And When I Die

Going to a concert when you are Social Security age is way different than going to a concert before you were of legal age to drink! Way different!

My wife and I just went to a Blood Sweat and Tears concert and I must admit that the crowd was a little more subdued than they would have been forty years ago; a lot more subdued and a lot grayer.

I didn’t know what to expect? Would the band members come out on stage with their walkers?

In fact, BS&T has been performing since 1967 and has been replacing band members all along.  The oldest member of the group we saw had been with the group for thirty years and didn’t really join the group until their string of hits and Grammies had ended.

One of the newest members of the group was Bo Bice; the runner-up finalist in the 2005 American Idol contest to Carrie Underwood. Bo brought his special gold album winning talent to the group which made for a great night. The new drummer was way better than in the original group.  It was a great night of blues, jazz and rock and roll!

There was more gray hair in the audience the night I went then at an ARRP barbeque. Not only were we older, but I think we were wiser then when we heard BS&T in the sixties.

How one perceives the lyrics to a song certainly varies by ones age. I can remember hearing BS&T songs in the seventies and thinking how radical and thought provoking they were; not so much anymore!

The BS&T classic “And When I Die” didn’t seem so threatening when I was twenty ; a little more now.  After the concert in the car on the way home, my wife and I both commented on how that song had a totally different meaning for us in the mellow years of our life!

When you are young, it might be okay to think about death as wanting to “go naturally”, but as I am now older, I want more assurances than just knowing that “there will be one child born, in our world, to carry on.” Still, I don’t “wanna go by the devil” or “wanna gby demon” or “wanna go by Satan” just like when I was when I was twenty, but because I lived a full life I know there is a Hell and I pray that I go to Heaven.

I also know that the only way to guarantee that you go to heaven is in giving your life to Jesus Christ!

*****

If you liked this blog post I know you will love my Hating God Trilogy. Please go to Amazon where you can read for free “Hating God”, “Ignoring God”, and “Loving God” if you subscribe to Kindleunlimited.

Please Forgive Me Meryl Streep

I didn’t start out hating Meryl Streep!

I don’t know Meryl Streep other than through her movies. I have never met her and probably never will. I’m sure she has never heard of me and could care less how I feel about her.

But…

I feel I owe her an apology.

You see, Meryl Streep is too damn good an actress.

It all began in 1979 when I was young, watching her in the movie Kramer vs. Kramer.  This was an amazing movie with a great cast: Dustin Hoffman, Jane Alexander, Howard Duff and of course Meryl Streep.  Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep won Oscars for their roles and the movie won three others including Best Picture.

Herein lies the problem; Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman were just so good at their jobs that I ended up associating their characters in this movie with them.  I could never see Hoffman and Streep in another movie for the rest of my life without thinking Kramer and Kramer.

Being a young guy, I totally bonded with Dustin Hoffman’s role in this movie as he struggled to take care of his son after his wife abandoned him.  I winced as he lost his job and had to find another lesser job fast as his wife had come back by now and was suing to get custody back.

Now that I am older and hopefully wiser, I realize that forces that work between a man and a woman in marriage are very complex and when you throw a child into the mix it complicates the situation even more.  Now, I think I could watch a story like Kramer vs. Kramer and hopefully see both sides of the situation. In fact, I am an author that writes about just these types of complex situations.

At twenty six, like many people my age, I saw the world as black and white and I saw red as the court awarded custody to the Meryl Streep mother.  I was so righteously enraged that I watched the rest of the movie through a crimson haze.

I was so mad at the Meryl Streep character in that movie that for many years I refused to watch any movie with Meryl Streep in it as no matter what part she was playing, it reminded me of her character in Kramer vs. Kramer.  My loss, as Meryl Streep is a magnificent actress.

Fast forward thirty years and I’m discussing that horrible movie with my daughter and she decides she wants to watch it.  As a good father, I agree to watch it with her.

An amazing thing happens!

Watching the movie through older and wiser eyes I’m not so enraged at the court decision in the movie and I actually am able to absorb the final scenes.  To my horror, I realize that at the end of the movie, the Meryl Streep character sees how much the Dustin Hoffman character loves the little boy and changes her mind and lets him keep the child.

For all the horrible thoughts I have had towards Meryl Streep over the years I sincerely apologize.

It’s a happy ending though, as I got to catch up on thirty years of great Meryl Streep cinema!

*****

If you liked this blog post I know you will love my Hating God Trilogy. Please go to Amazon where you can read for free “Hating God”, “Ignoring God”, and “Loving God” if you subscribe to Kindleunlimited.

Before Cell Phones

Do you remember what it was like before cell phones?  I’m not talking about not being able to post your latest adventures on Instagram, I’m talking about not being able to call someone.

This is a story before cell phones and before electronic ignition for that matter.

It was 1975 and I was leaving the northeast in my almost new Opel Manta on my way to Mississippi where I was going to enter pilot training at Columbus AFB. When you traveled back then, it was always good to have a lot of cash on hand as finding an ATM was almost impossible; Of course, fifty bucks was a lot of money back then.  I could fill the tank of my Manta fifteen times with fifty bucks.

I was cruising at seventy mph down the highway somewhere in Appalachia when all of a sudden my engine shut off.  No problem; I depressed the clutch and coasted a mile to the next exit.  It was one of those long winding off-ramps, but I was not worried as I still had enough speed to cruise the final two miles to the end of the off-ramp.

I then encountered something I never imagined in my life that I would ever find at the T-intersection at the bottom of a major highway off-ramp; a dirt road!  Not a dirt road with a gas station, but a dirt road with nothing in sight in either direction.  

In my short life up to this point, I had never exited a highway and not found a city of 100,000 people or more.  I was a little stumped, but hey, I was a brand new college graduate and I should be able to figure something out, so I pulled my car over to the side of the dirt road and got out.

I opened the hood and tried willing the engine to start to no avail.  I was getting a little anxious as it hadn’t been too many years before that I had seen the movie Deliverance and the phrase “squeal like a pig” kept running through my mind.

What was I going to do?  I had just about decide to walk the two miles back up the off-ramp to the highway and hope to thumb to the nearest civilization when I spotted two young boys, about sixteen years old,  walking my way.

I should say that I saw Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn walking my way; bib overhauls with no shirts, no shoes, straw hats and of course, bamboo fishing poles.  Was I dreaming?

I saw a problem right away when we started trying to communicate.  These boys had such thick Appalachian mountain accents that I only understood one word out of three. Eventually, I got my tool kit of my trunk and got a screw driver out for them relying almost entirely on sign language.

Evidently, the points in my carburetor had closed and with a little fiddling, they were able to get the engine running again.  I was so happy to be able to get out of there that I would have promised them my first born child, but they refused any attempt I made for compensation; they probably got enough enjoyment over the years telling the story of the Yankee who didn’t know one end of a screw driver from the other.

I thanked them again, waved goodbye headed back to the highway where I made my way to Mississippi where I learned many more life lessons south of the Mason Dixon line.

Sure would have been nice to have had a cell phone back then, but then I probably would have been out of service!

*****

If you liked this blog post I know you will love my Hating God Trilogy. Please go to Amazon where you can read for free “Hating God”, “Ignoring God”, and “Loving God” if you subscribe to Kindleunlimited.

Sally the Wonder Dog

Some dog breeds are smarter than others; some dog breeds just think they are smarter!

Dumb dogs are easier to take care of than smart dogs.  When you leave a dumb dog home alone, the dog just lies down and waits for their people to get back.  When you leave a smart dog home alone, the dog looks around to see what kind of trouble it can get into like, “Gee, I wonder what that table would look like with three legs.”

I have a friend who has a Newfoundland dog named Martha. They left her alone this past Christmas and she decided to eat the gingerbread house that had taken the kids six hours to build. They found gingerbread crumbs on every bed in the house; Martha had had a great time. After eating the spicy housing material, Martha was thirsty and cleaned out her water bowl and both toilets.

Guess what?

Martha decided she needed to relieve herself all over the house. Knowing that she was already in deep trouble, I think Martha said, “What the heck?” and went into the diaper pail and deposited a soiled diaper in every room of the house.

Talk about being in the dog house - Martha is in so much trouble!

Give me a dumb dog every time.

We had a Cocker Spaniel named Sally.  Cockers are a notoriously dumb breed.  Sally lived up to her forefathers quite well except for several flashes of brilliance.

For one thing, she was an infamous escape artist and once she got out she was really hard to corral.  We would let her out into the most impenetrable back yards you ever saw and she would find a way out.

Once she was out, she was awfully hard to catch.  We had to resort to trickery!  You see, Sally loved to ride in cars almost more than anything else.  So, when she got out, rather than trying to catch or call her which would do no good, we simple drove the car around and opened the door and yelled, “Sally, want to go for a ride?”

Worked every time!

We had just moved into a new neighborhood of duplexes that was only about five percent full.  One of our cats hadn’t been home for a couple of days and we were sure that a fisher cat had got ton her.  My parents were visiting from Florida and we had just sat down for dinner when Sally scratched on the front door to be let in.  My wife volunteered me to go let her in and I gladly opened the front door.

Instead of coming in, Sally started backing up like Lassie.  Instead of saying, “What is it girl?” like Timmy would have said, I said, “Do you want to come in or not?”  I closed the door and went back to eat.

When Sally scratched at the door again, my wife gave me one of those looks.  I said, “She doesn’t want to come in.”  My wife got up and went to let Sally in.

The next thing I know, my wife is following Sally across an empty field to an empty duplex.  Someone had broken the basement window and out cat had decided to jump through.  The problem was that she couldn’t jump back up the six feet to the broken window; there she was, sitting upstairs in the picture window wondering why we didn’t unlock the front door and let her out.

I was wondering the same thing myself.

Eventually, I lowered myself through the broken window down into the basement and went upstairs to let our lost cat out. But, I wasn’t the hero.

Sally the Wonder dog had saved the day.

I remember crying the day she died; I still miss her so much.

*****

If you liked this blog post I know you will love my Hating God Trilogy. Please go to Amazon where you can read for free “Hating God”, “Ignoring God”, and “Loving God” if you subscribe to Kindleunlimited.

Goodbye Aspartame

As soon as I opened my eyes, I knew something was wrong; my bed was moving!

My bed was moving and strange people were there staring down at me; and I was strapped down!

I thought my heart might jump right out of my chest as I tried to figure this out.  They didn’t look like terrorists, but they had uniforms on and they were questioning me.

“Do you know what year it is?”

I suddenly realized that I was in an ambulance and the strange men talking to me were EMTs. I was calmed and pleased because I knew the answer, “2014,” I answered.

Then I panicked as a flashback to a hospital room came crashing down on me as I remembered a scene when the doctor was giving my mother a dementia test; and she couldn’t come close to the right year.

What if it wasn’t 2014?  What if I wasn’t in the right decade?

I calmed down as I could see from the EMT’s eyes that I had answered correctly.  “Who is the President,” he asked?

“Do I have to answer that,” I asked?

It ends up that I had experienced a nocturnal seizure; the first one of my life.  I eventually was released from the hospital and I felt just fine.

Weeks later, after an MRI, a sleep deprived EEG and a battery of other tests, my neurologist said that she could find no reason that caused the seizure. She recommended that other than not driving until the six month point, I could resume all normal activities.

Have you ever had one of those annoying voices in the back of your head telling you to do the right thing even though you didn’t want to? I knew what I had to do, but even then it took me a month to take charge of my life; I didn’t want to do what I knew I had to do.

My cousin, the Pharmacist, had been telling me for years that Aspartame caused seizures.  I had always replied that that was BS as I was the poster boy for Aspartame.  Now that I had actually had a seizure, what could I say?

I knew what I had to do.

I did my research trying to talk myself out of it.  Most of the websites that linked Aspartame to seizures also claimed that all vaccinations were bad for you and we probably didn’t land on the moon!  But, in the end…

I knew what I had to do.

I went from drinking about ten Coke Cherry Zero’s a day to zero; completely cutting Aspartame out of my diet.  What I didn’t count on was cutting out all that caffeine out of my life.

There are ten caffeine withdrawal symptoms; headaches, sleepiness, irritability, lethargy, constipation, depression, muscle pain, lack of concentration, flu-like symptoms and insomnia.  I got most of them.

It was the worst about five days into the withdrawal and I stayed home from work and didn’t get out of bed all day.  The headaches lasted for another week, but I was completely over the withdrawal in two weeks.

The only thing that scared me was that I read on one caffeine withdrawal blogs that one person said that after giving up caffeine, he never quite felt as energetic as he did with caffeine.

So be it.

I will survive.

I’m Aspartame free and hopefully seizure free!

*****

If you liked this blog post I know you will love my Hating God Trilogy. Please go to Amazon where you can read for free “Hating God”, “Ignoring God”, and “Loving God” if you subscribe to Kindleunlimited.

The Wisdom of Simon Birch

“Faith is not in a floor plan”

When asked by Reverend Russell what he was doing sitting in a corner, Simon replied he was thinking about God.  “In a corner,” Reverend Russell was skeptical.  Simon set him straight.

I’m sitting at my dining room table right now looking out my window at some awesome New Hampshire fall foliage.  Somehow, I’m able to see God’s hand on the universe right now much more than I do sitting in church on Sunday.  Faith truly doesn’t have a floor plan.

“I don’t know.  Sex makes people crazy.”

Simon’s reply to Reverend Russell when asked about why Simon caused the Christmas Pageant catastrophe was truly honest.  From Adam and Eve to father Abraham to King David to us, sex has consistently made us crazy.  If you don’t believe it, just watch TV for a night and pay attention to how advertisers try to sell you things.  At times in each of our lives, as much as we don’t want to admit it, sex comes before God.

“If God's made the church bake sale a priority, we're in a lot of trouble.”

I have a continual struggle with the relationship of our current churches and the word of God.  Sometimes, I totally believe that it is so important that the believers meet in one place to publically worship.  Other times I’m just like Simon Birch and the endless announcements and plans talked about in church that have nothing to do with God drive me bananas.  I just want a place to come with fellow Christians and worship God; maybe that can’t happen without church bake sales, but I hope not.

“I want to know that there's a reason for things. I used to be certain, but now I'm not so sure. I want you to tell me that God has a plan for me, a plan for all of us.”

Christ is the only person who has ever lived that didn’t have any doubt about God’s plan for him; the rest of us can only wonder.  Sometimes we catch a glimmer of God’s plan when we find out something we did years ago actually truly affected someone’s life in their quest for God.  Most of the time we throw bread out on the water and never know what happens to it.  The only thing we can be sure of is that in the end God wins.

*****

If you liked this blog post I know you will love my Hating God Trilogy. Please go to Amazon where you can read for free “Hating God”, “Ignoring God”, and “Loving God” if you subscribe to Kindleunlimited.

Nature vs Nurture

How much of what you believe is genetic and how much comes from your environment?

If B.F. Skinner and John Bowlby were alive today, we could have a lively debate on this topic; but who wants to sit through a lecture from a couple of egg heads? 

What about personal experience?

I was raised in the bosom of Liberalism in Beverly, Massachusetts in the 1960’s.  Everyone I knew worshipped at the throne of the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port.  My family had been voting Democratic since the beginning of time.  If Nurture is right, then I should have swayed far to the left.

But, my brain was built a little different.  I remember when I was sixteen watching a debate on TV and on every topic, I agreed with Jerry Williams and not his Liberal opponent.  I can remember turning off the TV and thinking, “How could this happen? I think I’m a Conservative!”

Fast forward a few years.

I left my home on July 5^th, 1971, at the height of the Viet Nam War, for boot camp at the Air Force Academy;  not necessarily the most popular thing to do in the Northeast at the time. I was a little nervous leaving my family and friends to go to Colorado.

Luckily, once I started my summer training, I didn’t have to make too many decisions. Uncle Sam is really good at telling you what to do. It was in this first year where I transformed from civilian life.

Christmas was the first time I had any time off and I traveled home for a much needed brake.  The rule at the Academy was that all 4^th classmen (freshmen) must travel in uniform. I must have gotten some nasty looks retrieving my baggage in Boston, but I was so excited to be home that I didn’t notice.

I wasn’t looking forward to return to Logan airport a few weeks later!

After checking in at the gate, I was asked to by airport security, predecessors to the TSA, to accompany them.  I was led to a back room and strip searched; all the time being vilified about being in the Military.  I seem to remember the terms “military asshole” and “baby killer” being thrown around.

I’m sure this was just a couple of security punks showing off and not the official policy of Logan Airport towards our men in uniform.  If I knew then what I know now, I might have lodged a complaint; but at eighteen years old, I was just happy to get on my plane, on time.

I understand the value of frees speech; in fact, many of my friends have died defending free speech for these so called Viet Nam protestors.  What I don’t understand is why they always choose the American Military person to lodge their protests?

I believe it was Clausewitz that defined war as just the final step of diplomacy. Why weren’t these protestors surrounding their Senator’s and Congressman’s offices?  They are the ones who determined who would go to war; not the poor schmuck in uniform!

After that first year, I always tried to travel in civilian clothes. Of course, it was hard to hide my Military haircut back then.

I ended up leaving active duty after ten years only to join the Vermont National Guard after a ten year break.  Amazingly enough, even in the new millennium, wearing a uniform in Burlington Vermont was not the most popular thing to do.

Many of the full-time Guard people were briefed to change before they left work for the day.  As a part-timer Green Mountain Boy, my uniform wearing was limited to a couple of times a month.

For my Guard weekend, I would usually drive up to Burlington on Friday night and stay in a hotel. I remember one specific weekend just after 911.  On Saturday morning I dressed in my BDU’s and went down to the curtesy continental breakfast to get my bagel and cream cheese.

I was always a little uncomfortable standing in line, in uniform, and I must have flinched when the gentleman in back of me in line tapped me on the shoulder.  I turned expecting the worse and he shook my hand and thanked me for serving my country.  After that, the entire room broke into applause and everyone came up to shake my hand and pound me on the back.

I was flabbergasted! This was the first time in my entire career in the Military that anyone had ever thanked me for serving my country.  I don’t know who those people are who were in that room that morning, but I would like to thank them from the bottom of my heart; it meant so much to me.

Does either behavior I encountered, good or bad, come from Nature or Nurture?  I don’t know, but I imagine that the answer is somewhere in the middle.

*****

If you liked this blog post I know you will love my Hating God Trilogy. Please go to Amazon where you can read for free “Hating God”, “Ignoring God”, and “Loving God” if you subscribe to Kindleunlimited.