I don't think she appreciated the irony of her daughter's doomed name.

The last thing we heard before getting up from the sticky red picnic table and leaving Dairy Queen was the (thankfully) empty threat, "Liberty, sit down or I'm gonna smack you and you're not getting any ice cream!" We read the mind of the family dog, a little grey pitbull who sat the first time he was told, "I'm sitting. Can I have her ice cream?"

Earlier at DQ, another family had settled in at the table behind ours, the father complaining vociferously about the "dirty-ass table" before they all joined hands to bless the food. They'd brought take-out from another V-Town dining establishment and kept sending the youngest up to the counter to get, not ice cream, but napkins and utensils.

I don't which is the more "Vallejo" of the two family activities mentioned above...or maybe it was neither, but rather the fact that I knew, just by smell, that the take-out meal of the latter was Chicken Express.

After 11 years, I'm a part of this town and it's a part of me. You can't spell Vallejo without...