Email

I currently have zero unread email messages.  Nada, zip, zilch, nil.

(And if you think those sentences were hard to type since my z key doesn't work, you would be correct.)

I have methodically gone through my email.  I have saved contact info.  I have unsubscribed to lists I don't exactly remember ever wanting to be subscribed to in the first place.  I feel like in one small and insignificant corner of my life, I am in control!

What's next for me?

You never know.  I may just become a completely organized and orderly person.  (If you saw the current state of the desk in our schoolroom, you would be shaking your head sadly and telling me to dream on.)

One happy side effect of culling my email collection is revisiting email from my family.  I slid them over into a folder so I can save them.  My mom and Marianne each send a newsy and similarly styled letter every week.  Those two ladies were cut from the same energetic and tenacious cloth.

Olivia occasionally sends something witty bordering on snarky that makes me laugh.  Enoch and Ammon send infrequent missives.  They are always brief and usually funny.

And then there's Tabor.

I sat next to him at dinner when we were growing up.  I distinctly remember two things about him at dinnertime.

1) He'd float radishes in his water glass.  (We always had freshly prepared salad for dinner with lots of vegetables including radishes in it.  See above: my energetic and tenacious mother. When I have salad now, I open bag. )  I don't know why Tabor put radishes in his water glass, but he did.

2) Even though he was just a little kid, he made me laugh all the time.  All. The. Time.

Awhile ago I emailed my family a story that Frances in my writing group had written.  It was a story about her grandfather who had lived in Elko in the '30s.  I gave my family the assignment to find out whatever happened to the skeleton that was acquired in the story for the high school science department.

Tabor, the skinniest person I know--and that's counting Ammon--emailed me back one sentence.

I was that skeleton.

One of Braeden's teachers went to Disneyland with her dad.  I started thinking about my own dad who not only hates vacations but hates Disneyland.  (Who hates Disneyland?  My dad.)  I emailed my family and told them I couldn't wrap my mind around taking a vacation with my dad, just the two of us.

Tabor emailed back,

I guess we should finally tell Thelma. Every year in February father takes one of his sons to Disneyland. Just kind of a time to relax and unwind. It started after Ammon's mission. This was to be my year but since they are in Nauvoo we won't be going. All of us make sacrifices when a family member serves a mission.

Do you have to know Tabor for these emails of his to make you laugh out loud?  Maybe.  But he and I, we have a history.   

And that kid delights me.

**********

My mom sent me this picture of my dad.  It was taken on Christmas day.  My dad and another teamster took everyone on a festive horse drawn carriage ride.  The man my dad is helping is very sick with Lou Gehrig's disease and going home from his mission early.  He said that was the first time he'd had his coat done up in a long time.

I love my dad.  I love him so much it makes my eyes leak sometimes.

I forgive him for taking my brothers and not me to Disneyland every year.