The decade our boys will remember

Though just last night Dietrich asked, amidst giggles, for the shadow puppet story Uncle Rob told two years ago about a T-rex and a pizza store, my guess is that they will look at the teens as the decade in which they "grew up". I have plenty of memories of the '70's: going to the zoo, fishing in lakes in the Chequamegon Forest, and bouncing in golf carts at night while my parents watered the course. But it was the '80's that sang out the ridiculous lyrics forever imprinted in my mind and produced the fashions I clung to during the growing pains of teenagerhood. So I imagine that the boys will have their glory stories of Chicago and a nod to the steamy skies of their birthland, North Carolina, but it is likely this little spot in a mid-sized city during the new decade that they will claim as theirs. So let it begin, with Frog and Toad stories, a few wrapped gifts still under the tree from Uncle story-teller, and the hushed stillness of a a deep white earth, a few degrees above zero.