Читать книгу Dear Jeril... Love, Dad - Wayne P. Anderson - Страница 8

Dear Family,

I’m home this morning recovering from strep-throat—still having trouble talking—but since my writing hand is okay, I felt I’d take time to catch you up on some of our recent history.

We’ve enjoyed hearing about my brother Lester’s adventures in Panama. It sounds almost like stepping into a novel. I’m looking forward to sharing some of those adventures with him during July and August. In the meantime I have been doing some traveling of my own here in the United States.

For many years when I’ve gone off to meetings around the United States, I’ve tended to go in, attend the meeting and come home. It dawned on me one day (it takes me years to catch on to some things) that since other people pay good money to come see these places, why don’t I spend more time there.

So in the last few years I go in early by a day or two and stay over a day after a meeting to enjoy the sights. The sad part about my getting this insight late is that the university is so broke that they no longer automatically pay my expenses for two trips a year. I have to scheme and beg to get paid half for a trip.

Washington, D.C.

Anyway, in December I spent four days touring Washington, a couple with a friend and several alone. I find that I can go to a museum like our National Air and Space Museum and spend the entire day just moving from one display to another. I suppose that it’s partly I’m at an age where much of what is now in museum displays is part of my own history, so I’m often going back over old memories—like of World War II.

The other factor is that good museums are now so entertainingly educational. I walk through a science exhibit and have fun with moving displays and the working models and find at the end I know many things I didn’t know before. I’ve also reached the age where I forget more, and faster than I used to; that means I have to work fairly hard to keep the new material coming in to keep up with the old material going out of whatever hole forgetting goes out.

That’s not to imply that I feel old. From what I can gather we Andersons don’t ever feel old—we leave that to other people.

San Diego, California

Three weeks ago Carla and I spent five days in San Diego, California, three nights as guests of a former student of mine and two at a fancy resort hotel. That gave us a chance to do our morning run on a two-mile stretch of beach along the Pacific Ocean.

Buying tickets for a trip by air is a real study in illogic. A round trip ticket from Kansas City to San Diego is $600. If you fly from St. Louis—250 miles further away—tickets drop to $400 round trip; but if you fly from New York—over 800 miles further away—the price drops to $300. Based on that kind of logic they should pay you for flying from San Diego to London.

At the meeting in San Diego of the Society for Personality Assessment, the program two friends and I gave was well received. As a result we’ve been asked to do the same program in Tampa, Florida, next year.

I spent considerable time sightseeing, dining and talking with three ex-students who got their PhDs under my direction about ten years ago. Besides finding out how their lives are going now, it was interesting to hear about what kind of person I used to be. I guess we tend to forget how things once were with us. I was a much tougher guy in those days and much more active, but I also had a bigger following of students who wanted to go out and do my kind of work. It seemed very important to them that I approved of how they had turned out. God, here I am a father figure.

I was brought back to earth when at a cocktail party, I ran into a professor I knew when I first came out of North Dakota to an internship in Omaha, Nebraska. Surprisingly he remembered me, but as “Rube” Anderson.

He told Carla some stories of my early days, and it hit home how really green I was when I left Dakota. Some of my naiveté is still with me, but I cover it better, and it’s in some ways a plus. My childlike wonder at things is so much a part of what I see and do that makes my life so entertaining.

The ex-student and his family have done very well in the housing market in California, which if you haven’t heard about is very crazy. In 1969 he bought a $28,000 house, sold it for $86,000 in 1978, bought one for $89, 000 and sold it two years later for $136,000 to buy a $140,000 house that is now worth $200,000. The house wouldn’t be worth anywhere near that in the Midwest—but it does show now meaningless money is becoming in some circles.

Because of our contacts we did a lot of touring, like the waterfront and the old Spanish part of San Diego, but what stands out are the animals. We spent a day at Sea World with its trained seals, dolphins, and whales, a half day at what may be the best zoo in America and a full day at the wild animal preserve.

At 1800 acres of preserve, animals from all over the world live in open spaces, and the tourists go around in a train or a fenced-in walk. The main value seems to be that animals, now extinct in the wild, continue to breed under the natural conditions of the preserve—that is something they seldom do in the more confined area of a zoo.

Keystone, Colorado

Last week Carla, Rosie (seventeen), Stephanie (fifteen), and I went skiing in Colorado. We fought a snowstorm going in and a rainstorm coming out, but we had great weather while there. It’s something I’ve been promising the girls for three years. We missed out on skiing in Europe for various reasons and were too busy last year, so we were due.

Apartments have become very expensive in the ski area, and the prices of condominiums close to the ski slopes make San Diego prices look cheap. Again because of connections through a friend in Colorado, we got a low price on a two-bedroom, kitchen, living room apartment close to three major ski areas.

After a day of ski lessons at Keystone the girls were ready to follow me anywhere so we skied Copper Mountain, where their idea of a beginners’ ski route is two and a half miles of straight down with five-foot moguls. Well, maybe not that bad, but it was a real challenge. I’d be afraid to even look down one of their advanced trails.

My running has kept me in fair shape, but Carla did it better. Some friends from Columbia had a condominium close to ours, and Carla spent the days cross-country skiing with the wife and late afternoons in a sauna and pool. As a result she had less stiffness than any of us.

I was pleased with how well the girls are learning to ski. It made my heart skip a beat to look back on some really tough slope and see the two of them following right behind looking like real pros.

In Madrid in 1973 we met a retired Air Force colonel who was making a living selling his paintings—one of which now hangs over our fireplace. Carla found a story on him in the Colorado Springs paper, and we looked him up. His prices have now tripled since we knew him, but Carla and he see eye-to-eye on abstract art, and she ended up with another one. For someone who can be as tight with a dollar as she can, it was interesting to see that she didn’t even flinch when he asked $600 for it. I didn’t flinch either, but we had agreed that it was her money that she was going to spend.

I know I have mentioned money too often in this letter, but things have gotten so strange to me, with everybody talking in mega-figures that once would have bought everything in my old neighborhood. I suffer from time lag, and it’s hard to keep up with changing values. Anyhow lest anyone think we’re rich, we’re anything but; but interestingly have found that with contacts and special deals and a little roughing it, we often end up doing more than people who have lots more money. As we go along we are learning to enjoy what we have even more than we did in the past.

Jerilyn and Debra continue well. I’ll be visiting Debra in Germany, probably in November, and with Jerilyn’s husband going into the army I’ll probably be visiting them somewhere—Georgia for sure and maybe if things go right, Italy.

Love, Dad