Fleeting Memories

I’m not much of a reader. I never have been. Joy and most of our children are avid readers. I think that I just learned to read too late in my life. For years I delivered the paper in Boulder City for the Deseret News and for the Las Vegas Review Journal . My little brother delivered some papers for the Review Journal in McKeeversville, and I remember him reading the paper before he left to make the deliveries. Sometimes one of our parents would have to come out and tell him to hurry up and get the papers ready to deliver. In later life, our own sons who delivered newspapers would sit and read as they folded the papers and we would need to tell them to hurry up and get the papers ready. When they got home, they could read the paper. I sometimes suspected that as some of them got out of sight, they sat down and read some more. As I got older and learned to read, I would read part of the paper after I had made deliveries. Years later when I was teaching at Orem High School m...

When I was about ten or eleven, my cousin and I were told of a way to make a tattoo from the juice of a fig tree. You could take a small new stem, slice it up the stem so you would have two flat pieces of stem to work with. You would put the cut side of the stem against your skin and hold it there for a little while. After we had done this and couldn’t see any tattoo, we stopped trying. It wasn’t until later in the day when it would start to itch and you could see that there was a red welt showing that you began to think that it might work after all. I had made a cross on my arm. It was sore and itchy. My mother looked at it and was worried that I might have gotten into some type of poison like poison ivy or something. When my father came home, she had him look at it. He examined it and said he would put some KIP ointment on it. I’m not sure what it was, but my dad put it on everything from scrapes, cuts, poison ivy and a myriad of other problems. My mom was worried, but Dad said...

Summertime, after school was out, it was a time of sweet repose. After the lawns were all watered, our mother would take us down to the lake for swimming lessons. We were lucky to have Lake Mead just five miles away from our home. We would stay at the lake for some time after and then head home. When we got home, we had lunch and then laid down on the front room rug and Mom would read to us to help us fall asleep. Some of the books I remember were Where the Red Fern Grows, Boxcar Children, Heidi, and others. She would read while we fell asleep. We would try to stay awake so she would read more, but usually, someone would nod off, and she would stop. We did on occasion try to poke each other just a little to stay awake, but soon someone would drop off to sleep, and she was through reading until the next day. My favorite book was Boxcar Children . I would have liked to have had a boxcar somewhere near our home that my brothers, sister, and friends could have lived and played in. I...

There have been many ages in the history of man. Like the stone age, bronze age, middle age, space-age, and probably many more. Now we have so many advantages and wonderful things in our lives, but it has become the age of inconvenience. I have a cell phone, and it is great. The problem is that I get three or four SCAM calls a day and that is an inconvenience. They usually come during nap time. I don’t know why they keep calling, I’m not really looking for something new. I like life how it is with all of the benefits and none of the problems. With all of the problems in the world and in our own state and city at this time, my problems are of little importance, it is just an annoyance. No one has ever knelt on my neck or shot me in the back. So, I will quit complaining and pray for those that have problems that are not an inconvenience but often a matter of life and death.

I remember when our family got one of the first phones in town. It was a party-line it later became a private line. The phone operator could still listen in but they weren’t supposed to. Sometimes the operator would talk to my mom while I was on the phone to my mom. The operator was a friend of my parents. You would pick up the phone and the operator would ask you what number you wanted to be connected to, “Number Please.” Later there were modern rotary phones you could lift up the handle and get a dial tone and then dial the number. Everything was connected to a phone jack in the house. You couldn’t just move the phone without a jack. It was really something when my mom bought a twenty-five-foot cord which would allow you to be in a different room and use the phone. All of the phones were black. Like Ford said when asked about different colored vehicles, “You can have any color you want, as long as it is black.” That was my introduction to the world of technology. One Chr...

When I was fourteen, I went to stay at Harry Higgins farm. He was my uncle, and I spent the summer there. I want to think that it was because my parents wanted me to see what the farm was like. In reality, they were probably tired of me and my lack of any desire to help keep a peaceful home. One of my first jobs on the farm was to plow a field. I was given instructions and sent off in one of his tractors to disc the field. I was driving a little too fast and almost went off the road with the tractor. I finally got to the field safe, that means upright and alive. I lowered the disc and started my job. It may have been boring for others, but it was quite exciting for me. I had never driven before, at least not legally. Jim Stubbs in Kansas Wheatfield One of the exciting things about Kansas at that time was that at harvest and plowing season you were allowed to drive any vehicle at fourteen and it was legal. I was also allowed to drive an old Kaiser-Frazer car when work was do...

I remember hearing the statement attributed to Brigham Young as he looked over the desert area of present-day Salt Lake City, Utah that it would some day blossom as a rose. It certainly has done that. The whole area has blossomed with the aid of irrigation of one kind or another. I was raised in Boulder City, Nevada in the middle of the desert, and it was quite green there, again aided by irrigation water from Lake Mead. If you were to leave the city just one block, you were back in the desert where it was hot dry and usually windy. I rode the bus back to Las Vegas from somewhere else one time, and I remember as I stepped off the bus, it was like a blast furnace. I loved it.  I loved the desert, and there were usually flowers in spring from the rain. I would like to live there now, but most of my family live near me in Utah, with the exception of Nate and Kat who are in Florida. I have always loved the desert. There is a smell there when it rains unlike anywhere el...