Lessons I've Learned The Hard Way ...

 

The strongest fences in our lives are the ones we build ourselves. 

Not to get all pretentious here, but I’ve had a lot of interesting experiences over the last ten years, and I want to share some principles that guide my life I’ve learned from those experiences. There is also a story behind every statement. I may even share those stories sometime …

1. Sometimes we don’t see our personal prison until we’re out of it. Comfort zones aren’t always helpful, especially when they keep us from progressing. Relationships, careers, or where we live can all be barriers to being a better person.
2. Find someone you can love wholeheartedly, passionately, and without fear of rejection. Love someone who loves you for who you are now, but makes you want to be a better person. Love and be loved unconditionally. If you already have that someone, hang onto them for dear life.
3. Like what you do, but realize a career doesn't define you as a person. If you don’t love everything about your life now, find at least one thing you can love - exercise, a hobby, the arts, whatever it is that helps you transcend drudgery for a while. Life is too short to never find anything that makes you truly happy. I like teaching, but I don’t love the politics that go along with it. I’m lucky to be in a place now where I'm happy and engaged with my work, but there are many other things that make my life good as well.
4. Appreciate beauty. This is a lot of good in this world. Recognize the ugliness and change it if you can, but don't let it define you.
5. Fear sucks. Don’t be afraid of your feelings. Accept them, and if they’re negative, channel those feelings in productive ways. Recognize depression and deal with it.  I once reached a point where getting out of bed in the morning became a challenge. That was no way to live, so I did something about it. Mostly, I found reasons to get out of bed – my job, my kids, and the people I loved most. Don’t be afraid of trying new things. Don’t be afraid of trying old things in a new way.
6. Don’t trust anyone who says he or she knows what God - whichever one you happen to believe in - wants for your life. Organized religion is mostly bullshit and is usually just a means for people to exploit and make money off of others. For a long time, I believed there were people who were more insightful or inspired about myself than me, because they claimed to have a closer relationship with God than I had. I finally realized that nobody knows me better than myself. Depending on others for guidance because they claim to be more inspired is an invitation to disaster. It’s your life. Live it your way, but always strive to be kind. Be true to yourself, and accept, respect, and trust yourself. Don’t worry about what most others think or say about you; you can’t really do anything about it. Care what your loved ones think of you, but realize even they don't always understand where you're coming from. 
7. Accept others for who they are, but don’t be anyone’s doormat. Recognize that otherwise good people sometimes have bad days. None of us are defined by who we are at our finest moment or at our worst moment. Most of the time we're just doing the best we can. Be patient, but don’t accept being treated less than how you deserve, whether it’s by friends, family, employers, religious leaders, or anyone else. It took me a long time to realize that I didn’t have to put up with being treated poorly just because I had invested time and emotional energy into a relationship.
8. There are crazy and/or mean people out there who enjoy hurting others. Learn to deal with them. Even better, avoid those people altogether if you can. Sometimes bad people put on a good front before you realize who they actually are. Some of the worst people I’ve dealt with in my life have had advanced degrees or have been religious leaders.
9. Be grateful. You’re blessed (or lucky) every day in large and small ways. Be grateful for the good things, because it could always be worse. 
10. Knowledge matters. Education matters. Experience matters. Ignorance is not bliss.
11. Intentions don’t matter. Actions do.
12. When you're gone, you're gone. Live a consequential life that influences others for the better. Give people a reason to say good things about you years after you've shuffled off this mortal coil.

If I Was The Priest

Right now, this song is everything ...

Bruce Springsteen wrote “If I Was The Priest” nearly fifty years ago. It predates his debut album on Columbia Records. In fact, “If I Was The Priest” is one of the songs Bruce played at his audition with the legendary talent scout John Hammond, who also discovered Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among many others. “If I Was The Priest” is a Bob Dylan-esque old west fantasy about Sheriff Jesus requesting Father Bruce’s presence in Dodge City, where the Holy Ghost also runs a burlesque show ("where they'll let you in for free and they hit you when you go"). Father Bruce ultimately declines Sheriff Jesus’s request to join him, because Bruce is overdue for Cheyenne. Hammond said he immediately knew Bruce was raised Catholic when he played the song for Hammond at his audition back in 1972. I first heard “If I Was The Priest” nearly thirty years ago, on a bootleg recording of Bruce's audition tape. It’s been a favorite of mine ever since.

 

Bruce’s new album, Letter To You, is a rocking meditation on the loss of loved ones, and how their presence still haunts and influences our lives. My description makes the album sound like a bummer, but it isn’t. It’s actually quite joyful. Bruce wrote most of the songs for the album after the last member of his first band, The Castiles, passed away recently, leaving Bruce the last surviving member of his teenage band. Besides the new songs Bruce wrote about death and ghosts, Bruce recorded “If I Was The Priest” – along with two other unreleased songs from back in the day – with the E Street Band, for which I am very happy and grateful, because now we have a full band version of this amazing song. Bruce has what sounds like a gospel choir backing him up, and Steve Van Zandt contributes an outstanding guitar solo at the end of the song. It sounds like they recorded “If I Was The Priest” in 1975 instead of 2019. That’s a high compliment.

 

I was listening to “If I Was The Priest” full blast this afternoon while driving northbound on I-15 after picking up Tristen’s boys from their dad. Seven-year-old Maxwell complained about the volume, but ten-year-old Harrison told me how much he liked the song. Smart kid. Anyway, when the chorus of the song kicked in, I got a little misty eyed, because I realized how much my brother Phil, who is never far from my thoughts, would have enjoyed “If I Was The Priest”. It’s classic E Street Band rock and roll — which is the highest compliment I can give — and Phil would have loved Bruce’s rocking, slightly blasphemous take on the old west as much as Harrison and I were enjoying it. And ultimately, that’s the message of Bruce’s new album: music can help us feel the presence of people we love who are no longer with us. So Phil rode shotgun on the Fargo line — that’s a line from the song — with me as we headed home together, listening to a Springsteen masterpiece. The end.

 

The Wild, The Innocent, and The Eagle Mountain Shuffle*

*with apologies to Bruce Springsteen.

I drove to Eagle Mountain yesterday. I’ve been meaning to go back for a long time. I spent an hour there a little over a year ago — for the first time since 2011 — because I wanted to show the love of my life where my marriage fell apart, among other things. She wasn’t impressed with the place. My lady saw cheaply built houses spaced too closely together, and a remoteness that is frustrating until you get used to it, and then it’s kind of nice. And that was pretty much the only time I had been there until yesterday, with a few exceptions. I have a lot of unresolved issues that involve Eagle Mountain, and I went there thinking I might get some closure. I spent nearly six years in that little town, and I still think about my time in Eagle Mountain a lot. Every time I listen to John Mellencamp’s or Bruce Springsteen’s later work, it takes me right back there.

 I took my camera with me yesterday because I wondered if I could find any beauty in Eagle Mountain. I don’t know if I did. I spent several hours walking old routes that I took with my faithful pug, Waylon, years ago, while I took a few pictures. I’ll let the readers of this post decide for themselves if I succeeded.

My life wasn’t all bad in Eagle Mountain. I had a good job and worked for a principal whom I liked, which is increasingly rare for me nowadays. My kids attended the same school where I taught, which gave me the opportunity to see them everyday at work. I owned a house there, and my kids lived with me under the same roof, instead of seven hundred miles away as they do now. There are still people in Eagle Mountain who I consider friends. I had a period of stability there (outside of the shittiness of my marriage) that I have only recently regained. I hiked and biked in Eagle Mountain – which I loved because I didn’t have to worry about some idiot running me over, as I do here in the big city — and enjoyed the quiet and small town quality of the place.

However, for me, Eagle Mountain is haunted by memories that still make my heart ache for the loss of living with my kids full time, and haunted by the ghosts of what might have been had I been smart enough to see the trap I was creating for myself with the predominant culture. For the sake of marital and community harmony, I tried living a lie in Eagle Mountain and pretending that I liked it, and it didn’t work. God, I not only tried to be active LDS (although I never did get used to some Eagle Mountain LDS people claiming they lived “a higher law,” which apparently meant disbelieving that evolution was a thing, and that white shirt, tie, and clean shaven were what God required), I also pretended to be a conservative. You can stop laughing now. 

As I wrote earlier, my marriage ended there (although it was a long time coming), and the results of what my ex falsely claimed about me caused some sanctimonious school district people in the most Mormon county in the state to decide I was no longer worthy of working in a school district that, in many ways, is an extension of the LDS Church. Basically, they made my life so miserable in the district that I quit.

I wrote years ago that the former HR director of Alpine District thought he was the stake president of human resources, rather than the director, and he treated anyone as persona non grata whom he didn’t feel was living LDS standards. I say that with full confidence of it being true, because every time this person opened his big, fat mouth, the only thing he talked about was his LDS Church calling. He also vigorously pursued people for doing things in their personal lives that in most other school districts would not have been relevant to their employment. Yes, Mr. Spencer was a piece of work, but he was not an anomaly. The whole district reflected LDS Church guidelines in dress and behavior. I say that without bitterness now — although it took me years to get rid of that bitterness.

I didn’t mean for this post to turn into an LDS Church bashing session, but as I write I realize there is no way around it. The LDS Church created the culture in Eagle Mountain that made living there unsustainable as long as I was an active member of the church. The attitude of LDS leaders and the edicts they issued — let’s be honest, the bullshit they spouted and the herd instinct of the members there — made life miserable, and when that bullshit encompasses every aspect of your life, both professionally and personally, it’s a big deal. The LDS Church set the agenda for the area and everyone followed more or less blindly, just because there weren’t any alternatives for a social or spiritual life. As a post Mormon, I can see clearly how abusive and coercive the church is, especially in Eagle Mountain. And as it turned out, when my ex decided she was done with our marriage, she used the church as a cudgel to beat me with.

So yeah, I have some issues with my past in Eagle Mountain. Strangely, after walking around familiar places yesterday, I think I could live there again. I am no longer religious, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the hypocrisy and the sanctimony of the predominant culture. I could ignore it and just ride my bike and go for walks and appreciate the tranquility without worrying about what my bishop thought or what the stake president preached in church last Sunday. Hell, maybe I could even get another dog to follow me.

Honestly, my life is happier now. I have a great girlfriend who loves and cares about me, and provides very little drama in my life. I see my girls, but not nearly as often as I would like. I work for a principal who doesn’t suck. I now drive a vehicle that gets me where I’m going, is paid for, and doesn’t embarrass me. It’s twenty years old, but what the hell, I like it anyway. It’s been a while since that happened, and it’s because of what happened in Eagle Mountain.

Unfortunately, having the most important things in my life — time with my girls, my job, and my house — stolen from me will hurt for a long time. And I’m not sure closure is even possible, because that would require ignoring my feelings about the worst experiences of my life. I do realize I still have to live my life, however. Living in the present is more important than living in the past, no matter how much pain I endured when I lived there. Guess I’ll just have to call it a draw between Eagle Mountain (and all it represents, which is the main thing) and myself.

Anyway, here are the pictures where I tried to make Eagle Mountain look purdy, along with pictures of where I used to live …

From one of my old biking routes.

This is the place … maybe.

It can be pretty, if you look at it just right.

Where I lived.

It looked better when I lived there. It had trees and a fence. Ugh.

   

My route when I walked to work. There were fewer houses then. I think I actually made this look pretty.

Thus Sayeth The Lord ...

I rediscovered this picture today. It was taken in Provo, UT, in my former in-laws’ backyard during the summer of 2006. The photo presents a very placid, serene picture of me playing with my kids. In some ways that’s exactly what was going on, but oh boy, the story behind the picture … this was the day I found out how hypocritical and sanctimonious some LDS Church leaders are, and realized how negatively their actions had affected my late brother Phil’s life.

Phil had died four months previously, on March 15, 2006. I was still trying to cope with my grief over his death when the picture was taken. On the day that the picture was taken, July 10, 2006, we were visiting my ex-wife's parents in Provo. My ex-wife's sister was there as well. The adults were visiting in the kitchen that morning, while the kids played outside. My ex-wife's distant cousin came up in the conversation, and someone casually mentioned that, thanks to the intervention of an LDS General Authority, that cousin had been allowed to go on an LDS mission, even though he had fathered a child outside of wedlock.

My curiosity was piqued, because the LDS Church cancelled Phil’s mission call in July 1984 when someone claimed Phil was the father of her (then unborn) child. Local and general LDS Church leaders (including an apostle) told Phil he was obligated to financially support the girl and her baby, even though there was absolutely no proof that Phil was the father. The leaders cancelled Phil’s mission call because of that alleged obligation, and because of an LDS Church policy that said anyone who had fathered a child outside of marriage wasn’t allowed to serve a mission. When I questioned one of those leaders about the situation, he told me “girls just know who the father of their baby is.” The baby still hadn’t been born when I asked that question.

A paternity test later determined that there was no possibility Phil fathered the kid, but because of the “inspiration” of a handful of men (who believed God spoke directly to them), Phil’s life went into a tailspin from which he never recovered. The LDS cultural stigma of having a cancelled mission call was more than Phil’s self-esteem could bear, and he ended up marrying the first woman who was kind to him. Unfortunately that woman had borderline personality disorder, and made Phil’s life a living hell for the next twenty years. Phil was never able to break away from her and it ultimately cost him his life. Whenever Phil tried to get away, she played the “I loved you when …” card, which, along with the stigma of ending an "eternal" marriage, worked on Phil.

So I asked who the General Authority was who allowed the cousin to serve a mission.

According to my former mother-in-law, LDS General Authority Hugh Pinnock ensured that the cousin was able to go on a mission, even though the cousin – unlike Phil – had actually fathered a child outside of wedlock. Fortunately for the cousin, he lived in the same wealthy neighborhood as Pinnock, so Pinnock pulled a few strings and the cousin went happily on a mission.

Hugh Pinnock was one of the LDS leaders who cancelled Phil’s mission call. At the time of my brother's call, Pinnock had responsibility over the area where my family lived, and he, our stake president, and an apostle, were the leaders who dealt with Phil. According to The Mormon Murders by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Pinnock was a pompous, sanctimonious prick who was better known for inadvertently aiding Mark Hofmann in scamming money from a bank to purchase nonexistent LDS Church historical documents at just about the same time he was dealing with Phil. So much for Pinnock’s divine inspiration and powers of discernment.

When my mother-in-law said that, I thought my head was going to explode. I didn’t know whether to be angry or to cry. Pinnock’s hypocrisy was almost more than I could stand. I managed to say that Pinnock was the guy who cancelled Phil’s call. My former sister-in-law responded sympathetically, “Boy that guy (meaning Phil) couldn’t catch a break.” I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked outside and played with the kids. I couldn’t be in the kitchen any longer. I felt like someone had hit me in the head with a baseball bat.

And that’s when someone snapped that picture.

In the years since, I haven’t ever really gotten over the anger I felt about that bit of information from that seemingly innocuous kitchen conversation. My mother-in-law didn’t know the significance of what she had told me, and I don’t have any bad feelings for her that she said anything. It just was what it was: another nail in the coffin of a “testimony” of the “truthfulness” of the LDS Church.

To someone outside of the Mormon bubble, the belief that LDS leaders are always inspired by God sounds very cult-y, and it probably is, especially when he or she looks at the LDS Church’s policies on gays, women, and – until 1978 – African Americans. Also in the years since, I’ve learned a lot about LDS Church history, and how truly despicable most of the early leadership was, especially Joseph Smith. They basically believed that as long as they said, “thus sayeth the Lord,” they could get away with whatever they wanted, including murder and misogyny. Not much has changed since.

My brother’s life and death are a sad part of that legacy.

The Big 2-0

Adams Elementary, Logan, UT, February 14, 1991

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the official beginning of my career in education. In January 1991, I started Level II classes in the Elementary Education program at Utah State University.  Although I didn’t get my first real teaching job until August 1992, Level II was my first taste of what would eventually become my livelihood. I was actually working in the public schools, and had a few instructional responsibilities.

Starting the first week of January, I drove twice a week to Sunrise Elementary in Smithfield, a small town north of Logan, to observe and to work as a quasi-teacher’s aide for a practicum class. I worked in the classroom of a fourth grade teacher, Terry Olsen, who was very enthusiastic and had a lot of fun with his students. He was a big influence on me. After four weeks I moved to Adams Elementary in Logan, right next to Adams Park, where I worked in a second grade class for another four weeks. Good times.

Looking back at Winter Quarter 1991 makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It was something of a milestone in my life. I was finally progressing in my academic career, which had felt stalled up to that point. I’ve been rereading a journal I kept during that time, and it has been quite entertaining. My outlook on what I was committing myself to for the next thirty years was awfully naive.

That winter was also an interesting – if tumultuous – time in the U.S. The build-up to the first Gulf War was occurring, and the war would start on January 16, 1991. The night the war started I was sitting in the Salt Palace arena in Salt Lake City, waiting for a Paul Simon concert to begin. Paul came out fifteen minutes late because he and his band had been listening to the first President Bush address the country. I also remember listening to war news on the radio as I drove to Smithfield. That was the era when we all learned about Scud missiles and other slightly surreal words, like Kurds and Basra.

A disconcerting thing happened to me that morning of January 16th. I had an early morning class on campus, and as I scraped the ice off the windshield of my car – it’s too cold to walk very far in Logan during January – I managed to scrape the skin off of one knuckle as well. I didn’t think much about it until two days later when my hand began to swell and a red streak started making its way up my arm. I went to the campus infirmary in the student center and found out I had a raging case of blood poisoning. The doctor lectured me about the severity of the red streak. I’m just grateful I was smart enough to go to the doctor.

So here it is, exactly twenty years later. I’m now doing pretty much what I expected to be doing back in 1991. I’m occasionally nostalgic for those seemingly care-free days, but then I read something I wrote back then and think to myself, “Gosh, I was an idiot.” 

I hope I won’t feel the same way when I read this blog in another twenty years.

Drawing the Olsens

Christmas Day 1982. Kind of a punk.

I’m sitting here in my classroom after school, watching my daughters – Caroline and Grace – entertain themselves by drawing until it is time to go home. It’s been a long week and I’m not feeling especially motivated to correct papers or record scores, hence the blogging. I’m also feeling kind of blue, and thinking about the past. I have my iPod blasting a playlist of my favorite songs from 1982, and Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Bob Seger, and The Who are entertaining me …

I’ve mentioned it here before, but this year has the same calendar as 1982. I look at my daughters as they lay on my classroom floor coloring their pictures, and realize that they’ve never seen a year that begins with the number 19, let alone understand that 1982 was a real year, where both of their grandparents – my parents – were alive, healthy, and not that much older than I am now. My brother Phil was a senior in high school, and my one complete semester at BYU – I went there briefly again in ’85, just long enough to get my Spanish credits - was dragging to an exhausting and inauspicious end. My buddy Don and the rest of my friends were still single and ready to cat around every night. I was living at home with my parents and younger brothers, and driving to BYU every morning with my cousin.

There are several memories from November and December of 1982 that I still hold near and dear, twenty-eight years later. I remember lying in bed every morning that winter and listening to my parents quietly visiting with one another while they ate breakfast together, before my dad went to work. Joe and Vera genuinely enjoyed one another’s company. They usually had the radio tuned to KSL so that they could listen to the news while they ate and talked.

Joe and Vera, Christmas 1982. Best parents ever.

As I watch my daughters draw, and I look out my classroom window at the dark storm clouds gathering, one memory from the second week of December 1982 especially stands out. We’d had a large snow storm during the night, which had dumped nearly a foot of snow - I know, big surprise that it snowed in Heber in December. Anyway, the snow made Highway 189 through Provo Canyon treacherous. This was back in the day - boy I sound like an old fart - when the road through the canyon wound along the bottom by the river, instead of following the contour of the mountainside like it does now. It was a winding, two lane road, and was especially dangerous during a snowstorm. My cousin and I opted not to go to school that morning.

Since I was already up and dressed, I decided to make myself useful. After shoveling my parents’ sidewalk and driveway, I took my shovel and walked down Center Street a block to Clarence and Hope Olsen’s place. Clarence and Hope were an elderly couple - they had to be in their eighties - who lived with their adult son Joe, who was mentally retarded. Joe Olsen was a neighborhood fixture, standing beside the road for hours and watching the cars go by. When I first read the book To Kill A Mockingbird as a teenager, before I saw the movie, the Radleys reminded me of the Olsens (not that Clarence was comparable to the mean and cruel Mr. Radley), and Joe Olsen was who I pictured as Boo Radley.

As a teenager, I spent many hours in boring church meetings entertaining myself (and friends and family) by sketching various members of our LDS ward, especially Clarence, Hope, and Joe. It sounds cruel and disrespectful now, but at the time I didn’t mean it that way; they were just really interesting people to look at, which meant they were a lot of fun to draw. I never cartooned or caricatured them, I just sketched them as they appeared. Which was probably bad enough. Clarence and Hope were both quite feeble - I think Hope was a little senile at that point - although Clarence still worked in the insurance sales office that stood next to his house.

When I got to the Olsens it was still before eight o’clock in the morning, and the house looked quiet. Even then, I think I figured I owed them some compassion; I don’t think they ever knew that I drew pictures of them, but even so, I wanted to do something kind for them. I had their sidewalk and driveway shoveled before anyone was awake in the house. My goal was to escape without the Olsens knowing who had shoveled them out.

I wasn’t fast enough. As I was putting the finishing touches on the sidewalk, Clarence’s stooped figure emerged from the house. I remember Clarence, despite his advanced age and the proximity of his office to his house, was dressed in a suit and tie. At that point in his life, Clarence was slack-jawed and a little difficult to understand when he spoke. However, he seemed grateful and muttered his thanks, which kind of embarrassed me. I didn’t want the Olsens to know I’d shoveled their sidewalk; it was a lot more fun doing it anonymously. It wasn’t a big emotional moment anyway; Clarence didn’t throw his arms around me and tell me how grateful he was. He just mumbled thanks and I told him he was welcome.

I returned from an LDS mission in late 1984 and was a little surprised to go to church and see both Olsens still living. Joe was no longer with them; he had been institutionalized after Clarence and Hope were no longer able to care for him. Not too long after my return both Clarence and Hope died. A few years later Joe met a tragic end when he got separated from his group while on an outing in the mountains near Kamas. Joe spent the night in the mountains and died of exposure. It’s a sad story, but sometimes that’s how life is.

1982 was a long time ago, now. The music from that era brings back a lot of memories, both good and bad. My parents and brother Phil passed away a few years ago. My buddy Don hasn’t been in touch for quite a while, and I’m a little worried about him. I still see other friends that I grew up with, and I’m grateful for their continued friendship, although we don't always see eye-to-eye on some things.

Anyway, I like watching my daughters draw. I’m glad I passed that on to them. I just hope that they’ll shovel the snow once in a while as well.

Thank You and Happy Veterans Day, Sergeant J

Kind of a preachy blog post today. Normally I try not to preach; it makes me feel hypocritical in a major way. However, what I have to say today is near and dear to my heart, so I’m gonna preach:

I have two little girls - stepsisters - in my class this year. Their father and step-father, Sgt. J, is a master sergeant in the army. In September he was severely injured by an IED - what used to be called a booby trap - in Afghanistan. Sgt. J’s job in the army was to actually defuse IEDs. For the last two months he has been recuperating in various military hospitals between here and Afghanistan. Tomorrow (on Veterans Day, no less) Sgt. J finally gets to come home. Like other returning Iraq/Afghanistan veterans in our area, Sgt. J will be escorted by the local fire department, and the main road into town will be lined with American flags. My class, along with several others, will be waiting by the roadside to cheer and demonstrate our appreciation as his entourage pulls into town.

I’m proud to teach this brave soldier’s children, and proud that he lives in our town. America wouldn’t have survived over the past two hundred and thirty-four years without men and women like Sgt. J and his family, who are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. I honor our country in a million little ways, but compared to heroes like Sgt. J, my efforts seems pretty inadequate.

This Veterans Day, let’s truly remember and appreciate Sgt. J and all the other brave men and women who have served - or are serving - our country. No other country in the world offers the freedoms and opportunities that we have here in the USA. The men and women serving in the military are prepared to lay down their lives to safeguard those freedoms and opportunities.

As the holiday season nears, let’s not forget we’re still fighting two wars. It doesn’t seem like a day goes by that there isn’t news of someone being injured or killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are also hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women who won’t be with their families on Thanksgiving later this month because they are sacrificing that time with their families to serve our country. 

Let’s not ever take any of them for granted.

A River Runs Through It and the Meaning of Life

  

Me with a favorite book, September 1993

I’m working my way through Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It this summer for the hundredth time, and thinking about family.

I first read A River Runs Through It over seventeen years ago. I came to the book by way of the Robert Redford movie, which I saw with a good friend at a movie theater one snowy winter night in Heber the first year I taught school. I liked the movie so much I bought the book, and as good as the movie was, it couldn’t hold a candle to Maclean’s original story. Norman Maclean is a great writer; he’s one of my favorites. The man’s prose is like most authors’ poetry; A River Runs Through It is a very beautifully written book. Maclean uses fly fishing as a metaphor for - and counterpoint to - life. Maclean’s description early in the story of his brother Paul’s fly-fishing ability and technique is some of the best writing I've ever read, and you don’t have to be a fly fisherman to enjoy or appreciate it.

 

Running through Maclean’s book like the river in the title is family. A River Runs Through It is funny, but Maclean isn’t a comedian and doesn’t go for cheap laughs. Instead, the humor comes naturally from growing up home-schooled by his Presbyterian minister father, and with his argumentative younger brother. One of my favorite parts of the book describes the one and only fist fight Maclean ever had with his brother, and their mother’s unfortunate intervention in that fight:

 ... I did not see our mother walk between us to try to stop us. She was short and wore glasses and, even with them on, did not have good vision. She had never seen a fight before or had any notion of how bad you could get hurt by becoming mixed up in one. Evidently, she just walked between her sons. The first I saw of her was the grey top of her head, the hair tied in a big knot with a big comb in it; but what was most noticeable was that her head was so close to Paul I couldn’t get a good punch at him. Then I didn’t see her anymore.

 

The fight seemed suddenly to stop itself. She was lying on the floor between us. Then we both began to cry and fight in a rage, each one shouting “You son of a bitch, you knocked my mother down.” 

She got off the floor, and, blind without her glasses, staggered in circles between us, saying without recognizing which one she was addressing, “No, it wasn’t you. I just slipped and fell.”

 

So, this was the only time we ever fought.

When I first read that passage it reminded me of the relationship I had with my younger brother Phil, except we definitely fought more than once. When we were kids, we would pound on each other one moment and be best friends the next. Even as teenagers we still occasionally settled things with a punch up, and yet no one else could ever settle things that way with one of us if the other was around. A River Runs Through It gained unexpected poignancy for me a few years ago when Phil, like Macleans’ brother Paul, died an untimely death. Like Maclean, there wasn’t much I could do to prevent Phil’s death, and I’ve brooded about it ever since.

 

Despite that ending, A River Runs Through It is not a morbid book. Another aspect of the book that keeps me coming back is Maclean’s love of - and almost reverence for - the mountains in which he grew up. I can relate to that. Like Maclean, I spent several summers working for the US Forest Service when I was younger, and I miss being in the mountains every day.

 

Rereading A River Runs Through It also reminded me that one of the great things about my Forest Service years was the opportunity I had to retrace the path my grandparents - my mother’s parents - made (almost literally) through the mountains during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century. They were from the same generation as Norman Maclean, and ran a sawmill set in the Uinta Mountains, east of Heber. Maclean’s parents had a cabin in the mountains because they liked to fish; my grandparents had a cabin in the mountains because they had to earn a living. Thanks to some exploring I did as a Forest Service employee, and thanks to some great road trips with a favorite uncle, I learned my way around the areas in the mountains where my grandparents (and parents) lived and worked.

 

My cousin Jim recently e-mailed me a photo of one of the cabins my grandparents lived in while they cut down trees in the mountains. Here it is:

Not exactly the luxury mountain cabin common nowadays, is it? There wasn’t a jetted hot tub in it, anyway. The cabin doesn't exist anymore; it was only meant to be a temporary accommodation for my grandfather and his family while they worked. The Forest Service demolished it fifty years ago.

 

Finally, the lesson Norman Maclean teaches in A River Runs Through It is that our families define us. Who we are and what we do with our life is shaped by our family, for better or worse. Ultimately, we have our free will to choose our own path through life, but our family sets us on that path. As Maclean writes, near the end of the book:

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand are dead, but still I reach out to them.

  

A River Runs Through It is a great book. Check it out if you haven’t already.

 

 

 

Remembering Veterans...

Ten years ago I wrote a monthly newspaper column for the late, lamented Wasatch County Courier. I didn’t get paid much for doing it, but I had a lot of fun. The main focus of my newspaper column was history, especially Wasatch County history.

Today I'm posting a column I wrote for the Courier back in 1999. I always liked this column, because it dealt with two things near and dear to my heart: family and patriotism. Bear in mind that it was originally published the week before Christmas in 1999, so add ten years (now eighteen years) to any historical references. I’m posting it here today because it also applies to Veterans Day. This article may not contain the greatest writing in the world, but it came from the heart:

Joe Thacker and friend

"I'll Be Home for Christmas" has always been one of my favorite Christmas songs. Bing Crosby recorded it back in the 1943, at the height of World War II. “White Christmas” was more popular, but for my money, nothing can beat the emotional resonance of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” I’ve often wondered what that song meant to the Heber Valley men and women fighting in the second World War, and to the families they left behind. I can’t really know, because I wasn’t there. I can only imagine how poignant Bing Crosby’s song was for those people during that terrible time.

I also recently reread the book Citizen Soldiers by Stephen Ambrose. Citizen Soldiers is a history of World War II from D-Day to VE Day, told by GI’s who were there. I highly recommend this book. Ambrose’s tale of the Battle of the Bulge, which was fought the week before Christmas 1944, inspired me to talk to a relative who participated in World War II. I asked my uncle, Joe Thacker, about his war experiences. Uncle Joe spent three Christmases in the service of his country.

My uncle Joe Thacker is the son of Ray and Mima Thacker. He grew up in Charleston, along with his three brothers, Dale, Vern, and Dan, and his three sisters, ReNee, Vera, and Marva. All four of Ray and Mima’s sons served in World War II. Dale was in the Navy in the North Atlantic. Vern served in the Navy in the Pacific. Dan trained for the invasion of Japan in Oregon.

Uncle Joe served for three years as an army engineer. During Christmas 1943, Uncle Joe was in Louisiana completing basic training. He spent Christmas 1944 on the island of Leyte, in the Philippines. Uncle Joe was part of the Philippine invasion force, and has some amazing and scary stories to tell about that battle. On Christmas Day 1945, after the war ended, Uncle Joe was on a boat headed for home. That was probably the best Christmas of all.

Uncle Joe’s memories of the Christmases he spent during the war are bittersweet. He remembers the camaraderie he felt with his fellow soldiers. Their loyalty to one another and the devotion to duty they felt got them through the homesickness and the rough times. They supported one another. Uncle Joe said that remembering the real meaning of Christmas, the birth of the Savior, also helped ease the pain of being away from loved ones at home.

Uncle Joe commented that, although it was difficult to be away from home at Christmas, it was harder on the folks left behind. My Grandmother Thacker briefly kept a journal during the early months of 1944. Each entry details how lonesome she was and how miserable and cold the weather was. Receiving a letter from one of her sons serving in the military gave Grandma a lot of happiness. She missed her sons and worried about them every minute of the day.

Grandma Thacker wasn’t the only one who missed loved ones during World War II. Millions of Americans sacrificed time away from their families to secure the freedoms we enjoy today. Some even gave their lives so that we Americans could continue to live the way we choose. The next time we sing a Christmas carol, especially “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” let's remember the sacrifices the men and women who serve our country have made to protect our freedoms.