Silver Hair and Golden Memories is a collection of short stories about a lifetime of memories, experiences and offbeat opinions of Allen H. Forrester.

The stories run the gamut from gut-busting funny, to tearfully sad. They are all true and reveal the author’s inner-self even when it hurts.

This book was never meant to lie on anyone’s living room coffee table. It doesn’t have any breath-taking colored pictures of the moon or amber waves of grain.

It is, however, an excellent book to keep in the bathroom. The stories are short and concise. You can easily read one, . . . then . . . with laughter or tears, you can rip a page out and put it to good use.

How cool is that?

Allen H. Forrester was born in Fort Worth, Texas. When he was only a year old, his parents moved the family north to Amarillo.

He grew up on the desolate high plains of Texas with five brothers and attended Amarillo High School, where he met his wife, Mary.

Mr. Forrester attended Amarillo College, West Texas State University and Texas Tech University, where he studied engineering and mathematics.

He was an Inspector for the United States Atomic Energy Commission for nine years before entering the construction business.

He owned and operated Universal Contractors, Inc. for many years, completing countless commercial, industrial and residential contracts in the states of Virginia and West Virginia before moving his business back home to Texas.

Mr. Forrester held Master licenses in Plumbing, Electrical and Carpentry.

He and his wife, Mary, have three grown children and four grandchildren.

Mr. Forrester is retired and enjoys writing about his life. He lives in Cleburne, Texas.

The driving rain restricted my vision and caused me to go off of the road and run over a culvert. Pa and I both were unexpectedly bounced out of our seats. I hung on to the steering wheel and came back down in the driver’s seat with my foot heavy on the accelerator. Pa’s blindness made the trauma worse for him. But at the time, I couldn’t see much either.

Pa got the worst of it, he was bounced around backwards in the cab of the truck. His rear-end was up on the dashboard, sliding left and right in cadence with the windshield wipers while I fought the slack in the steering wheel. His face was buried in the seat where his rear-end had been just a few minutes before.

Pa was certainly in a laughable position, but there wasn’t anything funny about this . . . yet.

I zigzagged out of control, --off the road on one side, . . . then back across the road to the other side. It was a really scary ride.

We were hauling a new outhouse to our property in the canyon. The ancient and worn out old Dodge truck had a quarter turn of slack in the steering wheel. The tired old truck was hard to drive, even in good weather. Trying to drive it in this sudden and vicious storm was a daytime nightmare.

"Hang on Pa," I yelled above the noise of the North Texas storm and wind that continued to whip my truck off the narrow road to the right, then back to the left.

Pa struggled to lift his head off of the seat and stared at me with sightless eyes and a bewildered look of fear on his face.

"Hang on to What?" he whimpered with a serious and pleading voice as his rear end wiped the fog off the inside of the windshield.

I was very busy hanging onto the steering wheel that at times felt like it wasn’t connected to anything. With white knuckles and trying to drive, I looked over to see that Pa had ripped off the door handle, the window crank, the arm rest and the dash pocket door. The headliner was wrapped around his ankles.

"Pull off the road!" Pa yelled above the noise of the vicious storm and pounding hail.

"I am off the road," I yelled back as I clipped off a couple of fence posts on the left side.

"No, --I mean STOP!" Pa begged.

"I Can’t," I said nervously, . . . . "the brakes are wet!"

"Then downshift and use the lower gears to help slow us down," Pa grunted as he grabbed the back of the seat and pulled his knees up off of the floorboard.

I double-clutched the old truck and shifted to a lower gear. The truck reacted by suddenly slowing and threw me into the steering wheel.

Pa lost his grip on the back of the seat and his rear-end dang near pushed the windshield out. He was back on his knees in the floorboard, face down in the seat again.

The sudden slowing also caused the heavy outhouse we were hauling to slide forward, crashing into the back of the cab with a startling, metal crushing bang that scared the bejabbers out of both of us. Pa lurched and jerked like he had been slapped in the face.

"What the Sam Hill was that?" Pa bellowed in an equally startling burst.