05-DEC-A-4
APPROACHING THE LAST OF THE ELDP SEMESTER WITH FINAL PAPERS AND FINAL
EXAMS IN PREPARATION, AND DERWOOD DETAILS AND PROGRAMMING NEW PHONE AND
PHOTOJOURNALIST COLLECTION FOR ABBREVIATED YEAR-END LETTER
December 6-8, 2005
Happy
Pearl Harbor Day! It should be happier today in a later
recollection than it was on this day as I was Minus Six Weeks old. This was an innocent time when the US was
at peace even if the world were at war, and that “Tora Tora Tora!” changed all
that for at least a generation after that, with a death toll in those far away,
not-yet-USA-states islands that was uncannily close to the death toll of the
9/11/01 attacks sixty years later.
And
here I am, in a snowy Derwood woods, as change is everywhere around me and in
the lives of others. Craig Schafer is
applying for a new job and a change of status on the Eastern
Shore. Virginia is feeling
better and healthier although frenetically busy just now at semester’s end, at
the Christmas season for performances with her church choir and planning 26
performances at Del Rio and then at the time of Christmas collapse, planning
visits for the longer view as she emerges into her new life, reconsidered. ELDP classmate Edmina Bradshaw has been trying
through me to get her son Kieran treated for a pituitary tumor just now
discovered. Donald Geelhoed is getting
ready to go back to work with his (also) repaired heart. Paul Antony is immersed in his job as the
Medical Director of Pharma and is interested in accompanying me on a mission. And the ELDP teams are splitting up into
groups of five for the Comps to be administered this coming spring with the
questions for study to be handed out after our last sessions of the semester
this weekend after our final exams in three courses. I have been involved in the human drama of
each of these changes, along with each of these principals in my life, and had
thought of another Geelhood, in another kind of transition.
On
this Pearl Harbor Day I had though of the first of the Geelhood’s (sic) in my generation who made the
ultimate transition this past week—Stewart Geelhood (see 05-DEC-A-3.) I had got to know Stewart and Florence well during their granddaughter Bonnie’s
aspirations toward medicine, her first experience abroad which I had arranged in
Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland,
her Loma Linda graduation, and now as a married family medicine practitioner in
Washington State
with her parents moving from that state to be nearby neighbors in Northern Virginia.
Her grandfather Stewart was the oldest son of my Dad’s oldest brother
and had been encouraged into staying in school during the depression and had
been talked into going to Calvin
College by my Dad, and
remained a supporter of that institution as well as former president of KVP and
president of the Roundtable. I saw Florence and Stewart last
at David Griffioen’s funeral this April and they were looking well, even at the
age of 88. But his fall and fractures of hip and wrist led to pneumonia after
their repair and a rapid death at Spectrum Hospital in Grand Rapids, the same
institution where I was born and became the much later inaugural visiting
professor of the MSU program in the same historically preserved Grand
River-front Berkey and Gay furniture company building in which my father had
the first position of his career-long life in the furniture business. So, the times, they are achangin’, and we
change with it.
From
my recent push to complete papers in the ELDP courses I will collect two quotes
apropos life changes:
“In
times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves
beautifully equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.”
Eric Hoffer, 1972
“All things are possible once enough human
beings realize that everything is at stake.”
Norman Cousins
The
mass mobilization of the whole world last happened for the WW II that got
started in a big way on the occasion of that attack upon us on December 7 over
six decades ago, and a parallel attack with almost identical loss of life now
four years plus a month ago. I am doing
what ever transformational learning I can, not just in my thesis and course
work, but also in life writ large, in order to “inherit the future” rather than
be beautifully equipped for an extinct past, and I am looking forward to what
was phrased to me in the phone call at ten o’clock last night “show me
something exciting!”