Holiday Cheer

Tomorrow is New Year’s Day, and for all intents and purposes, the holidays are over. So is another year. Every year I try to create memories for my kids and with my kids. Sometimes I go through elaborate plans and spend exorbitant amounts of money to accomplish this. I can’t figure out how or why, but usually, in spite of my best efforts, some of my favorite memories happen randomly, spontaneously without any money or effort. Here’s my best example from this year:
We went to our ward Christmas party. It was a Polar Express theme, and Conductor/Bishop handed out a little jingle bell on a ribbon to every person as they walked in the door. Hundreds of kids, thousands of kids, ran here and then, some screaming, some laughing, some hanging on their parent’s arm, some waiting for Santa Claus, some filling their plates with yet another pile brownies/cookies/cakes/pastries from the dessert table. There was one boy—I don’t even know who it was—who made the night for me.
Steve went into the boy’s bathroom during the evening, and came back chuckling. He said in the stall next to him was a little boy, probably no more than three years old, with his pants down around his sneakers, and while he sat, legs dangling, he shook his little bell and sang Jingle Bells at the top of his voice. It was spontaneous celebration, purely without plan or money. It was pure Christmas joy. We laughed about it the rest of the night, and still when it comes to mind I have to stop for a minute and laugh to myself. All season long I kept wishing I could celebrate with that kind of spontaneous joy.
Now Christmas is over, and we turn our minds instead to our New Year’s resolutions. I keep going back to that little boy in the bathroom stall taking a private moment to vocalize his excitement. I realized when I sat down to set my resolutions, that’s what I want out of the new year. I don’t plan to sing in any public bathroom stalls, but I do want to develop the ability to experience spontaneous joy.
May we all be better at becoming like a little child, and let the proverbial bathroom stalls ring with joy.

Remebering the Pearl Harbor Attack

Today is December 7, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Being a writer for a newspaper sometimes allows me really cool opportunities, like this one: interviewing a survivor of the attack.
Dorothy Chenchick’s husband was a tech sergeant in the Marines, and they had been at the Marine base by Pearl Harbor since June of 1941. Dorothy was only 18 years old, and pregnant with her first child. They were living on Ewa Beach where most of the families of the Marines lived.
She and her husband woke up around 7 a.m. with the noise. She looked outside and saw all the black smoke, and they ran out in the yard where they watched the Japanese planes circle and come around again.
The planes came around right around over their house. A plane dived so close she saw the pilot’s face and the fur of his coat around his face. The plane was so close she could have hit it with a rock, but she didn’t wait around to give it a try. She high-tailed it back into the house. Later they found 37 bullet holes in their house.
Dorothy’s husband put on his uniform and ran to the base to see what he could do. She didn’t see him for three days, and didn’t know if he was a live or dead during that time. She heard later that he had climbed inside a bulldozer and had moved burning planes away from those that were still intact, and helped to save lives.
“Everyone was very courageous that day,” she said. “It was bedlam. It’s been 67 years, and I still remember it vividly,” she said.
Dorothy said that the houses being shot up are part of the story that isn’t often told. Women and children were shot inside their houses, and she remembered one Marine that stood on his front lawn and shot at the planes with his pistol. Dorothy was so scared she packed everything she owned.
“I didn’t like it at all! I was leaving!” she said.
Dorothy talked about what a well-planned attack it was.
“The sailors had all been out Saturday night drinking, so many of them were drunk, and then we had maneuvers all the time so people weren’t paying any attention to the planes until they heard the shooting,” she said. “It was just devastating what they did to those ships.”
Dorothy said there were beaches along the front of her house, and there were bunkers built along them where some soldiers had taken refuge. There was no food in the bunkers, and the soldiers hadn’t eaten since Saturday night, so she and some of the other wives made the soldiers sandwiches. She said some of the other women wanted to preserve their food since there was no telling when supplies could be shipped in again, but Dorothy told them, “These soldiers are protecting our freedom, and we’re feeding them!”
The first night after the attack, all of the military families on Ewa beach were called to stay in one of the lieutenant’s homes.
“In that time the officers and the enlisted people were not ever together,” she said. “You never even communicated with them. It was the first time we were ever around officers.”
During the night there was another air raid alarm, and she said they all thought the Japanese were coming back, but it turned out to be American planes.
“Our planes were trying to come in, and they had an air raid alert, and we tried to shoot down our own planes. That was something else,” she said.
When Dorothy returned to her own house the next day, she saw the army had been there and encircled the yard with barbed wire because they expected ground landings. She had to cut the barbed wire before she could get back in. All the civilians were issued gas masks, and the military implemented a curfew. She ended up staying with a friend for a while afterward, and the woman was scared Dorothy would go into labor in the middle of the night. All the roads were blocked. There was no way through.
Even though Dorothy had everything packed up and was pushing to leave, she wasn’t able to leave until February. This was a concern because she was getting closer to delivery, and there were no baby supplies available.
“The stores had nothing,” she said. “Everything that came into Hawaii was shipped in. I didn’t have anything for a baby, and the stores didn’t have a single diaper. They weren’t shipping any of that stuff to Hawaii.”
Finally she went to the chaplain, and told him her cousin was the commandant of the Marine Corps.
“He was a distant cousin,” she said, “but it was enough to get me out of there,” she said.
She told him she was due to have a baby and needed off the island. He put her on the next ship.
The chaplain was Howell Forgy, the man who first said, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.”
Dorothy said that the military issued orders before she left that they were to tell no one the extent of the damage the Japanese had done.
“They didn’t want it to get back to Japan how vulnerable America was,” she said.
In 2001, film director Michael Bay invited Dorothy to watch the premier of the movie Pearl Harbor. Bay asked Dorothy to tell him her story.
“He was the only one who really showed how low those planes came in,” she said.
She said Bay gave her “VIP treatment.” She was invited to the reception at his penthouse, and met Faith Hill and other big stars.
“We were aboard a big aircraft carrier, and Ben Affleck gave me a kiss on the cheek. It was really nice that he did that,” she said.
Today I pay tribute to Dorothy Chenchick and her baby boy, who was born in April 1942, small, but healthy, as well as her husband and the other brave soldiers who lived and died that Sunday in 1941.
God bless America

Embarrassing Thanksgiving Memories

It’s been nearly a week since Thanksgiving, and I’ve only just finished digesting.
My favorite thing was the pumpkin pie my sister made from cooking down a real live pumpkin she’d grown from her garden. She gave me one too, so last night I finally cooked it down and made it into two pies. It was all going well until bedtime when midway through my workout, I decided I was hungry (this is often the way my workouts go, which is why they aren’t terribly effective). I went in the kitchen, and cut myself and my husband a big old slice of that pie—which if you haven’t tried pumpkin pie made from the real thing, you need to. It’s in its very own food group. Back to the kitchen.
Steve and I both took the first bite right at the same minute, and we looked at each other, and ran to the sink and spit it out. In sync. It turns out pumpkin pie isn’t very good when you leave the sugar out, which is too bad, since I had to throw both pies into the garbage. It just goes to show you, don’t make pumpkin pies in between driving your children home from school, while you’re doing newspaper articles, driving your children to their friend’s house, and driving your children to the school basketball game. Looking back, I realize it’s a miracle that’s all I left out of the pies.
I was so disappointed about having to dump two whole pies into the garbage, that instead of finishing my workout, I climbed into bed and ate a cookie.
I’ve read many Thanksgiving blogs in the last few days, people sharing their sweet Thanksgiving memories. It got me thinking about some of my own Thanksgiving memories—not so touching perhaps, but in keeping with the no-sugar pie.
The first turkey I cooked after I got married, I didn’t know you were supposed to take out the neck and giblets before you put the bird in the oven. It was a small thing, but a little embarrassing since I was trying to do everything just right. Another year I forgot to turn on the oven, and the turkey was still raw when it came time to eat. Then there was the time we went camping over Thanksgiving, and dumped the entire Dutch oven over into the dirt. Since we were camping, we scooped it up and ate it anyway.
These are the kinds of embarrassing things I hate to admit on the world wide web.
The most awful thing ever happened to an apple pie one year. I’m particularly fond of apple pie, and I don’t mind saying I make a pretty mean one. It just so happened that we had an infestation of mice that year--another embarrassing detail I’d rather not claim. Steve saw the mouse run across the floor, and he had the broom, ready to smack it if it showed it’s little pointy face again. The mouse scampered up the counter and dived for the first cover it could find: the tinfoil covering the fresh apple pie. Whack! There went the broom right onto the mouse shaped lump on the pie.
No, I didn’t lift the tinfoil to see what the pie looked like with smashed mouse all over it. Ick.
Mom never did love Thanksgiving that much. Just a lot a food and a lot of mess. By Christmas she was tired out, and one year she skipped the Christmas dinner altogether. After presents were open, she locked herself into her bedroom with her Sees Candies and we didn’t see her again the whole day. I remember feeling jipped as a child, with no turkey dinner to close the holiday. But last night while I was lying there in my bed with my cookie, mourning my ruined pies, I realized there’s something to be said for that after all.

The last time I did this, it was with him.
He was old, even then, but still running with me.
I got Akela, a beautiful Alaskan Malamute, when he was five years old. For a big dog, who ages nine years to one human year, that didn’t give us a very long life with him after bringing him home, and I knew it then.
What I didn’t know was how hard it was going to be to let him go.
The reason I got him was to run with me. We ran and we ran and we ran. We ran for a lot of years. He was my bodyguard, and more than that, he was my companion and buddy. He weighed around 120 lbs, and was breathtaking when he ran. People would stop me on the street and tell me what a beautiful dog he was, and many times owners of female huskies would stop and ask if they could breed their dog with him. When I went to the zoo and looked at the wolves, they failed to impress me since my own dog was bigger and better looking than any old wolf.
He wasn’t always a good dog. He loved to run free if he ever got out of the backyard, and once the animal control officer had to bring him home; another time we picked him up at the police office where he’d been crated after capture.
That was the first time I noticed his age. He could hardly stand up after sitting inside that crate. His back legs shook so hard that he almost fell over. I knew he was old, and the day would come when he couldn’t run with me anymore, but it was hard seeing the evidence of it that evening.
When he would get out, his face would split into a grin from ear to ear and with tongue lolling, he’d dash around the neighborhood, peeing to his heart’s content. He was naughty, and didn’t obey when we called him back. We’d have to bring out a hot dog and wave it at him. He never could resist a hot dog.
He didn’t like to ride in the van. He wasn’t like those dogs that hang out the window and let their ears and tongue flap in the wind. Akela would hunker down as low as he could get, and sometimes we had to half heft him up because he refused to get in. Whenever we could, we’d let him run along the side of the van, holding onto his leash with our hand out the window. He was happier that way.
The first year we had him, he had the misfortune to mistake a skunk for a cat, and he got his come-uppance for it. It was Halloween weekend, and having never had such a close encounter with a skunk before, not a one of us knew what to do. We opened the garage door, and the smell whooshed into the house, and stuck on everything. Akela was the worst. You could see the yellow film of skunk spray across his face, and he’d clawed at his nose and scratched it up, trying to free himself of it.
We didn’t know what to do. We brought out the washtub and scrubbed him down, in the cold dark night, and since we’d heard tomato juice was supposed to neutralize the smell, we went searching in the pantry. All we had was a few cans of diced tomatoes, so we dumped them on his fur, chunks and all, and left it there to neutralize through the night. All it did was dye him orange. He still stunk. It was awful at the time, but now when I catch the faintest whiff of skunk, it’s almost nostalgic.
He loved the kids, he loved to howl at sirens, he loved to boss smaller dogs and he loved to chase cats. He loved to dig to a fresh layer of dirt, and lay in it. He loved to pee, and he loved hot dogs. He loved to roll his face in the snow until snowflakes hung on his whiskers and the fine gray fuzz on his cheeks. He loved to run. I’d take him ten miles in the summer time, and he was always ready for more. He loved to be brushed, he was that vain, and most of all, he loved us. There’s nothing like a doggy grin to warm your heart. If you opened the back door, he’d sidle up with his head ducked, and tail wagging, and his paw coming up like he wanted to jump on you, but knew he shouldn’t. All the way, his mouth would be grinning because he was happy to the core to see you, and he didn’t care who knew it.
He was sometimes clumsy. Once he was out playing with the kids, and he ran up onto the porch, and couldn’t stop in time, so he crashed into the house. We had a dent in the siding to show where he hit.
Another time he was rolling over onto his stomach to be scratched properly, and misjudged where he was. He rolled right down the porch stairs.
Then came the day last spring when he couldn’t get home after a run. It was only four miles, which even a few months prior, would have been nothing for him. He dragged at the leash, and finally sat himself down on the sidewalk. He was far too big for me to carry home, and it took hours to limp him the rest of the way. I never ran with him again after that.
It was sad running by myself. I missed having him there, and I’d find myself talking to him now and I’d still stop by his favorite drinking spots out of respect for him. When a small animal would skitter away in front of me, I’d tense, remembering how I used to have to ground myself against the pavement to keep him back.
That next summer I took him to the animal shelter. It was an act of pure cowardice. I knew it was time. He couldn’t hardly stand up anymore, and he could no longer control his bowels. He wasn’t happy, and I couldn’t watch him suffer. I knew they would have to put him down, but I told them I was putting him up for adoption.
We’d moved. We didn’t have a place for him. These are the excuses I told my kids and the women behind the desk at the shelter. Someone else would adopt him out and he’d be happier. It was because I couldn’t tell them I’d brought my dog in for them to kill.
He peed on the rug under their desk when I was filling out the paper work.
My husband checked in a week later and they told him they’d put him down. We still haven’t told the kids. To them, he’s living somewhere in Idaho on a ranch where he runs free and chases cats and rabbits and sleeps in the shade of two hundred trees. That would be heaven to Akela, with a hot dog thrown out for him to catch in his mouth, and so we assuaged our guilt by telling them that, and almost it was true, except for the Idaho part.
For a long time after he was gone, I felt him out there, standing guard over the house. I still feel it sometimes.
Now the weather has turned cold again, and for the first time this season, I bundled up in my gloves and earmuffs to go running. He was with me the last time I did that. I remember holding his leash through these same gloves, and the way his breath would huff out of him as he ran along beside me. When we were done, he would roll his face in the snow and cool off.
I was getting used to him being gone, but it turns out I miss him still.

Blogland and Honey Nut Cheerios

My friend and fellow author, Tristi Pinkston, welcomed me to blogland when I posted my first blog. It was a monumental day.
I thought it was well-named actually. Blogland. It sounds like something in a fantasy book. For me it’s just as scary and daunting. This cyber-net mass info world I’m entering is scaring the willies out of me. I like comfortable things, like Microsoft Word where I spend the majority of my time. I sit in the very same chair every day with my laptop on the table in front of me and I roll the blinds this way and that to keep the sun out of my eyes depending on where it is in the sky in relation to my windows. I get up to pick up my kids from school and run their errands, and occasionally to fill a bowl of comfort food, like rocky road ice cream or Honey Nut Cheerios (Just so you know, those can’t be replaced by other brands. It’s the real thing, or nada).
I put out a chapter or two, run my five miles like a good girl should, and go through my emails. It’s all part of a day’s work. Except now I’m having to do things like blog and collect friends on Facebook. (If you’re one of them, welcome.)
Just so you know, it’s all a marketing ploy. My publisher is making me do it. They say the days of authors hiding behind their computers in between launching new titles are over. Bummer deal too, since that’s just what I want to do. Authors, as a general rule, run to eccentric introverts. Marketing is tough stuff for that kind of personality. They even want me to Tweet on Twitter, which I just can’t take seriously. How can anyone be expected to use something with such a ridiculous name? I feel like Tweety Bird every time I talk about it.
Here’s the thing though, for all I mock it and run from it and hide in my closet when I think about having to do it, I’ve met some remarkable people in that world called cyber-space. And who knew I’d meet real live friends on Facebook? The real thing. Amazing!

Time, Age and Losing My Mind

Fall and Spring sometimes do this weird thing to me. I feel the change in the air, and for a tiny second I can’t remember if the winter is coming or going. It’s the same kind of feeling you get when someone asks you how old you are and you have to count on your fingers because somewhere in the passage of days, you’ve lost track of the years.
When my four year old said the prayer the other day I thought it was her little cousin. It was strange how they said the very same things in their prayer. Afterward when I saw it was Sarah, her voice slipped back into familiarity where a minute earlier it had seemed different. There was a sweetness to it, a baby softness, an innocence and clarity that I wouldn’t have noticed if I would have been listening for her voice. I was glad for the chance to hear her through a fresh perspective.
The week before that I went to Jimmy’s high school choir concert. He was so big and handsome, and when I pointed him out to Dad, I had a momentary panic that I’d pointed to the wrong boy. How embarrassing that would have been not to recognize my own child. I didn’t doubt it was partly due to bad eyes, and partly because I’m losing my mind. I think the other part of it is that it’s a shock to see him grown up and almost a man. How could I be expected to spot him looking like that when in my head he’s still my little boy?
The most disturbing thing is when I see myself with the same kind of shock. I’m all grown up too. I have wrinkles around my eyes and three white hairs, and when I catch sight of myself in a mirror with a room full of parents, I look like I belong. What a shock it is to come face to face with time and age and not recognize where you went.

Swine Flu

They sent a letter home from school with my kids saying they should stay home if they got sick. Everyone was afraid of the Swine Flu, even though most people didn’t really know what it was yet. We couldn’t figure it out if it was cold/flu or vomit/flu. We found out pretty quick.
Everywhere I go there are missing faces, people who are aren’t where they think they’re going to be. Everyone seems to have the Swine Flu. I read up on the symptoms, studied up so I can watch for them in my kids. Every time they sneeze or wipe at their noses I’m sure they’re coming down with it. The worst part of this is that every time I sneeze or my nose or eyes itch, I’m sure I’m coming down with it. I’ve had the hypothetical Swine Flu over fifteen times in the last month. It will be a long flu season at this rate.