The Beauty of Callused Hands

I enjoy the opportunity I have to read the blogs that my friends submit each month.  We really are blessed to live where we live and have the lives that we do.  Occasionally though, I take a look outside of our little town at the rest of the world.  One thing is certain, and that is change.  While I try to embrace changes that make life better or difficult tasks easier, there are a lot of changes that I quite frankly just don’t like.

My grandfather, Maurice Raban immigrated to the United States from France. His story is one that I hold very close to my heart.  I think of him often.  I also think of the things that he did that made him, and those of his generation great. Maurice came to this country by boat when he was not quite 8 years old.  He remembered standing on the deck while they were pulling into New York Harbor and hearing the people around him weeping.  His young child heart didn’t yet understand the great sacrifices those who traveled with him had made to come to the Land of Liberty where they could pursue their hopes and dreams.  He traveled with his uncle and aunt, and his grandparents who had given up everything they ever knew – their lands, their homes, their security, their language, their culture, and even most of their family and loved ones.  Grandpa Maurice might have been a little like me, when I was a child… He was precocious, and found himself on the wrong end of the discipline spectrum more than once. He was raised by his aunt, even though his mother lived in the Round Valley area.  When he was young, he went to work in California with yet another aunt.  This situation, however, was not good, and my grandfather was homesick and wanted to return not to France, but to St. Johns.  He was 13 years old when he packed his bag, and left his aunt’s home in Bakersfield, through a back window. 

Maurice did not have the means to travel home. He found work in a dairy, in California not far from his aunt’s.  He asked the farmer for a job, just until he could earn enough to pay for his way back.  The farmer and his family loved young Maurice.  The farmer asked him to stay, and promised he would be loved as though he was the farmer’s son.  As great as the offer was, the boy wanted to go home, and did just that.

Maurice, like most who lived in those days spent the rest of his life working not only with his mind, but with his hands, and his legs and his back.  He farmed; he took care of his family, and their animals.  He knew how to use a shovel, and how to manipulate the earth so that it provided enough for him, and those for whom he had stewardship over.

We don’t do that anymore.  In our world today, we hear of those who wait for someone else to do the work.  Please don’t misunderstand me!  I love the convenience of life in 2014. I am concerned though, that we are forgetting how to raise a garden, and put away for winter.  Our food generally comes from a corporate farm or ranch in a place few of us have ever seen!  Our kids are forgetting what a shovel is for, and that callused hands come after the blisters have healed.  They don’t know that Smuckers doesn’t make the best jelly and jam!

I am not a dooms day kind of person.  But, I can’t help thinking that if things continue as they are, at some point our living here will put us among the safest, most desirable places to be, because we are out of the way, and self-sufficiency is in our blood.

So, let’s continue to change what is good, and beneficial, but let’s not change the fiber of who we are.  Let’s not let the self-sufficiency and the ability to wear out a shovel escape us. Let’s keep our gardens, and our orchards, and our flocks and our herds healthy and strong. 

My grandfather Maurice, and probably your grandfathers too, left a legacy that surely is not just destined to be a footnote in history. It seems more and more likely that their legacy will be the roadmap for us and future generations of their families to live by, in order to preserve their posterity and ours!

Jeff Raban

The Lady Who Took Care of a Rogue Pig, Spilt Milk, and Me

I was six years old in 1938, and we lived in town in St. Johns. During the summer we did some gardening on our lot.

My dad was of the old school, and when he butchered a pig or a cow, he saw to it that all the widows in our area got some choice cuts of the beef or pork.

My job was to take a small lard bucket of milk to a family having a tough time. There were two older boys on my route to the family. They just gave me a bad time. Sometimes I spilled some of the milk, and the family was short because there wasn't that much left in the little lard bucket.

One of the widows was a lady whose name was Julia Greer. She was a school teacher, and when she spoke, things happened.

I was told that her neighbors had a pig. It would get in her garden and root up everything. She had told and told them again and again to keep their pig penned. She lived in a two-story house. The window on the second story made a good location to accomplish her task, and her task was to shoot that neighbor's pig. She did and killed it dead.

I would listen to that story and think, "Is that the same lady I have learned to respect and love?" Needless to say, I was full of respect for her or maybe you could call it a bit of fear.

The two older boys would wait for me to go down the street. They would cut through the field and meet me before I could deliver the milk. One day I could see I was in for another butt-kicking, and, to say the least, I was not looking forward to it. About that time, Mrs. Greer came out on her front step, and in a voice that you knew she wasn't there for fun, blasted those two kids. They hunkered down and ran back home through the shortcut in the field.

Boy, talk about a buddy! She was then and there mine.

My family taught me to respect older people.

Someday I will tell you about my time with a very old cowboy, Prime Coleman.

By Ted Raban
June 8, 2014

St. Johns, Arizona

I was born and raised in St. Johns, Arizona.  It seems like anytime I tell people where I’m from, they always seem to know someone from St. Johns, Arizona.  It doesn’t matter where you are.  In fact, it’s not just me.  I’ll bet most of us from that wonderful  little town have had that happen many times.  My dad, Ted Raban, had an experience once.  You may have heard this story, but like my dad says, if I’ve already told it to you, don’t stop me.  He was traveling across the back roads of Ireland with my mom many years ago.  They were visiting castles and country sides.  They were on a small bus taking them to the Bed and Breakfast where they would be staying that night, when my dad casually started a conversation with another gentleman sitting on the bus.  After getting acquainted, the gentleman asked my dad where he was from.  Dad told him he was from a small town in Arizona called St. Johns.  “Oh,” said the man.  “I once knew a man from St. Johns, Arizona.  His name was Ted Raban.  Do you know him?”

St. Johns will always be home to me.  Even though I’m grown, married with my own family and living away, St. Johns is still home.  To me, that meant knowing every single student in my High School graduating class, or every person in my High School for that matter.  It meant our teachers taught Math, Science and English during the week, and Sunday School or Primary on Sunday.  That meant when my sister was given a reckless driving ticket for driving on the sidewalk between the cement pillars and the old Wilbur’s store, the judge gave her a pat on the back and said, “I wouldn’t call that reckless driving, I would call that impressive driving!!”  That meant growing up with things such as Screamer’s Valley, the Little Resi, sandwash parties with bonfires, whitewashing the SJ, Duke’s pond, Lyman Lake, and Freshman initiation.  It meant leaving your keys in your car and going to bed with your doors unlocked.  It meant the cannon going off early in the morning on the 4^th of July, the pancake breakfast and races in the park.  It meant the 24^th of July  celebration, with the parade, rodeos and dances at the old downtown pavilion.  It meant our friend’s parents were known as “uncle and aunt” instead of “Mr. and Mrs.” and that they were almost as invested in how we were raised as our own parents were!

But more recently, it has come to mean so much more.  A few years ago, my husband Matt was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  He was given only a few months to live.  Even from afar, this “town of friendly neighbors” gathered around me and my family to offer their support of faith, love and prayers.  We received many financial contributions by mail.  To help out with a benefit barbeque in our behalf, fellow St. Johns friends and family donated beef to barbeque, and multiple items to be auctioned off, including guns, golf clubs, a steer and a registered quarter horse.  And just as important as the material support, is the moral support we continue to receive.  Phone calls (one all the way from Tampico Mexico), letters and mostly, the prayers.  Not just from our faith, but from other denominations as well.  We’ve been told that the High Priest Group in the St. Johns Little Colorado Ward prays together for Matt every Sunday.  I am continually told by people from home, “We’re praying for you.”  I believe that those prayers going up to Heaven from St. Johns, Arizona carry a lot of weight with our Heavenly Father, because after more than 5 years, Matt is still with us.  Faith, Love, Support and Prayers from home have helped to keep my husband alive and my little family intact.  That’s what St. Johns, Arizona means to me.

By Jodi King