Home Alone 2

This is my second week WOW (without wife), and I’m ready for it to end.  It’s a little fun at first because you can sit anywhere you want and watch anything you want on TV and eat anything you want (as long as you cook or buy it), but it gets old fast and it’s officially old now!  Last week was an eventful week, with four megazone conferences (with the requisite car swaps, car inspections and training sessions), a good HT visit with the Darcy family, and the NY Philharmonic in the Park concert. (And cleaning the sofa and washing the bedding, but they didn’t make the list.)

Jay and I had a good sit-down visit with the Darcy family finally, after four months of drop-byes, phone messages and food drops.  We sat and talked to them for about 45 minutes, just getting to know them.  We are very hopeful this kind of visit will be the norm now, but you never know.  After 20 years without the church in their lives, what we hope to do is help build a bridge they can find when they are ready.  He is Roman Catholic, the three kids all went to Catholic schools, and she did mention going to mass during the conversation. Their three ‘children’ are 15, 18 & 21.  

On Thursday, WOW, Jay and I went to the local ‘concert in the park’ put on by the New York Philharmonic at Cunningham Park.  The Philharmonic puts on one park concert in each of the five boroughs each year, and this was Queens’ week. It was a great experience and event!  That’s probably my quota for classical music for the year, but I was sure impressed with how GOOD they were! It reminded me of the MOTAB to see and hear that many instruments in perfect synchronization even during the very fast parts!  They played Dvořák’s "New World Symphony” (all four movements), Bernstein's “West Side Story”, and Gershwin's “An American in Paris”.  After the concert (about 10PM) there was a pretty spectacular fireworks display.  Neither of us expected to be very impressed, but it was as close as I’ve ever been (Maybe with the exception of the summer I was grounded for sneaking too close when I was about 12…thanks Mom!), and it was a pretty amazing 10 minute show! All in all another good memory of NYC!!

Cunningham Park, about an hour before show time. The crowd filled in pretty well later.

On Saturday afternoon we had one of those rain storms where it was 80 degrees and the rain was coming down so hard it bounced 5 or 6 inches in the air.  I don’t remember ever seeing that in Seattle.  Diane I have often talked and speculated why Seattle is so well-known for rain, even though NYC gets 20% more rain on average than Seattle!  Even when you look at the number of clear days per year, Seattle and NYC are not that far apart. Both cities are really beautiful when the skies are blue, though, just in different ways!

Rockaway 'Chapel' (fourth floor)

Sacrament Meeting room

Entrance just outside elevator on the 4th floor

Rockaway district correlation meeting & birthday party

(All these missionaries support one branch! Except Diane...)

With the birth of Kennedy Jo Martin on June 9^th to Courtney and Tyler, and seeing all the Facebook posts from the different families, I’ve been thinking a lot about the different phases of family life and how much each phase causes you to grow and increases your ability to love!  There’s the new marriage phase, the new baby phase, the kindergarten/preschool phase, the grade school phase, the teenage family phase, the young adult family phase, and the grandkids phase.  Wow! (Not ‘without wife’.) Each phase has things you love and things you definitely don’t love, but they all help you grow and mature and become what Heavenly Father wants you to become, as long as you move forward with faith.  I am so thankful for the guidance of the gospel, and so thankful for the refining influence of priesthood callings in my life!!  If not for those 53 years of priesthood assignments and experiences, I don’t know what kind of person I would be.  Probably not a horrible person, but certainly not where I am now—on a mission with my wife (assuming she comes back Friday) learning to love and serve even more! 

Walking home from dropping off a car at body shop. Pretty typical

double-park scenario. The truck was there for 45 minutes that I saw.

No big deal--everyone just flows around it!