Sometimes something triggers a memory and it makes me laugh. This week I saw something in a gift shop at Mount Vernon that made me giggle and remember an event from long ago.

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The sign clearly says ” Please do not blow bugles until after you have purchased them and are outside.” I think there is a reason for this sign. I think hordes of school children over the years who have visited this Mount Vernon gift shop have taken liberties with those bugles. Can you imagine a bunch of elementary school kids wrecking the display and bugling loudly inside the store while their teacher and chaperones try to corral them? I can. This sign spoke volumes to me.

It also took me back to when we lived in Pennsylvania and I took the boys and their cousins to the Pittsburgh Zoo. It was one of our favorite places to go and one time when I took them I bought them all those whistle pops. You know the ones —the ones that if you blow into they whistle loudly. Imagine 4 kids in the back of a van whistling to their hearts content and you pretty much have the picture.

If you have ever driven in Pittsburgh you also know that their roads can be a bit challenging. Lots of crazy roads and bridges and hairy driving, as I call it. So when we were approaching a bridge where I had to move from the far left lane to the far right lane in a very short stretch in busy traffic I asked the kids to stop blowing because it “was the hairy part”. They were quiet as can be and as soon as we got out of it I told them they could whistle again. Believe me, they did!

But that sign made me remember the hairy part and maybe the shop had a few hairy moments of their own.