LaRue's Views 1996

There comes a time in the life of every new family when it has to make some decisions: which holidays matter, and where and how they'll be spent.

After the birth of our first child, we made one trip to my wife's family, and one trip to my family for Christmas. Then, together, we decided that from now on we'd spend Christmas at our own house. My wife was adamant that we also pick a special breakfast.

It worked. Until that moment, we were adjuncts to other people's families. After that moment, we were our own family.

Whatever your religious background, you probably find something in the Christmas season that speaks to you. To the Druids (from whom we get the Christmas tree), it was the winter solstice -- the idea of the "evergreen," a life that sustained itself through the cold, but reveled in the seasons of the sun and the promise of warmth to come.

My Great Aunt Edith was a live-in cook. She worked for a wealthy family in Lake Forest, Illinois -- Adlai Stevenson III's maternal grandmother, as it happened.

Like most children, I didn't really pay that much attention to the adults around me. Particularly this time of year, my biggest interest in Aunt Edith concerned what she might have gotten me for Christmas.

One of life's great mysteries is how fascinating it is to talk about your own illnesses -- but how boring it is to listen to anybody else's.

So rather than regale you with the heroic saga of my week-long battle with vertigo (my third bout in six years, as it happens), followed and compounded by the flu, I'll get right to the point: when you can't get out of bed, it's important to have a whole bunch of your favorite books immediately at hand.

About 12 years ago I did a poetry workshop for a K-6 private school. First I got to talk to the kindergartners, then the first graders, and so on up to the 12 year olds.

My approach was pretty basic. I started off by asking, "How many of you had a dream last night?" My next question was, "Who taught you how to dream?"

I'd be remiss if I didn't start this column by thanking the many, many people who helped pass the 1996 library mill levy increase.

Mimi (my grandmother) played the piano. She started young. By the age of 9, she was the local church organist. Her legs were so short she had to tie wooden blocks to her feet so she could reach the pedals. If the congregation had trouble singing something, she just nudged the piece into another, more comfortable key.

But her heart wasn't in sacred music. Mimi liked boogie-woogie. She had a bass line that just STRUTTED up and down the low keys. I loved that stuff, and I loved to watch Mimi play it.

This is the last News Press column before the 1996 election. Aren't you glad?

This year, many Douglas County citizens voted early. But for those of you who haven't, here's a quick round up of the information sources you might want to consult before you walk into the ballot booth.

It's easy to be a little cynical in a campaign year.
Especially at the national level, candidates are out there promising things no one really believes they will, or can, deliver. Too often in America, a "campaign promise" is a little like cotton candy: sweet, but when you bite down on it, mostly air.

In 1990, the citizens of Highlands Ranch had no library at all. Well, that's not quite true. They could trek to the small Oakes Mill Library over by I-25. Or they could leave the county altogether.

But Highlands Ranch residents -- like most of the rest of the county -- are the perfect profile of the regular library user. Beyond that, many of them have kids, and tend to be very supportive of education. South of C-470, the only other place a family could go together was the Highlands Ranch Recreation Center on Broadway.