11/09/09 AN ASTONISHING HALF CENTURY IN A BLESSED COUNTRY

JOAN, JUDY, TED AND ART
THE FIFTIETH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY
DNR UFC MEETING: PRODUCTIVE FOR A CHANGE
US FOREST PRODUCTS LAB, WHERE ALDO LEOPOLD ONCE REIGNED

Monday, 7:30 AM. 40 degrees, wind WNW, calm. The channel is calm, the sky cloudless, and the barometer predicts the same. Tree leaves are mostly down now, all over the state, except for dead oak leaves and some recalcitrant willow tree leaves. The tamaracks have shed their needles.
The weather was superb for our trip to Madison for the quarterly Urban Forestry Council meeting (held at the famous US Forest Products Laboratory)and then on to Wautoma for cousin Ted Bauer and wife Judy’s 50th wedding anniversary. The UFC meeting was uncharacteristically productive, actually requiring us to think and speak out on relevant Department of Natural Resources planning and management issues rather than just sitting there absorbing and rubber stamping mind numbing bureaucratic statistics.
The 50th wedding anniversary was a walk back in time for us, seeing cousins and second cousins and others we haven’t been with in sometimes many years. There was a tendency to mistake grown children for their parents, since many resemble their parents in their youth. It is self-evident that we all become our parents, and our children eventually all become us, physically, mentally and socially. All of us are well advised therefore to be careful who we are, as we are what our offspring will become. That said, all of us at the event seem to have raised fine progeny, as evidenced by the excellent children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren present, or if absent, boasted about. Current recession or no, it is evident that we all have progressed immeasurably over a half century. The good things of life, temporal and spiritual, seem possessed by all, and that is most certainly not the way most of us started out. Fifty years ago few of us were beyond the hard scrabble farm and the outhouse, the pick and shovel or the factory floor, and more than a few of us carried some personal baggage. Now college educations, cell phones, digital cameras and computers are the norm. Our own parents are gone, but how amazed and proud they would be to see how far we have all come. We have lived in astonishing times, and in a blessed country.