When You're as Tall as the Grass

When you're only as tall as the grass, you see the world very differently. Everything is a threat, but everything is very interesting, too. When you are supposed to stay inside a fenced area but discover that you are able to crawl under the fence and your companion is not able to to it, this becomes a behavior that seems to define and validate your very being. It must be done more and more often

When Miss Sadie does this, she usually stays just on the outside of the orange snow fence we have strung across the back yard in lieu of the fence we were promised 18 months ago by the landlord when we moved in. (By now, only Harry Houdini can hold his breath better than us.) However, just the other day, the fence contractors were here for a couple of minutes, measured a couple of things out back, and then disappeared again into the ether. Our experience tells us that the Second Coming will probably occur before we see them again. In the meantime, the problem of Sadie getting out all the time just keeps on keeping on.

I sawed up an old rake handle into four quasi-equal lengths, then used my Bowie Knife to chop points onto the pieces, thus rendering them useful as tent pegs, vampire threateners, and fence securers. I'd have used a hatchet, but I don't have one of those. I do, however, have a $12 Bowie Knife which did yeoman service very creditably as a hatchet. Colonel Bowie, himself, despite the severe ventilation he experienced at the hands of Santa Ana's troops at the Alamo, would no doubt have smiled to see his famous invention perform so well in a practical situation.

I pounded the four new pegs into what I thought were the weakest spots at the bottom of the fence. Sadie found new weak spots. The next thing we knew, she was next door chastising Sister Lewis at the top of her already very high voice. Fortunately, Sister Lewis, an elderly lady who has seen a lot of life, thought the whole thing was delightful and kept trying to win Sadie over. She has her work cut out for her. Sadie fled from my approach for the first 5 or 6 months we had her.

Sadie weighs 3 pounds. This does not inspire confidence in anyone, even an obstreperous little dog. When she has gotten out and we call her, she tries to run away. But Sheryl has trained her to understand the word "sit" quite well. What she does on this command is not so much sitting as it is just flopping down and hugging the earth. If it's been a while since I've mowed, she can almost disappear.

Mico has learned to accept and even enjoy her. But, as an amateur portrait photographer, I think I sense a loss of enthusiasm on his part. He seems to feel that he is only the support staff these days. The real star, so to speak, is Sadie. I think he sees himself as the male dancer who holds the prima ballerina aloft for everyone to gaze at her beauty while his shoulder joints slowly deteriorate. Mico just doesn't pose as enthusiastically as he did when he was an "only dog." But there are times when he tries to get back into the old spirit of the thing, so I still get occasional good shots of him, too.

We fear that Mico might be turning old in the same way that I am. I.e., he seems to be more curmudgeonly all the time. When baby Akira would not leave him alone last night, he growled and snapped at her, for which behavior he was put in the slammer (kennel) for a while. But I felt a little sorry for him. He's about 50 in dog years, and he spent his first several years in a largely child-free environment. Tonight, while we were walking around a couple of neighborhood blocks, a Boston Terrier ran up to us. We all four froze, the canine half of our crew doing all the obligatory sniffing and tensing up of the hind legs. Then, for no apparent reason and on a signal which was not detectable to us, Mico and the Boston Terrier began to fight. Sheryl jerked Mico up above the danger by his harness and leash. The terrier's owner came out, all apologies, and blamed its behavior on its background as a pound dog. I don't know... Anyway, he seemed like a nice guy.

He's half Japanese and his surname is Larsen. That gave me a bit of a twitch. As pleasant as he was, I just couldn't find anything about him that reminded me of Vikings, longboats, or raiding England for its gold and daughters in the eighth and ninth centuries. We had spoken briefly with his mother just before the dogs got all bellicose. She had the most charming accent. He says she was born (in 1926) and raised in Tokyo. I, of course, had to ask whether she remembered the fire bombings. Yes, she remembered all of it. You know, Tokyo was just as badly damaged as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it was done with conventional incendiary bombs from the new, state-of -the-art B-29. Mrs. Larsen actually told her son that she remembers being chased down a street by a P-51 Mustang. She was able to look back and see the American pilot's face through the canopy! And yet, in 1951, she married an American soldier and has live here ever since except for a few visits back home.

But back to Sadie. Do not doubt that she knows that what she's doing is wrong and absolutely forbidden. I've actually seen her look over her shoulder for us before she starts poking around for weak spots under the fence. It's all a joke to her. I get pretty frustrated, but she seems to know that weighing three pounds and having the face of an Ewok is a get-out-of-jail-free card. I don't anticipate any repentance on her part any time soon. And by soon, I mean during this lifetime.

Pleasant Days and Nights This Month

Looking back at the 'Burban from the 300 yard gong.

Little Aric's Favorite Pastime

We had a great time today at the Idaho Falls Temple. Sheryl's Uncle Donnie and Aunt Donna, who have been married way over fifty years were sealed today after an endowment session which we all attended. Getting this accomplished has been one of LeRoy Wilde's goals to accomplish before he follows Celia through the veil. Selfishly, we hope he has a few more things on his agenda.

The Armells continue to be great friends and great Church contacts. Elders Potts and Meredith have taught them a couple of discussions lately, the most recent one in our home. Please keep praying for them to feel the Spirit and get testimonies of the truth of the Restored Church.

Herewith, some pictures of our recent adventures with the Armells. We look forward to bringing them to little Penny's blessing tomorrow!

The Selling of Godlessness to Americans

The Temple in Rexburg, Idaho

Twice in recent months I have received as an email an MSNBC voting page on the subject of whether the words "In God We Trust" should be removed from our coinage. 88% of us wanted the line kept. That should please me, and I guess it does, but I'm alarmed that fully 12% of those interviewed felt that the phrase amounted to an establishment of religion by the government and therefore a violation of the Church and State rule which so many see as the most important part of the first amendment to the Constitution.

Satan is very real and very patient. It has taken him more than sixty years since World War II to get 12% of us to be offended by the mention of our Father in Heaven on public coinage. That was the same World War II in which people went around saying, "There are no atheists in fox holes." That same time period has also seen the removal of the Ten Commandments from court houses while other famous codes of law, such as the Code of Hammurabi, continue to be displayed and honored. Hammurabi was a Babylonian tough guy, so it's OK to quote his laws. Moses was a prophet of the living God, so he must not be quoted.

I recall very clearly an episode of the old Daniel Boone television show in which an angry man said some irreligious things to the title character. Boone not only answered the man's argument, but he also said loudly, "I'll not stand for blasphemy." I heard my mother mutter, "Well, yes!" She knew what was right and what was wrong. A couple of years later the crew of the Enterprise, found itself on a planet where some of the old Greek Gods had gone to retire. They were excited that they would have people around to worship them again. But Captain Kirk said, "We've outgrown you. We don't need you any more." They faded away on the wind and were seen no more. I was only in high school, but something about that made me very uncomfortable. It wasn't a fear that maybe we still needed to believe in the various pantheons of non-existent gods and goddesses whom the ancients believed ran their lives with capricious cruelty. I finally realized after remembering that episode many times over many years that Kirk's statement implied that a technologically advanced society didn't need ANY gods.

And sure enough! A series of films about a little boy whose father was Satan became a huge hit in the seventies. He could not be defeated or destroyed, because Satan was his dad. I saw a couple of these films on late night TV years after they were made. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I knew that Satan could only get power over those who gave it to him by seeking him out and by obeying his directions. I also knew that Satan is a spirit who has never been given a body and who therefore has very little influence over physical things.

Other films came along, often preceded by novels which helped many people take the whole mythos of the stories more seriously. Some of the stories had to do with children who had been possessed. Catholic Priests, who had no real priesthood, would expend their energies and finally give their lives to save the children from the evil Spirits. The films dabble so much in real Satanism that many people said they had to get up and leave the theater, because the feeling of evil there was so terrifying. One of Shayne's brothers, a very tough young fellow, said he'd never seen anything as horrible as Rosemary's Baby. He was still frightened by its negative spiritual power months after having seen it.

It became quite a cult. Many movies, both well-made and cheap, grabbed onto the coattails of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist and sold tickets very successfully. Popular music began to join in the shift of public attitudes. Some preached anarchy. Other songs preached the pointlessness of life and the easy way out of life's pain - suicide. Many children did commit suicide. Many others tried.

In the Eighties we began to hear of songs which openly preached that murder and especially the murder of police officials was a desirable thing and a great accomplishment. Police Fraternities sued recording artists and their industry.

Screenwriters, not to be outdone, began in the Seventies and even more in the Eighties to feed us a steady fare of wounded doubters. These were people you could sympathize with, because crime or war or disease or the general unfairness of life had caused suffering in their lives. Always the screenwriter would express his or her own doubts through the mouths of the characters. "No GOD would have let that happen." "Where was God when she was suffering and dying?" "How could a God let an innocent person suffer like that?" "I was faithful all my life, but it didn't do me a bit of good; He took my child anyway."

These statements were sometimes designed to fly in the face of a God whose existence was still not doubted. Others expressed doubt and even seemed to express certainty that He didn't and couldn't exist, because he had failed some human test of minimal goodness or real power.

By the Nineties, practically no TV show even mentioned Christ in their Christmas episodes. Variety shows of the fifties and sixties had seen choirs and orchestras and solo artists sing hymns and carols to thank Christ for his sacrifice and to thank the Father for His birth. But not any more. The cartoons began as early as the sixties to invent new myths in place of scriptural truths. Even the Grinch, a well written children's poem about the conversion from curmudgeon and thief to loving, generous citizen of the fellow who lived on top of Mt. Crumpet, never actually got around to saying anything about God, Christ, the Atonement, or anything really religious at all. True, the animated cartoon version of the book did include a sweet little choir number of a religious sound, but it said nothing ...nothing at all.

About twenty years ago a film was made called Baby Boom. A high-powered business executive inherits her British cousin's baby girl and discovers that, as good as she is at managing an advertising firm, she's even more of a natural as a mom. While interviewing candidates for the job of daytime nanny, she asks a southern girl what brought her to New York City. When the girl answers somewhat rustically, "The Lord," the protagonist poorly hides her horror that anyone could actually believe that a God was guiding her life, and moves on quickly to the next candidate. That was twenty years ago and already we had reached the point at which God was a joke. The notion of His reality and His power to influence our lives and our world for good was absurd, particularly to people of education.

Remember Church Lady on Saturday Night Live? This was a genuinely funny character. The fellow who played her had a rubber face, great timing, and a gift for lampooning the hypocrisy of some people in organized religion. But, as we laughed at Church Lady every Saturday night over several years, we gradually became desensitized to the broad sweeps of the brush with which she painted religion. Church Lady was a hypocrite. Then religionists must be hypocrites. Church Lady had a paranoia about Satan. So Satan must not be a real threat or even a real entity. Church Lady had lots of suppressed sexual frustration. So anyone who is sincere about living the commandments regarding sexual purity must be some kind of a nut.

Then came 9/11 in the year 2001. There was a brief spate of outrage and religious fervor, but lots of us quickly cooled down when we realized that we'd actually have to make sacrifices in order to defeat the terrorist organizations behind the four hijackings and the nearly 3,000 deaths on that dreadful day. And then some of us began to take seriously the threats from those who were behind the attacks. The extremist Moslems say that we have been unkind to them by not allowing them to destroy the state of Israel and by selling arms to the Israelis since 1948. Well, then, said many of us, we'd better stop doing those things. We don't want to make them mad. Let's apologize to the world for our "arrogance" as Mr. Obama did just the other day. This attitude is what was practiced in 1939 by Prime Minister Neville chamberlain. His political opponent, who had warned for years that the "heartless guttersnipe," Hitler, would start another war no matter how much he was given to bribe him out of it, called Mr. Chamberlain "an appeaser." "An appeaser," explained Mr. Churchill, "is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

And now where are we? A new pandemic is beginning around the world. Wars and civil wars are all over Africa and central America and are even pushing across our southern U.S. border. Our economy is in a shambles. More than ever we need to repent. We need to turn back to God and serve Him and live his commandments so that He will be able to bless us as He so longs to do.

But humility and penitence don't come easily to those who don't believe in God. Prayer doesn't come easily to those who believe that Satan may be just as strong as God and might have real power to save us. And people who have never read scripture and never prayed don't come easily into a state of teachability and humility so that the Spirit of God can dwell with them, help them solve their problems, save them from disease, and deliver them from their enemies. It is in times like these that "the Devil laughs and his angels rejoice." We've given him plenty of cause.

Lest We Forget!~ We "Gun Nuts" Are Still Sincere

The overpowering majority of us are good people. About 80 million Americans own about 200 million firearms. Just the reputation of our being an armed nation has avoided invasion as recently as WW II.

Our new president said he wouldn't take away our firearms. No, he's leaving that to the new Attorney General and to Nancy Pelosi. I send along many, though not all, of the articles I receive showing that the threat to our Second Amendment rights is still very real. This is not an example of crying wolf when there really is no danger. Please take the time to read some of the articles I forward by email. Click on some of the links that come with them. You'll see chat room comments which show how mild and reasonable I and my friends really are compared to some very angry people out there who believe that the government is nearing a time when it will violate the Fourth (coming door to door without warrant) to get rid of the Second. And the thing is, it's getting harder and harder to argue with them. The Attorney General has made it plain for years that, if he had his way, the American people would be disarmed. Please recall that a state (nation-state) in which only the police may be armed is a police-state. Trust me when I say, you wouldn't like living in one of those.

Jim tries the set trigger on the 9.3x62.

Tibbs tries Aric's Russian carbine.

Aric tries some gong shooting with the 109 year old Swedish Mauser.

Joseph under recoil.

My Stainless Steel Ruger Single-Six in .22 WMR.

Jed Lewis attends a Haeberle Schuetzenfest.

Jake and Haeberbuddy meet at the scheutzenfest.

Why some cartridges were invented.

Joseph with his Chinese SKS.

Miles with my .45-70, Joseph with his AR-15.

Joseph and The Toddler check .22 hits.

The Haeberle boys share Uncle Alan's .22 WMR Marlin.

Near Troy, Joseph tries out his first .22 rifle.

Sheryl tries out her Russian battle rifle for the first time.

My 1896 Swedish Mauser, made in 1900.

A Little Pow, A Lot of Wow

When the Armells invited us to the Pow Wow being held at the Sho-Ban High school, I hesitated. It had been an active day and I was tired. Then, too, I'd seen Sho-Ban dancers on several occasions at the Rexburg Dance Festival and once up close when another teacher and I took our combined Junior English/Junior History class to Fort Hall.

Bu we love the Armells and couldn't stand to disappoint them, so we went. It was hot, loud, sweaty - - and absolutely wonderful!

There were more cute kids than you could shake a stick at (a behavior which I am not in the habit of doing.) Some of them had on costumes that bespoke hours and hours of hand labor.

The young men seemed magnified in body and in spirit when they boldly whirled about the gym floor, doing what is inaptly called "the chicken dance." There was nothing chicken about these guys! The serious looks on some of their faces reminded me how one of my female German ancestors shuffled off her mortal coil in the 17th Century (that's the sixteen hundreds, you know.)

And then came the ladies. I asked one man and his wife if it would be alright for me to photograph her, honestly stating that her outfit was the most beautiful thing of its kind in the building. They consented.

When I climbed back up to the bleachers, Aric asked me if I knew who the lady was. "No," I said simply. Grinning, Aric informed me that she was the girl (back in her teens) who posed for the Sacajawea dollar! She's the second photo down in the pictures you see here.

The first picture here is some high school age girl whom I caught in passing, "a target of opportunity" as pilots like to say. The Book of Mormon prophecy which says that the Lamanites will become a "delightsome people" seems already fulfilled in her artistically perfect face.

The little kids seemed delighted to be asked to pose. Some of them I got from a distance without letting them know; camera sniping, I guess you'd call it.

If you ever get the chance to spend an hour or two at one of these Pow Wows, you'll be as wowed as we were, I'm sure.

The PG-13 Testimony

I must have gotten carried away. I wanted to make the point in my testimony on Sunday that we should be sensitive to the suffering of those around us. I further wanted to testify that many people have been sensitive to me in my periods of suffering. Finally, I wanted to affirm my knowledge that the Third member of the Godhead is real, that He is called the Holy Ghost, that he is also known as The Comforter, and the He is very good at what he does.

But first I felt that I needed to come up with an example of someone being aware of the suffering of a companion. So I told the first story that popped into my head on my way up to the microphone - that of the Jackson/Dickinson duel of 1806. It ran a little long, but I felt that I'd eventually gotten to my important points.

However, half an hour later, as I sat in the Relief Society room waiting for the Gospel Doctrine class to start, Bro. Neal of the Bishopric tapped me on the shoulder from behind. Grinning, he said, "I told the Bishop that was a PG-13 testimony." I laughed at first, but since then it has occurred to me that I only received 4 or 5 kind comments about my remarks and that I typically get a lot more than that. I think I grossed out my ward. Sigh... I wonder just what parts of the story cut down on their ability to feel the Spirit.

Maybe it was the absolute inability of the two men to forgive each other their real and imagined insults. Maybe it was the fact that both were hit with .70 caliber round balls and that neither of them got much good out of the experience. Maybe it was my description of how Jackson's second, General Overton, didn't even know that his principal had been hit until he heard the blood sloshing in his boot as they walked from the field of honor. Maybe I shouldn't have thrown in the part about how many hours it took Charles Dickinson to die.

I think I'll wait a while before I get up there again. I want to give people a chance to forget how I lapsed into History Teacher mode when I was supposed to be feeling and sharing the Spirit. I think I'll just sit there and smile benignly next time we have testimony meeting. After all, we can't have me slipping into stories about Catherine the Great's personal appetites and get me thrown out of the Church for an R-rated testimony. I've always had a lot to repent of; I just never thought that the way I bore my testimony would be one of them.

Ten Second Romances

Maybe girls don't do this. I don't know for sure. I only know that, for most of my life as a boy and young man, I would constantly be falling in love with some passing creature of lovely face, long hair, and feminine step. I would sigh and imagine how sweet her companionship would be.



And then she'd be gone. Her folks would pull out of the gas station where I'd spotted her. Or maybe she was only walking by, going the opposite direction in a shopping center (We didn't have malls back then) and I knew that I'd never see her again. This might happen to me several times per day. Only in periods when I was anxiously engaged in some greedy cause would I not have momentary romances with people I didn't know and would probably never know. If I was excited about a particular Christmas gift, or going to a particular movie, or still in the emotional thrall of a movie we'd just recently seen, I might not notice the lovely creatures crowding the world around me.



But naturally, as I grew up, girls became more important than Mattel Fanner Fifties, O Gauge trains, or even my own copy of Stravinsky's Firebird. And the momentary romances with strangers would happen more often and with more force in my heart. Long after a face had dealt its blows to my youthful heart, I'd still be thinking about it, imagining how sweet time would be in her presence.



Of course, when I got home from Italy, this all started over again with a vengeance. I was taking a photography class from Brother Harold Nielsen in the Romney Science Bldg. at Ricks College. The year was 1973. I had not yet joined the service. Bro. Nielsen encouraged us to carry our 35mm cameras with us everywhere, and it was good advice, because we had many assignments to take a given number of a given type of photographs, schedule lab time, develop the negatives, print the pictures, and hand them in.



One snowy day in 1973 I was hanging around in the lobby of the Kirkham Auditorium, a place where I'd lived much of my life both before and after my mission. I was about to leave and approached the glass front doors when I was arrested by the sight of a perfect specimen of young womanhood, dressed in floor-length coat and dress as all Mormon beauties did back then, lifting the skirts of her coat with a practiced and decidedly feminine hand as she climbed the steps outside the building and approached the doors.



Now, this would probably have been just another 10 second romance, but I was carrying my camera everywhere as Bro. Nielsen had counselled. It was one of those moments which only photographers and hunters get to experience. The perfect specimen of the quarry is coming directly towards you and you have in your hands the perfect tool for reducing it to your possession. Although her face had already knocked the wind out of me, I managed to cock the manual-everything Petri 7S 35mm viewfinder camera, grab the focus ring and give it a whirl, form a quick sight picture, and squeeze off the shot. She became aware of what was happening even as it happened. She might have been embarrassed. She might have felt tired of being constantly worshiped by young men. She might have been prone to express disgust about my efforts to preserve her for future generations and myself to admire. But her face had no time to register any of these emotions. I had gotten her in her perfection. She would forever be the Angel of 1973.

I think I shoved the door open for her. It almost hit her, in fact, if memory serves. I never saw her again. I don't know her name. She was probably either 18 or 19. I was 22. That means that today she is a grandmother of about age 54 or 55. But none of that has mattered in the 36 years since then. I had her. And this time I got to keep her. True, I only occasionally saw the 8" x 10" glossy that I printed. Maybe once every 4 or 5 years. But I could always look at it for another 10 seconds and remember the way I felt when I took it. I still don't know who she was, but she's still the one 10-second romance that didn't get away. There was one little fly in the ointment; I had scratched the negative. You can see it right across her otherwise ideal nose. But I try not to let it bother me. Perhaps perfection is only a goal in this life. Reaching it probably comes later.

The Angel of '73.