My Portfolio

From my birth until I was 18 I always lived next door to my mothers parents and brother and sister.  Starting in Bronx, NY and including our move out to Tucson, AZ I always had a large family looking after me.

On the road…again!!!Essays, Stories, Adventures, DreamsChronicles of a Footloose ForesterBy Dick Pellek    In Flanders Fields the Poppies Grow  Of the many poems that haunted his imagination from grammar school, the one about a field of poppies in Ypres, Belgium had enough staying power to remain as a fragment in his...

Life is made up of achievement, failure, frustration, fulfillment, ecstasy and agony: and in my 84 years I have both sampled and sometimes dwelled too long in every one of them.  That is as it should be. I would find it impossible to say which among the thousands of joyful moments,...

Resting inconspicuously in my kitchen cupboard sits a small white bowl.  It isn’t an original.  It’s a substitute, a clone.  The original disappeared long ago, either in pieces in a trash can or simply vanished as things do over the course of a long life.  Being well-acquainted with the owner of...

The 21st birthday of a man’s oldest son begs for significant celebration.  This story relates how my oldest son and I celbrated his "coming of age" birthday. He didn’t enjoy flying and water sports had never appealed to him, so in a magnificent display of non sequitur thinking I decided that...

My father, James K (Jim) Long, never met a stranger. To him strangers were just friends he hadn't met. I always admired his ability to strike up a conversation with a person he had just met and talk as if he had always known him or her. The only thing he...

"From the time that Cory was just a young boy, he always wanted to go fishing; but being a single Mom and not knowing anything about how to catch fish, we would always try, but never catch anything.  My boys were always disappointed, but they still had fun trying.  During the...

This is the first time I got trampled by a bull. I rode it all the way.   I just remember I was getting up and I looked up and that bull was right on me. I flattened right down and he caught my head and stomped on my shirt, and passed...

The summer of 2009 a strong impression came to me, even urgent feeling, to go home to Colorado to transcribe and publish my parents and grandparents life stories. In Nauvoo, Illinois, 25 years earlier I videotaped my parent’s life story and they in turn videoed my grandparents.  I thought our family...

I do not know what age I stopped calling my Dad Daddy, but I know I made a concerted effort to be more grown up.  These are the tender experiences that make him Daddy to me. My Dad went to school and worked two jobs in Idaho before I attended first...

Dad was a big boy, a 13 pound baby at birth. The youngest of five children raised in the depression, from a broken family. He lived alone during most of his formative teen age years. He worked as a cowboy, and was fun loving, but not focused on his education.  He...

My Grandpa Fairchild was one of the roughest toughest cowboys I knew.  I watched him jump on a horse that was stomping in circles, not cooperating with the rider.  He would jump on the saddle and talk firmly and make them mind until they knew who was boss. In high school...

The smell of cinnamon Snickerdoodles, fudge icing, and dried rose petals transports me back to my Grandma and Grandpa’s farmhouse. It was always exciting to travel to Idaho in July to see relatives. It was a long drive and took most of the day. Driving northwest to Idaho, and then a...

                  Thanksgiving celebrating means different things to different people even within the same family!  My husband Tom grew up in the South and my young years were spread all over the country thanks to Dad’s Air Force career.  I’ll begin with my experiences and relate how they fit...

 Adelbert Ross Crosby, Jr. was the first child and only son of an impatient and cantankerous man whose main virtues were to teach “Bert” a lifelong love of mechanical equipment and of guns for their deer hunting expeditions. Bert openly expressed love for his mother and respect for his father.     ...

My fourth great grandfather Alexander MacLean, Sr. was born in 1709 on the Isle of Mull. His mother died the night he was born. His father left Mull bringing young Alexander to County Antrim, Ireland, where his father remarried. Sometime between 1725 and 1730 young Alexander sailed from County Antrim to...

Teenagers and their grandparent’s generation have more in common than most believe, and they have mutual gifts to offer one another. Creating an intergenerational legacy is among the most rewarding and memorable projects they can share. In an online article entitled Understanding the Elderly, Dr. Beverly Block, a staff psychotherapist with...

             My mother loved to look beautiful and she wanted her children to look lovely too. Because of her sewing talent provided many cute outfits for all of her children.  Several years she would make all the girls matching dresses for Easter.  A few experiences were...

            Lana one time when she was a little girl, she must have been about the second grade. We always got catalogs and even then our kids loved the catalogs and they would look all the way through them. She spotted a doll in the catalog and it was a Betsy...

My Artist Mother I see my mother at the table sketching, painting, working on crafts for relief society, and cutting silhouettes for posters.  Everything she worked on she would share some paper, paint, or beads with her kids so we could play too.  I am sure it was messy at times,...