Thanks for the well wishes, all of you.

Take care of yourself, Ardis!

My parents visited us here in New York in the fall of 2001, and they went down to the World Trade Center site and saw the pile of rubble that even then was nearly cleaned up; and they saw the closed streets and the dust that covered everything in that area. But my dad pointed out that whereas New York had lost two large buildings and a handful of smaller ones, and a few thousand people, something like half of the buildings in Vienna (where he spent the first year after the war) had no roofs, that a significant number were completely destroyed, that there was virtually no economic life–nothing was being produced, and there was no money to buy anything anyway, that there were large numbers of people who went to the railway stations day after day in hopes (ever more dim) that the trains coming in from the east might bring back a husband, a father, a son, and there were thousands of others who were mourning the loss of family members who they knew were not coming back home.

I’m just glad that there were light bulbs for Pres. Stover to rent, and electricity to operate them. (I wonder if the rental also included a generator. I also wonder if the rent was paid in Deutschmarks, or U.S. Dollars, or, perhaps in the universal currency in those ruined European cities–cigarettes.)

I’ll join with the others, Ardis, in wishing you a speedy and complete recovery!

I’ve been pretty buried at work, so I haven’t been able to spend much time even reading, but I suspect that to the German saints, that the rental of light bulbs was anything but “trivial”. Or as Joni Mitchell said, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.

I remember that incident, Researcher — one of the sisters said something like “Remember, our need is as great as yours.” I can’t quite wrap my mind around being so destitute that a light bulb or a needle would be irreplaceable.

Sorry you’ve been under the weather.

The story of the rented light bulbs reminds me of the story about the needle given to a war refugee in the book Wings of Faith about President Benson’s experiences in Europe after the war. The other sisters in the congregation wanted some assurance that they would be able to borrow the needle.