I didn't know about dad's first wife until I went to a first cousin reunion around 1980. My cousin Edgar Miller's wife Mary was showing me some photos that people had brought and picked up one and said "This is the wedding photo of your dad and his first wife and...
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163 Views
As I pedaled up I saw her sprawled out on the ground. She had lost her balance and fallen off her bicycle. Her knee was skinned very badly and her arm was cut. We asked her to let us call someone to come pick her up. She steadfastly refused. She had...
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It was fun seeing Christian on the Big Screen at Brenden Theatres towards the end of his 7th grade year (Spring of 2016) as the teams of kids in Video Production at Diablo View Middle School Showcased their year of hard work. Great ingenuity and so much fun to watch. Double...
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What Can I Give Him? Christmas Eve: Circa 1934 A Country Church Jack and Shug Carriker, their six kids packed into their old 1928 Star Car, pulled into the bare dirt parking lot of a little church located in the countryside about halfway between Drumright and Oilton, Oklahoma. ...
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Though I am dog tired from a day trip to Virginia to check on my 90-year-old Aunt Eunice, I want to share with you an amazing instance of synchronicity (if such be a word). I made the trip from Ohio for the nursing home’s Christmas Party today. Here is...
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The Merry Cherry Farm, Williamston, North Carolina The green John Deere tractor coughs to life like a prehistoric animal awakening from a dormant winter. Its long, pipe-like nostril sends smoke out the metallic lid, creating a faint ding, ding, ding that can be heard from the sleeping windows of the...
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Passages: Large families: Thanksgivings. Many years of lots of noise, Lots of family around - conversations solving world's problems - crowded house - seated cheek to cheek around a large table with a "children's" table off to the side. Years pass. Those children who were seated off to one side or...
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Chapt 9 1987-1994 Columbus Ohio The next 8 years of 1987 through 1995 marked a new period for us as I finished my graduate work at Ohio State University and expanded my music teaching from a part time avocation to...
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CHAPT 8 1978-1986 Columbus, Ohio These years were the most difficult period for our family in so many ways. There certainly were positive things that happened along the way, but it was also a period of many challenges, the likes of which we had never experienced as a family before. In...
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Chapt 7 1972-1978 Columbus, Ohio As I began to record this entry for the period of our lives between 1972 and 1978, it seems like it was just yesterday! Yet, now at our...
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Chapt 6 1968-1971 At Home in Devonshire Subdivision, Columbus, Ohio In 1967 Keith and I, now in our thirties, were so happy! We had a beautiful house in Columbus, Ohio with three children and our first foster daughter too. Keith’s job at OSU was exactly...
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From my birth until I was 18 I always lived next door to my mothers parents and brother and sister. Starting in Bronx, NY and including our move out to Tucson, AZ I always had a large family looking after me.
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Life is made up of achievement, failure, frustration, fulfillment, ecstasy and agony: and in my 84 years I have both sampled and sometimes dwelled too long in every one of them. That is as it should be. I would find it impossible to say which among the thousands of joyful moments,...
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Resting inconspicuously in my kitchen cupboard sits a small white bowl. It isn’t an original. It’s a substitute, a clone. The original disappeared long ago, either in pieces in a trash can or simply vanished as things do over the course of a long life. Being well-acquainted with the owner of...
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The 21 st birthday of a man’s oldest son begs for significant celebration. This story relates how my oldest son and I celbrated his "coming of age" birthday. He didn’t enjoy flying and water sports had never appealed to him, so in a magnificent display of non sequitur thinking I decided...
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My father, James K (Jim) Long, never met a stranger. To him strangers were just friends he hadn't met. I always admired his ability to strike up a conversation with a person he had just met and talk as if he had always known him or her. The only thing he...
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"From the time that Cory was just a young boy, he always wanted to go fishing; but being a single Mom and not knowing anything about how to catch fish, we would always try, but never catch anything. My boys were always disappointed, but they still had fun trying. During the...
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This is the first time I got trampled by a bull. I rode it all the way. I just remember I was getting up and I looked up and that bull was right on me. I flattened right down and he caught my head and stomped on my shirt, and passed...
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The summer of 2009 a strong impression came to me, even urgent feeling, to go home to Colorado to transcribe and publish my parents and grandparents life stories. In Nauvoo, Illinois, 25 years earlier I videotaped my parent’s life story and they in turn videoed my grandparents. I thought our family...
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I do not know what age I stopped calling my Dad Daddy, but I know I made a concerted effort to be more grown up. These are the tender experiences that make him Daddy to me. My Dad went to school and worked two jobs in Idaho before I attended first...
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