My Grandma is Better than Your Grandma

On Nov. 30, 2002, I conducted my very first interview. It wasn't as a newspaper reporter or as a magazine editor—I've conducted countless hours of those interviews since. This one was special, not only because it was my first, but because the subject was my maternal grandmother—Georgia Cordingley Oberhansley.

It was during the Thanksgiving break prior to my last semester at Brigham Young University. I had found out earlier that month that one of the options for Senior Courses the next semester—among mind-numbing literature classes and linguistics classes—included Oral History. Even though I had never tasted of oral history before, it had jumped out at me so fiercely that I scheduled an interview before the semester even started.

(As it turns out, that was a smart idea anyway. Since my grandmother was over 300 miles away from campus—and because there isn't ONE SINGLE day off from classes during BYU's Winter semesters because they have to pack so many events on campus after the Winter semester concludes and before the next Fall semester ends—that I couldn't have interviewed her in person after the semester started. Sorry. Rant over.)

Grandma Georgia didn't divulge very many details during that interview, but she told me a lot more than I had heard before. While I had always loved and adored Grandma Georgia, after the interview was over I almost worshiped her. I literally have the greatest grandmother in the world. Anyone who says different is wrong. Here’s why:

Georgia Cordingley grew up as a country girl, in a quaint little town called Marysville, Idaho, a mile east from the town of Ashton. While attending high school in Ashton, she met my grandfather—Wayne Alvin Oberhansley—who was boxing a cousin of hers during the boxing match. In the interview she says, “He really took my eye then,” but since then she’s told me a little more about the match. Apparently, Wayne was doing such a good job that she “enjoyed watching him beat the hell out of” her cousin.

He caught her eye then, but after his family moved from St. Anthony to nearby Farnum, she started to fall for him—and became good friends with his sister, Maydea. One day, the two friends wanted to go roller skating in St. Anthony. Georgia asked Wayne. Wayne’s sister, Maydea, and Georgia’s brother, Hollis, went with them. Then at the roller skating rink, Grandma and Grandpa ditched their siblings and went on a drive. They lost track of time. When they came back, the rink was already closed and it was starting to rain. Their siblings weren't happy. Oops.

Grandpa was drafted into the Marines when he was 19 and fought in World War II. (That’ll be the subject of a future blog post.) After he returned, he proposed and the two were married in 1947.

Then they started having kids.

Their first, my mother, LaDawn, was born on Mother’s Day in 1948. The second, Dennis, was born 12 months later. Then identical twins—Garth and Gary—were born about two and a half years after that, making four children under three years old. Now, I have to mention that at the time, they were dry farming and building a home next to his parents’ home near Conant Creek and Fall River. They didn't have electricity or running water yet, which means Grandma Georgia hauled water up from Conant Creek for all of their needs—including washing cloth diapers for three of the four kids. (At this point, only my mother was out of diapers.)

She says, “I had been a very fussy person who couldn't stand to have anything out of place, until I had four babies. I had to stop being so fussy. That was the happiest time of my life.”

Four years after the twins, she had another girl, Ina. Thirteen months later, she had a boy, Steve. With six children, she believed her family was complete. Then 10 years later, she found out she was pregnant again. After she welcomed Number Seven (Eric) into the family, she decided she didn't want him to grow up without a sibling to play with. (His next sibling was 10 years older!) She tried again and became pregnant.

Here’s the funny part. My mom—you know, the oldest—was already pregnant with her first. So four months after my mom gave birth to her first—Corbett—in 1969, Grandma gave birth to her last, Craig. She says, “Four months before I had Craig, we had this little gran

dson who was so adorable. I always wanted to have him out with Eric, so when I went to the hospital four months later and had Craig, I was as lonesome for Corbett as I was for Eric. When I left the hospital, I stopped and picked up Corbett, took him home, and the boys slept clear through the night. It was so fun. Corbett was just like my kid.”

Grandma was done giving birth to children, but she wasn't done raising them. When Craig was in the fourth-grade, she had the opportunity to take in a Native American foster child during the school seasons, through the Indian Placement Program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (The program lasted from 1947 to 2000.)

She took in a boy named Jay Redfox—the same age as Craig and Corbett—who wasn't keen on the program. At first, he’d just “sit there and frown.” The first two words he spoke to Grandma were after she accidentally peeled out in the car, getting onto a paved road from a dirt road. He said, simply, “Old Buzzard peels out too.”* He took a liking to Grandpa, since he had never known his own father, but he’d only call Grandma “Hey You.” At least temporarily.

She says, “Finally, one day I said, ‘I’m not “Hey you.” You either call me Georgia, or you call me mom like the other kids!’ He just frowned at me. He went to school, and one day the phone rang, I picked it up, and Jay said, ‘Mom…’ From then on, he was my very best friend. He didn't want to go to bed; he wanted to stay up until I went to bed. He would stand and help me cook and everything.”

Grandma also took in one more Native American boy, Murray Phillips, who was a half-brother to Jay. She affectionately called them “my Indians.” She loved them as much as any parents do their own children, so when Uncle Jay died in 2012, Grandma took it the hardest. I guarantee no one in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, mourned for Jay as much as Grandma did.

Grandpa died in 2006, and shortly after that Grandma bought a smaller house in Ashton and moved away from “the ranch,” having spent most of her 59 years of marriage in that house. (Eric bought the homestead and now lives there.) To date, she has 40 grandchildren—including Jay and Murray’s children, who not only call her “Grandma” but call her up on the phone regularly. I don’t know how many great-grandchildren she has, but she even has one great-great grandchild—my niece’s daughter, Brooklyn Vega.

She may not receive any official awards in this life for being the greatest grandmother ever, but when that dreaded day comes when she’s called home to her Heavenly Father, there will be no doubt in anyone’s minds on this Earth who takes the crown.

*She actually said, “Old buzzards peel out too,” but I’m guessing there was an old woman on the reservation known (probably not affectionately) as Old Buzzard. 

Speaker for the Dead

A few months ago, I listened to Orson Scott Card’s science fiction novel Speaker for the Dead on audiobook. At the conclusion was a recorded post-script by the author, who explained that even though it was the book’s indirect prequel that he’s most known for—Ender’s Game—this was the novel he had always wanted to write. (Both won the prestigious Nebula Award and Hugo Award.)

   

In the sequel, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin devotes his life to being a “speaker for the dead”—someone who is invited to speak at funerals but doesn’t eulogize the deceased. Instead, the Speaker researches the person’s life and speaks the full and honest truth—no matter how painful it is for all in attendance to swallow. It makes him a lot of enemies, but he as well as many others consider his occupation to be a great honor.

Back on June 10, I sat in a patio chair on a back porch with a member of my church congregation so she could talk about losing her son 15 years ago to cancer.

For almost an hour and a half, with a Sony digital recorder on the table and my laptop on my lap, I sat back in silence and let her do almost all the talking. Fifteen years ago, she went through an ordeal every parent dreads—watching her own child suffer and die. Barely a year out of high school in 1997, he was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed him over two years later.

Through all the sufferings she endured and through all the miracles she witnessed around the time of his death—and all the times she’s felt his post-mortal presence in the form of a recurring rainbow motif—she’s never written any of these experiences down.

That’s why I was there. She couldn't bring herself to write it down, but she could talk about it. And once she got going, she couldn't stop. Thoughts came flooding into her mind with such ferocity that it frustrated her that she could barely keep up. My follow-up interview with her was a week later—only two days after her late son’s birthday. She talked for almost two hours.

With nearly three and a half hours of recordings, I went to work transcribing. At a rate of five hours transcribing to one hour of recording, factoring in a day job with deadlines and business trips, I hacked away at it until I finished it earlier this month and returned it to her for fact-checking. Her initial embarrassment, believing she sounded incoherent, gave way to excitement and relief that these experiences are now on paper. She even gave me a few referrals—other women in the area who have lost children but haven’t been able to bring themselves to write down the experiences.

One of those women, also in my church congregation, I spoke with over the phone just this afternoon. Not realizing the significance of today—Sept. 23—I called her up but found her emotionally vulnerable rather than her usual boisterous self. Of all days for me to call, it just happens to be the 15^th anniversary of the day she buried her own son. (Both of these men died almost a month apart from each other.)

She told me about the miraculous events surrounding her son’s funeral. Instead of a rainbow motif as a sign of her son’s post-mortal presence, it’s the presence of eagles where she sees the little miracles in her life and finds extra needed comfort.

Just like the other woman in my congregation, this woman has never written any of these experiences down.

That’s where I come in. I may not be a “Speaker for the Dead,” but I am a listener. And a recorder. And a transcriber. And a writer.

So I guess you could say I’m pretty close.

My Journal Trek

If there's anything about which I can honestly say, “I'm the expert,” it has to be journal writing. When I tell people how many journals I have, the short answer is “more than 40.” The long answer is, well, long.

This is my Journal Trek.

One December evening, when I was three months shy of turning 10 years old, I noticed my mother had been keeping a journal. I don't know where the desire came from—whether it was because I was my mother's son, because I've always loved writing or because I was a kid who wanted what someone else had—but suddenly I wanted one, too. It was late enough at night in a small town that there wasn't a snowball’s chance in Hades I’d be able to buy one anywhere that night. But instead of reassuring that she’d go buy one the next day, she retrieved an extra, unused journal from her room and gave it to me. Fueled by instant gratification, I wrote almost a full page that night for my very first journal entry.

I made the commitment to write in it once a week—every Monday night. As tedious tasks tend to do when you’re a kid, my commitment eventually started eroding away. It became a self-inflicted chore. I would write randomly about things important to me as a kid, such as the latest Nintendo games, losing at whatever, and being picked on in school. Eventually I got so sick of writing that instead of merely quitting I started “cheating”—for several pages, I wrote large letters that covered several lines at a time. It culminated with one page filled with nothing but “Nothing happened. And nothing ever will!”

Because it was an intuitive obligation, I never actually gave it up. After that page, I started taking it a little more seriously. I wrote here and there and confined my writing to one line at a time (as you do). Then in high school, as a sophomore at North Fremont High School in Ashton, Idaho, my journal writing officially became a hobby the night of my first date.

While only a sophomore, I weaseled my way into the Prom by asking a senior—my best friend’s oldest sister. I was fortunate enough to be part of a date group with juniors and seniors I looked up to—two of whom, I had noticed during play practices earlier in the year, were avid journal writers. I took them as examples and decided to make my first date eternally memorable. Prior to leaving for the dance, I sat on my bed and wrote five pages about the day’s excursions—more than I had ever written before in one sitting. That wasn't even the dance itself. When I finished writing about that entire day, it covered eight pages. From then on, entries became pages long because I felt the need to include as many details as possible, even for events more mundane than the Prom.

At least until I became an adult and started learning the meaning of the word “busy.”

While serving an honorable full-time mission for the LDS Church in southern California in the late 1990’s, I became so busy 14 months into my two-year service that I abandoned the longhand journal and took up a tape recorder. I recorded entries night and morning for 10 months—to the day. I resumed writing in longhand journals after returning to Idaho, but it eventually came to a dead halt in March of 2010. Halfway through Journal #40 (which didn't include the longhand journal I kept the first 14 months of my mission), the pain of writing longhand convinced me to use a website called LDSJournal.com. That website tragically died in May of this year by starvation (i.e., lack of advertising).

Since then, Microsoft Word has been my official journal medium, but even that needs an asterisk.

Since adulthood, I've gotten into a vicious cycle of getting behind and catching up. I usually catch up but then get progressively further and further behind. At this point, it has been years since I've been current on my official journal keeping. Every day I write notes in a journal notebook, with the intention I’ll type them up in my official journal; however, as of right now, I've only made it to May of 2013. I also have a hole in the summer of 2009 because I haven’t transferred those notes to a journal yet. I also haven’t finished writing journal notes from about a week of travelling last month.   

And then there's my missionary cassette tapes from the last 10 months of my mission, which I call my “missionary book” (not missionary journal). After being confined to audio form for four years, I took an Oral History course at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and obtained a Sony industrial transcribing machine. With it, over the course of several years, I single-handedly transcribed every single hour I had recorded in 10 months—36 hours on 27 cassettes—and edited, added end notes, proofed, and formatted it in Adobe InDesign. As of right now, it needs to be indexed, proofed one last time, and then published.

So because I don’t have enough writing to do, I’m going to do some “Journal Trekking” on this blog site. Every so often, I’ll publish excerpts from publicly available journals, as well as my own and my paternal grandfather’s journal notes.

What’s your Journal Trek?

The Potty Source

Did you know there’s a magazine out there for the liquid waste industry? You know—porta-potties?

There are magazines for just about every topic known to man—not just for leisure. While there are countless magazines for fashion, sports, recreation, gossip (people read People, I guess), entertainment, etc., there are also countless trade publications for people who need accurate and timely information for their profession.

Name any industry out there, and chances are there’s a trade magazine for it. There are magazines for owners of ice cream shops, magazines for the construction industry, magazines for people IN the magazine industry, and—yes, it’s true—a magazine for the liquid waste industry.

People always laugh when I point that out, but it’s true. It’s called Pumper. Take a look at their website, found at www.pumper.com. Scroll down the page. Does it look like they don’t have much to talk about? You’ll find a lot less—ahem—waste in that magazine than you’ll find in Cosmopolitan. You may actually learn something.

Think about it. People use porta-potties all the time, such as at work sites and at summer events. That means there must be businesses devoted to providing enough porta-potties to accommodate the number of people who have to relieve themselves. That means that, when it’s time for the units to be serviced, something must be done WITH the human waste to put it back into the Circle of Life without spreading disease, contaminating the environment or offending your unfortunate neighbors. People who work in the liquid waste industry must treat the waste. They need to keep up on the latest trends, new products, and government regulations that may affect their livelihood—for better or worse. That’s what trade magazines are for.

To be a writer, you have to have something to write about.

You have to be an expert on something. You can’t just be an expert at writing, you have to also be an expert in a certain field—so that people interested in that topic will turn to your writing as “the source.”

While attending Brigham Young University, I majored in English but didn't know what I enjoyed writing about. At the time, I didn't have to—I just had to write about English and American literature.

My first degree-related job outside of college, as a reporter for a local newspaper, gave me the opportunity to write about agriculture. I had grown up on a potato farm in southeastern Idaho, but now I was going to write about the industry. A few years later, that experience landed me the editor position for the largest and most widely circulated magazine in the potato industry (yes, there are several), called Potato Grower magazine. That position lead to my current position as the editor of four agricultural magazines at a different company—which includes a different potato industry magazine.

In spite of all I know about the potato industry, I've spent many more years—since the late 1980's—obsessed with one thing that very few people pay attention to anymore but is something to which we must return.

But that’s a topic for another blog post.

And no, it’s not porta-potties.