September 6, 2011

Elder and Sister Blattman’s Missionary Weekly Journal
September 6, 2011

The last two weeks have been busy. As a friend used to say of his days playing shuffleboard in a wintertime retirement community in Arizona, “I don’t know how someone with nothing to do can stay so busy doing it.”
Jake stayed with us on the weekend before Irene came to visit, Hurricane Irene that is. We packed a lot of pleasant times into 1½ days together with Jake, including stake conference where he graciously endured being introduced to many of our Philly friends and then going to Valley Forge where we are becoming expert Revolutionary War history guides. The streets of North Philly can be more dangerous than a war zone in Afghanistan and we kept jokingly threatening to take him downtown into North Philadelphia at night for a real survival battle but we spared him for his upcoming desert challenge.
Hurricane Irene came and went leaving behind a lot of rain and some downed trees. As we drive through the tree lined streets of Philadelphia we are like kids watching fireworks on the 4th of July – “Ooo, look at that one! Those roots must have rotted away,” or “Look, it brought down the cable TV lines for a whole block.” An arcing power line downed on a driveway on the street behind our building bored a hole in the concrete and left a puddle of green glass behind. Abby, a young African immigrant woman who lives on the 12th (top) floor had her apartment flooded during the hurricane. The ceiling bowed down and her carpet became sour with the water. She has been sleeping on our couch until another apartment becomes ready – today we hope. She is fairly tall and our couch is, as Jake can attest, short and not very comfy. Abby is an ‘Au Pair’, a foreign nanny, who works and is planning to go to school. We have met a number of nannies including Elena, a Russian au pair, who we recently taught the temple preparation lessons, and now who has now left the singles ward to marry some guy she met online from Utah.

For our cultural immersion this month we went to the Philadelphia Art Museum to see “The Faces of Jesus.” The museum was pricey, probably in most part for the security guards in every room, but it was well worth it and worth going again. It is strange and almost overwhelming to be in room after room, many rooms with paintings worth in the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. This was a special exhibition of paintings of Jesus, many of them by Rembrandt. It has been interesting for us to see paintings of Jesus as a Black man, a Jew, (as in the Rembrandt paintings), as iconic figures, and as various types of Europeans. Rembrandt’s paintings had the most realism and feeling of expression of all that we saw. He used young Jewish men as models. The many students in his studio and other artists were influenced by his realistic
We have gotten together with the other senior missionaries several times now for dinners and family home evenings. It’s nice to commiserate (that’s a nice word for the scripturally condemned ‘murmuring’) with the other old geezers in the mission field. It turns out that they are all pretty normal folk.
These are the Larsen’s who just went home last month. They traded in their Dodge Caravan and bought a little Sion Box while they were here. It was an impressive feat to get all the way home in it.

This is our latest group: The Johnsons, Houses, Baileys, Smiths, Drinkwaters, Blattmans, Ashbys, Schaefermeyers, and Moyers.