Twenty Years

The Grandkids with Nana and Papa, Bountiful, Utah, 1986

Perhaps you all will forgive a very brief post today.  This is shaping up to be a very busy week.  In addition to having 55 midterms to grade, I agreed to substitute for seminary on Wednesday and Friday and the following Monday.  So I am planning on spending the day doing my reading for Seminary and trying to plan out my lesson for Wednesday on Helaman 1-2.  To be honest, even though it will be busy, it is wonderful to be able to be of service in the Church.  I'm sure that I have often overlooked the great blessing that it is to serve in the Kingdom of God, but I am convinced that the blessings are far greater to those who serve than to those they are privileged to serve.

Nana and Papa Haycock with Elder and Sister Hinckley and a very tall man, circa 1957

This week is a special anniversary for me.  Twenty years ago this Tuesday, I heard my dad showering extra early in the morning.  When I woke up an hour and a half later, I found that my dad had left home to rush to Salt Lake to be with my Mom at the LDS Hospital where my Papa Haycock had passed away at the age of 77.  I don't envy my sisters Stephanie and Jeni, who had the difficult assignment of informing their three younger siblings that our Papa had died.  But despite the difficulty of the assignment, they performed it.

I write about my Papa a lot and I'm sure that this is bizarre for at least a few readers of this blog.  But as his namesake (my middle name is David, which was his first name), I've always felt a special kinship to him.  He was as kind and gentle a man as I have ever known.  He was a natural story teller and could keep a room's rapt attention for hours while he spoke.  Aside from the somewhat dubious stories of trudging for miles through large drifts of snow to get to school, the most common subjects of his stories were the Prophets and Apostles that he served with, each story intended to deepen the faith of those who heard it.

It's been twenty years since I was able to sit in a room and listen to him tell stories and it will likely be a great while yet before I am so privileged again, but I anxiously await the time when I'll again be able to sit on the floor and listen to him speak.  Perhaps he didn't know how much those stories and those testimonies influenced his young grandson, but I've never been the same since.  Like him, I enjoy telling a good story; and my favorite subject is the Prophets I've come to know through my research and study.  Perhaps, in this small way, I've followed in some of the biggest footsteps ever left by a man who was only 5'6".  I miss him.

Brett