Why can't sleeping dogs tell the truth?

Dear Blog Reader

I hope that this finds you doing well. It leaves my keyboard in a state of cold, shivering, wetness. Which one of you did not remain steady and took your flannel sheets off the bed before Memorial Day? Your grandmother warned you. “You will catch your death of pneumonia if you don't wear a coat or if you take your flannel sheets off before Memorial Day.” These were hard fought truths. Grandmother had come through the cold times. Long before the ice age gave way to global warming, she remembered. She knew the grief of lives cut short by losing focus and letting down your guard during the late spring.

I’m just joshing you. The current cold snap has nothing to do with your infidelity to the flannel sheet, or your desire to pull out the cotton. Who believes in the old wife’s tales any more? No the late spring cold snap that occurs near the end of May every year actually has everything to do with the wild black raspberry winter. The blast of cold air always coincides with the blooming of the wild black raspberry canes. It is winter’s last gasp and send off for those purple juicy nuggets of goodness.

It is hard to believe but in about six weeks the lovely Miss Beverly will be putting on her long sleeved chambray shirt, long pants, heavy socks and shoes; all saturated with 40% deet to keep the mosquitoes and dreaded chiggers away. Thus clothed and carrying a one gallon ice cream bucket suspended around her neck with a piece of orange twine, she will wade deep into the tangle of barbed canes on a steamy early July day for the goodness that is the wild black raspberry. Where will I be? I will be sitting in the air conditioned house, writing a blog about the bliss of warm raspberry pie and ice cream on the patio on the 4^th of July.

So don’t worry, your impatience did not cause this cold snap or the near freezing of this year’s apple crop. It was nature’s cycles.

I must admit I had been seduced by the warm weather, the promise of breezy, light, cool cotton. There were three nights in a row when I had nearly spontaneously combusted from the natural insulative properties of the flannel. Drenched in sweat, I tossed and turned. I threw the covers off. I fretted. It wasn’t Memorial Day yet. Black Raspberry winter had not come and gone yet. I could not forsake the flannel sheets. And yet, I was not sleeping well. Each day my energy was waning. Something had to be done. So when the tempting Miss Beverly suggested that we switch out the sheets, I jumped at the chance. We would face black raspberry winter when it came.

While spontaneous combustion was averted, insomnia remained. I hate insomnia. When those voices in my head become so insistent that no relief can be found, I am miserable. The interminable loop running over and over in my head makes me crazy. 3:00 a.m. is the citical time. If I wake up during those 60 minutes then I am usually toast. I have woke up with nothing on my mind, not a care in the world and saw a clock that said 3:17 and it is like I have been given a hypodermic needle to the heart of adrenaline. I am wide awake worrying the recesses of my brain trying to solve all of the unsolvable problems of the world.

Over the past three weeks, I have shifted the season of my discontent from flannel induced overheating to the pall of retirement planning. The lack of planning is a character flaw of all Sharritts. It is ingrained. It is in our name. Prehistoric financial planners came by the Sharritt cave and suggested that we save our money for a rainy day, and great, great, grand pappy grunted back, “no, I think that I will share it with others.” Thankfully, I married the lovely Miss Beverly Hoover. Hoover is an ancient name that means the gathering of dust and small pieces and keeping them together in a bag until it is full by creating a vacuum.

I give my name too much credit by this bit of self-deception. The character flaw is two fold. First, I hate planning for the future because it is the great unknown. We have no idea what is ahead and how it will unfold. The Sharritt response to uncertainty is to fold our arms across our chests and become defensive. The second reason and probably more disturbing is that I can’t see a day where I am not going out and working. The idea of living off of previous savings is anathema to me. It is visceral. If I am not producing, making more; my life is contracting, decaying. I am dying. I know that I won’t live forever on an intellectual level. But I don’t have to embrace it by planning for it.

Thankfully, I married the lovely Miss Beverly. Her Ying balances my Yang. She has always been the one who advanced the future planning agenda over my reluctance. She forced me to face my reluctance. She invited the financial planner. There were a couple of meetings gathering data; looking for retirement account statements that had to around here someplace, resetting passwords on long forgotten and unchecked accounts. The depth of my denial had no bottom.

The meetings were productive enough. Some planning had taken place over a long enough period of time that we should be able to get by on the finer dog foods during our golden years. Yet each night after the meetings, I suffered from the worst insomnia. The dissonance of living off of what was stored up is too much for my subconscious to bear. The voices would start. The ideas would cycle. We have enough money. We can retire in 15 years and start to use that money to live off of. The pile of money will start to shrink because we are not adding to it. The pile will run out. I will die. Those thoughts would cycle over and over, getting louder and louder. My eyes were wide open; my ears listening to the deep sleepy breaths of the lovely Miss Beverly.

It’s over. The plan is made, and I have tamped down my flaws well enough that I am sleeping just fine again. It is good to live an introspective life; to face our demons, to fight through our fears. Yet sometimes, Grandma was right. “Its best to just let sleeping dogs lie.”

Take care,

Roger

Get out there and make a name for yourself?

Dear Blog Reader;

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. I still bask in the glow of spending the weekend with my family and Chris’ family at Ball State watching Grace and Chris graduate. We were in Worthern Arena with nearly 1000 newly minted Walmart Greeters, McDonald’s Cashiers, and the newly unemployed. I’m lovin it.

I did find it ironic that a 16 year journey that started with phonics flashcards ended with a phonics disaster. As the graduates approached the podium they were to present the reader with an index card with their name printed phonetically to aid in the pronunciation of their names; great plan, poor execution. With two Kozaks in the building, the reader had two shots to get it right. As number 623 Chris approached, he handed a card that had his name spelled as KOH-ZAK. After running through the higher education interpretation machine, it came out Kojak. 

I was even more distressed about Chris’ education when he looked at me blankly as I teased him after the ceremony that I was going to get Tootsie Pops for his Christmas stocking going forward. He had no context of Telly Savalas as Kojak. I gave him my best “who loves you baby?”; totally blank. Why do we let the Kozaks use our Hulu account? I fear that his four years have been wasted studying to become a lawyer of the highest caliber. He’ll not get these years back. Someday when he is 160 years old and he is asked if he has regrets . . . he will lose focus and not answer the question. He'll a 160 years old for crying out loud.

Grace took a subtler approach. Thinking how hard can it be, her index card simply said KO-ZAK. We had been anticipating this moment; wondering if the announcer would pull it together. Grace was graduate number 779. It had been a long day for announcer person, what with all of the Smith’s, Adams’, and Mephistopheles’ (what were his parents thinking). So when Grace appeared, card in outstretched hand, friends and family in the stands hoping against hope, announcer woman lost all focus and blurted out Kos-mumblemumblemumble-st. What? Who? I know that it is petty. After 52 years, I have scrambled a few rungs up Maslow’s hierarchy. I know that Grace and Chris received a great education; were mentored by fantastic professors that cared and left their mark on two fantastic young people, but it would have been nice to hear Kozak clearly enunciated and loudly amplified for a couple of seconds.

Earlier in the week, Grace had posted a “throw back Thursday” photo on Facebook. It shows Grace, Bev, and I in a newly minted dorm room at the beginning. Ben must have been taking the picture. She placed the following caption with her post. “If you had told this girl she would go to Ghana for a year, get married, and get recruited by nuns in Rome, she would have called you a liar.” She didn’t mention jumping out of a fully functioning plane 3 weeks into her freshman year. While mentioning Ghana, she left out a few details about falling into an open sewer, or a half day ordeal getting across town to pick up a parental care package, and having the post office close 20 minutes before her arrival. No mention of the Martin Luther King Day outings with friends or games of “kick the car.” Don’t ask.

Oh okay, I’ll tell you because I despise this game and am dying to share my disdain for it. Kick the car is a game where members of my daughter’s cabal would stand next to the busy street and try to kick cars as they go past. This seemed insanely dangerous to one’s person and insensitive to the owner of a dent-able 2,500 piece of metal. What would have happened if one of the hooligan’s shoelaces had looped around the edge of the bumper and they were dragged down the street? Or (and this is more likely) one of the passersby had taken pride in ownership of their previously undented vehicle and taken offense to Mr. or Miss Smarty Pants intentionally inflicting damage on said vehicle. Things could have gone South in a hurry.

I can’t wait. Some day I will be sitting in the back of a minivan with a grandchild or two. They will be sitting there bored. Suddenly, they will become aware of the extensions protruding from their buttocks and kick the seat in front of them, and mom and dad will holler back at them, “Stop kicking the car.” I do look forward to that day.

After the ceremony, we took this picture. We have grown in numbers. Ben has graduated from picture taker to model. Thank you, Steve and Nita Kozak for fulfilling the role of photographer.

It has been quite a journey for all of us; not just to Ghana and back, but also finding out that Grace isn’t an elementary teacher after all. She is a leader and wants to use that leadership to facilitate human trafficking’s end. Chris isn’t one of the world’s great architects but has a passion for the law and a desire for justice. Ben found out that he isn’t management material but has a huge heart for elementary children in educational crisis. However, the lovely Miss Beverly is still lovely and she found that she has a knack for connecting with college aged adults and can act as a bridge between where they are and where they are going.

Me? Well there is less of me. 10,000 miles on a bike will do that to you. I still have an Ipad in my hand, and by starting this Blog in response to my daughter jumping out of an airplane 4 years ago, I found that I love this few minutes a week with you.

To all of you graduates out there, move your tassel from one side to the other; matriculate, and get out there and make a name for yourself.

Take care,

Roger