What was that?

After sleeping in the same bed with the same woman for twenty five years, you would think that I had seen and heard everything. Before you get the wrong idea let me say it again…sleep…in the same bed. After this much time in grade you get so used to your partner that even the strangest of noises and movements become the new normal. I do keep a set of ear plugs handy for allergy season, but that’s another story worthy of claiming an entire chapter. Garden variety snoring is welcome background noise similar to one of those sleep machines. Water in a mountain stream, birds in the forest, a mild thunderstorm or snoring spouse; choose your personal setting.
But what never ceases to amaze me is just how quick one can go from stage 4 REM sleep to casual conversation. It’s like flipping a switch. Last night for example; we’ve been sleeping with the windows open for the last few weeks, enjoying the cooler weather. This week has been extra special because we’ve had rain! I remember waking a time or two and listening to water coming over the top of the gutters instead of exiting through the leaf choked down spout; music to my ears! You probably think this would be cause for concern, but let me say that old age has allowed me to sleep like a baby through the most urgent of home maintenance concerns. But sometime later in the night I heard PJ say in a normal tone “What was that?” I responded in real time “I don’t know”. Just a normal conversation in the middle of the night…how was your day or did you feed the dog?
Yes I heard it too; there was a loud noise of something crashing to the ground. PJ did ask me if I thought the falling satellite had hit us, but we were both fully awake at that point and I assured her that our yard would probably already be full of vans wearing NASA stickers. But isn’t it funny that I don’t hear the toilet flush or the dog bark anymore, but PJ can ask “are you awake?” and I will say “yes”. Maybe it’s just the ears of a parent. Before Taylor was born I rarely got out of bed in the night; sometimes I didn’t even roll over. But now thanks to the combination of an almost fifty year old bladder and daughter to care for, I get up at least once every night. I think that before we go to bed each night we “set ourselves” just like the clock. It makes me wonder what else is going on?

The Right Thing

Just another Tuesday morning. Two taps of the snooze button and the routine begins. Pour the first cup of coffee, iron some clothes, wake up Taylor, fix breakfast and maybe have a few minutes to watch the news. I at least like to have my weather professionally guessed before I hit the road. It’s a routine we can all do half asleep, and this day begins like so many others have before and (god willing) will again.
The weatherman declares that once again there is no rain in our immediate future. I think about washing my truck or watering my grass, some of the tricks that have worked in the past to force precipitation as the local news shifts back to the national scene. As I grab the remote to pull the plug on the steady stream of unemployment numbers and political infighting, I’m drawn to the images on screen of a burning car. Wait, it’s not the car that’s burning, it’s a motorcycle that is pinned under the front bumper. People are trying to lift the car amid the flames, and after several attempts they succeed! An unconscious man is dragged from underneath the car and he appears to be alive. “Wow”, I hear my daughter say as she appears from the bathroom. “Where is this?”
We watch the footage several times and Iearn that this has happened in Murray Utah. The man dragged from underneath the car, a 21 year old college student at Utah State, is expected to make a full recovery. The people that saved his life are strangers that just happened to be there at the right time. We collectively decide that he is a lucky man as we turn off the television and head out the door. This will be on my mind all day because I have about 200 miles of driving before the day is done. I’ll be extra careful!
As I went about my travels that day I continued to think about the accident. The attempts to lift the car. The first try with only 4-5 people was not enough, the car was too heavy. People kept appearing from the wings like extras in a movie. College students and construction workers, men and women, blacks and whites. A cross section that an independent survey would approve was giving it their all. All volunteers with one goal in mind; saving the life of a perfect stranger. What would I have done? Would I have jumped in and helped? Would the car explode and kill us all?
Luckily this is not a question that today I will have to answer. I was a thousand miles away when the accident occurred, and I watched it from the safety of my own home. I didn’t feel the heat from the flames or smell the smoke from the burning rubber; I didn’t have to decide. But what I did get was an urge to help someone, to do something good. To pay it forward. I don’t have to pull a flaming car off of someone to make a difference in another’s day. I will not make the evening news by simply treating other with respect and kindness, and I honestly don’t think I should. I don’t think stardom was what the rescuers were seeking when the saved the young man’s life, they were simply doing the right thing

A Team

In the name of getting my life on a more productive track, I joined the United States Navy. The year was 1982 and I was twenty years old. To say that I was uneasy about this decision was an understatement; I was terrified. Being from a small, rural town in middle Georgia I had never ventured more than 300 miles from home and even on those trips I was never alone. Time to grow up.
The only things I knew about military life came from black and white episodes of Gomer Pile. Somehow I knew that this would be of little use, though I caught myself listening for the laugh track and background music on several occasions. I began to feel comfortable when I came to the realization that although this was new to me and I had no idea what to do, I was not alone; we were all brand new. We struggled to learn to correctly fold our clothes and make our beds, and we flopped on our beds nightly exhausted from the additional exercise we were all “awarded” because of mistakes made by individual shipmates. We must work together or we would be the fittest graduating class in history.
Like many other young men of this era I was a smoker. This not something I’m proud of, but it was the perfect thing for the company Commanders to hold for ransom… and believe me they did! One Sunday morning we were hanging around the barracks writing letters, resting and just enjoying a much needed day off. I was in the bathroom shaving when I heard a shipmate yell the dreaded “Attention on deck”! This meant we were about to receive a surprise visit (and possible inspection) from our constantly disappointed superiors. “On the line” was called and we lined up at attention in front of our bunks. This could not be good!
All hopes of receiving a smoke break this day were brought to a screeching halt when it was discovered that one of our fellow recruits had a pinch of smokeless tobacco in his mouth. Tobacco of any persuasion was considered smoking, and the fact that this young fellow had taken it upon himself to partake was going to cost us dearly. A large steel trash can was turned upside down and the offender was made to stand on display in front on 79 very angry recruits. “You may never smoke again, and you have this young fellow to thank” was announced by the company commanders as they turned authority over to the head recruit and exited the building. The young man stood at attention on the trash can for hours receiving the taunts and catcalls of an angry mob.
Well I learned a valuable lesson about human nature that day. You are only as strong as your weakest link. Even the angriest of sailors began to feel sorry for the young man, and the taunts turned into “don’t worry about it” and “It’s no big deal, I need to quit anyway”. We were becoming a team. Even though this young man had made a mistake that would cost us dearly, he was one of us. I wonder to this date if this event happened in real time or was simply a bonding exercise, but either way it hit its mark. If we can begin to learn to view mistakes as learning opportunities for this great big team, the world will be a much better place to live.

Teach One

Since I was a little boy I have loved to cook. Growing up in a working family with three boys very close in age, food (and competition for food) was always a big deal. We all three learned to cook well enough to survive on our own, but I really loved it. Granted this was not a very manly thing to tell your buddies in junior high school, so I really kept my love for cooking to myself. “Dude I baked a really nice pineapple upside down cake last night, it was really moist”. That doesn’t sound weird now, but if you grew up in the 1970’s you would understand.
I’ve made several career changes over the years, but my love for cooking is one of the few things that has remained a constant. My wife of 25 years didn’t know how to boil water when we married, and while she is a pretty good cook now, I have been the one to feed us since the very beginning. I don’t mind because she does most of the cleanup, the smoke detector batteries last longer and we don’t eat at midnight. An excellent delegation of duties!
Since my daughter was very young I’ve let her help me prepare meals. I hoped that she would share my love of the kitchen, but she is now fourteen and I’m not so sure she has. The older she gets the more important it has become to me and I often feel like she thinks I’m leaving or dying when I tell her, “you really need to know how to make this” or “come watch how I do this part, I won’t be around forever”. I know this sounds morbid, but I have always thought the more she knows how to do for herself, the more independent she will be. Parents!
This makes me think of something I recently learned in an OSHA class. It was presented as the surgeon’s axiom and it is as follows; “See one, do one, teach one”. This is naturally what we do for our children, but this is also a wonderful approach for your business. When you take the time to help co-workers or new employees by answering the “there is no such thing as a stupid question” questions; you will be rewarded with a productive office and some karma bonus points. Teaching others is the best way to teach you!

Angel

I moved back to Milledgeville a little over four years ago. I would say that I moved home, but actually I was born in Atlanta and lived there until I was five or six. This, I know, is splitting hairs because Milledgeville is where I grew up and will always be home. I moved back here after spending about seven years right down the road in Wilkinson County. We lived just outside of Ivey on what was, at that time, my childhood dream farm. A home and almost eighty acres! Taylor went to the public school there and PJ was a stay at home mom. What more could a man want?
Well we all know that dreams have a way of changing once they are given life. Want is what makes us dream, and we both begin to want something else. We had moved there to be closer to my younger brother, but after his death the county just didn’t feel welcoming. I built a new home in Milledgeville and we moved back. We moved from eighty acres in the middle of nowhere to a neighborhood inside the city limit. Talk about change! I spent a large portion of the first year looking out the window at my neighbors cutting their grass, washing their cars and just sitting on their porch. All of this in plain view! They were coming and going like they didn’t know (or care) anybody was watching.
All of this now seems like so long ago.
I was in the area of our old place several times in the previous weeks, so I rode by to take a look. There is a brand new highway that comes within a few miles of our old place, but everything else looked the same. It was like I had gone to the store or maybe a short vacation and was returning home. I didn’t stop. I told myself that I needed to get back to work, but really I had mixed emotions about being in the area, period. My brother has been gone for over eight years, but looking at things that we discovered together made it seem like yesterday.
I’m not a stranger to death. I’ve cried my eyes out at funerals for friends and family, and some I still think about today. I’ve helped choose just the right casket and I held my grandmother’s hand when she took her last breath. My grandfather was one of a kind and hardly a day passes that I don’t wish my daughter had known him like I did. But my brother’s death, for me, was different. When I lost him I was scared. We talked a lot and I pretty much bounced every idea I had off of him before I acted on it. But just losing my voice of reason was not what scared me. I think this was the first time I actually wondered what happened to someone when they died. I understand the biological part, but would he still be around me in spirit? Would he haunt me? Would he leave signs for me so that I would know he was watching over me? Would any of this happen, or was he just gone?
I looked for him everywhere. Every morning I looked out the window overlooking a small field in front of the house. Sometimes I would see deer and turkeys crossing the field, but I never saw him. I half expected (or just plain hoped) that one day I would raise the blinds and he would be crossing the field. He would hesitate just for a second to acknowledge that I had seen him before fading into the wood line. A fake Bigfoot sighting that was too blurry to really tell what was going on. I could image it so clearly that at times I thought that it had happened. It never did.
When I told my family about riding by the old place they got excited. I agreed to ride back there the coming weekend and maybe even get out and look around. I wondered what effect this would have on them, especially my daughter. We had moved there when she was only three years old and she had experienced many “firsts” there. She had seen her daddy at his worst there as well. She arrived as a baby and departed as a young lady.
We got up early Sunday morning and headed to Wilkinson County. The new highway was a shock to both of them, so we traveled its full length before heading up the dirt road to the old place. All three of us put on our hats as we pulled in the drive in front of the locked gate and climbed out of the truck. Luckily the deer flies were not too bad, but we kept our hats on anyway, holding hands as we silently walked down the short drive to the front of the house.
We reached the clearing separating the house and shop and stopped to catch our breaths. The weeds were tall in front of the house and the field that I had kept almost manicured was overgrown nearly head high. Nobody said anything as we each looked at different components of our memories. My eyes were scanning the field when a movement at the wood line caught my eye. My heart fluttered and I dropped my daughter’s hand. I searched for words but none would come. I knew that I should say something because the moment would quickly pass. I somehow managed to point in the general direction of the movement and say “look”. They both turned in the direction of my outstretched arm and gasped. For standing at the end of the field was an almost completely white deer with a large set of chocolate brown antlers. A beacon in the drought burned scrub. An angel.

The Game

It’s the biggest game of their lives and everybody involved is getting nervous. There are only three outs left and the pitcher has almost reached the maximum number of pitches he can throw, eighty five. The coaches are pacing back and forth in the dugout trying to decide what, if anything, to do next. They can let him pitch to one more batter or take him out now. What to do when you are down by one run and facing elimination in the Little League World Series.
The manager makes his move toward the mound; he has to make a decision. He calls time out and walks on the field. The man waves his arms as he walks on the field and a crowd of long faced twelve year olds join him at the mound. Some of the boys appear to be fighting back tears while others are looking at their shoes. The team looks to have already lost the game and judging from their expressions, they are already thinking about the long ride home to New England.
The manager gathers the boys around him and looks each boy in the eyes. Here it comes, I think, he’s going to rip them a new one. “Isn’t this great? You guys are great!” he says with a thick Boston accent, “This game is great, we are a great team!” The boys look up at him and a few even manage a smile. “I’m so proud of each one of you. Go get them”. He hands the ball back to the struggling pitcher and walks back to the dugout.
Well a miracle did not happen for those boys that night, they were eliminated. They will watch the remainder of the tournament from home, and playing under the Williamsport lights will be only a memory. The numbers are not really in favor of any of these boys making it to the big leagues, so this will probably be the biggest sporting event in which most of them will ever participate. But what a memory it will be!
I have continued to think of this game since I watched it last night. Sure, the competition was intense, but what their coach told them when all was lost has really stuck with me. Whether we win or lose, we are great. If we enjoy life for what it is, what we are doing and who we are doing it with…we win every game.

Oh No!

By now I think that everyone who reads my blogs knows what I do for a living. Officially I am a monitor for the federal government’s weatherization program working in a grant funded position. Unofficially I am an inspector hired by The University of Georgia to oversee the work done by community action agencies. Before I go any further let me just say no, I can’t get you any free football game tickets, but I do like both the job and the employer. Getting to talk to the clients that have had their homes weatherized has been a lot of fun too. I’ve met some genuine southern characters.
Honestly I am a re-inspector. The work has already been inspected, so I inspect the inspectors. That is a mouthful, I know, but it’s to insure that there is no impropriety with our tax dollars. Sometimes I get to see some pretty rough stuff in some neighborhoods that, let’s just say, I wouldn’t want to be in after the sun goes down. But for the most part it goes smoothly. I have been trained on how to handle people that approach me, and I’m a diligent truck locker. I never go alone and I usually follow an inspector (my escort) from one of the agencies in my personal vehicle; safety in numbers. Sounds like we’ve got it all figured out, huh? Well something happened to me today that you just can’t train for.
We left a home in Houston County and headed for downtown Macon. I don’t care much for the east side of that town, but quite a bit of work is done in that area so I’m there frequently. We pulled into the driveway that was shared with two side by side houses and I began to look around. It was pretty much what I expected, so I grabbed my camera and stepped out of the truck. I usually let the guy from the agency go in first because he already knows the homeowner, but as I got out and walked around the home, he got back in his truck to let a car, he had blocked in, out of the drive. When I came back to the front of the house my escort was nowhere in sight, so I spoke to an older man that was sitting on the front porch as I walked in the front door.
It was pretty dark inside the home, but I could see three people sitting on the couch as I walked toward the kitchen. I said hello and they responded in kind. When I reached the kitchen there was an older woman sitting at the table. I spoke to her as well and started taking pictures of the appliances. I opened the cabinets and looked in the stove. I pulled the clothes dryer out slightly and took a picture of the exhaust pipe. As I went through the motions of my routine inspection, the lady sitting at the table asked me why I was taking pictures. I explained to her why I was there and what else I would have to do before I left. “Humph” was all she said. I apologized again as I ran another person out of the bathroom! How many people were in this home? After twenty minutes of taking pictures and opening cabinet doors I walked out back to look at the rear of the home. One of the ladies went with me because there were three pitbulls back there, and while I could tell that at least two were on chains, I didn’t want to take a chance. I hated to ask her, but I thought it was the least she could do after all of the work that had been done on her home.
She was in the middle of an apology for how much stuff she had stacked on the back porch when my cellphone rang . It was my escort, but why was he calling me? “Where are you he asked?” as the homeowner stopped her speech in mid-sentence. I thought this was a stupid question, but I told him I was in the back yard. He walked around the home at this point and stood there looking at me with a big smile on his face. “I was wondering where you were.” He almost laughed. “But I would have never dreamed you were in the next door neighbor’s house!”