Back in the fall when New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees was sidelined with broken ribs, there were questions about how many rib bones he had fractured.
The initial report after Brees was slammed to the ground in the game against Washington was that he had cracked five ribs. Then word got out that the injury was even more serious.
Some of our family members were chatting about this at lunch one day. We were discussing media reports that the superstar quarterback, who retired not long after the injury, had actually broken 11 ribs.
Charlee Ann, our granddaughter who was six at the time, said it would be impossible to break 11 ribs because people just have two ribs. She put her hands on each side of her body and said, “One on this side and one on the other.”
She obviously thinks ribs come in racks like the smoked baby backs she enjoys so much. My hopes for her becoming a doctor sort of went out the window that day…
When author and historian David McCullough was in town back in 1994 to speak at Northwestern, a few of us at the university and some area journalists had lunch with him at Lasyone’s.
McCullough, who had just won a Pulitzer Prize for his Harry Truman biography, did a campus-wide talk that morning and was scheduled to lecture at a couple of classes in the afternoon.
The dozen or so folks in our group were seated at the top of the stairs in the private dining room at Lasyone’s. The restaurant is well known for plate lunches and home style vegetables.
Waitresses were delivering our lunches when one who had not worked there long tripped on the top step of the stairs. Her tray of peas, beans, potatoes, corn, hamburger steaks and veal cutlets soared toward the table.
We all saw the barrage of food coming and managed to scatter before it landed. Everybody checked their clothes, and the minimal damage was cleaned up quickly with some napkins.
A few of us met with McCullough later to get him to the airport in Shreveport and asked how his afternoon lectures went.
He said there was an incident in one of the classes that had never happened to him before. “I sat on a desk at the front of the classroom,” he said, “crossed my legs and a black-eyed pea rolled out of the cuff of my pants.”…
A few of us from Natchitoches were on a seniors tennis team that made it to the national tournament in Tucson, Ariz., in the 1990s.
We had played for a couple of days in extreme, stifling heat in that desert area where there was rarely even a passing cloud. During one match, a downpour struck without warning. Rain came in torrents, flooding tennis courts and surrounding streets.
As we sat in the clubhouse waiting for the deluge to pass, a guy on our team said a rainstorm like this in the Arizona desert “must be kind of like Hell freezing over.”
A team from Minnesota that was in our bracket was huddled with us waiting for the rain to stop. A guy on that team said he grew up in Norway and there was a town there named Hell that froze over every winter.
I don’t think we had Google then, but my tennis partner Tom Eppler and I were talking about that clubhouse discussion years later and decided to look it up on the Internet.
The guy was telling the truth. There really is a Hell, Norway. It has a population of about 1,500 and is a bit of a tourist attraction because of its name.
Temperatures get down to minus 13 in the winter, and Hell freezes over. An English band called The Boys recorded an album there and titled it “To Hell with The Boys.”
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES