JIM

MY FRIEND JIM

When I was a young boy, and in my early teens, my parents wouldn’t let me have a dog. So I did the next best thing and I adopted someone else’s dog. The dogs name was Jim and his owner paid no attention to him, so I took over the job. Jim was an outside dog who was street smart so he had the run of the neighborhood and when he wanted company he always looked me up. When I got up in the morning for my paper route, there he would be in the yard waiting for me and when my dad came home at night he would quietly disappear, knowing he wasn’t welcome, although that changed, the longer he hung around.

None of my brothers or sisters ever paid much attention to Jim. I guess I was the dog lover in the family. Jim was a mutt and something of a cross between a German Sheppard and a Husky. He was stout and strong and even on the coldest winter nights he would curl up in a ball under our back-steps outside and sleep sometimes. I put some straw under there for him and as long as I wasn’t feeding him food from the house or letting him in the house, Dad dropped his opposition to him. I never fed him much but he stayed in good shape so his owner must have been putting food out for him, The man just didn’t seem to care where he was or maybe because he saw me with his dog so much, he was just happy someone else was paying attention to him.

I had a morning paper route so every morning at six I had to get up and go seven blocks uptown to the paper office and get my papers and then deliver them. It took me about an hour and a half and Jim always went with me. Many of my customers had dogs too, so Jim would help himself to their dog’s food while he was there, if it was outside. If their dog bothered me, Jim took them to task and he was a formidable fighter. In the winter when my hands got cold Jim would always let me warm them up in his fur and his tail was always wagging when he saw me.

Jim was well known around the neighborhood-- in fact around the town. I eventually switched to an evening paper route so I would go to the paper office after school and Jim was always there waiting for me. Fran, the man who ran the office, said he appeared every day about a half hour before I did and would lie on the sidewalk and wait for me. Jim seemed to know what time it was, but he didn’t know what day it was, so on Sundays he went up to the office too but seeing no one there he would go back home. He had to cross a busy highway to get there, but he always watched for traffic. Then I got a job and had to quit delivering papers and Jim would wander over to see me if I was outside, but he seemed to come less and less because I was never home.

Then one night while we were eating supper we heard a gunshot and went outside to investigate. There was Jim, lying on the sidewalk dead. There was a new cop on the police force and seeing Jim loose, he thought he was a stray so he shot him. While I knelt crying over Jim, my Dad lashed out at that cop and he was lucky to not been arrested for what he said to him. But I remember one sentence to this day, that dad told that cop, “You just killed the best friend that boy ever had.”

A BOOK

                                                          

Tonight I am finishing up my thirteenth book. Oh, it won’t be out for a while. The story may be complete but now comes all of the finishing touches. Hopefully while Pat and I are in Arizona there will be time for that. This is something fulfilling and yet sad for me to write-- “The end,”-- to this story. Sad because you see, it might just be the end of my stories. Somehow those creative juices I have enjoyed over the years are drying up and there are just no more stories to write. Only time will tell.

I’d like to think that this was one of my better books. After all time has taught me a lot of lessons about writing and story telling and hopefully I’ve been paying attention. There is something so unique about writing a story. To create all of those characters, name them, bring them to life and flesh them out and make them as real as life itself. As for the story itself, well there are very few stories left to tell that haven’t been told, over and over again. I guess the only difference comes in the signature of the author and how the story is told.

I remember as a young boy reading Hemmingway’s “Old Man and the Sea. I am going to read it again this winter, some sixty years later and this time I probably won’t be as intrigued with the story as I was back then because I know how it ends. No, this time my interest will be with the author and the way he wrote. There is a way to tell a story and there is a way to help you live the story through that writing and old Ernest Hemmingway was one of those, who had you squirming in your chair when he told you that story of Santiago and that big fish.

There is just so much you can do about shaping the world around you in real life. Not that that should stop any of us from trying to make this a better world for all of us. But a fiction author has the ways and means of making life right again, at least in the context of his/her story. Yes, its limited to what is between the covers of that book but sometimes, from that story comes the inspiration to make the story come to life in the real world. We are all dreamers of sorts but some people let those dreams die and some people live their dreams out and miracles happen and it’s all because of something they once dreamed up, believed in and became a doer. You see just dreaming of it isn’t enough. At some point you need to be a doer too. They go hand in hand.

Trying to succeed in life has always been a struggle and not just for writers. It is for any job. No matter the vocation, someone is always doing you one better but that is good for you if your paying attention because it keeps you trying harder if you take the challenge. Then again, maybe you’re right where you want to be in life anyway and you don’t want for anything more and if your happy, isn’t that what life is all about? But back to the book, for every once in a while someone comes along with a story or book that is so unique, so different. Not just a new spin on an old story but truly a new story, no one has ever heard before and I’m hoping this story of mine will be like that. Or at the very least--- I hope you will think so. 

TRUST

                                                          

Sometimes I like to kid my significant other and consequently the level of trust she has for me has taken a toll. Maybe it’s the consequences I deserve for not always being genuine but yet, I have too much fun with it to abandon it. I know that she knows that it’s all in fun and I mean no harm.

There is however, a much more critical matter and a serious lack of trust in our society today that is no laughing matter and it is hurting our relationships with each other and in the case of our government, with other countries. Without trust you have nothing. Trust is most often lost when you don’t keep your word.  As when we asked Russia for proof that they aren’t breaking treaties, when we know they are, and they know that we know they are, and they still say they aren’t-- well where do you go from there? England doesn’t trust the European union and vice versa; we don’t trust China and right back at us. Our leaders say one thing to the voters and do another and then they say “just trust me on this.” We should say, “Fool me once shame on me. Fool me twice shame on you.”

As a member of the Catholic faith my trust in the very church I profess to believe in has been shaken by the allegations that young people were abused and cover-ups existed. A breach of trust that is very egregious. I think we all knew priests were human and those things could take place but to have their bosses cover it up?  Most of it happened seventy years ago so that part of it may have been largely stopped but the cover-ups are still coming out and so much hurt could have been prevented by being transparent a long time ago. Think also of the tobacco companies and their lies and cover-ups about their products.

There was a time when you trusted your scout leader, your neighbor guy, your teachers and your Sunday school teacher to mentor you, not harm you. There was no need back then to have another person shadowing them all day just to verify that they did nothing wrong. As a young man in my teens, I used to hitchhike to the river to go swimming with my buddy and we never thought once that anyone would harm us. There was a golf course right across the road from the river and strangers were more then happy to give us a ride and they never thought that we would harm them either. But now day’s little kids are made to feel like a fox pup coming out of the den for the first time, knowing there is danger around every corner.

There are a lot of people that can’t be trusted in our society and by all means be cautious and especially with your kids but when you have to draw lines in the sand involving innocent people, you change society in ways that tear us apart. Until the day comes around again, when you can seal a deal with a smile and a handshake, we will live and work in a world that doesn’t see anybody as truthful and honest and when we get down to that point, a whole lot of other things like integrity, honesty, respect and truthfulness will be just outmoded words without meaning. Then well meaning people who are still trying to live by those rules, become liars, cheaters and untrustworthy, guilty by association along with those who ruined it for everyone.

CONFESSIONS OF A WIMP

                                                

A few years ago, when I started going to Arizona for the winter, one of my friends, asked me why and when I told him to be warm, he called me a wimp. This man had a job inside of a warm building his entire career but he still seemed serious with his banter so I did get a little defensive. I didn’t argue the point with him however, because he was a friend who didn’t know my past. If I had used some kind of a rebuttal that day, I would have said something like this.

As a child growing up my brothers and I slept in an unheated bedroom. For all practical purposes it was the attic. My dad burned wood and the fire went out at night but even if it had been kept going all night, our upstairs bedroom had one small register in the floor, where heat could theoretically leak through to our room. Needless to say it didn’t. Three of us boys slept in one bed in that room, not because we wanted too, but to keep warm. When we went outside, we wore homemade knitted caps and mittens. Shoes, inside of uninsulated six buckle rubber overshoes.

Several years later, when I was in my late twenties. I went to work for a large municipal park maintenance department for 13 years. In the winter 10 of us flooded and maintained 56 skating rinks. The colder the weather, the more you worked because that’s when you made the best ice. That went on for the better part of three months. You drew tanker loads of water from hydrants and then you went to the rinks and sprayed it on the ice. Some of the men rode in tractors with no heaters to speak of, fitted with rotary brooms to sweep the ice first. In the hockey rinks-- 14 of them—after they were swept all the shavings would be piled up against the boards when they were done, so you had to shovel them out before flooding. It was like shoveling a four hundred foot long sidewalk, a foot deep with snow, 14 times a day.

I also had at that time, joined the paid on call fire department. Our fire trucks had two men in the cab and the rest of us rode outside, in the elements, on a kick board across the back of the truck, while hanging onto a chrome bar. We had long rubber coats, thigh high rubber boots and metal helmets with thin earmuffs inside. If you think twenty below is cold, try it on the back of a truck going fifty miles an hour. Both flooding rinks and fighting fires requires you to work with water. Your mitts were wet with in a half hour of going to work, or at a fire. Spend an hour on a thirty-six foot ladder with water spray falling on you at a fire and everything ice coated, while it is far below zero and you will also know then what cold really is.

There is a word called acclimated and its often used to describe getting used to the ascending heights when mountain climbing but it also applies to getting used to working in the cold and you do. My story isn’t unique and I am sure there are many examples of people who lived and worked like this and still do. Construction workers, high line workers and people who have fought wars in such extreme temperatures. I’m no stronger and braver then any other person who does what we did back then.  But I choose to go where its warmer now and I know in my heart I have nothing to prove to anybody, when it comes to tolerating the cold. The wimp.

UNCLE PETE''S FARM

                                                

Not so long ago and not so far away, I remember the world of my parents. It was a far quieter world then we now live in and a more people friendly place. It was a world of quiet times by myself, roaming the woods and streams around the small town I grew up in. No portable phones and no televisions. Just a boy left alone with his imagination because that was really all I had for entertainment and to be truthful, it was all I really needed. No walkmans or I Pads or I Pods. The music that was in my head was sufficient. My dog was my confident and constant companion.

But, I wasn’t anti social. On Sunday afternoons my family usually gathered out at the farm. Everybody brought a dish to pass around and us cousins played softball in the pasture with cow pies for bases and hide & seek in the haymows and outbuildings. All of the old folks gathered in the house, men in the parlor and women in the kitchen and although I wasn’t privy to their conversations, because children knew their place back then, it wasn’t ever-contentious issues and laughter seemed to abound the most. They were family and that was the most important thing to them and that was why they gathered and enjoyed those times.

Then my world got all busy. My cousins drifted away, as did I, and the family gatherings at my uncle’s farm ceased. I grew up and went out to face a world I wasn’t prepared to face, in places where I was never comfortable. It was all asphalt and traffic and people rushing everywhere. The quietness of the rivers, woods and that farm were replaced with noisy televisions and people never happy, always looking for that elusive step up in life. Somehow yet, I adapted and became one of them, but I never accepted it. Fortunately I did live to retire back up north and found a little corner of the world, where sunshine and nature combined to feed my restless mind.

I’m an old man now and although I still remember that better world I originally came from, society and all of us have largely moved on. The quiet woods I came back to enjoy are criss-crossed with 4 wheeler trails and snowmobile paths and the trash they left behind. Helicopters and small planes fly nosily overhead while wave runners and speedboats race around our lake.  The sleepy town I live near in the summer, sometimes resembles what I left behind in the big city. Life has moved on and largely without me.

I drive by uncle Pete’s farm as I make my way over to my hometown, a couple of times a year to see my siblings that still live there. I can still hear the laughter from the kids playing; I can still taste and smell the hot dishes and the food we enjoyed together as family. I remember my diminutive ever-busy aunt Chris who looked so much like Mother Theresa always smiling in her apron. My uncle Pete in his overalls telling his kids playtime was over for now, because there were chores to do. Work or not, I have always envied those who farm.

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HEALTH CARE

                                                          

I have written before about health care and now I write again. I hear the phrase health care reform and somehow it makes me think that somehow, some place people are working to reform the way health care works, when in essence all they are doing is some unethical shell game of who is going to pay for it. Nothing is changing with the drug companies or the hospital networks prices. They just want some outside entity to subsidize the price so people can afford it. This does nothing to lower the price of health care. News flash! Tax money is our money.

The drug companies offer the billions they are paying for researching new drugs as the reasons for the high costs but what good does your new drugs and new therapies do when no one but the rich can afford them. It’s as if you are taunting ordinary people with your magic pills and saying, “Want some? You’ll have to pay for it.” Try to make sense of what that smiling little crook from Epipen had to say to congress a year ago when they were so concerned and brought him in for questioning. Yet today the price for that device, that costs little to produce, and has been around for a long time, is still through the roof. Thanks Congress for nothing. Whose side are you on?

Health care has the potential and already has; bankrupted companies and people that can’t afford to pay the premiums. It’s in every political debate. Other countries have made great strides in this but somehow this country doesn’t know how. Swallow your ego Washington and look around you, across the borders where quality health care exists. The answers are there if you want to pay attention to what you see and not the advice you hear and get, from big pharma.

My son is a retired cop, way to young for Medicare, who has to pay for his own health care for him and his wife. He works part time as a security guard in a hospital. The wages are not good, the health care benefits are. So in essence he works for health care. It used to be you worked for wages and health care was a benefit but for him at least, it’s the primary reason he has to work. There will never be a perfect health care system because of our two political ideologies that both have their own stubborn ideas on what health care should look like. One side wants free health care for everyone. They say elect me and I will straighten this whole mess out. They never say how and they never say where the money is going to come from. Then we have the other side that leans heavily toward capitalism. A free market they call it. That might work if you had capitalism that wasn’t run amok with greed. Their greedy plan omits way to many people.

Government of the people, by the people and for the people does not exist in this country. It exists only in textbooks and old cliques that date back to when our government was formed. . We have government by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists and they are the ones who rule our form of government and they will never quit until they have squeezed every last penny out of the people, as wrong as that is-- Washington should be charged with aiding and abetting.