How Did We Get So Old?

August 12th, 2025

Karin and I celebrated our wedding anniversary yesterday. Forty-one years. It seems like an impossibly long time. Of course, we know elderly couples that have been married for sixty years or more. We also know people who didn’t even make it through a year of marriage. And we know couples who don’t bother with marriage at all. I don’t understand why some couples stay married and others don’t. I certainly don’t why Karin and I are still together. Is it karma, love, or dumb luck? Or is it a combination of all those factors?

I suspect that a reason that a couple might stay together is because they have an intense, almost irrational level of commitment to each other. The “until death do us part” part of wedding vows is actually taken seriously. In many cases, marriage is seen as a contract between two parties. The relationship is purely transactional. It can be broken one party fails to comply with its obligations. A marriage can also be viewed as a covenant, as an unbreakable agreement where both individuals promise to stick withe the other regardless of what happens. In some situations, like spousal abuse or addiction, even a covenant can be broken, but the commitment is there at the beginning and the two members of the marriage do their best to make it work. That involves struggle and sacrifice, and sometimes love and joy. It is a vocation, a lifelong process. In a sense, two people really can become one.

Karin and I went out to eat yesterday. Our grandson, Asher, visited his mama for two hours, so Karin and I could be a couple while he was with her. Asher is constantly with us, since we are his fulltime caregivers. Maybe two or three times a year, we are Asher-free and we can do adult activities without a four-year-old tagging along. It just happened that one of these events occurred yesterday on our anniversary. We made the most of the opportunity.

We went to Cozumel, a Mexican restaurant that has outdoor seating on a balcony that sits high above the banks of the Milwaukee River. Karin ordered a potato fajita and I got choriqueso, an appetizer thar consists of chorizo and queso with a smattering of onions and peppers. It is basically a bowl of spicy cholesterol, but it tasted good with tortilla chips. Karin had a raspberry margarita and I had a cold mug of Negra Modelo.

We talked while we ate. We reminisced about our wedding in her home village in Germany four decades ago. Some of that is hard to recall. We have memories of memories at this point. Karin wanted to know what we had for dessert at the reception. I had no idea. Germans don’t do massive wedding cakes like Americans do. Actually, they prefer to have a plethora of smaller cakes. I remember her parents’ house being packed with kuchen from friends and neighbors.

Oddly enough, I do remember the wine we had. It was local vintage from Karin’s region of Germany. We toasted with a Marklsheimer Propstberg, a fruity white wine produced in the little town where we had our reception. It’s odd what things I can recall and what things I have completely forgotten.

Karin looked up from her meal and asked me,

“How did we get so old?”

I shrugged and said, “Lots of practice.”

She gave me a smirk. Then she said, “I’m seventy already.”

Yeah, she is. I’m sixty-seven. Most of our lives are in the rear view mirror. We’ve already done many things and made most of our decisions. Now, we are busy raising a little boy. This is our vocation, our calling. It may be the last one for us.

Karin didn’t finish her fajita. We asked the waiter for a box to take home. We were sitting at a tiny table at the edge of the balcony. I was trying to scoop the remains of the fajita into the box. I had a couple plates stacked up to make room. I nudge the plates and utensils as I filled the box.

“Fuck!” I said suddenly.

Karin asked me, “What is it?”

“A fork went over the edge of the balcony.”

She looked down and there, thirty feet below us, was a fork from our table.

We paid the bill and got ready to leave. I glanced at the waiter. I asked Karin,

“Should I tell him about the fork?”

She nodded.

I walked over to the waiter and tried to explain what had happened. He looked puzzled. I took him to the side of the balcony. I said,

“Look straight down.”

He did, and then he laughed.

“He told me, “Don’t worry. This happens all the time. Have a good night.”

I replied, “Gracias.”

He smiled, and said, “De Nada.”

We left to pick up Asher.

When the Flood Comes

August 10th, 2025

“When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You’re a thousand minds, within a flash
Don’t be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there’s only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they’ll
use up what we used to be.

Lord, here comes the flood
We’ll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive”

Lyrics from Here Comes the Flood from Peter Gabriel

I woke up at around 11:00 PM when I fell out of bed. There was a moment of utter confusion before my mind cleared. The bedroom lit up with a flash of lightning. I could see my little grandson, Asher, asleep in the bed. He was lying there crosswise, as he usually does. He was dead to the world, but the crack of thunder that accompanied the lightning made him roll over and moan. The room was filled with the machine gun patter of rain beating on the skylight. I didn’t bother to look out the window. I knew that I wouldn’t see anything with wind and rain.

My wife and I built our house thirty-four years ago. We live in an area close to Lake Michigan that is relatively flat. It’s not a flood plain, but rainwater tends to drain slowly. We don’t have storm sewers here. The water flows from yards and fields into deep ditches that hug the sides of the roads. Sometimes, when massive thunderstorms roll through, the ditches aren’t quite deep enough to handle the flow of rainwater. Last night was one of those times.

During severe weather, I always check to see if we have electricity. That is the first thing I do. This part of Wisconsin often has power failures. Nearly everyone in our neighborhood has a generator at the ready. Mostly, we need the generators to keep the sump pump (or sump pumps running). We’ve had a flooded basement in the past, and that is a distinctly unpleasant experience. We currently have two sumps in the basement, and last night they both ran almost continuously.

I could hear the sounds of the pumps from the bedroom.

“Click. Wirrrrrrrrrr. Flush. Water rushing from the drain tiles into the sump. Repeat.”

Every fifteen seconds, I heard the cycle of water being pumped out of the basement sumps through a PVC pipe out to the ditch. The outlet of the pipe was already submerged by the water in the ditch, but the force of the pump pushed the water from the basement out of the pipe. The pipe has a one-way valve to prevent water from backing up again.

The noise from the pumps is oddly soothing. It’s when I don’t hear the pumps that I worry. It doesn’t take long for water to slip through cracks and crevices in the basement floor and walls. Once that happens, there’s hell to pay.

I’ve never been in a serious, life-threatening flood, and I hope that I never experience that. Back in 2008, I went with my youngest son’s 8th grade class to New Orleans to help with the rebuilding of the city after Katrina. Keep in mind that we went to New Orleans three years after the hurricane hit. The city was still devastated. My son’s classmates were assigned assist a local family finish working on their home. The owners had to strip the house all the way down to the studs and completely remodel it. In that neighborhood, one out of every three houses were abandoned. I don’t know if that part of New Orleans ever really recovered from the flood.

I don’t ever want to be in that situation.

I didn’t sleep much last night.

Are You from Here?

August 8th, 2025

We were at the playground with the big sandbox. Asher likes to go there. He has a plastic bin full of beach toys that he insists on taking to the park. There isn’t a beach, so he plays with his shovels and trucks in the sandbox. Sometimes other kids are there. Asher is a good sport about letting the other children use his things. Most of the time the other kids ask before they use his toys, especially if their caregivers are nearby. Sometimes, they don’t ask. Asher doesn’t seem to mind, and I don’t either.

After a while, Asher got tired of playing in the hot sand. Even though we arrived at the park early in the morning, it was still quite warm in the sunshine. He had a drink from a cold smoothie, and then he decided to go on the swings. A group of children had just come to the playground from the Salvation Army center down the street. The kids were part of some kind of summer youth program that the Salvation Army sponsors. There were a couple chaperons with the group. One of them was a Muslim woman. She wore a hijab and a long abaya that went down to her ankles. She sat down under the shade of an oak tree close to the playground.

A little girl came over to the swings and tried to make friends with Asher. He wasn’t interested. The girl was sturdy looking. She had a very round face and a page boy haircut. She was wearing a dress with lavender unicorns on it. Asher likes unicorns, and he likes lavender, but not so much this time. It should be noted that for reasons that are obscure to me Asher is a babe magnet. He has the uncanny ability to attract girls, usually older than himself. Admittedly, he has a winning smile and a dimple on his right cheek that can melt hearts. However, he wasn’t smiling at the girl. He just stared at her as she spoke to him nonstop.

Eventually, the girl moved away and climbed on to the monkey bars. She hung on them for a bit and then she asked me,

“Are you his grandpa?”

I nodded.

She asked, “Does he talk a different language? Or is he too young to talk?”

Little did the girl know that Asher can be a relentless chatterbox. His verbal skills are very strong. I know from experience that it is sometimes almost impossible to get the boy to shut up when he is on roll.

I told her that Asher didn’t speak to her because he’s a bit shy (that’s kind of a lie, but whatever). She asked,

“How old is he?”

“He’s four-and-a-half.”

She replied, “I’m six-and a half. It’s kind of like being halfway six and half seven. He’s half between four and five. We got that in common, I guess. Is he in school yet? I’m in first grade, almost in second grade. I can only hang on to two of the bars on the monkey bars, even though I’m six-and-a-half.”

Then she told me, “I don’t worry about falling off the monkey bars. I’m tough. I don’t cry if I get hurt.”

She showed me her ankle and said, “I scraped my foot here. It was bleeding a little, but that’s because I scratched at it, but it’s better now and I didn’t cry or anything.”

I forget what all else she said. She rambled on for a while. Then she went back on to the monkey bars and swung unsteadily from one bar to the next. The Muslim woman got up and shouted to the girl,

“Be careful! Don’t go so far! You’ll fall!”

Ah, the voice of a mom calling.

I turned to the woman and said, “You have a very brave girl!”

She looked at me and said, “But she must be more careful. She could get hurt.”

At that point, I said to her, “A salaam alaikum.”

She blinked for a second, then smiled and replied, “Wa alaikum asalaam.”

I told her, “I know a little Arabic.”

She asked me, “Where are you from?”

I looked around for moment and said, “I’m from here.”

I need to mention that I grew up in the local area, but I was far away for twelve years of my life. I almost never ask people where they are from anymore, especially if they have a foreign accent. In today’s political environment, with all of the fear and xenophobia, I am reluctant to pry into somebody’s history. My wife is from another country, and I lived overseas for three years. I know how it feels to be “from somewhere”.

I told her, “I studied Arabic in the Army, but I don’t remember much.” That’s true. I took Arabic for four years at West Point, but that was many years ago. I am not fluent in the language at all, but having studied Arabic makes me relatively comfortable with Arabs and other people who are Muslim. I helped tutor the children of a Syrian refugee family for several years. My extremely limited Arabic was helpful at times

I talked to the mom about Asher. She talked about her tomboy daughter. She told me that it must be hard for me and my wife to care for the boy. I replied,

“Sometimes it is, but Asher is also a blessing.” I fumbled for the Arabic word. I said, “He’s a baraka.”

The woman laughed. “Yes, exactly. He is a baraka.”

It was hot. The kids were wilting. The group from the Salvation Army lined up to go back to their building. The little girl went to her mother.

The mom waved to us and yelled, “It was good to meet you!”

Yes, it was.

Hiroshima

August 7th, 2025

Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. That attack was the first use of an atomic weapon in human history, and it is an event that horrifies people to this very day. We try to ignore it. We ty to forget that it ever happened, but as Kenneth Clarke wrote about the atomic bomb in his book, Civilization,

“Add to this the memory of that shadowy companion who is always with us, like an inverted guardian angel, silent, invisible, almost incredible- and yet unquestionably there and ready to assert itself at the touch of a button: and one must concede that the future of civilization does not look very bright.”

Almost every day I read something online about Putin threatening to use nukes. Trump blusters in a similar way. Despite our best efforts, we can’t disregard our unwanted companion. The movie, Oppenheimer, proves that fact. The angel is close at hand.

That dark angel has been following every one of us for eighty years. I am a bit too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I can recall signs in the lower level of my elementary school designating it as a fallout shelter. I can remember watching Stanley Kubrick’s film, “Dr. Strangelove” when I was student at West Point n the 1970’s.

The angel was closest to me when I was an Army officer stationed in what was then West Germany. I was deployed there in the early 1980’s, back when Reagan was raving about the “Evil Empire”. The Cold War was intense at the that time, and it seemed like any day it would turn hot. I woke every morning in Germany wondering if “the balloon would go up”. I was a helicopter pilot, maybe ninety miles from the East German border. U.S. policy at the time allowed for NATO to use nuclear weapons first in a war with the Soviet Union. There were plans (or so I heard) of using tactical nukes in the Fulda Gap to keep the Reds from striking deep into West Germany. I remember watching the movie “The Day After” while I was in my unit. I saw the film in the pilots’ break area on the Army airfield. Henry Kissinger spoke on a television program after the show was over. He stated the obvious: we have to prevent a “day after”.

Around the same time, young people in West Germany were protesting against nuclear weapons of any sort in their country. That made total sense. They had skin in the game. One of the most popular songs when I was there was 99 Luftballons (translation: 99 Air Balloons), by Nena. The lyrics of the German pop song were about the beginning of an unintentional nuclear war. The song is still relevant. Almost simultaneously, Pink Floyd released an album called The Final Cut. That too was about nuclear war. The angel was hovering above me during those years.

I have two friends, Senji and Gilberto. They are Buddhist monks. They have a temple on Bainbridge Island near Seattle. They live very close to a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine base. They work with a group called Ground Zero to protest against nuclear weapons. Senji is my age. He is part of Japan’s postwar generation. He is especially passionate about preventing nuclear war. It is personal commitment for him. Gilberto and Senji always commemorate the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is their calling to help others to remember those war crimes.

They are currently in the process of completing the construction of a peace pagoda on land that is right next to the Navy base. That is part of their effort to bear witness. I admire them for it.

Nearly completed peace pagoda

Too Tired to Live, Too Busy to Die

August 5th, 2025

I have a t-shirt with a picture and quotation on it from Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist who wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I have always been a fan of Thompson, especially since I did a short stint in the Las Vegas jail back in 2017. I won’t describe that episode in this essay. I have written extensively about it elsewhere in my blog. You can find those articles if really look for them. Instead, look at the quote on the t-shirt. (See above).

I was wearing this t-shirt a couple days ago. I was sitting at the dinner table with my wife, Karin. We were both exhausted from a busy day. She stared at the t-shirt for a while, and then she said,

” ‘Too tired to live, too busy to die’. That’s us.”

Indeed it is.

We care fulltime for our grandson, Asher. He’s four-and-a-half years old. He is smart, active, and bursting with energy. Karin and I are not. Karin is seventy years old. I am sixty-seven. There are many days when we feel our age quite clearly, especially if we have been chasing Asher around nonstop. We can keep up with the boy, but just barely. As is fitting for his age, Asher is headstrong, and he tends to oppose our wishes. We grow weary of fighting with him. We were able to deal with willful kids thirty years ago, but now it can be an overwhelming challenge.

I pray each day. I don’t long recite prayers from a book. My petitions are straight and to the point. God literally placed the Asher in our home. As far as I am concerned, God gave us the job of raising him. Karin and I made an open-ended commitment to do just that when Asher was just a little baby. It is our spiritual calling. We have been conscientious about fulfilling our duty as his guardians, but it gets tough at times. I figure if God wants us to do the work, He/She better give us the strength to do so. When I pray for strength, it is often more of a demand than a request. I need the resources to keep going.

I also need the gift of discernment. I am a mere mortal. I can only do so much. I need to know my limits. God is only going to give me the strength that I need, and maybe not even that. If what I think I need exceeds that allotment, then I have a problem. I have to understand what I need to do, as opposed to what I want to do. I have to know how hard I can push myself.

I have a friend, Ken, who I know from the synagogue. He’s an Orthodox Jew. I go to his house almost every week for beer and conversation. We discuss our respective struggles. Ken likes to say that each person has a “peckla” (that’s a Yiddish word that could mean a backpack or a burden. Imagine a “peckla” as a load that a person carries on their back). Each person has a particular peckla that is specific to them. God knows every person’s strength and each individual carries a load that only they can manage. The burden I carry might crush another man, and the load he bears might be beyond my strength. I sometimes think of this load as a cross that I carry. Ken probably would not use that analogy.

The peckla that I carry is like my wife’s. We bear the burden of caring for Asher and bringing him to adulthood. We carry this weight voluntarily. We could set it down and say, “That’s enough. No More.” But we don’t. We won’t get rid of the peckla until we are unable to walk any further with it. We carry it because we love Asher, and he needs us. Love gives us the power to continue the journey with the peckla on our backs.

Love is sacrifice, and it is also strength.

A Hero of War

August 3rd, 2025

He said “Son, have you seen the world?
Well, what would you say if I said that you could?
“Just carry this gun, you’ll even get paid”
I said “That sounds pretty good”

Black leather boots
Spit-shined so bright
They cut off my hair but it looked alright
We marched and we sang
We all became friends
As we learned how to fight

A hero of war
Yeah, that’s what I’ll be
And when I come home
They’ll be damn proud of me
I’ll carry this flag
To the grave if I must
‘Cause it’s a flag that I love
And a flag that I trust

I kicked in the door
I yelled my commands
The children, they cried
But I got my man
We took him away
A bag over his face
From his family and his friends

They took off his clothes
They pissed in his hands
I told them to stop
But then I joined in
We beat him with guns
And batons not just once
But again and again

A hero of war
Yeah that’s what I’ll be
And when I come home
They’ll be damn proud of me
I’ll carry this flag
To the grave if I must
‘Cause it’s a flag that I love
And a flag that I trust

She walked through bullets and haze
I asked her to stop
I begged her to stay
But she pressed on
So I lifted my gun
And I fired away

And the shells jumped through the smoke
And into the sand
That the blood now had soaked
She collapsed with a flag in her hand
A flag white as snow

A hero of war
Is that what they see
Just medals and scars
So damn proud of me
And I brought home that flag
Now it gathers dust
But it’s a flag that I love
It’s the only flag I trust

He said, “Son, have you seen the world?
Well what would you say, if I said that you could?”

Lyrics to Hero of War from the band, “Rise Against”. Released in 2008.

I just played that track again on the stereo after not listening to it for a long time. I don’t particularly like the song, even though it is well done. I guess it’s because it’s just too accurate and it cuts too close to the bone. Hearing it makes my heart hurt. It really does.

I can’t listen to the lyrics without thinking about my oldest son, Hans. Hans enlisted in the Army in 2009. He knew when he enlisted that he was going to be deployed either to Iraq or Afghanistan. That was guaranteed. My wife and I did not want him to go to war, even though I am a veteran myself, or especially because I am a veteran. He joined anyway. Hans went to Iraq in 2011.

Hans did lots of things in Iraq. He went on patrols. He cleared buildings. He kicked in doors. He got wounded. He killed people. He came back different.

Hans texted a few weeks ago about his war. He said, “I’m actually grateful for my army experience.” He told me that it made him grow up in a hurry and it taught him what was important in life. I’m sure that’s true, but at what cost?

I’ve written numerous essays on this blog about Hans and things that happened to him in the Army. A few of his stories are funny, but most of them are not. The accounts of his experiences in Iraq are harrowing, at least they are to me. There are things that a father probably does not need to hear, although I am grateful that Hans trusted me enough to tell me.

If you’re curious, you can look up my essays about his war. It’s all here in the blog.

Hans was a hero of war, whatever that means.

The First to Leave

August 3rd, 2025

Mike died on the evening of July 25th. That’s what I was told anyway. I have been thinking about Mike since I heard about his passing. We weren’t close friends, and I last saw him in 1980 or maybe in ’81. During the intervening forty-five years, I have connected with him three or four times, and all of those interactions were relatively recent and brief. They consisted of a couple emails, a snail mail letter, and an aborted attempt at a phone call. We haven’t had an actual conversation in decades. I have no idea what he looked like in the last months of his life.

Mike was in my West Point class. We graduated together in June of 1980. We were in the same company at United States Military Academy. The Corps of Cadets at USMA consists of four brigades, and each brigade has nine companies. Mike and I were in the same company, B-4 (B Company of the 4th Brigade). We joined that unit in the fall of 1976 as plebes (freshmen) and stayed there until we graduated and became 2nd lieutenants. We spent nearly four years in the same barracks, day in and day out. Upon graduation, our paths diverged, and they never really crossed again.

B-4, like the other companies, was in many ways a fraternity (even though there were a few women in each unit). Over time, a cadet gets to know his or her classmates. You make friends. Some people are close, and others not so much. Eventually, a common bond is formed, and in some cases that bond remains intact for years, even decades. I’ve maintained contact with maybe half a dozen of my comrades from B-4. Mike wasn’t one of them. Once we graduated, we separated and stayed that way, that is until I learned that Mike had cancer.

Mike was a stranger to me when he left this world a week ago. I know nothing of his time in the Army or of his career in the civilian world or of his family. That’s why I grieve. I missed out on most of his life. He only died a few days ago, but he has been missing from my life for a long, long time.

I have never gone to a class reunion. Now that I am the legal guardian and a primary caregiver for a four-year-old, I doubt that I will ever go to one. I know that some of my classmates want to attend one of these events, because people are starting to check out of the net. If we don’t reunite now, we might never do so. I don’t know if Mike was the first to go. However, his passing is a wakeup call.

Give Me Your Arm

July 29th, 2025

Our young grandson, Asher, is a restless sleeper. He’s only four-and-a-half years old, but he has already seen more than his fair share of trauma. He sleeps in my bed. I don’t necessarily want him with me, but he can’t go to sleep unless I hold him. When he is tired, Asher crawls into the bed and nestles in the crux of my left arm. It takes him only moments to doze off once he is comfortable there. He doesn’t want me to cuddle with him. He just wants to be held in my arm.

Lately, Asher has been waking up in the middle of the night. He likes to sleep crosswise in the bed, which means I have little or no room. Last night, around 3:00 AM, he woke up and looked at me. He said,

“Grandpa, give me your arm.”

I did.

He touched my arm and found his sweet spot on my bicep. Asher fluffed it up like a pillow. Then he rested his head on my arm. He grasped my arm with both hands and held on tight. Slowly, gradually, he relaxed. After a few minutes, he calmed down and his breathing grew quiet. Then he was asleep, still holding onto my arm.

I waited half an hour, and then I carefully wrested my arm from under his round head. Asher slept on. I got up to take a piss.

This morning, I took Asher to the playground early. We stayed there until it got too hot for him to play anymore. Then he wanted to go to the library.

We drove to the library. Asher drank a smoothie in the back seat. When we got close, Asher told me,

“I can see the library! We are almost there!”

I replied, “I know.”

“Grandpa, we are there. We can park the car.”

“Yeah.”

After I parked, Asher got out of his child seat and climbed out of the car.

He said, “Give me your arm.”

I said, “I have to lock the car.”

I did. Then we walked toward the entrance of the library.

Asher grasped my right hand. I squeezed his little hand in mine.

He told me, “I’m only holding on to your pinkie.”

I told him, “That’s good enough.”

Pray Boldly!

July 27th, 2025

The three of us went to Mass this morning, like we do almost every Sunday. Karin, Asher, and I sat in a pew near the altar at the front of the church. We always sit there. Asher needs to see what is going on during the liturgy. We brought along some things to keep Asher busy during the Mass: snacks for him to eat and crayons for him to draw. Karin and I want to get something out of the service, so we do what we can to make sure our four-year-old grandson does not become bored and restless. He does anyway, but we have to try.

The priest who celebrated the Mass was relatively young. He was enthusiastic and clearly loved the old school ritual. This priest is new to our parish. He’s only been with our congregation for five weeks, which is not enough time to get to know hardly anyone. He definitely knew nothing about our family when the service started. Things were different by the end of Mass.

My wife and I are raising our grandson. We are his legal guardians, and we have an open-ended commitment to care for him in a fulltime capacity. We expect to be involved in his growth and development as long as we live. Asher is a wonderful little boy, but he is a little boy with a plethora of needs. Caring for him is an all-consuming endeavor. We haven’t had a day off since he got out of the NICU at the end of 2020. Things may change, but for right now, Karin and I are his sole support. The responsibility is at times intense, at least for me.

In addition to that, we also have other crises that flare up. I find it all difficult to handle. It’s overwhelming. They say that God never gives you more than you bear, and I have found that to be utter nonsense. I have known people to be crushed like Job by their burdens. I often wonder if God cares. The evidence of his love and mercy seems kind of iffy.

The priest gave a homily (sermon) at Mass about the power of prayer. One of the scripture readings was from the Book of Genesis. It was the part where Abraham haggles with God for the lives any innocent people in Sodom and Gomorrah. I’ve always liked that passage. Abraham had chutzpah. Somehow, the priest tied that Bible reading to the topic of prayer. He used the story of Abraham as an example of a person praying with confidence. In fact, he exhorted us,

“Pray boldly!”

One thing he mentioned was that congregants sometimes approached him saying that they were angry with God. He would always ask them ,

“So, have you told God about this?”

The point was that God already knows if you are angry with him, and He apparently can deal with that. God doesn’t necessarily want somebody to flatter him. He wants a person to be completely open and honest in prayer. He wants a relationship more than anything else. Relationships can be rocky.

The priest spoke about other aspects of prayer, but his words concerning honesty and authenticity resonated with me. I don’t recite long, involved prayers. I cut to the chase. For a long time, I have been angry with God. Mostly, I have upset that innocents suffer, that kids like Asher suffer. I don’t mind him hurting me that much. I’m an asshole, so I probably deserve it. But why allow kids in Gaza to starve? Why let children in Ukraine get killed? That sort of thing pisses me off.

After Mass, I approached the priest to talk about prayer. He was busy gladhanding congregants. I don’t think he wasn’t expecting somebody to actually talk to him about his sermon. He gave a great sermon, and I really did listen to it. I suspect priests sometimes assume that everybody in church suffers from amnesia as they head for the parking lot.

I had Asher with me. I tried to quickly explain our situation and what a struggle it is. He listened. I said to him,

“Regarding prayer, my prayer to God is simple: ‘Stop fucking with me and give me the strength to do this.”

I am sure he thought I was unhinged. I probably am. So be it. I spoke from the heart.

He looked at me and said, “Keep praying! Reach out to me if you want to talk.”

Pray boldly.

Fat

July 27th, 2025

I try to take my grandson, Asher, to a playground every day. Sometimes the visit is brief. Sometimes we are at the park for an hour or two. The point is that he is a four-year-old boy, and he needs to be outside and active. He needs to be moving.

I read an article about Dr. Oz, the man currently in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. He recently went on a rant about the nation’s obesity epidemic. It is a bit hard for me to take Dr. Oz seriously considering that his boss in the White House is almost as wide as he is tall. However, Oz has a point. Americans are fatter than we were in years past. It’s a fact.

A couple days ago, I took Asher to a local playground near a Salvation Army center. The Salvation Army has ongoing summer youth programs. Asher and I were at the park when a column of kids and their chaperons walked from the center to the playground. There were probably twenty or thirty children coming toward us. They were of various ages, both boys and girls.

In that group I saw that about 25% of kids were overweight, a few of them morbidly obese. That really kind of bothered me. Once the children arrived at the playground, most of them went directly to the swings and the slides and the monkey bars. They started organizing games among themselves. They were loud and rambunctious. They were doing exactly what kids are supposed to do when they are outside. They were in constant motion and generally having a good time.

Most of the heavier kids did not participate in the horseplay. They found a place to sit or lie down. Asher played with a few other children in a big sandbox. They took turns excavating a buried toy. One overweight older boy helped, but he remained prone the entire time. He laid on his belly while digging in the sand with a small shovel. He didn’t even bother to sit up. When he was done playing, it took enormous effort for him to get back up on his feet.

I was a fat kid. In grade school I was chubby, so I know how it is to be an overweight child. My folks took me to the “husky” section for boys’ clothes at the department store. I often felt embarrassed about my weight. I usually was one of the last kids to get picked for a team in gym class. Life sucked. I know how the heavy kids at the playground feel.

Somehow, once I got into middle school and high school, I became more physically active and I “thinned out”. I was actually in good enough shape in my senior year to get accepted into the U.S. Military Academy. Honestly, I don’t know who or what helped me to get in shape, but I did change. Now, I’m old and I could stand to lose five to ten pounds. I probably won’t, but at this point in my life it might not matter so much.

I think obesity does matter for these children. They are going to have serious health problems in the future, if they don’t already. I don’t blame them for their condition. I’ve been there. They need their caregivers to help them get fit. They need adults to help them get moving.

Asher is fit. He’s strong and agile. I am going to help him to stay like that.