Grandma Gene (Geneva Winn) was born on March 18th, 1911. She was a wonderful Grandma who loved her grandkids to a fault. She was also quite a character. For years she had told everyone that her birthday was on March 17th but when my sister Elizabeth arrived on March 18th in 1973, Grandma came clean and fessed up to the deception, explaining that she had claimed St. Patrick's Day as her birthday because she always wanted to be Irish but when Elizabeth was born on the 18th (Grandma's true birthdate) she now had something more special to celebrate.
Mom was furious for weeks after Grandma's scandalous admission, most likely from being embarrassed by the realization she had grown up 'living a lie' but to this day it is one of our favorite stories to tell.
I have very fond memories of Grandma Gene. I can still smell the scent of ivory soap on her neck as she rocked me to sleep in the living room of our home in Lehi. She loved to sing and could tell stories in such a way that you would find yourself drawn into believing you were actually there as she was telling them.
Grandma was quite clairvoyant and had come up with a number of ideas through the years. Earlier in her life she had worked as a hairdresser and had come up with her own recipe for permanent waves which she sold to a stranger. At about the same time a salesman came knocking on her door trying to sell her some new-fangled hair curlers. She suggested that hair would dry faster if the curlers had holes in them and shortly afterwards an innovative advanced curler started showing up everywhere with - you guessed it - holes to help your hair dry faster! Grandma never got the credit (or the money) she deserved but they were great stories to tell.
Decades later, while staying with us in Houston, Grandma Gene once again came up with a fascinating new idea (well new to me anyway) I was about eight years old then and very aware of two of her favorite things: watching General Hospital on the TV and drinking Pepsi.
She also loved to iron clothes and would delicately press and fold each article of clothing while watching her favorite show with a tall cold bottle of Pepsi resting on the end of the ironing board. I asked her every day for a taste of her coveted beverage and she would graciously let me sneak a sip – always making me promise not to tell my mother.
During this time, Grandma started falling mentally ill and seemed to have trouble with her memory. She became somewhat obsessed with recording her stories and history on a black cassette recorder. I would listen to her for what seemed hours as she spoke into that magic black box and then play the recordings back to make sure she had remembered to say everything she wanted to record.
One evening, we were all enjoying dinner around the dinner table when Grandma struck up a conversation with Dad. She explained to him how frustrated she would get when she would run out of Pepsi while ironing the clothes and watching "General Hospital" and had come up with an idea how she could record her program while she went to the store to buy more Pepsi and be able to pick up where she left off when she returned so she wouldn't miss anything.
She compared the magical box she had imagined to her black cassette recorder. In her mind she could already see how she would be able to set a timer to record her beloved soap opera and then play, rewind or fast forward it once she returned from the grocery store with a six pack carton of Pepsi in hand. She had even thought of the added benefit of skipping commercials! I remember feeling transformed as I watched her close her eyes and describe this yet-to-be developed device. The "tapes" would look and behave like her cassette tapes, only larger, and could record an entire program from the TV. She held up her hands to give dad an idea of how big these tapes would be – about the same size as what would become known as VHS just a year later.
I never forgot that experience. And you can imagine my delightful surprise when I saw a VCR for the very first time just a few years after her conversation at our dinner table. By 1983 Grandma’s health and memory had deteriorated significantly and she passed away in June of that year.
Now, fast forward twenty years.
By 2003 I had married my sweetheart Allison and we found ourselves in Stockton, California raising our five young children. I was the Webelos leader for a small troop of ten year old scouts at the time and had enjoyed beekeeping for a number of years. And that year was a great year to be a beekeeper. I had two very successful colonies and the word got out that I knew a thing or two about raising bees so I had been invited to a few elementary school classes to show the kids a thing or two about these amazing tiny creatures.
It was a lot of fun. I would bring in some of the equipment as well as some bees for show-and-tell. The kids would take turns trying on the white coveralls, veil and gloves. I put dry ice and a little water in a smoker to show them how it worked. I would let a handful of drones (male bees) crawl on the forearms of the bravest students (usually girls) and fascinated them all as they watched new bees emerging from the comb cells before their eyes.
I became quite popular and looked forward to sharing what I had learned with the kids. Over time I wanted to perfect my school presentation, so I came up with an idea to take a log about twenty inches in length and eight inches in diameter, slice a small part of its face off and carve out the middle to create a space for bees to live. I planned to cover the face with a sheet of plexiglass so the students would be able to see what bee hives might look like inside of trees in the wild.
It was a fun idea but never went anywhere for one reason or another.
Later that fall it was time to extract the honey from my hives. I had recently purchased some extraction equipment from a family whose father had been a beekeeper but passed away. I was pretty excited about the whole thing and ended up extracting just over eleven gallons of honey in a single day. It was a mess! I made the mistake of extracting in our kitchen and by the time I was through, honey was everywhere. The floor was sticky and droplets of honey had even found their way to the upper kitchen cabinet doors. While it was very satisfying stacking 188 pints of honey up against the kitchen wall, my excitement and enthusiasm quickly changed to frustration and disappointment as I faced the disaster that came afterwards - spending hours cleaning the kitchen.
Allison was not very happy and vowed never to allow me to do anything with honey inside the house ever again. But time has softened her up a bit and we reflect back on that day with a lot more humor and appreciation now.
The week following my misadventure I was out mowing the back lawn. I was still a little annoyed from my experience and my mind wandered back and forth as I contemplated how I might be able to improve the extraction process in the future. As I thought about one concept or another, I would glance back and forth between my now empty bee boxes and the discarded log I had attempted to carve out lying horizontally in our garden.
We had just wrapped up our Webelos pinewood derby at about the same time and I started to wonder what it would take to make a beehive that could roll down a track, be automatically disassembled, extracted, and then reassembled without me ever having to touch it during the process.
I came up with what I thought were a few clever ideas, jotted them down on a scratchpad, hid them away in a filing cabinet and moved on.
Then, in an ogenblik it was 2012.
There wasn't anything too spectacular about that year. Allison and I were enjoying a simple life raising our kids in a quiet little cow town called Mona in Juab County, Utah - "Home of majestic Nebo Mountain". We were fortunate enough to build a beautiful farm home right in front of it. And yes - it is truly majestic!
Like I said, I am no Saint but I do have my moments. I confess that I don't pray enough (at least not in the traditional sense) but I have always been grateful for the blessings I have received and am completely aware of who they come from.
Prayer is such a fascinating concept. A lot of people will tell you that the answers to their prayers come in some form of warm feeling they get. Or maybe a seemingly coincidental event with a stranger that points them in the right direction or helps them through a hard time. Others hear a voice. That would be me. For the most part I hear the voice.
And sometime half way through 2012 we had a very interesting conversation.
One particular evening I was pondering over some of those blessings my family had been the recipients of and I decided that it was probably a good idea to check in and thank Heavenly Father for everything He had been doing for us lately. So, right before I hopped into bed I took a moment to kneel down and express a little gratitude. There wasn't much to it. I didn't have anything specifically to ask for and nothing was weighing heavily on my mind at the time.Generally, I don't speak out loud when it comes to saying personal bedtime prayers and this time was no different. I addressed Heavenly Father in my mind and just as I started to thank Him for all the things he had given me and my family I was interrupted by the voice:
"What are you doing about the beehive?" he asked.
I was caught off guard by this question. I paused for a moment and found myself a little annoyed that I had been interrupted. "Nothing" I replied. After all, it had been nine years since I had come up with the idea and I figured that if it was worth doing someone else would have already done it. I continued my prayer uninterrupted, said "amen" and hopped back into bed.
For about two weeks afterwards, each night I would kneel at the side of my bed and almost immediately would be interrupted: "What are you doing about the beehive?" To be honest I got a little frustrated. In nine years I hadn't given the beehive idea more than a passing thought and now I couldn't even start my prayers without being hounded about it. It got to the point that as I knelt down, I would literally ask this invisible companion of mine "Can I just tell you 'no' now so I can get on with my prayers?"
On the last night of this single-phrase conversation, as usual, I ended my prayer and climbed into bed. I was wide awake and started thinking of Grandma Gene. I thought about how mesmerized I had been listening to her describe in detail the magical box she saw so vividly in her own mind those many years ago. I thought about missed opportunities. Then I thought: "Maybe I should do something about the beehive"
So I climbed back out of bed, knelt down, and said "Heavenly Father, I know what I know. I can build the beehive. But that's about all I can do. I'll do it. But I'll need your help with the rest." - not knowing at the time what exactly the 'rest' was.
I returned to bed and no sooner had my head hit my pillow, I heard the voice again: "You need to do the beehive".