123,456 miles!

Sunday evening, after we had returned from church and ate our dinner, Claudia and I went for a ride in our old 1998 Ford Windstar minivan. We took the back roads through Bountiful and Centerville to Farmington and drove by the house where Chris and Camilla lived for a while when they were house sitting for a missionary couple. We also drove by the historic rock home on the corner of 100 East and 500 North where my grandmother used to live after she married Harry Pledger. And by the old rock church where the first Primary was organized.

Less than a mile later, while still in Farmington, we pulled over to the side of the street we were on and took this picture of our odometer showing that our car had traveled 123,456 miles.

Not quite as far as the 222,222 miles Talmage's Saturn has traveled, but just as classy.

Meghan Reporting

Hello Cleverly Family! This is Meghan writing. Let me fill you in on some things that have been happening lately. Well if you haven't heard my dad (Michael) has been shaking, thirsty, and unexplained sudden weight loss. They thought that he might have diabetes but we have determined that he doesn't. He went in 2 days at LDS Hospital. He had to drink radioactive iodine. It has been discovered that he has Graves Disease as well as a hyper active thyroid.

And today we got a call saying that while Jacob was in gym playing fishy fishy cross the sea he went from standing up to on the ground. We think that he slipped because he doesn't have good tread on his shoes. He hit his head really hard. My mom and I were in Bountiful about to take the twins to the dentist for the first time. A really nice neighbor picked Jacob up from school and was going to take him down to Bountiful where my mom would then take him to the doctor. So, Grandpa Dean had to talk to the people at the dentist, so he, my mom, the twins, and I were there. Then my mom left to go take Jacob to the doctor. At first he couldn't remember his name but then he did. But didn't remember anything that happened. So after the dentist Grandpa Dean took us to his  house. My mom and Jacob had to go to Primary Children's Medical Hospital. We just got a call from my mom saying that they were in the E.R. there and Jacob was going to have a Cat Scan. Poor Jacob. We are waiting for more details.

Thanks for everyone's help!!!! What an exciting time!
~meghan~

I am 60 years old

Today I am 60 years old. It has been an incredible journey. Who would have thought a farm boy from Idaho would have witnessed such remarkable changes, participated in such historic events, and associated with such wonderful people all along the way? Hopefully I have made some useful contributions to the world during the six decades I have been here.

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008), one of the wisest men I have ever known and with whom my life intersected a few times, said many years ago: "Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he's been robbed. The fact is that most putts don't drop. Most beef is tough. . . . Life is like an old-time rail journey—delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride" (from a BYU devotional address in December 1973).

That rings true to me. Throughout life's journey I have loved and been loved, I have known both joy and sorrow, I have enjoyed both health and sickness, I have had a reasonable share of life's ups and downs.

I also like what his wife, Marjorie Pay Hinckley (1911–2004), once said: "The only way to get through life is to laugh your way through it. You either have to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh. Crying gives me a headache."

Good counsel indeed.

And, above all, I have tasted of the sweet fruits of the Lord's Spirit. I have basked in God's love. I have had glimpses of the glories that await if I remain true and faithful all the remaining days of my life, however many or few they may be.

I worked in the garden this morning

Along with a score of neighbors, I worked in the neighborhood garden this morning. I weeded one and a half rows of corn before going off to other commitments. The sun was up, and it was getting awfully warm before I finished. I was pretty sweaty. I was thinking we should have begun at six o'clock rather than eight.

"It was a lot easier to do this when I was 14," I said to my good wife after I came home. A bit later, in fact, I went to the gym to work out with my trainer and by then noticed I had used some muscles I was not used to using in my regular workouts.

Some of our neighbors have already been enjoying some of the fresh produce from the garden. The zucchinis are plentiful right now. The corn and beans and a variety of other vegetables are coming along.

We haven't been into gardening much over the years. Our focus has been on fruit trees, which tend to behave themselves and not get into too much mischief. We have four trees in our front yard: an apple, a cherry, a pear, and an apricot. This year birds ate most of the cherries, and the apricots are a lot thinner than in most years, probably because of the massive pruning of the tree early in the spring.

We pay neighbor boys to care for our lawn and flower gardens. Their mom grew up on a farm in northern Utah and wants her three sons to learn how to work. And to earn money for when they grow up and go away at their own expense to serve as Mormon missionaries. They still have a ways to go on learning how to work, but we're happy to contribute toward her goal. Last year they planted a row of green beans along our back fence. This year potatoes. In recent years that's pretty much been the extent of our vegetable gardening.

A retro gadget

I drive a 1998 Ford Ranger pickup. Going soon on twelve years old. It does have air conditioning, but otherwise nothing fancy. No power windows or door locks. Your basic model.

And, oh, did I mention it's entirely paid for?

A couple months ago I had a date with my oldest granddaughter. We call them nights out with Grandpa. She is twelve years old, and never before in her life had she ever ridden in my pickup. She was intrigued by the handle used to crank the window up or down. She had never seen such a thing. She was used to pushing a button to open or close a car window.

"This is a handy little gadget," she observed, as she cranked the handle to roll the window up. What will they think of next?

I love summer mornings

Early this morning, before the sun peered over the mountains to the east of us, I was waiting at the bus stop to catch my ride to work. It was a gorgeous day. Traffic along Orchard Drive, never busy at this time of day, seemed lighter than normal. Perhaps people were off on summer vacations.

A jogger happened by. He was running in the street, reverting to the sidewalk only when an occasional car approached, and then he was back into the street. We exchanged good mornings.

The temperatures were pleasant, the morning quiet, and I was in a relective mood.

I thought of the words of the Lord recorded by the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament: "I have made the earth, and created man upon it" (Isaiah 45:12). It is a remarkable place God has prepared for us. And yes, there is much of ugliness and misery across the face of the earth, far too much of it in fact, but the earth itself is a remarkably diverse and interesting and beautiful home for His children.

And then this further insight from the prophet Nephi in the Book of Mormon: "Behold, the Lord hath created the earth that is should be inhabited; and he hath created his children that they should possess it" (1 Nephi 17:36).

Just earlier in the week I had read of extreme environmentalists who share the notion that the earth would be better off if humans were not around, if people did not inhabit the planet. Or others, not going quite that far, urging that humans are simply one species among all the other life forms on our little globe and that we deserve no particular status or consideration beyond the whales or snails or whatever is the cause de jour.

Now don't start plastering me with comments about the environment. I firmly believe we should be good stewards of planet earth. I believe we need to be responsible citizens of the world. We need to treat our home with respect. But I view the world from a perspective of faith, seeing "with an eye of faith," to borrow an insightful phrase used throughout the Book of Mormon (see, for example, Alma 5:15; Alma 32:40; Ether 12:19). And that perspective is that there is a God, that He created the world, that He placed His children upon it, and that it exists for them to inhabit it. That's what it's all about.

When we don't see it that way, we get it all backward and screw up our public discourse and our public policy in horrible ways that can lead to no good.

And so, I guess that's why we need summer mornings. Outside and quiet and alone. Not in our homes or cars. And not with televisions or radio or iPods blaring in our ears. We occasionally need time and circumstances to be reminded of the truth penned by the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861):

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes—
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Brrrrr . . .

It's springtime. The temperatures are rising. The air-conditioner is on. And I'm freezing. Time to get out the sweaters and mittens.

Go Utes! / Go Cougars!

I was happy to see that both Utah and BYU won their games again this week. I hope they both continue undefeated until they meet each other in late November. Though that will be a great game, I will not watch it because I do not want to jinx the Cougars' chance of winning.

(Historically BYU loses football games that I happen to watch. When they won what came to be known as the Miracle Bowl back in the 1980s, I had been watching on our little black-and-white TV until Grandma and Grandpa Lange showed up from southern California and I quit watching and the final-quarter miracle happened and the Y emerged victorious.)

What is all that white stuff?

A headline in this morning's Deseret News proclaimed "Snow falls on N. Utah - more skiff than blanket." The skiff in our backyard at 10:00 this morning measured 6 inches deep. Given the relative warmth of the ground still, a lot more than that had to fall to result in an accumulation of 6 inches.

The circle of life

Just outside my office window I have watched a pine tree grow to maturity through the years I have worked here. In earlier times the tree was much shorter, and the top barely reached my third-floor window. In later years it pretty much filled the window and blocked the view.

Today during lunch hour we watched in fascination as a young lumberjack climbed the tree and with a chainsaw eliminated branches and cut off the top and worked his way back down, cutting sections of the remaining trunk as he descended. It was both fascinating and sad.

The tree is now gone, but we now have an unobstructed view of Temple Square and its magnificent temple.

I remember years ago when Claudia grieved over a large pine tree our neighbors removed. Were that tree still there, we would not enjoy the view out our kitchen window that we have of the Bountiful Temple on the foothills to our east.

I'm back, but will the voice be?

Surprise to one and all. I am actually blogging again after a nearly nine-month hiatus.

Chalk it up, if you will, to my being sick with a very nasty cold and being tired of just resting all the time so that I am in some sort of condition to teach Sunday School tomorrow morning (more of that starting in the next paragraph). Or, alternatively, chalk it up to the new MacBook Pro computer that we just got this week as Mom's and my Christmas gift to each other. It's fun still to play around with the new computer.

Mom was called and sustained a month ago to serve as one of four Gospel Doctrine teachers in our ward. Two teachers alternate lessons in the west Relief Society room, and two teachers alternate in the east Relief Society room. We are assigned to the west crowd.

Since the final lesson in the published manual was taught last Sunday, that left the final two weeks of the year with no scheduled lessons. Mom's teaching partner was going to be out of town the final two weeks of the year, so she had the brilliant idea of asking me to teach a special lesson on the Prophet Joseph Smith tomorrow since Sunday, December 23, is the 202nd anniversary of his birth. I happily agreed, but in the meantime got this nasty cold and had laryngitis on Thursday and Friday. Today I have some voice back, and by tomorrow we are hoping to have a lot of voice back. We do believe in miracles, after all.

Ward conference

So far this winter has been very well behaved: lots of snow in the mountains, some rain here in the valleys, reasonable temperatures, that sort of thing. Until today, at least. A major winter storm has moved into Utah, and it's actually dumping snow all over the place, on our sidewalks, the driveway, the roads, nasty places like that.

I attended ward conference in the Bountiful Fourth Ward this afternoon. I was there in my role as high councilor. Very inspirational meetings. During the first hour President Kenneth Olson led a tender discussion in a combined session of all the adults on caring for one another.

During the second hour was regular Sunday School classes, so I came home and shoveled sidewalks and driveway. (I had, by the way, already attended Sunday School in our ward this morning.)

I then returned during the third hour for their sacrament meeting. Bishop Tom Foy gave a marvelous talk on faith in the Lord, using his mother-in-law (Virginia Regis) as an example of faith on her CES mission to Tonga, starting when she was assigned to teach at the Liahona High School and had to figure out how to call roll when the Tongan names consisted of about 55 vowels each. He also told about a little boy who expected and received a miracle with his pet horny toad. President Cory Hanks, in his first ward conference address since becoming our stake president last September, spoke a little about faith, recounting his finding a prized watch when he was about six or seven years old after extended prayers that he might find it. He also talked about going to the temple and promised the Fourth Warders that everything in their lives would go better if they attended the temple more often.

At the start of the meeting the counselor in the bishopric who was conducting the meeting announced that a granddaughter of the Wall family who had just married in December was killed in a car accident on their way to Arizona for an open house. Her new husband is in the hospital in critical condition, unaware yet that his bride had died. Very sad.

Well, it's time to go shovel some more snow.