Catching up!

The past couple days:

—I interviewed a guy in Deadwood, SD, whose dad was a Triple Domer (graduated from grade school, high school and college at ND), class of 1914 with Knute Rockne. He had all kinds of great memorabilia, etc., but I think one of my favorite parts of the interview was a story he told me about his roommate's dad, who lived and died by ND football. He would come to every game, and one Saturday, we weren't doing so well, and he was really upset, yelling at the team and the refs, and someone sitting behind him said, "Hey, you better sit down or you're going to have a heart attack." And he turned around and said, "I can't think of a better place!" That's the second time in 2 weeks of doing these interviews that someone has expressed the wish to die and be buried at Notre Dame Stadium. I think what I loved about this particular story was that it reminded me of my Great Uncle Harry, a fiery subway alumnus who recently passed away. I could see him doing something like that.

—Yellowstone was incredible. After going on and on about the Badlands, I won't go into it too much here, but I ended up spending two days at the park, hiking and driving through. Amazing. My usual hyperbole is totally inadequate.

—Yesterday I drove from Yellowstone to Helena, MT, where I stayed with the Smillies (pronounced "smiley"), a family my family was friends with way back in the early '90s when Mark was getting his PhD at Notre Dame. The Smillies are the kind of people who are always really busy, and then when they get an email from me, who they haven't seen in 15 years, asking them for a place to stay, they ask how long I need to stay and even bust out the nice dinner glasses. They have 8 kids, ranging in age from 21 to 3, and staying with them last night was so much fun! Mark took me on a quick tour of Helena and showed me around the school he and Donna started with two other families, because the schools in the area were so bad. It's a K-12 with 175 kids, and Donna is the principal. We spent most of the night around the dinner table, catching up and just hanging out while the kids did their homework and ate the candy their mom just brought back from a recent trip to Canada. The kids introduced me to the Kinder Surprise, a chocolate shell shaped like an egg, with a toy enclosed in a plastic capsule on the inside. I got a little green car, which Johnny showed me how to assemble and take apart. I'll need to leave it assembled, because I could not figure it out. And we looked through all of my change to add to Matt's state quarter collection, and apparently there are two quarters per state, one from Denver (D), and one from Philadelphia (P). I didn't know that, and I worked at a bank...But it was exciting, because coming from the east, I was more likely to have some of the Ps he needed for his collection. Anyway, the whole evening was fantastic and really relaxing--the sort of controlled chaos I'm used to at home!

This catches the blog up to this morning, but I have to go. I'm in Missoula for the next few days. More later.