THANKSGIVING

                                               

 I wanted to write something special for Thanksgiving this year and for a few brief moments the sarcastic part of my meandering mind spoke up and said, “What is it you want to write about Mike that happened this year? Do you want to write about the death of your wife, or your dog dying, or the day you fell in the woods and a stick went into your eye and you ended up in urgent care? Maybe you could write about your son losing his business and his home or your friends who are suffering with illness. Maybe you should just skip Thanksgiving this year and keep your big mouth shut.” Then I stopped and looked around me and realized that there are two sides to every story and it’s up to you to pick the one you want to tell and the sarcastic one--- well it really does no one any good at all.

When my wife found out that she was not going to survive her illness I remembered her looking up at me from her hospital bed and saying to me. “We had forty nine good years together.” Actually if you count the ones before we got married it was more like fifty-one. At the time that was little comfort to me but now looking back I see what she was trying to tell me. So many people lose their spouses long before that. I read the paper and it happens everyday. We spent the best years of our life together in love, peace and harmony for half a century.

My dog lived to be fourteen and died at my feet. He could have been run over when he was five or died in some vets office on a stainless tabletop. He lived longer then most Labradors live and in good health for the most part. The stick that I fell on and went in my eye was blunt so all it did was bruise my eye. It could have been sharp and I would be wearing a patch today like old Blackbeard the pirate. My son is starting over in a different home with his family-- and yes---I do have a wonderful son with a great family. That in itself is reason to rejoice.

Two of my friends-- one with breast cancer and one with leukemia are in remission. Home with their family’s and loved ones this Thanksgiving. I have a great home with enough money to pay my bills and still have a few coins left in my pocket. My health is good and somewhere upstairs in my house there is shopping bag full of cards from my wife’s funeral and each one of them represents to me someone who cared about both of us and took the time to tell me that. Yes my friends and readers despite all that has happened I have been blessed and my cup truly runneth over. I challenge you to look at your life with an optimistic eye and to truly give thanks this holiday, for all of the good that has come into your life. To those of you who are far less fortunate and are sick, hungry, or lonely on this day. I sincerely hope that things change for you and next year you too will feel truly blessed. In the meantime God bless us all and happy Thanksgiving

    Mike Holst

AND THEY CALL IT JUSTICE

                                    

 I recently read an editorial about the plight of Dru Sjodin’s family as the court case of her killer winds its way through the system. I would like to comment farther.

Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., who was convicted of brutally kidnapping, raping and killing Dru Sjodin, has been given one last shot at getting his sentence overturned or altered. It’s called a writ of Habeas Corpus and its what you do when you have run out of excuses that make any sense for your actions. A district judge just appointed a new set of expensive lawyers for him

It’s been almost seven years now since that pretty and talented young woman’s body turned up discarded in a snow bank like so much litter. It’s been seven agonizing years since her parents first begged for justice, for their child’s murder. Yes, seven years of appeal after appeal winding through the courts. But that’s how our broken system works. Losing your child is only the beginning of your heartaches. Our court systems will do the rest. The best guess now is this will take until 2012. He will linger on death row for many more years-- if his sentence is upheld-- he will be living better than a lot of our population. The price tag for his defense will be staggering, but a carefully guarded secret. They don’t want to ruffle any feathers in the public but they are too late. My feathers are already ruffled.

Our justice system seems to go to the ends of the earth to defend some people and money seems to be no object for them. It’s in the best interest of the defense lawyers to drag this case out as long as they can because after all---they get paid for every day they are involved. If they win-- and it happens way to often-- the notoriety for them becomes a windfall for their resume and they go on to more of the same. All with the help of the government we pledge allegiance to with liberty and justice for all. The sympathy for the accused that they drum up, undermines the sympathy we should be having for the real victims here.

I am not an advocate for the death penalty; I am an advocate for swift justice that does not use our courts for a stage that makes a mockery out of justice. Years ago our government spent many millions of dollars convicting and punishing Timothy Mc Veigh, a self-professed killer in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma. Just another example of what I am talking about. Even when you confess and the evidence is conclusive, they need to play the game for all its worth.

The winners in the end-- if there is an end to this fiasco, will not be Dru’s family; it will be all of those who lined their pockets with the money appropriated to defend her killer to the ends of the earth-- and in the name of justice.

LETTERS FROM THE PAST

                                               

They were laying way in the bottom of her cedar chest, under some winter clothes. A place I never had reason to go to, because it was all of her stuff. I was cleaning out her clothes to give them to someone when I found the letters­—all tied up with a ribbon—looking like a Christmas gift. I read the return address on the yellowed envelopes and it was my parent’s house, the only mailing address I had way back then. I remembered that she had answered each and every letter I ever sent her. But I, being me, never took the initiative to keep her letters to me like she had done. How I wish I had them now, but they are gone with the tides of life, like the “Love Letters in the Sand” Pat Boone had crooned about way back then when we were kids.

Carefully, I set them on the bed. But something was telling me—don’t open them up—not yet. It’s been over fifty years since I wrote them, so I scarce remember what they said, but I know it was all part of the courtship. The winning-over process all young lovers go through. Who knew back then what a wonderful relationship would come from this. That what we thought was love back then was only infatuation, but it was the seeds of a love that grew and grew. That love isn’t born from first impressions, but it comes from a lifetime of caring and sharing—from good times and sad times together. Yes, sickness and health, and being a family.

In order for these letters to be meaningful I would first have to visit the past in the right order, as if I was going through an old picture album, one year at a time starting at the back. Maybe it would be like reading a book from the back to the front. The ending of our story is still fresh in my mind; it’s all the chapters in-between her last loving act, and that puppy love that I know is in those envelopes, that I need to remember. All the acts that never were written down because I was too busy, or I was taking her for granted.

When I write a book I have to have two things in place before I can start—the beginning and the end. The rest of it always falls in place because I know where I started from, and I know where I’m going with the story. How I’m getting there—well, that’s the meat and potatoes, and basically, the story. This story of her and me is somewhat similar because now, I have both the beginning and the end. But there is a small difference, because this time, my journey doesn’t need to be a written journey. It just needs to be “a remembering journey” of how I got to where I am right now. Then those letters, lying on the bed, will mean so much more to me.

So, for now, those letters will remain unopened and someday, when I’m ready, they will be opened around a campfire with my crying towel and maybe a cold beer. They will be read one last time and burned and their secrets will die with me. In the song, “The Story of my Life,” the last line says, “So the story of my life will start and end with you.” Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say, isn’t it?

THEN AND NOW

                                                            

 As is so often the case, people from my generation make comparisons between how it used to be and how it is now. This is a gesture to match or equate life between then and now that is both unfair and disingenuous. Our world and we have evolved into a far different society than the one we used to know and love. So many things that we now deem essential to our well being didn’t exist back then, but do now, and have to be dealt with. They are here; front and center, and they are real.

I think back to my mother and how she went most of her life without a clothes dryer, and hung her wash outside in the winter to freeze dry them and then bringing them inside to finish on a wooden clothes rack. If she made a cake it took two hours to assemble all of the ingredients and a miracle to bake it in her antique stove.  She baked her own bread spending countless hours kneading and making the dough. She arose in the morning to a cold kitchen and had to make a fire in the stove before the days activities began. She had a huge garden she took care of in the summer and fruit and vegetables that all had to prepared and canned. It is easy to say to today’s women, ‘you don’t know how good you have it’--- but wait for the rest of the story.

Mom never worked outside the home a day in her life. She never had to take kids to soccer or hockey, and she had eight of them. She didn’t have to take time each morning to be perfectly coiffured and dressed. She had no computer, no I pod, no cell phone to take care of. She went grocery shopping once a month for a few staples and dad would take her. She had no car of her own.  Her job was to keep the house in order and be a good mom and wife and she excelled at it but that was ok back then and now it seems it is not. We lived in a small town and very few women worked outside of the home. If she had known about the glass ceiling she would have been content to live under it, because she had no interest in what was on the other side of it.

It isn’t just times that change, but people change along with them. There is a lot more pressure to succeed and to develop into something you may, or may not even want to be. It’s to bad, that to often, there is also a stigma that goes with those who are content not to run with the pack. An almost socially acceptable perception that these people are lazy, and unwilling to make an effort to wring every little bit of creative talent out of their minds, when in essence they are just reasonably happy and satisfied with how they are.

There are many people who have made it all the way to the top, only to give it all up and return to a simpler life. I have known some of them and always they seemed much happier. Maybe they felt they no longer had anything to prove. Sometimes positions of authority can turn you into someone you don’t want to be, Maybe they found they were in a place that was not so nice, or not what they had envisioned, and maybe they went back to their roots because it was just more comfortable there.

MY OCTOBER LAMENT

                                               

I’m a summer person and I see autumn, not as the introduction to winter, but the cessation of another summer. I know it’s not a discontinuation of the time I love so much--and I know that another summer will come—but, for me, it’s a sad one, just the same.

I am standing here today, gazing out over our wind-swept lake through a cold and persistent rain. Yesterday we put the pontoon away and now the dock looks bare and useless. It begs to come out of the cold water, too. The big ash tree by the water’s edge--that shaded the beach all summer--has lost all of its foliage, and its leaves now litter the yard and the lake, while the tree stands skeletal and naked, almost embarrassed. The lily pads by the dock are all ragged, pale and sick-looking from summer storms and gnawing insects, trying their best to still stay afloat. A yellow rope tied to the dock that once was used to secure a paddleboat, now floats in the water, intertwined with dead seaweed and a few snails. A forgotten, faded-yellow plastic pail sits on the beach, half-buried in the cold wet sand. Its matching shovel, once intertwined with a grandchild’s pudgy fingers, now stands, half in and half out of the water like a lonely sentinel.

From across the lake, but far out of sight, a shotgun echoes; the hunt has begun. The water fowl, that swam by the dock so many times this past summer, are due to be harvested like the fruits of the garden, for the purpose God intended them to be. Most of the cabins and homes are shuttered and empty. The squeals of small children playing and adults laughing have vanished with the summer warmth but, if you listen closely, you can still hear them echoing through the annals of time. The aroma of outdoor grills cooking delicious meats has been replaced with the smoky fragrance of burning leaves, wood-filled stoves, and fireplaces. Back yards that were summer ball fields are now a collection of blue and green tarps sheltering all of the now-parked toys of summer.

With their bushy canopies stripped, the trees and bushes that sheltered the dark woods from sight this summer now offer a new glimpse into what had laid hidden from our eyes in their depths all summer long.  Long-forgotten rotting logs, tree limbs and leaves litter the forest floor. Their decomposing bodies returning to the ground from which they came, in a never-ending cycle of life. Unlike mankind, the flora seems to accept their wintry fate as a time to rest and rejuvenate. Time is not an issue for them; they live and die in the moment, somehow knowing they will be reincarnated to do it all over again next year. As for the birds and animals, it’s a time to think of shelter.  Either they go where they can survive or they burrow into mother earth and sleep away the winter.

For me at least, there is a loosely held correlation between the seasons and our own fragile lives and especially this year with the loss of my wife. I remember words from a song by Johnny Mercer that whisper through my mind each and every autumn day as I watch the colors. They go like this, “The falling leaves drift by my window--The falling leaves of red and gold--I see your lips, the summer kisses--The sunburned hands I used to hold.”