Last time we were here in Australia we had the worst rental car experience of all time. I wrote about it then and you can read about the entire debacle here.

In quick summary, these Aussie rental car sheisters overcharged my credit card by $9000 and forced us to drive all the way across Australia to return the car in Perth instead of allowing us to drop it off at their local South Australia office.

But a few days ago, I wrote about my farsighted farmer father’s fortuitious foray into the field of fertilizer, and it made me realize I’ve had another rental car experience that was worse than the one here in Australia. Much worse, in fact.

Please strap yourself into the Way Back Machine as we set the dial for 1966:

During my teenage years, my dad made me work on the dairy every Saturday and Sunday during the school year, plus seven days a week during the summer. God, I hated it. From my perspective, the only good thing that came from that work was that he paid me the same wage he paid all his other workers. Combine that with the fact that I’m a compulsive saver and you will realize that I probably had far more disposable income than most of the kids I went to school with.

So when I was a senior in high school, I emptied out my bank account and paid cash for a brand new, bright yellow 1965 Chevrolet Malibu. This was back when the Malibu was a cool, sporty car — long before it became the bloated model grandparents drive today.

About a year later, my parents informed me that they were going out of town for a few days and that I was being left in charge of the dairy. I was given strict orders to keep an eye on things, and the last words spoken by my dad before he climbed into his car were, “Don’t go anywhere.”

Of course, I was a teenage boy, so I completely ignored his explicit instructions. As soon as their car disappeared around the corner, I jumped into my new car and headed for San Diego, about 100 miles away, to visit a buddy.

Halfway there a car stopped in front of me and I had to slam on my brakes to avoid a rear end collision. Unfortunately, the driver behind me did not follow suit and I looked into my rear view mirror just in time to see his car slam into mine at 60 miles per hour. The crash was deafening. It curled the rear end of my car up into my rear window.

The tow truck driver hauled my now destroyed Malibu back to San Bernardino and dropped me off just up the street from the dairy. I knew, however, that my wrecked car wasn’t my biggest worry, because I still had to tell my dad that I had disobeyed his direct orders.

I had it all thought out. I decided I would allow my parents to return home, relax a little, tell me about their trip out of town, and only then would I gently reveal what had happened. Maybe after an hour or two. In my fantasy, it was going to go perfectly.

Then they walked in the door. My dad’s first words were, “Where’s your car?”

For god’s sake, man, he didn’t even bother with a caring, “How are you?” Nor did he waste time with any sweet, loving words about how much he had missed me.

Nope. He wasn’t in the house five seconds when he said, “Where’s your car?”

I had no choice but to reveal the truth in all its horror. Not only had my bright yellow 1965 Malibu been destroyed, but it had been destroyed while I was disobeying his orders.

Much to my surprise, he took it very calmly. He slowly shook his head from side to side as if to demonstrate his extreme disappointment in me. And then he said, “I’m going to have to think about this overnight.”

I didn’t sleep much that night, worrying about what kind of horrible punishment he would mete out. In my mind, it might be flogging. It might be death. But I knew it was going to be horrible and even worse, I knew that I deserved whatever happened.

So the next morning he shocked me by saying, “You scrimped and saved for 16 years to buy that car and now you wrecked it. I figure you’ve been punished enough.”

Oh, my god. Was it possible that my dad had suddenly been transformed into a pussycat?

No such luck. He continued.

”But you still need a car to get to school and back. So here’s what I’m going to do. You’re going to drive the shit truck until your car is fixed. And you’re going to pay me $2 a day in rent.”

And that’s exactly what happened. I was forced to drive his dented, manure-covered dump truck everywhere I went for the next several months. And even worse, all the money I made milking cows went back to him to pay the rent he charged me on that godawful vehicle.

I’m reasonably confident that I may be the only person in the history of the world who has ever paid 100% of his income to rent a dented, shit-covered dump truck.

Definitely the worst car rental experience in history.

Our friends Lisa and Daryl Mustard took us to an International Football game at the beautiful Adelaide Oval. Daryl’s employer was one of the game’s primary sponsors, so we got some very nice seats in the shade, midfield, in the second deck.

What, you may ask, is International Football?

None of us really knew. Luckily, the Mustards brought along their 17-year old daughter Ebony and her friend Bailey, who knows everything about Aussie Rules Football and its cousin, International Football.

According to Bailey, International Football is an Irish game that’s an odd hybrid of what Americans call soccer and Aussie Rules Football.

That being said, please don’t ask what Aussie Rules Football is, because Jamie and I have never been able to figure it out. All we know is that each side fields a team of fifteen big, burly men who wear jerseys and tiny shorts. They frantically run around a huge oval field — apparently at random — while whacking the ball with their fists or running with it until they are tackled to the ground or kicking it to other parts of the field for reasons we cannot comprehend.

Unlike American football, the action is non-stop. And also unlike American football, the players wear absolutely no padding. None.

Far as I can tell, these guys are some sort of genetic supermen bred specifically to play this fast, violent game, because mere mortals could not withstand the kind of extreme physical punishment they take in the course of four 18 minute quarters.

Many years ago the ill-fated Ontario International Speedway staged a day-long series of motocross races. It was the first time I ever heard the word “motocross.” My boss at my first ad agency wrote a brilliant radio commercial that started with the words “There’s only one rule in motocross…(LONG PAUSE)…And nobody knows what it is.”

That’s kind of how we felt after the game. Our understanding of the rules was only slightly more complete than it had been before the game.

But the hotdogs were delicious. The Adelaide Oval was a great. And the company couldn’t have been better. We had many, many laughs with the Mustard clan (even if they do make fun of our American accents).

It was a great day.

As the Aussie team ran onto the field they were greeted by this tender Australian ballad.

I love the contrast between the sparkling new Adelaide Oval and the 150-year old St Peter’s Cathedral in the background. Keeping the stadium’s original manual scoreboard right next to the new digital scoreboard was a very nice touch.

Here’s something unusual — football players all standing for the national anthem.

And as the game ended (with a 63-53 Aussie victory), they left the field with Men At Work’s classic blaring from the Oval’s loudspeakers. (Yes, they played MAW’s original song, but I found this cool version online, so what the heck.)

This morning I walked down to our neighborhood IGA grocery store to buy some bread. Two doors this side of the grocery store, I noticed a young woman down on her knees on the sidewalk taking a photo of something in front of the hardware store. I couldn’t tell what it was.

But as I approached, her husband, who was standing about five feet behind her, motioned me into the street.

“Don’t use the sidewalk,” he hollered. “There’s a brown snake sticking its head out of the wall.”

I wondered, of course, why he allowed his wife to get down on her knees so perilously close to the deadly serpent, but to each his own.

“They’re killers,” he insisted. “One bite can kill you.”

From what I’ve read and heard, this is true. One bite from a brown snake, especially a young one, will cause a relatively quick, but incredibly painful death. So painful, I’ve been told, that you’ll pray to die even more quickly.

So I had to laugh when I walked back up Sturt Street to see the outstanding precautions the owners of the hardware store had taken to protect their customers and other unwary pedestrians:

They put a cheap plastic chair in the middle of the sidewalk. Taped to it was a small handwritten sign that said, “Danger. Snake in wall.”

Oddly enough, the handwriting was so small that passersby had to get within striking distance of the snake in order to read the warning.

But I guess you get a bit blasé when you live in a country filled with so many deadly animals. A mere killer snake hanging out at a neighborhood hardware store apparently doesn’t merit too much of a warning.

Here’s how I described Australian iced coffee in a blog item a few years ago:

This is an Australian iced coffee. They’re so good that I’d be faced with a difficult decision if forced to choose between Jamie and one of these little treasures.

Rest assured, this is no American iced coffee where they just refrigerate regular coffee and maybe put some ice cubes in the glass. No, this is something entirely different. Entirely better. As if it were created by superior beings who came to earth just to give us this precious gift.

Start with espresso, pour in a little milk, add big scoop of ice cream, then top it all off with whipped cream and sprinkle a little chocolate on top.

Ahhhh, but who makes the finest iced coffee in the Barossa Valley? I’ve traversed the length and breadth of the Barossa sipping and sampling all the best (conducting scientific research can be so gruelling) to determine the answer to that question. After giving the subject much thought, I have narrowed it down to four contenders.

An iced coffee from Darling’s in Tanunda. Prepared by Antonio, Mista barista. Lots of ice cream, whipped cream, coffee beans on top, but ice cubes. Why ice cubes?

Iced coffee from Fleur Social in Nuriootpa. Prepared by barista Peri. Not much ice cream, no whipped cream, nice layered presentation, and no ice cubes.

Iced coffee from Bean Addiction in Nuriootpa. Prepared by barista Damien. Very little ice cream, lots of whipped cream and a liberal dose of chocolate sprinkled on top. But no ice cubes.

Iced coffee from El Estanco in Greenock. Prepared by barista Tilly. A tiny bit of ice, a big ol’ dollop of ice cream, no whipped cream, no chocolate powder on top.

As you can see, the variations of iced coffee are endless, and always delicious. I’ve done extensive research and these four are the best four I’ve run across.

Why, oh, why don’t they serve these beauties in America?

Pindarie is a family-owned winery just few miles outside of Tanunda. We love to wander over on a quiet weekday for lunch and a glass of wine.

It has a beautiful view across the western edge of the Barossa Valley with sheep grazing on the left and vineyards growing on the right.

Like all Aussie wineries, Pindarie has a dog. His name is Patch. Do not fall for his canine charms. He’s a manipulative little devil who sweet talks everyone into feeding him scraps under the table.

There used to be a sign on Century Boulevard a few blocks east of Los Angeles International Airport. It was famous, almost as famous as the HOLLYWOOD sign, and was known around the world for its…uhhhh…creativity.

It sat outside a strip joint and in huge, black block letters screamed, “LIVE NUDE NUDES.”

During the latter days of that sign’s existence, I worked at the Los Angeles office of a huge, international ad agency. The president and executive creative director of the agency often flew into L.A. from Chicago and passed that sign every time he drove into town. It bugged him. For years. Not because he was offended by nude dancers, but because he thought it was so poorly written and left an unclear message.

He was semi-famous in the advertising industry and wrote so beautifully that a major publishing house released a book filled with the brilliant memos he had written to his creative staffs around the world.

The sign bothered him so much that he eventually wrote one of those memos in which he analyzed and dissected all the possible variations of the LIVE NUDE NUDES sign. DEAD NUDE NUDES. DEAD CLOTHED NUDES. LIVE CLOTHED NUDES. And so on and so forth. The fact that I still remember it more than 40 years later tells you how funny it was.

So when I spotted this hand-lettered sign propped up against a fence post just around the corner from our cottage, I understood exactly how my former employer felt:

QUALITY HORSE MANURE

I can imagine the memo my former boss would have written about that headline.

He would have asked if QUALITY describes the horse or the manure. He would have railed about economy of expression and insisted that the headline would have been stronger and the communication clearer if its author had eliminated the word “QUALITY.” He would have asked what the opposite of “QUALITY HORSE MANURE” was, and observed that it might be “SHITTY HORSE MANURE.” And then he surely would have noted that the latter headline seems redundant.

I can tell you this with a certain degree of authority because I am one of the few people you will ever meet whose family made a living selling shit. Consider it proof of two things: (1) My illustrious farmer father was a very smart man, and (2) He would do almost anything to provide for his family.

I am about to reveal something that many, perhaps most, city folks may not be aware of. I hope you are sitting down, because this revelation may come as a bit of a shock.

Ready. OK. Here we go.

Milk is not the only thing that cows produce. In fact, the amount of milk they produce pales in comparison to the prodigious piles of poop they produce. Put a few hundred cows together in a pasture and it quickly piles up, and on most dairies, becomes unmanageable.

All the other dairy farmers in Southern California eventually solved their common problem by going in together and buying a large plot of land to which they hauled their excess excrement. The pile grew so quickly that the formerly flat parcel of land soon became home to a pile of poop hundreds of feet high. They named it — I swear that this is true — Mount Shitney.

But back to my father’s bovine byproduct business.

I have distinct memories of him standing on the front porch greeting neighbors who walked over to the dairy from the adjacent residential neighborhood to complain about the odors that frequently wafted across the street.

My dad would look confused by their complaints, inhale deeply, and with great conviction say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Smells like money to me.”

The angry neighbors always walked away looking defeated, suspecting that the smell of manure would still be in the neighborhood long after they had moved away.

But how, you may ask, did wily ol’ Bill deYong make money selling something other dairy farmers had to pay to get rid of? Simple. He sold it by the pick-up load to people who needed to fertilize their yards and gardens.

In the early days, it was hard work. Filthy, back-breaking work. He had to shovel it by hand into the back of his pick-up, drive to the buyer’s home, and then shovel it back out of the pick-up onto whatever spot the buyer pointed to.

Business boomed and before long he could sell more shit than he could shovel.

So he innovated. He designed and built an elevated grate under which he could back his truck. Then he scraped up a big scoop of fertilizer behind his tractor and drove it up a specially-constructed ramp and over the grate, which allowed the fertilizer to drop through the grate and directly into the bed of his truck, immediately reducing a process to about 30 seconds that had formerly taken about 30 minutes.

There was so much demand for his fertilizer that he had to innovate again. He purchased a pick-up truck without a bed and had it custom-fitted with a small dump truck bed.

Voila. With those two innovations he became the shit king of San Bernardino. He sold as much manure as his cows could manufacture. An efficiency expert would have said that his distribution was constrained by bottlenecks in production.

Ahhh, but how did the good residents of San Bernardino know about his fertilizer business? That brings us back to that sign shown in the photo at the top of this blog item.

For many years my dad ran a tiny classified ad every Monday through Friday in the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram newspaper. I can quote it from memory:

FINE DAIRY FERTILIZER
$4 per pick-up load.
Talbot 5-1962

My dad, the uneducated farmer, clearly understood advertising better than his smartass teenage son did. When I asked him why he needed the word “FINE” in his headline, he looked at me like I was his idiot child and said, “I don’t want anyone to think it’s shitty fertilizer.”

Hard to argue with his logic because the phone rang day and night. We had to keep a pen and a pad of paper next to the phone just to keep track of the ever-increasing number of fertilizer orders that rolled in.

Yes, you might say my father was a manure entrepreneur. The Poobah of Poop. An expert in excrement. Number one when it came to number two. A crapitalist. The Don of dung. The GM of BMs. The Captain of Caca. The Pharoah of Feces. The Top Guy of Cow Pies. A regular defecation sensation.

Many years later, he was in a contemplative mood one day while we were having lunch. He was trying, without much luck, to understand the advertising business I had gone into. He looked at me, his brow furrowed, and said, “What’s the biggest difference between what I did for a living and what you do?”

Without the slightest hesitation I said, “You deal in cow shit. I deal in bullshit.”

He laughed, which was always one of my greatest pleasures.

No shit.

UPDATE: In the comments section (right under the headline), Ray mentioned Bandini Mountain, which was the sanitized advertising name for the less acceptable Mount Shitney. In case you thought I was making the whole thing up, here’s a 1970s Bandini Fertilizer commercial that was actually filmed on Mount Shitney.

ANOTHER UPDATE: We sold the family farm after my dad passed away. The state of California, in its extreme wisdom, provides a special tax deduction on the sale of farm property. They denied us that lower tax level because they said we had not proved to their satisfaction that the property had been a farm. The dispute went back and forth for months with no resolution. We sent them photos the farm, newspaper articles that mentioned the deYong dairy, affidavits from neighbors, and copies of tax returns showing that my parents’ primary source of income was farming. None of that made any impression on the leeches at the California Board of Equalization. Then our realtor had an idea. “Send them this geological report,” he said. The buyers had commissioned the survey and the final report noted that a pile of cow manure twenty feet high was located on the southwest corner of the property. A couple weeks later we received a letter notifying us that the State now accepted that the land had been a farm and that we had been granted the extra tax deduction. In other words, we were able to profit off my dad’s fertilizer business even after his death. I am not shitting you.

We’re locals! We’re locals! We feel like Sally Field standing up at the Academy Awards and saying, “You like us. You really like us.”

We are now official members of the Barossa Co-op, a fancy new grocery store in the heart of Nuriootpa. Think of it as an Australian Gelson’s (for our California friends) or an Australian Market Street (for our Texas friends). In other words, it ain’t no ordinary store.

What makes the Co-op even more impressive is the fact that there are only about 20,000 people in the Barossa Valley and I wouldn’t have thought that so few people could support such a fancy schmancy operation.

But back to us being locals.

Our first trip to the Barossa was about three weeks long. I was talking to the owner of Tanunda’s local dry cleaner one day and when he found out we were staying for three weeks, he said, “Why so long?”

“Because we want to stay long enough to be considered locals,” I responded.

He laughed a sardonic laugh.

“I’ve been here for 30 years, mate, and they still don’t consider me a local.”

Well, maybe so. But we are now members of the Co-op now and we think of ourselves as locals. No matter what the locals may think.

We really love Acorn, the hundred year old stone cottage we rent when we’re in the Barossa Valley. This is our third extended stay here, but the first one almost didn’t happen.

We’d stayed at Byhurst, a cottage in Tanunda, the next village down the road, a couple times. But then its owners sold it and it became the permanent residence of the new owners. The cottage we stayed at during our next visit wasn’t nearly as nice and its owners were, well, to be diplomatic, very odd. So we decided to find a different place to stay.

Luckily, we wandered into Angaston one afternoon. Within about ten minutes we agreed, “This is perfect. Let’s stay here next time we come back to the Barossa.”

Easier said than done.

After we returned to the United States, I began scouring the internet hoping to find a gorgeous, restored stone cottage near Angaston’s main street. I finally found Acorn and thought it was exactly what we wanted. Jamie agreed, so I sent the owners an email telling them that we wanted to rent their cottage for three months.

They’re going to love this, I thought. Three months of 100% occupancy, no cleaning every few days after short-term renters leave, and no commissions on the rental to the website.

Instead I got into a long exchange of emails with the owner, who did not seem to want to rent to us. He demanded that we pay for the entire rental up front. He demanded that we provide him with travel insurance that would pay him the entire rental fee if we flaked out. In fact, he made it clear that he thought the entire concept of a three month rental was too odd to be legitimate. “No one’s ever rented our cottage for more than three weeks,” he said.

He insisted that he would need to speak to me on the phone in order to get a better read on the situation.

Although this seemed like more trouble than it was worth, we really wanted to rent his cottage, so I agreed to have the conversation.

Ken called me in California one quiet Sunday morning and we talked for about 45 minutes. He grilled me like Joe Friday taking down a perp. It went on and on and on. I did my best to reassure him that he had nothing to worry about because I was also a landlord and that we would show his cottage the same kind of respect we show our own home. Blah, blah, blah.

In the end, he seemed somewhat mollified, but still demanded that we pay him upfront for the entire three month rental and that we purchase that travel insurance policy.

Then everything changed. Out of the blue, Ken sent me an email saying that they would love to have us rent their cottage and proposing an easy monthly payment schedule. He never mentioned the travel insurance again. Of course, I followed his lead and never mentioned it again, either, because I had done a little research and found out that what he wanted was prohibitively expensive.

We arrived in Angaston and were very pleased to find that Acorn was even more beautiful than it looked on the internet. Ken and Sue, his wife, had done a tremendous job restoring the cottage to its original condition. And its location, just a couple hundred yards off Angaston’s main street, was exactly what we wanted.

Ken and Sue and Jamie and I quickly became friends. He’s exactly the kind of intelligent oddball that I love. She’s smart and tough and an absolute pleasure to be with.

Despite our budding friendship, I let a couple months go by without mentioning Ken’s earlier demands. But we eventually became good enough friends that I thought it was safe to broach the subject.

“Hey, Ken,” I said, “What made you change your mind about getting payment upfront and demanding travel insurance?”

He laughed.

“Funny story,” he began. “We went to lunch with some friends one day and they brought along another couple, acquaintances that we didn’t really know very well. At one point I said, ‘We have a very odd situation with our cottage. We think it’s some kind of scam. An American couple wants to rent it for three months.’”

“Is it Jim and Jamie?” the acquaintance asked.

“Yes, it is,” Ken stammered, dumbfounded that the acquaintance would pick our names out of 300 million potential American renters.

“No problem,” the acquaintance said. “They rented Byhurst from us several times. Lovely people.”

Turns out those acquaintances were Ray and Polly Dundon, who started out as our landlords in Tanunda, but had become good friends.

“I decided that if you’re good enough for Ray and Polly,” Ken told me, “you’re good enough for us.”

Right back at you, Ken.

If you’re good enough for Ray and Polly, you’re good enough for us. Well, Sue is definitely good enough for us, but Ken is still on super secret double probation and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

It’s still early spring here in the Barossa Valley, so I pulled over and took a photo when I saw the year’s first leaf popping out of a gnarled old grape vine just north of Angaston. But old and gnarled as this vine may be, it can’t compare to the Barossa’s oldest vines.

The Adelaide Advertiser, the region’s major newspaper, explains:

The Barossa is considered to be the home of some of the oldest vineyards in the world, a point of great pride for the region’s sixth and seventh generation vignerons who carry on the traditions of the original settler grape growers…

But the history simmers with uncertainty about exactly when and where the first vines went into the ground, and even more controversially, which are the longest and oldest survivors still providing valued fruit for the region’s prized shiraz.

The popularly accepted view is that a small plot of shiraz vines at the Langmeil estate north of Tanunda was planted in 1843 and that close to an acre of those 173-year-old vines are still producing grapes for Langmeil’s flagship The Freedom 1843 Shiraz which sells for $125.

The way I remember the story, a disease named phylloxera devastated Europe’s wine industry beginning in the 1860s. South Australia, because it was halfway around the world from Europe and its diseases, and because it began a strict quarantine that prohibited the importation of European grapes and vines, avoided those problems.

As a result, many European vineyards imported and planted cuttings of the disease-free Barossa vines, so it might be said that most of the European wines you order are actually South Australian wines.

And hard as it may be to believe, those same gnarled, old Barossa vines that saved Europe’s wine industry are still alive and producing outstanding grapes 170 years later.

I am just grateful that Jamie has an affinity for things that are old and gnarled.

I used to have a business associate who truly believed he was a genetically and intellectually superior human being who deserved more out of life than lesser beings. Despite our close business relationship, he clearly considered me to be one of those lesser beings.

One time we had a series of business meetings in Manhattan. He flew to New York early in the morning so he could enjoy a day in the big city prior to our meetings. I had some sort of commitments at home in Orange County and had to take a late afternoon flight. By the time I arrived at our hotel, it was sold out and the room I had reserved was unavailable. So they upgraded me to a suite — a big, beautiful suite in a fancy French hotel in the heart of Manhattan.

In the words of my illustrious farmer father, I was shittin’ in high cotton.

My business associate was shocked at the opulence of my suite. He was also angry that it had been given to me, one of those pesky lesser beings, instead of to him. He imperiously demanded that I switch rooms with him. I declined.

I’ve searched my increasingly faulty memory and as far as I can recall, that was the first time I was ever upgraded. But, oh my, how times have changed.

Jamie and I now get upgraded more often than can easily be explained. Flights, hotel rooms, rental cars, you name it, we get upgraded. We’ve never understood why. We just know how much it pisses off whoever is behind us in line.

For example, on this trip we were upgraded from economy to first class on our flight from Antananarivo, Madagascar to Mauritius.

We were upgraded from a studio to a suite, and given champagne to boot, at our hotel in Madeira. (Yeah, ok, maybe this one shouldn’t count because I lied to get the upgrade, but I’m including it anyway because I didn’t ask for it.)

We were upgraded from a studio to a family suite at our hotel on Mauritius.

We were upgraded from a studio to a two-bedroom suite in Broome.

But the best upgrade came when we rented our car in Melbourne. The desk agent upgraded us from a Corolla to a Camry. And then the branch manager came out and said, “If you can wait about fifteen minutes I can upgrade you to a beautiful, new SUV.”

This phenomenon is not unique to our current travels. We get upgraded every time we travel. I even posted a story about it on our last trip.

I’ve given this a lot of thought and can only come up with two possible explanations:

Possible explanation number one: One time we were standing in line waiting to check into a Marriott hotel in Toronto. The person in line in front of us was angrily waving his arms and loudly demanding that the desk agent upgrade him to a suite. The agent politely refused, saying no suites were available. The angry customer eventually took his key and stormed off to his “ordinary” room.

When we checked in, the same agent quietly said, “I’m upgrading you to a suite.”

“Didn’t you tell the last guy that no suites were available?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“So why are you upgrading us,” I asked.

“Because you didn’t ask for anything,” he explained with a smile.

We’ve never asked for an upgrade, but they are consistently given to us. The same business associate I referenced earlier always said, “You don’t ask, you don’t get.” Clearly that is not always true.

Possible explanation number two: Many years ago, Jamie and I were sitting at home one quiet Sunday evening when our phone rang. The caller was a second cousin I had never met — the teenage daughter of a first cousin in Montana.

She was staying with a college friend’s family a few miles from our home, so we jumped in our car and went to visit. We had a very nice time getting to know Suz and her friend and her family.

Turns out they had gone to the beach that day and everywhere they went, someone went out of their way to do something nice for Suz. Her clearly exasperated friend complained that Suz had gotten all the extras and all the attention, but she had been ignored.

“Don’t blame me,” Suz protested. “People just do things for deYongs.”

Jamie and I laughed hysterically because I have said those exact words to her a thousand times.

I can’t explain why people do things for deYongs, but they definitely do. And I guess that includes upgrading their hotels, flights, and rental cars.

Two explanations. Take your choice.