Friday, March 29, 2019

DREAM

So you get down to the last couple decades of life and you’re still thinking about that perfect place to live out the rest of your life. For many of us seniors that would be a place where we would find lots of peace and quiet, far from the clutter and din of this madding world. I have always dreamed of a cabin, on a cliff, on the north shore of Lake Superior, with lots of windows looking out over that beautiful body of water. A seasonal home it would be, so there would be a plan in place that would get you to some place warmer for the brutal winters, where you could sit in the sun and dream about your happy return come summer, to your rustic home by the lake. The trouble back then was, it was only just my dream. But then she passed and I started thinking about the limitations old age has saddled me with and I realized that although my mind and spirit are still willing for this kind of adventure, physically surviving by myself up there in Gods country, at least for me now, has some serious doubt’s.

As a kid it was always “pipe dreams” my mother called them when I told her what I envisioned for my future. In her mind, those dreams were something that never would happen and she was convinced that I was moored in this, “Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” mentality, which just translated to--it will never happen. But oh’ so many years later, here I am still dreaming about it and yes many of my dreams in life have come to fruition because I never gave up on them. I firmly believe if you want something bad enough you have a good chance of getting it-- within reason. Not that I’m going up to the north shore to look for lots this summer because I’m enough of a realist to know that the days of taking my chainsaw and hacking a trail out of the woods and building another home in some Northern Minnesota Shangri-La are behind me and I also know the means of paying someone else to do it is slightly beyond my pay scale.

Right now I live on a nice lake and I go south for the winter and for many people, including most of my friends and family, they say, isn’t that enough? Without seeming ungrateful I can only say that my dreams changed because they weren’t always just my dreams, because I shared my world with another. Now that I don’t anymore my dreams seem to play out most often at living in unspoiled places.  Dreaming is cheap and easy and inactivity makes me restless, so I dream on. So what is so spoiled about where I am? It’s spoiled in my mind because it’s so easily accessible. I want quiet and privacy. Not listening to wave runners buzzing around the lake like angry mosquitoes and hearing my neighbor’s conversations. Maybe there was a time when that was all right and what we both wanted and we is the magic word but as I said it is no longer we-- it’s now just me.

I see my life as a book and for a guy who has wrote many books there comes a time when you have to write the last few chapters. They don’t have to necessary be brief or hold a spectacular ending but they need to insinuate someplace that the story is drawing to a close. What is a close? It’s when there are no more stories to tell that are relevant. You don’t have to kill off the characters, you can have them riding off into the sunset. But in the very least of it, you aren’t going to talk about it anymore.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

MY FRIEND JIM

MY FRIEND JIM

When I was a young boy, and in my early teens, my parents wouldn’t let me have a dog. So I did the next best thing and I adopted someone else’s dog. The dogs name was Jim and his owner paid no attention to him, so I took over the job. Jim was an outside dog who was street smart so he had the run of the neighborhood and when he wanted company he always looked me up. When I got up in the morning for my paper route, there he would be in the yard waiting for me and when my dad came home at night he would quietly disappear, knowing he wasn’t welcome, although that changed, the longer he hung around.
None of my brothers or sisters ever paid much attention to Jim. I guess I was the dog lover in the family. Jim was a mutt and something of a cross between a German Sheppard and a Husky. He was stout and strong and even on the coldest winter nights he would curl up in a ball under our back-steps outside and sleep sometimes. I put some straw under there for him and as long as I wasn’t feeding him food from the house or letting him in the house, Dad dropped his opposition to him. I never fed him much but he stayed in good shape so his owner must have been putting food out for him, The man just didn’t seem to care where he was or maybe because he saw me with his dog so much, he was just happy someone else was paying attention to him.
I had a morning paper route so every morning at six I had to get up and go seven blocks uptown to the paper office and get my papers and then deliver them. It took me about an hour and a half and Jim always went with me. Many of my customers had dogs too, so Jim would help himself to their dog’s food while he was there, if it was outside. If their dog bothered me, Jim took them to task and he was a formidable fighter. In the winter when my hands got cold Jim would always let me warm them up in his fur and his tail was always wagging when he saw me.
Jim was well known around the neighborhood-- in fact around the town. I eventually switched to an evening paper route so I would go to the paper office after school and Jim was always there waiting for me. Fran, the man who ran the office, said he appeared every day about a half hour before I did and would lie on the sidewalk and wait for me. Jim seemed to know what time it was, but he didn’t know what day it was, so on Sundays he went up to the office too but seeing no one there he would go back home. He had to cross a busy highway to get there, but he always watched for traffic. Then I got a job and had to quit delivering papers and Jim would wander over to see me if I was outside, but he seemed to come less and less because I was never home.
Then one night while we were eating supper we heard a gunshot and went outside to investigate. There was Jim, lying on the sidewalk dead. There was a new cop on the police force and seeing Jim loose, he thought he was a stray so he shot him. While I knelt crying over Jim, my Dad lashed out at that cop and he was lucky to not been arrested for what he said to him. But I remember one sentence to this day, that dad told that cop, “You just killed the best friend that boy ever had.”

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

ELECTIONS

                                                         

As the elections are coming upon us, I am appalled by the anger and rancor we are witnessing, not only among the candidates but also amongst the voters. You won’t find me endorsing any candidate for any office and for a couple of good reasons. Probably the best reason is, “Who am I to tell you how to vote.” When I was working my boss called me in the office one day and told me that he didn’t appreciate the political sign that was in my front yard and I should take it down right now. Being a little stubborn, I left it up for a couple of days after that. Then he called me again and told me once more, in no uncertain terms, take it down or find another job. I had a wife and three kids to think about so I reluctantly took it down but I never forgot about that day. My rights as a citizen had been infringed on.

I have family members that are not on the same wavelength as me when it comes to politics. But it will never be an issue with me, because I won’t let it be an issue. My family is too important to me to let that happen. I do think I have an advantage over them, being as old as I am, and having the wisdom I have gained over the years to know what can happen to the best of people, in situations like this.

A while back when congressman Steve Scalise was shot down on a softball field we all saw how political rancor can get out of control. That person had more then one congressman on his list to be shot. I remember the assassinations that took place with President Kennedy and his Brother Robert. The attempt to kill Ronald Regan and the murder of Dr King. There are a lot of mentally deranged people out there capable of this kind of violence and the crass rhetoric of today’s elections only fans the fire.

Political campaigns have become brutal with attacks on peoples records, families and characters. Its not always that truthful and above board to start with and the end result is someone, who apparently can’t win on their own merits and ideas, is trying to make themselves look good, by making someone else look bad. That’s a behavior you had to go back to grade school to find, until lately.

Campaign reform needs to be initiated and soon. Its time to put the gloves back on and clean politics up and while they are at it, it’s time to get the lobbyists out of the campaigns. Ask the politicians, when they are politicking, where they are getting their money from? Then ask them what they will be expected to do for those people if they win and don’t take “nothing” for an answer. We all know better then that.

Were allowing our whole political process to be turned into a war of words and accusations that can ruin people lives forever, all in an effort to win the seats in congress that are supposed to be filled by people, we want to make rules for all of us to live by.  


Wednesday, March 6, 2019

GREATFUL

                                                           

For my younger readers you are going to say, “Oh here we go again” I wanted to share this anyway. The year was 1946 and with World War II over and all of the soldiers coming home, jobs were hard to find in small town Minnesota. Factories that had been running full steam for years on military contracts, were now laying people off all over the United States, including my father and this only exasperbated his problems. My father was no exception to the troubles that came from this and with a wife, two young boys, a baby and no place to live, he found an old farmstead where we could all live. It came complete with several head of cattle and the rent for the place was the milk they produced and dad and his brother-in-law were the one’s who had to milk them. My father had never lived on a farm before

Did I say we had no electricity and the house was all one big room and my mother hung blankets on ropes that ran from corner to corner to divide the house up. She got her water from a pitcher pump by an old wash board sink and the ice man came several days a week to put ice in the icebox. We had kerosene lanterns for lights and those two men milked all of those cattle by hand twice a day.  Then they dumped the milk into cream cans that were cooled by an artesian well that ran through the property. The house was heated with an old wood stove. You get the picture.

Why am I telling you this? Just to say how grateful I am for all that I have and the reality of that is brought home to me each time I think back to those days. I’m not only grateful for what I have now but I am grateful too for having a memory that provides me that glimpse into a world that I still remember seventy some years later and for having hard working parents that were absolute survivors, who never gave up and fought back.

Both of my parents had known a far better life then this before the war, so living like they were,  it had to have been very hard on them. I was a five year old so hardships to me were probably not that apparent. At least by the standards of that time and place. When my dad died almost fifty years later he still wasn’t a rich man by any means. He had lost his beloved wife some twenty years before that to cancer. But even in the grips of his grief and loneliness, he carried on with life; grateful for the large family he had by then, who rallied around him in those later years. He was poor in riches but rich in spirit.

I have always thought that those hard lessons of living with that kind of adversity become teaching moments if we let them. They are so much more poignant then reading about them or hearing 2ndhand about someone else’s struggles in life. Yes, you had to be there to get the full effect. I think of all the times my father could have turned to some under handed way to make a buck but he never did. He told me later in life that, “When you raise your son, you raise your sons, son too.” Those weren’t just words with him, that was his mantra and his constitution and he lived it to the fullest and even though three generations have passed since then, those words still live on with me and in my family. 

Monday, March 4, 2019

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL WORLD

                                    

I have always been intrigued with this place we call our earth. You see there is no other place like it known to man and believe me they have been looking. You think about all of the balances and safe guards this planet came with, that make living here possible and it is mind-boggling. The ozone layer that protects us from the suns ultraviolet rays that would cook us otherwise. The magnetic field that originates in the earth’s core that shields us from deadly space radiation. How the earth is tipped on its axis that gives us the seasons of the year and how it rotates to give us the hours of the day. How it moves in perfect cinch with the sun and the moon just far enough away to keep us from roasting and yet close enough to keep from freezing. How the plants and trees absorb the poison gases we give off and give us back life sustaining oxygen and to think it’s gone on for millions of years.

Then came man and in his infinite wisdom, he was able to find heavy metals and fossil fuels and start an industrial revolution by inventing electrical power and gasoline powered engines. Smelting ores into different metals and inventing plastics from petroleum and glass from sand. There was refrigeration to cool our homes and preserve our food and natural gas to heat our homes. Often with some side effects for this planet we didn’t fully understand and probably don’t understand yet. We invented miracle drugs to cure illnesses and chemicals to control everything from weeds to insects and yet we still didn’t understand what it was doing to our earth and probably don’t fully understand it today either but we use them anyway.

Then we blew a hole in the ozone layer with chlorofluocarbons and had to find a repair for it and it looks like we might have. But then came more problems with no easy fixes like that. Wells are pumping poisoned drinking water from chemicals and drugs we excreted and rivers, fed by runoff that flows into the gulf have created a gulf dead zone hundreds of square miles where nothing lives. Smog and air quality problems are sickening many and changing, weather patterns. There are fixes for much of this but they run up against the greed that exists from those who benefit from selling those products that are causing all of the problems. They hire legions of lawyers and buy off politicians while admitting no fault, even in the face of over mounting evidence. They know they are wrong, they just don’t care and they are going to milk this cow for all its worth and in the meantime the beat goes on.

The earth is becoming a ticking clock and we can stop and rewind it or let it run down. To those younger people who will inherit this mess, the day will come when you will curse the generations who lied and cheated and looked the other way, all in an effort to make a buck with no self-guilt for ruining this earth for the ages, when there were answers for all of those problems if you only looked for them-- there was no money in those answers however for the guilty people who were involved in the sickening of the earth so they rejected them. Someday when man is gone the earth will again heal itself and soon there will be no trace left of the people who inherited this great blue planet and elected to destroy it, instead of taking care of it. No one wants to write like this but the truth needs to be told.