That is what life is all about. It is about improvement and getting better. It shouldn’t be about survival and just surviving each and every day as it slides by. I am going to do better.

Many people who know me know much I enjoy going on cruises. Many people also know that I have had knee problems and that eventually I was told that I would need to do a Knee replacement on both my right and left knees. Further few knew that my mom recently was diagnosed with cancer, and then died just before Christmas. Now I will tell the tale.

In July of this year I had been looking at cruises and finally settled on doing a cruise in the Caribbean in December of this year to the islands of St. Kitts, St. Lucia, Barbados, Antigua, and St. Thomas. We paid for that and everything looked good. Also, we went past the deadlines when things would be fully refundable.

Meanwhile, we had experienced a lot of medical expenses during the year since my son Michael has Crohns Disease and in late April and early May had been in the hospital a week in Cheyenne and therefore we had reached out of pocket maximums well into the early part of the year and we had a healthy amount of hospital bills that we were paying on a term basis for him. With that we made a decision to get my first knee replacement done this year. We originally talked with the Doctor’s office about early September. Then, that slipped to October. When we talked to the office they indicated that they wanted to do a new procedure on my knee with a new kind of artificial knee. We soon hear that we couldn’t do it in October because the FDA would have to approve the procedure and probably wouldn’t be done until November.

This is where the complication occurred with regard to my mom’s health. We discovered in early September that she was sick with Stage 2 Uterine Cancer and that she would need Radiation Therapy treatments to hopefully survive the cancer. By the end of September we had found out that the Radiation Therapy and my mom was just beginning a journey that would eventually take her from ICU to Utah Valley Specialty Hospital, then to a nursing home.

When the operation slipped to the earliest to be in early November, we had a decision to make. If I was operated on in November, it would be very unlikely that I would be released by the doctor to fly across the country because of the risks of blood clots. It was too late to get most of my money back from the cruise line. We had no idea how long my mother would live but she was not eating and drinking and therefore things did not look good.

Because of the fact that my mom was not doing well in the nursing home, we also decided we would take my parents into our home during this last few weeks of my mom’s life. We moved them into our home in early November. We were able to get the surgery scheduled for December 22, just three days before Christmas. This would allow us to take advantage of the surgery being fully covered by insurance.

It turned out that my mom lived to December 18, the day we returned from the cruise. The surgeon was able to get approval from the FDA for the surgery and the part arrived on December 22, the day of the surgery. The cruise went as planned. Therefore, it turned out that on Christmas Eve I was indeed in the hospital and was trying to recover from surgery.

I look at the weather map and start to think to myself, I wish I had a home in St. George or Mesquite for the winter. I wish it weren’t so hot there right now and maybe I would go and stay the weekend. I find myself less tolerant of the extremes, the way hot days of summer or the way cold days of winter.

I love snow, but I don’t want 3 feet of snow on the ground. I just want a nice tolerable climate that allows me to enjoy the weather. Yeah, maybe it’s a sign that I am getting older.

The Lord has blessed me with a wonderful family, great friends, and a home in which to live. As I embark on the 7th decade there is much to be grateful for, and I have great hopes for the future. I pray that not only my family, but also my friends, my compatriots, this city in which I live, and the country and world in which I live are blessed.

The decade of the 60’s was a decade of newness, new ideas, new approaches to solving problems. It was also a war decade, a decade of protests and cities on fire. It was a decade of achievement (man first went into space and landed on the moon). At times I feel we have been so mediocre since then.

Music was no less exciting. The decade started with the Elvis Presley phenomenon and ended with Abbey Road and the breakup of the Beatles. Great music was made in that decade. It moved many people. For me, it is impossible to first separate out a 20 top ten list and not include the Beatles. The Beatles helped define the decade the musical landscape like no other group. Of course, the Beatles were not the decade and there was great music made by others.

Secondly, for me personally sometimes it is impossible to separate the single from the Album. For instance, the Beatles Abbey Road has so many connections to me on a deep emotional level. I would go to sleep listening to the second side of that beautiful album. On my mission, I would sing those songs to myself as I rode the Chinese countryside in Taiwan and suffered heat, rain, typhoon, and other challenges. The missionary experience was about more than music and weather though.

There are many great songs from the 60’s, and many great albums. It is hard to separate those two out. I dare not rank the songs that I love from that era. They include such songs as Hey Jude by the Beatles, Legend of a Mind by the Moody Blues, and Suite Judy Blue Eyes by Crosby Stills, and Nash. Not to be forgotten are such songs as Monday, Monday by the Mama and Papas, Creque Alley by the same group. Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin was another song that connects with me, Voices in the Sky by the Moody Blues, and many, many more.

There was so much diversity and creativity then. There has been great music since then, but I have trouble separating out the music I love from the experiences that have defined me.

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.

When I first became interested in music, it was on a transistor radio that I had just received for Christmas. I was at the mercy of some DJ that was playing the top 40. Of course, it exposed me to a lot of different artists, and the early 60’s (there, you know how old I am) were rich with an incredible variety of artists and types of music. So much then was new and different and exciting.

You only had three ways to listen. Being a poor teenager, it was either listening on the transistor radio or buying a 45 rpm record (with Side A and Side B) songs. Going to an actual concert was something I could only dream of, so I had to wait on change to come. Of course, you were at the mercy of mom and dad because of money issues, or sometime, someone might actually buy you your own stereo for a birthday present. I finally convinced mom and dad that they should do that and then I was in listening heaven. I could put on a whole album of music from my favorite artist of the moment. I went to sleep at night listening to records.

Of course, there could be problems or accidents. One time I was really sick and listening to a record on my parent’s stereo and fell asleep because I was so sick and drugged up. While asleep, something fell on the needle and wore a big groove into my Sgt. Peppers record. I was sick; there was a deep rut in the middle of “A Day in the Life”.

Overall, it was great. Getting together with buddies to view their collections influenced my tastes in music through the discovery of brand new artists and different types of music. Now I am a lover of rock music, classical music, folk music, western and modern western, pop music, Jazz, Blues, or new age, and the list goes on and on.

What has made it even greater is the revolution in listening technologies. First, the records gave way to 8 tracks and you could listen in your car. Then, tape decks became the rage and you could have a whole collection of cassette tapes that could make your music collection mobile. You could also listen to more, because most cassettes could be bought in times of 60, 90, or even 120 minutes. My heavens, two or three albums could go on one tape and it was stereo no less. You could buy the music prepackaged, or even better most of us started recording our own collections onto tapes and individualize our collections.

In the mid 80’s I started hearing about CD’s. Of course, my first thought was that those marketers were just thinking up new ways to get you to spend your money (and they were of course) but oh how it opened up the horizons. You could get even more music on one disk, could carry them more easy, and the offerings multiplied.

That takes us to today. I-tunes, or MP3 players, or whatever you want are now the rage. It has given us the ability to carry your whole music library with you. You can tabulate how many times you listen to a particular selection. I have spent the whole weekend listening to just a wide variety of everything. On my IPOD I can listen to any CD I have ever bought, or I can even download music and not have to purchase a hard copy of anything. I have my faith’s scriptures on my IPOD and also every conference the church has ever conducted and put on CD. I keep hoping they will make available a lot of talks and older conferences on CD so I can rip them to my IPOD.

I can listen to books, and now I have college courses produced by the The Teaching Company as part of their Great Courses series. I can listen and learn while driving. I have learned ancient Egyptian History, about the weather, about our climate, modern European History, and the list goes on and on. It is all there in one electronic gadget. I can make greatest hits lists, genre lists, and lists by artists. It is great. It is easy, and it is making music even more of a pleasure to listen too. What a blessing modern technology can be.