My wonderful birthday

This week I turned 78.  That means I'm closer to 80 than to 75.  Can I really have lived that many years?  

28489 days.  And I can only remember bits and pieces of a fraction of those days.  Some are big events that I remember, and some are quite small, interestingly.....where I probably didn't really register them at the time.

Thank goodness for photographs and movies.  I remember so much more from them, which is what I want since my life has been so very good.

I spent 30 years working (plus another 11 getting prepared for working).  I can remember only snatches of those years.  

My most vivid memories are in three categories:  1.  my childhood and adolescence.  2.  my children.  3.  My time with Vicky and all of the wonderful things we shared together.

And virtually all of my memories are positive.  All maybe.  The most powerfully negative ones aren't really even inherently negative.  They are the death of my parents.  I would feel worse about that except that I know they had full, rich, and loving lives.  And died old.  I was holding my mother's hand as she died.  I often say that I want to live a good life so that, if there's a heaven, I can go there and see them again.  I know the first thing I will say to my father:  "Dad, Mom did not die alone."   

As an old guy I do a lot of reflection.  So does Vicky (although she's neither old nor a guy).  We like to talk about our remembrances.

Well, my 78th birthday celebration(s) will be, someday, a part of those remembrances. 

Texts, phone calls, and emails from all our children and grandchildren wishing me a Happy Birthday and sending me so much love!

 

Vicky. making Mom’s signature dish, noodles with roast beef…

My birthday #2….celebrating with Owen, Mila, and the children at the cabin!

Grandma teaching Hannah how to cook Mom’s noodles….

Soren and Sebastian picked LOTS of fruit for their Aunt Mila and Uncle Owen!

We told Sebastian and Soren that their Aunt Mila, Uncle Owen, Hannah, Vernon, and Robert peel and eat lemons and grapefruit like oranges.  Also that their aunt makes their children lemonade from fresh lemons, that Vernon loves oranges, and that Uncle Owen makes his tea with orange peels.  

When they heard this, both Soren and Sebastian wanted to collect as much fresh fruit for them as possible.

This is the perfect time of year to find boxes of fruit along the streets and pick fruit in Leisure World.  So Grandpa and I drove Sebastian and Soren around Leisure World to find fruit.  The first thing we saw was a man just down the street shaking his lemon tree….and it was “raining” lemons!

Both boys picked LOTS of oranges, lemons, and grapefruit!  

We also found several boxes of grapefruit along the side of the road.  The fruit was set there for anyone to take.  Here is our total haul….

Good thing Owen and Mila have the shed at the cabin where they can store all this treasure.  

Gunfight at the OK Corral….and so much more!

 Our cowboys, Soren and Sebastian, ganged up with us and traveled to Tombstone, Arizona, an old western town that is rich in history from the 1880’s.

We stayed at the 1953 cowboy Larian Motel.  

John Wayne gave the owners of the motel, Larry and Ann (hence the name, Larian Motel) an autographed photo.  My Danny was sure that we stayed in the same room as The Duke, since our room was #1!

We all wore our cowboy shirts as we explored this wild west town where Wyatt Earp with his brothers and Doc Holliday had the famous gun fight in the streets of Tombstone.

We had dinner in the Crystal Palace where all the gamblers, cowboys, gunslingers, and the “ladies of the night" hung out.

The gunslingers stayed clear of Soren when he gave them his “look.”

We’re ready to head underneath the streets of Tombstone to one of the richest silver mines in our country.  

 

The work was done by hand, without machines, in the 1880’s.  It was dug out through solid rock with a hammer and spike.  When the spike was hammered deep enough in several places, the mine was cleared out. Dynamite was packed into the holes made from the spike, charges were set with fuses, and a chunk of rock about two feet square was blown out of the wall of the shaft. The pieces of rock were put into a sack, and a man would drag the sack filled with rocks out of the mine to be processed into silver.  Each sack weighed about 100 pounds.

Then the next day new holes where hammered out.  Day after day, year after year, this process was repeated.

The miners worked 10 hours, six days a week by candlelight in these shafts.  Their lunch was a can of peaches or pears.  Unfortunately, the cans were lined with lead, so the boys who had started to mine at age 15 were kicked out of the mines by the time they were 30, due to their ill health caused by lead poisoning.

These dark rocks are unrefined silver….

There were tunnels and shaft which led off in all directions.  We had traveled 110 feet underground, but the shafts led down to almost 500 feet!  The water table was 500 feet, so the mine never flooded.  

The refined silver was cast into 180 pound “Hershey kisses” shaped blocks.  This helped to prevent theft, as they were difficult, if not impossible, to lift or transport by a single man.

The men who worked to refine the silver had an even worse fate than the miners.  Mercury was used in the refinery process, which resulted in acute mercury poisoning within 2-3 years.

The miners port-a-potty….

Now that we had learned how to mine silver, we’re off to find our own vein of silver and strike it rich!

The Bird Cage Theater was a famous brothel and gambling house in Tombstone in the 1880’s.

These are the “Cribs” high above the stage where the "ladies of the night" “entertained” the cowboys and miners.  The girls were virtual slaves who were not allowed to leave.  They were mistreated, beaten, exploited, and then tossed aside.  

The gambling room was behind the theater.

Statue of Ed Schieffelin, the man who discovered silver in the middle of the desert….the beginning of a booming mining town where men and women flocked to in hopes of finding their fortune.

Very few of these men and women found silver at the end of a rainbow.  Most ended up living a hard, brutal, and short life.

We went back in time to the 1880’s this week.  We had expected to relive the excitement and adventure of the rollicking town mining of Tombstone, where the Gunfight at the OK Corral unfolded.  But instead, we discovered the story of desperate men and women trying to live and survive in a hard world.  We felt the anguish of these people who lived 140 years ago in Tombstone.  

Instead of reading about history, we stepped back in time, and lived in the history of a bygone era.  And we’re happy to live in this country today, not in the wild west.