A night of sober reflection

Today I planned to take the entire day off. We were signing all the documents on our house at 9:30 AM, and then were hoping to measure some things in the house, and run to Home Depot and buy a few things, like two new toilets and stuff like that. But instead, we learned that the sellers are firmly not signing until Friday. I think this is because they don't live in town, and so they set up a time that works for them, and that is okay. We were originally going to have a possession date of August 24, so we are still going to be a few days ahead, so it is fine.

I decided that I should email my siblings and tell them that we had bought a house--well, I had already told Bruce and Arlene, but not Colleen, so I wanted to let them all know in a group e-mail. I told them about the house, where it was, and whose house it had been. Colleen e-mailed me back to say, "Oh my goodness. Rodney Turner was my bishop in my freshman and sophomore years. I was good friends (and dated) his son, Mike Turner. Mike also paid me to type his papers. He was really a nice guy." So that was pretty funny! But the Turners were not yet in that house when Colleen knew them--well, knew them AND was around them--because that was 1969-1972. The house we are buying from them was built in 1974. So I am guessing that Colleen's friend Mike never really lived there, since he was a grown-up in 1974. (The older Turners died, Rodney in 2014, and his wife Bonnie in 2019 at age 95.)

So...I was in my office, but not working, because I had decided to take the day off. Although Janet emailed me for help with a reference question, researching a Utah bass singer from the early 1900s, Willard Andelin--a non-BYU scholar was working on that question. So I did a bunch of research, including finding Andelin's obituary, so I checked Family Search, and the obit was not there, so I added the obit. And then I found an article that had a great picture of his wife (also a professional singer and pianist) so I put that on Family Search, and then I thought, "Now what can I do?"

So my thoughts turned to my Uncle Wayne (really my dad's cousin) and to his son Mervin, who I sometimes talk to on Facebook. Mervin is a couple of years younger than me, I think. I am not sure of his age. Mervin has a box of genealogy information because his dad liked doing genealogy. (A passion that he and my dad shared.) Uncle Wayne, of course, was the son of the murdered Uncle Louis. I had added a bunch of stuff to Uncle Louis's page on Family Search, just not the murder. Which is now available only on my website. 

Mervin had told me that his dad spent a lot of time working on Aunt Nellie's line--I need to ask him about that, because on Family Search it only had her father's name and particulars, but not the names of his parents. He was born in Idaho and was a Taylor, so he could be from Mormon stock, though he was not Mormon. He married a girl who had moved with her family from Sussex, and they were Church of England. Anglican. Anyways--this is a line I could work on. Aunt Nellie's father, Leroy Franklin Taylor, died in November 1918, a victim of the influenza epidemic. His wife Elizabeth was left a widow at age 22. She had four little girls: twins who were two, Aunt Nellie who was one, and she was pregnant with a little girl who would be born in 1919, months after her widowhood commenced. I think that their family deserves some attention. (Elizabeth did not remarry. She just raised those four girls on her own.) 

But for today, I decided to add some obituaries to Uncle Wayne's family.

So I found Aunt Nellie's obituary, and then I went looking for Robbie's. Robbie unfortunately had a heart attack and died at age 40 in 1989, another sorrow for the heart of his mother. His older brother, Jerry, had died at age 15 in 1958. I was only seven months old at that time, so I had no clue that happened. But I remember being in Aunt Nellie's living room in Taber, and walking around looking at the photos she had and she would tell me about them. When she talked about Jerry, I knew that her heart was broken and that the loss of her oldest son was still a fresh and stinging wound. I could feel that, even though I was small at the time.

From things Mervin has said, I know that the loss of Jerry impacted Mervin's life, even though he was not even born yet. I think the grief cast a shadow over their family; it was a hard thing to bear. While looking for articles about the accident that took Jerry's life, I happened upon Uncle Warren's obituary, too, since he was also a Conrad who died in July 1958. That must have been a hard month for our entire extended family, with two funerals about two weeks apart.

Jerry was driving a farm vehicle, following his father who was driving a bigger farm vehicle, when he lost control and overturned in a ditch. Jerry was pinned under the vehicle. I don't know who found him, but I imagine it might have been his dad, who realized that Jerry was no longer following him, so he may have gone back to check. They were driving on farm roads--all of you who have been to Alberta know what these roads are like--very little traffic. So. That was very sobering to read about.

The last article, the one from July 28, was giving me so much trouble!! Newspaper Archives was acting up, and I had to go in and out and restart, and then the page numbers were all screwed up for that particular issue of the Lethbridge Herald, and I kept getting black pages and--it was a nightmare. When I finally could read it, I learned who the pallbearers had been at the funeral. And that was surprising to me, because Jerry is this phantom to me. Like, I knew he existed, but he was gone for as long as I could remember. So the fact that the boys who were his pallbearers were mostly men that I knew and had looked up to as a child was just a surprise. They were: Tommy Rachwalski, Devon Tufts, Keith Karren, Bernard Burbank, Ernie Meyers and David Smith. Three of these guys were in my ward, and they were, like, examples to me of how to live a good life! Keith worked for my dad, was my health professor at BYU, and is currently my Facebook friend (even though we have different political opinions.)

So I messaged Keith and told him what I had been doing--and that I had no idea that he had been Jerry's friend and pallbearer. He responded by saying: "Yes, Jerry was my good friend. It was the first time any of us had experienced death and we had a very difficult time wrapping our heads around it." Clearly, Jerry's friends would have had a hard time with his death--I just had not thought about it before; about who were his friends, and how did they feel.

In high school, Keith dated Jacquie Jensen forever. He was a super Senior in High School--stuck around for awhile. Finally went on a mission, to England, which was actually where he was born. (His mother, Joyce, was a young woman with a child, Keith, who met and married a Canadian Forces man and came back to Canada when the war ended. Her husband adopted Keith.) While Keith was away, Jacquie married someone else. Keith's mission president literally begged BYU to admit Keith, despite his sketchy high school grades, and they did. And he ended up with all the degrees and eventually a professorship at BYU back in the day when Health was REQUIRED. I don't even think there are any health classes any more. 

Anyway--this is all to say that Jerry's death involved his friend Keith who dated Jacquie who had a sister named Carma, about my cousin Mervin's age, and when Carma was 16, she died in the same way that Jerry did. Alone on a country road after losing control and going into the ditch. 

So. That was my night of sober reflection.

So much pain and loss. Poor Aunt Nellie's mom, losing her husband in the epidemic, so young, so many little girls. Aunt Nellie losing two sons--I do not here mean to diminish the loss of Robbie. Forty is so young. I remember his cute little daughter Chandelle. He also had a son, Bryce. They would have been teens when their dad died. More loss. And then learning who the pallbearers were, and making the connection to Carma, even though it is very tangential. 

Life is hard, and then you die, so spoke my dad. He is not wrong.

New House

We just signed all the paperwork for our new house today, but don't have possession yet because the sellers are planning to sign on Friday. So now we wait.

Our condo has been nice, but Bruce has never liked living in a condo, and it has gotten increasingly annoying since the pandemic hit in March. Since we moved here, at which time almost all the 16 units were owner-occupied, now the majority are rentals. That would be okay, except all the rented ones have been made into two apartments, which means the parking and the traffic are really annoying--this condo development was not built to support so many cars! I think what tipped me over the scales, though, was the garbage...with units both up and down, there are now garbage cans at the top, when formerly they were all at the bottom. So whenever I go outside to enjoy my cute little garden--instead I don't enjoy it. It smells nasty! Luckily for me (but unluckily for the remaining owner-occupied units) an investor is more likely to buy this condo than an owner, so they won't care; they will just turn it into two units and rent it.

So this is the house we bought. I will put the pictures that will probably disappear from Zillow soon.

This is apparently my first time posting pictures since the new blogger, and I hate the new blogger. WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THE OLD ONE?!!!!

Gah. I don't like the way the new one works, for resizing and captioning. The other one was so great. This one is less great. Uggh.

A poem

 I found this cute poem in the August 1921 Children's Friend magazine, page 309. It reminded me of Josie's pussy cats.

                                Pussy Cat's Medicine -- by B. C. Newton

                                           When Pussy Cat took medicine,                                                                                                                          We didn't pinch her nose:                                                                                                                                We brought the nasty tasting stuff,                                                                                                                      And rubbed it on her toes.

                                            Then Pussy took her sharp rough tongue,                                                                                                            And licked it off; because                                                                                                                                 A cat will swallow anything                                                                                                                                 To keep it off her paws.

BYU Summer Term COVID Count

 July 6 -- 14

July 11 -- 16

July 15 -- 19

July 24 -- 40

July 27 -- 47

July 28 -- 51

Aug. 1 -- 65

Aug.4 -- 68

Aug. 5 -- 73

Aug. 6 -- 78

Aug. 10 -- 85

Aug. 12 -- 90

Aug. 13 -- 98

Aug. 16 -- 109

Aug. 20 -- 125

Aug. 24 -- 131

Aug. 27 -- 141

Aug. 30 -- 151

Aug. 31 -- 166 (Final count for term.)

July 2020 Books Read

The seventh month of this very long and dreary year, and I managed to complete the reading of seven books. (I have several non-fiction books that I am slowly moving through as well, but I am not finished with them. Yet.)

1. The oddly named Two Crafty Criminals! by Philip Pullman. Oddly named because the book is really a set of short stories about the New Cut Gang, a group of children in England in the past. It was a fun read, and very different from the "His Dark Materials" series, which you know, I loved the first one, liked the second, and could hardly stomach the third. I read this title mostly because it seemed very different from the series I had read, and indeed, it was very different. Pullman is a good writer, able to tell a good story in various styles. This one is probably a middle grade novel, so an easy read.

2. Withering Tights by Louise Rennison. I am sure you can see where she got the title from. The main character, Talllulah, is accepted into a summer school program at a private school--all girls--on the Moors, not unlike Wuthering Heights. Which is why these drama students decide to do that story as their final project, with Tallulah playing the part of Heathcliff. It was funny, not super, but a good, fast read that was amusing.

3. Winterborne Home: For Vengeance and Valor by Ally Carter. I read this other Ally Carter book while I was waiting for the last Embassy Row novel that I had ordered to be delivered. This was a cute story written for middle grades. Ally Carter can tell a good story for younger readers, too, I learned. April is an orphan who accidentally starts a museum on fire, and she ends up one of the orphans at Winterborne Home. This book is described as "Batman meets Little Orphan Annie" and they are not wrong. There is a sort of a bat cave--or at least a cavernous basement--and some feats of daring do.

4. Take the Key and Lock Her Up by Ally Carter is the last of the Embassy Row series. This one was so intense that I had to read it kind of slowly because there was too much suspense for me in places. But--finally a happy ending to this long story. Well, not so happy for the person who ends up to have been the villain. It was not who I expected it was, so that was interesting. 

5. The Lines We Cross by Randa Abdel-Fattah was, I think, my favorite book of this month. I first read this author on the plane flying home from Australia about 14 years ago, since I bought a couple of books from the discount table at a bookstore in Adelaide before heading home. Randa writes about the experiences of Muslims in Australia, and Does my head look big in this? was the first book of hers I had read. This book, like that one, was a great read. Randa writes very compellingly and believably. In this book, a girl who is a refugee from Afghanistan meets a boy whose father is the leader of an anti-immigration group. You can imagine that situation being quite fraught. The two are very attracted to each other, but also very repelled by each other. They both have a lot to learn, and as they learn, they cross lines of thought that have ramifications for them and their families.

6. When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon was a fun read. It grew on me. At first it felt super light and fluffy, but it got better. I chose it because it was about not white people, and I like to read about the experiences of brown people in this country. Also, Bollywood fan that I am, I do enjoy a good NRI or Desi story. Rishi is a traditional Indian son, and is super excited to meet the girl his parents have chosen for him. Dimple tries very hard NOT to be a traditional Indian daughter, and she is super annoyed that the boy her parents have chosen for her to marry shows up at her summer school experience at UCSF. She is Stanford bound in the fall; he is MIT bound. She hopes to get rid of him once and for all. Instead...despite herself, she likes him. It actually ended up as a cute story. 

7. Meet a Murderer by K. D. Solstice. I was actually very happy to meet the murderer of my great uncle Louis Conrad. I had already read all the newspaper clippings, and I just wanted to know WHY he did it. Like, he ruined his own life as well as ending Uncle Louis's life. His relative, Jenna, had told me that he is now a very good man, in his 80s--a very good man who did a very bad thing a long time ago. She told me about the book, found out the title, and I bought it. The book could have used some editing for sure, but I came away from the book liking this man, and appreciating that some good came out of that particular tragedy. Let me quote from the back of the book: "When he was just sixteen years old, the product of a life that had not given him the skills to make good choices, K.D. Solstice killed a man. He made a wrong choice, and the consequence was a sentence of life in prison. But even under such dire circumstances, he knew that he still had a precious gift: he was alive, and as long as he had that, it was up to him to start making right choices, and to make them again and again, even when it was hard to do...Meet a Murderer is the story of his lifelong journey to redemption..."

So why did he kill Uncle Louis? I do not think that was his plan; he planned to rob Uncle Louis, but he took a gun with him, one with kind of a hair trigger on it, and when he snuck up to the gas station, which he thought would be empty, and raised his eyes up to the window, there was his uncle, and he just hit the trigger. That was not a good choice. And then when he went inside, why did he shoot him again? I don't think even he knows why--he just did. He carried out his robbery plan, and then heard that Louis had died. "The guilt and the agony at what I had done were unbearable." (p.67)

He mentions that all the newspaper articles say that he had no remorse. Actually, he felt what I would call "tharn"--in Watership Down, that is the rabbit-state of being paralyzed or hypnotized by fear.  He knew what he had done; he knew it was wrong; he thought that he would get, and that he deserved, the death penalty. 

"I awaited the verdict of death as I looked directly at the judge. "I sentence you to life imprisonment in the Idaho State Penitentiary" was the verdict from the judge's mouth. I felt no relief at the sentence of life. I thought to myself, "wouldn't death have been better?" I took a life, why should I not give up my own? Why did an innocent person, a very nice person whom I had no intent to kill,  have to die?" (p.68)

At the end of the book, as I reflected on the life D.K. had led to that point (2014) and how he had changed to become a man with a strong testimony of Jesus Christ, it seemed to me that the scriptural injunction "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13) applies to Uncle Louis--because through his death, through the impact that that murder had on a young D.K.--he saved D.K., who was not on a good trajectory. D.K. had real hatred in his heart for a few people, and Uncle Louis was not one of them. Had D.K. not been stopped in his tracks and thrown into prison to do some learning, he might have really become a black-hearted murderer. He might have become of murderous intent, and killed several if not many people out of hatred and anger. Committing the murder of Uncle Louis, as horrible as it was, and then serving a prison sentence, changed D.K. for the better. And changed him for good.

( I am putting D.K. because those are the real initials, not K.D. as he uses as a pseudonym.)

Two Things

1. The card from my Grandma to Aunt Eva--definitely have contextualized it. Aunt Eva's only son, Johnny Walker, died of pneumonia on 16 November 1951. He was 41 years old. That was the "same sad parting", losing a son. Which is what Grandpa and Grandma Conrad had gone through on 30 October 1952 when their son Kenny died of nephritis. Johnny Walker was a musician. There is a wealth of information about him in the John H. Walker Family Papers. Johnny only had one son; he had a few stepdaughters, but only recently acquired before his death, a couple of years, so I do not know if they felt super connected to him or not. His only son already died long ago, in 1982, in San Diego. (We lived in San Diego in 1982.) I don't know if he was married or had childen--he died at age 48. Aunt Eva's son Johnny was 6 ft. 6 inches tall, according to some of Aunt Eva's notes.  Going through those papers and pictures, I have really learned to love Aunt Eva and Aunt Lizzie, who I did not know; and gained greater love for Aunt Allie, who I did know. They were amazing sisters to each other! (I should note that Johnny's son was Aunt Eva's only grandchild. Her daughter Alice Wray was childless. I can tell from pictures and writings that Aunt Eva happily included Johnny's step-daughters in her love, while that lasted, but their mother quickly remarried.)

2. We have been running a re-opening experiment at our desk in the library. It was going well until Emmalynn got Covid-19. She is in a production of Music Man. (What the heck? Why are they even doing that?!!!!) Several cast members brought the virus to rehearsals to share with the rest of the cast. And then an asymptomatic Emmalynn brought it to work with her. Fortunately, Emmalynn is very rigourous in her mask-wearing and glove-wearing. But, three other students she worked with have had to self-quarantine and get tested. Adam is the most likely to have caught it simply due to time and proximity based on their work schedules.  So our desk is closed until Monday. Our janitor, Dee, personally did some rigorous cleaning.