Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Were you in any clubs in high school?
See my answer to the previous
question.
Who taught you to drive?
I’m not sure. My first memory
of “driving” was when I was about five years old. Greg was throwing hay to some
cows in a field, and we had a big old one ton truck pulling a flatbed trailer
with hay bales on it. Or maybe he was throwing bales onto the trailer, I’m not
sure. In any case, the truck had a manual throttle and he pulled out the
throttle so the truck would drive quite slowly, and stood me on the seat of the
truck and told me to follow the furrows in the field.
We did that and he was doing
his thing on the trailer and when we got to the end of the field he would hop
in the cab and turn the truck around and then repeat.
When I was about twelve, we
lived in Waterton, and I was the laundry boy, so I had to go and get dirty
sheets from the chamber maids. To get sheets from the Ponderosa Motel I had to
drive the car down to the Ponderosa, and throw the sheets into the back seat of
the car and drive it back. I don’t remember who made sure I could drive, but it
was probably my mom or one of my sisters. All I know is that I made the drive
(only a few hundred yards) several times a day and, on occasion, I may have
taken a bit of a detour (a few miles around town).
When I got my learners
license at fourteen, I was already very comfortable with driving but by law I
needed an adult in the car with me and that was mostly mom.
Did you ever attend any
school dances? Which was your most memorable and why?
I never missed a dance, church dance or school
dance. I loved the idea of dancing with a girl but all I ever did was stand
against the wall for an hour until there were a bunch of people on the dance
floor and then I would look for a girl who was pretty and by herself and then I
would ask her to dance. I was so scared. Some would give me a resigned, pitiful
look but only a few rejected me. I would never talk during the dance because I
was far too scared but also because the music was so loud, we couldn’t hear
each other anyway.
What made this process so
hard was that the girls were never alone. They would always form a herd and I
was terrified that a girl would reject me, and the entire herd would laugh or
give me that disgusted look I so often got.
On occasion, a girl wouldn’t
run the instant the song ended, and we would dance a few dances.
The most memorable dance was
one time I was standing by Tom Crooks and the main door to the gym opened and a
streaker ran through the crowd and out an emergency exit. All he had on was a
ski mask and running shoes. What is funny is that everyone knew who he was.
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