Tour of my mother's childhood neighborhood.

So, this past weekend when I was visiting relatives, and my brother was out in the garage with my uncle at my uncle's house helping him clean it up and unearth some stuff in boxes for him to get and take home, my mom decided to walk down to the local Walgreen's, and she invited me along, and said she was going to walk down the street she used to walk down to go to her elementary school, too ("St. Stanislas Kostka"), since that wasn't too much out of the way.

After walking a few blocks from my uncle's house - he lives in the house where my grandmother used to live - my mom was like, "Oh look, there was the factory where my dad used to work! Sometimes I used to come down here when he was getting off shift in the evening, and walk him home," and I asked my mom how old she was and if her dad liked it, and she said eight or nine, and she never thought about it at the time, but she thinks now he must have liked that very much.

Then, a little later, she was was like, "Oh, and here was a corner store, and it was the coolest thing, if you had any money in your pocket, you could stop here after school and get anything you wanted, and in fact, there was another corner store up the block, so you had your pick of two corner stores!"

Then, we walked past there to the school building, and she was like, "Oh, up in those rooms was the 8th grade, and you were so cool when you finally got up there, and down in the corner was where the kindergarten was," and then we walked around to the main steps, and she was like, "And we used to line up in two lines here, one line boys and one line girls!", and then we walked a bit further, and she gestured towards some flower beds, and she was like, "And here was the tarred area."

"Mom," I was like, "Maybe you called them that in the 1950s, but we say 'disabled' or 'handicapped' now," and she got pissed, because she simply meant that there was an asphalt place where they used to play jacks, and then she got even more pissed because when I told the story to my godmother and my dad, they (but not my one other uncle!) were like right away, "Tards? You mean like retards?", and my dad even added in a voice like he was my mom giving a tour, "Oh, and over here was the boy with four eyes," which she got pissed at.

My dad also can't let a joke go, and he said that the next day he must have just been walking along and like four times he busted out laughing to himself thinking of the tarred area.