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Show High Time RSto 1Mb Mmv By FLORENCE BITTNER We keep hearing about the importance of writing our life story so our children will know about us. Maybe it's our grandchildren since my children know as much about me as they can stand right now. Anyhow, this business of getting my life story written has been on my mind quite some time. Since 1938. I REMEMBER the date because that was the year I kept a diary consistently for three weeks and intermittently intermit-tently for the next six months. So I can tell you a good deal about what I did in 1938, but I doubt even my grandchildren will want to know who I walked home from school with, so we will skip the rest of that year. My life began at a very early age; about the beginning begin-ning of the bronze. If I have my history straight, which would be different, the bronze age was followed immediately immedi-ately by the iron age, and iron was one of the first household chores I learned to help with. MOTHER HAD an ironing board which she brought out of the hall closet and set up on the kitchen table. This was preceded by building a good fire in the kitchen stove to heat the sad irons and no household item was ever more aptly named. I helped by going to the stove to get a hot iron. I liked to lift the little button-knob and latch it onto the sad iron. That was followed sporadically by the bring in the wood age. In a household where all heat and cooking was accomplished by wood fires, bringing in the wood was constant so the wood encompassed en-compassed the years between the time I learned to walk and the time I learned to balk. ABOUT THAT time we moved to Mesa, Ariz, where I found out not every town's schools begin by engulfing children at age 5 or 6 and spewing them out at -age 17 or 18 all from the same building. Prior to that time I had heard rumors of elementary school and high school, but thought they referred to classroom numbers. Everybody knew high school was in the six rooms in the west end of the building, and kindergarten kids stayed down in the east end where they didn't get stomped on. So often. , WE ONLY stayed in Arizona one year on account of the shortage of jobs for father but that one year prepared me for life in the big city. I don't know whether my tender sensibilities could l a. a. a. have stood the transition from a one building school system to West High School without a year of Mesa thrown in to sort of get my feet wet so to speak. Actually I suffered more from dryness of the throat through sheer terror than from wet feet, but the phrase, "Get my feet wet" is a common com-mon one and is apt to be understood un-derstood by my grandchildren, grand-children, so I will leave that in my autobiography. I THINK I'll skip the University of Utah years and go on to the part where the love interest began. That was way back in the beginning of the big war when an Air Force Sergeant and I crossed paths. Well, crossed isn't exactly what our paths did, but we managed to keep in touch, and believe me if ever there was a misleading figure of speech, it's that "keep in touch" since we were "engaged" "en-gaged" for three years and saw each other 14 times what with him being off flying in B-17's over Germany and being be-ing shot down and kept in German prisons for 15 months and what not. HE WONDERED aloud fairly frequently over the next 30 years whether a girl from the small southern Utah town could find happiness with the boy from the" big citv think I had a shtSVJ Wu ; learned about h fr I ' buildings all their lsi should tave seeL0' I found out I tad an a HereIhdtenaiLaCCent-'ace HereIhdtenaiLaCCent-'ace straigM fcy father-in-lawid,, shoits got skoits on SKi then he had the Ball i,em" right out toFwKfWC f paper sack, "a 1": What?" "Sack." "She bag." Then why doesn? say so?" n ' 'he . THEN WE besan family. We got onTa'gS start with a baby gir62 weighed in at 2 lbs 4 e,rK bi"hday celebrated by moving her of a basinette into a crib Z ' could hardly find her She was followed, , exactly immediately, by Z ' bouncing baby boys. Ma.Ve of fact, she was leaving hi. school the day we took he brother to register for kin dergarten. Excellent fan! planning. ' LET'S SEE, now. I wonder if I've left anything out if keep it short, maybe someda one of my grandchildren win say, "I wish she had written more. And that seems about as good a place to stop as anv Well. There's another obligation taken care of. |