"I Am So Grateful. . ."

We have returned home from our trip to Washington D.C. where we picked up Sister Merilee Goates. She was released into our care and keeping a week ago on Thursday morning at the final transfer meeting. I take today's title for this post from Sister Goates.

If there were one phrase I heard repeatedly more than any other from our daughter, it was this one - "I am so grateful for. . ." and then she would cite a specific blessing she had received. The list included her testimony of the truthfulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ as she witnessed the dramatic changes that had come into people's lives whom she had taught.

She referred again and again to members of the Church with whom she had labored to teach their friends, many of whom eventually joined the Church.

I heard her express gratitude for ALL the people who had changed her life for the better, including her mission president, Matthew Riggs, and his wife and their children, the senior missionary couples who had influenced her, her companions, and all the leaders of the Church she had met, including President Brian Swinton of the Washington D.C. Temple. We had a chance to renew our boyhood ties as we concluded an endowment session last Saturday morning. She mentioned several occasions where he had given sound counsel to missionaries and members.

There was a stranger she met on the Metro as we rode back from the city that day, an engaging black lady who was a grandmother and lifelong government employee who was full of light. After their brief encounter, Sister Goates expressed gratitude for putting that wonderful woman in her path that day so she could invite her to join our Church. She was a Southern Baptist, who knew much about the Mormons and had visited the Washington D.C. Temple in times past.

Gratitude was on her lips for a pair of shoes someone had sent to her on her mission, and for a sweater an investigator had given her when she needed warmth during her first bitter cold winter in Virginia. I also heard gratitude expressed for Honeycrisp apples to which she was introduced. She was never without one thereafter, so grateful for the discovery.

The weather was also on the list. We were at Mount Vernon on a November day basking in 70 degrees when she said it. She also spoke of green trees, so dense that in summer it was impossible to navigate because of the canopy of leaves on all those trees. And then her gratitude was for the fall colors of the leaves that were still clinging to their branches. And then it was for barren trees that made it possible to discern our surroundings more clearly.

Her citizenship in the United States also made the list of things for which she is most grateful. Living in that history-rich environment had heightened her awareness of all our blessings as free people, and the incredible price for freedom that has been paid by so many hundreds of thousands for that precious gift. It is hard to visit those stirring memorials on the National Mall and not be moved. The inspired quotations chiseled in granite, marble and other stones remind everyone of the cost to overthrow tyranny. The World War II Memorial honors over 400,000 lost in the global conflict. The price of freedom is always eternal vigilance. May we never forget the sacrifices of so many! The Vietnam War Memorial inscribed with all the names of the dead in that conflict designed to stop the march of communism was yet another reminder.

On a gorgeous fall morning in November, she shed some tears as we stood inside the Lincoln Memorial and I recounted my love for that iconic American leader who presided during a very divisive time in our history. Emotions were also close to the surface as we stood at the base of the statue of Thomas Jefferson at the other end of the Tidal Basin. Reading their words in those sacred precincts is inspiring. Later we watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and soberly pondered how many there must be like that one in our perpetual struggle to remain free. As we visited JFK's grave site overlooking the capital city and stood before the eternal flame burning there, hope of our perpetual freedom in America was rekindled and sunk deep within our hearts. We were there only hours before the commemoration of Kennedy's death fifty years ago. Oh, what memories it conjured up within me!

Iwo Jima Memorial

She admitted her favorite monument was the Iwo Jima statue, since it was not far from her apartment in Arlington and she was able to visit frequently during her stay there. She was so grateful for those sacred times of somber reflection.

Perhaps most impressive was her introduction to us of a young refugee from Egypt, Yousef, a Coptic Christian who was forced to flee to America when the violence against Christians in Egypt seemed to accelerate a couple of years ago. Yousef is on date for baptism into the Church in December. We had a chance to read several scriptures with him, to testify, and to re-commit him to his baptism date. That's really what we spent most of our time doing in D.C. - retracing her steps with people she had met, loved, served and taught.

As we spoke with Yousef he told us how excited he was about the prospects that soon all minority groups, including the Mormons, would be recognized in two months when the new Constitution for Egypt becomes ratified. His desktop background has pictures of Mormon temples that dot the globe now. He loves the thought that someday there will be temple in Cairo. I told him I felt impressed he would be in the vanguard of early pioneer saints in Egypt, all in fulfillment of the prophecy of Elder Bruce R. McConkie in 1980. Yousef, thrilled at the prospect when I explained he would someday be a pioneer for Mormonism in his beloved Egypt, exulted, "Soon everyone on earth will know about the Mormons!" I felt impressed to tell him I believed as part of Elder McConkie's prophecy there would someday be a temple in Cairo, and he would live to see the day come to pass if he remained faithful to his testimony.

As we left his apartment with water bottles he had graciously given to us out of the little he had to give, Sister Goates once again said, "Meeting Yousef has helped me to appreciate so much my citizenship in America. I had always taken so much for granted. He is here to escape death in his own country, where he told me Christians were being slaughtered in the streets. How grateful I am for freedom to worship God!"

Tears silently fell as the aerial view of Washington D.C. faded into the distance on the horizon. Her face now turned West to resume her life again. She will look back with fondness on her missionary experience, but she will also begin a new chapter now with a renewed sense of gratitude, cultivated from her last eighteen months in Virginia. She will never again be the same person she was.

So we are grateful this week before Thanksgiving for all our blessings as a family. As we recount them all, our list like Merilee's grows longer and longer. This year they include being reunited with Merilee, and yesterday we met our first grandson at the airport, Elder Izach Jach, who returned home from the Iowa Des Moines Mission, taller, broader, and a pillar of power after a mission experience filled with happiness and success.

Our cup is running over, and I am so grateful. . .

A Calf's Tail

"So I said to Barack, I knew Abe Lincoln, and you ain't no Abe Lincoln!"

On this Presidents Day weekend, language used by politicians is worthy of comment.

We used to observe Lincoln's birthday on February 12th and then Washington's on the 22nd. Wouldn't you know it was the commercialization of their birthdays that prompted a change? Led by automobile dealers in the late 1980s, their need for a long weekend in which to hold a sale is what eventually produced "Presidents Day." It splits the goalposts between Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays and gives us three days and a shopping weekend mid-winter. Now it's not just those two we cite, but every president.

President Bill Clinton

I'm always fascinated with what presidents say and have said. Perhaps the most famous use of language and how it could be parsed was Bill Clinton's lamentable, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Or when questioned under oath, his "That depends on what your definition of 'is' is." I'm almost certain Bill Clinton said some things that are far more astute than those two statements, but they will forever be attached to him as the most memorable.

Jimmy Carter had a memorable quote along those lines long before Bill Clinton acted upon his thoughts and temptations, however. Carter once gave an interview for Playboy Magazine, in which he famously said, "I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me."

President Jimmy Carter

No matter what their political enemies may say, most U.S. Presidents have an abiding love for this country, its heritage and its values. Carter underscores that idea with this statement: "The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself -- always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity."

Three years into his failed presidency he was on national television giving what later came to be known as his "Crisis in Confidence" or "malaise" speech in which he said, "I promised you a President who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain, and who shares your dreams and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you."

Then along came Ronald Reagan who asked voters a simple question, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" They went for Reagan in a landslide election a year later in 1980.

Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

There's a story attributed to Abraham Lincoln, when he was faced with some thorny issues. He would ask his opponent who thought a question could be settled with a twist of language or a slight abuse of power, "How many legs would a dog have, if we called the dog’s tail, a leg?" Confident of simple math, Lincoln's opponent would respond, "Five,” to which Lincoln would respond, "No, calling a dog’s tail a leg, doesn’t make it a leg.”

The genesis of that story is interesting. Because it has been so widely quoted, most have assumed the use of the dog in the metaphor is accurate, but I found a source this morning that is the most credible I've seen in print. This source contends beginning on page 241, continuing into page 242, that the animal was actually a calf and not a dog.

Here's the source for the quote: Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by distinguished men of his time / collected and edited by Allen Thorndike Rice (1853-1889). New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1909. The University of Michigan has the entire text on-line, in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, an on-line source whose whole text is searchable.

President George Washington

George Washington, hailed as the Father of our Country by his peers, and fully aware that every move he made was being logged into the history books for future generations, observed, "I walk on untrodden ground. There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent."

Knowing there would have been no agreement on the Constitution without leaving the question of slavery untouched and having to pragmatically kick the question down the road for another generation of Americans to deal with, Washington lamented:  "I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery."

President Ronald W. Reagan

Ronald Reagan, recently confirmed once again by American citizens (as he has been for the last twelve years in eight different polls) as the "greatest president in U.S. history," left many memorable quotes in the history books. This is one of my favorites: "Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have."

Reagan recognized, as few ever have, where the horsepower behind America's economic engine comes from: "Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States."

Ronald Reagan was always warning about the fragility of our heritage as free people: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same."

Reagan was the people's president. He had an uncanny ability to tap into their psyche and he routinely used his sense of humor to poke fun at the politicians we love to hate. This is only one of his many gems:  "It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first."

President John Adams

Readers of this page will understand my affection for John Adams, who said, "Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society."

In his defense argument of the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre in 1770, where his clients were acquitted, Adams famously observed, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

To all the bloggers in our enlightened age, Adams would say, "Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write."

Like most of the founders, John Adams had a reverence and a complete awareness of what they were creating in the American experiment. Lest we forget in our day, he reminds us, "I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth."

President George W. Bush

In more recent years as the politicians have sparred, criticized and lampooned (get ready, it's coming again soon in the run up to the 2012 election), it was refreshing to hear George W. Bush stand down: "I just didn't want to get out there anymore; I didn't want to get back into what I call 'the swamp.' And the other reason why is I don't think it's good for the presidency for a former president to be opining about his successor. President Obama's got plenty of critics - and I'm just not gonna be one."

President John F. Kennedy was inspirational in so many ways. As a young man I loved reading his Profiles in Courage compilation. He reminds us, "A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten."

President John F. Kennedy

It was Kennedy who offered the unforgettable line in his first inaugural, "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."

Kennedy is credited with "breaking through" the unspoken barrier of religious affiliation as a litmus test for presidential candidates when he asserted, "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic."

No matter what your political affiliation or persuasion might be, you can rest assured of one thing: Presidents of the United States of America generally do what they believe in their hearts is the best course for America. Recently, Bill O'Reilly, the number one rated cable talker in America these days, interviewed both former President George W. Bush and current President Barack Obama. He came away with the surprising conclusion that each man sincerely believed he was right, even though their policies could not be more diametrically opposed.

O'Reilly observed:

"But what happens when a person's conviction is wrong? There is no question that Saddam Hussein could have been destroyed by other means. Surely the world is a better place without him, but would most Americans support the Iraq invasion if we could do it all over? I don't think so. In hindsight, the Iraq situation should have been handled by the Air Force and Navy. Saddam's regime could have been strangled without so much American blood.

President Barack Obama

"Things are a bit murkier on the economic front. Since the Obama administration has been in power, the feds have spent an astounding seven trillion dollars. This has left the United States vulnerable in the world marketplace because we need to borrow so much money from nations like China. The massive $14 trillion debt has now become as big a threat as the economic meltdown of three years ago. No matter how you frame the issue, federal spending must be cut back, and Mr. Obama has to know this. But, like Mr. Bush, the president does not regret his controversial policies."

So let's remember the calf's tail when it comes to measuring "truthiness" from politicians on this Presidents Day honoring not just Lincoln and Washington. Just because Bush or Obama calls a calf's tail a leg, doesn't make it a leg after all.

Sometimes the statements politicians write onto the parchment of time must age a bit to be fully understood and appreciated. We celebrated the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan recently. During his presidency he was anything but beloved. People were scared to death about this "cowboy" who had his finger on the trigger of nuclear weapons and didn't seem shy about pulling it as he took on the "Evil Empire." But the one thing he had going for him was his authenticity. He connected with people, even Mikhail Gorbachev eventually. We had to have a bit of perspective as Americans before we embraced Reagan and fully credited him with the end of the Cold War.

Only time and experience will tell the whole "tale" with accuracy.

In the meantime, let us give a wide berth to political "truth" in the here and now and wait upon history to make its judgments someday.

The Death of Innocence

Dealey Plaza

Dallas, Texas

Only those over the age of fifty will qualify for this post.  The question of the day is, "Where were you when Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas?"  Today is the 46th anniversary of that event, but its effects live on.

I was attending East High School.  It was my friend Doug's birthday.  The school was still reeling from its mourning of the deaths of two classmates, having just buried two seniors who were killed by a drunk driver earlier that month.  Lin Hewlett and Flemming Christensen's lives were senselessly ended only a month before on October 21st.  They were hardly in their graves before the tragic news of President Kennedy stunned the world, another promising life snuffed out inexplicably. 

For students at East High in 1963, it was another staggering body blow.

On November 22, 1963, a small group of us were huddled in the cafeteria of the school, passing around homemade cupcakes with candles, and the news reached our table.  Despite our celebratory mood, there was instantaneous soberness, shock and disbelief.  Someone had shot and killed the President of the United States?  Unthinkable!  Not in 1963!  Those kinds of acts were reserved for some dark chapter in history, like back in the day when Lincoln was shot and killed at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C.  But not now!

If no one knew Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather before that day, they certainly knew them thereafter.  I will never forget watching and re-watching Cronkite's report on black-and-white CBS TV News, choked with emotion as he removed his black horn-rimmed glasses and wiped away his tears as he made the somber pronouncement, "The President is dead."  It was unthinkable.  It was the era of the Beatles and Beach Boys when the decade began, but the Sixties would descend into a living hell of war protesting, racial upheaval and widespread psychadelic drug abuse.

The world mourned his passing for days, even years afterward.  Some spoke of it as the "end of Camelot."  There is never a year that passes but what articles are written (here's one that appeared today), specials are put together for TV, and we collectively recall that fateful day.  We never got to hear Lee Harvey Oswald testify in open court because he was himself assassinated by Jack Ruby, a nickel-and-dime hoodlum with Mafia ties who owned a nightclub in Dallas.  Ruby stood trial, was convicted, and died of lung cancer in prision while awaiting appeal.

No one who was alive in 1963 can seem to forget where they were and what they were doing on that infamous day.  We all recall it in complete detail.  It's as if time stood still.  Why?  I believe it is because for many of us it represented what I titled "the death of innocence." 

Evil was suddenly possible.  There were no barriers left.  Civility was dealt a severe blow.  Progress being made toward hope for a better tomorrow was suddenly and instantly suspended for a season.  We collectively pondered the question, "If a man can shoot and kill a President, is anything out of bounds?"

Of course, since then conspiracy theories have abounded.  Did Oswald act alone?  Was there a second or third shooter from the grassy knoll or a manhole cover?  Did the Warren Commission's finding that the single bullet theory that simultaneously maimed Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Governor John Connally in the front seat really have merit?  The debates wore on and on for years, and still persist.

Was it Cuba-backed sympathizers who killed him?  Was it a Mafia-inspired plot because of the Kennedy's pursuit of Costa Nostra crime families?  Was it Communist-inspired retaliation for the Kennedy blockade of Cuba when the U.S.S.R.'s long-range missles were discovered on Cuban soil?  There was no end to the speculation in those days.

While on business in Dallas a few years ago, I walked from my hotel down to Dealey Plaza and took my self-guided tour of the Sixth Floor Book Depository Museum.  It was a sobering reality to stand on the very spot where the unforgettable events of my youth had transpired.  I've never forgotten the feelings. 

I sifted through all the various theories about his assassination as I walked from room to room.  Then I stood at the window where Oswald fired three bullets (the casings were found in the nest after he fled), apparently one of which was the fatal shot if the Warren Commission is to be believed. 

They called it "the shooter's nest."  It was chilling to consider what thoughts must have been running through Oswald's mind that morning as I stood where he had crouched at an open window overlooking Dealey Plaza when the motorcade passed below.  Kennedy, standing and waving to an adoring crowd in an open Lincoln convertible was certainly an inviting target. 

But as I stood there that morning, as a former expert marksman myself (with a semi-automatic M-16, mind you), I considered that it would have had to be one heck of a shot, especially with having to cock, load and re-acquire my target three times within a matter of seconds at a target that was speeding in the opposite direction after the first shot rang out.  It was a bolt-action rifle with a scope that Oswald used, and a kill shot certainly could have been possible in the hands of someone skilled in its use, but I just thought over and over again as I stood there, "That was one heck of a shot (or two or three) from here." 

Like many Americans I read many, many books about the assassination in the years that followed, trying to understand and make sense of an irrational act of violence.  I even read the whole Warren Commission report.  Senator Arlen Specter (now D-PA, formerly R-PA) was the author of the single-bullet theory while he served on the Warren Commission. 

And I always thought to myself back then, "You'd have to believe pigs can fly to believe that theory."  But what do I know?  After all these years no one has ever offered a credible counter-theory that has seemingly stood up as well as Specter's, though it has certainly been attacked as uncredible by experts.  And that single bullet, the one they found on Kennedy's stretcher in the aftermath at Parkland Memorial Hospital, is not the one that accounted for the fatal head shot.  

I've forgotten most of what I read now.  I would have to say for myself that's it's still an open question as to the who, the why, the how about Kennedy's death. 

As a family, we still wonder about the premature passing of Lin and Flemming too.  In subsequent years there have been many other family members whose mortal lives have likewise ended too soon by our reckoning, and we search in vain for answers here and now.

But I do know this for sure -- for me and many others in my baby-boomer generation this day in history represents the loss of innocence.  After that, anything was possible.

When Lin and Fleming were laid to rest, President S. Dilworth Young of the First Council of the Seventy penned these lines while sitting on the stand at Flemming's funeral in the Douglas Ward:

I sit and ask myself:
These boys, these
Fair-haired
Boys,
Their hopes and
Dreams,
Once bright,
Now moving in
Eternal
Light.

We do not
See
That Light;
We know 'tis
There, but
How, or
Where, we
Cannot know
Until that
Blessed day
When
We, the veil
Worn thin
Will see
Them
Waiting patiently
Within.

Then what
Will be our
Joy?
No pain!  No
Fear!
But more!
We shall then
Know
The reason
Why.

What matter how
They
Go.  If in Thy sight
They stand before
Thee RIGHT,
Lord,
Stand there
Right.

If you're over fifty years old, your comments and memories are welcome here. . .