En Streng av Perler: The Mystery of Elephant Hill

I was blacklisted from the circus in 1980, so I went to vocational school for a third-class FCC engineer's license. You had to have one back then to work in radio, which I thought would be a pleasant change of pace from the rigors of the hippodrome. I was awarded such a license through Brown Institute of Broadcasting after nine months of mainly rote memorization.

During part of my exile I worked as the news director for KIWA Radio in Sheldon, Iowa. This is a pinprick of a town in the northwestern part of the state near the South Dakota border. The town shelters many members of the Dutch Reformed Church, who have last names like Vander Ploeg, Tjeerd, and Veldhuisen. The trauma resulting from pronouncing these convoluted monikers on the air without a stumble eventually gave me a lingering case of tic douloureux. On occasion I still twitch in Morse code.

I quickly learned that as an outlier I was not privy to the community's news simply by asking for it.  In that conservative and religious enclave, the news media is anathema. It was suspected that I would embellish any story I got my mitts on, until it resembled a farcical fairy tale and not the plain unvarnished truth. And that included time and temperature, mijn vriend.

 The daily dispatch logs from the police department and the sheriff's department, which contained many a juicy tidbit about the shenanigans of the demimonde, and which by law were open to the public, were always being 'updated' or otherwise made unavailable to me. The State Patrol never called me with an accident report, and when I called them I was fobbed off onto a superannuated secretary who could only repeat, parrot-like, "Nothing of interest today; call back tomorrow."

I asked the station manager for help in prying open the floodgates of information, but he was worse than useless. He kept a model train set in the basement of the station, where he and the town council spent innumerable hours putzing around with O gauge rolling stock. "Just give them time to warm up to you" was his constant refrain. Another Ice Age would come and go before THAT would happen.

I was worried about how to keep my job if I couldn't wheedle the news out of such deadwood. Losing another job would not sweeten my wife Amy's disposition in the least.

I had to crib items from local newspapers. I seized every single person who walked into the station on business, dragged them back into my studio, and taped interviews with them about anything I could think of. This led to some decidedly off-kilter stories. Such as "Overdue library book fines are a racket", and "Do you know how hard it is to find a public restroom in downtown Sheldon?"

I had started out on the job with dreams of becoming the Voice You Can Trust for the good people of O'Brien County; but I was quickly becoming instead That Man Who Don't Know Nothin'. Even the school board meetings were off-limits to me; the station manager's wife was a teacher at the high school, so she covered the school board meetings for the station (as well as announced the daily lunch menu for the grade school, the middle school, and the high school --  I never knew Tater Tots were so essential to the educational process).

One morning while I was on the air reading some yard sale announcements I noticed that several of them were to be held in the vicinity of Elephant Hill. Why is it called Elephant Hill, I wondered out loud on the air; is it shaped like an elephant or something? As soon as I was off the air I got a mysterious phone call; the speaker would not identify himself except to say he knew the real story of elephant hill. A mastodon skull had been found there by a farmer back in the 1940's. The farmer sold it to the Bell Museum up in Minneapolis. That's why it's called elephant hill, the man said. Then he hung up.

I placed a call to the Bell Museum to ask if they still had a mastodon skull, or had ever had one. The receptionist didn't think they ever had such a thing, but she would check and call me back. She called back an hour later to say their records did not show such a fossil in their catalog.

Oh boy, at long last a real scoop!

That evening I opened my 6 O'clock News by intoning: "The mystery of Elephant Hill continues to deepen. Reports that the hill's name comes from a fossil mastodon skull discovered there over seventy years ago and sold to a Minneapolis museum have proven to be incorrect. The Bell Museum of Natural History has no record of ever receiving or displaying a mastodon skull. I'll have the closing pork belly futures right after this important message from The Anhydrous Ammonia Association."

My story stirred things up in Sheldon and surrounding O'Brien County. It seemed like everyone had their own story or theory about Elephant Hill. One faction claimed a circus had played near the hill in question back in the 1930's and that their elephant had sickened and died there -- so it had been interred in the hillside and the place was called Elephant Hill ever since. Anyone who thought different, this group implied, would have difficulty distinguishing feces from shoe polish. Another group insisted there once had been a barn on the property that had an elephant painted on it -- that's how the name came about. A little old lady, clearly as dotty as they come, came to the station to insist I record her memories of the terrible elephantitis epidemic that had swept through the community in 1929; the victims had been buried in a mass grave on that hillside. And if you went up on Elephant Hill in the moonlight you could still hear their ghostly moans. Since she was the grandmother of the Chief of Police I decided to give that recording the Rose Mary Woods treatment and conveniently 'misplaced' it.

I milked that mystery for nearly two weeks, without ever announcing a reasonable explanation (there wasn't any), until the O'Brien County Fair started up and I got an exclusive on a farm wife who did seed portraits of religious figures like Martin Luther and Billy Sunday.

Hot diggity; I was finally on a roll!

And then, mirabile dictu, my circus ban was lifted. I was offered a gig at Disneyland, where they were gathering a "Grand Comedy Cavalcade of Clowns" for the Easter season to boost attendance. The money was good. Certain I could find a permanent position there, I handed my two-week notice to the station manager while he was fiddling with some wye tracks. It all happened in the space of one day. I didn't bother consulting my wife Amy, because I was sure that as a loyal spouse she would want me to follow the dictates of my restless jester's heart.

 I never knew a woman could heave a two quart slow cooker so far, and with such accuracy.

Restaurant Review: Fat Daddy's Pizzeria. Provo, Utah.

I hate reviews that leave you hanging until the last minute about whether the place is any good or not. I've been guilty of that a few times, I know. So let me start by saying you should eat here. They are at 22 S. Freedom Blvd. They sell by the slice and by the pie. The pizza is floppy and juicy and tangy and crusty -- it's what made America fall in love with this Federally Recognized Food Group in the first place.

I also had something called a pepperollie -- it's a bread stick stuffed with mozzarella and pepperoni. Like a calzoni without pretensions.

One slice of pizza and one pepperollie costs $5.00. Never mind the decor or ambiance or wait staff or who's President of the United States. When you and your friends and your family want good pizza, this is the place. I give it Four Burps with no reservations.

Group of U-Va. students, faculty ‘deeply offended’ by Thomas Jefferson being quoted at school he founded

When Jefferson cannot be quoted
without being labeled as 'foetid',
the nadir's been reached;
our country is beached.
The idiots rule now full-throated. 

Serve a Stranger

"Whatever our age or circumstance, let service be our “watchcry.” Serve in your calling. Serve a mission. Serve your mother. Serve a stranger. Serve your neighbor. Just serve."  Carl B. Cook. 

Service is a boomerang, returning to your hand
all that you have given and much more than you had planned.
So throw it like a prodigal and never fear the waste;
when you boost another it will leave a pleasant taste.
Succumbing to temptation to help others ought to be
a vice I never conquer, that gets worse eternally.  

En Streng av Perler: Clown Alley Gets Religion!

My mother was Catholic. My father venerated Micky Spillane. He would drive mom and us kids to Saint Lawrence Catholic Church for Mass on Sunday mornings, and then stay in the car smoking and reading Micky Spillane paperbacks until we came out. He didn't care one way or the other about his wife's religion, as long as he could follow the adventures of Mike Hammer making out with some blonde bimbo while plugging away at the bad guys.

After my First Communion I dropped the Catholic faith; I was leaning towards my dad's disinterest while hiding a deep yearning for mystical experiences. When I joined Ringling Brothers at age 18 as a clown the only dogma I followed was "Anything for a laugh."  My first week on the show I ran a rope six inches above the ground across the track just as all the showgirls came traipsing by -- they fell over it like bowling pins. I got my laugh from the audience. I also got the eternal hatred of most of the showgirls that season, and my first of many stern warnings from Performance Director Charlie Baumann:

"Dun't do dat kind uf schtuff again, funnyman" he growled at me in his thick Teutonic accent. He was also the tiger trainer, and always carried his whip with him while working -- after delivering his grim warning he flourished it above my head in a figure 8 pattern. I looked properly chastened, but when he turned his tuxedoed back on me I gave him a silent raspberry.

As I got to know the thirty-odd clowns in the alley that first season I noticed that only one ever bothered to go to church on Sunday. That was Tim Holst, nicknamed Bear for his roly-poly contours, who was a Mormon.

Everybody knew Mormons were wet blankets and closet satyrs. But one day he said "Hi Tork" to me and offered to split his smoked turkey leg from Winn-Dixie with me. A few days later the Elders showed up at the train car to tell me about something called The Plan of Happiness. I liked it, and asked Bear to baptize me on New Year's Day, 1972.

My conversion went unnoticed in clown alley. "Live and let live" was standard operating procedure for a group of thirty men tasked with creating chaos in the ring while trying to maintain some kind of sanity outside of it. There were Jews like Prince Paul and Murray Horowitz; Catholics like Lazlo Donnert and Kockmanski; Protestants like Don Washburn and Swede Johnson; Baptists like Boss Clown Levoi Hipps; and now there were two Mormon First of Mays added to the mix. So what? Everyone kept busy combing out their fright wigs and reinforcing their galluses with Velcro, and minded their own business.

Until, that is, Tinny got religion in a big way and tried to shove it down the throat of Spike and the rest of clown alley.

Tinny and Spike had been boon companions, roistering until the pearly dawn and pursuing carnal adventures best left to the pages of Hustler magazine. Their language was peppered with profane obscenities that would curdle the pointed ears of Lucifer himself. They were abandoned sinners, and proud of it.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, Tinny stumbled into a tented revival meeting during a lull in his nightly debauch, sans Spike, who was hot in pursuit of a solitary trollop. Something in what the itinerant preacher said broke through Tinny's hardened heart and touched him deeply. He knelt before the pine board altar that night and committed himself to a new and clean way of living.

Spike was disgusted with his friend's decision, refusing to listen to him and his 'pablum'. But Tinny was now concerned not just for his own immortal soul but for Spike's, and for everyone's in clown alley.

Tinny became a pest.

He read out loud from the Bible while we put on our makeup for come in. He kept asking each of us if we had been saved. To which Dougie Ashton replied "No, but I been recycled." Tinny passed out pamphlets and knelt next to his wardrobe trunk in deep but not quiet prayer for our misguided souls.

Finally Spike had enough; one afternoon in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as Tinny began to preach about the laying on of hands, Spike shot up from his folding chair with a pious shriek to announce he had just been "saved". He then went from clown to clown to lay his hands on the top of each head, bellowing the whole time "You are HEALED, sinner!" Prince Paul called him a schmuck and threw his mirror at him. Tinny did not take the satire kindly; he launched himself at Spike, and in a trice clown alley was transformed into a scuffling and cursing scene not far from Dante's Inferno.

Bear and I and Swede managed to bail out just as Baumann came roaring down upon the brawling clowns like an avalanche. He knocked heads together, flicked his whip none too carefully, and finally restored a semblance of peace and order. Everyone was fined ten dollars for fighting. Tinny and Spike were rusticated back to Winter Quarters in Venice, Florida, for a week, to meditate upon their folly. This was a not uncommon practice when personal issues between clowns threatened the quiet and dignity of clown alley. They had to pay their own way and got no salary for a week; it usually persuaded the feuding parties to kiss and make up.

A week later Spike showed up in clown alley, fresh as a daisy and completely unrepentant. When asked what had become of Tinny he replied with relish that the pious fraud had gotten drunk down at the Myakka Bar (a notorious dive in Venice that catered exclusively to cutthroats and white slavers). Tinny had tried to burn down the bar when they cut him off, and was now cooling his heels for sixty days in the county clink in Sarasota.

Tinny eventually rejoined clown alley, hollow-eyed and silent. He no longer tried to spread the good word, but neither did he rejoin Spike in his wicked ways. We didn't exactly welcome him back with open arms, but neither did anyone razz him about his previous religious mania. Not even Spike. Live and let live. The prop boxes needed repainting and a dozen new foam rubber animals needed to be carved for use in the clown car gag. Salvation could wait until the off season.

Restaurant Review: Wild Ginger. Provo, Utah.

My son Adam wants to retire from business by the age of forty so he and his family can go on LDS missions to foreign countries. He's nearly forty and he's nearly reached his goal; he told me today that his websites produce enough income to pay his mortgage each month, so a little more tweaking and fiddling should see him set for life. I told him he should put in for a service mission to Thailand, my old stomping grounds. His reaction to my suggestion was neutral; but then, his reaction to most of his father's sage advice and counsel is also neutral . . .

I took him to Wild Ginger for lunch today, on University Avenue near the Library. He had a short order of sushi; I had sesame beef.

He seemed okay with the sushi -- he's on some kind of calorie-restricted diet, so he only ate four pieces. My sesame beef was sweet and tangy, almost like barbecue sauce. It was a big portion, so I asked for a container to take the leftovers home -- but it turned out I liked it so much that I ate all of it in one sitting. For all I know my container is still sitting on the table back at Wild Ginger, a puzzling relic to our waiter.

Adam's sushi and my sesame beef cost a total of $20.49. I give the place Four Burps, easy. You can take anyone there for any occasion.

What will I leave behind?

"Is there any greater gift that we can impart to our children than a memory burned deep into their hearts that we know that our Redeemer lives?"  
K. Brett Nattress 

Sweeping away ev'ry mote, ev'ry trace;
Time my whole being on earth will erase.
My name will be spoken by no one at all;
my deeds uninscribed in a book or on wall.
Obscurity halt! There is one thing I must
accomplish before I am turned into dust.
Dear children, my children, please take to your grave
my testament that only Jesus can save.
If you know that I know that God came to earth
to rescue us from our extortionate birth,
then I am content to forgo all display
of pomp or remembrance when I've gone away.

En Streng av Perler: Minnesota, the Land of Ten Thousand Colds.

I'm catching a cold; my nose seeps like a mountain rill, my throat is paved with carborundum, and my head thrums like a crowdy-crawn at an oyster festival in Falmouth. Worst of all, there is no one to coddle me in my snot-ridden distress. Nothing makes an old bachelor feel more alone and forsaken than a head cold on a Sunday.

But I was not always so forlorn when a bug took me down; for I grew up in the Land of Ten Thousand Colds -- Minnesota. Every winter, without fail, I came down with at least one sloppy cold.

Wool was the one and only protection against catching cold when the snow lay smothering the ground. I wore wool socks and wool mittens and my parka had a wool lining and I wore a wool cap with a long long peak that was wrapped around my neck like a scarf. And it all itched horribly and soaked up water like a sponge. And it didn't do a damn thing about preventing a cold; but you couldn't tell that to my mother. When inevitably I came down with a cold she always made the same accusation: I wasn't wearing my wool socks or mittens or cap, and thus richly deserved my sneezing misery.

But presented with a fait accompli, both my parents sprang into action. They started to argue vociferously with each other. Because my mother believed in the old adage "Starve a cold and feed a fever", whereas my dad was morally certain it was the other way around: "Feed a cold and starve a fever."

So while mom restricted me to thin chicken soup and crackers, with a sip or two of Bubble Up to soothe my occasional tremulous tummy, dad would sneak me contraband like Slim Jims and pickled eggs from Aarone's where he tended bar. To this day whenever I feel under the weather I develop a craving for Beer Nuts.

My grandmother Daisy would try to get me to drink nettle tea.

"It's very good for the flux" she repeated endlessly; nobody knew just exactly what she meant by the 'flux', but the tea was certainly putrid and I would never touch a drop.

Uncle Jim always suggested a shot of straight brandy. In the spirit of scientific inquiry I indicated I was willing to try it.

"That'll cure anything!" he enthused to my mother, who looked like she wanted to carve her initials on his face with a dull hatpin. Needless to say, I never got to try the brandy.

Up from the basement came the bulky glass vaporizer; a massive cookie jar-shaped contraption that was filled with tap water, plugged in, and pointed in the direction of my bed to spritz hissing steam. It turned my bedroom into a tropical hothouse where orchids threatened to bloom.

I was rubbed down with Vicks VapoRub until I glistened like a glazed ham.

I got two orange flavored chewable tablets of St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin every four hours, and all the Aspergum I wanted to chew. Which wasn't much, as the sugar never really covered up the sour bitterness.

Then there was the codeine. Oh yes; whether I had a cough or not I was dosed good at bedtime so I would drift off into an opium-induced trance for the next eight hours. No whimpering invalid was going to keep my folks from watching I've Got a Secret or The Untouchables.

Towards the end of my cold there was the psychological warfare between my mother and I as to when my sniffles were officially pronounced cured so that I could scuttle back to Tuttle Grade School again. As soon as the thermometer showed no more fever, the wrangling began.

Having been waited on hand and foot, and filled to bursting with greasy Slim Jims, I was in no hurry to rise from by sickbed.  I always figured it needed about a month for me to regain my strength and stamina after my near-death experience. Mom, on the other hand, was anxious to scoot me out the door as soon as I was ambulatory again. The trick was to get me to school just as soon as possible, without the least possibility I might collapse over my finger painting and be sent home an invalid -- with my teacher branding mom for eternity as a "Careless Parent".

We started sparring the day she would waltz into my bedroom and cheerfully croon: "My, don't we look so much better today! I'll bet all your friends really miss you at school, hmmm?"

To which I would reply with a death rattle that should have garnered me an Academy Award for Best Expiring Child Actor.

"I think I'm headed for the last roundup, Maw . . . " I'd wheeze pathetically.

"Oh nonsense! You'll feel better once you have some Malt-O-Meal. Just come on downstairs and I'll let you put brown sugar on it."

This was the acid test. She was not going to bring anything up to me, so if I was hungry I'd have to navigate the stairs. Which meant I was strong enough to go back to school. Could I wait her out, call her bluff? It was mighty hard -- especially with that fiendishly clever offer of brown sugar; she usually wouldn't let me near the stuff.

Sometimes I held out until lunchtime, tottering down the stairs to be told my cereal was stone cold now so she'd have to make me a baloney sandwich instead; and since the day was half over there was no sense in sending me to school that day. I could go back tomorrow.

Yes!

Buying one more day of freedom was worth the preceding hunger pangs. Besides, as I gazed out the window I began to feel that maybe it was time after all to get out there and toss a few snowballs at the girls and get over to Van Cleave Park for some skating. Winter wasn't going to last forever.

To lack a Redeemer

"Without the Redeemer, the inherent hope and joy evaporate, and repentance becomes simply miserable behavior modification."   Dale G. Renlund.  

To lack a Redeemer would mean
we never could be really clean;
each modification
would be like castration -- 
and hope would turn into hygiene. 

En Streng av Perler: Joom makes Pla Ra.

I spent a total of 7 years living in Thailand.

In 1973 I was sent to Thailand for two years as an LDS missionary. After my marriage ended in 1991 I went back to Thailand to work as an English teacher for five years. It was then I met Joom, a native Thai woman my own age who had spent most of her life since the age of fifteen as a maid in Bangkok hotels. We became affectionate lovers, our passion for each other supplemented and finally supplanted by our sense of the ridiculous. She thought all 'farangs' (foreigners) were rich crazies, and I thought all Thais were just plain crazy. Turns out we were both pretty much right.

I had a perfectly good air-conditioned bedroom at the school where I taught. Joom lived down the street in what is called a 'duk' -- a narrow storefront with three stories above it. At various times she intended to turn her storefront into a Mexican restaurant, a pearl jewelry store, or a beer garden with lots of jolly bar girls to fleece the sodden farangs.

Want of capital, MY capital, kept her from accomplishing any of these dreams. Since she couldn't inveigle enough money out of me to start a business, she changed tactics to lure me into home ownership. This was a lead pipe cinch, since I wanted a nice place to live near the beach. Lo and behold, Joom just happened to know a lady with an empty 3-bedroom bungalow down by Ban Phe Beach. It was on an acre of land with a fish pond and dozens of fruit trees infested with orchids. I took one look at the place and signed a mortgage for half a million baht the same day.

Joom immediately took over, as I knew and expected she would. She hocked her first husband's wedding ring to buy a washing machine ("What happened to your first husband?" I asked her at the beginning of our relationship; she replied "I stabbed him when he came home drunk and tried to beat me!")

Before signing the papers I had told her in no uncertain terms that while her family was always welcome to come visit I would absolutely not have them living with us. This was initially a bitter blow for Joom, since the Thai family dynamic demands that the richest person take care of everybody down to second cousins twice removed. Seeing the steely glint in my bloodshot eyes, she acquiesced, but insisted on having a 'phu chooey' to help out around the place. That I could agree to, and so the very next day her daughter-in-law Geh-Teh showed up on a motor cycle with all her belongings wrapped up in a pink plastic shower curtain. Her husband, Joom's son by her first marriage, was working as an electrician on a kibbutz in Israel -- he had a ten year contract to fulfill.

Geh-teh, by the way, means squirrel; so I called her Squirrelly.

I initially strutted around the bungalow, helpfully pointing out cobwebs that needed removing and kitchen tiles that could be scrubbed a tad whiter, and otherwise demonstrating I was the cock of the walk. Joom and Squirrelly glanced slyly at each other, like those Siamese cats in Disney's Lady and the Tramp, and smiled their big smiles at me and then went on with the housework the way they saw fit -- never mind what the idiot farang man says.

I requested only Thai meals be served. Which fit in exactly with what Joom wanted. She hated farang food anyways. Most Thais do. They can't stand butter, cheese, french fries, breakfast cereal, and are only slowly coming to terms with bread and milk.

Joom's skills as a cook were superb, but she also harbored an imp of the perverse that wanted to see how high she could make my gorge rise. One of the first meals she served in our bungalow consisted of pale white palm grubs -- obscenely fat and wriggling creatures that lived in the heart of palm trees and were considered a toothsome delicacy eaten raw. I saw through her game, and politely declined the grubs on the grounds that there were so few of them that she ought to eat them all and I would be content to fill up on sticky rice along with the fruits and veggies from the garden. She sucked them all down, smacking her lips, and then went back into the kitchen to make me some fried fish.

Round one was mine.

Round two had her sieve tiny crayfish from our pond, mix them with sugar, salt, and red chili powder, and then offer them to me for an evening repast. How her eyes glittered with mischief just this side of malice in the tropical moonlight as she pushed the bowl of still pulsating crustaceans towards me! I couldn't believe this was actually a Thai dish, so I called her bluff. Without batting an eye she downed half the bowl before my astonished eyes. I ran out of the kitchen before I lost more than just my manly dignity.

Round two to Joom.


Round three was a draw.

Joom and Squirrelly constantly netted minnow-sized fish from the pond, chopped them up coarsely, and packed them in a five gallon plastic tub with roasted rice bran and lots of salt. They called this obscenity pla ra, or 'fermented fish'. At first they kept this tub of rotting fish guts out on the porch, but one day, when it was about full, they moved it into the kitchen, where the odor, even with the lid tightly on, played hob with my delicate nostrils. I commanded Joom in no uncertain terms to remove that Hazmat in the making, but she stood her ground, arms akimbo, telling me the tub of pla ra was the most necessary condiment in the Thai cooking arsenal. It had to stay in the kitchen, where she could get at it to season all future meals.

So be it. I coldly told her that I would be moving back to my air-conditioned bedroom at the school until such time as the odoriferous pla ra was banished back out onto the porch. She flung a few unladylike wishes about my physical well-being at the back of my head as I slammed the door on her.

We remained incommunicado with each other for five days, until I got really tired of eating soggy rice and canned curry in the school kitchen. That night I walked back to the bungalow, braving the feral dogs that lived in the scrub by the side of the road, and went up on the porch to knock on the door and apologize to Joom.

And there sitting on the porch was the plastic tub of pla ra.

Did I gloat or even grin? I ain't that stupid, friend. I merely came inside, swept Joom up in my arms, and asked what was for dinner. I don't remember what we ate, but it was delicious, and at the end of the meal I asked Squirrelly to bring the tub of pla ra into the kitchen so Joom wouldn't have to walk out to the porch every time she wanted to use it.

Peace was restored to Casa Torkildson, and my waistline flourished like the green bay tree.