Dear Grandchildren,
You know how these things work. You think that you have matters settled for a airplane flight someplace, and you don’t. Well, that happened to us (me, actually). We received notice three weeks ago that our flights back to the States had been set. All on Delta. Fine, we said. We received the schedule from a very helpful woman at the travel department in SLC and were fixed. I learned then that the first flight from Istanbul to Paris is to be on Air France. I paid no attention. (You begin to hear a change in the background music.) I began to think of all those hours sitting in a seat with the seat in front of me pressed against my knees. Ouch. If I am sitting in an aisle seat, I can stand this sort of arrangement for the hour’s flight to Istanbul or a slightly longer flight to Ankara. But not the eleven hours from Paris to Salt Lake City. So in an email I asked the very helpful woman in church travel how I could upgrade to a seat with more leg room. Such seats exist. She told me. A simple two or three steps would give me what I wanted. So on the Delta website, I upgraded to a "plus" pair of seats for Grandma and me for that long flight. But that’s not the most interesting part of the story. Air France now steps visibly onto the stage.
Thinking about our arrangements, I decided to upgrade to a slightly better seat for our four-hour Delta flight from Istanbul to Paris on an Air France plane. I went to the Delta webpage, as before, and I was allowed to do the deed. Actually, I could only get exit row seats at this early date. None of the others were available through Delta. But the exit row seats were. So I signed up for two. You know what? The Delta website wanted money for my upgrade. I paid. And that was ok. I was at last feeling good about leg room. Then last week I decided to check that all was well. You know what? All was not well. I could find that one of the two exit row seats was bought and assigned to Grandma, but not the one I had bought for me. It was still open for purchase. And next to my name was an unsubtle invitation to upgrade by buying (again) an exit row seat.
I found a place where I could send an email to Delta about the evident disconnect. I sent it. I waited. Forty-eight hours later, I sent another because I had received no reply. This one had a little edge to it, I am sorry to admit. A day later, a representative for Delta wrote and said that Delta could not help me because the flight was Air France. I would have to contact that company.
I found an Air France number in Turkey and called. The fellow was pleasant enough. But when I gave him my confirmation numbers, he could call nothing up on his screen. Whaaaat? Nothing, he said. He could not even confirm that Grandma and I are on the flight out of Istanbul. I protested that I had paid extra through Delta. He suggested that I contact Delta. I told him that I had already done so and had been told to contact Air France. It all went nowhere. In a mild panic, I wrote to the very nice church travel woman in SLC asking for some help. But it was too early in the day for her to be at her desk. So I poked around an Air France website. I typed in my number from Delta and voila! I found myself looking at a screen with our reservations listed on it. Just as I had hoped. And something else. The confirmation numbers for the Air France flight were different from those that Delta gave us. Why am I not surprised? But all seems to be ok. For the moment.
It has begun. My throat treatment, that is. In my return to my ear, nose, and throat doctor, he sprayed a mist into my mouth before looking at my throat. Oh my goodness. Oh My Goodness! It tasted awful. I was ready to spit out the whole thing. But it was only the anesthetic. My tongue went numb pretty fast. Then he proceeded to take a movie of my throat with his camera poking through my right nostril. Afterward, he proclaimed that he would give me two botox shots in the right side of my throat when I go for my treatment. He also talked a lot about my right "false" vocal chord, a piece of tissue that sticks out past my normal right vocal chord. Talk about growing stuff I never knew I had. More to come.
Thursday Grandma and I went to the city of Denizli where five Iranian members reside. We took non-perishable foods to a single man and to a couple with a two-year old boy who fell and broke some teeth the day before, his two-year birthday. We also carried some rent money. The husband was the one set upon by a drunk man at a gasoline station more than a month ago and is undergoing physical therapy for his injured arm. The thirteen-hour day was easily offset by the feeling that we had genuinely helped someone.
The Area President and his wife and small entourage arrived yesterday in our fair city for a seminar. It turns out that he was in the terry cloth business at one time and came regularly to Denizli which is a major manufacturing center for such items. Who would have thought?
In our Sacrament Meeting today, the opening prayer was in Hungarian and the closing prayer was in Russian. In between, the service was conducted in Turkish with an English translation and the talks were given in English with Turkish translations. What is more, the talks were from the Area President and his wife. They are in town for a special event during the coming week. Their talks were clear, simple, and carried important messages about how to stay connected with the Lord. Because we welcomed a group of seven from Moscow, including our main speakers, our numbers hit 37 for the meeting — 24 in the hotel room and 13 joining by Skype. I mark it down as our largest crowd so far. After enjoying a notable Testimony Meeting last week, we basked in an intense light again as one of the Lord’s anointed spoke in our meeting. And the reactivated sister who gave the Sunday School lesson was superb. I thought that this Sunday we would see a baptism. Next week it is to happen.
My first counselor almost swallowed his tongue this morning when he learned that he would be conducting our Sacrament Meeting that would feature a General Authority who is a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy. You can imagine that a good two-thirds of our branch presidency meeting was taken up in discussing just how to proceed during the meeting. One of the important points had to do with how to sustain a person whom I had called to be a Primary teacher. My counselor had never asked for a sustaining vote in a meeting, though he had put up his hand when needed to sustain someone in a prior branch or ward. Another point was that a conducting officer never says anything after a General Authority speaks. About all a person can do is say thank you and then announce the closing hymn and prayer. That is exactly what my counselor did. So the lessons were learned. He will do fine. I just have to be patient.
By the way, our Area President was taken by our Skype outreach to people who live at a big distance. Our success in this area really interested him. In Russia, some branches are as far from each other as Chicago and Salt Lake City, with only five or six active members. He was curious about how and whether we can ask distant people to participate in our meetings. (We can.) He wondered how they receive the sacrament. (If they can hear the prayers, they can partake.) He was impressed with Grandma's ability to make her speaker work with her iPhone to produce the music that we sing for our hymns. For him, attending our branch was a mini education about how to bring in those who are far from a branch headquarters.
This kind of outreach will all improve with time. It has to. Our Iranian members cannot get permission to attend meetings as long as the state of emergency is still in effect. So it is imperative that we find a means to connect.
I love you and pray for you all.
Grandpa Brown
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