Michigan

Movie Break: A Good Old-Fashioned Scare

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

Halloween night was always a favorite as a kid—and as a dad, when our kids were old enough to enjoy it. Dressing up is always fun, and, like reading fairy tales, I think traipsing about the neighborhood after dark trying to scare friends and family (not to mention the delight in a being scared and then laughing about it afterward) helps children learn to manage their fears.

Plus, CANDY! (Of course.)

Now all but Lily have left the nest, and she is more inclined to roam the neighborhood with her middle-schooler friends than with her parents. I stayed home this year to hand out candy. I created a giant spider from three pumpkins, two gourds, eight long and crooked birch branches, and a length of rope; this Arachno-Lantern and Lily’s Schnoz-o-Lantern greeted the children and teens who haunted our doorstep, and I got to enjoy the comments and the costumes, plus two good, old-fashioned scary movies on the over-the-air MOVIES! television channel.

I’m not a big horror movie guy, especially these days. Scenes of torture and gore are not my speed; I prefer a little drama (we loved A Quiet Place), a lot of humor (Shaun of the Dead was a guilty pleasure), or a classic, somewhat campy, monster movie. The latter is what I got on All Hallows Eve.

Continue reading →

Byline: J. Thorp

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

I was doing some work for an old friend and former employer today and found myself reflecting on the wide variety of writing I’ve undertaken for pay in the past 30 years. Beginning as an undergraduate working in the Yale School of Music Concert Office, I’ve been creating marketing materials and writing profiles, features, articles, and speeches on everything from interior design to kung fu to the public impact of higher education.

So, just for kicks, here are a few recent bylines I’ve rediscovered. For those that are available online, I’ve included links.

Continue reading →

Seeing Jesus in the Poor

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

James 1:27

A year or two ago, I took my dad to visit an old friend. I heard many stories from their younger days, from middle school through their time in the Army.

I knew my father grew up with a little bit of nothing: He was the youngest of his siblings; his mom died when he was little, and his dad and stepmom had new babies to provide for and little means to do it. That morning I learned that Dad and his friend lived out of Dad’s car for awhile when they were in high school, scraping together what money they could for food or a cheap hotel room by doing odd jobs for their teachers and neighbors.

I learned something else as well: As tough as Dad’s life was at that point, his friend’s was tougher. From his outside perspective, Dad had a wonderful family—a place to get a half loaf of bread if things got really bad. Dad was his friend’s safety net.

Continue reading →

A Life Well-Remembered

/ J. Thorp / Leave a comment

I remember, many years ago, sitting with Dad in a homemade ice-shanty-turned-deer-shack on the Lofgren farm in Michigan, where we used to hunt. It was muzzleloader deer season, snowy and cold, and we had a little porcelain-coated gas heater to keep us warm while we watched and waited. Dad was slicing an apple with his pocketknife and placing the slices on the top of the heater, where they hissed, filling the shack with the smell of the roasting fruit.

We ate them once they were soft and warm, and talked quietly together. My father is not a religious man; that day he told me he didn’t believe in an afterlife, but that heaven and hell are how people remember you. To his way of thinking, if you were a good person and took care of your family and your neighbors, you would be loved, missed, and remembered well. You would live on in the hearts of others, and that would be heaven.

If you didn’t, you would not be missed, and your memory would fade—or worse, you would be despised in retrospect. That would be hell.

I don’t share this view personally. I believe in a real and eternal afterlife, and I trust in our merciful God to see the goodness and beauty my father has brought into this world. But in the meantime, I want to give Dad something he can use here and now: a glimpse of his “heaven” as it stands today.

Most of our family and close friends know by now that my dad has both Parkinson’s Disease and dementia. If you hadn’t heard, please know that we didn’t intend to keep you in the dark. It’s not the easiest subject to broach, especially for our emotional clan. Parkinson’s and the resulting effects on his hands and mobility have been problems for several years now. The dementia diagnosis is a newer thing. Over the past few years, Dad’s short-term memory has declined and sequential thinking has become more challenging. More recently he has begun to imagine things.

Continue reading →

Autumn Update

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

The older I get, the more I repeat myself, so you may have heard this before: I would take six months of October. A half year of crisp, cool, color-filled autumn; about six weeks of snowy white winter between Thanksgiving and roughly New Year’s Day, and the balance a long, blooming spring that turns green but never quite gets hot.

If ever I find the right combination of latitude and altitude, I’ll be gone. You’re welcome to visit.

We’re currently blessed with a beautiful October here in Minnesota. The leaves turned from green to gold, red, orange, and bright yellow in a few short days, it seemed; a thunderstorm stripped the top two-thirds of one tree across the street, but left the others intact, and even a sticky, wet snowfall earlier this week served only to make the color pop before vanishing into the soil before noon.

This morning the rooftops are coated in pale frost, but the ground is wet and smells like year’s end. Indoors, coffee’s in my cup, bluegrass is on the radio, and a whiff of the furnace’s first burnings is blowing up from the registers. It’s gonna be a good day.

Continue reading →