Speaking Of Coincidences…

I was in 2nd grade at George Washington elementary in Wycoff, New Jersey. In those first few days of school that year I made friends on the playground with a boy in my class, his name was Duncan Taylor. It wasn’t long before I would ask my parents if my new friend could come over to my house to play. I remember my mom reacting strangely when I announced his name, she was certain that she had attended high school with his father (parents) and she was equally anxious at the possibility of reacquainting. It turns out that Duncan’s dad had married his high school sweetheart and that in fact they all did attend Ramsey High together (graduating class of 58, my dad was a few years older and grew up in New York).


2nd Grade: Me in yellow, Duncan in blue

Our families started to become friends somewhat, but not much later my dad would accept a job in California taking us across the country to a whole new world in the wild wild west. A few years later, Duncan's parents would divorce and his dad and the four boys would move west, eventually ending up in California. My parents too would divorce, but not before Mr. Taylor and Duncan had looked me up and had arranged visits to renew our friendship. It is perhaps obvious what transpired after that, the friendship of two young boys would lead to nuptials which would bring these two families together. I would gain four new step brothers and a step father, Duncan would gain a step mom, two new step brothers and a step sister (later, much later, our half sister Sydney would be born).




Duncan and I in 6th Grade together

Duncan and I grew apart over the years, in high school our interests and abilities took us in opposite directions. Duncan was extremely athletic, it seemed he excelled at whatever he endeavored to do, you can't imagine a person with so many natural abilities and gifts. I would spend my young life wishing I was him, or maybe just wishing that I wasn't me, desiring gifts and talents that would impress others. Duncan got involved in Wrestling and dominated at the State level, I never realized how good he was until years later, reading about his accomplishments in a program at our 20 year high school reunion. I, having spent my youth on swim teams took to the non-competitive pursuit of ocean sports including surfing and scuba diving and with that, associated myself with the deadbeat underachieving surfer crowd. Surfers ambitions were much lower than those of the athletes. We were more interested in making trouble than achieving. Had I been born with talents of a different nature, I imagine my life would have taken a completely different path. Eventually my choices, the direction my life was heading and the subsequent disappointment in myself would motivate me to seek a different path, try harder and I would eventually turn myself around to more noble pursuits.

As adults, Duncan and I are still quite different. Duncan did well in college and went on to get a degree from Hastings law school and became a lawyer, continuing to excel at whatever he set out to achieve. He eventually took an interest in surfing and has become a devoted surfer, traveling all over the world, surfing in the most exotic and celebrated places. He has two step daughters from a previous marriage, he is currently single with no children of his own and that is his greatest source of unhappiness, his kryptonite. He is handsome, has most all of his hair and he is in incredible physical condition. He has lot's of free time, lot's of play time. If he didn't maintain his moral and ethical values, he'd be considered to have the perfect bachelor life that any worldly guy would want. But this model doesn't lend to well to perceived happiness for the LDS faithful with the most recent proclamation to the world which states "the family is central to the Creator's plan for the eternal destiny of His children". And so Duncan has his challenges in life too.



I in contrast have never been a quick study (not that I'm stupid), I am bald and rather unfortunate looking (not that I'm ugly), I am not in good physical shape and I have very little personal time to myself. But thankfully, despite all of this, I somehow managed to marry a beautiful intelligent woman and to have 9 beautiful (maybe not so intelligent) children. I always tend to have to work hard at things, nevertheless, I have always been able to achieve my dreams and to find a great deal of happiness in my life. I have learned over the years that while everyone has different gifts and talents, they also have different weaknesses and challenges that help keep things somewhat balanced and very interesting. The playing field is more level than it may appear, the grass is not really greener in other pastures.

The intent of this post was not to compare and contrast me to Duncan but simply to illustrate how bizarre life can be where the lives of two people, who are so vastly different, when put together in such a way can have such an intertwining and yet significant impact on the lives of so many others. But was this far reaching event really a mere bizarre coincidence, or was it fate?

Adriana Memoirs...

Mission Viejo, CA

To many (OK, 4 of the 6 of you), the relevance of these photos and this post will be nil, but for me and people very dear to me, these photos have a tremendous amount of relevance and sentiment.

I was messing around on google maps with “street view”, couldn’t find any of the homes that I’ve owned but I found many of the homes that I lived in during my youth. This one (house on the right with the funky flat roof) was circa 1972-1974 and conjured up a lot of sentiment and introspection.

Memoir #1: It was in this house that my brothers and I got caught smoking cigarettes up in the garage rafters (don’t worry, we didn’t inhale, gross!). Dad sat us down (he and Mom smoked too) and said, “you guys want to smoke? let’s smoke!”. I’m not sure where he was going with this but it didn’t really matter, none of us had the guts to smoke with the old man and that was essentially the end of that. Well almost.

Around that same time, Mark Baldwin, a popular kid at school, learned that my friend Tommy Hildebrand and I were smokers, he then proceeded to mock us saying, “you guys probably don’t even inhale”. His scoffing hit a major nerve. He wasn’t a smoker and so his first jab was that we needed cigarettes to prove we were men. The second blow was that we weren’t even doing it like real men, and he was right since we didn’t inhale. He successfully made us feel stupid and childish at the same time, nevertheless we emphatically denied these accusations. Tommy and I realized the pickle we were in and knew the only way to save face at this point was to subject our nice clean lungs to the filthy toxins and become men. So we set straight out to inhale.

We found a quaint setting out back in the woods behind this Adriana house and did just that. He yacked up his guts like I’ve never seen anyone yack before. I got green, never actually calling for Ralph, but I most assuredly felt as miserable as Tommy looked. At that moment of near pukage, I decided tobacco was disgusting and I vowed never to touch the filth again, why would anyone voluntarily make themselves so sick to their stomach like that? Tommy went the other way, he was determined to become a man, barfing several more times before earning his stripes. I saw him years later, he was a yellow skinned, yellow teethed, throaty voiced hacking, full-on chain smoker. I became a very vocal adversary to smoking ever more (don’t believe me, ask my kids if there is anything in this world that I detest more).

Back to the more important Adriana memoirs. Memior #2: We lost our German shepherd Fritz, he was an old dog then but we had received him as a pup when I was just a little boy. He bit a neighbor girl in our backyard because she was messing with his tail while he was eating. Charges were pressed and we had to get rid of him.

Memoir #3: My brother Kevin and I threw a Frisbee back and forth to each other without dropping 732 times (or somewhere around there). Think it sounds easy? You try it! My brother is kind of a klutz and finally dropped a perfect pass (well, that’s the way I remember it, lol).

Memior #4: My brothers and I set up a huge tent in the back yard one summer. Somehow we got some pretty neighborhood girls to come over and we may have played truth or dare once or twice, and I may have kissed a girl for the first time. It was all fairly innocent really, except that I may have learned the art of kissing like the Frenchies that summer….

Memior #5: We didn’t have any religion at the time, but it seems that God took an interest in our family and He sent an angel to rescue us. That would be our next door neighbor (house pictured on the left) Kelli Smith, she was in her late teens if I remember right. She invited my parents to have the missionary discussions. My parents were reluctant but didn’t know how to say no, so along came the missionaries (Wagner and Clegg) with the fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It didn’t take for all of us right away, and some of us it didn’t take at all, or it was lost later on. But for me it had a far reaching impact on whom and what I am today and the choices that I have subsequently made in my life. The most significant is the commitment I made to marry my best friend and eternal companion, Cathleen.

So this is where it kind of becomes interesting. My family moved from this Adriana house to the other side of town even before we got baptized (yes, all 9 of us were baptized). At some point, Kelli Smith and her family moved away too out of that house next door. Eventually, my future bride and her family would move into the Smith’s old house. My wife and I discovered this unique little coincidence when we first started dating. To think that our paths would have come so geographically close and yet be so chronologically far apart.

Or was it? Ironically, she and I would enter the waters of baptism within just a few months of each other in the same year, 1975. She was just turning 8 half way across the country in Illinois, I was a convert in California at age 14. Eventually our paths would cross. I was home from a mission and home for the summer break from BYU to earn some money, she was a recent graduate from El Toro high, with plans and acceptance to attend BYU in the Fall. And the rest as they say, is history!

The Good Ole Days - Novi, MI

In 1990-91 we lived in the upper end unit right where the A balloon is

I just returned from a trip to Ann Arbor Michigan for some technical training that I had to attend. Ann Arbor is only about 20 miles from Novi, a place where Cathleen and I lived 18 years ago. So on the way home today heading for the airport, my colleague and I made a quick jaunt out of our way to go re-trace some of the old sites of those early years. I visited our apartment complex (above) and passed by a favorite dairy place down the street from our home that we frequented. They served the best ice cream around, Guernseys on Novi Rd. That's about all that we had time for.

I took a job in January 1990 with EDS and was assigned to a GM account out at the Milford Proving Grounds. This would be phase I of a three phase systems engineering development program. Phase II would be an aggressive/challenging 10 week programming course that was notorious for its very high failure rate. Thank goodness I passed. My phase III was spent back in MI but this time on a different non-GM account. Gregory was an infant, he had his first Halloween there, Tory (#2) was born there. We were in Novi for nearly two years.

The town of Novi was named after the train station that stopped there many years before. Roman numeral six, or No. VI. It has changed tremendoulsy in the 18 years since we were there, I barely recognized the place. A few landmarks were the same but it has become the home of the very wealthy, many many huge mansions everywhere. It was hard for me to remember how things were back when we lived there, certainly not anything like what it is today. It would have been fun to visit there with my eternal companion and reminisce of the old days when we were young and in love, embarking on our new life.

Here we are in our youthful glory

We took this in the apartment complex club house in Nov. 1991, just prior to moving away to Greenwood, Indiana

While I miss my young strong body and the excitement of the unknown, those were extremely challenging times for us financially and emotionally. We were newly weds and that presented all kinds of challenging adjustments. Nevertheless, it is now part of the fabric of our lives and I am grateful for those early years and the challenges that we've overcome. Seems like a lifetime ago. Twenty years from now I will be saying the same about the days that we're living in today. The good ole days...

The Undesirables

Halloween provides such a variety of sweet things for children to try. My favorites were always the pixie stix that usually ended up broken with the sweet tarty powder all over the inside of the bag and covering the other candies. For a few years when I was young, we enjoyed the wax lips, wax harmonicas, wax bottled liquids, etc. Wax was great, supposedly didn't harm the teeth and unusual for a while, then it wore off and they were everywhere and nobody wanted them. You can find them on the Internet still, if you want a blast from the past.

So it probably shouldn't be a surprise that the pictured above are the duds because as I remember they were the same when I was a kid. Who gives out these "yuck" black and orange wrapped taffy candies? Mary janes and bit-of-honey usually are last to be eaten (or instead disgarded). The butterscotch and varying colored spherical hard candies (especially the hot ones) are often rejected too. Dum dums are usually so numerous (though not very rewarding) but the upside, they make a great little treat (with a handle) for 2 year-olds. Even still after a dozen or so, the 2 year-olds will even turn their noses up at them (and you'll still have a bunch left over, with the wrappers off because they don't stay on very well). Tootsie rolls are often so numerous that they too are often last to go or are disgarded. An interesting tangent, in college I was required to take Econ 110 and there was a project where we were to pick a stock and fictiously invest in it and our grade would be based on the percentage growth over a two week period. After careful research, I chose Tootsie Roll and ended up getting the highest grade in the class for that project.

I was a little surprised that the little chico sticks were back in vogue from obscurity this year. This is similar to the stuff found inside a Butterfinger (not really my favorite, apparently not really anyone's favorite). They were bigger when I was young, about the size and shape of a cigar, but they were always really cheap compared to other candies. There's obviously a reason for that. Maybe they should go back into obscurity with wax lips and harmonicas.

You can probably never go wrong with chocolate (if anything Mom and Dad will plow through it if the kids won't). Kids always seem to love gum too. Then of course you have the unusuals, skeleton bones are always fun. Last year we handed out those gummy eye balls (see below), not really very yummy, but certainly fun to gross the girls out with.


I posted this especially picture for my Mom because she hates my eyeball picture...

Happy Armistice/Veteren's Day!

Veterans Day, first known as Armistice Day, originated ninety years ago at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 when a temporary armistice between the Allied Nations and Germany went into effect. The next year, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first Armistice Day to mark the end of the “Great War” and in 1926 he issued a proclamation that that November 11 be a day of displaying the flag and observing the day with public ceremonies. In 1938 Congress passed a resolution declaring November 11th to be a legal holiday to honor the veterans of World War I.

Over the years, this holiday has continued to evolve, first by a name change in 1954 from Armistice Day to Veterans Day to honor American veterans of all wars. As we honor our veterans today we recognize that our world has changed from that cold November 11th in France where the soldiers of the 353rd infantry awaited the end of the hostilities. Unlike the soldiers of World War I, today’s veterans are every gender, race, creed and religion. Their commonality is their response to a higher calling – an unselfish service to our nation. Here in our nation’s capital and across the globe, many of your colleagues, friends and neighbors have served with pride and distinction. Let us pause for a moment on this Veterans Day to say “thank you” for their service and sacrifices.

Happy Veteran's day!

Hurray for the UTES!

Never thought I'd be saying that but how sweet it is! I'm too cheap to PPV so I didn't get to watch the game but I watched the gamecast, it was a barn burner from my seat.

So now all we need are my Cougs to come through on a rivalry victory! Not really sure how they're going to accomplish that after the TCU licking they took. The math just doesn't add up. But hey, the Lord's university doesn't need math!

OK, I threw that last comment out there for the benefit of a possible Ute fan reader. Gotta stoke the fire you know...

GO COUGARS!

In The 11th Hour, I've Decided To Share My Political Opinion

I've hesitated to publicly share my views on politics, mainly because I don't have enough passion for any of the candidates running. Generally speaking I am a republican, I believe in capitalism, I think less government is better than more government. I am very much against abortion though I'm not sure that I want my government dictating to me what my morals and ethics should be. I'm kind of torn on this because laws should be put in place to protect us, and certainly the unborn should probably have some protection. Either way, I know that there will be eternal consequences for the taking of life (especially when it's done for selfish reasons vs. say negligence). Perhaps the laws should be there in an attempt to protect people from doing something incredibly stupid with their probationary mortal existence. But then that kind of steps on our free agency just a bit... In any case, I'd rather have my freedom of choice on ethics and morals rather than have them dictated to me by my government. I'm grateful to live in a country that gives me such religious freedoms. With that said, I certainly trust and respect a leader a great deal more when his/her morals and ethics are inline with mine.

I work for a government agency and I benefit from the inherent incompetence. With the government, you don't have industry competition to demand higher quality output. It's like a monopoly sort of. I do still have to do a good job but the people I report to don't necessarily have to. But having worked in the commercial industry for most of my career, I see the economical benefits of capitalism which drives lower prices and higher customer satisfaction. Companies have to earn your business, people shouldn’t just have to settle for mediocrity because there are no other options. It pushes everyone to strive to be the best that they can be, and isn't that kind of the purpose of life? If those companies reap the rewards of being competent and competitive, I say “kudos to them”. Hopefully they will become philanthropists and use their great fortunes to help others that are less fortunate. Again, I don’t think our government should mandate this benevolence (maybe stimulate it with tax benefits and other incentives), I believe people should have the right to choose such actions.

I am really struggling with this election because I have great concerns about the candidates. Since I'm not confident in either parties, I have decided that I must allow my morals, ethics and belief system determine the best candidate (and that's not easy to do with hypocritical politicians). I am providing a link to an email sent by a black man, Huntley Brown, who has really put his neck out in exercising his courage to do what he believes is right, despite the fact that his choices are very unpopular among fellow blacks, to the point where he is getting hate mail.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/huntleybrown.asp

I believe everyone should vote their conscience and I share this post not in an effort to convince anyone otherwise (especially since there are only like 5 people that read my blog). I just felt I inclined to share my own personal thoughts and reasoning for the choices and decisions that I will make tomorrow. After all, this is my personal blog, right?

I expect Barrack Obama to win the election tomorrow, I will be very surprised if he doesn’t. What this tells me is nothing that I don’t already know, I am in the minority when it comes to my beliefs and values. What does that mean to me personally? Nothing really, I’ll go on believing in the things that I believe in and that's the beauty of living in this free nation, no matter who wins tomorrow.