Sunday - Fullerton

Doug Tubbs is an amazing man. And not just because he is an amazing dad and father-in-law. And not just because he is almost 95 and still going strong. He is just amazing! By the time you get to the end of this post, we think you'll agree.

Doug grew up in Massachusetts, moved to Los Angeles in 1939 to go to art school, married Nedra Larsen, and worked as a technical artist and designer for General Dynamics most of his career. Even though Nedra died of cancer a couple years after he retired, he did not let that hold him back from continuing to live a full, rich life.

He continued to live in the house Nancy grew up in until he decided it was time to move into a multi-stage (independent to assisted to nursing care) senior community. He did the research and found a place near his home where he thought he could be happy--and his four daughters were smart enough to let him make those decisions himself. So for the past five years, Morningside has been his home.

Doug escorts Nancy back to his apartment after Sunday dinner in Morningside's spacious dining room. 

And this isn't just any home. Morningside has about 400 residents, most of whom live in independent villas or apartments. There is an exercise room, a computer lab, an outdoor pool, an auditorium with a stage, a putting green, a bocce ball court, and . . . The monthly calendar of activities is so full that residents have no reason to complain of boredom.

Morningside residents at their Superbowl party.

Doug sings in the choir, plays Scrabble and Rummy Tiles regularly with his games club, and is a contributor to the residents' monthly newsletter. He takes one meal a day in the common dining room--which is more like a 4-star restaurant, complete with a maitre-d that seats you, a printed menu with the day's selections, and pleasant servers who treat the elderly residents with kindness and dignity.

Since breaking his hip a few years ago, Doug needs a walker to get around, but he can fold it up, pick it up and lift it into the trunk of the car quicker than Michael can get out of the driver's seat to help him.

Shortly after we arrived yesterday, we took Doug to Best Buy to get a wireless router. He didn't like the fact that since the neighbor whose open wifi network he had been piggy-backing on had moved a couple of months ago, he could not get updates on his Kindle Fire unless he went over to the dining hall. Does your 95-year-old father know what a wireless network is, let alone how to use a Kindle Fire?

The biggest challenge Michael faced while installing the new wireless router was finding an open slot on the three power strips in Doug's study. He has, of course, a PC and monitor, plus speakers, two printers, a backup drive, a cable modem, an answering machine, a shredder, two lamps, and an electric pencil sharpener!

On the other hand, he needed Michael to "fix" his answering machine because it wasn't recording any messages. Well, it turns out that the answering capacity was turned off in the settings. That Doug could not figure out how to turn it back on is less an indictment of his abilities than it is of the user interface on most answering machines. It took Michael nearly 15 minutes to figure out just how to navigate through the settings and turn it back on! (As Michael writes this, Doug calls from the study that he cannot get into Facebook. The icon bar on his browser was turned off and he hasn't completely grasped what a URL is, so he is dependent upon his icons. But once he is logged onto Facebook, he knows exactly what to do!)

Nancy and Doug at work on a draft of his personal history.

For the past several years, Doug has been writing his personal history, as well as life sketches of many family members who have passed on. In anticipation of his official 95th birthday celebration in May, Nancy has been helping him prepare his memoirs for publication. One of her objectves in this visit is to find more photos to add to the typescript, and then make sure the people and places in them are correctly identified. Doug not only remembers who everyone is, but also locations and situations from decades past.

Isn't he amazing?

We were very happy when we realized that our flight to Sydney could be routed through Los Angeles so that we could spend a few days with Doug.

Today we went to church with Doug in the LDS meetinghouse that Nancy attended as she was growing up. Several of the people who were her childhood leaders and teachers are still there, as are some of her own youthful cohort who stayed in the area to work and raise their families. It's always fun for her to return to Fullerton and catch up with old friends. Today she was delighted to meet Ashlyn, the daughter of a former classmate in Primary and MIA (that's for Mutual Improvement Association, not Missing in Action) whom she had lost track of. Ashlyn was delighted that Nancy could show her a photo of her mother as a teenager that she'd never seen, and to hear Nancy describe her as "the queen of eye-rolling."

Attending church in Fullerton also gives us the opportunity to personally thank the local members who have been so kind and helpful to Doug through the years. Although his daughters visit as often as they can, none of them lives close by, so it's been a true blessing for him to have the additional support of such a thoughtful, caring church community.