Mar 5, 2009

The lovely Mrs Sneed is off to Phoenix for some conference and won't return until Saturday evening. I think we all know what that means...p-a-r-t-y!! So far the partying has gotten off to a slow start. I'm the only one who has shown up, but things should be picking up soon. In the meantime, here's a story about glass. Sort of. When I was seven or so, we lived in Guam, the largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands, in the Northern Pacific. In the days before the Japanese bought every available square inch of real estate, Guam's main industry was the US military, which was why I was there. My old man was a Master Sergeant in the US Air Force and was stationed at Anderson AFB from May 1956, to June 1958. Anderson occupies the northern end of the island. Our home was off the base and down the highway toward the capital city of Agana, as it was known then. It was renamed Hagatna to root out the Spanish influence and bring back the traditional name. Down the road from our house, within walking distance, was a market run by a local family. The locals were called Guamanians by most folks, but they refer to themselves as Chamorrros or Chamorrus too. Chamorro are the native people of Guam, prior to their various conquerings. The Chamorro people have been conquered politically, economically and militarily by the Phillipine, Spanish, American and Japanese governments in recent history. Like native Hawaiians, it is rare to find a Chamorro who isn't of mixed heritage because of all the interlopers hanging around making eyes at the locals. Anyway, a neighbor family took me along to the market one day, and as boys will do, my friend and I began to horse around in the store. Sometime during the horseplay, we knocked over a giant pyramid of one-gallon bottles of soy sauce. Who thinks making a pyramid of glass bottle of soy sauce is a good idea is beyond me, but the owner did it and we broke about ten bottles of the stuff. Ten gallons of soy sauce doesn't smell that good, and is made even more unpleasant by the owner of the stuff yelling about who is going to pay for the mess. There was a lot of he said/he said with respect to who did the actual breaking and in the end, my old man had to pony up about ten bucks to get the owner of the store off his case. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky

10 comments:

e said...

That's quite a tale, Merle! If all your dad did was part with $10, you and he both got off lucky. I hope you have a good weekend.

Barbara said...

I'll bet that was a vile-smelling mess. Did he make you clean it up? How many weeks of allowance was $10? For me that would have been 40 weeks at 25 cents a week.

Megan said...

I'm on my way soon as I get off work tomorrow. It's about a 6 hour drive, so if you need to stock up, latest you should leave for the liquor store is oh-something-hundred...

;)

a. said...

that's why they call it rough-housing, because you're not supposed to do it inside

Kurt said...

I have a friend who grew up on Guam. She was born after you left, tho.

Steve Reed said...

Yikes. What a mess.

I used to have a shirt that featured a big old map of Guam. I got it in a thrift store. It wasn't really appropriate for most occasions.

Avid Reader said...

Ten Bucks way back then was like $ 945.00 now! I bet your dad was ticked off!

mouse (aka kimy) said...

merle!!!!!!! i can't get past the fact that you lived in guam!!! I too lived in guam and of course for (almost) the very same reasons. this must explain a great deal about us.

alas our years did not overlap, I sense that your old man may have been older than my old man and obviously that explains it.

we lived in guam from 1964 to 1966. guam at the time I was there was a big staging area for the vietnam war, which probably explains why I'm the peacenik that I am now....

but despite the military maneuvers and presence, guam for me was an island paradise and it was a great place to be an inquisitive, adventurous kid whose parents subscribed to the notion that parents have their world and kids have there world and these worlds don't always have to intersect!!

I went to our lady of guam school? any chance that you did too? do you know the legend of the virgin and the sea turtle??? oh my.... this is all too wonderful!

oh by the by my dad was in the navy, he wasn't at all involved in the war - his mission was actually pretty cool which allowed him to visit all the islands all over that part of the pacific....he was kind of a airborne shepard of lost fisherman ....well, that is what he told us, but you know just now I realize that was probably a cover story.....given the timing and my father's photographic skills (he went to navy photo school) he might have been up to something else all together! hmmmmmm something to ask him about next time I see him....

i totally remember anderson afb...if memory serves me correctly, the naval base was on the other side of agana ....

thanks for the trip down memory lane.

i love chamorro foods.... very much like phillipine food....

dennis said...

Dennis has a nephew who was born on Guam.

Squirrel said...

Dennis might be lying.