Louis had great success working at Emerson Diesel. We were proud of him and Gail as well, who continued working at Boeing. Their lifestyle was surrounded with friends and raising the two girls. They had a new dock built and Louis had a dingy to putter around on the lake with. On our next trip out we would have a great baptism of the dingy.

Mom and dad were visiting at the time when we drove out one summer. John loved to fish so he asked Louis if he could use the dingy to go fishing. Louis was dubious because of the small boat and John being so young. Warren and I agreed to go with him, however, dad and Louis were still hesitant. Finally Louis agreed to let him use it and warned of all the possible dangers etc; etc; Stupidity and over confidence didn’t heed the warnings.

I had just showered and shampooed my hair. At the time I was wearing a French roll and so it took some time getting it dried and coiffed for the day. I put a pants suit on and arrived at the lake edge complete with make-up and sun glasses. As soon as the fishing trip was over I planned to go shopping.

The dingy had a small engine and we had been instructed how to start it, what to do, etc; etc: Again all this fell on deaf ears. How complicated could it be? So we stepped gingerly into the dingy, Warren in the bow, me in the middle, and John by the engine. There was enough breeze coming from the West to keep the dingy bumping into the concrete wall so Warren reached out to push away from it as John struggled to start the engine. He gave a hearty push and with his weight in the bow and not all that much in the rest of the boat it did a sudden flip and threw us out into the lake. We were splashing water like three beached whales.

Panic reigned for several minutes and when I came up out of the water dad was laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall into the lake. Even mom, who usually only managed a chuckle, and Gail were holding their sides. Who could blame them? I’m sure we put on quite a show. Dad hollered to John and told him to get the engine out of the water…..so between all of us we managed to get the boat upright and dad helped us get it out. The boat of course was not hurt, but wet. I guess you could say that for all of us.

After the foretold splashing and fear when we relaxed our bodies so that our legs were under us again, guess what? We were only in about four and a half feet of water. When the realization hit us that we were in no danger of drowning we felt so silly we just stood in the lake laughing at ourselves. In fact we laughed all day long over it but when Louis came home he was obviously disgusted with us. He had never used the dingy himself and here we flipped it the first time out. He was concerned about the engine more than the boat but the more we explained how it happened and the more we all laughed about it he finally found some humor in the situation. He fixed a drink for himself and pretty soon we were all laughing about it together. As a rule I didn’t drink but after the events of the day, I had one myself. Louis came up to me, put his arm around me and said, “ I should have known letting an old Baptist take the boat out you would have to baptize the son-of-a-gun.” He gave a hearty roaring laugh and we all had a great family time. Whenever we got together something would always happen to make a story worth telling.

I would give a lot to hear that forgiving laugh once more……………..

Until tomorrow,

Essentially Esther