The ornament on the top of our Christmas tree is, as has been usual for the past twenty-some years, a rather crinkly five dollar bill afixed to the tree with a rubber band. This five dollar bill has particularly poignant meaning for my wife Nina and me.

Twenty-some years ago we were living in the Rust Belt in the eastern mid-west. In early December of that year I got a telephone call from our bank telling me that we were significantly overdrawn and that they were holding several checks for payment, including our mortgage check. I went to the bank and found that someone had made four two-hundred dollar withdrawals from our account using an ATM card. After filling out all the paperwork to attest that neither Nina nor I had withdrawn the money (it had been withdrawn from local ATM machines a week or so earlier when we were not in town), I took out a ninety-day loan from the bank to cover the overdrafts and pending checks as well as a little money to live on until the next paycheck.

That evening we told the family why Christmas was going to be very sparce that year. We decided as a family that we had enough money to buy a Christmas tree and decorate it, even though there wouldn’t be much, if anything, beneath the tree on Christmas morning. We bought the tree the next day, put it in the stand in the family room, and went to the Church Christmas Party that evening. When we got home from the party we discovered that people had come in while we were gone and had decorated the tree … with five dollar bills. There were forty of them on the tree; all crisp, new, beautiful five dollar bills. We were astounded. We also decided that we would not try to figure out who the Good Samaritans were … we wanted to think that any of our friends might have done it. We kept one of the five dollar bills and put it on the top of the tree every year as a remembrance.

The story doesn’t end there, though. A few days later the bank called and said they had the surveillance pictures from the ATM machines where the withdrawals had been made. We went to the bank to see if we could identify the culprit and found that all four pictures were of a young man who had been staying with us named Chris.

Chris had been a good friend of our oldest son who, at this time, was away from home serving a mission for the Church. After high school Chris had some difficult times resulting in him being sent away from home. Shortly after that his parents divorced and left the area. Then in mid November of that year, Chris and a young woman appeared at our door. They were tired, ragged, hungry, wet, and very depressed. Hitch-hiking around the country had lost it’s glamor. The girl wanted to go home and Chris didn’t really have a home to go to. We took them in and contacted the girls parents, who were very happy to know where their daughter was. They made arrangements for her to go home on the bus. Chris, meanwhile, stayed with us. He found a job in the nearby town and seemed to be getting back on his feet.

After Thanksgiving, Nina and I along with some friends made a five-day trip to Washington, D.C. to go to the temple and have a small vacation. While we were gone, Chris found my ATM card in my bedroom dresser drawer, along with the PIN that I had put in the same envelope. The card was to Nina’s bank account, so I didn’t think I had a reason to carry the card with me. The temptation was too great and for four days while we were gone, Chris withdrew the maximum amount possible each day from Nina’s bank account.

This was now a criminal matter. I went home, explained the situation to Chris (who wasn’t very surprised; I’m sure he knew that sometime he would be caught), and drove him to the Sheriff’s office where he was arrested and put in jail. A few days later the county prosecutor talked with us about a possible plea bargain. We were agreeable with a guilty plea, a jail sentence and parole, but with the jail time suspended pending successful completion of a specific drug and alcohol treatment program.

That was the last time we saw Chris, but not the last time we heard from him. About six months later an envelope arrived in the mail with a much-worn money order for $40. A few weeks later another money order arrived, then another. Over the next year or so, Chris made complete restitution. A few years later we heard through the grapevine that he had moved to the mountain west, found a nice young lady, married, and become a good husband and father. The arrest and treatment had been the catalyst for him to turn his life around.

My wife Nina volunteers at the Pocatello Womens Correctional Center here in town, which houses some three hundred women in state prison for felonious criminal activity, mostly drugs. This past Thanksgiving evening I went with her to the prison where she was going to do a Christmas craft with any of the women there who wished to make one. I sat at a table with a young woman who was in prison for drugs … primarily meth (a drug which has no redeeming value and is a scourge on the land). She told me that she had so burned her bridges with her family that they kicked her out of the house. Her grandparents took her in to try and help her turn her life around. For her it was another way to feed her drug habit and she stole a large amount of money from her grandparents which was the crime that put her into state prison for several years.

I asked her about her relationship with her family. She said, “I don’t have a relationship with my family. I think they all hate me … except for my grandparents. The call me when they can and sometimes come down to see me. I don’t understand why they still love me.”

I do. I have a five-dollar-bill-Christmas-tree-topper and the Christmas lesson that goes with it.

I wish you a very Merry Christmas!

Dad has wanted to go back up to the old Calcite Mine in Treasureton, Idaho for several years. He has a theory about the calcite that he wanted to investigate further and he also knew where there was an outcropping of sugar quartz. Usually where there is sugar quartz, there is gold. So after several weeks of talking about it, dad and I took the Tracker and headed up into the mountains west of Treasureton, Idaho.

All the years that I was growing up in Soda Springs, Idaho, my dad’s father (my grandfather Smith) lived in a small trailer in Treasureton, Idaho and ran a calcite mining and crushing operation. Calcite rock when crushed up into fine gravel is excellent chicken feed because of the high calcium content. The bags of calcite from the Treasure Canyon Calcite Company had as their catch phrase “Builds strong bones and shells”. Grandmother, on the other hand, lived about twenty miles south in Preston, Idaho. Grandfather would come into Preston to shop and whenever there was a family function. Otherwise, he lived at the calcite operation.

For a while my dad was also associated with this business, owning about a third of the company. There was a plan to run the calcite through a kiln making quick lime which would then be sold to the phosphorus plants in the area to clean the off-gasses from their process. The plan didn’t come to fruition as family politics intervened and eventually all the partners in the business sold their shares to dad’s kid brother. Uncle Ross later moved the business about ten miles north into Cleveland, Idaho, opened a new limestone mine and abandoned the old calcite mine completely.

Treasureton and Cleveland only exist in a few people’s heads anymore. There is a Treasureton Reservoir, but that’s about all. The old LDS ward house where I attended church during the summers from ages 12 through 14 when I was working on a farm in Treasureton was sold many years ago and is now a private home. All the other small buildings in Treasureton are gone. Even more interesting to me is that most of the farms in the area are no longer working farms. The two farms below the calcite mine are now owned by a man in Preston who has all the farmland enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program and lets the government pay him to not farm. That’s a program I simply don’t understand! Cleveland has suffered the same fate, although most of the farms in that area are still working farms. The old store is gone, the hot springs are lost from view. The Cleveland Ward building burned to the ground about forty years ago and has since been bulldozed over. The farm that grandfather Smith owned in Cleveland and where my dad grew up was sold to a cousin many years ago. The farmhouse burned down when I was about four years old — one of the few memories I have of that time. The school that stood across the street from the farm and church building has been demolished and no traces are evident. I’m sure that the people who built a home in that area have little idea of what was there fifty-six years ago.

Today was the day we had picked to drive up to the old mine and over the top of the hill to where dad remembered the sugar quartz to be. Yesterday he picked up the key to the gates from the present landowner in Preston so we could get through the three gates — one at the road, the second at the end of the first farm and the beginning of the second farm, and the third at the end of the second farm and the beginning of government (Bureau of Land Management — BLM) land. We took my Tracker because it had a little more ground clearance and four-wheel drive. The road once we got on to the BLM land was overgrown and in some cases difficult to find. A couple of times we had to get out and go looking for where the road went. But, we made it past the place where dad nearly lost the truck (and almost his life) when the truck, loaded with eight tons of rock, slipped out of gear and the engine died. We drove past the place where the old worn-out trucks and equipment from the mine had been abandoned and then arrived at the mine. It’s quite overgrown but still very evident as a mine. We drove up over the top of the mine and down the dirt track leading to the Bear River. Dad recognized the outcropping of sugar quartz and we took several samples of rock. We turned back around and went to the top of the hill where I took several more pictures. Then we drove back down the mountain, out the gates, and back to Soda Springs. Our day of prospecting was complete. Dad will send some samples of the sugar quartz in for assay work. We’ll see what the report says. I had a good day and would like to go back up there again Real Soon. I’ve put some pictures from the day in the pictures! album.

There’s a Mother Goose nursery rhyme that goes like this:

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig.
Home again, home again, jiggety jig.
To market, to market, to buy a fat hog,
Home again, home again, jiggety jog.
To market, to market, to buy a plum bun,
Home again, home again, market is done.

I didn’t buy a pig, but there was plenty of pork on the menu for the past week. That’s actually better because then I don’t have to do any of the killing or butchering. Many years ago while I was going to Purdue University, I did some part time work for a fellow’s Ph.D research. He was studying the phenomenon of “double muscle” in pigs. This genetic trait would cause the pig to have about twice the muscle mass as normal pigs on the same diet and was considered to be a trait worth developing. As part of his research, he needed tissue samples from a number of pigs. These samples would be frozen, sliced, and put on slides. I’d take a picture of the sample, blow it up, and then measure a sample of muscle cells and write down the information. I also entered it into the computer and built the program to do the analysis of the data. The process obviously included killing the pigs. I was lucky to not be required to do the killing. Since the fellow doing the research only needed a few tissue samples from each pig, he’d get them from the pigs that other researchers raised and killed for their studies. There was one day a month when all the pigs / piggies to be killed were slaughtered and I usually ended up helping. Since the whole pig wasn’t needed, generous portions of the meat were available and we got an occasional roast or chops from that process. The money and the meat were worth it. About ten years or so ago, researchers finally determined the gene responsible for double muscles and the protein expressed by that gene. A similar gene is in cattle and a similar protein does the work in that animal. When the protein is administered as a hormone during pregnancy, the odds of having a double muscled offspring increases dramatically. However, I think that this process isn’t generally available to pig farmers in the Philippines. I often saw small trucks carrying pigs to market while driving between the hotel and the plant. These pigs were always very clean — scrubbed actually. There are no dirty pigs in the markets in Manila!

I’m home, of course, The flight from Salt Lake City arrived about ten minutes early. Nina was waiting at the airport. I was home by 5 p.m. and in bed by 6. I woke up about 1:30 for a pit stop and went right back to sleep and was awakened by the alarm clock at 5 a.m. I had a 6:30 a.m. meeting in the office. By noon today my brain had turned to mush (or at least much mushier than normal). I came home and grabbed a couple of hours of sleep , which hopefully will not affect sleeping tonight, and spent the rest of the afternoon working from home. Tonight was Nina’s night to be at the prison, so Bradica (the dog) and I have been keeping each other company. She’s sleeping, I’m doing things on the computer….

On my way through Narita Airport in Tokyo, I stopped at the electronics duty-free shop to look at small digital cameras. I wanted something that was good quality and would easily fit into my shirt pocket. I ended up buying a Sony DSC-T9 digital camera. The price was better than I could get over the internet in the US and it’s a delightful little camera. I’ve done some playing with it and the first batch of pictures have been uploaded in the “pictures!” link on the right.

Yesterday we made a quick trip to Soda Springs to pick up a gas grill to facilitate cooking hamburgers, hotdogs, and bratwursts on the Fourth of July. Lots of family are converging on Soda Springs that day to celebrate. Heather and family, Jaelene and Family, Daryl, and James and family will all be there. It should be a lot of fun.

The other day I got an e-mail from a lady in Florida who had done a search on the Cleveland Cemetery and my post about Decoration Day showed up. She has family buried in that cemetery and is a cousin of some sort. Some of her ancestors along with some of my family immigrated to the United States from Denmark on a boat that my great-great-grandfather had purchased. Since my dad knew the story, I took my iRiver model iFP895 mp3 player / recorder with us. I sat it on the dinner table after we had finished eating, turned it onto record, and asked dad to tell me about the boat.

I was quite delighted with how the recording turned out. This little tiny device and it’s even smaller built-in microphone did an incredible job of recording dad’s story. Tonight I pulled it into Audacity, did some editing, added a preamble, and put it out as an mp3. You can download the file here. This file is about 4.5 megabytes long, which means it’ll take about 45 minutes on a slow dial-up connection to download. On a high-speed connection it’ll take a couple of minutes (A lower quality audio file that is half the size is located here. It’ll take half as long to download. If you want me to send it to you in a CD, leave a comment with your e-mail address and I’ll contact you via e-mail to get your mailing address). The playing time is right at 5 minutes. It’s an interesting story and I hope that you enjoy it!