Don’t be like my dad

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Dad and me around 1956.

Over a breakfast of toast, fruit and eggs plucked moments earlier from the coop next to the house, my wife said I’d given her too much food. She was stirring her eggs about like a kid wishing lima beans to disappear.

“Just eat what you want, dear,” I said. “Don’t be like my dad.”

My dad, Marvin. Gone now for seven years. A child of the Depression, frugal to a fault. As a young man, he worked two and three jobs to buy groceries for his wife and three children, ages four to infant, living in a 19-foot trailer. He loathed the idea of “wasting” a single morsel of food well into his prosperous 80s.

Dad cleared his plate, no matter how miserable those last forkfuls made him feel later, especially if it was a restaurant meal for which he paid. I never understood it.

“Dad,” I’d say. “Don’t let some anonymous cook in the kitchen determine how much you’re going to eat, and how you’re going to feel afterward.”

Dad and me in 2015. He died in 2017.

But the thought of sending food back to the kitchen or down the disposal was anathema to dad.

Immediately after I told Sue Ellen, “Don’t be like my dad,” regarding his relationship with food, Newton’s third law of motion kicked in and brought an “equal and opposite reaction.” I thought of so many ways I would want my wife, my children, myself and anyone else to “be just like my dad.”

Dad was devoted to his family, teaching us to work by example, never complaining about his long hours. He stretched his finances to buy “the old Peterson place on County B” with 80 acres of farmland and an acre of lawn and outbuildings. On and off he tried raising steers, pigs and chickens to supplement his income driving a fuel truck among farms in four counties.

We mowed the grass, tended the large garden, fed the animals and picked stones from the fields that the annual freeze and thaw pulled to the surface. A big bellied wood burning furnace in the basement heated the old farm house so each Fall we gathered fuel from the woods.

He loved my mother in obvious ways, not afraid to hug, kiss and be silly with her in front of his children. My most poignant memory is of dad kissing his hand and laying it against the cold glass window as the ambulance carried her body away from the house, when she succumbed to cancer. He never got over her.

Dad’s reputation as an honest man was unassailable. He gave up the gas truck to manage the local farmers’ cooperative store, while also being treasurer of the local credit union, before computers. He had an amazing mind for numbers, though he never graduated high school.

He left home at 14, riding his bike to a neighboring town to live with his teacher aunt and attend school. But the lure of earning money to drive a dump truck for the county proved more attractive than another day in the classroom.

Yet, when i showed academic promise, dad instilled in me an assumption that i would become the family’s first college graduate.

Dad held opinions about things, but he easily relinquished defense of those opinions rather than stress a relationship.

I never heard him or mom exchange a cross word.

I could go on. Every Christmas I remember how he accidentally shattered my myth holding about Santa Claus. That fall he’d given me a football, just out of the blue. Dad never played organized sports, but we tossed the ball around a time or two.

That Christmas when i opened up my gift of a basketball, he took it, rolled it about in his hands, and said, “Do you remember the football I gave you?”

I nodded of course.

“I got this basketball at the same time.”

Fantasy fractured. St. Nick deconstructed.

But from that seed of myth, cracked open with the hammer of reality, grew over decades a sapling of hope, that one day, i could be like dad.

Funerals, and other fun rituals

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I attended the funeral of a friend and former colleague today. A man younger than me.

I learned of his death while driving home from a Florida vacation. I didn’t know he’d been sick, as he was a private man. As his son said in eulogy, “My dad was the most private public person in the world.”

The somber, intimate public gathering of persons who want to see and support the surviving family and who want to hear good things spoken of their deceased friend is a valuable human ritual. Loved ones recount memories and sometimes reveal things previously unknown.

Careful speakers offer subtle lines to confirm suspicions while lauding the deceased with praise most discerning supporters take with an appreciative grain of salt.

 I’m glad I attended the funeral several years ago of a former boss, who was the most difficult human I’ve ever worked with. It was healing for me to hear good things spoken of her, to hear friends recite positive qualities well disguised in our days together.

I delivered eulogies for both my parents. Some of my observations were meant specifically to comfort some quietly sobbing friend. Other words were to lighten the somber atmosphere.

My mother, who died at 64, was a very private, reserved person, not given to bawdy humor, even when the men around her were cutting up. The first night I brought my new bride to visit in the home, I found an apple on the bedside table. The next morning, I asked mom about the apple.

“That was a contraceptive,” she said. Immediately I thought of several ways that might work, none of which I voiced to mom. Instead, I asked, “Was I supposed to eat it before…or after?”

“You were supposed to eat it…instead,” she said, laughing. Those at her funeral laughed, too, at the telling.

My grandma was proud of the large attendance at grandpa’s funeral. She surmised that she didn’t loom as large in the minds of neighbors, community and family as he did, and she bemoaned that her funeral would be much smaller. “If it snows, nobody will be there,” she speculated.

If you want a large funeral, die young.

Part of my father’s lament toward the end of his 86 years was that all his friends had died. He was tired of attending funerals of his buddies, each of which left him lonelier.

I listened with great respect as the first born son of my friend delivered an insightful, humorous, sad and intimate portrait of his father. I knew this boy when he was just a kid and now he’s a man with gray hair at his temples. And I realized his relationship and age relative to his father, is the same as my oldest son to me.

And I imagined my son standing in front of my surviving friends one day. But I could not imagine what he will say.

I eulogized my father 21 years after my mother. Many of the same faces peered up at me. Many were absent, long gone to their own reward. And I realized the value of the ritual, the support those faces and kind words offered, the life they’d shared with my mother and father – experiences they recounted to fill my own my memory portfolio.

In his song “Standing Room Only,” Tim McGraw talks about this end of life ritual and encourages us to “Be somebody that’s worth rememberin’, to live a life so when we die “there’s standing room only,” at our funeral.

Since I’ll be laying down, or my ashes will already have been blown away by a strong wind, I’m not concerned about standing room. But when my children and friends go to rememberin’, I hope a smile crosses their faces.

One is the loneliest number

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My mother-in-law, during last days in nursing care.

In August 1971 anonymous government functionaries conducted a lottery to determine the order in which 19-year-old boys would be drafted into the Army, thousands of them eventually to die in the politicians’ war in Viet Nam.

They drew my birthday first. No. 1. It was the only thing I’ve ever “won” except a case of beer at the Rio Fireman’s Picnic, and the hand of my wife. I was too young to claim the beer, and my wife was almost too young to marry.

From that day on, the musical hit “One” by Three Dog Night became the soundtrack of my life as I went off to college, hoping to get a semester in before I received my draft notice. It’s resounding assertion that “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do,” pounded time after time out of my reel-to-reel tape player, putting to music the angst of a life on hold.

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do…

“It’s just no good anymore since you went away

“Now I spend my time just making rhymes of yesterday.”

Then the resounding, pounding refrain:

“One is the loneliest number

“One is the loneliest number

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.”

Every time that song surfaced on the radio or in sequence on my Three Dog Night album, I sank emotionally. No. 1 in the lottery. Draft certain. One is the loneliest number. The saddest experience.

Thoughts of “one” and being alone jumped at me recently while I stood in line for a table at southeastern America’s food oasis, Cracker Barrel. It hit me when the hostess asked the lady ahead of me, “How many?” and she responded, “One.” The loneliest number.

A sudden sadness for her and others being alone hit me like a gut punch through a curtain of memory.

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.  And it’s a growing trend in America. We’re in an epidemic of loneliness. It’s not just aging widows and widowers. It’s younger people isolated by screens who possess no ability to communicate with real, live people.

Lacking meaningful, human to human connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according to an advisory from U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

We once called on a young man who visited our church to encourage him to become involved. He said he walks into his apartment on Friday night after work and doesn’t leave it until Monday morning. Week after week. Crawling out to visit the single adult class we led was a major effort.

The prevalence of single-person households is unprecedented historically,  rising from seven million to 38 million since 1960. 

I don’t equate “being alone” with loneliness or depression, but community involvement and social interaction is the leading indicator for health in senior adults. Of course many single adults lead vigorous, joyful, involved lives and God bless them.

It’s just that as I approach my 48th wedding anniversary I know the deep satisfaction life with a loving partner brings. I think of the shared joys, sorrows and triumphs of raising our three children, and of their loving spouses and our seven grandchildren. I would wish that common good for anyone.

Beyond that, what are the implications for a society in which so many of its members live as single, unaffiliated, isolated souls? Think – as I’m sure they are – of long term health, housing, community, end of life?

And yet, one out of four of today’s 50-year-olds will have been single their whole lives. Never married, never partnered.

Social isolation is associated with a higher risk of dementia and other serious health problems in older adults — while having positive social relationships can help people live longer, healthier lives.

In other parts of the world, nearly four in ten older adults live with extended family, an arrangement that mitigates aloneness. But older adults in the U.S. rarely live with family. 

Our culture almost demands we go it alone, that we not “need” anyone or anything. Yet that is not the preferred condition of most single adults I know.

And when the person ahead of me is asked, “How many?” her “One,” sounds like the saddest experience she’ll ever do.

“I never thought about it”

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Much of the remodeling and landscape work on my son’s renovation of a 200-year-old house and barn in Pennsylvania is being done by Amish. Their work is exemplary, consistent and dependable.

Amish settled in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1720s, leaving behind in Europe the persecution of their “strange” and separatist beliefs. Amish emphasize humility, family, community and separation from the non-Amish world, which includes a reluctance to adopt modern conveniences such as cars and electricity.

The Pennsylvania Amish community in Lancaster County is the largest in the United States, numbering about 30,000, double its size of 20 years ago. They’re distinctive for their simple dress, beards, bonnets and horse drawn buggies.

We wanted to give visiting relatives an authentic Amish experience, without being “ugly Americans” who gawk or get our legs caught in tourist traps that exploit this set apart people. So, who better to ask for advice than Aaron, a white bearded, retired farmer now working for his son’s landscaping company on our project.

To my delight, Aaron suggested simply that if we wanted to experience Amish life in Lancaster County, “Come to my farm. I’ll show you around.” We made a date two weeks hence.

I texted a couple days before the appointment and was concerned that I didn’t hear back. But on a beautiful fall afternoon we pulled into his manicured yard and Aaron and Barbie, his wife of 40 years, appeared immediately. Since they hadn’t heard from me, they wondered if we were coming.

I mentioned the text I sent earlier. Then we both laughed. Their telephone is in a building separate from the house, to be used for business purposes only, and of course, is not mobile.

We took seats in their recently constructed house, modern and perfect in every way except that there are no electrical outlets, nor lamps, nor counter appliances, nor overhead lights. Designed to let in lots of sunlight, a propane tank on wheels with a filament bulb on a tall rod provided light when darkness falls.

A propane powered refrigerator graced the kitchen. While electricity is considered a convenience too worldly, workarounds with generators for power are apparent in the barns. Rules and restrictions governing humility and simplicity vary by area bishop.

We asked Aaron why farm implements roll on bare steel wheels, with no rubber tires. He said it’s a bishop’s rule to keep people from going fast.

Daily life is guided by simplicity and a pace slow enough to appreciate the smell of freshly turned earth or cut grass or a grandson’s grasp of your leg as you walk the fields together. No doubt outsiders romanticize these things about Amish life, but the truth is starker. Anyone dependent on modern conveniences woven so completely and unconsciously into daily life that we don’t even realize our dependence, would find it very difficult to shed them in favor of a slower, harder, more deliberate life.

For that reason, Aaron said, they do not encourage people not born into the Amish community to “convert” to their faith and culture.

As a young sharecropper, my grandfather walked behind a mule pulling a plow. But when he gained access to a tractor, he embraced the innovation and convenience wholeheartedly. Amish farmers are content with their mules. Whether tractors, telephones, automobiles or microwave ovens, they recognize that innovations do not necessarily contribute to a better, fuller, deeper life.

Sitting together in a comfortable living room, a Bible and reading glasses atop a small table by their chairs, we asked this 62-year-old couple if they were granted permission to embrace any single modern convenience – the kind of utility they see every day as they live among “outsiders” – what might it be?

Silence.

After a while I suggested to Barbie that I thought she might say “electricity.” She smiled meekly and said, “I considered that.” When pressed for his answer, Aaron said, “I’ve never thought about it.”

Whoa.

Aaron farmed 50 acres with mules, raised eight children, six of whom have 33 children, raises dogs and tobacco for extra income, gave the farm to a son and now works another son’s landscaping business, is a stalwart in church and community, and he’s never thought about what mechanical, transportation, electrical, communication tool available to others he might like for himself?

All the while he lives among outsiders who think camping out overnight to be first in line for a new phone model is logical and that instant gratification is too slow. We’re bombarded by constant messages that we will be happier if we grasp, strive and reach for the next purchase, entertainment, or experience that will somehow endow us with the satisfaction Aaron has just by living a simple life in a caring community of like-minded folks.

“Content” is the only word to describe a man whose lifestyle barricades him against the onslaught of television and social media, who has never thought about embracing modern conveniences. He is content and committed to a way of life that is set apart, not conforming to the world. Romans 12:2 He evidently thinks about such things no more than a fish considers water.

Few modern Christians are consciously set apart from the world. Our most significant symbol – the cross – has been so co-opted and adulterated that it no longer retains significance as a Christian symbol.

Maybe that’s why we admire the simple, quiet, slow – contented – pace of Amish life.

Before I met Aaron, I’d never thought about it.

What Color is Your Duck?

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I was not a self-assured little kid. I lived in the country and wasn’t particularly athletic, didn’t know my way around the terminology of machinery as it seemed my friends did. I was reticent in a crowd of my peers. But I was an early, voracious reader and I felt confident in the classroom.

white duck on grass field

Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash

At least until Mrs. Roberts assigned a coloring project that I blew.

Louise Roberts was my first grade teacher. She was lovely, kind and patient. But my most vivid memory of my nine months with her (not the same nine months as each of her sons experienced) is the zero she gave me on a coloring assignment.

I’m quite certain it was she who delivered my first academic trauma. First grade seems right for that kind of project. I doubt it was second grade, because Mrs. McGowan never would have given me a zero.

Mrs. McGowan lived in the county seat of Portage, 14 miles and a half century from my little school in Rio, and possessed a sense of savoir faire. She loved her students enough to invite a select few one at a time to her house in Portage overnight to give them a taste of “city life.” Portage had 10,000 people, to Rio’s 788.

I was one of the lucky chosen for an evening in Portage with Mrs. McGowan and her husband, a local official. She made dinner, then they drove me around the city, and introduced me to city hall and the jail. Come to think of it, maybe she was trying to “scare me straight.” Anyway, she was sweet enough that she would have given me a second chance, not a zero that haunts me 64 years later.

Mrs. Roberts’ assignment simply was to color the animals pictured on the white sheet of paper she distributed. I forget what all the animals were, but the ducks… oh, the ducks.

What color are ducks? In all of my six years of limited exposure to Disney and storybooks in which ducks floated in ponds near where Snow White lay waiting for the kiss that would bring her back to life, or beneath the tower that held Rapunzel, the ducks were white. Pure, innocent, naïve images floating blissfully about the main story characters to remind us that even when things appear to be going smoothly, we need to paddle like crazy.

The ducks I was to color were presented to me on a sheet of white paper. So, very logically, I colored the other animals and left the ducks alone. White ducks on white paper. That’s the color of ducks.

When I got the assignment back with a big ZERO on it, I had the temerity to ask Mrs. Roberts why. She said I didn’t do the assignment because I didn’t color the ducks.  “But ducks are white,” I said, a nascent lawyer arguing for the defense.

“You should at least have colored the bills and feet,” she said. I could see her point, but how about a second chance? Maybe they were albino ducks.

Fortunately, I recovered from that initial academic setback and grew up avoiding drugs, thievery, rock and roll and mayhem.

Thank you Mrs. McGowan.

You’re Faster with Mile Stones

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Driving expeditiously through the mountains suddenly seemed dangerous to my wife. “You’re going awfully fast,” she said. I checked the speedometer and I was well within the limit.

I don’t like to zip too quickly through that beautiful section of I-40 where North Carolina melds into east Tennessee. The panorama of mountains, with curvy roads and old forests crowding the tarmac merits a pace that allows an appreciative glance.

On this day, with restraining fences guarding against rock slides, encroaching trees, road warning signs, curves racing toward us and big trucks sliding behind me on the right, it seemed we were going faster than we were.

I recalled opposite days in 1974 when the national maximum speed was 55 mph in an effort to conserve energy. We lived in northern New Mexico and driving south to Albuquerque through a featureless landscape at 55 felt like standing still.

No geographic feature came toward us, no tree, no hill, no building. Road signs were rare because there was nothing to announce, no blind curve to warn against, no upcoming attraction. Just a straight ribbon of tarmac and sand minute by agonizingly slow minute.

A featureless landscape makes a journey seem slow. When elements natural or manmade come zipping at you, those landmarks make it seem you’re traveling much faster because you have them to measure your progress against.

School years once were that for us. The year moved in cycles, sometimes scattering about during the summer, but it always gravitated back to center just before Labor Day when the new school year started. School events dictated our calendar: teacher work days, holidays, test days, athletic competitions, performances. Christmas arrived with a sense of relief, tempered by the overhanging dread of first semester finals coming in January.

Then spring semester, Easter, class trips and anticipation of summer vacation.

When the last kid graduated from high school and the dog died, we were empty nesters for sure, no longer having to pretend we were napping on Sunday afternoon. College calendars and laundry drop-off visits kept some semblance of school year cycle going, but faintly.

Now, with the youngest in his 40th year, the calendar meanders, notable less for school events than for Social Security deposits and planning for winters in Florida.

I asked my dad when he was about 80 if days seemed to drag at that age. He shook his head and said every day flies by faster than the one before it. That puzzled me. Now I realize he had landmarks speeding toward him that I’d not considered: Breakfast, a good bowel movement, lunch at Karen’s, the local diner, cards with friends or the wife, doctor visits, driving a widow to the grocery store, a leadership meeting at Redeemer Lutheran, maybe a call from his daughters or his favorite child, a show on TV and hopefully a good night’s sleep.

 Those aren’t the landmark anticipations of the young whose life careens toward them hard around every corner with ever increasing opportunities and expectations. But they are the elements that mark progress of a life traveling confidently toward a destination of which he is sure.

We all find security in the coop we choose

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We raise some chickens on the hobby farm in Pennsylvania where we spend time with our oldest son’s family. We got them when they were too old to be called chicks and too young to be called hens. They were teenagers at poultry puberty, eating and sleeping but not producing a darn thing.

After foxes, hawks and weasels decimated our first two flocks that ran free in a half-acre pasture, we started over with this new batch from a farm that raises chicks to this level of maturity before they start laying eggs. So, they’ve navigated their brief lives in the narrow confines of a large, dark shed.

From that shed they were pulled, dropped into a big box to transport home, and then set in a coop to protect them while acclimating to new digs. And we built a small run to provide some level of protection from predators that was more than the ungirdled range of grassland occupied by their unfortunate predecessors.

When it came time after a few days to let the young birds out of the coop the strangest thing happened – or didn’t happen. They were reluctant to leave the confines of that shelter.

I thought once I opened the door they would burst out into the brave new world of open space, green grass, bug buffet and blue sky because they’d been confined to dark, confined environs their whole lives.

Instead, I realized that it is precisely because they’ve been confined in dark spaces their whole lives that wide open spaces terrified them. It took long minutes for the first curious, brave beak to break beyond the coop threshold, and hours for a chicken body to follow that beak out the door, into the pasture.

Joined slowly, tentatively, cautiously by others, they hovered in the shadow of the coop for more long minutes, barely moving a body length into what to them must have been a vast, horizonless universe of undulating grassy waves.

When I consulted on a fund raising campaign for a Boy Scout campground I was surprised to learn that boys from the inner city were terrified by the animal and insect noises reverberating through the dark night outside their tents. These boys – familiar with gun fire, street racing, domestic violence and the cacophony of inner city life – shivered and huddled in their tents, sleepless at the sound of crickets and owls in the night.

A beautiful actress I interviewed in Houston, living with a physically abusive partner, told me it’s less frightening to hear him coming up the steps, knowing he’s going to hit her, than it is to considering fleeing with her child to the uncertain world beyond their apartment door.

We are anchored to our security, the blankets under which we find comfort and assurance, even if those blankets hinder us from moving past comfort into adventure and discovery.

Michael Easter wrote about it in his book “The Comfort Crisis.” For a month he eschewed the electronic conveniences and digital distractions of his life while camping and hunting in Alaska, enduring – then appreciating – hunger, boredom and uncertainty, the very things we work so hard to avoid.

He said challenging yourself to embrace a hardship and work through it, rather than avoiding it, will help you grow.

Being alone in nature actually will help you connect with yourself and help you feel less lonely.

And, he suggests consciously ditching unnecessary conveniences that make you lazy and, ultimately, unhappy. Rather than heading for the fridge at the first tingle of hunger, skip the snack, embrace the hunger and the next time you eat an actual meal you’ll appreciate it all the more. And be healthier for it.

The first sermon I ever preached was entitled “Comfort Kills” and I implored the congregation in Shawnee, OK to step outside their comfort zone to engage those persons who were not just like us.

Be brave, I said. Don’t be…chicken.

Committing Errors and Omissions

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Oh good grief, will that lady please sit down so the rest of us can see?

I’m at the spring school concert for one of my grandchildren, who is dressed in white shirt and dark pants somewhere on the third row, right side, there, in the shadow, just beyond the edge of the light. Yeah, him. Take your finger out of your nose, buddy.

But the lady, and a dozen others, are making it hard to see my kid at all because they keep popping up, holding cameras, iPads, and phones at arm’s length to record their little darlings’ anonymous instant. Me, I’m trying to sit back, focus, and be in the moment so that the images and sounds in real time are seared into my memory.

I won’t need to pull up a grainy, dark, blurry picture to remember the grainy, dark, blurry image of the event I saw – through a viewfinder.

Studies show you will remember something better and appreciate it more if you concentrate on the moment with your own eyes, instead of looking at it through a viewfinder.

Elizabeth Loftus, a psychological science professor at the University of California, Irvine, says when our concentration at an event is to record it, it’s like we are offloading the responsibility of memory from our brain to our phones. Or, we’re so distracted by the photo taking process that we miss the moment altogether.

People upload 30,000 hours of content to YouTube – every hour.

I’m not sure if there is an exact parallel to the “losing the moment to a photo” idea, but I’ve discovered a strange phenomenon relating to journaling and memory. I’ve been transcribing my handwritten notes from journals of 50 years ago when I was in the army. Everything was new and not so wonderful for a young, pacifist country boy who grew up in a town of 788 people now thrust into a world of strangers being trained to kill people.

Still, there were friends, events, churches, girls and Kodak moments from those years that I’ve shared with people ever since. Special moments, meaningful events and forks in the pathway of my journey seared into my memory.

Yet, I’ve discovered that many of the most memorable, transformative, fulfilling moments of those days went completely unmentioned in my journals. Stories that made it through my memory dozens of times during the past half century never made it through my pen.

When I first realized the omissions, it struck me as strange. What I’ve come to believe, in a totally unscientific insight, is that I didn’t write down such significant things because I knew they were so memorable I’d never forget them. Things like:

  • My first ski trip when we encountered girls from church at the top of Monarch Mountain. It was my first day on skis and I’d done well and wanted to impress them. After we chatted a minute, we all turned to go down the hill and I immediately fell. Trying to catch up, I fell again and didn’t see them the rest of the day.
  • After wearing a full leg cast from a ski injury I had my buddy drive me to the base hospital to get it off, carrying my bike along with us so I could ride it home. Ha. My leg was useless until I’d rehabbed it.
  • A spur of the moment trip to Tacoma to see a girl I’d met through her cousin in Wisconsin.
  • After saving for a big ski trip to Vail, buddies Steve, Paul and I brought a fourth, Dennis, from Florida. He hadn’t skied, but said he was a surfer, so we thought if he could surf, he could ski. Wrong. After sleeping in the heatless van in the parking lot, waking to a quarter inch of frost inside the windows, we spent the morning at Vail, the premier ski area in Colorado, with him on the bunny slope. He never got it and we abandoned him.
  • Or, feeling compelled to back out of a trip to San Antonio to see a friend I’d met when stationed there, feeling I shouldn’t go. Hours after I was to leave, my mom called to say my cousin Dickie had died in a one-car accident. I went home to Wisconsin instead.

So, what prompts recollection of these events as I transcribe my journals? As I’ve gone through chronological entries, little butterflies flap around in my mind, whispering, “Didn’t this or that happen about this time?” We are an accumulation of our memories and each works in some kind of symbiotic relationship with others.

It’s kind of like how the things we eat work together in our bodies for nutrition and health. Who knows how an orange releases enzymes from a pork chop? Or how fish digests better with a glass of white wine?

I don’t. But thinking about why I wrote about fairly mundane things without recording events I considered very significant then and since makes me scratch my head.

Now, please scooch aside ma’am…I need to get this pic.

Don’t miss it: put those memories on PAPER

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Other than seven months in our second year of marriage, my wife and I have never lived closer than 600 miles to either set of parents. I grew up in Wisconsin, she in Illinois, and then Colorado, where we met.

We were faithful to stay in touch with our parents as we moved from Oklahoma, to Colorado, to Tennessee, to Texas, back to Oklahoma and then to North Carolina. Long distance phone calls were expensive so I consistently wrote weekly letters to bridge the miles and months between visits.

Each letter recorded the previous week’s events, which at our stage of life always seemed many – certainly more fascinating, important and original to us than to our families. But mom and dad always hung on every word and my mother was good to write in return.

At first, I wrote the letters in long hand, which to today’s teens is like code. Around 1980 our office moved from an exotic, spinning ball electric typewriter to early computers. Wow. The monitor itself begged me to write as it seduced me with the string of little green letters corresponding to the keys I pressed.

By the time children started arriving computers were more common and it was easier to chronicle the many initial, unique, and unprecedented achievements of Nathan, Erin and Austin – first smile, first roll over, first word, first step. I’m sure I went into detail ad nauseum. Eventually, I realized these letters were a chronos record of my children’s lives – and mine – and I started keeping four copies of every letter.

I wrote on different computers, duplicated them on various printers, was not consistent in type face, margins or paper quality. But my intention was to keep a file of these letters for each child and present them as a bound volume for a high school graduation gift – their life in print.

The books were such a hit the kids never pressed me for that new car I never offered.

They’ve used the books to reaffirm memories, to share with spouses – and eventually their children – something of their lives growing up. The first born – trying to recall for his wife his foray into independence at about age seven – rifled through the pages to the specific time he was running away from home, pulling his wagon, when I drove into the neighborhood from work, saw him and encouraged him not to be late for dinner.

Boyfriends, girlfriends, grades, sports activities, family moves, home building, job changes, awards and disappointments all are recorded in black and white in a bound volume, a ready reference for those mystical days when a fireplace, rain, wine and melancholy need a tiny, tangible toehold to step full blown into nostalgia.

Is our self-identity anything more than an accumulation of our memories?

We’ve moved a lot so to keep things simple we never clung to things. One moving team looked around our empty attic and spartan walls and said, “Mrs. Jameson, you don’t do clutter, do you.” I struggle against the tide of my wife’s tidying to cling to pool noodles of memorabilia.

Comedian Billy Crystal, in his hilarious memoir written upon turning 65, Still Foolin’ ‘Em, believes we ought to keep mementos that take us back to happy moments. Remembering them helps us to relive them, and who doesn’t like to go back to mental images that bring a smile?

The letters I wrote to my parents were subject to time, travel, USPS sorting and handling machines, the vagaries of weather, transportation and distribution. But each was a package of joy upon arrival.

Great historical biographies have been written based solely on the written correspondence to and from the subject. I join the chorus of lament that this kind of communication no longer is in vogue. It’s a lost art; a neglected source of historical reference, of anchors to memory.

My children have asked me to write letters to their children celebrating certain occasions, passages into “adulthood,” or encouragement in their Christian lives – requests I eagerly fulfill.

Perhaps one day they’ll come across such letters in their files or boxes of childhood treasures, pause and reread them, and whisper to no one in particular, “Ahhh, Papa. I remember him.”

Picking the bones with buzzards

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I walked among the buzzards at an estate sale today.

An estate sale is where a house filled with the relics of a life is picked over like road kill by vultures, tugging and pulling remnants of his memory off the skeleton and carting them off to cars.

Under marital duress, I joined the kettle of vultures who gathered well before the scheduled 9:30 a.m. viewing. Senior adults almost exclusively, none of whom needed anything being offered inside. All of us curious about what we’ll see, about how this man lived, what he’d considered important enough to collect, gather and keep through his final days.

Curious to see if anything in the house was a treasure his children didn’t know of, something we could “steal” for a few dollars and store in our own lockers for our children to offer in our future estate sale.

I chatted up other vultures, most of whom were in good humor, happy to spend a morning picking at the carcass of a deceased man none of us knew personally. We weren’t hungry, really. But if we found a morsel we’d happily chew on it.

And besides, in the cycle of nature – birth, life, death – weren’t we doing our part? Just like real vultures keep the highways clear of road kill carcasses?

I learned our guy was 95 and died after living in the house 30 years. His closets, cubbies and cupboards were filled as if he’d just stepped out for lunch, telling the house, “I’ll be right back.” But now, except for how the estate sale team had arranged and tagged everything, it stands as a cavernous crypt.

I wandered with the flock, poking, pecking and prodding. He loved Christmas music and books on history and architecture. His shirts were once expensive – but dammit, too large. The tools in his garage were well worn. His china cabinet held fine crystal too delicate for me even to want to examine.

It was the bathroom that arrested me. The sink counter was covered with personal care items that revealed an individual vanity, as would all of ours – how he cared for his teeth, his hair, his nails and skin.

Inside the tiled shower stood a collapsible walker, tight and forlorn against the wall. Available. Unused. The walker had wheels on the front two legs, so he could lift the back two legs and roll it along, dropping the back to the floor to rest or stand when he’d gotten to his destination in the house.  

The walker – alone among all the mementos of a long life – stood in mute testimony to the infirmities at the end of a long life. And it moved me from carnivore to compassion. I left silently.

Oh yeah, we got an Elizabeth Geisler basket. It was a steal.