David Triguiero's Idaho

Down Goes the Bride

  

 

            Now that everybody can be in the movies, performance weddings are all the rage with some You Tube extravaganzas making it to the television evening news. But none are as entertaining as the weddings I saw in Weiser, Idaho when I was young and unobtrusive enough to accompany my father to his wedding gigs.

            My father had a lovely tenor voice and might have had a career in opera had World War II not prevented him from accepting a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music. As it was, he taught chorus and Spanish and Weiser High School, gave private piano, organ and singing lessons and performed at weddings and funerals.

            Bride singing was popular at the time and most were looking for alternatives to the standard warhorses like “Oh, Promise Me”. Two of his voice students, Vaunda and Ruth Young had a double wedding where they performed a coquettish duet of “I Was Lookin’ Back to See if You Were Lookin’ Back at Me”.

            Bobbi Lee Travers, another student, earnestly sang “I’d Rather Have Jesus” before embarking down the aisle to marry Lance Lorigan. I remember searching faces in the Methodist church for any sign that someone else caught the irony.

            On rare occasions, the groom sang as well. When South Pacific was playing on every phonograph, a bride and groom sang “Some Enchanted Evening” to each other, alternating versus while she walked up the aisle, pausing every time it was her turn. So my father reported. I wasn’t there and don’t remember their names if I ever knew them.

            Concordia Lutheran Church was the setting for one of the nastier confrontations of my father’s long career. A rather large and acerbic young woman from out of town was marrying one of the Webb boys. Before the ceremony began she laid down the law: “I want you to really hit it when I come in, Mr. Trigueiro,” she ordered. Then her mother busily removed my father’s boutoniere explaining it was meant for the reader.

            Two dignified young boys in black slacks and white shirts rolled white butcher paper down the aisle and the wedding was set to begin. No one had informed my father that it was a candle-lit ceremony; as the organ was electric this proved a disastrous mistake. With the bride poised at the church door my father launched into a trumpet voluntary introduction to “Here Comes the Bride” only to have it collapse like a deflating balloon when an appointed usher turned off the main electrical switch.

            The bride fired my father a look that would freeze water. The lights were turned back on so everyone could get back into place and it started over. But the connection between the organ dying and the lights being turned off wasn’t made.

 This time, the bride and her father made it a quarter way down the aisle, her stiletto heels making a slight popping sound as they went through the butcher paper. As the organ dyed the bride wheeled around in a fury, caught a heel in the carpet and went down in a heap of satin and lace dragging her father with her.

The minister and my father finally persuaded the bride and her mother to leave the lights on, but the bride remains convinced that the catastrophic bridal marches were all my father’s fault. To this day, she drills Trigueiros with a dirty look whenever we encounter her around town.

Phantom Ray Holocaust

 

            Boeing has developed a new highflying drone called the Phantom Ray capable of carrying a 4,500-pound payload, which can be dropped on unsuspecting “enemies” from 40,000 feet in the air.  Not only does the pilot get to stay safe at home, he doesn’t even have to guide the Phantom Ray with a joy stick as with the now old fashioned drones. He simply enters the target coordinates into a U.S. Air Force computer and its nifty programs take care of the rest.

             Is there no end to the marvels of modern technology?  Probably not, but there may be an end to civilization as we know and enjoy it; and it’s getting here a lot faster than climate change. We may blow ourselves up before the rising oceans cover our coasts while the inland dries up, bugs destroy our forests and crops and cancer fries our skin.

 There is something satisfying about that. You know, to be destroyed by our rational brainpower instead of our irrational stupidity.   But is there a difference? We are just as dead either way.

             Fundamentalists on the religious end of the spectrum would say we are doing God’s will and the devil made us bomb him and kill ourselves in the process; but that’s okay because everyone who counts is raptured up to heaven where Jesus and 72 virgins await. Those at the other end would say man is still the measure and rational logic survives even if we do not.

            Why is it worse to be destroyed by a pilotless drone than a bomb dropped from a B-52? For the same reason that Hitler’s holocaust was worse than the pogroms preceding it, the Armenian genocide in Turkey just 20 years earlier and the Rwandan genocide, is still going on 15 years later.

            I think it is because human passion was dispensed with by the Nazis who set up a killing machine to eliminate Jews and other unwanted minorities rationally and efficiently. Like spraying mosquitoes. 

            Jews responded to this ultimate horror by establishing the state of Israel in the land of Palestine, which had been ruled by the Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, various Crusaders, Turks and Great Britain since the original state was destroyed in 70 C.E.  In perhaps the ultimate irony, the new Israel would be for Jews only. Arab Muslims and Christians were pushed into ghettos on the West Bank and Gaza where they dream of returning home and take pot shots at the Israelis who answer with bombs.

            Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows. Well, not nobody exactly; just nobody anyone pays much attention to. People like Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of Tikkun (Hebrew for repair the world) magazine and a tiny movement to apply liberal spiritual values in American politics, the Deli Lama, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Jesus Christ, perhaps the most ignored, misunderstood and misrepresented of the lot.

            What is the answer? – love. Not love that demands love in return as a reward; not Christian or any other religious love; not patriotic love of home and country; not tough love and those other radio psychologist cliché loves. Unconditional love, unmindful of material stuff, self-aggrandizement or self-preservation.   

                         

Dialing Up the Future

 

 

            Weiser was one of the last places in Idaho to get dial telephones; maybe one of the last in the United States. Certainly, it was the last town of more than 4,000 people to be hooked up to the worldwide telephonic web.

            It was a Monday in late September of 1959. I was a freshman at Weiser High School and we were called to an assembly. “All students will accumulate in the auditorium at 10 a.m. this morning,” assistant principal Walt Kerfoot  announced over the intercom. “Second period classes will be canceled.”

            I was thrilled. I had not read the two chapters of Silas Marner assigned for Miss Coons’s English class that day and was not looking forward to dodging her questions. We all knew what the assembly was about. The boys from AT&T had been installing new dial telephones in our homes for the past month. Tuesday we would be able to dial our own calls without going through the operator, just like they did on television.

            Our number was 479-R and we shared the line with two other households. This often made it difficult to make a call, especially when Arabella Long was playing records over the phone to her boyfriend. It also made for good entertainment listening in on other party’s calls. This took some skill as you had to pick up the phone very carefully while quickly pressing down the release button with the finger of your free hand. If you let the button up slowly enough there would be no click sound informing the talkers of your intrusion.

            Problem was, everyone knew people could be listening in so it was rare to hear anything particularly juicy or informative. If you were discovered, you might be reported to the phone company, which would notify your parents bringing serious consequences. Your parents could lose their telephone service, especially if you inserted snide comments into the conversation as my friends and I liked to do.

            As soon as dial telephoning was up and running children began dialing. Northam-Jones Funeral Home had cleverly, they thought, claimed the number 549-1234. For weeks afterward, their phone rang morning and afternoon as Weiser kids played with their new toy.

            Things soon settled down and before long most people forgot that there was anything new about dialing your number. Before long you didn’t have to go through the operator for directory assistance. I’ve always kind of missed picking up the phone, waiting for the operator to come on with “Number plea-uz”. You’d say “information please,” and she would say either “One moment plea-uz” or “This iuz”. You would tell her the name and she would tell you the number and say “A’ll connect yew” and you would have your party.

            I once went into the old telephone office on Main Street in Weiser when paying bills with my father. It all looked very ordinary to me at the time. But, as I reflect back on it, I realize we were in the presence of a bygone era. Lined up at the call board were three or four women in headsets moving plugs on the end of long cords in and out of holes. They all looked exactly like Ernestine Bass, comic Lilly Tomlin’s now iconic operator parody.

            Things were changing fast in Weiser, but everything was still human. None of us foresaw the day when there would be no operators, no directory assistance and virtually no human contact telephonically. .

               

Raging Dentistry

 

 

            Whenever someone roams nostalgically into “the good old days”, a friend of mine always interrupts saying, “I have two words for you: modern dentistry.” It works every time. Their tongue darts quickly over their teeth, their lips pucker as their cheeks draw thoughtfully between their molars and they shut up; usually with a knowing chuckle saying, “Okay, I’ll give you that one.”

            You don’t have to go back very many years to reach a time when dentistry was a lot more painful and much less successful than it is today. When I was eight or nine years old in the mid 1950s, my family went to Dr. Holmes in Payette. The 12 mile drive from Weiser was worth it because Dr. Holmes had been my mother’s dentist, my grandparent’s dentist and, for all I know, my great grandparent’s dentist.

            He was old, officially retired and therefore cheap. My father would later inform me that he didn’t care for dentistry and only did it because it paid considerably more than his first love, cabinet making.

            Dr. Holmes’s workshop in a converted garage behind his Center Ave. home was a sight to behold with every piece of modern woodworking equipment the 1950s had to offer. Think Norm Abrams’s New Yankee Woodshop fifty years earlier.

 His dentist shop above my uncle Clyde’s Thurston’s Drug Store on Main Street was a testament to nostalgia. His drill was electric, but, for all I know, may have dated from Edison’s time. It ground slowly and surely into my molars in search of nerve ends that would set me screaming and jerking in near hysterics. You see, Dr. Holmes believed pain medication was for sissies. He didn’t stock any, never had, never would.

I was a sissy and didn’t care who knew it.  Nothing aggravated Dr. Holmes more and, since he was always aggravated to begin with, my screaming fits had him constantly grumbling about my unmanliness. “Your little sister was here this morning and she didn’t make any fuss; now here you are acting like a little girl. Maybe you should be wearing the dress. Now stop this and get your mouth open so we can get this done,” he would say in his grumpy, soft voice.

I knew my little sister better than Dr. Holmes did and he was either lying or managed to fill her tooth without hitting a nerve. Not only would she have screamed, she would have called him a few not so choice names that she had picked up from her former best friend’s teenaged brothers.

Dr. Holmes mercifully died before I’d had more than a couple of fillings and we started going to Dr. Westberg in Weiser. He used a brand new, super high speed drill and always filled up your gums,   teeth and much of your face with pain medication. In fact, he insisted on it. Going to the dentist was not a good time, of course, but you didn’t need to hide in the woods to avoid it.

 

Religion Out of Contexts

            There are many reasons to be suspicious of charter schools, but the Idaho Public Charter School Commission has set upon the most insignificant of them to question the efficacy of Nampa Classical Academy.

The school wanted to use the Bible, Book of Mormon and the Quran in its secular history and English literature classes. In its questionable wisdom the commission dictated that using such “primary religious texts” in public schools violates the constitution.

 Just how this is accomplished is not specified in newspaper reports of the incident, but it is safe to assume that the ban has is based on the amendment requiring the separation of church and state. My first reaction was disbelief mixed with satisfaction and hope. When a state where students are forced to proudly pledge allegiance “under God” to their flag and country every day bans the Bible from its schools, that’s a sign of  rational thought lurking somewhere in the deep recesses of the body politic.

My second reaction was disappointment. Clearly, these people do not understand the meaning of the separation of church and state clause in the constitution. Worse, they likely believe that the Bible actually contains the words and dictates of God and that’s why the godless liberals don’t want religion in the schools. What’s needed is a new Supreme Court or a constitutional amendment that puts daily Bible reading and prayer back into the schools where they belong.

So why should these religious texts be used in schools? Simple. Because they contain the stories, myths and history that form the basis of Western civilization. Northrup Fry, the 20^th Century’s foremost literary critic and analyst, said all Western literature is based on concepts, themes and philosophies contained in the Bible. You cannot fully understand English literature without a solid foundation in the Bible. Similarly, all Western history is based on the Bible.

The Quran holds the same position in the Muslim world. To understand the history and culture of the Middle East, it is necessary to have at least a limited understanding of the Quran, which, incidentally, also contains some of the best poetry ever written.

We live in Idaho and the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints played a significant role in our state’s history. At one point in history, Mormons were not allowed to vote in Idaho. Why was that? In part because of polygamy and partly due to pure, hard prejudice, something that has not disappeared. Knowing what the Book of Mormon says is integral to knowing Idaho history and why it is the way it is today.

The only one of these religious texts that I have read is the Bible, but I think they are enough alike that each of them is virtually impossible to understand if you read them like a text book or a novel with a beginning, middle and end from which you can draw conclusions. They are a record of human relationships with each other and with God, or the unknown and unknowable, if you prefer. 

Each one is a vital part of knowing our literature, our history and who we are. That may be something the State of Idaho and its Idaho Public Charter School Commission don’t want you to know.