To me, 2020 will always stand as the year I lost my business partner, wise counselor, and best friend: my husband of 54 years, Jim Monteith, who passed away in November. Having suffered from both a neurological ailment and COPD, Jim had grown much worse in recent months.

Anyone who has lost a loved one in the COVID era knows that end-of-life issues are complicated. My wonderfully wise children understood that it would be ill-advised, if not impossible, to have a service. It's probably just as well, as Jim really hated funerals. Instead, our family decided that when international travel is reliable without quarantining, we'll take some of Jim's ashes and travel to Ireland — most likely to County Donegal. We are confident that Jim would like nothing better than to have us give him a sendoff in a Donegal pub.

In the meantime, I wanted to find a way to honor Jim. My effort was made easier because I have begun to organize the thousands of photographs I've taken during our many trips to Ireland. The number of pictures I had snapped of Jim surprised me, and a single theme dominated those images: Jim biding his time while I was off wandering all over towns, villages, harbors, and countrysides with my camera. It was a perfect arrangement for each of us, as I could range far afield on foot while my chauffeur could smoke his pipe in peace, without having to listen to my kvetchinging about his tobacco habit.

The question then arose: how do I present these images?

Not a problem as it turned out: What brought us to Ireland in the first place was my love of Irish music — traditional and contemporary. I first heard the unforgettable voice of Tommy Fleming playing on the radio at a B&B in Killarney in 2004; straightaway, I headed to town to purchase his CDs. As Tommy gained an international following, his playlist became the soundtrack of my life. I can't go a week without listening to his remarkable voice that always lifts my spirit and touches my heart.

When I first heard "Goodbye My Old Friend," from the musical Paddy, which he co-wrote and in which he starred, I was profoundly moved. Looking over my photos, I recognized that no words or music could better capture my feelings about Jim. Always mindful of copyright, I sent an email asking Tommy's permission to use the song. I was delighted that he promptly answered my request, personally, along with a message of sympathy and understanding. PPA Past President Ron Nichols kindly volunteered to create the video. Thanks to Tommy and Ron, I can offer this tribute to Jim.

I am eternally grateful to Jim Monteith for putting up with me for all these years. I see the photos that I took of him in Ireland as a visual metaphor for our life together: I have many passions and a stubbornness to keep pursuing them relentlessly. This tendency keeps my plate way too full, and Jim always was there to clear the way, allowing me to keep moving forward.

I am greatly comforted by these words of Helen Keller: "What we have once enjoyed we can never lose: all that we have deeply loved becomes part of us."

Godspeed, my old friend.

Please view the video here https://youtu.be/0plZk_BtywY.

Despite the good intentions and hard work of parents, teachers, administrators, and civil servants, the unknown of COVID-19 has made already fractious education systems impossible to move forward with certainty.

How could it be otherwise? So many stakeholders: Parents, students, teachers, administrators, state government officials, unions, and school choice advocates — all wanting it “their way.”

This 1914 photo of the Cedar Bluff School, near the hamlet of Alabam, Arkansas, shows that schooling was not so complicated in earlier times. A farmstead, some distance from tiny Alabam, is where my father and five siblings grew up. My aunt and two uncles are shown in this charming photo; my father was only three years old in September 1914, so he was too young for school. The single instructor taught all grade levels in this one-room schoolhouse with only meager teaching resources.

Ultimately, all six Kendall children became well-spoken adults who excelled in various walks of life. All made positive contributions to their communities, most without the benefit of higher education. By any standard, they were well educated, thanks to their own initiatives.

It's a pipedream that today's complicated school systems could learn anything from the one-room-schoolhouse experience, but it is reasonable to expect the 2020 pandemic to shine some light on those schools that managed to reopen safely and on time. The biggest beneficiaries will be the students and their parents. The heroes will be the teachers and administrators who did the hard work to make it possible.

It is not too much to ask that from the horrible experience of COVID-19, we learn something significant enough to inform and improve the future of American education.

Talk about The Unknown. My mom’s letter said she hoped to stay in Kansas City for the duration of the war. Because of how WWII changed the trajectory of my father’s career, a year later, they would make the first of over 40 moves around the U.S., Japan, Okinawa, and Europe. She could never have imagined how differently her life would unfold on that Thursday in 1941. The letter revealed that my mother’s vantage point toward the future — three days on from President Roosevelt’s Declaration of War — was decidedly domestic. She was pregnant at the time, and she wrote of her concern about budgeting for baby clothes and furniture for the baby, due in March 1942. Reading this was heartbreaking because I knew the future that she could not: The baby, James David Kendall, was stillborn. I suspect the reason was an incompatible RH factor between my mother and the baby, about which medical science, then, knew little or nothing. I was born a year later in April with a compatible factor RH negative factor. In December 1941, she was oblivious to the sadness and joys to come when she wrote the following to her folks:

“I have waited to write you since the fateful news Sunday, as I thought maybe I might hear something of interest, but I’m sure you know as much about it as we do here. Work at the Depot has gone on just as usual — the men are still working office hours, but of course that probably won’t last long.

“My mind is made up — I’m not going to worry about it, since all the worrying I do wouldn’t help the situation any. Bruce is very calm about the whole thing, although he doesn’t discuss his thoughts on the subject. I somehow feel sure that Bruce will be left here at least for the next few months. I only hope he will stay here for the duration of the war. I could really get to love Kansas City if I thought we’d be allowed to stay here. I guess you are a little upset about the draft age limit being raised, for of course that would include Jack. When I think of how many millions of families this thing will affect, I just get downright mad. I’d like to go fight those dang Japanese and Germans myself for upsetting the lives of so many people. Enough of this talk though.”

She went on to discuss her plans for Christmas presents (sewing ties for the men and making “string rugs” with my father’s help).

The timing of my finding this letter was remarkable. It’s a striking glimpse into the lives of regular people at a time of personal and national stress. It was a time when they were only just beginning to see the light at the end of the Great Depression tunnel.

As we contemplate the uncertainty of the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic, all might benefit from recognizing what the world faced in 1941. Much of the globe was already at war with a murderous totalitarian enemy. On Sunday, December 7, they awoke to war news that would alter the lives of tens of millions of men women and children. When my mother wrote to her parents on December 11, 1941, her future was nothing but uncertainty. I’m adding this precious letter to my family history because it’s a great reminder of how brilliantly our parents and grandparents faced an uncertain future. They just got on with it. And so shall we.

Once we received the telegram that we were approved to join my dad, my mother and a good friend, who also was heading to Japan, undertook a road trip from Arkansas to Seattle. By the time we reached the Army billet there, I had developed a nasty cold and was running a fever. Army regulations prohibited anyone with a temperature from boarding a troopship to Japan. During the week we were billeted at the Seattle port, I had to be checked out daily in the Dispensary. Each time, my mother would tell me to put the thermometer above my tongue, which I managed to do, so no one noticed my fever. No sooner had we sailed out of the harbor, I got a lot sicker, so I received treatment in the ship’s Dispensary. My mother felt so guilty she hardly ate anything. Then we hit the typhoon! For hours the vessel rocked and rolled so forcefully that she belted me into the top bunk with her dress belts and a sheet from her bed below. Then, for hours, she stood by the bunks holding on for dear life. By the time we reached Tokyo, I was a bit better, but my mom was exhausted. When I found this picture, all of those memories came flooding back. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this photo, but I see my dad looking excited to have his family with him; my usually smiling mom looking like she wanted to sleep for a week, and I look clueless. I’m confident I was annoyed at having to wear the darn scarf because of my cold. What a fantastic photo! This image also reminded me of the staff car ride from the port to our temporary quarters in Yokohama. Traffic was terrible, and we got stuck in a line of cars next to a streetcar island on our left. An elderly Japanese gentleman, standing to the right of our vehicle, wanted to catch the streetcar that was about to arrive at the island, but the autos were bumper to bumper. Without warning, he made a flying leap over the car but landed squarely on our vehicle’s hood. I was in the front seat with our driver, so I found myself staring through the car window at a grinning Japanese man, resting securely on all fours on the car’s hood. He dismounted, unharmed, and we all went on our way. I presumed that he caught the bus. A lot of priceless memories in a single picture! Note: I discovered the tiny clipping below in my Uncle Jack Billingsley’s suitcase, which, remarkably, found its way into our empty horse barn and was found in 2017. The article, no doubt, was published in the Arkansas Gazette. It was not dated, but from Jack’s notation, I learned that our 1945 halfway-around-the world trip began on October 6, and ended in Japan 12 days later — just the kind of information that my OCD Uncle Jack would record.

This discovery prompted me to dig through the file cabinet, which sat in a distant corner of our large studio for over a decade; there was little time to sort out files of papers in a business for which there were never enough hours of the day to keep it moving forward. I still have many documents to review, but I was delighted to find scrapbooks that I assume were compiled for my father by office staff during all of his commands as a general officer. Most astonishing of all was an album my mother had created during her teen years and several she made of our family, starting when we joined my father in Japan and ending when I was in high school. It didn’t take long before these priceless photos, letters, and mementos had taken over our house.

How could I have not known about my dad’s slides or my mother’s scrapbooks? I guess when you move as often as we did (34 moves while I was at home), by the time the film was developed, we were packing up to move again. I don’t remember my dad taking pictures, so he must have been pretty sneaky. As for family pictures, I grew up with several framed professional portraits my parents made of me before I hit the awkward teen years — I’m thankful they had the good sense not to preserve those years for posterity. The only other ones of me were my high school and college senior portraits. And there were portraits of my parents when they were a young married couple and some beautiful studio portraits of several generations of their ancestors.

So what I had, in effect, was a priceless time capsule just waiting for discovery when the time was right, thanks to the long-ago thoughtfulness of my parents.

Nearly a year later, the most stunning event happened while I was clearing out a stall in our long-neglected horse barn. It had become a magnet for stuff no one wanted to deal with because we were too busy running two studios and raising two full-time kids, one part-time kid, countless dogs, cats, a goat, two ponies, and a donkey.

After emptying the stall, I saw the corner of an old-fashioned suitcase or “grip” as my southern ancestors would describe it. I could barely lift it and had a hard time opening it as it was over-stuffed and almost impossible to unlatch. In it were treasures from my mother’s family that had been saved by my eccentrically OCD uncle, Jack, my mother’s brother, who had passed away in 1999 at the age of 90.

It took days to sort through the thousands of photos, diaries clippings, bits of paper with names and dates, calendars, and — best of all — letters from family members to my grandmother (his mother) that brought scores of my Billingsley and Inman relatives to life. I am eternally grateful to my dear, odd Uncle Jack, and for the unknowable circumstances that placed his suitcase full of priceless family history in our barn. It is truly his legacy that I hope will be enjoyed not only by my family, but also by his future descendants. That is . . . if I can live long enough to archive it all.