Through the Years

I can remember when I was 12 years old visiting the Seattle World's Fair. It was in some ways for me like visiting Disneyland with all the newest technology on display. And I wanted very much as a 12 year old to go up the Space Needle which had just been built for the fair there. However, the lines were hours long and my parents weren't interested in waiting then so I didn't get to go up on the Space Needle until I was about 37 years old. However, since then I have been up there at least 3 times. I was born in the Seattle Area and lived on my grandfather's 2 1/2 acres of Apple trees, cherry trees, raspberries and bosenberries in Lake Forest Park until I was 4 when my father moved us all (my mother, grandmother and I) to San Diego, California. Seattle is more culturally like Canada since you are basically right on the border of Canada there in the Seattle Area with Ferries going across to Canada from various points like Anacortes and all the others through the Puget Sound? So, there is this Canadian flavor to Seattle and like Canada people in Seattle are very polite in a sort of English like way and usually very kind as well. However, then I moved to San Diego where people lived outside all the time and went to the beach even in the winter. Life was completely different there in Southern California in 1952. I felt I had moved to a completely different world as a 4 year old and at first I found it hard to adjust to without my Dad's parents, my aunts and uncles and all my cousins that I played with all the time. However, in time I came to love living near the beach in San Diego and then at age 6 Tujunga and at 8 Glendale, California. So, at 6 we moved to the Los Angeles County area. I didn't like living in the city with smog that made my eyes cry all the time in the 1950s especially during the summers there. But, I liked the large Olympic Swimming pool called Verdugo Pool except I didn't like the smog-clorine knife feeling into my lungs as the clorine reacted with the smog riding my bicycle back home from the pool with my friends. So, the Los Angeles experience was always sort of a love hate experience for me but also trained me in a lot of sophisticated ways to survive anything else that came in my life.