What a Difference a Year Makes

I couldn’t sleep at all that night. I had received a phone call from the mayor and the city attorney earlier that day, asking me to consider running for municipal court judge.

I had thought about becoming a judge. My second summer of law school I externed for a judge in the district court in Provo, for just 3 weeks until my summer gig started, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Six months later, I landed a job clerking full time for Judge Valerie Adair, who had just been elected to the bench. Judge Adair had enjoyed a successful career as a criminal prosecutor, and my goal was to eventually work either for the district attorney or public defender, but we had a full civil calendar. To say there was a learning curve was to put it nicely. I seriously did not know what I was doing at the start, but I grew to love that job and participating in the judicial process. So yeah, I’d thought about it. I thought it was something that I would really enjoy doing.

Except for elected-judges thing.

Different states have different approaches to hiring judges, but in Nevada all state and municipal courts are elected positions. I am not a fan of that approach at all. Oh, and I’m also not a politician.

So when the mayor asked, I was definitely intrigued, but I was certainly not convinced. I laid there, awake, going back and forth.

After a few weeks, I thought yeah, I would like that job. I should run for judge. After all, it was just North Las Vegas, and I have friends and clients all over the city. I figured it was a race I could win.

But then I turned 50.

THAT was a bad idea.

COVID? Check (on my birthday, no less).
Pain in my legs and feet? Check.
Difficulty breathing? Check.
Racing pulse rate? Check.
Tired. All. The. Time? Check.

So I went to the doctor and he decided to explain to me all about how high blood pressure is the silent killer and how could I still be alive because the silent killer was seriously chasing me around with a big knife and why hadn’t I done anything about this before and whatever you do REDUCE THE STRESS IN YOUR LIFE! And just like that he brought my plans of running for judge to a halt, before I’d even started stretching.

I decided that I really wanted to play judge, though, so I reached out to one of the municipal court judges and asked what I needed to do to get on his pro-tem panel. (Ed.Splain: A judge pro-tem is just a substitute judge who covers for judges when they go on vacation, are sick, etc.) I jumped through those hoops and by May I was appointed as a judge pro-tem and in June I was sitting on the bench and living my best life.

I loved it. Seriously, like the most fun I’d had in a long time at work. But it ended after just four days. Four days and the judge was back from his vacation and I was back to my regular daily grind waiting for another chance to cover for him.

I started to look for other “judge” jobs. I was searching for administrative law judge gigs, but seriously the only thing that was open was for the Department of Taxation and just shoot me now. Did I tell you that Clorinda took the tax course at H&R Block to save our marriage because of how much I hated taxes? Yeah, taking any tax-related job was not going to be a thing.

It was all pretty discouraging.

On July 6 Clorinda and I went to the temple. As I was sitting on the back row, trying to pay attention, I was interrupted by a voice saying, clear as can be, “You need to look for hearing master jobs.” I reached for my phone, but, well, temple, so it was not in my pocket. I filed the idea away in the back of my mind and went back to trying to pay attention. And I promptly forgot to search for anything after we were done, until 2:00 a.m., when I woke RIGHT up with a moderately more firm, “You need to look for hearing master jobs!”

I rolled over and grabbed the phone and googled “hearing master jobs las vegas” and woke up a little bit more when the top result was a posting for the probate commissioner position at the District Court. “Hmm,” I thought, “probate commissioner. I could do that job.” I turned the phone off and laid back and thought about that until I fell asleep.

The next morning at work I looked at the announcement again. The job had literally just posted, together with two other hearing master positions, and was open until July 27. The more I thought about it, the more excited about it I got. I dusted off the résumé and worked on a cover letter and submitted the application early the next week. To that point, I hadn’t said anything to Clorinda, so when I told her I had applied for a new job that day she was shocked, but also excited.

Starting that night, Clorinda prayed, every night, for me to get an interview. I’m afraid my faith wasn’t as strong as hers, and I decided on the last day before the job closed to hedge my bet and I submitted a second application for one of the other hearing master jobs (I had no business doing that—the other two were for TROs and child support, neither of which I had any experience with, but hey, YOLO!). So Clorinda prayed, and I just looked at the calendar and counted the days from when the job posting closed.

At one week I figured it was too soon. Clorinda told me I needed to give it at least two weeks, so when we got there and still no word I was discouraged but Clorinda kept praying. By three weeks I was certain that my résumé had been tossed, probably with a laugh of scorn. I had given up all hope, so when Clorinda prayed that night, again, for me to get an interview, I had to ask her to please stop. Every prayer she voiced was a reminder that I wasn’t even good enough to get a letter telling me that I wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t two days later that I got a call at work inviting me to come and interview for the probate commissioner position that Friday. (WHAT ?!?!) Clorinda confessed that she had NOT stopped praying, she was just doing it incognito.  

So that Friday I interviewed for the probate commissioner position. I met with two of the district court judges and an attorney from court administration. I thought it went well, but by the time I was back to my office I had second-guessed every answer and had pretty much convinced myself that there was no way they could hire me.

The email came the following Wednesday, confirming my every second-guess: “Thank you for interviewing for the hearing master position. We interviewed many outstanding candidates. You won’t be moving forward.” I sent a text to Clorinda and she called me to tell me that I did NOT suck and that the job must just not be right for me.

Disappointment again.

But wait there’s more!

The next morning I was on a conference call and missed a telephone call from a number I did not recognize. The voicemail message was from a lady in human resources at the District Court. When I called her back, she apologized profusely and explained that the email was sent in error. While I was not selected for consideration (or even an interview) for the other hedging-my-bets hearing master job I had applied for, I was a finalist for the probate commissioner job!

So that was crazy.

She said that details would be coming soon. By soon she meant the next day, when I found myself on the telephone with the HR director for the District Court. He explained that the official announcement of the two finalists (including me!) had just been made by the court, and that the publication triggered a ten-day public-comment period. I was not familiar with the other candidate, but I looked him up and he was certainly qualified.

Then the panic started to kick in. I could feel the urgency creeping up inside me and the blood pressure rising. I texted my buddy Mike and asked if he had a minute to talk, and before I’d put my phone back down it was buzzing. Mike talked me in off the ledge and helped me map out a plan for the next couple of weeks. We didn’t really follow the plan, but just talking to him was so helpful.

My initial plan was to only ask a select few people to comment, but I opened that up quite a bit to friends, clients, and colleagues who were very generous in agreeing to help. I cannot express the gratitude I felt when I was sitting in my final interview and saw the deep stack of printed email pages (so much for saving the trees) with my application. For the most part, I don’t know what was said (a couple of people cc:d me on their submissions), but it must have been better than it should have been.

At the end of the two weeks, HR called again to schedule my final interview. I went on a Monday at 1:30 in the afternoon. This time I met with the chief judge, the chief civil judge, and one of the probate judges. They were a formidable bunch, but I felt like the interview went as well as it could have. They were cordial, and we had some good discussion about the probate office and my ideas if I were to get the job. After a half-hour, which felt much shorter than that, I was done. When I got to the elevator I pulled my phone out of my shirt pocket and it was DRENCHED. I had sweated right through everything.

At that point, I had done all I could do. The chief judge had told me the decision would be made by the end of the week, so I figured I had 96 hours, give-or-take, to stress about it. But the stress didn’t come.

Until Wednesday at about 4:30 a.m. Then it came. I woke up again and couldn’t fall back asleep, so I lay there with my thoughts.

By the way, my thoughts in the middle of the night are not kind. No filter. Just the brutal how-dare-you-think-you-were-even-qualified-for-this-position thoughts—by the time I got out of bed I had wholly convinced myself that there was NO WAY I would get selected.

I was spiraling.

And then the HR director called and offered me the job.

Me.

He offered ME the job.

So yeah, starting October 31, 2022, I will be the probate commissioner for Clark County.

There’s Two Things I Know for Sure

Tears were flowing. Pouring from my eyes, really. It was the father-of-the-bride dance, “Butterfly Kisses” was playing over the speakers, and I was swaying on the dance floor with my little girl. She was brand-new, just six-weeks old at the time, and I wasn’t familiar with the song. As I held Marien close to me and watched as Clorinda’s college roommate danced with her dad, I had a sudden, terrifying thought: someday that would be me. MY little girl would be dancing with ME, and I would be giving her away.

STOP THE MUSIC!

That was NOT something I was ready to deal with. I only got her six weeks earlier, and now I was going to have to give her away? Nope. I held that little girl close to my heart and cried and told her she wasn’t allowed to get married. Never. She was daddy’s little girl, and she needed to stay daddy’s little girl.

Until everything changed.

Friday night two weeks ago I couldn’t sleep. I laid on my back, and on my side, and my other side, and no matter which way I looked that little girl’s life was playing in my mind’s eye. I would doze off and then minutes later my eyes would pop right back open and there she was.

There’s two things I know for sure / She was sent here from heaven / And she’s daddy’s little girl / As I drop to my knees by her bed at night / She talks to Jesus, and I close my eyes. / And I thank God for all of the joy in my life

I could see her in that little floral dress, staring up at her mom, just days after she was born.

Suddenly, she was in red long-john pajamas, smiling at her grandparents’ house at Christmas time. It was adorable.

Then she was sitting in a highchair, gnawing on a long sprig of asparagus that was firmly clasped in her four-month-old hand, just because she had to have what mom was having for dinner.

I rolled over and slept for a minute or two, but I was awakened almost immediately by her little face staring at me, insisting on me reading the Dr. Seuss ABC book for the umpteenth time. She knew those books so well that when I would read it to her at bedtime she would wake up and correct me if I tried to skip a page or two.

Then I could hear her screaming at the top of her lungs from Salt Lake City to Beaver—almost four solid hours—until we finally just pulled off the highway so Clorinda could move to the back seat of the car and feed her. (They weren’t all positive memories.)

Just moments later, she was in my arms, crying because she had fallen out of her big-girl bed, not understanding why she was jolted awake by the sudden impact of the barely carpeted concrete floors in our apartment.

I closed my eyes, and her little three-year-old face looked up at me and proudly exclaimed, “dammit!” with a sparkle in her big blue eyes and a huge grin across her face after she hit a ping-pong-ball into the net (I’m sure she learned that from her mother) (also, the first and only time I ever heard her swear).

That one made me laugh.

I turned to my side, and I was in the kitchen sneaking a bite or two (or six) of ice cream right out of the carton. A five-year-old Marien came out from her bedroom because she couldn’t sleep, and she caught me cold-handed. She managed to get a couple bites for herself, which was our little secret (my little bribe) for years. She loved to remind me of that night.

Moments later we were walking into her kindergarten classroom (somehow, I was voted the one to drop her off on day one. THAT was a killer. I’m really not sure why it was so hard, but it was, and I cried. Again. You may begin to sense a theme).

There she was, being recognized for the third time that year as student-of-the-month (a real feat in that the school said you could only win it once per year).

And suddenly I was dropping her off at middle school. She could barely hold up her backpack, but off she went. Until she didn’t. Middle school was hard and exhausting, and more than once I found her curled up on my couch at work, desperately needing just a little more rest before braving the day.

She’s looking like her mamma / A little more every day / One part woman, the other part girl / To perfume and makeup / From ribbons and curls / Trying her wings out in a great / Big world…

Leaving her at the bus EARLY in the morning for an orchestra trip to Disneyland, and saving the text messages (from her friend’s phone) just to be sure that she was safe. That one was on repeat throughout middle school and high school, although it got progressively easier as she got older. And as I got older.

So. Many. Images.

Dances and proms and soccer games and orchestra concerts and track meets and academic awards ceremonies and talks in church and girls camps and vacations (oh, the one where she called and begged me to hurry to Clorinda’s parents house because nobody was laughing at her jokes) and seminary and graduation.

The time she called because she had jumped the curb in her car and totaled it.

The time she loaded her car and headed off to college. I really cried then. But not nearly as bad as I did ten months later when we dropped her off at the MTC. I still see her heading down that sidewalk, suitcases in tow, and eighteen months getting further and further away with every step she took.

And of course, seeing her eighteen months later as she walked off the plane. OK, well, maybe not watching her walk off the plane, but standing in baggage claim ten minutes after she’d arrived as her mother, siblings, and I ran to meet her (CURSE YOU T-MOBILE! AND NFR!)

All those images. All those memories. All that life just playing in my mind and keeping me from sleeping.

All the precious time / Oh like the wind, when the years go by / Precious butterfly / Spread your wings and fly

Saturday morning, I sat in a sealing room in the Las Vegas Temple. The same room that Clorinda and I were married in 23 ½ years earlier. 

She’ll change her name today / She’ll make a promise / And I’ll give her away / Standing in the bride room / Just staring at her / She asked me what I’m thinking / And I said “I’m not sure / I just feel like I’m losing my baby girl”

To say it was packed is an understatement—every chair was filled, and people were standing along the walls and near the doors. I was overcome with emotion as I looked into the faces of so many dear friends and family members, as well as new friends and family members that I was gaining because of the ceremony.

And then it was done. “Man and wife! Say ‘man and wife!’”

*   *   *

My Friday-night memories were replayed on the big screen during the luncheon and reception later that day, only this time they were interspersed with pictures of Hayden. When Hayden’s mom gave her speech, she talked about meeting Marien. The first time, over Facetime, she thought, “Wow, this is a really neat girl.” Then she met her for real and thought, “Wow, this is just the type of girl we’ve always wanted for Hayden.” Then she met her again and was sold: “This isn’t just the type of girl we’ve always wanted for Hayden, this is the girl.”

I’ve thought about that comment for the last two weeks. I felt bad because I couldn’t say that about Hayden. I mean, intellectually and objectively, yes, he is just the person I would want for Marien, but Marien was my little girl, my princess, and nobody was ever going to be good enough for her.

Except that he was.

And she loves him.

*   *   *

That night we danced to Butterfly Kisses. I held her in my arms and we just talked. She was radiant and beautiful and smiling ear-to-ear. That little princess I’d danced with in my arms 22 years before completely disobeyed my orders and ran off and got married.

Oh with all that I’ve done wrong / I must have done something right / To deserve her love every morning / And butterfly kisses / I couldn’t ask God for more, man, this is / What love is / I know I’ve gotta let her go, but I’ll always / Remember / Every hug in the morning, and butterfly kisses

Congratulations my princess. I truly could not ask for more that the love you brought into my life. I am truly excited for you and Hayden and your life together. I love you.

~Dad

Join the Club

[EDIT: Do you ever have those "oh crap, what did I do?!" moments? I just did this morning, when I looked and started reading some of the comments people had made to my post. I sincerely appreciate the expressions of concern, but I really need to emphasize that Clorinda and I are fine. The depression is there, and it's real, but we have learned and grown over 15 years and we are doing fine. I wrote this because some dear friends shared with me a very scary situation that they are facing as a young couple, and I wanted them to know that there are good things that come from facing hard things together. And I thought maybe someone else could use that encouragement, so I published it.]

I’m pretty sure there’s a Columbia House employee that thinks I have an unnatural obsession with Russell Crowe. And he may be right—Russell Crowe is a handsome and talented man. The truth is, when you get 8 DVDs for $10 and 3 of those that you select star Russell Crowe, there’s a very real possibility that you have a problem.

I was not an early adopter. As it happened, DVDs became THE THING while I was in law school. I still had my trusty VCR, along with a bunch of tapes ranging from Bear in the Big Blue House (teaching all about how to poop!) to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (that Donny Osmond is almost as good as Russell Crowe) to Dead Poets Society (my favorite all-time movie. Or at least top 3). When I graduated, my parents decided that I needed to come to the age of enlightenment, and they bought me a DVD player as a graduation present.

I still have that DVD player. Maybe I need to graduate from something else so I can upgrade to Blu-Ray.

At some point I realized that it doesn’t do a lot of good to have a DVD player if you have no DVDs to play on it. About that time, Columbia House decided that I was worthy of an exclusive invitation to join their club. I could get 5 DVDs for just a dollar, and then 3 more for the cost of shipping. All in all, 8 DVDs for ten bucks. What a bargain—I think I will buy some.

I got all through the process, right up to the payment page, and then decided I didn’t want to have to explain to Clorinda why I was buying all these movies (or why I would have to buy 5 more in the next two years at regular club prices), so I exited from the page. Columbia House didn’t see it that way though—somewhere I must have clicked a final acceptance that constituted my enrollment in the club—I was a member! Woohoo!

Sometime later we sat down to watch one of my Russell Crowe movies. It was A Beautiful Mind, the true story (as interpreted by Hollywood) of John Nash, a mathematician that we learn [SPOILER ALERT] is plagued by mental illness. Nash doesn’t know of his illness (neither do the audience or the woman he marries) and he ends up with relationships with 3 people that don’t exist—one a college roommate, one a government operative that hires him to do cryptography, and the last a little girl.

Nash is tortured by his illness. He believes that he is part of a top-secret government project to decrypt messages hidden in magazine and newspaper articles, and deliver his analysis to the government operative that hired him. At one point in the movie, his wife discovers the thousands of clippings in his office and eventually comes to learn of the illness. Nash begins treatment, and for all intents and purposes it appears that his illness has been brought under control.

Until his wife discovers a secret room filled with more clippings. The illness is back, and she is absolutely despondent.

Towards the end of the movie, Nash asks a young student if he sees someone across the way. He jokes with the student that he has to make sure because he’s never sure who is real. The old college roommate, the little girl, and the government operative are his constant companions, but he’s learned to remind himself that they aren’t real.

When the movie ended, I felt a surge in my gut. It welled-up into my chest and my head and I started to cry. I sobbed, almost uncontrollably. Feelings that were buried deep inside me clawed and scratched their way to the surface and burst through my eyeballs.

I didn’t know that anyone else understood.

My tears were not for John Nash. My tears were for his wife. She understood me.

This is a hard piece to write. It is unlike anything I think I’ve written before, and I hope that you’ll be kind as you read this. Mental illness is unfairly stigmatized, misunderstood, and, unfortunately, a source of embarrassment. Clorinda has shared elements of her story from time to time. We don’t share it looking for sympathy or anything for ourselves—our lives are our lives and we are doing our very best to live them. Our hope when either of us share these experiences is that it can bring strength to someone.

Clorinda and I are both the oldest of 8 kids. Not the same 8 (it feels like I’ve used that joke before). It seemed to be some type of a sign to Clorinda, and she believed we would also have a large family. In 1997, we were blessed to have Marien, and then Clayton arrived 15 months later. It was about that time I decided I needed to go back to school, so that I could one day afford to buy DVDs from Columbia House. At the end of my first year of law school, Kathryn was born.

Law school was not easy for me, but it was harder for Clorinda. She had 3 small children at home, no income to provide for them, and a mostly absentee husband. I graduated early and took a job with Clark County, clerking for a judge in the district court. For Clorinda, that meant two things: one, I had a paycheck, and two, I had health insurance. We were really behind schedule on those 8 kids, so we needed to get cracking.

That was, of course, the fun part, so I was a willing participant. And it worked! By the end of spring we were expecting.

I was also enrolled in a bar preparation course that was every-night, Monday to Friday, from 6 to 10, after I’d finished a full day at work. The bar was weighing heavily on me. It was scheduled for the end of July, and it was my WHOLE LIFE. It seemed every waking moment was spent reviewing torts or commercial paper (OK, that one’s a lie—I never studied commercial paper) or contracts or community property. I poured over outlines and Bar-Bri books and listened to bar-review CDs in my car (I may not have had a DVD player, but come on, I was a little bit civilized).

Ten days before the bar exam, Clorinda miscarried. She was devastated. Crushed. Lost.

I was not even present. I like to tell myself that I must have at least said sorry, but it’s more likely that I said something like “we shouldn’t have rushed into having kids right after school.” I was tired and stressed and impatient and I FAILED. This was NOT a husband-of-the-year moment. It wasn’t even a husband-of-the-day moment. I’m lucky it wasn’t an ex-husband-of-the-day moment.

About six weeks later, she apparently had another miscarriage, although we weren't certain then, and still aren't sure now, how she could have even been pregnant again. It was a very difficult time, and it sent Clorinda into an emotional tailspin like I NEVER would have expected.

Since that time, she has had all kinds of depression. At the outset, I was of the get-yourself-out-of-bed-and-get-to-work mentality and was not very patient with Clorinda. THAT is not a good mix for a marriage. I’m going to avoid specifics, simply because my purpose is not to disparage Clorinda. Suffice it to say, there were hours and days and weeks and months and years of hell in our house as she struggled with the realities of depression and I watched my idea of a perfect marriage be stolen from right before my eyes. It was like living in the hell of the upside-down sinners.

Again, out of respect for my wife, I won’t go into details, but it took YEARS before we started to see some type of consistency in the benefits of the treatments. Years. Even now I don’t know when it’s going to decide to rear its ugly head again and thrust itself into the middle of our lives. I wish I could say that it was gone, but it’s not, and it likely never will be. It’s our own little girl, college roommate, and government operative, just off to the side as a constant reminder of OUR new normal.

Hell of the upside-down sinners indeed.

[I need to insert a note here. This whole thing probably sounds extraordinarily selfish, because it’s Clorinda, not me, that is fighting the illness. I know that—believe me I know that. This is a VERY difficult subject to write about. Clorinda’s own hell-of-the-upside-down-sinners is different from my own, and I cannot speak to her experience. And that is not my purpose here, other than to witness that her experience is real. Instead, my purpose is to share my experience as the spouse of someone suffering with a mental illness.

My wife is an angel, and this illness has done its best to steal her best-self from her. Through it all she constantly and consistently strives to be happy and good and true to who she is. I love Clorinda with my whole soul.]

*   *   *

My parents have been married for 47 years—that’s pretty remarkable in today’s society. For the last decade and a half, my dad has suffered various ailments as the result of his type II diabetes, and about 4 years ago we watched in some combination of awe and horror as he went from being able to walk to being almost completely paralyzed from the neck down in a period of only 3 ½ months. He underwent surgery on the discs in his neck—they came in from the front and from the back—and he was confined to his bed for months. With a great deal of effort, he relearned how to get up and take steps and ultimately walk—first with the aid of a walker and then just having things nearby to grab if necessary.

Through all of that my mother stood by his side, his ever-faithful companion, nursemaid, and cheer-leader. She cared for him, fed him, watched over him, and encouraged him in his recovery. I know there were lots of sleepless nights and thankless days for her. Finally, over the last year or so, things had gotten much better for them.

In December my folks came to Las Vegas to see Marien, who had just come home from her mission in North Carolina. When they arrived at the hotel, my dad was in a great deal of pain in his back. We got him a heating pad and he stayed at the hotel to rest. Late that night, my mom called to tell me that dad was worse and asked for me and John to come to the hotel.

Ultimately, he went to UMC where they determined that he’d had a heart-attack caused by MERSA attacking the valves in his heart. After 3 horrible weeks at the hospital, we were finally able to get him released to home health in Cedar City, where he had nurses come daily to administer meds and physical therapists come to try to help him out of bed. Through it all, his back still ached, and he was stuck flat on his back in bed.

Once again, my mother cared for him. She fed him, watched over him, cleaned him, and cheered him on. When there was seemingly no progress in his recovery, she took him to doctor appointments and advocated for him. When the infectious disease doctor discovered that the MERSA was still lodged in his spine (surprise—that’s where the pain was so terrible, but nobody wanted to check until the heart was cleared up), she was there to help him endure another round of meds.

He finally started to see progress, and was able to get out of bed, get to the restroom on his own, and get his own new-normal. Until last week, when he woke up in terrible pain again. The heart doctor is convinced the MERSA has returned to his back. And my mom is back to having no answers. But she’s faithful. She’s right by his side.

*   *   *

I got a text from Clayton today. He had been listening to a TED talk about a woman that had crashed her bike and broken some 30 bones in her body. She spent 6 months in an ICU and had hit rock bottom. The lessen, the quote that Clayton gravitated to, was that you never learn how strong you are until being strong is all you can do.

I’ve learned that. I’ve learned that about my wife (honestly, I don’t know how she manages. She’s come to terms with the illness and she just keeps moving forward). I’ve witnessed it—with awe—in my mother and my father.

But I have also learned how incredibly weak I am—how quick I am to lose sight of what’s important, to become impatient with the illness and lash out at my wife, only to be reminded (eventually) that the illness is not Clorinda, and Clorinda is not the illness. Then I have to humble myself, repent, remind myself that I need to, and can, do better. It’s a process. I can only hope that I can one day be the type of patient, caring spouse that my mother is to my dad.

There are a lot of times that I want to just exit from the page, just click the little X in the top-right corner and not get the 8 DVDs in the mail. But life is like Columbia House. Whether it’s depression or MERSA or broken bones or MS or cancer or infertility, or it’s having a spouse go through it, life has a way of saying congratulations—you’re in the club!

I Fell In to a Burning Ring of Fire

Brian Head is on fire. That’s the big news out of Cedar City right now. My dad has posted several updates from news media on his Facebook page for anyone that is interested in the details. My brother John was down this week, and he said it’s really bad—like the-whole-mountain-is-pretty-much-destroyed bad. According to Channel 2 News out of Salt Lake City, the fire has consumed over 60,000 acres (the 4th largest fire in 15 years) and is, as of the date I’m writing this, now 60% contained. 

I saw another story, on the website for the Fox affiliate in Salt Lake, about some kids who made 40 gallons of lemonade for the firefighters. It’s 112 in Vegas today, and I feel like I could put down a gallon of lemonade myself. I imagine it was like nectar of the gods to those firefighters.

According to Wikipedia, Brian Head is home to the town with the second highest elevation in the United States—9800’ above sea level. It’s a little resort town at the top of a mountain, sprinkled with cabins and other ski-resort-town amenities. Wikipedia also reported (and I love this) that the “population was 83 at the 2010 census, a significant decrease from the 2000 figure of 118.” A “significant decrease.” Awesome.

I feel for those 83 people, but they should have known better.

My more astute readers will remember that six years ago Clorinda and I had the scare of our married lives when Clayton got to spend 4 days in the hospital. Those of you that haven’t been paying close attention can get up to speed here. Regardless, at the end of the 4 days, the doctor cleared Clayton to go to “camp” with his young men’s group from church.

You know, camp. Where you stay in someone’s ginormous cabin at a mountain resort and spend your days mountain biking and your nights in the pool and spa at the clubhouse. Camp.

Clayton’s camp was supposed to end on Saturday morning, which also happened to be July 2. (Six years ago today (well, by the calendar it's tomorrow, but who's counting?).) You know what that means, of course—LONG WEEKEND!! (courtesy of Thomas Jefferson, et al.).  Clorinda and I decided to spend the whole next week, in Utah visiting family and enjoying the respite from the Vegas heat. (It regularly gets into the 90s in Utah during the summer, even the occasional triple-digits, but that is considered a relief from the fiery pits of Las Vegas. Having lived here for over twenty years, I don’t even fear hell anymore.) But the boys were driving back to Vegas that day, and it seemed counter-intuitive to have Clayton come ALL the way back to Vegas just to turn right around and drive back up to Utah.

Solution: Dad gets to drive up a day early, “camp” with the boys, and then meet up with mom and the girls mid-day in Cedar City. What could go wrong?

“Camping” was great. I got there in time for dinner, which I have absolutely no memory of. Delicious. After dinner we went to the clubhouse, which included a HUGE pool/hot-tub area and two (2!) saunas. I spent way too much time in the sauna (it felt like spring (again, Vegas)), and then got to sleep, er, camp, in a queen size bed with something like 30 pillows. Little did I know that the mountain was plotting against me getting another decent night's sleep for a long, long time.

The next morning we got the boys all packed up, and I uttered words that have haunted me ever since. “Hey, since we’re here, I’d like to take just. one. ride.” Two of the YM leaders, Dan and Cody, grabbed their bikes, I took Clayton’s bike, and off we went to the top of the mountain. Dan and Cody had been there all week with the boys and knew the ins-and-outs of the trails, and they (certainly taking note of my nearly 40-year old lawyer/dad bod) decided on what was supposed to be a rather easy trail. We started off down the path, coasting mostly but occasionally having to pedal. Several minutes in we came to a point where a tree had fallen across the trail, and they took a sharp right through a meadow. Nothing bad—a pretty good slope initially, then across a small stream and then down a more gradual slope at an angle. Dan was out front, and Cody was probably 10 yards behind him. I was another 10-15 yards back from Cody, just enjoying the ride.

It was gorgeous. We were literally almost 2 miles above sea level, cruising down a mountain on bikes on a cool Saturday morning in July. Snow still hung tightly to spots that were shaded from the daytime sun. The green trees and grasses struck a beautiful contrast to the blue sky, and it seemed that if you stood up on the pedals you could see right over the edge of the peak. There was nothing between us and the sky.

And just like that there was nothing between me and the ground. Well, nothing but that same blue sky.

They say that everything slows down before you die. I’m curious how anyone knows this. I was a sociology major in college (motto: let’s all work at the Gap!), so I know a thing or two about surveys and research methods, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how you gather data from people who are DEAD about whether everything slowed down for them RIGHT BEFORE THEY DIED. Paranormal Sociology. THAT is what I should have studied.

Nonetheless, I found myself soaring above the ground, headed for certain DEATH because EVERYTHING WAS SLOWING DOWN!

“This may not have been the best idea I’ve ever had. How did I end up OVER the handlebars? Look at that dirt down there—it looks…”

It was about that moment that my musings were rudely interrupted by Brian Q. Head. The face hit first. Actually, I think my left hand and face hit about the same time (it seemed important to me to get my hands up to try to soften the blow) and I dragged through the gravel and dirt and rocks and grasses. My right shoulder slammed into the ground, and the many sins of my past (read: repeated trips to cheap casinos for prime rib specials at 11:00 at night—curse you Las Vegas) conspired to give me a refresher on Newton’s laws of motion. And probably some other physics lessons that I didn’t study in my sociology of violent death course.

I let out a weak groan. Truth be told, I didn’t have a choice. The mountain knocked the groan out of me. When the gravel finally succeeded in stopping my body (see Newton’s First Law of Motion), I stared down the hill and could just see Dan and Cody. They had reached the bottom of the hill and come to a stop near a grove of trees to check behind them. I’m not sure whether it was the heap of mangled flesh and bones or the bike still tumbling through the meadow that cued them there was a problem, but to their credit, they didn’t just leave me there. I couldn’t move anything, but I could see them running back up the hill. (It was like the opening scene of Baywatch, but with fully clothed men running up the side of a mountain instead scantily clad lifeguards jogging on the beach.)

I’m pretty sure Cody thought I was dead, which made two of us. They managed to get me straightened out and turned around and over onto my back, so I was face up, head up. My left hand was swelling up like Thunder when he sees that Lo Pan has been killed, so I asked Cody to take off my wedding band. Dan took off to get help (Cody did NOT want to get back on the bike after seeing how the mountain had abused me), and Cody and I waited. To say I hurt is an understatement. Brian is a big dude, and his cranium is solid rock (literally). He put a beating on my like I’ve never experienced before or since. I. Hurt. Everywhere.

Dan got back a short while later with a couple of other guys. They fashioned a sling for my right arm and helped me to my feet. Jared grabbed me on my left side and Si’itupe grabbed me by my belt and nearly tossed me down the mountain (that is one big Samoan).

Can I just say how much I appreciate all of those guys? True bone-deep gratitude for each one of them. Healthy bond-deep, even.

When we got back to the cabin, Clayton’s first question when he was told that his father—his own flesh-and-blood, life-giving father—had just endured a near death experience on the side of the mountain, was “how’s my bike?” Priorities of a twelve-year-old, huh?

Having raised three kids I’ve spent time in emergency rooms. I am not a fan, so I was particularly surprised when we got to the ER in Cedar City and … wait for it … there was NOBODY there. I was it. The lone patient. OK, that’s not true. They had some people that were being treated in the ER, but there was NOBODY waiting. They got me back almost immediately, where I learned that I had broken my right humerus (NOT FUNNY!) at the shoulder and two bones in my left hand.

Me in the ER in Cedar City. Photo credit: John Fontano

When you are employed as an attorney, it is not convenient to have NO USE of EITHER ARM! It’s very difficult to type (I eventually became proficient with my thumb, pointer finger, and middle finger on my left hand), and Clorinda (for some reason) didn’t want to let me drive. My right arm was strapped to my chest. I had to sleep on my back, which meant a lot of nights out on the recliner in the family room. I won’t even begin to get in to the personals except to say that Clorinda has secured her spot in heaven (this was my twin nephews’ (then almost 7 years old) favorite thing about the accident). I couldn’t feed myself, and my angel wife sees meal time as a social event, so I often resembled a baby bird, mouth wide open begging for food while she chatted away with someone else, oblivious to my plight.

To top it off, the pain meds made me itch. Everywhere. Constantly. And I had NO USE of my arms and hands.

I did have a hearing that I couldn’t get out of about 2 weeks later. I looked like Chevy Chase in Spies Like Us—one arm in a cast, the other in a sling, face covered in road (mountain?) rash. I was local counsel and had co-counsel from Seattle there, our first face-to-face meeting. Classy.

That was not the best independence day weekend of my life. Oh, I’ve recovered, for the most part. My wedding band does not fit on my left hand anymore, and I don’t have full range of motion in my right arm, but they are otherwise fine. And I have only ridden a bike one time since the accident, and that was a road bike on flat ground. I have panic attacks on high places, like rooftops. And stairs. But it's all good.

It's been six years. I really thought I’d forgiven that mountain for what it did to me, but when John said the mountain was pretty much destroyed, all I could think was that karma is a, well, you know the rest.

I think I need a glass of lemonade.

You Are My Sunshine

I was woefully unprepared for law school. In fact, I hadn’t really planned on attending law school at all, but one night several during my senior year of college Clorinda suggested that maybe I ought to consider having a back-up plan to my then-current plan (which was something along the lines of: “I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”) As luck would have it, Law and Order was playing on the TV, and being inspired by the TV gods, I said, “I’ll go to law school.”

Clorinda pointed out that I needed to take the LSAT (what’s the LSAT?) and so I should sign up, like right that moment. I did.

I took the test in early December at BYU. When I walked in, there were lots of smart looking folk that were putting off crazy levels of anxiety. The guy next to me had six pencils lined up, plus a sharpener and two (2!) little alarm clocks. He asked if it was my first time testing (of course—you mean people take it more than once? Why?!). He explained that he had taken it earlier that year, but had self-selected to void the test (an option available if you think you’ve bombed it and don’t want the results). Having been a poor married college student, I’m not sure if I was more baffled that he would take a test and not get the score, or PAY for a test and then take the test and not get the score.

As luck would have it, I DIDN’T feel compelled to void my test, made it through with my one pencil, and scored well enough to get admitted to law school at BYU.

My first year was an interesting one. First year law students generally all take the same courses—Civil procedure (it only took me 3 months to realize that Civil Procedure referred to the procedures for civil practice. Yeah, I was quick), Property, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, and a class that BYU called Advocacy. Other schools call it different things, but it was essentially legal writing and research. The second semester at BYU we had to choose one other class out of four. My choice was a jurisprudence course that was a legal theory/philosophy lecture.

Professor Cole Durham may be the most ivory-tower of any professor I have ever had. The guy’s discussions were so far over my head that I spent my time in class just hoping that he would say something, anything, that would make enough sense for me to write in my notes. It was much more a lecture than a participation class. Well, maybe that was just for me. I had nothing to offer. (I felt like I did in my junior year (HS) English class when we read Winter Dreams by F Scott Fitzgerald. My teacher explained how character names often have double meanings. He asked about why Fitzgerald named the main protagonist “Dexter Green.” My offering: because he’s playing golf and you have greens in golf. Let’s just say that wasn’t my strongest grade.)

As luck would have it, Professor Durham’s entire grade rested on one paper, due at the end of the semester. He encouraged us to work on the paper throughout the semester, but I had a long list of substantive classes that demanded my attention. So the paper got kicked down the road.

As the semester was coming to close, Professor Durham informed us that he would be out of the country for several weeks at the end of the semester. In an act of absolute benevolence, he gave us until the Monday after write-on to turn in our papers. Write-on took four days after the end of finals, so the end of my semester looked like this: 2 weeks of finals, then four days of write-on, leaving me Friday through Monday to finish the paper. (I suppose I should define write-on. Law Review is the premier legal journal at the law school, and so it’s the happening place to be. Employers dig that stuff, apparently. Write-on is essentially a writing contest to be selected for law review or one of the other journals.)

I made it through finals, plowed through write-on (and ultimately got selected to be on law review, btw), and finally decided to start work on a twenty-page paper due just three days later. I worked, nay, slaved for two solid days devising a topic, researching it, gathering information, and writing an initial draft of the paper. Or at least the first 16 pages of a paper. By the time Saturday evening came, I was exhausted and determined that I could come in on Monday, write the last four pages, proof-read and edit it, and hand it in. I locked up my laptop and research and everything in my desk at the school and headed home, hoping for a true day of rest after 3 solid weeks of law school insanity.

(I need to share some back-story. Nine months prior to this weekend, I had graduated with a degree in Sociology (motto: Old Navy, Here We Come!) and was gearing up to start law school. At the risk of sharing MTMI, we celebrated graduation. And that’s all I have to say about that right now.)

Sunday provided a much needed rest. Clorinda’s extended family had a big dinner up in Salt Lake, and we went and enjoyed visiting with lots of aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. We got back to Provo around 9:30 or 10:00 and started getting ready for bed. With reference to the back-story above, Clorinda announced that “this baby is coming tonight!”

“Wait, what? You’re PREGNANT?!” I guess I hadn’t paid her much attention during law school and hadn’t noticed the weight gain. Husband of the year.

OK, strike that paragraph. My real response was “Oh no she is NOT. I have a PAPER DUE TOMORROW!”

Guess who won that argument (hint: it WAS NOT ME).

I decided I’d better finish the paper, but I had a really big problem. This was long before Dropbox, long before thumb drives, and (as noted above), ALL of my work was locked in a desk in the law school library. And it was 10:00 at night. And my VERY pregnant wife was in labor.

I started typing. I don’t have a clue what I wrote, I just wrote. And wrote. And fabricated whatever literary tripe I could to get the last four pages done. I emailed the paper to myself and then went to bed.

At seven AM the next day I was at the law school. Thankfully, the labor was not progressing rapidly (don’t tell Clorinda I was glad that her labor was dragging out. That’s not a sensitive thought. Husband of the year!) The law school was … wait for it … locked. Shut. Tight. Like, nobody home. School is OUT and we are NOT COMING TO WORK.

Except for the janitors! Hooray for the janitors! One heard me banging on the door and came to tell me that the law school was on Summer hours and wouldn’t be open for at least two more hours.

Yeah, that’s not going to work. You see, MY WIFE IS IN LABOR and I HAVE A PAPER THAT IS DUE TODAY so I AM COMING IN, OK?

This janitor was no dummy. He probably saw the absolute terror in my eyes—facing my wife because I missed the delivery of my child OR facing my wife because I’d failed out of law school. Cue Darth Vader: NOOOOOOOOOO!! He let me in! What a guy! I raced to me desk, pulled up my email, cut and pasted the tripe to the end of the sixteen pages, checked my formatting, printed the paper, ran it to the professor’s office and then headed home to take Clorinda to the hospital.

That was sixteen years ago today. That day, Clorinda gave me my third child and second little girl. When the nurses handed her to me, I was overcome with an instant love for that little, perfect bundle of sunshine. I held her and sang “You Are My Sunshine” to her. She was a little doll, and I was smitten.

Marien and Clayton took to her, too. According to the birth announcement, Marien said that “Our baby is so cute” and Clayton added “She’s cute.” So three of the four of us thought she was cute. Clorinda was still too exhausted from the delivery to weigh in, but she didn’t use any of my dad’s favorite lines (i.e., “what a treasure, let’s bury it”), so we assumed that Clorinda liked her too.

Just a couple months ago that little girl played the lead in a production of Thoroughly Modern Millie. Although she’d been sick—like hacking and wheezing and aching sick—for a week before the performances, she pushed forward and absolutely killed the performance. She has a flair for the dramatic and can sing like a bird. (We’re not entirely sure where the singing came from. I can’t sing to save my life, and although Clorinda can hold her own, she’s not winning a spot on the Voice anytime soon. Maybe the outtakes from American Idol, but not the Voice. Kathryn, on the other hand, could win the Voice. The judges will just have to come sit in my family room while she showers--her music fills the whole house!)

I can’t believe that my baby is sixteen. Last night she had a little panic attack. She wasn’t ready to be 16 (which is moderately ironic, since she’s been going on 18 for a good 7 years). We talked it through, and today she’s seized it. I just love her.

Happy Birthday little Kathryn. You are still my sunshine.

Making Lemonade

I was fired once. It was in February 1994.

When I came home from the mission in Oklahoma I really had no idea what I was going to do with my life. In fact, I got sick on the flight home. Like sick to my stomach, vomiting-in-the-bathroom-where-there-is-no-room-to-vomit sick to my stomach. Yep, I am a member of a very different mile high club. The truth of the matter is that I had given exactly NO THOUGHT to anything that I would do after my mission. I had planned my life (to the extent I was a life-planner) up until the point that I was walking down the jetway, and now, like Indiana Jones, I was stepping off the ledge with nothing more than faith that there was SOME sort of plan for me.

On my second flight, from Salt Lake to Reno, I was seated next to a very attractive young woman. I had not actually spoken to a young woman for two years (well, that’s not entirely true, but certainly hadn’t talked with a young woman with any, umm, ulterior motives). My stomach had settled somewhat, so I thought I would engage in some pleasantries. Some very awkward pleasantries. Followed, almost immediately, by me burying my face in a vomit bag. Thankfully, I avoided retching any more (there wasn’t anything left to throw up), but after 20 minutes or so she very sweetly asked if I was OK.

OK? Sure, I’m great. Never better. I just happen to be ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED of going home and leaving behind the life that I’d come to know and love.

Sorry Mom. I would have stayed if they would have let me.

Life at home was a challenge for me. I really did not know where I fit in. I was back in Carson City, where my family had moved shortly before I left. Of course, I’d only lived there for a couple of months before the mission, but my family had been there 2½ years, so they knew everyone. I missed the mission, missed the structure and the companions and the ward members and everything about it.

I tried dating. There was a girl that was home from BYU that wanted to date me, and so we went out a few times, but she liked to take advantage of my naiveté—nothing evil, she would just have her sister pretend she wasn’t home, etc., to play with my mind. Being a newly returned missionary, I was just eager to please and not be offended by anything, so I fell for it. Every. Single. Time.

That relationship did not work out.

I got a job at a grocery store, Albertson’s. My brother Pete was employed there as a courtesy clerk/checker, and I got hired on in the butcher block. Being a butcher sounded like a cool job. I'd get to wield a knife, cut large cow parts into steaks and roasts, and talk grilling like a pro. Except that they wouldn’t let me touch the knives. Or even go in the back where the knives were. Heck, they didn't really want me to talk to the customers.

So I stood out front, looking pretty, trying to convince the soccer moms that country style pork ribs would make an amazing Sunday afternoon meal or trying to appear knowledgeable as the 30-something guy with a Guns-N-Roses t-shirt and leather jacket talked about the perfect method for grilling a tri-tip roast.

I had never even HEARD of a tri-tip roast.

But I could wrap up raw shrimp in paper wrapping and slap on a price sticker with the best of them.

After I’d been at Albertson’s for about a month, my dad mentioned that a local lumberyard was hiring. The owner was a guy in a neighboring ward. And so it was that I got hired at City Plywood and Lumber. Initially I thought I could handle two jobs, but the reality was I hated selling meat. And I liked playing with power tools and driving big trucks. So I quit Albertson’s and started working full time for City Plywood.

My boss was a crusty old guy named Perry, who happened to have a crazy generous streak to him. He was a classic man’s man. He swore like a sailor (a Mormon sailor, so a lot of d@*ns and h3££s and the occasional $#!+) and was not overly concerned with hurting anyone’s feelings. He called things like he saw them, argued with vendors over pennies, and expected his employees to WORK. He also bought us lunch everyday, and was quick to pull a twenty out of his wallet to say thanks for doing a good job. He loaned me cash to buy my first car after the mission, and he paid for my gas when I road-tripped to Utah to visit his daughter.

Oh, but that’s another story. Don't tell my wife.

I worked for Perry for a year. I started college about ten months in, but continued working for Perry. He had a couple of hard-fast rules, one of which was that we were expected to be at work at 7:50 every morning. We didn’t clock in until 8:00, but we were to  be there by 7:50. Having practiced before the NLRB, I can see the problem with that little requirement, but at the time it seemed reasonable. Reasonable, but impossible.

I could not get there on time to save my life. 7:54? Sure. 7:57? More likely. I was ALWAYS there before 8:00, but 7:50 seemed like it was SO FREAKING EARLY and I just could not seem to get my butt there on time.

Finally, Perry had had enough. I rolled in one morning about 7:58, and there was a line of trucks already in the yard waiting to be loaded up. I came in to grab my gloves and get to work. Perry was not happy, however. He fired me on the spot. Told me to get out and not come back. And then he followed me out to my car to make sure I left. Or to get his keys back. Probably the latter.

I was shocked. SHOCKED. And a little devastated.

But I learned an important lesson. Show up on time. Be there when you tell someone you’ll be there.

I’ve never been close to being fired again. From that time, I have prided myself in showing up on time and working hard, no matter the job.

My dad took pity on his unemployed (in GREENLAND!) son and gave me a job. Within not too long, I was running his corporate service business while he ventured out into other opportunities. We had employees of our own, had offices and rents and clients and bills and all of those businessy things. I understood a little better why Perry got so frustrated with me and why he had no choice, really, but to send me away.

After about 5 years, my life was completely different. I was married. I had two kids and a house and a mortgage. I was living in Las Vegas and running the business from here. My parents had moved to Utah and my dad was busy running a Y2K food storage business. I was learning another lesson, too: when you are the owner, you are the last one to get paid. On slow weeks, when there wasn’t money in the account, there wasn’t a paycheck to take home to my wife.

I decided that I needed to go back to school before those two little kids realized that we were poor.

We sold the house, I gave up my interest in the business (my brother took over), and we moved to Provo to finish school and eventually to attend law school. We may as well have gone to seminary, since we took a vow of poverty before attending school. We lived off of student loans, lived in a 3 bedroom apartment that would fit in my living room and kitchen in this house with room to spare, and counted ourselves lucky to have food on the table. Clorinda got really good at thrifting and couponing and we had some generous family members that helped out (like the time that our heater in the car went out in February—my parents paid to have it repaired so we didn’t have to wear winter coats while driving). I had awesome friends (the Super Best Friends) at school that would cover for meals just to make sure I could come along. Our bank account was empty, but we were well taken care of.

At the end of law school I accepted a job working for a district court judge, Judge Adair, and I eventually accepted a job with a small civil law firm in Las Vegas where one of the partners was a friend of my father. I have been there for over twelve years. Several times I’ve had opportunity to leave, but the circumstances weren’t right or I felt compelled to stay. ("Faithfulness he talked of, madam, your enduring faithfulness!") I work with some really great people, people that I will count as friends for life.

That lasted until Wednesday last week.

On Wednesday, December 14, the senior partner (well, the ONLY partner) invited us into his office and announced that effective December 31, he was shutting down the firm. 22 years and 10 months after the first time it had happened, I was again unceremoniously fired. Dumped. Sent packing. Thrown out on my ear.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Fontano. I got you a pink slip! (Hmm, read one way that sounds like I got some lovely women’s underclothing. That is NOT the way to read that sentence. Although I’m pretty sure I could pull it off. And it doesn't make you a bad person.)

They say that history repeats itself. For a long time I’ve had promptings to start my own place, to go out on my own, to be my own boss. I’ve gotten fortune cookies that assured me I would “succeed in business” or that I should “start a new venture.” I’ve had friends that asked why I was still working for the man, friends that encouraged me to open my own practice.

The coward in me was happy to sit in my office, work my hours, and take my paycheck each week. On good years there would be Christmas bonuses. On not-so-good years there would be smaller bonuses, but we were comfortable, so it was easy to stick with the status quo.

Well, whether it was God or the universe or the soothsayers at Panda Express, life decided that I needed a little more motivation.

So, it is with a little fear and trepidation, and a lot of excitement and anticipation, that I announce the law offices of HEATON FONTANO, LTD., opening January 3, 2017.

The website (www.heatonfontano.com) isn’t up yet (hopefully within this next week), and the phones aren’t on, but I've signed a lease and we’re rushing to get everything in place (two weeks is not really sufficient time to get an office ready, but it's what I've got!). But if you need legal help, or if your friends are in need of legal advice, I hope you’d consider calling me. Heaven knows I’ll need all the help I can get!

For you, I'll show up by 7:50.

Only a Mother

There are two dates each year of particular significance for LDS missionaries: Mother’s Day, and Christmas day. It is on those days that the missionaries get to call home. The rest of the time they’re restricted to written communications. Now it’s email, but in my day, it was snail mail. There was no such thing as email (well, for the general public there wasn’t email. I understand Al Gore had been using it for years. And probably Josh Haley, but that’s just a suspicion.)

Of course, Christmas brought presents, too. On Christmas Day in 1992 I was doing my second stint in Lawton, Oklahoma. (I had actually started the mission in Lawton nearly two years before, so in mission-speak I was born there and I died there.) Shortly before Christmas I received a pretty large box in the mail that was filled with gifts. Unfortunately, the specifics of all but one of those gifts have long since faded from my memory. By that point in my mission I’d given up on any consistent journal writing, so I doubt there’s any kind of record anywhere, unless my mom kept an account book. But there was one gift that I still have today.

A blue sweatshirt with an ice-skating polar bear on the front.

I still have the sweatshirt--24 years later!

At that time I was serving as the zone leader and was the only one in the zone that had been out for over a year. My companion, Elder Scott Davis, was a brand new greenie, straight from the MTC, who had only been out a month. It was hard to believe for me that the mission was about to come to a close. It had been my life for two years. I had been serving as a missionary for 23 months and I was two weeks from turning 21.

What I wasn’t was 4. Which was good because the sweatshirt was (and still is) size XL. If I HAD been 4 it wouldn’t have fit it very well.

Quick, think of any 21 year old man you know. What do you think he wants for Christmas this year? If you guessed a blue sweatshirt with an ice-skating polar bear on the front, you’d be WRONG! 100% of the time, you’d be wrong.

And so it was that when I opened that gift, which was, incidentally, the “big” gift in my box, I was a little, in a word, dumbfounded.

Thanks Mom.

My mother is perhaps the craftiest person I know. I mean that in the best way possible. Like in the sense of doing and making crafts. Like they should rename “Michael’s” to “Kathy’s” crafty. My whole life before going on the mission, our house was decorated for the season. About midway through January, all of the Valentine’s day stuff came out. The house was red and pink. Most kids gave valentines to their friends. We gave iced sugar cookies with each kid’s name handwritten in frosting, carefully made by my mother.

No sooner did the Valentin’s decorations come down than the house was turned green. My mother was a Griffin by birth and the Irish blood came out. We didn’t have a river near our house, but the water coming out of the faucet was green.

Ok, that’s not true. But her beer was green.

That’s not true either. Sorry. Although she was Irish, she’d long since adopted her mother’s LDS faith so no drinking. But we DID have hand-crafted St Patrick’s day decorations all over the house. And shamrock-shaped sugar cookies with green icing and names scripted in frosting.

If you decorate for St. Paddy’s day, you certainly decorate for Easter. And your kids’ friends get sugar cookies in Easter Egg shapes with pastel frosting and their names scripted in frosting. You decorate for Independence Day. And Halloween. And Thanksgiving. It didn’t matter what the holiday, my mother had crafts that announced to the world that WE CELEBRATE [INSERT HOLIDAY NAME] IN THIS HOUSE!! And your kids’ friends get sugar cookies with their names hand-scripted in frosting. GEICO could make a commercial about my mother—it’s what you do.

But Christmas was the granddaddy of them all.  The tree was decorated with homemade decorations, including a personal favorite—soldiers and reindeer and Santas and nativity characters and all sorts of characters made from old wooden clothespins. She made stockings and advent calendars and table runners and tree skirts and more advent calendars and Christmas card holders and still more advent calendars. And they weren’t just for us—our cousins all got advent calendars and tree skirts and table runners from my mother, too. In fact, just last year Clorinda and the kids and I were visiting my cousins in Philadelphia and they were telling us about the advent calendar from Aunt Kathy (my mom) that she had sent them probably 35 years ago that was still in use in their home!

A fairly recent advent calendar.
I'm pretty sure all of my siblings have a matching one in their homes, too.
I'm not certain whether my cousins do.

Yep, while the rest of the world was fighting it’s way through mobs of people at all of the stores on Black Friday, our house was turning red, green, and white. My mom was crafting 12-Days-of-Christmas gifts for 4-6 different families, to be snuck out in the dark of night and delivered to unsuspecting recipients. And our friends got cookies with their names handwritten in frosting. And fudge. Oh, and peanut butter haystacks.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. My mom could cook really well (except for cream tuna on toast—that was nasty). And bake really well (except for that time she made a cake that called for mayonnaise and used Miracle Whip instead. Zing!).

And it wasn’t just holidays. My mom could do it all. She was my cub scout leader, coached my brother’s soccer team, was a “merry miss” leader back in the pre-activity-days days (I still don’t know my color season—my mom was adamant THAT was just for the girls, so it’s her fault if I wear clothes that aren’t in my color wheel), and seemed to have held just about every leadership position available in church.

So as it happened, there was some sort of ugly sweater contest in 1992 at my parents’ ward, and my mom decided that everyone needed matching blue sweatshirts with ice-skating polar bears on the front. So she made them for everyone in the family. That is no easy task in my family. There were 8 kids, at that time ranging from 21-minus-2-weeks (yours truly) to 3 (my sister Amy). Six of those eight were boys. Ten people. Who has time during December to whip out ten blue sweatshirts with ice-skating polar bears on the front?  But I guess if you’re already doing nine, the tenth one isn’t a big deal in that situation. Of COURSE if the 3 year old girl wants one, her 21 year old brother wants one! (She probably sent matching sweatshirts to Susan and Karen in Philadelphia, too. I’ll have to check next time I talk to them.)

My mother.

My mother is the first of two and the third of four, depending upon which of her parents you’re basing it on. She has one younger sister, and two older brothers that share a different dad. She grew up primarily in northern California, in the East Bay. When she was just fourteen, her own mother passed away from cancer, and my mom became the woman of the house. Eventually her dad remarried, which was a good thing for him but not so great for my mom. Having some understanding of the teenage daughter dynamic, I can see where bringing a new woman into the home probably isn’t going to turn out like the Sound of Music.

Well, maybe the part where they put a frog in her dress. But definitely not the part where they sing and dance through the mountains of Austria.

Let’s just say there was some friction between my mom and her step-mother.

But that didn’t stop her. In High School my mom’s family moved and my mother transferred to Castro Valley High School where: (i) she met my dad and (ii) she graduated top 5 (?) in her class. She lived in a different world from today. There wasn’t an expectation that most people would go to college, and that expectation was even lower for women. The draft was in full swing, and she and my dad were both expecting that he would soon be off to Vietnam. They had decided to get married and were even engaged (make sure to ask my dad about the night he asked his future father-in-law if he could marry my mom—let’s just say the words “terrified” and “vomit” may come up (pun not intended) in that story). But the Lord works in mysterious ways, and my dad was called to serve a mission for the LDS church. He went to Michigan. (It’s no Oklahoma, but I’ve been to East Lansing once and I just saw the inside of the Detroit airport last week—it seems nice enough.)

While my dad was in Michigan, my mom moved in with my other grandparents. As the end of my dad’s mission was approaching, they were still of a mind to get married when he returned. My mother took matters into her own hands. She got the announcements put together and sent out. Yes, my father received an invitation to his own wedding while he was still serving a mission in Michigan. That doesn’t happen every day (it certainly better not happen with Marien!). He returned home from his mission on March 2, 1972, and they were married 18 days later in the Oakland LDS Temple. Nine and one-half months later (drumroll please), yours truly arrived on the scene and life as we know it was forever changed.

My parents used to joke that they didn’t know how kids were made—maybe it came from eating Chinese food?—and that’s why they had so many. Well, the Chinese food was apparently plentiful in the Bay Area. They had four boys in their first five years and four months of marriage. Another boy was added 3 years later, but since he was destined to be THE middle child (just ask him), they added a girl, a boy, and another girl during the 80s. At one point my mother had 5 boys under the age of 8, and my dad was in the Bishopric, so she had to keep all of us in line by herself during church. WWE has got NOTHING on my mother.

Of course, my mother is not perfect. We still laugh thinking about when she was the Activity Chair in our ward in Hawaii and showed “Popeye” for a ward activity (“haul @$$, haul @$$!”). Or the time she stood in testimony meeting and told the ward that sometimes she wanted to ring their necks. Or the time she got really mad at Jay over something and actually tried to ring his neck. I’m not sure if Jay’s laughter was genuine or just an uncontrolled nervous terrified reaction.

But she is perfect in many ways. As a grandmother, she loves her 24 grandchildren perfectly and is always looking out for ways to serve them. For the last several years she has cared for my dad perfectly as he has been in and out of hospitals and surgeries and while he was effectively paralyzed from the neck down. (Note to self: insert joke about how he’s been paralyzed from the neck up most of his life.) I’m not sure she realized how strong of a person she was before all of that, but I’ve watched in amazement as she’s spent day after day and night after night in the hospital room or at PT or the doctor’s office. She has been the perfect wife for a serial entrepreneur. My dad gets new business ideas more than anyone I know (he’s like a poor man’s Elon Musk), and she has lived through years of feast-or-famine. But she always managed to make sure we were fed and clothed and had a roof over our heads.

There is a great verse in the Book of Mormon. It talks about a large group of young men who had gone off to war. They were very young, but were valiant and unafraid. When one of their leaders questioned their courage, he noted their response:

[A]s I had ever called them my sons (for they were all of them very young) even so they said unto me: Father, behold our God is with us, and he will not suffer that we should fall; then let us go forth; we would not slay our brethren if they would let us alone; therefore let us go, lest they should overpower the army of Antipus.
Now they never had fought, yet they did not fear death; and they did think more upon the liberty of their fathers than they did upon their lives; yea, they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them.
And they rehearsed unto me the words of their mothers, saying: We do not doubt our mothers knew it. (Alma 56:46-48.)

With my dad at her side, my mom raised 8 kids. I’m a little biased, but 7 of those 8 are among the best people I know (sorry Dave—maybe next year you’ll make the cut). I can’t speak for those 7, but I can speak for the other 1 (yeah, it wasn’t really you, Dave. You’re back on the list). So much of who I am and what I know and hold dear in my life I owe to my mother. Like the sons of scripture, I have relied countless times upon her example and testimony, and when I may have doubted my own testimony, never once did I doubt that my mother knew.

I remember one time my mom commented about how all she had ever wanted was to be a mom. So much of the world doesn’t see that as successful womanhood, but I am eternally grateful for a woman that dedicated her life to the noblest pursuit. Only a mother? Perhaps, but she is my mother. My angel mother.

Maybe that’s why I still have that sweatshirt.