ARIZONA WILD FIRE

I remember my first firefighter’s funeral. As a twenty-some year-old rookie fireman, it was a very poignant moment for me, but one I felt I had to witness because, for me, I felt it came with the territory. Silently, though, I hoped and prayed it would never be me. Yet you simply had to honor your dead, and there was a certain solemnity that went with it. After all, they had given all they had to give. I guess, at that moment, I felt that I would get acclimated to such events. That as time went on, the funerals would not be as moving as that first one was for me. That, somehow, you would harden to the tragedy that can only come out of such events. I was wrong. They only got worse from that day forward, because there was an accumulative action to my grief. Firefighters belong to a great fraternity. Whether you’re fighting fires in the heart of New York City, a small town in the back roads of America or somewhere in the wild forests of the West, you have one purpose in mind; to do what you can to safeguard the people and their property, and to always remember the oath you took to do just that.  For the most part, you are always revered for your efforts by others, but never more than when you didn’t come back to the station, and never, ever, more than when you paid that ultimate price.

Death is no stranger to firefighters. Thankfully, not often is it one of your own, but you do have to deal with it all the time. You have had to press your ear to the blackened, burnt lips of victims to try and hear those last words—coming from throats that are scorched beyond being able to talk any more. You have begged someone pinned in the front seat, of a crushed and mangled car, to stay with you for just a few more minutes so you can get him or her to the hospital. You have done C.P.R. until your arms ached, and all the time praying this drowned child in your arms would just please breath and live again because you can’t stand hearing her mother’s screams in the background. There are no strangers in this trade, for the minute you were called they became your victims to care for, and it got up close and personal in a hurry.

Somewhere in Arizona, hundreds of hearts are broken. Moms and Dads have lost their sons, wives have lost their soul mates, and the nightmare they prayed would never come to visit their house, is now here. Children, who only days ago tried on their dad’s boots and helmet and wanted their picture taken, can’t understand why daddy is never coming home. In the tiny town of Prescott, where the ‘Granite Mountain Hotshots’ came from, a black cloud has descended over the station they left that day. All that’s left are their vehicles in the parking lot and their possessions in their lockers. Flowers and memorials sit outside the fence in silent respect.

Sometime in the future, nineteen rookie firefighters will once again fill the Hotshot ranks. For you see, fire takes no holiday and waits for no one. Life—as that fire station once knew it—will begin again. Then, bells will ring and a plume of smoke on some far away mountain will be calling them in once more. On the hill where they died, new plants will have bloomed and new houses will be going up. Soon, no one will know there was ever a fire. No one, that is, but the Granite Mountain Hotshots and those who loved them.

CRAZY RULES

                                                 

I saw in the paper, the other day. where a school district in the twin cities now has a no touch policy for the kids on the playground. I’m not sure if it’s the media blowing things out of proportion or if we live in a world that has gone way beyond politically correct. How do you play games without touching someone? Explain baseball with no tagging, and touch football with no touching. Tag with out touching anyone. Even ring around the rosy is in trouble with these rules. These are playground rules run amok by a frustrated administration that say’s we will just make a zero tolerance policy and be done with it. Were sick of being parents to these kids too.

Now I know that they are saying this is just an attempt to keep bullying and violent acts down, but back when I was in school if you got out of line the teacher either boxed your ears, or sent you to the office. Either way you were on your own. Parents did not challenge the school administration when it came to making you be a better kid, and less of a smart ass. In fact what went on in school when I was being punished was best left in school, or my father would try you in his own kangaroo court when you got home, where justice was swiftly dealt out because he too had little patience with ill behavior.

But we supposedly live in a more perfect world now and some parents of supposedly perfect children have an attorney on their payroll that is looking for work and everything has changed. It used to be that schools educated your children and had little tolerance for students who were disruptive. Now they walk on eggshells every time they have to tell parents that their little angel is acting out again and wasting everybody’s time and talents, just by being there. We have parents now days that blame the schools for their kid’s academic problems, when the kid isn’t even there most of the time.

Education is the most important thing we do to prepare our children for life, but the schooling is only part of the process. True they have the books, and the teachers to get you started, but parents’ getting involved in their child’s education is essential to their offspring’s success. It’s the schools job to put the material out there; it’s the parent’s job to see that it gets absorbed. Don’t have time for that? Then try home schooling, or get a tutor, either way they are your kids to raise, not the schools. Better yet, just have your kids behave. There comes a day when they have to go out in the real world and well-behaved kids become well-behaved adults. As a parent isn’t that what you would want?

People, who say I ignore the good kids and just complain about the bad kids, have criticized me. Let me say this. This isn’t about the kids as much as it is about the parents and I don’t like people from my generation who complain about the bad kids now days as if they had nothing to do with it. I acknowledge my part in failing our kids and want to change it. That’s what this letter is all about. As for the good kids, and yes-- there are more of them then the failing ones. Congratulations, you succeeded despite the mess we created and some day when you are out in the world and on your own, you too will be disgusted by the pandering that goes on in our schools and hopefully you will do something about it, because we seem not to be able to.

PRIMING THE PUMP

                                                

When I was a youngster, we had an old hand pump in the park where you could get water for the animals or a cool drink for yourself. The pump was old and leaked a little air so, to get it started, you had to pour some water down the well pipe to prime the pump. The water for priming was kept in an old rusty coffee can that had been left there by someone, and filled by the last person who used the pump.  Once primed, you could pump water for as long as your arms held out. Then, when you were done, you filled the coffee can with water for the next person. The can was always there and always full. It was strangers looking out for and helping strangers.

All of us need to take a look around at the youngest family member we have, be it a niece or nephew, brother or sister, son or daughter or a grandchild. These youngsters are our hope for the future, and we need to do everything we can to help them become educated and the leaders of tomorrow. We need to shape their bodies and their minds with the ideals which worked for us in so many cases, and not try to hide the mistakes that didn’t work for us so they can serve as bad examples. God knows there have been enough of them. We also need to do everything in our power to safeguard this world we all have to live in.  In effect, we need to leave them some water to prime the pump with so they can keep it going.

I often look at this younger generation and think—what kind of a world have we left you? Has our overwhelming greed for self-satisfaction and wealth left you an empty can of water? Our air and water has become more polluted every day, by people that are driven to make more and more money. Our code of ethics that used to include good morals, a sense of decency and family values, has been badly watered down. Yes, as the good book says, “we reap what we sow” but the sad part of that is, the next generation also reaps what we sow, and they had no say in it.

I met a young woman a while back who told me a story of how she had given birth to a baby daughter at home. They—she and her husband—hadn’t registered the birth and weren’t going to. They planned on home schooling the child, and keeping her out of mainstream society. I had a thought about how close that was to children that were raised on the prairie in sod huts a hundred years ago, and why would we ever want to revert to that? Then I look around me at the world we live in, and I see where her fears are coming from. Sadly, I don’t think it’s possible anymore to keep your children to yourselves. At some point, the government will find out and they will make you comply with the mainstream. We shouldn’t have to fear our government being involved in our lives, but we are starting to more and more.

We should leave this world the way we found it, or better yet, in cleaner shape then we found it. Many people drink only bottled water because they can’t trust that the water that comes from their wells is safe. Government guidelines tell us not to eat too much fish in some areas because it’s full of mercury. Huge areas of the ocean are filled with floating debris and the dead zone in the gulf gets bigger every year. That coffee can of water our kids need, to prime the pump, sadly is being left empty.

THE FOURTH OF JULY

                                                 

So it was the fourth of July once more and we celebrated the anniversary of our nation’s beginning. Last Sunday I went to church, and they tried to set the tone for the week by singing, “America the beautiful.” The song always makes my heart swell with pride because it merges the two most important institutions in my life—my faith and my country. But lately, I sometimes wonder if we don’t need to give God a reason to bless America. For you see, America has done everything it can to distance itself from Him.

In verse three we sing in part “Who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life.” When I think of our country today, I find it hard to sing those words and correlate them to America. There used to be a firm connection there, but self-serving people want no part of God and country anymore. God and country made great partners for so long, but they want that partnership dissolved.  In time, as things get worse—and they will—they’ll come crawling back to God because he’s always been their bastion of last resort. Let’s hope he doesn’t hold grudges like we do.

There are many verses to the song “God Bless America” but most of us know only four. In one of the later verses that we seldom sing, are the words, “America, America, God shed his grace on thee. Till selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free.” No, our heroes didn’t die for what we’re doing to our country now. They died so we could sing this song with pride and not have hypocritical thoughts about what we are singing and what we really are becoming.

In this country, we have always had this monumental task of keeping the peace and living harmoniously. Mainly, because we are a nation of immigrants that come from all over the world with many cultures, religions and traditions that people hold dear to their hearts and they are not always respectful of each other’s way of life. But the intent, when our government was formed, was to live and let live and to live in peace and respect for each other. The civil war was a great example of what happens when ideals clash and what it can lead to. This country was lucky to have survived that war, but we did, and it brought back some peace for a long time.  But now we see similar social problems rearing their ugly heads again, and we wonder—are we going to survive this time.

Back in 1971, what began as a Coke commercial, developed into a popular song. It was a catchy little song that kind of intrigued me, and not for the melody, but for what it said. The song was called “I’d like to teach the world to sing.” One verse I remembered in particular said, “I’d like to see the world for once all standing hand in hand. And hear them echo through the hills for peace throughout the land.” That’s what we all need in this country. Hand in hand instead of drawing lines in the sand. Our Christian faith, ingrained in our government, was once the catalyst that helped us achieve just what I am talking about. But now we want to get rid of it.

ONE MANS JUNK

One of the highlights of my life growing up in Staples was to accompany my father to the dump. About once a month he would hitch up his trailer that sat out by the garden and we would take that dirt road that ran along the railroad tracks, east of town, to the city dump. He would also take his pump Winchester 22 caliber rifle along so we could shoot rats. We always went at dusk when the rats were most active, and we would sit on the hood of the car just in case a rat got aggressive. My dad would howl with delight every time he got one, and as I got older he would let me try my luck, too. This was before anyone knew what a redneck was.

I talk about this because we often criticize today’s kids for their video games, which all too often involve shooting fictional people in various roles. I have tried out my grandson’s video game, but it doesn’t hold a candle to plinking a rat at the city dump.  To those who say video games lead to a propensity to grow up violent, I want to unequivocally state that I have never had any desire to shoot anything else, except wild game in season. Nor did my father.

There is an old adage about “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure” and my dad bought into that big time. All too often, we brought a load of junk to the dump, and came back with another load of someone else’s junk, that would just sit around until my father realized he didn’t really need it anyway, and then we would haul it back. I swear, this exchange program got so serious that, sometimes, we brought back junk that we had originally deposited out there.

As I look around my property, after fifty years of keeping house, I often say, “I got to get rid of some of this crap,” so I make little piles, because once a year I go to the landfill with my junk, and use my five dollar coupon the county sends out. Now, I’m in the last quarter of my life so saying, “I might use this or that someday,” just doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s been my experience that, when I do come across a need for something that might be in my junk category, I can’t find it anyway, so I just do the easy thing and run to town and get another one at the hardware store. I gave some thought to taking an inventory and entering the junk into a computer program that would tell me where I hid all the stuff, but as I told you, I’m in the last quarter of my life and I feel I would be doing that, not for me, but for someone else who I can tell you for sure—because he told me so—is going to rent a dumpster when it comes time to clean out my estate. His theory is, “one man’s junk is not going to be another man’s junk.”

I once visited some friends who have been married about fifty some years, and as I looked around their house, I noticed that every conceivable piece of wall space was covered with something. I think if they could have found some way to conquer gravity, they would have plastered the ceiling full, also. When I asked them if they ever threw anything away, they told me, “Hush your mouth man, do you know what this stuff is worth?” My guess is “nothing,” unless you find someone who wants it—and my dad is no longer alive.