Brief remembrances from the two years of my childhood I was blessed to have lived in Pullman: Reaney Park: I always thought it was rainy park. The slide. A long highly butt polished metal slide which required a bit of a climb up a ladder for an 8 year old but which rewarded the climber with a fast shot down a gravity-fueled dragstrip. Loved that slide. The Horse Chestnut trees and their projectile worthy droppings which me and my younger brothers probably threw at each other. The pool. As I recall there was an Olympic-sized pool with racing lanes and a general public pool. I would hold my breath underwater, proud I could keep my eyes open and look about as the chlorine only stung at first. Cheap movies in the evening at WSU: Dont remember which building, but sometimes the mom and pop would haul us kids to watch a movie on campus. I cant recall the theater/room that well, but I do remember it was always fun. Ferdinands: for ice cream. The.best.ever. A&W: for root beer floats, sometimes dinner. Sitting in the 59 Oldsmobile Delta 88* four door, dads window down halfway and the tray hanging on it. I still love A&W root beer the most. Sometimes my mom would pick up the glass jugs of it during the summer. Butch the Live Cougar: Living in the cage. Kinda smelly sometimes. I felt bad for him. Cougars should be ambushing prancing deer in the forest, beating the hell out of California football teams; or cruising bars checking out the ... uhhh ... nevermind on the last one. But he was impressively sized and to this day, when hiking with someone in cougar country (pretty much everywhere) who wonders about fighting off a cougar attack I always explain if a cougar ambushes us as cougars do, we have ZERO chance but the nice thing is, itll be over REALLY fast. The Episcopal Church: we went to a really cool church there, dont remember the name of it but it had a nice congregation, I played Joseph in the Christmas Play, and I will never forget one sermon (unlike almost all sermons Ive forgotten) about the question Time magazine had famously posed on their cover: Is God Dead? ... Sermon conclusion: NO. The more Ive remembered and written, often for the first time, about my time in Pullman, the more I realize how lucky I was to have experienced it. In the swirling maelstrom and chaos of the mid/late 1960s, Pullman seemed to be, if not an oasis, at least an island with enough windbreaks to keep us all from being blown away. I really adored that part of my growing up. *a car I temporarily inherited in high school, and while it was ugly, it had a high compression 397-ish V-8, a weird automatic tranny and it could smoke its stock tires from a standstill; plus it possessed a trunk the size of the state of Delaware in which I smuggled friends into Spokane drive in theaters.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Apr 2014 05:35:02 +0000
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