Second Thoughts on Memorial Day

Actually the previous blog occurred the Thursday before Memorial Day. Then on Saturday, Cathryn and I visited the graves in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. This also was an annual occurrence when Roger and I were children. At an agreed upon time in the morning, we would meet Aunt Lura's family and sometimes my cousins Mickey and Geri. People would stand around and talk while Grand (my grandfather) would clip grass around the headstone of his son Thad and putter with some of the flower bushes he had planted there. After about 15 or 20 minutes we would all leave. Nothing particularly significant seemed to happen there.

Yet when Cathryn and I visited the spot, it seemed to become very significant to me. There are now more headstones there. Grandma and Grand have theirs and Mom and Dad have theirs. Reading their headstones somehow affirmed and validated who I am. There were the names Leslie N Barkdull and Louisa T Barkdull. I knew them! They were very significant to me when I was alive. There were Ralph N. Kirkham and Mary Barkdull Kirkham Call. They were my parents who literally and partially figuratively made me who I am. And then there was Thad Barkdull, my uncle whom I never knew. But we visited his grave for many years when I was a child.

At the age of 70, childhood is long ago. Yet it was real, and very significant. Visiting the site of the graves of those who made it so, renewed those old "ties that bind" and reduced the many years between to but a moment.

First Thoughts on Memorial day.

I should tell you about Memorial Day. Cathryn and I decided to go to Garland, Utah and Bancroft, Idaho. (Where? Why? Who?)

In both our childhoods we traveled distances to commemorate Memorial Day. My family went to Garland where my Great Grandmother Smith lived and where her son-in-law, Nathan Kirkham and two of his children are buried. Other family members must also be buried there, because we often saw several aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles there.

When Cathryn and I visited the cemetery, we only decorated the graves of Nathan Kirkham, Clara, his wife, and their sons Reed and Ray. I noted that Reed was just an infant when he died, but Ray died one year after his father at the age of 10. My dad, Ralph, was just 13. What tough times that must have been for him, his younger sister, Melba, and his mother, Grandma Clara!

Now that I think about it, I need to investigate whether Great Grandma Smith and her husband are buried there. Probably they are.

Garland was on the way to Bancroft on interstate highway 15. We went there to decorate the graves of Cathryn's birth mother Louise and her grandparents Louie and Willard Call. Louise died when Cathryn was 6 year's old. We put bright yellow mums on her mother's grave and darker red mums on her grandparents' graves. The yellow mums stood out among all the other few flowers that were there on a rather cold, wet day. "Now your mother's grave lights up the whole cemetery," I said. We shed a few tears.

Having lived most of our married life outside of Utah, we rarely had opportunity to celebrate Memorial Day and never in Garland or Bancroft. Our traveling to those places this year therefore was quite special, something we had not done in over 40 years.

Technology

I love what technology can do for me. I watch the Tabernacle Choir every Sunday whenever I want. The broadcast is at 9:30, but I can record it and watch it at will, usually Sunday afternoon. I get to control how loud it is in glorious stereo surround sound. I watch it on my 42-inch Sony HD TV, which I noticed has a lot better color than the projected image I saw at the General Priesthood session. My first reaction was, what's wrong with my TV, and then I realized it was not my TV.

I enjoyed watching General Conference at home, all of the sessions (which is so easy to do if you don't have to dress up and then look for a parking space), sipping my Sprite Zero/Diet Mountain Dew cocktail, munching on salted mixed nuts.

High Definition is amazing. I am transported as I listen to the Tabernacle Choir and view the gorgeous scenic pictures that are often displayed with the sound of the music being sung. However the detail was a little too good when a General Authority started to become emotional with tears and, unfortunately, a runny nose. I remember thinking, "I hope he has a handkerchief. I hope he has a handkerchief," before it reached his upper lip. Thankfully he did and used it just in time. It was diverting, and it kept me alert.

I have always loved TV. I was 8 when we bought our first TV, a Motorola 10-inch "portable." TV was only broadcast two or three hours a day, but just watching a test pattern was fascinating.

It wasn't until we were married that we bought a color TV. Again, a 10-inch portable. There were colors, all right, but not often the colors you saw in real life.

I don't remember the TV that first had stereo sound, mainly because it didn't make much difference. The tiny, tinny speakers only produced recognizable sounds, separated by a distance of about a foot on the front of the appliance.

So I have waited all my life for my 42-inch Sony HD TV with surround sound. And I am satisfied.

Oh, wait. They're making TV's that show 3D! I wonder what they are like.

Health Care Bill

Hooray! It passed! That means the pool of the insured will increase and the premiums will....slow down in their increases. My kids don't need to worry about their kids being insured when they go to college all the way to the age of 26.

The accursed coverage gap "doughnut hole" for medicare prescription drugs will shrink and close. This year my wife and I will receive $250 each as a rebate for the doughnut hole. In the following years the gap will close even more.

Almost everybody by 2014 will pay their medical bills, which should mean the costs will be shared instead of being passed on to those who had insurance and therefore had to help pay for those who were not denied care, even though they could not pay for it.

It seems a lot more fair to me that everybody pays their medical bills instead of just some. I have no problem with health insurance being mandated.

Tax and Spend

Republicans use the phrase "tax and spend" as a label for Democrats and as a curse whenever emotions run high. I wondered what the opposite of "tax and spend" would be. "Don't tax and spend"? That's how the Republicans handled the Iraq war. Actually they cut taxes and spent on the war. I guess it was OK, because the cost of the war was not included in the national budget but was a separate item from it. I guess that is a Republican version of the opposite of "tax and spend"--"cut taxes and pretend not to spend."

Here in Utah, the Jordan School district is in a serious, financial crisis. To solve it they are cutting personnel. I believe it is 300 teachers. Parents are up in arms: Cut the fat! Cut the waste! Improve the efficiency! Cut the Superintendent's salary! Do not increase the class size!

One legislator had the temerity to suggest that they increase a tax somewhere. His suggestion was immediately dismissed. No more "tax and spend"!

We wouldn't want to pay for what we get, would we? Utah, after all, has a grand, Republican tradition.

I noticed the math on my previous posting was faulty. If you subtract 40 from 10, you get -30. But I didn’t want to be negative, so I dropped the “-” and became 30.

The impetus that I had for starting this blog was to point out some observations I have made concerning genealogy. Cathryn and I are the family history “specialists” in our ward. I laughed when I received my calling (kind of like how Sarah laughed when she was told she was going to have a child). I really felt unqualified. I still do, even though I have taken several on-line courses on new.familysearch.org and one downtown course at the Family History Center.

Right now Cathryn and I are teaching a Sunday School class on Family History. It is going well because the manuals and DVDs that go with them are excellent and because the people in our class actually know less than we do. New.familysearch.org is new enough that we all can feel like we are all in this together for the first time. Which brings me to the point.

Because I am now “into genalogy,” I started watching the PBS 4-part series, “Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” It ended last week, but if it repeats, be sure to watch it. “Skip” Gates was the man who had a beer with President Obama and the policeman who arrested him in his own home--but that’s beside the point. As a Harvard professor he is interested in following the individual histories of people, initially black people. But the program traces the genealogical and in some cases the genome history of a spectrum of people such as Stephen Colbert, Yo Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, and Mike Nichols, among others. For every one of the individuals there were moments of silence and contemplation as they discovered things about their ancestors which they had never known or had never seen before. They were really moments of reverence and excitement.

I recognized those moments. I have had them when doing my own genealogical research, and I have witnessed them with the few people I have been helping with their genealogy.

Another TV program, on commercial, network television, is “Who Do You Think You Are.” I missed the first installment last Friday, but will certainly tune in to it tomorrow. There was an article in the newspaper about, and you can read it on this link: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20100301/ai_n50379949/?tag=content;col1 .

In the article Lisa Kudrow, former “Friends” star and one of the executive producers of the show, talks about those genealogical moments: “And every episode has highly emotional moments when the celebrities make unexpected discoveries about their ancestors.

‘There's a moment of this kind of wish fulfillment in every one of them that's ... I'm going too far, but it's almost like supernatural to me,’ Kudrow said.”

In the Church we always talk about supernatural things, but we call them spiritual experiences. And these spiritual experiences are related quite regularly when we talk about Family History and “the spirit of Elijah.”

In the November 1996 Liahona, p. 19, Gordon B. Hinckley wrote: “There are millions across the world who are working on family history records. Why? Why are they doing it? I believe it is because they have been touched by the spirit of this work, a thing which we call the spirit of Elijah. It is a turning of the hearts of the children to their fathers. Most of them do not understand any real purpose in this, other than perhaps a strong and motivating curiosity.”

Even if people don’t understand, it seems to me that they still are entitled to the “spiritual experiences” that come under the head of “the spirit of Elijah,” as I have observed them on the two TV shows I have mentioned.

In the last book of The Old Testament, Malachi writes, (Malachi 4:)5 “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: 6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”

Moroni quoted this scripture to Joseph Smith and told him that Malachi would come and do what it said.

Thirteen years later it happened. And now, a hundred seventy-four years later, genealogical research has grown to proportions greater than anyone could have imagined, except, perhaps, for a few prophets.

10 Has Always Been Significant

I was born at the beginning of a decade. When I was young I thought it was cool that the year was similar to how old I was. In 1947 I was 7 years old. Then 1950 came, and it became a little more complicated. My age had two digits, but only one digit in the year's date coincided with my age. Nevertheless, by then I could add and subtract and learned if I subtracted the last two digits of my birthdate year from the last two digits from the current year, I would end up with how old I was. In 1957 I was 17 years old.

Then the century turned. Now let's see. If I subtract the last two digits of my birthdate year from the last two digits of the current year, I end up being 30 years old. That would mean that in 2007 I was 33 years old. Things are looking up!

In the 1980s I was in my forties. I was middle-aged and mature. Mature is good.

In 1990 I suddenly was in my fifties and I was getting what my students might consider old.

In my sixties I became eligible for retirement (which I recommend highly) and was officially recognized by my teacher retirement plan and Social Security as OLD enough to retire.

By the end of the decades I have learned to reconcile my age of that decade and enjoy the perks that go with it. But coming up on April 14 I will be in my 70s! That's going to take some time for getting used to it.

My first observation about being almost 70 is that 70 is not as old as it used to be. I'm going to work at making that true.