My Teeth Are In My Hat

[Too late. You've read the title. How can you possibly go away without finding out what in heck it means? But if that isn't enough to lure you in, how about this?]

[I'm using an innocent child's gap-toothed smile to pimp for my blog. And why is he wearing a number? You'll have to read on to find out! Yes, I'm shameless.]

MY WIFE and I were invited to Plymouth, Massachusetts, for the weekend. The inviting was done by my sister-in-law Victoria and my brother-in-law Joe. They wanted to see a concert with us as well as share a meal at a good restaurant. They said it would be their treat for dinner. That sealed the deal for me. You could invite me to a three-day festival featuring sculptures made of rabbit poop and if there was a free meal included, I'd be there with bells on.

Here's the whole weekend.

FRIDAY

We headed to the Hilton Garden Inn in Plymouth, our base of operations for the weekend. On the way, we stopped for lunch at Persy's Place in Kingston.

Actually, we didn't have lunch. We had breakfast because Persy's serves breakfast all day (except they close at 3pm, so it's not quite all day, but we were there at 2:15, so who cares?) and we're both breakfast people. If a place serves breakfast, we order breakfast. If it has home fries and eggs, we're on it like a democrat on a tax increase.

I ordered something called a "Dapper Dan", which is 3 eggs, hash, home fries, a stack of pancakes, baked beans, and coffee. MY WIFE ordered pumpkin pancakes because she is a pumpkin junkie and would eat an old shoe if it was pumpkin flavored. That sounds like a lot of food, and it is, but what arrived at our table was not a lot of food; it was a mountain of food. There was no way I only had 3 eggs on my plate. It looked more like 5 eggs. And everything else was similarly steroided. We ate our fill and still had full plates. We took away enough to have pancake snacks later that night while we lay in bed at the hotel watching TV, and then we had breakfast again (reheated in our in-room microwave) in the morning. We have a theory. We think since we arrived at 2:15, and Persy's closes at 3:00, we were probably the last people to order breakfast that day and they pretty much gave us everything that still remained on the grill. In any case, it was delicious all three times we ate it.

We arrived in Plymouth at 3:45 and checked into our room.

 
Very nice, non-smoking.

You know me by this late date. I smoke, a lot. We had requested a smoking room. Apparently, they don't have any smoking rooms. Enter Jim's wonderful electronic cigarette.

A few months back, I invested in an electronic cigarette. I won't describe the physics; you can figure those out from the illustration. I'll just tell you that it works. If I have to be someplace where I can't smoke, it does the job for me. I can go a full night without a real cigarette so long as I have my nicotine delivered electronically.

(I know - it's still no health treat to be sucking in nicotine, but it eliminates the tar and gunk that rots your lungs, AND there's no actual smoke to stink up wherever you are that doesn't allow addicts to feed their monkeys.)

It is the only thing I've ever tried that takes away the craving. I highly recommend it if you need to not smoke.

After we unpacked and I didn't smoke, we decided to take a walk around downtown Plymouth. We saw...

 America's Pet Rock.

It has a very spiffy home.

 

In actuality, though, it is a prisoner. They keep it in a cage.

Here's the deal: Plymouth Rock used to be much larger. You couldn't expect a shipload of pilgrims to have landed on what's there now. Heck, a canoe of girl scouts would be hard-pressed to fit. What happened was people kept coming to see it and they'd take a little chip from it as a souvenir. So now it is a much smaller rock, kept in a cage so people don't keep stealing pieces and turn it into Plymouth Pebble. So you stand above the rock, look down about 10 feet or so onto it, and marvel at the fact that one individual had celebrated his or her freedom by tossing an empty Marlboro package into the cage. If that person had an electronic cigarette, of course, then the rock would have a nice clean cage for itself (or maybe the idiot would have taken a poop on the rock because a jerk is still a jerk even if he or she is not smoking.) Anyway, as a person who had ancestors on the Mayflower who probably stepped foot on that rock, I'd appreciate it if you newcomers would stop throwing garbage at it. Thank you.

After looking at history, we were hungry again. Well, I was hungry again, anyway, but MY WIFE said she wouldn't mind watching me eat, so we walked back to the main drag and I had two slices of pizza at a place named The Pie Hole.

Yup. The Pie Hole.

Whatever you think of the name, it was excellent pizza of the thin-crust variety. I'd say it ranks in the top ten of my pizza eating experiences (and that's high praise considering I was still partially full of eggs, hash, home fries, beans, and other breakfast foods.)

After the pizza, we strolled back to where I had parked Roddy The Wondercar. Along the way, we traversed The Oldest Street In America. The asphalt has held up surprisingly well. They must have had a wonderful public works department in 1620.

Finally, we get to the title of this tale that's going nowhere. As I readied myself for bed, I took out my denture (I have a lower that pops out.) And, as always when I'm away from home, I then wondered what to do with it. I don't like leaving it out in the open because lots of my family had dentures when I was a kid and I'd always be coming across them in glasses of water in the bathroom, on bureaus, on the kitchen sink, or on the coffee table if somebody took them out to pick some crud off them and then forgot to put them back in before they went to make a sandwich or something, and I often found it shocking to have someone smiling at me without them being attached to their teeth. Also, even though MY WIFE certainly knows I have a denture, I try not to be too gross about it. So, I had to figure out where to put it so it wouldn't be a constant reminder of my gumminess.

The problem with hiding it, though, is that if someone doesn't know that a place has dentures in it, they might make some sort of mistake and break your teeth and then where are you? I'll tell you where: In Plymouth, without enough choppers to really enjoy the Japanese dinner you're going to have with your sister-in-law and brother-in-law the next evening, so even though you don't want to leave your teeth out in the open to surprise anybody, you still have to tell them where they are so they don't ruin them. And that's why you say, "My teeth are in my hat."

(I know that wasn't particularly worth waiting for, but you have to agree there aren't too many titles that can top it.)

And now I'll leave you hanging in (relative) suspense, not knowing why the boy at the top of the page is wearing a number. Feel free to hazard a guess, but I won't acknowledge it.

Soon, with Saturday & Sunday (Hot Tubs! Music! Food! Video! How can you not be excited?)