Reminiscence – Flying Back in Time

I suppose any trip back in time involves flying, so we fittingly started our trip at the Spokane International Airport.

Old Friends

We flew to Southern California, where we attended my 50th high school reunion. (Orangewood Academy) Somebody’s been messing with the calendar… that can’t have been 50 years ago! It was fun seeing so many classmates – most I haven’t seen in decades. My class is on the left below, on the right is the class ahead of ours. (Our classes have always been close.)

Maybe someday I’ll read this and not remember names, so for a future me, I’ll label them.
Our class: Mirtha, Charlotte, Me, Beverly, Mike, Jenda, Janet, Donny, Cher, Randy, Jack, Cynthia, Donald.
Their class: Linda, Liz, Linda, Suezy, Cal, Portia, Pam, Bonna, Vernon, Pam, Bobbie, Suzie.

This was probably the best cake I can remember eating! (And not just because I’m that old!) Awesome fresh fruit over a tasty cake that was not too sweet… wow!

Thank you Vernon and your wife for hosting us all, and making all that great food and arranging the fabulous cake! Thanks to Cher and Pam and Larry and all the others who put this party together!

Old Home

I never lived here, but after I was married and moved on, my parents lived for a while in Riverside. We checked on their old home, and it still looks fine. My folks moved in when the house was new, and Dad did all that landscaping, and planted the trees.

Old School

I spent three years in college at La Sierra, now called a university. The campus has grown quite a bit, but I found most of the buildings in the core of the campus look pretty much the same. (Like all of us classmates)

The Commons housed the cafeteria; I’m guessing it still does. Further along those buildings was the “Old” Library when I was a freshman here.

This used to be close to the entrance to the main campus. Now the entrance is a lot farther away.

This is the “New” Library. They built it when I was a freshman, and I believe it opened at the beginning of my sophomore year. We thought it was fabulous, especially when compared to the old one.

So above is a short tour of the buildings I thought looked pretty much the same as when I left. On a whim, I decided to check out the interior of Calkins Hall, where I roomed my freshman year. I saw a girl enter, so knew it was open. I was a little surprised to see a girl at the desk, and the other girl was gone. I found out it is now a girl’s dorm! The dean met me, and very graciously showed me a lot of the upgrades and listened to some of my crazy stories. She was very kind, and rearranged my understanding of most of the buildings I’d just photographed.

Angwin Hall was the upper class girls’ dorm. Now I guess it’s administration type stuff.
Gladwin Hall was a freshman girls’ dorm. Now it hosts classes.
South Hall was another freshman girls’ dorm. Now it is for Honor Students, boys on one end and girls on the other.
Calkins Hall was the freshman boys’ dorm. Now it is all the girls, except those few in South.
Sierra Towers was the dorm I spent my sophomore and senior years. Now it is all the guys except those in South.

Are you asking why I wrote all the above?? I am!

REALLY Old Friend (Sorry Bob!)

The day after our class reunion, we drove into Orange County to see a very special friend. Bob has been a friend of our whole family since the beginning of time. Or something like that. I remember our families camping together back when I was about 7 years old. We have spent lots of great time camping, snow skiing, water skiing, parasailing, and laughing over the years. Bob was hugely influential in my decision to practice dentistry. In fact, when I started dental school, he sold his practice and started training for Orthodontia at Loma Linda, so we were in dental school together! (Kinda) It was a great pleasure to spend an afternoon with our old buddy. Hang in there Bob!

I’m not usually the type to take pictures out airliner’s windows, but the sky was so gorgeous on our way home I couldn’t help it.

Back to the present

It’s not a bad idea to live in the present, especially when your daughter is making an awesome pie from the few remaining hand picked apples. This one sported a moose and two bears as crust! It was delicious, and evaporated quickly!

A pretty day to show our motorhome parked in the kid’s yard.

Ben Burr Trail

Karen and Loren took off for the weekend, and we got to spend time with some cool grandkids. Ours. We went for a walk along the Ben Burr Trail, which looks pretty remote for being basically in a big city. We were trying to find interesting birds, to be a part of Cornell University’s October Big Day, but didn’t do too well. Cornell has awesome bird studies, and a “Big Day,” where thousands of people record what they see and where, helps them study migration patterns and more. If you are at all interested, you can download a program called Merlin for bird identification, and eBird for recording and reporting sightings. It’s a lot of fun!

Our grandkids are not prone to staying on the ground.

While we may have been slightly disappointed in the number of species we found, we certainly weren’t disappointed in the scenery. Very nice.

Hoping to add a few water birds to our day’s lists, we checked out the Riverfront Park.

The park has a lot of interesting features, like this huge red wagon, a cool clocktower, and a bridge over Spokane Falls.

Among the random sculptures is a model of a harp, enclosed in glass. You can push the button and hear harp music. Nowhere near as nice as the harp music heard in our kid’s house!