Phillip Carey

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Perhaps my favorite calling ever was when Lisa and I taught Primary together. She has a gift of being able to connect with people in a way that I just don’t understand and that is doubly so with children. When we taught these classes I was able to go along for the ride.

We first taught ten-year-olds, which in my mind is the perfect age, but we were then asked to teach eight-year-olds. I was a little disappointed, but we were able to bond with them just as well as we did with the ten-year-olds.

I remember on our very first day, one of the little girls promptly climbed on my knee during sharing time and gave me a huge smile. It melted my heart. Her name was Ashley Johnston. I loved it, but quickly realized that this just wasn’t going to work, every girl in the class now wanted to sit on my lap and it became a fight. Even the girls who didn’t fight over sitting on my lap, because they were too shy, I could tell that they really wanted to but they weren’t about to take on Ashley who could be a little intense. Sitting on my knee soon became against the rules but they tried for the entire year.

My real surprise came within the next few weeks when suddenly one of our little boys came up to me in church and gave me a huge hug. His name was Nathan Carey. That quickly became what we did every time we saw each other. It was great. In fact, even today we hug those kids whenever we see them and some of them are now in the young men’s and young women’s. Sadly, most of them are in our old ward since they reorganized the ward boundaries. 

Nathan’s parents are Phil and Larissa Carey and they recently moved to Spokane Washington because he was getting ready to retire. His family has moved but he had a few months left to work so we do see him from time to time.

Last week when we were serving in the temple Lisa saw Phil and talked for a little bit. When they were done, she told him to give Nathan a big hug from her. He said, “why don’t you give him one yourself, the family is in town for my retirement celebration from the Navy tomorrow?” So, that is what we did.

The ceremony was held at the Veterans Museum and Memorial Center which is in a beautiful old church in Balboa Park. There were about a hundred people there and probably a quarter of them were from church. Apparently, Phil was a Commander in the Navy, but he actually worked his way up in the ranks from a humble beginning when he joined the Navy at seventeen as a simple enlisted man. I guess that is not very common and it sounds like officers who work their way up from enlisted soldiers are quite respected. At some point during his career Phil went back to school to get a degree in nuclear engineering.

Even before we entered the building, we could hear a band playing and we knew that one of the instruments was an Oboe. That always gets our attention. They were a quintet selected from the Naval Band. They were good.

The ceremony talked a lot about how wonderful Phil was, but I was also impressed how they devoted a lot of time talking about his family. It was a great ceremony and I’m glad we were able to attend.