A Sneak Peek of My Book!

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I started writing about my weird feelings about Utah and I ended up down a holiday rabbit hole, in nearby Idaho

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Here’s what I’ve been working on lately. Read it now, because I’m sure my editor will make me whittle it down.

(NOTE: I’ve changed the names of places and people because, they didn’t ask to be part of my shenanigans)

When people discover I was Mormon they almost always assume I’m from Utah. It’s true that Mormons colonized the Utah territory, but as of today, they make up less than 50% of the state. There are more Mormons that live outside of the United States than inside. In fact, the place with the highest percentage of Mormons (over 60%!) is the island nation of Tonga, with Samoa trailing behind with a respectable 42-ish percent, about the same ratio as Utah. I can’t prove it, but Moana is probably Mormon. Motunui seems very Mormon, if not for all the porn shoulders.

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Of all the places I’ve been to, none fills me with a stranger amalgamation of feelings than Utah. As a girl growing up in Southern California, my dad would load us into the family sedan and take us North to visit family for holidays. Nearly every summer and most Christmases included a pilgrimage to Utah and Idaho.

It was magical driving through the Sugarhouse neighborhood in Salt Lake where my uncle lived. I loved the little brick bungalows with covered porches and basements - so different than the chicken wire and stucco homes that dot the arid desert where I spent the majority of my year. The houses looked soooo American. They were traditional, solid, timeless and reliable little Rockwellian domiciles; homes with two parents and a dressed turkey on the table with multiple sides. My home was a hacienda style knock off where most of the meals served were nutritionally defunct TV dinners nuked in the microwave or from Burger King.

I take that back, fast food was rarely consumed at home. It was wantonly devoured in the back seat minutes after it was handed to us through a drive thru window and well on its way to being digested before we got home.

Utah felt consistent, safe and best of all, it had snow (something even rarer than basements were in earthquake-prone in Southern California). The minute we spotted snow from the car window we’d beg Dad to let us out to play in it. We usually had to wait until we got to Uncle Otto’s house but sometimes a gas station stop afforded us the chance to find a mound of plowed snow in the parking lot. We didn’t care it was covered in gravel and garbage, it was SNOW!

The air was filled with the smell of wood burning stoves, another novelty hard to find in a state that is engulfed in brush fires half the year. Our trips to Utah/Idaho are some of the happiest memories I have as a child. My dad was in his best form at his childhood home. He wells up at the mention of Bennington, Idaho.

Visits to my uncle only lasted a day or two, his tiny 600 square foot home chockablock under the chaos of three children and an additional grown man. As the home had only one bedroom, two people got the bed, two others on the pull out sofa bed and someone on the floor. Getting the bed would have been a bonus but it usually meant sleeping next to my uncle, who snored. This was terrifying mainly because my uncle is a quirky antique dealer and among his bric-a-brac, a giant taxidermied bear, occupied 50% of his bedroom.

I was repeatedly rattled awake by the eerie groan of Otto’s snoring. It wasn’t a stretch to think the bear had come to life while you defenselessly slumbered two feet from its extended claws illuminated by the moonlight on the opposite side of the room. We were all scared of the bear. We all knew it was better to sleep with the uncomfortable sofa bed bar in your back all night than waking up to what appeared to be your last night on Earth.

Otto never married. He had this house all to himself; never had a nagging wife to tell him to get rid of the bear, buy him nose strips, or ask him to cull his antique collection (of which he has dozens of storage units dotted along the Wasatch Valley).

Otto was the most fun of all my aunts and uncles. He was the gate through which all of the nieces and nephews passed on their way through Utah. Whether it was a free breakfast at the Little America hotel or a fudge sundae at Dee’s diner, Otto always had time for us. He always had time for his aging parents too. Though they lived three hours away, he faithfully cut their lawn, worked on the upkeep their small farmstead, and helped with their medicare checks, doctor’s visits, and big trips to the Pocatello Walmart. Otto was the family hero, historian and humorist.

After two sleepless nights avoiding a stuffed bear attack, we’d all pile into our car and his truck (which always smelled of linseed and motor oil) and make the three hour drive to a tiny hamlet in Southern Idaho. The farther we got, the deeper the snow. We’d anxiously await Christmas at Oma and Papa’s (my father’s parents).

Their rural Idaho life seemed like something out of Frank Capra movie. Crossing over each cattle guard deducted a decade off the clock and we’d mark it by humming Mister Sandman like when Marty McFly finds himself in 1950’s Hill Valley. Our car became a time machine when we drove to Idaho, the place really did feel like something I’d only seen in black and white movies. A pot-bellied stove, a toilet with a pull cord, no shower in the bathroom, just a porcelain cast iron tub where thousands of baths were given and taken by my grandparents and their four children for over the last 60 years. If that tub could talk, I would tell it to stop because it’s weird to think of all of my paternal family’s private parts soaking in murky water ever since the Truman administration.

The walls of their tiny living room was awash with scads of small, askew, mismatched frames filled with family photos from the turn of the century up until they ran out of room in the 90’s. My cousin Jessica, though now a teenager, hung on the wall as a perpetual toothless infant next to an old sepia photo of Papa’s grandparents in Switzerland.

The image that stands out to me the most is the faded print of Fragonard’s Rococo A Young Girl Reading displayed in a frame meant to look like finely carved wood, but in reality: brown molded plastic with a painted faux patina. Looking back, I wish I could ask the story behind why my grandmother hung it there. It was partially obscured by the large stove pipe ascending just inches front of it.

Was this painting aspirational? Was this an attempt at gentility and sophistication? Was it a gift from someone? It looked so out of place in this tiny hogan filled with signs like “Sometimes I wake up grumpy, other days I let him sleep.” and pink striped crocheted Barbie doll tissue box coozies. The golden taffeta-clad girl with a tiny book propped open by her delicate hand and extended pinky was in stark contrast to the 1986 Boise Rodeo photo of a young man being pummeled by a bull.

My grandmother could read, but with such a tiny house, large family and even larger farm, I’m not sure how much time she had when her brood was still afoot. She definitely read when she was older. I remember stacks of softbacks on her nightstand but I don’t remember her talking about what she’d been reading. That Rococo print would have felt more on brand if the girl was reading Danielle Steel.

Looking back, it makes me a bit sad. My grandmother was smart, funny, energetic, clever. She married Papa when she was 17 years old after meeting him at a local church dance. Our family celebrated the fact they’d been married so long. Through ups and downs, squabbles, twists of fate, loss and gains - they did it. They were faithful soulmates.

As a Mormon woman, that was the best you could hope for: a long and happy marriage. It’s only now as an adult I think: seventeen! I know the whole “different times” but we all knew that Papa’s mom initially disapproved of the marriage. The story goes when Oma showed the ring to her soon-to-be-mother-in law, she looked at it and blithely said, “I hope she’s old enough to know what that means.” and walked away.

One of the things we always did on our journey from Utah to Idaho was a stop in Logan Utah. We often eat at the Bluebird, an adorable art deco candy fountain restaurant located on Main St only a couple of blocks from the Logan Temple where my grandparents were married.

The Bluebird opened in 1914, thirty years after the Logan Temple was dedicated. I imagine my newly wedded teenage grandmother sitting on one of the bolt-down barstools, sipping a hand pulled soda in her pillbox hat two blocks from the building where she’d bowed her head and promised God in front of all of her (practicing Mormon adult) family members that she’d obey her husband.

To be fair, I don’t know that she had a pillbox hat, but I do know what covenants she made, because I had to make the same ones to my husband 75 years after Oma made hers. Mormon temple vows have remained largely unchanged since they were written by Joseph Smith in the 1840’s. In my desire for accuracy, I looked it up. Oma’s vow was more heavy handed than mine.

She covenanted to “obey” her husband, whereas I (being married post 1990 temple ceremony changes) only had to “hearken to the counsel” of my husband, as my husband “hearkened unto the counsel of God”. Thankfully my husband is a gentle, kind egalitarian sort so he never held temple covenants over my head if declined making him his favorite butternut squash soup. I could out-logic that by questioning God’s specifically counseled him on dinner plans. I acknowledge how unlucky some other Mormon women have been with their husbands who abused this “hearken” injunction and demanded, well, lets just say, more than butternut squash soup. In fact, I met a woman on my mission who summed up the horror of her first marriage with a short story about their wedding day. As they walked down the stairs of the LA Temple he looked at her and said, “Did you hear that? You have to do everything I say!”. Thankfully they divorced and she found “a good one” but only after years of sorrow with a brute.

I only knew my grandmother as a feisty older woman. I assume she was always sassy but maybe in part fueled by her songs never sung? Potential never reached for the years helping my grandfather deliver calves, peeling potatoes with a paring knife over an aluminum bucket, or the constant demand of young children?

When I married, a dear friend gave me a book called Fanny’s Dream. I love her but I know if she reads this she’ll hate what I have to say about it. It’s like a Mormon Cinderella. It never mentions Mormonism directly but the fact that the author’s name is “Caralyn” was a dead giveaway (classic Utah/Idaho/Mormon move to deliberately misspell a perfectly good name) and the main male protagonist is named Heber (gold star Mormon moniker). I looked, the author was born in St. George, Utah. I knew she couldn’t be from the UK by giving the female lead such a naughty name without realizing it.

Fanny, a large and plain looking Wyoming farm woman works her father’s land but dreams of marrying a prince as a way out of lifelong manual labor. Her family and townspeople mock her for being overweight and ugly, but in hope she waits all night during the mayor’s ball for her fairy godmother. Instead, a local farmer shows up and makes her an offer: work my 160 acre farm by my side through thick and thin. After an hour she decides to settle.

Her married life is more of the same, other than that Heber does her a solid every day, like wash her feet or the windows (which for some reason is her limit). Her fairy godmother eventually appears in arrears, offering her a place at the ball where she can set her up with a colonel. Unfortunately Fanny already has a husband and three children. Not great timing godmother. Fanny laughs at the offer and goes back inside to her family.

On the surface this is a touching tale of the realities of hard work, the give and take of marriage and parenthood. Does it unintentionally signal that wishing for fancy stuff is an unrealistic waste of energy, accept the fact that real life is hard. Not that I think gold-digging is better than being a farm wife, but that Fanny so easily folds and accepts a life of hard labor which we know from page one she despises. Fanny could have got an education, became a teacher, and/or moved into a future away from weed pulling and pig slop.

I don’t like this story now because the main character is a simp. I like stories of aspiration, ingenuity, cleverness. After all it’s called: Fanny’s Dream. Fanny’s desire, yearning, wish, ache, intention. But it’s a “dream” in the sense of: illusion, hallucination, conceit, delusion. She awakes to perpetuating the reality she’s accustomed to.

Fanny’s story now reminds me of Terence McKenna’s quote:

“If you don’t have a plan, you become part of somebody else’s plan.”

Unpicking the stitches of my upbringing both delights and saddens me. I love my grandparents. They were so delightful and sassy. They were friendly, generous and hardworking. They lived simple lives with no pretense and were content. They seemed genuinely happy. My father idolizes them (my dad would probably love Fanny’s Dream).

I think the divorce devastated my dad who dreamed of a family life like the one he had. I know my mom very well now and a Fanny/Oma life would have crushed her. A farm wife with four rowdy children, living in rural area with little chance of traveling, writing, and exploring beyond the boundaries of where your pickup truck will take you; your only reading the pages of whatever you managed to get a hold of from the local library or The Bennington Examiner.

I know I’m projecting my own inner world on Oma, who may have been completely happy. She may have never yearned for anything else than what she had. You could argue she was happier than I, since as Alexander Pope said, “"Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed". Was she better off living what Mormon prophet Thomas S. Monson often said, “Choose your love and love your choice.”? Am I so much happier harboring ambitions and hopes and longings that may never materialize, like lonely Fanny sitting in a field waiting for a godmother?

The Leah that kept me in Mormonism as long as she did would say no, your not happier having hopes and dreams, because after all, if they aren’t God’s plans for you, they won’t happen anyway.

These days I’m not really sure how I feel about the “God’s plan for you” stuff. Neville Goddard says God is imagination and if “imagination creates reality”, in a sense, no matter what I do, I’m following God’s plan, since I imagined it.

I imagine Oma is happy wherever she is, since she was happy here too.

xx