7 A final word

My wife, when she was growing up in southern California, used to travel by car with her parents and brother to visit relatives in northern Utah. This was in an era before cars had air conditioning, and in summertime you had to travel across those vast deserts at night. It was also before freeways spanned the distance, and you were limited to a lane of traffic going in each direction, and had to wait behind trucks crawling up hills and mountains, and had to drive through every dinky little town along the way, and hoped there was no road construction.

She quickly learned that the 13-or-more-hour trip seemed to go quicker if she slept along the way. The habit stuck. To this day, she can fall asleep on a road trip as short as the 17-mile ride from our house to where some of our children and grandchildren live.

She also has little sense of direction when she is in unfamiliar territory. That could be a function of being asleep along the journey. On our first trip to California after we became engaged, I awoke her as we dropped down into the Los Angeles Basin and asked her which way to San Gabriel, where her parents lived. I had never been there before, but I quickly sensed that she had sent me in an entirely wrong direction.

Had she been Sacagawea, the Shoshone Indian guide who led Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Ocean, they might well have ended up in Nova Scotia or perhaps Mexico.

Today I find these traits endearing. Sure, she has missed a lot of country in the cross-country road trips our family has taken. She would surely agree with the sentiment expressed by one of our sons-in-law after a road trip to Nauvoo, "There sure is a lot of road in this road trip." I merely mention these twin traits—her talent for sleeping and her ability to get thoroughly lost—as context for the following tribute I wrote this past Valentine's Day. I repeat it here as a Mother's Day wish to all you mothers who don't get enough sleep anyway and who realize that a GPS unit, especially if your husband is operating it, can get you from here to there.

I've journeyed a bit down the road of life, and I want all of you children and grandchildren to know that one could not have a better traveling companion than your mom and grandmother.

She may fall asleep along the way. She may send you down the wrong road—no, wait, that's just when she's with you in a literal car. In the metaphorical journey down life's highway, she never steers you wrong, and she's fiercely vigilant when it comes to those she loves. And her heart is a very big and generous and inclusive one. She just wants every chair filled, no one to miss the train—whatever metaphor you wish to use—so that everyone arrives safely at home at the end of life's journey, secure in the arms and love of our Heavenly Parents.

And that's my Mother's Day tribute to her and wish to all of you.