It's Not My First Time

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Fortunately, the January thaw is upon us. My good winter coat was in desperate need of cleaning. I had mentioned two weeks ago that I am the Sharritt version of Pigpen; the lovable dust cloud of a little boy in Peanuts. In this case, my dust cloud generator is an outdoor wood burning stove. Every morning as the car is warming up, I throw a few logs on the fire. You open the door to the furnace and the smoldering fire releases a waft of smoke. Over half of a winter, it adds up and my coat loses that vibrant red look that ironically, makes me so smoking hot.

My coat isn’t the only thing that makes me hot. I have to confess that I have a character defect. I have been working on it for 50 years. Who knows when or how it developed? Maybe someone dropped me on my head when I was one, or the cat swatted me upside of the head and took my Cheerios away from me. It is really a two headed hydra. I really hate it when someone treats me like an idiot, and I really really hate it when a person acts in an unfair manner. Not to toot my own horn, but I do think that over the years the maturation process has soften my reaction to incidents that push the aforementioned buttons on my lizard reactive brain. I will let you be the judge of that with the two memories that I am about to share.

Once a long time ago in a life time far far away, I was a residence hall manager at Purdue. I managed Cary Quadrangle a 1,500 men’s hall. When giving tours, we would say that it was the second largest all male dormitory in the country behind West Point. We had no idea. That was one of the lines passed on to me by the previous manager and since no one seemed keen to fact check, we passed it along as the gospel. As you can imagine, 1500 young men or old teens, depending on your perspective, can get into a fair amount of trouble if left unsupervised. We had 42 resident assistants to do the supervision. These were slightly older young men who had distinguished themselves by not getting caught breaking the rules that they were to enforce on their slightly younger charges.

As you can imagine, it took intensive training to convince them that the institution knew what it was talking about and that the rules were really in place to help with our charges orderly transition to young adulthood. Part of what we did each year was to foster a spirit of teamwork and belonging within the staff. We would participate in a series of team building exercises. One year we decided to challenge the staffs from two other dorms to a rousing contest of tug of war. We would have been doing this for a long time but no one could find a big enough rope to harness the energy of 84 testosterone charged young men in a battle for honor and glory. That summer one was found. An alumni who became a Navy officer sent us one of those massive ropes used to tie a ship to the pier with a note stating that tug of war would be the perfect team building exercise for the staff and this was the perfect rope for it.

It was big. Tug of war is a really good team building exercise. Your team faces your enemy in a show down of strength and strategy. If your team works together and develops a good pulling rhythm, you can use the victory as a metaphor for working together during tough times during the school year. So we met upon the green in front of Wiley Hall. Cary Quad’s 43 (of course I was going to participate) against Wiley and Tarkington’s 40 some. As you may have guessed, I live quite comfortably in the land of hyperbole. I easily turn molehills into mountains. I can easily turn tug of war into a battle for America and Apple pie. That is what I did. My guys were stoked. They were mean and lean and ready to pull.

My competitive juices were flowing. Since the tug of war challenge was issued and accepted early in the spring before the resident assistant selection process had started, I may have selected my staff based on certain physical characteristics. Yes, we were big. There may have been one or two or five high school heavy weight wrestlers on my staff that year. The facts are a bit hazy. But we were ready. The challenge was supposed to be the best of three. We had picked up our rope. We had slide easily into the tension. We had laced up our hiking boots. When the whistle blew, we strained. The rope groaned with the initial stretch. The contest was in stasis for a few seconds and we slowly walked our opponents the 20 feet to their defeat. We were exuberant in our celebration. It had not been that close. We knew that after 30 more seconds of exercise we would have bragging rights for the next year.

The rope was moved back to center. Both teams shouldered their harness once again. The flag was brought to a rest over the center line. We held. The whistle blew. We strained. The rope groaned with the initial stretch and the sissies on the other side let go. All 43 of us went sprawling to the ground. Trying to be a good leader and setting a good example, I was wearing my shirt, tie, and dress pants.  I untangled myself from the lump of humanity. I jumped up with my grass stained knees and went looking for retribution. I heard that I put on quite a show. I questioned their manhood, their sense of fair play, and their right to be called citizens of the world.

Six months later, I was speaking with one of my staff members who had just finished an interview for a real job after graduation. Coincidently, the interviewer was none other than my sister. In a misguided effort to establish some rapport with his potential future employer, he brought up this incident. My sister listened thoughtfully and responded, “That sounds like the kind of thing that would set him off. We Sharritts are big on fair play.” Big on fair play. Even when you know that you are about to lose, you take it. You try your best and you never let go of the rope.

So last week, I was pleased that I did not jump up with my bruised dignity and start ranting and raving like a maniac while I was out to eat with the lovely Miss Beverly. We were with friends and eating at a lovely new upscale restaurant in Pendleton, Indiana. Approximately a year and a half ago, I gave up drinking caffeinated diet soda. Like many things in my life, I was doing too much of a good thing. It got so bad that I could drink a 32 ounce of pop on the way home from work and the caffeine would not affect my sleep patterns. However, my blood pressure was not responding positively to the stimulation. So I bit the bullet and suffered through the monster headache and went cold turkey. However, I do love the burn of the bubbles going down. Thankfully, the soda makers have responded to the aging population and have started offering caffeine free diet at many find dining establishments.

This being a fine dining establishment, I decided to ask. “Do you have any caffeine free diet?” Our waiter responded, “This must be your first time here. We stock a full bar and have a fine wine list. However, the only pop we serve is Coke and Sprite in a bottle. “The old Roger would have responded. “Fine, bring one of those bottles out here and I will stick it where the sun don’t shine.”  How was I to know that this fine dining establishment didn’t cater to the soda drinking crowd? I figured that a fine dining establishment would want you to be inquisitive about their beverage selection. I know. I should have been more in tuned with our waiter’s feelings. This was probably a big step up from his last fine dining gig. It would take a while getting used to serving Chicken Foofoo without pop when you were used to slinging Big Macs and a supersized diet Coke with that.

Where did he think he was working New York? “Oh, I will insult these people and be indignant with my 10% tip.” But wait there is more. Our friends ordered the side salad with ranch dressing on the side; which we promptly found out was “Hoosier gravy.” Everyone knows that is just plain silly. Ranch dressing isn’t gravy until you mix some sausage fat with it.

However, I maintained. I breathed deep. I joked about it, and managed to be gracious with the tip. It is nice to be able to fight the old ways; to have mellowed just a little; to be able to almost understand that the young man was trying to find his way in a competitive service industry.

For me, there are miles to go though. I know this because I am looking forward to the day when my grandchildren ask me if I want to go to the restaurant which shall not be named for a fine meal for my eightieth birthday and I tell them, “No the last I heard they don’t serve fountain drinks there.”

Take care

Roger

Cloths Folding Machine

Dear Blog Reader,

I hope this letter finds you full of hope, as I am, one week after Roger’s post about cleanliness, consideration for others, and how your mother can really get into your head. It’s me, The Lovely Miss Beverly with a guest follow up blog.

I woke up this MLK Day, early, ready to head to Monday Morning Book Club, and with a full slate of vacation day activities lined up after that. I walked into the laundry room to pull a pair of pants out of the clean basket, and was stopped short. Flabbergasted. The laundry was folded and in neat piles. Not just any neat piles either, but piles sorted by person and type of garment—down to the dress socks not comingling with the athletic socks (mental note: maybe a good activity for this day celebrating unity  would be to just designate one big sock drawer.) In other words, the laundry had been done exactly like I would have done it, except that on Sunday, I had been knitting and watching football on the couch for 7 quarters. My 8^th quarter response to the Patriots trouncing of the Colts was to hunker down under an afghan and fall asleep. So I was sure that it wasn’t a short term memory thing, and I hadn’t forgotten that I had actually done the laundry the day before, because THAT is what it looked like.

 It was like some extremely considerate person had studied how I sort and fold at the same time and did it to my exact specifications.  It was like the voice of my 30 year old self whining and cajoling about the proper processing of laundry had been shouted into a long arc that finally fell back to earth and reached my 50 year old husband’s ears. My long term memory, unlike my short term, holds a pretty clear picture of that 30 year old self. The Young Lovely Miss Beverly is beginning to learn how to juggle life on a farm, a teaching career, and a family. She wants a lot out of life, including a husband who might want to get on board with an efficient way of keeping clothes clean and unwrinkled. Among many other things.

My image of that younger me comes into focus through a [RS1] gently lit lens. I would just like to reach back through time, pat her on the head and say, “you want so many things . . . maybe you should slim down the list . . . “  I see that she has not yet humbled herself to go see a therapist alone and with her husband and sort through the “many other things” that she does and, as it turns out, does not want. One of these things, along the way, was a husband who did everything just like she did. Somewhere in those decades she was guided by many an agent of the Holy Spirit to see that Roger’s love for her wasn’t about bending him to her will.

My friend Cyndy has a great metaphor for seeing a therapist also involving laundry. She says that you go to see a therapist because you are just a traveler, heading through say, an airport, trying to get to the plane, and your clothes are bulging out the sides of your suitcase, causing it to pop open and spill out everywhere. The therapist bends down with you in the middle of the chaos, helps you to take everything out, refold it, and hopefully repack it in such a way that you get to the gate without incident. I would add to the metaphor that the therapist (or pastor, or trusted wise friend) helps you see those around you as fellow travelers, with their own luggage dangerously close to popping open, or with at least one bra strap sticking out. For Roger and me, I would add that we have learned when to say, “let me carry that for you,” and “why are you putting that back in your bag? It is heavy, and it still doesn’t fit.”

The hope that I expressed at the beginning of the post emerged from the revelation of this transformation over time. It was the miracle of the perfectly folded laundry at 6:30 on a Monday morning, except it wasn’t about the laundry. I stood mute, with only Henry and Hugo looking on, reverently wagging their tails. I thought, this is the hard fought miracle of refusing to say, “They will never change”.

I went to the bedroom hoping Roger was awake, but he wasn’t. “Roger.” I whispered.

No response.

“Roger!” I couldn’t leave the house without saying something.

“mmmm. What?”

“You folded the clothes just like me!” I whisper shouted.

Mumbling sleep sounds followed by silence.

“Should I explain later?”

“mmmm. I’m sleeping.”

For now, I would have to ponder the mystery on my own. My own crazy luggage-repacking transformation would intersect with his later in the day.

---

 [RS1]

A Considerate Person Does What?

Dear Blog Reader:

I hope that this finds you doing well. I also hope that it finds you taking the first steps toward the successful completion of your resolutions for 2015. I am pleased to say that I am ¾ of the way to my goal. I resolve to get over this stupid cold. The mode of mortality for Ebola is the hyperactivity of the immune system to the infection. Your body is overwhelmed by your own immune system. After this cold, I am fairly certain that I am toast around Ebola. My immune system went way over the top trying to kick this stupid little cold. I mean it was a way disproportional response to the common cold.

At one point in time, snot was dripping out of my nose unprovoked. One night I woke up and had to sneeze so hard that I got a bloody nose, and I mean a very bloody nose; not just a couple of drips. If there are any eye doctors out there, maybe you can answer this. Can your sinuses get so plugged up that the pressure distorts the shape of your eyes? I know that they water like crazy, but I could swear that my eye sight was blurry for 2 days, and I think that it was my sinuses changing the shape of my eyes.  I was so sick that I did not ride my bike for an entire week. That means that I was weak and nearing death.

I would sit down for a few minutes and a pile of discarded snot filled Kleenexes would quickly grow on the night stand, the coffee table, the ottoman. That is when a blast from the past hit me in the face. Punched me in the gut is a better metaphor. I have been sifting through a memory more and more often all fall. I have known that it would be a blog. I have been holding back because it is a petty memory, and a memory that makes me feel uncomfortable.

I could rightfully been described as a messy kid. I was the pigpen of my Peanut’s community. Mrs. Quackenbush (true name) gave me numerous demerits for the pit that was my desk; pencils, papers, half used tablets, rocks, and strings. I believe that there may have been a pocket knife or two at the bottom of there somewhere. Yes it was a simpler time. It was before all of you people out there started having psychopaths and sending them to school. You ruined a very good show and tell subject. It wasn’t only my desk. My papers were messy. I hated the wasted space of margins. I would start on the left edge (of the paper) and go to the right edge breaking in the middle of words without thought of syllables or h yphens. No, I was not being harassed by a skinflint parent or grandparent. It was all self-generated.

That was just 1^st grade. It has followed me all of my life. In 4^th grade Mrs. Ash held up a paper of mine in front of the class and asked “who owns these chicken scratches?” Granted, I had not put my chicken scratched name on the paper. But she was obviously trying to shame me into better penmanship. She knew whose chicken scratches those were. They are quite distinctive. I showed her. It is still horrible. I write a handwritten letter to my kids nearly every week. After 7 years, there are words that they just have to kind of guess at. My ing’s are especially non distinct.

Obviously, there were parent teacher conferences. Mom and dad got the message. “You’re son is going to turn into the unibomber if you don’t do something about his messiness, he is going to live in a tarpaper shack and build letter bombs and write a manifesto if you don’t nip this in the bud.” Mom sprang into action. She went to the nearest Hallmark store and bought a motivational poster. It is a poster with a messy haired little boy eating ice cream. It is obviously a hot day. The ice cream is melting down his front, on to the table and the floor. His face is covered and sticky. The next panel he has cleaned everything up and his mom is beaming at her considerate son.

This poster was hung on the wall at the foot of my bed. I looked at it when I woke up and swung my feet over the edge of the bed to step on some discarded toy strewn on the floor. I saw it as I straightened the bed enough to lay down in the bed at night.

In the previous paragraph, I used present tense verbs in describing a poster that has not been in print for 30 years. That is because it is still present in my mind. As the Kleenex piles grew this week, he was there right in my mind telling me to pick up those nasty things or you are going to burn for being an inconsiderate person.

I don’t think that it worked. Sure I cleaned up my snot rags. However, that was because they were about to topple over onto my pillow. It is a wonder that I didn’t rebel and rip down that stupid little kid and clean up my wall. It stayed in the same place on the wall all of the way through high school. However, it did not go with me to college.

Did it teach me something hanging up there with its accusatory cuteness? It taught me to eat ice cream very quickly. A considerate person doesn’t wait long enough to let the ice cream melt. That’s insensitive. I had some other questions about consideration during this time. Mom’s vacuuming during Road Runner on Saturday morning in the TV room did not seem very considerate. I could not hear any of the beep beeps. Okay, it wasn’t that important for the Road Runner but it was crucial for the Bugs Bunny toons. Also why was battling entropy the gold standard for measuring consideration? What about helping little old ladies across the street, not speaking until spoken to, or not running with scissors? I was grade A considerate on all of those things.

Don’t we all bring our scars from our parent’s good intentions? Then we wrestle with them through early adulthood and pass along some version to our kids, which is why the lovely Miss Beverly and I gave our kids free counselling sessions for graduation gifts. Now that’s considerate.  Even more important as you create a life with your spouse you have to meld two levels of consideration together. There were fights and discussions about the level of cleanliness at the Sharritt house. Certainly, the lovely Miss Beverly had the power of the media on her side. The Big Comfy Couch had the 10 second tidy. That seemed terrible misleading to me. Here is a task that is so despicable that we have to perform movie magic on it and condense 15 minutes of clean up into 10 seconds.

At one point in time, we just admitted our differences and I would have the kids clean the house with mom’s eyes. She could see things that the rest of us had become inoculated to. That worked very well. The kids understood that there were different standards of cleanliness; that cleanliness was in the eye of the beholder. They were used to it. They saw it in their everyday lives. Some friend’s houses looked like they had never been played in and you had to take off your shoes at the front door. Other friends you left on your shoes for fear of stepping in a sharp toy as you ran pell mell through the house. So that worked for them.

The other thing that worked was the jobs list. This was the brain child of the lovely and very smart Miss Beverly. She developed a list of all of the jobs in the house. Each job had a point value. Each week she would print out the list and circled the jobs that needed done each week. For example, cleaning the toilet was an every week job, cleaning the windows was a twice a year job. The jobs would be tallied and the total divided by four. The family could pick any jobs on the list to get their total. We were always big fans of toilet cleaning. There is something about swishing toxic chemicals around for a few seconds and earning an inordinate 3 points. And we would go around picking our chores and within a half hour the house would be clean.

I suppose that 40 years from now Ben and Grace will be adding up how many points cleaning their dirty Kleenexes are worth. It is amazing how a good intention can leave a powerful mess to clean up. Mom should have been more considerate.

Take care

Roger

Sharritt Christmas Letter 2014

Dear Sharritt Friends

I can’t believe it. I was going through our draft file on the computer and found that we have not hit the send button for the Christmas letter. According to the date stamp on the file, it looks like it was done on July 22^nd. We just forgot to hit send. Nah. We’re just in denial. We followed the typical Sharritt recipe for the annual Christmas letter.

At T-minus 2 weeks that lovely Miss Beverly asks; “Got any ideas for the Christmas letter?”

Roger responds; “Not yet, we really need to get working on it.”

At T-minus 1 week Roger asks; “What do you think the theme for the Christmas letter should be this year? We really need to get to work on it now.”

TLMB responds; “I’ve got nothing. Couldn’t we recycle one of the oldies, age the kids a couple of decades and no one will ever notice? Shoot, Ben is still in Elementary school. We won’t have to change his paragraph. Even better, let’s have Facebook write it for us.”

  
 And still we procrastinated. Walking in from the mailbox with your wonderful cards and missives about successes, failures, gains and losses, we were in awe of your discipline, dedication and

fortitude. That is a lot of work to live your lives, get everyone dressed (including the dog) and sitting in front of the camera for the picture and then the paragraphs about your lives. Thanks for catching us up.

 

We do feel that things that have been changing are taking hold now. The kids who have left the nest empty have started good lives. As mentioned, Ben is still in elementary school (teaching). He finds his calling with the kids. His heart stretches to help challenged young lives learn. He also finds this calling in Bloomington among friends, church, community garden and skate boarding, a passion that took him across the country and world this past year.

Grace and Chris are in Michigan proving to other universities that they are very smart people. There will come a time in their lives when they sit down and count how many places they lived in their first three years of marriage and it will add up to something near 8 to 10. They still have some time left. They are obviously making lots of friends because you don’t move that much without some help. They both are pursing dreams of making the world a better place by expunging the scourge of human trafficking; Grace through a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Michigan, Chris through a Law Degree from Michigan State.

For TLMB the changes taking hold include really enjoying being known as The Lovely Miss Beverly through the literary reach of Roger’s blog. She is enjoying a smaller caseload at work just in time for a major revision of the English Braille Code, so she’ll spend time in the spring with online courses. She loves

Monday Morning Book Club at Starbucks, and Tuesday Morning Breakfast Club at Big Apple Bagel. She has a new Wednesday morning friend from the Y locker room that she’s thinking about corralling into another excuse for breakfast out. She went to the Indiana Dunes with 19 women in September for a yearly prayer retreat. It’s a great place for her Starbucks people to meet her Bagel people.

Roger’s change is that he is not feeling like he is still 25 any longer. If he would only act it. This year he rode for 4600 miles around the state of Indiana and a little bit on a lovely vacation by Lake Michigan in August. He also took the challenge to do the RAIN ride in July. He learned a lot about himself riding 160 miles from Terre Haute to Richmond in one day. 1; you can eat 39 packs of pop tarts and still be at a calorie deficit. 2; The lovely Miss Beverly and lovely Miss Grace are a sight to behold when you see them pull up beside you at the 145 mile marker with a pack of pop tarts and an quart of milk “just to tide me over.” 3; he will cry like a baby when he reads the sign from another biker’s fan club that says “Jerry has never ridden 160 miles in one day in his life.” Neither had Roger until then, and he cheered Jerry (and his 52 year old self) on to the end.

Together, we spent a week in the Adirondack Mountains for vacation and the wedding of Lydia and Andy. Grace was in the wedding, and we shared a house on the lake with her, Chris and other friends there for the joy.


Roger has discovered the benefits of yoga for keeping his joints feeling like they’re 25, and some nights when TLMB joins in, we are just two quiet trees together in the quiet Sharritt house. We’ve spent the year leading a new small “life” group in our church. This bunch includes singles, another couple our age, and two younger couples with babies and more babies on the way. This change has brought welcome community to our life beyond the nest.

We spent a Friday night in December caroling with this same life group through the streets of Pendleton, ending up in a nursing home. We had a few folks come to their doors or porches, but most were watching Jeopardy or John Stewart. We sang and laughed together, enjoying the lights against the cold dark, and the talk that happens in community.

At the nursing home, we strolled the halls, stopping when we saw waving hands and residents who joined with us. We were ready to leave when the nurses brought a resident to us that had been in the bath and had missed the singing. We started Silent Night, and the woman sang along. The nurses who had gathered around got tears in their eyes, and explained after that she hasn’t really spoken or been responsive since entering care. Together, we witnessed the constant of the Christ amidst the changes of age and time. Whatever changes you may be facing or settling into, we wish you the heavenly peace found on dark nights in unexpected places.

Take Care.

Have a Blessed New Year.

Bev and Roger.