Treason of Words

I couldn't help but chuckle a bit when the bespectacled clerk at Budget Rent-A-Car asked if I'd be driving 75 miles or less. "I'm afraid," I said "that we'll be going a good deal further than that." My wife smiled too as he went out to pull the twelve passenger van around, several tons of gleaming white American steel that would carry us to Beaumont and back. Months earlier; in fact, the better part of a year before the Southern Region Business Conference, I was drafted. The seasoned Zetas of the Alpha Kappa Zeta (AKZ) chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority (Inc.) decided that it would be great if someone were to rent a large passenger vehicle so that they might avoid the chore of driving the hundreds of miles between the capitol and the eastern corner of the state. It would be fantastic, in fact, if that someone were, for example, me. The sun was out in force when I pulled up at the house on San Bernard St, the Archival Center for Texas Chapters and the

The solstice is still over a week away, but the good ol' summertime is rapidly ramping up around here. We've attended graduations, seen three films on the epic scale (Caspian: OK, Indy: Good, Iron Man: teh w1nz0rz!!one!), celebrated birthdays, watered our lawn for the first time ever, and visited a favorite raspas stand. This week I'm driving out to Beaumont for one of Christina's Zeta events. Actually, that understates the oddness of this journey a bit: she's in charge of organizing activities for the husbands/boyfriends/"it's complicated"-s of her sorority sisters while they have Very Important Meetings. If there weren't any guys in attendance, she wouldn't be going; and if she wasn't, I wouldn't, but since we are, I get to be in on the fun (and, in fact, did much of the research for said "fun"). Since she's going, though, and it's a well-known fact that I happily accompany her hither and yon, her chapter, composed i