Pop's Question

They say that memories of good and bad times are like "writing on water" which  can only remind us of the impermanence of everything--and the constant ups and downs of life, and this is very true, I think.

But I remember those easy afternoon talks with Pop (as we brothers called our father) during our Children's Hour as some of my most pleasant family experiences as an adult.

Sometimes I did the talking when we were together and sometimes Pop asked me questions about my life and travels.

For example, sometimes while I was making a pilgrimage, I was living very free.

I didn’t pay much attention to personal economics or money transactions.

Whatever little cash I had in my pocket or whatever I earned was OK.

I didn’t wonder what would happen if I ran out of dough or if I would starve of if I would never get rich or anything like that. Ithopught at the time I was "living in God's pocket" as used to think of it--in a totally safe place in other words.

For a while I even had the policy of giving whatever money I had away every night so I could start every morning fresh and empty—you could say, “broke”—though I didn’t think of it that way at all. For me it was just kind of an experiment in living.

Pop asked me why I had lived that way.and I said : “Well, a long time ago you told us kids we shouldn’t be overly concerned with money.”

“Yeah,” he replied, “but I never thought you’d believe me!”

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Single Action Shotgun

The Single-action Shotgun

There’s another story Dad used to tell, which I would like to share with you.

Shortly after Dad married Mom, she gave him a pump-action twelve-gauge shotgun as a birthday present.   

This was a beautiful, expensive (for her) and practical gift because Dad loved to hunt ducks on the slough ponds south of Albuquerque.  The shotgun would fire about a dozen times from it’s magazine without re-loading—you just pumped the gun’s below-the-barrel lever to eject the spent shell and it would automatically re-load and be ready to fire again—you didn’t need to take your eye off the moving target—the flying duck.

In those long-ago days, thousands of ducks would be flying their migration path south in the autumn and north in the spring and Dad’s sport would provide tasty meals for the young couple and their friends. (The city grew, the ponds were drained and the ducks have disappeared like the beavers in the Colorado Mountains.)

Dad would hunt with his friend Danny Jucket (Isn’t that a lovely name!) and a Mexican I know only as “The Mexican”.

Dad and Danny had repeating shotguns.  The Mexican had only a single-action shotgun. This meant that The Mexican’s gun had to be manually re-loaded after every shot.

Dad said The Mexican would place a shotgun shell between every finger of both hands and when the ducks came into range he would shoot, break the gun open ejecting  the empty shell, slip in another loaded shell, close the gun, aim and fire again with lightning-like speed.

“He could shoot almost as fast as we could with our repeaters and got just as many ducks too!”

This incredible manual skill pleased Dad so well that he was still remembering it with pleasure sixty years later and thousands of miles away as we shared a glass of port in the quiet California afternoon.

When I attained twelve years of age—the age when a boy became a man back then—Dad bought me, as a birthday gift, a beautiful single-action shotgun...

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Blind Piano Tuner

I loved to hear dad's "Children's Hour stories.

He was what I consider to be a great story-teller--never preachy--never boring--never going beyond the time limit of a good story--and always speaking from his own experience--in fact his stories were ALL about his experiences and though his experiences were not dramatic or even interesting in the usual humdrum real-as-life way--his subject matter and his easy conversational style made them memorable to me  so I would like to share several of them with you.

You can imagine dad and I.perched side by side on bar stools in the tiny kitchen area of his A-frame house very slowly sipping and savoring a small glass of Gallo port--dad talking and me all ears as he tells about his experience with the blind piano tuner.


When Dad was quite young, about 22, I suppose, he worked as a Circulation Manager for the Albuquerque Tribune. 

Part of his job was to visit the towns all over New Mexico by train to arrange for the “big city” newspapers to be sold.

One day he was in Las Vegas, New Mexico.  He was through there often and stayed at a hotel, which was frequented by traveling salesmen and such. 

A blind piano tuner was staying at the same hotel.  This blind man would go from little town to little town also by train tuning pianos for schools and for those few rich people who had them in their homes.  Dad said that in the “old days” there was not much work that a blind person could do to earn a living, but tuning pianos was one thing a blind person could do as well and maybe better than a person with sight.

It happened that the blind piano tuner was late coming back one evening and the hotel owner was worried about him. Maybe the blind man had had an accident—maybe he had fallen into a ditch or something?. The hotel owner asked Dad to walk out and try to find the blind man.

The hotel owner knew that the piano tuner had gone to the high school to tune their piano, which was in the school auditorium. so Dad checked the route the blind man would probably have walked without finding him and by the time Dad had reached the high school night had fallen and all was dark.

Dad said he went to the auditorium door, which was unlocked, and went in.  He called and the blind man answered from the stage at the other end of the building

“The room was pitch black until I turned on the lights,” Dad said, “I found the blind man working on the stage surrounded by parts of the piano which he was repairing. There were parts all over the stage and before I turned on the lights it was pitch black dark! Of course that didn’t matter to him, but it was a big surprise to me. How did he remember where all the parts were?”

After sixty years, Dad was still amazed by this, to him, wonderful feat.

Isn't that a good little story?

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Home

I liked a lot of things about living as an adult with my parents, but what I liked most was meeting them as adults.

Dad and I made a practice of sitting together at the little breakfast bar area if the A-frame's tiny kitchen every afternoon at about four o'clock for what we called "The Children's Hour" when we would just relax from whatever tasks we had accomplished during the day with a glass of Port wine.

Later in the evening, usually after eating our supper together, dad would play his old favorites on the electric organ and I would accompany him on my cool crystal Ludwig drum set which we kept set up right next to the organ. Mom was our appreciative audience when we did these almost nightly sedate little jam sessions.

How many kids get to have these kinds of experiences with their parents?

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At Home

My parents and I really enjoyed each other's company.

We had breakfast together every day and then went about doing the things we wanted to do.

At the time I am writing about dad was retired so sometimes he would read his beloved weekly "Time" magazine so that he would be up-to-date for the Sunday school adult class discussions, sometimes he would quietly practice old familiar pop tunes on his Hammond electric organ (with foot pedals) and later in the day he might watch football games on TV with the sound turned off. (He didn't like the announcer's gab.)

Mom did all her housewifely chores, talked to her friends on the telephone, painted pictures and worked in her hillside (mostly flower) garden.

I had no "for pay" job at all, so I worked on my various small construction projects around the house and garden--adding a chicken pen with nesting facilities for the four hens and one rooster we bought at the feed store as chicks and building a "bath fence" on the cliff edge of our path to the top ridge of Laughing Mountain. We had all experienced the practical outdoor "bath fences" for plumbing-free hand held showers in the jungles of Liberia when we visited missionary Brother Joe on separate visits and wanted to have one for ourselves--though I think I was the only one who actually used it. (Did you know that if you fill a two gallon plastic bucket with water  and left it out in the sun that by afternoon the water will be nice and warm for a shower?) And I practiced playing the old junk-store piano in the little garage (which was entirely used for storage) for a few minutes every day

We ate lunch together and supper too. Since I was mostly a vegetarian at the time, I usually cooked, but used familiar seasonings and dishes so got no complaints and plenty of praise.

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Wold A Frame

 I loved the people and the high country of Lassen and Plumas counties in northern California

I worked two winter seasons at the Lassen Ski Lift and spent most of the summertime riding my bicycle, walking in the woods, helping Les Bodine in Mineral, fooling around with the old piano at Mineral school or doing odd jobs at Mill Creek Lodge.

When I left Mill Creek and Mount Lassen (barely starting my imagined pebble-marked ley line) I headed back to mom and dad Wold's little  A-frame house at the end of the road (Sky High Drive) and near a hilltop between Ventura and Ohai in the Ventura River Valley in southern California.

Some parents are heartily glad to get rid of their children, but mom and dad always liked their adult kids like me to show up and we got along just fine. I lived pretty much in my own Ford camper parked in front of their house on the steep slopng hillside surrounded by oak trees and chaparral brush--a lovely climate and away from the usual hubbub of Southern California.

I liked working in their garden--building a goldfish pond and developing a little outdoor chapel area up a winding path to the Laughing Mountain's (mom's name) crest and cooking tasty vegetarian meals which they liked. Of course I joined them going to the Lutheran church every Sunday in Ventura where I also sang in the choir--and I accompanied mom at her weekly painting classes with teacher Carlyle Cooper at Ventura Community College--all these activities such a change from my "mountain man" life in the Lassen woods.

I built myself a temporary ramada of branches and canvas under the oak trees near the hilltop where I spent most of the dry summer nights. It was very quiet up there with only the sounds of nature and very occasionally the far-off sound of an ambulance siren from Highway 33 across the Ventura river valley way down  below.

I could enjoy my private deep, low, sort of rumbling sound I mentioned earlier very well on these silent mountaintop nights.

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Chapter Two Foundation

Chapter Two: Foundation 

It seems true that everything follows from something else so every foundation is essential--whether of a physical construction or an individual life  .

A weak foundation mean weakness in everything subsequent.

For my own foundation, I was lucky this time around to start my life in a stable family with  parents that loved me and brothers that supported and were good to me.

My dad, Andy Wold, always worked as a retail salesman. I never knew him to be home sick a single day in his life. In early years he was a week-end drummer in dance bands and loved to sing old-time popular songs and hymns in church. He was well-liked by his peers and always brought a light edge to every situation with his very subtle Norwegian sense of humor. He had a neat little mustache and mom thought he looked like Clark Gable. He never became a boss--he didn't like that responsibility--but he always provided for his family. I think he always put his family's welfare before his own. He was religious in a quiet and personal way. And he dearly loved my mother--he thought she was terrific. Dad and mom were high-school sweethearts who never fell out of love.

Mom, Lorene Clayton Wold, was the kind of mother a boy is lucky to get. She loved the outdoors, camping, pick-nicks  and campfires, singing gospel songs, digging in the dirt and weeding the garden. She liked to have a dog and a couple of cats, some chickens for eggs and maybe a rabbit or even donkeys, pigs and calves on our half acre "Three Willow Ranch"  on the outskirts of the little town of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was kind, thoughtful of others and a very sociable little woman--always on the look-out for someone interesting to talk to but fiercely independent as the daughter of a Texan cowboy/contractor. She was deeply religious, loved church activities, Bible study and was proud  when elder brother Joe became a Lutheran minister and missionary.

My two brothers, Joe, Jack, and I were all healthy kids-- active in games and sports, given piano lessons and participating in school drama and singing clubs and drummers in high school marching bands. We were Boy Scouts, Luther Leaguers and did the things typical good boys of the 50's in America did.