Dawg Tales - Tradition

A Thanksgiving dinner gone awry, a homemade game of Jeopardy devoted to better understanding one's family and an ornament collection that's been growing steadily for nearly 30 years. These are just some of the stories told to us by UW Tacoma students, faculty and staff. Everyone now and then we're going to hand over the microphone and ask you to tell us a story around a certain theme.  We're calling this series Dawg Tales. For this first episode in the series we decided to focus on stories about tradition. 

Transcript

Ellen Moore: 0:00

Intruder alert, intruder alert. The authorities have been notified. Please leave the premises.

Sarah Smith: 0:14

From UW Tacoma this is Paw'd Defiance. Welcome to Paw'd Defiance where we don't lecture but we do educate. I'm your host Sarah Smith. Today on the pod- you. We handed over the microphone and asked you to tell us a story. This collection of stories is centered on a theme- tradition. Among the stories we'll hear, a Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and a side of fire extinguisher and a house warming tradition that has been passed down through the generations.

Paolo Laraño: 0:54

Dr. Paolo Laraño, staff psychologist, outreach coordinator at counseling and psychological services. So, my mom is, my mom is one o f seven, and essentially, tw o of them are here in the United States. My mom and her ol der s ister are her e in the United States. One of them sadly passed away, but one of them, but everyone else is i n the Philippines. And so, and so that means that the majority of the cousins over there too. And so I'm the oldest of 10 cousins. So, but anyway, one thing we've done for like the last, I wann a say almost 10 years, maybe, maybe a little bit less, has been to made a jeopardy game, like, made a full on with categories and number of values and stuff like that. And all the categories are just about our family. So like our immediate family and like our extended family. So like, you know, Filipino culture has a lot of naming. Like you, you name a lot of your cousins, like you give, you give them names, you give your nicknames and stuff. And so it's like, who, who is this person? This nickname belongs to who to whom does nickname belong and then like who gave him that name? Right. So that's pretty cool. I think that that everything from that to like our family's history. And, a nd l ike all the cousins compete. M y aunt] is really, really good at coming up with games. She would create scavenger hunts for us and stuff like that. She's very, very good at k ind o f coming up with games. So yeah, the questions are different every year. It's pretty awesome. And it's, it's a way a nd the whole family gathers around, and it's p rojected onto a screen. So it's like, it looks like Jeopardy. Right. And you know, we have buzzers but not really buzzers. We have to kind of like make buzzing noises. But it's really awesome because it allows our family to learn about, you know, learn, remind us of things but also it really brings up the idea of like oral tradition, oral history. Because you know, among my mom's siblings, siblings remember stories differently. They're growing up and they're spread out in terms of age. So you know, certain, they, one person might remember the story from the perspective of like a five-year-old while the other may remember it from the perspective of a 10 year old. So trying to figure out also too, like I may have heard the story differently than my cousin based on, you know, who is who that cousin's mother is. So there's all kinds of stuff like that and yeah, it's really great.

Karissa: 3:29

Hi, my name is Karissa. I'm a student here at University of Washington Tacoma. My major is arts media and culture and a minor in sociology and a family tradition that we have is my mom comes from the Philippines and before blessing a house and everything, we put in separate jars, a jar full of rice, a jar full of water, a jar full of salt. And we buy a mini bamboo plant. And then we go around the house and kind of sprinkle some of the rice and salt and water around. We keep it up there for a couple of months. My mom kind of has this feeling of something being brought in the house that's new or a brand new house. It should cleanse it. My mom learned it from her mom, which is my grandma. My grandma learned it from her mom but on my mom's side that we've learned this, my sister, one sister did it and she only did it for a week or so, after moving into a new place. And then my other sister did it and she did it for months. I did it when I was getting really bad sleep paralysis and we got me a new mattress so we brought that into the house, all of those jars. But I also brought sage in the house and my mom made us sage the whole house and open up all the windows and we just had to make sure we hit every corner. I feel like a little bit of religion is tied into it just because my mom is a type of woman that prays every night and has a rosary even though we don't go to church every Sunday, but she just prays. So I think it's a little bit of religion and a little bit of, I saw it, you know, come down the family line and I'm just gonna pick up on it cause I'll do it too. I, yeah, I do it.

Nicole Blair: 5:03

I'm Nicole Blair. I'm a Senior Lecturer at the University of Washington Tacoma and I'm going to tell two stories about my grandmother. And this ties in with somewhat of a tradition as you'll find out. My mother first met my dad at a training union party at Calvary Baptist Church. And if you're from the South, you understand that Baptist churches have what they call training union. It's like Sunday school at night. And, she looked at him, she took one look at him and said,"I'm gonna marry that man". And the girl that was with her said"he's with somebody else". And my mother said,"I don't care, I'm going to marry him". So my dad, you know, was like dating around and he was a young guy, just gotten out of the army and one day my mother was on the bus a nd the city bus and she had her hair in curlers and my dad saw her. She saw him first and she freaked out and my dad saw her and walked down all the way down the middle aisle of the bus and stood right in front of her and said,"hi Felton." My mother just about died. She was so embarrassed. That was the probably one of the first sort of flirty meetings that they had. And then they would, you know, have lunch a couple of times Downtown Jackson and stuff. But the very first time he ever took her on a real date, he was riding the bus, t hey didn't have a car, he was just out of the army. And so he rode the bus and he got off and there was this old lady, not, well, not really an old lady, but an older lady got off the bus a t the same stop. And he was like,"okay", so they're walking and he, you know, she's turned and he turned and she turned around and looked at him and she was like,"who i s this man following me"? And then they walked a little further down the sidewalk and she turned and he turned too. And he was like," I wonder where she's going". And she started to walk up the sidewalk to this little pink house on Frederica Road and he started to walk up the sidewalk right behind her. I think it scared her to death. She goes and shuts the door and she's like,"oh my God, there's a man following me". So he knocked on the door and she was like," yes." And he said," Mrs. Burnside?" And she's like,"yes". And he said,"I'm here to pick up Felton. We have a date tonight". And it was just like, she was like so embarrassed and he was embarrassed and I hope they laughed, but I don't know. I'm sure they did and everything turned out fine because here I am. The second story I'm going to tell is about how I introduced my husband to my grandmother. It was a Christmas of 1990. We drove up to Jackson from Laurel to have dinner with her and she was planning to make her specialty, Southern pot roast peas and okra and corn bread. The minute we walked in the house, we could smell it. It was amazing. And I was just like, our mouths are just watering. Mike thought she was a great cook and she, we had a really good time at dinner. She asked him all kinds of questions about, you know, Oregon and she, I think she even called it"Or-a-gone" and she had never been there. So she was excited to hear about that. And she was really excited to meet Mike. She called him"Miiiiiiike" and I could draw it way out, you know, cause she's from the South. And then after dinner we're sitting in the sitting room and big mama, that's what we called her. Big mama, decided she was gonna go get ready for bed. And she,, told us explicitly where we were going to be sleeping. I would be in one room and Mike would be in the other as if there was any doubt about that. So when she, when she left the room, is when he told me that he loved me for the first time and I, I thought that was very fitting because it sort of brings everything back full circle for me and I'm sort of connects me in that tradition along with my dad and my mom. So she came back and, you know, I don't think she had to pull us apart. I don't think we were in a, you know, passionate embrace or anything like that but you know, she, she came back and found the door closed and she opened it up very quickly instead and said"we'll have none of that". And so we quickly decided it was time to, to go to sleep. But, yeah, so that was, that is a very fond memory for me and it, and it really, you know, it brings, brings all that tradition back. And, you know, I was really gratified that Mike liked my grandmother, very first boy I ever took to meet her. That was the only one. She never met any of the other,s I mean, I didn't have like a whole string of boyfriends or anything like that, but I mean that was, he was, that was the serious one.

Danelle : 9:45

My name is Danelle Pettersen and I work in academic HR as an academic personnel specialist. And I'm in my family. We have several traditions around the holidays, but I think my favorite, my most favorite family tradition started 27 years ago when my first daughter, Amanda was born and I started buying special ornaments and they all had a special meaning depending on what was going on at for that year. And then my second daughter Alyssa, was born and did the same for her. So now 27 years later, we have just all these wonderful ornaments with all these memories. And nine years ago, my oldest daughter, Amanda passed away. And so now when my other one, my daughter Alyssa and I decorate the tree, there are so many wonderful memories and sometimes there's tears. If there's a homemade ornament or a school or photo, I have lots of little photo ornaments that have pictures of them with Santa, but it's, it's such a great time. We really take our time when we're decorating the tree to go over those memories and be thankful for them. And, in our tree or Christmas tree every year is truly a treasure of memories. And that's my favorite.

John: 11:00

I'm John. I'm a computer science major. Every lunar new year we have envelopes. We have food, new year's food, like, I don't remember the name for it, but it's these rice cakes wrapped i n bamboo leaf with red b ean. W ait with yellow bean, mung bean, I think, and pork. And w e e at it every single year. And red envelopes. We traditionally put money in there and we just give them out to aunts and uncles, basically the older family members give them out to the younger family members. So we just have as spending money or just have a little pocket money.

Ellen Moore: 11:37

I'm Ellen Moore Senior Lecturer at University of Washington Tacoma. And this is my story of a Thanksgiving fiasco. So, typically our family gathers in the small town of Galena, Illinois every Thanksgiving and last year was no different. We had about 20 family members gathered and we began to do what we always do on Thanksgiving day, which is cook the food, including the turkey. Now what we do as part of our tradition. So when my, when my parents first got married, they one year had no covering for the turkey and Thanksgiving was upon them. And u h, what did they do? They had to cover it somehow. So they used an old pair of my dad's boxer shorts-they were clean to cover it and that became a tradition. F ortunately, we no longer use my dad's boxer shorts on top of the turkey. Last year w e got a particularly large turkey because we had a lot of family members gathered. And so we began to cook it and it's cooking and nobody noticed. And it's very large turkey in the oven that it was cooking faster than we thought. And what happens when turkeys cook is that of course you get fats, you get oils that are filling up in the pan, use them to make gravy or whatnot. But nobody was noticing that the, that the pan was slowly filling up the sort of shallow pan. And so at one point, all of a sudden, there was smoke in the kitchen and we all kind of gathered, raced into the kitchen to see what was happening. It was just then that the oven caught on fire. And so you could see the flame, you know how ovens have that tiny window. So you could see that there were flames inside. And you know, the, the way that I typically think about oven fires, they don't happen a lot, but in with my cooking sometimes, but the way you think about oven fires is you get rid of what's causing that combustion and then you kind of let it burn out. So my theory on oven fires is that you keep the door shut, it can take the heat and then you just let the fire burn out, deprive it of oxygen. That was, that was my idea. However, I have a very, very much younger brother who's still in college, Aiden. And when he saw the fire, he, he did what any enterprising young person would do. He went, he raced to go get the fire extinguisher. Now rumor has it that some fire extinguishers are food safe. I thought I heard that they can be used in kitchens. Is that a rumor? I don't know but this one was not. And so here we have my little brother Aiden running to through the kitchen with a fire extinguisher about to put out the fire and then, and then my mother screaming, not the turkey, not the turkey. And so as my younger brother is running with the fire extinguisher, somebody else was coming grab the turkey, which is of course spilling juices everywhere. They started to race it outside ahead of the fire extinguisher. But the oils were making the floor slippery, so slipping and tripping on the way out to get this turkey outside. So one person, I can't remember, you know, it's the nature of trauma. You know, you can't exactly remember. So, I can't remember who grabbed the turkey, but somebody grabbed the turkey and ran it outside and my brother took that fire extinguisher and deployed it into all of the hot oil and the flames that were in this oven. And so he, so he sprays it in. I don't know if anybody's ever had this issue before, if you've ever had the opportunity to extinguish an open oily flame but what happened was, is that, um, it aerated. And so before we had smoke filling the house, but now everything in the kitchen was coated in white, oily, white material. So it was chemically, it was the oily and my brother was coded in white powder, including his hair. And he kind of had this shocked look on his face, like what just happened? And so at that point, the house alarm decided to kick in. It had enough. So not only was there smoke, but now there was this sort of chemical, but the, but the smoke alarm was identical to the burglar alarm. It's the same thing. And so what we all of a sudden started to hear was the alarm go off, which was, uh, the loud booming, deep male voice,"intruder alert, intruder alert. The authorities have been notified, please leave immediately." And the beauty of that alarm was that, so most of us were outside at that point, but the temperature was in the 20s and none of us had coats. So we're standing outside with the turkey, which I should say, rapidly cooling down and we're all standing out there without any, you know, real kind of winter weather gear on and we can still hear booming inside the house, this thing. And then it was burned into my brain. I think I tried to sleep that night and all I could hear was"intruder alert, intruder alert". So that's going on. And my father decides he's got to, he's got to turn off the alarm. The only problem is he doesn't remember the alarm code. So he's standing there trying to punch it in, trying to punch it in and nothing's working. So again, he has to make the phone call. So he calls the the alarm company. And they, you know, I will say this, you really want good security when it comes to an alarm, you know, company. And yet if not for them, we would have never turned that alarm off because what they did was they said to my father,"well, have you thought about, and they would give them hints. They would say, have you thought about a certain number"?

Speaker 1: 17:15

So this process took another 20 minutes. And so once the smoke literally cleared, we were able to go back inside the house. We were able to salvage the turkey and we w ere actually able to c ook our meal after w e've cleaned up all the white powder and cleaned up my little brother as well. And after we did all that, we were actually able to sit down and have a meal with a few just added extra chemicals.

: 17:44

This time after I talked to you, I went home and I was telling my husband that I really couldn't because he was there too. And we really couldn't capture how booming the voice was and how much it kind of took over our lives for about 30 to 40 minutes. And so then we realized, so my husband does voices and he does all kinds of voices. He can go to a movie or listen to a TV show, you know, episode one time and then he can just imitate it. And, so he, we, he and I were talking last night when he thought you really need to cup your hands like this. And it kind of makes it deeper. And then I began to practice. So this is my rendition of it now is, and"intruder alert and intruder alert, the authorities have been notified. Please leave"

Speaker 2: 18:37

Thank you to our guests and thank you for listening. Be sure to like and subscribe. You can find us on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Stitcher and Apple Podcasts.