A Boyce Crying In The Wilderness

Family Traditions

2011-11-13T04:09:00.000-08:00

Marguerite Starr Crain is a distant cousin of mine. Almost half a century ago, she took the time to locate and interview some of our oldest living relatives. She transcribed the interviews and I am indebted to her for doing so. I only think it fitting to post these on my blog so that others in our family can benefit from them as well.

Don Allen Thompson

Date of interview: 27 February 1968

Don Allen Thompson, born 21 April 1876 in Bell County, Texas, was the son of Elizabeth Jane Kegans and C. Hiram Thompson and the grandson of Clarinda Pevehouse and John Kegans. The interview was conducted at the Southern Manor Convalescent Home in Temple Texas. It was dictated to and transcribed by Gladys Lipscomb, 822 North 2nd, Temple Texas. Mr. Thompson was 91 years old and while he was frail, suffered from impaired hearing, and other ailments expected in advanced years, he seemed mentally alert, retained a sense of humor and was cheerful.

Crain:

Uncle Don, I am Marguerite Crain, Zilla's granddaughter. I'm glad to see you again. How are you?

Thompson:

Who did you say you were?

Crain:

Zilla's granddaughter, Zelma's daughter. Or do you remember her as Tommie?

Thompson:

Well I'll be dadblammed. What are you doing here at this place?

Crain:

I happened to be near Temple so I just came by to see you and this is where you happened to be

Thompson:

How are Tommie and Sam?

Crain:

Mother is fine but my father died a few years ago

Thompson

Too bad - I only saw Sam twice - once when they came here on their honeymoon. I sure liked to hear him laugh. Nanie and I went with Hy to Vernon - mst have been in '30 or '31 and we spent the day with Tommie and Sam. That was some farm your dad had. I thought though that was a mighty big house for such a little family - didn't you have a brother or sister?

Crain:

Yes sir. I have a brother. Aunt Sally once told mother she should be ashamed of such a tacky little family.

Thompson

(laughter)

Sally had 11 or 12 kids. How many of Zilla's are still living?

Crain:

Gladys, my mother, Ruth and Hiram. They all live in Vernon

Thompson

Hiram Garland - that was the rottenest kid I ever saw (chuckle) After he was grown he came to visit Nanie and me with one of Sally's boys - Jack I think it was. I don't think I ever laughed so hard. He could say 'how do you do?' and make you laugh.

Crain

He still is a great storyteller. Do you remember the time my grandfather, Aunt Gladys, and I visited you and Aunt Nanie when I was 15? That would be 1936. You had no phone so your daughter in Temple sent you a card us and could we come to spend the day on Sunday. You failed to get the mail so no card. The whole crowd arrived a complete surprise. I would have been horrified had I been Nanie, but she seemed to think it was terribly funny and aparently glad to see us. She kept running down into the dugout until finally we had more food than I ever saw.

Thompson

No, I don't remember that

Crain

You were quite upset because at the box supper on Friday night someone beat you out as the ugliest man there. I remember you saying it had to be crooked because you always one the prize.

Thompson

Son of a gun had to be a crook - never was anybody as ugly as I am.

Crain

When you were a child did you live near where you lived then?

Thompson

Nope - lived over on Big Elm near Oenaville

Crain

How old were you when your father died, Uncle Don?

Thompson

Eleven. He died on towards daylight, and the next morning Grandpa and Grandma Kegans came. I was sittin' out beside the house - colder than the devil, but I couldn't stay in that house. Grandpa came out and put his arm around me and told me was just about my age when his pa died and they took me home with them.

Crain

What was his name?

Thompson

John Kegans

Crain

Do you look like him?

Thompson

Lord no! He was a handsome man. Stood over six feet. Straight as a ramrod. Coal black hair. He was part Indian you know. He went to fight the Mexicans. You know that story about the Mexicans taking them prisoner and then made 'em draw beans and the ones that got the black beans got shot?

Crain

Yes sir, I know about it. Was he there?

Thompson

Mighty right he was - nearly died too. Some of his friends escaped and he would have gone with them but he was too sick. Took him a long time to get strong again. He had already fought the Mexicans during the war - afraid of nuthin' - nuthin'.

Crain

I'm sure he told you lots of stories about his experiences. What did he do during the war with Mexico?

Thompson

He sure as heck did tell stories, but they were the darndest yarns you ever heard (chuckle) He never talked about the bad times but every chance he got he would start to spin some crazy yarn and by the time he was through everybody was laughin'/ He was a good man - started the lodge at Oenaville - Methodist church too.

Crain

The Masonic Order?

Thompson

Yeah

Crain

What was his father's name?

Thompson

James Kegans - a friend of Stephen F Austin - came to Texas with him from Missouri

Crain

Is there any truth to the story that we are someway related to the Austins?

Thompson

(chuckle)

Naw - at least not that I know anything about

Crain

Who was Grandpa Kegan's mother?

Thompson

Mary Kegans

Crain

What was here maiden name?

Thompson

I'll be dogged if I can remember what her name was

Crain

Was your grandmother tall or short?

Thompson

Grandma was tall, tall and slim. She sure was good to me. You know she was born on the way to Texas. Her grandpa and the whole family came and when they stopped to raise a crop she was born.

Crain

Where did they stop?

Thompson

I don't know exactly - think it was somewhere around Texarkana

Crain

Was her father in the war for Texas Independence?

Thompson

Sure! The whole bunch was I reckon. Even Grandma listened to The Battle of San Jacinto - did you know that? She was just a young girl.

Crain

Did they live close to the battlefield?

Thompson

I don't know where they lived - down around Houston somewhere, though. But when the Mexicans started in their direction her grandpa gathered all the women and kids in the family together and they struck out east towards Louisiana trying to outrun the greasers. They had to walk at night and hide during the daytime - They were camped one day asleep in a thicket when the gunfire woke them up and they knew right then and there what was goin' on.

Crain

They must have been scared half to death

Thompson

Well I reckon they were! The Alamo wasn't far out of their minds, you know. Grandma said they just crouched in that thicket wonderin' where all their menfolks were - said she would always remember her grandpa standing beside a pine tree - had his hat pulled down nearly over his eyes - so still he didn't even bat an eye. After a while the guns stopped and then they heard a horse comin' - her grandpa slipped out in the clear to see who it was and yelled back that it was a Texan so they all came out of the bushes. He had been in the Revolution you know?

Crain

Who?

Thompson

Her Grandpa Hodge. The man saw them and as he passed he yelled that the Mexicans had surrendered they could go home. He never stopped his horse - just galloped on but turned and yelled back - go home, the war is over. She said they all just fell on their knees crying and thanked God.

Crain

Who was her grandfather, Uncle Don?

Thompson

Name was Hodge but I don't know that I ever heard what else - her pa was James Pevehouse.

Crain

Then her mother was a Hodge. Do you remember what her given name was?

Thompson

Crain

Was that an initial 'M' or a nickname Em?

Thompson

Darned if I know. They just called her Em

Crain

How many brothers and sisters did Grandma Kegans have?

Thompson

I don't know. Tab lived here in Bell County - then there were some that were old batchelors - were a bunch of Hodges here too - Lord almighty there was a time when I couldn't spit without hittin' some darned relative in this county. Tab was a baby I think when they were runnin' from the Mexicans.

Crain

Are any of them living around here now?

Thompson

None - pure dee - all have been watered down they don't know who they are.

Crain

I know the feeling - that is what I am tring to find out myself.

Thompson

(chuckle)

Maybe you ought to watch where you step. Her grandpa loved fine horses but he and her pa gave all they had to the army. He had one especially fine stallion he kept until they were ready to leave and he dismounted handed the reins to her brother and told him to take him to the army - he would walk with the rest of them.

Crain

Grandma's brother?

Thompson

Yeah

Crain

Wonder which one he was

Thompson

I don't know. All the slaves went with 'em. They drove their cattle into the river bottom so maybe the Mexicans wouldn't find them - buried what food they could - packed a few belongings and some grub in a couple of oxcarts and took off late in the afternoon. They had told the slaves they were free to go or stay - they all went. Grandma said it rained so much their d???s so deep the oxen had a hard time and if it hadn't been for a couple of slaves who really knew how to handle those buggers they never would have made it.

Crain

How many of the family went along?

Thompson

All of 'em I reckon - and I think that would have been a bunch

Crain

Did they burn their houses before they left?

Thompson

I don't think so - no they didn't

Crain

Were they still standing when they got back?

Thompson

I don't know

Crain

Where are the Keganses buried?

Thompson

Coleman Texas

Crain

But Uncle Don, I have looked all over that court house and they insist to me there is no record of their dying in Coleman

Thompson

I said they were buried there. I didn't say they died there. They died in McKinney. I was there when Grandpa died. We had gone to see Uncle James and it was December and ice on the ground. He slipped, fell, and broke his hip and died. But I tell you he was still standing straight and had black hair thick. He was part Indian - did I tell you that?

Crain

Yes sir. But how was he part Indian? What tribe?

Thompson

Well now I can't tell you that 'cause I don't know

Crain

Some of the family say his mother was Mary Ross. Does that ring a bell with you?

Thompson

Well, yes I think it does. I think that's right.

Crain

Uncle Don, where was your father born?

Thompson

Right out there at Oenaville. It is hard to see how a man as handsome as he could have an ugly kid as I am - mybrother Charley wasn't much for looks either. Where do you live?

Crain

Midland

Thompson

Lord - that is a long way out there. What does your man do?

Crain

Yes, it is a long way to Midland - my husband is an orthodontist

Thompson

What in thunder is that?

Crain

That is a dentist who straightens teeth. I would like for you two to meet but we thought it might be too many in your room

Thompson

If Nanie were still here we would ask you to spend the night - we like that,

Crain

We would like it very much too, Uncle Don. And I'm sorry she isn't here. She was a dear person. I remember she laughed so often

Thompson

Yeah, she did - and there were times when she was hard put to bring up a laugh, but she usually could do it. Grandma Kegans laughed a lot too. I guess the poorest feller in the world is one who doesn't have what it takes to laugh.

Crain

That seems to be a family characteristic and I am grateful for it. We must be going Uncle Don but I want to come back soon and visit you more, I notice your birthday is on San Jacinto Day and my birthday is on the 24th of April so maybe we can come and have a celebration on all three counts.

Thompson

Well, you had better stay while you are here - I am 91 - that's old as thunder and it makes a pretty slim gamble I'll be here for that celebration. Can't you just come back tomorrow?

Crain

I certainly wish I could, but my husband has patients waiting for him in Midland so we have to go. Can we visit on the phone? I could call you.

Thompson

No, Honey. I can't hear very well and that dangblasted phone makes it a lot worse - can't hear a thing but a lot of buzzin' You'll have to come back - soon

Crain

I shall.

Note: He did not live until the birthday

Clarinda

2011-11-12T09:51:00.000-08:00

Clarinda Pevehouse Kegans was one of my ancestors. She lived during some of the most exciting times in Texas history. I recently ran down her memoirs which are incomplete and somewhat disjointed. However, they provide some marvelous insight into the woman and the times in which she lived. Her memoirs were loose and obviously incomplete. What amazes me most is that she met and conversed with many of my Texas heroes, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, William Barret Travis, James Bonham, Deaf Smith...they all knew her and she knew them.

...only because you asked. I was born in Arkansas close to Texarkana I reckon it would be. Of course that city was not there. Mama and Papa were moving to Texas and they stopped along there near the river to raise crops. They needed food to carry them through the winter. They were traveling with Mama's family. My grandfather was a friend of Mr. Austin and they all went to his colony. They were the first Americans allowed in Texas. Papa's folks also came but later

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All settled on Oyster Creek west of Houston only it was not there until after the war. Grandpa's plantation was close by. He called it Hodge's Bend and I thought he had a fine house. Of course, it would not be thought of as a fine house now but it was then. It had glass in every window and that was really something in those days. Ours was not nearly as big but Papa kept building on as we needed room.

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Grandpa was a judge in Arkansas so when we got to Texas he was the official in our district. He was everything, judge, sheriff. People would leave messages with him and folks would come by to pick them up something like a post office. The Mexican name for him was alcalde. Many settlers stopped at his plantation and our family gatherings were always held there.

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Grandpa was a very busy man so he didn't take time for us children. We were taught not to be a bother. Hello and Goodbye was about all was said. He was a tall man very straight and sat horse well. Speaking of horses he loved them and raised fine ones but he gave them all away to the army when the war started. Papa's folks came to Texas a few years before the war. We loved Uncle Preston and Uncle..

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...floods. Mr. Stafford built his gin and that made it easier to sell our cotton and we had some money. Before that settlers just mostly traded goods. Once in a while Papa would go all the way to Anahuac where there were things to buy. One time he bought me some new shoes. Oh my, I thought they were beautiful. Usually we had to be content to wear the shoes Mr. Paddy Brown a cobbler in Harrisburg made. He was a nice man Papa said but that didn't make us enjoy his shoes any better. Everybody called them Paddies.

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Everybody worked awful hard and was good and honest. For a long time we did not even have a jail. Didn't think much about it then but I do now when there is one at nearly every crossroads.

I was very young when my grandmother died - of the cholera. Many folks died of that awful sickness then. Grandpa tried to get everybody who had it to Hodge's Bend hoping it would not spread. The folks never forget how sweet and good Grandma was. I remember how jolly she was. She always had a hug for us but demanded a hug in return which was a pleasure to pay.

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Grandpa had a cedar brought all the way from where Bastrop is now that being where they grew to put on her grave. He said they mean eternal life.

Folks really enjoyed the socials she would arrange every few months. Everybody came. After she died they were not nearly as much pleasure.

I will speak a little about the politicks since it seemed to occupy about as much time as anything. Anyway when we were at Grandpa's or my uncles came to our house the menfolks talked of not much else. Mr. William B. Travis was sometimes at Grandpa's and seemed to think the Texans ought to be more aggressive but Grandpa disagreed. He thought Mr Austin could settle...

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the problems as he always had. Many settlers just coming to Texas wanted us to declare independence and then join The United States but our family and friends did not. Grandpa blamed President Jackson for a lot of the trouble. He never liked the way he treated the Indians and his constant talk of moving The United States boundary farther west was worrisome.

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...like Sam Houston either. he had a reputation for drinking too much and he had not bothered to do anything worth a hill of beans for Texas since he came. Even after the war Grandpa was suspicious he would try to use his fame to get elected President of Texas. Grandpa thought Mr. Austin deserved to be So you see Grandpa was right as usual.

There had been a barbecue at Grandpa's the fall before the war began. I remember it so well because it was like the best ever held. Not just because I had the new shoes to wear but because there was an exciting crowd. Mr Travis everybody called him Buck except us children and his friend was with him. It was Mr James Bonham and he was so nice and handsome he caused all the girls to swoon! Then there was some Mexican horse buyers who we thought were awful nice. But I found out later they were actually spies. The De Leons had sent word to Grandpa by Deaf Smith to be on the lookout for them.

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The menfolks fooled them. The didn't say a word about the politickal problems. One of them turned out to be Colonel Almonte. Grandpa saw him among the prisoners at San Jacinto. He had been so nice we were disappointed to hear he had been a spy.

I will never forget the day we heard about the Alamo - our friends dead. It was sad sad. Papa left the next day to join the army and I was so scared for him to go. Then about two weeks later he came home in the middle of the night to wake us up and tell us that Colonel Fanin and his men at Goliad had been shot. He said we would have to leave that very day for Louisiana. Words fail me when I try to explain my fear for all of us but especially Papa. I loved him so much.

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We prepared for our journey to the Sabine River that being the boundry. The slaves drove our cattle into the bottoms hoping the Mexicans would not find them. They moved the washpot and ashes beneath it then dug a hole to bury our food then replaced the ashes and the pot. Papa, Grandpa and my uncles told our slaves that they could go with us or stay behind it would be dangerous either way. Papa thought they would be safe at home if they did not kick up a fuss if the Mexicans came. They all went except Grandpa's Old Sam who was too crippled with rheumatism. We would have taken care of him if he wanted to go but he didn't. Me heart nearly broke when we saw Papa ride off to the army. I could only think of Mr. Travis and Mr. Bonham. There were so many Mexican soldiers and so few Texans to stop their march towards us.

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..too terrible to describe but we made it only with the help of our slaves and Grandpa. The slaves were so strong, and good and kind. Joshua was a slave boy about eighteen and he made a harness to wear so Mary Jane Dunlavy could ride in it. She was only four and could not walk for long. She loved riding along on Josh's back. He had long legs and when she begged long enough he would give in and take her racing across the prairie and she laughed and laughed.

Grandpa was so wonderful. He wouldn't let us walk with our cousins we had to walk beside our mother but he would walk with different ones and always held our hand. I thought of all kinds of tricks to get him to hold my hand as often as I could. He talked all the time and that was comforting during the long dark

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nights even during the rain storms we could hear his voice and knew we would make it somehow. Then while we waited for our meals to be fixed he would tell us funny stories.

Papa had made the little box for me the year I was ten. It had a butterfly on the lid and he said it was to keep my treasures in. My treasures were the two glass buttons keepsakes from Grandma's dress and a scrap of blue ribbon and a pressed flower. What do you think about that for treasures? When we were...

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packing to leave Mama wouldn't let me take the little box said it was not necessary. She was cross with me and my feelings were terrible touched because she had made room for the violin and our study books. I didn't think they were necessary. Besides all that she scolded me in front of Grandpa which hacked me so bad. I went off to cry. But I knew later that she was very distressed and didn't mean to hurt my feelings. To be unkind was not her way but it sure hurt that morning.

The next day when we stopped to eat and sleep Grandpa came over to me and pulled the little box out of his pocket. I was so tired and scared. When I saw Papa's little box then I knew that he and Grandpa who had never said half a dozen words to me loved me after all. I threw my arms around his neck and cried. The box and Grandma;s buttons were precious then as they are to this day.

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Aunt Elsie was already there. I was glad to see them Cousin Maggie Kegans was a favorite of mine. She and Mary Jane and I went down to the lake to wait for time to go. There were cold campfires there where women and children from the west had camped before they went on to the Sabine. Grandpa's was on the main road. Cousin Maggie was in love with Ham Kegans and was worried about him. I saw smoke rising above the trees across the country. I knew the settlers were burning their homes and things before thy left. Mama had refused to set fire to ours said we would be back home soon. When I looked to the cemetery and saw Grandpa standing there at Grandma's grave with his head bowed I was awful afraid that we would never be back ever.

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Grandpa was a religious man and every day read us a chapter from his Bible and said a prayer for our men. I prayed every day for Papa and I know that every body else was also praying. That was all we could for them. I had my doubts that it would be much help because I had said prayers for the men at the Alamo and Goliad and they had not been answered, but I was afraid not to. I have learned since those years as a child to have greater faith. He does answer our prayers. It nearly broke my heart when Grandpa died he had been so wonderful and I loved him very deeply. However

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...vinegar water and Grandpa put vinegar in the drinking water for the trip. Tasted pretty bad I can tell you. We traveled at night and rested during the day. Papa and Grandpa thought it would be safer. I kept looking for the Mexican deserters they talked about to jump from behind every tree. It wasn't bad when it was clear and the moon was shining, but mercy! when the rain came it was so bad I cannot describe it. The mud was so deep it stuck to our clothes and sometimes it would suck our shoes off. The slaves had a hard time keeping the carts from turning over and keeping them moving but they did. They were experts at that I think. We could not cook for two days because of the rain and needless to tell you we were mighty hungry.

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...were so blessed to have food and stay well. There was so much sickness especially the children some died along the way. Grandpa insisted it was the vinegar water that kept us from getting sick. Maybe so he had been in the American Revolution and fought with General Marion in the South Carolina swamps. That is where he first learned about vinegar water to help ward off fever. Deaf Smith had advised Grandpa to take a route north of Buffalo Bayou by a few miles to avoid so many travelers and it was good that he did that.

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We always tried to camp in a wooded place because it seemed safer. So that is where we were when we heard the guns at San Jacinto. Mercy! we were terrified as we huddled there listening. For the hundredth time I wondered where Papa was. I noticed my dear Grandpa standing beside a pine tree with his wide brimmed hat pulled low over his forehead and his arms crossed across his chest. He was as still as the tree. I loved him so and knew he was worried I went over to him and told him not to worry us Texans were whipping the socks off those dam Mexicans. He sure laughed and put his arm around me. He promised not to tell Mama that I said dam when I asked him to. When the guns stopped we just sat there real quiet until we heard a horse coming

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Grandpa went to the edge of the thicket and called back that it was a Texian. We were afraid of what he might have to tell us but we hurried out anyway. We had to know. As he galloped past he called that the Mexicans had surrendered we could go home! Just like we were one person we fell to our knees and cried our thanks to God even Grandpa.

Our family appreciated General Houston's leadership in winning the battle of San Jacinto but still they did not support him for president. They were still loyal to Mr. Austin and wanted him to have that office. They thought he was better qualified in spite of the General being governor of Tennessee. This was different Mr. Austin knew about Texas and Mexico and he had done so much to build Texas. But of course the General was such a hero at the time he won the election. And poor Mr. Austin died before the year was over so it may have been as well but he should have had that honor

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When they had the anniversary ball in the new town of Houston the next year we went. I was going to my first ball and was so excited. My dress was blue and very beautiful. The fact that we had to go in wagons discouraged us not one bit. I danced with president Houston never mind that Grandpa and Papa did not think too much of him, After all he was the president and I held the event as something I would remember to tell my grandchildren just as I am doing. He was a commanding figure.

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The president of Texas had to take second place. John was always something of a flirt with my older cousins and just teased me like I was a child so I didn't like him very well. But at the ball he kept asking me to dance and treated me like a grown lady. I decided to like him after all really a lot to be honest and he was very handsome. But oh my poor John was among those volunteers who went to chase the Mexicans out of Texas again and was taken prisoner at Mier. Of course that meant he spent months in prison in Mexico. When he finally returned home barely alive it took him a long long time to regain his strength and health. He has never to this day mentioned anything about that dreadful memory.

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...worried about his friends Senior De Zavala and the De Leons and all the Mexican Texians who had given as much as anybody else for Texas Independence. He was right to worry. Senior De Zavala soon after he did so was not mistreated but the De Leons had been our family friends since we first arrived in Texas. I am sure - (remainder of page is missing)

1854 John helped organize a Methodist church for us as well as a Masonic Lodge. Then he served as County Commissioner hoping to get us some roads. There were only two. One went across the county east to west and the other north to south, I don't suppose Temple was even in anyone's imagination at that time.

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...faced with another war! When John volunteered for the army I finally knew how Mama had felt that day when Papa left to join the Texas army. But John got no farther that Louisiana he was sent back because of his age. So he served as a captain in the Home Guard. Only a mother with sons understands the grief and anxiety of sending...(remainder of page torn off)

...two stayed with us after they were free and John gave them a little tract of land for their own, Bad as the war years were the reconstruction time was worse. We had to contend with the Union soldiers in our midst watching every move we made and the poor ignorant freed slaves were misguided and taken advantage of by the soldiers and the dreadful carpetbaggers.

When a carpetbagger went missing the army's heel was on everybody's back. I will never forget the day when John got on his horse to ride to Belton to confess to treason and ask for pardon in order to regain his citizenship and be able to vote. It was the hardest thing he ever had to do in his life and the one thing he will never be able to forget.

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John always put unhappy things out of his mind that is why we have had so much laughter in our home. If an incident was not funny when John told it he worked around the story until it was. He was a great storyteller. He never was able to make anything funny out of that trip to Belton though.

It was terrible for all Texans that is why we were the last state to do what was necessary to vote. But they had to be able to vote. These men had fought for their independence and had a proud republic. When they wanted out of the union they were forced to stay against their will. To be humiliated in such a degrading manner was almost more than they could endure but they had to if they were going to be able to vote.Times were terrifying. One day John remarked that if it didn't end soon there would be a Yankee buried in every cotton field from Red River to the gulf. There was no need for him to add that many already were - secretly. John had not favored Texas joining The United States in the beginning.

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That's the extent of Clarinda's memoirs. As much as I wish I had a more complete journal, I am even more grateful for these snippets that give me great insight into my ancestors. Her husband John is John Ross Kegans and it was because of the stories I heard about him that I decided to name my son after him.

To My Children, on Mother's Day

2011-05-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Kids,

I will be giving a talk this Sunday on Mother's Day. Since it is a day set aside for honoring our mothers I will be talking about my mother that day...but I wanted to take some time to talk to you today about your mother. A lot of these things you know but, perhaps, they haven't sunk in to the degree that they should and so I wanted to give you all just a few examples of just how special your mother is.

When I set out to seriously find a wife, one of the criteria I had was that I was determined to find someone who would be a good mother. I didn't know it at the time but, when it came to this particular quality in a mate, I hit the jackpot. Your mother is, quite simply and without reservation, the most selfless mother I have ever known. From the moment you kids arrived on this earth, I have watched her fall completely and hopelessly head over heels in love with each of you. Just about every waking thought she has and every plan she makes is with one or all of you in mind. I know that it might seem burdensome or annoying at times to have someone have so many opinions about your life but, trust me when I say, someday you will miss it.

I know this from first hand experience because, when I became an adult, and for quite a few years before, I was annoyed by my own parents sticking their noses into my business and looked forward to the day that it would end. Although I didn't know it when I was wishing it, the day that they would stop sticking their nose into my business would be the day that they died...and now I sit here and look at pictures of my parents...pictures that show them when they were younger that I am now and I wish I could talk to them and get some much needed advice and wisdom.

There are four of you children, although only three of you are living. We would have loved to have a great many more children for each of you has brought joy and happiness to our lives but, even though your mom was born to be a mother, her body simply would not cooperate. Each pregnancy brought new and ever-increasing challenges.

John-Ross, when you were born, you came into this world a squalling, multi-colored mass of goo. To be quite honest, it was a little disgusting...and yet, as my gaze shifted from you to your mom, it was obvious that she was looking at the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. You were still kicking up quite a fuss when they placed you in her arms....then she softly spoke your name and you immediately became quiet. I knew then and there that, while I would love you to the heights and breadths of my soul, those heights and breadths were dwarfed by your mother's and that she would love you forever with a love that I simply do not think it possible for a man to achieve. It was, at the same time, one of the saddest and most beautiful moments in my life. Beautiful because of the pure love I witnessed and sad because I knew I could never hope to achieve the intensity of that emotion in this life.

When you were a toddler, you came down with pneumonia. We had to take you to the hospital and your condition was serious enough that they needed to keep you there for a few days. The doctors terrified you and you refused to stay still. You kept pulling the IV's from your arm and the doctors tried in vain until the only solution that seemed viable was to tie your arms and you into your bed so that you could not move. Your mother simply would not allow that and said that she would stay up and hold you. I was on a deadline at work and had to leave. Your mother stayed up with you and held you, going without sleep for three days and two nights until you were well again.

On your third Halloween, it was during the last great recession we had and I took the only job I could find, sales. It wasn't a very good sales job but one of the benefits was that I got paid the instant I made a sale. Your mom sent me out the day of Halloween with one quest. I was to make a sale so that I could get paid and we could buy you a store-bought Halloween costume. I failed. I called your mom at the end of the day and confessed my failure. I could hear the disappointment in her voice, not in condemnation of me but in sadness for you. She told me to come home that supper would soon be ready and she would think of something. That ride home was one of the longest in my life. All I could think of was what a failure I was that I couldn't even afford to buy my son a Halloween costume

When I drove into the driveway, the front door flew open and your mom, smiling from ear to ear, practically dragged me from the car and into the house. She had taken one of your grandmother's hair extensions (I think they call it a 'fall') It was salt and pepper gray to match her hair. Anyway, she had taken the extension and had twisted it into two long braids and tied it to your head with a red bandana. Then she took some eye liner and drew on a stubble beard and placed a ukulele in your hand. You were the cutest little Willie Nelson anyone had ever seen. Later that night, you won first prize at The Ward Halloween Party. I often think about that night and wonder if she realizes how grateful I was to have a wife who could so easily make up for my shortcomings. I also wonder if you realize how special your mother is.

Daniel, when you were born, your mom and I were living in San Francisco, far away from any extended family. Yours was the third pregnancy. We lost a son between you and your brother. We named him Gavin and every August 1st, your mom makes sure that we remember him. Each pregnancy seemed to take a greater toll on your mother's health and, when you were born, she had to stay in the hospital for quite a few weeks afterwards.

We didn't know what autism was and so, when you constantly cried and refused to be comforted, your mom blamed herself and constantly berated herself for her inability to comfort you. When milestones such as walking and talking came and went, it became evident that you would need much more care than other children. Your mom spend days and weeks on the phone searching for a doctor who could even give us a diagnosis....some place to start so we would know what to call it and how to start helping you. She kept volumes of records in milk crates....enough to fill up a small library. At any given moment, she could go to the proper milk crate and get the proper folder which held whatever record she needed at the time.

Finally we found someone to diagnose you. You have autism and your mother set out being an expert on that particular disease. Such was her determination that your doctors have used her as a consultation resource. The last doctor wrote a note to anyone looking in your file, "Give this woman whatever she wants for her son, she knows more about this stuff than you do"

When the school you were attending refused to give you the services you needed, your mom became an expert in that particular area of the law. There was a point in our lives when your mom and I sat on one side of a table with the other side being filled with twelve other people, school administrators and lawyers. They were there to tell us why they would not, could not, and did not have to, give your mom the services that she was requesting (demanding) that they give to you. Every objection from the other side of the table was met with a response from your mom, who could quote them the law, chapter and verse. At the end of three hours, the head lawyer threw up his hands and said, "We have to give her what she wants" I hadn't the heart to tell him that, if he had only asked me, I could have told him exactly how this was all going to turn out and would have saved us all three hours of our lives that we weren't going to get back.

You also had a special Halloween costume. You loved The Ghostbusters and determined that you wanted to go as The Staypuft Marshmallow Man. They didn't make one of those in the stores and so your mother sewed one from scratch, making the pattern herself..it was perfect. People came up to us and asked where we had bought it.

Sarah, when Daniel was born, the doctors warned us that the next pregnancy would kill your mother. We were both saddened because we both wanted many children but, for years, we heeded the doctors' advice to make sure your mother would not get pregnant. Many times, I would sit at the dinner table and look around at my family and realize that somebody was missing...somebody was not there who belonged at our table. I never told your mom about those promptings because I never wanted to place pressure on her. I knew already that, if I even mentioned having another child, she would risk her life to do so.

Then one day she came to me and told me she wanted another baby. I reminded her of what the doctors had said and she said, "I know. But I have a husband that holds The Priesthood. If you give me a blessing, I know we can do this". I wanted to bless her that she would have an uneventful pregnancy and deliver a healthy baby. However, all that I was allowed to promise was, "you'll live".

By the time you were born, two months early, your mom had been in the hospital for months. After the most grueling delivery of all, I arrived at home to tell your brothers that they had a sister. The phone was ringing. When I picked it up, it was your mother's doctor telling me that, if I wanted to say goodbye to your mom, I needed to hurry.

I raced back to the hospital and watched, terrified as they pumped transfusion after transfusion into your mother in an effort to stop the bleeding. Nurses would scurry in and out of the room. Every once in a while, one would catch my eye, set their mouth to a pencil-thin straight line and give me a grim shake of their head as if to say, "I'm sorry, we're doing the best that we can, but she is just not going to pull through"

Later on, while I sat in my wrecked car and fought off dying, I came to realize how difficult a task it is to hang on to your life when you really should be passing on. It requires a concentration that taxes every fiber of your body and soul. It is so tiring and so tempting to just let go and float away. It is a struggle that I had to endure for about an hour and I could not imagine being able to endure it much longer. Your mom struggled like that for two days. Her incentive was that she had three children to raise.

We often hear of how selfless a person has to be to die for someone else. Very few of us know just how much more difficult and selfless it is to fight off death so that you can live for someone else.

There are so many more instances but I wanted to give you kids these examples so that, perhaps this Mother's Day, your hugs will linger just a bit longer and your kiss on her cheek will be just a bit sweeter...and your hopes for a happy day for her will be just a bit more heartfelt

Love,

Dad

When Upon Life's Billows

2011-04-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

This little black rock is very special to me. Lately I've been trying to cultivate the character trait of gratitude. I decided to give myself a reminder from time to time to stop and recount to myself all of the blessings in my life...hence, the rock.

Every day, when I get out of bed, I look to my night stand and see my gratitude rock. It prompts me to think to myself at least ten things in my life for which I am grateful. When I get dressed, I pick it up and place it in my pocket...ten more things.

Throughout the day, whenever I place my hand in my pocket to get my keys, some change, or just to keep them warm, my fingers brush the rock and I am reminded to think of ten things that have blessed my life.

When I go to bed at night, I take it out of my pocket and place it on the night stand...ten more things. I've arranged it so that the first thing I do each morning and the last thing I do at night is to think of things for which I am grateful...and to give thanks to my Heavenly Father for those things.

It is amazing how uplifted my spirits have been since I've started doing this. Little annoyances no longer seem like obstacles. I find myself smiling a great deal more and speaking more sweetly to those I love. This little black rock is becoming a very important part of my life.

I'm very grateful for it

Sunrise in the Valley of Peniel

2011-03-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

After eight months of participating in this recession, I will start a new job on Monday. It has been a difficult time and I cryptically blogged about it a few posts ago.

http://boyceinthewilderness.blogspot.com/2010/10/in-valley-of-peniel.html

The way in which this job came about was nothing short of miraculous. Three months after moving my family to Utah, the engineering firm that hired me experienced a turn down and I got laid off...last hired-first fired. I was given a generous severance package that lasted for about four months and, for the last four months, there have been lean times at our home.

The difficulty in finding a job during a recession was compounded by the fact that I had just arrived in Utah and didn't know what firms even specialized in my area of engineering. For months, I would scan want ads, look on the internet for head hunters and send out resumes wherever there was a hint of a possibility...all to no avail.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, there was a ray of hope. A head hunter called and told me that he had set me up on an interview. I was excited because this was the first interview I'd been on in eight months of looking. I decided that my sport coat was a little shabby and I needed to look at the big and tall shop to see if any were on sale.

I don't know who makes all of the fashion decisions in big and tall men's clothes but, apparently being twice as large as anyone else isn't enough, they feel we need to call attention to ourselves with loud colors and patterns. Nothing seemed appropriate and, the only sports coats that were conservative enough for a job interview were well out of the $130 budget I'd set for myself.

For over an hour. the clerks and manager all tried to find something that would fit both my budget and my frame and be conservative enough for a job interview at an engineering firm. They mentioned that they could have something in my size and budget in a week and that's when I told them that this was the only job interview I'd had in an eight month search and I needed it the next day.

I turned to walk out of the store when the manager called me back in, saying that he'd 'found' a suit....not the sports jacket that I was looking for, but a suit....It was in my size, very well put together, the fabric was a very conservative dark gray...and (what a coincidence) the suit just 'happened to be on sale for $125.00'....they threw in a free belt as well.

My interview was the best it had ever been and the interviewer told me that I would start on the very next Monday. I was elated. It seemed that my troubles were over and that our family could finally start enjoying some niceties that we'd foregone over the last eight months. Then, later on that day, I got a call from my interviewer telling me that he had discussed things with the CEO and that the position had been put on hold for a week or two. I was a little disappointed but still confident.

When a week passed and I hadn't heard anything from the interviewer, I started to get worried, however, on our weekly visit to the temple, my wife and I both felt a very strong confirmation from The Spirit, that my employment woes would soon be a thing of the past.

Then, this last Monday, I got a call telling me that it didn't look like the position would be available after all. My heart sunk and I went to my knees to ask Heavenly Father why I had been promised something that didn't seem like it was going to come to pass.

About an hour after my prayer, I got a phone call from an engineering company that I'd never even heard of. They had pulled my resume from a website I'd put it on eight months ago. They wondered if I could come in the next day and interview.

Once again, it was a very good interview but, when I asked when they would be making a decision, the head of the company told me that I was the first of many candidates they were seeing over the next week. As I left, I saw two of my competition waiting in the lobby, both younger, thinner, and more dynamic than myself. I left the office a little less hopeful than when I'd entered.

Anyway, I just got off the phone with the head of the company. They made me an offer and asked me to start this next Monday.

Just try and tell me that there is no God...that He's not aware of my situation....that He's not concerned for my well-being....that He doesn't keep His promises.

Just try.

Heroes

2011-02-28T10:17:00.000-08:00

I grew up in the segregated South. The very first words I learned to read were, "Colored Only". It was a time preceding color television, seat belts, safety glass, and central air conditioning. You used to beg to go to the store with your mom just so you could cool off. They had this delicious stuff they advertised as, "Refrigerated Air". I still recall the day I spent wondering when death would come and claim my young life because I had staggered into the Rice Food Market out of the sweltering heat and mistakenly sipped at the "Colored Only" drinking fountain.

My Great Grandfather, the father of my maternal Grandfather was a merchant turned hotel owner. He brought his family to Winters Texas after the Ku Klux Klan burned down his mercantile store in Rome Georgia. His crime was two-fold. He hired colored people and, adding insult to injury, he paid them the same wage the white folks were getting...two inexcusable indiscretions in the Georgia of 1905. So one evening several men in white hoods came to my Great Grandfather's store in the dead of night, and set fire to the establishment. He escaped the blaze with little more than his life and brought his family to Texas.

The relative enlightenment of my fore-bearers notwithstanding, they still referred to black people as "Nigra" using a hybrid between the word, "Negro" and the dreaded "n-word"...a word that I was taught was only used by white trash folks. Apparently, all my playmates and their families were white trash because that's the word they used and, ashamedly, the word I used when in their company.

It's interesting how little difference there was between the word my family used around the dinner table and the word I used on the playground with my friends but that little phonetic nuance was sufficient to provide a chasm of social distinction between a person of culture and someone you wouldn't want dating your sister.

I attended Elementary School at Montgomery Elementary in south Houston. I remember every one of my teachers: There was Miss Buzzbee, my Kindergarten teacher (isn't Buzzbee the perfect name for a Kindergarten teacher?) One day she told us we were going to have some special visitors in class that day....they never came. I felt ripped-off until I was thirty and I realized that the "special visitors" she spoke of were named "Dick" and "Jane" and had a dog named "Spot".

There was Mrs Harris, my first grade teacher, who was a stickler for manners. It was her task to prepare us for eating in the cafeteria. With a precision that would make any Field Marshall proud, she drilled us on the etiquette of standing in line with a tray, our silverware to the right and our quarter for lunch in the top left hand corner. If you brought an extra nickle with you, you could get cookies and milk. (Although the milk came with a paper straw that was only good for two sips before it became impregnated with milk and collapsed, and the cookies weren't really cookies. They were rectangular and chocolate and dotted with holes. They looked suspiciously like ice cream sandwiches without the ice cream) I never used the straw, I just unfolded the milk carton and dunked in my ersatz cookies.

One day, Charlotte Stinson, the girl who sat directly in front of me at the lunch table ordered me to stop. (I should insert an editorial note here. Charlie Brown had his Lucy, Dennis the Menace had his Margaret, and I had Charlotte Stinson)

"Stop", ordered Charlotte.

I looked up with a mouthful of milk sodden faux cookie and asked, "Stop What?" (although it sounded more like "Top Wah?")

"Stop being gross", said Charlotte.

Although I was no stranger to an accusing finger being leveled in my direction, with the charge of "being gross" following right behind, I couldn't for the life me figure out what Charlotte was going on about. I looked to Pat Ellis at my right who eyed me up and down checking for wanton grossness and finally just shrugged as if to say, "Women!"

I looked to my left at Johnny Tait who had forgotten his lunch and was eating paste. He was similarly baffled as to what I was doing that would set Charlotte off like that. Finally, I just shrugged and picked up my next cookie. Charlotte jumped to her feet and went over to the table where the teachers were eating.

For a kid in the cafeteria to approach the teachers' lunch table was akin to a WWII prisoner of war crossing the warning wire in his prison camp. All eyes in the cafeteria were on Charlotte Stinson as she approached Mrs. Harris. I couldn't make out what she was saying from that distance but, when she finished, she turned with a smug expression and pointed at me.

Mrs Harris leapt to her feet and dragged me out of the cafeteria by my ear proclaiming loudly that if I could not mind my manners, I could eat outside with the other animals. I was accused, tried, and condemned faster than a French Aristocrat on Bastille Day. I didn't even get to finish my second cookie (For which Johnny Tait was grateful)

Mrs. Harris brought me to Mrs Nesbit, our school's principle who was, early in my academic career, on a first name basis with my mother. She was a behemoth of a woman whose massive backside rolled like thunderclouds beneath her perpetual black dress as she strolled the halls of Montgomery Elementary. Whether she was always dressed in black because she was in mourning for a lost husband or her youthful figure, I do not know. What I do know is that one day Kevin McCreary showed me a picture of Sophia Loren dressed in black lingerie and black seamed hose and I was for a long time, put off of pin-up pictures because black seamed hose happened to be Mrs Nesbit's stocking of choice.

As I look back now...maybe she wasn't always dressed in black after all. Perhaps she was so dense that light couldn't escape from her. I often wondered if I threw a chalkboard eraser at her if it would hit her or just go into orbit....but I digress.

Mrs Nesbit grilled me on what I was doing that was gross. I steadfastly maintained that I was doing nothing more than dunking my cookies in my milk. Mrs. Nesbit looked at Mrs Harris and asked, "what did he do?" Mrs. Harris just looked back as if to say, "What? it was the Boyce kid accused of being gross...you do the math" Finally, they decided to bring in Charlotte to clear up the mystery. When Charlotte corroborated my version of the events there was a moment of embarrassed silence. Finally they excused Charlotte and a much nicer Mrs Nesbit said, "Tom, you can go back to class now".

Montgomery Elementary was an all white school. There were only two black faces in the place, our janitor, and the balding black man in dungarees whose oil painted portrait hung in Mrs. Nesbit's office. The polished brass plate under the portrait declared that the black man's name was "James Arle Montgomery" On the way out of her office, I stopped and pointed at the portrait and asked, "Mrs. Nesbit, why is our school named after a n____r?"

Mrs Nesbit rose from her desk and, with a speed and agility that belied her bulk, closed the door and ushered me back to my chair.

"You must never use that word", she said.

"Why not?" It was a legitimate question at the time. Practically every one I knew used it.

"Because", said my principle, "it is an evil word".

Mrs Nesbit then told me a story of something that had happened a few years before I was born, at another elementary school in Houston named Edgar Allen Poe. Like Montgomery Elementary, Poe was also an all white school whose only black face was a janitor named James Arle Montgomery. One day a man named Orgeron came to the school. He had been in arguments with the school the day before trying to enroll his son, Dusty, but without the proper documents. He angrily vowed to return the next day with the proper papers.

When he did return, it was with a suitcase full of dynamite. He walked onto the playground and gave a note to a teacher threatening to explode his bomb. The teacher called over one of the students and sent them to get the school principle and the janitor, who was the only male adult in the place. Montgomery was able to get most of the children away from the madman and went back to try and get the rest.

It was while Mr Montgomery tried to reason with Orgeron that the bomb exploded and six people, including Montgomery and Orgeron were killed.

"I want you to sit here for a while and look at that picture and think about that word you said and what I just told you", said Mrs Nesbit. Then she rose and left her office, closing the door behind her.

I sat there for a while and stared at the picture and then I began to understand. Montgomery was a black man in a school just like mine; an all-white school whose students probably called him the name I had just called him.

For the first time in my life, I placed myself in someone else's shoes. I imagined being someone who was constantly made fun of and called names and had to watch what he said or did, where he lived, ate, slept, drank, sat on the bus or even waited for the bus..for all of these things he had to carefully be sure he was within the limits, for fear of violent reprisal.

There was a line drawn between us but even at that tender age, I could see that, if I crossed that line and drank at a fountain I wasn't supposed to, the worst that would happen to me was some chuckling or rolling of the eye from the people in charge.

For Montgomery to cross that very same line would mean being arrested or, perhaps, taken from his home in the dead of night and hung from the nearest tree.

I thought of being a man who was hired by the very people who had drawn that line and demanded that he stay on his side of it...who was hired to clean toilets he was forbidden to use and polish drinking fountains he was forbidden to drink from.

I wondered, if I were such a man and was called upon to come to the aid of the children of my oppressors, would my feet be as swift and my actions as daring? I thought about how much like Christ a man had to be in order to willingly lay down his life for the very people who mistreated him

I stared at the picture of Montgomery as I remembered how Mrs Nesbit related to me that, after the explosion, the police called the families of the victims to the school to help identify the remains. Tears rolled down my face as I thought of Montgomery's own son having to wait off of the campus until all of the white people had finished their business.

Mrs Nesbit stayed outside while, for the better part of an hour, I wept as I thought of all these things in her office. Then I stood up, wiped my eyes and nose on my sleeve and left.

In the early sixties John Glenn orbited the earth in his Mercury Space Capsule, and Mickey Mantle chased Babe Ruth's record for the most home runs hit in a single season.

When I went into Mrs Nesbit's office, my heroes were John Glenn and Mickey Mantle, when I left, my hero was a black janitor named James Arle Montgomery.

Making Others Feel Special

2010-12-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

I hadn't stepped more than two feet into the Memorial Ward Chapel before Bret Bassett came up to me and introduced himself. He asked me my name, welcomed me to the ward and laughed at my jokes. Forty years later, Bret is still one of my closest friends and that laugh hasn't changed.

I was invited to a pool party at his subdivision and a follow-up party at his house that next Wednesday. At the party, Bret made sure that I was introduced to everyone. All of the time I was in his company, he made me feel like I was his closest and dearest friend. I kept thinking of the words that Christ used to describe Nathanael, "Behold, a man without guile". (later on I discovered a little guile here and there...but not much)

The first time I ate dinner with the Bassetts, I discovered a few things. First, if you weren't quick, you'd starve before you got anything to eat in that household. All of the food was placed atop a large Lazy Susan that sat at the round kitchen table. Nobody ever asked for anything to be passed, they just spun the Lazy Susan until the food item they wanted was in front of them.

I have heard people opine that the smallest increment of time known to man is called, 'A New York Minute'. It is the interval of time between the light in front of you turning green and the cab driver behind you honking his horn. However, I have discovered an infinitesimally shorter increment of time..it is the period of time between 'Amen' being said over the food at the Bassett home and the Lazy Susan starting to spin.

I wasn't quite sure what was on the menu because that Lazy Susan spun so fast that all I saw was a blur...an amalgam of foods whipping by too fast for the eye to lock onto so the mind could register. (I thought I smelled chicken) It was Brett's brother Bruce who showed me how to get fed. You simply stuck your arm into the middle of the Lazy Susan and scooped whatever dish came by off and onto the table. Once I'd seen it done a couple of times and was assured that I wouldn't lose a limb in the process, I copied Bruce's example. The timing required to accomplish this feat is something akin to the timing required for double dutch jump rope.

The second thing I learned from visiting The Bassett home was that all of Bret's brothers and sisters had, in varying degrees, the very same ability to make a stranger feel like you were family. It didn't take long to discover that this remarkable talent was due to the example set by the matriarch of The Bassett Clan, Sister Bassett.

Sister Bassett was the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove. Those ice-blue eyes of hers would look straight into yours in a way that said, "I'll brook no nonsense from you, young man" with a generous twinkle that also said, "but you're fun to have around". Even when those eye's flashed in anger, you could still detect a hint of that twinkle lurking around the edges.

I think it was because I loved the dichotomy of those angry eyes with a hint of twinkle so much that I made it my life's mission to be the thorn in Sister Bassett's side. I never left the field of verbal battle with Sister Bassett unbloodied, or even close to victorious. (but to this day, I haven't given up)

Once her youngest son, Sid, did something that caused Sister Bassett to reach out and swat his behind. I chided her by saying that the prophet, David O. McKay's children said that the worst thing he ever did to them was to say, "I wish my children would be good". Usually, a zinger like that will catch my opponent off guard long enough for me to prepare another one before they answer back...but not Sister Bassett. She shot back at me with, "I've read a lot of wonderful things about President McKay. I've never read anything about his kids though"

Score:Janice 1; Tom 0

We had an ongoing argument over my failure to attend BYU Education Week. I refused to go on the grounds that they charged an entrance fee and The Book of Mormon says that paying people to preach to you was priest crafts

This one came out a tie.

I never paid for a haircut my entire time in high school. If my hair got too long, Sister Bassett would get out her clippers and barber's cloth, set me in a chair in the kitchen, place the cloth around my shoulders and cut my hair. It was during these times of captivity that she imparted her wisdom to me. If I showed any reticence about accepting that wisdom or wanting to argue with her, I was told to be quiet and listen. Usually these demands for silence were punctuated by short tugs to a lock of hair on the back of my head.

Sister Bassett's favorite form of punishment was to sentence the guilty to a week of doing the dinner dishes. Over the years I had seen each of the Bassett children take their turn several times with this punishment. The seriousness of infraction required for the issuance this ultimate sentence waned proportionate to the days of the week. Meaning, if it was Sunday and nobody was cued up to do dishes for the next week, you watched yourself.

I thought that this punishment was reserved only for her children and paid for my folly one week by stepping over the line while teasing the youngest sister, Liz. I was roundly chastised and told that I was expected in the Bassett home every night at seven o'clock for a week so that I could do the dishes. All of the Bassett children cheered...mainly because, if I was doing the dishes, they didn't have to.

Explaining to my parents why I had to leave our dinner table and drive over to the Bassett's to do the dishes was a little awkward, especially when I didn't do dishes in our home. My dad asked me what would happen if I just ignored Sister Bassett's demand. To be honest, I hadn't really thought about it...and when I did...it scared me a little.

Sister Bassett became like a second mom to me. She's been in the hospital and, as I write these words, she is about to undergo surgery on her heart. There is a definite chance that she will not make it through the surgery...but how I hope and pray she does.

I went to visit her in the hospital on Monday and all of her children there greeted me like a long lost sibling. We all chatted while Sister Bassett slept, when she opened her eyes and saw me, the first thing I did was offer her a sip of my Dr. Pepper.

"You know I don't drink that", She said.

"Are you judging me?" I asked. "Is this the kind of thing that you want to be doing while getting ready to see Jesus?...judge others?"

I was rewarded with a huge twinkle out of those eyes that hadn't seemed to age a bit over the last 4 decades (score one for Tom)

When it came time to go, I went over and kissed her forehead, she said, "I love you forever and have since the first time you came into our home."

I've been keeping up with her progress by reading the blog her kids set up. I also read the comments of the people she's touched over the years....people who I don't know but feel the same way about her that I do. It made me think, for a moment, that I wasn't that special to her after all....but then I quickly realized that we all are.

In The Valley of Peniel

2010-10-21T08:02:00.000-07:00

I watched a program on The History Channel the other day about the ancient patriarch, Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel after he wrestled all night with a heavenly being. Jacob called the name of the place where he struggled, 'Peniel' because, 'I have seen the face of God'. The name 'Israel' was given to Jacob as a blessing by the Heavenly messenger. Israel can have one or more of several meanings from, 'struggled with God' to, 'prevailed with God'. It was given to Jacob by the heavenly messenger at the dawn of an all night struggle during which neither was victorious. The scriptures state that the heavenly being reached out and touched Jacob's thigh and that his hip was out of joint. Despite the obvious pain and discomfort he was going through, Jacob stubbornly clung to the being and refused to let him go. Seeing that the dawn was upon him, the messenger told Jacob to release him. Jacob refused and demanded a blessing.

What interested me most was the literal way in which the historian commentators took the story. I must admit that, up to that point, I too had thought of Jacob's struggle in a literal sense...but not anymore. Maybe, perhaps, because I, also, have been struggling of late.

I've been going through some difficult times, lately. Although I've weathered far worse times, what makes this current episode so difficult to take is the way in which I've sought solace and comfort in vain. In other times, when I've gone to The Lord in prayer for relief and comfort, the burdens that I carried into the conversation and laid at Heavenly Father's feet have been taken from me. Nothing in my outward circumstances had changed. I still faced the same challenges as I did before I hit my knees, and yet...those burdens were taken from me and I left that meeting with my Father in Heaven with a knowledge that I was equal to the task before me...that things will, somehow, work out and my family and I will do well.

For the past few months, however, that solace has been sought in vain. The heavens seem to have closed themselves up and every petitioned blessing has been answered with a new challenge or obstacle. I don't know when I've ever felt more alone. Like Jacob, I have been struggling with God.

I suppose that's why yesterday's broadcast seems like a Godsend to me. For the first time I understood what must have been really happening that night, and I saw Jacob's struggle with God as a spiritual, rather than a physical struggle. Jacob seeking to connect with his Father in Heaven and seeking solace and comfort and assurance from God before he went on to meet his estranged brother, Esau...and that solace and comfort and assurance being withheld. Perhaps, during his distracted struggle to connect with God, Jacob lost his footing in the dark, slipped and fell and dislocated his hip, seeing that painful injury as an answer from God for his petitions.

As Jacob writhes in pain, he looks to the East and sees that the sky over the horizon is a shade or two lighter than the last time he looked and he realizes that he has been struggling with God all night long for a blessing that seems to not come.

And then Satan enters Jacob's heart in the guise of God, Himself, and say's 'Let me go'...'Abandon your worship of me'

And this is where Jacob proves to himself the metal of which he's made. He refuses to give up and abandon God, although it appears to Jacob as if God has given up on Jacob and abandoned him. He stubbornly refuses to let go and clings to God, asking a blessing once more...and this time the sought for blessing comes.

Jacob's name is changed to Israel and he is promised that he will be the father of many nations. The great blessing that was given to his father, Isaac and his grandfather, Abraham, will be realized through Jacob. Through his lineaqe will come the Savior of the World, and he will be praised throughout eternity.

Maybe I'm wrong and misreading this whole episode...maybe it's been so long since I've had a confirmation from The Spirit that I'm misinterpreting this whole scenario....but maybe I'm right.

Anyway, it's given me the strength to hold on...to stubbornly cling to God and await his answer.

Orange you glad we came?

2010-08-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

Salerno was my first and, as sometimes happens, fourth city on my mission. Nestled just south of Naples along the southern end of the Amalfi Coast, reputedly one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. It was one of my favorite cities for several reasons.

The allies landed here during WWII and then slugged it up north where they had a major battle at Monte Casino where Germans had set up their stronghold in a Benedictine Monastery high on a hill overlooking the town of Casino. The battle was one of the bloodiest and most decisive battles in WWII and with the fall of Monte Casino, the road to Rome was open.

For some reason, I confused the old dilapidated ruins of a monastery high on a hill overlooking Salerno with the famed battle site located some 100 kilometers to the north.

In my defense, I blame a lack of interest in World History and that Italians actually believe that the grotto and manger wherein Christ was born was spirited away from Jerusalem by angels one medieval night and is now located in the town of Assisi Italy (Of St. Francis fame). Apparently the lead in the Italian water system causes these types of geographical delusions.

The fact that St. Francis' birthplace and the birthplace of our Lord is now located within a five minute walk of each other should be viewed as a bona fide miracle and we should not fall prey to the cynical assumption that this is just a thirteenth century marketing ploy. (On your way out, don't forget to take a look at our beautiful place mats which feature St. Francis' "Lord, make me an instrument of they peace" prayer in gold leaf on one side with the Holy Family manger scene recreated in stunning 3D reality on the other side....if you keep your left eye open while rapidly blinking your right, you'll see Baby Jesus wink at you)...now, back to our story.

Anyway, when I told my companion that I was certain that the run-down monastery on the highest hill overlooking Salerno was the famed WWII battle site, we made plans to climb the hill and visit it on the very next P-Day.

We started our climb about ten in the morning under a blazing August Mediterranean sun. It soon became apparent to both of us that the hill was a lot higher than we had anticipated,a lot steeper than we had anticipated, and that we should have brought along some water for the climb.

The road to the monastery wasn't anything you'd drive a car up....or even a jeep if it had a nice paint job. It was more of a goat path, complete with the occasional goat bleating out protests against out intrusion into their domain. Both my companion and I were tired, hot, thirsty, and sweaty and I suspect that if either of us hinted at wanting to go back without making it to the top, we'd have turned around immediately...but neither of us wanted to be the weenie and so we soldiered on.

About fifty yards from the top, we stopped to rest on a rock and catch our breath. That was when we discovered that the monastery which we had thought was abandoned was, in fact, inhabited. A party of three monks came down from the top of the hill towards us. They had witnessed our climb, which took the better part of an hour, saw that we had foolishly forgot to bring liquid refreshment, and were coming down to greet us with a couple of bottles of wine.

In Italy, EVERYONE drinks wine...and many Italians view a refusal of offered wine as an insult akin to spitting on their flag. It doesn't matter how much you protest that it is against your religion, they will try every ploy up to and including wrestling you to the ground, forcing open your mouth, and pouring the stuff down your throat.

The monks came up to us and introduced themselves. One of them told us that he was the prior of the small cell of monks that was living in and restoring the old monastery. When he offered us the wine he had brought to us, we politely refused, telling him that we were missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and that drinking wine was against our religion.

Given the Italian's sensitive feelings about their wine and the fact that we were Mormon missionaries on Italian soil, we fully expected to be shown the way back down the mountain. Instead, the prior inclined his head and whispered something to one of the other monks who went running back up to the monastery with the two bottles of wine.

The prior then invited us to lunch and asked us to sit and rest ourselves on a large rock overlooking the Bay of Salerno until we were refreshed and could continue our journey. After about two minutes, the monk that had left came hurrying back with a couple of cups and a pitcher of the coolest, sweetest spring water I had ever tasted.

When we got to the monastery, we saw that a table had been set up in the courtyard and the rest of the monks, about twenty in all, were busy setting up a simple, rustic meal of freshly baked bread, goat cheese, tomatoes, olives, vinegar, appricots and oranges, all made there in the monastery by the monks that now waited on us hand and foot. We were told several times how it was a pity that we could not drink wine which was also made there and, reportedly, quite wonderful.

Towards the end of the meal, the prior again bent his head and whispered something to the monk who had brought us the pitcher of water and sent him scurrying off on yet another errand. When he returned, he was holding two dusty bottles. We thought that we were, again, going to have to refuse an offering of wine when the dust was blown off and we discovered that what was being offered to us was aranciata...simple orange soda. Aranciata is the second favorite drink in Italy right after wine and coffee. When the rest of the monks at the table saw the bottles, they hastily drained the wine from their glasses in anticipation of the treat. There was just enough for a small glass of orange soda for each of us.

As we sat around the table and talked, there was no arguing over religion. Instead, we openly envied each other. My companion and I envied the amount of time afforded to the monks for study and prayer while they openly envied the fact that we were actively involved in bringing souls to Christ.

The hour was late and we had to be back and dressed in white shites and ties before 5:00 in the evening and so, after much hand-shaking, hugging, and a little more cheek-kissing than either my companion and I were comfortable with, we said our goodbyes.

As I related that story to our branch president, he told me that the monks on the hill were very poor and that they normally only ate very poor fare. "That meal they gave you was probably like their Christmas feast...and those two bottles of aranciata were probably donated and saved for a special occasion. They usually only eat what they grow or make and only come into town only twice a year and what little money they have is spent on building supplies"

The very next P-day, my companion and I and the two other missionaries that served in Salerno with us trudged up the hill to the monastery once more. The climb took a little longer this time because each of us were weighed down with shopping bags full of cheese, bread, olives, vinegar..and orange soda...lots of orange soda.

We probably could have brought one or two bottles more but we just had to have room in the bags for twenty bars of chocolate.

Hi Dad

2010-08-22T19:38:00.000-07:00

Having a child with autism under your roof hones your senses in a way that few imagine possible. One of the things that changes is that you can spot another person with autism a mile away. There are various and sundry nuances to the way a person with autism will hold their head, react to a touch, walk, talk, make a noise....it really is uncanny. Kerry and I have been in the supermarket and she will prick her ears up at a noise made one aisle over and say to me, "That person has autism". Sure enough, when we turned the corner, there would be a person holding their head at the precise angle or moving their thumb and forefinger together in a way as to suggest that they are counting imaginary money. One of the key signs is the avoidance of eye contact. A person with autism will most of the time answer a question posed to them as if they are being distracted from some unseen attraction that commands their attention...physically in this world and yet, mentally, engrossed in some other world that is far removed and distant. People who are not intimate with this disease have no idea how much Dustin Hoffman deserved that Academy Award he won for 'Rainman'.

The hardest part of finding out that your child has autism is the death of all of the hopes and dreams and expectations that had unknowingly taken root in your heart the minute that child arrived in your life. You have to learn to say goodbye to that child and start learning to love the child that you have...and yet...somewhere behind that unseen and impenetrable wall...you have an inkling...a hope that the child you thought you had is still waiting there...biding time until the day when The Great God will make all things right and you will enjoy him as he really is, unfettered and free of all mental restraints.

Fortunately, for Kerry and I, Heavenly Father has given us brief glimpses into what this will be like. It's happened to each of us at different times and in different ways but we've each had the opportunity to briefly meet and converse with our son when he has been completely free of his autism.

For me, the occurrence happened about ten years ago when I was recuperating from my accident. Kerry had gone off to the store with John-Ross and Sarah and Daniel and I were at home by ourselves. I was busy with some project at my desk and Daniel was in the room watching television.

As I worked, I slowly became aware of a different feeling in the room....almost the way you become aware that the weather has suddenly changed outside. It was very subtle but very palpable.

I looked up from my work and into the eyes of my son. Everything about his visage had changed. The ever-present grin that is so endearing and yet, so indelibly reminiscient of a person with mental illness was gone. It was replaced with the calm serenity of a person who is completely confident and free of any remorse or regret. The eyes that would only briefly meet mine now locked onto me and seemed to penetrate deep into the depths of my soul.

There was a moment of silence as it dawned upon me that I was looking at my son, completely free of the prison that had held his mind and kept him away from me.

"Hi Dad"

I was afraid to speak for fear that anything on my part would shatter the moment and so Daniel and I stood locked in each other's gaze until I finally said, "Hello son.".

"I just wanted you to know that I'm not crazy"

"I know you're not"

"Good"

And with the utterance of those words...he was gone...The crooked smile returned to his face and his eyes clouded over and my son retreated back behind that wall that he had briefly pierced. Gone to a place where I could not follow.

One day, the wall will be forever torn down. The prison doors will be flung open and I will again see him as he truly is, majestic, unblemished, unfettered...divine. And he will retreat no more to a place where I cannot follow. I will bask in his company and learn to love him all over again...and I will have to say goodbye to the son I have now.

How I will miss him.

Sesame Street has been brought to you by the letters 'D" and "P"

2010-08-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

My wife and I often observe that we do not have three children, we have three only children. We state that because they are so completely different. We have our son, Daniel who has autism. We have our daughter, Sarah who's gifted in music and dramma and math and...(well...she's a girl)...and we have our eldest son, John-Ross.

John-Ross is a genius. There's no other way to put it. A lot of people abuse that phrase when they want to tell you that their kid is pretty smart so let me elaborate. When John-Ross was three, he taught himself to read. Before he started Kindergarten, he had read the entire collected works of Lewis Carroll and was working on Melville. He absorbed knowledge, particularly literature, not like a sponge but more like a black hole would absorb light. By the time he was eight, he was up to reading the books they give literature majors in college...usually three or four at a time.

As a young father, I often made the mistake of confusing intelligence with maturity. So when John-Ross came to me at the tender age of six and a half and wondered where babies came from, I thought to myself,"What? Vonnegut hasn't covered that for you yet" I was about to give my son a volume written by Kilgore Trout, one of Vonnegut's alter egos whose prose served when what Vonnegut wanted to say exceeded the poetic license he granted himself, thinking..."there ya go, kid...that ought to explain it to you " when my wife caught me and told me I had to man up and do it myself.

Like I said, it is easy to mistake intelligence for maturity and so, since my son was using big words and talking like an adult...I talked to him like an adult. I told him exactly where babies come from; the whole process. What he wanted...what he needed at the time was a simple, "When mommies and daddies love each other..." and here I was whipping out charts and graphs and full color illustrations out of the encyclopedia.

When I finished, I felt proud. I had just passed one of those seminal moments (excuse the awkwardness of that particular phrase here) between a father and a son. I patted my six year old on the head and asked him if he had any questions.

John-Ross looked up at me with those beautiful brown eyes of his like he had been pole-axed. Then, without another word, he turned, went into the bathroom, and began to throw up. When he emerged from the bathroom, he again turned those sweet brown eyes up to me. There was a pleading in them, almost as if he wanted me to say "Ha Ha....just kidding!. You see, there's this stork and this cabbage patch..." We stood there in silence for a moment.

When he finally spoke, he said, "Surely, you don't do that to my mother!"

That was when my wife and I instituted, "The Jar" Let me explain "The Jar". It operates along the same principle as a swear jar that many families use to punish daddy when he hits his thumb with a hammer and lets fly a few expletives to which tender young ears ought not be exposed. Only the swear jar is a mayonaise jar with quarters and nickles in it. Once the jar got full, the family would all go out for pizza.

Our jar was a five gallon water jug stuffed with tens and twenties and its intended purpose was to pay for whatever future therapy our children would need due to the ham-fisted way in which I handled myself as their father. "The Explaining Incident" (as it later became known) cost me a weeks pay.

The reason you need to know all of this is because you need a foundation for the story I am about to tell. When John-Ross was two and a half, Sesame Street was his main diet. Our home had more Sesame Street stuff in it than a PBS gift shop. There were two reasons for this: First, like I said, John-Ross was absorbing knowledge at an alarming rate and Sesame Street's sole raison d'etere was to stuff knowledge into little minds, and second (and perhaps more important) we had just moved to California, into the only apartment we could afford there which meant it was in a seedier part of Freemont. While we were moving in, I witnessed a homeless person relieving himself in the ally across the street and made the patriarchal declaration that, under no circumstances, until we could move into a better neighborhood, would our son be allowed to play outside by himself.

So, while we barracaded ourself into our eight hundred square feet of stucco-finished, Pepto-Bismal pink, Heaven on earth...the characters on Sesame Street became John-Ross' closest and dearest friends. Really..his only friends.

When Daniel was born, Kerry's father took ill and we flew her across country with our new baby so that she could care for her dad and show him his new grandson. I took a couple of weeks off from work to care for John-Ross.

My wife had carefully written out and placed in a binder explicit instructions on the care and feeding of our son. She even entitled it, "The Care and Feeding of John-Ross" (I tossed the book as soon as my wife got on the plane)

Instructions??? we don't need no stinkin' instructions! John-Ross was my buddy, my pal...we were going to have two weeks of fun while mom was gone and I had carefully planned out my own agenda...with a final Saturday crescendo and climaxing with our sitting front row and center at "Sesame Street Live"

My wife had caught me once slipping Dr. Pepper into John-Ross' sippy cup and I got a lecture that lasted for...(let's see....today is Friday....) on why we should NEVER give caffiene to children. I had no idea at the time that the reason we don't give caffiene to children is for our own safety's sake. So when the wife boarded the plane, John-Ross and I stopped off at the 7-11 and I bought him his first Big Gulp...filled to the brim with Dr. Pepper. (Heck...I was raised on the stuff....if it was good enough for me, it was good enough for my son)

The next thing that went out the window was that namby-pamby box of Cheerios. I went to the store and got REAL cereal...MAN cereal....."Son, let me introduce you to a friend of mine...his name is 'Captain Crunch' Oh...and here's some chocolate milk while you're at it!"

By the time two weeks had passed, I had completely destroyed any chance my wife ever had of ever getting our son to eat anything green (unless it was an M&M) and John-Ross was sleeping ...oh...I'd say about two or three hours a day.

We spent Saturday afternoon at the picture show watching "Return of The Jedi" ...More movie food. Two troughs of Pepsi. (They don't serve Dr. Pepper at the movies outside of Texas....I'm telling you...outside of The Lone Star State, people live like animals) The next best thing would be whatever you have that is brown, carbonated, and caffienated.

By the time we left the movies and headed for Sesame Street Live, between the caffiene, sugar, and special effects brought to us in surround sound Dolby, I had my little toddler strung up tighter than an 'E' string on a Stratavarious. He was one Skittle away from a diabetic coma.

We got to the auditirium and took our seats. I bought John-Ross a souvenir, one of those thick felt "Ernie's" that was about half the size he was and sat atop a 30" dowel. Ernie was John-Ross' favorite....his best friend in the whole wide world and he was about to see him live and in person for the first time. I was almost as excited as he was.

When the lights dimmed and the spotlights began to play across the stage, John-Ross went into a kind of trance. If you've never been to one of these shows, what they do is keep the excitment level just short of the children wetting themselves...which is fine if you don't have your toddler all strung out on kiddie crack. In fact, I think that they ought to print a huge warning on the ticket. "DON'T EVEN THINK OF BRINGING YOUR KID IN HERE IF HE'S EVEN SEEN A DR. PEPPER IN THE PAST WEEK!"

They bring out the characters one by one..First the minor ones...Then they work up to The Count. By this time, I was having to physically restrain John-Ross from leaping to his feet and going up on stage to play with his friends.

When Big Bird came out, he walked right by us and didn't even look down at my son who called out, "Big Bird!...it's me...John-Ross!"

This time, merely holding my son in his seat wasn't going to do. He was creating enough of a ruckus that he was causing a scene and I had to remove him from the auditorium until he calmed down. I had no idea at the time just how much these characters meant to my son and how much he viewed them as his only friends in the world. I tried to calmly explain to him that he needed to stay in his seat or we would have to go home.

Well....John-Ross was having none of THAT! He tried to run past me into the auditorium so I grabbed him and took him to a side alcove where he spent ten minutes trying to run past me, over me or through me. The tears in my son's eyes wear not tears of sadness but of rage. I had never seen that look in a kid before (well, I had in horror movies but not in a real kid) A security guard passed by and asked if he could help. For a moment I had a vision of John-Ross whipping the security guard's service revolver from its holster, emptying into me, then standing over my lifeless body asking the guard if he would kindly show my son how to reload the thing.

By some miracle, I got John-Ross calmed down enough to go back inside. We had no sooner taken our seats when the announcer introduced my son's favorite Sesame Street character, Ernie. When Earnie came down the aisle right beside us, I couldn't believe my eyes. John-Ross was sitting perfectly mannered in the seat next to me and waved at his friend, who waved back.

Ernie went on stage and started doing a little song and dance and asking us to clap along with him. My son was acting perfectly well at the time and so I unclenched my fist from his shirt onto which I was holding tightly and began to clap along.

It was the moment John-Ross was waiting for. Like I said...the kid's a genius and he was biding his time until I let my guard down. The second he felt me loosen my grip on his shirt, he shot out of his chair and onto that stage like he was on fire! He actually made it all the way up to Ernie who bent down and hugged John-Ross before the security guards pried him loose and handed him kicking and screaming back to me.

If I thought my son had gone berzerker on me before, it was nothing compared to now. I never knew what caffiene actually did for you, based on my own observation from trying to quit drinking Dr.Pepper, it keeps your head from caving in. Apparently, however, for kids it has a different affect and acts pretty much like gamma rays do to Bruce Banner. John-Ross turned into the Hulk...right up to and including super-toddler strength. I had to hold him by his belt, away from my body, as we made it to our car.

I strapped my son into his car seat in the back and buckled him in as tightly as I could. All the way out of the parking lot he was cursing at me in some dead language and whacking away at me with his felt Ernie-On-A-Stick.

When we got onto the freeway to Fremont, it was under construction and so they had narrowed the lanes down to a single lane...to my right were orange cones and workmen, to my left was a temporary concrete rail. I had about 6" on eith side of my car to drive.

In California, the rules are different. It doesn't matter how congested the traffic is, if the freeway is under construction or you have the narrowest of passages in which to navigate, if you're not driving 80 mph, the driver behind you will MAKE you go that fast. I had to do all of that while my hopped up kid in the back seat was intent upon beating me to death with a starch-stiffened PBS character impaled upon a 1/4" dowel!

I drove with my left had while fending off the assault with my right. I finally grabbed Ernie out of my son's hand and flung him beyond my son into the far back of the station wagon..thinking that the fight was over. I was wrong...that was just round one.

John-Ross manifested his Houdini skills then and somehow teleported himself out of his super-industrial strength Toys-R-Us escape-proof child seat and flew at me, balling himself up on my head, biting my ears, and pounding me with his fists. If you want a visual idea of what was going on, rent the Disney movie, "The Incredibles" and fast forward to the last five minutes where Jack-Jack goes berzerker and dismantles Syndrome. That's as close as I can come to what my child was doing to me as I drove 80mph down a congested California highway.

When my wife came home the next day, I had to explain to her the dowel-marked bruises on my face and neck and bite marks on my ear and why our son no longer took naps....

You want to know something? I got no sympathy from her at all.

Why I Have Forsaken Broccoli in an Effort to Save the Planet

2010-07-19T08:13:00.000-07:00

A while back, a co-worker came into my office and indignantly pulled my dormant cell phone charger from the wall. What followed was a sort of dressing down by the co-worker who lectured me on the evils of leaving an un-used cell phone charger plugged into an electrical socket.

Really descriptive phrases like, "energy vampire" were tossed about. I defended myself to no avail. I even protested that I love our planet (I do love it, you know...after all...my kids live here). But really...how much waste could a dormant cell-phone charger cause? It's not like I see the lights flicker or dim when I plug the thing in!

Luckily, we have all sorts of tools and gadgets in our office to measure such things so I wandered out into the shop, procurred one and proceeded to test just how much energy I was wasting by leaving my cell phone charger plugged in when it wasn't charging anything.

6 watts. That's what it was wasting. 6 watts over a 24 hour period.

Now, to the uninitiated, 6 watts might seem like a lot and it really is if you take into account the fact that there are 1.35 billion cell phones in use world wide. Assuming that half of them charge by wall socket and not car...and if we assume that all of them are energy vampires like myself...that means that over 4 gigawatts are being wasted every 24 hours. That's enough energy to send 3 Deloreans travelling through the space-time continuum and still have a bit more to spare (once every 7 days, we get to send 4). Now, I don't care how you slice it...that's serious energy.

But still, I enjoy leaving my cell phone charger plugged in. I don't have to hunt for it and, let's face it, at my age and weight, every instance of bending down to plug something into a receptacle is a risky venture. So I wondered if I might do something else to save the carbon emissions required to generate that 6 watts of energy every day and, I must say, my research has yeilded rich fruit indeed!

Every organism on the planet with a digestive tract emits an average daily quantity of (how shall I put this?)...."miasmic eruptions" As it happens, our federal government in an endeavor that I had heretofore thought insane, has funded research into the quantity and nature of these bowel burps.

It has been established that, on an average day, an average human will emit about fourteen of these totaling about half a liter volume.

The exact chemical nature of these eruptions varies depending upon the intake of the person in question but, on average, about a fourth of these eruptions is a combustable gas called methane.

Coincidentally, methane is also a greenhouse gas.

There are 28 liters in a cubic foot and 1200 BTU/ft3 of methane. and there are 3.4 BTU/watt of energy. Assuming an efficiency rate of 80%, it takes, therefore 4.25 BTU to generate 1 watt of electricity.

Following that criteria, The average human expels enough methane to create approximately 0.6 watts of electricity...about a tenth of the energy required to power that cell phone charger for 24 hours.

Ah...but heres the wrinkle....both the quantity and, in this instance, quality of these miasmic eruptions increases substantially when humans ingest certain foods. (Broccoli, Cabbage, Beans...) In fact, ingestion of these food items can increase the volume and methane content over ten times...My wife asserts that this is a most conservative estimate.

It follows, therefore, that for every day I do not eat broccoli, I save the planet enough greenhouse emissions to create 6 watts of electricity...exactly the amount I require to leave my cell phone charger plugged into the wall guilt free. It's my own little personal "Cap and Trade"

So there it is...it's what I'm doing to save the planet...

(I am working on an invention that will allow the eating of broccoli and take those emissions and convert them to the necessary energy to power my cell phone charger but the prototype for the collection system is not quite ready for certain "Victorian prejudices" still prevalent in today's enlightened society)

I apologize for my faulty math but it seems that this is even a better deal than I had previously thought!

1/28 x 0.25 x 1200 x .80 /3.4 x 10 = 25 watts. Meaning that for every day I don't eat broccoli...three other people besides myself can leave their cell charger plugged in guilt free!. This is really exciting news. We could even market it in a sort of "friends and family" type venture!

(note to self..."Call Verizon")

Lessons from Atticus

2010-07-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

"The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience"

- Atticus Finch -

It's the 50th anniversary of Harper Lee's masterpiece, "To Kill a Mockingbird". Ms. Lee never penned another work. Why bother? Her first effort was so masterful as to assure that any further attempts would pale by comparison.

I love the book and I love the movie made from the book. I can't think of a more perfect actor to play Atticus Finch than Gregory Peck. His melodious baritone evenly dispensed wisdom in such a quiet and unassuming manner as to command respect and assent.

After viewing the movie and reading the book more times than I can count, I have come to the conclusion that the greatest lesson Atticus taught us was that there was always room for manners. Emily Post stated that manners exist to make people feel at ease with each other; and Atticus Finch was a man who, even in the most extreme circumstances, NEVER forgot his manners.

From diffusing the anger and ire of Miss Dubose to making young Walter feel at ease at the dinner table. Atticus treated all with respect and kindness. Even Bob and Mayella Ewell were treated with respect; although in Bob Ewell's case, one gets the impression that Atticus remembered his manners to preserve his own dignity rather than Mr. Ewell's

I can't think of any greater scene in the history of cinema than Atticus Finch wiping Bob Ewell's spittle from his cheek, then casting the handkerchief aside and walking around his adversary to the car where his son waited and watched. Without a word, Atticus told his son what it meant to really be a man.

After Tom Robinson's conviction, when anyone would excuse Atticus for not remembering the niceties of social convention, Sheriff Tate drove up asking for a conference with Atticus who was in mid conversation with his neighbor, Miss Maudie. Upon hearing Sheriff Tate's request, he didn't just turn from his conversation but rather asked Miss Maudie to excuse him first. I wonder how many of us, under similar pressure and disappointment, would remember such a small social convention?

But Atticus' greatest lesson came after the attack on his two children. When his only son lay unconscious in bed, his prognosis undetermined, Scout discovered Boo Radley hiding behind the door. I never fail to smile through a blur of tears when I see the shy man start suddenly and cower when his hiding place is discovered, only to calm down when Atticus' reassuring voice offered the proper words of introduction that one would expect to hear at a cotillion, "Miss Jean Louise Finch? Mr. Arthur Radley"

As the father of a child who is very reminiscent of Boo Radley, I am also grateful that Atticus never failed to grant the young man with special needs the dignity of his proper name...refusing to call him Boo like the rest of the town...hence the quote at the beginning of this post.

In reading Harper Lee describe her father, and watching Gregory Peck's portrayal on the screen, I cannot help but realize that here is a man who is as close to being like Christ as any other man I can think of.

So....a belated note of gratitude to Harper Lee for her book and for showing to us that the best things are always those that inspire us to greater levels of perfection

Are You Honest in Your Dealings With Your Fellow Man?

2010-06-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

So many times in my church, I hear talks about the blessings of regular temple attendance. I probably don't attend as often as I ought to. Particularly considering that I pass seven temples on the way to work and I work within walking distance of the Salt Lake Temple...so I can't add any insight into the blessings that come to us with regular temple attendance. But I can tell you that being worthy to attend the temple saved my job once.

When I worked in Wisconsin, the company I worked for was owned by a man and his wife who were some of the finest people I'd ever met. The owner of the company was the kind of man who would often drive by late at night, see the light on in my office as I was working to meet a deadline, turn his car around, drive to Subway, and bring me a sandwich and drink as he sat in my office and asked me whether or not they were working me too hard and what they could do to ease my burden so that I could spend more time with my family and less time at work. He was a deeply religious man who often told me how he admired my religion's emphasis on family.

After a year working there, they decided to semi-retire and handed the daily management of the company over to a man who, by all reports, hated the very ground on which I walked. I never could understand why and none of my co-workers who told me that he had confided in them about his hatred for me could tell me why. Several theories were floated...I was a Texan and he hated George W. Bush with the white hot hatred of a thousand suns so he hated me as well....I was the only one in my company who fully understood how to do the job I was hired to do and so he disliked not having more control over the process....the most popular theory was that I was a big person and he was a cigar-chomping small man who, if psychiatrists had been in his company for fifteen minutes, would be rushing to write papers proposing to rename "Napoleon Complex" to "Skrowonski-itis"

But, whatever the reason for his dislike of me, it was something I lived with. I kept my head down, did my work, and did everything I could to not give him an excuse to fire me...then one day, he got the excuse he was looking for.

We had been hired by a construction company to design a water park. The initial job came in over budget and so all departments were asked to work with the sub-contractors to cut down costs. My department was asked to cut a quarter of a million from the cost and so I went back and forth between the two HVAC companies that were bidding on the job to get suggestions on how we might do what was needed to get the job within budget.

On my own, I discovered a possible way to cut more than a quarter of a million from the job. This job had a North Woods Lodge-type feel so it featured steep sloping roofs. I found a small obscure portion of the roof that would support equipment allowing me to go with a much less expensive system and made the changes over the weekend.

The following Monday, I went to our client with my proposed changes as well as my estimate of the potential savings. When my ideas were green-lit, I said, "Great! I'll pass this along to the two HVAC companies". It was then that I was instructed by our client to do something I considered unethical. I was told to give the information to only one of the companies and leave the other in the dark. I took my concerns to the CEO who told me to do as our client had instructed.

When the new bids came in, the company that had been informed of the new changes had a clear and distinct advantage over the one left in the dark. The owner of the company who had been left out of the loop called me in bewilderment. During the course of our conversation, he said, "I don't know where they're getting their numbers from. Are you giving them the same information that you're giving me?"

My heart came to my throat as I thought of all the possible ramifications of telling the truth...none of which were immediately good for me"

After a moment's hesitation, I said, "No, I'm not."

"Can you give me the same information that you're giving them?"

Another moment's hesitation..."No I can't"

"WHY NOT!?!?!?"

"You need to take that up with our client"

I'm not sure exactly what the conversation was between the two companies but when the smoke cleared, our client had been threatened with a lawsuit and had made some settlement agreement with the company that had been left out of the loop.

I was called into my CEO's office and, when I got there, Our CEO, and our client's CEO were in the office, both glared at me as I sat down and took my seat. I was about to be fired.

I was raked over the coals for the better part of thirty minutes being told how I had caused embarrassment to our firm and our client's firm because of my inability to maintain confidentiality. I heard the door open behind me, I assumed it was the head of Human Resources coming to give me my severance papers.

It was the owner of the company who came into the room and took a seat next to me. As he sat down, the CEO of the company asked me, "What were you thinking of?"

There was a bit of a pause. I glanced over to the owner and recalled all of the discussions we had had about my religion and how he had always expressed admiration for our ideals...and then, I reached into my wallet and pulled out my temple recommend.

"Do you see this piece of paper?" I asked. "This is one of the most precious things I own. It allows me to go to a place I consider to be one of the most sacred places on earth and worship my Heavenly Father". The CEO looked a bit confused but he allowed me to continue. "Every year, I have to have this piece of paper renewed. During that process, I have to be interviewed twice; each time by a man that I recognize as being called of God to represent Him. Both of them will ask me several questions, one of which will be, 'Are you honest in your dealings with your fellow man?'. You ask me what I was thinking? I was thinking how I was going to answer that question the next time I was asked."

I stopped talking and left my temple recommend on the table. After an awkward moment of silence, the owner of the company reached out, took the recommend, handed it back to me and then turned to the men on the other side of the able and said, "Gentlemen, this meeting is over".

Eventually the owner decided to sell the company but for the time he was there, I was assured by people in the know that I was untouchable.

The Portrait

2010-06-11T06:04:00.000-07:00

29 years ago tomorrow, Kerry Huber against all better judgement, rescued me from bachelorhood. I knew Kerry exactly three weeks before I proposed to her. In a way, it was an arranged marriage. It came about in a rather unorthodox way. (but when have I ever been orthodox about anything?)

As he officially released me from my mission, my Stake President asked me if I would like a blessing. I'm not certain if it was a usual offer but he was my Stake President and his son was my best friend and, in high school I had spent more waking hours at his home than my own so I looked to him and his wife as secondary parents. In light of all that, I readily accepted.

During the blessing, he paused for what seemed an awfully long time. In retrospect, I now know exactly what was going on because it's happened to me since. During the course of a blessing, you're prompted to say something out of the ordinary and, for a while, you kind of have to chew on it. Like when Kerry lost her diamond bracelet, the very first really nice piece of jewelry I'd given her and, in retracing her steps, she realized it could be anywhere up to and including a garbage truck that had carried away tree clippings earlier that day.

She was inconsolable and asked me for a blessing during which I was prompted to promise her she would get it back (I normally don't involve Heavenly Father on the matter of lost jewelry but this was a very sentimental piece and my wife was crying)

Anyway, when I felt prompted to give my wife that blessing, I hemmed and hawed for a moment thinking over the rammifications. Here I was using my priesthood to promise returned jewelry to my wife. It didn't feel right....on a smaller scale, like Nephi wrestling with The Spirit over the demise of Laban.

So, when I was prompted to give that promise to my wife, I kind of backpedaled and said, in my heart, "You know, Heavenly Father, if that's how you feel about it, why don't you just tell her yourself and leave me out of the whole thing?"

"Tell her"

"Okay...but...this doesn't feel right, Heavenly Father. I'm using my priesthood here to promise a blessing to my wife and it seems kind of vain"

"Tell Her"

"Okay...but....you're SURE she's going to get it back? Because, if I promise this thing and she doesn't get it back....I'm gonna look awful fool.."

"Would you just tell her already?

So I promised my wife she would get her bracelet back.

"Now tell her again"

The next day, I walked out of the house, went straight to the garage, opened the door and looked in the bottom of the fertilizer spreader to see my wife's bracelet lying there. (whew)

Anyway...that kind of exchange must have been what was happening in President Bassett's mind while he was paused in my blessing because, the next words out of his mouth were, "Tom, not everyone has somebody that they are supposed to marry, but you do. I bless you that, when you see her, you will know it instantly"

Two years later, I was talking to my girlfriend, Lisa at institute when I looked across the room and saw Kerry. The next thing I thought was, "what am I going to tell Lisa?"

Kerry and I were engaged three weeks later and married four months later. Over the years, I have seen the wisdom of our Heavenly Father in placing the two of us together. When the school district we were in was refusing to give our special needs son the services he needed, I watched in awe as the lioness I married argued with no fewer than twelve school district officials and lawyers. At the end of three hours, they finally threw in the towel and gave us everything we were asking for.

While I was recuperating from my accident, when growing a beard was the only thing I could do by myself, she fed and dressed and bathed me for the better part of a year. She never complained once or made me feel like the service she rendered me was a burden.

Over the years, she has been my companion, my confidant, my willing scrabble partner and, when I've needed it, the thorn in my side and the boot to my rear.

Our courtship was brief and so we had to get to know each other better after we married. We are both dominant personalities and so we've had to work out many many compromises over the last three decades. Most of these have concerned my personal wardrobe choices. If she hates a tie that I love, the compromise we work out is that she tells me I can keep it and then one day, several months later, I will look through my closet and realize that the tie we argued over hasn't been seen in quite a while.

If I could change one thing about her, it would be her own self-deprication. Although I love to take pictures, my wife has never been a willing subject, telling me that she want's to get a better haircut or lose some weight first.

Every time she offers these excuses, I look at her and wonder what the heck she's talking about. She looks more beautiful today than the day we married and I realize that I cannot look at her without filtering everything I take in through the three decades of our life together. And so I wrote her this poem and, in honor of the anniversary of her agreeing to rescue me, I share it with our friends:

(I'm a little ham-fisted when it comes to poetry so all I can manage is iambic pentameter)

The Portrait

I have no portrait of my wife to place upon a wall
There's none within my wallet, to share with one and all
There lies a canvas in my heart that's stretched out through the years
and with a brush of memories, I paint her portrait there

I have so many memories, from each of them I choose
her colors vibrant and bold or soft and subtle hues
and every time I add a stroke, I glance again to see
the portrait in my heart has grown more beautiful to me

Across the altar of The Lord, her lovliness and grace
are captured in my memory, and form the portrait's face
The day that our first son was born, I watched her hold the child
and it is from that memory, I paint the portrait's smile

Each tender word, each warm caress, each moment that I prize
are captured in my memory and shines within her eyes
And every day of triumph, and those of pain and grief
adds character, and contrast, and beauty underneath.

There are no borders in my heart; no barriers, nor fences
to mark the place the portrait stops, and where my soul commences
The countenance shall never fade; the colors never set
upon this cherished rendering, that's not quite finished yet.

The Last Spanking

2010-06-01T13:23:00.000-07:00

We never did spank our kids a lot. In our home, there were only two offenses which were 'spanking-worthy'

1) The child in question did something that endangered himself or others
2) The child in question directly (and I mean DIRECTLY) defied parental authority

Then one day in Foley's during the Christmas holiday rush, Daniel became frustrated with his mother for something or other and he raised his fist to strike her. I blocked the blow and, using his raised hand to turn him around, administered two swift swats to his hindquarters.

Sniffling ensued.

I pulled Daniel off to the side and asked, "Do you know why I spanked you?"

....sniff...."yes"....sniff

"Why did I spank you?", I asked

"'cause you don't love me"

That was the last spanking I ever gave.

(you should thank your older brother, Sarah)

The Duckars

2010-05-05T06:18:00.001-07:00

When I lived in Katy Texas, I would often spend an afternoon fishing at Mary Jo Pecham Park. It was decent, as far as fishing spots go. There was rumored to be a monster catfish lurking somewhere just southwest of the pier that jutted into the eastern part of the pond. I never did see the huge fish but once, I baited one of my lines, cast out and laid it on the shore in order to bait my other line and I saw a hundred dollar rod and reel whip into the pond, following whatever fish had grabbed my bait. On another occasion, as I was watching the waterfowl swim along the pond, one of the ducks just vanished beneath the surface and never came up again. Clearly there was something large enough to drag in a rod and reel and swallow an adult duck in that water.

There was also on this pond, a female mallard with an unusually large brood of ducklings following her about. Where the most I was used to seeing was five or six babies with a mother duck, this one had fifteen. Several of my fellow anglers and I surmised that this particular hen had adopted the ducklings from other hens who had fallen prey to the monster catfish in the pond.

As you can imagine, taking care of such a large number of babies was more than a full time job for this mother hen and, in watching her go about her tasks, it was quite evident that she had developed the organizational skills and the resourcefullness of the Duggar family on television.

When it rained, the mother duck would spread her wings as wide as she could and all of the little ducklings would scramble to take shelter underneath. The problem was that the area of the combined ducklings was greater than the area of the mother ducks wingspan...no problem, they simply devised an ingenious method of taking turns. When a duckling in pack pushed his way under the wing, a duckling in front would pop out much the way a ping pong ball would pop out of a tube stuffed with ping pong balls when you shoved one into the end. The evicted duckling would never try to fight his way back under the wing. Rather, he would scramble around to the back and take his place in the queue that formed back there. All the while the mother duck looked serene and, I would even say 'majestic' as she stood rock still with the rain pelting her and her outstreached wings.

Feeding the ducklings also required a bit of ingenuity on the part of the mother duck. Most of the smaller families of duck had no problem finding enough morsels to feed 5 or 6 young ones but 15 in the same group required the mother duck to be constantly on the move. It soon became apparent that she was a novelty and she quickly decided to take advantage of her unique situation and 'took the show on the road' as it were.

It took about two hours for this mother duck to parade her brood around the lake. And all the time I was there fishing, that's all she did. She would walk around the lake with her ducklings following her and, when she came to a family enjoying a picnic or a fisherman, she would stop and gather her ducklings around her and look up at the humans expectantly.

She was never disappointed. Corners were torn from sandwiches and spare hot dog buns were broken up to feed to the huge family of ducks. They were particularly fond of worms and fishermen were especially sought out to share in the responsibility of feeding her family.

Once, she came up and stopped her family in front of me as I was fishing. I wanted to test her resolve and so I just ignored her for a while as I fished. Her patience with me lasted about fifteen seconds and soon I felt a peck at the toe of my boot.

I stamped my foot at her....

two pecks on my boot....

I gave her a worm. She looked at me as if to say, "are you kidding me?"

another peck.

I laughed out loud...is there anything more courageous than a mother taking care of her children?

I upended both cartons of bait onto the ground in front of the ducklings and started packing to leave.

It didn't look like the fishing was going to be that good anyway.

Get It While It's Hot

2010-04-07T12:50:00.000-07:00

In my earlier married years, I used to rent a house from a dear friend of mine...a lot of you know him, Fred Knies. Actually, to call Fred a friend really doesn't do justice to him. He's in my kidney club, one of those rare individuals who, along with my siblings can call me at any time and request one of my kidneys or some bone marrow.

For those of you who don't know Fred, let me say that, he knows the value of a dollar. He did the grocery shopping because he felt his wife wasn't using enough coupons and I've personally seen him weigh all the five pound bags of potatoes so that he could get the one that weighed five and a half pounds and line up all the bottles of apple juice to get the one that was filled a fraction of an inch more than the others.

So, when we went a few years renting from him without a rent increase, it wasn't because Fred was forgetful, it was because he was mindful of our own financial straits at the time and he was exhibiting charity, a rare trait to be combined with someone so mindful of money. But then, Fred is a rare individual.

But, as it does happen, our own financial outlook changed for the better and Fred, who lived just a few doors down from us, came up to me as I was finishing up the yard work and told me that he was raising the rent by fifty dollars a month.

Now, I know I should have been grateful to him that he hadn't raised the rent in several years but all I was thinking at the time was that I was just enjoying having my head above water and now I have a rent increase to deal with.

So when Fred's little girl, Alden came skipping up a few seconds after Fred's announcement and excitedly showed me her first lost tooth, I bent down and patted her head and said, "That's WONDERFUL, Alden! Do you know that if you put that tooth under your pillow tonight, the tooth fairy will bring you fifty dollars?"

"Really?" Alden asked, her eyes wide with amazement.

"Sure enough!" I said, "That's what the tooth fairy brings to our kids!"

Then I smiled at Fred and went into the house.

Revenge isn't always a dish best served cold...sometimes you gotta serve it hot.

Laughter Through Tears

2010-04-03T07:16:00.000-07:00

The death of a loved one, perhaps more especially a parent, occasions such an intense grief that your soul cries out for any moment of relief or respite. I am reminded of that scene in "Steel Magnolias" where Dolly Parton's character says, "laughter through tears is my favorite emotion". It's my favorite emotion as well. It always serves to remind me that, no matter how bleak or how horrible I feel at the moment, that there will be a time when I will smile and laugh again.

When a moment of levity bursts the dam that holds your grief and laughter floods forth with tears...as you laugh, little moments flash across your memory...moments of joy and laughter that you had shared with the person you now mourn. It is the most wonderful, bittersweet feeling in the world.

The funeral home and cemetary at the corner of Dairy Ashford and Westheimer in Houston, Texas is where we buried both of my parents. It was also the scene of two of these moments for me.

When my mother died, we held the viewing at the funeral home associated with the cemetary. Our family huddled in a corner, our heads bowed with grief as scores of people who loved my mother shuffled past her coffin and paid their last respects, then made their way over to where we were to offer a word of condolence or relate a favorite memory.

As we accepted these offerings of love, out of the corner of my eye I saw my son Daniel in line with the the rest of the mourners. Although the halmark of a person with autism is an inability to understand or respect social conventions that most of us take for granted, Daniel waited patiently and respectfully in line with the rest of the mourners.

When my son got to the side of my mother's coffin, he quiety whispered to her, "Goodbye Grandma, I'll miss you". Then he sweetly bent forward and kissed her brow. We were all about to breath a sigh of relief thinking that Daniel had somehow managed to hold back the autism long enough to act normally when my son's condition reasserted itself.

As Daniel raised himself from that kiss, a worried look clouded his face and he turned to us and said, "Oh, she's cold!" Then, as if that wasn't awkward enough, he said, "I better check her pulse". I was just about to rise up and try to salvage the situation when Daniel sadly raised his eyes to me, his hand still on my mother's wrist, and slowly shook his head, announcing his prognosis,

"I don't think she's gonna make it"

That did it, the dam of our grief burst and laughter with tears overcame the whole family. I looked at the faces of my wife and children, my brother and sisters and their families and we all had the same expression...pure joy. Joy at the realization that we had shared this life with such a grand lady...that, above all people, we were blessed to call her mother or grandma. In that moment of mourning our loss, we were reminded of how priviledged we really were.

My father's funeral was held at the same location and, years later, I found myself standing in the same place as I had years earlier, once again looking into the coffin of a beloved parent and wondering to myself if I would ever feel happy again.

Before I was born, my father had accidentally cut off the first two fingers of his right hand at the first knuckle. Although, he was technically handicapped, one would never know it. There were more than a few times when I would look at my father holding a pencil and drafting, his work so beautiful and masterful that it eclipsed the work of other drafters with all of their digits, and realize that the most amazing feats are sometimes the ones that seem effortless.

Later on in life, when I spent a year learning to manipulate my own hands again, my father's example served as a quiet and constant inspiration to me.

The funeral directors had supposed my father's right hand to be a deformity and so, when they prepared the body, they hid it under his left hand. Well, my father's grandchildren were not having any of that! Every single one of them had teethed upon those bony nubs of what remained of his first two digits. They convened a quiet council in the corner, agreed upon a proper course of action, and elected one of them to go and correct the funeral home's blunder and place my father's right hand on top for all to see.

As I looked at my father's fingers and these thoughts crossed my mind, my eyes wandered down to a banner placed on the coffin. One of my sisters had seen to it that the final words my father always said to anyone who ever came to visit him were inscribed thereupon, "I'm glad you had a chance to see me"

Because this was a private moment, the laughter was a bit quieter but the emotion and release no less sweet.

There is another instance I wanted to relate concerning this funeral home...something that happened years before any of the first two. I was commissioned to redesign the air conditioning systems and had to go and visit the place and access the existing conditions.

The building had multi-level mansard type roofs...flat rooftops with 4 foot steep sloping sides so when I had to get from the higher roof down to a lower roof, all I had to do is sit down on the steep slope and let gravity do the rest. After checking the unit in question, getting from the lower roof up to the higher roof was a different question altogether...now gravity was working against me...gravity and quite a few extra pounds of weight. I tried to grab onto the upper roof and scramble with my feet but they would not gain purchase. I seemed to be doomed to waiting on the lower roof until the fire department came and rescued me...then a sudden inspiration hit. I won't go into any great detail but, if you've ever seen Shamu come out of the water at Sea World, you have a fair idea of how I finally made it up to the upper part of the roof.

There was only one more obstacle now to getting back down to solid ground...the roof hatch. If you've never had to climb onto the roof of a commercial building, there's alwas a long ladder attached to a roof hatch which is mounted onto a 18" curb. The reason for the curb is to keep rain water from leaking from the roof down to the utility room below. The way to install these is to put the ladder on one side of the hole with the hinge to the cover on the opposite side so that, when you try to transfer from the ladder onto the roof, you don't have to negotiate your way around a trap door facing you. The people who installed this roof hatch installed the ladder and the hinge on the same side so that when I got to the top and opened the trap door, I was, in effect, facing a wall that I had to climb around and get onto the roof...no easy but doable.

Getting back down was a whole 'nother story though...now I had to try and figure out how to step off of the roof, into a hole that dropped twenty feet, around the trap door and somehow make sure my foot landed onto the rung of the ladder....it's actually about ten times as difficult as it sounds, especially for a fat man.

I finally decided that the safe way to do this would be to sit down, straddle the roof curb and swing my dangling left foot onto the ladder rung.

The edge of a roof curb...the part the trap door rests upon, is about two inches thick...so (how do I say this delicately?)when I straddled the curb, one of the (ahem) 'boys' went on one side of the curb and one of them went on the other side.

All fine and good until I swung my leg to reach the rung and that had the effect of sqeezing one of the lads rather painfully.

For those of you who have not experienced this type of pain, let me state right here and now that the movies don't do justice to it. First off, the movies show a kick to the groin and the reciever of the injury immediately doubling over in pain....that's not how it goes down...it usually takes a few moments because, although there's an immediate pain associated with the injury, the REAL pain comes anout three seconds later when a huge all-encompasing cramp siezes everything from the groin up to the lungs....it's like having a charley horse in your midsection.

What actually happens is that the person recieving the injury realizes that something bad has happened and he says to himself, "that's gonna hurt ----------------------------- oh yeah...there it is"

So I when I realized I had done myself an injury, there was actually a second or two when I realized that, if I didn't roll onto the roof immediately, the possibility was very real that I would be plummeting twenty feet onto some very nasty electrical transformers with some very sharp corners, so I rolled onto the roof"

When the cramps hit, I doubled up in pain, groaned and moaned and cursed and generally made enough noise to convince anyone happening by that I was being dismembered by a rusty, slow-moving chain saw. When the pain began to ebb, I began to realize where I was and how loudly and profanely, I had complained....I crawled to the edge of the roof and saw my worst fears confirmed.

Just below me, a group of mourners had, apparently, been in the process of loading their loved one into a hearse when my screams and moans and complaints that I was dying wafted down to their ears from the roof above.

They had stopped what they were doing and stared in wide-eyed, open-mouthed wonderment and what they were certain were the death throes of a dying man above them.

There was a second or two when we just stared at each other and then I meekly said, "I'm sorry"....it started with just a snicker from one of the mourners and then a giggle...then some half-suppressed snorts. Before long, every one of the mourners were laughing uproarisly

Laughter through tears...it's the best.

Couched in Different Terms

2010-03-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

First off, let me state that I hate almost everything about this health care bill (I think I've made that abundantly clear) But, yesterday, my wife and I were talking and I was reminded of an incident in our marriage that is somewhat applicable to the health care bill.

We had inherited a couch from my parents...I loved that couch. It was the perfect Sunday Afternoon nap couch. It's the only couch I've been able to awaken from after a Sunday snooze and not have a sore back or a stiff neck. Like a seasoned baseball glove, that couch had been perfectly broken in and formed to my body.

The only problem was that, when I wasn't in the couch, it was still perfectly broken in and formed to my body. My wife hated the couch and I loved it. The couch's fate and its place in our home was the subject of many discussions, arguments, reasonings, pleadings, cajolings, briberies, and some sotto voce threatenings for a few years in our home.

Then I came home one day and saw that my couch...my beloved couch, was sitting on the curb with piles of trash bags heaped upon it. Well, I was having none of THAT! If she could take it upon herself to unilaterally remove the couch from our home, I could certainly take it upon myself to put it back in its proper place. I pulled into the driveway, got out of my car, slammed the door and stormed over to the couch pulling bags of trash from it and reached down to grab it by the legs and haul it back into the house.

The first thing I noticed was that my wife had sawn the legs off of the couch....the second thing I noticed when I looked up was my wife standing in the doorway with a smug expression on her face (things would have probably gone a LOT smoother after that is it wasn't for that smug expression)

When Cortez reached the New World, he burned his boats. As a result, his men had no other option but to succeed. All during the ensuing argument over my wife's unilateral decision, she kept protesting that she was NOT forcing me to buy a new couch, she was merely, 'helping me make the right decision'.

Now...let me state again...I HATE the way this bill has come about. It has shown the ugly side of both parties and of The American People. I really can't think of a single newsworthy instance during this clash of ideas where anyone has acted in an adult and reasonable manner.

The very simple truth (as far as I can see) is that health care reform is very much a needed thing in this country. The other undeniable truth was that the republicans did not address this issue when they were in power.

I have outlined, I believe, very reasonable and very attainable common sense ideas that would go a long way to bringing down the cost of health care and insurance and many of my friends have done the same.

What all of these ideas have in common is the realization that health care costs didn't begin to spiral out of control until the government stepped in and started to meddle with it in the first place. Almost all of the ideas cost very litte if any tax dollars to the public and, more importantly, they allow people the freedom to make their own choices.

But the republicans didn't seriously begin to address any ideas on health care reform until the democrats had a super-majority and said, that they were going to cut the legs off the couch...THEN the republicans got on board with the idea...given the years of frustration that the democrats have had over trying to bring this to the front burner, I understand it when they said to the Johnny-Come-Lately republicans, "you know what Chuckles? Sit your butt in that back seat there and let us drive for a while" I don't condone that type of attitude...but I understand it.

What happened next was embarrassing to say the least. Democrats tried to over-reach and republicans tried to grab back the wheel...it was about as ugly a scene as I ever wanted to witness from my elected officials. Frankly, I''m disgusted with the entire lot. Vitriol, invectives, lies, innuendos, all accusing the other side of the most heinous and foul motives possible.

The polls clearly stated that most Americans thought that something ought to be done about health care. They also clearly stated that they absolutely hated this bill. They hated the pork, the bribes, the cowtowing to special interests and unions...and the majority of Americans wanted our elected officials to scrap this bill and start over again, but like adults this time.

The democrats will not remain in power for long...this abomination of a bill all but guarantees that. When the republicans come into power again...I can only hope that they repeal this thing and give us something that offers real solutions and real choices to the public. I hope that they just don't grab the old couch off of the trash heap and drag it back into the house and prop it up with some cinder blocks.

But until then, as begrudgingly as I have to say it...I'm kind of grateful to the democrats for sawing the legs off the old thing.

No Substitutions Allowed

2010-03-26T07:34:00.000-07:00

I love Texas. To be certain, there are much prettier places to live (unless the bluebonnets are in season) and there are more hospitable places to live (climate-wise, anyway)...but I've never lived in a place with such a can-do attitude my entire life. The Texan attitude can be summed up in a joke I once heard.

A good old boy from Texas died and went to Heaven. Being from Texas, he was immediately admitted and St. Peter took him all around the place, showing him the glory and majesty of his new celestial home.

They passed by the garden and St. Peter said, "have you ever seen flowers so beautiful or smelled such a fragrant perfume?"

"Well, yes", said the Texan, "As a matter of fact they are almost as beautiful as the hillsides in Texas when they are covered in bluebonnets and indian paintbrushes and they smell almost as wonderful as the gardenias and honeysuckle back home in Texas"

Somewhat vexed, St. Peter then showed the Texan his heavenly mansion. "I'll bet you've never stayed anyplace like this before"

The Texan looked around and said, "I guess it will do, it's almost as nice as my huntin' cabin back in Texas and I've always been real comfortable there"

Getting even more annoyed, St. Peter took the Texan over to the edge of Heaven and asked him to look down into the fiery pits of Hell. "I don't suppose that you have anything like THAT in Texas, do you?" asked St. Peter

The Texan looked into the pits of Hell for a while and then quietly spoke, "No...I don't believe that we do" then the Texan brightened up a bit, "but I know this ol' boy down in Houston that could put it out for you!"

But the Texas spirit notwithstanding, the thing I miss most about Texas is the cuisine. Things that are taken for granted in Texas are precious commodities outside the Lone Star State. When you find a fellow expat and proudly tell them that you have a stash of Blue Bell in your freezer, they start to lobby for an invitation to dinner.

But, even though there are some things Texan that you can get outside of Texas, you still have to make due.

For instance, you can get Fritoes, and you can get onions, and you can get cheese...so you're three-fourths of the way to making Frito Pie...sadly, however, the fourth ingrediant is scarcely found outside of Texas; I'm speaking of course, about Wolf Brand Chili.

You can get other chili. Hormel makes chili and its even made in a town called Austin...it's just made in Austin Minnesota....it just doesn't cut it.

At least that was my stand for many years...a lot of people said I was being too stodgy and rigid...that I could make a perfectly wonderful Frito Pie without Wolf Brand Chili.
Then the other night I was watching "King of The Hill" and I watched Hank exuberantly proclaim that "Tonight is Frito Pie night with Wolf Brand Chili!!"

And I wondered if the King of The Hill people had been peeking in my window.

3:16

2010-03-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

I have the alarm set on my cell phone to go off at 3:00 in the morning. It's the time I need to get up to shave, shower, and dress and get out of the door by 4:00 so I can be at work in Salt Lake City by 5:15 (after dropping my mother-in-law off at Beehive Clothing).

I don't mind getting up early and I've been an early riser since I was a kid...but 3:00 am is pushing it a bit. Plus, the older I get the more I think of all those naps I refused to take when I was a kid and I kick myself (figuratively because, at my age, those kinds of shenanigans can cause you to break your hip...and I've already had one of those)

Anyway, today I happened to look at my cell phone to check the time and it was 3:16. It immediately reminded my of all those signs I see festooning football end zones. Zealot born-again Christians place them there to give us all a little shot of religion while we're watching 22 guys trying to pummel the life from each other....it really is, I believe, an inappropriate venue.

To tell you the truth, for the reason I cited above, John 3:16 has never been a scripture I much liked. To be certain, it is a beautiful piece of prose:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life

It should be one of my favorite scriptures, but it isn't. Mainly because the people who spend so much energy trying to display that scripture at football games can usually be counted upon to display an equal or greater amount of energy declaring that I am not a Christian.

It's been happening since High School when a fellow member of the football team came over to my house to tell me why I was not going to be admitted to The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and why I was going to hell. I can't tell you how much I appreciated that visit. I took to calling them "Church of the Good Ol' Boy" (along with a few other names). Then a couple of them squared off with me after school. The conversation went something like this:

"Hey, Boyce, we don't appreciate what you've been saying about us...and you better knock it off"

"How about you just forgive me?"

(sadly, Church of the Good Ol' Boy's lack any sense of irony)

If I had a nickle for every time I've been told I'm not a Christian by one of the Good Ol' Boys, I'd put all the nickles in a sock and beat the next one that told me that senseless (There's that irony again)

About 15 years or ago, it got real bad in Katy. You could literally drive down the street and see every marquee in front of every Good Ol' Boy church advertising how they were going to tell you all about what was wrong with the Mormons. It was quite unpleasant for quite some time and a lot of people in our church lost friends for no good reason other than they were LDS.

None of us could figure out what the impetus was for all of this sudden vitriol and persecution directed at us. And then, one day, they announced that our church was going to build a temple in Houston.....if you listened closely enough, you could hear a collective "aHA!" erupt from all the LDS people in Katy.

It seemed that there was one church in Katy that was at the nexus of all of this. They showed weekly anti-mormon films and had regular ex-mormons visit and speak to their youth. I was, at the time, Elders Quorum President and, during one of our welfare meetings, our bishop said that he'd had enough of this foolishness. He assigned me to call the pastor of the church and volunteer to have the missionaries come over and speak to them if they were so interested in our church. (I still don't know what I did to make that bishop dislike me so much)...but I took the assignment.

I didn't get hold of the pastor. I got hold of their "Cult" minister (oh joys!). I introduced myself and told him why I was calling. We got into the standard "You're not a Christian-Yes we are-No you're not-We believe in Christ-Not the same Christ we believe in" discussion that anyone whose run into a Good Ol Boy has had.

Finally, the pastor said, "I don't want you to get the wrong impression Mister Boyce. We don't hate you. We love you....we love you because Christ says we have to love you"

For a moment I was stunned...I didn't even know why I was stunned and then it hit me, and I said.

"You're right, Pastor. I don't think we do believe in the same Jesus"

"Oh?"

"No. You see, the Christ we believe in fills us with love for our fellow man. As a matter of fact, love for our fellow man is an automatic result of the simple process of believing in Him and worshiping Him and knowing and truly understanding that we are, each every one of us, petitioners for His forgiveness and mercy...so if you love your fellow man because you feel compelled to, perhaps we don't worship the same Christ after all."

We weren't invited to speak that his church.

So that's it....that's why John 3:16 has never been one of my favorite scriptures. And then, today I happened to glance at my cell phone and it was 3:16 and the scripture came to mind. It came to me unpoluted by the noise and glare of a football game...it came to me in a still small voice. And it immediately became one of my favorites.

I think that I'll set my cell phone alarm for 3:16 from now on....at the very least, I could use the extra sleep

Lead, Kindly Light - One Mormon's View on the Issue of Gay Marriage

2010-03-12T11:52:00.000-08:00

People outside the LDS faith have little idea how pervasive our culture is in our lives. They know about Jews and Catholics because there have been umpteen million movies centered around a jewish person or catholic person trying to rectify their belief in their religion and the culture that comes with that religion with the difficulties of living in a secular world...and many mormons identify closely with these characters because our lives are similarly enmeshed and entangled with the culture that comes with our religion.

For the record, there is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as preached by my church and there is the culture of mormonism. Any intersection between the two is purely coincidental and as likely to happen as an asteroid the size of Texas hitting the earth...we know it's happened before because we can see the geological evidence and we know it can happen again at any time.
People are rarely indifferent to mormons. They either hate us or they love us. If they hate us, it is a safe bet that they've had a past interaction with someone of our faith who focuses less on The Gospel and more on the culture.

I guess that's why I wanted to write about this particular subject; because, although I am steeped in the culture of my religion, I am constantly holding it up to the filter of The Gospel and, like Tevye, I frequently find myself saying, "on the other hand"

All during the Proposition 8 campaign in California, I was saddened by the accusations of hatred hurled at my religion. When it passed, I watched in tears as people who demand tolerance spray painted grafitti all over our most sacred structures. I was moved to tears again by pictures of people who were not members of my religion trying to scrub the offending spray paint from our temple walls.

The issue of marriage rights for homosexuals is something I've struggled with for many years and, to be honest, I'm still struggling with it. The evidence shows that blacks and hispanics overwhelmingly voted for Proposition 8 and yet, it seems that only my religion was vilified for its passing. It would be too prosaic to claim that the members of my faith were singled out for displays of hatred because of religious intolerance. The simple fact is that we were singled out because we were easy targets. Like homosexuals, there are many false assumptions made by people outside our religion about us. Like homosexuals, the lack of understanding, coupled with a fear of the unknown, sometimes leads to violence.

If you let yourself dwell upon the parallels here, the dichotomy of a group long persecuted and hated visiting violence upon another group long persecuted and hated is mind-boggling.

And yet, I understand. The simple truth is, were I not LDS and were I gay, I would probably react the very same way. I would be incensed beyond reason at my not being able to participate. I understand the reasons behind he actions against my religion because I've taken the time to try and understand the issue from the other viewpoint.

Sadly, I don't think that the people standing outside our temple with cans of spray paint have spent the same effort I have. It is too easy to assign a motive of hatred to people who do not agree with us. It requires no intellectual effort on our part. It is also, the very epitome of hypocrisy. Because, when you think about it, we assign the motive of hatred to a group of people who do not think like us so that we can then more easily justify our own hatred and violence towards them. So I would like to lay it out, from my perspective, as to why two groups of people with similar experiences of being the victims of bigotry and persecution could find themselves at this crossroad.

For the longest time, I was a proponent for gay marriage. My reasoning was that I saw no special lines in my tax forms that said if you're gay, you don't need to pay as much tax as the rest of us. When I got my jury summons, I never saw a provision that excused me from serving if I was homosexual...and, although I've looked, I have yet to see any speed limit signs that allowed people who had same-sex attractions to drive faster than the rest of us. If gay people are expected to shoulder thier fair share of being a citizen, I saw no reason why they should not enjoy all of the rights and priviledges of citizenship that I have. I still don't

And yet, my religion has taken a stand on this issue. My religion that goes out of its way to not take a stand on anything political, that every election time sends us a letter to be read from the pulpit in essence stating that political discussions are not to take place from our pulpits and that we are to prayerfully consider and vote for the candidate that we believe will serve us best, they have come out and said that the position of the church is to not support gay marriage rights.

And so, I had to make a choice...do I trust my own wisdom or do I trust the wisdom of men I believe are prophets of God?

Let me take a moment and explain faith as I understand it. Faith is an experiment very much like a scientific experiment...only you can only prove it to yourself. You can never prove it to another. I think that's the way it's always supposed to have been.

I never much understood Paul's explanation of what constitutes faith and I think too many people bandy about the word when what they really mean is that they believe. But faith is different from a belief because faith is a belief that you put your trust into.

A trapeze artist climbs to the top of the tent and swings out on that trapeze because he believes that when he lets go, the other trapeze artist on the recieving end will be there at the precise moment and place to catch him...he does all of that because he believes...but he doesn't have faith until he actually lets go of his trapeze.

The thing about faith in God is that the more you put your trust into it, the more it proves you right. I never have been able to understand why paying a tenth of my income to God assures me that I will somehow manage better but it does. I don't know why reading my scriptures with my family every day seems to cause all of the pettiness and bickering to end and for us to have greater calm in our lives...but it does. I don't know by what means people are healed when hands are placed upon their heads and they are blessed...but I've seen miracles time and time again. It seems that every time I place my trust in my beliefs and act as the men I sustain as prophets say I should act, the scattered pieces of my life oddly seem to align themselves.

And yet, on this one issue of gay marriage, I held to my own wisdom for the longest time because, it just didn't seem right. And then one day, in church, we sang a hymn that we'd sung countless times before and, for some reason, its meaning slammed into me with such a force that I knew I had to abandon my own wisdom and trust in what has never failed me before.

Lead, kindly Light, amid th’encircling gloom;
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor pray’d that thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path; but now,
Lead thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years.

So long thy pow’r hath blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone.
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

To my friends who are gay and to their friends who have taken the opposite side of this issue, I can only say I hope that you understand that I had to make a decision and again, like Tevye, say to myself, "there is no other hand...if I bend that far, I'll break"

I do not come to my stand on this issue lightly, nor is my stand on this issue motivated by fear or hatred. I am simply choosing to place my trust in my beliefs. They have never failed me before and though I know that many will read these words with bitterness, I truly hope that the day will come when we can disagree without being disagreeable.

Peanut Butter and Jelly

2010-02-09T08:19:00.001-08:00

When I was young and I would come home with a black eye or a bloody nose (a frequent occurance when I was young) my parents' reaction was to ask me what it was I did to cause someone to want to give me a black eye or a bloody nose.

It was a pretty good reaction. It taught me to be introspective and to try and see my part in the conflicts in my life. To be honest, it worked both ways. When some kid's parent called to complain of a black eye or a bloody nose, my parents asked what their kid did to cause me to want to give them a black eye or a bloody nose.

It worked most of the time....sometimes, however, it backfired. Like the day when I was five and I was out shopping with my mother and I finally convinced her that I was much too big to be taken to the ladies room, that I was big enough to use the bathroom all by myself, I never told anyone about the man in the restroom that hurt me. I was afraid that if I did, they would say, "See? I told you that you were too small to go by yourself, this wouldn't have happened if you hadn't insisted upon having your own way".

In my parents' defense, I now know that their reaction would not have been that...but that doesn't change the fact that, as a child, I was certain that their reaction would be what I feared.

Later on, when I was an adult, my mother and I were talking about humor. I observed to her that humor comes from pain. "But you're funny", my mom said, "where does your pain come from?" Even as an adult, I still couldn't tell her...I just didn't trust myself to word it in the right way.

I am the youngest of four children. My brother, John, is the oldest of us and, when I was growing up, he was my hero. He did everything I wanted to do and was everything I wanted to be. He drew well, he played the guitar, he taught me to hit a baseball, throw a football, ride a bike, build a fort.

He actually had the patience and steady hands to put an airplane model together without it having huge globs of glue oozing from the seams..he never seemed to not have time for me. He was always patient with me...even when I couldn't keep my grubby, clumsy hands off of his freshly-painted and decaled airplane model (which despite its aerodynamic design refused to fly very far and wasn't nearly as sturdy as it looked)....and when the incident in the bathroom changed me, caused me to begin lashing out and acting badly for all the rest of my childhood, it was my big brother who got me through everything....the one that never ever seemed to give up on me.

John was a soda-jerk at KG Drugstore about a mile from our house and our mom would often drop me off at the counter for John to watch me while she went shopping somewhere else. I marvelled at the dashing figure he cut in his starched white apron and bow tie and the paper hat set at a jaunty angle.

I watched the skill with which he made malts and turned burgers...waiting until the perfect moment to place the cheese on the patty so that it was melted at precisely the proper amount, then placing the top half of the bun down on the patty while it finished cooking so that it was all warm and greasy and filled with all of the artery-clogging goodness that makes a burger taste wonderful...and I especially loved the way he would slip me a cherry Dr. Pepper or a plate of chips from time to time. Sometimes he would pool his tips together and buy me a comic book or a bag of plastic green army men, half of whom I would position on the counter in a defensive line about the ketchup and mustard bottles while the other half assaulted from the salt and pepper shakers and napkin dispenser.

To this day, I prefer chips instead of fries, and a really good soda fountain soft drink is the epitome, the sine qua non of carbonated beverages...there's nothing in a bottle that can rival the taste.

One day my sisters came at the end of his shift and we all decided to race home...girls against the boys. My big brother swept me onto his strong shoulders and ran home with me laughing all the way. We beat our sisters by a wide margin and, not knowing what to do until they got home, my brother decided to teach me how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Almost five decades later, I still make them the same way he taught me.

When John left on his mission, I was devastated. I had no idea how I was going to cope with my pain without him there to destract me and make me feel like I wasn't dirty or damaged or like I didn't have a target on my back. I had no idea how to feel like a normal kid without my big brother there and I was terrified.

I don't know why I didn't make the connection with all of the preparation...maybe it was denial but I first realized that my brother was going to be gone for almost three years on the ride back home, after dropping John of at the train station. I looked about and noticed he wasn't in the car. I frantically told my parents that we'd forgotten John and we needed to turn around. When I was told he wouldn't be back for almost three years, I burst into tears.

I don't think that adults realize it but, time is a relative thing and three years to a five and a half year old is over half of his life span. At first they thought my tears were cute, then they got annoying and I was told in no uncertain terms to stop. Somehow I did but pain is non-compressable and, while I pushed it down there, it sprang up and manifested itself in other areas of my life.

John's return from his mission was to be three months after I turned eight years old and, though I loved and idolized my father as well, I could think of nobody other than my brother that I wanted to dip me into the waters of baptism so that I could finally feel clean again...so I postponed my baptism for three months until he came home.

As an adult, I asked my father if my decision hurt his feelings, like the wonderful father he was, he told me how proud he was that his eldest son baptised his youngest. I wasn't quite sure how he felt until my accident made it impossible for me to baptise my own youngest child and my own eldest son filled in for me. The glowing pride I felt at that moment made it possible for me to put the nagging fear that I had offended my father to rest.

My brother and I are so alike in so many ways and so different in so many others. There have been times when we've sworn we never wanted to see each other again and times when we couldn't wait to be together. Some of the happiest times of my life have been spent with him and I never laugh harder than when I am in his company.

Up until now, nobody but my wife has known what he meant to me growing up and how much a role he played in me being able to function as a normal person....not even John has known.

When people ask me why I love him so much, up to now, all I've been able to say was, "He taught me to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich"

Hidden Treasures

2009-12-25T16:05:00.000-08:00

Last night my family did something that we've never done before as a family. We shared our Christmas Eve ritual with the eight residents of the group home that my eldest son manages. The last time I did something similar was over 35 years ago and I was overwhelmed with sadness at the thought of so many people in this world who were rejected and forgotten during this one time of the year that so many people proclaim to have joy and love in their hearts for their fellow men.

The thing that goes through your mind as you experience a night like that is that there are those who are not only rejected and forgotten during this most special time of the year...there are those who are forgotten and pushed aside by the very people who are supposed to love them more than anyone else in the world, thier own families.

The last time I did this, I was a teenager and I played Santa Claus. A grown young man in his mid twenties sat on my lap and told me that his dearest wish on Christmas would be for his family to come and see him.

It broke my heart and, in the foolishness of my youth, I went home that night and plead with Heavenly Father to never ever let me have a child such as that. When I discovered that Heavenly Father, in His wisdom, denied that prayer, I silently resolved that, no matter what, my son would never ever live apart from his family.

Last night we met and ate and 'danced' to Christmas music with eight men who ranged in age from their seventies to their twenties. Only two of them were ambulatory, two more could get around with attendands holding onto them, the remaining four were in wheelchairs. For most of these men, there was not a single function that they can perform on their own. Virtually, every single one of them must be helped with just about everything they have to do. Attendants need to assist them with bathing, toileting, eating, taking medication, and staying as connected to the world as they can be.

I spent the night watching my eldest son attend to these men and treat them with love and dignity and serve them in ways that their own families would not. I glowed with pride as I watched my son act with Christ-like love and serve others in ways that many I know would never consider doing.

We read the Christmas story in Luke and then we read of the same night from The Book of Mormon. As we opened up to Third Nephi and began to read, Carlos, a young man whose bent and tiny body was confined to a wheelchair, motored his way as close as possible to John-Ross so that he could drink in the experience. In his exhuberance, he accidentally ran his 350 lb wheelchair over Daniel's foot.

Daniel cried out in pain and Carlos, who could not speak, motioned for a plastic sheet of paper with letters arranged in qwerty fashion. When he got the sheet, he laid it out on his lap and turning hos wheelchair back towards my Daniel, struggled to force his unwilling hands to point to letters....S.....O.....R....R....."that's okay", Daniel said as he reached out and held Carlos' hand, "I know you didn't mean it" Carlos' smile beamed up at my youngest son.

It came time for the men to go to bed and for us to return home but when we left, I couldn't help but remember my mom who often embarrased me by making me dig through things that other people had abandoned or thrown away on the side of the road. She would often push me on and try to inspire me by regaling me with stories of other people she had known who had found priceless treasure from items that others had found worthless..

Last night eight priceless treasures, named Carl, Carlos, Elano, Mickey, Ben, Paul and two Dannies were discovered by my family and became a part of ours.

I think my mom would be proud.

Unconventional

2009-11-15T17:26:00.000-08:00

About eight years ago, I took a trip to New Orleans with a couple of my nephews. Notwithstanding the fact that I had lived within easy driving distance of The Big Easy for the greater part of my life, it was the first time I had occasion to visit. I don't know why but most of my forrays outside of Texas had been to the west and not the east. I think that part of the reason for this is that nature hates a vacuum and, whenever I traveled eastward, I would get near to Louisiana and start feeling the IQ points getting sucked right out of my head. Once I made it all the way to Vidor and forgot how to read for a week.

If you've never been to New Orleans, you really ought to make the effort and see it before God gets around to destroying it....for the second time in man's existence, Sodom and Gomorrah has been created. I spent most of my time there with the following thought running through my head, "There is really no valid reason for a Latter-Day Saint to ever visit New Orleans"

My nephews and I checked into our hotel and became immediately aware that there was an hugely dispropotionate number of extremely beautiful young women also staying in this hotel. Not only were these women extremely beautiful, they were also dressed rather provocatively and, most of them were rather obviously, (how shall I put this?) "surgically-enhanced". They also wore laminated I.D. badges dangling from chords about their necks.

On the way up to my room, I shared an elevator with a couple of these young women and so I asked, "Is there a convention of some type in this hotel?". I learned that there was, indeed, a convention there that weekend...a pornstar convention.

When I got to my room, I called my wife right away to tell her what was going on. When asked why I was telling her all of this, I explained that over twenty years of marriage had taught me that there was just some information that my wife needed to hear straight from me and, more importantly, before she might learn about it from some evening news report.

That evening, as I waited at the dining room bar for my nephews to come down and join me for dinner, I passed the time drinking my Dr. Pepper adorned with a lime wedge and a cherry and joking back and forth with the bartender.

A couple of young women from the convention came and sat down at the bar and also joined in the conversation. After a few moments, one of them turned to me and asked, "Are you here with the convention?"

You know those moments when time just seems to stop and hang there?...the times when your mind seems to race with all sorts of responses and ponderings about the appropriate way to answer a question that you were ust asked?...that's what happened to me...

Why would they wonder if I'm here with the convention?

Are there really pornstars that look like fat dumpy greying old men?

Do I act offended when telling them no?

Eventually I settled upon what I considered the right response...because, really...how often does one get the opportunity to answer a question like that? So just before time began to move forward again, I put on my most pleasant and earnest face and answered.

"Yes....I'm a stunt double"

Tom vs. the Cockroaches

2009-11-14T06:30:00.000-08:00

When you live in Texas, you learn to live with cockroaches. you also learn that there are actually two types of cockroaches; each one is a tell-tale sign of something in your life. If you have the little bitty ones scurrying about, you might want to pick up a bit more around the house and not leave uneaten food out and about. If you have the really really big ones occasionally entering your home...well...welcome to Texas!

Not everything in Texas is bigger but we most definately have the biggest cockroaches in all creation. In Texas, a wounded cockroach is a dangerous animal. The big ones can fly and have no qualms whatsoever in dive-bombing you. (more on this later)

When you live in Texas, you never really quite get used to co-habitating with the most disgusting insects upon the planet but you do make peace with the fact that, like the war on terror, the war on cockroaches will never ever be fully won. You can only through eternal vigilance manage to stem the tide of these nasty little six-legged jihadists.

In my many battles against cockroaches, there are actually three that the enemy has won. I have decided to chronicle these three failures so that others may learn from my mistakes and future generations will benefit from the wisdom of my experience.

Battle One: Tom vs. The Dive-bombing Cockroach

When I was seventeen, my family lived in an apartment complex near a bayou in west Houston. The complex was nestled in a bucolic, park like setting and it was my mother's habit to place bird seed in dishes on our balcony so that she could watch the birds in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the bird seed sometimes also attracted some rather large rodents that lived in the nearby bayou who would make their nocturnal forray's to our balcony and eat up all of the bird seed.

Since my bedroom was adjacent to the balcony and the head of my bed was against the outer wall, I would occasionally be awakened by the sound of a dish of bird seed scraping along the balcony and then...well let's just say that I saw "Willard" when I was a kid and I've never been quite the same since. In order to get any sleep at all, I would have to grab a blanket and a pillow from my bed and go across the hall to sleep in a bedroom that my dad had turned into an office.

It usually worked out well but on this particular occasion, I had just come home from seeing a really stupid campy horror flick with three of my friends. The movie was called "Bugs" and it was all about these radio-active cockroaches. What damage can radio-active cockroaches do? you ask...well, it seems that the nestle in your hair and set your head on fire. It was a really stupid movie where only bald people were safe. My two friends and I laughed all through it and actually did a 1975 version of Mystery Science Theatre all through the show.

However funny the movie seemed at 10:00 PM when I was wide awake, it took on a more ominous hue at 2:00 AM when I was groggy with sleep and creeped out by the sound of rats scurrying about on the balcony; a mere six inches of easily gnawed through wall separating them from my head.

So, when I entered my father's office and turned on the light only to startle a huge cockroach crawling along the ceiling who reacted to my intrusion by taking wing and dive-bombing me, you will understand that it would be a completely normal reaction for me to run in place and scream like Little Richard with a broken nail.

My father rushed into the room only to see hysterical me running in place and screaming with the offending insect long vanished...I spent the next several hours convincing my parents that I did not do drugs.

Battle Two: Tom Loses His Peanut Butter.

I'm sure that Italy is much different now but, thirty years ago, there were several things that you could just not get. Hamburgers were unknown in all of my mission with the exception of a really bad place called "Whimpy Burger" in Rome. Peanut Butter and Kool-Aid were also rare commodities that could only be had by beneavolent relations sending them to you or by being fortunate enough to have access to the American Navel Base in Naples (which I did).

Just prior to my transfer from Naples, I had made a run at the base commisary and had purchased a large jar of Skippy Peanut Butter. When I unpacked my stash in my new apartment, my companion and the two other companions that shared our apartment looked at it like a couple of starving street urchins from a Dicken's novel eyeing a Christmas feast through a frosted window pane.

There was an unwritten code in our mission. A man's stash was his own and you could not help yourself to it. However, if the missionary ever partook of anything from his stash while you were within eyesight, it was considered extremely bad form for him to not offer to share with you. Because of this code, the other three elders in the apartment made certain that I was never EVER allowed to be anywhere near my jar of peanut butter if one of them was not present.

I did share with them but, my charity waned proportionate to the diminishing level of peanut-butter in the jar. As we got down to the last bit of peanut-butter, I set the jar into the pantry determined that I would not take it out again until I could enjoy it all by myself. So, early one morning, before the other three missionaries were awake, I slipped from my cot and padded to the kitchen to eat the last bit of my peanut butter in solitude.

When I pulled the glass jar from the shelf, a cockroach that had been on the opposite side of the jar scurried around and set up residence on my hand. Startled and disgusted, I whipped my hand back and forth determined to force the offending creature from off of me. Unfortunately, a cockroach's ability to overcome Newtonion physics is greater than my own and the jar slipped from my grasp and crashed against the far wall of the kitchen. I stared in horror at a glob of peanut-butter on the wall festooned with shards of broken glass and a nasty cockroach struggling to free itself from the sticky mess.

The other three missionaries rushed into the kitchen, surveyed the scene, and then, looking at me through narrowed-bitter eyes, pronounced my fate as deserving and left me to clean up the mess.

Battle Three: Tom and the Nuclear Option.

When we lived in Katy, my wife and I moved into a rental home. It was pretty normal as far as homes in the neighborhood went with the exception that, whenever night fell, we seemed to be over-run by the really big variety of cokroaches...the kind that you usually see only one or two at a time. Our first week in the home was a nighmare and it all came to a crescendo when I took the trash out one night and, there on the outside wall, was an army of these huge cockroaches. In the dark, it actually looked like the wall was moving. We had no idea where these roaches had come from and, when we questioned our landlord, he mentioned that the previous tenant had also complained and so he had the house sprayed.

We tried a series of bug bombs but that would only work for a day or two and then they would be back. We mentioned our dilemna to a friend who leaned forward and in a conspiratrial tone, told us about a product that he'd heard of that was guaranteed to get rid of any level of infestation.

We went to several chemical stores until we finally came to one who knew of the product. After locking the door and making us sign several release forms stating that we were through having children and we promised not to sue....the clerk donned a hazmat suit and went into the back of the store emerging again with a pair of tongs holding a package called, "Demon W P". He sold us the package and we went home and mixed it up in a sprayer and went all around our home treating it according to the directions on the label.

When we were done, there was still a huge amount of the stuff left in the sprayer and, not knowing what to do with it, I decided to dump it down a storm sewer grating that sat right at the edge of our driveway. After dumping the remaining contents, I turned to go back into the house only to be stopped by a cry of alarm from across the street. I turned to see what the alarm was all about and saw, to my utter horror that an army of huge cockroaches was boiling up from the storm sewer and pitifully dying on my driveway.

My neighbors came from their homes and witnessed this shocking scene with me. When it was over, I took the hose and washed the dead roaches back down the storm sewer and then, knowing that we would be forever after known as "The Roach House" went back inside and explained to my wife why we needed to move away as quickly as possible.

People Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout My Best Friend

2009-10-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

Twenty-Seven Years ago this week, my wife and I went to a Ward Halloween party dressed as nerds. I don't remember if we won the final prize for best costume but I do remember that we placed high in the competition. The reason my mind is a little foggy on the details is that, on the way home, Kerry went into labor and we went to Katy Hospital so that we could witness the birth of our first born son...dressed as nerds.

I was later to find out that this auspicious start in life was a harbinger of things to come as we were to watch our son win accolades and honors and...basically show us that we were now the older generation and...well....nerds.

Those few precious moments immediately after his arrival into this world are, I believe, one of the most sacred moments of my life. I still remember the look on my wife's face as they placed that beautiful squalling mass of multi-colored goo on her chest. She spoke his name and he immediately stopped crying; then she smiled. It was a smile that I'd never seen before or since. It was radiant, serene, God-like...it was a smile that radiated love in the purest sense of the word and it is the smile that is engraved into the deepest recesses of my heart...the smile that adorns her face whenever I picture her in my mind's eye.

I knew in that moment that I had ceased to be the center of her world...and, strangely, that's exactly how I wanted it to be.

They asked my to cut the umbilical chord and, after a few moments of squeamish hesitation, I did. That was also a kind of harbinger of things to come...as I was to learn that my role of father would entail sometimes placing myself between my wife and our son and, while secretly siding with her, making her loosen her grip so that he could learn to fall on his face and make his own mistakes in life.

Then they handed my first-born son to me so that I could give him a bath. As I concentrated on not dropping what was, paradoxically the slipperiest and the most precious thing I had ever held, I set him into the warm water and bathed his tiny face and body. One of the nurses giggled, "Look!". I looked down and saw that, as I was busy bathing my son, he was busy peeing all over me.

Also...a harbinger of things to come.

The salad days of a young family are, I believe, the most magical time of a union between a husband and a wife. That little bundle we held and fed and (she) changed represented a concentration of our combined purpose in life. To this day, when I see a picture of our first born infant, I realize that I did not cherish it enough. That I did not savor those moments enough...We concentrated all we had on pouring as much love and attention on our son as we could and yet, I can't think of anything I wouldn't give for the opportunity to go back in time and do more.

I didn't write this blog to sing his praises...anyone that knows John-Ross knows that he is gifted, talented, and (as they say in Boston) 'wicked smaht'

As he has grown into adulthood, we have had occasion to debate and argue and learn from one another. Politically, there are things on which we both agree and disagree. Political debates are among my favorite things and I've never debated anyone whose opinion I respect more than my son.

There are a lot of reasons that I love my wife. If I were pressed to name the number one reason why I love her, I don't think I'd be able to do it.

But high in the running would be the fact that, twenty-seven years ago, she introduced me to one of my best friends.

According to their desire

2009-10-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

There was a time on my mission when I went through a really rough patch. I won't go into great detail because it's really not important why. Suffice to say that I really wanted to go home and nobody would let me. Instead, I was banished to a far end of the mission that required a boat trip and two train trips and over 24 hours to get to. This place had not had a baptism in fourteen years. I told my companion that we would visit members and go to church but that if he even mentioned tracting to me I would beat him up.

Depression was not as big a deal back then as it is now and so, while all of the signs of clinical depression were there, nobody thought I was depressed...they all thought I was just a jerk. In their defense, I really was kind of a self-centered jerk. Also, I refused to bathe and I grew a beard (I was REALLY trying to get them to send me home)

While I wallowed in filth and self-pity, I explored our apartment for any kind of relief of the mind-numbing boredom. I came across some tapes that I hoped were contraband rock and roll. It turns out that they were tapes of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's performance of Handel's Messiah.

I had heard "For Unto Us a Child is Born" and "The Hallelujah Chorus" before...but never had I ever listened to the whole performance. Those two tapes stuck way in the back of our apartment library became the means for me to dig myself out of the hole I had dug for myself.

The music was so beautiful and the performances so wonderful that I began to lose myself in those tapes and listen to them over and over again. As I listened, I realized that every song was taken from a scripture about Christ and I took out my scriptures and looked up all of them and marked them in green. Reading those scriptures while listening to Handel's musical testimony of the divinity of Christ was as powerful an emotion as I had ever felt.

The music became a part of me and it began to lift me up. I shed many bitter tears as I began to realize how little time I had been given to share the gospel in Italy and how much of that time I had wasted. To this day, one of my greatest fears is standing before Heavenly Father and giving an account of that portion of my mission. The music began to renew and strengthen my testimony until I could hardly wait to get out of the apartment. What I desired most of all was the opportunity to share my testimony of Christ and the Restored Gospel with the Italian people.

In the space of three days, I went from a slob wallowing in his bed to a bright and shiny, freshly showered and shaved missionary urging my companion to get up so we could get out the door and go tracting.

Everyone thought I had really gone nuts now and they were starting to seriously consider my request to send me home.

The more I researched Handel's Messiah, the more intrigued I became. I was especially struck by the story of how fast this masterpiece was written and how influenced Handel was. I read about the weeks of largely untouched meals that were delivered to his door as he wrote and how, after writing The Hallelujah Chorus, his servant came to Handel's room only to see tears streaming down the composer's face as he exclaimed, "I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself"

The music became a part of my life and I listened to it whenever occasion would permit. Every part of the oratorio became a part of me...but one part sunk into my soul more deeply than the others...the tenor solo at the beginning.

As I listened to "Comfort Ye" and "Every Valley", I was more and more in awe of how Handel had used the natural timbre of the tenor's voice to emulate a sounding trumpet. I imagined John The Baptist standing in the wilderness and his voice crying forth these words. I thought of Alma and how he desired most to have the voice of an angel that he might testify more clearly of Christ.

And I began to desire the same thing. More than anything, I wanted to sing that tenor solo. That music had become such a part of me that I just knew that I would consider my life incomplete if I could not participate in its performance.

The only problem was that I'd never had any voice lessons and...I was a baritone.

But the desire was much more deep than my voice and I knew that, while I would never sing the tenor solo on a stage, I could sing along with with the music...and I did. I sang along with The Messiah whenever I could. When I got home from my mission, my practice studio was my car and I would often garner strange looks in traffic as I drove along during rush hour. As I sang, I imagined myself in a tuxedo belting out the words...my whole being concentrated upon being one with the music. Every once in a while, I would notice that I could actually hit a note that, up to that point, was beyond my range. When I did, I would strive to be able to hit it again and again until I could hit that note whenever I wanted.

Choristers in church began to ask me to sing in the choir and I learned how to read music. Timmie Debusk was the first such to ask me to sing a solo in church. She was the one who first made me believe that I might actually be able to fulfill my secret desire. When her son lost his battle with cancer, she asked me to sing at his funeral. Although, by then, I had sung at several funerals, it was the first time I had ever sung for someone I knew personally. It was also the last. Although I was able to get through the song, I doubt I will ever again be able to do so. I learned that, what we sing becomes a part of us in a way that what we say never does. I began a new respect and testimony of the importance of primary songs. I began to realize that music conveys emotions that mere speech cannot...which is why people can listen to opera in a language that they don't speak and still understand the story.

I formed the opinion that the Adamic language, being a perfect language would have to convey the meanings of one who speaks that language perfectly...and would, of necessity, be a language that was sung, rather than spoken.

I began to sing The Messiah in singalongs at Christmas time and whenever I could find a performance, I would try out for the chorus. I've sung it so many times that, whenever I hear any part of the oratorio, I can sing the tenor part, words and notes, without having the music before me.

Once or twice I would even be brave enough to try out for the solo part. I never got it, men who were much more talented and much better trained than I was got the part and, as I stood in the chorus and listened to them sing, tears would form in my eyes. It was frustrating to want to be that good and know that I would never be that good. I felt like Salieri in 'Amadeus'...doomed to recognize and desire talent that was beyond my reach. But, while I could hit the high notes required of that part, it was always tentative. It felt like I was riding a bicycle on the top rail of a fence and, if I pushed myself to have the volume and bell-like quality required of a tenor singing that solo, my voice would crack and I would be humiliated. Eventually, I gave up and resigned myself to sing in the chorus forever.

One Fall, Ken Turner called me on the phone. He and I had sung The Messiah several times together and he informed me that a group of churches in Columbus was putting together a performance that was to be sung in The Columbus Opera House. I decided that I would try for the solo part one last time.

I got it.

And an impossible desire that was born fifteen years earlier was fulfilled on a Friday night a week before Christmas when I walked to the podium in a tuxedo, in an Opera house in a small Texas town with family and friends in the audience and a brother in the chorus and I sang the opening solo to Handel's masterpiece.

As I sang, I decided that, for once, I would listen to all of the people who had encouraged me and, as they say in football, "leave it all out on the field". I held nothing back and I was surprised to hear a tremolo that my voice had previously lacked. I was the best I had ever sung and, as I sang, I realized that Alma was right, God truly does grant unto men, "according to their desire"

You Love That Which You Serve

2009-09-29T04:22:00.000-07:00

I once hung a jury for the better part of a week. I did so even though my gut told me that the defendant was guilty. But, even though I was fairly convinced that he was guilty, when weighing the evidence in a dispassionate manner, I realized that it was only my gut telling me so. The prosecution had presented the weakest of cases. There were several holes in the case that I could see and which, for some reason, the defense had chosen not to exploit. But still, my gut was telling me that the defendant had committed a crime...then it hit me. The defendant had, indeed committed a crime but probably not the crime of which he was accused...After four days, I finally agreed to convict the defendant on a much lesser charge. I did so because I was convinced both in my mind and my gut that he was guilty of that lesser charge.

During my time in the jury room, I spent eight to ten hours a day with anywhere from nine to eleven people yelling and hating me. The yelling and hating wasn't one-sided either. At one point I had to ask one juror to shut up and not be on my side because the only reason he could give for not believing the prosecution's key witness was that "he looked a little gay". Juror number four will forever hold a special place on my list of people who should die with festering boils. He was a pseudo-intellectual who kept saying, "it's a moot point" only he kept mispronouncing it; saying, "it's a moat point. By day three of listening to that man make arguments that a seventh grade debate student could rip apart, the only thing that kept blood from shooting out of my eyes, nose and ears whenever he spoke was the mental image I had of driving my freshly-sharpened Number 2 pencil through his eye socket and into his brain.

At one time, the following argument took place between me and mister "moat point"

"It was a GUN"

"The charge reads 'fire-arm' and the weapon was never produced so the prosecution could never prove it was anything other than a BB Gun"

"A BB gun is a firearm"

"No...a 'fire arm' as a weapon that uses gunpowder and fire is produced as a by-product of its projectile's means of propulsion...a BB-Gun uses compressed air as its means of propulsion and since no fire is produced, it cannot be called, 'a fire-arm'"

"That's a moat point...I could still kill you with a BB-Gun"

"And I could kill you with a pork chop bone or even this number 2 pencil I'm holding..neither of them is a fire-arm"

At another point, a very sweet looking little old lady complained to me, "Well, I'm going to tell the judge that I don't think you belong on this jury" . It was her misfortune that her particular statement was the final straw that broke my camel's back. "I'M THE ONLY ONE THAT BELONGS ON THIS JURY!", I screamed "Every single ONE of you answered the same questions I did during Voir Dire and every single ONE of you said you would not hold it against a defendant for not taking the stand in his own defense...and every single ONE of you, at some point in the last three days has said that he must be guilty or he would defend himself...so that means that every single ONE of you is a &*##! LIAR!"

(I might have over-reacted a tad).

I saw that little old lady once years later at the Cineplex Multi Cinema off of Grand Parkway and, when she saw me, she had that sweet, I-know-you-from-somewhere-but-can't-quite-place-where, smile. Then I could see the recognition creep into her eyes and that sweet face of hers darkened like thunder clouds as she turned her back to me and went over to her husband sitting on a bench. I stood outside the theater until the movie started enduring malevolent glances and whispering back and forth between the two. The old man looked at me through narrowed bitter eyes and I could tell he was wishing that he was thirty years younger. I vacillated between going over to them and offering the most sincere apologies for my inexcusable conduct or going over to the man and letting him know that the sweet little woman he thought he married wasn't quite so sweet after all. I finally decided that this was one instance when discretion really was the better part of valor.

During my time in the jury room, I could tell that what I was battling were deep-seated convictions. The people on the other side of the argument were all very fine and decent people. But it became more and more apparent, as we argued, that they felt in their hearts that their job as a juror was to convict the person accused of the crime. I had always felt that my job as a juror was to judge, not the defendant, but the case presented to me by the prosecution. If the case presented by the prosecutor was proved to me beyond a reasonable doubt. I would vote to convict. If not, I would vote to acquit. I was to place the burden of proof always with the prosecution and never with the defense and, even if I felt in my gut the defendant was guilty; if the prosecution had not done its job properly and presented a case proving to my mind that he was guilty, I was doing our justice system a greater disservice by going with my gut over my mind.

The basic difference in my philosophy and those of the other jurors was that they felt that their job as a juror was to judge the defendant. I felt that my job as a juror was to judge the prosecution's case against the defendant.

During those four days, I was tempted several times to make nice with my fellow jurors and just go along..I was told over and over again that I was wrong. I was called names, At one point mister moat point called me a bleeding heart liberal.(that was a first for me) But each time I felt the urge to capitulate, my mind kept coming back to a quote by John Adams."There are only two creatures of value on the face of the earth: those with the commitment, and those who require the commitment of others"

What it came down to in that jury room was a battle of values, my basic values and beliefs over the basic values and beliefs of eleven other people. A person's beliefs are based upon their values and, as such, there are many times when a belief is neither right nor wrong...it is right or wrong depending upon the holder's values.

But this wasn't one of those times.

What that experience left me with was the firm conviction that you really ought not to try and get out of jury duty. If you are a rational person who can look at a case without passion...the greatest service you can render your country is to serve on a jury. Unfortunately, most people who think that way are also very busy people for whom jury duty would be a financial sacrifice as well as a sacrifice of their time...and so, when they get the summons, they do their dead level best to not get on a jury. (My personal favorite was the man who showed up to jury selection with a "Nuke Gay Baby Whales For Jesus" T-shirt) Unfortunately, that leaves most juries filled with either people who have nothing better to do with their time or people who, for some reason or other, relish the thought of sitting in judgement of their fellow man...and believe me when I tell you that none of these people is apt to be sitting across from Regis Philbin holding a check for a million dollars with all of their life-lines still unused.

Ask yourself this. If you say you love your country and are willing to die for it...why do you try and get out of Jury Duty?

The next time you are summoned...go and serve

One Last Blessing

2009-09-02T01:59:00.000-07:00

It's four in the morning and I've been up for the better part of an hour. I love this time of day. It is my hour of peace and rest unmarred by earthly care. For some reason, my thoughts always seem better honed and more clear at this time. My emotions are more crisp and I can more easily identify thier roots.

For the better part of this hour, I have been feeling an emotion that I didn't remember ever feeling before...it is a mixture of happiness and sadness and anticipation and worry...all of my emotions seem to be mixed with its counterpart; except one...pride.

Today is the day that my last child, my daughter leaves for college. In just a few short hours, she will step out of my door and, when she crosses that threshhold one last time, her status will change. She will no longer be a permanent resident under my roof. At 3:00 this afternoon, my Sarah will take her fledgling flight into this world.

Oh sure, she will return to my home from time to time but these will always be temporary visits. When she returns, I will be painfully aware of the ticking clock that will take her away from me again. Although she will always be welcome here for as long as she wishes, if things go according to the grand design, once she leaves today, she will only have temporary residences until she finds and makes one of her own.

For the last week or so, my wife has been urging me to find the time to give our daughter her traditional father's blessing before she goes off to school. I have, to her vexation, been putting it off. I don't think that she realizes what she's asking me to do or she wouldn't be quite so frustrated with me when I procrastinate exercising my patriarchal franchise.

Whenever I ponder this blessing, the realization hits me that this could very well be the very last blessing of comfort that she seeks at my hands. The possibility is very real that she will meet someone else to whom she will look for comfort in a priesthood blessing and, when I lay my hands on her head this afternoon, I might very well be passing off the baton to someone I don't even know yet but, somehow, don't like very much right now.

Sometimes our thoughts and feelings take us down a path that seems almost pre-determined...as if the course for them has been laid by a divine hand...and that's what is happening to me this morning because, as I sit here and steep myself in this melange of emotions, it occurs to me that these feelings would not be possible were I not a parent...this is exactly the kind of thing that Heavenly Father wanted me to experience...this is what is referred to as "a growing pain".

All for this mixture of emotions that could be experienced in no other way (and others like them) a Heavenly Being created this world and sent me to it. Because he wanted me to return, he devised a plan wherein his First Born in the spirit and Only Begotten in the flesh would take upon himself my sins...all of that effort so that I could sit here at four in the morning and nourish myself with this wonderful bittersweet emotion. And now I have to add one more feeling to the mixture.

I don't know when I've ever felt more loved.

Danny Boy

2009-08-11T02:38:00.000-07:00

I've been nursing a feeling of sadness lately and I haven't quite been able to put my finger on the reason. Then, last night my daughter went off with some friends to the David Archuleta concert and my wife and I ate our dinner with our son Daniel. That's when it hit me...in a few short weeks, this is how it's going to be from now on. Except for a few holiday meals and some trips home during the summer, from now on, it will be just us three at the table.

And, even though the emotion was purely selfish, I have never been more grateful to have a child who would never leave and always be at home with his mother and I.

When you first have a child, you pray that they will have all ten fingers and ten toes and be completely healthy and 'normal'. When you find out that God didn't quite grant you all of your initial hope, your next hope is that they won't realize that they aren't like the other kids.

Daniel missed out on both of those accounts and through the years, when the kids his age began to reach milestones like baptism, priesthood, missions, marriage...Daniel would come to his mother and I and wonder when he was going to be able to partake of those blessings.

For years, I have felt like Gepetto with a son I love very much whose only wish is to be, "a real boy".

But even though it's been painful while he was growing up. Daniel has more or less come to terms with his condition and, along with his mother and I, has come to accept that this is the way it will be.

Is it wrong for me to be happy that he will always be at our dinner table? Children are supposed to grow up and leave and parents are supposed to want that for them but I confess that I am selfish in this respect.

I don't want any of them to leave and, while I could do nothing to prevent John-Ross and Sarah from growing up and taking their place in this world...I am going to find a great deal of comfort in Daniel always being here.

I heard a story once about a certain song.

It is the story of an old irishman whose wife had passed and left him with three sons to raise. In those days, his country was at war and when the county levy for young men to enter into the army was to be filled, it was announced by parades and bagpipes calling the young men off to war.

The old man's first son grew into manhood and the bagpipes came, calling him off to serve and, even though he served with honor, he dies in battle leaving the old man grief-striken but finding comfort in his remaining two sons.

As time passed, the bagpipes came once again calling the young men off to war and this time it was the second son's turn to go...and he also failed to return.

After a few more seasons had passed, the bagpipes came once again, calling the young men off to war. And this time, before he let him go, the old man took his only remaining son aside, and sang to him, the world's most beautiful love song

Oh Danny Boy
The pipes, the pipes are calling
from glen to glen
and down the mountainside
the summer's gone
and all the roses falling
'tis you, 'tis you
must go, and I must bide

But come ye back
when spring is in the meadow
or when the valley's hushed
and white with snow

'tis I'll be here
in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny Boy Oh Danny Boy
I love you so

When my wife and I heard that story, we told each other that if we ever had another son, we would name him after that song.

We didn't know how ironic it would be that the son we named after that song would be the son that would stay with us always.

Tom Goes to Girls Camp

2009-08-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

Blame Shauna Pitcher Anderson for dredging up these rightfully-repressed memories. It was she who sent out a request for Camp Liahona songs. For those who are unfamiliar with Camp Liahona, it was a spot of mosquito-infested, so-humid-you-could-chew-the-air, water-tasting-like-iron, surrounded-by-banjo-playing-inbreds-with-fewer-teeth-than-chromosones ground about fifty miles North of Houston. (We all loved it and went there whenever we could)

Camp Liahona was the offical camp of The Houston Stake and later the region. It was the place we went for Father-Son campouts, Boy Scout Overnight Camps, Family Reunions, and every single Girls Stake Camp. Most of us old-timers in Houston can find the place in the dark since those were the conditions in which we usually arrived on a Friday night. In fact, only about forty percent of the travel time from Houston to Camp Liahona was spent driving about ninety-nine percent of the distance. The remaining sixty percent of the travel time consisted of driving up and down five to ten miles of I-45 with a flashlight, looking for a dirt road turnoff that was harder to find than the entrance to The Bat Cave.

Various versions of the following conversation took place in virtually everyone's car:

"That's it right there, isn't it?"

"No...I'm telling you we passed it about a mile back. I remember because I tied a bandana to a branch so we could find it easier the next time"

"There's no bandana back there"

"Yeah...I know...but the BRANCH is still there"

I sometimes think that we called the place Camp Liahona because only a person with a Liahona could actually find it on their first try. In fact, in the LDS religion, a person whose patriarchal blessing declares him to be of the Tribe of Levi, can claim the mantle of The Bishop and serve without counselors. It was whispered that only such a person could actually leave Houston in the dark and drive straight to Camp Liahona.

To the North of the camp, down a long treacherous path with tree roots waiting to reach out and trip you in the dark, was a small creek which, when dammed with sandbags, filled up to become a fairly decent swimming hole. There was a nearby rope swing of questionable molecular structure that served to provide an airborn means of entry to the aforementioned swimming spot. No matter how dark it was, no matter how late it was...if you were the first to arrive at Camp Liahona, your first duty was to trek down the path with a shovel and start filling sandbags to dam the creek. Failure to do so would result in your becomming a well-deserved social pariah.

Later on, the Stake sprung for an actual swimming pool and Camp Liahona Alumni became thereinafter divided into two groups...those who had used the swimming hole and those who had not (or as I like to think of them, the non-pansies and the pansies)

My family moved from Houston to Corpus Christi when I was twelve and I became lifelong friends to Robert Ghormley and Buddy Murphy. We were all in scouts together, got our life-saver merit badge together, and, in the process, became ceritified Red Cross Life Guards together (this might sound like rambling but I swear it's part of the story)

The year before we moved back to Houston, my mom became Stake Young Women's President. If I were to go strictly by my own observation, then I would have to say that the calling of Stake Young Women's president consisted of a year long planning session of Girls Camp during which your family languished upon a diet of Whataburgers and Swanson's Turkey Pot Pie.

The fly in my mother's ointment, apparently, was in finding a place which was suitable for girls camp. It was my father who suggested she call the Stake President of Houston and ask to use Camp Liahona. She was given permission upon condition that she provide three Red-Cross Certified lifeguards as well. (see? I told you it would become relevant)

There are fewer moments sweeter in a young teenage boy's life than when he realizes that his mom actually needs him for something that is above and beyond the call of duty. Going to Girls Camp was something that every teenage boy dreamed of...you're all alone with every girl in the stake!. Unfettered access to endear yourself to over a hundred young women!...how was I to know then what a huge disconnect there is between fantasy and reality?

But this was no time to let my mom know what a huge plum had just fallen into my lap...nope...my mom was backed into a corner. This was the time to get concessions. Buddy, Rob, and I were to be allowed to take our family's tent trailer as our official lifeguard headquarters. We fashioned a sign to that end. It read:

"Official Camp Liahona Lifeguards...also Philosophers, Bikini Inspectors, and Notary Public...(flats fixed)"

The girls of the stake would have to camp out on concrete slabs...this was before those slabs had roofs on them so they were to be exposed to the elements while we luxuriated in our family's tent trailer complete with mattresses, a refrigerator, and stove!

Within two hours of arriving at camp, we had the swimming hole dammed. Our entire official duties were done for the day and so we sat back and drank root bear and Dr. Pepper from our cooler and played Risk while the girls went about their routine.

There was, over the decades of use at Camp Liahona, a huge mound of garbage that sat right about where the swimming pool sits now. I didn't know it then but, apparently, it was a part of Girls Camp for the girls of the stake to complete a "camp project" . By way of thanking the Houston Stake for allowing us use of the camp, my mom determined that the camp project would be to bury that mountain of garbage.

"She went out to the baseball diamond with a bull horn and announced" This year, the camp project will consist of the girls in the camp digging a hole and burying the garbage pile" She pointed to a stack of shovels and picks and then walked away.

The next day, my mom, again went out to the baseball diamond and, with her bull horn announced, "Okay...the boys will dig the hole and the girls will fill it with the garbage" Then she grabbed the shovels and picks and dropped them at the door to our sanctuary.

We spent the rest of the day digging a hole big enough to fill in that pile of garbage and cover it with a decent layer of dirt. I won't bore you with a lesson on the geology surrounding the Houston area but suffice to say that only about three inches of any ground around Houston is actually topsoil the rest is clay and caliche. We went to bed about eleven that night and slept like the dead anticipating that, when we awoke, the girls at girls camp would be busy filling in the garbage and we could get back to drinking root beer and Dr Pepper and playing Risk. Before we left, however, we stacked the shovels and picks over by the girls' slabs so that they could find them in the morning.

About ten the next morning, we heard, through the fog of our sleep, the clank of shovels and picks being dropped outside our tent trailer door. About fifteen seconds later, we were awakened by my mom's sweet voice coming through a bullhorn, "Okay....the boys will fill in the garbage hole and the girls will cover it up"

When we didn't emerge from our beds soon enough to suit my mom, she came up right to our trailer door, turned up the volume on the bullhorn until it squeeled with feedback and blasted us, "I SAID! THE BOYS WILL FILL IN THE GARBAGE AND THE GIRLS WILL COVER IT UP!!!!"

I got up, locked the door, and went back to bed. About ten seconds later, I was awaked with a loud, meaty "THUNK". I looked up to see the business end of a pick poking through the splintered door. Buddy Murphey's eye poked out from under his pillow. His muffled voice came through the covers, "I think she's serious"

I spent the rest of the day shovelling garbage into a hole while listening to Robert and Buddy invent a new brand of humor that has since become widely known as "Yo Momma So..(fill in the blank)"

By the time we finished filling in the garbage pile, we stunk and we were thoroughly disabused of any notions we had previously held about how neat it would be to spend a week surrounded by all the girls in the stake. For those young men who have not had my experience, let me state that, the moment the young women of the stake hit girls camp any pretense of fashion or hygiene goes right out the window.

They stop wearing makeup, plucking eyebrows, shaving legs, armpits or even wearing deodorant. In fact, just like one of those old black and white werewolf movies, you can actually see them transform into beasts before your very eyes!

It was Thursday and my mom had decided to bundle up everyone's dirty clothes and take them into town to wash at the laundromat. When she came back, all the clothes were dumped on a picnic table in one huge unisex pile.

Buddy, Rob and I had to dig through a pile of girls undies and padded bras looking for our duds. Every once in a while a beehive would come up to us with a disgusted look on her face holding up a pair of threadbare whitey tightys and, stretching the waistband for emphasis on each syllable ask, "are these yours?"

As I looked through the pile and pondered my humiliation, a plan for revenge began to formulate. I stuffed a few bras and panties under my shirt. I could see that great minds thought alike because I caught Rob and Buddy in the same activity.

Later that night, we hatched a plan on getting those purloined unmentionables up the flagpole, which sat directly in the middle of the girls sleeping area. We decided that a diversionary tactic would be utilized.

We gathered up as many pinecones as we could stuff in pillow cases and began a midnight assault on the girls' slab. We had planned a blitzkrieg of pinecones during which I would slip through their line of defense and run the panties and bras up the flagpole.

What we had not planned, was that the girls would see us gathering pinecones, correctly interpret our intentions, and have a stash of their own missles ready and waiting.

About eleven thirty that night, The Great Pinecone Raid of 1973 began. We emerged from the woods, our pinecones at the ready, and announced our presence with the tradional screams and yells employed by pirates and vikings which quickly turned into full-on boy screams once it became obvious that our intended victims were not only waiting for us but armed to the teeth as well.

We had depended upon surprise to be our ally but that notion soon disappeared , we quickly realized that we were outnumbered a hundred to three and we were about to be annialated. It is no shame, under such circumstances, to retreat as quickly as one can. I turned and ran down the path I had come from as quickly as I could; forgetting, in the process, that there was a branch that crossed that path about five feet above ground. (I was, at the time, five foot ten) When I got to the spot of the branch I was in full flight mode. The branch hit me in the throat which had the affect of immediately stopping all forward progress my body was making from five feet above the ground on up.

From five feet on down, adhering closely to the principles of physics Newton had discovered centuries before, my body continued on until it could go no further. At that point all forward motion was transferred to the branch which acted as a pivot, swinging my feet up until I was on a horizontal plane with the branch.

It was at this point, that gravity once again decided to manifest itself and slam me back onto the ground. knocking every minute molecule of breath from my body.

I had heard that Marines will stand over a fallen comrade and fight to the death, their motto being "no man left behind". My own comrades employed a different philosphy, known as "every man for himself" and continued running and screaming away.

In a perverse way, their cowardice had the affect of bringing our plan to fruition; for while the girls passed by me chasing the other two deep into the forest, I had enough time to catch my breath, slip back to the flagpole and complete my mission.

The cherry on top of all of this was that, by the time I got back to the trailer, the boys were barracaded inside while the girls surrounded the trailer, pelting it with rocks and pinecones. My mom was busy calling off the hounds (either figuratively or literally depending upon how one viewed the now more hirusite female youth of our stake)

My mom brought all the commotion to a complete stop by shouting at the top of her lungs, "THE BOYS ARE NEVER COMING TO GIRLS CAMP AGAIN!!!!!" (no bullhorn necessary here)

I threaded my way through the crowd, past my mom, and in as a bewildered and innocent voice as I could muster asked, "I was in the latrine....what's all this about?"

In my fifteen years on earth, I had done many things to incite my mother's anger. I had watered the wisteria bush with a gasoline can. I had waxed the linoleum floor with furniture wax (my mom slipped and broke her tail bone) I had impaled Keven McCreary's hand to the fence with an arrow.....I had NEVER seen her more angry than that night.

As we sat up the rest of the night, we pondered our fate in the morning. We decided that our only hope of salvation lay in retrieving the bras and panties I had run up the flagpole. We drew straws, I got the short one and since I had partially exhonerated myself from the previous night's fiasco, I felt it was my duty to go without protest.

I made my assault just before dawn. I had planned it just when I felt everyone would be asleep and my mom, whom I knew would be up all night keeping vigil, would be most vulnerable. I got safely through the girls sleeping area and got the lingerie down from the flagpole and was almost back to the trailer when my mom's voice called out,

"Tom! what are you doing up so early?"

"Nothing...just couldn't sleep, mom!"

I continued on...Rob came out of the trailer and watched from a few yards away and out of my mom's line of sight.

"You tell the rest of those boys that I expect them to get up for devotional...no sleeping in!"

"I'll tell them mom!" I mouthed for Rob to take the bundle of undies I had secreted under my shirt

"And tell them no more shenanigans or that's it!"

I looked at Rob, pleading with my eyes for help...he just shook his head. Buddy showed up next to him and looked at me standing there out in the open. I made a break for it and something slipped out of my shirt. My mom called after me..

"What did you just dro.........THAT'S MY BRA!!!!"

The three of us evaporated into the woods.

Later that day, my mom marched out onto the ball field with her bull horn. She had set up a table with sandwiches and chips and soda. She then turned up the volume on the bull horn and announced, "THE BOYS WILL NOW COVER OVER THE PIT"

We came out of the forrest, ate our lunch, and grabbed the shovels.

Later on, when we got back to Corpus, my mom got up in church and reported on Girls Camp. She stated with glowing pride how the girls had dug a pit and buried a mountain of garbage for thier camp project.

I had to be physically restrained.

Kicking and Screaming

2009-08-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

A lot of people ask me how a 6th generation native Texan such as myself came to be in Wisconsin. The answer I usually give them is "I came here kicking and screaming". Let me back up and explain a bit more. It's all the fault of my friend Robert Ghormley.

Rob and I knew each other when I lived in Corpus Christi. Our parents were best friends and we became best friends. In fact, Rob has gone beyond the status of "best friend" and has entered the status of being a friend who can lay claim to one of my kidneys and as much bone marrow as he can carry. I only afford this status to a select few so don't ask me if you're in the club.

Rob and I are such good friends that his wife and mine are best friends as well. When we first started visiting the Ghormleys here in Wisconsin, Rob (who was branch president) called my wife and I into his office at the church and laid the classic Ghormley Guilt Trip on us.

I've often said that Jews and Catholics only THINK that they do guilt. They're amateurs when it comes to Mormons and the best I've ever seen it done is in the Ghormley household.

If you ever spent the night there (and I did on several occasions) family prayer at bedtime was a kind of 'round robin' affair wherein everyone said a prayer. It was in these prayers that the guilt trips came out mainly because, if this wasn't said in a prayer, you'd interrupt and talk back. But, seeing as how this was a sincere prayer between the petitioner and The Lord. You had to pretty much shut up and say 'amen' at the end.

The only saving grace in this was that, if you were the last person in line, you got a whack at a rebuttal or two so when Dr. Ghormley prayed, "...and Lord, please tell Tom that he really needs to lose some weight...", when it came YOUR turn to pray, you could say..."...and Lord, please tell Dr. that he needs to mind his own damn business!"

So when Rob closed the door to his office and took out his handkerchief, I could tell that the guilt trip was coming. He first began by rehearsing the fact that we were the best of friends and then he brought our parents into the equation, recalling how THEY were the best of friends. Then he went on about how we were really needed in Wisconsin and would we consider moving up to be here with them. My reply was immediate,

"no"
"no?"
"no"
"why not?
"lots of reasons"
"give me one"
"Okay...I have a lot of metal in my butt and it freezes up here"

But my friend was not to be deterred.

"Will you at least ask The Lord?"
"no"
"no?"
"no"
"why not?"
"lots of reasons"
"give me one"
"I only bother The Lord when I'm not sure of something and I'm sure I don't want to move to Wisconsin"

But Rob would not give up and so, after about six months of his pestering me, I promised that I would take the matter before The Lord. It was one of the shortest prayers of my life. It went something like this...

"Heavenly Father..."
"Yes. I want you to move to Wisconsin"
"Wait...no....lemme get the rest of the question out..."

When I came out of our bedroom, I announced to my wife that we were going to move to Wisconsin and her immediate response was to inquire exactly what I meant by "we". I think her exact phrasing was, "What do you mean, 'we'? Do you have worms?"

After a few minutes of back and forth with my wife's stout refusal to come to Wisconsin, I finally said, "well we have an Adam and Eve Garden of Eden thing going on here because I promised Rob I would ask The Lord and I did and I'm moving to Wisconsin."

My dear wife decided that she would see for herself and disappeared into the bedroom. Her experience must have been similar to mine because she came back out a few moments later and complained, "you just HAD to ask, didn't you!"

But the truth is that, even though we came here kicking and screaming, we love it here. Oh sure, there are drawbacks. Taco Bell is the best Tex Mex around and when you complain about the quality of Mexican Food up here the conversation usually goes something like this.

"what do you miss most about Texas?"
"Decent Mexican food"
"Really? Because I know a really GREAT Mexican food Rest..."
"No you don't"

When we first started visiting, we attended a branch function at Noah's Ark. It is the world's largest outdoor water park in Wisconsin Dells..the place where water parks were invented and perfected.

When we first got there, we sat with the rest of the branch in a small pavillion that we had reserved and ate luch and socialized. Rob's son, Dylan was having a pretty good time with his friends and he had never been to a waterpark and so he didn't know what he was missing. All he knew was that he was enjoying himself right then

SO when Rob grabbed Dylan and started for the rides, all Dylan understood was that he was being taken away from something he liked...and he reacted like any four year old would react, he tugged at his father's grasp and went towards an unknown destination kicking and screaming.

Once he got to the water, he had the time of his life. After a while though, it became apparent that he was getting a bit too cold. He needed to get out and warm up a bit. So Rob dragged his son kicking and screaming back to the pavillion.

As I watched all of this, I realized how the difference in understanding between Rob and his four year old son was a lot less than the difference in understanding between me and Heavenly Father.

I watched a loving father take his son kicking and screaming to a place the father knew his son would enjoy and when it became too much for him, I watched that same father drag his son kicking and screaming away for his own good.

and I wondered how often Heavenly Father had done the same to me.

Treasures in Heaven

2009-07-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
-Matt. 6:19-21-

I don't know how many of you feel like those scriptures refer to good works. I used to anyway. I don't anymore though.

I don't know when or where or what the impetus was for the change but I now believe that those scriptures refer to those incidents in our lives which promote spiritual growth.

There is a favorite movie of mine. We've all played the game where you're to imagine being stranded alone on a desert island, and you could choose five movies. Which would you choose? First and foremost on my list would be, "To Kill a Mockingbird" I love this movie for so many reasons. Atticus Finch, for being someone who never forgot his manners. After the trial, when his world had crashed down upon him, as he was relating to his neighbor, Miss Maudy, his loss. Sheriff Tait came driving up and asked to speak with him. Under the circumstances, anyone would simply turn and start speaking to the Sheriff but Atticus first turned to Maudy and asked, "Would you excuse me for a moment?"

When his daugher and his son had been attacked and his son was laying in bed. When we first get a look at Boo Radley...anyone would excuse Atticus for not remembering the gentilities that were obviously ingrained within him but, even then, his first words were words of introduction that might be used at a cotillion, "Miss Jean Louis Finch? Mister Arthur Radley" I love how, of all the people in town, Atticus refused to call his neighbor, "Boo" but insisted upon granting him the dignity of his proper name.

Emily Post once said that manners are not meant to restrict us, but to free us. To let us know how we are to act in any situation so as to allow others to feel comfortable around us. Whenever I think of that quote, I think of Atticus Finch and how he always seemed comfortable in every situation..in command of himself and everything around him because he never forgot his manners.

One of the other things I like about the movie is the opening sequence...The one where the little boy takes out a cigar box of toys and trinkets and begins to look at and examine each and every one..a broken watch, a pen knife, a few marbles and crayons...as the sequence progesses, we come to realize that this is no mere box of trinkets, this is a casket of treasure. Each one of the items is important to the boy for some reason or other. We get the feeling that, by opening up and looking at and polishing his 'treasure', the boy becomes more grounded in his life.

I guess that opening sequence of that movie has had as much an impact as anything else in making me realize that Christ was not talking about good works, he was speaking of good experiences.

One of the things that life has taught me is that, while spiritual experiences might be strong and, for the moment, overwhelming, if we do not relive them through purposefully remembering and relating them to others, they soon fade and dull and lose thier significance in our lives altogether.

Spiritual experiences do not have much of a shelf life. Like hot house flowers, unless they are carefully tended, they will wilt and fade. Perhaps that's why we are asked to share our testimonies once a month.

Oddly, one of the things that made me come to realize this was a negative spiritual experience that I had on my mission. One that, for reasons which will become obvious, I did not often share with others. I only do so now to illustrate my point of spiritual experiences unshared and untended soon dull and vanish.

I had this experience while with with a companion and we went through it together. We lost touch after our mission. As the years progressed, whenever I thought about the experience, I would not dwell upon it and my mind would tell me that it couldn't really have happened...that I must have imagined it...that I must be embellishing in my mind what really happened.

When I reconnected with my companion after a couple of decades, I tentatively broached the subject of what happened to us on that night and quickly got a return email, "Oh thank goodness you remember it too! I thought I was going crazy and imagining things".

I have debated, in my mind, the wisdom of telling this story. At the risk of appearing melodramatic, let me warn anyone reading that this story, quite frankly, scares people. Probably more so because it is true. It is the story of the night when my companion, Elder Shrack, and I became certain that there was a God because we came face to face with his opposite number.

This story took place in the town of Sassari on the island of Sardegna. It was in one of the farthest reaches of the mission. Getting there required almost 24 hours of travel on a couple of trains and a boat. We did not have phones in our apatments. As such, the only contact we had with the mission office was a weekly call we made at the telephone exchange office to our Zone Leaders on the southern tip of the island and weekly reports mailed in.

We shared a massive apartment with another companionship. It was huge. One of our favorite things about the apartment was a huge salon with ornate deorations and painted ceilings. There were a few dozen mattresses in that room that we arranged on the floor every P-Day and had tag-team wrestling matches.

Another reason we loved this apartment so much was that it was so huge, you could literally go and be alone with your thoughts for a while...a rare commodity while being a missionary. Most apartments were so small that you were literally in each others face 24/7.

My companion and I had been concentrating upon reactivating people in the branch. In every italian city, there is an area that missionaries referred to as "the gut" It was the oldest part of the city with buildings that looked like they were designed for a movie featuring Romeo and Juliette.

We were in such a building, calling upon an inactive member when the groundwork of our experience was laid.

When we knocked on the door, the mans wife answered. When she saw who we were, her eyes got wide and she reached out and practically dragged us into the apartment. I must say, it was quite a different experience than we were used to in door approaches.

When we got into the apartment, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck rising. I was terrified and a quick look at my companion and our hostess let me know that they were just as terrified.

The lady of the house spoke up asking us if we were missionaries. We told her we were.

She then related to us that her husband no longer considered himself a member of our church and, in fact, no longer was a Christian. She said that he had started dabbling in Satanism and was now practicing that religion.

When we expressed a measure of incredulity, she pointed to some evidence in the corner..an area that looked like a shrine with an marble alter. There was some evidence on the alter that small animals had been sacrificed. (I know...I had trouble believing it myself and I was looking at it) The lady of the house asked us if we could cast the spirits from her home.

Casting out demons isn't really a lesson that they teach you at the MTC (LTM in my day) We had no idea what to do and so we thought we would offer a prayer.

Have you ever been swimming underwater in a river and heard rocks click together? You know how you don't really "hear" the sound with your ears but it seems like you hear it at the stem of your brain? Both my companion and I, during that prayer, heard voices in that same way...not in our ears but at the stem of our brain.

Trust me, I am fully aware of the rammifications that might come if I admit to "hearing voices in my head" but there's no getting around the fact that such was the case.

There is a scripture in The Book of Mormon that describes Christ praying:

And no tongue can speak, neither can there be written by any man, neither can the hearts of men conceive so great and marvelous things as we both saw and heard Jesus speak; and no one can conceive of the joy which filled our souls at the time we heard him pray for us unto the Father
3 Nephi 17:17

A lot of people have trouble fathoming that a person could hear words and yet not write them. I don't. Because, at the opposite end of the spectrum, even though I heard the words in my head, I really don't have a way to describe to you how horrible and threatening and frightening they were.

My companion finished our prayer and returned home for the evening..too frightened to even discuss what had happened to us.

For several days afterwards, I began to notice a phenomenon in our apartment. Where previously we all loved being able to be alone, I noticed that nobody would be alone anywhere for any reason. As a matter of fact, nobody went anywhere except their own bedrooms, the kitchen, or the bathroom.

One night, I snapped awake. One moment I was deep asleep and the next I was wide awake. Even thoughI was awake and in my bed, I had the sensation that I was moving..it was if I were in a roller coaster, some open air means of transport and I was travelling through a tunnel at a tremendous rate of speed.

The feeling was not unpleasant but the strangeness of the situation terrified me. I tried to imagine what was going on and I caught hold of a single thought...either my spirit was leaving my body, or another spirit was trying to get in.

Once I got hold of that thought, I began to concentrate, very hard, on trying to make the feeling stop. I prayed inwardly and concentrated so hard that I literally sweat through my bedclothes.

Eventually, the feeling stopped. Actually, what happened was that the "ride" I was on slowed until it stopped and then started "moving" again in the opposite direction. At one point, the feeling of movement stopped altogether and I had a settling or a "whompff" type of feeling.

I was terrified beyond all reason. I eventually got up the nerve to roll over. When I did, I saw that the room was dark but there was something even more dark right beside my bed. I screamed and my companion awoke and turned on the light.

"Did you see it?" He asked.

I nodded that I did.

"I've seen it three nights in a row"

We left the apartment and went to call our zone leaders to tell them our situation. In an almost cavalier manner, they said, "Cast them out"

"Hey! we TRIED that buddy!" I screamed into the phone, "They just followed us home! If you wanna come take a crack at them, be my guest!"

We left the apartment and spent the night at the church. We only returned for our things. We were never bothered again.

I related this story to a sister in one of my wards who had ten years later served in the same mission, in the same town, and, as it turns out, had lived in the same apartment. Her eyes grew wide as she heard my story and related a similar instance that had occured to her companion and she.

Beleieve it or not, I don't relate the story to scare people. I do so because, despite the intensity of the experience (and the negative nature of the experience notwithstanding...it was the most POWERFUL experience of a spiritual nature, I had ever encountered)

But the fact remains that, despite the power of that experience, because I did not cause myself to remember and relive it, I soon began to doubt its veracity and wondered if I had not imagined the whole thing. It was only wehen asking people who shared the same or similar experiences that I realized what a short shelf life spiritual experiences of any nature have.

Perhaps that's what the veil of forgetfulness is...simply time without the means of remembering and sharing the experience of heaven. I don't know.

What I DO know is that positive spiritual experiences are to be shared, and shared often. Both for the benefit of the hearer and, more importantly, for the benefit of the teller

Thank You

2009-07-08T18:46:00.000-07:00

This letter has been a long time coming. I want to thank you for the part you played in helping my daughter become the amazing young woman that she is today. Maybe you won't have occasion to read this blog but I want to thank you nevertheless.

When we first moved into your town, you and my daughter were just starting high school. You became friends and were close all thoughout the summer. Then a boy you had a crush on since grade school started to date my daughter.

We didn't know you had a crush on the boy. Perhaps, if we had known, steps might have been taken to avert what happened next but by the time we found out, it was too late.

It started with rumors and innuendo. Concerned parents in the ward began to call us and tell us that they had heard our daughter was behaving unseemly in public with the boy. When we asked our daughter, she denied that anything of the kind was taking place. We took our concerns to a sister in the ward who also taught at the school. She told us that nothing of the kind was happening. But by the time we found out the truth, a lot of damage was already done. People like to believe anything juicy they hear about someone else. On more than one occasion, my wife and I entered a room in the chapel where my daughter was the topic of discussion only to see the talk come to a quick and embarrased halt.

It would have been bad enough had it just been the youth engaged in this gossip but, sadly, adults were often present as well.

We narrowly avoided disaster when a friend of the boy who was dating our daughter told us of plans you had made to purposefully place our daughter in a compromising position with the boy during a party you were all to attend. It appears you wanted to find some way...any way you could make all the things you had said about her true.

At first, my wife and I did not want to believe that another member of the church could be capable of something like that but then the boy showed us the emails you sent him where you outlined your plans. We were heartbroken.

In an effort to put a stop to all of this, we encouraged our daughter to not see the boy anymore. We had no idea at the time but that was probably the worst thing. When she broke up with the boy, he was hurt and that gave you license to unleash hell upon my daughter. You wrote viscious and disgusting things on her Bebo account page. When she blocked you, you went on as your sister, then apparently you stole or finagled the account passwords of mutual friends and did the same thing under the guise of being someone else...but we knew who it was. Did you really think that we would not notice the same misspelled words and sentence structure? Eventually, she shut down her page altogether.

During this ordeal, her mother and I tried to make some sense of this madness. I was reticent to imagine that the only motive for such behavior was simple jealousy. In a brutish effort to get to the bottom of it all, I accused my daughter of not telling me the whole truth. I demanded that she tell me what had really occured to cause all of this vitriol and poison being directed at her. She broke down crying and told me that she didn't know. One minute you were friends and the next minute you were enemies and she had no idea what she had done wrong.

I wasn't satisfied and so I went through all of the hate mail you directed at her. There was nothing in there that I could see of any kind of an accusation from you. Just invectives and declarations of your hatred. All she had done was be the object of your crush's affection.

I went back to my daughter and begged her forgiveness for not believing her.

It would have been okay if just leaving you alone had been the end of it but what happened next was some sort of weirdness that I thought could only happen in a Hollywood movie. You began a campaign of alienation. You let all of you mutual friend know that, if they were friends with my daughter, they could not be your friends.

Maybe it was because they had been friends with you for so long, maybe it was because they knew what you were capable of and were afraid, or perhaps it was as simple as the fact that my daughter did not demand a decision from them, but for a while, your plan worked. Sarah was completely cut off from all friends at school and at church.

Eventually, she made new friends at school. The kids at church would only speak to her as long as you weren't around. In truth, I find their cowardice almost more disgusting.

If Sarah had a class at school that you were also in, you would have one of your croanies call her and encourage her to change. When she was accepted at BYU-I, you had one of them call even then and encourage her to go to another school because "you've always wanted to attend there". We heard rumors that our daughter was suicidal; that she "hated life"; that she was a lesbian. Almost weekly a new form of hate would be directed at her. When we looked into it, they all had a common epicenter, you. It was as if you were trying to throw anything you could at her to see what would stick. I still can't quite wrap my mind around how full of hatred a person has to be in order to do some of the things that were done.

I think that the hardest part was the alienation at church and seminary. It's especially difficult to get up for class early every morning and force yourself to go when you can tell that the kids who are supposed to be closest to you either hated you or were uncomfortable around you because of that hatred.

She made new friends at school and tried to go on in spite of all of what was happening. But, even though she was a cheerleader and in all of the school plays, because she would not drink or engage in the kind of behavior that you accused her of, she did not attend many parties.

I can't tell you how many times I would pass my daughter's room and hear her crying inside....how many times I would see her seeking solace in prayer or in reading the scriptures...the many times when she would come to her mother and I in tears and wonder when Heavenly Father would answer her prayers and make it all right...all the times when the only advice we could give her was to hang on...to not give in to the hatred...to go on as best as she could and, the answer that always seems trite, "The Lord would answer her prayers in his own due time"

The one bright spot was when a few of the kids that had been your mutual friends decided that they could no longer stand to hear the daily rants against our daughter and came to her asking forgiveness and seeking her friendship once again.

When it was announced that we were moving to a new town, we heard from these two that you went around asking everyone if they were as excited as you were that we were leaving.

I once heard a story about Houdini. How he claimed that he could escape from any jail. Scotland Yard took him up on his challenge and, in a much publicized event, took him into one of their cells, daring him to escape. After checking him and taking all of his clothes as a precaution, they locked him naked in the cell.

But, what nobody knew at the time, was that Houdini had trained himself to be able to halfway swallow and bring up again, a strand of wire. Once alone in the cell, he brought up that strand of wire, formed it into a lock pick, and went to work on the lock.

He worked at it for hours to no avail. Here was a man who could get out of handcuffs as quickly as a person could lock them; who could pick locks and tie knots in string with his toes, who had devoted his very life to understanding the mechanism to virtually every lock in the world so that he could defeat it and yet, despite his best efforts, he could not best the lock in that jail cell.

After hours of trying, Houdini fell exhausted and slumped against the door of his cell, which swung open. It seems that the cell door had been locked only in his own mind.

When I think of you and my daughter, I think of that story. I think of how much each of you missed out on in High School. How she missed out on a lot, but how you missed out on even more. How, if that door to friendship had not been locked in your mind, you could have been friends with one of the finest persons I know; someone who is pretty and kind and sweet and funny and loyal.

I realize that a lot of those qualities were forged in the crucible that you created for her in high school. She came out of the ordeal with her dross burned away, bright and shiny and beautiful. Someone whose testimony was formed when the only friend...the only person she could turn to for comfort and solace besides her parents was her Savior...a much better person than when she went in and, strangely, we have you to thank for it all.

Already, in just a few short weeks, the girls in our new ward have become the kind of friends with my daughter that you two could have been all throughout high school. We see her having fun and smiling and we can see how quickly what you put her through can vanish, and how The Lord does answer prayers and make things better.

The saying "that which does not destroy me, only makes me stronger" seems trite but, nevertheless, I want to thank you for making my daughter strong.

Forty Year Old Mystery

2009-06-28T00:25:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I thought of this last story...perhaps because my last post was about a teacher. There's a mystery that has bounced around in my head for the last forty years or so and I would like fresh insight as to how it might be solved.

Virtually all of my elementary school teachers made a lasting impression on me in one way or another...

My kindergarten teacher's name was Miss Buzzbee. (what a perfect name for a kindergarten teacher!) Aside from her name, I remember that she was very sweet and patient and that she made me feel safe in her classroom. I still remember that warm and genuinely loving smile she gave to me when my mom took me into her classroom on the day before I started school to introduce me to my new teacher. Once she told us that we were going to have some new friends come and visit us that day. I still remember my excitement; I've always enjoyed meeting new people. When they never came, I felt cheated for years until I finally realized that our 'new friends' were named, "Dick" and "Jane" and they had a dog named, "Spot".

My first grade teacher's name was Mrs. Gilliland. She was a stickler for manners and courtesy. It was while in her class that we were first allowed to go and eat in the school cafeteria. For a week, each day before lunch, she would drill us on cafeteria protocol. She taught us that it was inconsiderate to make the cashier and others behind us in line wait while we fumbled around in our pockets looking for our money. Such was her influence that, to this day, when I visit a Luby's, I still have my money or credit card in the upper right hand corner of my tray when I get to the cashier.

It was while in Mrs. Steven's third grade classroom that I first was allowed to write with a fountain pen and we were introduced to cursive writing.

Miss Piggett, my fourth grade teacher was a willowy blond who looked like she was the inspiration for Barbie and was the object of my first crush.

Miss Innis, my fifth grade teacher was fresh out of college. My ability to make her turn red with laughter any time I felt like it made me think that I had her in the palm of my hand. Then I got my report card and discovered that, under the category of conduct, I received an "Unsatisfactory"

My sixth grade teacher, Mrs Harris, was a no-nonsense woman who issued pages of math as a punishment and is probably the reason I can now do long division with the skill of an autistic savant.

Did you notice that I skipped over my second grade teacher? That's because I only remember one thing about her. I can close my eyes and see, in my mind, the face of every single one of my elementary school teachers except this woman. I remember absolutely nothing about her....what her name was, what color her hair was, was she tall or short? Was she skinny or plump?....nothing....my mind is a complete blank.

The only thing I can recall is one day (after a particularly bad day of conduct on my part) She dropped a note on my desk for me to take to my parents, allow them to read how horrible I had conducted myself in class that day, get them to sign it, and bring it back to class with me the next day.

Now, I understand that this was a time predating the Internet and so my teachers could not simply email my mom and dad and tell them how badly I had misbehaved. But, by the time I attended second grade, Alexander Graham Bell was dead and in his grave for the better part of a century...the woman couldn't pick up a phone?

Having a seven year old boy bring one of those dreaded notes to his parents was akin to having a firing squad victim pass out the bullets just before they tied him to a post and put a blindfold over his eyes. Worse, in fact. At least a firing squad victim knows what his punishment will be and that it will be much quicker and relatively less painful.

To make matters worse, the sadistic...(what's the adjective I'm looking for here?....it will come to me....) In any event, the woman dropped the note off on my desk a full hour before I was to go home; meaning that I had a full hour to fret over my fate and try to concoct an alibi (which I couldn't because, unlike her more considerate predecessors, THIS teacher had stapled the note shut so I couldn't read it before I got home!) I was going to find out what I had done wrong at the same time my parents did. Allowing for their reaction, I would have about 30 seconds to come up with a plausible story. I was going to have to call upon all my powers of persuasion and talents in extemporaneous speaking just to survive past dinner time!

I tried to prise open a corner of the note to get a clue as to what it might be all about. No good. The woman had used too many staples. I accidentally tore a corner and quickly tried to smooth it all back into place. Things were bad enough but they would be much worse if my parents saw the torn corner and correctly surmised that I had tried to circumvent my teachers will and read the note before they got it.

Nervous energy consumed me and spilled out of me in the form of fidgeting and drawing doodles on the object of my obsession....the instrument of my doom. I'd had to contend with notes from teachers before but never had I been hemmed in on all sides like this.

After an hour of mental torture, the afternoon bell rang signalling freedom for virtually every student at James Arle Montgomery Elementary School...save one condemned.

That long walk home was too much for me to face. I sat at the street corner, directly atop a storm sewer inlet, and contemplated my fate. I sat there for the better part of an hour before inspiration struck. I looked down and saw the opening to the storm sewer. I casually looked about for witnesses. There was nobody in sight. The only thing that would make me seem more alone would be for the wind to moan and a tumbleweed to come rolling by. I girded up my loins, took a deep breath, and dropped my teacher's note into the storm drain inlet where I was certain it would be transported to the nearest bayou and out into The Gulf of Mexico to disappear forever.

I had bought myself some time. Tomorrow was a new day and hope springs eternal for a seven year old. I felt my old confidence return.

The next day, in class, when my teacher asked me if my parents had signed the note, I told her I had lost it. I smiled inwardly. I knew I was going to have a new note but my bad conduct was almost a day old. Chances are that this note would be written with far less venom and vitriol...maybe she had forgotten what I had done altogether...

My teacher levelled her gaze at me, reached into her top drawer, pulled out that note...that very same note...and placed it upon her desk.

"you mean this note?", She asked.

Did you ever see the movie, "Psycho"? You remember how Hitchcock played that shower scene...keeping his viewers mentally off balance by rapidly, and repeatedly zooming in and out while strained violins screeched in cadence with the camera's movements?

All I can say is that something like this must have happened in his life to give him the inspiration because that's exactly what was happening in my mind as I stared, transfixed upon that note on my teacher's desk.

SCREECH!!!...SCREECH!!!...SCREECH

And it was the same note...not a replica...not a duplicate or a carbon copy. It was the very same note that I had stuffed down the storm sewer the day before without a witness in sight...right down to every crease, doodle...even the tear in the corner where I had tried to read it!!! all there!

And that's it...that's is my only memory about second grade. Now, there might be one or more explanations for my inability to recall anything else from that school year. Post traumatic stress might be coming to your mind. I can buy that.

But I can only come up with two plausible explanations for how my teacher came to be in possession of that note.

1) She lived in the sewer

or (and this is the one I'm leaning towards)

2) She sold her soul to The Devil.

On Judging Not...

2009-06-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

I had a history teacher in High School. I won't say his name for reasons that will shortly be evident. But, if I were to pick which of my teachers influenced me the most, this man would be high in the running.

He was a most opinionated man but I learned from him that it is possible to be opinionated and open-minded at the same time. He always preached to us about the dangers of communism in class and so, when he spoke of mormons as communists because, at one time, we had practiced The United Order, I stood up and told him that he didn't know what he was talking about.

You could have heard a pin drop.

The teacher eyed me up and down and then challenged me to back up my claim with a debate between he and myself. He allowed me three days to prepare and it was probably the hardest studying I had ever done in my academic career. We debated, he made his points and I made mine. In the end, he conceded defeat and thanked me for correcting his mistake.

His forearms were heavily scarred...a testament of a battle fought long ago with fire. In learning more about him, I discovered that when WWII broke out in Europe, he crossed the border into Canada and enlisted in the RAF before America was sucked into the war. He got those scars while piloting a Hawker Hurricane during The Battle of Britain. One of the most noteworthy features of that plane is that it took damage very well. In fact, it could still fly and fight while it was on fire, something my teacher found out first hand.

Even though he smoked heavily, the school administrators designated him to be the one to check for illicit smoking in the third floor boys restroom between classes. He felt it somewhat hypocritcal that he should turn in smokers when he, himself smoked so heavily. In the end, he figured out a way to do his job and maintain his integrity. He stood outside the boys room door between each period, coughed loudly and kicked the door for thirty seconds, then entered the boys room to see if he could catch anyone smoking...amazingly enough, he never did.

One of the greatest thing he insisted upon teaching us was to think for ourselves. The quickest way to get a mediocre or failing grade on an essay paper in his class was to parrot back an opinion he had offered. facts were facts, but when it came to opinion, you'd better have one of your own because he wasn't about to lend you one of his. I discovered that the best way to get an 'A' on any essay paper was to offer a well-researched and argued opinion contrary to his.

To say that the man was a hero of mine would be an understatement. Perhaps, you'll understand now why I don't mention his name when I tell you that I specifically went back to my high school after I served a mission to thank him and tell him what an influence he had on me only to discover that he was serving time in prison for child molestation.

The revelation turned my whole world upside down for quite some time. Nothing at all made sense and I wondered, for a while, what I could and could not trust. Thankfully, my father and I always had open lines of communication and in telling him my troubles, he wisely counselled me to keep that which was good in my memory and not dwell upon the bad.

"Every man is capable of both good and evil. In fact, a man cannot go very far in one of those directions without having the capacity to go just as far in the opposite".

That advice has stood me in good stead in my life. The thing is, I don't even know if my teacher was guilty because of the following story I am going to tell.

While serving as an Elders Quorum President, I had occasion to observe behavior in a little girl in our ward who exhibited many signs of having been a victim of molestation. I took my concerns to her mother who immediately implicated her husband, the child's stepfather.

The police were called and the man, who happened to be a friend of mine, was accused, tried and convicted and sent off to serve time in prison. I've designed many prisons and have visited all of them I can attest to the fact that the stories you hear about the treatment of child molesters in prison is absolutely true.

The years went by, the little girl grew up and graduated high school. I happened to be at her graduation and made it a point to go up and speak to her. I wanted to tell her how pleased I was that she had done so well through school and then, I don't know why, maybe because her stepfather was my friend, I broached the subject of her earlier life and expressed hope that she was faring well.

She looked at me with tears in her eyes and told me that it was all a lie. Her stepfather, my friend, had never touched her. In fact, she counted the time she spent with him as some of the happiest times of her life.

She had, in fact, been a victim. But the perpetrators were some men that her mother made friends with and had brought around to the house while my friend was at work. They were going through a divorce at the time and, when I asked about the daughter's strange behavior and expressed my fears, the girl's mom seized upon the opportunity to gain some leverage against her husband.

I felt as if ice water had replaced all of the blood in my body. The revelation that my friend had done nothing wrong and had spent the last five years in hell for it was beyond my comprehension. Worse still was the realization that I had unwittingly played a role in all of this by bringing up the matter in the first place.

All kinds of self doubt raced though me. Was I too quick to judge? Had I meddled where I ought not have? In the end, I realized that I was right about there being a problem, I just naturally assumed like everyone else that the source of that problem was the cliche that we all seem to accept.

A few years after the graduation, I was in Lowes and I spied my friend on one of the aisles. He had been released from prison. He is two years younger than me but he looked thirty years older. He had no teeth. His face was lined and scarred. His hair was thinning from malnutrition...

I went to him and begged his forgiveness for ever doubting him. I asked him to forgive me for the part I had played in his life turning out like it had. I half expected him to spit in my face or hit me or, at the very least, turn and walk away.

Instead, he embraced me and for five minutes we were the strangest sight ever seen in Lowes...two men embracing each other in the electrical department weeping like babies.

Given all of that, I hope you'll all understand why I try and give anyone accused of a horrible crime or sin the benifit of the doubt...and why I always try and keep the good things they brought to me and not worry so much about the bad.

I don't know what Michael Jackson did or didn't do. I do know that all of the jokes about what he might have done aren't very funny...and I do like his music.

The Ride of My Life..a moment of conversion

2009-06-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

By the time that the fire department and the paramedics arrived at the scene of my accident, I was over 40 minutes into what rescue workers and trauma center personnel call, "The Golden Hour"; that period of time following an accident where a victim's chance of survival are greatest if they can begin to recieve treatment.

Aside from my wrists being destroyed, I had shattered my pelvis into four separate pieces of bone. I learned a few interesting facts about the human pelvis in the following weeks. I learned that it is a most difficult bone to break. In fact, my surgeon informed me that, if I took a human pelvis and hit it with a sledge hammer, chances are it would stay intact. She also said that it is the most painful bone to break and the shock associated with the pain kills a huge percentage of people who experience a broken pelvis.

At that moment, however, it was an almost ethereal experience for me. While people frantically tried to cut me from my car, I could tell that I had one foot in this world and one foot in the next. I instictively knew that I had to fight in some way to stay in this world but the temptation was almost overwhelming to let go and slip away into the next.

In the time where I knew with an absolute certainty that I was closest to death, I have never been more aware of my immediate surroundings, (even what I could not physically see...it was as if I were somehow connected to all things and everyone around me) and I have never felt more at peace. I knew with an absolute certainty that my existence would go on because, in a strange way, as I lay dying, I never felt more alive. I lost, forever, my fear of death

I have likened the experience to being in a river and holding onto a rope while the current tugged at you. If you let go of the rope, the current would simply transport you away to another place. It was odd, but I held onto my life by concentrating very hard on a spot just below where my throat melds into my chest.

Although I am not a follower of eastern religions,(and I was completely unaware of it at the time) the Hindus refer to this region as 'vishuddha', one of their seven 'chakras', or states of existence and equate this one to being on the 'physical plane'.

I do not now nor did I then ascribe to any beliefs in any religion but my own but I do find it strangely coincidental that I would cling to life by instictivly concentrating upon a spot that some believe to be the spirit's gateway to this physical existence. Joseph Smith once said that all religions have some truth to them. Perhaps this is one of the Hindus.

A rescue worker, a tiny guy with a bushy red moustache broke the rear window of my car and climbed into the back seat. He placed a collar around my neck and began to check me for injuries. He touched my thigh and pain shot through me like I had never felt before. I screamed and cursed at him and told him to leave me alone. He cursed back and told me that he was there to save my life and that he was going to touch whatever he damn well felt like touching.

I didn't see why I had to be the only one with a broken bone that night and so I whipped back with my elbow and gave the mouthy little guy a shot in the face, breaking his nose. The fireman with the jaws of life outside of the car laughed and said, "he told you not to touch him".

My left foot was jammed up against the driver's door of the car and they were afraid that while cutting off the door, they might cut off my foot and so I could hear them planning to cut off the passenger's door and pull me out that way.

"If you do that", I said, "you'll rake my hip over the console and I'll lose my concentration and die". I discovered then that rescue workers, at least those without bushy red moustaches, know when to listen to the people they are trying to save.

They gave me time to try and move my left foot from the door. I won't go into how difficult it is to try and move your leg when the bone it's supposed to be connected to is destroyed but, let's just say that I felt a lot like Luke Skywalker must have felt when he was stuck upside down in the ice trying to get to his light saber before that monster got to him. I can't say for certain but I'm pretty sure that "The Force" had a lot to do with my left foot moving away from the door.

The cut the door away and spread the car apart and then told me to fall out into thier arms. I feared the pain of moving but took a deep breath and leaned out into my rescuers.

I was grateful to learn that their movements were quick, deliberate, and fluid. The pain was inevitable but they lessened it drammatically by thier expertise.

As soon as I was situated on a gurney, four pairs of scissors, weilded by four practiced hands came out and snipped away the arms of my shirt and the legs of my pants. Then, in what was reminiscient of one of those amazing magician, tablecloth, flower vase tricks, they whipped away my clothes leaving me strip stark naked on a gurney beside the busiest freeway in the U S of A! (With all of the traffic stopped to boot!)Continuing with the Star Wars theme, it wouldn't have been so bad if I looked more like Luke or Han or even Chewbacca instead of Jabba the Hut.

I heard a paramedic ask, "Did we make sure that the television crew was far enough away?" I thought, "Yes...please....Lord....let them be far enough away" and I screamed, "Can I have a blanket?" They covered me up and hustled me into the waiting life flight helicopter that had landed on the freeway. I said goodbye to one set of paramedics and hello to another.

The flight from Katy to Hermann Hospital was only a few minutes but it was some of the most painful moments of the night. They had jammed my hip up against the side of the helicopter and all of the vibrations of the ship and rotor were transferred to my broken pelvis and shot right into me.

I began to feel as if I was going to slip away again and I knew I had to do something to take my mind off of the pain...so I began to sing.

If you're ever a passanger in life flight and you ever feel like singing, you should choose a different song than I did. I began to sing, "Abide With Me". That's not a song that instills a feeling of confidence in the life flight nurse who attends you. In fact, it freaks them out.

The nurse yelled at me, "Don't you die! If you die...you die on the ground, not up here!"

It struck me as odd that the nurse should be more concerned with where I die and not if I die and so I felt like this was a nurse whose head deserved to be messed with...so I asked in a feeble voice, "do I go towards the light or stay away from it?"

Excited now, the nuse asked, "Do you see a light?"

Motioning with my hand towards the helicopter's console I said, "Yes, I see a green one and a couple of red ones and there's a pretty blue one that keeps blinking"

She looked at me hard and then began to laugh, "You might very well be the only one I've ever heard of joking while on life flight"

I thought that my rescue efforts were tortuous but that was a pittance compared to what lay in store for me in the trauma room.

A nurse began to try and tug my boot off of my foot causing pain to stream out of every pore in my body. I screamed and cursed in several languages, including a few that I made up on the spot, and told the nurse that they were just a thirty dollar pair of boots...cut them off!.

She finally got the boot off and then, in a strange paradox, whipped out a pair of scissors and cut off my sock. (I still have the sock...if I ever run into that stupid nurse I'm going to make her wear it on her nose for a day)

Red Duke was my attending physician that night and, in his Texas ranger drawl came up and said, "Now Tom, we're gonna have to do some things to you that are apt to hurt quite a bit but we'll try and get them over with as soon as possible. We have to set your leg in traction and so we have to drill a hole in your shin to set a bar in there. We gave you a local anesthetic but we can't do a general 'cause you're still in shock. The local should numb it up a bit but you're still apt to feel it a might when that drill hits the bone". I was half expecting him to give me a bullet to bite down on.

I looked up and there was one physician standing on the gurney with his butt in my face, holding my pelvis together while a second held my foot under his arm and leaned back. A third held up a drill.

Revelation comes to different people in different ways...for me, it usually takes the form of a scripture that I'd read springing into my mind at the appropriate moment.

Just before the drill went into my shin, D&C 19:16-18 popped into my head:

For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent;

But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I;

Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink

The drill bit into my leg and I thought, "Tom is gonna be a good boy from now on"

Small and Simple Things

2009-06-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

Joseph Smith once said that all religions have some measure of truth to them. I would imagine that this extends to non-Christian religions as well. If that is so, then I think that I have uncovered what the LDS version of Karma is.

Under Buddhism, Karma is the belief that one keeps coming back to the same life until a much needed lesson is learned and then the soul ascends onto a higher plane in its next existence.

The Mormon version of Karma is that you have to keep doing a calling until you get it right. That might account for the reason I was Elders Quorum President three times.

During one of my incarnations as EQP, I was called into the bishop's office and told that there was a couple who were going through difficulties in their marriage. The bishop of our ward asked me to go to the couple's home and counsel with them and try and get their marriage back on track.

I don't usually argue with bishops but this is one time when I made an exception. Not only did it seem unorthodox...but it also seemed downright dangerous. I had absolutely no training in couples counseling and I could only imagine the trouble that could rain down on my head in particular, and the church in general if I meddled in areas wherein I had no expertise.

The bishop was insistent, however, and so I played my trump card. I made him bear his testimony to me that this was something he felt inspired to do and wasn't just something done out of expediency. He did just that and so I accepted the assignment.

The couple in question had met and married a bit quicker than many people in the ward felt was wise and, now that the shine was off the new relationship, they were experiencing difficulties. The things that most couples work out during a courtship were things that this couple was having to work out after having already taken upon themselves the covenant of marriage.

As I drove to the couple's home, terror over all the possible mistakes I could make and all of the possible problems that could come from my screwing up (and let's face it, I excel at screwing up) overcame me; so I pulled over to the side of the road and said a prayer.

I got to the couple's home and, I no sooner sat down on the couch when the accusations began to fly from both sides. For five minutes, I couldn't get a word in edgewise because of accusations and insults followed by counter-accusations and counter insults.

Finally, they each stopped to take a breath and I was able to speak. I had no idea what I was going to say but, when I opened my mouth, the words just came out...

"Are you having family prayer each night?"

They looked at me like I was crazy, then they looked down and said, "no"

"Are you having family home evening?"

"No"

"Do you each have individual prayer?"

Neither one did.

"Do you read from the scriptures each day?"

"no"

"Do you pay your tithes and offerings?"

They admitted that they did not.

I scoured my memory for seemingly inconsequential things that the leaders of the church had been counseling its members to do since I was a child...things that seemed small and insignificant but that they constantly told us was important. In each and every area, the couple admitted that they were not doing those things.

Finally, I said, "It seems to me that if you were doing all of those things and you still couldn't get along with each other...THEN, we'd have a problem"

I got a commitment from the couple that they would start doing these 'little' things and I would check back in two weeks.

Three days later, I got a call in the middle of the night. It was the wife of the couple on the phone calling me to complain. The husband got on the extension so that he could represent himself.

I interrupted them and began asking the same questions I had asked when I was in their home. Before long, they realized that I wasn't going to budge from my position. They had given me a commitment and I was going to hold them to it.

After a few months, I noticed that the complaining phone calls had ceased. I also noticed that the couple began showing up in church regularly and were much more affectionate and kind to each other than I had ever seen them.

I realized what a powerful testimony had been given to me about the wisdom of the counsel we are given. That these small and seemingly insignificant things are the building blocks for the foundation to a happy home life.

A Really Really Good Man

2009-06-20T19:48:00.001-07:00

I posted this blog last year when I transferred all of my facebook notes to my blog. Since it is coming up on Fathers' Day, I wanted to post it again. I also wanted to add a poem that I wrote to my son about a trait of my father's that he shared

A lot of people think that they have the best father in the world. I really did...at least for me. I can't think of a single instance in my life where he treated me unfairly or harshly. I think that he only lost his temper with me once but in his defense, at the time, I was eating the very first brand new car he ever owned...(that will have to be a separate story).

Teenage boys growing up and becoming disillusioned when they find out what a hypocrite their father's been is a cliche I was spared. My father never professed to be anything other than what he was and while he constantly demanded perfection in himself, he was always forgiving of faults and weaknesses in others.

I was told once that, as children, we often model our concept of Heavenly Father after our earthly fathers. If you have an angry and vengeful father here on earth, your concept of Heavenly Father is that he is an angry and vengeful God. It has always been easy for me to envision my Father in Heaven as kind, loving, and forgiving...someone whose first and foremost passion was my own well-being and progress.

When I was twelve, Kevin McCreary stole a pack of his mom's cigarettes and we took up smoking. I got to be quite good at it and could smoke an entire cigarette and only cough up one lung. One day, Kevin left an unextiguished cigarette in his garage and it nearly burned down his house.

Like the very best friend that he was, Kevin immediately fingered me as an accomplice. My father called me into his room and asked me point blank if I had been smoking. I looked him straight in the eye and said, "no sir!". My father looked at me for a second and then just nodded his head and told me I could go. As I turned to leave, he reached out and took my hand. He held it for a moment and then brought it to his nose and inhaled. Then he looked at me again with sadness in his eyes and said I could go.

Somewhat puzzled by my father's actions, I held my hand to my own nose and inhaled. The smell of cigarettes was unmistakable. I looked at him and he looked at me. I immediately became aware of two facts. First, that both my father and I knew what the truth was and second, that my father as a man of honor expected his son to act honorably as well. I knew that he would never call me a liar and that I would not be punished as long as I held on to my story.

But the look in his eyes broke my heart and I burst into tears begging my father to forgive my lie. I was punished for the cigarettes, the lie was forgiven. I never lied to my father again.

He valued my privacy and guarded it more jealously than I did myself. My sister told me of a tithing settlement where everyone in the family was present except me. The Bishop was chatting with my parents and he began to relate to my folks something I had said. My father interrupted the bishop and asked him if I had given my permission for the information to be passed along. The bishop said that it was not something said in confidence but just in conversation. My father told the bishop that, nevertheless, if I had not given my permission, my father did not want to know. He asked the bishop to treat everything I had said to him as if it were said in confidence.

He was the most diligent home teacher I ever knew. A favorite story of our family is one where he was assigned for years to teach a family that never let him in the door. They had one of those screen doors where they could see you but you couldn't see them. Every month my father would come up and knock on their door only to be denied entrance. Every month, before he left, he stood there on their porch with the cigarette smoke wafting through the slats in the door and he would bear his testimony to people he never got to see. When he turned and left, he would often hear them giggling at him.

We moved away for a few years but we came back. On our first Sunday back, my mom and dad were walking down the hall when the door to the bishop's office opened and the bishop came out with a woman who had been weeping. When she saw my father, the woman screamed and threw her arms around him. My mother, wondered who this strange woman was who was crying and hugging my dad.

It was the wife of the couple he had home taught all those years. After our family moved away, their home teaching visits ceased. The woman began to go though some very trying times and one day she was at the kitchen sink and could see my father in her mind's eye standing there and giving his testimony every month. She determined that she would go back to church and get her life in order. In fact, she was in the bishop's office that very day to begin the process. The last thing she said to the bishop before they walked out was that she wished should could meet whoever that home teacher was so that she could thank him. Then she walked out the door and turned to see my father.

Twice in my father's life, he sold everything he owned to serve The Lord. Once when they didn't have very much so that he could take his wife and children to Salt Lake to be sealed in the temple and once when he had quite a bit more so that he could serve a mission in The Philippines.

He wasn't much on sports. He didn't hunt or fish and so I learned these skills elsewhere. What he did teach me was a love of great music and art. We would sit for hours and listen to symphonies and opera and pour over pictures of great works of art. When I visited The Sistine Chapel on my mission my joy was short-lived. It was beautiful and majestic and lovely and yet the experience was empty because I longed to have my father by my side to thrill in the moment with me.

He was always learning. It was rare that I did not see him with either a book of scripture or science in his hand. He loved to share with me the mysteries that were revealed to him as he studied these. Later on, when Alzheimer's began to rip away the knowledge that he had fought so hard to gain, I began to quit coming around as often. It was too painful for me to witness. I think that I shall regret my cowardice for as long as I live.

My father was in bishoprics but he was never bishop. He was in stake presidencies but he was never stake president. He never held public office or invented anything to ease man's burden here on earth. He didn't write any great books or symphonies. He never sang at The Met.

In fact, I can't think of anything my father ever did that would cause one to consider him great. But you know what? That's alright...a lot of men aspire to greatness. Many times, in aspiring to greatness, these men forgot to be good.

The world has a lot of really great men but what we need are a lot of really good men.

My father was a really really good man.

When my eldest son was quite young, there was a physical trait he had that he lamented. As it happened, my father shared that same physical trait...and he also lamented it. I was of a different mind, I was happy to have something that, when my father passed from this earth, would serve as a continual reminder of him. And so, I wrote this poem for my son.

Grandpa's Ears

Aaron got his sense of honor; Jenni, his quiet strength.
Lee got his sense of humor, and Ken knows how to paint
Amy and Valerie have iron wills; Jeremy, a tender heart
Joel and Sarah share a joy for life, and each of you is smart.

Laura and Brian are every one's friend. Gretchen loves to read
Rebekah had his infectious smile, and Rachel's as quiet as he.
Nathan loves worlds of fancy. Melissa is as loyal as they come.
Michael sings like a mockingbird. John Douglas is a dutiful son.

Daniel once proved stalwart, before the earth was new
so in The Savior's plan, our Dan is one of the chosen few
You each got something from Grandpa to see you through the years
but I think yours is the greatest gift, 'cause you got Grandpa's ears.

Now you might think that they're too big, or they stick out too far
but glance in any mirror, you'll see just whose grandson you are
Then maybe you'll try harder, each day you face life's tests
to live your life just like the man who gave you his silhouette.

Aaron might someday sit on a bench. Ken might paint a mural
Your grandpa gave to each grandchild, the keys to conquer worlds
But they say time will tell all things, and I think it will be said
that the greatest gifts he ever gave, sit right there on your head

For when life's trials bow that head, and sorrows bear you down
you'll look and see your grandpa's shadow there upon the ground.
You'll remember him...and who you are...and then you'll dry your tears
and thank your Father in Heaven above, He gave you grandpa's ears.

Disruption at the Drive-In or The Night I Ate the Car

2009-06-19T05:03:00.000-07:00

The South Main Drive-In Theater was a mere three and a half miles from our four bedroom house on Brookmeade in South Houston. Drive-In Theaters were invented up in New Jersey where the air actually cools down somewhat on a summer night and mosquitoes are not measured by the width of their wing-spans.

In Texas, they're not such a good idea. Nope, the infestation and the fetid atmosphere combined with the marketing ploy of admission prices per carload instead of per person made a drive-in experience in Houston somewhat like a cross-Atlantic trip jammed into the cargo hold of a slave ship...with an in-flight movie.

Any available space in an automobile was utilized. A standard VW Beetle became a clown car that could hold 12 people:

1 Driver
1 in the passenger seat
1 on their lap
3 in the back seat
3 on their laps
1 in the little cubby hole in back
2 in the trunk. You could fit as many as three in the trunk but then you had no room for the large cake-holder Tupperware tub of home-made popcorn.

The second you pulled into the drive-in and found your place, everyone piled out and went to their pre-arranged areas to socialize and wait for the movie to begin. Adults stayed in the car while teens went to the pavilion near the snack bar, and the kiddies ran down to the front where the ancient playground equipment lay rotting and rusting and festooned with tetanus.

When the movie started, you all jammed back into the car where you craned your neck around the other passengers and strained to hear the dialogue through a speaker that was built sturdier than the black box on an airplane and had a sound quality slightly higher than WWII prisoners of war enjoyed while listening to BBC on their home-made crystal radio sets.

When I was five years old, my father came home one night with the very first brand new car he ever owned. It was a 1963 Ford Fairlane. White with red trim and red plastic interior. It had a steering wheel with a bullet-shaped center that was certain to impale the driver upon any impact greater than 30 miles per hour, no shoulder harnesses, no safety glass, electric windows that were powerful enough to decapitate and side fins that jutted out at right angles that were as threatening as those jagged wheel hubs on Massala's chariot in 'Ben-Hur'

Detroit couldn't have constructed a greater monument to mobilized death if it had super-glued razor blades onto a killer whale.

As my father proudly displayed his new acquisition to neighbors and friends, my mom came out of the house with a Tupperware container filled with popcorn. We were taking the new car to the drive-in.

We all piled into the new car. My brother and two sisters in the back and my mom and dad in the front with me in between. As we settled in and inhaled that new car smell, my mom ran her hand over the newest feature Detroit had come up with; a padded dashboard. In reality, it was the standard metal dash with about a quarter inch of padding and red vinyl covering. The incentive here was to lessen the number of third-degree burns that came from touching a hot metal dash that absorbed solar radiation like a black hole.

As we pulled into the drive-in, dad went up and down the aisles looking for a place to park that would keep his new car free from dings and scratches and still offer us a decent view of the screen. I watched his face beam as he passed cars that honked and let out wolf-whistles in appreciation of the shiny new car with less than a dozen miles on the odometer.

Tonight's feature was a Vincent Price offering, "The Pit and The Pendulum", the only similarity between the movie and Edgar Allen Poe's work being the title itself. If you want to watch it, you can actually view it online for free at www.hulu.com. If you don't have the time for that, the embedded trailer I found on Youtube should be sufficient to give you an idea of the kind of movie that parents took their five-year old kids to back in my day.

As the movie got under way, I leaned forward to move myself as far as possible away from the body heat radiating from my parents on either side of me. My face came to rest on the padded dashboard.

During the course of the movie, Vincent Price's character, who was certain that he had mistakenly buried his wife in the family crypt while still alive, was making his way through the cobweb-infested crypt while his wife's taunting voice hissed out his name. To this day I can't watch a Ricola commercial because the wife's voice had the same sing-song meter to it

"NICH-o-lasssss"

As Vincent Price made his way deeper and deeper into the crypt, I became more and more absorbed into the movie. The violins played with greater urgency and I opened my mouth in engrossed awe....the padded dashboard slipped between my teeth and I unwittingly began to chew upon it.

As Vincent Price came to his wife's tomb, it opened slowly....I chewed with a bit more gusto. A bloody hand crept from the open grave.....my teeth were moving like a sewing machine. Suddenly, the wife's corpse shot from the grave and her accusing voice rang out. "NICHOLASSSSSS!!!!!!!"

I chomped down on the dashboard of my dad's new car and reared back away from the bloody harpie on the screen, tearing a huge chunk of the dash with me.

I have to depend upon information from my brother at this point because I lost conciousness a moment after I tore the chunk of dash from the car. I do, however, remember one over-riding thought before I slipped into oblivion, SWALLOW THE EVIDENCE!!!

My brother and sisters, who were in the back seat of the car and were just as hypnotized by the movie as I was were suddenly and rudely brought back to reality by my father and mother screaming "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!?!?" and pummeling me as if they were trying pound the life out of me.

This was the era of the sixties...the Red Menace...McCarthy....in short, paranoia.

Fearing that my parents had been made crazed killers by some mind-altering substance that was slipped into the Kool-Aid we had snuck into the drive-in and were brought to their crazed state by some hidden trigger-phrase uttered by Vincent Price, my siblings tried to escape through the rear windows of the two door Fairlaine while my parents were occupied with killing me.

The neighboring cars, also caught up in the crescendo of this horror movie, saw what was certain blood-lust and mayhem in the neighboring car and began to react as well. People erupted from their cars screaming and falling to their knees begging God to deliver them...which set off the next wave of cars and so on and so on until a full-on riot occured.

From that day, until my father traded in his car. My punishment was to sit in the front seat directly in front of the damaged dash board now covered with red tape, listen to my parents sigh heavily and then look at me and shake their heads.

The Passing of The Old Guard

2009-06-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

Lorelei Sinclair just posted on my wall that David Brackman had passed away. I'm still numb with the news. I called into the other room and told my wife as soon as I read it and she came into the office, her eyes were wet and she said, "It's funny, not an hour ago, I was wondering how Dave and Sue were doing".

David and Sue Brackman are an institution in The Katy Stake. I like to brag that I was the first missionary to leave from that area but, in truth, that is nothing compared to the work that they did. Dave and Sue and Aunt Edna were the only mormons in Katy for a long time. They were faithful members of the church when all of Houston met in the old church off of Broadway. Anytime I hear someone complain about having to travel as much as fifteen minutes to get to church, I want to tell them about The Brackmans and Aunt Edna.

Lorelei told me that David wanted to come back to Katy to die. I know how he felt. When Oliver Loving died on the cattle trail, he told his partner, Charles Goodnight, "Don't bury me in a foreign land" Charles Goodnight brought his partner all the way back to Texas to be laid to rest. Those of us up on our Texas history know where Larry McMurtrey got his ideas from in Lonesome Dove. I don't know when or if I'll ever come back to Texas to live but, like David, I don't want to be laid to rest in a foreign land either. I want to come back to Katy.

Anyone who reads this and knows David and Sue, please tell Sue how much we love her and mourn with her...and please tell her that we were thinking of David and she an hour or two before we got the news. It was strange how the thought of them just came to us out of the blue.

Maybe it's maudlin to suggest but we like to think that, perhaps David stopped in to say 'hi' before he went on.

Lessons Life Teaches Us

2009-06-17T05:20:00.000-07:00

After my accident, life was a lot tougher in our household. One of the things for which I am most grateful is that my wife is someone who lives close to the spirit. A year or two before my accident, she came to me and told me that she felt very strongly that it was time we got serious with our food storage. We discussed it some more. We had tried to get our food storage in order many times but something always came up that took its place in the hierarchy of our priorities.

This time was different for some reason and, after giving my wife the green light, she set to the task of storing up against hard times like a squirrel on amphetamines. I don't think anyone who hasn't gone through two years of being unable to go to work can appreciate the joy and satisfaction that comes from sitting down to a really good meal that is the product of your own industry and the prudence of your wife.

To be sure, we were beholding to the charity of others but the need for that charity was mitigated substantially by my wife's insight and patience and providence. She built up our food storage by adding thirty dollars a week to our food budget. She shopped for bargains like a miner panning for gold and, within a year and a half, she had stored up enough to see us through almost two years of my recuperating. All we needed to shop for during those two years were perishables like milk and eggs.

She didn't store only food. We had soap, razors, toilet paper...all the things she could think of and anything that went on sale became a food storage item. These were set aside in our closets and under our beds and everyone in our family knew that breaking open a package of any item designated as a food storage item would bring swift and terrible retribution upon our heads...(you husbands, think of what happens when you cut paper with "the good scissors" and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about.)

I found out that wives employ a version of fuzzy math and that a case of toilet paper that was purchased on sale at half off is ten times more valuable than a case of toilet paper purchased at the regular price.

But, even though we were prepared with our food storage, the two years recuperating were times of deprivation for our family. We wanted for none of the necessities but we had no luxuries either. We looked forward with great anticipation to our return to normal life.

We were involved in a law suit with the construction company and we were certain that our times of want would end as soon as the settlement conference came up. We had discovered things that we felt certain no insurance company would want to go before a jury and we were confident that, at the settlement conference, they would pony up and we could move on.

The conference took place on a Saturday and we spent all day going back and forth. Despite the fact that the insurance company was in agreement with many points of our case, they felt certain that a jury would not see past the fact that I had hit their truck. They also cited the fact that Harris County juries are notoriously stingy and so, after offering us less money than what would even cover my medical bills, they left the bargaining table.

My wife and I were devastated. We drove home in silence. It was almost midnight and my wife asked me to stop off at the grocery store so that she could get a gallon of milk before The Sabbath.

The Sabbath... I thought to myself bitterly...What use is it to obey the law of The Sabbath if we receive no blessings for it?

But I pulled into the store anyway and, because I was still having trouble walking more than fifty feet at a time, I sat on a bench at the front of the store while my wife went to the dairy section at the back.

As my wife disappeared in the back, another woman came to the checkout stand. I could tell that she had once been a very beautiful woman but that she had obviously been through many surgeries. I spotted a fellow accident survivor.

As she checked out, I looked at the many scars on her. She had kind of a stony expression on her face and she struggled to speak with the cashier through the corner of her mouth. Most horrible of all were her legs, the scars looked as if they had been through a meat grinder. She finished her purchase and struggled with her groceries as far as my bench and then she stopped beside me to take a rest.

I apologized for not helping her and showed her my own scars explaining that I was unable to hold much more than a pound of weight at that time.

Accident victims love to compare stories and, up until that point, I had won every encounter with a fellow accident survivor. She asked me what happened and, after I told her, I could see the remnant of a twinkle in her eye and she tried to smile as she said, "I can beat that"

She told me that she had been working at a photo kiosk in a parking lot when a drunk driver in an eighteen wheeler made a u-turn though the parking lot, crashed through the kiosk and pinned her against a tree, crushing her face and nearly severing both of her legs below the knee. When the truck backed away, she was still pinned to the tree by a pipe that had come through the truck and had impaled her to the tree's trunk.

If you think I've told you the worst...you're wrong.

While she was still in the hospital, the insurance company settled with her for several million dollars. The day that the check cleared in her bank account, her husband called to inform her that he could no longer stand to look at her. Then he absconded with all the settlement money and all the money they had saved prior to her accident, leaving her nothing.

I had to remind myself to breathe for several minutes after hearing the woman's tale. Several thoughts raced through me....no hole in hell deep enough.....the feminists are right, we're pigs finally I asked her, "how do you manage to even get out of bed in the morning?"

"Oh", she said, "It was rough for a while and then I realized that he only took money. I still have my kids and the rest of my family"

She struggled to her feet and grabbed her bag. Then she leaned down and patted my arm, "We don't always know what tomorrow holds...but we know who holds tomorrow"

That night I spent awake wondering if God hadn't sent an angel to me to remind me just what is and isn't important.

Things Aren't Always What They Seem

2009-06-16T05:18:00.001-07:00

These are two of my favorites...I love it when pictures come together like this. But what you don't know...what you can't see or hear, is why these cranes are flying in the first place.

I love to travel the back roads up here in Wisconsin. In Houston, I lived 20 miles from the office and it took me an hour to get to work. In Wisconsin, I lived 20 miles from the office and it still took me an hour to get to work because I would be travelling slowly on the back farm roads looking at all of the deer and turkeys and foxes and cranes. I love cranes! There is a word for someone like me..."craniac"

Anyway, I always have my camera on the seat and ready as I scan the fields next to these lonely backroads for wildlife...especially cranes.

On this particular day, I came out of a railroad overpass tunnel. The morning sun was shining against the forest and, right next to me, on the right, were these three beautiful cranes.

I slammed on the brakes, jammed my truck into park, and lept from my truck with my camera ready.

Unfortunately, I did not see the lady jogger coming towards me on the other side of that lonely farm road who apparently misinterpreted my actions as a prelude to an abduction.

She bagan to scream loudly and run in place (why do women run in place when they're scared?), which set the cranes off in flight. I was busy snapping these pictures as I apologized to the lady.

And now you know the story behind the pictures.

A Gift You Give to Yourself

2009-06-14T16:29:00.000-07:00

In our lesson today in church, we talked about forgiveness. In particular, we spoke of the power that comes to us in forgiving others. As the instructor taught the lesson, my mind wandered back to an autumn night over ten years ago when I slammed into the back of a construction truck, illegally parked in the fast lane of the freeway.

It was a sensory overload. My ears were still ringing from the loud bang of the collision. The air was heavy with the overpowering smell of steam, oil, spent radiator fluid, and whatever set off the explosion of the air bag.

As my head began to clear, I relived, for a moment, the sheer terror that ripped through me as the truck came up in my headlights. I had enough time to think, "Oh no!" before the air bag hit my face. I looked at my shattered hands which were bent at odd angles and the bones that were coming through my wrists and I had my first rational thought after the crash, "I think I'm in shock because that really looks like it ought to hurt"

My next thought is that enough time had passed so that people should be attending to me. After all, I was not that far from the construction site. Surely they had heard the sound of the accident and had come running.

"I must have killed whoever I hit". I thought. I knew that the accident was unavoidable but, nevertheless, I wondered how I was going to live with myself from then on. It was not long afterwards that a man in a hard hat, poked his head from around the truck that I hit. I found out later what his name was and that he was the driver of the truck. I also found out that he had been smoking dope in the cab when the call had come over his radio that the freeway was about to open up again and for him to clear his truck off the road.

He did not look at me with compassion in his eyes. Rather, he had kind of a clinical detachment...almost as if I were something he wanted to scrape from the bottom of his shoe.

"Help me", I said.

The man looked at me and shook his head, "No English", he responded.

"Ayudame" I replied.

The man disappeared and I thought that he was going to fetch help. Moments later I was surprised to hear the truck's engine start. The man was trying to drive off and leave me!

It soon became apparent that my car and his truck were inextricably connected and, after he dragged my car for about 25 feet, the truck stopped and he just ran off into the night.

Not long after he left, I head a soft "whoosh" and I saw an orange glow dancing on the shoulder of the road beside me. My worst fears had come true. I was trapped and alone in a burning car.

I had heard of coyotes who had chewed off their own leg to escape from a trap. Up until that point, I had no idea how the coyote felt. The windshield was cracked and crazed but was still in place. Unfortunately, it was my only possible means of egress. With my shattered right hand, I struck at it repeatedly until it gave way and I was able to push it aside. I fumbled with my seat belt release until I was able to apply enough pressure to free myself. It was excruciating but I imagined that the pain was a pittance compared to what was in store for me if I was unable to escape from my burning car.

With my left forearm. I tried to drag myself over my steering wheel and outside of my car. My legs would not help me. I discovered later why...the engine had compressed the driver's compartment such that the dash had struck my knee and driven my femur through my pelvis, breaking it into four separate sections and ripping the ball from the joint. My femur stuck through my back and into the seat.

As I settled back into the seat and looked at my right hand and left forearm, now ripped and bleeding from their recent desperate battle with the broken windshield, I wondered if I would have the good fortune to bleed to death, or at least lose consciousness before the flames entered where I was.

I remembered reading once of the execution of Joan of Arc. One of her executioners mercifully told her that when the flames reached her face, she should breath them in and she would die very soon afterwards.

I realized that my burning engine was jammed right up against the gas tank of the truck and I told myself that, when it exploded and I saw the wall of flame coming towards me, to breath them in. I prayed that I would have enough courage to do just that.

As I had these morose thoughts, a pair of hands came up to my window and an anxious face poked through my windshield. Someone had finally noticed my wrecked car and had decided to stop and render assistance. I was later to find out just how fortunate I was...my rescuer was an off-duty fire fighter. Perhaps Heavenly Father was not finished with me after all.

He battled the blaze under my car for quite some time. At first, his only weapon was a baby blanket but when that proved futile, he ran forward and found a fire extinguisher in the abandoned truck. It proved sufficient for the task at hand and he was able to extinguish the flames and call for help.

During the hours of torture that followed, every time a movement on my part or on the part of my rescuers would cause more pain to rip though me, I saw in my mind's eye, the face of the driver of that truck...the face of the man who tried to kill me, leave my children fatherless and my wife a widow.

In the emergency room, when they drilled through my shin so that they could set a bar through there and place my leg in traction, I saw his face and my hatred grew.

In the midst of all the trauma room turmoil, an administrator came up and asked if I was Tom Boyce.

"who else would I be?" I asked

"I need you to sign something", she replied.

"Can't my wife sign it?" I asked.

"No", she answered, "It has to be you"

"Look at my hands", I said. "I can't hold a pen"

"Oh my goodness!" she answered "I'm sorry"

I opened my mouth to tell her to get my wife to sign whatever it was and she placed a pen between my teeth and held the clipboard over my head.

As well as I could manage, I signed my name across the form, spit out the pen, and snarled, "What did I just sign?"

It was then that I found out that I was about to go into eighteen hours of surgery and that I had a less than even chance of waking up with my right leg or either one of my hands. I had signed a consent for amputation.

The driver's face came up in my mind and my hatred for him grew even hotter.

For years afterwards, every pain, each time that I struggled to complete a task that should have been easy for a man my age, I thought bitterly of the driver of the truck and hated him. I wanted God's judgement to be poured out upon him and for he to suffer as much as I had.

I'm not certain what the catalyst was for the change but, one day, I realized that this man who I hardly knew and didn't even like was consuming a large portion of my life. Many of my waking thoughts were directed at him and I realized that I had stopped moving forward in any spiritual progression. I had, in fact, started to move the other way. Because of my hatred, I had tied myself to someone I hardly knew.

I knew what I had to do. My prayers for justice became prayers for God to soften my heart. I prayed for the strength to forgive the man who had crippled me. The more I prayed, the more I was able to realize that the man did what he did, not out of malice but out of weakness and fear of the consequences for that weakness.

As the weeks progressed, the more I prayed for forgiveness to enter into my heart, the more I realized that a spirit I had not felt in quite some time, a spirit I had evicted from my heart to make room for my hatred, was beginning to return.

One day, I was asked about the man in the truck and I realized, to my joy, that I had to struggle to remember his name....a name I had dwelt upon with a vehemence for almost two years and yet, God was able to remove him and heal over that wound.

As I pondered that miracle, I realized that my hatred for the man did not cause him any problems or pain or suffering. I realized that the only person I had damaged was myself.

And I realized that forgiveness is a gift that we give to ourselves.

My Favorite Christmas

2009-06-12T07:05:00.000-07:00

It was just a day or two before Christmas in 2002 when I came across the young woman stranded on the side of the freeway. I was going into town to buy a Christmas gift for my brother, a radio-controlled airplane. I was looking forward to giving the gift to John because I knew it was something that he would long for but would never buy for himself.

For the first time in my life, I had enough money that I could afford to buy the gift for my brother. As I passed Highway 6 on I-10 headed into Houston, I glanced over to the other side of the freeway and saw the woman outside of her car with her hood up.

It wasn’t the first time I’d come across that scene. If you live in or near a big city long enough, you’re apt to come across dozens if not hundreds of similar sights. So maybe because it was Christmastime or maybe because I saw the car seat in the back seat or maybe it was the way she looked with her shoulders stooped and her hand to her forehead but I felt compelled to exit the freeway, turn back towards Katy, and stop to see if I could help.

I pulled up next to her car on the feeder road and, with my bum hip, tried to negotiate my way over to her car across the ditch.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

She was so distraught that she didn’t even see me coming. She whirled around in surprise. I was well aware of the fear that might be going through her…a young woman being approached along the side of the road by a strange man…so I stayed where I was and didn’t try and close the distance between us.

“My car just died” She said. “Nothing works…and I just bought that battery!”

“So it wouldn’t work before and you had a battery installed and it worked then?”, I asked.

“Yeah..but I must have bought a bad battery because now it’s dead”

“It’s not your battery”, I said. “It’s your alternator”

“My alternator?”

“It’s that silver thing right there with the belt running around it. It keeps your battery charged.”

She looked hesitant. “How much does it cost to get one fixed?”

“Last time I had one fixed it cost about fifty dollars for the alternator and a hundred for labor. Plus, you’re looking at about another fifty for a tow.”

“TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS!?”

“About that…probably a bit more”

I thought she looked distraught and dejected before but my last sentence just seemd to let all of the air out of her,

“I don’t have two hundred dollars. I just spent my last sixty on that battery”

It wasn’t a hard decision. I thought back on all of the times in my life when two hundred dollars was all that was standing between where I was and where I needed to be. I thought of the many times I had been the recipient of charity from others and, perhaps more importantly, the times when that charity was withheld…the times when I swore that I would never ever make another human being feel the way I felt then, like money was more important to everyone than I was.

Two hundred dollars would mean the world to this young woman and her baby and it wouldn’t even make a dent to my bottom line; so I took out my cell phone and dialed my mechanic.

When my son started to drive, I made arrangements with a mechanic in Katy so that John-Ross would not have to wait in order to get something on his car fixed. He could just pull in, get whatever he needed done done, and the mechanic would bill me for it later.

It was a pretty good arrangement and the mechanic was someone I trusted to not take advantage of the situation. The one fly in the ointment was that he bought all of his parts from a parts store in Katy where the guy knew that you had to go to Mason Road to the nearest competitor and so he marked up his parts a bit more. He wasn’t shy about it either. If you ever went into his parts store, Bill would let you know that he was more expensive than the chain store on Mason Road and then launch into a narrative about how you should just shut up and buy his over-priced spark plugs because he needed the extra profit in order to compete and wouldn’t it be sad if the chain stores drove the little guy out of business.

I told the mechanic the situation, asked him to tow the young woman’s car to his garage, give her and her baby a ride home, fix the car and then deliver it to her. I told him that I would take care of the bill.

The young mother began to cry and thank me. It was all a bit embarrassing so I just nodded and waved and told her she should wait in her car until the tow truck came. Then I turned and left to finish my Christmas shopping.

A few days after Christmas, I got an invoice from the mechanic. I opened it to discover that I owed him $39.87. I looked at it again and saw that the only item I was being charged for was the alternator. There was no charge for a tow or labor, This, I determined, was an invoice that I would have to pay in person.

I walked into the garage with my invoice in hand., The mechanic was busy under the hood of another car. I held the invoice up.

“This is the cheapest alternator I ever had to replace”

The mechanic never even looked up. “You think you’re the only one that keeps Christmas?” he asked.

I chuckled to myself. Then I said, “Yeah..but still, the last alternator I bought from you cost me over fifty dollars. Are they going down in price?”
The mechanic looked up from under the hood. “When I told Bill at the parts store what was going on, he wanted a piece of the action as well so he only charged you wholesale”

“I suppose I should be grateful you left a piece for me” I said.

“Well….we didn’t want to cut you out completely”

And so it happened that 2 millennia after the three magi brought gifts of Gold Frankincense, and Myrrh to one young mother and her child, three other men, perhaps not quite as wise, but nevertheless, compelled by the same spirit, imparted gifts of money, time, and profit to another mother and her child.

It became my favorite Christmas.

I'm On To You Now!

2009-06-06T23:23:00.000-07:00

You guys remember that final scene in "The Matrix"? The one where Keanu Reeves tells the machines how it's all about to go down? Well you guys can just call me "Neo" from now on because my eyes are open. I'm on to you. I SEE THE MATRIX!

(Incidentally, has anyone ever realized that "The Matrix" and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" are really the same move?...Think about it.

1) They both deal with alternate realities
2) They both deal with travel through phone lines
3) They both have central characters who are brought up to speed by an all-knowing mentor wearing awesome sunglasses
4) and last but not least, in both movies, Keanu Reeve's most convincing line was "Whoa!")

Okay but back to my rant now and let's see if you guys can follow what's going on here because I've finally put it all together!

It's the end of moving day, right? Which means that even my best laid plans have gone awry. Which means that, even though I did the laundry and carefully planned out the events two nights ago, the people helping me move had packed a mountain of boxes over and around the clean underwear I had planned on changing into which means that I couldn't find clean underwear which means that I'd been in the same underwear for almost 40 hours which means that I was about to go crazy, get a gun, and climb a clock tower.

Still with me? Good!

I have the most awesomist bed in the entire universe. Even when I'm not that tired, it only takes about 5 minutes to be in deep REM sleep in this thing. I need the bed to get a decent night's sleep because I basically have more metal in my body than a terminator (another awesome movie). However, for the last month, I've been here in Plymouth and my bed has been in Baraboo which means I've slept on a mattress on the floor in our new house until my daughter graduated High School and the family could move here. Which means that I've only slept about 3 or 4 hours a night for the last month.

Okay now...It's the end of moving day. I can't take a shower because I don't have clean underwear to change into and I stink to high heaven. The good news is that at least I don't have to chase the dog off my bed. He's at the far end of the house.

Despite my filthy-stinking state, I take a look at that bed...that bed I'd been deprived of for the last 30 days. I couldn't even wait for clean sheets. I did a perfect swan and was deep asleep before my body hit the mattress. But I eventually woke up. (it must have been the smell)

So I got up and, because I was a bit more revived, digging through boxes to find my clean underwear did not seem like such an insurmountable task. I finally found them an hour ago and what was an impossible situation before now turned into the perfect situation.

Everyone else in the house was asleep and still smelling. I alone knew that there was clean underwear to be had. I had clean clothes, clean towels, and (most importantly) an ENTIRE WATER HEATER ALL TO MYSELF. Do any of you realize how rare that is? It's Sunday morning...I don't care how early on Sunday...and I can use all the hot water I want because by the time the rest of my filthy-stinking loved-ones get up, the water heater will have regenerated enough for them to take their meagre rationed showers.

Ahhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!! (there's nothing like a hot shower)...but this is where it gets interesting. I've realized that the people who make bath tubs and the people who make shampoo and body wash are all conspiring against us...maybe even the undertakers, coffin-makers, and even the people who make those annoying little flower shaped adhesive thingies so you won't slip and break your neck.

Stay focused now 'cause this is liable to get a little complicated.

The average width of the shelf in a tub is two inches. You even have to take away three-eights of an inch to account for the radius of the curve caused by the caulking. I know...I checked...I found my tape measure while I was looking for underwear.

Thing is...the DAMNABLE THING IS!!!! that shampoo bottles and body wash bottles are all no less than three inches in diameter (except for the freebies that come in hotel rooms but I just realized that fits neatly into their nefarious little plan)

You see where I'm going with this, don't you? You're in the shower, you're all lathered up and you just put a big ol' glob of shampoo in your hand or body wash on your loofah and you try and balance that 3" diameter bottle on a space that is only two inches wide with a little, 3/8" caulk line trying to unbalance it and knock it back into the tub where its contents will gush out, causing you to slip and fall and break your stupid neck unless you buy those annoying flower-shaped (or fish shaped) adhesive thingies that nobody really likes but has to buy to stay alive and smelling sweet!

It HAS to be a conspiracy! It just has to be! How hard is it to build a three-inch shelf? I'll even give 'em the 3/8" caulk line. All I'm asking for is a sporting chance. For that matter...how hard is it to build a skinny shampoo bottle?

The hotels make them! And it's not just because they don't want you absconding with a big bottle either because they all know that when the maid's back is turned...we're all busy stuffing those life-savers in our extra bag that we brought along just so we could have enough space to put them! And don't give me any business about stealing. They build it into the price. They expect you to take them. If nobody took the shampoo bottles and the toilet paper when the maid's back was turned...we could all stay at the Hilton for a buck-fifty a night.

Noooo...They make 'em tiny because they don't want you slipping and falling and breaking your neck in their hotel. They want you doing it at home where your surviving kin cannot sue anyone!

So there it is! The entire conspiracy wrapped up neat and tidy. You're all exposed!

...or maybe I could just use another three or four hour's sleep.

Time Provides a Different Perspective

2009-06-04T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've never hit a home run in my entire life. You'd think that with my body mass knocking a ball over the fence would come as natual as breathing but I just never could seem to master the art. I came really close once and it would not have merely been a home run, it would have been the home run about which Hollywood made movies.

Back in the day when our church used to have intramural sports, the bitterest rivals of Memorial Ward was Maplewood II. They were better than us at EVERYTHING, bastketball, volleyball, softball. They were always beating us but always by just a few points. In fact we actually won a few games but I think it was when half of their first string had food poisoning. I still remember standing there on the court feeling like my feet were encased in cement while one of the Cope brothers sailed like a gazelle over my head to the basket. The only thing we ever beat them in was scripture chase. We had spring-loaded quadruple combinations.

In almost every regional tournament, at the end of the day, the results would be Maplewood II bringing home the first place trophy with Memorial Ward coming in second.

And so one early spring morning in 1976, we took the field yet again in a regional softball tournament. There were several stakes competing and so it was to be an all day tournament, double round elimination. Our hopes were high because we had a ringer on our side. Lance Wade had come home from the military academy where he attended high school and would be playing on our side.

I never could figure out how parents could look at their tiny baby and just know that he was going to grow up with movie star good looks and give him a name to match but such was the case with Lance Wade. He was a dead ringer for our modern day Matthew McConaughey right down to the wavy blonde hair, ice-blue eyes, chiseled jaw and rippling physique.

Since he attended an all boy's military academy, Lance had no idea how good looking he was. When he came home on the weekends, Bret Bassett, Lance and I would often go to the movies and Lance often expressed astonishment, wondering what all the girls at the movies were staring at. They certainly weren't looking at the two flabby chunks of flesh next to him...I used to look at him and think, "With my brains and your looks, I could take over the world"

Lance must have been particularly valiant in the pre mortal life because Heavenly Father decided that being the best looking kid around wasn't enough for him...nope, he had to make him one of the most gifted athletes as well. With Lance on our side, we felt we finally had an even chance to beat Maplewood II and finally take home the first place trophy.

The day progressed and we easily vanquished all of the other teams. We even squeaked by Maplewood II. Since it was a double round elimination tournament, they were still in the fight though. We got beat once by a team from Beaumont and we went back into the mix as well.

At the end of the day, all other teams had been eliminated except Maplewood II and Memorial. We were to face our stake arch-rivals for the regional softball championship. The game lead changed every inning. We would be ahead and the Maplewood II would come up and they would lead, then we would come up to bat and go up by a point or two.

We went to extra innings see-sawing back and forth with the lead. At the bottom of the fourteenth inning, the score had Maplewood II up by one point. We had two outs on us. Lance, the tying run was on second and I was coming up to bat.

While I was never a power hitter, I was pretty good at spotting weak points in the defense and placing the ball where I wanted it to go. Usually that meant dinking it over the head of the shortstop into no man's land between the infield and the outfield.

Like Lance, I too am built somewhat like a movie star... I am over six feet tall but only have a 29 inch inseam which means when I run, I remind people of Yogi Bear. If I didn't get the ball out of the infield, I hadn't a prayer of making it to first base on those stubby legs of mine.

Maplewood II's left fielder was Kevin Butler, another one of God's favorites who was blessed with a rifle for a right arm. Twice already that night he had thrown me out from deep in right field with a frozen rope to first.

The setup could not be much more drammatic. Our bitterest rivals up ahead by a point, the tying run on second..two outs.... and me coming up. A base hit would easily put Lance at home and me on first. Bret Bassett was coming up behind me and he was good for an occasional home run. If I could just get on base, we would win the game, the championship, and never-ending glory.

I stepped up to the plate intending on hitting the ball over the second baseman but then something happened, when the ball left the pitcher's hand, it just seemed to float towards me in slow motion. It was the biggest, beefiest softball pitch ever thrown my way and I just knew that this was going to finally be the home run I had never hit.

I swung and watched the bat connect. The ball leapt off the bat and sailed towards the fences. I felt the vibration of that hit all the way down to the soles of my shoes and I knew we were about to win...and on my very first home run! Life could not be any sweeter. As I jogged towards first, I watched the path of the ball.

Kevin Butler had been used to my previous dinks and so when he saw me swing, he started running towards the infield so that he could scoop up my hit and send it sailing towards first as he had twice before. I grinned as I looked at the fear on Kevin's face when he realized that this ball was headed out of the park. He immediately went into a slide and popped up running in the opposite direction, chasing my ball to the left field fence.

By the time I got to first, Lance was already home. My ball was on it's downward descent and, just as I thought, it was going to clear the fence. Then halfway between first and second, my dreams of glory came crashing to earth.

In a last ditch effort, Kevin leapt up, his hip caught on the fence causing him to upend. As he summer-saulted over the fence with his feet up in the air and his head towards the ground, his left arm shot out and plucked my ball from out of the air. When he stood up again, he held up his glove with my ball still in it. It was the most amazing catch I had ever seen.

We had lost. Maplewood II won the regional tournament and I had STILL never hit a home run.

For years, even into my adult life, whenever I saw Kevin Butler at stake meetings, it would be through narrowed bitter eyes. To be fair, whenever he saw me, he would give me a big smile and hold up an immaginary softball in his hands.

Then one day I realized, that catch was one in a million. I had never seen anything like it, even in professional highlight films...and, in a wierd way, I was a part of it.

Call it delusional or dementia but I now realize that I was an integral part of the most amazing catch I ever witnessed. The last time I saw Kevin, he held up his immaginary ball and I came over to him and told him about my different perspective and how I was grateful to be a part of that wonderful catch.

His brow furrowed as he digested what I said and I could tell it took a bit of the shine off of the memory for him...That was sweet.

My Friend Edwina

2009-06-04T06:25:00.000-07:00

And it came to pass that Enoch went forth in the land, among the people, standing upon the hills and the high places, and cried with a loud voice, testifying against their works; and all men were offended because of him.

And they came forth to hear him, upon the high places, saying unto the tent-keepers: Tarry ye here and keep the tents, while we go yonder to behold the seer, for he prophesieth, and there is a strange thing in the land; a wild man hath come among us.

Moses 6:37-38

I can't read that scripture above without thinking about my friend, Edwina Clark. Anyone who is LDS from Katy is familiar with Edwina. I suspect that the mere mention of her name causes a smile or two to break out and a story about Edwina will shortly follow. Everyone has one or two Edwina stories. I imagine that I have more than anyone outside her family, having appointed myself the chronicler of her exploits.

In describing her many adventures I hope you will realize the great love and admiration I had for her. I count many of her daughters and grandchildren as my friends and they all know of my feelings for Edwina. It is because I am confident that they know how I felt about her that I can give the following description:

Pick your metaphor...the cheese slid off her cracker; both oars weren't in the water at the same time, her elevator didn't go all the way to the top floor...any of them are apt descriptions of Edwina Clark. It wasn't just that she always came off as slightly odd, she was the most enthusiastic odd person I had ever met.

Every first Sunday of the month, she was the best entertainment for miles around. She was certain to give her testimony and just as her family would often cringe when she got up to take the podium, I would rub my hands in anticipated glee, wondering just what would come out of that loose canon rolling around on deck.

Although restraints of time and decorum forbid me detailing all of her off the cuff sermons, I will never forget the Sunday she decided we were all a bit too stuffy and insisted that we all sing along with her, "I'm a Little Teapot". The testimony to her persuasiveness was in the former bishop and high councilman in the congregation singing along with her, their left arm forming a handle and their right arm forming a spout.

Once, I was teaching the story of Christ and The Samaritan Woman. In the scriptures, the Samaritan woman asked The Savior, "How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest a drink of me?". I asked the class how the Smaritan woman knew that Christ was a Jew. Nobody seemed to know the answer. After a few seconds of silence, Edwina's hand shot up. It was the only hand up so I HAD to call upon her.

"Yes, Edwina?"

"Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I can spot a Jew a mile away"

For all of her faults though, Edwina was a fierce missionary. It is no exaggeration to state that you'd have to travel to Salt Lake City and knock on an apostle's door to find a more tireless and enthusiastic herald of the restored gospel. If anyone sat still in Katy Texas for more than a minute and Edwina was nearby, they were invited to a free copy of The Book of Mormon and Edwina's simple testimony of its truthfulness.

Once, she came up to me and asked me if I knew how she might obtain some pass along cards in Spanish. When I asked her why she wanted them, she told me she was taking a vacation in Mexico. When I asked her if she even knew any of the language, she grinned, and in imperfect Spanish (with an atrocious accent), she said, "This is the Book of Mormon; it tells of the restored gospel. If you read it, it will make you happy"

If Edwina went into the hospital, you can be certain that all of her doctors and nurses and even the lady who delivered her breakfast would get a pass along card and a copy of The Book of Mormon.

As Gospel Doctrine teacher, I heard from Edwina many times. Any time I asked a question, her hand would shoot up. If she didn't know the answer, she would guess. I was a great motivation for class participation. If the rest of the class was reticent to participate, they knew I had no qualms whatsoever in calling upon Edwina to pontificate....and Heaven only knows where that will lead us. (there was many a time when I found myself in the middle of a lesson thinking, "we're all going to hell and I'm driving the bus")

Once the lesson was on recieving priesthood blessings. The manual instructed me to ask the class for experiences in recieving annointings and blessings...so I asked the question.

Edwina's hand shot up. I looked around and nobody else felt like joining in so I called upon Edwina and prepared myself for the answer.

"Yes, Edwina?"

"Well, once, one of my dogs got sick so I made the elders give him a blessing"

"How do I salvage this?", I thought.

"Did he get better?"

"Well...he got better for a day or two and then the guy at the filling station shot him"

Not everyone shared my feelings of affection for Edwina and so, after a particularly brutal experience that had just about everyone in the class wanting to die from embarrassment, a group of two or three members in the class came up to me and said they had enough. They wondered if I would join them in a complaint to the bishop asking that Edwina not be allowed to attend and disrupt Gospel Doctrine.

My heart sank. I knew that they were wrong but I didn't know how to argue against them. Edwina had definately crossed the line earlier that day. She was disruptive but she was also innocent. It wasn't her fault. It was just who she was...and I have to admit, the thought of teaching Gospel Doctrine without my friend there filled me with despair.

The delegation before me was indignant, but it was an indignance sung in the key of intolerance. I remembered what The Savior did when he was cornered. There was no dust on the ground in which to draw but there was chalk on the chalkboard.

Picking it up, I marked several lines. I explained to the delegation before me that each of these lines represented one of Edwina's children, their spouses and her grandchildren. Then I marked a few more, representing the number of people of whom I had personal knowledge that had joined the church because of Edwina. A few of those who had converted because of her efforts had served missions. Like I said, I was a big fan of the woman and so I knew the number, over twenty more lines went on the blackboard representing people they had baptized. A few more went up representing children of the people she had helped convert who were born into the church.

By the time I was done marking on the board, over a hundred lines were there, each of them representing a soul who owed their membership in the Kingdom of God to the missionary efforts of this woman they were trying to ban from Gospel Doctrine class.

I looked at the blackboard for a moment and turned back to the delegation, "No", I said. "I don't believe that I will join you in complaining to the bishop"

After I moved up to Wisconsin, I got a call from one of Edwina's daughters telling me she had passed away. It tore at me to not be able to attend my friend's funeral and mourn with her family.

A few months after I got that call, I was reading a blog on the internet. The blogger was ranting about Walmart, especially all of the wierd and strange people that seem to congregate there. There were several comments to the blog, each with a shared experience. The words, "Katy Texas" jumped off the screen and I read one commentor's experience in stopping off at the Katy Walmart during a cross country trip. She left her children and husband in the snack bar and went to buy whatever they had stopped for. She related that, when she went to pick them up after leaving the checkout, she was surprised to find them cornered in a booth with a wild woman talking to them about The Book of Mormon.

I smiled, and then I laughed out loud, and then I laughed out loud through tears of joy and sadness as I said to myself, "I know that wild woman"

Some day, in the not too distant future, I will stand before the judgement bar of Christ. On that day, I shall throw into the balance against my transgressions, that I was a friend of Edwina Clark.

Who knows? It just might be enough to get me in.

Karma, Disneyworld, and Lying to Your Children

2009-06-04T06:22:00.000-07:00

You should never lie to your children. I know that, you know that. It's a subject on which we all agree. Yet, who among us can say with all candor that we have never fibbed, even a little bit, to our offspring?

It is true that, like all sins, there are varying degrees of lying. Stringing your children along about Santa Claus, The Tooth Fairy, or The Easter Bunny falls into the lower spectrum of lies we tell our kids. I won't go into the higher spectrum for fear of offending someone or causing hurt feelings but let's just say that the degree of sin rises sharply once you wander off the reservation of mythical beings bringing gifts to your children in the dead of night.

There are many reasons to not lie to your children, one of the least of which is that you'll eventually be found out. When I was a kid and I wanted to communicate with Kevin McCreary after bedtime, the best means possible was two juice cans connected by thirty feet of string between his bedroom window and mine. Kids today are mobilized, they're organized and they can text each other over cells phones brought to them by the mythical beings of the night we told them of when they were toddlers. You're just not going to lie to them for long and get away with it.

Unfortunately, I found out this lesson the hard way.

Early in our married life, my wife and I lived in Little Rock Arkansas. My eldest son, John-Ross was in that stage between toddler and kindergarten. (you know....easy to lie to). As it happened, the people who lived two doors down from us had a couple of kids close to our son's age and they became the best of friends.

For vacation, this year, they were planning a trip to Disneyworld. By night, at the dinner table, the family would plan the trip and the next day, their kids would eagerly relate to my son all of the wonderful things that lay in store for them in just a few short weeks.

Caught up in the excitement, my little boy came to me and asked me when we were going to go to Disneyworld.

"One day we'll go", I said.

That really wasn't a lie, even though I had no idea how we would ever afford such a trip, even one day. We were poor. I'm talking generic macaroni and cheese poor...the kind of poor where it's Wednesday and payday is Friday and you're scrounging around in the couch cushions for spare change poor.

But I didn't want for my son to feel left out. So I got together twenty dollars and went over to my neighbor's house and knocked on the door. When he answered, I told him my situation, gave him the twenty, and asked if he wouldn't buy a few souveniers of his trip to bring back and give my son.

What can I say? It was the best I could do. I swear by all that's holy, at that point in time, my intentions were entirely honorable.

But then events conspired against me. For one, they came home from their trip at eight-thirty in the evening. John-Ross was already in his bed. The next domino that fell was that my neighbor came over immediately and brought to me the souveniers he had bought for my son while they were away. The final nail in my coffin was when I opened up the bag and saw what they brought: A Disneyworld T-shirt, some Mouseketeer Ears, and a little felt banner on a stick.

An evil plot began to hatch in my heart...could I do it? Even if I could....should I do it? How bad was it, really? (I began to rationalize) "It's no worse than telling him about Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny", I thought. I weighed the risks versus the rewards of my evil plan and decided to go for it.

Scooping John-Ross up from his little bed, I grabbed the bag of souveniers in the other hand and went out to the car. My son was in that adorably drowsy state between awake and sleep when I placed him in his car seat. It was perfect, almost like a state of hypnotic suggestion. I drove around for a while until he fell deep asleep again. Then I pulled into a parking lot and dressed him in his new t-shirt and mouseketeer ears. I stuck the felt banner on a stick between the cushions in his car seat. Then I drove back home.

Everything was proceeding according to my plan. All that was needed now was the final touch. I gently shook my son. "Wake up, Boo-Boo", I said. My toddler did one of those numbers where he suddenly starts awake and then instantly settled back into drowsiness.

All parents know the trick of getting our kids excited by showing the excitement on our own faces. I turned it up full throttle, "Did you like Disneyworld?" I asked; my smile beaming from ear to ear and my voice at least two octaves higher than normal.

Confused, my little boy came a bit more awake. Like a drunk trying to remember a lost weekend, he looked at his t-shirt and his felt banner. His chubby little hand wandered up to his head. He pulled the mousketeer ears off and gave upon them with a bewildered look.

Then an expression came over his face; I'd seen it in war movies...that "thousand yard stare" shell shocked marines have after a long battle. His left eyebrow raised ever so slightly. I was beginning to lose him.

"Did you have fun?", I asked, reinforcing the illusion.

Finally, through a combination of lack of sleep, Disney mechandising, and a firm conviction that the father he idolized would surely never engage in such a cowardly falsehood, my son bought the story.

"uh huh", said John-Ross, with a befuddled nod of his head.

We heard no more about Disneyworld......for a few years.

"Be sure that your sin will find you out."
Numbers 32:23

Several years later, I was working late into the night at my drawing board. My son came to my elbow:

"Dad?"

"Yes, son"

"Remember back when we went to Disneyworld?"

My heart came to my throat. I didn't know how but it seemed as if the web of deceit I had woven was about to come unravelled after all of these years...maybe his mother had talked....she always had those lofty ideas about being honest with your children.

"What about it?"

"Well.....um...."

"Yes?"

"Can we go back? Because I can't find any pictures or tapes and I can't remember anything"

My heart settled back down into my chest. I took a deep breath, turned to my son and smiled.

"Sure, Son", I said, "We'll go back one day"

Eventually we did go to Disneyworld. Because we were a lot more solvent then and because a guilty conscience has a way of loosening the purse strings, we decided to go all out. We bought the "anything you want to do, is already paid for" package.

We stayed at The Grand Floridian. We ate at the best restaurants. We saw all the shows. I took my kids fishing and waterskiing...everything they wanted to do was already paid for and so we did it all. I felt a relief knowing that I had atoned for the sins of my capricious early fatherhood.

But it seems that Karma decided I had not yet fully paid for my foul deed. There was one activity that we had not yet tried, parasailing. It looked like fun. What wouldn't be fun about gliding hundreds of feet above the treetops, riding the wind currents like a magnificent eagle?

There was only one problem. I am a person who is only too aware of his own weight, the laws of physics, and (more importantly) The painful consequences of flaunting those laws. But my son persisted in wanting to go and, not wishing to appear like the coward I am, I relented.

If you ever go parasailing, you really need to benefit from the wisdom of my experience and pay complete attention to the safety lecture they give you before they strap you into that death machine...particularly the part about making sure that the straps are situated at the bend of your knee.

If you value your safety, your comfort, and (if you're a man) your manhood, for the love of all that's holy, get those straps at the back of your knee. You won't have occasion to correct that blunder once your parachute fills with air and your feet are lifted off the back of the boat.

Listen to me on this....THE LAST THING YOU WANT IS TO BE 400 FEET IN THE AIR, DANGLING FROM YOUR CROTCH!!!

It doesn't happen right away. If it did, you would be close enough to the boat that your screaming would alert the crew and your torment would be short-lived. But what happens is that the instant your feet leave the deck. Those straps that you thought were perfectly fine at the meaty part of your thigh begin to inch upwards.

You aren't really that concerned until you're about two hundred feet up. It is about then that you realize two things: First, those straps aren't going to stop inching up and second, you were probably joking around and not listening when the crew told you what the hand signal was for, "stop now and get me the heck down!"

By the time that your tether line is fully extended, you're well out of shouting range. That's when those straps decide to slip all the way up and give you the mother of all wedgies.

I had inadvertantly discovered the perfect means of torture. If the fifteenth century Spaniards had understood the laws of aerodynamics, surely this means of torment would have been reserved by the Inquisition for the most recalcitrant of heretics. I had been in far less pain in my life and lost consciousness.

I began to try and improvise hand signals to get the crew to pull me down. All that I accomplished was to induce them to go faster, and thus, lift me higher. As I danced about in the air, my screams lost in the ether, I remembered one thing from my safety lecture, "DO NOT TOUCH THE BUCKLE CONNECTING THE HARNASS TO THE TETHER LINE"

I looked about through the blur of tears in my eyes. I saw the forbidden buckle and seized it in both hands whipping it back and forth like a terrier shaking a rat. I could see them signalling for me to stop. I shook it again more vigorously. Finally, the boat crew decided to end the ride for my own safety.

By the time they got me onto the deck, I had composed myself. My son was eagerly awaiting his turn.

"How was it, Dad?", he asked.

I don't know why I didn't tell him the truth...what can I say? I am a wicked, spiteful man....

"It was fun", I said smiling. "You're going to love it"

Sometimes at night, I will jolt awake from a deep slumber with fear for just what Karma has in store for me because of that lie.

The Miracle of Ancona

2009-06-04T06:20:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with a friend of mine and she told me that her son was about to embark upon his mission. I've always felt that wisdom belongs to all and so I wanted to impart to the young man from my meagre store.

There is a saying that experience is a harsh schoolmaster but a fool will learn in no other. That pretty much sums up what should be written on my tombstone. My wife thinks it should be..."And a good time was had by all" We'll see...knowing my wife's penchant for squeezing a nickle so hard that Jefferson wets his pants, it will probably come down to which epitaph is the cheapest to carve. (That's if I even get a funeral or a gravestone...Kerry keeps threatening to stick me in a hefty bag and put me out at the curb on big trash day)

But enough of the morose.

From 1977 to 1979, I served in the Italy Rome Mission. There are a lot of tough missions. I'm sure that there are even some tougher than Rome. As you can imagine, mormons aren't real popular in Italy and so while I was there....(mothers with missionaries in the field, skip down to the next paragraph) ...I was spit upon, beat up, had gypsies steal everything from me but my pants, had dogs sicced upon me, got drug by a bus, and was shot at. (Although I'm not entirely sure I can count getting shot at as persecution because technically, the man thought he was shooting at a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses.)

But aside from all that, My first year in Italy was nothing but mind-numbing tracting. I taught very few lessons and I saw no baptisms. When I say that I saw no baptisms, I don't mean that my companions and I did not baptize anyone. I mean that I literally saw nobody get baptized. Every month we would get a newsletter from the mission office and on the back was a list of 25 to 30 baptisms throughout the month. So, apparently there were people getting baptized in Italy, I was just never able to witness one. Once I accussed the mission printer of just making up a bunch of names each month. I would get transferred into districts that were baptizing regularly and suddenly the baptisms would dry up. I was becoming something of a pariah in the mission. Nobody wanted to be my companion or have me in their district.

As I got to my anniversary mark on my mission. I looked back and assessed just what I had accomplished. Aside from a new scar on my left knee, I couldn't think of anything I had really gained from my experience. Apparently, I was wasting both my time and my parent's money. No...it's true....they would write me each week and complain....my mom's letters went something like this:

"Your father and I took a trip to Mexico this week. We redecorated the kitchen. We took delivery of your dad's new Trans Am . We're thinking of taking a cruise next month. I have to run but you're spending too much money"

(editorial note....what kind of father goes and buys a Trans Am while his son is on a mission and then sells it a month before he come home?...that's just cruel)

So, while I fixated upon my lack of accomplishment and on all thing things I was missing out on at home, the idea began to form in my mind that it would be best for all concerned if I just left my mission and went home.

I floated this idea past my mom and dad who weren't too keen on having me return just yet. My mission president was similarly discouraging of my plan but I persisted. I don't know why I never insisted on going back home, I guess I just needed someone in authority to agree with me that me being on a mission probably wasn't a good idea after all.

While I was in the process of trying to convince anyone who would listen that I really had no business being a missionary, zone conferences came up. It was our mission president's habit to give every missionary an individual interview during each zone conference. As it happened, at this particular zone conference, we were to hear from Elder Didier, the Seventy who was assigned to preside over the missions in our part of Europe.

I walked into the room for my interview and, instead of President Coletti, I was surprised to find that Elder Didier was to be my interviewer. It seems that he had learned about my efforts to convince everyone that we would all be better off if I just left the mission field and he wasn't too happy with me.

Elder Didier isn't one of those "warm and fuzzy" General Authorities. As a matter of fact, when he's peeved at you he can be quite intimidating. I retreated for a while until I got my footing and then I stood my ground. All the complaints that I had compiled up to that point came pouring out and I told Elder Didier that I was tired of wasting my time and my parents money on the off chance that I might be lucky enough to stumble on to someone willing to join the church.

"You think baptizing someone is all about luck?" asked Elder Didier. "Hasn't anyone ever taught you the way to find baptisms?"

Every month since I had been in the mission field we had a zone conference and at every zone conference, the assistants to the president would trot out a new "inspired" program for us to increase our baptisms. I never really had the chutzpah to ask what happened to last month's inspired program. Apparently the shelf life on inspiration in the Italy Rome Mission was 30 days.

Elder Didier smiled when I told him about the programs and said that there really was no trick to finding someone to baptize. The Lord knows who he has prepared to enter into the Kingdom. The 4th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants claims that the field is white, already to harvest. "All that is required", said Elder Didier, "is to cleanse the inward vessel and then, when you are confident before The Lord, go to him and claim the blessings of baptism"

Elder Didier could see instantly that, like Naman who balked at washing in the river Jordan or the rebellious Israelites who refused to look upon the brass serpent, I was skeptical that it could be that easy.

"Would you accept a challenge?", asked Elder Didier. I said that I would.
"Can you find ten investigators?", he asked. "I'm not talking about ten contacts but ten people who are actively studying the gospel"
I thought for a moment, ten investigators would be a stretch but I could see it being possible. I told Elder Didier that I believed I could.
"I promise you, in the name of The Lord that if you get ten investigators, you will have a baptism"

I accepted the challenge.

When my companion and I got back to Pescara from zone conference we went to work on getting those ten investigators. We worked like we had never worked before. We were diligent about observing every rule in the mission. There was no idle time waiting for buses. We talked to whomever was waiting with us. We raced each other to the top of apartment buildings. We opted to stay out in the field for lunch and talked to businessmen making their way home.

At the end of two weeks, we had taught a lesson to a family of five. Each of them was excited and of age and accepted the challenge to read more and investigate The Book of Mormon. Together with the five investigators we already had, they made ten investigators.

We could barely contain our excitement as we knelt down in prayer that evening and asked The Lord to tell us which of our investigators we should challenge to be baptized. (oh please...oh please...let it be the family of five)

Nothing.

We studied the matter out in our minds and again took it before Heavenly Father

again...nothing

Frustrated and wondering what I had done wrong, I took an internal inventory. It was one of the few times in my life that I could honestly say that I was confident I had done all that was required of me. I knelt down for my personal prayer that night and, in confidence, I told Heavenly Father that I had done all that he had asked and I felt I was ready to recieve the blessings that came from obedience.

The familiar tuning fork went off in my soul and I was warmly assured by The Spirit that The Lord's promises would be kept.

The next day, my companion and I were out tracting. Our tracting zone was on the farthest reach in our assigned area. It took forty-five minutes of bus travel to get there, so we were anxious to finish up that zone and get another one closer to town.

As we started on the last street in the zone, an overwhelming sick feeling came over me. I felt I was in danger and I should immediately return home.

"No", I said to myself, "you're just being a weenie" It was two hours before the mission rules would allow us to go back for lunch and we could accomplish no good sitting in our apartment. We started down the street. The further we got, the stronger the feeling of dread grew.

Finally, my companion turned to me and said, "I don't know what it is but something is wrong. I don't feel safe out here"

We returned to our apartment. I tried to busy myself by writing a talk. We were there for ten or fifteen minutes when a knock came at the door. I opened the door to find a ragged little man. I thought him a beggar so I reached into my pocket for some coins. He held up his hand to stop me.

"Are you the mormon missionaries?", he asked.

I told him we were. The tiny little man in the ragged clothes introduced himself as Paolo Spegne. He said that he lived in Ancona but that he worked in Bari.

A little geography lesson might be in order here. If you can imagine the boot shape of the Italian penninsula, we were in Pescara which would be at the back of the knee. Ancona would be located mid point on the back of the thigh and Bari would be at the tip of the heel.

"When I was back home in Ancona a few months ago, I met your missionaries and they gave me this", Paolo held up a ragged and dogeared copy of The Book of Mormon. "Since then I have tried to find them and have not been able to"

Our missionaries had tried to open up Ancona but had found little interest in the Gospel and, most importantly, could find no place to stay. It got too expensive living in hotels and so they closed up the city; apparently, however, not before meeting Paolo and giving him a Book of Mormon.

"I've read this book", said Paolo. From the looks of it, he had read it several times. "I know that it's true, but I had no idea what to do about it or even if I should do anything about it"

He continued, "Last night, as I travelled home on the train, I fell asleep and dreamt that I got off in Pescara. In my dream, I met the missionaries who gave me this book" Paolo looked past me into the apartment. "Are they here?", he asked.

Six hours later, after some lessons and a few phone calls to the zone leaders and the mission office, Paolo and I dressed in white and waded out into the clear blue waters of the Adriatic. Paolo held onto my left arm as I raised my right arm to the square, and having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I dipped Paolo into the warm waters of the sea and baptized him for the remission of his sins...just as I was promised by Elder Didier two weeks earlier.

What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself; and though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same

We put Paolo on the train and said goodbye. I never saw him again and many times, over the next few decades, I wondered how he was and if he was faithful in the Gospel.

But the lesson Elder Didier wanted to teach me was learned. There was really no secret to baptism. All that was really required was to make sure you were doing what you should do, take your personal inventory and, if you could go before The Lord in confidence and claim the blessings of obedience, you would baptize.

The average baptism per elder in my mission was three for the two years he's there. I went my first year without ever even seening a baptism. My last year I baptized thirteen people. I never tracted out one of them. They all came to me in one way or another. We would be walking down the street and a member would come up and say, "where have you been? I've been teaching my friend about the gospel all day and they want to learn more" or someone would stop us in a store and ask us where our church was. After giving them a card and some tracts, we would find them sitting on the front row the next Sunday. Every single one came about in non-conventional methods and as a result of having gone in confidence to The Lord to claim the blessings of obedience.

Obedience isn't easy, especially for me and so it's not quite as easy as it sounds. It's a whole lot more difficult to accomplish outside the mission field but I've even been able to get the very same results three times since I was a missionary.

Twenty five years after I baptized Paolo, my son opened up his mission call to discover that he was going to serve in the Italy Milan mission. We were excited but my own excitement doubled when I learned that the missions had been redistricted and, instead of Ancona being the northernmost city in the Rome mission, it was now the southernmost city in the Milan mission. I hoped and prayed that my son would be sent to Ancona so I might learn what had ever become of my first baptism.

As it happened, John-Ross was sent to serve in Ancona. He inquired about Paolo and was informed that he was in a hospital, suffering from the infirmities of age and dementia. In spite of the fact that there was little chance that Paolo would even know his own name, much less remember that he was a member, John-Ross went to visit him so that he could report back to me.

My son told me that Paolo was indeed in very bad shape but that, when his eyes fell upon my son's name badge, they lit up and he exclaimed, "Anziano Boyce! Anziano Boyce!..the gospel is true, the gospel is true". Before slipping back into his dementia, Paolo was able to ask my son if he had brought
some oil with him so that he might get a blessing.

And so it happened that, after twenty five years of wondering what had happened to him, the very first person I ever baptized bore his testimony to my son...and my son was able to impart a blessing to the very first person I ever baptized.

I recieved the news about Paolo with bittersweet tears. I would have wanted to be able to write to him and tell him about all that had happened in my life and learn all that had happened in his. But I was grateful to learn that, despite his condition, his testimony was strong and that he was able to bear it to my son, "the gospel is true...the gospel is true"

On Building the Houston Temple

2009-06-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

note: I wrote this a few months ago and posted it on my facebook account. Since then, I am told that this story went viral and has been passed about in various email accounts. Now, I'm not usually so vain...who am I kidding? I'm VERY vain. Therefore, I don't want causal readers of this post to think I plagarized it somewhere.

Tom

A few months after my accident, I got a call from a headhunter telling me that he had a position for which he wanted me to interview. I was a little surprised by the call since I wasn't actively looking for a job at the time. As a matter of fact, I was still learning to walk again and use my reconstructed hands. I politely declined and thought that was it.

It wasn't

The man kept calling me and every time I told him why I was unable to accept a job at the moment, he kept telling me that it wasn't important. After a while I decided to go on the interview. If nothing else, it would stop the annoying phone calls every couple of days.

The interview was with one of the largest HVAC contractors in Houston. I've never worked for a contractor before and, quite frankly, contractors and engineers often find themselves at complete odds with each other. I knew for a fact that, in my years of experience, I had been in more than one shouting match with a few project managers at this firm.

The interviewer brought me into a conference room and expressed his thanks for me coming in. He told me that I had come recommended to him as someone uniquely qualified for the job he had. He described the job and, I had to admit, it sounded like a pretty good gig. As a matter of fact, if I had to describe my dream job, this would be it.

I started asking questions about the firm...what kind of projects they were working on and so forth. They were one of the biggest contracters in Houston and so he ran down a pretty impressive resume of projects. Then he said, "Oh...and we're doing this church. It's the strangest church you've ever seen" I'd designed some pretty strange churches in my time. One of them was made entirely of pink glass. When you're especially bored some time, you should try and run down the thermal transfer properties of pink glass. If you find out, get back to me on it because I never was able to figure it out.

The interviewer continued with his description of the strange church."Another weird thing is that they're spending WAYYYY too much money on this thing. You know how, whenever we do a church, we're asked to figure out ways to cut costs? Well, not on this job. In fact, they keep asking us for ways we can make it even better"

(It's called 'value engineering'. It happens on almost every job when the owner gets hit with the sticker price of the project and we have to go back and try and work with contractors to hold down prices and yet still keep in a modicum of quality..that's where the shouting matches usually occur. Churches are especially notorious at this game and the end result is usually a facade of flash over substance. You build this really impressive looking church and pray that the next big wind won't come along and blow it all down)

Then the interviewer said something that sealed the deal. "...and the strangest thing of all is that we're not going to even be allowed back in this church to fix any problems. Only members with a special piece of paper will be allowed in"

I fished into my wallet and pulled out my temple recommend, "Is this the piece of paper you're talking about?", I asked.

And so I went to work on helping to build the Houston Temple.

The first job meeting was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. We all met in a little shack on the temple building site. It was an odd sensation to look out at earth moving equipment shoving mounds of dirt around and get tears in your eyes.

I didn't tell anyone at the meeting that I was LDS. For one reason, I didn't want them to think I was going to come off as a know-it-all. Another reason is that there were some pretty strong protests against building this temple and I wanted to see where everyone stood on the issue. You kind of want to know where all the land mines are before you go traipsing off into the clover.

You may or may not know this but the church sends its own project manager to the site when a temple is built. It's his job to make sure that the specifications are followed in every way. As it happened, the church's representative, a man named Leon, was called away to Salt Lake and so the project manager for the general contractor got up and started the meeting.

"Leon's been called away to Salt Lake and so I'll be running the meeting." He looked around and his eye settled on the Plumbing Contractor, "Gill, why don't you offer us an opening prayer?"

My jaw dropped. First of all, prayers just aren't the standard way that construction meetings are called to order. And another thing is that, I'd know Gill for fifteen years and anyone even mildly aquainted with the man was aware that he was incapable of stringing four words together without cussing twice.

"This is going to be some prayer", I thought...it was. Gill bowed his head and folded his hands and gave a prayer like he'd been giving them in sacrament meeting his entire life. We were grateful for the opportunity to work on the temple. We were mindful of the sacrifices of The Saints. We prayed for safety and harmony among the builders and we consecrated and dedicated our actions to The Lord.

Gill ended his prayer and the General Contractor went on with the agenda. I wasn't really paying attention, however, because I was still dumbstruck, staring at Gill, and wondering what had happened to him. I was still staring at Gill when the agenda came to me and I was asked to introduce myself to the group.

There was a bit of a pause when I got caught still staring, openmouthed, at Gill. Then everyone started to laugh.

"It's in the specifications", explained the general contractor, "we have to pray before every meeting"

Knowing the crowd, I asked, "And none of you tried to negotiate out of that?"

"Well, we did grumble for a while and then Leon started making us sing an opening hymn as well"

I wished I had accepted the job sooner, I might have been able to see that.

I soon found out that I didn't need to tell anyone I was LDS, they all knew and many times a contractor would sidle up to me to ask me something about my religion or the significance of something in the temple.

"What's up with the twelve cows and the big jacuzzi?", one would ask.

"Is that Gabriel up there with a trumpet?" (oh...little known fact but if you'll take a pair of binoculars with you and get far enough away so you can see it from the proper angle, you'll notice a lightening rod sticking out of Moroni's head)

I took to bringing my scriptures with me so that I could explain the significance of different things and point to their Biblical foundation.

One question was my personal favorite, "where's the counting room?". Remember the churches I told you about that I'd designed? Well one thing that never got 'value engineered' was the counting room. It was where they kept and counted the donations and it was always built like a bank vault.

"We don't have a counting room in temples", I said.

"Why not?"

"We don't take in any donations at the temple"

"You mean to tell me that you put all this money into a building and you don't ever get a nickle out of it?"

"Yeah, that's pretty much the case"

The contractor went away shaking his head. No doubt wondering how anyone as foolish as these mormons had ever amassed enough money to build such wonderful buildings.

Of all my experiences, only one was what I would have categorized as 'odd'. With an opening prayer at each meeting, design conferences went about pretty much like PEC meetings. There was a spirit of brotherhood that just wasn't normally present in construction shacks.

One day, however, the meeting got a little out of hand. Some voices were raised and anger entered the room. When it made it's appearance, I was surprised to notice a letdown that I recognized as The Spirit leaving the room. It made me sad. I looked about the table and I could tell that others were experiencing the same letdown.

It was then that the copier behind me started spitting out blank sheets of paper. Nobody was at the copier and yet it churned out about a dozen sheets of paper and then stopped. It took everyone by surprise and it completely diffused the argument that was going on. Someone made a small joke, everyone laughed and the meeting went on. Little by little I felt the warmth of The Spirit return.

After the meeting, I was going over some items with the General Contractor. I had to make a few copies and so I went to the copier. There was a sign over the copier instructing the sub-contractors to write down the number of copies they make so that their companies can be backcharged. Thinking that I was making a joke, I pointed to the sign and said, "Are you going to give the angels a discount on the copies they made today?" The general contractor looked at me and said, "you know? strange things like that happen around here quite often"

As the temple neared its completion, the general contractor and I had occasion to chat one more time. I knew that he was a staunch baptist, one of the churches, in fact, that was so vocal in its protest over our building a temple in Houston. Over the months, we had become friends, and so I felt no qualms in asking him just what his feelings were, as a baptist, building a mormon temple. I'll never forget what he told me.

"In ancient times", he said, "building work was overseen by guilds. The guild masters were the ones who saw to it that the integrity of the craft over which they labored was the best it could be. If you wanted to enter the guild you had to begin as an apprentice and dedicate long years with little or no pay. The master under whom you labored, gave you room and board and your tools. Eventually, you became a journeyman in the guild and you got paid. However, if you wanted to become a master of the guild, you had to present a sample of your work to be judged by the other masters. It had to be a work of outstanding beauty and flawless quality for it was the work by which your skills would be judged. It had to be a work that would weather the ages and it was called, 'a masterpiece'"

The contractor continued, "Every building I've ever built has been one where money won out over quality. I've never been able to do the best I'm capable of because of budget restraints. If I'm grateful for one thing, it's that you mormons don't skimp when it comes to your temples. For once, I'm able to build to the quality I'm really capable of"

Then he looked out over the temple and his gaze came back to me. His eyes were tearing up a bit and he swept his hand back towards the temple and his voice got a little reverent, "This is my masterpiece", He said.

I've been building buildings for almost thirty years. If been doing it so long, in fact, that they are beginning to tear down buildings that I was sure would live as a testament to my presence long after I was gone from this earth.

I'm really grateful I had a chance to work on The Houston Temple.