Christmas Letter to Jack

Christmas 2012

Elk Grove, CA

Dear Jack of Noble Birth:

I know I call you Cap’n Jack, but I don’t want you to forget that you are really Jack Richard Niu of Noble Birth.

Two years ago, when Uncle Joey and Aunt Julie got married in Oregon, your Mom and Dad came to Oregon and told us that they were going to have a baby.  They were very excited for you to come to them, and we were also excited.  As the months went by, your Mom’s tummy got nice and big, until it was hard for her even to walk.  Then on August 22, 2011 (your birthday!) you were born.  We lived in California, so Grandma Hogge drove to Utah to be there for your birth and to help your Mom take care of you for a few days.

I didn’t get to see you when you were born, so I was very happy when we got to come to Utah a couple months later.  You were still skinny and little, but you were eating well and growing.  It was fun to see my first grandson!

You are one year old now, and Christmas is coming – a great time of year.  Some day you will recognize that even a slight glance toward Jesus on the part of so many people in the world (even as they focus on the commercial elements of the season) brings a brighter, happier, more generous tone to the holidays.  I love Christmas because it is a shadow of what it would be like if all the world thought more about Jesus.

You have been given a family name – Jack Richard from your Dad’s maternal grandfather and Niu from your Dad’s paternal line.  They are both names of honor and tradition.  I hope that you will learn that tradition and honor it.

There is, however, another name that I would also have you known by.  There’s a story about that name:

Righteous King Benjamin was getting old and knew it was time to make his son Mosiah the new king.  But before he died, he wanted to speak to his people.  So he asked Mosiah to invite all of the people to the temple, where King Benjamin would speak to them from a tower.  He invited the people because he wanted to give them a name that would show that they kept the commandments.  They would always be able to keep this name if they continued to obey God.  Mosiah obeyed his father and invited all the people to come hear King Benjamin at the temple.

The people loved King Benjamin because he was a good and fair king.  They loved him so much that a huge crowd showed up at the temple to hear King Benjamin.  When they got to the temple, the people thanked Heavenly Father that there was peace in the land and that they had leaders who taught them to keep the commandments of God.  They were happy because they loved God and each other.

King Benjamin got up on the tower and taught his people.  He told them to always serve Heavenly Father.  And he taught them that Jesus Christ would come to pay for their sins.  (Jesus had not been born yet.)  King Benjamin warned them that they would suffer if they did not repent of their sins and have faith in Jesus.  And he asked them to take care of each other, especially the poor.  He wanted them always to be good and try not to ever be bad.

When King Benjamin ended his talk, his people all promised to obey God and be good for the rest of their lives.  This made King Benjamin very happy.  It was the promise he wanted them to make. 

King Benjamin said that, because they made this important promise, they would be known as the children of Christ.  Jesus Christ would be called their father because he would make it possible for them to return to live with Heavenly Father.  There is no other way to return to Heavenly Father, only by making this promise to Jesus Christ that we will obey him for the rest of our lives.

So that is the name that I want to make the most important name in my life, the name of Jesus Christ.  And more than anything, Jack, I want you to also make and keep that promise to obey Jesus for the rest of your life.

Never forget that name.  If we both make and keep that promise, we can return together to live with Heavenly Father.  I will still be your Grandpa, and you will still be my beloved Grandson.

Someday, you will also have the chance to be a king – a righteous and loving king like King Benjamin.  And you will make a great king.

You are very blessed that your Mom and Dad have made the promise to obey Jesus and are very good at keeping that promise.  They will always teach you what you need to know.  They will teach you to love Jesus.  They will show you how to follow Him.  They will even help you understand how to repent when you make a mistake.  And I will pray for you and try to help you too.

Someday, you will be a missionary for Jesus’s church.  As you serve, I will ask Heavenly Father to watch over you.

You will have many opportunities in your life to love your family, and you will have many opportunities to make new promises to Jesus.

I want you to grow up strong in body and spirit and become more than I can ever be.  And I will continue to watch over you and pray that you will always be safe and happy.

Even when I am gone, when I go to the next life, I will continue to watch over you and, yes, even help you.  It is what we do because we are a family, and that will not end just because we have passed on from this life.  We are each other’s, and we are the Lord’s.

Jack of Noble Birth, let us remember Jesus.  And let us be known by His name.  If you do, you will make this old Grandpa very happy.

Love, Grandpa Hogge

Christmas Letter to Trudy

Christmas 2012

Elk Grove, CA

Dear Trudy Lu:

It’s Christmas again – your second one.  Last year, about a week before Thanksgiving, your Mom was ready to have a baby.  She was ready for all the right reasons, like loving you and wanting you to come safely into this world.  But she also really wanted to not be pregnant so that she could eat chocolate.  (If you are reading this and eating chocolate, you should know you inherited that love for chocolate from your Mom.)

While your Mom was pregnant with you, though, she developed gestational diabetes; that’s the official name for the can’t-eat-chocolate-while-you’re-pregnant syndrome.  I promised her that, as soon as she had this baby, I would get her a box of See’s Candies.  So she was also looking forward to your birth because of that.

I got a call at work from Grandma Hogge, and she said you had finally arrived.  So I came straight from work to see you at Methodist Hospital.  Alice was interested, but she didn’t really understand that this was going to be a permanent, new sister.  Mari, however, was thrilled.  She got to hold you, and she wanted to unbundle you so she could see all your fingers and toes.  You were calm and pleasant, and we were all very pleased.  (And your Mom got her candy.)

You turned one year old last month, and you are still calm and pleasant.  You are succeeding at walking most of the time.  It seems that whenever you fall there is a piece of furniture or a fireplace to hit your head on.  At church last month, you stumbled in the foyer and hit your face on the leg of a table.  That produced a nice knot on your forehead and a pitiable black eye.  I’m sure you had a good cry at first, but after that it was more walking and more stumbling.  I’ve seen you with as many as three bruises on your forehead, thanks mostly to the fireplace at your house.

You know that I call you Trudy Lu, even though your name is Trudy Kimberly.  You probably also know that “Lu” is what I call your Grandma Hogge.  Your parents don’t tell us before a child is born to them what they are going to name the child, so your Mom always wonders what I will call the child after they announce the given name.  Mari Roann is Mari-ari.  Alice Juleen is Ali-baba.  And you are Trudy Lu. 

When your Uncle Joey was born, I told my old barber (he was about 80 then) that I called Uncle Joey “Beppe” – which is Italian for Joey.  The old barber didn’t like that at all.  He insisted that I should always call my children by their given names.  I thought about it for awhile, but not for long.  He didn’t convince me.  I call it a father’s (and now a grandfather’s) prerogative.

Since you are named after Grandma Hogge, I will tell you about her.  You already know that she is one of the world’s best grandmothers.  And I consider myself quite intelligent for having chosen such a superstar to marry. 

Grandma Hogge and I met at a New Years Eve sleepover and got engaged on New Years Day.  Don’t worry; those two events happened fifteen years apart.  She came to a New Years Eve sleepover at my grandparents’ home when she was four years old and I was six years old.  I felt sorry for her that there were no girls her age in my family because I wasn’t going to play with her.  Our lives were very parallel after that.  My grandfather taught Grandma Hogge’s mother the gospel.  My father interviewed Grandma Hogge for baptism when she was eight.  And my uncle Richard Stowers confirmed her.  But I didn't really get to know her until after my mission.

I won’t tell you here the whole story about how Grandma Hogge and I started dating.  You can read it in my journal if you want.  I’ll just say here that the Lord blessed me with the sense and good judgment to not let her get away.  I didn't fully appreciate when we were dating who she is.  But I know now, by revelation, how beloved she is of our Heavenly Father and how close she was to Him in the premortal life.  Knowing this, it does not surprise me that she is one of the world’s best grandmothers.

When Grandma and I went to the Oakland Temple to be married many years ago, we promised each and Heavenly Father that we would always love each other and honor God.  I was very happy that day, but I would have been even happier if I could have really understood what I understand so much better now – that eternal marriage with children and grandchildren is the greatest thing that could ever happen to me, not just on this earth, but in all the eternities.  Yes, Grandma Hogge is that important to me.  Some day you will be able to go to the temple with your sweetheart and make the same promises.  I hope that, when you do, you will remember that I love you and want you to have every blessing that I have had in an eternal relationship.

Among my most cherished possessions is your grandmother's opinion of me.  Among my most heart-felt desires is to live up to that opinion.

This year, as you toddle around our home and yours, I hope you begin to understand the magic of Christmas and the wonder of its founding event so many years ago in Bethlehem.  When Jesus was born, Mary laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.  For the rest of His life, humble circumstances would be His lot, as he eventually descended below all things.  After he suffered and died, He ascended to His throne in heaven.  Because of His suffering, we can be a family forever.

So toddle on, dear Trudy Lu, preferably upright.

And merry Christmas.

Love, Grandpa Hogge

Meeting Joe West

My first marriage worked.  As a result, for nearly 30 years, I have had a whole family of in-laws, including a father-in-law like no other.

Late March 1983.  I don’t remember the exact date, but I know it was late March because I was touring as a baritone in the BYU A Capella Choir.  (Don’t get too impressed.  I was well hidden in a large choir.)  It was a bus tour through the Northwest and into Canada, barely.  On the way back to Provo, we stopped in Pendleton, Oregon to do our last performance, in Vert Auditorium.

My fiancée Kim had it in her head that her dad and I should meet before the wedding, which by late March was only about a month away.  I didn’t do the traditional ask-the-future-father-in-law-for-her-hand thing.  Not sure why, probably just didn’t occur to me.  But there I was in Pendleton, about one month from marriage and about 120 miles from my not-so-distant-future father-in-law’s hometown.

Kim knew my itinerary, so she called her dad and arranged for him to come to the Pendleton concert and meet me in the lobby afterwards.  Simple enough.

As we sang, I peered into the audience, trying to decide which of these people was Joe West.  I don’t remember whether I had seen any pictures of him, but I had a description:  full-bearded mountain man, who by day was the barber in John Day.  Hmm.  The beard description was helpful; that eliminated many of the men in the audience.  They were all dressed about the same, ranging from slacks and dress shirts, to sports coats, to business suits.  But I couldn’t see all of the audience, and I was unable to draw any conclusions.

By the time the concert ended, I was duly nervous.  My instructions from Kim were to go to the lobby and find him there.  I went, still dressed in my tuxedo, found a perch on the bottom step of the balcony stairs and watched for bearded men.  Not a few passed by.  I tried to make eye contact with each.  No luck.  In return, I got mostly anesthetized stares.  (Is that what a-capella, classical music does to bearded men?)

This went on for a few minutes, and the crowd was beginning to seriously thin out.  Maybe this meeting was just not meant to be.

I was about to give up, perhaps too willingly, when a man came into the lobby from outside.  No mistaking – moccasins, blue jeans, and button-up nature-looking shirt (if you know Joe, you know the shirt), all topped off with a plaid, flannel jacket and a full beard.  He obviously had not been in the audience.

I approached him, shook his hand, and we had a very brief, superficial, but cordial conversation.  I had no idea what he would be interested in, and I’m sure he had no idea what to say to me.  It was not unpleasant, just chit-chat between two people who really didn’t know each other.

After about five minutes, I had to leave to go stay the night with a host family, so we said good-bye, again pleasantly.  He left through the front door where he had come in, and I headed backstage to go home with a host family.

I got paired up with a nice family – the father was a corrections or probation officer – that lived outside of town.  As we got into the car, I noticed Joe getting into his car.  It was a small car, so small that it had no business having a trailer hitch.  But it had a trailer hitch, and a small boat was hitched to it.  I would later learn that a car had little utility to Joe if it could not pull a boat.  This little car was taking Joe and his boat to fish on the Columbia River, which he thought he would do to make a trip all the way up to Pendleton in late March more agreeable.

I pointed Joe out to the host father and said something like:  “I’m marrying his daughter next month, and I just met him.”  Mr. Host wanted to know more, so I told him that Joe was the barber in John Day.  Mr. Host immediately knew him.  As a fisherman and hunter, Mr. Host had been in Joe’s barber shop.  That was where everyone who wanted to know about hunting and fishing in Eastern Oregon went.  I think I got to know more about Joe the Barber from Mr. Host than I had gathered from Kim and Joe combined.

I didn’t see Joe again until after I was married.  Kim and I came out of the temple, and Joe, with Kim’s grandmother Rita, had arrived.  This time he was dressed in a suit, not his more usual and comfortable attire; however, despite being way out of his element, he seemed much more relaxed and happy.  Probably because Kim was there.

We all went to Uncle Tom’s in Walnut Creek for a nice luncheon.  The plan was for Kim and me to go up to Mendocino for a few days, then meet everyone in Sacramento for the reception.  Before long, Joe leaned over to me and said:  “You better get going before Kimmy gets a headache.”  I’m sure my face turned plenty red, but ever since that day Joe has been my friend.

Over the years, we tried to spend a week in John Day during the summer.  On these trips, I really got to know Joe.  Being a grandfather brought out the best in him.  Every year, it seems, he had an adventure waiting for us.  We went to lakes and rivers all over Eastern Oregon, pulling out prodigious numbers of fish, and either having a good fish fry or freezing them and packing them up to take home to California.  I spent many hours sitting side-by-side with Joe filleting fish.

Beginning even the first year we went to Oregon, I became Joe’s close friend, not just a pleasant friend.  He would come in early and wake me up to go track elk, or bob puppies’ tales, or put together the gear to take the kids fishing.  We were different in almost every way, but we shared a deep love for his daughter and his grandchildren. 

He later told me that he opted out of attending the Pendleton concert and instead went to a bar to pass the time until it was over.  In fact, concerts and tuxedos never really were my favorite things either.  I might have felt more comfortable having a root beer at the bar with Joe that night in late March 1983.