Archive for the ‘General’ Category

That would be today.  Today, the day before the last day of school, the penultimate day of the school year, is also the second-best day of the school year.  Seems logical, doesn’t it?  Obviously it can’t be the BEST day of the school year, because that’s tomorrow, right?

Nope.

The BEST day of the school year is the FIRST day of the school year.  Think about it.  There’s nothing bad about that day.  Nobody really gets any work to do, you see all your friends again after months apart, and the year ahead doesn’t seem so incredibly soul-crushing because you honestly can’t remember how bad it gets in February.  New clothes, new school supplies, new friends, new stuff to learn and to look forward to.  Don’t talk to me about the sadness at the death of summer.  The weather’s still good, and the real fun of the summer came to an end in mid-August when you started buying clothes for school, so there hasn’t been any juice left in that orange for a couple of weeks.  It’s clean, trackless sand and football games for months ahead.

But today is a pretty good day, too.  The work is all done.  Nobody gets homework, or takes tests, or has anything of substance to do.  It’s Field Day, or dance day, or whatever your school’s tradition is.  Nobody’s even in the classroom much, let alone doing schoolwork.  There’s the glow of a job done, if not done particularly well, and the view, over the rise in the hill, of a bright sunny country just waiting for people to play in it for a few months.  But it still isn’t the LAST day of school, when the goodbyes begin and you know, even very young, that some of these people aren’t ever going to be part of your life again.  The day-before day has no overhang of that wistful sadness.  It’s just a party – but a well-earned party, the very best kind.  It’s the last couple of free throws, with 20 seconds left, that give you that 7-point lead that you can’t now lose.  It’s the last chapter of the terrific novel where you get to find out what happily-ever-after means for the hero and the heroine, now that evil has been vanquished.

And here, it’s sunny and 65, about the best weather it’s possible to have.  At last.

Do you miss the next-to-last day of school as much as I do?  Do you still feel some of its power echoing through your cubicle, as I do?  Not that I have a cubicle, but still.

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Many of you know that I’ve been in political PR for most of my life.  That makes stories like Rep. Anthony Wiener’s wiener all the more interesting to me, because out there for all to see is the spectacular Charlie-Browning of a political career because the PR has been so impossibly botched.  It’s stories like this that give guys like me a job.  You mess this up – and don’t think your favorite politician can’t have this happen to him - and it’s over.  You’re a laughingstock and a byword forever.  Even if he doesn’t resign, which I think he won’t, or get unelected next go-round, which I think he also won’t, he’ll never do another substantive thing politically.  He’s toxic.

But as I got to thinking about it, I started having more sympathy for what he’s done stumbling about in public and making a shame of himself.  Seriously, PR pals, what do you do here?  How DO you go about saying “I take pictures of my crotch all the time, so I don’t know if that is a picture of me or not, but one thing I know for sure, it wasn’t ME that sent the picture to Seattle”?  There isn’t enough lipstick in all the world for that pig.

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Reminding everyone that Saturday, all day, is the Fundraiser for Gabriel.  It’s at the Legacy Center in Lehi, right in the center of town.  Jill Peterson, my impossible Exec, has been working her guts out to make this thing a success.  There will be a huge yard/garage sale, then activities, food, dancing, and a pool party.  So come, check it out, go away and come back for more.  So many good people have put so much time and attention into this…Rich Wiltbank, Mark and Anjanette Lofgren, too many people to mention.  Please help them make it a success.

Three months ago, my little son Gabriel broke his leg, an event exhaustively chronicled in these pages here, here, here, here, etc.

Now that we’ve come out of the day-to-day difficulties relating to that injury, I thought I’d recap some of the lessons and give an update on what has happened in the aftermath.

First, the medical bills are not as catastrophic as we thought they would be.  They never reached the $20,000 mark, stopping just short of $15,000, although there is still one bill we think we’re supposed to get, but since no one is contacting us about it, forgive us if we don’t volunteer to go get it.  We have some negotiating room left as well, and all our sources have indicated that the bargaining will go better if we have cash to pay off whatever the final figure is.  More on that in a sec.

Second, Gabriel is fine.  By “fine”, I mean that he shows no detectable physical effects from the injury.  His skin healed very quickly and he is in no pain.  He does have a hitch in his giddy-up, but you can’t tell that unless you are intently watching him and knew what he could do before.  He jumps on the trampoline, runs about all over, generally behaves like you’d expect a 2-year-old to do.  There will obviously be no lasting physical damage from the experience, and of course he can’t remember it.  For this we are extremely grateful and conscious of the fact that we are blessed.

That said, there are a couple of non-physical remnants of the cast.  Gabriel does not sleep through the night any more.  One day we’re confident he will, but at this point, he still wakes up at least once every night.  We disassembled his crib during the six weeks of the cast, because we couldn’t lift him into it without hurting him, so he sleeps in a bed now, which means he can get out of it at will.  We find him standing next to our bed at many a 2am.  Generally, he goes back down pretty easily, especially for Dad, but we dream of the day he won’t get up at all.

He drank a lot from a bottle when he was in the cast, because of the no spilling and ease of operation, and now he wants a bottle practically every minute of the day.  We can deal, though it’s annoying.  But the worst of it is that he was once potty-trained, and now he isn’t.  At all.  As in, he has no desire, at all, to use the toilet.  No curiosity, no interest.  Nothing.  When he originally did the potty-training, he was very quick to get it, as he has a volume of examples in front of him to imitate and he is a social child.  But now, nothing.  We’re not forcing it – he’s not even three yet – but it does make us occasionally look wistfully back to early February when we didn’t use up five diapers a day.

In all, we gained significantly more than we lost from this, as I tried to indicate in this post.  Our huge number of new and intensified friendships, all by itself, would have made the experience worthwhile, but we learned tremendously ourselves, and we’re still learning and growing and improving.  It has made us more patient as parents, more unified as a family, more aware of others that have and will have similar and greater challenges to overcome.

And there’s one more thing I’d like to bring to your attention, though I feel a little funny doing it.  As I mentioned many times along this journey, we don’t have medical insurance, and paying out $10-15,000 for doctor bills is a bit beyond our resources.  Some good friends have stepped in and put together a fundraiser to see if we can eliminate the debt overhang from this.  It’s on June 4 in Lehi at the Legacy Center (Main and Center), and goes all day.  There will be a garage sale (for which we desperately need more items to sell, those of you that are spring cleaning and getting ready to de-clutter), a bake sale, a silent auction, whole rafts of things (tickets here).  There’s a family dance, a pool party, and I’m not sure what all, but Jill Peterson can tell you if you email her at jillyn_oc_ca@yahoo.com.  We will be absurdly grateful for anything you could do to assist.  All proceeds go to defray medical expenses (and give us negotiating leverage), and if we raise more than we need, all of those additional proceeds will go into a permanent fund for assisting other families in similar difficulties.  We’d like to make lasting good from what was a freaky bit of bad luck, and we hope very much that you’ll be willing to help us.

We’ve been consuming a good deal of media here lately, and I wanted to get some reviews down, in case you were looking for something to read/watch/listen to.  One word reviews, of course, because who has time?

Megamind - solid.

Toy Story 3 – superb.

Iron Man 2 – why?

Ponyo - engaging.

Mitch Albom’s For One More Day – meh.

William Mayne’s All the King’s Men – rewarding.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy – aging.

Kristine Katherine Rusch’s Retrieval Artist series – gripping.

Drew Carey and company, Drew Carey’s Improvaganza (Game Show Network) – uneven (but often funny).

Doctor Who, on BBC America – scintillating.

Castle, on ABC – improving (and I liked it before).

Okay, so some of those are more than one word.  Sue me.

What about you?  What are you watching/reading/listening to?

This post is mostly for those that are LDS, which is short for Latter-Day Saints, which is itself short for Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is what everyone who is not LDS (and, let’s face it, most people that are) call Mormons.  It will be perfectly intelligible to those that are not members, but it will be especially harsh on those that are.  You’ve been warned.

So we’re at church yesterday.  It was Easter, after all.

No, wait.  We’re at church every Sunday.  Anyway we were at church, and I was out in the hall with Gabriel getting a drink, and some people walked by and I wished them a happy Easter.  They smiled and said, “Oh, that’s right!  It is Easter.  We forget, you know, since we don’t have any little children around.”

You will be so proud of me that I did not say, “Naturally.  You’d forget about the single most important event in the history of history because you didn’t have little plastic pastel eggs to remind you.  Entirely understandable.”

Let me repeat.  I did NOT say that.  I didn’t say anything.  But I thought it, and I’ve thought it a lot over the years, that Easter is the most underappreciated of all the holidays.  People talk about Mother’s Day being kind of a bad way to celebrate mothers, and I don’t necessarily disagree.  But on Mothers Day we will have five talks about mothers and a whole primary section of songs about mothers and at the end we’ll have little appreciative tokens (like tomato plants, or flowers or candy) for the mothers.

Whereas, and not for the first time, we went through the entire sacrament meeting without the word “Easter” being spoken.  The only reference to it was my having the choir sing a special number.  We sang Joy to the World, which is, as far as I’m concerned, the best Easter song there is, except maybe the Halelujah Chorus.  Perhaps not coincidentally, another song we also sing exclusively at Christmas.  But I digress.

Easter is the reason that Christmas makes any difference at all.  Children were born before Jesus, you know.  A lot of them.  Births are worth celebrating, surely; we do some of that our own selves.  I like celebrations of all kinds.  The hoopla surrounding the birth of Christ is wonderful, and I love it as hard as the next guy, but really, the birth is just…a birth.  Even if the mother was a virgin, which, admittedly, doesn’t happen every day.  EVEN SO.  That’s worth, what, a National Enquirer article?  It’s a baby.  Born into some obscurity and relative poverty.  An unusual child, certainly, but no matter how you slice it, it’s not the birth that mattered.

Whereas, all of those children that were born died, eventually.  How many of those dead people rose again?

None of them.  Easter is the first time that happened.  THAT is worth celebrating.  Then, even better, because Jesus in rising from the dead became the Christ, the Redeemer, the Savior of the World, all of us get to do the same at some point, so that death is not the end and our lives do not have to be a story of separation and loss.  We can go Home again.

If Jesus fails, then there is no Easter.  But then there isn’t any Christmas, either.  Not going to be much point in being a Christian, is there, if there’s no Christ.  The entirety of our religion, of all Christian religions, is encompassed in this: that Christ died for us, and rose on the third day, that we, too, might live.  That’s the entire point of this religion.

So forgive me if I become slightly annoyed that you can be standing in the hallway of a church building, upon which is written the name of the Lord Jesus, about to go into a meeting the name of which is in reference to the body and blood of Christ, telling me that you forgot it was Easter because nobody was around to get all shrieky about Peeps and plastic grass.

I won’t hit you.  I’ve absorbed that much of my lessons.  But I’ll wonder what you’re doing there, as Heaven is my witness I will.

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I’ll be the one to say it: the LDS are absolutely awful at Easter.  We, of all the Christians, understand the reality of the resurrection of Christ in a visceral, undeniable way, and we are by far the worst at celebrating it.

If you’re LDS, you know that the place where our religion breaks with most other Christian faiths is the reality of the physical, necessary resurrection, not just of ourselves, but of Christ as well.  The resurrection should be the most celebrated event in our faith, because it is one of the raisons d’etre of our faith.

Growing up in Virginia, I wasn’t exactly surrounded by Mormons.  I went to all sorts of other churches, and liked most of them.  I like religion.  I think it’s great.  At Easter, I got to see a lot of ways to celebrate, because my high school singing group was asked to perform at a lot of them (I have to emphasize this – we were very good).  I went to Methodist sunrise service and Catholic mass and you name it.  Easter was a great holiday for that.  Music everywhere.  Festivities.  Real celebrations – and why not?  The Christ resurrected is the whole point of Christianity.  It’s worth mentioning, you know, when it comes about.

In Hungary, we adopted a protestant custom that I love to this day, wherein you greet people at church not by saying “jo reggelt” (good morning) or “szervusztok” (essentially, hey there, how you doin’), but by saying “Feltámadott! (He is risen!), to which the answer is “Igy van” (it is so) or, my favorite, “Ahogy mondott.” (As He said.)  But we had to steal this from the Calvinists, because there really aren’t Easter traditions in the LDS church.

You can say that’s because of the Puritan strain that runs like a chocolate ribbon through the Fudge Ripple of our religious ice cream.  Perhaps.  That doesn’t stop Santa Claus from appearing at Christmas parties, does it?  It doesn’t stop us from having ward-wide trunk-or-treats and spook alleys at church, among a host of things I find almost impossible to believe.  We have stake dances (if you’re not LDS, just go with it, we’re nearly done with the jargon).  We have wedding receptions in our cultural halls (that’s the last one, I promise).  We dance and sing and celebrate all sorts of things, just not the most important thing there is to celebrate.

It’s worse than that.  The Messiah, which the very name of says Easter, is now a Christmas piece, which would have flummoxed Handel.  In the LDS hymnbook, home to 348 pieces of music, how many are dedicated to Easter?  Four.  We’re not even trying, people.  Our Easter sacrament meetings are essentially indistinguishable from every other week of the year.  It is possible to go through the entire day without hearing the word Easter at all.  I shouldn’t have to mention that that is categorically impossible in every other church in the whole of Christendom.

And don’t give me the crap about Easter having been co-opted by the Easter Bunny.  When I start seeing egg-coloring dye in the stores on January 3, then you can tell me that Easter has been over-commercialized.  Christmas gets celebrated with festivals of all kinds thrown by our people, despite the routine appearance of the Jolly Round Elf.  If we wanted to, we’d celebrate Easter.  But we don’t.

I find this incredibly sad.

NOTE: those of you that are of other faiths, or other branches of the same Christian faith, here’s an opportunity to do the mote and the beam thing, and see if your faith traditions actually enshrine what you believe to be central to your beliefs.  If you have no work to do there, congratulations, but I bet you do.

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No problem without a solution, eh?  So I do have a couple of suggestions.

Yesterday my mother put together an Easter program with our family.  We had a set of scriptures read by the boys of the family that were of age, followed by the girls singing “Did Jesus Really Live Again?” a lovely primary song.  It was a very nice little program, and it helped.  You can do that kind of thing, too.

We never have Easter egg hunts on the Sabbath.  I don’t myself see how that activity is even remotely Sabbath-worthy, but if you do, I invite you to consider making a change.  It’s just a suggestion.  Saturdays work great for those things.  We do color eggs as a family, and that’s a fun activity, but of course that’s not what we do on Sunday.  You don’t have to eliminate everything culturally fun about Easter to be able to focus on the point of the holiday.  You can decorate a tree, you can decorate eggs.  Same principle.

Also, yesterday I came home from church and fired up the Messiah, starting at about the 18^th section.  At that point you’ve gotten the birth announcement out of the way and we’re to the part about Jesus being the Savior, not just a baby.  You get to keep the Halelujah Chorus, too (it’s section 39, not anywhere near the Christmas part), so that’s nice, and you can really dig in to the Amen at the end, which is the best part of the oratorio.  I’ll do that again, and one of these years, we’re going to do the full-blown Messiah sing-in on Easter week.  You’re all invited.

My sisters made resurrection rolls this week.  You can judge for yourself, but the kids liked it.  No doubt you have suggestions of your own, and I’d be thrilled to hear them.  We can reverse this, people.  We can bring Easter back to its rightful place at the center of our Christian worship.  In fact, I think we must.

We’re going to see dark times.  We are going to be challenged, and we are going to be threatened, and we are going to die.  As people, and each of us individually, we are going to have these things come to us, and I testify to you that Christmas will not be enough to save us.  No, we are each of us going to have to go to Gethsemane and Golgotha, not just Bethlehem.  Without the promise of the Garden Tomb, where will we find the strength to believe that horror and death give way to joy and life eternal?  That they have given way, that they must give way, in the end?

We find that strength in Easter, in the reality of the Risen Lord, else our faith is vain, and we are of all men most miserable.  Here is a fervent prayer that we will do some work toward restoring that greatest of all events to the center of our faith, where it will do as Christ promises, becoming a well of living water, springing up to everlasting life and joy eternal.

Feltámadott!

Today is the birthday of Jillyn Hawkley Peterson, one of the best people in the world, whether she believes it or not.  About eight weeks ago she re-entered my life like a gale and blew off all the smog that had collected there, changing in moments some things and beginning transformations that still have not come entirely to fruition.  Her efficiency and drive and boundless energy have led several people to inquire of me, “where do I get a Jill?”  This post, on her birthday, is an explanation of where she came from, and one of why that question’s answer is always, “sorry, I don’t think you can.”

Twenty-five years ago, or thereabouts, I was in the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, UT, preparing (I use the term loosely) to serve a two-year Mormon mission to the People’s Republic of Hungary.  As I was the first missionary called there from the States, and the only one at the time, my training regimen was somewhat haphazard.  Instead of being in class all the time, I frequently had time to myself, and on Wednesdays, that meant that I went to the front of the MTC and acted as a self-appointed tour guide.  Wednesdays, all the new missionaries arrived.

With their families.

And occasionally, those families included sisters of appropriate age.

Okay, there wasn’t anything I could DO about those sisters even if they were there, which they often weren’t, so most of the time I just helped the poor lost souls find their way to the farewell meeting, and carried their luggage.  Which is why I was there when the Hawkley family from Mountain Home, ID showed up to drop off Elder Danny.

Elder Danny had a sister of the appropriate age, as it happened, and her name was Jillyn.  As it happened, I knew someone from Mountain Home; I had dated a girl for five or six years whose family had recently moved there.  Mirabile dictu, the families knew each other, and Jill and Katie were friends.  That allowed me to write to Katie and ask for Jill’s address, and Jill, in typical fashion, did the same in reverse.

We wrote each other for two solid years.  Jill was the closest thing I had to a girlfriend while I was across the world, and she connected me to real things.  We became good friends, sent each other gifts, including an absolutely brilliant Doctor Who-esque scarf that I loved and that I gave away to a poor Hungarian family just before I left the country.  I was, of course, half in love with her the whole time, and thought that we might get together when I returned home.

Which in due course I did, and we did indeed get together.  Once.  She had me over to dinner, and it was not a particularly memorable occasion, for all that we knew each other very well and knew that we liked each other’s company.  There just weren’t any sparks, in either direction.  A few months later I met Jeanette, and about the same time Jill went on a mission her own self, to Iowa.

Cue a twenty-year separation.

We didn’t write, didn’t call, and somehow didn’t forget about each other.  I was dancing back and forth from career to career, finally settling on a mushrooming mortgage business, and Jill was moving all over the country and the world, having two children, and processing loans herself for her own husband’s mortgage business at one point.

Facebook connected us again about two years ago, to find that Jill was on her way to Australia, she hoped for a long time.  We had a brief interaction in support of a friend of mine in need, and nothing much more.

Until Gabriel broke his leg.  And all on a sudden, Jill was there again.

She volunteered to come and babysit so that Jeanette could come to my play, and thought that before she did so, she might want to come by so Gabriel and Jeanette could meet her before that evening, make sure it was going to be okay.  Since she was in town anyway filling out paperwork to start working for HobbyLobby, she came to see if I was at the office.  I was.  She stayed three hours.

For several years, it’s been apparent to me that I had more ideas, more businesses even, than I could possibly handle myself.  I’d tried several assistants without much success, mostly because I personally don’t know how to really use one effectively.  To use an analogy that will be familiar, I was Tony Stark, and nobody but Pepper Potts would possibly be able to deal with me.  But I had to have one, and especially with being named the PR Director at City First, I was now dropping so many balls that I was in some level of despair.  Then Gabriel’s injury happened and the level deepened.

Jill heard all this.  More, she felt it and knew some of it because she’s the sort that can draw the pain out into the open and deal with it.  And when I told her I was desperate for help in so many ways, she just nodded.  She already had a job.

Which the next day, she quit.  And then she came over to the house, and met Jeanette and Gabriel, and stayed five hours. At about hour four, she looked at me across the dining room table and said “what I want to talk to you about…”  The next day, she moved in and took over my business life.  Pepper Potts arrived.

I could never pay her what she’s worth, not even a tiny fraction of it, and she’d work for the sheer joy and challenge of it anyhow.  She’s dug in with both hands and both feet and the last eight weeks have flown by.  She pruned off so much dead wood from the tree of my business life that I found I could see again, could begin to imagine reaching some of those goals I thought had passed me by.  She saved my life.  Really, she did.  What I call my life now was in intensive care, and now is out of danger and starting to look seriously at rehab and returning to full health.

Jeanette says I’m happy again.  The business is improving and I have time to do some of the things I was neglecting.  All this, and we’re just getting started.

So Jill, this is the gift I have to give, that you have my trust and my confidence, my commitment and my enthusiasm.  My admiration and my gratitude.  Here’s to a long, long partnership with everything you ever wanted along the way.

Happy birthday.  And thank you.