A Life of Words

Sending buckets (the kind he used to sink on the basketball court in his younger days) of love and happy birthday wishes in heaven to my dearly missed dad Clark Lindsay Christlieb, who would’ve turned 94 today. To celebrate, I’m posting a couple of photos from my childhood that I don’t remember us taking and I’d never seen until recently.

I was going through a bunch of loose negatives (remember those?) that we found in Dad’s house after he passed away from melanoma at 84 in July 2014. Some go back to his childhood, some to mine, and some belonged to his parents – my grandparents Alma and Frank, whom I was named after when Mom and Dad adopted me shortly after birth 2/28/61 in Huntington, West Virginia.

I believe I’ve accurately pinpointed these two photos as being from 1974. I’m pretty sure they’re from that summer, when our grandparents flew down from St. Paul, Minnesota to visit us in Oak Ridge North in the Conroe area north of Houston. We’d moved into our brand-new house in December ’71 just before Christmas. My brother Isaac and his family moved into the very same home after our mother Olga died in 2004.

These photos, taken by Grandmother, show Dad, Mom, Granddad, Isaac and me. I don’t know why the photos are yellow, but a church friend tipped me off to a FB Photoshop group that I’ll check out to see if we can improve the quality. I’m really happy to find these and a couple others from that day, because I have no family group photos from my youth.

At the time, I was just 13 and about to start my freshman year at Conroe High (I was always a year younger than everyone in my grade after being bumped from kindergarten to first grade at 5 when Ike and I attended St. Matthew Lutheran School in Houston). Isaac, who’d just finished his freshman year, was about to turn 15 that August.

Looking at my dorky self, all I can say is: Why the heck didn’t I take a shower and wash my hair that day?!?

For those who don’t know much about my family, my adoptive mother Olga was from Panama. She and Dad met in the early 1950s when he was stationed there in the Navy. She stood 4-foot-11 and tended to be, shall we say, rather flamboyant – and not only in the way she dressed, lol.

Dad had a wonderful sense of humor and always loved to bring smiles to the faces of everyone he came across. But as you can see here, a lot of times he didn’t smile for photos. Ike always had the BEST smiles and still does. As for me, our mother always said I looked like a jailbird in photos because my brown eyes were just slits – apparently I didn’t open them wide enough for her tastes!

So Dad, I hope you’re having a fantastic birthday and making your fellow angels smile and laugh. Do they stream Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields movies in heaven so you can watch them there too? What about The Three Stooges and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World?

Love you always, CLC.