Learning To Drive

I truly had no idea what my parents went through while teaching 5 kids how to drive a car.  From my point of view it was an exciting and fun-filled time.  I was approaching the age of being able to drive and I was hungry, I was eager, I was excited to get that license.  Not only that, I was the envy of all my friends, because I was learning to drive in a 1969 Ford Country Squire station wagon.  For those of you not familiar with this vehicle, it was quite possibly one of the largest, bulkiest, way uncool vehicles for a teenager to be seen in on the planet.  My dads’ car had a standard transmission, so we were saving that little experience for a later time, so I had just one choice for my training vehicle.  I don’t actually remember that much about the actual process of learning how to drive.  I am sure I just got in and was driving like a pro in no time at all.

Birth

I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.  My father was in the university’s Dental School at the time.  I was child number four of five that my parents ended up with.  My sister was the oldest and then my parents got in a bit of a rut with four straight boys.  I don’t clearly remember the day I was born, but I am told there was some drama involved as I made my appearance into this world.  Let me just start by saying, my poor dear Mother.  Evidently I weighed 10 pounds 11 ounces at the time of my birth.  For much of my life this statistic didn’t have a whole lot of meaning to me.  Dang, 11 pounds is nothing.  Those 10 pound dumbbells that people use for lifting weights are pretty small and easy to lift.  In fact I always have to go to the 15, 20, 25 lbs dumbbells, because the 10’s are too light.  What’s the big deal? 

Family Dinner Time

"What's in this Mom?" my son would say as we sat down to the dinner table.

"Just eat it, I am not going to tell you what is in everything we eat." came the reply.

"I don't like it!" my daughter would add.

"We have never had this before; how do you know you don't like it?" I would chime in, not wanting to be left out of the nightly ritual.  My two year old would even make out the words, "Don't like this" before she had even seen any food.   Was I that bad?  It is then that I uttered those famous words that every parent has used at one time or another. "You just wait 'til you have kids of your own." 

Kids Games

What is it about kids and the games they play these days?  When I was a kid I was actively involved with playing GI Joe, army, cowboys and Indians, basketball, kick the can and stuff like that.  During the summer months we would be outside all day long and late into the evening playing games.  We would have all of the neighborhood kids playing baseball in the street with a tennis ball.  When it got dark we would play kick the can or ding-dong ditch.  Somewhere between there and here the whole gaming culture has changed. 

Let me illustrate what I am talking about.  When I was a kid I would call up my best friend and ask if he wanted to get together at the neighborhood park and shoot some hoops.  So I would grab my basketball, walk to the park and shoot baskets for hours with my buddy.  In the not too distant past, when modems were our primary connection to the online community, my son would call up his friend and ask him if he wanted to get together and play the computer game Age of Empires.  He would go downstairs on the computer, dial up his friends’ phone number and play computer games over the modem with his buddy.  What kind of interaction is that?  He didn’t even see the kid.  I have to give them some credit though; sometimes they actually would get together and play computer games in the same room.  One sits down at the computer and plays while the other sits and looks over the others’ shoulder, dozing off, spouting off strategy and occasionally reminding the other that it is time to switch.

Family Pets

When I was growing up, pets were always a pretty big part of our family.  Sometimes for our pets we paid a great deal of money, like our dogs; at other times the pets were what we caught outside and put in a cage, like various snakes and lizards.  One time when our family was vacationing in southern Utah, we caught a pretty big lizard.  This wasn’t any ordinary wimpy lizard like the ones we would catch around our neighborhood.  This was a cross between one of those ordinary lizards and a dragon, making it very non-wimpy.  We were so proud of ourselves at having captured such a wild and ferocious looking creature and looked forward to taming it and making it the latest family pet.  Our first clue that it wasn’t terribly domesticated was when it grabbed a hold of my brothers finger with its vice gripping, lock-jaws.  I am telling you, this thing had my brother’s finger buried up to the second knuckle and it wasn’t letting go.  I can still see the look in my brother’s eyes as he just repeated the words “Get it off, Get if off, GET IT OFF,” with a slight hint of panic and terror in his voice.  Well we didn’t want to pull on the lizard too hard.  Dang, the way it was locked on there, the finger could have come off in the process.  We didn’t want to pull the tail off of the lizard, because who wants a lizard with only part of a tail for a pet.  We would have shoved a garden hose down it’s mouth, with the water running at full bore, in an attempt to see if that would free the jaws of life, but just as we were about to do that we realized that we were in the desert and we didn’t have a hose, or a water faucet, or any water.  Well, eventually the lizard got bored and just let go, maybe it was just full.  So we found a container to put our bounty in and got in the car with visions of showing all our friends the cool dragon lizard that we caught.  However, before we got too far on our drive home, somehow the creature escaped its temporary living quarters and was soon making its acquaintance with my mom.  This was not a good situation.  Evidently mothers do not like demon lizards scurrying up their clothes and setting roost in their hair.  I had never seen mom move so fast, although she couldn’t really go anywhere, so it was more just a very fast flailing around violently there in the front seat.  And the screams; the decibel level certainly was beyond what was safe for my young ears.  Well once we finally corralled our new pet, we were promptly instructed to get that thing out of the car.  This had to be one of the shortest lived pet experiences in my lifetime.  But in those 10 minutes, I felt like I developed a special relationship with that handsome little critter.  The hurt has never fully gone away.