more normal than not

I turn 54 today…and they’re running commercials like this on my television.

Good grief.

Now, if this bald man can help me figure out how to avoid eating cat food in my retirement years, I’m on board with his plan…but what a drag to see those short ribbons stretch out a ways and then be reminded that they needed to stretch a lot farther.

GOOD GRIEF!!

That’s a drag.

That’s a stretch of my imagination to imagine a long ribbon.

Now, of course, thinking about the end of the ribbon is kind of like what I wrote about yesterday.

I’m “wrapping the sandwich” before I even have the bread out of the bag….I’m worried about the night to come when the sun is just cresting the hill and the rooster is crowing.

Actually, our stupid rooster crows a long time before the sun comes up.

He’s “bad to do that”.

I read a book a while ago that talked about how we probably need less money in retirement than we think we do.

I like that philosophy better…although figuring out a way to have a “butt load” (that looks kind of offensive written out…sorry) of money might be fun, too.

The book talked about community and vibrancy and having strong interests…and all the other things that really don’t cost a lot.

Desperately trying to avoid debt is the flip side of saving for retirement.

Maybe having no debt is the key?

Maybe this is weird to be thinking about this on my birthday?!

Do you know that when you turn 55…I’m 54 today…they start giving you a senior discount a lot of places?

What is this? Some kind of conspiracy to make us all feel old so that we’re more apt to just lay down and go away? Am I suddenly on the other side of the “youth conspiracy”?

I do feel like any chance of me doing anything “precocious” evaporated a long time ago.

That element of surprise is sailing over the beautiful horizon.

Now the only surprise is “I wonder what took him so long?”

Or maybe, “I really didn’t think he had it in him…”

Who knows…

A lady asked me if I was the “grandfather” or the “father” when I was carrying Sparrow around a fabric store…looking for Jenny…yesterday.

Of course, I proudly said, “THE FATHER!!! WHAT?!!! YOU LOOKIN’ AT ME?!!! YOU LOOKIN’ AT ME?!!!”

Actually, I only said…kindly said…”the father”.

That’s OK…it’s kind of a non-traditional situation to have these little guys running or laying around when I’m starting to look a little older. I can see why she’d ask that question.

I’d wonder, too, if I saw some old dude with a baby.

It is a trip getting older….not “old”, just a little older. It’s a trip to feel the gravitational pull of people’s expectations…that black hole of “how I’m supposed to act”….

I don’t want to be reminded of that…

Shut up, society!! In my head, I’m an immature youngster…so SHUT UP, ALREADY.

Another day older…but so much wiser.

So very much wiser…wise beyond my years.

Today, I celebrate MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

“for the love of money” o’jays

I had two of my lower molars pulled quite a while back .

Thankfully…and I suppose there’s always a twist that you can put on something like having a tooth extracted…some silver lining to look for…I had the teeth pulled at two separate times.

The first tooth split down the the base of the root when I bit down on something hard that was in a Taco Bell burrito.

There wasn’t anything they could do for that one…except maybe do an implant, but that was too long ago for an implant to be an option…and besides, I didn’t have any money….so they just pulled out the pieces of tooth and I went on with my life…one molar lighter.

The second one was “savable”…they could have “rooted” it out and done a crown…but again, I didn’t have any money…and the clinic that I was at was good at pulling teeth (at least they seemed to be for all the Mexican dudes who were coming out of the back with mouths loaded with gauze)…so I had them pull it.

That’s kind of a typically long-winded way of getting at the point that I was thinking about.

I am missing these two side by side molars on the bottom left side of my mouth.

I guess I could have just said that to begin with.

Who cares about the reason?

Anyway…I don’t really like to chew on that side because it’s just gum and teeth. It doesn’t hurt….just feels weird.

So yesterday, when I stopped to get gas at Ingles, I drove over to the “Liquidation Center” when I was finished with my fueling, and bought some candy.

I ate some on the way home…and rediscovered something that I already knew.

Man, our tongues have “taste zones”.

I was chewing these sticky organic gummie sharks that I’ve never seen anywhere else, and my jaw got tired of trying to chew them on the “toothed side”…so I started chewing them on the other side…and VOILA!! A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TASTE.

It was a little bit sweeter…more intense somehow….different from the side I usually taste on.

My mouth is not so big that I can really avoid a mouthful of food migrating from the side I’m used to chewing on to the seldom used side…the stuff is going to be moving around in there…I can’t be so completely selective that I only use one side of my mouth exclusively.

But when I was paying attention, the flavors were so different on the “other side of the fence”.

I knew about the different zones in the mouth…sour, sweet…what else? Oh….etc. ….but it was funny that a good gummie brought them back to mind.

We are pretty amazing. So may different facets and most of the time all the parts work in support of each other.

Why’d we get all these different “tongue zones”? What the heck? It might have been a world without variety…grey and consistent. If we had to eat, it could have been a matter of just shuffling over to the goo trough and going at it until we were full…our monochromatic tongues never really tasting the food we had to eat just to sustain ourselves.

I am amazed at how all this “life” is going down.

“Good and Bad”…it’s a lot more interesting than things might have been.

I have customers on the route who I love to visit with.

If they catch me at the mailbox, midstream in the routine of filling their receptacle with mail, I’ll stop and visit for a while if they’re in the mood.

It breaks the monotony for me…it can be good.

I have other customers who I visit with…but it’s sort of like getting caught up in something I can’t control…like visiting with someone you wish hadn’t sat down next to you at the Laundromat.

I have other folks on the route who I try not to visit with if I can help it.

They’re kooks. Not “fun kooks” either…they’re scary kooks. Ewwwwwwwwww…..scary kooks.

You know what I mean? Scary kooks.

Now, some of these “judgement calls” are based on something that I’ve learned from direct experience. I probably got caught up in a long conversation that was hard to get away from…a crazy conversation that just went on…and on….and on. Some of it is based on “hearsay”…and that’s probably wrong to jump to conclusions…but I can’t risk getting caught up in something weird.

I have a job to do. I can’t talk about weird stuff when I’m on the clock.

There’s this one older lady on the route who I’ve heard from “folks who apparently know” can be pretty mean.

I stopped at her box to put some mail in it…and I saw her coming out of the corner of my eye.

She was coming!!! Slowly…but she was coming for me and her mouth was open like she was getting ready to talk…and…

And…I finished quickly and pulled away…and waved at her as I passed by on my way to the next box.

She waved back…with an arm like a Saranwrapped parsnip…and I noticed that there were a bunch of really long white hairs on her arms…blowing in the wind as she waved at me.

Long white hairs…like a balding yeti…

I did a double take in the rear-view mirror..not sure if what I was seeing was really real…wondering if someone had dosed one of the letters I was handling and I was just hallucinating…but it was real….too real.

She had long white hairs growing out of her old monkey arms!

I thought, right in that moment, “I need to visit with that lady next time I make this loop and I see her out! I’ve got to get a closer look at those monkey arms!! That was weird….”

What does the Bible say about “no greater love…”? About laying your life down? I don’t think it only means taking a bullet or pushing someone from in front of a train….

Actually, I visit with everyone…EVERYONE…on the route.

That whole “get away from the monkey lady” thing was just a knee-jerk reaction…I was creeped out momentarily…I had to go…now.

I’ll visit with her next time.

Next time I’ll stop and say “hello”.

I just hope that it’s not a breezy day…and that some of that monkey arm hair doesn’t graze my cheek or something.

That would be a major freak-out.

Besides, it could have been cobwebs that I was seeing blowing in the wind.

She’s pretty old, after all.

(A short PS….awww, man…I just noticed that it’s April Fools Day…shoot. Rest assured, though…this really happened to me…I SAW THE MONKEY HAIRS FOR REAL. No fooling.)

When you brake hard over 500 times a day, you appreciate that your Jeep can stop.

You appreciate brakes.

You don’t pay attention to them…you have other things on your mind…you have a job to do, after all.

When things are working right, why should you give it a second thought?

My brakes stopped working yesterday…or, I should say, they stopped working right.

When I heard the sound of metal carnage, I got out to check them. I should check my brakes with more frequency than I do…but I changed the pads about 6 months ago, and the last time I looked, they were alright…so why worry? Turn up the reggae…why worry?

When I checked them, it was metal on metal… a padless pad close to the rotor and scraping like a house on fire.

Metal on metal scraping is a bad brake sound.

But half-way through the route, what was I going to do?

I could still grind to a halt…why worry?

Sometimes I’m like a cosmonaut monkey on a one monkey flight, adrift in a sudden meteor storm. Who am I going to call? It’s just me…sometimes.

(A disclaimer: Jenny has helped me on more than one occasion with vehicle issues on the route…been a real lifesaver…but she was in Asheville with the kids yesterday, so I was just another satellite…)

So I rode it out…gritted my teeth with every slow stop and corresponding metal on metal scrape.

I’d get out every once in a while to check the progress of the erosion of the rotor…and to my surprise, it really wasn’t all that bad….some minor grooving, but nothing that was all that bad.

“Man, these rotors are TOUGH!” I thought. “I’m really dodging a bullet on this one! I’M GONNA MAKE IT!!!”

On the way home, after I’d stopped at the parts store and purchased a set of brake pads, when I’d finished the 40 miles of driving with brake issues, I counted my lucky stars (that’s a funny saying…”counted my lucky stars”…I wonder where that one came from?) and prepared myself for the easy repair job ahead of me.

When I got the car jacked up, pulled the wheel and took the caliper off, I realized why the damage seemed so minimal.

The caliper was frozen in the closed position (open? the piston was all the way out…pushing the pad against the rotor all the time) …and the inner pad was the one that was doing all the rubbin’. A dull metal backing on a part that’s never supposed to touch metal gets really shiny when it’s been scraping off and on for forty miles…and really gouges out a rotor.

I mean…really gouges out a rotor.

So my simple repair job turned into a “replace a rotor and both calipers” kind of job…or just one caliper if I can get away with just one. I think you’re supposed to replace both, though.

So it’s a bunch of brake bleeding and other stuff I didn’t plan on.

That’s OK…I know how to do it…and I don’t think that it’s supposed to rain today.

Driveway mechanic-ing is better when it’s not raining on me.

So the job is a bigger one than I hoped it would be.

Thinking about this situation, it was kind of funny that I could fool myself into thinking that a miracle was occurring…and that the brakes weren’t really eating that rotor alive, in spite of the sound everything was making. Things might be OK because I couldn’t see the damage!

It was only when I dug into it a little and realized that it was the thing that I couldn’t see that was being damaged so deeply…that hidden stuff was messed up…that turning my head away from the problem didn’t make it go away, that grinning and bearing it wasn’t going to work this time…it was only then that I could even begin to fix all the issues that bare metal on bare metal had caused.

But you know…sometimes the surface of things is hard enough to deal with. Maybe next time there’s a problem, I really should just turn up the reggae and power on?

Who wants to dig deeply into anything? Who knows what we’d find if we saw the damage on the parts we can’t see?

What I can’t see won’t hurt me, right?

Anyway, I can always fix things later… if I can stop in time.

Sometimes, you find yourself staring up at the sky….in love with the world and you don’t know why.

It’s all so big…and you’re so small…but somehow you’re a part of it all…big by association.

The breeze washes over you and the grill is going and everything just feels right somehow.

Now, of course, it could be that you’re just finishing the last swallow of a really good beer…your one beer of the night…to be savored and enjoyed….and the feelings of mellowness and inclusiveness that you’re experiencing are just a by-product of a very slight buzz.

That could be what’s putting a shine on your existence.

It could be that it’s just the beer talking.

But I doubt it.

I got up early this morning…an hour earlier than I usually do. I think that I must have a sinus infection or something…my eyes feel like they’d like to pop out of my head.

I need to smear some more Vaporub up in my nostrils or something.

IT KILLS!!! aghhhhhh….MY HEAD!!!

Kidding mostly…it’s not that bad.

I guess that the trick is to figure out a way to stay in love with the world while you’re in moderate discomfort?

It’s always the same breeze blowing around me…the same stars…the birds…the wind in the trees…new grass coming up at the arrival of Spring…it’s the same whether I’m hurting a little or not.

I just need to remember that.

In my family, growing up, my mother was a good example of someone who sought the “good” in life. She sought the good no matter how much discomfort she was in.

I don’t think that we tend to want to focus on someone else’s pain or discomfort…it’s hard to remember that…it’s a hard memory to sustain.

There’s no reason to do that. It’s not good to pick the wrong element to focus on…you can waste a lot of time doing that.

My mom was in a lot of both pain and discomfort the last decade and a half of her life.

She hurt…but she loved life.

It’s funny that the “loving life” part of her years is the part that I remember over all the pain she was in.

Pain…not discomfort like a pop-eyed sinus infection.

She was in pain…but there was something else going on…..

There was something else….

I think that she sought God…and I think that she found Him.

That’s pretty straightforward…no need to beat around the bush on that one…I think she knocked often, laying there in bed with her Bible on her lap, and the door opened for her.

She took the time to notice…she had the time to notice.

The door opens…and the breeze blows and washes over us.

There is something real blowing through our lives …(Gads….it’s an ATMOSPHERIC CONDITION, YOU WEIRDO!!! THE HEAT HITS THE COLD, THE TIDE, THE SWELLS…BREEZE IS GOING TO BLOW…AND BECAUSE IT HITS YOUR CHEEK JUST RIGHT AFTER A SINGLE BEER IS NO REASON TO WANT TO VALIDATE THE EXISTENCE OF GOD…LIGHTEN UP, WEIRDO!)…what was I saying? Oh….something real blowing through our lives that’s there for us to notice…and it’s there whether we ever pay attention and notice it or not.

All of our “theology”…all of our thinking and scratching at the door…all our efforts to reach God fall short and it’s frustrating and maddening sometimes…but then that breeze hits us “just right” and we remember something that was there all the time.

I’m rambling…it’s too early and I haven’t had my coffee yet and I’m rambling…but it’s so windy out this morning and the wind chimes reminded me of something….reminded me of something….