more normal than not

A frantic little voice yelling out in the middle of the night is always an exciting way to wake up.

It is an exciting way to wake up quickly.

“Where’s my teddy?!!! I can’t find my teddy!!  Where’s my teddy?!!”

My wife got up and I could hear her talking to him…getting our youngest son calmed down.  She started laughing softly and told him, “it’s OK….he’s right here.”  Teddy was found…and with a kiss, our son went back to sleep.

I asked her where Teddy had been when she got back to bed…”Right by his arm…about 2 inches away.”

I think that things like that are funnier to me when I’m not the one getting out of bed.

There isn’t anyone left to find my “teddy”.

Losing a parent is a sad part of the process…but it’s the way things work.  Both of my parents are gone now…no one left to find my “teddy” even if I was so panicked that I needed them to do it. I think it probably is a parent’s job, anyway….I wouldn’t  shouldn’t ask my wife to get up and go looking for him if it was me doing the losing. That’s part of the process, too, I guess…outgrowing the need to have someone else fix my problems. I’m still working at figuring out how to do that part of growing up.

Maybe the secret to really appearing to be an adult is never mentioning when you think you’ve lost your “teddy”.  It has to be better to just lay there, wide eyed and frantic…afraid to reach out those last two inches because he just might not be there….or, maybe even scarier than realizing that the solution to the problem was never there when you looked for it…to realize that the solution to the problem was right next to you the whole time.

Most of us can wax poetic over solutions to someone else’s problems.  It’s easier to laugh when it’s someone else getting out of bed.  I know that most of the time, when I’ve been able to finally calm down and someone can point out, “It’s OK…it’s right here” things tend to get fixed quickly.

I don’t have a stuffed bear.  My “teddy” has been replaced with a pantheon of adult concerns…like expensive watches, Italian shoes, and full length fur duster coats.  Just kidding about what I consider adult concerns…the truth is much more down to earth and realistic. No matter how practical and common the needs are, though….I still wake up some nights wondering, “where’s my teddy?”

Computers make my life easier.

I can access more information than I need faster than I’ve ever known that I don’t need to know about something than ever before. Unless…something isn’t working like I expect it to.  System restore, bang on the box, cross my fingers, turn it on and off….maybe just sit and look at the screen and wonder, “what’s going on?”…I’ll try it all, my life ticking away while I sit, frustrated and flummoxed.

I stopped using Firefox after all the computer voodoo this morning…couldn’t get it to work right so I just gave up.  Google Chrome seems to work so I’ll just go with the “happy accident” and roll with learning about a new browser.

I think our brains work differently now than they did before we became so tethered to our electronic devices.  I remember thinking that it was so funny when I saw someone walking down the street talking on their cell phones….so funny that they couldn’t seem to give it a rest for even an afternoon. Now I have a cellphone ( a Tracfone…what a cheap skate!) and people can reach me anywhere if I have the phone with me and they know my number.  I’m one of them now…a reformed Luddite, a late adopter, dipping my toes into the pool to see how cold the water really is.  Now we think fast…able to accelerate our attention until we can notice everything even if we don’t really understand anything completely.  4G, wireless, fast and new…best…the next “must have”…the newest “don’t be left behind”.

I remember the first time I heard a Sony Walkman.  In the dining hall at Falling Creek Camp, Burts Bryant walked up and let me listen to one of his camper’s new “toys”.  I felt like some sheltered tribesman…jumping back in wonderment when the sound started coming out of the headphones.  What a revelation….”that little cassette player sounds like that?  Cool!”…it was quite an eye-opening event  at the time.

Now we make fun of it…like it was a wood and steel wheel….a relic from a distant time…our generation’s Victrola.

If I think back, it was really the beginning of a new kind of isolation.  I can’t remember anything before that that let us zone out quite as completely as the Walkman…maybe reading a book?…I don’t really know.  We were in the world…but not really of the world.

We are more connected to each other now… and less interactive.  We can have thousands of Facebook friends…and not have a single true confidant.  It is a strange time…and we get more used to it being the “new normal” with each passing day.

I guess that every generation has some kind of old benchmark…something that ties them to what they suppose were the good old days.  Maybe someday the next round of old people will say, “remember the days of 4G? …before the holographic implant and the wondertether?…things were microseconds slower and you had to carry the plastic box?…didn’t we talk more before the cranialscrew machine stopped all that? …weren’t things better when we didn’t race the solarshield hovercraft and move through the liquid field?”

Who knows what’s going to happen.  Maybe we’ll have some kind of “back to the dark ages” EMP and the closest we’ll get to technology will be burning the hot dogs over the fire…and then we can say, “remember the days of the store-bought bun?”…and reminisce as we stare into the flames…the brave new world of the Walkman far behind us.

“it’s the end of the world again“.

You take an old house that’s gutted when you bought it, limited carpentry skills, and no money for tools and materials…and what do you get?

A constant reminder that you might have a shot at doing a better job the second time around.

We are constantly re-doing.  I am amazed when I tear out a section of the old repair and realize how wacky what I did before can be.  “Holy Smokes!!  Check out this used 2×4 that I scabbed together with this cut down 1×6 to give us enough room to balance this part here...it’s INSANE!!!”  It’s like digging up a shot of weirdness from the past…3 Stooges archaeology…but it’s just me.

Jenny helped me to a crazy degree…hauling 5 gallon buckets of dirt out of the hand-dug, water- proofing project ditch behind the house (when she was 7 months pregnant), sitting on every board I had to rip because the thrift store table saw blew up, painting…sanding drywall with a baby on her back,etc….so I don’t want to give the impression that it was all my effort…that wouldn’t be even close to true.  But I think that looking back on it all, most of the really weird element was my doing.

Occasionally, I’ll come to a part of the house that really surprises me with an elegant and appropriate solution to a problem…but that is pretty rare. Usually, it’s a strange, overbuilt compensation for fear and a lack of knowledge…”maybe if I double up on these 6×6’s, it won’t cave in on us in the night?”  (this is the kind of post that they use in the building inspector’s deposition later).

We bought our house before our first child was born.  Our firstborn “worked” on this house in the womb in tandem with her mother…so she grew up with the whole hopeful process.  I think that when we bought the house, we thought that “6 months from now, we’ll be featured in Architectural Digest”…that 6 months from now we’ll be warm and dry and safe and FINISHED!! We were inappropriately optimistic about the whole process…babes in the woods (or at least as close to the woods as you could get and still be sleeping inside a structure).

The reality of the situation was that the first winter we spent in the house we didn’t have any insulation in the ceiling…just rafters and tin and a too small wood stove downstairs to keep us warm.  It was cold…our friend Steve Longenecker helped me pound nails in the ceiling with his piton hammer…getting it insulated and ready for the next winter.  He’s a long time wilderness instructor…spent a lot of time camping and climbing…and he said that he’d rarely been that cold.

That’s the way to keep a recent wife and new mother happy and comfortable, huh?

We are getting ready to celebrate our 19th anniversary in about a week.

My wife was looking at old pictures the other day and commented that “we had an awesome life!” That’s a good thing…to have some way to put it all into perspective. The natural tendency, I think, is to hold onto the hard memories…to catalog the pain behind every callus, the embarrassment of the home improvement project gone awry, the lack…and to build them up into a monument and reminder of “what should have been”. It’s hard to avoid wishing that things had been easier….but we wouldn’t be who we are if we didn’t have that set of experiences.  The “spin”…the ability to take something hard and see the bright side of the situation…that’s an awesome ability and legacy to shoot for.

The title of this post isn’t really appropriate.  There really isn’t anything that I’d want to tear apart…literally or figuratively.  There are a lot of things I’d like a “do over” on…I think I could probably do a better job when I had some of it all figured out…but I don’t think that I’d want to tear it all apart.

Little by little, we fix a house and move on in. Year by year, we build a life and a family.  I’m glad it doesn’t happen instantaneously…I don’t think I’d know what to do.