Friends of Friends of Friends of Friends

Tuesday morning I stayed at home and worked on my lesson for that evening for a few hours. Dee was also at home, except for going to the market outside our door downstairs to get some yummy fresh bread. As always, we left a bit early to prep for Taco Tuesday, with sunny and warmish weather. Spring is almost here!

We had a decent sized group for tacos, including some new faces. Food is a powerful tool to help gather people, but fortunately we use it responsibly!  

 

Silvia from Madagascar came, a friend of Alkmini's, so now we have a sort of descendancy chart: April-Margie-Alkmini-Silvia. Also, the Beechers, a family from the Provo area here on Sabbatical from BYU (where he teaches psychology), showed up. We had invited them because the mom and daughter were at the meeting the prior morning, looking for ways to serve and being disappointed that the new Friendship Center would open after they left Italy. The dad served a mission in Milan almost 30 years ago, so he still speaks Italian and is volunteering his psychologist services to help out refugees. We were hoping that they might be available to fill in on Wednesday afternoons now that the Spragues are leaving, but it doesn't look like that will work for their schedule. Still, they had fun and helped out quite a bit with the food prep. Linda, a non-member from Battipaglia who goes to school here (her sister is a member), showed up late and we still had some food for her.

After a while I slipped off into the library to finish my Powerpoint presentation for the lesson. I also had to translate a number of paragraphs from the autobiography of my great-grandfather, David King Udall, telling a couple of insightful stories from his life dealing with plural marriage. One of the stories is always very touching to me, about his two wives, Ella and Ida, and how they handled a challenging life together:
     [Ida's] love for all the children recognized no apparent
     difference between her own and Ella's. This was
     exemplified the night following an election in 1914 when
     her son, John H., and Ella's son, Levi, had awkwardly
     been placed as opponents on different tickets, each
     running for the same office (Clerk of Superior Court).
     I came home in the early morning hours after the election
     count had been made and, going to Ida's room, said,
     "mother, your son is elected." Rousing herself, she sat
     up in bed and asked, "which one, father?" When it
     proved to be John H., she was so glad that Levi was
     only a few votes behind.  
Note that the Levi mentioned here is my maternal grandfather.

We had an Institute council meeting which nominally started at 4pm, but it actually started almost an hour late. This is Italy, so that's fine! Only a couple of the council members were available, one via Zoom, along with Ugo in person. With Claudia at work, Dee kinda drove the meeting and took notes, and we were done in about an hour. After that I ate my dinner and polished up the Powerpoint, though of course I would find a few typos while I was giving the lesson, aargh!

At 7pm the Institute class started. There were about 20 people online, with only one student there in person, partly because of a conflict with a fireside across town by Elder Kopischke of the Seventy. There were two segments, the first taught by one of the class members on marriage, and then mine on plural marriage. I had about 40 minutes and used it all, leaving a few minutes for some good questions and comments at the end. People seemed to enjoy my presentation, with a few nice compliments coming back afterwards on WhatsApp. I also uploaded the slides and the stories to the WhatsApp group. The lesson got recorded and uploaded to YouTube; you can see it here, with my starting about 40 minutes in, but of course it's in Italian. It always surprises me how fast I speak, even in Italian, which isn't always a good thing. I'd probably be easier to understand if I slowed down a bit, but that's a difficult change to make at this point in my life.

It was really fun for me to teach this lesson, but it was a ton of work to produce all those slides in Italian. I now have much more sympathy for my wife, who does something similar every week for her family history class. Anyway, I'm glad to be free now to work on my two lessons for Friday and my Sunday School lesson -- no rest for the wicked!

After everything was over, we had to wait a while for the recording to finalize; the long post-processing time seems to be a feature of Zoom! Then we drove home the two Sorelle, as well as Anziano Wright, our former district leader in Rome 3 who is now nearby in Rome 2. The car was full, but we had a good time chatting. At home I was up late finishing Monday's blog entry, which I hadn't yet had any time to write. Fortunately, we didn't need to set an alarm for Wednesday morning, so that was fine.