:Family Matters

May 20, 2007

Every so often a mother will pass on to her daughters a bit of unsolicited wisdom. One such tidbit that I remember was, “When you marry you will find that the foods you prepare for meals will be the foods that your husband likes.” I don’t really know what she was referring to because I never knew anything other than the delicious meals that she fixed with such apparent ease. Perhaps it was the biscuits and gravy that appeared so regularly on our table that dad loved. Perhaps it was the Postum served in place of the coffee he had grown up drinking with his breakfast on the ranch in Arizona but which he gave up when he joined the Mormon Church. Perhaps it was his love of bread and milk and his satisfaction with this simple meal on a hot summer evening especially when the bread was homemade as it often was.

Do you think we will eat in heaven? If so, what will we eat and who will do the cooking, who will do the dishes? I suppose that is really a moot question because if we make it where we want, we will all look around and see what needs to be done and then pitch in and do it together with none of this division we have here between ‘men and women’s’ work. That really would be heaven, wouldn’t it.

Mother was a strong willed woman. If she made her mind up about something then that was the way it was. This also could be said about dad which meant the two of them had an interesting relationship while the rest of us headed for cover when they needed to work things out. Being keenly sensitive about the emotional vibrations given off by the people I know and love I quickly tuned into what wasn’t being said between the two of them as well as the verbal sparring that so often took place at meal times. While a teenager I spent most of my time at the dinner table sitting on the side edge of my chair which I think I did because I was so uneasy about what was going on between the two of them. I used to fear for their marriage and worry that it was in big trouble. This concern was fed by overhearing mother confide to a close friend that she didn’t know how much longer she could stay in her marriage and who knows, maybe it was in trouble but maybe she just needed to vent to someone.
Mother’s leukemia brought them back together again. I know this because of an incident I witnessed when she was in the hospital at Iowa City. MGH and I were visiting and she had been giving us her full attention until dad entered the room. At which point their eyes met and held as he crossed in front of us over to the side of her bed where she turned on her side, away from us, to greet him. Their eyes locked in the most tender of embraces. It was as if there was no one else in the room but the two of them. I was deeply touched.

Kathy, who has promised me that she will write the story of mother’s illness and which I await with bated breath as she has some fascinating memories that never fail to touch my heart as she recounts what it was like for her. She was fourteen and carried a heavy burden for one so young as she watched her mother die and her father grieve. The details of that time are still clear to her and I feel they need to be recorded so that this part of our family history is not lost. (Not to be overly morbid, which I probably am, but I am beginning to realize that we won’t be here forever and we will take our stories with us when we go. So its now or never and besides I am not sure just how long I can keep on holding my breath in anticipation.)
She told me that the one thing that dad regretted the most was that he was not there with mother when she died. During her hospitalization he would take care of the chores that had to be done and then drive the seventy-five miles to Iowa City to be with her for as long as he could. (I am not sure about the milking—if someone was helping him with that or not.) He would return home with the greatest of reluctance to get some sleep before repeating the whole thing the next day. The day mother died the nurses could see the toll this exhausting schedule was taking on him and encouraged him to go home and get a good night’s rest. I believe by this time they all knew she didn’t have much time left but the feeling was that her death wasn’t imminent and that for the sake of his health he needed to get some rest. That night he received a phone call saying that she had taken a turn for the worse. He immediately headed back to the hospital but by the time he got there she was gone.

I suppose this memory has surfaced as I witness Joy struggling through her divorce. The emotional toll on everyone concerned is high. I watch how poorly she is treated by HSTBE (HerSoonToBeEx). How frustrating it is for her as she struggles with him for cooperation in co-parenting Jordan and Kendra. There is so much that they could do by working together to help mitigate the effects of the break up of the marriage but it requires putting aside the desire/need for vengeance that can so easily creep in and take root in one’s heart. It will be good for all to have the divorce finalized so they can both start to move on to the hopefully happier futures that await them both but the untangling of their hopes and dreams together is proving extremely difficult for HSTBE.

There is a court hearing set for May 30th which Joy is hoping will get everything settled and if they use her date for when the separation occurred then that is a real possibility. If they use HSTBE date it will be postponed until August which allows plenty of time for all kinds of craziness to take place. The divorce will happen eventually but they will always be locked together because of the children. I hope there can be a reconciliation and realization that individual selfishness/wishes must be set aside in order to help these two precious children reach the potential that is in them with as few problems as possible. The last thing they need is to be caught in the back draft of the heated emotions that are flaring at this time.

It’s a wonder that as many of us stay together as do. I read the other day that 20% of all married couples make it to their 50th Wedding Anniversary. MGH and I were married in 1961 so we are getting close. Will we make it? I hope so.

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May 13, 2007

To Whom It May Concern: I am not where I used to be, so please don’t look for me there, as you will not find me. You will still find MGH holding down the fort in my absence, unless he removes himself elsewhere, which he just might do, being of a somewhat curious nature and never one to sit back when there is a good time to be had, in which case there will be neither of us in our Retirement Home unless you should happen to catch Sherman who is there for four days on a rotating schedule which means it is never the same four days of the week which can get quite confusing to keep track of. I, of course, kept fairly good track of him when I was home, but I don’t have a clue as to where he is, now that I am gone. As MGH never had a clue to begin with it will not do you any good to ask him—but we can send you Sherman’s phone number if you would like to ask him yourself. Just remember that he works a twelve hour shift from seven to seven and you will have approximately five minutes to catch him before he hits the sack or heads home.

Where might I have absconded to, leaving MGH behind? This is an entirely reasonable question and therefore worthy of some attention at this time. On Saturday last I left on a jet plane from McCarrin airport in Las Vegas with my ultimate destination being New Orleans, yes, that New Orleans, of Katrina fame. My sources tell me that I have arrived just in time for the hurricane season, of which there should be at least one this year because last year there were none and statistical averages say that that definitely won’t happen again in the foreseeable future, although MGH husband often reminds me that while figures don’t lie, liars can figure so one can only hope to beat the averages if it is indeed liars who are doing the figuring. With the record of the weather forecasters for accuracy in predicting, one does have to wonder, doesn’t one, not that I am trying to impugn them as the do a very good job of telling what is happening at the moment, but so do I if I open my door and look out so it is no wonder that they are always on the lookout for ways to increase their job security—hence their foray into the uncertain world of future prognostications.

Joy met me at the airport dressed elegantly in black. I had arrived on an evening when the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra was having a concert and Joy along with the rest of her Marine Reserve Band had been given free tickets and was required to be in attendance so she managed to finagle me a ticket as well. What a neat way to be introduced to the city known for its jazz even if I did look a little travel worn in my cotton skirt and blouse—red and blue, of course to show my patriotism—My hair added the necessary white to my costume, sigh. The concert was held in a large Baptist Church surrounded by a packed cemetery where every one was buried in fancy concrete shells on top of the ground. Joy told me that when the area was first settled people were buried under ground but that the ground has so much movement because the water table is so close to the surface that the bodies kept on showing up floating down river, which was most, unsettling to their loved ones. Hence the above ground solution which I find most unsettling but considering the alternative . . . .

But I digress, I’m here to be with Joy, who is going through a messy divorce as well as expecting her third child in August. I had thought to be with her three months but I failed to allow for the fact that she lives in on base housing. They have RULES and one of the rules is that two weeks is the limit for a stay unless there are extenuating circumstances. I think that the circumstances are definitely extenuating and so did base housing which gave me permission to be with Joy until the end of June at which time she will either be in off base housing or I will be on my way home having failed in my mission which is to be here until the baby comes and the divorce is finalized—hopefully not in that order.

I hope that I am of some use to her as well as Jordan (9) and Kendra (one month shy of 3). I can tell you one thing for sure and that is that they are constantly on the run from the moment Joy gets up (most mornings she ‘musters’ in at 7:30 which means she is up soon after 5:00. Twice this past week she has had to be there at 6:00 which means she gets up at 4:30. Kendra has to be dropped off at her caregivers so she is up early as well. I walk with Jordan to his school, which lets him, sleep until 6:30. He catches the bus after school and rides it to the base where his mother works for after school care and then she picks them both up and they get home around 6:00. The goal is to have them in bed by 8:00 but so far that is still a goal. All in all it makes for a very long day for all of them with everyone in bed at the same time. Oh well, MGH tells me that one hour before midnight is worth two after. Guess I am going to find out on that one.

I have had Kendra with me for two of the five days this past week. Her favorite thing to say is, “Play with me”. So we build block towers and read piles of stories which she likes to hear over and over. She is just like her mother in that she won’t let me skip any pages and so I read every page even though I am sorely tempted to try to slip in the ‘condensed’ version if I can. Still there is nothing that quite compares to having the warm little body of a child sit on your lap with their hair tickling your nose as they listen to you and you listen to them add their comments about the things they are seeing/hearing with a fat little finger pointing at each picture for emphasis. She intersperses these activities with, “I thirsty”.
“What would you like, juice or milk?”, I ask her, as it is always one or the other and sometimes both. She tells me and I get it for her placing what she doesn’t drink back in the ‘frig for the next time. This satisfies her for at least 20 minutes and then she will look at me and say, “I hungry”.

“What would you like?” I ask her. “Baloney” she will answer. “On bread with white stuff?” I ask her. This was always a family favorite but Kendra hasn’t acquired a taste for this exotic taste treat and prefers hers straight.

Thank goodness for “Dora the Explorer” which gives grandma a chance to catch her breath for a few minutes. The time wafts gently by until naptime and soon after that we hear the door open and in come Joy and Jordan, home at last where we are waiting and where I have disappeared to–if you get a chance come visit!

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Hey, everybody–welcome to the family blog! I’ve created a quick video tutorial on how to use the blog which can be viewed by clicking the link below:

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In the fall of 1979 I was introduced to one of the most remarkable stories of faith and works in our times.

At the time I was serving as Manager of Progeny Testing and Data Analysis for American Breeders Service (ABS) in DeForest, Wisconsin. I was working very closely with Morris Ewing who was Manager of Sire Acquisition. Morris was a member of the Windsor Community Church and Chairman of their Finance Committee. The Windsor Community Church was a small interdenominational church that many of the ABS employees attended.

One day, during the World Dairy Exposition that was going on in Madison, Wisconsin, Morris told me that Wally Lindskoog was going to speak at their church and invited me to attend. At the time I had met Wally but was not well acquainted with him as I would become later. I knew only that he was the owner of one of the most famous bulls in artificial insemination, Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, and that Morris had negotiated the lease of the Chief bull for Curtiss Candy when he was working for them. Morris didn’t tell me what Wally was going to talk about, but it seemed like a great opportunity to hear what one of the leading men in the dairy industry had to say about life. I accepted the invitation and took my daughter Sylvia, who was a curious high school teenager, with me.

It turned out that Morris, who had been authorized by his Pastor, had asked Wally to speak about giving to the church. This is what Wally said as I remember it. I am not enclosing this in quotes because it is my paraphrasing of Wally’s story.

I don’t know any better way to encourage you to give to the church than to tell you my own story. When I was a young man I had a very close friend on the neighboring farm in Turlock, California. We did everything together. We showed our Jersey heifers against each other at the County Fair. We attended church together and we played trumpet together in the school band. Every spare moment we could get away from our regular farm work and chores, we spent together, sharing our dreams and our concepts of life. We even made it a practice to practice on our horns just before bedtime each night. When it came time to retire we would each go out on our respective porches and play taps to each other. This ritual almost guaranteed a good night’s sleep.

The summer we were 14 years old, my best friend, Stanley, was stricken with appendicitis. His appendix ruptured, spreading bacteria throughout his body cavity that resulted in complications that took his life. When he died it was all I could do to play taps for him one more time.

Six weeks later I found myself in the hospital suffering from the same malady as Stanley had. My appendix had burst and I too had developed infection in my body cavity. In this extremity I went to God in prayer and said, “Father, if you will preserve my life I will give you half of what I earn for as long as I live.” My prayer was answered and my life preserved.

It wasn’t hard to give half of what I earned as a boy. Things only started getting tough when I thought about getting married. When I proposed to Arlene, I told her of my promise and she accepted it. It got really rough when children started coming. It got so bad I told Arlene, “I just don’t see how we can keep it up. I’m ready to go back on my promise.”

Her answer was, “The Lord did his part, Wally. You can’t forget that and you can’t fail to do your part.”

Soon after this crisis, we got into the turkey business and it treated us very well for a few years. During this time, I was trying to improve the dairy herd and enlarge it. We had changed from Jerseys to Holsteins and I got the opportunity to buy a really fine cow who was in calf by a leading bull. She had a bull calf that we named Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief. We took the trouble to prove this bull through progeny testing and he came out with a very favorable proof. Just when we had reached the point where we were again wondering how we could keep giving half our income to the Lord, we were able to lease this bull to Curtiss Candy artificial insemination service.

The rest is history. The Chief bull was one of the three or four most popular bulls in artificial insemination history. Royalties from him permitted us to continue paying half of our income to the Lord and become independently wealthy on the other half. We have since leased many of his sons to A.I. companies. For many years our biggest problem has been to figure out how to give our money without stealing blessings from our friends and neighbors by assuming all the obligations of our small church.

I am not advocating that other people do what I have done and give half their income to the Lord, but I am saying that if you do your part by paying your tithes and offerings, God will bless you as he promised in Malachi and open the windows of heaven to pour out blessings so great you will have difficulty receiving them.

Fortunately, I was able to become a very good friend of Wally Lindskoog in the following years and found him to be an exemplary person in every way.

13 April 2007

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May 6, 2007

Spring is achingly beautiful but all too short as it melts into summer leaving me to wonder why winter is bleak and often seems so long although the calendar tells me they are the same in length of time. Could it be that winter has a beauty all its own, if I could see it? This thought comes to me as I stand at my kitchen sink looking out across the valley. As April melts into May I watch the green of new growth fill my view. The lilacs have come and gone and the tulips losing their brave glory in my across the road neighbors flower bed will be replaced by the next rank of brightness waiting its turn to appear and so spring and then summer will march their way before my eyes just as the babies in their mothers arms with their innocent faces and dimpled smiles will blossom into young men and women bright in the strength and beauty of their young bodies, eagerly looking forward to the future as they accept their diplomas and join the ranks of those who have gone before into the adult world. I have watched this grand pageant unfold before my eyes for many years now and watched as I too have gone from spring with its beauty to summer with its strength to fall with its capable maturity and now when I look at myself in the bathroom mirror I see winter standing there before me and I marvel at the seasons of my life and what each has brought me and I wonder, now, about winter.

I used to wonder why the old dwell so often in the past and delight in sharing their memories with all who will listen and when no one does they share them over and over with themselves. I think I am beginning to figure it out—although some might say it has taken me long enough. . . I think it is because our memories take us back to the beginning when we were young and the people we knew and loved as children are once more with us if we choose. The mind doesn’t need to wait on time, it can flit where it will, intermixing childhood with adulthood at the flick of a thought. As we age our world begins to shrink back in around us as the family home is exchanged for a retirement apartment and when that becomes to much to care for we are taken in by family, if we are fortunate, where we have a room graced by a few of our most cherished pieces of furniture and a television there to sit out what is left of our days as our bodies slide away until nothing is left, leaving spirit to return from whence it came.

Yes, yes I understand that we are living longer and for most of us this translates into the ability to be active and productive for many more years than previous generations. Still, as I see it happening in my life and the life of MGH, this gradual narrowing of our world. I can’t help but remember the ‘grand’ tours we used to take where we would travel thousands of miles visiting family and in the process see much of this beautiful land we call America—“my native land, my own” . This kind of grand road trips are now history as MGH and I wince at the thought of long hours riding in a car not to mention fighting the ever increasing traffic on the roads—our world is indeed shrinking.

But oh what glorious trips we used to take when the children were young and even after they left home for that matter. How wide was our world. One such trip occurred in 1964 when we took off in our 1957 Ford pick-up with its homemade ‘hoochie’ which is what MGH called the shell he and the boys built out of plywood that allowed us to fit all the kids in as well as the camping gear we needed (think camper shell and you will have some idea of what I am trying to describe for you). I can remember the comment my aunt MaryJo made when we stopped in for a visit at her home in Virginia. She told dad, which he then, with much amusement related to me, “that it was great to see us but that she was rather startled when the tailgate came down and children started to emerge one after the other with seemingly no end to them”. I guess it was something to see, but really, there were only six children on that trip— as we left Sylvia with her grandparents.

We didn’t have a spare nickel to our name and our vehicle had a ‘few’ miles on it. (I can remember watching the odometer roll over as it hit 100 thousand miles while on that trip.) MGH had decided to leave the teaching profession which meant that we had no job waiting when we got back but being the intrepid man that he is he didn’t let that little fact stand in our way. He sold a registered bull for $250.00 which covered the expenses for our entire trip. The 1964 Worlds Fair was fantastic. It would have taken days to fully explore its plethora of exhibits but as we were traveling under a few time/money constraints we weren’t able to spend all the time there we might have wished. I can remember being in total awe at being in New York City with its traffic and people packed into such tight quarters amidst the concrete canyons formed by the tall buildings that shadowed us along our way. It seemed a wonder that any movement could occur at all with all the congestion and yet it did and so did we as we found our way past the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. How exciting to see her with her upraised arm holding a torch, a symbolic guide welcoming into this land all that would come to her shores seeking a better life.

That same trip allowed us to play detective when we solved ‘The Case of the Missing Raspberry Jam’. We left a jar of jam, which we were looking forward to enjoying the next morning on our breakfast pancakes, sitting on the picnic table when we went to bed. We awoke in the morning to find the jar licked clean with no clue as to what had become of its erstwhile contents until later that morning we saw a raccoon alongside the trail we were hiking on with its head covered with a sticky red substance that looked suspiciously like raspberry jam. This sighting did not lead to apprehension as the guilty party quickly slipped out of sight before any action could be taken.
We camped our way through the state of New York which seemed like a whole other world after the ego-centrism of New York City. Our goal, Niagara Falls was well worth the effort and extra miles that it took to get there. The blue green water as it plunged over the falls to the depths below seemed to have a hypnotic pull that drew me in with its siren song. Church historic spots were also visited along the way—this was indeed a trip of epic proportions for us as a family. We might not have gone first class but just like the people sitting behind those traveling first class on an airline who arrive at the same time even if they can’t get off first—still they get there and for considerably less expense. That’s the way it was with us when we traveled. The world was our oyster and we saw every bit as much as those who could afford more amenities even if this meant sometimes camping at parks where the restroom facilities were not of the ‘flush’ variety. (Have Dawn tell you sometime how long it is possible to ‘wait’ before answering the call of nature—that is a whole ‘nother story.

Now see, there I have gone and done it—dipped back into my memory bank and told a story I have told you all before. But it was ours. Something we did together as a family. An epic adventure, of monumental proportions, as the movies often headline their latest cinematic offering, for us the sky was the limit. Foolhardy perhaps in view of our perilous financial future but as it turned out when we returned home MGH was offered a job with Iowa State University in their Extension Service which he accepted and for whom he worked until returning to graduate school at Iowa State where he earned his masters degree—but that’s another story for another time.

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