Today’s round of Disc Golf was miserable. I started okay with a par on hole 1, but then I doubled 2, bogied 3, missed birdie opportunities on 4 and 5, Turned a birdie on 6 into a bogie, missed a birdie on 7, and then… THEN, when I was at 4 over par, I quadruple-bogied 8. The only thing that made that experience worthwhile was that a nice girl fished my disc out of the pond. She was swimming in it ANYWAY, but I still gave her a dollar for her troubles.

Then I bogied 9, adding insult to injury. Nine over par, for an average of one extra stroke per hole.

I hate this game. Why do I keep playing it?

(Don’t answer that. I mean it.)

Just a quick note. I spoke to Grandma on the phone this evening, and she sounds a lot better. On the 9th we’ll know if she’s well enough to fly out here to Utah.

Thanks for your prayers, everybody. I believe they’ve helped.

–Howard

A former “student” of mine from when I taught Sunday school to 14- and 15-year-olds bumped into me at Blockbuster this evening. (She’s married now, with an toddler). She was carrying a Blockbuster form of some sort, and I asked if she was applying for work.

“No, I already HAVE a job” she laughed. “This is an application for membership.”

Okay, it’s kind of weird for someone who has lived in the area for pretty much her whole life to not already have one of these. So I asked “You’re just now getting one?”

“Well, my parents had one, but after they got divorced–” (at this point my brain tuned out everything else she said while I sorted through that casual revelation. Had I heard correctly?”)

A moment’s silence, while I steeled myself to ask an embarrasing question.

“When did your parents get divorced?”

I won’t go into details, because I didn’t get many. It was this year, though, and to be honest, I had NO IDEA. I wondered why I hadn’t seen her father at Church much, but that’s about it.

And I guess that’s the whole point. Her father used to be quite the fixture in Church. I’d recieved several blessings under his hands, and he was what you might call a “pillar of the community,” or at least of the neighborhood. I’m anxious to know what happened, because I really, really, REALLY don’t want anything like that happening to me and Sandra.

I know, I know. Divorce doesn’t “happen.” It’s something you decide to do. It’s a destination on a path you choose, or at the very least it’s a waystation. But how do you know you’re on that path?

In other, sort-of-related news, it turns out the husband of the famously-missing Salt Lake woman, Lori Hacking, was even less honest and upstanding than we believed him to be. Apparently during the time when he’d said he was in school, he was loitering at the local convenience store satisfying a tobacco addiction. This may not seem like THAT big a deal, except that Mormons with tobacco addictions sort of stand out… he went to quite a bit of trouble to hide his behavior, and it seems he successfully hid it from his wife.

I said “sort-of-related” news. I guess it’s related in that when you choose a particular path, you also choose the destination. Whether or not he did violence to his wife, the discovery of his lies and his subsequent incarceration at a mental institution certainly qualify as all-but-inevitable waystations on the path he chose.

–Howard