The Slice: Try floating to the finish line

Rene Penna overheard a 5-year-old boy refer to Bloomsday as “Balloons Day.”

“Sounds like fun to me,” she said.

Maybe Sunday could be both.

Getting to be taller than a parent: “My dad was 5 feet 8 inches tall for most of his life,” wrote Bob Wilson. “I topped out at 5 feet 7 inches. But sometime over the last decade, he started growing shorter, and now has lost 2-3 inches and I am taller than he is. He will turn 90 later this year. It feels very strange to look down at the person I looked up to so many years.”

Linda Rise wrote, “I was 45 when my height exceeded that of my dad’s. He was 85. Somehow, I don’t think it was my height that changed.”

“I passed my mom in inches when I was about 15,” wrote Barbara Keene. “But in stature? Never.”

If you put a “For sale” sign out in front of your house: “Some or most of my neighbor friends would ask, ‘What tools are you selling?’ ” wrote Jack Newcomb.

In the matter of kids of military officers and children of enlisted personnel: Most responding readers who grew up as one or the other said the young people usually got along fine and that rank awareness was an adult consideration.

“The biggest difference I saw was between the military kids and our civilian counterparts,” wrote Hank Greer.

There’s a tendency to think of anything having to do with the military as being ultra-conservative. But at certain times and in certain places, “base kids” – accustomed to racial integration and having lived in different parts of the country – stood out as a decidedly progressive social influence in “town” schools.

Before turning and heading for home: “The halfway mark of my daily walk with Duke, our Lab, is at the top of a hill,” wrote Judy Pederson of Sandpoint. “He knows that he will get a dog biscuit there and immediately stops and sits when we reach the summit. Of course, I pat his head.”

Today’s Slice question: What percentage of those attending your wedding were friends of the parents?