My 3 sons...

Chris, Van, Peter - July 2009 - on a canyon hike in S Utah

Ten years...

Ten years ago this evening, Nana died.

My thoughts are often about her. Among the questions I have is whether I did all I could for her.

She moved to Tucson in July 1985, leaving behind friends who revered her, and a house full of all sorts of things that had accumulated over 31 years, and all sorts of other things that had been crammed into it when they first moved there when I was 11.

So she arrived to join us in Tucson in Summer 1985 with a moving truck full, the subset of possessions with which she filled her new condo.

She immediately took up grandmothering, driving kids to school, serving in its little library, eating supper with us, taking the kids to the pool where she lived.

She had 3 1/2 good years, and then she got sick. Surgery left her blind. Her driving, reading, and knitting days all came to an end at once. She was in and out of facilities - PT, nursing home, group home - and then came to roost at a good group home not far from our house. And it was there she died.

I could recount the circumstances, but it wouldn't make any difference. She did die. I didn't expect it, since she had been about to die so many times before. And this time, instead of falling on her head, or losing a function during surgery, or going into insulin shock, or having a stroke, she got pneumonia and faded away.

She always had said that pneumonia was the best friend of the elderly. All four of her grandparents had died of it, all around age 50, all around 1900. And she was far more elderly than they.

It may have been her friend, too. I don't know. I just miss her.

By now, 10 years later, she would have been almost 98, and would certainly be gone. So I would be missing her anyway. But it still doesn't seem right that she faded away when she did.

But what is a librarian without books? Maybe the time had come.

But, Mother, I still miss you. Love, RM

New meanings from the temple

We have been going to the temple every week, and understanding much more. It has all been there before, of course, but we are hearing it in different ways. These are profound truths that are emerging...

Developments part the next

How many developments have there been? Well, I don't know but here's another one:

We put an offer in on a house today. We should have a deal by Monday. Then we start on getting finances to buy it, and we're not sure how that will play out. But we're optimistic. We are scheduled to close on the house by the end of July.

Wow!

We're still full-time missionaries until April 30, and then we drive to New England for my 45th college reunion. On that trip we planned to do significant research and see friends. And then drive back by way of Tucson, pick up the Durango and the load from D's office at UA, and drive to Anacortes to start our life there.

So much for ideas from the past.

There's no point in assuming this new plan will endure any longer, but here it is:

We no longer have to drive to Tucson in late June, the hottest season, and get the stuff. And there's no need to take it to Anacortes: it can come here. To our house here.

Van asked the other day which would be our vacation home and which our primary residence. It's obvious, I think, that Anacortes will end up being our vacation home...

So we will go straight to Anacortes after the trip to New England, and get to work on books and garden and hikes and trips to the Cascades. And then we will come back to Salt Lake for the winter season. And at that time we will drive to Tucson and get the load from D's office.

So what will we do here? Resume our mission. Probably as Church Service (part-time) missionaries, but possibly for the six months after we get back - in fall 2010 - we could be full-timers.

There are details such as the need to reapply (and do the physicals and all that) if we are to be away for more than 3 months, which we would be. So probably we would be CSMs and work in the library 3 days a week.

But it's impossible to say. The books we have set out to write are compelling in themselves. And we have a whole community here to learn about.

Well, we might not get a sales agreement on the house, and we might not be able to arrange financing, but if both these things go through without a hitch, we will be residents of Salt Lake by August.

So what' the house like? About 1650 sf, big living room across the front, big dining room on the right facing the back, and a decent sized bedroom plus bathroom plus closet on the left. Behind the dining room a lavatory. Behind everthing a kitchen, the big closet before mentioned, and a laundry room. Then a small yard covered at the moment in concrete. In the basement, two finished bedrooms partly above ground. No garage, but a shed. No grass. Place for a shady garden in the front facing south. A tenth of a mile to Van's, up the hill and to the right. A total of 1.2 miles to the Family History Library, less to the temple by a bit. Libraries are nearby and Smith's and a haircut place one block up the hill, closer than Van's. It's over 100 yrs old, brick. Pretty cool place!

We'd have room for overnight guests and dinner parties and patio parties and midnight walks. And we hope we'd have nice enough weather, since we would be here winters, to walk to work and home again.

Well, we'll see.

Not enough!

Twelve months here is not going to be enough. So we have extended for another 6.

But 6 more won't do it either: we are fulfilled in what we are doing, with people we know, with being near family and walking distance to the temple and the choir and beautiful gardens.

We really need to stay forever.

But on the other hand, we need to get back to Anacortes and plant our garden and write our books. And see our friends and the ocean and enjoy cold summers.

So we have a plan: 6 months here, 6 months there. And that means buying a house here. And we've started looking.

We can't be full-time missionaries on such a schedule, but we can be Church Service Missionaries, and that can be essentially the same thing but with more freedom.

In fact, there may not turn out to be anything magic about 6 and 6. We'd have to learn by doing.

Which we intend to do. :)

Integration

We have been on our mission for 7 1/2 months. Each month has led us to new understandings and confidence. The pieces have been collecting. And now we are beginning to experience integration.

One of the beauties of turning 50, I recall, is the feeling that things were beginning to make sense. The parts were starting to add up to a whole. This new mindset resulted in peace as well as a certain headiness around the idea that life could be grasped.

Becoming 60 was like turning a shallow corner. The changes were not abrupt, and the realities of the sixties could be seen from well back in the 50s. The biggest augmentation of 50s life was in realizing we could take control of our affairs when retirement finally became our reality. We figured it would happen when JSL was 67 or 68, but times changed and we were fully retired right after his 66th birthday.

Retirement meant being able to make more choices about our life, such as where in the world to visit, where to settle, when to serve a mission.

The mission came upon us sooner because retirement was sooner. We had been thinking about our mission for years, but by January 2008 we knew we wanted to go to Salt Lake for a family-history mission. One reason was because the economy appeared to be tumbling and house prices were falling, which meant, we felt, that we needed to stay close to home so we could take care of our affairs.

So the events of our 60s started coming at high speed, and we embraced them.

Now, after 7 months of full-time mission life, we find ourselves molding the pieces of our lives - the ones we began to discover as part of a whole more than a decade ago - into just the life we want. Here's where we are today with this creating:

We want to continue to serve in the Family History Library indefinitely. We extended our full-time call until April 30, 2010. But that will hardly be enough.

We could stay here forever - till the end - but we have other work to do. We have books to write, and places to visit, and gardens to plant.

So how to bring it all about...?

By living half a year in Anacortes and half a year in Salt Lake. By having a garden in Anacortes. By living in Anacortes from mid-May to mid-November, or June 1 to November 1, or something like that. By writing books in Anacortes. By indulging widely in the outdoors life. And then by coming back to Salt Lake, serving in the library many days a week, visiting children and grandchildren, enjoying conference and the Choir and evening concerts. And in between by traveling.

It's a beautiful vision to me. I see our moving forward in this dynamic setting for at least another decade.

There is such a balance to this plan! I see a small house in each location. The Anacortes one would have room for a garden, a little greenhouse, and visitors. It would have a view of the sea. The Salt Lake one would be a short bus-ride or walk from Temple Square and would be cozy and have good workspace.

We would write the books we have lined up and continue to be physically active as well as deeply engaged in understanding our kindred dead and helping others to do the same.

This is what the 60s is all about: not only understanding the parts but molding them into a meaningful and dynamic whole.

This understanding is causing a great swell of passion, excitement, rightness, and goodness within us. We will create it, and do it. Amen.

OH NO!

I am grateful for the Holy Ghost in my life. I don't think I would have survived otherwise. I have been saved from errors big and small, and I also think my life has been saved. 

But there's the other side: Sometimes the Holy Ghost has a message for me that are unanticipated and maybe even unwelcome.

Such as what happened to me today.

Elder Lewis and I went to Mormon Tabernacle Choir rehearsal and broadcast, and instead of sitting in our usual place toward the front, we found it reserved for someone and moved toward the next section back.

I slid in next to a youngish man, smiled, sat down...

And he struck up a conversation.

Turns out he is a professor of Yupik languages at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. And he is in Salt Lake working with the translation group translating Gospel Essentials into one of the Yupik languages. He had started it on his own, but finished here, in connection with getting his PhD.

Now it so happens that in my first year as a linguistics graduate student at the University of Arizona I did a paper on Yupik, specifically on Central Siberian Yupik, which is spoken in Siberia and also on some of the islands in the Aleutians.

So we had much to talk about, and did. He illustrated for me some of the Yupik languages, including their prosody. It so happens that the rest of my linguistics career was spent studying prosody...

Then I asked him if he had been to the Family History Library, which he had not. And unfortunately he is leaving in 3 days and won't have time.

The follow up question was whether he had done any family history research, and essentially neither he nor the Yupik people he knows had done any.

This man was warm and friendly and concerned deeply for the language of his people, and the culture that goes with it. But not with his kindred dead.

And then the Holy Ghost spoke to me. It is a work to be done. And it appears that we may be the people to do it.

Until recently I have been compelled within myself to go to set up a regional family history center in Ulan Bataar, Mongolia. I have had no understanding of why, it was just there. Dear Elder Lewis's comment about this compelling desire was, "I'll miss you". 

But just recently it was spoken in our presence that lawlessness had taken over in Mongolia. That did damp down my enthusiasm.

So maybe I had misinterpreted the location for that effort. Or maybe thinking through what it would be like to do a big family-history project like that in Mongolia prepared me to consider such a thing in Alaska.

In any case, many arrows drawn in the past point to it:

1. Study of Yupik and even prosody! 

2. Serving on the International floor at the FHL.

3. Being courageous (?) about learning and speaking languages.

4. Having prepared to serve in the same capacity in Mongolia.

5. Being filled with the Spirit of Elijah.

6. Knowing from my own experience how easily the knowledge of a family can be lost with the passing of just one person, and how rapidly any culture can be lost without knowing the life and struggles of our kindred dead.

7. Knowing that we can't be saved without them, nor they without us - and a whole culture could perish in unbelief without such a work.

Well, we'll see what happens next. Many many layers of effort must be made to bring about such a project, and if we are not on the right track with these thoughts, those efforts will not bear fruit. 

But I have begun. I have checked the library's holding in Yupik genealogies and they are sparse or non-existent (depending on how narrowly Yupik is defined). Next: where are the centers of membership in Alaska?

Crazy or inspired? I don't know - yet. But my friend from the Tabernacle and I really connected, I have his email address, and now it's a matter of letting the Holy Spirit guide.

Moses Mather in Darien

This is a fascinating article about Moses Mather, the cause of religion he upheld, the religious side of the American Revolution, and some intense warfare that happened in my hometown just 170 years before I was born. It's a real eye-opener.

http://historical.darien.org/matherhistory.htm

Please share your comments about it.

Love Month Q&A - answers to a quiz

I stole this from a wonderful family member who wrote it on Feb 10, 2009 (2 days ago)
Valentine 25 (stolen from my sister)

Now here are my answers:

♥ How long have you been together? A bit over 45 years.
♥ How long did you know each other before you started dating? Not a moment! It was a blind date...
♥ Who asked who out? Another couple asked each of us out... I mean, Mary asked me and Phil asked him and then we all went together for the blind date. And Bob and Carol came, too.
♥ How old are each of you? I'm 65, he's 67.
♥ Whose siblings do/ did you see the most? About the same. It takes a cross-country trip to see them, and then we do them all at once, his sister and my brother and sister. In that order.
♥ Do you have any children together? Six. And 27 grandchildren.
♥ What about pets? We have a few grandpets and that is enough.
♥ Which situation is the hardest on you as a couple? Nothing. We're having a wonderful time doing and teaching family history research and enjoying all the benefits of being on a mission.
♥ Did you ever go to the same school? Never once. But while he was teaching at the University of Arizona, I was a grad student there in a very different department.
♥ Are you from the same home town? No, but we think our paths probably crossed.
♥ Who is the smartest? Depends on who you ask! And the answer is him. In fact, I used to be pretty smart until I married him...
♥ Who is the most sensitive? Definitely me. But deep down he is a bucket of sensitivity.
♥ Where do you eat out most as a couple? Nowhere. But if we were still in Tucson it would be Mariscos Chihuahua. Now we just love to eat at our sons' houses.
♥ Where is the furthest you two have traveled together as a couple? Hainan, China, in the South China Sea, probably, unless it's some other place in China. Definitely China. But I wish it was to Mars (and back).
♥ Who has the craziest exes? He doesn't have exes.
♥ Who has the worst temper? Oh, me, definitely. He doesn't have one.
♥ Who does the cooking? He is the prep chef and I am the real chef. We always cook together now.
♥ Who is more social? We're both show-offs in our own settings. He impresses, I .... I use a lot of energy connecting with people, strangers and co-workers and friends. But we're also both reclusive at times.
♥ Who is the neat freak? That would not be me!
♥ Who is the more stubborn? Shockingly, he is. He doesn't really yield.
♥ Who hogs the bed? We do. We like to live in places that are cold at night so we can keep each other warm.
♥ Who wakes up earlier? Right now the alarm wakes up first. And I have always been a morning person, but now it's a matter of just hoping the night is over when I wake up at 3:30 - and then having the smarts to go back to sleep.
♥ Where was your first date? A Dartmouth College football game weekend.
♥ Who has the bigger family? We both come from teensy families - he has one sister, I have one of each.
♥ Do you get flowers often? He likes to give them, but I don't like to get them. I like electronics.
♥ Who is more jealous? Mostly we're not jealous anymore, but this one lady in the library really annoys me...
♥ How long did it take to get serious? It took him a brief moment, and took me a long time - about 4 months.
♥ Who eats more? Him at meals and me total.
♥ Who does/ did the laundry? He does. Except I put away my clothes, mostly.
♥ Who’s better with the computer? I am. I have an intimate relationship with them, while he's a bit of an outsider. I know what they're thinking, and he's just mad that they're thinking it.
♥ Who drives when you are together? Me unless we're pulling the trailer, then him.

Now don't forget to share! YOUR TURN!!!!