craigdailypress.com

H. Neal Glanville

H. Neal Glanville's column appears in the Craig Daily Press on Mondays.

The year before I turned 17 and my life was forever changed by the uncaring horror of war, I was shuttling a bedroom between my grandparents and aunt Ruthie.

Shuttling isn’t the word I should use here, but Ruthie insisted that I be with my grandparents, and my grandparents insisted the other way.

Ruthie was the first female big dog for the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake, so my time with her had work hour limits, the only exception being the winter months.

If there was snow on the ground in Utah or Nevada, she found a way for me to get there and be on it.

She had routes and time needed for a casual drive to either of the cottonwood canyon resorts or my favorite, the high-speed punch through rush hour traffic to the airport.

It may seem that being a teenage ski bum or learning the basics of high-speed driving, from a crazed redhead in a rag top Oldsmobile, would contain seeds to my future character, and you may be right.

During the warm months of that year, my grandmother and I spent countless hours in her beloved flower patch.

She’d take days explaining the delicate art of growing an iris and the total lack of care a rose wanted.

We’d talk about politics, the books we were reading and why I should devote more of my life to the church.

She would giggle like a teenager when she whispered of falling in love with grandpa and how sad it was the religious part of Heber, Utah, took a step back away from her when they married.

She reveled in the stories of their early years and how the “wrong side” of Park City, Utah, took three steps forward when she moved across the valley.

Each morning of that year, grandpa and I spent poring over the two local newspapers and listening to the radio.

Each of those mornings, we’d talk about what had been read and listened to.

One morning, when I wasn’t listening, the radio commentator said something about a high school and a new parking lot.

“What’d he say?” grandpa asked.

Before my lips could form that stupid teenage answer “what,” a “Mother, I need the phone and its book” shot across his.

The conversation with the radio station was short, as was his question of me. “Can you explain why the opening of a new high school is being delayed for the lack of student parking?”

He asked while looking up numbers in the book. Again, I was saved by the same question being asked of the hapless soul on the other end grandpa’s phone.

He spent that day and a goodly part of the next calling anybody that might have an answer.

Each member of the board of the Jordan School District had a different answer, the mayor’s office had no idea there was a problem, and even the “liver coated democrat” from Midvale didn’t see any problem with the delay.

On the third or maybe the fourth day, the newspapers showed up and sat with grandpa on the sun porch. He had the same question, and they had 20 stupid ones.

At the end of the interview, the reporter from the Salt Lake Tribune, “a cousin of the liver coated democrat from Midvale,” asked the big one.

“Why shouldn’t the kids have a place to park their cars?”

“Why should a school, whose sole purpose in this life or any other is the education of our children, have its opening delayed by the lack of a student parking lot?”

They had no answer for grandpa, either.

In the end, the opening was delayed by the student parking lot, though the greeting was changed. Grandpa and the newspapers each got the same letter from the school district.

The papers put theirs on the editorial page; grandpa stuck his to the wall with a horseshoe nail.

I’d long forgotten that year and want to thank the Moffat County School Board’s “Guiding principles” letter to the editor on Feb. 2 for reminding me. I, as my grandfather did, will stick it to the wall, though mine will have his quote on the bottom “Don’t say much, but it sure is pretty.”

Hey, you be careful out there.