Mitchell Way
My wife Cheryl is fond of saying, “Why do movie and television screenwriters put out so many clever plots for burglaries? Don’t they realize they are feeding criminal minds, ideas for robberies which they wouldn’t have thought up on their own?”
In the evolution from growing out of my teens, I heard the haunted luring call of Larry, the spirit of manly outdoor men. He insisted that I get out of my slippers and bathrobe and seek pioneering adventure. I believe Larry was calling me because only my mom and my sister were also in the house and they had heard nothing, although my Cockapoo dog, Tinker, did raise an ear and look around the room.
My daughter, Kalene, got me started walking the Hovander Dog Park. It follows the dike of the Nooksack River as it flows through Ferndale. I have lived in Ferndale for 37 years and have visited the large Hovander farm off and on but never walked the dog area until her dog, Milton Barry, came into my life.
Ho, Ho, No. You ain’t getting me into that thing! And with that, Santa left his sleigh and drove off in his car.
Dad and I stared at each other. “Huh,” he said. “I guess we go with plan B.”
It was the yearly tradition in Whatcom and Skagit counties of The Santa flights.
In 2009 my mother, Patty, decided she would like to take her family to the Big Island of Hawaii. She had time shares in a condo, so she acquired two waterfront rooms for seven days in Kona. There were four families in the group. Mom’s husband had recently experienced a heart attack and was in a rehabilitation center, so mom had a spare airline ticket. She asked her niece, Gae, to join her.
For the longest time he had no name. Perhaps if he had not made a simple mistake, we never would have known his true identity.
The piano melodies of Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, and Brahms echoed around the walls of my small room. Occasionally, my mother would sing an opera or classical favorite from the 1940s while accompanying herself on the piano.
As far as I can tell, there are two groups of boys in high school: those who are comfortable with girls and those who are terrified of them. I personally, though not being afraid of girls, was still of the elementary school mindset that they were icky. As far as I was concerned, life in high school would have been far less stressful without two of the annual school sanctioned activities: Prom and Tolo.
“Seat belts on; Doors locked; Brakes set; Circuit breakers in; Fuel selector valve on both.”
Four of us were sitting in a Cessna 172 at the parking area of the Roche Harbor Resort airstrip preparing to depart.
Track 4362 is a mainline section of railroad track owned by the BNSF Railroad which runs inside the southern perimeter of the aluminum smelter I worked at for 34 years. It ran a little over a quarter mile to the cast house where flat cars and box cars were loaded with aluminum for shipping to customers. Joining track 4362 were many side spurs which allowed railcars to be moved to other areas of the plant also.
Thou shalt not sit down on T- Bars
For you first time users, T-Bars like rope tows are a means of pulling you to the top of the hill. You must first stand in an interminable line of skiers watching the skiers at the head of the line move into position where the attendant slaps them on the rear end with a T-bar as it comes around. To the first-timer watching the process, it all seems very straight forward. The cable with the T-bar comes around the bullwheel, the attendant slaps you in the hips with the bar and up the hill you go. What you may not know is that the T-bar cable is on a retractable reel and must feed all the way out before it catches and starts pulling you up the slope. It came as a bit of a surprise to me, a first-timer, when I skied into position. I felt the attendant slap my hips with the bar, which I assumed I could sit on. The result was a rather unglamorous flop onto my back in the snow as the cable continued to feed out of the retractable reel. Then, when the full length of cable had retracted, the T-bar shot up the hill, raking down the back of my legs, slapping the skis off my boots and causing raucous laughter from the interminable line of skiers behind me.
When my wife was away I took it upon myself to snoop in her private file cabinet. Going past the files on nutritional eating, aerobics, and personal training, I came across a file named “Wish List.” This piqued my curiosity and upon thumbing through various photos torn from the pages of Better Homes and Gardens, I came across a list, hand-written on a page of notebook paper. It looked like her criteria for a husband.
My wife and I have the same crossword puzzle app on our phones. Each day they send a new puzzle and it’s the same for everyone who has the app. At dinner, we both load the puzzle on our phones and have a race to see who can finish it first. In the two years that we’ve been competing, I can count on one hand, (which is missing a few fingers), the number of times I have beaten her.
Authors Note: Many years ago, I wrote the music for Something Forgotten which was produced in a studio and performed live in the theater. The music had no story or lyrics. Finally, after many years, I present the story. You may enjoy playing the song as you read the story.
Sometimes the best laid plans work too well.
The Screech Owl- Scientific name: Megascops asio. We had many of these smaller owls in our neighborhood. The first 30 years of my life I lived in a house close to the main railroad tracks which stretched from Vancouver, B.C. down the west coast of the United States. We had so many trains travel by daily that we didn’t even notice the noise anymore. The tracks followed the top of a cliff which dropped 100+ feet down to Bellingham Bay. The sides of the cliff had layers of sand and clay. During the summer months, the Angel boys across the street (Craig and Doug) and my brother and I would spend endless hours climbing the cliffs, jumping from the cliffs, and using trails on the cliffs as the shortest distance to travel to explore the beach itself.