A few years back, I took a good friend of mine to the local mall, south of town. She told me that she had to return a pair of jeans because she found them torn and faded.

After she showed me, I tried explaining, “They’re distressed jeans, they’re meant to be like that. Didn’t you look at them before buying them?”

She didn’t answer me about ‘looking before buying.’ Instead, she focused on a single word.

“They’re distressed?” she squeaked. “What about me?”

I tried not to chuckle as I quipped, “You’ve gotta be mortified.”

“Mortified? I’m distressed, not dead!”

When I was 10-years-old, Grandpa Bill took me to my first cattle auction in Ferndale at the Humboldt County Fair Grounds. Shortly afterwards, I gathered a passel of kids from around my grandparent’s neighborhood and held an auction of my own.

“So, who’ll give me fifty cents – fifty-pennies, ten-dimes or two-quarters for Adam?” I cried out.

Nothing but blank stares and crickets. Finally, I pointed at one of the taller boys, “You – do your parents give you an allowance?”

“Yeah,” he answered, “A dollar a week.”

“Great, we have an opening bid of one dollar. Do I hear a buck-twenty-five?” I stuttered, in a poor attempt at imitating the fast-talking auctioneer I’d heard.

By the time I finished, I’d sold my brother for five-dollars and seventy-five cents to the kid’s who lived right across Rohnerville Road from my grandparents. Adam, then went home to collect his few clothes and toys before heading off to his ‘new family,’ and that’s how Grandma found out what I’d done.

“If you’re willing to sell your brother, then you’ll eventually want to sell the rest of us,” Grandpa warned me as he tanned my backside with the tree branch he had me fetch.

He would’ve probably whipped even more, but as he explained to Grandma, “Damn kid said he had no idea he’d get that much money for Adam.”

That evening, they ate at the dining table while I sat in the hallway closet with a TV tray, eating alone. That wasn’t half as hard as having to return the money, the next day, even though I’d warned the crowd several times that ‘all sales were final.’

While still employed at the radio station I had a serious problem with our computers in the newsroom. For some reason, they’d all frozen and no amount of ‘rebooting’ worked to solved the situation.

At 1:36 in the morning, I called our corporate ‘IT Specialist.’

It was obvious he was not happy about having to drag himself from his warm bed and into a heavy snowfall to fix the malfunctioning system. It took him less than 15 minutes to get everything online and operating again.

I thanked him and asked, “So, what was the problem?”

As he pulled his coat on he answered, “It was an ID-ten-T problem.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks again, for fixing it.”

Later, as I wrote an email to the Program and News Directors, letting each know about the problem, I came to realize why I disliked him so much: there, in Ariel font at 12 pica was the word: “ID10T.”

From my notes:  “One day after and during a candle-light vigil, a Las Vegas Metro Police Officer scolded a man suspected of dealing drugs: “Can’t you take one day off?””

It was only day two on the job for Las Vegas Metro Police Officer Brady Cook, “I never imagined the second night would end this way. It all just happened so fast.”

Cook doesn’t know when he was shot.

The rookie officer sustained a four-in-one wound as a bullet ripped through his right arm, into the right side of his chest, grazing his rib cage, before ripping through his skin again. That’s when Cook and his training officer dashed for cover.

From my notes:  “In August the Las Vegas mass murder booked a room at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago overlooking the park where the Lollapalooza music festival was being held that weekend.”

The Las Vegas country music festival was supposed to be an annual mother-daughter trip for Malinda Baldridge and her daughter Brenna, “Staying at the Mandalay Bay. You know we did the pool, we did the concert, just kind of relaxed and hung out. We ran into two girls that we were with the night before and, like ‘Oh hi, how are you?’ So we stood with them, up against a barricade like we did before.”

And like many others, she thought fire crackers were going off during Jason Aldean’s performance, “Great somebody brought firecrackers, who does that?”

From my notes:  “Two sisters of Marilou Danley say that the Las Vegas murderer sent her away so that he could plan the shooting “without interruptions.””

A Las Vegas taxi driver who drove five passengers to safety the night of the mass shooting is tired of being called a hero. Cori Langdon in line a the Mandalay Bay, waiting to pick up passengers when she heard gunfire.

“There were so many other people who put themselves in harm’s way,” Cori Langdon said. “I just stumbled upon it. I heard what sounded like two pops. I think that’s when he was blowing out the window, but I don’t know. Then it continued and that’s when I turned on the video camera.

Somedays I don’t think this old heart can take anymore pain and crying really screws with a guy’s masculinity. I say this after learning that yet another friend of mine has passed away.

John Wayne Atyeo and I met while he was still operating the recycled waste route in our neighborhood.  After ‘single-stream’ recycling began in the Eagle Canyon area, Waste Management transferred him elsewhere.

Off and on, depending how busy he was that Thursday (our recycle day) we’d stop and visit for a few minutes, exchanging stories and laughter. From those relatively short chats, I learned that he had wrestled for and graduated in 1979 from Hug High, in Reno, Nevada; joined the U.S.  Marine Corps shortly after high school; and named after his father’s favorite actor, ‘John Wayne,’ “while being conceived in Hawai’i while my dad was on leave from ‘Nam and mom was there visiting him.”

An avid bodybuilder, ‘The Duke’ could hardly contain himself as he told me about how he’d place second in the ‘Master Men 50,’ and sixth in the ‘Men’s Middleweight’ classes of the Nevada State Bodybuilding, Figure & Bikini Championships in 2012, while three-years later he placed 11th in the ‘Men’s Middleweight’ and seventh in the ‘Masters over 50’ catagories. The last time I talked to him was in early November 2016, shortly after he took down an alleged gunman at a Trump rally being held at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center.

I remember how excited he was – and John was not the excitable-type – as he told me, “Someone yelled ‘He has a gun!’ I looked behind me and I saw this guy running through the crowd, so I tackled the guy to the ground.”

“I mean it was instinct or training, I don’t know, but I do know I couldn’t wait for him to take a shot at Trump,” he added.

“I tackled him from behind,” John explained . “He didn’t know I was coming, and I tackled him  hard and I threw him on the ground. I restrained his legs so he couldn’t move them. I also had his left arm, and at the same time I was trying to search him and get a hold of the gun. As I was doing this, he kept trying to get his arms free from my grip which made me think he really did have a weapon.”

John was pretty happy with himself and as we talked I looked the story up on the Internet, telling him he’d made the New York Times. “I hate that rag – but now I have to go find where I can get one,” he laughed.

“Yeah, Anita (his wife) is kind of miffed at me,” he chuckled, “But I also think she’s secretly proud of me, too.”

John passed away from a massive heart attack while working on October 29, 2018 in Reno, Nevada. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee on February 8, 1961. He was only 57-years-old.

But tonight, I’m hoisting a double whiskey, high in John’s honor, while shedding tears for everyone’s loss.

From my notes:  “Several witnesses, survivors, bystanders and law enforcement officers are still saying there were multiple shooters at the Las Vegas concert.”

As bullets ripped into country music fans, over 300 people ran a mile to the Las Vegas airport. In doing so they kicked down chain-link fences, climbed through razor wire and were briefly mistaken for attackers.

“I’m thinking to myself, I don’t know if the airport police know what’s going on yet,” says Mark Gay of Anahiem, California, “We were running, running out of the dark. If the cops were on that side, they don’t know who we are. So it was: ‘Put your arms out when you’re coming in.’”

“We were making the decision — we’re headed to the airport. The airport seems like the most secure, safe place,” says Fred Rowbotham, an off-duty police officer from the San Diego area.

As for Gay, “We’re still trying to remember how many fences we actually knocked down.”

There is nothing like the loss of a parent to leave a child overwhelmed with all the responsibilities and duties of taking care of that parent’s final arrangements. That’s what is happening to three women I’ve known since they were preschoolers.

Elyse, Lauren and Renee are the daughters of my son’s God-father, Gene, who passed away in 2016. Well, his ex-wife, Vicki died earlier this month and to help draw some of the strain off ‘the girls,’ I offered to do the only thing I’m fairly decent at.

Vicki Louise Hall Clauson, 63, passed away from a pulmonary embolism brought on by end-stage kidney failure, following a lengthy battle with diabetes on October 18, 2018 at Providence Medical Center, in Medford, Oregon. She was born in Portland, Oregon, on April 6, 1955 and raised in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey.

Prior to moving to Oregon to be near her daughters, Vicki worked at John Ascuaga’s Nugget in Sparks, Nevada, for 13 years. She was a member of the Red Hats Society and volunteered at the Central Point Senior Center.

Vicki is preceded in death by her parents, Richard and Vesta Hall and her former husband Gene Clauson. She is survived by her brother Gary Hall of Prescott, Arizona and her three daughters, Elyse Fryling, her husband, Dustin and their two daughters, Alyssa and Rylee of Medford, Oregon; Renee Clauson of Central Point, Oregon; and Lauren Clauson and her three daughters, Sierra Ingram, Madison Turner and Natalie Turner of Denver, Colorado.

The family asks that in lieu of flowers, a donation be made in Vicki’s name to the American Diabetes Association. Funerary arrangements are being handled by Perl Funeral Home.

In a nutshell — death sucks!

From my notes:  “Yes, I’ve ‘scoped’ down profiles on survivors and those who helped save others. We need to know, that amid the darkness, a brighter light shined the night of the Vegas shooting.”

As the shooting began in Las Vegas, Mike Cronk stood his ground. He tried to help his friend who had taken three bullets to the chest.

“Most people started scattering and they climbed the fence, but I had to stay with my buddies. We got him over the fence once the firing stopped and slid him under a stage so we were safe.

My first thoughts were for my buddy. I wanted to make sure he was taken care of. But, you know, we were pretty much yelling at everybody to stay down. That was what we needed to do.”