Spiders in the basement

 The last time Flora stayed here she told us she was NOT sleeping in the basement because there were spiders in the basement.  I was slightly amused and also had no answer because she was right, there were spiders in the basement.  The basement bathroom seems to the be place spiders flourish, they grew extra large in the basement bathroom.

When I first found them years ago I would just squash them with a thick wad of toilet paper then flush them down the toilet.  A rather harsh treatment for an innocent creature I did think, but it was a spider and it was rather large and quite ugly and I didn't want to share my bathroom with them.  Then I read that spiders were actually helpful to humans because they ate other smaller insects that were bad to have around the house.  This didn't make them any smaller or less ugly in my eyes but it gave me a little extra guilt for squashing them.  So then I would put a cup over them and then slide a stiff piece of paper under the cup and carefully carry the cup and paper upstairs to toss the spider outside hoping the paper and cup seal would not be broken along the way.  This made me feel better about the spiders in the basement.  Now I was freeing them into the natural habitat and who knows how much they were thankful for getting them out of our basement and into the real world.  I imagined a whole new life unfolded to them instead of a sudden death and then being washed away into the worst place on earth- a sewage pipe.  Although I did wonder how well they faired when I threw them out into the snow on a freezing winter day, but still, it might have been a shock, but better than being squished and flushed right?

All was fine with this plan until one day recently I read that moving a house spider to the outside is basically a death sentence to a house spider.  I had no idea.  Now I had to rethink my plan, I guess as long as it was just me and the spider I could live with him if he could live with me.  No one else used the basement bathroom so I decided to just let the spider be.  Most of the time the spider is in the shower which is opposite the toilet and I see him there when using the bathroom.  Sometimes I say a few words to him, nothing deep, just small talk. He never answers and rarely moves which is OK with me because when he starts moving is when I get the urge to squish him again.  Moving slow is OK but moving fast seems a little intimidating to me so I'm glad he almost always moves slowly.  I really don't know if I'm talking to the same spider over a period of time or if they live and die in a short period of time and I'm talking to a descendent of the one I saw last month.  I really doesn't matter, they all look and act alike as I never can pick out any identifying characteristics.  

Now I share the shower with them, I just tell him that if he leaves me a long, I will leave him alone.  The smart ones hide behind the shower curtain while the shower is going.  They seem to survive OK that way.  The not so smart ones don't go behind the shower curtain and apparently can't take the water because if they get too wet they die. I thought at first they were just shriveled up to protect themselves from the water and would be fine as soon as they dried out but no, they don't revive once they get all rolled up in a ball from the water.  Kind of surprised at that since once as a child I saw a spider walking around under water in the bottom of the bathtub and it seemed unfazed by the water and I was very frightened of the fact that the spider was so invincible.  So the drowned ones end up going down the drain in the shower anyway, but at least I didn't squash them and put them there, they sort of did it to themselves.

Lately I've noticed a large spider on several occasions in the shower while I visited the bathroom and began to wonder if maybe he was stuck in there, maybe he tumbled in and the sides are too slippery to climb back out.  That would be a rather unpleasant death I thought, starving to death in a shower stall because you couldn't climb out.  There's probably not much to eat in there.  I didn't really know if he was stuck or not but the fact that he was in there for several days made me think he might be.  Now I don't want to handle the spider, you know the old cup and paper routine, but I did want to give him a chance to get out on his own so he could go wherever spiders go when they go home for the night so I devised a simple plan to let him leave if he wanted to.  I took a few sheets of toilet paper, long enough to drape over the raised shower edge and it touched the shower stall floor on one side  and the bathroom floor on the other side, I called it my paper trail.  This way the spider could simply climb up the paper trail and over the low shower wall then down to the floor and freedom.  Seemed like a good idea to me.  The first time I did it the spider just hid under the paper, obviously this spider was not too bright, or my theory that he wanted out was wrong.  Either way I'm not sure if he ever got out or if he was one of the drowned ones.  It's not like I know them by name.  Just the other day though I put out the paper trail again and this morning it appears the spider is gone out of the shower stall.  He may be home at this very minute telling his family the horrifying story of being stuck in the shower stall and warning them to never go there.  On the other hand, he may have fallen into the floor drain in the shower and perished.  Or worse yet, his life in the shower stall was so bleak and he was so emaciated from lack of food that he flung himself to his death into the drain on purpose.  I'll never know, and really, I shouldn't waste what precious few functioning brain cells I have left thinking this much about spiders.

Sorry I lied, Mr Pallet

 I think I'm writing this because I still feel bad that I lied to Mr. Pallet, my junior high teacher and coach.  I met Mr. Pallet in the 7th grade, I was new to junior high, nervous as a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs (I love that line and just had to use it).  Mr. Pallet was my Geography teacher and boy was I intimidated by him.  To me he was a tough boxer masquerading as a junior high teacher.  He had a stocky build, raspy voice, and what looked like a broken nose and crooked lips.  On top of this he talked tough, he would shut anyone down who spoke up out of turn in class with "don't speak unless I pull your chain".  To a shy kid like me in a strange new school he seemed pretty scary, but you know, he had a very well behaved class.  And I found out as time went by he was funny, smart, and taught well- I just made sure I didn't speak without having my chain pulled.

Junior high had school sports and I found out my rapidly growing body was not too bad at knocking littler people over on the football field.  And there were lots of little people in junior high, now here was something I could do while hidden in a uniform wearing a helmet.  Instead of feeling scared, I could be scarry to someone else, felt pretty good.  Sorry all you little suckers, but not sorry enough to stop knocking you over.  After 7th grade football season was over I decided I should just keep on playing sports and basketball tryouts were next.  It didn't occur to me that not being able to dribble, shoot, make a layup, or know any of the basics of basketball would be a problem for me so I was shocked when they said I didn't make the team.  The coach was kind enough to say I could be the manager and that sounded pretty good to me.  I think I was thinking something like student coach, but in reality it had more to do with picking up wet towels in the lockeroom.  Not sure why but Mr. Pallet asked me about my basketball plans and when I told him about maybe being the manager the look on his face was enough to give me some doubts about the position.  In fact I think he just kind of scoffed at the idea of me wasting my time as a basketball manager and suggested I come out for the wrestling team that he just happened to be coaching with Mr. Pike.  There was a catch though, wrestling was only for 8th and 9th graders and me being a seventh grader meant I could only go to practice and not wrestle in any competitions.  To my 7th grade brain, there was no down side to that so the next thing you know I was sweating my butt off in wrestling practice with the 8th and 9th graders.  Neither Mr. Pallet or Mr. Pike had ever wrestled so it was kind of funny to see them trying to teach us wrestling moves from a book.  I can remember them laughing at themselves as they tried to teach us the moves while looking at the pictures in the book.  It was fun and in time I got decent at wrestling and had a winning record in matches in the 8th and 9th grades all the while Mr. Pallet and Mr. Pike kept on coaching us.  

In 9th grade I had Mr. Pallet again in the classroom and he was the head 9th grade football coach also so we saw quite a bit of each other.  I had grown to really like him, he was my favorite teacher and anytime he would talk to me one on one I felt he cared for me more than any teacher had before or since.  I did have one problem though- he was about my height and when he would talk to me he would step in close, put his arms on my shoulders and speak really close face to face.  It was never inappropriate but for a kid raised in a family of non-touchers it made me feel really weird.  I just decided that he was Italian and that's the way Italians talk.  

We had a sports assembly to honor the athletes when I was in the 9th grade and us guys on the wrestling team decided to get Mr. Pallet a gift to give him at the assembly.  We collected the princely sum of $30 (it was a princely sum to me) and one of the guys said his dad could get a really nice watch wholesale for that amount so I handed over the money to him and sure enough he came back to school with a fancy watch.  At the assembly I had to get up before the whole junior high and present the watch to Mr. Pallet, I was very tongue tied and very proud.  He seemed to like it, smiled real big, and tried it on right there in front of everyone.  I hope it really was a good watch.

Fast forward to high school, I was back in football and wrestling.  Same sports, same team mates, but new coaches, new bigger world of high school.  Once again sports was something I could feel comfortable doing.  Everything went along well until the 11th grade, I was still growing and had outgrown my wrestling weight class.  The next weight up had a senior who was pretty good in his class and there was nowhere else for him to wrestle so the only thing I could do was lose weight to stay in my weight class.  It was a disaster, I went from eating like a horse to eating like a bird and my energy and strength went from strong as a horse to weak as a bird.  I was getting beaten by wrestlers from other schools that I had beaten easily in the past.  Clearly something was wrong, I was arguing with my parents about not eating (some days I only ate one orange) and I had never argued with them before.  My school work fell off, I almost quit geometry- I couldn't think straight. My world had lost it's joy and everything seemed gloomy.  One of my worst showings on the wrestling mat was when I was easily beaten by a not very good wrestler in the high school gym one night.  After the match I headed for a side room off the gym to sulk and Mr. Pallet followed me there, he had come to watch his former wrestlers and was really concerned about me.  He asked me what was wrong, of course I said nothing was wrong and even when he asked me point blank if I was eating enough I lied and told him I was.  Team loyalty can be pretty strong and wrong sometimes.  

From the moment I told that lie I felt guilty, Mr. Pallet was my favorite coach and teacher and I had lied to him.  It bothered me that I lied to him when he was just looking out for my good. I got though that time of funk in my life and that was the last school sport I ever went out for.  Life moves on and graduation, marriage, children, career and a of lot other things crowd into the things you want, need, and have to do, still that guilty feeling would creep up from time to time.

When our oldest son went to school, who should be one of his teachers but Mr. Pallet!  I was pretty exited to find that out!  Really looked forward to parent teachers conferences, but it didn't seem appropriate to bring up that old lie while other parents were waiting to talk to Mr. Pallet. Some other time I would do it.  Then one day I saw him and his wife eating in Pizza Hut and went over to their table to say hi and once again, it seemed awkward to bring up that subject while they were there to enjoy a meal.  Another time I'm sure would be better.

It wasn't too long after that when I was saddened to hear of Mr. Pallet's passing.  It seemed he was all too young to die and now I realized I could never tell him I was sorry I lied.  It wasn't like he needed to hear it, I just wanted to say it for my own conscious, a rather selfish thing to think about in the time of someone else's death I realized.  But I genuinely was saddened for his sake and for his family's sake at his passing.  He was in my opinion a beautiful person, not with that fighter's face, but on the inside he was beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful, every so often I run into another beautiful person- Mrs. Pallet, she reminds me of Kathrine Hepburn.  I usually say hi to her and she remembers me as one of Mr. Pallets old students.  She is always kind and smiles when I bother her to tell her Mr. Pallet was my favorite teacher and coach.  I know I wrote this little post to assuage my guilt, but I'm hoping somehow I can give it to her and she will like it because it involves her Mr. Pallet.  

You can never go back, but what if you could?

 Sometimes I wonder what my 69-year-old brain would tell me to do if it was living in my 16-year-old body?  I especially think about High School because it was an unhappy time for me that I couldn't wait to get through and get on with life.  Somehow my 16-year-old brain had come to the conclusion that the whole world was watching me and if I did anything wrong I would probably die of embarrassment. I was only free in solitude or with the few persons with whom I was close to, then I could actually be myself.  Otherwise, whether walking down the hall at school, on the football field, riding the school bus, or sitting in church- pretty much anywhere I was, I was nervous about what I said or what I looked like or what I did.  I became what they called a shy person.  In hindsight I think I had become a self-absorbed person.  Everything was about the image I was projecting and whether it meet up with my perceived image I thought I deserved.  For that reason, I rarely enjoyed myself for fear I might forget about my image and do something embarrassing and that was a tragedy never to be experienced in my mind.  This thinking also kept me from connecting with other people on anything other than a surface level because I was just too busy thinking about me.   I guess I was a slow learner because it took years for me to realize that most people are so absorbed in whatever is going on in their life that they aren't looking that closely at my life.  For example, the whole school probably was not really as focused on the fact that the shirt I wore to school on Friday was actually the same shirt I wore on Tuesday and the teachers were probably not discussing it in the teachers' lounge either.  The final blow to my warped sense of self-esteem came late in life as a result of a divorce at the age of 48 which I found extremely humiliating.  But you know, the good thing about hitting bottom is you only have one direction to go from there and that is up!  At that point I decided I couldn't be any more embarrassed by anything I did or that someone did to me so I may as well just enjoy myself and if someone thought I was no longer cool- well that was their problem not mine.

So now I think what it would have been like to go to school with hundreds of kids my age and actually enjoy the process.  I love people and now I think it would have been a blast to have all those people to hang out with and have fun with.  It wasn't like we had so much responsibility that we couldn't be having fun most of the time.  There were some kids who actually did seem to have fun and didn't seem to care one bit about what people thought of them, I envied those kids, but I was looking at them from so far a distance away that I never even imagined myself in their shoes.

What would I do if given a chance to be young again but without the self-limitations?  Definitely have more fun!  Enjoy people!  Laugh! Pull pranks!  Tell people about Jesus!  Who knows?  I might even go to an after-school function!  Date lots of girls!  They were all gorgeous at that age!  I can see I may have gotten into some trouble without my self limiting behavior so I better just put away those plans to build the time machine back to 1970 and be thankful for where I've been, where I am, and where I'm going.  Yeah, I'm boring- just ask Cathy, but I'm pretty steady.

It has been about a week since I wrote the above blog and there is one more thing I wish I had done in High School and that is I wish I had been a champion for the poor, the unpopular, the socially awkward, and the slow in mind.  I saw them teased, ignored, and sometimes bullied and I wanted to step in and stop it but was too afraid that I would become the target if I tried to defend them.  I think I could have made a difference in how kids treated each other but I was not a champion, I was a chicken and that is one of my regrets from school.

Sudoku and life

This puzzle was fresh and new when I started, I had a fair amount of confidence it was going to be easily solved. Answers fell onto the page pretty quickly and I was seeing how the end would go from the way the beginning was progressing.  But somewhere a number didn't fit, well that's odd, but I can just keep going and that will probably resolve itself easy enough, sometimes that happens you know.  Problems just sort themselves out on their own sometimes, right?  But then another number didn't fit and another number that I was sure had to go in a square made another number in an adjacent square not work anymore.  What's going on here?  I buckle down and try harder but the more I try the more wrong answers I get.  Finally, I quit trying and go to the answer section.  I'm not going to cheat, just get a little help.  I start erasing wrong answers, but I don't write down the correct ones, that would be cheating, I just need a reset to get rid of the wrong answers.  Fair enough right?  I'm human, I make mistakes right?  Right.  Then I go back to work, this time with less enthusiasm but still I'm going to get this puzzle done for sure.  The trouble is the page is messy from erasing all the wrong numbers and the new numbers don't look so spiffy as I write over the erased squares, but, with a little more help from the answers section I get it under control and pretty soon the puzzle is complete.  All the numbers are right now and I made it to the end.  Not like I expected, the puzzle is tarnished and no one is giving me accolades for a puzzle well done, my head droops a little and I go on to the next puzzle.  Time goes on and eventually I have completed a whole book of puzzles, some well done, most rather mediocre, a few done really badly.  This puzzle book is my life, at one point enthusiastic and full of answers, but eventually tarnished and just glad to get by with whatever help I could find along the way.  No greatness here, never have been great, never will be, but that's OK, daydreams of greatness don't bring greatness, Greatness brings its own set of problems that I don't want anyway, so I'll just keep on doing what I know best- getting it done the best I can with whatever help I can find.

 

My children’s toilet paper revenge

 Please understand I really wasn’t trying to be so hard on you kids, times were tough, money was scarce, so we made tough choices.  Toilet paper was just not very high on the list of niceties in our day. We bought the cheapest one to get the job done and if I had to choose between putting food on the table or nice toilet paper in the bathroom I’d do it again. Fortunately now it’s no longer a this or that decision, we can afford good food and nice cushy toilet paper.

I think I have uncovered a revenge plot while visiting some of you lately. I think the minute my car pulls onto your street the orders are given to make the big toilet paper switcheroo and everyone jumps into action swiftly switching out nice cushy two ply toilet paper in all your bathrooms for the cheapest thinnest single ply toilet paper you keep just for this occasion. This toilet paper is what my friend Dan calls “John Wayne” toilet paper because he says “It don’t take no crap from nobody” except he doesn’t say crap. It’s probably imported from China and made from recycled wax paper.  

So look, I get it, we put you through a lot but please have a heart and put the cushy two ply back in the bathroom.

The old daddy birdie

 About once a year birdies all over the world talk about their daddy birdies with reverenced tones about how good a daddy birdie they are and sometimes special gifts are given or dinners and special messages sent to their birdie daddy.  This happens to me, I have six birdies who send me good wishes on this day and I sometimes wonder how this all came about.  I never set out to be a good birdie daddy, it just happened, but how did it happen?

Well my first memory of a birdie daddy was when I was just a little birdie and my mommy birdie and daddy birdie let me sleep in their special nest with them, I loved it!  It was so warm and cozy!  But after a while I got pushed out of their nest into my own little nest and it wasn't so warm and cozy and I was scared and felt alone.  My older brother and sister birdies were all sleeping in their own birdies nests and doing quite fine so I decided this was just the way it had to be.  Besides a new little birdie was now sleeping with my mommy and daddy birdies and she was so cute and tiny!  At least our nests were all close together in the same tree so it wasn't too bad, but still I sometimes cried at my mommy's nest door to come in but she said no and so I eventually gave up on that idea.  Plus I got to be a bigger and bigger birdie and I didn't even fit in their nest anymore so it was all good.

In time my older brother and sister birdies flew away from our tree and found a new birdie to live with and they began having their own little birdie families.  I found that interesting, but somewhat sad because I missed them.  Also the little birdies they had were meesy and seemed kind of gross to me.  They would fuss and cry over just about anything and then spit up their food and worst of all they would poop in a diaper that the big birdies had to change- Phew!  It smelled really bad and I hated the thoughts of getting my hands messy with anything as gross as that!

Then one day a pretty little birdie offered me some delicious cookies and I really liked them!  They were even better than my mommy birdie's cookies.  She kept giving me cookies and I decided I liked that pretty little birdie and that we should make our own nest in a new tree just like my older brother and sister birdies did.  Up until then I never really thought about how nice it would be to have my own nest in my own tree.  My pretty little birdie had all kinds of ideas on how to make the nest nicer and we set about working on the nest with much enthusiasm.  Pretty soon I found out that mating was more fun than playing football, working on the farm, or even eating!  

So mating and working kept my busy for a good while, until my pretty little birdie said she was going to have a little baby birdie just like my brother and sister birdies had.  I was surprised that baby birdies could be had so easily!  I wasn't so sure I wanted one of those crying, fussing, spitting up, pooping baby birdies but once they start to come, you can't send them back I was told.  When the babie birdy hatched I found he was so cute!  And the other birdies said he looked just like me!  How could I not be happy about that?  Yes, the baby birdie was fussy, cried over I don't know what, and made some pretty smelly, gross messes, but my pretty little birdie took such good care of him I rarely had to bother with any of that.  In fact taking care of the new baby birdie became my pretty birdie's passion and she fussed and coddled him day and night.  Sometimes I felt like I was all alone in my own nest with my new little family even though we were all together.  In time things eased up a little and me and my pretty birdie would spend some time together and wouldn't you know it?  Another little birdie was on his way!  By then the first little birdie was getting a little big for the nest and we set him up with his own little nest.  It was just perfect and I thought any little birdie would just love it!  But he didn't, he stood at the door of our nest and cried to come in just like I had when I was a little birdie.  I knew we wouldn't all fit in one nest once the new birdie arrived so we worked at making the first little birdie as comfy as possible in his new nest and given lots of time and crying on his part, he finally agreed.

And so it went, another new little birdie would show up and the one before it had to be pushed out of the nest.  It got easier though as the older birdies started sleeping together in their new nests and they kept each other company.  This happened six times!  By then my pretty little birdie was showing signs of wear, yes, she still gushed over the newest baby birdie, but the gushings were not quite as enthusiastic and she was getting woefully behind on keeping all the nests up in our tree.  Of course I was busy during the day working for our food and to pay the forest manager for our tree but when I got home it was MY turn to spend some time with the birdies.  At first I wasn't sure what to do, but I found they like being read to, being told stories and in general just being played with.  Eventually I found we could watch cartoons together while my pretty little birdie desperately tried to get the nests all in order.  Cartoons were the greatest!  I could just lay around and do nothing but enjoy the cartoons and I was watching all the birdies at the same time.

In time the little birdies didn't want to just watch cartoons or be read to, they wanted to play soccer or be taken to music lessons and things like that so I kept pretty busy doing those sort of things.  And even better, I found the older the birdie, the more they could help me with work around the yard!  In fact they became so good at helping me that other birdie families hired them away from me to help them do their work!  But no worry, there was a steady supply of fresh birdies moving up the ranks to help me.   That is until the last birdie came up the ranks and then wasn't there to help me anymore, that was a sad day for old daddy birdie.  By then I was an old birdie and lots of things had gone on over the years.  All the baby birdies had grown up and left our tree and their nests and even my pretty little birdie wasn't so happy to be with me anymore. I had grown tired and not so fun to be with anymore.

But!!  On that special day my baby birdies, now much older, still tell me I was a good daddy birdie. I sometimes don't believe them when I think how I never really wanted to have a bunch of baby birdies and sometimes I wasn't even the good daddy birdie I could have been.  However, I think I'm graded on a curve and that's good for me, there were so many bad daddy birdies out there that made me look better than I really was.  Plus!! my baby birdies grew up to be smart, good, birdies and that makes me look even better than I deserve also.  

So all to say, even though I didn't know what I was doing, I tried to do my best most of the time and with the help from my former pretty little birdie we got them all out of the nests and it seems to be just enough to get happy daddy birdie greetings every year.

Love you crazy birdies, daddy birdie

Death stop bothering me

 Life is full of fun and money, tried sex once was sweet as honey.

Who would know that fun would pass, and sex and money they don't last?

All the while the years click by, seconds, minutes, days, they fly.

While hanging on to time quite tightly, thoughts of death sneak up nightly.

But I push the thoughts away, besides- I lived another day.

What could possibly go wrong, with a man so smart and strong?

Hearts don't fail or cancers come to people over sixty-one.

I'm sure of that as people die (sometimes younger ones than I).

Then I think of all my chores, on thoughts of death I slam the door.

Somehow death can't tackle me, I'm sprinting on eternally.

(I could keep that lie alive, better at age twenty-five).

Ugly thoughts of end of life are brought to me by aching knees, various pains, and short memory.

This old body's showing signs of something I would call decline.

What the Heck? This shouldn't be! It's not the plan I had for me.

Don't ask me how, don't ask me why, somehow I thought I'd never die.

I'd keep on chugging endlessly, strong body, mind, and energy.

The details they do fail me know, but I'd succeed someway, somehow.

Aren't I the captain of my ship? barking orders from my lips?

Don't I decide which tack to sail? who gave the order I should fail?

I'LL NOT HAVE IT FOR ONE MINUTE! I'M THE CAPTAIN I SAY DAMN IT!

oh, so sorry, got worked up, just don't want to drink that cup

That cup of human frailty, for it brings loss and misery.

I'm fighting off that dark, dark, night when my life will take its flight.

To places I have never been, "no thanks" I'll stay right here again.

I want to be my own good god while walking on this earthen sod.

I chafe against any bit, that tries to make my will submit.

But I know what fool am I, mortality I can't deny.

And whatever makes me think I can pull back from the brink?

Have I had so much success, I think I'll never make a mess?

If I look back on my lifes trail, what gives me hope I will not fail?

Scattered all along behind, failures are not hard to find.

I've failed before will fail again, it only a matter of how and when.

So I have to honestly, think about my destiny.

Thought I hate to admit, to a higher power I must submit.

I'm not really any good at fixing me the way I should.

It's going to take a better plan to make of me a better man.

I look around and see, there's one who's call a Deity.

He's been trusted for so long, and even worshiped by a throng

of people oh so much smarter, the Bible seems to be their charter.

Though it says lots of things, there's one theme of which it rings.

And that theme is "live by faith", and you will find unending grace.

Grace to me the chafing one, to whom he says "please be my son".

Grace to get you through your trials, grace to others too (who wouldn't normally bring you smiles).

Grace to live, grace to die, and grace to trust he doesn't lie.

So now take a deep, deep breath, stop that worry about death.

And where we will go after that, my Good Lord didn't build no shack.

He's been making quite a place, it's all a part of his his good grace.

If faith it takes then faith it'll be, but solid rock faith you won't find in me.

It's stammering, stumbling, weakly me, until I reach eternity.

When that comes faith won't be needed, in fact faith will be unheeded.

We shall see him face to face, then all we'll think about is grace.

But faith for now however weak, is all my friend that we should seek.

A conversation with Jesus before death

 When I found out Sue Gansz (Shotts) was dying from COPD I wasn't too surprised, she had been a smoker and was on oxygen for a while already.  I knew she was a believer and I started to imagine a conversation she might have with Jesus in her last days.  Thoughts formed in my head and they evolved into a poem which I started, stopped, restarted, then finished after she died.  Here is the poem.

Hello Jesus, Susan here

Hello Jesus, Susan here

I'd like to talk, can you come near?

My voice is low, breathing weak,

It's getting hard for me to speak.

I know I'll see you any day,

but just a visit now I pray?

I want to ask of things ahead,

I'm thinking, thinking on this bed.

Hello Susan, Jesus here

Of course you know I'm always near.

So ask away I'm here for you

There's nothing more I'd rather do

Than talk with you and calm your fears

I want to wipe away your tears.

Oh Jesus, first I want to say

That life has drained me day by day.

I started off so strong and smart

but things have happened from the start.

Habits came and took their toll

while disappointments dimmed my soul.

Here I lay on deathbed sad

just wishing for the life I'd had.

So soon this life on earth is through

but there's much more I want to do.

I want to trade this weakened me 

for one who's strong with energy.

I want to run and not grow tired

I want to think with thoughts inspired.

I want to jump in mighty leaps

I want to never face defeats.

I want to write a hundred books

I want to have the cutest looks.

I want money to fall from trees

and rake it up whenever I please.

I want to eat and not gain weight

with heaps of goodies on my plate.

I want to sing upon a stage

with fans who think I'm all the rage.

I want to learn, I want to teach

I want to tan upon the beach.

I want to drive a car real fast

but never run it out of gas.

I want to laugh, I want to play

but mostly, I want the old to go away.

Jesus I've said a lot of things

please tell me what my future brings.

Oh Susan dear, you make me laugh!

in heaven you will make a splash!

I think though when you see this place

these thoughts of yours will be erased.

Once you see the Holy Fire

It's hard to keep these small desires.

You know I've spent a lot of time

making heaven so divine.

It only took me one short week

to make the earth of which you speak.

But if these things you still must do

then You Go Girl! I tell you true.

Thank you Jesus, you're so kind

but one more thing is on my mind.

I hate to ask, it might be sin

but such a state of hate I'm in.

The Devil's had with me his way

I really want to make him pay!

Could you lock us in a room

and leave me with a sturdy broom?

With which I want to beat him sore

and have him begging for no more?

For all the trouble he has caused

revenge is mine! and then I'd pause

And follow you in every way

never to sin another day.

Susan, Susan, what you ask!

I do not think that you can grasp,

The trouble that the Devil's in

he is the father of all sin!

I have the biggest axe to grind

that Old Snake- he's mine, all mine!

But when I throw him in the pit

stand close by me and on him spit!

He will give you no more trouble

I'll vanquish him on the double.

Now Susan dear you need to rest

you're passing through the final test.

Thank you Jesus, it's hard to breath

please send your angels with all speed.

Thanks for taking time with me

my fluttering eyes now angels see.

Rest well my child, they're almost there

your limp body they will bear,

And bring you to me oh so fast

then we will hug in one sweet clasp!

The Spirit of God from that embrace

will have you singing Amazing Grace!

Then voice and body ever strong

you will roar with the heavenly throng!

Voices from the junkyard

 

Trees! you give them an inch and they take a mile!

I'm a Jeep!  Jeeps don't belong in junkyards!

So he says to me "I'm taking you to a car show" Does this look like a car show?

Heh, heh, come on man, take me home, I'll be good!

I swear Henry, if you tell me that story one more time about how you beat a Studebaker Hawk back in '62, I will jump in the crusher!

Oh sooo many miles!  I just need to rest my weary frame on this tree for a little while then I will be ready to go.

                Tailfins! yes tailfins! that's why I'm here, he said he didn't like my tailfins anymore!

Fame! Fortune! I tell you I had it all!  I was running with the Jet Set then someone slipped a little Ethyl in my tank.  Man did I fly!  I wanted more and more until I was guzzling Ethyl by the tankful.  Pretty soon the pistons cracked then the valves went, after I blew out both mufflers I was towed here in disgrace.  I could have been a show car! now look at me- oh what a world.

So I does all dis work all my life see?  Den I have a little engin trouble and whamo! they sticks me in here.  Some gwaditude huh?

When I got here I had a few dings, I admit it, but just look at me now!  The bums who work here are the worst!

Oof! Oof! I've been pushing on this tree for years, one of these days it's going down and I'm driving right outta here!

From scooter to sports car with a little help from dad

In my last post I told you about my scooter and how in the end it went to my mom's cousin to be chopped up for parts to make a motorized trike, and that my dad got a 1958 Mercury Parklane convertible in trade for the scooter.  So then in place of a scooter I was the proud owner of the Mercury convertible.  But there was one problem, I didn't want the big old convertible- I wanted a little sports car.  My older brother Bob had recently bought a red Triumph TR4 sports car from Joe Fodrocy and I was just nuts about it.  My dad was really in love with the Mercury and he thought I would like it too, but it just wasn't my style and so I reluctantly had to tell him that I didn't want the big beast, and that I wanted a little sports car.  He took the news rather well and so that started me on a hunt for a little Triumph.  I finally found one by snooping around the back fence at the local British Import dealer in Muskegon called E&B Motors.  Behind the fence I spied a little black TR4 that looked like nobody loved it anymore.  I called the service manager there and he told me it was a 1963 Triumph TR4 that the owners had brought in for repairs but he wasn't sure what they wanted to do with it since it was in bad shape mechanically.  He said it no longer ran.  A day or two later he called me and said the owners would sell it to me for $250.  That was great news but as a junior in high school, I didn't have a regular job and $250 was hard to come by.  Dad to the rescue! He said he would buy the Triumph for me if I gave him the Mercury, I didn't even have to think about it!  A few days later we towed it home from the south end of Getty Street to our garage on Central Rd.  It had no brakes and I'm not sure how dad managed to keep from hitting me as I was the tow driver and he was in the brakeless car behind me.  Regardless, we got it home and into our little garage and it fit right into that little space.  I was on cloud nine!  I'm not sure exactly what was wrong with the car- I was only 16, but dad was a pretty good mechanic and he said he would help me rebuild the engine.  He pulled the head off the engine; got underneath the little car and the next thing I knew we were pulling pistons out of the engine.  He took the head to old Amel Heinz to have the valves ground, and I think he changed the crank bearings and put new rings on the pistons.  I didn't know exactly what was going on, but I was out in the garage the whole time just dreaming of driving the little car.  Eventually he got it all back together and we started it up and it ran pretty good!  I was so happy!  I had a few things to finish up on it and spent many hours in the cold garage with a small wood stove giving off a little heat to keep me from freezing to death.  Sandy came over and did a pretty good job of making me believe she was also interested in the car.  Mostly she just watched me work on it and froze in the cold garage in spite of the small wood stove.  I think I spent more energy working on the car than feeding wood to the stove.  Eventually I got it all back together and licensed and insured.  I think dad paid for that too.  Old Joe Fodrocy relined my brake pads and shoes with a machine that he used to reline brake pads for auto shops during WWII.  Parts were hard to come by for a British car in the US at that time. The car was a blast to drive, it had a four-speed manual transmission, and it was so fun to shift gears, in fact, I liked shifting so much I not only shifted up all the gears, but I also downshifted all the gears which really made the little car rumble and pop when I downshifted.  The fact that I had removed the muffler and put on what was called a "cherry bomb" in its place really gave it that sweet raucous tone that I loved.  My older cousin didn't though, he lived right across the street from Sandy and he heard it every time I came and went with my shifting and downshifting ways making a ton of racket.  He said it woke up their babies at night, but I just laughed and took it as a compliment to my little car.  It was the excuse for Sandy and me to go on our first date, I was just sure she would love learning how to drive a stick shift car and so we went to the blockhouse with a picnic lunch and I showed her how to drive it.  It was a great success, she learned to shift the car and I devoured a picnic lunch fit for a king.  I didn't think it could get any better than that and so the dating began.  My brother Bob lived in Kalamazoo at the time and he invited me to bring the car there and spend a few days with him so we could fill all the rust holes with Bondo and make it look better.  We did exactly that and most of the car ended up with black primer on it to cover up the patches.  The car wasn't very fast, but it was so fun to drive, it was just like a little go cart and could zoom around corners like no other car I had ever been in before.  The American cars of that time were bigger, heavier, and had really cushy suspension for a soft but sloppy ride.  This little car was like riding a skateboard, it wasn't too comfy, but it would turn on a dime.  Getting in and out of it was somewhat of a trick, you had to squat down next to the open driver's door, stick in your right leg under the steering wheel, than slide your body onto the seat, once there, you would have to pull your left leg up as tight to your body as possible while still being able to shove it down under the steering wheel next to your right leg.  Once you were in it was fairly comfortable with your legs straight out in front of you because the seat sat almost all the way down on the floor.  It felt like your bottom was about 4 inches off the pavement.  I do think if I stretched a little I could reach down from the open window with my left arm and touch the ground.  It had a convertible top of course and I drove it everywhere I could with the top down.  In time the reality of not being able to drive it in the winter- too low to clear the snow on the road, and the fact it had a tiny heater, made me look for another more traditional car.  My brother Bob took the car off my hands and paid me what I had in it, I think about $350.  He did a great job of cleaning it up, fixing it, painting it and eventually sold it for a decent sum, I think over $3000.  He offered it to me when he decided to sell it, but by then I was a married man with children and it wasn't practical to own it any longer.  There was one more brief affair with a sports car, a little red Triumph Spitfire, but that came around the time we were married and it just didn't hold my interest too long, it needed a lot of work and I ended up trading it for the only truck I ever owned.  It was a gas sucking Ford F150, I think it was a 1966. The only thing I can say about that truck was that it moved us to Alpena shortly after we were married and I sold it pretty soon after that.  Then for some reason, babies started showing up every couple of years, and babies and sports cars don't mix well.  My favorite Triumph ever made was the TR6 and it is still a pretty good-looking little sports car after all these years.  But it was British made during an era when British made cars were not well made so it isn't worth owning, besides I'm not sure I could do that tricky manuever to get in anymore.

My Scooter

 I was once the proud owner of a 1958 Cushman Road King scooter.  It was two tone aqua and white and is a collectible item now.  But in its day when I had it, it was way out of style.  I had it in the late sixties and the cool bikes were the little Honda's, Suzuki's, and Yamaha's zipping around.  Years before this when I was a little kid my older brothers had motor scooters and go carts but I was too young to drive them. Then by the time I was old enough, my brothers had moved on to cars and I was left with an old frame of a scooter in our decrepit barn just sitting there with no wheels, no seat, and no engine.  It was just a metal frame with a wooden floor and rusty handlebars that I would stand on (no seat) and pretend to drive.  I started asking my dad if we could put wheels and an engine on it and he made the mistake of saying that he sometimes saw engines in the window at the Goodwill Store downtown in Muskegon when he would walk by it on the way from his shop he worked at to the bank to cash his check on payday.  So every payday I anxiously waited for him to come home from work hoping he had an engine for the scooter.  But it was always either he forgot to look, or he didn't go by the store that day, or he checked and they didn't have one, Things were not looking good for me and my scooter.  

One day my luck changed dramatically, my brother Bob was going to work at the Grand Haven State park for the summer and he was also going to rent an apartment in Spring Lake so he needed something to get him just the few miles from Spring Lake to Grand Haven.  He and dad had found the Cushman somewhere for $50 it was decided this would do the job and they loaded it in the trunk of the car and brought it home.  It was big and heavy so that says a lot about the size of the car trunks in the sixties.  I was mesmerized by it, it had a full body that was painted as I already said in two tone paint, a floorboard with a clutch and brake pedals and a shifter on the side of the body to go from first gear to second- that was it, two gears.  Top speed was about 45 mph going downhill on a paved road.  The plan was for Bob to drive it for the summer then I was to buy it from him in the fall for $50 from the money I earned working for Tony Grumet.  I was really excited about this and couldn't wait to get it.  It seemed like an eternity before the scooter came back to our house and when I gave Bob the $50 he said I owed him another $25 for parts he had to put into the scooter to get it running.  I knew nothing about the extra $25 and only had $50 so I insisted that was all I would pay.  Bob got really mad about it and he and dad talked about it for what seemed like a long time, finally it was decided I only had to pay $50 but Bob was still sore about it.  

I was instantly the hit of the neighborhood; I had friends like never before.  Four or five guys would just drop by regularly to ride the scooter.  I was pretty proud of it, especially at first.  Yes, it was old fashioned, but it ran well when I first got it and was a lot of fun to ride on the little road in the woods behind the house.  We soon found out it was no nimble machine though; it was made for blacktop and the dirt road through the woods was a challenge for it.  It was easy to spill over in soft sand and really heavy to pick up right again.  But there were almost always two guys on it so between the two of them it was not too hard.

In time though things started breaking on it and I was not any good at fixing them.  One of the problems was the twist throttle on the handlebar broke and dad said there were no parts to be had for it.  I eventually rigged up a string to pull to make the engine run fast or slow but it didn't work very well and eventually I would just ride it with one hand on the handlebar and lean over with the other hand on the carburetor trying to control the throttle which made it even trickier to drive in the sand.  It got harder and harder to start but the final straw was when the old barn collapsed on it from too much snow on the barn roof.  At first I thought my Cushman survived the collapse with flying colors and I was pretty proud of it.  (Unlike the fiberglass boat that someone had unfortunately stored in the old barn that winter).  But a new problem began to plague the scooter, whenever I would go over a bump, I would get a sharp poke in the butt.  I thought maybe a coil spring in the seat had broken in the barn disaster. and when I went over a bump it poked up from the padding and got me.  I looked and looked for something that was poking me and just couldn't find it.  Finally I noticed that the engine also sputtered whenever I got the poke in the butt.  This lead to see that the wooden bottom of the seat had been cracked from the barn collapse and that the seat would flex down over the engine when I hit a bump and on the top of the engine was the spark plug with an uninsulated spark plug wire which would contact the coil spring in the seat when it flexed down.  So I was getting a shock from the spark plug in the butt whenever I went over a bump.  That and the other problems pretty much killed the love of the scooter at that point.  Besides, I was getting interested in cars by then.  So dad made a swap with my mom's cousin Monte Beegle who wanted the scooter for parts to make a motorized trike, I think he needed the gearbox.  We got in the trade a 1958 baby blue Mercury Park Lane convertible with a huge continental kit on the back.  The thing was bigger than the Titanic and it was now my car.  The only problem was I wanted a little sports car, but that's another story.

A day in the life of a sudoku puzzle

 This might be my day; I feel the pages around me turning.  It has been a long time since I was printed in this Sudoku Volume 101 puzzle book.  Puzzle number 144, and listed as a "very hard", I guess I can take some pride in being called "very hard", although my name 144 doesn't do much for me.  Oh Ya! I think the owner of this book is turning to me now, I don't know his name, some of the other puzzles have names for him though- like The Big Duffus, Dimmy, Dummy, Dork Head, anyway I have been hearing them snicker about him after he has tried his puzzle solving skills on them and I can't wait to have a look at this guy and his supposed "intellect".  It has been about a year since his wife gave him this puzzle book and it seems like an eternity to me for him to finally get to me.  Yup, I'm on deck!  Looks like I am the puzzle to be worked today.   Alright now, let's get a good look at this Duffus guy.  Hum pretty ordinary looking, no movie star that's for sure, kinda big, kinda chubby, gray hair, yeah, I see that dumb look when he sits there staring at me with his mouth hanging open.  Well, now that I have assessed his looks, let's see if he is as bad at solving puzzles as I've heard.  OK well I can see his eyes scanning me over, looking for the easy answers, but remember, I'm "very hard" I'm not giving up much to simple scanning.  Oh, he's not finding much is he?  Putting down some little possible numbers, that's not a bad strategy if you can make it work.  Ha! he missed that obvious 2 there right on line six, OK, this might be more entertaining than I had hoped!  Well, he is done scanning horizontally now he is going for the vertical scan, I'm not giving up anything there. There it is! There it is!  that dumb perplexed look they were all laughing at, Ha! if only I had a built-in camera.  So I can see he is stumped, what is he going to do now?  Oh, looks like he is doing the elimination process, trying all the numbers in a square to see if only one will fit.  Good luck with that Chumpo.  I knew that was going nowhere, what's he doing now?  Quitting? Where'd he go?  Hmm, I hear the fridge door open, yup, just like they said, this guy is a snacking machine!  No wonder he's chubby.  OK he's got his sticky fingers back on the pencil, let's see if his "brain food" of chips and hummus do him any good.  Alright, now were cooking, he is doing his fill out every possible number in a square routine.  What a mess!  He has studied this online and in help books many times but from what I heard; he is a very slow learner!  Now that he has this slew of numbers he has to somehow figure out which ones go where and this is the true test of a sudoku solver.  OK, he's looking really intently in square one at all the numbers in the nine boxes, I think I can see smoke coming out of his ears, I give him credit, he really is trying.  No, not yet, it's another trip back to the fridge, looks like a cold hamburger with no bun, leftover from last night's grill.  A little salt, a few quick bits and down the gullet, wipe hands on pants and back to square one.  Alright, he is making his move, getting out the new fancy eraser his wife bought him for Christmas and clearing out a couple of boxes that are just crammed with numbers and putting in the one correct number that he has deduced goes there.  Ha! Ha! Ha! he's got the numbers reversed!  Oh this is going to be good!  Now look! those wrong numbers are making him put more wrong numbers in the other lines and boxes!  Oh boy! when this guy makes a booboo, he makes it big!  I gotta control myself, if he hears me laughing he might suspect something is wrong and I want to keep this fun going for as long as possible.  In fact when he goes to the fridge for his next snack, I might just switcharoo a couple of my numbers to line up with his mistakes to make it look like he is on track to solving this one in a jiffy.   Oh! there go a couple more wrong answers, this is great!  I haven't had this much fun since I smeared ink all over the hands of that new kid the printer hired to print us in this book.  Anyway, what's the big galoot up to now?  Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! will you look at that!  Three wrong numbers all in the same row but they all look right!  Only a professional Duffus could pull this off!  Oh, this is rich!  Ha, ha, I don't know if I can keep my composure much longer, he is almost done- or so he thinks he is!  So far he hasn't seen the wrong answers staring out at him, I'm doing a good job of just keeping my composure and trying to look like all is well, "no problems here bud, just keep on putting down those numbers, you're doing fine".  OK folks, the end is near, he has only a few more numbers to fill in and then the truth will hit him like a ton of bricks.  It's funny how us sudoku puzzles can hide a page full of wrong answers right up until the very end, then when the last few numbers don't fit in it all comes crashing down.  Yup, there's it is, that puzzled look on his dumb face, is he going to figure it out?  I doubt it, he is in too deep to dig out of this mess.  Look at there! just like I thought- he's going back to the answer page- CHEATER!  You just can't trust anybody anymore- you know what I mean?  Wait now, hmm, he is not just changing the numbers, he is marking out all the wrong numbers, now he is erasing all the wrong numbers?  Well I hope he has an industrial sized eraser!   Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! gimme a break man!  you're rubbing the hide right off of me!  Oh, here comes that crazy little vacuum I heard about, ha, ha hee, hee, this thing tickles!  So he might be a rotten sudoku player, but at least he doesn't just brush the eraser crumbs off the book onto the floor.  Looks like he is going to go at the puzzle another time now that he erased all the wrong numbers.  Well it is definitely easier now that he got rid of all the wrong answers to finish solving me.  Plus he can still faintly see the wrong answers that he erased so he shouldn't make the same dumb mistakes again.  Although I wouldn't put anything past this guy!  Alright, finally done, looks like he got them all right finally, he's not too proud though, I can see that from here.  He hates having to correct all his wrong answers, but what's a big galoot to do?  He can't just sit around and spin his stupid fidget spinners all day.  Besides, I haven't laughed this hard since-I can't remember when, so as far as I'm concerned, this guy's a winner!

A dispassionate history of the Barnhart/Schotts family

 I am going to attempt to make a history of 4 generations of Barnhart history.  I will try to be brief because it covers a lot of time and people but I am sure a few extra comments will end up in here.

The Grandparents

My grandpa and grandma were Uria and Bessie Barnhart and Emmet and Rose Beegle.  I was told the Barnharts came here from Missouri when grandpa got a job working at Continental Motors in Muskegon.  My dad was born around 1925 and attended North Muskegon High School, did not fight in WWII as he was too young and had too bad of eyesight.  He did try to enlist.  Dad started working as a plumbers apprentice but soon switched over to working at Continental Motors and eventually retired there with an early medical retirement due to poor health.  He and my mom had seven children- Bob, Dick, Linda, Judy, Kathy, Mike and Debbie.

The Beegles came from Burr Oak Michigan to Dalton and were mostly farmers.  My mom's mom, Rose (or maybe Rosa) was a Dow and a Butterworth, also farmers.  Grandpa Beegle once ran a garage in Dalton and worked on Model T's I have been told by several people that he was a very good mechanic.  The garage failed during the depression.   They had three children, Floyd, Doris, and Mildred (my mom), Grandma Beegle was shipped to live with relatives in Chicago to prevent her from wanting to marry Grandpa Beegle but it did not work and they still got married.  The Beegles were dancers and drinkers so the Dows did not approve of him.  My dad said grandpa Beegle was an exceptionally good man.  However Grandpa and Grandma Beegle repeated history and did not attend my mom and dad's wedding due to not thinking my dad was a good man.  In time my dad was well like by grandpa and grandma Beegle.  The Beegle grandparents died around the time of my birth so I did not know them.

Grandpa Schotts was married to Ruth, not sure what grandpa Schott's name was, he died fairly young in what was ruled a hunting accident, not sure of the details.  The family was very poor and lived off the land in the White Cloud area.  I will try to list the children, Bob, Dale, Ken, Carl, Jerry, Art, and Kathy.  Dale was in WWII as part of the occupying force in Germany after the war.

Grandma Springer was married to Percy and he was a career army man.  They came from the Maryland area.  Grandma Springer was a short stout woman who reminded me of an English bulldog in appearance and personality.  Grandpa Percy was a tall man with a large belly which he like to keep full of beer.  Grandma Springer was the boss of the family.  They had a son and two daughters, Jeanette and Ester, I can't remember the son's name. He was somewhat of a drifter in and out of marriages and moved around the county some.  Ester was married to a sheriff in the Maryland area and appeared to have a comfortable life.  Jeanette met Dale while she was working in an army commissary in the Maryland area and they were soon married.  Grandpa Schotts took his new wife to live with his family in White Cloud and Grandma Schotts soon found out what poverty looks like.  Grandpa Schotts was self-employed most of his working life.  He was an excellent welder and built trailers for many years.

The Barnhart Schotts connection

I will call Sandy mom from now on because I think the only ones reading this are her children.  Mom and I attended the same small church in Dalton- Faith Baptist Church, and yes, she and her mother were late for every service even though they lived very close to the church, perhaps that was the problem, deceptively close means you don't have to get ready very early.  My older sister Kathy dated mom's brother Pat for years and so I knew her both through church and Pat.  One day mom brought me a plate of chocolate chip cookies for no reason and my opinion of her went up immediately.  I was enamoured at the time with a 1963 Triumph TR4 sports car and mom feigned interest in it and watched me work on it in our little garage.  Our first date was a trip to the blockhouse so I could show mom how to drive a stick shift car and she brought a nice picnic lunch.  A pretty young girl who feeds me?  I was hooked.  We dated though the twelfth grade, graduated in 1973 from Reeths-Puffer high school.  I went to work at the phone company as a janitor just before graduation, mom worked as a messenger girl at Hackley Hospital where her mom worked in the Personnel office.  I attended two years of automotive training at Muskegon Community College and mom attended one semester of Baptist Bible College in Clarks Summit Pennsylvania.  I wrote to her every day and she came home early because she said she was too homesick.  We were married September 9th 1975 at Faith Baptist Church.  It was a modest but nice wedding.  My grandma Barnhart had been moved to a nursing home by this time and so my Aunt Nell who owned grandma's home let us move in to rent it.  It was on Duck Lake Rd, and I found out what "mom clean" meant, this was a new experience for me.  The house was spotless from floor to ceiling and I got to help.  At this time I was still a janitor at the phone company and was itching for a promotion since I was now a married man with a college degree.  We moved to Alpena Michigan with everything in the back of my pickup truck (which I had traded to a coworker for a Triumph Spitfire, I got the better vehicle).  The move was because the job I wanted at the phone company was going to be open the following year when the old maintenance man retired and I was told if I did a good job as a janitor there I had a good chance of getting the maintenance man's job;  Jobs were hard to come by at that time so off we went.  One weekend we drove to Alpena and found an apartment in the want ads of the Alpena News, the next weekend we moved in.  I believe the address was 301 North Avery St, our landlords were the Wisneski's and they lived in the bottom half of the house.  We had the upstairs apartment with an outside entrance, pretty nice place except they controlled the heat and it was really cold in the winter and they got into a big fight and we could hear them shouting and throwing stuff almost every Saturday morning.  They had a cute little girl named Janell and guess where that name showed up again?

Life in Alpena

I worked as a janitor second shift and mom got a job as a waitress at the Big Boy restaurant which was a very popular place there at that time.  She also worked second shift which was tricky since we only had one car (truck actually).  We attended a small Baptist church in Ossineke just south of Alpena where we meet other young couples our age.  Ben was born 12-31-1976 in Alpena General Hospital and we found we had been blessed with the most perfect, smartest baby ever.  I got off work a couple nights a week for a few hours to attend electrical apprentice training at Alpena Community College then stayed late to make up for the lost time.  My goal was to become an electrician, along the way I got the job as a maintenance man.  We moved to Ossineke when our Pastor at Northland Baptist Church was forced out as pastor because the older members in the church did not like him.  We bought their house which was only a few years old at the time.  It was on Hiawatha Lane in Ossineke.  It was a bilevel with no garage, I added a small metal storage building, On 2-17-1979 (my dad's birthday) Steve was born, Alpena was the coldest spot in the nation that early morning-negative 36 degrees, and my 1971 Plymouth Duster barely turned over when I went to start it to take mom to the hospital.  We found we had another perfect baby on our hands and couldn't believe our good luck.  After about 4 years in Alpena I was really loving my job and enjoying the location when my boss's boss came calling to lure me to return to Muskegon as a supervisor.  I really didn't want to leave but mom wanted to go back home and she was always very persuasive so we went.  I was enticed by the nice pay raise and the fact the company would pay movers to move us.

Back to Muskegon

We moved to Muskegon in 1980, I had a hard time putting my money down on a house, they seemed so expensive!  $36,000 for a house?  Who ever heard of that?  So we moved into the little house in front of Joe and Jean Fodrocy's house.  It was kind of rough but I painted it and it got the "mom clean" treatment so it was acceptable for the time until we could find something better.  In the meantime we got a new kid and a new car all in the same year!  Janell was born 10-3-1981 and we drove a 1981 Plymouth Horizon Gas Mizer.  Janell turned out to be the far better and long-lasting deal.  My job was on shaky ground almost from the start in Muskegon, for one I hated being a supervisor and secondly our company was cutting back and consolidating and my job was being eliminated.  In those days you could just stay on in your job until they found another one for you so eventually I was offered a job in Terre Haute IN.  It was sad because now we had to move the kids away from grandma and grandps Schotts and Barnhart.  It was the spring of 1982.

Life in Terre Haute was not bad

I transferred as a building maintenance supervisor in Terre Haute and liked the job much better, Ron Jarman my boss was hard to please but he was in Lafayette IN and the local people and my employees were all good to work with so I was happy again.  We rented a little house from the Godfrey's -our new neighbors and attended Bible Baptist Church and the kids attended Terre Haute Christian School during the seven years we lived there.  Our house was on 25th St very close to the Church which was on 25th and Margret streets.  Our pastor was Bert Baker and he and Mary lived just two houses down from us with children that you all could play with.  Things seemed to me to go well there, we had David and Lisa born in Terre Haute, by now I couldn't keep track of the dates- so I will not attempt it.  We were now a family of 7, a force to be reckoned with.  I liked our life but we needed a bigger house for the growing family and mom didn't want to put roots down that permanently so after seven years we decided to move back to Muskegon.  It was a tough move, we no longer were being moved by the company since I had taken a job back in Muskegon as an hourly worker and we had to do the U-Haul thing this time.  The year was 1989

Back to Muskegon- again

I bought a house at 1208 W. Giles Rd to move the family back to Muskegon while mom and you kids stayed in Terre Haute to finish out the school year.  I gave it the "mom clean" treatment, took about a month after work every night. but I was living with my mom and dad at the time and had the time.  Being back in Muskegon was hard for me, I loved my new job and as long as there was overtime we could pay the bills but when there wasn't we were in trouble.  It got better in time once we pulled you kids from Calvary School but college costs soon came and I was broke for about the next 15 years.  To cheer me up, Daniel was born!   I think it was 1993.  Those were years of working, going to Church and Awana, raking leaves, attending soccer games, band concerts, private music lessons (which we couldn't afford), working on cars- mine, mom's and you kid's cars too, and sending kids off to college.  Somewhere along the way mom and I lost our way and she became very attached to another man.

The end of the marriage

It was a very dark time, I am not happy with how I acted.  Wish I could have been under control of my emotions but I didn't do that and things got out of hand a lot.  After fighting with mom for about a year over the other guy, I filed for divorce in 2002, the divorce was made official about a year later on 11-21-2003.  My birthday.  We had made 28 years of mostly happy marriage and then it was done.

In the meantime...

Kids were going to college, getting married and having babies!  So now it's your turn to see what life brings, I hope it is full of joy for each one of you.

Marriage is like a box of paper clips

 Let me tell you a little story about paper clips.  Paper clips are innocent enough, usually they are pretty mundane, not much noticed while they lay around in desk drawers next to the box of staples and pens and pencils.  But you would be surprised how much of my thinking has been taken up by the little paper clip and all because I decided to get remarried. 

My association with paper clips mainly started off with the Chronicle paper route and the need to attach monthly bills to the newspapers.  We found out that large paper clips worked well for that so eventually we bought a large package of them, probably about 10 boxes of paper clips and we had so many of them they outlived the paper route and just got used for general use mostly by me when paying bills and keeping financial records.  I found I had little use for any small paper clips, they were just too wimpy to hold much and didn't fit my big clumsy hands that well. So little paper clips were banished to the back of the desk drawer and large paper clips were always handy for when I needed them.  And that would be the end of the story except I got remarried and now the paper clip story takes a new turn.

Shortly after we took up housekeeping together, we got rid of the old green desk and everything I had in the old desk of importance had to move to Cathy's desk which was already pretty full of her stuff.  No big deal, I'm and easy-going guy this should work out just fine.  And everything did except for the paper clips, Cathy had a bunch of wimpy little paper clips and they were in a little plastic case that you had to open up to get a paper clip which wasn't that big of a deal but there were no big paper clips in that case, so instead of making a big deal about it I just added some of my big paper clips to the case of little paper clips and everything was wonderful.  But- in time I grew tired of fishing around in the little plastic case for a large paper clip and it seemed the little ones were always on the top and in the way of getting the large paper clip.  Did I complain?  No siree, not me, I'm an easy-going guy and why should I disturb our marital bliss by complaining about a little paper clip?  So, I decided to just handle the matter privately and wisely, which I did by finding a little dish that fit nicely in the drawer into which I put all the large paper clips from the plastic case leaving all the small paper clips in the case for anyone who wanted a small paper clip.  See how easy that was?  No muss no fuss as they say.  Things went along well paper clip wise for a good time until one day I reached into the large paper clip dish to pull out a large paper clip and to my disappointment I found I was holding a small paper clip in my hand; how did this happen?  Well obviously, my better half had decided that a paper clip dish is a paper clip dish and no one really cares what size goes in the dish, right?  On further inspection I found numerous small paper clips had been dropped into my large paper clip dish.  At this point I needed to decide what to do, do I bring up the problem, explain the whole situation from the beginning to the sad state of affairs that the paper clips had evolved into?  I knew doing that would risk me losing my easy-going persona that I rather liked having so I decided I just needed to put up with a few small paper clips in my large paper clip dish and move on with life. No sense making myself look small and petty.  This went on for some time but it seemed the large paper clip dish became fuller and fuller of small paper clips and finally in a flash of brilliance I realized I could just keep a small envelope of large paper clips in my financial folder that mostly only I use to pay bills and take them out when needed and put them away safely out of reach of any indiscriminate paper clip users.  And so that was the final solution, or so I thought.  Because eventually we merged our financial accounts to one bank with joint accounts and of course joint credit cards, so sometimes when Cathy uses the credit card if it something she wants to pay for herself she will attach the cash to the credit card bill for me to pay, with- what else? a small paper clip!  Now sometimes they are colored and cute paper clips but they are still small paper clips and since I have banished small paper clips from my life, I don't want to  put them in my secret large paper clip envelope in the financial folder so I just casually stroll into her little room where her desk is and drop them politely into the former large paper clip dish which is now just chock full of small paper clips then walk out knowing I am a bigger person for not complaining about it and  also realizing that she doesn't even know that the "paper clip war" has been raging on for years now.  

So, my take on all this is that marriage is a very good thing and why spoil it over petty things like the size of a paper clip?  Besides, how do I know that if I shine the light on the "paper clip war" she won't inform me of numerous "wars" I don't know about that she is fighting with me?  I'd rather stay dumb and happy and be an easy-going guy.

The birth of Ben

 Why was this guy in the store smiling at me while I proudly held my new baby boy?  I could only guess he thought as I did that Ben was the cutest thing that ever lived and wished he had one just like him.  I later found out that he probably was smiling because Ben had urrped up a batch of cottage cheese down the backside of my brown winter coat.  Shopping at JC Penny's was serious business and Ben had been handed off to me so Sandy could better concentrate on the shopping mission before her.  Which meant I wandered around the store aimlessly with the little squirt perched up on my shoulder.  Apparently this was before I learned the necessity of a burping cloth under his chin at all times.  Ben came out of the womb with a real talent for urpping milk, he did it in two variations, one was right after eating and that came out in the same consistency it went in but with a lot more force, think projectile vomiting.  Just don't get anywhere in front of him if you like the clothes you are wearing.  The other way was the slow cooker method, he would ingest large quantities of milk and then later deliver little white curds of cottage cheese.  This came out much more daintily and you wouldn't even know it was there until you noticed a curd or two lingering on his lower lip then find a fresh batch on whatever clean clothes he or you were wearing.  

How did two unknowing people find themselves caring for a little baby of which they knew almost nothing?  Well as the childhood rhyme says "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes (insert name here) with a baby carriage!"  But before the baby carriage came Lamaze classes and lots of breathing lessons.  I can't even remember all the different types of breathing that was required for all the different stages of childbirth which was going to make having a baby a pretty smooth process.  It was good to be living in the new enlightened age when just breathing correctly was going to be the difference between having a life and death struggle to bear a child and the joyful experience of birthing your child together.  In fact the husband was no longer banished to the waiting room as in the old days but he was now the coach and equal partner in the process, helping his dear wife concentrate on her breathing so as to move the process along smoothly.  Lamaze even said some mothers chose to have their babies in a bathtub full of water, what a calm and delightful birth that must have been..  I took my lessons seriously and looked forward to the happy birth of our first child.

Contractions started getting stronger and closer together, when they came about 5 minutes apart we headed to the hospital excited to get this done, the new baby was about to arrive!  But the rather naive nurse examined Sandy and said she was not dilated enough to be admitted and sent us home.  Did this nurse really know what she was doing?  We were having contractions 5 minutes apart, the baby must be imminent!  We went home against my better judgement and the contractions did slow down so maybe the nurse was right about this one.  Maybe a lucky guess on her part, who knows?  Later the contractions started up again and we headed back to the hospital, a little less confident this time, I wondered would  the mean nurse let us stay and get this delivery going this time or not?  Happily she let us stay this time, surely the baby will be out soon!  I started coaching, Sandy started breathing, we are doing great, in fact maybe too great.  The Lamaze coach did say it would become rather intense and there might even be a time when Sandy (I could hardly believe this) would have flashes of anger toward me for getting her pregnant but not to worry that would all go away after the baby was born.  There was no sign of any anger coming from Sandy, just diligent breathing and waiting for the big event to happen.  However as the minutes turned to hours and the breathing didn't seem to be moving along the birth in any way, it became difficult to keep up the rah, rah spirit a good coach should have.  After MANY hours of waiting, and contractions, and Lamaze breathing, things finally began to get more intense.  But when we would summon the nurses to check to see if Sandy was fully dilated they would just say "not yet, give it more time".  Somewhere along the way the breathing routine started to get old and when I tried to encourage Sandy to do the "candle blowing" she flashed a look at me that suggested the only blowing she wanted to do was blowing my head off with a gun if one were only available, so I decided to back off on the coaching for now.  Finally the time came, they called the Dr. to come to the hospital, by then it was late at night and I thought the nurses said they had to get him from a party.  In a while a short man with a cocky attitude arrived and started giving orders to nurses who seemed to be very capable of running the delivery room without him.  The time to push came and I saw  a struggle to push and veins popping out that I never even knew existed on Sandy's forehead..  The Dr. did a little checking here and there and then decided he needed forceps.  I don't think the Lamaze class said much about forceps so I watched with great interest as the Dr. inserted these rather large spoon like devices into the birth canal and then clicked them together to form a metal cup around Ben's head.  The Dr. said he had to wait for a contraction and would then deliver the baby with the aid of the forceps.  I anticipated a gentle tug from the Dr. would be just the thing to get that stubborn baby to slip out.  To my surprise the little man crouched down at the end of the birthing table and placed one foot on the end of the table and prepared to pull with all his might when the contraction started.  The contraction started and the Dr. pulled with all his might and I immediately lost all hope of having a live baby come out.  I was confused- why would this cruel Dr. leave me in the delivery room while he pulled our baby out one piece at a time?  Why would he not send me out if this is what the plan was?  To my surprise out came Ben's head and then amazingly, the rest of his body was still attached to his head!  We had our baby at last and he was alive- a little dented up, but alive.  The forceps put dents in his skull but the nurses  said that was normal and other than a cone shaped head, he looked pretty good.  So my moment of despair quickly turned to joy and all was right with the world and our little family.  Sandy didn't look like she hated me anymore and I began to realize the nurses were our best friends in the birthing room, the Dr. was a necessary intruder, and Lamaze?  Well, wasn't Lamaze French and isn't it said that very little in the French culture actually works?  I think now if it had been a German or a Dutch birthing program it would probably have worked, instead of being called something smooth and easy like "Lamaze" it would have been called "Der Gettenouttababe" and a lot of marching around and loud yelling would have proceeded a quick delivery.  Welcome to the world Benjamin James, nothing has been the same since you arrived.