It is not just a single memory, but a class of memories - of various times riding on my father's shoulders.  He would pick me up to ride when he was in a hurry and didn't want to walk slowly enough for me to keep up, and when my legs grew too tired to go on.  I sat up there for better visibility over the heads of crowds at parades and other events.

I recall watching a three-legged race, and a fireworks display, for the very first time, from that vantage point.  That might have been a company picnic, but probably was one sponsored by his labor union, Teamsters or Machinists - he maintained membership in both.

It was also a way for him to control me in hazardous places and situations.  Eventually, as I became more mobile, my parents put a harness on me and kept me on a leash in public, but until then Daddy's shoulders kept me out of danger without his having to give up one of his favorite forms of entertainment, gawking.  He liked to "follow the excitement."

He listened to police and fire department radio calls, and drove to locations of fires and accidents.  I remember getting to a big hotel fire in San Jose before all the fire trucks got there, watching them scream in, the fire fighters jump off, unroll hose, set up ladders and battle the blaze as people jumped screaming from upper windows onto their handheld trampoline.

One time we happened upon a wreck on the highway as we were traveling, and were the first to stop, before police or an ambulance arrived.  A bakery van had rear-ended a load of pipe on a bigger truck.  The van's driver was smeared all over the inside of his cab.  Until my parents explained, I thought all that red was strawberry jam.

The photo above was taken the day he took me to work with him.  When I was born, he was working in a defense plant, as a "burner," cutting steel sheets into the shapes of sheathing for tanks and armored vehicles.  When World War II ended, the plant was reconverted to its original use, building canning machines.  He welded in the winter, and in the summer canning season traveled from cannery to cannery, installing and maintaining machines.

The men working there handed me around, held me up, smiled and laughed as I looked on amazed at the activity.  I remember a lot of dirty, greasy, happy men.  There was the clang of steel hitting steel, sparks from arc welders, the roar and screech of the machinery, and bells clanging and whistles blowing to warn of danger or indicate time for a break.  The operator of the overhead crane took me up in his cab, where I rode across the cavernous building looking down on the men working below, and showed me how to work the levers that opened and closed the crane's claw, and directed its movement.

Daddy's shoulders, as much as anything else, gave me my start in life, a boost up in the world, a higher perspective on reality.  I wasn't shielded from experience, but I was guarded from harm, so I learned both courage and competence in emergencies.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

A Featured_Grownups challenge:

To whom it may concern:

I understand that Susitna Sue from Subarctic Suburbia is applying to accompany the party of colonists establishing an agricultural base on Balderdash V.  I would give her my highest recommendation for this position.  She is prime space colonist material.  Space is her specialty.  Formerly known as the Secretary of Space, she is the spaciest person I know. 

Flexibility and versatility are requirements for any colonist, and she meets those requirements completely.  This is a low maintenance woman, willing to accept a broad range of circumstances and conditions.  Given adequate nutrition and her daily requirement of caffeine, she will wear whatever fits, keep herself entertained, and function at a high level of competence on very little sleep.

She has experience in horticulture and animal husbandry under some of the harshest agricultural conditions on this planet.  Things grow for her without even having been planted.  Mushrooms have sprouted voluntarily behind her sofa, and the sticks she used to hold seed packets and mark garden rows took root and grew, although, unfortunately, the seeds did not.  She has cared for rabbits, ducks, chickens, turkeys, pheasants, quail, guinea fowl, geese, squirrels, chipmunks, various fish, turtles, lizards, tarantulas, snakes, pigs, cattle, horses, goats, doves, parakeets, canaries, cats, dogs, a raccoon, an opossum, and a chameleon, and is currently nurturing a herd of tadpoles to froghood.

A prizewinning competitive baker and cook, her culinary skills are semilegendary, and she can claim a large repertoire of original recipes.  Her skill in the galley earned her passage to Alaska, and the affection and respect of the crew, aboard the MV Chief, a crab fishing boat.  Her FUBARS have been carried to the peak of Mount Everest to be consumed there as a special treat.

No matter what the composition of the colonial party, she will have their group dynamics sorted out, their individual characters and personalities diagnosed, and will be ready to provide therapeutic intervention before they are ready for it.  Should the colonists encounter alien life forms, she will be prepared to communicate with them.  She has been communicating with alien life forms for her entire time on Earth.

(And that's all true, too.)

I have been having one of those weeks.  Come to think of it, it started last week.  My sleep cycle and other fatigue-related crap haven't leveled out since the trip to Wasilla on the Monday before last.

My meds had been in at the clinic up the valley on the road to Talkeetna for weeks and I needed to go up there and get them before my supply at home ran out.  The Willow Library, down the valley the other way, called to say the books I'd ordered through Interlibrary Loan were in and they'd hold them up to a week.  I decided a few days ago to do both errands on one trip.

I thought I was leaving home with enough time and some to spare, but I encountered a snag at the library.  The librarian wasn't there.  Her assistant was giving a hard time to a couple of boys using the computers, then she was poking around in some shelves talking to herself, before I got her attention.  She asked me if I'd heard that the library was going to be closed during August.  I was truthful.  I said no.  She gave me a disapproving look and started listing all the places they had published the notice.  Then she segued into a detailed explanation of the ConEx boxes in the parking lot, to which they would be moving everything so the library could be painted and carpeted.

She tends to repeat herself, and she did, several times, while holding onto my library card.  I was giving her adequate feedback to indicate that I understood, but that only sent her off on a couple of tangents.  Nothing could stop her from reiterating everything.  If I'd have lied and said I'd heard, it might have shortened the ordeal, but maybe not.  Her behavior, I have long observed, is consistent with lesions or abnormalities in the caudate nucleus, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Additionally, I think she's just a wee bit sadistic and power mad.  She will shoo patrons off the computers early if she sees that they are really into something, or keep people waiting if she sees that they're in a hurry.

I finally got out of there and up to Sunshine, but not before closing time... just moments after they locked the doors, according to the young woman sitting on the curb waiting for a ride.   A day or two later (mind fog is one of the symptoms of fatigue, and it is not unusual for me to be unable to recall when precisely I've done exactly what), I went back to the clinic and got my meds. 

On my way home, I stopped in to see Charley about helping us cut down the big spruce tree beside the house.  It is infested with carpenter ants and half dead, and I want to get it felled in a harmless direction this summer and not risk having wind or snow load bring it down on the house or car this winter.  He had visitors, people I have known for years, and I enjoyed seeing them.  They were smoking dope, however, and one guy got the defensive tone that stoners sometimes do when in the presence of someone who's unloaded.  I declined to discuss dope, and took care of my business.

Then, still fatigued from the previous days, yesterday Doug and I did a water run.  It was a perfect day for it, overcast but not raining, neither hot nor cold nor dusty, just comfortable.  It is always hard work, of course, and yesterday there was an unpleasant human encounter as well.  Usually I enjoy the chance meetings with neighbors, but I didn't enjoy that one.

He and another, younger and soberer, man, instead of waiting until we had finished and cleared the confined area around the waterhole, carried their few jugs down there while I was still filling buckets and Doug was carrying them up to the car.  He stood there swaying on widely-planted feet and came out with his first conversational gambit:  "Besht water in the world...."

Doug grunted something noncommittal, stepping around him with five gallons of water in each hand.  I kept filling our jugs and buckets.  The man made another stab at conversation:  "Been drinkin' it for... oh... ten (?)... [vague gesture] yearsh."  I could have kept my mouth shut and kept on working, but I looked over my shoulder at him and said, "Twenty-four, for me."

From his reaction, you'd think I'd claimed to be the Archdeaconess of Andromeda or something.  "REALLY?!," said with a lurch backward that unfortunately didn't quite land him in the drink before he caught his balance.  "Where do you live?"  It was a nosy question, and I replied with the name of the subdivision we live in.  That meant nothing to him, so I said it was, "up by the motel."

That got him started.  He asked me if I remember Jack and Becky, who briefly owned the general store and RV park in the mid-'90s.  "Yeah," I said, I remember..." caught myself before I said, "Jerk and Bitchy," ..."them."  From subsequent conversation, it seems they were friends of his.  I kept working and let him ramble on as he turned his back, unzipped his fly and urinated in the stream.

Then he said something about how Jack and Becky got "railroaded and cheated out of" their business there.  Forgetting everything I've ever learned about suffering fools and trying to reason with drunks, I took the bait and endeavored to set him straight.  All I said to him was that they had defaulted on the contract they signed, violated the covenants on the property, and forfeited the deed.  Now that I've brought it up, I probably owe my readers a bit more of the story.

Frank and Vivian Frederickson moved up here from their old place, Cache Country Store, ten miles down the road, and built a bigger general store a block off the highway in the mid-80s, the same time that their old friends Pete and Lucille Allen built the RV park beside it.  The new store had room for a laundromat, and for their daughter-in-law's barbershop in back.  Then Frank's health failed and the Fredericksons moved to the Sunbelt.  A new owner bought both the store and RV park.  Pete and Lucille bought the land on the adjoining block and built a motel there.

The businesses have gone through a succession of buyers who would try for a few months or a year or two before packing it in and letting it revert to the original owners.  Few of my neighbors recall Becky with the fondness that drunk apparently has for her.  She went out of her way to alienate people who live around here, who had been accustomed to using the laundry and showers.  She would gossip scathingly about, "locals," always spoken with a derogatory tone and a sneer, to other locals, which didn't endear her to us.  She plastered the walls of laundry and showers with crude hand-lettered signs prohibiting this and limiting that.  One wall was devoted to a photo and press-clipping shrine to her nephew Shane Bonham, a football hero somewhere in the lower 48.  When she wasn't bitching about her customers, she was gushing about her nephew's triumphs.

Becky had retired from a long career as a bartender to move up here and buy that place.  Her lifelong dream had been to own a bar of her own.  Neighbors protested the liquor license application during the public comment phase, and the liquor board granted her only an offsite package sales license.  Becky blacked out the windows, installed a pool table and jukebox, and called the place a "steak house,"  with the then-trendy grill-it-yourself setup.  As this was developing, I heard about it secondhand, having started using a bigger, brighter and more congenial laundromat in Talkeetna. 

Roadsides around here became littered with beer and liquor bottles.  One dark winter morning as I walked Doug to the school bus, one of Becky's regular customers at the steak house was slumped over the wheel of his car in the middle of the street at the bus stop, engine running and headlights on.  The bus came, Doug left on it, and I opened the driver's door to see if he was alive in there.  It was a guy who lived nearby, just drunk and passed out.  The local lodges, in compliance with the dram shop law, eighty-six customers when they become too intoxicated.  Becky, since her place wasn't a licensed bar and the drinks were under the table, apparently didn't think that law applied to her.

It was a short-lived scandal around here.  As yesterday's drunk at the spring reminded me, "Becky's sister was the one that got popped in Fairbanks for that pyramid scam."  RaeJean Bonham, Shane's proud mother, swindled dozens of investors out of tens of millions of dollars on a scheme involving sales of frequent flyer miles.  Not long after Jeannie Bonham got busted, Jerk and Bitchy were out of here.  The Frederickson's had learned of Becky's "steak house," which was not in compliance with the covenant they had placed on the sale, that the store was to remain a general store, specifically forbidding sale of alcohol. 

Why Becky had deluded herself that she could sign such an agreement and just ignore it, I don't know.  Maybe it's a family thing, related to her sister's apparent belief that she could take all that money and run.  Jeannie didn't get away with it.  After all her appeals were exhausted, her lawyers richer and her investors poorer but wiser, she went to jail for a five-year sentence.  Of course, it is unlikely that she served the entire five years....

Oh, well, today is a fresh new day, and I have up to about a week or so to rest before I have to go to Wasilla to buy cat food and goat milk.  On my last trip (before Doug's birthday) my shopping got put off until around midnight, the all-night supermarket didn't have a good price on the one, and was out of the other.  I also need to give Greyfox a beard trim.  He doesn't like the Gabby Hayes look, preferring a closer, neater trim more like our former governor, the late, much beloved, Jay Hammond.

Seeya.