Bucket list 42 – the frontiers of life

July 6, 2914

My younger years were always complicated by the fact that I should have been born and lived in the exploration days of the great movement westward on this continent. My father experienced moving from Concho Valley (San Angelo, Texas to Concho Valley (White Mountains, St. Johns), Arizona. Dad or Charles Glenn Jacobs, age 22 and his father Frank Elmer, about sixty three moved from Texas with a wagon and a “remuda” of horses. (I believe that was six or seven) They spent the first year at the “snake ranch”, which is straight west of Concho just off the old main road, past DeGlane’s house and further east from Roman Candelaria’s farm, which is now operated by my cousin Chris Canderaria. The next year they opened a store at the old junction which connected St. Johns, Holbrook, and Sholow and the next year they build Glenn’s Trading Post across the street on the same junction. It was a Shell Gas Station, a grocery store, a bar, a restaurant, and all things the imagination might carry one to consider. He spent his life seeking out the frontiers of life, of occupation, of spirituality, and family, never to be totally determined to stay in one place, or to stop learning.

I didn’t mean to follow his frontier trek in life, but as I review my seven decades, it is easy to see that some of that frontier spirit rubbed off on me. Like my father, I joined the Navy and learned many things while in service, the most important things being that I had an ability to learn, to adapt, to conceptualize, to understand God, and to focus my efforts on building a family. One of my most important goals has been to learn something new every day. This task is always exciting and keeps me young at heart. As most of you know I rely heavily on spiritual interventions through promptings from God through the Holy Ghost and ministering angels as I am guided through the maze of tentacles that take glancing blows at my self esteem, my abilities, my professional direction, my family activities, my personal and family physical and mental health, and all other elements of my life.

I would be a fool and a fibber if I even suggested my life has not been one in which mistakes and errors have been absent. Some of the errors (Notice I am not saying sins) have been habitual and ever reoccurring while other have one-time goofs that were soon squashed and put to rest. The most grievous to me has been the habit of swearing I learned at my father’s knee. It has taken nearly all my life to get to a point in which I feel I can go through a smashed finger nail, a crazy car ride, a meaningless - but frantic “discussion” with a colleague or enemy and never swear. All the nasty words are there in my mind – never to be erased, but through conscious, meaningful discussions with ministering angels, that mistake has been curbed.

A second error I have been plagued with since birth is my fascination with beautiful girls. Evidently, glued to my DNA, at six years old I have been told that I was at a birthday for June Baca and made sure she didn’t sit on her tricycle seat until I had dried it off with my coat. When I was seven years old I had a great flame for Leanne McCullough. Then, I was thrilled by the interest of Cathy Padilla, our across the street neighbor. When I was a freshman in High school I had a date with a girl (no, I wasn’t sixteen) to go on a hay ride. Sometime in the night we had a good time kissing while everyone watched. Several weeks later a seemingly unrelated incident occurred in which a girl about my age asked her friend (who was a boy to push me off the porch. He didn’t and I thought nothing more of it until this last year when the thought occurred to me that perhaps the girl had been offended by the hayride kissing incident. Over my career as a teacher Jean and I have shared the fear, and anxiety we have experienced as a significant number of girls and grown women have made timid, aggressive, and sometimes torrid assaults on my virtue. The only way we have been able to maintain our love and devotion is through constant, instant communication and vigilant learning regarding how to best assess danger and avoid any possible contamination. Have we succeeded 100 percent of the time? Surely not, but we have grown closer together through careening through the pitfalls of life together.

God bless us all that we may be ever learning, ever diligent, ever forging on in the adventure of life.

Duane Jacobs, Grandfather, father, brother, uncle, cousin, and fond friend