OK, my third post of the day!

I wanted to preserve this picture on my blog so when I make my blog book at the end of the year, this is a part of that book.

This is a picture of my third mission companion (KBB) on the left and a sister from the Hannover ward in Germany on the right (I. Voigtlaender) who was so much like a companion to me that I include her on my mental list of mission companions.  IV went tracting with us all the time and would go on splits with us at anytime.  She was such a great missionary!  She is still living and we correspond.  She is great!  This is such a wonderful picture of her.  This is how I remember her in my heart.  I am thankful to have this photo.

KBB was my third companion but second companion in Germany and she was a "golden" (aka greenie) and I had been out just two months.  Talk about the blind leading the blind!  Despite that, we really enjoyed our time together!  She's great, too!

I couldn't resist this!

I could not resist this blast from the past.  A mission companion of mine (KBB) posted this on Facebook! This photo made me laugh!  The phrase "googley eyes" comes to mind, but those glasses were the style then!  My hair also looks pink, but that is just the effect of an aging photograph. My youthfulness definitely shines through!  This would have been taken at the mission home in Hamburg during the one and only sisters' conference we had during my entire mission.

Last night's recognition evening

Last night we had a recognition evening for Young Women.  We had seven ladies receive the new medallion.  This is a picture (that I "lifted" from another blog) of the seven of them (with one spare girl in there, just for fun).  Four were receiving the medallion for the first time (left to right, #2, #4, #5, and #6, with #7 being the interloper in the picture). Sister #5 was the first adult in the ward to receive the medallion under this new program that opens up personal progress to all women.  The other three young ladies had already received a medallion under the old program and had completed the requirements for upgrading to the new medallion (left to right, #1, #3 and #8).

I was in charge of this activity, spent a lot of effort on it, am relieved it is over, and I thought it went well. I did have a lot of good help in pulling off the evening.  My secretary spent hours on her part of the program.  My counselor helped with invitations and tags.  We had a good turn out.  The two speakers did really well.  One speaker was sick.  I found out about 5 p.m the night of, so I jumped in and took her place.  Whew.  All in a day's work, right?

My counselor has challenged the Mia Maids to try to complete their personal progress (and for one to earn a bee) before she does, so I hope we have a recognition evening next fall or winter when we have one adult and three young women earning their medallions and one young woman earning a bee.

I need to figure out some way to facilitate this.  I had been trying to hold one personal progress activity per month.  I found that the Tuesday personal progress activities (on Tuesdays when we wouldn't have held YW because of something later that week) were the best attended so I had dropped back to those as they randomly arose but I've been thinking that perhaps this summer I need to make the most of the unstructured summer time and kick things up a notch, maybe? We have a new crop of Beehives and if they can make significant inroads into personal progress while they're Beehives, I think they will go on to earn their medallions.  Most of them need to get acquainted with the program, too.  All the Mia Maids turn sixteen in 2011, and I'm concerned that they earn their medallion by the time they're sixteen--there are too many other things for sixteen-year olds to do after that.

Next, we have Girls' Camp.  L and I are planning Youth Conference, too.  Lots to do between now and Youth Conference but it is coming together.  There's always something with this calling.

Three funerals

I went to three funerals this past weekend.  To give my actions context, I have to say that I usually do not go to funerals unless I feel it is very necessary.  Particularly in the last two years, I have found it difficult--almost verging on impossible--to attend funerals at all, even if I might have otherwise thought my attendance was necessary. For years before that, I would send a card or go to the viewing to give my condolences, but skip the funeral.  I cry too much at any funeral and usually come away with headaches that last for the rest of the week.  So for me to attend three funerals was unusual.  And I am glad I attended all three.

At one funeral, a friend put her arm around me and said she was surprised I could even come to a funeral since my mother had died so recently but, truthfully, it was less traumatic for me to go to each of these funerals this weekend (although they were still very sad and somber occasions for me) than any funerals have been for me in as long as ten years or so.

There seems to be a lot of talk at times about how long a funeral should be.  I believe a funeral should be however long it turns out to be.  There is no rehearsal for a funeral and there is no re-do.  There is no learning curve and generally not a lot of advance notice for planning.  I say if people have a problem with how long a funeral lasts, they should get up and leave whenever it is that they feel the funeral should be over and just leave the rest of the group to go on paying tribute to the deceased.  What else does the grieving family feel like doing that day?  Cooking?  Cleaning?  Going to doctors' appointments? Mowing the lawn?  What exactly does the grieving family need to rush through the service to accomplish?  Not a thing.

I thought a lot about my coming back to the place of my childhood to rub shoulders as an adult with the adults of my youth.  Truly, that is something everyone should have to do.  As an adult, I have had to revise my opinion of some of those adults from my youth, some for the better and some for the worse.  It has been good for me to overcome old and childish prejudices and aversions and come to really like some people and it has been really disappointing to me for some people to topple from various sizes of pedestals that I had earlier built for them.

At the funerals, I also thought a lot about the "back story"--the story behind each person's life that gives context to me for what those acquaintances and friends do and say and what provides context for those people's choices and life paths.  On the one hand, if you live among people you have known since birth, it is likely you also know their "back story."  On the other hand, as I am discovering more and more, you can know people for your entire life and still not even begin to know their back story.  Sometimes elements of the back story suddenly illuminate one's understanding of that person.  Sometimes the illumination is slight and sometimes it is huge.

I thought about how the adults of my youth are passing away.  And, by the same token, I realize that I am on the same conveyor belt that has been carrying them to their departure.  We have all been hurdling along toward the edge of the earth as we know it, and yes, the temporal world is flat and we will all go over the edge at some point.

I have given up trying to explain to my children how different the Tri-cities were when I was in my youth.  They do not get it, just like I did not get it when the adults of my youth yammered on about that topic. I realize that there was indeed a "ward family" and where we had the ward family and the people in the community all mixed up together as one in this Tri-City, it might have been even more "family" than not.  I grieve at the loss of those adults who were in the LDS ward of my youth. I have struggled to describe to myself how these people fit in with my life, an attempt to pigeonhole them. I certainly do not see many of them as casually as "acquaintances" but I cannot claim they have all air-brushed me into their family photos, either.  Many of them are somewhere in a subset just beyond my extended family but not far beyond, and some of them are closer than some in my extended family.  I really miss them once they are gone and I remember them fondly.

I thought a lot about voicing to people the good you see in them as you see it and not regretting later that you left the good things unsaid.

I thought a lot about the kids I went to school with--some of them I knew from Kindergarten through twelfth grade.  Most of them are in a subset a lot like the people who were in the ward of my youth--somewhere in a subset just beyond my family and some not very far beyond at all. If someone had told me at high school graduation that once I left the Fine Arts building after graduation that I would NEVER see some of my classmates again, or I would see some of them maybe once or twice in three decades, I would not have been able to believe it after seeing them daily for all of my then-life.  But it has become a truth.

I thought a lot about friendship.  A person said to me at one service, "You've always been our friend."  Well, in my heart I guess I had been, the way you mothball a friendship when you never see the friend and then eventually have only the past in common.  Perhaps I could have been a better friend but maybe I was all the friend that life allowed.  They have certainly had need of friends over the years, I gathered.

The Germans give a very narrow definition to friendship and I am sometimes prone to do that in my own life.  However, what do you say about people who were once your schoolmates or ward family but with whom you have lost contact?  You are not strangers, really, and yet your friendship is not current.  I find that once I like someone, I nearly always continue to like them in that same way despite distance and years.  But the relationship does not stay static, except in the heart, perhaps.

I came home from one funeral and happened to open a book I had checked out from the library.  At the front of the book was this quote that leaped out at me and immediately dovetailed with some of my funeral musings:  "For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not."  Ecclesiastes 7:20.  I thought a lot about the circumstances that we are born into, our faults and failings, our good qualities and the good-parts version of our lives, and our eventual entrance into the Great Beyond.  I thought of how most of us do about the best we can with what we are given and with what happens to us along the path that life and our choices take us.  All of us experience faults, failings, disappointments, sorrow, difficulties, and all those shared experiences of mortality.  We are all probably doing better here than we think we are doing.

One weekend; three funerals; lots of time to think.

I respond to a frequently asked question

My husband retired nearly two years ago.  I am frequently asked by women whose husbands are not yet retired, "How is it having a retired husband?"  Of course, I have worn out the joke, "It is twice the husband on half the income," although there is truth to that and I do feel it pretty much sums it up on my front. ;o)

Since I am asked this so often, I have pondered what kind of answer to give, something that addresses the question in a quick, concise way, but does not go on and on into any gory details.  HA!  :o)  Plus, I believe that any woman asking this question may have some passing interesting in my situation but I have decided that she is actually projecting into the future to a time when her husband is retired and she is asking me whether she should dread her husband's retirement or look forward to it.  So really, whether B's retirement is enhancing my life is secondary in responding to the REAL question, because whether we are doing well or not with this life change is no indication as to whether the questioner and her husband will have an identical response to retirement.

So I have come up with my answer to this question-behind-the-question and it, of itself, is a question.  Drum roll, please!  How are your Saturdays (or the days when the two of you are together all day long, and not necessarily vacation days)?  The answer to this Saturdays question is the answer to the REAL question I have been asked.  Put a whole series of Saturdays together back-to-back in an unending succession leading off into that retirement sunset, and there you have it, "retirement," and there you have a mystery of the universe revealed by yours truly, Purveyor of Truth. :o)

Nonresponse

Have you ever read something and just wanted to respond?  This happens to me quite often.  I have wondered whether it is a desire to continue the "dialog" the author started with his/her thoughts which then sparks some parallel thoughts of my own.  I really never follow through with feedback to authors but I have often mentally composed replies to them.

However, I have noticed lately that when I have the urge to respond to something I have read, that is it.  I have the desire but I have absolutely nothing to say in response. Entirely illogical.

Last night I was reading the Clark Memorandum from JRC Law School.  Several of the articles were just excellent and I kept wanting to reply to the authors.  But I was blank. After about the twentieth time of having that urge to respond but being blank, I imagined my response to be something like this:

Dear Zalkjdljl Qpaoisdjk,
I read your article in the Clark Memorandum recently and thought mslkjd lkjidi  lkjsid l ououd ,nosoeith, l.xoekngnt.  I particularly liked your statement of lzodoiemebnzo osodiemenn nshhossodk couslkneod!  Isn't it true that zcopiusdlke.,m  adopiuc,em ntousoiducme,n?  Furthermore, slskicient aacoue ldkna oaidid nelkjtlk  na lakdu llk. Thank you for your wonderful article.
Sincerely,
Me

What I was telling my son just this morning

This post is directed to those of you who either went to high school with me or who attended the same high school I attended "back in the day," which means not in the last several decades.

As I took my son to school this morning, I was telling him some recollections of how things were when I was in high school (which meant grades 7 through 12).  I was talking about the time when I was roughly the age my son is now.

First of all, I do not recall the school administrators being strict about absences. Of course, we needed to have an excused absence but today's schools get very worked up about excused absences.  I haven't had to go down the path of unexcused absences for me or my children so that is a completely different topic all together.  I am just talking about excused absences.

It seemed to me that school administrators of the time just accepted that students would be absent for things like funerals and other family events and that families might go out of town for other reasons.  I was not absent very often and so maybe I never ran afoul of rules?  I do not know.

Today, at least for the intermediate and middle schools, in order to take my kids out of school for a vacation, I have to plan a "learning" vacation, provide an itinerary in advance of learning activities we will do on vacation and, in some instances, classes require that the kids do homework while on vacation or write up the vacation experience for the teachers (the equivalent of "what I learned on my vacation") AND when the kids come home, they are required to find out what work they missed and submit it within a few days of returning home.  I can recall vacations with my children where we had to pack textbooks and then hope we didn't leave them behind in hotels.  My recollection of my elementary and high school time is we just went on vacation or on school activities, we came back, and we went on with learning.  If we missed learning about fractions while we were gone, we just missed it.  Period.  (In third grade, I went to California, for a cousin's wedding, and I missed the introduction to fractions, so my example isn't entirely fictitious.)

Second of all, I do not recall ever having to make up school work (except perhaps in Mr. Dickman's class) after an excused absence (the only kind I had except for a few "skips" of seminary one year), whether it was for a school activity, illness, or some kind of family absence.  I was involved in some extra-curricular activities that involved missing classes and I was sick on occasion.  I have no recollection of making up any school work that I missed while out of school for an excused absence.  I don't recall a teacher ever saying, "Oh, by the way, while you were gone we read War and Peace and you'll need to read it by tomorrow." I don't recall the discouragement of being handed a three-inch stack of papers that I'd missed and being told, "Finish these in two days."

Third of all, I do not remember having homework very often (except perhaps for Mr. Dickman's class), if ever.  This could have been that I was a fast worker in class.  I always took it as a personal failure if I had to take something home to work on after class, so I must have thought we were just supposed to finish assignments in class.  This could have been that teachers (except Mr. Dickman) just didn't give out homework.  Maybe there was the odd assignment here and there but not every single night nor even once a week.  I do recall having to bring a newspaper article every single day for Mr. Church's 6th grade class (because I forgot basically every single day) and that falls in the category of homework.  However, I couldn't have just ignored homework (like one of my children prefers to do) or I would have had dismal grades.  I do recall that once I was in college, it was a complete shock to my system that ALL classes required homework and it took a while for that "personal failure" feeling about homework to go away.

Fourth, we did not have computers so we could not check our grades to know we had missed assignments or know in advance what grades we were earning in our classes.  We'd just get our report card every quarter and, viola, we received the grade we'd earned--good or bad.

Grades always seemed a total surprise to me--a kind of grade lottery which by that point seemed to me to be disconnected to anything I might have done or not done for the past quarter.  This could be my personality coming out--a "we get what we get" attitude.  I do recall a friend telling me she talked with high school teachers about assignments and tests and discussed how to get higher grades (she was valedictorian, so see what that attitude gets ya??).  Of course, this wouldn't have occurred to me.  I just accepted the grades on my report card and went on.

After I recounted this tale of a veritable Camelot High School, my son sighed and wished aloud that he could go to such a school!  Actually, J is a very conscientious student with good grades (keeping a vigil on all missed assignments and actually talking with teachers when need be);  however, a "kinder, gentler" school life sounded great to him.

OK, now for my dose of reality.  What is your recollection?  Has my memory become corrupt?  Was I just spinning yarns this morning or were things a bit more laid back when we were in school?  Am I just in my La La Land of Memories or have things changed?