Panaca, Nevada goes back to 1864 when it was Panaca, Utah, a couple years before Nevada’s boundary was moved another degree east to the 114th Meridian. It was an agricultural community supplying mining camps. “Tranquil and religious, Panaca never had an easy relationship with its rambunctious neighbors, but it has outlasted nearly all of them.” Today with a population of 900, it is the only dry town in Nevada. There is a Panaca Nevada Stake of the LDS church, a Panaca 1st Ward, and a Panaca 2nd Ward. The last time I was there was two nights before the 2012 eclipse. The next morning I visited graves in Enterprise, 50 miles east of Panaca.

A weird crime occurred there Wednesday evening. (more…)

At the end of my row was a Navajo man without much temple experience. The workers were helping him through the ceremony. Meanwhile I was going through the ritual motions in a particularly brusque fashion. I caught myself doing it. I realized I had unconsciously decided to affect being the old hand who has seen it all before. I laughed at myself.  (more…)

From “Table 2. Births, by age of mother, live-birth order, and race of mother: United States, 2014” in “Births: Final Data for 2014,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Volume 64, Number 12 are the following number of first-borns, second-borns, etc.:

1st: 1,550,475; 2nd: 1,267,334; 3rd: 667,446; 4th: 283,953; 5th; 110,565; 6th: 46,045; 7th: 20,771; 8th and over: 21,589; not stated: 19,898; total: 3,988,076.

That makes for the following ratios:

1st/2nd: 1.22; 2nd/3rd: 1.90; 3rd/4th: 2.35; 4th/5th: 2.57; 5th/6th: 2.40; 6th/7th: 2.22.

I wonder what my six children would make of this, particularly the youngest. The ratios correspond somewhat with my own experience as a potential parent: The choice to have a second child was never pondered independently—it was part of the choice to marry. After that, conception was a consciously considered matter, and considered one child at a time. The last two were on exception, though. Before conceiving a fifth child, we decided to also have a sixth if we could and then retire from getting and bearing. After the sixth was born, that seemed to be a good decision and we stayed with it.