Dear Shelley (from Gramps)

I should be able to answer your request that I tell some stories from my life by quoting a series of pages from my journal, faithfully kept by means of daily writings. For example, page 1: "My birth was an accident. I refer not to the lack of planning for it, but to the actual event itself. Stairs were involved. When at the top of the stairs, my mother was pregnant. When she reached the bottom, she was not. Having tripped on the top step, she missed all the others with her feet, but not with other body parts. She, I and the afterbirth wound up a scrambled mess at the bottom. As with other newborns, my bones were non-brittle and my flesh was flexible, therefore, I was uninjured. I'm sticking to that story. My brothers and sister, all except one of the six of whom were born before me, frequently testified that there WAS an injury -- to my head. They insist that it accounts for many otherwise unexplainable aberrations for which I have since been responsible."

Sis, would the above suffice for a story from my life? Do you believe it? It is exactly as true as the idea of the existence of my daily-entry journal. My actual journal consists entirely of an account of Corey's miraculous escape from Korea (with me and Nana B) at the end of his mission there. In that adventure, there were visible firearms, an expiring visa and a sequence of leaping over piles of luggage in a last-minute dash for the gate to a ready-to-move airliner from Seoul. Corey ought to tell that story! The above account of my accidental birth is actually an exerpt from an exercise in fiction that I wrote in an attempt to publish a novel. With one small red book exception, my attempts at being published have been replete with rejection slips. Recently, on this family blog, you've seen evidence of the reasons for them. Maybe I should try to avoid both fiction and humor and just stick to the true things in my life. However, doing so would risk death by boredom of people I really like -- and love!

There is, however, the story of the 6' 7" truly ambidextrous high school freshman basketball player I coached in Bly, Oregon, who became a three-year all state high school and two-year all American college player. You've all probably heard that one, since it was my one and only school coaching experience. See, what you don't already know about my life, you probably don't want to know.