Frank is Emptiness

December 3rd, 2024

I sat next to her at the dealership. I had been in almost the same position exactly one year prior, when I bought the young woman a Honda Accord. Unfortunately, she no longer owned the Accord. Two weeks ago, she had totaled the car in an accident. I don’t know all the details of the accident, and they don’t really matter that much. She wasn’t cited or arrested. However, she instantly became carless and in need of transportation. For purely selfish reasons, I agreed to go to the car dealership and help her to buy another ride. I was not willing to be her chauffeur, even for a short period of time. I told her that I had no intention of paying for the whole purchase. She had money from her insurance company, but it would not quite pay for a car, even a beater. I offered to cover what her claim settlement would not pay.

I despise car dealerships, passionately. I could try to describe this particular one, but they are all pretty much the same. The sales team is always composed of people working on commission, and they are either utterly bored or feverishly trying to convince a customer to buy a vehicle. I don’t envy those individuals. I could never do that kind of work. I would rather clean bathrooms. At least then I would still have my self-respect.

She had looked up a car online that she wanted. It was a 2012 Ford Focus. As expected, it was no longer there by the time we showed up. The sales rep looked on his computer for other cars in her price range, which was a rather low range.

He told her, “I have a 2009 Buick Lucerne for around $5K. It has 160,000 miles on it. There was only one owner, so it looks pretty clean.”

I looked at her. “You want to see it?”

She nodded to me with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.

I glanced around the showroom. I noticed something odd.

I asked the sales rep, “”You have a gong here?’

He looked back over his shoulder at the large brass gong hanging in the room, with a mallet sitting next to it. “Yeah, we do.”

“So, do you hit the gong when you make a sale?”

He smiled and said, “The customer bangs the gong.”

I suspected we were not going to bang the gong.

The dealer went out to the lot to look for the car. That took quite a while. I have never understood how car dealerships can lose track of their vehicles. I worked for almost three decades at a trucking company and we always knew where every piece of equipment was. We made yard checks several times a day to keep track of the trucks and trailers. Years ago, I worked very briefly at a car dealership, and nobody there knew where their vehicles were. I remember walking around the lot for over an hour only to learn that the car I needed to find was offsite at a vendor for detailing. This place was very similar to my former employer’s.

At last, the salesperson pulled up in a black Buick. I let the young woman make the test drive on her own. She has frequently commented that I don’t know much about cars, so there was no reason for me to ride along. She came back looking unimpressed.

I asked her, “How was it?”

She replied, “The steering seemed…kind of loose.”

The salesman smiled and said, “It’s a Buick. It’s a soft, smooth ride. It’s like driving a sofa.”

Yeah, it is. As the young woman pointed out to me, it’s an old man’s car. It’s the kind of sedan that a guy would drive slowly to his colonoscopy appointment. Not really the type of vehicle for a woman who wants quick response and sharp handling.

I asked the salesperson about a warranty. There was none. The State of Wisconsin required the dealer to complete a list of safety checks, but that was it. As my dad used to say, the Buick had a “black top” warranty. Once the customer drives off the dealership’s black top and into the street, the warranty is null and void.

We closed the deal. The guy came back from his boss with the numbers. It came up to $6500. I stared at the paperwork, and I considered trying to bring the price down a bit. Then I thought,

“What for? Maybe I can haggle and get the price down a couple hundred bucks, but then this guy would probably have to look me straight in the eye and lie to me. I would have to listen to that. There’s not enough money to make that kind of abuse worthwhile.”

I wrote a check. Some guy from finance gathered us up and sat us down in his office. Papers were signed. Money changed hands. The young woman had a car, and I had smaller sum in my bank account.

The salesperson thanked us profusely. We shook hands. The young woman drove off in her car. I left in mine.

The gong was silent.

December 1st, 2024

Our grandson, Asher, will be four years old tomorrow. At times, he seems much older than that. He often acts like the preschooler that he is, but sometimes he surprises me. Years ago, when our youngest son, Stefan, was as old as Asher, the pastoral associate at our church described him as having “an old soul”. Stefan had a maturity and confidence (sometimes cockiness) that was unusual for a boy his age. Asher is like his uncle in that respect. They both are wise beyond their years.

Asher can be a handful. He needs things to be a certain a way, and he freaks out when they aren’t. It might be how I set the table for a meal. It might be how I slice him some cheese. It might be how I move his toys out of my way. Asher has had four years of chaos and instability in his life. I think that he gets upset about minor changes because he needs some kind of control over his environment in order to feel safe. Still, it can be infuriating to me when nothing I do for him seems to be right. I rapidly run out of patience with the boy. When I do so, he has a meltdown, and only calms down after he tells me with tears in his eyes,

“Grandpa, pick me up!”

I do, and he slowly relaxes in my arms. I start to relax too. I’m old, and it takes my body quite a while to let go of negative energy. The last time I held him after we had a confrontation, he looked at me and asked,

“Grandpa, are you okay?”

I thought for a while, shook my head, and replied, “I don’t know.”

Then he asked, “Are okay a little bit?”

I sighed. “Yeah, I’m okay a little bit.”

I held him some more. He rested his head on my right shoulder. Then he said,

“Grandpa, I like you.”

“I like you too.”

Asher told me, “I like you as much as I love you.”

That stumped me. I never had a little boy say that to me. I’m not sure I ever had anyone say that to me. I didn’t say anything. I just held him a bit tighter.

Asher is wise for a four-year-old.

November 29th, 2024

A few weeks ago, my wife, our grandson, and I were visiting family in Texas. We spent the vast majority of our time hanging around with our three Texan grandkids and their mom. While little Asher played with his cousins and Karin knit, I talked with our daughter-in-law, Gabby. She was always busy with washing clothes and chasing after her toddlers. At some point in the day, she started cooking supper. One day she decided to make corn bread and pinto beans. She told me that it was one of her favorite meals from her childhood.

That made me think. Why did she eat corn bread and beans as a child? The short answer to that question was that corn bread and pinto beans were cheap, and her parents had an extremely tight budget. Gabby also said that they ate a lot of Hamburger Helper. I assume that they could afford hamburger that required help. She mentioned that she and her siblings ate a lot of ramen noodles, cereal, and grilled cheese sandwiches.

I asked Gabby if she ate fried bologna when she was young. Her answer was “yes” to that. I also ate fried bologna as a child. Her answer made me remember other foods that I ate when I was kid. Most of them I don’t eat any more, but I still recall what they were. I have a good idea why my family ate what they ate. It wasn’t necessarily because they liked the food.

I am convinced that in many instances a person’s choice of diet is dictated by money, or lack of it. It was like that in my family of origin, and it was like that in my parents’ families. They had to make the weekly paycheck stretch, and they looked for bargains. What showed up on the kitchen table was often the result of making difficult economic choices.

For instance, corn bread is cheap to make. My mom didn’t make cornbread, but she made polenta, which is a boiled cornmeal dish that she served in the form of a loaf. Polenta is an Italian food, but we weren’t Italian. Our people were originally from Slovenia, which is a tiny Slavic country right next to Italy. So, in our house we ate foods that were from Slovenia, or from the neighboring ethnic groups (Germans, Hungarians, Italians and people from the Balkans). With rare exceptions, these dishes were meals that peasants would eat.

I had six younger brothers, so whatever my parents cooked needed to plentiful. Stews and soups fit that criterion. We had goulash. We always had pea soup right after Easter. In the spring, my mom would put in the pot whatever scraps were left over from the Easter ham, along with the bone, and let the soup simmer until every particle of protein was dissolved in the soup. We ate sarma, which consists of ground meat of some sort mixed with rice and wrapped in sour cabbage leaves. We ate sausages and potatoes and sauerkraut. Regardless of what was served, there were rarely if ever any leftovers.

My dad’s family took the strict budget diets to the next level. They used to eat “paprika speck”. “Speck” is the German word for bacon. Paprika speck was lard, plain and simple. It had microscopic pieces of bacon embedded in the fat. They ate it like butter. They spread it on bread and sprinkled a spice, like paprika or pepper, on it. That was lunch for them. Lard was also used for any kind of frying. There were no cooking sprays. My mom had three big containers in her kitchen. One was for flour, one for sugar, one for coffee, and one for lard.

They also ate cheap cuts of meat: hearts, livers, kidneys. They had a garden and ate whatever was in season. In early summer, they had big lettuce salads with oil and vinegar for a dressing. Later in the season, they ate whole tomatoes like they were apples. My grandparents and my mom did a lot of canning. They bought fruits and vegetables when they were plentiful and cheap, and then they preserved them for the winter. My dad made sauerkraut in the basement. It smelled like an animal had crawled into the house and died in a corner.

My family had a root cellar to store potatoes, onion, and apples. My dad hung chains of sausages from the ceiling in the cellar so that they would dry out. Our family was not the only one to do that. I had a friend whose family was from Sicily. His folks would hang up pepperoni and salami to dry and harden. My friend joked that you could tell if a salami was hard enough by testing it. If you could drive a nail into a wooden board with it, it was ready. When sausages were rock hard, a person could slice them paper thin and then put them on a piece of bread. That’s how you made them last.

Would I eat these foods now? Some I would. Like pinto beans and corn bread are for Gabby, there are some childhood foods that I remember fondly. I like to eat fresh tomatoes. I like pea soup with ham in it. Food links a person to their history. Maybe that is the important thing.

November 27th, 2024

Our three-year-old grandson, Asher, is sitting at the kitchen table, watching YouTube videos about monster trucks and eating a slice of raisin bread. He seems to be in a good mood. He’s looking healthy today. Two days ago, he wasn’t.

Two days ago, we took the little boy to his pediatrician. Asher was hurting. He had been having bouts of diarrhea and abdominal pain for ten days, and nothing seemed to make him better. Over the course of the ten days, my wife and I had taken to boy to the ER three times. The first time we went there because we had no idea what was causing the ailment. The doctor told us during that visit that he probably had a wicked stomach virus, and it would have to run its course. Three days later, we were at the ER again because Asher had blood in his diaper. The doctor at that time told us that his repetitive explosions of poop had caused an abrasion on his rectum, and that it would heal quickly once the diarrhea stopped. They told us to buy some Ibuprofen for the pain, and we did that. Two days later, we were at the ER one more time. This time we were at our wits end. I had been up all night with Asher because he had an endless series of tiny bowel movements. I changed his diaper probably twenty times. The third ER physician also assumed that Asher had a virus and told us to get a medicine to slow the flow of diarrhea down. We did that too.

Nothing helped. Asher was in pain every time he excreted. I was exhausted from getting up at night with him repeatedly. The whole experience was getting scary. As Asher’s fulltime caregiver, I was worried. Worry was gradually turning to panic as he cried every time he had to go.

Two days after the last ER visit, we saw his doctor. Asher was in a bad way. He cried and screamed during the entire time. His doctor is on the staff of the local children’s hospital, so he wasn’t bothered by that. He examined Asher and asked us about his symptoms. Then he immediately ordered an x-ray of the boy’s abdomen. He told us,

“I think I know what this is, but I have to be sure.”

Asher had his x-ray made, and the doctor showed it to us. He asked us,

“Do you see the dark areas?”

“Yes.” (There were many dark areas.)

“Those are places where the bowels are full of stool. He has an obstacle made of hard stool in his rectum that is blocking everything but the liquid feces. It seems like he has diarrhea, but he doesn’t really. Actually, he has constipation. There is name for this, encopresis.”

The doctor prescribed an industrial strength laxative for Asher. It was like what I took when I had my colonoscopy. He also prescribed Ex lax to get things moving. We started giving Asher the meds that afternoon. That night, after he went to bed, the dam broke. I spent almost all of the night changing Asher’s diapers. It was literally a shitshow. We will keep giving the meds for the next several days to ensure that he gets his bowels cleaned out. He seems emptier already.

He’s been sleeping quite a bit since he started on this protocol. It literally takes a lot out of him. He crawled into bed with me to take a nap this morning and I held him close. He won’t sleep unless he rests his head on the bicep of my left arm. He got comfortable and slowly closed his eyes. His left hand reached for my right. He didn’t want to hold my hand. He just wanted to touch it. Then he fell asleep.

We were both at peace.

November 13th, 2024

Caring for a sick kid is always stressful. It is especially hard to do if the small child is in pain and sobbing uncontrollably. That was the case with Asher, our little grandson, early on Sunday morning. He had been struggling with bouts of diarrhea since Friday. His condition seemed to be getting worse. The volume and intensity of his cries were growing stronger. My wife and I needed to do something.

That something was to take him to the local urgent care. We didn’t really want to go to the emergency room because we were not convinced that he had a true emergency. However, we couldn’t wait for the following morning to take the boy to his pediatrician. The situation did in fact seem to be urgent.

There are actually a couple different urgent care facilities not too far from our home. We took him to the one affiliated with the office of our primary care physician. We have had good experiences with his office, and we hoped that this urgent care would give us the same level of service.

I held Asher in my arms as I approached the lady at the front desk to check in. She was rather chipper for being there early on a Sunday. I handed her Asher’s insurance card and then she asked me about my relationship to Asher.

“I’m his grandfather and his legal guardian.”

She replied, “Do you have a copy of the court paper showing that you are his guardian?”

“What?”

She said, “We need to have proof that you are actually his guardian in order to treat him. You need to have that with you.”

After a short pause, I asked her, “How would I know this?”

She smiled and said, “Oh, you wouldn’t know it. That’s why I’m telling you now. It’s to protect the child. Hasn’t anyone ever asked you this before?”

“No, nobody has. I don’t have the anything on me. What exactly what do I need?”

She replied breezily, “Oh, it’s a paper from the court with a stamp on it. We will just scan it and then he will be in our data base. If you want, you can run home and get it and then come back.”

That dumbfounded me. Here I was with a sick little boy, and they won’t touch the boy unless I can show my legal status. How bad does something need to be to qualify as urgent? I knew I have the paperwork at home, but I had no idea exactly where it was. Going on a treasure hunt was not going to work.

Apparently, I stood there for too long lost in thought because she said to me,

“Or you could go down the corridor to the ER.”

I consulted with my wife. The boy was miserable. We were tired. This woman was useless to us. We walked to the emergency room.

That was quick and easy. We were in and out of the ER in 45 minutes or so. The doctor was good with kids, and he had no trouble examining Asher. He determined that Asher had a nasty stomach virus. There wasn’t much that we could do but make Asher comfortable and let the virus run its course. We were relieved that it wasn’t anything worse than that.

After we got home again, I dug around for the magic paper from the court. I found it, and I put it aside for the next time.

November 21st, 2024

When driving to visit our son, Hans, the GPS usually takes us through the forests and pastures of eastern Texas. We travel around big towns and through the small ones. and going by the back roads is actually faster than trying to get to Hans’ home by freeway. However, we often need to slow down along the way. The advantage to reducing speed is that it gives the traveler the opportunity to observe his or her surroundings. I try to do that.

I’ve noticed than that in the small Texan towns, regardless of size, there seems to be at least half a dozen churches, usually a mixture of Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal. Near Huntsville I saw a congregation called “Branded for Christ”. That looked interesting, but rather weird. It sounded like a cowboy cult. In any case, the spiritual soil of eastern Texas is supersaturated with Calvinism. It permeates everything. The region is definitely part of the Bible Belt.

Also, I’ve noticed a plethora of billboards with Christian themes along the highways. We have those up north too, but not in such profusion. It makes me wonder what the purpose of these are and who the audience is. It baffles me.

It appears to be a hard sell form of evangelization, but I can’t figure out who the sponsors of the billboards are trying to reach. I don’t think they are trying to reach people who have never heard of Jesus. I doubt that anyone living in the area falls into that category. Even if by chance, a religiously ignorant person traveled through the region, they would most likely just be puzzled by the messages on the signs.

A popular message on the billboards is “Jesus is the Answer!”. My immediate response to that is “What was the question?” Another classic line is “Jesus Saves!” I mentioned that sentence to a friend of mine at the synagogue. He smiled and quipped,

“Jesus saves. Moses invests.”

There is the possibility that the billboards are there to call back the backsliders. I guess then the question is how far have they backslid? To make sense of the signs, a person to have some understanding and appreciation the Christian tradition. However, if the individual has totally jettisoned that belief system, then the billboards are ineffective. If a person thinks that the Bible is just a book like any other book, it was all a waste of money and effort to use that message to reach them.

I am thinking that the billboards are mainly to encourage the true believers to stay the course. The signs exist to convert the converted.

November 20th, 2024

A long journey with a small child is by its very nature a challenge. A road trip with a sick little boy increases the difficulty of that trek exponentially. This we learned as Karin and I drove home to Wisconsin from Texas. Our almost-four-year-old grandson, Asher, caught a virus somewhere, and he had been struggling with a head cold and a cough. Now, as we were on the last legs of the trip, he also had bouts of diarrhea. This created problems.

Asher is generally a wonderful boy, but he can be moody and particular about how certain things are done. When he does not feel well, his mood grows worse, and likewise his behavior. It’s this way with adults too, but somehow the tantrums seem more intense coming from a preschooler.

Karin and I had divided the journey home into four bite-sized pieces. Madisonville, Texas to Tulsa, Oklahoma on the first day. Then, Tulsa to Lawrence, Kansas on the second. It should be noted that Lawrence is the home of the Yarn Barn, a pilgrimage site for knitters and weavers. My wife falls into both of those categories. On the third day, we went from Lawrence to Coralville, Iowa. The final day was to be the sprint home. That was the plan anyway.

The night before the last segment of the trip, Asher slept poorly. He rolled around and moaned. His tummy hurt. None of these things were good omens. He refused to eat anything when had breakfast at the hotel. Also, not a good sign. He just wasn’t feeling well.

After breakfast, we emptied out our hotel room and dragged a cart full of bags down to the foyer. I walked to the parking lot to grab the SUV. I drove the RAV4 near the hotel entrance and saw Asher sobbing uncontrollably. Awesome. Now what is going on?

Asher stared at me with tears streaming down his cheeks. He cried,

“I wanted to go with you to the parking lot!”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“But I wanted to! You have to take the car back to the parking lot!”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Yes, you ARE!”

There was a standoff. Karin, the only rational person in our group, suggested we load up the car. I tried to lower my blood pressure. Eventually, after we had all our stuff wedged into the RAV, I told Asher,

“If you get in and be good, I’ll drive back to the parking lot.”

He sniffled, and said, “Okay, but first you got wipe my tears.”

I wiped his tears. He prefers that I use the sleeve of my hoodie to do that. Then we all got into the car, and I slowly drove back to the exact same parking spot I had previously vacated. I asked him,

“We’re here. Is this okay? Can we go now?”

He said softly, “It’s okay, Grandpa.”

I wanted to put some miles behind us, but that was not to be. As we crossed the Mississippi, Asher loudly proclaimed that his tummy hurt. As fate would have it, sitting on a bluff on the riverside was the first rest stop in Illinois. I took the turn off and stopped at the welcome center.

We got out of the car, and Asher informed us, “I pooped.” No surprise there. I took him into the bathroom and dutifully changed his diaper. There wasn’t much in there besides his butt. We went back outside. A few minutes later, the boy told us, “I pooped again.” This time he wanted my wife to change him. So, she took him into her bathroom and did the same that thing that I had done. Just a smidgeon of feces, but it was enough to require a change.

We all went together to the playground a couple hundred feet away from the welcome center. He played for a while and then told us,

“I can’t go down the slide.”

“Why?”

“I pooped.”

I muttered darkly. Once again, he wanted Oma to change his diaper. She asked him if she could do it at the playground. She pointed out that there was a cushiony pad on the surface of the playground. Asher agreed to change outdoors. The was poop, but not a lot.

Asher played some more. I was eager to move on. He announced, “I pooped again.”

Oh well, fourth time is a charm. When Karin opened up the diaper, it was apparent that a shit grenade had exploded in it. She started to clean him up and said,

“We are running out of wipes.”

“That’s no good.”

Seeing as she has a great deal of experience with this sort of thing, she used a clean portion of the contaminated diaper to wipe his ass. She managed to get him sanitary again with what wipes she had available. He felt better.

He played a for another couple minutes. We bundled Asher into the car. He watched monster truck videos and ate an energy bar. After several miles, he dozed off.

I floored the accelerator.

November 18th, 2024

Several days ago, Karin and I had dinner with a young friend of ours. He recently moved back to Tulsa, and we stopped there to see him on our way back to Wisconsin from visiting family in Texas. We have known him for years. He was a novice in formation to become a priest at our church eight years ago. He was with our congregation for a year, and then he moved elsewhere for more training. Since then, we have tried to stay in touch. He has kept us abreast of his activities, and we have let him know about the drama in our lives.

This young man grew up in Tulsa, and after he left home, except for short visits, he did not see his family very often. Now, he is home again, although the word “home” is probably not accurate in some ways. As we sat and ate, he told me,

“I didn’t recognize the place when I came back here. Neighborhoods that were good fifteen years ago no longer are, and parts of town that weren’t very good are now better. My siblings have all moved on with their lives. I don’t see them much. I visit my parents and help my mom. She has health issues. They aren’t life-threatening, but she struggles to do some things.”

His comments reminded me of when I left the Army and moved back to the Milwaukee area after an absence of twelve years. My situation had been similar. I never really came home. My parents and my brothers were different from what I remembered. Also, I was different. I was meeting them again for the first time. The old relationships were severed, and it was hard to establish new ones. In some ways, I never connected again.

I think of my friend as a being a priest, although he left his religious community before he was ordained. He was trained to be a priest, and he always will be to some extent, just like I am still a soldier although I haven’t worn a uniform since 1986. I told him how sometimes a veteran can recognize another vet on first sight. He nodded and said,

“An indelible mark.”

A priest upon ordination is said to receive an indelible mark on his soul. This happens too with somebody who has served in the military. Being a priest or a soldier is not just a job. It is a vocation or a calling. A person who freely chooses one of these careers is set apart from the rest of society. The individual joins a culture that has radically different values from the population at large.

Can a person who was a committed member of a religious organization for many years assimilate into the “real” world? Can a soldier do that?

The short answer is: “No”. A soldier or a priest can never really belong there.

Sebastian Junger wrote a book called Tribe. His book speaks to this situation. A tribe is a group of people who differ from other groups in some fundamental way. One of the salient characteristics of a tribe is that each member is intensely dependent on the actions of the other persons. Each member is more concerned with the common good than with their personal wants and needs.

A couple days prior to dining with our friend, I was talking to my oldest son, Hans. We were riding in his pickup truck, and he told me about how hard it was to adapt to the values of civilians. He said,

“When I was in Iraq, when we went out on missions, everybody had to watch each other’s back. If someone chose not to do that, or if they froze when things got bad, well, then we had a party for him when we got back to base. Some of the guys who had a party left it with a couple broken ribs or a black eye.”

Hans smiled, “None of that ever got reported.”

Then he shook his head and said, “A brother is a brother, but when he isn’t anymore…” He left that part of sentence hang in the air.

Being a member of a tribe, whether it be a religious community or a military unit, means that there is a significant level of trust. Everything depends on this trust between tribe members, sometimes even survival depends on it.

My friend who is a priest in his heart is facing life in a culture where nobody gives a fuck about anyone else. That’s hard for him to handle. It was hard for me when I entered the civilian world. It was especially difficult for Hans, because he is a combat vet. We don’t fit in.

We don’t want to.

November 15th, 2024

Last week, my wife, Karin, our little grandson, Asher, and I were visiting our son, Hans, and his family in Texas. We didn’t get to see much of Hans. He was working most of the time. He pumps concrete for a living, and he often works absurdly long hours. Concrete pumping is a weather dependent occupation, so it is feast or famine with regards to how many hours Hans gets during any given week. When Texas has its monsoons, he is idle. When the weather is good, he may easily put in seventy hours in a work week. One week he was on the clock for eighty-eight hours. By any measure that is excessive, and probably unsafe.

Hans work schedule necessarily affects his family life. He and his wife, Gabby, have three small children: Weston, Maddy, and Wyatt. Gabby cares the kids fulltime while Hans earns money. They both have rather traditional roles. Hans does not often get to interact with his children. He is many times absent due to his job, or he worn out from it. It is not a perfect situation for Hans as a father, nor is it the best thing for his kids.

A few days ago, Hans had a relatively short work shift. He was home early, and he had the energy to play with his little ones. I watched how the kids acted with their daddy. Maddy, his three-year-old daughter found a hobbyhorse with a dinosaur’s head on its end. She held the long stick in her hands and attacked Hans with the T Rex head. He pretended that he was being devoured by the carnivore and fell to the floor. Hans got on his hands and knees and crawled on the floor as Maddy jumped up on his back. When she was done using him as a beast of burden, her older brother, Weston, took her place. The youngest boy, Wyatt watched the show in delight from his mama’s side.

After all of the horseplay was done, and its participants exhausted, Hans smiled at me and said,

“I live for that.”

He does. He truly does live for that.

I understand how he feels. When our children were the same ages as his kids, I was working third shift for long hours, and I did not get much chance to just play with them. I missed a lot of their early years. I was never one to play rough with them. What Hans does with his kids is not anything he learned from me. It’s just who he is, and he is good at it.

Hans is aware that children are only little for a short period of time. He knows that he can’t afford to miss any opportunity to wrestle around with them, or just be silly. Soon enough, he won’t be able play with them, or they won’t want him to do so. Childhoods are fleeting. You blink and your kids are all grown up.

It does my heart good to see Hans having fun with his children, and to see them enjoy his playfulness. I think that it is healing for him. Hans had plenty of trauma when he was deployed to Iraq. The laughter of his children does him a world of good.

November 6th, 2024

“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.” -Serenity Prayer

My Wife, Karin, our three-year-old grandson, Asher, and I are currently on a road trip. Last night we stayed in a hotel in Tulsa. I woke up at 3:00 AM and looked at the incoming election results. Already by that time, Trump has a lock on becoming the next president. I went back to bed and thought for a while. Eventually, I fell asleep.

Early in the morning, I texted our daughter who is staying our house while the rest of us are traveling. I told her:

“You can pull down the Kamala sign if you want.”

She replied, “Ok. I will.”

I expect that some of my neighbors will proudly display their Trump signs and flags for the next four years. Why not? They won. They might as well flaunt it.

Harris’ defeat was a disappointment, but not much of a surprise to me. I was never really that excited about her. I didn’t care much for her policies, even when I could understand them. I wasn’t enthused about her personality. I voted for her simply because she was not Trump. That’s it. That is the only reason.

In the last forty years, only two of my preferred presidential candidates actually won election, so I am used to bad post-election hangovers. The two guys who were victorious proceeded to disillusion me once they got into office. I take part in the political process, but I don’t have high expectations. These events are not a matter of life and death to me.

Am I worried about the second coming of Trump? Yes, I am. I think his plan to deport millions of people is at best impractical, and at worst inhuman. I foresee four years of unparalleled chaos. However, there isn’t much I can do about it.

While I laid awake in bed, I thought about how his election actually affects my life. On a personal level, I don’t see much change. I will probably do all the same things I planned on doing if Kamala had won. I will get a dental implant. I will take the RAV4 in for an oil change. I will continue to watch over our little grandson each and every day. In the short term, life will remain the same. The sun will rise each morning.

In the long term, who knows? Will Trump end the fighting in Ukraine or the Middle East? Will he become the authoritarian that so many people fear? There is no way for me to know what will happen, and there is very little chance that I can make a serious impact on future events. I can continue to write articles, and I can try to help struggling immigrants. I can only do small things, and those I will do.

One of the things I do that is rather anachronistic is that I love to write postcards to people when I travel. I mail a lot of them. So far on this trip, I have probably sent out seventy postcards to friends. I only mention this idiosyncratic behavior because I have a wide variety of acquaintances all over the country, and they come from diverse backgrounds. They are of different religions, ethnicities, and economic status. Often, I disagree with them about politics. However, we remain friends, and we try to stay in touch. All of them have generous hearts and care about their families and communities. They care about the United States. They are patriots in their own unique ways.

There are millions of people like them throughout out our country. These are all people of goodwill. We need to remember that.

The great challenge of the next four years will not be about securing the border, or taming inflation, or solving the crisis in Gaza. The real struggle will be for Americans to remember that we are in this together. We are not enemies. We are brothers and sisters.