A couple of months ago I had a brief email from my cousin Dave out in Ohio.\u00a0 He wanted a mailing address because he had a book he wanted to send me to share with the family out here on the East Coast.\u00a0 I sent him my address and waited.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t sure what book he wanted to send or when it might arrive.\u00a0 Of course, the current state of the world being upside down might slow things down a little.<\/p>\n
About a week ago, the book arrived and I was so pleased.\u00a0 Dave has written a small book of the stories and the old-school social networking that he heard and learned in his parents\u2019 farm implement dealership in Wakeman, Ohio.\u00a0 It is full of people and events and lessons learned, and a little philosophy.\u00a0 Reading it, I see at least one source of his daughters\u2019 writing ability.\u00a0 Cousin Dave combines two of the notable traits of the Denman family that have been passed down through generations:\u00a0 the mechanical abiity to see how something works, to take it apart and put it back together; and the urge to and ability to write about life\u2019s happenings.<\/p>\n
One of the first little vignettes that caught my attention was his brief mentioning of his mother\u2019s (my great aunt Doris) driving trip to the West Coast as a young woman (in perhaps 1928 or so) long before a national highway system or the ubiquitous Howard Johnson Motels.\u00a0 Dave noted it as an example of her capability to take on and handle almost anything.\u00a0 As soon as I read it, however, my immediate connection was that my mother had talked about this same trip and told a specific story about it.\u00a0 I wanted to find that story so I could share it with Dave and with my siblings.\u00a0 The only problem was that I couldn\u2019t find it.\u00a0 I could almost hear my mother\u2019s voice telling it, and was pretty sure it was written somewhere.\u00a0 But where?<\/p>\n
My sister, when asked, didn\u2019t remember it; so it hadn\u2019t been a conversation with our mother that we shared.\u00a0 What else could it be and where was it?\u00a0 Maybe in the piece Mom wrote about her own road trip West with her friend Dean.\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Although I had a memory that the two were somehow connected.\u00a0 I combed through my transcriptions of various interviews my mother had done, with no luck.\u00a0 Finally today (the end of May) I found it by looking for the interview about F.A. Denman\u2019s trip West<\/a> in the late 1930s.\u00a0 At the very end of Grandpa Lyle\u2019s description of that trip, my mother added her own short story about Aunt Doris\u2019s trip.\u00a0 This is what she said:<\/p>\n \u201cDean and I were so interested when we were with Doris on our trip.\u00a0 Doris was telling us a little about the trip the four girls had made some 60 years before.\u00a0 That summer they all drove west and she was telling us how they got across the desert.\u00a0 They \u2014 I guess they went across Death Valley.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know exactly where they crossed the desert.\u00a0 But they pulled into this little town late in the afternoon and had something to eat and they waited at the train station because that was, there was some shade there.\u00a0 And after dark they wet towels and hung the towels in the car windows and wrapped wet towels around their legs.\u00a0 And then, in the dark, they started across the desert.\u00a0 And that was their air conditioning. [laugh] So Dean and I were just fascinated with that, thinking of those four girls and how they giggled their way across the desert wrapped in towels.\u00a0 And we were crossing in great comfort with air conditioning” [laughter].<\/p>\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple of months ago I had a brief email from my cousin Dave out in Ohio.\u00a0 He wanted a mailing address because he had a book he wanted to send me to share with the family out here on …<\/p>\n