Hashland

[Martin Hash]

Everybody wants a theme park named after them: Disneyland, Dollywood, Hersheypark; even Willy World after a former client of mine, Will Vinton, god rest his soul. I got the gene; and though Hashland is either too pretentious or too pedestrian, I built the Bronze Zoo, the Hash Shortline RR, and the mini-Hampton Court Maze. The Illegal Mexican workers who built my house used to make Mickey Mouse ears behind my back when they thought I wasn't looking, and I liked it. That's not all, we got a vintage Thai 3-wheeler bike, Olympic-grade trampoline, civil war canon, and a big, lush, carpet-like lawn. I used the justification that it’s all for my grandkids but that excuse was starting to wear thin after so long and none of my 3 children were even married, though the neighborhood kids were welcome anytime; some even asked first but most just dropped their bikes in the driveway and started running.

A couple years ago we received a High School graduation invitation from a young lady neither my wife, Gwynne, or I could recognize.
“Who is that?” I asked. “Do they have the right address?”
“It’s addresses to the Hash's,” Gwynne replied.
None-the-less, we put a $20 graduation gift in the return envelope and sent it back, but something was tickling the back of my memory.

Bronze Zoo.jpg

Riding Train.jpg

A couple weeks later the mystery girl’s identity was solved. For a dozen years, starting as a little girl, she had been coming over to our house and running through the maze. She lived nearby but not in our exclusive neighborhood, and she had been bringing her schoolmates over to our house out of a kind of pride. She invited us to her graduation because she thought Gwynne & I were like the surrogate grandparent’s house. I must have seen her dozens of times but there were always lots of kids I didn’t know, and as a grown young woman, I didn’t recognize her. I felt both happy and sad; we should have sent her $50.

Maze.JPG

[heydaralon]

Very cool maze! I'll bet I could solve it in less than an hour.

[katarn]

I never have any sort of real response to these posts you make, but I like them. They're a good way to show the sense of humor that's sometimes missing from policy and news discussions.