It all begins again...

“When morning gilds the skies,
My heart awaking cries:
May Jesus Christ be praised!”

- Original lyricist unknown

Sung lovingly to me throughout

her life by my mother

Fan Dreisinger

Mornings are my favorite time of the day.

They don’t start quickly, because it seems to take a bit of time for the several million cells in my body to get in sync and wake up.

I used to sit on the edge of the bed in a semi-stupor for five minutes or so, as if waiting for the preconcert tuning of a large orchestra completing the tonal check of each player’s instrument – you know, the confused sound somewhere between the scratching of fingernails on a blackboard and a band of cars honking their horns on a busy street – dissonant… irritating.

But then, the conductor raises the baton…a momentary calm follows and suddenly emerges the sound of music where the individual gives way to the coordinated impulse of single purpose…the many parts forgotten as focus and resolve become a singular, living thing.

For decades, that’s the way waking up worked for me…the discordance of transitioning from sleep to wake…and then, in the space of five to ten seconds, the whole thing seemed light up…as if a group of engineers, having checked all of the internal routines needed for conscious activity of the day, had given the “…all systems go…” green light.

It is hard to describe the sensation, but it was a physically pleasant feeling signaling it was time to get going, as Marcus Aurelius noted, to fulfill the tasks and duties of being a human being – meaning forward movement with the day and life.

In recent years, the methodology seems to have changed somewhat…taking a little longer – or maybe it is just a different routine reflecting a change in the way I am now living my life.

I suspect the internal engineers have sensed I no longer have a specific place to be every morning with clockwork timing…no clinic to open…no office requiring punctual presence…fewer papers that require ‘immediate attention’ to write. 

Maybe they sense my life is slowing down a little, or that the tasks still occupying my time allows for more discretion on my part.  Maybe they understand, that since my office is not more than a few feet from where I sip the nectar of the gods (i.e. sleep), it is not necessary to ‘tune the orchestra’ quite so quickly.

I suppose, having the discretion to choose what I want to do, and the places I want to be have created a calmer sense of the work necessitated by the ‘engine starters’ of my body.

So these days, I wake, not in complete stupor, but surely an early morning fog. I quietly trek to the kitchen turning on the coffee and turning off the house alarm. The iMac is next as it announces its functioning alertness with the ‘bong’ familiar to all who use this technology.  

Soon, a satisfying coffee…that only Molly seems to brew ‘just right’… is in hand and slipping into a comfortable chair, a book at the ready and Leah – who by now requires assistance – finding her way into my lap, I am ready to peek into the mind of a writer, who through the labor of his or her gift, provides me the momentum to ‘lift off’ the runway for yet another day full of expectation and the unknown.

In truth, I find waking up to be one of the loveliest things that occurs with regularity of my life.  Almost everything else I do still requires deliberate forward movement,  whether it be regular exercise…weekly writing…fulfilling obligations for events placed on to the ‘to do’ list or calendar…all of which are part of the process of life and require energy to continue to move forward on the journey.

BUT waking in the morning, ah yes, waking in the morning seems to be one of those automatic things over which I do not have input, nor control. Waking in the morning is a gift I find to be one of the great rewards of life…waking in the morning means there is another day into which I am privileged to meet an unknown future of conscious existence, and for me, it doesn’t get much better than that…

- ted

Emma's tale...

"Not all that wander are lost."

J.R. R. Tolkien

“You must have a name,” I said after we had been chatting for 45 minutes or so.

“Emma,” she replied

“Nice to meet you Emma,” I said with a smile and an extended hand. “I’m Ted.”

It seemed like the right thing to do considering we had been in a ‘warm water’ conversation, before the flight even got off the ground from London Heathrow.

There are so many unknowns about life that emerge with the unexpected quickness of a nearby lightening strike. This conversation was one of them.

Backing up a bit…

There were a couple of ‘bumps’ on the trip to Denmark….the legs would be Phoenix > London > Copenhagen > Aalborg, Denmark.

The flight out of Phoenix was delayed causing a missed connection to Copenhagen… the rescheduled flight would be an hour and a half later.

Because it was so close to the flight when the flight was rearranged, there wasn’t really a choice of seats.  Mine? 28F – the last seat (window) on the right side of the plane…the one that resonates with every flush of the vacuum driven toilet directly behind me!

With the small roller bag overhead and my backpack under the seat in front of me, I consoled myself that I could manage the ‘knee touch’ to seat in front of me for the hour and a half flight, after all I had gotten a seat and that was progress.  My backpack, however, was a little too big to get under the seat, so I took my computer and iPad out, slipping them under my seat.

Emma the seatmate…

It looked like I would have the row to myself, meaning with a little shifting, I might just avoid the small pressure sore resulting from constant touching of the seat in front of me. 

Just then a woman took the aisle seat and after settling in, noted my ‘compact seating arrangement,’ and said, “Would you like the aisle? I wouldn’t mind switching, and I enjoy the window.”

Would I mind?! I thought. Are you kidding?

It would give me a little more legroom, and permit getting up without having to climb over her.

“I would love it,” I said, and with the switch was made!

The chat…

As it turned out, nobody sat in the middle seat, and as it turned out, it was the only empty seat on the plane!  This lent itself to an open conversation, AND a little more elbowroom.

I’m not exactly sure how the exchange got started. I probably asked whether she was leaving or returning home, and what she did for a living

Emma was heading home to Sweden from her job as a ‘long haul’ British Airways flight attendant.  I have come to appreciate this is not so unusual a thing for flight attendants to do…living somewhere quite distant from their ‘home’ flight base.  It’s just a matter of ‘hitching’ a ride to work, as it were.

Before we knew it, we slipped into an hour and a half  ‘life and the universe’ conversation that was so delightful and lively, it seemed we landed almost before we knew we had been in the air.  It was so engaging, I hardly noticed there was anyone else on the flight, nor did I ‘hear’ that toilet once!

Context for this event…

When I got on this flight, it was 9:00AM Tucson time and I had been up for 28 hours or so – majority of which sitting in airplanes.  By this time I was so tired, I was mostly thinking about the final few hours it would take to at my final destination and get to bed.

The conversation with Emma, however, was so engaging and lively, that getting off the plane in Copenhagen, I felt completely refreshed.  It was truly one of those ‘cup filling’ rather than ‘cup draining’ interactions…I’m pretty sure you know what I mean.

We wandered through customs toward the exit, said good-bye and I headed to the luggage carousel…she out the door to the rest of her life.

Realty bites…

While basking in the afterglow of this encounter, I noticed my backpack seemed a little lighter than it should have been.

Wait a minute, I thought, Where is my computer and iPad?

Had they been stolen?

There was a brief moment of ‘stomach dropping’ disorientation until I realized I had left them under my seat on the plan!

There was little doubt that by now, nobody was going to let me back through security to try and retrieve them.

Don’t panic…take a deep breath…think…

I went to the information booth in the airport to see if they might help.  It was by now nearly 35 minutes from the time I had gotten off the plane.

Sparing the intimate detail…

As it turned out, the cleaners had found the computers and were just about to take them to lost and found.  They were busy with other flights and would come as soon as they could…I would NOT be making the scheduled flight to Aalborg.

The next and final flight was one hour later and required changing my ticket, which by the way, needed to be done in a separate terminal.  I would go there, change the flight and then come back for my belongings.  Things would be tight for the flight.

As I was purchasing the ticket, someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Here are your computers,” said the woman sent to fetch my things. “I thought it would be faster if I brought them to you.”

She had gotten the computer/iPad, tucked them under her arm and pushed a two-wheel scooter through the terminals to get them to me.

I thanked her with gusto and kissed her on the cheek (she turned beet red).  She turned, hopped on her scooter and pushed it away…to the rest of her life.

By the time I arrived to Aalborg I had been up for 36 hours, but buoyed by the conversation with Emma and the wonderful kindness of the information folks at the airport, I was surprisingly alert.  In spite of the extra hour wait, Uffe greeted me with his usual winning smile and enthusiastic shake of the hand.

When my head hit the pillow a little later in the evening, I could not help but be grateful for all of the events of the trip.  The conversation with Emma is the kind of thing I truly cherish in the course of my life’s journey.  The unbelievable kindness and desire to help by the information staff at the Copenhagen airport helped me appreciate Bismarck’s comment that…God takes care of children, idiots…” and apparently, in this case, tired and long haul travelers…

- ted

An old yellow van..

“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you

would stay out and your dog would go in.”

- Mark Twain

The yellow 1967 yellow Ford Econoline pickup truck, sat in the parking lot at the YMCA. 

It shone brightly in the morning sun as if to say, “Hey, you…do I look familiar?”

As the guy got out of the truck, I said, “I used to drive one of those, but it was an OD (Olive Drab) green military van.” 

He smiled and said, “I’d sell her if I could! Are you interested?”

I returned an “I don’t think so" grin, but nonetheless had fond memories of a bygone era when bumping and shaking along country roads of rural Alabama to the smell of fresh growing peanuts, corn, an anticipation of watermelon season, and the more than faint odor of motor oil burning from an engine that sat between the front seats.  If you had a military license in those days, it was almost a rite of passage!

You want to wake up your taste buds and satisfy your soul? Put a watermelon or two in the refrigerator, give them a day to chill and then eat your and their hearts out! There is little on a hot and humid Southern Alabama day that calms the angry beast, more than ice-cold watermelon!

Memory is a funny thing.  As the sharp edges soften with the river of time, the feelings they generated don’t.  In fact, in some ways they seem to intensify, and I can say with authoritative assurance that the memory of cold watermelon on a hot summer’s day is richer than the sweet lips of the first girl ever I kissed!

Fort Rucker, Alabama…

It was 1970, and even though this vehicle had more than six-figures worth of ‘military abusive driving mileage’ under its belt, there was still a little life in it.  The shocks were so bad, and the seats so well worn, that every bump and rough spot in the road could be felt as it made its daily runs to our radar site in Headland, Alabama. 

This van had a standard transmission and required a practiced touch to make it shift smoothly.  “Shift smoothly…” might be an over exaggeration, but anyone who has military van driving experience, knows exactly what I mean!

The engine was in the center of the vehicle between the driver and front seat passenger and was covered with an insulated metal shell that was supposed to dampen the sound and keep the heat from filling the van.  The center console engine might not have had the greatest admiration from mechanics, but you could put almost anything on that thing from notebooks to take out lunch for the driver and passengers – front and back. 

Yes indeed, driving or riding in that thing was an experience not to be lost to the foggy back roads of memory.

The memory two-edged…

The puppy lay softly whimpering, on the center console this cool spring morning, as I headed to the veterinarian’s office in town…the engine warming his little body…my heart in my throat.

“I am so sorry,” I said as this little creature looked up at me.

It had been a valiant effort. Jim had wanted to kill the pup as soon as he realized there was a problem.

“No,” I said.  I had been going over every morning to play with it in the two months since it's birth.

“I’ll take him to the Vet in town and get him taken care of.” I said.  “I’ll take care of the bills.”

“Suit yo self,” Jim said.  “Ain’t nothin' no vet gonna do for the mange. That pup done already been dead!”

Radar neighbor across the road…

Jim was a day laborer on the outskirts of Headland, Alabama, working just for wages with stock in the land or its crops.  He was in his late 70s and lived in a single room house with his wife Anna across the road from the radar site where I worked. 

Sometimes in the late afternoons when we waited for the night flight helicopters to come and practice radar approaches to our ‘cow pasture runway,’ I would head over to Jim’s and sit on his tiny porch, where he would tell me stories about what it was like live in the segregated South.

“Anna would be walkin’ back from town, and sometimes those white boys would throw bottles at her…call her names.”

"One night, back in ‘42, the Klan come in the middle of the night and took one of my boys,” he said.  “They didn’t kill him, but they hurt him bad.”

The puppy…

Jim and Anna had a female mongrel dog, who had a litter that year.  It took too much to care for them, and he said he gave some away to his boys.  I think he drowned them…. but he let me have one with the promise I would feed it and take care of it.

“This puppy does have the mange,” said the Veterinarian, confirming Jim’s diagnosis.

“We can try to treat the skin lesions, but this kind is a problem and the treatment may not help.”

“Is there a chance?” I said.

“Slim,” he replied

“Let’s try,” I said, and we did.

After a month when I took the pup in, the Vet said, “Treatment’s not working. It’s time.”

“Give one more day?” I asked

“Yeah,” he replied

I spent the rest of the day with that little thing and the next morning, before taking him in. I played with him, rubbed his belly, talked as sweet as I knew how and fed him good.

Only one of us knew this would be our last time, and this would be his last meal.  I tried to slow the time down – tried to make it stop…but couldn’t do it, and here we were on the “…last ride.”

The vet asked me if I wanted to stay, or wanted the body. I told him I couldn’t bear to stay and could he take care of the body.

I nuzzled that puppy, said good bye, walked out to that OD green van and cried all the way back to the radar site.

Here and now...

My mind jumped back in that instant from that OD green…to the bright yellow Econoline in the parking lot. 

The fella said, “I’d sell her if I could! Are you interested?

I returned an “I don’t think so grin,” and headed into the YMCA for my morning workout, and the lightening memory of a little pup that had touched my heart so many years ago…

- ted

Hey! How did YOU get here?

“So far so good. Give me a little more

life and I’ll write the report…”

- Anonymous

It’s a miracle I am alive, I thought. 

How did this happen? I wondered

Hmmm…I am not exactly sure!  Maybe I don’t need to know all the details, but there are a few things I understand.

Pondering a little…

We often use the expression ‘miracle of life’ when attempting to describe the unspeakably amazing phenomenon of birth, beginning with the inherent impulse we share for the spreading of our species.

An amazing number of coordinated/complicated things must exactly align for conception to take place, so the biochemical and physiological processes of growth can occur in the womb.

During the ‘successful event,’ for example, millions of sperm compete for a single egg waiting to be fertilized…each one carrying minutely different combinations of genetic material.

Under normal circumstances one, and only one gets through and conception takes place.  It is so astonishing, that had a different sperm fertilized that egg, you and I might look different than we do.  Now there’s a cosmic ‘…what if!...’

That’s just the beginning.

While gestating in the isolation of our mother’s womb, the biochemical building blocks of life, following the DNA/RNA recipe, build a physical body cell by cell.  No easy task considering each of us is custom made according to the specifications of a blueprint, discarded and never again used in the creation of a human body.

If we survive the process, escaping the warmth of our mother’s belly – and it is quite obvious we did - we emerge into an alien, hostile and chaotic world providing the oxygen needed for our ‘first breath.’

Just getting here far exceeds the possibilities of winning any lottery of any size!

It is a miracle I am alive, I thought

An aside to the unknown – the really unknown…

Somewhere along the line, ‘consciousness’ is injected into our little developing brains, but that is a topic exceeding the grasp of the best and most thoughtful minds…a topic that continues to elude science and remains in the category of “…that is simply just the way it is…”  Thomas Aquinas would say, the things we don’t understand, we put under the category of ‘…God’s workings….’

Back it up just a little…

Consider for a moment the number of wars in the history of the world – okay, maybe you don’t know the number, but trust me, it is a BIG number…a number that has led to millions and millions dying as cannon fodder for forgotten disagreements that ended their lives.

Consider the number of premature accidental or purposeful deaths for whatever reason…famine, disease, anger, jealousy…each one eliminating the possibilities of future offspring…each one stopping the genetic chain of events that would bring forth an inherited strain of anything!

It IS a miracle I am alive, I thought.

Consider, the obstacles for:

- surviving childbirth,

- escaping childhood,

- passing through the stupidity of adolescence,

- the laissez-faire young adulthood, and/or

- the minefields of the mature years.

If you are a bit older like me, think of the traffic accidents, falls, head bangings, possible near drownings, and other potential ‘life enders’ you have dodged…sometimes by the skin of your teeth! 

Since you are reading this, each of you has survived the gauntlet of events, historical and/or personal, looking for ways to keep you from surviving! 

It’s a miracle WE ARE alive, I thought.

Getting to old age is a very tricky business.  Crossing the finish line, of ‘…from dust thou are to dust thou shalt return,’ relatively intact…if one might be so bold to say, is a notable feat in spite of the fact our ‘suit’ has become a little wrinkled in the process.

I’m just saying…

While there are millions and millions of reasons why you and I should never have been born, nor taken a single breath, nor reached any level of consciousness, here we are – me writing and you reading this piece…alive, breathing…carbon based creatures given the gift to express a complexity of experience through the sensations of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste…each one providing us opportunity for reflection, creating a whole new world of possibility with each breath.

Yeah, it is a miracle WE are alive, and in the context of so many reasons why we shouldn’t be…I’m pretty grateful we are!

- ted