wheeeee….I’m alive

Posted on by June 10, 2013

fullershock7

It is raining this morning.

It is raining heavily.

Apocalyptic rain, end of days style…pounding every dry inch of this part of the world into a soggy submission.  This rain is making its mark.

I woke up this morning to the sound of this heavy rain, and my first thought was “how’m I gonna keep all that mail dry?!”

Funny how that’s part of the first round of thoughts I have for the day.  I guess my job has made its mark on me.

One of the next thoughts I had…and the one I thought I’d base this blog on…was that I sure am glad that I can feel the discomfort of delivering in inclement weather.

( From what I understand, the PO didn’t start the old saying about “rain…or sleet..or snow” and the constancy and dedication of the mailmen….mail people ….out on the routes doing the “dirty work”.  Someone else outside the situation celebrated our dedication and hard work.  It sure sounds good, though…and the post office can use some positive publicity anytime it can get it. )

My route is what is called an “H” classification now.  That means that at the last count, I didn’t have enough mail to qualify me for a “J” route or….even nicer…a “K” route.

“Uhhhhhhhh….so what does that mean?” you’re thinking.

Well, what that means is that my job is a 6 day a week commitment.  I don’t get a day off with an “H” route.

The reason I mention this is because knowing what my schedule is, the chances of running the mail in the rain are about as good as it gets.

If it rains during the week, I’ll be there.

So….rain (or snow…or sleet) can be kind of a wild card depending on how heavy it is.  It changes the nature of the days work.

It can make life interesting.

My friend Garrett introduced me to a book called On the Loose while I was working at a camp down the road from where we now live.

There is a quote in the book that I always think about during inclement weather…whether it be on a hike or at work.

The quote is:

Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.    Thoreau

“Take shelter under the cloud”

My “discomfort”…and it’s such a minor discomfort in the big scheme of things…is that I’m going to get a little wet today.

It is going to be awkward to keep the mail dry.

It will be awkward to work a heavy volume Monday in the rain.

But I know that every thing that is hard in my life is just another opportunity to enjoy the days that are filled with sunshine.

The contrast is what gives the good days their power to be appreciated.

It’s no great revelation to remember that…but sometimes I have to think for a second to recall that some temporary irritation is just that…an only temporary irritation.

I’ve said it before…if I was a farmer I’d be loving this rain.

But I’m a mailman with an “H” route…so I tolerate it and appreciate what it can teach me about the deeper lessons and meanings of life.

Riggghhhhhttttt.  I’m gonna get soaked.

the gentle art of appreciation

Posted on by June 9, 2013

My friend Dave posted this on his Facebook page yesterday.

I’d never had a chance to see it before….what a great performance by Heart of the classic Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven”.

Watching Heart perform the song, the thing that really struck me the most was the three remaining band members’ response to the performance.

They are really moved.

After all the fame, the wild living and road life, the attention and positive feedback…after everything that they’ve accomplished in their musical career…they are still moved by a performance like this.

I sat watching their faces during the performance, and I couldn’t help but think of Rutger Hauer’s character in the movie “Blade Runner”….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_saUN4j7Gw

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe….”

These remaining members of Led Zeppelin are getting older…and they’ve seen things, too.

They’ve lived and experienced pretty much everything…good and bad..that the rock world offers.  They’ve lived for years with their fans’ obsessive appreciation.  They’ve had an opportunity to see just about everything in the world that could leave them jaded and unimpressible.

All the things they’ve done and seen and they’re still moved by an amazing performance.

That was pretty great….that to me was almost the real highlight of the moment.

There really is a gentle power in genuine appreciation.

No matter what our station in life, no matter what our accomplishments…we all love to be genuinely appreciated.

Not flattered, not pandered to…genuinely appreciated.

We love it.

And it’s not just a one way appreciation.

When we appreciate someone else’s acomplishments, we feed off the responses we get to our efforts.  We appreciate it when other people get pleasure from our appreciation of them.

So it’s a win win situation.

I really did appreciate getting a chance to watch these men’s response to this performance.

I appreciated seeing their joy in being appreciated so artfully.

 

 

 

graduation morning

Posted on by June 8, 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQqKBqj5xhY

I’m, in typical fashion for an early bird, the only one up the morning after graduation night.

I watched our first-born child graduate last night.

It was a night of violent weather and the need for flexibility.  Kind of like a progressive supper where you eat a different dish of a multicourse meal at a number of different houses, we started on the football field and ended up in the gym to finish the ceremony…a mad dash in the rain towards the “finish line”…maybe more fitting than we appreciated at the time.

It was a progressive celebration.

I love this Mr. Rogers appearance. He encourages gratitude.  I love that.

There was a lot of love on that field…and in that gym.

These young people worked hard to arrive at this point of moving on to something new.

These children are a product of the love we feel for them…as we are the product of the love of family and friends who care for us.

The full measure of the gratitude that we should feel towards those who love us doesn’t sink in immediately.

We usually feel it when we least expect it.

I guess the important thing is that we all feel it at some point.

Our children teach us as much sometimes as we teach them.

I am grateful for my daughter.

Happy Graduation, Zoe.

 

graduation night

Posted on by June 7, 2013

graduation caps

Our daughter graduates from high school tonight.

That’s a pretty huge milestone for a young kid.

It’s a big deal and worthy of great celebration.

I remember my own graduation.

We had the ceremony at the Cobb Civic Center from what I can recall.

When the ceremony was over, I remember going outside with my parents and our friend, May, who’d flown out from California for my big night.

It was hot…like it gets in Georgia in late Spring…muggy and hot.  I was standing in the parking lot with my parents…standing by our old Ford Fairlane.

Every one of my friends were tearing out of the parking lot in their old trucks….going to parties at the lake,etc…. parties, parties, parties….wild times on graduation night.

They were finished with something big…it was time to move on to the next chapter.  But first, they needed to party hard.

I was standing by our old station wagon with my parents and sister…and our family friend, May.

My parents said, “You can come home with us and have cake with May”.

I listened to the tires screeching…and the excited yelling of all my friends going off to have another adventure….going off to have the last adventure they’d have as “high school students”…..and my parents were inviting me to go back home and have cake with May….and I think that I panicked a little.

This was a big night for me.  I needed to be out in the world with the other celebrators.

I got into the Fairlane and rode home.  I had cake with May.

But I was chomping at the bit to get back out and find my friends…and after we’d had our cake, I explained that I needed to get back out there and celebrate….and I left.

From what I remember, I did end up finding a few of my fellow graduates and we went out and roamed around together…went to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, got a late bite to eat.

It wasn’t really a rocking party.  It wasn’t a blow out.  It was more of a trickle out, if there is such a thing.  I guess it was kind of a slow leak kind of celebration.

All these years later, I can’t help but think of May coming all the way from California for my big night.

May wasn’t a “blood relative”, whatever that may mean, but she was as close to our family as any relative related by birth.  She’d been a close and loved family friend for what seemed like forever.

I wish that I could have calmed down long enough to realize that having cake with May would be a bigger deal than partying with my friends.

That’s probably just something that you figure out when you’re older.

May’s long gone…and I never see most of the folks I knew in High School.

My parents are both gone now, also.

Tonight my daughter graduates from High School.  She drives an old truck, but she isn’t really in the “tear out of the parking lot” mode.  I don’t think she’ll have the same situation going that I had so many years ago.  I hope that she has a good celebration with us…and with her friends.

“You can come home with us and have cake with May”.

I’d like that.

 

image from here

 

 

in the world, not in the world

Posted on by June 6, 2013

Quiet_Getaway,_Lake_Tahoe,_Nevada

There’s a phrase in the Bible that describes our situation here on Earth.

It says that we’re to consider ourselves “In the world…but not of the world”.

I wrestled with that thought for years…wondering how do I transcend daily life, how do I draw so close to God that, even though I’m stuck on this earthly plane, I’m close enough to Him that I’m not really of the world?

Maybe I thought it was like getting a leg a little farther over the fence or something…impossible not to straddle a little, but my efforts would be enough to “get over“.

I pondered this thought hard.  I wondered why something so difficult would be required or requested.

Later, I came to the conclusion that what it probably means is that we’re here right now ….but that ultimately this world isn’t our home.

“Here” wasn’t something to transcend.  “Here” was a gift to be used like it mattered.  It wasn’t something to be feared or regretted.  We are “in the world”…we are here right now…but in the end, we’re designed for better things. We are not, in the end, of this world.

No one ever told me that when I was wrestling with my misunderstanding of the phrase “in the world…but not of the world”.

In keeping with that thought, driving around or running or doing any of the things I do outside, I notice people outside listening to what used to be Walkmen…but now, unless they’re real throwbacks or unable to afford something new, are probably MP3 players.

It’s like they understood the phrase to be “in the world, not in the world“.

Not even in the world.  It’s like they’ve got something to transcend every day… and they don’t even know it.

“YO, Man…gotta have my jams!!!”

It seems like getting out into the natural world is our shot to hear the wind, hear the little new frogs we call peepers around here, see the grass move in the breeze, hear the crunch of our footfalls on the gravel or pavement or dirt trail.

It is our chance to be in the world.

To be fully immersed in the world.  To be covered up with “world”…right here, right now….a good animal able to experience everything the world has to show us.

But instead, we stick something in our ears that lets us “do something practical” with our time outside.

“Let’s not waste a moment….while I’m exercising outside I can listen to Britney Spears and really get something out of the experience.”

I’ve done it…listened to music while I exercised.  I’ve been a gym member…paid my dues to come someplace inside to lift weights while I listened to really loud music.

I’ve done that.

I’ve even run with what at the time was a Walkman.

That was kind of goofy.

I’ve started wondering if that is the wrong way to approach things, though.

I think that when we’re outside, we need to be outside.  Not somewhere inside our heads, not somewhere else….listening to music is great, but Nature doesn’t need another soundtrack.

The soundtrack it provides should be enough.

And that, my friends, is the beginning of the true definition of “opinionated curmudgeon”.

Enough said.

fishing

Posted on by June 6, 2013

Sunset_fishing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I woke up this morning at 4:30 instead of my usual 5:00.

I’m not sure why a half hour would make such a difference, but it felt really early.

When I looked at the clock, I thought it was like I was going fishing.

For a minute, I thought I was going to miss all the fish I wasn’t even trying to catch.  I thought I was going to miss something.

I remember when we used to go fishing…up so early to get on the lake and catch the fish before they knew we were after them or something.

That was what you did when you went fishing…you got up early.

Back then, I was the one my father had to wake up.

“Wake up…time to wake up” and I’d get up and have some breakfast and then we’d get in the station wagon and drive to the lake.

Now I’d be the one doing the waking up…but for some reason we don’t go fishing.  Maybe it’s something I should start doing.

My children can wake up early, too.

Fishing is a good reason to wake up.

Yesterday when I was just starting out on the mail route, I looked up to a porch I never deliver to and noticed an older man in overalls staring out into the fog.

Fog is pretty atmospheric.

( “fog is pretty atmospheric” ?  Very true, Sherlock, very true.)

I’d seen him pulling weeds out in his garden before…but never noticed him up on his porch.

“I wonder what he’s doing up there?” I wondered.

( I’ve stopped listening to the radio when I deliver the mail.  “Wondering” must be what I replaced the external noise with…I seem to be full of wonder these days.)

I finally arrived at the conclusion that he must be watching time.

( Have you ever noticed that when we say “finally arrived at the conclusion” we never let it be the end of the thought?  Here we are at the “conclusion” and we can’t give it a rest.  Maybe finally arrived at the diversion….or “you know I’ll keep talking”…or something like that would be more appropriate. )

Watching time?  Like waiting for the fish to rise….

What better use of our time than just letting it wash over us some…times?

I don’t know what he was doing up on the porch in his bib overalls.  Maybe he was balancing his stock portfolio or setting up a big company merger somewhere in Bolivia…I don’t really know. He might have been doing something really involved.

It looked to me like he was “just” watching time.

You know….maybe fishing is just a good excuse for us to watch time?  Staring at that line going down into the water legitimizes it all.

When someone says…even if it should be obvious….”Whatcha doin’ ?”  and we’re able to tell them that we’re fishing, it sounds better somehow than if we say that we’re just staring into space.

“Watching time”  isn’t an answer that inspires the same understanding or confidence that “trying to catch some fish” does.

Like the old Rolling Stones song says…”tiiiiiiiiiiiime is on my my side…yes, it is”.

We should be able to watch it if we want to.

07 Time Is on My Side

acolyte

Posted on by June 4, 2013

Flame

I remember the first time I was given the chance to be the acolyte at our small Lutheran church in Georgia.

I was probably about thirteen and was good at chasing butterflies.

I was distractible.

This was in the days before ADHD…but I remember myself as being the classic undiagnosed case.

But when I was given the opportunity to carry the flame up to the front of that little white church, my focus was laser like.

I think that I must have felt like I was some sort of facilitator…like I was the one who was going to bring the Holy Spirit into the church and allow the service to begin.

I remember each measured step, watching the flame at the end of that brass…what was it called?  I know it wasn’t called the fire pole…it must have had a name…that wick…watching it like what I was doing was important.

I was still a child but what I was doing was important.

What I was doing was worthy of reverence.

Maybe a better way to say it is that what I was doing demanded an attitude of reverence.  I don’t think anyone reveres me.

I think that’s a pretty powerful feeling to be able to give a child.  There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot that we find ourselves able to sincerely revere these days.

To allow a child to feel their importance in the Creation is a good thing.

To be able to teach them to revere their connection to both the Creator and His Creation is even better.

We’re kind of a nation of smart a**** these days.

(That’s the kettle calling the pot black, of course.  I’m very guilty of being a smart aleck most of the time.)

I don’t think that reverence has much meaning these days.

It isn’t a “kinda like” or “yeah…they’re OK” or “I guess it was good” type of response that I think we’re after here.

But that’s the response we give.  It’s like we’re afraid to fully commit to something that’s worthy of more than complete commitment.

The definition of revere says “show devoted deferential honor to”.

Wow.

Who knew that was what I was doing when they let me slow down long enough to carry that tiny flame through that small church?

( And as an aside, that was probably one of the only times a group of adults felt comfortable with me walking around inside any building with something on fire.  It was probably a big moment for me for a number of reasons.)

“Devoted deferential honor”…that’s a pretty heavy thought.

I can do irreverence in my sleep.  That world view comes easy.  It’s easy to relax into gentle sarcasm and pointed humor, deflecting lack of substance with self-deprecating observations.

It’s not hard to suspect that most of the world is a curious place lacking the worthiness that would allow me to respond to it in a way that shows respect.

To give myself over to love in a way that would allow me to fully revere…to show reverence in the best and most complete sense of that word….now, that is something to shoot for.

When you’re a child, you probably don’t know what the word “reverence” means.

But…maybe that’s when you understand it the best.

I don’t really know…but I’d like to.

 

 

 

 

cello days

Posted on by June 3, 2013

Traveling down the highway, road tripping at 65 miles an hour…the not uncommon exclamation, “Did you SEE THAT?!!” as we quickly pass another milestone or marker….each of us seeing something a little different from the other.

Most of the time, we noticed…sometimes just barely.

My daughter plays the cello.

She finds her own ways to have fun with it.

This Friday she graduates from high school.

Another marker flying by.

The funny thing is that, until you pass the milestone, you think that you’re just out for another Sunday drive, a meandering voyage through the familiar country lanes….breeze on your face, fried chicken for lunch, no hurries or worries or thoughts of the future.

No thoughts of what you might have missed when you looked down to adjust the radio.

And then you pass the “milestone” on the one way country road and you wake up and wonder:

“How the heck did I end up on the Autobahn?”

The autobahn?  Now you’re driving to survive…faster than you ever wanted to go and no one is saying, “did you see that?”….we’re all just white knuckled, eyes forward vessels of adrenaline…looking for the first place to exit so we can catch our breath.

But if we realized how fast the journey really goes, we’d never get in the car in the first place.

How do you even keep something that fast on the road?  It sounds impossible.

My daughter plays the cello.

She started playing in the 6th grade…and played all through high school.

The funny thing about vehicles is that even though some of us may pick a fast car…and some of us may pick a slow truck…I think that the general consensus when we near the end of even a small part of our journey through life is that, “that part went a lot faster than I thought it would.”

Maybe we improve our driving skills as we get older….maybe we get fatalistic about the whole game, sure that something weird like a wheel flying off at one hundred miles an hour is just around the next bend.  Maybe we just take the closest on ramp and get swept along with all the other vehicles moving forwards.

We move forward.  That’s our option.  Fast…or slow…we move forward.

My daughter plays the cello.  That’s a small part of who she is…a small part of what she does.

They say that at the end, your life flashes before your eyes.  That’s something that, thankfully, I haven’t experienced yet.

But I have to wonder if some parts don’t flash before my eyes as I move through the middle of my life?

When our oldest children were young, someone wiser than me said, “you better pay attention”.  And in between remodeling a gutted house, working….and dealing with all the other distractions I provided myself…I really did try to pay attention.

If someone yelled out, “DID YOU SEE THAT?!”…I think that, at least some of the time, my response would have been, “What?! What did I miss?!”

My oldest child plays the cello.  My oldest graduates this Friday.

I saw that.

13 Benedictus

 

 

today may be a good one

Posted on by June 2, 2013

rural-iron-man-mailbox-29611280793326T1UA

I deliver mail.

I’ve mentioned before that delivering mail is the job I do.  Six days a week, I sort and load my collection of bills and checks, letters and magazines, good news and maybe even some bad news….and then I take it out on the road to deliver it.

I have some routines that I follow.  When you do something 6 days a week…for what seems like forever…routine is the word of the day.

I pull my mail down in the same way.

I load my vehicle in the same way.

My dog bones are in the same place in the vehicle everyday.

I eat the same breakfast and lunch everyday.

I don’t know why. Maybe it’s so I don’t even notice that it’s a different workday? Maybe I want it all to run together so I don’t notice what kind of stone I’m rolling up the hill?  Maybe I’m just a creature of lazy habit…

Anyway, this post isn’t really about all my many habits and routines.  It’s about one consistent part of my day that got me thinking about expectations and observations.

I have a customer on my route who is known in the community by the nickname “Zippy”.

Zippy ( I call him by his name, Michael…but Zippy sounds more colorful, so I’ll call him that in this post ) uses a wheelchair.  Everyday that the weather allows it, he powers down the road from his house to his mailbox and waits for a couple of minutes of conversation when I pull up in the mail jeep.

It’s an everyday occurrence.  I look for him and expect that my forward momentum is going to be halted for the time I sit and visit with Zippy.

That’s OK…what’s my hurry?

A typical conversation always goes like this:

Me: ” It’s nice outside today.”

Zippy: “It’s HOT.”

Me: “Yeah….but the breeze feels nice..”

Zippy: “Yeah…but it’s going to rain. ”

Me:  “Where’d you hear that?”

Zippy:  ” 40 percent chance today, 60 percent chance on Sunday, 20 percent chance on Monday, (etc. etc. etc.)

Me: “So…there’s a chance it won’t rain, too….”

Zippy: “Maybe….Maybe Not.”

That’s the way our conversations typically go…day in and day out.  “Maybe…Maybe Not” is sort of the joke that punctuates the end notes of our visiting….kind of the admission that even though something bad could happen, we don’t know when or what, so whatever the weatherman tells us can be held under suspicion.

My amusement out of all this is trying to figure out if there is going to be a day when I say, ” This snow is amazing…see how that one drift over there looks?! ”  and Zippy will say something like…

“Oh, I know…isn’t it beautiful outside today?”  or even that something to do with the weather is really kind of pleasant.

That’s my game.  It feels like a victory if perfection is ever recognized.

Zippy is not a bitter guy.  He delivers his observations of gloom with tremendous good cheer.  He is happy to point out that it may not be as nice as I think it is…and even if something strange has happened and it really is pretty nice right now, and he has to admit to that fact…well, something is projected to come along soon that will turn “nice” on its ear.

But all I really want is the admission that it might turn out to be an amazing day.

Just once or twice, I want to pull up and have our talk turn to how nice it is outside.

I don’t know if that’s going to happen.  It doesn’t seem to be the way our conversations are ever going to go down.

( It takes a lot of creativity to talk for five or ten minutes about how a beautiful day could turn sour.  It takes more muscles to frown, too…or so I’ve been told.)

Zippy is not a bitter guy.  I said that before….he’s pretty hilarious in his own way, and I think that we enjoy talking to each other.  I don’t know how many people become captive audiences for the moment at the end of his driveway….I think I’m the only car that has to stop at his mailbox…so I may be the only person he gets to talk to consistently.

He waits for me to pull up so he can wheel on down….and I wait for him at the mailbox when I see him coming.

That’s part of my routine.

I think that one of the things that keeps me going is that small break in the routine that I look for…the one where I pull up and before I can even start talking, Zippy says…

“You know….today may be a good one”.

 

Anything good can happen.