humorous, interesting, scary times

Writing a Biography or Life History

is very worthwhile, for reasons elaborated in the 2nd paragraph in the excerpts below. Of my 16 great grandparents, only one has a life history written by a descendant. For the other 15, little is known except name, place of birth, etc. What a tragic loss!  So first write your own, then your parents' and/or grandparents' life histories. In the next to last post are helpful suggestions, for those wishing to do these most worthwhile projects. Various kinds of experiences are exemplified below.

Excerpts from 
Learning to Love Life and Live with the Limp: 
The First 62 Years before I Forget:

Autobiography of Brian D. Stubbs may serve as examples of:

Humorous inclusions (first page and from pages 14, 30, 68, 125, 128, 133):

            I was told either to get a biopsy, colonoscopy, etcetera, or to start writing my life history.  So I wrote my life history.  Most autobiographies are written by persons found in Who’s Who.  Less celebrated individuals like myself belong in Who’s He?  Though priorities may lead to neither fame nor fortune, who is to say that the lives of us more menial meanderers through life are less interesting or less beneficial to learn from? Among politicians, manufacturers and farmers, the former make names for themselves while the latter two make what we need and can balance a budget. Whether one’s name is known by nations or neighbors is not so much a matter of greatness or intelligence as it is simply a matter of direction, misdirection, occupation, or bad luck. By bad luck I mean that judging by the number of perfectly normal lives ruined by luck in the lottery or other luxuriant living, the misfortune of fortune must be a terrible burden.  I’m glad I have had to work and struggle through life … I think.  In any case, I am limited to myself as sole subject for whom I can write an autobiography. 

            It seems we should want to learn from each other’s romps through the China-shop of life, so that we do not have to do as well at breaking irreplaceables, making messes, hurting people, and being the lucky winner of debts to pay. We spend chunks of life in recovery from error and returning from roads whose forks and misleading signs we come to know better than and should warn others of. That’s why we should share information. Anyone knows to consult a map or to ask the informed which road leads to where. But just like a man, some of us want to figure it out ourselves, which is sometimes good, okay, or survivable, but other times is a waste of time, costly, or dangerous. We can learn from each other. Life is too short to spend too much of it learning from mistakes. We don’t have time to make all the mistakes ourselves, though some give it a good try. So for my posterity and whoever else cares to read, I write the lumps, laughs, and lessons of my life.

            I considered a few titles: Bio-Bumps of a Charm-Challenged Chap; or Learning from the Lessons of His Life without Having to Live It—What a Deal!; or The Self-Life-Write (auto-bio-graph-y) of BDS (initials); or Memoirs of an Intermittent Memory; or The Autobiography of Supperman (with two pp’s). I finally settled on Learning to Love Life and Live with the Limp because both are important to learn, and I finally figured out how to do them.

(from page 14) The black horse could stop on a dime, and did so whenever he felt like it, leaving me and the laws of physics to be best buds in a continuing trajectory the horse had established for me.  I was always very obedient to the laws of physics. Of course, we never used saddles, always riding bareback, which lack of resistance allowed the laws of motion to operate more clearly for both observers and participants.

(p. 30) That Christmas, we were granted leave from Army basic training. The bald head was not an asset at the New Year’s Eve dance. It did attract glances, but not the kind everyone dreams of. The two-week leave sped by like a tracer bullet. Boarding the bus to leave family and girlfriends behind was a lonely moment … especially since I did not have a girlfriend to leave behind. Meanwhile, back in Fort Ord again, in loneliness I was not alone. Most were about as thrilled as I was to come from home and Christmas back to basic training where sergeants welcomed us with open armories.

(p. 125) What else do forebears do, except collect woes from their times to relate to posterity? And the woes of my times are lives full of sitting—desk jobs, meetings, rehearsals—and buying, registering and maintaining motorized vehicles of every sort to do all our walking for us: cars to drive us where we used to walk, riding lawn mowers to mow our lawns, elevators to climb stairs for us, and 4-wheelers to do our hiking for us!  Of course, no one expects us to enter a world of such woes without preparation. So the preparation for a future of sedentary immobility is substantial: we are trained to be inert from an early age by having to sit quietly through 5 days of school and another day of Sunday school. But Saturdays we get to shuffle—sweeping floors, raking leaves, or taking out trash. It is a tough life—I just want posterity to know.

(p. 128) As a whole, few families lay claim to social awkwardness more convincingly than my extended Stubbs clan. Some have married into more sparkly genes to give some lines some hope, but for the most part, Stubbs are known as quiet, strong, shy, hard-working, hopelessly non-sparkly people. Of course, blaming one’s weaknesses on genes is not recommended by motivational speakers or the mental health industry, but I try to avoid pushy people peddling perfection.

(p. 133) Silvia may be close to it, but not perfect yet, and her generosity and fiscal exuberance can occasionally benefit from the calming, mathematically sound, frugal, wise, logical voice of reason (that’s me) to prevent fiscal difficulties quite avoidable with a little calculatory forethought, but hey—someone has to have his feet on the ground (calculator in head) to complement the visionary head in the Heavens. So we’re a good team—most of the time—she has the visions and dreams, and I do the math to see how many of them we can afford. Outside of giving away a pickup now and then, her generosity is admirable.

Ordinary things—like turning off the TV—can entertain, even if slightly embellished:

(p. 68) Like bumper cars, juiced from without, big-city lovers sometimes seem unable to function without the raucous juice that powers the mad rushing about, as if a lack of crowds, traffic, and clatter immobilizes those conditioned to the beat. They seem to thrive on the vibes of the motion and commotion, as if noise is life, and vibrations help us move. My family sometimes seems subject to a similar mode of existence with the TV set.  The TV seems to be on all waking hours—sound to live by, no doubt.  I can pass through the living room, notice that no one is watching the TV, turn it off, and then watch an interesting phenomenon permeate all life forms in the environment.  Existing momentum allows all to continue their activities and movements for a while, but like deer alerted to a change of scent in the forest, they eventually perk up.  Something is wrong.  They cannot immediately put their finger on it, but some life-threatening state has just been put into effect.  All life forms in the house slow down and nearly die until someone realizes that the TV is off.  Then with the discovery, the culprit (me) is arraigned and prosecuted like all other disturbers of the environment who build reservoirs or try to save on the electric bill.

Fun Family Moments

(p. 71)  1987 was the year I made Silvia laugh so hard that she almost lost unborn Sarah. Silvia was expecting, which always brought on serious levels of toxemia.  She was told cayenne pepper is a circulation improver, so I volunteered to fill the capsules.  It was the least I could do; she was having the baby.  I was opening a plastic bag of cayenne pepper.  The plastic was very tough, but a tug with my teeth worked, except that the pressurized bag caused the pepper to explode out of the bag into my eyes, nose, and mouth.  With three of five senses on fire, my only relief was filling the sink and submerging my whole face under water.  Silvia lay on the couch laughing with such intensity that she could not breathe nor emit sound.  Of course, my head was under water, but even when I came up for air now and then, I could only hear whimpering gasps of wheezing from the couch. We both eventually recovered.  

(p. 70)  I am not a teaser, perhaps because neither of my parents are teasers, but one time I could not resist. Connie Stevenson, the Young Women’s advisor, called. I answered, and as I handed the phone to Shana, I said, “You have to tell him you can’t date until you’re 16.” Silvia perked up, made her way toward the phone, hoping to overhear. But the conversation was short, the identity was clarified, and some quick laps around the kitchen table kept me out of reach of the only one who did not think it was funny.

Interesting or Challenging/Scary experiences:

(pp. 16-17) But the speed came in handy for more than just track. In the dark one early morning when I was 16, the black horse came galloping to our house, and slipped and fell on the cement driveway while trying to make the sharp turn into the driveway.  I was sleeping outside on the flat concrete garage roof as I did every summer, and heard the black horse’s tumultuous arrival.  I got up, but could not see well in the dark, but I could hear the black horse breathing and lightly snorting, so I knew who it was. I climbed down from the roof and saw that the horse had scraped itself quite badly, so I woke Dad up.  Dad guessed what had happened (that the white horse had gotten loose and spooked the black horse), so he stayed to doctor the black horse’s wounds and sent me to check on the stallion.  I jogged the half mile to where the horses were supposed to be, but there was no white horse. It was getting light by now, and off to the north I found “Whitey” chasing 3 mares in circles around a small pasture, an oblong acre or two.

            Seeing the long rope still around his neck, I climbed into the pasture and tried to catch up to the rope.  But the horse knew exactly how long his rope was and knew what I was doing and would take off each time that I was within a few feet of the end of the rope.  The horses were all running around quite a bit anyway.  I decided it might work to wander around nonchalantly in haphazard patterns, pretending not to care about the horses at all. It worked. The stallion quit paying attention to my random meanderings, and then I arranged one such meandering to cross the rope.  Since part of the plan was to show no interest in the rope, I did not look at the rope until I was striding over it.  Then I quickly bent down to pick it up, at which instant, 3 things happened simultaneously: the horse took off again, I noticed my foot stood inside a circular entanglement of the rope, and the entanglement wrapped around my foot before I could touch it or lift my foot up.  Before I knew it, I was being dragged by a stallion chasing mares in season.

            My first thought was a story my dad had told me about a cousin of his that was dragged to death by a calf.  The boy was walking a calf, and decided it would be easier to tie the rope around his waist than to hold it in his hand the whole way.  A dog came barking and spooked the calf.  The calf did not slow down until the boy was dead.  A calf did that, and here I was being dragged by a stallion.

            I tightened my hindy muscles while bouncing across a rather rocky pasture.  Luckily the rocks were the smooth riverbed type, being located near the mouth of Rock Canyon, on the north side of the street, just north of what is now the large grass playing field between the MTC and the Provo Temple.  Smooth or not, they were still rocks, and the horse was not slowing down.  I tried to sit up a number of times, but the speed and bouncing prevented it.  Though I could do lots of regular sit-ups, this was like trying to do a sit-up with 300 pounds on my chest.  I tried but could only get part way up, my hands unable to reach the rope around my foot. 

            I knew my only hope was that if the horse happened to approach a corner, so as to have to turn 90-degrees or partially double back, it might allow me a moment of slack in the rope, sufficient to sit up and quickly untie the entanglement. That thought no sooner crossed my mind than it happened. Cornering themselves, the horses had to do a sharp left turn, and I came to a brief stop, sat up quickly, and undid the entanglement.  I had barely gotten it off my foot when the rope was again accelerating, this time through my hands.  I had not yet had time even to stand up, but I knew there was a big knot at the end of the rope, so I flexed my knees a little, dug my heels in the ground, and let the rope slip through my hands until the knot came and lifted me to my feet as planned, and I was off to the races. At least I now had the option of letting go if I wanted to, instead of being dragged to death. Though not a very fast horse, the stallion was faster than I was and I could barely keep my legs under me.  I circled the pasture a time or two, running faster than my legs normally carried me, while thinking about what to do.  As hard as I tried, my efforts did not slow that stallion in the slightest. About the 2^nd lap I noticed that each circle brought us a little closer to the only tree in the pasture.  I thought that, with the help of centrifugal force on an extraordinary effort and burst of speed, I might be able to run on the other side of the tree, and with the tree’s help, perhaps stop the horse, if I could hang on to the rope during the jolt.  A lot of if’s, I know, but worth a try.

            Situations conditioned with lots of if’s remind me of my Uncle Eldon’s quip: if we had some eggs, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some ham.

            Nevertheless, the plan worked. Each lap around, I worked the circle a little closer to the tree, until I knew that the next circle would be close enough to try.  So the next approach near the tree, I sprinted to the outside as powerfully as I could and did manage to go on the other side of the tree.  The tree stopped both of us instantly, and the momentum swung me around so fast that I crashed into the stallion’s ribcage as we met on the other side of the tree. He was one surprised horse, standing still with shock. He could not figure out how I accelerated so fast as to suddenly catch up with him and smash into him from the side.  I also managed to hang on to the rope in the flurry of a sudden stop from 20 mph and being hit by an 800-pound linebacker.  I quickly tied the rope to the tree, then went to get Dad’s help. One more time that Heaven had to have been watching over me. I look forward to watching the not-so-instant replay of that one in the next life too.

(p. 117) In that typical drowning situation, I was barely able to pull her out. Only later, after Tori told a few people that I had saved her life, did it occur to me that maybe I had.  It was scary, and the more I reflected, the more scared I got. And if the prevailing view was that I had saved a beautiful young lady’s life, should I be stupid and argue otherwise?  Or is that being humble? Either way, I try to avoid being stupid (with great effort), and humility I can avoid effortlessly, so I let the complimentary perspective be left alone and enjoyed.

(p. 62)  After graduate school at U of U with an M.A. in linguistics and ESL, and ABD PhD in Hebrew and Arabic, both Silvia and I felt impressed to return to Blanding. Though without a job, we had a house to live in and paid for and no other debt. Kay Shumway, one of the nicest guys in the world and Dean at the local College of Eastern Utah, said they could use an adjunct (part-time) ESL instructor, teaching English as a Second Language, so I did that at CEU’s very low adjunct rates for a year and a half (until hired full time).  It was enough to pay the utility bill and buy food for the family, but not enough to fix the now kaput pickup that I normally hauled wood in.  So the first part of that first winter, I carried the wood on my shoulder.  I don’t like borrowing things, though I knew many would lend me their pickups if they knew. Nevertheless, after dark, I would take the axe and walk from my house to various points west of Westwater, trim an already blown down cedar tree trunk to what I could carry, about 80 to 100 pounds, and carry the log and the axe back home in the dark of night, alternating shoulders or in both arms, with rest stops as needed. Once home, I would chop it into firewood, which would last 2 or 3 days. Then I’d go out again when it was gone and do the same thing. Wilcoxes, Pincocks, and Carrolls were more than willing and later lent me their pickups a lot, after Silvia helped me overcome my shyness about asking. Ron Kartchner put a good strong used transmission in my International pickup so that the rest of the winter I hauled wood in my pickup. Ron Kartchner is as good as they come and as good a friend as a guy could have, like most people in Blanding.

 (p. 69) In January I once took the bus from Monticello to Provo and back (when it used to do that route) so that I could sleep on the bus instead of drive. All worked well until the bus dropped me off in Monticello at 2 a.m. and the white van that I had left parked behind the county building would not start. A policeman tried a push-start with his car, broke his front grill-like protection, was not a happy camper, and drove away, though he knew I needed to get to Blanding. I was on my own. Being only 21 miles from Blanding, I knew I could make it on foot by daylight no problem, and I did not need to be to work until 8 a.m. So I started off at a jog in my Sunday suit. The only problem was that the temperature was near zero and a bitter cold wind put my ears at frost-bite risk. So after a mile or so, I took one sock off, put that black Sunday shoe back on the stockingless foot, put the sock over one hand and held that stockinged hand over one ear. That kept one hand and one ear warm, and every so often, I switched to the other hand and ear, needing to swing one arm. The alternation kept both hands and ears warm half the time and eliminated the frost-bite risk. I also knew that if I ran all the way I would get so wet with sweat that hypothermia might set in. So I did a run-walk alternation—ran a quarter mile, walked 50 yards, ran a quarter, walked, etcetera. I was about half way to Blanding when Claude Lacy, the highway patrolman on duty, picked me up and took me home as he was headed home too. Good man, he was. That allowed me 2 or 3 hours sleep before getting up to go to work.

(p. 75)    Bill Redd—Friend, Businessman, and County Commissioner

            Shana was a 17-year-old senior when one Sunday she needed to leave church to perform a musical number in another ward. Unaware of her need for the family car, I took it to do an errand; so it was absent when she needed it. Connie Stevenson, her generous Young Women’s teacher, told Shana to borrow her car, that it was a certain color, parked at the northwest corner of the building, and that the keys were under the front seat. 

            Nearly late, Shana hurried out, found a car of that description at the northwest corner of the building, took the keys from under the seat, and drove off.  When she returned, Connie asked Shana why she had not borrowed her car as she offered. Shana replied that she had, and thanked her. They went outside and Shana pointed out which car she had taken. Connie said, “That’s not my car; this is my car, and I came out just after you had left, and it was still here.” 

            Two cars happened to fit the description and both had keys under the seat.  Mike Halliday, a local police officer, happened to be standing nearby, so they asked him if he knew whose car Shana had borrowed. He went to call in the license number and returned to inform them that the car belonged to Bill Redd, our San Juan County Commissioner. At the very moment Mike was giving them that information, Bill Redd approached, handing Shana some music and said, “Here’s some music you left in the car.” 

            Bill Redd had known our family for years, and in a later conversation with him, we heard his view of the incident: He walked out of the church to see Shana driving away in his car.  But he was not unduly concerned, though he could not help but be curious. As he later told us, “I figured she must need my car more than I did.”  So he simply waited for Shana to return. Shana was gone more an hour. Bill’s jovial, fun-loving personality is rare. Few would accept an episode of their car being temporarily stolen as good-naturedly as Bill Redd did.

            However, their paths crossed again two years later when Shana was crowned Miss San Juan County Queen.  Bill Redd, as County Commissioner, was to introduce the queen at the state competition, where he collected a little humorous revenge, introducing her as “the young lady who stole my car.”

            Those who shopped regularly at Bill’s Blanding Mercantile enjoyed hearing his contagious laugh echo through the store. His wit often had others laughing with him. For example, at the end of each month I paid off the grocery account we accumulated that month. One month I approached him at his accounting desk, “Just came to pay Bill the bill.”  He handed me the receipt, saying, “And I’ll give Stubbs the stub.”