Sunday, June 24, 2012

On the Launching Pad?


Dearest Blog Reader;

I hope this finds you doing well. I of course am doing well. Well fed on the anniversary of my birth, and at the end of a very successful trifecta (see last week's blog), where those, who love me more that I deserve, have showered me with kindnesses and permitted indulgences that if it went on for much longer would turn me into a five year old brat and who wants to hang out with a brat. So, now it is time to get my own pop from the fridge, time to help load the dishwasher, and time to stop being a turd.

As you can well imagine, on this the first day of my next 50 years, I do feel the need to wax poetic. Not that 50 years hasn't been reached by people wiser and more accomplished than I, they have, and the sales of their autobiographies suggest that you are interested in what these titans of humanity have to say. Just in case I do have standing to spout a few lines of supposed wisdom, I think that I will take that opportunity at this the end of the first one-third of my life.

That's right with certain medical advances that I am sure will be available to all of us with universal medical care over the next 100 years, I could very well live until I am 150 years old. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think it will be a walk in the park. I will have to live a healthy lifestyle, and take my medicine, and be prepared to leave pieces and parts of me in medical facilities throughout the country; hips, knees, appendix, a lung. Who knows, like Tony Bennett, I may have to leave my heart in San Francisco.

What with medical advances, and "life saving" treatments, we will all live to this ripe old age. Some who have come after me undoubtedly will live longer. Those who have lived life without Big Macs and are older than me may live that long, but is a life without Big Macs really worth living? Have you ever wondered about the phrase "life saving?" "That heart transplant saved her life." "The chemo-therapy saved his life." "That colonoscopy was a pain in the butt, but it saved his life." "Good thing she was wearing her seatbelt while texting, eating super-sized fries, and drinking a fructose infested large Coke, it saved her life." The medical industrial state and nanny state always seemed a bit presumptuous to me; "saving" someone's life. Isn't the life just being extended? Don't get me wrong. Life extension is a concept that I whole-hearted support, or I will until at least until 2112.

At best, it is a rigged game. Like a proctologist, Death gets us in the end. It reminds me of a hockey game. The goalie "saved" the score, but death scores on the rebound. What me worry? I am not. That reality is a century away; 100 years of an Alfred E. Newman grin is what I have in store.

It is a bit sobering though. One-hundred more years when 2 generations ago, one's lot had been cast. At 50, you were on the down hill slide; 15 years to retirement and 7 years of living off your kids social security withholding. Even that scenario had the Pollyannas in Washington warning us that social security was about to run out.  Think about it now.

Instead of the downhill slide, I am just arriving at the launching pad. I only have to punch a clock for 15 more years and the I get to live off the teat of human kindness and governmental largess for the next 85 years. Now that is an investment that I can get excited about.  I thank you great great grandsons and great great grand daughters. While you are working until age 125, I will be out riding my bike deciphering the ways and methods of the assassin deer and probably "saving lives." Don't worry, surely free medicine, medicine without the economic incentives to attract the "best and the brightest" will continue to advance and you will have a 75 year retirement. Can a 1400 on your SAT be turned into medical pioneer with $200,000 in student loans? Suckers!

So now that I am sure that my retirement years are secure, I can focus on other things. I think that the biggest challenge to the 150 year thing is really about flexibility. I don't mean the flexibility to be able to bend over and tie my shoes. That is what slip-ons are for. No, I mean will I be flexible enough to make course corrections in my life, my attitudes, and my soul to make 150 worth it. In the old paradigm, Uncle Stubby was clearly an old bastard by age 60, and we only had to put up with him because we figured that he was only good for another 5 years, what with the diabetes and high blood pressure. While for a significantly shorter length of time, that was a fine example of "life saving" medicine.

I'm thinking that if we had to put up with that old bastard for another 80 years, our forbearance would have grown thin. There surely would have been a hunting accident by his 70th birthday.  While Stub's "old bastard" diagnoses wasn't firmly made by his daughter at a family reunion after years of her own therapy until he was 60, he had been on the road for a while. Bigoted and prejudiced against just about everyone, no one had done right in his eyes for a long long time. Everyone has their faults, and it was Stubs self-appointed responsibility to point them out.

Surely he wasn't always like that. Hadn't he been a good friend, father, husband; at least for a little while? The first missteps to his terminal diagnosis must have been small. They were just a few degrees off of the straight and the true. Yet, as the protractor of life stretched out and on to forty years, that one degree left him way the Hell out there separated from those he loved or should have been able to love.

I don't believe that it is a question of are we good enough. By definition, we aren't. We are all a degree or two off true. Even the very good of us, people who we want to spend time with, are off by a half a degree from true, and even the good will wander off the path in 100 years and be separated. No, I believe that the question is are we flexible and brave enough. Are we pliable and corageous enough to transform, to make the course corrections to stay connected when we sense or are told that we are getting further away, becoming separated. Are we loving enough to stay connected for another hundred years?

Take care

Roger

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Fireflies are for What?


Dearest Blog Reader;

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I am sitting here on my father throne soaking up the adoration of my minions . . . I mean children. Father's Day is the pivot point of a very important month for me. Annually, June is the harbinger of three celebratory days for me. I'm not Jewish, but when my Sunday school teacher was telling me Old Testament stories with the flannel board cutouts, it seemed to me that the Jews were always down in Jerusalem celebrating something or another.

Tu B’Shevat, Fast of Esther (Taanit Esther), Purim, Shushan Purim, Fast of the Firstborn, Passover (1st day), Passover (final day), Yom Hashoah, Yom Hazikaron, Yom Ha’atzmaut, Lag B’Omer, Yom Yerushalayim, Shavuot (1st day), 17th Tammuz, Tisha B’Av, Rosh Hashanah (1st day), Fast of Gedalliah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Hoshanah Rabbah, Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah, Hanukkah.

Please, don't be impressed with my knowledge of Jewish celebrations. My Sunday school teacher didn't know Hanukkah from the Twelve Days of Christmas. I owe all of my knowledge to that wizard behind the screen: Mr. Google.

It is a holiday calendar that would cause a school boy to wet his pants in expectation. "Time for school Tommy." "Not today mom. It's Shavuot, first day. I get the rest of the week off." "Get your uncircumcised butt down here young man. You're going to school today." "Mom stop trampling my religious rights." "I give you religious rights with the back of my hand. Now get down here right now. And don't even think about walking down here in that Yakama on young man."

June gives me a small taste of that sweet celebratory life. In fact, it is a little better than the Jewish celebrations. Because rather than being all about God this or Supreme Being that, it's all about me. Well not completely, the first celebration is balanced and shared with the lovely Bev. We celebrate our anniversary every year on June 8. Of course, its actually June 5th, but I can't bring myself to break Bev's spirit by correcting her year after year. So we compromise, we celebrated 27 years of wedded bliss this past June 8th, and I got the satisfaction of knowing that I was right on the 5th.

Then in the middle of the month, it is time to get funky on Dad's day; breakfast in bed, chocolate amaretto pie for lunch, with a nightcap of double stuff Oreos. I am living the dream. Phone calls come in. I get accessories for my Big Green Egg. I am living large.

I know what you're thinking. How do you top off two celebrations like that? You focus. You say to yourself, "Damn it! It's my birthday coming up and it's going to be something special." It helps too that I have found a good marketing gimmick. Rather than have people think oh Roger gets three celebrations in one month I'm skimping on a present, I package them all together. That's right! We celebrate the trifecta in the realm of Sharritt. Once defined how can you not want to reach a crescendo on the last "part" of the celebration. I feel like the Whos down in Whoville; Oh the noise, noise, noise, noise!

"A bit grandeous, don't you think master Sharritt?" I used to think so. Then around age ten, I realized that even God was getting in on the celebration. What else could explain the existence of lightning bugs. Every year we would see one or two early June or late May. The earliest recorded sighting at the Sharritt farm was May 26. Never earlier. They weren't faked out by an 80 degree March. Nosiree!

That is because they are not warm weather loving insects. No, they are Roger's birthday celebrating accoutrements from God. Building, and building, and building, and building! Until the third week of June, with the celebration so out of proportion in those blinking taillights, the earth actually changes its relationship with the sun. The northern hemisphere tilts away and we take our slow, spiraling descent to the winter solstice and seasonal affective disorder in the afterglow of that humdinger of a party.

I can't deny it. It makes me happy to think these things. How do I respond to my detractors and their whispers of "delusions of grandeur"?

I'm just glad there's someone in New Zealand with a birthday on December 22 to get it heading back my way.

Take care.

Roger




Tuesday, June 12, 2012

who died?


Dear Blog Reader:

I hope this finds you doing well. I am pretty good. As you can probably tell from the rapid redeployment of this blog, I have a lot on my mind this week. I must admit though that when the assassin deer take control there is little room up there for much else. Now that those demons have been expelled, my mind turns to other more pleasant thoughts.

Specifically, my thoughts have turned to Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip. That's right this past weekend England celebrated the diamond jubilee.  Queen Elizabeth has been on the throne for 60 years. You would have thought that a former world power would have advanced farther than that in perfecting pharmaceutical laxatives for their royalty.  Oh well.

My thoughts have really been on Phillip and what a prince of a guy he is. In this age of power marriages of convenience, he and Elizabeth really seem to have a good thing going. I hope so. I just hate to see these celebrity unions break up in the checkout lanes of our supermarkets. "Clean up on aisle 'I do'."

Not that their marriage hasn't had its rough patches. All marriages do. I am sure that  Prince Phillip has awoke in the middle of the night after a heated spat and thought to himself "who died and made her queen?"

Take care

Roger

Monday, June 11, 2012

connect the dots?


Dearest blog reader:

I hope that this finds you doing well. While my excellent typing skills mask it, I must admit that I write this with a trembling hand. Several seemingly unrelated recent events are causing my trepidation. Yes, it appears that the assassin deer are back at up to their old mischievous ways.

They had taken a break; the long winter's nap sabbatical. They kept their flannel sheets on their winter beds in spite of the evidence surrounding them of an early spring. No, the shortage of apples this fall will not be on their heads. While resting and regrouping from the fall hunting season, the assassins even took a long enough break to get their children off to deer kindergarten.

Now they are back with a vengeance. They are pulling out all of the stops, and enlisting the more nefarious members of the animal kingdom in their dastardly plots.  That's right raccoons have thrown in with the deer. Raccoons, you are either for us or against us. Your actions of the past week make it abundantly clear that you have entered into an unholy alliance with these Lyme diseased, tick harboring, scoundrels of the suburban woodlands. 

I know what you're thinking. "those are pretty big words and accusations for a man with no proof." Well listen to the following and connect your own dots. I think that it makes a pretty convincing picture.

Last weekend I was cutting the lawn pretty early on Saturday morning before the heat became too bad for the rest of the day. I was outback of the house and looked up and saw a doe stampeding around the barn wide eyed; obviously surprised to see me there. It was like I had interrupted her on a surveillance mission, or more likely, a practice suicide bomb run. She was looking to see how close she could get before I sounded the alarm. Once discovered, she skedaddled on over the hill. I tried to warn the authorities, but they were too busy with afghanistani goat herders living in Pakistan to keep any predator drones on station above central Indiana. Do you think me paranoid? Then explain recent NSA intercepts of terrorist "chatter" where they talk of terrorists using brown-eyed doe-eyed jihadist women to carry out their diabolical plots. Chilling!

There have been other near encounters recently. A friend of Bev's commented naively how cute a deer was that had come into her yard. "Just curious and so beautiful", she said. “Curious” my little cloven feet. It was on the same sort of reconnaissance mission as at our house.  What if the deer was really on a kidnap mission, getting close to the house to steal the family dog? The assassin deer's interrogation methods are quite chilling to watch and not the kind of thing any of us want our beloved pets to have to face.  The worst part of that scenario is that the deer have found the perfect scapegoat. If any dog goes missing in a slightly wooded area, it is the misunderstood coyote that will be accused unable to combat the prejudice that the lovable Bambi relative could do no wrong.

These cunning warriors are enlisting help from the raccoons. On three occasions this week, I witnessed a momma raccoon try to escort a brood of young to the greener grass on the other side of the county road that I ride my bike on.  The use of raccoons for diversionary purposes is well documented in the annals of this blog. See Deer Assassins from October 17 of last year.

Many people think that the mothers of the animal kingdom instinctually care for and protect their young. Let me disabuse you of that wrong headed notion. On these three occasions, I watched as, upon the mother raccoon realizing that I was approaching in near silence on my bike, she panicked and went bounding off into the tall grass leaving her brood to bounce off of one another like five untied balloons in a small room. Only my superior driving and evasion skills saved the little ones. Don't get me wrong. I feel no compunction in driving right over the top of future nerdowells. However, one must have their priorities straight. Priority number one is staying upright in your vehicle when being stalked by blood thirsty deer assassins. Priority two is getting machineguns mounted on my bike so I can "clear" a path when confronted with this situation in the future.

Having been thwarted in the unholy pursuit of their evil overlord's favor, I believe that the raccoons are resorting to trickeration in order to distract me so that the assassin deer can deal me my ultimate demise. Last night, as I was riding up the big hill, testing the limits of my endurance and strength, with my mental faculties at their lowest, I looked down at the road and saw a crushed catsup packet. Obviously, they were testing the efficacy of calling upon my Christian kindness. They hoped that if I saw that my enemy had fallen and was covered with "blood" I would not cross to the other side of the road.

 They hoped that I would get off my bike and bear the poor hurt animal to the nearest inn where an assassin deer would be working the front desk after tying up the real innkeeper. In the brief moment of my confusion, the assassin would rain down my doom. It probably wouldn't work. Even when I am doing good deeds, I am in a state of heightened awareness, ready to react in any situation.

I think that you will agree that the dots connect into a pretty convincing picture.  Be alert America.

Take care.


Roger




Sunday, June 3, 2012

Remembering Memorial Day?


Dearest Blog Reader;

I hope this finds you doing well. I am fine. This is a repost of a Memorial Day blog from two years ago. I shined it up a little and thought that it still holds up well.

I am enjoying this near summer weather on Decoration Day. I have no idea how I remembered that Memorial Day was called Decoration Day by Nellie Kincade, later Sharritt. Shoot all of the sisters (my grandmother and great aunts); Nellie, Mildred, and Irene called it Decoration Day in deference to the moniker given to it as it started after the Civil War. The last Monday in May, buckets of peonies were gathered from the sister's yards. Profusions of reds, or whites, or pinks were lined up in the back seat of the Ponitac Bonneville. Each year was a segregation of colors. This wasn’t for some decorative sense of style; a purist’s nod to sanity. No, it was an acquiescence to the variety of Indiana weather. The colors represented the heirloom standard bearer of an early, mid-season or late peony variety.

The decorators were covered. Early spring, regular spring, or late spring, it didn’t matter. They had a three week window of opportunity: so let the 80 degree March days reign. A fifty degree April could not loosen a single blue gray curl. Yet, while prepared, those tightly pursed Kincade lips were willing nature’s cooperation while steel gray eyes looked at the calendar, the sky, and the peony bed during the weeks leading up to Decoration Day.

Those pursed lips were freely given to a grandson and great nephew. Pursed lips clamped tight remind me of my elders as I catch a glimpse in the mirror after a hard day. A glimpse of pursed limps reminds me of those three sisters. Late May was the facial decoration every mid May on as they exerted their will to bend nature. It is hubris to think that the will of these three could make nature behave, but every Decoration Day had peonies on the graves of Pop, Uncle Bud, Irene, and Dad Kade and several other sites inside of Gravel Lawn Cemetery.

Gravel Lawn Cemetery was founded by the town fathers around the turn of the century, and Sharritt’s and Kincades are on the front row. Seeing that the little township cemeteries were too far flung and too filled with the good intentions of sloppy grave tending survivors, the fathers decided to consolidate the grave digging and tending duties to an on site superintendent. They could hire the superintendent, stoke his grave tending intentions with a pay check and their forebears would have well tended graves with little bronze urns affixed to granite stones that the town mothers would fill with peonies from the front yard every last Monday of May.

The father’s pooled their money and purchased 40 acres, and subdivided it so that the descendents of Fortville’s denizens could purchase 36 square feet at a time, or rather 216 cubic feet at a time. Gravel Lawn seems like an odd name for a cemetery. It is until you know the rest of the story. The Fortville fathers were tight fisted, with tightly pursed lips. They wanted to save as much money as possible. Looking around northwestern Hancock county, they found the poorest farm ground available and purchased it to bury their dead. As the geological fates would have it, the glacier decided to dump 40 acres of gravel on the edge of a stream bed. Then with persistence aided by several millennia, Lick Creek lowered the South boarder of the property so that in 1900 Fortville’s finest would not have to suffer the ignominy of “Rolling on the River”, (as Credence would sing it) should the creek rise during the spring rains.

While gravel makes for poor farmland, it makes for a great cemetery. Dark rich loam holds water. In the winter, the water freezes. Frozen water is frozen dirt which makes it very difficult to bury Grandma after she gets run over by a reindeer. With gravel the water drains away quickly, this leaves the gravel very friable even when the cold temps arrive. Rich fertile loam will help the grass grow lush, and thick in all but the longest droughts. Sod under laid with gravel will only grow buckhorn after June 15th in all but the wettest of summers. That means not much summer mowing to do to keep the place looking tidy. Little mowing means fewer lawn mowers which means lower costs.

As you can tell, I have more than a passing knowledge of Gravel Lawn Cemetery. I have an inside baseball kind of look. That is because from time to time, during the busy season, before the purchase of a backhoe by the tightfisted fathers, my dad would help the then superintendent dig graves, or cut down trees, or grade the drives. Jim Girt was the superintendent. Ruth was his wife. They lived at the cemetery. In my memories, Jim was always as old as the dirt that he dug, and the kindest man I have ever known. His son was grown and had left home. He and my father had a relationship that spanned many decades and was one of mutual support and admiration. My father would help during the busy times and Jim would help on the farm when we spent a week each fall filling a trench silo with the forage that the dairy cows would eat through the winter.

Jim and Ruth knew what kids liked and let my cousin and me use their son’s bb gun while he and my father dug the 216 cubic foot eternity holes. They were also very smart because there were no bb’s in the gun. So my cousin and I would never be tempted to shoot one another on “accident”. Actually, no bb’s meant that our succumbing to temptation would have no long lasting consequences.  So on bright summer days, I can remember hunting for carpenter ants making their way across the ground and shooting at them from mere millimeters away. Invariably the spring loaded gun would generate a big enough puff of air that the ant would be “vaporized” and a little divot in the dust would be the only evidence of our dastardly deeds. In actuality, I suppose the ants were blown out of the field of our tunnel vision as we watch the devastation our evil intentions wrought.

I can remember doing that for hours while Jim and my father talked talk, checked their work and made sure the sides of the newly departed digs were straight, square, and six feet deep. Finally, they would be done. Ruth would come out with some tea. She would discuss with Jim the route to lead the procession through the winding lanes of the departed. The goal being to take them far enough that all of the cars made it off the road, to take them past sections that were newly mown, and to have the entourage lined up so that they could make a fast get away to the church meal that was awaiting the bereaved back in town.  

I remember standing off several sections away, knowing to be quiet and respectful but disconnected. I had no skin in the game. I did not know the departed. I remember thinking that these people were sad but all I really felt was a deep desire to vaporize ants, and I remember wondering if that was okay.  Today, I wonder, with a grin on my face, what those people in those big, black, shiny cars must of thought of two elementary aged, dust covered boys toting a bb gun, and “why were they staring at the ground so intently?”

There you have it; a wandering meandering walk through a memory that comes back every Memorial Day. All of those people described above now reside in the place they decorated and labored. I go by on hot Memorial Days near dusk and remember them and the others who have given me so much. People who taught me to keep my eyes peeled for the possibilities, who taught me to go “over there” and entertain myself, who taught me to know who I am and where I’m from.  

And as I wander from stone to stone, reading and remembering, I have my eyes cast down, looking for carpenter ants wishing I had a bb gun.

Take care,

Roger