placid mountain clouds
from skies deep in the scheming
of hard storms to come
Wednesday, May 9, 2018
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Ein Brief von meiner missionarischen Tochter
Ihr!!!
Ich war fast sechs Monate draußen! Jedes Mal wenn ich darüber nachdenke, kann ich es nicht glauben. Es scheint, als hätte ich gestern meiner Familie und Freunden von meinem Abschied Abschied genommen, bevor ich ins Missionary Training Center gegangen bin. Die Zeit vergeht zu schnell !!!
Ich habe ein wenig darüber nachgedacht, wie diese letzten sechs Monate vergangen sind und was ich gelernt habe. Ich fühle mich immer noch wie ein neuer Missionar, und ich denke, ich werde es immer tun. Es ist nervös, mit Leuten auf der Straße zu reden oder zu wissen, wo die Dinge sind, oder zu wissen, was man im richtigen Moment sagen soll. Aber letztendlich gewöhnst du dich einfach daran, dich aus deiner Komfortzone zu fühlen und du lernst darüber nachzudenken, was Gott dir antun würde, anstatt darüber nachzudenken, wie unwohl du dich fühlst. Hartes zu tun ist gut für dich!
Wir hatten einige kirchliche Autoritäten und sprachen mit uns darüber, wie wir das Sühnopfer Jesu Christi in unserer Arbeit als Missionare und in unserem persönlichen Leben besser gebrauchen können. Das Sühnopfer Jesu Christi ist so real. Seine Vergebung und Gnade sind so real für mich und sein Verständnis für alle. Das ist letztlich die Botschaft, die wir den Menschen vermitteln. Wir laden sie ein, zu kommen und zu sehen, wie wir durch das Evangelium Jesu Christi und sein Sühnopfer zu ihrem Leben, ihren Familien und ihrer persönlichen Freude beitragen können.
Ich bin so glücklich, eine Mission für den Herrn zu erfüllen und so viele Menschen zu treffen, die mir für den Rest meines Lebens wichtig sind. Es gibt keinen anderen Ort, an dem ich lieber wäre! Danke für alles, was du individuell tust, um den Menschen zu helfen, die du in der Nähe bist, sei das Licht, das sie in ihrem Leben brauchen. Ich liebe Sie alle!
The Music of My Life
As a child I was extremely sensitive to music. I remember one dreary winter afternoon on a Sunday when I was six the TV began an infomercial for the Longines Symphonette Society. The upper crust British ‘host’ of the infomercial loftily informed us plebeians that we could have the beauty of music in our homes for just nine ninety nine per month, and then frostily allowed us to hear Mascagni’s intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana.
I became bolted to the spot at the first notes of that mournful, exultant, tune. It bruised my heart, leaving me in tears. Mom asked if I had a tummy ache. I could only shake my head, willing the rest of the world to disappear until that wonderful piece of music subsided like the tide going out.
The sad fact is my family was not musical. Mom and dad played no musical instruments, and, outside of tunes from the radio, we had no music in our home when I was growing up. To make up for this awful vacuum (for I believe I was born with an innate hunger to make and to celebrate music) there were the old MGM and Warner Brothers cartoons on the boob tube. Those huge and vigorous studio orchestras introduced me to snatches of Beethoven, Liszt, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, along with the wonderfully frisky piano piece Nola, by Felix Arndt. I capered along with these classical pieces like a pint sized Nijinsky. To me, it was pure Imagination Music; propelling me into a throbbing world where anvils fell from the sky and black round dynamite bombs were juggled with careless elan. I’m telling you, brother -- it made my blood sizzle! Contemporary music, whether Bobby Darin or the Beatles, left me unmoved. Give me the Espana Waltz by Waldteufel over “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles any day!
In fourth grade I prevailed upon mom and dad to let me take violin lessons. I had been watching the Jack Benny show and figured the fiddle was just the thing to wring some laughs from my compatriots at school. They rented a violin from Schmitt Music for twenty-five dollars a month, and soon I was rosining up my bow like Jascha Heifetz. Unfortunately, I was allergic to practicing the scales or doing fingering exercises, and so the violin eventually went back to Schmidt’s and I had to content myself with an old plastic ocarina I picked up at the Goodwill Store down on Como Avenue by the bus transfer station.
As a teenager I bought Nonesuch brand LPs at the record store in Dinkytown, driving my family crazy by endlessly playing the 1812 overture late into the night on my cheap record player. Those cannons at the end of the piece still make my spine tingle. Then I discovered the comic operas of Gilbert & Sullivan, and would yodel “My Object All Sublime” at the drop of a Twins baseball cap. Had I taken the trouble to moderate my volume I might have had a pleasant though unassuming singing voice; but, inspired by Alfalfa in the old Our Gang comedies, I screeched in a molto forte register that raised blisters on wallpaper. I was the only child in the history of Tuttle Grade School to be invited OUT of the sixth grade choir when my solo antics proved too distracting during a rendition of “The Hills are Alive With the Sound of Music.”
And then I joined the circus as a clown. The Blue Unit of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows. The marches, gallops, polkas, cakewalks, and waltzes as essayed by band director Bill Prynne thrust me up into a higher plane of existence. There were never any clown gags going on during the trapeze act, so I would sit on an elephant tub next to the band just to hear them play John T. Hall’s ‘Wedding of the Winds.’ The best music, to my way of thinking, was reserved for the clown gags. We tossed shaving cream pies to Fillmore’s bumptious ‘Lassus Trombones’ and took tremendous pratfalls to the accompaniment of ‘Mosquito Parade March’. To this day I still suffer from an earworm infestation from those two perky melodies; in Church, when the sermonizing goes a bit flat I find myself humming one or the other of those pieces and swaying slightly in a blissful limbo.
During my first year with Ringling I asked Lou Jacobs to teach me how to play the musical saw, the way he did in center ring. His reply was succinct and to the point: “Hell no, kid; the musical saw is my racket.”
But that didn’t discourage me in the least. In a back issue of Popular Mechanics I found an ad for the Mussehl & Westphal Company, out of Wisconsin, makers of premier musical saws. I ordered one and scraped away at it until I could do a credible rendition of ‘Aloha Oe.’ Next I bought an old squeezebox at a Saint Vincent de Paul store in Toronto and quickly learned to press out a basic ‘ Du Du Liegst Mir Im Herzen,’ with plenty of wheezy oom-pah-pah. Music washed over me night and day -- and I reveled in it.
When I was blacklisted from the circus, I was banished from so much grateful music it seemed I must run mad. But I was fortunate in having an ecclesiastical leader who offered me bountiful and beautiful choral music during my months at Brown Institute of Broadcasting, where I was trying to learn a new trade. Branch President Lewis Church was, by his own admission, nothing much but an Idaho spud -- but he loved choral music and put together a choir at Christmas to sing Gounod’s ‘Oh Divine Redeemer.’ By then I had gotten over my Alfalfa compulsion and sang in a decent baritone. As with my earlier experience with the Intermezzo, I could never sing or even hear this piece without the salt tears furrowing my cheeks. Such beautiful music made my circus exile endurable, if not enjoyable.
I was fortunate to marry a woman with music in her soul. Amy played piano and filled our home with hymns and Scott Joplin and nursery rhyme tunes for the kids on an old Naugahyde-upholstered upright we bought for fifty dollars. When we divorced I lived in a horrible musical silence for many and many a year -- feeling I no longer deserved any kind of charm in my life.
But now, as the years rudely crowd me, I am once again enjoying the allure of music -- mostly from the free stuff on YouTube. I’m trying to broaden my musical tastes. I’ve even -- lord love a duck! -- started listening to Frank Sinatra. That man had the phrasing of an angel, even though he also had the disposition of a devil. And when the lonely nights seem especially long, and my osteoarthritis keeps me awake, I am listening to the symphonies of Jean Sibelius. I don’t yet understand what that anguished Finn is trying to say in his music, but I’m not giving up -- not by a long shot. When he exhausts me with his tonal ambiguities, I play Bing Crosby singing ‘Far Away Places’ for a brief respite. His plaintive croon easily takes me back to my peregrinating years, and present discomforts dissolve for a blessed while.
Monday, May 7, 2018
Cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words.
Ether. Chapter One. Verse 34.
Words are nails I use to hammer
Meaning into shape, not yammer.
But I know they’re many who
Confound words without a clue.
Save me, Lord, from all who twist
Words of peace into a fist!
Help me so the filthy terms
Of men don’t grab me like vile germs.
All double-talking speakers should
Nailed in boxes of hardwood!
Sunday, May 6, 2018
The Squirrels
Squirrels were an easy animal to take for granted; to ignore as background noise on a flippant summer afternoon amid the billowing shades of the mighty elms in my Minneapolis boyhood front yard. Yet now that I have pulled up stakes to live among the boulders and cacti of Utah, I find I miss their constant chit chat among the branches. I have to settle for an occasional horned toad, silently blinking at me in an impertinent manner before scuttling away.
They made fine targets for my slingshot -- but I hasten to add that I never got close to hitting one, or even nicking the branch it was squatting on. Slingshots, like pocket knifes and BB guns, were great status symbols for a boy to possess -- ownership of such deadly devices gave a boy a certain cachet, an aura of danger and excitement. Which is why, I suppose, my right to carry a slingshot was constantly revoked by my mother for the least little thing. After all, who needs perfectly solid windows -- what’s wrong with a few obscure ventilation holes in ‘em? I saved up for a pearl handled pocket knife, and when I finally got it I immediately began carving my initials into every available surface. This was alright for tree trunks, fence posts, and telephone poles,but when my mother caught me hefting my pocket knife while looking thoughtfully at baby Linda asleep in her crib, she assumed the worst and confiscated said knife -- which disappeared into the Forbidden Drawer; the kitchen drawer where matches, lighter fluid, and Victor mousetraps, among other things, were kept. The drawer had no alarm rigged up to it, as far as I could tell, but whenever I happened to pull it open my mother would yell from wherever she was inside or outside the house: “Shut that drawer, young man, this instant!” Which is why I’m pretty sure to this day she had some gypsy blood in her that caused such devilish second sight.
I began to take notice of the squirrels, the rotten gray squirrels, when I planted my first garden at the age of seven. We had a sclerotic swingset in the backyard, fully oxidized into rust, that finally collapsed of its own decrepitude, and I begged mom for the chance to dig up the spot for a pumpkin patch. Seeing no possible way I could turn such an innocent pastime into a melodramatic farce, she acquiesced. And it was a stellar year for my pumpkins; the Jack-o-Lantern seeds I planted sprouted with unabated vigor and took over nearly half of the backyard before the frost began nipping them back in October. Rubbing my hands together like a stage miser, I gloated over the fortune soon to be mine when I went door to door selling pumpkins for Halloween. But when I began harvesting them I noticed that nearly all had a puckered nick or two on their undersides -- the result of squirrels taking an exploratory bite. These blemishes cut into my profits at a murderous rate.
The next year I steered clear of pumpkins and planted tomatoes. Once again, the crummy squirrels just had to take a single bite out of each green fruit, causing them to shrivel up and fall off prematurely. My third year as a gardener I planted sweet corn, and declared war on those dastardly tree rats. I had read that dog poop spread around a garden would discourage marauding squirrels. Since my best friend Wayne Matsuura had a Boston terrier, there was no problem in getting a sackful of doggie dust. But the squirrels seemed to revel in it -- they clambered up my corn stalks and began chewing on the tender green corn like nobody’s business. Old Benny, down the street, told me that a dead squirrel trussed up over the garden would keep the critters out. He just happened to have a few dead squirrels in his garage at the moment (how he got them and what he did with them I decided were things I didn’t want to find out) and offered me a prime carcass. Any corpse in a storm, I say -- so I took the cadaver home and strung it up amidst my defenceless corn. The depredations stopped, by golly, but as the squirrel decomposed it attracted a convention of huge black flies that buzzed around the back yard like dive bombers -- landing on my mom when she wanted to sunbathe and inviting themselves right onto our hotdogs when we grilled. So my older brother Billy cut down the dead squirrel to toss in the garbage, and immediately its live cousins were back -- with sharper teeth and appetite than before. I did not harvest a single ear of sweet corn that year.
I gave up my horticultural dreams after that. But when my mom put in a bird feeder on a metal pole near the kitchen window I became enamored with identifying all the many different types of birds that showed up for the free eats -- blue jays, cardinals, grackles, robins, juncos, and sparrows. But then those pesky squirrels had to get in on the act! They climbed up the metal pole to raid the bird feeder several times a day. This was an out and out act of criminal theft, and I determined to stop it. In our garage was a discarded pan of ancient black crankcase oil. Into this I mixed a can of cayenne pepper. Then I coated the bird feeder pole with the deadly oil. I must say I enjoyed the sight of those fat pompous squirrels shinnying halfway up the pipe and then dropping to the ground to roll around in discomfort. Round One for Timmy!
Being of an unforgiving and unforgetting nature, I carried on my warfare against the squirrels to even more determined, and whimsical, levels. Years later, when I was with the circus and came home for the Holidays, my dad got a big bag of walnuts still in their shells. He had no use for them (since the only thing he ever cracked was his knuckles) so I was able to abstract the whole bag for my nefarious anti-squirrel plan. In our backyard we had a majestic willow tree. I taped walnuts to the very tips of several very pliable willow branches -- then sat back to watch the fun. First the squirrels tried jumping up to reach the walnuts -- and I was infinitely surprised at how high they could jump. They got most of that first crop I put out. So I taped a second batch of walnuts to the ends of willow branches that were higher up. And now the squirrels were at a standstill. Ha-ha! They tried crawling out to the tip of the willow branch, but the thin yellow branches would not support their weight -- and off they would fall deep into the snow. Maddened by the nearness of this holiday feast, the squirrels just kept trying -- and kept falling, twisting in midair in the most comical manner as they plunged into the snow drifts. I was really enjoying myself at the kitchen window, watching this spectacle. Then the phone range. Back before there were cell phones, the landline phone was usually installed in the kitchen. When I answered it turned out to be my old circus pal Tim Holst, calling from balmy Florida to see how the Holidays were treating me. I told him things were fine, in fact great. I was watching the squirrels falling out of the willow tree trying to get at the walnuts. After a pause, Holst asked:
“What’s that about walnuts and squirrels in your willow tree?”
“I tape a bunch of walnuts to the ends of the willow branches so I can watch the squirrels fall out of the tree -- I been doing it for the past couple of mornings. It’s a lot of fun!”
“Tork, I thought you said you were gonna go ice fishing or sledding or something. Did you get frostbite of the brain or something? Whaddya mean you tape walnuts to your willow tree?
“It’s true! They crawl out to try and grab the nuts but the branches are way too thin, see?”
“Uh-huh. You think I’m gonna believe that?”
“Just a minute, you doubting Holst! I’ll get mom to tell ya!”
I yelled for mom to come to the phone to tell Tim Holst about the walnuts taped to the willow tree.
“Oh, hang up that phone and go out to shovel the walk!” she yelled back at me. Mothers are such unhelpful creatures at times.
For the rest of his life, whenever we ran into each other at odd intervals, Holst greeted me with “Well, well -- if it isn’t old Walnuts in the Willows himself!” I never could think of a good comeback for that.
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