Coming soon--Newsletter 2008

Just kidding . . .
this photo will have to suffice.

Christmas-ish 2006

You may have noticed that we’re not good at deadlines. Habitually, the Christmas letter gets away from us and we send it in March or so, therefore (and, yes, not for the first time) we must encapsulate two years of Magleby life. Since there is not an incomplete letter in a file somewhere, we’ll hurry through 2005 so you’ll be better equipped to understand 2006.
2005 -- The Year of Adventure
The first big item of business for the year was Andy’s application to BYU. It climaxed in a harrowing snowstorm drive on the last hour of the last day to deliver the final version. We waited and watched for official notification. When the letter arrived, Rob was the first to the mailbox (as is his habit). He pinched the letter, and called Berkeley and described the size and thickness of the envelope to the one person he knew would know what an acceptance letter looked like. Having verified that it was good news, Rob ferreted it off to the Faulconer’s, who helped him conjure up some believable University letterhead and compose a very empathetic rejection letter, which he placed in the mailbox. Andy was not duped, but had to admit it was an elegantly executed ruse. Rob revealed his satirical forgery in the third paragraph when he cited Andy’s messy bedroom as the deciding factor in the University’s rejection of his application. Andy missed his Provo High graduation exercises as we soon left for a semester abroad; the ersatz ceremony we held for him in London deserves no mention at all.
Berkeley had only just recently forgiven us for leaving her home with her beloved pets in 2004, but happily, she was able to go with us in ‘05 because cousin Tyler was willing to shepherd her flocks. Living in the BYU London Centrewith the Barton’s and the Ostraff’s for four months was an exciting proposition. It was glorious to have our own little flat within a stone’s throw of Kensington Palace, three Tube stations and Portobello Road.Julie and I didn’t even try the double bed—we gave it to Rob and slumbered soundly on the sitting-room floor. Andy and Berkeley bunked in the student dorms. Instead of grubbing for food in supermarkets, delectable hot meals were provided by Tony and Tina Wilcox, the Centre’s resident directors. On their day off, we procured exquisite fruits and breads at the Borough Market, Onken “Summer” yoghurt, chocolate Hob-Nobs, and discounted ethnic cuisines at closing time in Camden Town. Don’t believe the tired, inaccurate aspersions about English food—it is a glorious amalgam of the world’s best cuisines.

As Harry Potter fans all, we felt fortunate to have secured our copies of The Half-Blood Prince from the tiny neighborhood bookseller (where there would be no midnight throng of customers), freeing us to attend the release-night festivities with the rest of London at the Waterstone’s flagship bookstore at 311 Oxford Street. As we were leaving for Berlin and Prague only a day later, we had planned to start our reading marathon at midnight the very second we got our hands on the book (Julie read aloud for 20 hours with only one break), but just as we turned to leave we encountered the most charming group of witches, all students in our program. These radiant girls caused a media frenzy, for as Julie got them to pose for a few pictures near the countdown clock, a crowd of tabloid photographers clamored behind her to get their own shots of our beautiful students. Their arrival en masse upstaged the celebrities in attendance. We were proud and concerned.

We have so many happy memories of our 120 days at the Centre in London and beyond: attending the Hyde Park Ward, the pungent smell of the Paris Bagnolet ETAP hotel, or arriving at Stonehenge at 4:30 AM in time for an amazing sunrise over the heel stone two days before the summer solstice. The Henry Moore sculptures at Perry Green, situated in his studios and in the fields of grazing sheep were seen to great advantage,as were Dale Chihuly’s Venetian glass installations at Kew Gardens. Sometimes we were rendered speechless by the intensity of the optical experience: a country walk through a field of Chinese red poppies that stretched to the horizon, or the radiating symmetry of the gravestones at the American Cemetery near Cambridge. We encountered the sublime as we approached the colossal chalk horses on West Country hillsides, the Mediterranean sunsets on the beach in Cyprus, or the view from the Astronomy Tower of the National Library in Prague. Before we knew it, and far too quickly, it was time to head back to the mountains that defy being taken for granted.(This photo was taken from my car as I drove home the other night--every night the sunset here is stunning.)

On his first day at BYU, Andy was hired to answer questions at the Info Desk in the Wilkinson Center (the BYU student union building). He approached this role with great confidence despite the fact that he knew virtually nothing about the location of any campus institutions. He proved to be a quick study so he was only dispensing incorrect information for the first month or so. Berkeley entered her junior year taking mostly English classes as she prepared for missionary service. During Rob’s senior year at Provo High he completed his Eagle Scout requirements and survived living alone with his parents by spending most of his time in the company of his outstanding gaggle of friends. The year ended with several family retreats to Midway, the first of which included a visit from my esteemed advisor at Ohio State, Myroslava Mudrak, and the second potentially constituted our last Christmas all together with the kids. We have many fond memories of the little village of Midway.

2006 -- The Year of Change
The New Year brought Rob’s application to BYU and Julie’s transition at Wasatch Elementary School from the part-time computer lab instructor to the full-time lead secretary.It is a hectic wonderful job that she was born to do. Berkeley celebrated her 21st birthday with the extended Magleby adult clan on a cruise while all-the-time wondering if Rob might be home tampering with her anticipated letter from 50 East North Temple Street, Salt Lake City. Instead, they arrived home to sobering news: Julie’s dad, Lee Knell, had just suffered his third, massive stroke. We felt so blessed that Julie was home in time to experience her father’s final day. For twenty-four sacred hours we were gathered around him in the hospital, singing hymns and recounting his teachings and his amazing legacy. We miss him, yet we know he is joyfully engaged in things that faithful Elders continue to do. It is comforting to imagine him laboring with Hal, all the while keeping an eye on his posterity. Another great soul awaits us in Paradise.

Springtime came and brought another life-changing event, and this time Julie got to the mailbox first. Mormon families sometimes afford the opening of a missionary assignment a certain amount of ceremony, but apparently not my children. Julie hid the letter to keep Rob at bay, but he deduced its hiding place and hastily tore it open and announced to Berkeley (over the phone, while she was at work) that Hamburg, Germany (currently in Dortmund) would be her home for the next year and a half. Berkeley left for Germany on the 25th of July and she couldn’t be happier. Just after we got her safely ensconced in the MTC for 2 months of intense German language training yet another letter came, this time for Andy. We resolved to attempt some semblance of ceremony by entrusting the envelope to our friend, Luke Heperi. Andy’s plan was to have Luke open the letter and in reading it, assume the accent of the destination country, but when the moment came, the significance and Spirit of the occasion left him speechless. After a moment he was able to utter, “Bucharest, Romania.” Andy left on August 30th and he will be there for two years.
Rob graduated with high honors (not those cords of shame Berkeley dragged around) from Provo High. He celebrated by procuring a genuine Indiana Jones hat while at Disneyland(the boys' first ever visit; my first time since the Bicentennial in 1976) with the Taylor’sand the Kershisnik’s. Tom T. and Suzanne K. are hyper-strategic Disneyland navigators and their spouses follow pell-mell, passive/aggressive, at a half-gallop to keep up. Our family, Disneyland novices, watched the whole simulacral culture in awe. We loved the g-forces and smooth banks of the rollercoaster in the former parking lot. We loved the miniature landscaping inside Monstro’s gaping jaws. We loved it all. We have had so many great adventures via the luxury of Taylor’s twelve-passenger van.

The end of the summer brought an extended family reunion in the cities of St. George (red rock desert terrain) and New Harmony (30 minutes away in a shady mountain valley) where we renewed our great esteem for the descendents of James Green and Lydia Thornton Knell and memorialized both Lee and Aunt Iva. Julie created a complicated name-tag system encoded to indicate your branch of the clan as well as your generation; it was a real conversation starter. I’m not kidding. After the barbeque/potluck, when Julie got up to conduct the program, her front tooth leapt from her mouth into the audience. She was momentarily distraught but kept her poise and emceed a wonderful program. It is impossible to describe the admiration we have for these good people.

Rob currently resides at Bennion Hall at BYU. No word on first semester grades yet. He expects to leave on his mission after winter semester, and his call will probably come in February or March. Can you, gentle reader, fathom how much our lives have changed since last we wrote? We’re coming up on twenty-five years of marriage and are quite suddenly empty-nesters. As these transitions have been so meaningful for us, we claim now the indulgence of expressing how much we love these good and noble children of ours. These events are the fulfillment of some of our most profound ambitions for them, and we sense that they know where much is given much is required. We have been blessed beyond measure.

The fall brought a trip back home to Ohio. Berkeley’s darling, lifelong-friend Jenny Frost got married in the most beautiful week of the Ohio year and Scott and Pam, her parents and our dear friends, arranged for us to experience the extraordinary, elegant spectacle in the warm autumn color. We visited beloved friends, missed others, retraced by memory our old newspaper routes, and whetted our desire to return.
This holiday season brings us to the end of what have been for us two eventful years. Julie and I compose this letter with competing purposes in mind. I imagine our posterity reading it as an essentialization of our lives, but in reality, this letter is an inadequate family history because we leave out so many important bits for the sake of brevity(!) or propriety (the stories I could tell about some of Rob’s teachers. . .) and because Julie reads over my shoulder and says, “That’s boring.” Thus, events that I believe generations hence will deem newsworthy are exorcized because of our (mostly Julie’s) concern for your time and attention span. We love to hear of YOUR lives, by any vehicle, at any length. We rejoice that some of you are close by and, alternately, that many of you hold down the fort in cherished places where we have been. We are honored to call you friends or kin, or both. We pray for Heaven’s best blessings to attend you in the coming year. We conclude with two samples from the best moment in our week—Monday mornings at about 5:30 -- when our inboxes receive priceless messages: the week’s news from two of God’s choicest missionaries pecked out in an internet café eight or nine time-zones away. Everybody loves getting mail, but we had not anticipated the degree of joy we would derive from reading, re-reading and then reading-between-the-lines of these faith-filled missives. You, too, are welcome to “listen in” on our website created for this purpose. Go to www.magleby.com and click on the missionary link.

Andy wrote from the MTC: (Missionary Training Center, right near BYU where they both went for the aforementioned intense language training for 2 months.)Nothing really happened this week except that Elder M. Russell Ballard came yesterday and gave us a blessing.
OH . . .YEEAAAAH! We never know who the speaker is until about 5 minutes before we start. There are always rumors that an apostle will speak so you just don’t get your hopes up. Then the man who tells elders off for not having their jackets on couldn’t keep a secret. He was just smiling like he knew something we didn’t, so it was pretty obvious someone good was here. It was announced, there was a quick intro, and his wife gave a 5-minute testimony about missionary work (it was good, but when we only get an hour for the devotional I was glad she cut it short). He specifically did not thank the choir for the musical number and he was right not to. (Bunch of pretentious . . .) He then gave a fantastic talk about, well, everything. I can’t think of anything that wasn’t covered or wouldn’t tie in and I wrote more notes than in my whole life. The Spirit was strong throughout the meeting (except when the choir sang) but at the close of his talk he told of an experience where he blessed the earth against the forces of nature, then he went on to give us an Apostolic blessing. You know when Sauron blows up in the first movie of The Lord of the Rings at the very beginning? That is what it was like—we were on the front row, and when he said those words, a physical wave came forth from him. It was amazing.

And from Berkeley:When we biked out to Bergen we assumed from the map that it would only take us an hour. Two hours later (after riding through several beautiful forests and towns) we made it to Bergen. It was very draining but we figured we could take a train back to Celle. After our appointment we found that there was no train going to Celle. As we rode home it started pouring rain. Normally I love rain but this rain made it difficult to bike and to see. I prayed for strength. Now, I'm not an expert on how the Spirit works and I don’t know if He ever uses Simpson's quotes. Perhaps He does when the hearer is not well-versed enough for Him to use an appropriate scripture. Either way I was happy for the following memory. It was the time when police chief Wiggam got his tie caught in the hot-dog roller at the Quick-E-Mart. As he was steadily pulled into the machine he said, "Uh oh, this is gonna get worse before it gets better." And then the footage cuts. I laughed and laughed. I could scarcely bike for laughing. And then the wind started to blow. As hard as the wind blew and the rain fell I was blessed with strength and with laughter.
Words to live by. May we all remember to pray and then notice when we’re blessed with strength and laughter.

Much love from,
Mark and Julie et al

Did you notice? Not one mention of the pets. What gives? Remember Julie’s critical eye? “Boring!” Okay, no pet stories. Except this one: Frances the Ferret died in August. Julie found her and, despite their differences, displayed genuine sympathy. After I had prepared Frances for burial, I went back to the cage to check on Charlotte (the surviving ferret, formerly known as “the nice ferret” or “the cute ferret”). I carried Charlotte with me as I broke the news to the boys, then asked Julie if there was anything she wanted to say to Charlotte. She looked pensive for a moment and then said, “Hello little ferret (she pretends not to know their names). I am sorry that your companion died, but I hope you will die soon, too.” I sensed this zinger was coming a split second before she uttered it, but was not able to cover Charlotte’s ears in time. I notified Berkeley, but I am afraid she thought it was just another “your pet died this week” prank.