My Current Status
After my divorce in 1998 I moved to the Southwillow Apartment complex in West Jordan, Utah, and I have been here since then. I love living here as much now as when I moved in. My apartment is perfect for me, and I have made it my refuge from the outside world. I live on the second floor, and I have two balconies, one on the east where I can watch the sunrises, the other on the west where I can watch the sun go down. The complex has a lot of very nice amenities, a swimming pool, a racquetball court, an exercise equipment room, a lot of grassy areas, outdoor gas grills and play areas, and many walking paths and trees which I have watched grow to great heights in my seventeen years of living here. I live with two cats, one of which will be going to cat heaven quite soon, as she is about 20 years old. My younger cat is only about nine years old, so he will probably outlive me. I do hope that my cats have souls that will be with me in the afterlife, because they are like my children, and I love them very much.
From my move in 1989 to the present, many things have happened in my life. In 2001 I ended my career job with the bank, lived off my money for about two years, and when my money ran out I took on several jobs, most of which were short lived for many reasons. I finally ended up returning to the bowling industry when in the summer of 2003, I saw an advertisement in the newspaper from a bowling center only a mile away from me. Though I had always avoided taking jobs that I done before, I realized that I liked my previous work at another center on the extreme east side of the Salt Lake valley, so I decided to get back into this type of work. I immediately went down to the center, and I talked with the owner there about hiring me. He told me that the ad was meant for later on, more towards the end of the summer, and that he would think about hiring me then. I really did want to be hired now, so I kept bugging him every day until he relented and hired me a few days later. He made the comment, "I guess I'll have to hire you now because you're so damned persistent." I have been there ever since.
I started my new job by being trained to work the front desk, which I did for about two years. I really didn't like that type of work, and I occasionally told the owner this, who by this time came to really like me and treated me like a friend. So, during the fall league season of 2005 he came to me and told me that he wanted to replace the league coordinator, who he said was not doing a very good job, and would I like to take over that position and leave the front desk. Since this was an office job, using a computer, getting away from the noise outside in the bowling area, doing my job listening to classical music, and choosing my own hours to do the work, I immediately, and very gladly, took over that task. I've been doing this job to the present, now over ten years. I also took over keeping track of all 260 lockers, managing the supplies in the office, and being one of the computer guru's when there were problems in that area.
In 2006, when I turned 62, I came up with a plan and presented it to the owner of the bowling center. I asked him if he would salary me, set my wage, and just let me do the work even more my own way. In return, I would retire early and start collecting social security, even though it would be at a lower level than if I waited a few more years to retire. I had done all the arithmetic to see how this would work. It turned out that my income would increase by about five hundred dollars every month, even though my hours at work would take only 25 hours or less, instead of 40+ each week, and his payout to me would decrease by about the same amount. His first question was, "Is there anything illegal about this?" I laughed and told him that I would never ask him to do something illegal. So he said, "Then that sounds like a good deal to me." This arrangement was the best thing I had ever come up with in my entire life. Instead of living most of my life on the brink of financial disaster, I became able to have a more than sufficient income that would pay all my bills when they came due, my rent that never got behind, money I could save for car repairs when they occurred, all the food I wanted to buy for me and my cats, and still have extra money to spend each month for other things that I needed, or just wanted. My life, because of this arrangement, became my ideal way of living, and I went into my "golden years" in great shape. I often tell people that in my old age I'm living a charmed life. I finally found the way to never again find myself on that brink of financial disaster that I had so often experienced in my earlier years.
Now to move on to other things that have happened to me during this time.
Even before my divorce in 1989 I was active with the Mountain Vista United Methodist Church, and I am still very active as a keyboardist/musician. I current play for two or more services each month, which I enjoy doing very much, mainly because it keeps me constantly working with music, as well as providing me with a loving church family that has replaced nearly all of my own family that disowned me many years ago. I will continue on being active with this church as long as I'm still alive.
Also, in 2006 I started teaching classical music appreciation classes at a senior center close to where I live. How I came to start doing this was that my mother, whom I talked into moving to Salt Lake in 1988 so that I could watch over her better, asked me if I would take her to this senior center a couple times each week to have lunch there and get to know some new people. Shortly after our going there, a very elegant lady named Marion Kimble got to know my mother and me, and learning that I was a classical music fan, she asked me if I would give a short presentation on Fredrick Chopin in a class that she wanted to start. I agreed, and when we had that class, I gave my presentation. She really liked it, as did the people that came to see what the class was all about. As soon as I finished my presentation, she announced that she wanted me to now take over the class, and she would be one of the members. I was quite surprised when she said that, but I agreed to do it as long as she wanted me to. So, each month I prepared my own subject matter, and we continued on with the project. Except for a little over a year that I had to take a kind of sabbatical a few years later, which I'll explain latter, I taught this class, any many of the same members along with new people, the class has survived now for eight years. Not only is it still in progress, I have added three more senior centers/residences where I take my presentations. It has been a true work of love on my part, and the people that come to my classes tell me that I have given them a new lease in life and look forward to what I bring to them each month.
In about 2008, I started working with a sax player from my church, using mostly "golden oldie" music in lead sheet format (single staff, simple melody line, chords above to improvise the harmony, and lyrics for vocalists that we used later on). We started playing as a duo at different places, and we were well received. Shortly after we started doing this, we were asked to play for a dance. It was from a LDS church close to my church, one that joined with us on a few other occasions when there were neighborhood events. We accepted, and shortly after that, we got a call from a man from that church asking if we would like to include him on his bass guitar, and his son on the drums. We said we would be very happy to have them join us. This soon turn into a band that we called "The Mixed Nuts." The sax player and I started working on the music, and over the years we put together over 700 songs, he doing the original arranging, then sending the arrangements to me via email, and I would work through the chords and make the music look very professional. We started playing in different places as a four piece band, then added a vocalist, making it a five piece band, the way it is to the present.
The first full year that we started playing, then about 2009, we played about sixty gigs. The next year, we had about eighty or so, The next year we did about 120 gigs. It was a lot of fun, but now it was getting out of hand, at least for me. With all the paper music I was working on, playing increasing number of gigs, or finding substitutes to play in my stead when I had other commitments, I no longer had my own life, which was unacceptable for me. It was during this time that I even had to take my leave from the music appreciation classes, because I had no time to do anything but work with the band. So, to rectify this situation, I resigned from the band so that I could go solo again, restart the music classes, and recover my lost life. I often said that I should have resigned even earlier, but it's good I at least resigned when I did. In subsequent years the band took on more and more gigs until this year (2015), they ended up with over 240 gigs, playing up to eight in one week, sometime playing two or three gigs in one day. I started looking at their schedule now and then, and whenever I saw that they had a gig on any particular day, just seeing that actually made my day, because I didn't have to go to it.
It took me a few months to recuperate from my participation with the band, but when I got myself together again, I have since had a wonderful time doing my own music. I have arranged many songs to play my own solo piano gigs my own way, and I am always and happily busy preparing music that I use at church every month. I have even started to compose some of my own music. I never would have been able to do this had I stayed with the band.
I do wish that my mother could have extended her life beyond May of 2007, because it was only after her death that I became very immersed in all the music that she loved so much, and danced to in her earlier years. She would have loved to go to some of the band gigs, and she would have loved even more to hear me play the music on her piano. She didn't care for a lot of the classical music I played for her, but she would have loved everything I could have played for her that came from my work with the band. Nevertheless, after she died, I often feel her sitting next to me, and inspiring me as I play "her" music, and working on my own music that I know she would have enjoyed so much. I know she would have been very proud of me for my recently increased skills at the piano, especially how I learned (and still am learning) to improvise the chords in my music as I feel it in my heart and in my soul. My mother always wanted me to excel in my music, and though she may have been disappointed in certain other aspects of my life, I now believe that I have made her wish come true in my music. As I approach my own death, I have started uploading the many recordings I have made over the last few years to a site where my Facebook friends have started to listen to them. Now that I have completely finished this history, and in case you may have missed it, my music recordings can be found in Part II--Beyond Chronology section in "My Music." As long as I am still alive, I will probably keep adding new music to that link as long as I am able. Maybe this will be the best legacy I'll leave behind, but I hope even more that it will be the Karma that I take with me as I leave this life and venture on into my next one, whatever that turns out to be. Music has been my life more that anything else, even without being more than an amateur at doing it, and my hope is that I might be reborn as a child prodigy, or getting nearer to that for a future life to come.
At this point, and having written about all I want to include in this next to final section of my history, at least about the happenings in my life since 2001, I'd like to write about something that I have thought about all of my life, at least from my mid teenage years. As I became aware of my life, and life in general, and moved beyond childhood thoughts, I pretty much stopped reading fictional books. I was mildly interested in some biographies and especially autobiographies, but I became very interested in non-fiction writings. I have been this way ever since those teenage years and to this very day. My brother recently tried to get me to read fiction for entertainment, but it didn't work. Entertainment for me is not reading books. For that I use mostly the TV and movies. Music, to me, is also not entertainment so much, either. Music to me is what I use to be inspired, to heal my soul, to see beyond what my eyes see, to truly feel what is in my heart, to look into the skies at the stars and contemplate what is "out there" that we still don't know about. This is all music to me. I often tell the people in my music classes that music is the language that God speaks. I do believe that to be true. Also, starting in my earlier years, became very interested in sciences, mostly the science of large things, especially the largest of all things that we see in the Universe, which is so large that it is incomprehensible. From the evolution of humans when they became aware of themselves and their habitat, they have been studying the large bodies of matter that are strewn throughout the Universe, including the planet where we humans live in as small, microscopic points of dust, on a planet that is almost equally small and microscopic as we are. Without understanding very much how scientists do their work, I have followed their theories, both past and present, all of my life. In other words, I read for knowledge, not entertainment, and I read a lot. I have read so much that I often even disagree with some of the theories that scientists come up with, not that I know better than they do, but because they simply don't seem reasonable to my mind, as feeble as it might be, but truly wants to know what really is true. I'm also quite interested in very small things, those microscopic things that in past years scientists thought were the basic particles of matter that couldn't be broken in to smaller pieces, but soon, and constantly, have found that even those particles of matter are still comprised of even smaller particles, never yet finding the end to it all. I have read books about many different theories, and books by Stephen Hawking, the scientist whose theories I most often do not believe in, and I feel proud of holding my ground when he occasionally repudiates his own theories, usually the ones that I was skeptical of in the first place. I have always believed that scientists will never find that final and basic particle of matter, which Hawking once said that he believes exists, because I believe it simply does not exists. I have always believed that everything is pure energy, and that the very strong bonds of energy create the illusion of all matter. Many of today's scientists believe that our entire universe is an illusion, maybe even in the form of a hologram.
Having written that, I would now like to end this section with something else that I believe to be possibly, or just hopefully true in my own mind. I've always tried to find theories that seem rational to me, theories that seem to answer questions that haven't previously and satisfactorily appealed to my way of thinking. But before I write about this, and in case I forget to end this section with this next sentence, I'll write it now. I admit that I could very easily be completely wrong about what I'm now going to write.
I was brought up by parents that were very religious. They were faithful in their church and in their callings in that church. They hoped, more than anything else, that all their children would grow up and embrace their version of faith in God and in their church. Some of us, sadly for them, departed from their beliefs in some ways. Others made them proud because they did embrace their beliefs, and I'm happy that they were able to do this for our parents. I was not one of those that did. I was actually the blackest sheep of the fold. In ways, I am saddened to be what I was for their sake, and for the sake of my siblings that remained in the fold. However, a person has to be true to his or her self. Many times I tried to play act to make them happy, but it only caused problems in my own life in so many ways, one of them being that I ran away and seriously contemplated suicide. It took me years to put aside things I did to simply please them, even though I knew it wasn't in me to do them truthfully. It really wasn't until after my second divorce and over the last seventeen years of living alone that I fully became who I really am, though I partially moved into this direction right after my first divorce.
It was difficult for me to believe in a God that is taught by most religions. Their gods are all so different, and some of them are actually mean spirited when it comes to how they have treated their human "children" on earth. I did came to like the god of some of the Christian churches, including the church that I belong to, in the way they interpret "Grace." Nevertheless, I am still not religious and still call myself an agnostic, only barely avoiding using the name atheist. I've always tried to find another word for God, because that name always seems to apply to church based religion. In another section of my history you will find some writings that I put together a few years ago about what I believed then. Those writings can be found in the Master List under the name of "What I Believe" towards the bottom of that page. I still believe most of what I wrote then; I would just change some of the words I used in those writings. As an example, and in my attempt to find a better, all inclusive word for "God," I started using a composite Nature/God, Nature for, shall we say, the Scientific term, and God for the term that completes it. I couldn't use the God of Nature, because that would be different, and it would mean two different entities. I believe that God has to be everything, and that God is "Nature." But Nature by itself doesn't necessarily include self awareness, so that term needed a bit of help, too. So, Nature/God seems more correct to me, at least for the time being.
Two or three years ago I starting reading writings coming from eastern counties, where the religions believe in reincarnation, or rebirth, and Karma. I read many books, or parts of books, including writings of the Dalai Lama. All this reading reinforced my interest in and a stronger belief that this probably is how everything works. I came to strongly believe in the soul, and from one book that even identified where the soul resides in our bodies. I also came to believe that the soul does not enter the body until sometime after the birth of the baby, and identifies its presence in the baby when the baby shows awareness of itself and its surroundings, which can occur at different stages in its development.
I came to believe that our souls are part of, yet retains individuality and immortal status, within God from the beginning. How God, or Nature/God became aware is way beyond our knowledge and comprehension, at least in our mortal material state, but we probably have greater understanding of a lot of things in our spiritual, or energy state. I also believe that this material state is a type of illusion, that matter is actually very strong bonds of energy and not made of what we see or feel as solid material. I also believe that our souls have entered and lived in millions of bodies and have evolved into what we are now through the beginning of life on this, or other planets, as life began on them within the Universe. I further believe that death marks our true "resurrection" back to our true home in the spirit, or energy home. I suspect that when we are home, we plan out what our next life and our next body will look like and which talents we will be born with, either by our commission or Karma from our previous existences, or both. I believe that because of our previous lives and the talents and progress we have gained, we emerge in ever better states in our new bodies. This idea actually solves several questions: Why why child prodigies of all kinds are born, why some people remember previous lives, why Deja vu experiences happen to us from time to time, and several others. I also believe that we all know each other because of our eternal existence within the Nature/God. I believe that Nature/God's nature is a combination of cause and effect and natural love itself - and that, again, we are part of that nature because we are part of Nature/God. We simply cannot be anything else. We are also creatures of free will, and we either move forward when our causes are good and just, rewarding ourselves in the positively affect, and we go backwards when our causes are bad and unjust, punishing ourselves by the negative affect. Either way, it affects our Karma that, good or bad, and at some time in our present of future, will come our way. There can be no other way. We are not punished because of our sins; we are punished BY our sins.
With that, I'll just end by saying: I admit that I might be completely wrong about my believe - but I hope not.
Now to my future outlook as it appears right now. As I wrote above, I have been living in my apartment for over seventeen years, and a lot of things have happened to me over the previous 13 to 14 years. Over the last three or so years, and now looking into my future, however long that will be, I seem to have leveled off, making my life very much the same from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, and now year to year. Things no longer change very much, and I my life is very scheduled and ordered. This might sound boring and uneventful to you, but for me, it really isn't, and I'll write now why I am very satisfied with my life as it looks ahead.
In June of this year I turned 71, and though I can hardly believe that I am now this old, I realize that my time is now numbered, that it won't be long before I die. Because I have had so many different adventures in my like, so many and different ones that I now have nothing in my bucket list that I still want to do, other than what I am doing now. And because I believe in the things I have written about in this section, I am actually looking forward to moving on, leaving this life and starting my next one. The proof of what I am saying is that I do not go to doctors, I do not take any medications, and I do not worry about my eating habits, though I do eat decent and healthy food - sometimes. Occasionally I will have some health issue that makes me wonder if this thing that's going on in my body will kill me instead of eventually go away, like all the previous ones have done exactly that, gone away, so far. Even if I have a heart attack, I will not call for help. I will simply let it end my life if it is bad enough. I have told so many people that I want to live a natural life, without medical assistance, and die a natural death, no matter how soon it might happen. I do not want to live into very old age, when I'm too feeble to continue working my part time job, or stop doing music to record and play for other people. When the quality of my life goes down hill to the point that my life is no longer fun and interesting, it is time for me to move on. I do not believe in suicide, but I do believe in helping my body to shut down and die in natural ways. I have a book called "Final Exit" by Derek Humphry, the author also of "Let Me Die Before I Wake," that has been on one of my book shelves for many years. Because of my age now, I am starting to look through it to see ways that I might help myself to sometime, fairly soon, die before I wake. This is not suicide. Suicide is when someone takes their life when their body is not shutting down yet, and they are still healthy. I'm not afraid of death; I'm only afraid of HOW I might die, especially if it involves great pain or death by some kind of violent event.
I do hope that I still have a few more years left. I would like to outlive my cats, because I love them, and they love me - maybe more than anyone else in my life except for my parents, who have been the epitome of unconditional love when it came to loving me no matter how undeserving of their love I have often been throughout my life. I do miss my parents, more an more as I age, and I am literally dying to see them again, and unite my soul with theirs once again.
So my outlook on my future is simply that I will continue to do my best to live as good as I can, for as long as I can, and strive to better myself and try to do good things and add as much positive Karma that I can before my time is up. With that, I now end this section of my life history and move on to my last and final section that was written many years ago, leaving me to finally, and completely, end the writing of my life history.
