Anne Slater and Janet Lewis

00:02 Hello.

00:03 Good morning.

00:04 Good morning. I can't see anything. I guess I should push the next button.

00:12 I can see you.

00:14 You can?

00:15 I can.

00:16 Well, I'm looking at a screen that says, welcome, anne, blah, blah. I'm going to click on the next and see if that is anything. Oh, here you are. I just didn't scroll down. What an adorable baby behind you.

00:35 Thank you.

00:36 How old is that baby now?

00:42 He just turned 30.

00:47 Well, hi, Janet. I'm Anne.

00:49 Hi, Anne. Nice to meet you.

00:51 Nice to meet you. I love that music. That was what clued me in that you might be there because I heard the music. I love it. Is that a real person playing?

01:02 No, it's YouTube.

01:04 Okay. So somewhere along it said we were supposed to read each other's biographies. But whatever you wrote, I read a long time ago. My thing in life is that there aren't enough people who just can go up to somebody and say, hi, my name's Anne, how are you? And just talk about the things that women talk about, like families and cooking and if your shoes hurt or if they don't hurt or. I got my haircut this morning for you.

01:44 It looks really nice.

01:46 Thank you. It'll look really nice for about 18 hours, and then when I go to bed, it doesn't. But my hair is very dry and fine, and it needs to be nice for Christmas, needs to be nice for church. So I did it.

02:09 I think you got your goal.

02:13 I think so. I'm really happy. Yeah. So your hair is really long. My hair used to be long like that, too, and I loved it. But at some point, I used to lie on my bed on my back and hang my head over the back, and I'd pull the hair altogether right at the back of my neck and braid it and then flip it up and put a clip in. And one day it just wasn't working. And I said, well, darn. So I called my hairdresser and I said, can you cut my hair right now? And she said, sure. So I went over and it was only about 2 miles away. And I came home and my husband looked at me and said, what did you do? You cut off your hair? And I said, I'm going to be able to take care of it better now.

03:12 Yeah. I go through seasons. I'll have it short for a while. I don't have it long.

03:16 Yeah.

03:17 So this is about three years.

03:20 Oh, wow. I can see on your right shoulder it's pretty long.

03:27 It's great. Yeah, it's not.

03:33 Whoa.

03:36 My husband's is longer.

03:38 Really? So I left my husband a long time ago, but we were married for 35 years, and he taught in a private school, and then I think he retired about 30 years ago. He wouldn't have been able to have long hair. He almost wouldn't have been able to wear a plaid shirt, although I'm sure the younger teachers did. But anyway.

04:14 He'S had his hair long about half the time we've been married. We've been married 34 years.

04:26 It's long enough to know each other really well. Yeah. I got to the point where I knew my husband well enough to say, this just isn't working for me. It was really sad for both of us, but there was a little problem of alcohol involved, and I just couldn't live with it. So tell me about your family.

04:56 Well, I've lived in the same city since I was born. Third generation.

05:05 Wow.

05:09 Married my husband and we have three sons, and they're all across the country.

05:20 They do spread, don't they?

05:22 They do, yeah. So I don't get to see them. I have met my grandkids, which is nice. I have a new one coming in the spring.

05:33 Wonderful. So how many?

05:36 This will be number six.

05:38 Aren't you lucky? You are so lucky. I have three kids. The two oldest are twins and they're 59, and their little sister is 55. And the two oldest ones are a boy and a girl, and the girl's never been married, and she's happy that way. Her brother has two sons, and my younger daughter has one son and two stepsons. So that's all boys, no girls whatsoever, which is very irritating. And fortunately, the oldest grandson has first a son and then a daughter. So my great granddaughter is 16 months old, and she's just so cute. And one of the things I got for her for Christmas was a woolen knit cap with some kind of a dog on it. She loves dogs. It's way too big for her. Ah. So. But I got used to being the grandma of boys with three grandsons. I'd go to their house, especially the two who are. Only one set is 45 minutes from me and the other set is almost the same. But the two boys, the two brothers, I'd get to their house and I'd honk the horn and they'd run out and they'd say, grandma, grandma, grandma, when are we going to go for a walk? And that was fun for all of us until they got to maybe ten or something. And then walking with grandma wasn't their idea of fun time. But my guys are all close. The farthest away from me is my oldest daughter, and she lives in New York City and doesn't have a car. Actually, she doesn't know how to drive either. I cannot imagine not knowing how to drive. I'm very talkative, so you need to talk, so I'm not taking up all the time.

07:51 You're doing fine.

07:52 Okay, well, so you're the third generation. And what town are you in? Fresno, California.

08:01 Right.

08:02 Why did I think you were in Utah? Fresno? Fresno is a much better place to be from. So I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is about a two hour drive from New York City, which I've never do that. You take the train and a little over an hour from Philadelphia, and now I live about a 15 minutes drive from the center of Philadelphia. So I grew up in Lancaster, the oldest of five kids. And I can't tell you how many generations of family have lived in Lancaster since 1760, something like that. I mean, they just were among the early ones. I know. One that we like to brag about came as an indentured servant, and he helped dig the Erie Canal. Wow. Which, when I was in fifth or 6th grade, and we were talking about canals and such, that was pretty exciting. But one of my brothers. I have three brothers and a sister, and one of my brothers lives in New Mexico. He's the farthest away, and he got out there because he was a career air force officer, and he just loves New Mexico. And the other two brothers both live in Lancaster now, mostly because the youngest brother has Parkinson's, and the one older than him is a retired doctor. And he decided when he retired, he'd just move his family back to Lancaster so he could be near the youngest and help him. And he's done a great lot of help. And my sister lives across the river from me. She's about 25 minutes, depending on the traffic, because to get to my house, from her house, you have to go. There's, like a lot of highways right through the middle of Philadelphia, and she has to cross both of them. And then to get to my house, she's the one who kept me sane all through the pandemic, because I knew the people that she was meeting with, which was not very many, and she was the only person I allowed to come into my house for a while. So she came last night for supper, and it was fun.

10:37 And my parents are still here in Fresno.

10:41 Oh, aren't you lucky?

10:43 They're in their 80s.

10:44 Yeah, well, me, I'm 81, so I don't think I could quite be your mother, but.

10:53 My mom is. She just had her birthday. She's 86.

10:57 Whoa. I have some church friends who are that age, and they're really with it. I mean, they're lucky and I'm lucky. One just stopped driving, which she found very difficult to give up her car, but it was a smart thing to do.

11:20 Yeah. So that's basically what keeps us in California right now.

11:24 Right.

11:25 Probably start traveling when my husband retires and be able to visit the kids more.

11:36 That's great. One of my good friends through a church listserve, she lives in New Mexico, was in Wisconsin before, but her son lives in North Carolina, and she and her husband are visiting him now, and she hasn't seen him for three years. Oh, I like that song. That's one of my favorite french Christmas songs, noel nouveau. Yeah. I married my high school french teacher, so I got to be moderately good in speaking French. But the way we learned and the way I learned German in college was through songs. Yeah, it's a great way because the rhythm helps you remember the words and then you sort of go from there.

12:42 So do you do lech singing?

12:44 Well, I'll tell you what. I have sung in church choir since I was six years old, but by the time I was in high school and college, I was a good first soprano. And I do love to sing, and my family all loved to sing, but now my voice is, well, I'm a very bad second alto. So the choir director said, well, Anne, you could sing tenor. And I just say, I don't want to sit with those men, because one of the men in the tenor section is the music director's father, who's not quite my age. But I'm learning it. I'm practicing it because we've got lots of music for Christmas Eve, and I love Christmas Eve. At my church, we do a candlelight service, and it's really all candlelight. There's wax on the floor to witness it. But whole families come in all ages of kids. But half of the choir has gone home for Christmas, which is what my husband and I did until our kids were. Until it was a real pain to take three kids. It was only 70 miles, but it just was a pain to take all the clothing and the Christmas presents. And we asked my parents, couldn't you come to our house, please? We do have a guest room, so we did that.

14:09 And it's a lot similar to our church service. We have a candlelight service also, and the psalms, all the kids playing.

14:25 Right.

14:26 A lot of fun.

14:27 Right. We used to have a Christmas pageant on the Sunday closest to Christmas. Well, it turns out we have two ministers, and they both have little children. One has a three, not quite three year old and a six month old, and the other one has a kid who's about two. So the pageant that the second minister devised is a no rehearsal pageant. You come into the front door of the church, and depending on how old you are and how interested you are, you are given a costume, and you can choose. We had a cheetah, a gorilla, a dinosaur, and a couple of tigers, and then a bunch of sheep. Those were all children. The shepherds were adults. The three wise men were two adults and two children. It was just fun, because the way it works is the minister reads a portion, and they'll say, the shepherds came through the front to look at the baby. And so we have somebody, whoever in the church has the youngest baby, they get to be Mary and Jesus and baby. I mean, Mary and Joseph and Jesus. So this year, the Christmas Eve service is on. We're not having a morning service since Christmas Eve is a Sunday.

15:59 Right.

16:00 It's going to be a 530 service, which will be easier for the moms and the little children. I'm really looking forward to it. And then Christmas day, my sister and I will go across the river to a little town in New Jersey where my son's house is big enough to accommodate 15 people and two great grandchildren who are five years and 16 months.

16:29 Wow.

16:29 What are you going to do for Christmas?

16:32 Well, probably spend the day with my parents.

16:38 It really makes a difference. I mean, I'm the oldest generation, and my ex husband, he came to everything. We did all family stuff together. We even both stayed in the same church together because there was no way either of us could say, you've got to get out. I've been in that church since 1966, but he died last summer, and his wife is in California with her daughters. So I'm the old generation. It's easier for me to travel around. But I remember going to my parents'house every Christmas and all the stockings that my mother made for us and for the grandchildren. And being with your parents is a wonderful thing.

17:31 It is. Their neighbors. They've adopted their neighbors.

17:42 So how close are they to you?

17:46 Probably maybe 8 miles, if that much.

17:51 Oh, that's great.

17:54 They were up in the foothills, right. Which was about a 45, 50 minutes drive when the boys were growing up, and so didn't get to see them as often.

18:07 Right. That's a part of California that I can imagine myself enjoying. I have some college friends who live in San Francisco and in Los Angeles, and all they talk about is driving around there and how awful it is.

18:30 Yeah. San Francisco and Los Angeles are very congested.

18:34 Right.

18:35 They'll probably end up like New York and have more of a transit system.

18:45 I have, I live close to two colleges, and because my house has a finished third floor, I have a lodger who's a graduate student. And she left yesterday to go home to China for a month. She walked to the train station, which is a local. It's a commuter station. And she took this train into Philadelphia, then she took another train into New York City, and then she went to the airport. And my daughter in New York uses the train all the time. Well, she can take one train that goes to about ten minutes from her brother's house, which is really nice. So I have a question for you. Aside from the big job of being a mother and a wife and keeping house, have you had a job?

19:45 I have.

19:46 What do you do or did?

19:48 I started in food service when I was just out of high school, and I worked nine and a half years at the children's hospital.

20:00 Wow.

20:02 So just cafeteria, right. While I was there, I was able to go to city college and I got my AA and started being a teacher's aide in a kindergarten classroom.

20:21 Great.

20:22 And I did that for three years. And then I had my second son by then. And so I stayed home for just about ten years, had my third son and got them all into school. And so when the youngest was in kinder, then I started working for the school district again as a classroom aide.

20:52 I know you were important. I know you important. I have a couple of friends who are elementary and high school teachers in the public school system in Philadelphia, and they really depended on the aides because even when one moved to teaching handicapped children, where she had much smaller classes, she still needed the aides because she just couldn't do it. All right.

21:18 And that's where subbing as an aide, where they need you most is in the special ed department.

21:26 Right.

21:26 So I could pick and choose what days I wanted to work and what days I couldn't work as far as subbing goes. And then it was just a half a day, so I could pick my son up after school and then have the rest of the day. And if they had appointments, I could take those days off.

21:45 Right. That's great. My younger daughter went to art school and suddenly discovered that unless you're Michelangelo, you're not going to get a job with art. So she got a job at the closest grocery store, and they live kind of out in the boonies. She loved it and the people loved her. But she had her son, and so her whole schedule was worked around when he was in school. Well, guess what? He's 27, and she's still working the same schedule because she liked not working on weekends. Lately, she had been working until noon on Thanksgiving day, which we all hated because we'd have Thanksgiving at her house sometimes and her husband had to do all the cooking. This year, she didn't. She stayed home, but it was really convenient for her. And she does her art stuff sometimes. She and her husband have their son and his lady friend and the two children living with them. At the moment, my grandson moved back to the area from Florida. My daughter was thinking, oh, they'll be here for a little while, and then they can move out, find a place to live. Childcare is so much more expensive here than Florida. And they only had one car, so my grandson could drive to work. But Jess didn't have anything to get around right anyway. But my daughter loves having her grandchildren there. They're fun kids.

23:56 Yeah. When I was still subbing as an aide, I met a brand new teacher at the high school level in special ed and worked with her for a couple of months. And then over the summer, she called me and asked me if I would go with her as a full time aide to another school that she was being transferred to. And at that time, my boys were going to school, to a private school. So I was driving them to school every day, and I said, well, I have to work it around my son's school. And she goes, whatever you need.

24:42 Really wanted you.

24:46 I worked with her for six years.

24:50 Wow.

24:50 And while I was working there part time, I was taking college classes and was able to get a scholarship grant to the university and got my teaching credential. And so I've been substitute teaching since 2013.

25:08 Oh, good for you. That really takes courage and persistence.

25:17 Yes. I had to push through those. Last semesters are pretty rough on students, right?

25:26 Well, I was fortunate. I was able to just go straight through college because I had scholarships. And then I got married halfway through, so my father was paying the tuition, but we didn't have any room and board. But I must say I was very pregnant during the last semester. We hadn't quite planned it that way. So fortunately, the kids weren't born until August. But I remembered sitting sideways in the desks in some of the classrooms. And then I started working at that college in the library and watched, especially the older students there's one set of older students who were doing what you did and going back to college at an untraditional age. Most of them seemed to be able to cope with it because they were adults and they had coped with other things in life. But some of the graduate students just didn't know how they were going to get through and they really fretted a lot and that made it difficult.

26:47 Yeah, it's neat that I went through at the time that I did. And the curriculum was almost identical to the curriculum on the high school level where I was working part time in the classrooms. So it was really neat to be able to hear the information at the high school level and then hear it at the college level and be able to apply it when I went back to the high school level.

27:20 Exactly. Oh, that's really interesting. One of the things that I missed, well, when I was working at the college, I took French and Italian just because my brother was in Italy. And the French, I just really like french literature. But I missed out on lots of history courses. I never took economics. I sort of can't wrap my head around economics in general, although more now that I've been living and paying my own way. But I wish I could have taken more history courses.

28:06 Yeah, I like listening to Prager University online. He does a lot of history. It's really interesting.

28:15 Is this something that you have to pay for?

28:17 No, it's on YouTube.

28:19 Oh, I'm going to write that down. Thank you. That's very helpful.

28:23 P-R-A-G-E-R-I believe so.

28:31 YouTube.

28:34 Can you just put in whatever you're interested in and it'll come up?

28:38 Oh, cool. Oh, I intend to look that up. That's very nice food for my brain.

28:49 So I haven't worked much this last school year. I had an injury in 2021 in my knee and so I was in a wheelchair for almost three months and then on a walker and crutches.

29:08 How is it now?

29:10 It's fine. The Lord is so good.

29:12 Oh, I'm glad.

29:13 Yeah. But now that our youngest son moved to Missouri with our oldest son, then we only have one car and my husband works a little about 20 miles away, so he needs the car. There are schools close to where I live, but if there's nothing available there to sub, then.

29:40 Right.

29:42 So I've just been trying to do stuff around the house.

29:45 Right. My problem is that I and my cousin Nancy are the two oldest grandchildren in the family. My grandmother had three kids and those three kids had twelve kids. But Nancy and I are the oldest. So we got the prime choice of furniture and things, right? So my house is full of stuff. I'm waiting for my grandson to move out of his parents house so I can unload some of the furniture and have a little more space. Well, the most interesting thing about that boy is that although he and his girlfriend have a five year old and a 16 month old, they're not married yet. And I said, look, go get married. It's important for your children for you to be married. Oh, well, we want to do it the right way. Jessica wants a fancy wedding. I said, how you can have a fancy wedding? Don't tell anybody. Just go to a justice of the peace and get married. Oh, we're going to wait.

30:58 Yes, I know the story. Yeah, my oldest son was that way. And then they did get married, but now they're divorced. But the oldest grandson is 13.

31:17 Oh, that's nice. A nice age. I hope you're able to connect with him.

31:23 Yes. We talk to them FaceTime and on the phone.

31:30 Yeah, that's really important for kids. I grew up with two grandparents in town and two grandparents in Indiana. And the ones who are in Indiana, I didn't really get to know until the grandmother was gone. And then my grandfather started doing some traveling, so he would come and stay with us for a while. And that was funny and weird because we'd heard stories from my father about growing up with this guy as his father grandfather worked for the Pennsylvania railroad, and so his boys could get what they called deadhead tickets, free tickets to go anywhere. You just couldn't have a berth. You had to sit up. So they traveled all over the country.

32:19 Wow. My grandfather also worked for the railroad.

32:23 Really? That's great. I could never figure out what a civil engineer was, but I found out they design tracks and places where trains are supposed to go. But the best trip my father and uncle Joe had was to New Orleans. And this must have been maybe as late as 1932 or 33. It had to be beforehand because they were born in 1914 and 1916. Anyway, they got to a really fancy restaurant called Antoine's. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's just one of those big name restaurants that's famous all over the place. So they decided they had to go there. And they and the friend they were traveling with got there, and they looked at the menu, and the only thing they could afford was the appetizers, which were $0.15 apiece. So they each had an appetizer, and then they left. He said the Mater d was not very happy.

33:40 Anyway, sounds like my first trip to San Francisco was high school. The only thing I could afford was a bowl of onion soup, but it was really good. A japanese restaurant.

33:54 Oh, that sounds time. I think the first time I went to New York by myself was when my daughter was already living there, the oldest daughter, and she was a graduate student, and she took me to her favorite restaurant, which has actually appeared in Blue Bloods, which is one of my favorite tv shows. Have you ever watched?

34:22 I have, yeah.

34:23 So when Jamie, the youngest son, and his wife were having an argument in this restaurant, and I looked and there was a name backward on the window, veselka, a little slavic or something restaurant. She said, mom, they make really good gravy. Noodles and gravy.

34:42 Wow. So when you go to New Jersey, is it anywhere near the street Dorchester?

34:53 What town is it in?

34:59 It's just. I'm not sure.

35:03 Is it near New York?

35:06 It's in New Jersey.

35:08 Yeah.

35:11 I don't remember. Let me see if I can look it up real quick.

35:16 Yeah. There's New Jersey, adjacent to New York City, and then there's south Jersey, which is beach towns and seashore towns.

35:31 Yeah. She's not far from the beach.

35:37 Because.

35:37 She always posts pictures of the street with a wall and then the ocean.

35:43 Oh, wonderful. Oh, wow. Lucky to live there.

35:47 Lakewood.

35:49 I've heard of Lakewood because my local tv station does the weather for Philadelphia, central New Jersey and Delaware. And so we get the names, especially of the towns along the ocean, depending on what the weather is going to be. So it's probably close. I know that when my kids were little, on a three day weekend or something, we couldn't afford to go and stay at the beach, but we would go for a day and we'd take picnic lunch and a big umbrella. And those were the days. The one place we liked to go was a state park, and you had to pass a supermarket just on your way, so you didn't have to buy any food until you were there. And we would just go sit on the beach with the kids and then on the way home to keep them quiet when they were really little, we'd give them each a little beer, and that would make them sleepy. And they didn't fuss because at one stage they would scream if a big truck came up next to us on the superhighway. Anyway, today they want beer, too, but that's because they're old enough to drink beer.

37:12 Right? Yeah. In the central valley, where we are, it's two and a half hours to the mountains and the lakes, and it's two and a half hours to the coast.

37:29 So you're in a good position to go on vacations that aren't an arm and a leg away from home.

37:35 Yes.

37:36 Oh, that's wonderful.

37:37 Yeah. San Francisco and Los Angeles are farther than our mountains and beaches from the Central Valley.

37:45 Right. They're probably a lot more expensive, too, for anything. That's why my goddaughter is being married in May. In New York City. It's a 430 wedding, which means there's going to be dinner and most of the out of town people are going to have to be spending the night in a hotel. $500 a night for a room in a hotel. I'm not doing that. So I'm going to drive to my son's house, and he lives in easy commuting distance of New York City. So he'll drive us in to the city and then bring me back to his house afterward, and I'll spend the night there and come home in the morning. I like the girl. I mean, she's girl, she's 31, but she's just getting married and I want to be there for her, but I hate spending. If I did that and if I stayed in New York City, then I couldn't afford to give her a present. Right. And as it is, she's going to get a sterling candlestick that was given to me when I got married in 1962. It. So what do you like to do for fun when you've got time on your hands?

39:19 Um, I like to crochet, and I got a bunch of sewing projects that I haven't started on. Yeah, I like being outside. We have a dog and a cat, and I saw your kitty in the window behind you.

39:43 Oh, really? Which one?

39:45 A black one.

39:46 A black one. Okay. So I have three cats, and it was sort of an accident. The oldest cat I have is Molly, and she has short legs and she's fat. And I claim she's related to me because I've got short legs and I'm fat. I'm not grossly fat, but I'm fatter than I want to be. And then the boys are. The black one that you saw, his name is Hermes. My grandson named him and his brother, who is half again as big as he is, who's black and white and his name is Beowulf because he's so know. I got the cats after I left my husband and I was living in the city, in Philadelphia. I loved the had it had a scrawny little backyard that, as I discovered when I tried to pry up the bricks to see what kind of dirt was underneath. It was all clay, so you couldn't plant anything in Clay. And where was I going with this? Okay, so I needed something. I'd had a gentleman friend whom I really loved, but he was a lot younger than me and he really wanted to have children and I said, go. And so he went to San Francisco and got married and had kids and left her for somebody else. But anyway, these cats just kept me, Janet, in a period when I was missing having somebody in my house who needed me. I mean, you know that your husband really needs you and you've got a long history of needing and wanting and delighting in each other. And I had the cats, so they really kept me, Janet, for a long time. And then I got used to being myself. I haven't dated at all since I left my husband. No need to. I'm happy by myself mostly. So one cat, that little one you saw, he comes and sometimes he crawls under the covers and sleeps right next to me. Then after a while he kind of wiggles around and I hold up the blanket and he goes out and the other two just sleep on top of my legs on top of the blankets. What makes me happy is that the two boys, who are brothers, take care of each other and the little one is the leader of the pack. I didn't get a dog originally because I knew I couldn't live in the city and work in the suburbs and have a dog. I mean, it would take me half an hour to get to work, so I couldn't leave a dog alone from 730 in the morning until 430 in the afternoon.

43:02 Right.

43:06 Anyway, so I have what is for my neighborhood, a big backyard, which has a great big cage in it that's 10ft wide and 20ft long with a chicken wire roof because the cats know how to climb up chain link fence. And in my front yard, which is very small, I have an asparagus patch because it's the only part of my yard that gets sunshine. The backyard has a great big tree. It was a mistake. I got. It's called a river birch, and they get to be like four stories high, which is too big for a neighborhood with lots of little houses. So mine is three and a half stories high now. But last summer, in the middle of the summer, when it was really hot in Philadelphia, I had a group of people come from church. There's a group that just goes and takes brown bag lunches and sits around and talks. So we gathered all the chairs we could find, and we sat out under this big tree, and it was very pleasant and cool. I couldn't have had them in my house. It was too small and too hot. But under the tree, it was amazing. So I guess the tree is here to stay.

44:27 Are you still working?

44:29 No. I retired at 62, and I probably should have stayed on. I worked in a college library, and I loved it. I loved it because I got to meet the students and the faculty, and I got to take courses, and there were just a lot of really nice people. But I didn't like the guy who was the head of the library. He liked the girls too much. And at a women's college, you don't walk in in the morning, throw your arm around a girl, and say, how's it going, honey? You just don't. And I just didn't like him at all, mostly for that reason. So I retired when I could. And so what's happened is that work, not work. I belong to the same church since 1966, and it's in this city, so I'm in the choir, and I've been on a bunch of committees, and I love to do that because that's where I feel like it's my second home. But this is the most wonderful music you have on. Really? I would have to look for it.

45:44 It's YouTube, right?

45:47 Well, that's how we practice a lot of our music, because there are lots of youtubes for all the Christmas songs and some of the more difficult music, you can get one that has the tenor part and the alto part and the soprano part and the bass part. And that's wonderful because I can't really play the piano.

46:10 Me either.

46:11 Oh, good. What to say? You know what? We only have, like, three and a half minutes left, and I just want to say thank you for being interested in doing this. You're welcome.

46:31 I actually did put in for my retirement. I just turned 62 in April.

46:36 When is your birthday?

46:38 April 14.

46:40 Mine's the 15th.

46:42 Wow.

46:42 Happy birthday.

46:43 Thank you.

46:44 Happy birthday. I'll think of you on the 14th. It's a good age to retire because when you're 62, you still have a lot of energy that you don't when you're 81. Right between Zoom, which has helped a lot with church meetings. And I park in the alley next to my church, and they've only ticketed me once in all those years, so we have little signs that say parking here for church service, so they don't give us tickets. Yeah.

47:26 We'Ve been in our church for 30, 33 years.

47:30 It feels good, doesn't it? It's like having another family.

47:34 It really is.

47:35 Yeah. One of the things I like best is that my friends at the church range from 25 to 85. And it really is like having another family. One of the oldest members lives about 2 miles from me and I usually pick her up on the way into church. She's the one who doesn't drive anymore. So what are you going to do with the rest of the day now that.

48:06 My husband had to work today so he won't be home till after twelve. But I have leaves I can rake and I have laundry I'm working on.

48:19 Yeah, well, I'm mending my bras. I got two new bras and the straps are too short, so I've taken one old ratty one. And using that and raking leaves is actually one of my favorite activities at this point in my life. It just is kind of zen. I don't think much about it.

48:44 Right. It's something that you can just kind of think about whatever you want to while you're raking.

48:51 Right. And then we have people from the. I guess the trash people, they come around and suck up all the leaves that are brushed to the curb.

49:04 Right.

49:04 Very pleasant.

49:06 Yes.

49:10 Well, I'm going to make myself a cheese sandwich, a grilled cheese sandwich. And I'm going to read a book.

49:17 I think that sounds like a nice, relaxing afternoon.

49:21 Well, I should do Christmas cards, but I haven't done a single one yet and I'll just wait a while. Sorry.

49:31 I got the Christmas cards that are going out of state. I got those out in the mail.

49:35 That's a good idea. I found a box of cards and a strip of stamps, too, which was cool. Now we're really down to it. Janet, have a wonderful Christmas and a very happy new year.

49:47 You too, Anne. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. Indeed, listening to your story.

49:54 Well, thank you. Next time I'll get more of your story.

49:58 Sounds good.

49:59 Okay.

50:00 All right. You take care.

50:02 You too. So I don't know when this is going to do. This is probably just going to stop.

50:09 I don't know.

50:09 I guess we can click on stop recording, click at the same time.

50:14 All right.

50:15 One. Lord. Click.

50:18 Lord be with you.

50:19 Yeah. Take care.

50:23 You too. Bye. Love.