The forest is alive with the sound of birds!

We heard eleven different types of birds singing this morning during our 1.4 mile hike.  We were in the Tonto National Forest—just a few blocks from our cabin.  

These are the birds that sang to us on our delightful hike….

We were surrounded by music.  This is one of the many reasons why we especially enjoy a walk in the forest in the hour just after sunrise.  The sweet birds have just awakened, and are singing to each other and calling to alert each other of danger.  They sing as they gather food, court, make nests, and feed their babies.  

At this early hour, the birds seem to be singing for the whole world.  But as we walk through the forest, and they joyfully serenade us, we’re sure that the birds are singing just for us.

Three generations together in the Arizona mountains

Ryan and Rachelle and our grandchildren, Ida, Alden, and Wilder, (and Alden’s dog, Lilly) started at the Olympic Peninsula in the Pacific Northwest and traveled by car, bus, ferry boat, airplane, train, a rental car, and on foot to visit us at our cabin in Pine, Arizona.  It took them over fourteen hours…and they did all this just to see us.  Thank you.  This means a lot to us.

We didn’t make any real plans for the visit….we just wanted to spend time together, talk, laugh, tell stories, and relax.  This was their first time at our home in Arizona.  And our first time to have a long visit, days on end, to just hang out with these lovely grandchildren.

Our time together was amazing! 

Just as the sun was setting we saw our family walking from their airbnb to our cabin….on the final leg of their long journey to see us.

The first morning together, Ida and I got to fix my famous breakfast—Grandchildren Chocolate Chip Pancakes and  scrambled eggs with LOTS of cheese.  She is an excellent cook, and much more than a Grandma’s helper…she ended making ALL of the pancakes!

Then  Grandpa got to work building model cars with Alden and Wilder.  Cars have always been a major interest and love of Wilder, Alden and Grandpa.  In fact, Grandpa started teaching them how to build cars a few years ago via FaceTime.  But this was a special treat, because they got to sit down together and discuss all their favorite cars as they built their model cars together.  

It was a joy to watch my car lovers working on their cars together.

And I got to bring out all my jewelry supplies, because Ida loves to create beautiful things and do crafts as much as I do.  So Ida and I went to work making jewelry.

Ida’s first necklace….it’s a piece of art!

It was a hot day, but everyone wanted to see the Anasazi ruins on the top of a BIG hill in Pine.  

Grandpa is almost to the top of the hill.

It seems as if nobody knows about this hidden unmarked trail to the ruins.  We’ve never seen anyone else on the trail or at the ruins.  And as you can see, it is a treasure to have this ancient Anasazi home right in our backyard.

No self respecting boys could resist seeing which of them could leap the furthest.  

The boys were not jumping off the top of the ruins…it is a bench that was recently made out of the same type of stones as the ruins.  

We had five evenings together, hence five dinners.  Rachelle very sweetly assumed that she would be making ALL the dinners.  I really appreciated this, but I convinced her that we should share the meal preparation.  So she planned three of our dinners and brought a whole suitcase full of food from her home and garden on the airplane!

Here she is making one of her dinners….with the help of Alden and Wilder who peeled the potatoes.  

It turned out that it was much more fun to use the knives they carried on their belts than a potato peeler.  It appears that a knife is not as efficient, and the peeled potatoes were half size.  So they had to go back out and peel (with a potato peeler) the remainder of the five-pound bag of potatoes.  But they didn’t complain and seemed to have lots of fun.

We celebrated Ida, Wilder, and Alden’s birthdays, because we are never together on their actual birthdays.  They all brought birthday presents for me and Father’s Day presents for Grandpa.

Ida crocheted me a beautiful flower doily in my very favorite colors!

Wilder created a lovely blue and white bird for my birthday.  How did he know that Grandpa and I love birds?

And Alden built Grandpa and me very unique sailboats.  We had admired the miniature boats that he makes, and he had asked us a few months ago what kind of boats we liked best.  Alden plans on going into the Coast Guard, so he can learn more about the sea and gain boating skills. He plans on being a commercial fisherman.  

Rachelle gave each of us a jar of the  magical cream that she makes with herbs that she collects.  It seems to work for about everything…our old dried skin and scalp, aches, and pains.  And we found that it also quells the itch of bug bites!

She also gave us each two tubes of her homemade chapstick.  She gave us some last year, and we were hoping to get some more, since we had used it all up.  

Thank you Rachelle, Ryan, Ida, Alden, and Wilder for the handmade gifts.  They are all very special to us!

One morning we all went on a hike that wound through the pine forests to the edge of the Mogollon Rim.  It was lovely.  We found several shell fossils.

Rachelle had packed us all a picnic lunch.  It was the first time we had ever had a picnic in the meadows on the Rim—2,000 feet above our cabin in Pine! 

As you can see, there were clouds gathering on the Rim while we were hiking.  Rachelle sent the boys outside to peel more potatoes and Ryan out to barbecue hamburgers in the sunshine when we got home….

But before they came in look what happened….thunder, lightning, rain, and hail the size of small ice cubes!

Looks like our Pacific Northwest family brought us some rain—or rather, our first monsoon storm.  Grandpa and Ryan had to dry off, but the boys headed out to enjoy the storm.  Everyone had a blast!

Another morning, I had just started making breakfast when everyone came over.  Ida made us a wonderful egg, bacon, potato, and cheese, omelette.  

The model cars are progressing…..

Ida made a beautiful bracelet….

And we went to a hike just a few blocks from our cabin—the Pine-Strawberry Trail.  Here is Wilder next to the Century plant that had stabbed his knee a few days earlier.  Rachelle had made him a raw potato poultice to decrease the swelling and pain.  

We now call this trial the Wilder Century Plant Stabber Trail.

Rachelle and Ida made Pizza with crust that Rachelle had made at their home and transported to Arizona on the airplane.  It was the best pizza that we have ever eaten!

Our last day, everyone wanted to go 4-wheel driving.  Alden and Wilder had asked if we had any rough roads that we could take them on in our Desert Rat (our TRD Off-Road 4Runner).  So all seven of us (and even Lilly) piled into the Desert Rat and headed up to the top of Hardscabble-Mesa Road.  

And we found them a great road…so rough that we almost had to turn around, but Grandpa went on, much to the delight of Wilder and Alden.  We were having too much fun!

Then Rachelle spotted a small meadow of mullein.  She uses this plant to make a tea that cures the onset of any croupy type illness.  They even used it in 2020 for covid like symptoms near the start of the pandemic.  Rachelle normally buys mullein in the PNW for $40/pound.  She was super excited to see endless mullein plants growing wild!

So she (and everyone else) jumped out to gather this special medicinal plant that grows abundantly in burn areas in Arizona.  

Unfortunately, this wonderful visit was coming to an end.  So all our grandchildren finished working on their cars and jewelry projects.  Rachelle made a necklace too.  By this time Ida was able to help her mother with the clasp. 

Ida played us a beautiful song that she had composed.  She is taking violin lessons, but had not played a piano.

 

 

All of our grandchildren and Ryan too spent some time playing Grandpa’s new Father’s Day piano.  It was so nice to hear beautiful music in our cabin, and see them all having fun.

Ryan decided on our final evening that before dinner and cookies and ice cream that all the kids (and he too) needed to get some exercise.  He went out on the road in front of our cabin and made a pinecone obstacle course.  And off they went to have some fun with an amazed elk looking on!

The boys with their cars and all their old (and young man) humor.  By this time in the visit Alden and Wilder were teasing Grandpa as much as he was joking with them. 

The girls with their necklaces and lots of love….

Very early this morning Ryan, Rachelle, Ida, Alden, and Wilder gave us hugs and kisses.  As they drove off our grandchildren waved out the open car windows until they turned the corner and were out of sight.  We waved back as tears streamed down our cheeks.  

We need to plan another time to see these dear grandchildren and Ryan and Rachelle. Then maybe the parting would not be so difficult.  But we expect that it would be just as hard to say goodbye.

We love this dear family so very much.  

My father's day

 I am overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed with the love I have for my and our children and the love and gratitude I have always had for my own father, who taught me so much and who was my role model.

My grandfather was an abusive alcoholic. My father started sleeping in his mother's room at age 14 to protect her from him.

He had two uncles that stepped up and gave him a father. One of them was never married and never had kids. I met him frequently during the 1950s, and found him to be a nice, gentle man. My father worked on his farm during his adolescence....sunup to sundown.

In the 1950s, my father would come to school every year during my elementary school years and spend a day with me. No other father, or mother, did that. I loved it!   The other children fawned all over him.

My dad became a rather famous man in the field of statistics. Devoted to his wife despite a childhood watching his mother being abused and despite not having his own father be a role model for him. But the abuse he witnessed never defined him for me. He was a gentle, loving man.  What defined him were the small things...like cleaning the church before services, working on a cabin together, and listening to him preach (always about love, not damnation).

He was my role model. So I too went to my children's school once a year to spend the day with them.

I miss him every day.

I love you Dad. I want you to know that Vicky, my wife, and my sister were there in the room when Mom died. She didn't die alone. Looking down from heaven, I know nothing would have made you happier about your life.

Here is more on him, on a trip Vicky and I took 10 years ago to my childhood hometown, where I had such sweet memories of my parents. 

https://livinginthebedofapickup.blogspot.com/2013/10/how-green-was-my-valley.html

15-20 years ago I went out to eat lunch with my mother and father, at our favorite Mexican restaurant.   With no one to need our table, we sat for 2 hours, and all I did was tell them about all of the wonderful memories I had of them and my childhood.

Then, about 12 years ago, with Vicky, I did the same thing.  They weren't bored hearing it all twice.  :)

In his last years he loved assembling his Snow Village for Christmas.  In the fall I mentioned it, and he said that he wasn't going to be doing that any longer because it was too hard and dangerous for him to go up to the attic where they were stored.

I said "screw that!"  "I'm coming out for Thanksgiving so I'll get your Snow Village for you."

So I did, for one or two years until they had to go into an Assisted Living home.

They sent me a thank you note.  So, I responded.  Here is my response.

They kept the note.  We found it when going through their things 7 years later after both had died.

I cannot tell you how much peace it gives me to have thanked my parents, and for them to know about my gratitude toward them for the quality of my life.

One other memorable thing I did with my father during my childhood in the 1950s was that at least once a week we went to a western movie together.  He loved westerns, so did I, and I still do.  I remember many of them we went to.

One stands out in particular:  3:10 to Yuma (the original, 1957, not the dreadful remake).

On this particular evening, for I believe the only time, my sister came with us.  We got down the street and I asked my dad to let me out.  I felt bad about mom being home alone, so started walking home.  He convinced me that she was fine with this.  

That night, lying in bed, I heard my dad relay the story.  It's the old advice about parenting:  Let your children overhear you saying good things about them.  I felt so proud of what I had done.

One time my dad and I went to see The Alamo (1960).  After the film, as we were walking back to the car, I was raving about what a good movie it was.  My father was very quiet.  The next night he took me to Mein Kampf.   I remember it well.  He said: "I want you to know what war is REALLY like."  And I learned.  Years later I applied to be a Conscientious Objector in Vietnam and, in my interview with my draft board, I mentioned this experience. 

Bruce Springsteen (yes!  That Bruce Springsteen; how does one mention him in a father's day blog post?)  stated once that the secret to good parenting is to simply "be in the same room."  

My father made consistent great efforts for me to be "in the same room" with him. 

 ...wish I was in the same room with him right now, on Father's Day.  Talking with him and my mother who was also in the "same room" with me.  For example, I spent 9 months with nobody except her when I was in her womb.  We also played piano recitals together:

And a big part of our family life was oriented around our church.  My mother was my children's choir director, for example.   

I remember taking this photo below.  It was shortly before we moved to Colorado from Oklahoma, and I wanted a picture of my family in front of the church building where we attended for several years.  It was a 7th Day Adventist Church building that we rented from them for Sunday services.  My father was the pastor.  He preached love, Jesus' love, not any of that damnation crap.  His favorite part of the Bible was the parable of the Prodigal son. He used it so frequently in his sermons that it became a fun family joke.  Vicky and I asked him to find a way to use that parable in our wedding ceremony because we all loved the sweet parable. 

 

 ________

My father's day:

It started a couple of weeks ago.  Vicky wanted to get me a piano.  I had an electronic keyboard, but it did not produce a sound that I liked....in fact not even close.

So she found one on something called OfferUp.   They couldn't even get an offer on it.  So, we bought it for nothing...they were just happy to get it out of the house.

Can you imagine?  A 75-year-old nice looking piano, and nobody even wants it?

Well!!!!!  We did.

But we had to move it 15 miles, from Payson to Pine. So, we called the man who has put several finishes on our logs to keep them a golden brown.  So many cabins have turned black from the sun, but we are preserving ours---with his help.  We know him well--a really nice guy, in addition to being a young man who has established a successful business.

He said "sure."  And asked how heavy it was, etc.  I told him it was a small one--a spinet.  

Well, it was anything but light.  It was heavy with wood.  But he and his friend Thomas got it here, cheerfully.  

Come to find out---he's a maestro.  He can play the piano wonderfully, and all by ear.  Some people just have talents that the rest of us don't have.  He has come back since and played and played for us.  Somebody who doesn't get turned off by older people.   He will be back to play some more. 

We are wanting to introduce him to our granddaughter Marina.  He doesn't realize that this is the ultimate compliment.

Then I bought music. Several books of music.  All of them are called "Fake books," which means they don't really have the music to songs in them.  Instead, they have the melody (one finger) and the name of the chord.  You are to supply the rest.  That's the only type of music I have played in 50+ years.

Here I am playing a song for Emily for Father's day.  It is one of two songs I used to sing to her as a bedtime lullaby.  Sang it for years.  

And, ironically, it is from the film The Alamo.  How coincidental is THAT?

I love being a husband, a father, a grandfather, a brother, and an uncle.  These people give my life meaning.

Raising my children, like it was for Vicky, made me soar, every minute of it.  I am so grateful to them for bringing this love into my heart, which has done nothing but grow over the years.  The days both Emily and Jules left for college I cried and cried...knowing my time with them in the home was over.  It happens. That's just life, I guess.

Vicky is making Father's Day, which is tomorrow, special for me.  This morning we danced on the front porch....mostly to our old favorites.  I'll show one of them, one that reflects our life together.  It's called "Today" by the New Christie Minstrels.  A song from the early 60s. The lyrics are absolutely beautiful.

 

Tonight she is fixing me fondue.  Yum.

Tomorrow we are taking a rest day.  And she is making me her nachos, which are the best nachos on the face of the planet.  I got to choose the meal.  Then I'll have cherry pie and ice cream.  Can't wait!  

p.s. There is also a stack of gifts in the house that I think belong to me.....:) 

I picked out tonight's movie.  Vicky snuck in and took a photo of me looking at our DVDs (yes, we don't stream movies...instead we have a collection of a few thousand films that are digitalized or on DVDs.  Come the revolution, we'll be watching movies and YOU WON'T BE!)

Do you think it's nice to take a photo of me on father's day that emphasizes my bald spot?  Can't wait for next Mother's Day to get her back.  

The best news for the entire weekend is that I was able to get up off of the floor all by myself, without her help!

I picked one I went to with my father., a western of course.  Two Rode Together, with Jimmy Stewart, and directed by John Ford.  It's an underrated John Ford film, showing settlers trying to be reunited with their wives and children who had been taken by the Comanche Indians years before.  The "captives" didn't go back quietly---most wanted to stay with their tribe.  And instead of the kinds of films that show settlers as being God-like and Indians being cruel and subhuman, this film shows the lack of humanity that can be on both sides.  It's a similar theme to the best western film ever made:  John Ford/John Wayne's The Searchers.  

Here is a blog I wrote about The Searchers.  The blog post is long.  Toward the end I relay a story about a distant grandmother of mine, born in 1757 who was taken by the Delaware Indians for 7 years, until the settlers caught up to the tribe.  When her mother went to claim her, she couldn't recognize any of the girls.  Then my distant grandmother started singing a song that her mother had sung to her years earlier and, because of this, was reunited with her family.  Without this singing of the song, I would not be here today. 

In Two Rode Together, something eerily similar happened, except it was a music box. 

Oh Dear Deer:

One part of my father's day weekend that we will always remember is the baby Elk that Vicky adopted.  

Elk and Deer mommas often stash their babies during the day when they go foraging for food.  A little baby Elk was in our front yard day before yesterday. We've had this before.

It was beastly hot, and the little guy, trained by evolution, wouldn't move even a few inches to get into some shade.

We got worried when the little guy was still there yesterday, all day. 

We both knew that you can't fool mother nature, but Vicky got concerned.  Two days in the beastly hot sun. No water.  

So, being the mother that she is, Vicky took action.  

 

 

She called every animal protection/control/9-11/etc. that she could think of.  They all told her everything was as it should be.  One said that if they came out, it would be to shoot the baby because they had no options for caring for it, so we didn't follow through on that one.

Finally, Vicky took it some water. 

 

 

For some reason, known only to God, I get to be married to this woman.

 

Sunday, Father's Day: 

Our baby is gone.  We're so happy.  Did the water help?  Didn't seem to hurt.  We'll never know.  But I do know one thing even better than I have already known it:  My Vicky's heart.  

 

Started off with breakfast in bed with, my favorite, REAL bacon fried crisp:

 

 

Then Emily called and we had, as usual, a terrific conversation.  Got to tell her I loved her.  (She said the same thing!!)

 

Then I opened my first gift.  It was very special.  It was a music book of Eva Cassidy's songs.  Eva Cassidy is someone we ran across several years ago.  She has perhaps the best female singing voice ever.  She never got famous--just sang in the Washington D.C. area.  She died in 1998 from cancer at age 33.  That's just wrong.

 

Well, her father put together this book as a tribute to her.  Vicky thought that it would be an ideal time to give it to me because it was her father, and it was father's day.  There is a lot of love in that book.  I will be learning the songs.

 

 

Then I spent time doing something I love, which is making separate dance videos after we have had a dance.  Takes me a few hours.  And now, to add to that, going through my music books and playing songs on my new Father’s Day piano that I never thought I could play.  What a day.

 

In the process of working on the dance videos Vicky brought me out my cherry pie that I'll have for desert tonight, so I could drool over it. (I did). 

 

 

Got texts from Stella and Marina:

 

 

Then, we ate.  Here it is.  Mine's the big one.  We ate about 1/3 of it which means........Another meal!!

Then I opened more gifts.  I got several very old items from Carson, Iowa, where my father grew up and where I spent lots of time in the 1950s and 1960s.  Postcards of the schools, a matchbook cover, etc.  I have a collection of Carson items, and will add these to my collection.

It is so fascinating, and sad, to see evidence of how this small town of Carson was a thriving community early in the 20th century, but now it is really nothing.  Almost no businesses are left, churches have closed, etc.  That's just life, too, I guess.  

I also got a plaque of Emily's award for her teaching that we will hang on our wall in Leisure World.  It's called the proud papa award.

 

 

Also got cards.  This one was from Jules.  It's sweet.  It's like something you would see in the 1950s, along Route 66, which he knew I'd like.

 

 

FINALLY.....

 

 desert! 

 

Vicky brought out two pieces of cherry pie with ice cream.  Since it was father's day, I dug into both of them.  

 

 

But, OK, just a joke......I didn't eat hers.  Instead, I just had a second piece.

What a day.  A day that makes you focus on how good life is.

 

Thanks to my Vicky who worked so hard to make it nice for me...as she always does. 

p.s.  after I was asleep this message from Candice came in.  (we go to bed very early).  Candice and I are very close.  

addendum:

Two days later I got cards from Emily, and from Soren/Sebastian.  

How great are these, huh?  I love my family so much.