Mar 04, 2010

Did you ever get in trouble for saying a bad word?

It only happened maybe once or twice and after that it was easier to withhold the word than it was to get the soap out of my mouth. Mom did strictly believe in using soap to wash out ones mouth for saying a bad word and I didn’t like the taste of it at all. I still puzzle to this day why Clair had a swearing problem but he must have been able to evade the soap treatment or just liked the taste. He even was told by dad that if he would stop then dad, a hardened rancher, would also stop. None of us knew about that challenge until we were listening to Clair as he spoke at dad’s funeral. He said then “I wish I would have stopped then.” Clair, as far as I know has not sworn for many years. So, yes, I must have said a bad word even though I can’t remember what the word was, I can remember the taste of soap. Even now if a word happens to slip just as it did when the truck pulled in front of me when I was going 50 miles an hour straight to ward where he was pulling, I feel bad and wish that I could take it back.

Mar 03, 2010

Did you ever pretend to be sick to stay home from school.

You kidding? I wanted to be to school, at least in the later years because I could get to see and talk to Marie. Now when I was in elementary there might have been a time or two even though the only time I remember being sick to stay home from anything was for Stake Conference when the afternoon session was being held in Altamont and I had already been to the morning session in Duchesne (Yes, we had two full two hour sessions back then on Sunday, one at 10 AM and one at 2 PM) and just didn’t want to spend the rest of the day in church, let alone travel for a half hour to get there and a half hour to get back.

I did have one day that I wished that I had stayed home from school however. Mom had been riding me about how my hair was getting to long and was starting to curl up on my collar. I had a pretty full head of hair back then and it was always pretty straight until it got to the collar and then it would start to curl. So after mom left for school at 8 and the bus wouldn’t get there until 8:30 I figured I had plenty of time to cut my hair. I worked on it frantically but basically I really couldn’t bend my arm around and get it going the right direction to get the back of it like I needed to do. Well needless to say the bus came and I was still trying to cut my hair but I didn’t want to try and run to school that morning on foot for the 2 and ½ miles so I dropped everything and had Leesa tell our bus driver Jinks Ivie to wait a couple of minutes. He still just about gave up but I made the bus, got to school and got teased for my haircut the rest of the day. I gladly let Dad fix it up that night even though I knew he would cut it a lot shorter than I had wanted when I started that morning.