Diary Returns My Thoughts To The Summer Job From 1968

Fifty Years ago - this Friday, this was my diary entry.  This is the transcription. 
Friday
We are done doing Ajax samples.  What a fine job!
Yesterday the best house I think belonged to the Krafft’s – a long cement walk through thistles and roses, daisies, dandelions and a butterfly going across a leather glove  a collie.
Very good.  No one around.
Today we got a wild route for afternoon.  We had a boundary on the State Game farm & one on Chambers Creek Road.  We went down this one long hilly bumpy driveway in the car – there were these signs Beware Of Dog all along.
We get to the house – the dog comes barking out.  I say, I’m not getting out.  No on your tintype –
Janet gets out.  There’s the lady.  The Dog Bites…
But he didn’t bite Janet fortunately & we beat a hasty retreat.

My diary fifty years ago - last Friday in July, 1968.  My poem The Ajax Samples was later included in my first chapbook, After I Have Voted.   I would go back to U of Washington, Seattle, in September.  I wrote poems during the summer, I looked for work, I did a few oil paintings.  There were some rainy summer days, it was the same place I left when I went to U of Washington in the autumn. 

A Poem from my chapbook, After I Have Voted

The scheduled reader for the Distinguished Writer Series was not able to be present yesterday evening.  It was the sunny last part of a beautiful day, the attending audience read extra poems for the open mike.  This was one of the poems I read from my earliest chapbook, After I Have Voted:

TO HAVE YOU HEAR

two sounds at once,
walking and not walking,
I stop in the parking lot gravel.

There is a fire back of the log,
a sandy beach, behind trees big with summer.

Two big umbrella butterflies (like Haiku elephants)
flutter one by one
among the leaves, their shadows, and the air.

On the green slopes
the sprinklers turn like maypoles.

It has been summer for weeks now,
and you refuse to talk about it.

After I Have Voted was published by The Gemini Press in Seattle, 1972, in summer 1968 I wrote some of the poems when I stayed with my parents in Tacoma after my first year at University of Washington. 

Tacoma Historical Society and Tacoma Main Library

The Boater - from Navy Uniform

At the Tacoma Historical Society

Uniforms from the collection of Alice Miller at Tacoma Historical Society Saturday.

Scientific Shoes   Tacoma,  Wash.