MY WAY

As I grow older I often think about my past life. The places I have been, the people I have met and the things I have accomplished. I guess if I were challenged to put it all in one word, I would say, “satisfied.” I look around me at the way my world has changed and although its still pretty damn good, I hoped for far more then this. I wished that someway, somehow, we would have managed to live in peace with each other better. I wished we wouldn’t have changed so many things in the name of personal freedom, and especially at the expense of the things that got us where we are, like morality and honesty. I wished for an end to the greedy and gullible way we defined success. But as Grandma said, “If wishes were horse’s beggars would ride.”

 Then I switched gears and zoomed in at what I could control—my own life. The late Frank Sinatra sang a song that’s lyrics spell out so well, how I feel today about my past life, in his song “My way.” I’m going to skip the first few lines because I don’t feel the end is near or anticipate the final curtain. But I do realize that realistically it is possible, so maybe writing this now is the prudent thing to do. I have lived a life that’s full and for so much of it, I did do it, “My way.” The fruits of my labors show not in any wealth I have accumulated, which by the way isn’t that much, but in the eyes, minds and bodies of the three children, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren I call my own. No accomplishment in life could cast a shadow on me more then this does because I knew years ago that life was not infinite but my influence could be to some extent and that’s what kept me on the straight and narrow.

 Regrets, yes I have had a few. But unlike Frank they were not too few to mention. For you see if you want to bury your regrets someplace where you no longer go, then you’ve wasted their lessons. I’m not talking about living in the past, I’m talking about not repeating the mistakes of the past anymore then you have to and believe me if you think you can discount them as just some Freudian slip, then you will repeat them again, as sure as God made little green apples. The best men are born out of their faults. I, like Frank, did bite off more then I could chew on more then one occasion. Did I chew it up and spit it out? Maybe nothing quite that dramatic but I did face my problems and not run away from them and for the most part turned most of them into a learning experience.

 But it is in the last part of the song that I find the biggest message. Frank sang, “What is a man, what has he got? If not himself he has naught.” For years I have had on my desk, a poem by some anonymous person called the “Man in the Glass.” Look it up or Goggle it, because its message is something that should be every person’s mantra. In short it says to look in the mirror, because there you will meet the one person you can’t deceive.

This essay was too much about me and not about others far more worthy then I but in reality it rings true for every person who ever lived. My accomplishments, my victories in life pale in the context of many others but to me they were fulfilling and I truly feel that in the end, I will be able to say. I never cheated the Man in the glass.

THE SOUNDS OF LIFE AS WRITTEN IN THE FALL OF 2016

Once on a camping trip to the boundary waters, I remember sitting around a campfire in the evening and being mesmerized by the absolute quietness. It was almost an eerie feeling but it was then that I realized how important my hearing was to me. I lived in the cities at that time, in a place where there is no such thing as a quiet moment. From my bedroom window there was always the sound of constant traffic, if not from the street in front of my house, from the freeway three blocks away. Neighbors talking in their yards and cars starting up. Train whistles from the tracks two miles away and sirens from emergency vehicles, and the back up horns of garbage trucks and delivery vehicles. There was always a lawn mower or a snow blower going someplace and the constant spitz, spitz, spitz, of the neighbors sprinklers. Dogs barking and feral cats meowing. Then we moved to the lake and the sounds changed and our world changed. At least the way we heard it. As I sit at my desk this morning I hear three things. Raindrops on the roof, the hum of the refrigerator and the clicking of the keyboard as I type. Some other sounds I might hear from time to time are the loons celebrating, a passing boat motor and waves lapping on the shore but this morning, it’s pretty quiet. My son-in-law told me that after he and my daughter moved to Arizona the sounds he missed the most were birds singing and the wind in the trees. They have trees, but not the kind that make much noise and in the hot months the birds seem to disappear. Mostly all you hear is traffic. Incessant traffic in a busy, busy city and air conditioners running. As a kid growing up in Staples we had our share of noise pollution for a small town. We lived a block from a major highway and it was a busy railroad town during the age of the steam engines. But for the most part wherever you live you may hear a lot but you digest just what you want to hear and tune the rest out. It’s when you change environments that your ears get a work out, at least for a while. There are sounds I used to hear that I miss and I will probably never hear again. The church bells ringing on the Catholic Church in Staples calling people to worship on Sunday morning. The click of Moms knitting needles, as she sat in her chair in the evening knitting. Sitting in the train depot on a cold winter night, I would just close my eyes and listen to the telegraph keys clicking off a message from the clerk’s office. Cows mooing in a cattle truck, at a truck stop, a block from our house. Then there were the sounds of my three brothers breathing as we slept, four of us in the same cold room. We are constantly barraged with sounds and sometimes when we hear nothing, that’s when we get alarmed. It’s a feeling that something is wrong, something is not working. Something isn’t right. We don’t realize how important our ears are-- besides holding our glasses up-- until its totally quiet. I remember as a fire fighter working in a blackout environment, inside of a burning building, listening for the crackling of the flames and the sounds of my partners breathing apparatus. When our first baby was born, I remember standing in the bedroom doorway at night, listening to him breathing. I needed that reassurance he was all right. How different it must be not to hear.

CHANGE IN FAMILY VALUES

As the oldest child of my parent’s family, I often think about my roots. How I would like to go back to that day and time once more, and sit around that table with my immediate family. There wasn’t anything tangible there to brag about, except our quality of life. Now I’m going to shock you by telling you the “quality of life” I talk about had nothing to do with the tangible things we equate with it today. Our house, back then, didn’t have much of that. Meals were always on time, but red meat was largely absent. There was no soda in the fridge, and no candy dish. Maybe a homemade cake for a birthday—and there were ten of us, so that was a plus. The house went cold at night when the fire went out. Clothes were mostly hand-me-downs. There was one TV and one phone. “So tell me,” you say, “where was this ‘quality of life?’” I measured quality of life in the love, and character, of my parents and siblings. This example must have stuck, at least with my generation, because the seven surviving siblings are all with the spouses they married, except me—and I am a widower who was married forty-nine years. My father never worried about handouts, he only prayed that someone would always give him a job and let him earn his way. He was one of the hardest working men I ever knew. My mother always made good meals out of little. In the eighteen years I was home, going out to eat never happened unless it was potluck at a church, or a relative’s home. Mom washed clothes for her family and hung them outside to dry—even in the winter. She baked all of our bread, grew a garden, and canned the vegetables. You get the picture. As the oldest, I have seen the births and lives of twenty of my parent’s grandkids and thirty-some great grandkids. I have also seen where that love and respect, our parents demanded from us, has been watered down. We were raised as a Christian family, and that, too, has been lost in some cases. It’s funny how love and respect seems to run off and hide when that leaves. I sometimes wonder what the fourth generation will be like, but I know time will run out for me before then. We’re no different than most families, and I daresay this story could be repeated by anyone of that same era. That the decline of love and respect for each other, the decline in morality and faith in God, the love of power and money, poor work ethic, and an attitude of entitlement was going to happen in this fast changing world. It was going to happen because many people today don’t know anything else. I still wish I could go back and sit with my family, at that table we had in the late 1950’s, knowing what I know today. That I could say to my parents, “You tried so hard to raise us right, and you showed us the right way. I would hope you wanted us all to have a better life than you were able to give us, and for the most part, that happened, but Mom and Dad, somewhere some of us made some trade-offs that ate away at your way of life, and we are living to regret it.”

RACE PROBLEMS

                                                

I have at times, written about the ethnic problems we are having in this country and I have often felt that people saw me as hypocrite when I write about them. I, living in a part of the country that is predominately white. It wasn’t always that way though as I lived in the Twin Cities for many years and in some very diverse neighborhoods. I once had a black man working for me for ten years or better. I would say African American for the politically correct people but I have no idea where his ancestors came from. It could have been Haiti for all I know. We became the best of friends and ate lunch together everyday. I cried the day he retired and we said goodbye.

He told me in our lunchtime conversations about growing up in Mississippi and the discrimination he faced as a child. Yes, he was still bitter and in a way I didn’t blame him a bit. But on the other hand he was driven to make good for himself and he was a good and faithful employee. It hurt him to talk about it and we didn’t do it often. He wasn’t one to complain a lot so he harbored a lot of hurt.  He was a single man with no family and I always thought he would have made a good mentor for some young black child. I guess as far as that goes he would have made a good mentor for any child. You see children are copycats. Mom’s a doctor they want to be a doctor. Dads a truck driver, they want to follow his lead. Good examples begat more good examples. But when dad is not even there, or worse yet, is there and sells drugs to make ends meet, then you have trouble. I don’t want to insinuate that this is just a black problem, it isn’t. It just seems to be more egregious in the black community and one only needs to look at Chicago and its gangs to prove that.

We’ve been a long time getting to this kind of unrest in our country and it’s going to take a long time to make it right. I think the cure for this kind of social unrest lies only in education. But for those who are nodding their heads yes and want to spend mega funds for changes in education you need to answer this question first. How do you motivate kids, who drop out of school in the ninth grade to sell drugs and join gangs, not to do that? Common sense says you can’t teach students who aren’t there. So were back to a problem that can only be solved with the cooperation of parents and guardians. That’s the only people kids will listen to. Were back to the family structure and hasn’t that always been where good seeds and bad seeds get sowed.

There is a widening education gap between whites and people of color. There is no appreciable difference in the learning ability of people that has to do with race. Only in the desire to learn. A desire that is not inherent but is instilled by the parents, guardians and peers, but how do you manage that? I know the schools are not equipped to do that, nor should they be. Caring about these kids is everybody’s responsibility because in the end, everyone is impacted. There has to be a way to put pressure on parents to quit looking the other way and get involved in their kids lives. Yes, poverty plays a big part in this. Poverty has always been a seedbed for crime and discontent but a lack of education also plays a big role in being in poverty.