There is no other person in my life that fits the phrase more than my Dad! Harold Smith was indeed quite the character. I remember being a little girl riding in the car with my Dad and he would wildly start honking the horn when he saw birds lined up on an electric wire. HONK, HONK, HONK and the birds would all fly away. He would smile and laugh as he watched the flock bursting into the sky before circling back to land on the wire….as if to say ” what the heck?” . He got the biggest kick out of it.

When he saw cows standing along the fence, he would honk and wave at them as if they were long, lost family. I remember asking him one time who he was waving at when I was small. “Mr Ludkey’s cows!” he replied. As we drove along in route to ANYWHERE, it was often time to sing a silly song. Row, Row Row your boat and 100 bottles of Pop on the wall…(no beer in our house) were two of his favorites. We thought all kids sang in the car with their Dad.

My Dad was known to follow fire trucks….he learned that from his Dad who also did it. He followed safely behind but he thought he “needed” to know where the fire was. My Mother used to scold him for it. I learned as a teenage that when he was seven or eight year old he was playing with matches in the field behind his house and he started the field on fire. My Grandma told me that story. He was a preachers kid and you know what they say about that! As a young adult, I was told, that just after he got his drivers license, he drove his Dad’s new car out on frozen Lake St. Clair so he could “do donuts” on the ice. Thanks goodness it was frozen solid! He got his drivers license taken away for a bit!

He loved to disobey signs….if the road said unimproved…he had to find out what was wrong with it. He loved a good logging trail or a garbage pit road. You never knew what kind of animals you would find; bear, deer, elk, porcupines…you just never knew.

When they were first developing Algonac State park, my father decided to drive around a road close sign and see what the park was going to be like. It was a Sunday afternoon and we were on our way home from visiting Grandparents in Marine City. So he went around the barrier. “It will be OK, there is no one around.” , he told my mother. “We will just see what it’s like! “. He got our station wagon full of six kids (two of which were toddlers in diapers) stuck in sand up to the axles. He hiked out and got a tow truck but it took over an hour to find one. In the meantime, it was hot, it rained, became humid and the mosquitoes swarmed us so bad we had to close all the windows. There we sat in the closed station wagon waiting for him to return.

In the mean my two year old brother pooped his pants and we I spent the rest of the time trying to not gag. And the older kids, myself included, complained loudly. My poor mother was beside herself when my Dad arrived back at the car with the Tow Truck. I heard the driver scold him for taking his family back there. The Tow truck guy pulled us out and we were back on the road again but not before Mom did a diaper change on my youngest brother.

My Dad and his friends from church wrer in charge of the Methodist Youth Fellowship meeting on Sunday evenings. They came up with the goofiest games….Like passing a life saver from person to another person while on a tooth pick! That was so embarrassing to a preteen!

I do not remember when my Dad started our birthday song tradition. It seems like we have just done it for ever. He would begin the birthday song out normally in his best singing voice but as it continued he got more and more off key. My Mother would beg him to sing nicely and that made it all the worse. It wasn’t too long when all of the kids got into the act too. I remember his mother (Grandma Smith) just smiling when he got started. We sing off key in restaurants, on trains, in churches, and at other peoples’ homes….anywhere that we are celebrating a birthday we sing the “Smith version” of the Birthday song.

My mother always sheepishly tried to sing nicely while we belted out our most outlandish version of the song. For her eightieth birthday party at our church in 2008…we sang to her nicely with the crowd who had gathered…but then we broke into Dad’s version of the Birthday song and she finally joined in. The rest of the party gathers were caught a bit off guard by our performance but they all seemed to enjoy it as we “Smiths” all carried on our tradition. My Mother died the following year.

My Father has been gone twenty four years now but we still honor him with his birthday song for every birthday celebration. We have learned that there are other family members and friends who have taken up the same tradition.

My Father was indeed…quite the character! Love you Dad! Miss you Dad!

Happy Hunting,

Jan

Charles Densmore was my Great Grandfather. Charles was sexton for the Woodlawn Cemetery in Marine City, Michigan for 18 years. I believe that I have acquired my love for cemeteries from from him. I have a hard time picking one favorite cemetery. I love them all.

When I was a little girl, I often visited our local rural cemetery in Washington, Michigan. As you can see from the photos, there are now houses built all around it but when I was a girl it was surrounded by farm fields. It was located just down the road from my house on 29 Mile Road and our road was still a gravel road. You would see cows or sheep grazing in the nearby fields with an occasional horse tossed in the mix. It was a peaceful place. I did not know anyone who was buried there. I knew it was an old cemetery because when you looked at the tombstones the years began with 17XX and 18xx and I was living in 1964. I was fascinated by it.

I can still recall riding my bike down the gravel road as fast as I could. I would ride up the sloping entrance of the cemetery into the center of the graveyard, jumping off my bike and dropping it in the middle of the grass.

For the next 30 minutes or so I would wander the cemetery reading the names and dates on the gravestones. In my mind I would create thrilling stories about these people and their lives. There was a Frost Family buried in the cemetery and I was sure that they could all write poetry like their famous relative, Robert Frost.

When I found a child, they would become my playmate. One day we might play marbles and the next it might be tag or hide and seek, hiding behind the tombstones.

A young woman would transform into a mother or a local farmer’s wife helping to milk cows, gathering eggs in her apron or hauling water to the kitchen.

When I saw a military stone, I would imagine soldiers in their uniforms marching off to war and fighting in battles. Old men became like Grandpas letting you sit on their lap while they tell you about the old days, the really old days….

Older woman became Grandmas that let you help make cookies and pies and a little mess once in a while. I wish I had written some of the stories down now.

I came from a fairly large family and this was something I always did when I was alone. It was not a conscious thing as I recall but in a large busy family each member needs some alone time and this was mine.

Sometimes it was fun to lie in the grass and watch the clouds as they formed, dissolved and reformed. I would lay there with my friends who had been laying there long before me and have remained there long after I was gone.

Think that I am strange if you like but there are very few places on earth that I like better than a cemetery!

Happy Hunting,

Jan