Novel. The Old Funeral Home. Chapter Four. Part Two.

 

The Beloved at her computer. Wednesday. March 30.

2022. She often brags to me: "I can do boring."

She well knows I cannot. That's what keeps

me from doing much with Family Search.

The tap water in Tioga was delicious. That's because they put in a new well in 1991. I reported on it. Because, at the time, I was the News Director for radio station KTGO. Dave Guttormson, manager. 

Full Disclosure: I was actually just a deejay, but Dave let me do news on the side just so I could maybe somehow with god's blessing and if there were a blue moon get a regular broadcast news job again so we didn't have to live with the Beloved's parents in the Old Funeral Home. I didn't get paid any extra for it.

I don't remember how I got hired for the position. Most anyone could get a deejay job there. Even the Beloved's sister Ova. The station was a daytimer -- it could only operate from sun up to sun down. I manned the board from noon until sign off. In winter that was just four and a half hours. The station's format was country-western. I have always loathed country-western. Except for Homer & Jethro. 

We'll get back to that loathing in a moment, folks.

But first I want to go back to KSAL Radio in Salina, Kansas. After I got released from my contract to be Ronald McDonald in Wichita, I was able to latch on to a news job at KSAL. It lasted all of 2 days. The first day at work I wore a necktie, as was required in the employee handbook. The second day I showed up wearing a bow tie, and was summarily fired for insubordination. For wearing a bow tie. As Jonathan Brewster says in Arsenic and Old Lace: "I have led a strange life."

Anyway. Back to Tioga, with the new well. That water was great. I drank glass after glass. It was always ice cold, coming out of the North Dakota tundra as it did. Everyone drank tap water. There was no such thing as bottled water in town. Except for Perrier -- which only a Rockefeller could afford. Anybody else who drank it was considered a foreign spy or effete Hollywood snob. It was the stuff that Thurston Howell the Third would have on Gilligan's Isle if he could get it.

The best tasting water I ever had was as a kid in the summer. When we'd slake our thirst straight out of the vinyl garden hose in the backyard. After fermenting in the hot sun all day, that tube of water, bursting with toxic chemicals from the vinyl, had a toothsome tang I can still smack my lips over. It's probably why I grew a second liver.

As you can tell, I'm not big on chronology in this memoir/novel/taradiddle. I've given up telling you what year this or that happened. I'm depending on the Beloved to do it. If she wants. She likes detail. I like vagueness. 

In the summer at KTGO I was putting in long hours, working from noon until after 9 p.m. At least they seemed like long hours to me. The roustabouts in the Tioga oilfields, of course, were working 48 hours straight. But they were being paid a relative fortune for it. Whereas my salary, if I remember correctly, was a measly five bucks an hour.

I introduced one of Willie Nelsons songs by saying, on the air, "Here's Willie Nelson singing Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain. This is a favorite of mine, because it gives me enough time to hit the john."

I got reprimanded for that by Guttormson in a curious way. He demoted me from doing any news to just plain deejay and gave the news position to a friend of his, an itinerant plumber. 

This did not sit particularly well with me, although I didn't receive a pay cut or anything. Still, now my chances of getting another news position were beyond the point of nil.

At the same time I had a flourishing side gig going on. Writing Letters to the Editor for the Minot Daily News. They would print all that I sent them. They were humorous letters, along the lines of Petroleum V. Nasby, (Google it -- it's a real person.) So I had high hopes that if a real radio job never came along I might be the next Mark Twain. But I wrote a letter lambasting country western music, saying it all sounded like 'a drunk in a brick alley arguing with a prostitute." It got printed in the Minot Daily News. And for that, Guttormson fired me.

Where did we go after that? I don't remember. Maybe the Beloved does.

I remember we once went to her high school reunion in Stanley. Each alumnus was invited to stand and give a brief history of themselves since graduating. Part of the Beloved's verbal autobiography was: "We have moved 28 times since being married -- and we're not even in the military!" 

[The Beloved is too busy folding laundry to add anything to this particular part at the moment.]

(Where did we go after that? (Tim went to Minneapolis and did some job hopping and apartment hunting. He lived with his parents while I stayed with the children at my folks house. I moved the three oldest into the library where it was warmer than staying in the little house. I stayed on the couch in the living room with Sarah’s crib next to me. Sarah was a sweet baby who never cried. My dad formed a relationship with her because she was so quiet. She got pneumonia and had to be hospitalized for a week during that winter. The kids and I went to the hospital to be with her. I worked for the school from time to time as a gymnastics judge. It was money but not very much. Tension was high between my parents and me because I had so many kids there and they had their own family. My little brother was not yet 6 years old! I remember one phone call from Tim where I told him in tears that I was so tired of doing this!)  I don't remember. Maybe the (my)Beloved does. (I don’t blame Tim for not remembering the way things went. He was working constantly at forgetting it.)

**************************************

I've started taking melatonin again. My current sleep pattern is to go to bed at 11p.m. and then be awake at 4a.m. I'd give anything to sleep a few more hours. When I'm awake so early and the Beloved continues her deep rest I like to write short religious verse for Twitter. Today I wrote:

When God looks down from heaven/I wonder what he sees/to give his heart deep pleasure/and set his mind at ease/The sinner's restitution, and kindness to a foe/I think make him feel better/than any chanting show.

I consider these rhymes as a sort of social media missionary work.

Also this morning I sent some verses to Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, about the Post Office:

Ben Franklin ran the Post Office/He made it pay its way/Delivery was certain/and came neatly twice a day/The penny post they called it/knitting folks together by/encouraging the writing/of epistles fond or sly/Good Ben I'm sorry to report/the Post Office right now/has slowed to an eccentric crawl/mixed up like stale chow chow/Perhaps your portly spirit/with great humor to deploy/cajoling can get action/from this fellow named DeJoy/Otherwise dear Franklin/I'm afraid the mail is dead/with new trucks blowing greenhouse gas/while sitting in their shed!

The fleshpots of Egypt

 The fleshpots of Egypt are always at hand/making us slaves in our very own land/A famine of wisdom and plain common sense/leaves us with nothing but hollow pretense/Send us the manna of tolerance, Lord/Deliver us from dogma's dull rusty sword!

Haiku: 妻と散歩 A walk with my wife.

 

a walk with my wife

in the freshness of morning --

stepping on cold ants.

妻と散歩

朝の鮮度で-

冷たいアリを踏む。

a walk with my wife

to the rec center --

did you bring a towel?

妻と散歩
レックセンターへ-
タオルを持ってきましたか？

a walk with my wife

in her yellow coat and scarf --

I feel like strutting.

妻と散歩
彼女の黄色いコートとスカーフで-
気が遠くなるような気がします。

Novel: The Old Funeral Home. Chapter Four. Part One.

 

The Beloved in our kitchen at Valley Villa in Provo. Sunday,

March 27. 2022. She's getting a bowl of shredded wheat

ready for breakfast. She will use a lot of cream but no sugar.

Part 1

The old funeral home in Tioga seemed windswept in the winter. The same way Wuthering Heights was windswept in the novel. Located at the bottom of a hill,it was topped by the nursing home and hospital. It seemed to me that some kind of Stephen King cold dark horror flowed down from those buildings in the winter. Because it got gosh almighty cold, and the winds that howled about the old funeral home took on a desperate character. Often malignant. 

But that is the curse and blessing of a poetical mind like mine; like the weather, it tends to go to extremes. So as this piece is written on a balmy March morning  — a sunny 72 degrees – I am shuddering with imaginary chilblains at the remembrance of those cold, cold Tioga winters that I and my beloved spent in North Dakota.

According to the National Weather Service, the coldest place in North Dakota ever recorded was in Parshall on Feb 16, 1936 when it dropped to 60 below. And I can tell you from personal experience that Tioga was not very far behind. (I never thought to complain about the cold. In our family we just dealt with it. If it was cold, you just bundled up good. If it wasn’t cold you were glad to get out in nice weather. I think it was a lot of bragging about the cold instead of complaining. I often heard many people say things like “cold ‘nuf for ya?” and “the cold keeps out the riff-raff!” When the oil boom was in full swing we had many people come to North Dakota who had never experienced extreme cold. The weather reporters on all the radio and TV stations began to publish education about weather things. Things I grew up with because my parents and other family and friends all knew how to deal with the cold. Newcomers were “stupid” – uneducated – about it. Wind chill was important to know about. If it’s -20 and the wind is blowing at a simple breeze of 20 mph the wind chill is  -40. So it feels like -40 and you want to be prepared for  -40. That means cover your face, cover your head, zip up your jacket and wear either long johns under your clothes or show pants over your clothes if you plan to be out in the weather longer than a couple minutes. Always have extra gear in your trunk when traveling because your car can act up any time in that kind of cold weather. Stranded on the side of the road with the temperature so extreme has claimed the life of more than one unprepared poor sucker. And then you have the born and raised  North Dakotan who is still having outdoor BBQ’s when it’s 32 degrees Fahrenheit. People from California are ice blocks. North Dakotans get out their winter jackets at -20 and when the wind starts blowing more than 40 mph. By this time everywhere else knows that hell has frozen over and the Vikings will win the Superbowl!)

I went to work at KGCX in Williston. One of my early morning duties before signing on at 6AM had me calling surrounding towns for their temperatures and rainfall.  In the summer the amount of rainfall was of crucial importance to farmers, because an inch or two less than normal meant a famine crop. I added one town to the list. Tioga. Even though they had no official weather station I called my Beloved at the old funeral home for the temperature. To this day I do not know if she referred to a thermometer or just made it up. (I used the thermometer outside my parent’s kitchen window which was next to the house phone. I had to get a flashlight and shine it just so or the reflected light would obscure the numbers. Sometimes Dad was still home when Tim called and he would scowl at me for the phone call. Dad worked in the oil field industry. He was usually dispatched to work by 3:30 or 4 AM. If he wasn’t gone then he was up at 5 waiting for dispatch to call. Work was very important to Dad. He wasn’t a tyrant about his duty to work. There was a quiet respect we all learned to appreciate. As Tim mentioned this was in the days before cell phones so the house phone was the life line for the family. Dad worked 10 days on and 2 days off for three rotations and then 10 and 3. That is unless the job he was doing was held over his days off and then he worked his days off. He didn’t care about that. He worked to provide a good place for our family.) But we got to chat each morning when I called on the station’s dime. 

Back in the Stone Age, before there were any cell phones, whenever you called outside your own town or city Ma Bell would charge an arm and a leg for these “long distance” calls. I remember with a cheapskates shudder the phone bill I received for August in the year I was courting my Beloved. It was over $100 dollars. After we were married, when people would ask why we got married, I would sometimes say “well, it’s cheaper than talking to her long distance.” That was 9/10ths joking!! 

Now I grew up in Minneapolis Minnesota, where it can get plenty cold. But it seemed like a more optimistic chill; the brutal cold of North Dakota is a brooding futile environment. But I will say this much, it breeds strong men and women. My Beloved’s mother was as sturdy as a cedar fence post. She never faltered, nor gave up on an idea once it had been planted in her deeply enough.

And my Beloved’s father was the sturdiest and strongest man I ever knew. Give him a thermos of hot black coffee and he could endure working 48 hours straight out in the oilfield in the middle of January. He could charm the birds out of the trees, but most of the time he wore the stoical mask of a Norwegian farmer.

My Beloved’s parents were truly “Giants in the Earth”, as written about by O. E. Rolvag.

***********************************************************************

One reader's recent reaction to our novel:

"Honest, sweetly painful, the awful endless effort to connect and have place… for indescribable reasons, the story, the tone and the emotions resonate."

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Haiku: ウズラの奇妙な叫び The weird cry of quail

 

the weird cry of quail

wakes me up in my wife's arms;

we missed church again.

ウズラの奇妙な叫び

妻の腕の中で私を目覚めさせます。

the weird cry of quail 

in the morning reminds me

to make sweet cornbread.

ウズラの奇妙な叫び
朝は私に思い出させます
甘いコーンブレッドを作るために。

the weird cry of quail

再び行方不明の教会

the weird cry of quail

in the black asphalt alley --

scratching at wet hulls.

ウズラの奇妙な叫び
黒いアスファルトの路地で-
濡れた船体を引っ掻く。

The Plagues of Egypt

 In Egypt Moses turned the streams to blood for Pharaoh's sake/But that stubborn autocrat no thought would undertake/to free the Hebrew slaves and let them go away in peace/and so a raft of plagues began without the least surcease/Bloody waters still exist around the world today/as people after people freedom's price still have to pay!

Biden Says Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘Cannot Remain in Power’ (WSJ)

 

Biden went to Poland to put Putin in his place.

He wants that bum to beat it and to get the coop dee grace.

Nobody told Biden that his powers don't extend

to autocratic Russians and their longed-for final end.

Maybe it is hubris and then maybe it is not.

But presidents do not fare well against a juggernaut.

It takes a lot of money to shake a tyrant's grasp;

taxpayers who foot this bill are gonna give a gasp.

But in the Oval Office cooler heads may find a way

to keep our brave Joe Biden from producing a doomsday.

Let Putin gather all the rope he needs to hang himself;

we'll keep our prissy meddling upon a dusty shelf!

Haiku: 3月の偽りの暑さ The False Heat of March

 

The false heat of March 

promises little more than

a thick grey snowstorm.

3月の偽りの暑さ

少しだけ約束します

濃い灰色の吹雪。

The false heat of March

tricks worms out of the brown earth --

fat happy robins!

3月の偽りの暑さ
褐色森林土からワームをだまします-
太ったハッピーロビン！

The false heat of March

starts me making red chili --

foolish hope of spring!

3月の偽りの暑さ
赤唐辛子を作り始めます-
春の愚かな希望！

Novel. The Old Funeral Home. Chapter Three. Conclusion of Part 2.

 

The Beloved's hands on her keyboard in our bedroom,

where she is working on rewrites for client blogs. We

do five of these each week day. I find them boring.

But the extra money is needed to fund our smoothie

crusade.

I remember a field of chokecherries off a roadside while I was courting the Beloved while she still lived with her parents and siblings in the old funeral home in Tioga.

There was one particular day I remember in late summer. The sun caressed the weedy fields as she and I drove to the chokecherry patch. I knew she was going to marry me when I asked her. And that anticipation made me so happy I thought I might become ill with impatience. 

I had not felt such an intense and puzzling sense of joy since the missionaries had taught me the LDS discussions back on the Iron Lung at Ringling Brothers during rehearsals back in 1971. When they got to the part about the War in Heaven, my heart almost gave out on me and I had double vision. When I told the missionaries they would have to stop because I was ill they wisely replied that I was not ill at all -- I was experiencing the Holy Ghost testifying to me of the truthfulness of what they were telling me. 

And so we arrived at the chokecherry patch. Where I unwisely asked the Beloved if one could eat chokecherries raw. With a masked smile she assured me they were sweet.

They were not. The first taste nearly caused my tongue to leap out of my mouth and run howling away like a dog who has sat on a cactus.

But then, my Beloved has always had a puckish sense of humor. Today whenever I ask her to make me an omelette she immediately replies "Poof! You're an omelette."

There is nothing in the world I love so much as to hear her laugh, whether at her own humorous japes or at something we are watching together. I had a glorious time when we watched the TV series Monk together. Her screeches of glee at the introverted detective's many foibles were like medicine to my heart. The sound washed away years of sorrow and doubt like a river of warm honey washing over me.

This day I have not heard her laugh very much. It makes me wish I had a magic artifact that I could rub or shake to cause her to giggle and chortle on command. 

I don't think I ever did anything as a professional clown that ever made her laugh . . .

( I feel a certain pull to interject and say that he does make me laugh. He did make me laugh when we were courting. I laughed till I cried! – That is a title to a book written by the wife of Jerry Lewis, the comedian. She refers to the things that he did that were aimed at her to make her feel badly and actually hurt her and they were not funny any more. – There was a little of that going on with Tim and me. It feels like telling those things would not help anyone yet so it will be another time we might talk about some of those things.

He certainly did make me laugh. And he does make me laugh. Clouds of sadness did overtake me when we were married the first time so it happened like his selective hearing about the sweet/ sour berries. I learned from a study about human behavior that it takes ten times of doing goodness about a memory to overcome one bad memory. It holds true for me. I watched that formula work for my children in many instances too.

So the times I laughed at things he did as a professional clown… let me see. )

(Shock and awe are the things that usually get a laugh. The first time I heard his story about Mishu, the smallest man in the world, I laughed. The first time I saw his “sleepy man at church” routine, I laughed. When I hear him tell a new “did I ever tell you about the time. . .” , I laugh. He is always thinking of ways to make things new. And so we both laugh at bungles, foibles and mishaps. I think I really love to laugh. I smile at almost everyone as an automatic response to seeing a person. Keeping my smile – or keeping their smile – is dependent upon how receptive people are to me over time.)

I remember my covenant

 

"And I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians keep in bondage; and I have remembered my covenant."

Exodus 6:5

God remembers covenants while man forgetful stays/The Lord redeems his promises in all these latter days/The arm of flesh is nothing when compared to Heaven's might/And God will be a-coming down to win the final fight!

Frogs

  And the river shall bring forth frogs abundantly, which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs . . .

Exodus 8:3

There's a frog in the oven/a frog in the stew/there's one in the bedding/and in the car, too/Are we holding anyone in bondage raw/with our deceit and unwise martial law?

Novel: The Old Funeral Home. Chapter 3. Part One.

 

The Beloved on her way to work as a tax consultant at

H&R block across the park from our apartment. She

works in the evenings, until the middle of April.

This photograph was taken during an earthquake.

As the (my)Beloved fries me some hamburger, onions, and potatoes this afternoon I'm reminded that the memory can be a good servant or pleasant entertainer, but is a cruel master.

So as I remember the old funeral home in Tioga I determine to think of that time and place as happy, bright, clean, and full of opportunity and fun. 

Because, you see, I have developed a default setting over the tumbling years for my memory -- which is not happy or carefree, but rather brooding and blame-seeking. When I allow my mind to wander where it will it automatically goes to unhappy places. And since my remarriage to the (my) Beloved I have found that such memory mucking is counter-productive and not in the spirit of harmony that we need in order to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous marriage snafus. Of which there are plenty. And which are all my fault. All the time, Without exception. One-hundred percent. No excuses offered. 

[I'm hoping the Beloved will interject something ameliorating here . . but you never know . . . ] 

(He is hoping for an interjection and I have a few things. I see this “memory time” a little differently. I understand the blaming mentality to which he falls prey. Taking blame when it is squarely on one's shoulders is an important thing for responsibility sake. It takes a person of good character to own mistakes and do something about them. It’s a small person indeed, who takes the blame for things and does nothing but wallow in self-pity. Or worse, seeks to blame someone else for things.

My husband and I still create things together. We created children and meals and mistakes in our relationship the first time around. Now we create meals and written word combinations and we foster good in our relationship, in spite of mistakes. Our marriage this time is different because I am different and He is different. My actions gave me cause to make decisions, both those in my memory and those yet to be. Indeed, he has cause for the same types of decisions. It would be wonderful to teach something about those decisions so people can benefit from this writing. Benefit is a wish and a prayer I have for all readers. Though you, dear readers, are the ones to choose your benefit. 

Somehow launching into my “soap box” seems pretentious. I will wait.)

Homes have their own personalities. Just ask James Whitcomb Riley. My parent's home was a brooding iceberg with four walls, right out of an Ingmar Bergman movie. The(My) Beloved's home, on the other hand, the old funeral home, impressed me from the get go as a happy busy hive of confused activity and unpretentious but filling meals at all hours of the day. You were as likely to find a pair of muddy gumboots on the sofa as a warm basket of home-made scones -- made from winter red wheat ground by the (my) Beloved's own mother -- in the sewing room. With chokecherry syrup or wild plums on the side, bottled by the mother. Who we have decided to call Alberta. The mother, not the scones. (Chokecherry picking is about the best way to get chokecherries with flavor. You can buy chokecherry jelly or chokecherry syrup but unless you experience the hunt for the berries it’s just not the same. Chokecherry trees don’t lend themselves to transplanting. They grow wild in North Dakota and parts of the rest of the plains states. I have heard of people trying to grow the bush/tree in the city, but unless it is there in the first place it won’t grow. I was lucky and found a house in town with one chokecherry bush that had grown to a considerable size so it was nearly as tall as the trees in the yard. The yield from the bush was enough for about a pint of syrup. That’s pure gold to my family! The coulies on Grandpa’s farm had some chokecherry ‘trees’. Also on Grandma Pete’s, my dad's mom's farm. I could tell a little about Dad’s dad here. Grandpa Manley died when my dad was 4 years old. Dad is the middle child of 5 boys. So Grandma Pete raised their boys with the help of the farming community at Beaver Creek. She was a strong woman! I didn’t find out about Grandpa Manley’s business skills until very late in my life but I have several brothers who are showing the inherited skill. Grandpa Manley had lots of land by the time he died and Grandma Pete was able to survive with the money from the land for about 5 years. By that time the three oldest boys were able to be hired hands for farmers in the area and help with their own meager existence. One of the things they did was pick chokecherries every fall. We got to carry on the tradition because the trees are still there. I remember many hot August days filling several ice cream pails full. You think of berries and automatically you think there is some pilfering, right? Well, unless you get a bunch of chokecherries and coat your mouth with the natural pectin from them you don’t do much pilfering. I watched my little brother do it every year though. 

Then you wash them and clear out the leaves and sticks and spiders and ticks. Once there is enough in the biggest pot you have then you cover them in water and boil them. You pour the water in another pot through a colander. The experts have a berry sieve. It’s a cone shape with a fitted mashing stick. That you can use to mash the berries till all that’s left are the seeds. We used a cotton flour-sack cloth. Mashing the berries gets the natural pectin into the juice and makes the best syrup and jelly without using the added pectin you can get in the store. And THAT’S good jelly!)

And to top the chokecherries or the wild plums, (wild plums are similar in finding them but they are a very different flavor. And you can actually preserve the plums) there was always thick unpasteurized and unhomogenized cream from the Hartsock farm (10 miles) down the road from the old funeral home. Collected each week in plastic one gallon mayonnaise jars by Alberta. (You have to skim the cream off the top of the milk if you want to have the thick stuff. Otherwise it gets stirred in with the drinking milk and you have to wait for the next batch of milk or go to the store.)That cream was as thick as library paste. The fact is, I have been daydreaming about those luscious preserves covered in cream so much that I let my lunch scorch on the Stove while the(my) Beloved was working on something in the bedroom. So it'll be Cajun food, that's all. Blackened for flavor.

There's much more to write, but I'm going to stop and eat my lunch while it's still hot [before it carbonizes completely.]

I believe that my Beloved will be interjecting quite a few things here abouts, to pad out this first part of Chapter Three.

But then again, you never know . . . 

(Everyone comes to this earth with a story. The one they get from the family that made them. Several facets make up that story. Then the story is added upon by yourself. Some people call the story baggage. It can be baggage unless you learn what to do with it. Some people are able to teach their children what they have inherited and what to do with it. Others, most of us, just muddle through. We get by. Still others observe what the taught people have learned and they pick up some skills of what to do and life is better. I love the people who have learned to share their learning. My life is better because I decided to listen to some of them.

If a person has learned to like the feeling of self-pity there is room for thought, reflection and action. Pity parties are nasty things to attend. “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to…” is a cliche we all know. The counsel is to learn to mourn the loss of the thing and decide to do something better. This is a trait of the people who observe. I wish to speak freely of the important things. I will mention here that the most important thing is Jesus Christ. He taught us what to do with our bag and baggage. He gave us the chance to make mistakes and learn from them.)

When Pharaoh Knew Not Joseph.

 

When Pharaoh knew not Joseph and made the Hebrew slave/a mighty man named Moses was sent  all them to save/His staff became a serpent; yet Pharaoh shook his head/Never would he let them go, until his son was dead/When prophets give a warning we'd better heed them quick/To fight against their sacred word is work for lunatic.

Narrative Poem: The New Ice Age

 

Well, the experts were wrong.

Like always.

There was no universal global warming after all.

What happened was the Earth's

weather patterns are completely

on the fritz.

Like, for instance, Greenland.

It's full of monkeys and coconut trees now.

South America is snowed under.

Permanently.

Here in Utah the ice pack just keeps growing.

We live in tunnels carved out of the ice.

Wear animal furs and mukluks. 

I myself have learned how to subsist on

shaved ice, Eskimo potatoes,

 and baked Alaska.

It's not so bad. Once you get used to it.

All the bugs are gone. Not one cockroach left.

No one sleeps alone. You get hypothermia if you do.

So everyone bundles -- like the Colonials did.

But I have to admit I'm saving my pennies

so I can buy a condo on the beach in Greenland.

Novel. The Old Funeral Home. Conclusion of Chapter 2.

 

Me, Tim Torkildson, on our patio at Valley Villa. 

650 West  100 North Apartment 115.

Provo  Utah. 

Sunday, March 20. 2022.

The Beloved. Amy Lynn Anderson Snyder-Torkildson.

On the same patio on the same day as me.

She is holding a mask made by our daughter

Sarah in high school.

[If you recall, we were talking about cows and farming up in North Dakota in the first part of this chapter.]

All this talk of cows reminds me of the Red Owl there in Williston, back in 1980.

When I was a kid my mother always took us shopping on Tuesday mornings to the Red Owl in New Brighton. And by the way, I’ll get to why I associate cows with the Red Owl in just a moment.

As I was saying, my dad would take off work from Aarone’s Bar and Grill, where he poured suds, every Tuesday morning, to take mom and us kids to the Red Owl ' for the weekly grocery run. My mother bought groceries only once a week. She would be aghast at the way my beloved and I do our shopping today. It’s pretty much whatever comes to mind each day . . . we go shopping. If we want organic sweet potatoes for instance, or I crave a cheddar/jalapeno bagel,  we stop at the store for it. Whether it’s on our shopping list or not. I personally don’t feel guilty about this. And I'm sure my beloved is not biting her nails over it. But my mother was raised during a sterner time. During the Great Depression. Every penny had to be carefully delegated. There was no room and no money for buying a bagel on a whim. Or even a postage stamp.

But getting back to the Red Owl in New Brighton. I remember they had a gigantic hand cranked coffee mill. It was painted fire engine red and it seemed to my midget eyes to loom up at least two stories in front of me. I dearly wanted my mother to buy some coffee beans so she would turn that giant wheel to grind them. I imagined the machine would emit a groaning chorus  of “Yo heave ho” in a deep Russian bass. But she only bought Folger’s in a can. Or was it Hills Brother’s? (My dad made Mom get Hills Brother’s. She didn’t drink coffee, since she joined the Church in 1962. We taught everyone in the small communities within 100 miles of us about the fact that we didn’t drink alcohol or coffee or smoke cigarettes. North Dakota is like that. Farmers are all spread out. Everyone is related somehow or other. We went to the Red Owl in Stanley when I was growing up. It was 7 miles from us, as opposed to the 65 miles to Williston where our meeting house was. When we moved closer to Williston by moving to Tioga, the store there was the “Piggly Wiggly”. By that time new ownerships were taking over and the first oil boom was a bad memory. The next oil boom was gearing up and happened in 1983-88.)

The other thing I remember about shopping with Mom at the “Red Owl” is the vast array of gumball machines. They not only dispensed candy but also little plastic or latex trinkets in a clear plastic egg. I always wanted to get one of the clear plastic eggs that had a green latex skeleton in it. When the gumball machine finally spit it out and I opened it, the smell of that cheap Japanese latex made me gag!

But getting back to the Williston Red Owl. That place was wonderful to me, because you could buy a pre-cut packaged slice of steak (here we have the link to cows and “Red Owl”), and they would grill it for you right there. I loved eating my dinner there with a side of potato salad. A carton of chocolate milk. And a package of Hostess Suzy-Q’s. 

And that leads us, patient readers, to the subject of my weight. 

Today (2022) I am proud to say I am under 300Lbs.  This only happened because of the help and faith of my beloved. When I was a child I was referred to as “beanpole”.  I was so thin because I was such a picky eater. But once I got back from my mission to Thailand, I ate so voraciously that my weight ballooned. I could not fit into any of my clothes. I was determined to lose weight. And I did. When I enrolled in the Brown Institute of Broadcasting I would walk there and back everyday. It was 6 miles one way. So I was walking 12 miles each day Monday through Friday. And that took the pounds off during the 6 month course. I also gave up things like mashed potatoes and gravy, and Suzy-Q’s.

When I got to Williston I still had to walk or ride my bike everywhere. So that gave me some exercise. But not enough. Those steak dinners at the Red Owl and my serious Hostess relapse, started putting the pounds back on my slender frame. And I have struggled with my weight ever since. 

But I don't much care for Hostess products anymore -- I'd rather have sour pickle or a juicy anjou pear for dessert anytime.

My dad was always a fat man. He looked and acted like W.C. Fields in his later years. He never worried about his weight. It did not bother him. Back then, bartenders were supposed to be fat. You couldn’t trust a skinny bartender. When my mother was mad at him, she would refer to him as “you fat toad on a stove.” 

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(I’ve known a few bartenders in my life but they weren’t fat. They were regular ladies that worked for my parents.  And now it comes out. 1964 Dad bought the bar in Ross. Mom and Dad with 7 kids moved in and set up housekeeping in the top part of the Hilltop Bar. The upstairs used to be the motel part. New owner, new face to the business. It was now our house. A set of steel cabinets and a sink were put in one of the rooms for a kitchen. A wall was removed to be the living room next to the kitchen. As you came up the stairs the first door on the left was the boys room. The door on the right was the bathroom and laundry room. Then the next two rooms had been opened up for the kitchen and living room. The last door on the left was for my parents and was also the only way to get to the girls room.  We lived in that apartment situation for 11 years. Added to our family were the next four children. 11 years. 11 children. And so many prayers that were very strange. I remember hearing Mom tell God that we don’t drink or smoke and we don’t want to teach others to do that but if people want to do that please let them come here where friends meet. Mom was a strong woman. She taught us the lessons for the children’s Primary each week for those 11 years. She taught us each to sing and also to sing together. We had piano lessons in Stanley from her High School piano teacher Sibyll MacDonald. I remember 6:30 AM mornings practicing on the piano in the bar. There were 5 of us who were up that early. The bus came at 8 so there was enough time for three a day to practice. There was no way to practice after school like normal people. I remember going to sleep many nights listening to Mom’s piano music as she played and the people in the bar would sing and dance. Some guys would even play guitar with her. Sunday mornings were strange too. We cleaned the bar before we held church.

The bottom of the building was a Cafe if you entered the building on the north. And a bar if you entered the building on the east or west. And how did we access our house you ask? There was a shed to the north of the east bar entrance and we went in there. You could go in and then up the stairs or across the landing to the kitchen of the cafe. For a couple years Mom tried to run the cafe and keep up with the family but it got to be too much. She did experience a miscarriage of a baby during that time. So the cafe was closed in our house and that opened up an opportunity for one of Dad’s cousins to put a cafe in the little store in town. It was good for a time. It also opened up an area for more sleeping rooms! Two bunk beds in the boys room. A double bed, a single bed and a crib in the girls room. I got the first bedroom downstairs after the cafe closed.

Back to the bartenders. Ida, Belinda, Mom and Bonnie all ran the bar. Dad would work mornings sometimes too. He got work with the garage down the hill and then Mom took over the mornings until she had babies. Then for a couple months she would be home and soon she would be back at work in the mornings.  Ida was a cousin of Dad’s. Ida had two kids and I babysat them sometimes. Belinda was from Syria. There was a whole settlement of Syrians in our area. The older people all spoke the strange language to my ears. The kids were friendly and I was glad they were my friends during high school. They knew the pain of ridicule and sometimes it was nice to have someone to commiserate with. Bonnie was another of Dad’s cousins. Bonnie had 5 kids. Her husband died of cancer a year after we got to Ross. They and a couple kids that were the same age as my brother and me. When I say “cousin” you should understand that in North Dakota we can know our 3rd and 4th and even 5th cousins. That’s the kind of cousins that Bonnie and Ida were.)

Haiku: 詩人は食べる鶏しかありません Pinatas.

 

beaten to a pulp --

bleeding tootsie rolls and gum;

kids have all the fun.

start jumping around --

swing a blind stick at your friends;

grow a year older.

the lighting in malls

makes even the toys and games

seem way too grown up.

Narrative Poem: What's holding us together?

 

Ever since I learned of atoms as a child

I have been obsessed with disintegration.

I mean, c'mon -- what's holding all those 

atoms together?

Magnetism? Gravity. Electricity? What?

Some people are marked by an experience

with spontaneous combustion --

where a person just goes up in flames

for no reason.

With me, it's spontaneous disintegration.

And not just of people. Of things.

I have a memory as a small boy

of seeing a red fire hydrant near my house

slowly disintegrate before my eyes one

summer day. It was horrible.

Since then, I have worked at keeping

myself together.

I take collagen supplements.

If you take enough of it,

Elmer's Glue tastes rather sweet.

When I feel a loosening of my atoms

I immediately lay down in a tub of 

warm mucilage. 

So far, it seems to be working.

Of course, everyone else seems fine;

there's no reports of spontaneous disintegration

in the news.

Not that it would ever be reported

if it's been happening since the beginning

of time.

Something that happens all the time,

like dandruff,

is not newsworthy.

So I keep my eyes peeled.

And have placards printed that read:

"Keep yourself together!"

I just sent a shipment of 'em to

Lviv -- with rolls of duct tape.

One does what one can.