That’s convenient, now isn’t it? My daughter just had a baby a month ago and now Al’s daughter has one! Imagine the coincidence. Is it art imitating life? No, it’s just a damn good storyline. But unlike Al’s daughter, mine actually revealed her baby’s gender (a girl, Charlotte) as soon as she found out from the doctor. But John and I felt a gender reveal party was just too juicy to pass up. It’s the kind of thing that has made its way into the cultural zeitgeist, and most of us 60+ year-olds have heard of it but actually have no idea what it means. John and I actually called our daughters to get the lowdown. The bottom line is this: some people want to know the gender of their baby before it comes out, some want it to be a surprise and some want to make it an excuse for a party, or in the lexicon of today, an event. As my children used to say “In real true life,” one of these parties had a couple setting off fireworks, which led to a massive wildfire destroying thousands of acres of California. Another in Mexico just last month had a small plane flying over Mexico, set to reveal the baby’s gender. The only problem was it crashed and the result wasn’t pretty. We promise a gender reveal party somewhere down the road where nobody dies or even gets injured. But don’t ask us what the baby’s gender is because we ain’t tellin’!

The second strip is something a lot of us in this age group has gone through or is going through. It involves selling your parents’ house because either they’ve moved into an assisted living home or they passed away. Gosh this blog is very morbid today, isn’t it? John and I have both been through some form of this and everybody tells you the same thing, “Don’t get emotional. Whatever the buyer want to do with the house is up to them. It’s no longer the home you grew up in. It’s now their home.” You can nod along in agreement to this very rational piece of advice, but when the moment comes, all reason flies out the window. Marv’s interior dialogue goes something like this: “That was MY room damnit! And if I say it’s a great boy’s room, then that’s what you should use it for. I don’t care that you don’t have kids. Keep your freakin’ loom outta here and put up some posters of Jacob deGrom, okay?!” (By the way, that last piece of punctuation - ?! - is called an interrobang. John taught me that from a book about cartooning, written by Mort Walker, the creator of Beetle Bailey). At any rate, Instead of that angry interior rant, Marv just says, “Or a loom, a loom would be perfect in here.” This type of debate between the internal dialogue and what actually pours from our characters’ mouths is the type of discussion we have every week. If you know us it would come as no surprise that I would be the type to say the internal dialogue out loud whereas John would go for the second, more politic way of speaking. Since you’ve already read the comic, I guess you can figure out who won the debate for what Marv actually does say.

So that’s it for this week. Next week we’ve got another series coming up. We’ll be checking in on Sam, as he deals with the demands of being a new dad in his 60’s. The fun begins.

Have a safe, covid-free weekend and thanks for staying with us

Andy and John