That Sixties Liberal Is On The Loose Again

An incredible story came out of Iraq stating that on Sunday nine American mothers received comfort from dozens of Iraqi mothers who had lost their sons during the Saddam Hussein era which ended in 2003. 

"When I hugged an American woman we couldn't express ourselves in words, but what helped us to express our feelings and understand each other were our tears. We found them as a true expression to our grief and suffering," said a 55-year-old Kurdish woman who had lost most of her own close family during the scorched-earth campaign against the Kurdish rebellion.  

The American women expressed how they had been angry before their visit to the country in which their sons had died, and yet had found peace and comfort as they visited the land where their children lived their last moments and spent time with people who inhabited that country and felt their same pain.  "I'll have visited the land where a piece of my heart will remain forever," said Amy Galvez, who is from Salt Lake, and whose son, Cpl Adam Galvez was also from Salt Lake City.   

The meeting of the two groups of women was organized by a group called “Families United Toward Universal Respect’ from the state of Virginia and officials from the local f Kurdish government and our State Department.

Yet while these women were meeting together in the northern part of Iraq, which is a mostly peaceable area currently, other parts of the country were experiencing  ongoing bombings and death.  

Doesn’t it seem silly to fight and kill?  The people who are doing the fighting are hardly able to sit down and discuss the points and minutiae, doctrines and principles they are fighting for.  If people have differences, it’s ridiculous not to work them out with discussion, arbitration, judges.  

But using innocent people as battering rams, target practice and ammunition?  Mothers can see how stupid that is.  Why can’t supposedly intelligent old men?  Old men who are too old to fight themselves? 


Source:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39369062/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Happy Birthday, Sweet Girl, I Only Wish I'd Known

What do you do when it’s too late?

Cristi Buffenbarger and I were about all there was when we lived in Bolingbrook, Illinois.  

We lived across the lawn from each other when our children were little.  Ben was three when we moved in, her Stephen was two, Brad was one and her Suzie was a baby.  

She came over and held Brad in cold water when he was running a fever while I was reading to Ben and Carl was working and I was desperate.  I babysat for her and she babysat for me.  We spent hours together, laughing and talking.  We were kindred.  Neither of us had a car, both of us loved to laugh, and hardly the day went by that we weren’t together, outside in the summer, inside in the winter.  She was so funny, so kind, so dear to my heart.

She was raised in Chicago, I was raised in Utah, and we had much to share.   

One day, I borrowed a thermometer and broke it.  She told me not to worry because she had another, but I replaced it anyway.  She thought that was a remarkably honorable thing to do.  It was really nothing, but a long story made short, she investigated the Church and became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- a Mormon.  

It’s hard to relate how much I love her.  

Yesterday I went on Facebook to wish her a Happy Birthday and things were strange there.  People said they’d miss her.  Then someone said she’d make a great missionary in the Celestial Kingdom.  I Googled her name and there was her obituary.  She’d died on June 10 of this year after a three-year battle with breast cancer.  I’d known she was sick.  But I thought she’d beaten it.  I’d not talked to her in so long.  I am crying.

She’d not even had a funeral.  She was cremated.  If I’d only known I’d have been back there before she died.  Why didn’t I know?  She’d been divorced for so long and her children wouldn’t remember me so who would have told me?  I guess it would have been her, but was she too sick?  I should have stayed closer.  I should have done something.  I should have known somehow.  Maybe she thought that would be too much to ask for me to come see her.  It wouldn't have been.  No way.  Not for Cristi.  

God give us strength.  God preserve our love.  God fill the in blanks.  God, thank you for those we love and still have in our midst.  God help us.

The Sixties Liberal Stumbles Onto the Stage Again

An incredible story came out of Iraq stating that on Sunday nine American mothers received comfort from dozens of Iraqi mothers who had lost their sons during the Saddam Hussein era which ended in 2003. 

"When I hugged an American woman we couldn't express ourselves in words, but what helped us to express our feelings and understand each other were our tears. We found them as a true expression to our grief and suffering," said a 55-year-old Kurdish woman who had lost most of her own close family during the scorched-earth campaign against the Kurdish rebellion.  

The American women expressed how they had been angry before their visit to the country in which their sons had died, and yet had found peace and comfort as they visited the land where their children lived their last moments and spent time with people who inhabited that country and felt their same pain.  "I'll have visited the land where a piece of my heart will remain forever," said Amy Galvez, who is from Salt Lake, and whose son, Cpl Adam Galvez was also from Salt Lake City.   

The meeting of the two groups of women was organized by a group called “Families United Toward Universal Respect’ from the state of Virginia and officials from the local f Kurdish government and our State Department.

Yet while these women were meeting together in the northern part of Iraq, which is a mostly peaceable area currently, other parts of the country were experiencing  ongoing bombings and death.  

Doesn’t it seem silly to fight and kill?  The people who are doing the fighting are hardly able to sit down and discuss the points and minutiae, doctrines and principles they are fighting for.  If people have differences, it’s ridiculous not to work them out with discussion, arbitration, judges.  

But using innocent people as battering rams, target practice and ammunition?  Mothers can see how stupid that is.  Why can’t supposedly intelligent old men?  Old men who are too old too fight themselves?


Source:  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39369062/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

Nancy Lukens, Gone Much Too Young

Nancy Lukens was one  of the nicest people you’ll ever know.  She died last Saturday, much too young.  She would have been fifty-five in November.

She had been Carl’s boss before he retired from IBM and did such a good job.

Everyone liked Nancy.  She always did her best to be kind, to do a good job, to love the earth, to take care of animals, to eat well and to do her best by that which she had been entrusted.

That’s why it makes me particularly sad and disheartened that she should die so young of cervical cancer.  By the time she did die, her husband, Gary, said the only place cancer had not reached was her feet.  

She was a small woman to begin with, and as she lay in her casket, she looked so tiny.  A friend of hers who had been rafting on the Ogden River just two weeks before she was definitively diagnosed  last August said doctors had said she was suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome for two years.  That’s what she had.  IBS.  

How can that be?  Isn’t the test for cervical cancer pretty easy?  Isn’t the cervix, well, right there?  And they let it go for two years before they figured it out?  

And this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of such a thing.

Even the Mayo Clinic took a long time before they figured out that my brother-in-law, Wayne, had colon cancer.  Why?  

Twenty years ago I found a sizable lump in my breast and they did a mammogram.  The results of that was that they could see nothing on the mammogram and was I sure that what I felt was unusual?  

I’m really confused.  Why isn’t cancer one of the first things they check for and continue to check for?  

Get it early, they say, and it’s easy to save your life.  

Well, gosh.  Nancy had been trying for two years and I sure wish we still had Nancy.  

Another Good Guy Laid to Rest -- Goodnight, Bishop Miner

Bishops have to be creative to be sure.

When we were twelve, there were a bunch of us -- probably twenty of us who went to Sunday School.  And few of our parents went to church at all but most of them sent us to Sunday School to get us out of the house.  Unless we had the grippe or some such thing.

Quite a number of us were scary, too.  Names could be named.  Names of several have probably been to jail, or possibly prison.  We were a blue-collar neighborhood in Provo, Utah with houses built right after World War II.  

Little tiny houses right at the base of Y-Mountain, almost all alike; two bedrooms, one bathroom, living-room, kitchen a little hall adjoining all and almost everyone's dad worked at Geneva Steel. And like I said, almost no one went to church except for the kids who went to sunday school so the parents would have some peace and quiet on Sunday morning.  All the kids went to church, I might emphasize.

Anyway, no one wanted to teach our class.  We were awful.  Loud, crass, awful.

So the good Bp. Gordon B. Miner called my father, Ben R. Cannon and Ted Bandley to be the Sunday School teachers.  They were neighbors and buddies and of course never went to church.  They accepted the call.  After all, Bp. Miner evidently liked and trusted them to do no real harm, so how could they say no?

Every week, Ted would read the lesson right out of the manual without ever looking up.  Dad would run the room, hurting people if they dared step out of line.  I remember one week, Jon Hall was high up in the window sill, and dad lifted him down, just by two fingers by Jon's forearm, slowly and carefully, Jon hanging and flopping like a trout.  Jon, too tough to cry or yell, just took it.

Dad would squeeze the thigh, or shoulder of anyone who looked like they might try to act out of line.  That class never behaved better before or after that year.  It was an inspired call.

I don't know why everyone continued to come.  I imagine it was because no one dared tell their parents about what was happening at church.  I think once they got the gist of what was happening, the torture really didn't need to happen very often.  The parents didn't want their kids home and they also didn't want their kids behaving badly at church anyway.  They knew Dad and Ted and knew they'd treat them the same way at home anyway so what was the problem?  Those were different times anyway.  Those were the fifties.

Bp. Miner died last week at 92.  I bet God welcomed him home with open arms.   Who doesn't want a good man like that around?

I think my Dad and Ted welcomed him home, too.  How could they not like the guy, too.  He was just a really good guy like that.  He liked everyone.   He was just a really nice guy who wasn't judgmental like sometimes religious people can be.  He even liked that class of twelve-year-olds.  Enough to have them taken care of by a couple of guys who could do it.

The Days You Hate Are But a Few

That's Cassandra Nicole Bear on the right.  That's her friend and roommate, Ashley Fivecoat, on the left.  Cassie died the night before last of bacterial meningitis which brought on heart failure.  She was so young.   Just twenty-two.

And she was so bright and hopeful.  At least most of the time she tried to be.

Unfortunately, she didn't have everything to hope for, but she always kept fighting onward and upward.

She worked at the Training Table where she would answer the phone and would fill the drink and salad orders.  She was trying to become the first in her family to graduate from college.

She had been in my Institute class at LDS Business College when she was a new little Freshman.  She was one of those who wore her broken little heart on her sleeve.  She told me and the class right off that she had been sexually abused as a child.  She also said she was hopeful that a blood disorder she had was in abeyance.

She told me later she had not yet decided to make a police report on the perpetrator who had been a family member. She wanted so badly to mend, knew that the mending required reporting it to the police, but didn't want to disappoint members of her family who felt that she should let bygones be bygones. I tried to talk her into talking to a detective and sometimes she decided to and then later decided not to.

Dear little Cassie couldn't please them and herself and on she went with so much unfinished business weighing her down that the joy she deserved could not overtake her.  Her heavy heart finally did her in.

Well now joy has taken over.  The burden has been set down.  Until the end she loved God, she loved his Word, she loved taking pictures of the Temple and she loved bearing her testimony.  Some souls are so good and it really is in spite of everything, not because of it.  You did it so well, Cassie, girl.  Peace be with you.

"He was everything anyone would ever want in a friend, a father, and an eternal companion"

Funeral yesterday. It was wonderful. First of all, it was for Robert J. Matthews. He is as Christlike a person as there is. The place was packed so I'm not alone in thinking so. Plus, there were some wonderful talks aobut the Plan, about Christ, about Joseph Smith and Bro. Matthews love for all of them. And then Boyd K. Packer was there and spoke for a minute. He called Bob "a treasure." It was beautiful.

I've got some nice, nice memories of Bro. Matthews, too. Back in 1989, I was on a plane on our Israel trip on my way to the bathroom. I knew he was the writer of the LDS Bible Dictionary, and there he sat in his seat reading THE BIBLE DICTIONARY. I had to stop and ask "Why are you reading that?" He simply responded "To see what I once knew." Kinda funny. Kinda like him. He liked low-key funniness.

He worked for LDS Church Education, for a long time he was Dean of the College of Religion at BYU and had his PhD from BYU in Ancient Scripture. Now, most CES instructors are kinda show people, but he wasn't. Like they said today, he was as much at home talking to a student custodian in the hall as he was meeting a general authority. He knew answers to things that most people have no idea there are answers to. So it was wonderful asking him questions. But it wasn't the answers, it was the rapt attention he paid to the questioner, never in a hurry and never implying that the question was uninspired. Those sparkling brown eyes were with you and the smile, gentle and kind. He seemed almost excited that he was talking to you -- and he made everyone feel like that. He was a true teacher. He wanted to teach and tht was his living, breathing, constant purpose. He was always aware of his students, never his own importance or his students' awareness of him.

I do believe that our gifts come with us from the pre-earth life. And I do believe that Bro. Matthews gifts were strong when he came here, but were intensified to where he was when he died by a life well-lived and focused on Christ, in touch with the Spirit and with years of concerted effort on his part. Catching up would be impossible, but with the time I've got left, I'd like to find myself becoming a little more like Bob.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince

I complained on Twitter from and about a funeral, today. In retrospect, I think that was really bad form but I couldn't help it. It went on and on for almost two hours. I even took a potty break. But I digress.

Ray Jones was my high school speech teacher. It's because of him I memorized the whole Old Testament chapter about Belshazzer the King and the handwriting on the wall. He never gave me a part in one of the school plays because I was a jerk and showed how nervous I was during one of my class speeches. That's when I learned the valuable lesson that "you never let them see you sweat." That has served me well my entire life.

He was a blast. A gnomish little guy who was bombastic, full of life and a man who expected a lot from us. I remember snippets of Shakespeare to this day.

He told us one day he had some sort of neurological disorder that made it so that when he brushed his teeth with his right hand, his left hand mimicked the actions. He hands did not work independently naturally, so he hooked his thumb into his beltloop for most things so keep things looking normal.

He played Charlie Brown in "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" and a gang of us youthish married matrons went to see him like the high school groupies we used to be. He was gracious and kind to us after the show, giving us the full impression that he remembered us.

He never married. I talked to his sister today at his funeral and told her that we had hoped that he would fall in love with Wanda Scott who was also a teacher at Provo High School. They were great friends and did a lot of things together and we couldn't figure out why their relationship didn't have a happier ending. His sister told me that she thought that they did fall in love but that each was so concerned with caring for his/her aging parents, that they never got around to it.

Too bad you didn't know him. You would have loved him too. I wonder he's checked out heaven for Shakespeare, his hero. If not yet, it'll happen and Shakespeare will love him too.