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.

Get out before she blows!

I'm going to take a winding trail to get to the heart of this story.  It starts for me with the fact that my Dad often had an old car sitting around that was there as far as us kids were concerned to drive through the two track in the woods behind the house.  Usually the trick was getting it started.  My first rememberence was my great aunt Nell's early sixties Renault Dolphine- it was a little bug of a car with a rear engine that was supposed to be Renualt's answer to the Volkswagon Beetle.  The brakes had gone out on it and so Dad had it at the house to fix them, but I remember hearing him tell people that the car had a full splash pan under it and all the bolts were metric and he wasn't about to tackle that project.  So us kids started driving it though the woods, driving a car without brakes thought the woods- what could possibly go wrong?  Actually nothing ever went wrong, we knew it didn't have brakes and drove accordingly.  My older sisters taught me how to drive it since it was the first stick shift car I ever drove.  It stayed around for a year or so as I remember, then it must have moved over to the junkyard next door.  The next car I remember was  a year or so before I got my drivers license, someone gave my dad an old rusted out mid 50's Ponitac which was an old clunker that was too far gone to fix.  But it ran- if you jump started the battery and poured a little gas into the carburetor before you started it.  That car would roar to life once started and it was a very satisfying sound to a young man's ears.  The exhaust had almost completely rusted away and a V-8 engine with no exhaust is a deafening sound.  I loved the car, but it did have it faults, first of all if you were careless with giving it a shot of gas in the carb it would sometimes shot a flame out of the carburetor like a flamethrower so you never knew if you might catch the car on fire or get a fun ride.  The second problem was the floor boards were totally rusted out and the front bench seat would flip over backwards when you stepped on the gas so you had to hold onto the steering wheel to keep you upright while you drove.  A minor inconvenience for a teenage thrill seeker.  It was pretty fun to drive and I figured out how to make donuts at the turnaround at the end of the two track, the roar of the engine and throwing dirt from the tires while turning around made the trouble of getting it started worthwhile.  Around that time my best friend Tim decided to rebuild the engine in the old Nash station wagon his dad gave him.  Tim espoused to be a seasoned mechanic at the ripe old age of 14 and proceeded to pull the engine out of the car and install new rings and bearings with my dads help.  Somewhere along the way a bolt must not have been tightened properly and when the rebuilt engine was started it had an ominous knocking noise that clearly said something was wrong.  Well my dad laughed and blamed it on Tim (which was probably true) and the car joined my Ponitiac on the trail.  This was all for the good since now Tim and I could race each other through the woods.  It was great fun until one day when Tim slid into a tree and smashed up the front headlight and grille,  After that Tim's claim that he was going to go back into the engine and fix the knocking sound and have the car road ready by the time he got his license quietly went away and the car ended up next door at the junkyard with the rest of the junkers.

Fast forward to around 1989 when we had recently moved to Muskegon from Terre Haute.  Your mom decided Ben needed his best friends Jason and Shawn to visit for a week the summer after we had moved here.  Of course Steve joined in also for a week of camping, hiking, biking, and Michigan's Adventure type activities.  And of course somehow I was volunteered to take the week off work to make this all happen.  It was actually a lot of fun but also the hardest working vacation I probably ever went on.  Feeding and supervising 4 busy boys was a full time job.  I think most of the meals were cooked over an open fire at the campsite at Pioneer park and clean up lasted almost until the next meal.  At that time my dad had an old 70's Buick that he let Ben and Steve drive though the woods,  It was a huge four door land yacht and not in too bad of shape.   So of course all the boys had to take the car for a spin through the woods.  We warned Ben to drive slowly and carefully which was probably just a waste of breath at that point.  We were standing in the yard at Grandpa and Grandma Barnharts waiting for the car to come back from their ride when all of a sudden we heard a tremendous crash sound from the woods.  Sandy and I both raced out to see all of them out of the car which had plowed into a tree and the front fender was crushed into the wheel so the car couldn't move.  Ben's story was he was driving carefully and somehow got distracted or something and hit the tree.  When it happened Jason shouted "get out before she blows!" and I think they all jumped out the windows at that point.  I was really disgusted and took an axe to the fender and chopped it away from the tire so it could at least be driven again.  "Get out before she blows" became a favorite saying in the Barnhart clan after that whenever something crashed or when wrong.  Which was fairly often.

Greg reaches out

Greg crouched low by the chain link fence.  The morning light brought a red glow to the sky in the distance, lately the sky was reddish almost anytime of the day.  Greg looked at it and felt the hate swell up in him like it does often now.  "Why does it have to be this way?"  He remembered when things were different, when mornings ushered in blue skies and singing birds, when it wasn't blazing hot all the time even at night like it is now.  He knew who to blame, "it's the greedy capitalists" he thought for the hundredth time, if they hadn't just keep on burning fuel and causing the earth to heat up things could have stayed like they were before.  There were plenty of warnings- private, government, local, and global experts had been warning for years it was coming but the business owners didn't listen, they had products to sell, deadlines to meet, profit margins to reach.  And then toward the end once it reached a point when no one could deny what was going on they finally got scared enough to stop production of the factories, but by then it was too late.  It was like a heavy flywheel spinning out of control and nothing could slow it down or stop it.  The earth just kept getting hotter and hotter, people moved in droves further and further away from the hottest areas at the equator toward the north and south poles, and pandemonium became the norm.  Laws and borders, fences and walls, border guards and vigilantes could not stop the flood of immigrants.  Survival overtook civility and mob rule became the way of the world in this new era of take what you need to survive and don't worry about anyone else.  The toll was staggering in human life, those in the hottest zones would die if they stayed there, many who left in roaming gangs looking for food and relief from the heat died along the way and more died trying to cross the obstacles placed in front of them by the people who had gotten to the livable areas first.  But still they kept coming, in waves of fifties, hundreds, and more, relentlessly pressing, pressing, pressing, against the barriers set up to stop them.  Eventually nothing could stop them and once they overran the blockades and had ravaged the land of food and water and resources in that one area they would be on the move again and push into the next area and the cycle would repeat itself over and over again.
Greg hated the immigrants, hated the way they looked, the way they talked, the way they smelled, and mostly the way they just took whatever they wanted in order to survive.  

He didn't like to think about it, but most would say Greg grew up privileged.  Sure his family had a business making tires for automobiles, but it had been in the family for generations, and Greg didn't feel guilty about what part it had in the destruction of the planet.  He didn't ask to be born into his family, he never ran the business, in fact he just jetted around from one vacation spot to another until lately when he traveled from one place to another just trying to avoid the heat, find sustenance, and avoid the roaming mobs. There was no such thing as a vacation get away anymore and Greg resented it.  It was getting harder and harder to travel, grounded jets were now being taken over by the homeless, and for the last month, Greg had been on foot to reach this destination at the chain link fence.  He was in full desperation mode now, he really wasn't much different from the homeless people he loathed and avoided at all costs.  Gone was his prestige and his money, his ability to pay his way out of any situation he found himself in.  He was dirty, hungry, and desperate to get away from everything that had now become life on earth.
On the other side of the chain link fence was Greg's last hope for survival.  Standing against the orange morning sky was a sleek rocket with the name Spirit emblazoned on the side. Greg had heard enough about this rocket to know that this was his ticket to escape planet earth.  Greg had heard that the rocket was owned by the Theos Corp and had even seen short video's of the son of the owner of Theos urging people to sign up to leave the earth for a new habitation, one that promised everything that earth had the potential to be at one time but unlike earth, this new planet would be controlled by Theos Corp and would not allow anything to destroy the perfect way of life found there.  But Greg had a problem with all this, it was said to join the people in the rocket he would have to submit to the Theos Corp rules and even give up his rights as a person to do whatever he wanted.  Greg was too independent for that, he had been his own man all his life, in fact he had lived a pretty good life.  Sure he had stepped on a few people along the way to get what he wanted, but isn't life the survival of the fittest as they always say?  Besides the Theos Corp, Greg had another problem, and it was the owner's son Chris. Chris was promoted in the video's as this loving, caring guy who just wants to save as many people from earth as possible and take them to the new location.  And then there was the talk about the supernatural surrounding Chris, how he did things that couldn't be explained with science- and that really bothered Greg.  He figured science was the highest pinnacle of man's wisdom and for some guy to allegedly go around science and make things happen like magic just didn't set well with Greg.  It was like who gave this dude the right to suspend the laws of nature?  It's not as if Chris set up the laws of nature himself and then could get around them as he pleased, right?  Greg was sure it was all just hype from the Theos Corp anyway and that made it even worse.
In spite of Greg's disregard for Chris, Greg knew that rocket roared off the launch pad every morning at 6 AM and if he wanted to live much longer he needed to be on it.  Instead of signing up through the Theos Corp Greg made his own plan.  He had been hiding by the fence watching the rocket make trips for about a week now and noticed there were hand rails on the sides all the way up to the cargo bay doors and he had seen workers on the lift off scaffold open and close those doors before every launch.  They weren't locked and he was sure he could get that door open on his own if only he could sneak up to the rocket just before liftoff and climb up those hand rails.  It was chancy Greg knew but he was not about to submit to Theos Corp and Chris for anything.  Greg had a stubborn streak that ran hot when it came to getting what he wanted and how he wanted to get it. 
Movement to Greg's side roused him from his thoughts and he instinctively sprang to his feet to escape what must be a security guard.  Greg had not seen a guard outside the fence the whole week he had been there and had gotten careless, Greg chastised himself as he started off running.  A strong hand grabbed his shoulder from behind and Greg stumbled down face first to the ground writhing and kicking at whoever was holding him back.  "Stop it! settle down!" Greg turned to see it was a guard and who was bigger and stronger than Greg so he had little choice but to lay there and hope the guard would let him up.  "What are you doing here?  You know this is a restricted area."  Breathing heavy, Greg decided to just tell the guard what he was doing there, Greg was too weary to make up a lie at this point.  The guard nodded as Greg talked, he had heard it many times before, and as Greg finished telling him the plan the guard just shock his head slowly and asked why on earth didn't he just sign up the right way and get on board like the other people did?  Greg got angry and cussed out Chris, the Theos Corp, and even cursed the rocket a few times.  He was just too proud to humble himself to that ordeal he said.  The guard looked at Greg for a moment, and he genuinely felt sorry for him.  The guard told Greg some amazing things about Chris and how that Chris had even been injured to the point of death trying to get people into the rocket and how that medically speaking he shouldn't even be alive, but in spite of this he keeps putting out the word relentlessly to warn people on earth to enter the rocket and leave this doomed planet.  Greg wasn't buying it, "another stupid zealot" he thought to himself "how much is Theos Corp paying this guy?".  "Just let me go and I won't bother anyone around here anymore" Greg told the guard.  To Greg's surprise the guard let him go with just a stern warning to stay away.
Greg went back to a hiding place he had set up when he first arrived at the launch site about a quarter mile away in some bushes and tried to sleep for a while.  It was too hot to sleep, Greg was hungry and thirsty.  He had eaten and drank the last of the provisions he had stolen the day before.  "Tomorrow's the day" he thought, "I can't hang on here any longer, I've got a plan I will just have to work the plan tomorrow morning.  It's my only hope."

Fitful sleep made for a long night, Greg got up and moved around some.  "I've got to get limbered up to be able to scale that fence then climb that rocket all in the short period of time the lift off crew leave the site and the rocket starts liftoff."  Greg knew the fiery liftoff would bake him to a crisp if he was still climbing up the side of the rocket when the burners started igniting.  He had only about 2 minutes he figured from the time the liftoff crew left the area for him to climb the fence, race to the rocket, climb up it and get in the cargo doors before the flames started rolling up the sides of the rocket.
Greg was tired and dirty, he smelled as bad as the immigrants he despised and now hunger and lack of sleep were dogging him but none of that mattered.  It was go with the plan or die, "the survival instinct is stronger than I thought" Greg realized.  Greg checked his time, it was time to move out.  "If only that guard doesn't show up I think I can make it" Greg thought as he crouched and moved toward the fence.  In his weakness Greg felt like he could see himself moving along as if he were watching from above his own progress, it was strange but Greg had little time to think about it.  Finally at the fence Greg thought he must be getting delirious because laying against the fence was a pair of wire cutters, Greg grabbed them and they were real, in no time he had the fence cut open, "no climbing for me" he thought.  He checked the time again and it was almost time for liftoff, the ground crew began moving out and Greg got ready to make his move.  It was crucial that he get from the fence to the rocket without detection but he had no plan for how to accomplish it.  This part of the plan was just left up to sheer luck and Greg hated that, he wanted to be in total control but as hard as he had planned he could not come up with any good way to get there undetected, he would just run as fast as he could and hope for the best.  The fence was cut, the ground crew was gone, now was the time to run for it.  Greg's legs felt heavy as he started out across the open area to the rocket, in fact he could see himself from above again and it looked like slow motion steps as he ran.  Everything in his brain screamed RUN! but fatigue in his body failed him.  Nevertheless, somehow he made it across the open area and when he came to the base of the rocket it looked bigger and harder to climb than he thought it would be.  Greg had no time to waste, soon the rocket boosters were going to ignite and he was standing right under them.  With waning strength Greg jumped up to grab the first hand rail and pulled himself slowly up to reach the next rail.  Once he got a foot hold on the lowest rail he began climbing hand and foot up the rails.  It was slower climbing up to the cargo doors than Greg had planned, but he keep climbing.  Up and up he climbed exhausted and breathing heavy, every reach up for the next rail and every step up with his feet was painful and he felt he was going to drop off the side of the rocket at any moment.  Strength was low and hope lower as he finally reached the cargo door.  Greg saw the cargo door handle just above him and paused to get one last breath before reaching for it, but the pause was interrupted by the thundering sound of ignition from the boosters below.   This was it, open the door and get inside or die Greg lunged for the door handle.  "LOCKED!" Greg cursed the door handle, he cursed the rocket, he cursed Chris, and the Theos Corp and he slumped back away from the door in defeat.  He may as well just let go and fall into the surging flames that were starting to roil under the rocket.  How could he have not known they would lock that door!  How could he have thought he would be able to pull this off by himself?  Greg was done with himself, it was over, he knew he was a thief trying to lie and cheat his way out of the earth that he had helped destroy.  He saw himself for the fraud he really was in that instant and it hurt more than anything else had ever hurt him in his whole life.  "How could dying in the flames be any worse?"  he thought. The flames were reaching out from under the rocket and the rumble and roar of them was getting louder by the second.  Heat was blasting up from below him like no heat he had felt on the scorched earth he had hoped to escape.  Greg knew the end had come and he felt his grip on the rails getting weaker.  The cargo door above him made a loud sound then with a louder bang it swung open,  Greg's grip locked onto the rails as he was startled back to the reality of the open door and at the same time the intensity of the flames grew hotter around him.  Standing in the door was of all people-Chris, and he reached his hand out to Greg to pull him in.  Chris shouted above the roar of the rocket engines, "Get in! you only have seconds!"  Greg pulled back, this wasn't his plan, he didn't want Chris to rescue him, it was all wrong.  Time seemed to stand still as Greg looked at Chris and saw two things instantly, the first was his hands, they were charred beyond belief, Greg didn't have time to think about it but what could be the reason for those hands?  Then he saw the eyes, they were unlike any eyes he had ever seen before, in just the short moment of time Greg looked at Chris's eyes he felt like Chis had looked all the way down into Greg's soul and knew everything about him- good and bad, but also the penetrating eyes emitted a sense of warmth, of comfort, of caring.  It was almost like love was flowing out of those eyes and Greg needed love now.  At this point Greg was engulfed in the flames and he could feel his hair and clothing bursting into flames, the heat was unbearable and Greg knew this was the end of him.  In that final moment of the end, Greg reached for Chris's hand and then everything went blank.
Greg opened his eyes and he had no idea how long they had been closed or where he was.  Was he just imagining he opened his eyes and was he really just laying on the launch pad cooked to a crisp?  "So you have revived?" Greg heard a voice, the same voice that called him into the rocket ship,  And of course there he was, it was Chris, with the same charred hands and the same eyes that Greg had seen standing in the cargo door.  "You mean I made it inside?" asked Greg,  "Yes you did, with very little help from you" Chris smiled.  Greg looked at Chris's hands, those charred hands, "You got those hands burned from pulling me in didn't you? " "Yes, you and many others" Chris said.  Greg looked around, "where are the others?" he asked.  "What others? you are the only one on this trip except the guard who left you the wire cutters."  The guard walked up to Greg smiling, "did you leave them where I can find them for the next guy?" ""What next guy?  What do you mean?  Where are all the people who sign up the right way?  Why am I the only one on board?"  Chris sighed, "You don't think anyone really just signs up and comes on board like that do you?  You are all the same" he said laughing, "you all think you are the only one who is going to sneak in by your own grit and bypass me.  You know, sin is more powerful than anyone can imagine.  No one leaves earth who hasn't been burned by it.  And look at my hands, every one I pull on board just like you gives me another layer of char.  But it's OK because we now have a great new start to life together, I love you because I made you originally, you wandered away, and now I have you back again, and you love me because I saved you."  We have a new place to go and figure this new life out together without any of the evil from earth following us there."  Greg looked at Chris "I am so sorry! what can I do to show you I am sorry?"  Chris shook his head "you can't do anything, everything has been taken care of by Theos Corp, I pull people on board, and the Spirit carries us to the new perfect planet." Greg smiled for the first time in he couldn't remember how long.  "I'm going home to a place where I have belonged and I never even knew it existed" thought Chris.  Greg looked out the window at the new planet they were headed to hanging like a jewel in space, first tears welled up in his eyes, and then he laughed the hardest he can ever remember laughing.

I shot the cat, went to work- Mike

I remember Mom was somewhat amused by the note I left on the kitchen table.  "I shot the cat, went to work- Mike"  We used to leave little short notes to each other on the kitchen table just to know where people were and what we were up to. I remember her commenting on it years later as a note she still thought was funny in an odd way.
It must have been the summer of  '73, I was taking classes at Muskegon Community College and working evenings at the phone company as a janitor.  I came home from school to find no one home, but Tom our roaming big orange and white cat was still laying on the porch with his rear end and legs mangled from what must have been a car-cat accident which he didn't win.  He was still alive and had managed to pull himself home with his front paws and had made it as far as the porch.  Of course we didn't take him to the vet, people barely were taken to the doctor back then let alone take a cat to the vet.  So someone put a little food and drink near his head and left him there to see if he lived,  and that was the trouble, he did live.  But in my opinion it was not a good life, he couldn't get up and walk and messy stuff was oozing out of his rear end onto the cement on the porch.  To make it worse, you had to step over him to get into the house. But it was the oozing that really bothered me.  He had been laying there a couple days or so and it just seemed to me that no one was taking this seriously and doing anything about it so I decided to be decisive and that I had to be the one to step up and do a mercy killing of the cat.  I decided the best place for this to happen was in the field between the garden and the pine trees behind the house,  Then I could bury him right where he died.  I also decided the cat should die happy so I got a big chunk of hamburg out of the refrigerator for him to eat as a combination last meal and to keep him occupied while I shot him.  The only gun I had available was my 12 gauge pump shotgun, the bad thing about that was it was a big gun for just a cat, but the good thing was if I missed the first shot I had five more shots before reloading.  So somehow I got the cat, the hamburger, the gun and the shells all out to the field behind the house to carry out what I thought was a rather noble mission.  Now in my mind I think I expected that when I shot the cat, he would take the bullet like a man, raise his head up and give me a look of thanks for putting him out of his misery then drift off calmly to sleep.  Sort of like those cowboys died on Gunsmoke or Bonanza every week when the sheriff or one of the Cartwrights would have to shot some bad guy who knew he had it coming.  I won't describe how it really went when I shot the cat because to this day it still disturbs me a little to remember  that sight so I will just say the cat had more life to him than it appeared and it wasn't a calm and thankful death on the cat's part, which did ruin my self image as a mercy killer.  So after the unpleasant task I buried the cat, left the note and went to work. No one complained about what I had done,  at least I didn't see any notes about it on the kitchen table the next morning.