Len's Memory Blog

  Goodbye Final Post in Len's Memory Blog--2/26/2025 There’s a saying—all good things must come to an end. I’m going to revise it slightly. I think  all  things must come to an end, good or not. I hope this blog has been good, but whether it has or not, it’s ending. Now. With this post. I’ve been debating with myself for a while how I would end it. One last happy or sad remembrance? Some memorable event from the distant past? One more character description of a friend or relative? I’ve decided against all those possibilities, and have decided instead to provide a simple timeline—something you can use to fit all previous 39 posts into, to create a chronological order for everything. It’s not that I think chronology is the most important ingredient in a memoir. I think theme-relation and topic-follow-through are more important, and I have jotted all these remembrances down in the order they came into my brain, with no attempt to arrange them into any kind of sequence. But n...

  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...