For Arienne

Wednesday October 28, 2020

Hi Arienne, I knew that my response to your text message this morning asking me if I could think of nice things about mom and dad would run a little too long to send in a text message or 3 so I'm going to blog about it.

Ladies first, so I'll start with mom. Out of the 2 parents she was definitely the one most likely to be compassionate. She read stories to us when we were young, made cookies fairly often, taught us how to make cookies so we could make our own cookies whenever we wanted. As I got older she told me stories about her when she was a child and about some of our family. She was good at administering first aid. When I was 6 years old, I ended up on the business end of a car's front bumper on my way home from school. The neighbor on the corner of our street where that happened knew that Mrs. Wilson who lived down the street was good at first aid so she ran to our house, knocked on the door and announced when mom answered it that a child had been hit by a car and needed help so come quick! Of course there were times when mom was not so nice so my first thought after I peeled myself off the pavement and limped out of the street as fast as I could so the pickup truck heading my direction didn't hit me too, was "oh man I am going to be in SOO much trouble for this." So I panicked when I saw mom running across the neighbor's lawn where I was laying. She had a worried look on her face and instead of being angry, she helped keep me calm and rode with me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I never did get in trouble for that, so that was nice. Mom also encouraged me to draw. That started at a young age, I remember being in the high chair and mom would squirt finger paint stuff on the tray in front of me. One of my favorite things to do was to tap all of my fingers at the same time over and over and pretend that was a picture of a forest and then I'd use the palm of my hand to wipe the forest out of the way so I could "see the people that were in the forest" lol. When I was a rebellious teenager I announced to mom that I was going to bleach my bangs. Mom said ok and booked me an appointment with her hairdresser and might have even paid for it.

When I was younger we would take an annual trip to visit the Wilson grandparents in Idaho in our Volkswagen van. One time was during the winter and we went with Uncle Bruce's family to go sledding and ride snowmobiles. I was too young to operate a snowmobile so I did a lot of sledding. A nice man at the top of the hill would help me onto the sled and push me down the hill. Uncle Bruce would pick me up at the bottom of the hill on his snowmobile and give me a ride back to the top where the nice man would help me again. Decades later I realized that the nice man at the top of the hill was dad. I just didn't recognize him because he was all bundled up in winter clothing. Another time at grandma and grandpa Wilson's within a year of that winter trip we took a summer trip around the 4th of July. This time we went to a go kart track and I ended up face down on the track while my go kart ran by itself off the track. I don't know how I got there because the last thing I remember before that was that I had rear ended Andrea (who was going way too slow and has been rear ended in her car a larger than average number of times so I think that speaks to something about her driving) and she turned around to look and I yelled at her, "GO!" So I'm looking forward to that part after the resurrection when we get to see the replay of our life so I can find out what happened that day. Anyway, mom and dad drove me to the hospital that time and dad carried me from the car into the hospital. I was probably around 4 or 5 years old and that is the only time I remember him ever carrying me. And then of course there were the years that I was in Cub/Boy Scouts and dad was really active and helpful. I won't kid you, he did that for him, not for me, because he enjoyed doing that stuff. But he was kind to me while we were doing those activities. He was also kind to me after dinner when we were out in the garage on Santa Leonora Circle while he was woodworking. Dad would also read us stories when we were young. But he didn't read the words on the page, he made up his own silly story to turn it into a game where we would protest that he wasn't reading the story right but it was still an amusing story and never the same one twice.