The Best Kind of Father's Day Present

Autumn Marie (Haeberle) Mulverhill

Last night, Sheryl and I said our family prayers preparatory to reading scriptures and some other reading. Before I could get to the word Amen, there was a good, sharp knock at the front door. I thought of picking up the walking stick that I made a couple of years ago as I walked through the house. Sheryl had left the front porch light on earlier and I had dutifully turned it off before going to bed. Now, in the little bit of light from the street, I could see a small, female form with long hair through the beveled glass in the door.





Agressively, I flipped the porch light back on and cautiously opened the door, peaking around it to see who might be with the disarmingly feminine form visible through the glass. She smirked at me, watching closely for my reaction. That reaction was as natural as anything I've evcr done, because it was one of genuine "shock and awe" (to use a presidential expression.)





My little girl had come all the way up from Winnetka, CA several days early, just to surprise me for Father's day. I couldn't stop telling her, during our prolonged hug, how happy I was to see her. Little Aubs had come to see me, and life, which had seemed pretty rotten earlier in the day, was suddenly full of bright promise and joy and hope.

Over 200 New Looks at the Old Days

I've been away from Blogville for a while. I've been busy. As Autumn will testify, I occasionally have a spasm of scanning old photos into the computer, editing them, and then sending bunches of them out to those who might have interest in them. This bunch this past week included lots of portraits of my first wife, Shayne, of our 4 children, and of places we've lived and places we've visited since our marriage in 1975.

I found a few surprises in this stack of old photo prints. There were facial expressions I hadn't remembered, whole portraits I didn't recall seeing before, and pretty decent photos of old cars and lovely firearms that I'd not seen for a long while. Already, some of you who read this column have been the recipients of some of these pictures. Just in case I missed anybody, I'm going to include some of my favorites here tonight. They're pictures of people and things which are dear to me and which I want everyone to see and appreciate. That's sort of a typical human attitude, isn't it? We love some thing or some person, and we want the whole world to see how wonderful our beloved is. It doesn't always work, but we keep trying, don't we?

So here, in varying degrees of focus and glory, are some of my favorites from the more than 200 I put together several days ago.

Recent Events and Developments

Joseph witnesses Jed's dead center hit.











Well, let's see. What's been going on? I'm sure something has been happening, because the time has been passing, and, as John Archibald Wheeler said, "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once."

It has been my pleasure to come into renewed contact with a number of former students recently. Mindy Timothy started reading my humble blog after she learned of it from my excellent daughter, Autumn Marie Mulverhill. (Don't you love that surname, Mulverhill? It sounds like a Hobbit name to me.) Now Mindy's sister Delsa, who took two or three classes from me, is also reading my silly offerings. I was sorry that I didn't remember Delsa until she said a few things by email to help me recall. Getting old is terrible, and I hope I didn't hurt her feelings.


Just today I ran into a fellow named John Bryant at the new CostCo here in the Pocatello area. He looked familiar and asked my name. (No doubt he remembered me as having hair and that being a much darker color.) He said he'd done the "Youth Legislature" thing with me way back when. Poor John was recently divorced and moved here to help open the new store. He's been a CostCo employee for four years, but I think he was in my classes in the early nineties. Not sure.


One of my all-time favorite students was Will Springer, Madison Class of 2002. He took my History classes in the 2000-2001 school year. We became fast friends and often ventilated milk jugs and other threatening paraphernalia with paramilitary hardware of various types and calibers. It was Will who stepped up to me early on the morning of 11 September 2001 and asked if I'd yet heard of the "airplane hitting the World Trade Center." I hadn't heard. But, during my first hour class, we watched live as the second aircraft hit the second tower. On its seventh anniversary this year the History Channel ran a two-hour special consisting strictly of videotapes taken in real time as those events were happening. It truly was like living it all over again. Some things you don't really get over in this life. You just learn to live with them and the hole stays in your heart. Seeing all those folks being pushed out the windows by the flames and falling 100 stories was about the worst thing I'd ever personally witnessed.


Will is a USAF 1Lt now at Malmstrom AFB, Montana. He's a missilier. He hopes that his wife, Jaime, will "let him" get a new 1911 pistol when he makes Captain. Go, Will!

I believe everyone knows that Mary and Heather are both due to produce new humans in April. I think Delsa might have said she's having one, too. We wish them luck in that endeavor.



Another dear old friend and former student is Jed Lewis. I'm able to attach a photo of him here and also of the one he called "Haeberbuddy," my brother Jacob. These two survived my classes by dint of hard work and great senses of humor. Either that or they were smoking those cafeteria crispitos.











Jane Haeberle, my youngest sibling, master of the pursuit of all things trivial and manager of the gift department at the BYU-I bookstore, was also one of my students at one time. She really was a serious, hard-working student, but taking too many classes from one person can leave psychological scars that are visible in one's speech and behavior decades later. Then, too, she had to endure being accused of being my daughter, a trial actually reserved for Autumn.

My first four children were also doomed to endure my classes. They were all very nice about it, although my mild insanity (it was mild back then) might have embarrassed them occasionally. They all did pretty well at it, too. I particularly recall Hyrum, though, expressing his doubt at some amazing factoid I'd dropped on the class. "Nuh-Uhhh!

I'll get Sheryl to teach me (again) how to scan, so I can at least show year book pictures of my students when I refer to them. Tonight I'll be limited to those of whom I already have pictures in the computer.