It's Such An Easy Word!

Put yourself in this situation. You are a grandparent whose daughter and granddaughter live on an island in the Pacific. Not only do you miss them, but also you worry about how they must be living in such a faraway place. Imagine your excitement when you receive a recorded tape from them. You put it into your tape player and turn it on, anxious to hear the voices of your daughter and her family. One of the first words you hear is your toddler granddaughter yelling "woach!," followed by the sound of a child's foot smacking the floor.

The island was Okinawa. The time was the 1960's. The child was my oldest daughter. The "woach" was real, as was the tape. We lived on Okinawa for almost two years. It was an interesting time for us, to say the least. It was also a place with many insects, not the least of which was the large, flying roaches that seemed immune to the spray the Navy gave us to kill them.

Living on Okinawa was an adventure. Our house was bounded on one side by an Okinawan cemetery. On another side were rice paddies which stretched almost a half mile to the edge of the South China Sea. To get to work I walked through a local village and caught a very crowded bus each day. We used the same buses to take us to and from the army base where we did our shopping. We boarded up the entire house for each typhoon that was coming our way, although none hit while we were there. And yes, we killed roaches.

One of the first words our daughter learned was "woach." Maybe that's why she moved from Texas when she grew up. After all, we have the same kind of "woaches" here.

Of Course Global Warming Is Real

It's coming up on the time of year when we would get bundled up, grease our sled runners with bacon grease and slide down the hill on 15th street. At least that was true when I was many years younger than I am now, back when we still had snow.

The road up Barger Hill was once one of the finest sledding roads known to any wide-eyed kid. We loved when it snowed because we knew it was time to get our sleds out and start making that road impassable to cars. That was before salt trucks, of course.

I remember bundling up so much that I could barely walk, which was the only way mom would allow me to go out into the cold air. We would walk our sleds up the hill, lie down on them and rocket down the hill, ending up on 15th street in front of our houses. Over and over we did this until the street was a sheet of ice from the sled runners.

The time came when we could no longer use the street. The city started plowing it before we could make it impassable. The people who were building the big houses at the top of the hill insisted upon being able to drive home. We thought that was pretty unreasonable of them. After all, there was a little back road they could use. It was barely one lane, but it would have allowed us to keep our sledding track.

Also, it has been quite a few years since that much snow has fallen on my little hometown. When I've been home I've seen kids sliding down the dead grass on the hillsides. No sleds, though, just cardboard. What a poor substitute for flying down that icy hill, barely in control of a speeding sled, laughing all of the way down.

If we reverse global warming and widen the back road will you give us back the road up Barger Hill?

American Eels as a Bonding Tool

Slipping and Sliding with Dad

(This blog also appears as a guest post at www.maydecembersecrets.com)

The American Eel is believed to come from an area of the Atlantic Ocean called the Sargasso Sea. They are born there and then spend most of their life in fresh water. They are energetic little fish which swim from the Atlantic ocean up many of the rivers and streams in America to mature in some interesting places. This post is about those which found their way into the muddy banks of creeks in West Virginia. That’s a pretty long swim.

One of the activities I loved to do with dad was to fish. We usually fished in Twelve Pole Creek, an almost river-sized creek near home. Most of the time we fished with either minnows or worms. There were times, though, when dad wanted to fish with eels. They lasted much longer than other baits on a hook and big bass seemed to particularly love them. Obtaining them meant a lot of work for us, though.

We could stop at any bait shop for minnows or worms, but eels required that we wade in creeks around home with bait buckets and long handled shovels. Somehow dad knew just the right creek in which to “dig eels.” He would point and say “dig there” and I would shove the spade into the mud at the edge of the water and throw it out onto the bank. With luck, and speed, we would quickly be able to dig a half dozen or so eels. As I remember, though, they didn’t come easily. There were many shovels full of mud with no eels or eels that were so fast they got back into the water before I could grab them. Sometimes he yelled at me when an eel made it back to the water, but it would only be a few minutes before we were laughing again as I scrambled around trying to catch those slimy, slick little creatures. As was usually the case, he was very patient with me.

We would take the eels we caught and happily fish with them for many hours. Some of my fondest memories of dad are around the time I spent fishing with him. He was a good fisherman and a good teacher. He taught me everything I know about fishing.

Dad loved to wade as he fished. I guess he felt it got him closer to the fish. The family had a bit of a problem with that, however. You see, he never learned to swim. I saw him slip under water a couple of times. He always came back up sputtering, with his fishing rod in his hand, and somehow scrambled out of the hole he had stepped into.

Earnestine was also fortunate to have the benefit of some of his fishing knowledge. Living in the big city she never got an opportunity to fish as a child. We’re both glad she learned a little about fishing from an expert like dad. The memory of her catching her first (cat)fish in my sister’s farm pond will always be with us. Again, we were all laughing as she dragged the fish out of the water and yelled for help with it.

It was hard for my parents to accept my divorce and remarriage, particularly to a woman who was much younger than I. We have always emphasized bonding between Earnestine and my children. Because of the distance and reticence of my parents we could not similarly emphasize that closeness with them. Although she ultimately bonded with most of my family, I believe her interest in fishing was one of the things that strengthened her friendship with dad.