Father died in 2001 at the VA hospital in Menlo Park after a string of strokes and related health problems.  He wasn’t an old soldier, but rather an old civilian who had served his country.  He didn’t leave behind many objects – physical possessions or war memorabilia. His entire collection of things from his service included:

His dog tags
Alaska Department patch (polar bear with star)
Rank patch – technician 5th grade
Campaign medal for Asia Pacific
Two garrison caps
His discharge paper

The only other thing I have from his military service is his flag.  When a veteran dies, the VA gives a US flag to the family.  I remember the day father died, the doctor called me early in the morning with the bad news and later in the day someone from the VA mortuary called to ask where to send the body and the flag.

We displayed it at father’s memorial service (father was cremated so there was no casket) and afterwards my brother and I folded it.  My wife bought me a display case for it and now the flag sits atop my memorabilia cabinet next to my desk.  As I write this, his flag and memory sits over my right shoulder.

Perhaps that is as it should be.  There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t remember one of his jokes, or one of his stories, or bits of wisdom.
I could go on for days listing all the things I remember.  Here are a few of his often spoken quotes:

When told, “Good to see you.” He’d always reply, “It’s good to be seen.”
“I didn’t quite smoking, I became a non-smoker.”
“You are who you say you are.  Be careful what you call yourself.”
“Can we say that in a positive way?”
“There’s the right way, the wrong way and the Army way.”
“If I had to live my life over, I would.”

Father also told, and retold, a number of his Army stories.  One that came to my mind this last week was his story of “Dock Duty.”  Here is my retelling of that story (I’ll do the short version – dad’s version could take 20 minutes or more depending on the level of embellishment):

A couple of times a month the supply would come into port and all enlisted men were called for dock duty to unload the ship.  Father didn’t really like this heavy lifting detail and like any good enlisted man did his best to figure a way out.  Normally the arrival of the ships wasn’t announced – mostly to give the men as little time as possible to think up an excuse to get out of it.

Being in the coast artillery and working the radar set, father often found out about supply ship arrivals well before anyone else (some times even before his CO knew).  Well one, cold snowy day, father had learned the ship was coming in and came up with a plan.

He went down to the radar shack just before he thought the lieutenant would be around to collect all the enlisted men for dock duty.  When the lieutenant came into the shack father was ready – he had his maintenance manual out, a set of tools and the log book.

The lieutenant came in and called out, “Fall out for dock duty.”

No doubt he put on his innocent face and replied, “That’s today sir? I’ve got a problem, the set needs it’s weekly maintenance and it should really be done today.”

“Dock duty is important too, Reynolds, now move it,” replied the lieutenant.

“Yes, sir,” says my father, “Could you just sign my log book saying you sent me to dock duty instead of working on the set?”

“You son-of-a-bitch, you’d do that too.”

“Just following procedure sir, you see I’ve already started and if I don’t do it, it should be noted in the log.”

The lieutenant didn’t press the point, didn’t sign the log and father dusted the vacuum tubes, made a few voltage checks and put on a pot of coffee.

Father claims he did this twice.  Then one morning father was in the barracks when the lieutenant burst in and called out, “Dock duty, everyone fall out.  and you Reynolds, I suppose the set needs maintenance work today?”

“Yes sir, I was just about to get started,” replied father.

“Well, get going, Reynolds,” growled the lieutenant.

Father hadn’t been on the radar set the night before so didn’t know that a ship was coming in.  He just figured the lieutenant was just tired of the game.  Father said that he never did dock detail after that day.

But father did his share of KP – I suspect because it was the best way to steal extra food from the officer’s mess, but that is a story for another day.

Till next week,
Andrew

Seriously, what is meaning?  What does it mean to be ‘meaningful’?  Or, the question I use to torment my elders with, “What is the meaning of life?”

In my teens and twenties I was seriously concerned that there was some grand purpose to the universe: that I hadn’t been clued into what it was and was missing out on something good. After many years of asking almost everyone I could thinking of the most direct answer I got was from my father when he replied, “Yes, it must mean something.”

Then he’d break into singing, “What’s it all about Alfie.”  Father was not a singer and in time I learned not to ask father certain questions.

In my thirties I settled on this nobel statement, when asked the question – “I believe it is about finding out what God’s will is for me and doing that.”  I was all about the notion of “discernment.”  Turns out I am not very good at it and still haven’t figured out what the man/woman/being/thingy upstairs wants me to do.  There are times I feel like I’ll get to the gates of heaven and just flat fail St. Peter’s little quiz – you know the one that lets you in the gate to the promised land.

In my forties I just tried not to have such lofty thoughts and got on about the business of living.

Today I am feeling old – mostly because yesterday, Heather and I spent much of the day building a deck.  The deck is turning out great, but today my body feels shattered – walking hurts, typing hurts, thinking hurts, hurting hurts…

Now that I am feeling old, the whole, “what’s all about?” question popped up in my brain so I thought I’d take stab at it again.  This time I thought I’d use some different methods to analyze the question.

So the first tool I thought I’d apply to the problem is one that many young people use today for such questions, yes, google.  Top of the list of answers is in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_of_life  If you can’t believe Wikipedai, what can you believe.

Then I thought I might apply some good old literary criticism to the problem and see if I could derive some meaning by looking at what is the question really asking.

I’ll admit that as a young’n I asked without really understanding the question.

Let’s start by looking at these three words: ‘the’, ‘meaning’ and ‘life’.  We need to look not only at the significance of the word but also at it’s opposite.  We often need to explore both sides of a thing to understand it.  For example, day is meaningless without night and to be wet is ‘not dry.’

Take the word ‘life.’  It could be defined as, “not dead.” Therefore the meaning we are seeking to know about only applies to a specific period of time – that time between being  birth and death.  The word is a limiter to the question and rules out all other times.  Therefore the question doesn’t apply to any ‘after life.’

The word, ‘the’ is an interesting word in that it implies that there is one and only one meaning of life.  The opposite of ‘the’ is many so we’re not talking about many possible meanings but rather the one meaning.  We could also use the word ‘a’ here and change the question from, a single meaning to one of a number of meanings.

And this one should drive you nuts to think about it too much, “What does the word meaning mean?”  If you want a dictionary version try this:

what is meant by a word, text, concept, or action
implied or explicit significance
important or worthwhile quality; purpose

The implication is that to be meaning full, life should have an importance, a worthwhile quaintly or significance.

If we put the whole thing together and rewrite the question in a more specific form, we might come up with: “What is the one worthwhile quality of not being dead?” or possibly “What is the specific explicit significance of the time between birth and death?”

However, given the variations of possible questions that could be generated, is it possible for there to be one meaning? Or is it more likely that our life has meanings at different levels at different times?

Or, is it just possible that the question is unanswerable and the only value in it is the exploration?

A further complication that I’ve proven in my life is that as we have new experiences and learn new things the whole structure of our understanding shifts and the question itself changes, so I end up back with my father’s statement, “Yes, life must mean something.”

I am just hoping that at the Pearly Gates, I get away with the answer, “Sorry, couldn’t figure that one out.”

Till next week,
Andrew

I found the quote interesting because earlier in the day I had gone to my dictionary to look up the meaning of a word.  Don’t remember the word, but trying to find the meaning of a word got me thinking about how we know what things mean – how do we find meaning and ultimately, the Truth (note the capital T – the real truth, the truth that sets the world free)?

Normally I just try to watch old WWII movies to keep myself from thinking about such things,  but our copy of “Saving Private Ryan” got a large scratch on it and I couldn’t watch it so my mind started to wander.  Then I went and started looking up things.  Using google, I searched Wikipeda for stuff, then found a word I didn’t know and went to the dictionary on my computer to get a quick definition.

Then it hit me that we define words with other words and the meaning of a word like say, “tree” is dependent on my ability to describe what a tree is with words you know the meaning of.  That in turn got me to thinking about the lessons in language that I learned while getting my BA in English and the reason way I was drawn to the noble study of literary criticism.

Literary criticism is an often misunderstood academic study and discipline.  It isn’t about witty remarks on how horrible the last novel I read was – rather it is about how we derive mean from a literary work.  In this case the criticism part really refers more to “critical thinking” than “criticizing that horrible movie.”

There are a number of ways to do that which are referred to as “literary theories,”  that is to say ways of viewing a text.  One of my favorite theories is the notion of intertextuality.  So once I let my mind start drifting towards literary theories I remembered that I didn’t have a book to read and went to look at my “to-read” list on Good Reads.

What joy to find that top of my list was Graham’s book on Intertextuality.  The Kindle version of the book was about the same price as a 12 pack of beer so I figured I could afford to buy it.

Well, if I’d bought the beer, this post would have been a lot shorter.

I could go into great lengths to explain the theory to you, but the three of you who read this far would now be clicking to a different website.  So here’s the short version: How do you know what I am talking about in this blog post?  How can you understand its meaning?  Simple, you’ve read other texts that use the same words – language – and assume that I am using the word or phrase in a similar way and then in your brain you construct a mental picture of what you think I am saying.  Then a meaning is formed for you.  Each reader of my blog approaches it from a different set of experiences and therefore each reader is likely to understand my words differently.

Cool, huh?

Makes more sense after the second beer.

But here is my problem as a writer – I don’t want you forming your own meanings to my words.  I want you to see what I am trying to say.

Let’s take a simple example.  Let’s say I use the word, ‘tree.’  What picture does that bring to your mind.  Think about it for a minute.  I’ll wait……

Okay, now let’s finish the game.  I was thinking of a tall redwood tree – specifically a sequoia semperviren (or coastal redwood) that inhabit the California hills near where I live.

Chances are the tree you thought of and the tree I thought of were very different.  Once I tried this exercise with a group of software engineers and when I went around the room, each engineer described a tree from where the grew up.  However, one engineer had a puzzled look and said, “I thought you were talking about a file directory tree.”

I am consistently amazed that we humans have any level of mutual understanding.  It’s no surprise that people misunderstand each other.  After all the only way I have to understand you is to relate the language of you to language that is me – a language stored in the dictionary of my experiences and knowledge.

The only way for you to get the same exact meaning out of this blog post that I intended, is for you to have had all the same experiences as me – that is to be me.  But you aren’t me so you’ll discover a different meaning (or none at all).

Makes one want to give up writing altogether – what with readers having their own minds and all.

But despite the challenge we writers persist – either looking for common ground or throwing words to the wind, hoping that someone will find something worthy in our words – whatever it might mean.

Or we could just get a beer and watch a movie.

Till next week,
Andrew

Unlike the combat veterans of that war, my father talked freely about his experiences in the Army and during the war.  It’s an interesting difference I’ve noted among veterans – those who suffer in battle are the least likely to talk about their experiences.  Just too painful I image.

For my father the war past him by.  He was drafted, trained and went where the Army told him.  He didn’t like being in the Army and likely wouldn’t have volunteered, but when the draft notice came he did his duty.  He put on the uniform and tried to be a soldier.

He wasn’t much of a soldier.  Physically uncoordinated, not physically fit and no idea which end of a rifle to point at the enemy.  Father often told the story of how on the obstacle course while he was trying to climb the wall an exasperated sergeant just yelled, “go around Reynolds, just go around you’re holding up the platoon.”

It’s very likely that had they turned my father into an infantryman, father would have done more damage to our side.  Seeing my father in later years, I could just see him walking along, falling into a foxhole and injuring his squad.

We’ve all heard stories about the dumb things that military organizations do, but in my father’s case the Army did the right thing – they took away his rifle and sent him to radar school. Likely the best – father was smart, mentally tough, detail oriented and learned fast.  Everything they needed in a good radar man.

When I was a teenager listening to my father’s war stories, I often wondered how good a radar technician he was.  After the war father didn’t carry on in electronics, becoming an accountant instead (a damn good one).  He couldn’t really fix anything – not even changing a tire, so I often wondered about some of the stories he told.

Then I turned 18 and decided on a career in electronics for myself.  I signed up for an electronics school and proudly brought home my text books.  Showing them to my father, I was astonished to have him start lecturing me about the applications of Ohm’s law and correcting my inductance calculations.  His theories on troubleshooting electronics helped me move ahead in my career.

But that was my father – more theory than practice.

What I’ve come to realize is that he only really knew how to repair two radar sets – the ones the army taught him.  The two he was ordered to operate.  The two that were used at his base.  Other than the general theory, he wasn’t really interested in radar.  He was willing to do his duty and take part in the war.  He was told to learn how to fix the radar and so he did.  Knowing my father, I suspect that if they had told him to learn how to repair tanks, he would have done it.

Father often told this story about the first time he was on duty as an operator – he was both the repair man and operator. During the day the radar wasn’t used and radar was used mostly at night, or in foggy conditions – anytime that the men at the base end stations couldn’t get a good view of the ocean.  One foggy night, father was watching the set and noticed an echo.  He swung into action.

Quickly he calculated the position, speed and size of the target.  Then he called the battery commander with the sighting report.  It was a worrying target, about the size of a submarine conning tower and in a likely place in the harbor for a sub to sit itself.

The battery commander was a bit confused by the sighting – odd place for an enemy vessel and in the dark and fog, what could a Japanese sub hope to accomplish?  Plus the fact that the officer hadn’t received much training on radar and knew little of its capabilities.

So they watched.  The whole thing took on a very odd, surrealist quality.  The target dropped out of sight once or twice. Then it got bigger and slowly moved about 100 yards to the right.

At dawn, after calling in position reports every fifteen minutes, father was ordered to shut down the radar set and report to the base end station (an observation point for battery).  There, a slight harassed officer pointed out to the harbor and said, “specialist, you’ve been tracking that rock all night.”

Yup, there was a big rock in the harbor that was only visible during low tide.  Father had just come on duty as the tide turned.  Over the next few days the radar men were ordered to plot the position of every rock and obstacle the radar could see and where given the tide tables with orders to record high and low tides in their logs.

Father’s version was much funnier and went on for much longer.

But on this memorial day, he is on my mind and I remember.

Father died in 2001 at the VA hospital in Menlo Park, California.

On this memorial day, join me in remembering all those who served – however they served, from just doing as ordered to those who were called to do more.

Till next week,
Andrew

The most often heard cry from the novelist’s desk is, “I don’t know what to write about!”

I have an answer to that cry, sarcastic and flippant, but it is an answer. It goes like this:  Write anyway – you can always rewrite and edit later.  Not every piece of writing needs to win a Pulitzer Prize (bet this blog post won’t).

I have wondered from time to time if journalists suffer from writer’s block.  Think about.  Does the New York Times hold classes for journalists who can’t think of a thing to write?  Let’s say you’re a reporter on the city desk and a ten-car pileup, closes the Holland Tunnel.  You’re sent out on assignment.  Is it an option to come back to the editor and say, “Couldn’t think of a thing to write.  I think I’ve got writer’s block.”?

What do you think the response will be?  A compassionate hug with a free pass to the next writing seminar or a quick kick up the backside with a ticket to the unemployment line?

I will leave the answer to that question as an exercise for the reader.

I bring up the above little illustration because I am about 15 minutes into an essay where I am suffering from writer’s block.  Yup, I don’t have a clue what to write about but I have a self-imposed weekly deadline for my blog and would hate to have to fire myself for missing it.  So I am following my own advice and writing anyway.

Some times free writing – the process of just writing whatever comes into your head – for 15 minutes, is enough to get the brain and creativity working.  I will admit to writing a lot of stuff that you never see on this blog.  I figure if I can write for an hour, there will be enough stuff to edit out for a decent post. And if there isn’t a decent post – well I’ve got tons of pictures in iPhoto that I could post.

Hey, photo captions count as writing.

My reason today for not having an award wining post is:  I’ve been busy and I am very tired today.

Heather and I know we’ve been over doing lately and yesterday, we planned a day out. As Julia Cameron suggests in her book “The Artist’s Way,” to ‘breath in’ – to do something that feeds our soul, rests our mind and inspires our creativity.

I think I inhaled too deeply. We went for a hike at one of our favorite spots, Fall Creek (watch for a Reluctant Hiker post with pictures and some words).  It was a great day out.  We hiked about four miles and I took 81 pictures and 10 video clips on my iPhone.  Today I can barely move without pain – well maybe not that bad, but yesterday did show how badly out of shape I am.

I was also still a bit tired from my day on Thursday.  My brother, Wild Bill, had his treatment procedure for his prostate cancer.  I was up at 5:00 am to get him to the hospital and it was well after 1:00 pm before I staggered home.  Bill’s fine and the procedure went as expected.  His doctors are confident that this treatment will be enough to knock out the cancer.

The emotional and physical energy drain was more than I expected.  Guess I am getting a bit too old to be lifting wheelchairs in and out of cars and chasing doctors and nurses around hospitals.  Since Bill and I have the same cancer the emotions ran deeper since I knew what he was going through.

And I am just plain physically out of shape.  Have I mentioned that yet?

I’ve been doing my daily walks at lunch time and have been trying to eat as healthy as possible (a large pastrami sandwich is healthy if you skip the bag of chips and the soda, right?).  I have felt my fitness level fall lately – gotten worse since our treadmill died.  You’d think that a treadmill would last more than ten years – especially when you consider that I didn’t use it for five of those years.

So here I am, out of shape, with nothing to write about.

Well I’ve got a solution to both.  I am now committing myself to a serious fitness program to both improve cardiovascular and general fitness with the vain hope that I might lose some weight.  Heather and I are going to look into health club options and possibly buying a new fitness machine.

Okay, get the laugher out of your system now, I’ll wait…

Next week I shall write about my new fitness program, my progress, goals and the name of the hospital to send the get well cards too.

Till next time,
Andrew

My mother loved the mountains – any mountains, all mountains.  She had this need to see them – to travel to them.  They were her church, her temple.  Her soul was incomplete without them.

Sadly fate forced her to live in the valley, where she could daily look upon the mountain, but rarely travel there.  She made her pilgrimages to the Yosemite high country as often as she could. From her home in Stockton she’d often take a Saturday drive into the golden foothills above Sonora, California.  In summer she’d drive over the pass on highway 108 to Bridgeport.  In winter she’d stop just below Pinecrest.

These trips were ones I only heard about – often from her friends and not her.  It was in a time after her divorce when the need to get a job, drove her to move 100 miles away from where her now-adult-children lived.  She needed the comfort of the forest, the peace of a mountain stream, and the solitude that only can be found in a meadow.

Or so I suspect.

When I was a child, before teenage problems and before father’s alcoholism finally shattered what was left of her marriage and our family life, she would take me and my brothers on long summer vacations to the mountains – the coast range of California, the Sierra Nevada, Marble Mountains, Siskiyous, Tehachapi, the Grand Tetons, the Rockies and once even into the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Mother was a teacher and on those trips she taught her sons to love the mountains too.  She showed us their importance, their majesty – their soul renewing power.

I now find myself in the same trap as Mother – forced to earn my living in the flat lands and only getting to visit the vistas and tall trees on occasion.  Each year Heather and I make our pilgrimage to the sacred Tuolumne Meadows and breath in the life-giving air of that high place.  It was one of my mother’s favorite places and I can’t help but remember her when I am there.

Once a month we drive into the hills and hike for a few hours – barely enough time to taste the air but enough time to remember and renew a little.

Just after my mother retired and just before her health failed I decided that we should go on one more car trip together.  I’d become interested in the Pacific Crest Trail (link to PCA).  The PCT is a hiking trail over 2,000 miles long stretching from the Mexican border and ending in Canada, that generally follows the crests of the mountains that form the boundary along the west coast.  Hundreds of ‘thru hikers’ hike the entire distance in a single year – spending six to eight months on foot.  Thousands more hike sections of it.

I showed Mother the maps I had and suggested that we could drive to many of the places where the trail crossed the road.  We would start in Southern California, just northeast of Los Angles and then up highway 395 following the eastern Sierra until we got to just north of Lake Tahoe.  I only had a week’s vacation so our time was limited.

It was an interesting trip and a reversal of roles.  I drove and mother sat in the passenger seat.  She had recently had knee replacement surgery on both knees and couldn’t walk too far, so we couldn’t do any hiking.  Mother got tired easily so we made it a low energy trip.

Each day fell into a rhythm – we had brought an ice chest with food for breakfasts and lunches and it was my job to haul them out in the morning so mother could fix our breakfast and decide if we needed to stop at a store.  I’d check the maps, the gas tank and the water bottles and then we’d be off to find the next place the PCT crossed the road.  Then we’d find a picnic spot and I’d haul out the ice chest.  Mother made the sandwiches. Then it was down the road again chasing lines on a map.

Around 4 pm, I’d start looking for a motel and a place for dinner.  By 6 pm we were usually checked into a room and off on foot to find a restaurant.

Mother talked the entire trip – every waking moment.  She complained that I wouldn’t let her drive and then would see something that would remind her of a story – then she’d be off down memory lane.  She told me things on that trip that she’d never spoken of before – her problems with father, her disappointments with life, where she found strength, her faith – even a few subjects I didn’t want to know about.

I just listened and eventually the journey ended and we came home.  I returned to work and she returned to her apartment, but neither of us ever forgot that trip.  Neither of us spoke much about it to others – it was our private time together.

I’d like to think that I gave her something on that trip.  I know I received from her.

My last gift to her was after she died from cancer.  Heather and I went to the cemetery to pick her gravesite. Where Mother wanted to be buried  (where her parents and other family are) is getting full and there aren’t many sites left.  They led us to a far corner of the cemetery to a section that had some space left.  At first I wasn’t sure, as it was very far from where my grandparents graves are.

But then we found the number marker just up a little hill and I looked up from the grass into the distance – beyond my grief – I could see the mountains.

He calls me when he’s broke.

Yes, my older brother, the guy I’ve mentioned before.  He’s often on my mind, more so these days as we move closer to his prostate cancer treatment.  The last few decades I’ve been his – well hard to describe but it’s some place between guardian, case manager and caretaker.  I don’t do much of the day-to-day care, but I do check in from time to time to make sure his caregivers, doctors and others, know that I am watching.

It hasn’t always been this way.  There was a time, when were young that we’d tie a wagon to Billy’s three-wheeled bike and he’d take me an my friends for rides up and down our quiet suburban street.  There was a time he could walk and drive a car.  There was a time he was my babysitter.  There was a time I caught him smoking a cigarette and he paid me two dollars not to tell (hey – $2 doesn’t buy forever, you should have given me the five).

Bill was born in 1949.  He was the first child and both my parents often told the story of getting Mother to the hospital and how they barely got there in time – my father could spin that story to an uproarious 20 minute tale that would get everyone laughing.  What they didn’t talk about and I didn’t learn until I was in my teens was that Billy was a ‘blue baby.”

The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and he was turning blue from suffocation when born.  The doctors were able to revive him but within 18 months it was clear that something was wrong.  By the age of two years Billy was diagnosed with cerebral palsy (CP) ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_palsy for a basic description ) – basically a form of brain damage.  It affected his right side and he has very little muscle control over his right arm which tends to move seemingly on it’s own – often jumping at loud noises.  His CP is spastic and impairs his ability to control some muscle groups.  He also suffers from speech difficulties and mild dyslexia.

As a young child I never really understood that there was a problem with Bill.  He seemed to do everything a normal kid would do: went to school (in a special bus to a special school), had a bike (a three wheeler with a large basket), was in the Boy Scouts, went to church and in high school a few girl friends (one whom he married).

That was largely due to my father, who insisted that Billy was, “A normal American boy who happened to have cerebral palsy.”  My father was actually very progressive for his time and thought the best way to help Bill, was to ensure that he had as normal a life as possible.  At first Mother wasn’t completely sure that dad’s approach was right, but she quickly saw the wisdom in it and went to great lengths to ensure that Billy had a chance to do all the normal things a boy got to do.

It was Mother’s idea to get Billy a bike to ride – all the boys in the neighborhood had one and it was a normal thing to get your boy a bike.  Because of the CP, Bill has little natural sense of balance and could only stand and walk after years of physical therapy.  Mother did what she did for all of her life, adapted.  The bicycle shop had a red three-wheeled bike with a big basket in the back.  No doubt the intended consumer of this contraption was a senior citizen who’d just lost their driver’s license but to Mother it was the perfect solution.  She brought it home and taught Bill how to ride it.

And ride it he did.  Everywhere.  All the time.  He rode to the store, the play ground, the movies and even did the normal daredevil stuff you’d expect from a 16 year-old.

I remember it well. Billy was out with me and my friends.  We all had roller skates and Bill was giving rides.  He’d line us up on the sidewalk and one kid on skates would hold on to the basket and he’d ‘haul ass’ pulling us down the sidewalk as fast as he could go and he could go fast – fast enough to thrill us 7 year-olds.  At the  corner he’d turn right and we’d let go to jump off the curb into the street.

In the ‘60s mothers would often say, “it’s all fun and games until someone looses an eye.”

No, Bill didn’t lose an eye, but he did miss the turn and lost a tooth.  We’re not sure how it happened – either he turned too late or took the turn too fast but the result was Billy flying over the curb, the bike turning on it’s side and blood running down his face.

I was about four houses away when it happened and one of the older boys with us came running to me and said, “Go get your mother fast, Bill’s hurt bad.”

I skated home as fast as I could and ran into the house yelling, “Mom, Mom, Billy’s hurt, Mom!”  She came at a run and years later she said there was something about the way I looked that caused her to worry.  Whatever she saw in me, she never mentioned the fact that I came into the house with my skates on.

Mother bought Billy home and I was sent to the back patio and told not to come in.  I remember being quite miserable out there on the patio.  I felt personally responsible and felt in physical pain because of it.  I desperately wanted to make it alright and wanted to know how bad he was hurt.

After what seemed like years, I heard Mother on the phone and my other brother Rick came out – sent by mother (likely to make sure I was still there).  Rick told me that Bill was badly scraped up and had lost a tooth.  Mother was calling the dentist.

Mother never said much to me about it, but I still feel that she held me mostly responsible for the accident.  I suspect that, because that night after dinner father came to my room and gave me one of his special fatherly talks on, “How important it was for all of us to make sure Bill had as normal a life a possible, but also make sure we protect him when he exceeds his abilities.”  That’s about as short as I can make that.  As I recall the lecture lasted about three years of kid time and by the end I was wishing he’d just spank me and get it over with.  The lecture ended when I was able to repeat and paraphrase father’s major points and promised not to let the other kids take advantage of Bill’s good nature.

Then father made popcorn and gave us all a Coke to drink.  Likely not the best thing for Billy at the time but dad was more of a theoretical parent rather than a practical one – great ideas with no clue how to put them into practice.

The dentist was able to put Bill’s tooth back in but about 20 years later it needed to be removed.  Today Bill has a bit of a toothless smile and every time he laughs at me I see that missing tooth and …

Well, Wild Bill’s cancer treatment procedure has been set for May 16.

I feel very responsible.

Till next week,
Andrew

I’ve resisted for years but finally the decision was made to drag ourselves into the 21st century world of communications.

There are a number of reasons why I’ve been resistant to getting smart phones.  Here are some of the more important ones:

I rarely use one.  Really, I call Heather maybe once a week to tell her I’ll be late getting home.  Each of my two brothers calls once a week.  A high-tech recruiter calls about once a week for a chance for me to hang up on them.  So that’s about five calls a week.  During a busy week I might get six calls, if a friend calls – seven if my doctor’s office calls.
I’ve got a big 27 inch iMac computer to read emails on.  Why would I want to read them on that tiny little smart phone screen?
I am afraid that a new phone will become obsolete five minutes after I buy it.
Have you seen the price?  OMG!!! Not just the price of buying but the monthly fees.
The world just needs to disconnect more, slow down and consider the beauty of the natural world all around them.  I am trying to lead by example.
I have a cellphone.  It works.  It’s worked for 11 years and until it stops working I see no reason to get a new one.

Franky, I’ve just not seen the utility in having one, but then I am a bit of a Luddite and tend to object to most new technologies just because they are new.  Yes, not rational.  I am one of those guys that just falls into habits and tends not to veer from my routine.  If I was left undisturbed, I’d likely wake up, shower, go to work, come home, have spaghetti for dinner and watch Red Green, Adam-12 and Emergency! every night before going to bed.

Well, I have discovered that Netflix has all the Adam-12 and Emergency! Shows and Red Green has posted all his shows on Youtube – all of which I can now watch on my fancy new big screen TV.  So, I guess not all new technology needs to be beaten with clubs.

Here we are at that part of the post where I must revile the truth:

Why I bought iPhones

I am thanking Heather for being on the beach with the grandkids with her old cellphone in her pocket and in a fit of playfulness ran into the surf with the kids.  Yup, cellphone turned on and straight into the salt water of the Gulf of Mexico.

She discovered this back in the hotel room a couple of hours later (no wonder she didn’t get my call).  The phone was dead, DOA.  I made a half-hearted attempt to revive it.  Dried it off, plugged the charger and the poor little thing just vibrated and flashed it’s little screen.  Obviously it was suffering so I removed its battery – humanly euthanizing the poor little creature.  I hate to see things suffer.

“What do we do?” Asked Heather.

“We buy iPhones and blame you,”  I immediately replied.

Visions of playing Freecell and getting driving directions on an expensive iPhone started to fill my head so I don’t really recall the conversation after that but generally recall Heather agreeing to buying the new phones.  Still not clear if she is going to take the blame, but I figure she can send me Text message to let me know for sure.

Still, even with all the general agreement and Heather wanting a phone, it was last Monday before I called and ordered them.  I tried ordering them on-line but failed – too many buttons and Verizon site was being weird.  I tried to chat with a rep, but got a polite message that one would be available in the morning.  Instead, I just called the 800 number and did what successful men through the ages have done – I played dumb.

“Could you send me two new iPhones?  I have a credit card.  My wife said she wants a white one.  Do you have a book on how to send them text message things you can send along with it?” I asked of the overly friend operator.

As she brought up my account, I sensed a change in her attitude as she became more and more helpful.  Guess they work on commission and she realized she had a sucker on the line with a high credit limit.

I am not sure I like being called ‘honey’ by someone taking my credit card number.

The phones arrived on Wednesday and per the instructions I called the 800 number to activate the phones.  I failed.  Ended up having to call back twice and even the tech support people where having trouble.  Something to do with upgrading from an 11 year-old analog phone was causing troubles.  I’ll have to say nice things about Verizon’s support (even though in a blog, I am supposed to complain bitterly). They stayed on the line and kept escalating the call until they found someone who could get it working.  Then the lady stayed on the phone for another 25 minutes to walk me through setting up everything on the phone – email, voice mail, wifi, that texting thing but I drew the line at trying to figure out Siri (whoever/whatever that is).

And I handed Heather her iPhone and we started to play with them.

We entered a realm of bliss and excitement we’ve not know since… sorry about to cross into ‘too much information.’

These new phones are the coolest toys we’ve ever received.  Is there anything these phones won’t do?  I am sure there is app to cook breakfast but I haven’t had time to look for it.  So far I’ve loaded my music, played with the GPS driving directions, sent Heather a text message or 12, got a voice mail, played freecell while watching Adam-12, set up my email, connected to three different wifi hotspots, created a calendar, added a contact and blocked a recruiters phone number.

So far I think I’ve spent more time on my iPhone than my iMac this week.  The only reason I am on the iMac right now is that I can’t type this much on the tiny iPhone screen.

A couple of other things happened this week.  Heres a picture of the one other thing I did this week (taken with my iPhone naturally).

Basket weave marquetry. Details in a future post.

Till next week,
Andrew

Yup, I failed.  Couldn’t think of a thing to say.  Now four days later, I still don’t have a witty, insightful or meaningful comment on the subject.  That’s not completely true – I do have one suggestion: Go play with Legos.  Personally I enjoy building castles out of Lego.  Here’s one of my creations:

Simple castle with central tower and outer curtain wall anchored by four guard towers.

I have a rather extensive collection Legos – mostly grey bricks and castle parts.  Heather has the Lego Hogwarts express and needs to buy more track.  We do have other color bricks and a whole box of people.  I would like to point out that this is a collection of parts we bought for ourselves – long after the children were grown and gone – and I only grudgingly allow my grandkids to play with them (they put the parts back in the wrong boxes, mess things up and try to steal our mini-figures).  Usually after they visit, Heather and I will have to take a whole evening to sort out the pieces and put them back in the right containers.  Kids! They think Lego is some kind of toy.

Last week we went to Florida to spend some time with the grand kids and family. It was a nice vacation and we got to spend a lot of time with them.  Going to Florida has never been high on my list of things to do but I found out last year that they opened a Legoland there and only a 90 minute drive from where we were staying.

Well I had to see it.  We got there about just before noon and stayed all day.  The Lego city is simply amazing.  It’s very impressive to see what they can do with Lego and we took lots of pictures of the creations.  Here are a couple of pictures I took:

Space shuttle moving to the launch pad

Plumber carrying a toilet. This is a life size model about five feet high. This is right outside a restroom.

A Lego Boat recovering treasure from a sunken Lego Pirate ship.

Some of you were looking for the kids in the pictures.  You won’t find them – they had to go to school that day and Gran and Grandpa went to Legoland on our own, unescorted by children.

Lego is simply another media for the creation of works of art.  The nice thing is that you can build some, take the pieces apart and build something else.  Make a mistake? No problem, just take the pieces apart and start over.  I’ve lost track of the number of different castles I’ve made, but it’s got to be going on to about 50.  Sadly I rarely take pictures of them.  Usually at Christmas, Heather and I will get the trains out and make a train station, signal box, water tower, etc with Lego.

The adult in me wants to justify my use of Lego as just another of my many creative outlets – like marquetry, scroll saw, or other woodworking techniques.  But I do have just enough kid left in me to admit that it’s just plain fun.

As with all good things they have to come to an end. After Legoland we had to fly home.  The flight turned into a mess as we got caught in the great American Airlines computer failure on Tuesday.  The flight out of Florida was uneventful but when we landed in Dallas to get our connecting flight to California we found out that the computers were out.  We were among the lucky travelers that day as our airplane was at the gate with a flight crew when the computers went down and after a five-hour delay we got to fly home.  The passengers for the next three flights at our gate weren’t doing so good as their flights were canceled.

When we finally got home, I built the Lego set I bought:

Lego for grown ups – the architecture series. I wanted “Falling Water” but didn’t think we had room in the suitcase.

Yes, I bought a the Lego version of Big Ben.  Partly because I like Big Ben and partly because it was small enough to fit into my suitcase.

The rest of the week was crazy with getting back into work, taking my brother to see another doctor(more on that next week), having a night out with friends, doing some work in my shop and trying to figure out what to write tonight.

When I sat down to write, I couldn’t think of a thing to write about so I was about to go play with my Lego when I thought, “At least I could post some Lego pictures.”  Well, here I am a page later with more words than I started with, all because I thought of Lego.

So there is today’s writing advice: To be a better writer, buy a big box of Legos and build stuff.

Till next week,
Andrew

I had planned on writing a bit of a post before I left and then set it to auto-publish tonight.  Yeah, that never happened and here I am in a party hotel listening to loud music and writing.  I had promised myself that I wouldn’t do any writing or looking at the computer at all this weekend.  So far it’s been three days since I’ve touched a computer keyboard.  The withdrawal symptoms haven’t been too bad.  You should know that I don’t have a smart phone to fall back on so I’ve not read email, looked at Facebook or even any other blogs.

The music isn’t great but there’s enough drinks flowing that no one seems to mind.

Now I do have a perfectly good reason to be on the computer right now – it’s gets back to that not having a smart phone.  You see, tomorrow we’re off to LegoLand and I needed to get directions on how to get there.  I guess I could have rented a car with GPS instead of dragging a laptop through two airports, a bus, a train and the rental car.  But then, how would I write this post so you’d know that I was just taking a week off of writing and not in the hospital  on those tiny little screens ? My typing teacher never taught me how to type on one of those.

Nothing like that – just Heather and I here in a hotel without a smart phone and me needing to figure out how to get to LegoLand.  I am thinking that having a smart phone might be a good idea when we travel.  It would certainly be lighter and you’d get much shorter posts while I was traveling.  The only thing that’s kept me from getting a smart phone so far has been the expense, the question “would I really use it,” and the fact that my ten-year old cell phone still works for the three phone calls a month I get.  A friend at work was showing me this new fancy thing called, “Texting” which looked really cool.  My 14-year-old grandson has confirmed the coolness factor of being able to “text.”

Over the last three years, I’ve repeatedly said that my next phone will be a smart phone and that I’d get one as soon as the battery in my ten-year old flip phone dies.  It just seems wrong to take a perfectly good working phone and just throw it on the scrap heap so I can text Heather while she’s in the garden and I’m in the workshop.  I guess I could start sending her hourly updates while I am at the office.  She might be interested in everytime I go get myself a cup of tea or go to a meeting.  Do you send a text to tell someone you’re not going to be texting for a while?

Seems all too complicated to figure out and I only logged in to tell you that I am on vacation am not got to write a post this week.

Till next week,

Andrew