Starving the Old Year Feeding the New
There are several New Year’s menus that I can remember distinctly. My mother Sybil Miner Beck always served pork and sauerkraut for New Years’ Eve. She told us that it’s an old German tradition to eat pork and sauerkraut to ensure good luck and to welcome in the New Year. The type of pork wasn’t always traditional, but with Mom it was a pork roast. At other New Year’s meals I’ve eaten sausage, kielbasa, or even hot dogs.
My wife Cindy Morrison Beck and I often shared meals with Cindy’s best friend, Deborah Detar and her husband Bill. We sometimes spent New Year’s Eve at each other’s homes to celebrate. Cindy’s menus were more “traditionally” flavored foods, while Debbie always added sugar to all of hers. Her sauerkraut was brown, heavily flavored with brown sugar and her mashed potatoes were one teaspoonful shy of being candy. Even the sour cream dips she made for veggies and chips was more like dips served with fruit. Her kids carry on that sweet tradition.
Sometimes Cindy’s parents Bud and Retha Morrison would share homemade sauerkraut with us. It was a veritable feast with freshly its canned flavor. This year I helped make sauerkraut and can hardly wait to share the flavor with my kids.
Another menu that remains firmly established in my memory bank is the meal my dad and grandparents Ray and Rebecca Miner made for New Year’s Day. Dad would buy several cans of oysters, the tiny round soup crackers, and vanilla ice cream. My grandparents had a farm and provided the milk, cream, and freshly churned butter to make the oyster stew. Gram always baked an apple pie or two. While we waited for the oysters to stew, we would play games like dominoes, Pachisi, or Uncle Ted’s favorite Sorry on the dining room table.
Gram’s house soon filled with savory steam from the stew simmering on her wood fired, kitchen cook-stove. It merged with the spicy aroma of the pies still in the oven. Hungry eyes of the older members huddled around the dining room table would occasionally stray into the kitchen “wondering if the soup was ready yet?”
Finally Gram would put the games away. She’d set the table with shallow bowls. Dad would carry the stew pot to the table; steam often obscuring sight through his glasses. The rich broth was ladled into the bowls and cellophane package of crackers passed from hand to hands until everyone had some. Soup spoons clicked as we slurped the broth. The flavor was remarkable. The meal ended with slices of still warm pie and melting ice cream. It’s still a deliciously full memory.

 Needs
We all have needs. Our needs appear at different times, in different situations, and for different people. Sometimes we have needs that are an absolute necessity and sometimes our needs are little more than our wishes or desires. Some needs are us wanting to lose weight or finding some free time or even finding something to do in your free time. Just like clothing, needs come in all shapes and sizes. Some needs are universal, like oxygen, water, food, and shelter and are essential for us to survive.
Sometimes the needs are to finish chores around the house, vacuuming, laundry, dusting, doing dishes, or cooking meals and if we’re not careful, those chores can accumulate and cause a backlog to the point that they overwhelm us. The very same thing may happen when things need repaired or fixing. Sometimes when we don’t have the knowledge of how to make the repairs or we don’t have the cash to hire someone to keep up with those repairs, the chores become major problems.
It may seem strange, but I don’t like to talk on the telephone, especially much of my job as a nursing supervisor was using the telephone. Telephone chores included confirming surgeries, giving instructions to patients, or searching for personnel to cover shifts. I don’t know if my fellow workers noticed, but if I could, I would often make rounds to the different areas of the hospital when a telephone call would suffice. It may have been weird, but I had the need to see someone’s face when I talked to them. It was much easier for me to see if what I was saying was being understood. The biggest insult was when the “need” for my assistance as nursing supervisor was changed from an over-head paging system to a pocket-carried voice-pager, then to a cell phone. With the over-head and the voice pager, I could delay answering if I was in the middle of something, but with the cell phone, I wasn’t allowed to use the restroom in peace.
You can ask my kids, when I came home from an especially stressful day, I would allow our home phone to ring until someone else answered it, even if it was right beside me. I’d been drained of my phone tolerance. Need I say more?

 Keep Christmas Merry
The Christmas season is often filled with the rush of buying gifts, wrapping presents, and with many other tasks like writing greeting cards, baking cookies, or creating an extravagant meal. These are the temporal things that will keep us busy, consume our time, and possibly frustrate us. When we gather at Christmas it’s a blur of activities that are over and done within a matter of a few hours. Then what? As we sit among crumpled colored paper and discarded boxes, we sigh and often feel let down, depressed and deflated. We may think, “Is that all there is?” Is this what the Christmas season is all about…or is there more?
Celebrating Christmas isn’t about a lighted and decorated tree in the center of the living room or is it about the stockings hanging on the mantle of the fireplace. It’s not about Santa, the elf on the shelf, or the sleigh and reindeer. The Grinch came close to finding the true meaning of Christmas, yet missed it by a mile. He recognized that Christmas was so much more than food, frivolity, and favors, but didn’t look far enough for the reason. Perhaps the celebrants of Whoville didn’t know the real reason either.
No one mentioned the birth of the Christ child and no mention of the baby Jesus. There was no mention of angels announcing the virgin’s conception of the prophesied Messiah. There was no mention of the shepherds being directed to seek this special child that was swaddled and lying in a manger. There was no mention of the heavenly omen of the star that guided the magi to Bethlehem to seek this newborn King of kings.
The television renditions of Christmas have purposefully removed and avoided any mention of the Christ child’s birth, yet they often invoke His holy title in each Christmas story that they create. They use only His title without sharing anything else about this Holy Child who is God and yet willingly took on the form of a human. God loves us so much that He sent His only begotten Son to endure and understand the trials and temptations of mankind and yet Jesus remained sinless. He came to suffer and to die; carrying all of our sins to the cross at Calvary so mankind might be redeemed from sin’s curse and to provide a way to heaven and to dwell there eternally. This was the ultimate Christmas gift. This is reason for the joy of the season. Jesus birth is the true blessing of Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all of my readers and thank you for your supportive comments.

Basement Blues
I’ve been working off and on working in my basement to clean and rid it of accumulated items from the past twenty years or so. Things that weren’t worn enough to toss have now been tossed. Things that haven’t been used, tossed. Things that have been stored for others, I gave options and some of those got tossed. There were plastic shopping bags of newspapers. I imagine nearly twenty in all and most of them were incinerated. This was written in 2018 and the hoarding has resumed.
I burned a coffee table and two end tables that had become scarred and wobbly. Some small scraps of wood joined the pile and helped to bring on the global warming that scientists have lied about. An old plastic cooler minus its lid sent a smoke signal to be saved, so I tossed on two foam rubber pillows from an old couch, but to no avail. They ascended into the heavens on dark billows. In their place is a patio table and a dining table with chairs.
Old pieces of warped plywood became part of the funeral pyre, as did some magazines, a few rags, and other odds and ends. My daughter, Anna and her boyfriend, James, said that they got a call from NASA saying they could see my signal. It was bright that evening they commented, but I thought it was more like the rubbish heap outside of Jerusalem, called Gahanna; the place of eternal fire.
I certainly made a blaze that I fed over several days as I uncovered more and more things that had lost their usefulness. I have saved boxes on shelves. You never know when a solid cardboard box will come in handy.
The original reason for ridding the basement of unnecessary things, and believe me there is still a lot left, was that my basement was a wet basement. A slow trickle of water would slide across one side of the basement and sometimes cover the floor when it  rained. I decided that I wanted to keep it dry and have a usable basement.
I hired a well known company to come in on a contingency plan. If an opening came up, they would give me a week’s notice to get everything away from the walls, so the workers can open a channel on the inside floor to arrange all seepage into a sump area and be pumped outside. The remedy worked. I now have a dry basement and that is why the accumulation of items has returned and hoarding now has returned. Who can throw away a good box? I need to start the de-cluttering again.

 Coincidences Sometimes Confuse Me
Coincidences… why do they happen? Sometimes the randomness of them confuses me. The coincidence is an unexpected collision of two or more instances happening at once. The happenstances may have some relation to each other, but others seem to defy logic. Recently I received a pecan fruit cake from the Collin Street Bakery from Corsicana, Texas. I found it in my mailbox. This company makes excellent fruit cakes. They aren’t the bourbon drenched wheels that your Aunt Sarah baked and passed out as Christmas gifts; the heavy super-dense cake that became an heirloom and was passed down to some other unsuspecting relatives years later with it still in pristine condition. Their cakes are 29 % pecans, delicious, and totally flavorful. So now that I’ve given my blessing on that product, I’ll proceed to the coincidence.
I was surprised to see a pecan fruit cake from Collin Street Bakery in my mailbox. I panicked because I thought that I’d sent the fruitcake to my friends in New Mexico. Finding the box with the label from Collins Street Bakery inside, I thought to myself, “Did I make a mistake and send a fruitcake to myself and not to New Mexico? I thought I gave the receptionist at the bakery the correct address to deliver the fruitcake to my friends.” But with the recent “slipped cog” incident, I thought perhaps I was standing on shaky ground.
So as soon as I came into the house, I reached for the phone and dialed the bakery. I began to talk with a lovely lady having a sweet southern accent. She looked up the information from my order from the 8th of December. I read the address and information from the packaging label of the fruitcake box to her. I reviewed the label. It read, “Mr. Tom Beck” and my address. The lady shared with me that the fruitcake I’d ordered had been sent out and delivered to San Jon, New Mexico on the seventeenth of December.
Looking more closely at the label on the packaging I saw a note printed on the corner that address label, “We hope you have a wonderful Christmas.”
It was for me. My friends had also sent a fruitcake to me. For me to receive a fruitcake from the very same company was certainly serendipitous event It was definitely a pleasant coincidence. I hadn’t slipped another cog. Now I just have to remember to send my friends a thank you note.

Feast Days
It’s begun. The Christmastime of overeating has started. Not that I’ve been a glutton, but I have eaten more than I usually do. Friday evening Mt. Zion Community Church held their Christmas potluck gathering and meal. The tables were festively set and the gym was pressed into service. About fifty-five people attended. Three tables were filled with a variety of foods with one table reserved for beverages and one for desserts. The tables were heavily laden with meats, vegetables, stews and pasta dishes. I wasn’t able to take the smallest of spoonfuls to sample each dish, so I limited what I sampled. I chose selectively from the dessert table. After we’d eaten, there was a game and a skit as entertainment.
Saturday afternoon was the annual Christmas banquet for the Chestnut Ridge Historical Society members. We usually held the meal in the evening about six o’clock, but because most of our members are senior citizens, we began to celebrate earlier at one o’clock in the afternoon. Driving at night has become a problem for us older drivers, especially since the introduction of those new blinding blue-white headlights. Oncoming cars can see farther in the darkness, but they too often cause temporary blindness in the older driver’s vision. The last two years we’ve held it in the Cook Township building, the former elementary school building.
The dining area was beautifully decorated by several ladies of the Society. They had the affair catered with very tasty selection of meats, potatoes, and vegetables. Tickets were sold to bid on donated baskets for the “white elephant” sale. The display of items covered three tables ranging from an oil painting, electronic wares, baskets of car care, and baskets of food items. There was a wreath covered in lottery tickets.
I left early because my oldest granddaughter Celine held her eighteenth birthday party and I certainly wanted to be there. She’s become a beautiful young lady. The party was on the far side of Uniontown and would take nearly an hour for me to get there. It was a nice party and of course I had to have a slice of cake and a small scoop of ice cream.
I lingered and had to drive home in the dark facing the onslaught of headlights and the dreaded blue-white headlights. Only one stretch was a bit difficult when there were six cars, one after another with those blinding beams. I did make it home safe and sound, overfed and ready for bed.

 Having Another Slipped Cog
Although the gears in my brain usually mesh quite well even after the head injury in February 2015, once in a awhile something happens to cause my mind to jump the track. This aberration was the first time in my fifty plus years of owning and driving a vehicle.
As I was driving back from my volunteer work at the Chestnut Ridge Historical Society Wednesday, I noticed that the inspection sticker for my car had run out at the end of November. What upset me was that I kept telling myself that I needed to get my car inspected before the end of the month, but somehow my thought process shifted the date to the end of December and not November. The realization suddenly hit me, my car was out of inspection and I was driving illegally.
As soon as I arrived home, I called my mechanic and he said that he would squeeze me in on Thursday since my car’s inspection was outdated. I am now legal and passed inspection. Several days ago I purchased new tires for my car and had the front end aligned. About a month ago, my mechanic replaced the rotors and pads for my brakes. I knew my car would pass inspection. The only thing it might have needed was if a light bulb had burned out. Thankfully all my lights and signals functioned properly. I fished out the proof of insurance and the registration for my car. I was ready and I got my new sticker. I’m legal again.
What now worries me more happened later in the day. I answered my home phone. It was my mechanic. He was missing the paperwork for another customer. He was inquiring whether he’d given the missing papers to me with my paperwork. I tossed the plastic sleeve with my papers into my console without checking them. I had a similar plastic pouch. When he asked, I checked and I had someone else’s papers tucked in the sleeve with mine. My mechanic was very much relieved when I found and returned the papers to him.
Now I am beginning to be worried that cog-slipping may be catching. I hope that it doesn’t turn into another pandemic. If it does start a pandemic, the Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization will require people to don tinfoil caps to prevent the spread of the invasive slipped-cog disease. They may even try to force inoculations that cause sterilization of men, abortions in women, and other health problems without actually curing the “disease.”

 Jesus Was a Jew
If you read the Bible, you must know that Mary was the mother of Jesus. She was a young Jewish virgin. His stepfather was Jewish as well, and Jesus was raised in a traditional Jewish home. He observed all of the Jewish feasts and holidays. In His life and His death, Jesus fulfilled all of the promises that His Father God made with Sarah and Abraham and fulfilled the prophecies made elsewhere in the Bible. Because of the sins of Adam and Eve, a blood sacrifice was needed to atone for and cover the sins of mankind. The death of Jesus on Calvary was necessary and His resurrection fulfilled many of the predictions of the Old Testament.
The gift of redemption He offers is free, but just like any gift, the person to whom it was offered must accept it before it is actually theirs. It becomes theirs only when they actually claim it. If a person is offered something then refuses to take it, it isn’t theirs to own.
I was watching the testimony of an Indian Muslim who claims to have been saved by reading the Quran. He was a devout Muslim who studied the Quran. As he did, he noticed that Jesus was mentioned more than fifty times, directly or indirectly by other titles. He said that the actual name of Jesus was mentioned twenty-five times, the Messiah eleven times, and twenty-three times as the Son of Mary. He also noted that Muhammad was only mentioned four times. In his reading of the Quran, he noticed that Jesus was still alive while Muhammad was dead.
He went to his mentor and Imam to ask about the things that he read. When the Imam couldn’t give him the answers he sought, he began to read the Bible. When he did, many of the words surrounding Jesus began to make sense. One thing he mentioned was Jesus was mentioned as the Word. At the very beginning of the book of John it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God.” John 1:1. From that, this once Muslim ascertained that Jesus was more than a just a prophet as the Quran branded Jesus, He was more than a prophet, He was equal with God. The more he delved into the Bible, the more he understood his need for a Savior. It was something that he could not find in the pages of the Quran. It became his testimony that he was directed to Salvation by the words he found in the Quran. Salvation can still be found in this Jew-born Man.

 I Can Be Such a Card
Most of my friends know that I have become the repository and caretaker for many of my family’s postcards. They have been gathered by family members over the past several generations. I have postcards from my great-grandparents and grandparents who have saved them and passed them on to my parents. I have also inherited postcards from my wife Cindy Morrison Beck’s family. A lot of them were sent to Cindy or our kids Amanda Beck Yoder, Andrew Beck, and Anna Beck Prinkey over the years that their Grandmother Retha Johnson Morrison travelled with friends all over the United States and Canada. A few of the cards I own were either gathered by me, for me, or sent to me from friends when they were visiting other countries on mission trips or while vacationing. There are some that I purchased while I was in the United States Navy or while traveling on vacation with my family or friends. How many do I have? I’ve never counted them, but I have two boot boxes filled with cards. I have to be honest, several of the saved items are not postcards, but photographs of the local area that were made into calendar tops.
What sent me down this trail of thought was finding several past Christmas cards, thank you cards, and birthday cards. I’ve decided not to keep them. My office/computer room is already cluttered enough. Just to show you that I am ecologically conscious, I don’t plan on tossing them into the garbage to be burned or to fill a garbage disposal site I am passing them on to a friend. She will recycle them. She uses the photographs on the front of old cards, crop them, and then she will glue them to cardstock making a new Christmas card, thank you card, birthday card, special occasion card, or a card with a blank interior so a person can write their own greeting message.
To extend the “I can be such a card” theme, I often would tell a story or joke while I was working at Frick Hospital in Mt Pleasant, Pennsylvania. I hope it made the work day pass much more quickly for my workmates. Even today while shopping I will tease another shopper or cashier just to make them smile. My motto is, if I don’t make someone smile, I might as well stay home. No one likes dealing with a grumpy old man. Unlike a physician that I used to work with, Dr. Vandyk, when someone would wish him a Merry Christmas, he would mutter the Scrooge-like saying, “Bah Humbug!”

A Tree-mendous Christmas Memory
There was a time in our not so distant past that a person could go out into a grove where pine trees grew wild and harvest one for himself. The person would cut the tree that he wanted and haul it home. It wasn’t quite stealing, but it came very close. These unclaimed trees were always fresher and cheaper than going to a Christmas tree sales lot to purchase one.
A friend was doing just that. He and his wife drove their car to get an evergreen for the Yuletide season. Once he and his axe were out of the car, his wife sped away with plans to return to collect him and the newly acquired tree. The friend would recognize it was his wife with the signal that she would flash the headlights on her return. He would hurry back to the road with his prize, he would quickly load it into the car, and they would drive away. The trunks of cars were much larger then and unless the tree was huge, it would fit inside the car’s trunk with only the tip of the pine peeking out from the tied down lid. If the tree was too large for the trunk it could be tied to the car’s sturdy steel roof for the short trip home.
It was a cold day and my friend was warmly dressed in his red and black Woolrich pants, coat, and hat. The thick Woolrich clothing was the accepted winter and hunting clothing of that time period. Having cut the tree, he squatted on a bank above the road to watch for his wife’s return. When headlights of an oncoming car flashed, he hopped down onto the roadway only to find that it wasn't his wife.
The oncoming car had rolled over a bump in the road and the headlights only appeared to flash. He told me that the surprise on the driver's face looking out of the car’s windshield was impressive when he suddenly leaped onto the roadway. Can you imagine the surprise of the man as he drove along and saw a man clad from head to his foot in red at Christmastime carrying an evergreen tree in one hand and an axe in the other unexpectedly pop into view? My friend said the driver of the car slammed on his brakes then swerved the car to avoid hitting my friend and sped away. I really like this story and may be an annual post at Christmas.

 Cluttered
When I was looking for something in the clutter of my office/computer room/ storage area, I thought “Wow, I really need to clean this up.” Boxes of manuscripts, books, and cartons of photographs and postcards have claimed much of the floor space. Clutter has even topped my ironing board. Yes, my ironing board functions as a third desk. I have to clear off a corner when I want to press something to wear and yes I do still iron some clothing. There are enough natural wrinkles on my body without adding another layer.
Boxes of partial unfinished and a few finished manuscripts fill the knee niche in my second, older desk. It also houses my medications, office supplies, and of course an ever-present junk drawer with items that may just come to be handy somewhere in the future. I’ve managed to toss any old batteries before the begin to leak and have outlived their usefulness.
Right now my computer desk is cluttered with Christmas cards. I’m trying to get them sent out before it becomes too late. One thing that I tossed and wished I hadn’t was the envelope with an address for our associate pastor and family. I forgot to copy his new address since he moved to North Carolina to continue his education.
This leads me to the most cluttered area in my life. It’s my brain. Too many ideas collide, mix, and refuse to make sense at times. That is why I have so many unfinished poems and manuscripts stored in boxes. The ideas begin to flow, then close down. I’m not sure if the creative juices dry up or whether a new thought has grabbed my attention.
I have to keep my calendar up to date. So many things are happening this month, I need to keep the drivers and chaperones for each Wednesday evening for our church straight in my head, two doctor’s appointments, four luncheons and parties. I’m still of the old school. It’s necessary to keep the information on a desk calendar as a back-up for my digital “secretary/alarm clock” on my cell phone. I know I’m an old fuddy-duddy and am resistant to change. It could be why my closet is still filled with outdated clothing.

 What to Wear
When I was a kid I didn’t have to make the decision of what I was to wear. My Mom Sybil Miner Beck made those decisions for me. I was the oldest of three kids, so I didn’t get to many hand-me-downs. The only hand-me-down I can remember was a winter coat. I didn’t hate it, but I managed to burn a hole in it trying to get warm on the potbelly coal stove in fifth grade. I went to a two room schoolhouse in my youth. I missed going to a one room school house by one year.
As young kids when we woke we’d run around in our underwear until after breakfast. Mom would put out the clothes we were to wear and that was that. Just like Mom preparing food for a meal. There was no argument. Eat it or go hungry.
Now I have to make these decisions on my own although I usually still run around in my underwear until after breakfast. First and foremost directing my choice is the weather. Will I be too hot or will I freeze exposed skin? Next I must decide where I’m going. Is it a place where grungy clothing is permitted or is it a place where a button-down shirt and tie is required? One of the final and most important decision is considered, will my friends who are there going to really care.
A sidebar here, often my kids will say, “You’re not really going to wear that out where someone can see you, are you?” Yes…I have outdated clothing still hanging in my closet. Who knows, they may come back in style and I can retro fit a generation.
Sometimes I think I’m too old to care about what covers my body, as long as it’s covered. I’m no longer looking to find a date. I’m not planning to impress the checkout people at Wal-mart and do I really care who I bump into at Ollie’s or Big Lots? I do miss the Save-a-Lot store though.
I quite often meet a fellow worker from Frick Hospital in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania at Wal-Mart and I’m glad to see that they didn’t dress-up to meet me either. Our trials and troubles at work created a friendship like that. We survived the years of toil and now we are what we are.

 May I Have the Envelope Please
As I was growing up, many of the television programs had an answer or something that needed to be kept secret until the time of the reveal. It was then that the Emcee would call for an assistant to fetch the sealed envelope to announce the winning answer. The emcee would say the oft repeated phrase, “May I have the envelope please.”
I’m thinking the same thing as I sit here with my Christmas card list and the boot box filled with the leftover cards from years past. I’ve said before, I am frugal and I usually but me Christmas cards right after Christmas the year before. Sometimes the designs in the boxes of cards have been picked over, but there are always some themed cards that are still acceptable.
The reason my boot box is filled with Christmas cards is that I usually have more cards than people to whom I send the Christmas greeting cards. So the cards are random with different subjects and verses. I have some cards that look old fashioned with their sepia cover pages. I have cards with fold out features that stand up when removed from the envelope. I have cards with gold writing sharing the birth of the Christ Child and ones that announce “Joy.” Written in gold on a royal purple cover are the words, “Hallelujah, King on Kings and LORD of Lords and He shall reign forever and ever.” There are ones that depict the Christ Child in a manger. The cards come in all sizes: longer thinner ones, smaller cards, and some that are just larger.
I try to choose a card verse that suits the person to whom I am sending the card. Sometimes I will choose a more secular light-hearted one or for someone else, I may choose one that is more serious and religious in nature. If you are like me, you’ve made mistakes writing on the envelope or card which leaves an envelope without a card or a card with no envelope.
Here’s where my thoughts of “May I have the envelope please” comes in. All of the cards and envelopes have been randomly placed in the box. They get shuffled and loosely stored from year to year. So when I’ve selected a card that I like, I have to sort through the stack of envelopes to find a correct size to fit the card. It’s like a miniature scavenger hunt.