more normal than not

What is the law of physics that says that a 2″ tall plastic Batman figure that was easily avoided when the lights were on is going to be stepped on both coming and going to the bathroom when the living room is dark?

And what does it say that I didn’t pick it up the first time I stepped on it?

I’m thinking about the phrase “ran when parked” this morning.

That’s an optimistic way to sell a car.

It’s even more optimistic to buy a car that’s advertised like that.

I’m always checking out the cars in the want-ads.

I know at this point that a bargain is rarely a bargain. I have enough experience to know that something that’s cheap is something I’m going to pay for over and over as I break down and worry about how to fix it.

My psychic well-being is worth something.

But this whole thing about “ran when parked” is so enticing.

It says, “This was a good car at one point. This car ran like cars do run. It ran like the wind….started every time…took us exactly where we pointed it.”

“This car ran when we parked it years ago.”

“This car could run again.”

“This car ran when parked….”

And here comes the subtle and never completely expressed sentiment that draws me in every time, the sentiment that is never stated and probably never intended, but that swirls in the back of my mind every time I read “ran when parked”.

The hidden sentiment is this:

“This car ran when parked. I’m not smart enough to make it run again. That simple dream is beyond the capabilities of my rudimentary mechanical abilities. But a genius at fixing things could do it. A genius could do it.”

“A genius could resurrect this fine automobile.”

And I think, usually with a lot of undeserved confidence driven by greed and the excitement of getting a really cheap car , “Yeah…a genius. That’s what it would take. Those other guys don’t know what to do…but I do. I would. It would take a genius. It would take a real genius to get that car back to a driveable state.”

“I’m just the genius who could buy that broken thing and make it go again.”

“I have TENACITY, after all. I’d grab that problem and shake it in my mouth until my head fell off.”

“I’d worry that car to death.”

Of course, I don’t buy these cars. I might have before growing a family….but I can’t do that now. I can’t put Jenny through that.

Our cars need to run. They need to serve a purpose.

I don’t need more projects.

So, other than being an untested ego boost, other than being an untried conceit, other than my mechanical abilities being something that usually only invades and conquers when the wrenching stays up in my head…other than that consistent misconception and ever-present self-deception swirling up in my brain…I don’t mess with the “ran when parked” cars much.

To twist that sentiment a little…personalize it…I know that I don’t want to be one of the “ran when parked” people who barely inhabit the planet. For some of us, that’s as far as we go. Maybe that’s why so many people pass away after retirement? They “park”…and that’s all she wrote.

I’ve got to figure out a way to keep rolling smooth right up until the time that I can’t “keep it between the fence posts” anymore.

I can’t park this life.

And….I need to learn to buy things that are “right” right now.

 

I buy a lot of things in thrift stores.

Probably 80 percent of the “nonessential” things that I buy are purchased in thrift stores.

Thrift stores are where I got the bulk of my music collection.

That’s probably why my music collection is so diverse and strange sometimes.

So wonderfully diverse and strange.

One of my favorite things to do was to buy other people’s mixtapes.

There was something about the process of making a mixtape that forced the “maker” to consider what he or she was doing….dropping the needle into the groove slightly behind where the music started, then pushing record on the cassette recorder at just the right time after setting the recording levels correctly, then listening to the whole song until the fadeout at the end when you hit the stop button, picking up the record off the turntable, replacing it with another album or maybe changing a couple of settings and recording off of a cd….it was a pretty coördinated effort to fill up the standard 90 minute cassette.

It wasn’t just moving a mouse and clicking away.

(Although that’s pretty darn cool to be able to compile things that way…just not as physically interactive as making a mixtape.)

So, when I went into a thrift store and found a mixtape with a cool cover and an interesting list of songs that someone had compiled, I often bought it.

We didn’t have Pandora or Spotify or Sirius then.  Finding out about new music was a “word of mouth” experience….or serendipity and a good DJ….or maybe just buying someone else’s mixtape.

I first heard this BB King song on a mixtape that I bought a while back.

I remember that the tape had a good cover…children on a swingset…black and white photo…artistic…and the tape had this song and a lot of jazz standards, obscure folk songs, some blues.

It was a great tape.

Talk about messages in bottles.

Who compiled this tape?  Who sat in front of the stereo, looking at album covers front and back, wondering if the perfect song was in the next sleeve somewhere?

And how…and why…did it end up in a thrift store where I bought it and heard a nice BB King ballad for the first time?

All this digital stuff is pretty darn cool.  I’m listening to a free preview of Sirius radio right now as I write this….a channel called “Classic Vinyl”….Led Zeppelin….then Creedence.  How could I have done that before the internet?

It wouldn’t have happened.

I would have had to have found the right radio station….or a good thrift store with a bunch of “other people’s mixtapes”.

There’s more magic in the happenstance, though. It just isn’t the same to click on a new website by accident as it is to paw through a thrift store box and find a strange tape that someone else put together.

What’s good stays good….even if most of the music is somewhere up in the cloud now.

I guess that the music was always in the clouds, anyway.

It just landed on cassettes every once in a while.

I like those old analog landing zones.

I like a little hiss or a click and a pop now and then.

“Human style”, you know?

The guy at the tire store lost my business the other day.

I came in to ask him if he could rotate and balance the tires on the minivan. It was pulling to the right….wobbling a little.

Wobbling a lot.

I figured that if I asked an expert what was going on, he could rotate the tires and the problem might go away.

When I got to the part about purchasing the tires at Sams Club, and how I wondered if the balance hadn’t been done right after the guy patched a nail hole, and that the wobbling had started after the technician had fixed the leaking tire….well….our conversation seemed to be over.

“Sounds like something you need to have them fix…better take it back to where you got the tires.”

Now, unless there’s something that I’m missing, a rotation and balance is 20 dollars and they do it for you no matter where you bought the tires.

Usually.

Maybe they need a sign out front….”rotate and balance, twenty dollars…if you bought the tires from us.”

Anyway, this part of the story is longer than it needs to be.

I went home, dragged the heavy floor jack across the gravel driveway, jacked up the car and rotated the tires myself.

I couldn’t balance them at home…but I could rotate them, and when I finished the job and drove the car around, the problem was gone.

The front end didn’t wobble anymore….or pull to the right.

Maybe I should have been more forceful with the guy…came in and told him, “Rotate and balance these tires…now!!….please.”

Maybe I gave him too much information.

But he was kind of a jerk about it….and the town’s big enough that I have plenty of other options, so I’ll take the car in a different direction next time I need tires.

But I was thinking about this rotation thing a little this morning, and I came to a conclusion, if only a possible temporary conclusion, that maybe all this self-help stuff is missing the point sometimes.

A lot of what I read seems to be centered on “getting rid of problems”.

We want to fix things. We want to get better at things.

We want to correct. We are told to ERADICATE.

Now, in the case of the tires on the minivan, whatever was wrong with the tire that was causing the original problem is probably still wrong.

It’s out of balance….or has a ply that got a little wonky. The problem is still there.

It’s just that now the problem is in the back where it can’t affect the way the car drives.

Maybe the problem is corrected? Not really, maybe…the tire is still wonky…but it’s not noticeable because nothing’s shaky anymore.

I have things that I notice to the point of paralysis. I don’t know how to fix them, so I don’t act on the problem at all.

I can’t balance by myself.

But maybe I can move something better to the front of my life….and relegate the problem to the background where it’s not as noticeable?

“Out of sight, out of mind.”

I guess that the really powerful and constructive way to approach problems is to make a list, check things off as you complete the task, and move on to the next issue.

The way to do it right might be to become a home and lifestyle improvement juggernaut and just plow through all the life issues that bring you discomfort.

“SEEK AND REPAIR! SEEK AND REPAIR! SEEK AND REPAIR!”

But maybe moving the “tire/problem” to the back of my life, where the problem doesn’t affect things in the same way, buys me enough time to figure out how to really fix things later without screwing up the big picture right now?

Maybe there’s no more philosophical importance to the story than figuring out where it might be more pleasant to buy my tires?

I just thought it was interesting that moving things could make that much difference.

As far as I need to be concerned, the problem is fixed.

 

The problem, if there is one, with naming your new baby “Sparrow”, is that every time I make a reference to a little bird, people are just going to make the assumption that I’m talking about our littlest girl.

I’m not talking about the baby this time….although if your name is “Sparrow”, “little bird” wouldn’t be a bad nickname.

It certainly wouldn’t take a lot of imagination.

This is about a different little bird.  This is about a real little bird.

Lillie, our cat, caught a young bird on the porch the other morning.

She’s an old cat…but still pretty agile…and when the bird started bumping up against the lower part of the window, trying to get out, she jumped up and caught it in her mouth.

She’s a sweet cat…when I grabbed it from her, she didn’t even growl.

I brought the bird inside to show to everybody….and after a couple of seconds of sitting in my hands, it flew off when Nate started petting it.

“Flew off”?

How far can a bird “fly off” inside your house?

It flew around and behind for a while…landing on bookshelves and other high places, and eventually landed where I could catch it….and then I put it back outside, away from the cat.

Nate still wanted to pet it before I let it go, though.

Two little birds inside our house…but one was a lot harder to catch.

Our propane is down this morning.

I think the regulator must be frozen again…so no propane until the sun hits the tank and unfreezes whatever is locked up with ice.

I miss my coffee.

I’m heating water on the woodstove.

It’s a much slower process than putting some water in the kettle, setting it on the kitchen stove, and then turning a knob.

You have to be mindful while you’re building a fire to heat some water.  It takes a while.

Of course, while I was doing that I was thinking about how there’s not many things that we do these days that don’t allow a little “mind wandering”.

We don’t have many activities that really demand our full attention…like building a fire.

Of course, if I can think about how mindfulness isn’t a part of our daily lives while I’m doing the activity that I suppose demands my full attention, I guess that kind of shoots down my theory.

Not too “mindful” to veer off into parts unknown while I’m being forced to “simplify my life” by heating water for coffee the “old school” woodstove way.

But we really can do a lot of things at a time….and not do a lot of things well at the same time while we’re getting so much done.

That’s the path we’ve chosen…or that’s been chosen for us.  We hurry as much as environment and technology will let us. We speed up because we can.

I’ve got a to-do list about a mile long…and a couple of years old.

I better hurry up and do something…that list is getting bigger as I write.

I’m not a complete Luddite.  I’d be at the center of the interactive holographic entertainment extravaganza if I could…I’d be out in space fighting some weird alien if I could do it from the comfort of my living room.

This monkey does like his tools.

But sometimes, when I’m forced by circumstances beyond my control, like a propane tank regulator icing up, to slow down a little and let the fire in the stove do its job at its own pace, I wonder if my multitasking isn’t doing myself some sort of disservice.

What’s the hurry for, anyway?

Where am I going that can’t wait a minute?

Where would I fly off to if I could get out of the house?

 

 

 

We must be out of propane.

Dangit.

We just refilled the tank a couple of months ago….has it been that cold?

Is a line frozen or something? What is wrong with the propane?

Oh, well…that’s what a woodstove is for.

I wrote about a rooster that we have who I was sure was dead.

I was sure that he’d been eaten by a fat raccoon that I’d noticed was stalking him.

When I didn’t see him or hear him crowing, I was sure that he’d “bought the farm”.

(I wish we had a rooster who could “buy the farm”…I’d move in with him if that were possible.)

I write my blog early in the morning…and when I got home that evening, Jenny said, “That rooster is alive.”

I’d missed the resurrection. I was too busy driving the mail around to see it.

Apparently, Jenny was sitting with the little kids when she saw something flash by in her peripheral vision.

Then she saw something bigger flash by a couple of steps behind the first flash.

When she looked more closely, she realized that the first flash was the rooster…and the second flash was our neighbor’s young hunting dog following in extremely close pursuit.

It was so close that the rooster was in the dog’s mouth.

It was that close.

“In the mouth” is pretty closely pursued.

It was early in the morning, it was 10° outside with a pretty extreme windchill,  and Jenny was still in her nightgown, but she knew that she had to do something quick if that rooster was going to continue to live.

The rumors of his demise were already greatly exaggerated once that morning.

So she did the only thing she could think of to do.

She went out and grabbed the neighbors dog and brought him inside with the little kids.

The dog was very excited to see our small children.

Nate was not excited to have this strange big puppy jumping up on him.

Sparrow was keying off Nate.

Jenny was in her nightgown.

It was exciting.

When my older son, Isaac, went to check on the rooster, the rooster was bleeding pretty badly.

He was missing most of his elaborate tail feathers.

He was pretty alive, though.

Our neighbor came over from her house across the field (she knew what was possibly happening when Rhett, the dog, broke loose and ran across the road to do what bird dogs do) and said, “I AM SO SORRY!!! WE’LL PAY FOR HIM!! I AM SO SORRY!!!”

Jenny said, “Oh, no…we tried to give those roosters away (when we had three roosters…before the other two died) on Craigslist and no one wanted them. The only reason this one is still here is because he’s the last survivor so he stays around.”

Dangit.

That “prizewinning purebred rooster” could have been our ticket to the good life…or at least a hamburger if it was on sale.

Nahhhhh….I’m only keeeeeding.  I wouldn’t do that to Tammy…those guys are nice neighbors.

And, you know, I really like that hyper spaniel, too.  He’s pretty cool…pretty wild…pretty funny.

But Nate didn’t like him.

He pushed Nate farther into the “I want a little dog” territory when he jumped up and knocked him over.

I don’t want a little lap-dog.  I want a “man dog”. I want a big dog.

Darn that rooster…HE SPOILS EVERYTHING!!!!

And to top it off, I just heard him crow…and it’s not even light outside yet.

Stupid rooster….stay in the mouth next time