My Story Part 3 – Grandma

  

As the twig is bent so grows the tree. --  My grandma was a powerful force on my formative years and my life took a certain direction because of her. She was a rough old gal who cussed like a sailor, dipped snuff and used a 3 pound coffee can for a spittoon. She was loud, opinionated, and eccentric. She was my cheerleader.  She was in my corner.   I adored her. I have always felt that she singled me out from her 9 other grand kids for special attention. Yet, I think all the others felt the same. On Saturday mornings my sisters and I would go grocery shopping with grandma. We could help ourselves to candy bars and eat them right there in the store. We gave the wrappers to grandma and she paid for them at the check out. Once home with the groceries it was soda floats for all of us. She bought orange soda, strawberry, cola , and root beer in those big Mother's Pride bottles and we had our favorite over ice cream in a tall glass. We slurped them up with a new invention, the “flex” straw.

Feeling special didn't exempt me from suffering the consequences of my actions like when I and my two cousins were playing with squirt guns at Grandma's house and made the mistake of squirting her.  She broke our guns and laughed at us when we cried. Once we climbed up her peach tree and made so much commotion the hard green peaches began falling to the ground. She picked them up and knocked us out of the tree with them. Our love for her was unfazed.

Because of my precocious reading ability Grandma bought me a Little Golden Book every week.

Over the years we spent a lot of time at the library. My favorite book from those times is The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton Porter. That book was so real to me because it takes place at the sea shore and I could visualize the story unfolding on the sands of  Hermosa Beach where I lived and the Palos Verdes peninsula  nearby. I've recommended this book to the the grand kids but the Little Scout is no match for Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen.

                                                          Redondo Beach public library

 We went through a science fiction phase and our favorite from those years was The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. We talk about that book for years. As I grew older she introduced me to books like Cannery Row and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. I was finding books on my own by then and recommended them to Grandma. She got a kick out of Phillip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. We had long discussions about books by Henry David Thoreau, Alan Watts, and Robert Ardrey.

Palos Verdes Peninsula

Ada Slay 1949, my grandma

Historic Perspective:

When we were reading The Keeper of the Bees my uncle Bob was fighting in Korea.

The year we read Portnoy's Complaint  Neal Armstrong walked on the moon.

(To be continued)

note: This project has turned out to be more difficult than I first imagined. When you start digging in the memory closet you find things unthought of for years. So, I'll have to decide whether to bring out the skeletons or just push them back into the corner of the closet..

Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult.  In actual life it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.

C.G. Jung

My Story (part 2)

I suppose before I begin my story I should establish the context from which my life evolved and took shape. I was born in 1945 a few days after atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the day before the Japanese announced their surrender to the Allied Forces. The war that brought employment to my family was grinding to a stop and leaving our family as well as many others without resources. The last job in Oklahoma my father worked at was spreading grease over the fuselages and wings of the bombers that had been manufactured at the Douglas Aircraft factory at Tinker's Field in Oklahoma City. The grease was to preserve the skin of the airplanes that would never see action because the war and my father's job had come to an end.

An uncle who had also worked for Douglas Aircraft learned that the company was still in operation and hiring workers in Long Beach, California so he traveled to the sunshine state and was soon working and doing well. When they heard the news my parents and grand parents started making plans to make the move. In 1947 with my grand parents and an aunt driving a Model A Ford pick up truck loaded with belongings and my dad driving a 1933 Ford sedan they set out for a new life. The sedan broke down in Arizona and Dad had to sell it and buy passage for the family on a Greyhound bus. He continued the trip in the truck with Grandpa and Grandma and my mother managed the long bus ride to get me and my three sisters to California with the help of her younger sister.

A fourth sister was born in 1948

Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.

Joseph Campell

My Story

It's time for me to write my story. I'll be 70 years old soon and since I'm experiencing short term memory loss and the general befuddlement that comes with the passing of years I think it best to put to paper things that I've thought and experienced over the years before the inexorable mental and physical frailties take their toll. I've heard people say that they wished their grand parents or parents had written down the history of the family before they died. So many valuable stories fade away and are forgotten. Very few families have a written history. What I want to write is not a linear memoir or autobiography set in chronological order, but a mental connecting the dots of my life and my perception of the world around me that would give me, and any curious family member or reader, some idea of how I got to this place in life, both geographically and psychologically. So, in the coming weeks and months I'll be gathering my thoughts in to a semblance of order. Maybe I'll throw in a photo or two.

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."

-- John Adams

Gracen and Jenna's workshop

Dorothy bought this table at an auction to display potted plants on the

front porch, but it has become a place where Gracen and Jennna

create delectable dirt meals or scientific formulas.

There will be a time when loud-mouthed, incompetent people seem to be getting the best of you. When that happens, you only have to be patient and wait for them to self destruct. It never fails.

 
-- Richard Rybolt

April Blooms

Quince

Pink Dafodils

I think these are called Jonquils

Tulips