Category Archives: Oklahoma City

It’s Christmas, 1980’s Oklahoma style.

My favorite Christmas decorations are nativity scenes. The stores are loaded with them. All sorts of styles to choose from.

We have several in our house. Sweetie does a great job with them.

This one below is special to me. It is not the fanciest one we have.

I got it in 1986 right after I moved to Oklahoma City from Dallas. In those days before the internet and Amazon.com you ordered novelty merchandise out of catalogs. Remember all the catalogs from those days? Lands End, and Eddie Bauer were just the beginning. Anyway my secretary, whom I’ll call Frances, was the catalog queen in the office. She’d find something cool and several people would order it. Anyway she found this nativity scene and several of us in the office ordered one. I don’t know why I did, I was single and didn’t decorate for Christmas but I liked it.

A subsequent summer Frances drowned after falling off a sailboat during a midnight cruise on Lake Hefner with her new boyfriend. She wasn’t wearing a life jacket and didn’t know how to swim. It being at night the guy couldn’t see her and a sailboat is not the most maneuverable thing around. They didn’t find her body until the sun came up the subsequent morning.

It was a real mess. She had left her long time boyfriend of many years a few weeks before. But he was still the beneficiary of her life insurance, 401K, all that stuff. It was a real heart breaker. He got it all and he kept it all and I dealt with both him and her family through the whole process. It was a sad and stressful time, for a long time, for everybody who knew her.

We were kind of a tight knit little group and the loss and chaos afterward hit us hard. This was in the midst of the mid 1980’s oil bust that knocked all of Oklahoma for a loop. It seemed that things were never going to get better but eventually of course they did.

Christmas is many things to many people and to me a big part of it is remembering Christmases past especially people who are gone. I always think of Frances at Christmas and how things often don’t turn out the way we plan and that life is fragile. I also learned that people are resilient and although they may never forget something somehow they get through it.

“She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,because he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21 NIV)

And of course I learned that you need to keep your beneficiaries current on your life insurance, 401K’s, and such to help out the people you leave behind because you really don’t know when something is going to happen to you.

I’m linking up with That’s Baloney today for her perfect pairing day.

Devon Tower

I went to Oklahoma City yesterday to see a customer. I took the opportunity to check out the Devon Tower. It is topped out and will be ready for occupancy early next year.

Weekend Reflections

Remember April 19, 1995

16 Years ago today 168 people lost their lives in the Oklahoma City Bombing.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial stands where the Murrah building stood. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

I was living in Tulsa when it occurred. I remember at first it was speculated that Islamic terrorists had perpetrated the crime. Within hours though we found out it was our our own countrymen who planned and executed the killings.

16 Years later all is quiet and peaceful.

Amond the tranquility there are few raw reminders of that day.

It is a very emotional place.

Visitors talk softly, it is like being in a church or other sacred place.

Memorials like this are very important. We don’t ever want to forget what happened, even though many of us still don’t understand how such a thing could occur.