Month: March 2023

As my self-imposed deadline to post something weekly approached, and then passed, I was thinking about times when Pop had to work late. As an adult, I see how people work until late into the night before going home. Pop never just stayed at work until it was dark before coming home; he always came home for dinner with the family. At the time I never thought much about it, but now, I think it was actually a pretty remarkable thing.

There were times, though, that there was some deadline that he was up against that forced him to go back into the office. Fortunately, it wasn’t a regular occurrence, but there were occasions where he’d go back in and have to work some more, occasionally until the wee hours of the morning. 

If I was lucky he would let me go with him. That was always a special treat, although I don’t know why. There wasn’t a lot to do at his work. His office was in the basement of an old building on campus and just had a desk and office equipment in it. It was mostly sitting and sometimes watching Pop update a schedule manually (this was before it was done on computers). He’d cut different pieces of tape with a razor blade and stick them on the timelines where they needed to go. If he needed some text, he would let me go type the words on the machine and bring them to him. 

Sometimes he would send me to the vending machine to get us a can of Welches grape soda or a Grandmas molasses cookie. And we’d have a drink and a cookie together. 

If he had a lot of work to do, I couldn’t stay up for all of that so he’d find something soft for me to put my head on and I’d go lie down under the desk and go to sleep until he was ready to go home. I think he probably got work done faster when I was sleeping because I wouldn’t be pestering him with questions. I bet that he was even faster at getting the text typed without me, even though he always let me feel like I was being useful. 

I knew Pop for nearly a half century. In that time there were a lot of things that I learned about him. Many things I picked up watching him, a number of them were things he taught me, and then there were the things that I never knew. No matter how much time you spend with someone you will never know everything about them, but I think that there comes a point where you think you know someone pretty well. 

I found a box of letters that my mom wrote to Pop when they were dating. From these letters, a whole new side of Pop, that I never expected, was revealed. It was eye opening to see a version of Pop long before I knew him. And it was interesting to see a new perspective of Pop from someone else. That Pop kept all of mom’s letters was interesting to me, I expected that it would be the other way around. 

As I was going through some stuff this week I found some cards and letters from Pop to mom. I don’t recall the two of them going out together very often. And I don’t ever remember Pop making a big deal of Valentine’s day. But I found two envelopes. One the size of a postage stamp and the other was about three inches long and maybe 3/4 of an inch tall. They were obviously hand made. One had a stamp with a postmark drawn on it and a tiny valentine inside. The other was a long letter for mom’s birthday. Neither of them were expensive, but both were thoughtful. Pop was in love with mom from the day that they met until the day he died. 

There was a time I was sitting in a cafeteria and overheard a conversation between two young women. One said if she didn’t get a ring that was at least a carat she was going to say no. I remember thinking I hoped that poor guy gave her a smaller ring than that. Mom and Pop were never extravagant, but they were definitely in love. They didn’t need expensive gifts or expensive gestures, they had each other and the simple, thoughtful things were enough. 

They were married for over five decades when mom passed. Pop was never the same without her. It was a great love story. If only everyone could be so lucky.

Sometimes life is hectic. It’s funny how life is a lot like the sea, it ebbs and flows and sometimes the waves are great and other times things are calm. It is inevitable that things change and there are cycles. 

It is easy to look at life, not going according to plan and complain. I know I do my share of that. More than my share to be honest. But I’m in good health, my mind is sound, and I have people who care about me, even if all the circumstances of my life are not ideal. 

Pop was stuck in the memory care unit of a care facility, which meant he was on lockdown most of the time to keep him from wandering and getting lost. He wasn’t confined to his room or anything, in fact the people there loved him and took great care to include him in activities and try to make sure he was happy. He had daily visits from family too, but he didn’t have the same freedom that he was used to.

Gone were the days of freely strolling around the neighborhood passing out roses. His daily visits to the hair salon or to visit with the neighbors at the mortuary (sounds stranger than it was). When he was put in a wheelchair after a fall, that didn’t improve things.

Even though things were changing, and not for the better Pop rarely complained. His complaints were usually because he didn’t understand why he didn’t get to go home with me. He had a number of reasons to gripe about his life, but he didn’t.

What he usually did was thank me for coming to see him. He told me he was grateful for all the things I did for him. He thanked the people around him, and made them smile. If he could do all that, then what do I really have to complain about anyway?

This week I decided to take a picture of another bird house. The real reason was because I knew basically what to do, having done a similar setup last week and I had a second available bird and alternate tree. It should have been easier than it was, but the weather decided to pretend to be menacing without actually becoming inclement. It caused several breakages, multiple failed attempts and, ultimately, a solution that I didn’t exactly condone, but resorted to anyway to meet my self-imposed deadline.

On the subject of birds, the robins have been in the yard in great numbers and I found the body of a bird that hit the window and didn’t survive the impact. It seems that birds have been a topic on my mind this week, so I suppose it is a topic worth writing about. 

Pop used to carry on conversations with the birds. I’m not entirely certain what spurred this behavior, needless to say it became a thing. The back yard often has birds. There are a number of fruit trees, which seem to be a favorite nesting or feeding place for birds. Once a humming bird made its tiny nest in one of the trees. It gave pop ample chances to communicate with the birds.

Sometimes he would just whistle at them as he was puttering around the yard. Other times, he would set up a chair and go sit in the sun and talk to whichever birds chose to chirp in the vicinity. Maybe that makes Pop a hipster, he was tweeting before it was cool.

While I was working on the bird picture, and having a really frustrating time with it, I thought about how Pop might have done things better than I was doing them. He used to spend hours building jigs and devices to help him do some masterful projects. With short deadlines (a week or less) for each picture, I don’t take the time to do that. The fact that I often don’t even have an idea what I’m going to do, is not conducive to the plan ahead and build tools to help line things up mentality. 

Pop also just sat on a chair talking to the birds. The world has become rushed; I feel it in my projects, I feel it as I’m driving around running errands, I feel it in the expectation of next day shipping and fast food drive thrus. Sometimes it behooves us to intentionally slow things down. There are times we might benefit more from talking to the birds for a while than we would from madly rushing from one thing to another. 

Even in the rush to get things done, sometimes it’s better to slow down and think things through and maybe do some planning or building a jig to help us do better work more efficiently. Go, go, go often leads to frustration and in today’s case, saying some very rude things to an apple tree. It is possible that slowing things down from time to time just to reset ourselves might actually benefit us. At the moment, I don’t know that I have the answer, maybe I will ask the birds.