Len's Memory Blog

  Dread (entry for 2/19/2025) (note: this post previously appeared on  Medium.com, Jan. 31.) In the 1995 TV miniseries  The Langoliers , written and directed by Tom Holland, and based on a novella by Stephen King, the best part is the way the dread builds. You absolutely know that something dreadful is going to happen. And you’re right. Something dreadful does happen: the monsters you’ve been dreading finally show up, and they’re ludicrous: Huge headless jaws with swollen crimson lips and huge white fangs, snapping at anybody and anything in sight. (Sorry if that spoils it for anyone, but if I didn’t spoil it the show  would , so who cares?) For me, almost all ‘horror’ shows, which this allegedly was, suffer from the same disease: the tension builds and builds, the dread mounts, and then, poof, the monster appears and it’s laughable. (Or the bucket of blood gets dumped.) I always actually do laugh at that point, and if I’m watching the show in a movie theater with an...

  Spring Creek Mesa (entry for 2/12/2025) Of all the twenty-three places I lived in between my birth and my sixteenth birthday, my favorite by far (except for the summer of 1947, which we spent in Grandma’s cabin above Denver) was Spring Creek Mesa, about a hundred and fifty feet above Montrose, Colorado— a house we lived in from the summer of 1951 to the fall of 1952. (A typical stretch of the Mesa can be seen in the picture at the head of this post, though this is not where our house was. At my last visit I couldn’t find the house and it may be gone.) All of the other houses we lived in while in Montrose (namely, three others, all still there) were in town, with close neighbors. We had a dog and a cat, but that was the extent of any livestock we could have in town, and even though Montrose was not then, and still is not, a large or crowded city, you rubbed shoulders with other people constantly. On the Mesa, we could stretch our wings and almost fly. My mom bought a dozen week-ol...

My Dad the ‘Doppler’ (entry for 2/5/2025) In Scientific terms, there are two ways to create a Doppler effect: 1. You’re standing still and a sound source is moving past you. 2. A sound source is standing still and you’re moving past it. Of course, both things could be happening at once! The things you notice as a Doppler effect happens is that the sound changes in pitch. While you and the sound are moving closer together, the perceived pitch of the sound is high. As you move past each other, the pitch moves downward, and as you and the sound source move farther apart, the pitch stays at its lower level. So what do I mean when I call my dad a ‘Doppler’? I mean that his way of presenting himself always depended on which way he was going: away from himself or toward himself. I used to think he was ‘bipolar,’ but the symptoms of that disorder are quire different. When a bipolar person is ‘down,’ they’re  really depressed . I don’t think my dad was ever really depressed. He was often ‘d...

Church (entry for 1/29/2025) Several times in these posts I have mentioned the fact, in passing, that one of the features of my childhood was being raised in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. That denomination is different in many ways from most other denominations, but the one most significant difference is the honoring of the seventh day of the week as holy. (It’s sort of a joke in the church that the Catholic world keeps the Saturday of the crucifixion week as Holy Saturday. To SDA members,  every  Saturday is holy!) The difference doesn’t involve merely having a different day of the week from other religions for worship services. It has to do also with the  style  of ‘keeping the Sabbath’ that is far different from ‘keeping Sunday’ for most of the churches that follow that practice. The SDA church takes the fourth commandment quite literally. Unless you’re a farmer with cows to milk or animals to feed, you don’t do any work from sundown Friday night until sundown...

City Park (entry for 1/22/2025) Many towns have a feature called ‘City Park,’ but for me there’s only one place that deserves the name. It’s City Park in Denver. There are many parks in Denver, and I have already written about one—Cheesman Park, of the nightmare material. (You can click HERE if you missed it.) But Cheesman Park is only 80 acres, while City Park is 330, so there’s no comparison in that regard. (Plus I have never had a nightmare situated in the larger space.) I was too young to remember my first visit to City Park, but as soon as my memory developed engough storage space, I began collecting memories of the place. Most of our visits were in the late spring and early summer, plus occasionally in the fall. So why am I writing about it now, in the middle of winter? Because I miss it more now than at any other time of year! What made the Park so special? Many things. The Denver Zoo, with its famous blind polar bear (sadly now passed on). The Pavillion and Fountain, with its ...

  ‘ Field’ Trip (entry for 1/15/2025) This event happened in the early spring, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, so am going to go ahead and post this now, while it’s fresh in my head. My first year in Grand Junction was strange in some ways. The Adventist School there was a lot bigger than the one in Montrose had been (10 grades instead of 8, and two hundred students instead of 30), and, more importantly, at least to this story, there were a few boys who seemed to think they were in charge of everything, instead of the teachers. (My tiny eighth grade teacher in Montrose, Mr. Hoyt, about five foot one and around 90 pounds, would have tolerated that for less than five seconds, and they would have ended up kneeling and kissing his toes. He was just that kind of guy. He could praise you with a glance, and kill you with a look. The teachers in Grand Junction were no match for him.) One day in March of 1954, with the snow mostly gone but still some frost on clear mornings, t...