Category Archives: Family History

Stuck

Posted on by Leave a comment

Stuck

Stuck is my current problem.  I have not been able to write a word for a couple of weeks.  That problem seems to be receding.  Writer’s block and my general lethargy stems from a deeper problem.

First, some of what I know of the Buddha’s thinking.  One of his core concepts is about what today we call the ego.  In our regular thinking we treat our egos as permanent things stemming from what we are as beings.  Not so, folks.  We have made it all up.  We draw from our genetic makeup and our interpretation of our experiences in living to form a sense of self.  This is necessary for our survival, both as individuals and a species.

In the tribe, boys learned how to hunt from the tribal hunters.  Girls learned how to have and raise children from other mothers.  Everyone’s experiences are somewhat unique, but have a lot of commonality with others around us.  If things go well, children grow up to be healthy, capable members of their group.

Often, however, things go wrong.  Trauma, disfigurement, disease, and deprivation can lead a person to develop a wounded ego.  This is true of all of us to some degree.  The wounded ego suffers.  Suffering prevents us from reaching our deepest innermost being, the condition often called emptiness.  It is pure being, free of suffering stemming from the decisions we have made about ourselves.  It is often called enlightenment.  A better word is peace.

Insight Meditation can lead to the state where we have let go of all the encumbrances of ego.  It doesn’t mean ceasing to act much like the suffering person we were once were.  It doesn’t eliminate the need to cope with the tasks of living in the world, (especially a world containing Republicans.)  it’s clarity, freedom free of suffering but not of pain, grief, infirmity, and death.

Letting Go

I have tried to reach this goal for a large part of my life.  I tried many paths, Christianity, Buddhism, raging atheism, and trying to ignore the whole mess.  An amalgam of the teachings and lives of Jesus and the Buddha is what I have settled on.  It works for me, and much of my suffering is gone, let go.

But not all.  As a young child I experienced some abuse that seems to have gone to the very core of my being.  I have had profound, life changing spiritual experiences.  I have had over thirty years of therapy, I take medication for depression and ADD/HD.  ( not to mention prostate medication). My spiritual work has done the most good, but the other stuff is important.  I couldn’t meditate or write before I got effective ADD treatment at age 59.

Still, the deep reservoir of unease and discomfort remains.  Now, I am not the greatest practitioner of Insight Meditation or prayer, although I practice them every day, sometimes for much of the day.  I still go to therapy, go to meetings a couple of days every week, see my shrink, actively meditate and study the dharma.  They help tremendously.  Drugs, alcohol, and the motorcycle did not work.

That pool of existential isolation remains.  My teachers tell me to continue the process and I will, but I have times when I despair.  Is it karma, I am destined to suffer throughout this lifetime?  Or as my teachers say, I just need to persevere.  Well, I will persevere, continue the struggle.

I usually can chug along just fine, but a few weeks ago, one of my teachers said the continued practice of letting go will do it.  It hasn’t, not that deep pool of anguish.  His saying that just triggered more agony. This stuff sure is taking a long time, and I am not sure it will ever work.  Do you have any ideas?  Maybe I need to go to the mountains.

Posted in Addiction, Depression, Family History, Insight Meditation, Letting Go, Stories

Addiction

Posted on by Leave a comment

I am an addict. At various times they have been tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, food, the internet, and sex, to name a few.  Currently they are food and the internet via the iPad.  Addiction runs in the family.  My mother and her brother were alcoholics.  I have managed to leave some behind, namely tobacco and pot.

I started smoking in 1960 at the University of Colorado when the tobacco companies were giving cigarettes away in order to get people hooked.  I quit smoking in 1965, three packs a day of Camel straights.  I quit pot in 1982 when I noticed I was having trouble remembering what I did yesterday.

Sex.  What adolescent male isn’t a sex addict to some degree?  I just kept it up too long.

I have left alcohol behind several times, but after a period I would start drinking again.  I controlled the drinking for a while then slowly ramp up until I scared myself and quit again, only to repeat the cycle.  I have been sober for almost two years, and I think I have left booze behind.  I realized alcohol was going to kill me if I kept it up.  I think of George Thorogood  singing “When I drink alone, I want to be by myself.”  Scotch or bourbon, vodka when money was tight.

I started when I was fifteen, drinking 3.2% Coors.  Those were the binge years.  I remember four of us in a line outside a Grand Junction beer joint vomiting in unison.  One time we drank some beer after a field trip and went to football practice.  We would hold our breath when the coach came into the huddle.  In the army my buddies and I drank steadily.  Fridays in the enlisted men’s club beer was a nickel and mixed drinks were a dime.  That’s when I developed a taste for scotch.  The well bourbon was Ten High, which isn’t fit for cleaning floors.  See? I have discerning taste in choosing my poison.

I think I realized the danger of booze for me when I saw “Leaving Las Vegas.”  Nic Cage’s character had sold everything and was in Vegas deliberately drinking himself to death.  I saw myself.  It took years, however, to give the stuff up.

Food.  Chocolate and ice cream.  Ice cream craving came from my father.  He had a big bowl every evening.  Chocolate? Who doesn’t like chocolate?  In grade school, a friend and I came across a box of Hershey bars that fell off a delivery truck.  We snuck around and ate the entire box in one afternoon.  A few years ago, it was the ice cream sandwich summer.  I would buy a box of them, eat four or so, and ditch the rest.  It was cheaper than buying singles.  I gained fifteen pounds.

I have a gastric condition resulting from a lifetime of acid reflux.  Chocolate tends to cause reflux.  Alcohol, of course is the worst, especially straight whisky.  I am a lot better after quitting drinking and drastically reducing the chocolate intake.  Now I just pick Ice cream flavors that don’t have any chocolate.

The iPad.  Currently it is Words With Friends, Facebook, and You Tube.  I hate boxing, so of course I watched a lot of boxing and mixed martial arts.  I then went to car crashes.  There are lots of dash cams in Russia, and they are terrible drivers.  I like to watch Jeeps get mangled in the Utah red rock country.  Currently it is firefighting.  Urban fires, wild land fires, even car fires.  I was a volunteer firefighter for a while.  There is nothing more exciting than going into a burning building with a fire hose.  No better way to waste time than watching it on line.

Quite a list, isn’t it?  I have taken up Buddhism, and a major tenet is that craving is a root of suffering.  I guess suffering has been a big part of my life for a long time.

Posted in Addiction, Alcohol, cigarettes, Family History, My Story, Stories

Sexual Abuse

Posted on by Leave a comment

A hot topic these days, sexual abuse and harassment can cut both ways.  Men can be sexual abuse survivors as well.  I am.  As a child, my mother gave me enemas I did not need.  I remember my helplessness as she draped me over her lap and stuck the tip up my butt.

The act itself was bad enough, but what has stuck with me the most about the experience was the seductive tone of her voice.  I never heard that voice in any other context.  My physical sensation was somewhat erotic but was overshadowed by my feelings as I felt the water entering me.

I felt fear, revulsion, humiliation, helplessness, and an inability to move.  I was paralyzed by my feelings.  The fear was most powerful.  I couldn’t stop her, but I wanted to have anything happen to me other than what she was doing.   My fear was constantly rekindled by seeing that red rubber enema bag hanging from the towel rack in the bathroom.  We had only one bathroom, so I could not avoid encountering the thing every time I went there.

The most revolting object in the universe for me is a red rubber enema bag.  I just looked, they still sell the things.  The enema bag was a constant reminder of my helplessness.  Mother was the most powerful person in my world and what she was doing to me was something I could not avoid.  I didn’t feel I had the right to hate what she was doing.  I just had to endure.

As I grew bigger, the enemas stopped.  I felt no sense of relief, I was doing my best to block the experience out.  I actually never thought about the enemas, but my body remembered.  From that time on I have had difficulty with anal fissures, probably from holding myself closed all the time.  I eventually had surgery to deal with the abscess that developed in my rectal canal.

I grew, there were no more enemas.  At puberty, my sexuality awakened, and like almost every young male I turned to masturbation.  I was afraid of girls and their potential power.  Masturbation was my outlet.  Safe.  Then, one day I was in my bed masturbating and my mother walked into the room.  As the door opened I stopped, yanked up the covers, and just laid there.  She came over and her hand went under the covers and then retreated.

She turned and walked out of the room.  As she walked out she said something in that seductive tone I had not heard since the enemas stopped.  Not long after she got ovarian cancer and died after wasting away for more than a year.  She died around the time of my sixteenth birthday.

The entire experience has dramatically affected my sexuality.  I am mostly incapable of sustaining a truly relational sexual relationship.  My recurring fantasies of being in total control almost always surface.  Sexual partners can sense my disconnect with them.  As I mentioned, I remain afraid of women where there is a potential for sexual attraction.  I am most comfortable with lesbians. As I have aged, the problem has diminished, but never left me despite years of therapy.

I was in a men’s therapy group for a while.  We were all sexual abuse survivors.  One evening a new member of the group mentioned he had the same enema experience as a child.  He wasn’t sure whether he needed the enemas or not.  Several of us simultaneously said “Have you ever had enemas since?”  Well, no.

Posted in Cancer, Enemas, Family History, Health Issues, My Story, Sexual Abuse, Stories

I am an Evangelical

Posted on by Leave a comment

Augustine

Well, not really.  But I was one.  I was raised a Methodist, and had a profound conversion experience into a Pentecostal denomination.

Yes, they were evangelical.  Evangelicals tend to take the Bible literally and have traditional beliefs about sexuality, marriage, abortion, and politics.  I hold none of those views.  I’m a liberal of the kind vilified on Fox News.  I retain some Christian beliefs, but am a practicing Buddhist.

I have an extensive library on Christianity.  Most of the books are about the relatively new thinking about Jesus and the Bible, most of them anathema to an evangelical.  I do accept the historical reality of Jesus, but that is about as far as it goes.  I tend to view it all from an historical perspective.

Regarding God, nobody knows for sure.  Most every culture deals with God in some fashion, but my view is he was extrapolated from the spirit world, entities who exist, but in my view are no more deities than we are.  Like us they would like to be gods, but only Donald Trump has made it.

I am from a milieu steeped in the old time religion.  It is ironic that the concept of original sin came from Augustine, a Catholic Scholastic.  His idea about the event in the garden leading to human depravity rather than free will leads directly to the idea Jesus assumed our sinful nature to release us from God’s curse.  John said God loved us and freed us from sin on the cross, but Augustine said God let Jesus atone for our depravity.

John Calvin

American evangelical Protestantism adopted Augustine.  Conservatives: we’re bad.   Liberals: we’re good, but need help because the event in the Garden gave us free will.  We can choose, a coyote can’t.  But, we sometimes make bad choices.

For several reasons, deep down I believe I’m bad.  I am engaged in overcoming that belief, with limited and intermittent success.  Sometimes I feel good about myself, sometimes I don’t.

I really don’t like Augustine, Calvin, and their wrathful God.  My father and grandfather had that Scots Presbyterian Calvinist outlook even though they were not religious.  I caught it from them.  The underlying attitude was nobody could ever measure up, including me and them.  There, ladies, and gentlemen, is a prescription for an unhappy life.  My mother was raised Congregationalist, another Calvinist denomination (no longer, however).

Grandfather, Father, and Mother were pretty nice people, which revealed their true natures, but under it all they thought they were lost souls.  As our current self-appointed deity would say, “Sad.”.   I’m afraid some part of me will always believe I am really a bad dude, which I caught from them.

Our culture remains contaminated with the evangelical attitude.  I sit here in the coffee shop next to Denver University, started in 1864 as a Methodist school.  The Methodists have never been quite as infected by Calvinism, coming from Anglican roots, but that need for redemption is still there.  The idea behind DU was to bring the gospel to the wilderness.  That was fine, but there was an underlying belief those naked heathen Indians were beyond redemption.  John Evans, the Methodist territorial governor in 1864 and a co-founder of DU, and John Chivington, a Methodist minister and Colonel of the Third Volunteer Cavalry Regiment decided those murdering heathens had to go.  Thus, the Sand Creek Massacre.

The streets at DU are Methodist, starting with Wesley, the Anglican who founded Methodism.  Looking west from Evans Avenue one sees Mt. Evans, both named after an Indian killer.  I live between Evans and Asbury Avenues.  Asbury is named for the first Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop in the United States.  I don’t seem to be able to get away from it.  The current DU students, however, don’t seem to be as infected with that stuff as I am.  The architects designing buildings at DU don’t seem to have gotten the message.  Even the big athletic field House has a bell tower. The old part of the campus has several spires and bell towers.

The University of Denver has, to its credit, recognized the tragedy of Sand Creek and the role of the Methodist founder of DU in the act of genocide.  DU is no longer evangelical, but has the history.  I am no longer evangelical, but I carry the history.

Posted in ADD, Addiction, Agression, Family History, Free Will, Jesus, John Calvin, Moral Decline, My Story, Original Sin, Stories

Leadville

Posted on by Leave a comment
Leadville

Leadville

As part of our week in Breckenridge, we did a day trip to Leadville over Fremont Pass.  This country figures in my life.  My father grew up in Leadville, and I worked at the Climax Molybdenum mine one summer when in college.  Breckenridge is low country, around 9600 feet.  Leadville is over 10,000 feet in elevation, the highest incorporated city in the U.S. Climax is at the summit of Fremont Pass, 11,360 feet in elevation.  Some years, it doesn’t snow in July.   

Climax, Elevation 11,300 Feet

Climax, Elevation 11,300 Feet

Climax is at the foot of Bartlett Mountain, once one of the largest bodies of Molybdenum in the world.  Moly is used in alloying steel and as a lubricant.  Moly alloyed in steel makes it tougher, useful in high stress applications.  It’s first big use was in gun barrels during WWI.  Much of Bartlett Mountain is gone, hollowed out, crushed, had the metals removed, and the tailings dumped into a once beautiful glaciated valley.  Common with most mining operations, Climax has gone through several boom-bust cycles, and is currently just limping along.  Leadville is limping as well, still dependent on mining. 

I worked at the Storke level, 300 feet down the mountain from the original portal and mill.  I lived in a company hotel there. There was once a company town, but it went away as the milling operation took the land.  The store and the beer joint were still there in the mid-1960’s.    

I worked as a miner.  Drill, shoot, and muck.  That’s mining.  The drill was a jack leg, a pneumatic rock drill with a leg attached to be extended as the drill hole got deeper.  It was powered by compressed air, and had a water feed to keep dust down.  Drill holes in the face, load them with explosive, shoot, then remove the broken rock (muck).  I plan to go into the whole operation some time.  I did it for the money, and I can now say I was a miner. 

Leadville is down the pass.  What a place.  First gold, then a lot of silver, then bust as the silver market collapsed.  Mining has always gone on, from small independent operations to massive developments supporting a fairly large town.  My grandfather lived there for about twenty years as a railroader, a good Union job.  Born in 1903, my dad grew up there until 1918 when the railroad went broke and the family moved to Grand Junction.  Growing up, I heard lots of Leadville stories.  I will tell some more sometime.  If you go down the hill from the hotel on Harrison Avenue, the house at the bottom on the right is where my father grew up. 

Mining Hall of Fame

Mining Hall of Fame

When we visited, we drove around and I bored everyone with Leadville stories.  We ate at the Golden Burro, where I ate in the 1960’s, and went to the mining museum.  If you have any interest in mining, that’s the place.  Mostly, mining is taking metals and fuel from the earth and leaving a mess.  Leadville has lots of messes.  The worst ongoing mess is the water.  As it comes out of the mines it is highly acidic and loaded with toxic metals in solution.  It will have to be treated forever, at least in human terms.  Mining built Colorado, and we will always deal with the legacy.  Oh, what a mess we made.

Posted in Climax CO, Family History, Geology, Gold Mining, History, Leadville, My Story, Stories

Declining and Arising

Posted on by 3 comments
The Quarter Moon

The Quarter Moon

A few years ago Carol, my wife, her sister Judi, and I wrote a blog about caregiving for aging parents.  The aging parents are gone and so is the blog, but one piece I wrote sticks with me.  Watching the decline.  I wrote the piece about Frank, Carol’s and Judi’s dad who went into a serious decline in his ’90s.   

Frank is gone, so now I am watching my own decline.  I had it come home to me when I forgot where I parked the car in downtown Minneapolis and spent three hours searching for the damn thing. By the time I found it I was tired, relieved, and a bit ashamed.  Not finding the car has always been a problem for me, a function of my ADD.  I keep a little yellow ball on the radio antenna of my pickup so I can see it in the parking lot.  Losing the car for three hours is a new one, however.  Yes, I have a GPS in my cell phone. 

Losing the car is only one symptom.  My knee, wrist, shoulder, and back hurt.  I fall down.  I can’t remember names.  Carol and I make a plan every week, and I forget what I am supposed to do.  I go downstairs to get something, do three other things and end up back upstairs without what I went for.  Three times. 

I will be 74 in October.  What do I have left?  Ten, maybe fifteen years?  Aging is reality for me.  Usually I take these things in stride.  After all what is important is the moment, which is almost always pretty good.  The trip to Minneapolis threw me into something of a funk.  I got scared when I couldn’t find the car.  I went to help my brother-in-law, who is facing some aging issues as well.  I still haven’t recovered from the trip. 

My life is good.  We have a nice home and garden, good things to do, travel some, and have fun together.  I can write, which I was unable to do until the last few years after getting diagnosed and treated for ADD.  I have gone places and done things.  I can ( http://www.insightmeditation.org/ )meditate which I could not do for most of my life.  I have found an important role as family caregiver. Caregiving is especially meaningful because it didn’t exist in my family. 

The meditation has opened up a spiritual life I have sought since I first asked “Why?”.  I now  know the answer: Because.  The secret to because is becoming.  The sun is up every morning.  The birds sing, even if I have trouble hearing them.  The new in my life outweighs the difficulties.      Most of the time.  I get myself in trouble when I stare at that unknowable wall out there.  If I stay where I belong, here and now, I’m fine.  Events, however, sometimes present that wall-my brief time on this world and in this body.  I’ll get through it.  Writing this has already helped.

Posted in Aging, Balance Problems, Current Activities, Family History, Health Issues, Meditation, Minneapolis, My Story, Stories

Those Damn Cars

Posted on by Leave a comment
Tacoma. Mine has lots of brush scrapes on the sides.

Tacoma. Mine has lots of brush scrapes on the sides.

Living in the USA almost always means having cars.  It is possible to do without, but difficult except in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.  I was eighteen when I got my first car, a 1957 Ford.  I have lost count of how many since 1961.  I have had sedans, a panel truck, 2wd pickups, 4×4 pickups, SUV’s,  and sports cars.  I have also crashed a few.  It’s a combination of ADD and poor eye-hand coordination responsible for the crashes.  I was even in one crash that wasn’t my fault. 

My favorites?  Pickups and sports cars, sort of on opposite ends of the automotive spectrum.  I learned how to drive in a pickup, and their versatility appeals to me.  Lately, the pickups have been four wheel drive so I can risk my life on really bad mountain and desert roads.  Currently my four wheeler is a Toyota Tacoma.  It is just went in to get its rear springs replaced.  That is the third recall. 

Matrix

Matrix

Carol’s car is a Toyota Matrix, sort of a mini SUV.  It has had recalls as well, those Takata airbags that throw shrapnel.  I still like Toyotas.  They are reliable and are for the most part well thought out.  We have friends with Priuses, but I am still not sure. 

We have another resident in the garage.  It is a 2006 BMW 325i four door sedan.  Don’t be fooled, the thing is a sports car with four doors.  Power, handling, looks, and some snobbery.

That thing is fun.  I turn corners without slowing down.  It just turns, no squeal, no big deal.  The steering varies with speed.  At slow speeds, it hardly takes any turns to corner.  At higher speeds, you have to give the steering wheel more input. 

BMW 325i

BMW 325i

The BMW is fast.  I don’t have any comparison with, say, a Mustang, but it goes when you mash down.  To me, it has just enough power.  Passing those RV’s in the mountains is no problem at all.  Speeding up or slowing down to change lanes, zip.  I have never spun the tires to show off. 

It is helpless in the snow.  It has traction control, but no help.  The tires are wide, the car is low, and it just sits there and spins those rear wheels.  The BMW’s with an X in their model name have all wheel drive.  Carol’s daughter didn’t need AWD in Silicon Valley, where she bought the car. 

The thing is automated.  Everything is programmable, even the rear view mirrors.  There are buttons everywhere and a digital interface controlled by a knob you turn to scroll through options.  I think I can operate about ten percent of the stuff.  I keep telling myself to get out there with the owners manual and learn, but I haven’t done it in seven months. 

BMW’s cost too much, they are expensive to fix, not very roomy, and so much fun to drive.  We don’t need three cars.  We could probably be fine with one.  I don’t know what we are going to do.  we will probably sell the Matrix and the BMW and get Carol a cool AWD car.

Posted in Cars, Current Activities, Family History, Money, My Story, Stories

My Meditation Practice

Posted on by Leave a comment
The Buddha

The Buddha

As I mentioned in the last post, for years I was unable to meditate.  I have Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and as soon as my eyes closed my brain would go into high gear.  The idea of meditation is to let those thoughts go so you can be aware in the moment.  For ADD’s, the moment is often chaos, with thoughts leaping from subject to another, or hyper focus, with the thoughts totally engaged on one topic or task. 

After a diagnosis and treatment, I can meditate.  Now meditation is not spending all one’s time in the moment.  At first and often those thoughts arise and with my addictions, they can be compelling.  So, sit, watch my breath, the thoughts arise, I let them go, and they arise again.  It can be excruciating, dealing with all that meaningless thought.  I find a prayer helps me instead of just focusing on the breath.   

Paradoxically, my prayer is Christian.  At its core, Buddhism is essentially atheistic and in my view a psychology, not a religion,  being 2500 years old from a culture soaked in religion, it adopted all the trappings.  I grew up nominally Christian and became a toung-talking holy roller Christian in my forties.  I don’t do that so much any more, but Jesus is in my life to stay. 

I use the Jesus Prayer, an ancient Eastern Orthodox prayer dating back to the desert fathers.  “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”  The most famous book about the prayer, “The Way of a Pilgrim“, suggests starting with 3000 repetitions per day.  I recite the prayer a lot, but never 3000 times.  I sit, start praying, and time the words with my breath.   When those thoughts rise, as they always will, I return to the prayer.  Those times of being in the moment come, and I drop into watching my breath.  Thoughts arise and I gently return to the prayer. 

I find the moments of stillness are slowly growing.  I also find the poisonous thoughts are diminishing.  When poisonous thoughts about pretty girls arise, I pray for them.  “May she be happy, may she be free, may she be safe”.  Then back to the Jesus Prayer until more thoughts arise. 

The thoughts aren’t just about pretty girls, I find myself planning, plotting, reviewing past mistakes, feeling guilt or shame; being angry, sad, sick, hurting, happy, horny, old, tired, loving, lonely, excited, the entire range of feeling and thought.  All that stuff comes from my past or is about the future.  Thus, they are all meaningless.  The past is gone, and the future is unknown.   

All there really is is the moment.  My brain tends to disagree.  I experience all those thoughts and feelings as real because they are wired neural connections.  The task of meditation is to rewrite those connections so I can spend more time in the moment. 

Now, lots of those connections are important.  I need food, shelter, my long baths, some rags on my back, all the stuff of daily living.  I don’t need Donald Trump or the Kardashians.  I mention those because I was in the  doctor’s office yesterday reading those stupid magazines.  Why didn’t I have my book or just pray? 

I find myself wanting to meditate more.  The toxic thinking is diminishing, although lots of people continue to be prayed for.  I have purged the computers, my library, don’t watch the wrong television or movies, and am able to spend more time in the moment (still not much time, alas). 

Next is some retreats.  Retreats last from one day up.  I have done them in a Christian context and found them useful.  I am looking at attending a four day retreat in the mountains.  There are lots of retreats available, mostly led by Dharma teachers who are therapists or in other helping professions.  Retreats allow intensive meditation with little interruption from the outside world.  I need that.

 

Posted in Buddhism, Family History, Health Issues, Insight Meditation, Jesus Prayer, Meditation, Mental Health, My Story, Pain, Stories

Riding in Cars

Posted on by Leave a comment
Bad Drivers

Bad Drivers

The holidays are always stressful, and we find ourselves going places with family members we don’t often ride with.  I have to confess that I am a terrible passenger.  They aren’t doing it right, going too fast, and not paying attention.  I am, of course, without peer as a driver.

I have been in several accidents but there were always extenuating circumstances.  The people I ride with have had less accidents, but they are lucky.   I just do not understand why they won’t follow my lead and drive properly.  My gentle, caring suggestions go unheeded and are often received with hostility.

Oh, the injustice, the way they treat me when I have the best of intentions.  I only wish to share my vast experience and expertise.  Unfortunately, I have to resort to cowering in my seat as they recklessly endanger me with their driving.  They especially resent it when I stomp on my imaginary brake pedal when they aren’t stopping when they should.

This is bad for my mental health, forced to live with the fear and anxiety they create in my delicate psyche.  The worst part is not being allowed to express my panic at being put in one life-threatening situation after another.

Christmas Eve we went to see Theory of Everything, one of the best movies I have seen in some time.  On the way home, Steve drove us around the University Park area to look at all the wonderful Holiday light displays.  It was difficult to enjoy the lights knowing my life was in danger with the reckless 10mph driving I was forced to endure.

DrivingI do prefer to drive, but my family members, usually loving and caring, are united in disliking my driving.  I always resolve to be especially careful when I have passengers, not honking or giving the finger to other drivers, but no one seems to appreciate my selfless generosity.

Is there no justice?  Am I doomed so suffer at the hands of my loved ones?  I only want to do what is right and good.  (That sentence seems familiar.  Oh yes, George III.)  I find myself driving alone, meaning I am always searching for ways to help other drivers improve their skills.  They seem unwilling to learn.

Oh, well, I guess I will just have to take other’s driving as a test of my equanimity.  It is strange that the tests come so often.

Posted in Current Activities, Family History, Holiday Lights, My Story, Stories

Holiday Decorations

Posted on by Leave a comment

 

?????????? Carol and I have always been ambivalent about elaborate holiday decorations.  We have had natural trees, artificial trees (boo), and now a little painted plywood tree made by a former coworker.  Decorations go on the mantel; there are colorful magnetic ornaments on the refrigerator door, a Santa on the stand in the foyer, and a Menorah in the front window.

 

Holiday Lights

Holiday Lights

The big one is the 20 foot tall tree in front of the house.   A few years ago something inspired me to light the tree.  This entailed quite a project.  The tree is between the street and the sidewalk, so I had to tunnel under the sidewalk to install a two inch pipe for the electric cord.  We didn’t want a cord tripping people on the sidewalk.  I dug, I pounded, tried a water jet,and dug some more.

 

The pipe is in, is capped and doesn’t show most of the year.  After Thanksgiving I run a long extension cord from the tree, throughout the pipe, and up to the outlet on the side of the house. We decided to be old fashioned and use large colored bulbs rather than the mini lights popular today.  Seven strings of lights for that big tree.

 

Next comes the hard part, getting those lights up.  We have a big lighted star on top.  Several seasons of trying methods have come up with the solution of putting the star on a stick and bungeeing it to the trunk.  The problem is getting it up there without killing myself.  That tree is TALL.  I have wobbled on the top step of my eight foot stepladder, tried to place it with the long hooked pole I use for hanging the light strings, and prayed, while Carol is on the ground crying and wailing.

 

This year I drug out the 20 foot extension ladder after deciding my life was worth breaking a few branches on the tree.  It turns out there is a sturdy side branch in just the right place to support the ladder.  I firmly believe I have a guardian angel.  Without that angel I would be dead many times over.

 

Menorah and TreeWith the star up, is is just the matter of winding those strings of lights around the tree.  Carol holds the string, and I put a kink in my neck placing the wires around the tree.  The whole process took three hours this year, and I am still alive.  The timer lights the tree from 4:00 PM to about 10:30 PM.

 

More neighbors on our block have lights, and it is festive out there in the evening.

 

Happy Holidays!  Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All!

Posted in Current Activities, Family History, Holiday Lights, Home Improvement, My Story, Stories, Writing
« Older Entries