Wednesday, December 28, 2011

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS


                                               
Each year, at the start of the New Year, we take pause to think about the things that we did last year that we just as soon would not repeat this year. They were mostly things that were unproductive, or hurt other people or us. For some of us this desire to not repeat, comes in the form of a resolution, but for many of us it’s just time to reflect and try to clean up our act a little. If all of the resolutions that have been made over the years were actually kept, this nation would be a much better place to live. But as has been said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” I know I have failed miserably at this many times. Always because I wasn’t serious about it in the first place but also because I promised things that weren’t really possible for me to do. I have rethought this whole process and I am vowing to take these promises more seriously or not do them at all. I don’t want to be disingenuous.

The word resolution has many meanings but the one we are most familiar with, as it pertains to New Years, means to be determined not to do something that we have been doing, again. The second meaning that I am drawn to means finding a peaceful solution to a problem. It doesn’t necessary mean you have to entirely compromise your beliefs but structure them in such a way to make them more acceptable to others. A little give and take if you would.

I think this year will be a year of reckoning for our country. A year when people in Washington and party hopefuls that want to be there, need to be thinking about being more of a problem solver and less of problem makers. That being so resolute in their thinking and beliefs and not leaving any room for compromise will not solve anything. That candidates making promises they can’t keep is lying and wrong. We have all been there before and saw the results. One thing that always comes up in resolutions is the act of looking back, albeit briefly. Now that being said no one in today’s political climate would ever admit that they did anything wrong so how can you resolve to change with that attitude? Their opponents on the other hand are more interested in what the other party did wrong, then anything they themselves did right. Basically nothing constructive will ever come from that.

So this year I say this. We need to look ahead and set some goals and try to get there and if we don’t-- lets just say that in our heart of hearts we will know we tried our best. It’s a big mess and it will take time. Lets not waste energy on talking about all of the things that went wrong in the past but just resolve to do better going forward. No promises, just an earnest effort to solve our problems in government and at home. There was a time when this country was looked up to as the best of the best. A place that epitomized freedom and opportunity and people flocked from all over the world just to be a part of it. But something changed after World War II and we lost all of that good will we had fought so hard to grow and protect. We went from being respected, to being hated. We need to build that respect again and hopefully someday we will be emulated again. In the meantime we need to build character.  Ben Franklin said, “How few there are that have the courage to own their faults, or resolution enough to change them.” Let’s prove Ben wrong and be more then a few.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

COPING


                                                                        
 Last night was the first snowfall of the season. This morning I gazed out over my backyard, from the comfort of my desk chair, to see a new world cloaked in a soft covering of dazzling white. Unblemished, as of yet, it seems to masquerade all of the imperfections that were there yesterday—as right on cue, and in the background, the radio softly plays the Irish Ballad “Danny Boy” throughout the room. Selected lines of the lyrics seem so relevant to me right now. “Summers gone and all the flowers dying. The valleys hushed and white with snow. “

It’s my first winter without her, and that is one thing that cannot be masqueraded by snow or anything else. My first time through the holidays, and already Christmas seems so different. So subdued, and inconsequential, and not the season it used to be. I went to the cemetery yesterday and knelt by her grave. The second verse of “Danny Boy” says so well what I felt she was telling me. “And I shall hear, tho soft you tread above me and all my dreams will warm and sweeter be. If you’ll not fail to tell me that you love me, I’ll simply sleep in peace until you come to me.”

The human mind is such a complex depository for all of the feelings and memories we harbor. It’s not something that can be turned on and off, at will, and it seems to want to have all of its files full, and when something like this happens, we keep drifting back and opening them up. Although painful at times, we simply won’t and can’t let go because they are just that precious to us. But each sunrise brings a new dawning, and eventually we will add new files and try to fill them with more good things, in the hope that they, too, will become relevant and precious to us. We’re not trying to purge anything; we’re only trying to cope by making new memories because, beyond that, we simply don’t know what to do. Each day there are new packages to open. Ones that try to replace the memories we can’t, and won’t, throw out but we put them away in the attic instead.

I look around me at all of the lonely people in the world. There is no comfort in knowing you aren’t alone in this—only a greater realization of what life is all about, and an understanding of how fragile our lives really are. No, it’s not the same for everyone. It does seem like the greater the love you had, the greater the love you lost. But it is also the greater the lesson you learned, about how to love, and without her, that would have never happened.

“Danny Boy” is now over and the radio has gone on to a new song. I know the song can’t last forever and neither can any of us. I also know there are new songs to sing every day that we never knew existed.  It will take us some time to learn them but we have to try, because only in learning will we realize their true meaning and what they’re trying to tell us. “Danny Boy” won’t go away—it will always be there as long as you have a memory. And now “Tis you must go and I must bide.”                                               

KITTYS CHRISTMAS


                                                
 Christmas Eve to her was her birthday, her wedding day, the birth of her children, and a Mardi Gras celebration—all wrapped together in one euphoric day. It was the evening she had waited for all year and the next day was the day she started planning her next Christmas — often while I was out burning the torn wrappings and discarded boxes from the previous nights celebration. Nothing gave her more satisfaction or brought her more happiness than seeing those sparkling eyes on the kids and grandkids as we all sat around that tree, buried in piles of gifts. She had never gotten over that little kid mentality when it came to Christmas. The gifts that had been given to her by others remained piled alongside of her chair until all of the other gifts had been opened, and all of the thank you’s had been uttered. She didn’t want to be distracted; she needed to see each and every reaction.

She believed in quantity more than quality, although many of them were very nice gifts. She never wanted to spend her whole allotted amount on one wonderful gift because that brought happiness only once. She was a careful shopper always looking for bargains and coupons that would give her the most “bang for her buck.” You see, half price meant another gift could be purchased someplace. The purchases would be stockpiled in every closet, nook and cranny in the house until the tree went up, and then the stack would engulf the tree.

Then her life changed and the cancer that would take her home, to be with the real meaning of Christmas, spread throughout her frail body and last Christmas, she knew it would be her grand finale. The kids had all married long ago and there were other sides of the family to contend with when it came to spending Christmas together. For many years we had celebrated early or late, but always managed to get together as a family. But this year had to be special because she knew, and we knew, it would be her last one, and we would be all together one last time, on Christmas Eve.

So on the eve of our Savior’s birth, we gathered around her that one last time. We did our best to hide our emotions, because just below the surface was an agonizing sadness that said to all of us, this would never again be repeated. We smiled through our tears, as did she, and it was a night to remember.

I’m not sure what Christmas will bring me this year. I’ll try to spend some time with all of them. My tears are still there, held only in check by my resolve to move on with life—a feat I find daunting most days. I know it will be a big change for all of us but a necessary change just the same. I know that try as we may, we will never forget the happiness and the spirit that came alive with Kitty’s Christmas. We will probably never again know someone who got so much joy out of giving and making others happy.


Wednesday, December 14, 2011

PROBLEMS IN THE LUNCH ROOM


            
Last week a woman at church stopped me to tell me she likes my column and she said I was developing into Crosslake’s answer to Andy Rooney. Not sure what that meant, but just to be compared to an icon like that was good but knowing full well he was often referred to as just a cantankerous old man, I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I did trim my eyebrows this morning just to be safe.

There is an ongoing discussion about obesity and proper eating habits in our schools. Last week it was an argument about pizza and if it should be classified as a vegetable or not, because it has tomato paste in it.  Kind of like classifying liver as a vegetable if you put ketchup on it but be that as it may be. The schools are just running out of healthy choices for food that the kids will eat, because at home too many times the kids make the menu up themselves.

My wife worked for many years at a junior high school and part of her job was holding the food fights to a minimum in the lunchroom. Two years experience at that, in that school, qualifies you to work in the lunchroom at Stillwater prison.  She often told me about the huge gray garbage cans that ended up filled with the vegetables and fruit the kids wouldn’t eat but the schools were forced to serve. For many people the question was, why do you feed them things they don’t want? The explanation was always the guidelines make us serve it. My questions were two fold. Why make them take it if they tell you they are going to toss it and to go deeper in that thought process why wouldn’t the kids eat it? My answer to the last question, that I already knew, was they don’t have to eat it at home and they’re not going to eat it here. You can lead a kid to the lunchroom but you can’t make them eat what they don’t want to eat.

So in essence the schools end up trying to educate kids about healthy eating choices but the parents who always hold the trump card with the kids when it comes to who has the most influence and rightly so-- them or the schools-- don’t offer it at home or insist on it. For some parents they might as well tell their kids that Math is malarkey and science is all a bunch of monkey poop. Yet the government regulators seem to think that the problem lays in the schools and the schools alone and they need to fix it. Well my apology to the school cooks for having to be such bad people.

Now going into peoples home and telling them they have spoiled rotten kids is never going to fly so you can see where this whole thing starts and ends. Why do I care and how would I know what kids want to eat? There are sixteen million kids living in poverty in this country—one out of four—and most of them would welcome any food. They’re the ones in the lunch room that do eat their food, along with the ones who come from family’s that teach their kids good eating habits. Sadly the ones with obesity problems are all to often the ones that eat just what they want to eat. Blame Mom and dad and not the schools for that mentality. Let the kids have Pizza one day a week but Pizza as a vegetable? Humbug

Thursday, December 8, 2011

LETTERS FOR HELP


                                                            
 Each day as I go and pick up my mail there seems to be an increasingly amount of letters in my mailbox asking for donations. Some of them go so far as to paste coins to their letter or send me pages of address labels, calendars and Christmas cards. All of them in an effort to somehow touch my so-called soft spot for a donation.

Right now I have enough address labels to last into the next millennium. I have used them so often; I have forgotten how to write my address. In fact some days I’m not even sure what my address is. I could wallpaper an entire room in them and still have some left over. The other day I saw an advertisement for a company actually selling address labels. That’s like selling leaves in the fall or snow in the winter. I haven’t bought a Christmas card for years and most people send me Christmas letters instead of cards anyway. I put a calendar in my garden shed this year for the first time because it’s the only building that I own without one in it. My watch tells me the time, date and day of the week, if I care to gaze down at it, as does my computer when I turn it on in the morning along with my phone. My smart phone will tell me the time and date in Bangkok if I’m headed that way. Not likely. If all else fails I find a pretty girl and ask her. I get the date and a smile, what more could you asks for. The other day I asked my phone if it was going to rain today and it told me what do you care? You’re not going anywhere anyway. My smart phone is a smart-ass phone.

Now I’m not a scrooge by any means and I set aside a part of my income to give away. My favorite place for donations are those run by volunteers helping the sick and needy. Food shelves, clothing centers and churches rate high on the list with me. I do support cancer research and people volunteering to raise money for them by walking, running, crawling or swimming. I support those in my family in their time of need as long as they are trying hard to help themselves. I believe in giving with a warm hand and if I die broke that’s okay. I was broke when I came into this world, naked and crying and I’ll probably leave the same way. However, I will not support organizations run by professional fundraisers. I don’t make political contributions because it only encourages the politicians to do what they are best at doing-- nothing. It’s my feeling that if you are a good, honest politician and I hope that’s not an oxymoronic statement, that you will be elected without having to buy your votes. I know some of them and I vote for them. I do the best with what I have but I’m only one person when it comes too charitable giving. If I gave to every one of those letters or phone solicitors I would be the one standing in the soup line instead of helping buy the soup. The only good I see coming from the avalanche of letters I get each day, is it does help the post office pay their bills and they need all of the help they can get. I have lost my level of trust with some of these people. I gave to one organization and quickly received letters from many more in the same business.

To all of the people who work so hard volunteering their time to feed, cloth and care for people less fortunate--- thank you so much for your efforts. It’s a shame you have to compete for the available money with those whose efforts are suspicious.



Thursday, December 1, 2011

THOUGHTS OF WINTER


Maybe it was the day the acorns started bouncing of the roof-- and my head-- and the birch tree turned yellow that I got the first hint that summer was saying good-bye. Later driving down the road I noticed the sumacs were turning red and there were few boats on the lakes anymore, and some of the cabins were already shuttered. The schoolyards are busy again and those orange buses are back on the road and the roads also see more motor homes heading south in the exodus, I call the flight of the silver heads.

I remembered back some sixty years when I was a kid and winter preparations seemed so much more complicated then they are now. There was wood to cut and stack and still warm caning jars, filled with vegetables and fruit covering the kitchen table. Mom would make me take them to the cellar, two at a time and stack them carefully on the shelves. Potatoes were dug and put in gunny bags and carrots and beets were hung from the cellar rafters.  Storm windows were dug out of the back of the porch, washed and put back up and straw bales were stacked next to the leaky foundation of the old house. Now days we close the windows, lock them and push the little button on top of the thermostat from cold to heat and sit back and wait.

I remember when the thing I was most proud of was a sheepskin parka my dad had bought me at an auction. Mom knitted our mittens and caps and my overshoes had six buckles on them that would get full of ice and you had to wait for them to thaw out before you could leave that chair on the rug by the back door. The back of your mitten was your handkerchief for that rosy running nose you always had. We had a sled with steel runners that we drug up to Allen’s hill by the Catholic school in Staples for a two-block icy ride down to the bottom. It wasn’t any Arctic Cat by any stretch of the imagination but we had fun and it always started. There was a skating rink at the bottom of the hill with an old boxcar for a warming house and when you got too cold you could go in there to warm up and carve your name and your sweeties in the wooden walls.

My three brothers and I slept upstairs in an unheated bedroom, in a bed piled high with comforters mom had made. The windows would freeze over with frost and you would lie in bed and try to think what the ice crystal patterns looked like. Waterford was no match for Mother Nature. When mom called you downstairs for school you ran for the kitchen with your clothes under your arm to dress around the cook stove. While you ate your oatmeal she would walk around the table with a pan of warm soapy water, making sure your face was clean and your hair was combed.

Maybe it was the simplicity of it all that makes me think fondly of it yet today rather than the cushy life I now have. Oh, I do appreciate the cushy life I now have, but appreciation only comes because I know what it used to be like---and hear we go again kids--- yes, back in the good old days. We were just happy to be alive and healthy back then and yes, there are probably some who live like that even today. In some ways I would kind of envy you, if time hadn’t spoiled me so much.