Power to the People-Light On

Power to the People-Light On

In the big picture electrical power is the single ongoing issue which dominates any discussion about being off the grid.  Water is a royal pain in the summer, because we have had to [literally] scratch, claw and dig our way to success [or not], but once the system is functioning, it is pretty hands-off.  In the winter, when we don’t need it, we generally have torrential amounts of water; we just have to keep it from freezing.

Heat is the easiest/most challenging element to implement.  It’s easy because we live five miles up a dirt road, in the heavily wooded coastal mountains of NorCal.  There is no shortage of wood.  It’s challenging because I still have to go through the mechanics of providing as few as five cords-to as many as eight-for any given winter, but it’s all about working in incremental stages: baby steps if you will.  

Even with a sniveling right knee, I had minimal problems using the log splitter (sorry, S.Staus) to render a stack of manageable rounds into firewood, both smaller stuff for the kitchen stove, or thumpers for the big stove.  I merely put a leash on my enthusiasm, and limited my work to no more than two hours at a shot.  The same with moving it in the wheelbarrow back to where I can access it easily in three feet of snow.  Ok, scratch the word “easily” out of the previous sentence, because nothing comes easily in three feet of snow.

But, and it’s a big butt, electricity presents the biggest challenge.  It is so idyllic to imagine an existence free of electricity, but believe me, I prefer to have the choice.  Yes, there are 15,000 volts cruising along those high-voltage wires, crisscrossing Bell Springs Road, right at the top of our driveway, a quarter-mile off.  But we only need 110 volts of it, I remind you, so that power is useless.  Kind of like dying of thirst, while standing at the Pacific Ocean’s edge.

When we made inquiries at the local PG&E office, about the feasibility of getting power to our site, they informed us that they would happily provide power if the residents of the area desired it, but such had not been historically the case.  In retrospect, I am glad for that, even though we pay a steep price, both economically, and in terms of personal inconvenience.  It’s a war, with an ongoing series of battles to keep us on our toes.

Originally, the only source of power we had was a 3500 watt generator, whose purpose in life was to charge the two deep-cell storage batteries that provided twelve-volt power to the house.  I had wired the cabin originally, with guidance from Matt, my younger contractor brother, but only for twelve volt.  That meant we had good lighting, though no light switches; we still had to hit the button on each light fixture.  Except for a portable cassette/radio, there were no other drains on our electricity.  We used the genny to power the washing machine, and the clothes racks we used to dry them, required nothing in the way of electricity.  We never have owned a dryer.  Or a dishwasher (except me).  

Around five years after we moved up, we sprang for a small television set and a VCR recorder, so that we could access films.  There was/is no television reception in our area except for satellite TV, which had never been affordable, until after the boys had left the building.  All those years they begged me to provide what all of their friends had, but it never happened until they were gone.  

I admit that one reason I got it was to try and entice them back on occasion.  It only works with Lito, who is as addicted to the Niners and Giants as I am.  It is a good thing I am writing about electricity, or I might feel inclined to to mention something about the victory of the Niners over the mighty Pittsburg Steelers last night, but I will restrain myself.

Sometime in the nineties, we did an upgrade of the electrical system, so that now instead of two deep-cell storage batteries, we had eight.  Now when we used the generator to charge the batteries, it took about five hours, but they were good for several days.  We could also run the television and VCR off the batteries, instead of having to run the generator just to power our entertainment system.

The goal, of course, was solar energy; others around us had it, and it was well worth the investment, but we simply couldn’t afford it.  Quite a while back, the price of individual panels leveled off at about 350 dollars apiece, and we had determined that we needed eight panels to provide enough electricity to power our house, including being able to use the washing machine, which drew more power than anything except the power tools I used for carpentry. 

So we waited.  When we finally had the system installed (not by me, that’s certain) we were ecstatic.  It corresponded with the surge in the price of gasoline, so we were instantly reaping economic benefits of not having to burn five or more gallons a week to power the genny.  We had no monthly PG&E bill, but that gas bill could sure add up.  Now we could sit back a tally up the loot being saved.

It is still not peaches and cream, because as soon as I got full of myself and ordered the satellite TV, I found that the “control box” drew a ferocious amount of juice, and our power system needs another upgrade.  It’s not going to happen for a while, and meanwhile the digital device which reports out the amount of amperage being taken in by the solar panels, and the corresponding amount of power being used in the house at any given time, is kaput.  We are completely in the dark (quit snickering, boys) as to how much power we have stored up in the batteries.

At any second, the system just shuts down, and we are completely powerless.  That requires that I gas up and start the generator, which immediately restores the power.  It’s painful, but doable.  Until we can afford to replace that digital device, we are in limbo.  I do remember, however, what it was like to be in darkness.  If I had my druthers, I’d take limbo, because at lest I can flick on the light, and the music for that matter. Maybe I’ll catch Chubby Checker doing the “Limbo Rock.”

Off the Grid

Off the Grid

I saw the phrase “off the grid” the other day, and I thought to myself, “That’s us.”  Mind you, I have been wanting to tell someone this for thirty years, because around here, everybody is off the grid.  Yawn.  It will have been thirty years, come this May, that Ann and I permanently set foot on this ridge top in Northern Mendocino County, after moving our belongings from San Jose.  

We hauled our stuff to the 16 by 20 foot, windowless cabin, that I had built with brothers Matt and Tom, and neighbor Rex, the previous summer, after having bought my twenty-acre parcel in 1975, for 400 bones an acre.  Our sole vehicle for conveying our household goods, was my 1962, calico-colored VW bus, though we did make two of the five-hour trips, one earlier in the month.  When I say the cabin was windowless, I do not mean there were no apertures framed in, I mean simply, that there were pieces of plywood nailed over the openings, creating what?  A cave.

There was no running water, which was kind of OK, because running water without plumbing tends to get inconvenient, especially in the summer, when there is minimal water.  No water meant no toilet, no sink, no showers and no water heater.  There was no electricity, propane, telephone (cell phones?  :), refrigerator, method of heating the cabin, shelves, steps to the loft, or steps up into the cabin, for that matter.

We did have a stove, and it was convenient to have something to stack stuff on, but without propane, it served only as a small counter.  We were at least thirty minutes away via a five-mile dirt road, and eleven miles of Highway 101, from the nearest post office, although the Czech Lodge was located three miles closer to town, after we left the dirt road.  There we could get gas, newspapers and a bare-bones assortment of daily necessities. 

Ann was preggers with our oldest, Casey, who arrived in September, so any of you who have ever been in a similar expectant situation, I think Ann, rather than me, would have you imagine what that experience would be like, if you could not pop into the shower, or more enjoyably-but probably impractically-a lie-in with the tub. Assuming water was on hand, she still had to fire up that Coleman stove, heretofore used only on camping trips.  And I’ll bet you’ve never thought about the joys of camping-for four months-while in a family way. 

The one saving grace was the fact that we were not the first in my family to make this move.  My brothers and I had been searching for property for eighteen months, while living in the Bay Area, branching out on Sundays, to look at parcels listed in the Chronicle.  When we found this 100,000 acre ranch for sale in Mendocino County, it had all of the necessary components that we had been searching for.  Amazingly, in addition to me purchasing twenty acres, two of my brothers, and my parents, each bought twenty acre parcels.  Therefore, because my folks made the move from the San Gabriel Valley in SoCal, to Bell Springs Road, in 1977, they were already well-established, and able to provide Ann with the amenities of civilization.  All we had to do was walk the ten minutes or drive three to their spot.

I was just reading that delightful blog piece about the proposal for birth control: have your teens be required to take care of one or more sick child, for a period of time that must extend through a full twenty-four hours.  Forty-eight would be better.  This is just as good; camping full-time, when you are battling life for two, which is just not as much fun as it sounds.  It should be Ann writing this, but I think maybe by this time, she has ground it out of her mind.  The construction project last winter, providing the upstairs facility for teaching her sewing/quilting classes, has helped even more.

We have had an interesting ride, and there are still glitches in the system, like the fact that there is still no electricity to said new addition, even though the wiring is done, the fixtures are in place, and it LOOKS like a million dollars.  I can do carpentry, brick and block work, concrete of any sort, plumbing-reluctantly-and most other kinds of homesteading skills, but I fear the E-Beast.  I love our solar panels, which still cost $50,000 in 1977, when they were first presented to our Environmental Studies Class at San Jose State, but now can be afforded.  Of course Ann and I taught in the District all of those years with only a twelve vote system in place, because teachers don’t make a lot of loot in California. 

We did get hot, running water in October of that first year, much to our relief, and the rest came along in bits and spurts, as I learned how to pound nails and fix frozen, burst plumbing, under the cabin.  When I got Satellite TV three years ago, so I could watch my beloved Giants, after listening to more than 150 games annually on the radio every year of my life, I was dazzled.  I got it in time to see them win it all a year ago, October.  Small minds, small pleasures.  It don’t cost much, but it lasts a long while.  Baseball been very good to me.

 

The Versatile Blogger Award: Wanton Turtles Frolic

The Versatile Blogger Award

or

Wanton Turtles Frolic

I am not a versatile blogger.  There, that is the first thing you need to know about me, so I am accepting this award on false pretenses.  I am a guy who is more familiar with the past tense, or when studying Latin, the pluperfect tense, than I am with pretense.  I will just say I have been ping-ponging my way around the country for a few weeks now, and I have seen what  a “versatile” blog resembles, and I/mine ain’t it.  

The second thing you need to know about me is that I completed a series of seven visits to a therapist, located a half hour from my rural home, a year ago September.  Each visit was fifty minutes, and the psychologist rode out of town on her white horse, the day after my seventh and final visit, leaving me all of the reading that she had xeroxed for me, and that I had been examining.   Not until the following March was I prepared to complete the assimilation process, by writing a moderately short narrative of my therapeutic journey.  By chronicling my experience, I opened a door back to when I was ten years old, and actually determined what it was that caused me to begin having panic attacks. That led to the recognition of self-talk, and allowed me to get a handle on my anxiety issues. [No fear of a diatribe against parents/family-if you take a peak at any of the “Fellowship Street” stuff, you will find nothing but warm and fuzzy.  That’s me, and no, it’s not mold, except maybe on the brain.]

Whew.  Got that out of the way.  I drive the people in my immediate world crazy, because I am so exuberant.  I can’t help it.  However, you are hearing this for the first time.  Sarah, over at “My Life in Contradictions” used the same word as I did, tunnel, when describing a mental condition.  You are trapped within, but can still see out.  You can’t get out, only dream about it.  

The third thing you need to know about me is that I eschew the use of exclamation points.  I prefer to let my words do the exclaiming. That doesn’t mean I never use them, but when I do, you will know that my world has just been rocked.  I welcome their use by others; I am not an e.p. snob.  For me the occasion must warrant it.  

The fourth thing is that writing the narrative, Six Days a Week, unlocked the wordhoard within my mind, and out spewed 250,000 words within the framework of Military Madness, something I had been writing inside my head for thirty-seven years.  I sat down in March and when I was done in May, I had all of these words stacked up in an insidiously evil laptop computer, that did mean and spiteful things to me, until JT said wtf, and bought me a MAC Book Pro.  Now I have two female knights in shining armor, Dr. Jill, and JT.  btw, wtf stands for, “Wanton turtles frolic.”

The fifth thing is that when I was a kid, not so very long ago, I hated to be the last person awake in our house, when the last light was turned off.  With three older brothers, and the parents and lots of little ‘uns, there was little chance of that, normally.  That, however, did not prevent me from stressing out over it, thereby honing skills that would control my life until last year. 

The sixth thing is that  my Virgoan personality actually derives a secret sense of joy, when the floors are are spotless, the place is looking great and the dust has been put at bay until the next pickup truck comes hurtling along Bell Springs Road, sending the resultant cloud of dust down in our direction, unmindful that our homestead is a dust-free zone.  I figured that if Berkeley could vote to be nuclear-free, then so could we.  Vote to be dust-free, I mean, though we are also nuclear-free.  And electricity-free, also, but that’s a blog that is yearning to be written, so...  

The seventh thing is that I sing out loud at any time of the day.   I sing to the dogs. I sing to the blue jays.  I sing to the skunks.  Luckily, they don’t sing back.

The following seven things were the ones that I originally jotted down, before I saw JT’s blog, and wrote the ones above.  

* That’s the first one; I am insecure about all matters technologic.

* Until I went into the army, everything revolved around the number 7.

* Being dead doesn’t scare me one iota. Arrgg!  But the dying part?

* As a child, I was petrified of bulldogs; now one sleeps with Ann and me.

*  My first wife, with whom I parted amicably in ’79, has cancer; it hurts.


*  I sent out hand-made Christmas cards this year; I haven’t sent any since ’85.

*  The English language has a finite number of rules, and I know them.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t make mistakes.  I used to tell my dog-owning, deer-hunting students, that when I stopped making mistakes, someone should shoot me and put me out of my misery.  Not make mistakes?  Only if you’re not human.  I used to pay them school currency to spot errors of mine, even if it was as inconsequential as forgetting to write up today’s date on the white-board.  People who perch on pedestals, end up on the floor.  I'll get there on my own, fast enough.

Heavens to Murgatroyd!

Heavens to Murgatroyd!

Going “full-circle” is an expression that implies you begin at point “A," travel along the path for an indeterminate period of time, and then return to the point of origin.  That’s where JT and I are at, which means I can finally answer Robert’s question, “Mark, do you know where you’re at?” in a different way than, “Yes, Papa, I’m right here.”

My sister and I arrived on Fellowship Street, 360 days apart from one another, with yours truly having dropped by first.  From the time we were able to think, I jack-hammered that little piece of information into the fabric of our relationship,  and for those magic six days of the year, from the Glorious Fourth of September, to the tenth, I was two years-take the time to count them-two years older than my little sister.  How I lorded it over her.

As preschoolers, JT and I spent endless hours during the winter months (“winter months” has a somewhat oxymoronic connotation in Southern California, a land where the annual average rainfall rarely exceeds the twelve-fifteen inch range) playing together happily.  Included in our activities were hours of building forts or castles out of couch cushions and blankets, with chairs and pillows inserted where appropriate.  

We constructed a “store” where we would buy and sell a warehouse of items carefully set aside over time by Mama, for us to use in the store.  Empty metal Quaker Oats tins jockeyed for position in the store with square metal saltine cracker boxes and a cornucopia of Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Rice, Wheat, and Corn Chex boxes.  These items meshed well with an assortment of carefully chosen (more for longevity's sake) empty grocery items for us to stock shelves with, or to put in our shopping bags.  Mama was a genius when it came to promoting activities that were long on imagination and play-acting, and short on necessary, exhaustible supplies or direct parental supervision. 

In the summertime, we played in our one-acre back yard and the empty lot next door, which burgeoned each year with the most impressive display of mustard greens.  They grew as tall as our pre-school height, so we used to make paths, or more accurately, corridors through this forest.  From the perspective of an adult, we were two little kids playing in the weeds. 

From our view, we were pioneers, or if we chose, Lewis and Clark.  We couldn’t see over the top, so it was like being in a fragrant forest, the blooming flowers infusing the heat with an intoxicatingly sweet scent.  There was a sense of timelessness which lent itself to the magic of our forest.

We truly were inseparable.  I remember JT accompanying Mama and me, as we walked the few long blocks down to Baldwin Elementary for my first day of kindergarten.  I didn’t go until mid-day, so we still had our mornings.  Afterwards, I would ride the bus, but Mama and JT still walked me to the bus stop, until the imminent arrival of brother Matthew, later in the school year, made that impossible.

Elementary school found us still chums, as we plodded our way through the most unimaginative-almost listless-elementary school imaginable.  When Fidel Castro became dictator of Cuba in 1962, he tossed out the Catholic Church, or at least components of it.  We ended up with four nuns, que no puede hablar ingles, who sat in the back of the classroom in their respective grade levels, for the second half of my third grade year, and then they became our teachers.

If you can say, “Read de book and answer de questions,” then you have a pretty clear idea of what school was like in a class of 46 (that was me-my brother Tom, later, would have 73 kids in his first grade class.)  JT and I were in a carpool that whisked us off to St. Martha’s each morning, arriving in time for eight o’clock mass in the cold church.

Then, along came high school, and I turned into a dick, pure and simple.  I didn’t know it at the time, but have since been appraised that my actions left a lot to be desired.  The reason I didn’t know I was being mean, is because I never lost my affection or love for her, but my actions suggested otherwise.

Our parochial high school contained an invisible line down the center of campus, which divide the boys’ three wings of classrooms, from those of the girls.  My senior year featured two girls in my trig class, and we tortured them unmercifully.  I ain’t proud, just factual.  Jt and I did not see much of each other, and when we did, I was always surrounded by a sea of my friends, and absolutely, did not want to be seen in my sister’s company.

To this day, I figure it must have been some distorted sense of propriety, which dictated that I not allow my friends to get to know her, because then I would have to contend with the inevitability of one of my friends dating her.  Heavens to Murgatroyd-we couldn’t have that.

Moving north from SoCal to attend San Jose State University, in 1974, after I was released from my  military cage, JT and I became close buds again, when she had the downstairs floor of a duplex across the street from San Jose State’s library, while I had the top floor.  The seventies went by in a blur.

Then I moved up here to a ridge top in Mendocino County, and JT ended up in Sonoma County, living in Sebastopol.  Both of us spent our careers in education, at the middle school level, and we didn’t see that much of each other, as she raised her family, and I mine.  

And then we reconnected via the Net, and have resumed a daily communication, that belies the three hours distance between us, down Highway 101.  It is as though we are back in pre-school, except that we play with words, instead of Quaker Oats boxes.  I find it a most enjoyable prospect, that at a time when our bodies are slowing down, that our minds seem to be revving up.  That gives me a strong sense of hope. 

Now, if I can just get her to quit calling me on my birthday and crowing, “Hey, did you realize that you are now TWO years older than me?”  She’s been doing it to me since we were in our twenties, and it’s getting old.  I am too, but she doesn’t have to rub it in.

Yes, Virginia, Men Can Clean Toilets *

Yes, Virginia, Men Can Clean Toilets

Yes, Virginia, men can clean toilets.  Some of us have peculiar ways, out here in California.  Since I retired from teaching, five years ago, and excluding this most recent summer, I have maintained the household, endeavoring to keep ahead of the dust that descends upon us each day from Bell Springs Road.  I would think of it as the gift that keeps on giving, except when I try to exchange this “gift’ at Customer Service, they suggest I try elsewhere.

Ann has her long-arm quilting machine here at the house, so she is gainfully employed much of the time. I have my pension, but except for plunging back into the world of construction this past summer, for the first time in more than twenty years, I do not work outside our home.  Therefore, it seemed logical that Ann should not have to worry about house-cleaning.  

Having been raised in a household where the four oldest of us were boys, I learned at any early age, that washing dishes and floors, though not at the same time, was not women’s work.  It was work, pure and simple.  Mama used to give each of us a list each summer morning, with a number of tasks which might include cleaning one of the bathrooms, or washing the lunch dishes.  We learned at an early age that if you ate meals, then washing the dishes came with the territory.

If you watched television at any point in time, then vacuuming the living room seemed appropriate.  I tracked dirt into the house, either on my bare feet in the summer, or my shoes in the winter, so sweeping and washing the kitchen floor seemed the only logical course of action.  I never felt as though the chores were demeaning or unmanly (unboyly?).  That doesn’t mean I enjoyed the chores, it just means that I accepted it as a way of life.

Now, I keep the kitchen counters clean, the mechanics of the recycling, trash and compost coordinated, the floors swept and mopped, the bathrooms cleaned, and the clutter on the pool table kept to manageable levels.  I wash dishes, do laundry, clean toilets and feed the cats.  I vacuum, make the bed, empty the ashes from the wood stoves, and get up on a stool to clean the top of the refrigerator.  One of my son Ben’s favorite things to do, at six-two, is run his finger across the top of the ‘fridge, as though at the firehouse, conducting an inspection, and cluck disapprovingly.  If you have ever been “clucked” at, you know what I’m saying/talking about.

I hear all of the men out there muttering, “What do you want, a medal, or a chest to pin it on?” and I say, “Eat a root.”  I’m simply not a macho kind of guy.  Kat didn’t call me Pooh Bear, because I walk around flashing knife scars all over my face.  

OK, there was that incident last summer on the job site, when a one-inch piece of plywood, slipped innocuously into the side of my finger, and nestled there, rendering my finger incapable of bending by its very rigidity.  Was there a tweezers in the house?   Does the shoemaker’s kids wear shoes?

Luckily Casey, who was visibly distressed at my discomfort, had a spanking new razor blade from his pack of a hundred, and I was able to make that inch-long incision in the time that it would have taken to scream bloody murder.  Of course, I may have had to put squeezing out the mop temporarily aside, except that during the summer, I was lucky to be able to water the tomatoes upon my return home, let alone mop floors.

MY point is that washing toilets, is no more women’s work than men’s work, unless the men refrain from using the toilets.  [Be careful what you ask for.]  If someone wants to view my househusbandry, in any other way than an equal exchange of responsibilities, then I say, “Fine, I’ll leave the chain-sawing to you, and you leave the grout-cleaning to me," and I’ll get the better end of the deal, because we don’t got no grout. 

The Christmas Box: Entry # 11: Dangling Disneyland

The Christmas Box 

Entry # 11:

Dangling Disneyland

The following excerpt is found on a storage box, used to house Christmas ornaments, a bedraggled cardboard arrangement, upon which I began scrawling an annual message, careful to affix the date each year.  Some of the messages are filled with hope and whimsy; others, with dark forebodings of dire straits.  Still others contain a blending of the two, a more accurate description of life up here on the mountain, on Bell Springs Road, and possibly where you live, also.

January 2, 1994

Well, it’s time to wax 

Philosophical again; it would probably be

Better to wax the car, but oh well.  Every year I

Look forward soooo much to Christmas and it rarely

Meets with my expectations.  Well, this year it did.  May

1994 be as comfortable and smooth as 1993.  I do not

Think that I will ever see another Holiday Season, as filled with

Enjoyment, as this one.  See you next year.

1993

Us

The car referenced in the inscription would have been the Trooper.  It was the first brand new car that either Ann or I had ever bought, so waxing it makes a certain amount of sense.  That Trooper had driven us to New Mexico, the first of two consecutive summers we went, with never so much as sneeze.

I was part of a workshop, geared to teachers who taught in districts with large percentages of Native kids attending classes.  The program was called Art Connects, and was designed to incorporate art projects into the reading and language classes, so as to integrate the two, and allow for expansion of vocabulary.  The lessons were effective for districts with a majority of Native kids, not so much Laytonville, where the percentage of the student population that was Native American, was around 14 or so.  

As a staff at Laytonville, we had been informed mid school-year, that this workshop was being offered, and who would like to attend?  There were three of us from the middle school, and three from the elementary school, who ended up making the trip, so we made it a school-wide endeavor.  This workshop took place during the five-year period that the district was restructuring, so it could not have been more timely.

The class not only taught the concepts and provided materials, it also ran a series of learning centers, for teachers to actually get the opportunity to play around with different mediums.   At one station, there was an assortment of musical instruments, lots of percussion and other easily accessible instruments, and the task was to make music, in any form we chose.  We had a lot of fun, and produced a fun ditty, that required that we work together to produce the perfect sound.

I also worked with a group to perform a play, I sculpted a little rabbit out of clay, and I got my one and only experience painting.  We were supposed to paint a picture of this rocking chair, by filling in what was visible through the gaps in the chair, thereby forming the chair by the process of the white paper, still visible on the “canvas.”  Though the picture I produced, certainly left a lot to be desired, if you were looking for an aesthetically pleasing chair, it was actually pretty fascinating, for what it was designed to instruct.  “Fascinating” is a politically correct way to say it was pretty crudely drawn.  I didn’t mind; I was happy with my clay rabbit.

One of my strongest memories is of the drive across the Southwest, to get to New Mexico.  The boys would have been ten, nine, and seven years old, and were prone to arguing amongst themselves.  I know that sounds unusual, that three male siblings would argue,  but the verbal gymnastics that these three could engage in, were epic in their presentation.  So I devised a system which required a certain number of points to be accrued, in order for each boy to gain admission into Disneyland, which was scheduled for the return trip.

It doesn’t matter that the impracticality of arriving at Disneyland, with one or more boys ineligible for the experience, would probably have been problematic.  “Sorry, Billy, you will just have to wait the next twelve hours out here in the parking lot, by yourself.”  The idea was you got points for doing or saying something nice, you got points for helping out in the motel, and most importantly, you did not get points if you were whiny, petulant, or simply a jerk.  Amazing what the power of positive reinforcement will accomplish, while traveling across the desert in July.  It was 114 degrees in Needles, California, which for me, being a SoCal boy, was fine, but not so much for the others.  After all, we had to walk from the car to the air-conditioned room, and from there to the pool.  Tough job, but someone had to do it. 

This was the Holiday season that we set out to duplicate a Dickensian Christmas, including roasting a goose, and acquiring English Plum Pudding, which to my surprise tasted just like Mom and Pop’s fruit cake.  We had a Christmas tree that was ten feet tall, and just about as wide, almost brushing up against us, as we sat in the couch, which had been rearranged in the first place to accommodate the tree.  We had done all of the traditional decorations, including putting lights into a manzanita tree, out in front of the house, amidst the rose bushes.

We thought manzanita worked just fine, especially since it was Casey who actually got up into the tree, and installed the lights.  That was also a year when we got snow, thereby bringing to fruition, my oft-repeated line about the only time snow being welcome, is on the sixteen day break from the school district. 

As far as whether or not it was the most enjoyable, I always figure my degree of enjoyment, is directly proportional to my degree of exhaustion.  Short of sleeping through the sixteen-day break to better convey my sense of fatigue, I was able to enjoy this Holiday more than any other, because my gas tank was on empty, and my vehicle had come to a rest-sitting in a chair at the card table, with a 1,500 piece jigsaw puzzle, and a stack of Christmassy VHS films.  

When the boys could put their squabbling on hold long enough to play a rubber of bridge, we put a piece of foam board over the puzzle, and dealt the cards.  All I ever asked of them was to be civilized at the bridge table, but asking that of three pre-teen boys, or three boys that close in age, at any time period of their lives, was like asking for them to be civilized for a three-day automotive trip, and there was no Disneyland to dangle in front of them.  About four hands of bridge was shelf-life for us in those days.  Baby steps, you know, both in the game of bridge, and the game of life. 

Life Is a File Cabinet

Life Is a File Cabinet

Life is a file cabinet, into which you store experiences, expectations, and if there is any room, maybe some folders of good advice.  The letters in “life” and “file” are interchangeable.  There are four drawers in my life’s file cabinet, and I have divided my life’s experiences into those four drawers.  Each has an infinite capacity for all things warm and fuzzy, but a minuscule section for the shards of shattered dreams and plans.

The bottom one contains my youth, the Spring Training of Life, if you will, every minute up until the point that I walked through the door at AFEES, Los Angeles, and began filling up the second drawer, one that was equipped to handle only those twenty-one months of chaos, that represented my military career.  The bottom drawer is, by far, the most stuffed, because there is a lot of warmth to be found within the framework of a large family.  

We were taught from the earliest age, that we were lucky to be “O’Neills” and that, “everything comes to him who waits, especially old age.”  There was lots of work, but minimal feeling that I was being ill-used.  Work was not only expected, but required.  There was no second guessing.  When I went to work as a boxboy for Augie, at Sunrize Market, I wore tennis shoes, and never stopped running the whole time I filled that role.  Augie’s mantra was, “If it’s a Kennedy, vote for him; if it’s an O’Neill, hire him.”

The second drawer is the most complicated, because of the fact that it should be empty, the military not being all that warm and fuzzy.  However, the high points were so magnified in their intensity, that they outweigh any comparable events in later life, simply because of the circumstances involved in being caught up in the military net.  Though we are only talking about one-thirtieth of my sixty year life span thus far, I needed one-fourth of the file cabinet, for those two years, that were ripped out of the core of my young adulthood.

The third drawer is my life’s work, both from the standpoint of my family, and from my professional life.  This drawer remains comfortably available for any additional folders I wish to store, because of the policy about not retaining things that are not warm and fuzzy.  I had to “circular file” a good amount of this period, as being a little too sharply defined, to warrant “fuzzy” status.

It was after I experienced the thrill of back distress, stemming from a typically O’Neill endeavor to try and do too much, that I switched to education, and managed to put my back issues on hold, at least until I do the odd tweak here and there, and walk around very gingerly for a few days.  None of this going to bed business.  I found out with back spasms, that to keep active, and work out the spasm was the best procedure.

The first time it happened, I had to be at a certain place, lifting and hauling what had to be lifted and hauled, and did not have the luxury of being able to decline.  To my shock, as the afternoon wore on, the pain began to be more bearable.  In less than a couple of hours, I had worked my way back to some facsimile of bearable pain, and have never taken to my bed, as a result of back distress, again.  

The fourth drawer, the one at the top, so as not to have to bend over to access it, is for the euphemistically entitled “late innings” with all of the accompanying reflection, that inevitably ends up rearing its mammoth head, at any given moment of the day-or more likely, the night.

Retirement brings about a time, unlike any other point in my life, when I can do what I want, when I want. 

Unfortunately, my body is not so gung-ho, but as long as my razor-sharp, cottage cheese brain, keeps plugging along, I don’t worry about my body.  I have heard all my life about the foibles of growing old.  It’s the old good news/bad news syndrome: The good news is you made it to “ripe old age.”  The bad news is the same.  You either get old, or you die.  I prefer to think of getting old as the preferable option, thereby negating that first barrage of criticism, for carrying on in a body that is dilapidated, to say the least.  It just means I have to slow down.  Now, when I need to split up a pile of rounds, I use a hydraulic splitter, and I sit on one of the rounds to accomplish this task.  It’s all about adapting.

As far as that file cabinet is concerned, I keep it readily available, so as to not have to go down to the basement or up to the attic.  You see, I blew out my knee, one Friday afternoon, while playing basketball with my Spanish elective class, and it’s hard to maneuver steps.  I’d give you the details, but they were not allowed into the file cabinet, being a little too painful to qualify as warm and fuzzy.