FAMILY TIES----COUNTRY TIES

There is amongst my family of eight siblings, blessings that few people get to enjoy. It’s the fact that some of us are now approaching our middle seventies and we’re all still alive and relatively healthy. But that’s only one of the blessings. The other is all of the grandkids and great grandkids that have come along from these unions are for the most part, good people making their way in this world. My grandfather had a saying. “He said remember Mike, when you raise your son, you raise your sons, son.” I think at least for my family, the proof is in the pudding and I’m not trying to be self-serving here. Remember that grand father I mentioned. That’s where it all started for me and that’s where the credit is due.

Another blessing comes in the fact that we as siblings still all love and respect each other and when one of us has problems we rally around each other and try to help, despite the fact that in many ways we have chosen far different paths in life. We don’t often get hung up on the details though, because in the end, no matter what happens-- she is my sister and he is my brother and we don’t let things like that unravel us. My dad was a big believer in the good book. The one that says, “You are your brothers keeper” “Judge not lest you be judged.”

Last month I listened to a news story where a father killed his son because he wouldn’t pay for cable television. I can’t fathom what brings anyone to the point to kill their own flesh and blood. The news this morning has a high school boy plotting to start another school massacre and right here in old Minnesota nice. You need other examples--- they’re a dime a dozen and they come along everyday. In most cases these are young people who grew up left to there own means. Kids are like electricity. They take the path of least resistant’s and the results are often shocking.

There is a vigilante attitude growing in this country. People are fed up with all of the rules and regulations and they are starting to fear their government. They don’t trust that they or their families will be safe anymore. They can’t understand how we can’t keep drugs or illegal aliens from coming into the country but yet profess to keep terrorists out. They can’t understand how we can go on telling the rest of the world how to live and yet the rest of the world hates us for it. We incarcerate more people then any other country in the world but yet people are still buying guns to defend their families and homes. Something is terribly wrong.

I am not sure we can recover some sense of normalcy in this country anymore. I think the pendulum has swung to far. I think our problems are insurmountable both fiscally and morally. Our government seems to be infected with the same greed and corruption that is tearing our society apart so we have the blind leading the blind. This is how revolutions get started, when the people have had enough. Maybe we need another big war to bring us back together. It worked sixty years ago. But then after all of the bloodshed and smoke went away, we took that hard earned victory, that had made us loved and respected by most of the world and peed it away. No, another war would be a bad idea. Just another band-aid on a huge, huge, wound. 

FLOWING RIVER

In my younger days, when I was living back in Staples, Minnesota, I would often travel north of town a few miles, to the Crow Wing River. This river, at least in those days, was one of the most peaceful and cleanest rivers in the state. I would go out to this remote spot that I loved so much, and just sit on the riverbank in the summer sun and watch the river flow by. There was something serene and peaceful about it, and it always put me in a pensive mood. “Kind of like watching paint dry?” you say. Not if you go there and let it work its magic.

Life, to me, has always seemed like a continuous flowing river. You get one chance to enjoy it. Then, it goes around the bend and there’s no getting it back. There is little you can do to slow its flow, or alter its course. You can only enjoy the moment, make good decisions and go for it. Like the river, you have no idea what is coming along next. It might be something wonderful that you had never thought of before. Then again, it might just dry up and leave you with nothing but mud and rocks to look at. It might even send a wall of water that causes you to momentarily scramble out of the way, but life has taught me that these things are temporary. You deal with them, and then you can go back and sit on the bank once more, and dream. For every trouble that comes your way, there will often be opportunities to set it all right.

We need not dwell on our regrets, but still keep our eyes fixed on the upstream part of life, because life past is just that. But there are lessons to be learned if we pay attention. Yesterday is history, and tomorrow is a mystery, and it is that mystery we pin our hopes on. There are times you want to just slip in, and go with the flow, because it seems so easy, so comfortable to do right now. But something tells you to be cautious, and make a good decision, because once you accept the status quo, it’s hard to go back to your dreams. Swimming upstream, against the current, is very tiring and you may never get back to that spot where you were. All of those opportunities yet to come, that you couldn’t wait for, will now be behind you, and they will spend the rest of your life chasing you far downstream, most likely never catching you. I like to look at the faces of our young people as they graduate and go out into life, but always, I wonder when the seriousness will set in for them. For most of us, that time comes when we have offspring, and we realize the ramifications that will come if we continue to degrade our earth, our values and our way of life. We know that by the time they start to think, like we are now thinking, it may be too late and we won’t be here to say, “I told you so.” On the other hand, it’s hard to be advice-givers when we have made such a mess of things already. It’s hard to say “I told you so,” when we were so much a part of the problem. I know that, someday, mankind will succeed in eliminating themselves because, for some strange reason, we seem destined to do that. Soon after we are gone, the earth will replenish itself, because Mother Nature is far more resilient than we are. For now, she is just putting up with us and our antics.

I THINK IT'S HERE

I say, “I think it’s here,” because life in Minnesota has taught me that you can never be sure when spring has really arrived. But something happened the other day that brought me hope. Many of us have taken a long journey, to some far-off destination we yearn to go to, and have experienced that feeling of relief that comes when we finally get out of the car, or off the plane, and know we are at our journey’s end. It’s as if we have endured something on that trip that had to be done before the real fun begins. We “paid our dues,” you might say, and that’s where that part of my analogy ends.

Here is where the other half starts. Yesterday morning when I got out of bed, and went to the patio doors to check the weather, as I often do, there it was—the ice was gone! Our lake was back, and to top it off, swimming right in front of my house were our loons. All thoughts of that long journey, through last winter’s brutal encasement of snow and ice, were gone from my mind. The dark nights of winter staring at the television, and listening to the wind blow outside the house, were history. We have finally turned the corner.

There lives in many of us an older person, with an aversion from work. We’re retired now, and punching the old clock is a distant memory, but there is such a thing as a labor of love for others and me, and it comes in spring. Each flowerbed I uncover brings little surprises because there they are again, poking their little heads above the earth, searching for the sunlight that is their lifeblood. The dead leaves have been raked and blown away, and just in time the rains come, and that drab brown grass magically finds its chloroform and green is the new color. The rhubarb seems to grow an inch a day and the buds are swelling on the maple and aspen trees. The earth is having a rebirth, and this is a time for celebration.

There is no analogy, however, between my life and the seasons, as is often portrayed. The earth passes from one season to another until the cycle is complete, and then it simply starts over. This reincarnation is second nature to Mother Nature, for you see, she’s been at it a long, long time. But just because it’s October in my waning life—and that might be a generous assumption—it doesn’t damper the feelings I have for spring. I might be old and wrinkled, but I love new things and spring has an abundance of them. God willing, I will get to see them grow up once more here in Mother Nature’s own backyard.

It’s been a few days now since I started this essay. It feels good to walk upright again, and not having to shuffle my feet from one patch of ice to another. I’ve pulled my head up out of my coat collar, and stretched my neck back out. Took the truck out of four wheel drive, and put the plow away. The rakes and shovels are out of the shed, and so is the ibuprofen bottle. I keep thinking that there are more spots hurting than last year, but what the heck, if they’re hurting, then they must still have some life left in them, right? All of us need “a purpose in life” to be able to get up and go on each day. Spring gives us that purpose, and you know what? Summers on its heels, and like they say back where I come from, “It don’t get no gooder than that.”