Tag Archives: History

Courage at Twilight: She Loves Me

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“I slept so much better last night,” Dad crowed, reporting how much softer his mattress felt now that it was flipped over. I quietly asked Mom if she had noticed a difference, too, and she slightly shook her head no.  Whether placebo or fact, I felt glad his sleep had been more comfortable, devoid of aching hips and nightmares.  What would an 87-year-old have nightmares about?  Answer: dreams of walking effortlessly to any destination he desires, and then waking up paralyzed.  The waking is the nightmare.  He grunts and he groans, but he rarely complains, and he keeps fighting for his best life.  With Dad awake, showered, and breakfasted, the time had come for Mom’s requested Mother’s Day gift: an outing in the faithful Suburban to the forgotten little town of Copperton, located 20 miles straight west of us.  Dad and I did not even know it existed.  “This is very educational,” he opined.  Copperton lies hidden behind a sandy bluff at the foot of the world’s biggest strip mine, the Bigham Canyon Mine, boasts about six gridded blocks, houses 829 inhabitants, and was founded by Utah Copper in 1926 as a model subsidized town for Mine employees.  Mom and Dad grew up in the shadow of the Mine, and Dad postponed his education to work for Kennecott prior to university study and missionary service.  He labored at two grueling tasks, the first shoveling up ore that had sloshed out of house-sized steel tumblers, tossing the escaped ore back in, and the second keeping free of obstruction sluices conveying rushing liquified ore.  The tumblers destroyed his hearing.  The sluices swept away lives as well as ore, lives of men trying to clear mine beams and fence posts and boulders from the flumes and instead getting swept away and drowned and crushed by the rushing rock.  He risked limb and life for his education, for his mission, for his future.  But in Copperton, all those agonies were 70 years past.  Today, in the Mighty V8, we crawled past well-maintained century-old brick and stucco houses with steep Scandinavian gables and porticoed porches, neat little lawns and rose bushes, and friendly old-timers returning our waves.  Mom loves roses, especially yellow roses.  She instructed Dad to buy no more than a single yellow rose, but I bought her a dozen-cluster of miniature yellow rosebuds, ready to burst.  She set the vase on the fireplace hearth where she could see the roses all the long lazy days.  Washing dishes that evening, I watched through the kitchen window a scarlet-headed house finch perched on a lilac twig, tearing at the tiny purple petals one at a time, as in a game of She loves me—She loves me not—She loves me.

Courage at Twilight: Class of ’58

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“I’ll go with you!” I enthused when Mom showed me her invitation to her 64th high school reunion, for the Class of ’58. I have never once attended my high school, college, or law school reunions, but felt excited about going to Mom’s.  But the morning of, she confessed to being very nervous and perhaps not wanting to go.  I suggested we just go for an afternoon drive and perhaps stop in at the reunion to see what it was like.  We drove through the old dilapidated Magna neighborhood, Mom pointing out “Uncle John’s” house here and “Uncle Jim’s” house there.  With Mom hanging on my arm, we entered the high school cafeteria and saw milling around a milieu of gray smiling heads and gnarled mottled hands with an assortment of canes and walkers.  Faces mostly were unrecognizable to Mom after 64 years, but looking at each other’s nametags through the bottoms of their trifolds, recognition dawned and faces lit up.  “Lucille!” one woman cried.  “Valorna!” Mom called back.  They were young girls again.  Louie Notarianni wandered over with a pleasant hello.  “He was so cool then,” Mom whispered to me.  “Now look at him!”  I guess carrying the cool is harder at 85.  “Neil wasn’t very nice,” she remembered, but noted how pleasant he was to everyone now.  And her second cousin Gay (with the same maiden name, Bawden) ambled over with a smile and a hug.  “When I called in and found out you were coming,” Gay rattled to Mom, “I decided the long drive from Portland would be worth it.”  Still sweet friends.  Don Lund welcomed the crowd and explained how Doreen Harmon had catered the lunch from Harmon’s grocery store as a gift to her class.  Don held up like a waving flag a typed list of 147 Gone But Not Forgotten classmates, 147 out of a class of 200.  The list sobered me, knowing Mom was one of a dwindling minority of surviving members of the Class of ’58.  Which one of these good cheerful persons will be next to join this list? I wondered.  I hoped it would not be Mom, turning 83 this year.  The scull & crossbones on the reunion announcement added a macabre touch to the event, even knowing the Pirate was the mascot of Cyprus High.  Mom decided she had had enough of a good thing, and that we could “go home now.”  I hurried over to cousin Gay, a spritely youthful woman, embraced her (for the last time in this life), and crowed, “The Bawdens are great!” twinkling to her husband that the Iversons were okay, too.

Class of 1958 Cyprus HS Centennial banner, reused from 4 years prior.

 

Class of ’58 reunion announcement.

Courage at Twilight: Meager Meals

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I emerged from my sick room, double masked, to figure out a mid-day meal, and opted for summer sausage slices, gouda cheese cubes, Wheat Thin crackers, and sliced apples. A pleasant snack.  Mom commented from her corner recliner, “What a perfect snack!  Isn’t it nice to have so many good foods to choose from?  I feel so blessed.  I feel so grateful.  I thank Heavenly Father in my prayers.  I was often hungry as a child.”  I stood stunned at the thought of my mother being hungry as a child, and asked her about it.  She explained that her family had been poor.  They ate healthy foods they grew in their own garden, but their meals were meager.  She told me about thinning the carrot and beet rows, of squashing the tomato hornworms, of gathering the eggs from protective hens, and of dunking dead chickens in scalding water to pluck their pungent feathers.  Her father was a junior high school teacher, and worked odd jobs during the summers, as a milk truck driver, supervisor at a pea vinery, county roads crew member, school bus driver, laborer at a munitions factory, and custodian.  He kept taking classes at the University of Utah, and eventually made a better salary as a junior high school guidance counselor.  But as a younger child, a skinny, slight child, there were no snacks between small simple meals, and Mom’s stomach often growled as she lay in her bed at night.  As I munched my lunch in sick-room isolation, I pondered my mother not having had enough to eat, and likewise thanked my Heavenly Father for our bounty.

Pictured above: Mom with her father, mother, and little sister.  Circa 1944.

 

Mom’s house, built in her birth year of 1939.

 

Mom’s house in 1957.

 

Mom in the family farm fields with her father and little sister.  Circa 1942.

 

Mom in the wagon while dad cuts the grass.  Circa 1940.

Chapter 39: Erda

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–Erda: the good earth.–

The weekend cowboy had neglected to secure the trailer gate as he drove down Church Road.  Arriving at Russell’s arena, he put his truck in park and hopped out, stopping stunned at the horror of what he saw behind.  Continue reading →