Edi commented: I would love it if you could tell us more about your family and what your favorite things were as a kid.
I have wanted to write more about my family but I didn’t know how to do it. Like how to do it right or in a way that would be interesting or enjoyable. It got me thinking about how we remember things.
We liked to play with the hose and the inner tube for hours in the back yard. No, I didn’t wear a shirt for as long as I could get away with it.
I notice often that something from current time brings little flashbacks. I don’t remember big long stories, all the words, or the diagrams of understanding. I remember a look, a smell, emotion, and pieces of events.
I remember opening the front door of our house and having food smells, good cooking immediately waft up my nose. It felt welcoming and abundant.
Let’s look at pictures.
Back to current time for a moment.
We dug the irrigation ditches by hand at the Quaker Meetinghouse for a landscaping project and when I say we, it was not me, until later when I had to dig a T off the main channel, a mere foot or so. This is hard packed earth of clay and rock and I was on my knees reaching deep and low, scraping with hand tools. It seemed impossible and I had the urge to run for the hills but I was with committed people so I stayed. The scraping hand tool I used was exactly the same tool I had stuck in my foot one time when I was playing in the yard at about 7 years old.
We sort of mixed play and chores when I as growing up, which was usually just fine.
The photo below was me and brother Lance washing the weathervane on our small A-frame in the back yard. My mom also had us paint the fence with a bucket of water. She followed Dr. Spock’s advice.
As I settled myself into digging, I thought of how much I like people who take on things like peacemaking, using hand tools to mind tree roots and avoid other damage. I enjoy democrats working for democracy. I like those who pay attention and lend help to rivers and oceans. Some causes seems impossible. I love the people who take on the impossible, the preposterous, the hard, the things that we may or may not see to their fruition.
My family weren’t activists that I recall. We did read the paper every day and discuss. One reason was we got it for free because my dad worked as a photojournalist. His assignments did bring issues into my awareness.
Dad always had a camera and took tons of photos- we enjoyed being his subjects (at least I don’t remember anyone hating it).
I learned how to read through comics. We all loved comics. My dad bought us collections of Orphan Annie, Popeye, Superman, Captain Marvel, and a bunch more, those were just my favorites. Oh, also we had many books of Peanuts and Doonesbury. I didn’t get Doonesbury until I was older and it definitely informed me. I loved the political wit.
[I started this not really knowing what I would write and so I’m just going with whatever comes up].
I am lucky because I have a huge volume of photographs from my family. This helps me remember.
My mom taught me how to garden. I didn’t really take to it right away. I liked hanging out near the garden and talking while she worked with a hoe or shovel. I liked watching her make something happen and I wanted to be like that. I initially had jobs like find the rocks and remove them. We were on an old riverbed so there were endless rocks. We made piles of them. I don’t remember where they all ended up.
Once I learned to shovel and hoe I felt like I had some pull in the creation of food. This was in our back yard, the northwest corner by the “western shed” which held a work table, old wagon wheels, pick axes, shovels, rakes, gas station signs from the 30s (grandpa’s Texaco) with gas prices frozen in time: 35 cents.
My dad often referred to the geographical locations (NSEW) when identifying things, which I couldn’t grasp when very young and I found it annoying but eventually figured it out when I memorized north. I still guide by north.
I remember doing chores together- gardening, chopping wood. Sometimes it was batty stuff like we would drag our parents brass bed into the backyard and hand polish it in the sunshine.
Not a chore, but batty, we liked to eat outside in the summer and sometimes we set up our picnic table in the front yard and ate dinner while waving at our neighbors driving by. It was a dead-end street so at least low traffic. We thought it was funny. I learned about humor and wordplay from the frequent bantering we did amongst ourselves. I did imitations of Flip Wilson’s Geraldine. In my teens I would perform for friends as an evangelical preacher. Huh, I had forgotten about that. Anyway, it got laughs.
Today at the Farmer’s market I bought two Himalayan marigolds (these get big!). I had already forgotten that my brother told me about them and we both thought they were too cool as our mom planted marigolds around the garden for slug control and a border accent. I didn’t follow this example until now and the two plants will be huge and I will remember all the gardens I grew up with.
Last photo: Lance on movie set with Lee Marvin. This was when you could take your kid to work and it was Lance’s lucky day!
Past/present