Poverty and Exercise

I watched an eye-opening segment on NBC Nightly News about Latino women in Phoenix who joined a local fitness program. It covered, briefly, several aspects of why Latino women have a higher-than-average obesity rate in this country, including their traditional roles as caregivers and their traditional diets. But what struck me most was the part about exercise. The women interviewed lived in poor neighborhoods and didn’t feel safe walking for exercise. Instead, they went to places like Big Lots or WalMart and walked around the store’s parking lots.

Wow. Slap me in the face.

I didn’t realize until that moment how much I take exercise for granted. And shame on me. Shame, shame on me. I pissed and moaned this morning – in my office which doubles as my exercise room – that I didn’t have the energy to work out. I was “tired.” I didn’t “feel like it.” I was behaving like a spoiled brat. My desk sits next to an elliptical machine and stationary bike. My hand weights are stacked against the wall, as is my barbell. But still….wahhh! Big baby me didn’t “feel” like exercising.

Poverty and obesity are separate subjects and yet interconnected. Obesity rates among the those living in poverty is substantially higher than middle- and upper-class families. Eating right and exercise is the least of their concerns, and yet the women in Phoenix were changing their way of thinking and behaving. It’s just that the odds were stacked against them. The things I take for granted are beyond their reach and yet, they persevere.

I found Poverty News Blog tonight as I searched for more information on this phenomenon. The statistics regarding statewide childhood obesity rates was particularly alarming in the blog entry “Poverty Fuels Obesity Rates.” Children and adults need access to affordable and safe exercise opportunities. We can’t solve our country’s obesity problem, particularly in light of this economic crisis, if the poorest among us don’t have the opportunity to move, to feel not only the physical but the psychological affects of exercise.

As more fast food restaurants and fewer grocery stores invade the poorest of neighborhoods, how do we stem the tide of obesity? This is all off the top of my head, a reaction to a news story, so I don’t have any answers, only questions, and I’m asking you for your input. In this season of giving, we might not have a lot to give, but where can our resources best be utilized, those of us who believe fitness should be accessible to everyone? I’d appreciate any feedback you have.

As for me and my whining about exercising…I’m still ashamed, but I’ll use the energy of it to spur me into action and a new way of thinking.

Your thoughts?

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B is For Beets…and Breakfast

I had strawberries and Greek yogurt and beets for breakfast this morning. Don’t worry, they weren’t all in one bowl.

I woke up this morning thinking about the beets I made last night. I had every intention of eating them for dinner, but after my soy crumbles/pasta sauce/sautéed mushrooms/butternut squashgasm, I was satisfied and didn’t want to eat any more. OK, maybe “didn’t want to eat” isn’t true, but I chose not to eat them because my stomach said I didn’t need to. And my stomach is much smarter than my brain.

I think I’ll start more mornings with beets. I was awake at 4:15 for no reason and finally dragged my butt out of bed at 6:15. I thought for sure I’d be dragging by 8 and want to take a quick nap, but no. My body was full of energy and I completed a full workout. Could it have been the beets? Hmmm…

I went in search of information about this yummy root vegetable and found The World’s Healthiest Foods website. What a gem! It features a food of the week, cooking tips, in-depth nutritional information and even healthy menus. I also signed up for their free newsletter. By the way, today’s food of the week is crimini mushrooms. Where has this website been all my life?
Anyway, back to beets. According to WHF, “Beets are an excellent source of the B vitamin, folate, and a very good source of manganese and potassium. Beets are a good source of dietary fiber, vitamin C, magnesium, iron, copper and phosphorus.” Eating them can help prevent colon cancer, birth defects and inflammation. One cup of beets is only 74 calories. I never thought to grate raw beets into salads before or to roast them. So many options! I’ve also never eaten beet greens before, but I will try them now that I know what to do with them.

Tonight I’m cooking up Brussels sprouts and will make enough to have for breakfast tomorrow. I’ve decided to incorporate a veggie into every breakfast, even on non-omelet days. I know it wasn’t simply eating beets that kept my energy level high this morning (although I know beets have a high sugar content, I’m pretty sure my energy came from my scale number which was down and that made me very happy and when I’m happy, I’m energized), but eating veggies at every meal is my new goal. I’ll just have to be very careful not to confuse them for the fruit I put in my yogurt or on oatmeal or Shredded Wheat ‘n Bran. I’m pretty sure asparagus in light vanilla soy milk wouldn’t be very appetizing. Although, green beans in warm milk was a staple while I was growing up. Mmmmm…now I want green beans.

My mind is a scary place sometimes.

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Because I Said So

Back when the Season of Food began (aka Halloween), my friend Shari was struggling with food and was feeling deprived that she “couldn’t” eat some of her favorite foods while losing weight. It was an emotional struggle and we talked about it at length. A few days later, she read the blog I posted about my own difficulty with Halloween candy, and sent me this email: “Ah, Halloween candy. I bought mostly stuff I don't like...with the exception of M&M's. I thought I'd be safe as long as I didn't open the bag... and I was... until one day when I thought, ‘Just one fun size package would really make me feel better.’ Four days and many fun size packages later, you saved me with a visit that pulled me out of my funk. I haven't touched them since. :) Thanks, buddy.”

You’re welcome, Shari, but as you and many of my readers know, I don’t always practice what I preach. Good advice I dole out to friends doesn’t always get through my own dense thinking.

Over at Refuse To Regain, I wrote in my last blog about how my knee (which subsequently turned into “knees”) went out and I was unable to work out like I wanted to so I could have a little extra T-day food. When I wrote the blog on Tuesday, I really thought I’d wrapped my head around it and accepted that I’d need to be careful with my choices on Friday (we had a delayed T-day this year) since I didn’t have the buffer of a huge cardio workout.

On Thanksgiving Day, first daughter and I cooked for six hours and I didn’t pick or taste test anything except the new cranberry sauce recipe I tried (which was fabulous by the way – click here to see it). I patted myself on the back, solidly convinced that since I cooked the meal without being tempted, I’d be just dandy the next day when we bought it all down to second daughter’s house to eat it.

What derailed me was the scale. (*Insert big eye roll and sigh*) I stepped on it while getting ready to go to second daughter’s house and wouldn’t you know it? I was up a few pounds. After posting a rant to my online maintenance group about it, I thought I would just move on, let it go, deep breath, all that s*it.

But that scale number sat there in the back of my head all day, gnawing at my good sense and sanity. I kept thinking, ‘What happened to what I wrote on RTR?’: “I forget that I really do know what I’m doing. Pilots are trained to fly in inclement weather. I, too, have been trained to maintain when these physically turbulent times arise. I just need to trust myself, continue to fight, and utilize the tools I’ve honed over the last four years. Yeah, so, I gain two pounds. Doesn’t mean I’ll gain 170.”

What happened was that I didn’t fully embrace my own words. I still, after nearly two years in maintenance, don’t fully trust that I know what I’m doing or that I won’t throw it all away in some mad potato/stuffing/pumpkin pie craving and dive head first into each one as they pass from the person on my left to the person on my right.

*Insert additional eye roll*

As we played The Game of Life (a T-day tradition), I ate a few baked pita chips and salsa and sampled the artichoke dip (as I had planned). I drank a glass of wine, picked up G-baby Claire at least 20 times because she wanted up (I can never say no) and made the green beans and checked the meal warming in the oven. But still, that ever-nagging, “Why me? Why can’t I eat all the potatoes and stuffing I want? Why? Why? Why?” wouldn’t go away. Finally, I retreated to the bathroom and got all mom on myself. While I can’t say no to G-baby Claire, Child Lynn had to be told to suck it up. She had to hear, “Because I said so.”

Parent Lynn compromised with Child Lynn and allowed her to have a taste of the stuffing and the potatoes. Not a face-full, but a taste. And a taste sufficed. In fact, a taste made me remember why I don’t eat “party” potatoes or stuffing (the real stuff. The kids banned “diet” stuffing this year). Rather than eating more than a taste, I had a few extra string beans with almonds and another bite or two of sweet potatoes and Child Lynn was really happy.

Today, I am back to clean eating and (mostly) clean thinking. I stepped on the scale (sorry, Sondra, I just had to) and I was down a pound, which made me realize that other factors beside food and no exercise contribute to the scale number (like water retention in my melon-sized knees, maybe?) and that I do, probably, know what I’m doing. Wait. Scratch that. I don’t actually “know” what I’m doing all the time. Weight-maintenance Nirvana will take a little longer, I’m afraid. But I trust the learning process. I (almost) trust myself.

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Stuff That Won’t Be In The Book – Part 6

Many of you wrote to say Part 5 made you teary. Sorry about that. It’s why I decided I may as well hit ya’ll over the head with another one and get it over with. This part still makes me cry.

Part 6:

Mary and Mr. Jones made me visit places I’d not been to in years. While I could have been undone, I was proud of myself for facing the fear and feeling the pain and crying the tears, all while losing weight and working and doing all the other things I did in my normal life. Grief hadn’t won. Yet.

Just as I was about to walk on stage and thank the Academy for my awesome performance, Carlene got an email from David – the man who married us, buried Bruce, baptized Carlene and stood in the center of my loss.

“As I sit here at my computer, I have in front of me the bulletin from the funeral service for Bruce,” David wrote. “I often think of that week in the life of the Jasper community because it was filled with some of the most profound pain and sorrow I have ever witnessed. Your dad belonged to those people and his death was deeply felt by all who knew him…

“…Looking back, I also remember one of the greatest errors we made in those days was not letting your mother at least touch some portion of his body. It was not fair of us (the mortician and me) to not make it possible for this physical ending to happen. How difficult it must have been to have Bruce virtually disappear from her life…my deepest apologies for this mistake.”

When I learned Bruce’s tractor was hit by a freight train and David told me I couldn’t see his body, I imagined Bruce strewn in a million pieces along the tracks. Blood, body parts, his coveralls, boots, and hat all unrecognizable pieces of what had a been the person I woke up next to four hours earlier.

A week after the funeral, our local newspaper confirmed I was wrong. And they had photos all over the front page to prove it.

No one warned me there would be photos. I expected there would be an article about the accident, but I never thought there’d be photos of Bruce’s mangled tractor next to a line of coal cars, of people mulling about the scene like it was an Easter egg hung, or of glass and metal scattered all over the tracks and ditch. But one photo in particular hit me smack between the eyes: “The body of Bruce Bouwman can be seen in the center of the photograph alongside the tracks and covered with a tarp.”

What the…? I didn’t understand. For a second, I floated outside my body and looked at me looking at a photo of my husband’s bootless legs sticking out from under a tarp. Then I was riding on an asteroid plummeting through the earth’s atmosphere.

Think, Lynn, think. What’s going on? What is this?

I tried to make it make sense when a few seconds later, wham! I hit the ground, and from the crater rose up so much anger and despair I started to choke and hyperventilate. There is no sense of direction in hell.

“That’s my husband!” I screamed to no one, although Carlene was asleep in her crib in the next room.

Tears and snot ran into my mouth as I reached for the phone on the wall and dialed my parents’ phone number. Dad answered the phone.

“Daddy,” I bawled, “you promised me I’d never have to see his tractor! You promised me!”

“Lynnie?” he said. My voice was unrecognizable and he was obviously taken off guard. He begged me to calm down and tell him what happened. I paced the length of the phone cord and cried and listened to him saying calmly, “Shhhh, honey. Shhhhh. Shhhhh.”

Finally, I slumped to the floor and in fits and stops, told Dad about the photographs. While it was true he promised me that Bruce’s tractor was taken far away and that I’d never have to see it, he couldn’t have known there would be published photographs. My dad, who’d lost his father when he was 6 years old and felt tremendous personal sorrow for Carlene, was beside himself trying to comfort his daughter 200 miles away. As a parent, I can only imagine how he felt. My guess is he wanted to hurt someone. Really badly.

The only thing those photos did was assure me that Bruce had not been cut into a million pieces by a freight train, and that the body we buried in the ground was whole. I wondered why that mattered. Dead is dead. But because it mattered and I was left with so many questions about the accident, I sought the answers a few weeks later. I went to talk to David because I knew he’d tell me the truth. Even though he thought he was protecting me by not letting me see Bruce’s dead body, he knew I needed to know what happened and how.

I told him of my original fear about how Bruce died and he assured me that Bruce’s body was indeed intact and that he died of a severe head injury. Investigators surmised that the train hit the front wheels of Bruce’s cab tractor and that his body was thrown through the front window and into the ditch. The glass lacerated his brain and he was killed instantly. I still wonder if in the last seconds of his life, Bruce saw the train and if he was afraid and if he knew he was going to die. My heart aches for him if that is true.

David was on the ambulance crew that day, so he’d seen Bruce dead, and David’s trauma became my lasting nightmare. I developed what I call “Bruce dreams” shortly after our conversation and I’ve had them ever since. Experts say it’s because I never saw him dead. Never got the chance to say goodbye.

I wasn’t angry with David about his decision to not let me see Bruce. I knew he acted out of love and compassion all those years ago. Still I welcomed his apology because it validated what I’d felt for years – that I needed to see Bruce dead so I could have some closure. If I hadn’t been a 19-year-old bleeding, nursing new mother, I would have demanded it.

Reliving the hardest days in all of my life gave the 19-year-old me some satisfaction, but the present me was falling into a black hole. As Carlene’s project wore on, I became more aware of how the time separating Bruce and me had stolen the small details of our life. I remembered the painful things, but I couldn’t always recall the good.

Carlene’s project was under my skin and had become way more personal than I expected or wanted. By the time the final response came in late winter, I was off the DASH diet and on an antidepressant. I had too many feelings and not enough space in my head. I couldn’t stand the nights of crying and days of sleeping. I got stuck when I tried to break away from the memories and put them in perspective, all the while trying to nurture my real-life relationship. I still loved Bruce and I felt like I was betraying Larry by crying over a ghost.

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Stuff That Won’t Be In The Book: Part 5

A few more sections to go. This one’s a little long. Sorry about that. I really appreciate allowing me to share these with you. While Carlene’s project happened years ago, putting these stories out here is healing all over again.

In Part 4, the letters and email began arriving in earnest. As Carlene’s project progressed, so did my deepening awareness of my unresolved grief.

Here’s Part 5:

With every email and every letter, the 200-pound, 19-year-old me tapped at my window, begging to be let in, but I resisted. The first couple dozen responses were easy to take, and while I visited a few soft spots reading what people wrote, I was in control emotionally and physically, still DASH dieting and heading down the scale. But the girl who was widowed and left a single mother could not be silenced. She had unresolved issues that she demanded the 200-pound, 36-year-old me deal with.

Bruce’s high-school girlfriend, Mary, selected a few letters Bruce had written to her when he went off to college that she thought Carlene would like to have. When I read Mary’s initial email offering to send the letters to Carlene, I remembered a moment from the day of Bruce’s funeral, when the mortuary’s limousine was parked in front of the church and I was sitting in the front seat between the driver and my grandmother waiting for the processional to the cemetery to begin.

Mary’s family lived in a stone house near the church. I saw her leave the church and I watched her walk briskly across the street.

It could be you sitting in this car, I thought as a couple of tears welled.

I wish it was you.

I shifted in the seat to reach for a tissue in my coat pocket and felt the pull of 35 stitches between my legs. (Note: Carlene was 9 pounds when she was born and I was still recovering from her delivery 2 weeks earlier.) I caught the tears with my gloves and I thought about Carlene. I felt grace in the knowledge that she was my daughter. If Mary or anyone else was sitting in that car, Carlene wouldn’t be mine. l would never have known Bruce’s silly humor, freezing feet and balding head. I wouldn’t have warmed baby pigs born at 2 a.m. on a cold winter night or sat in a tractor in a bean field after the sun went down singing “Endless Love” at the top of my lungs.

I also wouldn’t have learned how one simple moment in a car on the way to a burial could feel as real in the present as it did when it happened 17 years earlier. I sent Mary an email thanking her for helping Carlene with her project, and in my mind, thanked her for not being Carlene’s mother.

Shortly after Mary’s envelope of letters arrived, Carlene received a package from Bruce’s high school choir director. Bruce was a talented tenor who won every choral award possible in high school. He toured Europe with America’s Youth In Concert, and was a member of the Statesman’s Chorus at South Dakota State University. When we were alone, he talked about leaving the farm and pursuing a music career. That’s what made Mr. Jones’s gift so difficult to receive and yet the most important piece of Bruce’s past anyone could give Carlene.

“You’re not supposed to have favorites when you’re teaching,” said Mr. Jones in a cassette recording. “But Bruce was one of my all-time favorites and as far as vocal music is concerned, probably my best performer. As far as his personality, Carlene, your dad…was always with a ready smile, very polite, very positive, calm and really quite unflappable. I wish I had some of those characteristics.

“Along with the program from ‘Lil Abner,’ I’m sending a very poor tape of a rehearsal we had for ‘Oklahoma!’ Keep in mind that this was a number of years ago and it was a little hand-held tape recorder and on a stage where there was a lot of activity. Much of the voice is lost, but at least you have an inkling of what Bruce sounded like. Hope you enjoy it.”

Bruce was a senior when he played the lead in “Oklahoma!” and during every performance my 13-year-old butt was planted in the second row with my eyes focused only on him. My heart flip-flopped when he sang the duet, “People Will Say We’re In Love,” and as I listened, I secretly hated the female lead. I couldn’t sing my way out of a bag, but I wanted to be Laurey. I wanted Bruce to sing to me and kiss me. But Bruce never paid any attention to me when he’d come over to our house with my older sister’s friend whom he was dating or when I’d go out of my way to walk past his locker when I wore my junior high cheerleading outfit. I was just Debbie’s little sister. An eighth-grade nobody.

Twenty-two years later, I was his widow and the mother of his child, and I was standing in a living room in western Pennsylvania holding a tape of him singing “The Surrey With The Fringe On The Top.”

All these years I’d kept Bruce’s memory comfortably alive in photographs where he was safely one-dimensional. Dead. The last time I heard his voice, I was sitting on the living room floor changing Carlene’s diaper. He got on his knees and kissed her cheek.

“Goodbye, Carlene. Be a good baby for mommy.” Then Bruce kissed me on the head and said, “See you at noon! Love you!”

Now I was in a different living room and standing next to an almost grown up Carlene. I feared the joy of hearing his voice again wouldn’t be enough to counter the dread of remembering he was dead. Holding the tape was like holding the pull cord to a net filled with grief disguised as confetti. If I played the tape, I’d release the grief and surely it would bury me again.

Then I looked at Carlene, who’d only known her father through the voices of others. Her face was beaming with excitement. She was only 11 days old when he died, much too young to remember what he sounded like. Without me, she might not know which voice was his on the tape. I thought how I’d witnessed so many of her firsts – first step, first day of school, first date, all the things Bruce missed – and decided that despite anything I feared, I couldn’t miss the first time she heard her father’s voice.

I put the cassette in the tape deck and hit play. We stood there staring at it like we were looking into the sky for a shooting star. Just as Mr. Jones said, there was the raucous sound of teenagers laughing and a pit band rehearsing. Then, like fine tuning the radio, I pulled Bruce’s voice out of the chaos. Rather than a net spewing grief, his voice spread into the room like a warm blanket. He was singing in our living room, his voice playful, animated, and for me, familiar. I was relieved that I hadn’t forgotten what he sounded like and I was grateful to Mr. Jones for helping me introduce Carlene to her father in that one, small way.

Carlene listened, wide-eyed, and hung on to every word he spoke and sang.

“I’ve never had the whole package, Mom,” she whispered.

Carlene saw images, heard stories, and handled tangible pieces of physical evidence that her father had been alive once, but in all her life, he’d not been a part of the family. She was a Bouwman. Her grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were Bouwmans. But Bruce, in his absence from her visits at Christmas or Easter or during school breaks, wasn’t. He was a face in a photo that looked a lot like her, but he was never a living breathing member of the family she’d grown up with. Then Carlene heard his voice, and in it, she heard her grandparents and uncles and cousins. More importantly, she heard herself. Finally, Bruce was more than her father. He was her dad.

In the written portion of her project, Carlene wrote about the tape, “It was by far the best gift I could ever receive! If anything happened to it, I’d be crushed.”

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It’s My Favorite Breakfast Day!

I realize I have strange taste when it comes to food. I get reminded of that all the time by my family. “Ew!! How can you eat that?” is a phrase I hear often.

Do I let them stop me from eating what I want? Nope. I’m happy eating leftover asparagus and Shredded Wheat for breakfast or tomato soup and tofu paprikash for lunch. They can have their boring meat and potato dinner. Give me a huge cookie sheet of roasted turnips, sweet potatoes, carrots, broccoli, red peppers and onions with a side of Ak-Mak crackers and PB2 and I’m set for the evening.

I’ve never been one who can’t eat in the morning. (Evenings, though? Not a big fan of food after 7.) That’s why I love breakfast most of all. I usually break breakfast into two parts: before workout and after workout. Before working out, I eat some protein and maybe a complex carb. After I work out, I have a protein and a fruit. I rotate through yogurt, cereal, oatmeal, maybe a smoothie once in awhile, plums, bananas, berries, what have you.

But once in awhile I treat myself to my favorite breakfast ever; the one I think about before going to bed and wake up eager to eat. (Yes, sadly, things really are that simple in Lynn Land sometimes. It doesn’t take much to make me happy.)

I give you: French toast and a mushroom omelet. Total POINTS: 3.5

I use ¼ C Egg beaters mixed with two egg whites (1.5 points) and two slices of lite bread (35 calories each, 4 grams of fiber, no fat – 1 point). I dip the bread in the egg mixture and cook it on a non-stick griddle. While that’s cooking, I sauté a cup of mushrooms, minced onion and minced garlic in a pan sprayed lightly with Pam. When they’re done, I pour the rest of the egg mixture on top and sprinkle with 2 t. of parmesan cheese (.5 point), tarragon and basil and flip it into an omelet. Sometimes I’ll slap a few tomato slices on depending on my mood. Then I get out the REAL maple syrup (2 tsp equals .5 point) and pour a teaspoon over each slice of French toast and there you go! My favorite breakfast ever.

Told you I was easy to please.

This hasn’t always been my favorite breakfast. Things have changed a lot in four years. My favorite breakfast used to be a toasted bagel with chive cream cheese and a big-ass latte from our local coffee shop. Easily 10 points. I used to love bacon sandwiches, too, and potatoes at Bob Evans, and three-egg “veggie” omelets (if you call bits and pieces of soggy tomatoes and peppers “veggies”) with a side a pancakes and hash browns at our local diner.

Now it’s my turn to say, “Ew!” I can honestly say I don’t miss those things. If I want a pancake, I have a few really good low-fat whole grain pancake recipes that I like very much. If I want hash browns, I make them without oil or I use butternut squash instead. A bagel and cream cheese is something I could eat if I wanted to, but I don’t want to. I’d get too full. I’d feel miserable afterwards. I used to always feel miserable and thought that was normal.

I like my new normal better. I like eating things that make my children say, “Ew!” In the long run I’d rather stay a size 6 than eat bacon ever again. Compromise? Perhaps. But I really, really love my French toast and mushroom omelet days. And that, as well as many other foods I choose instead, makes up for any food I might “lack” or say no to.

What’s your favorite (healthy) breakfast? The one that gets you out of bed in the morning? The one you wish would last all day?

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Stuff That Won't Be In The Book: Part 4

In "Stuff That Won’t Be in the Book: Part 3," I was DASH dieting and feeling good about reaching my goal of 150. At the same time, my oldest daughter Carlene began a school project that involved her late father – my first husband, Bruce, who died in a train-tractor wreck in 1983 when Carlene was 11 days old. To read more about Bruce, I’ll provide links to blog entries at the end of this piece.

Here’s Part 4:

In order to graduate from high school in Pennsylvania, seniors must design and implement a project in which they demonstrate the accumulative knowledge they’ve gained throughout their high school years. Some kids raise money for charity, others perform community service or write a play or a song. Carlene decided to write a biography of her late father (husband #1).

She wanted to get a head start on her project during her junior year and began planning shortly after I started the DASH diet. I was 100 percent behind her project, fully expecting to stay detached from her research. I’d lived with her father. I knew him and loved him well. Bruce was never a ghost in our house. Anything she learned would just reinforce what I’d told her all her life: that her father was a kind, gentle, fun man who loved us very much.

We sent a press release and letters to editors of newspapers serving the area in southwest Minnesota where we used to live, explaining her project and asking people who knew Bruce to share their memories with Carlene. As we waited for a response, I told her to not be too hopeful because it had been nearly 17 years since Bruce was killed and probably not many people who knew him would see the articles or even remember him very well.

More than 40 emails and letters later, it was clear I’d underestimated the memories of the good folks of Jasper. Carlene’s project became an almost sacred place where Bruce’s friends could finally share their memories, love, and profound pain. They needed to tell Carlene about her father, like they’d been waiting all this time for an invitation, and they remembered him in incredibly precise detail.

Bruce’s second-grade teacher, Mrs. Anderson, sent Carlene the get-well letter Bruce wrote to her in 1967 when she was recuperating from an illness. In it he wrote, in his best second-grade penmanship, that his cousins had visited over the weekend and that when his nephew messed up the house, they had to clean it up. After supper, he said, they watched “The Monkees.” He signed it “Your Friend Bruce.” She also included the playbill from the community play Bruce was involved in when he died and she told Carlene the story about how Bruce brought a banana cake and a Thermos of coffee to practice the night after Carlene was born to celebrate.

One of Bruce’s classmates, Darcy, gave Carlene a piece of sheet music she’d kept from a wedding at which she accompanied Bruce on the organ.

“Bruce had written the words of the second and third verses on the first two pages so we wouldn’t have to keep turning the page back and forth,” she wrote. “I remember having a lot of fun practicing this song with Bruce. It’s difficult for me to give up this piece of music since it brings me back to that time in my life, but after seeing your article in the paper, I feel it may mean a lot to you. Not only was Bruce very talented, but he was a fun, upbeat person to be around. I’m am sure that Bruce would have been very proud of you.”

A groomsmen from our wedding, James, sent Carlene a letter and photos of a fishing trip he and Bruce and some other friends took when they were out of college. Another friend, Rick, wrote that some of his favorite memories of Bruce involved hanging out with their friends drinking a few beers and listening to music. And as only Rick could tell it, he told Carlene the story of how Bruce, who when he was 18, snuck his friends who weren’t 18 into a drive-in that was showing the X-rated movie “Pom-Pom Girls.”

“He was worried that if we got caught they would kick us out and he wouldn’t get to see the movie!”

Bruce’s neighbor, Marilyn, wrote that she and Bruce rode the bus to school together. Sometimes they’d walk down to the creek near their farms and throw rocks in the water and talk about school and baseball and her brother, who died in a car-train wreck in 1971 at the same intersection.

“This seemed to bother Bruce,” she wrote, “and we talked about it many times; I in grief, he in curious compassion. Ironically, his life would end at the same spot.”

Almost everyone who responded with a memory also included the story of where they were and how they felt when they’d learned Bruce died. Our friend Jim’s response summed up what many people expressed: “It’s amazing how people will remember so much of a single moment in their life. It’s like a picture was taken at that moment I heard your dad died and I remembered everything. God, it was so tragic. I thought about you and your mom for days and how devastating it must be to your mom. This is still hard to write about….We all missed out on a lot since Bruce was killed. What would have been different if he were still here? Watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ I wonder how much better things would be in Jasper if her were still here.”

Jim was right about “It’s A Wonderful Life,” only we were watching it in reverse. Instead of Bruce being shown what life would be like without him, we, his family and friends, were actually living life without him, and there was no Clarence in our lives trying to earn his wings by saving us from jumping in the river.

For more blogs about Bruce, click here to go to the entry I wrote earlier this year about Bruce. In it are several other links to entries I’ve written about Bruce over the last few years.

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