Blogging My Autobiography - Chapter 26

’Tis a Privilege to live in Colorado.

This saying was first coined by Frederick Bonfils, a 19th Century Denver entrepreneur who helped found the Denver Post. Today, this proclamation can be found in the Post’s weather page. Fall weather in Colorado is especially pleasant with abundant sunshine and warm days followed by crisp cool nights.

For me, no place is better than Colorado. I do like Salt Lake City, Vancouver BC, Boston and other places all over the world, but Colorado is my favorite. We lived there for 14 years. It’s a cowtown for sure, but it’s also a pretty sophisticated city. I like the combination of chic, granola, cowboy and outdoors. Our kids grew up there and if you ask them where they are from, they will say Colorado. Did you know that America The Beautiful was written about Colorado? Spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain’s majesty, the fruited plain, all images that you can see from the slopes of Pikes Peak where Katharine Lee Bates finished the poem. We have driven up Pikes Peak numerous times and it is truly breathtaking. We have also been up Mount Evans where the highest paved road in the US is located. How high? Well Pikes and Evans are both Fourteeners, 14,115 and 14,265, respectively. I do have one regret, I haven’t actually climbed a Fourteener. Will I in the future? I hope to.

I have so many memories of Colorado. Most of the adult friendships we have had over the course of our lives started there and many continue to this day. We did a lot with our friends but a couple of things stand out. One is going out to clubs to listen to one of our friend’s band. He played bass and sang harmonies and I danced with his wife because Debi was too embarrassed to dance with me, I tend to be a bit of a show off. One time we all went to Mataam Fez, a middle eastern restaurant, the belly dancer asked me to join her, thinking she had a patsy on her hands. I showed her, I tell ya! I can shake and shimmy with anyone, much to my wife’s chagrin and everyone else’s disbelief.

The other thing about our friends is that we did plays together. Musicals, skits and melodrama were our bread and butter. We wrote most of them ourselves. Debi and her friend Rosalie are quite the authors and we had other friends that contributed original songs. I liked the melodramas because we encouraged audience participation like cheers, boos and ahhs. There was even a fair amount of heckling from the audience, most of which was directed at me because I was always the villain.

Our children learned to play the violin in Colorado. I can’t tell you how many recitals and concerts I have been to listening them evolve from “twinklers” to Vivaldi. Twinklers are kids that play variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” which is actually “Ah vous dirai-je, Maman,” a French folk song, which Mozart made famous by writing a piano concerto consisting of 12 variations on the theme. Those concerts were our only means of entertainment at times so we enjoyed them greatly. Learning music has helped our children think creatively, given them self esteem and a taste for good music and the finer things in life. Our son even got his degree in Music and Sweets played in the orchestra at college.

The most lasting memory of Colorado is probably Fireworks. Now watching them is fine but we sold them from a roadside stand that we built and set up every year. It’s a real good business for 2 weeks worth of work. There were years when we lived for months off the proceeds of the stand. We got started in that business by helping our friends for a couple of years in their stand. After the second year, we decided that we could do just as well on our own and have a stand closer to home. In the third year, we started with hope, plywood and posterboard advertising. It worked. We had a good location and good prices. It’s what you need to succeed. It grew every year until we moved from Colorado. Our kids and the neighbors loved it. We usually had a big fireworks show in front of our house to “test” out all of our wares. We had to know what they did, after all. You need to be able to explain to your customers and also to know what to buy the next year. The test show ended abruptly, though after the cops saw one of the arial displays go off in front of the house. It was called Thunder and Lightning and created a tower of sparks about 30 feet high with multiple concussions and flashes. It went off just as the police drove by on a cross street. The 50 or so people who were watching melted into the darkness, Debi dove for the garage door, closing it and ushering the kids into the house, leaving me standing alone amidst 50 plus burned fireworks tubes, boxes and other assorted debris to face the music. They were cool, though and told me to just clean up the mess,which I promptly did.

We didn’t want to move from Colorado, there are claw marks all the way down I-80 where I was dragged screaming from my home. However, we had something else to do and we finally accepted our fate. Would I move back now? You bet I would. ‘Tis a Privilege to Live in Colorado.