"To See Afar Off"

This weekend we were blessed to listen to and watch some of the key note speakers for the rootstech 2018 conference.  Thanks to our friend Ginger, I learned that some of this could be accessed online, so our trip to Las Vegas went forward, even though I looked longingly at the tickets in my inbox for the Family Discovery Day. 

The message I received from President and Sister Oaks' presentation is how family stories can impel us forward.  I wrote out a story about Dad for a talk I was asked to give a few weeks ago, but had forgotten where I put it.  When I was listening to another keynote speaker, Scott Hamilton, an Olympic men's figure skating champion, I was touched by his landmark decision as a youth to dedicate every one of his performances to his deceased mother.  He says that is what made all the difference.  

So here is the P.S. to my Honesty talk...Returning with Honor, by allowing someone we love to help us to "See Afar Off:" 

I was born "of goodly parents" in a small college town in eastern Washington State.  I went to nursery and Sunbeams in a ward with a bishop named Clarence Bagley, father to a Tarryl in our present neighborhood. 

My Dad took his first job at a small university on the other side of the United States teaching soil and water science to students from Taiwan to Brazil. I remember taking his students on  vacation with us, driving through downpours in New York, and singing "Tinse La Hu" (Chinese version of "Frere Jacque," about three tigers running very fast.)  Soil Physics was not a large department.  In fact, I remember hearing that the whole department dissolved when Dad left. 

During a Valentine dinner of homemade shrimp and jugo de (juice of) jamaica this February, Val asked me to tell him about a favorite family vacation. I don't know if I remember my family really did "vacations."  We lived so very far from both parents' homes, so every chance we had, we would pile up to seven of us into a station wagon 


and eventually a flowered green van to travel the three days' journey to central Wyoming and eastern Idaho, where we would visit grandparents and cousins.  
Peering from car windows at the large dark splotches on rolling Wind River hills (they were clouds--unusual to see--as we were used to wooded New England hills) we scanned the radio to listen for Grandpa Gee's booming weatherman voice, "It's a BEAU--tiful day in Fremont County!"  He said this every day with conviction, rain, snow, sleet or Wyoming wind.  And he meant it. 

It was this grandfather who became the star of a story I heard from my father the summer before he died:   

Dad told me about studying soil physics for eight years post high school.  After finishing, he taught and researched at two universities on the east coast for seven years.  During a good portion of these years, I remember watching him serve faithfully with my mom and a handful of children (his own and borrowed) delivering sacks of groceries to shacks in the mountains of Maine and New Hampshire, counseling teenagers with lockers surrounded by classmates in trouble, organizing and spearheading building fund projects like combing the beaches to sell fried shrimp and elephant ears at the county fair, handmade sewn items at bazaars, and going door to door to pedal corn on the cob and fire extinguishers. 

I remember Dad's handmade poster toting the red thermometer as we went from rented building to building,

  indicating how much was our portion of the funds necessary before funds from Salt Lake would be available to build our own chapel. 

                                             
                                     (As these pictures taken years later indicate, dreams come true!)
                                                                                              

I remember counting out 234 personal pennies and hearing them clang in the tin for the "Penny Parade" (for the Primary Children's hospital) in a little upstairs room of an apartment with a pump organ in Sanford, Maine. 

      I remember how good it felt to have given every penny.  

(Revisiting the place we attended Primary, nearly 40 years later--strange how much smaller things can appear!) 

Which "vacation" sticks out in my memory? I have decided it is the summer that Daddy took a three month assignment with the United Nations teaching irrigation in an exotic island off of India,

 leaving Mom to sell the house and journey with four of their five children (ages three to 14) across the country.  

Mom instigated driving help from a young teacher, Rhoby Treadwell, who had to give up the wheel to gape at  geysers, morning glory, and buffalo

 in Yellowstone National Park.

 

Having regularly seen such wonders of nature since we were small, our eyes reopened, just as they do when we attend the temple with a new friend or take a walk with babies

--the universe looms bright when observed with new eyes!

As Dad traveled far from home      in an unfamiliar land,

                                                 
                       he found comfort in a book he had brought with him. 

On his paper thin aerogram letters, he challenged us to join him in his discovery of a 527 paged treasure of the Book of Mormon.  Mom purchased a series of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and apportioned the Narnia volumes to match chapters once carved into ancient plates, as we dashed through Dad's challenge. 
           

It was a race! And we all won.  His invitation planted a thirst for truth that has rooted and bloomed into a seedbed of light, to beckon goodness each morning.

                                  

It was after this far away summer, that Dad became acquainted with more trial with a taste of a verse from Jeremiah 29:11, retranslated in the New Living Translation of the Bible: 

 "For I know the plans I have for you," says the LORD. "They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope."

Following eight years of university, graduate school, and seven years of teaching and research, Dad pumped out resume after resume while driving a propane truck for a year for his brother through the fierce winds of Wyoming.
 

He pondered relocating abroad, but accepted a position reclaiming fields and hills from strip-mining patches, this time amid frigid wind chill factors of North Dakota.  After accepting another three month Sri Lanka assignment, he landed a position with a research laboratory positioned in the desert of Washington state, where he worked to protect and manage the soils affected by the creation of atomic bombs at the Hanford nuclear project.   The job was not what he had imagined it to be. It was not his favorite science to generate funds or try to convince politicians and officials to fix a hazard they deemed innocuous. It was difficult work.  He was discouraged. 

As a teen, I remember him with chin cupped in his hands at our kitchen table, commenting that one of his brothers was a doctor, the other a university dean, and who was he?  (A dirt doctor.)  

Not long afterward, upon a visit to Wyoming, my Dad asked his father for a father's blessing. 


In the blessing, Grandpa promised my father that Dad would one day be known throughout the world for his contributions to science.  Dad said later, "I did not believe the blessing.  But I believed that my father believed in me
--I went back to work, and things got better."  

Thirty years later, we attended a soils symposium in Texas that was named after my father. Students and colleagues converging from China and Canada, from Nevada to Colorado and beyond--all came together to appreciate personal mentoring, honest science, persistent inventions and contributions from a dedicated scientist--to celebrate Dad's contributions to soil physics.

(Photo 1: Far left, a colleague from China heading a research station in Canada; Far right, a colleage from Richland who Glendon baptized.  Photo 1:  Brown jacket, right front, Dr. Daniel Hillel, Dad's friend from Tel Aviv, World Food Prize Laureate 2012, Dad just behind him in light blue floral shirt)

Potential propagated with patience offers vision to "See Afar Off."  

Our own children may not believe what their parents see, but if they know that we believe in them, a few words may give them just enough courage to return to work and make things better. 

So, this is the talk I did not give.  Studying honesty,  I discovered the root word is "honor."   Perhaps "returning with honor" can simply mean doing something just a little better.  My triathlon athlete neighbor Alison suggested taking something we are good at (you know--making the bed, brushing teeth) and coupling it with something we want to do a teeny bit better. What if we do it today? 




Another afterthought:  In the one of the buildings above (or maybe it was the hall that burned down shortly after the owners refused to rent to our little group) I remember a Fast Sunday, sweeping out bottles and debri from the previous night's party, then gathering with our little Sanford branch for a testimony meeting. A handsome young man we did not know stood from a folding chair at the back.   He explained he was not yet a member but wanted to bear his testimony, which he did. Over time, the young man joined and became the first missionary to leave from our branch.  When he came home, he married a young single adult sister who had also completed a mission to South America, whom we adored.  (Our branch love story!)  Steve has since served in a Stake Presidency and as bishop to one of the wards that blossomed from our little "twig."  

During the second Thursday in April, when Val and I expect to be in the MTC in Provo preparing ourselves for our California mission, these exemplary "love birds" plan to travel west to celebrate their anniversary, visiting Mom on the way to the Manti, Utah temple, where they married, nearly 40 years ago.   What wonderful thing to honor honorable friends!

Happy marching with March!