Behind the woodshed…

A tough morning for Ellen's adoptive dog Henry. Hey, I'm with you, pal.

I have had an epiphany.  Actually, the light bulb came on in the half hour I was taken behind the woodshed for a good old fashioned ass kicking.  But no writer has deserved the punishment more.

Administering this private flogging was my friend Betsy who, thankfully, had the nerve to tell me A) the letters to Ellen and Reid are too shallow, B) the letters sent to my mom should be segregated in a different space, perhaps a different blog, C) there are too many rants against technology on this space and instead I should delve more into what is written to Ellen and Reid and why.  None of her criticisms stung in the slightest; I think she was spot on yet her counsel was in part self serving.  If she was going to spend her precious time to read the blog and the letters, she wanted content worth reading.

This reaches well beyond this blog to the core of the letters themselves.  Because Betsy has seen the letters over time (this is the 125th post) - each with one or more letters on display - she spotted what you may have noted, too; a disturbing trend of short paragraphs about the same things over and over again.  The weather.  Tomatoes.  The bike.  Golf.  Why not, she said, open up about losing my first job ever (at the age of 60) and how it shook me to my core?  And that’s just the tip of the topic iceberg.

Betsy thinks I don’t give the kids enough credit for being adults who want to see a deeper side of their father.  I couldn’t agree more.  The letters hadn’t matured as the kids grew.  Why or how it took hundreds of letters until the deficiencies were uncovered might seem a mystery.  Yet even as she began to outline her case, the points she raised were no strangers to me.  Most had already crossed my mind through the years.

So I’ll pay a long overdue visit to the drawing board.  It may not be wholesale change but there will be change.  Will it mean tossing aside an approach that has worked (or has it?  Do Ellen and Reid share Betsy’s view?) on upwards of 500 letters ?  Could be.  I am about to find out if there is a middle ground.

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Of course, Betsy’s comments about depth do not apply to letters to my mom.  Here is today’s letter to her.  Betsy did point out that the letters to my mother (along with prior letters to my mother and father when he was alive) don’t necessarily fit a blog about letters to children.  She suggests parental letters be housed in a whole new blog.  I’ll toss that one around.

October 29, 2010

Mom: They have put me in a new job at work and if I didn’t feel pressure before, I sure feel it now.  But hard work never hurt anybody, least of all me.  I’m glad for the challenge and its fun.

I see from the weather than you’ve had your first cold snap and frost.  That’s really pretty late for you guys up North.  We haven’t even sniffed a day in the 30s just yet but it appears we’re in for that sometime in the next week.  The Indian Summer here has been just glorious.  The weather couldn’t be any better than it is right now.  Lots of people here locally say this is their favorite time of year.  As for me, I like April and May.  That’s the best time.

I’m starting to see a few more deer begin to move around the neighborhood.  They have to learn how to dodge cars if they’re going to survive.  I don’t think the deer grow quite as large as they do in Nebraska but there sure are a lot of hunters around here.  There’s a lot of forest area around Charlotte and the Carolinas so there’s no shortage of spots to shoot a gun.  They hunt a lot of quail down here, too.  My shotgun is with Ellen’s husband Tim up in Minnesota.  I don’t want to hunt down here.

I’m supposed to play golf on Sunday, but if you saw my real swing on the course you would be disgusted.  It’s really bad, and it makes me not like golf very much.  It’s been such a big part of my recreational activity for so long that it’s kind of hard to think about giving it up, but I am.  I’ve been doing a lot of walking these days and that’s almost enough workout for me.

Your other son says you went to the dentist the other day and things went pretty well.  He says you have some more dental work ahead of you, and he’ll do a pretty good job of keeping me up to speed on how things are going.

Tomorrow Nebraska plays Missouri in football in Lincoln.  I’ll videotape the game and if the Big Red wins, I’ll watch it.  By the time this letter reaches you, you’ll already know if they won, too.  They’re doing about as well as can be expected.

Reid was in San Francisco last week and he seems to have had a good time.  He likes Chicago a lot but it wouldn’t surprise me if didn’t think hard about moving out to California.  But it’s so expensive to live out there.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I’ve got to put my nose back to the grindstone, but watch for another call real soon.  And keep that fleece on because winter is coming.

Undermining our focus…

Try as I might to strike a balance between populist hi-tech and my brand of admitted low-tech, along comes news that bursts my bubble.

Like this headline in Tuesday’s Charlotte Observer: “Plugged in, but not engaged.”

In short, scientists say we cannot process the constant deluge that pours through the information portals.  It seems our “ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.”  Even die-hard multi-taskers who profess their gadgetry makes them more productive have, on the contrary, even higher thresholds of trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information.  Hence, they feel still more stress.  Even for those moments addicts are removed from their electronic lifelines, the inability to stay on point persists.

Little wonder we bite off more than we can chew.  People consumed three times as much daily information in 2008 as they did in 1960.  Then there is our compulsive nature.  Today’s workers check email nearly 37 times per hour.  The findings are damning.

All this is a bit of salve for me.  Already, my mental processors have formed the backbone of Friday’s letter to my parents.  Topics – their health, the concern of family members, etc. – have been proposed, then mulled over to be accepted or discarded.  Paragraphs are constructed, reconstructed and then rearranged.  All of this is absent of distractions that are not of my own making.  Rather than my attention becoming diverted or otherwise undermined, my focus on this single page remains relatively intact.

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Today is Wednesday, and given the spate of recent sorry events, here is a letter to Ellen and Reid from happier times.

February 28

Reid and EB:

“Flurries”, they said.  It’ll only be “flurries.”  Yeah, well let me tell you if I end up shoveling 4”-6” of “flurries”, this will be on red-hot da-da.   The snow is falling and it’s falling hard.

By the time you receive this, however, we will be into the widely acknowledged and all-important psychological start of spring.  In theory, that is.

Remember the book we read over and over and over to you guys when you were tiny tots: the terrible-awful-no good-very bad day?  This is one of those days.  In fact, it surpassed terrible before we reached 9:00 a.m. and abutted up against very bad a few minutes before noon.  The title of my new column was already registered by another party (hmmm, by a New Yorker just days after I leaked the name of the column) and now I’ve got to arrive at other names and go through all the legal diatribes – not to mention legal costs – associated therein.  And the New Yorkers won’t return my calls.  No one returns my calls, not even Grandma and Grandpa.  That’s how bad it’s gotten.

Actually, this is just a continuation of the back luck/misfortune/generalized woe that started last week.  You know all about us missing our flight to San Francisco.  It was all my fault.  I thought – swore – that my ticket said 2:00 departure.  Then, when your mom discovered at 11:45 as we stood in the kitchen that it was actually wheels up at 11:45 and not 2:00, I swore again.  Loudly and often.  What a monumental goof-up.  Totally my bad.  Believe me, it was one quiet car ride to the airport.  Instead of getting there early for a nice dinner and walking tour, we went stand-by on separate planes and arrived at separate times.  The moral of the story: look at your tickets.

Once we got there, it didn’t get a heck of a lot better.  We had virtually no walking around time, and I blew $450 on a round of golf at the Olympic Club – greens fee, rental car, caddie (plus tip) – that I though would be comped.  “A fool and his money are soon parted,” I always say.  Look no further for living proof.

We did have one adventure.  It was a dinner theatre show called Teatro Zizzanno.  Hard to describe, but it was a combination meal-vaudeville-musical review at some funky spot down on one of the piers.  We laughed out loud almost the whole time.  The talent from singers to jugglers to performers was really good.

But we got back in good order on Friday without any further difficulties.  But I wish we could’ve stayed through the weekend so we could’ve at least seen the sights.

With spring break on the horizon, you guys better get your acts together in terms of rides home and the like.  Any and all of your friends are welcome to stay here on the way through town.  After my $450 golf junket, I’m staying here.

Ciao.  Adieu.  Adios.  Ta-ta.  See ya.  You get the picture.

A 44 cent security device…

More bad news on the local personal security front last week.  Seems a CD chock full of Social Security Numbers and other personal data was swiped and no one knows for sure how or where the information will surface or if it ultimately fell into the wrong hands to be used for criminal purposes.  For all we know someone could be downloading the hot data right now onto some nefarious website or applying for bogus loans or arranging for ersatz credit cards.

This instance, while far from isolated, is another reminder that our dependence on all things electronic and interconnected has rough, jagged edges.  Admittedly it is a stretch to equate written correspondence as somehow safer than the brittle security of the Internet.  But one thing we know to be true; whatever goes on the web can be fair game for someone who doesn’t play fair.

Maybe I am nutty – that is a rhetorical question that does not demand an answer – but I keep falling back on the idea that there is not always a need to go electronic in our communications.  That’s why much of the time my best security device is a 44 cent stamp.

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Here is the May 24 letter to Ellen and Reid

May 24, 2010

Ellen/Reid: We’ve had better days than these but somehow we will manage to get through it all.  It is just the way of the world.  Your grandfather’s most recent setback would have been a death knell had the intestinal blockage not been removed.  As it turns out, the blockage was caused by a hernia which was constricting his intestine.  Not quite sure how that occurred but it did.  It is of a mild relief that it was not related to his cancer but still, it won’t further his cause.  He is exhausted and in need of rest.

This happens just when we thought we’d found the ideal place for the pair of them.  To stay together was their wish but we could not of known the emergency surgery lay ahead.  That has thrown a wrench in the works.  How the place works is that you sign up for a specified level of care; i.e. your grandfather stipulated he would handle your grandmother’s medications and most of the other duties.  But with him out of commission, there is no one to give your grandmother her pills, no one to take her to the dining area, and no one to literally watch over her.  They would have ridden things out in their little apartment and that would have been great.  Hospice would have come in to assist your grandfather when that time arrived.  Honestly, I’m not sure what we would have done if they were still at home.

But they found your grandmother roaming outside the building yesterday, and what that means is that she can likely not stay there anymore.  The cost to provide what is essentially 24 hour babysitting is exorbitant and well beyond their budget.  So now we’re up in the air and all of this is upsetting, particularly to your uncle who is incensed that planning for such eventualities didn’t occur long ago.  We didn’t have benefit of a crystal ball to foresee events.  Who knew your grandpa would go into surgery and turn this latest plan upside down?

The move itself went okay.  Your grandfather was upset at the rapidity of things but your uncle really pushed the envelope very, very hard.  A bull in a china shop.  But fortunately he did or we’d be in worse straits than we are now.  Watching your grandparents go up and down stairs in a dimly lit house was agonizing; you saw that for yourselves a few weeks ago.  I’m thinking of taking a leave of absence to go up there to attend to things, in part because your grandmother needs it and to ease the burden on your uncle who is closest to the action.  Not certain how all of that will plan out but I’m looking into it today.  I am still scheduled to be there June 4 – 10.  The family room and kitchen and their bedroom has all been moved.  As a practical matter, what remains is to simply start organizing the remaining items; tools, kitchenware, clothing, furniture, and other odds and ends.  We haven’t even talked about readying the property for sale.

Before all of this came down I began to ask your grandfather again about our family past.  I’ve included a recent newspaper clipping recounting his story from November 21, 1944 when his B-17 made a forced landing in Belgium.  He was glad to talk about it.  We also talked about his forebears; looks like his side of the family had its roots in North Carolina and we fought on the losing side of the Civil War.  That’s why they ended up in Clark, Missouri as they pushed Westward after the great conflict.  Reid, your grandfather thinks Gen. Omar Bradley is a first cousin of your great grandfather, Ed Bradley because they were both from the same neck of the rural woods in Missouri.  We talked too, about how grandpa worked for a little paper in Ida Grove, Iowa before jumping to the Sundance Times and Crook County News in Wyoming.  His pay in Ida Grove: $30 a month.

I’ll go for now, but keep your phones on for the latest updates.  If you have any questions, let me know and I’ll answer them as best I can.  We’ll get through this even if it’s not easy.