Pappa Hardy's Musings on Life.

In the not too distant future I will begin my seventh decade here on the planet. Being around for that amount of time and looking at the prospect of my 7th decade allows me to take stock of where I am and what has happened in my life.

There have been a lot of changes over the years. Today we live in a society dominated by technology. I have a cell phone that can just about do anything. It has a GPS unit that can guide me to any destination with an address. I can watch videos on that phone. I can send a text message to friends or family. I can take a picture of my grandson or granddaughter and send it to my wife or to my friends. I can search for a restaurant, a church house, a recreation venue, or just about anything else on the phone. I can transfer money from one account to the other. What can’t I seem to do on this phone? I can view actual live events as they take place. I can do all of this on my phone. 40 years ago my family, not me, had a phone on a party line and we had a TV. However, it was black and white and all we could get were three national networks, three channels, and no way to record the programming. We had transistor radios, which I thought were fantastic. So much has changed.

What have I learned so far? I have learned that family relationships are paramount. I have learned that love can be deep and lasting, but that one must nourish it every day or it can become fleeting. I have learned that some people “have my back”, while others can’t wait to see me make a mistake or do harm to me and those I care about. I have learned that the definition of friendship and marriage for many people has taken on a brand new color. I understand that I no longer live in the same world that I grew up in. I savor reconnecting with old relationships. Modern technology, through such things as facebook, has allowed me to once again part of the lives that I knew so long ago. Friendship no longer needs to be just dependent on geography or phone calls. I have learned that the strength of use is fleeting, that with age new challenges arise to challenge our ability to cope. Pains appear where once youthful tissue was. Financial challenges set on us from all sides, either personally caused or cast upon us by circumstances no longer under our control. I have learned that public service, just like church or family service, can bring much satisfaction. It can also bring challenges.

I have learned to appreciate the good. There is so much that is not so good in this world, but there is also so much joy and beauty in the world. There is natural beauty, beauty created by man, and mostly the beauty created by God. There are things that make it all worth it, outside of the family and the human relationships. I still treasure sunrises and sunsets. I treasure the beauty of newly fallen snow. Mountains intrigue me.

What is the outlook for this seventh decade? Well, I hope to be able to savor the family relationships that I have, watching grandchildren grow up, and watching my children mature and lead their own families. I look forward to building current relationships and renewing others. I look forward to making good relationships, and I hope my memory lasts long enough to remember the relationships. I hope to improve my health. I hope to keep what I have. I hope to do good. I am so glad that I have this life.

I love looking into the eyes of a precious 4 month old granddaughter, with her smiling at me and cooing and so adorable. I love playing with a 3 year old granddaughter and enjoying her discussions with grandpa and her being a grown up girl. I love my 1 year old granddaughter who plays so coy and smiles so beautifully. She loves to play with my adoration. I love my 4 year old grandson and all the games he plays with grandpa. He has so much energy. I love my 2 year old grandson and his wonderful playfulness. I love being a father to such wonderful sons and daughters, and grandpa to my grandchildren. This is what life is all about.

It was fun entertainment. Bonnie, Julie, Shirley and I went to the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City. We saw two plays, The Music Man and Noises Off. They were both fun to watch. I wish we had been able to stay a few more days, take in more plays, and travel around in Southern Utah. However, it was just a quick trip.

Plays are fun. Family is better. It was a lot of fun talking with each other. The campus of Southern Utah University was also beautiful and it was a terrific place to be able to visit and experience some “culture”.

Yesterday was a great day. My son Gordon received his PhD in Pharmacy, rewarding him for 4 years of hard work, sweat, and tears. What an accomplishment for him, and for his family who supported him through all of this hard work.

Julie likewise has recently earned her RN degree. I am so grateful that I have children (5 of them) that are willing to work hard and accomplish much through the hard toil and labor studying and work. They have all out performed there dad.

These are the kinds of Days of our Lives that I like to see. I am so proud of them all.

I must be a natural for the Geriatric Crowd. Of course, my kids would tell you that and say, Gee dad, duh, that is sure obvious. However, going on a cruise makes you compare yourself with the people on the boat and you know what, I am feeling like I fit in just fine. These are old guys about 50, 60, 70, or even 80. We had dinner a lot of nights with these characters.

This is in stark contrast to walking down a street in Payson, or any other town in most of the United States. When I walk down the street, I am usually the oldest guy on the street. I haven’t had people start to offer me wheel chair rides (except of course at my hospital visits which seem to have become more and more extensive as of late), but I expect that will come soon.

Yeah, I guess if I am not already there, I will soon be a member in full and complete standing of the geriatric crowd, silver hair and all.

I love vacations. I particularly love a vacation with my beloved spouse. However, I miss family and sometime I think that it would be great to have the family along on all of the vacations. That thought sometimes lasts a long time, but also lasts a short time when I think of the challenges. Luckily, the good overcome the bad.

That title above is reserved for a booklet and program that exists within the youth program for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It is to that program, that I do not refer. Instead, I refer to the feats of youth, particularly those of my son. Michael this morning ran in a 10K and had a personal best time of 51:45. While that is by far not the best time that was run this morning, it is an improvement of his previous personal best. I love the youth that can move forward and improve and become better. For me, it seems that each minute, each hour, each day, month, and year, finds me physically getting a little bit worse and worse. Ah, to have the strength of youth again. I just now need to find a Fountain of Youth.

I had a disturbing conversation with a friend and business associate the other day. We were discussing the disturbing state of affairs in the United States and the World with regard to crime, drug abuse, and particularly, the safety of our homes and our children. That thought immediately took me back to my childhood and my experiences.

I remember days of playing outside during the summer, and the winter, and not having a care in the world. I didn’t have a care, and while I am sure my parents had cares, they really didn’t need to worry much about the safety of their children playing in the neighborhood. Those were days of playing baseball from morning till night. Those were days of building snow forts and having neighborhood snow ball fights for control of the imaginary turf states that we held. Those were days of not worrying about strangers coming along and either kidnapping us children, or of trying to get us to use substances that would be bad for our health. When I became older, I knew that there were bad things in the world, but my neighborhood and my home were a fortress held inviolate and bad things of the world did not find me there.

How times have changed. I remember the first fear in Detroit in the 1980s, where we lived in a neighborhood that had drug houses across the street, and where we had a man stop and try to get our daughter to get into a car. It was only the speedy reaction of my wife that saved our daughter in that instance.

We had a respite in Cheyenne, when our children could go out and play and we didn’t feel the pressure that we felt in the “big city”. We moved to idyllic Payson, and also heard the screams and yells of children other than ours now, playing in the neighborhood, and it was music to our ears even though our young kids by then were grown and gone.

However, not all is well in Zion, or anywhere else for that matter. We also hear of a huge meth problem, or drug use going rampant amongst even the “good kids”. Neighborhood homes are broken into randomly, probably by friends of neighborhood kids who may have a drug habit to feed. You can’t leave your garage door open anymore for fear that a lawn mower, a car, or something else may disappear. You have to be careful about the appearance of your house. You can’t let you daily living habits signal to “bad” people the times that you and your aren’t at home. You have to worry about your house getting broken into, and putting in security systems that may or may not secure your home. What have we allowed this world to come to. The big problem is, we could trade our freedoms for guarantees of security from the government. If we do so, we will have neither security nor freedom. We indeed live in perilous times, and other than convincing the world to live according to the precepts of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I have no idea how we can cure the world of this disease. Yes, if fear that there is “No Safety for our Children”.

My two oldest sons are fans of a band called Barenaked Ladies. My oldest son in particular really loves this band. While I knew of the band, and had heard some of their songs, I really didn’t see anything special about them. As we all grow older, we tend to take new things and not embrace them, simply because we have too much emotional baggage invested in the old, and to bring new in takes a lot of effort and energy.

However, I sometimes eventually will move on. Recently I started to listen more to this group and have come to find I like them. In fact, I claim a father’s privilege of having my oldest son take me to the next BNL concert that occurs in Utah, if in fact he comes to attend. The group has catchy lyrics and tunes, and I believe they would be enjoyable in a concert setting. Come on Chris, break loose and take your old dad.

My generation has often been called the Baby Boomers. I come at the tail end of that group of people, and now is the time when you finally see evidence of our dominance wherever you go, for good or for ill.

Icons of that generation are evident everywhere, and no place is more evidence than at shopping malls. I was in a mall recently and saw prominently displayed pictures of The Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. When one thinks of the 50s and the 60s, those are icons that will forever be indentified with us. It was a great time to be alive and to be young. Now, it is just as good a time to be alive and be old.

However, there will come a time when my generation fades out of the collective consciousness of the masses and they will not remember us like they do now. Our son Michael the other day told me that the last of his missionary companions was coming home. I told him that now Elder Hardy will just become a legend in the Raleigh North Carolina Mission. Soon, people will forget he was there, except for some members who will remember him with fondness. The legend of Elder Hardy will slip away. It is much the same with my generation, the icons and the memories of us will slip away from people and they will hardly know that we were here, unless we make histories and recordings of who we were and hope people will cherish them.