I Warn You, I'll Curse the Skies

What do I hate most about the end of summer?

The unpredictability of the weather?  The wearing of coats?  The shortening of days?  The irregularity of the blueness of the sky?   The onset of chilliness?   Potential precipitation?  Not really.  that's not it.

I really like Autumn.  I like harvestime.  I like crisp beautiful days.

I like the holidays.  I even like goofy Halloween.  I like Thanksgiving, Brad's, Julia's and Ben's birthdays.  Sophia's and Alison's birthdays too.  And of course Christmas.  Who wouldn't?  Then we get to go to Hawaii!!  Three glorious weeks in Hawaii!!  Most of January in Hawaii.  What's not great about all of that?

But then what?

Winter.  February.  Nasty, cruddy, ugly old February.  That should sum up my Winter.

I should then perk up and say "March!"  Nearly the onset of Spring again is it not?  "Who can't tolerate the short, little month of February?" you say.

But remember this year?  Didn't we have Winter until the end of June?  Didn't we?  I thought in retirement we'd beaten it.  We head off to Arizona to see Ben, to Hawaii, to warmer climes like Las Vegas, but global warming doesn't seem to be hitting us if you use Utah as a reference point.  And we can't stay away forever.  Really, if you were paying attention, it was a miserable Spring.

Well we'd just better not have that happen again.  I'll raise my fist to Zeus or whoever is in charge of the weather and also fire off a letter to Al Gore -- as if he had any power over the situation.  I warn you, I'll curse something, anyway.

Can't Learn Enough About Theodor Geisl

Trust me on this one.  You can't.  And you can't wish too much he was your uncle.  

And also, still alive.  Let's just hope Heaven is happier for having him around because they're sure all the better for it.  Know who he is?  Hit the link.  

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8Vzkqu/www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/66293

John Cheever -- A Book Worth Reading

Oh, no.  I’ve finished another good book.  I hate that.  

Cheever, A Life, the biography of the writer, John Cheever was fabulous and I’m not sure why I liked it so much.  He was a lonely bi-sexual, a drunk for most of his life, an unhappy man, yet  I loved this book.  

It was honest, sharp and so insightful yet no one around him seemed to know him well.  Everyone seemed to think of him as a nice and kindly man except for his wife who despised him for most of his life and his children who didn’t understand him.  These were the people, incidentally, he wanted to please most, but he didn’t seem to know how to do it.  Relationships of all kinds seemed to elude him.  

What interests me, too, is that much is told from the point-of-view of his journals which he seemed not to want to hide, in which he referred to his loathing of his homosexual tendencies and fears that his drinking is what made his wife hate him so much (though she fixed him dinner without fail for all the years of their marriage and cared for him during his final bout with cancer.)  I wonder, too, why more didn’t read his journals during his life and find out more about him.  He invited his son to read them and sat watching him at one point as he read.  No one seemed interested.  It made me want to keep a journal better and more honestly.

I think I love the beauty of the writing of this book and the mingling of that with the beauty and honesty of the writing of John Cheever himself is what got me.  I don’t really know if I’ve read much of John Cheever’s work at all.  I’ve read much of his rivals’ works:  John Updike, whom I love, Saul Bellow, John Irving.  Cheever is mostly known for his short stories.  But I’d heard so much about this biography that I had to give it a shot and I’m so glad I did.  I still may not try much of his work as it has settled back into obscurity a bit, but his life I love.  

Hope my family, friends and former students aren't too alarmed at the range of my reading interests.  Somehow such things don't alarm me as much as they seem to other people.  I think there is great beauty in understanding the difficulties of others.  I don't enjoy crassness nor do I have a prurient interest in obscenity and suffering.  In fact I'll stop reading if I find in books things that appeal to such things.  

But perhaps that is what the appeal in my Master's Degree in Educational Counseling was.  To understand the human heart a little better and sympathize, empathize and wish a little I could help out those for whom life is tough.  God knows everything and I am so far from that but something inside me tells me that he approves when I seek to understand the hurting that goes on.  I think that's why he made me tough and not especially judgmental.  No excuses, just a little explanation I guess.

Carl's Off The Table And Recovery Ensues

Carl is home from the hospital at last.  

He has never really had quite the assault upon his person that he has had the last five days in his whole life.  

He had stents put in his heart arteries -- a couple in the early nineties and three last July, but his insides were never quite so abused as this.  

I feel, though, that he was so blessed to have his kidney stones a couple of months ago so that Dr. Daniel Hibbert, a 6 ft. 9 in. giant could check out his prostate and PSA count and find that Carl indeed did have prostate cancer.  It’s just a little like my brother, Brent having kidney stones about this time last year and finding he had kidney cancer.  I think it’s God’s way of putting on a little sticky note to say “I don’t want you home quite yet.  Do something now right about right here.”  

Thank you, God, for both of them.

But there are some inconveniences.  

As I said in a previous blog, Carl doesn’t swear, but he does get to wear a little catheter bag for a couple of weeks and he almost cussed out the length of tubing, clamps and bag as he tried to figure the whole mess out his first day with it at home.  I wasn’t laughing to be sure as he commented that anyone who thinks catheters are funny doesn’t know what funny is.  It’s not that we think they’re funny.  We just are mighty glad it’s not us.  He's more used to it now, but he still doesn't like it.  

He hurts pretty bad still.  Not as bad as he did yesterday and not as bad as he did the days before.  I presume tomorrow will be even better.  

His surgery was the robotic laproscopic prostectomy which is much less common than the usual wide open hands-on job, but has far less hacking and hewing on the outside and is far more precise on the inside, but it still requires lots of cutting through the muscles of the stomach and still hurts like a son-of-a-gun.  

He will have a total of two weeks with the catheter and some recovery besides, including another four weeks of getting better and better, according to the good Dr. Hibbert and then after that he should feel pretty good.  Who knows how long before he's "back to normal" whatever that is.

I did mention to Dr. Hibbert that a "Dr. Hibbert" is also on the Simpsons and wondered if he gets teased a lot.  He said that those in the circles he travels in don’t watch the Simpsons much.  What?  You’d think patients of Urologists would gravitate right to the Simpsons.  I’ll let you provide the punchline yourselves.  

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.

Some People Can Really Say It For Us

 Laure-Anne Bosselaar

It seems like so much is going on.  Some is personal, so much has a national and an international impact.  Some is good, some is not.  So many lives impacted.  Some hurting. Some rejoicing.  Some afraid,  Some hopeful. Some just living on.  That's why I love this poem.  It reminds me that Heaven knows about it all, too.  Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a very talented contemporary poet, don't you think?  Try to read it through to the end.  I think you'll like it.




The Worlds in this World

Doors were left open in heaven again: 

drafts wheeze, clouds wrap their ripped pages 

around roofs and trees. Like wet flags, shutters 

flap and fold. Even light is blown out of town,

its last angles caught in sopped

newspaper wings and billowing plastic — 

all this in one American street. 

Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide 

recedes, incense is lit, an infant 

sucks from a nipple, a grenade

shrieks, a man buys his first cane. 

Think of it: the worlds in this world. 

Yesterday, while a Chinese woman took 

hours to sew seven silk stitches into a tapestry 

started generations ago, guards took only

seconds to mop up a cannibal’s brain from the floor 

of a Wisconsin jail, while the man who bashed 

the killer’s head found no place to hide, 

and sat sobbing for his mother in a shower stall —

the worlds in this world. 

Or say, one year — say 1916: 

while my grandfather, a prisoner of war 

in Holland, sewed perfect, eighteen-buttoned 

booties for his wife with the skin of a dead 

dog found in a trench; shrapnel slit 

Apollinaire's skull, Jesuits brandished 

crucifixes in Ouagadougou, and the Parthenon 

was already in ruins. 

That year, thousands and thousands of Jews 

from the Holocaust were already — were 

still — busy living their lives; 

while gnawed by self-doubt, Rilke couldn’t 

write a line for weeks in Vienna’s Victorgasse, 

and fishermen drowned off Finnish coasts, 

and lovers kissed for the very first time,

while in Kashmir an old woman fell asleep, 

her cheek on her good husband's belly. 

And all along that year the winds 

kept blowing as they do today, above oceans 

and steeples, and this one speck of dust 

was lifted from somewhere to land exactly 

here, on my desk, and will lift again — into 

the worlds in this world.

Say now, at this instant: 

one thornless rose opens in a blue jar above 

that speck, but you — reading this — know 

nothing of how it came to flower here, and I 

nothing of who bred it, or where, nothing 

of my son and daughter’s fate, of what grows 

in your garden or behind the walls of your chest: 

is it longing? Fear? Will it matter?

Listen to that wind, listen to it ranting

The doors of heaven never close,

that’s the Curse, that’s the Miracle.

 by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Where Are the Fire Extinguishers?

This whole business of burning the Koran for whatever reason makes me heartsick.  Of all people, we members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints know what it’s like to be assaulted for what we believe and to have our scriptures belittled.  

However, I was pleased the other day when the Church issued a statement (September 8, 2010) through a spokesman which said, “A key tenet of our faith is to accord everyone the freedom to worship as they choose. It is regrettable that anyone would regard the burning of any scriptural text as a legitimate form of protest or disagreement.”

The Church is definitely not defending the actions of the church in Florida or the one potentially in Kansas which are threatening to burn the Koran.  It is merely defending their right to do so.  

Does that leave us to allow such disgraceful behavior to take place on our country’s soil?  Certainly not.  Nor does it leave us vulnerable, as says General Petraus, to retaliation against our troops who are serving in Muslim countries.  

I have a former student, Nathan Dalley, who is shown in the picture above, who was killed on November 3, 2003 in Iraq.  He was as fine a person as I’ve known.  Among other things, he was Senior Class President at Brighton High School in Salt Lake City which shows the value other students placed on him.  He was a great kid.  He was respectful, loved the Lord, was bright, was a fun, joyful boy who loved everyone.  He is missed to this day.  I, and many others, don’t want to run the risk of losing anyone else if we don’t have to.  

So do we put our hands in our pockets and say, let anyone just go ahead and do anything they want regardless of how it might impact on the rest of us?  Of course not.  That’s not what the Lord meant when he inspired the eleventh Article of Faith which is:  “We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.”

He also taught us to teach, preach and to pray to bring upon ourselves and our families, friends, and our detractors his greatest blessings.  And these we need so badly these days.  He also taught us to be courageous and to take heart.

We can’t forget this because of fear, despair and in our forgetfulness of one of the greatest scriptures of them all:  Luke 1:37,  “For with God nothing shall be impossible.”