My Constant Companion

Every day of my life I can count on with the utmost certainty, my constant companion pain. I go to bed with pain and I wake in the morning with pain. Most days my hands feel like a hammer has hit my knuckles, my neck is stiff, my foot tingles with a numbing feeling that borders pain and tingling and my back, the crown jewel of my chronic pain. Pain as we know is our bodies way of alerting us that something is wrong with our body. It helps us remember where that bedpost is in the dark. Some of us learn at an early age just what electricity is and where it comes from. I have had my share of mishaps in my life and have been able to experience all sorts of pain. From the cement of a driveway to baseballs hitting me in the head, the usual assortment of cuts and bruises, to a couple of broken bones, even a broken heart, pain has always found its way to be with me as a nurturer and foe. I'm not trying to make this a woe me post but to raise awareness that people live with pain everyday, many I'm sure worse off than I. I live in its shadow, I carry its weight, day after day. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? I do not see the light but I am continue moving through the tunnel we call our lives. Maybe the light will appear, around the next bend perhaps. Maybe.

Teachers To Remember

My first grade teacher was a grey haired Mrs. Smith. She was a very typical old school first grade teacher for the 1960's. Second grade belonged to Mrs. Krause, younger and a quite a bit rounder than Mrs. Smith. In third grade my teacher was again a Mrs. Smith. She was definitley an old school teacher and much stricter than either of the previous two. Ms. Turner ran the fourth grade class and I remember her as the prettiest of them all. Yes I was starting to notice these things even in fourth grade. But it was fifth grade that my teacher, again a Mrs. Smith, oldest of them all as she was at least 72 from her own admissions, fostered an enviroment that encouraged us to learn and to take control of our learning. I can recognize now her depth of wisdom that obviously was kindled by her passion to teach. She allowed us to control a couple of hours every week based on what we as a group and individually accomplished through the week. She like all the teachers taught all the required subjects, Math, English, History and Reading. But it was her creative spirit that allowed us as young students to explore beyond what the state of Texas required of fifth grade students in 1970. We started a chess club in her class and you could earn extra playing time by scoring well on quizzes or turning in extra work. Our classroom became a darkroom as she taught us how black and white photos came to life. By the end of the year we published a small humble school paper. The Principle allowed us to use a staff restroom for our darkroom and Mrs. Smith provided us with a twin lens camera. We were junior journalists. It is now almost forty years later and I still remember her blues eyes always lit up behind her glasses, her crooked nose and her stacked up bluish grey hair. This was what made up Mrs. Smith. She taught for the love of teaching long after earning her teachers pension. Thank you Mrs. Smith.

Championship Day

Today marks the day my son's YMCA youth basketball team will play for the East Championship. Last night they played in the semi-finals and won by about eighteen points. Nick played for about thirty seconds at the end of the game. Nick missed practices and this coach holds players back from playing when they miss practices. But I write this today not to gripe about the coach but to recognize my son's steadfastness as a team member while on the bench. I saw him cheering his teammates on and leaping to his feet when they made exceptional plays. I'm proud of him for supporting the team and his willingness to go into the game at the very end. I played some sports when I was younger but was never a gifted athlete and my Dad never saw me play anything. As a father it is important to me to be there supporting Nick in all he does even sitting on the bench. I know and he knows that he is capable of playing at a high level. Today will be a new game and I believe Nick will again be a valuable player for the team. As a father who is a much better arm chair athlete than he was a real athlete, re-lives some of my own youth through his actions on the court. As a father I couldn't have been more proud of him last night.

Memories Of Turning 21 Can Rest Now

Don't we all look forward to turning 21? For me this was supposed to be the milestone that meant I didn't have to sneak into bars anymore and I could buy my own beer at any store not just at the little Korean owned place behind the Social Services building that always bagged it up before ringing it up. Actually I still patronized his store but not as frequently. The night of my birthday I didn't plan an elaborate party. I only wanted to go to a club and dance the night away and drink some beers. My roommates were going out to see Star Wars for the who knows how many times and left before I did. I didn't want to get to the club too early so so I cracked open a beer and was listening to some tunes when Alfred arrived.

(For this story I have changed the names to protect ......... well to protect me.)

Alfred had recently been our other roommate but we had kicked him out because he never paid the rent. He and I always got along pretty well and were close friends. I had always been closer to Alfred than Steve had. Tonight he was touting some Yukon Jack whiskey. "Come on in." I told him. This was a cold wet September night in Utah that already had the hint of frost in the air and it wasn't even 9pm yet. Alfred was soaked to the gills and needed to come inside to dry off and the bottle of Jack looked very inviting too. So we sat around on the couch and drank the whiskey for about an hour telling jokes and stories of old times. I was getting pretty buzzed and still wanted to go to the club so I called a cab. Alfred then showed me a rather large knife in the liner of his jacket. I said, "What you going to do with the sword?" And laughed a bit when he replied, "I'm going to prove to Steve that I'm a man." Steve was one of my roommates. Steve and Misty were at the movie and I really didn't know when they would be back. So I brushed this comment aside as Alfred always carried a knife for protection anyway. I was sure the that was just the whiskey talking. Before my cab arrived Alfred fell asleep and I decided to leave him in the apartment. After all he had been our roommate just a month before. I trusted him. So I left and true to my desires danced the night away. It was close to 3am when the cab was dropping me off at the apartment when my neighbor ran out and said, "Don't go in there." "Why?" I asked. He looked at me very solemnly and said, "Alfred is dead. He and Steve had a fight. There is blood every where inside all the way to the basement." I was shocked and horrified. I had to see this for myself. I went in and nothing can prepare you for what I saw. The blood in some places was still pooled and wet in others it was dry. On the walls, the floors, the cabinets and stairs. All the way to my room the trail of death led. I was so shocked I was no longer buzzing from the alcohol but now stoned from the horror I was seeing and feeling. The police had already been there and gone. My neighbor a card from them. I was supposed to call. You never feel the real horror of death in the movies. This was reality, this was my home and these were my friends. I felt like I was being buried in a gravel pit unable to breathe the clean frosty air. I wanted to die right then rather than live with the building guilt growing like a tumor inside of me. I knew Alfred wanted to confront Steve but I didn't think nothing of it. I couldn't have kicked him out in the cold right? I didn't know then that Misty had been sleeping with both of them. I just thought it was the Yukon Jack talking shit. It was in a way. Courage from a bottle will enable even the most sensitive person to do things they never would do otherwise. No longer would my 21st birthday be remembered as a joyous fun night it was supposed to have been. It is now a grey memory of the past. A memory of two fiends struggling for the love from the same woman. Memory of the night that forever changed my life.

Life Requires A Bit Of Luck

I personally believe you always need a bit of luck in life to get through it. When I was growing up we didn't even know what seat belts were and the dash of the car was made of metal. Sure glad the accident I was a passenger in wasn't that bad. Luck? The 1959 Plymouth wagon my brother hit wasn't even hardly scratched but his Mustang was totaled. No one was seriously hurt and that can be considered lucky. I haven't won the Lottery yet so I am not that lucky but I have been in front of a couple of guns pointed at me and I have lived to tell those stories. Lucky? When I was younger, can't remember how old but Dad was not in Vietnam, I loaded a .22 caliber rifle with a .22 long rifle bullet. The gun was only designed for .22 shorts. Well the bullet wouldn't come out and I wasn't supposed to have been messing with it anyway, so I quietly placed it back in the closet and never said a word. Sometime later my brother was showing it off to his friend Freddy and he blew the light out from the ceiling. Lucky? I know Freddy was that day but Doug wasn't because Dad gave him a whooping. Twenty something years later as Dad and I were having a beer or two one evening, I told him the truth. He wasn't too pleased but what could he do. I do consider myself to be lucky but luck can be elusive and not always present itself in full sunlight. So ask yourself today, are you feeling lucky?

I Fried An Egg On The Pavement and It Was Me

Wow it was hot last Saturday. The mercury hit 118 degrees in Chandler. As I walked across the parking lot at the South Mountain YMCA the thought occurred to me that I was inside a convection oven and any minute now I would burst into flames or my skin would char. I now know what it feels like to be an egg broken into a skillet. I felt the sizzle Saturday. If salt had been sprinkled on me I would have been cooked, scrambled of course.

Dad You Have A Face

One of my best moments of fatherhood came when traveling down a winding road on the way to my Dad's place. Donna and I worked separate shifts in order to care for John who was just about three then. I would drop John off at Dad's and Donna would pick him up about an hour or so later. On that day John was next to me on the truck seat in his car seat and as I drove down the winding tree lined road with the sun popping out from amongst the patches between leaves, John suddenly looked up at me and said rather excitedly, "Dad you have a face!" It was so funny because I had had a beard for quite a bit of his short life but had shaved it all off at least two days prior to that day. So for two days he hadn't noticed but riding in the truck it struck him. This still brings a smile to my face today. Back then we were real buddies, cheeseburger buddies in fact. We still are but it is very different now that more than twenty years have past.