Just Some Val Stories

The last few blog posts have been pretty depressing and the next few that I already have written are not cheerful. I know – as if any child’s death should bring out the laughter. But we still have to remember the happy times.

          I’ve already written about some of her escapades, such as when she spilled her beads all over an overlook in Wyoming, pooped in the Badlands, and left her sandals at a wayside in Kentucky. Okay, maybe those were only funny to us, but years later she would still laugh when we retold those stories.

          She never had a good sense of direction. After we stopped at an ice cream parlor in Abbottsford a few times, she thought every trip we took would take us through that little farming town and she’d expect us to stop for an ice cream cone. And then one time, after we each had our cones and were walking to our car, she took a lick from her cone and biffed the entire scoop of chocolate ice cream onto the parking lot.

          This picture isn’t from that day, but was taken in the UP. Not real ice cream, but a cone of twist frozen soft serve. 

          And then she got to play with the soft serve machine at Dairy Queen one time. 

          When she was in high school, she threw legendary co-ed parties. I made rounds checking on all of the kids all night long, constantly reminding them of the rules. One time, though, I didn’t think to check what they were doing out on the road at the end of our long driveway. I didn’t find out until one of our neighbors asked what the fire trucks had been doing parked outside our yard. It was the end of the school year party for Val and her friends, so they were lighting their class papers on fire on the road. Someone driving by called the fire department on them. And no one ever told me until much later. 

          She was also accident-prone. When she and I were painting her bedroom walls, she tried to take the door off its hinges. The screwdriver she was using slipped and drove a two-inch gash in the middle of her forehead. I ran her to the ER where the on-call doctor glued it together with liquid bandage and sent us on our way. The scar it left didn’t bother Val; she called it her Harry Potter scar.  

           Years later, when she was in her own apartment, she called me in a panic because she had burned her thumbs draining a boiling pot of noodles. We were on our way down to see her anyway, so I made a Walgreens stop for first aid supplies. I patched her up as best I could, but she still looked hysterical holding out her thumbs the rest of the day.

          And so many more stories. 

          One last one. When she was heading off to college for that one semester, she was excited to find out who her roommate would be. When she opened the letter, she said, “That’s a funny last name. Stpeter.”

          I looked at it. “Val, that’s St. Peter.”