My favorite thing to do in the summer when I was growing up was that my parents would take me from Ishpeming to Minneapolis where my grandmother lived. My mother’s mother. She was a little bitty woman who had had red hair. She had come down from Winnipeg for what reason I have no idea, I wish I did. Her name was Sarah Mable. In the afternoon in the middle of the summer, when it was hot in Minneapolis, every…
1: I grew up in the plains in western Iowa. Something I really miss when I hear about a storm coming: I have to wait for it, and then it happens. I can watch it on TV, of course. The thing about living out on the plains was that you could see hours ahead that the storm was on its way. You knew it was happening, and you would even see lightning out in the distance. So you knew what…
I don’t know if anyone remembers this storm just the other day, you know that real loud lightning we had—thunder and lightning. Well, there was a lighting strike, must have been within a block of my house because the flash and the sound came at the same time. That reminded me when I was a kid back on the farm; we had this big old tree. I can’t remember what kind of a tree now. A cottonwood, probably. Every time…
Speaking of childhood beds, we had bunk beds. I got this bright idea that I was going to take my pants and take the belt loop on the back and tie it up onto the post of that bunk bed and get onto the top bunk and jump into my pants. It worked, my legs went right down in it, but my center of gravity was up. So I got into them, and I spun around, and I was hanging…
I had a grandfather that was more the father figure for me. He was a salesman—he sold tombstones just to make it interesting—but he would always come when he had free time. We’d go fishing together. We were close to the great lakes of Iowa in Dickinson County. He knew all of the people up there, and we’d go up there, and he knew all of the better places to fish. And I kind of grew up in that area…
Does your mother ever spank you? Well, my mother hardly ever did, but she started to one time, and I ran to the backyard. And the dog was MY dog, and the dog comes RRRRRRRR! So she didn’t! Stopped her in her tracks.
Did you ever make a skate scooter? No? Do you know what I’m talking about? Maybe you’d use one of your roller skates. A skate scooter was just one board like this, another board like that, and you make a handle, and you’d take a skate apart and put half of it on the front and half of it on the back. And now they buy them.
1: A place I really like is my bed. I just feel like whenever I’m feeling sad or something like that I just go there. 2: I was thinking about my childhood bed, too. It was a bed like this, and right over here was a window to the backyard, but no one was ever in the backyard. So I’d lay on my stomach across the bed and I could look in the backyard, and no one was there so…
A meaningful place for me is the top of my Volkswagen Bug. Last week I was telling some people about how I used to do cartwheels over that Volkswagen. Another thing I loved to do on that is park at either upper Hickory Hill Park or at a farm field somewhere, and I would go out and lay on it backwards on the top of it, and it had that nice curve and arch, and it was a nice, nice…
There’s a park really close to my house that has this huge pine tree in it, and a lot of times, if I just want to walk some place, I walk down there, and I take off my shoes, and I climb up almost to the top. It’s really nice in the mornings and in the evenings because the sunsets and sunrises are really cool. You can see the rooftops down in the neighborhood. It’s really peaceful—there’s no one around…