Lynne's Quilt for Baby Eason

A treasure!

(Click on photo for a closer view)

Continuing the Dream by Charles

With the sheriff burning up the road behind us, with his siren blaring and lights flashing it was no longer a fun time for the check out girl.  She was crying out for  me to stop and hitting my shoulder.  She was pounding my arm as hard as she could and screaming "my ass hurts and i can't sit like this any longer stop this car!"  I couldn't feel a thing from her pounding my arm as my adrenilin was pounding throughout my body and my hands were busy with the wheel and shifting gears trying to keep the roadster on the road at such a high speed.  The check out girl cried out again, "You don't even know my name is Nancy and could this guy next to me please put the gun away.  I just want to go home!"  She was crying and heaving so hard that tank top was draping off her shoulders and her breasts were starting to be unveiled.  

I glanced over at John and he stared back at me in disbelief and then he went back to staring down the barrel of the glock pistol.  He did hesitate for a moment and checked out Nancy's particulars.

Chaz: My Bookcase

Ever since I can remember I have had this small wooden bookcase in my room. The bookcase is only about 2 1/2 feet high and 3 feet wide and is made out of pine.  It has a small piece of scrollwork right under the top shelf that gives it a modest classic presence and the wood is stained a golden honey color.

When I was a child it stood between my bed and my brother's bed.  The bookcase sat right under the window that looked to the east.  I would lean on the bookcase and brace myself so that I could look out that window and watch the sun rise over Omak Mountain. I would also check to see if the neighbor kids were up yet and playing outside in their yard.

I kept my favorite books on this bookcase.  20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Last of the Mohicans were the books I remember.  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was my favorite and I was always thumbing through it looking for the most gruesome parts before I went to sleep. I also had an old copy of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson who I think I really wanted to become when I grew up.I remember that this copy of Treasure Island had some great maps in it and a picture of Stevenson dressed as a Pirate.

Later as I became a teenager I had a radio on the bookcase.  My parent's house had these copper balls on the roof of the house that were supposed to attract lightning strikes instead of having the lightning hitting the roof.  The thought that lightning was going to strike the house was troublesome to me as a kid but the copper balls made for a great antenna for my radio.  One day I scurried out on the roof of the house and attached my radios antenna, via more copper electrical wire, to the lightening balls. Voila, I could listen to rock stations, at night, from as far away as San Francisco. 

I remember lying in bed and listening to KNBR, a station in San Francisco that had a DJ who had a show late at night called the Crazy World of Arthur Brown who used to sing about being lowered into fire or something like that between songs.  Later on he made this little ditty into a hit song called Fire.  He would scream out that he was the god of Hellfire and this would bounce out into the darkness of my room and I would laugh out loud.  Every night I would lie in bed and hear all the hit songs coming out of the Bay Area in the mid sixties.  I first heard Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead and the Fugs on this station.  I loved feeling a part of the 60's even if it was only by listening to the radio.  The 60's were a long ways away from the Okanogan back then.

Back to the copper lightning balls, there was once a storm that came up with a lot of lightning and thunder and I leaned on the bookcase and yelled out "come on hit the lightning rods and let's see if they work!"  If I had any sense I would have realized that the copper ball was about five feet from my face and if lightning had struck I would have probably been burned to death. 

Another big thrill for me, associated with this bookcase, came with my discovery of the "Catcher In the Rye" by JD Salinger.  During the 60's this book was the most coveted by kids because it was so hated by adults and it was banned from libraries and it was thought of as pornography.  Well one day I was going through my parent's books to find something to read and as I scanned the books I thought out loud.

Let's see, Readers Digests, enough Raymond Chandler mysteries to paper over downtown Omak, Time and Newsweek magazines and then suddenly there it was "The Catcher In the Rye," My eyes blinked 600 times and I couldn't believe my find.  The most notorious book in the world is just sitting in my house.  What the hell is going on?  How can it be that I am actually touching this book?  At first I was almost afraid to open the book thinking demons were going to jump out of the pages with naked women wrapped around them. 

I looked around the room to see if my parents were watching me and then I just calmly put the book under my arm and quickly walked upstairs into my room.  I tucked the book on the shelf of my bookcase and for days I just looked at the title of the book staring back out at me just beaming to know I had the book when so many kids across America weren't even allowed to see the book.  What fortune, I Charlie Grimes have "The Catcher in the Rye " right here in my own god damned room and I actually found it on my parent's bookshelf.  I didn't have to break any laws to get this book.  The book just landed in my lap when I wasn't even looking.  I would run home from school and climb the stairs to my room at full speed just to make sure the book was still there on the bookcase.  I didn't even tell my friends I had it thinking they would tell someone else and then my parent's would find out I had found it and take the book away.  Gradually I began to read the book and then the voodoo of the book being dirty wore off and the insight and angst of being a confused teenager forever changed me.  The constant swearing was great too. I learned some great comeback lines from Salinger.   Every time I clip my toenails I think of Holden and his college roommates.  Funny thing about that book my parent's never even noticed it was missing from their bookcase and they never went looking for it.  I thought then that providence wanted me to have it.

 In high school I talked my parents into having a teenage phone line in my bedroom.  The green rotary dial phone sat on the bookcase.   At least it did for a while until one day, as I was talking to my girlfriend in Tonasket, my father drove home and calmly walked into my bedroom.  He went over to the phone cord and pulled it out of the wall.  This is back in the days when phone lines were hardwired into the wall.  The long distance bill had just come that day for the phone and this was my father's way of announcing the phone was now gone from my life.

 When I left for college this bookcase always was near my bed and I always laid the important books of my days on top of my little wooden friend.  Books of Greek history, Nietzsche, Jung and Rilke were always to be found there.  I would read these books with great intensity and then lay them down for safekeeping on this little bookcase.

 When Melanie and I got married and moved into our first house all we had was two suitcases full of clothes, an old blue velour chair, a mattress and this bookcase.  I put Melanie's picture on top of it to keep her safe.  Throughout these past 40 years since I left my parent's home this bookcase has been with me.  In our home on Queen Anne, in Seattle, for 25 years I kept only my favorite books on its shelves.  It's funny how I have become attached to this little bookcase.  It's not really any thing to look at but it has served me well for so long it's like a part of me.  This bookcase has observed my entire life and been a partner in my best moments of reflection and thought.

Today that bookcase lives with me in Ann Arbor.  Once again my radio sits on top of it and I have my favorite rocking chair right next to the bookcase and it is here that I read, reflect and listen to classical music.  I am sitting next to it now as I write this and my favorite book on the Peloponnesian war sits on top of it.  Some things never change.

When I am old and unsteady I will have to get up from my chair and brace myself on this bookcase like I did as a small child trying to see out the window of my bedroom.  I wonder what I will be reading then or what I will see out the window.

 

Charles

  

Lynne says: 78" ARGHHHHHHHHH!

We have been keeping busy here in Hanover, a mell of a hess!

(ed: click on photo for a better view)


From the Hanover Evening Sun:

Hanover's final total for the storm that began on Monday and stretched late into Tuesday evening was 23.1 inches, according to National Weather Service Meteorologist Aaron Tyburski.

It was the largest amount to fall in any of the reporting sites in York County, he said.

The weather service doesn't keep official records for many small locales including Hanover, Tyburski said, but does compile information that's phoned in from participants in its Cooperative Observer Program.

And the 23 inches reported locally by Hanover Water Plant, combined with this past weekend's snowfall to leave 51.7 inches on the ground this week, he said.

"That blows away everything from years past," Tyburski said. "I mean by leaps and bounds, not even close."

The previous snowfall record in Hanover - for an entire season - is 56.8 inches, which fell in the winter of 1995-96, and included the blizzard of Jan. 7 that year, he said.

"You almost beat that total just this week," he said.

And counting the snowfall of this past December, when mother nature dropped 23 inches in town, the year-to-date total in Hanover of just less than 78 inches is far and away the most the area has seen in one season, Tyburski said, at least since the early 1990s, when the Weather Service began keeping such records.

Machines Begin Dominance

An anniversary reminder from Wired:

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/02/february-10-1996-the-machines-takeover-begins/

Cleaning Out the House

This is heart-breaking sometimes. Cleaning out the house is like de-constructing Dad and Mom's lives and - by extension - saying something about our own. It's very hard. Lori found a treasure today that we didn't know existed: a small, postcard-sized book titled "Autographs of My School Friends." It was Dad's from March -June 1940, going to school in Sanders, AZ. From entries in it, I guess it was the end of the school year and he was moving somewhere. Maybe going away to high school. He'd have been about 13. This may be about the time that Mim headed West and Dad went out on his own. Dunno. A number of entries are from his basketball team mates. In fact, near the beginning is a page Dad labelled "My Sport" with a simple little drawing of a basketball. The class motto was "Be prepared, in love or war." One entry says "Dear Johnny . . . my heart is turning over and over because its just worried about you . . ." Another: "Dear Johnny, There's a pansey in the valley that I love veary much and I love you as much as I do it. Ann Leland" Betty McDonald says, " I like you little/ I like you big / I like you like / my little pig." And from Tommy Lynch: " Dear John, I Tommy a member of the Junior High team is wishing you the best of luck, for your position as forward and I as center which jumps for the ball to win a game. I'm hoping success will cheer you up." One page has signatures of Tommy H. Lynch, Pat Lynch, Sidney A. Counts, William P. Lynch, John Hurd,and Herbert Johnson. There is a little note that says, "These Boys are the basketball team."

(p.s. this is sung to the Talking Heads "Burning Down the House" . . .)

PAHurds Say: Snow is Us! Woe is Us!

Charlie continues the dream . . .

What a sight we made screaming up the mountanous high desert road just past the gas station.  I was intent on losing the sheriff who started tailing us after we passed him going 90.  Weaving in and out of traffic and gunning that little roadster's engine to its full tilt.  Sweat was running down my brow as the checkout girl started rubbing my forehead with a piece of ice.  She was sitting on my coat between the bucket seats.  I still didn't know her name but she was confident that I would find that out shortly.  She began to play with my ear and slightly knocked my sunglasses askew as johnny sat next to her in the passenger seat cleaning his glock pistol.  Johnny reached into the back seat and began taking an inventory of the ammuniton.  He knew we would need it once the sheriff caught up with us.