MY 77TH BIRTHDAY (Feb 21)
I got caught up in writing a story for "Growing Up In Fullerton" and forgot to start a post with my birthday date until it was too late. I will just have to borrow George Washington's (Feb 22 for those of you too young to have learned that date the easy way- getting that day off from school). My generation also knows Abe Lincoln's - Feb 12, having learned that by getting that day off from school too. None of this 3 day Monday holiday stuff for us so that no one has a clue when to really celebrate their days.
One of my favorite jokes was to tell my students that I was one day older than George Washington and let them figure it out for themselves. It wasn't so funny when they all just nodded OK, thinking that my joke was the plausible truth. ( Of course, it didn't help any that by then the 3 day Monday holiday had started and none of them had a clue when George's birthday was,)
It was a good day for a birthday party because when I had a party, we didn't have to worry about going home early to get ready for school the next day or worrying that we might eat too much cake and ice cream and be too sick to attend the next day.
I just wanted this post to put the picture of my birthday flowers on- beautiful peach tulips.
Click on "Comment" to see the story that I sent to the "Growing Up in Fullerton" group on Facebook for those of you who can't read it there. (I hope to copy it in the comment anyway. We'll see if I can. If I can't, you can always email me if you're interested in reading about a true Fullerton experience. I may also try to put my story about a horse almost killing me in an orange grove on West Malvern.)
posted by Connie @ Wednesday, February 22, 2012
1 Comments:
At 8:14 AM,
Connie said…
On my 77th birthday, I am thinking I’m lucky to have lived this long.
I just remembered another way that I almost got killed growing up in Fullerton (before the horse almost stepped on my head).
When Mother and I lived in a little house behind a store on Spadra a couple of blocks south of the train station, I would ride my bike up to the Melody Inn restaurant close to the corner of Spadra and Commonwealth where my mother was a waitress. One day during summer vacation before 7th grade, I was riding up to the restaurant (on the wrong side of the street where any halfway-intelligent kid knows to ride so they can keep an eye on coming cars) and as I crossed over the railroad tracks and passed the packing house across the street from the train station, a truck loaded with heavy wooden boxes filled to the brim with oranges started turning left out of the packing house and onto Spadra just behind me. It was packed at least 6 layers high with those boxes and, as it passed behind me and the driver got ahead of me, the top box at the back of the truck teetered and fell off of the truck and landed just in front of my bicycle. There were oranges everywhere. I was able to veer away from the box so I didn’t run into it and have an accident. I just pedaled like I had never done before. If it had landed on my head, that heavy and from that height, it would have killed me for sure.
Of course, I never told my mother. (I was setting a precedent for my horse accident experience that would come a couple of years later.) I always regretted leaving those beautiful oranges behind, but I knew that I had had a lucky break to just survive. (And how would I have explained where all of those oranges in my bike basket had come from?)
I wonder where the driver thought his cargo was. I hope that he got in trouble for not tying down those boxes.
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