National Adult Literacy Database

June 4, 2001

On this week, we launched eleven stories written by students from The Victoria READ Society. You can read their stories as well as hear them.

Randy Olney has been coming to the Victoria READ Society for a couple of years now. He likes to walk, hike and ride his bike. He especially likes to spend time outside and he has been a volunteer at Goldstream Provincial Park. There he helps to show people around and tell them about the salmon and the eagles. This is the story Randy has chosen to share. It is about growing up on the mainland of BC. Randy has lived on Vancouver Island for quite a long time, but when he was a boy he always liked living near the Fraser River.

 

Play an audio version of this story

Childhood Memories

by Randy Olney

When I was one or two years old, I had two Persian cats, a bird, a turtle and a dog that I named Cougar. He was a Golden Lab. When he was a puppy, he got run over by a car. He got wound up under the car somehow, and he never forgot the smell of that oil from under the car. My dad had a friend that worked in a garage, and he came over to visit and have a coffee with my dad. He had coveralls on that had that smell of oil. He was sitting on the couch and Cougar bit his hand, not hard, just a little bit, and walked him to the door. He wouldn't let him in until he took the coveralls off. When he took them off, he let him in again to finish his coffee and talk to my dad.

When I was five years old, I took Cougar for a walk down by the Fraser River and the sawmills that I lived by. I saw a big puddle that I walked into the middle of and got stuck in the mud. Cougar started barking on the road just as someone was driving by. He stopped to see what Cougar was barking at. He got out of his truck and then he saw me in the puddle. He came in and got me out. He asked where I lived so I told him and he took me home. I can't remember what my parents said, but I think it was not to do that again I walked around the block and stayed away from the big puddles after that. That was in New Westminster. When I was six years old we moved to Burnaby where we lived for two more years. We lived close to a railroad track. We moved here to Victoria in 1967 to our house in Langford. My parents have lived there ever since. This is the story of my pets and I.