The books on his shelf, mostly math, a subject I could never fathom. But there’s one we share in common, second from the right, that NIV Study Bible.

We’re currently in Palo Alto, on a quick visit to our kids and grands. Taking a moment to write, I’m on the campus of the medical school of Stanford University. Specifically, it’s in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences section. I’m sitting in son Hyatt’s office, him behind his computer screen, and me at my paint-splattered lap-top.

I have no idea what he does, or very little, but others who come and go seem to respect him. That’s enough for me.

I remember when we were up here last time and he was defending his PhD. I could hardly follow, but I was gratified by the satisfied looks on the on the faces of his supervisors and peers. Afterward, the oldest, an eminent professor and still going at 85, just shook my hand and said, “Good job.” That was all I needed to hear.

I was just now looking at the books on his shelf. Higher calculus, programming, sleep studies (his specialty, to which he applies his computer science and electrical engineering) and I know I could not read one of them past the introduction, if that.

One gratifies me, a worn copy of the New International Version of the Bible.

He’s a busy guy, husband of a great wife with whom, together they’re raising four fine children. Unpretentious, and still athletic, he just told me he won the U. S. Open Championship for jiu jitsu in his weight class. That was some time ago but he’d overlooked mentioning it.

We enjoy time together. Since he was young it’s our way to have long conversations about life.

He still asks me questions.

I don’t always have answers.

But I’m always glad he asks.

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A happy moment before the crash, Justine and father Vernon. Photo by Allison.

Thanks, all, for your kind response to the last blog. Many understandably thought I was referring to our current storm. It’s true enough. But there are many storms.

Vernon is still in his coma. We remain hopeful. Did you know there is a blog dedicated to his progress? The most recent entry is by our daughter Allison, Vernon’s wife. It’s about today’s first hospital visit by their daughter, four-year-old Justine. I’ll supply the link here.

I think you’ll find it meaningful, and absolutely precious.

That’s how we feel about all these souls around us.

Thanks for you.

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Flying a Wave,
acrylic on paper

Lord, You feed the five-thousand,
You dismiss everyone
You send your men across the lake,
You go up the mountain alone to pray.

To Whom? Being who you are.
About what?
Generally or specific?
About what’s next?
For success?
Are your prayers ever not answered?

Then you look and see from your distance the storm on the lake
And the disciples straining at the oars
And what? You just let it be awhile.

Finally you respond.
Had they called out?
Either way, you came.
And how you came . . .
On the water . . . and as if to walk on past.

Wanting, it seems, to be discovered, recognized,
To be called out to.
And what do you say? “Take courage.”
But by then was it the storm they feared,
Or you, yourself?

You climbed into the boat and the storm was calmed.
Will you Lord, climb into mine?
Of course you have . . . do . . . and will.
And my storm is also calmed.

___________
Mark 6

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We have no new news on Vernon. He’s still in a coma, undergoing various bone operations, now also on dialysis for his kidneys, and they’re watching the onset of pneumonia. For ongoing updates and a way to contribute, go to the website dedicated for this, here. I will also update at moments.

Also, we have not finished the series featuring my parents’ history and stories. We’ll get back to that shortly, too.

Meantime, here’s a brief meditation for us artists (and by that I’m including just about everybody). It comes from quick notes jotted in my sketch book, inspired by a segment from Psalms:

The highest heavens belong to the Lord,
But the earth he has given to man.*

Ok then (says I), Get to work.
What is your role? To beautify?

Ok then . . . Get your orders: Make earth like heaven.
(That’s beautiful.)

Pick up where Ray Frieze left off, or Robert Heindel, or S. C. Yuan.**

Give up your small ambitions . . .

Whatever things be noble, whatever things be lovely, whatever things be admirable . . . produce these things.

Begin again every morning.

Ok Lord . . . reporting for duty.

_______

*   Psalm 115:16
** All recent painters who have died, no work of their kind to ever be made again. 

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First, Allison and the rest of us have been very grateful for the love and the support for Vernon. One day, we trust, he will also become aware of it. For the moment, however, all seems the same. It’s not that there isn’t healing going on, and non-stop monitoring, and more operations . . . even this week, but from the outside, it’s a long waiting.

He remains in coma.

Allison spends many hours in the hospital. Being near. Visiting with friends who come to comfort. Getting any information available. But there’s little. The waking out of the coma, when it comes, will be slow. The hospital stay will continue. The work of rehab will be hard, and will go on for a long time. Of course, we’re praying for a one-hundred percent recovery, body and mind.

Vernon and Allison with Maki and Justine, two months ago (on the day we buried my father).

Vernon came into our lives about a decade ago. Allison and he had mutual friends on the Internet. That’s how they first met. She was in California, he was in England.

The first time they saw each other was a brief (actually running) stop in a London airport as Allison was passing through. Two years later, after a number of trips back and forth, they were married. It was my great honor to perform the wedding.

Allison moved to England. It had been Allison’s encouragement to him to return to school and get his master’s degree in type design . . . a deep interest of his for a long time. The highly-respected University of Reading had such a program. After a few years, Maki, Vernon’s young son from a previous marriage, came to live with them full time.

Four years ago little Justine came into their lives, and ours. A year and a half ago they fulfilled a long held plan and moved to America.

We’re grateful. Of Anne’s and my five children and 16 grandchildren, this is the only family that lives anywhere near us. Allison pursues her photography, sometimes her painting, cares for her family and keeps up with her many friends. Vernon pursues his freelance business in font design, primarily for Google, but also others. Recently he’s formed a partnership with a friend providing stamps for the scrapbook business.

(BTW, the fonts used in this blog are Vernon’s design—as are many others now on the web.)

Vernon is one smart guy, able to figure most things out, often helping me with my own computer-related qualms, and sometimes in woodworking as well. Even the Vespa was just a recent hobby. He’d bought an old one and spent evenings and odd hours mastering its mechanics to get it running. Actually riding it wasn’t the main point.

But of course all this abruptly stopped last Friday evening at 8:30. How it will all start again is yet to be seen.

In the meantime, updates and a chance for interaction will be offered on a new website dedicated to such. Also, for any who want to help financially, there is an option for that as well. As you can imagine, there will be needs . . . particularly with Vernon not able to work his craft for some time. Click here for the site. (BTW, all the fonts on that site are Vernon’s too.)

Again, thank you for your abundant and heart-felt concern.

_______

Next: a reminder for our long-planned show this weekend . . . something Vernon, also an artist, would endorse.

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At a healthier moment, Vernon with Allison.
(Below) How he looks today.

Today we’re breaking from the ongoing saga of my parents’ story for a news-flash on another member of our family. It’s our son-in-law Vernon, Allison’s husband. He’s currently the center of our concerns, though he knows nothing about it.

Friday evening police showed up at Allison’s door in San Clemente. There’d been an accident and she should get to the hospital as soon as possible.

Even now it’s taking time to get the details. Apparently a pickup truck turned into the road never seeing Vernon cruising home on his Vespa. There was never a moment to break or swerve. Many people saw it, many immediately punching in 911. Paramedics were there within minutes. Some onlookers thought it was already too late.

By the time we got to the hospital a group of what was to become a team of five doctors was assembling. The neurologist was first, brain trauma being a major concern. As was pulmonary; he wasn’t breathing when they brought him in. Then there were all the broken bones, the jaw, the pelvis, the femur. Plastic surgery would be needed for the face.

We were there for hours. The team of doctors worked till 5:00 in the morning.

Vernon is in a coma, part natural, part induced, and will be for a week or longer. The hospital stay will be long, the rehab longer. Even now we’re in a precarious period what with the brain trauma.

So many people have come to the rescue. The nameless paramedics, with their quick action, saved his life. The doctors, we’re told, are among the best in the land. Many, many are gathering around Allison, supporting her.

My reading the following morning was in Mark. Jesus was interrupted in his teaching to come heal the daughter of one Jarius. On the way, another sufferer touched the hem of his clothes, hoping for a healing. She got it. He told her that her faith had done it. But by the delay, the daughter of Jarius had died. But then Jesus reversed that too.

The take away for me at the moment is how it was the faith of the one that effected the healing, and yet there was a complete lack of faith on the part of the other, already dead. But others believed.

And that’s where we are.

Believing.

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Continuing in Betty Allison Moore’s own words:

When we moved into the one room log house that the rancher had loaned us, known as “the Johnson Creek Place,” we had all the beds, the cookstove and the dining table and chairs in that one room! Not much walking space.

That was in November and the first week we were there my dad drove us to Roach to go to school on a Thursday and Friday. When Monday came he said he couldn’t take us to school anymore because he had no gas and no money to buy any. So we stayed home from school for the rest of that year.

I didn’t have any books and even then I was an avid reader. Behind the house was an old bunk house with two bunks. Only thing in the building was a huge pile of paper back books, hundreds of them. Most of them were cowboy stories and I read all of them and dreamed of marrying a cowboy. When my dad found out my desire he squashed my dreams by informing me that cowboys were ignorant, uncouth, uneducated, uncultured, unchristianized nobodys. I was CRUSHED.

As I read those books I would throw them into another pile, and when I was finished I read the love stories, which were not nearly as interesting as the westerns. But at least I had something to read.

Someone loaned us the book, Swiss Family Robinson and All Quiet on the Western Front and my mother read them to the family. I learned about World War 1 from one of these books. It had ended four days before I was born in 1918. November 11 was called “Armistice Day” because it was the day the armistice was signed. The agreement ended that war. Years later it was changed to “Veteran’s Day.”  

Mom mentioned more than once in these memoirs how she graduated from high school two years late, due to all these exigencies. What she doesn’t mention, but was clear from her life, is that just learning to read, and that applied, is sufficient for all education to follow.  

(And thanks for reading these.)

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Continuing in her words. Living on the Colorado homestead, eight miles from that log-mill town, she indicates the financial state of her father (the word “poverty” is never used) and his ingenuity.

The first six or seven months we lived in an unused log cabin belonging to a rancher who let us use it rent free until we could get our own house.

One of the houses left behind [when the saw mill town closed down] was one that no one wanted so my dad got it for free. He tore it down and loaded the logs on a flatbed truck that he borrowed, moved it to our homestead and rebuilt.

It had three windows, probably three feet square. Daddy put them all together so we had a forerunner of a picture window. My mother was very proud of that.

It was really more of a cabin. It consisted of two rooms, the smaller one with a wood-burning range. Daddy built a cabinet about four feet long to hold dishes and pans. It was all the kitchen storage there was, no overhead cabinets. The top of that was for washing dishes. [No sink, of course.] There was a shelf where a bucket of water and a dipper and a washpan stood with a hook on the wall for a towel.

At the other end of that room was a square dining table. One side of the table was placed up against the wall and we used only three sides of it. There was room for six chairs but we had seven in the family. It was so crowded it was hard to get around.

We didn’t have any living room furniture.

The other room was for sleeping and just big enough for all seven of us.

Later my dad added a third room, not made of logs. “A frame room,” he called it. Just wide boards, one thickness, and no insulation and no heat. In cold weather we would dress and undress by the heating stove in the corner of the main room and RUN for the beds in the add-on room.

This additional room held three beds, a double bed where my parents slept and two three-quarter beds where three of my brothers and I slept, two in each bed. We slept cross-wise of the bed, our heads at one side and our feet at the other. There must have been a crib also, for baby Jim, though I don’t know where there would have been room for it. There was just room for those three beds, no dressers, mirrors, or anything else.

I slept that way until I was about 13 and then my folks got a metal army cot and I slept in the living room.

I didn’t think anything of all this. I thought everybody lived this way.

_______

Next: No gas, no money, no school. Still, a reading education.

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Picking up from where we left off with Dad’s story, in his words:

Betty’s family moved away to Colorado in the spring. I gave her my box camera and told her that I would develop and print pictures for her if at least one of the pictures on the roll was of her. We wrote every week, sometimes twice, as postage was only three cents.

Two of Dad’s early cameras. Was the “box” the one he gave Mom to use?

Whatever happened to those photos I don’t know. The couple was apart two years. We’ll use that break to back up and give some of Mom’s story, in her words. (I’ll put those in red.)

I got an invitation to go to a high school class reunion. I hear all the time of people going to those but I have never gone to my own. I think there were about 30 people in my class. That was in Yuma, Colorado, where I graduated in 1938. Of course I couldn’t go all the way to Colorado for my 20th reunion, but I did get a list of where everybody lived at that time. No telling where that list is now. I was surprised to find out that about a third of the class had moved to California.

I was two years behind in graduating because of my parents’ frequent moves, causing me to miss so much school.

One of those times was the year they homesteaded in northern Colorado, 40 miles southwest of Laramie, Wyoming. Our homestead was just barely over the state border. The first six or seven months we lived in an unused log cabin belonging to a rancher who let us use it rent free until we could get our own house.

About eight miles from us was the town of Roach, which doesn’t exist any more. It was just a settlement, with a post office, one general store, a sawmill and a schoolhouse. The school was one room with all grades and one teacher who came every year from another state. There were two of us seventh graders. It was a company town of the owners who owned the sawmill. They made railroad ties. When the trees suitable for that purpose were gone the company would desert that town and start a new one. If I remember right, Roach was the name of the company that owned the sawmill, and the town.

 Next: The two-room homestead, built from reclaimed logs.

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I came across a clipping from a Rawlins newspaper. The date was missing but by context all the children were grown.

I knew nothing of this. I knew she was hearty, raising seven children almost single-handedly, including on that desolate Wyoming homestead and those Washington scrub farms. I’d understood there was a God-respect about her that passed into the family. But this craving for learning is for me a new realization. And an inspiration for us all.

The photo was taken quite a few years before the article was written. There’s no date, but all seven children are in (even if Orrelle only barely at the bottom). By the looks of the “craftsman style” house, it must be Washington. Is that my dad in glasses? He was a reader through his 97th year, but never with glasses.

Busy Housewife puts Spare Time to Good Use, by Bobbie Johnson

A mother of seven children and a grandmother seven times, who in spite of all her household duties has finished four correspondence courses and is starting on the fifth, who has a keen desire to learn and the ambition to follow her desire, is Mrs. H. E. Moore, 345 Daley Street, a woman who has literally educated herself.

Mrs. Moore completed only two and a half years of high school work, but she “always wanted to finish high school.” Her burning desire for knowledge caused her to spend several hours daily studying and reading.

Her first correspondence course was in dressmaking, tailoring and handwork. This she followed with a cooking course. From these courses she has learned to do almost anything with her hands. She sews beautifully, crochets, knits and tats. She can display hundreds of her handmade articles, all finely made down to the last detail She is a proficient cook.

Being a lover of music, Mrs. Moore bought an electric guitar. For two years she studied, practiced and taught herself to play through her mail order lessons. Today she plays the guitar with a near professional touch.

After finishing her guitar lessons and receiving her diploma, Mrs. Moore subscribed to a correspondence course in Spanish. This she studied by books and recordings.

Because of her ardent interest in the Spanish language, Mrs. Moore is organizing a class of interested neighbors for weekly study this winter.

Her present course of study is the piano. She recently received her first lesson from the US School of Music, New York City, and is now teaching herself to play the piano. Although she has studied only a short while, Mrs. Moore has a large repertoire for the piano.

The ambitious person who has lived in Rawlins for the last 23 years, has always impressed upon her children the importance of education. “My main ambition was to see my children have good educations. You can’t make a child acquire an education, you have to talk them into it,” Mrs. Moore said.

And “talk them into it” she did. For all seven of her children have been graduated from Rawlins high school and all but one have gone on with their education. Four of her sons attended college. One of them was graduated, and one of them will be graduated next spring. Both of her daughters attended nurses training, one of them finishing.

“Women are foolish if they do not do something with their spare time. A woman with a family is confined to her home and idleness can make a person old,” Mrs. Moore stated.

One look at Mrs. Moore with her trim figure, dark hair and smooth complexion will defy her . . .

At this point, the article trails off. But this picture of Margarite Didami (Comer) Moore (b. 1889) at her marriage describes it all. What a beauty. What an attitude! (And there’s my chin cleft!)

Next: Mom’s Story, and Homesteads Again.

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