Hi,
A friend I met on eons suggested I write a blog and fill it with my memories. Well, I have always hesitated to be very open, but maybe this will be good for me.
My first memory is of my third birthday party. I know it was my third because of the setting. My parents and I and my younger sister had moved to Arizona from Idaho. We had gone via San Diego because I remember my little sister riding on top of a huge galapagos tortoise. Probably not good for the tortoise and I know they do not let little kids do that any more, but it was the fall of 1957 and we did a lot of things back then that we have now learned weren't so good.
Anyway, we were outside, it was November and there were palm trees, and the grass was green and I tipped over one of the old aluminum lawn chairs. I remember the gifts we got also. My sister and I were both given sueezeboxes. You know those plastic things, like acchordions, that kids squeezed to make noises. We must have driven our parents crazy.
It was a new life. We were part of a flood moving to the southwest. My father had been a marine during WW2. He had fought on Iwo Jima, as had his two brothers, and visited Iran, Iraq, India, Australia and Hawaii while in the service. He had returned to Idaho and married my mother in 1949. They had tried to make a go of it. Financially successful, he hated the weather and wanted something better for his family than small town Idaho. He told me once he just could not bear the grey any more.
So they sold the house and the country store they owned, bought a moving truck, packed us into the car and moved.
more tomorrow