the infinite blue

the infinite blue

ends where it began as blue

purity of space

A prisoner of time

. . . the time passed away with us, and also our lives passed

away like as it were unto us a dream . . .

Jacob. Chapter Seven. Verse 26.

Looking back upon my life, it does seem like a dream;

The flood of time has washed my essence rapidly downstream.

How came I settled where I am? What am I now to do?

The past and present have combined into a scrambled view.

A prisoner of time am I; confined and sinking fast.

Oh Lord may I awake to Thee from reverie at last!

A letter from my missionary daughter in Dana Point, California.

Helloooo everyone!

This week has been crazy busy getting settled in to my new area in Dana Point! It's quite different from San Clemente, but it's pretty cool :) I don't get to see the ocean as often, but there are so many cool little houses built on windy roads and steep hills. We have  a lot of members who don't come to church, which is a bummer, so I think we'll be working on visiting them and serving them so they know that they're valued and needed. It's been an interesting experience being with a different companion in a totally new area. My goal when I got here was to treat myself like I wasn't a new missionary. Which basically means: fake it til ya make it ( or having a ton of faith, if you want to put it in spiritual terms). Acting confident and like I know what I'm doing is hard and not very convincing sometimes, but it's helped a lot with making the transition. You just have to know that God is in control and listen for His voice to tell you what to do. I've learned that His voice comes in many different ways: through church leaders, especially the prophet; through studying the scriptures; and through the gift of the Spirit.

 My new companion's name is Sister Peterson, she's from Utah, was adopted and is half Tongan! She's hilarious and really fun to be around, she loves missionary work and the people here. She sings suuuuper well, so I'm excited to use music in our teaching when I find a guitar! We've seen miracles already this week and I'm excited to see what God will have us do in the future :) There's a few pictures of us in the folder below. 

Well friends, that's all the time I have this week. I want you each to know how special you are to our Heavenly Father and how much he cares for you. When it seems like no one else is there for you, He always is. Just look up! :) Have an awesome week!!

Love, Sister Torkildson

The Saga of Pointy Pete

With publishers craving stories about critters other than

 ‘the big two,’ writers crank out tales of life with hedgehogs,

 tarantulas and tree kangaroos.  WSJ

“The Porcupine Who Saved Me” is the title of my book;

All about an animal with many a barbed hook.

It shuffled in my tent one day while I was fast asleep,

And needled me so thoughtfully that I yelled out ‘Oh bleep!’

I took the critter home with me to assuage my woe

Over my true love’s betrayal seven years ago.

She left me for the chance to work at ASPCA,

In the Great Blue Hole, Belize, with dolphins and stingray.

I named it Pointy Pete, although I didn’t know its sex;

And learned to back off when its spiky back muscles did flex.

Whenever I had company, ol’ Pete was always quick

To offer each and ev’ry guest their very own toothpick.

Then just when Pointy Pete and I were going to be married,

A Greyhound bus ran over him and he was quickly buried.

But he has left me with the marks of love and true devotion,

Which have become infected and require Walgreen lotion.

Helping to find joy

President Russell M. Nelson

“Everything we do in the Church is to make life better for

other people, to bring them joy.”

President Russell M. Nelson, speaking in Hong Kong.

The short supply of joy on earth should mean that people want

To know wherein their happiness can find a nursing font.

And yet so few are now convinced that any church at all

Can nourish them and help them flee the devil’s bitter gall.

A better life comes not from strife, nor from the cynic’s sneer;

But only through our faith in Christ, and in his prophet dear.

There is comfort, there is bliss, inside the Savior’s church;

Don’t wait too long to join our throng while doing your research!

Too Much Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing -- if it's mine.

As justifiable as the focus on Facebook has been, though, it isn’t 
 the full picture. If the concern is that companies may be collecting
some personal data without our knowledge or explicit consent,
 Alphabet Inc.’s Google is a far bigger threat by many measures:
 the volume of information it gathers, the reach of its tracking
 and the time people spend on its sites and apps.
WSJ

Since Google knows all about me

Perhaps they can give me the key

As to why I persist

In letting them list

My info sans wild shooting spree.

Fishing

(Author’s note: I’ve been binge watching The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy on YouTube for the past several weeks, and it’s just possible that all the stories I’ve written in that same time period are actually variations on some of those episodes, and not part of my own life at all. My spongy brain retains cartoon tropes very easily. Good thing I haven’t been binge watching Sex and the City!)

Is there anything as bright and promising and glorious as a Sunday morning in summer when you’ve got some fishing planned? I mean for the godless heathen, of course. The good Christian, naturally, rejoices in the spirit and fellowship of church services. Which is what I do nowadays. But before I joined the LDS Church I was most certainly a godless heathen -- and boy oh boy how I reveled in those godless heathen fishing Sundays!

Up until the age of twelve I had to attend Catholic Mass with my mom and my two sisters, Sue Ellen and Linda. I always found the whole thing ludicrous and boring. First of all, it was all in Latin. Second, they wouldn’t leave you alone, to maybe catch forty winks sitting in your pew, but kept ringing little bells to signify standing up time or kneeling time. And then the chapel at Saint Lawrence Church in Southeast Minneapolis was, to my sensitive mind, a gloomy and forbidding crypt. The walls were lined with old lithographs of The Stations of the Cross -- a very far cry from Dr. Seuss illustrations, I can tell you that. It was always dark in there, and all those little candles flickering in their red glass cups cast lurid shadows on the walls. Back in those bad old days Sunday clothes were starched and ironed and fitted like some kind of garrote. My Buster Browns pinched my feet; my wool slacks chaffed like sandpaper and left a red welt around my waist; and my white shirt collar bit into my tender neck like a hacksaw.

I was finally manumitted when my mother got into an argument with Father Applebaum over some trivial point of doctrine like transubstantiation; she never attended Mass again, contenting herself with a subscription to Maryknoll magazine. We kids were left to our own devices on Sundays, instead of being roped into attending Mass. And for me that meant fishing.

I was alway mad to go fishing. Give me a bamboo pole and a can of worms and nothing else mattered. Not even catching fish mattered -- just sitting under a welcoming tree with the play of light on the water and the splashy sounds of frogs and turtles; the breeze tickling the cattails; the smell of fermenting mud; twas a very heaven for a lazy daydreaming boy like myself.

I took the bus to Como Lake at Como Park and fished off the modest pier for sunnies and perch. Those old Minneapolis bus drivers were an unpredictable lot. When my luck was good I would haul my catch onto the bus back home, dripping slime and scales all over the bus floor. Most drivers asked me what I was using for bait and were clearly envious of my carefree existence. I was living the life of Riley, they said. But there were some bad apples, as always.

“Hey kid!” they’d yell at me as I dripped fish ooze on the way to my seat. “Keep that bleeping bleep off my bleeping floor, you bleep of a bleep!” Bus drivers had quite the colorful vocabulary back in those days. And they all pretty much looked like Ralph Kramden. I remember one of ‘em even stalked back to me, grabbed my fish, and threw them out the bus window. Bus drivers not being part of the human race, or so my mother said, I didn’t let it bother me.

Fishing Sundays only got better when my best friend Wayne Matsuura got his driver’s license. His dad let him borrow the car on Sundays to drive the fifteen miles to Lake Minnetonka.

Now there is a lake, by jumping jupiter! It covers over fourteen thousand acres in a wide ranging pattern of bays, inlets, and marshy canals. Pooling our meager resources together, we would rent a boat and head out to Crystal Bay to hunt down the black crappie. There were no limits on black crappie back then. Catching them was about as easy as falling off a log. You baited your hook with a worm, lowered the line twenty feet, waited a few minutes, and bingo, you had a crappie thrashing away. We’d haul in twenty in a few hours, easy. Then we’d motor around the big lake for a while, drinking in the boisterous wind and relishing the slap of the waves against our boat. It made me feel like a Viking getting ready to pillage Lindisfarne.  

Back home, sunburnt and reeking of decomposing worms, we gutted and filleted the crappie on a newspaper-covered picnic table in Wayne’s backyard. Wayne’s mom would fry ‘em up in sesame oil and serve ‘em to us, hot and hot. With pickled rice balls covered in seaweed. And a pitcher of black cherry Kool Aid, mixed with a bottle of Bubble Up to wash it all down with. Don’t tell me that ain’t living the life of Riley!

Of course, there were Sundays when Wayne’s family needed the car to go visit relatives. Back in those less prodigal times a family had one car, ONE car, no more. Just like all the houses on our block had one bathroom, ONE bathroom, not two. Nobody in our neighborhood was King Farouk, y’know.

On those car-free Sundays I’d hoof it down to the Mighty Mississip to angle for carp and bullheads. Funny thing about bullheads; they take a long time to expire out of the water. One Sunday I brought home a mess of bullheads and dumped them in the cast iron laundry sink in the basement, intending to gut them later. Nasty things to gut and fillet, too. You have to pull their slimy, scaleless skin off with a pair of pliers. Anyway -- I got caught up with watching Ed Sullivan with the rest of the family, then What’s My Line, and then Candid Camera. I kinda forgot about the bullheads in the basement and went to bed instead. Early the next morning, being Monday and wash day, my mother went into the basement to start a load of laundry. In the early morning murk she didn’t notice the quiescent bullheads lurking in the sink until she dumped a basket of underwear on top of them to presoak. The bullheads suddenly came back to life, flipping and flopping like a house afire.

When this incident was described to me by my mother a few minutes later, in a piercing shriek that included, I thought, way too much invective of a personal nature, I couldn’t help breaking into a big grin and giggling. It sounded to me like one of those innocent, merry incidents people sent in to Reader’s Digest. This, it turned out, was a mistake. I was sent to the basement, to sort out the bullheads from the underwear, then to dispose of the bullheads by burying them in the backyard garden, and then banished to my room without either breakfast or lunch.

And wouldn’t you know it, when I came down to dinner famished that night, mom had made fish sticks. I didn’t realize until then that mothers knew how to practice irony . . .   

Bleep!

rocketing into life

rocketing into life

from roots that never give up;

I must live like that

My Career in Radio

Come, my little wombats, and I shall lead you down the primrose path of my faltering memory once again -- concerning my footling career in radio. We shall make merry over my redundant indiscretions that consistently caused my speedy exit from one small market radio station after another.

And why not make light of my intractable, nay indefatigable, ability to bring station managers to the boiling point in a matter of months -- sometimes in a matter of weeks? Now a tottering wreck, practically chained to my recliner, I look back on my mad capers in broadcasting only to say:  “So what?” “Who cares?” “Big deal, schlemiel.” In broadcasting annals my stunted career will never rate so much as an asterisk; but I did manage to upset the applecart quite often . . .

For instance, when I landed at KTGO Radio in Tioga, North Dakota, in 1983, after an abortive attempt to find work as a birthday party clown in Florida (old people there would rather look at caskets, and young people have the beach; nobody wants a mundane clown.) KTGO was a daytimer station -- meaning it went on the air at dawn and off the air at sunset. Most days I pulled a 12 hour shift, playing country western records, giving the weather and pork belly futures, and doing a ‘rip and read’ newscast for five minutes at the top of the hour. It was hard to fit in a bathroom break, let alone lunch. Amy fixed me innumerable ham sandwiches on her own whole wheat bread, which I gobbled like a Hun whenever a free minute presented itself.

My bladder was saved from bursting by the extended song cycles of Willie Nelson, who often went six or seven minutes with his barnyard ballads. One fine day I introed one of his songs by saying “Willie is the DJ’s friend -- without his long winded yodeling I’d never make it to the toilet and back to the mic in time.” Dave Guttormson, the station manager, summarily dismissed me at the end of my shift that same day.

Up in Park Rapids, Minnesota, a few years later, at station KPRM, I managed to discombobulate the automated FM station one Sunday when I was put in charge by turning the wrong switch. I didn’t bother to listen to what the station was spewing out -- which turned out to be the same single song and the same single commercial for seven consecutive hours -- but hurried off to church in the morning and then went out fishing in the afternoon. I caught half a dozen eelpout, a ghastly looking fish but rather tasty when fried in lard. Early Monday morning as I came in the door to prepare my newscast I was met by the owner, Ed Delahunt, who informed me of the previous day’s debacle and then invited me to take my carcass elsewhere. Oh well, that’s showbiz.

At KICD, in Spencer, Iowa, I nabbed the job of morning talk show host, where I immediately set the community buzzing with outrage by referring to Storm Lake, a nearby community that sheltered about 1200 Ethiopian immigrants, most of whom worked at the Butterball Turkey processing plant, as Addis Ababa. I was given a verbal warning by the station manager, and told to keep my nose clean. But he said nothing about eggs, so that summer during the sweltering dog days, I did a live broadcast from Main Street, where I attempted to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Alas, the egg I chose to make broadcast history with was from a carton of organic eggs that had been laying around the station for several months, unrefrigerated. They had gone bad. And I mean REAL bad. As soon as it landed on the hot sidewalk my egg exuded a remarkable stench that drove the curious crowds away at light speed. I had chosen to crack the egg in front of a prominent dress shop, and the owner felt forced to close up for the rest of the day -- while I vainly tried to scrub away the egg and the odor with bleach, ammonia, and a quart of Mr. Clean. Naturally enough, in the scheme of things, the shop owner was not only a big advertiser on KICD, but was also the manager’s brother-in-law. He put in the good word and I was once again ‘at liberty.’      

My last radio job was at KRCQ in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. I worked as the news director. The only reason I ever got the job was because the station owner was impressed when I ordered liver and onions for lunch after my interview with him. “That’s a gutsy move” he said to me. “I want a fella who’s got the guts to get the news for me!”

And initially I performed gutsy. My first day on the job I caught a squeal on the police band monitor about a gas leak in town in a substantial residential area. I was the first one on the scene, interviewing the police chief and the fire chief as they supervised the evacuation. My report scooped all the other local media, and even made it down to the Twin Cities, reported by WCCO Radio, using my name. The station owner gave me a fifty dollar raise.

But as the months wore on I turned sour. I was in my late forties, divorced, never able to get ahead in my child support payments, and haunted by an obsession to Make It Big. How could I ever Make It Big in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, for the cat’s sake? My brooding led to a psychotic break -- I began making up the news. Real happenings didn’t interest me anymore. I reported that the North Dakota State Patrol was now stopping all cars coming from Minnesota to look for pennies, which were illegal tender in North Dakota. I ran a story about the introduction of wooden manhole covers in downtown Detroit Lakes in an effort to save money and be more green. My listeners were astonished to learn that with the coming of the railroad in the 1880’s, both the humidity and the rainfall in Becker County had increased by sixty percent -- and quoted faux statistics from the weather bureau to prove it. My piece de resistance undoubtedly was my story on the Fourth of July of a man who blew his head off by mishandling fireworks. I quoted a nurse from the hospital in Hawley saying the head was making a speedy recovery and would be sewn back onto his body within a week.

That was the straw that broke the station owner’s back. During one of my live newscasts, while I was observing a moment of silence on air for the extinction of the passenger pigeon, he burst into the studio, roaring “What the *bleep* is the matter with you!”

That *bleep* was heard by roughly ten thousand people in Becker County and surrounding areas. And when the FCC got wind of it they immediately fined the station several thousand dollars. Needless to say, I got the bum’s rush. After that affair, I turned my back on radio (or, rather, it might be more accurate to say that radio turned its back on me) and I went back to my first love, the circus. Didn’t do much better there, either -- but that is a tale for another day . . .  

North Korea’s Kim Strikes Milder Tone on Nuclear Tests, Detainees

That Kim is such a pussycat;

He only wants some nice chit chat.

So when we meet him at the board

He’ll strike a most congenial chord.

He’ll smile and promise a blank check

If we will just get off his neck.

And when he gets a breathing space,

It’s back to warheads he will race.