Posted on September 30, 2008 - by Hubba

Bohemian Rhapsody

This post was inspired by my buddy Jim Thorp over at the Yield & Overcome website (http://werdfu.blogspot.com).  He recently did a little piece on chance encounters in faraway places.

Hopefully at some point in this little story, you will see the mental connection…

There are about five predominant bloodlines in South Dakota; Native, Bohemian, Norwegian, German and Irish.  There are smatterings of a few other bloodlines, but they are so minor as to be incidental.  (I don’t mean to sound offensive, that’s really just the way it is.)

I am not Native, Norwegian or German, but I am Irish and Bohemian.  Dad is almost a full-blood Irishman, and Mom is Irish, Bohemian, and a few incidental bloodlines.  So it’s always fun for me or my family to meet Irish/Bohemian crosses.

A few years ago, my sister Steph and I attended the Nebraska Alfalfa Marketing Association Expo in Kearney, NE, which was every bit as exciting as it sounds.  We were manning a booth at the Expo, and across the aisle from us was a booth run by a man named Dan Gillespie.  Dan had somehow talked his parents into helping him man his booth.  His parents, Leo and Margaret, were probably in their seventies.  Margaret’s objective in life was to show pictures of her grandchildren to as many people as she possibly could, and Leo’s was to pretend to be annoyed by Margaret.  Steph and I were enjoying the show immensely, and liked both of them immediately.

The second day traffic was kind of slow, and Margaret wandered over to our booth.  At some point the conversation turned to the Gillespie’s trip to Ireland to try and find their relatives.  She then went on to lament that they had not as yet visited Czechoslovakia, home of her Bohemian ancestors.

We were in home territory now.  Steph asked Margaret if she had ever made kolaches, a hollowed-out sticky bun with your choice of fruit preserves in the middle.

Steph had hardly gotten the word kolache out of her mouth when Margaret straightened up like she’d just been zapped, turned on her heel and marched straight over to her son’s booth across the aisle.  It seemed to us that something we had said offended poor Margaret.

We were trying to figure out what we had done while Margaret rummaged around underneath a table over at her son’s booth.  After a few moments she retrieved something from between the agricultural paraphernalia under the table.

It was a Rubbermaid tub, one of the big ones, full of kolaches that she had made.  We were stunned.  There were several different varieties, including pineapple-filled, her newest experiment that she was very proud of.

I bet Steph and I ate half the tub.  Across the aisle, Leo just rolled his eyes.

So you see, home is never very far away.