Ten years...

Ten years ago this evening, Nana died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how to bring it all about...?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ironies Of Family Research

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

Lovely Sunday

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.