121 A Lovely Week at Cape Kiwanda

Who doesn’t enjoy spending a week on the beach in the month of August especially if it’s on the Oregon Coast? Oregon has some of the loveliest sand beaches anywhere in the world, and the scenery is spectacular. So it was with great anticipation that twenty-five of us showed up at Cape Kiwanda, by the little seaside town of Pacific City. With so much family coming from all over, the two condo’s we rented couldn’t hold everyone, so some of the gang had to stay in a nearby motel.

Uncle Steve and Ginny drove down together, his sons, cousin Mick and cousin Will, came down with Great Gramalene, Mick doing the driving. Aunty Sharon drove down from her fruit farm near Wapato with Cousin Cori and cousin Brandon. Sharon’s oldest, Cousin Philip also came down with his two kids, Tyler and Kelsey. Uncle Bob and Aunt Becky drove all the way over from Walla Walla, the land of winter wheat, bringing their four kids Chloe, Paul, Spencer and little Mary Bella. Grandma Sandy and Grandpa Bob drove down from Canada and picked up Aunt Mandy and her son Benjamin in Bellingham. Aunt Teri and Uncle Teddy drove all the way up from Arizona with their two kids Meagan and David and what topped it off was that Grandpa’s good friend Wally Wacker and his wife Geri came over from Eugene midweek and spent a day with everyone on the beach.

Just because it is the first week of August is no guarantee that the weather on the Oregon coast will be warm and sunny. Without notice the fog and drizzle that hangs just off shore can come rolling in and in a matter of minutes you are chilled to the bone. We were fortunate indeed as the weather was so perfect that even Grandma Sandy’s spirits were revived, in spite of a broken leg. Such a perfect week meant that whatever we did had fun written all over it. And of course the first few days had to be beach stuff, everything from wading in the surf and not getting soaked by that extra big wave that you didn’t see coming, to the making of sand castles and the flying of kites.

Someone decided that we should completely bury Meagan and Chloe, except for their heads, so that’s what we did. What’s cooler then to see what looked like two talking heads just lying there on the beach, waiting for someone to take home and add to their mantle?

One afternoon we went for a hike through the woods to a head of land with the sea on every side. The trail was very rocky and uneven and in some places except for the salal and the odd tree, there wasn’t much between you and the rocks below. If you should catch your foot or lose your balance it was just about clear sailing and a swim in the ocean below. We had been walking for sometime when we realized that Teri was not with us. After waiting for a few minutes we saw her running frantically to catch up. When she finally caught up with us we asked her why the blood on her face and she told us her story of survival.

Not realizing her interest in birds we had left her to her own amusement and it was at this point that she started running to catch up. In her haste she caught her toe on a stone, which sent her sailing for a loop. She was fortunate indeed to catch hold of some salal to keep from rolling down the bank and into the sea. Trooper that she was, she got up and just kept running until she finally caught up with the rest of us.

What better place to celebrate a birthday then at the beach and as luck would have it Great Gramalene was having her eightieth birthday on our first Saturday at the beach. That Saturday everyone had a great time, as there was plenty of cake, lots of punch, with more than enough balloons and presents. You only get to celebrate your eightieth birthday once in a lifetime so we made it one that Great Gramalene would not forget.

Well what do you do when you want a change of pace from doing beach stuff? You go golfing; visit an aquarium, or air museum or even a cheese factory if one is near by. And the evenings were no less entertaining as each evening the kids put on an adlib talent show, which everybody thoroughly enjoyed.

The week ended all to soon and everyone wished that they could have stayed even longer. But that’s a good thing as we now have something to look forward to in the years to come.

120 Aunt Dorothy, You Have to Love Her

The world is full of unique and somewhat eccentric characters and Aunt Dorothy was as unique as they come. She never was a very big part of my life but what little I saw of her idiosyncrasies led me to believe that she was unique indeed. As she was Sandy’s aunt on her mother’s side I did not get to know her until after we were married. I will never forget the first time that I met Aunt Dorothy, who was two years older then Sandy’s mom and at forty-two looked to be in her eighties. When Sandy’s grandmother, Bina, who was in her late seventies introduced her as her daughter, the friend responded, “Bina you must be losing it, you mean your mother.”

Aunt Dorothy spent time in the US Navy as a hospital corpsman in both the Second World War and again during the Korean War, where she acquired a taste for strong drink, which haunted her for many years. Her strong will and the desire to be free from booze led her to take the drug Anabuse as treatment. She faithfully took the drug every morning, and eventually conquered the habit. She was a chain smoker though and succumbed to her habit shortly after her eighty-second birthday when her heart finally gave out. I can still remember the last time Sandy and I visited her just weeks before she died and what she said with a smile on her face.

“The doctor told me that it would be harder on me now if I quite.”

She then invited us outside so as not to annoy us with the smoke and lit up another Camel.

It was not until after the last of her fourth or fifth (lost count) husbands that I really got to know her. Her last husband Willie, who I met briefly, was a nice enough fellow but was young enough to be her son. The relationship only lasted a few years as Willie took off for the hills of Tennessee and as far as I know was not heard from again.

We used to stop to visit Aunt Dorothy whenever we could. I remember the time on our way back from Disneyland when we pulled into the old farmhouse at the Curtain-Lorrane Junction where she happened to be living. It was a damp and rainy evening when we arrived at the ancient farmhouse that Aunt Dorothy rented with an assortment of animals and Charlie her pet pig, which she eventually ate.

South central Oregon is normally fairly dry but that evening the light rain had left the yard somewhat muddy. Rather then have us put the tent trailer up in the rain and mud she invited us to sleep in her bed.

I said, “Don’t bother Aunt Dorothy we don’t want to put you out, by making you have to change your sheets.”

And she responded, “No bother, I wasn’t going to change them anyway, they have only been on two weeks.”

I realized the offer was to good to be true when I laid back the covers to climb in and noticed all of the debris between the sheets

Here I was on my knees with the covers pulled back, frantically brushing away at the sheets to clear the bed of as much of the debris as possible, while poor Sandy, who couldn’t believe her eyes, watched from her chair in the living room. All she was thinking was it’s a good think that Aunt Dorothy couldn’t see what I was doing from where she was sitting.

Just a few months before she passed away, Aunt Dorothy came up to visit some of the family at my son Bob’s place in Walla Walla. This normally would not have been a heroic event but in view of her failing health it put quite a strain on her. She was determined to make the trip before she died and had taken care of the minutest details in case the inevitable should happen while she was there. On arriving from her arduous plane trip she explained to Bob my son, how he was not to worry as she had taken care of everything. That is to say, she had contacted the appropriate authorities, coroner etc. in case she didn’t make it back home from his place.

She informed him that she never slept in late and if she did he was to check immediately as her time had probably come. Wouldn’t you know it, that first morning she slept well beyond her usual time, so needless to say, they were terrified thinking that Aunty Dorothy had ended her days in Chloe’s bed. They knocked frantically on her door and all breathed a sigh of relief when she finally answered the knock by sticking her disheveled head out with a most questioning look on her face. When she finally realized what the concern was about everyone had a good laugh, especially Aunt Dorothy.

119 Bring on Those Golden Years

Oh for the days when getting old was so far in the distance that it could be easily dismissed as a bad thought. As a young fellow I was not really concerned with aging but I did have an appreciation for the carefree and under forty. Having worked in a care home for the elderly in my twenties, I saw firsthand the ravages of old age and what inconsistencies in lifestyle can reek upon the human body.

The young I suppose all look for the day when they can get out from under the parental thumb and have their first car, and what to them is total freedom. I never felt the anxiety that some seem to feel about parental restraint and did not even own a car until I was twenty-three and then it was only a month or so before my marriage.

I still remember my fortieth birthday and how I felt depressed at just the thought of reaching that milestone and the implications of what it meant to enter, what I considered middle age. I could not bring myself to admit that in fact, if it was not middle age, it was pretty darn close.

Life passes by at such an incredible speed. It is amazing to sit there and watch such things as your childhood, university, marriage, work, and having kids accelerate by. Before you know it, you are sitting there in the empty nest watching it again as your kids do a rerun of your life. Life just seems to blend together in one big blur.

I suppose the one thing that makes up for the never ending spin of events is the fact that at some point you end up with grandkids, which seem to make it all worth while. I must say that they brighten the most negative of moments. You gotta love those grandkids. What a joy to visit with them, love them, and then leave them without having to take care of them.

With the good also comes the not so good and I remember when the hospital was sometimes the only answer. I rejoiced over the positive outcome when I had a malignant thyroid, but felt the pain of what Sandy had to go through, what with her lumpectomy and the radiation that it entailed. We were however thankful for the positive outcome.

Old age seems to strike each of us indiscriminately and what it did with Sandy’s bones was not good. At this point in time she is a bionic woman with more metal in her then a pincushion.

The first bone to break was the ball off her left hip when we were on a trip to Arizona. She did not know it was broken so walked for what seemed like miles at both the Las Vegas and Seattle airports. When she got home the doctor, not realizing it was broken prescribed physiotherapy treatments on her broken leg, and it was bone against bone until the therapist realized something was wrong and discontinued the treatments. It wasn’t until her regular doctor got home that an x-ray showed it was a broken hip. What seemed strange to us was the day of her surgery for her pinning; they bumped her for someone that had just broken their hip. Sandy had only been walking on a broken hip for six weeks by then so I guess the doctor figured another few days of pain was of no consequence.

A year or so later the right femur broke in the middle and had to be pinned followed by the left femur which snapping in another place as she was getting out of bed. That meant a five thirty am trip to the hospital by ambulance and another pinning.

Life is not easy, not after forty but the alternative is not for the faint of heart or the sissy. Bring on those golden years I can handle them, I think. If the gold in those golden years does not turn to dust before you get there, you only have God to thank.

“Hey mother, could you please shove the walker over this way so I can get up and walk to the bathroom and empty my urine bag.”

“What did you say, I’m sorry, can’t hear you, left my hearing aid in the bedroom.”

Oh the sweetness of old age, no time to sit down and take a break cause I might not get up again.

118 The Big Snow of ‘96

It is not often that it snows more then a few inches on the southern tip of Vancouver Island in the normal course of a typical winter. For this reason to live in the Greater Victoria area is quite popular and people flock there literally by the thousands to retire.

Because our climate is Mediterranean, the snowfall is usually light and the temperatures only on rare occasions reach into the single digits on the Fahrenheit scale.

This particular December when Christmas was yet a couple of weeks distant we felt the excitement of the first snowfall and the child in each of us thrilled to the eighteen inches that covered everything in white.

The week before Christmas Sandy and I took off for a trip south to Arizona to celebrate Christmas with my daughter Teri and her family. Our plane was to leave Seattle late Saturday afternoon, but on the way there we had an early mini-Christmas in Bellingham with my youngest daughter Mandy and her family.

The light snowfall that began sometime Thursday became a wild blizzard that screamed all night and by Friday morning when we got up to leave had literally surrounded our car in snowdrifts. After digging the car out and clearing the engine compartment of packed snow we took off for Bill and Jadie’s.

On the way to their home in Briar, where we were to spend Saturday, just north of Seattle, the roads were packed solid with six inches of icy snow. As we were coming down a small hill to an intersection the light turned red. I barely touched the breaks and the front wheels locked up solid on the frozen snow and instead of turning we came sliding in for a crash. I barely had time to take my foot off the breaks, and steer around the crash. But now we were flying through the intersection against the light. We were extremely lucky that no cars were in the intersection and we cleared the intersection unscathed. Whew what an adrenalin rush, many more like that and I would have a heat attack for sure. I think Sandy was pretty faint as well and just as shaken as I was.

It was nice to relax over Sabbath with Bill and Jadie as the snow of the previous few days had closed most of the roads and we stayed put until Jadie drove us to Sea-Tac for our late afternoon departure.

What a shambles when we arrived at the airport. People had literally been waiting for hours because of the winter weather. While waiting for our flight to leave Sandy asked a lady who looked somewhat distraught, how long she had been waiting for her flight. She said because of the weather her flight had left the day before without her and now she was not sure when she could catch another one as all the seats were taken.

As it was between storms our flight left on time and just ahead of another huge weather front that was roaring in. It felt good to be leaving all of the turmoil that the winter weather was causing on the ground and spend two lovely weeks with my daughter Teri and her family over the Christmas season in sunny Arizona.

In the meantime Mandy had gone over to Sidney to fill in for Sandy’s baby-sitting business, but as it turned out there were no babies to sit as the snow had ground everything to a halt. So instead of baby-sitting, Mandy spent the next several days just shoveling snow.

The Pineapple Express that came roaring in after the arctic front dumped enough rain on the already snow laden roofs to cause a major disaster. With the three feet or more of snow covering everything, the added weight of the several inches of rain from the Pineapple express was more then many of the roofs could stand. Many arenas, curling rinks, and school gymnasiums caved in under the added weight.

I was greatly relieved, as I knew Tom, a good friend who rented my basement suite, and Mandy, were able to shovel my sun decks off before the rain came. It is on rare occasions that a heavy snowfall with a Pineapple Express roaring in from the Pacific causes such a disaster, but it is more then heartwarming to know there are those you can trust and rely on.

Ten days later when Sandy and I landed back in town all that was left of the ravages of our short winter were a few not quite melted snowdrifts. I said to Sandy I feel kind of gypped that we missed the biggest snowfall of the last one hundred years with all its excitement.

Maybe if I can hang on another 86 years I’ll be around for the next big one.