We had our granddaughter for a week in August, and as summer is winding down, we had such a wonderful time together. I wish I still had the imagination and energy of a four year old, but those days are long gone for an old man such as myself. All of my children live in an adjoining state, and as the week and our visit came to an end, we decided on a half way point to meet my daughter to pick up our granddaughter and return home. We chose an outlet mall that drew quite a bit of traffic at one time, but now has more cars of employees than anything else, and the whole thing seems very sad to me, in the same way old pictures of abandoned amusement parks do. With weeds overtaking everything left behind, and the paint long since peeled away and fading. At the center of this sad mess stood a playground full of weeds and packed sand, and needless to say, my granddaughter wanted to play, so as she made her way to the slide, I looked for broken glass, and other things that I wanted my granddaughter to have no part of. After a few minutes, even a four year old could tell that this was no place to be, so we decided to go up to some of the abandoned businesses and make faces in the tinted windows. Novella made scary faces and silly faces, and we had so much fun, but in all honesty, I was so good that it really wasn’t a fair contest, so we moved on to the next window, where I just made her look bad again. After my wife finished shopping and my daughter arrived, we noticed some people coming out of the abandoned store we had just been performing in the windows of. Apparently there were far fewer abandoned stores than I originally thought.

Damn tinted windows.

The End.

ws