Feb 12 08

February 12, 2008

Our packing marathon continued today. We have now cleared all our stuff out of the Elders’ room, packed up most of the two bookcases in the front room, and cleared off the closet shelf in our room. That’s pretty good progress considering all the interruptions we get.

First of all we need to finish last night’s Blog. We did go to Whiteriver and got home about 10:00, too late in our lives to finish the Blog. When we got to the hospital there must have been 60 people there, waiting for poor old Grandma to make her exit. In the hospital room itself there were at least 15-20 people standing around, and then all the rest were out in the waiting area. They were all quite upset because they had been told by Security that they couldn’t have so many people around. One relative was sitting next to Grandma’s bed, shaking the poor old lady’s hand and yelling, yes yelling, “Grandma! Grandma!” Even on my deathbed I believe I could summon the strength to slap her.

The Apache attitude and traditions surrounding death is downright freaky. We wanted to join Security in shooing all those people out of the hospital and let the poor lady have some privacy and dignity. She’s still hanging on today, but there’s no hope for her. Her organs are shutting down. She was so obviously suffering, we felt sorry for her and can only pray this doesn’t last too much longer.

This afternoon we were getting lots accomplished until the phone started ringing. President Bonito called and wanted Robert to meet him at the Post Office and pick up some boxes that had been delivered for the church. Just after Robert got back from doing that Elder Lindsey’s mother called. She is in Tennessee and will be passing through Arizona on her way home and wanted to visit her son. She went on and on about her travel plans until Robert panicked and gave the phone to me. My conversation with her was fairly short. I said call President Craig and see if he’ll give you permission. She called back a couple of hours later with the news that President had said, “Thanks, but no thanks.” So she’s not coming.

Then Naysha called. She is going to a spelling bee in Holbrook tomorrow and asked me to help her study her spelling words. Of course she needed us to come and pick her up. Before we could leave to do that Raymon called and asked if we would take Rocky and him to the Commercial Center so they could get some food for dinner. Next, Cheryl called and wanted to know if I have a recipe for cookies. Like about 40 of them. We decided on Snickerdoodles, so I hurried and typed the recipe for her and grabbed my Cream of Tartar and some other cards and gift-wrap we wanted to take to her. We picked up the boys, left them at the center and went to get Naysha, who informed us that she needed to be taken to the school so she could get her spelling list. Finally we got the boys home and Naysha at our place. I didn’t mind helping her, but it was hopeless. It was apparent she had never studied the words before. Many of them she had no idea how to pronounce or what they mean. She brought about 500 words to study and that was just the first half of the alphabet. But I wanted to try, so we started at least reading through the list. She didn’t have time to practice the spelling, but I thought it might help if she could at least recognize the words.

We worked for about 45 minutes when Kyesha showed up early for her counseling appointment. Tavis came by with a CD he wanted to sell us, which of course we purchased for $10. I took Naysha back in the bedroom to study so Robert could talk to Kyesha, and Dion called. He said Verbena was making Valentine cupcakes and would we like to buy some. Of course we said yes. Now it was time to get Naysha home, and I couldn’t leave Kyesha alone with Robert, so we interrupted her counseling session to ride with me. Robert said to just take her home after I delivered Naysha, but Kyesha didn’t go for that at all. She convinced me she wanted to finish her counseling session, which, translated, meant she wanted to play on our computer. So I brought her back, and then her dad came. She got a few minutes on the computer, then he took her home, which was where she never wanted to go, and returned for his own counseling session. We won’t go into detail about that. We’ll save that for our second book.

Finally about 9:00 Byron left and Robert was able to eat the dinner he cooked for himself at 6:00.