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Total_Hits
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The sentence "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter of the alphabets.
And Now You Do
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25:17, Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour\s house; lest he be weary of thee, and so hate thee.
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I suppose children in every family grow up hearing stories from their parents. Perhaps this is the way people keep alive their own memories and pass them along to their offspring. My own father had a wide repertoire of stories—of how he mended fences with his dad, our grandfather, of how Grandpa Vernon preferred mules and for many years refused to buy a tractor, of the trip Dad took in the summer of 1933 with a group of classmates in an old converted schoolbus to the Chicago World Fair, of the highjinks he and his high school pals pulled in Kerens during their senior year—naughtiness that even today more than a decade after my father’s passing had best not be told in fulsome detail lest it incriminate some who are still living!
He told some of these tales over and over, and he often laughed as he recited the details, enjoying vicariously, one supposes, the events of his youth. One cannot remember a time when the stories were new, when they appeared in the first telling, and we heard them so often that any one of the nine Vernon kids could probably have recited the tales without Dad’s participation. Perhaps the stories became boring at times, but I distinctly recall that we kids sometimes asked for repeats: “Daddy, tell us about the time when you . . .” Although we knew the tales, I think perhaps we wanted to live the stories again through our father’s voice, to see his smile, to hear his laughter over the events recounted from the years before our birth.
The story I remember best is the one about how Dad met our mother, the story of my mother’s yellow dress. Dad had been away at college for two years, and had returned home for the summer. Actually, he already knew of our mother because he was a friend of our mother’s brother, Booth Tarkington, and had once lent our mother a typewriter for typing practice. It is not quite clear whether he had ever actually met her—that was not part of the story!
The story as Dad always told it, is that he attended the Bazette-Prairie Point Picnic in the summer of 1938. While at the picnic he spotted a beautiful raven-haired girl in a yellow dress, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life! He asked his friend Booth who she was, and Booth told him the girl was his sister, the girl to whom Dad had lent the typewriter.
As Dad told the story, he fell in love at first sight, and never looked at another girl the rest of his life! That part of the story is believable because at this point in the story telling, he would invariably embrace our mom . . . but she would just as surely be embarrassed and scold him and struggle to avoid a kiss, “No, Steve, not in front of the kids!” Mom always lost this little battle, however, and I feel sure none of the Vernon children suffered any long-term psychological damage from seeing their affectionate display!
Dad told other stories about their marriage, and one story was intended to convey the thought about how little wealth he and our mother possessed at the time of their marriage. In one oft-recounted tale, he related that he owned nothing except a young pig which he was raising. He explained that he borrowed five dollars to pay for their marriage license and borrowed a friend’s car so the two of them could travel to the preacher’s house to say their vows. They had to return the car, and when they got back home the pig had run away. They still owed the $5.00 borrowed for the license, so Dad said they began their marriage “in the hole” and had not dug their way out yet!
You know, throughout my life, I have wondered, from time to time, what ever happened to the yellow dress my mom wore to that picnic so many years ago. Did she wear the dress again? Was the dress handed down to other relatives, or did it wear out and eventually become a part of one of Grandma Tarkington’s piecework quilts?
Recently I asked Mom about the dress, wondering what she could tell me about it. Her answer was a complete surprise. She never had a yellow dress, she told me, and had no idea where Steve had gotten that idea! I wondered why she had not corrected him on this point, why she permitted him to repeat this story so many times over a 52-year marriage without ever once setting him straight. It seemed to me that a sparkle appeared in Mom’s eyes as she answered with perfect logic: “Well, it was okay with me if Dad wanted to believe I was wearing a yellow dress, and besides I always rather liked the way the story sounded.”
Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
ivernon-ohio@att.net
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Average Score: 5
Votes: 16
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