Dad was wounded badly in the South Pacific jungles during the Second World War. Mom had a drawer full of medals, commendations, and newspaper clippings to prove what a hero he was. His feet, legs and buttocks were riddled with shrapnel, making them prone to infection. And there were the malarial fevers that he got regularly. During the first ten years of my life, he was in and out of the VA Hospital continually.

So strong was my correlation between “bad” and “Japanese” that I used these words interchangeably until I was seven or eight. When I was angry with one of my friends, I called her “Japanese,” which was the worst insult I could think of. If I didn’t want to eat my vegetables at dinner, I would say, “Yuck – these peas are Japanese.” My parents thought my confusion was cute so they told this story over and over. They probably thought it meant that I was a budding literary genius.

Oh how I wanted one of those piglets – so much cuter than dogs! Well, why not? So I tore off running down the grassy track back to my house, and burst into our kitchen where my father sat peacefully reading the Sunday paper. I shrilled out, as only a 9-year-old can, “Daddy! Can I have a pig? Can I can I? They’re so cute and he said he’d sell me one for only $10, can I have $10 please, Daddy?”

Now most suburban fathers, normal ones that is, would say something like, “No of course you can’t have a pig. Don’t be silly.” But my father was not your average father, or normal either. What he said was, “Well that’s an interesting idea, let’s discuss it.” In the background my mother, standing at the stove, said, “Oh, Armond …” in a warning tone, but my father ignored her. She said “Oh Armond” a lot, whenever he got an idea.

So we discussed it, and my father got out paper and pencil and he helped me figure out how much money it would cost to build a pig pen in our back yard, and what the pig’s food would cost, and the straw, and how much we could expect to sell our pig for, when it was grown, and whether the whole operation would make us a profit. (You can probably tell that my father was a successful businessman.)

I of course could think of nothing but the cute little pink piggy and its wiggly ears. The upshot was that I did indeed borrow the money from my dad (he made me keep an account book), we bought the pig, built a pig pen, and food, and for about a week I was the happiest 9-year-old around.

Until I got tired of slopping the pig every morning before I went to school, and until the pig grew huge, much bigger than me, and mean too. With teeth. And he was fond of making mud in his pen, the mud being made of pig pee and pig poop, with some straw added for texture. I had to wade through this stinky mud whenever I had to put more straw in his pen. The pig also figured out how to get out of its pen, and discovered the neighbors’ gardens, which he raided regularly.

When we sold the pig I was so relieved I didn’t even blanch when I learned that we sold him to a butcher who promptly killed him. The butcher gave the pig’s feet to my mother, who pickled them and kept them in jars in the pantry. I’d often look at those pigs feet and they would remind me to think before I asked for anything.

And to top it all off, since I bought the pig when pork was high, and sold him when it was low, I lost money.

We went camping on the Olympic peninsula and drove though the Indian reservation, where we stopped at a small store and my father engaged the suspicious Native American clerk in a long conversation about his family history, while we kids traded stares with two antagonistic young men, and my mother refused to get out of the car.

We went to Hawaii and visited the active volcano Kilauea and my father threw my brother’s shoe out onto the hot lava so my brother could see it burn up. It convinced all of us that we’d better stay away from lava, and made my mother so nervous she went and waited in the car.

Also in Hawaii, we went on the glass bottom boat tour – my dad, my brother and myself – Mom didn’t go because she was nervous of sharks – this trip was especially memorable because my brother threw up overboard and we got to see the fish making a glorious meal of his vomit – a sight which caused me to throw up too.

We went to an archaeological dig in eastern Washington where we handled old bones and fossils and my father told us stories about their lives of the bones owners – even giving the bones names and making up fantastic, horrible, or funny details of their lives. My mother came on this trip because she wasn’t scared of bones – although she was sure my 5 year old brother would fall into a pit so she drove him crazy by clutching his shirt collar.

One time in the late 1960s we went to New York City and had dinner at the Plaza restaurant and rode in a cab with a huge black Afro’d cabdriver named Innocent Henry who my dad made friends with and convinced him to become our personal chauffeur over the three days of our stay. Innocent Henry even took us to Harlem and showed us the sights – I remember the Apollo Theatre – and we walked down the street, the only white faces on the block. My mother, of course, waited in the car.

Gather a group of people in a room and turn off all the lights. Send the youngest person into another room. (If the youngest person is a child, send a supervisor with them.) While in the dark, think about the blessings of the past year, and what you’d like the Light to bring. Meanwhile, the youngest person will light a candle or candles and when the time is right, open the door and
bring the Light into the room again.

This sounds simple, but it can be powerful and dramatic. Sing “light” or “sunshine” songs as the new Light is carried into the room. Some of our favorites are: You Are My Sunshine, This Little Light of Mine, and Let It Be.

Have a blessed Winter Solstice. May the new light bring goodness and beauty to your life.

Boo is a flexible word. Also old; it’s been around since the 15th century. It’s one of those words that came from a sound – the combination of a hard consonant and the “oo” vowel sound produces a loud startling noise, so when you say Boo you are trying to surprise or scare someone.

But that’s not all. If you put a contemptuous spin on Boo you are expressing disgust or even anger at something stupid. This is the Boo that is often heard at sporting events or political meetings. In other words, a catcall. (Another interesting word, but I digress.)

There’s more. If you combine Boo with Hoo (another sound-alike word) it means sobbing. If you double Boo, it becomes Boo Boo and means a mistake or an owie. (Or Yogi’s sidekick.)

Okay, I’m done digressing and I’m going back to booing now.

My father was a natural born storyteller with a gift for making the most trivial happening seem dramatic, funny or exciting. One of my favorite pastimes was to listen to him tell stories of “the old days.” So vivid were his stories that I was more familiar with my grandparents, aunts and uncles as young adults and children, rather than the adults I actually knew.

After dinners at our large tribal gatherings on Thanksgiving, while my cousins and brothers ran playing and screaming around the house, I was usually hiding under the dinner table listening to the adults talk. Because I was hidden by the long white tablecloth, they didn’t know I was there, and freed from the inhibition “not in front of the children!” they would tell the real stories of their lives. Beer, wine and scotch would be poured, and sex and death and scandal would ricochet around the table. Long standing jokes would be resurrected and laughed over again. Speculation and opinions about old family mysteries would be offered up and argued over. Politics, religion, history and wars: no topics were taboo. Since my family was filled with loud, passionate people, the stories tended to be juicy.

My eavesdropping habits, which I must confess I never outgrew, have been a great blessing to me in my work as a writer, ghostwriter, and historian, where I get to hide under the Thanksgiving dinner table all over again – only metaphorically now, which is much better for my knees.

Don’t you just love bragging about your kids? I do.

One of the things I found that surprised me most was a single sheet of paper with song lyrics printed in his crabby hard-to-read handwriting. Now, my dad thought real songs had ended with Bing Crosby, and he was especially scornful of rock and roll, which when I was a teenager he labeled as “the element that is destroying the only country I know and love.” Yet here was this piece of paper that he had saved in his secret stash, with song lyrics from 1986 written by Bob Seger, who I would have swore he’d never heard of, and if he had, would have dismissed as another low life rock musician. Yet here they were:

My hands were steady
My eyes were clear and bright
My walk had purpose
My steps were quick and light
And I held firmly
To what I thought was right
Like a rock.

My father impressed with the words of Bob Seger, amazing. Where had he heard this song? I cannot wrap my mind around him even listening for a minute to a rock and roll song, much less writing down the lyrics.

How little we truly know the people we think we know best.

“Before I read this book, we had tried and failed to get my father to share his stories of the past,” said one librarian reader, “but with these fabulous timelines and writing triggers, now he’s singing like a bird!”

Are your parents, grandparents, or (if you’re especially lucky) great-grandparents alive? Do you wish they’d share the stories of their past? If you want to help them remember so they sing like a bird, I encourage you to buy this book.

Then in the summer of 1938 the casket factory failed and there was no work at all. Dad had heard of the CCCs, or the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program designed to benefit out-of-work young men and their families by providing jobs working in the national forests – creating structures, making roads, and fighting forest fires. There was such a camp a half-mile away from Darrington, a tiny mountain town in the Cascades.

Although driven to the CCCs by unemployment, Dad was happy to learn that they provided another benefit – the CCC boys were allowed to attend local high schools or take correspondence courses paid for by the government. The CCCs also sent a portion of his earnings back to his mother – $8 a month, which at the time could buy a lot of groceries. Since education (he didn’t want to be a casket carpenter forever) and helping to support his mother were important values to him, Dad joined the CCCs, and moved to Camp Darrington.

Camp Darrington consisted of two barracks and a mess hall, and could house up to 200 men. The boys were under the jurisdiction of the US Forest Service. The country adjacent to the camp was rough and mountainous, accessible with great difficulty, so the primary jobs of the CCC boys was road building and ditch-digging, focusing on the Sauk and Siuattle truck trails. Over 40 miles of road was laid by CCC boys, most of it through solid rock. The work was hard and demanding. But it was also full of spectacular scenery and wildlife that was truly wild. Since most of the CCC boys were from the city, they were often stunned to confront black bears, deer, mountain goats, even grizzlies.

Meanwhile, my mother was 17 and also going to Darrington High School. Mom, in common with all the other Darrington girls, was bowled over by the citified CCC boys. To girls from a tiny hick town in the mountains, miles away from any city, those boys could have come from another planet. They seemed glamorous, sophisticated, and dreamy, to use some 1930s slang.

It took another six years and a world war before they married, but I guess you could say that without the CCCs, I would not be here.