Date: 7/28/97

To:

Lisa & Michael
Maaike & Howard
Lorraine & Lon
Brenda & Ralph

From:

Gene Kincaid

Subject:

Follow-up to the Silver, Texas Homecoming Reunion

cc:

Alison, Jessi, Emma, Emily, and Laura

__________________________________________________________________

All,

This is a follow-up note to each of you, letting you know what a great time I had at my reunion, due in large part to having all of the girls along. They were absolutely wonderful. Well behaved, energetic, polite, responsible, and cheerful. Good troopers in some pretty hot and dry landscape. Even better, they were great sports around a bunch of old folks talking about a place "long ago but not forgotten".

Thursday's trip to San Angelo was a breeze, given the magic of cassette recorders with headphones and the prepackaged snack industry. An easy road trip to West Texas. A quick dip in the pool to cool off was a great idea after the girls sorted out who was sleeping where... Jessi gets an award for agreeing to make a pallet out of bedspreads on the floor for a bed. And believe it or not, the girls chose to not have maid service and kept the room is good order for the whole weekend, as far as I could tell. Personally, I didn't dare try to wade through all that gear on the floor, but they seemed to make out just fine. Thursday night dinner at Golden Corral left everyone stuffed on buffet food and ready for some sleep. Amazingly, the motel was "new construction" and quiet. I only had to bark once, when the girls' volume hit a record high and filtered through the wall.

Friday was late breakfast at the Dixie Dinner, noon-time shopping, afternoon swimming, dinner, a movie, ice cream, and more swimming. Breakfast at the "1950's period-correct" Dixie Diner was inexpensive. But, I forgot that this period included ashtrays on each table and some old folks who smoke at breakfast. Yetch. We'll nuke that from next year's agenda, given everyone's reaction to smoke from two tables away. Live and learn. The 2-3 block, historical, downtown shopping district held up well against the girls' buying spree, and I think we may qualify as our own "economic boost " designation by the San Angelo downtown merchants association. The afternoon swim created only pink faces with no major sunburns. After some serious back-and-forth, we ate dinner at Pizza Hut and then did some major arm wrestling over what movie(s) to go see. I got to be the bad guy, and did a command decision that seemed to work out OK. Some saw "Out to the Ocean" (?) and some saw "Contact". Ice cream and one last dip for the evening wrapped things up.

Saturday breakfast was at the motel's buffet, which turned out to be pretty good. Then we were off for a day in Silver including a quick solo hike by the girls to the old abandoned grocery store where I'm sure the few remaining glass bricks suffered mightily and more than one gourd met an early end splattered against the tumbling-down walls. We killed an hour down at the Colorado River (actually flowing for the second year in a row, which must be some kind of record) skipping rocks. Emily caught on to this in fine order, working her way up to 4 skips, with one really long skip on her last toss. Alison warmed up her arm, and I think hit a couple of long runs herself. Photos (to come) will confirm that the river actually had water in.

We then met friends at "base camp". But they were already hot and dirty, and decided to call it a day rather than accompany us on our next little adventure. So we decided to hike over and climb up Silver Peak before returning to San Angelo for the reunion's Saturday night dinner. So, we scrambled to the summit of Silver Peak. Emily was the first to scale the hill, and she cheerfully put up with my "overview description of Silver". Well, actually, an overview of what's left of the town. Most of it went like this, "See those evenly spaced evergreen cedar bushes over there? My house was in between those two, and Steve' s house was two rows back". Alison banged up her fingers a little, but no one suffered any major injuries. A friend of mine did come nose-to-nose (nose-to-buzz, actually) with a wild honey bee colony, but we had the good sense to leave it alone. After scrambling down the hill, we decided to hustle back to San Angelo for a quick swim and dinner, with a pre-reunion gathering thereafter. The girls were on good behavior and only got cranky once. But, gee whiz, I'd get cranky too if I had to hang around a handful of really old geezers, a bunch of "mom & dad" aged people who hugged a lot and laughed at old stories, with not many people my age around. Overall, the girls did great putting up with the whole thing.

Sunday morning came early with a 7:20am wakeup call so we could eat, pack the car, check out, and have breakfast before leaving for church services at 10:00 a.m. in Silver, 45 minutes away. It's a good thing we made it, too. Our whole crew, including my brother, made up a full one-third of the total congregation for the Silver Baptist Church morning service. It was a pretty good turnout for the Kincaid "back pew Methodist" crew! And Rev. Blackman was on a "kinder and gentler" track this year, which was a blessing itself. He's a true West Texas Baptist preacher and can get pretty worked up. But this year has seen the passing away of a number of my friend's moms and dads. When Rev. Blackman chose to look forward and be thankful for the grace of their presence over the years, it was a good thing. They were good people, who will be fondly and forever remembered.

The Reunion itself was a success, with my best friend delivering prepared remarks (for the fourth year) that generates both laughter and tears. He really is good. Lunch and more fellowship followed, lasting until the early afternoon. Then the girls pitched in to help clean up the sanctuary and the fellowship hall, helping stack chairs and police the area for trash. Their help was very much appreciated by me. The girls were absolutely on best behavior. All of my friends, their spouses, and their moms and dads commented on that fact a number of times. Sure made me proud.

The trip home was 1/3 sleep (to Brady), 1/3 slow wake-up (to Llano), and a rousing 1/3 home stretch (just outside of town) that included, no kidding, 45 minutes of "Down by the Bay where the watermelons grow" rounder song that revealed an amazing ability to rhyme words in a context that challenges logic and syntax. But it made for a great song!

Overall for the weekend, Emily gets major "rookie" points for being first to the summit of Silver Peak, getting the knack of skipping rocks from the banks of the Colorado in short order, and generally taking in the whole affair with ease and grace. Alison, the veteran Silver traveler, was a source of much needed energy and hard charging drive, punctuated with some major accommodations to group decisions on several occasions --- all accomplished with good humor and tact. Jessi, always in the center of things, was our technical wizard this year with a really cool "digital recorder" that she built herself, and provided much needed perspective at a few key points in the trip. Emma mixed it up with everyone the whole weekend, acted as a great "frugal spending" role model, and has the Silver Reunion thing down pat... very much at home with the changing landscape, the shopping expedition, and the people and the event itself. Laura gets a dad award for taking the brunt of my barks while demonstrating what makes the trip the most fun for me... a stubborn streak that led to our arriving a day early for the reunion, inviting a great group of friends, scheduling a day of shopping, and generally having fun, laughing a lot, keeping friends motivated and included, plus constantly reminding me that, after all, it is a vacation to Silver, Texas, where I had more fun than any one kid should have had.

This letter turned out to be a little longer than I intended, but I wanted each of you to know how much I enjoyed having your daughter along on the trip. My dad and mom were the very heart of Silver, Texas, and every year my parent's friends who come to the reunion tell me how much they miss them. The best response I have to those wonderfully kind remarks is to simply point to Laura and her friends and say that Silver's values, traditions, ethics, and teachings are alive and well in another generation... and "the girls" are living, laughing, loving, concrete evidence of a good future.

Thanks for letting me show the girls a little bit of what my home town was like. It means a lot to me. I hope they'll want to return next year for Silver's 50th Anniversary.

Take care,

Gene

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