Christmas 2024
Merry Christmas
and Happy New Year!
Uni took the picture above at Thanksgiving this year. Our Thanksgiving
was celebrated with Fred and Uni in Riverside. In our picture, David and Julia
Zuckerman are standing, Uni and Fred Clarke are on the floor trying to get Oso
to look at the camera. On the couch we have Craig and Esther Kinzer sitting
next to Sylvia and Wil Clarke with Katie (or Catherine the Great) lying on
Oso’s bed. Our whole family was together! Our dogs even made it, but on account
of their consideration, the cat and rats stayed at their respective homes. Our
kids made the food including dessert. They asked us to bring the drinks. Thank
you, kids, for your consideration for the old folks!
A website called NaNoWriMo tends to build a fire under me to
keep writing, even when it’s inconvenient. NaNoWriMo is short for National
Novel Writers’ Month = November, and any genre (not just novels) is grist for
their mill. It helped me get all but the last chapter or two of my book about
our experience in Tanzania (1967-1971) written. It is in memoir form. I should
really say our book because Sylvia has put a lot of time into it, too. I
hope that before next year at this time, we will have the printed book in hand.
You may remember that there was an eclipse of the sun back
in August, 2017. I was still recovering from West Nile Virus, and that
prevented me from traveling to see it. So we laid plans to see the eclipse this
year (April 2024), the only other total eclipse visible from the U.S. until
2044 (at which time I would be 102 years old, if I lived that long.) Julia, who
works at Cal. Tech., figured out that Torreon, Mexico, would have the best
possible chance of clear skies. So we flew there in April. We rented a car that
was supposed to seat six people. Herz cheated us and gave us an SUV that only
seated five. There were six people in our group: Julia, David, Fred, Uni,
Sylvia and I. Almost everybody on our plane was going to Torreon, Mexico, to
see the eclipse, so there were no other cars in the area from any rental company.
Uni volunteered to sit in the back facing backward. Thank you, Uni! The skies
were cloudy in Torreon, so we drove for over an hour to Durango and had a
wonderful view of the eclipse. Watching the total eclipse gave me an amazing,
unexpected emotional high. We are grateful to our children for making this
possible.
We travelled east again this summer. My cousin Fred’s wife
passed away around Thanksgiving last year, and my primary goal for the trip was
to attend her funeral in June. (Because the ground freezes in northern Michigan
during the winter, they delayed the funeral
until June.) An
advantage of attending funerals is that it is usually accompanied by a family
reunion. It is a foretaste of the grand family reunion we will have when Christ
comes. I’m counting on you to attend that one with me! Thank You, Jesus!
On Lincoln Highway in Wyoming
A couple years ago two young people phoned me from Ontario,
Canada, They had done some research and wanted to write a historical novel
about my mother, Esther. I asked them how much they knew about her, and Nolan
sent me a document close to 50 pages long of stuff they had found on line! I
was stunned. We spent a few weeks on and off, talking on the phone about her,
and I tried to give them an idea of the human side of her life. So I set
another goal to stop and see these two, Nolan and Sarah.
I had a frustrating time trying to get a time when we could
all three meet. Nolan and Sarah live about 150 miles apart. While I was in
Michigan and Ohio, I just couldn’t get it to work and couldn’t get hold of
Nolan by phone, I finally prayed to the Lord to have Nolan phone me. That was
about 10:00 one night when Sylvia and I were sleeping in the bed of our pickup.
The Lord usually doesn’t answer me with such alacrity. But 2:00 a.m. my cell
phone rang, and Nolan promised to make all the arrangements. I was stunned that
God had chosen to answer my petition so soon! After the phone call, I lay back
and laughed just like Abraham and his wife laughed when God promised to give
them their son, Isaac. It is an astounding event when the almighty God chooses
to answer you personally. We had a tremendous get together the next Sabbath in
St. Thomas, Ontario. We were delighted to meet both of their families. Now I’m
eagerly awaiting the fictional story of my mother’s life from their computers!
We had originally planned to come
home via Washington State and see Sylvia’s brother Judson. However, a sequence
of events brought us home pretty much along I-40, which doesn’t go anywhere
within half a country from them. So in August we outlined a detailed plan that
would take us north to Washington to see Judson and a number of our other
family members and friends.
At Pumpkin
Rock near home
Sylvia and I are now both
octogenarians, so the morning we left home, I said to the Lord, “You know,
Lord, I haven’t really talked to You about our trip. Please give us a safe trip, and if You think we shouldn’t go, please
let us know, and we’ll turn around and come home.” The temperature was well
above 105º (40°C), but we made good time. We were driving our car this time, and
it has a better A/C, than the pickup. At 168 miles (270 km) from home along US
395, we stopped at a rest area.
Before
taking off from there, I pulled out a map and studied it a bit. My cell phone
rang, and my ENT (otolaryngologist) said, “I just got your culture back, and
you have a staph infection. Find the nearest hospital and go to the emergency room
and get treatment.” He was sure they would admit me. Not wanting to be in the
hospital out there in the desert—if there were one to by found—I realized that
the Lord was telling me to turn around. At about 9:00 p.m. I pulled into the
Riverside Community Hospital. They indicated they wanted to keep me there.
However, by about 2:00 a.m., they sent me home with a prescription. A couple
weeks later, my ENT did surgery on my sinuses, and the staph has disappeared.
Thank You, Lord, for taking a personal interest in my well-being and Dr. de
Jager for following up on my condition.
One of the major reasons for going to Washington
State was to see my cousin Eugene. He was in a precarious condition health-wise,
and I really wanted to see him again. However, that was not to be. He passed
away a couple months later. If I had driven north, I would have probably seen
him, but there may have been two funerals instead of just his. My brother,
Elwood, helped me financially to fly up to Eugene’s funeral.
Sylvia is celebrating her retirement by taking voice lessons
from a voice teacher she found in Loma Linda, CA. She has sung in choirs on and
off ever since before we were married and got a lot of training there. However,
she never had the opportunity to take personal voice lessons, before. She is
really enjoying the training. She has performed in a couple concerts recently
including singing “The Holy City”, a musical ballad composed in 1892 by Michael
Maybrick (alias Stephen Adams) and text by Frederic Weatherly. Needless to say,
I’m mighty proud of her! This season she has laid some plans to take groups
singing carols in the neighborhood especially for people who are shut-ins.
You’re welcome to come and join her.
“The Inlandia Institute is a lively center of literary
activity serving the 29,000 sq. mile inland Southern California Region”. Sylvia
and I have benefited and been benefitted by the Institute. I have been an
Inlandia Writing Workshop leader for four years now. I started doing this after
the untimely death of Ms. Celena Bumpus, who was our leader for years before
she passed away at the beginning of 2021. I have neither the creativity nor the
wide knowledge she had. But our group is producing excellent material. Both
Sylvia and I enjoy meeting with our group, Celena’s Scribes, and with Rose
Mongé’s Memoir Writing Group. Rose spends a lot of time preparing for her
group. She even publishes an annual writing anthology. Both Sylvia and I
contributed some articles to what Rose calls Writing Warriors: Time Passages
this year. Sylvia also has seven pages and I have six pages in the 2023
anthology, Writing From Inlandia, published last month. Besides my
Tanzania memoir that I am finishing up, I also have a devotional blog I call “Experiencing
a Bible Verse,” and I encourage you to check it out at https://wils-thoughts.blogspot.com/ I have not published as many blogs this year
as previous years. Let’s just attribute that to my slowing down as the years go
by.
We wish you a blessed and merry Christmas this year and pray
for a powerful and prayerful 2025. It appears to us that things may be winding
up for the spectacular coming of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We can rejoice
to meet Him in person.
Love,
Wil
& Sylvia Clarke
5547 Wentworth Dr.
Riverside, CA 92505
Wil’s cell: 951-231-5402
E-mail: wil.clarke@gmail.com
Erase our home phone if you have it
