A VOICE FROM THE PAST

                                              

Over the fifty years I was together with my wife we accumulated a lot of things. The only difference was, most of my stuff was out in the garages and hers was in the house. But now the time has come to weed through all of it and decide what is worth keeping for posterity and what has to go. My wife’s family is all gone now so there is no interest there. My own children, some whom have been married for thirty years themselves, have no interest either. Most of it is old pictures and papers and tossing them away seems so cold. So that is my quandary and I’m a long way from done.

But this is really not about what I found in all of those boxes but about one thing in particular I came across the other day. It was a baby book. The kind your mother keeps for you. Notes about your development from a baby to a child, written by your mother. What was so mind blowing for me was, this wasn’t my wife’s baby book or our kid’s book but my baby book and I didn’t even know it existed.

You see my mother left my father and her family when I was four years old and my kid brother was two. Why this happened is not important to this essay. My father later remarried and I was blest with a wonderful stepmother and six more siblings. Over the years I was made aware of my mother but until I was a young man she made little effort to see me. She and all of my parents have long since passed away.

My father must have passed this box of pictures and papers on to my wife before he died and she either wasn’t aware that it was in there or knowing my past, thought it might be too painful for me to deal with, and didn’t show it to me. Either way right now I was looking at it for the first time. I was reading my mothers musings written seventy-five years ago. There were swatches of my baby hair and baby pictures I had never seen before. Her name scrawled on a birthday card was the only other time I had seen her writing. As I read through this I was getting to know more about her then I ever knew before, twenty some years after she died. I can’t share what she wrote but it made me cry. All I ever knew about her was all the wrong things she may have done and now here was a woman seemingly so in love with her infant son.

Over the years, family and friends who knew my past have asked me if I loved my mother? I have a hard time answering this because in my past there was another woman who was the only mother I ever knew. Someone who earned my love and respect. Do you love someone because of blood ties more then the one who took care of you when you were sick and sad. I don’t know and I don’t know if I will ever know. But I do know as I read what she wrote, that no matter if I loved her not, she loved me. To those of you out there who have split up a family for whatever reason, I ask that you make every effort to keep your kids front and center. To love them and be a part of their lives even if you can’t live in the same house. Don’t make them wonder years later if they really loved you or not. Love is such a beautiful thing and the more people you can love in your life, the better a person you will be for it. Someday when you are old like I am now, you will need that love from your children. Especially when you’re all alone in the world once more.

WINTER HIATUS

                                                

My life has been made up of many chapters. From my youth growing up in a small town, in a poor family; to marrying a young lady I always felt blessed to have as a wife and the mother of my children; to having a career that spanned four decades and brought with it a world of satisfaction and accomplishment. To retirement to the lake with my writings, grandkids, traveling both with my wife and now with my special friend Pat; and now new plans to spend my winters in a sunny warmer climate. Yes, I have been so blessed.

Is this the last chapter? No one knows that but God but I do know one thing. From a prince to a pauper you only go around once in life and as my father used to say. “Life is pretty much what you make of it.” For many of us life has thrown up roadblocks at us but what we did to get around those roadblocks and keep on, keeping on, was what defined us. We are each of us our very own person, as different as the snowflakes that fall in the winter and as different as each of our personalities are. All of us combining, in one-way or another, to make up this smorgasbord we call life. For without this mix and match, we would have a very bland world indeed.

I have learned one thing about life that has been proven to me over and over again and that is the fact that home is always home, no matter where you go. The essential parts to a house are boards and glass, nails and shingles but the essential parts to a home are you and your loved ones. These precious people who are always with you, because they live in your heart even when they don’t live in your shelter. As for the house, it lives in every lumberyard in the country. As a firefighter I watched so many people lose every tangible thing they owned. I tried to comfort these people-- often wrapped in blankets in the middle of the night sobbing and dazed. I tried to tell them. “Yes you have lost something precious here but the stuff you lost had no soul, no personality, no heart and the most precious thing you own has survived and this is one of those road blocks you have to knock down, because it is that resiliency that got you where you were before all of this happened and it is that same resiliency that will get it all back again. Bigger and better.”

So I will leave Minnesota for a few months this winter and do what so many other Minnesotans have done, go where the earth is not sleeping. Follow the birds of the air that figured it all out a long time ago. Those birds probably say to each other-- what so many of us say. “I wish we didn’t have such a long trip and God willing we will be back because this is the place where we raised our families. This is the place where a lot of our heart still lives.” Minnesota is a precious gem but its one of those places where God has said, “You need to hunker down for a while because Mother Nature needs to take a break but I promise you the 2017 summer model is going to be spectacular. In a way I will miss the wind howling around the house on a cold winter night. The house cracking and creaking with the cold. Pushing my snow blower down the driveway my mustache full of frozen snot. Yes, I will miss it but I won’t miss it much.

IMAGINE A WORLD

                                              

Imagine a world where you had nothing to fear. A world where your house and car could remain unlocked, your family and possessions were always safe and you could walk through the dark with no threat of robbers or the boogieman. A world where complete strangers went out of their way, to get to know you. A world with no atom bombs and weapons of mass destruction and a place where all countries borders were sacred, and other countries only interest in your country, was to trade and socialize with you. A world where drugs were meant for the sick and not for recreation and a place where compassion for the poor and disenfranchised was commonplace. A world where respect and love for each other was not only prevalent, it was demanded.

Sound like a fairy tail doesn’t it. But the sad thing is, it has always been with-in our powers to be that way, but a couple of things got in the way. Power and greed come to mind. I look around me at the nations that are warring and you have to shake your head. In Syria, when it’s all said and done, what will Assad have? A country in ruins and half his population gone. In that half of the population that left his country were Doctors, Dentists, Engineers, Skilled labor of every kind. Religious leaders and Architects. What does he have left? Homeless people and those too sick and hurt to leave. His allies will quickly leave. They’re not interested in building up and restoring Syria. They’re only interested in blowing up and conquering and an airbase or a seaport to use. This is just one example of what I am talking about; there have been thousands of them over the centuries.

There are people who seek peacefulness in their religious beliefs. They base this on beliefs they have that God never intended for us to get along the way we do, or should I say don’t. That he wanted us to get along and be compassionate, sharing and loving each other. But he also knew that he gave us each a mind of our own and that mind could be for good or evil, it was up to us. He warned us we would be that way and he warned us too that we couldn’t have it both ways. We have a lot of people that want it both ways. We need to only look at the agendas of the political parties to see this. “No wait a minute,” you say. “You’re mixing religious beliefs with government and that’s not supposed to happen.” No I’m not. I’m just saying religious or not, living in peaceful co existence with each other would be a good thing. Just because God would condone it, doesn’t necessarily make it religious. I know a lot of people who are not religious who are good people. Maybe they didn’t need religion-- they just figured it out on their own.

There will never be peace on this earth because were not wired that way. But everyday so many good things do happen that never get noticed, never get reported. Things we should all emulate but never hear about. You see we’ve spent so much time on the bad things there seems to be no time for that. The media loves shock value because it sells papers. Acts of kindness don’t. There will always be people in this country that love war and conflict because they make a lot of money from it. And money is and always will be, the name of the game.

ABOUT LIFE

                                                

Fiction writers, and I’m one of them, try to write stories of life that for the most part have happy endings. They hope that when you turn that last page and set the book down, you will think, “It’s not how I thought it would end—no it’s better.” Now that being said I admit that not every story I ever wrote, left you giddy and feeling all fuzzy but believe me that was my intent and if I failed you I’m sorry. Remember though, it was just a story and endings are not always what you perceived. You just have to be flexible and think it through. What would it have done to my story to finish it differently?

In a way that’s how real life is too. We all want happy endings and it’s not always in the cards and its not always conclusive either, unless as a writer that’s the way you choose to end it. There is a thing that comes into play here and its called perception and perception is reality.  But Albert Einstein said, “Reality is merely an illusion” It’s your first impression and your first impression doesn’t always need to be the one that sticks with you. You do have the power to change your perception to some degree, if you want to think it through. Sometimes we initially see and hear only what we want to see and hear and sometimes we look through narrow slits in the walls we build to hold the real world out and never see the big picture.

Fear is one of the things that drives us to be shooting from the hip and not make good decisions. Now I’m not knocking fear. Fear is good and it’s like our early warning system and we need to pay attention, but it’s not always right. Its just saying, “heads up here buddy.” In the end fear shouldn’t be making your decision for you. You see a bear in the woods and fear tells you to run but experts say that is the wrong thing to do. That action will only encourage the bear to pursue you. A while back I wrote about being in a fire filled hallway as a firefighter and fear telling me to turn and run but my training was telling me to stay low and fight the fire. Had I ran that day, I won’t be here writing this.

But back to writing. Every writer is different in their approach to story writing. They have an idea for a story and some may not act on it until they have the whole story in their head. Others like me have an idea and an ending so they start writing and let the story take them to the conclusion. When you write that way—making the story up as you go---you come to a lot of Y’s in the road and its those Y’s that can get you into trouble with the reader, because they come to those same Y’s reading it as you did writing it, but sometimes, given a choice, they may have taken the other road.

That’s the way life is too. Tough decisions just when you thought you had it all worked out. I’m at one of those places right now in my own life. I have lung problems that are not conducive to Minnesota winters. I’m faced with going someplace warmer to be more comfortable. I love Minnesota and have lived here all of my life. Do I, at my age, take on the expense and responsibility of buying a second home? Do I leave Minnesota permanently? Do I rent? I’ll keep you posted.

DEER HUNTING

                                                            

I’m not deer hunting any longer but I thought I would write about it. I don’t hunt for two reasons. I lost that killer instinct you need to have and I can’t take sitting in the cold for hours on end anymore. I did hunt for over 60 years and every year I dreamed about shooting that big buck, that looked like a moving brush pile when he was running through the woods. Several years ago I was hunting with my son when dusk was coming. I had unloaded my rifle as I was giving up for the day when I heard something moving towards me. I reached in my pocket and found a shell, retracted the bolt and slipped it in. Just then a nice doe came out of the brush almost in front of me and I took her down. I heard another noise to my left and there was that buck I had always dreamed of, thirty yards away and looking at me. I, with an empty rifle. He gave me a few seconds to forever engrain on my memory what he looked like and then he slipped away. In a way I’m glad he got away.

It was right after that my hunting desire started to wane. Now day’s my son and grandsons still come up and hunt every year and I’m the head cook and bottle washer. On opening morning I get up and see them off and then I go back to my warm bed, pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep. I have no regrets. Last year when the hunting was over my oldest grandson shot a nice buck using my old rifle. He had used the rifle for the last few years and always cleaned it up and put it back in my gun cabinet. Last year when he asked for the keys to the cabinet I handed him the rifle back. I told him it was his. I had planed on doing that for a long time but I just wanted him to prove to me he was serious about hunting and that day he had.

Each year we tell the same old tired stories about years gone by. My son who used to sit and listen because he hadn’t made those memories yet is now the old hunter in the group. He has a special stand where he has had a lot of luck over the years. He told me a while back that this year he is going to put his son-in-law in that stand this year so he has a better chance at getting his first deer. He knows now, that once Nick gets some shooting he will be hooked. I tried a while back to think of anything my family had done over all of these years that drew us together like hunting does. There was nothing. It was then that I realized as much as we use hunting for the reason to gather, the most important thing was not what we did or didn’t shoot. It was the love we had for each other that far out weighed the love for the sport.

Deer hunting gets you back to nature. It happens at a time when the world is all black and white. Most of the other animals are sleeping. The birds have left and the trees and brush are now naked. Yet there is a serenity out there in the woods that seems to surpass the understanding of those who haven’t been there. Those long hours in the stand—alone-- make a perfect setting to be one with nature and yourself. It’s often that right then and there you realize what a blessing it is to be living in this country and how much your loved ones mean to you. It’s also a time to iron out some problems and erase some regrets. You see you’re really never alone. Not as long as you have a conscience. Who knew deer hunting was about so much more then shooting a deer?