Saturday, March 28, 2020

My hero, Michelle Obama

The personal connections hit me deeply:
"I had failed.
I had never in my life failed a test. . . . But I'd blown it with the bar. I was ashamed, sure that I'd let down every person who'd ever taught, encouraged, or employed me."
Like Michelle, I failed my first bar exam. It wasn't because we weren't smart or didn't study hard. It just happens to a lot of people when the two-day test is extremely tricky to keep the passage rates low. It was only 58% on my first try of the Maryland bar exam and only 56% six months later when I did pass. Michelle passed the Illinois exam on her second try too.

The second one also hit me joyfully:
He worked late at night in a small room we'd converted to a study at the rear of our apartment--a crowded, book-strewn bunker I referred to lovingly as the Hole. I'd sometimes go in, stepping over his piles of paper to sit on the ottoman in front of his chair while he worked, trying to lasso him with a joke and a smile, to tease him back from whatever far-off fields he'd been galloping through. He was good-humored about my intrusions, but only if I didn't stay to long.
Barack, I've come to understand, is the sort of person who needs a hole, a closed off little warren where he can read and write undisturbed. It's like a hatch that opens directly into the spacious skies of his brain. . . ."
Socially-distancing in my "hole," I finally go around to reading Becoming by Michelle Obama.

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

Mission Update, uh, Rewind

No one ever really wanted to watch my mission slides with me. Now that I have that slide scanner, I thought I'd try it on the blog.

We'll start with the inspirational:


In my current mission, I am documenting the early missionaries in Wales who were trying to get converts for the New Zion in America. My mission in Brazil 1976-78 was to bring Zion to the People of Brazil. The Temple under construction in São Paulo was the culmination of that. It would bring sacred ordinances to seal up individuals, families, and peoples together in preparation to live with God. They gave us a tour of the nearly completed Temple on our way out of Brazil. Note the guide wires to the steeple. Lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.

My mission started a little slowly. We were held up for a time, a long time, in the Language Training Center (LTM) in Provo waiting for visas (later, the Missionary Training Center or MTC). We had to find creative ways to keep studying.