Family History and Adjusting to Utah

I guess I owe anyone reading this an apology; I have not been anything close to regular in keeping this blog updated. Mostly I've just been busy; a few things have been added onto my plate that have kept me jumping. But more on that another time. This post's going to be a little more introspective than comedic, but I'll try to follow it up with something more adventurous.

Anyway.

Coming off of a mission is hard. That's no secret; they even make movies about it, and during the last three months of my mission every returned missionary in Laredo started giving me sympathetic looks and telling me to "give it two or three months and you'll be OK. It'll get better."

Well, it's been two and a half months now so I suppose that means I've met a sort of finish line, and I do feel more "normal" (whatever that means, because I will admit that I'm not sure) than I did. I don't know, it's a hard transition to explain, and if you've been through it yourself you already know what I mean. But to those who haven't returned from a mission, try to think of it this way: you have a specific purpose that you live for, a specific community and culture you belong to, standards and rules that you pride yourself in striving to live up to, a challenging work load that brings you some of the happiest and most heart-breaking moments of your life--and then it's gone. Your purpose is, more or less, what you thought you wanted two years ago. You are in a culture that is at once familiar and foreign, the community you remember moved on in your absence, you are regularly expected to break the rules that you dedicated yourself so long to following, and you go from a very adult world of responsibility to an almost childish world of school-yard drama and the slog of college life. It's confusing. You don't feel like you know who you are anymore. You look around at your old things and dreams and wonder why they mattered.

Or, at least, that's how I've been feeling.

And things are finding their way to a balance, a decrease in my floundering like I'm drowning in a kiddie pool. I don't know who I am yet, but I know who I want to be. I don't feel like I fit into college life so easily as I did before, but I hang on with hope to the transitions after graduation as a chance to start fresh and figure life out in an entirely new arena instead of tripping over myself in the old one.

But--I use too many metaphors and move too slowly to my intended topic.

You see, there are things that have helped me adjust and things that have not. Cold is not helpful. My roommates' weird boyfriends are not helpful. But music is, and family is, and rediscovering myself as a fiction writer is. (Putting my act together as a blogger might be helpful if I get my act together long enough to find out...)

And then there's family history.

To give you a bit of background, I've always been vaguely interested in genealogy. My family history is an interesting one, and I remember asking parents and grandparents about who my ancestors were and what they did.

But when it came to "doing it", I was always at a bit of a loss. In young women's and other church programs, the lessons about family history usually meant lecturing us about how we should be doing it, then having us fill out the same darn 4-generation pedigree chart over and over again.

Yep. This old thing. I've done this SO many times.

Which didn't do much for me. There are plenty of family historians in my family so I didn't even have to work to get this information, just copy what was already written.

When I was eighteen or so, I saw a poster for a "family history workshop" day that my stake was holding at a nearby church, and eagerly signed up, hopeful that someone there would tell me what to do, how to get started. I was disappointed to find that all of the classes were geared towards people with a lot more experience than I had, and filled with in jokes for people about thirty years older that left me feeling a bit left out. I left early and decided to just let it alone for a while.

What finally got me on the right track was actually the last companion I had on my mission, who before she left was a genealogy major at BYU. It turned out that there were a lot of people in Laredo who are in need of that kind of talent, so we ended up with several individuals asking us to help them get started. I felt a little intimidated, but she volunteered to show me the ropes, and we went to the library to get onto the LDS church's family history website.

She picked out an ancestor of hers for us to work on, a woman named Mary English who had no information in the site about her parents. We couldn't find much about her until we searched the records for her daughter, and found a census record. Information wise, this proved invaluable-it turned out the reason so little information on Mary English had arisen was that the information in the system (claiming that she had died in England) was incorrect; she was born in Canada and died in the US. But seeing that census record did more for me than that.

It's hard to explain exactly what I experienced. Searching for the information was a puzzle, it was fun. I felt like a detective, teasing out the smallest details, looking for inconsistent information and clues. But seeing the census record made it real. Reading it, we saw that she and her daughter were working as servants, and realized that this was taken a year after her husband had passed away. This was a job she and the oldest daughter had taken to support a family with six younger children. But Mary English herself would pass away just a year later. And for just a moment, looking at this page and putting the details together, I felt like I knew her. I felt a connection to this woman, even though she isn't even my relative and doesn't have any connection to me. I actually started tear up a little, overcome by this sense of a glimpse into someone else's life.

And that's when I started to get into family history.

I'm glad I started with such a powerful moment because the work I've been doing on my own family tree has been decidedly less exciting; I'm not "discovering" new people to enter into the system or finding awesome sources like that census. Mostly I'm cleaning up the records in the system website, clearing out duplicates, fixing cases where people are listed a being married to someone who died before they were born and other errors. Not glamorous work by any means, but I feel good that a large section of my family tree has become tidier and better organized. In fact, if you were to go through my family history you would find this trail-blazed swath of individuals with properly standardized names and dates and without duplicates covered in little "edited by jennifer16" marks.

Since I've gotten back, I'm enrolled in a family history class and I try to spend a little time on it every week. It's been... nice. Something that helps me feel grounded to where I am, because I'm making sense of something very personal. And for me (and pretty much any member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), the connection we feel with family is something very sacred, so it's also a way of holding onto the Spirit that I felt as a missionary.



There was a "temple walk" event a few weeks ago on a Saturday morning at the Logan Institute of Religion. It was part of an event called "temple week" where they were encouraging people to do family history work and to make visits to the temple--they had a few devotionals and gave out "angel moroni" shaped cookies (which were delicious). Not a lot of people came to the temple walk, but enough that they split us up into four groups. We walked to the temple and back, then had hot chocolate--it wasn't anything particularly fancy, though the testimonies shared during the walk were nice.

It was a cold day, the sky clouded over. Have I mentioned that I hate the cold now? I'm getting used to it, a little at a time. It's not as painful as it was when I arrived. But it's taken on a symbol as a negative force--the "anti-mission", the unforgettable difference between here and there, between Logan and Laredo, between what seemed at the time to be an Eternal summer and what now seems like a never-ending winter.

But. I braved the cold anyway, and I was glad I did.

Logan LDS Temple-- I took this photo during the temple walk

After all that had been racing through my mind, part of me expected to have some sort of epiphany or revelation. It was, after all, the first time that I had gotten close to a temple since I left the Missionary Training Center in Provo, and I was standing on Holy Ground. I think part of me was hoping that just being there would make sense of things, somehow.

That didn't happen, not exactly. There was no new insight or understanding. But it felt peaceful there, under the grey sky, looking up at the crenelated walls of the temple. I just stood there in silence for a moment, and found that I wasn't wishing I was anywhere else or worrying about who I was supposed to be. I was just there. 

It started to snow, and the snow was beautiful. It got colder and I didn't really mind.

Studio C - Message From Above (+playlist)

This is funny because it's true...



Sometime I'll have to put up some of my crazier criminals and missionaries stories, I've got a few.

Cars really do just make life more complicated

First of all, I am not used to driving this vehicle. For the last year and a half, the only vehicle I have driven has been this baby:

That's the Laredo model, displaying my mad parking skills. Gorgeous, I know.

The dark grey Toyota Corolla. I drove four different cars on my mission and all of them were this.

The vehicle which I currently have as a long-term loan from my grandparents is not a Toyota Corolla (is Corolla really spelled with double l because now I'm wanting to say "co-ro-ya" and I know that's not right). It's a red land boat--well, no, it's an old Buic and a lovely car, and I'm sincerely grateful to be allowed to use it right now, but it's slow to turn, slow to break, and drives nothing like a Toyota. My friend that I dropped off in Wellsville shortly before my meeting with Wellsville's finest couldn't stop laughing at me because I kept turning the windshield wipers on by accident the entire drive up. Also, the lights stay on for about three minutes after the car has been vacated and locked, and I don't know whether or not I should be concerned.

Anyway, tonight was finally a night when my landlady would be home and so would I, so I drove out to get my parking sticker tonight. Sadly, about halfway there from Logan my GPS gave up on me, and I ended up driving around the wrong town. It worked out alright, thanks to the very logical way that Utah streets are numbered--had I been in Texas I guess I would've had to find my way back out to the main road to buy a map, but I didn't get too horribly lost before I got back on the right track.

So it turns out that parking a car in Logan is about as complicated as can be.
You see, the city has some kind of regulation that prohibits cars parked on the streets between 1AM and 6AM, but there aren't actually enough parking spaces for all the tenants in this apartment, so if you are unlucky enough to not get a spot then the plan is that you scooch into a really awkward space that doesn't permit any of the other cars to leave, and then get up at 6AM the next morning to move the car out into the street. (Frankly, if it comes to that I might go park in the church parking lot again, even if it means walking back in the cold.) Also, you are required to move your car every 96 hours, or else you'll get booted. And you can get booted for parking crooked. The crooked parking could be problematic, I have a bit of a reputation for my lousy parking jobs. As for the 96 hours rule, it might tell you something about my car usage that I didn't touch my car for 8 days and only used it tonight so that I could get a parking sticker; this might turn into one of those ringamaroles where every four days I move the car to a different parking space in the same parking lot just to avoid trouble.

Regardless, I managed to get back in one piece. I was a little concerned I'd come back to a full parking lot and, with comedic inevitability, leave my car in the church parking lot again--but for once the late-night lifestyle of the common college student interposed in my favor, and the parking lot at 8PM was more than half empty. So for now, at least, my transportation problems are under control.

Though walking to class at 7 this morning with wet hair (don't do that! Bad idea!) made me about wish I used my car more often. My hair froze into solid chunks that clicked against each other, and every time the wind blew I got a brain freeze. And I thought I had it bad when it got as low as 38 in Laredo. Oh well, at least there's hot chocolate.

Comings and Goings

Well, I'm clearly slacking off in keeping this updated, though I suppose that it's forgivable at the moment seeing as I don't have any readers yet.

Being in Utah has been strange, though little by little it's starting to feel more normal. For the first couple of weeks everything felt like a dream--already Texas feels too far away to be reality, but here everything is a mix of the unfamiliar and the very familiar and the end result is confusing, to say the least. But routine is good for reality checks and I'm starting to figure things out.

Temperatures have been in the 20s and 30s, which leads me to believe that Utah is trying to kill me.

But, anyway, storytime.

The 19th (two weekends ago) was my Homecoming talk. Well, sort of, I guess we're not supposed to call it that anymore? My certainly-not-a-homecoming-talk, then. Either way, I think I deserve some sort of title for worst returned missionary in regards to inviting people--the only person in the world that I invited was my old Mission President's wife, because she asked me when it was, and I gave her the wrong time. Other than that, at around 11 PM Thursday night I remembered that I even was giving a talk, I didn't even get on a computer on Friday, and I spent most of Saturday yelling unintelligibly at the photograph downloader on Facebook and realized, late that night, that I needed to write a talk. Even later that night I realized that I hadn't invited any of my companions. My mom had sent out some kind of notification around, but the only one who actually received it was my old mission president's wife (who missed the different time on this invitation). I felt pretty awful later when I heard from a few people who had wanted to come but didn't know it was going on, including my trainer. Ouch.

But one of my old companions was able to make it, and my old Mission President and his wife and another of my companions did make it to the house afterwards for sandwiches and Texas-shaped cookies. The talk went alright, I guess, for something thrown together so last minute. I dunno, I've heard a lot of returned missionaries talk (especially because I have a huge family with about 80 cousins, all older than me, so I spent my entire childhood going to missionary farewells and homecomings and wedding receptions for all those cousins) and it seems to me like most of them sound a little more confident up there than I did. (Ironically, I think I got asked to give less talks on my mission than any other missionary I met, and was never asked to give a talk in Spanish. I did teach Gospel Principles many times, even in Spanish, but teaching a class is so much easier than giving a talk for me) But I talked mostly about the missionary purpose--ie inviting people to come closer to Christ--and overcoming our fear of doing that, something that was a pretty big theme of my mission.

Anyway, the weekend went well and it was nice to spend some time with friends and family. The big downer came Monday night as I went back up to Logan. First, as I was driving along through Wellsville, I saw the speed limit sign was at 60 and thought to myself, "Oh, whoops, I'm going a little too fast. Better slow down." Almost immediately I saw the flashing lights behind me; I was pulled over and got my very first speeding ticket. Sigh.
But it gets better! Shortly after that I called my landlady who lives out in Millville to ask if I could get the parking sticker for my car (I hadn't gotten it before because I didn't have the car yet and she prefers not to risk students loosing them) but it was already too late for her that night for me to go by. Thus, when I did get up to Logan I spent a merry hour trying to find some kind of parking lot where I wouldn't get another ticket--a disappointing venture. When you spend four years as a pedestrian, you don't really think about parking lots, so I hadn't ever realized before the complicated system of which cars are allowed to park where and when on a college campus. Finally I parked in the only free legal parking space I could find--in front of a church four blocks away from my apartment--and grabbed what I could carry to get the rest of the way back on foot, grumbling all the way that this is why I never asked my parents to let me use a car at school--they really just make life complicated.

Actually, my car's still there, haven't been able to get the parking sticker yet.
And all the plates and bowls and a set of shelves I brought up are still in there too.

Hm.