Even with skyping most days, plenty of life happens in five weeks that doesn’t get brought up in those brief conversations with a husband eager to collapse into bed six thousand miles and seven hours away.

We picked Bill up from the airport early on Thursday evening.  A set table and dinner was waiting at home.  Everybody had stories to tell, so there were few quiet pauses between landing and bedtime.  At one point, I was telling him two independent, but vaguely related stories at once, swerving haphazardly from one to the other as the details of the second reminded me of things I failed to mention in the first.  Fritz, who knew both stories, was frustrated at my narration and the mental agility required to follow along and kept interrupting me to clarify whom or what I was talking about.  I interrupted myself to say to him, “Look, I have been telling this man stories for over twenty years.  He doesn’t need your help.”  Fritz looked at his dad.

“I’m trackin’ her, man,” he assured our son, “I’m trackin’ her.”

This morning, we had our alarm set for 5 am and started getting kids up at 6.  Fritz stayed behind with the still sleeping tot, and shortly after 7 am, we were pulling up to the airport again.  The silver lining to an early flight on a Sunday morning, Father’s Day, was the lack of traffic and construction congestion.  We were home again before most people were likely out of bed.  This one is just 12 days and the same time zone which should make it easier to stay in touch and on top of story-telling.  And then I think he said in August, he’ll start repeating the trips he has been doing for the last year.  Yip.E.