THE STORY OF OUR EARTH

                                               

The astronauts’ aboard Apollo 17 took one of the most requested photos from N.A.S.A. in 1972 as they were traveling to the moon. N.A.S.A. labeled it the “Blue Marble.” It was taken looking back towards the earth from about 18 thousand miles away, showing this beautiful planet wrapped in wispy white clouds. From that distance it was a beautiful blue and white orb but on the ground things were happening. Since that day we and other countries have sent probes all over the galaxy but nothing that resembles our beautiful home has ever been seen anywhere else. Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t another earth like planet out there some where, but when you think about it why don’t we just take care of the one we have.

The greatest threat to our planet is us and yes some of that can’t be helped because as long as we are breathing and emitting bodily wastes we can’t help but to pollute this planet. But even that can be overcome with technology or at least slow down the process of decay. Instead we fill our heads with pipe dreams, of colonizing some other planet we haven’t found yet, just in case things get too bad here and accept the decay of earth, as the cost of doing business. Our cities are choking with noxious air but yet fossil fuels are still the most popular. Our weather seems too erratic to be normal but our leaders deny any correlation between climate warming and the weather. Seas are rising and the arctic is melting but once again our leaders say it isn’t happening. Hundreds of thousands of species of bird’s, animals and fish are going extinct. Yet we turn a blind eye to all of it. The economy is good and we’re just going to hang our hat on that. The economy being good should be all the more reason to use that money to safeguard our earth.

This year for the first time in twenty years there were no bees to pollinate my apple trees so they are barren. Is it just a coincidence that our neighborhood has seen an increase in commercial spraying for pests? As a kid I was a hunter and there were pheasants and ducks in abundance but no more. We’ve chased them away with off road vehicles and wave runners. There are very few places sacred anymore to the birds and animals.

Sometime in the not to distant future the earth will not be conducive to healthy living for most people. There will be more and more disease and more unrest. We are seeing the seeds of it right now. Maybe it will be weather disasters or mankind will reach the boiling point and have that war of all wars we they have been practicing for and preparing for and stockpiling weapons for. Pandemics too are looming on the horizon with medical professionals powerless and they admit it.

I watched a film a while back that showed what would happen to the earth if mankind were wiped out. In the course of a few centuries it will heal itself without any interaction from us. From out in space it will still look like that picture I talked about at the start of this soliloquy of mine. But on the ground the healing will have finally began. Without us. 

THE GREAT BEE DEBACLE

                                               

So last week Molly and I took a leisurely stroll down to get the mail from the box at the end of the driveway. As soon as I opened the door of the box a small swarm of bees emerged and proceeded to sting the $#%*-- bad word intended, out of both of us. I took off running--Well I call it running, some call it a shuffle--- but Molly elected to do the stop drop and roll. Not a good a maneuver when the bees are still there and you’re showing them your pink tummy. But it was something she remembered from one of our late night fire prevention talks so she thought she would give it a shot. Finally she took off running too-- towards me-- bringing the bees along with her. Winded, I went to the safety of the garage and Molly diverted towards the lake.

My mailbox is one of those cute little covered bridge things with a steel mailbox inside of it. This leaves a gap between the steel box inside and the little wooden building outside and there in lays the problem and there in laid the bees with little room for you to get at them. There was only one answer. One of those cans of bee and wasp killer bombs. So off to town I go and I buy the most powerful one on the shelf. This one the label says will kill them if you just threaten them with it. But I got bee stings that are still burning in several places and Good Lord my poor dog, so I’m pi@#$% off-- another bad word but you had to be there. There will be no threats, just total annihilation.

 It said on the can, wait until dark so now I’m up an hour after my bedtime and that’s not helping my attitude either but I snuck down there and emptied the whole nine yards in every crook and cranny I could find.  Later I found the calamine lotion and swabbed down my bee stings and retired for the night. Did I mention a double hook of brandy to calm me down? I had to beg for Molly to come in the house because she hadn’t forgotten me shutting that garage door in her face. Needless to say we slept on opposite ends of the house and she’s still not talking to me.

The next morning when I went to get the paper and gloat over the bodies of all those dead bees, my mailbox was humming like a Crow Wing Power transformer It was still dripping with that so called deadly juice and those bees, we’ll they’re, there waiting for me. Perplexed I waited for the mailman to warm him but he proceeded to tell me he had already been stung yesterday and fix the problem-- or as the soup Nazi used to say on Seinfeld---“No mail for you.” So the box is looking old and maybe its time to get rid of it anyway. Only one problem. To unscrew it from the board you have to be right there. I gave it a try anyway and got stung. Twice more.

So off to the house I go for some newspaper, which I shoved in the box and one quick pass with the grill lighter. Vengeance is mine. Not sure what was in that juice but that box burned like a Roman candle. I know it’s a federal offense to destroy a mailbox but damn it this was my mailbox. 23.00 dollars later for a new box and I am back in business. Now when we go to get the mail, Molly stops half way there with one eye on the garage door and seems to be saying “I’ll wait right here big guy.”

UNWANTED AND WANTED TOUCHING

                                   

I was raised in somewhat of an unemotional family. From the time I was a young boy until I met my soon to be wife, no one ever told me they loved me except my grandparents. No one ever hugged me except my grandma. My parents did not abuse me, or were mean to me. They tried their best to provide for all of us kids. They just weren’t the kind of parents that were good at showing affection. This lack of affection was troubling to me however-- as I did love them both very much. My wife’s love for me however opened new doors into showing affection for others.

Today the far left is trying their best to paint Joe Biden as a pervert. Joe is a moderate and a hugger but not a socialist leaning person and that threatens them. It shows you how shallow they are. It shows you the depth of animosity that runs in our political process. Enough about that and yes the other side of the aisle has the poster child for this kind of bad behavior but their politics trump his behavior also,  (funny how that word got in there) anyway they don’t care.

I have over my long life hugged many people. I hug my family and friends, boys and girls alike because I care for them. Never was it done to try and touch something I shouldn’t touch but I guess if someone wanted to make the case they could. It would be a ‘he said, she said’ thing-- and usually ‘he saids’and ‘she saids’ end with off setting penalties that hurt both parties-- at least in politics. I’m never running for office but yet my life is an open book and I have talked many times about things in my past. There are people that are not comfortable hugging me or anyone else. I don’t think anything is wrong with that. All you have to do is extend your hand and your intentions are apparent to me and everyone else and believe me, I understand. No one will think less of you for being private.

As a firefighter I was at a particularly hard fought fire many years ago. It was an extremely hot day and I was exhausted. I had found a place under a tree in the shade and took off my gear. I was being somewhat emotional as there had been a heavy loss of property and life. A woman who lived in the neighborhood saw me and brought me something cold to drink and while I drank she could sense how troubled I was. She asked me if I needed a hug and I guess I smiled at her suggestion but I didn’t answer her and I didn’t get up for that hug either. As she walked away from me I could see she was crying and I felt so bad because it was then that I realized that maybe we both had needed that hug. I found out later her friend’s apartment was one of the ones that was lost.

We live in troubled times. The conflicts of politics has done it’s best to drive wedges between all of us and compartmentalize us. Male and female, white and people of color. Rich and poor, young and old were all in this together and this world belongs to all of us. Until we realize this and fight for what’s right and decent for everybody and not what gets you votes with distortions and half truths and attempts to ruin someone’s reputation to make yourself look good, the answers for a better society for all of us, will remain out of reach.

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.

A TIME FOR CHANGE

                                                          

On Easter Sunday I went to my sons home to see my family. It was also the day that I got to hold my newest little great grandchild Jaden for the first time. I thought back to the times when my own kids, now in their 50’s, were babies and I used to sit and rock them to sleep, my nose nestled in their silky hair. Nothing ever smelled so clean and pure as that little baby’s hair. There isn’t anything that has ever given me the pride I had right then, being a new father, but my contentment was short lived.  For I knew the babies would inevitably grow up and I worried about the trip they had yet to take in life and I knew that only for a few short years, would I have the power to protect them and influence them. It was 50 years ago and already I was troubled about the world we lived in. I found those same fears coming back to me Easter day as I held that baby boy. Want kind of a world have we made for our kids?

It should have always been our goal to make this a better world. To find cures for diseases, educate, and make those kids smarter then we would ever be and not just our kids-- but also everybody’s kids.  At the same time we needed to put aside our natural greed and differences and live in peace with our fellow mankind. For it’s only in this spirit of love and cooperation that this world will survive.

About this same time 50 years ago our nation sent astronauts to the moon and I will always remember the picture they took as they circled the moon looking back at the earth. Here in the vast emptiness and darkness of space surrounded by billions of light years of nothing but rocks and cold, was this beautiful blue planet. It was warm and viable and filled with life. To those of us who believe in creation the proof was there in the pudding. The question that begged to be asked however was, why wouldn’t we want to take care of it? That question has never been answered but I know why anyway and it all has to do with human greed.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is a great example of people who amassed a fortune and elected to take it and try to make this world a better place to live. They have shown dysfunctional greedy governments all over the world what can be accomplished if your heart is in the right place. There are others helping too but sadly far to few of them to counteract the greedy ones who care less about helping anyone but himself or herself.

So Jaden, I hope that someday when you are my age, you too will be sitting at a keyboard, typing out your thoughts with your great grandbaby in your lap. I hope and pray that at that time you will be much more optimistic then I am today. That your grandparents and mom and dad will have been part of a great transformation in this country and this world and you will no longer perceive the threats I see today to your great grandchildren and others. For lack of a better adage it has been said, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” I’m not sure how much darker it can get before we come to our senses and change. Time will tell. We have been at this stage before and were never able to learn from it. I won’t be here for the transformation and I do take some blame for the past. Hopefully your generation will do better.

THIS CIRCLE OF LIFE

It’s Easter Sunday morning and I’m up early. Too much cake and coffee last night with friends and loved ones and a fitful nights sleep. Its dark yet, the sun is still below the horizon but you can see the first vestiges of light, peeking through the trees in the east.  Yesterday the ice went off the lake and this morning as I took Molly out to do her thing, for the first time since last fall I could actually smell the lake as the waves softly lapped the shoreline. Then as if on cue, I heard the loons calling from somewhere out on the lake. Yes, their back, I’m back and spring is back. Somehow, this circle of life goes on.

Today I will travel to the cities to be with my son’s family. I look eagerly to holding my newest great grandson born just a few days ago. The oldest and the youngest member of my family, being introduced. The day will be bitter sweet for me however, because this babies other great grandfather, my daughter-in-laws dad, is in the end stage of a long fight with dementia that has robbed him of the ability to eat and drink. It may well be the last time I see him. My heart breaks for his family. It’s a ritual that plays out for to often at this stage of my life. Yet somehow, this circle of life goes on.

I wish there was a way for younger people to see and feel, what us old people feel at this stage of our lives. I know this; there are no words to adequately describe it. I can try but the thesaurus that holds those words has never been written. There is no magic elixir you can take to just numb your feelings and help you get through this kind of recurring sadness. You just have to accept and live through it as we have done so many times before. Time weighs heavily on your mind in times like this. But for every door that closes, another opens and at least for me this baby today will be in that open door. Somehow, this circle of life goes on.

Outside today that same circle of life is being renewed. This world that was black and white for months, locked up in ice and snow, is coming back to life. Soon winters picture will only be seen as a photo negative of what we have seen for the last few months and the new picture will take on the vibrant colors of summer. As if Mother Nature, sitting at her easel, with her swift broad brush, was creating another masterpiece as she has done so many times before. Soon eggshells will crack and baby birds will crawl out. Deep in dens in the forest wombs will empty out and tiny replicas of their parents will start their journey through life, insuring the renewing of the species. In the shallows the fish are spawning and the insects they and the birds need to eat are coming back to life. Somehow, this circle of life goes on.

I feel so blessed to be able to be with loved ones this Easter and to enjoy the love our risen lord came to instill in all of us. It’s only through our relationship with him that all of what I have written about today makes any sense. Earlier, I talked about those magic words I couldn’t find to describe my feelings today but one word does keep coming to mind and that is hope. Hope for a better world. Hope for a life in the hereafter and hope that somehow for all of us, this circle of life will go on.

MORE ON DRUGS

                                               

I just watched a Netflix special on Drugs in America and I have so many questions that seem to defy common sense. First a little history. The war on drugs has been going on for over thirty years and we have spent well over a trillion dollars on it and the proliferation of drugs seems to grow every day. So why aren’t we wining and what are we doing wrong? The short answer is, we need to only go back to prohibition. For those of you who don’t remember that or haven’t read about it, it was an attempt to ban alcohol in America. Long story short, we found out that the American people wanted alcohol in their lives and so they fought prohibition tooth and nail and until it was repealed. The same argument is being made for drugs.

The drugs we buy come from impoverished counties, so in order to make a living, these people are only to happy to risk their lives to supply our society, even though most of them live in fear for their lives.  And just so I’m not making you think we are alone in this, this zeal for drugs goes on in other free societies around the world too. Add to that our governments zest to make more money on taxes, to prop up our economy and you are finding more and more governments simply advocating for legal drugs as long as they can somehow tax them. Somewhere down the line after the laws are changed this will come back to haunt them, because the people who sell the same drugs that our government is advocating making legal, will not be under cut when it comes to price. Hence we will get all the problems that come with the drugs and little taxes coming in and we just made it easier for the illegal’s to operate. 

I have several friends and acquaintances that have lost children to drugs. I witnessed overdose deaths on the fire department many times. The loss of a loved one to drugs is probably only topped by suicide for the guilt and pain it leaves the surviving loved ones, and to be truthful they are closely related. It used to be you worried about your kids getting hurt or killed in car accidents but death from drugs now takes front and center in our society and that is only going to get worse because not only are there more drugs, there are newer and stronger drugs now available. Every great society that has existed since the times of the Romans collapsed because they couldn’t control their vices. When I was a kid and was doing some foolhardy stunt my father would always say, “You guys think you’re indestructible. The grave yards are full of your kind.” Well what was foolhardy then-- pales in comparison to what is foolhardy now.

We live in a new era of permissiveness. We are asking for freedom to do things today that we were not even thinking about doing twenty or thirty years ago. Keep in mind nothing has changed, except the pressure to change the laws to conform to what a segment of the population wants to call their rights and to hell with the consequences. What drugs and the results of people using drugs does to our economy is almost incalculable. The crime it spawns is one the biggest drivers of burglaries and robberies. Not to mention the killings amongst those fighting for their share of the business. Just think, 200,000 Mexican people, killed trying to get their drugs to our lucrative markets.

CLASS OF FIFTY NINE AND MY ONION

                                                                                   

So sometime around the first of June, it will have been sixty years since the class of fifty-nine, Staples High School, was handed their diplomas and sent on their way to try and change the world. If you had asked me then, where I would be in sixty years? I probably would have said, “Under the sod.” So many of my classmates are, but yet through the miracles of modern medicine, a little luck and some perseverance here I am. Still plugging away. We classmates, have lived long enough to become our parents and for many of us-- our grandparents. But I write this with some sense of forbearance, for we are at the point in our lives were the odds of going on are getting skinnier and we can no longer take the future for granted.

I have often wondered why after all of these years, I still remember the names of my grade school teachers. That is all except my second grade teacher. I do remember she was beautiful but I was seven, so we won’t talk about that anymore but my mind was developing wasn’t it? I do remember many of the teachers in junior and senior high too and our principal who I got to know up close and personal as she was quite the disciplinarian. Was it that the teachers made that big of an impression on us? I would like to think so. Think of all of the people we came in contact with out in the real world during those sixty years. Friends, fellow workers, neighbors, and yet none of them stick in your memory like those teachers did, at least not in mine.

I guess if I had one word to describe my feelings on that graduation day back then, it would have been bewildered. For some of my classmates it would be college, the service, or they had a job waiting. For me it was the later and I couldn’t wait to get started. Beyond that I had no idea where life would take me. That is until she came along and then they came along and my life changed immeasurably. New jobs and new adventures and with it yes, there were things in life I regretted doing, but her and the kids were never one of them. For me they were the purpose, in a purpose driven life. They were my biggest reason for living and some of the things I never accomplished myself, came to fruition through them.

Life for me was like peeling an onion. It simply got richer each time I revealed new layers, like promotions, retirements and grandkids but on the other hand the smaller the onion got, the faster it peeled away and then one day I was back to being alone again, remembering the past and realizing how dependent I had been on her and that partnership. Webster calls limbo “an uncertain period of waiting” and that is what it was. But then one day you wake up, shake your head and look at what little onion is left and say to yourself, there are things to be done, that I still need to do while I’m able to. For in the end when that onions all gone-- you don’t want to have wasted any of it. You only get one onion in life.

For now life is good again. The past is the past and yes there is no forgetting it but there is also no readily identifiable end to life as long as you find a reason in it for you. Then all you really need is faith in yourself and others, hope for a purpose in life and the love of those friends and family that got you here, where you are today.

DREAM

So you get down to the last couple decades of life and you’re still thinking about that perfect place to live out the rest of your life. For many of us seniors that would be a place where we would find lots of peace and quiet, far from the clutter and din of this madding world. I have always dreamed of a cabin, on a cliff, on the north shore of Lake Superior, with lots of windows looking out over that beautiful body of water. A seasonal home it would be, so there would be a plan in place that would get you to some place warmer for the brutal winters, where you could sit in the sun and dream about your happy return come summer, to your rustic home by the lake. The trouble back then was, it was only just my dream. But then she passed and I started thinking about the limitations old age has saddled me with and I realized that although my mind and spirit are still willing for this kind of adventure, physically surviving by myself up there in Gods country, at least for me now, has some serious doubt’s.

As a kid it was always “pipe dreams” my mother called them when I told her what I envisioned for my future. In her mind, those dreams were something that never would happen and she was convinced that I was moored in this, “Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” mentality, which just translated to--it will never happen. But oh’ so many years later, here I am still dreaming about it and yes many of my dreams in life have come to fruition because I never gave up on them. I firmly believe if you want something bad enough you have a good chance of getting it-- within reason. Not that I’m going up to the north shore to look for lots this summer because I’m enough of a realist to know that the days of taking my chainsaw and hacking a trail out of the woods and building another home in some Northern Minnesota Shangri-La are behind me and I also know the means of paying someone else to do it is slightly beyond my pay scale.

Right now I live on a nice lake and I go south for the winter and for many people, including most of my friends and family, they say, isn’t that enough? Without seeming ungrateful I can only say that my dreams changed because they weren’t always just my dreams, because I shared my world with another. Now that I don’t anymore my dreams seem to play out most often at living in unspoiled places.  Dreaming is cheap and easy and inactivity makes me restless, so I dream on. So what is so spoiled about where I am? It’s spoiled in my mind because it’s so easily accessible. I want quiet and privacy. Not listening to wave runners buzzing around the lake like angry mosquitoes and hearing my neighbor’s conversations. Maybe there was a time when that was all right and what we both wanted and we is the magic word but as I said it is no longer we-- it’s now just me.

I see my life as a book and for a guy who has wrote many books there comes a time when you have to write the last few chapters. They don’t have to necessary be brief or hold a spectacular ending but they need to insinuate someplace that the story is drawing to a close. What is a close? It’s when there are no more stories to tell that are relevant. You don’t have to kill off the characters, you can have them riding off into the sunset. But in the very least of it, you aren’t going to talk about it anymore.

MY FRIEND 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.”

ELECTIONS

                                                         

As the elections are coming upon us, I am appalled by the anger and rancor we are witnessing, not only among the candidates but also amongst the voters. You won’t find me endorsing any candidate for any office and for a couple of good reasons. Probably the best reason is, “Who am I to tell you how to vote.” When I was working my boss called me in the office one day and told me that he didn’t appreciate the political sign that was in my front yard and I should take it down right now. Being a little stubborn, I left it up for a couple of days after that. Then he called me again and told me once more, in no uncertain terms, take it down or find another job. I had a wife and three kids to think about so I reluctantly took it down but I never forgot about that day. My rights as a citizen had been infringed on.

I have family members that are not on the same wavelength as me when it comes to politics. But it will never be an issue with me, because I won’t let it be an issue. My family is too important to me to let that happen. I do think I have an advantage over them, being as old as I am, and having the wisdom I have gained over the years to know what can happen to the best of people, in situations like this.

A while back when congressman Steve Scalise was shot down on a softball field we all saw how political rancor can get out of control. That person had more then one congressman on his list to be shot. I remember the assassinations that took place with President Kennedy and his Brother Robert. The attempt to kill Ronald Regan and the murder of Dr King. There are a lot of mentally deranged people out there capable of this kind of violence and the crass rhetoric of today’s elections only fans the fire.

Political campaigns have become brutal with attacks on peoples records, families and characters. Its not always that truthful and above board to start with and the end result is someone, who apparently can’t win on their own merits and ideas, is trying to make themselves look good, by making someone else look bad. That’s a behavior you had to go back to grade school to find, until lately.

Campaign reform needs to be initiated and soon. Its time to put the gloves back on and clean politics up and while they are at it, it’s time to get the lobbyists out of the campaigns. Ask the politicians, when they are politicking, where they are getting their money from? Then ask them what they will be expected to do for those people if they win and don’t take “nothing” for an answer. We all know better then that.

Were allowing our whole political process to be turned into a war of words and accusations that can ruin people lives forever, all in an effort to win the seats in congress that are supposed to be filled by people, we want to make rules for all of us to live by.  

GREATFUL

                                                           

For my younger readers you are going to say, “Oh here we go again” I wanted to share this anyway. The year was 1946 and with World War II over and all of the soldiers coming home, jobs were hard to find in small town Minnesota. Factories that had been running full steam for years on military contracts, were now laying people off all over the United States, including my father and this only exasperbated his problems. My father was no exception to the troubles that came from this and with a wife, two young boys, a baby and no place to live, he found an old farmstead where we could all live. It came complete with several head of cattle and the rent for the place was the milk they produced and dad and his brother-in-law were the one’s who had to milk them. My father had never lived on a farm before

Did I say we had no electricity and the house was all one big room and my mother hung blankets on ropes that ran from corner to corner to divide the house up. She got her water from a pitcher pump by an old wash board sink and the ice man came several days a week to put ice in the icebox. We had kerosene lanterns for lights and those two men milked all of those cattle by hand twice a day.  Then they dumped the milk into cream cans that were cooled by an artesian well that ran through the property. The house was heated with an old wood stove. You get the picture.

Why am I telling you this? Just to say how grateful I am for all that I have and the reality of that is brought home to me each time I think back to those days. I’m not only grateful for what I have now but I am grateful too for having a memory that provides me that glimpse into a world that I still remember seventy some years later and for having hard working parents that were absolute survivors, who never gave up and fought back.

Both of my parents had known a far better life then this before the war, so living like they were,  it had to have been very hard on them. I was a five year old so hardships to me were probably not that apparent. At least by the standards of that time and place. When my dad died almost fifty years later he still wasn’t a rich man by any means. He had lost his beloved wife some twenty years before that to cancer. But even in the grips of his grief and loneliness, he carried on with life; grateful for the large family he had by then, who rallied around him in those later years. He was poor in riches but rich in spirit.

I have always thought that those hard lessons of living with that kind of adversity become teaching moments if we let them. They are so much more poignant then reading about them or hearing 2^ndhand about someone else’s struggles in life. Yes, you had to be there to get the full effect. I think of all the times my father could have turned to some under handed way to make a buck but he never did. He told me later in life that, “When you raise your son, you raise your sons, son too.” Those weren’t just words with him, that was his mantra and his constitution and he lived it to the fullest and even though three generations have passed since then, those words still live on with me and in my family. 

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL WORLD

                                    

I have always been intrigued with this place we call our earth. You see there is no other place like it known to man and believe me they have been looking. You think about all of the balances and safe guards this planet came with, that make living here possible and it is mind-boggling. The ozone layer that protects us from the suns ultraviolet rays that would cook us otherwise. The magnetic field that originates in the earth’s core that shields us from deadly space radiation. How the earth is tipped on its axis that gives us the seasons of the year and how it rotates to give us the hours of the day. How it moves in perfect cinch with the sun and the moon just far enough away to keep us from roasting and yet close enough to keep from freezing. How the plants and trees absorb the poison gases we give off and give us back life sustaining oxygen and to think it’s gone on for millions of years.

Then came man and in his infinite wisdom, he was able to find heavy metals and fossil fuels and start an industrial revolution by inventing electrical power and gasoline powered engines. Smelting ores into different metals and inventing plastics from petroleum and glass from sand. There was refrigeration to cool our homes and preserve our food and natural gas to heat our homes. Often with some side effects for this planet we didn’t fully understand and probably don’t understand yet. We invented miracle drugs to cure illnesses and chemicals to control everything from weeds to insects and yet we still didn’t understand what it was doing to our earth and probably don’t fully understand it today either but we use them anyway.

Then we blew a hole in the ozone layer with chlorofluocarbons and had to find a repair for it and it looks like we might have. But then came more problems with no easy fixes like that. Wells are pumping poisoned drinking water from chemicals and drugs we excreted and rivers, fed by runoff that flows into the gulf have created a gulf dead zone hundreds of square miles where nothing lives. Smog and air quality problems are sickening many and changing, weather patterns. There are fixes for much of this but they run up against the greed that exists from those who benefit from selling those products that are causing all of the problems. They hire legions of lawyers and buy off politicians while admitting no fault, even in the face of over mounting evidence. They know they are wrong, they just don’t care and they are going to milk this cow for all its worth and in the meantime the beat goes on.

The earth is becoming a ticking clock and we can stop and rewind it or let it run down. To those younger people who will inherit this mess, the day will come when you will curse the generations who lied and cheated and looked the other way, all in an effort to make a buck with no self-guilt for ruining this earth for the ages, when there were answers for all of those problems if you only looked for them-- there was no money in those answers however for the guilty people who were involved in the sickening of the earth so they rejected them. Someday when man is gone the earth will again heal itself and soon there will be no trace left of the people who inherited this great blue planet and elected to destroy it, instead of taking care of it. No one wants to write like this but the truth needs to be told.

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.