Random Memory of My Dad, the Butcher
On Father’s Day, of course, I think of my father. And in the summertime, I think of summers long ago. This year, a random memory of my father popped into my head—I remembered going to see my father work as a butcher while he was in graduate school. I’ve mentioned before that we lived in […]
On Stop Signs and Safety in 1969
I’ve written before about my youngest brother learning his alphabet—how we sent him on reconnoitering missions around the card table to find where the Airplane letters were. That was the summer of 1969, shortly before he turned two. By the time little brother’s second birthday rolled around in November 1969, he was beginning to put […]
Learning to Play Chess
I’ve written before about our family’s competitiveness in playing games (see here and here). One of the early memories I have of living in the new home my parents built in 1963 is of my father teaching my brother and me how to play chess. We moved into the house in October 1963, so our […]
Battle of the Sexes, circa 1963
I first became aware of gender differences when I was about six or seven. I had a brother just seventeen months younger than me (he turns 61 in just a few days), so I knew about the physical differences between boys and girls. But in terms of sexism and role-playing, it didn’t really strike me […]
Memorial Day Means More as I Age
As I reviewed old posts, I realized I haven’t written much about Memorial Day. That’s because it was never a big occasion in my family growing up. We were new transplants to Richland, Washington, and didn’t have old relatives buried in the local cemetery. My grandparents were also the first generation in the family to […]
My First Broken Bone
As I wrote last week, my husband and I are dealing with his broken kneecap. He had surgery, which successfully wired the bone pieces back together, and he is moving pretty well a week later, but he will be in the knee immobilizer for several weeks longer. His broken patella brings to mind my first […]
“When He’s Ten . . .” And Now He’s Fifty!
When our youngest sibling (a boy) was born, my ten-year-old brother announced in awe, “When he’s ten, I’ll be twenty!” As if it was impossible for him to consider ever being twenty, which it might well have been. My grandmother loved telling that anecdote, and she repeated it often over the years. Of course, she […]
A Belated Veterans Day Post
It seems that in over five years of writing this blog, I have never written about Veterans Day. This year, I am finally doing it, albeit a couple of days late. I never expected to be part of a military family. I didn’t have any veterans among my relatives. Neither of my grandfathers served during […]
A Halloween Story I’ve Never Told Before: Alone with the Wind
Every year on Halloween night, I remember Halloween night in 1963, when I was seven years old. Our family had just moved into a newly constructed house in a new neighborhood about a month earlier. I had my own bedroom for the first time in my life. My room was on the corner of the […]
The Long-Term Effects of Birth Order
Today is my sister’s birthday. Regular readers of this blog can figure out which one, but this post isn’t really about age. It’s about birth order and growing up and distance and—well, maybe it’s a little bit about age. My sister is eight and a half years younger than I am. In some ways, we […]