Don't make me stop hugging

Abrazos!

I'm having a six-week stint as principal of Jennie P. Stewart again, replacing a principal who is off opening another new school--just as I left to open Snow Horse nine years ago. Some of the parents and teachers are the same; none of the children are, but the place is still filled with love and lovable children, and teachers who need to know that what they do is noticed and appreciated.

It's weird being in the role of jefe but without evaluative nor planning responsibilities. God must have known I'd need help in my goal to be present in my life. Each day, I have that day, just that one day. The little incidents, celebrations, meetings and opportunities that come up that need a principal-- those are what I'm there for. It's surprising what a variety of issues I've already dealt with, in just a month. This job doesn't go on hold just because the usual person isn't in the office.

Teachers reported some vulgar sex-talk on the playground. I've learned to take it to the parents before confronting the children, and in doing so, this time, opened a can of worms that was good to open, but will be life changing for this family. It turns out that the older (both adopted) brother has been molesting the fifth-grader and the night I called the parent--and they learned about the abuse--police were called and the boy removed from the home. Is it any wonder the child was and is still acting out?

I met a different boy on Day One. He was introduced as the school's trouble maker. I'll call him Hank. He's been through two mothers to death--at a fairly young age, as I understand, and is driving the office staff and his teachers crazy with his behavior. Any change is upsetting to him, and field trips have been particularly rough. He was forbidden to ever return to the Ogden Nature Center this year, so the policy has been that he has to have his dad along on any subsequent field trip. On Monday, the second-grade was going to Pioneer Village at Lagoon and dad was just married on Friday. Surely, he wouldn't be going on Hank's field trip! I told the teacher that I thought it was important to let Hank attend and if I had to, I'd go and hold his hand at Lagoon. The bell rang and the teacher said, "You won't have to go. Hank's dad's new wife is going with him!" I walked out to the bus where people were waiting to get on and said, "Hank! Who do you have with you?" "It's my MOM!!" Does this woman have any idea how important she is to all of us? Later Hank told the psychologist when she asked about his new mom, "She's the most beautiful woman in the whole world!"

And then there's the hatchet in the backpack. "You forgot it was in there?!" You could hardly zip the thing. I told the boy, "It's mine until your parents come to get it." It apparently is still mine.

The millions of ice bags and band-aids every recess--lines of children needing first aid. I got on the intercom before one recess and said, "New policy: bandaids for blood and blisters. Ice for bad bumps and bruises. Hugs for everything else." I think it's slowed the traffic to the office, but an interesting thing happened. A teacher told me that after I made that announcement, one student said, "She's so nice!" The teacher, puzzled, said to me, "You just told them don't come to the office for bandaids and ice and what they heard was you would hug them." I will, too!

I'm trying to hug the teachers, too, with encouraging notes, cinnamon rolls and various kinds of "atta-boys" in these last weeks of school. I'm really loving the time I have to do this and am grateful for the opportunity. Tomorrow, I've been asked to speak to the first-year principals at their last Rookie Rap. I did it a few years ago--read stories from my principal journal, and I get to have a repeat performance. I'm looking forward to telling my "little shit" and other stories. I may tell that one here, another day.

Winter Adventures

 Shawn and Jay panorama, snowshoeing in the Uintas

Grand Canyon panorama South Kaibab Trail

Zion panorama from Observation Point

Jay and Rafael at Bryce Canyon

Chains and snow on Angels' Landing

Snowshoeing at the cabin

Selfie on the trail to Phantom Ranch

 JuliaAnne and Owen at the Provo Temple Open House

 Observing Zion at Observation Point

Shawn snowshoeing from the Mirror Lake Highway

No words!

Books! Paper versus everything else

Retirement has many perks, but freedom to read from sunup to sundown is high on the list.

During the Great Clean Up after our Chile sojourn, I rid the house and garage of tons of books. I was heartless. I've experienced just a bit of heartburn since over some volumes that went to Deseret Industries, but generally the switch to digital has been painless and freeing. I've downloaded books while listening to the radio in the car, at church and during casual conversations when a book is recommended. When I travel I can have books in progress and back-up books handy in my purse without any extra weight. The advantages of e-books are many, but there are still reasons that keep me adding books to the shelves.

One is the ability to share an actual hardbound book. Passing around a favorite book gives such pleasure; the prelude to a delayed conversation we will have when the book is returned.

Some books just cry out to be in paper: books with maps, books with photographs, books of poetry. Graphic novels, though it isn't a genre that particularly appeals to me. Picture books--can you imagine a Caldecott Book on the Kindle? Inscribed books, autographed books. Handsome books of family history that need a special shelf of their own. Scriptures.

Yes, scriptures. I'm trying to use the digital scriptures, and see good reason to do so. The highlights, notes and tags that I enter can follow me from device to device to infinity and beyond, once I figure out how it all works. But it's not the same to see a little box in the margin that I must click to find out what I said the last time through. With my "real" scriptures, I can draw and write in the margins and read those insights right along with the printed text--and in color! I downloaded and had a wide-margin Book of Mormon printed and bound that I am having a good time with as I study because there's plenty of space for notes, drawings and ideas.

Journals. I have the Day One app, and enjoy how easy it is to add a photo to the day's entry, and the way it can include the weather and location along with whatever I decide to write. I do, though, also keep a "real" journal, hard-bound and hand-written. As sporadic as I am about writing, it's one way of being accountable for my life, and I like being able to glue and tape or create a rubbing, or smear a purple flower on the page as I see fit. These books will remain when digital is lost in the ether.

So, what's the answer? Like almost everything, I can see both sides and I want it both ways. Digital? Paper? Yes, please.

End of Life

Last summer most of my brothers and sisters rafted the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Like all Sargent adventures, conversations ranged far and wide and deep. Yesterday, my brother Wayne emailed the siblings an article, "I Know You Love Me--Now Let Me Die," by a Dr. Louis M. Profeta, with this heading, "A little follow-up on our Grand Canyon conversation." 

Here's my response.

I just finished a book Suzanne recommended on the same topic, “When Breath Becomes Air,” and with the one we read last summer, “Being Mortal,” we certainly have a lot to think about. When Jay and I updated our family trust recently, we were advised to name those to whom we give power to relay our desires concerning end of life care—rather than relying on written directives. The reason for this would be these individuals would know our latest wishes rather than forcing the medical staff to abide by what we put in writing and perhaps have changed our minds about. I can’t imagine changing my mind on the basics: no extraordinary means when it’s clear the outcome is being in a "vegetative state,” do not resuscitate if I’m 99 years old and so on; but what if I’m on my way to the hospital in a coma after a serious fall (knock on wood) next week?! Or in ten years? Twenty? (do, do, don’t). Annie and JuliaAnne are our plug pullers, just so you know.

Of course, my visiting teachers were here last night. One is a nurse in cardiac care and she says that if a patient’s children are there and even one says “keep mom alive,” they will follow that one, regardless of paperwork or medical power of attorney status. I’ll be eager to hear Saundra on this one. 

Another thought—in keeping with Jerry, or was it Wayne, who said in our discussion at high altitude in Colorado after a long bike riding day, “Anyone who needs to call Dr. Kavorkian simply has no imagination,”—I have a friend in the last stages of ALS, now on a feeding tube and with breathing support at night. At lunch yesterday with friends, I was told of another woman with ALS who did not want to be helpless, or even in a wheelchair and simply stopped eating. Watching my own friend’s beautiful and spiritual journey “home,” I think ending it prematurely wouldn’t be my choice, but get Hospice so I don’t burden my kin TOO much! And if it’s Alzheimers, don’t insist that I eat. Better yet, take me on a dangerous hike. When the trail is icy.

What good shall I do this day?

I'm not sure what I'm going to say, but in 2013 and 2014 I posted 22 blog offerings, and so far this year, I've only written twenty-one. That just seems wrong on this 31st day of 2015. I guess I'll "shape at the point of utterance" and see where this leads.

At age sixty-eight, I have little faith in new-year's resolutions--that endless list of habits to develop that never seem to materialize. Same ten pounds. Same slothful lack of discipline. Same pride issues. Same pinching pennies and throwing away hundred-dollar bills. Not of general interest. (Can you tell I'm rereading "Cheaper by the Dozen" for the dozenth time?)

What I am enthusiastic about is listing experiences to accumulate. Last year was amazing in that regard. We visited Iguazu Falls, cruised Antarctica, rafted Grand Canyon, jumped off a cliff into the Colorado River, rode horses every day for a week, completed a mission, prayed a couple of friends back into the Church (no, I'm not taking credit), helped a terminally ill friend create a book for each of her children, made a road trip to the Northwest and visited six siblings, knit socks and hats and scarves for 23 Christmas gifts. Done and done.

What's on the Bucket List for 2016? More praying, obviously. More service to those close to home. An Institute Class. More temple visits. Knitting that Chilean wool from Hada and sending her pictures. Avoiding taking politics seriously. Oops, starting to sound like resolutions.

Okay: Train trip across the USA. (Elder and Sister Betts, are you reading this?), Monthly cabin trips of at least a week and including hikes in Zion. Mexico with sisters. Tuacahn and Shakespeare Festival, high school musicals. Having a hundred-dollar bill in my purse at all times. Eating out occasionally (no this is not reducing the amount of eating out, it's tripling it). Having a thousand dollars in my drawer. In twenties. Getting a good pair of gold hoop earrings again. Reading all the books on my Kindle and beside my bed. Staying off FaceBook except for the weekly check-in. A monthly massage, which I'm going to schedule right now!

Shawn gave me an enamel plaque with the words, "What good shall I do this day?" I've still to decide where best to hang it, but what a thoughtful question to have before me each day of 2016! Besides the obvious service it implies, it asks the moral question as well. What will I do with the unexpected $700 bill from the contractor who was paid the amount he bid for our home improvements in full long ago? How do I respond to the failures of others? How do I handle my own feelings of having failed? How do I decide between competing "goods"? How do I resolve the tension between faith and doubt? How do I "get over myself" and become unselfish?

I'm looking forward to it! Not going to lie. Perfection is a long way off.

Home

Home: such a foundational concept. A red brick house with a bay window from which to press our noses watching for Mom to come home, or be the first to see the school bus in the morning. A porch light on until all the kids are safely in their beds. A “Welcome Home” sign on the garage door. The place of comings and goings.

Home: Bread baking, Tide, willows, leather tack in the barn, tomato vines; windows open, curtains blowing in fresh air; lying under a fresh Christmas tree’s pungent sap aroma while squinting eyes to make multicolored lights flare out in all directions. Hay stacks. Certain smells evocative of innocence and family.

Home: “Annie I Over,” Fox and Geese, Sorry, Mumble Peg with pocketknives, picnics on Grandma’s lawn with food on metal trays and cousins. Walking fences, running along cement ditches. Chores. Corners for reading. Books and magazines everywhere. Those mundane moments that accumulate and become life.

Cedar City was home. Moving my senior year was traumatic. Who was I if I was not Dave and Millie’s granddaughter, Mid and Tom’s niece, Brad and Mary Ellen’s cousin, the girl in the orchestra, Suzanne’s little sister? I defined myself by being a happy farm girl in a small town near the red hills and canyons that I loved. In Yakima I was an unknown homesick girl with glasses and braces in a nondescript house that I did not consider “home.” Letters kept me alive that year and I escaped to Southern Utah as soon as I could.

When I married Jay, it was partly his home that attracted me: a white farmhouse with a wonderful staircase with railings looking down and a long hall with a dartboard at the end and evidence of many, many darts that didn't quite hit the target. It was a house crammed full of history and life and a big kitchen table that was the scene of thousands of games of Rook and 14 on a Corner. Ice cream and burnt peanuts.

So what was I to do with the idea of being an Air Force Wife for twenty years?! I lost count of the houses we lived in during those years, but we did live in Washington, Utah, Texas, Mississippi, Illinois, Germany and the Philippines, and in most of those places in at least two different houses. How could I create "home" with no specific house to put it in? I eventually landed on two sustaining thoughts. First, home is where the family is. An apartment in Germany where we could walk to the little market where they were always eager to see our little blonde-headed Shawn and give him a piece of weiswwurst, a World War I barn house on stilts on the parade ground at Clark Air Base in the Philippines where we could walk to the Officers' Club Pool every day or eat Mongolian Barbecue on Thursday nights, a brick home in Mississippi across the Biloxi Bay Bridge where we'd see fishermen and women with poles and buckets for their catch each morning and near where we'd buy shrimp straight from the ocean, a  corner house ("It has stairs!--an upstairs and a downstairs!" the kids excitedly told everyone.) in Illinois that became the neighborhood tornado shelter when necessary, a little cinderblock home on Williams Air Force Base in Arizona with a community playground just beyond our patio that was watered by flooding periodically and where our dog, Louie, would insanely throw himself in front of the spurting hydrant responsible for creating a 5 inch pool of water to revive the Bermuda grass that I initially considered a weed and tried pulling it all out. Home is wherever our family lives.

The second saving thought was one I painted on a cutting board at Relief Society. (Suzanne was visiting and painted a design that, in retrospect, I remember as being similar to Mexican pottery.) Mine said, "Bloom where you are planted." Indeed. I learned that I needed to be able to bake bread (an oven), wash clothes (a bathtub did the job for most of the year we were in Germany), explore (we discovered some military recreation areas wherever we lived and generally hunted down places to enjoy with the kids), and attend church. If I had those basics, and my family, I could bloom. Jungle, desert, city, country. East, west, north, south. If I can participate in an LDS congregation, bake bread, wash clothes and have fun, I can be home. I can bloom, because I can make friends. I can bloom because I can contribute. I can bloom because I can learn new things. I can bloom because I can be comfortable anywhere life takes me. 

Nacimiento~ Nativity

Our Nativity collection began with these olive wood figurines, a gift from Saundra--probably in the early 1970s. We loved the olivey smell and the fact that they came from the Holy Land. Another Saundra gift was a beautifully illustrated book, The Christ Child with the text from St. Luke. It has been the narration to our family's nativity play for at least forty years.

When we lived in Germany, we took little Shawn to Nurenburg and the Christmas Market, where we bought this nativity in 1971. Our tree that year was decorated with flat wooden ornaments that we painted from a kit, and we somehow found the money to buy Shawn a little green trike with room for a passenger on the back--he gave rides to his little sister after she was born two months later.

When our children were  small they made this little bread-dough nativity with instructions from The Children's Friend--and a lot of help from the mother. The recipe was simply Wonder-type bread and Elmer's glue. Believe me, it was not easy to make fluffy bread and glue into a smooth paste. But hey! It hardened to a ceramic-like material and has lasted a good many years.

This (American) nativity was a gift from the family of several students that I taught at Morgan Elementary. The year before, they had given me money. After I sent a thank-you note telling them I'd used it for classroom materials, they tricked me, and gifted me with a certificate to the Rock Loft, a cute shop with nothing that would be useful for school. I have loved it for twenty years.

On a sisters trip to Guadalajara, Mexico (a spa vacation in which we all probably gained weight on the wonderful fresh food), I found this nativity. It reminds me of a long hike we took with a guide who took no food or water because he said he enjoyed being really, really hungry and thirsty before satisfying that urge. Never actually having been hungry, I could not relate; but I'm going to try it sometime. These slender figurines look a little hungry.

In Uganda, I had the choice of fabulous ebony wood carved figures, or this banana leaf nativity. I'm not sure if the price was a deterrent, but my selection, as always, was toward folk art. I'm sure I'll find baby Jesus once the holidays are over, but He seems to have disappeared for now.

Why wouldn't a Peruvian pesebre (nativity in Chile) not have a llama? And the cathedral in Lima has a painting of the Last Supper in which the disciples are eating cuy, a.k.a. guinea pig. I tried a piece that was about a square centimeter in size to say I had. It tastes like chicken. Paul made the sweet rock and wood stable.

Family reunion rock painting resulted in this stone representation of the Holy Family.

This one is from Z.C.M.I. Who knew this institution would ever become a thing of the past?

In a little town near the farm where we served our mission in Chile, clay objects of all types can be found, but the only pesebres I could see were these odd little animals sheltering the entire nativity. The one with the prickly pear cactus is endearing to me. We saw so many "tunas" (the fruit) and marveled at how they could be harvested and enjoyed almost universally.

Finally, my wool pesebre. I had seen a similar one at a yarn exposition in Santiago but didn't buy it, thinking I'd see them all over. Not so! I searched for months, finally finding a woman in Melipilla at a local craft fair. When I explained what I wanted, she said she would make one especially for me, but what figures did I want? Of course, I needed sheep, Mary and Joseph and the baby. What else? Well, how about a donkey? We gave her our contact information, and a couple of weeks later, she called to say they were ready. We met her at the town square. I think she was as proud as I was thrilled with how they turned out. You just can't imagine how adorable this little set is! The baby's little hands up near his mouth, Mary with her arms clasped, the burro's little haunches, the curly little sheep. I'm so in love with it!

 Christmas is the time of year to think about a young girl, a virgin, delivering her child; but not just her child, not just any child: God's child, our child, the Savior of the World. He came to earth as we all did, helpless and innocent, needing all the care that Mary and Joseph could give him until they gradually realized that He was the one who would ultimately care for them, and for us. He would save us from ourselves. He would show us how to love and how to forgive and how to live. My nativities remind me of my debt to Him and my love for Him.

Merry Christmas!