Season's Greetings                   Christmas 2019  
 

      Honestly, didn’t all of us know back in 2016 that we would all one day be in this Trump Impeachment morass? 

      The biggest news in our family this year is that my daughter, Holly, and her husband, Dave, found out they were pregnant at the end of 2018, where I was surprised by Holly showing me and, later, my Mother a sonogram photo and a T-shirt explaining I was going to be a Grandpa for the 3rd time!   Holly planned and still taught her 15 dance classes up until mid-June when both of her New Jersey studios held their recitals.  Holly was 7 1/2 months pregnant by then!

Dave is still the Chef for “Cuisine at St. Eve’s” and is still working many chef hours, as usual. Holly and Dave brought into the world their baby girl named Melanie Jane Garb, in which the names hold great significance and rolls off the tongue quite well.   “Melanie” is from Holly’s late Aunt Melanie (her mother’s baby sister) and “Jane” is from Dave’s mother.  Melanie was born at 5:50 p.m., EDT on July 30^th and was 7 lbs. 3 oz. and 21.9 inches long.   They could not be more enamored by this bundle of joy!  “Baby G” has quite the personality, but seeing who her parents are, she was never destined to be the shy type.  Holly will be coming home this Christmas and I will finally get to meet Melanie.          

      My son, Johnathan, has been working the past two years at CPSI in Everett, WA. He was promoted this summer and is now the Director of Account and Finance. He is also working on getting Ardent Wealth Advisors up and running in his spare time. In February, Johnathan’s wife, Carissa, will be in her 8th year of working at the Swedish Medical Center, north of Seattle, as the Lead Sonographer. She has been a part of the SEIU 1199NW negotiating team which began in April and is preparing her team for a strike, if necessary. Eight-year-old Hunter started a new school in September for gifted children and gets to ride the bus to and from school. He is still taking swimming lessons and loves being in the pool, especially while on vacation. Currently he is attending chess club weekly and likes playing video games, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh. Kennedy turned five this year, started Kindergarten and has the same teacher her big brother, Hunter, had in Kindergarten. She played T-ball over the summer and continues to take swimming lessons at the YMCA. She is very energetic and likes having playdates with her friends. Their family spent Carissa's 40th birthday in San Diego and enjoyed watching the Cardinals beat the Padres in extra innings. The Cardinals then came to Seattle and they enjoyed watching the Cardinals winning two games out of three from the Mariners. I enjoyed seeing Johnathan’s family and Holly when they made separate trips to Missouri in April and I was able to give Easter Baskets to Hunter and Kennedy.

      This past July commemorated the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon by Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. I watched shows, mostly on PBS, over and over and over again, but I didn't mind. I had forgotten the sheer magnificence of the mighty Saturn V lifting off from the launch pad with its 7.5 million pounds of thrust. (And human beings haven't left low earth orbit in the 47 years since the final manned lunar mission of Apollo 17 in 1972.) Spearheaded by my sister, Rochelle, my five siblings were kind enough to give me a beautiful T-shirt that commemorates the historic mission of Apollo 11 on its 50th anniversary. I showed my family this T-shirt when many of us met at the Golden Corral in Columbia, Mo. on August 31, 2019 to celebrate our Mother's recent 87th birthday.

      My five siblings and I and my Mom's two sisters, Ferne and Jane, are happy to say that my Mother turned 87 years old in August and is still living on her own at the farm where, this coming February, 2020, she will have lived there in "Sleepy Hollow" for 70 years since she married my father on February 25, 1950 (when my mother was still a senior at Clarence High School), a longevity of living in the same home that very few people will ever equal. And she still works a couple hundred crossword puzzles per year, much better than I can do. (My specialty is Sudoku puzzles.) This is the first year in quite a few in which my Aunt Jane didn't make it back to Missouri from California for a visit, but all of us keep Jane and Ferne and our cousins in our thoughts (as well as keeping tabs with them on Facebook).

      In June, all of the Jarboe clan living in Missouri had a really great time at Golden Corral restaurant in Columbia, Mo. visiting with two of my cousins on my father's side, children of my Aunt Yvonne, Gary Magruder and his wife, Samra, and Marilyn Jorgensen, and her husband, John, who we hadn't seen in over 20 years, if my memory serves.  (I was a bit embarrassed when the entire group sang "Happy Birthday" to me as my birthday was three days earlier.)

      I enjoyed another year as being “pen friends” with a married woman from Ohio, Carol Ann. The valued place that Carol Ann has had in my life since 2015 is such that words cannot truly adequately describe it. So, I won’t try.  In Sept.,    I met, online, and enjoy messaging with a new female friend, Velina, who now lives in Colorado, but she was born in Ireland and has lived most of her life just outside of London, England.  I also wish to give a special mention to Zofia, who is married and originally from Poland, but now lives in Germany, and I have enjoyed messaging with her on Facebook.

      I was saddened to learn that one of my very best friends (and is good friends with many people), Terry Cooper, who I worked with for 10 years in Doniphan, Missouri, unexpectedly and sadly lost his wife, Evelyn, in October.  Evelyn worked for a sister agency of my employer, the Soil Conservation Service, in the USDA (known as the ASCS) and Evelyn once told me that she wished that she could adopt Mernell and me as her own children. // One of my closest and very dearest friends during my two years at the University of Missouri at Rolla, Kim Simon, and her husband, Dennis, sadly lost their daughter, LaNae, 35, in June. Very few parents know of the great pain of losing their child. // In March, I was saddened by the passing of Mary Wood, 88, who's the wife of my father's first cousin, Paul. For all of my life, I knew Mary to be a very beautiful, kind, and sweet woman. //  In June, we lost another matriarch of my old home area in the Woodlawn, Missouri area, Kathryn Slaton, at the age of 96. // George Hodgman, who I shared a study hall with when he was a bright 13-year-old 7th grader at Madison C-3 School when I was a senior in high school, sadly passed away in July at the age of 60.  George became a nationally-recognized (and in other parts of the world) author by getting his memoir published ("Bettyville") in 2016, which tells of his leaving his career in the publishing world in New York City and coming back home to the small town of Paris, Missouri (~20 miles from where I grew up) to care for his aging mother, Betty.

      I am happy to report that my heart is serving me well 13 years after my heart attack (and Life Flight by helicopter) in 2006. And that my CLL (leukemia) is still in spontaneous remission (after my initial diagnosis in 2009), something that my cancer doctor told me that he had never seen before in any of his other patients. (From what little that I can find on the Internet, this has only happened to about 1% of all CLL patients.)

      The Cardinals made their first playoff appearance since 2015, winning their division and defeating the Atlanta Braves in the first round of the playoffs.  St. Louis sports reporters are still trying to determine if the Cardinals showed up to play the Washington Nationals in the NLCS. 😏 The Nationals defeated the Astros in an exciting World Series.

      I turned 65 this year and it is just plain harder for me to lose weight as I get older. As some of you "long term subscribers" of my Christmas Letters may recall, in my 2011 Letter I wrote of my successfully losing 35 pounds, "which I hope to maintain." What I neglected to tell you in subsequent Letters is that I gained about 30 of those pounds back by early 2015. I was able to find the "fire in my belly" to lose weight this past February, but I was determined that if I should successfully lose weight this time, to TRY to permanently eat less every day for the rest of my life, as that is the only way to maintain weight loss, I now believe. As I write this in late November, I have lost 27 pounds since February.

      I close with an amusing story that really begins 20 years ago when I began going to Mane Tamers here in Hannibal to get my hair trimmed by a very fine woman, Nickki. But for the next 17 years, when I entered Mane Tamers, I walked right past the nails station and I completely ignored who I would later learn to be Nickki’s sister, Michell, who does nails there. One day in early 2017, I decided to plop myself down in front of Michell’s nails station and I couldn’t believe the immediate rapport that Michell and I easily struck up, my not having any idea, at all, of what I had been missing out on during the past many years. Michell, now in her late-30s, is as smart as a whip, she knowing much more about automobiles and real estate and many other “real world things” than I ever will. (Though, I must point out that I, and her nails customer that day, must take a few points away from Michell for not knowing who the well-known female country singer, Lynn Anderson, is.)  For several years, Michell was in an “on again, off again” relationship with Jason, who is the father of their four children. One day, I was sitting in a nearby chair while Michell was doing a woman’s nails and I tentatively told her, “Michell, there’s a question that I’ve been wanting to ask you, but I didn’t know if I should or not.” Michell asked me, “What’s that, Greg?” I gently told Michell, “Well, my question is: Does Jason know…..about…the deep.….feelings..…of affection.….that I have for you?” Michell looked up at me and she flashed her trademark big, beautiful smile at me, and she then looked back down and spent a few more seconds working on her customer’s nails. Michell then looked back up at me and told me, “No one knows about that, Greg,” leading me to have a good laugh. (Michell has asked me if this story will be in my Christmas Letter as she knows that I love sharing this story with others.)

          I hope that you and your family have a prosperous 2020!   Greg