For Esmé, the Princess Blueberry, and her Knights -- part 1

Dear Esmé, ( and Jaedin, Ethan, Preston, Greyson, and Massimo, the esteemed knights )

Soon you and your new cousin ( set to arrive a little after you ) will be born and the BailorTale will have a new chapter.

I am your great-aunt, your Grandpa's sister and your daddy's auntie. Like Auntie Holly, and Rachel, and Danielle. One day we will play together on the beach in heaven, I believe...but for now I want to tell you some stories about the people who gave you your last name. :-)You may never know your great-aunt Amy, or maybe I might get to see you when you are also four, as I was on that long-ago Christmas I remember.

A long time ago, I took a train with my parents, my brother, and HIS three sisters to our grandparents' house for Christmas, and we stopped at a great-aunt's home along the way. Icicles hung from the roof, and my great-aunt's Margaret's cheery living room gave warmth from that crystal cold night. That night, 44 years ago, your grandpa Kirk was  already twelve years old.

Grandpa Kirk arrived on May 31, 1958, in Riverside, Ca., in a little bungalow hospital in the shadow of Mt. Rubidoux. To this day, a huge concrete cross sits on top of that pretty little hillside, so you might say your grandpa has always been close to the cross. :-) He lived in two different little houses before he turned nine, close to each other, both surrounded by big palm trees that fluttered in the sunshine while he played outside in the yard. He burned his baby feet on the heater grate in the second house, in the night. Back then the furnaces blew really hot air through the air shafts under houses, and there were pretty iron grates covering the opening to let the hot air would rise up. Poor Kirk --his bare feet met with a red-hot shock in the middle of the night.

We didn't have neighbors across the street in the house we moved to when he was nine, the same beautiful house where your Great-grandma still lives.  Only a big brick wall with ivy growing on it. A little bridge crossed over it so we could walk to our elementary school on a street across the canal. When he was a little boy he liked to play cowboys and Indians, and had toy guns and a cowboy hat. He also had lizards and snakes, in little glass cages in the garage, and sometimes he would let me help feed them wiggly worms out of a little cup full of sawdust and wiggly worms.

As he got older he liked to put together models of race cars and rocket ships. One time, he had left his model project on his desk in his room.

I loved that desk with a big surface as big as a table, and a writing board that slid out from a secret slot, and big, deep drawers. We passed it down to each other as the years went by, and it was already 60 years old! G'Grandma still has it at her home. Maybe someday you can play under it, like my sisters and I used to.

Anyway, Kirk left out a little jar of turpentine, which he used to clean the paint brushes used on his models,  in a small glass. Always curious, I sniffed at it and maybe put my mouth to it to see what it tasted like. Either your future grandpa discovered me in his hallowed space, and called for help, or someone else did, but the story is that they rushed me to the hospital to get my stomach pumped. Hopefully your brothers won't leave out anything dangerous for your curious self to discover. Blech. Turpentine. Like nail polish but so much worse.

When your Grandpa got older, he had a paper route. Back in those days, the paper got printed two times a day. Teenage boys and some girls had paper routes in their neighborhood. They would ride their bikes early in the morning or after school, roll up lots of newspapers in rubber bands, and then ride through the neighborhood to which they were assigned and throw them on the steps, like people do now from truck in the night. We didn't have the internet back then, or cable television or satellite dishes or anything like that. The news reports aired in the morning and afternoon too, and once more late at night. If you stayed up too late with a stomachache or the chicken pox, there was nothing to watch on television after midnight. the TV went fuzzy until the morning time, and we didn't have DVDs back then. We watched movies at the theater, or on Saturdays on television. But most of our news and advertisements were in the newspaper.

He loved to go backpacking in those days.  Loved the trees and the lakes and the mountain views, and time spent with his friends among the beautiful trails and evening campfires. He had a big green backpack that sat in the corner of the garage waiting for summer to roll around, next to his old baseball bats and fishing poles.

Your grandpa was the oldest cousin, so when he graduated from Riverside Poly High School in 1976, on Victoria Avenue where all the orange groves grew,  lots of  the relatives from came to Riverside to celebrate. We had a pool, so we spent lots of time out there. We also went to Knott's Berry Farm, which only had three big rides and a little Western town back then -- but we still had lots of fun together that season. That summer was the Bicentennial, America's 200th birthday. Lots of big parties and celebration went on that summer. Turning 200 is a pretty big deal! That summer, and every summer before and afterwards, they set off fireworks from the top of the mountain with the Cross. The fireworks would light up the Cross for seconds at a time with bright colors...and then the falling sparks would land in the dry brush below and little fires would burn all over the hillside. Sometimes BIG fires, so the firefighters were waiting on the roads to quickly put them out.

Not long after that, your future Grandpa Kirk moved into a little apartment by the big hill where our house sat along a canal(which watered the orange groves farther away). They didn't do fireworks on our hill, so we never worried about fire much, and we didn't have neighbors across the street. Just a big brick wall with ivy growing on it. A little bridge crossed over the canal, so we could walk to our elementary school on a street across the canal and down the next block.  In the springtime you could go outside and the whole city smelled sweetly of orange blossoms. ( One time, before he graduated, he and your great-aunt Karen babysat me and your great-aunt Alyson while our parents went out for dinner. The house at the end of the block sat up higher than the rest, and you could see over the top of the wall along the canal. That day my brother and sisters helped me and Alyson over the wall and we "played in the creek". We didn't ever get to do that, so we had so much fun -- until our parents found out. :( We spent a lot of time in our rooms for a while, after that.)

Train tracks run alongside our big hill. All during the day and at night the train whistle would blow as it came along, warning to clear the track in the little canyon. It must have been a little rumbly and shaky in his new apartment, but he didn't seem to spend much time there. Every time I went over to his apartment, he only had Ritz crackers in the cupboard. HA

 I always felt special when he would  to come to my church youth group and play his guitar for us, while we sang songs. All of my girlfriends had a big crush on my brother, and all the young boys were jealous.  HA

Your grandpa learned how to operate a backhoe, which is a big tractor with a big scoop and a deep bucket for digging lots of dirt. ( I forgot to tell you that we had a two-story playhouse with a sandbox underneath it, and when he was little he had a toy backhoe and lots of other big toy trucks he liked to play with in the sand. When he grew up, he did the same thing in real life.)

Later on he moved up to what we call The Valley. Our other grandparents lived there and our aunt Yvonne and Uncle Dale and our cousins. We went there for Christmas a few times too. Aunt Yvonne and Uncle Dale had a yearly contest of who could make the best Christmas candy, so their kitchen table overflowed with fudge and divinity fudge ( white fluffy goodness ) and other tins of delectable goodies. They had a big garden too, and grapevines, and a German Shepherd named Princess. Uncle Dale was a truck driver for a moving company, and always had a gazillion Girl Scout cookies in the big freezer in the garage which the cookie company gave to his company for delivering the cookies to the Girl Scouts.

Aunt Yvonne was my daddy's big sister. She had a big happy laugh and loved to tell stories about our family. Their other sister Aunt Barbara lived far away in beautiful Michigan, so we didn't see her so much. She had a big happy laugh too. I will tell you more about them in another story.

Kirk loved the valley. Big oak trees and rolling hill and wide open spaces where Uncle Dale and he and cousin David could ride their motorcycles. Sometimes they took me with them and we'd seem to be gone all day roaring along endless roads through the green and gold Santa Ynez hills.

That's where your grandpa met your grandma Christi, and suddenly, after a long time of seeming sort of sad, he was happy. I will tell you more about that next time too.

love,

Auntie Amy