Another great Saturday

Yeah, it's still hot but I'm alive and kickin'. I used to hear that expression a lot among the farm folks in Kansas. Trouble is, most of those farmers that I knew aren't kickin' anymore. I suppose there's not that many farmers anymore either.

I can remember how Saturday nights were a pretty big deal back then. My folks would sometimes get together with four or five other families for a big night of Canasta. For you young whipper-snappers, Canasta was a card game played with pardners. If you're team won, you moved up in the ranking until you were playing for the Saturday Night Championship at the Head Table. Win or lose, if you made it to the Head Table, you had a good night with the cards.

If there were no Canasta parties scheduled on Saturday Night, we would head to the town of Horton, Kansas, about a fifteen minute drive. There I would be given a quarter, twenty-five cents to spend any way I wanted. My choices never varied, a ticket to a movie (15 cents) and a comic book (ten cents). I spent many an hour agonizing over which comic book to buy. But nine times out of ten, Superman or Batman would win out.

The ride home in the back seat of our old Ford was the perfect way to end the day; slowly drifting off to sleep, listening to the sound of the tires while the folks quietly chatted about the latest news in the community. I always wished that road were fifty miles long instead of the short five that it actually was.