Childhood Houses

I realize it is fathers day 2016 and I should maybe write something about that.  It was just me at home, went to church and listened to the primary children sing, had pie with the men in the third hour, visited the singles ward and listened to Keeley Curry (works for us at the Brick House) speak, went to the folks for dinner and enjoyed time there and then the highlight would have been speaking to the kids tonight.  They are doing well and it was great to talk to them. They are missed and it will be wonderful to have them home in 42 days - if Jack and I did the math right.

Well, I came across a document here in the house titled 20 Questions to Ask a Parent.  I don't know which of the kids brought this home but they never asked me the questions.  I thought I would spend some time answering these on the blog and then they will all have a lasting record of my answers.  I don't know what kind of a schedule I will follow in answering these questions at this point.  I don't think I will do them over the next 20 days but will try to answer them over the course of a couple of months or so.

The first question is What do you remember about the houses you lived in as a kid?  Which one did you like the best?  Now this is a loaded question because I lived in at least 16 houses from the time I was born until I got married.  That does not include flats or apartments I lived in on my mission and I am a little unclear of houses prior to the house we lived in when I was in kindergarten in Carson City in the late 70's.  I will not go into detail about all the houses we lived in but will try to say something about each of them.

The Carson City house I remember dancing to Saturday Night Fever 8 Track and also being scared to death at bed time because I could hear my heart beating through my pillow and I thought it was a group of monkeys coming to get me.  I don't know if I saw planet of the apes or maybe the wizard of oz as a wee child but monkeys were coming to get me, I could hear their footsteps whenever I laid down and I could picture them coming in the house, walking down the hall, snatching me out of bed and walking straight out the house and through the garage.  It was terrifying.  A couple other things I can remember here, the huge splinter Jim got in his finger, Jay taking a ho to the head as he leaned in to check the depth of a hole that Jim was currently digging with said ho, Mike was born a day after my birthday and I went off a sweet jump on a green bike that had a broken pedal and that rod went into my leg.  I still have the scar. It was also in the garage in this house that I taught myself how to ride a bike.  I remember the bike being yellow but that could be wrong.

We moved to Utah during my second year of first grade and we lived in Grandpa Al and Grandma Vi's house while they were on mission in Switzerland.  It was an up and down duplex.  We didn't live there more than a year but we did end up moving from their half of the duplex to the basement half when the people that were in there moved out and the grandparents returned home from their mission.  I remember learning about paying tithing in that house and I remember that Ronald Reagan was shot while we lived there.

Our house on Glider Lane in Sandy was next.  It was a great house but I hated the basement and hated being down there.  The reason being, a neighbor boy named Phillip Kimball was over to play when we first moved in and told us about a green rat that lived in and basically haunted the basement.  There was no rat but the thought of it haunted my thoughts.  I could run up the basement steps so fast that I would float for a second when I reached the top - clearly there was a green rat at my heels and I wasn't having any of that.  It was in this house that I tried to cut school as a 4th grader - that didn't work out so well.  I basically left for school, hid on the side of the house, jumped the fence and then climbed through my window when I saw my mom leave.  I went in and got comfy, turned on the TV and was flipping through cable channels when my dad came home.  I didn't know the school called when you didn't show up for school. I heard the front door opening so I turned off the tv and ran out to the garage but it was hopeless and back to school I went, dang it.  It was also in this house that the first girl in the family was born and we were all excited to have Laura in our family.

Piper Lane was just around the corner from the Glider Lane house and we lived there while I was in fifth grade.  The basement had a room that was carpeted with carpet samples. It was a cool room.  The best part of this house though was that I had my own room.  There was a workshop off the carpet square room and I was allowed to put my room in there.  It was the best.  After dinner once I didn't get enough roast to eat so I swiped the left over roast (which was a pretty could chunk of meat) and I went down to my room with it.  Later pops discovered the roast was missing.  He wanted to know where it went.  I wouldn't fess up and we were all grounded for a time.  I didn't finish the roast for a few days and it turned into more of a beef jerky after a while.  I finally fessed up to it but I didn't want to.

Ida Lane was one street over and as a sixth grader we lived in a house on Ida.  President Spencer W. Kimball passed away when we lived in this house and Ezra Taft Benson was called as the new Prophet.  Also during this time the space shuttle blew up.  That was pretty intense.  I also remember learning how to suck water through a house to create a vacuum of sorts to empty out window wells that were filling with water and flooding the basement.  Dave was born while we lived in this house and it was here that I can really remember shoveling snow, a lot of snow.  It wasn't the first time because I remember Glider Lane and a snowblower we had there but I don't think I took on the load of clearing the driveway seriously until we moved to Ida.  The snowblower was stolen out of our garage on Glider Lane shortly after we got it.  On Ida Lane I grew to love the World Wrestling Federation and one of my favorite wrestlers was Ricky the Dragon Steamboat.  He had a snake eating lizard that he would bring to the ring with him and used to compete with Jake the Snake Roberts.  These were good times. 

From Ida we moved to Hawaii.  Our first house there was on Mokuhano St.  I don't even know if I spelled that right.  Next to our house was this sweet hill that we used to climb.  I shot at a mongoose on that hill and also shot a bird there.  The bird fell to the ground and I thought it was dead.  Sudden pangs of guilt filled my soul and then it jumped up and flew away.  All was right with the world again.  We didn't get our furniture or belongings for several months after the move.  It wasn't that the shop got lost but that the company that moved us there decided not to move forward with the plan and decided not to pay for the shipping.  We were stuck.  We had a sunken living room in this house and we came up with a marble style game using golf balls that we found in the storm drains that ran through Kalama Valley and by the golf course.   I slept on the floor because I didn't want to share an air mattress with Jim.  Well, there were a lot of new things in life now that we lived in Hawaii.  There was the beach of course, I loved it.  There were gecko's and centipedes the size of small dogs.  There were roaches and then there were the B52 bomber roaches that flew through the room and were extremely scary.  I remember making mac and cheese with Pete, heavy on the butter and the milk so it was extra creamy.  I slipped on the floor horsing around with pops once while I was rounding a corner and my knee went through the wall.  This was a fun time.  We had none of our cherished belongings but we had each other and it was wonderful.

Our next house was on a street we lived on twice, Kahului St. Our first house on Kahului St was a great house because we had a pool on an upper level on one side of the house.  You could go down some stairs in the yard and there was a grassy area with out trampoline.  You could then walk around the back of the house to the other side and there was a basketball court.  It was pretty fantastic.  I was in the 8th grade and remember getting into skateboarding and boogie boarding.  I used to go to the beach everyday after school.  We would look out towards the ocean as the bus pulled into the valley to see how big the waves were and then we would get our boards and our bikes and ride through the golf course to Sandy Beach.  It was the best.  I also used to take care of pool cleaning duties at this house and I was quick to the rescue when we were sitting and playing a video game and I watched Dave as a two year old pulling a chair backwards across the pool deck, fall in the pool and pull the chair in on top of him.  I was up and in that pool in no time pulling off the chair and lifting Dave out of the water. I felt like a hero to be sure and then went to scout camp and caught my hand on fire because that's what any hero would do.  It was pretty severely burned.  I also had a paper route when we lived here and would ride around on a moped delivering papers in the wee hours of the morning. One day I crashed on that moped while riding by the park.  I was looking to see if any of my friends were there and I hit a dip in the road. It popped up the front wheel and shocked me a bit.  In the process I turned the handlebars and when the wheel hit the ground the moped turned sharply and I came crashing down and slid down the road with the moped on top of me. That did a number on my knee.  Still have the scar. Good times.

We moved before my freshmen year to Makaweli Place.  It was no longer in Kalama Valley but over at Portlock and we had a beautiful view of the bay.  We hiked up the mountain we lived on and found that Hanama Bay was on the other side of it. I knew it was in that general area but didn't realize it was that close. That was pretty cool.  One of our neighbors was the mother of a professional boogie boarder.  I don't remember what his name was but I thought that was pretty geat.  I remember somebody tried to break into their home one night and that kind of freaked us out a bit.  Amy was born in this house and somewhere there is a video where I said something like 'she's crying for food I know' and maybe even a wimpbreath came out of my mouth.  We used to one arm box in this house because we only had one pair of boxing gloves.  I worked on the Otsuji farm when we lived here as well.  I picked flowers that would be used in making leis.  I didn't do a really good job at this line of work and should have been a better employee.

During my sophomore year we moved back to Kalama Valley and into a house that was owned by Brian Lee.  This was our second house on Kahului St.  I began working at Kentucky Fried Chicken during my sophomore year.  I was a cook and then trained in other positions as well.  I worked with a gay man named Freddy.  He was a manager and gay men out of the closet were not so common back then.  I didn't know what to think.  I had some good friends there including Josh Ashton.  We used to make monster ice cream cones at night when we closed and had to clean out the ice cream machine.  Those were fun times.  I also used to ride home on the aforementioned moped with bags of left over chicken loaded up.  We always had chicken in the fridge.  I eventually left KFC and went over to Subway which was a much better environment.  One of my buddies Scott at KFC ended up coming over as well.  It was in this house that I smashed Dave's face into his birthday cake.  He was not happy with me.  I was 16 and a bit of a turd.

We moved from Hawaii in 1990.  In fact we left on the 4th of July.  I can remember flying into Oakland or San Francisco (wherever we landed) and saw fireworks going off.  It was nice of the good people of California to celebrate our return to the mainland.  We ended up in Carson City Nevada in a house on Overland St.  This was outside of town just a hair and we had a large property there.  Linda Panter gave us an old motorcycle that was her kids when they were younger. It was in pieces.  I put it back together and it ran.  I loved it.  One time Pete and I went riding with our buddy Lystra and his younger brother.  We had to go and get gas and while so doing I went off a little jump area by some new tennis courts built at the park down the street.  Lystra and his brother did the same thing and then came Pete.  He was riding one handed with a gas can if I remember correctly.  He decided to go off the little jump as well.  There was a bus parked just to the side of the road between the road and the little jump.  Pete wiped out pretty well and kind of slid under the bus.  It was a good start to that ride.  He was fine and we went on to have some fun but it was a little scary there for a minute.  I managed to break the front window in this house when I watched Jim throw a football into the couch in front of the window so I tried the same thing.  Didn't go so well.  Jim left on his mission to Oklahoma from this house.  I had finally received my Eagle Scout award and was able to start driving.  Our friends the Reeds let us use their old suburban and I used to drive that all over. In rain storms we used to drive through the area and hit dips as hard as we could because it would shoot water everywhere and we would go flying.  Pretty dumb thing to do with a vehicle that didn't belong to us but when you're a young teenage driver you don't have a lot of sense.  I also reared into a light pole at the C-Hill building in that suburban.  Those were fun times.

During my senior year of high school we moved to a house on Sycamore Glen.  It was a nice place.  I had bought my first car. It lasted two days.  I bought my second car, a Mazda Rx7.  It was a great ride.  I worked again at Subway and took on the responsibility of making payments on that car every two weeks.  It was a great lesson to me.  I enjoyed that car.  It was a backfiring machine and made for some good times as flames would come roaring out of the tailpipe some times.  I raced some friends at times.  Once was Lystra in his 68 Mustang.  He totally had me out powered but I out maneuvered him.  We lined up once.  He was in the regular lane and I lined up in the turn lane.  We took off and all was well until my turn lane turned into opposite traffic turn lane and then opposite traffic lane.  That was still okay until opposite traffic was coming right at me.  I pulled off onto the dirt shoulder and kept going as fast as I could. Lystra got stuck behind slow moving traffic and I zipped by and then turned into our neighborhood.  A couple minutes later Lystra pulled up and we were all laughing pretty good.  Did I mention teenagers do dumb things behind the wheel of a car?  I managed to graduate from high school and then we moved again.

Telegraph Street.  This was a great house.  We put a lot of work into it.  We were there just under a year when I left on my mission.  When I got home from my mission a miracle had taken place.  The fam did not move the entire time I was away.  Sweet.  A month or so after I got home we moved the family business to Vegas and a month or so after that we moved the rest of the fam down there too. I lived in an apartment with Jim until he got married in December and then I moved into the family home on Bethany Street out in Green Valley until a few months before I got married.  I could say more about Telegraph, the apartment and Bethany St. but I will only say this.  On Telegraph Street I got a letter from Jim who was still on his mission. He referenced a verse of scripture in that letter in Alma 7:23-24.  I opened my scriptures and read the passage.  It touched my heart.  I was not a strong reader before that but that day I felt something powerful and I got into the Book of Mormon like I never had before. It touched my heart and provided needed encouragement to get my things together an get out in the mission field.  I did so.  Upon my return from mission I lived with Jim in an apartment just off the strip in Vegas.  It was a good place.  I learned some things there as an awkward return missionary adjusting to non mission life.  There was powerful revelation in that apartment that reconfirmed what I already knew - Heavenly Father knew who I was and he was aware of what I was going through.  There were things given to me spiritually at that time that the Lord knew I needed.  On Bethany Street I live with the fam once again and it was great.  We had lots of great basketball games in the street in front of the house and many roller blading expeditions.  There were continued times of spiritual learning and enlightenment.  I was grateful for those times in my life.

I don't know that I can call anyone of the many homes we lived in my absolute favorite.  There were wonderful things that happened in each of them.  Each home had it's own unique character and there were life lessons learned.  Overall we always had a gospel centered home no matter what it looked like or where it was located and that I think was the most important thing. We were blessed with goodly parents who loved the Lord and established a home and a family life that lead us towards our Savior.