Category: Stories

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Ya Gotta Be There

Tie o’ the Day flashes the country’s flag and the outline of the contiguous states of the United States o’ America. For the last few years I had the Delta house, we got ourselves all set up to watch the parade in our very own driveway gravel at the side of the road. The minute folks began to stake out their spots with their lawn chairs up on Main Street, I dragged ours out by the road in front of my house– as a gesture of solidarity with the rest of the town, while also gently razzing the tradition of staking off every inch of public parking on the mile-long Delta streets for the few days leading up to the 4th. Nevermind that the road in front of my house and Mom’s house is not, nor has it ever been, on the parade route. It was just fun to sit by the road with Mom and whoever else each day, drinking our sodas, and watching people try to figure out what the heck we were doing as they drove by.

The 4th of July in Delta is basically Christmas in shorts. It’s a bigly deal everywhere in the country, but nothing like in Delta. I have seen a lot of 4th’s in a lot of other places, and I am telling you Delta is the July 4th-iest place to be. It’s not that it has events and things to do which you can’t find at other 4th’s. It offers about the same stuff to do as any other Independence Day celebration I’ve attended, but it offers a key difference: The Spirit o’ the 4th of July. Everybody’s into it. It just plain matters.

There are really only two annual holidays in Delta: Christmas and the 4th of July. If you’ve moved away from Delta, you might come home for Christmas. But you WILL come home for the 4th of July. It’s what you do. I have never met people who feel such an intense desire to go back to their hometowns for the town’s July 4th celebration. Natives and Delta-natives-who-live-elsewhere plan their summer trips around Delta’s 4th of July. I kid you not. If you’re a Delta Rabbit, when you put away the Christmas ornaments each year, you start dragging out the 4th of July decor.

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Gracie Gets A Blessing, But Not A Photo

The divine Miss Grace Anne Blackwelder received her name-and-a-blessing in church yesterday. It was a momentous occasion, so I knew I needed extra eyes to take it all in. My wood, eyewear Bow Tie o’ the Day volunteered to give me two extra lenses for the event. Suzanne even accompanied me to Provo for Gracie’s bigly day. It was Suzanne’s first time attending church with me at Bishop Travis’ and Bishopette Collette’s ward. It was also Suzanne’s first meeting with Gracie.

Of course, my SWWTRN was there. My oldest sister, Mercedes Rae, and her husband, Nuk, attended the bigly event as well. Bishopette Collette’s entire Family Tree seemed to be in attendance too. They are a gregarious and welcoming bunch of folks. As far as I could tell, not one of ’em was afraid of Bow Tie o’ the Day.

Bishop Travis’ blessing on Gracie was a marvel. He does not give cookie cutter, fill-in-the-blanks blessings. When Bishop Travis offers a prayer of any kind, you have to pay attention. You have to think. For example, his blessing upon Gracie included a brief acknowledgement and appreciation for the birth mother who made the difficult decision to give up a baby, which made it possible for Travis and Collette to receive the miracle of Gracie. And it also made it possible for Gracie to receive the miracle of Travis and Collette. Sometimes others pay a big part of the price, for something which enriches us.

Gracie’s fans lined the pews of the chapel. We covered at least three of the long, center rows. All through Sacrament Meeting, Gracie was lifted over heads and over pews, from one person who already loves her, to the next, and to the next. She was body-surfing the crowd. Gracie slept through almost all of the holding, rocking, kisses, and love. But I’m sure her soul drank it in.

Gracie was so busy receiving loves and smooches from the multitudes, I couldn’t get one snapshot of her.

FYI Suzanne made the quilt you see here especially for Gracie to share with Mom and Dad. Bishop Travis was never a child: he was a caped superhero throughout his kidhood. Mostly, he was Batman. Now, Travis and Collette work for BYU as important Cougar superheroes of some kind. The quilt had to combine superheroes and BYU. Gracie really is a Wonder Woman already, so that fabric was a must. The BYU fabric was a perfect clash-match choice. Suzanne nailed the themes beautifully.

Another FYI I like bragging about what Suzanne creates.

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It’s Lookin’ Good

SCAR UPDATE! Bow Ties o’ the Day present my scar, exactly one year after it was carved into my belly during my pancreaticoduodenectomy. 6 inches o’ scar! It is healing well. It’s gradually whitening up, especially on the left end so far. It will never be invisible, but it will fade. I don’t mind having a scar on my body. It’s like my wrinkles and gray hairs: I earned them all. Deal with them or look away. In a way, they are my body’s evidence of parts of my life’s story. This is my only physical scar. If it were my style to wear bikinis, I’d still wear one. I am not ashamed to show what my belly has been through, inside or out.

RECOVERY UPDATE! My handsome Hanky Panky scar is an adequate symbol for my year o’ post-operation recovery. I can report that every step in the healing process has been textbook, best-case scenario, near-perfection. I’m feeling substantially less Hanky Panky pain. I’ve done everything Dr. Mulvehill told me to do to heal. Suzanne made sure of that. She has taken good care of me and she did all the heavy lifting, as they say. She fussed at me to slow down when I got over-zealous about how much I could do. I learned Suzanne knows how to scold when she sees bad behavior. (It’s kinda funny though. She didn’t seem to know how to use that disciplinary skill when Rowan was a young’un. Alas! I was always the bad cop o’ his kidhood.)

I continue to feel weird tugs and pulls in my torso, but throughout the last year, they have lessened in terms of pain, oddity, and regularity of occurrence. I notice them most now when getting in and out of bed, and when using my bigly strength to push something down– like closing my car’s obnoxiously heavy hatch or pushing down the lid on my mini keg.

I’ve been extra cautious with my recovery. (Except for falling down the stairs while running. Twice. And a few other not cautious things we won’t talk about now.) I rested and rested and rested until my rester was sore. I didn’t lift anything but Popsicles and Diet Cokes for the first two months after the operation. I’ve gotten my stamina back almost completely, because I go for walks.

Also, I take what I call My Pancreas with every meal. My Pancreas is a bigly capsule containing a prescription pancreatic enzyme which helps what’s left of my pancreas do its job. I take My Pancreas very seriously. I am beyond diligent about taking it when I feast. I have, on only a couple of occasions, forgotten to carry it with me when we’ve gone out to eat. At one restaurant, I was so surprised and aghast I didn’t have My Pancreas that– upon discovering it wasn’t in my pocket– I said a little too loudly, “I forgot to bring My Pancreas!” That entire evening, I got the distinct impression nobody at the restaurant noticed my bow tie or my cape. Instead, they were straining to see if there was evidence of a nook, cranny, or cupboard somewhere on the side of my gut where a pancreas could be kept or let out.

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Whew! I’m Glad THAT’S Over

On this date and at this very hour last year, I was being gutted at Huntsman Cancer Institute. (You can see in the photo that Bow Tie o’ the Day jumped on my neck right after I got into my regular hospital room.) After nearly 20 years of chronic idiopathic pancreatitis, I’d had enough. Most of my dastardly pancreas (my Hanky Panky) had to go. With it, went my gall bladder, duodenum, and a bit of my small intestine. And finally, my surgeon had to replumb my innards. Whenever I tell the story of my surgery, I am most excited to tell this detail: While hacking out 2/3 of my pancreas, my surgeon, Dr. Sean Mulvehill, found and removed a bunch of pancreatic stones the size of olives! That’ll clog your pancreatic duct! Olive-sized stones! That’s my fave part of my whole surgery tale to tell.

In today’s later post, I’ll write a very tiny update about my recovery, and I’ll show y’all a Scar Update, so be warned.

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My Eyes Are Getting Sleepy, Sleepy, Sleepy

That kind of day when one of your email accounts locks you out and you’re not sure if you’ve been hacked or if you just hit the wrong button the last time you used it and you’ve run out of options for troubleshooting the problem so you decide to grit your teeth and call CenturyLink to unlock your account and let you make a new password so you can use your CenturyLink email again and after a while the techie on the phone tells you it works now and so you end the call and go to check your account and you’re still locked out so you call CenturyLink a second time and go through the whole Concocting o’ the New Password and the Unlocking o’ the Old Account with a second person and finally your account really works this time but you realize that you have spent almost three hours of your morning on the phone with CenturyLink just to get you back to normal in your email situation and then you realize that being patient with techies on the phone for almost three hours not only blew your entire morning’s work and errands it exhausted your bipolar noggin and now all you want to do is tie on a wienerdog-wearing-a-bow-tie Tie o’ the Day and take a nap in the recliner while curled up in the tv blanket Suzanne made you and then you’ll contemplate how it is that being polite and patient with your email account problems and the phone techies who helped solve them can make you so very very sleepy.

Yeah, that kind of day.

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It’s In The Photograph

Little ol’ Mom, and little ol’ me. We were tuckered out, and I just figured out why. I am wearing the neckwear we kids wore when we had a sore throat or were congested. As I was filing this pic this morning, it leapt out at me: I was wearing Vick’s Rag o’ the Day. Neckwear! I don’t know what you called it in your house, but in our house it was The Vick’s Rag. It was a clean, white dishtowel, rolled up, slicked with a glob of Vick’s VapoRub against your neck, and fastened around your neck with a bigly safety pin. It most likely had absolutely no medicinal value, but it always helped me feel a tad better when Mom put one on me.

The Vick’s Rag was also a kind of neck tiara or full-on crown. It came with privileges. You had dibs on just about everything. The living room sofa was yours if you were wearing The Vick’s Rag. Mom would anoint the couch with The Tuckin’ in o’ The Sheet down its length, for you to rest on. You could ask for special eats if you wanted to– and that was on top of Mom’s regular family fixin’s. Your cup held endless refills of warm Jell-O water. And.. you could do all of your sick eating and drinking on the couch. You were not required to move your bones one iota, as long as your wore The Vick’s Rag.

The highest prize The Vick’s Rag entitled you to? Television channel selection was all yours. Now, for the benefit of you youngsters, let me assure you: Being the boss of TV channels back in the olden days when I grew up was a bigly deal, like you cannot fathom. We, like most people, had only one television in the house. One. That was it. You were choosing for the whole family what you’d all be watching.

But receiving the television privilege was a somewhat complicated prize, because in those same olden days when I grew up, TV remotes were not a common entity. This meant either you had to get your speshul butt off the couch to change the channel, or you could ask someone else to change it for you.

Each of those two options carried with it a hidden trap. You had to be careful. If you got up to change the channel too often, Mom or Dad would say, “Oh, you seem to be getting around ok. You must be getting better.” That was code for, “You’ll probably be well enough to go to school tomorrow.” Doh!

If you asked someone else to turn the channel for you, you had to be extremely polite. You could not be bossy or constantly asking for the channel to be changed, or Mom or Dad would say something about how they don’t work all day just to come home, and get up and down, to change TV channels. You knew that option would rarely end well, and Dad would be allowed to take over “your” couch before the evening was over– even if everybody knew you wore The Vick’s Rag in the family.

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Smoke ‘Em, If You Got ‘Em

Checkered-flag Bow Tie o’ the Day is protecting the innocent by hiding the identity of some unfortunate DHS boy who actually went on a date with me in 1980. I don’t remember which dance this was, but the brick wall tells me it was held in the old gym of the old DHS. I seem to remember we went 4-wheeling out by DMAD with another couple before AND after the dance. And then something weird happened, which I can’t seem to remember, and we ended up walking to my house, and then I drove my mystery date to his house.

Don’t think for one minute I’m not wearing a bow tie in this photo. If you look closely, you can see the girl on my sweater is wearing a pink bow tie around her collar. I find bow ties even when I didn’t know I had ’em. They’re just little pieces of the real me, showing up in my history. Some people’s souls throw glitter wherever they go. Apparently, I sprinkle a little trail o’ bow ties on my life’s journey.

The 3-D, pigtail-adorned sweater I’m wearing in this photo is one of my fave pieces of clothing ever. But I ended up wearing it only two or three times. You see, I have this stoopid tendency to “save” my best stuff (clothing, dinnerware, etc.) for speshul, bigly deal occasions. I’m afraid I’ll spill, snag, or otherwise ruin them if I wear them on regular occasions. And then, to compound it, I also worry the next speshul occasion will be speshul-er than this speshul occasion, so I should save the best outfit for the upcoming possibly speshul-er event. And so on.

Before I knew it, my pigtail sweater didn’t fit anymore: I had pubertied into a larger shirt size. My sweater was nearly pristine when I finally had to take it to D.I.. While it fit, I didn’t wear it and enjoy it as much as I could have. That means a gaggle o’ spectators couldn’t enjoy it while I wore it too. My decision to “save” it means I held back a bit o’ joy from others and myself.

We forget that every minute we’re alive is a speshul occasion, and we should wear our best stuff every day if that’s what we want to do. Each of us is important enough to deserve to do speshul stuff just for our own tiny selves. We don’t need to be in front of a grand audience before it’s okay to dazzle and shine while we walk across a room.

We don’t need to feed speshul guests at our table, to use the good plates and cups. We– and the folks around us who love us– are speshul too.

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“It Takes A Long Time To Grow Old Friends”

TIE O’ THE DAY brings flowery Bow Ties o’ the Day in honor of Peggy Crane’s birthdate. Peggy was amused by my neckwear, even as she told me it was weird.

It has been almost two years since Peggy and I last spoke and razzed each other. I was blessed to be able to sit beside her hospital bed and hold her hand for a long while on the day she passed. Throughout our conversation, she was still showing signs of her wild self, despite her rapidly deepening pain. I miss Peggy, and I think of her daily. She was Mom’s best friend, and she was my second mother.

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Once, I Almost Smiled

Some people are BORN TO RUN. Some are BORN TO BE WILD. Some are even BORN TO BUY FABRIC (like Suzanne). I was BORN TO BE BIPOLAR. I probably won’t be making a silly t-shirt or bumper sticker about it though. I joke around about my escapades in lunacy, but I also take my brain’s mood pendulum seriously. While combing through photos, in an effort to learn more about my brain’s life, I made a discovery. In pix of me as a child, I wasn’t usually smiling bigly, animatedly, or even cheesily– the way most kids do. Even as a kid, I carried a hidden darkness. I was around 6 months old in this photo, which shows me wearing an almost-smile. This is a rare snapshot of 1964-baby-HEW coming close to actually showing a happy, bigly smile as a kid.

[NOTE: Not only do I think I was born with my crazy head, I know I was born with my Spock ear. See, it’s there atop my left ear.]

Bow-tied Bow Tie o’ the Day is helping me act out on some infantile ridiculousness this afternoon. I admit it: The 1964-baby-HEW is jealous of the newest baby in the Wright clan, Grace Anne Blackwelder. I’ve been posting so many pix of her, and posts about her, that 1964-baby-HEW has developed a severe case of jealousy. In my family, it’s all about Gracie right now. “Gracie! Gracie! Gracie!” I’m even jealous of all the attention I, myself, pay to Gracie. I childishly believe Gracie has thrown down the pacifier-gauntlet, and now the baby duel is on. 1964-baby-HEW v. Baby Grace Anne. I’m cheering for Gracie. I want her to win.

That’ll make 1964-baby-HEW even more jealous. And thus, the infantile, bitter absurdity of the life of babies goes on. Just kidding. 😁🤣

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Trespassing On City Water

Tie o’ the Day was given to me by my bro–in-law, Nuk. I think of it as a summer tie, or more specifically, a tie for the water. Tie’s wearer can blow it up on one end, which makes it a safety tie one can wear with a life jacket. Air-filled Tie can also be Skitter’s floatie, as is seen here.

I mentioned Delta’s old outdoor swimming pool in one of yesterday’s posts, and the topic got some of you reminiscing about “old pool love” right along with me.

The long-demolished Delta pool was set on the corner of the property where The Sands is currently located. Its structure was basic: a swimming pool, with a single diving board; an office and dressing rooms. In the office, you could buy chips, sodas, candy, and Popsicles from Arjanna Wood, who ran the joint. I guess you could say Arjanna’s office was Delta’s first convenience store.

The pool was surrounded by tall cinder block walls. I’m just guessing the walls were somewhere in the ballpark of 10-feet tall. I never took time out of the fun I was having to measure the pool wall height.

I remember waiting anxiously every year for the city to get the word the Utah Health Department had once again declared the pool sanitary and safe enough to be opened for at least one more summer. The state’s annual stamp o’ approval quit happening in the mid-70’s. To be honest, the Health Department probably should have closed down the open-air pool we dearly loved long before it did. But I’m glad they didn’t. The slippery, cracked place was a blast. It was a palace to those of us who made it a second home for the summer.

The city’s “cement pond” was also a blast after dark when it wasn’t officially open. Think about it: Outdoor pools can’t really close. It wasn’t difficult to sneak in after dark. Ropes, ladders, milk crates, even backhoes were just a few implements we used to get ourselves inside for a midnight swim. You simply had to make sure you pulled your break-in tools over the wall with you, eliminating your outside-the-wall trail.

I know one doofus and his group of friends who threw a ladder against the outside wall and didn’t pull it in after everyone snuck inside. The cop out on patrol saw that clue right away. Doh! Heck, I watched a herd of at least a dozen kids ride their bikes to the pool around 2 in the morning, and then were dough-headed enough to leave their bikes piled up outside one of the pool walls. Cop noticed the mound o’ bikes. Hey, people, if you’re going to commit a prank, don’t tell on yourselves by leaving bigly clues. Just a thought.

The real trick to not getting caught trespassing in the Delta pool at night was to not emit too much noise. It was best if you didn’t yell or cackle or do a cannonball. Delta is not a loud village. It especially wasn’t loud in the 70’s, and the city cops made their rounds through the town faithfully. If a cop caught you trespassing in the pool, you weren’t in too much trouble if you hadn’t been drinking or smoking or damaging the property. The cop would usually drive you right to your house (like free Uber) and chat with you and your parents. That was as far as your legal concerns went. For better or worse, your fate was up to your parents. 😱 Fortunately for me, Dad had harmlessly trespassed into many an outdoor pool in his youth too. He understood the exuberance of kidhood.