Home sweet 1968

If I had $1.2 million and a huge desire to pretend to be Carol Brady, I would buy this house in my neighborhood and pretend it's still 1968, the year it was built. 

NOTHING INSIDE HAS CHANGED. What a time capsule! The red velvety bathroom wallpaper! The gold velvety bathroom wallpaper! The bar! The curvy fireplace! The intercom! The bidet! The indoor BBQ! And is that a RECORD PLAYER built into the wall in the kitchen, of all places? They should shoot "Mad Men" here.

Every home I lived in with my parents had a built-in bar. Neither of the ones Rob and I bought had one. My folks even had a framed placemat with drink recipes for drinks like the Singapore Sling and the Pink Squirrel hanging behind one of the bars. (Says my friend Kim: "Like Sally Draper's Cheat Sheet!") Ladies and gentlemen, America's GI generation... Look, if you're going to be asked to storm Normandy/shoot down kamikazes (now a drink name...IRONY!) at Okinawa, you're going to develop a high alcohol tolerance.

My dad could make any drink in the world, and from a college job as a butcher (and, uh, a stint in the Marines during WWII) could carve up an entire cow. He would have been a good man to have around during a zombie apocalypse, it just now occurs to me.

Dad, in September 1973, looking off into the middle distance, while his youngest daughter (me) and first grandchild (Erin) are fascinated by ... something. Eggs from the chickens? I can't tell...

Miss you, dad.