Tag: my family

Memory Lane: Bowling at Home

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Image result for images of old toy bowling set

On dreary, rainy days, like the ones we’ve been having here, the past two weeks, my brother, my sister and I used to go bowling–in the cellar.

We had the ball and the pins, which you weighted by filling them with water. If you didn’t fill the ball just right, the water sloshed around inside of it and made it do strange things when you released it.

We had a ready-made lane in our cellar, between the wall on one hand and the furnace and hot water heater on the other. So as the ball wandered down the alley, bumping into one or the other barriers would return it to its intended course. And there was a plastic sheet to guide us in setting up the pins–if we were able to knock them down.

We never did learn how to keep a proper bowling score, but at least we could count the pins that we knocked over. And the ball made a pleasant sloshing sound as it meandered down the cement floor. The pins made a dull thud when you hit them: not at all like the satisfying “ka-pocka!” they made when you hit them in a real bowling alley. But this one was our own personal bowling alley, and we were mighty glad to have it.

Years later my father bought a wooden pool table, which soon warped just enough to make a straight shot impossible. Really, water-filled bowling was a lot cheaper and much more fun. Even if my sister had to use both hands to roll the ball: the price she paid for being the youngest.

I think we’d all be very pleased if we could somehow play it again, Sam.

Memory Lane: The Family Cookout

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Image result for Men Playing Horseshoes

On many a Sunday in the summer, my father liked to hold a family cookout in the back yard. So early in the morning, I’d run over to the playground and fetch some fine sand for the coals to rest on.

If Uncle Ferdie came, as he usually did, we’d break out the horseshoes and have a few games, him, my father, my brother, and me. There’s nothing like the clang of horseshoes on a summer day. If Uncle Bernie came, he’d do some simple magic tricks that always wowed me. I never could figure out how he pulled off one of his fingers and stuck it back on, good as new. When he finally taught me how to do it, I had a lot of fun blowing the minds of the younger kids in the neighborhood.

When my aunts came, they usually brought slides of their latest visit to some exotic clime–places like Yucatan, Uganda, Iceland, or Australia. My Dutch step-grandfather, John, played old Dutch tunes on his harmonica. Grandpa reminisced about the misdeeds of Woodrow Wilson.

And then came the hot dogs and the hamburgers, which always tasted so much better, off the grill. I enjoyed watching the charcoal briquets catch fire briefly, then settle down to glowing redly and sputtering when fat dripped on them. A simple feast, but highly satisfying.

If only we could do it all again…

Memory Lane: A Rainy Day

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Image result for images of toy knights

Sometimes on a dreary, rainy day, my father let us take the slats out from under our mattresses, set them up across the beds, drape the throw rug over them, and pretend that we were camping.

Having done so, my brother and I would break out the toy animals and dinosaurs and set them on adventures. We never got into army men, but we did have a couple of toy knights, which my mother identified for us as Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad. Under the shelter of our make-believe tent, Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad enjoyed some exciting times exploring lost worlds full of dragons, jungles, the North Pole, and the planet Venus.

Assisted by assorted lions, rhinos, elephants, stegosaurs, and giraffes, our knights overcame aggressive tyrannosaurs, hostile natives, and alien beings. Sometimes we resorted to Grandpa’s old stone building blocks and endowed the knights with castles and forts that had to be defended. A gigantically overgrown Dimetrodon was their biggest challenge, but they were up to it. Occasionally they would recruit bands of cowboys on horseback to help out.

It was amazing how time flew by, when we were doing this. Did I mention that we had lots of little toy cavemen, too? They usually found their way into the story, sometimes as the good guys, sometimes as the bad.

Video games? Fah! Who needs video games?

Cats Getting Stuck (Which Reminds Me of a Story…)

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Watching these goofy cats get stuck in various containers–I promise you, at least one of these you won’t believe–reminded me of a story.

Once upon a rainy day, my aunts, Joan and Florence, when they were little girls, decided to play Robin Hood. They had one of those old-fashioned bedsteads with bars–just the thing to represent the castle in which Maid Marian was being held prisoner. So Aunt Florence, playing Maid Marian, climbed onto the bed, stuck her head through a couple of the  bars, and called for Robin Hood to help her. Aunt Joan, playing Robin Hood, could not help her. She was stuck. Nothing they did could get her unstuck. They’d be there still, if Grandpa hadn’t come upstairs with his tools and taken the whole bed apart. I have a feeling he was not amused.

‘I Need Thee Every Hour’

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This is the Sunday school version of Annie Hawke’s beloved hymn (1872): you get the piano and the lyrics and the Holy Spirit, but you have to sing it yourself.

My mother used to sing this around the house. So did Grandma, her mother. Oh, I wish I could tell them that what they taught me, as a little toddling boy, I have not forgotten. No! I think I hear them more clearly now than I did then. It takes the seed some time to grow: that’s why you have to plant it when the children are very young. And give it time! It might take 50 years or more to bear fruit.

Eureka! (Maybe)

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Image result for images of eureka moment

Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day! My Facebook referrals are back.

When Archimedes, in the course of taking his bath, suddenly realized he could calculate an object’s weight (or something) by the amount of water it displaced, he leaped out of the tub and shouted “Eureka!”, which means “Hot dog!”

I can’t quite do that, because I don’t know that anything I’ve tried actually did the trick, bringing back Facebook referrals to this blog after I got mysteriously disconnected from FB last weekend and have gotten hardly any referrals all week long. Maybe some of you folks out there accomplished it by sharing one of our cat videos on Facebook. I don’t know. All I know is, they’re back today, returning as inexplicably as they disappeared.

My father had no object in his house which he didn’t understand. Whatever it was, if it stopped working, he knew how to fix it. And if he didn’t know, his kid brother, Uncle Ferdie, an inventor, would be sure to know. I used to love to watch the two of them take apart the television set and fix it. Dad never had to send it to the shop.

Well, my own apartment is full of gadgets whose workings I couldn’t explain if my life depended on it. And I daresay I’m not alone in that respect.

And so, at least for the time being, my nagging Facebook problem has been solved–how, I just don’t know. But if any of you readers did anything to solve it, you have my thanks. It wasn’t a big problem, but it was certainly a nagging one.

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Memory Lane: The Lennon Sisters Sing ‘Paper of Pins’

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This video, vintage 1956, has the Lennon Sisters, on The Lawrence Welk Show, singing a dear old folk song, A Paper of Pins–one of the first songs I ever heard on a record: one of those little red records they used to have for kids.

Grandma never missed Lawrence Welk, and the Lennon Sisters were her favorite. This video brings back fond memories of staying overnight with Grandma and Grandpa and my aunts, and wondering why they chose to watch this stuff.

Now that I’m as old as my grandparents were then (if not older–but to a little boy, everybody over 40 is downright ancient), and part of my job is to keep track of things like claiming that drinking milk makes you a Nazi, jawohl, I don’t wonder about it anymore. Jump on my bike and pedal down Memory Lane for all I’m worth. Stop in and see the Lennon Sisters. And maybe even sack out on a Castro Convertible–remember those?

Memory Lane: Travels With My Aunts

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Image result for images of world map 1960

My mother’s unmarried sisters, Gertie, Millie, and Joan, lived in the same house all their lives, with their mother and father, and worked at the same jobs all their lives. You might think that was boring, but you’d be wrong: it freed them up to do what they really, really wanted to do.

What they did was travel. Not like travel is now, with everybody doing it, jet planes, computers, etc. We’re talking the 1950s and 60s, with propeller-driven airliners and luxury ocean liners. It was glamorous, back then. And very few people did it. But my aunts did it practically every year, usually in the summer, and there wasn’t much of the globe they didn’t cover.

They started out seeing America, places like Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon, then Canada and Alaska, back when Alaska was an exotic destination. Before it was a state. By the time they were done, they’d been to Central America, Egypt (where Millie had a bout of claustrophobia inside the Great Pyramid–imagine that!), Norway, Iceland, England, Spain, Italy, East Africa (lunch at The Black Cat Cafe in Uganda: not for the faint-hearted), South America, and Australia (where Gertie declined to hold the koala). They always brought back slides, boxes and boxes full of slides, and souvenirs. And they were much in demand as speakers at their churches. I think the only places that they didn’t go to were places that you weren’t allowed to go to, back then, like Russia or China.

I can’t stress this enough: back then, nobody was traveling like that–nobody but professional travel writers. And these three little maiden ladies from a small town in New Jersey. They could’ve easily hosted a TV show. But they liked their lives the way they were–stable, peaceful, and Christian… and seasoned with a hearty tablespoon of worldwide travel. A lot of us would have called that “adventure.” But for my aunts, it was just the way they liked to live.

Memory Lane: Zebras

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Image result for images of stuffed toy zebra

Very young children have some fanciful ideas, and who knows where they come from?

When I was a very young child, a pre-schooler, I wanted to be a zebra when I grew up. How that ever came into my head, I don’t know. I think I was already in kindergarten when I finally realized this was impossible. But I never did outgrow my fondness for zebras. A lot of children are crazy about horses, and a striped horse living wild in Africa–well, how could you beat that?

Many years later, when I was married, and working as a newspaper editor, my Grammy phoned and asked me to come and see her, she had something for me. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, so I had to hustle over there to find out.

It was, of all things, a stuffed zebra. And I am looking at it right now, almost forty years later, as it sits proudly on my coffee table–looking at it and remembering her, and how very much she loved me, and I her. I was her first grandchild, the first of many; and she never forgot how fond I was of zebras.

Love your family while you’ve got ’em, folks! Of all the wonderful and precious gifts God gives you, your grandmas and grandpas are very high on the list.

Memory Lane: The Workbench

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Image result for images of tool room

When I was a boy, I never met a man who didn’t have a workbench either in his basement or his garage.

I can see it now, my father’s work area. The big bench strewn with tools, and more tools stored in old dressers on the flanks. Jars full of screws and nuts and nails of all different sizes. Uncle Bernie’s work area was nice and neat, like the one in the picture above, but my father’s was more mystical: more intriguing.

In those days, men were expected to know how to fix things, and even how to build some of the things they needed, rather than buy them. Was this because they were all biggits? But what a world of wonder for us kids! I wouldn’t have dared switch on the power saw. But the vise! Hammers! Screwdrivers! And all those cool doo-dads he used to bring home from the Ford plant. I wound up making a lot of my own toys–a whole Civil War flotilla, back in 1961, ideal for naval engagements on various mud puddles in the neighborhood.

I don’t know if every household still has such a magical alcove as a workbench area, these days. I was never very good with tools, but they were so much a part of everyday life, you just couldn’t help learning how to use them. All you had to do was watch your father, and you’d pick it up.

Need I add that my sister had free access to all this fun, just like her brothers?

All I can say now is, I should’ve spent even more time watching my father and my uncles, my grandparents, my mother and my aunts. I would have learned a lot more!