NOTES ON A SUNDAY MORNING

           It’s a beautiful day in the Gorge. 69 degrees with a slight breeze. A far cry from the heavy rain/windstorm we had last night.  I'm skipping Church this morning to keep an eye on Vale.  He's had a cold/sinus/allergy problem for several weeks, and yesterday, he was a lot worse than he's been and felt even worse this morning.  I was ready to take him to the ER for a prescription of anti-biotics, but he seems better this afternoon  Still, I felt I should be around just in case!!  I've heard numerous complaints this season:  "I've never had allergies until now."

 

Dad has spent a lot of time in the yard this spring. Most of his efforts have been to trim back our many trees which were damaged in the ice and snow this winter. We can see that we’ve lost one or two bushes/shrubs but no trees. 

See the lilac bush by the shed?  It has a triumphant tale to tell.  We've had the bush for about ten years, and it's never been more than about the height of the wall, and it's produced exactly one bloom each year.  I think the experiences of some of the other bushes who've been trimmed way down to their underwear taught the little lilac bush that he'd better do something or he may suffer extinction.  So he's shot himself right up there.  Hope he continues and starts a family--I've always wanted lots of lilac bushes.

In addition, as soon as there was one moderately "good" day, Dad loaded his truck with his saws and awls, his compadre, Astro, and his Gene Autry cd and headed for the woods.  To my delight, his trips to the woods are in full view of our friends the Kings and the Matosiches, so I don't worry about him quite as much.  In addition, he's bought several cords of wood from the Boy Scouts. There's more wood behind the tree.  Now he has to split all of it.  Since Vale won't be here for Scout camp, he hasn't been in on the woodcutting project.  When the Scouts came to deliver the first cord, Dad sent the entire troop in to the house to roust Vale out to unload the pickup.  They were quite impressed with Vale's new man cave.

   The picture's a bit dark.  The black head in the middle is Vale with his headset.  On his right is Uncle Garth's old recliner which is where Vale usually sits.  On his left is all of his "stuff...clarinet, guitar, game cds, etc.  It's a touch life Vale leads.  If you look right in the center of the other picture, you'll see Vale.  He's in Concert Choir.  .

As for me, in addition to being Vale's chauffeur and taskmaster and the housekeeper, I'm into my usual:  genealogy, indexing, and quilting.  On the genealogy front, I discovered Mark and Debbie's mother's genealogical line.  Turns out there's a lot of blue blood running through those veins; they're descendants of the kings and queens of France and Spain.  For Indexing, I'm working on the 1940 Census.  Indexing is a job of processing the original sheets into the computer, which has been interesting and quite informative, as well as dull.  For 2 or 3 days now, I've been doing a neighborhood in Brooklyn which is full of surnames from many Eastern European countries.  I indexed the family of Samuel Cohen, whose son is Isidore Cohen.  I knew Isidore Cohen was a famous name, and, sure enough, he was a well-known chamber musician and violinist with the Julliard Quartet.  I also indexed a family in Bremerton.  The father in the family was Merton Wells, who was in his 80's when we knew him.  The ward was so desperate for Scoutmasters that Mert was still a Scoutmaster when Mark joined.  When Mark got ready for his first hike, we simply couldn't afford a backpack for him, so Mert brought his over for Mark.  It was his WWI pack made of canvas and boards!  As a mom new to Scouting, I dutifully packed every single item on Mark's list into the pack.  The list for the overnight campout included a set of winter clothing even though it was July and enough packaged meals to last for a week!  As Mark got ready, I was trying unsuccessfully to hoist the monstrosity onto his tiny back.  I could hear Mark yelling, "Julie, please quit pushing down on the pack!!"  Fortunately, one of the other Scoutmasters heard of our plight and brought us a different pack.  However, I've never forgotten Mert's kindness on that occasion.  I'm also still quilting.  I'm still working on Tom's quilt, which I mentioned in an earlier blog.  Half of the queen-sized quilt has been hand-quilted.  I'm also making quilted couch covers for our old couches.  They are designed, one top is finished, and I have 27 blocks out of 64 done on another, so I'm cooking along.

We are always concerned about all of you and wish we heard more from you, but we know how busy your lives are.  Both of us have become hard of hearing.  It makes for lots of jokes between us, but it is also a challenge.  We often don't hear the phone even though we're home.  If you call, and you don't receive an answer, try again.

Love from here to each of you.  Mom

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.  "It's the same thing," he said.

Chapter 2

            In my January post, I told the story of the quilt I made for my husband.  This post is Chapter 2.  To truly understand my tale today, you have to understand that I need to have a hand sewing project to do!!  Most evenings, my sweetheart and I watch television; he with a book or his scriptures on hand for the boring parts, and I with a hand sewing project.  This one is the quilt.  "Lovers' Knot" designed by Eleanor Burns.

I emphasize quilt top because a quilt is actually a sandwich of fabric:  the colorful top, a batting for warmth, and a backing.  The quilt maker puts this sandwich together by either tying, machine quilting, or hand quilting, and then binds the sandwich.  What you see in the picture above is the quilt top, and it looks symmetrical and quite attractive, doesn't it?  This particular quilt top was designed as two large separate triangles.   Designing my own Celtic Lovers' Knot pattern for the red and green knots you see in the quilt, from January to late February, I spent every evening hand quilting the bottom triangle.

My mother and her sisters used to brag about their quilting stitches.  Ladies in their seventies, they were so proud of their tiny stitches--twelve to an inch--that, if one dared to contradict or criticize, the others resorted to calling her some of their childhood naughty nicknames.  My stitches are more like six stitches to the inch, but I'm learning.

                       When I put the finished triangle half on my design board, I noticed, to my horror, a horrendous blunder.  See if you can spot it.  Look along the edge in the bottom left corner of the picture. See it now?  Look at the little red triangles.  There's a pattern:  red triangle, green V, red triangle and Ooops...

Three of the four sides of the quilt have this same error, and two of the sides are fully handquilted.

                       DO I CORRECT MY ERROR OR NOT???  This is the part of the quilt called the overhang--the part that hangs over the edge of the bed.  The border.  Should I ignore the problem and just finish the quilt?  Hours and hours and hours of picking out the hundreds of stitches.  Is it worth that much effort?  YES.  Yes it is.  This quilt is for the man of my dreams, and, even at 70+, he is as handsome and kind and loving--a Prince Charming--a real Boy Scout, as he was 41 years ago today when I met him!!

                 The first step was to label every part of the quilt with sticky notes. looking for the error. 

                 Then, I used these wicked-looking fellows:

Picking, picking, picking at miniscule stitches--mine aren't as small as my mom's, but they're small.  Picked and picked and picked through football games, political caucuses, old movies, and tv episodes until the pattern and rhythmn of the border is back in sync. 

                       In the meantime, my sweetheart is up to his old tricks.  These are his wicked-looking fellows.  He's been trimming and pruning the damaged trees in our yard.  Yes, he climbs on that orchard ladder.  Yes, I've told him a million times not to.  But, as I want the border on the quilt to be right, Tom wants the trees in the yard to look right.

 

Maybe that's the secret:  to do what's in our power to help what we love be the best that they can be. 

                         Love, Mom

“The purpose of life is not to be happy – but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.” Leo Rosten

LEST WE FORGET

           Have you ever had times in your life when events seem to have a theme?  That's been my plight this week.  The theme has been service in the military.  I think the seed was sown when I began to read Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, which is the true story of Louis Zampereni, an Olympic runner who survived a plane crash and a Japanese POW camp during WWII.  One evening when I was involved in the book, Tom suggested that I watch a two part episode of the old tv show, "Doc."  These episodes originally aired as a Veterans Day tribute in 2001.  Wow...talk about gut-wrenching!!  Then, there was the flap about flying the flag at half-mast for Whitney Houston.  I had no choice but to research my own Whitby family's service in the military, so the theme kicked into high gear.

 I've talked before on this blog about my brother, Joe, who served in Vietnam.  I still remember his first leave home from Marine Corps basic training. Every shoe in the house was polished to a high gloss, and every bed made to military rightness.  Joe was 23 when he was killed in 1967.  He had only been in the country for a month or two, having served most of his military time as a guard at a military prison.  He wrote a few letters in which he warns me over and over:  DO NOT DATE MARINES.  He didn't have to go to Vietnam because of the nature of his assignment, but he felt duty-bound to serve with his fellow Marines.  I found this description of his last days: On 05 March 1967 Charlie and Delta Companies, 1/9 Marines, assaulted NVA forces emplaced around Phu An. The NVA were defeated at the cost of at least eleven Marines killed in action: 

I've talked to two of the men who served with Joe in that horrendous battle who credited Joe with saving their lives. 
                                                 Then, I researched the military service of my uncle, Cyrus Whitby, who was career military, serving in the tail end of WWII and dying during the Korean War. 
Sergeant Whitby was a member of Company D, 8th Engineer Combat Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division. He was Killed in Action while clearing a mine field at Sin-dong, in South Korea by a direct hit from an enemy mortar shell on September 16, 1950.  He was 29.  I never knew Uncle Cy, but I have a few letters that he wrote to his brother, Jack, that I cherish.  In most of the letters, he longs to come to Seattle and have some beers with his brother.  His last letter is dated September 16, 1950.  He tells Jack of new leadership responsibilities that have brought him to his knees in prayer for the first time in many, many years. 

                                His brother, Jack, also served in the military--the US Navy during WWII.  Jack was the uncle we children knew well.  He was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy and loved us dearly.                                          

Another of my uncles, my father's half-brother, Frank Warr, was also career military.  He served in the cavalry and actually worked with horses early in his career.  I also have some of his letters where he talks about the many precision drills for which he was grooming and training the horses.  Since he is buried in Manila, I began to wonder if he had been in the Bataan Death March.  Although Uncle Frank was in the 31st Infantry Division which was marched to their deaths, he died of his wounds in a battle at Acubay four months before the horrible Death March.  Uncle Frank's brother, Ray Warr, was the son who stayed home to care for their widowed mother and to run the family farm which was considered vital to the war.
                                           

                       Finally, I researched my father's military service.  Daddy wasn't drafted until late 1944 because he worked in the asbestos industry which was vital to the war, but in 1944, his number came up, and he reluctantly left my mother and we three children behind for almost two years.  He never spoke of his military service, and he did not allow my brother to have even toy guns in our home.  I did know that he had served in Germany during the occupation.  I searched hard to find his military records since he'd been drafted for the "duration of the war" and to be assigned "as needed."  I'm still waiting for official copies of his war records.  Through bits and pieces in newspaper accounts in his hometown newspaper of Oakley, Idaho, I found out that he was in the 701st Battallion which was part of the First Infantry Division. He served as a truck driver in France and Germany, and in 1945, I received a birthday letter from him which is postmarked "Gotha, Germany."
The 1st Infantry Division continued its push into Germany, crossing the Rhine River. On 16 December 1944, 24 enemy divisions, 10 of which were armored, launched a massive counterattack in the Ardennes sector, resulting in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. On 15 January 1945, the 1st Infantry Division attacked and penetrated the Siegfried line for the second time and occupied the Remagen bridgehead. On Easter Sunday, 1 April 1945, the Division marched 150 miles to the east of Siegen. On 8 April 1945, the Division crossed the Weser river into Czechoslovakia. The war was over in Europe on 8 May 1945.
                                     Though the theme for these last few days has been depressing, it's also been affirming.  These men served their country, sacrificed their lives, in some cases, to protect their families and way of life.  I doubt that any of them wanted to be warriors; they wanted to parade their horses, drink beer, be at home with family.  Our son, Steve, and our son-in-law, Ben, are this generation's military men, and we're proud of them. 
                 Hope all is well with everyone.  Love, Mom

   

Listen to your heart. Even though it's on your left side, it will always be right! :)

MISCELLANY

          This is a morning so quiet that I can hear myself chewing my gum.  My blinds are still closed, so I don't even know exactly what the weather is like, except that Weather Bug tells me there's a 40 per cent chance of mixed rain and snow.  So be it.  I'm not going anywhere today.  Even the dog hasn't wandered in yet this morning; he knows I won't stir from my sewing/study room for another 40 minutes to do anything interesting like take him for a walk or fill his food bowl, so why stir from his warm nest on the couch? 
           I've been reflecting this morning on how ironic life can be sometimes.  Following through on a New Year's resolution, I've tried to replace mindless internet surfing with working on genealogy.  While working on the Shurtleff line, I came across this ironic obituary:  The following is taken from a newspaper clipping of Mar 18, 1826: "Died in Carver, Mass, on the 6th of January, Mr Abiel Shurtleff, aged 93 years. So late as the 21st of December, this aged pilgrim walked to Plymout, a distance of nine miles in four hours, where he passed several days, remarking among other things, the he had reaped in his native fields eighty two summers, where in his youth he had seen wigwams and aged sachems. and that he had been a soldier in the campaigns of the ware of 1756 at Crown Point.  Abiel Shurtleff Sr died on 6 January 1826 at Carver, Plymouth, MA, USA, at age 93. Mr Shurtleff walked to Plymouth on "Forefather's Day," sat upon Pilgrim Rock and took a severe cold which resulted in his death.   I laughed aloud when I read this, on one level marveling the he could, at 93, walk nine miles in four hours, but also remembering how shocked I was when I saw his sitting rock for myself about 7 years ago.

                  I love this room I'm in this morning; it's my sewing room--my nest, my spot.  My husband created the room for me a few years ago.  It's reflective of my interests--computer at one end, sewing machine at the other.  Soft office chair for me, old oak straight-backed chair for Tom to sit in when he drops by all through the day as he works on his own "stuff."  Wine red walls, lace curtains, cluttered, scattered, unfinished projects here and there...me.  Grandson Vale asks often in family prayer for God to bless me while I do "Grandma Things."  If forced to define Grandma Things, he probably wouldn't be able to do so.  He knows I'm busy at my sewing machine or computer in all my leisure time, and you know what they are because I've told you often in these blogs.  Vale received this Grandma Thing just recently 

                     Until a few days ago, four large oak bookcases lined one wall.  They seemed to loom large, ovewhelming the room, catch-alls for miscellaneous "stuff."  We moved the bookcases into the living room and replaced them with a quilters' dream--a design wall.  A design wall is a pallette for me to work on sewing projects.  You can see six projects on the wall--my some days.  The catch-all with the oval handle is a gift from sister filled with pins, scissors, etc.  The seven red, white, and blue blocks are the beginnings of a Quilt of Valor for our son-in-law, Ben, who has served two deployments to Afghanistan.  See the Mormon temple block??  It's a rough design for a memorative something--the temple is Idaho Falls where we were married 41 years ago.  The small yellow and green block will find its way into a sewing machine cover I'm making for my sister, the tulip block into a pillow or machine cover for myself, and the longer piece is a table runner I started and don't know how to finish.  At the top,  are six little crocheted cups and saucers.  My mother made those in the last few weeks of her life.  I need to design something for them as well.  Thank heaven for sweet ironies in life, sweet husbands and children who pray you'll have good health to do your "Grandma Things," and projects to do and enjoy to keep yourself young.  AND a red room to do them in.  Love from here.  Mom

 

Listen to your heart. Even though it's on your left side, it will always be right! :)

 

                  

                

ON TURNING FIFTY

            No...not me.  I turned fify almost twenty years ago.  This time the one turning fifty is our oldest son, Mark.  I met Mark nearly forty years ago as the new bride of his dad.  We met at SeaTac Airport in Seattle.  Waiting for him to walk off the plane was a nerve-wracking ordeal filled with insecurity and doubts.  How would he feel about me?  Would he be accepting of me?

No need to have worried!!  He took hold of my hand and never looked back.  In fact, he talked all the way home, telling me the plot of a B movie called Freebie and the Bean, a blood and guts R-rated movie. Mark has loved me unconditionally and always treated me tenderly and with respect.  Today, he's a successful businessman, happily married,  father of three beautiful daughters and grandfather of 2.  Happy Fiftieth, Dear Mark.
             We Kennedys like February birthdays, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY to: Ivan, Connor, Ben, Nicole, and Brenna as well as Mark.

                 We're back to our normal, if dull, routine.  After seven days off school because of illness and snow, Vale was grateful to get back to his second semester at Columbia High.  He was recruited into Choir class and returned to band class as well.  There should be some joyful noises around our house now.  We've had a couple more days of power outages which seem to be caused by an ongoing feud between our local public utility district and Bonneville Power. We're keeping a list of lessons we've learned by "roughing it."  Lesson Number One is to put emergency supplies where we can find them in the dark.  Poor Vale stumbled around trying to find flashlights and candles which were scattered all over the house.
             Just recently, we had a lesson in our church class about procrastination.  The teacher, who always has us laughing one minute and crying the next, did an excellent job of making us squirm in our seats.  She got my Guilt Quotient up, and I determined to make up for lost time.  I started by determining to organize and clean out the shelves in my sewing room/office. First chore was a large stack of unfiled, loose papers.  Aha...I pulled out file folders and looseleaf binders to get those errant strays back into their proper order.  A choice, choice experience...better than any game of solitaire.  The stack proved to be unorganized pages of journals from years ago, pieces of my writing from as far back as 1963, letters to our missionary and our exchange students.  The afternoon flew by, and by the time I had everything properly organized, I was renewed and refreshed with not a guily pang in sight.
                 Life is good right now.  Tom, who's been prowling the house like a caged animal, can now get outside and move on with his projects.  He's even sneaking off to the woods to see if the snow has melted enough to allow him to start cutting wood.  Fun times...much love and happiness at our house, hoping the same for all of you.
Love from here.  Mom

"Some people are so poor that the only thing they have is money."

TRYING AGAIN

                                  I just saved my 2011 journal to an external hard drive--196 pages, single spaced, size 10 font. 117,000 words. My journal, since about 2007, has consisted of cutting and pasting the daily, often twice daily, emails I send to my sister, into a Word document. I don't include her responses. This endeavor has reaped a fairly accurate representation of my life each year. It's honest but not brutal; tender at times, touching, filled with words and feelings of frustration, anguish, soul-searching. As I read the journal, the tears flowed, laughter filled my house, and sweet memories flowed from every entry. What were near-fatal crises six months ago had become only a blip of the ups and downs of daily living. I also keep a Quotations file in my Word program. It's a collection of little poems, pithy sayings, words of wisdom I hear or see as I read, surf the web, or watch tv. No one will probably ever read my journals--they're really quite boring. In addition to my written collection, I have pictures...hundreds of pictures, which I've put onto my computer. Because I was new to organizing my pictures, I'd loaded literally hundreds of pictures three and four times. I've reduced my 377 files to 20. I'm now ready to launch into 2012.

                 We did manage to get through the holidays unscathed.  Thanksgiving was a quiet affair.  Vale was with us for Thanksgiving dinner; then his mom whisked him off to Vale Las Vegas, Baby to see Phantom of the Opera and Lion King.  We had no such excitement--just a quiet weekend together.  Christmas was a busy circus.  Marie's family came.  Our five grandchildren wanted only one thing for Christmas--snow.  The two smaller children have never seen snow; the older three had only vague memories of playing in snow, since they've lived in Guam and then California for the last four years.  On Christmas Day, it did snow and hail for FIVE MINUTES.  Our nine year old grandson exclaimed, "It's snowing!!  Heavenly Father does answer our prayers!"  There was no snow during their entire visit.  Poor babies.  A good time was still had by all. 

                   January brought snow.  Finally!!  We need the moisture.  A week or so ago was a wintry, stormy week.  A phenomenon occured in our area that I haven't seen in all the years we've lived here.  Hundreds of trees in our area were broken and downed by the horrendous ice storm.  Broken tree limbs and fallen trees clogged nearly every residential street in our town.  In the picture taken from the window of my sewing room you can see the branches and twigs that literally covered the entire surface of our front yard.  To the left is our neighbor's yard where a beautiful evergreen tree and an old-growth oak tree were downed by the ice.

Many of the smaller old oak trees in our yard were damaged as well.  Since we're town dwellers we had only an 18 hour power outage, but many in our area were without power for as long as eight days!!  Everyone is telling survivor stories.  I was impressed by a group of the retired men in our neighborhood who came by on skis with shovels over their shoulders to help their neighbors dig themselves out of 4 feet of snow!
                   Tom has been confined to the house for a few weeks and is feeling like a caged animal!!  He's kept himself busy, but he's itching to get outside and start the cleanup of the yard.  I've managed to make a few quilts in this confining weather. 

           The top quilt is for two year old Mason.  I feel that I will only be able to make one quilt for each of my grandchildren, so I've made them all so that they fit a standard double size bed.  Mason's quilt is a strip quilt; the white panel is an old-fashioned train puffing out his name.  I made two quilts that were quite similar--jeans/flannel quilts for my grandsons, Kahlil and Wyatt.  When Vale saw their quilts, he asked if he could swap the red and blue jeans quilt I made for him some years ago with Wyatt's.  Vale hadn't used his quilt because he'd always lived in California, and he'd outgrown it.  So we made the swap.  I revamped the quilt I'd started for Wyatt so it would fit a 6 foot plus young man.  The Ivan quilt is for almost 7 year old Ivan.  If you knew Ivan, you'd know how perfectly this bold, optimistic quilt fits him!
                 The red and green quilt was my gift to Tom for his december birthday.  For the first time in 40 years of marriage, I was able to surprise Tom on his birthday.  I went to visit my sister, explaining that I wanted to have some sister time before the weather got bad. We put the quilt top together in two days; Tom never suspected.  The picture is of the quilt top; I'm still dong the hand-stitching on that quilt.  I'm even doing my own design of Celtic Lover's Knots on the quilt.  (For those who can't tell, I'm the sister on the left.)

            Our stormy weather is gone--temporarily the weather man says.  We're well and keeping ourselves busy and fulfilled.  Hope all of you can say the same.  Love, Mom
“When our wagon gets stuck in the mud, God is much more likely to assist the man who gets out to push than the man who merely raises his voice in prayer—no matter how eloquent the oration.” (Deiter F. Uchtdorf)

This will be a long blog that I am compelled to write. This weekend is the 181st Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. Conference, as it's experienced by members of the church, is a unique and wonderful custom. Conference has been held almost every October and April since the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ in 1830. Thousands of members flock to Salt Lake where there are five conference sessions to attend; often missionaries hold reunions with other returned missionaries, and many families plan family gatherings and reunions around Conference sessions. The majority of the membership, however, must be content with viewing Conference via closed wire broadcast, satellite, internet, or the radio, or published copies of the talks. Watching in our homes, we plan special snacks, gather blankets and comforters, and enjoy the novelty of wearing our casual clothes to "church." We love Conference and our leaders and cherish their words, are comforted by their messages.

I've been a member of the LDS Church for 57 years, and I have embraced it with all my heart, even though I was coerced into joining. My father grew up as a member but drifted away. However, he felt so guilty about his inactivity that he sent we three children to church. For several years, we merely sat on the back row, stoically obeying our father's orders until we met Althea Herring--Althea WHITBY Herring. She instantly recognized that we had to be Whitbys because all Whitbys look alike!! Althea would brook no resistance; we were to be baptized immediately. We didn't know we could argue with such an immovable force. We were baptized, in spite of being terrified of the deep water in the font.

I am who I am--good or bad--because I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ. I embrace the doctrines of the Church, which is very definitely a Christian Church, in spite of any bad press we've received on that subject. I try to live my life so that others will know that I am a practicing latter-day saint. Most of all, I have found within the sacred scriptures, strict tenets, and strong emphasis of family and service of the faith what I've needed to travel through the winding path of my life. I have, and have had, a good, blessed life, and this is not my swan song nor my last lament--I don't plan to leave this life any time soon. I don't feel that I've had nearly the afflictions, difficulties, nor tragedies that so many others have experienced in their lives, and I've sometimes wondered why not. For a Christian, afflications bring strength of character; Billy Graham once said that if a Christian doesn't have any problems, he'd better pray for some, so that he could be refined in the fire of affliction.

I realized today, while I was watching Conference, listening to our current president, Thomas S. Monson, that I never seem to see the trials of my life as afflictions when I'm going through them!! Once they're over and I have time to reflect on them, I think, "That was pretty tough, but it's over; we can go on." I feel this way because of my personal testimony of the power of faith and of prayer. The best example I can use is my experiences in dealing with my children and their struggles now that they are adults rearing their own families. When a child calls in crisis mode, I'm like the person who's been dog-paddling around in a quiet stream, only to realize that the rushing sound he hears is a nearby rapids that he's about to head into!! My child doesn't know it, but I'm paddling ninety miles an hour in a silent prayer that I may have the right answer or words of comfort at that very moment for their personal benefit. I have trust that a loving Father in Heaven is giving me a big shove, so that I can get back into the quiet stream.

The tradition of Conference that best explains what I've been trying to convey is that we believe in the existence of a modern, living prophet, who we accept as a mouthpiece of God. The first prophet I became acquainted with was David Oman McKay, the ninth President of the Church. To introduce President McKay, let me share this story:

I remember being in New York when President McKay returned from Europe. Arrangements had been made for pictures to be taken, but the regular photographer was unable to go, so in desperation the United Press picked their crime photographer--a man accustomed to the toughest type of work in New York. He went to the airport, stayed there two hours, and returned later from the dark room with a tremendous sheaf of pictures. He was supposed to take only two. His boss immediately chided him, "What in the world are you wasting time and all those photographic supplies for?"

The photographer replied very curtly, saying he would gladly pay for the extra materials, and they could even dock him for the extra time he took. It was obvious that he was very touchy about it. Several hours later the vice-president called him to his office, wanting to learn what happened. The crime photographer said, "When I was a little boy, my mother used to read to me out of the Old Testament, and all my life I have wondered what a prophet of Good must really look like. Well, today I found one."

I accepted David O. McKay as a prophet, and his words as prophetic, as I have accepted all other presidents and prophets up to this day. Just a few hours ago, I listened to the words of our current prophet, Thomas S. Monson. His talk was riveting, challenging, powerful. His sweet counsel on this day has moved me to share my testimony in this blog. Thank you for listening. Love, Mom