Another great Christmas Memory orchestrated by Mom and Dad
By this time, we had moved from Mercer Island, Washington to Lake Oswego, Oregon, just outside Portland. This family move was accomplished in 1958 or so. I would have been 8 or 9 years old. This story will illustrate how inventive and creative Mom and Dad were when it comes to combining parents activities with an awesome something for the kids. Mom and Dad both had great senses of humor and could always find something to laugh about. We were a happy family with a good dose of freedom for us kids until proven otherwise.
We will get to the Christmas Memory in a minute after a story about how I was cured of my incipient and developing tendency to do bad things at the age of eight. It must be said, in all honesty that I was not completely cured, since as a teenager, living in New York City and later in Bronxville, New York that I pulled a couple of doozies but for the most part, I had learned my lesson back in Lake Oswego due to this incident which will I will recount next.
I am reminded of an embarrassing and a life-long lesson learned incident from back then in Lake Oswego. We lived on hilly street. Our house was near the top of the hill and the whole street consisted of about ten or eleven houses. The elementary school we attended was a short walk up the hill and over to the school itself. So getting to school everyday took about five minutes of walking.
There was a vacant lot at the bottom of hill. The owners of the lot brought in a builder and he began building them a house. As kids (and there four or five of us living on our street), the construction of the house was fascinating. We would go to the house almost everyday after the workers left and explore to see what they done that day. They had got the plumbing in and were getting ready to pour the concrete over the plumbing stubs for the slab foundation.
To this day, I have no idea what possessed me to think it would be “good idea” to stuff the plumbing stubs sticking up with some left over concrete from a small, rotating concrete mixer that was sitting there but that is what I did.
There was much consternation by the builder and in the neighborhood the next work day when the builder showed up to work and discovered the vandalism to his job site. By the end of the day when I got home from school, the whole neighborhood knew what had happened but not who was responsible. I did it while all of us kids were there and if I recall correctly, none of them joined in on my act of vandalism. So that day, amongst the hoopla created by this vandalism, I sat there and pretended not to know who did it. Details are a little hazy on what happened next but Dad got home and somehow, some way, when Dad said something to me about the incident at house build site, I confessed to him that I did it.
Two things happened next. Dad took me down to the basement with a belt in hand to deliver a disciplinary belt application to my butt. When I got down there, Dad said I was too old for this and he could not go through with it but he did tell me that I was to go down the next day and apologize to the builder personally and Dad said it would be up to the builder to deliver any punishment he saw fit. This solution seemed fitting to me. So, the next day with Dad accompanying me to the job site, we went down the hill and spoke directly with the builder. The builder was kind to this scared little kid and basically told me in no uncertain terms that this behavior was unacceptable and gave me a warning to never do that again. I trudged back up the hill with Dad, severely chastised and embarrassed by my behavior. So, in retrospect from the perspective of this 73 year grown up kid, I was cured of my tendency to vandalism at an early age and I knew deep down that I could not lie about my behavior or actions and I knew, also, that taking responsibility for me and my actions was the only way forward for me from that day on. The lessons learned that day have stuck with me ever since.
As a final aside before we get back to the Christmas story, I do want to pass on to y’all a quick insight my Grandpa told me a few years later. And that was this: “Alex, if you never lie, you won’t have to remember what you said.”
This resonated with me on a deep level and I recognized immediately the truth about that statement. Grandpa was right and to this very day in 2024, I have strived to do just that which is to never lie about anything and yes, there have been a couple times, I have failed to adhere to that advice but overall, in my 73 trips around the Sun, I have lived that way ever since.
Well, that retelling of that incident from my Lake Oswego days took an unexpected turn but that is the way it is when you do something like this Log Book of Memories, you just never know how it is going to turn out.
with that in mind, I am going to save the story of a Christmas memory in Lake Oswego for Log Book Entry VI and will end this entry here.
To be Continued