Candy cane Bow Tie o’ the Day reminds me that I refer to all things peppermint as being “Christmas breath.” My pal, Kathleen Hansen, and I came up with that term when we were students at DHS and happened to be eating a bag of hard peppermint candies. I have no idea if she remembers we did that. I haven’t seen Kathleen in person—or even talked to her—since her first child was born in the early 80’s. It blows me away to write that sentence, because Kathleen was the closest I came to having a best friend in high school. To this day, peppermint candy of any sort reminds me of her and our various exploits—including the night we broke into DHS and left anonymous notes on the desks of the teachers and administrators. (I’ll have to write about that naughty and hilarious night—and the ensuing fall-out—in a future post.)
I have been going through some of my early writing this past week, and today I ran onto a story of mine in a copy of the SIGNPOST, the Weber State newspaper. It’s from Dec. 4, 1984—my last quarter in college. My story won 1st Place in that year’s Weber State Christmas story contest. It is the first published story for which I was “paid.” I won a $100 gift certificate to any store of my choosing in the Ogden City Mall. I still remember going to Nordstrom and buying my first pair of leather penny loafers. (I was ever so briefly a Preppie. Excuse me for that.) After re-reading the story today, I decided to do y’all a favor and not inflict it on you. After writing it 38 years ago, and not reading it since then, I find that I’m positive I can live without it. It is so bad, especially when compared to stories I wrote just a year later when I was in graduate school at the University of Utah. You’re lucky you didn’t get the opportunity to read it. I think it’s time to safely shred it and put it in the recycling.
But I want to point out some points of cosmic coincidence. First, there’s the candy cane bow tie which reminded me of “Christmas breath,” and then the term shows up in my story I haven’t read since the day it was published. I didn’t plan for that to happen. And then there’s the Dad stuff. Trust me when I tell you that the story reflected a lot about me and Dad, at a time when we were having problems communicating in our relationship. Note the date of the story’s publication: December 4, 1984. My dad passed away on December 4, 2007—23 years later. And don’t even get me started on the number 23’s significance throughout my life.