Resting.

Check back with me from time to time.  Old Son resting.

Love & Blessings in the New Year.

Film: Bella

Bella is a beautiful film, a film that works for the tender hearted. When I came out of graduate school I thought it my academic duty to teach students the heady difference between “real” literature/film and sentimentality, that snake in the lush garden always ready to tempt the softhearted away from the darker, brain-stressing mind nutrients.

Shortly into my stay at Ricks College, a sojourn that lasted 37 years, I read a C.S. Lewis’ essay on the problem of sentimentality in literature [and film]. He cautioned young professors like myself who were spending a lot of time “professing” the dangers of too much heart.  While reading I found these lines, which changed my approach in a mere 5 minutes. “We teachers are not in the business of clearing a forest, but in the business of planting trees.”

I looked at my students that next hour. Lewis was right. I wasn’t looking at a rain forest. I found myself in the Gobi desert.

My colleagues and friends know that I have always loved the life of the mind and the life in the mind. Yes, let me admit, however, the painful truth: The best literature is cerebral.  I love Bedford Falls, but I know that is not the world of The Brothers Karamazov, a world accessible only by way of that enigmatic genius, Dostoyevsky. And often, as Liz Lemon [Tina Fey; “30 Rock”] says, “I want to go to there.”

Bella is not the turbulent world of the Karamazovs, but it is about some of the same human emotions:  Love, hope, and, most of all, forgiveness. Add Bella to your Christmas film list; join a wonderful Hispanic-American family and take them to London, to Bob Cratchet’s or to Bedford Falls. We’ll break tradition and have a goose or turkey tacos. We’ll ask Jimmy Stewart to do an imitation of Jimmy Stewart. And our hearts will leap with joy.

Jose, played by Mexico’s answer to George Clooney, Eduardo Verastegual, leads us on a journey from a promising soccer career--through a fatal accident--to his brother’s kitchen as a gourmet cook--and finally to Nina [Tammy Blanchard], to love and forgiveness.

Meet Jose’s family: Warm, full of laughter and joy. Who else but our Hispanic brothers and sisters would interrupt a meal to start dancing? Well, our black brothers and sisters would, wouldn’t they? Don’t we need that pepper in our bland daily broth? Does anyone play classical music while eating these days? Or is everyone texting and taking calls from the office?

Because Jose, always in his chef’s whites, his flowing black beard, sitting in the sand, his eyes resting not on the Sea of Galilee but the Pacific Ocean, clearly fills the soul of Savior, we look for Saving.

And we find it. Who is Mary? Who is the oblique reference to the Christ child? And what of family, especially the parents?  Jose’s mother, the Earth Mother, her warm lap where a broken and confused Joseph weeps.

Cap your Christmas with Bella. You may even feel like calling your sister or brother. You know, the girl you grew up with, who washed your face and probably changed your diapers.

Wish her a Merry Christmas. Tell her she’s the “Bella” in your life. 

Film: The Return

Many of you know of the famous French tale, based on an earlier case in France in the mid-16^th century. In the famous 1983 French film, Martin Guerre returns after many years away but has trouble convincing the villagers that he is truly Guerre.

The Return, a later version, in Russian, reworked, appeared in 2003 and is available on Netflix in the foreign film section. Easily accessible, you can stream by pushing a button.

The film could have been shot in black and white. If there is a musical score, it passes in and out of your ears without memory. The sounds you remember are the natural sounds of nature: a hatchet chopping wood, water splashing against a shore, and the pull of the oars through water.  Nature sounds.

When the “father” returns after 12 years, he meets near total silence. The wife says fewer than 50 words in the film, the husband less than 200. The two sons, Andrei and Ivan, do all the talking and all the speculating.

So what can such a film be about that makes it worth 90 minutes of our time? The focus centers on the boys—on their relationship and on their coming to grips with the “lost” father. We watch them and listen to them respond to him while on a failed fishing trip. They visit an island instead. Apparently, he has bigger fish to fry, but he says off-handedly that he “doesn’t like fish.” What gives?

The hints about who he was and where he went come through the sons.  But don’t look for anything overt. Their world is covered in clouds and mist, appropriate symbols, the shroud that covers the father’s identity.

What, then, is the larger meaning here? One theme explores anxiety separation. What happens to children when the father leaves? He may not be Russian Special Ops or a criminal [there are hints]. Social scientists tell us the single most traumatic event in a child’s life is loss of the father—for any reasons.

Both Ivan and Andrei are losing their moorings when the film opens. They are living dangerously. Secondly, where is the communication in this family, and what does the film teach us about talking to each other? The aunt does not speak at all. At their first breakfast, the father merely says “hello.”

A third, deeper possibility, is the Freudian notion of “the search for the father.” For Freud, an atheist, who did not go deeply enough and religiously enough, missed the point. On the emotional-psychological level, there is that ongoing search for a/The Father. Lose him and you have a vacuum to fill, which creates Freud’s laundry list of childhood traumas, some of them sexual in nature.

But I reject Freud here and seek a deeper religious answer. Yes, we seek The Father, the Father of us all. That core archetype is where our meaning and fulfillment lie. Our spiritual journey is an effort to return to The Father---a road of trials, a yoke both heavy and light to bear. The paradox depends on what kind of day you’re having. As my granddaughter, Ashley says, “it’s all in the journey.”

Finally, perhaps the film helps us examine in a displaced way the trauma children feel when parents who separate come back together. Perhaps, it dramatizes the return of the father from Iraq or prison or desertion from the family itself.

In any case, the father’s inscrutability, the vague, even fragile replacement by the aunt and the mother, and the growing Cain and Abel animosity between the brothers leaves us with a breach that does not close in the film.

Can we bridge such emotional gaps in our own lives? A returning college student for Christmas experiences the readjustment to what he was and what he has become in 15 short weeks.

Or what of the LDS missionary who attempts to transition from Mexico City to Simi Valley, California? Things have changed. Perhaps the “girl” is gone and the wounds are deep. And perhaps as so-called adults, we take that very pain too lightly.  Finally, there is the returning serviceman.

Can you set up an outpost, say, Restrepo [a famous documentary now on Netflix] and be the same? A Dutch documentary [also on Netflix] follows a squad of 12 men to Afghanistan, to what they collectively call, “The Hellhole of the world.”

They arrive home: one dead, three wounded. Within a year, 8 of the original 12 returned to Afghanistan.  One fair-haired Dutchman asks, "How can Holland now make use of a man who can only fire an M-60 machine gun?"

Yes, departures are hard.  Are returns any easier?

Film: After the Wedding

Those of us who are married know that the wedding is the easy part of marriage. After the lovely mess has been cleaned up, we face the “after,” which is, to be sure, where the real marriage begins. Here is where our film focuses: After the Wedding.

There’s a message even in that insight: once the ceremony celebrating, any ritual event is over, we return to the real world.  The Eagle Scout wakes up a pinch different; the departing missionary sports a new suit and tie, etc., and puts on the battle badge.  The Green Beret paints his face and jumps into the “work of death.”

What happens, then, when the woman you love but have in your endless drifting, lost track of her, only to find her married, blessed with two young bouncing Danish tow-heads and a daughter, much older, say 18, about to marry.

And you’re invited. Then her father offers your orphanage enough money to keep going, to survive, maintaining that oasis in the middle of New Delhi, teeming with hungry children.

Watch this chess game for real stakes played out by Jergen, the father of the children. You’ll find yourself studying Jacob’s [the great Danish giant, Mad Mikkelsen] every move and always his eyes. The musical score evades you 5 minutes after the film but the camera work is excellent, carried out, of course, in that Bergmanesque manner. Apparently Scandinavians like to look you in the eye. Perhaps they don’t. That’s why Bergman would not take the camera off the eyes. The windows of the soul.

In fact, film buffs become detectives. We like to look for hints. You accomplished chess players, in keeping with our chess motif, will enjoy following the moves.

Jergen is the power piece, and he controls the center of the board. Jacob sees himself unfairly as a pawn. The object in this chess game, however, is not to hunt the King and kill him. The idea is to orchestrate the board into a balanced, aesthetically pleasing arrangement.

What would you do if you had great resources, but “time’s winged chariot” was at your heels, relentless in her pursuit, soon to scoop you away after running over you, into the heavens, into peace?

The full impact of that moment brings the best out of Rolf Lassgard. And it is as fine an acting moment you will see, even in George Clooney’s breakdown in Descendants.

Imagine yourself empowered to do this good thing.  My skeptic friends would say, “look at history, look at human nature, look at your own sacred texts’: “We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, . . . they will exercise unrighteous dominion” [italics added].

It doesn’t say all men [and women]; it says “almost all men.” Jergen is not one of those men, whatever his faults.

Book: The Sea

Somewhere in your mind rings a line, “Let us go down to the sea again. . . ” John Banville, an Irish writer, born at the end of WWII, wrote his novel, The Sea in  2005. That’s 6 years ago, but I choose him, not because he’s “hot off the press,” in the days when the presses were really rolling. He’s written a half a dozen additional books. This one works for me. The other five sit on the shelf. Let’s see what happens. I know The Shroud will not, so skip it.

Banville’s prose is exuberant, flowing, yet penetrating. You could read a line like this aloud in the middle of the night when Mr. Sleep doesn’t arrive and you’re eating chips and looking at a crack in the ceiling. Here, for example, is Banville's heady but plangent prose. Adolescent Max allows his imagination to float over Connie Grace, his friend Chloe’s mother.  Such stirrings are not uncommon. Sometimes a boy sees a woman before he sees a girl.

“She is in my memory her own avatar.” Then Banville wrestles with the book’s theme: What is the role of the past in our lives and how real and regenerative is it? “Which is more real, he asks us, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections. Or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her?” Banville begs us to give place sometimes to our past. The Past is Light; the Present is Darkness.

And so Max battles with past and present. Anna, his wife, dies of cancer. He returns to the little coastal village away from Dublin. Can he solve the  problems that plague him?

In The Sea I had hoped for a solid father-daughter relationship such as my own with my three daughters. I didn’t get it in the film, The Descendants, and it’s a fragile work in progress in The Sea. Ironically, and most commonly with women, The Woman saves. Claire, Matt’s daughter, a female St. Sebastian, riddled with arrows of failed love, outlasts her drinking father’s immaturity and emerges, now stronger and centered by the end of the novel, than Anna, her mother. She takes Max, near dead from alcohol poisoning to her home, cleans out the liquor, refuses to sell her childhood home and marries. This blossoming into womanhood is more convincing than Alex’s so-called coming of age moments in the film, The Descendants, a film the press wants for the Academy Awards.

Anna and Max, our flawed couple and parents of Claire, are two floating creatures in the sea of life. More like jellyfish. Anna drifts, content to be a vague Mischung of all the other people she knows. Max tells us she—all of us—is “defined and have our being through others.”

Try working that statement through while you walk the dog or are helping your wife clean the kitchen. Allow your mind to plow the “sea-scenes” of your life—yes, the deep, abiding relationships that have “made” you what you are. I speak of the people in your past who impact even to this very day.

How much of your wife is in you? Your grandfather in you? Her aunt in her? Beyond this little mind game, however, Banville questions—and fails—to challenge my own notion of a core self. Sociobiologists love this problem. Gallons of coffee and hours of much-needed sleep have been spent in student eateries over this one. And when your own children come into your life, you continue to wrestle, as Jacob’s struggles with his angel. “Honey, who is the child? Where did she come from?”  Your wife calmly answers, “she is your daughter but she is more like your grandmother.” Complicated!

We can’t solve Max’s question quickly for ourselves, but for Max, there is never a complete answer. "Be  somebody," Anna yells, "Be anybody you want!" Then continues, "I am what I want to be, and what I don’t want to be." Max has no moorings; he drifts with the tide. As William Yeats, the Irish poet says, “The center will not hold.” Max is a spiritual drifter, pulled by the life-tides and occasionally bitten by deep ocean monsters.

And that same restless tides of time and water, wash both the twins, his friends, Myles and Chloe [second “love”] beyond help and down into the dark depths of a sea-death. Like Siamese twins, they are locked together in life and in death.

Banville, then, lays out some interesting questions about the past and the present for us to digest.  The novel spoke to me because I’m an incurable, untreatable Romantic. My own acute memory, one of my few gifts, has kept the Past alive in me.

That force field of memory feeds my deep affection for others. I bring the past, which is always with me, into the present. And because I believe in an endless Future, I will never suffer Max's trauma. The trifecta of these three time zones fuse and make people fascinating for me and worth knowing and loving. When I say, “thanks for being in my life,” I really mean it.

When I return to my own imaginary cottage by the Irish Sea, I’ll take all three worlds with me.

And ask you to come along.

Film: Electric Shadows, Part II

I finalize Part II with a suggestion. Thoreau spoke of active listening as well as active talking. What about interactive reading and watching of films?

Call me mad, but the early monks of the Franciscan order directed the sacred text to themselves. They read aloud, alone, engaging in a dialogue with the words. “Let not the sun go down on your wrath.” Lord, I went to bed last night, angry with Abba Tomas; we don’t agree about how loud the liturgy should be sung. What happens inside my heart if I defer and sing louder, as he wishes?

“Please, let the sun not set on my now uneasy heart.” Peaceful, relevant application. And so what of film? What does Ling Ling find in film that life cannot provide? How does film finally bring her and her Maoist-frenzied childhood friend together [in a park, near water, of course]? Born a child of disgrace, she becomes jealous of  her baby brother, born to her mother and new father, “Uncle Pan,” the projectionist for the popular outdoor films he shows each night. When she does more to attract her parent’s attention, she receives a beating, which leaves her deaf.

Because films order the world in two hours, they are an order principle in our own lives. Of course we suspend time and logic. If we can’t, go ahead and read a book on physics and forget the film. She becomes a runaway, living, ironically, down the street from her parents. She writes in her journal, “if my life were a movie, I’d be the only one watching it.” Loneliness? I think of those lines when I write one of these blogs. This insight, easily topped by the famous Groucho Marx lament: “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me for a member.” Electric Shadows captures loneliness, deafness, alienation, but it also captures love and reconciliation.  Let the camera do its work as it helps you pick up the hints.

Jiang also helps us with symbols:  Cameras, film, binoculars—all capturing the theme of perception and misperception. Here comes the old Scot, Robert Burns: “O would power gie us, the gift to see ourselves as eithers see us.” That honing of the senses begins with film when they are very young.

While my mother and I walked home from My Foolish Heart, I kept thinking about something children can’t get their minds around:  Love. How could the beautiful Susan Hayworth weep so much over a man, now gone? I was 8 at the time.

Ok, I admit it. In my privacy while watching Electric Shadows, I put myself in the film. How would I have treated the outcast and beautiful Jiang Yihong, disgraced by a pregnancy, deserted by her lover, a Red Guard enthusiast, more obsessed with a fat man who killed hundreds of thousands of people as Chairman and wrote 20 pages of political and economic nonsense that sent an entire nation into madness, than the woman he loves, the child, the new little human who is his responsibility?

Could I escape the rabid world of the Red Revolution? Would I have ceased being human had I lived then?

How precious are the shadows that invade my mind, as I lie abed, drifting into sleep. How could that angel wife of mine and I join forces and help such “fallen” souls? How would we help mend broken hearts and deep wounds of those hearts and souls? Well, first, we would want a landscape as background—a brook, trees, and a little bridge, a place to sit. We’ll need the mothers and fathers of such lost runaways. Carolyn, critical in these tender moments, would hold the crying woman without a mother. She would lay her head on her lap and stroke her forehead.  I would sit near, and in perfect Cantonese I would begin the words of comfort.

“You are not really responsible for all of this.  Let me tell you the rest of your story--the part you don’t know. .  . .”

Film: Electric Shadows, Part I

How is the weather where you are?  My Idaho friends are watching the red line head for zero. Here in Austin, we’ve had rain but pray and dance for more. We need a drought-buster! Cold, overcast and windy.  A perfect day for a film.

Let me suggest the Chinese version of Woody Allen’s, The Purple Rose of Cairo. The Mia Farrow character, who has nothing in her life but her imagination at the local theater, literally loses herself in the film.  Finally, the Jeff Daniels character joyfully steps off the screen, walks down the aisle, takes her by the hand, and they walk out of the theater and into life.  The question Xiao Jiang raises in his first directed film, Electric Shadows, is what is the role of the imagination in our lives?

You think that is a non-question, or one you’re too busy to answer during the Christmas rush.  Really? Your children, well the children in my time, “dreamed with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads.” Actually, I’ve never seen a sugarplum and have never bought a single plum that I could eat. Too sour. Beware of such promising fruit as apricots and plums, unless someone is lucky enough to live south enough to grow them.

Ask yourself while you’re unloading all those electronic machines just what your children are dreaming about. Forget the sugarplums. Your children want more screens, more ways to escape into a world of imagination ready-made for them. They don’t have to slip into those “free and easy, apple orchard days” Dylan Thomas, the poet writes about.

A new Apple will soon replace those “apple orchard” dreams. Your children are entering a world Aldous Huxley already built for you in 1936:  A Brave New World. The new virtual reality isn’t even your own God-endowed mind moving you to other worlds of thought. The “Feelies,” he wrote of, will take you into a tactile experience more real than their minds could ever mold.

Sad—and true.  Does the human imagination have a function beyond escape? A friend of mine said that she didn’t think I would have “survived my life as I have without my lively imagination.”

Let’s settle for her definition: Imagination enables us to survive. Of course, a twisted, corrupted imagination sends us to crime, prison and death. Or if we high center on that screen filled with impossibly half-clad women [also seen on airport paperbacks], we are simply paralyzed. Those gals are not real, anyway:  They are pixels, dots that shape an image. You’ve fallen in lust with an idol.

I plea for a richly textured religious imagination. Such a shaping force builds a possible world for me:  One that is lively, inspiring. That shaping force William Coleridge, companion to William Wordsworth and poet, said the imagination is “esemplastic”—it shapes and informs our experiences.

Faith without an imagination is a kind of vague hope—a desperate trust. Our religious life without imagination is an exercise in patience, a plodding, trekking towards something about as real as a mirage.

Last night Elder Eyring added pictures to his Christmas devotional message. What happened?  We see Mary now. Beautiful, pure, dark hair [of course, she lives in Palestine], her skin clear [but not as brown as it really was]. We see the authentic looking blue dress. We see Gabriel enveloped in light, speaking. We watch Mary journey to Elizabeth, managing her own miracle. Mary lays her head in her cousin’s lap. Two women bound together for cosmic comfort—a moment in a sand-swept village, flies buzzing, the simple bread lunch and a small glass of wine.

Wombs of destiny.

Film: Kolya

In a Seinfeld episode Elaine learns the hard way from a handsome pediatrician and the child’s proud parents that all babies are “breath-taking.” Even Hitler, from what German “historians,” say, was considered breath-taking in old Austria [at the time].

No one will argue that Andrei Chalimon, who plays Kolya in the Czech film named for him, is not breath-taking. He’s so huggable, hug-hungry grandparents want to lurch into the screen and grab him. And it helps our hearts when we realize he’s been abandoned by his mother—part of a “fake” marriage to get her out of Russia, into Czechlosvakia and then to Germany, where the man she loves awaits her.

Three aspects of this film besides Kolya took me through it 3 times: the musical score, Louka, the middle-aged cellist, and Klara, played by the apparently ageless Libuse Safrankova, the “voice” who leads a handful of string musicians who play for funerals.

Bedrich Smetama’s score captures the ethereal, almost other-worldly moments as Louka and Kolya bond.  I don’t know the voice-over for Libuse Safrankova’s rendition of “The Lord is my Shepherd,” but it is worth listening to—well, I’ll admit it—20 times. Add Kolya, looking up into Klara’s eyes, and you have what the New York Times called, “The Jesus Story.”

Lest I, as they say, uberwork [German makes a slight comeback]  this somewhat sentimental gem to death, let me add that it won a Golden Globe and a nomination for the Oscar.

The always present moral?  Even a middle-aged man [oh, so young] cannot only learn how to love a young boy like a grandson, but also win the affection of a  much younger beauty. The latter aspect clearly rests in the fantasy part of my mind and does not count as creative and healthy imagination.  I don’t want to undo what I tried to build a couple of blogs ago.

Yes, there is the music and the friendship among the outcasts from the dominant Communist Party. Louka, once first chair, lives like a musical gypsy, banned from the National Orchestra.

And then the wall falls down. Communism fails; people are free. The love scenes are tender and tasteful. Lots of  blankets and lots of hugging.

The choice to watch Kolya is yours to make. Some of my more tough-minded friends will find it simply sentimental.  But what’s wrong with a happy ending—once in a while?

Film: The Human Resources Manager

If you are surfing Netflix for a serious comedy—if you want to laugh and shed a tear and come away happy about what good humans are willing to do for one another, watch the Israeli film, The Human Resources Manager.

The title tells all, another subtle aspect of foreign films that makes them overshadow American films. Look for the words the film defines: "human/humane," "resource/source" and the simply understated word, "manager."

Think about how the manager of a large bread factory in Jerusalem becomes the only "resource" willing to follow through when a suicide bomber kills a former worker.

Will he stay home, do the minimum, try and please a beautiful but angry wife and lonely daughter, or will he decide to make more than bread? Will he sniff out trouble lurking below the fragrant and life-sustaining bread the company is known for?

Why sleuth the life of a Russian immigrant, an engineer from Russia and attempt to find her family and return the body to Russia? A two-day promised journey to Russia ends up being a comedy of errors and tender moments. Good people pop out of the frozen tundra; even the Russian army or at least part of it, gets involved. A broken family comes together—slowly.

A reporter, looking for a scoop for a fledgling expose kind of paper you see at the check out counter in Albertsons, hitches a ride. Hot news about corporate inhumanity and coldness warms into something deep and enduring. Enemies become friends—sort of.

People care about people they don’t even know because others are part of the human family. Seen any fellow humans lately? How far would you track their lives? Not gossip, verbal diarrhea, but caring:  love in action. It could mean baking a loaf of bread, and asking real questions. "I want to take you for lunch this week. You've been on my mind lately."

You'll need to be careful. Charity is costly; it can cause you pain. Is the dead Russian girl “more” than an unemployed mechanical engineer who simply mops floors something more than a janitor? Was she a wife? A mother?

Is this a film that warns us yet again that our work can swallow us? Career can seduce us from what means most. As a guy who probably got at least an A- for “husbandhood,” I find myself watching a film, hands clenched, saying, "Fool, don’t leave without making sure she knows you love her. Good-bye is never enough; it might be your last."

And if you find yourself in a 17-year-old van in the middle of Russia, don’t forget to call and say more than, “I am in a fix here. We have a situation.” Say, “Think about me. I need you, but I’m glad you’re safe from this.”

Tell that daughter, your arms around her, “I really am glad you’re my friend.” She knows you love her but do you like her?

Dig deep enough--beyond that fake smile, the fake, fatuous response that  things are "great" and see a real human standing in the line for stamps. Nothing like a follow-up, either. "Our family remembers you each night at prayer." I go on believing that there is an energy field we can tap into. Who knows, one phone call, one email may change the day for both of you.

That’s the manager’s mistake and redemption. He starts asking questions. The answers, like our own, might take us from our chair by the fire all the way to a Russian village, suddenly surrounded by new friends.

It’s Christmas. Are you ready to manage your resources?

Part II of Old Son Speaks: Film and Book Reviews

What follows is a series of critical reviews of foreign films and, occasionally, novels I’m reading. Please try and remember the medicine analogy earlier. When I write about a film I am, in a sense, recommending it. Because it worked for me; however, it does not mean it should work for you.

I am discreet, but I have greater tolerance for that four-letter Anglo-Saxon word that has become a grammatical "filler" for both men and women. I hear the words but I do not listen. The characters speak the words, I don’t and don’t use such words.

The films I chose are almost “skinless.” I have learned, however, that in Sweden if there is water, a woman will quickly unclothe and dive into it.

So, there will be moments. Many of you, for this reason, will want to move on to greener pastures.

Remember: Motrin does not cure every headache. If you see film and books as “medicine,” i.e., equipment for living, this stuff just may not work for you. God bless and good hunting.

Finally, these are my views and not the official views of the LDS church. I speak without authority of any kind. If you want lasting counsel, look to the Brethren, not me. 


First Review:  The Descendants

Very few women can resist George Clooney, so I took my daughter to the matinee in order to get out of a rare Austin downpour.

I got what I  feared most in watching this Academy Ward darling. The baby shower has begun. Million await the Red Carpet reality show. But the Oscars never go to the really good actors—or rarely.

How could America’s sweetheart, Sandra Bullock [Blind Side] take the Oscar away from Helen Mirren for The Last Train Station, Tolstoy’s death, which culminates two days of tumultuous arguments whether his complete works should be signed over to the Communist Party or remain in the Tolstoy estate.

The focus in Descendants is as much on Matt’s dying wife, who has been unfaithful to him, as it is on the effervescent Clooney. In fact, there seems to be a lot of the “real” Clooney in real life.  In the film, he has two daughters, money, looks and power. As one critic carps, “it’s hard to be a land baron in Hawaii.”

However, My Sunday school lessons echo in the back of my head, and I work to clear them, in order to be “objective.” The fact remains, however, that Clooney, one of life’s great successes--rich, handsome, a home in Italy, amply provided with the most beautiful women the country can stock [in spite of its larger more important financial problems], sadly and openly admits it’s too late to have children. “I’ve known too many women to decide.” Now that’s the stuff of a real film: The story of a man who has “everything” but no wife and children.


Whoops, he did that in another film, Up in the Air, a better film.

I only push this because Clooney is not comfortable with children. He doesn’t know how to hug a child. His body language around two grieving, confused daughters is awkward. And I’m not convinced wrapping up in a quilt and eating ice cream, watching March of the Penguins is the convincing beginning of a new family chapter.

He remains handsome, always impeccably dressed even as a happy so-called casual Hawaiian.  The color red makes his abundant locks stand out. In the film he has more money than he can ever spend—oh, and two foul-mouthed, unruly children he must take responsibility for because he has apparently spent too much time being a lawyer.

Now we all know the story of the dying CEO who on his death bed does not say, “I should have spent more time at the office.” Nearly everyone could make that deathbed statement.

Secondly, Clooney rides alone in this film. Shailene Woodley, touted on line as a “possible candidate for best supporting actress” does outgrow some of her crass immaturity, but the transition is too quick, too fatuous. She’s a “woman” only in the last scene. Granted, Clooney’s breakdown scene and forgiveness of a wandering wife is convincing.

And this is only one of three problems in the film. We’re in the hospital room too much and we’re not sure Matt’s wife’s adultery with Brian is merited. Who not why becomes the film.

But this film wants to be 3 hours long. Native Hawaiians clap when Matt gives his “we’ve taken over their island” speech, but that won’t change much. Beyond the calendar shots, Hawaii looks a lot like Atlanta to me. No, I haven’t been to Hawaii, nor will I make it in this life. Natives must have also liked the authentic music in the background. In spite of the traffic, there is lots of vegetation.

But there is no supporting cast to prop up Clooney. We get more gratuitous four-letter words than we need, and we skim the surface. Judy Green’s cameo appearance, hot coffee in hand, tears and flowers later in the hospital moves us. Clooney’s wife really did pick an idiot to engage in an affair and hope for marriage later. He doesn’t even show up to say “good-bye” to his ever-willing  squeeze.  I  have a complicated idea: Let’s have Clooney marry Judy Green, Brian’s wife. Meld two families and paint an unfortunately American scene.

No, this American film fails when set it against the Israeli produced Human Resources Manager.

Perhaps our obsession for so-called “real life,” the reality shows, have already contaminated our love of true, theatrical performance. We seem to know the real life drama of a Snooki or her abdominal wonder side-kick, “The Situation,” but we don’t know art—the art of Helen Mirren or Hiam Abass, whose performance in the political allegory, The Lemon Tree, outshines the trio of George Clooney, Shailene Woodley and Judy Green put together.

The Inconvenient Truth About Old Son: Guest Blog, by Lora Clark

Yes, Old Son is resting.  Allow me to fill you in on some of the reasons I think this is happening:

• Dad is now collecting twist ties.
• He's saving them for "later."
• He's asked to sleep between Tim and me.
• We often find him curled up on the pantry floor with his Hudson Bay Blanket.
• He's been on Ebay day and night trying to buy a 1942 aviator hat, complete with goggles.
• He asked Bishop McCullough if he could be a greeter for church, "Wal-Mart style."
• When I asked him if his pills were organized and if he'd taken them, he answered, "all blue ones today.  Those are gooo-ood."
• Haagen Daz Rum Raisin or Vanilla for lunch every day.  He's trying to raise their stock index.
• He's been in chat rooms like, "Disney Cruisers" and "Crockstar Cooking."
• Speaking of cooking, he's whipping up things like sauerkraut, raw eggs and croutons.
• I found out he's sleeping with his Timberland boots on, just in case we have to evacuate for wildfires.
• On November 1, he began wearing a winter parka indoors...even though it was still 85 outside.  Always an Idaho boy.
• Today he accidentally wore Josh's underwear.
• He gets his beard trimmed at "Roosters," and asked Carey to shave only the left half off, so he could sleep more comfortably on that side.
• He's watched Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood over 100 times.  He shows keen interest in the re-opening of her murder case.  [He's been writing Bobby Wagner hate mail.]
• He rides the lawn mower with Pedro on Thursdays, to work on his Spanish.

So I think we're good here--no cause for alarm.  We thought of buying him an elf costume for the holidays, just to keep him busy.

Healing: At-One-Ment

In an earlier blog, “The Haunted Lake,” I suggested writing, reading, loving others and actually reaching out, physically and emotionally, to help us and others heal. We are trying to sort out the bad fish, the ever hungry carp that eats up the sweet memories that live in the deep Lake Austin of our sub-consciousness and consciousness.


There’s something in the human touch.  Pick up a baby and see. I ask you, isn’t there something eternal in a handshake, an embrace? I see Darwin, he who changed our world forever, dying, lying quietly, his huge hand in Emma’s, “my love, my precious love.” The other side of earthworms and apes.


I want to convince you that Terry Warner’s credo, “who we are is how we are with others,” lies at the heart of connection with Self, with God, and, of course, with others.


I’m willing, as well, in the spirit of tolerance, to suggest that a number of what I will call God Concepts seems to help us as humans who are respectful  and loving of our neighbors.  If it helps to substitute Energy or what one scientist calls “Empowered Selfhood free of all the trappings of organized religion,” so be it. Having read all of the works of the popular Stephen J. Gould, I came to admire his mind and unequivocal belief in a biology-dominated view of the world.  That was his Weltanschauung.  I could picture him reading late into the night, working through his probably battered copy of Darwin, finding fascination and peace, because it worked for him; Darwin met his needs, as the Prince of Biology does for many others in the world.  And they are kind, respectful people.


And what we have in Adam Gopnik’s study of Darwin the man is a sensitive, humane peek into Darwin at home, which was often his laboratory. He tested earthworms with his daughters’ help at the piano. Which tones on the keyboard would the worms respond to? Let’s see. Let’s turn this into a family home evening. You graph the responses, Anne, I’ll arrange the worms, etc.

We must find space for all of God’s children, regardless of their ”godliness or ungodliness.” Strangely enough, the so-called “demons” often turn out to be “angels.” We reach only a few meters of the inner Darwin as we watch him watch by his daughter’s bed. A death-watch and much sadness.

How Darwin was as a Victorian father, husband, and gentleman-scientist tells us who he was as a humble human being. A neighbor worth knowing and loving, like my own Darwinian neighbor.

At the risk of being glib with such words as “godliness” or “holiness”  or "sinner," I’ve been willing to use those words conscientiously and with conviction, whatever the price.

I do call your attention to a blatant paradox. I speak for tolerance, but my own spiritual journey, which began when my parents became LDS in 1942, continues in that landscape. So when I finish, calling for a Oneness of All in God, I raise questions about an abundance of “God Concepts.” Here I include science with its rainbow connections and its own set of rules.

I believe in the ultimate plurality of happiness. We will reside where we are happiest and best suited.  For example, I cut a wide margin for Muslims, who in the other World, continue living in what the Koran calls “the meadows of the gardens.” Datepalms, mosques, Koranic studies—an endless oasis. And they will be happy, free of the repugnant idea of an Intercessor, Christ, free to follow Allah. Some may decide on a lane change, and become Christian or  perhaps even LDS. One thing for sure: The repressive, often violent mistreatment of women and others will cease forever.  Of the so-called 40 virgins and the abundance of wine I have no insight or answer.

My perspective, then, family and friends, is shaped and informed by my LDS theological convictions. And my interpretations. Clearly and happily, some would say are, without authority.  Some of my own grandchildren, independent of orthodoxy or dependent on orthodoxy, as they are in their rich variety, will beg to differ from Old Son. Bless You!

I have often presented my own mother in the spotlight of these now 45 blogs, presenting her honestly and openly but with an abiding, eternal love. She is, in my mind and soul, becoming what she was destined to be. And I will not be surprised at her Glory when we meet.

Prescient, like her mother, Lucy, Mom was sensitive to things of the Other World.  What she felt and heard was mere silence to me.  My folks spent nearly 20 summers in my brother’s apartment or with us, or even in their own apartment.  As I approached the podium one Sunday to teach a Gospel Doctrine lesson, Mom told me later, her eyes filled with tears, "I remembered in a flash all the unkind words, the belt once in awhile, the irritability and the yelling, and I whispered, 'I’m sorry, Father.'"

“Hush--you gave him the Gospel,” was the quiet, penetrating response. There she sat, on the third row of a generic LDS chapel. Not Notre Dame, not Easter morning.  Just another Sunday . . . .

The film Five Corners charts Harry’s [Tim Robbins] path to peace and forgiveness. Watching Martin Luther King’s famous Washington DC speech, he decides Vietnam was enough war, the civil rights movement a cause worth giving one’s life to, even if it means teaming with a group of African Americans on their way to a very dangerous Mississippi. The rub, of course, is that Harry’s father, a cop, has been killed by an African American recently. Meeting the threatening Heinz, fresh from prison, he tells the psychopath [the great John Turturro], “I love you, Heinz.” See how that gives Heinz pause, later, and saves Harry’s life.

No, Cain, we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We are care-givers, nursing the countless wounds of our family, the community, the human family. We are volunteers in a giant hospital. The wounds, the illness are within and without.

Estranged, alienated, Entfremd, we look forward to the day when we are One.  The Haunted Lake becomes Walden Pond, surrounded by trees and laughing children on a warm Saturday afternoon in Concord. Free at last, thank God, we are all free at last.

Atonement: Yes, two become at-one. The cross and the garden are now part of our own personal landscape.

PS:  I will now take some time off to rest for a spell. Be safe, my beloved friends and family.

Home Remedies

We live in an age when you see enough ads on television to prescribe your own medicine.  Never have so many known so much about medicine, illness and their own bodies. We know what's new for our medicine cabinet before we even get to a doctor's office.

While your wife seeks out Bath and Body Works for a magic bottle of aromatic peppermint body lotion that promises calm nerves, you can get a full body scan and walk away knowing your body is full of potential land mines. The Life meter says you have 22 months and one week. Quickly, mortgage your house and head for a Total Health and Happiness Clinic somewhere in Florida.

Off to an army of smiling white coats, garden hoses, pliers and a long thin thing that looks like a vacuum hose. Don’t worry, all equipment, made in China by high school dropouts, are stainless steel—and guaranteed to hurt like hell.

Your own your way to the now mythical 82, where, bleary-eyed from your third cataract operation, leaning on your third new knee you can watch your 600^th game of T-Ball game. Batter up!

Such cynicism. I am sorry. I intrude on personal, sacred stewardships. And I am dangerously light minded when I speak so flippantly of our sacred journey Home. Take your time, dear friends. Back to something less heavy. I want to make you laugh. It’s often my lonely way of embracing you, my friends and family. If I make you laugh in a good way, I show you I love you.

Medicine and illness in the 50s? Very different. What about a lower middle class kid? The son of two well-meaning high school grads whose medicine cabinet was bursting with, oh, your great grandfather can guess: hydrogen peroxide, baking soda [stored in five different locations], an army-green bottle of Listerine [marketed I guess by the CIA], a half gallon canister of Vick's VapoRub, wood alcohol, and assorted bandages.

The rest of the medical supplies were in the kitchen, or, in the case of excessive bleeding, a handy cobweb in the far ceiling corner little Dollie could never reach. No thoughts of a broom with a cleaning cloth on the end. I had to wait for Lonesome Dove to teach me that. And then watch. But I loved being watched. She was our champion "watcher," her green eyes smiling, happy someone else was making progress on spiderwebs and dirty dishes. This morning I would gladly both wash and de-spider web the house to have those green eyes following my every adroit and stallion-like moves.

You laugh about spiderwebs?  It’s a fact. The day of  my little accident, a Piute woman was visiting Mom. She knew everyone in town, so it was not unusual to follow her into Black's Market and end up in a level 2 conversation with a logger or a miner from a place we called the Venadium. She was always reaching out and the greater the need, the longer and stronger her reach.

Anyway, I cut my arm open, as, kids often do such things. Maybe I picked up the wrong end of Mom’s Bowie knife that served as potato peeler and carving knife. The Piute lady, round, sweet but unsmiling, who for some reason, only looked at Mom in the eyes, grabbed a chair and reached for Nature’s Blood Clot. Her soft brown hand swathed my bleeding arm in, yeah, you guessed it, a spider web. The blood stopped immediately, allowing me to scamper into the Bishop summer—to play cowboys and "Indians." This time I chose to be an “Indian” and suffered the immediate consequences. Down I went with 16 Winchester 76 bullets fired by the “good guys,” those ever-ready boys in blue.

Allow me a slight shift for a second here. My sister-in-law, Jennifer once said my parents “worshipped sleep.” I do know that the kitchen closed at 6 [for Dad and Mom, that is] and the yawning started halfway through Frosty Frolics or Lawrence Walk. By 7:30 you’d better find a place to be—to be very quiet. The phone hung free, the line dead. We were officially cut off from the outside world--until 4:30 in the morning, when Dad was up and ready to go. Strangely enough, no phone calls ever came quite that early.

The television separated my folk’s room by 2 inches of either plasterboard or cardboard. “Turn that thing down!” Time for Big Brother, Larry, to issue commands: “Scatter guns,” a line, I think I picked up from an old Lash Larue movie. Or was it that mechanical toy, Bob Steel? The most important thing was to clear the decks by 7:30 at home. As Gene and I moved into adolescence, Dad solved this obvious conflict of circadian rhythms by giving us each a trailer of our own. "There are your new bedrooms, boys," he said.

Gene, fearing imminent war with both China and Russia, stocked his domicile with enough aspirin and bandages to cover Gettysburg. “Quit going out to the store for medical supplies," Mom said.  Senor Boflis [a name which endless research has not uncovered] has started his own Botica.


But Gene's pharmacy houses roughly the same medicine in the house. For Dad, everything came down to baking soda, that Oakie panacea for bunions, sunburn, even “boils.”  The list of ailments rendered harmless by the muscle man holding a hammer was endless. 


Now we were set for the atomic bomb. We knew how to "duck and cover." Gene's Botica was stacked to the ceiling with aspirin, and Dad had a 10-year supply of baking soda.  Seldom sick, he resorted to this Oakie panacea  for "tired feet" [from golfing?] and brushing his teeth.  He didn't even have to borrow a tube of Colgate from Senor Boflis.  

Remember that playing Man [homo ludens] was also Repairing Man.  He loved the notion of saving 22 cents on the toothpaste. "The beauty of this, boys," he would say, while folding a towel deliberately, even the Marine corps. way that made us proud, "is that you are getting better cleaning for practically nothing." Take a cheap shortcut, beat the “system,” emerge triumphant and free of The Man.  Did he ever add up Senor Boflis' inventory?  Or those gallons of orange juice?  Or all those Snickers "for weight gain"and strength?

And now Dollie. Her first-aid kit was about the size of an old-fashioned cigar box. In the 40s and 50s they built those little containers out of real wood. Three of them were large enough to hold 900 marbles I won at the height of my marble powers, in the 8^th grade. Then one day, Gene shot them into space, hoping to kill a bird or two, slung into oblivion by his new Whamo slingshot. 

If Uncle Roy had been around, he could have come up with some form of Mafiosa torture yet unknown to civilization. And I might have used it. I can still see those gems, made for variety and class. Such marbles disappeared, along with the game, around the mid-fifties. Nibs, anyone? Remember: "shooters go."

But real sickness called for her little boxes of her cure-all medicine: Vick's VapoRub. A simple sleep-disturbing cough was worse than, say, Malaria, or what Dollie called  a “bark,” a dress rehearsal for a firing squad because it took so long. Lying in bed, tracking the ceiling cracks, you knew she was coming. You piled into bed at, say, 6, and then buried your face risking a Desdemona-like death. If you slipped, lost focus and surfaced for air, you were doomed. Mom’s bare feet hit the well-worn linoleum floor---kkkkkaaaaaathmpppp. Then the fast-paced—no, the near running to your bedside.  You want me to say, “so she would climb in next to me, hold me to her breast and hum one of her half-finished Spanish ballads.” Sweet.

However, not true. She brought with her Ponce de Leon’s elixir. “Here, put a finger full in each nostril and then . . .swallow a finger-full.” In spite of the label, we could have been ahead of our time, though it’s been quite awhile since I've seen someone eating Vick's VapoRub. Shhhhhhhh. Perhaps word on the street already precedes me.  It could be some kind of “upper” or "downer." But it worked, and you knew it, as you drifted into a vapo-fog--swaddled in VVR.

The Vick's water boarding was only to be outdone by a torture invented by the Kiowa Indians, back before the ever-ready US cavalry was even invented. Yes, the infamous onion poultice. Once again, the philosophy of medicine in those days was "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." Sounds like chemo to me.

The sound of angry, sleep-interrupted bare feet hitting the floor was easily outdone by the sound of surgical instruments in The Kitchen. Out came the heirloom frying pan, the Bowie knife cutting and peeling the onions.  I can still hear the paper-like crackle of onion skins flying around the counter, The top burner explodes into action; soon it warms the onions into a 50s version of Amoxicillin or a  Z-Pack. Then came the swaddling cloth: a worn, faded, paper-thin cotton diaper. No babies anymore, but they played a backup role as “rags”--an all-purpose piece—cotton for all seasons.  Dollie rolls the onions onto the waiting cotton diaper, then, smack! down on your chest, close to your mouth, nearly on your nose. “Now lie there—and sleep!” Oh yes, sleep. Breathing onions. Today onions may abound in Lora’s salads but never, oh never [sounds like a hymn I know], have I touched a fried onion.


In moments of turmoil and self-pity my nose can conjure up the reek of leeks.

This training in do-it-yourself medicine was not lost on me, I assure you. Ask my brother Gene. Isaiah Berlin, in his study of Tolstoy, says the "fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows only one thing." I was a hedgehog.

Somehow Dad and Mom were gone—probably visiting Uncle Gene, searching for another dream. Dad, who was a financial prophet for everyone but himself, wanted his brother to buy 40 acres of vineyard next to us for $40,000.  No deal.  Do you know what 40 acres of ground is worth in Escondido today?

Parents gone, Larry takes over. And there is trouble; there was always trouble. The Guardian Angels swing into action. Gene first drops a glass bottle of milk and then steps on it. This is no flesh wound from a Randolph Scott matinee. We have blood everywhere. Sissy hides in the corner; Michael keenly observes my first real ER experience. Curious fellow. Gene screams loud enough to even wake up Jimmy Lail, the hapless victim of earlier ambuscades at the hands of my brothers become Katzen-Jammer Boys. The Terrors of the Trailer Park.  He shudders and stays down low in his trailer, waiting for an ambulance.

I have to work fast before Gene passes out watching his own blood pooling on the linoleum floor. I put him on the sofa, call for reinforcements. Michael is not strong enough to hold his hands down. He sits on Genet’s flailing arms [Gene became French Canadian the last time the folks left; it soothes him--he finds his roots[?].  Carol sits on his legs, her face turned. I grab the round carton of salt; you know, the one with the little girl carrying an umbrella.

It Rains Salt. We're into something from Gone with the Wind.  I can hear that shattered Confederate in butternut, crying, "Don’t cut; Don’t cut!" We don't even have a saw.  Later in college I would learn about Okham's Razor, which translated into Texan means, "keep it simple, stupid." We settle for salt.

Carol heroically offers to stuff a recycled diaper into Gene’s mouth. Equally heroic and disgusted, he turns aside—and continues to scream. The salt, now starts taking the shape of a miniature Mt. Saint Helens. It does its work. We save his foot, and he proudly bears the battle scars today.  He tells people it was Cold Harbor. Or was it The Battle of the Wilderness?

So here we have a living, albeit painful example, of Yankee Ingenuity, the roots of our courageous pride as Americans.  The spirit of Ben Franklin and our own forefathers lingers here. "Home Remedies." Do our grandchildren even believe that there is any kind of remedy at home?  Our home?  Don't we need a professional?  A clinic?  A Workshop?  Counseling? Sylvan Learning Center?  More name brands in our closets?  Yet another "App" for a screen?


A courageous pride. Our roots. You, my grandchildren, who will read and understand this only when you are in your late 30s.  You will realize you need to dig deep and find that gutsy and for the most part happy past your great grandparents knew.  And we found the remedies . . . because we had to.

Your legacy and . . . mine.  

Playing Amigos

Those of us, who moved from one town to another, know the pain of waving goodbye, and the pain again, of saying hello to strangers.

But I have a feeling that may be an Eternal Life’s Pattern. Are there dozens of so-called “airports” in our endless journey? My Dad always felt moving was progress, which didn’t always mean making more money. It usually meant making the same amount of money doing something different.

When he walked away from Petrolane Corporation’s offer to stay and run Mountain Gas in Bishop, they offered him more monthly salary than he would ever make again, playing corporate businessman, opening their own store in the morning, publishing business cards but with his name.

But Dad insisted on being his own man.  His dreaming of "black swans," made me think of Willie Loman, that painful version of the American Dream. However, Pop was sometimes bigger than life for me and loved by everyone. They affectionately called him The Little Giant. He dreamed like Willie but he knew enough about life to ignore alcohol—except in small packages, say, a can of Bud Light, sitting in the storeroom with Sam Powers, his gentle giant friend, who painted Camp Pendleton army green buildings 8 hours a day and then wandered out to the store to be with Dad.  He would fill a car once in a while with 18 cent Rio Grande Regular and once, he even condescended to play upstart Gene, my brother, a game of checkers.

Not this time. This was not the Battle of Little Big Horn with Uncle Gene as Custer. In less time than it took me to snatch yet another Snickers and gobble it down, the board was clean and The Terror of the Junior Marines was “on the canvas,” as Sam whispered, "It's ovah," his Maine accent still stuck on some words.

It was clear, though, that when I stood up; or, leaned forward, to be honest, and told Dad that I was “not going into business,” I really meant it.

I wanted a salary, security, and safety. I would take Dad’s sage advice and redefine the American Dream. Unlike Nick, in The Great Gatsby, I would not even look across the harbor for the Green light—because there would be only the White Light of God—but no Green Light and no Daisy.

Strange.  I always wanted to be someone else’s man.  By the time my mission in Germany had ground to a 30-month halt, I was looking for a way to be a perpetual student. I liked the “student” rhythm. And at Ricks College that’s what I found. I wanted a salary, a desk, some books and friends to spend my life with. It all happened—well, nearly. I am writing this at 2 in the morning from Austin, Texas, anxiously awaiting the sound of rain. Nothing.

Think of it, though, children. You knew of a man, your grandpa, who slept lightly on Sunday night, not because he had the Monday “blues,” but because he couldn’t wait to be in the classroom, teaching, loving the ideas, and loving the often bewildered but laughing students.

Paradise Regained.

Good people surrounded me, driven by the same sweet compulsions. Ricks was, the cynics say, "The Lord’s College." Well, if you describe a place where there was no political infighting, struggle for rank, or special recognition, a place where everywhere you walked, you just might walk into a colleague who would see you in the temple within the next week. "Then," as Jerry Seinfeld would say, defining yet another human phenomenon: "I think we’re talking about a preeeettty special place."

We shared the hall with the nursing college, so Barbara Quirl was always ready to bandage a thumb or offer the latest on bi-polar disorder, an especially Mother Nature designed torture rack for our home. She drew and then surgically quartered Carolyn’s brain on a regular basis.

Down the hall lived Don Decker, who sneaked into the Marines at 16, traveling to Hell and back by way of Iwo Jima. That meant our daily ritual of handball was Iwo all over again. Craggy faced, he had the heart of a lion—a Good Lion—and the students and those of us who knew him, loved him. I think he read Homer’s Odyssey 50 times and certainly knew dozens of pages by heart—not by head—by heart.

Next door to him was Don Hunter, part time dairyman, poet, teacher, temple sealer, father of 8 children [I think] and a gem of a wife, who really made all of the above possible. He is not only the only guy in Idaho [the whole US?] to have read all of Henry James, but to have both finished The Ambassadors and then walked around the Rexburg winter to think it through.

Don Hammar, our large, deep-voiced Norwegian Viking had the most strength; a stellar member of the handball quintet, he had a vicious serve, the only one of us, really, who could make the ball dance. If you managed to get it back, you had a chance. He was weak in the ankles, so our only hope on his good days was for an ankle to bend like a rubber band and send the gentle giant to the floor. He also had the lowest threshold of pain, so that caused problems and created rare opportunities for the “Dons” to win the Most Critical Point in The Universe! Yelping like Aztecs, Hunter and Decker jumped over The Fallen Viking’s anguished body, supine on the hardwood.  I apologize for Decker and Hunter, Old War-Scarred Warrior. Remember your Aztec history: Death to the losers!

Let me further intercede on behalf of their failings because they were young. In spite of Hammar’s groans, Decker thought only of entrenched Japanese, Hunter of a possible easy point.  It would make milking the cow easier that night.

Bill Conway and I usually tried to stay out of the way of the two Peterbilt trucks and drag the raging Hammar to shore.

Conway was the clinician, expert in self-analysis of posture, swing, follow-through, and body position. I think he knew all of the rules. But his game, for all the soul-searching, didn’t seem to change all that much. He won and lost about as much in the end as he had in the beginning.  One Eternal Round.

I simply aimed for the front wall and was notorious for the infamous “dinker,” a return that slowed to 2 mph and died a slow death in one of the two corners.

Decker would quietly—no very loudly--respond that “most of your shots are so lame they’re not worth going after.” I think he wanted the hard black little ball to bounce with vigor off the ceiling and the four walls. The court was, after all, a box.

If he and Hammar had bazookas, I was carrying a .22, an apparent weapon of choice in our family. Ask my Uncle Roy.

Conway and Hunter were better at playing position and won a lot of games with cunning. I was usually too bogged down in protective gear: goggles, sweatsuit [which hid my imposing calves], headband and wristbands. I looked like a mummy and moved like one. Mummy speed.

Looking back, I was the Court Jester. When Conway or Decker, especially, raced to the back or head-on for the dying duck dinker, I would yell a distracting “troubles!” Troubles? I was working on something beyond the handball court. Fishing for larger, cosmic questions was my business. Trouble at home?  In Denmark? At the office, which a student had set afire?

It rarely worked, but the pause and the stutter it occasionally created made my day. Conway and Hunter kept a four-year score sheet, each claiming “total victory,” something Nixon would bark, or some other politician or general.

Surprisingly, neither Hammar nor Decker seemed to care once the game ended. The dead lions were removed and Nero went home. Actually, I secretly kept score and have the numbers to prove that I WON MORE GAMES. SSSSHHHHHH.

Bill Conway, an accomplished machinist and wood-worker, rebuilds airplanes and mills blocks of metal into diminutive steam engines. A Man for All Seasons. Here is a man who taught a superb Shakespeare class, complete with a much-borrowed test bank and then spent Saturdays rebuilding century-old lathes in order to mill custom-designed engine parts. And now he paints landscapes.

Don Hunter still writes a little poetry, woodworks in his shop, identifies birds of all feathers, and paints. He even went back to school to take painting classes after three LDS missions, after one in Mexico where he labored as a 19 year old. With Spanish-speaking Nita, they served as presidents in Mexico, in humanitarian service in Panama, and as temple president and matron in Santiago. As Brigham said of Jeddy Grant’s funeral: “He served more than a 100 years in the Lord’s church--in less than 35 years.” [Hunter is now 82.]

Don Decker exited this world in grand, Greek epic style:  Failing to belt up to demonstrate a “simple maneuver” on a dangerous cliff in the Grand Tetons, he slipped, falling to his death in the 80s. ”He awakens,” says Hunter, in a eulogy-poem, “to a view of the Tetons/And he will know where he is.” Fearless in the face of death, like my Dad. “Tough minded,” William James calls them.

Yes you will arise, Donald Decker. We still miss you and your warrior spirit, a leader in God’s Army in Another Place.

Don Hammar, another Renaissance man, pours cement, can do finish carpentry and feels at home as a cuisine-artiste of some renown. In fact a friend, with some aplomb, some, I say, asked if Don would be cooking my funeral dinner. Don has cooked for those who mourn. At my wife’s funeral, he couldn’t fix my broken heart, but he and Joan sure “fixed” a lot of grateful people’s stomachs.

But before the funeral there were other cuisine encounters. One day he stopped by with a fresh huckleberry pie. I was trying to paint my daughter’s room. “You have more paint on you than on the walls,” he laughed his hardy laugh.  He came into the house, grabbed a little paint rag and began to paint without protective gear: no face mask, no coveralls, no paint rag the size of a the sail of the Pinta [or Santa Maria]. Mozart’s Concerto for Clarinet—the theme song for Out of Africa—played quietly while the winter snow flew and fell. He moved across the ceiling with the roller, covered the walls, and never even had to dob a stain on his clothes from the wet paint.

“Don,” my daughter, Alison asked, “can you show me how to make your cinnamon rolls?”

"Sure; turn on the oven to 400 and we’ll wait."  Back to painting and humming. IT WAS A MOMENT. Mozart and the smell of baking rolls filled the house while snow flittered out of the dark Rexburg winter skies.  In an hour or so we were on the verge of baking greatness, and DaVinci had come and gone.  Now that’s a keeper.

Hammar, in spite of chronic injuries, apparently lived through the handball phase and is doing better these days. No handball, a sport only for the young, but still teaching, wondering if I’ll return this month so we can drive to Kilgore about 3 in the afternoon, ski out 5 miles and make it back before midnight. Afterwards we could eat an entire huckleberry pie.

He was brilliant enough to get into medical school at the University of Washington, but I could never convince him that it would likely take as long to ski back as it took to ski out.

You ask, where is your brother, Gene, your walking companion for 20 years? Well, it was “quick and dirty,” as they say in Idaho. My brother slid into my cross-country skis, fell on his face in a couple of feet of snow, brushed himself off and never looked back. When President Hafen asked what the difference might be between us, Gene said, “Larry’s the compulsive; I’m the obsessive.”

And here we are at 2:30 in the morning; Gene sits in his office, his computer clicking, obeying his regular-army, quick-moving index finger, preparing for a class he’s taught 508 times. I’m up at this wretched hour, unable to sleep, writing about eternal friends who came marching into my dreams. They and all my dear friends, God’s kind gift to me, live within my mind and heart.

Scott Samuelson, the Rookie, arrived too late for the handball epoch. After 5 years, shoulders, knees, and elbows froze up. The smell of Icy Hot filled our homes at night. Other sounds replaced the thunk of the black spheroid.

Samuelson, like these other talented guys, chose racquetball, along with poetry, painting, woodworking, etc. The dreaded racquetball? Too much a lethal weapon. To bump shoulders with one of the first to hit the sand at Iwo was one thing; to be on the wrong end of a pesky club was something else. 

But with Scotty, had I tried the sport, I would have been in good hands. He would have beaten me, but gently, sweetly.  It would even have felt good.

So we “few, we happy” five, left the “Playing Fields of Eton.” Exercise died and Walking-While-Talking was born. Ok, I admit my earlier mistake. For 5 magic years, I Was Homo Ludens. As with the Randy Miller, Ron Messer, and Ralph Thompson Reading Groups, something sweet and eternal lingers long after the lights are, so to speak, turned off and the warriors are heading home. The sweet memories of friendship endure.  No one really kept score [except Hunter], but all of us remember being together.

And in spite of “troubles,” we move on, without Decker, remembering the time we were the Playing Amigos.

Perhaps the tone has gotten out of hand, here. The night wears on and now I’m completely awake and emotional. It was about games, though, wasn’t it? I mean playing, as Huizinga instructs us, allows us to play out the earth’s curse, that hunger every man has to either go to war or play football.

And so we end with the Rookie, Scotty. I did tell you he would hug afterwards, but don’t forget your Bandaids.

Scotty worked from the top of the ability ladder down. Why not begin with the president of the college? A man, competitive to make sure, he finished dessert before you did because he had to. Life was a CONTEST! EVERYTHING. Even the sweet ritual every morning any caring husband knows: making the bed, his half, at least. But you would think him the only man on the globe to help his wife make the bed in the morning—and in less than a minute.

I see him now: jaw squared, muscles tight as violin strings, racquet ready for mayhem. But he always lost. And he didn’t like to lose, which made “our man,” Scotty’s constant victories, even sweeter. No malice, mind you. It’s only a game.

I remind you and me that rigor and gut-straining courage built this Kingdom. And with profound respect, I bow to our former president. I’ve just reread The Giant Joshua. Whipple charts the struggle, that pioneer sinew that built, prophetically, southern Utah into what it is today—good and bad.

Allow Maurine’s irony its play. Faith is the accommodation of ambiguity. And our college and the church became stronger because of that president, who, to be honest, did lead a herd of thoroughbreds to water, and they did drink.

But  he could never handle Scotty’s backhand.

And here in Austin, now early in the morning, all is silent. My Carolyn-designed house, her signature everywhere, covers another family, now a rented house.  Here, the Tabernacle Choir guides me through Handel.

And all is very quiet.