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Buried in my list of unpublished blogs are three drafts, written about the same subject, that I just can’t seem to finish.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.