Learning to read...

Learning to read...  I started reading at a very young age, and a large part of the credit for that goes to my mom.  I have no memory at all of my earliest brushes with reading, just stories about it that mom told me years later. 

According to her, when I was three (but nearly four), she was reading a kid's story out loud to me, and I asked her how she was doing that.  She sat me in her lap, put the book down in front of me, and started pointing to the words as she read them.  After that, I apparently insisted on her doing that whenever she read to me; for some reason the act of reading fascinated the young me.  Mom told me that by the time we'd read a few books like this, I was recognizing many words – and learning how to pronounce them from their spelling.  She didn't use any sort of method or curriculum to teach me, just the examples and practice – and lots of encouragement.  We had several hundred books at home, many of them inherited from my paternal grandparents.  Many of these books were aimed at children or juveniles (such as the Uncle Wiggly series by Howard Garis, and the Dr. Doolittle series by Hugh Lofting).  By the time I entered first grade (I never went to kindergarten; back then parents had the choice of skipping it), I was reading books on my own.

Mom told me that she tried the same thing with my brother Scott and my sister Holly, but neither of them (as toddlers) had the same interest in it that I did.  Both are avid readers as adults, but they didn't start as young as I did.

My own memories of reading when young start when I was seven or eight years old.  I have two very clear memories of reading at that age.

The first was reading novels from the Reader's Digest Condensed Books that my parents were buying almost from their outset in 1950.  We had dozens of these books on our shelves, and each of them contained about five novels (and sometimes, non-fiction).  These were my introduction to adult literature.  Their shorter length and dumbed-down vocabulary were absolutely perfect for me at that time.  When I first started reading them, mom would check the novels first to make sure I wasn't reading something she thought I shouldn't.  Then she discovered that prohibiting a particular volume just made me want to read it more – so she gave up :)  There were quite a few occasions when she had some conversations with me that were very awkward for her, when I started asking about things I'd read in the novels.  She consistently encouraged me to read them, though.  I devoured those books; by the time I was about ten I'd read every one we owned, and longed for more.

The second clear memory was when I was eight years old, not long after my birthday, and mom coming home from a yard sale with a complete copy of the World Book Encyclopedia from the early '50s, in great condition.  She was very excited about it, as she hoped it was something I would be able to learn from.  I don't think she expected what my reaction was: I was determined to read the entire thing.  I did, too, though it took me several years to do it.  I spent a lot of time with a dictionary by my side while I did that, and I remember sometimes having to read whole sets of articles that cross-referenced each other.  That was a real challenge for the small me!  All through that period, my mom was encouraging me to keep at it.  Of course I couldn't assimilate all that knowledge to be found in those volumes, but the breadth of exposure to ideas and facts that reading gave me has benefited me for my entire life.  I remember that period as transformative for me, most especially for the introduction to science, math, technology, and history those volumes gave me.  They also introduced me to the very idea of learning from books (sans teacher), and that's something I've been doing all my life since then.

I never would have done that reading without my mom's help and prodding – and without that reading, I'm certain my life would have taken a very different course...

Update 6/27/2016: My brother Scott emailed me with this:

You were probably 4 or 5 when you could read a lot. I wanted to be like you and I tried reading but every book I tried was boring as hell except for science fiction. When I was 5 or 6 years old I read Jules Verne's 'Mysterious Island'. It was a spine tingling sensational experience for me. I felt like I was there with the characters exploring that island and meeting Captain Nemo. It was a real joy for me to read this book even though I was a very slow reader, and that's when I got hooked on reading which for me was mostly cartoons, comic books and science fiction. So when I wasn't drawing or working on the farm (90% of my spare time) - I would read. I remember bragging about how young I was when I read that book as I was proud as heck with myself for accomplishing this at this age as soon as I put the book down.  That was a fat book.

You know you're having a bad day...

You know you're having a bad day ... when you make a network cable that tests bad (one open conductor), so you replace both ends – and it still tests bad!  That's exactly what just happened to me.  I couldn't believe it when the cable tested bad after replacing both new ends I'd just installed.  I tracked it down: there was actually a flaw in the cable itself, a place where one conductor got kinked and broke.

First time that has ever happened to me, in over 50 years of building electronic gear.

That cable was “proudly” made in the U.S., too...

Just saying...

Just saying...  I scanned in some more paper today (love my paperless system!), and I noticed a feature that counts the total pages scanned to any folder.  I've been using this system for just under 18 months now, and I have scanned 266 pages of medical-related stuff.  The vast majority of this is either Explanation of Benefits (EOBs) from our insurance company, or bills from medical providers.  That's about one page of paperwork every other day.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a bit ... excessive?

We're still receiving EOBs and bills for Debbie's latest injury, a month ago.  But so far, we've received stuff for:

• paramedics who treated Debbie at the fairgrounds
• ambulance that took her to the hospital
• emergency room
• three different labs for blood and urine tests
• four different X-rays and CAT scans at the hospital
• evaluation for surgery
• medical ward (while waiting for surgery and recovering from it)
• transitional care unit
• physical therapy at the hospital
• physical therapy at home
• surgeon who did the knee repair
• anesthesiologist
• surgery room
• drugs from hospital pharmacy
• followup exam at the surgeon's offices (not at the hospital)
• X-rays at the surgeon's office

Surely there's a better way than subjecting everyone who needs medical care to this sort of paperwork avalanche.  It's as though you took your car in for repair, and then got 40 “Explanation of Repair” forms, along with bills from the oil wholesaler, the mechanic, the lift, the billing department, the guy who cleans the place up, the spark plug manufacturer, and the other 35 parts they used.

Just saying...

All men are created equal...

All men are created equal...  While I cannot recall either mom or dad ever using that particular (famous) phrase, I'm certain they'd both have agreed with it.  I've written before about one particularly memorable example of my dad's lack of racial prejudice.  Mom was of one mind with dad on that subject, and she showed it in her daily behavior.  My younger readers may not realize that such blindness to race was far from the norm back then.  It certainly wasn't a rare thing to have a family free of outright racial or religious prejudice – but it was, I think, a minority of them.  I remember that most families I knew (neighbors, friends', etc.) had adults who didn't hesitate to express, forcefully and perhaps vulgarly, their own racial prejudices.  This wasn't restricted to white families, either – I recall a Chinese friend whose father hosted a burning hatred of black men. 

My own family, thanks to mom and dad, contrasted sharply with these experiences.  Mom and dad weren't militant in any sense.  Even during the civil rights movement in the '60s, they were quietly unprejudiced, but not really trying to change the world outside their family.  But they were sure determined that their own children would not be raised as unthinking racists.  We kids saw this through their actions.  Some of mom's actions I remember:

• Gertrude Ames was the mom in the black family that were tenants on our farm.  I remember mom swapping cooking tips and recipes with Gertrude, entrusting Gertrude with babysitting us (including my youngest brother as an infant), and just generally treating her exactly as she would any other woman.  It's not so much that mom did anything special with Gertrude, it's that she didn't.
• One of my friends in junior high school was a classmate named Matthew G. who lived a mile or so from our house, along a back road.  I had been over to Matt's house a number of times before he ever came over to ours.  On that first visit of his, my mom invited him in to have lunch with us.  Matt's family was Jewish, and they kept kosher at his home – so the lunch my mom had prepared, with sandwiches and milk, Matt knew he couldn't eat.  He was very embarrassed, literally turning red.  Mom gently asked him if she could call his mom to find out what he could eat, which made Matt feel better – and then she called Matt's mom and got the first lesson in her life on making a kosher meal.  Her good-humored and open-minded approach soon had both Matt and his mom laughing, and it wasn't long before the mom's came up with an acceptable meal for Matt, served on paper plates and in disposable cups.  We kids saw that mom didn't care if he was Jewish, that she respected his religion's beliefs, and had no problem with accommodating them to the extent she could.  Something that made a particular impression on me was how easy it was to talk something like that dietary conflict out with an equally open adult (Matt's mom).
• When I was perhaps 7 or 8 years old, someone knocked on our door on Halloween evening.  We didn't get a lot of trick-or-treaters, but we did get a few most years, and mom always had some nice treats ready.  On the occasion I am remembering, when we opened the door there were three cute little kids in homemade costumes (the norm back then!) on the porch, and a teen-aged girl just behind keeping an eye on them.  All of them were strangers to us, all of them were black, and when my mom opened the door, the girl immediately started to round the kids up to leave.  Mom then said something like “Now which kind of treats would you like?”, making it clear as could be that they were welcome to choose some treats out of the bowl she was holding out.  There was some hesitation, but then the kids came shyly forward and picked out some stuff while the girl looked uncomfortable and worried.  Mom was being as nonthreatening, cheerful, and smiley as she could possibly be.  Finally the kids left, and even the girl had a tentative smile.  Mom shut the door, sat down, and started crying.  My dad heard her, and came in to find out what was wrong.  I remember her saying how awful it was that these little kids would think they couldn't come to our house on Halloween just because they were colored (that was the then-proper term).  This incident sticks in my memory, I'm sure, because I started asking questions about what was going on – and both mom and dad tried their best to explain racial prejudice to me.  That's a surprisingly hard concept to get across to a naive kid with no experience of it.

Mom's absence of prejudice wasn't perfect, though.  In recent years – mainly since 9/11 – she was afraid of Muslims, and in particular of Muslim women with covered faces.  This fear led rather directly to the kinds of prejudicial behavior that she so abhorred in any other circumstance.  For instance, there's no way that mom would have gone through a checkout stand with a clerk she knew was Muslim.  The first time I encountered this in her, around ten years ago, I was shocked – precisely because it was so counter to every prior experience I had with her.  On that occasion I went to WalMart with her, and when she saw a woman wearing a hijab, she abruptly abandoned her partly filled shopping cart and left the store, with an open-mouthed me trailing behind.  I didn't know what had happened until we got back to her car!

I'm so very thankful that I was raised by parents that set such a fine example of racial and religious harmony.  My life would have been much poorer had I instead been taught to fear and loath those different than myself...

Now here's an interesting idea!

Now here's an interesting idea!  CANZUK.  And maybe Brexit made it more likely...

Ground Observer Corps...

Ground Observer Corps...  Most Americans alive today likely have never heard of this organization, also known as GOC.  It was modeled after the British civilian observers mobilized in WWII, and the goal of it was to search the skies for enemy aircraft.  In the earlier days of WWII, there was no radar – so visual observation was the only practical way to spot and identify an aircraft.  More information about the GOC can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

When the U.S. joined the war in December 1941, my mom was just nine years old.  At the end of the war with Germany, in 1945, she was almost thirteen.  Despite her young age, she volunteered for the Ground Observer Corps – which was mainly composed of women, children, and men too old or physically unable to fight.  She joined it when she was ten years old, and she wasn't the youngest volunteer by a long shot.

I first learned about mom's participation in the GOC in the mid-'80s, when she saw a structure in California that reminded her of the watch tower she knew from her GOC days, and she mentioned it.  After that we had several long conversations about her experiences in the GOC, and WWII in general.  

The particular GOC group she was part of kept two observers on station 24x7 in a concrete tower (around 20' high) located above the ocean beach just east of Plum Island, which itself is just south of Sandy Hook, New Jersey.  Like most of the observers there, she bicycled from home to the tower for each of her watches.  She stood four hour watches, five times a week.  Her group was responsible not only for spotting German aircraft, but also German submarines.  These occasionally prowled along the American east coast, and they were especially prevalent near large ports.  The tower where mom stood watches was close to two of America's largest cargo ports: New York and Newark.

Mom never saw a German aircraft, though her group did report a few “unknowns” – aircraft that they could not identify.  All of them turned out to be experimental aircraft flying from one of the many military air bases in the area.  She did spot two German submarines, both times at night, and both times with no running lights (as was usual for German submarines operating in U.S. waters).  Like the other observers who spotted submarines, she spotted them by their silhouettes when they were backlit by the moon or more distant (and lit up) ships.  She could still recall her fear and excitement at calling in the report – by getting the operator on a standard telephone and saying the magic phrase “Army flash.”   That caused the operator to connect her to an Army center where these reports were collected, verified, and perhaps acted upon.  The two subs my mom spotted submerged again before they could be attacked; so far as she knows, her reports didn't result in any military action.

Of interest to me was how the Army managed to make use of kids like my mom for this effort.  When she started, the only “equipment” she got was a set of flash cards with photos and silhouettes of the aircraft and submarines she was supposed to identify (both friendly and enemy).  She spent hours studying and practicing with these cards, and was only allowed to man the observation tower when she passed a test administered by the Army liaison officer to her group.  She was tremendously proud of the fact that she passed that test on her first attempt, about a month after she got the set of flash cards.  This was, perhaps, another example of her powers of memory.

Later in the war, the observation tower got two pairs of WWI-era binoculars – far from the top-of-the-line, but a heck of a lot better than having nothing at all.  Only after they had the binoculars could mom see well enough to actually identify a submarine from its silhouette.

My mom's partner on watch was one of three people (in a rotation): a young woman a few years older than her, a WWI destroyer veteran, and a older lady around 50 years old.  She remembered long conversations with these three people, all of whom she became very friendly with.  The veteran, in particular, fascinated her because of his understanding of how to stand a watch: how to preserve your best eyesight (by staying in total darkness), how to stay awake and alert, and on the importance of avoiding false alarms.  That fellow made a big impression on her, and was also responsible for expanding her four-letter word vocabulary :)

In my conversations with mom about the GOC, it seemed to me that the most important thing about it for her was that it gave her a sense of actually helping the war effort in a tangible way.  She, like most others not actually at war, was filled with the sense of the existential danger facing the country – and she desperately wanted to contribute to winning.  The only other thing she did that gave her a similar sense of participation were the drives to collect metal (especially aluminum) that she spent a lot of time doing in 1943 and 1944.  But the watches she stood for the GOC gave her an especially direct sense of helping in a way that was as close to being a soldier as it was possible for her to do.

Something I've thought about often, since then, is just how young she was at the time she volunteered for the GOC.  I don't have many clear memories of any kind at just ten or twelve years old, but I certainly wasn't doing anything that could be even remotely construed as helping a war effort!  Mom was then about the same age that I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.  I remember that event clearly enough – but only a few isolated vignettes.  I couldn't tell you much about the context I was in; I was just a kid, consumed with the things that most kids in those days were consumed with.  None of that was particularly memorable.  My mom, at the same age, was keenly aware of the country being at war.  She followed the war news avidly, as did everyone she knew who was still stateside.  She was aware of the setbacks and victories, and she remembered them all still, forty years later when I had those conversations with her.  For instance, she recalled vividly the sense of joy and hope she had (as did those around her) upon hearing about Doolittle's raid on Tokyo in April 1942, when she was just nine years old.  Her memories of those years seemed to me to be more like the memories of an adult's experience, not those of a child.  But child she was.

I've read several history books that covered the GOC, including one that was entirely dedicated to it.  All of them conclude that from a military standpoint, the GOC was actually a net negative – about 90% of the GOC's reports of enemy aircraft or ships were judged to be false, and quite a bit of military resource was spent chasing them down.  But in one sense, at least, the GOC was a resounding success.  My mom's sense of wartime participation was far from unique.  The GOC was a huge morale booster for its volunteers (over a million civilians!), and even at the time the leadership of it recognized the value of that.  During the war there were several efforts by military commanders to shut the GOC down, but those efforts were always shot down by senior commanders who understood that the GOC was about more than spotting airplanes.

Somehow I'm certain that my mom would agree with that...

Great Britain voted to leave the European Union...

Great Britain voted to leave the European Union...  That sure surprised me!  I have no idea what the economic impact will be, either to Great Britain, the EU, or the U.S.  But I've long thought that the whole idea of the EU was fatally flawed – especially the fact that unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats ran the thing.  As Nigel Farage said repeatedly during the campaign: a vote for “Leave” is a vote for independence and democracy.  I'll take that over (possible) negative economic impact – which is most likely short-lived anyway.

For me, perhaps the most exciting possibility this opens up is that the entire EU will collapse.  First, Great Britain was one of the largest net contributors to the EU – and that means that the remaining EU will now have a lot less money per capita to play around with, reducing the attraction for all the net takers.  Second, the independence-leaning politicians of the other EU members are likely to be greatly emboldened by this vote – and even more so if the exit is free of horrible economic consequences.  Third, there will be a contingent within the EU who wants to punish Great Britain for their sin of leaving – and I think that the debate over that issue (whether to punish Great Britain with import/export duties, passport restrictions, etc., or to welcome them as they have Switzerland) will serve to further weaken the collective will to maintain the EU.

Way to go, Great Britain!

An old-fashioned skill...

An old-fashioned skill...  For about half my mom's life, the cash registers used by check-out clerks at grocery stores and most other retail stores were mechanical devices.  My younger readers may have trouble believing this, but bar code scanners had not yet been invented.  The poor clerks had to manually enter every single price into their mechanical cash register, which added them together using a complicated set of gears, levers, and so on.  The total showed up in the form of a miniature billboard for each digit.  Such a thing is almost unimaginable these days!

At least up until the early '70s, when I left home to join the Navy, my mom was able to do something completely unique in my own experience.  As we loaded up her shopping cart in the grocery store, she would mentally add together the cost of all the items in the cart.  So far as she was concerned, that cash register (and the clerk) were there to cheat her out of her money (something she never had much of), so she would double-check them.  It was fairly common for her to catch an error, too – I'd guess it was maybe 20% or 25% of our shopping trips.  Somehow more than half the time the error was in the store's favor, too :)  Each time her mentally-computed total didn't match the total on that cash register, she'd make the clerk go over the whole thing, using the tape generated by the cash register (which just had prices, not the name of the item).  Sometimes the error was an incorrectly entered price, and sometimes it was a mismatch between the price marked on the shelves and the price the clerk looked up.  In every case, mom would insist on getting the error fixed (even when it was in her favor) before she'd hand over any money.

When we were grocery shopping, she was buying for six people (she and my dad, and four kids).  There would be a lot of different items in that shopping cart – and yet, most of the time, her mentally-computed total matched the clerk's total to the penny.  Can you do this?  I certainly can't!

So how did she do this?

One thing to understand is that for girls who went to school when and where she did, this was a skill taught to them as something ordinary, along with reading and writing.  Really!  I did some research on this a while back, and discovered that the general technique was commonly taught in the U.S. (usually just to girls) as far back as the early 1800s – and probably much earlier than that.  The video at right, if you can get past the thick Australian accent, demonstrates the general method my mom described to me.  Even with no practice at all, I can do it for a short list of numbers.  But a long list of numbers, incrementally added while you're shopping?  I don't think so!

I suspect her ability to do this sort of arithmetic was somehow related to her ability to remember the cards played during a game.  Both of them seem to me to be astounding feats of memory – and in both cases, she dismissed them as simple things that any idiot should be able to do effortlessly. 

In the '80s and later, when I went shopping with her, I noticed that she no longer double-checked the clerk.  When I queried her about this, she told me that she could still do that mental arithmetic, but it was no longer worth the effort, because she hardly ever caught an error.  I suspect part of her dropping it was also the fact that money wasn't quite so tight with she and my dad any more.  About 10 years ago, I asked her again, and she told me she'd lost the skill – but wasn't going to put the effort back into re-learning it.

It seems somehow a shame that people generally no longer have this mental arithmetic skill.  Once this was a common skill, but today someone with this skill looks like a magician performing tricks.  On the other hand, I'd trust my calculator's answer more than any answer a human produced :)  

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  The field in the photo at right is our south alfalfa field, just after it was baled (on the first cutting of the year).  Those bales are more than twice as close together as the best cutting last year (the last one).  Scott N., the fellow who leases the field from us, is indeed a happy fellow.  All of the fields he leases are producing at a high level this year, but he tells me that our field has the highest yield per acre of all of them.  He's not sure why, but he's absolutely positive that he likes it :)

For about a week now, we've had the two puppies in separate crates.  They often bark at each other across the 3 feet or so that separates them.  It occurred to me (just) today that perhaps if they couldn't see each other, they would fuss at each other less.  So today I tried draping a blanket across the end of one crate (Cabo's) – and it seems to work!  Debbie reports much less barking today.

I've spent a few hours today dealing with bills, trying to straighten out the air travel mess from last month (when I canceled some flights, added some, and rescheduled others, and changed all sorts of things – all by phone, so no paper records).  I think I finally got through it all.  Sheesh...

This is...

This is ... quite the court transcript.  I've never seen anything like this before :)

The card player...

The card player...  My mom loved to play cards – almost any game was fine with her.  For a time in the late '50s and early '60s, she was a fairly serious contract bridge player, playing several evenings a week.  She was consistently one of the top ten players in New Jersey during this period.  As we kids got older, she had less evening time for that sort of thing, and her card playing became more social and recreational, and less serious.

I asked her once how she got started playing cards, and why she loved them so much.  Part of the answer I could easily guess: her dad and his friends (both in Maine and in New Jersey) were avid card players – usually penny-ante poker, accompanied by lots of beer, cigarettes, joshing, and laughter.  Even when she was quite young, they often let her join the game (and participate in the beer, cigarettes, cussing, and joshing :)  Purely recreational and social.

The other part of the answer, though, was a surprise to me.  She joined a bridge club in high school, found that she had a real talent for the game.  There were two things that were easy for her, but that most people found quite difficult.  First, she had no problem remembering all the cards played in a game.  Not just which cards, but who they were played by and in what order.  Up until a year or so before she died, so far as I can tell her card memory was perfect.  Secondly, the complex bidding system used in contract bridge made sense to her almost instantly (that's something I've never been able to wrap my head around, despite trying several times).  Two months after she joined the bridge club (this was in 10th grade), she was the number one player at her school – and she stayed number one until she graduated.

That experience with the bridge club was her gateway to serious card playing.  By “serious”, I mean that she studied each game she learned to understand the strategy and tactics.  This study wasn't from a book, but rather from her own experience and practice – but it was very deliberate.  If you talked with her about poker, for example, she could go on for hours about the subtle differences in the odds for different variations in poker.  She never did understand the mathematics of probability, but she did understand it intuitively, just through her own experience.  I once found an odds table for a particular variation of poker, and went through it with her.  She couldn't tell me what the specific probabilities were, but she could rank them.  For any given hand, she could quite accurately tell you how many to discard and draw, based on her intuitive understanding of the probabilities.  She had this same sort of knowledge for every card game she had mastered – and that was a lot of card games!

Whenever the family got together with her, no matter where or when, she always wanted to play cards with us.  I can't think of anything that she enjoyed more.  As an adult, once I left the Navy (where card-playing is the standard time-passing mechanism) I rarely played cards – except when visiting with mom, or when she was visiting me.  In my head, playing cards is closely correlated to being with mom.  When I recall something about her (especially her laughter), very often it's associated with playing cards.

She was the card-playing mom.  My mom, our mom.  I miss her...

Morning in Paradise...

Morning in Paradise...  The field adjoining our front lawns was baled and trucked out yesterday.  The yield was unusually high, putting a big smile on Scott N.'s face (he's the fellow who leases our field to grow hay).  That cleared me to turn on the sprinklers for my lawn, which I did this morning.  As I cleared one nozzle, I noted the beautiful sunrise over the Wasatch Mountains to our east, and managed to get a photo of it looking over the fields across the highway east of our home.  That grass hay field is owned by the LDS church, who leases it out to Mike Clawson, a local dairy farmer. 

This morning I'll be transporting the kittens we're fostering, along with their mom, to a veterinary clinic about 25 miles north of us.  This clinic works with the Four Paws rescue organization to neuter stray or feral cats at low cost.  In a week or so, we'll be handing these kittens – now over 3 pounds each – over to Four Paws for adoption.  The little calico girl will be staying behind with us...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Scott and I made a trip down to the PODS storage facility in Salt Lake City this morning, to bring back a load of the stuff my sister Holly and her husband packed up a couple of weeks ago.  The pod made the trip in good order; we saw very little damage to the stuff inside (one plastic tub collapsed, and we haven't yet inspected the stuff in it, and one piece of furniture had a corner's finished rubbed off).  A couple of the things I was most concerned about made it just fine.  We may discover a bit more damage when we unwrap stuff, but I'm not expecting anything serious – it all looks great.

It was really hot down there doing heavy physical work.  The pod had been moved out onto the pavement for our access, and it was in the full sun on a day with a forecast for a 99°F high.  By the time we were done filling Scott's trailer, we were both hot and thirsty.  It's quite a bit warmer in Salt Lake City than in Paradise, and I suspect it's more humid as well.  When we got back to Paradise, it felt almost cool by comparison :)

We took about 2/3 of the pod's contents this morning, and it's all going to Scott's basement for further sorting.  We're headed back down to Salt Lake City to pick up the rest of the stuff next Tuesday.  The next load will head to my barn for sorting and (for some things) shipment back to other people.  I suspect it will be two or three weeks before we finally have completed all that work.

On our drive back to Paradise, I got a most unexpected phone call: from Danny Roger, the chaplain for Rocky Mountain Hospice, the folks who cared for mom while she was here in Utah.  He was checking up on Scott and I, to make sure we were ok, and whether we needed any support from him or their associated psychologist.  It's been almost two weeks since mom died, and nearly every day since then someone from the hospice has reached out to us in one way or another.  It almost feels like we're disappointing them when I tell them that we're doing ok, and don't need anything in the way of assistance ... but it sure is comforting to know that if we did need some help, it would be available...

Every box tells a story...

Every box tells a story...  A few weeks ago, while at my mom's old house in Virginia, I was searching for my dad's old Army records.  He served in the Army Air Force in WWII, as did his brother (and my uncle) Donald.  In that search I came across this small wooden box, about 8" x 6" x 3".  A photo of its lid is at right.

From the return address you can learn a lot.  My uncle Donald was a Technical Sergeant, specializing in radio and radar repair for the B-29 “Superfortress” bomber (photo at left).  He was assigned to the 875th Bombardment Squadron of the 498th Bomber Group, and he was stationed in Saipan from late 1944 through the end of the war in late 1945.  That dates the box to sometime in that period, and tells us that it was sent from Saipan.

Like many of his Army Air Force contemporaries, my uncle Donald had a secondary assignment: belly gunner in the tail belly gun.  He didn't like to talk about the war at all, but one day while we were searching on our farm for Indian artifacts, he told me that he flew on around 70 bombing runs over Japan.  On most of those missions he never fired his guns (except for testing) – American air superiority was so complete that usually the only defense was anti-aircraft guns from the ground.  Nevertheless, being a belly gunner was a risky proposition – should anything cause the aircraft to make a belly landing, you would end up being a smear on the runway.

One thing about my uncle that long surprised me: though he was a highly trained electronics technician, when I knew him (after the war) he never demonstrated either interest in, or knowledge of, electronics.  His post-war profession was accounting, which seems like an unlikely career course for someone so highly trained in then-exotic electronics.  To this day I have no idea why he abandoned electronics.  His older brother, my uncle Earle, was a noted electrical engineer (worked for Scott making transformer-coupled hi-fidelity tube-based amplifiers) who then transitioned into writing for and then editing one of the major publications in the field (EDN).  I guess uncle Donald didn't get those genes :)

The box itself is hand made from 3/16" plywood – three plies, aircraft grade.  It's probably spruce (as this was most common in WWII), but could possibly be birch.  From the broad grain, though, I suspect it's spruce.  This plywood is a material that could be found in any aircraft mechanic's shop at the time – it was the go-to material for interior partitions, cabinets, and so on, so uncle Donald would have had easy access to it.  The dovetailing is hand-done, with a chisel or possibly a knife; sharp blade marks and grain deformation are clearly visible, so it wasn't cut with a saw.  The dovetails are only approximately placed, as though they weren't even measured but just eyeballed.  Similarly, the dovetail widths vary by as much as an eighth of an inch.  I'm fairly certain uncle Donald made this box himself – as I saw him make some similar boxes in the '60s, using thin teak plywood.  When I watched him make such a box, he used an ordinary pocket knife and wood glue to do the entire job.

Then there's the address the box was sent to.  Mrs. Earle Dilatush was my grandmother, and uncle Donald's mother.  Her address doesn't even include a street, much less a zip code (which didn't exist back then) – just her name, town, and state.  At the time Robbinsville was quite a small village, located a few miles north of the farm where she lived – but still, that's all that was required for a letter or package to get to her.

Inside the box you can see fine particles of sand and shell embedded in the wood.  It's possible those particles got there long after the box was originally sent.  But it's also possible – likely, I think – that those particles are actually from Saipan.  My uncle was an amateur archaeologist, and he did some of the very first archaeological field work with the native settlements on Saipan.  He even had an article about his work in Saipan published in a professional journal, despite his (utter) lack of credentials.  His letters mention several hundred pounds of artifacts that he collected on Saipan and shipped back to his mother.  I'm sad to say that I never saw a single one of these artifacts, and I have no idea what happened to them.  But I'm guessing that this box was used to ship one (or some) of them back to his mother – and probably particularly interesting artifacts, given the care taken in making this box.

There you have it: every box tells a story (with apologies to Rod Stewart)!

Mom = safe...

Mom = safe...  One of my earliest memories is from when I was about 7 or 8 years old.  My brother Scott and I had been playing out in the field near our house, digging a hole to make a “fort”.  I was wielding a spade, and Scott a garden rake.  At one point we encountered some hard dirt, and Scott swung the rake overhead like a pick – but hit my head instead of the dirt.

Various people I've told this story to have immediately assumed that this skull vs. rake encounter explains some of the mental aberrations they believe I possess.  However, so far as I can tell the only direct consequence of that rake to the head was blood – a lot of blood.  Scalp wounds are notorious for bleeding heavily, and I had a bodacious scalp wound: a semi-circular incision about 8" long, resulting in a flap the size of a small dish that fell forward over my forehead.  Blood was pouring over my face, to the point where I could scarcely see.  My head hurt like hell.  I did what any kid would do: I ran for my mother.

She was perhaps 100' away, working in the kitchen of our house.  I can only imagine what she felt when she heard me burst through the door, yelling my head off, then saw me looking like someone who'd had a bucket of blood poured over their head.  I do know that she fell to her knees and looked absolutely stricken.  That so surprised me that I stopped yelling and started to get worried.  Years later mom told me that she had very nearly passed out, but managed to get herself together while on her knees.

Shortly after that she was talking to me, to make sure I was still alive.  Then she started looking carefully at my head, discovered the flap of scalp, and flipped it roughly back into place.  Watching her, I saw her getting covered with blood (especially her hands and arms) – and that's the first time I really understood that I was bleeding heavily.  Next thing she did was to call our family doctor, an old fashioned general practitioner named Dr. Norman Garwood, located in Crosswicks (about a half hour from our home).  She got his wife and assistant, who quickly got the doctor himself on the phone.  Good old Dr. Garwood calmed mom down, asked some questions, had her put a clean towel over my head, told her to have me press that towel down (which hurt!), then told her to bundle me into the car and get me to his office as fast as she could.

Mom did exactly that – we were on the road in about 30 seconds.  She didn't even wash the blood off her hands.  I remember riding in the passenger seat (instead of the back seat like we usually did), with her talking to me the whole time to make sure I wasn't passing out.  She also kept hollering at me to press harder on that towel; she was worried about how much blood I was losing (later, Dr. Garwood assured her that I hadn't lost enough to be worried about, other than making a mess).  The blood on my face was starting to congeal, and that felt weird and uncomfortable.  It also smelled and tasted odd.

Most of all, though, I remember feeling safe, despite the frightening thing that had happened to me.  Why?  Because mom was there, doing her mom thing: comforting me, making sure I was ok, getting me to medical help.  To me, she looked cool, calm, and totally on top of things.  I never felt in danger at all.  I felt pain, to be sure, but never actually threatened.  Her total focus on me and my injury surrounded me like a protective cocoon. 

Moms are an awfully good thing...

When we got to Dr. Garwood's office, he was all ready with the cleaning supplies, needles, and thread.  He spent a half hour or so getting all the dirt (from the rake) out of my wound, then just a few minutes stitching it up.  I got a lollipop and bragging rights for a bunch of stitches (which were, much to my chagrin, almost invisible under my then-thick head of hair).

Many years later, mom told me that the trip to Dr. Garwood's office that day was one of the most terrifying things she'd ever done, and not just because I was bleeding all over the place.  As long as I kept talking, she said, she figured I wasn't about to croak.  She was most frightened by the possibility that my skull had been cracked, and that I'd suffered some sort of brain damage (and I can hear the jokers now!).  She was also frightened by something else: she and dad had no money to pay Dr. Garwood or a hospital: I'd sustained this injury at a very dicey moment for them, financially.  I don't remember hearing her talk with Dr. Garwood about the money issue, though she said I was there.  Dr. Garwood told her not to worry about the money; he'd give her a bill that they could pay if and when they could.  If and when they could.  He also told her that that was true for any emergency medical situation – don't worry about the money, just get the emergency dealt with.  Years later, when she told me about her side of this story, that was what she remembered most clearly: Dr. Garwood telling her just not to worry about the money.  Mom and dad did pay Dr. Garwood back, but it wasn't until the following spring, nearly a year later.  She took him a check with an apple pie as “interest” – and we heard about that apple pie for years afterwards when we saw Dr. Garwood :)

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Well, yesterday's furniture assembly project didn't go quite as intended.  The long table and hutch assembled just fine, and you can see the result in the photo at right.  The desk?  That's a whole 'nother story...

The desk was supposed to go right about where I stood to take the photo at right.  As I got ready to disassemble the desk (so I could get it through the office door), I noticed that it seemed a tad big for the space it was supposed to fit in.  I measured the width available: 64".  I measured the desk's width: 81".  Yikes – 17" too big!  What happened?

My first thought was that I had screwed up the measurements used when we ordered the furniture, and that I had actually ordered the 81" desk.  However, when I went back and checked the paperwork, I saw that we actually ordered a 60" desk.  The craftsman messed up!

So we contacted our furniture broker, and she's already committed to fixing the problem.  It took five months to actually receive this furniture, though ... so now we're worried that we won't see the (correct) desk until near the end of the year.  Dang!  For a while, Debbie may have to put her computer on the same old folding table she was using, while the rest of her office is gorgeous.  There's also the matter of this gigantic desk we can't use, and that's now sitting on the second floor of our house.  Somehow that will have to be sent back to North Carolina, from whence it came. 

Tomorrow my brother Scott and I will drive down to Salt Lake City to unload the “pod” of my mom's stuff that was shipped out of Virginia.  It's likely that it will take us at least two trips to get everything; the second trip will be tomorrow.  We're going to go early in the morning to try to avoid the forecast high heat, but ... we'll be unloading in the heat no matter what.  Oh, well...

This morning we had a beautiful full moon hanging over the Wellsville Mountains just before sunrise (at right, from our front yard).  If you're wondering why we have three trash cans in our front yard, they're for storing bird seed.  I'm going through about 25 pounds a week now, of four different kinds of seed (black oil sunflower, high energy mix, Nijer thistle, and cracked corn). 

Today I'm expecting a split-system air conditioner to arrive via truck.  This is going to cool my office down to something livable on hot summer afternoons.  The model I got is actually a heat pump, so it could also be used to heat the office in the winter.  That means I'll have three sources of heat: the forced air from the (floor heated) first floor, the wood stove, and the heat pump.  I should stay nice and cozy no matter what :)

Card from mom's hospice folks...

Card from mom's hospice folks...  From the moment mom arrived out here in Utah, we were impressed with the quality of the care her hospice team delivered.  Even more we were impressed by the genuine caring that they repeatedly demonstrated.  While all of their folks were great, the nurse assigned to mom – Logan A. – was particularly good.  When mom died, Logan was the one who called me (in the middle of the night) to let me know, and she did so in a sweet and caring way.  In a conversation a little later that same day I found out this was the worst part of the job for her.  After mom died, Logan went out of her way to reach out to me, to make sure that Scott and I were doing all right.

Yesterday we got an envelope from Rocky Mountain Care, the hospice organization, and it was obviously a card.  From the outside (above), it looked like a standard generic corporate card.  Inside was something else altogether (click to embiggen):

That was the last thing in the world that I expected.  Some of those people I never even met.  Some, like Logan, were an important part of mom's care.  I cannot even imagine doing the job these fine folks do every day.  Even if I somehow managed to make myself do it, I can't imagine maintaining that degree of caring for people – strangers to them – that they know are going to die soon.  That's the very definition of their work.  But these folks do it, and they do it very well.

Kudos to them all.  Now pardon me while I wipe a tear or three away...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Yesterday Debbie's new office furniture was delivered: a long table (with the top in two pieces for shipment), a large hutch for storage, and a desk.  All of this furniture was custom-made by the same craftsman who made our dresser and a few other pieces.  We ordered it back in February, and only now did it arrive.  It's made of massive black locust slabs with trunks for table legs.  It's stunning stuff, the kind of thing we'd only seen in glossy magazine photos before.

“Delivered” is a bit of an ambiguous term, however :)  The delivery company knew they had some heavy pieces (the hutch is over 400 pounds), so they promised to send some muscle along.  The driver, a very nice fellow named Preston, stopped in Wellsville and picked up a few relatives: his brothers and their wives and children, and his parents.  We had the whole family clan along for the effort!  My brother Scott and I were the muscle on our end.

While the delivery folks wanted to be very helpful, in fact they were completely unprepared to make this delivery.  They didn't even have knives to remove the packing material, much less any hand trucks, skids, etc.  Worse yet, they had no experience at all moving furniture.  I am vastly more experienced than they are, simply from having moved my own household a few times.

Except for the hutch, the clan and us managed to get everything upstairs.  There was a bit of damage to the desk in the process (we're working on resolving that), and the house suffered a ding or two (nothing serious).  The hutch, though, was simply too large to get upstairs.  That's my bad; I measured the hutch to fit the space and didn't even think about what it would take to get it into the upstairs office.  It was too big to fit in the front door!

So the delivery folks left, and it was just Scott and I left.  After some thinking, we realized we were going to have to partially disassemble the hutch.  A couple hours later, our front yard was littered with beautiful furniture components, and the remaining hutch framework was just small enough to fit through the door.  However ... it was too long to make the turn required to go through the front door and up the main stairway.  What to do?

After considerable thought, measurement, and plotting, I came up with a way.  We put the hutch on a pallet, and used my tractor to get it to the back door, which opens into our kitchen.  We then skidded it on a piece of cardboard through the kitchen, rotated it (with about 1" of clearance!), and skidded it into our dining room.  From there we could easily get it to our second staircase that leads up into the TV room.  I'm not quite sure how Scott and I did it, but we managed to get that monster up the staircase without dinging either it or the walls – despite having less than 1" of clearance on the width.  Once in the TV room, skidding it into the office was a piece of cake.  The hutch was upstairs – we did it!

That ended our efforts for the day.  We were both exhausted.

Today is assembly day.  The furniture is all upstairs now, but partially disassembled and not in the right place.  So far this morning I've assembled the table (though all the screws are not yet in place).  The two pieces of the table top weigh over 100 pounds each; they were quite tricky to get into place by myself.  Ingenuity was required, along with a tolerance for smashed toes :)  Next up: the desk, which will have to be disassembled to get it through the office door, then reassembled once it's inside.

It promises to be a long, long day...

The chair...

The chair...  A few weeks ago I bought a fancy electric reclining chair for my mom to use here in Utah.  With a simple hand-held control, the chair's back could be moved anywhere from lying almost flat to sitting up straight.  Likewise, a footrest could be placed at any desired angle.  On top of all that, the seat would rise high enough to stand you right up, and then go back down to normal chair height.

Mom never had a chance to use that chair.  The day after we set it up, she was admitted to the hospital, and she never returned to her independent living apartment.  After she died, we owned this very useful chair - but nobody in the family had any need of it.  What to do?

After some thought, I decided that mom would want us to find someone who could use it - preferably someone local, or a veteran ... or both.  I've come to know my predominantly LDS community well enough to know there's a good way to search for someone in need of particular help: the bishop of the ward we live in (Paradise ward 2).  

So I called our bishop and explained the situation to him.  A few days later he called back to tell me that he couldn't find anyone in ward 2 - but the bishop of ward 3 had a great candidate: Roy and Maxine M., whose house is less than a mile from ours.

Last night my brother Scott and I picked up the chair from mom's apartment and delivered it to Roy and Maxine.  We had the pleasure of getting to know them a bit - mom would have called them "salt of the earth", and she'd have liked them.  Roy has a number of physical challenges, and that chair will be a big boon to him.  Furthermore he has back surgery scheduled for next week, and he'll be unable to bend his back for a few weeks - making the chair a very timely gift for him.

Roy is local, and he's also a veteran.  Mom would have loved it that we found someone like him to give her chair to.  On the short drive home from Roy and Maxine's place I had a big smile on my face - it felt so right for mom's chair to be there for Roy...

Slo-mo puppies!

Slo-mo puppies!  Just go enjoy...

Obituary...

Obituary...  My sister Holly and I collaborated to write an obituary for mom, one that we hoped she'd approve of.  But when I called the Trenton Times (the paper she read every day for over 50 years, even after leaving New Jersey) I got quite a shock: the cost for published her short obituary would be well over $500.  Even more shocking: the tiny little newspaper in Lincoln, Maine would charge over $300!

My mom would never forgive us for wasting perfectly good money on something stupid like that.  I can almost hear her hollering at me for even considering it.  So instead, I'm going to self-publish it right here, where anyone searching the Internet for her name will find it:

Elinor Bernice Dilatush, 83, died peacefully in Logan, Utah early in the morning of June 8, 2016. She was the daughter of Donald and Mable MacLaughlin of Red Bank and Locust, New Jersey. For most of her life, for reasons that nobody really understands, Elinor lived voluntarily in New Jersey. Almost 50 years of that time was with her husband Thomas Jobes Dilatush on the Dilatush Nursery, along U.S. 130 just south of Robbinsville. Her only escape was the many summers she spent at Long Pond, Maine and camping all across the country with her family. She is survived by her four children: Mark, Holly, Scott, and Tom. While Elinor thought her children and their progeny were all extraordinary and superlative examples of humankind, an objective observer would almost certainly be less charitable – but she loved them all anyway, warts, questionable characters, and all.

Elinor loved flowers, ornamental plants, weeding, watering, birds, four-letter words, playing cards (almost any kind would do), and talking about creative ways to eliminate liberal politicians, ignorant voters, and religious fanatics with violent tendencies. She owned a .357 revolver and knew how to use it; allegedly she even occasionally hit a target when practicing. Elinor was a talented crafter: painting, sewing, and creative decorations were all in her repertoire. Her teasel Santa Clauses and gingerbread villages were famous; articles about them were published in the Trenton Times. Her cooking was legendary amongst friends and family; anyone lucky enough to eat at her table would remember the experience the rest of their lives. Her willpower was extraordinary; amongst her feats of self-control were her instant cold-turkey smoking cessation when the Surgeon General's report came out in 1964, and control of her diabetes through diet alone.

Elinor's favorite place on Earth was Long Pond, just north of Lincoln, Maine. She had much to cherish there: many friends, the natural beauty of the pond and its surrounds, and most of all the good times to be had fishing, paddling on the pond, and playing cards with the delightful cast of characters who frequented her cabin on the pond. Per her wishes, Elinor's ashes will be scattered in Long Pond so that she can look at the fishes, the loons, the people, and the pond she so cherished.

Elinor asked that no service or ceremony be held at the time of her death – she had an aversion to the very notion of formal mourning. Instead, she asked that family and close friends gather at Long Pond at an appropriate time to scatter her ashes and celebrate her life, and this is exactly what we are going to do.

We miss you, mom...

Long Pond...

Long Pond...  North of the town of Lincoln, Maine there is a body of water named “Long Pond” (Google Maps satellite view at right).  Maine has a lot of bodies of water, some quite large – so what they call a “pond” in most places would be called a fairly large lake.  Out here in Utah, Long Pond would probably be a national park :)

My grandfather – my mother's father – bought a few acres of land along the side of that pond back in the 1940s.  It was located on the western leg of Long Pond, on the south shore, accessed via Sweet Road.  My grandfather had a slew of fishing buddies up there, and they had a grand time each summer when he went up there for his vacation.  They fished, drank (lots of) beer, played cards, cussed, told stories, and played outrageous pranks on one another.  Adding to the charm was the presence of a good many “characters” who lived up there year-round.

My mother grew up amongst this joy and carousing, and for her it was some of the very best that life could deliver.  Of course she came to associate that with the place – the beautiful country that Long Pond was a part of.  The people there were also a major part of what made that place special to her, just as the people here are a big part of what makes Paradise, Utah special to Debbie and I.  Mom had a million stories about Long Pond, and every one that I can remember now involved someone there.  That's very different than the stories I remember about my dad, as often those stories involved wild places and plants – but not people.  I suspect my introversion was inherited from my dad; certainly my mom's genes did not contribute to that at all :)

Long Pond was my mom's favorite place on the planet.  Her explicit wish is to have her ashes scattered over Long Pond, so that she can “look up” to see the fish and the loons – and her son, Mark, fishing there just like her father did.  We will be honoring those wishes when we can arrange a time that works for everyone who wants to be there; tentatively that's going to be in June 2017.

Mark now owns that land alongside the lake, and he's in the process of building a new “camp” for his family to use.  His children grew up enjoying and loving Maine much as my mom did, and I suspect his grandchildren will do the same.

That is just how my mom would have wanted it...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Cabo and Mako, our two field spaniel puppies, continue to delight us.  Click the video at right to see why.

Yesterday afternoon, Debbie and I took a drive up to one of our favorite local spots: Hardware Ranch and the road to Ant Flats.  Debbie felt ready to try an outing, and while it made her knee a bit sore (with the bouncing), she pronounced it well worth it.

We saw a few wildflowers along the way (below).  The first one we're familiar with from San Diego, but I don't know it's name.  The second is a particularly nice Indian Paintbrush.  The third is unfamiliar to me, and is interestingly weird.  First, the flower's aroma resembles skunk cabbage – most unexpected!  Second, the stem is hairy and fairly tacky – but doesn't leave your fingers sticky.  It grows in low-lying, wet areas, usually in bunches of wild onions.

Even better than the wildlife, though, was the birding!  We had beautiful close-up views of a cedar waxwing, a banded kingfisher, and (we think) a juvenile black-headed grosbeak.

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  While I was setting out sprinklers for our lawn this morning, the glorious rainbow at right suddenly lit up right in front of me.  The conditions were nearly perfect: a rain squall passing to our west (headed north), and the early morning sun shining through a hole in the clouds from the east.  If you embiggen that photo and look closely, you'll see that there are two additional (much dimmer) rainbows besides the primary one.  One is just below the primary; the other is about twice the radius of the primary.  Both were clearly visible to the naked eye; the camera didn't do a great job of capturing them.

As I was drinking my tea this morning, I spotted Tim D. walking toward his hand line (irrigation pipe), getting ready to move them.  I pulled on my boots and went out to help, and the two of us spent a very companionable hour moving his three strings of hand line.  For each cycle of irrigation, we move those pipes six times, in 30' increments, so that the entire field gets watered.  Generally he irrigates about once every 10 to 15 days, so about a third to half of summer mornings we need to move hand line.  This morning, we mostly we shared our thoughts about the beauty around us, and it truly was a gorgeous morning.  The skies were mostly cloudy, but the occasional holes in the clouds led to bright sunlight playing over the hills and mountains around us.  Every piece of land in sight is a beautiful green right now, and washed clean by yesterday's rainstorm.  Everywhere we looked we saw life: crops, pastures, cattle, sheep, horses, and more.

I love this place, and the people in it!

Willpower and the 1964 Surgeon-General's report...

Willpower and the 1964 Surgeon-General's report...  My mom was a 3-to-4 pack a day cigarette smoker for about 12 years, from age 17 to 29.  U.S. citizens younger than about 60 would likely be surprised by just how normal that was.  In 1955, about 56% of adult men (and about half that percentage of women) were smokers.  Mom's smoking habit wasn't at all unusual back in those days.

I have some memories of her smoking, but even more memories of an errand she often had me do: running into the pharmacy with some change to buy her a pack or two of Kent menthol cigarettes.  It seems very odd, these days, to think that a pharmacy would be the place to buy cigarettes, but that's where she usually bought them.  I found that little errand exciting, as it seemed like a very grown-up thing to do for someone my age (I did this for a few years starting at about age 8 or 9). 

On January 11, 1964, my mom quit smoking.  Cold turkey, immediately upon hearing the news reports of the Surgeon General's report on the health hazards of smoking – and his recommendation that all smokers immediately quit.  I remember her searching out and throwing away all the packs of cigarettes she had squirreled away in convenient places.  All the ash trays in the house were cleaned and put away.  I was just 11 at the time, so I didn't understand that she was doing something that most people find difficult; she never showed any sign that quitting was hard for her at all.  I remember her urging her father to quit (he did not, and emphysema claimed him not many years later), along with several siblings.  To the best of my knowledge, she was the only smoker in her family to quit at the time.  I never saw her waver in her determination to quit smoking: she heard the report, made up her mind, and just quit.  Right then.  Just one attempt.  No nicotine patches or gum.  No furtive tokes when she thought nobody was looking.  She made quitting look effortless.

This is one example of an important element of mom's character: her amazing willpower.  It manifested in quite a few ways, some of which will be the subject of other posts.  Her willpower is legendary in our family, with good reason.  This is the earliest example I know of, though I'm sure it didn't spring up fully formed on that day.

To this day I have never heard of another person who quit smoking, cold turkey, on the day the Surgeon General issued that report...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...   As I write this post, it's raining outside – a nice, steady, moderate rain.  The forecast says we're to expect about 0.15 inches, but I'd guess we've already got that much, and the storm is only about half over.  The storm is coming from due south of us, and on the radar snapshot at right you can see that we're about to get slammed with some harder rain.

The farmers around us have started to cut and bale hay.  My neighbor to the north, Tim D., just had his baled on Wednesday.  Yesterday I picked up 21 bales of around a half ton each from the 3.5 acres he's raising alfalfa on.  That's up substantially from the yield last year, much to his satisfaction.  He'll get three cutting this year, and probably between 25 and 30 tons of hay total.  On our own field to the south of our house, we have 11 acres in alfalfa (it's leased out to Scott N., a local hay farmer who mostly uses leased land).  Scott hasn't cut that field yet, but he likely will within a day or two.  All this cutting, hay drying, and baling means that the air around here is full of the delicious aroma of alfalfa and grass hay.  The farmers who are caught with hay cut and drying right now are not going to be happy about this rain...

The puppies continue to be a joy for Debbie and I.  The video at right shows Cabo enjoying a delicious stick, until Mako comes along and tries to steal it.  Yesterday I took the two of them in to see our vet for their second round of puppy inoculations.  In the waiting area they were a big hit with the staff, the dogs waiting, and their owners.  Lots of people asked what breed the dogs were, and several of them were writing it down.  The vet (Dr. Watkins) gave them a good exam, then pronounced them beautiful and perfect.  After he gave them their vaccines, he just sat back and watched them for a few minutes, a happy smile upon his face.  He told me that I had made his day by bringing these two in – and that I should be charging him, rather than the other way around :)  There are now a couple hundred puppy videos uploaded to YouTube, most of them around one minute long.  Any of them will make you smile (and if you don't smile, please schedule an appointment with a psychologist posthaste!).  The photos below capture a few kinetic puppy moments, and the joy of Debbie at last able to hold a puppy.

Meanwhile, our five foster kittens are thriving.  They've had their first round of inoculations, and they're old enough now to be rambunctious and naughty.  Very naughty!  The photo at right shows their room after they apparently held a party in it on a recent night.  Some of those objects are heavier than you'd imagine a kitten could move, and yet there the mess was.  Shortly the kittens will all be neutered and get a second round of inoculations, then we'll be returning them to the Four Paws organization for adoption.  One of them will likely be staying with us, though: the little calico kitten has captured not only Debbie's heart, but also our friend Michelle's.  I think I'd suffer terribly if I didn't cave in to their desire to keep her.  Not that I'll get any credit for caving, of course :)

A few days ago I somehow found an hour to talk my beloved morning walk.  It was overcast and cool, and the dogs and I had a lovely time exploring all the life around us.  The lowest field we walked by was planted in alfalfa, and it was in bloom.  There was a leaker riser that provided great entertainment for Race, who loves to bite streams of water.  He went sort of bonkers for about five minutes, apparently thinking he was defeating the water.  He wasn't, of course :)  Our neighbor now has four horses and two mules pastured, so we stopped for a while to chat with them.  Then there were large patches of a beautiful yellow weed.  I'm sure the farmers would do their best to eradicate these, but when the show up in great masses (as they are right now), these tiny yellow flowers can be quite beautiful...

Of friends and raspberry pie...

Of friends and raspberry pie...  The first friends we made up here, just over two years ago, were Bruce and June N.  They were the realtors who helped us find our home here, and since then have become good friends.

Yesterday Bruce was driving home (they live just south of us, in Avon) from Ogden, a route that takes him past Maddox Restaurant.  Knowing that we love fruit pies, he stopped in and got a raspberry cream pie for us.  Usually fruit pies from restaurants are ... less than spectacularly good, but Maddox is a standout exception.  Many of their fruit pies are made only when the local fruit is in season, and that's the case with their raspberry cream pie.

Last night we'd already eaten when Bruce showed up with the pie, so it went into the refrigerator.  Today we just ate our lunch, and we each had a nice slice of that pie for our dessert.  Heaven in our mouths, it was.  I don't know how one could get more intense raspberry flavor than that pie.  The cream filling and whipped cream on top just added to the overall decadence.

Oh, man, that was good!

When my mom first got to Utah a couple of weeks ago, Bruce and June were the first local friends of ours to visit with her.  Mom greatly enjoyed meeting them, and experiencing a heavy dose of Utahan niceness; Bruce and June likewise enjoyed meeting this character from New Jersey.  Bruce told me afterward that he was really looking forward to getting to know mom better.

Bruce didn't know that mom had died, so yesterday afternoon when we told him, he was quite shocked.  When he and June visited mom, just 10 days ago, she was energetic and brimming with vitality; there was no indication of someone near the end of their days.  After he recovered his own composure, he was full of compassion and sympathy for us.  We had a warm conversation about mom, losses of loved ones, the trials and tribulations of life, and more.  It was one more manifestation of the reasons why Debbie and I feel so very lucky to have joined the community here...

The story of “Mildred”...

The story of “Mildred”...  An astute reader noted that the filtered view (link at right) for my mom uses the tag “Mildred”, and she wondered why.  After all, my mom's name is Elinor, not Mildred.  So what gives?

I don't remember how it got started, but in her later life “Mildred” was my mom's favorite nickname for herself.  It was used by both family and friends, and she often asked people to call her Mildred.  I do remember that at one point, when I was a child (this would be back in the '60s), we'd tease her by calling her Mildred – and she reacted just as you hope someone will react when you're teasing them.  We'd say things like “What a Mildred!”  Sounds quite silly now, but my mom didn't appreciate it.  She certainly didn't embrace the nickname as her own back then!

Her given name is actually Elinor, a slightly unusual variant of the name that's usually spelled Eleanor.  I've no idea why her parents chose the spelling they did, but I will note that the name Eleanor was very common for girls in the year she was born, and that spelling variations (including Elinor), while not as common as Eleanor, were certainly not rare.  I've only run into two much younger people who spelled their name as Elinor: one a young woman of perhaps 25 years, born in England; the other the baby girl of an employee of mine, adopted from a Chinese orphanage and named in honor of a grandparent.  I suspect it's pretty unusual these days, even if it wasn't in 1935.

Mom's memorial...

Mom's memorial...  For the past year or so, mom was actively engaged in making sure that her worldly possessions would go to people who cherished them (for either material or sentimental reasons) or who needed them.  For example, her paintings will be distributed amongst family members as a remembrance of her.  A table made of holly tree wood will be in my sister's house, beautiful on its own and a remembrance of her.  Her car has been donated to a (very appreciative!) veteran.  Scott will have a favorite stuffed armchair.  Debbie and I will have some cut glass and glass paperweights.  There were far too many of these arrangements to list here, but they are all of the same spirit.  Settling the disposition of her possessions brought her much joy and satisfaction.

Some of her possessions were left undesignated, though – especially things that were very recently acquired.  We're distributing them in the same spirit that she would have.  For instance, she owed an electric reclining chair for her room in Williamsburg, and the bishop of our local LDS ward is helping us find someone who could really make good use of that.  A beautiful bouquet and vase that was in her nursing home room has been given to a patient there, someone all alone in the world and in need of some cheer.  Her glasses will be donated to an organization that sends them to Africa.

These gifts, collectively, are a kind of memorial for mom.  They epitomize her generosity and kindness.  She wanted her passing to bring some light to others ... and it already has.

Mom left us very simple, explicit instructions about services and ceremonies after she died: there shall be none.  She didn't want us to mourn (sorry, mom), and didn't want us to hold any sort of service or ceremony at all (we're honoring this).  She wanted to be cremated, and at a time of our choosing when the immediate family and some close friends could get together alongside Long Pond just north of Lincoln, Maine, have her ashes scattered over the pond.  We're going to do that as well.  It may take a while to organize that gathering, but we will do it...

The manifestations of grief...

The manifestations of grief...  Years ago I took a management course, one segment of which dealt with handling the grief of employees who had had some tragic experience.  Probably the most important thing they taught us was this: that everyone has their own way of dealing with grief, and that you might find some of those ways surprising, odd, out-of-character, or even inappropriate.

I had a small experience of this myself earlier today, of the out of character kind.

This morning I visited our favorite grocery store to pick up a few items we needed.  As I was loading fruity sparkling water into my cart, a woman I didn't know came up to me and asked, very gently, “Are you ok?”

I had no idea why she was asking me this, so I asked her.  She said “Because you’re crying, and you look so sad.”  Only then did it dawn on me that I was crying; tears were streaming down my cheeks and into my beard.  Until that moment, I had had no idea at all.

So I told this kind woman about my mom's death yesterday, which was why I was crying.  She gave me a big hug, talked with my a bit about her own experience losing a brother (to a drunk driver), and left me feeling better.

The world has lost a character, and a cherished mom...

The world has lost a character, and a cherished mom...  My mom – Elinor Bernice Dilatush – died early Wednesday morning.  She was free of pain and fear, comfortably in bed.  Up until just the past few days she was active, happy (oh, so happy!), and excited about her new situation here in Northern Utah.  My brothers and sister and I are thankful that her last days were as good as they were, and that she didn't have a long, miserable time at the end.  We're also thankful that she was able to see my brother Scott and Debbie (my wife) once again; these were high on her bucket list.  If we could ask her what regrets she had, I suspect her answer would have been something like “That the 2016 election has Trump and Clinton as candidates!”  As regrets go, that's not so bad...

I will be writing more about her when some time has passed and the emotions aren't so raw.  I'm expecting that writing about her will be much more challenging than writing about my dad was, as my memories about her are less about stories and more about feelings...