Welcome to Forgotonia

(White Christmas on my family’s farm, 2008)

(White Christmas 2008. A barn just down the road from my family’s farmhouse.)

(Snow drift during White Christmas 2008.)

The following entry was originally in my “Six Degrees from Galesburg” column for The Galesburg (IL) Register-Mail. The online version of the column is no longer live on the newspaper’s re-designed web site, so here it is as a post.)

(Friday, August 4, 2006 edition)

My dad got a part in a movie once. It was the winter I was in eighth grade.

Normally, his announcement at the dinner table – “I got a part!” – would’ve been thrilling news. Especially since we couldn’t have lived further from Hollywood, at least culturally speaking.

But this was to be no Hollywood movie.

“I wouldn’t tell anyone at church about this if I were you,” I said.

“I hope none of my friends find out that my father is converting,” my sister said.

“Girls,” Mom said. “Just because your father is going to be in a Mormon movie doesn’t mean he’s going to become a Mormon.”

But lately he’d been making us nervous. Dad was supposed to be Lutheran, after all – a leader in our congregation, too – and he’d been spending all his time reading books about Mormons. And now he was going to spend all his time acting like a Mormon – an 1840s-era one, complete with top hat, cane and pancake makeup.

No way was I telling anyone about this at school.

Dad had read in the Hancock County Journal-Pilot that a film crew was going to arrive in nearby Nauvoo to shoot a historical drama. The movie, “Legacy,” would be about the Mormon pioneers who settled in Nauvoo before being driven out by religious persecution. In the winters, with no crops to tend, Dad liked to work at part-time jobs or take on creative projects. The movie would qualify as both.

At first he was only going to be an extra. But when he showed up for work on the first day, they’d asked if he wanted a bit part, the role of Willard Richards.

After he got the part, I hardly saw him. He got up early and drove to Nauvoo in the dark to be on set by 6 a.m. He didn’t return home until after we’d finished supper without him.

And when we did see him, it was weird.

” ‘Confound it, Parley!’ ” he’d say, thumping his fist on the kitchen table, practicing the one line they’d given him. “Or … maybe I should be more thoughtful,” he’d say, looking off into the distance and letting out a sigh. ” ‘Confound it, Parley.’ ”

I worried that Dad had let the life of movie acting go to his head. But real life got in the way.

When he got the chance to appear as an extra in the climactic migration scene – when the Mormons move their wagons west over the frozen Mississippi – he had to miss it for a Farm Bureau meeting.

It wasn’t until after the movie had wrapped that Dad found a Mormon history book that explained who Willard Richards was.

Like my dad, the real Willard Richards had been something of a writer. He’d been one of Joseph Smith’s “scribes,” in charge of writing down everything the latter-day prophet said. The book also said Richards had come from the East Coast.

“Now I wish I’d have said it more like ‘Confound it, Paahley,’ ” Dad said, doing his best Kennedy.

In the end it didn’t matter. Dad’s line didn’t make it into the movie.

None of us knew this, however, for years. When the film wrapped, it was never shown in the area, and Dad never got to see his work.

But last year – some 15 years after the fact – Dad met a Mormon couple from Utah at a Farm Bureau convention and they told him where to get it.

When he finally got his own copy, he paused the DVD to show me the scene where he appears. He stood in front of the screen and pointed out a small figure in the background.

“I can hardly see you,” I said.

Then he looked kind of hurt. I felt guilty.

“But you look really dignified in that top hat, Dad,” I said. “And you can hardly even tell you’re a Lutheran!”

(The item below was originally one of my weekly columns for the Galesburg IL Register-Mail, from July 21, 2006)

Pool of sweat

When I found out my parents had bought a pool, I was ready to throw a fit. Kind of like I did when they bought a satellite dish-the day I left for college-after I’d spent my youth complaining about missing out on MTV.

Then I saw the thing and calmed down a little.

It was one of those blue puffy-looking ones that have started cropping up in so many back yards over the last year or two. It was an adult baby pool.

I wrinkled my nose at it.

“Is it even a real pool?” I asked my mom. “I mean, does it even have chlorine?” This was my euphemistic way of saying, “am I going to get your germs?” (Never mind that I came out of this woman’s body.)

“It’s got chemicals in it, yes,” Mom said.

Still, I was reluctant to get in the thing.

Until the first hot day of summer. I called home with the intention of inviting myself over.

“You in that pool yet?” I said.

“No, it’s not warm enough,” Mom said. “The water needs to warm up.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “I thought the whole point of a pool was that the water in it is cool.”

“You’d be surprised how cold it is,” Mom said. “The pool came with a solar cover to put on top, and you have to wait for the sun to heat it up a little bit.”

This sounded suspicious to me. How, I wanted to know, would the pool cool back off once it got warmed up? I wondered if the designers of these solar-covered pools had ever spent a July or August in Illinois.

The next time I saw my parents, I was disturbed to notice a large bandage on Mom’s ankle.

“What happened?” I said.

Mom looked away and pretended not to have heard me.

“Your mother scraped her foot on the pool ladder,” Dad said. “So when you get in it, make to use the ladder VERY carefully. You don’t want to let your foot linger on the step. …”

“Excuse me?” I said. “I thought the whole point of a ladder was to … oh, never mind.”

I had no intention of going near the thing anyway.

But last Saturday when I went home for a visit, I gave in. It was sweltering. And Mom, my sister, and my nephew were all going to get in. So I donned my suit and headed outside, where Dad was already in the water.

“Now, just so you know, it’s a little warm,” Dad said as I started to climb the ladder, being careful not to use any of the rungs for their intended purpose.

I plopped in and let out a yowl.

“DAD!” I screamed. “This isn’t a pool, this is a hot tub!” I felt like I’d just dunked myself into a vat of chili soup. The water felt was as warm as, if not warmer than, the muggy 90-degree air.

“We had the solar cover on to keep the leaves and bugs out. …”

My sister then arrived poolside. She set my nephew in his little inflatable boat and then stepped into the pool herself. “Jeeze!” she cried. “This thing is like a sauna!”

Soon Mom stepped in, and all of us sat there, sweltering, up to our chins in hot water.

But we were together. And it was worth staying in and sweating it out, I decided, once I saw how cute my nephew looked in his little inflatable boat, never mind that the thing was melting.

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