STRUGGLES.....and LOVE

Girls

My thoughts today are on our 3 big kids…no not you, you’re our biggest kids. Eleanor, Liam and Ruby are our three little kids. No, I’m thinking of Anna, Mason and Owen. 

We had a good time last night watching Owen playing basketball, a nail biter of a game. He played well but I know at the same time he is fighting internal struggles...just like Anna...and just like Mason. The three of them are at that stage of life where they are trying to find themselves. What do they want to do, and how do they get there? We want their picture to be clearer than what it is, but we realize we can’t control all of that. It will happen, when it happens.

I think back to my teen years and the challenges I battled. My mom and her issues, my dad and how I idolized him and was angry with him at the same time. Our lack of money. Our living conditions. My geeky body. It was all self-pity. Only as I got older did I realize those battles I faced, and the many scars they created, were mostly self-inflicted. And I realized those battles and scars made me a better person for having gone through them. I was so self-absorbed I didn’t take into consideration that mom had no control over how she was…and that dad was doing the best he could. I didn’t take note of the love that they both had for me as well as the support my siblings (who were often my co-parents) had for me. They wanted the best for me, encouraged me, and praised me, but not until I was older and a little wiser did I realize it and learned to appreciate what they did for me and recognize the battles they were facing of their own at the same time. 

The same thing will happen for Anna, Mason and Owen. They will eventually find their way. And when they get older, they will realize the struggles they have faced, are facing and will face were all a part of the growing-up phase of life. It will make them better people, more empathetic, more accepting, more loving. They will realize and recognize the love and support that was always there for them from their family and they will give it back to those who gave it to them and even be willing to share it with others. 

We are always a parent. Just as our parents worried about us, we worried about you girls growing up, and we still worry now. You worry for your children as well. As grandparents, we worry about your children (our grandchildren) too. Parenting never stops.

Love from family helped pull me through. I hope and believe you feel it helped pull you girls through, and it will pull your children through too.  

Love. It’s a powerful thing.

REMEMBER: Learning what you don’t want to do is the next best thing to figuring out what you do want to do.

Be talkin’ to ya.
Dad

 

January 1, 1972

Girls
 
Fifty years ago, I was at a party at my friend, Byron Haflich’s, house, along with about 30-40 classmates and friends. My high school class, for the most part, seemed to be a close group that were also friends with the other classes, and it was pretty common to have BIG parties. On this night, Byron’s parents were not home and it was a good reason to have a party at his house. Of course, part of the celebration was that it was New Year’s Day, but for my group of about 10 close guy friends, it was also for celebrating my birthday.
 
I even got a gift from the guys. Well, I say that lightly because I’m not sure it was from the group. My friend Mark Morgan gave me an 8-track player for my car. Mark worked at Schmitt Auto, a car parts store in Vincennes and he bought the 8-track player there. As he gave it to me, he said “we all pitched in to buy you a new 8-track player.” Knowing Mark as I do now, I’m guessing he bought it with his own money but wanted to give credit to the other guys, to make them feel good and to make me feel good that it was coming from everyone. As a back-story, 8-track players were the cool thing to have in your car in those days and I had had one, but someone broke into my car on prom night of my junior year and stole it. So, Mark was being kind and replacing my stolen one. Mark was a good guy.
 
Meanwhile at the party, while lots of folks were milling around the house, partying, I was at the dinner table with 3 other guys playing euchre. Several other people were standing around the table watching us and rooting us on and one of our classmates, Cindy Irvin, was looking over my shoulder and said at one point, “I don’t understand this game, so I don’t know how to play it.” I pulled up a chair and told her to sit down by me and I’d teach her how to play.
 
The night went on into the wee hours. Most of our gang of 10 and a few stragglers stayed overnight at Byron’s. Cindy and the other 40-or-so people went home at some point.
 
The next Saturday, January 8, another party broke out, this time at Lucy McGiffin’s house, which was out on the edge of town. Again, her parents were gone so….party time. Again, lots of folks, lots of mingling, and eventually 4 of us sitting at a table playing euchre. Sure enough, Cindy Irvin is there and I spot her and ask her to sit down by me and I’ll teach her some more about euchre. As the night is beginning to wind down for some, Jimmy Miller comes running into the house to say, “Ruth Obermeyer just ran over herself.” We all ran out into the yard and it had gotten very foggy out. There were lots of cars out in the front yard and while trying to back out and get her car in the driveway to leave, Ruth opened her car door to lean out to make sure she wasn’t going to hit anyone’s car, and she fell out and her car kept rolling and the front wheel ran over her leg. We called for an ambulance and they came and got her, among a yard full of cars, and took her to the hospital. Why there weren’t any police officers that came along I’m not sure, but we were happy because we would all have been in deep doo-doo. While we were standing outside watching the action, I had my coat on and Cindy didn’t, so I did the ‘gentlemanly’ thing and took my coat off and put it around her. It hung on her like I had put a 5-XXX jacket on her…but I thought I was cool. The party began to wrap up shortly after 'the Ruth thing' but before I left, I asked Miss Irvin if she would like to go out on a date the next Saturday. I was so excited when she said, 'sure'.
 
I don’t think we talked much to each other at school during the week, probably as I was nervous and stupid and worried she might change her mind…but on Saturday, January 15, 1972, I picked her up for our first date and we had a great night together, going to see movie and driving around the main drag seeing all our friends. As I took her home, I asked if she’d like to go out the next Friday, and as fate would have it…she said YES.

That...was the start.  50 years ago!

Be talkin' to ya.

Dad

The Summer of '71

Girls

I was reading my copy of AARP magazine today and saw a reader commented about the fun he had the summer of 1971 when he and a friend rode their motorcycles across the U.S.

It reminded me of part of my summer of 1971. My friends Scott (Rasico) and Steve (McCoy) and I drove my 1961 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 to Atlanta for a week to stay with my mom and sister Jean. The summer before, dad and I went down for a visit and Jean and I went to a concert at the Atlanta Auditorium and saw Jefferson Airplane. 

So, this summer we wondered who we might get to see while we were there. After we arrived, we headed to a local head shop/record store to check out their album selections and see what groups were in town that week and bought some tickets while there. On back-to-back nights we saw Humble Pie (featuring a young Peter Frampton), Rod Stewart and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. We had heard of Humble Pie and Rod Stewart before, although both were just emerging as big stars. We had never heard of ELP before so we bought their album to listen to before heading to the concert later that week. I think there was a 4th headliner but I've forgotten who it was. 

Scott took in a tape recorder and recorded some of the Humble Pie concert. A few months/years later I listened to a 'live' album they recorded at the Fillmore East and it was basically the same concert we saw in Atlanta. If you ever hear that album, "Humble Pie, Live at the Fillmore" you'll hear some great rock-and-roll. And ELP put on a fantastic show. It was a great concert week for us.

We also spent a day at Six Flags, played cards until the wee hours every night and ate some good cooking from my mom.

We had a dynamite week, and either Scott or Steve came up with the idea that we should pool some of our remaining money and leave it under the rug in our room for Jean to find after we left. Since neither of the 3 of us ever had much money, it probably wasn't much, but I'm sure the intent was appreciated. 

Unknown to us at the time, mom would soon be diagnosed with breast cancer. She and Jean made a trip to Indiana that fall for Thanksgiving at aunt Joan's and mom died a few months later in January. 

I had a lot of fun with Scott and Steve over the years of high school, and the summer of  '71 was one of them.

Be talkin' to ya.

Dad   

My Greatest Christmas Gift

Girls

I may have told you this story before but I'm going to repeat it, as it is fresh in my mind. Mainly because as I write this, it is Christmas Eve 2021 and I'm watching Christmas Story on TV for maybe the 100th time...maybe 200th...but I so enjoy watching it. 

So many events that happen in the movie remind me of my days as a little boy in Owensville. Just like in the movie, we too had a coal furnace at our house. I can still see dad going down the stairs to shovel coal in this humongous monster of a furnace with arms reaching up through the floor (the heating ducts leading up to the rooms in the house). There is a smell from that burning coal that I can still imagine smelling to this day. 

We also had an old car like so many of them that they show in the movie. Also like the movie, the downtown of Owensville was the active part of town, even though it was much smaller. The hardware store where dad worked was right on the square and was a busy place. Even the old school building in the movie looked just like the school that we walked to from our house about 6 blocks away.

And just like the movie, when I was 6 or 7 years old, I got the present that I still remember as one of my favorite presents to this day. It too was a rifle. Different from Ralphi's B-B gun, my gun only used caps that I could load in the gun and when I fired it, it gave the sound of a bullet firing. In those days in the early 1960s, there was a cowboy show on TV called The Rifleman that we watched when it was on. It was based in the 1800's and was about a single parent farmer raising his young son out on the prairie. The dad had a rifle that he'd rigged up with a special handle that made it a rapid-fire rifle. The gun that dad got me that Christmas was a replica of that rifle and from that day I was the king of the cowboys in the neighborhood. Even before I got that rifle, I wore a cowboy hat all the time and our neighbors, the Presnell's, always called me 'Cowboy'. I'm guessing that new rifle only reinforced my nickname in those days.

Like Ralphie says at the end of Christmas Story...that gun was one of the greatest Christmas gifts I had ever received or would ever receive.  

I hope you have Christmas stories in your memories that remind you of happy times.

Be talkin' to ya.

Dad

Life Insurance Policies

Girls

I've decided to dedicate this site to you, telling stories or events that come to mind that you can read some day. If someone else reads them...oh well...but it will be meant for you.

As we've probably told you recently, mom and I have updated our will, POA and associated documents. Since we're closer to 70 than not...we wanted to get some of those things in place so you wouldn't have so much to worry about years from now. In the process of looking through our file cabinets and safe, I found a couple of old life insurance policies that mom and dad took out on me when I was little. After some research I found out some interesting info.

One policy was taken out on January 11, 1954, when I was 10 days old. The value of the policy appeared to be $176 and the premiums cost mom and dad 10 cents per week. I found out that back in those days, insurance guys would come by the house, knocking on your door, trying to sell policies and if they did, they'd come by every week or so to pick up the premium. I suppose back in the '50s, $176 was enough to bury a child if they died. A second policy was taken out in 1964 when I was 10 years old with a value of $400. Both of them were taken out with Western-Southern Life, a company that is still around today, in fact there is an office down the street near the IGLOO. I stopped by last week to have the agent see if the policies were still good and had any value to them. It took them awhile to look back in records that were 60+ years old but they found it at last. 

For some reason, one of them had been turned into the Ohio unclaimed funds in 2013. I later called them about it and was told that I would be getting a check for $365 for the policy what had a value of $176. I guess all those pennies in interest over the years added up. The other policy did even better and has a value of over $1000 with a current cash value of $884.93. 

To keep you guys from having to mess with all the paperwork of trying to get the $1000 after I was gone, I decided to cash it in so I will also be getting a check for that in a few weeks. 

I hope that mom and I can use the $1000 from the two combined policies to help pay for the motor home we'd like to rent this spring or summer to do some traveling with friends.

Hopefully, mom and dad will travel with us in spirit as we spend their money on foolish things (ha!) 

Be talkin' to ya.

Dad  

TIME FLIES.......FASTER THAN YOU THINK

 

Back in 2016, one of the consultants who came to our workplace every quarter was in for the day. He and I got to talking about how long each of us had worked for our current employer. For me, I would soon be starting my 40^th year working for the same hospital organization I started with in 1976. He too had worked a long time for his consulting group. I asked him how much longer he was going to work before he retired and he reached in his pocket and got out his smart phone and showed me an “app” that he had downloaded. It was a countdown app. 

Some time back he had decided what day he was going to retire and had entered that date in the app and it began a countdown, showing the days, hours, minutes and seconds until his retirement date arrived. I don’t remember the exact number of days on his countdown clock but it was less than a year. I kept thinking about that over the following days and since I’ve always liked playing with numbers, I decided to download the app onto my phone. I entered what I thought my retirement day would be and the app clock showed right at 1000 days until that day. 

Holy cow, 1000 days seemed like a lot, and it was, but either way, the countdown began. 

Not every day, but every once in awhile, I would open the app and see that I had reached a new milestone…now it’s under 900 days…now it’s less than 2 years. Some days and weeks and months seemed to take so long to pass…but they continued to pass none the less. Before I knew it…it was less than a year…then it was under a 100 days…then a month…then into single digits. On that last day of work, the app was counting down the hours left…and suddenly…like I passed through a time machine…it was at 0 and I was clocking out for the last time. 

Some months after retirement, I was looking at my phone and realized I had not deleted that countdown app and saw that it was still keeping count of the days…but this time, it was the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds SINCE I had retired. So I just kept the app and occasionally would look in amazement to see it had been THAT LONG since I had retired. 

Tomorrow, ironically…it will be 1000 days SINCE I retired. I started the countdown to retirement with 1000 days to go, and now I’ve been retired for 1000 days. Like it or not, 2000 days have passed since I first started the countdown. 

Time indeed flies by…faster than you think. 

REMEMBER: We act like we are going to live forever but we don’t. We think we won’t get old but then we do. Life is short. Enjoy the ride. Make the most of each day. 

Be talkin’ to ya. 

Dan

 

A FAVOR FROM DAD

With the recent 90 degree weather during the day and 70s-80s at night, it’s not surprising a thunderstorm would make its’ way through the area. Recently a noisy thunder and lightning storm passed through one night while I laid in bed and once again it took me back to my days as a kid in Owensville and thoughts of my dad. 

Owensville is a little farm community of about 1000 people. When we lived there, we lived about 2 blocks from ‘downtown’. Dad worked at Smith’s Hardware Store and was the Chief of the volunteer Fire Department. We had a special phone at the house (maybe the other volunteers did too) that was specific for the fire department. On any given day, at any time of the day or night, that phone might ring and dad would answer it if he was home. He'd listen to the caller and then take off running to the fire station, 2 blocks away. We could then hear the alarm go off to warn the other fire fighters. I assume other volunteers would then head to the station if they were available. Soon, the truck would take off for the fire with one guy driving, a few in the seats inside and others hanging on to handles on the outside of the truck. 

The thunder and lightning storm that was passing through this night reminded me of a night in Owensville when a storm was raging outside. The special phone rang and we knew dad was about to get called out to respond to a fire, probably due to a lightning strike on a barn or home in the area. 

On this particular night, my sister Jean and I were home with dad and we were scared out of our wits at the storms intensity and asked...no…begged…dad to not go on the run. I seem to recall him stepping out on the porch and waving the fire truck and crew on by the house while he stayed with us. I am certain he was frustrated with us as with most storms...after a few minutes...the worst of the storm likely passed by and simply became a heavy rainstorm. But dad being dad, chose to stay home and take care of his kids. That was our dad.

REMEMBER: Be a reflection of what you’d like to see in others. If you want love, give love. If you want honesty, give honesty. If you want respect, give respect. You get in return what you give.

Be talkin’ to ya. 
Dan