Letter from Tim Yates
Dear brothers and sisters,
We pray you are well and we miss you to a painful degree. We’re really grateful for your love and support. There are many here at the seminary who don’t seem to have the kind of parish family and liturgical life at home that we are blessed with. Please continue to pray for us. For the benefit of those who’d like to know, I’ll relate some of what we’ve experienced since moving here. And to those who are wondering why it is the end of October before we’ve sent anything like this to you, all I can does is beg your forgiveness. And don’t think I don’t know that Michael is the one most care to know about, but you’ll simply have to get more immediate details on him through word of mouth - the stories go better that way, so give us a call sometime.
Despite the fact that I’ve just endured midterm exams, our biggest news is that Tami is indeed pregnant, and we are expecting a new Baby Yates in May - probably right around finals week, if I were laying bets. She is feeling the effects of the first trimester, which for her means nearly unceasing nausea, but this should diminish in the next few weeks, and she’s not disappointed. Please pray for her, as her endurance is really tested these days.
So what’s been happening since July? Well we arrived August 3rd, and moved in to our apartment at the seminary, here in the Yonkers district known as Crestwood or Tuckahoe, depending on where you look up the address. Jim Kirkland drove our moving van all the way from Tulsa, and helped us get settled during our first week here; he helped me locate furniture, install window a/c units, bought groceries - he blessed us beyond description. Within minutes of getting here, a lot of fellow seminarians showed up to help us move in, so we met many people right away and even had a potluck that evening with them. Tami and her sister Rachel traveled here with the children in our minivan, and got to visit Holy Transfiguration Monastery (for women) in western Pennsylvania on the way here. Rachel then stayed with us for the remainder of August and we enjoyed her immensely. She is now working for several months at Raphael House in San Francisco and loving it. So we spent the month of August making the apartment home, getting acquainted with neighbors, and seeing the area a bit. Just before classes started, we also drove over to visit St. Tikhon’s monastery/seminary, which was great, and we met up with Josh Coolman, who you may remember sang in the traveling choir this summer and brought the Sitka Icon of the Theotokos. He was a great host and it was good to catch up with him.
Orientation for new students started the last week of August, and Steve & Michelle got here all of one day before, so they had a rapid start. Orientation was fairly involved, took four days, and we were able to hear His Beatitude Met. Jonah speak several times. His house is just south of here, so, when he is in town, he is a regular a visitor, which is great. After orientation, we had a full week of classes, and its been very intense since then.
We live in a dormitory/apartment building called the North Dorm, and most of our neighbors are families new to the seminary. Our apartment is really nice. Its larger than we were expecting, on the second floor. This is a rather woodsy area compared to New York City proper, and all of our windows look out into the woods that divide the campus from the neighborhood to the north, so that one visitor told us it was like we were living in a tree house. There is a playground attached to the dorm, and its makes an easy place for the kids to play, and for families to get together. There are nine families in North Dorm, including Steve and Michelle, who are just down the hall from us, and we are grateful for them living so close.
The children like it here, and probably adjusted to the change much sooner that Tami and I have. Walker is doing homeschool with Tami, and is just about to be reading on his own. He and I also go to a karate class together here on campus (this would be a good time for a laugh). Madalene is doing a lot of crafts these days, goes to a ballet class on campus, and has begun to argue with her mother about what clothes she will wear. Michael has developed a throwing arm that you just wouldn’t believe, and although I’ve warned people here, he seems to charm them anyway. He continues his tradition of being a ‘church baby’, and seems to be very much at home, The kids are blessed with a community that has a lot of children, something like 65 or 70, and they are doing real well.
Tami pretty much holds our life together, making this home for us, and balancing all the regular tasks that go along with that. Monday nights, she leaves me here with the kids and spends the evening with other ladies in both the women’s choir and the program for the seminarian wives. The latter program involves discussions with various speakers that the school brings in - one week Sister Veronica spoke to the group; she has been living not far away in recent months. As a side note, we were able to invite her and Sister Ameliane over two weeks ago. We met in our apartment, but Steve and Michelle did ALL the work (including clean up), and essentially hosted the whole event, and we had a great evening together.
As for me, its pretty quiet. Not really - I’ve never been in constant movement like this. Classes require a lot of reading, and the papers and projects start to come due in the coming weeks. We have a different academic class each morning, Monday through Thursday, with afternoons being a mix of music (theory, tones, choir practice), liturgics training (the how-to course), and a seminar which serves as a weekly ‘integration’ of all these threads. Balancing the requirements of classes with the needs of family is as yet unachieved, but that may be part of the serendipitous training that takes place here. There are a number of students in the ‘first-year’ class, around 25, and there is quite a diversity of backgrounds - young men nearly straight out of college, a former CIA analyst, a retired submarine commander, two brothers (from the rock band Luxury, for those musically inclined) who came here with their respective families, a young lady who moved here with her husband days after their wedding, and two guys proudly representing Oklahoma. Steve and I have all our classes together, and its a blessing to be going through all this with him. He and Michelle are our family here, and they help make it more like home.
I saw on the website a picture taken when Zac and Kate were here with Shepherd. That was really a great day. They were in NYC for a week, and made time to come up on the train and spend a Sunday afternoon with us. Steve & Michelle came over and we had lunch together in our apartment, then Sister Veronica came by as well, and we took them all around campus. It was a beautiful day, great friends and company, it was like they brought Holy Apostles to New York for the afternoon. And this is a good time to open the invitation to the rest of the parish. We would love to for anyone who can to come visit us (“us” being the Tolbert and Yates families) - we can provide free lodging, food, and entertainment (you remember our kids, right?), a ride to/from the airport or train station, all you have to do is get here. And give us a day to two’s notice. And bring real bbq and texmex. Other than that, we’ve got you covered.
For all the things one could do in this area, we’ve not been out as a family as often as we’d like. We spent some time in NYC in August and September, which was great. And Columbus Day weekend we drove up to New Hampshire to see Tami’s grandparents, who had never seen the children. The fall season was more advanced there, and we had a very welcome and quiet weekend in the country. New York is crowded, you just can’t get away from it, and we learned that most New Yorkers feel the same way, so the highways are full on the weekends of people leaving the city and going out to somewhere less crowded. We certainly joined the exodus that weekend.
I’ve included some pictures that we’ve taken since leaving Tulsa in July. Tami puts a lot of pictures on her facebook page, so people could view that too. I’ll try to shoot some more of the campus before all the leaves have been blown away. One thing about this area, it rains very regularly, so the autumn colors are quite vibrant.
That’s all for now. Please email us if you would like to write: tyates@svots.edu for Tim; tjyates@svots.edu for Tami. Our previous email accounts with Cox are now turned off (one of the bills we eliminated), so any messages sent to those addresses will probably show as undeliverable. A more responsible person would’ve had them forwarded to the new accounts, but then this is me you’re dealing with.
We miss all of you. Its a blessing to be here, but difficult, and we think of you often. Although I anticipated us traveling to Tulsa over the winter break, our travel plans are unknown at this point, and depend on several factors. We’ll know better after Thanksgiving break.
In Christ, Timothy
