Allow me to go off the beaten path and bounce between America and Thailand to talk about coincidences in life. My paternal grandfather's name was George Virgil Bowman. If you look left of the window below and above the jukebox there is his name on a plaque. For years, he and my grandmother owned and operated D&G Cafe in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My father said that they never made a lot of money mostly because his father would give out too many 'chits' to people unable to pay. I never thought to ask what the D stood for and now there is no one around to ask.
Furthermore, I have no clue why my grandfather and grandmother look so stern in the old photo. He died at the age of 45 in 1947 from a heart attack and the shop was closed soon afterwards.
For years my wife (Dee) and her sister ran D&G Restaurant in Phitsanulok, Thailand. When we retired to the village the restaurant was just too much work and we shut it down so I hung the old sign in our pavilion for a joke. Now here is something else coincidental. Our three acres in the boonies of Thailand is called D&G Resort. Only it ain’t really a resort it is our home. I’ll admit that our place is unique and occasionally we have friends spend the night but never any paying customers.
Now instead of having D&G restaurant, we have George's Pizza. And guess what most everyone calls our place on social media? D&G. And Dee often complains that I give away too many free pizzas. I think my grandfather would have approved.
Shown below is me apparently putting on shoes in my great-grandparent's house that was also in Tulsa. They had both traveled from Virginia to Oklahoma many decades before via a wagon train. He died at the age of 70 from pneumonia, incidentally just a few days before he was still driving an oil truck fulltime at work. She lived until the age of 92 and thought going to the Moon was impossible. Now stay with me.
My mother wrote on the back of the above photograph about my clumsy attempts. She was killed in an auto accident when I was three and for the life of me, I can't remember her. Luckily, my father saved all of the photos of her while he was in the US Navy. When he passed away, I began to peruse the collection and soon noticed that everything my mother wrote, she always printed. Even her name.
Funny thing is all my written work has been in print form since junior high and the mandatory and dreaded cursive writing stage. I print. High school, college, army, teaching, everything. Even my name...
