Month: August 2019

Sometimes I know when I am seriously in thought I probably don’t look too friendly. I may appear to be scowling, but I’m not…believe me. My mind wanders like a greased pig on slick ice. I’m all over the place. I can’t seem to concentrate on over one thing at a time anymore. I might say “uh-huh” and didn’t understand a word you said. Part of it might be my hearing. I was “borderline” on the last hearing test I took before I left work. Probably the results of a LOT of noisy factories, and some loud Garth Brooks concerts. (That one in B’ham got me…I couldn’t hear normally for three weeks!) OR it could just be selective hearing. Nevertheless, please don’t think me rude..I can’t seem to help it.

I’m praying for a lot of friends tonight. There’s a lot who need it. I hope some pray for me too. Regardless of the fact that I quit going to Church regular, I ain’t lost my religion, my humanity, or my philosophy of life which is live and let live, give when you can, what you can and care about all life big and small.

Perhaps I am getting old because I appear to ramble. Anyway, if I walk by you with my head down and a blank look on my face just holler “hey” and that will get my attention and we will talk. I like you…believe me I really do….I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Going through things trying to decide: keep, sell, give away?

I come across a hot wheels container with multiple used…some well used, toy die cast cars. I recognize some of them. They are left overs from pre 1987, when we lived at 35 9th street. They belonged to Teddy and Matthew.

I posted a few weeks ago about finding all my tax returns from way back in the day. In 1982 through 1987 we were a one paycheck family, and it wasn’t anything to brag about dollar wise. But we got by.

However, every payday I’d take the kids to the store for a toy. Most of the time the boys bought hot wheels. More bang for the buck at .99 cents each. I can’t remember exactly what Kisi got…by 1987 it was probably teen magazine, with Menudo, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna pictures.

But the boys pretty much stuck to the hot wheels during that era. I can’t tell you how many times I’d clean up their room and put stuff into their big old basketball shaped toy box, and there would be dozens of hot wheels in the bottom. They buried them, burned them, and blew them up…but some still survived. They made roads in the dirt for them, dropped rocks and bricks on them, and let Junior have some. Some still survived. Ted started wanting the ones with electric motors, and even cleverly wired one of them up to an electrical cord one day, and plugged it into a 110 outlet. That little motor ran 1000 miles an hour til it started smoking like a bomb, and blew the fuse.

Ted and I moved on to baseball cards in 1988, and Matt started wanting spider man comic books, so one day before we moved to Elm street in 1987, I cleaned the bottom of the old toy box out one last time and put what was left in the box I found today.

After a little reflection, I decided to put them in the “keep” pile. What else could I do??

I cannot reconcile some of the posts I read with the commandment that Jesus gave: “A new command I give you. Love one another. As I have loved you, you must love one another”. You must…he…said…

He didn’t say love the sinner, but hate the sin. What nonsense!

He didn’t say justify your lack of love due to mitigating factors of your own invention.

He didn’t say to cherry pick this verse, nor that verse, and use it out of context to make some convoluted point that proves absolutely nothing.

I’ll tell you this. I have not melted myself down to the dregs in a hot cauldron these past five years…tortured and searching, and repoured myself into a new mold, to see and hear people say up is down, and wrong is right.

It’s not. You can’t make it so just by thinking it.

Change comes hard for me. It’s the Scottish blood I think. At least that’s what I’ll blame anyway.

My Grandpa was a Stewart. About as Scottish as it gets. He loved his old home place at the end of Snake nation road. I can only remember him being talked into riding the 100 mile trip to Trion just a few times during our time together on Earth. Fewer than you could count on one hand. Most weeks while he was living at the “old” place you were lucky to get him to go to town on Saturday and to church on Sunday. Actually going to church was voluntary on his part, while going to town was something Grandma had to fuss at him in order to get him to do it.

I’m sure he would have gladly drawn his last breath in that old house…but the tornado of ’73 blew it off it’s foundation, and in the end Grandpa got sick and lost his memory, and ended up in the nursing home. I still think of him and Grandma quite often, as anyone who reads what I write can tell.

We had a lot of good memories in the old house. Almost all our Christmases were spent there. I gave Eli the last physical thing I had left from those Christmases the other day. It was a tin box which candy canes had come in that had a lion on it. I still have most all my memories from there and then though. Sometimes it takes a little digging to uncover them. I’ll keep doing that now and then as I can.

As Paula and I move from this old house in which we have lived for most of the past 29 years (with a two year hiatus on 7th street) I’m taking many of the familiar things which surround me that trigger memories. Some little physical things which will inhabit our new space with us.

But most of all I’m taking my memories. Raising three kids here…all the joys, and a few sorrows. The get togethers and the holiday festivities. The “long” hallway. The kids and grandkids coming and going. It’s been a pretty good run, and I’m hoping the coming years will be full of new memories…good memories! The only thing changing is just my abode. My love is not changing. My caring is not changing. My heart is not changing. These things will always remain the same…constant…towards those I love.

As Paula Neurauter Bowers says, soon the things which are changing will just become the new normal. We will remain Mom and Dad, Papa and Nana…for as long as we live.

This is simply my little soliloquy for this epoch of my life.

Now…I gotta quit cause my eyes are leaking.

Peace and Love…

Has anyone ever thought to themselves….I’d love to be young again? I’ve had that thought before, but I’ve qualified that statement: I’d only want to be young again if it could be “in my own time”.

I would not want to be young again now. Not in this day and age.

I’ve thought myself depressed over the past few years. I cry quite often over various things. A lot of times it’s thinking about the way the world is now. I’m sure that’s probably not unusual for people my age.

I’m often angry over my generation not being able to make a difference for the better in our world. We baby boomers…so numerous, but apparently too self absorbed and shallow to have enough vision to prevent being where we are today. It’s not the loving world the flower children were singing about at Woodstock. It’s the world where “the love of many has grown cold”.

Just tonight in the tiny limited time I saw the “news” I heard of police in a nearby city tasing an elderly woman who was cutting dandelions from the property of a Boys and Girls club with a paring knife. The owners called the police, who ordered the old lady to “drop the knife” and then tased her when she didn’t. Turns out she didn’t speak English and had dementia. There’s a lot of room for some compassion at several points in that story.

I saw a video also of an adult teacher taking down a male student onto a table in a classroom and choking him. How does that happen??

You don’t have to even look very closely anymore to ask yourself what in the world is this world coming to? Oh, I understand it’s always been a pretty rough world…I do understand that, and I understand we see a lot more things a lot more often, and more quickly then they did back in the Wild West, or during the Middle Ages. It just seems so wrong somehow to have a world right now where we could be so much better….yet we won’t. Not can’t, but won’t.

Greed pervades us, and insensitivity and plain old bald faced rudeness populates our “social media”. Hatred towards people who are different, for whatever reason…than what some groups consider “the norm” ignites viral conversations coming from positions of power, and positions of popularity, that I never in my wildest dreams as a young man would have considered possible.

The love of many has definitely grown cold, and continues to do so every day.

I can’t do much about it. What am I…who am I to even know what to do? All that I can do is to try and take care of those people who I love. Try to encourage and educate them to be caring and loving, by giving them all the loving and caring that I can. The little ones anyhow. The grown ones I can only offer advice if it’s sought, and try to be a decent example of someone who genuinely cares. Many days I still just turn out being a crabby old man. I’m sorry…

Where was it I started this? Would I like to be young again? No, no….indeed no. I pray every night as I’m preparing to do now, that the future holds answers which I do not see which will make this world a lovely and wonderful place for my dear ones, just as wonderful as it has been for me. Somehow, someway dear God…let it be so.

I know that many people hope and pray for better things beyond this mortal life. A lot of the World’s religions promise such in their teachings. I’m not debating or demeaning anyone’s beliefs. I’m coming to think that sometimes hoping for great things in the afterlife blinds us to the possibility of the great things humans might do in the here and now, and in our future.

I know I sometimes steer my boat a little to the negative, but the more I watch the babies of the world and see how smart they are, how quickly they pick things up…the more hope I have for humanities future. I hope for a new paradigm which allows humans to live together without hate and war, with cures for dread diseases, with mankind reaching out for the stars to find and populate new worlds. I think it is within the grasp of the many tiny hands now out there learning to navigate themselves through a world of technology which is already here, and a more complex and wondrous one which they themselves will create…it is within their ability to perform magical works.

So, let us love them. Let us teach them tolerance and virtue. Let us tell them they have no limitations. Let us entrust to them all of humanities tomorrow’s, and I swear they will succeed where we have failed. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”

I was thinking about the old Weave room tonight. Back before the air jets and sulzers…the days of the old X1′ s and X2′ s. The old clackety clack of the shuttle’s flying out and back, and the beat up slamming that filling yarn in so tight. That rhythmic beat you could hear before you even hit the front door. “Slamaty..Clamity..Slamity..Clamity” over and over and over again. Hundreds of them in time creating an almost unbearable noise and a vibration that shook deep inside your chest.

I remember no air conditioning, and the sweat falling off in salty rivulets…And the white t-shirts all the men wore being soaked with sweat and dirty and greasy from laying on the Weave room floor up under a loom, legs sticking out in the narrow alleys.

And all the women with their waste aprons shoving those round battreys on each loom full of wound double tight yarn spools fresh out of the spinning room, double checking that it’s the right gauge and thickness. “Can’t have no mixed yarn.” Says the floor boss. You’d get wrote up for that. “Hell with that thick yarn!” Momma says. “Can’t get a break without the battery running out.”

And them’s the good old days.

But when we cut ourselves the blood was red. And some fixer who was caught up would help fill the battries so you could take a break and go to the water house and eat a bite. And the paychecks came home, with one savings bond a week coming out of it. But…in the end the money ran out anyway. And the old looms gave way to the air jets. And things changed and changed and changed some more.

But is it better? I can still hear those old looms in my head. My hearings a little hard, but my eyes are a little misty.

1619-1865 is 246 years. 1865-2019 is 154 years. We have almost a century left until this country has lived as many years without legal slavery as it did with it. That doesn’t even count another 100 years exactly from 1865-1965 when the voting rights act passed. So in reality that’s 346 years.

Spain, and then Mexico…after it won independence, owned much of the Southwestern US from 1521 after the conquest of the Aztecs, until 1848, when the Treaty of Hildalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War, which the US had instigated. The US got Texas, Southern California, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado in that treaty. That’s 327 years the SW United States belonged to the “Hispanics” and 171 years that the United States has owned it. All citizens of Mexico got to choose to stay in the new United States, or go back to Mexico. Most of them stayed, creating an instant cross culture between the United States and Mexico, which has persisted since then. That’s a total of 498 years that Spanish speaking people have been in this area, as opposed to only after 1848 that white Americans started to go into these areas to settle. (The Gadsden purchase of 1853 further enlarged New Mexico and Arizona)

It amazes me that in just a very few short years, history in this country has been forsaken for media make belief. The myth of white manifest destiny over the cultural patterns of this country, and the belief that somehow the stain of slavery and repression has been washed as white as snow in a few short years belies the facts which lie in the history of America, if any would take the time to read it.  Perhaps it cannot be understood.

Perhaps the trend of purposeful ignorance has taken such deep root that it can never be reversed.  It is a shame that we Americans of the last half of the 20th century have been either unwilling or unable to defend the hard won freedoms and openness that our Fathers fought and died for in World War II. We have given them up to Autocracy and Oligarchy with hardly a fight.

My Dad’s nickname was “Tarp”. His friends and brothers gave him the name because he used to catch a lot of terrapin turtles when he was a little kid. It certainly wasn’t because he was slow. J.W. Greenwood was Dad’s good friend when they were young. He once told me that Daddy was the “quickest” man he ever saw, and also the most accurate rock thrower he ever knew.

My Dad told me himself that he had beaten many a big bully by “rocking them” then running away….then rocking them again. They finally gave up and ran when they had too many knots on the noggin’ to count….and they never caught him. If they came around the house where my Daddy lived, they risked getting their butts kicked by my Uncle “Curly” or by the oldest brother Robert…who everybody called “lightning” because he could hit so hard and so fast. Fighting was a pretty common pastime during the Great Depression.

My Mom had three different versions of my Dad’s name. When she was just commonly addressing him…she would just say: Tarp

If she wanted something, as in getting him go to the store it would be: “Tarpie will you go get us some frozen yogurt?” Mom loved that frozen yogurt.

The most fearsome of the versions was when we….my brother and I, were kids and did something wrong. Then it would be: “Tarrr…up! Come and give this kid a whooping.”

Strangely enough, that happened more often than I needed it to up until I turned 13, after which Daddy said I was too old to whup anymore. I guess he figured I could be talked to, and have some “privileges” taken away….with the same effect.

My Mom, on the other hand, continued to chase me around be the house with the wire handled fly flap!

Ahh..the memories.

A lot of times I still find myself picking up a pen and paper and write things down on them before I transcribe it to the cyber world.

To me, writing something down on a page, especially if you are trying to create something gives me a warmer more responsive feeling, as opposed to the cold, clinical, sterile feeling of creating something on a screen that sits up in front of you, like a monolithic all seeing eye, daring you to put your fingers against the keyboard and interact with it in some kind of weird pseudo sexual dance. A dance that it always seems to win. I still participate in that particular dance more often than I would like. In this day and age we have very little choice if we are to interact with the world at large. However, my deeper feelings are still recorded with pen and paper. Just an old habit that’s hard to break.

In my life time I have seen humans being gradually sucked into the black arms of technology, gradually a few steps at a time. I have gone along too, I will have to admit. Sometimes reluctantly, fighting against it tooth and nail, but more often like everyone else accepting the change as just another step to make life easier and more convenient for us.

Wood cook stoves have changed to electric and gas and then to microwaves. Dinner used to run around on two feet and your Grandmother would grab it, and it would be extremely fresh that night for supper. Now, we grab it out of the freezer from a box.

People used to walk places. Miles and miles to places. It wasn’t unusual for my Mother to walk 6 or 7 miles into “town” when she was a child, and then the same distance back after she had conducted whatever business she was doing. It took all day. You were tired after that and had no problems sleeping. Adults didn’t have any problems with sleep either. They worked all day in the fields, or in the barns or at the house. There was very little idle time. Maybe a little bit in the evenings before the sun went down to read a little in their tattered old Bibles before going to bed, exhausted. No problems sleeping. No sleeping pills needed due to having sat around all day and pecked on a computer keyboard and not gotten up and walked more than a few steps. No sleeping pills needed due to worrying about deadlines for unimportant things which seem critical. Just tired bones and muscles needing a full nights sleep before getting up at first light the next day to start over again.

Miles of walking. Now, I sometimes drive the single mile to the local Wal-Mart Superstore 5 or 6 times a day to pick something up. I am the one that worries about the critical things which are not critical and has to have the pill to sleep well. I don’t have to build a fire in a wood stove to stay warm, just turn up the gas or the electric heater. I wonder if I am better off.

Oh, and on those trips to Wal-Mart ( I really don’t particularly like Wally World, but…I would have to drive 20 miles to go to another store that has what they have, SO I conform…what’s a person to do?) most of the time I used to end up buying some pre-packaged stuff to fix for supper. I used to pop a Freshetta Pizza out of the box, and pop it into the oven. I used to NEVER look at the labels. I was afraid of reading them. I didn’t want to know what it took to preserve what I was eating. I’ve changed that by a long ways now…trying to pay attention to all the stuff that I have been consuming over the years which has been slowly killing me. Will it work or not…time will tell.

I know that Grandma used to cook stuff in Pure Lard. For a long time the Drs. said that was really bad for you, all that animal fat and stuff. I don’t know about that though. There is some contradictory report on the TV news every day now about what’s good for you and what isn’t. It’s enough to boggle your mind. If you try and keep up with it, and do what they say you have to change the way you eat and drink about every other week because some study shows this or that. I quit keeping up with that too, and just eat what I think is right for me. A lot of veggies and stuff. I guess if it’s bad for me one day, and good for me the next I figure things are balancing each other out over the long run. Right?

I can barely remember back before there was a TV in the house. Just vaguely. I remember listening to records and radio programs on the Philco combination Radio/Phonograph that my folks owned. There were some great singers. Sinatra, Dean Martin, Rosemary Clooney. There some funny radio shows. All of those are fuzzy memories though. I don’t think we used that radio more than a few times after the first little Black and White TV came into the house. After that, it was ‘I Love Lucy’, ‘The Honeymooner’s” and Baseball games during the week. And then on Saturday mornings, it was the BEST of all. There were Western’s with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hoppalong Cassidy. You name them, they were there. The cartoons were great too. Bugs Bunny and Popeye the Sailor man. The “Officer Don” show, with the puppets and the cartoons and clowns, not to speak of “Howdy Doody” and old Buffalo Bob. Who could resist that over listening to the radio? We sure didn’t realize we were being suckered into a new life style though. It just seemed like entertainment back then, and not a shady plot to take over our lives. But boy we were wrong, weren’t we?

Now, there are 4 or 5 TV’s in more every house. Every resident usually has one of their own. There are 2 or 3 computers, there are enough Nintendo game systems, and Microsoft game systems out there now to fill up the Superdome if you could stand up at the top and chunk them all in, prior to setting them all on fire in order to save mankind. I am afraid it’s a little to late though. And I will even have to admit that at my house there are two TV’s, and three or four computers. I sigh while I am sitting here thinking about it, but there’s no use in trying to deny the fact that I also have been caught up in the technology trap.

I have seriously thought sometimes about trying to simplify things, but I don’t think I know how anymore. I watched that movie “Lost” with Tom Hanks a few weeks ago, and I don’t think I want to live like that. You know the one where he is trapped on a deserted Island for so long that he starts talking to a soccer ball? Ohh…the lack of a dentist would kill me, but ol’ Tom survived it.

I guess there’s no turning back the hands of time. I wonder how many of us would go back even if we had the chance. I probably wouldn’t.

I wonder if there is anybody out there who has a list of the technological items that have come along since 1950. I have thought about trying to come up with one, but it would take more time then I have now to even think about starting. If there is one out there on the web that anyone knows about, make sure and let me know. Surely there is somebody out there who had all the spare time that all this wonderful technology has created for us to do such a list. That was the point in starting to invent all of it wasn’t it? To make life less complicated and less hard for we humans, and to give less time toiling away at menial tasks, like growing our own food, and raising our families, and more time to do the IMPORTANT things we want to do, like watching more TV, playing more video games, text messaging our friends on our Cell phones, going to one of the 9 billion fast food places in the country to eat our supper, pay our bills online, order our Christmas presents online, read our newspapers online, go to war with people we don’t like with smart bombs, and laser guns, because we have found out we hate each other more because we know more about each other, and what we know we have found we don’t like, and to drive our mega trillion automobiles around 1 mile to Wal-Mart 10 times a day putting so much Carbon Monoxide in the air that our planet is starting to warm up (so they say on TV anyway)

We take out other people’s body parts and put them in people to save their lives. They can transplant just about anything nowadays. I heard a few years ago they are working on a head transplant, so that’s why they got Old Ted William’s head frozen away out there somewhere in California waiting til’ they perfect that surgery. There are pacemakers, and stints. There are Dialysis machines and heart lung machines, and Cat Scans, and MRI’s…….

….and so on and so forth. Whew…we have come a long way baby, to get to where we are today.

I could go on, but there’s no use. You get the point by now.

Of course there is good connected with all of these things. Certainly, there is. I’m still alive because of some of this technology. I would never have gotten to do some of the amazing things I have done because of it. I have friends I would have never “spoken” to without this technology. I can keep in touch with my family, and that’s the most important thing I have gotten out of it. I guess it’s best to live with it, take the good and try to change the bad if you can. We were all created with a built in conscious (at least

Most of us were) so we know good from bad, and it’s up to us to try and change the things about our ‘New’ society that are bad.

We can write our Congressmen and Senators about the things that are wrong with our government, and how we feel about the Economy, and such. (Those would be some very long letters, but…it’s what we should do) If you see a program you don’t like on T.V., turn the channel. That’s the fastest way to get something done there. Recommend to your friends that they do the same thing. Vote next time there’s an election. Even in a GOOD voting year, most of the time fewer than 50% of registered voters vote! If they are not listening to the cards and letters…vote them out!

Quit making so many trips to Wal-Mart (That will be a hard one around my house) Cut down on the computer time, cut off the lights when you are not using them, read some instead of watching TV all the time. Spend time with your family….real time in person, not time “on line”

Question anything you aren’t sure about when it comes to technology:

Just because some Dr. wants to do something to you, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right or correct thing to do. I don’t really want them doing too much to me to tell you the truth, but I haven’t gotten on the stick and even written a living will, or a real will yet. Yes, that’s something I need to do, how about you?

Just because some salesperson at the computer store wants to sell you the “latest and greatest” PC doesn’t mean you really need it.

Do you really need that flat screen or HDTV? ( I decided I did…arrghhh.)

When you get your next car can you make sure it’s not a gas guzzler, or maybe even try and get a hybrid.

Ah well, I have rambled on long enough.

By the way, I wrote this directly onto the screen, instead of using a pen and paper. It would have taken too long otherwise.

Dang me. Dang me….outta’ take a rope and hang me…