For Me And My House

Faith and the Scientist - talks by Elder J Lewis and Sister P Lewis, 25 Apr 2010

2010-04-26T11:34:00.002-07:00

The following are talks given by Elder John S Lewis and Sister Peg Lewis on 25 April 2010 at the Second Branch of the Salt Lake Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Elder Lewis's talk
Sister Lewis's talk

Please feel free to leave comments below.

Faith and the Scientist - a talk given by Dr John S Lewis on April 25, 2010

2010-04-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

The Testimony of a Scientist

John S. Lewis

Salt Lake Second Branch, 25 April 2010

The Church has a long tradition of freedom of inquiry and expression on matters with no settled doctrine. Many members and General Authorities have stated a vast range of opinions and supporting arguments on numerous topics. It should come as no surprise that in many cases there have been serious disagreements, some extensively and energetically argued in official Church publications by respected General Authorities. When General Authorities differ profoundly with each other in the pages of the Ensign or other Church publications, what is the average Church member to conclude? Such conflicts afford openings for dissention and divisiveness. What then is doctrine; indeed, how can we know what is truth?

The most durable—and heated--of these public disagreements have been those concerning scientific issues: the creation of Earth, the origin of Adam, the age of the Earth, evolution, and so on. Some Church leaders have received a scientific education: Elders John Widtsoe, James Talmage, Frederick Pack, and Henry J. Eyring serve as examples. But in matters of doctrine it is the President of the Church who alone holds all the keys of revelation for the entire body of the Church. First Presidency messages take precedence over the opinions of individual General Authorities, no matter how strongly expressed.

Suppose we desire knowledge—how do we acquire it? The answer is clear: we study it out using every available relevant and reliable source of information and then form a conclusion. We then can test that conclusion by seeking the guidance of the Holy Ghost. Those who “take no thought except to ask” are like the student who wants a good grade without doing the coursework.

Suppose, specifically, you want to know what time it is. Do you pray for the answer to be given to you? No, you look at a clock. Suppose you want your laundry washed, dried, folded and put away. Do you ask the Lord to do it for you? Suppose you want to learn integral calculus. Do you pray for instant enlightenment? No, you read the textbook, attend class, and do the homework. After all that you can do, you are entitled to assistance in the learning process. Suppose you want to know the age of the Earth. You look at the clocks built into Nature: you collect the available evidence, study the dating methods and their results, and form a conclusion. After all that you can do, you are entitled to consult the Holy Ghost for confirmation.

Most of the supposed conflict between science and religion is caused by a failure to avail ourselves of both study and revelation. I am convinced that there is no meaningful conflict—the apparent disagreements are due to people failing to use one or both of these methods. Primitive misconceptions of non-scientists about what science is, does, and says are as destructive as the interpretation of scriptures by religionists using the intellect alone, without guidance by personal or ecclesiastical revelation.

Two false concepts bedevil this debate. Some hold that the material world was made by God with abundant false evidence of great antiquity to test our faith. But God does not lie and falsify: indeed, he cannot. This idea is heretical. Another argument holds that fossils and other evidence of Earth’s great age were created by Satan to confuse us. This attribution of the creative powers of the priesthood to Satan is the essence of the Gnostic heresy, which has been rejected by all Christian faiths.

Let us consider a few of the most frequently debated points. First, let us consider the duration of the creation of Earth. Genesis talks of six days of creation, but the Hebrew word for “day” is freely used in a figurative sense in the Bible. In the highest and purest version of the creation story revealed to us, we are told of “creative periods” Elder McConkie, who I believe represents the most conservative viewpoint, has also commented that the “days” of creation are figurative, and not to be taken literally. In the June 1982 Ensign he wrote: “What is a day? It is a specified time period; it is an age, an eon, a division of eternity.” We commend this statement to the many Church members who falsely believe that Elder McConkie advocated a one-week duration for the creation.

Secondly, let us inquire into the age of the Earth. Considering that D&C 77:6 refers to “…this earth during the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence”, what led Joseph Smith, who wrote that verse, to speak of Earth as 2,555 million years old in the King Follett discourse? The answer appears to be straightforward. Seven thousand Earth years is in conflict with all physical, chemical, genetic, archaeological, and linguistic evidence. But seven thousand years of God is not ruled out. The arithmetic is easy: 7000 years of God, calculated on the basis of one day of God being as a thousand years of man (one year of God therefore being 365,257 years of man) is just 7000x365,257 Earth years. That is 2,556,799,000 Earth years. Clearly Joseph Smith did not intend the “7000 years” to refer to Earth years. But why did Joseph Smith and his amanuensis W. W. Phelps quote 2,555 million years instead of 2,556.8 million? Their calculation simply ignored leap years, and took the average duration of the year as exactly 365 days: thus 7000x365,000 = 2,555 million years.

The same number surfaces again in Elder McConkie’s polemical address, “The Seven Deadly Heresies”, delivered at BYU in 1980. He says that God “has presided in our universe for almost 2,555,000,000 years”, but without any indication of the source or significance of that number, or where the phrase “presided in our universe” comes from. Let us recall that, at a time when scientists scarcely dared speak of tens of millions of years, Joseph Smith firmly spoke of billions.

Thirdly, there is the belief that Church doctrine holds that there was no death on Earth before Adam’s fall. We shall return to this topic later.

Fourthly, there is the question of “pre-Adamites”, man-like beings who lived on Earth before Adam. The first LDS speculations on life before Adam were by Orson Hyde in an 1856 talk published in the Journal of Discourses. Elder Hyde wrote that manlike beings, which he called Pre-Adamites, long predated Adam on Earth. This theme can be traced back at least to the 16th century in European writings, and was treated from a Christian perspective as early as the writings of St. Augustine.

Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection first appeared in 1859, three years after Elder Hyde’s suggestion.

Fifthly, we come to evolution. John A. Widtsoe, in his book Joseph Smith as Scientist, (General Board of the YMMIA, Salt Lake City, 1908), was strongly supportive of a geologically ancient Earth and anti-evolutionary only in the sense that the origin of man was left out of the general evolutionary progression of nature and life. Elder Widtsoe wrote (page 105):

…it has been found that under normal conditions all things undergo a process of evolution; that is, become more complex, or advance. This, in essence, is the law of evolution, about which so much has been said in the last fifty years. Undoubtedly, this law is correct, and in harmony with the known facts of the universe. It certainly throws a flood of light upon the phenomena of nature; though of itself, it tells little of the force behind it, in obedience to which it operates.

Several other articles around that time advocated conflicting points of view. Evidently the doctrine needed clarification.

In response to this flurry of interest, a First Presidency message, mild and conciliatory in tone, entitled The Origin of Man, appeared in Improvement Era 13, 75-81 (Nov., 1909). The President at the time was Joseph F. Smith: Whether the mortal bodies of man evolved in natural processes to present perfection, through the direction and power of God; whether the first parents of our generations, Adam and Eve, were transplanted from another sphere, with immortal tabernacles, which became corrupted through sin and the partaking of natural foods, in the process of time; whether they were born here in mortality, as other mortals have been, are questions not fully answered in the revealed word of God.

Elder Frederick Pack wrote a series of three articles entitled The Creation of the Earth, Improvement Era 13, 1023-1027 (Sept., 1910); 1121-1127 (Oct., 1910); 14, 220-230 (Jan., 1911). Elder Pack, like Elders Widtsoe and Talmage, was a trained geologist who accepted the antiquity of Earth. He discussed the geological record in detail and was frankly positively disposed toward evolution. He also later served as Chairman of the Church’s Gospel Doctrine Committee. Clearly the Brethren did not suspect him of doctrinal error. He speculated, indeed, but did so wholly within the range explicitly allowed by the First Presidency.

In 1927, two General Authorities, Brigham H. Roberts and Joseph Fielding Smith, took diametrically opposite views, Roberts defending the fossil evidence and Smith denying it as a Satanic fraud. Both Elder Roberts and Elder Smith argued their cases before the Quorum and its President, Elder Rudger Clawson. The Quorum, hung, sent the matter back to the First Presidency. They wrote, and announced in an assembly on April 7, 1931, that "The statement made by Elder Smith that the existence of pre-Adamites is not a doctrine of the Church is true. It is just as true that the statement 'there were not pre-Adamites upon the Earth' is not a doctrine of the church. Neither side of the controversy has been accepted as doctrine at all."

As of 2010, the most recent First Presidency message regarding the origin of man is still that 1931 address. It concluded:

Upon the fundamental doctrines of the Church we are all agreed. Our mission is to bear the message of the restored gospel to the world. Leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church… Upon one thing we should all be able to agree, namely, that Presidents Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, and Anthon H. Lund were right when they said: "Adam is the primal parent of our race." Presidents Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, & Charles W. Nibley, the First Presidency

The First Presidency next expressed a desire to see a moderate, authoritative treatment of the main issues: that General Authorities not invent "new doctrine"; that evolution be treated as an open question; that the idea of no death before Adam be abandoned; that the antiquity of the Earth and the authenticity of geological evidence be defended; that both sides of the issue of pre-Adamites be set aside as "no doctrine".

The logical Apostle to author this overview, Elder Widtsoe, was in Europe. That left Elder Talmage as the mediator. The First Presidency gave him this assignment, and on the same day Elder Talmage wrote in his journal:

Involved in this question (Roberts) is that of the beginning of life upon the Earth and as to whether there was death either of animal or plant before the fall of Adam, on which proposition Elder Smith was very pronounced in denial and Elder Roberts equally forceful in the affirmative. As to whether pre-Adamite races existed upon the Earth there has been much discussion among some of our people of late. The decision reached by the First Presidency and announced to this morning's assembly was in answer to a specific question that obviously the doctrine of the existence of races of human beings upon the Earth prior to the fall of Adam was not a doctrine of the Church; and further, that the conception embodied in the belief of many to the effect that there were no pre-Adamite races and that there was no death upon the Earth prior to Adam's fall is likewise no doctrine of the Church. I think the decision of the First Presidency is a wise one on the premises. This is one of the many things on which we cannot speak with assurance, and dogmatic assertions on either side are likely to do harm rather than good.

Elder Talmage presented his talk on this subject in the Tabernacle on August 9, 1931, in which he was very cautious about the descent of Adam, supportive of the geologically sanctioned great age of Earth, generally negative on human evolutionary change, but also positive on the presence of death on Earth before Adam's fall. It was a conciliatory, statesmanlike position, doctrinally secure, and consistent with his knowledge as a professional geologist. He explicitly upheld the authenticity of the geological record, and he left the pre-Adamites a completely open issue. Realizing that he had contradicted Elder Smith in several important ways, Talmage sent the manuscript of his talk to Elder Widtsoe for approval, knowing that Elder Widtsoe did not accept Pre-Adamites. He then met privately with the First Presidency on November 17, 1931 to review every detail of the manuscript of his talk. They approved it, and it was published in the Church News of November 21, and later as a pamphlet authorized by the First Presidency.

Interestingly, Elder Widtsoe later adopted and advocated the existence of pre-Adamites in his article Were there Pre-Adamites?, Improvement Era 51, 205 (May, 1948). Gary J. Begera and Ronald Priddis, in their 1985 book Brigham Young University: A House of Faith quote Elder Widtsoe as saying, in a letter to Albert R. Lyman on 14 June 1948, “If (the Lord) chose to place manlike beings upon the earth before the days of Adam, I really have no right to find fault with that”.

From a doctrinal point of view, the two most important facts are the Who and Why of creation. They both have clear relevance to the principals of salvation. The When, Where, and How of creation are matters for scientists to clarify. As President Grant and his Counselors said, Leave geology, biology, archaeology, and anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church…

The relationship between evolution and the principle of eternal progression is also deserving of careful discussion, but we have too little time to attempt it. Just reflect that “eternal” encompasses all time.

We are told to beware the wisdom of men. Science is non-dogmatic and non-authoritarian. It places observation of nature supreme over hypotheses and theories. The sociology of science rewards most generously those who overturn orthodoxy and improve our ability to explain and predict nature. Science is not perfect; it is self-correcting. It is personal and idiosyncratic interpretations of scripture, uninformed by revelation, and in conflict with established facts, that most clearly represent the wisdom of men. Brigham Young warned us of the destructive influence of such uninspired and intellectually dishonest ideas, which lead to faithlessness (“infidelity”):

I am not astonished that infidelity prevails to a great extent among the inhabitants of the earth, for the religious teachers of the people advance many ideas and notions for truth which are in opposition to and contradict facts demonstrated by science, and which are generally understood.

I bear testimony that

1. The greatest strength of the Church is that it is governed by revelation through prophets chosen by God. Their word is superior to all written scripture in matters of both doctrine and practice. This is a Church of both order and revelation. If we hearken to the words of the First Presidency we are following the proper order of God. If we shun doctrines rejected by the First Presidency, we will never be led astray and will not fall into contention, schism, and apostasy

2. Respect for truth demands that we study out these issued diligently, formulate our conclusions, and seek confirmation from the Holy Ghost. It is through the testimony of two independent witnesses that the truth can be known. Those witnesses are revelation and science. The two witnesses of truth, science and revelation (intellect and spirit) do not conflict in any way. The supposed conflict of science and religion is a myth that is dear to Satan and serves his purposes.

It is my hope and prayer that when, in the due course of eternal evolutionary progression, we are called upon to assist in the building of new worlds, we will be both spiritually and intellectually prepared to go and do the things which we are commanded.

Faith and the Scientist - a talk given by Peg Lewis on April 25, 2010

2010-04-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

Years ago we were on a long trip with some church members we didn’t know very well. As the miles went by, the brother described a new business venture he and some friends had undertaken. They had invented a new way to heat houses that would save a great deal on energy costs. As he described it, my husband, an expert in thermodynamics – the science of heat – grew more and more aghast. It became evident that the new ‘invention’ would break a fundamental law of physics. Finally he told the excited brother that it wouldn’t work. The brother shrugged his shoulders and said that there are naysayers in every crowd and they had the faith that it would work (and make them all a fortune).

My point is: The best of intentions without adequate knowledge of the laws of the universe often leads to failure. My purpose today is to show that that good science supports faith, and that faith is essential to good science.

Before I begin, I would like to establish my authority to speak on the subject of faith and the scientist. I was a scientist from birth, as all babies are. I experimented with dropping things and squishing bananas. And I kept at it through childhood. When I was 7, I looked at a glass of water that I had stirred salt into and honestly had a hard time believing the salt was still in there, even though I knew it had to be. I couldn’t see it. I had read that if you have a glass of salt water and evaporate away the water, the salt would return. I wanted to try it. My mother wasn’t so sure we should waste the gas to try the experiment, but my father was game, so we did it. We boiled the water in the pan and when it was all gone, salt covered the bottom of the pan.

Later I became fascinated by the Solar System, and wanted to know about the planets. I wanted to build rockets. I wanted to know how disease worked, and cars. I collected snakes, turtles, and frogs. I read about these things. I wanted to know this world and understand it.

Deep inside me, I knew there were rules, and I was trying to uncover them. It’s the same for all children, I believe.

I loved numbers. They work in predictable ways, and I loved the way they provided answers. I did my 9th grade project on electronics, a relatively new field back then, and taught my science class how a computer works, including doing arithmetic using the binary number system. I majored in chemistry in college because I thought it would provide me with ultimate answers about creation (and met Elder Lewis because I was the only person who would go out with a chemistry grad student). Later I got a graduate degree in linguistics, the science of language. I also translated science books and edited medical books, and I wrote space articles for Technology Review. Today I love math and computers, languages, the Solar System, the outdoors, all growing things, the mountains and other formations around us. I have never stopped being a scientist.

Now to the topic of our talks, faith and the scientist. First, a bit about science

The word science comes from sciere, a Latin word that means ‘to know’. Science is a way to know things. Science is a way to investigate truths.

Science is a way to eliminate he prejudices and agendas of scientists and those who hire them and pay their way and politicians who might use their discoveries for their own ends. It is a method for achieving objectivity and eliminating influence. It is friendly only to those seeking truth, and nothing but the truth.

In fact, the ultimate purpose of science is to discover the laws that underlie, and also give rise to, all of creation.

Likewise, the ultimate purpose of faith is to discover the will of God for us and understand his creation (so we can return to him).

The biggest difference between science and religion is in a few details of the method used to gain knowledge. We will look at this more closely in a moment.

But first, let’s look at the scientific method. We learned it in school, but that’s a long time ago, so let’s look at it again. Here are the steps a scientist takes to gain knowledge.

a. He becomes aware of a problem, or has a question he would like to answer.

b. He studies what others have done and finds out all he can about the problem.

c. He comes up with a possible solution, which is his hypothesis – an untested idea.

f. He designs an experiment to test his hypothesis, to find out whether this solution his correct OR NOT. (Rules have been laid down for the proper design of experiments to eliminate the possibility that the scientist will get only the results he is looking for.)

g. He runs the experiment and analyzes the data, and from the results draws a conclusion whether his hypothesis is correct or needs to be abandoned or adjusted. And he needs to replicate his results so that he can eliminate chance.

h. He publishes his results so that others can check them. If his results are flawless, he has now come up with a new theory. Otherwise he must repeat one or more steps.

Now, how does a person of faith solve a problem or answer a question? In a way that is strikingly parallel:

a. He ponders the question.

b. He studies it out through scriptures and conference talks, counsel, prayer, etch.

c. He forms a hypothesis, an idea of a possible solution.

d. He does an experiment by praying about the solution he has come up with.

e. He gets an answer through the power of the Holy Ghost and analyzes it in the clear light of day.

f. He may repeat the process of praying about it several times until he has a clear answer.

The greatest point of difference between science and a faithful approach to a problem is the nature of the experiment. Everything else is the remarkably similar: the question, the study of the issues, the conclusion about a possible solution, the analysis of the answer, and the verification or replication of the answer.

Importantly, in both science and faith it is necessary to ask a question and study it out. We have this important instruction in D&C 9:7-8: “Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed I would give it unto you, when you took no thought, save it was to ask me. But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right. And if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore you shall feel that it is right.” This is the scientific method using the Holy Ghost instead of a lab experiment.

In fact, we are urged to experiment. The following scripture is astounding to a scientist, because here is an essential piece of science found in a scripture, the need to experiment, to test the idea. It is:

Alma 32: 33. And now behold, because ye have tried the experiment and planted the seed and it swelleth and sprouteth and beginneth to grow, ye must needs know that the seed is good.”

We have just talked about how a good Latter-Day Saint essentially uses the scientific method but how about the scientist using faith? While some scientists are proud of not having faith in a personal God, including Albert Einstein, they are denying the very forces that give them their scientific interest and pursuit.

In fact the very essence of science is the elucidation and understanding of the laws that underlie creation. The fact that there are laws for them to study is a testimony of a Creator. The creation IS the handiwork of a creator, and Einstein admits this.

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.

While he investigated throughout his life the most fundamental laws of creation, nonetheless he is saying that there is an existence of something we cannot penetrate. Not that we haven’t penetrated it yet, but that we can’t. It is not a law – it underlies law.

So the fact that there are laws to investigate testifies to an orderly creation and a creator who brought it about.

D&C 130:20 “There is a law irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this world upon which all blessings are predicated.”

So when a scientist looks for a law, he is using faith that there is a law and an orderly creation, and he has a testimony whether he wants one or not.

I love the following scripture; to me it unifies science and faith.

Moses 6:63: “And behold, all things have their likeness, and all things are created and made to bear record of me, both things which are temporal, and things which are spiritual; things which are in the heavens above, and things which are on the earth, and things which are in the earth, and things which are under the earth, both above and beneath: all things bear record of me”.

A second way in which scientists rely on faith is in the hypothesis step of the scientific method. Hypotheses are ideas that spring into the mind. Scientists talk freely about inspiration, or a hunch, or the lightbulb going on. Their hypotheses come from outside the realm of experimentation and logical thinking. A scientist may feel he is very clever to come up with such an idea. Of course we know where they really come from: They come from the Holy Ghost.

In case I sound as though I am mocking scientists because some deny God when they are essentially studying him, , let me testify as a scientist that others know and seek to know God through understanding his laws and mulling over and investigating his handiwork; that they openly use faith and inspiration as important tools; that inspiration is a key element of the scientific method, as are honesty and diligence and intelligence.

15. Let me tell you a story. Four hundred years ago, a great scientist, Isaac Newton, devoted a portion of his life to investigating the laws of motion that he observed around him. He came up with what are now called the 3 laws of motion. Later when he investigated the gravitation, he tested his hypothesis of gravity and found that his formulation was correct on Earth. By way of further experimentation he applied his new theory to the moon, based on what was known about the position and motion of the moon at that time. His theory failed: the motion of the moon could not be accounted for by his theory. He tucked his papers away in a drawer, where they remained for years. Later, though, when man’s ability to measure the distance to the moon became more accurate, large errors were found in the previous results. Newton then took out his papers and found that his theory of gravitation was correct. The theory was correct, though the original calculations on the moon’s distance from Earth were too crude to validate it.

From the time it was validated, we could find the mass of the sun and explain and predict the motions of the planets.

And this is how accurate these laws were: when the Voyager spacecraft was sent to Neptune in 1977, taking 7 years to get there, the moment when it was closest to Neptune as predicted by Newton’s laws to be within 1 second of the actual moment of arrival : 1 second out of 7 years and 3 billion miles! His theory is now a law for good reason.

Both scientists and the faithful as they strive to understand creation experience these things:

a. Joy in the discovery, and in creation. The more we know it, the more we love it and the more awe we experience.

b. Avoidance of mistakes (as our friends dreaming of a new type of heating system made )

c. Focus on what is important, true, and good

d. Improvement of life in practical ways.

e. The uncovering of the handiwork of God, to his glory.

In conclusion I would like to say, most earnestly: don’t be afraid of science. It is the systematic study of the works of the Creator. We ignore this knowledge at our peril. We give up our agency when we choose not to learn all we can on issues because they’re scientific, as if that were a dirty word. Learn all you can about God’s creation. That’s why he gave us the 13th article of faith. Read about DNA, about global warming, about pollution. Don’t take someone else’s word for them – knowledge and choiceyou’re your birthrights. Remember that science is a great tool for removing prejudice and agendas from fact-gathering and rule-making. It helps remove us from the clutches of ignorance and error and political and financial manipulation. We are asked to seek out the truth, as is laid out in scripture. As a scientist, I testify that this is true, that all truth can be known by the power of the Holy Ghost and the study of creation, and that all testify of the Creator. To this I bear personal and solemn witness.

My 3 sons...

2009-07-12T20:02:00.003-07:00

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

Ten years...

2009-07-03T20:31:00.002-07:00

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

2009-07-02T19:17:00.003-07:00

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

2009-06-20T17:29:00.003-07:00

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!

2009-06-20T17:29:00.002-07:00

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

2009-06-15T18:43:00.005-07:00

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!

2009-05-17T09:47:00.002-07:00

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

2009-03-06T16:43:00.002-07:00

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

2009-02-12T20:53:00.002-07:00

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!!!!

Ironies Of Family Research

2008-12-06T06:35:00.004-07:00

Right now, as part of our training, we are spending nearly all our time on our own family research.

And if you look at the logic of it, that means more and more people all the time: each time we find one new person in our family tree, the door is opened to at least two parents. So the list of people we need to investigate increases rapidly: each success means the list grows longer.

It is delightful to discover the parents of an ancestor. Last week I found Elizabeth Wheeler's parents, Joseph and Sarah Wheeler. And then this week I found Sarah's maiden name: Manners.

I also had great correspondence with someone alive today who is descended from my third great grandfather, Alfred Adams. In fact, I found a whole family of descendants. And one, Cousin Helen Leaver from Colorado, has sent me a great deal of information, including a photo of Alfred's daughter Mary Jane Stottlar. She is a sister of our antecedent Augustus Albert Adams. These are the two children of Hannah Scott's four who lived to adulthood.

So where is the irony? While we are searching out our ancestors, we are unable to see many of our own children and grandchildren! We are learning about those who have died but we the living are mysteries to our descendants. That's ironic.

For this moment in our lives we are fully committed to being here, on location at the great Family History Library, an amazing repository of information about those who have lived and died, not only in the US but also in Europe and in many other parts of the world. And it's growing all the time. The library has thousands of microfilms in drawers that take up a huge amount of floor space and that extend so high that a tall person needs a stool to reach the top.

And just one microfilm contains names, dates, and places of thousands and thousands. Just the other day I was reading a film of the parish records made over the past 600 years from one small town in England, the town of Calne where our ancestors hovered for at least many generations. Just picking out the family names from that one town, I have pages of notes in small writing showing the christenings of babies, and their parents' names, and the date. It is possible to build entire families from such a record, ours and others'. That's how I found the names of Elizabeth Wheeler's parents, and verified her maiden name.

Sometimes after work we see our grandkids who live here in Salt Lake. We are not integral with their lives, though we are trying to get to know them and find things to do with them that they would enjoy.

But it may be that the only way our children are going to know us is if we right our own family histories, especially our own personal histories.

That's a project that would require a great deal of attention, and ironically it would come at the expense of actually spending time with our descendants.

There may be no other way. I don't like it. But I don't have a better solution for now. PL

Our kindred dead, newly found, and living people too - Part 1

2008-11-23T10:11:00.004-07:00

The first week of training, when we worked intensively on our own family lines, I felt like I was standing still. No one emerged from the shadows. I learned technique, but didn't find a soul. Until that first Friday afternoon. Since then, I've received a torrent of discoveries. I'll post them one by one.

I'll begin with Elizabeth. Here's who she is: my father's mother's father's mother. She was born in Laycock, Wiltshire, England and had a whole family before her husband died and she met and married Charles Wilcox Tanner, in Calne, Wiltshire. They had 3 little boys and came with them to the US in 1853. Their youngest, Charles, was my grandmother's father.

Previously, we (I plus my great researcher-daughter Elizabeth aka Bonnie) knew that her maiden name was Wheeler because we found her marriage certificate for her first marriage, and it was given there. But I didn't know her parents.

So I went to the FHL (Family History Library, here in Salt Lake) and got out a microfilm for Laycock in the early 1800s (actually 1550 to 1900, approx.). I went through painstakingly - the pages were shadowed with age long before they were microfilmed - until I reached approximately the right date. And there she was: Elizabeth, dau of Joseph and Sarah Wheeler, christened 7 Jul 1807.

So now we knew the parents. The natural question was whether they had other children. I plugged the parents' names into ancestry.com's England and Wales Christening Records, and found all 9 of their children.

I've now put them together as a family in PAF and in New Family Search.

I love putting families together! I was able to determine from the dates of their christenings that there were probably no missing children for this family.

Joseph and Sarah are my great great great grandparents. Now I wonder who their parents were? Next step: marriage record in Laycock, around 1805, in the same microfilm.

Training is over...

2008-11-23T09:28:00.003-07:00

We have just completed our two weeks of intensive training in the Family and Church History Mission department. It was amazing!

The 34 or so of us met in 4 labs on the third floor of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. The labs were filled with computers, and we met each day, all day long, with a trainer apiece. Each trainee and trainer shared a computer. A written manual guided the way. The trainer pointed at the screen with a soft-tipped stick. Following instructions, the trainee learned all the tricks of using PAF, Family Search, New Family Search, and Ancestry.com.

Some of us had more experience than others. Because we each had our own trainer, though, we were able to go at our own pace.

I have had a lot of experience with computers, some with the various programs - and absolutely no discipline in sourcing the results of my research. That was my biggest lesson: how to source effectively. I now have census record and World War 1 draft card images attached to the people they refer to. It is very satisfying!

One surprise is that we are using PAF (Personal Ancestral File, a free download at http://familysearch.org/) as the main location for all our records. It's easy to create sources in PAF, and an enormous family can fit all its records, including images and photos, on a memory stick. No internet connection is needed, then, to add a fact or a new photo. PAF is easy to use, and I've enjoyed getting to know it again.

Our days consisted of intense instruction, practice, snack breaks, an hour for lunch, more of the same in the afternoon, and trips at times to the Family History Library. The FHL is about 300 steps from our apartment, so it's easy to drop in there and take a look at christening records made nearly 500 years ago that have been preserved on microfilm.

But now training is over. On Friday we had our 'Go Forth' day, a beautiful event filled with inspiring talks, announcement of our assignments, and a trip to the Temple with everyone in our Training Zone.

The Family and Church History Mission is made up of 28 zones, so after training we are assigned to one where we will spend 6 months to a year, or possibly more. Some zones work on the technical side, such as digitizing or repairing books, or entering data. Others are there to help patrons visiting the FHL to find what they're looking for. John and I were assigned to the International Reference zone.

In International Reference, we help people looking for ancestors from countries other than the US, Canada, or the British Isles, which have their own zones (and their own floors of the FHL). International has its own floor, and covers every other part of the world. Some of the patrons are English-speaking, but a large number are not. We need to be able to communicate the basics in foreign languages on a regular basis. Both John and I have studied several languages, so maybe that's why we received this calling. It sounds really exciting, and of course more than a bit challenging!

We have our first meeting in the zone on Monday, when we begin more training and have a new manual to absorb, specific to that zone. I am really excited to learn more about what we'll be doing.

These are all the details of our life, but the bigger work is about finding and linking to our kindred dead. All our training was focused on our own family histories. Our hearts are fully engaged with these loved ones from the past, most of whom we don't know and haven't even heard of. We have had many touching successes during our training period. I will write about these elsewhere.

I have learned so much these past two weeks! We feel it a true blessing to be able to be here at this time. Living on Temple Square is a wonderful experience: we are able to walk to work, and come home for lunch. We have new friends. One son lives 5 minutes away by car, another less than half an hour away. We have friends in the Provo area and also just north of SLC whom we are able to visit. Senior missionaries have a lot of latitude in their after-hours activities, and can travel a radius of 60 miles. We have a small apartment, sufficient for our needs, at a very reasonable price. We walk over to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir rehearsals and performances each Sunday morning, and to church at the old and lovely Salt Lake City Stake building half a block away. It is a lovely life. No gardens, of course, and no long trips. But it suits us very well.

And since we can't come to you, why don't you come to us? Or better yet, come be part of this mission? (They need you - they are short 125 missionaries and have projects on hold for lack of faithful servants.)

Visits

2008-10-26T18:05:00.003-07:00

Last week I enjoyed reconnecting with many wonderful friends and family members, and also met some new cousins. Here's the way it happened:

Friday. Left the house at 7:45 am, took the shuttle to SEA-TAC, flew to JFK, flew to Hartford, took the shuttle to La Quinta for a good night's sleep.

Saturday. Took the shuttle to Enterprise to pick up my car. Sat in the car and downloaded GoogleMaps to my Blackberry. Discovered I had GPS. Entered Aunt Dot's address and got directions. Spent an hour trying to follow them. Ended up driving through scary parts of Hartford. Got to Dot's latish (1 pm). Took her to lunch in Farmington, got back around 3 PM, had a message from Cousin Paul Strauss that he'd love us to come to Cheshire to see him and family. We did that. Had a great visit with our Chinese cousins Hailey (7) and Kira (2 1/2). Took photos, will post. Had good conversations w/ Paul and his wife Mary. Drove home, dropped Dot off, and drove to Natick, again going through Hartford to get to I-84. I got to the Daniels' about 10:40 pm. Long day! They had gone to bed, since I was again running late.

Sunday. Woke up in time for church, we headed out in two cars: Peter in one, me and Val in the other, so Peter could come home after the first meeting. Met Danny Ainge, the bishop. Enjoyed great talks. One was my a sportscaster from a local network news program but I don't remember his name. Then I met some friends from years past: Mary Anne Foley and Jane Nebeker Murphy. It was like meeting life-long friends, though it's been 27 years. I found out during Sunday School that my Blackberry could access the scriptures online at lds.org, so I was able to enjoy the lesson. I found out in Relief Society that I don't know many people there at Weston Ward. And I found out afterwards that Jane had divorced Bernie Murphy after a 9 year separtion. Their 3 kids are grown... And while I was waiting to sing in the choir just for the fun of it and because Val was staying for that, Jane came and got me because the Lavins were in the foyer. What a wonderful thing to see them! I got to talk to Marsha quite a bit, saw Tony's kids, found out Jolene was in North Carolina with many goats (7?) (or maybe 5), and that they were visiting just for that week. I did get to share a few thoughts w/ Dick, too... Then choir was over and on the way out I saw Fred Bowman, who I heard had gotten married, had a leaping hug w/ him, and then went home w/ Val. We took a walk around the lake at Wellesley College, including hugging the edge of the Hunnewell Estate (or was it Honeywell?), walking between their topiaries and the lake. Then we went back and meditated while Peter made curry. We ate, talked, went to bed. Nice visit. Oh yes - while Val worked to get ready for the next day's teaching, Peter read the paper and occasionally watched The Game, and I watched it and did my very best to get tose Sox to win, but it was The 7th Game and, well. I stayed up to 11:30 to see the end and shoulda gone to bed.

Monday. Got up almost on EDT, at maybe 7:30 aka 4:30 am. Took a shower, packed up, took off for Hadley MA where I had an appt w/ some Shaklee people. I planned to be there at 10:30 and that's when I got there. Talked to Joyce and Bill, took them to lunch, talked some more, meditated, took off for Hartford just ahead of rush hour, gassed up for $2.27 a gallon, and got to Hartford 15 min early, at 5:30. Picked up Dot soon thereafter, went around the corner to the home of Cousin Bob Killian. There we met not only Bob, but Jim Killian (uncle to Bob), Candy (Bob's wife), and Cindy (Bob's younger sister). The purposes were first to meet and second to figure out who everyone was vis-a-vis each other. While we had the wonderful hors-d'oeuvres, we chatted to the point where I began to feel that we were imposters in their wonderful home full of their wonderful hospitality. I got out my computer and went wirelessly to task trying to find the link. Dinner was served, so we exited to the dining room. Bob helped Candy cook steaks in the kitchen while we sat and chatted in the vein of Catholic culture and politics Democrat-style. I felt right at home. My relatives are all part of the party machinery in Hartford, with Bob himself being the elected Probate Court judge for the past 24 years. (Uncle Jim, actually our cousin but Bob's uncle, spent most of his adult life in San Francisco - never married, and apparently enjoyed politics more from a distance.) While we were at dinner, Bob came in w/ his computer because their daughter Virginia was calling on Skype from Chicago. That, folks, is the cousin who wrote the comment here about Robert K Killian (q.v.). She is about 28 and is married and teaches...nice girl, has a dog. (The Killians have a younger daughter who lives near to them.) So we ate steak, had rice pudding for dessert, and with the exclusion of the LDS member of the family managed to consume several bottles of this that and the other thing. We went back to the living room, made our connections, and we left. My plan was to spend the night at Dot's so she made me up the other bed in her room (Uncle Bob's, still there) and we had a pleasant end of the day and good night's sleep.

Tuesday. Lucy and Alan Katz, having arrived home from England the night before, were expecting me, and I drove the 75 min or so to Easton. We visited, went out to eat, had great conversation with Lucy about ethics, morality, and religion. And politics. Slept. Wonderful day!

Wednesday. I worked while Lucy did some things she needed to do, including a chemo treatment. I went to Greenwich and met with our new tax accountants for a couple of hours, then took them to lunch. I got back around 3 pm. The Katzes' granddaughter Ginger turned 4 so we went out to supper with Steve, Laura, Owen, and Ginger. More talk, sleep.

Thursday. Lucy had an appointment in the morning, and I worked. Then we had a quick lunch and headed off to Norwalk City Hall Vital Records office. We spent the next 3.5 hours researching the Tanner line. Lucy's a research whiz! Then we went to Starbucks so she could have a pick-me-up, then back to the house. I cooked supper, then bundled up for the trip home.

Friday. I intended to wake up by 7:15 so I would have time to drive back to Hartford. That worked out, so I arrived at Bradley early, dropped off the car, took the shuttle to Delta, etc etc. I had a 4 hour layover at JFK. I got to Seattle in plenty of time for the shuttle to Anacortes, took the 2 1/2 hour ride to Anacortes, and was picked up by D at 11:40 pm PT. Long day!

Saturday. Good to be home! And it was good to see so many family members and friends...

Set Apart

2008-10-26T17:08:00.004-07:00

Today we were set apart. We are missionaries. We are very happy.

We were set apart by Pres Rhine, our stake president, in the Anacortes building. We had several guests, our dearest friends from the ward: Nancy Oczkewicz, Kay and Larry Winebrenner, Bishop Rutter, his second counselor Bro Treiber, Fred Stone, Karen and Norm Buker, and my dear 'brother' Norman Landerman-Moore.

I was set apart first. D and Pres Rhine did it, w/ Pres Rhine as voice. I was blessed with health and strength and the ability to inspire and teach the family history patrons effectively. I was also blessed that during our service our own family would be blessed with the things they need. There was much more that is only vague in my memory. It was very nice.

Then D was set apart. Pres Rhine was voice again, and Bsp Rutter assisted. D's blessings emphasized more of the technical side of the work, and mentioned patrons only toward the end. Again he was blessed w/ health and strength, patience, and blessings for his family during his time of service.

So we are missionaries now.

Our report date is still 12 days away. But this was our last Sunday here. Next week we will attend w/ our new branch.

Which reminds me that we were both promised wonderful new friendships. Stay tuned...

We only hope the friends we are leaving behind will find their way to SLC and visit and have some fun with the wonderful family history facilities that will be our bailiwick. They think they will...

Look Alikes 1 - Who?

2008-10-05T20:38:00.002-07:00

Age 21 months.

Map of where Alice Donelly lived

2008-09-17T22:50:00.001-07:00

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=16+Cross+St,+Norwalk+CT&ll=41.121069,-73.414121&spn=0.015486,0.038452&t=h&z=15&pw=2

A Delightful Take On An LDS Ordinance

2008-09-10T07:05:00.003-07:00

This Irish journalist has something to say to concerned Catholic bishops:

What if the Mormons were right?

Thanks, Dionni, for sending this to me. PL

PS I have now changed the link to a more permanent location. Try again if it didn't work earlier.

Justice and Heredity

2008-09-07T13:29:00.003-07:00

Recent sound research shows again and again that a person's character grows to be more like his heredity (nature) and less like his upbringing (nurture) the older he gets. By 50, it's just about all heredity.

Obviously level of education and probably hosts of other factors influence the outcome of heredity, but still, the principle holds. Twin studies confirm it: studies on identical, fraternal, and virtual twins (those who are raised in the same household but are less than 9 months apart).

These are the things I've been reading, and they make sense. At least they are gospel-compatible: the essential principle underlying the gospel is that we are each responsible for ourselves, and that it is through personal repentance that we are redeemed. It is not the fault of our parents, the way we turned out - but it is in great part due to our heredity.

There are some interesting implications of this for family history research, though they're all pretty subjective.

What traits follow the family lines? How mixed up do they get? What can we learn from our ancestors by noting family traits in the current generations? Are traits survival characteristics or just random behavioral tendencies? I'm thinking about it and doing some reading. No one knows of course. But there are clues...to be continued.

D in Beijing

2008-09-07T13:17:00.002-07:00

D will be going to Beijing on Sep 22 to do the commentary for the next Chinese manned launch, Shenzhou 7, on CCTV9. Since weather can affect the launch, we don't know when he'll be back, but he told them he could stay only till Oct 4. He is working on getting a visa now. He's going on Hainan airlines straight from Seattle to Beijing. He's going to write a book on his hours off...

Our Yard

2008-08-25T17:31:00.002-07:00

JSL has tended these plants for a couple of years. Here are the results.

Our Backyard

Thanks, D!

Poignant Realization

2008-08-25T13:09:00.003-07:00

Back in about 1979 or so, when we lived in Massachusetts, I had a poignant realization. We had waited for years and years for our cousins to return from overseas duty to the US so our kids could get to know them. We were really looking forward to renewing acquaintances and raising our kids together. But when they came back, they decided to move to Colorado, nearly the whole width of the country away. I was so sad! Even though we did what we could to go see them, it was years between visits and the kids ended up barely knowing each other.

Now we are having a parallel experience, and the poignancy is far more intense, because we realize that many of our grandchildren are going to grow up with knowing us only as very occasional visitors.

I am very dedicated to putting family together. I spend hours and hours trying to find and understand my ancestors just for that reason. We have driven many hours every month to visit a couple of our grandchildren who had to move away. We have driven hours and hours at other times to be sure we see grandchildren.

A lot of the separation was inevitable when we were locked into being in Tucson for most of the year. That's the way things are in our culture right now, with families thinking little of separation if it's because of a career. When our grown kids started setting up their work locations far away, we took it with a grain of salt because it didn't seem permanent.

Now it seems devastating. Of course we have moved away from everyone ourselves. But we picked a place where we felt the family would most likely gather sooner or later.

But it's not going to happen. Maybe in 20 years or so we will stop living our dream and try to go where everyone is, but by then every one of our grandchildren now living will be out of their homes, and many - most - will have homes of their own.

We could stay in Tucson instead of Anacortes. We love Tucson. But the values we can live in Anacortes are closer to ours. We like the climate, we like eating for free out of the garden, we love a place where we can be outside every month of the year, every day of the year. We love the water and the wildness and the easy access to all sorts of biomes and ecosystems and opportunities for adventure.

So it's a challenging tug of war, our desire to be part of the lives of our grandchildren traded off against our desire to live in a life-supporting setting where we could even live self-sufficently if we had to or wanted to.

Our most fervent hopes are that every family member would live in a place that we could reach for a weekend visit - say within 6 hours maximum. That would take a miracle. But even if some lived in ONE remote location that we could visit quarterly, it would be a help.

Otherwise the few memories they have of us will fade away.

I saw a photo of my grandmother a couple of months ago and didn't recognize her at all. She has a big smile on her face and all I remember of her is that she was grouchy. HOW HORRIBLE!

I don't want to be forgotten!

Sigh. I can only pray.

Still Moving

2008-08-25T13:06:00.002-07:00

I am still doing my sprint-walking 6 mornings a week. But now I have added on the time for warm-ups and cool-offs, which are 3 minutes each.

We may end up walking a lot on our missions but it won't be from our apt to our worksite. That might add up to a tenth of a mile in a stretch. But we're ready for more...just don't know how we'll get it.

PL

Walking Intervals Day 6

2008-08-21T11:02:00.003-07:00

I have been walking intervals now for a week. Very wonderful! I think I'm getting something like 25% more exercise in the same amount of time, based on distance. Cool!

Our SLC Apartment

2008-08-20T10:26:00.003-07:00

We just received our housing assignment for our mission. Our address will be: 131 W 200 N #5. It is in the Garden Apartments complex, half a block due west of the Conference Center.

Our ward is the Salt Lake City Stake 2nd Branch. It meets directly across 200 N from our apartment. Our church meetings are from 1:30 to 4:30.

Our apartment is available beginning Nov 6. We have an appointment to pick up the keys at 10 am that day.

Our first mission meeting is a luncheon on Friday Nov 7. We start training on Monday Nov 10. Training lasts 2 weeks, at the end of which we will receive our assignment.

I need to find my winter boots.

Trouble With Isabelle

2008-08-15T21:12:00.004-07:00

For those who have been following my efforts to find the elusive Isabelle Tanner. I've posted on how I found her, and have written about it in detail on Helium.com as an instructional piece for anyone wanting to know how to do family history.

HOWEVER!

Just recently I met a new relative, Fran D'Alessio of Norwalk CT, on a genealogy site. Without going into the details of how I connected with her, I ended up talking with her for quite some time, and discovered that she had had access to a Tanner family Bible at one time. She had copied out all the information and given it back to a family member - and has no idea where it is now.

Many of the 'facts' in the Bible were not correct, and in fact were the cause of much wasted time in my search for the origins of the Tanner family, because my cousin Bennie Tanner, whom I found in 1981 and talked with on the phone, was using that Bible for the information he passed to me about the family, information that was not true.

The bad information could easily be refuted by census records, which I sent to Fran.

A few entries in the Bible concerned Isabelle. Someone had recorded the name of her husband (John Gilbert) and at least one daughter, just the facts I had independently discovered this past Spring. But one fact was entirely different: she was listed as the daughter of Frederick Tanner, not Charles Tanner.

Charles Tanner was my great grandfather, the youngest child of Charles Wilcox Tanner and Elizabeth, formerly married to George Bailey, dec. Frederick was the second son.

Charles W and Elizabeth had brought their family to the US when Charles was 3 years old. They settled in Bristol RI. By adulthood, Charles had made it to Norwalk for some unknown reason, Frederick had disappeared, and so had the oldest son.

The Tanner Bible has Frederick and his wife in Norwalk around 1880, though. Isabelle was born in 1888 there. She is listed in the 1900 census as the daughter of Mary Jane Tanner, Charles's wife.

So either the Bible is wrong again, or Mary Jane had simplified the facts for the census taker! Of course it is possible that Mary Jane and Charles had adopted her, but what I am really interested in is her actual parentage. Well, that and the whole story!

It would be easy to conclude that the Bible was wrong about this as about so many other facts. But the person who probably recorded a great deal that was in the Tanner Bible was Charles Ernest Tanner, son of Charles and Mary Jane. He was my grandmother Ida May's older brother, and supposedly Isabelle's older brother, too. If he recorded that she was the child of Frederick, she could easily have been. It would be an odd thing to make up!

So I am perplexed, and have a great deal more to learn.

We have sealed Isabelle to Charles and Mary Jane Tanner. Mary Jane claimed her as a daughter, and that's what we went by. Time - or Eternity - will tell.

If anyone can shed light on this mystery, or would like to help uncover new facts, please feel free! PL

Walking Intervals

2008-08-15T20:39:00.003-07:00

Now that it's easier to walk (I'm no longer anemic, the days are cool), I have been doing a half hour walk each morning, and then occasionally another one in the evening. After having built up using mailboxes (q.v.) while still in Tucson, I decided that just walking would do here in Anacortes.

Until today. Yesterday I heard a Canadian doctor describe a technique for improving the exercise value of walking, and I decided to try what he suggested.

The suggestion: After a warm-up period of 5 minutes, alternate a 30 second walking sprint with a 30 second comfortable stride for the remainder of the time. Then cool down for 5 minutes.

I began the program this morning. Keeping an eye on my timer, I sprinted and strode for 33 minutes, and finished my usual course 4 minutes faster than usual - which meant adding distance till fill out the time.

The area of our neighborhood consists of hills and more hills. I decided to sprint according to the timer and not heed the change in terrain. The uphill sprints were particularly intense.

I had thought I was walking fast on all my walks. I want to use the time well. But the sprints were definitely faster than what I had been doing.

Today my lower legs felt the extra exercise. The whole program was satisfactory for me, and I'm happy that my walks are doing more now. I'm definitely sticking with this program!

An Appealing Mission Task

2008-06-23T11:24:00.002-07:00

Here is one of the appealing tasks we could be assigned to for our mission. I'm copying it from the mission handbook:

Medieval Zone FHL B2 (Family History Library Basement Level 2)

"The Medieval Zone provides service by researching and organizing medieval records. They develop, maintain, and make available the Medieval Family Files (with temple ordinance date when competed) for selected individuals who lived before 1600. The need is to prepare early records that may have been filmed but not yet reduced to digital form, and are not well resourced, nor merged into family units. The goal is to avoid so much duplication as presently experienced. Although the principal effort is aimed at data from England, there are also substantial efforts in German, French, Polynesian and Scandinavian underway. Another unique feature of this work is in the level of effort being accomplished by workers at home. This zone is uniquely equipped to do this kind of work. The zone has no contact with library patrons and, as the work becomes very complicated quite frequently, everyone is highly trained and uses the best of technology and experience."

Sounds good to us! They all sound good, but some especially so...

The Packet!

2008-06-21T16:16:00.003-07:00

We received our missionary packet today, the one that lays out all the details of the mission.

It turns out that the mission is divided into the two main divisions, Church History and Family History, and then each of them is divided into many many subdivisions. We read their descriptions as soon as the packet came, and we already have clear preferences. More on this as time goes by.

In general, there are the outer, public areas that everyone knows about, such as the Family History Center, and the Church History and Art Museum, and work among the patrons there. Within these divisions are areas pertaining to parts of the world, such as Chinese, or Scandinavian, where specialization is possible. There's a Deaf specialty, also.

And then there are areas where archives are handled. For example, there is a facility in Orem that is just opening, which when up and running will work 24/7 to digitize vast amounts of church-related printed material.

In the Church History section, journals are often sent to the church which have to be analyzed for authenticity and relevance (my words, actually); also summarized and passed on to the professional historians.

There are teaching assignments also. And more you will hear more about shortly.

We learned a few things about our apartment and our branch, too. We don't know which apartment we'll find room in, but the map we were sent shows various complexes surrounding Temple Square, all within 1/4 mile. We need to take cooking and eating tools, linens, and of course personal care items, and there were a few comments that suggested the apartments are only incompletely furnished and we might need to buy some furniture - too bad given how much we'll have in storage here! We'll call for more details.

Our branch meets at the Salt Lake Stake Center at 143 West 200 North. It is made up of half of the missionaries working in this mission, and our class of November 2008 entering missionaries all attend together. (The other branch meets in the JSM Bldg.) We meet at 1:30 with RS / P first.

Our cohort of 20 (those entering in November) are to do activities together at least every 3 months. In other words, we are a 'family' or a team, regardless of our assignments. We had something a little less structured but similar when we were in Beijing, and it was quite satisfactory.

We work 8 to 4 every day, with the exception of about 20% of the assignments, which have Saturday hours and shiftwork during the week. We are given 4 hours a week during work time to do our own family history research, and are required to bring our PAF files for 4 generations plus names and dates for the 5th generation, along w/ our Patriarchal Blessings.

That's a quick overview. It's exciting and I've left a lot out. I'll tell you more about our favorite areas soon.

One delightful development: the mission has 3 choirs, general, men's, and women's. We'll be there!

It is possible to be invited to extend. I hope we qualify...

Houses And Other Encumbrances

2008-06-18T21:35:00.004-07:00

Today we have our 6 properties, and from the moment we conceived of going on our mission sooner rather than waiting, our goal has been to lessen the load.

That means either selling or renting out all of them.

We have no idea how long this mission will last - 12 months to 4 years, probably at least 18 months. So we have no business owning several domiciles and the huge bills and responsibilities that are part of owning properties.

We put the land on the market some time ago, and now we have this Anacortes house for sale and also the Tucson Sallee Place home for sale. We have been successful in getting renters where we weren't able to sell, or the timing was wrong to sell. So we're making progress.

The Anacortes house is being shown tomorrow and looks great (except for the lawn, which is only partly mowed due to rain).

Our goal hasn't changed. We report to church headquarters for training in 4 1/2 months. There's still time!

If the Anacortes house sells quickly, which it could - this market is not like the supersaturated Tucson one - then we will possibly see if we can start our mission sooner. We'll cross that bridge when the time comes.

We would consider ourselves very blessed to have the land and Sallee Place house sell. What a relief that would be!

Your prayers and positive expectations are welcome!

Pre-Mission Travels

2008-06-18T16:07:00.004-07:00

We expect to take a month to travel before we end up in Salt Lake for our mission.

We have people we don't want to postpone seeing, and we want to feel free to extend our mission if we want to without getting Wanderlust.

Here's our pathway, without firm dates so far. If you are on this list, be forewarned. And then later we'll add some dates:

1. Drive (in the Durango) to Great Falls MT to see grandkids and drop off a bed.
2. Drive to Salt Lake City UT to drop off our mission belongings. Quick hello to friends and family.
3. Drive to Boulder UT to meet someone coming from Tucson with our Prius, who will take our Durango back to Tucson.
4. Drive to Denver or Colorado Springs (in the Prius) to see the Samuelsons.
5. Drive to Fairfield IA to see Kay Ferguson.
6. Drive to Paulding OH to see Deb and Sara and Sara's kids.
7. Drive to New England to see: Jim and Lenny, Lucy and Allan, Patrice and Harry, Valerie and Peter, Bill and Joyce, Dorothy, and as many other people as we can find and fit in.
8. Drive to Eden Prairie MN to see Adamses.
9. Drive to Cowley WY to see Toni, Rich, and the boys.
10. Drive to Salt Lake for our mission, arriving approx Nov 5 in the evening.

This is the best guess right now, some 3 mos and several days before we'd have to leave.

What is not on this list, and still a possibility, is a trip to England with Lucy and Allan Katz. They lived there for a year and would be great tour guides. Plus, we've been planning a walking tour w/ them, plus some family history in the same locale where they wanted to tour, for some time, long before Lucy retired. But we may not be able to afford it this year. If we do go, the trip will be shoehorned in just after arriving in New England. That means an early start date for the trip.

As it is now, the trip will need to be close to a month long. With England, add 2-3 weeks.

If you have any input about when you don't want us to be somewhere, let me know quick! And I am looking for volunteers to drive the Prius to Boulder, and the Durango to Tucson, on the date when we would be there, which, best guestimate, would be about Oct 15.

Here are some durations of visit. This would be subject to some flexibility as needed - we may build in 1-2 days for flexing the plan:

Great Falls - 2 nights, one full day
Salt Lake - 2 nights, one full day
Boulder - 1 night
Denver/CO Springs - 2 nights, one full day
Nebraska - 1 night
Fairfield IA - 2 nights, one full day
Paulding OH - 2 nights, one full day
New England - 1 week
midway to MN - 1 night
Eden Prairie MN - 2 nights, 1 full day
midway to Cowley - 1 night
Cowley - 2 nights, 1 full day
Total: 25 nights on the road, 26 days - Approx dates Oct 10 to Nov 5 (no-England version),

It will be nice to be based in SLC after that. We have so very many wonderful family members and friends we can visit on our days off! Because we will have something like 1 to 3 years for those visits, we're waiting to do them when we're living right there on the Wasatch Front.

We're getting excited.

A House, A Home, Pt 2

2008-06-12T16:42:00.002-07:00

Our house is on the market - or to be clearer, our WA home is on the market. It looks great!

There's a little left to do, but the bedroom is painted (as you saw), the deck railing is pressure-washed and is now partly painted, thanks to a sunny respite. Flowers (deep-pink rhododendrons, a purple iris, a deep-red rose, and many chive blossoms) are on the table in a small vase. The counters are clear, the front lawn is mowed and weeded and the back will be done tomorrow. All clutter is out of site, or on its way to the storage area. The stove is clean, the granite counters are shiny.

All that's left to do is to find something like a printer table to hide the cable spaghetti on our family room floor, and to put the TV on, because a TV on a printer box on the hearth is not as attractive as it might be. And I have one more business-related box to secret away.

Tuesday the carpet cleaners come. A week later we have our Realtors' open house.

Pretty much, we're good to go. Now bring on the buyers!

This is a good little house. The yard is wonderful - just the right size. We could grow all our own produce here. It's tempting to keep it.

But we will be away for over a year, maybe even over a year and a half. And that's a long time to be making house payments, and paying the tax bill and utilities, and getting the lawn mowed by someone who won't forget and who understands about doing the trim, too, and raking the leaves.

So we are selling it. Sigh!

One lesson learned: it is easier, on average, to live without one's junk than to live with it. Tomorrow we have an expedition with several boxes we brought up in the trailer, to take them to the storeroom. Knowing you will be living without purse, scrip, or boxes in a few months sure makes the decision easier. (Not quite true about the scrip, but still...)

The Morning After, And After That

2008-06-08T08:27:00.002-07:00

So what purpose does this blog serve now?

It may not be kept as a blow-by-blow account of things, but there is much preparation - and transformation, I think - left to be experienced. So I will keep it for myself, and for whatever other wise purposes there may be, and you can read it or not as you will...

Preparations to date: We have written our acceptance letters and will have them endorsed by our bishop today. This is not quite as straightforward as it might sound: first we have to have our records transferred to this ward, and then we can have our bishop endorse our letters.

Bishop B Anderson from Tucson had the foresight to list Anacortes as our home ward, so even though he did all the hard parts as we filled out the papers, and offered us great counsel and encouragement and used his time for interviews and so on, he is not the bishop of the so recently called missionaries. That is Bishop J Rutter of Anacortes, who met us last week.

So first we switch our membership, and then our bishop signs, and then we send the acceptance letters to church headquarters.

The next step of preparation that we have begun is to figure out about our stuff. We are limited in what we need to take with us, what we can take with us, and the rest has to be stored here.

That's because we are putting this house on the market this week. And unless it and another major property of ours sells, we won't have a house at all - just two storage units, one filled to the door with our belongings from Tucson, and the other awaiting our furnishings from here.

But what goes where? We now have three lists: Storage unit, Salt Lake, or Tucson.

We thought there might be things that should go back to Tucson, for someone's use there, and that can be accomplished when we trade cars with Katie and Tyler.

So that's the next item for planning: when to trade cars - we have the big one, and they have our beloved Prius, which now barely accommodates the 5 of them. So we need to switch, and with a distance of nearly2000 miles between us, doing that is not trivial.

We have also considered what to do if this house sells before we're ready to leave. We have some contingencies, but it all depends - primarily on when this house needs to be vacated. (The market in Anacortes is not nearly as bleak as the one in Tucson, and our house, a one-storey rambler, is of a popular type.)

So: membership, stuff, houses, and cars.

And just a side note: the general presidential election is held 3 days before we report. We've got to figure out how to vote in that also. Probably absentee from AZ, because we won't really be residents of WA at all by then...(and we have plenty of properties left in AZ to use for addresses!).

So these are the infinitely fascinating things we'll be talking about - these and I hope some elements of spiritual preparation. Stay tuned ... ????

Mission Call

2008-06-07T17:20:00.002-07:00

Here are the details of our Call, signed by the President of the Church on June 3, 2008:

We are called to serve at church headquarters in the Family and Church History Mission. We report on 7 Nov 2008, and it is anticipated that we will serve for 12 months.

(We have been informed that it is easy to extend that period up to 3+ years.)

We will receive further instructions in the mail in the next few days, and we'll let you know what those are.

We were joined on our conference call by several family members. Thanks to all those who were there, and we missed those who didn't get the word in time.

Now we will continue our preparations, and your prayers are solicited on behalf of our success in matters such as selling our Tucson house and land, as well as maintaining our good health and all other matters, both worldly and spiritual, in which we stand in need of success and/or improvement. Thanks!

Conf Call Changed To 5 pm PT

2008-06-07T16:31:00.001-07:00

Same number, but be there at 5:00 pm PT...

It's HERE!

2008-06-07T12:58:00.003-07:00

but we haven't opened it yet. We are thinking about how to proceed. Prayerfully, I can assure you.

For all you faithful blog-watchers, we will have a conference call at 6 pm tonight (PT, incl Tucson, or 7 pm in MT and UT), which we hope will allow anyone interested to be there: it's after day activites and before evening activities - we hope!

The number is 308-344-6400, pin 887953#. If you have trouble getting in, hang up and enter the pin slowly, even if it tells you it is invalid. And stand away from a computer while doing that. Maybe call in a few minutes early so you can be sure to be there.

Keep an eye on this blog for changes: If I hear that this time is bad for a few of you, we will try to find a better one. And of course I will post the details right after the call for anyone who has to miss it.

YAY! They do want us after all...any last guesses?

Not This Week, I Guess...

2008-06-06T10:24:00.002-07:00

The mail just came. At least the mailtruck just went by. But nothing for us. I suppose there is some small hope it will come tomorrow, but it seems unlikely it would take 4 days from Salt Lake, and we know they're mailed on Tuesdays.

So it looks like we wait for another week...

Nope, Not Today...

2008-06-05T16:51:00.001-07:00

Oh well. And I'd be surprised about tomorrow, too...but it's possible, I guess.

Waiting...

2008-06-05T07:40:00.002-07:00

It's nearly 11 am on the first day the call could come (on this revised schedule previously laid out).

I just ran out in the rain and checked the mailbox. It's empty - mail hasn't come.

It is not lost on me that someday all this will be history, well-known, understood, absorbed, assimilated, written, finished, archived, journaled, told to future generations, and even forgotten. But right now it is all future, all potential, all what-ifs and full of hope and a little terror (what if it's Ohio?).

Maybe it will switch from unknown to enlightenment in the next hour. Or not till tomorrow, or next week, or the one after that... But maybe in this next hour.

Whatever it is, it will be life-changing, it will change OUR lives - and the only way to walk through this is by faith, and an earnest desire to make the best of everything, and the firm knowledge that we will do so.

Maybe no one is watching with us. But it feels like a roomful, at least.

Late Spring Cheerfulness

2008-06-04T18:43:00.003-07:00

Now that I have the knack of getting photos into blogs - even if not where I want them - I have a few more to share. These are of our house from the back.

Our Newly Painted Room

2008-06-04T10:51:00.005-07:00

When we moved into this house two years ago, after we got back from China - having bought it sight unseen - we knew we had to do something about the deep turquoise master bedroom right away.

This climate can use some bright colors at times, so we decided to make it a good solid clear yellow.

Yellow, even with primer and two coats, over deep turquoise has a tendency to look greenish.

And it wasn't until we had these coats on that we noticed there was something wrong with the woodwork. It was looking grayish. On closer inspection we found it was actually a very pale shade of lavender. NOT GOOD with yellow! It just looked dingey.

So Monday we started painting. Our friend Judy, who is mildly insane in that she adores painting, especially the fussy stuff like woodwork, joined us in Fixing The Room.

What an awesome job she did! We now have yellow yellow walls, and white white woodwork. Last night we went out and bought blue curtains (all we could find, actually, that would fit) and found they went perfectly with an indigo and pure white embroidered coverlet that we brought back from China. And now we have a lovely bedroom!

As you've seen, I've added some photos. I didn't want to leave them at the top, but I can't get them to move...

This room is the only one that NEEDS painting. But it makes the neutral colors professionally done by the seller two years ago look very dull.

As we continue preparing the house to be sold, we are solving problems one room at a time. I'll probably share our successes with you again.

What Elder Godfrey Said - Then And Now

2008-06-03T15:25:00.002-07:00

Last Friday when I called Elder Godfrey from the Missionary Department to request our address change, and he told me about the mustache and all that old news, he also said our call would be mailed on Tuesday (today).

Just now I talked to him again to find out where to send the new photo he requested.

And attempted to verify that we were expecting the call later this week.

And he said, well, if all goes well, the computer system works, no secretaries are sick and so on, we could expect it in two or three or maybe four weeks.

I reminded him that last Friday he said it would go out today and he said, well, if that's what he said then that was probably good, but he didn't have the stacks any more and couldn't say for sure.

Now the interesting thing about this is that over the past several weeks I have shared with several family members that I knew that it wasn't coming two weeks ago (though we thought it should, by rights) and it wasn't coming last week (though technically it should have, from what we knew). I also shared that as I looked at the weeks ahead, I saw that this week there was a faint chance, but that my real sense of it was that it was actually coming the following week, or more likely the week after. This was a clear vision of a reality, and didn't make any sense at the time.

When Elder Godfrey said it was coming this week, I accepted that with delight, but was surprised because of that prior clear vision. Now what he's saying is more compatible with the original vision of it.

So now we can all just sit back and wait for a miracle (its coming this week) or a wait a little longer for what is more likely...

Stay tuned!

Elder And Sister Lewis On Display

2008-06-03T15:06:00.002-07:00

One Step Of Progress

2008-06-02T16:55:00.003-07:00

Just now I received a call from our rental agent in Benson. Our house there is now rented with a year's lease. YAYAYAYAYAY! This house has been vacant since last October, and a real drain on us.

Now we have the opportunity to wait and sell it at a more advantageous time. (This is the least conceivable advantageous time, with prices down a hefty amount and days on market at record highs in the Tucson area.)

One of the mission preparation steps we undertook in January was the resolving of all the real estate challenges: selling or renting our properties that we were not currently using. So this first success in that area is very welcome in a week during which we are expecting our call, and in which we fasted with our mission-preparation steps foremost in our minds.

We pray constantly for additional relief in this area.

A House, A Home

2008-06-01T21:07:00.002-07:00

Yesterday I had good cause to notice the difference between a house and a home.

Five months to the day after we had our last meal, just the two of us at our little table, before leaving for Tucson, just before leaving our little 'second home' behind, we sat together again at home in Anacortes.

In reality, I think there is no such thing as a second home. Home is where the heart is, and also the essentials of life: the favorite frying pan, the family-history archives and heirlooms, the folders full of income-tax returns. (This observation presumes that all these things are in one place.)

Saturday night we arrived back in Anacortes, having driven for 16 hours minus a 50 minute lunch break, and having stopped at the store on the way in to pick up some essentials to get us through till Monday.

As we sat at that same little table, eating a bite of supper at 11 pm, the circle closed. We were right where we'd been. The 5 highly stressful months in Tucson were effectively excluded. We were home now, and all that was 'other'. I was neither all happy nor all sad: it just WAS. It was the first moment when I fully realized that home was here now.

Why not all happy? We love Tucson. We just can't have it. It's hard to live in two places. Going back and forth, the original model of having two houses, means never being 'home'. It's stressful and unsettling. One has to pick.

Further, in these years of missions and travel, having domiciles sprinkled here and there is unnecessary and not even appealing. One is enough.

And one is good. I have said for several months that we want to be homeless when we go on our mission. That sounds a bit cute. Other senior-missionary couples have said it. But the fact is, we don't want to be homeless. We want a homebase to return to. We want friends who miss us. We want a recognizable HOME for family members to visit and grow fond of, because it's ours and has a great deal of us in it and around it.

And for now, this little house in Anacortes is home. As we go about putting things away from the 5 months out of town, the very decisions are different now that this is home. The awkwardnesses or compromises of what goes where are not as tolerated, for example. Things need to be 'right' about it, because it's home.

Not that this is the ultimate house. It is still going on the market. Anacortes is home, and this is our current house. But as soon as we can we'll be finding and moving to the final house, which will become our true home.

We haven't had a true home since Sweetwater. We left there in 1997. The time has come...

Here in Anacortes...

2008-06-01T16:38:00.002-07:00

Here we are at home in Anacortes, with all our stuff.

This afternoon we put a lot of it away. We also have the internet sort of working. And we harvested 3-4 lbs of edible-pod peas, and cut off the old asparagus stalks so we might get some spears this season. The broccoli raab had just about taken over the garden, with 8 foot stalks, and the brussels sprouts are nowhere to be seen. And alfalfa abounds...

But the garden is little and we had fun in the cool (65 degree) sun and we'll have a little harvest for our supper.

Also some beasties went to snail heaven today....

Mystery of Missing Mission Call Starts with M

2008-05-30T12:14:00.003-07:00

I just talked to the kind Bro Godfrey from the mission department, having called him because we needed to change our address from Chris's to Rye Court, Anacortes.

He said, funny thing you should have called - I have just talked to your stake president....

It turns out that they had processed our papers, and knew that I was probably related to John, an astronomer...

But they couldn't send us our call because of our photo.

!!!!!!

What was wrong with our photo?

The MUSTACHE! One has a choice: mustache or mission.

He said if I would cross my heart and hope to die, he would go ahead and send our call along with the others for processing, and that it would go out in the mail next Tuesday. He laughed and said it could not go out today no matter what.

But I had to promise to provide a new photo with no mustache!

I said I would but that it would take a few days while we were in transit. He was ok w/ that.

So next Thursday or so, we should get our call. We are having it sent to our home address so we don't have to hang out at the post office. It has been cleared by the Apostles already.

The actual mustache-bearer is not overjoyed, but will comply. Right before we do the photo, I think...

Sad...

2008-05-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

...to say, the call did not arrive in the mail today. Thanks for checking in.

An Hour Later...

2008-05-29T10:06:00.002-07:00

The mail just came!

The spirit of prophecy is upon me.

Did I mention yesterday at this time that ...

I didn't think it would come today? Actually, I was pretty sure it wouldn't come today.

Of course we're talking here about our MISSION CALL!

Well....

It didn't come today.

The mail comes at 10 am tomorrow....

:)

Actually, I don't think it's going to come then, either. :-

Mail Comes at 10 am MT...

2008-05-29T09:04:00.001-07:00

...and right now it is...10:04!

And it hasn't come yet.

Just thought you'd like to know...

Sealings

2008-05-28T12:03:00.004-07:00

After much planning and careful coordination with Chris and the Romneys, today we had our long-planned family sealing session. Much thanks to our special friends!

It was a spirit-filled event, with many happy family members in attendance, too many to count. Humility, hope, and repentance filled some hearts, and also relief.

Babies (Leslie, William Edward, Teresa, Charles H, Chauncey) were made part of their forever-families, and parents were joined to receive them. Couples greeted each other with open arms.

The work is just beginning, and we know we'll have ever so many more helpers for future searches.

We'd like to schedule another sealing in SLC when everyone can make it. We'll know better what dates might work in another day or two, when we learn whether we will be in Mongolia at this time next year, or Salt Lake, or Milwaukee or Atlanta or Yellowknife. Once we know, the planning will begin in earnest.

Already Chris and the girls will do baptisms this Saturday, with 18 scheduled so far. If you'd like to do some of the work for these loved ones, please let me know.

Checking the Mailbox, Wed 28 May 2008

2008-05-28T11:59:00.002-07:00

It's a beautiful day here in Salt Lake City, about 72, sunny with some fluffy white clouds. We had a wonderful sealing session at the temple this morning. Afterwards it was time to check the mailbox.

Actually, when we got back, Andrya had already brought the mail in, but I didn't know that. The mailbox was empty...

But inside the mail was on the counter in the kitchen. AND!!!!

Our call envelope was not there. It didn't come today.

Sigh!

So now we have ONE MORE CHANCE - tomorrow. After that, we'll have left.

Or actually, we don't have to leave till Fri afternoon, so that is actually the last chance. Stay tuned!

Peace

2008-05-24T15:19:00.002-07:00

Here we are in Boulder UT. If you haven't been, you might want to make the effort to come. The scenery alone would make it worthwhile, and there's no describing it. Red, yellow, rugged, wet, cold...

Down the street from where we're being hosted, Navajo sheep graze in a field next to Belgian draft horses. These churro sheep are great to eat, but even more valuable as a source of the finest wool, or maybe mohair.

Back toward town, cattle appear and disappear again as they are moved from one field to another. These are grass-fed, mostly Black Angus (so probably corn-finished). Across the street is our friend's famous restaurant, Hell's Backbone Grill (named after a well-known nearby land formation).

We ate at the grill last night as guests of the establishment. We had, variously, trout, trout, chicken enchiladas, and meat loaf. But these are not the usual presentations of these standard foods. They were exceptional, but again, indescribable. Save your pennies and come taste these novel combinations. One clue: my trout came with quinoa mixed with lots of pine nuts and other things, and worked perfectly with the trout.

Everything at the restaurant comes from nearby, or as nearby as possible. It also comes with Buddhist prayer flags. One of the owners is Buddhist and practices the doctrine of extreme friendliness and kindness and caring.

So this has been a great stopover on our way north. First, the unseasonably cold weather has prepared us to some degree for the transition from Tucson. We drove in snow yesterday when we were out trying to see the sights. Next, we have been treated very well by our hostess. And third, we have enjoyed the company of three of our granddaughters and their father, our eldest son.

Tomorrow we go to church in this small Mormon community with half the town likely to be in attendance. Because we are friends with the owner of the biggest commercial establishment in town - the restaurant - we will be somewhat famous when we get there.

Then tomorrow afternoon we get to tour the organic farm that supplies the produce for the restaurant. It's 6.1 acres and they use everything they grow for the restaurant.

This is a neat place. The wetness comes as drainage from the surrounding mountains. It's delightfully damp and makes gardening and farming doable.

Come see!

Still Sitting In The Closet..

2008-05-20T19:07:00.002-07:00

When all your stuff is in boxes (except for your computer) it's hard to be productive, helpful, creative, or anything else.

So I'm still sitting in the closet. The movers have been here for just under 9 hours. They still have boxes to put in the truck, and haven't started on the ones from the garage. They are doing a beautiful job - a knife couldn't be inserted between the boxes. That's because the estimate was too low, the cu ft too skimpy, and the truck too small.

It may be another hour. We've changed plans several times today, as the promised finish time of 3:30 came and went. It's 7 pm now, actually 7:10. We had to cancel taking Madi and Sam out for dinner, all dressed up, for one thing, and I'm very sad about that.

I am fairly certain this will be behind us tomorrow. Then we take a rest day, attend to a few last-minute details, and prepare to head out early Thurs to see Van and the girls in Boulder UT at 6 pm MT. Lots to look forward to! That's why we want to get a little rest. We hope NOT to get up at 4:xx tomorrow morning!

We're grateful to the Pershings for housing us, and to the Paulls and then the Lemburgs for feeding us.

And you all for your tacit support.

I think I'm glad the mission call isn't coming this week after all. We want to savor the experience and be spiritually prepared when it happens, and right now - we're just too tired!

But next week we'll be ready! Don't forget to keep an eye on this blog and then call our conference line that night at 6:30 PT to hear all about it: 308-344-6400 pin 887953#.

Love you all!

Sitting In My Closet

2008-05-20T16:39:00.002-07:00

Here I am, an hour after the movers were to have been done, sitting in my closet. They have progressed to the stage where they are carrying things out to the van. They have been here 6 hours, and our belongs are wrapped in miles and miles of plastic tape. It is an environmental nightmare.

I am in my closet because there is no furniture in here. An electrical outlet in the bathroom just outside the closet door is keeping the two laptops happy. I am sitting on the floor. Just a few minutes ago I woke up from a fitful 10 min nap with my head on a computer case.

Moving is the pits. STUFF is an abomination - until you don't have a chair to sit on or a bed or pillow for your weary head.

The movers are Russian, or rather Khazk or Kazakh or Kazahk or one of those. One is kind of Mongolian or Hun type, oriental plus Slavic. The other is strictly Turkic or Altaic. They are from the same unnamed city; the former has been in the US for 4 years (and his wife is back home). They drove 10 hours to get here from LA, then got to work. Tonight they go to drop things off in Phoenix, then may head back to LA. I guess it doesn't pay to sleep. I treated them to Bianchi's meatball grinders for lunch, and cokes. They ate while standing at the counter, half of the sub each so they wouldn't fall asleep, then went and sat on the front 'porch' for a smoke.

I have decided to sit in the closet rather than develop the relationship further. I know I would be closing the door each time they go through it, so it's better that I have taken myself out of the action.

The whole process has been annoying: packed drawers were unpacked - POLICY! (and fills up more boxes). A lot of baloney. But it's almost done.

Maybe another hour. We're ready to be done.

Now for the big shocker that we finally figured out: we had thought that the blankets would be draped onto the furniture. We didn't know everything would be taped on in multiple layers and twists and turns. The problem is that they will need their blankets back when they deliver the furniture to the storage facility, so it will be stored - and moved, when we have a place for it - without the blankets that they have spent 6 hours putting on. What about the next move?

Too much to contemplate! It's not likely to happen till 2 years for 2.5 years from now, I think. Unless we go on another mission, and then even longer.

Moral: I have no idea. We have lovely furniture we bought in 1969, and there's not much like it out there today. I guess we could have ditched it and started over. Or not moved, ever. That would mean living in a 3 /1 1200 sf house in Lexington MA, the first home of some of these pieces. No move to Wellesley, South Natick, Sweetwater, a storage unit, or Sallee Pl.

Or else you just put up w/ moving day from time to time. We hope that after today there's only one more time .

Leaving Tucson

2008-05-19T19:40:00.002-07:00

In a day and a half, we leave Tucson.

How does that feel? Well, half the story is already written: we love where we are going.

The other half made us feel pretty good, too: the temp in Tucson hit 103 degrees today (65 in Anacortes).

I don't want to hide in an air-conditioned house, but that's what I end up doing here. Part of it's the heat, and part is the pollen. The valley is filled with blooming trees that are stunning and viciously itch-inducing. My eyes seem to be the major complainers.

Even so, it is hard to leave the home we have had, at least part time but mostly full time, for the past nearly 27 years.

Of course it's mostly the people. We know many people here, have some friends, have even more family.

But we have friends and family in many communities, in many states, and have learned to live without being in physical contact with them.

So we think this won't be any different: we will miss them, but it seems that in this modern world we can't have them - not all of them.

None of these observations will keep me from trying to get everyone permanently together in a microcosmic universe. We may be apart, but we don't have to like it, and we don't have to tolerate it. So now it's time for some serious plotting. Hehe.

Progress On Move

2008-05-17T22:04:00.002-07:00

These cute grandkids keep coming over and that doesn't make moving any easier!

But as for our infinite quantity of belongings, we are continuing to close doors, literally: both front bedrooms are CLOSED. Their bathroom is CLOSED. The supply closet is CLOSED as of 30 minutes ago...

The living room is lined w/ boxes and has furniture awaiting their ride north, but otherwise it is done.

That leaves the kitchen (needs to be used for another day and a half), family room (an hour's work needed from me), D's office (needs furniture moved out, closet needs an hour's attention from me), our room's closet is CLOSED, bathroom almost, bedroom almost... Clothes are all sorted and packed, and that was the biggest deal in the bedroom.

We'll make it. Monday is another day, not without its challenges (103 degrees, for example). That's the day we load the car and U-Haul trailer. Everything else goes in the moving van on Tuesday morning (104 degrees forecast). That night we have a date, then Wed morning I have an appt, then Wed noon we have a date, then Wed afternoon we leave and go as far as N AZ.

On Thurs we meet up w/ Van and the girls...

Sis Baty Called Back...

2008-05-17T22:01:00.002-07:00

I was asleep when she called, and later I almost forgot about it.

She said she had a message from me on her answering machine. I reminded her about our conversation, that the message I left predated that. This was yesterday.

It was kind of funny. We've had a new call from SLC every day this week, or just about. This one was NOTHING. But the others were all potential roadblocks. So this was just one of those teasers.

But so far so good, and we may make it to the committee this week!

Blue Suit

2008-05-16T09:29:00.003-07:00

Today as I was finishing the last of my mother's boxes, I encountered an item that brought back a lot of memories.

Actually, as I have been doing these 10 final boxes of hers, I have been steeped in memories, plus items that predate me, plus a lot of junk. It's lovely to have a place like Deseret Industries to donate unwanted stuff to!

And before I start about the blue suit, I want to make this categorical statement: storing precious things in a box for 60 or more years does not add to their beauty. Moth doth corrupt, etc.

But about the blue suit:

It turns out that Nana had some items that I would not have associated with her. For example, she had probably 50 handkerchiefs, all pristine (except for the 60 years) and most quite lovely. I know she was fond of textiles and this was part of that love, I suspect. Another example is her collection of gloves.

I never saw my mother wear gloves! Or maybe on Easter. But she had many many lovely pairs. I have given a lot of them to DI, because they are too small for me, and still in beautiful shape. I have saved a more exotic dress-uppy sort of pair for a granddaughter. Among them all I found a pair of my own gloves.

They are in perfect condition. I know I had gloves as a child (beyond the ones for playing in the snow) and then I had these, and one other pair. (Come to think of it, I had to wear white gloves to dancing school, but these were a different sort, a lighter weight, purely decorative.)

These gloves I found today are white. I recognized them immediately. They are for a middle-school sized girl. I wore them with the blue suit I made for Easter when I was in Grade 8 or 9.

This blue suit was one of the fanciest things I had made at that point. It had a relatively straight skirt, calf-length, of medium blue wool. The jacket was of the same fabric, short, with big blue buttons up the front. What made the sewing a challenge is that it had a 'waistband' at the bottom (of the jacket), so all the fullness of the jacket needed to be captured smoothly into the waistband. Then to complicate matters, the back had a huge pleat in it from yoke to waistband that gave the jacket some fulness in the back. Whether the jacket had a collar I don't remember.

I have a photo somewhere of me wearing it. I had on a white blouse and the white gloves I found today. I thought I'd hold onto the gloves. The suit is no doubt long-gone.

I don't remember the clothes we bought, but I do remember the ones I made. I just wanted to share the joy I had in creating that suit. That's why I'm keeping the gloves.

Mission Update 5/15/08

2008-05-15T12:21:00.002-07:00

We just got a call from the Missionary Dept. They would like to send us on a mission but Bro Lewis's blood pressure is too high.

Sis Lewis: Oh, Sis Baty called about that last week and wouldn't release our papers to you until we could give her a good report.

Bro Evans: Oh she already did that!

Sis Lewis: Yes, would you like to know what the numbers were?

Bro Evans: Oh yes, certainly.

Sis Lewis: (reports the three days of good numbers)

Bro Evans: Sounds like you folks should go on a mission! Congratulations on the good blood pressure! You've missed the committee rotation for this week but they will go to the committee next week, and you should get a letter from us, oh, in about 2 weeks.

Sis Lewis: hmm, we'll be in Salt Lake by then!

Bro Evans: Let me ck the address, oh yes, Quail Run Sandy, very good.

Sis Lewis (w/ a sigh): Thank you!

Bro Evans: Bye

So...about Wed May 28 or Thurs May 29, at Chris's, just as he and Andrya had hoped. Unless someone else would like to know something else! :)

Other mtDNA - A Wish List

2008-05-14T16:40:00.002-07:00

For MY lineage, since I don't have a Y chromosome, I can only get mtDNA. It's an interesting thought about how to do this since my father is dead and my brother has the same as mine.

So first, how to get my father's. Well, that would come from his mother, and she is dead and had no daughters. But she did have a sister, who is also dead. Her sister, I just found out, had daughters. One of them lived in CA until 15 years ago or so! Did she have any daughters? I haven't been able to find out. But if she did, or if her sisters did (and I don't know what happened to them - yet) then they have the same mtDNA as my father and his mother and that whole maternal line.

What about my maternal grandfather? He had sisters. Where are their female offspring? I'll have to ask Dot...

And my paternal grandfather? That would be his sisters' daughters' daughters. I met one of those daughters once, one of Aunt Ella's daughters. In 1980, before mtDNA testing. I wonder if she had daughters...I wonder if she's still alive. Someone w/ her name is alive in the right part of Stamford.... That would give us Margaret Fagan's maternal line.

The question is, does it matter? I think so! Genetics has a lot to do with temperament and tendencies, and populations have characteristics that differentiate them from other populations. The implications for understanding are enormous! What do you think?

Obviously this is just an example from my own results. Whose samples do you need before it's too late?

Haplotype Results

2008-05-14T16:27:00.004-07:00

I have my Sorenson Molecular Genetic haplotype results for my mtDNA.

I belong to haplotype U5a1 with an additional detail that I haven't been able to track down.

This group entered Europe very early, possibly from the Near East, about 50,000 years ago. It followed the retreating glaciers closely, and arrived before agriculture.

(This is interestingly the same pattern that we discovered when I was investigating wheat sensitivity: predating agriculture, following the glaciers - ie hunter-gathers.)

This group inhabited the periphery of northwestern Europe, though apparently were not Celtic and did not occupy the British Isles at this time.

The mtDNA is passed from mother to daughter down through the ages. Sons get it from their mothers but can't pass it on.

So our mtDNA came from my mother, my grandmother Teresa Clark, her mother Mary Quigley from County Monaghan in Ireland ...and that's about all we know. Looking at a surname map of the British Isles, we see Quigley is not Irish but British, as is Clark. My guess is that the Quigleys and Clarks were part of garrisons in Ireland, married locally, and found their offspring marrying locally also. I have to figure out the generations and timing and see if this works.

The part of England where the Quigleys and Clarks are found are the northern parts on the east coast, with the Clarks distributed much more widely in England than the Quigleys. The northern part of the east coast is a good place for northern mainlanders to wander to and stay, and that notion is compatible with the mtDNA results.

It's a tall tale with some possibilities behind it. Does anyone want to help find out more?

The Best Of The Best

2008-05-14T08:05:00.002-07:00

Thanks to Martie, who put this together. It brought such joy that it can't be expressed. I am posting it here so you can partake and enjoy, too - and also so that I'll always have it. I found last night at a moment of regret at having eaten something not so good that it had great therapeutic value.

Happy Mother's Day and Father's Day, Grammy and Grampy

We can't take credit for all the cuteness. We just got things started. What I especially love is the mixing of families, so many connections between family members who don't see each other very often or know each other very well. May they always turn to each other for comfort, support, and fun - as they do here.

We are appreciative of our own children and also very much so of our in-law children, who add so much to the family. We love them, we love their parents.

We are blessed.

Reunion 2008

2008-05-13T11:31:00.002-07:00

This is based on a lot of BIG IFs.

IF we are in SLC for our mission, and IF the SLC family members could handle another reunion (same or different), we could have a reunion over Thanksgiving, because we are scheduled to report on Nov 7 IF we have a SLC mission and IF it begins in Nov (right after our availability date of Nov 1).

IF that plan doesn't appeal, this would be a good time to suggest another one!

I am with Manda. (See Meg's blog.) We need another reunion! Some of those kids are growing awfully fast!

(In another 10 years we're going to have to have color-coded tee shirts so everyone can keep track of whose cousin-kids they're looking at.)

Thanks to MTLM for putting together such a glorious slideshow for Grampy and Grammy, and to Chub for the dubbing!

Sis Baty Called Back, and...

2008-05-13T10:10:00.002-07:00

Sis Baty called back, and asked for D's blood pressure numbers and my blood iron numbers. I gave them to her. She asked what mine had been. I told her. She was delighted in the change. She asked if I was going to keep on taking iron. I told her I certainly was. She asked if I had more energy already...I was agreeable about that.

Then she said...ok, then, I will pass these papers on (said with many exclamation points). !!!!!

So I said THANK YOU (with many more exclamation points). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And she sounded pleased at that and said a buoyant goodbye.

So that's that. The papers have made it through the first Church Headquarters filter.

(Since I didn't know there was one at this stage, I couldn't venture to guess how many more there might be.)

But...it is possible they will go to the Brethren now.

:)

Impatience And Attitude

2008-05-13T08:44:00.002-07:00

I know that any minute now Sis Baty from Church Headquarters could call back.

And I know that she could say, ok, I'll send your papers to the Brethren before lunch.

Or she could say, not yet, keep working on it and call back in 3 months.

I also know she might not call back today.

So I am working on getting myself ready for all these possibilities.

I'll work on that easy, flexible attitude. I might even go get some breakfast instead of sitting here by the phone waiting and talking about waiting and wondering and...

Oh never mind. It's no big deal.

Sigh.

Thoughts On Anemia

2008-05-13T08:19:00.002-07:00

My iron has been pretty low. Two docs have said, it's not THAT bad. I agree. I am able to walk several miles at a good pace, go up and down stairs without fainting, and keep active.

However, when I see the reference ranges for normal blood iron and see how low mine are, all sorts new possibilities for enjoying physical activity come to mind.

(I will give the reference ranges below so you can see what I mean.)

The realization that I might walk faster, hike longer, hike higher, be more active - these are the enjoyable thoughts I've been having since yesterday.

Whereas walking the mailboxes in our neighborhood has a certain amount of appeal in that I feel I'm progressing when I go farther or faster, I believe it will pale to blah compared to being able to walk for a couple of hours on a trail in the Cascades. Or the length of Long Beach on Vancouver Island. Or down to the shore (and up again!) in a steep and rugged patch of coast.

My heart is normal, so I'm limited in activity only by my oxygen-carrying capacity. And that is fixable.

I was an outdoors kid. I rode my bike (hey, that's another thing I will be able to do better!) all over our part of town. I rode home for lunch from school. I explored on foot, too. I swam for hours at a time. I sailed and rowed. I clammed and fished. I love the outdoors!

This is what I want to transform myself into again, an active outdoors wind-burned red-cheeked vigorous grandma who joyously explores new terrain and walks 10 or 15 miles a day most days. Heaven knows Washington lends itself to the outdoor life year round and why would I want to hang back from all that? The geology alone is worth the move!

So I'm working on building up those iron stores to see how I feel and what I can do when I am 'normal'. (Don't worry - we're only talking about blood iron here. I'll still be me in all the other ways.)

So here are the reference ranges for 'normal' blood iron and my reading of last week:

Hemoglobin 11.5-16.0 g/dL mine: 10.6
Hematocrit 35.0-48.0 percent mine: 33.5
Iron 35-175 ug/dL mine: 21
TIBC 250-400 mine: 383 (ability to absorb)
Saturation 15-50 percent mine: 5
Ferritin 11-307 ng/mL mine: 8 (doc says 11 is not normal - normal is about 250)

So isn't that cool? So much room for improvement and being able to do more. I find this quite exciting.

Update on Papers 5/12/08

2008-05-13T08:09:00.002-07:00

I was hoping to have a bit more to tell, but here are the facts. What happens with them will have to wait for a call back from Church Headquarters.

D's bp passed the test. He had 3 days in a row of good readings, the middle one by his doctor, and that is exactly what was required. So - CHECK!

I had my bloodwork done last week as I was already scheduled to do, and received the results yesterday. My anemia is lessened: the hemoglobin has gone from 9.4 to 10.6 (an increase the doc didn't think was possible). The hematocrit went from 30.1 to 33.5.

Neither of these is in the normal range, nor were the other iron-related numbers. What was normal was the test that showed my ability to absorb iron. So it's all a matter of the iron budget, and that is obviously responding positively to the changes I've made.

The question is whether it is enough for Sis Baty from Church Headquarters to pass the papers on to the Brethren or not.

I called this morning at 9 am SLC time, and got her message machine. Now I am waiting for her call back.

I'll let you know...

Just Plain Weird

2008-05-11T22:52:00.002-07:00

As we ooze along toward our final day here, now 9 days away, and spend our next-to-last Sunday with members of our Tucson ward with whom we've attended church in some cases for 27 years, and have visits from our local kids, and surprise our local grandkids with the nearness of our departure date, and not know the fate of our papers, we are feeling just plain weird.

One thing is definite: the moving van comes on May 20.

And another: we are spending the last two nights we're in town, May 21 and 22, at the Pershings'. So nice of them! (By then our stuff will be on its way.)

And speaking of stuff: I am now down to the last several boxes of Nana's. It's strange to see things from my babyhood mixed with a schoolpaper of Peter's and photos of her with the people she lived with at Sin Vacas. With some fortitude and luck I will be done tomorrow.

Mother's Day meant contact with just about everyone in the family - very nice. It also meant a simultaneous happy birthday to Bu. Back in her birth year Mother's Day was on the 10th, not the 11th, so I spent it in labor but didn't get the baby till the next day. Happy Birthday, Bu!

And thanks, all, for the flowers or calls or messages or ...

The Tucson valley is still yellow w/ blooming palos verdes, intermingled with lavender blooming ironwoods. When we went out the door to church today, at 2:20, it felt like it was 100 degrees (and dry). The car thermometer said 100 degrees and didn't change in the two miles or so to church. On the way home it was 95, at 6 pm. So I think it was actually 100! (The official temperature was only 94, though. Given that nearly every year we have 100 degrees by May 15, it's surprisingly 'cool'.)

So this next to last Sabbath is winding to a close. Tomorrow it's back to work, back to the last boxes, the packing of clothes into suitcases, and probably the purchasing of a bit more food to tide us over. It's tempting just to keep emptying out the pantry and not adding anything more BUT it won't take us long to go through three more kimchi dry soups and 6 more cans of baked beans, and maybe we will supplement them with a dozen eggs and a few other things. We do have 9 more days after all, and then 2 at the Pershings', and then...

Report May 9

2008-05-09T19:59:00.002-07:00

11 Days till the moving van comes.

D has normal blood pressure and the doc expects it to remain that way if he keeps walking/running. We thought running on various beaches and hiking on various trails would be the best way to do this. And to think: no bursage stuck to the laces!

And I have my anemia-checkup appt on Monday.

On Tuesday we call SLC back and report in.

Then possibly the papers will move out of the medical-screening process and we can begin to wait.

But as D says, now there is no urgency - no urgency because we are healthy and likely to remain so and if we don't go now, we'll go later. It's entirely out of our hands. Nice!

An Odd Change of Perception

2008-05-09T15:44:00.000-07:00

To put this in perspective, I just LOVE it when this happens: something comes along that causes an inner change that gives a whole new perspective on things.

The something in this case is the possible postponement of our mission, or at least the increase in hoops to jump through before our papers will be processed. We're making progress to some degree on this, but we won't know till next week how successful we might ultimately be.

But that's not the change in perspective. The change came about because of this but is only peripherally related. Here it is:

Old perception: Details of move, details of trip, details of arrival in Anacortes, timetable for summer, timetable for fall, including trip to East Coast, possibly to England and Ireland, landing in SLC in very early November. Mission.

New perception: Details of move and trip and arrival, build new life in Anacortes. Travel from time to time. Go on a mission or two.

This second is a great gift! It means that instead of being in Anacortes temporarily once again, the only difference from previous years being that our stuff is sitting in a storage area down the street instead of in a house in Tucson, we are now NOT temporary, we are permanent and make life-choices from that homebase.

The externals of our activities would probably not appear to be that different. But inside, it's a huge transformation. Can you get the drift of it? The mission is not LIFE, it is a service project that we have chosen to undertake in the context of the rest of our lives.

It's healthier this way. We both feel much more settled now. It's cool. PL

Children

2008-05-07T20:32:00.002-07:00

"Children do not see themselves as apprentice adults. They are trying to be good at being children, which means trying to find a niche within groups of peers - conforming, but also differentiating themselves; competing, but also collaborating. They get their language and their accents largely from their peers, not their parents." Ridley, p 256.

"Ancestral human beings reared their children in groups, with women engaged in what zoologists called 'cooperative breeding'. The natural habitat of the child was therefore a mixed nursery of children of all ages - almost certainly self-segregated by sex for much of the time. It is here, not in the nuclear family or the relation w/ parents, that we should look for the environmental causes of personality." Ridley 256.

Revelation II - About Education

2008-05-07T20:20:00.002-07:00

"Parents' most important job, therefore, is to provide support and opportunities, not to try to shape children's enduring characteristics." Sandra Scarr, quoted in Ridley, p 254. From Psychology, Public Policy, and the Law (1956).

Revelation!

2008-05-07T20:17:00.002-07:00

"Parenting is a revelation to most people. Having assumed you would now be the chief coach and sculptor of a human personality, you find yourself reduced to the role of little more than a helpless spectator cum chauffeur." Matt Ridley, The Agile Gene, page 254.

YES!

Found In A Box

2008-05-07T20:01:00.002-07:00

This poem, from my grad-student days, was in a box of all sorts of other things. This is as good a place as any to store it:

From gossy ruin silv'ry
Streaking skyward, spinning
A chilly dawn of rose, golden
Spears appearing, searing
Somber spheres of slumber,
Rising, glowing gold
Across the rusty hold
Seem soon to ransom gloom.
But then--
A rose surrenders bloom.

It is untitled and sent to a teacher, unsigned.

Does anyone know it? Or did I really write it, as it appears? In any case, I have to say I rather like it!

Call On Hold - Need Prayers

2008-05-07T08:44:00.003-07:00

We just got a call from church headquarters from a sister who apparently goes over the medical stuff with a fine-toothed comb. She found that JSL's blood pressure was high. And that my hemoglobin was low. Here's the story:

JSL has elevated blood pressure (actually up, then down) when he is getting measured in a doctor's office. (Not an unknown phenomenon - called 'white-coat syndrome'.) So they fitted him w/ a cuff and monitor for 24 hours. It pumps your arm up to about 200 every 15 minutes except at night when it's every 1 hour. He came to hate it. His bp was 141/91. His doc wanted him to go on drugs.

The church needs him to have below 140/90 three days in a row.

I don't think that will be hard at all, once he's not in a aggravating setting. Plus he's been walking or running an hour a day and that's the best way to get it down. He is definitely under stress to get us moved and this is the worst it gets. We have no intention for him to go on drugs for 1 point over the standard, esp since they don't address the root cause.

Now for me. This one is trickier and may make it so that we can't go on a mission at all, though as D says, it's just another thing to push against. (We find a lots of barriers, but we have learned just to push against them...)

Context for me: I have just been declared healthy, above average health: normal heart, everything else great too. I walk vigorously for an hour a day when it's not too hot out.

But I do have irritable bowel, managed except when aggravated by some food. One of the real aggravations for it is iron in large quantity.

And when something irritates me, it makes my intestines inflamed. And they bleed, and stop as soon as the irritating substance is out of my system. So with enough aggravation I get anemic.

Plus I've always been anemic. This walking vigorously an hour a day is done w/ low hemoglobin numbers (9.4).

The lady at the church said 'we want you healthy enough to serve'. I'm trying to tell her I am but I have to get my hemoglobin up to 12. It has never been 12.

I need to take more iron. But it is very aggravating, if I take more than a certain amount. It will make me bleed. The last time I increased my iron to overcome 'anemia' I bled enough to take me to the next lower level!

I can eat iron-rich foods, but that takes a long, long time to build up iron levels to 'normal' (which is not normal for me at all).

The way we left it is, when D has his blood pressure behaving (3 days in a row under 140 / 90) then I go get a hemoglobin, and then they will look at our papers.

It is probable that his bp will be ok 3 days from now and that my hemoglobin will never be ok.

So that's why we need prayers. We need a way to show the church that I am healthy and capable without meeting a certain standard of 'average' hemoglobin levels.

I was scheduled to get my hemoglobin done today anyway. I doubt if I've made headway in the past 6 weeks since it was measured before - it's just too soon, plus taking extra iron made me bleed. We'll see shortly.

So we are in a difficult position right now. I suppose we could just unpack and go back to life as we've known it. It's so strange to have come this far and to have an 11th hour challenge.

We will push against it and see if it's real. But don't count on a call any time soon. We need prayers and insights into what to do. Do we stop by the missionary department when we are in SLC and let them see me run up and down the stairs several times? I'll do it...

Your suggestions are welcome, and certainly prayers. Love to all...

Papers Update 5/6/08

2008-05-06T20:33:00.002-07:00

OK, just got a message from our awesome go-the-extra-mile bishop. And it said, when he opened our file it disclosed that...

Our papers are now at Church Headquarters!

OH MY!

It brought tears to my eyes and a pitter-pat to my heart. It looks like this is really going to happen!

We could hear next week I suppose, but it's much more likely that we'll hear the week after. Or the week after that, maybe? What do you think?

How 'bout everyone who reads this vote on 1) when you think they will come, and 2) where you think we will go. Spouses vote separately... (we need lots of votes to make it fun - please vote! Just submit a comment here.)

Anyway, the send-call-to address is still Chris's, just in case we're on the road. So I'd still like to do the conference-call opening, if anyone is game. Not everyone has to be there. See earlier post about this. And let me know in your comment whether you want to be there...or at least be informed that it's happening.

OK, I can't prolong this message any more. I've got to go sort Nana's stuff for the move. 10 boxes left to go. Etc.

WHEEEEEEEE!

A Snippet From The Life Of Teresa Horan

2008-05-04T21:38:00.003-07:00

If I don't record this while I'm thinking of it, it will never be remembered. This was told to me by my mother but also by Dot, I think:

When my grandmother was pregnant with her 5th child, a year after having lost her baby boy at 3 days of age, she had a stroke. It was July when it happened. The only thing to be done with her was to put her to bed. She was 36, and the year was 1920.

A month later, a little girl was born, 2 months premature. She lived for 5 minutes.

My grandmother spent a year in bed recovering from the stroke. I believe Aunt Mar stayed home from work to care for her. At the end of the year she got up and put her life back together. From then on she walked with a cane and had a 'withered' left hand - something I remember vividly from my toddlerhood.

So that's the background. The story I want to record is what happened shortly after she was on her feet again:

A young girl, maybe 12, a neighbor from up the street, got appendicitis. My mother, who was about 10 (or possibly Dot, who would have been about 5 or 6), came home and said to her mother, Anne Boyle (or whatever her name was) died last night.

My grandmother was aghast! Just the day before the girl had been fine, and all this, the attack and the infection and death, had occurred overnight.

So my grandmother put on her black coat and her black hat. I know she had on black tie-up shoes because she always did - ones with a bit of a heel, a rather blocky heel. Then she took her cane, and made her way out the door, across the wide front porch (where I sat years later playing Hearts with Aunt Mar and Cousin Bobby Strauss), down the front steps, down the concrete walk, down the step at the end, and up the sidewalk to the home of this young girl to console the mother, her friend.

It was not easy for her to make the short walk, but it was in her character to go and do what she could. I wanted you to know that.

Getting Around To Things And Us

2008-05-04T21:13:00.002-07:00

The list of possible things we could do in Tucson before leaving 'permanently' is long enough that we've started to ignore part of it. One of those things is placing a pin on the timeline of life with regard to 'the boys'.

In other words, having a good time with them in some meaningful way as a way of 'finding our way back' when we see them again.

(Metaphors seem to be the only way to say this.)

Theresa and I have vaguely tried to make plans, but something has interfered: Nick and Nariana coming for Sunday dinner, for example. So it has happened. Today provided the opportunity. I think it was a gift, of sorts.

What happened was that Gilbert, poor lad, collapsed and went into convulsions at church. He was 'guarding' the door during Sacrament, and suddenly went down. I, sitting toward the back and directly behind the Paulls where we usually sit, must have heard him going because I turned around just as he landed - hard - and started twitching.

Many people went to his aid. They called 911, who came discreetly. Mike went to be with him at the back of the chapel and was there when they got him up. They took him out and that's all we knew for a while. Then Mike came back in and got Theresa, who asked me to make sure the boys were behaving themselves.

They were. They were quite sobered. Eric wanted to know what was going on, Jose was crying, Keenan kept an eye on the door, Gabe, when he was finished passing Sacrament, sat down and looked sad. It was a tender moment. I told them what little I knew (minus the convulsions). Mike and Theresa didn't return. The boys remained exemplary.

After Sacrament Mtg we went out in the hall and saw Gilbert sitting, obviously sorely afflicted, in a classroom, with several attendants (but not the EMTs). Mike came out and told us he had knocked out 3 or 4 teeth when he went down, but otherwise he was ok. They were hoping to get to an oral surgeon to have the one intact one put back in. I asked about the convulsions. It turned out no one had seen those. So whoever was in attendance decided it would be a good idea for Gilbert to go to the hospital and get checked out. Mike handed me his Sunday School lesson (well prepared and as it turned out, very easy to use) and he and Theresa took Gilbert to the hospital. On their way out one of them asked us to bring the boys home.

When church was over, I collected the boys, who wanted to know what was going on. We didn't know much. Then Theresa called and told us that Gilbert had a lot of anti-anxiety meds being dripped into him, plus a fair amount of IV, and was having various analyses done. But despite the drug he was still convulsing intermittently. She told us that if we got the boys home, Mike would be at the house by the time they got there (since they can't be left alone). So we arranged for Bro and Sis Claridge to take Jose and Gabe, and we took Eric and Keenan.

That gave us time for some great conversation, which I thoroughly enjoyed. For one thing I found out that Keenan had gotten and tremendously enjoyed his special box from the Martells.

It took us a while to get to their house and Mike was there to meet them. A few minutes later the Claridges arrived with the other two. We spent a few minutes chatting and left for home. An hour or so after we arrived Mike called to say that Gilbert's tests were all negative and that he'd be coming home in an hour.

An hour later or so Theresa called to report that they were home. The Ritalin that Gilbert takes has a side effect of convulsions, and it had gotten too concentrated in his body because he had become dehydrated during his fast.

Because of the convulsions they were not able to put the 'good' tooth back in, so now he's ok from the fall but has to have 3 tooth implants. Poor kid!

There may be easier ways for us to find ourselves taking the time we need to get around to what should be done before we leave. As I looked across the lobby and saw the four lined up and waiting for us, I thought, these are my boys. I love them. They - and all the Paulls - are family. Maybe we will be separated but we need to take the time to link ourselves up for the gap in time when we won't be in physical proximity. I hope we can heed this lesson during these next couple of weeks.

Paper Update 5/4/08

2008-05-04T21:12:00.002-07:00

As of this morning, our papers were still at the stake offices, according to Bishop B Anderson, who is kind enough to look at his bishop's screen once in a while for us.

Impolite!

2008-05-04T08:16:00.004-07:00

I intend to stop being so polite. Out the door with it also goes being constrained and disciplined and 'correct'. All these things are the veneer of an insincere civilization designed to make sure the others in one's life are comfy and never upset. But there's too much to heed to let niceties prevail, and too much difference that could be made by rocking the boat.

For example, food. Market manipulation, government protections, US subsidies affecting global food production. Makes me MAD!

What makes me mad is my ignorance about such things. BUT NO MORE! I intend to dig deep and learn what's really going on, then reinstate my status as a hot-head and do a least some little things to chip away at all this.

I can't run for Congress because I wouldn't play the game the right way. Whatever it is.

But I can investigate and report.

We're only 230 years old as a nation. That's not much. I'm afraid this great concept is going to fail because of greed and manipulation.

I have a great belief in free markets, but what we have now are not free markets and the US is leading the way in manipulating them, for the benefit of a few tolerated by the ignorance of the many. At least I don't have to be one of those!

I'm concerned about education (as always), about food, and energy.

I'm also excited about the possibilities for these things, the solutions that are beginning to emerge.

I'm concerned about global cooling, but I can't figure out how to do anything about that except to be prepared.

Back 230 years a bunch of regular folks with a concept got together and challenged one of the great nations of the world, one with which they had close ties. That was pretty awesome, and a good example of what can be done. And not necessarily through public office.

The thing is, none of them lived to see if it was going to last. It was a huge experiment that they began and then had to let perk along on its own.

I think we need a restoration. The Gospel needed restoring - it needed returning to its beginnings to start over. I kind of think that's what we need to do w/ the US government also.

But I don't know! I haven't been paying attention. I've been leaving these things to others and allowing my ignorance and inattention to accumulate.

Now it's time to activate myself.

Yesterday I wrote a piece, a very delicate and gently and mildly informative piece, about hunger in Haiti. One of my Shaklee people saw it and was offended. Oy! So what's the point of being delicate and mild?

Right now all I can say is, No More Ignorance For Me! (relatively speaking...)

You can think of this as a slow awakening.

Papers

2008-05-02T07:45:00.001-07:00

As of last night at 8 pm the papers were still in the Stake President's office. We await word.

Receiving the Call - A Plan, plus calendar

2008-05-01T07:27:00.003-07:00

Some of you may want to be 'present' when we open our call letter. Here's what I have in mind.

The call is being sent to Chris's. This is because we don't know enough to be certain it would arrive in Tucson before we leave. We think it would, but if it didn't, it would delay our getting the letter for 10 days. So we have asked Chris to receive it, and he has agreed.

So when he does receive it, presuming that we will not yet have arrived at his house (see calendar below), he will gather his family around, and then open it and read it to us.

If any of you would like to be there, we have a conference line we can use. You dial in to the conference line, and it's like a big phone call with everyone able to talk and listen. I will give the details below.

The biggest question then becomes, how do we let you know that the call has arrived and that we will be opening it at a particular time?

Right now I would like to propose that we read it at 6:30 pm PT, which includes Tucson; 7:30 for Utah and Montana. This way most children would be awake and most adults would be home. This time also allows me to avoid conference calls I am committed to each week.

The best way I know how to communicate quickly is email. I would put the message that the call has arrived in lewfamzoo, regular email addresses, and this blog. I would also have to call Katie to include them.

If you can think of a better way, let me know. (I think we need a family phone tree, where the initiation of a communication can be done by any one family member and reach everyone within a few minutes. It would serve us well beyond this mission call. But we don't have to do this now - it would be for emergency communications.)

If you don't care about being there when the call papers are opened, just let me know. You'll certainly find out soon, anyway. This is just for those who like to be in on the whole experience, such as their parents swooning or whatever the case.

Here's the calendar as we know it:

May 20 - moving company picks up furniture
May 22 - we drive out of Tucson, go to Phoenix for a temple day and speaking event
May 23 - drive to Boulder UT to meet Van and girls
May 26 - drive to SLC to stay w/ Chris and family
May 28 - sealing day - we spend the morning at the SLC temple doing sealings
May 30 - Happy birthday, Chris - we leave for Anacortes
May 30 or 31 - we arrive Anacortes
June 1 - church in Anacortes
June 2 - moving van arrives, things put into storage

The call could arrive as early as May 15. If not then, it is likely to arrive on May 22, just after we leave for Phoenix. It is possible it will arrive a week later than that. Of course it might not arrive on a Thursday at all: Chris, being in SLC, could receive it a day earlier.

Conference line info: dial 1-308-344-6400 pin 887953# (enter pin when prompted). Dial in a few minutes ahead, and if you have trouble entering the pin, hang up and start over. Some phone systems require that the pin be entered rather slowly.

I'd love to know if you and your family would like to be included in the opening of the call. Meanwhile we solicit everyone's prayers that the Spirit will prevail during the call process and at the time we receive the call. Thanks!

Meeting w/ Stake President

2008-05-01T07:23:00.003-07:00

Last night we had our meeting with the Stake President. It was uneventful in particulars. He passed our papers to the Stake Clerk for final data entry and for pushing the button. We think the button will be pushed tonight. We HOPE!

The papers go instantly to SLC, where they are processed quickly. We could receive our call in two weeks, or it could take longer. See the next post for details about that.

We are happy to have come this far, on schedule and with an increase in faith. If preparation for a mission can be this fruitful, then the mission itself must be most enlightening.

The Cost of Ignorance And The Light of Knowledge

2008-04-30T14:54:00.003-07:00

Let me tell you a little tale that leads to a big lesson for me.

Last August we went to the Shaklee convention in Nashville. We got as far as St Louis by plane, but they were late arriving and we had to drive in a rental car to Nashville late into the night to get there in time for the main meeting of the convention early the next morning.

We were staying in a hotel with a large indoor pool around which the rooms were arrayed, on 3 or 4 floors. Our room was not among these but required passing through the large courtyard the pool was in to get back and forth to the convention buses.

The first afternoon, on returning to our room, I had a great deal of trouble making the walk across the lobby floor. I didn't have the energy to carry my tote, and I basically had to take small shuffling steps the whole distance. I didn't get respite from this problem until we returned to Anacortes.

We supposed the problem was the chlorine from the pool. I was marginally better at the convention facility, but not by any stretch normal.

I secretly assumed I was about to have a heart attack. At one event, held outside, several ambulances were standing by (which I guess is not unusual at an event for 10,000, several of whom are over 80). I kept an eye on them, I was so convinced I might need one any minute. I took charge of walking w/ Kay just to hide my slowness: she has Parkinson's, is on meds, and can't hustle as she used to. Good thing for me!

Even when we were back in Anacortes, I didn't walk that well. I was really slow on hills around our house.

When we were in China, we walked everywhere. It was nothing to us to go many miles a day (mostly on the flat, except for stairs in the classroom buildings). Beijing is at low altitude, so that was no challenge.

On returning from China I had a very bad summer, mostly due to wheat - as I later discovered. We did very little walking. But when we returned to Tucson, with the wheat issue resolving due to my changing my diet, I felt well enough to take up tennis, and enjoyed playing all winter w/ Tonie and Theresa.

Then it grew hot, and the tennis faded away. It was too hot to walk. When we got to Anacortes a year ago we walked but then that was interrupted by our trip to Alaska, 5 weeks of mostly riding in the car. It was just after that the incident in Nashville happened.

When we got home from Nashville I was discouraged that I couldn't walk, even though we went out every day. Gradually the weather and short days took their toll and we walked only briefly - 30 minutes most days. I was still plodding along and felt I would probably do that for the remainder of what would certainly prove to be a short life.

It was in this state of discouragement that it came to me that we should go on our mission right away, not several years in the future after we were well settled into retirement. There were other contributing factors, but this was a big one: if I didn't go now, I would never be able to go.

D and I talked about what could be going on, and one possibility came up, that I was anemic. The intestinal problems, whether poor absorption or bleeding, could have been contributing. We reasoned that anemia could account for not being able to move very fast, and further that the effect of the chlorine could have been due to further inhibiting oxygen absorption, or perhaps the effect was more of a toxic one.

Nonetheless, I secretly thought it could be heart disease. My mother had a heart attack at about age 52, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart problems by the time she was in her mid-60s. It was reasonable enough. Plus, when I walked, I got tightness in my chest.

I didn't want to go to a doctor because I didn't want to get a hefty diagnosis that I'd have to live with.

I determined that when we got back to fair skies in Tucson I would start an earnest exercise program. I began to walk the mailboxes and do the Canadian Air Force exercises, as noted here, so I would not have restrictions on my papers that would hamper our ability to serve anywhere in the world. The motivation was primarily the mission, since I wasn't sure health was an option for me any more.

In the course of getting ready for a mission, a large number of the tasks center around medical poking and prodding, so of course I knew I'd be found out. That gave me at best a couple of months to build some stamina and perhaps some normal speed.

So out I went and began to walk. Sometimes I was breathing hard by the time I got to the mailbox. But I forged ahead, and most of it is recorded here: I made real progress. Pretty soon I was walking at a decent speed, certainly a normal one - no more plodding or shuffling along. That was such a relief.

The first medical clue of what had been happening came when I had my physical and got bloodwork done. I was anemic! HURRAY! In a perverse way it was good news - it opened the real possibility that anemia was a contributing factor to my problem.

During the physical I suggested to the doc that I have a stress test. By now I was doing better enough to want to know what the situation was!

The test was scheduled for April 28, Monday of this week. I had an enjoyable time with a fascinating set of procedures in the category of a nuclear stress test. It is thorough!

Today I got the results.

My heart is completely normal. Exercise ecgs are normal. No blockages. Great blood pressure (which I knew). Great recovery. EVERYTHING about my heart was normal.

The whole thing was a chimera. My fear prevented me from pursuing knowledge that would have put my mind at ease and allowed me to look for other causes. Something appeared to be quite real, but when I pushed against it, I found it was merely a deceit.

So I am rejoicing. I am a well person. I am still anemic. That was a little worrisome, and my main doc was a bit freaked by it. But another doc pointed out it wasn't all that bad: hemoglobin of 9.4. Basically it's enough to account for slow walking but not enough to do something drastic about.

The lesson I take from this has to do with faith and self-trust: if I had had a heart problem, I would have found solutions or adjustments that were suitable for me, with the Lord's help. If not this mission, then that one. And I would have adapted. It's also about humility: I was too proud to accept a label that would indicate I was less than fully capable. And a third lesson comes straight out of D&C 129. I leave it to you to apply that as the Spirit moves you.

In the end, light and truth and knowledge are the choice. Ignorance and darkness and fear have no place among even the weakest among us. That is what I have learned through this year of worry and enlightenment.

Update 4/29/08

2008-04-29T16:05:00.003-07:00

Tomorrow we meet w/ the Stake President. On Thursday, May 1, they will push the button on the online recommend system and the package will instantly arrive in Salt Lake, 6 months to the day before our availability date of Nov 1.

Then we wait.

But not for long! Two weeks, they say...

I will not be surprised to have a few surprises along the way.

Meanwhile we are finishing up here at the house. We have multitudes of unknowns still ahead of us, most of them - we think - during the month of May.

Just so you know. PL

Lovely Sunday

2008-04-27T22:20:00.004-07:00

Today we had stake conference so the afternoon was wide open. Our home teaching team came in the afternoon: Lem and Janie. We had a great discussion. Then in the evening our two oldest grandchildren came for dinner, along w/ our second daughter and her lovely family, including the three nearly perfect children. I have great photos of the 5 grandchildren, ranging in age from 22 to 19 months, playing with sidewalk chalk together on the back patio.

About the time dinner was over, the phone rang. It was the stake executive secretary setting our appointment with the stake president for Wed evening at 6:30. YES!

Friends from our ward just got their call. They are going to Orlando FL.

Family Day

2008-04-26T23:09:00.003-07:00

Today we had a lot of fun.

We got up early to take friend Judy to the airport and start the drive to Phoenix. Not too many people were on the road!

We got to the temple just after 9 am so we could help take care of kids while Garrett got married. It didn't work out exactly as planned, but one of the moms, and the grandma and grampa had fun tending to 5 kids under 7, a pretty good ratio I think! It was of course sunny in Phoenix, but not truly hot - pleasant enough in the shade. Soon everyone came out of the temple and our duties were over.

Then we went to a temple session ourselves and did work for Mercy Jones and her son George Clendening.

Then we had a quick bit of lunch and drove home. Katie and family passed us on the way.

Then we took a quick rest, and went to Garrett's reception and saw the kids again. I had made friends with Dessa, a 4-yr old cousin, and it was fun seeing her again at the party, as well as seeing the other kids and their parents...and the bride and groom.

Then we went to stake conference and heard wonderful talks on preparedness of all sorts, including an MD's view of the Word of Wisdom. Bottom line: trust the Holy Ghost and the scriptures, even when supposedly new breakthroughs are announced.

A great day!

Milestone

2008-04-22T22:42:00.002-07:00

Tonight our completed papers went to the Stake President.

Introducing Elizabeth Wheeler

2008-04-20T13:03:00.004-07:00

Elizabeth is our antecedent through this line:

Me - Christopher A Adams (b 1908) - Ida May Tanner (b 1886) - Charles Tanner (b 1849) - Elizabeth Wheeler (b 1811)

We didn't know about her until this year (thanks in great part to Bonnie's research) and didn't know her name till 2 weeks ago. I have redone the entire tracing and landed in the same place.

In the 1840 census we find Elizabeth married to George Bailey, the mother of several children. In the 1850 census we find her married to Charles W Tanner and the mother of three more, all little boys (William Charles, Frederick, and Charles). The first of these was born when Elizabeth was 35. At the time she married Charles W Tanner, he was 20-ish.

They all lived in Calne, Wiltshire County, England, though Elizabeth was born a few towns away in Laycock, Wiltshire.

After that we lose track of them for a while, but now they have re-emerged: I found them living in Bristol Rhode Island in time for the 1860 US Census. According to later census reports pertaining to my great grandfather Charles, they immigrated in 1853.

After that one sighting in Rhode Island, they all disappear except Charles, who reappears 20 years later in Norwalk, married to Mary Jane Reynolds.

Other than the 3 little boys, Elizabeth's other children did not come to America with her. Some were quite young (12+) still when Elizabeth and her new young family immigrated. We may be able to get clues about her parents by looking up where her left-behind offspring lived and who they lived with.

Isabelle's Life

2008-04-20T09:26:00.002-07:00

Having found Isabelle in the 1910 census, and not seeing her in the same household in 1920, I began to search for her and her family.

The place to begin was Norwalk. The family had been centered on Norwalk for 40 years if not longer. Norwalk is a small city in Fairfield County next to Darien. Fairfield County was homebase of virtually every ancestor in the Adams lineage going back to before 1800, the exception being the Fagans.

The 1920 US census record did not show a John Gilbert family, nor an Isabelle Gilbert, living anywhere in Fairfield County.

I decided to look for one of the daughters. Marion Gilbert is a unique enough name so that I could go through the candidates presented by ancestry.com one by one to see if they offered any clues.

What caught my eye right away was a Marion F Gilbert living in New Haven. New Haven County is the next one up the coast from Fairfield County, and New Haven itself is about half an hour from Norwalk on today's highways. But I didn't know of any reason for a New Haven residence, especially since this Marion Gilbert was living as a niece in the home of someone named John Fenner.

It seemed unlikely, but I took a look anyway. It turned out that John 'Fenner', as the indexer interpreted the census record, was actually John Tanner.

The Tanner name couldn't be a coincidence! Isabelle was born a Tanner, and now someone with her daughter's name was living with a John Tanner.

This Marion F Gilbert was 11 years old, just the right age. The rest of the household consisted of John's wife Clara, his in-laws (the Nicholses), and another niece Sarah E Gilbert, age 8.

No John Gilbert, no Isabelle, no Ida Gilbert...

Where was the rest of the family?

I looked for John Gilbert again in Fairfield County. I found one living in Ridgefield, an inland Fairfield County town north of Stamford, a place where I lived for 11 weeks when I was 6. This John was living as a boarder with a family. He was the right age, and he was listed as a widower.

I think this was Isabelle's husband John, and I think he was indeed a widower - that she had died.

I think that Sarah was her daughter, and that possibly she had died at the time of Sarah's birth.

John Tanner and Clara appear not to have had any children of their own. I tried to find John in earlier censuses, but have not been successful. If Isabelle died it would not have been unreasonable for a family member to take her children.

Two mysteries remain: who is John, and where was Isabelle's oldest daughter, Ida?

As for John Tanner, I believe he is an older brother of Ida May and Isabelle Tanner.

Going back to the 1900 census, I noticed that Mary Jane was listed as having had 7 children. This is something I had missed entirely before. It also said that 4 of her children were currently living.

We knew not only of Ida, and now Isabelle, but Mary Jane's son Charles Ernest, my dad's Uncle Ernie. These were born in 1883 (Ernie), 1886 (Ida May), and 1888 (Isabelle). John's age listed in the 1920 census indicates he was born in 1881, so he could have been an older son.

I have no proof that he was, but a further indication is that in the 1920 census he states that his mother was born in CT and his father in England. That is true for the other three of Mary Jane's children: their father Charles Tanner was born in Calne, Wiltshire, England.

(The three children who had died could have been from Mary Jane's supposed first marriage.)

In looking at Charles Tanner's record, we see that he had been married for 19 years at the time of the 1900 census, or in other words late 1880 or early 1881, which is compatible w/ having the four children of the ages listed.

You may recall that Mary Jane listed herself as a widow in 1900, but she wasn't: she and Charles were separated and Charles was living in Wilton, a town carved out of the northern part of Norwalk, with Charles Ernest, now 17, at the time of the 1900 census.

From all this I conclude that it is most likely that John Tanner was the eldest of the family that included Isabelle and Ida May.

So what about Ida Gilbert?

I didn't find her until I searched for her independently. She was actually hiding right under my nose, enumerated in the 1920 census with her grandmother Mary Jane, her aunt Ida May Adams, her uncle Chris Adams, and her cousin Christopher A Adams. In other words, she grew up with my father. He was her first cousin, she was just somewhat older, and in fact I believe I have a photograph of her:

In my father's trunk is a photo of an old lady sitting in a chair, with my grandmother Ida standing protectively behind her. Certainly this old lady is Mary Jane. To the left in the photo is my father, about age 10. He is standing next to a girl who looks somewhat like him and was of a similar age. I had asked my mother who that was, though unfortunately by the time I found the photo she was already blind. I described the scene but she had no idea. She just said that my grandmother had taken a lot of people in and this could be one of them.

In fact it was. My grandmother and great grandmother were raising Ida Gilbert. My father grew up with his cousin but never mentioned her in later talks about family.

My guess is that this photo is a birthday picture of Mary Jane. I need to get the photo out to check how old my father might have been to see if I can pin down which birthday.

So what happened to Isabelle's girls? I lose track of Marion F and Sarah E Gilbert. I would need a marriage record, and haven't found one so far.

But as usual, that big multi-generational house they all been living in in Norwalk furnished another clue: In the 1930 census we find Ida, Christopher, Ida's new husband Ben Porter (Chris Adams, her husband - known to us better at Christopher J - had been killed in 1921 in an automobile accident), and some boarders: Ida Champagne and her husband Edward. I had little doubt this was Ida Gilbert.

Ida and Ed were 29 and 23 at the time of the census, and had been married for 3 years. At this point they had no children, and the 1940 census is not yet available (not till 2010).

But in checking the Social Security Index records, I find that Edward Champagne, born July 4 1900, died in August 1977 (the same month and year as my father), and Ida Champagne, his wife, born August 5 1906 in CT, died May 9, 1994. Both died in Covina CA. In the Social Security record, Ida's mother's maiden name is given as Tanner, and her father as Gilbert.

That's the end of the trail for now. It means that while we were here in Tucson my father's first cousin, who knew him as a child and my grandmother and great grandmother as her caretakers, lived a day's drive away in CA. How I would have loved to meet her! All I can do now is to make sure she gets sealed to her parents and sisters, which I know is something Mary Jane wants for Isabelle.

Finding Isabelle

2008-04-20T07:30:00.005-07:00

Sometime in the 1980s I stumbled on a mystery named Isabelle.

I was checking out the 1900 census record looking for my grandmother Ida May Tanner, I found her listed as the daughter, age 14, of Mary Jane Tanner. The record also included another daughter, Isabelle, age 12.

So I asked my mother who Isabelle was. Ida was my mother's mother-in-law, and my mother had known her. If she'd had a sister, my mother felt she would have known about it. But my mother had never heard of Isabelle, and questioned whether she could really be Ida's sister.

In all the questioning of my father about his family that I did as a child, he had never mentioned an Isabelle, either.

So for years I wondered who she was. The 1910 census record had entries for Mary Jane Tanner, head of household, age 50, widowed, Ida May Tanner 14 - daughter, and Isabelle Tanner 12 - daughter. Some boarders were also mentioned. It also noted that Mary Jane was renting this house, in Norwalk CT.

More recently I had returned to that record and again mulled over the fate of Isabelle. The only conclusion I could draw was that she had died sometime after 1900.

Then a few weeks ago we went to the temple and I did the work for Mary Jane, whose name before she was married was Reynolds.

(I am not saying it was her maiden name. We have evidence that she had been married previously and don't know if Reynolds was possibly her earlier married name.)

In any case, I did the work for Mary Jane Reynolds, and from that moment on it became easy to piece together Isabelle's existence. Maybe her mom wanted her found.

When we got back from that long day at the temple and the 200-mile round-trip, I walked into the house and straight to the computer. I had a general desire to find Isabelle, and just wanted to give it a stab.

I always seem to gain a little something when I revisit old sources, so I went to the 1910 census, sure I had checked there before, but - why not give it another shot?

What I saw was a little surprising and made me think maybe I hadn't seen it earlier. There, in the same house as 10 years earlier, was Mary Jane, her daughter Ida (now Adams), her son-in-law Chris Adams, and her grandson Christopher A Adams, age 18 mos. What a thrill! I was peeking into the home of my father when he was a toddler! As usual, Mary Jane also had a couple of boarders that were listed as members of the household.

No Isabelle! I concluded she must certainly have died sometime in the previous decade, though of course she could be married and not living there any longer.

I tried to find a death record for her. The death records are fairly incomplete on Ancestry.com, and I found nothing.

So I went back to the 1910 census, looking for those little clues. Mary Jane was still the head-of-household, still renting, still boarding...

I looked at the boarders, this time a couple. John Gilbert (interesting name for me - I know someone named John Gilbert), his wife Belle, his daughters Ida May Gilbert and Marion Gilbert...

HOLD ON! The boarders named their daughter after the daughter of their landlord? Dubious...maybe John was a relative of some sort?

Then it dawned on me. The wife, Belle, was Isabelle.

It was so thrilling! She hadn't died! She was there, married, living with her mom, her husband, and her two little girls, ages 3 and 1. Isabelle herself was now 22, so she had probably married at 18.

So I immediately went to the 1920 census to see if they were still living there. Mary Jane was, and so were Ida and her family. But John and Isabelle and daughters weren't.

What I did find is another story for another day.

Progress

2008-04-18T23:12:00.002-07:00

As of tonight, the bishop has the last of our papers, my medical report. (It had been sitting on the doc's asst's desk for 10 days...).

So Sunday we have our official final appt w/ him. And then we can sign up for an appt w/ the stake president, though he has Stake Conference to think about next week.

That means the most likely day is Sunday, May 4 - an auspicious day! Or possibly during the week either just before or just after that.

Since we want him to push the button on May 7 to send the papers to SLC, all seems to be in order.

The moving van comes here on May 20, and we drive out on May 22.

This all puts us in position to open the papers at Chris's on May 28, the day he, the Romneys, and D and I are doing the sealings for some 30 family members.

The day after or so, we leave for Anacortes.

This is our plan.

Sticky Spots

2008-04-16T19:32:00.002-07:00

We seem to have little cul-de-sacs in our progress. I think it's inevitable. One is that my medical papers are 'lost'. I don't believe they're really lost, they're just not found at the moment. I gave them, in an envelope addressed to the bishop, with adequate postage on it, to my doctor. After our first round of physicals, he called and talked about which category he was going to recommend for my mission service (A, unrestricted - able to work 6 days a week, walk 6 miles a day, and stand several hours a day). I agreed, and he said he was putting it in the mail. That was just short of 2 weeks ago. The bishop hasn't received it yet. The system is such that I can print out another copy and put it into the system again, but by then the old one will have shown up. I just know that - it's the way these things work.

Another sticky spot is just the long string of medical things to do that don't seem to move along very smoothly: get a referral, but they never call.

We think it's all in the nature of hobgoblins and their obstructionism. But it won't make any difference.

Once upon a time, waiting to push that final button until May 7 seemed like we'd be treading water for quite a while. Now it looks like just the most earliest likely date. That is 6 mos from the report date of at least one of the missions we might get called to. Out of several hundred.

Mission Papers

2008-04-14T15:31:00.004-07:00

There's progress!

It took a while, but we finished all the applications, lists of credentials, doctors' reports, dentists' reports, and all else required of us, and the papers are now in the inbox of our bishop.

The hardest part was coming up w/ a photo of the two of us in mission clothing.

We have our interview next Sunday w/ the bishop, and then if all is well, we will have an interview w/ the stake president. We have Stake Conference on the second Sunday from now, so we'll have to wait till after that to meet w/ him. Say, around May 4.

Then if all is well, he pushes the final button, and off it all goes to Salt Lake.

Then we wait. Maybe not for long. The earliest we could hear is about May 12, and the latest is about May 23, a day or two after we leave here.

We're tempted to have our call sent to Chris's so we can get it as soon as possible!

It was back in January that we began to initiate the first steps of this process. Now we're well down the road. Preparing the papers were just part of it.

I took my little break from writing in this mission blog on March 14, and started again on April 14. On May 14 we could have our call. We'll let everyone know!

Update, a month later

2008-04-14T15:26:00.002-07:00

For Me and My House, this has been a busy stretch, also a challenging stretch.

I found out from mission-related doctor visits that I am once again seriously anemic. That meant upping the iron, and that meant changing the diet and that meant having a major rebellion on the part of my tender gut. And that meant too much to deal with and write too.

Well, of course I do publish a newsletter every month, and that takes a week out of things.

But the biggest discovery was that I get a whole lot more done when I'm exercising, and so now I'm back to it after a big break. It's warming up here in Tucson, so that's more and more of a challenge, esp w/ the sun getting up around 5:xx. So now we are going at sunset, around 6:30 pm. Of course I still do Air Force exercises in the morning (though I took a break from those, too - YUCK!).

So now we're back. Thanks for asking. It's nice to know someone stopped by in my absence.

How To Feel Better

2008-03-13T13:39:00.002-07:00

On a test of 8 measures of well-being, women who took up an exercise program increased their score significantly over a 6-month period. Here's the article:

AHA: A Little Exercise Goes a Long Way for Overweight Older Women

They said that while the study was done on older women, there was no reason to expect the results to be different with other folks.

I am 2 months into my exercise program (as opposed to my usual less diligent program) and I do feel better. I certainly can walk better and farther! I wonder what 6 months will bring!

Really, exercise isn't optional for a well-functioning, good-feeling body: we weren't designed that way - sedentary beings used to be eaten.

I like starting slow, like the mailbox technique. No one day was hard on my body, but now I am walking over 2 miles per day at a decent clip instead of 200 feet.

What Seniors Are About

2008-03-13T12:26:00.001-07:00

Here's a quote from a recent book on marketing to seniors. I thought it was pretty close to what I am experiencing in my life. Just in case the mindset I exhibit is a puzzle to you...

People who have a middle-aged perspective look for deeper psychological and metaphorical meanings, and grasp the relationship between concepts more quickly. They value self-sufficiency, social connection, altruism, personal growth, and personal revitalization.

FWIW! PL