#52 Stories- WEEK TWO

 Week Two Prompts:

1. Share a memory of your first year in school.

2.  Talk about one of our pets.

3.  Tell a story that includes the weather in some way.

4.  Always-Personal Choice.

First Year In School

Marcus Whitman where 6 of the eight Gibersons started school.

Valerie: I remember going to some sort of Kindergarten orientation. I think Robin came too because it was customary to have someone more experienced bring you--I am not clear on this but have a faint memory of it. My teacher was Mrs. Bareth and my best friend Molly had Mrs. Bondurant so that was just wrong. My one vivid memory from the year is getting rapped on the hand with a ruler because I touched an egg the teacher was using for a lesson that day. That may sound like it is discipline straight out of Little House on the Prairie but be assured this was 1966.

Judy: I was SO excited to start school.  I was able to walk from our house on Longfitt just a couple of blocks to reach the school and I often walked with friends.  I had a very good teacher and some of my friends from the neighborhood and also from Church were in my class.

One memory I have from kindergarten involves sucking my thumb.  Now I had sucked my thumb like many preschoolers do when I was tired, not feeling well or bored probably.  I know that I did it often enough that I can remember my parents encouraging me to NOT suck my thumb.  One day in class, our teacher had made us lay our heads on the table to “rest”.  I think the class had been a bit loud and crazy.  Anyway, I remember starting to suck my thumb and thinking-oh what if my friends see me?  Now it is likely that my friends had seen me suck my thumb before that, but for some reason that thought hit me and I decided that I was too old and as far as I remember, I didn’t suck my thumb after that time.  I went “cold turkey” as they say.

The other memory involved recess.  The boys in our class would often gather and play “war.”  They would run around the playground, shooting each other, and it must have looked like fun, because my friends and I wanted to play as well. One recess I asked the boys if we could play with them. Matt—their ‘leader,” promptly said no and when I asked why, he informed me that girls did not go to war.  As I remember his older brother was in the military and he was the source of all facts about war.  I complained about that and he finally said that we could be nurses and he pointed to the bike racks and told us that was the hospital, and we could take care of the wounded.  So we headed over to the bike racks and waited…and waited…I am not sure how long we waited.  Maybe even a recess or two, but finally we complained that no one was coming to the hospital for us to take care of.  The boys didn’t care and just ran off playing their game.  I told the girls that we would have to go out and “shoot them ourselves” so that is what we would do.  We would try to drag a wounded soldier to the hospital-bike stand.  The boys did not like our approach and stopped playing war at recess (or at least hid it from us until we lost interest in the game.)

 Our Pets

Valerie: We had a dog once whose name was Tuf. He was part Boston Terrier and not very big. Judy remembers receiving him for her Christmas gift one year. The name came from a math game that my family played (and it was a tough game especially when playing with the math-smart people in my family.) I remember one traumatic experience--not sure how it happened but I was with Tuffy (I think most of us called him that) in the field across the main road from our street. I don't know if I was taking him for a walk or what, but I couldn't catch him and I was chasing him and calling his name but he wouldn't come and I cried and cried because I didn't know what to do. In my memory I remember going home crying to Mom and she said not to worry. I don't know what happened after that but the dog appeared at home later.

Judy: I don’t have much of a story, but I am the reason that we had cats to begin with.  For years there was the idea that Dad was allergic to animals, so no pets.  I think this is somewhat true, although we had cats for years.  I was playing in the shelter belt when I was 10 years old and found a lost tiny little kitten and brought it home.  For some reason, our parents let us keep it and I named it “Happy” because it made us all so happy.

The Weather

Rick: Weather provided two tests during an important time of my life. The weather was snow and ice. The time was 1990, when I was a student at BYU.

 

Scene One: February 1990, weekend before President’s Day

BYU had no spring break, so a lot of students turned President’s Day weekend into a mini break. I was dating a girl at this time. For purposes of this story, let’s call her Shannon. We decided to drive her car down to her hometown of San Diego for the long weekend. Several of her other San Diego friends were doing the same. We counted on good weather in San Diego, but the drive out of Utah was on highways of snow, slush, and ice. The sun was up and beginning to melt things, but the highways were just a slushy mess, which made driving challenging at best.

Apparently my driving was not up to the challenge, as Shannon was getting very stressed about how I was driving her car. And her vocalizing her stress was just making me even more stressed. It was not a pleasant drive. And then after all that, it rained most of our time in San Diego.

I will summarize by saying that the car survived the trip just fine, but our relationship really did not. To be fair, our relationship was already trending down before this, but this trip probably sealed the deal.

 

Scene Two: December 1990, start of Christmas Break

The next fall semester I got reconnected with a friend from winter semester 1989, and we started dating. For purposes of this story, let’s call her Linda. We decided that for Christmas we should visit both of our families, mine in Amarillo, Texas and hers in Carson Valley, Nevada. But we didn’t have a car and I had essentially no money. By a miracle, we arranged a combination of planes, trains, and automobiles to make the trip work. That is a story in itself, but here we will focus only on the first stage of the trip: driving a loaded pick-up truck from Provo to Amarillo for somebody that had recently relocated.

On the long drive down, we encountered snowstorms and icy roads in Colorado and New Mexico. Just outside Cortez, Colorado, with me driving the truck, we lost traction and slid off the road and into a ditch. We were stuck. But not a hint of stress from my travelling companion. We just finished listening to the song that was on our cassette tape, and then I set off to find a phone to call a tow truck.

The trip’s snow adventures were not done yet – there was more to come in New Mexico. But this incident is sufficient to make my point. Despite the very challenging weather of this long drive, all was peace and calm and good between Linda and me. We had passed this test.

Spoiler alert! Linda and I ended up getting married. In the 30 years since that first Christmas together, we have had plenty of challenging adventures. And I have always appreciated having a calm, cool travelling companion!

Valerie: I don’t think it snowed a lot in Richland but I remember we would make some sort of track through the snow in our front yard with intersecting points, and then play tag on it. I remember doing this when it was dark outside. Was it just this one time in my memory or did we do it a lot?

Texas makes me think of thunderstorms—the big one that came when we were staying at the Howard Johnson when we first arrived in town, and the one at the campground in Lubbock when our tent fell apart. We were there I think for Mike’s patriarchal blessing and then Stake Conference the next day. (Mom wrote about this event in her book of family stories.)

Judy: This happened at our Longfitt house and I think I was five or six.  One day, I was playing across the street and it started to rain so I headed across the street to my house to go in.  However, it wasn’t raining on my side of the street.  That amazed me and I ran back to my friend’s house where it was raining and we spent several minutes running back and forth across the street—in and out of the rain.  It was one of those moments where the front of the storm was sitting right there.  What I remember is the amazement that we could go in and out of the rain by crossing the street.  I guess before then I thought if it was raining it was raining everywhere.

#52 Stories- WEEK ONE

 Week One Prompts:

1.  Earliest Childhood Memories

2.  Foods you remember from our childhood and a story connected with food.

3.  Things you connect with your childhood home....Longfitt, Agnes or Carlton. (or your own childhood home for the grandchildren and great grandchildren.)

Earliest Childhood Memories

Todd: I do not remember much from the time in our house on Longfitt Dr. in Richland.  I do remember that we (Mike and I) played with another boy named Mike that lived a block or so away.  What I remember is that his mom looked very old and shriveled up.  She also smoked and drank coffee.  For me, I attributed her appearance to the fact that she smoked and drank coffee, something my parents did not do.  It was pretty certain that I would never smoke or drink coffee.  It was more than just being told to avoid those things in Church or by my parents -- I had seen the effects!

It did not cross my mind until later in life that my friend's mom was much older that my mom.  My mom would not have been out of here thirties at the time -- I was one of the older kids in the family.  My friend, as I remember, was the youngest in his family and there was a number of years between him and his older brother closest to him, who I think was a teenager.  His mom might have been late forties.  But by the time I figured that out the lesson had been ingrained.

Rick:  

1. I have a single memory (or so I suppose) of our house on Agnes Street in Richland. I see the wood steps down to the basement, and the basement is mostly dark. Some of my older siblings have set up some sort of “spook alley” there, or maybe it is more like a challenge course. There is a laundry basket rigged such that if you trip a rope it dumps some (soft) contents on you. As you make a loop around the rest of the basement there are other obstacles to overcome. I thought this was a pretty cool thing they did and I enjoyed getting to experience it.
2. The family was staying at a hotel/motel in Amarillo (maybe Howard Johnson’s?). Presumably this was when we first moved to Amarillo and couldn’t yet get into our house. If so, I would have been 4-1/2 years old. I’m pretty sure we had two adjoining rooms. I had some colorful plastic men to play with, about 3” tall – I think they were football players. I got in Mom’s purse for something, and I saw one of those medicine capsules that had the tiny colored balls visible through half of the capsule. Maybe I thought it looked like candy. In any case, I managed to break open the capsule, but the little balls of medicine spilled all over, maybe in her purse.

Judy:  I am not sure why I have chosen this particular memory as my earliest memory from the random collection of brief experiences that I have recalled over the years. All I know is years ago, I identified this as my earliest memory and I always think about it when people talk about remembering things from their childhood. This was in the Jadwin Church in Richland, Washington, on the second floor in a large room over the Cultural Hall. I can remember mom and the other Relief Society sisters tying quilts while I and my childhood best friend, Kathy Nelson, played underneath them. Because of that memory, I tell Kathy she is my oldest friend. She will response, not your OLDEST friend, but your longest friend. (She and her husband are serving a mission right now in Africa.) I discussed this with mom and she thought I would have been about 3 years old at this time. Kathy’s mom was Relief Society President at that time and they did a lot of quilts for people.

Valerie: I have a memory of when I was very small eating ice cream cones with other kids in front of a big house. But not just any kids and not just any house. I always thought the kids were some of my brothers and sisters and some of my cousins, and that the house was my Grandma Owen's.

I consider it my earliest memory but I don't know how old I was, and it's not really that specific. Like if I said, Remember when we ate ice cream cones at Grandma's big house my siblings might say, Um, sure. We probably did that.

Recently I was looking at family photos on FamilySearch.org and was in the Memories section for Grandma Owen and discovered a picture of her in front of a house.

A big house. This was the house in my memory!

+if you scroll down a bit to earlier posts, you'll see a photo of the house and a detailed description from Judy+

Foods Remembered From Our Childhood And Story Connected With Food

.

Judy: Mom did not like to cook. She told us that frequently and I grew up just like her, in that one way, at least. Despite that, I can remember many of the great things that she made that I love. I hope someday to be able to eat at her table again.

My favorites: Spaghetti; Macaroni and Cheese—oven baked not Mac and Chesse; Rogo; Fried chicken; her bread and scones—although when I was little, I did sometimes wish we had “white bread” from the store for our school lunches. Kids are silly like that; homemade pizza, chocolate chip cookies, and her pies. Of course, her cherry pie was my personal favorite and I had it whenever I could for my birthday. And I loved when she had extra pie crust leftover and would put cinnamon sugar on them and cook them in the oven right as we got home from school. LOVED IT! I also remember the glass candy she made every Christmas which we passed out to people. However, I personally was never a big fan of that. It certainly is a food memory, however.

When I told Gary the topics for the week, he immediately said that I needed to write the story about the chocolate chip cookies and Todd. So here it is:

“When I was in third grade, Todd and I happened to be walking up to our house on Agnes Street after school at the same time. About the time we got into our yard, Todd said, “Mom has made us chocolate chip cookies for snack.” I said,” Oh, did she tell you that she was going to make cookies today?” He gave me a strange look and said, “No, can’t you smell them?” No, actually, I couldn’t smell them. That was the first time that I figured out that I wasn’t smelling things like other people did. Perhaps I had noticed that before, but I don’t remember knowing that before this moment. We spent some time smelling cookies—which were waiting inside for us plus smelling other things

around the house. Nope, I couldn’t smell them! In my lifetime, there are random times when I have a bad smell that might last a day or two, but I can’t identify any smells and really can’t smell things, even dirty diapers which I hear can be terrible.

Turns out that 10-15% of the world have problems with smelling. It is called Anosmia. It is sometimes caused by accidents breaking your nose, but I never broke my nose so we think I was just born this way.

All of my children went through a phase where they tried to “teach” me how to smell by putting different things under my nose and instructing me to “just sniff it.” So far, just Scarlett has tried to do that, but they find it interesting that I don’t smell things.

Todd:  Sometime while we lived in the Carlton house, the kitchen stove developed an electrical short.  Between the time the short developed and the time when it was corrected, you just had to be careful NOT to be touching the stove and the adjacent refrigerator at the same time, or else you would receive a not-so-nice shock.  One evening a large pot of spaghetti had been prepared for supper (amounts were always large, of course) and I went to bring it from the stove to the table.  Somehow I brushed against the refrigerator after grabbing the pot of spaghetti.  With the jolt I received, I jerked the whole pot of spaghetti onto the kitchen floor.  I'm not sure what we ended up eating that day for supper.  (Editor note:  I thought you told us years later that you scooped it up and served it to us anyway because no one had seen it fall. ) 

Valerie: My favorite food from my childhood is probably spaghetti. But, apparently, not just any spaghetti. I found this out when I turned eight. Dad and Mom took me out to dinner as was the tradition, and when they asked what I wanted I said spaghetti, because, you know, it was my favorite. We went to some hole in the wall Italian place (this is well before Olive Garden). When my order arrived it looked like spaghetti except there were these huge meatballs on top. That’s not how Mom made it. It certainly did not taste the same either. I don’t remember eating much of it. Then we went to see Swiss Family Robinson*, a whole movie about a family living off the land. They probably would have been appreciative of that spaghetti.

*I Googled the movie and it came out in 1960. I turned eight in 1969. Seeing this movie with Mom and Dad has always been part of my memory but maybe I’m wrong or the theater showed previously released movies sometimes.

Things You Connect With Your Childhood Home:

Longfitt, Agnes or Carlton

Judy: Longfitt is the first house I remember although all three of these houses have many memories connected to them. I think that is one of the benefits of being the oldest. Our house was a prefab house built in a city of mostly prefab houses at that time due to the rapid increase in population in the 1940s and 1950s to support the growth of Hanford and related industries.

It has three tiny bedrooms, a bathroom with only a shower (I think), and a small living and dining area, a little kitchen and I think a small closet or storage area in the back of the house. Here is the floor plan that I found online which is as I remember it. Robin and I had bunkbeds in bedroom #1, Todd, Mike, and Valerie slept in bedroom #2—the crib was tucked into that space between the closets. Mom and Dad were in #3. In our kitchen, mom had an old fashion washing machine that you had to roll the clothes through to wring them out before you put them on the clothesline. It was here that I put my right hand through the wring which left a scar which you can still barely see on the back of my hand. That scar was how I learned which hand was my right hand.

Valerie: Agnes Street

Agnes Street: playing records on the record player and singing and dancing to our favorites, getting the piano, reading books from the library, playing dodge ball in the backyard, playing with Matchbox cars in a hole in the ground behind the garage, learning to skate in the basement, Mom sewing, the rough, rocky surface of Agnes Street, playing with Molly and other neighborhood friends, our phone number 939-9039 (Am I remembering it right?), the lilac bush outside our back door (I think), tumbleweeds, the Shelter Belt and getting in trouble for going out past the Shelter Belt, being excited about the “Mosquito Man” coming, Jim Sloman, Jerry the mailman delivering the mail on a snowmobile on a snowy day, the excitement of Christmas Eve, watching The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Monkees, Perry Mason, Star Trek, Batman, and other shows . . .    

Personal Choice

Robin:  Not very long ago, I was talking to Dad, He was wondering where was he when I had this incident with getting stitches in my right arm were the wrists are located. Here is the story: When I was in the third grade, I remember that Mom was always telling us not to run in the house on the way to go outside. (Editor's note--Our home on Agnes Street in Richland.) The front door had a screen door in front of it. Needless to say that, not giving the proper response to Mom's words, my right hand went right through the glass of that door. Dad was asking me when did this happen. I provided with the story. My 3 grade class had signed their names on a Snoopy dog, the stuffed Snoopy dog came with a pen. Dad said He must of been at work, when I had the incident with the screen door, it was more glass in that door than screen!  That is all from daughter #2 love Robin  (Editor's note:  I am sure he was at work, because I remember babysitting while mom went to the ER with you---I am not sure how you got there, because we often didn't have a car at home.)

#52 Stories

 Blog readers--you know who you are-- will notice the hashtag #52 stories on blog posts over the next year.  As the Giberson siblings, we have started a project to write a story a week to share with our dad, with each other, and here with the grandchildren and great grand children of our parents.  The idea is that if you wrote one story a week about your life, in a year you would have collected 52 memories and made a very good start on your own personal history.  We come from a line of people who have written journals or left other artifacts from their lives.  Those are the things that we use to learn about them and in turn, we can learn a bit more about ourselves.  We are trying to do the same for those who follow after us.

On Friday and then again on Sunday of each week, I (Judy) am sending three topics as ideas.  The siblings then can choose to write a memory about one or more of those ideas OR come up with their own memory that they want to write about.  They can then send it to dad and then to me to put on the blog to share with all of you.  

I will post them together with #52 stories in the title.  I am also going to include the memory prompts just in case you would like doing the same thing.  You can add your memory in comments--or send them to me and I will add them into the blog as well.  Whatever you do, save them for yourself so that your children and nieces and nephews can learn about your life as well.

We realize that it is unlikely that we will be 100% at these, but we know that each thing we do record will be fun to share and might make a difference now or a long time in the future.

So enjoy-- Our #52 Stories Project!