My Final Blog Post

About six weeks ago or so my immediate family (my wife and two daughters) had what amounted to an unintentional and unplanned intervention with me. It was just like the TV show, except that there were no cameras rolling, and there was no drug addiction or alcoholism or anything like that. And also, as I mentioned already but wanted to re-clarify, this wasn't a planned thing. No one had any speeches written on tiny scraps of paper that were nervously read with shaky voices and shakier hands. But it was an intervention nonetheless.

The REAL scheduled event of the night was that my older daughter was off that night to her first formal high school dance. She came downstairs in her formal dress, her hair and makeup perfect, my wife, other daughter, and I all watching her descend the stairs, and I reacted the way parents have reacted for the last 75 years. "Oh!" I said to her. "I have to grab a camera and get a picture of you." I took off for the office, and was back in 10 seconds with the camera in my hands, powering it on and adjusting settings on it while I walked.

My Next to the Last* Blog Post

About eight months ago I decided that I was going to take a break from writing this blog, but stated at the time that I would probably come back to it. And I did. After a one month break, I came back to the blog with renewed enthusiasm. But I've decided now that I am actually completely done with this blog. I will not be adding to it after this post and the next one.

In the next blog post, my final blog post, I'll explain WHY I'm quitting this blog. Today, though, I'd like to take a look back and present to you my 25 favorite posts on this blog. I read back through all 840 prior blog posts, and these are the 25 that summed me up the best.

Dealing with the government

I received some correspondence today at work that I thought was rather humurous, and also an example of the absurdity that occurs sometimes when dealing with the federal government...

I don't need to go into all of the details here (because the details are many, and to be honest, I don't understand them all myself), but you do need to know that the federal government has a funding program for schools and libraries that provides them with some electronic equipment at a huge discount. But the program funds aren't guaranteed, so often in my job I'll apply for the funds but not receive them (which isn't fun, because filling out this paperwork is as difficult and time consuming as doing one's income taxes--This is, after all, the same federal government). Two years ago I applied to have wireless networks installed in four of the six schools in our district. All told, the upgrades would cost almost $250,000, and if my application were approved, the federal government would pay for almost $200,000 of the expenses.

More on My Mother

It occurred to me just now that...three posts ago...I wrote this long blog entry about my mother being in the hospital and asked for prayers from everyone, but I never followed up with how my mother was doing. So here it is...

...My mother is doing much better. In fact, she came home this morning for the first time since going into the hospital. This now marks the SECOND time that my mother has been close to dying (so close to dying that even the medical professionals around her admitted later in both cases that they didn't think she'd make it) and pulled through. She's like a cockroach--you CAN'T kill her!

Oh great, with that "cockroach" comment, I've now given my mother TWO reasons to hit me over the head with a newspaper. I guess I can take comfort in the fact that--thanks to the fact that both the State-Journal and the Lexington Herald Leader are online--my mother hasn't subscribed to a newspaper in more than a year.

And on the off hand chance that you do find a newspaper around somewhere, Mom, I'm going to post this photo on here so that you'll remember how much I love you AND HOW MUCH YOU LOVE ME!

Anyway, everyone, thanks for the prayers!

...Until you Walk a Mile in His Shoes (or rather, Until you DON'T Drive a Mile in His Car)

Here's a story from way back in August. I've been meaning to tell it since it first happened, but something else came up and I forgot about it. But I had an almost perfect repeat of it this afternoon, so I was reminded to write it now...

I typically leave work at 4 PM. I come home and make dinner (I'm the primary chef in our home), and I try to get the food on the table by 5 o'clock. On the first day of school this year, though, I was running a little bit late (lots of technology "fires" to put out on the first day), and I was in quite a hurry when I tore around the corner of Royal Drive on the way home to my house. Just past the Drawbridge Inn Hotel is a set of eight apartment buildings, all mostly identical and all just a few feet away from each other. I had to put on my brakes as I approached the apartment buildings because there, at the sidewalk of the fourth apartment building, was a school bus. It was the first day of school, and the children--mostly kindergarten and first grade children it looked like--were getting off the bus and running into the arms of their parents, who were excited to see them after their first day of school. Both the parents and the children--who were carrying back packs, lunchboxes, and fistfuls of paper to their parents--were beaming with these gigantic smiles. It was a stunning sight to see. Their joy infected me, and I smiled broadly, enjoying the spectacle.

Then my eyes focused on the car in front me, between me and the bus. The driver was angrily shaking his fists and his head was jerking up and down and I could tell that he was shouting something. I didn't know what he was shouting, but I could tell that he was directing his anger at the bus in front of him. I couldn't believe the nerve of the guy. Stop and smell the roses, I thought.  How big of a hurry could he be in that he couldn't wait for these excited kids and parents to have their moment? And it was just a moment. A few more seconds and the final child got off the bus, the big, red "STOP" sign on the side of the bus folded back into place, and the bus rumbled forward.

It went all of about twenty feet before it stopped at the end of the sidewalk of the fifth apartment building, and the scene repeated itself. I watched the whole scene again, this time with a little less joy in my heart as I watched. When the bus rumbled forward slowly and then stopped AGAIN at the sidewalk of the SIXTH apartment building, I craned my neck as far to the right as I could in order to see around the bus. I saw a whole line of parents also standing at the end of the seventh and eighth apartment buildings. 

By the time the bus pulled away from the eighth apartment building, I think I was shaking my fist harder than the driver in front of me!...

A Wicked Realization

As a child and as a teenager, I used to love to read. I did it all the time. In middle school and high school I was always carrying a book around with me from class to class. I especially liked science fiction and fantasy stories (Yes, my geek nature is showing here), especially the DUNE novels and the SWORD OF SHANNARRA and the THOMAS COVENANT THE UNBELIEVER novels. I absolutely consumed those stories. Later, in high school, I fell in love with Shakespeare, and I began reading Shakespeare, even outside of class. Reading was a joy.

And then something happened: I became an English education major. I did it BECAUSE I loved reading. What could be better, I thought to myself, than to spend a lifetime reading great literature and sharing it with students? And in becoming an English major, my ability to APPRECIATE great literature expanded tremendously, but my ability to ENJOY it decreased. Yes, I did get to read everything Shakespeare ever wrote (thanks to a total of six different Shakespeare courses taken in high school, undergraduate school, and graduate school), and I also found some other literature along the way that I really liked (including a lot of poetry). But mostly, I plodded through a bunch of stuff that I NEEDED to read but didn't necessarily WANT to read. And once I started teaching school, I ended up teaching the same literature over and over again, and any newness and joy in the literature wore off pretty quickly.

I left the classroom eight years ago to take an administrative position, and in that eight years, I haven't read a single piece of fiction. Until the last six weeks.

As I mentioned over several posts back in November, I purchased a Kindle Fire for myself as an early Christmas present. And I decided that, after eight years, it was time for me to start reading again. So I decided to begin with Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked, which is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. My entire family had seen the musical a few weeks before, and I was sufficiently intrigued by the musical to wonder what the book might be like. I assumed that, like almost always, the book would be better than the musical. And so I started reading. I found the novel difficult to get through, though, and I couldn't figure out why. Despite having some familiarity with the story thanks to the musical, I still struggled to focus and maintain my interest. At first I assumed that maybe reading on the Kindle Fire wasn't going to work for me, because after reading a page or two I'd find myself leaving the book to browse the web on the Fire, or to play Doodle Jump or Angry Birds or some other game. Maybe, I thought to myself, I was just too easily distracted.

But then about a week ago, on a whim, I downloaded a different book to my Kindle, and I read the entire book in less than a day. And once I had finished that book, I realized what it was that was making Wicked so difficult for me to read: I hated it.

I HATED it!

Once the thought occurred to me, I knew that was the problem. I absolutely hated the novel Wicked. The storyline was intriguing, but the characters were awful in their development. And the author did a lot of "telling" and not "showing." Instead of showing a scene in which Elphaba and Galinda--these two complete opposites--became friends, the novel just said something like, "And over time, Elphaba and Galinda became friends." That's the laziest writing I've ever heard of! The novel just bored me to death, and I didn't even know it.

Apparently, all of those years of forcing myself to read literature that didn't particularly interest me but that I "needed" to read had broken in me the ability to distinguish what I truly liked from what I disliked. It reminds me a bit of the video below, from the film STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (again, showing my geek nature here). In the scene, Data, a robot, has developed emotions and the sense of taste for the first time. This is pretty much how I felt that day, even to the point that--after I realized I hated the novel Wicked--I read another 20 or so pages of it to see WHY I hated it.

(I can't see the video.)

My mother

My mother was a New Year's baby, born January 1, 1934. On New Year's Day of 2010, my mother turned 76. On that day, as we did every year, my wife, children, and I made the trip from Cincinnati to Frankfort to my parents' home to celebrate my mother's birthday. And like every year, the trip was a major pain in the rear. After all, we had just made the trip down to Frankfort the week before for Christmas. I don't know if you have ever made the 95 mile trip back and forth between those two cities, but if you haven't, let me tell you that the word "exciting" doesn't fit anywhere into a description of the trip. It doesn't matter which route you take (and there are about three routes that make any sense), there's nothing exciting about any of them, and making the trip twice in a week just pushes the whole experience over the line from being unexciting to qualifying as out and out tedious. But it's not my mom's fault that she was born a week after Christmas, so we go every year.

And after an hour and a half road trip down to Frankfort, and an hour and a half at a local restaurant (One of the quirks of my family is that we don't spend a lot of time at gatherings actually talking or anything--we pretty much just eat, open presents, and leave.), we got back in the car again on January 1 of 2010 for another hour and a half trip home. And on the drive home, Lisa and I passed the time by talking about the new decade that was beginning on that day.

"Wow," I said to her as I drove. "I can't believe it's 2010. We're leaving the--what do you call them?--the Zeroes--I guess--and headed into the--the what?--'the Tens'? 'The Teens'? It can't be 'the Teens' because those won't start until 2013. I mean, say what you want, but 2011 and 2012 aren't 'teen.' So I guess it's the 'Twenty-tens,' huh?"

My wife, who is used to me getting lost in meaningless semantics, didn't even address the issue. Instead, she said something like, "Yeah, we're already ten years into the 2000's." And then, after a moment of silence, "A lot has happened in the last ten years."

"And a lot is GOING to happen in the next ten years," I said to her.

And at that point we began listing all of the things that we assumed were going to happen between 2010 and 2020. Both of our children were going to graduate from high school. One, and maybe both of them, would graduate from college and get a job and move completely out of the house. In 2018 I'll be eligible to retire from public education in Kentucky, so by 2020 I would either be retired or at least mulling over my options. We might be retired and back at Vent Haven, working on the museum. Or we might be living in Key West in a condo. Things were going to be different, though, for sure.

We drove for a few moments in silence before I said, "You know, between now and then, we're also almost certainly going to bury at least one of our parents. Probably two. And maybe more than that." She agreed, and we then--being the morbid people we can sometimes be--spent the next several miles of the drive trying to figure out the order in which that would happen.

My point in telling that, I guess, is that the death of one of our parents didn't sneak up on Lisa and me. We knew one or more of our parents were going to die during the decade, but we didn't expect it to happen so quickly. Eleven months and a day after that conversation was the day of my father's funeral. And here we are now, in early January of 2012, and my mother--whose birthday celebration had been the cause of that trip two years ago--is in the hospital for the second time in less than a month, and she's not doing well. I don't know if she'll ever leave the hospital, and if she does, I don't know if she'll ever recover and be the person she was before going in.

It's been an absolutely terrible couple of days since my mother went back into the hospital, and if you've never lost a loved one, I probably can't convey the sense of it to you, and if you have, then you don't need me to. But it's changed my whole perspective about my father's death. I used to think it was so unfair that my father died so suddenly. My sister said she had a sense of his death a full day before he died, and I knew the night before he died--when I saw him in the intensive care unit and told him that I loved him but I wasn't going to kiss him because I didn't want him to catch my cold--that I might never get to kiss him again, but with even that little bit of advanced knowledge, his death seemed too sudden. He had been doing so well two days before, and most of the family didn't get to say goodbye to him.

But that's not been the case with my mom. From late Saturday until about noon today she got steadily worse, and by this morning it was apparent that things weren't going well. More than that, she was suffering. Truly suffering, something that my dad had only experienced for a brief period of time before his death. She's been laboring to even take a breath for days now, and it's been painful to watch. Gut-wrenching. And most of the relatives came by today and saw her, and looked her in the eye when they left and said something along the lines of, "I'm leaving now. Goodbye. You KNOW I love you so much," and my mother was able to tell them that she loved them, too.

In a way it's beautiful, I guess. And touching. And sweet. But she's been suffering so much, and without batting an eye I would give up all of the goodbyes and kisses and the gentle rubs on her forehead if it could take away her suffering.

Having written all that, I can say that--between the time that I started this blog entry (a little after noon today) and right now (10:35 PM), she's actually improved quite a bit. She might actually pull through. And if she does, she's got the Internet at her house, too! She's going to get home, read this blog post, and the next time I visit her she's going to hit me on the head with a rolled up newspaper and say something along the lines of, "You thought that I was going to die! And you wrote about it in your blog for the whole world to see! I'm going to KILL you!"

I hope that day comes, and if you're a religious person and so inclined, I'd appreciate your prayers for my mom's recovery. Ten hours ago I would have told you I was sure that it wasn't going to happen. Now I'm not so sure. But there is one thing that I AM certain of: Understanding that your parents are going to die someday, and being prepared for it--those are two different things....

Mantle Clock

This past weekend my younger daughter and I visited my mother in Frankfort. While we were there, she gave me something that I had told her years before that I wanted--a mantle clock. It was broken, and my mother told me I could take it with me if I would promise to get it fixed. I made the promise and put the clock in my car and drove home.

Before I tell you more about that day, though, I need to provide a little background info about the clock itself. When my parents were newlyweds, way back in 1955, they purchased the mantle clock for their new home with money that had been given to them by a relative. It was a rather simple, wind up mantle clock that at the top of each hour chimed the hour (It chimed once at one o'clock, twice at two o'clock, etc.) and that at the halfway point of each hour chimed a single time.

I was born more than a decade after the clock was purchased, so as far as I am concerned, this mantle clock has always existed. By the time I was born, though, my parents had moved from their first house to a new home without a fireplace, so throughout my youth the mantle clock set--not on a fireplace mantle--but on the dresser in my parents' bedroom.

Until I was about twelve years old, my bedroom adjoined my parents' bedroom, so that as I lay in bed falling asleep, or when I awoke in the middle of the night, I could hear the clock ticking, and I always knew what time of night it was at the top of the hour. Like every other child, I had irrational fears during elementary school (one of which I admitted to in this post). Sometimes I would lie in bed at night sure that some monster or another was going to get me, but the clock--because it was in my parents' room where I knew my mom and dad were both sleeping--was a comfort to me. It was a calm, tick tick tick reminding me that my parents were there; I was safe.

All of this I had forgotten until Saturday afternoon when I came home with the broken clock that I was going to get repaired. I set it down in the kitchen and then thought to myself, Where's that sound coming from? I looked at the clock--it was ticking like it had before it had broken. Apparently the clock had just been wound too tightly, and the 100 mile ride in the car had jostled the gears loose. I set the clock in the middle of the fireplace mantle at our house, and it's been ticking away ever since.

And it wasn't until I heard it chime in my own house that I realized much of what I had written above and how much the sound of the clock meant to me. When my mom and I were looking at it last Saturday afternoon, before my daughter and I headed for home, my mom said to me, "It's a Seth Thomas. When we bought it they told us it was the best brand to get. And it's been a good clock. Maybe it's worth something now." I checked on eBay when I got home. Apparently they are darned good little clocks. There are plenty of identical models for sale on eBay, all of which supposedly keep perfect time, just like this one. Asking price: 30 to 75 dollars. So I guess I'm NOT going to get rich off of the clock. Not that it matters. I wouldn't sell it anyway.

All that first night (and my family will attest to this if you ask them) I'd be in the middle of doing something--maybe having a conversation with my wife or doing the dishes after dinner--and I'd freeze, look at the time on my cell phone, and say, "Wait a second. The clock is getting ready to chime!" And I'd run into the living room, sit down, and wait for the whirring sound that occurred just before the clock rang, and then the steady "Clang, Clang, Clang," which my spirit translated as "You're Safe, You're Safe, You're Safe..."


(I can't see the video.)

Right There

Four months ago I posted a blog entry about my propensity to overuse the phrase "I'll figure it out." I mentioned how I was reluctant to use the phrase at all any more, and how ridiculous that was because quite often it was the RIGHT phrase to use. Four months later, I can say that I've quit trying to avoid the usage of that phrase. When it fits, it fits, and I use it. Also, I've focused my attention on another phrase that I misuse often in my speech, and unlike the above phrase, this one really is something that I need to stop using.

The phrase is "right there."

There's nothing wrong with saying "right there" when a person is referring to something that is...well...right there. As in, "Could you hand me the remote control that's right there?" But I tend to use it as a point of emphasis, as in "That's good food right there!" or "You made a good point right there."  I guess I do it to sound folksy or something.  But it's not making me sound folksy. It's making me sound like a hick.

Why am I telling you this? I suppose so that you'll help me. I already have all three members of my immediate family shouting, "There you go! You just did it!" every time I use the expression. Maybe you could join them. If you hear me end a sentence unnecessarily with "right there," let me know.

That'd be a big help right there!*

*That's supposed to be a witty ending to the post, not an actual slip up. You don't have to let me know about that one...*

*I know that most of you already knew that, but you can never tell with some people. Also, some people will point it out just to irritate me...