Leaving Utah With Family--and Feline--Values Intact

My wife and our two daughters-in-law decided they wanted to take a hot-air balloon ride.

We were spending a week with our two sons and their wives in Park City, Utah, in what turned out to be a test of our family values.

The balloon took off at 7 a.m., so we had to get up early. We met at a hotel and followed the balloon crew out to a starting point in the boondocks.

There were other passengers, too--10 in all. They crowded into the basket, the gas flame shot up into the balloon and off they went.

We followed the ground crew over the condo-dotted landscape, up one street and down another, trying to figure where the balloon would land.

Luckily, it just missed the wooded hillside and came down on a road. Then we all went to the hotel where the crew poured champagne.

I wondered why the women had taken the ride and the men hadn’t. I also stayed behind when all of them took a mountain hike and the women took a horseback ride. I suspect that women are, after all, more adventurous.

I remembered that my wife had taken a helicopter ride over the Christo umbrellas in the Tejon Pass while I held her purse. I had performed a similar service when she rode a helicopter over the volcano Haleakala on Maui and when she entered the inner tomb of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

It was obligatory to visit the Mormon Temple and Tabernacle, only half an hour away. We took a 45-minute tour conducted by a young Mormon sister who made only perfunctory attempts at proselytizing us.

She explained that the temple, with its many spires, was for sacred ceremonial use only, and that we Gentiles, as they call non-Mormons, could not enter. We sat briefly at the rear of the Tabernacle, however, looking at the empty seats and trying to imagine the sound of the famous choir.

We went into a visitors’ building, where we were invited to watch any one of several videos on various moral or religious subjects. It seemed appropriate, so we chose “Family Values.”

It was about a young architect who was so busy in his work that he had no time for his son. It was an object lesson for me, but of course too late.

On our next-to-last day we had to drive our daughter-in-law Jackie to the airport.

According to her plan, one of us had to fly home alone, to avoid a catastrophe that would leave our five grandchildren orphans. Her husband had flown one day late to join us. My argument that the lone eagle might be the one to die had not prevailed.

First we drove north through Ogden and Brigham City alongside the great Salt Lake and out over the wilderness to the point where, on May 10, 1869, a Union Pacific locomotive from Omaha, Neb., met a Central Pacific from Sacramento to complete the first intercontinental railroad.

Two well-kept locomotives, their brass highly polished, now stand at the spot, head to head, where the famous golden spike was driven into the rails.

A plaque in the little museum notes that at first the two companies, evidently out of stubbornness, missed each other by 250 miles. They finally got together to produce that famous ceremony.

On my wife’s birthday we had dinner in an Italian restaurant on Park City’s historic Main Street.

Her sons and daughters-in-law gave her a necklace and earrings and a T-shirt that said “Count Your Blessings,” with the names of her five grandchildren inscribed on carved figures hung in a semicircle across the breast. She said it was the best birthday she’d ever had.

The only conflict we had was over the cat. It was a white male cat that had come crying to our screen door; my daughters-in-law had fed it and talked of taking it home.

I protested, pointing out that Jackie already had a cat that had been severely chewed by her Dalmatians, Gail had a dog that would tear a cat apart and my wife was already feeding five wild cats every day.

Besides, I said, the cat had survived before we came and would survive after we left.

On our last day Doug said he had to do something about the cat; his wife had made him promise.

He found an organization called Friends of Animals in the directory and left a message on their answering machine. (They said they were out “catting around.”)

He said he wanted them to pick up our cat and have it spayed. “I’ll be glad to pay for it,” he said magnanimously.

My wife told him, “Give them our name.”

He told Friends of Animals to charge the cost to my wife and gave her address.

So it looks as if we’re going to pay for the cat’s operation.