Dear Grandchildren,
One of the highlights of our week centered on a town north of here about three hours by bus. We went to meet a member sister who enjoys only sporadic contact with the Church. Add to that the fact that she has never told a family member about her joining the Church, and you can see that she is pretty lonely spiritually. When we arrived a little over a year ago, we learned about her but had no introduction. Since then, we have gone to visit her a couple of times and she has shown up in our fair city twice for services. Because the YVs were keeping up with her, their absence has made our urgency to keep track of her a bit more urgent. If you understand my meaning. So Grandma and I climbed on a bus last Wednesday for the trip. It seems that sitting is now my worst sport. I can’t do it very long without suffering discomfort. But we toughed it out. The sister was at the bus station to meet us. We caught a taxi to our hotel where we held a short sacrament meeting and I talked briefly about the eye-witness account of the institution of the sacrament that appears in Third Nephi. Then we went off to the town on the other side of the island, enjoyed a nice dinner, rode a boat to the other side of the bay, looked around a bazaar in the main city, and rode back on a boat to the island and to our hotel. We spent a part of the next day with this sister before coming back. This all sounds a little tedious, I know, but I assure you that it was an important moment for us and for her. We plan to return in a month or so. We want her to feel that we care.
Friday I went to meet my ear and throat doctor. As is customary by now, he stuck his little light and camera through my right nostril and down into my throat. I only gagged firmly twice. Not bad for an old guy. He declared my voice box to be in good shape. I said that my voice was about 60 percent of what it used to be. Then I went to the audiology lab to learn about my impaired left ear, the one that has not heard so good for the past two plus months. By good fortune, the really professional woman was there to run the hearing tests. At the end, she told me that in the low frequencies, my hearing in each ear is about the same. It is in the higher frequencies that my left ear seems to be impaired. Later, the doctor looked at the same charts and said that the hearing in each ear was about the same. He had no explanation for the dissonance that I experience in my left ear when I am in a noisy place. "Who knows what happens in the inner ears of individuals when they have a little duress?" Or something like that. He then gave me a steroid shot. I could feel a painful pressure all the way into my throat while he was squeezing the liquid shot into my middle ear (he had stuck the needle through the eardrum). Then I lay on the gurney for ten minutes, arose when the doctor’s associate appeared and said that I could get up, and then bled a little out of my ear. "That’s normal," she said. But I could tell that I was a little unsteady on my feet. So I walked out of that area to the waiting room where I took a seat for almost ten minutes before I continued my walking journey to the bus stop, taking care to walk near things that I could grab in the event that I began to pass out. I didn’t. I made it home ok, went to the bank, drew out some fast offering funds, and proceeded to pay some bills for some needy folks. I should know in ten days whether the steroid shot has begun to help my hearing. The MP’s wife has said that I can go to Istanbul to a first rate clinic if I feel the need for further help. We shall see.
One of the SV couples came to town Friday evening. He came to conduct a branch audit; she came to spend some time with Grandma. The last time we did one of these little audits, it was an gentle ride through the park. But this time, it seems, I was obliged to answer all kinds of tough questions and to produce receipts and documents to back up my expenditures. But that is as it should be. I should not have easy access to other people’s money, especially to donated funds of the Church. I was glad that I had been keeping receipts. They were in three different places, so it took a constant effort to bring them all to the table, one group of receipts at a time. In the end, I passed. Imagine. I never wanted to take another test in my life after graduate school, and here I was taking another test of sorts. Call me the amazing survivor.
It is Karilynne’s birthday today and we celebrate our Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary tomorrow. Yes, Karilynne was born the day before our first anniversasy. Actually, we are going to a hotel this evening that has bathtubs in its rooms so that Grandma can enjoy a real bath and not a shower while she stands in a small foot well, such as in our apartment. Happy Anniversary to us! If I can find a week in October, we shall go somewhere for a proper celebration. The weather is too hot now around here. Not like the reasonable cool in Teton National Park where we went for part of our honeymoon.
We have been enjoying sweltering heat and suddenly a wind blew in from the north, cooling down the place. Actually, Istanbul had a hard time getting out of the seventies a couple of days ago. Here, we were in the eighties yesterday. And we left our windows open all night, something that we have not done for months. But tomorrow will bring a rise to near normal temperatures, reminding me to enjoy each little cool puff of air. Please don't take those cool puffs for granted.
We were seventeen in our Sacrament Meeting and Sunday School today, nine at the hotel and eight via Skype. We were blessed by the presence of the other SV couple from Istanbul who spoke about the importance of families. They know because each lost a spouse in death, and she had to raise a group of three teenage children as a single parent. No easy task. They talked about personal experiences, enriching the meeting. I was really happy to have their input to our meeting.
I love you and pray for each of you.
Grandpa Brown
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