Mark Dean Nielsen

Several years ago, one of my best childhood friends passed away when he was struck by a train in Nebraska. A couple years after his death, his mother asked me if I would write something as a tribute to his life. One of my many failures in life is that I haven't accomplished this goal. I thought with the use of the Internet, maybe she would do a search one day and stumble upon it. I'm not exactly sure what happened to her after Mark's passing. The last I knew she was living in West Valley, Utah. I hope she is doing well.
What can be said of Mark. I'll do the best that I can considering the constraints of an aging thick skull and the fog of time. I'll beg the reader's pardon if the best parts are left out, my lack of memory is one of the wonders of the world. And certainly there were so many experiences we shared in our decade of friendship that I won't recall them all. I can't believe its been over 10 years since he died!
One thing I do remember is the first day the Nielsens moved in next door to our house in Provo. We looked over the empty lot between the two houses and beheld a UHAUL truck in the steep driveway of their new home and wondered together with my family who they were. Todd and I speculated whether or not they had any girls our age. I have to admit, I didn't think much of Mark the first time I saw him, because of his long hair. We thought maybe he was the girl. This was an oddity in 1984 Provo. I thought, "great we get to live next to a stoner". Now that I'm older and a bit smellier, I'm ashamed for thinking that way, but thus is the ignorance of youth and first impressions are often misleading. This is a great lesson for me now, as I've learned more forcfully that we are all God's children and have good qualities which we just need to be reminded of from time to time. I don't remember how we were forced into servitude helping them with the move, but I'm glad we were. It wasn't the smoothest move in the world and maybe Charlotte wishes she'd asked the Teemonts instead. We broke the aquarium going down the driveway and her fish flipped and flopped all around on the pavement, but Mark and I inaugurated a friendship that would last a decade and see us through some amazing times. Why did our friendship transition into a life-long friendship so easily then? We're we meant to know one another? Why was it so much easier to nurture friendships then? Are we less friendly as we get older, more insecure or less trusting? I don't know. But I digress.
After quickly becoming friends and realizing we both shared many common pleasures, (i.e. sports, girls, wanton destruction, you know the usual) Mark became a permanent fixture in our house. It got to the point where my mom would stumble up the stairs on a school morning to find Mark rummaging through the fridge in search of some breakfast. She grew, or at least we trained her to stop asking why Mark had slept over on a school night. After a while, she didn't even mind and Charlotte would call to ask if Mark was there. "OK, just wanted to make sure he was there, see ya later", Charlotte would say. Mark was like my mom's fourth son and she'd often say "hi son" to him only half joking.
We were notorious for having, shall we say a little bit of a pit for a home and I wondered why Mark wanted to spend so much time there, but we loved that he did. Maybe in retrospect, it was the way it was because we rough housed so much. I remember taking the mattresses off the beds, standing them upright in the stairwell and pushing them down in front of us. We would fall over each other tumbling down the stairs.
It wasn't long after our friendship started that I discovered Mark's dad was Danish and his mom was Greek. The Schmo that I am, I took great joy in referring to him as the "Dan-Greek", a nickname that stuck and was propagated in the neighborhood for years to come. He took it in stride and didn't seem to let things bother him much. (much)
We teased Mark unmercifully looking back with the objectivity that distance allows. I remember tip toeing around him as he slept in on the weekends. I and usually Todd, my accomplice, would quietly place the speakers on both sides of his head as not to wake him before the anticipated moment had arrived. I'd put the White Album in the "boom box" forward it to ole' #15 on the display. Going Marty McFly on the volume, I turn it to the right until you could hear the static slightly register, I'd don the sun-glasses and hit play. Mark would wake up to Ringo poundin' on the drums and levitate momentarily off the bed, before hitting the ground again. Then running towards us as if he was going to punch us, he sang to us a "chorus of the four-letter-serenade". Sure he cursed us a lot, but deep down, I think he really liked it. He must have, he always came back, right?
Mark somehow kept a healthy respect for the Beatles despite these rude awakenings. He even liked the 15th track I do believe, but he could never seem to grow an appreciation for "Crosstown Traffic" by Jimi Hendrix. There was something deeply flawed in his personality to not like this song and I took it upon myself to aid Mark with this deficiency. I embarked on a mission to bring him to the light! I played it for him whenever the occasion would permit in a vain hope that it would grow on him. I would call him on the phone, say "hey Mark", hold the receiver to the speaker then press play. "Do do, do do do, do do", he loved that part. I'd play it when he came over to watch MTV at our place, play it under the door when he was trying to do his business in the bathroom to which came a muffled response through the door. My favorite methodology of all was blasting it full out my window facing his house. He would pop out the door and yell something like "turn off that #%%# thing, I'm trying to watch the smurfs over here and I can't hear the TV over that garbage!" OK, that part isn't true, I can't remember exactly what he watched in those days, I don't think it was the smurfs. Maybe it was "A Small Wonder", no that was grandpa's stupid show.
The one thing that annoyed the living heck out of me is the previously mentioned, MTV Watching (AT MY HOUSE)! I remember I was starting really to hate MTV, because it was in the crapper after being somewhat good in the very early 80s. Mark, on the other hand, loved it and would come over to get his fill. I'd be watching something and he'd sit down, grab the remote and turn on that infernal channel! I finally called and had them block it, because it drove me nuts. I don't think he appreciated it very much and couldn't understand how I could do something like that. How can you pay for a channel and not get it, he would inquire. Because if the cable company really wants to screw you, they'll give you MTV2 for free or something to that effect was usually my reply.
Maybe the reason he liked MTV so much was that he was an entertainer (in his own mind).
We used to work at Arbys together. After we'd close, he would get in front of the lobby microphone and start wailing "TAKE ME DOWN TO THE PARADISE CITY, WHERE THE GRASS IS GREEN AND THE GIRLS ARE PRETTY!" He would gyrate and bob back and forth in front of that microphone like he was Axl Rose. It was truly horrible and several times, I almost threw up in the Arby's sauce containers, but somehow managed. Just when I thought I'd gotten through to him and convinced him that he had slightly less talent than Robert Goulet, I'd go back to cleaning the shake machine. Teri would come running and say "do it again". "NOOOOOOO!!! What are you doing?". She'd just laugh and Mark would hear the guitars and the drums key up for an encore and I'm sure he saw groupies in the audience judging by the goofy smile on his mug. I'd just go back to my work and let them have their little show while trying to concentrate as best I could on the elevator music playing through the weak arby's speakers.
Even though we teased him an awful lot (see, I'm still teasing him), Mark was always a good ally to have. I remember one time, we were driving back from somewhere and I was being a brat to one of my siblings. My parents finally lost it and told me to get out and walk. It was a substantial distance from home, probably about 8 or 9 miles. Mark jumped out with me and started walking. My mother informed him that he need not walk and that they'd take him home, but he said "no, Clint's my friend, I'll walk with him". I thought that was a wonderful display of loyalty. That was a christ-like gesture if there ever was one. "I'll walk the distance with you, even if you're the one that got in trouble!".
He was merciful, but still had a streak of righteous indignation. There was the time that we were at the Provo High pool and a couple of guys wanted to start something with us. Todd and I weren't gonna do anything about it and Mark, though agitated and exchanging words, was willing to let bygones be bygones. That was of course until they followed us outside. The kept hurling pejoratives at us and finally after Mark responded with a comeback of his own that the bully took exception to, he came up behind Mark and hit him in the back of the head. Mark spun around and yelled, "YOU HIT ME!". This made me and Todd laugh at the least opportune moment. Mark being in the midst of puberty, had his voice crack. Exactly as he said "HIT", his voiced cracked and went high pitched. But undeterred, he went over and popped the kid between the eyes and he toppled over a bike.
Had Mark not been my ally, I would have been sorry. He was always kind of a tough guy. He hit really hard in football and "smeer the queer" (I know, it's not PC, shut up). He was so tough that kids in the neighborhood would throw the ball at him rather than take the hit like a good victim should. I won't point any fingers, "Gardners I'm lookin' in your direction."
As any card-carrying teens, it was truly a wonder we survived at all. One thing we liked to do was to dress up in layers of my step dads army clothes, go up in the mountains, get a running start down the mountain and jump head-first into the scrub-oak! Amazingly, we were never impaled, by a branch! We also used to love to roll boulders down the side of the mountain as well. Never hit any homes, but I'm sure we displaced some squirrels and snakes.
Mark seemed more fearless than most though when we pulled our stunts. I remember he'd always go the fastest on the bike and jump the highest off a jump. If he fell, he'd laugh it off. I imagine that's why he had so many scars and broken bones. What was it? Left-collar bone twice and right once, maybe both twice? I can't remember anymore. I remember having a lip-sync concert in our garage and inviting the whole neighborhood to watch. Todd was pounding away with "paint scrapers". Mark stepped a little too close and slice! Just about lost his hand. It slit the top of his wrist. He just looked at it and said, "wow, cool, look how deep it is". He went home and not the hospital. He always had a HUGE scar on the top of his wrist, because of that.
Of course, with teen years came, girls!!! We loved them. Oooh how we loved them so, and they loved....Mark (wait a minute, thats not fair!) Why don't they love ME? But they did seem to take a shine to him, which always made me a little jealous, I'll admit it. I remember in Rockland when he decided to go back home to Utah, the girls were begging him to stay.
Earlier when we were attending Junior High at Farrer an incident occurred. We were in art class one day. He and I were over by the window doing something "arty". Mark took his art serious back then. I was looking at him and laughing about something as a cute girl walked behind us. I saw a jerking reaction, a kind of shocked look as he went up on his toes slightly. I realized that she had just given him a "scwonch"! Holy cow in Happy Valley! In Junior High? "Did she just grab your butt?" I asked. He just kind of shook his head affirmatively and not at all smiling or amused. It was to Mark's great credit that he took offence when a lot of guys in Junior High would've pulled the old mr. suave "well, well, well, hey baby." That for me was awesome, especially at an age when a stiff breeze makes the male sex start singing Wayne Newton loves songs 24/7.
I did respect him a lot, because at his core, he knew what was right and what was wrong. I know that if he were alive, he'd be fighting for values right now. I wish I'd have told him that I respected him now that he's gone, instead of being competative and teasing all the time. There were a few times when the teasing just got to be too much and he blew his cork! Like the time we were filming our little crap C movie "Follow the Ho Chi Mihn Trail". My brother, Roger, kept shooting Mark in the backside with his bb gun. Mark finally snapped and our movie took a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse. It went from 'G', uninteresting and totally stupid to 'XXX', provocative and yet somehow, totally stupid. Mark very creatively restructured the English language in a way that had previously and has yet been duplicated. He even suggested in great detail several different things Roger could do with his bb gun and most of them were anatomically infeasible. Mark though was good natured about the shootings in the end. Roger approached him with a hand full of Sego-Lillies to beg his forgiveness and asked him to the prom. Mark accepted and smiled the cheesiest grin in the history of bad-cinema. I don't how the prom went for those two and I never saw the pictures, but I'm sure they made a snappy couple.
The other "snapping" incident occurred on a day when Mark chose to sleep-in, he was pretty good at that too. He loved to sleep in on the weekends. I mean you know it's bad when he out-slept me! We wanted to go do something fun and were sick of waiting around for him, it was the weekend, time for little boys to play and cause havoc! Todd and I ran over to the "Dan-Greeks" house and knocked on the door. "No, he's asleep", his mother informed us. We were disappointed, but I decided we could avoid the middle-man and get it directly from the horse's mouth. We went to the back of the house and started throwing little pebbles at his bedroom window to wake him up. He finally popped his angrily distorted head out to see who was disturbing his slumber. Recognizing who it was, he motioned for us to go away. We respectfully listened to his complaints, having great empathy for him and then did the only thing we could being in our position. . . We waited for him to close the window, draw the curtain and allotted about a minute so we could be sure he was comfortably back in bed and then started lobbing pebbles again. Of course we did, what else could we do? This was now our entertainment. It didn't matter if we could get him to come out and play, now he was the show. If we could get a reaction, that was sufficient for us. After 3 or 4 more gestures for us to leave him alone (several of the gestures being made with his longest finger), he finally came running around the side of the house with a big old boulder (I swear I don't know how he fit that sucker in his hand) and hucked it at us as hard as he possibly could. It didn't hit us, which is evident in the fact that neither Todd or I have a physical deformity, but we did decide on that note it was time for us to find a less dangerous past time.
Mark had some odd talents. Belching was chief among them. He could suck air over and over until he had built enough in his innards to release a death defying burp! On occasion, he would even hurt himself and be out of commission for a couple of hours (no exaggeration here). Honestly, I have never heard burps like that in my life and didn't think they were humanly possible. It sounded as if the bowells of hell were opening and releasing all there wrath in one giant, long drawn out groan. One night, we thought that it would be funny to put this talent to good use. My sister Di and her fiance, Troy, were courtin' on the front steps after work. They both worked at Arbys at the time and had driven home together after working the late shift. We were "asleep" in the living room and noticed that they were out on the porch. Of course, we couldn't just let them just enjoy each others company uninterrupted so we opened the window and started dropping stink scudds into the crisp night air. This didn't seem to dampen the romantic atmosphere enough, which was very frustrating. We decided drastic measures were in order and closed the window. "Mark do 'The Burp'"! He started sucking air over and over as fast as he could. He placed both his hands by his mouth and formed a suction with his hands up against the door. We said, "loose" and then came the release, "waaaaaaaaaaaaaah"! Its a wonder that the door didn't go flying off into space like the trapped villains in Superman. I was looking around for General Zod and his ilk! You could hear Di and Troy just outside the door laughing, "oh my gosh" and speculating if that was a burp or what, it might have been an explosion in the house, maybe we should go check. I know somewhere in Heaven, Mark is travelling around awing the heavenly hosts by burping the alphabet in every earthy spoken tongue, and some unspoken, including the adamic language!
The burping probably came as a direct result of all the maraschino cherries that we dared him to eat. He was always good for a dare. "I double dog dare you." One time, we received a giant bottle of the things as a white elephant gift or something. No one really liked them, but Mark. "OK, tough guy, if you like them so much, we dare you to eat the whole bottle." "Oh yeah, no one double dog dares me and gets away with it." He ate the whole thing, every last one (ick)! I'm not sure what kind of ill effects it had an his digestive system, but I'm sure there had to be some. It still makes me sick every time I think about it.
Then there is the time he made out with my sister, Di. Just kidding Di. I'm not sure how this rumor got started, but just to clear it up so there's no question about it. Mark and my sister did not make out. That would have been like Marty and his mom kissing in 'Back to the Future'. Mark was like her brother.
Mark was a close friend to all of us. I saw him judged by others and myself at times, yet he was more than he appeared. Though imperfect, as we all are, I'm glad I had the pleasure to know him and learn from his life. I know that in so many ways, he was a far better man and boy than I was or am. We all remember his life with great affection and fondness. I ofter wonder what he might have done had he not passed on. This much is certain, he is still doing good things in the hereafter. Mark sought out truth in this life and he will surely find it in the next. He is sorely missed even more than a decade after his untimely death. I love you my com padre.
C.D.D
P.S. I reserve the right to add to this as more comes to mind.