This year instead of exchanging gifts, my family exchanged memories (the ones that were present - sadly we were missing a few). We wrote up a favorite memory with each person, and then spent the evening reading them together. I made this slideshow to go along with it with my stories. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to upload a powerpoint presentation to the blog, so I had to convert it to a movie. I lost some of the effects and some of the pictures got chopped a little or blurred. But at any rate, the idea is here. The transition pictures relate to the memory I wrote up, so it won't make sense unless I give a brief explanation:
Daddy - jewelry that he has given to me
Mother - Puff the Magic Dragon magically appear
Karen - our debacle in an orange grove
Jason - the letter he sent me while I was in college when our dog Shadow died
Tammy - camping at Lake Tahoe
Chad - whale watching in Hawaii
Derek - our trip across Hawaii's highway into the "Misty Mountains"
Brandon - baking blueberry muffins
Eric - volleyball summer
Sean - fishing and adopting a turtle
Caleb - his friendship with Chad
Anyway, I don't know if anyone is interested in this other than my family, but it was a wonderful night. Thank you Karen, for letting us use Wild Thyme!
By the way, here are the written memories, if you care to read my little book!
Daddy
“Hello there,” the
voice on the phone said. “This is your father.”
“Hi Daddy,” I was
sitting at my desk at Southwestern Business College.
“I picked up a
bracelet that you might like, and I thought I’d bring it by for you to look
at.”
He worked with Mike
Sorrell, who bought gold and silver and coordinated auctions and estate
sales. So Daddy frequently picked up
interesting pieces of jewelry. My
favorites were the Siamese bracelets.
Most of my coworkers
were women and they were always excited when Daddy came by. They oohed and awed over the jewelry that he
would bring. Usually when he left, he’d
give me a few dollars for lunch. (I was
thirty years old, but even then he was still feeding me.) Even though I can’t
remember the names of the women in the office with me, I can remember what they
looked like, and what one of them said that afternoon.
“I wish he were my
dad. Do you think he’d adopt me?”
Mother
I personally know a magician. My mother’s one. Many people may say that, but it usually
means that she’s a whiz is the kitchen or can do wonderful things with
flowers. That’s not what I mean. My mother really is. And I think I’m the only one who knows.
When I was a little girl and it
was just the two of us, she would share her mysteries. There are several tricks I remember, but I
have one particular favorite. One
morning I was sitting at kitchen table.
“Close your eyes,” she told me. I
did. I heard some mysterious rustling,
but I didn’t peek.
“Okay, you can open your eyes
now,” she said. On the table in front of me was a brown paper bag. Where did that come from? I looked inside and found a Paint-With-Water
Puff the Magic Dragon book!
Isn’t funny how those early
memories can affect a lifetime? Puff the
Magic Dragon has stayed close to my heart for fifty years now.
Karen
“Well Ollie, this is another fine
mess you’ve gotten us into.”
Did either of us actually say
it? It’s appropriate for so many of our
adventures. This time, the sun was
setting and the wind was gently rustling the leaves in the orange trees. We were stranded deep in an orange grove, the
tires of the Mustang deeply sunk in sand.
If we’d been outside of Derry
Maine instead of somewhere in Florida, it would have been the perfect setting
for a creepy movie. And since the
setting was so perfect, we went ahead and did what you always yell at
characters in the movie for doing. We
hiked back to the highway, waved down a car and led two young men into our
isolated sand pit. I’m not sure who was
dumber, the girls who could have been attacked by psychopaths, or the guys who
followed behind them willingly.
For whatever reason, God seems to
protect fools and drunks, and even though we were stone cold sober, we were a
pair of fools who got through another adventure unscathed.
It certainly wouldn’t be our last.
Jason
“Something terrible happened last
night,” the letter from home read. Since
it was scrawled in a nine-year-old’s handwriting, I figured it couldn’t be that
horrible. Surely Mother would have called.
This was before the age of instant communication, but still – landline
phones had managed to make their way into college dorms.
I continued reading.
“Shadow died in the middle of the
night.”
Shadow was our family dog. She had travelled the country with us and had
given birth to beautiful puppies a couple of times. Was she the perfect dog? Maybe not – she was about as diligent in her
obedience school training as her boy was in middle school (the difference being
that Mother refused to let Jason quit). But
she was gentle and sweet, and had been with the boy since he was a baby. She was a Norwegian Elkhound, with thick gray
and black fur and a fluffy curly tail.
The letter had a few more
sentences and concluded with, “Just writing this letter makes me sad.”
Just reading it made me sad.
One Christmas shortly after that,
three sisters begged their parents for permission to buy a special
present. Jason woke up to find a puppy
under the tree. And that’s how Bo came
to the Barnick household.
Tammy
James Dobson says that if you want
to make family memories, go camping.
Something always goes wrong, which means fodder for years to come. I can think of a camping memory with any family
member, but this one takes place at Lake Tahoe.
One of the joys of camping is
being in the great outdoors. But as Jon
Holmes says, the wilderness is not Disneyland.
There are things out there that aren’t always benevolent. Lake Tahoe has its bears. And we have a family member who finds cubs
cute.
We tramped through leaves and over
fallen limbs, enjoying the birds and other sounds. One of us – maybe Derek – noticed some brown
clumps up ahead. When we realized that
it was a bear and cubs, Tammy wanted to get closer to get a better look. I was about to pull my hair out. All I could think was, “I don’t necessarily
have to run fast – I just have to run faster than you!”
Chad
There once was little boy who used to a fish. Because he’d been a fish, he had no fear of
water. He jumped into pools, he pushed
brothers in lakes, and he swam in oceans.
For many years, however, he had forgotten a very important thing – he
wasn’t the only fish in the sea.
One day when he was a
boy and not a fish, his mother took him on a boat ride. The boat was actually a zodiac raft so it wasn’t
very big. There were a few other people
with them, and even though Chad didn’t know it, they were going whale
watching.
The day was
beautiful. The sun was shining and the
salty air sprayed against his cheek as he leaned over the side of the raft. Then Chad sat up abruptly. About fifteen feet from the side of the raft,
a blackness was emerging from the water.
It got bigger and bigger until it looked like a small black hill. Chad
turned to his mother and astonished, whispered, “What is that?”
“That, Chad, is a
whale. That’s what we’ve come to see.”
Right then water spurt
from its blowhole, and it burst through the water before sinking back to the
depths of the sea.
The little boy who
used to be a fish stayed out of the water for a while. The big bathtub that he’d enjoyed for so many
years turned out to be much more mysterious than he had realized.
Derek
Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and cavern old
We must away ere break of day
To seek the pale enchanted gold.
Twice a week we drove along the H3
across similar misty mountains. Derek
had his own music to make – he took violin lessons on the other side of the
island. Almost every trek, he’d look
longingly at the lush green cliffs towering over us, and talk of how wonderful
it would be if we could be part of that ragtag band of characters in search of dwarven
treasure.
The boy who was in no real hurry
to read on his own first jumped headlong into fantasy with Harry Potter. But it was JRR Tolkien who truly grabbed his
heart and he had read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy before his
tenth birthday – before the movies came out and the Baggins became household
names. I, too, have an intense fondness
for the inhabitants of Middle Earth, but if you were to ask me why, I’d have to
say because my son loved them first.
Brandon
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.
That faulty memory again – in my
mind they’re blueberries. Maybe it’s
because of my fondness for them. Maybe
it’s because of our berry picking adventures in Alaska. Or maybe it’s because of Brandon.
Even though the memory
is one that’s mentioned frequently, it’s still one of my favorites. For a few months we lived in Mililani with
Karen, Dennis, and the boys. Brandon
just knew that everything I did was for him (and how could it not be – he was
always so very appreciative!). One day,
I made a batch of blueberry muffins.
Little Brandon, just barely three, came into the kitchen. His eyes lit up when he saw the muffins.
“Kaye, did you make
those for me??”
Yes, Brandon, of course I did.
Just for you.
Eric
There are times we savor because we know we will never pass this
way again. Volleyball summer was just
such a time. Ron was stateside, Derek
and Sean were both here, Eric was in town, and even Chuck was around. With a little help from John Kell and Seth
Hodges, we usually had a full team. What
a thrill it is to have so many family members passionate about the same thing!
One of my fondest
memories from that summer was sitting in Cosmos with Eric before our game
began. He had his school books with him
and was working with linear algebra, I believe – some big matrices problem. Two of my favorite things with one of my
favorite people. I wanted to make time
stand still for just a little while.
Sean
In my mind, the novel The Grapes
of Wrath starts with a turtle crossing the road. But Steinbeck doesn’t actually
introduce him until chapter 3. It just
goes to show that memory isn’t always an infallible thing.
I remember a summer day when Sean
and I saw a similar turtle crossing a country road. He asked if we could stop. It had been a good day – we’d gone fishing at
a little trout farm tucked away near a quiet stream in the woods. The owner helped Sean clean his catch so I
didn’t even have to worry about the mess back home. “Mom, can we take him home? Please?” I’ve always liked turtles too, and
there was no real reason to say no. Ron was gone, so I didn’t have to consider
anyone else’s opinions. Sean and I both
wanted the turtle, so home he went.
He didn’t stay long. I’m not even sure what happened to him. Sean left to go someplace and I had let him
out of his box to crawl around the front yard.
The phone rang and I was in the house for about 5 minutes. When I came back, he was gone. It was a mystery, because he really was such
a slow moving turtle. I don’t know if
hawks have a fondness for boxy reptiles, but I prefer to think that he headed
for a quiet stream somewhere.
Driving down the road months
later, I saw another turtle. Jackie was
with me this time and we picked him up to surprise Sean. And a surprise it was! When we got home I told Sean there was
something in the back of the Kia for him.
He ran outside and came back in shortly. “Mom, you do know that’s a snapping turtle
you picked up, right?”
Caleb
Some memories are
peripheral. We cherish them because they
mean so much to someone we love. Many
summers ago, a pair of ragamuffins joined hands and hearts and set out more
bravely together than either would have alone.
I watched Caleb walk away with Chad, knowing the days were
numbered. We’d be gone soon and the
magic would be gone as well. But for that
short time, they each had each other, and Chad knew what friendship was.
Sharon
It was the fall of 1984. But it wasn’t a cold and blustery day – at
least not for me. I was living in
Florida. I called home (Ohio) and talked
to Sharon.
“Guess what!” I said,
“I joined the Army!”
“Are you kidding?” she
replied. “So did I!”
You might be thinking
that we had discussed this idea before.
But no. It caught us both off guard.
“Well, I signed up for
the delayed entry program, so I won’t go until the summer time.” I told
her. “June 19th actually.”
“Me too! I go June 20th!”
“I’m going to Ft.
Jackson, South Carolina. Where are you
going?” I asked her
“Ft. Jackson,” she
replied. And that’s how we both ended up
in the same pit of hell for basic training.
We weren’t in the same platoon, but we were in the same company and got
to see each other every day.
Having your sister
with you as dealt with the craziness of psychotic drill sergeants made life a
little more bearable. Of course, it also
caused us a tremendous amount of grief because of one of those psychotic drill
sergeants, but that’s a memory for another year.
