more normal than not

I throw the porch rooster off his perch when he starts crowing in the morning.

It’s not really his fault that he crows early…our neighbor has a big security light that looks like the sun turned down a few notches.  It’s confusing for a rooster to sleep in the artificial daylight.

He wakes up early, I wake up earlier, and when I hear him start to crow, I throw him off the porch before he can wake everyone else up.

It’s one of the many aspects of my comforting routine that have become both…comforting and routine.

This morning, when I picked him up to aim him toward the grass below and set him free to do his awkward rooster flight to freedom, the rooster veered.

He almost flew into the minivan.

What the heck?!  I set him up to have the same kind of experience he has every morning…a flapping, squawking combination of falling and flying down to the ground below.  It should have been the same as every morning we spend together.

But he veered and for a moment things got more exciting for the rooster than either of us expected.

“What were you thinking?! YOU COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED!!!!”

If I were the rooster’s father, I might say something like that to him when I made him hand me the car keys.

Roosters do what they do.  This particular rooster is like a dog…follows us around and gets in the way. I can’t really teach him how to behave.  I am not a “rooster whisperer”.  I am not Dr. Doolittle.

He’s beautiful in the way a rooster can be beautiful, though…kind of prehistoric, really, if you get a chance to ponder just what’s going on with those rooster legs and those lizard like eyes.

Take a good look next time you get a chance to spend time with a rooster.  They’re kind of weird-looking.

It’s strange to get used to such a big bird hanging around.

I don’t really know what made him veer this morning.  Maybe it was some new atmospheric anomaly, something in the wind…barometric pressures that only he could feel.

Maybe he just hadn’t really had a chance to wake up yet?  Maybe he was having a weird rooster dream that confused him…got him off course.

Who knows what a rooster is up to.

But who can blame him for veering a little when the routine can be so jarring and strange.

It’s an odd way to wake up in the morning.  To have something quite a bit bigger than you pick you up and throw you off something…whether you could fly or not…would be an odd way to start the day.

They’re getting ready…and when I say “they’re”, I mean the USPS…to do what they call a “duo” to our office.

A “duo” is when they combine offices in order to save money.

They move the drivers from one office to another office…and then “let” the drivers deliver out of that new office.

We still deliver to the same boxes, but we start at an office that’s far away from our route.

The new office is in another town…down a twisty mountain road.  It’s a fairly long drive to get there.

This saves the post office money.

Somehow.

I guess that the big move is going to happen sometime next week.  Some folks are coming to talk with us this morning about what’s going down in a couple of days.

I don’t know what was going on with that rooster this morning, but I feel like veering, too, after all the changes in the air.

There’s a great bakery across the road from our “new” Post Office, though.

Maybe veering off course isn’t always a bad thing.

Dreams are pretty strange.

I think I’ve covered that territory in an earlier blog post .

They’re weird…they don’t make any sense.

I kind of like dreams, though.  It’s nice to have something that doesn’t make sense that’s easy to wake up from.

It’s nice to be able to leave something strange behind in the morning.

Last night or very early this morning, I dreamed I found another cheap apartment.

I had some pretty strange living conditions before I got married and we had our children.

When you’re actively looking for the “cheapest”, sometimes you get exactly what you pay for.

In this dream, I’d found a place that rented for, if I remember correctly, about 65 dollars a month.

We have a dirt floor crawl space under our porch and I think the apartment in my dream was kind of like that…except it had a higher ceiling and a door that was easier to lock.

It had a curtain that covered the dirt side wall, and it looked like it had been freshly painted sometime in the past.

One small room…I don’t remember a bathroom….and now that I think about it, I don’t remember a kitchen, either.

It did have a light bulb…so I guess I could see at night…but I don’t remember much about it that was very nice.

I don’t remember a window.

But, man, it was cheap.

It was a place to hang my knapsack…stack some clothes…it even had a corner where I could put my library books. It was big enough for me and the tiny bed that was included in the monthly rent.

In my dream, I was kind of excited.

I’m not even sure what country it was in.

The dream was kind of a combination of “House Hunters International” and the worst expression of my tendency to be a cheapskate.  It really could have been anywhere.

It could have been just about any family’s crawl space.

No…that’s too creepy.  It could have been a cheap one-room apartment just about anywhere. Forget the crawl space angle.

I haven’t lived like that for a while now.  I’m glad.

When you have a family, you want things to be a couple of steps up from a third-world existence if you can swing it.

You want it to be nicer than “not so nice”.

I do love seeing the hopeful aspects of weird situations.  I love trying to figure out how to make something that’s maybe a little “non-traditional” nicer.

Robert Schuller used to call that aspect of our personalities being a “possibility thinker”. I always appreciated that.

“Possibility Thinker”.

When we were first married, we bought a house that was gutted,  and spent the first couple of years getting it back up to speed.

I remember that first winter, bare tin roof and rafters, no insulation yet. That was kind of hard.

It was like camping in a hard-walled tent.

You don’t want to be camping like that all winter with a newborn in the family.

That was our reality that first year.

It wasn’t a dream that we could wake up from.

But it was a good dream to imagine the possibilities of a wreck of an old country house.

It was a good waking dream to think that things could be better in a place that seemed close to “too far gone”.

I’ve grown out of “cheap apartments” and the dreams of inexpensive places to live.

That’s a part of my life that I’m glad is behind me.

I wouldn’t trade my family for all the cheap apartments in the world.

I like being awake.

The rooster on the porch didn’t get the memo that the government was rolling the time back an hour.

He was right on time this morning.

Of course, that means that if I can sleep until what used to be six in the morning so that I can get up at my usual 5:00 AM, the rooster is going to get up at our new 4:00 AM so that he can maintain some consistency, too.

This time change is always kind of weird…no matter how many years I’ve been doing it.

So I woke up at the right time, according to my clock.

I was correct this morning.

Correct is all in my head, of course.  I have a bunch of bright numbers on a piece of plastic that I plug into the wall to back me up…but really, correct is only a matter of my own perspective.

This time change may be nothing more than the biggest test of obedience that’s ever been concocted.

What’s our option, though?  We don’t want to be the one guy who’s constantly late…or early.

It would be bad to mess up with time. It would be a failure not to be able to read all the signs.

We don’t want to be an oddball.

That rooster’s an oddball but he’s just doing his job well.

I think I heard the other rooster….the one who lives in the garden…crowing back in answer to the porch rooster….so the porch rooster is not alone in his refusal to buy into the mass delusion.

In their minds, they’re right on time.

This daylight savings time stuff hasn’t been around forever.

Apparently, the concept was proposed in 1895…and then actually adopted by Germany and Hungary in 1916.

And not everyone uses it…here’s a map…

I guess that the blue countries use it every year, the orange countries don’t use it at all anymore, and the red colored countries never used it.

It looks like we have more to worry about than what the international dateline is when we travel.

Thinking about that rooster on the porch reminds me that we “go with what we know”.

He doesn’t know jack about mandates or rules.

There’s a fox and some birds of prey, maybe a loose dog who want to kill and eat him out somewhere in the night.

Why should he worry about some rule set up to help the workers of the world milk a little more daylight out of the working day?

He has bigger worries on his mind.

I think I’ve heard that a chicken’s brain is really small.  He probably doesn’t have room for more than a couple of dogs and a silent owl in there. Why complicate things with a rule that requires a clock he doesn’t even know how to read?

A chicken doesn’t need those kinds of additional stress.

But, then again, maybe ignorance is bliss.  Maybe until the moment plays out, a rooster doesn’t know he’s being eaten.

I’m not rooster expert. I really don’t know what they think.

The South tried to secede from the Union a while back.

I wonder what would happen if someone started a movement to secede from Daylight Savings Time?

Except for showing up late for all the meetings with the opposing side, the idea might stand a chance.

They could call themselves the “Real Timers”.

I may get going on that idea in about…oh…let’s say, about an hour.

I can’t wait.

 

We took our 4-year-old trick or treating the other night.

We took him trick or treating on Halloween night.  His success rate went up astronomically.

Actually, we took him twice.

The first time, Jenny took him into town to walk around Main St. with all the other costumed sugar addicts, but he fell asleep in the car and because he hadn’t been feeling well earlier, she decided it might not be a good time to wake him up…so she came on back home without doing any candy harvesting.

The second time, I went with them after I got off work.

We went to one of the little “country churches” around here…for their “trunk or treat”.

What nice folks…it was a good experience.

Nate woke up in the parking lot of the church, so he was still pretty groggy as he made the acquisition loop.

He didn’t respond much to the comments about his costume except to say a quiet “thankyou” when they gave him some more candy.

Nate was the human embodiment of the Transformers character “Bumblebee” this year.

He was proud of his costume…polyfill muscles and simulated strength…it was macho but not menacing.

He was the best Transformer of the bunch…the character in all the cartoons and movies that people find themselves loving without reserve.

He was in the pocket…he was in the groove…he was Bumblebee.

No matter how bad he was feeling…even if he was starting to come down with the flu…even if he was groggy after waking up in a strange parking lot…he was on top of the world.

We went by one “candy station/trunk”, and the lady dressed as a zombie gave him some candy…and then she said, “OH, LOOK!!! YOU ARE THE CUTEST YELLOW POWER RANGER!!! ISN’T IT THE CUTEST YELLOW POWER RANGER?!!!  SO CUTE!!

Nate got even more quiet for the rest of the walk around.

It was his own version of a quiet walk of shame.

When we got back to the car, it looked like he was tearing up a little, and then he frantically tore off his prized Bumblebee uniform.

“The Yellow Power Ranger is a girl character”, Jenny whispered to me.

I don’t think Nate is sexist or anything, but it didn’t have the same cool factor to be a little dude dressed in a “girl’s costume” that being the appealing and powerful Bumblebee had held for him.

There really is a fine line between a genuinely helpful suggestion or observation and a misspoken comment that we can mull over the rest of our lives.

That lady didn’t know who Bumblebee was, probably, but it blew Nate out of the water that she didn’t have a handle on the names of all the Transformers.

When someone says something that seems to define us…like “Aren’t you a cute Yellow Power Ranger” or “You could be a hairdresser”, they usually always mean well.

It’s helpful to figure our someone else’s deal.  It’s good to guide and shepherd. It’s a comfort to be able to pigeonhole someone else efficiently.

The quicker we can do that, the sooner we can get back to the real business at hand…thinking about ourselves.

“I hear that the sanitation department might be hiring” isn’t a bad observation, but when it seems to be a commentary on abilities or potential…and you have dreams of doing something really grand…it can seem like a cut.

(No one ever suggested that I should be a garbageman…it’s just an example.  There’s nothing wrong with being a garbageman, either…any steady work is good. )

I guess that what I’m thinking is that the Yellow Power Ranger is pretty cool, in her own way. Her gender doesn’t have anything to do with being…or not being… cool. She’s cool because she’s a Power Ranger.

It’s just not cool to be dressed as Bumblebee and be mistaken for a “girl hero”.

Especially when you have your mask off.

I overfilled my coffee cup the other morning.

On the way back up the steep stairs that lead from the kitchen to the living room, I was watching the coffee move gently in the cup, almost touching the rim of the cup…but never spilling over.

This particular morning I didn’t spill a drop.

I didn’t spill any coffee.

What a feat of balance.

It was in that moment that I realized something about myself while I balanced that overfull cup perfectly.

I’M PRETTY FREAKING AMAZING!!!

I’M A HUMAN GYROSCOPE!!!

Now, I know some folks might be thinking something like, “wellllll….that is so prideful.  When did he get so full of pride?”

And they would be dead on, one hundred percent CORRECT!!

Darn straight, I’m full of PRIDE!!!

That’s some pretty amazing stuff I can do…balancing and all.  That’s pretty darn cool, if you ask me.

Now, if you get down to it, I suppose that I really can’t take credit for most of my accomplishment.  It’s the way I’m put together…something about the inner ear and synapses and sheer muscular coordination.

It’s not all me…it’s not an effort, it’s just another gift I’ve been given.

So I guess that it is PRIDEFUL to notice just how GREAT I AM.

Something about noticing that greatness that might help put it into perspective a little is that knowing I’m GREAT doesn’t mean that I think I’m BETTER.

Maybe needing to be BETTER than other people comes from a place of doubting my worth?  Maybe it comes from a place of doubting the worth of the people around me?

Maybe that’s where the real COMPETITION comes in?

You really have to work to get a leg up over all the flawed people around you.

In a world of flawed, fallen angels, you really have to push to shine more than them.

So the prideful part is well deserved and overdue.  Why discount the miracle that God has plopped me down into…the miracle with all its trials and victories….all its potential…why discount that miracle with false modesty and a self-prescribed negative self-image?

You really don’t earn any brownie points for always looking at the ground.

It doesn’t help you carry your coffee to only look at the ground.

I’m a HUMAN GYROSCOPE!!! ONE OF MANY!!!  I DESERVE TO BE PRETTY PROUD OF THAT!!!

And I better not forget that all the other people are pretty amazing, too.

We all have accomplishments that deserve to be celebrated.

We have gifts that deserve to be appreciated and celebrated without reserve.

YOU GO, HUMAN GYROSCOPE!!! YOU’RE ANOTHER ONE OF THE AMAZING OUT THERE IN THE WORLD!!!

YOU GO, BOYEEEEEEE!!!