Hot weather reminds me of...

Well, it is summer in the PHX. Weather.com shows that we are going to get as high as 115 in the next 10 days. That is really hot, but luckily for me I'll be in San Francisco where the highs are in the 60's for the next 10 days. So, you know how going certain places, or smelling certain smells, or hearing certain things bring back memories? For example, when I smell sunflower seeds I always think of little league baseball. I would always eat seeds while either playing or watching a game. I loved those memories because they all include sports and family, two of my favorite things. I also remember that after the games we would get drink tickets to go to the snack bar and get a drink. I would always get a suicide. A suicide is a drink that includes all of the drinks available at the soda fountain. It would always be an orangy brown color and taste like nasty medicine, but we loved it.

For those of you that don't know, we had a dust storm (haboob) come through phoenix last week. It was the largest dust storm I had ever seen. Some people say we have these all the time but this one was extreme. It was a wall of dust 100 miles wide and 10,000 feet high. Basically think of the dust storm from the mummy movie and that is pretty much what it was like. We weren't in town but saw pictures of it on the news and saw the aftermath of it when we returned home. Dust was everywhere! So, yesterday I was doing some clean up and all the dust brought back some memories from my childhood.

When I was a kid we lived in Yuma, AZ. We liked to spend our winters out at the sand dunes. We would camp out on Friday night and spend all day Saturday riding and playing at the dunes. We would usu ally go with our friends the Lemmons. Since it was all dirt and no foliage to be seen we would always start camp fires. One time we were having a hard time getting the fire to start. So, in an effort to help I started throwing sand on it thinking that the sand would get that baby a blazing. As most of you know sand has the opposite effect on fire. After throwing about a trash can amount of dirt on the fire it went out. Sis. Lemmon looked at the fire and said "who put the fire out?" I said that all I did was throw dirt on it to try to get it to light. She filled me in on the mechanics of fire starting and the non-lighting properties of dirt. Since then I only used dirt on a fire to get it to go out.

Another memory I have of the sand dunes is when I flipped and cracked my head open. We had 3 wheelers growing up as quads were not around yet. My parents bought a small automatic 3 wheeler called "the Tri-Zinger" for us boys. It was only 50cc and had a top speed of about 20mph. We didn't care that it was slow because it was easy to ride and it was just our size. We also had a rule that we had to wear helmets at all times, which actually surprises me because I don't remember any other safety rules coming from my folks ever, like seat belts in the car or don't throw pad locks at your brother (from a previous post). We had white helmet that buckled under the chin. The buckle was the kind with a strap on one side and a ring on the other and you had to loop the strap through the ring a couple times to get it to be secure. I hated doing the loop, so instead of buckling the helmet I tucked the strap and buckle up inside the helmet, looking back this was not such a good idea. When it was my turn to ride I put on the helmet tucked in the strap and buckle and took off. I was racing along the flats when i saw a small bump. I headed strait for it, thinking I would pull up a little and maybe get my front tire off the ground. So I hit the bum at top speed and yanked up on the handle bars as hard as I could. What happened next was kind of a blur, but I remember flipping completely over. When I stood up I saw that the bump was a bottle on its side covered with sand and the Tri-Zinger flipped and still running. I didn't know what to do so I started waling back to our camp, which was only about 200 yards away. While I was walking I noticed that me head hurt really bad. I reached up to feel it but my helmet was still on. I took off the helmet and as I did I felt something that I had never felt before. The buckle had jammed itself into my scalp and the feeling was the buckle sliding back out of my scalp, this is when the real fun began. As soon as the buckle came out of my head the open wound started gushing blood, and I mean gushing. Immediately my back and side were covered in blood. As I got closer to the camp my parents saw me and I could only imagin their horror when they looked and saw their favorite son staggering towards them covered from head to toe in blood. They ran towards me and wrapped my head in a towel, threw me in the back of the truck and raced towards the hospital. By the time we got to the hospital the towel was soaked and there was a pretty good sized puddle in the bed of the truck. We walked inside and needless to say we got right in to see a doctor. I was confused about what they were going to do to help so the nurse that was helping me drew a circle on a piece of paper and said "this is what your wound looks like now" then she drew a strait line and said "this is what we're going to make it look like". So they shaved my head around the wound and stitched me up. Is till have a scar to this day, ask me about it and I'll show you.