Looking back with Lot's Wife

My granddaughter Madden asked me where Jesus was today, and to my eternal embarrassment (pun intended), I didn’t know. We had been reading a church magazine and there were pictures of the apostles and prophets, all the people who worked for the Savior, but no picture of Him. And she wanted to see what He looked like. We used to have a picture of the Savior in the kitchen but with the new paint job and the kids moving out and me updating things, it had migrated. There’s an “Out of Africa” look going on in that kitchen corner now. I suddenly realized I had no idea where our picture was. Now, we’re Mormons, but even if we weren’t, we would be the kind of people who have a religious picture somewhere prominent. It could be the Pope, or the Dalai Lama, or Buddha, but it would be a picture of who or what we believed in. It would be there to teach our kids and to let people to know who we were and what our beliefs were. We would especially want it if the Mormon missionaries came by so...

I have this weird thing I like to do when I’m tired or just have a minute. I like to take a snapshot in my head of where I am. I look around at what I’m doing and think about all the implications of it, where it stands in my life. I take a sensory inventory of everything I can see or smell or feel: the air temperature, the season, the color of the sky. I try to take about five minutes to soak it all in. Then I frame it as a picture and hope I can call it up again some day. I actually can recall many of my snapshots, partly because I’m self-conscious about doing it and partly because they seem to stay longer than other memories. I started doing this a few years ago when for some reason, I was having vivid dreams about the house I grew up in. My mom told me once that as she got older, she forgot some of the things that had happened to her as an adult, but that the memories of her childhood became more alive. She especially remembered the house she grew up in. She told me this a y...

Halloween was the only holiday my mom really got into because she didn’t have to cook, it involved chocolate, and it was an easy way to actually make kids happy. I really like Halloween. We had a gate up to our front porch and to my horror, my dad propped it open one year with my entire collection of Nancy Drew books, which were stolen. But in spite of that, I still love Halloween. My dad would swing the front door open and the light would flood out on the porch. He smoked a cigar and he was tall and loud and jovial. Little kids would cower in fear, but he gave full size candy bars, so it was okay. The crunch of leaves underfoot as kids in crazy outfits wandered around with their dad after dark, meeting the neighbors under different, new, exotic circumstances. The magic of the warm, spooky glow of houses half hidden in the shadows, not completely lit by the porch lights. I loved the thrill of getting a peek inside people’s living rooms when they invited you in to pick your can...