Len's Memory Blog

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...

Money (entry for 1/8/25) When I was a teenager, around 14 or so, there was a television advertising jingle I used to love, though some people hated it. (To get the full effect of the jingle, you need to be aware that there was then, and is now, a chain of grocery stores called Safeway.) A rather rotund middle-aged cartoon man is counting a veritable snowstorm of dollar bills and letting them fly through his fingers like confetti. “Money,’ he sings. “Money’s my hobby! My wife’s out saving money now at our Safeway store!” The ad is long gone, but it evidently worked, because the stores are still going strong. I think one reason I liked the ad so much is that I had learned to count money myself, at a very young age. When I was about four, my maternal grandma, Emma, and her oldest surviving daughter, Eda (subject of an earlier post which you can get to HERE ), in addition to being, respectively, the church organist and church pianist for the Denver Central SDA Church (now a batch of medica...

On the Eighth Day of . . . (entry for 1/1/2025) I never believed in Santa. I was told from year one that he was imaginary, and I never doubted it was true. For one thing there was one of them on every street corner, and no two alike, so how could he possibly be real! I felt sorry for kids who did believe, because they were so obviously backward in their ways. Along with Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph with his Nose So Bright, and all the other famous non-religious seasonal characters, Santa was sort of a joke. Sure, I went and sat on his lap and had my picture taken. And then we went to the next Department Store and did it all over again, with a different Santa. And then another. Etc. It was fun, and the lights were pretty, and the music was nice to listen to, and that was all that mattered. We sang all the carols, both the religious and the non-religious ones, and mixed them up with each other sometimes. It was a nice time of year, and the cold was invigorating, and we played in the snow....