At Fox they want beauty, not brain

At Fox they want beauty, not brain.
It's no place for smart Lois Lane.
But supermen, now,
they've got 'em, and how!
They fly ev'ryplace raising Cain. 

Letter. Sunday, July 3, 2016.

Hey there, Madel Paddle;

Howz by you? Hope everyone is healthy and busy, but not too busy.

I'm finally beginning to feel better. I've had 2 days in a row w/o pain or inconvenience, sleeping well, with a good appetite. It is a glorious blessing, after the last 5 weeks! I now take the Senior bus to and from the Rec Center for my lunch and for swimming -- walking in the sun and heat seems to always trigger something with me, so until the fall I guess I'll just keep using it. It's free, thank goodness.
I think I'll even be able to go to Church today.

This morning I was out on my patio to watch the sun rise over Y Mountain. I tended my little flower garden that the apartment building planted in front of my patio. There are 3 peony bushes, long past bloom but full of seed pods (Lance almost killed the biggest one by jumping on it hysterically several times the last time he was here; but it's recovered, although the stems are mostly on the ground). I pulled some weeds. I've set out an old wooden chair for the morning glory to climb up; I think it's a another weed, not planted by maintenance but sprouted from some wild seed. But the purple flowers are vivid in the morning as it climbs up the chair legs and onto the back. I hope they let me keep it until fall -- they get kinda picky about those kind of things.

Speaking of which . . .
I put up one of my clown signs on my front door -- the one that says "UNEMPLOYED CIRCUS CLOWN. PLEASE HELP PUT ME IN THE WHITE HOUSE WHERE I BELONG". Several old Hispanic ladies have scolded me for it, asking why I am begging for money, it's a shame, why don't I go out and work, etc. And the English speakers are no better. When I was walking through the lobby the other day several of them pounced on me to ask what the sign meant. I tried to explain how it's a bit of satire, but they didn't seem to get it. As soon as the Conventions are over I'll take it down, if the management doesn't ask me to first. I bet some of those old geezers have complained to them about it.

My poetic muse has been in overdrive this week. I went back to count and discovered I've written 27 poems this week alone. I'm not saying they're good poems, but I still think that's quite an achievement for someone who has been as sick as me.

I had your mother over for movies and popcorn Tuesday night; it was over 100 that day and she has no ac, so I invited her over to cool off. We had a good time watching Preston Sturges movies, but she couldn't stop herself from lecturing me about my diet. I didn't let it irritate me, just listened and nodded my head. She did have one good point, though; when I told her how much cranberry juice I was drinking she looked at the bottle and told me it was mostly grape juice, not cranberry juice. And by golly she was right! I was paying a fortune for grape juice, not cranberry juice. So the next time I went shopping for cranberry juice I found the 100% pure stuff. It's super tart; you can't drink it by itself -- so I mix it with orange juice and pineapple juice and lemonade.

I splurged on a small bag of frozen shrimp for my Sunday dinner today. I'll saute it in butter, with onions, garlic, mushrooms, and sliced zucchini to have over vermicelli. With a tall glass of cold pineapple/cranberry juice.  mmmmmm. It's making me hungry already!
Now I think I'll go make bacon and eggs, with lots of buttered toast (and some leftover black beans from dinner last night -- beans go good with bacon & eggs).

Your mother tells me that Ed has been assigned to the submarine U.S.S. Cheyenne, out of Pearl Harbor. But maybe you knew that already. I forgot to put that on FB -- I'll do it after I finish this. It's funny that your mother doesn't use FB. But then, she doesn't have wifi at her apartment.

Take care, my little petunia!  Love, dad.

Full Circle.

It was over 100 degrees on Wednesday, so I invited Amy over to spend the afternoon/evening at my place -- since her place has no air conditioning. She was happy to accept, and she spent several hours on my couch working on her nascent insurance business, and some genealogy. I made her dinner. Then we watched some DVDs together.

As we sat on the couch eating non-GMO buttered popcorn, it occurred to me that she and I had come full circle. 35 years earlier, our first date had been me inviting her over to my place for dinner.

Not only that, but my income now is nearly the same as it was 35 years ago when I began courting Amy.

I mentioned this to her, and she said the same thought had occurred to her as well . . .

So maybe things don't ever really come to an end after all, they just keep going in a circle . . .

The Sunday Without Shoes

I proposed to Amy in 1981 in an unorthodox way.

I lived in Williston, North Dakota, and worked as the News Director for radio station KGCX. Amy lived fifty miles away in Tioga, where she was a teacher at the high school. Since I didn't have a car, and she only had access to her family's car intermittently, my courtship was rather sporadic and long distance. But it was bearing a bumper crop from the smooch tree, so I thought the time was ripe to 'pop the question'.

The MonDak Utility Company had a large community room with a stage in their downtown Williston building, which they donated to different groups and individuals for public events. I decided that my grubby little town needed a solo pantomime show, by yours truly, to give it some cultural tone. MonDak was glad to oblige, and I began advertising the show to all my friends and co-workers at the radio station, as well as everyone at the LDS branch I attended. The local newspaper picked up on it, and I was able to slip in some freebie advertising on the air while doing my newscasts. So attendance turned out to be good.

I closed the show with my musical saw routine, where I brought out a trombone case in which said saw lay nestled -- much to my bewilderment. After various pieces of schtick I discover its real use as a musical instrument and sit down to play a selection of show tunes.

This particular time, however, I changed the routine. I beckoned for Amy to come up on stage and to sit next to me -- and then launched into a high-pitched rendition of Mendelssohn's Wedding March. My matrimonial intentions could not have been any plainer.  Amy blushed until her face took on the hue of a deeply ripe eggplant. Then she nodded yes and scampered off the stage and out the back door.

I finished my performance to a modest standing ovation, tore off the clown makeup at lightning speed, and fled out of the MonDak building to where I knew she would be waiting for me -- the Service Drug Store on Main Street.

Over endless mugs of hot chocolate that winter eve, we discussed our future together. That was when she sprung the first of many surprises on me.

"Timmy, I want to have a lot of children" she said softly to me.

"Yes, dear" I replied dreamily, lost in the ambient stillness of her cottony brown eyes.

"A dozen, like my mother has" she said sweetly.

"Of course, dear. We can . . . gakk!" I suddenly found a lump of solidified cocoa in my throat that caused a brief choking spell.

When I had recovered I did the only manly thing possible. I said 'Okey-dokey'.

And so it came to pass, fifteen years later, that we had welcomed 8 little rugrats into our home, and had no plans to terminate the basic goal until a full dozen were granted us.

That we did not achieve our goal is a tale for another day.

The day before the Sunday of which I wish to speak was a typical Torkildson Saturday -- full of sound and fury; the kind of Donnybrook that only eight rambunctious children and two harried parents can produce.  

When the hollering and scrambling had subsided to a simmering murmur that evening after dinner, I gathered my loved ones around me to reveal an Executive Decision I had reached sometime earlier. In order to make Sunday morning as nearly sane and normal as possible, I announced, we would be spending the evening getting all our Sunday church clothes together on the living room sofa, checking for stains and stray threads that needed attending to, as well as lining up our Sunday shoes in front of the sofa for inspection -- so that any pairs that were dull and scuffled could be immediately polished.

Much to my surprise, and Amy's, the kids actually settled down placidly and executed this plan in a matter of only 2 hours, with hardly any conniption fits -- the big ones helping the little ones until everything was shipshape and Bristol fashion.

We all went to bed that night with happy expectations of a quiet Sabbath morning spent enjoying each other's company instead of the mad scramble to get dressed in time for Sacrament Meeting that was the norm.

At least Amy and I went to bed with that expectation. The kids, those little fiends, apparently had something else in mind.

Because the next morning they were up well before their mother and father, in order to play a new game that their fertile imaginations had just come up with -- called, I believe, "Throw Your Sunday Shoes Around Until You Can't Find Them and Then Start Tying Up Shirts and Blouses into Knots".

Amy and I interrupted this orgy of sartorial whimsy just in time to save their clothes from utter ruin. But the shoes were gone to . . . who knows where? We hunted for them, without success. Sacrament Meeting was just minutes away, and the chapel was a full block down the street.

So I made another Executive Decision.

"All of you" I barked, "get dressed and get out the door. Since you obviously didn't want to wear shoes to church, you can go bare foot!"

Admittedly, this did not have the disciplinary effect I was aiming for. The kids whooped with glee and rushed out the door to let their bare feet slide through the verdant summer lawns of our neighbors. I shrugged at Amy, who was looking at me with a stunned expression (which I was getting more and more used to) and we followed them to church.

I'm happy to say that this little episode had no detrimental effect on them. In fact, they were the envy of every child in Primary that day. I heard afterwards that a sort of mutiny took place during Sharing Time, when most of the kids slipped off their shoes and socks to wiggle their toes in the face of their befuddled teachers.

We had just gotten home and were settled around the kitchen table for dinner, where I was lecturing my little ones, in a sincerely pompous manner, on the importance of Order and Planning, when there was a knock on the front door. Amy answered it to find the Relief Society President smiling at her, with a large cardboard box in her arms. She came in but did not stay long, simply saying that a hasty collection after church had netted a dozen or so pairs of shoes that she thought would fit our children for now, and she would be back with a chit we could take to ZCMI Department Store to outfit each one of them with a decent pair of shoes.

I began to chuckle at her misunderstanding of the situation, considering it a huge joke. But one look at Amy's crimson tears of embarrassment told me I had, once again, miscalculated things very badly. I explained the situation as well as I could to the puzzled Relief Society President and asked her to please return the shoes to their previous owners. We had plenty of footwear for the kids -- we just didn't happen to know where it was at the moment.

After she left with the box of shoes, the house became preternaturally quiet. The kids could see that Mom was in a Mood. And to trifle with her while she was held captive by one of these Moods was to court instant death.

I sat silently in my recliner the rest of that Sunday afternoon, reflecting that Amy and I had come a long way from that winter night at the MonDak community room.

Poultry Workers

From Mother Jones Online:

After a three-year project interviewing dozens of current and former [American] workers across the country, Oxfam came to this stark conclusion:

Routinely, poultry workers say, they are denied breaks to use the bathroom. Supervisors mock their needs and ignore their requests; they threaten punishment or firing. Workers wait inordinately long times (an hour or more), then race to accomplish the task within a certain timeframe (e.g., ten minutes) or risk discipline.

When plucking a chicken, take heed;
the management spits on your need
to take a small break --
and what is at stake
is how much your pants you have peed.

Garbage

There once was a man in Taiwan
who wanted his garbage all gone.
He fed it to pigs
and composted figs,
and even found some he could pawn. 

The Weather

Predicting the weather is dicey;
will it rain frogs or be icy?
Those who forecast it
never outlast it;
here's hoping their crow ain't too spicy.