The Silverfern Chronicles

A tortured parent

2010-09-28T19:25:00.000-07:00

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 her 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, form 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 shy 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 eye 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 the room, unconscious, knowing she is better off right now being unresponsive to my touch or to my voice and yet wanted 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

2010-05-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-04-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

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 doing?," 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 doing?" "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 thee meantime, I'm about a two. I can deal with that.

Would you like some freakin' fries with that?

2010-03-03T20:34:00.001-08:00

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 employees relations 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 t 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, cells 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! They 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 ...

2010-01-25T06:21:00.000-08:00

If you ever want to get lost in the crowd, drop by 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

2010-01-20T20:12:00.001-08:00

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.

Thanksgiving on Oasis Avenue

2009-11-24T19:26:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is about family - no one can deny that.

And when family is as intense and plentiful as I enjoy it, Thanksgiving comes with a ton of memories. Some are unique to our family, to be sure - most probably involve gravy, football games and John throwing some kind of food while protesting his innocence.

But a lot of these memories are generally shared by many other families - things like cranberry sauce cleverly molded into the shape of a can; a card table for little kids; all the excitement about the big 'ol meal and the knowledge that Christmas was a mere five weeks away.

Some of my early memories involve the little kids table. Even when I was older, as a teenager, I was sometimes condemned to the folding card table with children ten to 12 years my junior for my meal of thanks. And the indignity was compounded by molded thin plastic plates - or worse yet, paper - and plastic silverware that would never cleanly cut the meat, but managed to mar the plate to the point that the gravy and other wet foods on the plate drained out and into your lap.

Let us not forget that the sawing action required to make those utensils cut amplified the rickety wobble the table made anyway from the inevitable shorter leg. At times, I was tempted to balance the table leg out with a wedge of turkey or a hardened biscuit.

The turkey - of course, Mom made sensational birds. And the joy of Thanksgiving led to the bliss of the leftovers, like turkey sandwiches and all kinds of other delights in school lunch sacks.

I used to think there could be no bigger windfall in Turkey Land than to get the leg. All that meat! And the delightful roasted skin ... you betcha! But as I got older, the leg gave way to the breast, of course.

I am still talking about turkey here, and not a college date.

These days, I love the dark meat of the bird, the thighs and such. I enjoy breast meat if it is not too dry, and making the bird with juicy white meat is a legend right up there with Bigfoot.

A few years ago I discovered the delight of deep fried turkey. I have fried up a few birds in my day, and they were lip-smacking good - the skin, at least. Imagine a few dozen sets of fingers pulling at the gobbler before it is even sliced ... that is the fascination with the fried bird.

Of course, you lave to lower the bird into the hot - and I mean smoking hot - oil very slowly. Imagine what is going through my head as I stand arm's length away from the hot cauldron, lowering an 18-pounder into the pot as the gas-fed fire burns inches from my legs.

What am I thinking? I am thinking this: "If that oil spills out into that flame ... I will be the first to die. "

Mary Jo will not let me fry a bird. There is a danger involved, as fire department reports from across the south have chronicled. The key to safety? Drying the bird out so there is no moisture on it pre-dunk. Hot grease and water are volatile. And frying a frozen bird is just stupid - so of course, about 6,000 idiots try it every year.

I will not be joining the crowd at Mom's this year, nor will we be part of the Tennessee celebration at Mary Jo's parents. It's her and me this year, after she gets off work. I have a twelve-pound Tom tucked into the fridge, slowly defrosting. I have several pounds of sweet potatoes and the makings for a pumpkin pie, as well as the ingredients for green bean casserole and cranberries galore.

And I am the chef, since Mary Jo will be working. I had better do a good job for her.

Because when she comes through the door and smiles at me, I know what I am thankful for.

A moving experience

2009-11-12T19:28:00.000-08:00

Funny thing about this blogging exercise. If you want to do it right, there is sort of a discipline to it. Each blog needs to present the reader with the desire to want a little more, so they will come back and read it more.

Apparently I have that part down. The only thing I lack is the drive/incentive/ability to do it on a consistent basis. I could have sworn I just wrote my last entry, and apparently it has been a few months.

Sorry to the thousands - OK, in reality, two or three - faithful readers who have e-mailed me with messages that begin "WTF?" One day, I will master all this Internet jargon and find out just what WTF means. I swear. Soon.

I have been a bit busy, which I know is the universally accepted excuse of bloggers everywhere who would actually watch reruns of "Rescue from Gilligan's Island" than do their Internet duty. But I have been busy. I have a job, such as it is, to do nearly every day, and I do take a little time for my own selfish interests. That Mary Ann looks good even in her sixties.

My wife has kept us busy almost from the moment we arrived in Dallas with dreams of getting a house. And we have jumped through so many hoops in the attempt to buy a house that there are no more hoops to be had for the rest of you.

Those who have use for a hoop, anyway.

When we arrived here, we got a nice apartment, which we will live in. From this base of operations, and with our house in North Carolina on the market, we optimistically began the search for our dream home.

We looked at townhouses. We looked at patio homes, the patio of which clearly does not deserve top billing. We looked at foreclosed homes, short-sold homes, unsold homes, Homes with pools, homes with fences, homes with pools and fences, pools with homes.

And we waited for our house to sell. It did, and as anyone out there who has sold a home in this "economic downturn" can attest, we lost money.

But we got over it, and without the encumbering mortgage to hinder us, we search for a home in earnest.

I use the term searched in every sense of the word. I use the word "we,' however, in much more general terms.

Mary Jo was the hunter. and she was the big-game hunter when it came to houses. She spearheaded the sojourn for a home from the word go, lining up realtors, talking to anyone who would listen, leaving countless phone messages and e-mails. She was a warrior.

My part was as active as I could make it. But in my fifty-plus years of living, I had never before bought a home. I bought a mobile home, to be sure, and spent 15 years-plus in it. But buying a mobile home is nothing compared to the purchase of the stick-built kind. Funny how that works. A mobile home salesman will tell you every six minutes that "this beauty is built to stick-built home specifications." All the while the realtor is laughing at him and feeling sorry for you.

More on that another time.

Anyway, Mary Jo hunted and hunted for a home in most of the neighborhoods of the Metroplex - Trophy Club, Lewisville, Irving, Las Colinas, Cedar Hill and may others.

Finally, though the efforts of a broker who has actually become quite a good friend, we looked at a new home in Grand Prairie. Mary Jo was smitten. I was smitten (three-car garage, four bathrooms, and a media room!). We bit the bullet and will sign the note tomorrow.

Buying a house is one slow process. It is supposed to be. It's the biggest thing most of us will ever buy. I know it is the biggest thing we have ever bought. I know this because as much as my wife loves to shop, she hates being in debt. As a result, she has essentially bought nothing since we arrived in Dallas.

She was saving up for the big present.

We love our house, and one small reason why is that it is brand spanking new. There is something special about buying something no one has ever had before you. I have never bought a new car - until we got here. The feeling is one that cannot help but make you feel good about yourself. We are not having to deal with someone else's home problems, their bad repair jobs, or the skeleton that might be hidden in the wall.

I have to quit watching bad horror movies - or CNN.

So we are packing up the apartment tonight and tomorrow and the movers come Saturday. Since we left North Carolina, this will be the first time all of our things and us will be in the same home at the same time. And it is exciting.

My nephew just moved - I know this because he shamelessly pandered for housewarming gifts. I am not doing this, since we have a little dignity. We also have enough stuff.

I thought of my bachelor nephew, in his twenty-somethings, moving his belongings to his new place. Probably took two truckloads and about 3 hours. Jeff Foxworthy was right - if a bachelor throws a party in his place and everything he owns is broken, he out about 15 bucks.

I envy my nephew the speed of his move. Mine will not be as rapid. But we will, one day, be cuddled together on our coach in our living room, watching the roaring fire.

We'd be watching TV, but I am betting the installer won't make it in time.

If you come to Dallas, be sure to drop by. Now, we have room for you all.

Fantasy football

2009-09-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

Fantasy football has become a passion for millions of football fans. And yes, I am one of them.

I can blame my son for having given me the bug. He invited me to join his league three years ago. I used to enjoy watching football on television with him, but whenever he got the remote control, he would incessantly flip channels. I know, it's in the guy genes to do that, but he was flipping from game to game, looking for his fantasy players and trying to see how they were doing.

It struck me that he was not enjoying the games anymore. He was enjoying the efforts of the players, and not the results of the team. He was interested in his own interests, and the NFL was just a conduit to those selfish interests.

To some degree, I had it nailed.

But I eventually accepted his invite to fantasy gaming because as a fan, I have always thought that somewhere in the back of my fan;s mind, I was a better GM and coach than the ones doing it for real. This is essential for fantasy players - you got to channel your inner Tony Dungy or Jerry Jones.

Scotty explained the technical side - pick players in each skill position and track those players in each week's game. Your team gets points based on the performance of those players. You win if the team you are matched against scores fewer points than your team does.

You get to pick players to "start" (players whose points will count) and who to "bench," trade other teams for players, check the waiver wire and adjust your lineup based on injuries from week to week.

It has enough variants to make the game interesting, and it give you a little extra incentive to pull for teams or watch games you might not have watched.

Ask the wives or girlfriends that become football widows if that is a good thing or not.

We held our fantasy draft a week ago, and 11 of the 14 league owners came together for an afternoon party and live draft. I attended via Internet, which was an adventure in itself. I got the first overall pick, which sounds like a good thing since you get the best player out of all the NFL players, but it can be a drag in that the picking order was serpentine (from 1-14 and then back14 to 1). I could not pick another player until everyone else had picked - twice.

I am still glad Adrian Peterson is running for me.

It is important to note that the people in the league are friends, most of them buds since college. That is something a little different than most fantasy leagues, made up of casual acquaintances or virtual strangers who are bound only be their love of football and their common egotistical belief that they are the evil genius of gaming.

Strangers, throwing down against strangers, will compete every weekend this fall on the backs of real athletes who will be playing for their usual motivations. Is this a great country, or what?

I have got to admit that I have drank the Kool-Aid of fantasy football. I won the league last year and I really want to do it again. There is luck involved, but just enough skill that you can take some pride in your results.

And interesting dichotomy exists among the NFL Folks. The analysts, coaches and purists of football hate fantasy football because it dilutes the team effort and enhances individual effort. The players, to some degree, share that philosophy. But most of them are players in leagues.

Football is the only fantasy game I play. No golf, baseball, hockey or basketball leagues need to contact me for a further conversion to nerd-dom.

This is not World of Warcraft. This is reality.

Really.

I mean it.

Reality.

2009-08-06T08:11:00.001-07:00

I come from a big family.

Not big in the sense that we all need to try out for "Biggest Loser Families." Well, we probably could do that, but I don't mean big like that.

I mean big in the sense that I have four sisters and two brothers. That makes seven children - nine people living in the house that I grew up in, when Mom and Dad are thrown in.

That's unusual. That's not Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not unusual, but it is not something you see every day. Growing up in a suburb of San Diego, California in the 1960's, it was definitely not something you saw every day.

Unless you lived in our neighborhood. Then you saw it a lot.

A kid living near Oasis Avenue in Chula Vista naturally gravitated to our house nearly every day, because something was going on there. The seven kids' ages spanned just nine years, so it was easy to find something to do with kids your own age - you pretty much showed up and looked to see if something was happening that you were interested in.

My brother Tony was likely playing football in the front yard, or basketball in the driveway. My sister Glenda was in the house (on the phone) or in the bathroom or the back patio, with a few of her teen-aged friends, fooling around with their hair and talking about boys.

Brother John was in the back yard, on restriction. John was always on restriction. Ask anyone. This was because he could not stay out of trouble - not the kind of trouble where you picked him up at the police station at 4 a.m., but the kind of trouble that meant he was staying after school and the teacher (or principal) called Mom, and then Dad would yell at him and extend his restriction again.

If he served out the actual time he was given, he'd still be in the back yard - and he'll turn 54 this year.

Mom and Dad, looking back, did an amazing job to keep us all fed, clothed, healthy and unsuccessful in our efforts to kill each other. Dad was career Navy by the time the younger children arrived, and instead of moving us every few years as happens to most military families, the Navy left us in San Diego for 12 uninterrupted years. Dad took any assignment he could that kept us there, so he worked a variety of Navy jobs at a variety of Navy bases from north of Tijuana to northern San Diego County.

As you might expect, money was tight with all those kids and just a Navy paycheck. So Mom and Dad worked nights at the base's NCO club to make the money go further. That left Glenda in charge, which permanently made her the most unpopular kid amongst us seven - the boss, after all, is the bossiest.

We pushed her around, to be sure. But the ultimate retribution was on Glenda's side - "I'm telling Mom and Dad on you!" And she did, too.

Dad was a yeller, a lecturer in reality. He started as the grand administer of household punishment. As the son of a minister that believed in not sparing the rod, he intended to raise his kids in the same manner.

Now don't go all right-wing, corporal-punishment-is-abuse spastic on me. He was administering what he saw as tough love. And there is a difference between smacking a kid's backside and bloodying it with a switch. Thank God he knew the difference.

He believed in gang mentality behavior - if one kid did it, they all got punished. So he would line us up for spankings, oldest to youngest. Of course, by the time he got to the littlest kids, he was so worn out that we just got sent to our rooms - which we gladly accepted.

Mom, however, was different. She delivered swift and terrible punishment, on the spot, with the quick wrath of a lightning bolt. She was handy with the palm of her hand, supporting the convicted child with the non-swinging hand clenched around an arm so they were left to dangle as she paddled.

She was impressively good with her slipper, which came to be the delivery method of choice as we got older. She would throw it at you, hit you, then tell you to "bring that back to me." The child then had a tough balancing act - get close enough to Mom that you could give her the slipper back and stay clear of the swinging zone and another barrage, whilst not being so far away as to be accused of "throwing my own slipper at me."

Mom learned this from her mother, my Big Momma. She was revered for being able to throw slippers around corners. I never saw her do it, but both my brothers swear to her doing it.

But punishments were not so frequent. The best method of gaining control was clearing the house of non-family members and sending the kids to their rooms or the back yard. Dad or Mom would walk out the front door and deliver this message - "If you do not live here, go home. If you do, go to your room!" In about five minutes, calm was restored.

Of course, you never had to tell John. He was already in the back yard, remember?

A few friends had special privileges. Glenda's friend Janet Holmes had free run of the place, and Tony's bud Robert Holmes, who lived down the street, would frequently walk into the house and just jump into whatever Tony was up to. Someone challenged him to at least knock before he came in once, and from that point on Robert would walk in the front door as he always did, and knock on the hallway walls, yelling, "It's Robert Phelps!" Robert had a pool in his backyard, so he was a shoo-in for popularity among the neighborhood kids.

Sister Kathy was sneaky, at least to me. She never seemed to get into trouble. I am sure she did, but she was very low-key about it, having her on-the-edge fun when it made the smallest splash.

The big kids - Tony and Kathy, usually - apparently had this past time when Mom and Dad were not home of climbing onto the roof with their friends. The house had a typical flat roof and was very low to the ground, so it was easy for an average-sized teenager to get up on it. As far as I know, that was Kathy's big home risk. I guess she did her thrill-seeking out of the neighborhood.

Cindy was the good one. She usually went along with whatever everyone was doing, but she was not in nearly the daily trouble the others were. Later in life we would pick on her about being "the sheltered one" who seemed to never get the off-color jokes we heard.

We had lived in military housing in Coronado ( Pam and I were just babies), so we had a life before Oasis Avenue. But Dad bought the house shortly after it was built and moved in. We saw our world grow from that little neighborhood. The elementary school was just a block away, our friends were across the street or down the street, and you could go outside and play after breakfast and play all day, with break for lunch, and not come home until dark without anyone worrying about you.

Gradually, our world got bigger. We all started junior high and high school, met new friends, and matured. Glenda would bring home boyfriends. Tony was suddenly too cool to hang with the little kids, which infuriated John the most.

He was the in-between child, fourth in the line, and stuck in the middle. He was too young to be considered a "big kid" as were Glenda, Kathy and Tony. But he always felt too old to be a "little kid" like Cindy, me and Pam. It was a point of contention for many years with him, and it manifested itself in our bedtime.

The little kids always went to bed at 8:30 p.m. and the big kids went to bed later on. John saw it as a tragic miscarriage of justice that he had to go to bed with the little kids, and he was always vocal about it come bed time.

For me, I loved it, I was a scaredy-cat as a kid, and I hated going into that dark bedroom alone. I would casually insist that John always go first, to scare off the night-beings that stayed in the closet when no one was looking, intent on slaughtering me as I walked across the bedroom floor.

When he finally received the coveted "big kid" designation, I am not sure it was all he thought it was. He got to stay up, sure. But I don't think he ever got control of the TV watching that he thought he would get.

More later ...

2009-07-31T10:59:00.000-07:00

Doctors have one heck of a racket going for themselves.

I went to the doctor yesterday, and for reasons of tact I will not go into the specifics. It was my first experience with this particular doctor and this particular clinic, and it was good. The people were nice, helpful, and best of all, empathetic to the patients they were treating. I left feeling pretty good about the experience overall, even though there were certain parts of it I would not enjoy repeating.

That experience, I have found, is much more the exception than the rule.

The whole thing about dealing with medical environments is that is the one thriving industry that does not care if it is customer-friendly. If you sit out in the waiting room - or the examining room - for a few hours, well, you are just going to do it. Unlike your favorite restaurant or the dry cleaners, you have to see these people. Your ball is in their yard and you have to play their game to get what you need.

That may not be true for general practitioners, because you certainly can change to other ones. But even there, the racket that is medicine rears its head. Most people do not get a new doctor if their current one ticks them off. You have to fill out hours of paperwork - the same paperwork you filled out with the previous doctor - and the new guy has to accept your insurance (assuming you have insurance).

He may even decide that he has enough patients right now and does not want to accept you as a patient. How does that work in other walks of life? Have you ever pulled into a car wash to get your ride spiffied up, and the manager says, "Well, bud, I am swamped right now. I am just too busy to deal with you at all. Good luck."

Are you going to rush back to him after you ride down a dusty road? Heck, no. But we all queue up at the doctor's office no matter how badly we were treated last time out.

Customer service is certainly hinted at in the medical profession. If not, who would have invested in waiting rooms? Which reminds me - why in the name of sanity would a doctor not subscribe to a wide variety of magazines, instead of the ones that just suit their tastes? I have sat in countless waiting rooms, praying for something at least slightly interesting to read, and the best I can come up with is Good Housekeeping, Entrepreneur, or Kayaking Quarterly, all of which are six months old. The most current Newsweek I found celebrated the election to the U.S. Senate of a newcomer from Illinois named Obama.

The office manager should turn to page 155 of their two-year old Ladies Home Journal and discover fourteen wonderful ways to recycle this stupid waste of trees.

I usually go to female doctors. Perhaps I am seeking a maternal influence from my medical professionals. I haven't really gone into any deep analysis about this. Perhaps it boils down to the basic requirement that if anyone is going to touch my personal areas or have their finger up my butt, we are not going to share similar gender. If this is homophobic, so be it.

I was reminded of a line from the movie "Same Time Next Year," a classic in which a couple carry on an affair over the same weekend every year for over 20 years. The man, who was played by Alan Alda, was talking about how he had a woman doctor and she was giving him a rectal exam. She asked if he was tense, and he said he was. She asked if he was tense because she was a woman. He replied, "No, I get tense whenever anyone does that to me."

No wonder doctors are often accused of being God-like. In what other profession would a person walk in into a small room with you, drop their pants and point their bare posterior at you - all the while knowing what you, as the doctor, were going to do? You don't go to that personal a level with just anyone. What a power to behold.

And I wonder why it is that over the course of medical history, no one has come up with a better way to check for problems with the prostate? I mean, in the age of MRI, CT scans and high-tech peeks inside the human body, the best way to see if the prostate gland is acting up is to stick your finger in your patient's butt?

Who first suggested this, anyway? Can you imagine the reaction he got at that medical convention? "Sure, Larry, I'll try that as soon as I get back home. Try not to drink so much before you present your paper next time."

By the way, a quick little English lesson: Prostate is a gland in the body. Prostrate is lying down. Mixing these up makes you look stupid. (Excuse me while I check these facts ........... yep, that is correct.) Remember: You get prostrate to check your prostate.

Know why? Because if you were on your feet and someone tried to do that, you'd run like hell.

My favorite person in the world that agreed to marry me says that all doctors are learners. What she means is that doctors do not know it all, and probably never will. What she does not say is that if a doctor does not know what is wrong with you, by and large, they will decide you are making it up or are imagining the symptoms. If you had something wrong, by God, they would have found it.

That is the attitude - and believe me, it is prevalent - that pisses me off about doctors. I will gladly go to them and see if they can take my pain away or fix what ails me so I can live to a ripe old age. But for crying out loud, let's not stop when the problem gets too challenging.

Many will recommend a specialist. That is the out for a GP - he can always send you to someone who specializes in this particular part of the body. But when those guys recommend other specialists, what they are really saying is, "Dude, it beats the hell outta me; let's ask this other guy."

That starts a chain of guys who have no idea what is going on. There are not a lot of original thinkers in the medical community. Most doctors stick to research and book learning to treat a patient, and if it ain't in the book, then someone is flat out of luck - the patient.

Of course, a doctor that thinks out of the box won't be good friends with his lawyer or his insurance company. But sometimes you just have to look at something from a new perspective to gain some insight.

We will all still keep going to doctors and keep doing just what they say. There's no way around it. And to show my support of changing the health care system in this country, I am willing to make the following deal with all the other patients. I will donate a year's worth of my prized Sports Illustrated magazines to the waiting room of the next doctor's office I visit, if someone out there will pledge to do the same with their US News and World Report.

Shoot, I'd settle for Reader's Digest.

Welcome!

2009-07-29T13:44:00.001-07:00

Welcome to the Silverfern Chronicles!

I am blogging because I like to write. I could have been blogging a few years ago, but I am not one who falls into this computer-Internet-New Age stuff without a little trepidation.

I figure a lot of you are out there are my age, and have now come to the realization that this computer fad just might stick around. And you want to play with it, send messages on it, use it and receive the same unbridled joy and passion your kids and grandkids have expressed.

But you're scared. Or at least, a bit hesitant. You have it in the back of your mind that one errant keystroke will cause your computer to burn up and set off the smoke alarm. Or the many options available to the online-literate are so dazzling that you do not know where to begin.

I hear you. And I am here to help.

I am not expert myself, so I will speak your language. In case you need help that is beyond my scope of knowledge - shoot, it is a certainty that you will ask questions beyond my scope of knowledge - I will go and find the experts and get back to you.

This blog may even go beyond the world of tech. If you are my age, and you feel like the world is passing you by for a younger, savvier, more brash generation - in my family, they are called "The Cool Kids" and believe me, the title is not one they earn - then we all have felt pushed aside, no longer a generation that could change the world, but a generation condemned to live in it as the next generation holds the wheel.

I am here to say that you are not heard because you are not speaking loud enough. Get your feelings out there! Let the advertisers know that we are important and we do not care to see feminine hygiene products being peddled while the football game is on. Let the employers know we did not just suddenly get stupid when we changed the lead digit on our ages. Let the rest of the world know that we value ourselves, and they had better value us as well - or they will be left wondering why those old folks don't come to my restaurant or shop in my store or stay in my hotel or buy my car.

Case in point - any one use one of those Jitterbug cellular phones? This may be a good product, but for Pete's sake, can the commercial be any more insulting? A phone for old people - we know this because a couple of seniors are dancing to the "Jitterbug" jingle - that is stripped down to the most basic thing a cell phone does, send and receive telephone calls. If the oldies are too dimwitted to handle that, we have a special operator standing by to help you get it done.

Please. We can use a cell phone. If you want to be helpful, how about making the numbers bigger so I don't dial three numbers when I was aiming to hit one?

Anyway, that is where I am hoping to help you out. Bridge the generation gap and make sure no one misses the point - that people past a certain age do not need to be led out onto an ice floe and floated out into the ocean, never to be seen again.

Let's see how we do, OK?