Category: Uncategorized

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.

One of my memories of Pop is that he used to play the guitar and sing. We would sometimes sing as a family and sometimes pop would just entertain us. That is the memory.

It turns out that Pop wrote songs too. When he was young, when he was dating mom, apparently he sang them. From what I hear, though the accounts are definitely biased, they were pretty good too. I never heard any of those. That is the mystery.

As I dig and rummage, I find so many things that pop did, some I knew about, and those bring up memories; others I had no idea, the mysteries.  Mysteries bring up questions. How come Pop never played his board game with us? What was the book that he wrote about?  How come he never told us about that either?

I have no answers for the mysteries, but I have many great memories. Perhaps that is the point. 

The night was thick and hazy… The fox went out on a chilly night… Memories.

How was I so fortunate to have such an amazing father… Mystery.

My thoughts today relate to the picture. Jaques the monkey is not King Kong. He isn’t even a 600 pound gorilla. There is a notion that bigger is better but that is not always the case. For a tiny monkey a regular sized banana is like winning the lottery. And Jaques is feeling like the luckiest monkey ever.

Pop will never have his memoirs published. He won’t ever have a life remembered by millions. I think that he would want it that way. This week, Pop would have turned 89. In nearly 9 decades he didn’t change the world, at least not in any flashy manner. He didn’t do anything that would end up in the 24-hour news cycle for weeks on end. His life was quiet and mostly unassuming. That doesn’t make it a life not well-lived or worth living.

Pop would never have been an influencer. That being said, he was substance not appearance. While the things he did will be unknown to the world at large, they weren’t inconsequential. For much of his life he worked with teenagers. Perhaps that alone should win him accolades and fame. Many of those young people who he worked with have grown into fine responsible adults. And some of them have shared those lessons that they learned from Pop. One Halloween, one of the young men that Pop advised as a scout leader shaved the top of his head. His costume was Pop. He said he was dressing up as his hero. 

Pop spent many hours making scenery for church productions. He build numerous floats, award winning floats. In the days before social media, and the three second attention span, he was able to put things in a healthy perspective. While working on a set, one of the other volunteers was worried about whether they were doing a good enough job. He took them aside and they stepped back from the set where he pointed out that the details that they worried about weren’t even visible from the audience. It was the bigger picture, the overall thing, not the minuscule details that mattered. With floats he pointed out that people would only see them for 15 or 20 seconds. This wasn’t meant to imply that good work wasn’t important; he always did good work. It was a lesson that there is a point where things are good enough for the purpose for which they were meant and worrying about things being perfect is unnecessary. In fact, sometimes the things you are stressing about aren’t even noticeable by the outside observer. 

When working with youth he tried to make them successful. He got permission to work a few hours a week with some at risk youth. The project that he worked with them on was a model of a bridge. He spent the time building jigs for the pieces so that the kids couldn’t fail. It was a project that ended up as something that not only the kids, but his company and the school were all proud of.

Pop didn’t know anything about fiberglass, but that didn’t stop him from figuring it out and helping build 8 canoes. Canoes that were used for over 20 years for numerous river trips, family vacations and weekends at the lake. He helped maintain them for years so that they could be enjoyed by generations of people. Few people know the amount of time and effort that were spent on that project.

Perhaps the most important thing that Pop did, though, was that he was a true friend to many people. He was widely loved by the people in the neighborhood in which he lived. When he couldn’t look after them, they took it upon themselves to look out for him. Neighbors often mentioned how they saw him out walking, and if he ever seemed to be in trouble, someone was always there to make sure he was looked out for.  It says a lot about a person when a whole community keeps an eye on them. He befriended the girls in the hair salon who said that when he started being a regular visitor that it made it feel like a real shop. 

Little things matter. A good life is made up of little things. Day after day they add up. While there may not be fanfare for those who only do thousands of small acts, perhaps those are the lives that are most significant. They touch others in a positive way and leave marks that are unseen, but are passed on to others and live on long past the original act. Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things but we can do small things with great love.” In the end, isn’t doing the latter thing the key to doing the former?

When Pop passed, it came with more relief than sadness. His decline at the very end was rapid and lasted only a few days, which was a blessing in itself. That it was expected, to the degree that Pop wasn’t going to live forever and his older brothers had passed at the age of 85, I suppose, made it somewhat easier. As a result, I didn’t cry when I heard. If I believed that I would never see him again, I think that my reaction would have been much different. But I do believe that I will see Pop again and the separation is only temporary. 

Separation, however, can be painful, there is no denying that. At the time, though, I felt relief for him. He was no longer hindered by a body, once strong but weakened by age. His mind was now back to the sharp and capable mind that I still see evidence of in various projects that are part of the house or that are still present here. Maybe best of all, Pop was back with mom. After many years of loneliness and grief, that was now a thing of the past for him.

The morning of the funeral, I arrived before everyone else. It gave me some time to just be alone with my thoughts and, for the final time in this life, to be with Pop. If I hadn’t been alone I never would have done this, but with no one around I took a few moments to say goodbye. Something about the act of speaking just broke something loose, and for the first and only time since Pop died, the tears just flowed. And for a minute I just wasn’t ok.

I left the room to go to the bathroom to compose myself. On my way I passed a neighbor in my broken down state and he asked if I was ok. I think that we are so used to just saying things are fine when anyone asks that we rarely let anyone know what is really going on. I think normally I would have just nodded or said that I would be, but in that state, I was wholly and vulnerably honest and I said, “No.”

I wish I could remember what he told me verbatim, but in the moment I wasn’t looking for words of wisdom, I was looking to escape and recover, but he said something like, “We feel this sadness because we had great love.” That is a great truth to think about. We hurt because we care. Grief can seem like a debilitating disease, at times the loss feels so great that we can hardly get out of bed or put one foot in front of the other. As I reflect on things more, perhaps I am gaining a different perspective on the matter. Of course it hurts, sometimes tremendously so, and I think it’s meant to. What value would love have if its loss came with only some nominal amount of discomfort? 

It is easy to wallow in sadness. Perhaps it is better to consider that grief is the memory of love. Even though it can be like an arrow to the heart, would it have such power to wound if it wasn’t backed by the force of joyful memories? This life is fleeting and temporary and none of us will make it out of here alive. And if that’s all there is, more’s the pity, but wouldn’t it be better to savor the good and beautiful memories that are the echoes inside that grief? Consider grief a protective blanket that reminds us to wrap ourselves tightly and bask in the warmth within rather than a weight that covers and suffocates. 

Maybe that is what grief is for, to pull our minds out of the mundane and force us to ponder the good times and meditate on the experiences that taught us to love and the lessons we learned from so doing. Most things end badly, that’s why they end. Endings are a natural part of life. Even good things don’t go on forever, if they did we would grow used to it and eventually become bored. Then that thing would come to an end too. Chapters in books often end with a cliffhanger and no matter how many times we re-read the chapter the circumstances won’t change. It isn’t until we move into the subsequent chapters that we get to see the resolution. The great stories have twists and turns and unexpected events. 

Grief can turn our lives from a page turning adventure story into a stagnant story if we don’t turn the page and move forward, but like a good mystery, we may need to re-examine the clues to put the rest of the story together. Even as I write this I know that there will be times I choose to wallow in grief and pity. Maybe, though, I will be able to recall the past with fondness and keep moving forward, whatever the challenge.

If you were expecting an ad, then you will be sorely disappointed… or perhaps filled with glee. 

I have been thinking about what to say this week and I haven’t landed on a great idea. I do need to say something though, because that is the pattern I am developing with this project.

The pictures and the posts are pretty disconnected. I considered adding backstories to the animals that could highlight things about Pop. In the end I decided against that, but decided that I should talk about this project as a whole. Everyone who creates something has their own unique process. Some gain inspiration through nature or meditation; others force themselves to work and get inspiration through perspiration. I’m not sure what my process really entails except to say it usually ends up with a lot of stewing and fretting followed by some frantic work to hit my own self-imposed deadlines. If I was a professional artist, I suppose that I would have to have some more consistent motivation to produce, but I don’t have that. I enjoy photography, I love trying creative new ideas and I relish making, and let’s be honest, sometimes breaking things. Oftentimes the work happens in fits and starts, sometimes going through long periods of inactivity followed by frenetically paced creative spurts. 

For me, projects take a different tack. When I start a project I give myself a framework that I operate within. Sometimes the rules I set and parameters are well thought out and sometimes they are just guidelines. I will (probably) never undertake a project that includes 300 pictures in a year. I think I learned my lesson on that one. But a 52 photo project seems manageable. I like to set projects that take up a year, although since Covid started, I haven’t had the will, for lack of a better word, to always stick the projects out. As an unknown, that hasn’t caused me much of a problem, and I think that sometimes just sticking out a project that isn’t working for you and isn’t bringing you any joy is the smart thing to do. 

The Change of Mind project had its own hiccups. It was supposed to be a one year project in which I would do something with pill bottles followed by a weekly picture and then I would document it in a blog post. That turned out to be far from reality. The something became clear early on — animals. That was where things got hung up. It was bad. On the one hand I was producing the figures. On the other, I was broken. Pop’s death wasn’t unexpected. He was nearly 88 and anything after 85 was kind of bonus time. I wasn’t sad for Pop to pass, not like when my brother died, I knew I would miss him, and I do and did, but I believe he is happier now on the other side and, frankly, better off than he was. Grief is an odd thing though. I don’t think you can really predict how it is going to affect you. So 2022 just ended up being a bad year. 

At the beginning, though, I felt like it was time to do another project. This one was for Pop. That is really a big part of why I just pushed things forward and decided to finish what I started last year. Some projects just need to be done. Not because anyone will see them, but because they do something for you. A Quarter for Cancer was therapeutic for me. It was incredibly stressful, but it kept me busy and at the time I needed that. Maybe this kept me from really shutting down and pushing people away last year. This falls into the category of something I needed to do, though few people may ever really see it. 

This was an art project, from its inception. The point of it was to make something artistic with the pill bottles and funded by the spare change that was contained within them. The words weren’t originally part of it. I intended to add some thoughts about the pictures, which would have made them relevant, but emotions get tied up with things, and even though the animals weren’t directly tied to or related to Pop, except that the raw material came from him, they really are related to him. Because, while I spent hours working on new figurines, I thought about Pop. When I cut pieces of wood, it was Pop that taught me to use power tools. I cut my teeth painting from watching Pop make scenery. What little I know about sculpting or model building came from spending time with Pop. He is woven into the fabric of every picture in some indirect and perhaps inexplicable manner. 

The result of this indirect connection is that the picture is a picture. It is an animal doing something that an anthropomorphic miniature animal just might do. That is what the picture is. What I write isn’t necessarily tied to the visual. The picture is my way of using things that Pop taught me to, hopefully, delight someone or maybe even many someones. But I hope that the words will also have value. 

Monday this week was the one year anniversary of Pop’s passing. That has led me to think about him more than usual and perhaps more tenderly than I often do. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had Pop as my dad. I have known many good fathers and numerous amazing father figures in my lifetime, but I don’t think that I could point to one that I think is better than Pop was. That makes me so lucky. As Pop began to lose his cognitive faculties due to the dementia and Alzheimer’s, he never forgot who I was. Many times I have heard stories about how someone with Alzheimer’s doesn’t remember a family member that is talking to them and I imagine that that has to be incredibly heartbreaking. So, in a second way, I was incredibly fortunate.

People say about people that, “He was like a second father to me.” I could name several that I feel that way about, but they aren’t included in the three dads that I have been thinking about this week. Cognitive diseases can do some strange things to people. My grandpa suffered a series of strokes as he got older that took away his ability to communicate clearly. Prior to this I can’t recall a single profane word coming out of his mouth. He became an honorary sailor in the post-stroke season. In retrospect, I suppose that it was his frustration coming out as he tried to communicate to his then young grandchildren or embarrassment from having to be fed by a child. I can’t claim to be an expert on stroke victims so this is all just speculation, but I think that his mind was still working, but the body and parts of the brain were in rebellion. What a terrible thing it must be to not be able to tell your loved ones how much you care. One day after feeding him I was getting ready to go do something else and he reached over and grabbed my arm. I think he just wanted me to stay with him a little longer. As a result of the physical impairments that came from his strokes he wasn’t overly gentle. He didn’t hurt me, but it freaked me out and bolted. In my minds eye and much to my shame, I think he shed a tear. That was the one and only time that I was ever afraid of him.

Growing up Pop could be gruff at times. I don’t think that there is a parent who doesn’t have to lay down the law at times. This was the first of my three dads. This was the dad I called dad. He taught me most of the things I know about day to day life. I knew him for nearly four decades. He was pretty amazing. He was an award winning float builder, scout leader, engineer, craftsman, breadwinner and artist. I remember building pinewood derby cars with him. He was a master with cardboard. He made a bull head (like the two person horse costume) with tubes running through the nostrils that blew “smoke”. The egg drop contest entry that he helped me build was strong enough to stand on (I know I tried it). He was practical and fun and sometimes ornery all rolled up into one. Dad was never overly emotional, and he wasn’t one to verbally express his feelings very often, but I knew he loved me, even if he didn’t say it very often.

Pop was my second dad. I call him my kind dad. This is the Pop that I think most people who knew him in the last few years of his life remember. This was the dad who gave roses to everyone, who gave multiple copies of the same Christmas card from 1989 to everyone at the grocery store, who made new friends with the girls at the beauty salon. He walked to the local senior center until Covid closed them down. He walked through the neighborhood giving away roses (or putting them in his pockets to be laundered at a later time). This was the dad that everybody loved. 

After he broke his hip, I got a third dad. He didn’t stop being kind, but I named him for a new characteristic that seemed to come to the forefront at this time. This was grateful dad. I mentioned earlier that Pop had never been verbally expressive but he began in his last few months to be more open with his feelings. I know that he was confused and maybe hurt because we had to put him in a care center. And to be honest, when I had to leave him, even though he was in capable and kind hands, it was a hard thing to do. He was under the care of some phenomenal people, but he wanted to be at home with his family and friends. He told me often how much he loved me, but more than the expressions of love, I remember his words of gratitude. Thanks to me for visiting him. Thanks to the people who took care of him. In similar circumstances, I doubt that I would have reacted from a place of thanks, but Pop did.

I learned some important lessons from each of my dads. I learned how to build and break things from Dad. How to work with tools, what a loving father looked like. From kind dad I learned some lessons (which I’m still trying to implement) about how to treat other people. We come into contact with all sorts of people in our daily life. Kind dad was a friend to all of them, many who you might not expect to be friends with an itinerant octagenarian. And maybe the most important lesson came from grateful dad. Even when life is throwing you the greatest challenges and you have more to be unhappy about than you have to be grateful for, you can always thank the people around you for the things that they do. And you can just be grateful that they are part of your life.

Thanks, dad – all three of you.

Identity theft is an ever more common crime these days. It’s a major inconvenience when it happens, not to mention a crime that costs billions of dollars each year. When it happens, it feels like such a violation of privacy, but what about when it is a crime you commit on yourself.

Pop was never the same after mom passed. He missed her so much, though he rarely said anything about it and never really communicated his feelings about his hurt. At least he didn’t say that much to me about it, maybe he was more open with his feelings to my other siblings. But we knew. Mom and Pop were really a matched set and one without the other was just half a team.

I remember visiting with Pop a few days before he passed. He was in a wheelchair because he had fallen a few days earlier and they were afraid that he would fall again and hurt himself. I wheeled him into his room and he said, “This is the room where Dixee was.” Pop had a picture of mom on the night stand and I assumed that he was confusing the picture with mom. Pop passed a couple of weeks after that and I wonder if mom had been there visiting him and preparing him to be with her again.

Mom and Pop were married for 50 years before she died. Their story was a beautiful one. Pop told me the story of their engagement more than once, but I still remember the day that he couldn’t remember it anymore. One of the great love stories had been lost, stolen by a merciless and unforgiving disease. Identity theft of the most terrible kind. 

Pop lost a lot of other stories too. Some I try to recall from when I was a child and he would tell me about his experiences in the campus married housing, his work for Kennecott, or how he considered himself Steve Young’s first receiver. But those ones were stolen too. 

What a shame.