CHRISTMAS 2007

At Christmas time I can remember a number of stories of contacts with children that I have had, sometimes with one child and other times with a number of children.

Daughter Robin was taking courses at the University Of Pacific and was sent for a week to a school house being run by an Indian tribal elder in Northern California. She asked me to go along with her because the school needed repairs that the tribe couldn't provide. The children were all from single parent families or completely abandoned, mostly of kindergarten age. A large room was used for teaching; this had little furniture except a huge overstuffed arm chair. I made the mistake of sitting in this chair. Instantly I was handed a book and asked to read a story. I was instantly covered with children wanting to touch and sit as close to me as possible. The children needed a father image, ideally one which they could actually touch.

The woman who ran the school lived in a small house and she had bought a large electric stove from Sears. It turned out that her house was not served with an electric line large enough to supply the stove; it sat on her porch and she finally had it delivered to the school. It sat, unused, in the kitchen area of the school - there was no 240 volt outlet into which it could be plugged, even though the school house had plenty of power nearby. It took me only a short time to get a breaker box and wire it into the school's electric supply. But each day I was followed around with children asking if I were tired enough to sit in the chair.

This wasn't the only time I was involved with the telling of stories. While David and Ali, his daughter, were first living with us, I would escort her to preschool and home each day. Her class was learning the alphabet and once a week for show and tell, they were to bring something that began with the letter they were learning that week. When they got to G, Ali said she would bring something special to school that week. She invited me, her "G"randfather, to show and have me tell them one of her bedtime stories - the story of the 5 (!) pigs. Ali had expanded the story over time, to make it last longer. In addition to a grandpa and grandma pig, the story included additional houses made of a number of materials (including a house made of sticker bushes and one made of concert and rebar), and a family dog. The story always ended with the dog growling loudly at the wolf, and the wolf saying he was leaving for good, packing up his favorite books and disappearing, never to be seen again. The story was a big hit with Ali's class, and when they found out we also had a story about Goldilocks and the 5 Bears, they (and their teacher) invited me to come back another time and tell them that story as well.

While Robin and my grandson Greg were living with me, I also told him stories, which he also modified. One of his favorites was Goldilocks, but instead of adding bears, he had Goldilocks make bigger and bigger messes in the house. Starting with her tracking in mud, he added her tracking in black grease and tar. She not only made a mess in the house, but also on her dress, shoes and all over her skin. Worse, when she tried to clean up the mess, the bathtub became so clogged it had to be replaced along with the tile near the tub and on the bathroom floor!

I can't remember telling stories to Lois and Dave's daughters, Kristin and Donna, but this is a story about something that happened when they were about 7 years old. They'd come to visit us during the summer, and they and their cousin Greg helped me flatten a pile of aluminum cans and gather up other recyclables to take to the recycle place in San Jose so we could them in for cash. I had been collecting cans for a long time so I had a large amount of them. They watched as I unloaded two large sacks of crushed cans and took the slip from the weighing man to the office where people were standing around waiting for their money. I had put their names on the weight slip. The total amount of money was over 30 dollars. When the paymaster announced their names and handed a handful of paper money to the girls they both screamed, "All that money!?!" Heavy laughter from the crowd followed. Where they lived in Texas, they got much less for aluminum cans, in part because (as they were told by the person at their recycling center) the cans were often full of sand. Greg had previously gotten this much money so he wasn't nearly as excited as were the girls who left the recycling place repeating "we're rich, we're rich!" We later went to a flea market where they found a wide variety of things to buy.