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Life is like a balance scale. You must balance out the things you want with the things you really need. You may never have all you think you need, but then…did you truly need it after all?

As a child and a young man I would often dream of what I could become. What I have become is much different. I would not have imagined this. Nobody dreams of growing up to become “ordinary”. But ordinary is not bad, it is simply what has been weighed out in the balance, through choice and through chance.

After all, free will is what has been given to we humans as our heritage from the trials and errors of our ancestors, and through natural selection, or from God if you will.

We should not fail to exercise it, but we should realize at the same time the moral limitations it puts upon us. We should weigh in the balance that which makes us happy and productive against the idealism of that which we think would make us more satisfied.

Sometimes they are one and the same, but most of the time they are not, and those are the times which cause us to get out of balance, and to hurt ourselves and others whom we love.

As one of my favorite fantasy writers Brandon Sanderson said in his book The Hero of Ages:

“Somehow, we’ll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be. But for now, we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.”

It’s plain to me that we humans cannot understand the point of view of other human beings until we “walk a mile in their shoes” I think it holds true for almost everything. A person doesn’t understand Japanese cuisine until they eat it for the first time, no matter how much it’s described to you. Especially those big old flames that shoot up from those Hibachi grills!

It especially holds true for a person’s point of view as they accumulate years.

My Mom was 20 years older than me, my Daddy was 22 years older. Barely a generation. They were youngsters when they had me, just as Paula and I were youngsters when we married and had children.

I remember looking at them as a little child, and they were my whole world. Everything that came to me, came through them. My food, my clothes, my toys. Everything. They seemed to me as a four year old, which is as far back as I can remember, as almost super human. As I grew older, of course that point of view changed.

As an older child they seemed less super human, and more authoritarian. Always telling me what to do, and when to do it! How irritating that sometimes seemed to me. I didn’t care if it was a school day, and my bedtime, I didn’t think it was necessary to put that comic book down, and go to bed. But, there were consequences if I didn’t obey, so I put down the “Spiderman” comic book and jumped under the covers.

As a teenager, I thought I knew it all. I can’t remember when I learned it all, but I thought I knew it. I didn’t think Mom and Dad were right about anything. I didn’t think they knew much about life. Heck, who were they to tell me I couldn’t stay out past midnight? Who indeed?

As a young adult with children of my own, it seemed to me that Mom and Dad got a little smarter again, somehow. The advice they gave me about the kids was pretty accurate, especially the parts about how to handle them when they were misbehaving! And then, as my children grew into teenagers, and into adulthood and had children of their own, I looked back with new eyes at my parents. I looked back with more respect at how well they had handled my upbringing and that of my brother. I looked back with admiration at the help they had lent me, and the love that they had unselfishly given me…for free.

Now, as I sit here and watch the wind blow through the trees, and the rain start to fall in sheets from the sky, I am just now beginning to understand their viewpoint as “older” adults, as “senior” citizens. I don’t feel any differently then I ever have really, but I think that’s because time creeps up on us so incrementally that we don’t notice the changes that it causes until we walk by a mirror, or start to get up from flat on the floor after helping your little three year old granddaughter build a “block tower” Then you notice.

I just have to whisper a thanks into the air sometimes at night to those folks….thanks Dad and Mom. I appreciate it.

Information is now so “directed” that it almost seems like an “upside down pyramid” system, where tons of disparate “news” and questionable blocks of “knowledge” are aimed at just you…and you alone. It’s impersonal, but oh so important!

It’s sort of like a story I heard a couple of weeks ago about how the government was going to “get into” reducing the number of phishing and nuisance phone calls which Americans get. Since I heard the story, I’ve gotten twice as many calls! Maybe it’s the “last gasp” of the phishing telemarketing thieves…but I doubt it.

A huge number of evil spirits flew out of the Pandora’s box we call “the worldwide web” back when the lid was opened. They cannot be put back, and I seriously question whether or not they can even be controlled.

Remember that good is something mostly given when you personally look at, or touch someone in person. Love is given face to face in all but the rarest of cases.

The weight of an upside down pyramid on our figurative heads is going to drive some of us insane, and is going to cause many to continue to make decisions which are based on clicks transmitted through thin air.

What does it hurt to help someone a little? I know of people who have plenty of money who are as tight as a tick, but wouldn’t give another person a dime. I know of people who give, but resent it. I know people say “I give to my Church” and that’s all well and good, but a lot of that doesn’t end up in the hands of the people. A lot goes to the upkeep and operation of the Church, and that’s commendable.

When I used to work in Dalton, there were several homeless men who hung out around the Walnut Avenue bridge. I used to give them 10 or 20 dollars a week. I didn’t ask them what they did with it. I didn’t care. Some people would tell me they were just going to drink it up, but I didn’t care. Once I gave it to them it was their money. I hate to say, but I have probably given more money away to individuals over the years than to anything else. I have several people at Trade Day I give things away to every time I see them. I save keys and old rings and badges for three mentally retarded men who come by every time I am there. That’s what they want, and I save them something and give it to them. They don’t want money, for some reason they are just wanting those particular things and so that is what I give them. I am not blowing my own horn, cause what I do is not much, because I don’t have much. You couldn’t buy a good car with what cash I could scrap together from IRA’s and bank accounts and stuff…it just ain’t there.

There is one thing missing from the soul and nature of a lot of people these days, and that’s compassion. Look up the word in the dictionary and email it to our Congressman and Senators, and Supreme Court judges. Live by compassion. Live by caring. What does it hurt to care a little about other human beings, no matter what they look like or what their condition is?

I get so tired of hearing how “great” this country is, and how if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere, from some particular radio hosts and pundits. They should try walking a mile in other people’s shoes before running their mouths. Love one another, that’s the commandment we should live by every day.

I remember when the “Doughboy” stood in the center of the “square” out in front of the “Big Friendly” Trion Department Store. I was always in awe of that statue. I remember reading the names on it over and over…some of them familiar names of families who lived in Trion.

The Department store itself was a wonder! There was no other place like it in the world. You could get anything, and I mean anything in that store. I loved going in there as a child. The toy aisle looked like it went on forever! There were Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and Matchbox cars. There were cap pistols, and a rack next to them with a “bluejillion” packs of caps on it. There were porcelain dolls for the little girls. There were bicycles and stuffed animals. I can remember how wonderful this area looked when it was decorated for Christmas. Big, giant, bright Christmas balls. Rows of tinsel. Lots of the big old huge lights that screwed in and out of the sockets.

One of the most vivid memories of Christmas, was when I was four years old and I got the “Hopalong” Cassidy outfit and guns. I don’t think I took that outfit off for a week. I didn’t find out until years later that Dad had put that outfit and those guns on “layaway” almost 6 months before Christmas and had paid a little a week on them until he had them paid for. I don’t know what happened to them. My Mom was NOT a person to let something lay around in the house and take up useful space if it was not being used. I surmise that I probably wore them out using them the first year or so I had them, and they got tossed out in the move we made to Simmons Street. One of those guns go for about 120 dollars now on Ebay.

Mom got me even worse when I went off to college my freshman year. I had MY closet in my room filled with all of the Marvel comics that I had bought over the years. I had the first issues of a lot of them, plus the subsequent early issues. I had my old baseball cards which I had taken good care of, in a couple of shoeboxes. Mantle, Maris, Aaron. They were all there. We were not allowed to come home from school for the first month, if I remember correctly…it was one of the rules. The first time I came back home, I opened my closet and my stuff was gone! I know everybody says it, but in my case it was true….my Mom had thrown my comics and cards out. I cried then…but I cry harder now when I see how much some of those collectibles are worth.

Back to the Big Friendly though, there was a fabric department, a hardware store, a grocery store, a drugstore, a funeral parlor…? Yes, there was…a funeral parlor upstairs in the Big Friendly. The way the store was laid out, you could drive around the back and be at “ground” level. And so…the departed could go in and out the “back door” without creating an issue throughout the rest of the store.

Across the street from the Big Friendly you had the Post Office on the corner. Next to the Post office was the Barber shop.

We had one of the most modern and wonderful places called the “Y” The mill had first built a swimming pool sometime around 1934, and then built the “Y” up around it. It had an inside heated pool, a gym, a pool and ping pong room, a weight room, a theatre on one end, a snack bar….this place was WAY ahead of its time. In 1973, our class of 1968 had our five year reunion there….not long before they tore it down. I loved that place and often wished there had been some way to save it. It would have really been a historical landmark if it could have been saved.

If we wanted to, we were allowed to leave school for lunch back in those days. A lot of us opted to do so…lunchroom food being what it was. A lot of times we went up to a little place over near the mill which served burgers, fries, and dogs. I think Mr. Colbert owned the place. We thought the food was decent, and he also had a jukebox which was somehow filled with the most current songs. That was the first place I ever heard a Beatles song, the Rolling Stones, many of the iconic groups of those days first came to me over the jukebox in that dive.

We had to cross over a little bridge leading out to the burger joint. There was a creek which ran out from under the mill which flowed into the river at that point. It started into the mill as normal colored water…but being as there was a dye house at the mill back then, it would come OUT of the mill almost any color you could imagine. I used to like to guess what color the water was going to be every time I crossed over that bridge. I had no idea the colored “water” going into the river was polluting it.

The river is cleaned up now and it’s one of the cleanest in the State. There are kayakers going up and down it every day, and I believe that there are some great game fish in the river now.

As much as I long for those “bygone” days every now and then, I realize that memories are sometimes much sweeter than the actual living. So, I try to live everyday now hoping to give the people who are around me…especially the little ones, something sweet to remember.

I love music…almost any kind. I love music played with a stringed instrument most of all. I think, even though I pluck a guitar a little, I love to hear a violin…played by someone who knows how to handle the instrument. I’ve heard recordings of Heifitz, and I’ve heard Charlie Daniels and I like them both. I think piano ranks 2nd. I often wish I had taken piano lessons….I admire good pianists.

I love light also. Light enables us to be able to take a photograph…a frozen moment of time if you will, and a photographer’s worth depends upon how well he can gauge and use the light to his advantage when catching the frozen moment. I love to capture those moments when I can.

I love the ocean too..the primal, primordial part of most human beings draw us to the ocean, with all its life and its vastness. I think it’s no coincidence that our bodies are almost the same proportion of liquid to solid as the oceans are to the land. I could watch the waves break for hours.

We each love different things about our lives. That’s what gives us our own unique perspective within our own personal universe where we reside. I don’t expect anyone else to like everything I like, or vice versa. I do think however, if we all could just take a moment and genuinely respect other people’s right to their own “likes” and not criticize because it’s not something on “our” list, the world would be a wonderful place.

Think about it next time before you start a sentence with “I hate those…….”

I think tomorrow might be a good day to rest. Sunday is a traditional day for rest. I might even sleep in til 7 am if the storms don’t come rolling forth.

I remember my Grandmother Stewart was not a sleeper. If she slept five hours it was something. Many times when I stayed there Grandpa would still be snoring (I think he had sleep apnea) while Grandma was already up stirring around. Grandma made him wake up and start a fire during the winter though, and as soon as I would hear him clanking that old wood stove I would extricate myself from under the five quilts I was entangled in upstairs and come running down to the heater.

Grandma lived to be 100, so I guess she was the exception to the rule about needing plenty of sleep to live a long life. She never napped much either.

Grandma died in December 1999. I was supposed to be a pallbearer, but I’d had a heart attack and a stent just a month before she died so I couldn’t help carry her as I had done with Grandpa in 1993. They played such a large part in my childhood, but as I became an adult and had my own family my visits were infrequent. I think we all run into that pattern of life as we live it.

You regret the time you might have been able to spend with your family, much more when they are gone. I apologized to Grandma once for this, and she simply said “Don’t worry about it honey, I understand”

As I approach 65 I am beginning to also understand. We have what we have when we have it. Live it that day, that week, that month. There is time enough to love if we take it, because it does not take much time to show it in the present. A hug, a kiss, a word, a touch. An unexpected tenderness or an emotion expressed. It’s better done now than wishing it done later. Believe me, I know.

I’m afraid from where I sit, I really don’t know much about the Universe. I’ll freely admit it.

The Universe is big beyond my imagination. It boggles my mind to even try and contemplate it. I watched one of those fantasy mock ups which takes you from our planet out into the Universe. Everything keeps getting bigger and bigger, while Earth gets tinier and tinier. There’s a star out there, they say, which will hold a billion of our suns. A billion! Damn…that just blows my tiny fist size compilation of gray matter.

It’s hard for me to believe that human beings have books that we wrote which tell us all about how the universe came into being and why. How the Universe was created. Religions say these books are divinely inspired. Maybe so. I won’t step on anybody’s beliefs, I promise you that. I’m for people believe whatever they want to believe and me believing what I believe and let bygones be bygones, and live and let live. I’m very tolerant about most things. I can’t stand loud boom boxes, and could do without constantly barking dogs, but even with those I’ll let most the instances flow by like a river as long as they are not too extreme. I despise human actions which result in harm to other human beings.

Science has come a long way over the centuries and we have what I believe are some relatively (no pun intended) simple theories about what makes the Universe tick. We think they are pretty deep and informative, but I’m not really so sure about that. What we think we know might not even be close to right. We may be way wrong. Humans are smart in a human way, but perhaps in a Universal way we are still just babies.

There’s umpteen theories about what happens to us humans after we die. We place a huge amount of emphasis on those theories. I think I’ve read about most of them. I’ve read about some of them extensively.

I lay there at night sometimes and I think, and I puzzle and I worry and sometimes I pray and sometimes I don’t. I try my best every day to do what my conscious tells me is right, especially over the past 5 years or so. I try to take care of my grandchildren in a kind way, and I love them and my children and all of my family. That’s about the best I can do.

So…I’ll take what I get when my time comes.

I expect at the very least to have a long peaceful sleep.

Washing the Car

I had a dream last night. In my dream, me and my brother Mike, Ted, Matt and Stacy were all over at the old house on seventh street. It was a beautiful day like today, and we all had our cars lined up on the curb of the road in front of the house. Dad had his bucket and his car washing “mitt” ready and we were all going to wash our cars!

Now, there’s really a lot of truth in that dream.

One of the Sunday afternoon rituals for many, many years was to wash our cars on nice sunny days.

We used to go over to Mom and Dad’s house on most Sundays for lunch. That was a ritual which began farther back than I can remember. We started that tradition when they lived on 8th street, back when our kids were very young. Mom and Dad moved to South Carolina for about five years and then moved back down to Georgia in the late nineties. After they move back we resumed our regular Sunday visits.

Mom would cook dinner most of the time, occasionally we would order some food, especially when Mom and Dad began to get older. Some days it was hectic, especially after mine and my brother’s children grew up and got married! But it was our get together time, our family time, our sharing time. Looking back from where I am now, it’s time that can never be replaced. Time which was as precious as gold. Only we didn’t know it then.

My Dad’s house was situated right next to the road, and his outside water spigot was near the front of his house. He always kept the right supplies right there on the edge of the front porch. A coiled up hose pipe, a bucket, a fuzzy mitt and a bunch of car washing liquid.

As I mentioned earlier, my brother and I would park our cars out front when our kids were little. If it was a sunny day, we’d break out the hose pipe and have a go at the cars. I was always the more reluctant of the two of us to wash the car, so I usually went last. After I was through, my Dad always did an examination of the car.

“You missed a spot here” he would say

I usually had, because I was in a big hurry to get it done. I’m not a big fan of hand washing a car. Car washes are more my thing. But I did it for Dad.

As my kid’s, and my brother’s children grew up we continued the “car washing” tradition. All the boys have at one time or another…and most many times, lined their cars up in front of that house and washed the road dirt off of them. Most of the time, we’d hook up Mom’s old vacuum cleaner with a drop cord and vacuum out the dirt too. We had clean cars.

I hadn’t hand washed a car since my since my Dad died in May of 2010. As I said, I’m more of a “car wash” kind of guy.

But in the dream I had last night, my Dad was chewing my butt out for letting my car get so dirty. I was first in line, since I’m the oldest, and I couldn’t get that damn car washed to my Dad’s satisfaction. “You missed a spot” he repeated again and again. And I had! Mike and Ted and everyone else behind me were getting mad. “Can’t you get that thing clean” I heard somebody say “We ain’t got all day”

I woke up with that last phrase echoing in my head.

So after I got back from eating breakfast with my brother and sister in law this morning, I got my bucket, my towels and my soap, and pulled my car into my driveway between my house and my neighbor’s house. I got my little step ladder so I could get the top good. I washed it one time, but I wasn’t happy. I had missed a spot. I washed it again, and then one more time after I had let the warming sun dry it out good enough to see the teeny tiny spots I had missed the second time. At one point, I thought I could actually hear a voice coming from my car saying “Oh baby…rub it right there”

Well…it WAS a dirty little car, after all.

Then I took the full size towel I had brought out and wiped that car down from top to bottom. I looked it over once, twice, three times. There were no spots. Not even on the windows, because I had done them inside and out.

I turned around to look, but my Dad wasn’t there to inspect my work.

At least not in person. I could hear him inside my head though: “good job son, I knew you could do it” Finally!

On days like this beautiful day, I sometimes wish I had continued to live in that old house over on seventh street.

Or maybe instead I wish this house I live in, in which I have lived in since 1987, had a water spigot situated more conveniently for car washing.

But that was then and this is now, and the one thing you have to know about life is that it changes, and keeps on changing.

I have two little dachshunds who sleep in their crates, their beds, in our bedroom. Every night when it’s bedtime I tell them “go to bed” and I break one of the little “snap” treats in half to give them.

These little wafers rarely ever break evenly, and I’ve always told them “first dog in bed gets the biggest piece” That’s always Hoosie, the smallest and oldest. Always most obedient, in this case anyway.

Daisy, the black and white piebald, always hangs back. I thought she was just less obedient, but I noticed the reason she hangs back is because she is waiting on my wife….her “Mommy”

So, there’s the conundrum. Should I be rewarding obedience, or loyalty? Obedience might one day save their life if the situation ever arose where they really needed to obey. Loyalty might do the same, or perhaps even go a step further and the stubborn loyalty might protect the “leader of the pack”

Both of these are qualities which we humans also exhibit. Which is the better in us? Should we be obedient, and if so, to who and under what circumstances?? Should we be unquestionably loyal, and if so how long, and to whom?

I decided with the dogs that I would just alternate nights of giving them the biggest piece. As long as both are being rewarded for what they perceive is their best quality then I don’t think they care who gets the biggest piece. After all, they are dogs and it really doesn’t matter to them. The only thing that would bother them would be getting no reward.

As for we people, I wish decisions which we must make could be so easily discerned. Nothing is ever that simple for us though. Too many nuances and careful considerations must enter into deciding who gets the biggest piece. A lot of times we still get bit on the hand too.

Time for me to close up my “crate” and get some sleep.