Around Christmas this past year, I stumbled across this website called StoryWorth. The premise of the site is that you sign up for it, and every week for an entire year, the website will send a question to the person of your choice for them to answer. At the end of the year (or 52 weeks time if you don't start at the beginning of a calendar year), the folks at StoryWorth will compile all the questions and their answers into a book for you to have. I thought this would be a wonderful gift for my mom. My mom is a great writer, and I'm sure there are so many stories from her past that I haven't yet heard. I thought this would be a great way to get to know her just a little bit better. I also thought it might be fun to play along and answer some of the questions about myself on my blog. So I'll get to it...unfortunately I had planned to keep up with this like she did, but I'm already 5 months behind so I'll be playing some catch-up. I'll start with January's questions and go from there. :)
How did you get your first job?
Well, my very first job was probably babysitting some of the neighborhood kids. I grew up on a street in a small town in rural Minnesota, and there were lots of kids both older and younger than me. Babysitting was a little bit like the passing of a torch for all the neighborhood girls. When the older girls got too old to babysit, or I became too old to be babysat, it was then my turn to start watching the next crop of young kids. This was back before babysitters had any sort of certifications or took any classes...you basically just had to be older than the kids you were watching. When I think back to my 11 year-old self taking care of my neighbors' infants, I just can't believe I was trusted to do something like that. But I think the comfort came in the parents of the infants knowing that my own parents were just a few houses down, and only a phone call away. I don't remember calling my parents all that often when I was babysitting, but I always knew that they were there if I needed them, and that made it a lot easier. I absolutely loved watching babies. They were so warm and snuggly and so wonderful to hold. I loved listening to them breathe and watching the way their little lips would move as they dreamed about who knows what. I didn't know it at the time, but I think I was driven home on several occasions by a drunk parent or two, which is funny to think about now, because I had no idea back then. But it was a small town and they didn't have far to go. It could have been worse. Alas, after a while, I too became too old to babysit; sports and friends and better paying jobs in Rochester pulled me from the warm homes and the warm babies of my neighbors.
What was your first big trip?
I consider myself extremely lucky that I grew up with a family who loved to take road trips. When I was younger, we would always drive to northern Minnesota for one week every summer to go fishing. It's funny to think that back then, I thought it took us all day to get up there. In reality, it's probably only about a 5-6 hour drive, but when you factor in young children with short attention spans, as a parent you have to get creative to keep them quiet and contained for that long. I remember car games, walkmans, and lots of stops at roadside attractions...the Cannonball restaurant in Cannon Falls; a mere hour's drive from our home but we almost always stopped there for breakfast. The big walleye statue at Lake Mille Lacs, north of the Twin Cities. I don't remember where we stopped for lunch, but I remember feeling like the trip would never end. And then all the sudden the pine trees appeared, the air felt cooler, and we knew we were in northern Minnesota. The mosquitos and wood ticks were there to welcome us with open arms! Hahaha! So that was our yearly summer trip. We stopped going after my Grandpa Ellringer passed away in 1991. It was just too sad to be there without him.
My first big road trip was to South Dakota when I was 11. After that it was to Oklahoma when I was 14. After that it was Texas when I was 15. My first flight on an airplane was to Jamaica when I was 22. Ever since then I've been traveling all over the country and the world, adding more and more places to the list of places to go all the time.
Are you still friends with any of your friends from high school? How have they changed since then?
You know, high school is a bit of a sore subject for me, because I was bullied for a large part of it. I don't really feel like getting into that right now, right here, but I will say that if not for the support of the few friends that I did have, I don't know where I would be right now. My friend Dana was my best friend and I still consider her among my best friends to this day. We've known each other since kindergarten...she remembers peering under the shared door between our kindergarten classrooms, and seeing my little face looking back at her. I don't remember this, but I'm so glad that she does, because it's such a sweet memory and even though it isn't mine, I still hold it very close to my heart. Dana and I didn't become good friends until about 7th grade, and we were inseparable from there on out. We were silly, we were goofy, we spoke almost exclusively in annoying British accents, and we let our imaginations run wild playing with model horses, running around in the yard, riding our bikes all over town, and just getting into general mischief. But sometimes we were quiet. Sometimes laid next to each other on my bed and read books for hours, not a sound to be heard except the turning of pages. She would come with me to my grandma's house after school and we would play cards with my grandma. Most of my best memories from high school have Dana in them. Dana and I went to college together in Winona, Minnesota for four years. We lived together our freshman year, and everyone told us that was a mistake, that it would ruin our friendship. There were some hard times, of course, as any two people sharing a bedroom and a living space for the first time would have, but we beat the odds and finished our freshman year together, still best friends. We had our own rooms in the dorm sophomore year, and then lived together in a house with some other friends junior and senior year of college. Our friendship hasn't always been easy, mostly because of me, I think. I used to be a very insecure, negative, and jealous person, and too frequently I think Dana was my punching bag for that. She had every reason in the world to drop me like a hot potato, but she never did. She stuck with me through my worst times, and I will forever be grateful to her for that. A few years ago, I went to visit her in Minneapolis, and I apologized for all the times that I was mean to her. It felt so good to get that off to my chest, and to give her the opportunity to acknowledge that yes, I wasn't always a very good friend. She didn't let me off the hook, but she forgave me. So there we were, crying together in her little apartment in Uptown Minneapolis, and I couldn't have loved her any more than I did in that moment. She has always been my rock, and I think that she always will be. Geography, work, life, and circumstance have created their distance between us over the years, but every time we talk or see each other, we fall right back into our old rhythm again...the British accents might be gone, but all the love and laughter is still very much there.
I'm also still very close with my friend Elizabeth, who lived just down the street from me. Our paths post-high school took us far away from each other, both geographically and emotionally, I guess you could say. There are a few years in there where we weren't in each other's lives at all. While I sometimes mourn the years that could have been, I'm so incredibly grateful that we found our way back into each other's lives, and I consider her one of my best friends as well. She and her family live in Montana, and we've found a way to add on a visit with them when we're driving home to visit people in Minnesota. No matter how much or how little time we have to physically be in each other's presence, it is always the very best of times, even if all we're doing is drinking coffee and going for drives. The conversation when we're together truly doesn't stop, and I find myself wondering how in the world we could possibly have so much to talk about. But I love it...I love our conversations so much. Elizabeth and I talk very frequently on Marco Polo, and I adore her husband and children. I truly love them like family, because to me, they are family.
I'm still friends with a few others from high school, but not many. Several of us are friends on Facebook, of course, but the friendship doesn't extend much past there. I went to my 10-year high school reunion, and it was actually a really good time. I had crazy anxiety leading up to it, wondering how I would be received, if the people who treated me poorly would be there, and if they would continue to treat me poorly. I was pleased to see that we had all grown up quite a lot, and I had such a good time getting reacquainted with all these people with whom I had spent so many of my early years.
What was your mom like when you were a child?
When I think of my mom through my childhood eyes, I picture her dancing. My mom was always a be-bopper. She had a large record collection and she was always playing music. When I was home in April of this year, I found a bunch of her records stacked in one of the spare bedrooms. I didn't have time to go through them and relive some of those memories of her playing music and dancing around the room, but next time I'm home, I'm going to. I love those records and I love thinking about her playing them, because they brought her so much joy. My mom has always been a very warm, touchy person. When you see photos of her with her siblings, her parents, us kids, my dad, she's always holding hands with someone or touching someone. She's a very tactile person. I remember her hugs, and I remember her wrapping me in her arms when I would come home from school, upset about an interaction that I'd had with one of my classmates. She always told me, "Someday this will be over, and you'll leave all these mean people behind, and you'll realize that they don't matter; that they never did." I don't know how many times she told me that, but I needed to hear it every time that she did. Of all the things I remember her saying to me when I was a kid, that stands out the most. The best part is, she was right...because as a kid, she had gone through it too. But mom wasn't always soft hugs and inspirational quotes...she had high expectations for my brothers and I, and punishment was swift when those expectations were not meant. We were never physically abused, but it was definitely made known that our behavior had disappointed my dad and her, and that was almost worse than any spanking would have been. I remember getting grounded, having my car keys taken away, getting a stricter curfew. One of my favorite funny moments was when I had gotten grounded and the keys taken away for something, and my friend Kevin came over to sweet talk my mom into letting me go out with him and some of my friends that evening. He assured her that he would be fully responsible for making sure that I was home by curfew. I couldn't help but notice the little smirk on her face as she listened to his proposal. In the end she let me go out, because she truly trusted me, and she trusted my friends, and I tried really hard to maintain that trust as best I could. Another thing I remember about my mom is that she loved to read. She has shelves and shelves and shelves of books in her house, most of them with little post-it markers sticking out of the pages, denoting quotes that she liked. Sometimes I'll pull out a book and flip to a page that's been marked; I'll read through those pages to try to figure out which quote it was that she liked, and I'm usually right. It's a neat little piece of her that I enjoy exploring.
What were your favorite toys as a child?
Hands down, my most favorite toys were my Breyer model horses. I still remember the first one I ever got...it was for Christmas one year when I was still pretty young. I remember how devastated I was when I broke one of the back legs from playing too rough with it. Dad tried his best to glue the leg back on, and while he succeeded in glueing the leg back on, still continued to snap it off playing with it. I remember crying the day that horse got thrown in the trash. My parents still continued to buy me those horses as gifts, and as I got older and more careful, less and less legs needed to be repaired. When I was in 7th or 8th grade, my grandma and I made tiny little horse blankets for all of them out of remnant cloth she had from her quilting. I loved going to her house after school and cutting out patterns, and choosing fun ribbons to sew on as accents. I think I had about 60 of those horses by the time I was done playing with/collecting them. By the time I graduated high school they were just sitting on shelves in my bedroom as decoration. A few years ago Simon and I brought all my model horses back to Flagstaff with us. I wasn't sure what to do with them at first. But then I had an idea...I wanted to give them to other little boys and girls, in the hopes that the horses would provide them as much fun and entertainment as I had. I posted a little ad on my Facebook page, and my friends and coworkers messaged me immediately with requests. Some for a particular breed, some wanted models that looked like horses their kids rode or had ridden when they were little. It felt really special and really good for me to be passing them on to a new generation. I remember going to a friend's house and seeing of my my horses in the sandbox outside, the legs snapped off, the tail missing, the paint scratched, and for a moment, I had this horrible sinking feeling in my stomach, that I had done something wrong with the toys that I had loved so much. But then...I remembered that toys are meant to be played with, and that sometimes toys get broken, and I managed to find a way to be okay with the fact that something that I had cherished and cared for, even though it was now battered and broken, was still bringing happiness to someone else. At the end of the day, that's all that matters. I did manage to keep a few of my favorites...they're sitting in a box out in the shed, and I know that someday I'll get around to giving those away too, but right now I'm just not ready to let go of that piece of my childhood, and that's okay.
Well, there you have it. The first month of StoryWorth questions. It felt really good to write all that out, and I'm looking forward to answering some of the other questions. I've been a little bit on the struggle bus as of late, and it felt good to sit down and write. I hope you enjoyed it too. Until next time, my friends.
