Wanted: 250 American Fork Memories

Posted on by David Rodeback

Can you spare a happy memory? It’s for a birthday celebration.

I was recently invited to be the guest editor for a project we’re calling American Fork Memories. It’s part of American Fork’s official celebration of our nation’s 250th birthday.

From May 1 through August 31, we’re gathering and publishing 250 short, positive memories of life and work in American Fork. You can read them as we post them at afmemories.substack.com. When you go there, Substack will ask you to join and subscribe—both are free and require only an e-mail address—but you can bypass that and just read. If you do join Substack and subscribe to American Fork Memories, we’ll send you digests of memories by e-mail from time to time.

Just remembering is an act of civic and moral consequence, but please consider writing and submitting one of your memories. It should be 200–300 words long, roughly one-third the length of this column. We’ll publish one memory per person. Details and instructions for submitting your memory are at our Substack.

I already wrote mine. I chose one about the American Fork High School Marching Band. I connected it to two tragic memories, but the editor (cough) found it positive enough to qualify.

I’ve lived in six states and studied in Russia for a while. I’ve found good people in all those places. Some of my memories could have happened anywhere, I suppose, but they happened in American Fork. I’ll mention a few among many.

What I, the Reader, Owe the Author

Posted on by David Rodeback

Some books cost more than others. I don’t mean the dollars we pay for them. I mean the work done by the author and others, despite life’s challenges, great and small.

If you’ve seen the professional musicians in my family perform, you know they’re wonderfully talented. I watch them offstage too, so I see how much work they’ve invested to become the musicians they are, besides their preparations for specific performances. They never stop working and learning.

Writing is like that. About a dozen years ago, I decided to write fiction. That is, I decided to learn to write fiction. For decades I had written other things, with some success and sometimes professionally. But writing fiction is a different adventure.

How to Solve the NBA’s Tanking Problem

Posted on by David Rodeback

I love basketball, and I’m a Utah Jazz fan, but I’ve watched very little of the NBA this season. Too many teams are trying to lose games by the bushel to improve their draft position, including the Jazz. Losing is part of the game, but intentionally losing shouldn’t be. It ruins the product.

A Personal Tribute to Jeffrey R. Holland

Posted on by David Rodeback

Multitudes of BYU students, Latter-day Saints, and others met Jeffrey R. Holland at a pulpit or in his writings, where he changed lives, including mine. Relatively few of us sat at his feet day after day in a classroom.

When I arrived for the first day of the freshman Book of Mormon class he taught in my first semester at BYU, I was already a voracious reader of everything from history to mystery. I had read the entire Bible and Book of Mormon. So this will sound strange: in that class he taught me to read.

We Still Need Public Libraries

Posted on by David Rodeback

I’ve been thinking about public libraries. I’ve been in several recently, besides my own in American Fork. I had events at libraries in Provo, Logan, Herriman, Springville, and downtown Salt Lake City, plus an offsite fund-raiser for a new Alpine library.

I also saw news of an imperiled library near Logan. To save taxpayer dollars, some Cache County elected officials proposed closing it and leaving some county residents without free access to a library.

Obviously, not everyone values or uses public libraries. It can sound, oh, so trendy and wise to declare that whatever a library can offer is readily available on the Internet. It can sound, oh, so conservative and fiscally responsible to assert that whatever the taxpayers pay for libraries is too much.

I’m generally conservative but not obsessed with pinching every taxpayer penny. I’d rather conserve a civilization, including a political culture of self-government and an economic culture stacked with opportunities for have-nots to become haves. If this conservation were a shooting war, public libraries would be main battle tanks. They’re the point of the spear.

A Very Short Christmas Story in Lieu of a Column

Posted on by David Rodeback

Hi. I’m Nani. I’m a girl in Mrs. Eberding’s fifth grade class. Yousef’s in the class too. We’re the ones who read outside, behind the school, even when it’s cold, instead of having lunch in the cafeteria. I do it because I don’t like the cafeteria or the kids in it, and Mom lets me make my own sandwich. Yousef does it because he doesn’t eat lunch.

Once I offered him half my sandwich and learned his family doesn’t take charity. Or handouts like free school lunch, he said.

Another day, he was sad and wasn’t reading. I thought maybe they’d teased him about his thrift store clothes again. “They say I should go back where I came from,” he said.

“But you’re from here, your parents too, and everybody’s legal!”

“They don’t care.” He slipped something into his coat pocket.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

He stared at me. “Don’t laugh. And you can’t tell anybody.”

Be More Human, Not Less

Posted on by David Rodeback

Imagine you and I are identical twins. We can look however you choose.

We were uncommonly close until some family, economic, or geopolitical upheaval separated us at age 12. We haven’t seen or heard from each other since. Now we’re 40. (I’m imagining too.) You’ve missed me, wondered how I’m doing and what my life is like, and longed to share all sorts of your life’s moments.

You’ve searched for me online over the years without success, and small wonder. Our surname is Jones and our given names Robert and Michael (or Mary and Elizabeth, as you please).

Today you find a letter from me in your mailbox, four typed pages with my handwritten signature at the end, plus a small photo. (We still look alike.) You read hungrily of more adventures than you’ve had and the natural beauties of the place where I now live. I mention childhood memories you don’t recall, but we all forget different things.

You’re delighted to reconnect. Before you reach the end, you restart at the beginning, you’re enjoying this so much.

Finally, you read my last lines: “I hate writing, so I had ChatGPT compose this. It’s not all true, but I wanted to send a long letter, now that I’ve found you.”

How do you feel now?

Teaching Children to Read Books

Posted on by David Rodeback

Less than half a hundred years ago, in a high school gym in southeast Idaho, I gave a brief valedictory address. When the commencement ceremony ended, two parents sought me out with a question: “How can we get our children to enjoy reading books?”

Looking back, I’m not sure why parents would seek out an unmarried, childless, newly minted high school graduate with a parenting question. But I had read a lot of books, and it showed.

“How often do they see you reading books?” I asked.

Not often, they allowed. I don’t recall what I said next. Maybe it was, “They need to see you enjoying books.” Maybe I just shrugged, suggesting they’d answered their own question.

I had a point then, but when I get that question now, I have more answers.