staid five
weeks, but it cost us over three hundred and fifty dollars for hotel
bill alone. So Mother said we wasn’t going no place to be robbed. So
my son-in-law spoke up and said that Tampa wasn’t the only place in
the South, and besides we didn’t have to stop at no high price hotel
but could rent us a couple rooms and board out somewheres, and he had
heard that St. Petersburg, Florida, was _the_ spot and if we said the
word he would write down there and make inquiries.
Well, to make a long story short, we decided to do it and Edie said
it would be our Golden Honeymoon and for a present my son-in-law
paid the difference between a section and a compartment so as we
could have a compartment and have more privatecy. In a compartment
you have an upper and lower berth just like the regular sleeper, but
it is a shut in room by itself and got a wash bowl. The car we went
in was all compartments and no regular berths at all. It was all
compartments.
We went to Trenton the night before and staid at my daughter and
son-in-law and we left Trenton the next afternoon at 3.23 P. M.
This was the twelfth day of January. Mother set facing the front of
the train, as it makes her giddy to ride backwards. I set facing her,
which does not affect me. We reached North Philadelphia at 4.03 P. M.
and we reached West Philadelphia at 4.14, but did not go into Broad
Street. We reached Baltimore at 6.30 and Washington, D.C., at 7.25.
Our train laid over in Washington two hours till another train come
along to pick us up and I got out and strolled up the platform and
into the Union Station. When I come back, our car had been switched
on to another track, but I remembered the name of it, the La Belle,
as I had once visited my aunt out in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where
there was a lake of that name, so I had no difficulty in getting
located. But Mother had nearly fretted herself sick for fear I would
be left.
“Well,” I said, “I would of followed you on the next train.”
“You couldn’t of,” said Mother, and she pointed out that she had the
money.
“Well,” I said, “we are in Washington and I could of borrowed from
the United States Treasury. I would of pretended I was an Englishman.”
Mother caught the point and laughed heartily.
Our train pulled out of Washington at 9.40 P. M. and Mother and I
turned in early, I taking the upper. During the night we passed
through the green fields of old Virginia, though it was too dark to
tell if they was green or what color. When we got up in the morning,
we was at Fayetteville, North Carolina. We had breakfast in the
dining car and after breakfast I got in conversation with the man in
the next compartment to ours. He was from Lebanon, New Hampshire,
and a man about eighty years of age. His wife was with him and two
unmarried daughters and I made the remark that I should think the
four of them would be crowded in one compartment, but he said they
had made the trip every winter for fifteen years and knowed how to
keep out of each other’s way. He said they was bound for Tarpon
Springs.
We reached Charleston, South Carolina, at 12.50 P. M. and arrived at
Savannah, Georgia, at 4.20. We reached Jacksonville, Florida, at 8.45
P. M. and had an hour and a quarter to lay over there, but Mother
made a fuss about me getting off the train, so we had the darkey make
up our berths and retired before we left Jacksonville. I didn’t sleep
good as the train done a lot of hemming and hawing, and Mother never
sleeps good on a train as she says she is always worrying that I will
fall out. She says she would rather have the upper herself, as then
she would not have to worry about me, but I tell her I can’t take
the risk of having it get out that I allowed my wife to sleep in an
upper berth. It would make talk.
We was up in the morning in time to see our friends from New
Hampshire get off at Tarpon Springs, which we reached at 6.53 A. M.
Several of our fellow passengers got off at Clearwater and some at
Belleair, where the train backs right up to the door of the mammoth
hotel. Belleair is the winter headquarters for the golf dudes and
everybody that got off there had their bag of sticks, as many as ten
and twelve in a bag. Women and all. When I was a young man we called
it shinny and only needed one club to play with and about one game of
it would of been a-plenty for some of these dudes, the way we played
it.
The train pulled into St. Petersburg at 8.20 and when we got off the
train you would think they was a riot, what with all the darkeys
barking for the different hotels.