The stories

Uno wants to know the stories of my youth. "Tell me about when you were a baby," she asked me last night. I told her I didn't remember much of being a baby because I was so little at the time. I like that she's asking, though. I've always loved hearing stories of my parents' lives:

About how, growing up in California, my mom used to babysit for celebrities (Grizzly Adams, for one, and a neighbor who won a game show -- Queen for a Day -- because her life was the most pitifully sad among that day's group of contestants). About her first kiss, behind the San Gabriel JB's Big Boy hamburger place, with a guy who swore his dad worked for the CIA and/or wrote famous pop songs. About her college semester abroad in Salzburg, Austria and her travels all over Europe -- about the time she and a friend accidentally got locked in a museum when it closed for the afternoon siesta. About the letter she wrote home to her mother when she met the man she'd eventually marry: "He's nice, but he's sure not Jim" (her other boyfriend, lol).

Or about my dad's childhood in Oregon and Idaho -- how he nearly drowned in a creek as a toddler, but at the critical moment his brother grabbed him by the toe, thinking he was a fish, and pulled him out of the water. Or that his family lived without indoor plumbing until he was 10 years old (that was 1959, folks -- doesn't that seem kind of late?). Or how he raised his hand in school once, so proud to know the answer to a difficult science question because one of his older brothers had told him all about it, only to find out that his brother was a big fat liar, lol. Or about how my dad, the most conscientious and responsible man I know, rammed the Dairy Queen delivery truck straight into the brick wall of the Nampa Dairy Queen (mistaking Drive for Reverse, apparently) at his first after-school job.

And not just my parents, but the ones before them: The apocryphal tale of my mom's mom meeting her dad as a Navy nurse during WWII (my grandpa was in the Navy, but my grandma was not; they actually met in college after the war). The true story of my dad's mom upstaging her sister's wedding and how the two of them didn't speak for something like 20 years after. A great great grandmother who, on one of her first evenings as a servant in a fancy house, accidentally spilled hot gravy on Lady So-and-So (who, the gggma recalled in her memoirs, was very gracious about the whole thing, phew).

"So tell me about when you were in first grade," my future first grader asked me.

I told her about how I was among three winners (Bobby Thompson was another, and I can't remember the third) of a reading contest. I didn't read the most books, but I read the most pages. Our prize was to go to dinner and a movie with our teacher (I'm sure that wouldn't be allowed anymore -- crazy liability issues there). I wanted to see Savannah Smiles, but the others had already seen it so they chose that movie about an East German family escaping to the West in a hot air balloon (which seems like a weird choice for six-year-olds, but whatever) instead. They let me choose the restaurant: Annabelle's. I'd been there once with my dad; it was the fanciest place I knew. I wore a new blue dress, and promptly stained it with a squirt from a cherry tomato.

I told her about how I had the best handwriting my teacher had ever seen. My lines were perfectly straight, the short ones not too tall, the tall ones not too short. My rounded letters were perfectly rounded. Everyone fawned over my beautiful letters, their proportion and spacing. Instead of As, Bs, and Cs, we were graded on a 1-3 scale (with one being equivalent to an A); I earned an unprecedented 1+ in penmanship.

I told her about having hula hoop races with my friends Jenny Gardner and Sarah Thornell at recess. We used to stand them up and race down the field, spurring the hoops along with us, in our very own Hula Hoop Olympics. ("We did that once in gym!" Uno said.)

I have lots more stories to tell Uno. Some day (when she's older) she'll hear the story of my first kiss; of my adventures in Europe as an unaccompanied minor and how I missed my flight home, leaving poor 16yo me stranded in London all by myself with £20 to my name; of my life as the lone Mormon (or student from west of Tennessee, for that matter) at a Presbyterian women's college in North Carolina; of my swinging single days in Kansas City and the heady days of courtship with their sexy Southern-accented father (at which the girls will roll their eyes or stick out their tongues, I'm sure).

We'll keep telling the tales and some day the girls will have their own to add to mine and DH's, to my parents' and his parents', when they share stories with their own children. :-)


~RCH~