Letters from Grandpa. Letter 1.

(These are the letters I've written and mailed to my grandkids. I wanted a permanent record of them somewhere, because it's highly doubtful the grandkids themselves will comprehend the historical importance of them, and will probably lose them eventually -- much as their parents did when I wrote them letters 20 years ago . . . )

Monday, November 09, 2015.                                  Timothy Robert Torkildson

1274 West  820 North

Provo  Utah  84601

My Dear Deisel;

I’m feeling pretty spruce this afternoon, after getting a pedicure at the Model Nail Salon (business card included).

It’s run by some Vietnamese, and they charge $20.00 for a basic pedicure. Sadly, I’ve grown so fat and my back so stiff that I can no longer cut my own toe nails with any accuracy or comfort. So every other month I go to them; they’re right across the street from the Provo Recreation Center, which also houses the Provo Senior Center, where I get my lunch every week day. On the dot at noon.

It’s about a mile walk from where I’m living, and I enjoy the exercise and the chance to poke around as I traipse along the uneven sidewalks of 820 North. Today I picked up a maple leaf from North Park, which I am including in this missive to you. (Not the Park, but the leaf!)

Another nice thing about walking is that I can stop and gawk at whatever interests me – today that happened to be a couple of guys with a huge vacuum on the back of a truck. They drove all over the park, vacuuming up the leaves. Looked like a lot of fun. I imagine if any squirrels or chipmunks were unwary enough to be hiding in the leaves they’d get sucked up too.

Have you ever had days where you feel like you’ve been sucked up into a giant vacuum cleaner?  I have . . .

I suppose your mom and dad will be after you to rake up all the leaves in your yard. As I remember, there was always a ton of ‘em. I think I helped you rake them one year, didn’t I? We put them in orange pumpkin bags for Halloween.

When I was a kid (you’ll be seeing A LOT of that phrase in these letters) we didn’t have to bag up the leaves. Instead we raked them into a HUGE pile and were allowed to set fire to them!  Lemme tell you, son, for a buddying pyromaniac like me that was simply heaven on earth! And strangely enough the fire never killed the grass underneath. It left a grey ashy patch, sure, but come next spring the grass there would be a brighter healthier green than anywhere else in the yard.

You’ll be happy to know (or maybe bored and don’t care at all) that my Social Security starts this month. Once that starts rolling in I won’t have to ever work a paying job again, and devote all my time to my useless poetry.

Which reminds me, here is one I wrote today:

Down in Dallas, at the zoo, you can't come packing heat.

If you try to bring a gun you'll be thrown out in the street.

But zoos are full of danger, and a gun should be allowed.

What if the flamingos are let loose into a crowd?

Suppose a tortoise with a knife creeps up on you one day --

or a loopy llama lobs a hand grenade your way?

Those monkeys . . . they're planning trouble; you can see it in their eyes.

And the seals are waiting for the signal to take us by surprise.

When confronted by a large and vicious alligator,

I'd rather shoot first and then ask all my questions later!

(It’s from a Wall Street Journal article about how the Dallas Zoo is being sued by gun nuts who want to be able to bring their concealed weapons into the zoo, which currently bans all weapons.)