Michael J. Buinickas and I became friends in Boy Scouts in 1966, but I did not become a Buinickas until the summer of '68. I walked into their house on Maple Ridge Lane, and was immediately offered food and a choice of beverages, and made comfortable in Mama B's home. Mr. B was my Scout Master and drill sergeant, but Jessica was my mom away from home. Margaret became my big sister, Michael was my older brother, Bill and Barbara my younger siblings. I actually felt more at home there than I did at home.
That same summer, my parents moved me to Florida, far away from everyone and everything I had ever known. During the summers of '69, 70 and '71 I basically showed up on the Buinickas doorstep and was welcomed in, staying for days or weeks before I'd have to return to school in Florida. I had a bed, a place at the table and chores to do including the dreaded "water under the house" detail.
I knew that this home away from home was the handiwork of Jessica Buinickas, and that she had schooled her children in the fine art of hospitality. I have never experienced the like anywhere else in the fifty-odd years since.
Bill's eulogy for his brother in 1997 emphasized that Michael had always been the one who kept the far-flung family together, and I'm sorry to admit that after his passing, I fell away. One very brief visit in 2000 was the last time I saw any of the nuclear family of which I have had the joy and honor to feel a part. Twenty years later, I am back in Florida mourning the passing of Jessica Buinickas from afar.
When Margaret joined Facebook, she friended me, so I still feel connected to my other family, especially now that my biological parents and brother are gone.
And now, I reckon that Marge is matriarch, her mother's shoes thrust upon her. Don't worry, Marge, Jess's family is and has always been your family, and we'll love you through this.
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Monday, April 13, 2020
New Ways
Once again I am entering uncharted territory here. I am trying to keep these blogs fairly current, but nothing has been pressing my creative buttons of late. There are a few things that might be blogworthy. I'll leave that judgment to you-uns (that's Pittsburghian for "y'all") to decide.
Shopping. Who'da thunk such a mundane thing as buying groceries would become a hazardous activity? So now, every source of groceries has some form of contact-free delivery - some even free contact-free delivery. The only one we've tried is BJ's, shopped and delivered by InstaCart. It's sort of like an online game. We select the items we want and put them in our cart, then pay for them. At some point we get a notification that someone, and we are told their name, is shopping. If we watch the app, one by one items go from the cart list to the shopped list. Sometimes an item is out of stock, and an alternate is suggested. We can approve the replacement or have that item refunded. Then the shopper is at the checkout, and it's too late to add or change anything. Then the shopper is on the way. And when the notification comes that she/he is almost here, we open the door and there the vehicle is, rounding the last turn into the parking lot. Groceries are unloaded onto the porch, and we bring them in for disinfecting and putting away. It's easier than the old way!
I told mt neighbor the other day that if this goes on much longer, I'm going to have to invest in a comb. The last time I can remember having hair long enough to comb was in the previous century - the previous millennium even. But it's the beard that gets "wooly-bully" and makes me crazy. Cutting my own hair, with my benign essential tremors, is a very risky project, but I did set my clippers on 2 and chopped back my wooly-bully beard last week. More exciting than that, however, was that Carmen, emboldened by my action and driven insane by her own hair growth, set my clippers on 13 and chopped hers back. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Worst of all, though is the plight of our poor abused bassador. Her favorite activity during our walks is being loved on by nearly everyone we meet. Her plaintive cries as I pull her away are heartbreaking for everyone involved.
Other than that, life goes on pretty much as usual.
Shopping. Who'da thunk such a mundane thing as buying groceries would become a hazardous activity? So now, every source of groceries has some form of contact-free delivery - some even free contact-free delivery. The only one we've tried is BJ's, shopped and delivered by InstaCart. It's sort of like an online game. We select the items we want and put them in our cart, then pay for them. At some point we get a notification that someone, and we are told their name, is shopping. If we watch the app, one by one items go from the cart list to the shopped list. Sometimes an item is out of stock, and an alternate is suggested. We can approve the replacement or have that item refunded. Then the shopper is at the checkout, and it's too late to add or change anything. Then the shopper is on the way. And when the notification comes that she/he is almost here, we open the door and there the vehicle is, rounding the last turn into the parking lot. Groceries are unloaded onto the porch, and we bring them in for disinfecting and putting away. It's easier than the old way!
I told mt neighbor the other day that if this goes on much longer, I'm going to have to invest in a comb. The last time I can remember having hair long enough to comb was in the previous century - the previous millennium even. But it's the beard that gets "wooly-bully" and makes me crazy. Cutting my own hair, with my benign essential tremors, is a very risky project, but I did set my clippers on 2 and chopped back my wooly-bully beard last week. More exciting than that, however, was that Carmen, emboldened by my action and driven insane by her own hair growth, set my clippers on 13 and chopped hers back. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Worst of all, though is the plight of our poor abused bassador. Her favorite activity during our walks is being loved on by nearly everyone we meet. Her plaintive cries as I pull her away are heartbreaking for everyone involved.
Other than that, life goes on pretty much as usual.
Sunday, March 22, 2020
Plague
As I was washing my hands (again) this morning, I was musing (again) about this pandemic, and thinking about what I have read over the years concerning the centuries long bubonic / pneumonic plagues in Europe and the "civilized" world. Those people had no clue what caused it, how it transmitted, or how to avoid being infected. Hygiene was probably not even a word yet, and certainly not practiced by anybody. Fear was rampant, and anyone who offered an explanation or a plan of action, however ludicrous it might sound to us in this century, was given credence.
Now I see and hear political and "religious" " leaders " blaming the coronavirus on whatever target group suits their agenda, or Satan, or Obama or anything or anyone. I am thankful that in this century, we have the option to listen to many different sources of information, including those whose only agenda is to get us through this as painlessly as possible.
I have a friend in Virginia, a microbiologist / belly dancer, who has been working over a hundred hours a week, trying to figure out how to combat this beast (by microbiology, not belly dancing) and a best friend / wife who works at a hospital, where all the latest information is put into practice. Those are the kind of sources I trust, not the finger pointing "news" channels or the creepy preachers bent on demonizing whatever or whoever they want us to perceive as enemies. Here in the twenty first century, we can choose between fear based and love based information. Choose love, my friends, choose love.
Now I see and hear political and "religious" " leaders " blaming the coronavirus on whatever target group suits their agenda, or Satan, or Obama or anything or anyone. I am thankful that in this century, we have the option to listen to many different sources of information, including those whose only agenda is to get us through this as painlessly as possible.
I have a friend in Virginia, a microbiologist / belly dancer, who has been working over a hundred hours a week, trying to figure out how to combat this beast (by microbiology, not belly dancing) and a best friend / wife who works at a hospital, where all the latest information is put into practice. Those are the kind of sources I trust, not the finger pointing "news" channels or the creepy preachers bent on demonizing whatever or whoever they want us to perceive as enemies. Here in the twenty first century, we can choose between fear based and love based information. Choose love, my friends, choose love.
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Going Viral
This post is unusual because I truly don't have a clue what I'm going to say. I just feel it's my duty to weigh in on the coronavirus situation, since pretty much everyone else on the planet has done so. My email trash file is littered with responses from grocery chains, pharmacy chains, restaurant chains, hardware chains, paint store chains, AAA, AARP, AT&T, the UUA and everybody else. Evidently it's the thing to do, so here goes.
First of all, wash your hands. That's number one on everyone's list. Wash 'em long and hard and frequently. Stay away from other humans. I have been doing that for many years. Of course, when I do encounter humans, it's on a city bus or the Skyway. And of course, when Carmen comes home after spending all day at the hospital, where they wash their hands hundreds of times a day.
Beyond the standard cautions about infection, there is also a positive side to the situation. Facebook has been richly peppered with ideas for things to do while stuck at home with your family or just yourself - and many of them have been very good ideas. For me, though, the upside is that this frantic, manic culture of ours is being forced to slow down or even come to a complete stop. We have an opportunity here to learn that life doesn't have to be run at a breakneck pace. I have no illusions about this, however. Every opportunity that has come along so far has been embraced by many and also exploited by many, and the pace picks up again as soon as enough people forget what it was all about. I can only expect the same this time. But I can hope.
One really nice thing for me is that Susan Werner, my favorite singer song writer, is doing free online concerts for her fans, due to cancellations of her upcoming in-person gigs. We saw her twice in Boston, but 2009 was the last time she came anywhere near where we have lived since then. Last Sunday evening was "All Request Night," and this coming Sunday she'll be doing all new stuff. I can't wait!
Anyhoo, y'all stay safe out there. I only have about six loyal readers, so losing of even one of y'all would be a huge loss. And don't forget to say a silent thank you to Vicki VanGundy for pushing me off the edge and making me swim in the pool of my four blogs again.
And wash your damn hands!
First of all, wash your hands. That's number one on everyone's list. Wash 'em long and hard and frequently. Stay away from other humans. I have been doing that for many years. Of course, when I do encounter humans, it's on a city bus or the Skyway. And of course, when Carmen comes home after spending all day at the hospital, where they wash their hands hundreds of times a day.
Beyond the standard cautions about infection, there is also a positive side to the situation. Facebook has been richly peppered with ideas for things to do while stuck at home with your family or just yourself - and many of them have been very good ideas. For me, though, the upside is that this frantic, manic culture of ours is being forced to slow down or even come to a complete stop. We have an opportunity here to learn that life doesn't have to be run at a breakneck pace. I have no illusions about this, however. Every opportunity that has come along so far has been embraced by many and also exploited by many, and the pace picks up again as soon as enough people forget what it was all about. I can only expect the same this time. But I can hope.
One really nice thing for me is that Susan Werner, my favorite singer song writer, is doing free online concerts for her fans, due to cancellations of her upcoming in-person gigs. We saw her twice in Boston, but 2009 was the last time she came anywhere near where we have lived since then. Last Sunday evening was "All Request Night," and this coming Sunday she'll be doing all new stuff. I can't wait!
Anyhoo, y'all stay safe out there. I only have about six loyal readers, so losing of even one of y'all would be a huge loss. And don't forget to say a silent thank you to Vicki VanGundy for pushing me off the edge and making me swim in the pool of my four blogs again.
And wash your damn hands!
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
The Oak Leaf Hotel
I was really not aware of the phenomenon of homelessness until the late 80s. If there were homeless people in Odenton, Maryland in the 50s and 60s, I never encountered them. Vero Beach, Florida, same deal. It wasn't until 1988, when I began working for Image International doing huge corporate theme parties, that I came in contact with this class of humans. Al, the owner/CEO/Big Cheese employed a production manager, a truck driver, lighting guys, A/V guys, shop guys and a warehouse boss. All of the additional labor came from a temp agency.
We never knew what we were going to get temp-wise. Some were pretty sharp, ready and willing to "get some work did." Some were sullen and difficult. Some were barely upright and likely to be discovered sleeping somewhere - and at the Marriott World Center, that was frowned upon. Most were there to put in their time, do the work and get paid. Some we would request if they were available, and some we would send back with the delivery driver if they showed up. The one consistent trait was that none of them were around very long - maybe six months at the most. They would just disappear, and nobody knew anything about it unless maybe if they were arrested. And if Image hired one on, he would never last longer than a few days before he would disappear, never to be seen again.
I get why some folks say that homeless people are homeless because they want to be. From the viewpoint of the privileged it can appear that way. Speaking as one who has worked shoulder to shoulder with these guys, shared food and conversation with these guys, I can say that it's simply not that simple. For the most part, they are homeless because they have to be, because, for whatever reason - drugs, alcohol, brain damage, mental illness, PTSD (I worked with a LOT of Vietnam veterans) - they just do not have the wherewithal to be an upstanding citizen. The rigors of managing money, paying rent, showing up for work on time, keeping themselves clean and presentable are simply beyond their capacity. Most are really nice people who will never be accepted into society, so the homeless community is what they have.
One really touching moment during my six and a half years with Image happened when I took the bus from International Drive to downtown Orlando to meet up with Carmen after work. I was grungy and unkempt after a hard day's carpenting, and wearing my Image International T-shirt. When I got off the bus at the downtown terminal, there were several grungy and unkempt guys nearby. We didn't know each other at all, but they assumed I was one of them. "Hey, Brother, you all right? Need anything?" I assured them that I was fine, thanked them and went on my way, but I was humbled by the fact that these guys who had almost nothing to call their own, were happy to offer help to a fellow.
The title of this post is a quote from one of our temporary workers one lunch break. A frequent topic of conversation was "Where did you stay last night?" Beneath overpasses of I-4 were popular sleeping spots. Doorways and alleys were also high on the list. This one dude, who had slept in a cluster of trees, said "I had a room at the Oak Leaf Hotel." It doesn't get any better than that.
We never knew what we were going to get temp-wise. Some were pretty sharp, ready and willing to "get some work did." Some were sullen and difficult. Some were barely upright and likely to be discovered sleeping somewhere - and at the Marriott World Center, that was frowned upon. Most were there to put in their time, do the work and get paid. Some we would request if they were available, and some we would send back with the delivery driver if they showed up. The one consistent trait was that none of them were around very long - maybe six months at the most. They would just disappear, and nobody knew anything about it unless maybe if they were arrested. And if Image hired one on, he would never last longer than a few days before he would disappear, never to be seen again.
I get why some folks say that homeless people are homeless because they want to be. From the viewpoint of the privileged it can appear that way. Speaking as one who has worked shoulder to shoulder with these guys, shared food and conversation with these guys, I can say that it's simply not that simple. For the most part, they are homeless because they have to be, because, for whatever reason - drugs, alcohol, brain damage, mental illness, PTSD (I worked with a LOT of Vietnam veterans) - they just do not have the wherewithal to be an upstanding citizen. The rigors of managing money, paying rent, showing up for work on time, keeping themselves clean and presentable are simply beyond their capacity. Most are really nice people who will never be accepted into society, so the homeless community is what they have.
One really touching moment during my six and a half years with Image happened when I took the bus from International Drive to downtown Orlando to meet up with Carmen after work. I was grungy and unkempt after a hard day's carpenting, and wearing my Image International T-shirt. When I got off the bus at the downtown terminal, there were several grungy and unkempt guys nearby. We didn't know each other at all, but they assumed I was one of them. "Hey, Brother, you all right? Need anything?" I assured them that I was fine, thanked them and went on my way, but I was humbled by the fact that these guys who had almost nothing to call their own, were happy to offer help to a fellow.
The title of this post is a quote from one of our temporary workers one lunch break. A frequent topic of conversation was "Where did you stay last night?" Beneath overpasses of I-4 were popular sleeping spots. Doorways and alleys were also high on the list. This one dude, who had slept in a cluster of trees, said "I had a room at the Oak Leaf Hotel." It doesn't get any better than that.
Thursday, February 13, 2020
A Royal ... Flush
In November of 2018 we bought this condominium with three bedrooms and three full bathrooms. One bathroom is downstairs, geezer friendly, with an "ADA" toilet, a shower with a low step-in entry, and grab bars for security and easy ups and downs. We have a guest bedroom upstairs with its own bathroom attached. No geezer accommodations included. Bathroom three is upstairs, off of the room designated as the office. We keep a litter box in the tub, and only I go in there and only to clean the litter box. With one notable exception.
In October of 2019 we had friends from Nashville come stay with us for a few days. One fine morning, Carmen was accompanying them on an adventure - I don't have the vaguest recollection what or where - so bathrooms one and two were in use. Not to be too graphic, I needed to use one, and the only one was three. Now, I'm sure that we, and the Inspector, flushed that toilet to ascertain that it worked. I'm also fairly sure that it had not been "stress tested" by anyone since the previous owners, if then. The bottom line is, when I came down to the kitchen a few minutes later, I found that much of what I had done upstairs had also come down to the kitchen. It was not a joyful discovery.
I called our home warranty folks, and they arranged for a plumber to come. The plumbing company asked if I wanted a water damage remediation company to come, and I said yes. Meanwhile, I, a bottle of bleach and a roll of paper towels cleaned the cabinets, counter and floor. Not a joyful project.
The plumber ascertained that the wax ring under the toilet was at fault. He replaced it, and the plumbing part of the story was finished. Simultaneously, a guy from Dri-Maxx was there assessing the water damage situation. There was water behind one of the cabinets and the drywall - well, wet-wall. He told me about how my homeowner's insurance would pay for the lion's share of the drying and rebuilding process, and we signed an agreement.
Later that same day, two guys with implements of destruction and two drying fans came, tore out one cabinet (yay, only one cabinet!) the drywall behind it, and part of the soffit above it. They taped up a sheet of plastic with a zipper in the middle over the kitchen entrance, and turned on the fans. They left, but returned each morning for three days to check the drying progress. Oh, and they took the cabinet door with them to match for the rebuild.
Meanwhile, the first Dri-Maxx guy called. "Uh, well, your insurance carrier does NOT pay anything for drying and rebuilding. Sorry. We can still rebuild you for nine million dollars (maybe a slight exaggeration) or we can leave that to you." Thanks, but leave it to me. And bring my cabinet door back. He did.
So, the plastic and the fans were taken away, and we were left with a gaping hole between two upper cabinets. I began researching cabinets for sale, and discovered that pretty much every company was interested in designing us a whole new kitchen, not replacing one "box." Two local companies I called were willing to fix me up with a 21" X 42" X 12" upper cabinet box. One wanted three hundred bucks, and one said two hundred if I was willing to wait until they ordered another kitchen. Otherwise, the shipping would be another hundred. I went to Kitchen World, paid for my cabinet, and the waiting began.
The condo two doors down has been undergoing extensive renovations. A scrap of drywall appeared on their back patio one day, I measured it and found that it was just a little too big to be a perfect replacement for the piece torn out by the Dri-guys. I asked if I could have it, and soon had patched part of the gaping hole. Carmen taped a piece of plastic over the soffit hole, and for months that was the best our kitchen looked.
Monday, February 10th, 2020, Linda at Kitchen World called to say that the cabinet was in! we picked it up on Tuesday. Yesterday I installed it. Four months later, the saga finally ended. And I haven't had the courage to flush toilet number three again.
In October of 2019 we had friends from Nashville come stay with us for a few days. One fine morning, Carmen was accompanying them on an adventure - I don't have the vaguest recollection what or where - so bathrooms one and two were in use. Not to be too graphic, I needed to use one, and the only one was three. Now, I'm sure that we, and the Inspector, flushed that toilet to ascertain that it worked. I'm also fairly sure that it had not been "stress tested" by anyone since the previous owners, if then. The bottom line is, when I came down to the kitchen a few minutes later, I found that much of what I had done upstairs had also come down to the kitchen. It was not a joyful discovery.
I called our home warranty folks, and they arranged for a plumber to come. The plumbing company asked if I wanted a water damage remediation company to come, and I said yes. Meanwhile, I, a bottle of bleach and a roll of paper towels cleaned the cabinets, counter and floor. Not a joyful project.
The plumber ascertained that the wax ring under the toilet was at fault. He replaced it, and the plumbing part of the story was finished. Simultaneously, a guy from Dri-Maxx was there assessing the water damage situation. There was water behind one of the cabinets and the drywall - well, wet-wall. He told me about how my homeowner's insurance would pay for the lion's share of the drying and rebuilding process, and we signed an agreement.
Later that same day, two guys with implements of destruction and two drying fans came, tore out one cabinet (yay, only one cabinet!) the drywall behind it, and part of the soffit above it. They taped up a sheet of plastic with a zipper in the middle over the kitchen entrance, and turned on the fans. They left, but returned each morning for three days to check the drying progress. Oh, and they took the cabinet door with them to match for the rebuild.
Meanwhile, the first Dri-Maxx guy called. "Uh, well, your insurance carrier does NOT pay anything for drying and rebuilding. Sorry. We can still rebuild you for nine million dollars (maybe a slight exaggeration) or we can leave that to you." Thanks, but leave it to me. And bring my cabinet door back. He did.
So, the plastic and the fans were taken away, and we were left with a gaping hole between two upper cabinets. I began researching cabinets for sale, and discovered that pretty much every company was interested in designing us a whole new kitchen, not replacing one "box." Two local companies I called were willing to fix me up with a 21" X 42" X 12" upper cabinet box. One wanted three hundred bucks, and one said two hundred if I was willing to wait until they ordered another kitchen. Otherwise, the shipping would be another hundred. I went to Kitchen World, paid for my cabinet, and the waiting began.
The condo two doors down has been undergoing extensive renovations. A scrap of drywall appeared on their back patio one day, I measured it and found that it was just a little too big to be a perfect replacement for the piece torn out by the Dri-guys. I asked if I could have it, and soon had patched part of the gaping hole. Carmen taped a piece of plastic over the soffit hole, and for months that was the best our kitchen looked.
Monday, February 10th, 2020, Linda at Kitchen World called to say that the cabinet was in! we picked it up on Tuesday. Yesterday I installed it. Four months later, the saga finally ended. And I haven't had the courage to flush toilet number three again.
Sunday, January 26, 2020
Hear Ye, Hear Ye
My mental health professional assigned homework: "Update your blogs!" so here I am.
This all started, probably in the late sixties, with Jimi Hendrix and Cream. Then in the seventies I worked in loud environments for a few years. In the eighties I was sound man for a ridiculously loud rock band for a while, and then I started working in wood shops with power tools, air compressors, forklifts and vacuum systems roaring all around me. By the turn of the millennium, my high frequency hearing was toast.
In 2010 I got my first hearing aids. They were very uncomfortable and made all noises louder than they needed to be. Turning them on or off involved opening or closing the little tiny battery compartment, a very difficult task with my tremors and arthritis. They were very expensive, so I was hesitant to wear them to work, to walk outdoors unless the weather was perfect (wind made a horrible sound!) or to get sweaty. In short, I rarely wore them. And yet they crapped out in a couple of years. Not a good experience.
Since then there has been steadily increasing lobbying going on to improve my hearing once again. I, of course, hesitated - dug in my heels, you might say - and deferred any action until a couple of months ago. At that time I received yet another mailing from Miracle Ear, this time with a Free Gift for anyone who comes for a hearing test and consultation. As my co-worker Steve said decades ago, "If it's for free it's for me!" So I went. With Carmen's last words ringing in my ears, "Don't sign anything!" I set out for the bus ride to my appointment with Gary.
Gary put me in the sound proof booth with the headphones and the Jeopardy button and did the testing I've had so many times before - press the button when you hear a tone. Then he drew the graph of my hearing frequencies - good on the low frequencies and off the scale bad on the highs. He pulled out a pair of hearing aids and synced them with his computer, programming my needs into them. Then he put them on me and in me, and suddenly I could hear a whole world of sound I couldn't remember ever hearing before. He took me outside into the parking lot, just fifty feet away from busy San Jose Boulevard, and talked to me in a normal speaking voice. I understood every word. He walked away ten feet and talked. I understood. He went another ten feet. Still I understood him in spite of all the traffic noise. I was duly impressed. We went back inside and he took them off. The world collapsed back to the limited hearing of my unaugmented ears. I nearly cried. But I didn't sign anything. I asked how long the "special price" of only $5700 was good for. Three days. I took my free gift home along with a new appreciation for how far hearing aid technology has come in ten years.
After I recovered from that experience, I went to the AARP website to see what they might recommend. There was an ad for "hear.com" touting affordable hearing aids. How can you go wrong with AARP? So I called them. They set me up an appointment with Randy at Ear To Hear on Hartley Road, also easily accessible by bus. They also set me up for financing, with a 45 day risk-free trial period. Great. I went to see Randy on the day after Christmas. He did another hearing test and drew another graph - I can draw it in my sleep now - and put a pair of Signa hearing aids on me and in me. It was better, but not as good as Miracle Ear by far. He said he was starting me off slowly and would bump up the volume over the next three weeks. I wore them home and walking the dog and working around the house. In three weeks he had stepped up the volume to where it is now, and I'm happy with them. There are no batteries to juggle, and putting them on and off the induction charger turns them off and on. they are comfortable enough that I forget I'm wearing them. And they are only $3500
Next week we are going to an appointment with Costco Hearing Aid Center. Theirs are less expensive than Ear To Hear. We'll see if they make me as happy as my 45 day risk-free trial.
This all started, probably in the late sixties, with Jimi Hendrix and Cream. Then in the seventies I worked in loud environments for a few years. In the eighties I was sound man for a ridiculously loud rock band for a while, and then I started working in wood shops with power tools, air compressors, forklifts and vacuum systems roaring all around me. By the turn of the millennium, my high frequency hearing was toast.
In 2010 I got my first hearing aids. They were very uncomfortable and made all noises louder than they needed to be. Turning them on or off involved opening or closing the little tiny battery compartment, a very difficult task with my tremors and arthritis. They were very expensive, so I was hesitant to wear them to work, to walk outdoors unless the weather was perfect (wind made a horrible sound!) or to get sweaty. In short, I rarely wore them. And yet they crapped out in a couple of years. Not a good experience.
Since then there has been steadily increasing lobbying going on to improve my hearing once again. I, of course, hesitated - dug in my heels, you might say - and deferred any action until a couple of months ago. At that time I received yet another mailing from Miracle Ear, this time with a Free Gift for anyone who comes for a hearing test and consultation. As my co-worker Steve said decades ago, "If it's for free it's for me!" So I went. With Carmen's last words ringing in my ears, "Don't sign anything!" I set out for the bus ride to my appointment with Gary.
Gary put me in the sound proof booth with the headphones and the Jeopardy button and did the testing I've had so many times before - press the button when you hear a tone. Then he drew the graph of my hearing frequencies - good on the low frequencies and off the scale bad on the highs. He pulled out a pair of hearing aids and synced them with his computer, programming my needs into them. Then he put them on me and in me, and suddenly I could hear a whole world of sound I couldn't remember ever hearing before. He took me outside into the parking lot, just fifty feet away from busy San Jose Boulevard, and talked to me in a normal speaking voice. I understood every word. He walked away ten feet and talked. I understood. He went another ten feet. Still I understood him in spite of all the traffic noise. I was duly impressed. We went back inside and he took them off. The world collapsed back to the limited hearing of my unaugmented ears. I nearly cried. But I didn't sign anything. I asked how long the "special price" of only $5700 was good for. Three days. I took my free gift home along with a new appreciation for how far hearing aid technology has come in ten years.
After I recovered from that experience, I went to the AARP website to see what they might recommend. There was an ad for "hear.com" touting affordable hearing aids. How can you go wrong with AARP? So I called them. They set me up an appointment with Randy at Ear To Hear on Hartley Road, also easily accessible by bus. They also set me up for financing, with a 45 day risk-free trial period. Great. I went to see Randy on the day after Christmas. He did another hearing test and drew another graph - I can draw it in my sleep now - and put a pair of Signa hearing aids on me and in me. It was better, but not as good as Miracle Ear by far. He said he was starting me off slowly and would bump up the volume over the next three weeks. I wore them home and walking the dog and working around the house. In three weeks he had stepped up the volume to where it is now, and I'm happy with them. There are no batteries to juggle, and putting them on and off the induction charger turns them off and on. they are comfortable enough that I forget I'm wearing them. And they are only $3500
Next week we are going to an appointment with Costco Hearing Aid Center. Theirs are less expensive than Ear To Hear. We'll see if they make me as happy as my 45 day risk-free trial.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Memory Lane, With A Few Potholes
This morning, in a post on my Facebook timeline, my friend Mary asked me where I went to school in 7th and 8th grades. This kicked off a cascade of memories of that era, and curiosity about why she might have asked.
The 1965-66 school year was a very strange one. My class was near the peak of the baby boom squeezing through the school system. While "they" worked on building the new MacArthur Junior High, my class was shuttled to a block of barracks in Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the second Army. "They" called these barracks MacArthur Junior High That year was remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, it meant that we were not the newbies coming into Arundel Junior High - which was 0.2 miles from my house. We were the only grade in the barracks, so there were no bigger kids to pick on us. Second, we were out of school for a whole week in February due to the Blizzard of '66, which dumped three feet of snow on us. And third, I developed my first serious crush on the girl sitting in front of me in our primary classroom. When the mean girls got an inkling of my feelings, they told her that I liked her. She whipped around and said "HA!!!" in my face. This was the spark that ignited eleven years of clinical depression.
The 1966-67 school year was in Arundel Junior High. MacArthur was finished, so there was room enough for 7th grade to return to Arundel as well, so my class was not the newbies again. My favorite subject was Physical Science, which kicked off my lifelong love affair with physics. I became pretty close to the teacher, Miss Bell. I often stayed after school to help her tidy up and prepare for the next day. The other side of the coin was Art class. The teacher is the one I thought of when I read about Professor Snape in the Harry Potter books. Several times during the year he took whatever I was working on up to the front of the class to show them an example of what NOT to do. The last time he did that, when he returned my sculpture to me, I grabbed a hammer and a chisel and began pounding it to dust, sobbing uncontrollably all the while. My mother was called, and within a week or so, I was seeing a psychiatrist. A "depressive reaction" was the diagnosis of my art class meltdown.
Ninth grade brought on my second serious crush, this time on an eighth grader whose family were the current occupants of the Army officers' off-base rental house next door to mine. That goofy obsession dragged on for seven goofy years. Also, I was heavily into photography and photo-processing by then. I became known for taking pictures in school one day, and bringing the prints in to show everyone the next day. I was invited to be a photographer on the yearbook staff at Arundel High the following year. I was also looking forward to being on the Arundel Wildcats football team. So, at the end of the school year, we went on a 5-week vacation to Vero Beach, Florida, where my mother's mother lived.. After our return to Maryland, my parents decided to move us to Vero Beach, The end of my first incarnation.
Needless to say, I have often wondered about some of the people I went to school with back then, but none have surfaced in over 50 years. Has Mary encountered one of them?
The 1965-66 school year was a very strange one. My class was near the peak of the baby boom squeezing through the school system. While "they" worked on building the new MacArthur Junior High, my class was shuttled to a block of barracks in Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the second Army. "They" called these barracks MacArthur Junior High That year was remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, it meant that we were not the newbies coming into Arundel Junior High - which was 0.2 miles from my house. We were the only grade in the barracks, so there were no bigger kids to pick on us. Second, we were out of school for a whole week in February due to the Blizzard of '66, which dumped three feet of snow on us. And third, I developed my first serious crush on the girl sitting in front of me in our primary classroom. When the mean girls got an inkling of my feelings, they told her that I liked her. She whipped around and said "HA!!!" in my face. This was the spark that ignited eleven years of clinical depression.
The 1966-67 school year was in Arundel Junior High. MacArthur was finished, so there was room enough for 7th grade to return to Arundel as well, so my class was not the newbies again. My favorite subject was Physical Science, which kicked off my lifelong love affair with physics. I became pretty close to the teacher, Miss Bell. I often stayed after school to help her tidy up and prepare for the next day. The other side of the coin was Art class. The teacher is the one I thought of when I read about Professor Snape in the Harry Potter books. Several times during the year he took whatever I was working on up to the front of the class to show them an example of what NOT to do. The last time he did that, when he returned my sculpture to me, I grabbed a hammer and a chisel and began pounding it to dust, sobbing uncontrollably all the while. My mother was called, and within a week or so, I was seeing a psychiatrist. A "depressive reaction" was the diagnosis of my art class meltdown.
Ninth grade brought on my second serious crush, this time on an eighth grader whose family were the current occupants of the Army officers' off-base rental house next door to mine. That goofy obsession dragged on for seven goofy years. Also, I was heavily into photography and photo-processing by then. I became known for taking pictures in school one day, and bringing the prints in to show everyone the next day. I was invited to be a photographer on the yearbook staff at Arundel High the following year. I was also looking forward to being on the Arundel Wildcats football team. So, at the end of the school year, we went on a 5-week vacation to Vero Beach, Florida, where my mother's mother lived.. After our return to Maryland, my parents decided to move us to Vero Beach, The end of my first incarnation.
Needless to say, I have often wondered about some of the people I went to school with back then, but none have surfaced in over 50 years. Has Mary encountered one of them?
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Phoney Baloney
About five years ago, our car got a rock to the windshield and Carmen called an auto glass place to get it replaced. On the appointed day she took the car in to have it done. They pulled the cracked windshield, crushed it and threw it into the dumpster. Only then did they discover that they had ordered the wrong replacement. This, of course, required them to provide alternate transportation until the windshield was replaced.
I told you that story to tell you this one.
Back in August of ought eighteen, Carmen and I were planning our Thanksgiving week getaway to St. Augustine, where we could relax near the beach and see our gaggle of friends that live nearby. In the throes of this planning, it occurred to us that a) we're not getting any younger; b) we have no children to comfort us in our golden years and c) most of our closest friends live in northeast Florida. We began working toward buying a condo in Jacksonville (that's an extreme capsulization of the real range of options we considered before we narrowed them down to a 'condo in Jacksonville') which included a four-day trip down in September to look at properties, and Carmen's quick flight down in October to see in person what finally became our condo.
It came to pass in those days that we closed the deal in mid-November, which prompted us to rent a 12 foot truck in which to carry a load down on the way to our St. Augustine getaway. They didn't have a 12' in stock, so we got a 16' at the same price. We loaded it about half full of stuff we wouldn't need during the months following our return to Nashville. I drove it down here, and we unloaded it ourselves before we went on to our vacay.
By the time our vacay was coming to a close, we began to realize that there were things that needed to be done here after she needed to return to work in Nashville. We decided that I would stay here and show our electrician friend what all needed to be done, greet the painter and explain the job to him so he could work up a quote, install the new internet-connected thermostat, install the new internet-connected security system, and assemble several pieces of Ikea furniture in my spare time. These things I did, and gladly, before renting a car to drive back to Nashville.
There was, of course, a fly in the ointment, otherwise why would I be writing all of this, right?
The laptop computer I am using now, I only use when I want to write something on a real keyboard, or print something. Otherwise, I use my Kindle Fire. It's smaller, faster, way less cumbersome. I did not bring my laptop on vacation. So after I finished with the electrician, the painter and the thermostat, I pulled out the Ring security system. I found the instruction booklet. Step 1 - plug it in. Done. Step 2 - synch your phone with the system: a) download the Ring app from Google Play. Well, the Kindle Fire will not accept apps from Google Play, period. I know this because I called Amazon tech support and they assured me that this was the case. In addition, the only way to activate the system is to download the Ring app from Google Play. I know this because I called Ring tech support and they assured me that this was the case. They asked if I had a computer other than my Fire. Yes, in Tennessee. That was no help. I puzzled and puzzed 'til my puzzler was sore, and finally came to the conclusion that the cheapest and fastest way to solve this was to buy a $45.00 smart phone. I walked to Walgreen's and then to CVS on a fine Sunday morning, and came home with an LG Phoenix 3 smart-ass phone. I wrangled with AT&T to get my prepaid service going - another $45.00 - and within seconds had downloaded the app. Good to go, at last! And now I had a fancy new 904 area code phone number, and a smarty pants phone like the big kids have! I activated the system, set up all of the sensors, rented a car and drove back to Nashville.
Fast forward to January. Two days after my birthday, I drove a 24' truck packed tight from front to back with most of the rest of our stuff (loaded by professional loaders!) and two kitties in carriers on the seat beside me. On Tuesday the 15th, I became a resident of Jacksonville. Carmen drove down with the dog in her car. Professional unloaders brought everything in, most of it to the right places, and a few days later Carmen went back to Nashville. She is still there as I write this, and we four mammals miss her bunches!
Not long afterward, Carmen had finally had it up to here (picture my hand hovering somewhere around my nose) with her old smart phone. She pow-wowed with the tech folks at her church, and they decided to order two new phones from Google fi, because adding me to her plan cost less than keeping my prepaid AT&T plan. And I could keep my fancy 904 number, which was good because I have given that number as my primary contact number to every entity with which I deal. Days and weeks went by, watching for the phones to be delivered. Finally, the office administrator at her previous church in Pennsylvania called to tell Carmen that a package had arrived for her from Google. What??? Carmen called the internet technology behemoth to straighten things out. There was an old Pennsylvania billing address connected to her account, so their brilliant computers disregarded the shipping address on the order, and sent the phones to Pennsylvania. A whole lot of rigamarole ensued, Pennsylvania shipped the phones to Nashville, and all was once again right with the world. RIGHT!
So another tech pow-wow occurred to set up the new phones. They called me with questions about my AT&T account so they could close it. I, of course, had already prepaid March by then, but these things have to be done when all of the parties are free to do them, so, whatever. I spent hours on the internet (on my Kindle) and on the phone to AT&T, and finally got them all of the info they needed to close that account so that the fancy 904 number could be given to the new phone. Great. But Google, upon realizing their shipping malfunction, had refunded the money paid for the phones. "No problem. Just send back those phones, and order another round." That was the internet technology behemoth's best solution to this situation. "Can't we just keep these and pay for them again?" "No, because those phones have now been reported as 'lost or stolen' and we can't undo that." "You can;t??!!" "No"
So, until the new new phones arrive and are set up, and mine comes to me somehow, my fancy 904 number is in limbo, and I'm back to my $10.00 Tracfone flip phone. And that, my friends is the end of the phoney baloney story for now.
I told you that story to tell you this one.
Back in August of ought eighteen, Carmen and I were planning our Thanksgiving week getaway to St. Augustine, where we could relax near the beach and see our gaggle of friends that live nearby. In the throes of this planning, it occurred to us that a) we're not getting any younger; b) we have no children to comfort us in our golden years and c) most of our closest friends live in northeast Florida. We began working toward buying a condo in Jacksonville (that's an extreme capsulization of the real range of options we considered before we narrowed them down to a 'condo in Jacksonville') which included a four-day trip down in September to look at properties, and Carmen's quick flight down in October to see in person what finally became our condo.
It came to pass in those days that we closed the deal in mid-November, which prompted us to rent a 12 foot truck in which to carry a load down on the way to our St. Augustine getaway. They didn't have a 12' in stock, so we got a 16' at the same price. We loaded it about half full of stuff we wouldn't need during the months following our return to Nashville. I drove it down here, and we unloaded it ourselves before we went on to our vacay.
By the time our vacay was coming to a close, we began to realize that there were things that needed to be done here after she needed to return to work in Nashville. We decided that I would stay here and show our electrician friend what all needed to be done, greet the painter and explain the job to him so he could work up a quote, install the new internet-connected thermostat, install the new internet-connected security system, and assemble several pieces of Ikea furniture in my spare time. These things I did, and gladly, before renting a car to drive back to Nashville.
There was, of course, a fly in the ointment, otherwise why would I be writing all of this, right?
The laptop computer I am using now, I only use when I want to write something on a real keyboard, or print something. Otherwise, I use my Kindle Fire. It's smaller, faster, way less cumbersome. I did not bring my laptop on vacation. So after I finished with the electrician, the painter and the thermostat, I pulled out the Ring security system. I found the instruction booklet. Step 1 - plug it in. Done. Step 2 - synch your phone with the system: a) download the Ring app from Google Play. Well, the Kindle Fire will not accept apps from Google Play, period. I know this because I called Amazon tech support and they assured me that this was the case. In addition, the only way to activate the system is to download the Ring app from Google Play. I know this because I called Ring tech support and they assured me that this was the case. They asked if I had a computer other than my Fire. Yes, in Tennessee. That was no help. I puzzled and puzzed 'til my puzzler was sore, and finally came to the conclusion that the cheapest and fastest way to solve this was to buy a $45.00 smart phone. I walked to Walgreen's and then to CVS on a fine Sunday morning, and came home with an LG Phoenix 3 smart-ass phone. I wrangled with AT&T to get my prepaid service going - another $45.00 - and within seconds had downloaded the app. Good to go, at last! And now I had a fancy new 904 area code phone number, and a smarty pants phone like the big kids have! I activated the system, set up all of the sensors, rented a car and drove back to Nashville.
Fast forward to January. Two days after my birthday, I drove a 24' truck packed tight from front to back with most of the rest of our stuff (loaded by professional loaders!) and two kitties in carriers on the seat beside me. On Tuesday the 15th, I became a resident of Jacksonville. Carmen drove down with the dog in her car. Professional unloaders brought everything in, most of it to the right places, and a few days later Carmen went back to Nashville. She is still there as I write this, and we four mammals miss her bunches!
Not long afterward, Carmen had finally had it up to here (picture my hand hovering somewhere around my nose) with her old smart phone. She pow-wowed with the tech folks at her church, and they decided to order two new phones from Google fi, because adding me to her plan cost less than keeping my prepaid AT&T plan. And I could keep my fancy 904 number, which was good because I have given that number as my primary contact number to every entity with which I deal. Days and weeks went by, watching for the phones to be delivered. Finally, the office administrator at her previous church in Pennsylvania called to tell Carmen that a package had arrived for her from Google. What??? Carmen called the internet technology behemoth to straighten things out. There was an old Pennsylvania billing address connected to her account, so their brilliant computers disregarded the shipping address on the order, and sent the phones to Pennsylvania. A whole lot of rigamarole ensued, Pennsylvania shipped the phones to Nashville, and all was once again right with the world. RIGHT!
So another tech pow-wow occurred to set up the new phones. They called me with questions about my AT&T account so they could close it. I, of course, had already prepaid March by then, but these things have to be done when all of the parties are free to do them, so, whatever. I spent hours on the internet (on my Kindle) and on the phone to AT&T, and finally got them all of the info they needed to close that account so that the fancy 904 number could be given to the new phone. Great. But Google, upon realizing their shipping malfunction, had refunded the money paid for the phones. "No problem. Just send back those phones, and order another round." That was the internet technology behemoth's best solution to this situation. "Can't we just keep these and pay for them again?" "No, because those phones have now been reported as 'lost or stolen' and we can't undo that." "You can;t??!!" "No"
So, until the new new phones arrive and are set up, and mine comes to me somehow, my fancy 904 number is in limbo, and I'm back to my $10.00 Tracfone flip phone. And that, my friends is the end of the phoney baloney story for now.
Sunday, January 6, 2019
Career Path
Since Carmen and I got married, I have worked one career more consistently than all of the others, and that has been relocating and setting up housekeeping. We were married in September of '86. We moved twice in '87, once in '89, once in '96, once in '05, once in '06, once in '09, once in '010, twice in '015 and now we are in the middle of what we once again hope will be our last move, our fifth interstate move.
Back in the summer, when Carmen was in Florida visiting her gaggle of girlfriends, I was becoming grumpy (well, grumpier than usual) because I had not had an actual vacation since the Alaska trip in '01. Every "vacation" since then had been dealing with my dying brother, helping my aging parents or, dare I say, MOVING! So, I did what I do best: I wrote a letter to Carmen telling her how I felt and asking for some fun time off. So we began planning a Thanksgiving week vacation to St. Augustine Beach, where we could relax with no responsibilities and visit with our friends. We even invited our friend Rose to have Thanksgiving dinner with us.
As time wore on, while we were anticipating our fun getaway, we began to see things in a different light. It occurred to us that pretty much all of our friends are in Florida. We are aging ourselves, and have no children to help us when we need it. It suddenly made sense to think about moving again, this time not for work or school or family reasons, but for us, for our happiness and security. I won't go into the details of the long drawn-out process, but will cut to the quick: we bought a condominium in Mandarin, an area in the southeast corner of Jacksonville. When we went down for our vacation, I drove the first truckload of stuff. We spent several extra nights in our "new" condo.
This morning, while walking the dog (another career path) I was thinking about all the work ahead of me at this end to get ready to move, and the huge amount of work ahead of me in Jacksonville before Carmen comes down after her 90-day notice is up. Nearly every move has been this way. If nothing else, I have installed ceiling fans and blinds in every place we've owned. The bookcase beside me here is the fourth of six major bookcases I've built in three states. I totally renovated the kitchen here, as well as major upgrades to doors, cabinets, plumbing fixtures, light fixtures and closet systems throughout. Hell, in Meadville, we bought a 3/2 and moved into a 2/1. I started out life in that house by finishing the interiors of the closet and bathroom, framed out and abandoned by the previous owner. And I won't even go into the long list of projects facing me in Mandarin.
If we were thirty years younger, we would be flipping houses and drowning in cash. But we're not. My arthritis, tremors and carpal tunnel are there every step of the way, reminding me of why I retired at 62 and only work on houses in which we live. It's not a career I chose, but it is a career from which I can't seem to retire. But I hope it slacks off some once we're settled in. And I hope to go fishing!
Back in the summer, when Carmen was in Florida visiting her gaggle of girlfriends, I was becoming grumpy (well, grumpier than usual) because I had not had an actual vacation since the Alaska trip in '01. Every "vacation" since then had been dealing with my dying brother, helping my aging parents or, dare I say, MOVING! So, I did what I do best: I wrote a letter to Carmen telling her how I felt and asking for some fun time off. So we began planning a Thanksgiving week vacation to St. Augustine Beach, where we could relax with no responsibilities and visit with our friends. We even invited our friend Rose to have Thanksgiving dinner with us.
As time wore on, while we were anticipating our fun getaway, we began to see things in a different light. It occurred to us that pretty much all of our friends are in Florida. We are aging ourselves, and have no children to help us when we need it. It suddenly made sense to think about moving again, this time not for work or school or family reasons, but for us, for our happiness and security. I won't go into the details of the long drawn-out process, but will cut to the quick: we bought a condominium in Mandarin, an area in the southeast corner of Jacksonville. When we went down for our vacation, I drove the first truckload of stuff. We spent several extra nights in our "new" condo.
This morning, while walking the dog (another career path) I was thinking about all the work ahead of me at this end to get ready to move, and the huge amount of work ahead of me in Jacksonville before Carmen comes down after her 90-day notice is up. Nearly every move has been this way. If nothing else, I have installed ceiling fans and blinds in every place we've owned. The bookcase beside me here is the fourth of six major bookcases I've built in three states. I totally renovated the kitchen here, as well as major upgrades to doors, cabinets, plumbing fixtures, light fixtures and closet systems throughout. Hell, in Meadville, we bought a 3/2 and moved into a 2/1. I started out life in that house by finishing the interiors of the closet and bathroom, framed out and abandoned by the previous owner. And I won't even go into the long list of projects facing me in Mandarin.
If we were thirty years younger, we would be flipping houses and drowning in cash. But we're not. My arthritis, tremors and carpal tunnel are there every step of the way, reminding me of why I retired at 62 and only work on houses in which we live. It's not a career I chose, but it is a career from which I can't seem to retire. But I hope it slacks off some once we're settled in. And I hope to go fishing!
Tuesday, May 9, 2017
P.S. - Gilbert Emerson Revisited
My previous post came rushing out of me in a frenzy. Since publishing it, I have had a lot of time to think about what I left out of it, which is, of course, a lot. The most important part of his life well lived was his impact on the people around him.
The first huge impact he had was on his brother Jim, who was born paraplegic to a farm family, in which pulling your weight was paramount. Gilbert was my Uncle Jim's best friend to the end of Jim's life. During their childhood together, they figured out ways to include a paraplegic boy in every aspect of their life. Gilbert built transportation devices for getting him around the farm, carried him around the neighborhood on his bike, insisted on including him as plate umpire in baseball games, and helped figure out ways to make it possible for Jim to do his share of chores with some device or gadget they would invent and manufacture. In an early indication of the direction his life would take, Gilbert was the illustrator of the bird books he and Jim produced. Jim wrote the text, Gil drew the pictures. When they got mad at each other, they would each tear up their half of the bird book. Then they'd make up and start over.
During his time in the Navy, Gil was an excellent morale booster. His wacky sense of humor and upbeat attitude were just what was needed during those grim years. He did impressions of the celebrities of the day - such as Jack Benny and Rochester, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In one instance, he hid behind the radio, which was huge enough to hide behind, and did a long Roosevelt speech which included the story of those brave men in uniform fighting the war from the little town of Vero Beach, Florida. He had them mesmerized for a short time, until he got so specific, even naming names, that they knew it wasn't really FDR.
After the war, he married Wynifred, and a year later they had their first son, Jack. My dad was a good dad to both of us, even though my mother insisted that he refrain from being affectionate so that we didn't grow up to be sissies. He was always involved in our lives, gave us baths, helped us build things, took us with him when he could. When Jack was in second grade, Gilbert became president of the PTA in Odenton Elementary. He was president when the Supreme Court handed down their decision that segregation was unconstitutional. Gil refused to consider all the mighty protests that were thrown down. He told them that he would cooperate with the decision, and if they didn't like it they could vote him out of office. They didn't.
He and my mother were largely responsible for forming a Cub Scout pack in Odenton. He was Cubmaster for many years, and my mother was a den mother for many more. One really cool thing I remember from the Cub Scout years was a thing he built for ceremonies. When he asked Akela for a sign that He was with them, an arrow suddenly appeared, stuck into a target. In later years, I realized that the arrow was inside the target, spring loaded to pop out suddenly so that it seemed as if it had been shot from beyond. Show biz.
He was always very involved in Boy Scouts. He was Scoutmaster sometimes, Assistant Scoutmaster sometimes, and went camping with us whenever his schedule permitted. My favorite adventure (and his too, I believe) was a week-long canoe trip, 87 miles down the Potomac River, sleeping under the stars on the river banks in the mountains of West Virginia and Maryland. He took a lot of pictures on Kodachrome, and after we got home and rested up, he and I created a slide show with two carousels of slides and a reel-to-reel tape with his narration and music. We presented it several times to Scouting groups in the area that were thinking about doing the same trip. We recommended it highly.
When we moved to Vero Beach, one of the services he tried to market was slide show production. We did several, most notably one for Mel Fisher, the famous seeker of sunken treasure. Is it any wonder, then, that my project for High School Communications class was a very dramatic slide show with music? Or that I was a sound technician in community theatre years before I built sets. But I digress.
One of the first big projects we did in Vero Beach was a bit of show biz. 1969, our first full year living there, was the 50th anniversary of the incorporation of the City of Vero Beach. The Indian River Citrus Bank hired us to build a full-size replica of the front of a 1919 Model T Ford for people to sit in and have their picture taken in front of a street scene of 14th Avenue as it was in 1919. At sixteen, I was in awe of his ability to transform ordinary objects into windshield, headlights, grill and radiator cap, not to mention drawing and painting the street scene. When we were done, the pictures looked for all the world like people were coming down 14th Avenue in a Model T. I was proud.
Gilbert was in business there for about twenty years. We worked together for my three years of high school, and then for nine years before I married Carmen and we moved to St. Cloud. During that time he developed a devoted pool of clients and vendors. The thing I liked best about it, however, was his willingness to take on young people with no experience in graphic art (me being the first) and teach them the business. He preferred people who had no formal art schooling, because he didn't have to deal with the know-it-all attitude. He could teach them what he needed them to know how to do, and they were grateful for it. Most notably, my friend Craig, a brilliant guitar player and singer. His family was always struggling, due to the sketchy opportunities for brilliant musicians in the little city. But I knew that he also could draw. The thing that told me that he was a good candidate for the Gil Emerson School of Art was the fake license plate expiration sticker he put over his expired sticker. I had to get very close to it to see that it was hand drawn. I brought him in in '82, and he stayed with my dad until a year or so after I left in '87. Craig and his family also lived in one of Gil and Wyni's rental properties for nearly twenty years, their longest stay in any one dwelling.
The rental properties were another matter. For one thing, helping him with repairs and maintenance taught me a lot (mostly it taught me to not be a landlord) and for another, it was a platform from which to help people along. Sure, he got screwed now and then, but there's a much longer list of families who are forever grateful to him and my mother for their compassion and flexibility, including Craig's family.
Then they moved to Smokey Mountain Estates in Blairsville, Georgia. I am truly grateful for the help and support given to both my parents, but mostly my dad, by his neighbors on the mountain. Mary and Darrell just down the hill have been wonderful friends to them, providing companionship, gluten-free beer, dinners out and in their home, and transportation above and beyond. Ted and Ray and Chip and the rest have all been helpful and fun to have around. I personally attended the 70th anniversary party, which provided us a brief respite from a long siege with my mother in the hospital; and the Goodbye Gil party in February, with Gil Emerson wildlife paintings as party favors for the guests to take home. Both parties featured live entertainment, as well as story telling, gifts and good wishes.
And let us not forget Rachel. She married my brother in 1986, divorced him ten years later, but remained the devoted daughter-in-law for as long as my parents lived, which was thirteen years beyond the death of my brother. In 2013, six months after Gil's stroke, she moved from Denver to Blairsville to be there for my parents. Living in their house quickly became impossible with my mother's dementia, but she got an apartment nearby and continued to help them out with whatever they would let her do. It was a great comfort to us to have her there, and to my dad as well. Luckily, she still loves living in Blairsville.
Anyhoo, perhaps you can tell that the biggest impact he had on anybody, was on me. From him I got my patience and calm demeanor, my love of inventing and building interesting things, my facility with sound technology and my wacky sense of humor. All of those attributes have served me well over the years and decades. And the long history of doing things as a team served us both well as we navigated life together as hospice patient and care giver.
The Wizard of Oz said, "A heart isn't measured by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others." My daddy had a huge heart.
The first huge impact he had was on his brother Jim, who was born paraplegic to a farm family, in which pulling your weight was paramount. Gilbert was my Uncle Jim's best friend to the end of Jim's life. During their childhood together, they figured out ways to include a paraplegic boy in every aspect of their life. Gilbert built transportation devices for getting him around the farm, carried him around the neighborhood on his bike, insisted on including him as plate umpire in baseball games, and helped figure out ways to make it possible for Jim to do his share of chores with some device or gadget they would invent and manufacture. In an early indication of the direction his life would take, Gilbert was the illustrator of the bird books he and Jim produced. Jim wrote the text, Gil drew the pictures. When they got mad at each other, they would each tear up their half of the bird book. Then they'd make up and start over.
During his time in the Navy, Gil was an excellent morale booster. His wacky sense of humor and upbeat attitude were just what was needed during those grim years. He did impressions of the celebrities of the day - such as Jack Benny and Rochester, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. In one instance, he hid behind the radio, which was huge enough to hide behind, and did a long Roosevelt speech which included the story of those brave men in uniform fighting the war from the little town of Vero Beach, Florida. He had them mesmerized for a short time, until he got so specific, even naming names, that they knew it wasn't really FDR.
After the war, he married Wynifred, and a year later they had their first son, Jack. My dad was a good dad to both of us, even though my mother insisted that he refrain from being affectionate so that we didn't grow up to be sissies. He was always involved in our lives, gave us baths, helped us build things, took us with him when he could. When Jack was in second grade, Gilbert became president of the PTA in Odenton Elementary. He was president when the Supreme Court handed down their decision that segregation was unconstitutional. Gil refused to consider all the mighty protests that were thrown down. He told them that he would cooperate with the decision, and if they didn't like it they could vote him out of office. They didn't.
He and my mother were largely responsible for forming a Cub Scout pack in Odenton. He was Cubmaster for many years, and my mother was a den mother for many more. One really cool thing I remember from the Cub Scout years was a thing he built for ceremonies. When he asked Akela for a sign that He was with them, an arrow suddenly appeared, stuck into a target. In later years, I realized that the arrow was inside the target, spring loaded to pop out suddenly so that it seemed as if it had been shot from beyond. Show biz.
He was always very involved in Boy Scouts. He was Scoutmaster sometimes, Assistant Scoutmaster sometimes, and went camping with us whenever his schedule permitted. My favorite adventure (and his too, I believe) was a week-long canoe trip, 87 miles down the Potomac River, sleeping under the stars on the river banks in the mountains of West Virginia and Maryland. He took a lot of pictures on Kodachrome, and after we got home and rested up, he and I created a slide show with two carousels of slides and a reel-to-reel tape with his narration and music. We presented it several times to Scouting groups in the area that were thinking about doing the same trip. We recommended it highly.
When we moved to Vero Beach, one of the services he tried to market was slide show production. We did several, most notably one for Mel Fisher, the famous seeker of sunken treasure. Is it any wonder, then, that my project for High School Communications class was a very dramatic slide show with music? Or that I was a sound technician in community theatre years before I built sets. But I digress.
One of the first big projects we did in Vero Beach was a bit of show biz. 1969, our first full year living there, was the 50th anniversary of the incorporation of the City of Vero Beach. The Indian River Citrus Bank hired us to build a full-size replica of the front of a 1919 Model T Ford for people to sit in and have their picture taken in front of a street scene of 14th Avenue as it was in 1919. At sixteen, I was in awe of his ability to transform ordinary objects into windshield, headlights, grill and radiator cap, not to mention drawing and painting the street scene. When we were done, the pictures looked for all the world like people were coming down 14th Avenue in a Model T. I was proud.
Gilbert was in business there for about twenty years. We worked together for my three years of high school, and then for nine years before I married Carmen and we moved to St. Cloud. During that time he developed a devoted pool of clients and vendors. The thing I liked best about it, however, was his willingness to take on young people with no experience in graphic art (me being the first) and teach them the business. He preferred people who had no formal art schooling, because he didn't have to deal with the know-it-all attitude. He could teach them what he needed them to know how to do, and they were grateful for it. Most notably, my friend Craig, a brilliant guitar player and singer. His family was always struggling, due to the sketchy opportunities for brilliant musicians in the little city. But I knew that he also could draw. The thing that told me that he was a good candidate for the Gil Emerson School of Art was the fake license plate expiration sticker he put over his expired sticker. I had to get very close to it to see that it was hand drawn. I brought him in in '82, and he stayed with my dad until a year or so after I left in '87. Craig and his family also lived in one of Gil and Wyni's rental properties for nearly twenty years, their longest stay in any one dwelling.
The rental properties were another matter. For one thing, helping him with repairs and maintenance taught me a lot (mostly it taught me to not be a landlord) and for another, it was a platform from which to help people along. Sure, he got screwed now and then, but there's a much longer list of families who are forever grateful to him and my mother for their compassion and flexibility, including Craig's family.
Then they moved to Smokey Mountain Estates in Blairsville, Georgia. I am truly grateful for the help and support given to both my parents, but mostly my dad, by his neighbors on the mountain. Mary and Darrell just down the hill have been wonderful friends to them, providing companionship, gluten-free beer, dinners out and in their home, and transportation above and beyond. Ted and Ray and Chip and the rest have all been helpful and fun to have around. I personally attended the 70th anniversary party, which provided us a brief respite from a long siege with my mother in the hospital; and the Goodbye Gil party in February, with Gil Emerson wildlife paintings as party favors for the guests to take home. Both parties featured live entertainment, as well as story telling, gifts and good wishes.
And let us not forget Rachel. She married my brother in 1986, divorced him ten years later, but remained the devoted daughter-in-law for as long as my parents lived, which was thirteen years beyond the death of my brother. In 2013, six months after Gil's stroke, she moved from Denver to Blairsville to be there for my parents. Living in their house quickly became impossible with my mother's dementia, but she got an apartment nearby and continued to help them out with whatever they would let her do. It was a great comfort to us to have her there, and to my dad as well. Luckily, she still loves living in Blairsville.
Anyhoo, perhaps you can tell that the biggest impact he had on anybody, was on me. From him I got my patience and calm demeanor, my love of inventing and building interesting things, my facility with sound technology and my wacky sense of humor. All of those attributes have served me well over the years and decades. And the long history of doing things as a team served us both well as we navigated life together as hospice patient and care giver.
The Wizard of Oz said, "A heart isn't measured by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others." My daddy had a huge heart.
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Gilbert H. Emerson: A Life Well Lived
My daddy died on Friday morning at about 7:35am. I was sitting in a chair beside his bed as his ragged breathing became slower and shallower until it finally stopped. It was a very peaceful end to a very well-lived life. We should all be so lucky.
He was born in 1923 in Monmouth, Oregon, third of four children of a wild west drifter turned farmer and a Denver society girl turned farmer's wife. Some of his earliest memories were of their trek across country in 1928, moving a family of six from Oregon to the Eastern Shore of Maryland in a Model A truck. We still have a chunk of petrified wood collected from the Petrified Forest on that trip.
His stories of growing up on their farm, doing chores, building things, killing rats and being best friends with his paraplegic younger brother Jim (from whom I got my name) are well documented in two sources, both of which he wrote while in his eighties: The Big D, an unpublished manuscript describing his childhood during the Great Depression; and Pinetown, a fictional story which was published by Publish America in 2010. Both are full of stories about farm life during that period of time and in that place, including a richly detailed account of the operation of a steam powered wheat harvester. Their way of life influenced his way of life on into the twenty-first century: don't buy it if you can make it; use it until it wears out beyond usefulness; waste nothing, throw away nothing. We dealt with this until the very end.
After Gilbert graduated high school, his father tried to hand the farm over to him. He declined. He worked in a tomato canning plant, a button factory and then Glenn L. Martin's airplane factory in Baltimore at the beginning of World War II. His experience there no doubt influenced the Navy's decision to send him to airplane mechanic school before stationing him at Vero Beach Naval Air Station in Florida. He was an engine change mechanic there for the duration of the war, although they all expected to be shipped out to more exciting duty at any moment. They were the lost patrol, forgotten by the Navy bigwigs to the end. One guy was born and raised in Vero, and joined the Navy to see the world. Damn!
The best thing about Vero Beach, however was this beautiful young woman who volunteered as a coast watcher (the Japanese never attacked Vero Beach!) and at the Ship's Service Club, a community-sponsored recreation place for the sailors. Gilbert and Wynifred hit it off pretty well, though their marriage only lasted seventy years and one day, until death did them part.
They married in April of 1946, right after his discharge from the Navy, and drove from Vero Beach to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to introduce her to his family. Then they took up residence in the southern outskirts of Baltimore while Gilbert worked and went to art school. Like me, his first job was at Montgomery Ward. Unlike me, he worked in the warehouse. His first illustration job was with the Baltimore City Planning Commission. From there he moved on up to the Maryland State Roads Commission. Then he got a great gig close to the first house they owned, built from a Sears & Roebuck kit by him and his brother Bob on the lot next to brother Bob's place in Odenton, Maryland. He worked at Westinghouse Armaments Division five miles down the road, illustrating bombs, rockets, torpedoes and the like for sales materials to be shown to the military. He taught himself to airbrush over a weekend before starting that job.
We found out last month, during one of his marathon story telling sessions in our living room, that my mother badgered him into applying for the illustrator job at National Geographic. He was perfectly content to meander five miles through the countryside to Westinghouse every morning. Driving thirty five miles into the heart of Washington D.C. did not hold the same appeal, even if the prospect of working for a magazine like National G. was about as cool as it gets. But he got the job, and stayed for thirteen years. For a few years he took the train in, but as his responsibilities grew, he needed to have the flexibility of driving a car in.
In 1968, as the country reeled from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Gil and Wyni decided to get crazy and move to Vero Beach, where her mother still lived, and try to make a living as a free-lance commercial artist. I went into tenth grade at Vero Beach High School, while my dad worked at convincing Vero that they needed a free-lance commercial artist. Success was limited, but their shared ability to stretch whatever money came in served them well. I worked in the biz part time, and often made more money than they did.
During the 70s, after I graduated High School and went to live in Maryland, they supplemented their meager income by working real jobs. My mother worked at the library, and my dad at the VB City Planning Commission. In his free time, he threw himself into his lifelong passion for painting wildlife, and on weekends set up a booth at art shows all over Florida. Also, they bought a couple of duplexes for rental properties.
Then in the spring of 1978, I returned to Vero, and my dad and I decided to really make a go of Emerson Art Service. He bought a copy camera, we built a big darkroom for it, and we set out to conquer Vero Beach. The huge break came in the latter months of 1979. The Dodgers, who did their Spring Training at what used to be the Vero Beach Naval Air Station, were planning to start a minor league team playing in the Florida State League. They needed someone to do their programs, pocket schedules, posters and newspaper advertising. They inquired at every print shop and publication they could find. Every single one told them that Gil Emerson was the man they should deal with. After the sixth or seventh time, they surrendered, and we became graphic artists to the Dodgers. We had, by that time, several other accounts that gave us a modicum of work, but the Dodgers were our bread and butter.
Then in 1986, at the ripe old age of sixty three, Dad decided to hand the business over to me. I declined. My new wife and I moved to St. Cloud, Florida, about a hundred miles from Vero, and my dad sold the business to one of our competitors. They bought a small used motor home, and began searching the Carolinas and Georgia for a place to spend their summers away from the oppressive heat and hurricanes. Finally, in 1995, they bought a lot in the mountains of North Georgia, paid a contractor to build the foundation, outside walls, roof, sub-floors and stairs between the three floors, with enough framing inside to hold it together. A plumber plumbed the kitchen and two bathrooms, and an electrician wired the whole house, with my dad as his helper. From then until he came to live with us in Nashville, my dad worked at finishing the "cabin." It was his last great work of art.
The last three months of his life were very special to Carmen and me. We delighted in listening to his stories, we found joy in helping him with things that once were easy for him. We fixed food for him, and in the last days even spoon fed him. All the while, he was grateful to be with us instead of in a nursing home, and even was tender and loving sometimes - something he rarely was before then. We took him in knowing he would die soon, and we all made the most of our final three months together. The last week saw a sharp decline in his strength and his mental alertness. He stopped eating, couldn't produce anything on the toilet - try as he might, and several times said "Why can't I just die?!" He refused the comfort medicines provided by Hospice until Thursday night. Friday morning he was totally unfocused, confused and agitated. We gave him some medicine, he calmed down, closed his eyes and gradually stopped breathing. It was a very peaceful end with me sitting beside him. We should all be so lucky.
He was born in 1923 in Monmouth, Oregon, third of four children of a wild west drifter turned farmer and a Denver society girl turned farmer's wife. Some of his earliest memories were of their trek across country in 1928, moving a family of six from Oregon to the Eastern Shore of Maryland in a Model A truck. We still have a chunk of petrified wood collected from the Petrified Forest on that trip.
His stories of growing up on their farm, doing chores, building things, killing rats and being best friends with his paraplegic younger brother Jim (from whom I got my name) are well documented in two sources, both of which he wrote while in his eighties: The Big D, an unpublished manuscript describing his childhood during the Great Depression; and Pinetown, a fictional story which was published by Publish America in 2010. Both are full of stories about farm life during that period of time and in that place, including a richly detailed account of the operation of a steam powered wheat harvester. Their way of life influenced his way of life on into the twenty-first century: don't buy it if you can make it; use it until it wears out beyond usefulness; waste nothing, throw away nothing. We dealt with this until the very end.
After Gilbert graduated high school, his father tried to hand the farm over to him. He declined. He worked in a tomato canning plant, a button factory and then Glenn L. Martin's airplane factory in Baltimore at the beginning of World War II. His experience there no doubt influenced the Navy's decision to send him to airplane mechanic school before stationing him at Vero Beach Naval Air Station in Florida. He was an engine change mechanic there for the duration of the war, although they all expected to be shipped out to more exciting duty at any moment. They were the lost patrol, forgotten by the Navy bigwigs to the end. One guy was born and raised in Vero, and joined the Navy to see the world. Damn!
The best thing about Vero Beach, however was this beautiful young woman who volunteered as a coast watcher (the Japanese never attacked Vero Beach!) and at the Ship's Service Club, a community-sponsored recreation place for the sailors. Gilbert and Wynifred hit it off pretty well, though their marriage only lasted seventy years and one day, until death did them part.
They married in April of 1946, right after his discharge from the Navy, and drove from Vero Beach to the Eastern Shore of Maryland to introduce her to his family. Then they took up residence in the southern outskirts of Baltimore while Gilbert worked and went to art school. Like me, his first job was at Montgomery Ward. Unlike me, he worked in the warehouse. His first illustration job was with the Baltimore City Planning Commission. From there he moved on up to the Maryland State Roads Commission. Then he got a great gig close to the first house they owned, built from a Sears & Roebuck kit by him and his brother Bob on the lot next to brother Bob's place in Odenton, Maryland. He worked at Westinghouse Armaments Division five miles down the road, illustrating bombs, rockets, torpedoes and the like for sales materials to be shown to the military. He taught himself to airbrush over a weekend before starting that job.
We found out last month, during one of his marathon story telling sessions in our living room, that my mother badgered him into applying for the illustrator job at National Geographic. He was perfectly content to meander five miles through the countryside to Westinghouse every morning. Driving thirty five miles into the heart of Washington D.C. did not hold the same appeal, even if the prospect of working for a magazine like National G. was about as cool as it gets. But he got the job, and stayed for thirteen years. For a few years he took the train in, but as his responsibilities grew, he needed to have the flexibility of driving a car in.
In 1968, as the country reeled from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Gil and Wyni decided to get crazy and move to Vero Beach, where her mother still lived, and try to make a living as a free-lance commercial artist. I went into tenth grade at Vero Beach High School, while my dad worked at convincing Vero that they needed a free-lance commercial artist. Success was limited, but their shared ability to stretch whatever money came in served them well. I worked in the biz part time, and often made more money than they did.
During the 70s, after I graduated High School and went to live in Maryland, they supplemented their meager income by working real jobs. My mother worked at the library, and my dad at the VB City Planning Commission. In his free time, he threw himself into his lifelong passion for painting wildlife, and on weekends set up a booth at art shows all over Florida. Also, they bought a couple of duplexes for rental properties.
Then in the spring of 1978, I returned to Vero, and my dad and I decided to really make a go of Emerson Art Service. He bought a copy camera, we built a big darkroom for it, and we set out to conquer Vero Beach. The huge break came in the latter months of 1979. The Dodgers, who did their Spring Training at what used to be the Vero Beach Naval Air Station, were planning to start a minor league team playing in the Florida State League. They needed someone to do their programs, pocket schedules, posters and newspaper advertising. They inquired at every print shop and publication they could find. Every single one told them that Gil Emerson was the man they should deal with. After the sixth or seventh time, they surrendered, and we became graphic artists to the Dodgers. We had, by that time, several other accounts that gave us a modicum of work, but the Dodgers were our bread and butter.
Then in 1986, at the ripe old age of sixty three, Dad decided to hand the business over to me. I declined. My new wife and I moved to St. Cloud, Florida, about a hundred miles from Vero, and my dad sold the business to one of our competitors. They bought a small used motor home, and began searching the Carolinas and Georgia for a place to spend their summers away from the oppressive heat and hurricanes. Finally, in 1995, they bought a lot in the mountains of North Georgia, paid a contractor to build the foundation, outside walls, roof, sub-floors and stairs between the three floors, with enough framing inside to hold it together. A plumber plumbed the kitchen and two bathrooms, and an electrician wired the whole house, with my dad as his helper. From then until he came to live with us in Nashville, my dad worked at finishing the "cabin." It was his last great work of art.
The last three months of his life were very special to Carmen and me. We delighted in listening to his stories, we found joy in helping him with things that once were easy for him. We fixed food for him, and in the last days even spoon fed him. All the while, he was grateful to be with us instead of in a nursing home, and even was tender and loving sometimes - something he rarely was before then. We took him in knowing he would die soon, and we all made the most of our final three months together. The last week saw a sharp decline in his strength and his mental alertness. He stopped eating, couldn't produce anything on the toilet - try as he might, and several times said "Why can't I just die?!" He refused the comfort medicines provided by Hospice until Thursday night. Friday morning he was totally unfocused, confused and agitated. We gave him some medicine, he calmed down, closed his eyes and gradually stopped breathing. It was a very peaceful end with me sitting beside him. We should all be so lucky.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Both Sides Now - Reflections On Daddyhood
Most of my dedicated fans know that my 93-year-old father finally decided that he couldn't hack it any longer, living alone in a three story house on the side of a mountain. He came to live with us on my 64th birthday, January 12th, 2017. Carmen gave up her office; it's now my dad's room. He says it's the finest private nursing home he's ever seen.
He has a laundry list of health issues: celiac disease, emphysema, extreme difficulty swallowing and abysmal balance. He has fallen several times since coming here. Thankfully, we have caught him most of the time. He has bad dentures that don't help him chew, so his food is nearly always soft or blenderized, and his allergy to wheat and gluten narrows the choices of foods quite a bit. He's 5'10" and 95 pounds, and losing weight.
For the most part, his spirits are good, and he loves to talk. He likes to tell his stories of his childhood on the farm during the 1930s, his WWII Navy experiences, his working life at the Baltimore City Planning Dept., the Maryland State Roads Commission, Westinghouse Armaments Division and The National Geographic Society. He was an illustrator at heart when he was eight years old, and continued to draw and paint for a living - or at least a supplement - until his stroke in 2013. He didn't lose much, as strokes go, but he forgot how to draw and paint. He also lost the ability to read and make sense of sentences and paragraphs. He can read the words, but not tie them together into complex thoughts. And his hearing is very bad. Lucky for him, I dealt with a very hard of hearing mother for fifty years or more, so I know how to make myself heard.
It's now pretty much up to Carmen and me - mostly me - to keep his life together, make sure he has food he can eat, keep his bills and accounts up to date, get him to appointments on time and with the proper paperwork, wash his clothes and his dishes, and be his ears and his memory. Basically, I'm his daddy now. But that's okay. He was my daddy for a very long time.
He has a laundry list of health issues: celiac disease, emphysema, extreme difficulty swallowing and abysmal balance. He has fallen several times since coming here. Thankfully, we have caught him most of the time. He has bad dentures that don't help him chew, so his food is nearly always soft or blenderized, and his allergy to wheat and gluten narrows the choices of foods quite a bit. He's 5'10" and 95 pounds, and losing weight.
For the most part, his spirits are good, and he loves to talk. He likes to tell his stories of his childhood on the farm during the 1930s, his WWII Navy experiences, his working life at the Baltimore City Planning Dept., the Maryland State Roads Commission, Westinghouse Armaments Division and The National Geographic Society. He was an illustrator at heart when he was eight years old, and continued to draw and paint for a living - or at least a supplement - until his stroke in 2013. He didn't lose much, as strokes go, but he forgot how to draw and paint. He also lost the ability to read and make sense of sentences and paragraphs. He can read the words, but not tie them together into complex thoughts. And his hearing is very bad. Lucky for him, I dealt with a very hard of hearing mother for fifty years or more, so I know how to make myself heard.
It's now pretty much up to Carmen and me - mostly me - to keep his life together, make sure he has food he can eat, keep his bills and accounts up to date, get him to appointments on time and with the proper paperwork, wash his clothes and his dishes, and be his ears and his memory. Basically, I'm his daddy now. But that's okay. He was my daddy for a very long time.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Wynifred J. Emerson
My mother requested no funeral, no memorial service, no whistles or bells. She was cremated early this week, and her ashes were mailed, along with my brother's, to the family plot in Shamokin, PA. It was purchased by her grandfather in 1940 for $98.00. George at Mountainview Funeral Home said $98 won't buy anything at all any more.
She was a stay-at-home mom for my entire childhood in Odenton, Maryland. For most of it we lived in the split-level house she had designed in 1956. She was, I think, remarkably tolerant of me and my particular brand of fun. Some might argue that she was too tolerant. I was an outdoor kid, ranging far and wide around the neighborhood. As long as I was home for lunch and supper, she didn't worry about me - or at least I was not aware of it if she did. When I came home, I often brought turtles and /or snakes to live with us. One summer we had 14 box turtles on our screened back porch, all with names and distinct personalities. She fed them scraps of meats, vegetables and fruits. She didn't feed the snakes.
When I stayed in the yard, I still could not be a calming presence. I started a forest fire in the woods behind the house once. A forest ranger gave me a stern talking to after that. I climbed trees as far as I could possibly go and then some. I had a rope swing on the old pine tree, and I would wind the rope around and around it as far as I could, then launch myself, spinning madly while I also spun around the tree until I was unwound and then wound up again, then spun madly the other direction. She saw my head flying perilously close to that tree at breakneck speeds many many times. She told me to be careful.
She was a den mother in my Cub Scout pack, and an interested mother in my Boy Scout troop for which my dad was Assistant Scout Master and designated Akela. She planned family trips to Civil War battlefields, museums, zoos, fishing and all manner of other interesting activities. She read to me - The Wizard of Oz books, The Borrowers books, the Alice In Wonderland books to name a few - instilling in me a love of reading. We made Christmas ornaments, assembled Easter baskets, dyed eggs with onion skin dye, beet juice, or regular commercial egg dying kits. She was the best mom I knew.
We always had four-legged family members, cared for primarily by Wynifred. Princess and Sindbad, a German shepherd and a Siamese cat, were the primary critters I remember from my youth. Both of them died after I graduated high school. We also had a two-legged family member until I was eleven. The Easter after I was born, they gave my six year old brother a tiny baby duckling, He named it Mr. Peepers after his favorite TV show. The name held until Mr. Peepers laid her first clutch of eggs - just in time for Easter! Then she became just Peepers. My mother made sure Peepers, living in a pen at the edge of the woods I almost burned down, was fed, watered and taken regularly to the pond near our house for some swimming and tadpole hunting. That became my job after my pre-adolescent brother lost interest.
In 1968, when I was fifteen, we moved to Vero Beach, Florida, where she had spent her teenage years until she met and married a handsome airplane mechanic stationed at Vero Beach Naval Air Station. Her mother still lived there, and Wynifred hired a local contractor to turn the concrete block ruin in the back yard - it was intended to be a garage before it was abandoned by my grandfather - into a house much more modern than the sixty-year-old frame house they had lived in since the thirties. My mother was a whiz at designing living spaces. If she had been born forty years later, she could have been an architect. For a short time, we lived in the old house while my grandmother shared the new house with Gil Emerson Commercial Art, for which my mother was secretary and bookkeeper. I was a part time graphic artist, photographer and darkroom technician. We scraped by on her genius for buying fifty dollars' worth of groceries for ten dollars and a fist full of coupons.
After I left home in 1971 she worked at the Indian River County Library, doing books and answering the phone for several years. My dad was plying the art show circuit on weekends around Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. Then in 1978, I decided I liked fishing the Indian River and the inlets better than ice skating, and moved back to Vero Beach to stay for nine years. My dad and I decided to really dive into the commercial art biz. We got a process camera, built a darkroom for it, landed the Los Angeles Dodgers account, and were off to the races, with my mother again at the helm with the books and the business end of things. When my dad decided to hand the business over to me in '87, I and my new wife decided to move to Central Florida. He sold the business soon after, and bought an RV.
My parents then began to wander the mountains in search of a suitable location for a summer home at which to escape heat and hurricanes. It was not until 1995 that they bought a lot in Smokey Mountain Estates in north Georgia. They hired a Vero Beachite contractor to build the shell of a three-story house with subflooring, stairs and enough interior framing to hold it together, and for the third time, my mother took on the task of designing. This was their dream cabin in the mountains. For ten or so years they hauled themselves and their cat(s) back and forth from Vero Beach to Blairsville every spring and fall until it got to be too much for them. They decided they liked cooler summers and the lack of hurricanes better than warmer winters, and they moved the rest of their stuff up to Georgia. A few years ago, my dad declared the cabin finished, with only a trickle of small projects to keep him busy.
Their health was pretty good through the 1990s and double naught years. About five years ago her cardiologist told her that she needed a pacemaker. She refused, period! No pacemaker nohow!
Three years ago my dad had a stroke. He was taken to Gainesville, GA, fifty miles over Blood Mountain, to a hospital better equipped to handle his situation. Then he was transferred to a rehab /nursing home in Gainesville, where he celebrated his 90th birthday. I was with my mom for a couple of weeks after the stroke, and realized that she was not physically, mentally or emotionally fit to live alone without help. We hired in-home help for her, but she refused to let them do anything other than to take her down to Gainesville several times until Dad was released to come back home. He was left weaker but still ambulatory, and with some difficulty speaking and swallowing, but in pretty good shape. He promised my mom that he would never put her in a nursing home, that he would take care of her until death did them part.
In late February, my dad told me that he had been keeping it from us that my mother had Alzheimer's. "I ask her to put things in the refrigerator. She says 'What is a refrigerator.'" He knew that if he tried to get her tested, there would be hell to pay. He asked me to go with her to her routine doctor's appointment on March first. I did. I told Dr. Sanders about her memory issues. He had his nurse come in and give her the standard test. She could not answer most of the questions. The first three: what year is it, what city do you live in, what state do you live in. He was convinced. He gave her a card with four weeks' worth of pills of increasing strength. "They are not a cure. They only slow the progress of the disease." After she had finished the card, they went back for a prescription to continue the medication. The day after the first new pill, she got really sick. An ambulance took her to the emergency room. They pumped her stomach, and she was okay for a few days. Then she got really sick again. Back to the ER, where they admitted her. They spent a week trying to figure out what was wrong with her. Finally, my dad told me that she had an intestinal blockage, and they were going to operate. I was concerned about her chances of surviving surgery, but he had already authorized it, so I zipped my baloney lips.
On the afternoon dog walk of April 12th, a nurse at Union General Hospital called me on my cell to tell me that the plan was to haul her to Chattanooga, through the roller coaster roads that she hated, implant a pacemaker so that she might survive this surgery, and find and remove whatever was blocking her lower intestine. I told her that this sounded crazy to me. She said that that was why she had called me. She thought I might be able to convince my dad to rethink it. I tried calling him. No luck. At about 8:00 that night, Union General called again to ask me for final authorization to haul her to Chattanooga. I guess they, too had not been able to reach my dad, and my mom was unresponsive. I said NO! and told them I wanted to talk to Dr. Sanders. Carmen finally got a hold of my dad. Dr. Sanders called my cell. Between the four of us, we decided to abort this insane plan and put her in hospice. My dad said that he was not aware of the pacemaker piece (his hearing is not so good) and he had thought that after this surgery she would come home for him to take care of her. Doc Sanders said no, if she survived the surgery she would go to a nursing home until she was well enough to come home, and he was skeptical of the chances of either of those outcomes.
Carmen and I went over to Blairsville on the 14th. We sat with my dad who sat with my mom every day until the end. He decided to let the neighbors go ahead with the 70th anniversary party on the 21st, and on the 22nd he told her all about it. He opened the numerous cards and read them to her. She was still unresponsive. We went home at 5:00 as usual. At 8:12 the hospital called and said she was soon to go. We got ready as fast as we could, arriving at 8:40 - about ten minutes too late.
Carmen had gone back to Nashville several days before. I stayed with my dad, helping him with the arrangements and the contacting of relatives with whom he hadn't communicated in years - decades even. I listened to his stories and told him some of mine before I went back home on Tuesday the 26th. He is living alone now for the first time in his almost 93 years. The neighbors keep trying to help him, but he says he needs to be alone with his grief for a while. I think he'll be okay.
She was a stay-at-home mom for my entire childhood in Odenton, Maryland. For most of it we lived in the split-level house she had designed in 1956. She was, I think, remarkably tolerant of me and my particular brand of fun. Some might argue that she was too tolerant. I was an outdoor kid, ranging far and wide around the neighborhood. As long as I was home for lunch and supper, she didn't worry about me - or at least I was not aware of it if she did. When I came home, I often brought turtles and /or snakes to live with us. One summer we had 14 box turtles on our screened back porch, all with names and distinct personalities. She fed them scraps of meats, vegetables and fruits. She didn't feed the snakes.
When I stayed in the yard, I still could not be a calming presence. I started a forest fire in the woods behind the house once. A forest ranger gave me a stern talking to after that. I climbed trees as far as I could possibly go and then some. I had a rope swing on the old pine tree, and I would wind the rope around and around it as far as I could, then launch myself, spinning madly while I also spun around the tree until I was unwound and then wound up again, then spun madly the other direction. She saw my head flying perilously close to that tree at breakneck speeds many many times. She told me to be careful.
She was a den mother in my Cub Scout pack, and an interested mother in my Boy Scout troop for which my dad was Assistant Scout Master and designated Akela. She planned family trips to Civil War battlefields, museums, zoos, fishing and all manner of other interesting activities. She read to me - The Wizard of Oz books, The Borrowers books, the Alice In Wonderland books to name a few - instilling in me a love of reading. We made Christmas ornaments, assembled Easter baskets, dyed eggs with onion skin dye, beet juice, or regular commercial egg dying kits. She was the best mom I knew.
We always had four-legged family members, cared for primarily by Wynifred. Princess and Sindbad, a German shepherd and a Siamese cat, were the primary critters I remember from my youth. Both of them died after I graduated high school. We also had a two-legged family member until I was eleven. The Easter after I was born, they gave my six year old brother a tiny baby duckling, He named it Mr. Peepers after his favorite TV show. The name held until Mr. Peepers laid her first clutch of eggs - just in time for Easter! Then she became just Peepers. My mother made sure Peepers, living in a pen at the edge of the woods I almost burned down, was fed, watered and taken regularly to the pond near our house for some swimming and tadpole hunting. That became my job after my pre-adolescent brother lost interest.
In 1968, when I was fifteen, we moved to Vero Beach, Florida, where she had spent her teenage years until she met and married a handsome airplane mechanic stationed at Vero Beach Naval Air Station. Her mother still lived there, and Wynifred hired a local contractor to turn the concrete block ruin in the back yard - it was intended to be a garage before it was abandoned by my grandfather - into a house much more modern than the sixty-year-old frame house they had lived in since the thirties. My mother was a whiz at designing living spaces. If she had been born forty years later, she could have been an architect. For a short time, we lived in the old house while my grandmother shared the new house with Gil Emerson Commercial Art, for which my mother was secretary and bookkeeper. I was a part time graphic artist, photographer and darkroom technician. We scraped by on her genius for buying fifty dollars' worth of groceries for ten dollars and a fist full of coupons.
After I left home in 1971 she worked at the Indian River County Library, doing books and answering the phone for several years. My dad was plying the art show circuit on weekends around Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. Then in 1978, I decided I liked fishing the Indian River and the inlets better than ice skating, and moved back to Vero Beach to stay for nine years. My dad and I decided to really dive into the commercial art biz. We got a process camera, built a darkroom for it, landed the Los Angeles Dodgers account, and were off to the races, with my mother again at the helm with the books and the business end of things. When my dad decided to hand the business over to me in '87, I and my new wife decided to move to Central Florida. He sold the business soon after, and bought an RV.
My parents then began to wander the mountains in search of a suitable location for a summer home at which to escape heat and hurricanes. It was not until 1995 that they bought a lot in Smokey Mountain Estates in north Georgia. They hired a Vero Beachite contractor to build the shell of a three-story house with subflooring, stairs and enough interior framing to hold it together, and for the third time, my mother took on the task of designing. This was their dream cabin in the mountains. For ten or so years they hauled themselves and their cat(s) back and forth from Vero Beach to Blairsville every spring and fall until it got to be too much for them. They decided they liked cooler summers and the lack of hurricanes better than warmer winters, and they moved the rest of their stuff up to Georgia. A few years ago, my dad declared the cabin finished, with only a trickle of small projects to keep him busy.
Their health was pretty good through the 1990s and double naught years. About five years ago her cardiologist told her that she needed a pacemaker. She refused, period! No pacemaker nohow!
Three years ago my dad had a stroke. He was taken to Gainesville, GA, fifty miles over Blood Mountain, to a hospital better equipped to handle his situation. Then he was transferred to a rehab /nursing home in Gainesville, where he celebrated his 90th birthday. I was with my mom for a couple of weeks after the stroke, and realized that she was not physically, mentally or emotionally fit to live alone without help. We hired in-home help for her, but she refused to let them do anything other than to take her down to Gainesville several times until Dad was released to come back home. He was left weaker but still ambulatory, and with some difficulty speaking and swallowing, but in pretty good shape. He promised my mom that he would never put her in a nursing home, that he would take care of her until death did them part.
In late February, my dad told me that he had been keeping it from us that my mother had Alzheimer's. "I ask her to put things in the refrigerator. She says 'What is a refrigerator.'" He knew that if he tried to get her tested, there would be hell to pay. He asked me to go with her to her routine doctor's appointment on March first. I did. I told Dr. Sanders about her memory issues. He had his nurse come in and give her the standard test. She could not answer most of the questions. The first three: what year is it, what city do you live in, what state do you live in. He was convinced. He gave her a card with four weeks' worth of pills of increasing strength. "They are not a cure. They only slow the progress of the disease." After she had finished the card, they went back for a prescription to continue the medication. The day after the first new pill, she got really sick. An ambulance took her to the emergency room. They pumped her stomach, and she was okay for a few days. Then she got really sick again. Back to the ER, where they admitted her. They spent a week trying to figure out what was wrong with her. Finally, my dad told me that she had an intestinal blockage, and they were going to operate. I was concerned about her chances of surviving surgery, but he had already authorized it, so I zipped my baloney lips.
On the afternoon dog walk of April 12th, a nurse at Union General Hospital called me on my cell to tell me that the plan was to haul her to Chattanooga, through the roller coaster roads that she hated, implant a pacemaker so that she might survive this surgery, and find and remove whatever was blocking her lower intestine. I told her that this sounded crazy to me. She said that that was why she had called me. She thought I might be able to convince my dad to rethink it. I tried calling him. No luck. At about 8:00 that night, Union General called again to ask me for final authorization to haul her to Chattanooga. I guess they, too had not been able to reach my dad, and my mom was unresponsive. I said NO! and told them I wanted to talk to Dr. Sanders. Carmen finally got a hold of my dad. Dr. Sanders called my cell. Between the four of us, we decided to abort this insane plan and put her in hospice. My dad said that he was not aware of the pacemaker piece (his hearing is not so good) and he had thought that after this surgery she would come home for him to take care of her. Doc Sanders said no, if she survived the surgery she would go to a nursing home until she was well enough to come home, and he was skeptical of the chances of either of those outcomes.
Carmen and I went over to Blairsville on the 14th. We sat with my dad who sat with my mom every day until the end. He decided to let the neighbors go ahead with the 70th anniversary party on the 21st, and on the 22nd he told her all about it. He opened the numerous cards and read them to her. She was still unresponsive. We went home at 5:00 as usual. At 8:12 the hospital called and said she was soon to go. We got ready as fast as we could, arriving at 8:40 - about ten minutes too late.
Carmen had gone back to Nashville several days before. I stayed with my dad, helping him with the arrangements and the contacting of relatives with whom he hadn't communicated in years - decades even. I listened to his stories and told him some of mine before I went back home on Tuesday the 26th. He is living alone now for the first time in his almost 93 years. The neighbors keep trying to help him, but he says he needs to be alone with his grief for a while. I think he'll be okay.
Monday, January 25, 2016
Both Sides Now - Reflections on Snow.
For the first 15 years of my life I lived in Odenton, an unincorporated little burg on the Pennsylvania Railroad line between Baltimore and Washington in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. It seemed to me that we had a lot of snow during those years (1953-68) but now I'm not so sure. The biggest deal I remember was the Blizzard of '66, which dumped three feet of snow over a weekend in February. Add to that the fact that Troop 721, including my dad and I, were camping out that weekend, and it's no wonder it is etched on my memory. We had to tunnel out of our tents, then dig our way out of the campground on Sunday morning. Then we were out of school for a whole week.
The primary snow-related recreation was sledding. Our back yard had a gentle slope from the edge of the woods down to the driveway. In the early years on Hammond Lane, our best sledding was there. Soon, however, the new Junior High School was built a quarter mile away, and the grounds around it offered several excellent hills. As soon as there was enough snow to sled on, we kids - about seven to ten of us - hitched up our wooden sleds with steel runners and dragged them to the Junior High. Usually four or five times per winter (sez my 63-year-old memory) we were blessed with enough snow for sledding.
Then we moved to Vero Beach, Florida. In 1977 there was a hard freeze that shut down the citrus industry for ten days. It snowed, but not enough for sledding. Not enough for a decent snowball.
In 2005 Carmen and I moved to Massachusetts. We had heard about New England winters, and learned that the rumors were true. Especially our last winter there, 2008-09, the snow just never seemed to stop. In four years, I saw kids sledding only once, which was perplexing.
Then we moved to Albuquerque, where the news media gave us dire warnings of horrific winter storms coming. They'd blow through overnight, dump 3/4 of an inch of snow and move on. By 9:00 it was all melted, and by noon the world was as dry as ever - and that's pretty dry. There was nary a sled in town.
On the opposite side of the coin...Meadville, Pennsylvania, the moss-covered buckle of the lake effect snow belt. The average is 120 inches (that's ten feet to you and me) of snow per year, and for the first two years I never saw anyone sledding. Very perplexing. Then we got a dog who required long walks three times a day, taking us to parts of Meadville I'd never seen before. It turned out that there were kids who went sledding when the weather was good. They weren't there frequently, but at least four or five times per winter.
Now we have landed in Nashville, Tennessee. This past Wednesday night the rain turned to sleet and snow. By morning there was a quarter inch on the ground and next to nothing on the roads, and on Thursday we were warned to stay off the roads. We former Meadvillians laughed at that. Then on Friday morning we woke up to a half inch of snow that kept on coming down. By the end of the morning dog walk, it was about 3 inches deep. During the afternoon walk, it was approaching 8 inches and still coming down, and everywhere we went there were kids (and grown-ups too) dragging sleds along the unplowed and unsalted streets, heading for the hills. Every decent hill we saw had kids (and grown-ups too) sledding on them. By last night (Sunday) the hills were showing dirt due to the hundreds of downhill runs over the snow, and still kids were sledding well past dark. It began to dawn on me.
In Odenton, Maryland, maybe four or five times a year there was enough snow to sled on. In Nashville, Tennessee, 8 inches is the most snow people have seen in decades. In Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, if you skip the sledding today or tomorrow, there will be another opportunity the next day, or next week, or next month at the latest. Wait for a nice sunny day, not too cold.
And that, my friends is what I have learned from Snowmageggon 2016.
The primary snow-related recreation was sledding. Our back yard had a gentle slope from the edge of the woods down to the driveway. In the early years on Hammond Lane, our best sledding was there. Soon, however, the new Junior High School was built a quarter mile away, and the grounds around it offered several excellent hills. As soon as there was enough snow to sled on, we kids - about seven to ten of us - hitched up our wooden sleds with steel runners and dragged them to the Junior High. Usually four or five times per winter (sez my 63-year-old memory) we were blessed with enough snow for sledding.
Then we moved to Vero Beach, Florida. In 1977 there was a hard freeze that shut down the citrus industry for ten days. It snowed, but not enough for sledding. Not enough for a decent snowball.
In 2005 Carmen and I moved to Massachusetts. We had heard about New England winters, and learned that the rumors were true. Especially our last winter there, 2008-09, the snow just never seemed to stop. In four years, I saw kids sledding only once, which was perplexing.
Then we moved to Albuquerque, where the news media gave us dire warnings of horrific winter storms coming. They'd blow through overnight, dump 3/4 of an inch of snow and move on. By 9:00 it was all melted, and by noon the world was as dry as ever - and that's pretty dry. There was nary a sled in town.
On the opposite side of the coin...Meadville, Pennsylvania, the moss-covered buckle of the lake effect snow belt. The average is 120 inches (that's ten feet to you and me) of snow per year, and for the first two years I never saw anyone sledding. Very perplexing. Then we got a dog who required long walks three times a day, taking us to parts of Meadville I'd never seen before. It turned out that there were kids who went sledding when the weather was good. They weren't there frequently, but at least four or five times per winter.
Now we have landed in Nashville, Tennessee. This past Wednesday night the rain turned to sleet and snow. By morning there was a quarter inch on the ground and next to nothing on the roads, and on Thursday we were warned to stay off the roads. We former Meadvillians laughed at that. Then on Friday morning we woke up to a half inch of snow that kept on coming down. By the end of the morning dog walk, it was about 3 inches deep. During the afternoon walk, it was approaching 8 inches and still coming down, and everywhere we went there were kids (and grown-ups too) dragging sleds along the unplowed and unsalted streets, heading for the hills. Every decent hill we saw had kids (and grown-ups too) sledding on them. By last night (Sunday) the hills were showing dirt due to the hundreds of downhill runs over the snow, and still kids were sledding well past dark. It began to dawn on me.
In Odenton, Maryland, maybe four or five times a year there was enough snow to sled on. In Nashville, Tennessee, 8 inches is the most snow people have seen in decades. In Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, if you skip the sledding today or tomorrow, there will be another opportunity the next day, or next week, or next month at the latest. Wait for a nice sunny day, not too cold.
And that, my friends is what I have learned from Snowmageggon 2016.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
We can rebuild him. We have the technology.
November 30th, 2015...a date which will live with the other three.
On October 3rd, 2011, I had my right knee replaced. It had been hurting with varying degrees of agony since the early 1970s. After surgery it hurt less, but never really stopped hurting until the summer of 2014.
On December 16th and 30th, 2013, I had my cataract-slimed lenses replaced with Bausch and Lomb implants. That was amazingly cool, to wake up and see better than I had in years.
On June 6th, 2014, I had a minimally invasive right hip replacement, and within a couple of months my right leg was nearly pain free. But!
In the fall, I was still using my cane on dog walks, just for extra stability. I had to stop, however, because my left shoulder was beginning to hurt so horribly. I figured the pain would subside after a while of not using the cane. It didn't. In the spring of '15 I told my doctor about it. She gave me a steroid shot. No effect. We moved to Tennessee, we bought a condo, I was remodeling the kitchen, and my shoulder started getting rushes of pins and needles that continued down my left arm to my wrist, leaving me breathless with pain. I told my Tennessee doctor the whole story. He sent me to physical therapy. I learned to stop the pins and needles thing (yay) but I also learned that now I couldn't lift my left arm above chest level - very counter-productive for kitchen remodeling. Three weeks of physical therapy showed us that a) the pain was getting worse and b) the mobility was not getting any better. My doctor called me back in and sent me to a neurosurgeon, who sent me to get an MRI, which showed that the C5 nerve coming out of my neck was being pinched by a bone spur. That's the nerve that tells my muscles to lift my arm above chest level. Surgery was the only hope. No big deal. They would simply slash open my neck in the front, move my throat parts out of the way, and go into my neck vertebrae with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction. Ten days later, I was scrubbed and shaved and prepped for surgery. They removed an assortment of bone fragments, fused together four levels, installed some screws, and closed me up again.
When I awoke on November 30th, my shoulder pain was gone. I had a sore throat, some difficulty swallowing, and some constipation, but that was a good trade for the blinding pain I'd had in my shoulder. By Wednesday, I was able to raise my arm all the way in front of me. Today, I raised it all the way out to the side. My sore throat and other issues are gone. My neck pain is gone. The only way I know that all that was real and not a bad dream is the big bandage on my neck, and the hard plastic cervical collar I wear at all times. The bandage comes off tomorrow, leaving Steri-Strips to keep me together until they come loose on their own.
I spent a long long lifetime whining about doctors and how I didn't trust them and refused to have anything to do with them. It took getting old and running out of other choices to admit that there are many doctors that really can and will help me feel better.
Damn it!
On October 3rd, 2011, I had my right knee replaced. It had been hurting with varying degrees of agony since the early 1970s. After surgery it hurt less, but never really stopped hurting until the summer of 2014.
On December 16th and 30th, 2013, I had my cataract-slimed lenses replaced with Bausch and Lomb implants. That was amazingly cool, to wake up and see better than I had in years.
On June 6th, 2014, I had a minimally invasive right hip replacement, and within a couple of months my right leg was nearly pain free. But!
In the fall, I was still using my cane on dog walks, just for extra stability. I had to stop, however, because my left shoulder was beginning to hurt so horribly. I figured the pain would subside after a while of not using the cane. It didn't. In the spring of '15 I told my doctor about it. She gave me a steroid shot. No effect. We moved to Tennessee, we bought a condo, I was remodeling the kitchen, and my shoulder started getting rushes of pins and needles that continued down my left arm to my wrist, leaving me breathless with pain. I told my Tennessee doctor the whole story. He sent me to physical therapy. I learned to stop the pins and needles thing (yay) but I also learned that now I couldn't lift my left arm above chest level - very counter-productive for kitchen remodeling. Three weeks of physical therapy showed us that a) the pain was getting worse and b) the mobility was not getting any better. My doctor called me back in and sent me to a neurosurgeon, who sent me to get an MRI, which showed that the C5 nerve coming out of my neck was being pinched by a bone spur. That's the nerve that tells my muscles to lift my arm above chest level. Surgery was the only hope. No big deal. They would simply slash open my neck in the front, move my throat parts out of the way, and go into my neck vertebrae with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction. Ten days later, I was scrubbed and shaved and prepped for surgery. They removed an assortment of bone fragments, fused together four levels, installed some screws, and closed me up again.
When I awoke on November 30th, my shoulder pain was gone. I had a sore throat, some difficulty swallowing, and some constipation, but that was a good trade for the blinding pain I'd had in my shoulder. By Wednesday, I was able to raise my arm all the way in front of me. Today, I raised it all the way out to the side. My sore throat and other issues are gone. My neck pain is gone. The only way I know that all that was real and not a bad dream is the big bandage on my neck, and the hard plastic cervical collar I wear at all times. The bandage comes off tomorrow, leaving Steri-Strips to keep me together until they come loose on their own.
I spent a long long lifetime whining about doctors and how I didn't trust them and refused to have anything to do with them. It took getting old and running out of other choices to admit that there are many doctors that really can and will help me feel better.
Damn it!
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Thinking Inside, Outside, All About The Box. Turtles, That Is.
During the 60s my summertime activities included collecting box turtles. One summer I had seventeen of them wandering around our screened patio, looking for a way out. Did you know that box turtles can climb screens? I didn't either, but they can and did, sometimes several feet off the floor. Anyhoo, we named them all and got to know their various personalities, fed them fruit, vegetables and meat scraps, had turtle races, traded turtles between us, and at the end of summer, we let them go. Often we found the same individuals again the following summer. It was, you can tell, a major part of my childhood, finding and keeping box turtles. Once I had a snapping turtle, and several times I kept snakes, but summer after summer - box turtles.
Then in '68 we moved to Vero Beach, Florida, and my focus shifted to fishing. After high school graduation in 1971, I returned to Maryland, but had neither the time, the space nor the inclination to look for box turtles. The next time I saw one was in Ocoee, Florida in 1998, thirty years and many thousands of miles later. It was walking calmly across the driveway of F/X Scenery and Display, where I worked as a carpenter. No longer having any desire to keep wild critters captive, I watched it crawl into the scrub beside the driveway, and walked away. It did spark these same memories, but having no blog, they got away from me. Did anyone have a blog in 1998? Probably.
In 2009, nearly twenty years and many thousands more miles later, we were living in Albuquerque for Carmen's ministerial internship. One of the things we kept hearing people there complain about was the problem of snails in the garden. There was a pretty nice garden behind the house we were renting, so I looked up snails and remedies for same. Lo and behold, one of the best ways to control snails is to keep box turtles in your garden. Some garden supply stores had box turtles for sale. Carmen mentioned this to her peeps at the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, and it turned out that one of them had a bunch of box turtles, and would be happy to give two of them to us. We got them on our 23rd wedding anniversary. So 23 years is the Turtle Anniversary. Very soon after they arrived, the weather started cooling off, and Buckbeak and Fluffy disappeared until the following June! We gave them to Amy and Colby Landers for their garden when we moved to Pennsylvania in July.
In Meadville, PA, especially after the acquisition and marathon walking of the dog, I was always on the lookout for box turtles. The only one I ever saw was half the size of a teaspoon.
A month and a half after moving to Nashville, on our way to walk Grace in Edwin Warner Park early one morning, there was a full grown box turtle crossing Hicks Road. Carmen stopped the car, and I ran to pick it up before someone smushed it accidentally or intentionally. We let it go in the park. I hope it is thriving there! And I hope there will be more of them in my future. I like box turtles!
Then in '68 we moved to Vero Beach, Florida, and my focus shifted to fishing. After high school graduation in 1971, I returned to Maryland, but had neither the time, the space nor the inclination to look for box turtles. The next time I saw one was in Ocoee, Florida in 1998, thirty years and many thousands of miles later. It was walking calmly across the driveway of F/X Scenery and Display, where I worked as a carpenter. No longer having any desire to keep wild critters captive, I watched it crawl into the scrub beside the driveway, and walked away. It did spark these same memories, but having no blog, they got away from me. Did anyone have a blog in 1998? Probably.
In 2009, nearly twenty years and many thousands more miles later, we were living in Albuquerque for Carmen's ministerial internship. One of the things we kept hearing people there complain about was the problem of snails in the garden. There was a pretty nice garden behind the house we were renting, so I looked up snails and remedies for same. Lo and behold, one of the best ways to control snails is to keep box turtles in your garden. Some garden supply stores had box turtles for sale. Carmen mentioned this to her peeps at the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, and it turned out that one of them had a bunch of box turtles, and would be happy to give two of them to us. We got them on our 23rd wedding anniversary. So 23 years is the Turtle Anniversary. Very soon after they arrived, the weather started cooling off, and Buckbeak and Fluffy disappeared until the following June! We gave them to Amy and Colby Landers for their garden when we moved to Pennsylvania in July.
In Meadville, PA, especially after the acquisition and marathon walking of the dog, I was always on the lookout for box turtles. The only one I ever saw was half the size of a teaspoon.
A month and a half after moving to Nashville, on our way to walk Grace in Edwin Warner Park early one morning, there was a full grown box turtle crossing Hicks Road. Carmen stopped the car, and I ran to pick it up before someone smushed it accidentally or intentionally. We let it go in the park. I hope it is thriving there! And I hope there will be more of them in my future. I like box turtles!
Sunday, August 9, 2015
Nashville Cats, Dog and Humans
Three weeks. That's how long we've lived in Greater Nashville. We're renting a 3 bedroom 2 bath apartment in a pet-friendly complex three minutes from the church, next door to a Shell gas station/ convenience store/ Dunkin' Donuts. The gas station also has several pallets of mulch for sale, if gasoline isn't enough for you. Bellevue is southwest of downtown Nashville, but the address is still Nashville 37221.
The apartment is pretty nice, as apartments go. One bedroom we use as a bedroom, one bedroom is Carmen's office. The third is the storage unit, with my chrome shelving, completely filled with boxes, around the perimeter, the floor space inhabited by several large items of furniture and more boxes, and the closet also full of what we politely refer to as stuff. Along one wall of the living room we have a four-high, three-deep stack of boxes of books - about 100 boxes - most of which will go into Carmen's office at the church as soon as the remodeling of office space is finished.
Dog walking has been excellent. There are many dogs here, as one might expect of a pet-friendly complex, and there are a lot of green and brown and shady spaces for dog walking purposes. Rabbits and squirrels are plentiful as well, providing hours of entertainment. And yes, our hound dog indeed caught a rabbit right here in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition, less than three miles away is Edwin Warner Park, with miles of shady paved trails through the woods, and a fenced dog park, where we have never been without dogs for Grace to play with.
Down the road a short piece one way is a Publix grocery store. They have Geezer Day - 5% off your total order every Wednesday if you're 62 or older. They don't call it that, of course, but they should. Also there is Staples, the post office, Home Depot and a cluster of restaurants. A short distance down the same road the other direction are two great Mexican restaurants, the Thai restaurant mentioned in the previous post, a bunch of nice stores and Yogurt Mountain, a hard place to stay away from on a hot day.
Carmen officially starts her job as minister to the Greater Nashville Unitarian Universalist Congregation on the fifteenth. She has been using this between time to get settled, get herself prepared to begin work, get our life here in gear, and yes, even to relax some. Right now she's at the pool. Good for her. But she's already had several meetings and phone calls with church folks. And she's been asked to do the blessing at the Mayoral Run-off Candidates' forum next week. Toto, we're not in Meadville any more.
We love it here. Yes, it's hot outside during the middle of the day. We do our major dog walks early in the morning before traffic builds, and run our errands in the evening if we can. And it's dollars to Dunkin' Donuts (only 99 cents each) that it won't be 23 below zero in February.
The apartment is pretty nice, as apartments go. One bedroom we use as a bedroom, one bedroom is Carmen's office. The third is the storage unit, with my chrome shelving, completely filled with boxes, around the perimeter, the floor space inhabited by several large items of furniture and more boxes, and the closet also full of what we politely refer to as stuff. Along one wall of the living room we have a four-high, three-deep stack of boxes of books - about 100 boxes - most of which will go into Carmen's office at the church as soon as the remodeling of office space is finished.
Dog walking has been excellent. There are many dogs here, as one might expect of a pet-friendly complex, and there are a lot of green and brown and shady spaces for dog walking purposes. Rabbits and squirrels are plentiful as well, providing hours of entertainment. And yes, our hound dog indeed caught a rabbit right here in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition, less than three miles away is Edwin Warner Park, with miles of shady paved trails through the woods, and a fenced dog park, where we have never been without dogs for Grace to play with.
Down the road a short piece one way is a Publix grocery store. They have Geezer Day - 5% off your total order every Wednesday if you're 62 or older. They don't call it that, of course, but they should. Also there is Staples, the post office, Home Depot and a cluster of restaurants. A short distance down the same road the other direction are two great Mexican restaurants, the Thai restaurant mentioned in the previous post, a bunch of nice stores and Yogurt Mountain, a hard place to stay away from on a hot day.
Carmen officially starts her job as minister to the Greater Nashville Unitarian Universalist Congregation on the fifteenth. She has been using this between time to get settled, get herself prepared to begin work, get our life here in gear, and yes, even to relax some. Right now she's at the pool. Good for her. But she's already had several meetings and phone calls with church folks. And she's been asked to do the blessing at the Mayoral Run-off Candidates' forum next week. Toto, we're not in Meadville any more.
We love it here. Yes, it's hot outside during the middle of the day. We do our major dog walks early in the morning before traffic builds, and run our errands in the evening if we can. And it's dollars to Dunkin' Donuts (only 99 cents each) that it won't be 23 below zero in February.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Going South
We left Florida ten years ago. Upon departure I declared that I never wanted to set foot in Florida again. Of course, three months ago, when temperatures in Meadville dipped into the double digits below zero, that decision seemed hasty. It was not an unwelcome thing, therefore, when the dice were thrown in the ministerial search game, and came up Nashville.
The next step in the process is a ten-day candidating week, to meet the whole congregation, have meetings with various groups and committees, preach on two Sundays and be voted in by the congregation as their next minister. The normal routine is that the minister and significant other fly to the host city. We, however can usually be counted upon to eschew the normal and carve our own groove. We were not comfortable leaving Grace with "strangers" (Grace knows no strangers - all humans are her close personal friends) so we planned to drive to Nashville, a ten-hour drive according to Google Maps.
My parents live in Blairsville, in the mountains of north Georgia - a four hour drive from Nashville, according to Google Maps. We figured that if I were going to get a visit with them this year, now would be the best time. If I accompanied her to the first three events - dinner with the Search Committee on Friday evening (to which Grace was pointedly invited,) dinner with the Board of Trustees at a Thai restaurant (A THAI RESTAURANT!!!) on Saturday evening, and church on Sunday morning - I could be excused to go to Georgia for the rest of the week. We contacted my sister-in-law Rachel, a Blairsville resident, and asked if she would be willing to drive to Nashville, babysit Grace on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, then haul Grace and me to Blairsville on Sunday afternoon. Lo and behold, she said she'd love to.
On Wednesday. the lace on my right Keens waterproof dog walking boot began to fray. It looked as though it could snap at any time, but time to figure out what length of laces I needed was something I did not have. I tied them gingerly, and vowed to rectify the situation as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
On a snowy Thursday morning (April showers bring snow plowers) we loaded the Subaru with Carmen's ten days' worth of interview clothes, my much smaller volume of stuff and Grace's big bag of necessary items. Hermione, our GPS, declared our arrival time to be 8:30pm. She sent us down south on Interstate 79, and off we went. Looking at my new 2015 Rand McNally Road Atlas, I thought that the best route would take us down I-79 all the way to Charleston, WV and I-64 over to Lexington, KY. The Bluegrass Parkway would take us to Elizabethtown, where we would pick up I-65 south to Tennessee and on to Nashville. Evidently, Hermione wanted us to go through Columbus and Cincinnati. She added a half hour to our arrival time when we ignored her orders to take I-80 west. When we ignored her again and refused to take I-70 west, she added an additional hour. She must be pretty well connected, because we hadn't been on I-64 more than ten minutes when we hit a wall of stopped traffic in western West Virginia. Three more hours were added by the time we cleared whatever it was at mile marker 11, but we had a lovely drive through downtown Huntington, WV to cap it off. By now the estimated time of arrival had jumped to 1:00am Eastern daylight savings time.
The late night drive around Lexington was the next pain in the ass. I thought going around the south side looked best, but my track record hadn't been very good up to now, so we followed Hermione's directions. Off the Interstate we went, traversing about five miles of suburban surface streets north of the city to reach the Bluegrass Parkway. Once we did, however, it was smooth sailing all the way to Nashville. As advertised, we arrived at Extended Stay America right at midnight Central time.
Room 325 was, as one might guess, on the third floor. What we did not guess was that our little girl Grace is afraid of elevators. This was her first encounter with one, as far as we know, but she did not want to go in there. Carmen took her up the stairs while I maneuvered the fully loaded baggage cart into the elevator and from there to the room. It was a pretty nice room, with a kitchen sink, a two burner stove, cabinets and counter top. We were perplexed because there were no dishes, utensils, pans or even a coffee maker (!!!) until Carmen found a notice about calling the front desk and requesting items from a list of possibilities. First thing Friday morning she called, and within ten minutes we were up and running.
Carmen was busy with her preparations for meetings and Sunday's sermon. After walking the dog around the block and back, I slipped quietly out the door and set out to find boot laces. The first place I tried was a running and walking shoe store two doors down from the hotel. They recommended Cumberland Transit, a hiking and camping clothing store. On the way there was a shoe repair shop. They recommended Cumberland Transit. I went to Cumberland Transit. What they had was a twelve foot long lace with four shrink wrap ends, All I needed was a knife or scissors and a lighter, and I was in business. Yippee.
Even more exciting: between the hotel and the store I passed a Panera, Chipotle, an Indian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a steak house and an ice cream shop. "I could live here," I said.
Soon after I returned to the room, we saddled up the pup and drove about five blocks to Centennial Park, where there was reputed to be a dog park within the park. We didn't find it, but had a lovely couple of hours walking Grace around the pond and the Parthenon. It was warm (to us, anyway) and sunny. Grace was her usual big hit with park goers, and we were struck by how alive and vibrant the atmosphere was. "We could live here," we said.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at Walgreens. I stayed in the car while Carmen went in and bought a lighter, a roll of paper towels, two gallon jugs of water and a few more items. The rest of the afternoon was spent (by me) unlacing my boots and installing my newly cut and tipped laces. It turned out, however, that the hard rubber top grommet had a very small hole, and the shrink-wrapped nibs on the new laces were not going to slide through. After 2 1/2 hours of trying, I managed to poke two of them through with the help of a fork. The other two nibs came off in the struggle. After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I peeled the label off of a prescription bottle and used strips of it to tape up the two fraying ends. They went through the grommet pretty easily! So I had laces - not pretty, but not fixin' to break, either. I measured the old laces before throwing them away. They were 48".
At 6:00, a search committee person picked us up and drove us to the beautiful home of another search committee person and his significant other. Grace was warmly welcomed and so were we. Grace was the belle of the ball. She greeted every guest without being a pest. When the hamburgers came off the grill, she curled up beside me and went to sleep for an hour or so. Dave, our host, fell in love with her. He said he'd be happy to dog-sit anytime. About an hour after we ate, Grace woke up and lobbied me for a walk. I took her out to explore this new territory and mark it for canine posterity. When it was time to return to the party, we encountered some difficulty trying to figure out which of the nearly identical condos was the right one. When we finally did, folks were stirring, getting ready to depart. We loaded Grace into the car and went back to the hotel.
Saturday morning at about 9:30 Rachel called to say she was downstairs. I went down and helped bring her stuff up to the room. After a bit of relaxation and conversation, we loaded the four of us into the Subaru and drove to the Greater Nashville Unitarian Universalist Congregation's beautiful building, where we were met by Pam the realtor, thick southern drawl and all. We put towels on the back seat of her Lexus, loaded all five mammals and set out to look at the possibilities for places to live on the west side of the Nashville metropolitan area. The one she was most anxious to show us was "near the church," and would likely become available about the time we would be ready for it. She drove and drove, describing all the while how nice the place was, how convenient to the church, how the coyotes would make it unwise to leave Grace outside unsupervised. And still we drove. The whole way I was thinking about how much I love to walk to the store, and how many hours it would take to walk from way out here. Long before we arrived, Carmen and I both knew this was not the place for us, but we kept quiet. Then Pam drove us around and around the vicinity, describing subdivisions and neighborhoods as we rode through them. The ones we liked the best had no homes available, but Pam said she would keep watch for them to come up for sale. After about two hours, we returned to the church, said bye to Pam and headed back to the hotel.
Dinner at the Thai restaurant was very yummy, as Thai food is wont to be. (I hadn't had Thai since "Tasty Thai" in Orlando) The Board of Trustees was a nice group of humans, and they seemed to like us as well. We didn't want to take up the ten-person table for very long, so it was still pretty early when we broke up the meeting. Back again to the hotel, where Carmen worked on her sermon, Rachel watched TV and I took Grace for a long walk.
Sunday morning was a joyful thing. The congregation had been hearing updates from the Search Committee for two years, and here at last was the minister and her wife. We hid out in the minister's office until time to go on. When the time came, I took a seat between two Search Committee members, and Carmen went to the front. A Search Committee person introduced her, to tumultuous applause - yes, they are an applauding bunch - and on with the show. Her interaction with the kids was a hit, her sermon was a home run, and then came coffee hour. Obviously, someone had spilled the beans about me and my long love affair with show business, because several congregants sought me out to tell me about their theatre group or operatic organization. It appears that I will have no trouble finding fun and rewarding things to do in Nashville. The problem will probably be choosing what to do and what to say no to. Luckily, I learned to say no many decades ago.
We peeled ourselves away at about 1:30, picked up lunch for us and Rachel, and returned "home." It was after 3 by the time we had eaten, loaded Rachel's, Grace's and my stuff in her Rav4, piled in and hit the road. We ran into a one hour construction delay just east of Nashville, but one stop for gas and one more for all three of us to "rest'" put us at my parents' house a little after 9:00. Rachel high-tailed it home to her kitty, and Grace and I visited for a little while before going to bed.
I fell easily into the routine at my mommy and daddy's house. Up early, eat breakfast, lounge around a while discussing what to do and not do today, eat lunch, lounge around sleepily for a while, eat supper, watch the 8:00 movie on TCM and go to bed. I, of course, included hour or so dog walks after breakfast and before supper. On Monday afternoon we went to the grocery store, where I found 42" boot laces. The 48s were really too long, so I bought the 42s. They work excellently to this day. At last the bootlace saga came to a happy ending! On Tuesday morning, my dad and I took Grace to a big wooded park where people walk their dogs. The (nearly) 92 year old man kept up with us all the way around, and Grace got to sniff some dog butt - a good day! On Wednesday, Grace and I wandered onto the property of a geezer wearing a pistol in a holster. "Oh, this is for snakes," he said. Thursday we were back at the grocery store primarily because of ice cream issues. They eat ice cream after lunch and supper pretty much every day - I like that. I don't remember any fun facts about Friday or Saturday. On Sunday early afternoon, I got a text message from Carmen that the vote was unanimous to call her as the new minister at the Greater Nashville Unitarian Universalist Congregation!
It was early evening when Carmen rolled into White Oak Drive. She was exhausted after ten days of meetings and church services, not to mention the drive from the west side of Nashville. We all visited for a little while, then went to bed. Monday morning we got up, ate breakfast, I walked the dog while Carmen got everything packed up for transport, and by 10:00 we were on the road. We stopped by Rachel's apartment to see her new digs and thank her again, then lit out for Summersville, WV, with one stop for gas and another at Tamarack, the artsy fartsy "Best of West Virginia" place near Beckley. After a fairly peaceful night's sleep, we pushed on for home with one stop for gas and another at the Fiesta Ware Outlet at the other end of West Virginia. We arrived home in late afternoon, ready to go full bore into the process of fixing up the house to sell and deciding what to move and what to let go.
By early June, the whole house was repainted inside and out, the realtor had put it on the market and we had let go of a whole lot of stuff. Every room was staged to look roomy and cute. The landscaping was beautiful, a far cry from the ugly it had been. Today, June 15th, we accepted a strong offer and signed a contract to sell. A month from now we rent a 26 foot truck, bring in the loaders Carmen hired, and off we go, new boot laces and all!
The next step in the process is a ten-day candidating week, to meet the whole congregation, have meetings with various groups and committees, preach on two Sundays and be voted in by the congregation as their next minister. The normal routine is that the minister and significant other fly to the host city. We, however can usually be counted upon to eschew the normal and carve our own groove. We were not comfortable leaving Grace with "strangers" (Grace knows no strangers - all humans are her close personal friends) so we planned to drive to Nashville, a ten-hour drive according to Google Maps.
My parents live in Blairsville, in the mountains of north Georgia - a four hour drive from Nashville, according to Google Maps. We figured that if I were going to get a visit with them this year, now would be the best time. If I accompanied her to the first three events - dinner with the Search Committee on Friday evening (to which Grace was pointedly invited,) dinner with the Board of Trustees at a Thai restaurant (A THAI RESTAURANT!!!) on Saturday evening, and church on Sunday morning - I could be excused to go to Georgia for the rest of the week. We contacted my sister-in-law Rachel, a Blairsville resident, and asked if she would be willing to drive to Nashville, babysit Grace on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, then haul Grace and me to Blairsville on Sunday afternoon. Lo and behold, she said she'd love to.
On Wednesday. the lace on my right Keens waterproof dog walking boot began to fray. It looked as though it could snap at any time, but time to figure out what length of laces I needed was something I did not have. I tied them gingerly, and vowed to rectify the situation as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
On a snowy Thursday morning (April showers bring snow plowers) we loaded the Subaru with Carmen's ten days' worth of interview clothes, my much smaller volume of stuff and Grace's big bag of necessary items. Hermione, our GPS, declared our arrival time to be 8:30pm. She sent us down south on Interstate 79, and off we went. Looking at my new 2015 Rand McNally Road Atlas, I thought that the best route would take us down I-79 all the way to Charleston, WV and I-64 over to Lexington, KY. The Bluegrass Parkway would take us to Elizabethtown, where we would pick up I-65 south to Tennessee and on to Nashville. Evidently, Hermione wanted us to go through Columbus and Cincinnati. She added a half hour to our arrival time when we ignored her orders to take I-80 west. When we ignored her again and refused to take I-70 west, she added an additional hour. She must be pretty well connected, because we hadn't been on I-64 more than ten minutes when we hit a wall of stopped traffic in western West Virginia. Three more hours were added by the time we cleared whatever it was at mile marker 11, but we had a lovely drive through downtown Huntington, WV to cap it off. By now the estimated time of arrival had jumped to 1:00am Eastern daylight savings time.
The late night drive around Lexington was the next pain in the ass. I thought going around the south side looked best, but my track record hadn't been very good up to now, so we followed Hermione's directions. Off the Interstate we went, traversing about five miles of suburban surface streets north of the city to reach the Bluegrass Parkway. Once we did, however, it was smooth sailing all the way to Nashville. As advertised, we arrived at Extended Stay America right at midnight Central time.
Room 325 was, as one might guess, on the third floor. What we did not guess was that our little girl Grace is afraid of elevators. This was her first encounter with one, as far as we know, but she did not want to go in there. Carmen took her up the stairs while I maneuvered the fully loaded baggage cart into the elevator and from there to the room. It was a pretty nice room, with a kitchen sink, a two burner stove, cabinets and counter top. We were perplexed because there were no dishes, utensils, pans or even a coffee maker (!!!) until Carmen found a notice about calling the front desk and requesting items from a list of possibilities. First thing Friday morning she called, and within ten minutes we were up and running.
Carmen was busy with her preparations for meetings and Sunday's sermon. After walking the dog around the block and back, I slipped quietly out the door and set out to find boot laces. The first place I tried was a running and walking shoe store two doors down from the hotel. They recommended Cumberland Transit, a hiking and camping clothing store. On the way there was a shoe repair shop. They recommended Cumberland Transit. I went to Cumberland Transit. What they had was a twelve foot long lace with four shrink wrap ends, All I needed was a knife or scissors and a lighter, and I was in business. Yippee.
Even more exciting: between the hotel and the store I passed a Panera, Chipotle, an Indian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a steak house and an ice cream shop. "I could live here," I said.
Soon after I returned to the room, we saddled up the pup and drove about five blocks to Centennial Park, where there was reputed to be a dog park within the park. We didn't find it, but had a lovely couple of hours walking Grace around the pond and the Parthenon. It was warm (to us, anyway) and sunny. Grace was her usual big hit with park goers, and we were struck by how alive and vibrant the atmosphere was. "We could live here," we said.
On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at Walgreens. I stayed in the car while Carmen went in and bought a lighter, a roll of paper towels, two gallon jugs of water and a few more items. The rest of the afternoon was spent (by me) unlacing my boots and installing my newly cut and tipped laces. It turned out, however, that the hard rubber top grommet had a very small hole, and the shrink-wrapped nibs on the new laces were not going to slide through. After 2 1/2 hours of trying, I managed to poke two of them through with the help of a fork. The other two nibs came off in the struggle. After much weeping and gnashing of teeth, I peeled the label off of a prescription bottle and used strips of it to tape up the two fraying ends. They went through the grommet pretty easily! So I had laces - not pretty, but not fixin' to break, either. I measured the old laces before throwing them away. They were 48".
At 6:00, a search committee person picked us up and drove us to the beautiful home of another search committee person and his significant other. Grace was warmly welcomed and so were we. Grace was the belle of the ball. She greeted every guest without being a pest. When the hamburgers came off the grill, she curled up beside me and went to sleep for an hour or so. Dave, our host, fell in love with her. He said he'd be happy to dog-sit anytime. About an hour after we ate, Grace woke up and lobbied me for a walk. I took her out to explore this new territory and mark it for canine posterity. When it was time to return to the party, we encountered some difficulty trying to figure out which of the nearly identical condos was the right one. When we finally did, folks were stirring, getting ready to depart. We loaded Grace into the car and went back to the hotel.
Saturday morning at about 9:30 Rachel called to say she was downstairs. I went down and helped bring her stuff up to the room. After a bit of relaxation and conversation, we loaded the four of us into the Subaru and drove to the Greater Nashville Unitarian Universalist Congregation's beautiful building, where we were met by Pam the realtor, thick southern drawl and all. We put towels on the back seat of her Lexus, loaded all five mammals and set out to look at the possibilities for places to live on the west side of the Nashville metropolitan area. The one she was most anxious to show us was "near the church," and would likely become available about the time we would be ready for it. She drove and drove, describing all the while how nice the place was, how convenient to the church, how the coyotes would make it unwise to leave Grace outside unsupervised. And still we drove. The whole way I was thinking about how much I love to walk to the store, and how many hours it would take to walk from way out here. Long before we arrived, Carmen and I both knew this was not the place for us, but we kept quiet. Then Pam drove us around and around the vicinity, describing subdivisions and neighborhoods as we rode through them. The ones we liked the best had no homes available, but Pam said she would keep watch for them to come up for sale. After about two hours, we returned to the church, said bye to Pam and headed back to the hotel.
Dinner at the Thai restaurant was very yummy, as Thai food is wont to be. (I hadn't had Thai since "Tasty Thai" in Orlando) The Board of Trustees was a nice group of humans, and they seemed to like us as well. We didn't want to take up the ten-person table for very long, so it was still pretty early when we broke up the meeting. Back again to the hotel, where Carmen worked on her sermon, Rachel watched TV and I took Grace for a long walk.
Sunday morning was a joyful thing. The congregation had been hearing updates from the Search Committee for two years, and here at last was the minister and her wife. We hid out in the minister's office until time to go on. When the time came, I took a seat between two Search Committee members, and Carmen went to the front. A Search Committee person introduced her, to tumultuous applause - yes, they are an applauding bunch - and on with the show. Her interaction with the kids was a hit, her sermon was a home run, and then came coffee hour. Obviously, someone had spilled the beans about me and my long love affair with show business, because several congregants sought me out to tell me about their theatre group or operatic organization. It appears that I will have no trouble finding fun and rewarding things to do in Nashville. The problem will probably be choosing what to do and what to say no to. Luckily, I learned to say no many decades ago.
We peeled ourselves away at about 1:30, picked up lunch for us and Rachel, and returned "home." It was after 3 by the time we had eaten, loaded Rachel's, Grace's and my stuff in her Rav4, piled in and hit the road. We ran into a one hour construction delay just east of Nashville, but one stop for gas and one more for all three of us to "rest'" put us at my parents' house a little after 9:00. Rachel high-tailed it home to her kitty, and Grace and I visited for a little while before going to bed.
I fell easily into the routine at my mommy and daddy's house. Up early, eat breakfast, lounge around a while discussing what to do and not do today, eat lunch, lounge around sleepily for a while, eat supper, watch the 8:00 movie on TCM and go to bed. I, of course, included hour or so dog walks after breakfast and before supper. On Monday afternoon we went to the grocery store, where I found 42" boot laces. The 48s were really too long, so I bought the 42s. They work excellently to this day. At last the bootlace saga came to a happy ending! On Tuesday morning, my dad and I took Grace to a big wooded park where people walk their dogs. The (nearly) 92 year old man kept up with us all the way around, and Grace got to sniff some dog butt - a good day! On Wednesday, Grace and I wandered onto the property of a geezer wearing a pistol in a holster. "Oh, this is for snakes," he said. Thursday we were back at the grocery store primarily because of ice cream issues. They eat ice cream after lunch and supper pretty much every day - I like that. I don't remember any fun facts about Friday or Saturday. On Sunday early afternoon, I got a text message from Carmen that the vote was unanimous to call her as the new minister at the Greater Nashville Unitarian Universalist Congregation!
It was early evening when Carmen rolled into White Oak Drive. She was exhausted after ten days of meetings and church services, not to mention the drive from the west side of Nashville. We all visited for a little while, then went to bed. Monday morning we got up, ate breakfast, I walked the dog while Carmen got everything packed up for transport, and by 10:00 we were on the road. We stopped by Rachel's apartment to see her new digs and thank her again, then lit out for Summersville, WV, with one stop for gas and another at Tamarack, the artsy fartsy "Best of West Virginia" place near Beckley. After a fairly peaceful night's sleep, we pushed on for home with one stop for gas and another at the Fiesta Ware Outlet at the other end of West Virginia. We arrived home in late afternoon, ready to go full bore into the process of fixing up the house to sell and deciding what to move and what to let go.
By early June, the whole house was repainted inside and out, the realtor had put it on the market and we had let go of a whole lot of stuff. Every room was staged to look roomy and cute. The landscaping was beautiful, a far cry from the ugly it had been. Today, June 15th, we accepted a strong offer and signed a contract to sell. A month from now we rent a 26 foot truck, bring in the loaders Carmen hired, and off we go, new boot laces and all!
Thursday, October 9, 2014
The Stand
We listen to books when we go to bed. It helps Carmen turn off the whirlwind of thoughts and impending obligations spinning around in her head. Our favorite, by far, is the seven Harry Potter books, read in their entirety by the best reader we've ever heard, Jim Dale. We've heard all seven probably twelve times or more. Harry and his friends risk everything to stand against the evil Voldemort. Right now we're on book two of The Hunger Games series. She risks everything to stand against the Capital. And just last week we watched the TV miniseries of Stephen King's The Stand again. It really came as no surprise to me when she came to me last night and told me that the UUA has called for clergy to go to Ferguson, Missouri to stand against the evil there, and that she felt compelled to go.
Twelve years ago we began this journey, throwing all of our considerable talent and tenacity into a quest to leave behind the plush life of the paralegal and jump out of the airplane to soar as a UU minister. Perhaps I knew better than she did that this journey would require enormous grit. I definitely knew better than she did that she has grit enough and plenty to spare. She will go to Ferguson.
I understand that there is risk involved in this choice. There is risk involved in driving to Erie, too, which she is doing right this minute. I am an unabashed atheist, but I always tell her in times of doubt and anxiety, "Have a little faith!" I don't mean faith in a supernatural being who will keep her safe. I mean faith in her own intelligence, resourcefulness and instincts to keep herself in the right place to be, whatever that might mean.
I have faith that her going to Ferguson to stand against evil will mean something far more important than anything else she might do instead. Laundry was one thing I she might have done if she stayed home. Important, yes. Imperative? No.
Stand.
Twelve years ago we began this journey, throwing all of our considerable talent and tenacity into a quest to leave behind the plush life of the paralegal and jump out of the airplane to soar as a UU minister. Perhaps I knew better than she did that this journey would require enormous grit. I definitely knew better than she did that she has grit enough and plenty to spare. She will go to Ferguson.
I understand that there is risk involved in this choice. There is risk involved in driving to Erie, too, which she is doing right this minute. I am an unabashed atheist, but I always tell her in times of doubt and anxiety, "Have a little faith!" I don't mean faith in a supernatural being who will keep her safe. I mean faith in her own intelligence, resourcefulness and instincts to keep herself in the right place to be, whatever that might mean.
I have faith that her going to Ferguson to stand against evil will mean something far more important than anything else she might do instead. Laundry was one thing I she might have done if she stayed home. Important, yes. Imperative? No.
Stand.
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