In which we break a solemn vow (again)
Thirty-odd years ago when we were first married, Bob and I made a solemn vow that when we were more mature (like forty), we would never have "old people arguments".
Anyone with elderly relatives knows what I mean: those torturous debates about what restaurant you ate in in some unidentified town that had such good chicken- or was it the steak?
The route you took to get from Point A to Point B twenty years ago, on a trip you don't plan to repeat. The year some family event took place. Those kinds of arguments.

Alas, we started to fall about ten years ago. I don't know why. Maybe it's the grind of living together for decades that makes you want to be right about something once in a while. Maybe it irks you because your nearest and dearest is living in a fog of mistakeness- even over the stupidest stuff imaginable.

The other morning at breakfast, we got into one of those. It was about
oh, this is so embarassing I can barely say it
No, seriously- I'm so mortified
where Corpus Christi is on the Texas coastline.

Now, to anyone not embroiled in an old people's argument, the solution to that is glaringly simple: you go get one of the thirty Texas maps, both ancient and new, lying around the house and look it up.

But not us.

We actually wrangled about this for five minutes: I describing exactly where it was, he insisting that I was wrong and it was someplace completely different. There was a lot of 'north, south, east and west" thrown around, in fact, I remember "south by southwest" being mentioned.

At one point, I leapt to my feet and held out my forearm at a 45 degree downward angle. "Look! Here's the Rio Grande border. My elbow is El Paso, my hand is Brownsville."
"I don't think the border is that straight. It curves more."
"It's my arm! It does not bend upwards!"

I think it was here that he went for the map and found that Corpus is, indeed, where I said it was. He thought it was near Louisiana-why, he could not say. I had to concede that San Antonio is west of Fort Worth, if you draw a straight line down from Cowtown. So, it was a draw.
And we sheepishly agreed never to do that again.
Until next time.