Love 7

Things I Love

 

I love my sweet husband, Jakob.

I’ve blogged so much about my life and told so many of my own stories.  But nobody gets to hear any of Jakob’s stories.  And his are way cooler than mine.  So I thought I’d just highlight a few stories about Jakob in tribute to my love this Valentine’s day.

This will be my Valentine’s gift to Jakob.  He is the fourth of five children.  A middle child.  So he will love the attention.  Plus, he surprised me (something so hard for him to do) with the best Valentine’s gift I have ever received:

North and South.  He introduced me to this series our first year of marriage.  It is the Downton Abbey of the Civil War.  Made in 1985.  Starring Patrick Swayze.  It is Awesome.

Jakob was the cutest baby.

This was his favorite shirt.

Jakob was also the happiest kid.  He just loved life and was always super happy.

The highlight of his early childhood was his 5-year-old birthday party.  All of his friends at his house to celebrate him.  He was in heaven.

One time, when Jakob was 7, he dialed a radio station for a contest and won the Prince Purple Rain album.  He was so excited.  He tried many more radio contests over the next month.  That was back in the day when they charged you for every call you made from you home phone.  Jakob had charged up $20 in calls to the radio station.  He had to earn the money to pay his parents back.

When Jakob was eleven, he starred in a movie that was shown at the BYU Film Festival. His uncle was majoring in film at BYU, and his final project was a movie he wrote and directed called, “Oh, What a Pretty Web”. Jakob was the main star. It is about a little boy who gets caught up in his web of lies. Jakob won best actor at the BYU Film Festival! He showed me this movie on our very first date. One of the many things that the unabashed Jakob did when we were dating that makes me laugh.

When he was twelve, he got a paper route to earn money.  One time, when he was going through his route to collect the payments for the month, an old man propositioned him to earn money in a different kind of way.  Jakob ran home and told his mom.  That man had already been twice convicted of child molestation, and Jakob had to testify at his trial.  He put the man back in jail with his testimony.

Jakob received his Eagle award from the Boy Scouts when he was just fourteen years old.  His dad served as the Scoutmaster practically the whole time that he was in Scouts.  They are a devoted scouting family.



Jakob grew up in a kind of sketchy area south of Los Angeles, Harbor City.  (This picture is a memorial set up a few houses down from Jakob’s old house after two teenagers were killed in a drive-by shooting.)

Jakob’s dad’s truck got stolen out of a store parking lot, a couple of radios got stolen out of their cars, and every year someone in the family got their bike stolen, sometimes from their backyard.  When he was younger there was a drive-by shooting at his neighbor’s home.  You can read about more gang related crime in his neighborhood here, here, and here.  A student at his high school was beat-up and killed while at school in 1995, just a year after Jakob graduated. 

For these reasons, Jakob thought he was a gangster and didn’t smile for pictures from middle school until after our wedding.  If only he had known that he would spend the rest of his life listening to his wife going on and on about how he was not a Mexican war lord and that he looked ridiculous not smiling in his pictures, he would have been grinning from ear to ear for every picture.

A day after the 1992 LA riots, happy-go-lucky-not-an-enemy-in-the-world Jakob decided to walk down to his neighborhood convenient store for a soda by himself.  The store was closed because of the riots.  On his walk back, a group of  Hispanic gang members started following him and throwing rocks at him.  They caught up with him, and surrounded him.  They stared him down, got in his face and were yelling at him.  “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself.  It’s not safe.”  And then the angels intervened and all the gang members just walked away.  I think the angels in heaven had to work extra hard to keep "everyone-is-my-friend" Jakob alive through his childhood.

Despite not living in the safest part of the country, Jakob got a good education.  His school had an excellent Math and Science Magnet program that he attended from elementary school through high school.  His school was very diverse.  The minorities were the majority.  His junior year in high school, he saw injustice in all of the cultural clubs at the school that excluded him – Pacific Islanders Club, Filipino Student Union, BSO Black Student Organization, Hispanic Pride Organization, etc. – so he proposed the formation of a new club, The European Descent Club.  He wrote a letter to the editor of the school newspaper.  His proposal was denied.

Jakob played basketball in high school.  It was a pretty competitive division of basketball, considering they played against Crenshaw and Dorsey High School.  Jakob’s junior year, his high school coach told him he needed to put on weight and told him to drink weight gainer shakes.  He gained 20 lbs. in one summer.

Shortly after high school, he realized that putting on weight may help you for sports, but not so much for when you aren’t playing sports.  It only took him 14 years and a major jaw surgery to lose that round, baby face.

Jakob worked at The Gap from the time he was 16 until after we were married.  He was stockroom manager while we were married.  He was a pretty stylish guy.

He served a two-year mission for our church in the Peru, Lima South Mission.  Except for in the MTC, he served with only native Peruvian companions the entire time.  His Spanish was perfecto.

Jakob’s mom once told him that she thought that hair on a man’s chest was very manly and attractive.  This could’ve been true, or it could’ve been a way to help her extremely hairy son not be embarrassed by his hairy chest.  Either way, Jakob bought it.  Jakob would show up at my apartment many times when we were dating, shirtless.  I thought his lack of self-consciousness and complete unawareness were charming, and I fell in love with him.  In that context, hairy chests are attractive.

I love this guy and am so glad that this gangster from the hood took a chance on a young girl who had never even bought anything from The Gap.