LESSON FROM THE BIRDS

                                              

Right outside my office window a Red Robin set up her nest in the elbow of some old antlers that are there by my back door. For many days she would fly each time I came out the door but gradually we developed a level of trust and eventually she would perch on the edge but not fly. Later she didn’t even bother to get up. Then came the hatch and three hungry mouths could be seen, wide open waiting to be filled. A male robin came to help with the feeding chores and the chicks grew fast. For a few days the dragonflies were active so the birds had plenty of food.

About two days ago she quit feeding the chicks and I thought maybe something had happened to her. But then I would see her out in the yard and I put two and two together. The chicks were ready to leave the nest and the only way she could get them on their own was make them hungry and want to leave. It was time for them to be on their own. She knew if she kept feeding them they would never leave.

Is there a lesson in this story? Look around us at the people who have never learned to fend for themselves. Someone has always provided food, shelter and medicine for them. There are more jobs then there are people and still they go unfilled. Businesses have had to shut down or curtail activities for lack of help. Yes no one ever kicked them out of the nest. We talk often about the greed at the top in this country but talk little about the greed at the bottom. This country will be great again when everyone who is capable, pulls his or her own weight.

When I was fourteen I was invited to a dance at the school by a girl I liked a lot. I accepted but then started to fret because I had no money to spend on her and no dress up clothes. I asked my dad if I could get some new slacks and shirt. He told me he had barely enough to put food on the table but he would help me get a job. He also told me that when he was fourteen it was 1929 and his family was as poor as church mice. In fact his father was a minister. No pun intended. He said it was a great learning time to grow up in because you knew where the bottom was, and how it felt to be there, and nothing motivated you more then having nothing.

I did get a job after school in the local drug store. I also got some new clothes and something called pride. I never stopped working until I retired. I remember job-hunting once as a machinist. Jobs come and go in that trade. I asked the owner of the shop if he had a job for me. He looked at my resume for a second and then he said. “I always have a job for a man who wants to work.” He was the best boss I ever had. He never laid me off. When my kids were growing up I watched them struggle sometimes. I wanted them to try and find a solution before I offered one. I never picked out their career for them. I never told them they had to go to college. But I was there for them. “What does that mean,” you say? It means I wanted them to be successful but I wanted them to be self-made people and find their own way in life. I knew if they wanted something bad enough they would find a way. They would fly out of the nest-- and they did.

THE GREATER GENERATION

                                               

I was not part of the greater generation but I was part of the generation that succeeded them. Their examples and their ideals were emulated by my generation. We saw in them, courageous people who had been through so much. They had lived through the Great Depression and a terrible war of aggression against our country and came out of both victorious. Their tenacity, their courage is still talked about today because they changed the course of history for our country and the whole world. We were seen as a shining example for the rest of the world when it came to freedoms ring. Then the greater generation faded from prominence and my generation is not far behind.

Bit by bit we have wasted all of that good will we had. Today we stand on the precipice. A country the rest of the world no longer trusts or looks up to. This isn’t just about the current president who has taken a hard line stance with our neighbors on several issues. We became not just a protector but also an invader causing the destruction of Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and other countries. With no clear-cut way to win these skirmishes we went ahead anyway and the results speak for themselves. 18 years in Afghanistan, no closer to victory today then we were when we started. Vietnam a hasty retreat, Iraq and Libya in ruins beset by terrorist and I offer this caveat. It’s not the fault of the soldiers.

It’s a new attitude in town today, a new attitude in Washington, that the greater generation would have looked down on. Getting along with others was important to them but we now have a new, go it alone attitude that will prove disastrous. We also have a new attitude about what is right and wrong. Right seems to be whatever feels good for you and wrong is anyone who thinks otherwise.

So now we celebrate the 4th of July. On my back porch is a wooden American Flag, crafted and given to me by my neighbor who is a veteran. That flag will stay there for as long as I live here. I grew up saying the pledge of allegiance in school everyday. I marched in the band with the flag out front. It stood in our house of worship, a gentle reminder of a partnership between faith and country. Our firefighters uniforms had a flag on our arm. We revered the flag wherever it was, not because it was pretty but for what it stood for. But as I see it now-- that is all changing. The flag is and has been disrespected over and over again. Veteran’s organizations are closing. Solicitors fill my mailbox with pleas for help for wounded veterans that our country can’t or won’t take care of and yet we want to make more of them.

We need only to look back to the days of the ‘Greater Generation’ to see what “Making America Great Again” would be about. No one in this country suffered like they did. No one gave more and asked less and yet they persevered and made this country great. The example is there for all to see but Oh!-- That’s right. We don’t use examples anymore. We know better.

FATHERS DAY

                                                          

As a young boy in elementary school I used to hurry home after school, change from my school clothes; to my play clothes and then I would walk to the highway that bisected the town. I wasn’t allowed to cross the busy road but I would sit on the curb and wait for the whistle that signaled the end of the day at the car shops, across those many rows of steel rails. I would see dad coming a long way off and he would always look tired and dirty, even troubled, his overalls caked with dirt and grease.

As dad approached he would get a tiny grin out of the corner of his mouth. He would give me his dinner pail to carry and sometimes there would be a piece of cake or a cookie in there and he always said, “He just couldn’t eat it all.” He would tell me to eat it and don’t tell mom or she might not give him another one.

But the thing I remember the most is he would always give me his forefinger to hang on to while we walked home because his hands were dirty and oily. He would ask me about school or my friends, as if he genuinely cared. As soon as we got home though, he had many more kids to pay attention to and our special time would be over for the day.

When Dad passed away, 50 some years later he was already comatose before I got to the hospital. The whole family was gathered around his bedside. There were no other chairs so I sat on the end of the bed. Dad’s hands were crossed and someone had placed the family Bible under them. In my grief I reached down and only took his forefinger and squeezed it in my hand and I couldn’t let go. That same finger I had held so many times as a kid. Even though the room was crowded with family I felt alone with dad again. Even as close as we had been over the years I had renewed a bond that I had all but forgotten about. I wept silently and the others left the room. I told him how much I loved him and then I finally let go of his finger. He passed a few hours later.

 I’m sure your dad was special too. Maybe you were his princess and you remember that night at the father--daughter dance when he told you, you were the prettiest girl on the floor, even when you smiled and your braces showed. Or how he would sneak food off your plate when Mom’s back was turned and hold his finger to his lips because she told you that you had to sit there until you ate it. Or farther back yet when he held onto the back of your bicycle after he took the training wheels off and collapsed in the front yard after running for six blocks and you thought he was having a heart attack so you cried and he laughed and hugged you or the day he gave you away to your high school sweetheart and he had to hide his face because a little bitty tear got in the way. He bought a pitch back for your big brother so he could show him how to hit a baseball and father and son practiced until it was so dark you couldn’t see the ball because he wanted him to be the ball player he never was. Then the day your brother graduated from the Police Academy and Dad’s heart swelled with pride once more.           Happy Fathers Day Dad 

A WORLD OF FIRST'S

                                               

Last week many people perished on the upper slopes of Mt Everest. They had paid, 10’s of thousands of dollars for the privilege of scaling that frozen rock high in the Himalayans. Yet, although it would be for them a personal achievement, it can never equal the risk that was taken by the pioneers in mountain climbing who were the first to go there. To be the first to attempt such a feat, just has so much more luster then to be the 2,000^thperson to do it. To have climbed it in leather boots, with nails driven through the soles to give you traction, instead of modern boots with heaters good to 50 below. Wool gloves instead of insulated Gore Tex ones. Light weight oxygen tanks instead of heavy steel cylinders or no oxygen at all. Heavy braided ropes that froze stiff as a cable compared to modern equipment. Yes, were not talking apples and apples here but it still is very dangerous.

Yet five people perished, because up there at the top of the world last week, in what has become one of the most commercialized sports around that part of the world they lost their gamble. Truth be told, they probably had no valid reasons for being there except they could afford too and wanted to do it. Many of them inexperienced and unprepared. All of the best equipment in the world won’t help you if the 100-mile an hour winds blow you off the side of the mountain. Or you get caught in an avalanche or fall into a crevice, simply to do what has been done over and over again but here is the caveat-not by you it hasn’t- and to some, therein lie’s the reasoning.

So many times climbers add restrictions to up the risk and create another first. They want to be the first person to climb the mountain in the dead of winter, or to climb it without legs or legally blind. The first octogenarian to climb it without a walker or the first to push a wheelbarrow full of frozen yak dung to the top and slide down in the barrow, there is no end to the firsts. I’m being facetious but all of this pales in comparison to the conquests of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on Everest. Or Ernest Shacklelton and his band of explorers in the Antarctica because their conquests were truly the first. While in Alaska on a vacation I talked to a guide who has climbed Denali seven times. He told me that even with all of the experience he has gained, the odds still favor the mountain in an eighth attempt but he was sure he would do it anyway.

Yet after all of this talk of the foolishness of taking these kinds of risks, while the trophies have already been passed out, I still envy these people and their spirit. If I could afford to go there I would love to just stand in Everest base camp and see the mountain or walk amongst the penguins in Antarctica. Mankind will never replicate the greatest architecture in this world that Mother Nature has made but he may destroy it and I would love to see it before that happens. My personal achievements nowadays are getting a couple of miles down the road and back with Molly and I know my limitations. Yet I still have my dreams and wishes and grandma always said, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” 

THE FAMILY FARM

                                              

I have on my desk a picture of an old abandoned barn. Sandwiched between the side of the barn and the cement block silo, is the milk house. Its roof is sagging and on the verge of collapse. The door is open, hanging askew and if you could see inside you would probably see an old cream separator and several rusty pails in the corner. On a shelf is a cardboard box with some left over milk filters. On the wall is an old calendar from 30 years ago with notations of the times when certain cows were due to calve. I remember as a kid turning that long handle on a separator. It was geared very low, to make it spin fast enough to do the job of separating the cream from the milk and your arms would ache after just a few minutes of turning it. This room, now littered with dirt, debris and dust used to be the cleanest room on the farm

The barn in the picture still stands tall and proud but rows of shingles have fallen off and its just a matter of time until the rains rot out the roof boards, floors and the framework and it too will succumb to gravity and fall into ruins. The once brilliant red and white paint job is now a faded blotchy red with more gray then color. It once held rows of stanchions’ where the cows would almost magically march into the stall they were assigned, to be milked and fed. As a dairy farmer you held a certain kinship with each and every cow. They were your girls and you took good care of them. They in turn took care of you. The haymow doors now hang open like a big yawning mouth. One of them is dangling, by one rusty hinge. A rotten rope and an old block and tackle still hang in the peak. The huge loft is now empty but in better days it would have been packed with winter fodder for the girls downstairs. Now it is littered with beer cans and garbage from young people who come here to party.  

If there were a job description for a dairy farmer it would go like this. Wanted one dairy farmer. Hours are from sunup to sundown and on call after that. Seven days a week and fifty-two weeks a year. Duties will include but not be limited to caring for a herd of cattle and other farm animals. Planting, cultivating and harvesting food for the animals and your family. Milking the cows twice a day and seeing to their health and well being. Maintaining a fleet of equipment and assorted buildings. You will become out of necessity, a welder, a butcher, a carpenter and a businessman. Benefits are slim for you and your family. No health insurance, no dental insurance, no sick days, no holidays or vacation. No workmen’s comp, no maternity leaves and the retirement plan is what you can manage to put away. When you retire and if you retire, the farm will probably be sold because if you bequeath it to your children the taxes will put them in such a financial hole to start with, it will be economically unfeasible to stay in business. Most likely the farmland will be sold to a bigger conglomerate or rented out. The same family for a century or better has operated some of these farms but now it’s the end of the road.

Yes we are seeing the end of the family farm, as we knew it. Each year more and more of them call it quits. It’s sad and the end of an era but progress if you can call it that, is sometimes mean. At least we still have the memories of the family farm, even if they’re only in a picture of an old abandoned barn. Soon that too will be lost.