Routine Maintenence

I have always taken pride in my ability to enjoy things that are not typically male. I love to cook, iron and I’m a laundry genius until some someone mixes up my cleaning agents! Okay, I don’t read labels any better than I read directions. I love female authors, and while I don’t exactly read romance novels, often my favorite books are pretty close to exactly that. I don’t necessarily enjoy putting the hammer down (in the middle of adding a room on my house) to cook supper, but I’ve done it many times. I don’t consider myself exceptional; I just have a problem with gender assigned roles.

I understand that this is not always a good thing, and I feel sure that my wife and daughter would agree. I have worked them both like hired help during construction projects and we have all gone to bed mad more than once suffering from the backlash caused by my “unrealistic” expectations. I won’t say that I’m proud of this, but if I’m going to be your mother at dinner time, you can be my man while the work is going on!

But there is one instance where I know that I am all male. Please remember that this is a G-rated post as your mind begins to wander. Welcome back. The time that it is most obvious that I am all male is anytime a doctor is involved. My man’s version of needing a doctor involves wrapping a severed body part in a wet towel for safe and healthy re-attachment. Anything less is like taking a perfectly good car to a mechanic, leaving a blank check, and asking him to find something to fix! Not really, but when I went this week to be checked for a suspicious spot on my face and the doctor told me to take of my shirt…let’s just say I wasn’t surprised. “We’ll find something to remove!”

Understand that I mean everything I’ve previously said about doctors as a joke. I want to be better at this and luckily I am about to have my wish. Anything that sits in the sun for fifty years has (if not an expiration date) a definite need of maintenance. I will do better. I love my family and I plan to live long enough to thoroughly annoy my daughter. Luckily the doctor made an appointment for me to come back in six months to be checked again. We’ll call this something that every real man understands; routine maintenance! Take the whole family and we’ll call it fleet maintenance! Ahh oomp! But I really did like the doctor, he was a nice guy. Maybe I’ll take him a batch of homemade yeast rolls on my next visit!

A Cobbler's Son

“A cobbler’s son has no shoes” I’ve been aware of this saying for what seems like most of my life, but until recently I’d never given it much thought. Honestly I think the primary use of this saying is to let someone off the hook for not doing something that they should have long since done; so let’s just say it makes a good excuse. Because if you really think about it…this is a really stupid phrase!

Have you ever seen a pawn shop owner that didn’t wear a lot of jewelry; or a hardware store owner using a hammer with duct tape on the handle? Antique dealers with a particle board entertainment center standing proudly in the living room are about as common as an accountant with tax problems. I’m not so sure cobblers really exist in modern times, but I all but guarantee you that the owner of a shoe store has an exceptional (if not embarrassing) collection of footwear! Trust me; the cobbler’s son would have had plenty of shoes if he hadn’t spent so much time with that damn budget-killing puppet!

I think of this today as I sit in my recliner typing on the computer. This is without a doubt my favorite spot in the house and it’s where I do some of my best thinking. But today, instead of kicking back comfortably while writing, I am sharing my space with a massive 6 ½ pound chair-hogging Chihuahua! Dog number two; pet number four. The cobbler’s shoes are beginning to stack up.

As a family we have discussed the merits of owning one dog at a time on many occasions. This had to be spoken aloud when we started volunteering for an animal rescue group, otherwise we would quickly become a satellite location! The best way to spot the new guy at the shelter is to count his animals. But I really don’t intend to have too many and I tell myself that if the new dogs wasn’t the polar opposite of my old one, I would not have taken her home. I tell myself lots of things.

I think I will sign off now and maybe go and change my shoes. I’ve had this one pair on since breakfast, and while they are very comfortable, I really have some others that I want to wear today!                          

Smile

One of the best parts of getting a new pet is choosing the perfect name. Of course this is just a technicality for me because I’ve always been of the school of thought that a really good pet deserves a dozen names! I often call them by a secondary name for so long that I forget what their given name really is! It’s probably a good thing my animals don’t have a Social Security card or I could be charged with identity theft!

Imagine for a minute the volume of names that must be chosen by an animal rescue group. Some do come already named, but the vast majority of them come in with no name. I have been amazed how quickly they learn the names they are given, but in an atmosphere as crowded as this, they really seem to long for an identity.

I’ve recently started volunteering at the shelter again after a 25+ year absence. My younger brother got me started back then, but honestly I had my feelings hurt pretty early on and was unable to stay. I always admired him for possessing a gene that I obviously lacked; he was a diligent and dedicated volunteer and I feel sure that he helped choose many names for the animals over the years.

I have to admit that I think of my brother often, but when visiting the shelter I think of him constantly. My brother Gus was the type of guy that a dog would approach without hesitation. Okay, they approach me the same way, but it is sometimes with a growl and fangs bared! Gus told me that the reason this happened was because I needed to smile more. He said that the look on my face (the one I deemed concentration) was a little scary to dogs and people. More than once, when I passed him driving down the road, he would call me and say one word; “smile”. I would look at my reflection in the rearview mirror, smile as wide as I could manage, and do my best to hold it for the rest of the day.

Okay, I have gotten way off course on the subject of naming pets. After all this time I still enjoy talking about my brother as much as ever and I still give myself the old rearview-mirror-check more than you might imagine. But as I rode home Saturday afternoon from a long ARF adoption event at a local business, I had no need to check my smile. I was very tired, but it had been a good day. Two dogs that had just met that day found great homes; Turtle and…wait for it…Gus! I hope you smiled too.

Vacation Pictures

Okay, there is nothing quite like a brand new computer! It still has that new computer smell and jumps around as fast as lightning. But I have to admit that I become really attached to one after I’ve had it for a while. It’s kind of like your favorite shoes or a well-worn baseball glove; a part of the family. But when something goes wrong…I have to stop myself from throwing it out the window! I’m glad I don’t have such a volatile relationship with my family.

The latest near-miss episode involving my virtual best friend happened last night. Granted I had no business even being on the computer given the fact that I had just driven the six hours that officially ended a four day beach vacation. I should have been unpacking or cleaning up the dinner dishes, but what I really wanted to do was scroll through my vacation pictures! Milk it just a few more minutes!

I took the card out of the camera and slipped it in my card reader as I have done a million times before. I scrolled through the thumbnail images and chose several to email some friends we had met there on a fishing trip. I leaned forward slightly for a closer look and the laptop moved just enough to bump the USB connection of the reader with my freshly suntanned leg. The computer made the “new hardware” sound and the images disappeared. When I tried to open them back up...that damn loose USB port! Now it said that the SD card needed formatting! I had well over one hundred pictures that would be wiped out by this function.

I immediately looked online at several SD card repair programs that claimed to be absolutely free, but that was only to look at the pictures. “Oh, you mean you wanted to save them? Well that will be $39.95, you should have said so before you loaded all the software”. Luckily my wife stopped me before I downloaded a direct link to a Russian boiler room. Under direct orders to “leave it alone” I went to bed and promised to visit Office Max the next morning.

Luckily the clerk at Office Max had no idea what I was talking about. “Why don’t you just format the card yourself” was the best she could do. Wow, I never thought of that! Can I just throw my camera in the trash here or do I need to take it home and put it in the recycling? Sorry, the impatience returned there for a second. To make this story simply too long instead of way too long, I’ll finish up here. After a desperate plea, a Facebook friend sent me an article that mentioned a program called PhotoRec. It was absolutely free and it not only retrieved my vacation photos, it brought back about 200 more that I had long since erased from my camera! It runs in a DOS format that I don’t begin to understand, but it can’t be too hard because I saved my pictures! I may just keep that old baseball glove a little longer!

Pompous Grass

When I traded my home and 80 acres in the country for a subdivision inside the city limit, I saw no need to keep my tractor. Of course my wife didn’t think that was the best of ideas, but I was really kind of tired of trying to keep it running anyway. I don’t know the exact acreage of my current yard, but the little push mower I owned seemed to be adequate to preen what little lawn I was now charged with maintaining. I must have forgotten what dragging around a lawnmower in 100 degree heat really feels like!

One of the best ways to combat the pain of outdoor work in this type of heat is to only work early in the morning and late evening. Unless you are retired, or independently wealthy, this leaves the evening as the only option for weekday maintenance. Get off work, eat supper, drink a couple of beers, and see if you can have a heart attack before bedtime! Wait a minute…it sounds like I’m complaining about summertime. I’m better now; I just slapped myself.

I thought of one such summer evening this morning as I read a friend’s Facebook post about a battle waged with a clump of Pampas Grass. It was probably my second season in the new house, and I was doing my best to finish cutting the scorched summer grass with what little daylight remained. The main part of the yard was done and I was trimming the little strip that touches the street. After pushing the mower all the way to my neighbor’s mailbox, I turned to drag the screaming beast in the opposite direction. If the heat was stressing my heart, what I turned to face almost stopped it! Every one of those awful English horror movies I watched as kid had just come true; I was locked in a death gaze with Count Dracula!

Okay, it wasn’t an actual vampire, but my heart was a little slower at figuring this out than my head was. This stoic demon I faced was actually my dark-headed, dark featured Romanian neighbor that I really didn’t know very well. The fact that he was offering the use of his “sit-down” mower calmed my nerves a touch, but I was still shaken as I relayed the evening’s events to my wife and daughter. Of course they thought this was pretty funny, and once I sat down and stopped stripping cloves of the garlic bunch, I enjoyed a pretty good laugh at myself as well. I knew what his real name was, but from that day forward he was referred to (in private of course) as Boris.

Fast-forward a couple of years and I’m sitting on his back deck having a taste of his favorite scotch. His English is not perfect, but after a couple of drinks we seem to understand each other pretty well. But alcohol also has a way of relaxing the tongue and after I slipped the first time and called him Boris (he didn’t notice) I decided to just pack up and go home before I did it again. I walked through the dark mumbling his real name over and over; doing my best to bring the truth to the forefront!

That was a long story to explain my grandmother’s love of pompous grass! But what I do know is that she knew (at some point anyway) what the real name of this plant was. But she had used her pet name for so long I doubt that she remembered anymore. Her name for this plant was so etched in what she knew that I feel sure it sounded funny to say the correct name. If you say, or think… or hate something for a long enough period of time it becomes the truth.

A path

Buried in my list of unpublished blogs are three drafts, written about the same subject, that I just can’t seem to finish. I think I know what I want to say, but each time I begin I end up spiraling in several (often unrelated) directions. How could a subject so simple lead my mind in so many directions? I’ve made an executive decision to just lay it out there and see where everyone else’s mind wants to go.

The subject in question is a small dirt trail carved neatly into the thick green grass of my lawn. This path winds around the side of my house from the garage to the back steps and is as neat and smooth as any made by man or machine. Both of my cats and my current dog use this path on a daily basis and I have even witnessed the propane delivery guy drag his hose around back using the trail as though it was made just for him. At only a few inches wide, I have always been amazed at how permanent this trail has become.

The machine that carved this path was a little 35 pound border collie. Even though he has been gone for almost two years, the trail is as neat and smooth as the last day he used it. As I was cutting the grass last weekend, I have to admit that my heart skipped a little when turned toward this side of the house and noticed the path; he was a good guy and a great companion. But I also understand that he created this trail simply because it was the shortest distance between to places he wanted to be; he wasn’t carving a monument to honor his existence.

But as we go about our day to day lives, how do we know exactly when we are creating something as permanent and lasting as this faint little trail? Maybe we should just assume that we always are. Speak as though someone is listening; act as though everyone is watching. You never know, one of those little trails you are carving may be one that will still be here long after you are gone.

The World is Round And I Can Prove It

The ink on my marriage license was probably still wet when I began looking for a good spot to build a house for my wife and I. Of course I was a rookie husband and didn’t understand (yet) that all I really needed to do was put my wife on the task and it would be solved. Once she was on board we would go from simply looking and wishing (man style), to actually purchasing (woman style). Though this was almost 25 years ago, I can still remember it like it was yesterday; “What do you mean you need to think about it? This is what you said you…we…wanted. Just sign the damn papers!” I did; she was right.

Of course I needed a second push not too long after we moved on to the property. The trailer we were temporarily (this is a relative term…as decisive as kind of or probably) calling home was the complete package; cozy, mine and paid for. I had my pre-planned share of responses to the I-though-you-said-we-were-going-to-build-a-house music that had become the soundtrack of my life, but the one I usually settled on was our lack of money. “What do you mean you need to think about it? You said if you…we…could get the money we would build a house. Just sign the damn papers!” I did; she was right again.

If I sat here and continued to tick off the timeline of my life it would end pretty much with the same few sentences as the previous paragraphs. I have no doubt that most successful relationships are fairly similar even if the roles are reversed; somebody fattens up the hog and the other makes food out of it. I’ve lived long enough to know that the history books left out the part where someone (Mrs. Columbus?) said “You said the world was round and if you had the money you…we…could prove it. Just sign the damn papers! He did; somebody was right, again.

We all need that little push of validation and we rely on it whether we realize it or not. It is so easy to accuse others of back seat driving and second guessing your well-laid plans, when the real problem lies with our ability to have our good ideas perfected. Credit is both fleeting and worthless; too much is harmful. To throw the dart and hit the bullseye on the first try is, and will always be, luck. You can be really good, but you will never be a champion alone.

Last Day Of School

The last day of school came and went this year for my daughter with little fanfare. We did go out for lunch that last half day day (if you know me that is somewhat of a big deal), but I do miss the grammar school days and their end of the year parties. Sometimes I think I actually became more attached to her school buddies than she did, but really I was just looking for a chance to have some fun.

My daughter is an only child. I don’t mean to inflect any type of tone into this, it’s just the way Mother Nature planned it for us. When the OBGYN wants to discuss birth control on the first post-delivery visit…you just know it’s time to leave well enough alone and enjoy what you are fortunate enough to already have. Having grown up with two brothers, I have to admit I have kind of liked the idea of having only one child. I can both take her to school and pick her up, and we have plenty of alone time to get to know each other. She may argue too much time, but I kind of like it.

One of the bad parts of having only one child is that I wouldn’t dream of her riding the school bus without siblings. She did ride some when she was a little kid, but this was mainly because she wanted to and we lived in a county with a tiny school system. I knew the bus driver and most of the kids she rode it with.

 But when I was a kid the school bus was the place to cause trouble! We (okay I) found plenty of trouble on a regular basis, but the last day of school called for plans of epic proportions. Something to laugh about all summer! I feel sure we discussed several potentially lethal scenarios, but at the last minute we decided something involving water guns…and the bus driver.  Okay, I never thought about the fact that we would have to ride next year, same bus-same bus driver; miscalculation number one!

Somehow we managed to keep the water guns in our pockets until it was our time to depart the bus. Living very close to the county line meant we were among the last to leave the bus, but there were still enough kids to laugh at the bus driver and maybe he wouldn’t be as pissed with only a few watching him get hosed down. Another miscalculation! As he pulled to a stop and worked the lever to open the door, we sprang into action. With all of the trouble there has been lately with schools and guns this hardly seems funny now, but watching the screaming driver cover his face with both hands as three little boys soaked him with water guns…well I don’t care who you are; that’s funny.

But the most memorable part of the day was what was to follow. Physics state that a bus driver shaped man would never be able to catch three little boys on a good day, but our last miscalculation was the fact that my father was walking down the driveway to celebrate with us the survival of yet another school year. As we tore down the driveway, the fear in our eyes was enough for him to know that what he really needed to do was run with us, and in any direction other than the house! Till the day I die I will never forget the image of three boys and a grown man, hiding in a ditch in the woods, listening to the infuriated bus driver scream “I’m gonna tell your daddy!”

Old Photos

When I was a kid, my parents and grandparents would often give me a family lesson by showing me boxes of old photos. “This is my great uncle John; he’s my mother’s uncle from the Taylor side. You know, they were the ones that moved from the country before I was born. Doesn’t he look like your cousins in Dublin?” I remember thinking he really looked like the man that my fourth grade social studies teacher told us drove the final spike in the transcontinental railroad, but to say that would just be mean. Everyone in those old black and white photos really looked like the only people they were related to were each other.

Those grainy old photos made everyone look sweaty and sunburned. Their clothes were too big and if they were actually looking at the camera, you would think all they really wanted was something to eat. But as detached and indifferent as I was, the look on my relative’s faces when they viewed the pictures was much different. These weren’t images of dust bowl farmers in a text book; they were real individuals that my relatives knew personally. Loved ones captured with the technology of the day. I didn’t want to be mean, but most of the time I really didn’t feel much emotion and I had no Idea what to say.

As technology advanced, so did photography. There a few gray pictures (as my daughter refers to them) of me as a child, but luckily most are in color. My neighbor gave me an old camera when I was probably 10 years old, and while color film was available, it was out of my price range. I wasn’t necessarily the next Ansel Adams anyway and I stand by my parent’s decision not to pay good money for the developing of pictures “snapped” of the back of my brother’s head or vacation pictures of a car lot in North Carolina. Pointing and clicking was cheap, but buying the film and having God only knows what developed was not.

Affordable digital photography has been nothing less than revolutionary. I can now take hundreds of photos and decide if I want them or not in just a few seconds; I can re-take until I get what I want.  I do feel sorry for those who have never experienced the anticipation of driving to Revco to pick up a package of 24 unknown images from a family vacation, fishing trip, litter of puppies and a few shots of the nothing that it took to finish out the roll of film. But don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t go back to this for anything!

Since Facebook has become “the box of old photos in the attic” for many, I can now anonymously scroll through thousands of old photos whenever I choose. It is easy to spot the digital photos from the scanned images taken from the real box, but not necessarily in the obvious pixel count or color saturation. The old photos are rarely perfect; someone is looking the wrong way; eyes are closed; the group is off center or the lighting is wrong. “Take two just in case”. These photos were taken with the cross-your-fingers-and-pray-for-a-good-one cameras of really not too long ago, but they are as real to me as the perfect pictures of today. I knew these people and I love and miss them. Technology can’t change everything.

Art

Middle Georgia has enjoyed an extended spring this year; what old timers refer to as a “real spring”. Fifty degree mornings in mid-May are unusual for this part of the planet as we typically go from winter to summer without an in-between. I am a die-hard cold weather hater, but I have to admit I have enjoyed the mild temperatures.

A big bonus of a lengthy spring is the amount of time we are able to enjoy blooming plants. Flowers. The cool air has probably slowed the growth of my vegetable garden somewhat, but I’ve lived long enough to know that I will soon tire of dragging a garden hose and watching plants I’d known since birth slowly wither in the heat.

Having grown up in a rural area, most of the flowers I was accustomed to were wildflowers. My parents were always slowing down (or stopping) to positively identify some type of roadside plant that had gone unnoticed until it bloomed and I learned the names of many beautiful plants. I’m not saying that we had no store-bought flowers planted in our yard, but I will say that we had more than a few native plants that were allocated from the roadside. Many of these were wildflowers that, not having been manipulated by modern science were not as ornate as their hybrid offspring, but I learned to love and appreciate them nonetheless.

Somewhere along the way I decided that my family’s love of all things growing and blooming was unique. I knew that I was probably one of the only kids in Mrs. Bruner’s science class that knew what a host plant for butterflies was, but I didn’t understand that many of the other kids (and their families) loved flowers and plants for no other reason than that they were beautiful. Simple aesthetic love; art for the sake of art.  The realization that people who would never attend an art show or buy a sculpture; those who could not pronounce the scientific name of a sunflower (or care to even if you helped them) would spend long hours and hundreds of dollars on something as frivolous as flowers.

As we back out of the driveway for our morning commute, my daughter leans back to allow me to look for oncoming traffic; I didn’t even have to ask. We make our first turn and she opens the console, takes out two peppermints, and absently places one in my outstretched palm. She reminds me that today is Friday and pick up will be the normal 3:15 as we come to our last turn before leaving the neighborhood. “Wow!” my daughter exclaims as I automatically tap the brakes expecting the usual family of confused deer to narrowly escape my bumper. “Look at that bush”. When I look at the bright orange flowering shrub that was (until this morning) a nondescript green ball of leaves, I understand why we go to such great lengths to plant flowers.

You Never Know

I was the type of kid that dreamed of having a job long before I was old enough to qualify. My parents offered an allowance for doing things around the house, but like most kids this just didn’t seem like a real job to me. I often wonder why I was so impatient to jump out in to the complicated world of busy adults, but I remember thinking that my life just wasn’t happening fast enough. I’d been preparing for the launch for 13 years! I wish I could have understood back then that at my current age life would happen at lightning speed, but what teenager thinks they will actually live 50 whole years!

I was able to find odd jobs here and there, but of course transportation to and from was always an issue. We didn’t exactly live walking distance to town and the only bus that passed my house was the school bus. So let’s just say that my options were limited. Picking up bottles beside the highway (aluminum cans were yet to be invented) and farm work were really my only options, and trust me when I say that I met very few self-made millionaires in this line of work.

One summer a neighbor with a very large farm planted watermelons. This particular fruit doesn’t lend itself well to mechanical picking and I had high hopes for a good late summer job. I knew I would be perfect for the job because by the end of the summer I had stolen so many of them for personal consumption that I could run the 100 yard dash with one under each arm in less than ten seconds! As luck would have it, me, my brothers and several other kids that lived close by got hired for the job.

I quickly discovered that running with two melons in no way compared to picking up, lugging and tossing melons for eight hours a day. This was real work! I was pretty tired by the end of each day, but I still looked forward to late afternoon when we actually loaded them in to the eighteen-wheeler. At this time I was able to talk to the truck driver and I guess I kind of felt like a big-wheel loading a product for over the road travel! An important cog in the wheel of interstate commerce!

I have never forgotten the day, as we finished loading the last of the trucks with melons, the truck driver came up to me and said “you are a really hard worker; you’re going to make somebody a good man one day”. At this point I would have worked for free! In hindsight this driver could have paid all of the workers this compliment, but I didn’t even consider this at the time. I knew that I had tried really hard and someone had noticed. This lone comment fueled my ambition for many years and in many ways it still does today; if you try hard, others will notice.

I won’t pretend that I thought of this exact moment last night as the 4-H awards presentation we attended came to a close, but the spirit was with me. My wife and I made small talk with the parents of the club members and gave a pat on the back to many of the award winners. But as the crowd began to thin and everyone headed for the exits I motioned for one of the younger club members to come closer so I could tell her something in private. “You are a good speaker” I told her, “Keep at it and you will be better than most of the others who spoke tonight”. You never know what will stick with someone…for fifty years!

Hate?

I joined the military with high hopes that some discipline would straighten out my life. This was during peacetime, but given my state of mind at the time I probably would have joined even if our country had been at war. I know this is easy for me to say now, but as I sit here reflecting on my 20 year old decision making ability (or lack thereof) I think I would have. I joined simply to get away from my town and my bad habits. I needed a little “Leave the driving to us”.

I guess you could say that jury is still out on military discipline putting me on the straight and narrow. I had a looking-for-trouble state of mind back then and I found plenty of trouble in the military. If you expect it, you will find it. So while I was not a model Navy man, my experience did help me point my life in a much needed new direction. At least I learned something.

But enough about me! What I really want to comment on is simply the why of my joining the military. I wanted to grow up. I don’t necessarily think everyone joins for the same reasons I did, but I wasn’t alone. A portion of my recruiting class had attended a military school or had ROTC training in high school; these guys were looking for a career. Several were from military families and were following in the footsteps of a familiar life. But there were many just like me. I knew who the president was, but that was about the depth of my political knowledge. I had no cause and little care; the only ship I was truly interested in was the USS Ande.

I think of this today after reading an article about removing the carving from the face of Stone Mountain. The images of mounted southern Civil War icons Davis, Lee and Jackson loom large in the saddle as they look straight ahead with their hats placed over their hearts. A salute to the South and a tribute to those who lost their lives in a war that happened over 150 years ago; a war that changed the face of this country forever; a war that made it official that all human beings (at least in the Unites States) are created equal. Even though I was born a raised in the South I feel like a winner.

So what in the world do this carving and my infamous military career have to do with one another? Everything. Wars are fought, won and lost by people just like the confused 20 year old boy that was me in 1982; boys that need a paycheck; boys that need to get away from their hometown; boys that have little idea of what the war is even about; boys that, during the Civil war era, would have been killed by their own had they chosen not to fight. Many of these boys and men from both sides never made it home and right or wrong, their ultimate sacrifice should never be forgotten. The carving is not a tribute to division and hate; it is a memorial to the process of defeating it.

Just Another Day

Just another typical weekday morning; we could do them in our sleep, and often that is really not too far off of how they start. Eat breakfast, walk the dog, brush your teeth and load up in the car; sometimes I think we really don’t even need the clock. We may run a minute or two late, and believe it or not, sometimes even a few minutes early, but we’re always close! We have developed such a routine that we could be mistaken for a family of robots.

As we reached the halfway mark between our home and the school, the traffic begins to get heavier and slow down, and eventually we came to a complete stop. Don’t think for a minute I am trying to compare the traffic of my micro-town to real city traffic, but remember I said we were a family of almost-robots. Even my passenger daughter could tell you approximately what time we should pass certain landmarks along our morning commute. “Oh no” she says, “must be another wreck”. I’ve noticed that the closer she gets to driving age the more attention she pays to even little fender-bender accidents.

The closer we get to the intersection of our road and another main highway, the slower and thicker the traffic becomes. We can see flashing blue lights ahead, but there is no sign of an accident. When we finally reach the intersection there is a police officer detouring traffic away from our preferred route and all lanes are attempting to merge in to one. “How late am I going to be now?” my daughter asks, “I’ll get detention if I’m tardy.” I know that even if there are no more delays she will be at least fifteen minutes late, but I decide not to mention this and attempt to change the subject. “Why don’t you check my Facebook and see if you can find out what the problem is”.

I think we both thought that we were the victims of another all-to-common-lately bomb threat, but were surprised to learn that a pedestrian had been hit and the driver had left the scene. A big crime for a small town. We were a solid thirty minutes late getting to the school, but with the large number of busses and cars I saw arriving late, I assured my daughter that she wouldn’t get detention. I laughed and told her that now her day would be thirty minutes shorter as she climbed out of the truck and headed for the door.

I have to admit that my initial reaction to this morning’s delay was one of irritation; this was messing up my routine. But as I headed for the office I was struck with how easy it was to throw a monkey wrench in to our normal everyday life. Not to say that a fellow human getting struck by a car is a small thing, this will be the worst day of their lives for several people. It is just humbling to think how easy it is for a single event to change so much.

We have all become so accustomed to getting both our information and our entertainment from television that is sometimes hard to tell the difference between the two. With a click of the remote we can go from live footage of a mass shooting at an elementary school, to laughing on a road trip with the cast of Family Guy as they head for space camp. From footage of a flood that will kill and bankrupt many, to smiling as a fictitious handcuffed suspect is lead to jail; the neat, hour long crime drama coming to a close. The act of separating fact from fiction gets tougher and we become desensitized to the real pain felt by the genuine victims. A morning, even like this one, makes me happy to have the other 364 (often boring) days of my life.

Hope

I stepped down out of my vehicle and stood beside it for a few seconds to test the air temperature. Driving with the windows rolled up on a sunny day will often give you a false sense of how warm it actually is, and I’m cold natured anyway. After a few moments of indecision I reach back inside the vehicle and grab my jacket; it’s one of those days that could go either way, but I would rather lug around a kerosene space heater than be cold!

The parking lot is full of vacationers with the same idea; it may be too cool for the beach, but it’s just right for (never thought I’d say this; man card alert) putt-putt. A gust of cool wind hits me and I silently pat myself on the back for bringing my jacket. We head to the kiosk to pay for our game and I notice that most of the 18 holes are bathed in sunshine; maybe this won’t be so bad.

The crowded course is speckled with players in varying levels of dress, and as luck would have it we end up behind a family with two loud teenage girls. Two starlets wearing short-shorts, tank tops and sunglasses that send and receive texts after every shot! If I didn’t think I would be arrested I would walk over to one of them and warm my hands! Not really, but I know they have to be cold.

I will say that as I look around the course it is not necessarily young people that are under-dressed. I see a few guys my age in shorts and tee shirts, but they do seem to be playing the game rather quickly. A couple of them are probably being warmed by the beer furnace that stretches the tee shirt beyond the manufacturer’s limits, and while I am not completely without fault in that zone, my extra poundage doesn’t seem to be warming me at all! Honestly some may have simply forgotten their jackets, but why would anyone choose to be uncomfortable?

I think it just how we have been trained. We plan ahead and anticipate; we look over the shoulder of winter and wink at the pool chemicals. Last minute Halloween shoppers must wade through Christmas decorations and the best selection of coats are available in September. We stand rooted in the middle of one season and pine for the next. We assume that we will be here to enjoy the coming season as we have in the years before.

As I sat down to write this, my initial thoughts were that we spend our lives forcing the seasons. But perhaps this is not the case. Maybe it is just that emotion that keeps us going; the desire to get out of bed each morning and the will to live another day; another season. Its called Hope. 

Joinery

I’ve heard it said that falling in love with an inanimate object is not possible. That love itself is something that must be shared with a creature that can offer love in return. I guess when I really think about this statement I have to agree, but in my fifty years I sure have been in deep-like with some objects and ideas.

I do believe that my fascination with all things made of wood could be described as love. When this obsession struck me I was in my mid-twenties; a young man looking for something to do for a living that would both hold my interest and get me out of the bed each morning. Of course I wanted to make money, but at this time in my life I worried more about enjoying myself. I made things out of wood all day for an hourly wage and I built things in my own shop at night (and weekends) for fun. Sounds like love to me.

But naturally this fascination waned. It took over twenty years, but wane it did…and ultimately we broke up. Maybe we spent too much time with one another; it wasn’t the wood, it was me, I don’t know. But other businesses caught my eye and I went for years without thinking of my first love.

During the break up I continued to read articles and publications about woodworking. I always admired things built by others and I did my best to encourage and compliment. I always found it odd when many of the elitist publications began to call woodworking joinery. To me it was like calling driving automobile operation, or eating was consuming nourishment; just a fancy way to describe a simple task. Would I now refer to myself a joiner?

But with each passing year the logic of this term makes more sense. Everything comes down to joinery. A piece of wood kept indoors will last forever, but once you construct something from it, the connections (if made poorly) will fail. The same can be said for how we live our lives; if our connections with others are made poorly or not maintained, they will also fail. Alone we are simply a piece of wood, but through joinery we can become a beautiful masterpiece!

Forgetting

I could iron clothes in my sleep. This is not something that I necessarily want to brag about, it’s simply a fact of my life. Yes, I am domestically gifted, but there are many tasks that each of us do daily that require little concentration or attention to detail. I'm sure that some are much more important than my household chores, but I use this time to plan my day and beat a few dead horses killed in the days and weeks before.

This morning I used the iron and its hissing steam as white noise while I prioritized my day. I’m no busier than the average person, but most of what I was attempting to pull together today was an exceptionally eclectic and random mix; multiple businesses, volunteer boards and family woes. And then it hit me! A fleeting image of my forgotten homework lying neatly on the dining room table; me, standing in the school lunch line with no money in my pockets, loaded tray in hand; my daughter, standing in front of the school impatiently checking her watch and looking down an empty street. I had forgotten something major…but what?

When it finally hit me I had to smile. What I had allowed to sneak past me was a date that I had actually been trying to forget for quite some time. How long I had been trying to forget is really not as important as the fact that it had finally happened. I had forgotten to be sad on the 10^th anniversary of my brother’s death.

I won’t try to tell you that I hadn’t thought of this date at all in the previous months, but I will add that it had not filled me with the same level of dread that it had before. This was not a date that he and I shared or celebrated, it was an anniversary created when he left. It was almost like adding another birthday, but for all the wrong reasons. We only need one, and I will happily dance on yours again this year as I celebrate your life.

Santa? Is that you?

The silent alarm sounded and I sat upright in my single bed. I was a little scared of what I had to now do, but I was also a little proud of the early warning system I’d developed that had allowed me to be accident free for more years than I could remember. At a full nine years of age I usually slept soundly through the night, but on this night, I had to pee.

Luckily the bathroom was right next to my room and I wouldn’t have to walk by that big scary painting in the living room; the one with the man and wife that stared back at me no matter where I stood in the room. My parents had laughed when I told them how it scared me, but at least they had been kind enough to move it out of the hallway…and to not tell my brothers why they had done so.

When my feet hit the cold December floor it crossed my mind to just jump back in bed and have an ‘accident’. Except for that watermelon incident last summer I really couldn’t remember the last time I’d wet the bed, but I was a big boy and I knew that my parents and Santa were keeping tabs on my progress. Santa! That’s right; it was Christmas Eve; how could I forget! Maybe I could endure the staring strangers long enough to check the living room and see if Santa had come. Maybe I would even catch him in the act!

The first thing I noticed when I entered the hallway was a dim light coming from the end of the house. I knew that Santa was magic, but he probably still needed a little light to do his work. I took a few steps and hesitated; would he be mad if I caught him? I would hate to do anything that might cause a reduction of my anticipated bounty. Before I could take another step I heard a muffled voice coming from the living room. I strained to listen because I knew what Santa’s voice sounded like; he usually called before I went to bed on Christmas Eve. Then I heard another voice. It was different from the first and much more feminine. Was Mrs. Claus with him?

When I heard my mother’s familiar giggle I realized that it was my parent’s voices I was hearing in the living room. Now there was nothing to be scared of I thought as I charged down the hall! Maybe they had even talked to Santa and made a few last minute suggestions. I could get an early start playing with my new toys!

When I entered the room they both fell silent. They wore the same embarrassed expression they had when I had come to their bed one night after a terrible nightmare; something is wrong. And here they were, standing in the living room playing with the toys Santa had brought for me! Sensing my disappointment, my father recovered quickly and scooped me up in his arms. He cleared a place on the sofa, pulled my mother to us and sat all three of us on the couch. Showered with comfort and kisses, they proceeded to explain a true story that changed the way I looked at life (and certainly Christmas) forever.

This is one of my favorite stories, but wish as I may, not an ounce of it is true. The Beaver and all six Brady’s probably learned this way, but I learned the truth about Santa the way most every other kid of my era did. I learned through ridicule, false information and embarrassment. I may have been a little angry at first, but I quickly realized that if I just played along, the gifts would keep coming in. Wink wink.

But the real value of this lesson is one that I have to remind myself of regularly as I age. I know that no medals are awarded for simply being right. I know that nothing positive comes from ‘calling out’ others on the little white lies that allow them to make it through a work week. I know that believing in something different does not necessarily make it wrong and that being mad about something you cannot change will ultimately stop the flow of gifts. I know now that there is a Santa Claus, and if you truly believe, he will come every day.

Groundhog Day

Anybody who has known me for very long knows that I have always had a fascination with animals lying dead by the road. Yes road kill! But before you picture me cooking up a long dead possum or raccoon, let me explain. The fascination revolves around the chance to look at these animals up close and personal without risking my health and safety. I would never dream of killing most of these animals myself, so if they are already dead…why not? It always kind of seemed like meeting a celebrity to me.

I come by this trait honestly. When I was a kid we often stopped and inspected road kill, and if it was something rare like a big rattlesnake or copperhead, we would take it home and save the skin. I still remember the look on the bag boy from A&P’s face when he opened the trunk on our VW Beetle only to stare in to the eyes of a quickly thawing road-killed bobcat! If I remember correctly that was the last time he hit on my mother. Let’s just say that not everyone shared (or understood) our fascination.

Over the years inspecting road kill gave me a great understanding of what lurked in the woods around our home. I could brag that I had identified and touched most of the wild animals native to middle Georgia. Sure they were dead, but I petted foxes, coyotes, skunks, wild hogs, and countless species of snakes, hawks and owls. This up close and personal inspection allowed me to make positive identifications in the field as well as those drive-by inspections done at 60 miles per hour on the way to school. “That was a grey fox” I would counter when one of my brothers said “poor dog” or just simply “awwwe”. Maybe DOT would hire me as an amateur biologist!

But even the truest of pleasures has a way of fading over time. After years of poking these deceased creatures with a stick I was beginning to think I had seen it all, and the number of times we actually stopped decreased. It had to be something we couldn’t identify or something really special. Of course my wife-to-be knew of this fascination, and while I can’t positively say she enjoyed stopping and viewing the carnage, she did a good job of at least playing along. It wasn’t long before she could tell the difference between a red fox and a grey one at almost 80 miles per hour! Looks like I had chosen a good one.

So as I approach my wedding anniversary of twenty four years, I am reminded of one of the most unusual road kill identifications of my illustrious career. We were married on February 4^th, and while I won’t say that the groundhog’s search for his shadow had any influence on our destination, we chose to head to the cold mountains of North Georgia anyway. In spite of the frigid weather we had a wonderful time and I somehow managed to keep my eyes on the road; tougher than it sounds for a guy like me traveling through an exotic location with potentially unidentified species of animals unable to safely cross the road.

We had almost made it to flat and familiar ground when we zoomed by a reddish, immobile lump lying a few feet off of the side of the road. “Was that a grey fox?” my wife asked as I applied the brakes and pulled on to the shoulder of the road. I had been wondering the same thing, but I was delighted that she was the one that brought it up. Nothing kills a honeymoon quite like loading a dead animal into the back of the truck beside a busy road! The joy of adding a new animal to my long list of positively identified road kill quickly faded as I realized the irony this one. His prediction of six more weeks of winter was incorrect…he only managed four days!

Semesters

The last few months at my household can best be described as “trying”.  Throw in two major holidays and a job change on top of a semester at school that was not going my daughter’s way and you have a really good recipe for the perfect storm. I think all three of us felt like we were the one carrying the entire load, and while I know this was not the case, if you feel that way does it really matter?

Fortunately the new year has started off much better. Of course I have I have to qualify this statement with the fact that it is Winter; the arm pit of seasons. I don’t necessarily lose my will to live during this time, but my want often suffers! But we finally got that new semester the three of us had been holding our collective breaths for. A fresh start. One can only say “hold on, it’s almost over” so many times before they too begin to lose hope, but often this is the only option. We practice our breathing lessons.

We all live our lives trying to make it over that next hump. Friday’s paycheck, the big test or the boss’s vacation…if I can just hang on until…Fortunately school, like the four seasons, is broken up in to manageable clips. Even a lizard in search a hot rock like me gets tired of sweating! Change keeps us both fresh and on our toes. The only activity more fun than decorating for Christmas is packing things up and enjoying a Spartan household, for about a week. Happiness comes in semesters.

Really isn’t everything temporary? The things we love don’t last forever, and would we truly love them if they did? If Santa came every night we eventually would become so tired of baking cookies that we might slip him a store-bought one every now and then *gasp*. The danger lies in forgetting that the bad times are temporary as well.

So don’t quit your job or leave your spouse just yet; neither of those operate on the semester system, and really they are not the things we need to change anyway. Math will pass, that demanding client will cycle and eventually the air will warm. It may not happen tomorrow, but there is always next semester.

It's not far...

My older brother moved around a lot in his almost thirty year military career, and while this offered me the opportunity to enjoy a few low cost trips to some cool cities, we really didn't see each other much. When he ended up a few hours away in Opelika Alabama the entire family was ecstatic! I don’t mind air travel, but it’s complicated and expensive; just being able to get in the car and visit for the weekend was a huge bonus.

But one of the first things I realized when I struck out on my first visit there was that the trip from Milledgeville to Opelika was also complicated. Turn here…drive a few miles on this two lane…look for this turn…there is no sign, but there’s a big tree…It wasn't that bad, but it wasn't like taking the interstate to Atlanta either. When I mentioned the trip to a friend he explained it to me in true Southern fashion, “it’s not that far, but there really is no good way to get there”. Exactly!

This was a more than a few years ago now and I will say that with the addition of the Fall Line Freeway the trip is certainly much easier. The new highway is four lanes, divided by a grassy median, with speed limits in some sections of sixty five miles per hour!  Progress, finished just in time for my brother to move away!

I ended up on a short section of this beautiful highway yesterday as I ventured from Milledgeville to Gordon. I understand that the ultimate goal of connecting two of Georgia’s larger cites (Columbus with Augusta) is not yet realized, but I have to confess that I didn't pass a single car on this highway coming or going. It’s somewhat of a joke to a few area residents, and a sore spot to several others. It chopped a few surface streets in half and blazed through some of the most beautiful property in Georgia. One of the affected areas was a property I hunted for many years.

Construction on this leg of the new road lasted for several years. I must confess that while the work was going on the hunting, if not improved, was a little more enjoyable. The big machines opened up areas where you could see farther than you could shoot and I often watched animals of all kinds cross the newly graded roadbed. But each morning as I sat perched in a tree high above the ground watching the sunrise, I knew that my days here were numbered. Did I think the new highway was a good idea? I guess after my years of traveling the ‘pig paths’ to Columbus I would be a hypocrite to say no, but why did it have to blaze through my favorite hunting spot? The answer is simple…it’s not far, but there is really no good way to get there!

Almost!

When I was a little boy my brothers and I watched every minute of Sunday NFL football that our single channel would allow. If we were lucky, or someone climbed on the roof and turned the antenna, this meant two games; if we were not, we either had to go outside and play football ourselves or watch a well-worn version of Bye Bye Birdie; a channel 13 favorite! Yes, I was raised in the caveman years of television.

Winter Sunday afternoons consisted of three little boys wearing any clothing item football related, draped over the furniture trying to find a way to stay focused for the four hours it took to decide the outcome of a football game. Often we would get up right in the middle of the action and go outside a throw the ball around. Of course we were practicing our ball handling skills, but the most important skill was learning to make a football move without the appearance of really trying! What you did was not as important as what you looked like while you were doing it! “It’s better to look good than to feel good and darling you look marvelous”…well, kind of, I know what Billy Crystal was trying to say!

Of course I have never been able to shake this idea of being cool completely, I am a male. But as I get older one of the things I've realized is that these professional athletes were trying to appear flippant partly to cover just how much pain that last amazing play, and really the entire season before it, inflicted! I now understand what my father meant when (after an awesome tackle) his first word was “Ouch” instead of “Yay”! Turns out missing work and missing school are two entirely different missings!

But of course there were valuable lessons hidden in this “be cool” training we practiced every day. I learned to approach every situation as though I belonged in it; I learned confidence. I learned that playing through the pain could mean working at a job I dislike while I waited for the one I really wanted to open up. I learned to not sound the alarm when a friend wanted help with a problem that terrified me.

But in spite of my fifty years of practice, this morning I almost slipped. As I attempted to place the massive 20 lb. bag of dog food on the self-check counter at Walmart, my lower back decided I should not. The look on my face as I frantically searched for a shopping buggy to carry the load to my car was obvious to the older cashier standing a few feet away and she politely asked me if I needed some help! “No thanks” I managed, “I just thought for a second I had lost my wallet!” Almost!