Sunday, March 13, 2016

Triple Threat

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope this finds you doing well. I am fine in spite of the harrowing times we face. It is that time of year when things shift. It truly feels like the shift is being compressed this year. The weather has shifted a couple of weeks early. It was 70 a couple of days last week. If that weren't enough, the Wizards of Time thought that it would be a good thing move Daylight Savings Time to early March a couple of years ago. This exposes us to that YouTube video about the horrors of DST. You haven't seen it? Don't worry. Get a few more hipper friends on Facebook, and it will show up on a news feed near you. We also face that awkward moment when St. Patrick's day is in the middle of the week. It is a question of timing and propriety. "Do I go out a drink green beer this weekend, next weekend, or like a true Irishman do I go out and get a weeklong drunk on?"

Yes it is a week of tumult and tempest. We are tossed to and fro by these mighty forces arrayed against us. We are gripped in the madness of March. "Beware the Ides of March" could be restated as I'd rather just skip March. Like Caesar, we would be better off with out it.

Can you feel it? For me it is palpable. It is 70 during the day; 50's at night. I walk to the bedroom at night and look at the warm flannel sheets and I struggle. I don't want to wake up at 3:00 in the morning in a sweat. I know that the cotton would be cooler. Those uncomfortable moments can be a thing of the past if I just change out the flannel sheets. Then I despair. I know that the second the sheets are changed a cold front will slam through the northern plains and leave me shivering in the night catching my death and lingering a couple of months to expire in the month of May; our month of memories.

No, leave the bed cloths alone. Be a good example for the trees. They are on the cusp. They are nearly ready to release their buds. We are just a few degree days away from bud emergence. If that happens, that cold front that will leave me low will kill those young apples, cherries, peaches, and plums. I still remember three years ago when we had no apples. Driving by the Apple Barn looking at that fore lorn sign "Closed;No Crop." It may be best if I do succumb in May if I have to face another winter of South American Apples.

I had a young man perfectly sum up my feelings of DST this morning at church. Here is his picture.
As an eyewitness to the events leading up to the moment of this collapse, I attest to the fact that he was barely able to make it this far. And I was sad that propriety kept me from laying down too.


To all of you who feel this way, take a day or two off, go down to the local pub and get your Irish on early. I do feel for all of you leprechaunic sympathizers out there. Your posts have been the  the right amount of whiney. It sounds like you have trouble deciding if you should drink the weekend before or the weekend after. It sounds like the conundrum of the ages; right up there with "tastes great - less filling", paper or plastic, and Bernie or Hillary. With such a weighty question and our propensity to make decisiveness a negative attribute since a decisive person can not be a considered person, you do what any sane, considered person would do. You go out and drink both weekends. Good luck with that.

As the lovely Miss Beverly and I drive home from visiting Chris and Grace in East Lansing, I bask in the glow of getting away for a weekend. It was nice to get away from some of these concerns for a while. It is that bit of distance and the promise of better things to come that allows me to pen this limerick.


They say the Irish drink beer
I fear DST every year.
It still will get cold,
Or so I am told
I'd be okay if March weren't so drear.

The time, the beer, and the cold.
March as a month makes me old.
The relief that I seek
Give the sun just a peek
A year without March would be gold.

So yes, it's a March filled with madness
I gained weight I can't fit in my dress
The weather will turn.
My skin, it will burn
On the beach, this summer I'll de-stress.

It will be okay.

Take care.

Roger.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

May I have this Dance: Part II

Dearest Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. The grass continues to show a little bit more green out there. Hints of photo synthesis showing on the brown landscape of winter. I also noticed that the willow twigs were starting to show a bit of yellow, another sure sign that spring is coiled tightly waiting to be released. However, the live oak is fiercely holding onto last year's leaves like Bruce Springsteen holding on to his glory days. So sad.

Speaking of the past, I had the opportunity yesterday to remember an old blog. While old, it continues to be one of my favorites. "May I have this dance" was posted back in May of 2011 and was a glimpse of a cyclist couple riding by Sharrittland and the lovely Miss Beverly and I out in the yard overhearing their conversation. The glimpse showed how couples are always dancing. Go back and read it. It is one of my favorite blogs and yours too if you believe the number of hits.

http://yousaidwhatroger.blogspot.com/2011/05/may-i-have-this-dance.html

As I was saying, I came across a slice of life yesterday that reminded me of the dance. I have been in search of a joiner for my wood shop for several months. I have been scouring Craigslist and eBay daily for the perfect and cheap joiner. To the uninitiated, boards rarely have parallel sides. They start out that way when they are first cut. However, those internal stresses that they suffered through while they were out standing in the woods minding their own business are borne out in their afterlife while they are drying in a kiln. If they leaned left, in life they will lean left as they dry. If they were right leaners in the woods then their grain will twist right as the moisture leaves the wood and the wood becomes stable. (I do hope that our afterlife isn't the same. Or there will be a lot of fighting over the remote in heaven and hell's TV room; CNN vs Fox News for eternity.)

After the wood drys, the moving is mostly over and it is stable. It is ready to be turned into beautiful furniture. It is impossible to make good square furniture with boards that twist to the left or the right. So the first thing that the woodworker does in make the board flat, square, and true. They do that with a joiner. It trims off the high spots as you slide it along a long flat surface with a spinning blade. You run the board along the long flat surface and after a few passes all of the high spots are gone and you have a true side to base some parallelograms on and soon you can build that wonderful bedside table to keep your IPhone on as it recharges every night. And you thought that you would never use geometry after learning it in 8th grade.

So you can see, I was searching high and low of a joiner. I found the perfect piece of equipment. I emailed the seller and nothing happened. A few days later, I emailed again and nothing happened. That was strange. So I emailed a third time and finally got an email answering my question but not acting like they wanted to sell this joiner at all. Something was wrong. The purpose of Craigslist is to sell things (and from time to time lure people into tragic circumstances.) But even then, people are keen to make contact and complete the transaction. I was intrigued, and I had joiner fever. So I pursued my quarry. Finally, contact was made. They called. Actually, the wife called and it immediately became clear that we had two different agendas. She was ready to sell. He not so much.

So a date was made and I was able to walk into a beautiful dance. Our dance was set at a retirement village on the NW side. Retirement villages are those loose accommodations for those of us who believe the lie that it is all too much to take care of. So we downsize. We get someone else to plow the snow, cut the grass, and change the lightbulbs. By eliminating all of these chores and opportunities for over exertion, we are escorted on to the full care facility a step at a time until, like the frog in the gently warming water, there is no escape. I believe that the grim reaper is the perpetrator of the lie that you can "retire in style in our community." He came up with the lie because he was tired of tromping all over the place to collect his charges. Much better to get them all in one place, and put a gated fence around it. Sort of like a big game hunting farm for the grim reaper.

The soon to be former owner of the joiner and his lovely wife had downsized a year ago. As so often happens something gets in the way of the good life. He developed an eye condition and a year later is nearly totally blind. Near total blindness and power tools do not work well together. So it is time to liquidate the shop holdings.

As I drove up the dance began. Before Matt got out to the garage, Joni opened the garage door and encouraged me make an offer on any of his tools. I am confident that if I had offered $5 for the lot, I could have filled the Subaru with some pretty nice wood working tools. Matt having danced with Joni for more than 50 years knew that something was afoot. He came out and shooed Joni back into the house and got me focused back on the joiner.

"Yeah, we moved here and I was hoping to do more wood working. But my sight started to fail and I can't do much now. In fact, I just had eye surgery last week and I am not supposed to lift any thing." He said as he was moving four pieces of wood before lifting the 25 lbs planer off of the bench.

Fifty years of knowing her man, the lovely Miss Joni came back out of the house and caught Matt red handed. "Matt you know that you are not supposed to pick that up. Put it down. He can carry it." I could too; no problem.

It wasn't about who should carry what or what should be sold or if dust would get into the surgical sight and damage the doctor's good work. No, it was a dance of sorrow. A dance that started fifty some years earlier; a dance that wasn't always about sorrow. It was a dance that took them across the country chasing good jobs and raising two children that are my age; a dance that has 6 grandchildren who were taken to Honduras last month by Joni to save the sea turtles.  It is a dance that retired in North Carolina for ten years. Before the daughter and son in law brought them closer to Zionsville. The arc is closing.

The current steps are a dance of sorrow and loss. Matt may not be able to look at the lovely Miss Joni if he isn't careful. Matt having been a strapping straight backed 6'2" specimen of manhood now stumbles in the garage over things he can't see very clearly any more.  While he can't see the worry on her face, he can hear the worry in her voice. While she never had to do anything for Matt, she knows that she will if this surgery doesn't work. She knows that will kill her proud, proud man.

I wrote in that earlier blog that there were stumbles and stepping on toes during the dance. But I wrote as if those were all past. I wrote as if the lovely Miss Beverly and I had it all figured out. It is a lie. Life causes us to stumble and step on each other's toes. It keeps us off balance and unsure of our next steps, leaving us wondering how to figure it all out. But as Matt and the lovely Miss Joni can testify, that only happens if you stay close enough to keep on dancing together.

Take care.

Roger.