A tortured parent

After nearly five months, I have a reason to blog.

I reason I did not need or want.

One of the most terrifying thoughts a parent can contemplate has to be the loss of your child. It involves fear, panic, unspeakable dread, and an overwhelming sense of something you care deeply about going terribly and strangely out of your control, getting beyond what is within your own ability to maintain.

And I began that process Sunday night, when my son called me to tell me that his sister was in a fatal accident - another man had died - that put her in the hospital, in very serious condition.

Blind panic. I had to get to her. But I was hundreds of miles away, and far away from my responsibility, from where I was needed.

Guilt at leaving her crept into my soul. It was just a month ago that she called, crying at the distance between us and telling me that she loved me so much. She knew why I left, that the chance for a changed life was too valued to pass up. But still there was a searing, empty pain that sat behind my heart and thumped at my tortured soul.

No sleep. No comfort. she hurts, I hurt. That's as it should be.

Would I ever see her again? Will I ever be able to see how much love comes out of those brown eyes when she looks at me? Can I live with that? A parent outliving their child brings an odd, perverse feeling of wrong, an absence of balance. It is disquieting, a disharmonious discomfort that comes as though you took something which you did not deserve.

It is like no feeling I have ever experienced.

Seeing her in intensive care, unconscious, knowing she is better off right now being unresponsive to my touch or to my voice, and yet wanting to see that spark of recognition in her eyes ... wanting to be with her, and yet standing in the frustration of uselessness ... it's all a part of the tearing of your soul.

She is not out of the woods. It will take time for her to begin a tough road back. It will take adjustment to the new challenges that await her, and everyone around her.

It will take adjustment for me, was well. That's fine. Facing that adjustment is the sweetest challenge that awaits. Because in facing that challenge, she will have survived. And survival for her is all I ask.

She lost her foot. We got her life, at least for now. In the current moment, I will take that and thank God for it.

Duty to the masses

If you are going to do a blog, for heaven's sakes, do one.

It is incumbent on those who write these things to regularly perform those blogger responsibilities which keep the masses entertained. I believe that. Really, I do.

I just have trouble, well, doing it.

It's like a lot of other goals a lot of us have every day, but life gets in the way of accomplishing - like getting some exercise, or filing those papers, or washing the dog.

If I had a dog, I guess he'd smell pretty bad.

I am amazed this blog does not die of loneliness. I like doing it, but life indeed does get in the way of proper care and feeding of blogs.

When I was writing columns, I sometimes would have to fit a lot of small subjects into one column. I feel one of those times coming on.

So, let's rapid fire a little ...

- God Bless my lovely Mother, who prepared desserts for "a few folks" who came over for Mother's Day - "nine or ten," she said. Relatively, she is right on the money, since 40 to 60 relatives can make it for any given holiday - nine or ten is child's play. I caught the irony of my Mom having to cook to celebrate her special day. But to be honest, I wish I was one of the "Few folks." Especially if she made that pound cake. Yum.

- Erin Andrews is a lovely lady and a talented dancer, as she proves weekly on "Dancing With The Stars." And in no way am I condoning what the filthy slimeball who took naked pictures of her did - he is in prison where he belongs. But I can appreciate the irony of millions of people scanning the web for uploads of those photos of her, and her screaming about her privacy (and rightly so) and then accepting a role on a show in which she dances each week in skimpy, barely-there costumes.

More later ...

How much pain can you tolerate?

Apparently, the answer to that question surprises the people who ask it.

For reasons of relevance, I am talking about physical pain, not the agony of lost love, or the daily annoyances we all live with, or the overall crosses we bear. I am talking about the "shoot, that hurts" kind of pain we all endure.

I have just come out of the hospital after spending a few days trying to find out why I passed out while at work. After a bunch of tests and exams, I was told I passed out (as best they can tell) due to dehydration and stress from pain.

So I guess you can tolerate things better with a lot of drinking.

My own pain comes from a herniated disk in my neck, coming from a dive out the restaurant drive-thru window to save a ten-dollar bill that had blown away. I will go into that episode later on. But since that time, I have had to develop a tolerance to pain levels that I have not had to develop previously. I am not looking for a "poor pitiful you" reaction - knowing most of the blog followers, I would never get that anyway - but I have discovered that dealing with pain becomes a daily, even hourly exercise in just how much a person will put themselves through.

I was given medication to deal with the pain. But that medicine makes me sleepy, and I cannot work and take part in the rest of my life staggering around drowsy. I take it when I have time to tolerate the side effects, which is not very often. The doctor did change the prescription to something for arthritis, which has helped. But even with that, I cannot say I am pain-free.

So my pain does not go away, but it is adjusted to a level I can live with - usually. When asked "How ya doin'?," I am not honest when I say "Great." Usually, I am in a little pain. But you do not answer the casual question "How ya doin'?" with a long list of aches and pains, so you say "Great" and move on.

But you are not great. Some days, in fact, are better than others.

Medical folks have a scale they use, that measures a patients pain from a scale of 1 to 10, with one being perfectly fine and 10 being the worst pain you ever experienced. That would be good to use in casual conversation - "How ya doin'?" "About a three, thanks."

My sisters - three of the four - came to town to visit us while I was laid up. I noticed how difficult it was for one of them to get around, particularly when she stood up or went up stairs. She takes injections to ease the pain she has, and although it was not time for her to get another one, she is obviously feeling more pain than she would consider tolerable. But she goes ahead and tolerates it.

I felt badly for her state of pain, but she said she was fine and went on with her life. I guess that is what most of us do - we draw a line of final tolerance with the daily discomfort of our lives, then grunt and grit our teeth on those occasions when pain breaks that threshold.

If the pain breaks through that level more often, a little medical expertise is needed.

So dealing with pain is a matter of tolerance. Problem is, that experience is challenging to make others understand. My pain may make others wince, but would get still others to wonder what all the fuss is about.

It is, like most things in life, relative.

In the meantime, I'm about a two. I can deal with that.

Would you like some freakin' fries with that?

I am a manager at a fast-food restaurant.

I know, I know. I am really a writer. Have been for many years. But a series of events have changed my life once more, and now I have become what I once was before - a fast-food restaurant manager.

As Jerry Seinfield once said (about another subject), "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

A lot of really good people work in fast food. My used-to-be sister in law has done nothing but restaurant work since before she left high school, and has been very successful at it. My son and daughter have both worked in fast food restaurants, and several people I have met here in Texas who work in fast food are great, hard-working people who do their thing and make their way in life.

I am apparently good at my job, because I still have it. These days, with ten percent unemployment, bosses really do not take a lot of time working through employee situations. The easy answer to everything has been, "See ya - I have 15 resumes here and I can get someone who can fit into your uniform by 5 p.m."

My restaurant used to be owned by the franchise, but was sold to a franchisee just after Christmas. That involves changes, and not all of them are warmly received. No one likes change until it becomes routine, after all, and I am a team player. So if you want me to write up the sales report at 9 a.m. instead of 10 a.m., I can roll with that.

Dad used to tell me that any job is a good job if it involves honest work and provides for your family. He was right, as he often was about a lot of things. But going a bit deeper, for a lot of guys, a job is what defines who you are. It is what you might have trained for, gone to school for, gotten extra practice at, or generally worked hard at in order to become the best you could be.

Another Dad-ism: "If you cannot dig a nice, round hole in the ground, do not take up a career in ditch-digging. But if you do, be the best digger in the ditch." I adopted that stance when I began working in the restaurant. Sure, a few sandwiches might have come out without a few little things - like meat. But I got the hang of it and got through training. I spent the next six weeks or so certifying as a manager that knows how to cook food and serve it to the public in accordance with health and safety laws.

I have come to the conclusion that, like the days of the military draft, many people ought to be forced to work in restaurants or some other (so-called) menial labor so they can get a feel for how the other half lives. Many people would not act like jackasses at restaurants if they had to endure the aftermath of a customer gone bad.

For example, a customer asked for a sandwich with lots and lots of extra pickles. He got it. He then dunked each pickle in ketchup and used his napkin to slingshot them onto the wall, the window and the ceiling. How pleasant it was to clean that up.

Would any of you out there do that at home? Of course not. My mother never tolerated such stupidity at the dinner table, with the exception of one food fight that stated over the serving of hominy. A story for another time, although you can be assured that John started it.

So why do people - especially young people - get with their friends and have "I can be stupider than you" contests at a fast food restaurant?

Here is a quick list of dumb things done at fast-food restaurants - at least, since I have been there:

- Ordering food that is served at other restaurants. Ten times a day, I get asked for a "Happy meal." That ain't us. People come in and order Whataburgers with cheese. Wrong-o. We don't have tater tots and we don't have ice cream. And if the food item you want starts with "Jack," go to a restaurant with "Jack" in the name.

- Cell phones. Most people have precious little manners when it comes to using them in public anyway, but something about coming in a fast food place magnifies their uncouth-ness by a factor of ten. They come to the register, usually with people behind them, and talk away while they point at the item they want as if the staff can decode these signals. They talk with their voices to the called party, but pantomime and lip-sync their directions to you. And in the drive thru, the latest craze is to drive in, get the order taker's "Can I help you?" and tell them to wait with they call their friends and ask them what they want.

All of which, by the way, is RUDE AS HELL.

- Families. Fast-food places are family-friendly places, and they want parents to bring in the little ones. But for God's sakes, most families turn it into a baby-sitting service. One kid was playing in the playground as his father was out in the parking lot, in his truck, Yes, cell phones were involved. Kids, delightful as they are, change when they come inside. They scream, yell, cry, run through the restaurant, knock people down, throw stuff on the floor, smear condiments onto everything they touch and go into the bathroom to destroy anything they see.

All this goes on while Mom an Dad are munching away on their own bags 'o goodies with hardly a care as to what their kids are doing. After all, they don't have to clean it up - and believe me, they don't.

Not getting all racial on you, but some people of a certain culture that is widely populated here in Texas (guess for yourselves which one) comes into the restaurant with their kids. The parents cannot speak English past "Hi." So the kids, at age seven or so, come to the register to give the order, all the while yelling back at the parents (who have found a booth) in native tongue to get the order right. It's SO much fun! The kids might speak English, but they have not the math skills to get the correct change from the $20 they are going to give me no matter what the order totals.

- "Value" menus. Some sadistic bastard in the corporate office got a raise for inventing the "Value" menu. The problem is, no one knows what "value" means. At my store, the smallest fries or drink you can get is called a "Value" because it is the cheapest. So when a customer orders a small drink, you have to find out if he wants a small or a "Value" drink. This wastes more time at the ordering stage and ticks off the customer, who just wants a little damn drink.

Of course, at other restaurants, a value might be the largest drink of all at the price of a medium drink. Value is such a generic word and can mean so many different things that no one is really sure what they get when they get a value meal.

Anyway, I started out by saying I am a restaurant manager is if that was a bad thing. And I came to the job in the process of restarting my professional life, something I have done many times in my life. It is not a bad place, or an embarrassing place, or a degrading place to be. It is merely a place to begin again, to get up after the fall and start the climb back up the ladder.

I had to learn the hard way that Dad was right - about the ditch, the honest living, the effort that has to be put into everything you do. Honest, hard work is rewarded. Maybe not with a lot, but it is rewarded.

So if you want fries with that order, come on up to the second window and let me know. At this stage in my life, I will be glad to help you.

Too many faces ...

If you ever want to get lost in the crowd, drop by my Mom's house when the family is there.

It does not even have to be all of the family. Any sizable branch of the family tree is likely to have enough people on it to populate a reasonably-sized Pacific Island. And there are not many days in the month when at least some of them are around, in, in back of, or in front of Mom's house.

It has always been like that since we were kids. As children, one of the kids always had someone over doing something in some part of the house. I have mentioned previously that Glenda was famous for performing hair experiments and ghastly homemade piercings (just the ears, as I remember) with her friends in the bathroom, her bedroom or the back patio, while Tony and his crowd was playing football in the front yard or basketball in the driveway.

Dad set up a basketball goal over the garage door, like a lot of families did before the days of portable hoops. What set "Williams Arena" apart was Dad's modification to the curved driveway we had that led to the garage - he "squared in" the curve to allow better parking. The unintended result (I guess it was unintended) was the creation of a reasonably good half-court driveway. Tony, John and the neighborhood kids had a field day, with hours-long pickup games that attracted kids from blocks around.

To draw a parallel to the present day, my family still draws a crowd. The only difference with the present day is that if someone stands around long enough, they usually become part of the family.

I admit that living a long day's drive away from Opp makes it difficult to keep up with people whether they are family or not. But I have to say that over the years, every trip home I made found me looking at people whom I did not recognize that seemed eminently comfortable on Mom's couch. These days, I will even find people napping in her living room that bear no resemblance to my forefathers.

Now, that is what I call making yourself at home.

I am glad everyone feels so at ease around the family. My problem comes with keeping up with WHO is IN the family.

A little detailed research has indicated to me the cause lies partly with my nieces. Over the years, the girls have dated guys and married guys. A few have divorced and married other guys. I have no problem with people divorcing whatsoever - I've done it myself, and my oldest brother was unconsciously attempting a world's record before finding his current (wonderful) wife.

And before you say it, girls, I know the guys change partners occasionally, too. But I have really never met an unidentified girl in Mom's house on the couch. And my wife said I had better not meet a girl on any couch, ever, either.

But that leaves me with a sense of confused wonder when I visit home. It must be similar to what Alzheimer's patients go through, meeting new people every day. (Hope that is not insensitive, which it probably is. OK, sorry.) Usually the new population consists of boys who are tracking a feminine interest like a bloodhound on a convict, and they wander into the house lulled by the distracting smell of food and the warm glow of a television.

I will walk into the living room, and three guys will be there. I do not recognize any of them, and even those who have been around awhile have not seen me enough to know who I am. We all look at each other, suspiciously, and the same unspoken question is on our minds: "Can I see your ID, please?"

In one instance, I believe one guy dated one of my nieces enough to be considered steadies. They must have broken up, because the niece married someone else. But I believe he hung around the family for a few months afterward. Mom liked him, and of course getting the permission of the matriarch and homeowner trumps nearly all claims of citizenship.

I think he even started dating another niece. But we won't go that scenario as it may bring up other family-and-marriage stories that probably need to remain a part of Southern myths and legends.

When we first moved to Opp, Mom got very curious about our school friends from the first day. She heard us mention their last name, and she would ask us who their parents were, where their parents went to school and in what year, and other details to the point that we began calling the queries "filling out the application."

She was trying to identify the kids of people she knew from her school days. But I have to admit that I could use information like that about my own family. I missed most of the weddings, sadly, but had I gone I would spent so much on airfare that I would have accumulated enough frequent flier miles to take most of south Alabama to Cancun.

Admittedly, they would have be told where Cancun was, but I digress.

I saw a family picture from a recent wedding, and I was a bit flummoxed in that I could only recognize just over half of them. It probably says more about my lack of time spent in Alabama, but it is still sort of disconcerting.

My family (the ones I know) are not a lot of help. A few of them seem to believe in community memory, acting as if I will know the person in question if I can relate it to someone everyone in the room knows. That would work if I was in the room more than 2 days a year.

"You know," they will say, "Tommy's brother."

Tommy? Tommy Who? Tommy Lasorda? Tommy Tune? Tommy whose momma used to teach school with Norma McCutcheon, whose aunt went to church with Rowena St. McCorkle and tried to make her cornbread, but Lord, it came out bad, and she stopped talking to Sammy Bob Doowhatchie because he moved in with her grandma and ... you get the idea.

A little local information, though, can be a very good thing. There is a reason mountain climbers taking on Mount Everest use Nepalese Sherpas. (Alabama alert - Nepalese people are from Nepal, where Mount Everest is located. You're welcome.) The theory works in rural Alabama, as well.

When my wife first came to Opp, she was driven there by her son. Neither of them had any notion of how to get to my Mom's, where I was, and they called me just outside of town after they gave up on finding the right road.

"Where are you?" I asked her as I sat with family on the front porch.

"I'm not sure," she answered. "But the white house we just passed has a bicycle leaning on the fence and a boat in the side yard."

I repeated those landmarks out loud, mostly to make sure I heard them right.

"Wait," said my brother in law, Dwight. "I know right where she is."

Next time there is family gathering at which I will gather, I want the people whose names I do not know to come up to me and tell me who you are, and how you are related. Please do not be embarrassed. I will be the embarrassed one, but I need to know.

Help a family member out, OK? I'd hate to have to ask if your momma went to school with my mom, or if Rowena has been cooking your aunt's cornbread.

The Original Seven

There was a movie - a Western movie, to be more precise - called "The Magnificent Seven." I really only remember the title of it, but I think a sequel was made called "The Magnificent Seven Ride." The movie was made in the 1960's, so nowadays the sequel could well be called "The Magnificent Seven Crowd the Sidewalk with their Walkers."

I mention this movie because the title could well apply to my generation of my family. The family spans four generations, and with the recent arrival of my niece Bonnie's first grandchild, the fifth generation of the family has made its initial appearance.

Each generation has sort of created its own identity. The brash and arrogant members of the generation after mine decided to informally declare themselves "The Cool Kids." We will not burst their bubble and remind them that calling yourselves "cool" is probably the best evidence that, in reality, you are anything but cool.

Whoops, there goes the bubble.

That generation went so far in their labeling as to name my generation. We are, in their parlance, "The Original Seven."

This is where the movie title would have served a much better purpose. First off, we are not the Original Seven, or at least, we certainly are not original. Mom and Dad's generation were vast in their number - Mom's more so than Dad's, but still the families were numerous. And going back in our family genealogy, it can be found many of our forefathers and their fore families were prodigious at expanding the family - or they figured out a way to keep warm in the winter.

To call ourselves original removes dozens upon dozens of stories about Big Papa and Big Mama, Uncle Billy, Aunt Christine and all of Mom's siblings. And the family without stories about Uncle Bob and Uncle Dick, Aunt Hazel and all of Dad's family is just not the family. So, Cool Kids, who are they? The Cro-Magnon Generation?

I can sort of see their point in naming our generation "The Original Seven." For many of the "Cool Kids," life begins with them. So the generation before must be explained, and for that reason we are the "Originals."

We are sort of an original group. Everyone we know is astounded that the seven of us don't hate each other or hold petty jealousies towards each other. Of course, a lot of the people that know our family do not really believe I exist - that I am a sort of phantom, heard about but never seen. Rumor has it that a family friend actually tried to take my place in the family group after claiming I did not really exist.

Gary, you knew better. But I forgive you.

It has become a status symbol to be an Original Seven member. It is an exclusive club - I seriously doubt anyone else can gain membership. The Original Seven's spouses, while loved and revered, cannot even claim an equal status in the family hierarchy because we are the ones who lived through the raising by Harold and Sue. To be more honest, it was probably more a case of Harold and Sue living through raising seven children.

We tell stories. True stories, although everyone remembers them differently. Stories that get us laughing so hard at each other that we just start crying and holding our sides. And Mom provides the perfect foil.

When we last got together, we disputed a claim about the grades we made in grammar school. In mere moments, Mom swooped into the room and dropped a pile of papers in front of each of us - all of our report cards from school, from kindergarten through senior year. She not only kept them, but knew exactly where they were. Not bad for 82, huh?

We Originals don't keep to ourselves. We talk to the children and our siblings' children and tell them stories and try to pass on to them our wisdom and expertise on life. What they do with it is their problem.

We are, after all, magnificent, each of us in our own way. We deserve the title if, for no other reason, we managed to raise each and every Cool Kid. Just as we owe our development and character to our parents, the Cool Kids are who they are, in no small part, through the efforts of at least one of the Original Seven.

That should rock their world a bit. I will smile at this thought as I run through the IMDB website to see just who was in that western. It's going to keep me up nights trying to remember.