IT'S THE LITTLE THINGS

It’s the little things. For several years now I have been trying to use our small bedroom as an office of sorts for myself. Inevitably, the room finds other uses. My clothes are in there so it is a closet, and the spare bed is in there so the room is also a guest room. But there is open space and it quickly fills with whatever we need to hide when company comes over for a visit. I finally got a little, $29, build it yourself desk that holds my laptop. After a few twists of the nifty tool the manufacturer gives you and a few more swear words of my own, I had the table ready and put it in the small room. It is the perfect size for the spare bedroom. I was ready to have my early morning time checking emails and playing word games on the internet and figured this would also be a time that I could write without interruptions. But fate rears its ugly head, or in this case, its red head and our son decided to sleep in the spare room. While he can sleep through earthquakes, he somehow manages to wake up when I open the bedroom door. There is no way he would tolerate my being in the room and typing while he was sleeping. The keys would be too loud and “Dad!” and a few other words would start my day. Recently he returned to sleeping in his bedroom and I decided to take advantage of this change in accommodations. I asked my wife and son if either of them had any objections to my rearranging the small room so that I could put my little desk over by the window to take advantage of the natural light. They didn’t object. As I tried to decide how to move things I realized there was more effort involved than I wanted to expend. I decided the desk was just fine where it was and all of the stuff could stay where it was. That afternoon I went off to work at church to set up for the evening Mass. Mass ran longer than usual and there were a few extra duties after Mass so I got home later than I normally do. As I walked in the door my son says, “We were going to have dinner all ready for you when you got home. You got home sooner than we expected.” That was okay. I was just glad to have someone besides me fixing dinner. But I thought to myself, “What? I’m later than usual. They have no idea of what time I get home.” I went from the living room to the small bedroom to change my clothes. The bedroom door was closed because we had a fire in the fireplace and closed bedroom doors make for a warmer living room. I opened the door and was taken by surprise. My little desk was in the corner of the room by the window, the bed had been moved, the floor lamp was strategically placed by the desk, the storage items had migrated to the attic and I was in awe. I could not have come up with a better arrangement of the furniture and the decorations than my wife and son had. A couple of pictures were put up, one painted by a dear friend who has gone home to God. My Oregon Duck hats were hanging by my desk; my Rose Bowl hat, a regular Duck hat with an O on it and my worn out, sweat stained yellow, screaming Donald Duck hat. The Donald Duck hat is my favorite. I sat down in my desk chair and was feeling quite comfortable in my new office set up. But the icing on the cake, so to speak, is something special. On the other wall above my desk hangs the blade of a canoe paddle. My son, an Eagle Scout, told his mom that I needed to have the paddle blade on my wall. “Makes it more like an office and it’s the one thing Dad got for being Scoutmaster.” I was the Scoutmaster for my son’s troop and in my second year we went to summer camp at Camp Parsons in the Olympic Peninsula, on the shores of the Hood Canal. On the Friday of the week at camp they run a big athletic contest with relay races and other activities. The final event is The Octopus Race. It is just a canoe race but you have four people in the canoe, thus the eight arms of the octopus. We had never been to Parsons so we did not know what the race was all about but we did have our four strongest Scouts ready to go. Prior to the race, while the Scouts were getting their paddles and life vests, I was talking with another Scouter. I told him we hadn’t seen this race before. He told me the secret was to not get into the middle of the canoes at the starting gun. “Go to the outside, otherwise it is a traffic jam.” I thanked him for his advice and immediately found our Senior Patrol Leader to tell him. Sure enough, when the race started, the traffic jam appeared. Our Scouts went to the outside and were one of five canoes that were free of the traffic jam. The race is about a mile in length and by the halfway point there were only two canoes still in contention for first place. As they made the turn, our canoe was in the lead. The rest of us from the troop were watching from the pier. My Scouts started chanting our troop number, “69! 69! 69!” getting louder and louder as our canoe got closer to the finish line. We won! The prize for winning The Octopus Race is the blade of a canoe paddle, hand painted by one of the camp staff. It has our troop number on it, a picture of the bay and Octopus Island, the halfway point of the race, and the words Octopus Cup, Week 4 2003, Camp Parsons. It is an award you won’t find in any trophy shop. I look up at the paddle blade from my chair and think of my Scouts, all of whom are in their twenties now. Ten years have passed but I still remember that race. My son was wrong about the paddle being the only thing I got from being Scoutmaster. I got an Eagle Scout son, a bunch of adopted sons and wonderful memories of their struggles and successes as they journeyed into adulthood. The paddle blade contains them all. But my son was right, the paddle blade does make my little corner of our spare bedroom more like an office. So here I sit, typing away in the early morning and so very thankful that my wife and son spent over three hours fixing up the room. It is just a little thing in the larger span of time but it is an incredibly big thing for me. I am relishing my new office. It doesn’t have a high back leather chair, a rosewood hand carved desk with matching bookshelves or even a Tiffany desk lamp. What it does have is a whole lot of love and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

MOVING RIGHT ALONG...

We are moving our daughter today. This is her second move in a year. She has been leasing a loft apartment in a condominium. The condo has been sold. Our daughter has to move. She found a two bedroom apartment closer to the center of town and in an area that she loves. It is a good move. But if you are going to move, you need some help. So, today, on the hottest day of the year, we are going to move boxes and boxes of stuff. Tomorrow the professional movers will do the furniture moving. But today, it is the amateurs, family. Two days ago we had family, from out of town and out of state, watching our daughter play in an ultimate Frisbee game. After the game we were talking and making plans for this morning’s move. We start early at eight and plan on beating the heat. It is always a good idea to feed the workers and tempt them with good food so that they show up. The wise guys in the family asked, “What’s for breakfast? Steak and eggs?” My wife started to volunteer me to make sourdough cinnamon rolls for breakfast but I stopped her. “That’s already taken care of.” At the steak and eggs question I had glanced over at my daughter. She had that look in her eye, “Dad, I need you to make cinnamon rolls.” In that split second the request had been made and acknowledged. No spoken words, just a look between a daughter and her father. The cinnamon rolls will be eaten quickly and greatly appreciated by my brother who is in town for his annual visit. He really enjoys my cinnamon rolls and will say wonderful things about them. But the good feelings I will have listening to his praises will pale in comparison to how I feel when my daughter looks at me and says, “Dad, I need you to…”

DAD'S DAY

The Friday before Father’s Day I was at the barbershop. I was next in line. As the gentleman before me is getting out of the chair, he and the barber exchange Father’s Day greetings. Then the gentleman says, “It isn’t as big a deal as Mother’s Day.” I joined in with, “Yep, we get stiffed on Father’s Day, especially when the kids are in grade school. We don’t get the handmade gifts that moms do.” And dads do get stiffed on the handmade gifts. It is the end of the school year and there is so much going on that teachers just don’t think of having the students do handicraft gifts for dad.

When our daughter and son were in pre-school classes, I always got a handicraft gift for Father’s Day. A card, a painted rock or something of the like, that my child could give to me on Father’s Day. The gift wasn’t so important. It was the pride and joy that emanated from the giver that warmed my heart and made me glad to be a dad.

It is has been about 20 years since I received a handmade gift from one of my children. But now, in the year 2012, it has only been a day since I received a handmade gift.

My daughter came over for Father’s Day to spend some time with her dad. That alone is a good gift but she upped the ante. As I sat down in my chair she says, “Dad, I have a card for you but before I give it to you, did you read Zits today?” I hadn’t so I checked my online newspaper source and read Zits. As an aside, my daughter says the characters resemble my wife, me and our son. She’s right. I even look like the dad. We must have the same barber.

Then, as I am chuckling about the comics, my daughter hands me my homemade, handicraft card. She had been at coffee with her boyfriend earlier in the day and she realized she didn’t have a card for me. There was nothing at the coffee place that would work. So she decided to put her creative juices to work.

I have a homemade card! A piece of cardboard, about 8 ½ by 11 inches, as the backing and several pages stapled to it. The cover has a picture, cut out from a magazine, of Kermit the Frog and some singer singing into an overhead studio mike. The handwritten message on the front:

Celebrating you! On Father’s Day.

Inside there is another cutout picture of a somewhat bald man leaping into a pool of water that is surrounded by rather large rocks. The picture has a cutout word taped to it. voice This leads me to believe that the man is screaming in fear as he leaps from a very high ledge into the water. Something I would never do. The leaping, that is. Screaming is a given. The words surrounding the picture read,

"Through the wild ride of fatherhood you managed to help me find my own voice. It’s a brave dad who lets his children be themselves. Scarier than any great heights. Thank you for listening to my voice.”

Five pages of The New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle are next. The cardboard backing provides a nice support for my heavy hand as I write the answers in the hundreds of little squares. The perfect gift for a puzzle solver.

Lest you think my son forgot me, he says to me, after wishing me the greetings of the day, “I have a card for you, Dad. Just like the one I gave Mom for Mother’s Day. It is perfect. You just switch the word father for mother.” It is the perfect card. I picked it out for him to give to his mother for Mother’s Day. It fits him where he is in life right now. The perfect card, only he never signed it or gave it to his mother. He is saving it for next year. So I did get the same card as his mother. The difference being that I have seen the card. My wife knows that it exists.

Later in the day we went as a family to see Men in Black 3. A movie on Father’s Day is our family's tradition. My daughter sat next to me. In one scene in the movie Will Smith’s character, J, is standing on a gargoyle at the top of a New York skyscraper. My love for high places took over. Fortunately, there was this comforting hand on my arm, letting me know that I would be okay. To paraphrase my daughter’s words,

“Through the wild ride of fatherhood… It’s a brave daughter who lets her dad be himself…even though he is scared of great heights, real or imagined. Thank you for listening to my voice.”

CLOSED CAPTIONING

It has been a year since I first started to wear hearing aids. Early on in my journey with the hearing aids I had an email discussion with a friend from high school. He asked me how life was treating me. I told him I that I now had hearing aids and I expressed my frustrations with having to wear them. My friend asked what my hearing aids looked like. Photos of hearing aids are not particularly interesting so I sent the following picture, conveying my innermost thoughts about having to wear hearing aids. A picture, after all, is worth a thousand words.

General 'Bloodbath' McGrath aka Ted Levine http://wildwildwest.warnerbros.com/

Over the last year I have finally gotten used to wearing the darn things and the benefits outweigh the inconvenience. Life is better now that I can hear. My wife is more patient with me when she says something and I don’t respond. She checks to see if I am wearing my hearing aids. And I am much better about letting her know that, “I don’t have my ears in.” My wife will speak louder and I will pay closer attention to what she says. This has saved us both a lot of frustration.

I have noticed that when one of my batteries dies, I can immediately tell the difference in my hearing. The stereo effect is gone and I feel a bit lopsided, listing to one side and turning my head so that I can make good use of the functioning hearing aid. The simple cure is putting a new battery in and getting everything back to normal.

One of the niftier amenities of TV that I have discovered, now that I have a need for it, is Closed Captioning. When I get up in the early morning hours my wife is still sleeping so when I turn the TV on for the morning news and entertainment I keep the volume down low. But then I can’t hear the TV. So I click the Closed Captioning button on the options menu and I can follow the show as I read the words that appear on the screen.

The Closed Captioning works great on an old movie or TV show that is on tape, the words keep up with the action on the screen. Live shows such as the news or sports don’t have the same results. The words are always behind the video. In fact, one story may be half over and the words showing on the screen are from the story before that. In addition to the time delay between story and text there is often a spelling problem.

I was watching the April 12th morning Mass on EWTN and the priest was giving his homily on the day’s passage from the Gospel of Luke. The priest says, “And when Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” The Closed Captioning read, “My Lord and my guide!” While it is close to the spoken word, it doesn’t have quite the impact as “My Lord and my God!”

The priest went on to talk about,

“Theophilus, the person to whom this gospel is directed.”

The Closed Captioning version came out as,

“The omphalos, the person to whom this gospel is directed”

And what holy, sacred song did this caption bring to mind?

Oompa Loompa doompadee doo.
I've got another puzzle for you.
Oompa Loompa doompadah dee.
If you are wise you'll listen to me.

If I could hear you, Willy, I would listen!

BECOMING THE OLDER GENERATION

My mom’s only sibling, her sister, died recently. Aunt Geri was the last of her generation on the Gretzer side of the family.

When I was telling my brother Rick about Aunt Geri he was reflecting on days gone by. He said, “When I was a little kid I always thought Aunt Geri was kind of crotchety. But when I visited her in my 20’s, she was pretty nice.”

I thought the same. When you consider that Aunt Geri was married to Uncle Eddie, a very gregarious man, and had five sons who take after their father, who could blame her for being crotchety? She was outnumbered 6 to 1. And when her sister and family came to visit, the odds weren’t any better. Our family had six children, one girl and five boys. Come to think of it, my mom was crotchety too. It was quite a sight, two mothers having to deal with all those boys. I would feel sorry for Aunt Geri and Mom but I think they won the battle. The ten of us boys turned out okay, despite our efforts to the contrary.

My earliest memory of Aunt Geri was on a visit to the Gretzer family house in Council Bluffs. It was a grand old house with lots of family running about. Aunt Geri and Uncle Eddie, the boys, our grandmother, great-aunt and great-grandmother all lived there. We were visiting one summer and after a hard day of playing and staying up past our bedtime, Aunt Geri was trying to get my cousin Tim and me to settle down and go to sleep. We finally did, but we tried Aunt Geri’s patience as best we could before she eventually won out. Strong and determined to get done what must be done, Aunt Geri prevailed.

Like my brother Rick, when I visited as an adult I saw Aunt Geri in a different light. I had just turned 20 and had quit school. The draft was in effect and I had opted to enlist in the Air Force. I was telling Aunt Geri and her son Tom about it. Tom, who had been in the Navy, urged me to do something else. Aunt Geri said to Tom, “Let him do what he wants.” What she didn’t say to me but what I heard was, “It’s your decision and we love you!” There was no judgment, just unconditional love.” I never told her how much I appreciated that. Instead, I told her one of my favorite dirty jokes. Aunt Geri had this absolutely marvelous laugh! Such a different woman from when we were little kids with 4th grade bathroom humor and she would have to scold us for our behavior.

Aunt Geri was what I call a tough old bird. She was part of a generation that lived through the Depression, fought in World War II and raised a passel load of kids in a post war economy. You had to be tough to survive those events.

About 10 years ago, my mom showed me a picture of Aunt Geri. She was elegantly dressed and looking deep into the camera. Mom says, “Doesn’t Aunt Geri look just like a southern matriarch!” She did indeed. And you don’t mess with a southern matriarch or a tough old bird. I found this out the hard way.

There is an old family photo of Mom and Aunt Geri when they were little girls. It hung in the grand old house in a place of honor. On one visit, looking at the picture, I asked Aunt Geri, “How much older than Mom are you?” I didn’t make that mistake again. However, I did set my younger brothers up for a similar experience in the ensuing years by getting them to ask the same question. They needed to know Aunt Geri’s tougher side. But even after the obligatory fuming over our insolence, there was always a glimmer in Aunt Geri’s eye that told you that you really weren’t in trouble.

With Aunt Geri’s going home to God, we cousins are now the older generation and my sister Kathy is the oldest of the Gretzer women. The next generation, the younger generation, has a few more women in it than ours and the torch is being passed to them.

I have a hope for you ladies in the next generation with that Maloney/Gretzer blood flowing in your veins. It is simply this; I hope you have qualities like Aunt Geri.

I hope you are crotchety, that you have dealt with the ups and downs of life and have survived. You will have earned the right to be crotchety.

I hope you are strong and determined and getting done the things in life that need to be done. The world needs your strength and determination.

And I hope that when your own children and nieces and nephews mess with you and test your patience that you have that glimmer in your eye and the unconditional love that Aunt Geri showed me. They need to know your joy, your guidance and your love.

There is sadness in my heart now that Aunt Geri is gone from this world. But there is great joy as well. Aunt Geri and Uncle Eddie are together again, holding each other close and resting comfortably in God’s loving embrace.

REMEMBER WHEN

Remember when you could kiss the owie and make it all better?

One of the most powerful forces in the universe is the parent of a toddler. Whenever there is a pinched finger, a stubbed toe, or a bonked head, a parent can provide an instant cure. A simple kiss on the owie eases the pain. A little cuddling in mom or dad’s arms with blankie in hand seals the cure. Sometimes a cartoon character Band-Aid is added for that cherry on top feeling of satisfaction. Wipe a few tears away, kiss the owie and the child is ready to take on the world yet again.

As a parent, you cannot be more powerful, compassionate or wise. All in a simple act. King Solomon has nothing on the parent of a toddler.

But one day, that all ends. Somehow the days have passed and your toddler is no longer. Your child moves into adolescence and then into adulthood. Somewhere around the fourth grade your child learned that you are not invincible and all wise. You learned that you can’t cure all that ails your child.

The only problem with that passage of time is that the owies continue into adulthood. If only the adult owies were as easy to fix as the childhood owies. The adult owies are more dramatic and rarely involve a pinched finger or stubbed toe. What ails your adult child is life, adult decisions, problems and issues that hurt the ego and the psyche. As a parent you can’t fix those things. You can only listen, offer a shoulder to cry on when needed and shed a few tears with your child. You ache when your child aches.

If only the adult owies were as easy to fix as the childhood owies. If only you could kiss the owie and make it all better.

A MAN'S HOME IS HIS CASTLE

There was a time when that was true. Not any more.

A man in his home would have a place of refuge from the world. He could hide from the worries of life, safe and secure with his wife and children by his side. His home provided a place to ward off the marauding hordes of Visigoths and Huns, Barbarians and Mongols, Indians and desperados, traveling missionaries and cable TV representatives.

But not all dangers are outside the walls of a man’s castle. Some rise up unexpectedly from within. Thanks to the Internet and Facebook there are dangers that can separate a man from his family; from his wife, from his son, and from his daughter who has her own castle.

My wife is on Facebook and some friend invited her to play a game on the net. That in itself is not bad but my wife has shared that interest with others. Now our daughter is playing the game. But worse than that, right here in my so called castle, our son has joined in.

I am not part of the group. I am an outcast in my own castle. My wife and son sit on the couch playing the game and discussing strategies, sending information and game pieces filled with energies and potions to other gamers. While my wife and son are bonding in their shared love of the game, and my daughter is joining in from the other side of town, I wonder if this digital intruder can be driven from my castle.

I don’t know that the intruder, this game they play, can be defeated. All I can do is sit in the living room and listen to the plotting and planning as they build whatever they are building.

The website for the game they are playing has this promotion:

Create your Happy Ending
Build your very own Kingdom in a magical land.
Banish the Gloom and nasty Beasties while you’re at it.

While they are building their CastleVille, my castle walls are crumbling around me. John Wayne and Fess Parker had a better chance of defeating Santa Anna at the Alamo than I do in banishing the Gloom and nasty Beasties from my castle.

Bring on the marauding hordes! The enemy I can see…