STORIES TO TELL WHEN YOUR OLD

     If you don't have experiences when your young how will you have stories to tell when your old:

     Like flying out of San Carlos CA in a little Cessna 150 heading out over the coastal hills to fly over Half Moon Bay and up the coast in the evening.  Flying over the Golden Gate Bridge on a clear night the cars on the bridge and the lights of San Francisco are twinkling and so beautiful.  I'm helping Rod watch for other air traffic as we don't want to fly into anything.  Over the San Francisco Bay across to Oakland to Livermore  and the Red Baron a "fly in" restaurant for dinner.  Cross winds and turbulence prevented us from putting the plane down and it almost felt like we were hovering there on the approach to the runway like a helicopter forever.  We've flown in here a number of times for dinner so tonight we head back across the Bay to San Carlos and end up having dinner at the restaurant in the Sheraton on the Peninsula.

     Like the time we were flying on  employee passes on United out of  Washington Dulles and we stood by but didn't get on any non-stop flights to San Francisco and our only hope was a direct flight through Denver.  There's non-stop flights and connecting flights which are two different planes and two different flight numbers... but there's also what we call direct flights which are flights that may make a stop but it's the same flight number and plane all the way to the destination.  There's also change of gauge flights that I might explain at some other time but they don't relate to this story.  Well, we stood by for the direct flight through Denver and got on and just before the plane landed they announced from the flight deck that this plane which was scheduled to go on to San Francisco after the Denver stop was going to Colorado Springs instead so they dumped all us standbys and paying passengers out at Denver.  There was only one flight left to San Francisco from Denver left that evening so we all hoped we would make it... Rod and I and all the other employee standbys who were hoping to get back to the Bay Area that night.  The plane that was going to San Francisco was coming from Seattle and the only passengers on the flight was the Denver Broncos who had played Seattle that day.  I don't know who won or what but we stood there watching all the Broncos deplane and they were HUGE.  The flight was delayed because the Broncos had trashed the plane and they had to clean up the mess.  It wasn't looking good for us because the flight was a full flight out of Denver and the gate agents advised all us standbys that there was a flight into San Jose we could probably all make and then we could carpool in cabs up to San Francisco Airport to pick up our cars.  Rod and I decided if we didn't get on we would try for the redeye out of Denver back to DC and arrive for the early non stops to San Francisco the next morning so we continued to stand by for the San Francisco flight while all the other standbys went for the San Jose flight.  It's a good thing we did because we were then the only standbys and we got on in First Class and finally made it home that night.      

     Like pulling into the dock at Pillar Point after salmon fishing all day on the Pacific ocean and Rod tells me to get in the bow of the Grady White to jump off and tie the boat to the dock as we pull in only there's someone on the pier I hand the rope off to and he holds the boat for Rod and ties her up.  I think I can step off the front over the rail and don't realize how high up I am so what I do is crawl over the rail and land flat on my back on the pier it's a wonder I didn't fall in the water.

     Like boat camping on Lake Shasta.  We're pulled into a cove and Rod has tied us up in the middle and we've stored everything in the cabin after dinner and blown up the air mattress to sleep in sleeping bags on the deck under the stars.  You feel so close to eternity because without city lights the stars in the night sky are so clear.  We've got a tape in the little TV we've brought with us and we're settling in in the dusk cause night falls real fast on the lake.  Our poles are still in the rod holders with the line pulled up and secured when we hear a jetski come into the cove and a female voice calling out "Oh fishermen, aren't you worried about your poles?"  When we hear this our heads pop up and we startle this poor girl and she heads out of the cove exclaiming "Oh, I'm so drunk".  Don't know what she expected.

     Like the next morning when Rod releases the ropes so we can pull into the bank to go up into the woods to do what everyone does in the morning after coffee and he pulls into the bank for me to step over the bow to jump down only as I go over my right heel catches and I'm hanging there with my hands clenching the rail and my arms stretched and my heel caught on the rail like a ballerina with the highest kick in the world and I'm yelling for him to push my heel off it's stuck and Rod's looking at me with huge eyes.  Finally he lifts my heel off the rail so I can drop down but when I come out of the woods back to the boat he's turned it around so I can step over the back into the boat. Whew.


     I just read this to Rod and he smiled and said "Hopeless" and I smiled and said that's what my family calls "Doing a Sandy".








           

THE CEDAR CHEST

Mom and Dad on their wedding day August 25, l945.

     When my Mom graduated from Fairfax High School at sixteen (soon to be seventeen on the Fourth of July 1944) she went to work for the Federal Government.  Her parents moved the family from The Pink House, and some of you will know what house I'm talking about but it wasn't pink then, in Clifton VA to Cameron Valley in Alexandria VA to housing built for the influx of workers who had come from all over the country to work for the war effort.  The war was World War II and her parents were already working at the Torpedo Plant.  The move to Alexandria was because gasoline was rationed and hard to come by.  With the money she earned working in her very first job she bought a bedroom set for herself and a cedar chest.

     The cedar chest was a hope chest.  In it she put the sheets and linens and treasures she was saving for her  marriage to her own true love.  That was my Dad who was her first cousin's pen pal.  When  Dad came to finally meet Mae he found she towered over him but Mom was just right.  This was okay with Mae because Dad introduced her to his friend Warren and they became a couple.  Dad and Mom and Mae and Warren were close friends all their lives.

My guest bedroom and the cedar chest.

     The cedar chest was always at the base of their bed but when my parents moved from the country on Popes Head Road into the Town of Fairfax in 1958 Mom put the cedar chest in the bedroom I shared with my sister Linda and we displayed our dolls and stuffed animals on top.  The cedar chest held treasured baby clothes, love letters, pictures and wedding portraits, and the little powder blue suit Mom was married in.  I could wear it when I was a freshman in high school and I did as a Halloween costume.  The skirt was short because styles were very short during WWII and it was a little snug.  I thought of myself as a kind of hillbilly Li'l Abner type character so I pulled my hair up and put a Minnie Pearl hat on my head with a flower sticking straight up.  Linda and I went trick-or-treating with Pat McGhee and Judy Norwood and Tina Meyers in Green Acres.  I think Pat's sister Deenie was with us.  We trick-or-treated at the house my parents eventually bought in 1965.  Tina's mom was supposed to drive us home but somehow there was a miss communication and we kids ended up walking home cutting through where they were building the new administrative building on University Drive.  It was scary.

     When United Airlines transferred my parents to San Francisco in 1966 the cedar chest stayed with Linda and eventually became her three boy's toy chest.  When she and her family moved to Phoenix AZ in 1979 she left it at my Grandmother's house on Popes Head Road in the basement where it stayed for years.  Dad retired from United Airlines in 1978 and Mom and Dad returned to Virginia to the house on Popes Head.  In 1994 when Rod and I became engaged after dating cross country for four years I transferred from United Air Lines Washington Reservation Center to  the San Francisco Reservation Center and I took the cedar chest with me.  United allowed me 500 lbs. of personal possessions which they flew out for me for  free.  Rod and I were married June 24, 1995 in a ceremony at our home.

I just had Mom's cedar chest repaired and refinished this year.  It sits at the foot of the bed in my guest bedroom and holds linens.  I treasure it.  As for the bedroom set Mom bought at the same time as the cedar chest with the money she made from her first job my parents still owned it at the end of their lives.  Momma passed in 1998 and Daddy in 2009.