Memorial Day 2022
Tag Memories
Happy Old Year
Thirty days ago I issued a challenge. That sounds pushy. Let’s say 30 days ago I made a suggestion and intimated I would do it too. “It” was recall one positive, happy thing that happened this year each day during December. The purpose was to demonstrate that although 2020 might not be the poster year for The Best of Times, it is far from The Worst of Times.
Did you? Were you able to recall a mere 30 happy memories of all your recollections from this year’s 366 days? I did and I was. The only change I made from my proposed plan was instead of starting the day with a happy memory, I wrapped up my day with the positive reminiscence. I was thus able to share it with my friend every night. To being able to tell somebody else about the positives of the year animated those memories and kept the memory machine in tune for the following day’s offering. Another happy side effect of holding my pluses until day’s end was that it gave me the entire day to decide which memory I was most interested in sharing that day. Yes, by the second week I found myself in the unanticipated although hoped for position of having multiple merry memories.
This year was one nobody expected regardless of what your Facebook friends tell you. They nor anybody else, except perhaps a handful of world class immunologists saw this year’s great pandemic coming. That same group of friends, unless they also doubled as meteorologic oceanographers likely didn’t expect 46 storms across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. (Thirty for the Atlantic, its most active recorded season and 16 in the Pacific, its least active.) Even the most studied sociologists couldn’t have predicted protests in every state and many nations against over a dozen different issues and conditions. Yes, this year was filled with misfortune. Still, there were the fortunes of 2020. The difference is that the majority of the good times were held individually although if individuals got together and pooled their happy times that would be a powerfully positive pack of people.
I hope you spent December recalling the good of 2020. Spending the month knowing at least some part every day would be a spent thinking happy thoughts may be the most positive memory I’ll have of 2020. And a significant challenge for 2021!
Bloody Hell
It’s nice to have memories. Pictures are good reminders of things fun times and people. Certificates bring back the pride of recognition. Scars are my reminders of usually something stupid I did.
Last week I was reminded of a scar as I was conversing with a friend. She had mentioned the previous night, actually early that morning, unusual activity in the house across the street from her. Lights were on at a time they shouldn’t have been and cars were in the driveway that shouldn’t have been. Immediately my mind went to activity at my house that shouldn’t have been.
I once ended up in the emergency room seven stitches to close a cut that I got from walking into a cardboard box. I don’t know why nobody could understand how a piece of cardboard sliced my leg open so efficiently that I had left a trail of blood from the living room through the dining room into the kitchen where it collected into a pool of blood rivaling what one usually finds beneath a freshly slaughtered chicken. And I use that animal as the example because I was scared like the proverbial chicken not just at the thought that I might die of massive blood loss on a newly laid kitchen floor while all the sharp objects lay safely nestled in their holders, but that if I lived long enough for someone to try to close that gash it was going to involve other sharp objects like scrapers and needles and undoubtedly a tetanus shot. Maybe it wasn’t a chicken I was channeling as much as a scaredy cat.
What happened that one morning I was up early roaming the house with only the light coming through the windows to guide me. There wasn’t much light because it just shortly after five in the morning but it was an August morning so full sunrise wasn’t that far away. Besides I had gone down that hall to the living room for 29 years and I was certain where to step. Except this was that period of time between having a contract to sale the house and actually moving out and closing on the deal. More specifically it was at the moving out stage and that’s why there were boxes hither and yon. One of the ones in yon was right next to my chair where I had planned to plop myself and watch the morning news. As I rounded the bend I walked into the box catching a top corner with the outside of my leg and I knew immediately I had done something unpleasant. I knew immediately because that’s how long it took for me to feel blood running down my leg.
I thought at first it was just a scratch and I started a hobble back down the hall to the bathroom to wash and dress it. Then I saw how much blood covered my hand when I brought it back up from checking what I’d done. I altered course for the nearer kitchen sink and by the time I got there I had left a trail Dracula could have sniffed out from his home in Transylvania. I grabbed a towel and tied it around my leg, grabbed the phone, called my daughter for help, and went back to apply as much pressure as I could to the outside of my leg.
I should mention that all this was happening about 8 weeks after I got out of the hospital for the marathon four month stay and probably hadn’t the strength to apply sufficient pressure to stop a paper cut. By the time my daughter got to the house I looked like the victim of a mugging. I was on the floor with my leg elevated on the lower rung of a kitchen stool. I was whiter than the towel that continued to get redder. I held the phone in one hand trying to dial 911 with just that hand while the other was feebly twisting said kitchen towel around my calf. Between the calling of the daughter and her arrival I decided we weren’t going to be able to staunch this flow and navigate our way to the required help ourselves and opted for professional assistance.
Not much later were in the ER, an IV running to replace my lost fluids, a clean dressing covering my first stitches not associated with surgery, and awaiting the dreaded tetanus shot, we discussed where to go for breakfast. It was after all still morning and my kitchen was busy doing its imitation of a crime scene. Not much gets between me and food.
So that’s what I thought of when my friend had seen activity in the early hours across the street and as I ran my hand over the scar on my lower leg I wondered what my neighbors might have thought on my unusually active morning.
Incidentally, if you ever want to get the front of the line at an emergency room, show up in an ambulance and bleeding.
A Cheesy Story
Yesterday I made a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. For me that’s a rare treat. I used to do a grilled cheese, with or without tomato soup, almost weekly for years. And years. And even some more. Now I make one a couple of times a year. I have a complicated relationship with grilled cheese.
Grilled cheese doesn’t hold one of those warm, fuzzy spots youth’s memory. I’m sure my mother made them but I don’t have a real recollection of them. I do remember eating grilled cheese at my elementary school cafeteria. Mostly I remember them being greasy.
I remember in college grilled cheese hitting a new level. There the cafeteria put ham or turkey with it! Who knew? And, I discovered with the help of some aluminum foil and the iron my mother insisted I have in my dorm room that I could prepare a nutritious and alcohol absorbing pre-weekend snack. Even considering the food service’s meaty additions, college level grilled cheese was more utilitarian than culinarian.
I remember making grilled cheese for my daughter. But I can’t say they were the things of lifelong memories. They were mostly things that could be thrown together quickly between her dismissal time and band practice.
Throughout my childhood, my young adulthood, and my adult me’s child’s childhood, grilled cheese was just there. It wasn’t until many years later that grilled became more than a pasteurized processed cheese product between two slices of bread.
In March of 2015, after a 4 month long hospitalization, I was admitted to rehab to learn how to walk again. For the next several weeks I went through physical therapy seven days each week working to the day that I could shuffle my own way out of there. To make a long story short, eventually the day came when my doctor said I could be discharged soon. But first, for lack of a better way to put it, I had to pass several tests. Among them I was to prepare my own hot lunch. I was given two to pick from. I don’t remember the other choice but I picked the grilled cheese sandwich.
It took a while, but eventually I had the required pasteurized processed cheese product, two slices of bread, and a stick of butter on the table in front of me. I assembled them into a reasonable sandwich like fashion and placed it into the medium hot pan on the very hot stove. About 4 minutes later I divided the sandwich into two triangles and passed one to the occupational therapist who had been watching my poor imitation of Jeff Mauro. Three days after that I was propelling my walker to the entrance of the rehab unit where, per hospital policy, I was transferred to a wheelchair to the outside world.
Now every time I make a grilled cheese sandwich I think of those days in that unit, trading half of a sandwich for my freedom. And that’s why I now make grilled cheese only a couple if times a year. Yeah, I guess it’s not that complicated.
Happy Early Father’s Day
Earlier this week someone told me how much she thought I look like my father. People always say family folk look like each other and most of the time the resemblance stops at having the same number of eyes and ears. I don’t often look at myself so I’m not a good gage if I even have eyes and ears but I do look at my father every day. On my refrigerator is a picture of my parents at a dinner some 20+ years ago. I don’t know if it’s the last picture they had taken but it is the last picture of them that I have.
Yesterday I looked at the picture then I actually looked at myself in the mirror and darned if I don’t look like him. It helps that we’re not too terribly far apart in ages, his in the picture and mine in the mirror. And it doesn’t hurt that he was always looked a bit younger than his age and I a bit older. But there he was, in my mirror, looking back at me.
When our resemblance was mentioned I remarked that I wish I could be like him rather than look like him. He was a remarkable person, in that he really deserved to be remarked about. Born the year that World War I came to an end he grew to be tall-ish, strong-ish, and with a year round tan courtesy of the fire and heat of the steel mill where he worked for 45 years. Until I came along he was the sole male in a house filled with women. He worked, he prayed, he played, he hobbied, he hubbied, he befriended anyone he met. He served country and community, but always it was God and family before all else. I have very few specific memories of things we did because it seemed he was always there. Rather than a specific memory I have one long memory from childhood to manhood.
He retired the day I got married. You hear so often that poor old Mr. So-and-So just retired and then died within a year yet he managed to get another 26 years out of life after becoming a gentleman of leisure. I don’t think he figured he would have lived as long as he did. He developed diabetes in the early 1960s when people died of the disease and had a few other bumps along the way after that. But it wasn’t illness that makes me think he lived longer than he expected. I think he figured that anybody who was born in a year that ends in something-teen probably won’t be around when the year’s first two numbers change. But stick around he did. Long enough to travel, long enough to see, play with and make a grandfather’s impression on my daughter, long enough to endure my mother’s various redecorating ventures, long enough to see her beat her own demon cancer. And long enough to make it just past his 88th birthday and almost to his 56th wedding anniversary. If you do the math you see that he was a little on the late side for marriage in mid-century America. I think he waited to make sure he would get it right.
Over the years he taught me how to be me. But exactly when or how I couldn’t say. When he died I can honestly say I didn’t lose my father. I lost my dad.
That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?
Picture Perfect
I was watching an old TV show yesterday when it was noted that the then most popular hobby was photography. Then was in the mid-1960s.
In mid-60 I was still measuring my age in single digits and picture taking was a natural extension of any structured family gathering – birthdays, Christmas, opening pitch at the local little league. After the pictures were taken the film was developed and the printed pictures 
became the center of attention for an evening. They were passed around among the family, mounted in (or at least stuck between the covers of) one of the many family picture albums, and that’s where there seemed to rest until happily ever after.
Fast forward 50 years. That’s when my father passed away. I don’t know when the custom began or if it was/is even a custom but then it was a thing to display pictures on French memory boards and scatter about during the viewings. My mother and sisters spent hours going through albums and boxes and envelopes to select the images that represented as many of the 8 plus decades my father walked the earth. Pictures I remembered from those family “picture shows” were there and there were also pictures from milestone events since and not so milestone events before. Faces of relatives who had died before I was born shared space with the one of a much younger father. While we were occupied fitting remembered names to forgotten visages we became caught up in remembering lives lived rather than one so recently lost.
The interesting thing was that after the funeral and things returned to their normal paces and places, those pictures didn’t. Every time I stopped by at my mother’s house a new old picture found its way into a frame on a wall, a spot on the mantel, a corner of a mirror. “Who is that,” was answered with who, when, where, what was happening, what happened next, what everyone else in and not in the picture thought about it, turning a simple question into a wonderful story.
Today the most popular hobby is, depending on what site you pluck out of the 2 million or so that a search returns, either gardening or fishing. Photography is still pretty high on all the lists. A quick peek at Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or any other social site confirms that. Hopefully some of those images will last for 50 years so when today’s generation fast forwards the next mid-60s they will turn into their own stories. And rest happily ever after.
That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?
Fishing For Memories
Trout season begins this week. Saturday specifically. In my state. I’ve never fished for trout. I’ve fished for walleye, I’ve fished for bass, I’ve fished for compliments. But I’ve never fished for trout. And that’s unusual for around here because there is a lot of trout around here. Of course, to catch trout around here you have to fish around here and I’ve never done that either.
Around here is huge on fishing. The county I live in issues more fishing licenses than anywhere else in the state, odd for an urban area but the numbers don’t lie. Even though the county sports only 10 percent of the state’s population it has ranked number 1 in fish licenses since 1919. Probably before that but that’s as far back as I could find records. For most of those years there were more fishing licenses issued in this one county than in the rest of the state combined.
I’m not a real fisherman – or fisherperson as the TV reporter reminded the viewing public of the start of trout season put it. I fish, or fished, once or twice a year and at what could at best be called sporadically over 40 years or so.
My first fishing memory was of my father taking me up into the mountains for an overnight trip with two friends of his and their sons. I didn’t catch anything. I’m not sure that anybody caught anything. I remember cooking something outside for dinner but it was probably hamburgers. After dark we piled into someone’s station wagon and went deer spotting and that night slept in someone else’s hunting cabin. That was the first fishing memory I have. It is also the first memory I have of doing something special with my father.
My second fishing memory came 20 years later and 20 states away. Floating in the middle of some lake in the middle of Texas were me and an Army friend in a rented bass boat. It had all that was required for fishing for bass. We had the trolling motor attached to the bow, the big Merc mounted on the stern, the electronic fish finder, the funny chairs that looked like bar stools. We got just far enough out to finish our to-go coffees and were when his pager went off. Return to base. His unit was being mobilized. In less time to write about it we were back at the dock, secured the boat, gotten to the car, and were two-thirds of the 15 minute drive to base. That’s when my pager went off. Later that day we found ourselves as parts of one of the largest training exercises our base had mounted in years. We ate in the field that night but it wasn’t fish.
Another 20 years and in the middle of another lake, this one called Erie, I was one of a group of five pulling in our 30th, and last, walleye. After years of doing so, my friend had the planning down pat for this trip. We left the day before for the drive north, now mostly highway making it a relatively quick trip. Quick enough that we got there hours before anyone else. We picked up our licenses, checked into the hotel, and asked for wake up calls for 4 the next morning. That gave us twelve hours to meet the rest of the gang, have a few beers, have dinner, retell our lies from previous years’ trips, make our ways back to the hotel, and turn in for the night. What was much more than but felt much less than a couple of hours later we were back in the lobby with our coffees and headed for the dock. Our hired captain and his boat were waiting in the dark and we clambered in for the ride to where the fish waited in the dark. The lines weren’t all in yet when the first walleye struck. As he was being brought in another line was hit. The first fish was landed, pictured, and chucked into the well when number three hooked on. And so it went. Nobody remembered a year when the fish came so willingly to us. We had reached our limit and turned back to the docks before some other boats had begun their day. The picture of us with our racks straining under the morning take was on the captain’s charter company’s website the following day. A copy of it is still on one of my walls. A week later we reassembled in my friend’s back yard to fry fish and tell lies. That was the last fishing memory I’ve had. Three weeks later I was in the hospital where a surgeon took longer than we did to fish for his limit.
Trout season starts this Saturday. I’ve never fished for trout.
That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?
Get the Picture?
Last week I was digging under the bed to see what I could pull out of there. I try to clean out the “underbed storage” about every ten or fifteen years. I found a duffel bag that I was looking for just a few months ago. There were coin wrappers and bill straps; unfortunately they were all empty. I saw a shoe box with no shoes in it. And there was a camera bag. Not the big bag that had the big camera, lenses, flash and such. That was in the office. Not the little case that held the palm size digital camera that goes on vacation if I ever go on vacation again. This was a forgotten camera bag with a roll of film (actually a cartridge of film), a strange sized battery, and a claim check from an airline that has since gone out of business. No camera.
I don’t remember the last time I used a film camera. I do remember it was a 35mm camera and not one that used the 110 cartridge. I remember a camera that used that cartridge but I remember it from something like thirty or forty years ago. (I know I cleaned out under the bed since then. I know that because I’ve moved a few times since then.)
I might not remember that camera – and it’s a good thing the camera wasn‘t there because nobody probably still processes those little film cartridges – but I do remember that I used to take quite a few pictures and actually displayed them. I had pictures on walls, on end tables, in bookcases, on desks, even stuck to the front of the refrigerator in magnetic picture frames. Still do. I’ve slowed down in picture taking. Lots of people today take many more pictures than I ever did. But how many of those pictures ever end up as photographs.
So many pictures get taken and are posted somewhere electronically. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I’ve always thought of a picture as an opportunity to remember someone or something. At work I had pictures on my desk, file cabinets, and walls. They were of my daughter, of She and me, of people from work doing fun things. They were snapshots of things to make me smile usually when I most needed a smile. I remember only three other managers in my building who had personal pictures somewhere in their offices.
Print a picture, pop a stick or chip in a printer at a drugstore, or download a few shots to a digital frame. Don’t make all of your future memories “images.” Take a photo every now and then.
That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?
The Real Reality Show Blog 