The Constitutionalist's Daughter

As I watched our television being loaded into the back of my sister's father's best friend's truck I realized that my days of using the coffee table as a surfboard were over… The year was 1993 and my sister and I were now the only kids still living at home.  My oldest brother had moved out shortly after returning from Desert Storm and the other brother had gone away to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil for a two-year religious mission.  It was the dead middle of summer in northern Utah, around June or July though I forget the precise month.  I was ten years old and my sister was fourteen, both of us would be having our birthdays later in the fall.  Somewhere among the lectures, seminars, and meetings that my parents attended for people who were wary of Big Brother and all of the strange happenings of the government, my dad had befriended a man named Dave Seich and had arranged the private purchase of some land in a tiny town called Virgin, Utah just outside of Zion Nation...

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under man … Wait … what? Did you catch it?  If you grew up in the USA reciting the pledge of allegiance every morning in school I bet you did and even if you didn't grow up here, there's a good chance you still caught it.  I was part-way through the third grade when the announcement was made that the words to the pledge of allegiance had been changed.  Now, you're probably seconds away from running to Google because surely the words were never officially  changed to say, 'one nation under man' and let me spare you the trouble – you're right, they weren't.  Perhaps I should back up a bit. The year was 1991 and it seemed like the country had just started taking offense to anything even remotely related to or involving God or religion in general.  You might think that particular offense is more recent than that but it actually starte...

My mother, angry as I'm sure she must have been, couldn't stop laughing as I stood there proudly between a dripping wet cocker spaniel and two 5-gallon buckets of bleach.   It would have been the summer of 1984 or 1985 (yes, we're going back in time a bit from our previous story) which means that I would have been around 2 or 3 years old.  We were at our family cabin near Fortine, Montana and it was a hot day (as Montana summers go) full of hard work.  You see, our primary residence at that time was still in Utah but my parents had purchased a piece of property on a very isolated chunk of a mountain and were determined to build a cabin there.  My father was what one might call a jack-of-all-trades but rather than fitting the rest of the adage – master of none – he had the somewhat jealousy invoking habit of mastering nearly every trade he set his mind to.  I'm sure he had a great deal of help from my two older brothers but I am also equally certain th...