Enjoyable day ended too soon

We went to a carving exhibition last Sunday. We had arranged to meet some old friends for an afternoon out. Due to some mixed up directions we were late. Very late. Thankfully they waited on us to get there and weren’t the least bit grumpy about it.
I absolutely despise being late. I think it is the height of rudeness. But sometimes it is unavoidable. The fact that I had awakened that morning with a really bad sinus headache didn’t help. I always figure that I won’t feel any better sitting at home feeling sorry for myself so if I have plans, I load up on aspirin and go anyway.
I’m glad we went. My friend looked fabulous. If I look half as good when I get to be her age, I’ll consider myself to be a very lucky woman. Plus she had recently received second place in a chili cook-off and first place in the dessert category in a local competition she had entered. She said it was the first year since she started entering this particular contest that she hadn’t won the chili division. It might have had something to do with her thinking the contest started two hours later than it did. Obviously I am not the only one who is sometimes late.
When she described her dessert it made me gain five pounds just listening to the ingredients. How she managed to lose nearly 50 pounds while testing recipes simply doesn’t seem fair.
We soon split up as I stopped at one display and she and her husband tarried at another. Sometimes I think carvers are the friendliest people in the world. They all like to talk as much as carve and will insist on sharing any and all tips and techniques in their repertoire.
There were some extremely talented people there. One guy had the usual display of carvings plus a line of tiny carvings. When we commented on how intricate the miniature ones were, he insisted that those weren’t the little ones. Then he brought out a carved caricature of a man that was less than an inch high and beside that he set one out that was only a quarter of that tall and no bigger around than a toothpick.
I wanted to get out a magnifying glass to look at them as they were so small that I could barely see them. The miracle was that he said he didn’t use any magnification while carving them. After we admired them he put them away as the merest breath would cause them to fly off the table.
We stopped at a display of flutes and the vendor said he was giving a free talk on the musical instruments in a few minutes. That was too good to pass up as our local carving club had made flutes. I’m still working on mine and have been for what seems like forever. I learned a little bit from his talk but it was his playing that won me over.
He had one flute he called his “Amazing Grace” flute as it was tuned perfectly for that song. He played the hymn and bits of other songs. Then he did bird calls with the same instrument. Before we realized it an hour had passed away.
When we caught up with our friends again they had acquired a wooden flower given to them simply because they had admired it and a stick of cedar to put in the closet. They bought some wood for a couple of projects of their own. I also left with several projects that have a remote possibility of being completed by Christmas. I’m not saying which year.
We went out to dinner afterwards and if it had not had been a three-hour drive home we could have talked all night.
Some days are like that. They may start off poorly and we may get lost for a bit but if we stay the course we will be rewarded with good times and good memories. And who knows? We may end up with a free flower or enough projects to keep us busy until Christmas.[[In-content Ad]]