His parents were always “three sheets to the wind.”  His mother once told me that she wished she had become a nun like she had originally intended.  His father, while I knew him, despite his drinking problem, was able to maintain a job with NCR.  But I understand he was let go after I left East Lansing.  Ultimately, I don’t know what happened to my friend’s parents, but the prognosis was obviously not good.

I was reminded of my friend’s parents when I recently watched the film Crazy Heart.  For his efforts, Jeff Bridges won an Academy for best actor for portraying the role of an over-the-hill country singer with alcohol and drug addictions.  When the film opens, the main character is playing the bowling alley circuit.  The movie also has a subplot involving a May-to-December romance.  Jeff probably didn’t deserve his Academy Award for this flic, but maybe he did for life-time achievement.

Anyway, I found the movie to be very derivative of an earlier movie:  The Wrestler.  The general plots are the same, just substitute a broken-down singer for a broken-down wrestler.  I’m not a country music fan, but I loved the music in Crazy Heart, which also captured an Academy Award.

I didn’t like the ending of Crazy Heart.  The “hero’s” rehab was way too easy and the ending was very unsatisfying.  The conclusion made logical sense (younger woman dumps older man), but lacked emotional punch.  Life just isn’t as clear cut and clean as the movie’s ending.  If movie goers want something that doesn’t pull punches, they should watch the classic movie The Days of Wine and Roses.  I saw the latter movie with some high school buddies, including the one mentioned above.  To this day, I wonder what impact the movie had on my high school pal.  I know I never saw him consume alcohol.

Cultural Definition of “three sheets to the wind”:

To be “three sheets to the wind” is to be drunk.  The sheet is the line that controls the sails on a ship.  If the line is not secured, the sail flops in the wind, and the ship loses headway and control.  If all three sails are loose, the ship is out of control.

The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy

“Wittwer surmises that he was probably the last doctoral student of the late Guarth Hansen, USU Distinguished Professor Emeritus and renowned biochemist.  Wittwer remembers working industiously at the lab bench when Dr. Hansen stopped by and said, “Carl, you’re doing a great job but once a day you need to stop and think about your basic hypothesis and what your research is trying to tell you.”

Wittwer recalls that another valuable piece of Hansen’s advice was not to take things at face value.  “He asked me, ‘Carl, why do you think the chemical in the bottle is what you say it is?’”

“Dr. Hansen taught me to ask more question,” says Wittwer.  “And not to necessarily believe everything I read, saw, or heard.”"

Uncle Vincent, a retired surgeon, was featured in a story that ran in SLTrib (12 July 06) about his membership in a group called the Dirty Shirts.  They get together every Wednesday rain or shine to play golf in the summer at Rose Park Golf Course or bowl in the winter months at The Ritz.  Some Wednesdays, they just meet at Lumpy’s for lunch.  Uncle Vincent is the oldest of the group, which averages over 85 years of age.

According to the SLTrib “The golf is pretty informal — a lengthy list of whimsical rules that would make the president of the USGA storm the place ensures scores stay reasonably low — but the lunch afterwrd is serious business.  All 16 Dirty Shirts take their turns aphabetically to be “host” of the lunch and pick up the check.  The host must provide desert, preferably homemade . . .”

My Grandmother Rees lived alone until she was almost 100.  She loved to play bridge but was continually outliving her bridge club members.  Two of her sisters were at her funeral.  Almost all of her 12 brothers and sisters lived long productive lives.

So what is the secret to living forever?  In the case of the Munks (my grandmother’s family) there must be several factors, foremost is genetics.  But hard work and not smoking probably help(ed) a lot.  My Mother is also very nutrition conscience (my Father was a biochemist and nutritionist).  And I’m sure that didn’t hurt.

This subject is a huge issue in Mormon culture.  I keep hearing all kinds of horror stories about the relations between parents and children, and keep being told examples of how parental expectations are both problematic and unrealistic.  How parents can see their children in only one light, and fail to take into consideration their children’s needs and desires.  This is ironic for a culture that claims to emphasize the family.

Parents who say that they would rather see their children dead than come home early from a Mormon mission need to reevaluate their own lives.  They need to ask questions like:  Am I putting my social status above the happiness of my child?  Am I unfairly transferring my expectations to my children?  This issue of parent/child relationships was effectively examined in Richard Dutcher’s adult Mormon-genre movie States of Grace.  Here the director/writer looks at the issues of a Mormon missionary going home early and a young girls “transgressions” in Hollywood.  It is a must-see for all thinking Mormons, any parents for that matter.

I think the bottom line is:  We need to love our children (and, in my case, grandchildren).  Each child needs to live his/her own life.  If they are gay, so be it.  We must come to grips with the fact that they, in all probability, will not be changing.  If they need to be agnostics or atheists, so be it.  Religious beliefs can and do evolve.  Forcing our beliefs onto them is a losing proposition.  Both movies are good and recommended.  But I didn’t like the ending of either.

Hogans (accent on the second syllable) come in a variety of shapes and sizes.  Early versions had a circular floor plan, but more recent designs have been octagonal, all with the door facing east to welcome the rising sun.  There are two general type of hogans:  male and female.

The “male” hogan is typically smaller and is only used for sacred or private ceremonies.  The “female” hogan, the family home, is much larger.  In it, the children play, the women cook, weave, and talk, and the men tell stories.  Navajos used the circular design until the 1900s, when they started to make them in hexagonal and octagonal shapes.  The change in shape may have been due to the arrival of the railroad.  A supply of wooden cross-ties, which could be laid horizontally, allowed for larger, taller homes.

Last year on a visit to the Navajo Mountain corner of the reservation, I ran onto Silvia’s partially completed octagonal hogan, the exterior was complete but the interior still needed a lot of work.  The floor plan was very practical, being divided into two general living areas.  The front portion contained the kitchen, bathroom, and living room, and the back portion the bedrooms.  My colleagues and I helped complete the interior.  This spring, we plan to add indoor water and power.

The design of Silvia’s hogan caused us to wonder about possible “green” additions to the design.  Several other groups have had similar thoughts.  At Colorado University, Dennis Holloway (solar architect and prof) and Charles Cambridge (Navajo graduate student in anthropology) teamed up to work on home designs that were low-cost and energy efficient.  But most of all, the homes needed to be culturally appropriate.  Part of the current problem on the reservation, Holloway explained, was that their highly-valued traditional home, the hogan, had been ignored in government housing project.  The CU project developed a “green” home around the hogan concept.

In some respects, CU’s plans looked derivative of some of the designs I had seen outside of Taos NM, at Earthship.  Here the homes are constructed using earth for insulation, solar energy for electricity and heat, and water harvesting and recirculation.  Although the homes have fanciful exteriors, they are designed to be extremely water and energy efficient.  They  also use a lot of recycled materials (tires, enamelled steel plate, bottles, aluminum cans, etc.)

Another Navajo-related housing program is being carried out by DesignBuildBluff (an adjunct organization to the architecture program at the University of Utah).  Headquartered in Bluff, UT, this NGO constructs at least one home a year in the northern Navajo Nation, using architecture students for design and construction.  So far, four homes have been constructed.  Two are based somewhat on a traditional hogan design.  The Bluff portion of the operation is very ably ram-rodded by Mitch McComb.

• A lengthy and bleak discussion of the tribulations and horrors of the Last Days.
• A very descriptive lesson on the gory nature of the crucifixion of Christ, involving such details as driving nails in the hands and feet.

Kids need to be kids.  Growing up needs to be fun.  There is plenty of time to learn the details of the crucifixion and of the Last Days.  And I’m not sure that studying  the latter is ever necessary.  Learning to be good stewards of the Earth might be a better more positive subject.

A different spin on a similar issue is provided by the new reality television show:  Undercover Boss.  On the first show of the series, placed just after the Super Bowl, Larry O’Donnell, president and COO of Waste Management, goes undercover at his company, picking up litter, cleaning toilets, etc.  Some of things he discovers horrify, humble, and shock him.  He vows to change things.  The show at times is moving, but it’s also overtly manipulative.  While a few of the workers that made it on TV were given raises and rewards, there is no reason to be optimistic that the corporate culture will change.

But hopely the show will have one positive benefit:  it will dramatize the plight of the workers at the lowest end of the pay scale.  It will hopely cause lower- and middle-level managers to think long and hard about working conditions, levels of pay, and benefits.  While the show represents a very narrow top-down management approach to the problems which plague American workers, hopefully it will inspire more bottom-up solutions to the conditions of the working poor.

Lisa Dodson in her book The Moral Underground highlights several individuals who have worked out solutions to issues related to the working poor.  While several of the solutions are illegal, or borderline illegal, they do represent a very personal form of civil disobedience, a way of dealing with injustice.  Particularly important in an era where CEOs earn millions, and their company’s lowest paid employees aren’t paid even enough to survive on.

But there has been a renewed interest in the work of the once popular artist.  On a recent visit to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, instead of rushing to the floor with the French Impressionists, I found myself searching for Millet’s oeuvres.  I love his earthy hues and sympathetic snapshots of rural French peasants.  His paintings are an encyclopedia of farm work:  digging, hoeing, planting, reaping, spreading manure.  I remember some of his paintings, like The Gleaners, being used as illustrations in my Sunday School manuals.

Millet’s outlook on life was fatalistic and conservative.  For him, the peasants were trapped in a never ending cycle of toil, bound to the earth and its seasons.  And that was the root experience of his own peasant childhood.  He was born in 1814 in the village of Gruchy (Normandy).  “I will swear to you,” he wrote to a friend in 1851, “at the risk of seeming even more a socialist, that it is the human side that touches me most . . . and it is never the joyous side that shows itself to me:  I don’t know where it is.  I have never seen it.”  Millet died in 1875.

Millet had his greatest influence on post-Impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh.  Millet and his work are mentioned many times in Vincent’s letters to his brother Theo.  I served part of my Mormon mission in the Borinage area of southern Belgium, in coal mining country.  Van Gogh lived in this area for a time and, like me, began his ministry there.  One of the homes Van Gogh was reputed to have lived in was located near my missionary apartment in Mons, Belgium.  During his time in the Borinage, Vincent came to identify with the miners, their lifestyles, and their families.  This fascination with the working class later shows up in his works depicting peasant life (ie. The Potato Eaters).

Unlike Millet earthy tones, Van Gogh eventually splashed vibrant, heavy-stroked colors across his canvases.  Since my mission, I’ve had the opportunity to travel throughout much of southern France.  I particularly enjoy the area around Arles, the countryside and its people greatly inspired Dutch post-impressionist.  Provence, France, is still a beautiful area and a wonderful place to visit.  The area is haunted by the ghost of Vincent.

In the 1980s, Wilson used his seat on the military appropriations subcommittee to secure major US backing (much of it covert) for the mujahideen forces which were important participants in the war to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan.  Pakistani president Zia ul-Haq, who had allowed the CIA to military supplies through his country, credited Wilson with the defeat.

During his 24 year in Washington, Wilson was known as ‘Good Time Charlie’, a scotch-drinking, womanizing pol (He was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the 2007 movie.).  The movie was based on a 2003 book by former 60 Minutes producer George Crile.  I’m not sure why, but the movie bombed at the box office.  For me, it was an enjoyable flic, and had some great comedic moments.  Generally, I’m not impressed by the work of major directors and actors, but this one is a minor masterpiece.  I highly recommend the DVD.  Luckily Wilson lived long enough to see it.

While Charlie’s war was a short-term success, the victory in Afghanistan left a power vacuum that was later filled by the Taliban, many of whom were heavily armed with weapons procured by Wilson and provided by the CIA.  In hindsight, the war had very obvious unintended consequences.

To the public, Wilson appeared a political lightweight and benchwarmer, rarely speaking on the floor of the House.  He generally stayed out of the major policy battles of the day.  But from behind closed doors, he was able to significantly alter the course of world history.  It is fascinating to mull over the influence that one obsessed Congressman can wield.

“Devotion does not provide a template for finding your personal Jesus (or whoever).  It’s a history of Shapiro’s quest to explore her own faithlessness.  She grew up in an Orthodox household but cast aside her Hebrew religious study as a teenager.  As an adult, her sense of God was that if he existed, he was not a micromanager.  (”As far as I knew, he had never gotten me a parking space.”)  She wants to believe in something but doesn’t know what.”

For me “God as micromanager” has always been a problem.  It is common in Mormon culture to recite inspirational stories of how God has personally intervened in lives.  Here are three stories that I remember.  Years ago, my home teacher related a tale of an overflowing bath tub.  Without any communication, the neighbor ran over with a shop vac and helped clean up the flooding.  My home teacher was convinced the neighbor had been alerted by God.

At a fast-and-testimony meeting (FTM) meeting, one of our neighbors related an experience of trying to repair a bike.  She was stumped and frustrated, and couldn’t get the job done.  So she retired for a moment of personal prayer.  She then returned to the bike repair job and was able to complete it successfully.  She attributed her success to God’s inspiration.

At another FTM, our Bishop told of an experience where the family car broke down in a very dangerous stretch of canyon highway.  After a family prayer, a good semaritan stopped, and took our Bishop’s family to his home in a nearby city.  While the car was being repaired, the Bishop’s new-found friend let his family stay at his house.  The Bishop, with tears in his eyes, attributed the successful resolution of the problem to God intervention.

While I’m sure that each of the inspirational storytelIers was a sincere believer, I find their three tales difficult on several different levels (eg.  Bad things can and do happen to people who pray for relief?  And then what?  Do you lose faith or rationize God’s response.).  But most of all, the God I believe in is not a micromanager.  I don’t believe that he Is up in heaven stirring the pot on micro-issues.

Prayer does provide an important step in the two examples above.  In the first, it provided a brief respite from the problem.  A timeout is frequently all that is needed in problem solving.  It works for me on crossword puzzles.  On the second, a family prayer was very important in helping to settle the everyone down.