Two Boots on the Highway and Cup Holders

Somehow product designers can often really have their heads .... etc.

Why does my pick-up truck not have any cup holders?  No place to put your coffee mug when you're driving.  Worse this is Virginia, southern Virginia -  where are you supposed to put your open beer can?  And, nothing will stick to the dashboard material.  Go to Walmart, buy a cheap cup-holder.  Won't fit over the door thickness window place.  None of the ones that are supposed have a stick-em patch stick - at all, even for a minute ... well, at all period.  The stick-em don't stick.  Heavy-duty glue, SuperGlue, Gorilla Glue.  All of the glueiest glues hold for at the most, a week.  And they don't break off, leaving a mark.  They just fall off.  No mark they were ever there.

What is the stuff they make those dashboards out of?

So I've had this truck for two years and I still have to jam my coffee cup up against the seat with some heavy object to hold it there.  It's a five-speed on-the-floor manual - a stick shift!!!  This means a constant juggle a thousand times every time I drive it anywhere!

Now!!  Why is it our cheap Kia Salantra sedan, which seats four people, have SIX cup-holders!
Four of them up front.  You might squeeze three people in the back, there are seatbelts for three people, but they would have to be pretty small people.  But up front there are bucket-seats.  Two of them.  And those two people get two-cup holders apiece!

And my pick-up has NONE! 

Designers - you really dropped the ball (or cup) on this one.

Driving my cup-holderless pick-up to town today, I spot a small boot, looks like it's gotta be a woman's boot, in the middle of the left lane.  Hmm...  "That curious." I'm thinking.  Then about a quarter mile further I spot the other boot on the breakdown lane.  These boots look new, or nearly new.

Brain is saying, "How does this happen?  Two nearly new women's boots get chucked out the window of a car; one out of the left side of that car and the other out of the right side?  A quarter mile apart?  There is a story in this scenario somewhere.  Gotta be."

(c) Copyright 2014 by Dale Clarence Peterson

I love you ... but you're fat!

So I'm picking up my daughter at the after-school Y program she loves.

Tuesday is Ballet Day, I'm guessing because the waiting room outside the gym is full of little girls in their leotards.  I am maybe way out of line even mentioning it, but ALL of these little girls - like twenty of them - are very overweight.  Wa-a-ay overweight for such young children.  And it's simply obvious, to anyone and it bothers me.

Of course, they are all happy, running around like young children should be.  All excited to get in the gym and start dancing around doing what ballet dancers do, I guess.

It crosses my mind how cruel it is of their parents to let this happen to their kids.  But the parents, mothers and fathers, also there in the waiting room, are overweight - really really fat.  Currently we live in the south where they deep-fat-fry butter, so it's kind of a culture thing to be chunky.  Guys! This is getting out of hand though.

I have two daughters.  Neither were ever, like, overweight.  My youngest is disabled and she exercises with me for about ten minutes every night.  She can do thirty sit-ups with a sixteen lbs rubber weight ball in her hands.  It really doesn't take much.  Eat about half the carbs and walk to the mailbox and you won't get that big.

I do believe in political correctness and social sensitivity, but holy cow who's gonna take care of them when they get to be thirty and the airlines run out of belt-extensions.  They're going to die from exposure in the Walmart parking lot when the little battery powered go-cart battery runs down.

Believe me, I understand, I sympathize.  At my age I'm loosing the battle with gravity too.  I go to the gym nearly every day and I can't brag on being tiny myself anymore.  I seem to have developed the metabolism of a tree sloth.  Not to lie either, it hurts.  Arthritis, my knees are shot ... I feel like I need an ibuprofen I-V drip.  I've noticed that these days most of the people I see there are gettin' on in seasons like me.  Why is this?  Where are the youngsters?

You might be against taxes, but somebody's gotta pay to fix the roads and bridges or nobody's gonna get to Dunkin' Donuts.  And then the whole economy is going to crash.  If all the young ones can't fit in their cubicles at work, who's gonna pay any taxes?  That and the whole Art of Ballet is going to become a distant memory.

Admittedly the food the food industry is producing nowadays is mostly corn syrup and salt.  Has all the nutrition of plain candy.  Thing is, there is a produce section and they do sell vegetables  (whoops! I didn't mean to swear.  Can't help it ...vegetables!!!)

My daughter and I spent a half an hour trying to find the humus the other day.  Half an hour!  I finally had to call my wife.  With her help we located it - in the bakery section in-between a huge rack of cakes  (massive three layer cakes with enough frosting to give anyone immediate type 1 diabetes) and deli-gourmet bread.

Little boys aren't any slimmer.  I encountered the information that the Armed Forces are having a real problem because close to half of the enlistees can't pass even the most basic physical fitness tests.  It's going to get so bad that when the republicans send us to another war they will have to re-institute the draft.  But it won't be based on age, it'll be based on cholesterol and blood pressure levels.

Which means, I'll get drafted again!  Well, at least the uniforms are more in line with southern fashion - by which I mean camo.  (They even camo their fishing boats down here.)

Bill Gates has a policy, I've heard, that his employes can make any criticism they want as long as they include a suggestion for a solution.  So with that in mind,  I say put leotards on the Moms and Dads and make them get out there with their daughters and dance.  If it doesn't kill 'em, maybe it make them think about not eating every single thing on the dinner table every night.

Continuum

Back in my office (Starbucks) in Gloucester, Virginia.
Yesterday we held services for my Dad, who passed away the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.  My brain won't do the math to give the date.
It was 6:30 p.m. on the dot when his spirit left.  I had been staying in the Hospice with him since the Saturday before.  Sitting there at the foot of his bed watching him breath for three and a half days.  He was in a great deal of pain from a bad fall that put him there.  At ninety-five, a person really can't fall.  Especially if they are over six foot tall.
When you have lived close to a century, floors are especially hard.
He did everything.  Raised as a child during the Great Depression on a dirt poor hard scrabble dirt farm in the high desert of Utah.  A place where nothing grows unless you damn near pull it out of the ground.  He also served with high valor during a World War.  Married and remained married to the same woman for nearly seventy years.  Is survived by three children, ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.
When my oldest son had Dad's first great-grandchild, he said, "It's not so much I think about being a great-grandfather, but being the father of a grandfather really does stick in my mind."

And his passing was peaceful.

When I first received word that he had fallen and due to his age and state of health, he was not expected to be able to pull out of it, I was truly crushed.  Hours of intense weeping in the company of my wife, who also loved him dearly.  Everything, reality seemed to stop - on hold until I got my plane tickets and got to his bedside.
One of my niece's sons picked me up at the airport and took me directly to Dad's hospice room.  As soon as I walked into his room, he knew I was there.  Some may find it odd, but as soon as I saw him, was in his presence, much of my intense grief left me.  Something about the thought of him passing without my being there, was worse than actually being there.

He seemed to have an aura of serenity and gratitude that I had come.

For the first two days he was quite aware.  He spoke with many of his grandchildren on the phone and my brother in Australia.  He was always such a tough dude, for a while we all thought he might pull out of it.  After all he had twice before.

Every year after ... oh ... say eighty (or so) seems to be like five or six when a person is younger though.  The difference between ninety-four and ninety-five, I think, is more like ten years than one year.  Jeez, he had had cancer and recovered so many times, I don't even remember how many.  For the last twenty years he was always being treated for cancer of one sort or another.

I am not a religious person.  None of the major faiths ever actually made sense to me.  I did try, really tried.  The whole logic was missing something.  Still is.  That is another topic.  And yet there is something that says to me this physical life is just not all that there is.  It keeps coming back to me, if matter cannot be created nor destroyed, how can a human awareness, a mind, just be created or destroyed.

So whether his sentient being was with us just after his last breath or not may be suspect to some, but I felt he was there.  Still do.  I feel my mother presence in the same way, though it's been some three years since she died.  I cannot balance (?) the concept of life in the physical body as being one thing.  It has nothing to do with there being a God, or prophets, or scriptures, or morality being based on some arbitrary set of rules written by men and women.

Odd?  It seems scientific to me that awareness is universal and timeless - infinite in all directions.  That every once in a while all the elements required to bring a physical life, as we think of say - human - just co-aless and congeal.  The elements themselves that make up a new body generate enough energy - and it all must be exact and precise - to produce awareness within the life form.

How is this any different from two highly flammable gases combining under similarly required precision to produce a compound all earthly life forms require to maintain those lives?  And some compounds, like water, seem (according to most scientific data we posses) remains as water throughout the infinite universe.  It can be boiled, frozen, fractured in all kinds of ways and poof it reforms as water.

It might be highly polluted, but we have exactly the same amount of water on this planet as we did when the surface, the mantel, solidified.  Exactly, down to the molecule.

So is my father, is the loved ones, of any person or persons gone because their bodies are nonfunctional as far as we can determine?  I don't think so.

Goodbye Dad

Jim (eldest son - 1st son)

I am sitting on my front porch in brisbane australia admiring the greenery,enduring the heat and thinking of my father.

 Accidents of fate and geography kept us apart for the latter part of his life which i will ever regret. But when he and could still travel, he used to love to come to australia. When i was trying unsuccessfully to become an orchardist he loved helping me out, picking the fruit, packing the fruit and eating the fruit. He didnt care if we made any money. He loved being busy and doing something useful.

 This was one of the excellent character traits i inherited from him. I love being busy and doing something useful. When it became clear that i was never going to be a successful orchardist i took up art -sculpture a little more successfully.  One of the lines of work i developed was sculpting fish, insects, reptiles and so forth out of computer trash. Once again dad was my willing collaborator. Our most ambitious project was a two metre long crocodile stomping through the bush. I couldnt get the legs right and fell into my usual problem solving strategy which was swearing a lot.

 But dad said no lets to figure this out. That was another of dads most endearing traits. Lets figure this out. So i pretended to be a two metre crocodile made of circuit boards and we got it right. Thanks dad. 

One thing we never shared was a love of sport. Dad loved his sport. And i did not. When he first came to oz he spent hours watching aussie rules football on tv and asking me why did they this or why did they do that and i would have to shake my head and say i dont know. 

Sorry dad. There are so many wonderful traits i got from my father that i cant list them all. But they are part of me. Thanks dad. 

Ann (youngest)

Dad, my papa this I consciously made a pact with myself i would be here every day during your waking times, because I knew you were  going to pass away and I wanted to say to myself that I had you, to myself.  That you would never be alone. Im so glad I did that.  You always said to sandy to manu while I cant do much for her i can put her feet up and down and change the tv channel.  Give her water. 

But he really enjoyed our evenings together while sandy and manu spent time with their family.  My whole life I have done everything I could for you to be proud of me.  And you were.  

My first memories of my life of you was when I was in our bathroom in Arizona and I was two years old and locked myself in the bathroom and an ant was crawling around and you had to take the door down to get me out.  Then you hugged me.

My second memory was I remember sitting on your lap while you took out splinters in our quonset hut in England.  And my crying and crying while it didn't hurt at all but I thought it was going to. 

You were the biggest example of human kindness I have ever known. You never had a bad word to say about anyone except maybe my two husbands.  That still makes me laugh.

When we lived off base at Otis Ir Force Base, there was an enormous tree that fell down in our back yard during a storm and you told me not to play on it and then you left for work.  I went right out and got on that tree, and you drove around the blovk and came back and caught me.  I didn't get a hug that time.

Dad I love you so much and I'm going to miss you like crazy and I know I am going to see you and Mom soon.

Molly (grandfather)

Sigh, Grandpa has moved on to that peaceful place... with his family around him and all of us far away releasing him and letting him know he gave us the strength to continue on without him. We are strong. It will be OK. Love

Me (dale)

So long ago I ... I saw a photograph of the tiny farm house in which my father was raised.  The house was some distance from the town of Gunnison, Utah where he was born.  And at that time Gunnison was many miles from anywhere else.

LaMar Clarence Peterson was born there in 1919.  I never knew him as Lamar.  He was always Dad to me and my sister Ann and brother Jim.  My mother Maralene Henry Peterson, called him Pete.  And everyone else called him Col. Peterson during those years.

Dad was a big man.  Six foot and very strong.  He seemed to generate respect from everyone around him just standing where he was.  There never was any doubt he was a leader and not a great deal of nonsense was tolerated.

With his family he was the great oak.  The protector, the rock always always always right there with a gentle hand and a kind word.  His family and friends knew he had an amazing sense of humor.  A good joke or some family anecdote and he could laugh until tears ran down his cheeks.  Big belly laughs.  

During his wartime service he was awarded several of our countries highest medals for valor.  The silver star, the bronze star, several oak clusters among many others.  Later he was among the first Air Force crews, maybe the first flight crews of any kind, to fly through the eye of hurricanes to gain scientific data for purposes of military air support defense.

He and his brother Gene spent some years sleeping outside in a three walled farm shed because two more brother and sisters came along and filled that tiny farmhouse to overflowing.  Growing up there in an LDS farming family and LDS community he learned to work hard from his earliest days.  And when he overcame that poverty with two years at Utah State University and gaining a commission in the Air Force he still never forgot his roots and a deep respect of his heritage and extended family.

At every opportunity as a family of five, we all always came home to Utah.

The time he spent in the service took him, mother and his three children all over the world.  He and mother made sure everywhere we went we saw every natural wonder, every museum, palace, castle.  We were never left behind, including many car trips cross country from New England to Utah ... Before the interstates were built ... Through every small town and major city on the route.  Trips that took a week or more ... Three very active kids with everything we needed ... No car air conditioning ... 

Talk about love and patience ... Occasionally he threatened severe discipline, which we truly truly deserved, believe me ... But he never did more than that, then again as i have said, he had that presence where he didn't have to.

Dad walked the walk.  He was devoted to his family, he was always a gentleman, he was sincere, honest, patriotic and always in some form of community service from the Rotary club to the moose lodge.  

We love you Dad, we will miss you, but we also know that you are and will be forever with us.

Crystal   Branch. (Grandaughter)

Grandpa passed away tonight. He was my hero and I will miss him like crazy. I will imagine he walked through the gates, shook his fathers hand, hugged his mother and danced into forever with his bride. Rest in Peace Grandpa I love you.

Death as life.....

A person has two unavoidable steps in the process we call life.

We are born and we die.

It takes many many years to actually realize we are, in fact, alive.  The fact of being alive doesn't really occur to a child.  Life is all we know.  We don't question our existence one way or another.  Even if the death of someone else happens within our small world, it is still a very abstract concept.  The adults give us stories of heaven or some other explanation with which they are comfortable.  As children, all we really know is that the person who is now dead, or passed on (as it is euphemistically said), is no longer around.  

Our childish world goes on ... and yet it does expand year to year.  At some point the death of someone close to us, quite suddenly, hurts.  Our psyche experiences a new emotion and we call this loss.  Thereafter every time someone we know passes the emotional impact sticks with us.  We start remembering each death.  Depending on the closeness of the person to us; a relative or long time friend, that death has a greater or lesser impact on our lives.  Even to the effect of changing the direction of our own lives.

There is a special group of people in the life of each one of us.  We call them parents.  Whether or not these parents are of the same genetic material as each of us, or not, is of not as much consequence as that these are the adults who cared for us as children.  And whether or not these parents were particularly good at parenting, or not, also, in the overall, is not so much a major factor in terms of the idea I am putting forth here.

There is someone, or two - a mother and a father, one or the other or both - from whom we emotionally declare the origin of our lives.  Our real lives as we enter into the realm of adulthood.  We look back and say in our minds, "I remember this person as being my mother-father."

Somewhere in my own memory, from reading or television ... could be either one, a quote, "You are never free until both of your parents are dead."  

My mother passed some three ago, as of this writing.  I sit, at this moment, in Hospice as my father is dieing.  These just happen to be my genetic parents.  My mother was nearly ninety and my father is ninety-five.  Very long active lives.  Globe hopping adventurous lives.  A world war survived.  Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

And long tortuous painful drugged out declines into death.  Very difficult to witness.  A sense that death comes as a relief.  Not a release from life, but a relief from maybe too much life.  A relief from life gone on longer than a human body is supposed to live.  A spirit that seems to refuse to accept that the play is over and it's time to exit the stage.

The circumstances of every human beings death is as unique as their very lives up to that time.  Quickly as from a fatal accident, combat in a war, rapid degenerative disease, victim of violence - each person's final moments are as historically distinctive as their DNA.   For many who were childless, death might be seen as less important, but in fact if their death precedes that of their mother-father then it is possible they are ones who have been granted an extended benefit.  To them life was eternal until it simply stopped.

To me, my objective with this essay, is to observe that; death is as much a part of life as birth.  The facts are these; prior to birth we have no true knowledge, from the vantage point of being alive we have no true knowledge beyond our own death.  

I accept that there are those people of faith who vehemently disagree with me.  And I also accept that this world of faith is how they personally view life and everything.  But faith is not fact and facts are mostly simple and brief and, truthfully, universally few.  

Therefore it is only from the point of coming of age, where we recognize and accept those whom we know as our parents, up to the point when they die, is it possible to have a true knowledge of what is death.  

After that point, that place in our awareness, suddenly, almost shockingly we are free.  At the same time, for a time, we also feel abandoned in a sense of timelessness.  Once the shock wears off, once all the grieving is done, once that sense of freedom becomes our new day to day experience, that is when I think it is possible to actually see, to review as in viewing again but anew, our own lives.

And, I postulate, that it is only at the death of our parent, or parents, can we truly conceive of our own death as being just another part of our own life.  

Email is poison

Email is poison.  Over the years I have determined it is simply too easy to write some "Lincoln Letter", a quick knee-jerk reaction in the writer's voice that comes across as "mean".  Then to hit the "Send" button and forever regret that you were such a jerk to another person.  You can loose friends, even a job .. as I can attest ... by doing this.

Since Amazon Kindle recommends Blogging for anyone who is a writer, I'm worried about Blogging become a problem in that way for me.  Except with Blogging, the Blog owner can go back and delete stuff.  The really does have that advantage.

The Great Mouse Massacre"

From "Boxes of Clay" - "Molly and the Great Mouse Massacre" (out on Amazon Kindle Dec. 2013)

"Some things you don't forget, but it's not for lack of trying"

I have been told that the French think peanut butter is a gastronomic sacrilege.  I don't think very many mice are French.  In my experience, mice will climb right over cheese to get at peanut butter - even if there is a trap in the way.  Put cheese in a trap ... nothing.  Squish some peanut butter onto the little trap lever and blam!  Of course if you put close to a dozen traps in various drawers full of clothing in a small bedroom the parfoom of a left over school lunch tends to remain for a while.  Especially in the clothes.  But, moving on none the less.

Tears, whining and stinging fingers later.  Our bedroom was some miles away down the bend-over-hallway and through the boys room, and into the second floor of the breezeway. So mom and dad were unaware of the rest of this adventure but in Molly's telling it goes something like this;  "I turned out the lights, but then I got afraid because I knew we had baited traps in my drawers and they were going to attract the mice.  Even if they didn't usually come there they were going to come that night.

So I turned the light back on and got in bed and hid under my covers.  THEN I thought I don't them to be able to sneak up on me, so I peaked up over my covers.  Nothing happened for maybe fifteen minutes.  So I turned the light back off and hid under my covers again.  Just as I was peaking out again - blam!  Blam-blam!  Blam!  Blam-blam-blam!  It was like a machine gun or really loud pop corn.  

Hello all my wonderful fans!

So here I am 2013