Cancer Survivor

I saw her in the Dillons parking lot.

She was parked as close to the entrance as possible, the way it looked.

Her head was wrapped in a turban and her movements were slow, tired looking.

Before I knew what I was doing I found myself standing by her cart, handing her the groceries out of it.

“Cancer survivor?” I asked.

“Yes.  I’m still in treatment and so is my husband.  We both have it.”

“Wow,” I said, “You are brave.”

“Yes,” she said, “I guess so.  Takes a lot to make it through each day.”

We were silent then as I took my time matching her pace as I handed her the rest of her groceries.

And then, I was mortified as I realized I was handing her purse to her. 

“Oh my,” I thought, “What will she ever think of me for handing her purse over,” as I realized how brash it seemed.

But she didn’t seem to notice.  

And it seemed she really meant it when she said thank you to me as I rolled her cart away to the cart corral.

But I felt helpless in spite of it all.

I couldn’t walk in her shoes; I didn’t even know her enough to call her in a week or so to see how she was doing.

I guess, in a way, cancer is a one-person journey as far as the diagnosis of it.

But surely, no one need suffer it alone.

For sure in this holiday season, when the big stores try to sell cheer as a commodity. 

“God, be with her,” I prayed.

And then I she left, and so did I.

Special Needs

It was only recently that I learned our dog is a special needs dog.

Somehow, I guess that fact eluded me.

I guess living with her since she was a puppy until now, I never noticed anything different about her.  I just figured she was normal.

Did I miss it because her love is unconditional and immense?

Or that she is loyal, almost to a selfish degree?

Or that she is easily unsettled, and when she is, she comes and lays on my feet, even if I am standing, pushing herself as hard up against me as she can.

Did I miss it because she is so completely happy when she is around us?

I have never had to raise my voice when I ask something of her, and her obedience is immediate.  I don’t ever recall teaching her to be obedient.

When I tell her to drop whatever she is carrying, she drops it.  We didn’t go through this one either to get it trained into her.  Somehow, she just knew. 

I have never had to punish her when she has done something wrong, but I can see she knows of my disappointment in her when I tell her not to do it again by the sad side-eye she gives me for the next few minutes afterward.

When I take a bike ride, she follows me as far as she thinks she can get away with towards the end of the drive and waits there until I come back.  Once or twice, she has edged her way down the ditch and is sitting there, facing the direction I left, watching for my return.  This makes Mama J quite uneasy, because actually this is her dog, and she likes her just as much as I do and doesn’t want her involved in an accident.

Her joy at my return is palpable.  Her eyes are bright, and her ears are laid back in a way that happens only when she is extremely happy.

I guess she must think her sole duty to us is unfeigned love and loyalty.

And she pretty much has that one aced.

Now, there are some things that happen when we aren’t around that she lets slip by.  Some things that by all appearances are things that only young dogs or pups do. 

She likes to dig holes. 

And she likes to chew on anything plastic.

Or, if we aren’t in the kitchen and there is food on the counter, she sometimes can’t help herself and hoists her long frame and front paws up there to sneak a little something off.

Mama J has issues with this.

Somehow, some of the simplest of things have become second instinct to her. 

For instance, she knows when I put my spoon or fork down for the last time at the table when I’m done with my meal.  She can be in a dead sleep but comes full awake at that sound.  I must put it down a little harder or something because it is then she rises from where she has been waiting patiently for what she knows comes next, which is that I hand my plate down to her to finish off anything I might have missed.

All of these things, including the not so good things she does rather infrequently, endear her to us.

Mama J calls her Bailey, and I guess that is the name she has at the vet.  I call her Soogah, after the pleasant way the wait staff in Germany would ask if I wanted some soogah in my tea.

But according to studies that have been done and according to how other dogs live and mature, they say it takes her breed 3 years to leave the puppy stage behind while as, they say, your normal dog leaves puppyhood after 1 year.

And by the time she will be 3 years old, her frame and weight will be that of a normal three-year-old large frame dog.  She already weighs in at well over 140 pounds. 

Which makes for somewhat of a heavy thump when she lands on my lap for her evening nap. 

I guess, though, it seems like the three years of her puppy stage are almost like a gift, if you will. 

That stage of unadulterated love; always happy, and none of the moody attitudes that fester in adults or whatever else it is that we take to ourselves because of greed, jealousy or any other untoward habits that are longstanding within us.   

And we adults are pretty adept at hiding these things away so that we can appear shiny clean to those we are with.

Childlike wonder is a stage of total innocence and humility that we so often disdain and call abnormal when we see a fellow adult portraying it.   And who has made it that way but we ourselves, who have arrived at a measurement we call normal, and anything too childlike that emanates from us is called abnormal.

But this really isn’t a true standard at all.  Nevertheless I guess it’s as close as we humans can get when it comes to our culture and how we approach schooling ourselves and our children.

I guess I wonder, sometimes, if all of us aren’t a little bit like my Soogah.  We all have places in our lives that have taken longer to develop or maybe never will develop.  Is that a problem? 

Is it a problem to my Soogah? 

She doesn’t seem to think so. 

All she cares about is how much she cares for me and Mama J. 

At least she doesn’t have the handicap to contend with that we adults do when we try so desperately hard to impress those around us with something we think we have arrived at that pertains to mainstream culture.

God bless all the Soogah’s among us.  For in them, it seems we see God Himself.

Quips and Quotes

A smorgasbord of things I remember people saying through the years.

From Ivan Jantz during an especially bad rainy spell when the roads were treacherous to say the least—“You can’t drive slow on these roads.  You need to drive fast enough so you have enough speed to get back out of the ditch if you slide into it.”  (Rumor had it that he ran south of 50 m.p.h. on those roads.)

From Charles Schmidt when I was stammering my way through why it had taken so long to get the job I was assigned to done—”Computers never lie.”

From David Toews on running cattle—“I’ve never lost money on cattle, although there have been a few times when the manure got pretty expensive.”

From Uncle Dewayne in bible study on raising children—“Some parents think their child is naturally tended to grumpiness if their personality leans that way.  But this can be trained out of them if started at an early enough age.”

From Uncle Mark when I was stuck between two parties that weren’t happy with each other—“You can expect three things to happen.  1. You’ll get dirty.  2. You’ll need to back up.  3. When it’s over, you be thankful you went through it.”

From Sam Wehkamp on dieting—“You figure like everyone else that your heart only has so many beats in it right?  I mean, when you die that’s how many beats it had, correct?  So don’t jump on the treadmill.  It will only go through the heartbeats that much faster, and you’ll die sooner.”

From Sam Wehkamp on winning a fight—“Never grab hold of something you can’t turn loose of.”

From Sam Wehkamp on winning a fight—“Only show enough of your strength to win and no more.”

From Mark Nichols when I couldn’t get something apart on the tractor I was working on —“You have to be smarter than what you are working with.”

From Aunt Marilyn when she saw the copious amount of sweat coursing down my face— “When you live in the south like we do, you learn to glisten, not sweat.”

Anonymous—“You need to know when to be willing to use raw labor rather than wasting time finding a machine to do the work for you.”

From David Toews—“It takes rain to make rain.”

From Brother-in-law Nolan—“Sometimes you can work too cheap and then people won’t hire you.”

From Uncle Harvey on running a successful business—“Always try to be aware of the leaks and plug as many of them as you can.”

From Yogi Berra—“It was like `deja` vue all over again.”

From Albert Einstein—“The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.”

From a preacher—”Any one of these three things can take a man out, Power, Wealth, or Fame.”

From Uncle Mark—“Every child deserves Love, Acceptance, and Security.  Every child needs to be taught Respect, Obedience, and Purity.”

From Richard Jantz when cattle needed to be herded across cornstalks and furrows that were 30 inches apart—“If you get going fast enough, it all smooths out.”

Amy Dresner—“You go where you look.”

Mary Chapin Carpenter—”We’ve got two lives.  One we’re given and the other one we make.”

Mary Karr—”Prayer, getting on your knees, makes you the right size.  You do it to teach yourself something.”

Anonymous—“Faith is a choice like anything else.  But thinking it through at the final hour is absurdity.  You can only try it out.”

Paulo Coelho—“Maybe the journey isn’t about becoming anything.  Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so that you can be who were meant to be in the first place.”

Anonymous—“Adults can’t be abandoned, they abandon themselves.”

Anonymous—“In the end all that matters are three things—How much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.”

World War Two Pilot—“No profanity on the intercom.  It doesn’t say anything.”

Anonymous—“You can always create a short-term commotion to get a bit of attention.  But you can’t possibly hype your way into being trusted.”

Robert Schmidt preaching about a near death experience involving his bailer—“And I almost rung the bell.”

Grandma Isaac when the conversations got a little too critical—“We just don’t know about these things.”

Nathan Unruh when the lawn mower he was trying to start for the auctioneer wouldn’t start—“Don’t know what’s wrong with it.  It ran the last time it ran.”

Deacon Dale on saving money because—“Hard times are coming.”

Jeff Schmidt on being seasick—”I was s-s-so s-s-sick I threw up everything since s-s-s-second grade.”

Getting There

I think I finally am.

Getting there.

The signals lead me to believe so.

In fact, several of them have manifested themselves in the last half hour.

I have recently joined a small, though I doubt very elite group. (unless you asked my boys, then the answer would be different)

I am a fledgling Mac user.

I’ve made fun of my boys pertaining to this matter for years.  I’ve ribbed them about the terribly tiny navigation buttons that are on the wrong side of the screen. 

I’ve extolled the ease of a Windows machine. 

But today, even as we speak, I am writing this on a Mac machine.

I ought to know better. 

I used to be a Chevy fellow to the bone.

But then one day Austin got a Ford.

I made fun of it too.

I passed it off as being synonymous with the way he ordered strange things at restaurants and claimed he enjoyed them.

But then Bryce got a Ford.

And then, after riding around with both in their Ford trucks off and on, I got a Ford. 

I don’t regret my decision about that one iota.  Just yesterday I got into a Denali to move it a bit so I could get parked under the car port because of the rain.  Oh sure, it had lots of bells and whistles, but I recognized a lot of them as old hat stuff that Ford has had for the last number of years.  And the seats!  I feel sorry for whoever takes a trip and must sit on them for any longer than an hour. 

However, the jury is still out on the Mac versus Windows business.  I’d like to say crummy things about Mac at this point.  But I know that wouldn’t be fair because I’m still trying to learn my way around.  And, if I must admit it, I’m a little bit proud of myself, me being such an old dog and all, that I’m willing to try a new trick now and then. 

I tried to pacify my guilty feelings when I first started using this machine by googling Mac versus Windows.  I hoped it might say something about Space X using Mac because of the seamless integration with their high-speed inputs and technical operations.  I hoped that maybe it would say that behind the landing of the last booster into the chopsticks, was a single Mac getting it done. 

But it didn’t. 

In fact, it said more people used Windows than Mac. 

Maybe that’s not all bad.

Maybe it puts me into the earlier mentioned small group because they like their privacy better than the rest of the herd. 

The other game changer that I claim got me there is, wait for it, Sushi.

Yes, I eat it now.

I didn’t use to.

I used to make fun of it just like I did Fords and Mac machines.

I used to say that the folks who ate Sushi really didn’t like it, they just ate it to look cool, while hiding a pronounced gag reflex behind their hand as they fluttered the chopsticks up to their mouth with the next bite.

But here I am, saying I like it.

Well, that statement needs to be qualified.  I like one, and at the best two varieties of it. 

And both are deep fat fried. 

Don’t even think about making me try one of those raw ones.  I had a hard enough time convincing my stomach just to get to the place I am with it all.

It’s true, I had some gag reflex issues I had to work with at the start.  And I couldn’t even hide them with fancy fluttering chopsticks, cause I don’t know how to use them.

And, once while I was trying to get the whole piece in, because that’s how the boys say I should do it, half of it fell off my fork and landed smack on my jacket front.  I was deeply offended, to say the least.  It was like that stuff was doing the turns on me before it ever made it to my stomach. 

Whether I’ll take on more responsibility in this area, such as learning to eat a few more varieties of it, or learning to use chopsticks, remains to be seen.

But here’s the deal. 

Google says sushi is extremely popular with Americans, saying nearly 5 million eat sushi at least once a month. 

Say now.  It looks like I’m in with real dudes on this one.

Wedding Blessings

Or, perhaps it could read, Things to be aware of if there is a wedding in the family.

Particularly if it involves someone’s sweet daughter.

I won’t go so far as to say it all went smoothly and with a fairytale ending, even if there was a frog involved.  (Isn’t there some fairytale that has a frog in it?)

But it did go considerably well, all things considered.

If, however, your sweet daughter decides to get married, allow me to share a few observations.

Your job, if you are the hubby, or crusty ole dad, is simple. 

Be completely agreeable to everything.

Plan on being totally on board for everything that is required from you.

Plan on being totally off board for anything remotely not required of you.  They will ask for your opinion of this want it, although when they do, remember all they really want is you to tell them their opinion is exactly what yours is.

Being on board means you cheerfully make a complete turnaround in the middle of the road, even if you are only a few hundred feet away from the place you just chauffeured your beloveds to.

Being on board means you willingly chug down fast food for whole days at a time, even though you had barbeque on your mind while doing the aforesaid chauffeuring.

Being off board means you sit idly, sometimes for whole hours, while your lady folk peruse material stores.

And even when they make it back to the vehicle, and perhaps your patience has thinned a bit, possibly because you suspicion that the main focus of buying dry goods for the wedding was lost somewhere along the way and the visit turned out to be, instead, one of interest in anything and everything, you say nothing.

Oh, and always say whatever they bought looks beautiful on them.

But you can’t say that without taking an interested look at whatever it is that they bought.

Be prepared to be inundated with shoes.

Because, you see, just because one pair looks just right doesn’t mean it will fit just right, and just because you know this brand fits just right doesn’t mean it will match just right.  So, several pairs need to be purchased, so the just right can be found.  This process stretches the wedding blessings long past the wedding itself as you cheerfully take many boxes of shoes to the place where they are shipped back to the vendor from whom they were purchased.

You will endure several crying jags.  In fact, after the first one, reassure your womenfolk that this probably won’t be the last one.  Say this in a tone that lends confidence you will be there for every jag that comes along, even if you aren’t sure at all what the jag is about.

Be prepared for several instances where the material that matched and they were so settled on suddenly takes on a different hue and the tone of it goes totally against their own coloring. 

A day will happen when you feel the sweet daughter’s allegiance shift subtly away from the blind trust and confidence she has had in you.  You’ll feel hollow on those days, but it’s okay.  Because you know life is this way, and, in a way, you are happy to let her go, just because she is so happy.

On such a day, it might not be all wrong to find a frog that is hopping along gaily.

That is, if your sweet daughter has a deathly fear of frogs.  (You may have to alter this to whatever criteria your daughter offers in this area.)

Now let’s be clear.  We aren’t doing this to be mean. 

Not at all.

We are doing it for a couple of reasons, although I’m not really sure what they are.

But let’s just imagine the sweet daughter is reclining in the recliner couch.  On one side is a straight up wall.  On the other side, sits her mother, who is also reclining, and, who it just so happens, has brough her daughter up and trained her thoroughly in the fear of frogs.

And both are screening.  (As in, looking at more pairs of shoes on their phones.) 

And both don’t see you have this happy frog in your hand, hiding behind the back of another couch. 

And both don’t see the frog until it lands square in the belly of the sweet daughter.

Two screams will pierce the dark night.

And two bodies will tremble violently.

Because what else can they do?  If the daughter sits up, there’s no telling where the frog will go.

And there is no telling if the frog will take it upon itself to jump somewhere, anywhere, maybe landing on Mama J. 

And so, the screams will pierce the dark night again, and wails of agony and desperation will be cast towards the crusty ole man with frantic entreaties that he remove the frog.

At which point it would be mean not to. 

There.  Maybe that is one reason for throwing the frog.  Just to show them you aren’t mean after all.

And then, a couple of evenings later, a banana peel tossed in the general direction of the two fair maidens who are occupying the two same seats does almost as well as a live frog. 

Because their overworked and overwrought nerves make it appear to be another frog to them.

And then, last of all, if the sweet daughter tells you one late evening, after she has spent hours with her beloved and you are already in bed, that her stool seems to have ran through and there seems to be a lot of water on her bathroom floor, it will behoove you to instantly jump out of bed and become industrious in the water removal business, even though the wedding is only a few scant hours away.

Maybe you knew about this problem a few days previous, and then again maybe not. 

But at this point, maybe all that matters is that you will survive even this, and in the end, you will survive the wedding as well.

Written in my new office on the corner of Main and 56.

Papa Don

Man, I enjoyed those days.

I asked one of my friends, who was a farmer, if I could help him during harvest.

I had just quit my job as a schoolteacher, and having had farm experience growing up, wanted my boys to have a bit of it also.

It worked pretty well because as fall came on, the sprinkler work slowed, and I could pretty much dedicate as much time as harvest needed.  My wife picked the boys up from school and brought them out to the field, or, if the route driver had room in their van they brought my boys out.

I guess I must have helped them with harvest about ten years.

Back when I started, we still ran tandem axle trucks. 

Gutless as a gizard when loaded.  They were fun to drive though.  It was always a challenge to get the gears right against the hill we had to climb while traveling the 9 miles to the elevator. 

Thirty-seven miles per hour if you weren’t bucking the wind.  Thirty if you were.  Sometimes, after that hill, on a good run, you might see forty-two.  The only position for the foot feed was flat on the floor.  Coming back, downhill and with the south wind at your back, they screamed out at sixty.

Then one of the trucks got traded on a white Freightliner semi.  Now we were cooking with gas, although the poor guy who had to take his turn at the tandem suddenly had a rough day of it, underpowered, and no A/C.

Next year, a red Freightliner joined the line up, and then both of us truck drivers were equal. 

Sort of. 

The red truck had Jake brakes. 

The white didn’t. 

The red truck had deep bass sounding horns. 

The white had a femmy little honker. 

The red truck had cloth seats. 

The white had vinyl. 

The red truck had synchronized gears. 

The white didn’t as much. 

The red truck was underpowered and heated up easily. 

The white was overpowered and hardly heated. 

The red truck had power windows. 

The white had hand crank windows. 

The red truck had a power tarp. 

The white still had the old hand crank that sometimes made the person rolling it back tread air with it on a windy day.

The white quickly became my favorite.

Someday, maybe I’ll write about the adventures incurred at the elevator.  But today it’s about the feedlot we sometimes hauled to.

I liked that feedlot.  Almost better than the elevator.  I liked to watch the cowboys sorting out the calves and I liked that it was a one man show, which meant there often wasn’t more than two trucks there waiting to dump.  Three, was max.

I had long ago memories of this feedlot.  Back in the day when we hauled high moisture corn that we dumped over the side of the above ground silo to the floor below where a loader tractor scooped up huge scoopfuls and dumped it into the biggest grinder I had ever seen.  Everyone drove tandems back then.  Semis were still used only for serious over the road truckers. 

So, when it was your turn to dump.  You backed up an incline to the top and side of that silo.  The man there to help you dump was often one picked out of a dime a dozen who needed temporary work and who knew nothing of trucks nor of the extended time needed to get them stopped when loaded. 

It was more than once I thought I was going over backwards, down to the floor of that silo, some fourteen feet below.

But now, it was all semis, and we pulled straight off the scale to a small pit that measured approximately four feet across and two feet wide.  The pit wasn’t any deeper than two feet, and at the bottom, an eight-inch auger ran horizontally until it was about two feet out of the pit area, and then it angled up to dump into a transfer auger that could be switched to the various bins. 

You had two options when you were unloaded to get back to the scale.  Back up and crank your trailer to the right before driving forward in a large half circle to get back on the scale.  Or, if you were down for it, back up all the way from the pit to the scale and see how well you could center it.  If there was no other truck there, I usually tried backing it in. 

I hadn’t hauled more than two loads there when I pulled up to the pit and no one was around.  I waited for a few minutes before getting out and looking around for someone to start the auger.  I eyed the switches and thought about starting it myself, but I could envision the debacle if the second auger didn’t switch on and everything jammed up.

I didn’t find anyone on the main floor of the mill/flaker, so I climbed the ladder to the second floor.  While I was up there, I heard this urgent, high-pitched voice calling to me, “I’m over here, I’m over here.”

Here was to my left.  He soon joined me on the second floor and asked if I wanted to see the setup.  He said he had designed parts of it and poured the cement for all of it besides being the regular maintenance man for the whole feedlot. 

The first thing that struck me was his black plastic cowboy hat.  I had never seen an adult size plastic cowboy hat before.

The second thing that struck me, almost literally, was the longest string of linked together cuss words I had ever heard.  Most I recognized, but then he switched to Spanish, and I was spared momentarily.

The third and fourth thing that struck me was that his coloring, dark brown with jet black white hair, and his voice, urgent, higher pitched and commanding, both reminded me very much so of someone.  I just had to figure out who. 

Papa Don. 

The incongruity of it made me almost double over with laughter.

Because see, the Papa Don that I knew was a preacher, and quite a preacher at that.  He had also been a missionary, and once I asked him how many times he had been to Africa.  He didn’t want to say, but eventually he said quietly, twenty-seven.

And so here was this fast cussing, loud talking, very self-aware man that looked and sounded just like Papa Don.

Less the cuss words, of course.

The guys I worked for asked me, once I was on my way home, what I thought of the load out guy.

“Papa Don?” I asked.

And I guess from there on the name stuck.  And we always laughed when we thought about it.

Over at that feedlot, they didn’t probe your load for a moisture sample.  They gave you a red Folgers 1 gallon coffee can and when you were dumping your load, you were supposed to reach in under the truck and fill the can.

Papa Don’s job was to run the augers or check how full the bins were by using his home made ‘Y’ shaped sling shot wrapped with innertube rubber to shoot rocks at the bin while listening to the sound they made.  He said it saved him a heap of blankedy blank climbing in a day.   We truck drivers were responsible for catching a moisture sample and to dump our trucks, while standing just behind us, the invective poured out.

I was so entranced, I guess you might say, by how explicitly the everyday sentences were peppered with those peppery words that on one of my loads I almost forgot to get my moisture sample.

I hurriedly reached under the truck, as the last bit of corn was about to pour out to get it. 

And just as hurriedly my phone flew out of my shirt pocket and immediately disappeared into the pit under a pile of corn.

I was too stunned to do anything, but not Papa Don, with a screech and several words, he had that whole shebang shut down in a second. 

“Let’s get your @#%!! phone,” he shouted.  The bars on the pit were just wide enough for me to reach the top of the auger, not the bottom. 

Papa Don took control of the situation right away, telling me to reach my hand in there while he would kick the auger on and off.  His theory was that the bleeping thing was at the bottom of the auger, and it would be carried up to the top with the spiral of the auger.  If we were lucky, I’d catch it on its way past.

Fortunately, no OSHA man was on site.

I had about given up on it, when I felt the slick cool surface of my phone.  I almost didn’t get it as I felt it sinking back down.  All I got was a corner, and then I had the same problem as the monkey with his hand caught in the tin can because he was holding the shiny thing in his hand. 

But, finally, with enough twisting and turning, I got it out.

What rejoicing. 

Papa Don in his language, me in mine. 

Sound

I heard something the other day that nearly dumbfounded me.

And then, upon reflection of what I heard, I realized it was very possible.

I heard that every sound that has ever been made never goes away. 

Just as water is still in the same amount as when the earth was created, and energy remains constant, so it seems sound could be.

Those sound waves carry on into the atmosphere, and probably on into the universe.

Obviously, we can’t hear them anymore, but they are still out there.  And I like to think there is a collective place where all those sounds find themselves and their counterparts. 

I slipped into a reverie and began to hear some of those sounds in my imagination.

The softest, the some of the most deafening.

I heard the soft invitation to a couple long ago.  I think that couple was so madly in love that the invitation given could have easily been disregarded as something invasive.  But they didn’t ignore it, and, in the cool of the day, they met the One who had made them. 

I heard the wailing death cry only a few short years later as one of their children died.

I heard the splash as an ax head fell into a stream and the gasp of those who saw it fly off its handle. 

Next, I heard the resonating tones of faith coming from one giving them instruction on how to retrieve it.

There was a quiet murmur of noise for a while, and then I heard the most terrifying sound of an approaching storm mixed with the shrieks of the damned. 

And then, after quite some time, all I heard was the gentle lapping of water upon water, silvery, almost.

Hope sounded when the waters receded, but not for long, and then, the most unnatural silence.  It was a silence that was so oppressive and yet it carried with it the despair and groaning of a whole creation waiting, most who knew not what for, and a few who did.

And after that horrible silence came absolute sound; visible and liquid in its purity, and as it quieted, I heard a quiet whimper of a newborn child and the soothing tones of his mother as she shushed him back to sleep.

Jubilant sound came forth, some thirty years later as mankind rejoiced in a new way and the complete liberty they felt within themselves.

I heard lightning split the air and immediately after came that frightening hiss right before the crash of thunder.   I heard men cry out in fear and I hear waves of immense height crash upon themselves.  And then, a shout, and all was still.  Such a stillness that was; holy in its quietude.

I heard as the miracles muted and, in their absence, harsh and unkind words, shouts of derision, and then, slamming down through all time came the sound of a whip, lashing against human flesh.

I heard the shout of victory three days later so entire that it reached to every rock on earth and every man.

I heard the martyrs weep, and the music given to them intertwined with their tears in a sound so reverent that I hesitated to listen, for all seemed so sacred.

Clanking and clanging of machinery soon gave way to horrible cries of men mixed with explosions and roaring that I feared for the escape of any caught in between the two forces pitted against each other.

Peacefulness followed those terrible explosions, and for some years, it seemed as though all was not lost until the strident noise of rebellion lifted itself again, both in the music of this world, and in picket lines strung across this nation.

I heard the gut-wrenching cry of the poor and innocent as man’s wicked schemes took those whom their vile desires settled upon from their safe places and trafficked them into the sex trade so that other men as wicked as themselves could consume themselves upon them in their own base desires. 

And I heard the most heartbreaking sound of all.  It was deafening in its silence. I heard the children whose parents didn’t love them.  They couldn’t cry out loud because they were old for their age, and they knew if they did it would only make things worse.  They have no home, either structurally, emotionally, or place of solitude where all is quiet.

But one sound kept me centered in the midst of all the sounds. 

It was that shout, with an outstretched hand that calmed the storm on a sea called Galilee.

And I think, somehow, that Voice that calmed everything in that dark night is enough.

Enough it seems, to bring to back to each of us, for our own benefit, whichever sound He chooses from all those that have been uttered.  

Especially so for the sweet daughter and her Josh as they begin their lives together next Sunday.   

Good Business

I’ve started this post at least ten times in my head. 

Maybe even more.

And the reason I never write it is because I’m scared.

I don’t feel like I have what it takes to give thoughtful advice on how to make a business work.

Mostly because I don’t have a lot of experience at it.

But I know some things I like, and some I dislike.

And an exchange I had this last week with the fellow in Staples made me smile enough that I thought maybe it was time to throw a few things out.

So, here’s what happened in Staples.

I walk in and quickly find the aisle with cables.  My son wants me to pick up a cable with HDMI male on one side, and USB female on the other. 

Okay, computer nerds, that’s a volatile combination.  Although I didn’t know it at the time.  Neither did I know that there is a nice little terminator that takes care of the volatility.

This guy walks up to me and asks if he can help me.  I say, “Yes, I’m quite sure you can.  All I need is a cord with HDMI male on one side and USB female on the other.  Just want to see if you have such or not.”

My confidence in his outward appearance is maybe a 1 out of 5 stars.  His eyes are bulging (He probably can’t help this) and they keep wanting to close on him as he walks towards me. 

As he gets closer, I see he has puffy welts here and there on his neck.  My mind wants to think drugs, but I settle on a lesser conclusion of allergies.

Our conversation goes like this—

Him-  Uh, well, you are in the wrong place to begin with.  The cables are over here. (showing me there)

Me-  Okay, yes I see.  Do you have the cable I am looking for?

Him-  What cable did you want?

Me- HDMI male to USB female.

Him- Uh well, I can see you don’t really know much about what you are asking for.

Me- Okay, tell me what I need.

Him- Well, you really don’t know much, or you wouldn’t be asking me what you are asking.

Me- Okay.  So, do you have the cord I’m talking about?

Him- Uh, well, what you want is impossible to do.  What was it you wanted to do again?

Me- HDMI male to USB female.

Him- Yeah.  I can see you really don’t know anything at all about this.

Me- Let me look again at the note my son sent me. (pulling out my phone, I read the note.)  Yeah, all he needs is HDMI male to USB female.

Him- Again, you clearly don’t know anything about this.  What is he trying to do? 

Me- Hook up another screen to his computer.

Him- What machine does he run?

Me- Mac.

Him- Oh, well then you are completely wrong on what cable you need.

Me- He just sent this to me.  He’s right in front of his compu—

Him- NO. No, you don’t want that at all.  You’ll need a (scramble of technical jargon)

Me- So, back to the cable I am looking for.  Do you have it or not?

Him- Look.  I have to tell you again.  This is electricity.  Clearly you don’t know anything about electricity either.  If you did, you wouldn’t even try this in the first place.  Cause, you know, if you do the wrong thing with electricity, it gets all balled up and blows up.  Yeah, you know you could have a real problem on your hands if you try this. 

Me- Okay, I’ll just see if I can find that cable here.

Him- No.  You won’t find it.  You’d be running electricity backwards and you just can’t do that.  You’ll end up with a short.  You know what a short is?  It’s when electricity goes backwards and blows things up. 

Me- (Thinking to myself but not saying anything out loud) Would you be pulling your info from the 2017 NEC or 2020 NEC (National Electrical Code)  Or, just so you know, electricity is how I make my living. 

Me- Okay, so you don’t have the cable then.

Him-  No, and I would really suggest you go home and try to learn more about this before you come back in.

Me- That’s rather blunt.

Him- I’m sorry man.  But it’s just what I got to say to folks like you.

I grab a cable, maybe or maybe not a bit out of spite, that is completely different than I came in for, thinking I’ll just make it work.

I go to Menards, and stand for long minutes in their cable aisle, hoping against hope I’ll find the cable.  Not that I would go back and show him or anything.

I call Austin while I’m there and tell him a bit of what Staples guy had to say.  He snorted and said, “I just ordered that cable online.”  And went on to tell me that the guy was partially right, that it wouldn’t work long without the terminator that the one he ordered had built in. 

So, I drove back to Staples, and ducked in while the cable/electricity guy was in the back and returned the cable I had so recently bought. 

I was really glad the clerks didn’t ask too many questions, and I kept my feelers out to my side and back in case cable/electricity guy came up and pounced on me with more helpful information.

I was sweating by the time I walked out. 

I guess I’ll save the other things I was going to throw out for another time.

Written in The Bake Shoppe

Anne Sullivan

If it was me reading that title, I would have no idea who she was.

But if the title had been Helen Keller, I would have known immediately who Helen Keller was.

And maybe, after giving my subconscious enough time, I might have been able to piece together who Anne Sullivan was.

Anne Sullivan was Helen Keller’s teacher.

And every time I think about Helen Keller’s teacher, regardless of whether I remember her name or not, my mind stops.  It stops with almost the same kind of incomprehension that some spiritual things make my mind stop.

I remember my school teaching days, and I remember those times when a student of mine didn’t get the concept I was trying to teach.

Of course, being the teacher I aspired to be, I took time to reexplain the concept.  If my student still didn’t get it, I changed tactics, and started over again.  If, after that I still couldn’t get through to them, I sometimes asked one of their fellow students to explain it to them. 

I always felt frustrated with myself in those situations. 

Sometimes, I felt impatient with my student who wasn’t getting it. 

But if I did feel impatient, I was quickly reminded of those days I worked beside Mark at the local John Deere. 

He knew so much, and had so much experience, that sometimes I think he felt like the gap between what he knew and what I was trying to learn was insurmountable.  But he stood by me, and, if I have any mechanical abilities today, I credit him.

Anne Sullivan must have had similar qualities.  When I think of her patience, standing by the water pump for, how long?  And spelling the word ‘water’ into Helen’s palm over and over, well, this is where my mind stops.  Both in comprehending Anne’s patience, and the wall Helen had to scale to actually get to where those impressions in her palm made the smallest hint of sense. 

And, do you know what else?  A lot of the pictures of those two show Helen resting her head upon Anne.  She knew she wouldn’t be disappointed in any way, shape, or form by her mentor. 

Anne had developed an atmosphere of complete trust in which Helen could repose in.  She knew she could ask anything, and Anne would do her best to answer.  And if Anne didn’t know the answer, or if the school they were enrolled in together couldn’t find a way to get the answer, then they changed schools.

In essence, Anne spent her whole life pressing the word ‘water,’ into Helen’s hand.  Figuratively, of course, one it had been learned.

And her patience, care, and understanding love is what made her history’s best teacher. 

It’s August now. 

For many, school will be fully in motion by the end of this month.

There will be many new teachers stepping into their teacherhood for the first time. You will be scared.  You will be stressed out to the limit.  You will be continually tired.   

There will be seasoned teachers who may be tempted to take their job for granted; you may feel like it doesn’t take so much time and effort to be a good teacher.  You may be tempted to become impatient with the student who can’t seem to get it, forgetting the gulf of knowledge that separates you from them.

More than imparting the academics, more than getting better grades for your students, more than having the best polished flair among your sorority of teachers is this—

Patience.  Care.  Understanding love.

These. 

These will make you the best teacher, both for yourself and for your students.

School Daze #5

Let’s go back to my first day as a teacher in the classroom.

I am terribly nervous. 

I stand at the door like I think all good teachers should do, and say good morning to my students.

I extend my hand to each and try to call them by name, although, even though I only have 9 students, I stutter on a couple of them. 

Next, we go out to the main room for an initiation on school etiquette.  A lot of is new to me, but it’s all old hat to my students and they squirm and fidget.  I have a small anxiety attack, wondering if I’ll need to call them out for misbehavior on this first day of school.

But we slide through it and make it back to the classroom.

I notice, peripherally, that the other classes are going out to run a lap and then, they must be coming back in to study.

I feel a little somehow about this, because I don’t have any study planned for the next hour or so.  Mostly because I’m afraid; I don’t know how to get started.  (By now I know a bumbling start is better than two hours worth of nervous babbling.)

I babble.

For two hours.

I see interest, high at the start, devolve into laziness, knowing glances, and sleepiness.

I try to bump the interest up by speaking in exclamation marks.

It doesn’t work. 

I have my eye on one fellow.  He scares me more than the rest. 

He’s a tough customer, the way it looks. 

He is macho.  He has clout.  He has attitude.

I know he comes from a hard place, and that perplexes me.  Should I treat him with soft gloves?  Should I treat him with tough love?   

But now it’s time for recess, and everyone breathes a collective sigh of relief and they spin out the door, pent up energy at having sat through so much drivel that they fairly burst apart at the seams.

I hear them say to each other, “What do you think of our new teacher?” 

“I dunno,” another says, “Seems like he talks a lot.”

We are back in the classroom, and I began the lesson presentation.  I explain things simplistically.  Way too simplistically in fact. 

The nervy kid, the one I had my eye on before, raises his hand and says, “We know all this stuff already.”

Ooookay,  I think.

So, I turn them loose.  They do just fine with that, until we get into the deeper stuff later in the month.

By now, I know that I wasn’t mistaken about my reservations regarding the energy of the one guy I had my eye on at the start of school.

He and I have locked horns a couple of times already.  Nothing serious, just enough to rattle me.  I’m scared of him, scared of all of these folks after all.

I keep pondering how to break through to him.

My first impulse is to curb his actions, to make it known who is in control.

I try this for a couple of weeks, but it doesn’t work.  He knows how to fight; he learned that at home. 

And then it hits me.  Right during math class.  Right during a sentence leaving my mouth about, well, something about math, I hope. 

Let him be the leader; let him show you how it’s done.  Begin by complimenting him and generally buttering him up.

I go with it. 

And everything changes.  Responsibility isn’t something he is used to, but it is his forte, nonetheless.

When he tells me, “This is how our teacher did it last year,” I tell myself to listen, rather than perceive it as a threat.

And, doing it like their teacher did last year, at least in some things, seems to enamor me to them. 

Soon, the whole class is pulling together, helping me to make this school system work.

Today, I really don’t know if that first class of mine got an education or not.  I think not.  I have to hope a higher power stepped in and was the teacher who knew what they needed and imparted it to them. 

But, neither could it have been done without each one of them, and their help.

Including the guy I had my eye on, and who has turned out remarkably well. 

Thank you, Jason. 

Written in Patrick Dugan’s