Snow Traveling: how not to do it

In October of 1985, my gymnastics group traveled to California to compete. My mom drove me and Amy, along with our older sister Suzette and a couple of other gymnasts. This was back in the day when people rolled their eyes at seat belts, so while you think we may have taken a giant Chevy Suburban or van, you'd be completely wrong. In fact, we took my mom's giant brown Cadillac car that she'd inherited from my grandpa.

Things were great on our trip for the first few hours. For some reason I can't recall, instead of driving straight down the I-15 corridor to LA, we took a detour through Delta, UT, and drove through through Nevada via the sexy towns of Ely and Tonopah in order to end up in Bakersfield, CA. This was all fine and good until we stopped for dinner at a casino in Tonopah. After we ate with the other people we were caravaning with, we somehow got separated from them as we left the casino. (It might have had something to do with the fact that one of the girls traveling with us took the cash sitting on a table in the casino, meant for a tip. She had no. idea. that it was a tip, and that she shouldn't pick it up and take it with her. My mom explained to her that people don't do that, and made her take it back to the waitress.)

I can clearly remember driving out out of the casino parking lot and my mom asking us if we saw any of the other drivers or cars. It was dark by this time, and it had started to snow. The rest of the party had left us. Undaunted, my mother soldiered on into the evening and eventual night with her carload of girls as she climbed into the Sierra Nevada. But after a few hours, the snow kept getting worse and she worried about going over the
mountain passes alone.

Finally, we stopped at a diner in the mountains. My mom went in and talked to the owner of the diner and the truckers who sat at the counter drinking coffee. They advised to stay put for the night. Not knowing what else to do, she paraded us all inside and told us to lay down on the benches and sleep. I'm pretty sure she sat at that counter all night, talking with this or that trucker, keeping us all safe.

The rest of the trip was uneventful in comparison. It's something that I will always remember, and after this weekend when I drove with Shane and my boys to a soccer tournament in Mesquite, NV, it's been on my mind. You see, we left for Mesquite at 11 on Thursday, knowing that Utah had had quite a storm the night before, but sure that we would be out of most of of it after we left Northern Utah. How wrong we were.

I think we left in the exact pocket that would ensure we had weather the entire way. The first leg of a southern trip for us usually has us stopping in Fillmore, UT, which is about 120 miles from home. Instead of the normal 2 hours, it took us close to 3.5. We ate lunch there and came out to 6 inches of new snow covering everything. We even had to wait 10 minutes to get on the freeway, as a trailer hauling steers had jackknifed at the bottom of the off ramp, while a long bed semi sat in in the middle of the on ramp.

I kept thinking it would get better, as we drove 30-50 miles an hour, but oh how wrong I was. You see, it was 17 degrees and snowing about as hard an fast as is possible. I'm not sure what did it, but the combination of freezing temperatures, blowing snow, hours on the road, and our defroster running at high for hours made our windshield wiper blades freeze over. We found ourselves going 15 miles an hour with a tiny inch of clearing for Shane to see out of, and a tiny clearing for me to see out of. I felt like I was driving as much as Shane as we just tried to follow the tail lights of the car in front of us as we crawled towards Cedar City, UT. There weren't any lanes, just snow and deeper snow where it hadn't been packed down. We stopped twice to clear our blades of ice and snow, which effectively ruined them.There is no way we would have made it if we hadn't have been going so slow.

We finally got into Cedar and bought new windshield wiper blades. By then it was after 6pm. After we got the blades, we went across the street to a delicious diner. The red booths were exactly like the booths that me and my sisters and friends had slept on so many years ago, so I told my kids the story. I realized again that at least when things don't go as planned, they at least make a memory and (hopefully, eventually!) a good story.

I wish that things magically got better once we got back into the car, fed and watered and newly bladed, but they didn't. It took us nearly 4 hours to go the 90 miles between Cedar City and Mesquite. At least one of those hours was spent at a dead stop. It didn't help to see the freeway on the other side also at a deadstop, multiple car crashes and pileups and even a jackknifed semi adorning the freeway going north. Once we got to St George, where the roads were finally, miraculously clear, even if they were wet, we were so gunshy that we traveled the Virgin River Gorge extra cautiously. And I've never been so relieved to be at a small town casino hotel in my life as I was when we finally arrived at 11pm.

It took us 12.5 hours to go 330 miles. I'm pretty sure my kids made a pretty interesting, if not fun, memory. They didn't get to sleep on the benches, but they will remember the snow and the hours in the car, me scraping the windshield with a plastic tray from out of my car console (because I didn't own a windshield scraper, wft!?), rolling down their windows to keep from melting from the heat as we tried to defrost the snow and holding their hands out the window in the freezing snow, the icy hills that we crawled down at 5 miles an hour. It was an adventure that we can all tell, especially now that we are home and safe and warm.

Leap day snapshot

Because I am a huge copycat, I'm totally copying this post from Amy. And since Leap Day 2016 was a fabulous day (so far!) I'm excited to make a snapshot of today as well as highlight a few of the Leap Days in the past.

Leap Day 1988: I would have been at gymnastics. I was in 7th grade, and that was a terrible year for friends. I was just making friends with a girl named Amber, whose birthday party was the first week in March. Amy was competing in a meet in Sandy, and I missed the Friday night meet for the party. I had a cold and I was not planning on staying the night for the sleepover, but then decided to at the last minute. I can remember my sister Suzette taking me to Party City in Springville so I could pick out Amber's present since my mom was with Amy at the meet.

Leap Day 1992: I was a junior in high school. After a terrible fall, things were a bit better with my friends. I'm pretty sure I smoked my first cigarette in February 1992. What a lovely thing to remember. I was dating a guy from Pleasant Grove that I had met at the Palace Dance club in Provo, Utah. In March, I would dump him and start dating a guy named Daron from West Jordan.

Leap Day 1996: I was at school at Virginia Tech. On Leap Day, I did a performance with my dance group and another dance group at the school named Ujima. I danced in a piece that had been choreographed by a girl with scoliosis so there were no bends in the upper part of the spine, which I thought was really cool.

Leap Day 2000: I had just moved in to my first house the month before. I was working at my same job, and we were on the fourth floor of Eagle Gate in downtown Salt Lake. I sat in an arrangement that we called the Quad and I had three coworkers who sat within feet of me and heard every word I said.

Leap Day 2004: I was training for a marathon that I would do in April. Thomas was 2.5. We had just bought our Nissan Xterra (which we just sold last summer.) Shane and I carpooled to work every day together. I was waiting for the marathon to come so that I could get pregnant with Ben. I read the Time Traveler's Wife for the first time.

Leap Day 2008: Thomas was 6.5, Ben was 3. I still lived across the street from my friend Shelly, and we spent every weekend with our BFFs the Bells. I would have been working at year-end processing at work, just like I've done every February. My dad was still living at home, and I went down a few Thursdays a month to spend the afternoon with him. It was the first year I did SDBBE and I was reading How to Be Good, my friend Isabel's book.

Leap Day 2012: We were living in our current house for almost 2 years. Thomas was 10.5 and Ben was 7. Shane was working at a company down the street - he would change to his current job in 2 months. I was at my job, and we were still in our old building while most of the company was in our current location. Mel and John still lived in Utah, and my dad had been dead for 6 months. I was reading The Dive from Clausen's Pier for SDBBE.

Right now in 2016, we are:

• We are loving snowshoeing. I'm sort of obsessed with it, actually. We've gone twice in two weeks. This week was our longest one yet. There is only one section of the trails at Solitude resort that we haven't gone on, which makes me feel a bit excited and proud. 
• Ben just finished indoor soccer. It was an adventure. He had a lot of fun playing with one of his besties, Weston, and the rest of his team. They were sort of ragtag, but that makes even more fond of them for some reason. 
• Thomas is plugging away at ninth grade. He went to his first region church dance about a week ago. He had so much fun, which made me so happy. I remember going to dances at his age and having the time of my life. He loves to play his Xbox, and spends a lot of Friday and Saturday nights on it with his friends in the basement. I'm pretty proud of the kid he is becoming.
• Shane is finding himself a little nostalgic for doing household improvements. After spending two years with more than enough projects to do in the basement, it's weird for him to come home on Friday night and not have hours worth of work ahead of him. He's going to build a door for the utility room downstairs (we are jumping on the barn door bandwagon!) so he's got an opportunity to pull out his tool belt soon.
• I'm trying to figure out this whole being 40 thing. I realized last month that I have choices. I might not be able to control what happens, but I can control how I react to things. I want to take more opportunities to do things I am interested in. Embrace and act are my two words for the year. I'm rereading Time Traveler's Wife and Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince.

Today I: went to work. Had a lovely Gandolfo's turkey avocado sandwich at my desk. Ran on the trail wearing my favorite running tights and new running shirt. Almost finished a project I've been working on for over a month. Picked Ben up from school for the first time since the first of February when he went off track. Did a  five minute workout on Youtube. Left my phone at work. Made chicken bowls for dinner and ate a Rice Krispy treat for dessert.

We were 465 and 7586.

When we would check out books from the library as kids, there would be envelope at the back of the book with a card in it. To check out the book, the librarian would take out the card and write the last four of your phone number on the card. There were a lot of books that had 7586 on them.

About a year ago, my mom let our old phone number go. That was weird. I always liked the little pattern that 7586 made on the phone. When it was coupled with the prefix, all the numbers in the middle two rows of the phone were used. It was strange to know that I couldn't ever call that number and have the anyone in my family answer.

This weekend, my mom moved out of her house. 465 has gone the way of 7586. The numbers still exist, of course, but have no more relevance to our family.

My dad used the chassis from an old truck of some kind to make this mailbox post.

I went there for the last time on Thursday. I helped my mom in the kitchen mostly, packing the cleaning supplies from under the sink, sweeping now-empty pantry, and other odds and ends. In the early afternoon, we sat down and ate a Jimmy John's sandwich. I made sure to sit in my old place at the table so I could look out the window at the mountain with the face in it that only Amy and I could ever see. The church that was built in 1991 sort of ruined the view. And the trees that my dad planted that just kept growing and growing.

This is what it looked like to eat dinner from my chair. Back in the day, Michele and Suzette would have occupied these two chairs. My dad would have been to my left, my mom on my right, and Amy at the other end of the table to the right of my mom.

In fourth grade, I read "Anastasia Again!" by Lois Lowry. In it, Anastasia Krupnik moves from her apartment in Cambridge to the suburbs. On moving day, everyone is sad, but especially her little brother. He says his blankie is sad to leave the apartment. As a solution, Anastasia cuts the blankie in half and folds it small and leaves it in the corner of the hutch. I always remembered this scene when I move and have made a habit of leaving little "I was here" tokens. So after lunch I took a sharpie and went on a mission. I don't know if you are supposed to do this or not, but I wrote a message on the very top shelf of my old closet. "This was Amy and Becky's room. Then it was Becky's room." I then gave the sharpie to my mom to do the same. Standing on the stepstool so she could reach the very top of her closet, she wrote "I loved this house" and signed her name. I remembered the picture I took on Christmas of what I felt like was my dad's "I was here." How long will it take the new owners to find these leftover clues?

The tree grew around the saw my dad left in the tree many years ago. Just the tip of the blade is now visible.

Before I left, I walked through every single room and remembered and remembered. I lingered in my old bedroom longest, thinking of the nights Amy and I would talk when we were little, watching the lights from the cars make a familiar track across the ceiling. I thought about the mornings when I would lay in my bed after eating breakfast and look in my closet to decide what to wear. I realized how impossible it was to remember it all. I felt that strange juxtaposition of being in a place right at that moment and knowing that very soon the moment would end and I wouldn't ever stand there again but again, being right there.

So many emotions. Not all of them good. I wish some things could have gone better in this process, but it wasn't mine to control.

I doubt I will  ever stop having dreams about this place.

Goodbye, 465.

Favorite things 4: My hometown

The other night on iTunes, they had a selection of 80's songs for only 69 cents. I played each one - Alphaville Forever Young, Eurythmics Sweet Dreams, Bette Midler Wind Beneath my Wings. As I played each one Shane and I would start to sing. And I would start to feel what that song meant to me when it played. For good or bad, I felt things that I couldn't explain or share, but just feel and remember. 



In sort of the same vein, I could never, ever live in my hometown. Like certain songs that I will always avoid when they come on the radio, living there wouldn't work. Just imagining the people who I would run into at the grocery store or see while taking the kids to the dentist makes me cringe. But I do enjoy visiting there, like I did today. I spent a very enjoyable day with my mom and Amy setting up and decorating my mom's tree. I love those ladies so much.


After we decorated, I set off on a run. The past two times I've run in my hometown I took the same path which led me towards the canyon, over to my high school, past my elementary and then home. But I recently saw a picture of my grandma's house which is also in my hometown. One of my cousins bought it years ago and raised her two sons there. I don't think I have been there in almost 20 years. So I decided today that I wanted to run the direction that would take me past grandma's house.

I was not disappointed in my route. I am always amazed at how much smaller places are now than they used to be. In less than a mile, I ran through 20 years of memories - the corner that used to have a small store on it that we called The Little Store where we would buy candy and do ceramics, the street where the friend I had in 7th grade lived, the houses where my oldest sister lived the first few years of her married life, the gas station that I drove to the very first time I drove in my life - all in .88 of a mile. Bizarre!

At a little over 2.5 miles, I spent a couple of moments at my grandma's house, looking at the giant trees and the carport that look exactly how I remember them. I pictured my grandma raising her three sons there, I pictured my dad living there, I pictured all of my cousins and sisters gathered in the living room for Christmas Day. When I left, a few blocks more took me past the house where my best friend from kindergarten lived (it's all boarded up now - so sad! It was the house that was shown in Touched By an Angel back when it was on.) I ran past the funeral home where my dad's viewing was held, and my old orthodontist's office, and the space where my family lived while our house was being built (the house has been torn down now.) All that history in a mere 4 miles.

I like not living there. Similar to how I want some songs to always remind me of him, or of her, or of that one special/terrible/life changing experience, I want those places to always remind me of my  former life rather than my current one. I don't want life to water down the feelings. I want it always and forever to be home.

February love number 16

So tonight we had a repeat of the dinner we had two weeks ago: tomato macaroni soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. As I pulled sandwiches off the hot sandwich maker, I realized that it, along with Ben's dresser and a table that my dad made in high-school wood shop, are among the few items I've carried around with me my whole adult life. I took it with me to college two different times, have moved it from apartment to house to house and it still works just like it did in when it was first purchased.

I have a very clear memory of making grilled cheese sandwiches with this very sandwich maker with my friend Janna. We were living in the apartment I had in downtown Salt Lake in 1994. It was summertime and I had just been to my third Grateful Dead concert and had celebrated my 19th birthday. Janna and I stood in our tiny kitchen and she kept calling the sandwiches I was making for us "crunchy sandwiches" rather than "grilled cheese sandwiches." I laughed at her and she laughed at me and I asked her why she kept saying that and she said it was because that is what she thought I had said when I suggested dinner that night. So it kind of stuck and we at a lot of crunchy sandwiches that summer.

It's kind of dumb- just a little snippet of a moment - but it came back so powerfully to me. You know that little smell that comes off of your hand mixer - a conglomeration of all the powdered sugar that has been sucked inside it over the years? I think it's the same with waffle irons and, as I realized tonight, sandwich makers. I loved that this memory came back to me tonight. It was one of the most uncomplicated times of my life. I went to work everyday with Shane but we were just friends. After work I would hang out in my room with my two best friends/roommates, sitting on the top bunk of our bunk beds and smoking out the window, or going for coffee at the Salt Lake Roasting company. It was a fun time of life, and it was all brought back to me with that one little whiff.

So tonight I'm loving my memories of my younger days, before any drama that rocked our friendships or we got married or went away to college of out state or had kids or whatever. Sure, my life wasn't perfect. Stuff would happen in the next few months that would change everything forever. But right then, we were just friends eating crunchy sandwiches and loving life. And it's all embodied in a little appliance that lives under my counter.

Dance teachers do not go gentle into that good night...

(Thanks to Dylan Thomas, the poet, for contributing to my title today.)

When you say the word "marathon" in our family, it means one thing. And it isn't the one you are used to.

For many years even before I was born, the yearly marathon was a dance recital that was indeed, very marathon-ey.  Three and a half hours for three consecutive nights marathon-ey.  You see, me, my mom, all my sisters, and 5 of my nieces all spent copious amounts of time being taught dance by not just a person, an institution.

Her name was Colleen Collins-Smith.  You had to add the Collins into the name, because she never moved past her maiden personality.  She had a yell that could wake the dead.  Her and her prodigious progeny all taught, demonstrated, choreographed, and showcased themselves over 4 generations on various Utah County high school stages.  Each class was peppered with at least on of her daughters or granddaughters, all standing front and center while the rest of the class bumbled behind.  Each year, the big show ended with line after line of dance classes turning their faces away from the audience, sitting, kneeling, stooping, or standing, to the musical version of The Lords Prayer. The culmination of this finale was when everyone on stage would raise their hands above their head, clasp them together, and then lower them into praying hands, right in front of their chest.  Every year, one smart-alek kid would clap their hands loudly.  They always thought they were the first one to think of it.

I first encounted Colleen when I was 5.  I danced with her for a year, and then spent the next 10 enamored with gymnastics.  When I broke my ankle in 9th grade, I didn't go back to the gym, but headed back to Colleen with my best friend Rebecca (who had been taking from her for a few years.)  My first class we learned a dance called Spanish, and it was set to music from The Nutcracker/Fantasia.  My second class, we learned a dance to Michael Jackson's Bad.  I still to this day know most of the steps to these two dances.

The thing about Colleen's dance classes that you had to get used to were this:

• No matter how good you were, there would always be a relative of Colleen who was better.
• The position you were placed in to perform the dance was directly correlated to how much you were liked/appreciated by The Family.
• You better pick the dance steps up right away, because if you missed one little section, you would be lost. For months. Or possibly forever.  So learn fast.
• Technique was more of a suggestion than a rule.

There were families within the circle, and families outside the circle.  My first day in class when I returned to dance, Colleen had my mom stand up and introduced her as one of her first students (which was totally true.)  So for a while, I had tiny bit of status.  Or at least I learned dance for a few years.

I ruined all that when I was in 11th grade.  I had been taking dance with Colleen, but also dancing at another dance school on the side (unknown to Colleen, but known to my other teacher, Ann.)  I decided to call in "sick" to class one day so I could sit in on a rehearsal with Ann.  It all went bad, bad, bad.  Colleen called back and got my dad on the phone instead of me and found out I had lied to her.  I admitted my lie in a subsequent phone call and the proverbial crap hit the fan.  In the end, I insulted almost the whole Smith family, and got myself kicked out of the partner dance I'd been chosen to do (I hated it anyway.)  In the end, it was about 2 hours of telephone drama between myself, Colleen, and my mom (who somehow got pulled into the ruckus.  Sorry, Mom!)  At the advice of my teacher Ann, I crawled back into the Smith family's graces enough to finish out the year.  But Colleen never, ever after that looked or spoke to me kindly.  I guess my saying that I no longer wanted to "cater to her son Tye" in our partner dance was unforgivable.

So, what is the point of this post you are wondering?  Colleen, the institution, the unstoppable, the beloved of many, and dreaded by more (she never was my dad's favorite, it seems!), passed away a few weeks ago (don't you love Facebook?)  I heard that she was in good health almost up to the very end.  I'm sure she had been in class up to the very last possible day with her record player, her enormous black bun and all black clothes in attendance.  And while we had our differences, I paused for  moment, and remembered her and her contribution to my life, and to many in my family. 

She may not have been the best dance teacher in the world, but she had heart.  She wasn't afraid to put on a show of recycled choreography from the 70's, 80's and 90's year after year and call it The Big Show.  She wasn't afraid to allow that show to go on for hours and hours over many consecutive nights.  She wasn't afraid to put 14 year old girls in markee-like costumes and make them dance to commercials for Mounds and Almond Joy and call them dances.  She wasn't afraid to yell at the smallest 4-year-old open-mouthed and perplexed grandson to pas-de-bourre a little faster.  She wasn't afraid to put a 29-year-old pregnant mom in a leotard and let her do a solo.  If it was for her one great passion in life - dance - she wasn't afraid.  Even if people made fun and called in a marathon behind her back.  It wasn't any skin off her back.

Rest in peace, Colleen.  I'm sorry for lying to you.  Teenagers do that. Thanks for teaching me dance.