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.

Men Without Women

Randy's Records, November 14, 2020

Nowadays, unless it’s a new album by Bruce Springsteen, most of the vinyl records I buy have some emotional resonance for me, which means I mostly buy old stuff. If I can find an original pressing of a favorite album rather than a reissue, it’s even better.

In 1982, my brother Phil gave me the album Men Without Women by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul for Christmas. Little Steven is actually Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen’s best buddy and lead guitarist in the E Street Band. It’s a great album – Steve’s take on 60s soul music. Phil passed away in 2006, and my original copy of the album disappeared years ago. I finally found an original pressing of the album at Randy’s Records around 2017 or 2018, which made me really happy, because it had never – up to that point – been reissued on vinyl. Finding that album was also like having a little bit of Phil back with me, which I think was ultimately the point. Unfortunately, in December 2018, I took my new old copy of Men Without Women with me to a Little Steven concert at The Depot, hoping for an autograph, and due to circumstances beyond my control, I lost the album. I recognize that losing an album is really a #firstworldproblem, but I have missed having it in my collection ever since. Even buying the newly remastered CD version that came out this year did nothing to alleviate the sense of loss I felt over misplacing my vinyl copy.

 

Today, I finally decided that screw it, I was going to see if they had another copy of the album at Randy’s Records. I get nostalgic for deceased family members this time of year, so I didn’t even care if it was an original pressing or the new reissue. Because of social distancing and the exploding Utah COVID numbers, Tristen and I had to stand in line about fifteen minutes to get into Randy’s. Once I finally got in the store, I searched the record bins, but to my dismay, there wasn’t a copy of Men Without Women to be found, new or old. I finally asked a clerk if they had the album, and after debating with him over the title of the album (which I admit is a little weird; Steve Van Zandt named it after an Ernest Hemingway short story collection), he went in the backroom and found a copy from 1982 that even contained the poster that came with the first pressing. Not only that, it was in great shape and reasonably priced. You better believe I snatched up that sucker and paid for it without a second thought.

Right now Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul are singing the song “Forever” on my turntable – one of my all-time favorite love songs, and a song that never fails to bring a tear to my eye – and I’m reminded that life doesn’t always suck. Sometimes it’s pretty good.

 

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.

 

Excitable Boy

 

Late spring 1978, and there was an incredible new song playing on the radio. It was called “Werewolves of London,” and my late brother Phil and I fell in love with it immediately. It hit all the right notes with us: werewolves, rocking guitar (provided by the legendary Waddy Wachtel, we later learned), howls, and the deep baritone voice of singer Warren Zevon. My other late brother, Ray, informed us that he had heard the whole album playing in a record store in Provo, and everything else on it was just as good as “Werewolves.” Ray said the album was named Excitable Boy.

 

That was it. I had to have it. My fourteenth birthday arrived and Phil gave me Excitable Boy, in LP format of course. Ray was right; the whole album WAS just as good as “Werewolves of London.” There were songs about a headless, well-armed, zombie mercenary soldier named Roland, a psycho killer who does unspeakable things to his prom date (with back-up vocals by Linda Ronstadt), and an innocent man hiding in Honduras (because he went home with a waitress who turned out to be a Russian spy) who needed lawyers, guns, and money to get himself out of his predicament.

 

Excitable Boy blew my fourteen-year-old mind, and I had to share the album with my late best friend Don. Warren Zevon hooked him, too. I then scrounged the money together to purchase Zevon’s other album (he only had two at the time), his self-titled debut that he had released in 1976, and it was even better than Excitable Boy. I became a life-long Zevon fan, and his music seldom disappointed me. I even saw him live in concert in 1988 at the Utah State Fairgrounds, when he opened for Los Lobos (now THAT was a damn good show.)

 

Zevon died of mesothelioma in 2003 at the too young age of 56 (the same age I am now), but not before releasing one last classic album, The Wind. Also before Warren died, David Letterman devoted one whole show to an interview with and music by Warren Zevon, where he revealed the most important lesson he had learned about life, the immortal words “Enjoy every sandwich.”

 

Thanks, Warren.

 

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.

"Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar eats you ..."

September 2007. Lucky to be alive.

The title is a Sam Elliot quote from one of my favorite movies, The Big Lebowski. A clip from YouTube is posted below. It pretty well sums up my story in this blog post. Sometimes, when you least expect it, death comes up and narrowly misses biting you on the ass. That happened to me nine years ago this weekend...

In September 2007 my life was pretty good. I was forty-three years old, I owned a house in Eagle Mountain, UT (not the greatest place in the universe to live, but at least the mortgage company and I had a roof over my head), I had three amazing daughters, a minivan and an ancient SUV, and I had a job I liked that was a five minute walk from home.

Despite all that, things weren’t quite right. The previous summer I had acquired my first strep infection in over thirty years. It put me flat on my back for nearly a week and I never felt like I completely recovered. I was tired and weak most of the time, and any sort of physical exertion gave me shortness of breath and dizziness. During my first walk to work of the new school year I had to stop every few minutes, lean over with my head between my legs, and try to catch my breath. Clearly something was amiss.

On Saturday, September 8, my family and I were visiting my in-laws at their home in a hilly area on the upper east side of Provo, UT. Because I was bored and because my optimism overcame my common sense, I decided to go for an afternoon walk. I started out on a route that I had walked a thousand times before. It was a strenuous route, but not overly so; in previous years, when my kids were younger, I usually carried one of them over my shoulder or under an arm while I hiked the area. 

However, on that warm September afternoon I thought my walk was going to kill me. I had barely gone half my usual route before I had to turn around and go back to my in-laws’ house, because I literally couldn’t catch my breath. My face was pale and I had broken out into a cold sweat before I even walked through the front door. I flopped into a chair and basically scared everyone in the room to death. My in-laws insisted I take an aspirin in case I was having a heart attack. I asserted that I wasn’t, but I couldn't move from the chair for the rest of the afternoon.

The next day was Sunday and I felt awful. I spent all morning and most of the afternoon prostrate on a couch in my man cave, too exhausted to move. I don’t remember much about the day other than my kids were in and out checking on me, and I had no energy for even the most basic life functions, such as eating or bathing. 

Finally my ex-wife — to her credit — told me she was taking me to the emergency room. She called a neighbor who was a nurse and he told us that the hospital in Provo had the best cardiac care unit. The Provo Hospital was thirty miles away, so my ex arranged for her parents to meet us at the hospital and pick up the kids.

As soon as I described my symptoms the admitting nurse moved me to the head of the line for treatment, in front of other people with obvious bloody bodily injuries. The admitting physician was — coincidentally — an old high school acquaintance, and when I reported what I was feeling, he immediately admitted me to the hospital for testing. I remember being wheeled to my hospital room in a wheelchair and thinking that I could have walked to the room myself, although in reality there was probably no way I was capable of actually doing it. The delusions of a very sick man, I guess. The rest of the day is kind of a blur. I remember a visit from my ward elders’ quorum president — the only LDS Church leader to actually care, which is a story for another time — and not much else.

The next day, Monday, September 10, was hell. I remember lab techs hooking me up to a bunch of monitors and trying to jog on a treadmill. I couldn’t do it, which devastated me so completely that I broke down crying. I had always prided myself on being in reasonably good physical condition, so my inability to do something as simple as jogging on a treadmill scared me badly. The lab tech injected me with a drug that caused my body to react as if I had been able to complete the stress test on the treadmill. That medication made feel terrible — severe muscle cramps, shortness of breath, and nausea — and it was about that time my dad called. I told him what was going on and I think I scared him badly.

I honestly don’t remember much that happened after that. They wheeled me to an operating room where they injected dye into my cardiovascular system. A cardiologist found a blockage in one of the main arteries of my heart. The blockage was nearly one hundred percent (I found out later that a strep infection can cause plaque that already exists to expand rapidly.) The doc ran a catheter through an artery in my groin and opened the blockage, and then inserted a stent. I woke up the next morning to a few stitches in my groin, news stories about the sixth anniversary of 9/11, and a brand new, expensive piece of metal in my heart. A cardiac therapist told me to take it easy for a few weeks, but I actually felt better than I had in months. 

So that was my brush with death. Apparently I was a few days away from a major cardiac event due to the blockage in my heart. There should be all sorts of life lessons I could impart now, such as the temporary nature of life and how easily it can slip away, the inevitability of death (which I rediscovered less than a year and half later when my dad unexpectedly died in his sleep), and how easily and quickly things can potentially change for the worse. All of that is true, but the biggest lesson I learned is that I am sometimes one lucky sumbich. 

My belief system has changed a lot since September 2007, but I still think that there may be some primordial universal force that occasionally smiles on us and blesses us with good fortune. I don’t know why that happens; I look at places like Syria and the people fleeing the carnage there and wonder why them and not me. I’ve had a lot of really lousy things happen in my life since then, but I am still amazed that I lucked out so completely that September day, when I could have keeled over and left my kids without a father. I like to think they still need me; maybe they're why I'm still around.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I’m still here. Despite it’s challenges, my life is good. I’m living more authentically (another phrase I hate, but I don’t know how else to say it) and I’m finding out what it’s like to actually be loved for who I am and appreciated for the talents I have to offer. 

It’s a good feeling.

Dear Phil ...

3/14/16

Dear Phil,

Ten years ago tonight you left us. Cardiac arrest brought on by an overdose of narcotics, and I’m still not sure exactly how it happened. I have my suspicions, but I guess it really doesn’t matter now. The point is you’re gone, and you’ve missed a lot.

My girls still talk about you. Susan remembers you; she was a few weeks short of her sixth birthday when you died. She remembers you were planning on coming to her birthday party. Caroline and Grace were too little to remember you when you died; Gracie was only twenty months old. But they love to hear stories about you, and I have some good ones. One of their favorites is about you flipping off the evangelical Christian protestors outside a Bruce Springsteen concert in Denver. I called it the patented Phil one finger salute. I like the story too. What were those people thinking, anyway?

Phil after the Springsteen concert, September 1985

My girls are awesome, Phil. You would be very proud of them. Susan has your attitude and smarts. Caroline and Grace have your twisted sense of humor. They’re great kids and I wish you were here to see them. Their mom moved them away from me a few months ago and that still stings a little. But I call them every night and I see them as often as I can. In my heart I hope you are able to check in on them for me sometimes.

Susan and Phil, November 2000

A lot of stuff has happened in our family since you left. Dad and Ray have passed away. Kind of hoping they’re with you and Mom. It would be cool if they were. I got divorced. I’m back to being a principal and I have a great job. I get to help kids who really need it. It reminds me of the stories I heard from your cop friends about you the night of your viewing, only happier. Apparently you never met a kid on a call that you didn’t feel compassion for and want to help. One of your friends called you Officer Sugar Bear. That made me smile on an otherwise very unhappy night. I like to think you would be proud of me for doing what I’m doing.

Officer Sugar Bear, WVPD

A few months before you died you called me expressing a lot of regrets about things that happened when we were growing up; stupid fights, unkindnesses, etc. I think about that conversation sometimes. I was telling a good friend a few nights ago about that phone call. I wish I could talk to you about it now and let you know that everything is okay. I told you that then too, but I’m not sure you understood. Those “hurts” you thought you did to me were just a part of growing up fourteen months apart. It makes me smile and feel a little sad that you regretted not working a shift at Day’s Market for me when we were in high school when I wanted go chase some girl. I didn’t even remember that incident, but you did; just a symptom of the world famous Rasband over-active conscience. Now that I’m pushing fifty-two, I really do understand that life is too short and precious to be spent on silly regrets about things that don’t matter.

Speaking of over-active consciences, I have some profound regrets about you, Phil. I feel like you were hurt badly by people who should have helped you, and I was too young to really understand how adversely that affected your life. People who were supposed to be your religious and spiritual leaders did you a huge injustice. I regret that I didn’t step in and push harder when you needed me most, when someone you trusted was isolating you from the people who could have made a huge difference in your life. My mind tells me that there was only so much I could do, and that I couldn’t rob you of your free will, as much as I wish I could’ve. My heart tells me I should’ve done more. Stupid heart. It’s probably right.

Anyway Phil, you’ve missed a lot. There is some damn good rock and roll we could be listening to. Bruce is still going strong at sixty-six and touring away. Caroline texted me this afternoon to tell me that he is going to be in Seattle next week. I imagined what it would be like to head up there with you, pick up the girls, and take them to their first Springsteen concert. Instead you're dead and I have to work. I know you could’ve come up with even more colorful adjectives to describe Donald Trump than I have, too. Susan would have appreciated that.

I miss you Phil. You were a hell of a guy and a damn good brother. I miss your laugh and your no bullshit attitude. You left an incredible legacy to the people who knew and loved you. And I hope you finally understand how much you were loved.

Love your bro’,

Rich

Summer of the Monsters

One of my brother Ray’s greatest contributions to my life was introducing me to the magazine Famous Monsters Of Filmland before I was even old to read it by myself (Ray used to read it to me.)  “Famous Monsters,” as we affectionately nicknamed it, was all about the great Universal Studios monster movies of the 1930s and 40s - Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and of course, Frankenstein. The magazine contained photos and articles about cinematic classics - a least in my eyes - featuring those monsters, as portrayed by Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr.

We also actually got to watch those classic monster movies on Nightmare Theater every Friday night at 11:30 on Channel 4. My mom used to sit up and “watch” - actually doze - with me while Bela Lugosi snuck into a victim’s bedroom in the original 1931 version of Dracula. I had to smack Mom’s leg and wake her up when that happened, because it gave me the creeps:

Our favorite place to buy Famous Monsters Of Filmland was Palace Drug on Main Street in Heber. Palace Drug had an awesome selection of magazines, comic books, and paperback books. Here’s a photo of it from 1968:

The old Palace Drug - before it was remodeled and expanded in 1974 - was long and narrow, with the magazines in front, a marble soda fountain running along one side, and the pharmacy in the back. There was a large window by the magazine area, an awning to block the sun shining through that window during the summer, and black and white tile on the outside of the store. There was also a large orange Rexall sign above the awning.

By the summer of 1972 Ray had outgrown Famous Monsters, but because he had me hooked, I started buying the magazine myself. I mowed my parents‘ lawn to earn the enormous sum of seventy-five cents that each issue cost.

One warm August evening I convinced my mother to take me to Palace Drug because I just knew the latest issue of Famous Monsters had to be there. I ran into the store, turned to my left toward the magazine rack, and this is what I saw:

I happily bounded back outside. Mom took one look at me and knew why I was so happy. She handed me seventy-five cents and said, in mock exasperation, "I was afraid it would be there."

She was teasing me of course. I knew that, because I knew that Mom was an avid reader of Batman and Superman comics back in the early 1940s when she was a kid. I was just grateful I had a mom and an older brother who broadened my horizons.

Not many eight-year-old boys could brag about that.

Thinking About Mom

Kind of a bittersweet anniversary today, one that I usually don’t think about much anymore. Today, however, it’s on my mind. Thirteen years ago today - February 16, 1998, Presidents' Day that year - we lost Mom. She’d been an invalid - wheelchair bound because of a stroke - for nearly two years previously, so it was a relief for her to go. I guess I'm thinking about her today because I would love to have a chat with her. I could use a dose of her common sense and wisdom. I’m mildly irritated that I can’t pick up the phone and call her. I thought T-Mobile had coverage everywhere.

My mom was well known for many things. She was the happy, friendly lady behind the counter at the Dairy Keen. She was the enthusiastic referee or line judge at LDS Young Women’s volleyball and basketball games. To the people who knew her, she was always Vera, never Mrs. Rasband or Sister Rasband. Her most famous creation - other than her children - were her chocolate chip cookies, otherwise known as “Veracookies” to friends, neighbors, and my college roommates. She always made sure there was a bag of cookies in the freezer for me to take back to Logan when I came home for the weekend. When I started teaching school in Heber, Mom’s sour cream sugar cookies were my students’ preferred treat for Halloween and Valentine’s Day school parties. I had students from miles around show up at our house on Halloween night just for a second (or third) cookie.

My mom was the yang to my dad’s yin; they brought out the best in each other. Mom was outgoing, friendly, and optimistic. My dad was quieter (until you got to know him), reserved, and more of a pessimist. I could take a road trip with Mom and have an interesting, entertaining conversation all the way to our final destination, even if the destination was seven hundred miles away. I could take a road trip with my dad and ride in comfortable silence with neither of us saying a word for hundreds of miles. It’s interesting to look at my brothers and sister and see who inherited which trait from my parents. I think I’m a weird mutation of some of their best and worst qualities; sometimes I can talk your ear off, other times you’re better off not bothering me.

My mom’s greatest attribute was her faith that things would always turn out all right. I remember after her stroke, when she was completely paralyzed on her left side, she tried to persuade me to take her out to the car and let her go for a drive, never mind that she couldn’t use her left arm or leg, and her peripheral vision was gone. Mom just knew that if she just had the chance, she could relearn to drive a car.

In many ways, Mom isn’t really gone. I see reminders of her everyday in my daughters; Susan’s athleticism, Caroline’s smile, and Grace’s small stature, funny personality, and penchant for waking us all up in the morning with her singing, all came from their grandma.

So that was my mom. I’m sorry my daughters never got to meet her in this life, but there are enough reminders of her in themselves - and me - that they know her anyway. I’m grateful for the legacy of kindness, happiness, and optimism that she left. If I can leave a legacy half as good when I depart this veil of tears - sorry for the cheesy language, but that phrase always makes me smile; it would have made Mom gag - I will have accomplished something.

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.