For most people, I imagine, Thanksgiving is all about the convergence of family and food. It’s one of the few times of the year when certain dishes make their appearance, and more often than not, those dishes have come down the generations, following familial lines as surely as the gene for eye color or hair texture, and with much the same result: your family’s food traditions are unique to your family. Sure, everyone has eyes… but your eyes might be your Great Uncle Frank’s eyes… and a particular dish might be something that lots of families enjoy, but your family has a way of making it that’s unique to you and yours.

For example, Anne has spent much of the day making from-scratch rolls to go with our holiday meal this afternoon… but they’re not just “from-scratch rolls” in her mind. They’re her Grandma Memmott’s rolls. And while Anne has her grandmother’s recipe (lovingly preserved in a battered old cookbook filled with recipes from all the ladies of the small-town LDS ward where her grandmother lived), it’s taken her some experimentation to figure out exactly how to make the recipe work, because her grandma is no longer here to walk her through it. The inevitable passage of time has made the connection with her family tradition a bit more tenuous, a bit more imperfect.

But we’re living in a time when technology can help resolidify those connections. At least, that’s one of the exciting possibilities of a new venture under development by my friend Jill and her husband Torgny. It’s a digital cookbook called Foodles.

Now, before you say “meh, another recipe site, like there aren’t a million of those,” hear me out.

Foodles is a recipe site, but it’s got a lot of built-in functionality that is unlike any such site I’ve run across before. One feature I find especially exciting is the ability to embed personal notes, photographs and even video into the recipe. Imagine if Anne had video of her grandma actually making these rolls, walking the viewer through all the steps that she used to follow (but maybe didn’t think to write down when that ward cookbook was compiled, for whatever reason). Best of all, imagine being to relive time spent in the kitchen with your loved ones who are longer here. This has to the potential to preserve more than a list of ingredients; it can preserve the personal nuances that truly make a dish “Grandma’s,” or “Uncle Frank’s,” or even “Anne’s.” And it can ensure that your loved ones live on in some form, right there in the kitchen with you.

Jill and Torgny have a lot of other good ideas, too — tools that add convenience and help modernize some recipes, like nutritional facts that adjust automatically to show you what happens if you replace ingredients. There are privacy settings so you can limit your recipes and other content only to your family, or share them with the world. And you can create an actual printed cookbook for your family, too. I sincerely think there’s a lot of potential here.

But of course they need help to make it a reality. I know the Christmas shopping frenzy is about to begin in only a few short hours and money is always tight this time of the year, so I hope you’ll forgive the sales pitch… but at the same time, when better to bring this up than on Thanksgiving Day, when we are the most conscious of family and food? I urge everyone reading this to check out their Kickstarter page… watch the video of Jill explaining all this in her own words, read the details for yourself, and consider backing them, if you can.

And now, I’m going to go sop up some gravy with those Grandma Memmott rolls…  Happy Thanksgiving, y’all, and happy shopping if Black Friday is your thing (personally, I plan to watch a lot of DVDs tomorrow!)

If you’re at all active on social media, you’ve no doubt encountered the Ice Bucket Challenge at some point during the past month. This viral stunt phenomenon in which people videotape themselves pouring buckets of icewater over their heads and then call out their friends to do the same was intended to bring attention — and more importantly, donations for research — to a dread ailment called ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. And it seems to have worked; here in the U.S., the ALS Association reports that as of September 8, it has received over $111 million in donations specifically attributed to the Challenge. That would seem to be an unalloyed social good, wouldn’t it? And yet, as with all things in our prickly, contentious 21st-century America, the Challenge has not been free of controversy. A number of critics have attacked the IBC as everything from lazy “slacktivism” to a waste of water in drought-stricken California. An article in Slate appears to have been especially provocative, prompting a number of bloggers in my online circle to fire back testy responses. The ALS Association was later forced to issue a statement denying accusations of fraud, and one of the religious nuts at WorldNetDaily has reportedly even denounced the Challenge as “satanic.”

Personally, I’ve viewed the whole thing with a somewhat sour perspective, if not as outright cynical as some. I have a history with ALS, you see, and I freely admit that I have no sense of humor when it comes to anything associated with this shit. Some of my friends — notably my blogging colleague Jaquandor — feel that charitable causes need to have some kind of “fun factor” to get people interested, that too solemn an approach tends to put them off. It’s possible that he’s right. Maybe even likely. Hell, I’m the first one to change the channel when those animal-cruelty PSAs with the Sarah McLachlan soundtrack come on. But in the case of this cause, which cuts very close to the bone for me personally, I tend to resent the introduction of frivolity. I’ve cringed at many of the videos I’ve seen because they’ve had a little too much frat-boy attitude, a little too much of the “Woohoo! All right, Bro!” tone. I have found myself wondering how many of the people who’ve dumped water on themselves to prove to their friends what good sports they are have followed through and actually donated to the cause. Truthfully? I’ll concede that a lot of them probably, if not most of them, have made their donations. I know I often tend to suspect the worst of people. But I can’t help it, considering how closely related this thing seems to be to dumb competitive horseshit like that cinnamon challenge that went around a few years ago.

What’s that? You don’t remember that one? Well, that’s something else that troubles me about this IBC thing: These viral sensations are just another kind of fad, aren’t they? Novelties that come out of nowhere, soak up lots of attention for a brief time, and then flame out and disappear without a trace. Sure, the ALS Association has been making a ton of money right now, but what about a month from now when a new shiny bauble has come along to distract everybody? Will anybody give any mind to ALS or think to make another donation six months from now? Wouldn’t it be better to do something to increase the steady annual flow of money to ALS research, even if only incrementally, then to generate this one-time Bell curve of donations? I don’t know… maybe I’m missing the point. Maybe every dollar collected is for the best, regardless of whether future donations drop back to regular levels. Maybe this subject is just too touchy for me to think rationally about it.

In any event, given my less-than-enthusiastic embrace of the IBC, you can imagine I wasn’t overly happy when a friend of mine tagged me to do it. I debated for a while over whether or not to just ignore his challenge. But after another friend offered to increase his donation if I went through with it, I decided to go ahead… and to try and make a point while doing so. I don’t know if my speech made any difference, if I managed to get through to anyone who mistakenly believes this whole thing to be nothing more than a childish game, or even if such people exist or if I’m just being a misanthrope. But I did it, and I did it my way, as the song says. Here’s the video:

The Ice Bucket Challenge seems to be yesterday’s news already, just as I knew it would become — I did this two weeks ago, and I haven’t heard much about it at all in several days — but maybe by reposting my video here and now, I can reach somebody who hasn’t already seen it and encourage them to write a check. I’d really like to see a cure for this shit in my lifetime, so no other 16-year-old boys have to learn compassion the way I did… and no one else has to die the miserable, undignified way my uncle did.

I saw my first wild moose this afternoon.

What a shame she was roadkill.

Anne and I were riding in my Mustang with the top down, transiting north over Trappers Loop Road from Weber Canyon to the Ogden Valley. It’s a lovely scenic drive that ends in one of our favorite destinations for an afternoon road trip, a little farm town called Huntsville. We’d just passed a field full of cattle, so at first glance, I thought the massive black heap laying in the dirt off the side of the two-lane highway was a cow that’d gotten through the fence and wandered into harm’s way. But as we got nearer and the true size of the carcass became more evident, I realized it was no cow. And then I saw the head and the unmistakable Bullwinkle nose. I felt a twinge of sorrow for the poor beast, even as I noted that anything smaller than an eighteen-wheeler must’ve been totaled by the collision.

And then we were past it, our noses wrinkling at the stink of such a huge quantity of meat left out on a warm day. The wind currents swirling through the open car quickly cleared away the odor and replaced it with more pleasant scents, like alfalfa and sunshine and even exhaust from the truck in front of us, but the sight lingered in my mind for a long time after.

Not far past the moose, we crested the top of a hill and began dropping toward Huntsville along a series of broad, gentle switchbacks. We gasped at the sight of Pineview Reservoir ahead of us, which had been brimming over the last time we’d been this way, but was now depleted and outlined with steep, rocky beaches. Sandbars were visible beneath the shallow water, but that hadn’t frightened away the holiday weekend mobs of speedboats and jet-skis. They swarmed over the shrunken lake, seemingly too thick for safety.

At the intersection with the main road, we turned east toward Huntsville, then back north, then east again. We drove down a tranquil two-lane road with no sidewalks, where log-cabin-style houses alternated with cultivated fields, following a familiar path leading into a secluded corner of this high mountain valley. We passed beneath an archway made of welded pipe, then down a narrow lane shaded by colonnades of ancient oak trees, finally arriving at at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity. I’ve written before about this Trappist monastery whose monks have been peacefully working the land here since 1947, living and working in war-surplus Quonset huts. In that earlier post, I lamented the end of an era because the monastery was no longer selling the honey that had drawn Anne and me to this place every summer for years. The monk who tended the bees and made the honey had grown too old to do the job, and there were no young initiates coming in to take his place.

Anne and I knew then that the days were numbered for the abbey. That was two years ago. Now those days are even fewer. A news article published Friday informed us that the abbey’s bookshop, where we’d bought the honey and other foodstuffs in bygone days, is closing for good. There are only 10 monks left, down from 18 when I last blogged about the place, and there is talk of the abbey itself closing soon as well. So I suppose we made the drive this Labor Day for old times’ sake, to bid farewell to one of Utah’s unique treasures, a place that we have enjoyed so much over the years.

We weren’t the only ones. The news story had brought out a lot of other tourists as well, mostly couples older than ourselves who wandered the grounds taking photos with the mournful air of people who know they won’t pass this way again. Anne and I took our turn doing the same. We stepped into the bookshop and winced at the sight of so many empty shelves — everything at 50% off, close-out prices! We bought a CD of Gregorian chanting for Anne, and I finally picked up a St. Christopher’s medal, something I’ve toyed with doing many times over the years. I’m not Catholic, not even particularly religious, but I identify somewhat with Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. It seemed a fitting souvenir… even if I didn’t have the courage to ask one of the fathers to bless it.

After that, we went over to the chapel and soaked in the quiet for a moment. We saw the kindly old monk who’d often sold us the abbey’s famous honey, now grown thin and feeble with time. We took a look at the cemetery, at the 29 neat white crosses standing over men who devoted their lives to this place, to simple hard work, to the dream of building something bigger than themselves. I’m sure they would not have seen all that work as vain, but I’ll be honest, I can’t help but think it was. Their home will be gone soon, closed up and abandoned, the Quonset huts torn down, the fields left fallow. I suspect the whole area will be subdivided building lots within five years.

No, I’m not Catholic. But the thought of that serene place vanishing from the earth makes me profoundly sad.

Labor Day always makes me a little sad anyhow. It’s the traditional end of the summer season, of course, as well as a reminder that another birthday is just around the corner, and that’s something I’ve not welcomed in a long time. And my regret at the passing of this particular summer is especially keen because it seems like summer never really got off the ground this year. Oh, sure, my social calendar has been full — it always is, it seems. But somehow, the last three months have never really felt like summer, if that makes sense.

I’m not sure it does make sense, even to me. I don’t know what I expect “summer” to actually be like, aside from my obsolete childhood impressions of being carefree and unscheduled for months at a time. And we all know that’s not realistic for a responsible adult, certainly not one who actually has to work for a living. But like I wrote the other day, I hardly ever feel the absence of urgency anymore, at any time of the year, for any significant length of time. I always feel like there’s something that needs to be done, usually something other than whatever I would prefer to be spending my precious allotment of time on this earth doing. These annual mileposts we call holidays tend to remind me of how many things I’ve failed to accomplish in the preceding block of time, whether that’s a season or a year or a decade. For example, I had an idea back in April or thereabouts: I was going to re-read Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt series during the summer months, blogging about each novel along the way and exploring how well the series actually conforms to my adolescent memories of it, how well the books have held up over the years, that sort of thing. My ambition was to give Pitt the same treatment Michael May has been giving Ian Fleming’s Bond series over on his AdventureBlog. Well… you can see how that turned out. I have been reading the books, but the blogging part… not so much.

There have been other things I’ve failed to write about, too… notably a series of three deaths that hit me very hard: an eccentric neighbor who was often, frankly, a pain in the ass, but whose loss has left a surprising hole in the texture of my days; my great-aunt Luann, the sister of my late grandma June, who I didn’t see very often but always liked and now regret not seeing more; and my beloved Hannibal-cat, one of the three kitty-boys who’ve shared my life for the past several years. Hannibal, in particular, was my little buddy, the one with the strongest, most unique personality, who followed me around the Bennion Compound like a dog and jabbered at me like a little kid telling me about his day, a fat little clown who seemed to know he amused me and liked to do it. Like that poor damn moose, Hannibal met his end in the road. I should’ve have written about him before now, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it, just as I wasn’t able to write about his brother Jack, who preceded him into the undiscovered country a couple years ago.

So many deaths, so many things changing and running out… the days pouring through my fingers like water through a flood gate. They’re running out, too, aren’t they? Another summer gone to who knows where. The season that I used to live for and now barely even notice in between commutes. I couldn’t tell you the last time I drove my beloved old ’63 Galaxie. Or whiled away an afternoon reading comic books… hell, books of any kind. Or hit the sweet spot while I’m writing something and felt the universe inside me open up and gush out onto the screen or the paper with virtually no effort. It seems to get harder and harder, not merely to find the time, but to access whatever it is that used to just… be there… and now seems to be locked in a trunk someplace very far away.

In retrospect, that moose was a harbinger of a very dark mood…

I took the day off yesterday, largely so I could run some errands that never seem to get accomplished on my weekends, and also just because I could. I slept an hour later than usual, spent some quality time with my last surviving kitty boy, Evinrude, and watched a movie over breakfast. A real breakfast, not a hastily cooked (and hastily gobbled) bowl of five-minute oatmeal or a smoothie. And then I took care of my errands — inspections and renewing the registration on my car, if you really must know! And then in the afternoon, I even found time to take a leisurely walk.

It was a beautiful day, one of those late-summer afternoons when knots of slate-colored clouds roll along the edges of the valley, but don’t seem too interested in closing in overhead, and the mild quality of the air makes me feel like I ought to be getting ready to go back to school, even though I finished with that almost 25 years ago. Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again” started playing on my iPod, something in my chest unclenched, and I realized I don’t have enough days like this. Days with no sense of urgency, no clock ticking away in the back of my head telling me I only have this window of 90 minutes to do what I want, that I only have an hour before I have to be somewhere, that I really shouldn’t be wasting this handful of free minutes because there are chores that need to be done. The type of days I took for granted when I was young and had all the time in the world.

Feeling nostalgic is nothing unusual for me…. readers of this blog know that very well. I am captivated by so many elements of my own past. But I think the thing I miss most of all is not a hair style (or even hair, for that matter!) or parachute pants or a certain kind of music or a television show. It’s time. Specifically that sense you have when you’re young that there’s an endless supply of it, and you don’t have very many demands upon it, and the afternoons are going to stretch on forever because you have no particular place you need to be…

Three-and-a-half years have passed since my coworker Julie Ann Jorgenson — a smart, beautiful, vibrant young woman — was killed in the frigid pre-dawn hours of a gloomy January day. She was in her car, stopped at a traffic light in downtown Salt Lake, when a speeding pickup truck plowed into her little Mazda with enough force to push it through the intersection and partway up the next block. Julie’s car burst into flames on impact and was quickly incinerated… with Julie still inside. I still struggle with the image of her lovely face and hair being consumed by fire. I want to believe she was killed on impact, before the fire reached her, but… well, let’s just say that a vivid imagination is a real curse sometimes, because I can see other ways it might have happened as clearly as if I had stood there watching.

Yesterday, the man who was driving the pickup, Shane Roy Gillette, was sentenced for the crimes of manslaughter and “operating a vehicle negligently causing injury or death.” He received two consecutive prison terms that could max out at 10 years. He’ll also be required to pay $5,000 in restitution.

According to the defense, Gillette was suffering from a psychotic delusion at the time of the accident, convinced that he was being attacked and was running for his life. Now medicated and rational again, he’s expressing remorse and lamenting that he’ll have to live with what he’s done for the rest of his life. I’m not unsympathetic to the guy. At least, I’m not now. (Long-time readers of this blog may recall that I wrote some pretty unkind things about Gillette back when this first happened, and then later got schooled by his brother, who somehow tracked me down after stumbling across my remarks.) He is a fellow human being, after all, and it’s not like he set out to deliberately harm anyone.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Julie is dead… suddenly, shockingly, and forever denied whatever future awaited her. And if I’m honest with myself, I find I’m still really angry about that. And I barely knew her, really. I can only imagine how her family and loved ones must feel.

If you were in Shane Roy Gillette’s shoes, what would you do — how would you spend the rest of your life — to try to atone for something like that? Is atonement even possible for something of that magnitude? Would you even bother to try? And how could you live with yourself if you didn’t? Stories of redemption tend to have a profound effect on me these days. There’s a certain category of movies and novels that will reduce me to sobs in fairly short order, because I so want to believe that you can somehow make up for the huge mistakes and failures of your life. But honestly, I think a big reason those stories are so appealing is because I know, somewhere deep down, that they’re impossible. Mere wish fulfillment. That there are things you just can’t take back and that you just can’t fix, no matter how long you live or how hard you try or how much you want it.

Due west of Salt Lake City, out past the big smelly pond that lends the city its name, and beyond the outermost fringes of suburbia, the landscape seems to open up. The dome of the sky, which feels much closer back home, suddenly pulls away from you and soars up to an untouchable height. You find yourself in a dried-out, otherworldly place, with few signs of human encroachment. A line of telephone poles, their bases crusted white with salt left behind by the receding lake. A lone factory refining minerals from that same dead sea. A 1950s motor lodge, long since boarded up and abandoned, the painted doors of its rooms bleaching into pastel shades in the sun. And the road, of course, the endless double ribbon of a divided highway unrolling across the floor of the basin, then slanting up into the hills in the distance before dropping to the bottom of the next valley over, rinse and repeat all the way to California.

Traffic is different out here too. The tight, congealed knots of cars you endure in city driving relax, and the space between the vehicles increases almost imperceptibly until you realize there’s a half-mile or more between you and the next one ahead, and the last one behind. That constant sense of defensive urgency you feel while commuting fades.

Out here, the outpost towns are a hundred miles apart with nothing in between, and you and the other drivers around you are long-haulers. The college-age kid in a Subaru station wagon, its windows obscured by boxes and garbage bags of possessions, on her way to a new, exciting phase of life. The middle-aged, pot-bellied salesman in the ten-year-old sedan with a couple of dress shirts hanging from the hook above the back seat and a quota to meet. A family in a mini-van, with Disney princesses on the flatscreen monitor in the rear to placate the bored kids. An RV towing an economy car, which will become a shuttlecraft once the big mothership docks someplace for the week. And the big rigs, of course, the eighteen-wheelers that snarl and claw their way up the inclines while you roll right past them like mobile cliff faces in a range that spans the country.

I’m barreling along in my Mustang with the cruise control holding the speedometer at 80. The top is down and  a hot crosswind tugs at the steering wheel. A mild stinging sensation is beginning to penetrate into the skin on my cheeks and my bare shoulders. I’ll slather on some Coppertone in another few miles, but for now, I let the sun have its way with me, ravage me with its delicious warmth. I fancy I can smell my own flesh cooking in the heat.

The famous Bonneville Salt Flats spread out around me, the eternal road like a pencil mark on an endless sheet of white paper. My breaths are deeper and slower than they’ve been in weeks, and something inside me has finally unclenched. Out here, alone behind the wheel with that road reaching toward the distant Pacific, I feel like I’m not so much of a screw-up, like redemption is possible, like maybe all kinds of things are possible. I feel authentically myself. I want to drive until I reach the sea and then stand on the beach or the pier or the edge of a cliff — whatever may be there at the end of this road — and watch the sunset, and then in the morning, drive on to some other place…

I want to be just another long-hauler in the open spaces between the outpost towns…

The mind-boggling and unexpected (well, to me, at least — I really didn’t think it’d fly) success of Salt Lake’s first-ever official Comic Con last fall, followed by the even-bigger Comic Con Fan eXperience (or FanX) this spring, has inspired another promoter to try their hand at throwing a big party for Utah nerds. FantasyCon will be held this coming weekend, July 3 through 5, with an impressive line-up of celebrity guests that includes many of the hobbits and dwarves from Peter Jackson’s Tolkien films, as well as genre favorite Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead and, sadly, JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot… but I won’t hold that against him!), who is making his first convention appearance anywhere. Considering that Pegg is British and will have to spend a lot of time on a plane to even get here, that’s quite an honor for my little backwater city.

To help spread the word about the fledgling event, FantasyCon has commissioned a series of amusing TV spots in which a group of familiar character types — an elf, a knight, a cleric, and an orc — are engaged in a role-playing game called “Cubicles & Careers,” with a white-bearded wizard as their “Cubicle Master.” That’s right, the premise here is that their imaginary game world is our ordinary reality. And as you might imagine, these rollicking freebooters who live lives of romance and adventure, who are accustomed to solving problems with magicks and steel and strength, have a bit of difficulty navigating through the mundane horrors we face every day. My favorite of the ads is “Episode 3: Cleric”:

The lovely cleric’s increasingly exasperated expression and simmering attitude as she roles the dice over and over without getting anywhere crack me up. I know exactly how you feel, fair lady.

There are five of these ads, all produced by a local Salt Lake agency called The Brute Squad. Here are links to the others, if you’d like to check them out (and you know you do!):

Episode 1: Orc

Episode 2: Elf

Episode 3: Cleric

Episode 4: Knight

Episode 5: Wizard Cubicle Master

Anne and I are on the fence about whether we’re going to this — honestly, I’m still trying to pay off what we spent at FanX — but if nothing else, I wanted to share these clever ads that gave me a chuckle, and to wish the organizers success…

If you also follow me on Facebook, you might recognize the little passage below. I originally posted it over there about this same time last year, after a midnight drive down Provo Canyon. I’d been in Heber, a small town in the mountains above Provo, Utah, for an annual car show my parents attend there. It’s become a bit of a tradition for Anne and me to spend the day with them, but last year, for some reason that now escapes me, I’d gone alone and stayed quite late, and my mental gears started to turn during the trip home, resulting in this little exercise in scene-painting. Not to toot my own horn, but I really like the mood I captured in this post, and I received a lot of nice feedback on it, mostly variations on “why aren’t you writing a book?” (A question, by the way, for which I have no good answer, or even a good excuse.)

Well, this past weekend was the Heber show again, and that got me thinking about what I wrote last year, and how one of the most frustrating things about Facebook for me is the inability to easily access old posts. They’re still there, if you care to scroll back through your Timeline, but there is no search feature or other convenient method to quickly recall your good stuff. Fortunately, I saved a screenshot of the post — as I said, I was proud of this little chunk of writing, and frankly, I thought I could use it and the supportive comments as an ego-booster on those occasions when I start doubting my abilities — so I have a local copy available. And now I’ve decided to post a copy of it here as well…

Coming around the back side of Deer Creek [reservoir], the surrounding hills black shadows in the night. Alone except for a monstrous full moon hovering just behind my left shoulder; it fills the car with silvery light almost bright enough to read by. The top’s down, of course, and the heater struggles against wind that flirts on the edge between “chilly” and “downright cold,” while Springsteen sings about girls in their summer clothes.

 

These are the moments you wish could stay…

 

If you’re curious, the Springsteen song I referenced is “Girls in Their Summer Clothes,” a lovely, somewhat melancholy tune from his 2007 album Magic. Listen here, if you’ve a mind to.