Dad was one of the original “outside the box” thinkers, the best and most unconventional type. One of the ideas he considered was for our family to work with the harvest crews and pick cherries. He probably thought that between two adults and his growing family of six children, we could pick a lot of fruit and make pretty good money in the fields following the migrant, Mexican illegals through California, Oregon and Washington states. I was twelve years old at the time and mortified at the notion. Jesse, the baby was barely two. Thankfully the idea of being a migrant fruit picker never came to fruition.

For a time, Dad strongly considered the idea of living in a home with no electricity like some of his hippie friends. To him the back-to-basics approach made a lot of sense. Not using electricity would save money. To that end, he considered moving to an Amish community, where you had no bills to pay and could live free.

Mom lobbied hard against this grand idea as well. She said that while the values of the Amish were great, she didn’t want to wear black all the time, and would not go through life without wearing make-up or owning a mirror.

We were constantly looking for ways to earn money to make ends meet. For a time, we picked up the discarded aluminum cans from roads, collecting them in big, black garbage bags. You could easily spot the Hansen clan along Highway 12 in Idaho as well as the side roads and near landfills. Anywhere there were cans; we were picking them up and putting them in great, plastic bags.

Crushing them was the fun part. Collecting them in public was mortifying. I was incredibly concerned that my friends from school would see me and my life would be forever ruined. We lugged all of our bags of crushed cans and were rewarded with a mere pittance for all of the time and effort we put into the endeavor.

​Thankfully Dad decided it wasn’t worthwhile and I realized there was a God who loved me after all.

Levi is the fifth child, the first born in Idaho. He was a tough, wild kid from the get-go. He wore a football helmet indoors for his own protection. He has a peculiar habit of slamming his head into the wall and Mom was concerned about brain swelling.

Lee has blonde hair, almost white. Dad said he has “Garfunkel Hair.” After sleeping and rolling around at night, Levi’s hair became frizzy and looked like the hair of folk singer Art Garfunkel from the singing duo, Simon and Garfunkel.  
“Hey, look, Levi has Garfunkel hair!”
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Since Lee couldn’t pronounce Garfunkel very well, he would scream, “I don’t have Gunklefunkle hair!” Actually, Levi didn’t scream as much as he roared. Screaming would have been weird for a boy, especially a rambunctious boy with white hair. Roaring was much more becoming of him and he seemed to prefer it.

Erik has light brown hair and blue eyes. I almost killed Erik…well, twice. Both were accidents of course, the second time I had a rifle in hand. 

He almost died a third time and thankfully, it had nothing to do with me. Erik is a cool cat and I figure he still has six lives left.  
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Angela is thin with light brown, almost blonde hair and blue eyes. Angie is quite determined and is a bit of a Tom-boy. Once she was riding a bicycle, pumping the pedals so fast that the bike started coming apart like a rocket entering earth’s atmosphere! The front wheel came completely off and speed and gravity combined to drive her face into the dirt. The bike was an adult sized 10-speed, much too tall for her which didn’t help matters.

​Thankfully, she was tough and resilient and our mom was a creative caregiver. Mom fixed her up with prayer, aloe plant and an egg membrane.

When I was in sixth grade and Nina was in fourth, we lived on an Indian reservation in Idaho. There was a boy named Gordon who liked her. As is the case with many immature boys, he would call her names to let her know he had a crush on her. Gordon was half Native American Indian.

He was loud and proud, always running his mouth about “Honky White People.” Considering that we lived on an Indian reservation, I could understand his complaint but considering that he was half honky himself, it was more amusing than insulting.

Eventually he realized that his insults were ineffective in winning the heart of the girl he adored and moved on to greener pastures.  

When Dad was home, he played sports and games with us and he'd make up amusing stories that captured our attention and fed our imagination. His infectious laugh inspired laughter from everyone in earshot.

He made up his own funny language that he used when he talked to his kids, substituting “Chickicago” for Chicago and “b-sketty” for spaghetti. He’d call us “Pebbs” and “Bamms” (after the Flintstone children). When frustrated, he invented names like “Sammy Bonehead,” or “lunkhead.”

He said that he loved us “50-40” which was the ultimate measurement of love for him. Although I’m not sure why he used those numbers, we knew what he meant. As I began liking girls in my early teen years, he’d tease me about “mini-babes.” Of course, he was referring to cute girls that were “just my size.” 

Since Mom’s grandparents were pioneer doctors, she mastered unusual, unconventional remedies that always seemed to do the trick. Somehow, she knew that if you cracked an egg, took the thin, gooey membrane that lined the eggshell out and laid it on an open wound, the egg membrane would draw the wound together and mend it as it dried. When caught between a rock and a soft place, just remember that egg membranes are nature’s stitches.

The beginning of the end began when I was born. My name is Dana, a strange name for a boy but it’s the name my mother wanted me to own. Apparently, there was a male actor named Dana and she liked the name. At the same time and for reasons unknown to me, many other mothers were busy naming their daughters “Dana” as well. This happened so frequently that most people I’d encounter wondered why I had a girl’s name. I wondered the same thing. Just once I wanted to meet another boy named Dana but in the entirety of my childhood, that would never happen.  I would, however experience opportunity after opportunity to feel self-conscious about my name. 

As a teenager, I didn’t have much; if any, body or facial hair. My dad affectionately called me a “Mexican Hairless,” which I believe is a small dog without fur. Of course he could joke about it. I envied him with his big beard, hairy armpits and the flowing long, blonde hair on his arms. You could practically feather the hair on his chest. I hoped and prayed that one day I’d be hairy like him. Saturday Night Fever and the Bee Gees were popular during the time that I was in junior high and I was the short, hairless wonder, the furthest thing from cool.

I couldn’t do much about my height. Although they were all the rage in London and New York, platform shoes were nowhere to be found in rural Idaho. Hair on the other hand, hair was to be had if you knew where to find it and the right place to put it.

Before school one day, I summoned the courage to change my station in life. I cut a little of the black, synthetic hair from the head of one of my sister’s dolls. With the help of Elmer’s Glue, I applied the hair to my skin just above the opening of my button-down shirt. I examined myself in the mirror for several minutes, from several different angles. In the end, I decided that the dark, black hair looked too obvious, so I washed it off before I made a fool of myself in front of my friends at school.

My sister Nina started shaving her legs recently and it seemed to stimulate hair growth on her legs to the point that I overheard her complain about it to Mom. If it worked for her, it had to work for me because I am two years older than she is.

I began to lose my nerve as I stood in the bathroom, razor in hand. At least now I had small smatterings of hair here and there, a small, elite team of hair scouts performing reconnaissance, checking out the scene before calling in the rest of the troops for an all-out, hair assault.

What if I scare them off for good by shaving them? They could view this as a hostile situation and never return!

After two weeks of careful consideration and no more hair scout reinforcements in sight, I lathered up with Dad’s fluffy, white Barbasol shaving cream and started going to town with his razor. I started shaving my face first and then everything else was fair game. Any hair on my arms, my arm pits, legs, feet and everything in-between was eliminated. There wasn’t much there to begin with but now I was as smooth as a baby’s bottom.  

That night I lay in bed, nervous but happy, hoping that I’d become a hairy beast of a man in a week or two, the kind that made all the ladies weak at the knees…like Magnum P.I or one of the Bee Gee’s or if I was lucky a mixture of Magnum, one of the Brother’s Gibb and a smidge of Chewbacca, the ultimate trifecta that would drive the ladies mad!

Panic set in the following morning as I got dressed for school realizing that my friends would surely notice and give me a hard time when we dressed and undressed in the locker room for P.E. class.

Good Lord, what have I done? Maybe they won’t notice. I’ll just shower really fast and get dressed in record speed.

If they noticed and teased me, I’d have the last laugh when my hair grew back, thick and dark.

Days turned into weeks and four months later, the hair began to grow back only to resume its original state of sparseness. The hair wasn’t longer, thicker or darker. I guess I was the way God wanted me to be and that was disappointing.

I never wanted an interesting life, just a normal one free of embarrassment.