HELLO WALLS

                                                

The year was 1960 and I lived in Minneapolis but my heart was still in my hometown of Staples. Every Friday evening when the whistle blew at the shop, where I worked, I would point my old 53 Mercury north and go home for the weekend. Home to my family and her. Her, being the girl I would later marry. I worked the evening shift and I didn’t get off until midnight so the trip was a long, lonely one of a hundred and fifty miles in the dark. She was only a senior in high school that year but she would wait up for me at home. Oh, her mother wouldn’t allow me in at that time of the night, so I would drive slowly by the house and toot the horn and she would shine her flashlight out her bedroom window in acknowledgment. Somehow I always felt better knowing I was back home with the ones I loved and she was still there waiting to see me too.

I was hooked on country music back in those days and on that long trip home my radio would be tuned to W.D.G.Y, which back then was the twin cities country music station. The farther I got from the cities, the fainter the radio would get and pretty soon it was nothing but static and I would twist the knobs trying to get just one more song but in vain. At last it would die out and so I would shut it off. The last forty miles were in silence. No 8 tracks or cassettes or disks in those days. I had a buddy who had a Chrysler product that had a turntable under the glove box and it played 45 records. Talk about distracted driving, flipping records while you drove.

I still like that old country music I used to enjoy and now with a satellite radio it’s always on in my car. Sometimes I have to humor Pat when were traveling and try something else but always when I’m alone the dial goes back to “Willy’s Road House” and those oldies but goodies. County Music for some reason isn’t always about the best of times. Back then though, times were good for me and I just enjoyed the music for what it was and not for what it said.

Fifty years later and shortly after my wife passed away, I was coming back from the cities one lonely night on that same old road, while I had been down there visiting my son’s family. The old country classics were on and a man by the name of Faron Young came on singing that timeless classic “Hello Walls.” It went something like this. “Hello Walls, how’d things go for you today. Don’t you miss her since she up and walked away? And I bet you dread to spend another lonely night with me. But lonely walls I’ll keep you company.” I switched the station.

For so many years it had been just a song about someone else’s bad luck but now fifty years later it was so relevant. She hadn’t walked away, she had just gone away but never the less the song still fit me like a glove. Time and old age have healed my heart now and I can listen to that song once more. My walls are not so lonely anymore. Pat, and my family see to that. But I write this for all the lonely people out there who have only the walls to talk too and no one to sit across the table from. It’s my hope that soon, you will have more then those walls to keep you company.

MY PEAK

                                                         

Someone once asked me when I felt I’d hit my peak in life. At first I was taken back a little and became a little defensive because I felt they were implying that I was going down hill. And although that might be true, no one wants to hear about that but then I became more analytical about the statement they had made and I thought-- were they talking about physically or mentally? I admit physically there has definitely been a turn for the worse. One look in the mirror or one walk around the block will prove that out. But mentally I’m not so sure where or when my life’s peak was, or if I ever got there, or if I ever will. You see all of us are the sum total of our life’s experiences and although I’m not getting around the way I used too and I’m playing bocce ball instead of basketball, I am still putting one foot in front of the other and getting out and meeting people and learning things I never knew. For me at least, that’s what life is all about.

The people in the know say that physically most of us top out in our late twenties or early thirties. Now because I can no longer remember what my physical prowess was in my late twenties or early thirties I guess I’ll take their word for it. If you were to show our physical life’s journey on a graph and you live to be eighty-five it seems to me to be a short steep hill getting to the top and a long meandering one coming down. It also seems to me that when I analyze this graph and try to convert it to the mental side of life, I come up with the opposite. When I was in my late twenties and full of testosterone and energy and seemingly at the top of my game physically-- knowing what I know now—I was dumb as a post. Even people coming out of college in their middle to late twenties with PHD degrees have a lot to learn in their fields. Most of their knowledge will come later in life when they put into action, what they learned in school. At least what they learned in the classroom.

I once went to a medical doctor who was so fresh out of school he still smelled like the cadaver’s he’d been practicing on. This guy’s acne looked like an adolescents at thirteen and he couldn’t even cover it with a beard because he couldn’t grow one yet. His stethoscope still had the price tag on it and his white coat fit him like a sack. He examined me then left the room for a while—presumably to look something up or consult with another doctor—then came back and said, “I think what you have,” and that’s where my suspicious nature kicked in. I didn’t give a rip what he thought I had, I wanted to know what he knew I had. Now to play the devils advocate against myself, everybody needs to start someplace right, even if you’re a doctor. I’m not implying that doctors right out of college aren’t fit to practice medicine. I’m just saying that twenty years down the road they will be a far better doctor. Or an Engineer, Nurse, Firefighter or a Farmer or most anything except an athlete. But twenty years from now Dr. Jr. might have a few of the things eating at him that he’s been treating in others because mentally we keep growing but physically most of us are going down that long proverbial hill. Now there are places, where for a while you can make up with a lack of speed and agility-- both signs of aging by the way-- with cunning moves and not making so many dumb mistakes. A sign of having been there and done that and fool me once, shame on you but fool me twice shame on me.

                                                            

BABIES

                                                                    

As I have gotten older I’ve turned into a far more sentimental person then I used to be. I used to just get misty eyed over patriotic displays and the death of friends and family. Two different kinds of tears I guess. But something happened to me in the last six months that hasn’t happened before in my lifetime. Three little great grand babies came into my family. “So what’s sad about that you ask? You should be giddy about it.” I am happy and proud beyond my wildest expectations about these babies but yet sad underneath when I look at the world these little ones will have to grow up in. Oh, not their immediate world, they come from good families where they will be loved and cared for. I’m talking about the world they will inherit beyond the nest.

There is a special sentiment for babies of all species and maybe it has to do with their vulnerability and helplessness as they enter into the world. Even the beasts of the forests will fight to the death to protect their young. I’m sure the parents and families of these little ones I’m talking about will go to great lengths to keep these babies safe too. At some point however the tide flows back out and they flow with it and they become part of a greater society and the parental safeguards that protected them go away. For you see, in this world of today, we as humans are turning a blind eye to the future of our young, when it pertains to the world we will leave them to live in. It’s not only the fact that we have poisoned the waters they have to drink and the air they have to breathe-- all seemingly in the name of progress. We also gave them a world laced with drugs and alcohol, cigarettes, greed and promiscuity. As much as decent people abhor this, those in charge, with some convoluted theory about peoples “rights” allow it and by their inability to control it—aid and abet it.

It is a frustrating job indeed to raise your young with high ideals and respect for the earth and those around them. To instill in them a love for God and country and a desire to be decent and a yearning to be a productive part of an ever greater society. Only to have them run head on into those who want to use them as pawns to farther their goals. These in effect brand everything you taught them about growing up the right way – to instead be wrong and inconsequential.

Parents today have an ever-increasing fear of what lies in wait for their kids as they go out into the world. Just the other day I read that deaths from opioids and illicit drugs are now the number one killer of our young people, surpassing automobile accidents for the first time. I look at these babies I talk about and know that as some point in their future they will be tempted by outside movements to join the drug crusade or the sex trade. That leaders of our country will call those fears of their parents fake news and the poisoning of our air and waters a hoax. Oh wait! That’s not just in the future it’s already happening. I grew up in a world largely void of the things I see today. But I fully realize that this scourge happened on my watch and the watch of every other older adult in this county. To my grandkids and great grandkids I can only say God be with you little ones and here’s hoping you can do what my generation couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Make this world a better place to live for your babies.