The Flow of Time

We have arrived at the end of May, a variable month that brought us the last struggles of winter, days of perfect spring weather, and a taste of the summer to come. Last week was the last week of school. We are done until the end of August, which seems like a long way off, but will come too soon. Today is Memorial Day, so it seems that summer has begun, although the official beginning is weeks away at the solstice on June 20th.

Late May morning.

May ended with some fine weather, not hot like it was last week, but just right for the final days of one of the prettiest months of the year. But winter also had to try one more time to crush us before the month was out. The forecasters predicted rain several times during the week and were wrong every time. We needed the rain. We’d reached the point where I was watering the flowerbeds and garden by hand. The rain barrel down at the barn went dry and I had to carry water down to the chickens. The forecasters also said that a cold front would be moving in on Friday and temperatures would drop. They predicted the nighttime low on Saturday would be 38°. I always subtract another ten degrees, this being cold Gold, which would have meant a freeze for us, which would have been devastating. When I first saw their dire predictions on Wednesday, I began to pray. I knew I would be out of town when it hit, but that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Anything already out in the garden could not be protected. The orchard, with its thousands of tiny tender apples would suffer catastrophic damage. Thankfully, it did not freeze. The temperature fell, but with the cold came rain and that saved us. I think we are done with the cold now, but how many times have I said that lately? Now we come to June, by far the loveliest month of the year in my opinion. The garden tends toward glory in June. The days are long and temperate. The world is green and vigorous. This is the month of poppies and cornflowers, irises and peonies. We’ll eat lettuce and spinach, asparagus and strawberries from the garden. I love June.

On a morning walk.

White lilacs by the front proch.

Little green apples.

On Tuesday Stacey and I celebrated our 37th anniversary. It hardly seems possible that we’ve been married that long, although it seems at times, when I look back at photographs and count the intervening years, that it might be possible after all. We didn’t do much in the way of celebration, we usually don’t. We sat after dinner and told the story of our meeting, courtship, and marriage to Miriam and Hannah. They’d heard it many times before and knew most of it by heart, but they listened to it one more time.

Clockwise: A date in 1981, our engagement picture, newlyweds, my family at the wedding, Stacey's family.

The whole gang at the post wedding dinner.

Our wedding cake.

Stacey and I first met at church in Sylmar, California, in the summer of 1980. I’d been home from my mission for six months. Stacey had moved to Sylmar to work and to help take care of her brother Bill and sister-in-law Lark’s family. They had four young boys and a pretty hectic lifestyle. Although I saw her at church, we didn’t really speak to each other until later in 1981 when we were both at a Young Adult activity, painting the Bishop’s Storehouse. I was awkward and shy. Luckily, she was not. She asked me if I liked the musical Camelot. I said I did. She said would I like to go to a performance of it at the Pantages Theater with her. I said I would. That’s how it started. We did a lot of things together after that, although many of them don’t qualify as “dates” by any romantic definition. I spent a lot of time with her at her brother’s house. She spent time with my family at my parent’s house. After a time, she told me she wanted to serve a mission. I thought that was a great idea. She didn’t know it (maybe she did), but I’d always planned to marry a returned missionary. She went to Italy in June of 1982. I wrote a lot of letters to her. When she got home in December 1983, she thought I’d give her a ring for Christmas. Remember that I said I was awkward and shy? Maybe stupid is a better word, at least in the area of romance. I didn’t give her a ring. A few weeks later she gave me the boot (the famous Get Out of the Car Episode that my children all know well). I was miserable. Then she invited me to go to the park with her one afternoon to talk. We came to an understanding. Our relationship resumed. I didn’t propose to her in any sort of spectacular way. It wasn’t really a proposal at all. She wanted to help me buy a truck. We went to a dealer to look at vehicles. We found one we liked and in the course of discussing credit with the salesman, (mine was nonexistent, but Stacey’s was good), he asked us if we were getting married. I said yes. Stacey looked startled. We didn’t buy the truck. Once we’d made the decision, we decided to move right ahead. We looked at the calendar and saw that Memorial Day was a few weeks away. We both had that long weekend off from work. We announced to our families that we would be married on Friday the 25th of May. Our wedding was not fancy. We were married in the Los Angeles Temple. We didn’t have a fancy reception, instead we had a family dinner. Stacey’s dad cooked a feast. We gathered at her brother Bill’s house. After dinner, Stacey and I drove up to a house in Blue Jay, up in mountains near Lake Arrowhead. We were there for the weekend. Monday we came home. Tuesday we went back to work. We lived in a tiny apartment on Foothill Blvd. The next weekend we had an open house at my parent’s with wedding cake and gifts. That’s how it began. Now 37 years, eight children, and seven grandchildren later, it almost seems more like a story I wrote than reality. I look at the photographs and marvel at how young we were. How is it possible that the time has flown by so quickly?

On Thursday the 27th, my father celebrated his 91st birthday, another seeming impossibility. I have always struggled with coming to grips with the passage of time. Having loved and studied history most of my life, I often crunch decades and even centuries in my reckoning. My familiarity with past eras and ages makes them seem not so distant at times, just a few years before the decades of my life and memory. I’ve never been satisfied with the way time moves. I want it to slow down or speed up at my pleasure. The good times seem to pass too quickly and the not so good drag by. Once in college while talking to my teacher at Institute about the nature of time, he said something that I’ve always remembered. He said that, understanding God’s great Plan of Happiness and how we fit into it, we realize that we are creatures of eternity. We came from eternity when we lived with God before our birth and we return to eternity when we go back to Him. Time does not exist in eternity. Our experience with living in Time is not long and, being eternal in our nature, we often feel dissatisfied with it. We resent its inexorable pace. We want to control it and we can’t. That’s how I have always felt and I feel it more keenly as I grow older and watch my parents and my children and my grandchildren grow older.

My father and brother-in-law celebrating their birthdays.

And speaking of grandchildren, Stacey and I just returned from a quick trip to Utah. We left on Thursday afternoon, flying out of Buffalo on a late flight. We arrived in Salt Lake City at 1:30 A.M. Geoffrey picked us up. We went straight to his house and to bed. We spent the next three days with them and we had a great time. Josiah drove down from BYU-Idaho on Friday and joined the fun. Over those days we had great food (as always), some of it homemade and some of it not. Geoffrey treated us on Friday evening to dinner at a very good Japanese restaurant. We also had In-N-Out Burger while we were there. We went to a great ice cream parlor called Brook’s Founding Flavors. We got to visit with my cousin Rick and his wife Melony. The key event that we went there for was the baptism of our granddaughter Gwen. That took place on Saturday morning, a very special event. That afternoon, Geoffrey and Joni had lunch for everyone at their house, a taco bar. On Sunday we went to church with them. That afternoon our niece Kale and her husband Roman and their children came over for dinner. Josiah left to go back up to school that evening. This morning early, Geoffrey drove us to the airport. Stacey and I spent all day today on planes or in airports. We arrived home just a while ago. It was a quick, but a great trip. We will see Geoffrey and his family again soon in July when they come here to visit us. I can hardly wait.

Out for Japanese food.

Ice cream at Brook's.

Geoffrey and Gwen at the baptism.

All the family after the baptism.

Roman and Kale and their children.

As soon as I got home this evening, I did an inspection of the gardens and the orchard. There was a report that there might have been a frost last night, but I saw no damage here. Miriam and Hannah did a great job taking care of things while we were gone. So now I’m home. As I wandered the property I saw dozens of things that need to be done and I’m making a list in my head as I type this. I can hardly wait to get to it tomorrow, but tonight I feel a bit wrung out. Traveling does that to me. And reflecting on my growing and aging family – Geoffrey and Joni’s children, so much bigger than they were the last time I saw them, my father’s 91st birthday, Stacey and my 37th anniversary – has made me feel more keenly than ever the flow of time that carries us on.

Home again.

Dan