Spring Break

It has been a long time since I was in any kind of school setting where spring break had an influence on my life.  Actually we did not have spring break back in the old days.  In our narrow vision of the world we had no school on Good Friday nor the Monday after Easter.  We, also, did not have teacher training days.  We did get free polio vaccinations.

JR returns from his first Florida
visit with the Houn Dawg Band
January, 1987

Our son left for college in 1991 so even his spring breaks had less of an impact on our life than when he was at home. His second year in college he used our time share and took friends to Florida.  They watched major league baseball teams in spring training.  I still believe that is what they did because it was a dream of his and his roommate to go see spring training.  Yes, I am a mom that has an almost perfect son.  But I digress.

With our blessings, three nineteen and one twenty one year old start a road trip from Ft. Worth, TX, to Pensacola, FL.  Two are in JR's pickup, two in the nice Camero or some sort of sporty car.  No problem.  Our son had shown his ability to function as a responsible adult or at least we were confident in him.  After all, the only thing that would probably happen on the road was rain.  Wrong.  This was the year the south received a freak snow storm in March.  Ten inches in Georgia and Mississippi.

We saw the weather problems on the Weather Channel.  We were anxious.  This was spring of 1993.  Cell phones were not handed out like dime store candy as we do now so no immediate text or call.  JR told us later they had the opportunity to pull the 21 year old's car out of a ditch a time or two.  Our son's response was, "He grew up in St. Louis.  I thought he should know how to drive in snow as good as me!"

Still a huge sports fan!  Go Frogs!!!

There are a few phone calls all parents fear.  Ours was that night at around midnight.  The other end of the line is our one and only precious child saying, "No one is injured."  Okay, that is really good news.  The person delivering this message never gives the facts fast enough, sort of slow motion speech.  Anyway, his truck was in line at an intersection at a stop light obeying all laws.  Unfortunately, someone behind him failed to follow the rules and there was a chain reaction traffic accident.  Not much damage to his red pickup except dents in bumpers.  Others were not quite so fortunate with smashed trunks and front ends.  Humph, that brought new meaning to the term Spring Break.