Today is Jay Wentz' birthday!
I am stuck at home today since Steve has the car at work, so I can't go take balloons or anything, which is a bummer, so that will have to wait till tomorrow.
But for today, I don't want his birthday to be forgotten.
He deserves a Happy Birthday shout out!
He would be 28 today. How crazy is that?
Once I remember Jay getting this big ol bag of taffy for his birthday. We were jumping on the tramp in our back yard and he had a bag of orange taffy. Random memory, but it paints a super vivid image in my mind. The peach tree was on the side of the tramp and we'd see if we could jump higher than it.
I remember how much he liked halloween. He dominated Halloween. He would get a pillowcase of candy and then gamble with it with us- we'd all put a piece in the pot, play paper rock scissors, and whoever won got all of it. He seriously wiped us out. Kyle and I still can't figure out how he always won. But the thing about Jay was that he wasn't selfish and kept it all- he'd make us say some surrender line like "Jay is the coolest ever, Halloween champion extraordinaire and I will give him all my money", and then he'd give it all back so we could keep playing (and he would win it all over again, but we never got tired of playing.)
I remember game days. Wentz game days were intense. Jay made all games/competitions the real deal. We'd play monopoly, parcheesi, and Life all day on Thanksgiving. We would play over and over and over. It was so fun. New Years day and Thanksgiving were always game days.
I remember lots of times that he would set a brownie mix or cake mix on the counter so I would see it when I walked by and he would say, "Huh, what's that doing there? You should make them!". :) That was his ploy to get me to make food for him.
I remember I really wanted to go to EFY (my parents weren't too into the idea, so I had to pay for it myself) , but I wasn't going to have enough money. Jay was talking to me about it and said that a lot of his mission companions really gained their testimonies at EFY, and he really wanted me to go. He said that he made a lot more at his job than I made at mine so he wanted to help me out, and he gave me $80 to cover the rest of the registration money. He said if I wanted to pay him back I could, but if not then it was just a gift. That's probably one of the sweetest moments I had with Jay. That's how he is. He isn't out for himself at ALL. You can't say that about too many people. He really is generous, and I knew he loved me.
Another time he wanted to buy a new camera (he is an AMAZING photographer), and I didn't have one, so I said I would buy his old camera. Well I bought it, but shortly after the screen got jammed and wouldn't really work. Most people would say tough, you bought it, it's yours now. Not Jay. He bought it back from me. I didn't even ask him, he suggested it, and said that he wanted me to have a good camera, not a broken one. He didn't have a lot of money then, he had just quit his job, and it was only $40, but to me that was a ton. And it showed his character so much. That's just how Jay is.
I remember when he learned that you could text via yahoo chat. He didn't have a cell phone then, but he had a yahoo email, and he would text me things from there. We had a cat obsession phase (our cat had just had kittens), so we would text back and forth silly poems about cats. It was always the best when I was sitting in a long class and I would get a kitten poem sent to my phone. I loved that. and I miss that. I still have that yahoo chat number, ya know-the number of whoever sent it to you, saved in my phone as Jay Wentz. :) I don't know if I'll ever delete it.
I admired what a good student Jay was and I always wanted to be like that. I learned that getting really into learning and going hardcore, like trying to "dominate" (that was his word) tests, or classes was actually really fun.
I learned to be passionate from Jay. He would get super into movies, styles, once he even got super into foreign chocolate. He loved calling himself a chocolatier. After all his studying he concluded that Milka and Symphony were the best.
I learned to take care of my stuff from him. He would make things last forever, and held on to cool little sentimental things. He had this little basket thing he had made for years after he made it.
I remember he would have Kyle and I drink a cup of milk but not swallow it, just keep it in our mouths, and sit on the linoleum by our front door while he did funny plays for us. As soon as he made us laugh enough that the milk would come squirting out he would consider it a success.
He was hilarious. Jay was totally the humor in our family.
He kept this notebook, the kind that's bound at the top and then you flip the pages up and over it, of all the words he really liked. He got an "Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus" (he would always say the full name when he referred to it, again, he's hilarious) once, and went through and found the definitions to words he liked. It had quite a few pages. One day, I got the honor of taking over the word book. He passed it on to me to start writing words in. I felt privileged. :) I started a new one. In a little striped book. I have a couple pages filled, but I want to keep going. I want to show it to my students when we do vocabulary lessons to show them how cool new and awesome words can be.
I remember a few months after he passed away my dad pulling the bbq out of the shed, and when he opened it there were a couple pieces of bread sitting on the grill. Remember how I said Jay was an amazing photographer? Well we had found this album that had a bunch of cool pics he had taken, and this was one of them:
I thought it was a really cool picture when we first found it. He really liked making every day things look really cool using shadows and light. When my dad opened the grill he found these pieces of bread- I guess Jay had forgotten to take them off after he took it, and we hadn't used it since then. I never thought I would say that opening a grill and finding five stale pieces of bread would make me cry like it did, but that's totally what happened. It sure made me miss him.
At Hobby Lobby in American fork (That used to be Smith's), there is a waist high yellow cement pole right near the south west entrance. If you look at the top of it there are the initials "JW", and at the base of the pole there is a smiley face. Jay drew those in the wet cement when that Smith's was first built and he was a kid that couldn't resist wet cement or leaving his legacy. He would love the fact that it's still there today. :)
He would write his name underneath our kitchen counter with the date and year, and it was so cool when five years later we would happen to be under the table and see it. I wanted to be as cool as Jay. So did Kyle, we wrote our initials everywhere to try and be like him. I was not as discreet about it and did it with a green paint pen on the wall right next to our garage door opener in our garage. I think the only reason it's still there is that we're so used to it we don't even notice it anymore, so no one has ever thought to paint over it or wash it off.
I cherish my memories with Jay. And the fact that I know I don't get to make any more makes me want to hold on to those memories with everything I have. I don't ever ever want to forget them. Or forget him. I miss him so much. and I love him so much.
Happy Birthday Jay Wentz. We love you :)
