It’s amazing how much you can learn about someone while enjoying a meal of chicken fingers and fries.

Last week, I got the pleasure of having lunch with Judy Lane at the Chuck Wagon Restaurant in Livermore Falls. The occasion? Judy, who lives in Jay, won a Sun Journal B-Section contest by correctly spotting 19 errors in a mess of a paragraph I had written myself. So, as I made the drive to Livermore Falls from Lewiston, I was expecting to find a retired English teacher waiting to swat me on the nose with a dictionary.

Nope. While Judy is a top grammarian, her chosen profession was nursing. Obstetrics, in particular. It’s a field in which she worked for longer than I’ve been alive. Did she like it? Yes, she did. No regrets at all.

I found out other things about Judy while she enjoyed her fish and chips.

She has three sons, six granddaughters and 10 great-grandchildren – seven boys and three girls, two of them being identical twins. She likes dogs, but cats not so much. She longs to go to Hawaii and Ireland, but hasn’t yet figured out a way to drive to those places. Why is driving important? Judy likes to do it.

When she retired after roughly 50 years of nursing, she bought a new car and convinced her husband to drive around the country with her. It took them six weeks, which they split up by essentially sofa surfing with friends and relatives. Now she wants to drive straight through the middle of the country to see some of the places she missed.

But what am I doing telling you all this? Judy tells it so much better.

How long were you in nursing? From 1959 until about 5 or 6 years ago. (Can’t remember the date, it’s age you know.)

How many babies do you guess you’ve seen born? I stopped counting at 700, but that was about 20-plus years before I retired.

What states did you visit when you drove around the country? Oh, my! We went through: Maine, New Hampshire, Mass., N.Y., Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Canada, back into Washington, Montana, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and home to Maine. Visited friends or relatives in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Washington, British Columbia and then home.

Tourist places that we stopped at: Grand Canyon (a big wow!), Mount Rushmore, T. Roosevelt National Park – nice statue of him in the wheelchair with his dog beside him, through the Amish country, but didn’t stop – lots of black horses and buggies, and then glad to be home. Great time, even good weather throughout.

What was your favorite place during that trip? All of it was favorite, as we had never been to those places before.

How did you get so good at grammar? My 6th- and 8th-grade teacher, Mrs. Verna Grant, was an excellent teacher and made sure you DID learn.

Did Mark have any weird dining habits? That is between Mark and me, don’t you think?