Moments

By Pat Hughes

He saw the look on his dad's face. He would never forget it. Dad had asked his wayward nineteen-year-old son, ''Where are you living now, Pat?" "Here!" he exclaimed. His siblings cheered. Mom smiled. Dad wondered what was next. Later that night, his dad started reminiscing about the last few years in Billings, Montana. Nine years ago, he was in a financial hole that seemed impossible to ever climb out of. He had skipped paying the last ten house payments. He hadn't gotten late payment statements or anything. He went into the bank and looked up an old friend who worked there. Someone had made a clerical error eleven months earlier and had recorded receiving ten payments instead of one. His banker friend said that he was going to make another clerical error and increase the term of his loan for another ten months. He told dad he would call him for the next few months to remind him to make his house payment. Dad prayed for a better paying job. Months later, Dad fell into his business where all of a sudden, he employed one hundred salesmen. Years later, he prayed for a bigger house, and someone mentioned that a neighbor wanted to move into a smaller house. Somehow, they traded houses, and moved within a month or two. Now they had a house with one more bedroom and one more bathroom. He had also prayed for one less child in the house. I was the one less child he had prayed for. He mentioned Matthew 18:10 about his personal guardian angel. "Why the hell would I want to know all that crap?" Pat wondered as he headed for the party. Years later, after the passing of both of his parents and most of his older relatives, he wonders, "What was my dad thinking, how could he have done that, why did he do that..." Pat decided that his children could read what he was thinking, how he did that, why he did that. He decided to write it down. After a few years of writing and losing many typed backups, he started sorting his collection of stories into two groups: Moments and My Guardian Angel. Publishing a book, combining these two groups of stories, is an attempt to save his writings. There is much more. This is just the first book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781645690467

Pat Hughes

Pat Hughes has 40 years experience in documentary research, studying the background to historic houses, townscapes, and landscapes across the Midlands and the west of England; she is particularly interested in the insights provided by documents in interpreting standing buildings and archaeological sites.

Book preview

cover.jpgtitle

ISBN 978-1-64569-045-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64569-046-7 (digital)

Copyright © 2019 by Pat Hughes

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The ’50s and ’60s

1968, Garryowen, Montana

1965, Billings, Montana

1969, Forsythe, Montana

1956, Missoula, Montana

1956, Missoula, Montana

1967, Indian Caves

1969, Summer Camp

1961, Augusta, Montana

1968, Bozeman, Montana

1969, Lander, Wyoming

1960, Sunrise Shopping Center

1966, Missoula, Montana

1969, Nebraska

1967, San Diego

1969, Whitehall, Montana

The ’70s

1971, Bud

1973, Christmas Trees

1970, Tomahawk Room

1973, Ride at the Fair

1979, Christmas Trees

1972, Harford Field

1970, Army Reserves, Casper

1980, Casper Mountain

The ’80s

1980, Casper, Wyoming

1986, Seventh and Missouri

1989, Glenwood Springs, Colorado

1986, Is Your Kid

1988, Rex

1986, Colorado Chrysler

The ’90s

1993, Mile-High Stadium

1993, Cresthill School

1992, Seattle Reunion

1998, Kelly Walsh Bleachers

1995, Weekend Bowling Excitement

1995, Dr. Ellbogen

1992, Salt Lake City, Utah

1992, Billings, Montana

1997, Jean

The 2000s

2001, American Airlines

2003, Temecula

2004, Casper Mountain

2005, Leiter, Wyoming

2008, Casper Windows

The 2010s

2011, Cody

2018, Frosty’s

2018, Gun Control

2017, Christmas Trees

2014, New Year’s Eve

2015, After Easter

2018, Boston, Massachusetts

2016, Pops

2018, Golf

Do you ever just stumble upon a situation, a feeling, that is simply memorable? Do you have a concert, a movie, a trip that is enduring? Do you have a conversation of hours, minutes, seconds, or a moment of silence that is simply unforgettable?

Don’t we enjoy or detest jokes of all flavors? Don’t we all love or hate the writing on bathroom walls? Even though we condemn graffiti, don’t we have a slight respect for the artistic quality of the perpetrator? Don’t we all put ourselves in the shoes of the artists? How did they climb up there? How many cans of spray paint did that take? Is that an original design? Do they have a message?

Why do I find myself constantly surprised by a reply, an action, a situation? Am I not looking for a personal satisfaction or hungering for some small measure of gratification?

I seem to constantly seek out satisfaction by listening or talking, by feeling or giving, to be involved in the making of a memory.

My Guardian Angel

Someone was constantly watching over me, guiding me, maybe restraining me. In school, I seemed to have answers to the questions before they were asked. In sports, I was always on the team. At play, I was always included. At work, I was always involved. When there was trouble, I only seemed to be just close. There was always an action, an incident that kept me slightly distant from a situation or occurrence, but involved enough that somehow, I became the suspect of somehow causing the event.

Was I occasionally saved from disaster to learn a lesson? Had I been guided close to or into trouble to educate me? Did my peers undergo punishment or injury to teach me a lesson? Did I suffer a minor calamity to prevent a major disaster?

My family relocated in my fifth-grade year. My best friend and constant companion was sent to reform school four months later. He has been incarcerated his entire life.

During the summer of 1965, a group of friends and I were walking around Billings, Montana. We decided to swim across a gravel pit on the west side of town. I was daydreaming, floating on my back. I was only halfway across the water when my friends reached the other side. They started yelling at me and throwing rocks near me. I had trouble reaching the shore. I experienced a type of dry drowning. I didn’t mention this to any of them. The next week, a classmate and good friend of ours drowned at that gravel pit doing just about the same thing with a group of friends. My mother is buried right next to this person in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Billings, Montana.

My wife refused to go to a twenty-first birthday party on Casper Mountain for my good friend. She insisted that she didn’t want to drive down the mountain after everyone had been drinking all day. We stayed home. This friend of mine died in a car accident after the party on the way back down the mountain.

I exited a vessel on the Frontier Refinery at about 12:02 p.m. My bicycle was my method of transportation around the refinery. One of the pipe fitters on the job had knocked the chain off my bicycle playing around. I jumped on the back tailgate of a pickup full of laborers from another company to ride out of the refinery for lunch. As I ran into the restaurant at 12:07 p.m., the power surged. I sat down to observe a smoke-filled sky. The refinery had suffered a major explosion. The source of the explosion was within one hundred feet of my bicycle. Three workers died. Seven more were burned over 90 percent of their body.

I’m not really trying to answer any questions that I have, I’m merely relating a few experiences where I believe that I have had an outside influence help me escape from what I perceive to be an accident, maybe an injury, or an uncomfortable situation—maybe death. I would really like to believe that I was allowed to exist in the manner that I have with the help of my guardian angel.

Book 1

The ’50s and ’60s

Chapter 1

1968, Garryowen, Montana

Twenty years old, invincible—that was me in 1968. I was working for Sweetheart Bakery out of Billings, Montana, my hometown, as a relief bread salesman throughout Montana and Wyoming. I would work on different local bread routes in many towns for two to four weeks at a time. I was currently working in Casper, Wyoming.

I was a member of the Marine Reserves in Billings and had to attend weekend reserve meetings once a month. I would hitchhike back and forth to these meetings for the adventure and challenge as much as anything. If I got close enough to Billings early enough, it seemed like a fellow reservist would pick me up and take me to the meeting.

I had learned to ask how far people were going when they stopped to give me a ride. It only took one time being dropped off on the wrong end of Livingston, Montana, to learn this lesson. Livingston was notorious for its five-mile long main street. The city police strictly enforced a twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit and disapproved of hitchhiking. It was not much fun to have to walk these five miles while trying to get across the state.

I never felt like I was the least bit prejudiced, but I had learned not to accept rides from Indians. It seemed that they would change their minds where they were going once they got you in the car and started moving. Sometimes I didn’t follow my own rules depending on the volume of traffic. This particular time, I was stranded in Garryowen, Montana. This ice age gas station/ convenience store/museum was in the middle of nowhere. It was close to the Custer Battlefield site in the middle of the Crow Indian Reservation. I had accepted a ride with an Indian couple, and they had decided to stop and stay with relatives for the afternoon near Garryowen.

I wasn’t having any luck getting a ride, so I accepted a ride with a carload of teenage Indians. There were six of them in the car, so I ended up in the backseat with three wild Indians. The one Indian that I wasn’t sitting against in the back seat was about fifteen years old and looked like he was mad at the world. He kept looking at me like he wanted to cut my throat. The two nondrivers in the front seat were also less than friendly. The driver kept turning around and teasing me about all the similarities that I had with Custer. This was one of the many times that I was glad that I didn’t have long blonde hair.

I wanted to get out of that car in the worst way. It didn’t help my situation much that the driver was driving eighty to one hundred miles an hour and that he couldn’t seem to keep the car on the pavement. If he would have been looking at the road instead of at me, it would have made me feel only slightly terrified.

My guardian angel showed up in the least unexpected way! The radio, which was already blasting, brought me to life with Paul Revere and the Raiders’ Cherokee Nation.

Turn it up! I screamed, waving my fist toward the air. I started punching and shoving… All seven of us became blood brothers for the next three or four minutes. We bumped and slapped and screamed ourselves into hysteria. Each of us was trying to sing louder than anyone else, but none of us really knew the words to the song.

Just as the song was ending, we approached a wide spot in the road next to two trees, a 1960’s rest area.

Hey, I’m supposed to meet somebody here! I yelled.

The driver slammed on the brakes. I jumped out, and they sped off, all waving and yelling madly to their new friend. I didn’t ever sweat much, but I was soaking wet that day. I managed to catch a ride from there to my meeting with some of my reservist friends.

Chapter 2

1965, Billings, Montana

The night started out like a normal summer night for a couple of inseparable boys, seventeen years-old, on summer vacation from high school. We spent out mornings caddying at the Yellowstone Country Club Golf Course, our afternoons trying to hustle work, our nights working at the baseball park, or just hanging out when there was no baseball game. We were just hanging out in John’s parent’s basement that night. He lived right next to one of the few late-night gas stations at 8th Street and Grand Avenue in Billings, Montana. John had grabbed a couple of beers from his parents’ refrigerator, and was downing them slowly since they were probably all the beers he was going to have that night. I had tried drinking once at Augusta, Montana, where I spent my previous summers. I hadn’t touched a beer in Billings in my lifetime.

Because of the location, we usually had quite a few friends show up at John’s house when we hung out there. There was something else going on that night, so we weren’t expecting anyone. Then, wow, five girls showed up. Too bad for John, one of them was his steady girlfriend. My steady girlfriend worked out of town. These five girls were really good friends of mine, and John, and my girlfriend. We were all in the same class in school, and did many activities together. Two of these girls were long time girlfriends of our friends in school.

John was drinking the second bottle of beer by then, so the girls decided to play ‘’spin-the-bottle" with the empty bottle. The ground rules were simple: no boys kissing boys or girls kissing girls. My complaint about being seriously outnumbered went unheeded. The next hour and a half was one of the highlights of my high school years. The four girls really laid it on me. John and his girlfriend were seriously hampered by both being there. When the girls left, they swore us all to silence. Man, I was ready to run out on Grand Avenue and tell the world what I had just been through.

By one thirty, John and I had migrated to the roof of the garage, where we lay looking up at the night sky. There was no way either of us was going to sleep anytime soon. I was on top of the world and John was mad at me and the rest of the world. I kept talking about trying to repeat this party every night for the rest of the summer, and maybe the rest of the school year, Maybe college, … He kept trying to change the subject.

We casually noticed a spaceship above us in the air. This UFO appeared out of nowhere and hovered above us, slowly descending from about two miles up, down to approximately three hundred to four hundred feet, where it seemed to stop descending. Four or five minutes had elapsed since we first noticed it. This craft had four to six brightly blinking lights. The lights seemed to be different colors, but not colors that we could easily recognize or identify. The lights were slowly rotating and flashing so brightly and erratically, that they were really confusing. We were scared to death. We were talking flying saucer, UFO, abduction, getting your brains sucked out,… I was also thinking no more spin-the-bottle, or maybe, spin-the-bottle with alien girls. I was shaking and experiencing a behind the eyes brain flashing. Oh somebody, take us back a couple hours to where life was so uncomplicated.

Just then, a jet came out of the west end of the Billings airport, did a tight U-turn at full speed and came after this spaceship at full acceleration, at about three hundred feet above the ground. This UFO made a slight whirr, and then a loud clanking sound, as it disappeared to another dimension to the east. We were left with a jet buzzing by us. This jet was really loud. The spaceship disappeared in a split second. It was followed by a flash of light hundreds, maybe thousands of miles long that also disappeared instantly. The trail of light was amazingly straight. The jet slowed to a wide circle, and landed back at the airport. We jumped off the roof and went back in the house.

John and I sat and talked and worried for a couple more hours as we watched out the window. We were really afraid that the UFO might come back for us. Nothing came back, but John swore me to silence so people wouldn’t think we were crazy. I thought I was already crazy because of it, having experienced the shivers on an eighty-degree night in Montana. I had so many mixed emotions about it all. Even so, before going to sleep that night, I still wanted to just run out onto Grand Avenue and tell the world what happened to me earlier that night.

I called the Air Force Base and the airport in the morning, asking about a UFO sighting last night. They both said that I probably saw