I’ve been thinking lately about how frequently I see/hear privilege (white or otherwise) raising its head. IN particular we have been having a lot of road construction nearby and that has resulted in deviations, and closures and my, oh my, how folks like to get on their high horses and whine and whinge about how things
“used to be”
“should be”
“would be if…”
“don’t have to be”
and a few other “’be’s”.
The fact is that in Wisconsin when you hear the word “privilege” it’s pretty much assumed that you are talking about white privilege and that the intended message is one of racial equality. With that presumption a great many people walk away from conversations thinking privilege is something other people should deal with but isn’t anything for me to worry about.
But in the daily run of things I hear examples of privilege — whether white or not doesn’t matter — because it’s the exact same place in your brain that gives rise to the idea that you personally shouldn’t have to deal with something that a lot of other people are dealing with — presumably because you don’t deserve to be inconvenienced.
What a crock of baloney. And what a child of the whole American Individualism attitude. I can do anything I want, because… well,… for no good reason, just because I think I shouldn’t have to deal with that. From drivers who break out of traffic and go tearing up the shoulder of the road to get ahead of traffic to the patient. in E.R. with a cut who is offended that someone with a heart attack is being seen before them. We can conjure an infinite number of reasons why WE should not have to put up with what lots of other people not only put up with, but have to live with day in and day out their entire lives. Where do we get such an attitude of superiority, or exclusivity from? It can be the result of parenting, but I know plenty of folks who grew up with parents who would never condone the behavior of their spoiled and privileged offspring. So that’s not it.
Wherever it comes from I”m ready for it to be over — but it won’t be. And I see no indication that many folks even care.
The world changes and I must change with it. I”m doing my best, But I”m not happy about it. And there is no way to change it. I can’t live other people’s lives, and staying out of their way is getting harder and harder.
I know others my age who have either given up on driving, or have started limiting their driving to certain types of roads, and perhaps avoiding other kinds of roads completely — like Interstate Highways — because with their current perceptions and reaction times perhaps they aren’t alert enough or fast enough to react to the stupid actions of thoughtless drivers — or reckless drivers (because some people do those things intentionally, not accidentally). Thus far I’m not bothered — though I am more careful at points of interaction — ramps, interchanges, intersections, etc.. I don’t know how long I’ll feel the same, and whether the time will come that I stop driving certain places or at all.
I know I dreaded the day when I would have had to tell my dad that he wasn’t a safe driver and to surrender the car keys. AS it turned out he passed before that day came — peacefully in his sleep — after a lovely weekend with the entire family and a 100 miles drive back home. I don’t know how I’ll react if my time comes for our daughter to have that conversation with me? I hope I’m gracious about it. And, by the way, that’s another area where privilege is a huge issue among the public.
OK — I’m gonna stop here. I’ll be back tomorrow. and we’ll see what’s on the agenda then….
Why are so many people bashful about expressing themselves? I know that my recent rant about group manipulation has some role to play — people like to be liked, and the best way to be liked is to agree with everyone else. And agreeing with everyone else, pretty much means, you are never going to say what YOU really think.
But…. And there is always a but…
To do so denies who you are, and you’ll never be more confident, never be more appealing to others, never be heard if you don’t open your mouth and speak up for yourself. To say nothing about getting yourself into trouble — minor or disastrous — because you let others lead you into a mess of some sort.
It’s a hard thing to learn that we all have our own audience — large or small matters little — but there are certain hearts who will hear what we have to say, and others to whom we are speaking gibberish or a foreign language. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just life. It’s not a curse or a blessing, it’s simply reality.
As a way of illustrating this let me use a simple example from our marriage. Peggy remembers dates, I remember names. She remembers events, I remember places. In a day’s conversation we regularly run into the impasse (given both our aging brains) in which an appeal for assistance in remember s place, or event is met by a blank stare. What I remember, she doesn’t. What she remembers I’m clueless about. Yet we get along famously. And in this illustration there is no impact upon our ability to COMMUNICATE. We have our work-arounds.
Half a lifetime ago I left a Christian fellowship I’d been involved with all my life. I was extremely active and had been a bi-vocational pastor for 25 years. (our church didn’t believe in a paid ministry) There came a time when history came to tell a different story than their theology and I felt a need to move on. And through the leaving process — mentally and physically — I came to realize that the message that was most dear to my heart was never really a message being heard by the listeners. There were smiles and congratulations but the living of lives proved to me that ultimately there had been a deafness all along — my message wasn’t meant for my then current listeners.
It didn’t take 25 years for me to realize that — there were myriad events along the way that affected how I thought, and how I was willing to express my thoughts — to I gradually pushed the limits — rather like trying to communicate with someone in another language just using Google Translate — there was some understanding but without nuance.
There was even a time when I was on a speaking engagement in Europe; I visited France, Germany, and Poland as well as the UK. I travelled with my own interpreter but I realized when I was in Poland that the length of my statements was much shorter than the length of my interpreter’s translation — and it wasn’t just my imagination. While in France I quickly came to realize that translating certain nuances were impossible because that language didn’t have words for what I wanted to say. Several nuanced words in English all ended up being translated by the same French word. I faired better in Germany but there the translations were just too abrupt — so my high school German told me. I understood enough to grasp the additions and subtractions to my own thoughts.
Years later I worked for a company that did foreign language translations of technical manuals. We would translate an English manual into as many as 17 different languages. Some were elegant, others seemed — to be honest — brutal. Spanish didn’t handle engineering terms very well, and there were lots of string on ideas, The “this” of the that or the something else modified by a whatchmalit — ad infinitum. Finnish was the most compact of all and it seemed as if most of the content was missing but I was assured by the translators and the translation checkers that was not the case — still, there was a lot of leftover space on a supposedly look-alike page of the manual.
Audiences differ. We think that the people around us on a daily basis share a lot in common with us, but much of that is a fallacy. We are all very different in ways that other people have no clue about and while we may think that keeping our opinion to ourself is being helpful I have rarely found that to be the case; and keeping my own mouth shut (which I rarely do anymore) benefits no one and only leaves room for misunderstanding.
The idea of “Freedom of Speech” — just as an aside — is also fraught with complications. The only time there really is FREEDOM of speech is when the people we most want to have silenced are allowed to express themselves openly and loudly. Everything else is really just pretending because there is no challenge to belief. It’s possible that a nation, or a culture can grow into and out of an interest in allowing “freedom of speech”. The nature of a government at any given point in history will tell the tale of how national attitudes towards, for example, the Press have morphed and transformed depending on the nature of the current rulership. We are seeing that in our own culture as I write, but that’s a topic for another day — or maybe another decade.
That’s it for today. I hope you’re taking care of yourself and your loved ones and I’ll be back soon to chat again.
January 20, 2025 till April 8, 2026 has been an awakening for people around the world. After his first presidential term no one with a brain in their head could possibly image that DJT would be another JFK, but I doubt anyone not in public life had any idea just how far off the beam he would be the second time around.
The Orange Buffoon is teaching the world just how far you can go — away from reason, and sense — before people are willing to actually take action and stop you. I was reminded recently that the U.S.A. never decided to stand up against Nazism and Hitler and the German War Machine. We waited until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and then as an ally of Japan, we were at war with Germany. The U.S. has no great history of standing for democracy, equality, or justice. We have a history of looking out for our financial interests and plundering the world for resources — and along the way we have been forced — kicking and screaming — to treat some of our minorities better, but only after long and contentious struggle. And once again the Nation — even with it’s mass protests — has DONE nothing to remove the Orange Buffoon from power — we have just talked about it in private, and marched in public where it was relatively safe and the government, en masse, has sat silently on the sidelines neglecting their duty of care for the citizens they were elected to serve.
The best assessment of Trump’s leadership skills
Part of the reason I haven’t been writing is that one more voice complaining about the Orange Buffoon isn’t going to make any difference in the world. If millions of people can take time out of their precious weekends to parade around the city streets and their combined voices have little effect, what sense does it make for yet another — solo — voice to rise up in protest?
And yet…
Before Jesus, God sent John the Baptist, as a “voice crying in the wilderness, saying, ‘prepare ye the way of the Lord.’” Now don’t get me wrong. I’m no John the Baptist. And I had no revelation or voice from God telling me to DO anything. But like millions of people — not just here in the U.S.A. but around the world — one has to recognize the aberration we are witnessing and testify against it.
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
I never in my 77 years expected that there were so many people who would tolerate evil they can see right in front of their eyes. But then the past 50+ years we have seen a move away from religion and morality and the idea that ANYTHING is RIGHT or WRONG. From the rise of situation ethics, little by little we have allowed individuals to do whatever they chose with no one pointing them out and saying “That’s just wrong” because as a culture we haven’t been able to agree that anything is actually RIGHT or WRONG. A big part of the reason our national wealth has been centered in the hands of so few is that this lack of morality has given them free reign to steal from workers, cheat customers & and the tax collector, and blatantly abuse public trust .
It would be easy to say I’m disillusioned with society and my fellow citizens. But, I guess I’ve been that way most of my life.
This is the actual edition in paperback that I read all those years ago
As a junior high school student I read a book called: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. I know it’s not your typical reading for a young kid but I’ve always had strange tastes, and even my mother would try to belittle me because when I went to the library I never came home with fiction (which she loved) and always ended up with serious non-fiction.
Anyway, after reading that short book I never looked at groups of people the same way. It was before my religious convictions moved me to be a conscientious objector, but the realization of how easily groups of people are manipulated to ANY action — right or wrong — certainly impacted why I felt as I did about military service.
In the news of the day we hear of statements by the politicians who are in charge of the military and their willingness to consider, and take order actions that the rest of the world consider War Crimes — these things reinforce my feeling that the military has always been a tool of oppression and subjugation. It’s hard to find a period in human history when humans were not fighting with each other — and always, always, always there has been money and profit and greed at the heart of the dispute. Humans don’t go to war to “save” others, they go to war when they are pressed against the wall with no other choice — or when greedy rulers decide that a few thousand or a few million souls are expendable to feed their personal greed.
The Orange Buffoon is no different than other monsters in history. Upon his demise there will be an entire industry created among scholars and the intelligentsia explaining why he was what he was, how he became such a mean, vengeful, and uncaring human, and what the world SHOULD have done about him. Time will go on and his name will be written in the annals of history as a mistake of a human being, an arrogant, self absorbed fool with no grasp of reality.
I find it interesting that while the world cries out not only for the release of all the Epstein files, and that action be taken against those who so abused the lives and bodies of innocents — that the Orange Buffoon, who many have said is the most litigious human in history, has never filed a lawsuit against claims that he was a pedophile or raped children. The reason, of course, is that such an action would expose him to deposition and further investigation — something he evidently doesn’t want to happen.
Anyway… I diverge.
2026 should be an interesting year. Yesterday was the Wisconsin state primary election and there have already been shouts of joy that the only contest on the ballot in my part of the state was for the Supreme Court of Wisconsin and the more liberal candidate won. The previous Supreme Court election had been heavily financed by Republicans and their candidate lost, this time around there wasn’t nearly the same effort to sway the electorate.
There is this lasting question, however, Is there a moral compass that keeps humans within some definable range of morality? When one looks at recent history — the past 100-ish year — and we see two world wars and numerous other regional wars one might say that as a species we vacillate back and forth between barbarity and civility. Is there a point where our oscillation will go too far and plunge us all into barbarism never to return? I sometimes wonder. The super-rich, who profit most from war, and who order it up like selections on a menu, are best off when there is a pseudo stasis. Enough unrest to provoke purchases but not so much as to ruin the marketplace. The rich aren’t really rich if the society fails. They depend on the poor and so-called middle class (who aren’t really “middle” at all when compared to trillionaires) to make deposits in their bank accounts, to do the dirty jobs in life, and to keep the conveniences of life ticking along for them to enjoy.
We worry about a WWIII, and whether the Orange Buffoon might trigger a nuclear war, but those who fund his hallucinations know better than to kill the golden goose that keeps them in cashmere and silk drinking exquisite drinks and abusing the innocent. The Orange Buffoon is a monster, but worse than him are those silent voices behind him that put ideas in his only too incoherent head.
That’s enough for today. Take care of yourself, and I’ll be back again to chat soon…
Well, it’s been A WHILE! I have no idea (without looking it up) how long it’s been since my last post, and actually, I really don’t care. This interim has been important for what it was — an interim — an in between — a getting settled/comfortable/adjusted to a new reality. So, it’s not going to be an “Easter” Easter post, It’s going to be an chatting sort of Easter post instead.
It’s been 2 years since we left Franklin, WI and moved into this property. And 1 1/2 years since we completed the purchase and moved from the upstairs flat to the downstairs flat where we are now. It has NOT been an easy transition!
I have said, multiple times to myself and various family members that this is NOT the house I would ever have even considered LOOKING at, much less purchasing. But it was an idea that Michael and Katy came up with to have us two closer to them two and provide a little longterm security for them as well. The plan is/was for us to stay here as long as we are able and eventually it will be their property. In the meantime we pay them rent and they sort of take care of the maintenance and management of the tenants and property. It sounds like a workable idea and in most ways it is.
When we moved in upstairs the then-owners asked that we not use one of the bedrooms — the one above the bedroom they use during the 6 months per year they lived in the building. It was no big deal and we agreed. Since we moved back to Wisconsin I have been sleeping in my own bedroom as the CPAP and my sleep sounds make it even harder than the annoyances of old age for Peggy to sleep. So, I set up my bedroom in what was a third bedroom, even though some of the features of the room weren’t traditional “bedroom” design.
After the purchase we moved downstairs as planned — knees and legs aren’t happy with stairs anymore. At the time it seemed logical that I use the so-called second bedroom as mine instead of the third bedroom. We painted accordingly and I settled in. Except I didn’t really settle in. That room has a corner window arrangement and just down the alleyway there is a super bright streetlamp — yes, street lamps in the alley!
I tried to be smart and put in blackout drapes but bright light still snuck around the sides of the curtains and I was never really happy with the room at night. Also, there was only one alignment for the bed that worked. 2 choices resulted in a face full of furnace air ever time the system kicked in, and the one remaining position (due to the placement of the closet one wall as unusable for the bed) ended up with me feeling as if I was on display in my bedroom. Just not a great set up.
The third bedroom had been turned into my plant room. And for a while that seemed to work just fine. But as seems to be the case with plant lovers, the number of plants began to grow and grow and grow. The space in the living room soon became inadequate.
So, some of the plants that had been in the living room…
,,,Moved into the plant room, and my accumulating habit only got worse.
Long story short, I was feeling uncomfortable in my bedroom, the plants weren’t happy, and life as it was just wasn’t comfortable.
So…
It took an entire week…
And way too many sore muscles…
But…
Without repainting anything I moved my bedroom out of one room and into the other and the plants and all swapped places.
I can finally say that this place feels pretty much like home — finally.
The new arrangement means that my computer desk which, of necessity had been living in the middle of the old room, now lives up against a wall and whilst sitting my back is NOT to the door. I hate not knowing if someone is looking in without my knowing it. Not that anything happens in there — most of the time I’m tending the plants. But, it’s just a mental thing.
In the bedroom I feel more cocooned away. The bedroom door opens against a central hallway and the entrance to the kitchen so you’d THINK that it would feel more exposed an noisier, but in fact the layout allows my bed to be more out of sight and cozier — so it’s a win/win. Everything fits with a reasonable amount of space and I’m finally happy. I guess in a way it feels like my sleeper in my truck from the days when I drove semi. I always used to sleep with my head plastered into the rear corner of the sleeper and bundled up in my blankets.
There remain “move-in” details that have not ben sorted. My SIL has made us wait 14 months to fasten a kitchen cabinet securely in place, and to raise the height of the stove to match the counters, We’ve been waiting 8 months with a leaky faucet — the replacement for which is sitting underneath a kitchen counter but he seems never to have time or inclination to install. And we have a damaged floor joist in the basement that needs reinforcement or replacement but that I got angry enough about that I went out and purchased a ceiling jack just to be safe and now I still care about getting it repaired but at least it’s safe again. And, we have lived through two winters waiting for a concreted walkway so that the risk of falling during the winter is minimized. I almost thought we’d get it done last fall, the SIL actually talked about getting a crew together to do it — but then winter came and nothing happened. C’est la Vie.
On a more positive side we have not been in hospital since last August when I did a “drug loading” to change off one NEW med and onto another OLDER med that I tolerated much better than the experiment. Peg’s health has been stable too so on the “staying on the right side of the grass” front we are both doing well and happy with life.
AS FOR MY PLANTS… I’m still happily growing whatever is happy to live in my care. I have actually done a shift in thinking. Those shelves pictured above pretty much limit plant height to 12 inches. And as a result I have started looking more at succulents like jades and portulacaria afa to make up the bulk of my collection. Like ficus — of which I still have some — they are more compact growers and they respond quickly to pruning and trimming — as well as responding much more predictably. I still have the original ficus that I bought in December of 2024, but over the time I have separated the three trees that were originally a group planting in one pot into three separate trees — as well as having made a number of cuttings off of the original — but they are larger and in true bonsai fashion I may just cut them all way back to bare stems and let the trees re-grow new branches. It takes time but might fit my “longterm” plans better — (says the guy who’s 77 years old and who know how much time he has left!)
If you’ve been following me you may be surprised to see this post. I have no idea if I’m going to start writing regularly again — we’ll see that happens but it could just happen.
Let me begin by saying that today I’m thinking about a great conundrum. Donald Trump is the least important part of my life but currently occupies way too much of it. Any media I look to — news related or not — it’s impossible to get away from his visage and the insanity that has been the last 11 years, where the nation has seemed obsessed with anything done by the least worthy candidate for our attention. But on the other hand he means absolutely nothing to my life at all.
Let me be clear. How I live my life isn’t determined by anything the man says or does. I must still breathe, eat, exercise (at least a little), care for those around me, etc., etc.. None of this is affected one way or the other by dRumpf. Furthermore, whatever he may do, or cause to be done is genuinely out of my control. I may post about him as a warning and reminder to others but I dare not think that my little blips on the sea of unrest are changing anything. I have to live in spite of him.
And there’s the rub. I am no different than millions upon millions of humans who have gone before me. For centuries there have been obscenely wealthy and powerful men (and women) who have pushed the faces of their fellows into the mud and laughed.
The difference is that in this century we cannot get away from hearing about them, from learning all their foibles and atrocities, and from thinking that we are the most oppressed humans on earth; while at the same time there are refugees and prisoners and homeless and mentally afflicted humans whose lives are far worst than the lives we who are able to troll the interWebs for news might be facing. Even having access to information makes us stand far and away from those who suffer the most in this world. And who, just like us, are doing the best they can to eek out a living in a very unfavorable world.
I remember 25 or 30 years ago on a trip to Europe that I found myself in the South of France viewing some castle or another — built on a high formation of rock. At the base of the rock formation was an interpretive plaque — written unfortunately for me in French (of which language my skills are very rudimentary) but the gist of the plaque was quite plain. While the rich lived in opulent splendor high on the rock, the ‘common man’ lived in caves beneath. I don’t think the term on that plaque so long ago would still be accurate, I suspect science has moved forward from their understanding in terms of timing in human history, but at the time those poor peasants were referred to as troglodytes. (a term we now generally apply to humans some 25,000 years ago) But the bottom line is that those farmers, laborers, and even skilled craftsmen lived lives a world away from that of their rulers some hundreds of feet above in the castle on the rock.
My point is simple. Humans have always lived with great disparity between themselves and their rulers. Today we get to KNOW about the difference. In fact, today we are inundated with their travels, their wealth, their lifestyle, their abuses, their foibles, their atrocities — to the point that it’s hard NOT to know about all the things that irritate and madden those of us who have far less and are incapable of doing anything about them.
And so, while we have information beyond belief, but little or no power, it falls to each of us to live whatever meager lives we have. And let’s be very clear, unless you are a millionaire or billionaire you are closer to poverty than you are to them. You are closer to catastrophe than to wealth. The numbers are just that huge. You can “want” to be like them, to go where they go, eat in the restaurants they eat at, or buy the clothing they buy — or are given, and you may want to copy all the accoutrements of wealth but the fact of the matter is that you are just pretending — living a temporary fantasy.
Years ago I saw a graphic I searched in vain for this morning. It was a clever cartoon of a person standing “beside themself”. And the concept is, I think, worthy of consideration. Sometimes we need to step outside of ourself and look at the context in which we find ourselves. In so many ways the 20th and 21st centuries are an aberration. For millennia humans have traveled no faster than the fastest horse and suddenly we think we can conquer the know and unknown universe just because we have been clever enough to make a few discoveries that have lead to a plundering of the planet heretofore unmatched. Suddenly we humans think we are gods and nothing can stop us — at at least that seems to be the mindset of the ultra-rich. But we who AREN’T ultra-rich need to take ourselves “in hand” as it were and slap ourselves across the face and say, “look here buddy — wake up, you’re living a fantasy but you have serious things to do and you’d best get on doing them.”
Serious things indeed.
Care for our family
Care for ourselves
Be kind to other humans, all creatures and the earth that provides for us,
Work together for the benefit of all — building society
Live honest lives without arrogance
All these things and more are more important than anything I think — or don’t think — about dRumpf. He is less than smallest flea, And in the annals of human history he will go down as an abomination. Why should I waste my life, my time on this earth obsessing about him?
Yeah — we SHOULD speak out against evil, and I think it’s also right to remind those who are responsible for that so many are suffering because of him that it is THEIR fault that the situation exists s it does. Because the history of the lion is written by the hunter and humans have a short memory when it comes to their complicity with evil. And if you doubt that, you can ask why is it that there are so many people trying to deny that the holocaust ever took place. We are uncomfortable with our own failures as a nation, as a race, as humans — and we need to be reminded that evil is but one step away.
But never can we let speaking out agains evil prevent us from doing good. Upholding ideals. Encouraging those who inspire us. Etc. It’s my job and your job to live the BEST life we are able and to let those who tear down, those who destroy, those who defame and foster hatred fall by the wayside. The scales of life incline towards justice and even if we have suffered our pleas are heard. Perhaps not in a timeframe I might choose. But who am I to decide the pace of fate?
Try it. Step outside yourself and look at what you’re doing. Is it the best that you can? Do you really have to worry about the things you are obsessing about? And is there someone out there who needs a hand, a help up, a pat of the shoulder?
Take care of yourself and I’ll talk to you again. I hope soon, but whenever.
I hesitated to use this graphic even though I think it’s just a great point to be made because after the results of the last election I’m not sure that many people ever DO see and understand deeper truths. Perhaps some people are just stuck in a maze instead of a spiral — and never make it out the other side.
There is merit in the concept though. A spiral “sort of” returns you to the same point, but some spirals are like screws which rotate around a fixed center but move vertically. Other spirals stay on the same vertical plane but increase or decrease the distance from the center depending on which way you are traveling. I’m not sure for literary purposes it makes any difference which you look at. In both cases traveling along the spiral changes your perspective.
Or it should.
Life changes us, but it’s up to us to decide whether we will pay attention to those changes and adjust the way in which we live accordingly. As I age my body refuses some of my commands. I can learn to alter the commands I try to impose on my flesh, or I can suffer the pain of aching muscles and getting stuck in positions I have a hard time getting out of. It’s up to me. But the changes aren’t only physical.
We also see what’s going on in the world around us. If we are on a spiral as we get older we ought to be getting smarter about how to interact with others, with society, with time, etc. But you know, I know a lot of people sho say, “it didn’t used to be this way.” They are right. But “things” aren’t going back. You and I are one grain of sand on a vast beach and the changes we notice are good to clue us in to how to behave but never, for a moment thing that you are going to change the beach.
That’s the sad thing about the whole White Supremacy issue. The population of the world and of this country is changing and those who think of themselves as “white” are increasingly in the minority. Every year there are more and more people of supposedly different blood from them (though even the most ardent of White Supremacists are far from “pure” blooded). Immigrants arrive and intermarry with long time “Americans”. You can’t change that. So called whites are being gradually outnumbered and no legislation is ever going to change that. Whites never had a legitimate reason to exert power over other peoples but that never stopped the efforts to enslave and subjugate others. Now, as the numbers shift I can see how it’s scary. But being scared about something that shouldn’t have existed — the loss of power — it futile. It’s best to learn how to cope, how to adjust — and that pretty much always means — on the macro scale — you changing your point of view. You aren’t going to change the entire beach — of the entire world.
Pretty much every aspect of our life is affected by the spiral of life. I can’t think of a single area in my life where I shouldn’t have changed and grown and altered my thinking about as I have gotten older and I hope smarter. Smarter isn’t the right word — nothing has changed my bodily powers — my brain doesn’t work better, faster, with fewer errors now. But I ought to have a better perspective on things so that I can say “this works now,” or “that has stopped working, what do I have to do now?”
I don’t know… Am I getting more intolerant of others? It just seems like there is so much going on that makes no sense. And yet thousands and millions of people are buying into nonsense.
I was in my 20’s when one of my mentors said to me,
A lie often repeated is easier to believe than a truth seldom told.
Those words have stood with me a long while. And decade after decade I see them illustrated all over again.
One other thing is sure, advertising and media are a great way to repeat things often.
That’s it for now. I hope you’re doing well, and that you’re taking care of your family and friends. They need you.
I have been uncharacteristically quiet for a long while and maybe now the situation will resolve itself. Since February of this year we have been not exactly “home” less, but rather ‘house’-less. Through a peculiar series of events we got involved in a real estate purchase that has taken 10 months to conclude.
I’m not going to bore you with all the details but what we started in February took on what felt like sketchy details when we needed to moved at the end of the then current lease which happened in April. Knowing we had a deal in place — but one which would not finalize till the end of summer or the beginning of autumn we were faced with the quandary of what to do/where to live in the meantime?
Our future home would be a two story/duplex. Half of it was being used 6 months a year by the owners — Snowbirds who spend half the year in Arizona and half in Wisconsin. The other unit — the upper — had been set up as guest accommodations for their friends and relatives and as a result had really not been lived in for 12 years. It was clean. And well cared for. But neglected.
We worked a deal whereby we would occupy the upper until the transaction closed and then we would move to the ground floor. Our lovely, caring daughter however decided to open her mouth and tell the then-present owners that Peg & I spend most of the summer out at our trailer near Wisconsin Dells. That was “sort of” part of the agreement that we felt we had to live with — moving into temporary quarters that we were expected to not spend a lot of time in until the deal closed. The old owners were buyers and sellers who had lots of “stuff” stored here and they would need time to garage sale and clear out.
In the end it turned out that they never really did any garage selling — they ended up moving all their “stuff” into the garage at a new, smaller, residence that they purchased in the interim. This too they will occupy only 1/2 of the year. And while they are nice enough people they are not folks we found easy to be around. Being “away” for as much of the summer as we could manage actually seemed like the most comfortable solution to an uncomfortable situation.
The idea in all of this is that we are now one mile away from our daughter and son-in-law. The residence is on the first floor and with a little luck should be the last place we ever live. Kind of a “final” sounding fact — and obviously dependent upon future health events. Still, the idea is noble. Our kids are looking out for us and that feels wonderful.
Still and all it didn’t change the fact that for 6 months — April till yesterday — we have been betwixt and between. Having a place to lay our heads — yes. But never having a feeling we were HOME. It’s a 1st World problem to be sure. SO MANY millions of refugees and displaced and catastrophe caused homeless have life so much worse than we — but it remains that we have had a difficult time adjusting to what we were hoping was going to be a new life.
We closed on the property at the end of September. Then came three weeks of painting and fixing and dealing with materials put into temporary storage, and all the good things that go along with the verb “to move.”
Yesterday it all came to fruition. After countless trips up and down during recent days and with the help of three able bodied younger folks we completed the move. My Apple health app says I’ve been doing between 15 and 25 flights of stairs daily, but that should be done now. I still have locks to change (we are replacing all the locks which were old enough and outdated enough that they offered zero security), and a few little things to handle but WE ARE IN!
And here I am, the first morning after the first night’s sleep in our actual NEW HOME, and what am I doing? I’m writing. It feels good. I have missed writing. I’m not sure what life will have in store from here forward but I’m in a much better frame of mind and I have a much more conducive set of surroundings. Life is good. It’s always good, but sometimes it’s a little easier to appreciate it is all.
Today I’m not necessarily thinking age related thoughts, though I’m sure those of us who are advanced in years know plenty about what’s on my mind. So, let ‘er rip….
Have you ever had an experience that forever changed your attitude about someone, something, or somewhere? I dare say there is no one who has NOT had that experience but, hey, the question was rhetorical, wasn’t it?
Five years ago we visited one of our favorite spots in the whole world. Not a place that anything miraculous had happened before — it was just a pleasant location near the water that we had been visiting for donkey’s years and carried a lot of memories of pleasant walks and deep conversations.
At the end of that visit we were leaving the location and we were involved in a minor collision with a cyclist. The damage to the cycle was minimal, there was zero damage to our car, and the cyclist assured us there was nothing wrong with them. Incident forgotten — almost.
Sometime thereafter we hear that there is a claim filed and ultimately the insurer advises us the other party’s claim has been denied. Ok…
Three years after the collision we get served papers about a lawsuit. Our insurer takes care of all the paperwork. We have a couple meetings with a lawyer. We attend a deposition. Lots of time passes and nothing happens. A trial date is set and nearly a year passes. Two weeks before the trial date we are notified by the insurer that the suit has been settled. Everything is done.
All that took nearly 6 years. We didn’t have all that much to do with any of it.
And Yet…
I can truthfully say that we have lost all desire to return to a place that formerly held a great many good memories. The scar of a very unpleasant situation and a grab for everything to be gotten have forever changed our reaction to anything related to that place.
We used to enjoy watching kites flown. We had loads of fun overseeing the yacht moorings and watching large and small boats using the harbor and moorings. There’s an annual art festival that uses part of the property for parking and we always enjoyed a good snoop around at the art — even though in recent years the crowds have been enough to discourage us from attending even if the locale had been elsewhere.
Some might say we should just get over it. But it’s like dew drops on a flower petal. Once they are gone there’s no amount of spraying or atomizing that will return a drop of dew to its delicate perch on a flower. Somethings just change.
I don’t know whether the two of us have been more or less likely to have experiences like this in our advancing years. Certainly there’s more that has “changed” from what we remember of our youth than what has stayed the same. So, one might think that it should be a more common experience to find places and memories ruined. I don’t think that’s true.
We always lived our life openly. We made the best decisions we could at the time with the best information we could get. Some choices were sound; others caused a bit of problem — but they were always the best decision we could make at the time — so we have almost zero regrets about our lives. Sure, a lot changes. This isn’t the world we grew up in, and it’s never going to revert to what had been. That’s just life and it’s never a good idea to dwell on the past. The past is irrevocably gone.
I still spend a good amount of time thinking about the future. We have plans — not nearly as exciting as they once were — but we aren’t ready to call it quits here on earth. Our family is strong, we have ideas about things we’d still like to accomplish so what’s to be sad about, or regretful, or to feel ruined.
Still, there are a few things like the one I’ve mentioned. I hope that doesn’t become a common occurrence: finding a place or person suddenly distasteful. Most of the “stuff” in our life isn’t long and protracted. I think that had a lot to do with how we both feel now. Most of the “stuff” in our life is more under our control that this experience. Even health problems which many would say are NOT in one’s own control — how we react to a health situation, or a health emergency — that IS in our power. Positivity, endurance, long-suffering — these are things that can completely change how an experience plays out — and they can change the outcome as well.
That being true… I admit that there are actions I tend no longer take. I’m more careful about where I drive. With well over a million miles under the steering wheel I have seen huge changes in how people behave whilst driving. And I don’t like what I see. Too many people in too much of a hurry taking too little care about the well-being of others. As a result there are areas of town I no longer drive into. Too congested. Too many speed demons. Etc.. I avoid driving during rush hour — Most of my/our trips don’t have to be time-critical — maybe with the exception of lab work on mornings when fasting is involved! :-) I’m sure you get the idea. Retirement gives you the luxury to pick and choose your battles and I choose to avoid foolish behavior when it’s reasonable and prudent to do so.
What’s your take on changed attitudes? I always like to hear how others cope with similar situations.
Well, that’s about it for today. I hope you’re well. I’ll try to talk with you tomorrow.
From the Far Side of '70 
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