Barbara J. Hamby

Family Stories

Family gatherings that are most common around holidays are great places to swap family stories. As the sole surviving parent of a middle-aged sister and brother, hearing some of their scary tales for the first time, I am sometimes amazed that they survived to adulthood. I’m sure they wouldn’t have perished at my hand had I known these stories earlier, but there might have been consequences.

Fortunately my memory is so poor now that I hear these accounts of long-ago events, go into a short period of shock, and then conveniently forget the details. I imagine other parents probably have similar experiences.

I’m sure my mother went to her grave without learning about many of the stupid, dangerous things I did when I was young. At times, I’ve wondered how I survived. Perhaps the reason I enjoy swimming so much now, is that I nearly drowned a couple of times before I learned how.

When I was eleven, I was tall enough to tiptoe out to a raft in the Rogue River. A boy my age, that I had a crush on, pushed me off the deeper side. He logically thought I had gotten to the raft by swimming. He pulled me out and I don’t know if my folks ever heard about that.

When I was a few years older, but not much wiser, I walked out on a log boom in Lake Washington with some friends. I fell in and my water-soaked blue jeans weighed me down. I don’t remember who jumped in and pulled me out that time, but I was so embarrassed, I vowed I’d learn to swim. I began teaching myself and took a swimming class a few years later when I went to college. I never did learn to swim well, but I do enjoy the water.

I had grown up in small towns in California where swimming pools were not available to me, and the rivers and irrigation canals were not good places to learn to swim.

Actually, my kid’s stories, at least the ones I’ve heard so far, are not any more hair- raising than these, and many others, of mine.

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