Adventures in Mormonism

As usual, Gerard Van der Leun at American Digest not only comes up with ‘net gold, but gives wonderful commentary on it as well.

This video is for me more haunting than any of the post-apocalyptic films Hollywood has pushed out. The video itself, a homemade production, was shot back in 1977. There’s a good chance that at least one of the people in the video is dead by now; it will likely only be a few more decades until they all are, along with me — I’m roughly the same age as the players in this film. I’m not bothered by my own mortality, but this video makes me reflect upon that of my entire generation.

And a good Monday morning to you, too. ..bruce w..

Sandra and I are throwing one of our periodic very-large-scale BBQs this Saturday, January 30th, 2 to 7 pm. If you’re in Colorado (or can get here) and you’d like to come, drop me a line. If you’re wondering what these BBQs are like (and what’s on the menu), here’s a blog post from a few years ago chronicling one. Should be fun.  ..bruce..

Back in January, BYU Magazine (or whatever its called) solicited tales of dorm life. I submitted the stories below, and they apparently chose one of them (based on my daughter-in-law’s comments on Facebook). Here are my original stories. These are all from 1971-72, my freshman year at BYU. I was living on the 3rd floor in Penrose (“T”) Hall in Deseret Towers.

Glow-ball Warfare and Other Dorm Games

When you put 40+ young men, mostly freshman, all on the same dorm floor — in this case, the 3rd floor of Penrose (T) Hall in Deseret Towers (1971-72) — interesting activities develop. One of our periodic games was called “Glow-ball Warfare”, and we played it in the commons room (with all the furniture in place). The main playing instrument was a plastic, glow-in-the-dark ball. All the players would gather into the commons room, with a few towels to block out light coming from beneath the doors. One person would start out with the ball, holding it up to one of the ceiling lights. After a minute or so, he’d nod, and all the lights would be turned out. He would now do his best to hit someone else with the now-glowing ball, the only thing visible in the room. Everyone else would do their best to get away from him in the darkness, usually running into each other and the furniture (the worst I ever got hurt in the game was crawling head-first into the heavy metal pole holding up one of the tables). Once the ball was thrown, there was a scramble to grab the ball; whoever got it now did his best to hit someone else. When the ball got too dim, we’d call a halt, turn on the lights to recharge it, and then continue. There were no teams; it was strictly a free-for-all.

In high school, I had played football for four years. There was another guy on my dorm floor, Layne Jensen (’74, ’76, ’78), who had been in wrestling in high school for four years. Every now and then, Layne and I would have contests where we would take turns hitting each other in the stomach as hard as we could to see if the other guy could take it. For the life of me, I can’t remember how this got started or why we thought it was a good idea, but I know we always walked away feeling that both of us had done well.

Greg Zippi (’77, ’83), another floor-mate, came up with a less violent and painful game: Hallway Frisbee. The two players would start a modest distance apart in one of the long dorm hallways. One player would toss a frisbee to the other player. If the frisbee didn’t touch the wall, ceilings or (of course) floor, then both players would take a stride back, and the second player would throw to the first player. If the frisbee did touch the floor/walls/ceiling, then we stayed the same distance apart. The goal was to throw the frisbee the full length of the hallway without it touching anything. Given how long and narrow the Deseret Towers hallways were, that was a rare accomplishment, but always much celebrated and bragged about when accomplished.

I will pass over in silence the Hallway Whiffleball games, which were a bit, ah, rougher on the ceiling light fixtures than Hallway Frisbee.

Finally, at the end of our freshman year, at the end of finals, we challenged another floor in our hall to a few outdoor competitions, one of which was a tug-of-war across one of the the irrigation canals that ran near Heritage Halls. Because the heights of the two banks of the canal weren’t quite the same, we decided to switch sides after the first event and repeat the tug-of-war. Many of us, not wanting to walk the 30 yards or so to one side to walk across the canal, simply ran and jumped over it. Since the canal had 2-3″ of water in it, and since the canal had sloping banks, I kept a careful eye on the ground as I ran up to the canal and leapt. I then looked up just in time to see that someone from the opposing team had done exactly the same thing at exactly the same time in exactly the same (but opposite) place along the canal. One of my floormates (it may well have been Greg) later told me — once he could stop laughing — that it was like watching a live-action cartoon. This other young man and I hit one another full on right over the middle of the canal, exactly canceled out each other’s momentum, hung for a split-second in mid-air, and then dropped into the canal’s cold, cold water together. For my own part, I put out my right hand to break my fall and slammed it onto one of the large, water-smoothed rocks at the bottom of the canal. I was unable to shake hands for a month.

It was a great year.

Bruce F. Webster (BS, ’78)
Parker, Colo.

One of the reasons my blogging here (and elsewhere) has been so light for some time is that I spent almost all of May and June out in California, living out of a hotel, working on a case where I spent most of the day (and often a good part of the evening) in a closed room in a secure facility, reviewing source code and files. I came back at the start of this month dismayed at the weight I had gained, especially since I was far (oh, so far!) from svelte when I went out there.

Part of my long-standing problem in keeping my weight down is that I really like to cook and I really like to eat. Since I’ve been self-employed for the past eight years, work at home, and frequently have nothing pressing to do, this means that the most pleasurable times in a given day are often the times I fix and eat food.  Also, I tend to be up from about 6 or 7 am in the morning until 11 pm or midnight. As a result, I have some bad eating habits:

• snacking at all hours, since I’m usually home all day;
• substantial late-night snacks (fried egg sandwich, toasted cheese sandwich, peanut-butter-and-butter on [several pieces of] toast);
• eating too fast (comes from growing up in a family of six kids, most of whom were older than me);
• a propensity of fixing larger meals for myself than I really should, telling myself that it will lead me to eat less at the subsequent meal (which it rarely does, because the meals themselves tend to be spread out from early morning to late at night).

Finally, there are some real emotional components to my eating. It’s a source of comfort, particularly if I’ve feeling stressed — and anyone who has been self-employed can tell you that stress is a way of life.

Anyway, I came back to Colorado at the start of July, determined to start exercising again and to get rid of not only the weight I had gained, but the weight I was carrying around before I ever went out to California. I started doing an early-morning routine of stretching and walking, but knew that would not be enough.

And then Fast Sunday (July 5th) came along. (See, there is an LDS connection in here.)

Our ward is currently on a late schedule (2-5 pm), so fasting largely means skipping breakfast and lunch on Sunday. And while fasting is never easy for me, it is something I can do. So it was during this past Fast Sunday that I came up with an approach to break up my eating habits. I’ve been trying it for a week, and it’s been very interesting and actually quite easy to follow.

Here it is in a nutshell: I only eat between 11 am and 6 pm, with the exception of allowing myself one piece of fresh fruit in the morning, if I want it. I place no restrictions on drinking and in fact have a 72-oz drinking bottle that I fill with water (with some fruit juice for flavoring) and try to get through each day. But I stop eating around 6 pm and (with the piece-of-fruit exception) I don’t start eating again until 11 am the next morning.

In short, it’s like a really bad attempt at fasting.  I’ve trained myself for 40+ years to tell myself, “OK, no more food or drink until such-and-such a time tomorrow.”  And since I can do an honest LDS fast, fasting poorly is a cinch, in part since I can drink all I want and even cheat in the morning with a piece of fruit, but largely because I have lots of experience and success at fasting poorly.

I’ve only been trying this for a week now, but I find the results to be very interesting. My consumption of bread, butter, cheese and eggs — my early-morning and late-night foods of choice — has dropped dramatically. For that matter, my overall consumption of food has dropped. Since I can’t eat after 6 pm (or whenever I finish my dinner, which has to be started before 6 pm), my evening snacking has gone away. The morning-piece-of-fruit exception makes the wait until 11 am very tolerable.  And the fact that the rest of my eating is compressed into a 7-hour period — instead of being spread out over 16 to 18 hours — means that the large lunch I usually fix at 11 am really does have an impact on how much I eat up through 6 pm.

So far, I haven’t made a great effort to put any limits or directions on what I do eat during those 7 hours, either quality or quantity. My new pattern seems to be: a large lunch, a mid-afternoon snack, a regular dinner. Note that I haven’t been gorging myself, and I do try to eat healthily regardless.  But it’s clear to me that I’m eating less on a daily basis than I was before. More importantly, I seem to be breaking up some of my self-defeating eating habits, particularly cutting out all snacking during 17 hours of the day. And I’m doing it by leveraging training I’ve put myself through for 40 years.

In case you’re wondering, yes, I have lost weight since getting back and particularly since changing my eating pattern. However, I’ve also been faithful about the stretch-then-walk routine in the mornings (I walked 18 miles this week), and the weight lost so far represents weight I gained out in California. The real trick will be my weight back down to where it was two years ago, four years ago, and finally back down to my goal weight (where I was about 11 years ago). That will require upping my personal exercise as well as continuing to improve my eating patterns and habits. Hey, eat less and exercise more — what an insight!

Thoughts?  ..bruce..

I’ve got a work project that’s kept me in California for most of the past 6 weeks and is taking me back tomorrow night. It’s been intense enough, the hours long enough, that I’ve had little energy left to post here or on my other blogs. But I’ve got some things to post about, and I’ll try to do at least one each week.

In the meantime, here’s my first honest-to-goodness struggle with COVETING in some time.  Fear not; the fever dream has faded; if we get a second car, it will likely be one of the aging $2000 pickup trucks parked by roadsides in our neck of the woods. But it was a nice few weeks.  ..bruce..

[cross-posted from And Still I Persist]

We have family and friends coming over for dinner (actually, two of our grandsons have been here since Sunday; we’ve been having a great time with the Wii, the ping pong table, and the air hockey table), a total of 10 people. Here’s what I’m fixing for dinner:

• roast turkey (22.5 lbs)
• corn bread stuffing (water chestnuts, whole cranberries, sliced almonds, celery, onion)
• mashed potatoes (new potatoes, skin on, lots of butter)
• sweet potatoes kittichai (mashed sweet potatoes plus coconut milk)
  
• mixed steamed fresh veggies (green beans, broccoli, broccolini, brussle sprouts, carrots)
• homemade cheese sauce (Sandra’s contribution)
• roast acorn and delicata squash (1 each, small, mostly for the novelty)
• Pillsbury Grands! rolls (hey, gotta take a shortcut somewhere)
• homemade cranberry sauce (made with orange juice and fresh orange zest)
• homemade pumpkin and mince pies, with homemade whipped cream

Note that “homemade” for the pies means Pillsbury roll-out crusts, jarred mince filling, and canned 100% pumpkin filling (plus requisite sugar, spices, eggs, and condensed milk). I actually made a pumpkin pie from scratch many years ago (e.g., cut up and cooked the pumpkin, made the crust from scratch, etc.), and I decided it’s just not worth the time and effort.

This is a feast day, and a day for giving thanks. I was going to write a longer posting about the meaning of this day, but then I remembered that I did that last year, so just consider that post included by reference. In spite of the current financial turmoil, we still live in the land of greatest opportunity and freedom. And with our son still over in Iraq, we are especially mindful and grateful for all the sacrifices made for those freedoms. God bless us, everyone.  ..bruce w..

Heather O. over at Mommy Mormon Wars has a posting about “Another Mother of the Year moment” (which involves her toddler daughter stuffing her mouth with holly berries). The comments (be sure to read them all) have similar “I can’t believe I did that” parental moments.

In fairness to Heather O. and the rest, however, many of these moments are less the parents’ fault than simply the consequences of having children. I think that many of my mom’s gray hairs come from my own actions — and I started young. Here are some examples:

1958 (age 5, living in Imperial Beach, California):

– The street we live on has (as I recall) no sidewalks — just yards that go right up to the street. After a heavy rain, there are wonderful large puddles in the worn depressions along the shoulder of the road. As I go out to play, my mom tells me, “Don’t play in those mud puddles with your clothes on.” A while later, she gets a call from a neighbor who says that I’m playing stark naked in one of the large puddles — with my clothes carefully laid out on the neighbor’s lawn.

– There was an abandoned workshop or garage across the street; I thought of it as a “barn”, but it was far too low for that. I used to climb up to the roof and jump off. In fact, I very much loved jumping off of high places until I was about 9 or 10. Then I suddenly developed a fear of heights. I don’t know if that was just a realization of what I was doing, or the result of an unpleasant jump whose details I’ve blotted out completely.

1958-1960 (ages 5-7, living in Naval housing outside of Subic Bay, Philippine Islands):

– I used to leave the Naval housing area (West Kalayaan) and wander in the surrounding jungle. On at least one occasion, I took the first aid kit from my house, and a friend (same age) and I wandered into the jungle, found a nearby Negrito village, and tried to ask them if they had any cuts that needed band-aids. (They spoke no English.) It’s been nearly 50 years, but I remember the warm (and, in retrospect, probably amused) smile on the face of the native — an older man not dressed in much more than a loincloth — who tried to talk with us and who offered us coffee in a tin cup.

– I was crawling around an abandoned pillbox (probably Japanese) in the jungle and cut myself (on a rusty piece of rebar) on the inside of my thigh. Rather than tell my mom when I got home, I just put a large band-aid on it. Luckily, I was wearing shorts; she spotted the band-aid, asked me about it, took the band-aid off, and then transported me to the Naval hospital, where I got two stitches and a tetanus booster.

– On a regular basis, a truck pulling a trailer would wend its way through the Naval housing area. The trailer had a DDT sprayer that would emit dense clouds of wonderful-smelling DDT fog. We (the neighborhood kids) would play tag in the DDT fog.

– My older brother Chip and I would go down to a construction area on the outskirts of the housing area near sundown to throw dirt clods at the fruit bats.  Chip and I also used to capture large beetles and make them fight each other.

– I remember on a few occasions walking from the Subic Bay base itself to the naval housing area and noting with keen interest the signs along the side of the road saying, “Danger! Quicksand!”

1960-61 (ages 7-8, Astoria, OR):

– We lived in Naval housing again, with the (moderate) rain forests starting at our back yard. I used to wander through these woods at will — alone or with a friend — and capture snakes. My friend Paul and I once captured 26 snakes in one day. I kept large numbers of snakes in two unused trash cans behind our duplex. Somehow, in all this, I never once caught or encountered a poisonous snake.

And so on.  Your own stories?  If you need some different inspiration, here’s a post over at thisisby.us made two years ago in response to some school banning tag; the comment thread is still going.  ..bruce..

True story. I know. It happened to me.

In the fall of 1974, I had returned to BYU after spending two years in Central America on my mission. I quickly started dating someone whom I had dated in high school and during my freshman year at BYU as well. After several weeks, I proposed to her (which she accepted) — and then after a few weeks decide that I wasn’t ready to be engaged. She and I had been talking about marriage since high school, but I wanted to be sure I was marrying her because I was ready and willing to be married. I wanted to date around to be sure that she was my choice for marriage, not just a habit.  So I ended the engagement, though I was sure we would ended up getting married (which we did, about a year later).

Anyway, this was still in the fall of 1974. A day or two after the breakup, I get a phone call from another girl — Chris — whom I had also dated my freshman year at BYU, and who had written me from time to time when I was on my mission. (I was very careful not to leave a “waiting” girlfriend behind when I left on my mission, which had the unforeseen — but welcome — effect of having about five different girls write me.) Anyway, Chris has two tickets for that Saturday’s game, which I believe was against Arizona State and which was being telecast regionally (including in Provo). I’m not sure Chris knew about my engagement or its abrupt end (though knowing Chris, I wouldn’t be surprised if she did); as far as I knew, she was just asking me out to the game, and since the whole reason I had ended the engagement was to ‘date around’, I accept.

OK, so we get together and head to the stadium. Chris is giving off the “It’s sure great to see you after two years!” vibes, linking her arm through mine. We get to the game, it starts, and the other team (ASU) takes the lead and holds it for some time. Then BYU starts getting some points. Each time BYU scores, we jump up and yell, and Chris turns to me with that “Let’s hug each other!” vibe (ok, boys and girls, you know what I mean). I ignore it after the first BYU touchdown — hey, I was just engaged a few days earlier — and even after the second BYU touchdown. But on the third BYU touchdown — when BYU takes the lead in the ballgame, and the whole stadium goes crazy — I figure, “Hey, why not?” And so I turn and give Chris a big bear hug, which she enthusiastically returns.

Unbeknownst to me, the network TV camera is at that very moment panning across the screaming BYU fans. It then stops and zooms in on — Chris and me enthusiastically hugging each other. It apparently holds there long enough, and zoomed in enough, so that everyone at BYU who knows me and who is watching the game on TV clearly recognizes (a) that it’s me, (b) that the girl I’m hugging is not my fiancee (or ex-fiancee, but nobody knows that yet, or almost nobody.), and (c) we appear to be enjoying the hugging (which, frankly, we were).

I remain clueless about this televised exposure until I get a call from someone that evening after the game (I honestly don’t remember who), telling me that my ex-fiancee was watching the game with several friends and was, well, we shall say, not amused. My first thought is: “Uh-oh.” (Actually, my first thought may have been a bit more profane than that, though probably not out loud.)

Yep, the next morning, at my BYU ward, before meetings even start, a girl I know comes up to me and says, “Bruce, it’s funny — I was watching the BYU game on TV yesterday, and at one point they zoomed in the crowd, and I saw someone who looked just like you — but the girl he was hugging didn’t look like your fiancee.” I smiled (sort of) and said, “Yes, well, that was me, and no, that wasn’t my fiancee, but we actually broke off our engagement earlier this week.” She said, “Oh!” and smiled at me in a way that clearly said, “You pathetic scum — you broke off your engagement a few days ago and you’re already hugging other girls?” and then walked off.

This scene was repeated quite a few times that day and in the next several days that followed.

The real irony is that I’m pretty sure that Chris and I didn’t go out a second time.

I’m sure there’s some great lesson in here somewhere, but I think it boils down to, if you’re breaking off an engagement, let everyone know and wait for at least a few weeks before going out with anyone else. Not a great life’s lesson, except possibly for me (since I have been engaged roughly five times in my entire life). But there you have it.  ..bruce..

I have a lengthy post on one of my other blogs as to why the Left’s vicious and hypocritical reaction to Sarah Palin’s nomination has led me to finally leave the Democratic Party after 37 years:

The Democrats like to complain about “the politics of personal destruction”, even as they have mastered it (again, since Bill Clinton’s ascension in 1992). But the absolute frothing rage and vile, hypocritical and/or false attacks that have followed hard upon the announcement of Sarah Palin as the GOP Vice-Presidential candidate have left me appalled beyond words. The Left has shown once again that no one surpasses them at their willingness to utterly trash anyone — especially women and minorities — who defy or threaten them.

Here’s a simple thought experiement: suppose that Sarah Palin were a Democrat and had been chosen by Barack Obama as his VP candidate. Virutally everything that the Left is attacking Sarah Palin on right now would instead be touted as “real-world experience and understanding”, especially her time as mayor of a small town in Alaska.  They would fiercly mock any criticism, however mild, of Bristol’s pregnancy; they would tout Sarah’s choice to keep Trig (their Down’s Syndrome child) as showing how much of a ‘big tent’ the Democratic party has; and they would shout to the heavens Palin’s reformist credentials, particularly her fight against corrupt Republicans in Alaskan government.

For what it’s worth.  ..bruce..

Come, thou Fount of every blessing,
tune my heart to sing thy grace;
streams of mercy, never ceasing,
call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
mount of thy redeeming love.

This morning , I was listening as usual to the 7 am rebroadcast of last week’s “Music and the Spoken Word” on BYU TV (I’m usually at church when the 9:30 am live broadcast comes on). The closing number was “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing”, always one of my favorite hymns (and one that needs to be in our LDS hymn books). By the end of the performance, I was weeping — and not (just) because of the beauty of the arrangement and the singing. This hymn, like few others, speaks to my deepest struggles and frustrations in my own personal life.

I joined the Church at age 14, some 41 years ago. Through those four decades, I always assumed that by, let’s say, age 55 I’d be a lot more perfected than I am. As I have stated any number of times in talks and lessons at church, including just last week, the power of the Atonement is not just the power to cleanse us — it is also the power to perfect us, to change our hearts, to receive Christ’s image in our countenance.

Yet a few months ago I ran across some note cards I had written on twenty years earlier listing goals and areas for improvement in my life. With no little dismay, I saw that I could just as easily have written them just a week earlier instead of nearly half a lifetime ago. Where the change of heart, where the progress, where the perfection?

Here I raise mine Ebenezer;
hither by thy help I’m come;
and I hope, by thy good pleasure,
safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
wandering from the fold of God;
he, to rescue me from danger,
interposed his precious blood.

It may just be me, but I wonder if we as Latter-day Saints generally tend to shift from focusing on works to relying on grace as we grow older. This doesn’t mean that we abandon our efforts at service to others and personal righteousness — quite the contrary — but that we realize how far short we will always fall from where we need to be. We struggle with the trivial and the mundane, and wonder how we’d ever deal with the wrenching and the profound — not always realizing that it is the starkness of the latter that often makes those decisions easier. It is in the day-to-day things that we often trip up.

As I grow older, I understand better the repetition of the phrase “endure to the end” in the scriptures. A large part of that enduring is, I think, enduring ourselves, particularly our own imperfections, and not becoming discouraged thereby. I think we run the real risk of giving up in frustration at our own failings, at the messes large and small that we’ve made in our own lives and the lives of those around us. It is why I think Paul and Mormon placed “hope” right between “faith” and “charity” — it is hope that keeps us bound to Christ, even when faced with our own sins, errors, and weaknesses.

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.

This last verse is the one that makes me weep. It captures my fears, my frustrations, my hopes, and my pleas to God. The foundation of my hope is that I’m pretty good at enduring; beyond that, I simply have to trust that God’s grace will do the rest.  ..bruce..

[cross-posted over at Mormon Mentality]