Jeff

As promised, if a few days late...we had a busy weekend.

Jeff's entry into our family circle represented the largest gap from a previous sibling...but he was not a surprise.  I remember Mom saying in later years that whenever our family gathered before Jeff was born, it felt like someone was missing.  When Jeff came, it felt complete.

Jeff was the one who most inherited Mom's "Indian in the woodpile" looks...in summers his tan was so dark.  One summer time when Jeanne and I were in our first student branch Mom, Dad, and Jeff came to attend our ward with us.  At the time, the Church had a program where disadvantaged Native American children, with their parents' approval, could live with LDS families off the reservation, where the opportunities for education and work would be  much greater.  It was called the "Lamanite Placement Program", and I knew several kids growing up who benefited from it.  Well, the next week several of our friends approached us to ask about the handsome young Native American whom my parents were boarding.  Jeanne and I got quite a laugh over that.

Jeff  was nine years younger than me, six younger than Dave, so the groups of kids we ran around with were a little too old for him, and there weren't many kids in our neighborhood his age.  We did have one family who occupied the house next to ours for a few years, the Englebretsens, who had two sons around Jeff's age: Shell, who was a little older, and Mark, who was a little younger. Jeff's easygoing friendliness made it easy for him to attract friends though, so there were often kids from school populating our house.  Later he would become close friends with Johnny Maestas, a full-blooded Native American from a few houses to the north whose father, a great man, became our Bishop while I was on my mission.  I wrote some time ago about an experience forever linking my father and Johnny (see April 13, 2016 post), and Bishop Maestas was a great friend to Dad.

Because he was nine years younger, our games with each other were a little different.  One of our favorites was "stairway basketball", where we set a plastic bucket at the top of the stairway, and one of us would take a Nerf ball, and from the bottom of the stairway try to get past the other enough to stuff it in the bucket...very physical, but lots of fun.

We also played a modified whiffle-ball  baseball where there were just three bases, home, 1st, and 2nd. If you hit the ball hard enough to make it around all three bases, well and good; but if you got stuck on 1st or 2nd, the pitcher-fielder would toss the ball a little bit in the air, enough to tempt you to try to advance, but not enough you actually could.  It required great skill and strategy, and Jeff beat me virtually every time.

The summer after I got back from my mission, Dave and I got the crazy idea we could coach a little league team.  Jeff's team was in need of a coach, so we volunteered.  I don't think we were the worst team in the city...we actually had some pretty talented players, Jeff among them...but I am pretty sure we had two of the most clueless coaches.  Fortunately kids are pretty forgiving...not so much their parents.

When he was older, Jeff became a great help to me in many ways.  When Jeanne and I moved from Virginia back to Provo for the summer, before determining where we would go to law school, we decided to do the move ourselves, for which we would be paid by the Army what they would have paid the movers.  Jeff agreed to come out and help me drive the full-sized Ryder moving van from Virginia to Utah...good thing, because I knew nothing about such things as backing up a tractor trailer,and he was quite comfortable with it.  

Later still, he would become my mentor as he became a Bishop before I did, and later became a counselor in a stake presidency before me...what an example.

How was I so lucky to have four such gifted, fun, and uplifting siblings??