My CMS The View from a New City

12:21 a.m. January 5, 2023: Woke up and can’t fall back to sleep. Thinking about the cornucopia of experiences of my life from childhood in Montana to dragging McArthur Blvd in Oakland California to milking cows to studying English Lit. to facing death in Vietnam to marriage and six children to burying my oldest child to winning and losing jury trials and supreme court cases to winning a multimillion-dollar arbitration against IHC to serving as bishop and stake presidency counselor to implementing computer programs in C, C++, Java, ADF, JavaScript, Xml, Json etc… Thinking of how the four trunks Joe Banks got from the man for whom “luggage is the central preoccupation of my life,” and how those trunks symbolize the four canopic jars under the sacrificial altar of Abraham in facsimile no. 1 from the Pearl of Great Price. Thinking about talking to Ambassadors and Counsel’s General and presenting to the Religion Writer’s Assoc. and sitting on the dais at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan New York. Thinking of how life is so much more magical and rewarding than anything in the Wizard of Oz and how fears of failure and starvation were so misplaced in a world created for us in which there is “enough and to spare.” Euphoria!