Grandparent Day

Yesterday I went to my granddaughter Hannah Yoder’s elementary school for grandparent day. The visit lasted about half an hour. It was half an hour of sitting on a tiny tikes chair and reading with her. I had a great time and the chairs were much roomier than the ones in the lunch room from a different school function. It was a time of interaction with my granddaughter and a few of her other classmates.

While I was waiting for this momentous occasion, I was talking with some other grandparents and waiting in the lobby out of the wind and cold. One man was nearly as conservative as I am. We connected on several things, one of which was being privileged to live in the United States and another was the lack of respect for life and for the respect of others today.

Several of the other grandparents, I was privileged to work with at Mt. Pleasant Frick Hospital and it was great seeing them again.

I even bumped into one of my high school classmates. She mentioned a story I’d completely forgotten and still don’t remember, so I’ll have to share her recollection of the incident. One night, she brought one of her children to the hospital because of an illness. While they were there, a rowdy, obnoxious man who’d obviously been consuming alcohol was brought in on a wheelchair. He continued to be disruptive to the other people in the emergency room waiting to be treated.

I don’t remember this, but she said, “You went behind the desk and came out holding a fly swatter and waved at him and saying, ‘If you don’t settle down right now, I’m going to use this on you.’ You waved the swatter in front of his face. He settled down quickly.”

Let me say that this was not my usual bedside manner, but it worked.

 

More Morning Sneezing

In my attempt to downsize my near hoarder-like house, I have been spending time in my dust collecting basement moving, sorting, sweeping, and discarding the flotsam and jetsam that has accumulated from me, my wife Cindy, my three children in the thirty years that I’ve called this place of residence, home. Little by little things that have been worn have found a nesting place in my attic, basement, and unused bedrooms, so little by little I am bound and determined to whittle it down to size. In the future, I can see a yard sale to pass along these treasures to other collectors, to others who appreciate and need these slightly used items, and will again return them to a useful life.

Doing this chore is nothing to sneeze at and yet that is exactly what I am doing. Either I am starting my third head cold or the dust from the ages has me sneezing and my nose running. Because I don’t feel ill, and am not running a temperature, my bet is the dust.

My sneezes are loud and disruptive for those around me. Often I will stifle them. People would complain and say I was going to collapse a lung, but because I expelled the breath from my lungs, there was no air left to sneeze.

I can’t remember my grandfather Edson Beck ever sneezing. I am sure that he did, but they must not have been memorable ones. My grandfather Ray Miner softly sneezed sounding like Rass-hole. My mom, Sybil Beck sneezed with a soft Choo-Choo. Other folk who sneeze aren’t as memorable, but am thankful for the makers of soft tissue.

History Repeats We Never Learn

Our colonial forefathers expanded into the wilderness building homes, fortifications, and churches. The stockades were constructed for communal safety and most times this place of refuge also contained storerooms for food and gunpowder. Homes and churches were located outside of the fortification and at risk for raids from Native Americans.

These frontier homes, crops, and barns were protected with the weaponry owned by each individual family. On Sundays during the church service, the meetinghouse would post armed guards at the door to defend the worshippers inside from attacks.

As our nation grew and became more civilized, attacks became a thing of the past. The Colonies became a nation, the Constitution became the law of the land, and freedom to worship became an accepted ideal. Churches evolved into bastions of safety without fear of intrusion from government or other enemies.

There came a time when we slipped back. Churches became targets for violence, targets for the lashing out of racism, and the bull’s eye for intolerance. It was a time when the color of a person’s skin was more divisive than the person himself/ herself. Churches were no longer safe. Burning of these sanctuaries and killing tainted the country.

Although those tensions have eased, we are still faced with a similar problem. There are folks with different ideas of religion and culture that are selecting some houses of worship, schools, and gathering places as places for killing, destruction, and to further their agenda. These acts of violence has now made it necessary to place armed guards at locked doors again, to keep those worshippers inside safe from the evils without.

Will It Work

Today, I am treading very close to being political in a general way. The experiment of Socialism was tried at the founding of colonies in America and it failed miserably. Both Plymouth and Jamestown started by having a common storehouse where the colonists could take what they needed and replaced with what they could. It punished the persons who worked long and hard and rewarded the ones who worked little or not at all. The leaders, Captain John Smith and Governor William Bradford decided to give the people their own piece of land saying, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” It restated the biblical design and gave an incentive to prosper for each individual. When everyone had everything available to them with responsibility for nothing, it was bound to end up in disaster.

One of the reasons the war for Independence was fought was because of England’s impingement on regulating the finances of the Colonies. The dreaded Stamp Act and the tax on tea were especially odious.

The beliefs of our Founding Fathers further shored up free market ideas. Thomas Jefferson’s views shaped the Land Ordinance of 1785 making public lands available for private citizens. Alexander Hamilton displayed his belief in individual responsibility and the sanctity of contracts when in 1791 and 1792 refused to allow government bailout of banks that were the cause of the panic. Benjamin Franklin supported the belief in Capitalism with his printing business and with the wit and wisdom found in the “Poor Richard’s Almanac.

The United States Constitution is filled with core concepts supporting free market enterprise. It includes the Sanctity of Contracts, the freedom of expression, and a limitation on the government to regulate individuals and to levy taxes. It also lays out a responsibility for paying debts.

The Constitution is a major roadblock to those who seek a Socialist paradise. It is why so many politicians and judicial entities today want to diminish the Constitutions power or to actually do away with this document altogether. They want to remove the individual’s freedoms and God established inalienable rights.

Chore Boy

It has started. Another round of sorting through drawers, rearranging, and cleaning the dreaded basement, the black hole for stored things no longer frequently used or even no longer used. Yesterday, I started to sort those junk drawers. I have two dressers that were purchased for the kids to store their clothing when they were young. At one time, there used to be a store that sold unfinished furniture in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. That is where my wife, Cindy and I purchased them many years ago.

When the kids outgrew them, the bureaus were moved to the cellar to become a hoarder’s haven, a picker’s paradise. The drawers became pockets of the forgotten and designated a magnet for all sorts of used items that were “too good to be tossed and may be needed” at a future date, Much of my upbringing was based on the idea, when you wear it out, save it, you may be able to repurpose it.

I have collected four drawers of plumbing supplies. Some are old and some are new. The old pieces came from plumbing that was replaced. The new items are leftovers that were bought and never used, parts that are still in plastic, because they came as a kit and only the needed object was used.

There are four drawers of electrically related items. Old breakers, face plates, parts of ceiling fans, receptacles, and so forth have gathered themselves together for a possible reunion with the useful world again. There is one entire drawer filled with nothing but electrical cords. The cords belong to old electrical appliances, old computers, and extension cords that have amassed over the years.

There are three drawers that, don’t laugh, have collected plastic thing-a-ma-bobs, metal what-cha-ma-call-its, and one that holds drawer handles, door hinges, latches, pulls, knobs, and a lot of I-don’t-know-what -these-are in metal and plastic. I didn’t get rid of many of this not-quite-antique collection yet. But the good thing is, I now have them sorted and I know where to look if any of those odds and ends are ever called back into service.

Eye Love You

Very little is as precious as our eyes and our sight. The words associated with eyes are varied and many. They take up quite a bit of American vocabulary and idioms. One example is someone who is extremely handsome or extremely beautiful is called eye candy and may deserve an eye wink if we can make eye contact. A person on the other end of the spectrum is called an eyesore. Any person who sees a crime is called an eyewitness.

Some expressions are because of their location to our organs of sight. The orb itself is called the eyeball. Arching above the eyeholes are the eyelids, the eyelashes, and the eyebrows. There are cosmetics called eyeliner and eye shadow.

If they are overworked, we might have eyestrain and need eyeglasses, eyewear, or some other types of eyepiece like monocles, magnifying glasses, or something requiring lenses. Perhaps the eyes might need soothed by eyewash from an eyecup or eye drops from an eyedropper.

If someone knocks at our home, we might peek through the eyehole before unlocking the door. If we’re shopping and see a bargain, that would be an eye opener or eye catching and if the deal was extremely fantastic, it would be an eye popper. Wow, what an eyeful.

When we go to the dentist, he or she checks our eyeteeth and the rest for cavities.  A plastic surgeon may recommend an eyelift to eliminate bags under the eyes.

The military may have documents that are secretive and be stamped with the logo, “eyes only.” Sailors braid rope ends into an eye splice and hardware stores carry metal eyehooks and eyebolts.

Needles have eyes, but straight pins are eyeless. Finally, someone who says they will do something, then doesn’t is giving eye service only.

The eyes have it. Eye think eye am finished.

Superman No More

The “Superman” that I once was has slowly slipped away, disappearing. I have been weakened by the ever present, ever pressing Kryptonite of time. Each year my x-ray vision sees new cracks or finds the widening of an old one on this aging “Man of Steel.” It is extremely disheartening. My will remains strong, but more and more often I find my flesh has weakened. I find there are things that I never thought twice about doing--- I just did them. Now it seems I must plan ahead, finding ways to do things differently or to accomplish them in stages.

My grown children worry when I climb onto the roof to do a quick clean of my chimney. It’s not the cleanest. most pleasant, or the safest job for me, but my dad shoveled snow off his house roof when he was in his late seventies and my grandfather climbed ladders and cleaned his house gutters in his eighties. Somehow, I feel like a slacker if I can’t do the things they did.

I’m not an invalid yet and plan to fight old age tooth and nail until I am toothless and my nails are all broken. I will continue to stack firewood in the fall and haul it into my basement for my wood burner until I have gotten rid of my house or until the Lord calls me to my eternal home.

Because I have developed the condition called benign prostatic hypertrophy, an enlargement of the prostate gland that frequently happens in men as they age, I sometimes have difficulty in voiding. My stream is no longer faster than a speeding bullet, nor stronger than a locomotive, and it certainly doesn’t leap forth in an arced stream. Last night was one of those nights. I was not able to fully empty my bladder. The residual pressure caused me to wake up and fly to the bathroom all night long.

Ah, I remember the simple pleasure found in an empty bladder before the Kryptonite of time struck.