Tommy's 18th St. News

Hutch Run May 28, 2011

2011-06-09T14:53:00.000-06:00

Here are photos we took at Hanna Wyoming the day they buried Molly's remains. Thought you might like to see the scene. --Tom n Laura

Fare Thee Well

2011-03-18T15:21:00.001-07:00

Hasta la Vista, baby. Sayonara. Adios. Aloha. See ya later, alligator. After a while, crocodile. Vaya con Dios.

That’s right. Buenos noches Irene. After more than three and a half years, the Friday Letters bids you adieu.

In 189 weekly installments, Mr. Tommy has strung together approximately 190,000 words. For readership ease and appeal, the rule was to limit each chapter to about 1,000 words.

At first, the weekly letters were intended for our four children. The original concept came from daughter Tammy, but others, like my sister-in-law Bonnie, were supportive.

As you may have read in last week’s installment, the family is spread out over the whole globe. An e-mail communication device seemed logical.

We soon discovered the existence of the “blog” system, and sister-in-law Joan established one for us, Tommy’s 18th St. News. Blog, by the way, is a contraction for “web log.” I mention that so that some word historian somewhere may understand the heritage.

Doing the weekly letter has been a hoot. I have spent six to eight hours each week on it. Laura puts in another hour editing the text and placing it on the site – something I have never learned to do.

We signed up for “Site Meter,” which counts the “hits” on the site. My record high, two weeks ago, was 120 page views and 80 site views. I’m told that’s pretty good for an old cowboy reporter.

Perhaps a good time to quit – or at least to take a hiatus – is when one has reached the zenith or the nadir. I’m guessing my readership, after 3 1/2 years, has grown as large as it’s going to.

It has been good for me to exercise my English skills. My mother-in-law used to do crossword puzzles for the same reason. (Crosswords make my brain fuzzy. Mom loved the game.)

We have made many friends through the Letters, and we have given old friends a new insight into our personalities. It has been great fun, exciting and fulfilling.

There are some disappointments, naturally. I was ambitious. I thought the Letters might attract the attention of someone who would want to publish (pay for) my writing.

No dice. No offers. I’ve always been a failure, a big loser, when it comes to getting paid for what I do, whatever it is. For instance, I have dozens of oil paintings in storage – good ones, I’m told – that I have been unable to sell. I have never sold a one.

Other than newspaper work, which pays poorly, I’ve never been paid at all for anything I have written. Writing is time-consuming, difficult work. I’m dog tired when I finish each week’s chapter. I’m positive Laura’s contribution causes a bunch of fatigue as well.

I’m not going to roll over and die. (Well, I am going to die eventually, but I have no plan to roll over to do it.)

My brother Dick has asked me to write the story of our 1955 family dream vacation. I have photos and documentation to go with it.

The weekly Letter has given me discipline, a regimen to which I have adhered. My fear is, if I don’t have a weekly deadline, I’ll let things slide, and go for a motorcycle ride instead. At the moment, a ride sounds pretty good.

These days, Laura and I spend from five to eight hours each week editing and formatting the weekly bulletin for St. Peter Historic Roman Catholic Church – “our” church. It is a grind, a beautiful fulfilling, exciting, terrifying weekly grind.

Frankly, at this point, I’d rather put my energy into that than the weekly Letters. I’m hoping to continue my e-mail relationship with the family as well as Brighton High School classmates and other friends who live far away.

I fear the lack of my persistent presence will erode that. Want to keep in touch? I answer every e-mail I get but I do not do no Facebook.

Hasta luego compadres.

-0-

Happy Belated St. Patrick Day

Words of the week: Zenith, nadir. The zenith is the top of something, the nadir is the opposite. That isn’t necessarily bad. The nadir of the earth isn’t always a bad place to be. However, Zenith made a good television set. Nobody ever made one called a Nadir.

One more word: Hiatus. It’s Latin, from hiare, to gape. Today it means a break or gap where a part is missing or lost, as in a manuscript. It means a blank space or a pause.

Love you all.

Tom and Laura

News From the Four Siblings

2011-03-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

A credible eyewitness has come forward with shocking news: Mr. Tommy’s memory isn’t always what he thinks it is.

Regular “Friday Letters” readers may recall that the Feb. 11, 2011, version consisted, in part, of an anecdote about Tommy’s 1979 Jeep CJ-5.

An adventure was reported in which the lives of Tommy and a passenger were endangered by a mechanical malfunction. The gear shift lever came out in his hand when the vehicle was in a precarious position at the edge of a big river.

Here’s the incredulous reaction from the credible eyewitness. It was reported previously that the passenger endangered was “another man’s girlfriend.”

The eyewitness was my daughter, Jayedominique Hodge Blair, who now lives in Indiana.

After reading the Jeep story, she telephoned and said: “Dad. That wasn’t somebody else’s girlfriend. That was ME. I remember it clearly. It scared the hell out of me.”

Let’s see. Jaye would have been 16 at that time. She has always had the most beautiful brown almond-shaped eyes, since the day she was born.

Her hair was and is a lustrous brunette color. She is very feminine and mannerly and extremely intelligent. She has always had the most wonderful smile and a beautiful mirthful laugh.

At the time of the Jeep incident, I was recently divorced from her mother. I was busily “trying to date” a woman named Deon Rossi. Deon already had a boyfriend. A jealous boyfriend.

A gorgeous brunette, Deon had the most beautiful brown almond-shaped eyes. She had a mirthful sense of humor, a wonderful smile and a beautiful laugh. Are you beginning to see the synapse-link wreckage?

Once upon a time, I believed memory, particularly my memory, was infallible. But I have to admit now that time, and wishful thinking, and a guilty conscience, played tricks on my memory.

Certainly, there were other instances in which I could have been caught, uh, in a compromised position with another man’s gal. (See also the Feb. 18 report, “Desperation and Falsehood.”)

Over my entire writing career I have made it a personal policy to own up to it when I make a factual error. Thanks to Jaye, this one has now been set aright.

Siblings around the world

Son Benjamin lives with his family in Seattle. He reported by text a few days ago that he had accomplished almost nothing he had intended to do while off work for the weekend.

Ben and Shana are parents of a brand-new Christmas baby, their first child. He texted, “Hey Gramps. Spent the weekend holding Sal. Time flew by. There were other things I could have done, but I was busy squishing the boy.”

Squishin' the Baby

My son is a good father, a real good father. I already know this. If you have a beautiful Christmas baby like Ben and Shana have, you should spend the weekend squishing the boy.

Touch is intuitive and essential. Good parenting depends a lot on loving touch – demonstrating to the child acceptance, affection, inclusion. Good nurturing technique.

Good for you Ben and Shana. Squish the baby.

-0-

Shortly after she was graduated from high school, our youngest daughter Monica left for Florida. She has made her life there since.

Like the other three, there are many admirable traits in her. She started from scratch down in F-L-A, and has succeeded in various endeavors on her own. Well, on her own with the help of an amazing network of friends and supporters. Currently, she lives seaside in the Keys and spends her days working in the yacht business.

She is attentive to her parents, thoughtful, generous, concerned, loving and kind. Much the same as her brother and sisters. She is attractive with a bright smile, self-assured bearing and confidence that bring her strength when “life happens.”

Monica said something on the phone a few days ago that has really stuck with me. I was wondering aloud about our nation, our people, our future, probing a little for my daughter’s “take.”

I asked, “Why do people give so little attention to their spiritual lives? They don’t seem to realize there are consequences . . .”

Monica interrupted. “Dad. People don’t even know about that stuff like you and Laura do. Most of them are simply caught up in the fury.” Fairly bright, I thought. Perceptive.

Caught up in the fury.

-0-

Then there’s Tammy, younger sister to Jaye, older sister to Monica.

Twenty years ago, Tammy moved to Australia and then more recently to New Zealand, Auckland to be exact.

She and Phil have two beautiful sons who are growing tall and strong in beautiful New Zealand. Tammy is like her siblings, relying on her inventive survival techniques, a self-starter, analytical thinker, downright hard worker. She’s quite bright and beautiful. There’s that smile again . . .

In a recent telephone conversation, Tammy revealed that she had resigned her high-profile job in a company that specializes in real estate auctions. It was engaging work, she said, but pressurized, and she became fatigued.

As a good dad, I thought I’d better ask, “How are you going to make a living now?”

She answered, “Oh, we’ll do something creative. I don’t really know yet.”

I like that. To leave one job without having another one to go to? It shows a young woman who is courageous, resourceful, confident, self-reliant, strong.

It’s enjoyable being a dad to these four strange moppets. Indiana, Florida, Washington, New Zealand. But once in a while I have to say to their mother, “What have we done?”

-0-

Word of the week: Sibling. Originally in Middle English, “sib” and “ling” meant “a relative.” We use it today to mean one of two or more persons born at different times of the same parents; brother or sister.

A Buick for Tommy

2011-03-04T14:20:00.002-07:00

When I was about to turn 16, just old enough to drive in Colorado, I bought a car for $1. It was a 1940 Buick Special, a four-door sedan that looked like a streamlined stagecoach.
Something tells me there was an undisclosed business arrangement between my Dad and Harold, the man who had owned the car. But as far as I knew at the time, the sale price was one antique silver dollar.

Harold was also the scoutmaster of the Boy Scout and Explorer Scout organizations to which my brother and I belonged. Dad and a couple of other men who were teachers in Brighton were assistants to Harold.

Curbside in Laramie, ca 1963

Looking back, that car was quite beautiful, a quiet, smooth automotive wonder with “suicide” rear doors. It was jet black, a luxury car for its time. It was a sort of foreshortened limousine.

It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was what I was allowed to have. The Buick’s eight cylinders were in a row, not in a “V” like the quick Fords and Mercurys that were laying rubber all over town. Horsepower- challenged, the Buick was unable to spin its rear tires. A stopwatch indicated the car would reach 60 in 25 seconds. Eight or nine seconds was common at the time.

I can’t deny the Buick’s attractiveness. Still, had I had my own way, I would have acquired a ’49 Ford two-door hardtop. I would have added Turnpike Cruiser skirts, maybe a continental spare tire kit. I would have lowered the car in the rear, and I would have put three-point “Fiesta” star spinner covers on the front wheels.

Oh, and dual exhausts and shaved hood and trunk. A car-club plate would have hung on chrome chains from the rear bumper, dragging just a little bit when we drove into the A & W. At least I could dream. You could get girls if you had a car like this, or if you played the saxophone. Or both.

Along this line of dreams, I asked my friend Gary Barnard, a fantastic artist, to make me a design of a rearing horse, a “Black Beauty” which I thought would make an attractive addition to the rear fenders of the old black Buick. Gary made right and left prototype drawings.

Dad got wind of my project. It was very threatening to him. He became apoplectic. He confronted me. His face turned bright red. The veins bulged out on his neck. He yelled. He threatened. He postulated ultimatums. He cursed and waved his arms a lot.

Embarrassed, I had to tell Gary that all was for nothing. He would not be allowed to paint his two beautiful Black Beauty designs on my car.

A short time later, I borrowed a pair of clamps designed to compress coil springs. I “raked” (lowered) the front of the Buick with these devices. The car became cool, scraping the front mudguard going into the drive-in.

I drove the car this way for one day. Apoplexy struck again. Real bad apoplexy this time. I returned the borrowed lowering kit.

Giving up, I returned to daydreaming, longing for the day when I didn’t live in my parents’ home, when I could have a damn lowered rusty Ford and paint a picture of a damn frog on it if I wanted to.

To add to my pathetic teen frustration, Dad by some quirky thinking did not believe the Buick could be repaired. He fixed his own vehicles, including school buses, but he thought the Buick wasn’t eligible for fixin’.

I drove it for years putting up with the “Buick Lurch” going around corners, over rough roads or across railroad tracks. This uncomfortable and dangerous condition was caused by worn-out shock absorbers.

The shocks weren’t like those we know today. They were of a design featuring an oil cylinder and a double-bend arm linked to the coil-spring suspension.

So we bounced and lurched all over the roads between Brighton and Aurora and Laramie and Boulder. Dad insisted the shocks could not be repaired. He also insisted the shock absorbers would not be repaired.

Knowing well by then the critical point at which domestic peace turned into apoplexy, I made no further effort even though I knew the vehicle was unsafe.

Years later, I saw replacement shock absorbers in a catalog. In the same Buick-specialty book, there was an advertisement promoting repair of these devices.

A valet at a Denver parking garage slipped the Buick clutch all the way to the sixth floor. It was burnt out. The car became unusable.

Miraculously, Dad permitted a repair. The mechanic installed incorrect parts, so we drove the car the rest of its life with us with an ill-performing clutch. Re-do or take-back was not permitted.

When I started banging into things like fences and garage walls, Dad permitted repair of the master brake cylinder. But new tires? No way. The four unmatched and balding skidders were good enough until I got stranded in a Wyoming blizzard. Mom bought new tires.

When Annette and I got married, it was our only bouncing-bubble family car. We drove it to and from Wyoming summer and winter.

After the baby (Jaye) was born something changed with Mom and Dad and they bought us a brand-new Ford Econoline van. It also was monumentally underpowered, but it came with new shock absorbers. I put bigger wheels and tires on it, and seemed to get away with that modification. It wasn’t a Buick, I guess.

We tried the two-car thing for a while. Then Annette’s father died and we came into possession of the 1950 Ford F-4, a two-ton truck with a pickup box.

The Buick went to Brighton for storage. Over the years, I tried various restoration projects, but my efforts all failed because classic cars are expensive to repair, to drive, to own. Cash and time. I had neither.

After moving the Buick out to Idaho, then back to Brighton and then to Greeley, I sold it to my friend Ray, who greatly admired it and had “low-rider” on his mind. Ray let it set out in the sun for years, which I had never done, and he eventually gave it to his son Rick. I don’t know what Rick did with it.

Tressl Road, Blackfoot, ID, ca 1975
Tom, Jaye, Monica, Tamara, Benjamin, Annette

Sometimes in my dreams I have the Buick back, and I am repairing it, restoring it. Upon awakening, I realize I still don’t qualify for classic, antique Buick ownership: Time and Money.

Besides, in our garage at this very moment sits a 1968 Ford XL 500. It has one immense V-8, and it goes like a striped-ass ape. And no rust. It will spin the tires. Happiness abounds.

-0-

Word of the Week: Apoplexy. Latin and Greek. To strike down, or disable by a stroke. Medically, it means sudden paralysis with total or partial loss of consciousness and sensation, caused by the breaking or obstruction of a blood vessel in the brain. Webster’s exemplary sentence is, “He was apoplectic with rage.” Hmm.

Mormons from Venus

2011-02-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

This week I cleaned off my desk. Shock. Amazement. Astonishment. I sorted and filed (in a cardboard box) the collection of notes that had accumulated there over a couple of years.

I scanned my notes to make sure I wasn’t missing anything that could be turned into immortal prose among The Friday Letters. One name kept popping up.

It was none other than Paul Solem, a character who was an inhabitant of the lava rock desert of central Idaho.

Why I have Solem in my notes so often is a minor mystery. I met him in the late 60’s or early 70’s.

Solem came to my newspaper office to ask for publicity. He wanted the public to know he was organizing a vigil to call down brothers and sisters from the planet Venus by means of telepathy.

By the time I met Solem, I had been promoted to “editor” of The Blackfoot News. I wanted to do the reporting. Temptation, you know. I assigned a reporter to the story.

Perhaps a little historical background will help. Solem, depending on the which witness one heard: Had been excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; or, he had left the church of his own volition; or he never was a Mormon, just a random nutcase with some Mormon trappings.

Regardless, there were many of his ilk in eastern Idaho. The history is, that shortly after the Mormon arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, a rift took place.

Members clinging to the “old” ways, many of them Scandinavian by heritage, were steadfastly following the teachings of Joseph Smith and couldn’t abide the radical teaching of this new guy Brigham Young.

When this particular Mormon schism (there are many) happened, many of the old-school folks decided to move north, into Idaho. They took with them their Scandinavian-accented English and stick-in-the-mud humorless spiritual delusions.

They clung to Smith’s Book of Mormon and its various fabrications and oddities. One of these is that each good man, as he dies, will inherit his own planet for himself and his wives.

Solem believed that certain souls who had gone on before had found glorified bodies and a home on Venus. He was convinced that space travel had become feasible for them. He had asked them to come for a visit, to show themselves, to confirm the faith, in a way.

He was just a plain scary guy. A chunky white-haired man with enormous shoulders and a considerable paunch, he never threatened me or offered any hazard. But looking into his Lee-Harvey-Oswald vacant white eyes, one could not read any emotion. What was behind those eyes? No one but he could know.

Solem had picked Ferry Butte as the vigil site. Ferry Butte is southwest of the Snake River near Tilden Bridge. The butte is on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation. Solem had gotten permission from the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes to use the butte for his vigil.

I assigned cub reporter Bill Hathaway. Hathaway attended the vigil faithfully, night after night. He managed to cast new light on the event for daily reports. The reporter carried a camera but no photographs of spacecraft or space visitors resulted.

Solem’s idea was that if enough believers would assemble and put their minds to it, people from Venus would receive the message and respond to it.

Ferry Butte is minor as buttes go. It is a rounded hillock with an easy slope. Old folks can climb it. It’s nothing like Devil’s Tower – but Solem’s project was an eerie precedent to the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Curiosity seekers arrived, along with many Indians and some real believers in the Solem cause. Hathaway’s approach to the story would be that he was skeptical the first night, mildly convinced the second, gradually becoming a believer. It was an excellent yellow-journalism gambit. Management approved.

The vigil went on for a week or so. Hathaway complained of having a stiff neck from looking skyward for hours at a time, and suggested he should get extra monetary compensation for his physical pain. Management declined.

In the end, interest waned and no Venusians in space ships showed up. At least, we don’t think they did. Solem didn’t claim any visits either, saying people just hadn’t concentrated hard enough to call them.

A series of stories in a newspaper will usually lose reader interest after the third installment. We had seven or eight. The congregation on the butte diminished from 200 or so at the beginning to a dozen hard-liners.

After things died down, Solem came in again to my office and asked for coverage of a different aspect of his story.

He told me that he had built a gigantic shelter in a cave somewhere out in what Idaho people call “the lavas.”

Solem said the cave was made into a shelter from wind and weather and human invasion. He said he had built two giant wood and iron doors on huge hinges for this security. A space ship could enter this cave, according to Solem.

He wanted to take me and/or Hathaway to the site to demonstrate what he was up to. He required, though, that whoever went with him would have to be blindfolded to keep secret the location of the cave.

I declined this offer. Hathaway declined as well. I never saw Solem again. That I know of. I don’t think I saw Hathaway after that, either. That I know of.

-0-

Words of the Week: Modus Operandi. Guess what. It’s Latin. Latin is so hard to understand. Modus Operandi means “method of operation.” It describes a procedure, as in “The modus operandi of the burglar was to hide in a restroom until the building was closed.”

Our Nephew Andy, so very well loved by so many people

2011-02-25T12:37:00.001-07:00

Desperation and Falsehood

2011-02-18T15:02:00.001-07:00

For perhaps the tenth year in a row, I am victorious. I am ecstatic with my secret little accomplishment. This success gives me perhaps way more pleasure than it should.

We’re well past “The Super Bowl” for 2011, and once again I never knew the names of the teams which played in it. Who won? I did!

I was able to ignore that idolatrous cultural oddity almost entirely. I couldn’t help but overhear a conversation about the absence of cheerleaders this year, but I still don’t know who the teams were. Don’t call and tell me, O.K.?

Regardless of my resistance, the spectacle does have an impact on me, on my psyche at least.

Here’s one thing that happened: On the evening of the big game, regularly scheduled events at church were cancelled.

That’s right. Leadership at my church, St. Peter Historic Roman Catholic Church right here in Greeley Colorado, cancelled Religious Education for grade schoolers and two other events geared for high school and college-aged young people.

Imbued with the predictable righteous indignation, I pressed for details. I found that the cancellations were done out of sad resignation. Previously, the adults volunteering to conduct these youth events had tried to continue in spite of “The Game.” They got shut out. No one showed. No one.

Here’s the question: How is “The Super Bowl” that important? It is beyond me why this absurd spectacle is given almost universal attention.

One year my neighbor suddenly bolted out the door of his apartment, screaming at the top of his voice, running around the parking lot barefoot, in his underwear, waving his arms in the air. We didn’t figure out until the next day that this had been his reaction to the outcome of “The Game.”

My dad loved football, or said he did. If I’m not mistaken, he was a charter member of the Denver Broncos’ season ticket club. He attended many, many games both at home and away.

In an attempt to buy in to his interest, in 1975 I acquired a huge Sylvania television set and faithfully watched pro football every Sunday afternoon.

I mistakenly thought that my knowledge of the details of “the game” would give me something to talk about with Dad during our Sunday evening calls to Brighton. I could never seem to know the right facts or who-won-who previously.

In those days long distance telephone was costly, so the silence I heard was expensive. My effort did not please him at all.

That little lesson with Dad was like almost all the other lessons with him. He could tell instinctively that I really didn’t give an obese rodent’s posterior about pro football. It was I being false, desperate; the telephone silence wasn’t his fault, it was mine.

‘False’

Just in case you didn’t know this:

The concordance of the Bible names sixty (60) places in scripture in which the word “false” is used.

In addition, we also find 15 uses of the word “falsehood,” 21 uses of “falsely” and one use of “falsifying.” Then there are “false accusation,” “false apostles,” “false brethren” and “false Christ.” We also find “false prophet,” “false teacher” and “false witness.”

The Bible is fairly strong on the concept of falsehood, wouldn’t you agree? Stands to reason, since in science (logic class, part of Philosophy 101) we learned that anything that is not true is false.

You think I’m going back into “truth vs. fiction” don’t you? Well you’re off the hook. Can’t seem to pound the point through, so I have to let up. For a while.

Desperation

I apparently don’t have the olfactory skills to recognize it, but to some folks desperation does have an odoriferous aroma.

Come back with me more than 30 years. I was one desperate little horny puppy. Man, it was tough. I’d look at a pile of rocks and wonder if there was a snake in it.

I went to strip joints. I tried to strike up conversation with women camped next to me in the Sawtooth Mountains. I talked to women in bars, restaurants, at work.

Perhaps they didn’t even know what they were smelling, but every female I approached in those post-divorce days could apparently detect an unpleasant odor, a warning stench. Women avoided me universally.

Finally, through grace from God, I realized why I was such a loser with women, why “I’ve been a flop with chicks since 1956.” (Thanks to the song Love Potion #9.)

I sat myself down and promised me that I would get over it. I resigned myself. I thought I might well be single for the rest of my life, but I was braced for it. This mad and futile pursuit of ephemeral feminine companionship was making me crazy – and I wasn’t getting any lovin’ either.

Differently than other self-made vows, this one actually took. I quit running all over town chasing waitresses. I quit hitting on barmaids. I quit looking longingly at coeds walking home from class. I quit asking women, “Does your husband mind if you date?”

I didn’t give up my yearning for feminine company, really. I simply and successfully gave up on desperation.

Almost immediately, I met Laura. She didn’t seem to think I smelled funny. At least, my personal aroma probably wasn’t desperation. Wow. That’s going on 30 years ago.

-0-

Word of the week: Ephemeral. It’s from the Greek and Latin, ephemeros, short lived. To us it means transitory, perhaps even vaguely defined, elusive, difficult to perceive, as the ever-changing order of the stars in the heavens.

"The Truth:" An object lesson

2011-02-11T16:12:00.000-07:00

“Cinnamon Girl”

In the fall of 1978 I bought a brand-new 1979 Jeep CJ-5, right off the showroom floor at Dolder Motor Company in downtown Blackfoot, Idaho.

It was a gold metal flake cinnamon brown with orange and yellow vinyl hood striping and lettering in similar colors that read “Renegade.”

My Jeep immediately became “Cinnamon Girl,” named after a very good Neil Young song of the era. In the style preferred by Jeep CJ owners of the time, I put her name in the space below the glass in the fold-down windshield.

Quickly, I removed the factory installed “smog” pump and put on a set of Smithy mufflers and twin exhausts that came out in front of the rear tires.

This thing had an enormous V-8 engine, and once relieved of its breathing problems, it was a formidable beast. Yipes. It would go fast. It would crawl. It would go straight up. It would go straight down. Brown convertible top and brown weatherproof seats completed the ensemble.

Later, as a gift, a girlfriend bought me a matching spare tire cover with “Jeep” imprinted on it. It was one stylin’ vehicle, very macho, very suitable to the mood I was in at the time.

One day after I took delivery of this monster, I invited a lady I knew to come for a ride with me. She consented, and I proceeded to show off. (Disgusting how predictable I was.)

We drove into the wilderness west of the Snake River near Rockford. I saw a sandy ramp where fishermen had been launching their boats, and decided to drive forward, down into the water a little bit, just for fun.

Well it was fun. At a certain perilous point, I put on the brakes, depressed the clutch pedal and grabbed the shift lever, intending to change the transmission into reverse.

Brand-new Jeep. Less than a thousand miles. Regardless, the shift lever came out of the transmission in my hand, dripping oil. I had enough knowledge of mechanical things at the time to know that I – we – could be in big trouble.

I held the brakes on. I kept the clutch pedal depressed so the transmission wouldn’t spin around and “lose my place.” I shoved the lever back into the transmission in a sort of random way. Whew. With the help of God, I found reverse and we backed out of the predicament.

The ride was over. The mood was certainly over. The lady in the passenger seat at the time was another man’s girlfriend. I took her home. Nobody died. Nobody else knew until now.

True story.

“Tired Eyes”

After a few months of the usual adventures associated with Jeep ownership, my fortunes changed. Cinnamon Girl had to be adopted by someone else.

I ended up with a very green 1969 Chevrolet half-ton pickup with bald tires, a broken/missing carrier bearing, worn out shock absorbers and a sloppy, leaky automatic transmission.

My friend Ralph and I had been listening almost exclusively to Neil Young music in this era. One particularly poignant and tragic song was about a drug deal gone bad, an epic titled “Tired Eyes.”

This became the name of my new pickup truck. I went and got a stick-on alphabet set and put "Tired Eyes" in the back window. Later, Ralph and I were out driving around, listening to Neil.

Suddenly a phrase from the song stuck out. Neil whined, “I dunno why, he had bullet holes in his mirrors.”

It had to be done. I stopped the truck pointed down into an excavation, a gravel bank to the front of the vehicle.

I got my rifle from the rack (de rigueur in Idaho in those days) and shooed my friend back away from the scene.

Standing at the tailgate, I shot one hole in each of the outside mirrors of Tired Eyes, first the left, then the right. Ralph shrieked and leaped about in surprise and disbelief. Later, I used clear packing tape to keep the mirror shards in place. This rear view arrangement worked all right until I traded Tired Eyes for a ’76 two-door Cherokee.

True story.

The Harley said tick-tick-tick

For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the sleazy bar. It’s probably still in business in downtown Ketchum, Idaho.

My friend Guido and I would hang out there sometimes. One night I went by myself, and bellied up to the bar: As was my custom, I ordered a beer, and a beer and a beer.

In a little while, I noticed a young woman. I couldn’t help but notice. She had seated herself on the stool next to me.

Pointing at my three glasses of draft beer, she asked, “Can I have one of those?” I told her as far as I was concerned she could have all of them.

Ahem. Time went on. I ordered more drafts. She immediately began to tell me her sad story. She had had a fight with her boyfriend, and he had left, some days before.

Eventually, the bar closed. The woman invited me to her apartment. Seemingly without a thought as to my safety, I went. Ahem. One thing led to another.

Suddenly we heard it: No mistaking that Harley-Davidson sound. “Oh my God it’s my boyfriend,” the woman said.

The man rode the bike into the driveway and parked under the window. I watched as he dismounted and put a giant padlock on the steering mechanism.

When he started around to the front of the house, I opened the window and jumped out. It was about six feet to the ground. I landed in a flower bed right beside the bike. Shortly, my belongings followed me out the window, and the window went closed.

I gathered up my stuff and listened. The cooling exhaust system was all I heard. It said “Tick. Tick. Tick.” Eventually, I got myself together enough to find my vehicle and return to the safety of my dormitory room.

Parts of this third story are blatant fabrication, hence it becomes fiction. Do you feel a little betrayed? I would.

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Word of the Week: Guise. It’s from Middle English and Old French meaning “way” or “manner.” It can mean a manner of dress or garb, but that definition is thought to be archaic.

Nowadays, it means a false or deceiving appearance, a semblance. Webster’s exemplary sentence is, “Under the guise of friendship, he betrayed us.” It’s the root word of “disguise.”

I suppose if I ever run out of true stories, I could begin writing more under the “guise” of fiction. Hmm. Maybe not.

The C. S. Lewis Bible

2011-02-04T18:25:00.000-07:00

A visitor brought a “special” Bible to my business, proud of his find and eager to show us. The book was covered in friendly-feeling pastels, pink and lime green.

I checked inside and found that it was purportedly an NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) containing the deuterocanonical books requisite for Catholics. But it also had something unique – it featured excerpts inserted throughout from popular fiction writer C.S. Lewis.

I could hardly contain myself. My visitor had punched my big red outrage button dead-center. The C.S. Lewis insertions instantly called to mind a couple of places in Deuteronomy and vivid words relating to this subject in Revelation, Chapter 22 Verse 18, thus:

“I warn everyone who hears the prophetic words in this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words in this prophetic book, God will take away his share in the tree of life and the holy city described in this book.”

I’m no Bible expert but that looks to me like a fairly serious exhortation. I would rather avoid Revelation’s plagues.

But my visitor was proud of his new purchase. It’s been our merchants’ policy for many years not to denigrate a purchase someone has made from another vendor. It’s not good customer relations to say, “Where did you get this piece of junk?”

However, there is a principle involved in this instance which gives me great pause. The idea of a comingling of sacred scripture and fiction in one book is frightening, appalling. It is patently wrong to publish a book like this.

Can’t say I’ve read much C.S. Lewis. Makes me yawn. I doze. My eyes wander, looking for spiders and cracks in the plaster. Suddenly, watching the street sweeper go by seems quite interesting.

Other people seem to like writing by Lewis, and they’re certainly welcome to it. But to me it’s only fiction. It’s stuff he made up. It is conjured, fabricated, assembled, faked.

The only writing I do know as absolute truth is in the Bible. Fiction can be true but is not necessarily true. Fiction is the intentional muddying of the facts. Mixing Biblical truth and fiction and calling it a “Bible” set my teeth on edge.

C.S. Lewis readers claim spiritual benefit from reading about lions with human speech and an imaginary land known as “Narnia.” It’s probably harmless for the most part – but it is fiction, and mixing it with Scripture sets a dangerous precedent.

In discussing this, I immediately encountered a defensiveness of C.S. Lewis. True, I don’t find any evidence at all that his writings go against Church teaching. However, I have to try to make it clear: It’s not C.S. Lewis I am “going after” here. The issue is the comingling of fictional work and scripture.

The potential for confusion between Scripture and fiction is enormous in the format I saw. If someone thought of throwing Mr. Lewis into a mixed book, why not do one with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy? Why not an Oprah Bible? An Oral Roberts Bible. A Walt Disney Lion King Bible.

Pick your own. The door is open.

St. John’s precaution in Revelation is very close to the end of the entire Bible. The few words that come after it are: “The one who gives this testimony says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’ Amen! Come Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all.”

Maybe the C.S. Lewis/Holy Bible isn’t such a good idea.

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Recently, I had the blessing of undergoing a medical test called “Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” better known as an MRI.

I didn’t require sedation like some do; I could see that physical escape from the tubular machine was possible in two directions. I wasn’t comfortable, but I felt confident I could put up with it for 20 minutes.

Before the test began, I was presented with a pair of earplugs. Obediently, I put them in my ears. Must be a reason, I thought.

Well there was a reason – an entirely fake reason. The rattling, banging, slamming percussive noises and vibrations made during the imaging process were nothing more than mechanical theater. Yep. The machine itself is quiet. The technicians add the noise and vibration as a distraction for claustrophobic clients. To me, the sound track was an obvious fraud.

I guess they figure we all need to be entertained these days. For myself, it would have been preferable to use my 20 minutes in quiet prayer.

The result of the MRI scan? Inconclusive.

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Back in 1974, Annette and I decided to replace our well-worn 1962 wedding-gift stereo. We went to Pocatello and got “the best,” mostly for Mr. Tom. We spent $1,500, as I recall, an enormous amount for the time.

Later, as part of a gut-wrenching division of property, I ended up with the stereo, which I have carted with me everywhere, wherever. Over the years, I have replaced the receiver twice and the turntable three times. But the original speakers I have always retained.

With the most recent new receiver, I blundered. I ignorantly pushed one little switch and instantaneously subjected my antique speakers to enormous volume. One of the bass speakers went kerphlooey. I actually heard it blow out. Not a pretty sound.

I tried, our son Ben tried, Radio Shack tried, and we couldn’t find replacement bass speakers. So for several years, we limped along, not really “using” the stereo much because there was little bass sound, and balance couldn’t be achieved.

Monday after Christmas I drove the truck down to the mobile court to empty our household trash in the dumpster there. I drove around the corner at the #3 house.

Voila! There they were. Under the awning. Rather beat up and weathered, two lost sisters.

Yep. Exact matches. Identical Jennings Research Laboratories stereo speakers, made with pride in California. Rare today, to understate it. Made in 1974. Walnut speaker cases with walnut veneer. Abandoned property. Previous owner in jail.

In our home, coincidence is a word viewed with suspicion. What are the mathematical chances of this happening?

Now they’re ours. We have four now. Oh, and the newly found ones, the wooden boxes are beat up pretty badly from weather and rough handling, but the speakers inside appear to be brand new. We combined the original speakers with the newly “found” hardware, and on the whole the historic stereo actually sounds better than it did in 1974. Much better.

We have been enjoying our newly regained musical blessings. The vinyl – some of it from as early as 1958 – is mostly in excellent condition. What fun. I’ll take it.

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Word of the week: Lamentations. A book of the Old Testament attributed to Jeremiah. To lament is to feel deep sorrow, to mourn or grieve. Lamentable is grievous, deplorable, distressing – such as the C.S. Lewis/Bible stew.

2011-01-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

A cousin sent me a “link” to a 2007 film clip about the piano and the “black keys” on it.

My hope is that you will click on the link below and watch as much of it as you wish. Then please come back to read my report, if you will.

Amazing Grace - Just the Black Notes ←click here

The film captures Wintley Phipps, a well-known singer and musician and president of the “U.S. Dream Academy,” an association which exists to benefit the children of parents in prison. It appears as though the featured event was a huge concert in a large auditorium, put on to raise funds for the association.

When I watched this presentation the first time, I muttered involuntarily in Spanish, under my breath, “Calmarselo, Señor Tomasito, calmarselo.”

Seldom have I seen such brazen fabrication. The entire premise is preposterous, a hoax, a myth, a construct, an outright lie.

Mr. Phipps makes the claim that “all . . . well almost all . . . Negro spirituals are written using only the black keys.”

Bunk. Balderdash. Bullshit. Just not so.

My base authorities are Miss Elva Whitney, the music teacher in the ‘40s at Fort Lupton Grade School, and Mrs. Carlson, a blind music teacher from whom I took a few piano lessons in that era.

The consistent teaching was that Negro spirituals, much like the Old Testament, have come to us originally from oral tradition. Not written but spoken, sung.

Original Negro spirituals were not “written” using the piano. The musical score was not “written,” it was passed down through generations.

The music was created in tribal sing-along situations, first in west Africa and then among the enslaved blacks of the Americas. They were oral. Using the voice or voices. They were sung a capella. There may well have been percussion accompaniment – drums. The piano just wasn’t there at the inception of what we know as the Negro spiritual.

Imagine, if you will, an African tribe having possession of a piano and imagine, further, the transport of that instrument from jungle camp to jungle camp.

Even more of a stretch is the idea that the indigenous people would look at the black and white keys on the instrument and make a qualitative judgment: “The black keys are better. So let’s write all our songs using only the black keys.”

Why are the black keys supposedly better? The inference by Mr. Phipps is that they are better because of their color. They are black like his skin.

Imagine Mr. Phipps looking at a zebra and making the qualitative judgment, “There is a black-and-white striped animal. The black stripes are better, though, because their color is like the color of my skin.”

Imagine Mr. Phipps looking at a checkerboard. He will come to the conclusion that we should play checkers using only the black squares. The black squares are better because they are black like his skin.

Here’s the deal. The white keys on the piano are in the “major” key. The black keys are in what we call the “minor.” The white keys are more numerous (a majority) and the black, less numerous (a minority). A racist perspective can be developed using this thinking.

The black keys themselves are shorter, narrower and smaller, positioned higher and further from the player. This is simply practical, a way to facilitate learning and playing of the instrument. The black keys are used by the pianist to achieve sharps and flats, and in the cases where something is to be played in minor chords.

Shockingly, Mr. Phipps, an accomplished musician, doesn’t seem to realize that anything that can be played on the black keys can also be played on the white keys – and vice-versa.

“Almost every Negro spiritual was written using only the black keys,” he says. Bunk. In the first place, he doesn’t know “all” Negro spirituals – can’t possibly. Secondarily, it is patently racist to think that a composer would choose to use this piano key or that, based on its blackness or its whiteness.

When the Negro spiritual came to the Americas, the lilting melodies fit quite naturally into lyrics with classic Christian themes. Hence, we have a wealth of deeply meaningful, beautiful compositions such as “Amazing Grace” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.”

I tried “Swing Low” on our piano at home. Using my one-finger, seek-and-peck method, I could play it – on the black keys or the white, interchangeably. So much for Mr. Phipps’ fallacious presentation.

I’ve learned through this investigation that there is such a thing as the “slave scale,” also known as the “pentatonic scale,” using the five black keys. Even this doesn’t support the Phipps assertion that “almost all” Negro spirituals were “written using only the black keys.”

Do we think there was convenient access to pianos all over the South’s cotton plantations? Almost every slave family had a piano in the shack, right? Would the men who captured people on the Slave Coast in Africa have said, “Sure you can bring your piano. We’ll store it aft?”

Oh, and if the potential composer of Negro spirituals ventured up to the mansion, the mistress of the house would say, “Yes, you can play my piano – but you can only use the black keys because your skin is black.”

Is Mr. Phipps really this dense? Or does he really think the rest of us are this dense?

I once saw a piano in Las Vegas with all gold keys. It was said to have belonged to Liberace. I’m sure the great Liberace made sure to use only the “black” keys when he played spirituals. He couldn’t possibly play spirituals on a piano with monochromatic keys, could he?

Or how about Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder? Did they really know the “difference” between the black and white keys?

Once upon a time half a century ago I went to a Fats Domino concert at a bar in Cheyenne. During the event, two legs of the piano fell off the edge of the stage and the instrument ended up at a crazy tilted angle. Mr. Fats did not let this unusual condition interrupt the rock and roll.

Because of the crazy angle, I could see plainly. The pianist was definitely using all the keys – regardless of their color. As you older people will recall, Fats Domino was black.

Using the reasoning asserted by Mr. Phipps, Fats should have used “only the black keys.” After all, the black keys are there for Negroes to use, right?

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Word of the Week: Racism. Webster says this word is a contraction for racialism, and racialism is a doctrine or feeling of racial differences or antagonisms, especially with reference to supposed racial superiority, inferiority, or purity; racial prejudice, hatred, or discrimination.

The Penultimate Chapter

2011-01-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

One day in 1978 at the Blackfoot News, the rumor we had been hearing for some weeks came true.

We were getting a new publisher. He was none other than Mark Brown, son of Drury and Verna Brown. DRB promptly retired and I kind of had a sense it wouldn’t be long for me, either.

David Mark came to us directly from a stint as a Washington, D.C. reporter for The Associated Press. He came to us complete with a wife, children and a ubiquitous . . . um, personal assistant.

Some months prior to Mark’s return to Idaho, I had been named Editor of The Blackfoot News. Young Mr. Brown was obviously envious of me; envy never makes sense, and it didn’t this time.

Long story short, blood is thicker than water. I’m told I wasn’t fired. After more than 30 years to reflect on it, I’d say it was more like this: Because my role as the editor had made me the most prominent member of the News staff, my authority was removed and I was re-assigned as “copy editor.”

I wouldn’t say I have a monumental ego. It’s plenty swollen at times. But hell. After my deep devotion to my job and my newspaper, it hurt my feelings.

Eventually I did what management wanted me to do. I quit in a fit of pique. Can you imagine. If I quit, I don’t get unemployment. And I didn’t get unemployment. Not a dime, after 15 years as a contributor to the fund.

Annette and I had bought rental property in Blackfoot, the 18-unit Avalon Motor Court right downtown. I mistakenly thought the rentals would provide sufficient income. Wrong.

The federal government came along and built brand-new senior housing. Rents were lower for new units than I had been charging for my 40-year-old units. There went a third of my renters.

Then the federal government came along and built brand-new housing for poor folks. There went another third of my renters.

(Annette and I had been divorced in 1977, but that’s a sad side-story with which I might deal here – sometime. Maybe.)

One night I awoke to see flashing blue lights all around the complex. The federal Immigration Police had come to take away the rest of my renters.

So I had 18 units, 17 empty. I lived alone in one unit. Not a good cash-flow situation. So I “sold” the apartments and said goodbye to Blackfoot. (I sold the business by paying a man $10,000 to take over my payments. Such is Idaho, even today.)

After 15 years in Blackfoot, my marketability as a newspaperman had somehow evaporated. The Idaho Falls Post Register and the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello didn’t want anything to do with me. And I really didn’t want to engage with either of them.

What to do?

I persuaded the State of Idaho to send me to a trade school because I am handicapped. The state paid my tuition to learn how to be a commercial cook. I am a straight-A graduate of the ISU Culinary Arts college. Success helped my dour mood quite a bit.

So I went from a sit-down job (writer, good for handicapped) to stand-up work (in restaurants, not especially desirable). But. I learned how to work in bakeries, and it gave me the change I needed.

After Idaho State University, I landed a job in the bakery at the high-end ski resort in Sun Valley. Yippee. Ski bunnies here I come!

I was 37, single, living in a one-bed employee dormitory room, and dreadfully afraid of solitude. After figuring out that I was no dummy, my supervisor put me on the midnight shift.

I was alone from midnight to 8 a.m. in a kitchen that was the size of a small high school, the kitchen that served 11 ski area restaurants.

Wow. I thought being alone that I would go berserk or worse – but that quickly changed. Alone in the bakery, operating a revolving oven the size of a school bus, I immediately began to look at my job as a Godsend, not a curse.

It was January. It was always warm. There were no annoying people around to make noise or requirements of me. There was a phone but it didn’t ring. I ate prime rib, escargot, lobster . . .

Rising bread in vast quantities captured my attention. I learned, oh my how I learned. I got so I counted the revolutions of the Hobart brand mixer for a just-right rise on the french bread, the rye, the dinner rolls.

It was like a huge vacation. On my days off I took my motorcycle on tours of the great Sawtooth Range. I slept on the ground. I went fishing. If I caught a trout, I would eat. If not, I would fast.

I got down to 125 pounds, my lowest since high school. I was also more content than I had been my entire life. Sure, the aftereffects of a failed marriage and the absence of the four children wore heavily on me. But I was all right!

I stayed at Sun Valley for a little over a year. In retrospect, I’ve got fond memories of every salaried job I ever had, but I talk the most about the bakery days.

My supervisor was one Jack Flaherty. Jack worked seven days a week – but on Sundays he would come in later, having gone to Mass that morning. Catholic Mass. I could see Jack wanted to evangelize me, and I should have at least permitted it. But it wasn’t time.

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Word of the week: Colloquial. No, it’s not a synonym for vernacular. Not exactly. It’s from Latin (what isn’t?) colloquium. It means having to do with conversation; conversational or belonging to the words, phrases, idioms characteristic of conversation and informal writing. The label “colloquial” is used as a modifier in most dictionary definitions – and the word does not indicate sub-standard or illiterate language.

FDA Orders Manufacturers to Stop Making Colchicine

2011-01-21T13:24:00.002-07:00

From Arthritis Today, link at bottom of story as well as editor's note.

Inexpensive supplies of gout drug colchicine may soon disappear from store shelves.
By Brenda Goodman 10/1/10

Companies that make unapproved versions of the drug colchicine, which is used to treat and prevent gout and familial Mediterranean fever, have been ordered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to discontinue manufacturing these pills within 45 days and to stop shipping them within 90 days.

The action means that within a few months, as pharmacies run through their supplies, the only kind of colchicine likely to be available to consumers will be a brand name version approved in 2009 called Colcrys.

So-called unapproved medications like colchicine are drugs that have been used by doctors since before the FDA began reviewing and approving new therapies in the 1960s, and they include medical mainstays like the painkiller morphine.

The FDA contends that these drugs may put patients at risk because they’ve never been reviewed for safety. Since 2006, regulators have been pushing companies that make and sell these older medications to put them through the rigorous approval process, which includes studying medications in clinical trials. In return, the manufacturers are promised market exclusivity for a period of time so they can recoup their supposed investments in the drugs.

The upside for consumers is that this effort will almost certainly help to identify potential dosing issues and drug interactions that were previously unknown to doctors and pharmacists.

The downside is that these unapproved medications, which are typically priced like generic drugs, will become much more expensive. In the case of colchicine, the retail price of the approved version, Colcrys, jumped from $.10 to $5 per pill.

After a chorus of criticism from doctors and patients, the manufacturer of Colcrys has added patient assistance programs that provide substantial price breaks for people hit hard by the increase.

Tom's left foot with gout. Not a pretty picture.

The American College of Rheumatology, or ACR, has been encouraging other pharmaceutical companies to create more market competition for Colcrys; and on Sept. 30, 2010, Stanley Cohen, MD, the president of ACR, announced that a second drug company would apply to the FDA for the right to sell a branded form of the drug.

FDA Orders Manufacturers to Stop Making Colchicine

Colchicine has been used to treat gouty arthritis since before Christ. Do we really need to run new tests to determine its usefulness?
This week Tom has been in bed since Tuesday because the pharmacies have run out of colchicine.
It went from $4.00 per month to about $20.00 per month.
Colcrys is $150.00 for a one-month supply.
Thanks be to God and a caring Doctor, he seems to be on the mend today. Prednisone and indomethacin.

From Frying Pan into Fire

2011-01-14T15:27:00.001-07:00

When we left Mr. Tommy last week, he was stuck in Riverton, Wyoming, stuck in a low-paying, long-hours journalism job.

The weeks went by. High school basketball, football, track and baseball still held no allure for Tom, who had been hornswoggled into an assignment reporting on the central Wyoming sports scene. Here’s what Mr. Tom did:

I called my friend Gary, who had just landed a job as a reporter working for United Press international in the Cheyenne office.

Gary said there was an opening there in addition to the one he had just filled. On his recommendation, I telephoned Jeff Grigsby, a UPI executive in the Dallas corporate office.

Mr. Grigsby suggested I send him my résumé and said to include personal facts. I did so, and in a week or 10 days he called me back and said the company was willing to hire me – to work in Cheyenne alongside Gary, a college buddy of mine.

I was elated. Bob and Roy Peck weren’t so happy with me, though. They resented the idea that I gave them two hours notice, instead of the customary two weeks. I said hey, I’m not a sports writer. Goodbye.

Annette and I and our three baby girls packed up all the stuff we had just unpacked a few weeks earlier, and made some phone calls trying to find an apartment or house in Cheyenne.

Dad and Mom – to the rescue again – came to Riverton to help us move. We had three babies and two vehicles and quite a bit to do. Without them . . .

I went after the U-Haul trailer and when I got back to begin loading it, the phone rang. It was Mr. Grigsby in Dallas, informing me that things had changed.

We wouldn’t be going to Cheyenne after all. We would be assigned to Little Rock, Arkansas. Oh, and moving expenses were up to us. “UPI doesn’t pay moving expenses,” Mr. Grigsby said.

What’s a cub reporter to do? We borrowed money from the folks. Dad paid for a 17-inch truck tire that blew out at Muddy Gap. (Ever been to Muddy Gap, Wyoming? Grim.) Arriving in Colorado, we left our three daughters, Jaye, Tammy and Monica, with Mom and Dad in Brighton.

Towing our ’64 Econoline van with our ’50 F-4 Flathead, we crawled to Little Rock. We rented a house, found rats in the alley, rented a second house. The folks soon brought the girls to us on a Braniff Airlines flight. Remember Braniff?

The UPI office was in an otherwise empty fifth floor of the Arkansas Gazette building downtown.

We were definitely second best at the Gazette – The Associated Press was favored. We felt it and resented it. But we were in truth only Number Two.

Seldom did I leave that office during my shift. My main job was to write scripts for radio news, and to use a balky teletype system “live” as it were. I had to re-write everything hourly for the hick town AM stations all over Arkansas, and I had to be fast.

An operator could use the teletype “direct” from the keyboard, in which each key had to be pushed with considerable pressure. Speed was not an option. A later invention was a ticker-tape setup which greatly improved the speed of the device. The operator would “cut” a yellow paper tape with coded letter images.

I got so I could compose in my head and type faster than the yellow ticker-tape could run through the stodgy machine. Once again, sorry Mom, I couldn’t catch on to the piano keyboard, but the typewriter? I’ve got it down.

After six months sweltering in unfamiliar environs, my bureau chief Lloyd Holbeck discovered that I was handicapped. He said I had concealed that fact from him in my application. Ahem. My physical health had been reported in full, and when you meet me in person my condition is immediately apparent. It took him six months to see that I limp?

I was obviously being shanghaied. Again. An appeal to Mr. Grigsby failed, and we started packing up to move.

Does this story begin to resemble a recurring nightmare? Does it look like Mr. Tommy is really building a success-filled résumé and reputation so soon out of college?

By good fortune, I quickly found a job at The Blackfoot News in Blackfoot, Idaho. Feature writer and photographer. It was to pay $120 weekly, plus a gasoline allowance.

I also found a hero there – Publisher Drury R. Brown, a cigar-smoking Kansas newspaperman who had bought the faltering News without fully investigating the demographics of Blackfoot.

I was an additional member to his reporting staff. He had bought a million-dollar offset printing press and had begun publishing daily. The News was weekly or bi-weekly before he bought it.

Mr. Brown actually paid me what he had said he would, and assigned me to do the kind of work he said he would. How unusual, so far in my career. An honest and candid publisher.

Immediately, I began to have delusions of living in Blackfoot for the rest of my life. What a nice Methodist man, DRB.

Silly me. I did last 15 long years there but lots of dynamics came between me and the dream of “the rest of my life.”

I became Blackfoot’s Vern Shelton. (You’ll remember him from Laramie, the Ace Reporter at the Boomerang.) I went after eastern Idaho scandal like a wolverine on acid. I did not become Bingham County’s most loved celebrity. My résumé began looking better but my friends all worked at the newspaper. A clue I didn’t get.

Remember those “demographics?” This can be explained in two words: The Mormons.

The population of Blackfoot at that time was about 80 percent “Mormon,” or more formally, a cult called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Living as a minority member of a population of 80 percent of any majority group is difficult, but the Mormons were and are especially hard to deal with.

Their faith structure is founded in a fraud. Although the words “Jesus Christ” appear in their very name, they aren’t Christians. They disdain the Holy Trinity and the Holy Bible takes a distant second to the Book of Mormon, a fabrication by one Joseph Smith.

Mormons do believe in baptism – not Trinitarian, though. Baptisms take place in a room closed to the public, and baptisms are done in behalf of the deceased who weren’t Mormon when they died. Mormonism is like a combination of Islam and Freemasonry with falsehoods and fictions of its own.

The population included large numbers of hypocritical, devious, cheating, lying double-dealers. The Mormons know instinctively that their beliefs are based in fraud, and it has an impact on their moral conduct.

Non-Mormons weren’t necessarily exclusive targets. The Bingham County folks would cheat each other just as quickly as they would cheat an outsider.

They talked big about not smoking and not drinking alcohol. It was all talk.

So why did we stay so long in Blackfoot? Partly because Mr. Brown kept on paying me, and partly because of our fear of change. Moving might mean jumping from the fire back into the frying pan.

But the main reason for our longevity – for me anyway – was the corruption. Finding “news” was as easy as picking apples off a low tree.

As parents, Annette and I were painfully slow to figure out what my prominence was doing to our children. They (son Ben had been born in Blackfoot, 1968) suffered socially, scholastically, physically. They are tough now, all of them, but I wish they hadn’t had to learn toughness the way they did.

Watch for a report on life-after-Blackfoot another time.

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Word of the Week: Vernacular. It’s from Latin vernaculus, belonging to home-born slaves, or native, indigenous or domestic. Today it means to us the use of the native language of a country or place, as a writer.

The vernacular is the language commonly spoken by the people of a particular country or place. The vernacular is peculiar to a particular locality, as a vernacular disease.

Here’s a sentence in the Eastern Idaho vernacular: “Pet thet harse en th’ born.” That means, “Put that horse in the barn.”

Journalism Career Redux

2011-01-07T19:14:00.000-07:00

When I was in fourth grade, my mother decided to teach me to use the typewriter. She said it was because my penmanship was so terrible.

This led to a college study and later a career in journalism, where I spent most of 25 years raising utter hell with the populations of towns and cities in several states.

Mom’s old black Royal was so heavy I couldn’t lift it. The platen raised and lowered, yielding upper and lower case alphabet letters. It required brute strength to create legible writing.

One day in 1963, partly because I could type, I landed a job as a cub reporter at the Laramie Daily Boomerang. Yes that’s really its name. I have no idea of the implications. It might be because of what happens when paperboys try to throw copies of it on porches.

At the Boomerang, I was required to wait in line to use a typewriter. Ahead of me in status were any of the sports reporters and Ken Costello, a handicapped man who compiled (with only one finger available for the keyboard) the weekly bowling report.

Finally, one day in May, 1965, twins were born to me and Annette, and the Boomerang staff gave me a double paycheck. (Two times $48.48 is $96.96.) I was also given a promotion to regular reporter.

As a regular reporter, I was privileged to be assigned my own typewriter. I discovered that this machine could be fastened to a hinged shelf in my desk – and that the typing machine could be lowered into the desk out of sight. And locked. No one but I could use that particular machine. The low wage seemed bearable, somehow, if I had “my own” typewriter.

In an effort to make myself more valuable to the newspaper, I began learning other skills. I learned from Editor Horace “Hod” Campbell how to make plastic engravings of photographs on a machine called a “Scan-A-Graver.”

This involved looking through a microscope and adjusting the size and shape of the tiny “dots” that make up the engraving that ultimately goes on a printing press. I got quite good at it.

I also learned how to use a Crown Graphic and a Speed Graphic, two forms of a news camera with negatives that measured 4 X 5 inches. Depending on the lens used, these cameras could produce very high resolution photographs.

Hod began sending me on photo assignments, and an early one was a rodeo. This little crippled boy got in the ring with a large angry bull being ridden by a tobacco-chewing drunken fool.

When the boy flashed the “Strobonar” brand strobe light to illuminate the bull ride, the beast transferred his anger from the cowboy who had been abusing him to the college boy who had made him temporarily blind.

I got a good picture. I even got the light-tight slide back into the negative packet, preserving the precious image. But when I ran (as if I really ever run) from the arena, the bull was right behind me, and the gate slammed shut on the Crown Graphic and the Strobonar flash.

Upon return to the office, I held most of the utterly destroyed, costly pieces of the equipment in my hands and presented it to, um, Mr. Campbell. He was not pleased. But the newspaper used the photo I had taken and even gave me a credit line for it.

One evening when Ace Reporter Vern Shelton had a day off, I was sent out on his “beat” to gather the police news. I returned with the requisite information – births, deaths, auto crashes, fires, arrests.

Among those arrested was one Keith Burman, charged with Driving While Intoxicated.

It so happened that Mr. Burman was the owner of the Laramie Chevrolet dealer at the time. The dealer was a big advertiser in the Boomerang. The dealer was also a friend of Russ Allbaugh, publisher of the Boomerang at the time.

When the paper came out, the DWI list somehow read “Keith Furman” instead of “Keith Burman.” I retrieved the hard copy from the previous night’s file and found where Mr. Allbaugh had made the little bitty change. He had initialed the change. RRB. I have it somewhere.

I of course was the laughing stock of the police department the next day. And one cop, Officer Chuck Brezeal, told me it wouldn’t be the last time I got screwed in the newspaper business.

He was frighteningly correct.

-0-

At the end of my college career, I tried to persuade the Boomerang management to hire me on “full time” and at a living wage. They said no, the job I’d held was going to go to another cubby whenever I would leave.

So I drove up to Riverton and interviewed with the Peck brothers, Roy and Bob, at the Ranger. Sure, they said, we need a feature writer who can take photographs.

Before accepting the job in Riverton, I made it clear to my new employers that in the summer I would be attending the marriage ceremony of my brother Dick and Mary Clark, out in Wray, Colorado.

I agreed to go to work there. With the help of my parents, Annette and I moved our family to Riverton and I went to work. Surprise surprise.

My duty as the darkroom technician wasn’t mentioned to me until my first day on the job. My responsibility as the sole sports reporter was explained to me about the same time.

Oh, and when my paycheck came, it wasn’t anywhere near the $90.00 weekly that I had been promised. Somehow, the warm handshake had cooled.

I had no interest in sports. I had only a little interest in processing film – if my own pictures were involved.

While I was trying to figure an escape from Riverton, I did my high school sports reports. I did my darkroom time. I wrote feature stories. I did straight news stories. I worked sometimes 90 hours in a week.

When I got back from that trip, I found my paycheck had been docked for the days I had missed. The 90-hour weeks counted for nothing.

-0-

For years, I kept on working for newspapers, and it was always the same. Every job ended in a disaster – but sometimes that was because I found out things like when the Chevvy dealer gets a DWI. I’m told I shouldn’t take such glee in this, but I can’t help it.

It was grand, a great time. I loved it. I couldn’t work for the Greeley Tribune, though. That would be like driving a truck that says “Isuzu” on it. Yuck.

-0-

Word of the week: Lamentations. A book of the Old Testament attributed to Jeremiah. To lament is to feel deep sorrow, to mourn or grieve. Something lamentable is grievous, deplorable, distressing. But I do not lament my years in the newspaper business. It’s part of what makes me who I am.

DeMolay: Our Readers Respond

2010-12-31T15:56:00.000-07:00

Please see editor's note at bottom.

Last week’s minor treatise on the Order of DeMolay and related organizations drew a variety of comments from readers. Here are some.

A reader wrote, “You are so WRONG about Rainbow Girls. The benefits afforded me by that organization and our leader made for me a better world then and now, with an understanding of Faith, Hope and Charity, which I have carried into a very HAPPY life.

“With the lessons learned, I no longer need to be tethered to the ‘church’ and feel no guilt about my non-attendance with the CHRISTIANS. My relationship with the Holy Trinity surrounds me with Faith, Hope and Charity.”

-0-

A reader wrote: “I never did tell you why I quit DeMolay. The Master Councilor (chief youth leader) was convicted of statutory rape.

“For me, this exposed the cult for the religious fraud that it is. If the fruit of the leadership was evil, then the whole ‘tree’ was just as rotten. My parents were nominal Presbyterians and I attended that church, so had some understanding of morality. Not enough, alas, but enough to recognize the counterfeit. Thank God!”

-0-

A reader wrote, “If you wanted to succeed in those days, the men had to be Masons, the women Eastern Star, and the kids either DeMolay or Rainbow Girls.

“My sister was required to be a Rainbow Girl, and when I was old enough I was sent to DeMolay. I didn't know any better at that time, or I never would have done it. The Masons and their offshoot organizations go against everything I believe as a Christian.

“My Dad and Mom both went through all the positions in Masons and Eastern Star. My grandparents, even though he was a minister, went through all the positions. It was assumed that I would do the same.

“My sister was high up in the offices of RG when she sponsored her best friend, a girl of Japanese descent, as a member. The woman who was in charge blackballed the girl because of her race, not her religion; she was a Methodist.

“My sister was so angry she resigned on the spot, as did several other girls. For once my mother supported her and didn't require that she continue in the organization.

“In the meantime, I was progressing through the ranks of DeMolay. I was slated to be the next (Master Councilor) but that's when I told them that we were moving and I could not continue.

“They gave the position to another young man who immediately announced that he was also moving away. I think it took the organization a little while to recover from that.

“When my grandmother died in 1983, the Eastern Star conducted the graveside service for her. It was all I could do to remain silent as they honored “Electra” (whoever she is) and never once gave this pastor's wife the sendoff she deserved.

“That turned my stomach forever. Then I started to read about the Masons (and not via Dan Brown!) and discovered that my feelings against the organization were correct. We steered our daughters away from RG and kept them active in our church youth activities.

“So your blog brought back some not-so-nice memories, but it also reminded me that I chose the right course for my life. So for that I thank you for giving me the opportunity to reaffirm my life choices.”

-0-

A reader wrote, “I believe that God has given us a sharper understanding of this ‘secret-society’ strategy of Satan, for a purpose. You may be free of influence in this area, and I sincerely hope that you are.”

-0-

A reader wrote: “I belong to several business groups and have held leadership positions in them. All of these groups are required to make public their bylaws and organizational documents, as well as their financials, in order to obtain and retain their tax exempt status.

“The Freemasonry groups, which would include the 'animal lodges' (Elks, Moose) both attract and keep their members through secrecy. This is an appeal to the same spirit of pride that cost Lucifer his place in heaven. It also mimics the Gnostics, and Gnosticism’s secret knowledge.

“The term, ‘mystery religion’ means that it is a religion in which elements are kept hidden from the ‘profane’ (non-members). You can only learn these elements by going through a formal initiation in which you are ceremonially set apart from the masses and sworn formally to secrecy.

“Only then is one entrusted with the group’s secrets, and then in degrees. In other words, there are things a "third grade" or "third degree" Witch is allowed to know that a first degree Witch is not.

“Jaycees, Rotary and Kiwanis are business and community promotion groups, and are to my knowledge NOT secret societies.

“The real litmus test, for any of these groups is, do they preach a false gospel?? A doctrine of good works vs. salvation through faith in Christ?

“Why do the Shriners have some of the best children’s hospitals in the U.S.? They don’t give up their Masonic affiliations; and justify their antics with public service.

-0-

A reader wrote, “Mom and Dad got us into lots of stuff, much of which I have decided was the need for us to meet really interesting characters. Who would introduce me to Tommy Dorsey but Mabel Leick (a unique music teacher). She was one of the original John Phillip Sousa Girls.

“We also met Shorty Hawthorne the handyman, Bill Hobbs the swimming pool superintendent at Fitzimmons Army Hospital, Lucile Rockne the language teacher and a long list of other characters.

“In the list were Boy Scouts, Methodist Church, and DeMolay. Junior Masons become Senior Masons, properly groomed.

“Mom was pushy about getting us into the right stuff. How did we miss 4H?

“I’m not sure the folks understood the historical basis of DeMolay. There probably needed to be such an organization during the Inquisition, maybe not so much any more.

“I have Spanish Jewish friends who moved to the Las Vegas N.M. area during the Spanish Inquisition. The family history there says they needed protection, which they could get in the new world. Odd they are now Catholic.”

-0-

On the subject of the DeMolay “secret sign of distress,” a reader wrote, ”I have stood in the street from time to time with my arms crossed, no one has ever seen it as a distress sign.”

“And there are only so many ways one can position the parts of a body without looking like a baseball coach or deaf ski instructor.”

-0-

Word of the Week: Freemason. A member of an international secret society having as its principles brotherliness, charity and mutual aid.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to All!

Blindfolded and Bamboozled

2010-12-24T14:42:00.000-07:00

We could hardly have known what we were doing at the time; my brother Dick and I participated eagerly in a mutual purgative ritual, probably in the summer of 1962.

Driving east one night to what was then the eastern city limit of Brighton, we parked my car on a dirt lane that ran along an irrigation canal, just up a rise from the city’s outdoor swimming pool.

We proceeded to consume several beers each. For some reason we didn’t fully comprehend at the time, we got out of the car and began shouting the secret word of the Order of DeMolay.

“Fidelitas,” we shouted repeatedly, “fidelitas.” At the top of our lungs, we energetically revealed the important secret which had been entrusted to us. Our mutual revulsion with the organization was expressed in a very unusual and aggressive way.

At the urging – even insistence – of our parents, Dick and I had been members of the Brighton Order of DeMolay, an organization sponsored by the Masonic Lodge, during our high school years.

Though I don’t pretend to speak for Dick, I could safely say that DeMolay was a puzzling experience for both of us.

We had both been active in Boy Scouts and Explorers, thriving and excelling in the activities and requirements of those groups.

Dick became an Eagle Scout; I barely missed that goal, having gone off instead to The University of Wyoming. I kind of thought scouting would have been enough to satisfy the folks. Silly me. DeMolay was required as well.

What a weird experience, our foray into the Masonic world. Interrogation took place before admission was granted. We new guys were blindfolded when we were finally allowed into the inner sanctum of the Masons’ ritual room. Blindfolding: this has always given me the creeps.

The aversion to being blindfolded had precedence galore. Before I even started grade school, a group of girls made sport of me during a game of “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.” I felt like I was the donkey. A blinded donkey at that.

Later on came “Blind Man’s Bluff,” same sadistic sad story. This is a game in which a blindfolded player has to catch – and identify – another. Oh what fun.

When it came time for the piñata, I balked. The object of the piñata: The blindfolded child is given a stick with which to hit and break a paper container of candy suspended overhead. To “win” one would have to ignore the hazing of the other children while swinging the stick repeatedly through thin air. Doesn’t sound like fun to me.

And so, I was already plenty tired of being blindfolded and bamboozled by the time I was “honored” by being named a new member of the Boy Scouts’ secret “Order of the Arrow” in a ritual at Camp Tahosa.

We candidates were blindfolded, taken from camp, well after dark, up a winding mountain trail strewn with exposed tree roots. Blindfolded. Not a good idea for this little crippled boy.

After about 20 yards of stumbling embarrassment, I bailed on the whole project. I got out of line, sneaked back to my tent where I had hidden an L&M cigarette. Oops. I wasn’t the only one; there at camp I discovered Emil Zeiler, the janitor-cum-scout leader, also playing hooky, also smoking a cigarette. Misery loves company.

I was eventually awarded my Order of the Arrow embroidered pocket-flap patch, my absence from the initiation ritual not having been discovered. After that little escapade, I went reluctantly on to DeMolay, and once again endured the blindfold, albeit indoors on a flat floor.

Dick and I passed “through the chairs,” trying half-heartedly to memorize portions of Mason-speak for the Stations of the South, West, North and East.

Dick was better than I was at memorizing his parts – he says Mom force-fed him the words. I always cheated by looking at the book during the ritual, but Dick could recite his from memory. Sometimes.

There was a great deal of pomp and circumstance. There was costuming – long black robes – and mysterious, theatrical stuff we didn’t quite get, and an altar of ill repute in the center of the ritual room.

The altar was where we replicated the torture and murder of the supposed martyr Jacques DeMolay. We were told it was evil men from the ancient Church who did the dirty deeds, making poor Jacques a hero of sorts.

Well yes. The Inquisition did take place. No reasonably educated person could deny that. But upon mature reflection, the heinous deeds of some early Christian leaders should not lead us to reject what Jesus has taught us.

It doesn’t stand up to rational inspection for mere men to establish their own “church” in denial of the teaching of our Lord. It isn’t logical. It’s a dangerous idea, toying with God, with salvation.

But this is what the Masons and dozens of offshoot or imitative organizations have done.

In DeMolay, we were told it didn’t matter whether we were Christians, just so that we were “something.” Simultaneously in that era I was struggling with the oddities of Methodism, so DeMolay’s lack of Christian structure was moderately attractive to me.

Still, it seemed something just wasn’t right. The blindfold. The secret word. The deep faith in ritual for the sake of ritual. The implied superiority over Christianity.

For these and any number of other reasons, I was grateful to be finished with high school, finished with life in my parents’ home. With a great sigh of relief, I went off to Laramie, away from DeMolay, away from Boy Scouts, away.

Only recently have I gone back in memory to the days of DeMolay. Although the Masons helped the boys with ski trips, roller skating outings, dances with the Rainbow Girls and Job’s Daughters, there didn’t seem to be any real reason to participate in DeMolay. Back in the day, I asked, “Why?” Today, I ask, “Why?”

Had I been better prepared, educated, at the time, I would have known DeMolay and other Secret Societies for what they are – the anti-Christ.

Stay tuned.

-0-

Word of the week: Blindfold. It comes from Middle English, blindfeld, struck blind. Webster’s first definition is “to cover the eyes with a cloth or bandage.” Number two is to hinder the sight. Number three - get this - is to delude, mislead. It can also mean reckless or heedless.

You wouldn’t think a bunch of nice people like the Masons would delude or mislead a bunch of innocent high school boys and girls, do you?

Nolo Contendere

2010-12-17T18:22:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, folks take a look at me and suggest, “Hey, you should play Santa Claus at Christmas.”

I usually respond with a smirk and something smart-alecky like, “Hey, the last thing I want is to sit around in a mall all day holding other people’s children on my lap.”

A little boy in a truck stop restaurant once looked up at me and asked, “Are you Santa?” I said, “No, but I know him.”

Ah the Santa myth. There was, we think, really a man who gifted the poor and cared for children. We call him Saint Nicholas, abbreviated in our clumsy language to “Santa Claus.”

It is a tragic, ill-conceived, damaging, stupid, disgusting thing to do to a child. We present the very young with this myth – and then they’re on their own. We wait for them to “find out” that it’s a myth. At age 3, they have to learn the art of debunking. It’s cruel.

About the same time in their young lives, we begin presenting them with the Gospel Truth and expect them to believe it without question. But they’ve already got a history with us. They remember that the Santa thing was a lie, a bald-faced lie. Mommy and Daddy and Grampa and Gramma lied. Why would they not think the Jesus thing is a lie? Or at least, be understandably skeptical?

Santa is far from the only lie we tell our own children. Consider the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Mickey Mouse, Snow White, the Talking Lion who lives in Narnia, The Denver Broncos. All of this is unadulterated horse pucky, but we expect the kids to figure it out on their own.

Meanwhile, children ache for something in which to believe. They want the structure, the explanation, the reasons. They’re searching for reality and we give them Barney the Pink Dinosaur.

It’s beginning to look like I have legitimate reasons to avoid playing Santa.

My dad did it though. He brought gifts to the Camenga family in Fort Lupton, dressed himself in the fake beard and red suit. But the Camenga children busted him when they recognized his car.

Even though I wouldn’t have to wear a fake beard, even though I wouldn’t have to wear a pillow under my red suit, it gives me the urge to hurl, just thinking about doing that.

I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. Oh brother. Think of the porno movie one could make with that theme. On second thought, don’t think about that.

Time

A popular folk tale concerns the Indian who was cold at night because his blanket was too short. As you will recall, he cut off the bottom of his blanket and sewed it on the top. This is exactly what Daylight Savings Time does.

It’s reported the state legislature is planning to discuss Daylight Savings Time – keep it in, throw it out. We hope the legislature throws it out, but a simple solution like this is unlikely from any state legislature.

I was there when we first had DST. The specious explanation at the time was that the War Effort would be helped somehow if we all changed our clocks twice a year.

This was a lie then and it’s a lie now. It’s a lot like the Santa Claus fabrication. You cannot “save daylight” by changing the reading on your clock or wristwatch. Daylight isn’t adaptable to a savings account. The timing of the earth and the sun aren’t adjustable – by us, anyway.

What’s really involved is one of those clever gimmicks with which we are faced – law resulting in confusion. The gummint wants us to be confused, and forever changing the clocks around is one way the bureaucracy accomplishes this.

Spring ahead/Fall back. Again, unadulterated horse pucky. Have you ever been early for church? Have you ever been late for church? Was it due to your confusion over DST? Quite likely.

In our world market, it would make sense for all of us on the planet to set our clocks the same. The leather supplier in California would say, “Yes, I’ll ship that out at 3 today.” Three my time, or three your time? No problem. But this would be too easy.

We’d run into a problem with the calendar. But we could adjust that too. It’s the same day everywhere, it’s just dark some places and light other places.

Time. Precious time. Quality time. Remaining time. Time out of time. Time out. Time clock. Nap time.

Here’s one you probably haven’t heard of: Sundowner Time.

See, Sundowners are members of a motorcycle club based in Utah. We know some of them. They sometimes invite us to social events. Sometimes we have gone to Sundowner parties – but we have had a difficulty.

Sundowner Time. If we get there when we were told the party would begin, we’re early. If we go away for a couple of hours and return, we’re too late. The party’s over. Sundowner Time. It’s hard to tell whether members of the club understand Sundowner Time – or if they’re mystified as are we.

Then there’s Indian Time. It has some similarities to Sundowner Time, but it’s different somehow.

Indians I have known – and there have been quite a few – don’t really wear watches or worry about clocks. Or foolishly modify their blankets.

One might be told to meet a group of people at the tribal office at 10 a.m. No one shows. Come back at 11. No one there. Hang around for 20 minutes and here they come, from all parts of the reservation, arriving pretty nearly simultaneously.

Indian Time. It’s a cultural schism. I’m working on a deadline and so is the Indian, but we have a different view of time. My time is important to me. The Indian’s time is important to him. They’re not the same Time. I prefer the Indian way in this, but it isn’t practical in the white man’s world, which is after all where I live.

Ideas

Perhaps the legislature will consider the idea of lengthening the hour itself. Or shortening it. For myself, I need an hour that’s got about 90 minutes in it. Don’t you? Then, to improve on this, we’d make it law that there will henceforth be 30 hours in a day.

This could really help the economy. People on hourly wage would still get paid the same, they’d just have to work longer in “real time.” Or Indian Time. Or Sundowner Time.

Yeah right. And I believe in Santa, too.

-0-

Words of the week: Nolo contendere. In Latin, pretty obviously, this one means “I do not wish to contend this.” In law, it is a plea by a defendant in a criminal case declaring that he will not make a defense – but won’t have to admit guilt. I like that idea.

The Bastardization of Language

2010-12-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

Originally, the word “Spam” was a contraction of the words for the ingredients in a rather low form of preserved food intended for human consumption.
The word might be a contraction for “spiced ham.” A can of Spam contains a mysterious mix of a spongy material that is purported to be meat. It could be ham.

Spam was trademarked long ago; the product can still be found in the grocery store. It still has the same horrible taste, but it costs a lot more than it once did.

Spam was a staple in some homes during and right after World War Two. Some foods were rationed because they were needed to feed the troops overseas. The GIs got Spam also, along with lots of mutton and chipped beef. But the good stuff was rationed. Ask a WWII vet, if you find a living one, what he thinks of mutton.

Spam canned 50 years ago is still edible. Well, I mean, if one can bring oneself to eat Spam at all, one can safely eat Spam no matter how old. It has a radioactive half-life of approximately ten centuries.

Here is how language evolves, how words come to be used for different purposes. Spam was a convenient and clever choice in the search for a word to describe the mysterious collection of tasteless crap that floods the internet and e-mail recipients.

It’s quite likely that a huge majority of folks who use the word “Spam” today don’t know its heritage. Or care.

This new use of the word is all right with me. When I see spam on my server, I fondly remember the earlier meaning of the word but have no problem accepting its new usage. It is fitting and proper.

This is not so with all changes that go on in language. Some I resent. Some irritate me. Most are simply annoying.

Two girls talking

Go back with me a couple of weeks to a scene in a restaurant. I don’t intentionally listen to other people’s conversations. I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I don’t have room in my brain for personal spam.

However, some things just stand out, or leap into the air to become unavoidably imbedded in the ears, and hence the memory.

Two young women sat in a booth behind me. I couldn’t help but hear. One girl was complaining about her boyfriend. He is a slob. He has a nice car but doesn’t take care of it. He should get a haircut. He forgets to call me. His mother is a bitch.

The torrent of bile became so cloying that even the woman’s lunch partner had to object. The partner asked, “Then if he’s so terrible, why are you dating him?”

(Here comes the part where de-evolution in the language bothers me.)

The first girl, the complainer, said, “Oh. It’s true I am DAY-teen (dating) ham (him). But that doesn’t mean I LIKE ham.”

We lost the “i-n-g” in there, somehow. “Ing” became “een.” She is not dating. She is DAY-teen. With this girl, and probably millions of others, we have lost “him.” It has become “ham.”

Perhaps when she was 12, this woman’s mother sat her down and instructed her, “When you are out in public, be sure to, like, speak in a stupid way, like. Say to yourself, ‘I’m, like, a Valley girl.’”

The Rolling Stones got under the skins of the early women’s libbers with the song “Stupid Girl.” But I still defend the lyric as forthright and useful. If I had turned in my restaurant seat, I could have looked at a prime example of a Stupid Girl.

The unfortunate changes in pronunciation don’t enhance understanding. Unless, in my case, it was a telling verbal affectation which allowed me to clearly understand the lack of character in the speaker.

Gag me with a spoon.

“S” vs. “Sh”

We are losing the proper pronunciation of the letter “S” in many words. As an example, I hear radio announcers say “Schwagg” when they mean “swag.”

Swag means loot or plunder. Swag is free stuff you get if you telephone the radio station. But the pronunciation is “swag” not “schwagg.”

The radio guy is still called a “DJ” even though he probably doesn’t know the initials once meant “disc jockey” and he no longer uses discs in his vocation of playing recorded music for our entertainment. Evolution in language causes loss of meaning.

If you listen, you’ll hear the sharp hiss-like “S” being replaced by “Sh”.

There are dozens of examples. Here are some: “I was planning to go schwimming after shcool. I went to the shoe schtore but they didn’t have anything in my size.”

“Schtore?” What in the world would be wrong with simply saying “store”? Listen and you’ll confirm my observations. It’s an unfortunate degradation of the language. How shtupid. Gag me with a spoon.

Another café conversation

This anecdote doesn’t have anything to do with affected pronunciation. It’s another overheard conversation, but with a cruel O’ Henry climax. (Ask me about “affect” and “effect” sometime, but be prepared for a doctoral dissertation.)

A man and woman sat in a booth behind me. Both appeared to be in their 40s, both were, um, overweight some. They were having coffee. Visiting.

Eventually, the man asked, and I couldn’t help but overhear as his head was inches from mine, he asked, “Would you like to go to a movie or a concert?”

She hemmed and hawed, and finally said, almost inaudibly, “I don’t date. I am uncomfortable with my body. Thank you for asking me, but I just don’t date.”

Here’s the incredible part. The man responded (Man? I wonder.) “Hey. It would be all right. I like fat girls.”

He really said that. The boor. The the scar will never heal.

-0-

Word of the Week: Swag. It most likely comes from a Norwegian dialect, svagga, to sway. Webster gives first meaning as “to sway or lurch.” It can also mean to sink down or sag. In Australia, it means to travel on foot carrying a swag, or a bundle of personal belongings. Our meaning today is stolen money or property, loot, or even plunder.

Swag. Not schwag.

Lessons Learned at Church

2010-12-03T16:20:00.003-07:00

A dear friend of ours had died. The funeral was at 11 a.m. In those days, I was ambitious, so I dressed in my “work” clothes in order to do a few chores before the ritual.

Time flew. Suddenly, the opportunity was long gone when I could have bathed and changed clothing. I decided to be punctual rather than to be properly dressed. I rationalized that I would sit in the back, become invisible. Muddy pants and all.

There are consequences for stinkin’ thinkin’ like this. Even for minor infractions, little things that one hopes will go unnoticed.

I am mandated as an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist. This means that in extraordinary circumstances I can be called upon to assist the ordained clergy.

My pastor was looking around for help. As sometimes happens, his eyes landed on me. He signaled for me to come forward.

There I was in my muddy corduroy pants. At least I had washed my hands, and at least the work shirt I had on was one of my less tattered ones.

I had the great privilege of serving the cup, the Blood of Christ, during the funeral Mass for our dear friend who had died of cancer, who had died leaving young children.

No one mentioned my inappropriate dress. Perhaps no one looked down at my pants. But I was mortified. It was my own carelessness that had gotten me into the cul-de-sac.

I’m not foolish enough to say something like that won’t happen again. But I now realize the consequences. You never know.

Mother always wanted me to wear clean underwear “In case you get in a wreck.” Well, Mom, that wasn’t a real good reason, but there are good reasons.

-0-

She was a brand-new altar server. She was perhaps ten years old. The duties of an altar server are complex and various. You don’t necessarily learn the job all at once.

The young lady kept up pretty well through Mass, needing only occasional prompting by the priest or the deacon.

She carried the heavy processional crucifix at the beginning of Mass and installed it properly in its stand in the sacristy.

At the end of Mass, the priest and deacon said their final words, made their final bows to the altar and the tabernacle, and turned, expecting the altar server to be there with the processional crucifix.

No little girl. Long moments followed. The musicians had begun the closing song, then had to add verses while the recessional was stalled.

Finally the deacon, with a bemused facial expression, mounted the steps back into the sanctuary and went into the sacristy searching for the missing altar server.

After a few moments, he emerged, raised his hands in the gesture of “I don’t know,” and shrugged his shoulders. No little girl. No crucifix.

The priest and the deacon conferred and after a time decided to wait. And they waited.

Eventually, the young woman came out to lead the recessional. Not realizing she could take the direct route, she had gone out a side door to exit the sacristy, a much longer path than necessary.

Her small mistake had an element of humor in it, and those who saw it could smile a little, knowing that order would come out of chaos. No big deal, but enjoyable.

What I treasure about this incident is the amused and bemused looks on the faces of the clergy. Their appearance at an otherwise frustrating incident told a lot about their character.

No one was angry. No one had a harsh word for the girl. The deacon did give a small corrective instruction after the recessional, but I’m sure there were no hurt feelings.

Having witnessed this humorous incident at close range gave me even further reason to love my deacon, to love my priest. People with a good sense of humor are easier to love than cranky people.

-0-

I was first reader. I was well prepared. I had practiced and I had prayed. I knew the context of the scripture ahead and following the reading to which I had been assigned.

It should have gone perfectly. But then I looked up on the ambo at the lectionary, open to the correct page, marked with a purple ribbon. And there he was.

One big old box elder bug was making his way around and around the outer cover of the book.

The choir finished the “Gloria” and the priest said, “Let us pray.” That’s my cue. If I’m first reader, that lets me know I’m on next.

Around and around went the bug, around the outside of the book. I rationalized that I could deal with it. I could ignore the bug and go on with my reading.

I mounted the steps. I said my silent prayer asking the Holy Spirit to help me read well. I adjusted the microphone. I pronounced my opening phrase, “A reading from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah.”

The bug chose that moment to jump from the edge, the cover, of the lectionary, right onto the center of my reading.

Then he began running quickly in circles. Right in front of my eyes, which didn’t need a moving, living being from nature to distract me at that moment. I couldn’t see much but a spinning bug.

Temptation took over. What a time to be tempted, me being up there on the elevated ambo, with everyone in the room looking at me.

I was tempted to slam the book on the little booger. Man, I wanted to smack that book shut and solve the problem.

But I regained reality, and simply brushed my box elder bug from the page and read the reading.

It had seemed like long, long minutes had passed while I underwent the temptation. But apparently no one had seen my quandary, no one had observed my temptation, no one had become alarmed at my delay.

At least I was dressed properly. Thanks be to God.

-0-

Word of the week: Ignoble. From the Latin, ignobilis, unknown, obscure, or gnobilis, known. Today it means not noble in birth or position, of low origin or humble condition. It can mean dishonorable. It is similar in its roots to Gnostic and agnostic.

-0-

Please take the time to watch this video. This little girl really knows the story of Jonah, and wants to share it with you.

How Many Varieties Has Heinz?

2010-11-26T18:19:00.000-07:00

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. No one else has volunteered, so I’m the man.

Ready? We have to discuss the word “variety.”As long as I can remember, which is about 65 years, the Heinz company has promoted its products with the phrase, “57 Varieties.”

Wrong. Heinz has only one variety. The company’s product line has great variety. It has fifty-seven separate products in its variety.

In order to truthfully have 57 varieties, it would have to have six flavors of catsup, which would make one variety numbering six, seventeen flavors of mustard, which would make one variety numbering 17, and so on, until 57 varieties were reached. It only has one variety of catsup. It can not possibly have 57 varieties.

Go to the grocery store. Look at the indoor signage. You’ll see something like, “Featuring six varieties of apples this week.” Wrong. The store has one variety of apples, numbering six.

See, here’s how it works. “Variety” is a singular noun connoting a number of items. Hence, the hypothetical grocery store would have one variety of apples, one variety of eggs, one variety of potatoes.

I have a variety of children and grandchildren. Believe me, they are various. There is variety among them. But I do not have eight varieties. Gadzooks no, Lord help us all. I have one variety.

Webster says “variety” means the state or quality of being various. It means a different form of some thing, condition, or quality as in “a variety of cloth.” It means a collection of varied things as in “There is a variety of items in the basement.”

Another loss

I heard it, I swear I heard it. Someone said, “I lost a lot of money last night. I didn’t know the one guy was a card shark.”

Wrong. He was a “card sharp.” Now I grant you, it sounds reasonable enough to call somebody a “card shark.” But dammit, that’s not the phrase. It’s “card sharp.”

Assembly vs. congregation

I do hear it at church, sometimes even from the clergy. There will be a reference to the “congregation” when what’s really meant is the “assembly.”

Admittedly, according to Webster, I’m on thin ice with this one. However, I submit: “A man was shot in a bar and curiosity seekers congregated.” Or, “the people assembled for Mass.” They became an assembly, and I wouldn’t use the word “congregation” to describe them.

A congregation is formed at a fight, a fire, an unusual spectacle, a car crash. An assembly is formed at church.

The word assembly just fits better to describe what we do at Mass. We assemble. It’s just more orderly to assemble than to congregate.

Besides, I myself wouldn’t want to be identified as a Congregationalist. See? There’s the crux.

-0-

Is it “upmost” or is it “utmost?”

Webster says “utmost” is something situated at the farthest point or limit, the most extreme or distant. Utmost is of the highest degree, the extreme limit. I did my utmost to win the argument.

Webster also says “upmost” is . . . uppermost. Case closed.

-0-

When I show up at church on a Sunday, if I am assigned an extraordinary duty, I go to the back of the nave where there’s a little clipboard with names on it and I “log in.”

But we’ve probably lost that. What I do when I go to the server to sort my e-mail is I . . . “login.” So do I log in or login? For myself, I’m staying with log in, two words. But I am a big loser. (editor's note: according to google blogger spell check, "log in" is correct.)

The local newspaper is especially unmindful of the following:

When it’s time for him to go outside, I put the dog out in the back . . . yard. I do not put him in the . . . “backyard.”

See, here’s how it goes. When the words “back” and “yard” are combined, they are used as a modifier only. This would be the case in “backyard barbecue” or “backyard swimming pool.”

We don’t put the child in the “backseat” of the car. We put the little ankle biter in the . . . back seat. It’s not so difficult to understand, but I am pretty sure it is lost. All gone away, into the morass of jumbled communications.

More on “conversion”

Bear with me please. I know I hammer this subject too much, but I am inspired.

Though I evangelize unceasingly, I hold out no hope that I will be able to persuade anyone to “convert” to the Catholic Church or to Christianity.

Rather, my prayer and my persuasive abilities could more reasonably be expected to succeed if I point out to an individual that he already owns, that he already is, what I am talking about. I am not asking anyone to change who he is, to become something he is not.

My prayer is that each individual will realize and make use of what is already available to him at birth. So far as I am concerned, inside each and every individual human being lives a ready made Catholic waiting to be released.

A man needn’t “convert.” He must realize, to actualize, to set free, who he always was, who he has always been. Most importantly, he must become who he can become, to seek to achieve his highest potential. You don’t change or convert who you are, you become who you are.

O.K., here’s my O’Henry of the week: It’s a sentence lifted entirely out of context from Archbishop Charles Chaput’s column this week:

“Conversion is an unwelcome message for the proud and self-satisfied.”

Gulp. Uh-oh. Well, as Chuck Berry once wrote, “Meanwhile, I was still thinkin’. . . "

-0-

Word of the week: Impasse. It’s from the French. It means a passage open only at one end: a blind alley, hence a situation from which there is no escape; a difficulty with solution or a deadlock. I am at an impasse with the concept of “conversion.”

An ear-piercing story: The sequel

2010-11-19T16:21:00.000-07:00

Satan can’t speak, or so says Fr. Tadeusz, one of the priests at St. Peter Roman Catholic Church in Greeley.

Since the Prince of Lies is bereft of the power of speech, says the priest, the Devil can only scream or cause what we hear as “static.”

Culturally, we experience this noise almost everywhere, almost constantly. For example, in one restaurant we frequent, a radio station is usually playing country music – while simultaneously a television set drones stupidly.

I seem to be the only one who notices the overlaid clack. Eventually, I become emboldened and walk across the room and climb up on a chair to turn the television set volume off. At least that leaves us with only half of the media murmur.

Cell phones create a barrage of annoying sounds that apparently don’t bother anyone but me. The “individualized” ringtones have worn thin. How ‘bout them cowgirls.

People don’t seem to hear their own children howling in church – or banging wooden toys against hardwood pews. They’re accustomed to so much noise they don’t hear the racket made by their own children.

Cars by the dozen carry drivers and passengers to businesses in our neighborhood, boom-boom bass “music” deafening the rest of us. There is a “noise ordinance” in Greeley, but the police find it nearly impossible to enforce.

Is the Devil the source of this noise? Doesn’t matter, he likes the result. He can’t speak, but he can make static. We’re deaf, deafened, and don’t know it. Am I the only one with a hearing problem? Not necessarily.

My blogosphere friend “The Dude” writes:

“Could it be the anatomy of the ear? I love sporting events, concerts, live events. Unfortunately, I've sustained a severe enough injury to my inner ear to make attending such events risky.

“I learned of the problem while I was at a Giants game. The crowd let out a sustained, unified roar. One ear went silent. Then my ear began to ring. Then there was discomfort. Both physical and psychological.

“The ringing continued for hours. It was quite disturbing. It became impossible to hear anyone speaking on my right. And the pain. A slight nausea set in. I persevered. It has recurred, infrequently. I persevere.”

Two similar reports of hearing damage were reported during a family outing in Brighton last weekend. Both resulted from “referee” whistles. Nephew Andy said an official at a roller derby event blew a whistle within inches of his ear. He was essentially deaf for some time, but seems better now.

Niece Nicole said another staffer at the school where she works blew a whistle signaling the end of recess. Blew it within inches of her ear. She was essentially deaf for some time, but seems better now. (Is this is beginning to sound familiar?)

Responding to my story of last week about having my hearing damaged by a singer in church, my dear friend Maureen wrote: “We heard this same voice at the 8:30 Mass. It lifted my spirit to where you were in your prayer.

“Music is a huge expression of our love, worship and praise of God with which I think you agree. Perhaps you were looking forward to hearing your wife's beautiful voice and were more than a little disappointed that it was not her voice you were hearing.

“I thought (the singing of the soloist) was uplifting and beautiful.”

The late great Fr. Bud Raney would admit privately that he really preferred saying Mass when there was no music at all. Considering his long career as a priest, you can most likely understand how he came to that preference, though you might disagree.

My second cousin David wrote, “I've learned over the years that worship has very little to do with music. One of the biggest mistakes the modern church makes is trying to please everyone with the music.

“I was a worship pastor for about eight years and heard these comments almost every Sunday . . . the music was too loud, the music wasn't loud enough, the music was too slow, too fast, too much drums, too wordy, to lengthy, too short ... blah, blah, blah.

“The point is that I always thought my charge was to bring God’s people to the throne, that place you described in your story . . . the place where the music disappears and it’s just you and God alone in the secret place.

“It’s not mystical, it’s spiritual and has nothing to do with the music. It all takes place in the heart and comes from the inside out, not outside in.

“If it’s not pleasing to the ear it’s a distraction. My real job was to get out of the way and become invisible. It’s a tough or impossible task. But I feel for ya.”

-0-

The Brighton visit centered around a baptism at St. Augustine Catholic Church. Two children were baptized, my grand-nephew Ignatius and a little character in a natty white suit.

The little guy, who could easily have passed for Hervé Villechaize, “Tattoo” on Fantasy Island, kicked, hit, squirmed and screeched during the entire ritual. Ungodly ear-piercing screeches. ‘Nuff said.

And me? I’m like The Dude or my family members. I haven’t experienced deafness, but I had discomfort, pain and uneasiness.

Since that Sunday, I’ve been wearing cotton plugs in my ears, and I don’t go outside without folding down the flaps on my winter hat.

I did suffer physical damage to my ears, to my hearing. It’s a very real injury – trust me. I’m not happy about that. My hearing ought to be safeguarded, especially in church.

To help prevent a recurrence, I’ve begun carrying a set of earplugs. Sorry folks, but my hearing is more important to me than uplifting screeching.

-0-

Word of the Week: Clack. It’s from Middle English, clacken, an echoic sound. It’s also spelled “claque,” meaning clatter.

Today, clack is an abrupt, sharp sound. Doesn’t sound like anything that could be called meditative. Satan loves clack. He can’t speak, so he makes clack. Or static. Or screeching.

He also likes the sound of weapons of war being discharged, like in a church in Baghdad. But that’s a yarn for another time.

Mr. Tommy Gets His Ears Pierced

2010-11-12T16:15:00.001-07:00

The memory of a radio broadcast from 60 years ago still crops up in my brain from time to time.

The broadcast play was a drama about a man who has just been told that his incapacitating illness will soon result in his death.

He is bedridden. Soon, his ability to speak is impaired. He is confined to a bedroom upstairs in his home. He is paralyzed and mute.

By and by, he begins to notice something very strange.

His hearing becomes more and more acute. He can hear sounds, music, voices from further and further away.He can hear a railroad train whistle even though he is several miles away from the tracks.

Soon he hears, or overhears, hurtful conversations. The lawyer comes by to discuss with the pending widow the imminent demise of her husband. The details are cold and crass. There’s a scene with the banker. The doctor. The mortician. Upstairs, unable to move or speak, the poor man hears it all.

The sick man’s parents come to visit. In a discussion downstairs, his dad says something conciliatory to the pending widow like, “I don’t know why he grew up to be so mean. He was always a very mannerly little boy.”

Later, he can hear his wife speaking with his best friend. They are hatching a plan to marry, once the sick man dies. On and on.

Through my adult life, I have occasionally reflected on that little drama and I have pondered what it would be like to have super-human hearing. It would certainly be a curse. It would hardly have any positive value.

-0-

The answer to this particular lifelong question came, at least in part, last Sunday.

We attended the 11:30 a.m. Mass. Laura was the cantor and I was simply a member of the assembly, having for that day no extraordinary duties.

Every Mass has its values and its benefits, but you have to admit some go together better than others.

This time, the lectors performed flawlessly, deacon reading the Gospel had a good grip on the holy words. The homilist was quite helpful to us, adding a contemporary view of the meanings of the scripture readings for that day.

Like she always does, Laura presented her melodious voice, giving glory and praise to the Lord. I was lulled into a kind of drowse or maybe even a trance. I do that sometimes, when I am consciously well prepared for Mass, communion and prayer.

When it was my turn, I got in line and went to communion. I received the body and then the blood of our dear Lord Jesus Christ.

I returned to my pew and knelt. I went immediately into deep prayer, so deep that I was almost paralyzed, at least immobilized.

I was physically and emotionally unable even to pick up the hymnal, to turn to the page containing the communion song. I was unable even to sing. Something had taken me away, and it wasn’t Calgon.

Dreamily, after a time, I looked up and saw that the communion line was at its end. Soon, the priest came down from the sanctuary. As is his custom, he turned back toward the crucifix and the altar, and knelt in prayer. In post-communion meditation.

It was time for the meditation song. Laura had planned “Jesus Loves Me,” which has re-entered my life as a favorite song. It is a very good song for meditation, especially verse four.

Then it happened. A horrid, ungodly, jarring screech began issuing forth from the choir loft. It wasn’t Laura and it wasn’t Jesus Loves Me. And it wasn’t meditative in any sense of the word. It was a guest vocalist whose name is unknown to me.

Later I learned that the vocalist’s presence was to promote her concert that afternoon, a concert to benefit a Greeley Catholic grade school. We support the school. We wish our children would have had the benefit it offers.

When she began her performance, however, my hands flew involuntarily to cover my ears. I frantically looked around, to see if anyone else was suffering from a similar reaction. Didn’t find a companion in my misery, not one.

Immediately, I began plotting an escape. Nope, the fire exit wouldn’t work because I’d have to walk to the left of the kneeling priest, and my movement might distract him from his meditation.

At least he was giving the appearance of meditating. I will probably never know if he was really able to meditate. My dreamy meditation time was long gone, lost to a most exquisite example of caterwauling.

The screeching continued, minute after painful minute. It was so high-pitched and voluminous that even with my little fingers jammed into my ear canals about three inches, I couldn’t shut it out. I envied deaf people because they could turn their hearing aids off.

I looked back. The side door was too far away for any kind of subtle escape. I lurch when I walk and draw attention, causing distraction. Not wanting to interfere, I realized I had to sit it out.

I remembered the poor man in the radio show. Couldn’t shut off his extraordinary hearing. I wondered. Will calluses form where my eardrums once lived? Will I have new piercings to brag about to New Age people?

Will my brains come foaming out my ears at any moment? Will I really die from a terminal dose of caterwauling?

I was in very real pain. I lay down in the pew, hoping the screeching wouldn’t penetrate the hardwood to find me there. No good. Fingers in ears, eyes tightly shut, mouth firmly closed, I was doomed. I was ready to die.

Finally, short of death, came reprieve. The obnoxious high-decibel cacophony ceased. Mercy. God had granted me the mercy for which I had been fervently praying.

A woman sitting in the pew ahead of me turned and asked, “Wasn’t that beautiful?” I didn’t want to lie and I didn’t want to tell the truth. I could only manage a blank look.
Later, my ears hurt. In fact, my ears have hurt for several days, and I have had a slight sore throat. My teeth and gums were sore from clenching my jaw.

Apparently, I am the only person who suffered so. Laura’s word for the performance was . . . “beautiful.” The presentation Sunday did not persuade me to attend the benefit concert.

In vain, I have cautiously inquired of other persons who were present. To a man and woman, no one has reported any kind of similar experience. “Beautiful” is the word most people use to describe their personal experience through an event that I found offensive, jarring, even painful.

What happened, then? Why was an event so horrific and unpleasant to me perceived so differently by others? I am anxiously awaiting the answer to that and some other questions.

-0-

Word of the Week: Caterwaul. “Cater” is a noun from Latin, meaning a person who provides or acquires a product, as in caterer. A cater is also a male cat. Middle English has caterwrawen, an echo.

To us today, caterwauling is the making of a shrill, howling sound like that of a cat at rutting time. It’s a screech, wail or scream. Caterwauling.

The Result of Obstructionism

2010-11-05T15:42:00.000-07:00

Way back in 2004, our neighbors at Biltrite Sign Service here on 18th St. saw an opportunity to expand their business.

The Bad News - View South

It was time to fish or cut bait. They knew they could decline expansion, cut back on the number of employees, limit the size of the service fleet. Stay a mom-and-pop company. Do a smaller volume of business. Perpetuate the status quo.

Or, it seemed, a better idea would be to expand. The building they were using was a family-owned residential house onto which service bays and sign construction space had been added.

Southwest

Trucks are bigger now. Bucket lifts are longer and taller, even when retracted. Signs themselves are much bigger than before.

Two blocks north of the Biltrite establishment on Third Avenue, there was a large vacant lot. It was for sale. The company decided to buy that site and build a brand-new home for the Biltrite Sign Service.

West

It was perfect. Close to the original location. Big enough. Already zoned for heavy industry.

Sounds perfect, like a fairy tale, right? Not to the obstructionists who inhabit the offices of the City of Greeley building permit department.

There were, according to the city guys, problems with 16th St. access, with storm drainage, and with the steel building that was being proposed.

What? Drainage? Where is the drainage going now? Access? Steel building? Figure it out.

Northwest

The city ruled, and would not back off of its rule, that the Biltrite company would not be allowed to construct a steel building.

I went over there again Thursday. I stood in the middle of the acreage in question. In any direction, only metal buildings are to be found. Yes, I said only metal buildings. Mud abounds. Access is horrid.

There is no drainage except when large volumes of storm water run out of the vacant lot and down the gutter.

North

So if the Biltrite company was to establish a brick or stucco structure, as the city required, it would be the only building like it for several blocks in any direction.

Everything else is metal – grain elevators, truck and farm equipment service buildings, a motorcycle shop, a truck tire shop, a farm supply store, a wood cabinet manufacturer, a couple of World War Two Quonset huts.

North

Clearly, the city did not need the property tax or the sales tax revenue that would have been generated by the sign service. The city was obviously rejecting the Biltrite Sign Service out of hand. A clear case of obstructionism, malfeasance on the part of ego-infested bureaucrats.

The Biltrite family inquired in nearby Evans, and soon built a new facility there with minimal municipal oversight. Greeley lost an environmentally-friendly, vibrant, productive industry.

North-Northeast

The vacant land has remained vacant. People got in the habit of dumping Christmas trees there after the holiday. Mud and weeds remained. Tax revenues went elsewhere.

Hey, good job, city obstructionists. Doing your duty to prevent business from expanding in Greeley.

But that ain’t all. The worst is yet to come.

East-Northeast

Recently we got the news. The same site, the place where an attractive, clean, prosperous, environmentally friendly, vigorous business would have gone . . . the same site will probably soon be used for an oil well drilling operation.

What? An oil well? Yep. It’s probably not British Petroleum that will do the dirty work, but who knows what might happen.

We’ll have noise, vibration, air pollution, all kinds of crap. Not friendly. What about drainage? Does an oil rig look better than a steel building? What about access? For gigantic well drilling equipment?

Oh, to be sure, the drilling interests have come around offering to pay some kind of a pittance to lease mineral rights, along with a “lease bonus” being accepted by some property owners.

For sure, this area is zoned industrial. We knew that when we moved here a quarter of a century ago. Because of the zoning, there are certain realities we have to put up with – the railroad, the farm chemical plant, the electrical generation plant, the auto body shop.

The city, the obstructionists down at city hall, are mum on the subject of oil drilling. Not a peep. Apparently, you need a building permit from these stiffnecks unless, unless it’s something as grotesque and unfriendly as an oil well.

It’s a case of bravery toward little Biltrite Sign and cowardice or greed when faced with an oil company. True impotence has shown its face. The big-bad-tough-guy inspectors and their good-old-boy bosses have no cojones whatsoever. Oh well. There will be a judgment day.

-0-

Word of the week: Cojones. There isn’t a delicate translation into English of this Spanish word. Colloquially, it means balls. Courage. Backbone. Strength of conviction. Something some people don’t have.

Conversion

2010-10-29T15:45:00.000-06:00

I love feedback. Iron Butterfly, Steppenwolf, Neil Young. Feedback is one of the best inventions of the 20th century, along with the electric guitar on which feedback is usually played.

By the nature of the word, “feedback” would seem to be something undesirable. To be sure, when some unknowing soul ventures into the “wrong” position behind the monitor in the choir loft, feedback occurs, and it ain’t pleasant.

But feedback as an art form, ah, makes me smack my lips just thinking about it. Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” or “Cowgirl in the Sand” would be good examples. To this day I cheerfully imprint on a good feedback riff. Power chords put me in an exotic mood. Rubber bands come off the top of my head.

I love Bob Seger’s “Against The Wind.” “Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” No matter how many times I hear that song, my eyes mist up. “Searching for shelter again and again, against the wind.”

I love a good steak for breakfast. Medium, with basted eggs and rye toast. A little bit of A-1 if I’m feeling particularly expansive. I relish a good steak, especially for breakfast.

Because of my good fortune, I own two Harley-Davidson motorcycles. One of these is a highly modified “Shovelhead” with excessively loud two-into-one exhaust and a funky Tupperware container for an air cleaner cover.

The other Harley is a rather sedate machine, much newer, much quieter, much smoother. Ah, drives my anticipation gear just thinking about gliding across Wyoming on it. I love ‘em both. Each in its own way is a thrilling machine.

Speaking of machines, I also dearly love our 1968 Ford XL 500 muscle car. This one, now this one is something else.

When the driver (usually me) presses on the accelerator radically enough, this machine makes a “police car” sound and takes off like a striped ass ape. When I see a car with a badge on it that says “Passat,” I do. I pass that. No problem. Pontiac Grand Ma wants to pass me? Don’t make me laugh.

Then there’s the Ford F-600 on which we reported some weeks ago. It’s a five-ton truck with dual rear wheels, a custom-made flatbed and an adorable, personalized rough-and-ready appearance.

Don’t make the mistake of following me too closely in the ’56. Steel plate protects us. Heavy steel plate. We’re not fast, but we’re armored. I love that truck. Gives me little chills just thinking about it.

Since 1988, Laura and I have operated our own business. In some ways, we’ve suffered for it, and there are more challenges now than ever. We have to face the fact that maybe we won’t be able to do this for very much longer.

But when I open that door for business, it gives me a thrill. I look at what we’ve done with this decrepit building, and with nothing except desire and sheer dumb luck, and it gives me goose bumps.

Speaking of thrills and chills, here’s one that will go on my whole life:

Laura and I had errands to run Thursday morning, two of them in adjacent buildings. So we decided to divide and conquer.

She went one direction and I went the other. When I came out to the car a few minutes later, I saw that she had already returned, and was waiting for me.

A tingle went through me. It always does. Just like the first time I ever saw her. My heart flutters. That’s just me, that’s just the way I respond. I’m the same guy I always was.

-0-

My friend Ramon was searching for the words to give me a compliment. “Mr. Tommy,” Ray said. “You are a changed man. Congratulations on your conversion.”

Gulp. I had to swallow my tongue. Here was Ray, my good friend Ramon, trying his best to pay me a compliment, and the first thing that comes to my mind is to say, “I am not a convert.”

He was referring of course to our journey into the Roman Catholic Church.

Ray and wife Delia were there that Easter Vigil a decade ago when we made it official, when we recited the creed.

But for once, I held my tongue. I did not shout “I am not a convert.”

A relative of mine once said, “That church has taken away your integrity.” I had to respond, to the contrary, the Church has lent me integrity.

We didn’t give up any freedom or character qualities or personality quirks by joining the Church. We had everything to gain and nothing to lose.

My standard joke is, “I’ve always been a Catholic. I just didn’t realize it until the year 2000.”

I haven’t been required to give up music with feedback, or fast cars, or good food, or a good beer buzz after work. It’s just not like that.

Ray was absolutely correct in what he was trying to say to me, and I treasure his sentiment. The fullness of our lives has expanded exponentially.

Everything is bigger, heavier, more vivid, more meaningful. I am thankful that I didn’t press the intricacies of all this on Ray – he doesn’t have it coming.

The pilgrimage hasn’t made me soft. I have not become soft for any reason. I am the same hard-headed individual as ever.

I insist. I wasn’t converted. I was enabled. The difference is important to me.

-0-

Word of the week: Conversion. Ho hum, it’s from the Latin, conversio. It means to change from one belief or doctrine to another. Sorry, that ain’t me. I never had another belief or doctrine from which to convert.

“Conversion” means a change from a lack of faith to a religious belief. I did not ever have a lack of faith. I simply and ignorantly lacked the mechanism for the expression of my faith.

The Holy Spirit led me, us really, to the Church. The Holy Spirit did not “convert” me, he enabled me. To me, it was a process of realization, of learning – not conversion.

The Adventures of Simone

2010-10-22T16:46:00.000-06:00

We met Simone (See-moan) some months ago. Our tenant Alvino, in violation of a lease agreement prohibiting pets, had taken her in.

Simone sans bell

When I ventured down in the mobile court last weekend to check things, I had a couple of surprises waiting for me.

Alvino’s rent was due on the first of the month, but for years his custom had been to pay on the 10th . . . or the 11th . . . or the 12th.

So on the 16th I went looking. As I approached the little mobile home, I had that eerie landlord’s intuition.

Darn. Alvino had vanished. He had taken with him almost all of his tomatoes, almost all of his auto parts, almost all of his furniture. And all of his spooky wood carvings.

Surprisingly, someone (probably not Alvino himself) had mopped the floors, cleaned the bathroom, and wiped out the cupboards.

But that wasn’t the real second surprise. In the distance, coming across a field, making her way through the neighboring mobile home court, was little Simone.

I knew it was her because I heard the familiar sound of the bell that Alvino had attached with a sturdy chain around her little neck.

When she got to the #3 house, which had only recently been her warm and secure home, she wove her way around my shoes, rubbing, purring and mewing in a very affectionate way.

Even though I wouldn’t usually pick up someone else’s cat, I did pick up Simone. She was skinny, emaciated. Tiny little ribs were sticking out while she purred.

I hurried home on my bicycle and rounded up some cat food, a serving bowl, and a container in which I could put some water.

Simone was still there when I got back, and she dived into the food as if she hadn’t eaten for five or six days. Which is about how long it must have been.

I sat down on the step and watched her eat. After a time, she got her fill, thirstily drank some water, and came over and climbed into my lap.

From there, I lifted her into my arms again and lay her on her back, her furry face in my furry face. She looked up at me with pleading dark golden eyes and purred and purred. It was oddly similar to holding one of my own children.

After a time, I determined to leave Simone there for the night, on the off chance that Alvino might come back for her. After all, I had decided to overlook the lease violation when I saw how much Alvino loved her. Or so I thought.

When I took off on the bicycle again, Simone tried to follow me, running as fast as she could, her distinctive bell jangling cheerily.

She stopped at the edge of the mobile court and sat down, ears perked up, studying me with those golden eyes. A solid dark gray, she nearly disappeared in the shadows.

I rounded the corner at the front of the store building, out of sight of the cat, and stopped. Really, I’m not accustomed to weeping. But I had to stop the bicycle because my vision was impaired.

Simone had been abandoned. Deserted. Betrayed. The son of a bitch just drove off and left her to fend for herself. He had abused her trust. The thought of it saddened me, angered me.

Suddenly, the betrayal that had happened to us, the loss of the rental income, the absence of any notice, and generally the sneaky way Alvino did things, seemed small.

I left Simone there overnight; I was still thinking her master might return. After having fed and watered her on the second day, I left her overnight again.

The third day, Monday, I couldn’t stand it any more. Laura and I had plenty of work to do “down in the court,” so we brought the truck, the tools – and a cat crate.

Simone entertained us through the day, alternating between us, rubbing our pants legs, climbing trees and jumping down, hiding under places, playing hide-and-seek, cavorting.

As she played, the jingle bell fastened around her neck was an ever-present reminder of her whereabouts – which was the idea of the bell in the first place.

It was no easy decision to take on another cat, but there was the thought that we didn’t really have an alternative. It wouldn’t be easy for Laura especially, rearranging this and that so that Simone could be introduced to the herd slowly and humanely. But we did it.

On Tuesday evening, the integration with the other cats was progressing well, and with them appropriately separated, we went off to class at church.

I had left the chain and bell on the little kitty’s neck, thinking it might have become something in which she would take comfort, a physical item affording security. I wanted to cause as little trauma as possible; I didn’t want to take yet something else away, considering what had already been taken from her.

Three hours later, we arrived home and heard Simone crying. Somehow, perhaps while trying to remove the chain herself, the device had become lodged in her mouth. Like a bit for a horse.

We tried everything. Even my heavy-duty metal shears wouldn’t cut the chain. Finally, with the determination and patience that Laura seems to have, the chain came off.

There were tears. Mine, and Laura’s. The cat, except for yet more psychic damage, was apparently unhurt. No blood, no broken teeth. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Simone.

-0-

Word of the week: Betray. It’s from middle English, betrain, betrayen, old French trair, as in traitor, and finally, the Latin, trader, to hand over or deliver.

To us these days it means to help the enemy, to break faith, to be a traitor. It means to deceive, to victimize, to seduce and fail to marry.

For Simone, it meant a nasty psychic blow from which she will never recover. In the Norwegian language, the name “Alvino” is translated: “Quisling.”

That Was FUN

2010-10-15T14:43:00.001-06:00

Gerald laughs

Once upon a time toward the end of my Idaho days (1978) my friend Gerald bought a motorcycle similar to mine and we decided to go for a ride.

We went west from Blackfoot on Idaho Highway 39 toward Riverside, but soon decided to turn around and go back to “town.”

An inexperienced rider, Gerald made a shaky u-turn and swung a little wide. His brand-new motorcycle tipped over in soft gravel on the shoulder, and Gerald fell off and went rolling down into the borrow ditch.

I watched him rolling over and over, in the beer bottles and weeds and barbed wire.

He stood up, brushed himself off, then, smiling, climbed up the embankment. We teamed up to right the fallen machine and Gerald began laughing as only Gerald can laugh.

Then he said, “That was FUN.”

Gerald lives in California now. He has returned to his Catholic upbringing, and goes to Mass every single day. He’s a very serious man.

But something tells me he is still capable of having fun, of laughing, even laughing at himself.

Thanksgiving in California

Prunedale California to be exact, a few miles north of Salinas. Every day of the year, Prunedale gets a little pre-dawn dew, then the temperature soars to maybe 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Hardly ever is there a heavy wind, just calm, cool air. Biker heaven.

Our new friends John and Samantha had bought a beautiful five-bedroom home in Prunedale, situated on ten acres. An old-fashioned barn had been converted into a huge motorcycle garage down the lane.

There was no lawn to mow; this was California, and there, you just cut the naturally occurring groundcover back once in a while. No water necessary.

The big house had decks everywhere – one for morning, one for afternoon, one for a rainy day.

A giant turkey was in the oven, along with everything else that goes with that traditional feast. Dinner was maybe an hour away. The pie was ready. The dressing smelled delicious. I was catching a little pre-dinner beer buzz.

I went out on the deck that faced west, looking down to the bike garage. Laura was down there hanging out with the guys, as she likes to do. (The women there were talking about fingernails, she said. Harleys held more interest.)

I like watching Laura, even from a distance. I like to see Laura enjoying herself, which she was. It was my pleasure to witness the scene, to see motorcycles and bikers drinking beer – laughing and enjoying a fine California Thanksgiving day.

After a time, Samantha came out from the kitchen and leaned on the rail beside me. She took a sip of her rosé and said, “John and I are having problems.”

So I had to ask. “What’s wrong, Sam?”

“Well,” she responded, taking a long drag from her Virginia Slims cigarette, “John thinks he has me locked into some kind of marital fidelity bullshit.”

If you had been there, you could have seen Mr. Tommy do the Instant Biker Backstep. “Uh, hey, uh, Sam I gotta go down to the barn. I think Laura was calling me.” I wasn’t ready for California.

Now that was fun

Once upon a time in about 1990, my friend Jerry Carlson and I were on a motorcycle run together “way out east,” like we say.

We had ridden east from Sterling on U.S. Highway 6, to Holyoke. We turned south on one of my favorite Colorado roads, U.S. 385, toward Wray.

After a few miles, Jerry stopped at a gravel pullout and I followed him. He said, “Do you think your Harley is as fast as my Gold Wing?”

I said I didn’t know. He asked, “Do you want to find out?” We both grinned.

Back on the pavement we went, hell bent for leather. I’m constrained to tell the truth; the Gold Wing was ever so slightly quicker than my Harley dresser.

Faster and faster we went. We probably reached top speeds of just over 100 miles per hour – not fast, really, by today’s standards, but plenty fast for the two of us on a wild and wooly wilderness highway.

Highway 385 is on the “plains,” all right, but the plains aren’t flat. Between Holyoke and Wray, it’s quite hilly. Old 385 hasn’t been leveled like modern roads; it follows the terrain.

Over hills and through creek valleys we went, as fast as we could go.

About five miles later, we crested a hill and there was the inevitable, the unavoidable: A gigantic washout. The road down in the draw was entirely covered with a thick layer of mud and gravel.

There was no stopping. Sure, we slowed. But each of us was smart enough to know that if the brakes were on when the bike came onto the gravel, a crash was certain.

Side-by-side, we coasted through the washout, probably at about 70 miles per hour by that time. There was no slithering, no skidding, no sideways position. We just rode it out.

At the top of the next hill, there was a turnout. Jerry pulled off, and I followed. We shut off the bikes and put down the side stands and got off.

He came over and embraced me. I returned the gesture. We began laughing. We laughed until we cried. We stood there on the plains, between Holyoke and Wray, resting, taking deep breaths, laughing and crying like babies. Tears rolled, making little trails in our dusty beards.

After a time, we decided to get back on the highway and ride. Other riders had caught up to us; we were after all on an “organized” run.

As we left the pullout, Jerry looked at me and said, “That was FUN.” That’s what I thought.

Jerry’s wife Jill died not long after that, and Jerry grieved and Laura and I grieved. Jerry himself died a few years later. Cancer. Both of our friends.

I have been grateful ever since that day on the prairie that I’d had the opportunity to race with Jerry, and that we lived through a potentially deadly situation.

And I continue to be thankful that we thought of it as fun. I think of Jerry and his Gold Wing every time I hear someone say something about having fun. Thanks, Jerry.

-0-

Word of the Week: Carcinoma. It’s Latin, from the Greek, karkinoma, or cancer. It means to us these days to affect with a cancer, any of several kinds of epithelial cancer. Similarly, carcinomatosis means a condition in which cancers are spread extensively throughout the body.

Who is Your Doctor?

2010-10-08T14:27:00.000-06:00

It must have been some time in 1974 when the new cubicles were installed in the newsroom of The Blackfoot Idaho News, where I was an employee.

My friend and co-worker Emily was a brassy woman, vivacious, outspoken, experienced, competent in the English language.

Emily’s competence as a reporter and photographer made my job easier. I seldom had to correct or discard something she had done.

Hey. It was a newspaper office. There’s rough talk sometimes. The portable cubicles, a concept new to us at the time, provided privacy we never had before; conversely, the cubes didn’t always give us privacy we thought we had.

Several of us on the editorial staff were having some kind of a racy discussion. Emily, thinking she wouldn’t be heard outside the cube, said:

"Sex is a pain in the ass."

The publisher of the paper had a cube just a few feet from mine. When Emily’s comment floated out over the newsroom, the publisher, usually a sort of straight-laced fellow, leaned out of his own private cubicle and said:

"Emily. I think you're doing it wrong."

A doctor story

A doctor told me recently of an incident that happened during a time when she practiced medicine in the tiny hamlet of Yuma, east of Greeley on the plains.

A patient was brought in who was suffering excruciating pain. He had been working in the harvest on a farm when a black wasp flew into his ear.

The wasp didn’t know how to get back out. So the insect began stinging the man inside his ear, over and over.

The doctor told me she tried to wash the thing out. Lots of water, no result, no relief for the patient. They tried oil. Same lack of result.

Finally the doctor used surgical tweezers and pulled the insect out – piece by piece. Once enough pieces had been removed, the wasp finally died and his remains could be removed with the tweezers and water wash.

Ouch. The doctor told me this story while she was stitching up a minor incision next to my left ear. Sunspot removal.

Somehow, I hadn’t felt a thing.

Pro life

My primary care doctor, the one who had sent me to an associate for the skin procedure, is a Catholic.

When I first visited her, I did not know she was of the faith. By and by, one gets to know another, even in a carefully distanced doctor. When she mentioned offhandedly that her father is a deacon, I was pretty sure, so I broached the subject.

Sure enough. I got myself a Catholic doctor, by the “luck” of the draw. It was comforting when I realized this fact. Why?

As a Catholic physician, she does not perform abortions. The very thought would give her the cold shivers. You would have to consider her to be “pro life.”

Hmm. You realize, I’m sure, that the political establishment which is promoting abortion is also promoting euthanasia.

Euthanasia is the act of putting someone “out of his misery.”

Think about it: My Catholic doctor is dedicated to my good health. She wants me to live. It is her every goal that I will live. This gives me comfort.

Don’t know about the non-Catholic doctor guys.

My last name

I had a run-in with someone on the telephone last week. I was attempting to do business with this someone. She insisted that I reveal to her my “last name.”

Don’t know why, exactly, but this always makes me balky. In her file, on a screen in front of her, this person already had my account number, our federal business tax number, the transaction number, my merchant number and yes, even my Social Security number. Plus she had all three of my phone numbers.

I just didn’t think she needed my last name as well.

She said, rather curtly, “Everybody has a last name.” I responded, “Liberace? Bono? Ann-Margaret? Cher? Sting? Madonna? Elvis?”

She said, “Elvis had a last name. It was Presley.” I said “Oh. Did you do a lot of business with Elvis?”

We agreed that we would hang up, and that I would try another day to reach a more compliant agent. Click.

Capitalization

Here you go, Lucille Rockne fans.

As a member of an advanced English class taught by Mrs. Rockne, I was being a difficult student, drawing out a discussion far beyond the time necessary for it.

I said I refused to believe it was necessary to capitalize pronouns when referring to God or Jesus.

“Why should I capitalize ‘Him?’ ” I said with my best I-am-18 sneer.

Mrs. Rockne would often stand up behind her desk at moments like this. This time however, she remained seated and asked, “Tom, you capitalize ‘I’ don’t you?”

The quick Laura

One evening I asked the lovely Laura, “Can you tell me the meaning of the word ‘calisthenics?’”

She can be droll. She said: "It means jumping to conclusions."

-0-

Words of the week: Euthanasia and Euthenics. In Latin and Greek, euthanasia means a painless, happy death.

In English, the meaning has broadened. To us today it means an act or method of causing death painlessly, so as to end suffering. This is an act advocated by some as a way to deal with victims of incurable diseases. You simply kill them.

Euthenics, a closely related word, deals with the improvement of races and breeds, especially the human race, through the control of environmental factors, as distinguished from eugenics.

Ah Margaret Sanger. What foresight. What brilliant science. What a heroine. Mainly because of her, more than 3,000 babies are aborted in this country every day. Every single day.

Most of those aborted are black. Negro. The idea of this is to improve the race. Genocide in the Sudan? Don’t even talk to me about genocide in the Sudan. As horrific as it is, it’s a drop in the bucket.

How about genocide right here in the good old USA, right up the street at the local Planned Parenthood clinic.

Invisible, clean, tidy, politically correct genocide. Thanks again to Margaret. Wonder if she had a Catholic doctor. At least she’s out of her misery.

Practicing the Ave Maria

2010-10-08T13:49:00.000-06:00

Entitlement

2010-10-01T14:34:00.000-06:00

Want to buy The Villa?

Once upon a time, a halfway house known as “The Villa” operated in buildings just up the street from our home and business.

Closed now and melting into the ground like empty buildings do, “The Villa” was once a set of student dormitories owned by the University of Northern Colorado.

Most recently, the complex served as housing for an odd mix of people: criminals finishing out court sentences; disabled or handicapped individuals; and the elderly poor.

Not a good mix. The criminals wanted drugs. The challenged people had to have drugs. The elderly sat in silence, turning their heads from left to right, watching the inevitable exchange.

Amid a big sex-and-drugs scandal, The Villa closed some years ago. A good deal of pressure was removed from our neighborhood when the ragtag collection of humanity which lived there was moved elsewhere. It’s palpably improved around here without “The Villa.”

We met a lot of characters over the years whose residence was The Villa. Here’s a sampling:

-- Slurpy. He was a Down Syndrome adult with a nasty disposition. He walked back and forth between The Villa and the convenience store a dozen times each day, cursing, growling and baring his pointy little teeth.

He always carried a large slurpy cup and we’d see him when he was motivating to or from a refill session. When I would be over at the mailbox and he’d happen by, I would say hello. I never got a response.

One day a freight train interfered with his free migration and he threatened violence to the Union Pacific staff. Slurpy’s freedom in our neighborhood ended at that point, but one day last week we saw him over on Tenth Street. Riding a bicycle! Aw, Slurpy.

-- Mr. Bill. This poor man had one claim to fame. He had actually met WWII hero and movie actor Audie Murphy. He would tell the story again and again.

-- Librium Paul. One day Paul came into the store, sweating. “Where’s a chair? Mind if I sit down? I’ll be O.K. once the Librium kicks in.”

-- Dog Bite. We were walking home from work on the south side of the street, accompanied by our dog Jack, on a leash as always. Coming toward us on the north side, slogging along with a huge canvas bag, was Dog Bite.

She stopped slogging and screamed. I mean she screamed. “Don’t let your dog bite me! Don’t let your dog bite me!” Naturally, she became Dog Bite.

-- Barney. Barney was the original model for the animated character in television cartoons. Tall. Pear-shaped. Always cheerful.

One day we looked out our window at home to find Barney in our front yard. He had picked a handful of flowers. I opened the door and said hello.

“Purdy flowers. Purdy flowers,” Barney said. He didn’t have cognizance of the inside or the outside of a private fence. Later on, Barney grew a tomato garden just across the fence from our house, in the weeds at the cigarette store. Barney watered his garden every day, “borrowing” water from the tobacco merchant.

-- Jowley. Like Slurpy, Jowley made frequent daily trips to the convenience store, mostly for soft drinks in large containers.

We nicknamed him Jowley because when he walked so purposefully along the street, his jowls would shake violently. Later on, he lost weight and his jowls didn’t shake so much. But the name stuck.

-- Carrot. This woman was able to sit in a wheelchair. Period. That was the extent of what she could do. She was in a vegetative state.

Often Carrot paired with Jowley. He would push her from the Villa to the Conoco and from the Conoco to the Villa. We wondered if this might be the reason Jowley lost weight.

-- Elvis. This man bore an uncanny resemblance to . . . Elvis. Dark black hair, slicked back in a ducktail. Shining eyes. Perfect teeth. A little sneer always on his lips. He was God’s gift to woman. Don’t believe it? Just ask him.

-- One Eye. This poor man also had some resemblance to Elvis, except that his left eye was missing. Perhaps through the miracle of modern medicine, whatever had happened to One Eye’s other eye had been covered with a skin graft. He wasn’t pretty. His personality had adapted to match this lack of beauty.

-- Spider. There were numerous guys who wanted to be known as “Spider.” They were criminals, to a man. They had all been reading Easyriders magazine, they were all wannabe or ustabe bikers.

They all wore leather vests which had shrunk up the back. They all smoked countless Marlboros. They all favored Harley-Davidson paraphernalia.

They were all drug-deal related convicts. They were all recidivists. Sad.

-- Downtown Patty. The last time I saw Downtown Patty, she had put on enough weight that she couldn’t quite fit in her electric wheelchair. Everything lopped over.

Patty dyed her hair purple at times, and would have one or two yappy dogs in her lap. She was not a nice person.

The last time I saw Patty she was in the downtown Safeway, careening through the aisles at top speed. She very nearly ran over my toes. I am fortunate that she did not.

Entitlement

One thing all of the Spiders had in common was a belief in their own entitlement.

Spider #1 asked if he could use our business phone. I pointed out to him that there was a pay phone 30 steps away.

“I don’t have no money. They only give us a dollar a day for cigarettes. These days, prices what they are, I don’t know how they expect a man to buy his cigarettes on a dollar a day.”

Although he had been in the state pen and although he did get a small allowance, Spider #1 firmly believed he was entitled to smoke cigarettes. The idea that tobacco is a luxury, not a staple, was lost on him.

Downtown Patty firmly believes she is entitled to run over people in the grocery store. After all, she is obese and confined to a wheelchair. So she can thrash about without a care for the rest of us.

To a man, the criminal types we knew from the Villa believed in entitlement. “Well. They took away ten years of my life.”

To a man, the criminal types we knew would swear their innocence. I’d say, “Hey, somebody had to be guilty, maybe it was you.” I’d get the universal blank stare.

I know people who believe they are entitled to their handicapped parking stickers. I know people who believe they are entitled to cable television. Or to a certain pew or parking place at church.

Ya got another think comin’ folks.

-0-

Word of the week: Entitlement. Latin, in plus titulus, a title. It means a right or claim or legal title to an office or an honor or possession. Spider #1 is entitled to his cigarettes. Pretty spoiled, we humans, to believe we are entitled, even to life itself.

Molly Hutchins 1959-2010

2010-09-24T17:39:00.002-06:00

Friday Letter #165

Brother Man spotted me in the dairy aisle of the downtown Safeway and came over to greet us.

Floggin Molly's New Low Rider 3/13/2010 1st Ride - WOO HOO
photo by Christine Johnson

We had become acquainted with Brother Man over several years. We would be working in the church flower gardens and he would ride by on a bicycle, sometimes stopping to visit.

Brother Man is a descendant of indigenous people, one tribe or another, but he doesn’t talk about it. He’s bandy legged from daily bicycling; he doesn’t drive.

Brother Man has graying black hair tied back with a rubber band in a pony tail. There’s scarcely a whisker on his pockmarked face, his nose has the classic Red Cloud or Geronimo bend and bump. What’s left of his teeth would appear to cause him pain.

Perhaps because we are friendly and outgoing and we speak to people on the street and in the grocery store, characters like Brother Man recognize us and often want to talk a little.

Brother Man asked, “Tommy, are you all right? You don’t look like you feel too good.”

I hadn’t realized that anything showed on my face. I blurted out, “Our friend Molly died on Monday, a motorcycle-pickup crash in Cheyenne.”

Brother Man looked me in the eyes and said, “I saw that on the news. She was your friend?” Then his eyes clouded over; he looked down and to his left, no longer able to meet my gaze.

It seemed to me that my report had deeply saddened him. He turned, wordlessly, and left the store without buying anything. I saw him later, bicycling past the church.

-0-

Molly was a widow. Her husband Bill “Hutch” Hutchins died of a heart attack a year and a half ago. Molly was riding her Harley-Davidson, the first motorcycle she ever owned, although she had ridden with Hutch on a variety of Harleys.

She died when some dickhead (the kindest word I can think of for him) turned left in front of her in an intersection.

When Brother Man confronted me in the grocery, I was still in shock. For that matter, I am in shock at this moment.

Hutch died of a heart attack after a full recovery from hepatitis. He won but he lost. The chemo used to fight the hepatitis weakened his heart. He was too young. We wrote about Hutch just last year. (Click on the previous sentence to see the story.)

-0-

Molly was 50. I remember well her stubborn attitude about death. Some years ago, a young woman drowned in a fast-flowing river near Glendo during a big biker party. Molly reported this, then laughed and said, “I told her not to go bobbing for boulders.”

Molly dearly loved her daughter Allison, her step-daughter Samantha, and her stepson Billy. Billy was killed in a hunting incident; he and Hutch are buried in a gritty cemetery atop a perpetually windy hill in Hanna Wyoming. Molly was in the habit of making pilgrimages to visit those graves.

When she returned from one of those trips she laughed and said, “Why didn’t somebody tell me the wind blows in Hanna.”

-0-

We met Hutch and Molly in the late 1980s when they volunteered to help with the Linda Holt Memorial Run. Linda was murdered in 1987, and a “run” is one thing bikers do to deal with extreme grief and sorrow.

Linda’s horrific death tugged at the enormous hearts of Hutch and Molly, as it still does for us.

When they lived in Kersey, Molly worked at the Holiday Inn downtown in Greeley. When Allison was born, the fact was announced on both sides of the marquee outside the hotel. Molly had that kind of effect on people.

Hutch didn’t drink. Never saw him take a drink. At a party, he would say to Molly with mock irritation, “Woman! Get me a drink.” In an equally mocking way, Molly would pretend to hurry to attend to his needs, bringing a Coke.

-0-

We invited Molly to our wedding anniversary party shortly after Hutch died. She came. But she asked me, “Why am I here?”

This summer, we invited Molly to come to church with us. She came. All the way from Cheyenne, driving Allison’s beat-up car because something wasn’t working on her own vehicle.

July 19, 2009 photo by Jaye Blair

After Mass, Molly came up to the front of the church where I was visiting with a friend. When she approached, I put my left arm around her waist.
Her flesh was warm, solid. Full of life. That day, once again, Molly promised to introduce me sometime to the hyper-realist painter James Bama. Bama was a neighbor of Molly’s family in Cody. I might still meet Mr. Bama, one day. I fantasize he and I will gossip about Hutch and Molly.

-0-

A pair of riding chaps that belonged to Hutch are still here in the leather shop. Molly had asked me to make saddlebags from the garment – no small order.

I talked with Allison just a little bit. She said I should go ahead with the project. “That’s what she wanted,” the young woman said. “That’s what she wanted.”

Laura and I sometimes offered the “grand prize” for the Linda Holt run, and one year we awarded custom tailored leather vest and chaps. Molly won.

One time I overheard Molly responding to someone who was complaining about some real or imagined hardship. Molly said, “Hey, this isn’t the Good Ship Lollipop you know.”

I also heard her express a plan. She said, “When I get to Heaven and I see Hutch again, I’m going to tell him, ‘You butt.’”

-0-

Word of the week: Mourning. It’s from Middle English, mournen, akin to the Gothic maurnan, to be anxious. Mourning is the action or feeling of one who mourns, specifically the expression of grief at someone’s death.

The De-Evolution of English

2010-09-17T15:52:00.000-06:00

Some prankster had set a wastebasket fire in the boys’ locker room at a high school. A young lady friend of ours was describing what happened.

“First the smoke started pouring out into the gymnasium and then the fire alarms went off, and then here came the boys.

“They came running out of the shower, and all of them were butt naked.”

(Regular readers will already see where I’m going with this.)

The young lady didn’t know it, and probably still doesn’t know it. The phrase she was looking for but couldn’t find was: “They came running out of the shower, and all of them were buck naked.”

One meaning of the word “buck,” used derogatorily and contemptuously, describes a young man, usually an Indian or a negro.

“Look at the biceps on that buck over there.”

A buck can be a deer, a goat or a rabbit. It can be a dandy or slang for a dollar. As in, “He’s really got the bucks.”

The ignorant “butt naked” has quite likely superseded the phrase “buck naked” in general usage. It’s an understandable mistake, especially considering that the high school boys did reveal “buttocks” or “butts” when running nekkid from their communal shower.

But it’s so sad. The de-evolution of the language is one of the tragedies of my time. I grieve for my beloved English.

A rejection

An acquaintance went for a job interview. It did not go well.

When he arrived, he was asked to sit in a waiting room. There he sat for one hour leafing through copies of “Golf” and “Trailer Life.” At long last, a woman came out and said the person
who was supposed to conduct the interview had become ill and had left the premises.

But the woman said my acquaintance should fill out an application anyway, with an eye to returning later for the in-person interview.

So the man sat down and began going through the application, filling it in with a pencil. Soon the receptionist came back and said, “No, no, no, no. Don’t do that with a pencil. It’s strictly forbidden to use a pencil.”

So the applicant began anew, using the requisite ball point pen. Some of the questions seemed off-subject, so he left blanks.

He turned in the application. The receptionist said, “You can’t leave blanks. Every space must be filled in.”

At this point, the applicant balked. “I’m not answering those questions for anybody,” he said.

“All right,” said the woman. ”We have plenty of applicants anyway.” She put his application in the shredder.

Here comes the point of this longish anecdote. Relating this story to me, my acquaintance said, “I wish I had never stepped foot in that place.”

Erk. The phrase is not “stepped foot” but “set foot.” Alas. This is probably lost as well.

The truth

A newspaper columnist, a high-dollar one, wrote, “The President has not been forthcoming on this issue.”

It gave me shivers to see that in print. I almost went into a swoon. I had visions of fingernails on a chalk board. Menudo and blueberries. Goatheads in the carpet.

Webster says: Forthcoming means “approaching,” as about to appear. “The author’s forthcoming book.” Another example: “The promised money was not forthcoming.”

Had he taken the trouble to look past “Fort Henry,” in the dictionary, the newspaper columnist would have found (drum roll) “forthright.” Right word, two words away from the wrong word he had used.

Forthright means straight forward, direct, or frank. The President wasn’t being forthright. Now that, I believe.

But the word “forthright” may be on its way to extinction. Or it may even be extinct already.

Lost words

A friend wrote me a letter. This guy is intelligent, educated, savvy. He wrote, “I was more tired then I realized.”

Than and then. There is a difference, but the difference is being lost. But get this next one: “I was so tired, I had to wander why I had worked so hard that day.”

Wander and wonder. Vastly different words, but the difference is gone. I can just see myself wondering in a winter wanderland.

It made me slightly sick to my stomach. I didn’t really feel nauseated, but I sure was nauseous. Get my drift?

For sure lost

The Denver Catholic Register, a good example of a well-written, well-edited periodical, published an article on parenting.

The story purported to give us some hints on overcoming the difficulties in “raising children” in this modern era.

Ahem. We raise goats. We raise corn. We raise cattle. We raise hell.

But dammit, we don’t raise children. We “rear” children. It’s lost, I know it’s lost, but I can’t help grieving.

I think the young woman who saw the butt nekkid boys probably wouldn’t want to say the word “rear” in connection with her children. “Rear” is too much like “butt.” So we cave in, and we say “raise.” True, the first meaning of “rear” is the back part of something, as the rear of the house or the rear of a horse.

“Rear” as it would be used regarding children means to put upright, to elevate, to build or erect, to bring to maturity by educating, nourishing and protecting.

But as sad as I might be by this fact, we just don’t say it that way any more. Moo. Baaaa. Glad my parents raised me right. Moo.

Really hard ones

How about two, too and to? How about sight, site and cite? Don’t get me started.

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Restaurant reviews

Never again will I darken the door of Isla Bonita in downtown Greeley. I’m actually sorry I stepped foot in the place one Sunday not long ago.

Hombre, I favor Mexican food. I like it a lot.

The fajitas came on a hot iron skillet, sizzling, smelling delicious. The silverware with which to eat the fajitas came sometime a few minutes after the sizzling had ended.

My fingers stuck to the table when I went to pick up my water glass. I mean my fingers stuck to the table. But there’s more.

When I stepped foot in the well-vandalized restroom, it smelled like a bus station in Butte Montana. My shoes stuck to the floor. I mean my damn shoes stuck to the floor in the restroom.

Don’t like Mexican food that well. Nope. Won’t step foot in there again.

A.J.’s

For long years in downtown Greeley, there was a Mexican place with sticky floors called “Lucerito’s.”

By and by Lucerito himself left town. Somebody else tried to take over, but you know how that goes.

The building, once painted a gleaming nauseous chartreuse, sat empty for many long months.

Then a young couple came along and opened “A.J.’s” in the cavernous airplane hangar rooms once dominated by Lucerito.

Because the new people promised to contribute to our church if we patronized their restaurant, we tried A.J.’s this last Sunday.

Champagne brunch. Twelve dollars per person. Forty-eight dollars for the four of us? Ooops. The ten percent donation to the church only applies if you buy the brunch. Ooops. Wasn’t what it was represented to be, was it?

Where’s the men’s room? It’s in the other side of the building, past the bar, across the dance floor, up a ramp, around a corner, down another ramp and then a right turn. In the dark. Oops. Sayonara A.J.’s. Or should I say adios.

The Lonely Ranch

I am told this new place, on the first floor of The Hotel of Many Names downtown, serves good
food for reasonable prices.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bar. Live music. The Lonely Ranch has it all.

Only, only, only, it has yet to be open for business when we have arrived. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, but when?

At least the Lonely Ranch won’t get a bad review if I never step foot in the place.

-0-

Word of the week: Satrap. It’s from Latin and Greek, “satrapes,” and old Persian, "shathrapavan," the protector of the land. A satrap as we know it biblically is a petty tyrant, a ruler of a dependency, often a despotic, subordinate official, probably irked by being inferior in power to a stronger, bigger dictator. Do you know a satrap? I can think of several.

Letter Number 163, Potpourri

2010-09-10T16:19:00.000-06:00

A "Contained" Blaze

Consider a few sentences near the end of the “Reader’s Digest Atlas of the Bible,” the sixth printing of which was in February, 1990:

“ . . . continuing geographical expansion, combined with the relative autonomy of individual churches, gave rise to inconsistencies and conflicts.

“While all shared the same fundamental beliefs, there developed a bewildering variety of local rites and doctrines.

“Increasingly it became evident that a more formal structure or mechanism was needed to bind the far-flung congregations together and resolve their differences through recognized channels of authority.

“It also became evident . . . that Rome was the natural center from which that authority should flow.”

Recognized channels of authority? And they knew this early in the second century of church history. Channels of authority. What a concept.

End of story. End of argument. As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be. United we stand, divided we fall. A house divided cannot stand.

Reader’s Digest rules!

Good ol’ Denver

Robert S. Allen assembled a group of essays by other writers describing various U.S. cities during the mid-1940s. The book is “Our Fair City,” copyright 1947 by Vanguard Press, Inc.

A scathing view of Denver was contributed by reporter Roscoe Fleming.

An example: “The early settlers (of Denver) improvidently shot or drove away all the Indians, careless of their value for twentieth-century window dressing, so they are as rare in Denver as in Philadelphia.

“As a result, when the town needs a few redskins to provide Western atmosphere for a President or a Sinatra, they must be imported from the Dakotas or Wyoming.

“A Denver columnist is currently making quite a stir in the city with a campaign for a permanent local stock, or backlog, of Indians for such purposes. There are cowboys on occasion, but their big festival is the National (Western) Livestock Show in midwinter, when there are few big-name visitors around.”

Sounds like a ripe opportunity for an ambitious entrepreneur. Can you dig it? “Rent An Indian.” “Native Dancers for Lease.” There must still be a need.

What’s the diff?

A "wether" is a castrated male sheep. A "bellwether" is a male sheep wearing a bell, usually the leader of a flock. Hence, the word is used to describe a human leader, not necessarily castrated, but a leader nevertheless, especially of a foolish, sheep-like crowd.

A scapegoat is a goat, over the head of which the high priest of the ancient Jews confessed the sins of the people on the Day of Atonement.

After this transfer of guilt from Jew to goat was effected, the goat was allowed to escape, or was sent away into the desert carrying everyone’s sins on its head. Find this in Leviticus, 16: 8-22.

It has come to mean a person, group or thing that bears the blame for the mistakes or crimes of others, or for some misfortune due to another agency.

So is our President a bellwether or a scapegoat? Or both?

Courtesy

Courtesy is defined as gracious politeness. It is a polite or considerate act or remark.

When the State of Colorado wanted to establish a state police force, there was opposition.

The county sheriff and the city police chief and the local constables were doing a fine job of enforcing the law. No state force was needed. Or so went the argument.

To put a better spin on the idea of a statewide police corps, some early word-master came up with “The Courtesy Patrol.”

The imputed meaning of this title was that if you had automobile trouble on the highway, a courteous servant of the public would eventually come along and help you with your flat tire or boiling radiator.

Unfortunately, I’ve lost track of the moment in time when the word “courtesy” was removed from any reference to the state police.

“Courtesy” no longer describes these minions of overweight trucks and zooming Corvettes, so the word has been lost.

Personally, on the rare occasion when I have been contacted by the Courtesy Patrol, I have been treated courteously. But I have had only two or three contacts with them in 52 years of driving, none of which resulted in my arrest or receipt of a citation.

I hope to avoid any unpleasant contact with the Courtesy Patrol, and I shy away from driving on holiday evenings when the notorious DUI roadblocks go up.

Those roadblocks are patently unconstitutional, and if I am detained in one, I fear I might not be so courteous to the patrolman who has infringed on my constitutional right to free travel.

“Courtesy Patrol” my aching gluteus maximus.

Naughty naughty

You would probably never guess this, but sometimes I am ornery.

When I go past the magazines in the grocery store, I often pause long enough to reverse any “Oprah” publication. Can’t help myself. Whatever image is on the back page, it’s easier to look at than the "All-Oprah All The Time" cover.

I don’t steal anything. I don’t do any damage. I just turn her craven image away so that people don’t have to unwittingly view her toothy grinning face.

Ornery, but a kindness to my fellow man.

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Word of the week: Gluteus. It’s from Latin and Greek, gloutos, rump, or buttock. It designates any of the three muscles that form each of the buttocks and act to extend, abduct, and rotate the thigh.

The Kids Clean Up After Us

2010-09-03T13:17:00.000-06:00

It was a large chest of drawers, worn and aged to the point that it required disposal.

We hauled it out of the abandoned apartment and across the lawn to the dumpster. My son Ben tipped the chest, allowing the many drawers to fall to the ground.

Jaye Hard at Work

Then this muscular young man picked up the heavy wooden piece and heaved it into the air. He threw it. Simply lofted it skyward.

When it came down, it broke into a thousand pieces, reasonably sized for the dumpster. It fit so well that there was room for one giant television set, a bunch of household goods and a quantity of yard garbage.

Where was my camera? It would have been so memorable to get a photograph or two of the young man destroying that chest of drawers.

Monica - we should have had a dust mask for you!!!

Benjamin, who lives near Seattle, was one of a team of family members and friends visiting helping over a period of a couple of weeks.

My daughter Jaye came from Indiana to visit – and to add her mind and muscle to the cleanup project they decided to do. My daughter Monica came from Florida to do the same.

Jaye’s friends Terri and Randi came from Idaho – thinking to visit Jaye and her family here, not necessarily expecting to do hard physical labor.

But they pitched right in, removing several dumpster loads of weeds and yard trash, toiling under the hot Colorado sun.

They all worked up a sweat. All four of my children are hard workers, good workers, seemingly tireless workers.

Benjamin models Grandpa Woodall's uniform

The “team” did a huge volume of work that would have taken me and Laura weeks. They gave us a beautiful head start on the job.

In addition to all the work, we still had time in the evenings to drink beer and wine, listen to old-time music, eat huge meals, to laugh – and cry.

It was unworkable for daughter Tammy to come from her home in New Zealand, but we’re hoping for a visit one of these days.

What a reunion. What a way to spend the time – working! Ain’t we grand?

Life

The man who vacated that apartment had called it home for 50 years. Fifty years. He moved there with his family when he was about five years old.

A few months ago, our longtime tenant suffered a tumor on the back of his neck. Brain surgeons removed the growth – but there was a cost; a result of the surgery was similar to stroke.

Now the man resides in an assisted living home, and endures therapy, striving to return to health. His family came and sorted out his personal belongings, but a lot of the cleanup was left to us. He isn’t coming back.

Materials of a lifetime went into the dumpster. The bed, the couch, the plastic dishes, the worn-out remnants of a life lived frugally, all gone, all disposed.

A trip to DIA

We left Greeley at 4:30 a.m. Monday to taxi Ben and Shana to DIA. The shuttle doesn’t leave that early, so we drove the antique Ford.

Never had I approached DIA by car at that hour. It was eerie, spooky at dawn. The “vibe” was just . . . evil.

A great blue horse with the bright red eyes appeared in the pink sunrise, dominating the horizon. A sculpture intended to entertain the masses approaching the airport, the huge structure didn’t welcome us that day. It frightened us.

“Idolatry,” I said. The first word that came to mind was “idolatry.”

I was ignorant at that point. It was my mistaken belief that the great blue horse had to do with the Denver Broncos.

Later, I was told the sculpture does not have to do with the sports team. But how would I know differently?

Idolatry. I saw that evil statue and I thought “golden calf.” I had the same reaction Moses must have had when he returned from the mountain. I have that same reaction when I see all the Broncos paraphernalia – bumper stickers, hats, rear-window decals. Idolatry.

The sculptor died making that giant structure. It fell against the artist and he died from its immense weight. But the thing was evil even before it murdered its creator.

At various times, the whole family, all of us, had to pass inspection under the gaze of the red-eyed blue horse. Godzilla himself couldn’t be more frightening.

If I had a vote, I’d vote to replace the blue horse with a statue of the Blessed Mother, or Jesus, or Abraham Lincoln. Or Moses. Hey.

Home safely

Everyone who came to visit, everyone who passed the image of that evil equine beast on the way to the Terminal of Tepees on the Plains, everyone has arrived home safely.

Laura and I got home safely as well, and even though we were exhausted from the visit, we worked that day. We worked hard.

Can’t let that head start go to waste.

-0-

Word of the week: Megalomania. It’s from Modern Latin, megalo meaning large, great, or powerful and mania, fear or insanity. To us, megalomania is a mental disorder characterized by delusions of grandeur, wealth or power. It’s a passion doing big things – hence a tendency to exaggerate. Megalomania produced the statue and the tepees at Denver International. Delusions. Idolatry. To say nothing of vanity.

A law that’s not a law

2010-08-27T14:19:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time, a person could legally buy a somewhat effective non-prescription medication to treat nasal or lung congestion.

Usually, this med would have been pseudoephedrine. It was a substance that may have had some small impact on a stuffy nose or phlegm in the breathing apparatus. I say it may have had an impact: There’s the possibility it was only a placebo effect.

Suddenly, something odd happened to pseudoephedrine. It became pseudo-legal.

The story was that bad guys use one of the ingredients in pseudo to make whatever street drug it is. Enter, the law that’s not a law.

One ludicrous idea has just given birth to another ludicrous idea. It’s just stupid. The bad guys don’t make drugs out of little pills they buy or steal from a pharmacy.

No. The bad guys make the bad drug from buckets of chemicals that come into the country from somewhere in the south.

Criminals just aren’t content with small-time operations, like making drugs out of little tiny pills that come in impossible plastic bubble packages. That’s why they’re classified as criminals. They figure out how to go big with little effort.

Even if they steal a case of packages of 24 Dristan tablets, they’re small time. The active ingredient is minute. And the labor required to take all the little pills out of the blister packs – think of the hours a bad guy would spend doing this. Might as well get a job.

But this myth became so popular that the powers-that-be felt compelled to do something. So did they take the obvious path and make pseudo a prescription drug?

No. They made pseudo the first pseudo-legal drug.

Here is the second phase of a ludicrous endeavor: To buy pseudo these days, the consumer takes a card from the display rack, presents the card to the pharmacist, who requires a signature on a list on a clipboard, then sells the pseudo to the consumer.

We have gone from the sublime to the asinine.

Is this really prevention? How does this intervene with the criminal’s intent? It does not.

Could not doctors give patients prescriptions for medication that would relieve symptoms of colds or congestion?

They could, but that would “legitimize” pseudo, giving it credibility as a substance of relief. To some degree, pseudo was always snake oil anyway, so there was a problem.

Somehow the “establishment” had to establish “control” of a substance that really didn’t need to be controlled.

Myself, I simply had to find another method of relief for the occasional cold or stuffy nose. I refused to participate in the ludicrous “Sign Here” ritual. I eat more citrus and use a saline nasal spray. Goodbye pseudo, you were politically incorrect anyway, so goodbye forever.

Here’s a fun hint, though, if you do still buy pseudo. Spy on your neighbors! If you’re sneaky, you can find out who bought pseudo ahead of you, just by quickly perusing the names on the clipboard list.

So much for “keep back for privacy” in the pharmacy line.

Linear thinking

The good Lord gifted us with remarkable peripheral vision.

When you think about it, peripheral vision doesn’t just mean side-to-side. It is hemispherical.

But because of our culture, our peripheral vision has fallen from use.

Here’s what happens. Most of us drive. When we drive, we look through a “windshield,” which closely resembles a television or movie screen.

Most of us watch television. It requires only a narrow field of vision. We simply drive and watch, and peripheral vision is lost.

But not mine. I still have almost 180 degree vision from side to side, and slightly less than that vertically, because of interference from my cap and my beard.

Why am I so fortunate? 1. Art classes. 2. Motorcycle riding.

In art classes, I was taught the powers of observation. The instructors pointed to areas of light and dark, areas of distance and proximity – and areas on the perimeter. Any painting or drawing has to have perimeters.

I actually listened to the instructors, and I learned from them. (Did you read that up and heaven, Mom and Dad? College really did pay off!)

In motorcycling publications, one often reads about the “freedom” felt by the rider and even a passenger while riding a bike.

What is that freedom, really? I think it is the lack of restrictions on the peripheral vision – side-to-side, top to bottom. I see a hawk overhead. I see the shadow of a cloud on Elk Mountain. I see a deer, threatening to leap out, off to one side. I see everything around me.

You can watch the television or the windshield if you like. For myself, I’m ever so grateful for the peripherals. This helps me with “the big picture.”

Next time you go past my business building, look up. See me up there on the roof? Look up. Look down. Look all around. Enjoy the peripherals.

-0-

Word of the week: Misanthrope. It’s from the Greek “misanthropos,” or hating mankind. It’s meaning in English is the same – a person who hates or distrusts all people. That is to say, I am not prejudiced, I am a misanthrope.

A Divided Greeley

2010-08-20T17:28:00.000-06:00

Downtown Greeley is a ghost town. It doesn’t have thousands of Muslims inhabiting crumbling ruins – like Detroit – but it’s a ghost town nevertheless.

Other northern Colorado cities do not suffer the same fate as Greeley.

The cause? Division. Greeley is divided by the physical form of the very thing for which Greeley was established. The accursed railroad.

Loveland doesn’t have a railroad bisecting it, at least not in the horrific way as does Greeley. Fort Collins has railroad presence, but somehow it isn’t as divisive.

At the northern and southern outskirts of Greeley, overpasses permit free automotive and trucking traffic.

Other than these overpasses, however, truck and auto traffic must use the accursed street-level crossings that should in all reality be maintained by the Union Pacific.

Maintenance of smooth crossings isn’t a railroad priority. They want “smooth” their direction, but could not care less about the rest of us.

Crossing the tracks in Greeley isn’t really something a thinking person wants to put his vehicle through. Hence, division. We hesitate, all of us, to cross the tracks.

Eighth Street – except for the accursed railroad – could be a main thoroughfare leading shoppers from the sticks to the big city.

Once you drive your nice car or pickup truck across the tracks on Eighth Street you may well learn not to do it again.

My navigator was doping off one day earlier this week, and we innocently re-discovered the violent damage the rough crossings cause. We were both thankful we didn’t lose any fillings from our teeth. I forgot not to go that way, but I’ll remember for a while now.

There are four sets of tracks at Eighth Street. That makes eight rails to cross. What the railroad, and for that matter the city, does to relieve this situation is . . . nothing.

So here’s the deal. The huge farm store at the intersection of Eighth Street and Highway 85 draws big traffic from the north and east, Cheyenne, Fort Morgan, Brush, Sterling.

But these shoppers don’t go downtown. What happens is people are jarred to their jonquils crossing the tracks to reach downtown, and when they get downtown, the stores are empty and there is nothing to buy.

Once you do cross those tracks trying to reach downtown, you tend to avoid it another time.

Instead, you head south from the Big R Farm Store, you cross the railroad using the overpass at Highway 34. You head on south to Brighton or Denver, west to outlying shopping areas, or even to Loveland.

The railroad has effectively blocked traffic from downtown Greeley. I know, people will tell me the railroad was here before the town. It’s true. The town grew up around the railroad.

That was then. This is now.

-0-

When Frontier Days is going on during July, the UP starts up its historic steam engine, hooks up to some antique passenger cars and travels back and forth to Denver, escorting a privileged few to the rodeo and home.

When this special train approaches the crossing at 18th St., near where we live and work, its steam whistle is actually musical, pleasing to the ears. We look forward to Frontier Days for this reason. We both scurry out to watch and hear the old time train.

If that steam-powered whistle is legal – and pleasant at the same time – the railroad could get away with far less noise at crossings for its day-to-day freight.

Taking breakfast at The Ranch Restaurant in downtown Greeley, diners risk real damage to their hearing. The train whistles are so loud, people inside the restaurant have to cover their ears.

If the doors are open during Mass at our church, St. Peter, the train whistles can be so loud as to cover up the music and the spoken liturgy. The tracks are four blocks away.

This clack from the accursed railroad interferes with sleep, with business, and even with worship.

The point is, if the steam engine whistle is loud enough to be legal, loud enough to give a genuine warning, then further decibels are extraneous. But will a shred of humanity strike among the railroad executives, and they will take action? Not likely.

It’s just another way in which the railroad divides Greeley.

-0-

Which brings us to downtown.

They’ve tried everything. For a time, two blocks downtown were blocked off to vehicle traffic. This idea was to make downtown “feel more like a mall.”

Eventually, we all realized that closing a street is like closing a door. Slam. Dead business results.

Now, at yet another outrageous expenditure of our tax money, the city has opened a sort of deer trail through those two blocks. You can drive gingerly through there, but you don’t really want to.

This hasn’t resulted in more business. In fact, more stores are closed now than ever.

-0-

Then there’s the skating rink. I call it the “White Elephant Ice House.”

Voters approved this project. Don’t look at me, I didn’t vote for it. It’s a huge building smack in the middle of downtown, used by a privileged few for fun activities.

The ice rink was promoted as a cure-all for the ailing downtown business community.

It was supposed to inspire commercial activity downtown? The White Elephant has had no perceivable impact on business. Ice skaters don’t really stay downtown after skating to go shopping or dining.

If skaters did want to dine out, they’d have to catch any specific restaurant quickly. They go out of business with regularity. There just isn’t the volume downtown to support the food-and-drink industry.

Divided by the railroad and by dumb fix-it projects, downtown can only get worse.

The Muslims haven’t arrived in any numbers yet, but they will find downtown Greeley. A rotting inner city is just the thing they’re looking for.

Spider of the Week

Word of the Week: Clack. It’s from Middle English, clacken or claque, or clatter. It describes the noise made with an abrupt, sharp sound as by striking two hard substances together.

Here's a '56 In Your Face

2010-08-13T14:10:00.000-06:00

Twelve years ago, we were driving down the street in nearby Evans minding our own business.

Laura said, “Hey. Do you want to go around the block and look at that truck that’s for sale?”

We were cruising cool in a brand-new Ford F-150. I looked at her like she was, er, touched, and said, “Naw. What do I want to look at an old truck for?”

A week later she didn’t ask. She said, rather insistently, “Let’s go back and look at that truck.” She knew that the undoing of me is to test drive something. We drove it around the block.

We soon became the proud owners of a completely beat-up 1956 Ford F-600. It had 49,000 actual miles on the odometer, but it had been rode hard and put away wet, like we say.

The first expenditure to get this vehicle roadworthy had to be tires. We bought two used wheels, two new and four recapped tires, spending $1,200. We had paid $800 for the whole truck. That’s pretty much how it’s been since then.

The gross vehicle weight of the truck is 17,000 pounds. This means it can legally carry about five tons. It ain’t no big truck, by today’s standards, but I’ve never had anything other than half-tons. For me it’s a big truck.

Over the past dozen years, we’ve bought even more tires and we’ve replaced, repaired or modified: the bumper, radiator, water pump, fan shroud, carburetor, intake manifold, generator, oil filter adapter, starter, clutch and ring gear, muffler and exhaust system, windshield gasket, driver and passenger seat, rear view mirrors, door weather strips, heater core, heater motor, universal joints and pinion gear seal.

An acquaintance of ours built the steel flatbed with some of the original equipment and some new material. Another friend modified the bed-to-frame mounting system and replaced a broken section in the truck frame adjacent to the dual rear wheels and tires.

This is nowhere near a comprehensive list of what we’ve done on this thing in its dozen years in our yard. Once for Laura’s birthday we replaced the muffler, and when I showed her the surprise she said, “Oh honey, you shouldn’t have!” Then for my birthday we installed dual tailpipes. I was ecstatic.

The truck is powered by an early version of the Ford 272 cubic inch “Y-block” overhead valve engine fed through a Chevrolet two-barrel carburetor. (That lets us out of the Pebble Beach Concours Classic show, doesn’t it?)

The transmission is what Ford calls “Five Direct,” meaning it has five forward speeds with fifth gear being direct, engine to rear wheels with no change in ratio. The drive train features a two-speed axle, giving us ten forward gears and two in reverse. Absolute top speed is 65 miles per hour.

The vehicle gets an even seven miles per gallon, loaded with freight or empty, slow or fast, summer or winter. Before improvements (Chevvy carburetor) we were getting 6.66 miles per gallon. A twenty percent improvement is pretty good, we think.

Early on, we had the seat covered in leather, and we’ve worn it out. Today, the truck has 60,000 miles – actual miles – on the odometer. Do the math. That’s 11,000 miles since we’ve owned it. It’s not easy to drive it very far.

And now, we present: Big Red Rose

“What year is your truck?” There might be a visual clue in the license plate – though the county issued this by coincidence.

The meaning of this sticker is lost on the owner. But it seemed as if it wouldn’t be politically correct, somehow, so on it went.

Save the Coal Act? That is for sure not a politically correct bumper sticker, now is it Mr. Tommy?

Remember Y2K Phobia? We were safe in Oklahoma, with the bumper sticker to prove it.

The brush guard was purchased for One U.S. dollar in a Boise thrift store. Our friend Hugh made the brackets and installed the important piece of hardware. . . . Like we go in the weeds with this thing.

This is the power takeoff. You could run a wheat thresher with this truck's engine, hooked up to this device. When we bought the vehicle, the PTO was hidden under about five inches of mud and grease. The previous owner didn't know it had a PTO.

This is a phrase invented long ago by Mr. Tommy. It's "faux Latin," and its intended English meaning is . . . "Don't let the bastards wear ya down."

Remember the Culhanes on Hee Haw? And is there any visual clue here as to the date of manufacture?

Hitchiker from Nebraska has stuck with us for years.

What a nice touch. Laura has her name on “her” door. How sweet, Mr. Tom!

This Mustang grill emblem may well be the shiniest thing on the truck. We had the horsie so we found a place on the truck for him. There’s also a Pinto.

What a birthday present! Mr. Tommy always wanted Twice Pipes and now he has ‘em. Fuel mileage and performance did improve ever so slightly after this attractive addition.

This ought to be bloody obvious. But in Oregon, they have teenaged losers fill your gas, so they might need a visual clue.

Though it’s a Ford, Fisher Body obviously built the rusty, bent parts.

Where once there was a rusty hole, now there’s a stainless floor by Mikey & Tom.

Garden tool rack can substitute as a grenade launcher.

Cows watch out! We’ve got warning bells.

Sure it’s hard to read it backwards, but the nickname in the back window is “Exxon-Valdez.” Any ideas why the truck has this nickname?

Our little duckie has a magnet in a tender place.

Mom assured Tom that a truck like that was incomplete without brass balls. (MOM???!!!)

Suck in your breath and check your bank balance when you go out to buy four of these 9.00x20 traction tires. Tom cut down the mudflaps from ones intended for an even bigger truck.

This is the End

The Candle Incident

2010-08-06T14:53:00.005-06:00

You almost have to be Catholic to understand some of this, but permit me an effort of explanation to the uninitiated. It’s my hope the delightful anecdote is worth wading through my setup.

Over the past few months, our pastor has made some refinements in the Mass at St. Peter here in Greeley.

Yes he actually has the authority and the desire to make little changes, nuances, embellishments which improve the flow of the Mass, accent its serious nature, refine the dignity and formality of the ritual.

No doubt, these modifications are a return to previous practice, lost to us temporarily through neglect or a pastoral desire to simplify things or even simply a pastoral preference. It’s all right. Little things come and go, even in the Roman Catholic Church.

To my own personal glee, our pastor sometimes likes things to be more ornate and elaborate. To this end, he has added several performance functions for the altar servers.

Their jobs during Mass have become somewhat more complex. They have more to do, more cues to remember. Falling asleep during Mass is not an option.

For example, these days an altar server will kneel to ring the bells at the appropriate times during Mass. There was a time when this wasn’t done at St. Peter.

A couple of these added duties have to do with candles, which is what this story highlights.

All right so far? At the beginning of the rite, we have the procession, in which the priest and the deacon and other servers, youths and adults alike, parade from the entry of the nave to the sanctuary and the proximity of the altar.

This procession is accompanied by the opening song, led by the cantor and in which the assembly, the choir, the clergy and the various servers also sing. (Witness this traditional practice on the right day, and it will give you goose bumps of joy.)

Preparatory to the procession, two altar servers have come out from the sacristy to retrieve two of the six candles which have been previously lighted in stanchions lined up at the front corners of the altar.

They take these candles to the “back” of the church and when the time is right, they lead the processional to the sanctuary.

They are followed by a third server carrying the processional crucifix, and finally the clergy. The candles light the way for the formal procession. The candles drive away the darkness. A nice celebratory touch.

The deacon follows the candles and crucifix in the procession, carrying the Book of the Gospels high, for all to see.

(The Book of the Gospels and the Lectionary are open to inspection by anyone – it is the real thing, the Holy Bible, and the Church wants the assembly to know it. It’s the truth, folks.)

Upon their arrival at the sanctuary, the altar servers put the two candles back into their two holders adjacent to the altar and the deacon places the Book of the Gospels on the altar, in plain view.

Then there is the opening blessing and the opening prayer, after which the clergy and the assembly take their seats.

At this point, the readings from the Bible begin. For Sunday Mass, there are the three readings, usually from the Old Testament and one of the Epistles, and always from one of the four Gospels.

The lector (always from the laity) assigned to the first reading rises and ascends the ambo. He or she reads from the Lectionary, which has been placed there before the procession.

When he or she completes the reading, the cantor ascends the ambo and leads the assembly in the responsorial song, most often from the Psalms.

When the cantor completes this assignment, the second reader takes his or her turn, again, reading from the Lectionary.

After the second reading, the lectors return to their seats among the assembly, and all rise to their feet in preparation for the reading from one of the four Gospels. We take it very seriously.

The candle bearers go to the altar and retrieve their same two candles. The deacon picks up the Gospels again, and then in a sort of mini-procession, the servers with their candles lead the deacon from the altar to the ambo.

In one of those minor modifications instituted by our pastor, the altar servers hold the candles at each side of the ambo while the deacon reads the Gospel of the day.

The idea is that the altar servers are bearing “light” so that the Gospel can be properly, respectfully and effectively read, and those in the assembly can see the book itself from which he is reading.

The candles are also a sign that we ourselves are being illuminated by the Gospel. It’s a nice touch to the ritual, a meaningful nuance.

The crux of this story

Having been one of the lectors on this particular Sunday, my seat in the assembly was close to the front, near the ambo. So I had the joyful experience of being an eyewitness to the following hilarious little incident.

One of the altar servers, a girl of 12 or 13, has a habit of blowing her hair out of her eyes. A strand will fall, and she will extend her lower lip and puff once or twice to get the hair out of her eyes without having to take a hand from the candle she’s holding.

The deacon was holding forth, somewhere in the midst of emoting the precious scripture.

A hair strand fell into the young woman’s face. Then came the habitual reaction. Puff, puff. Oops. The offensive strand of hair moved. But in the process the candle got blown out.

I looked at her. She looked at me. Most likely, no one else saw this happen. The youngster got a most mirthful look on her face, and I suppose I did too. It’s obvious she takes the Gospel reading seriously, but on this one day she listened with a very bemused expression.

Neither one of us laughed out loud, and with great aplomb, when the Gospel reading was complete, she returned her candle to its stanchion – having quickly and unobtrusively re-lighted it from another candle along the way. She did not lose her composure. She maintained decorum. How marvelous. How well this type of experience will serve her throughout her life.

One of the dozens of things I love about keeping company with my Catholic community is the wry sense of humor, even among teenaged altar servers.

There is plenty of room for humor, even during an event so serious as Holy Mass. I think it’s called joy. And I read somewhere that the Lord wants us to be joyful.

-0-

Word of the week: Nuance. It’s from the Latin, nubes, or cloud, and French, nuer, to shade. Today it means to us a slight or delicate variation in tone, color or meaning. It can also mean a shade of difference.

Spider of this Week - white side is top, colored side is bottom. Viewed outside the kitchen window at the shop.

Friday Letter on Saturday (But Wait, We Can Explain! . . .)

2010-07-30T22:22:00.018-06:00

Once upon a time, the "Friday Letter" came out on a Thursday. That was because we had other commitments on that particular Friday. Today, the Friday Letter is posted on a Saturday. A ferocious tornado-like windstorm of 65 miles per hour caused a power outage. Computers don't run without electricity. There was also the circumstance that . . . we wanted to try something different. What's different is photographs. Pictures from right here in Two River City. The pictures took forever to process, adding to the delay. But! Feast your eyes on Wandy the Wambly Wabbit, the Widow Mrs. Black, and Mr. Tommy's very tired rocking chair. In a Friday Letter first, there's a video! Big Red Rose the '56 Ford gets a flush! Enjoy.

Yes, he's Praying.

Where is the west of the wabbit?

Scary Up Close!

The Spider that attacked the Leather Store

What a Web She Wove

Her Cousin was here Last Year

Who's Tired? Grampa or the chair?

(See next photo)

50 years of Lard-Fatigue

Ben, Shana and new Grampa!

Our Lady of the Hood Ornament

The Tempo Odometer Lies

(just 'cause it can't show 145454.5)

A Beer Truck Attacked the Mailboxes

Scruffy Gets a Hug.

(Which one is Scruffy?)

Thanks for Stopping! See you next week, Lord willin' and the creek don't rise.