Leaving Arizona

The refrigerator is empty.  So are the closets.  The cable and internet will turn off Sunday.   Our personal items and a few decorator items we’ll keep are boxed and waiting to be loaded into the car.  Our realtor, Kay, stopped by yesterday to tell us that based on the inspection report, the buyer has accepted the house as is … and the closing has been moved up to may 31.  Without the personal items and with our grandkids in Utah, the house doesn’t really feel like the place we called our Little House in the Desert.  Tomorrow, we will be Leaving Arizona.

Throwback Thursday – Falling or Climbing

Would you believe I have over 1800 posts here on Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog?   Maybe that’s why new post topics seem hard to come by.  At any rate, I’ve decided to repost my favorites on Throw Back Thursday.   This post, Falling and Climbing, was originally posted in 2009 then again in 2011.   It is about the true meaning of love, at least as I see it.  It is about what it really means to have a soulmate who challenges you to be the best person you can be, not one who is a reason to leave the relationship you are in.

My wife and I are friends with a couple who are about ten years older than we are … and who have been married ten years longer.    When they’re out together, they get those aren’t they a cute old couple looks.   People often ask them, “How can we have a marriage like yours?”    The answer is this –  “If you want to have what we have, you have to go through what we went through,” a response I liked enough to use in my toast at my daughter’s wedding.

Monday Smiles – Memorial Day 2015

This is has become my traditional Memorial Day Post.  I think it captures the spirit intended for the holiday.

I have traveled the political spectrum from fairly far left to fairly far right and back toward the middle in my seventy years.   But as I traveled that broad spectrum, I think I’ve always been a patriot in the sense that I love my country dearly and believe for any faults it may have, it is unique in the world.   When I was protesting the war and voting for George McGovern, I believed My Country Right or Wrong, but not America – Love It or Leave It or America, Fix It or &%$* It.  Every Memorial Day, I get to think back on my decision to seek a deferment from the draft based upon my employment in the defense industry, a decision that might lead some to question my claim of patriotism.   I won’t deny that my motivation wasn’t entirely selfless but I’d offer that some of the systems I helped develop for keeping track of Soviet submarines during the dark days of the Cold War contributed substantially to our National Defense.  Just watch The Hunt for Red October.  Still, sometimes I feel a little guilt that others served in my place.   At seventy, I simultaneously abhor the realities of war (brought to us in gruesome detail by modern media) and resign myself to its necessity in what is, more than ever, a dangerous world.   Some of our military excursions have been essential, others have turned out to be unwise.  Both fall at the feet of our leaders and those of us that elect them.

Monday Smiles – Memorial Day 2014

This is a repost of my 2011 Memorial Day post.  I think it captures my feelings on this Memorial Day perfectly.

I have traveled the political spectrum from fairly far left to fairly far right and back toward the middle in my seventy years.   But as I traveled that broad spectrum, I think I’ve always been a patriot in the sense that I love my country dearly and believe for any faults it may have, it is unique in the world.   When I was protesting the war and voting for George McGovern, I believed My Country Right or Wrong, but not America – Love It or Leave It or America, Fix It or &%$* It.  Every Memorial Day, I get to think back on my decision to seek a deferment from the draft based upon my employment in the defense industry, a decision that might lead some to question my claim of patriotism.   I won’t deny that my motivation wasn’t entirely selfless but I’d offer that some of the systems I helped develop for keeping track of Soviet submarines during the dark days of the Cold War contributed substantially to our National Defense.  Just watch The Hunt for Red October.  Still, sometimes I feel a little guilt that others served in my place.   At seventy, I simultaneously abhor the realities of war (brought to us in gruesome detail by modern media) and resign myself to its necessity in what is, more than ever, a dangerous world.   Some of our military excursions have been essential, others have turned out to be unwise.  Both fall at the feet of our leaders and those of us that elect them.

Time

I was setting an up an appointment with a friend this week for next month.  June already, she said.  This year is going by so fast.  I told her about an article that claimed that the reason time seems to go by faster as we age is that each hour, each day, becomes a smaller fraction of the time we’ve been allotted.  I believe that is true.  It seems only a few blinks of the eye ago, I was clicking the Publish button on a post titled Feeling Old.  I was sixty-four.  I am now 69 years, 355 days old.  More astonishingly, the grandson whose birth introduced me to The Grandfather Gene is now nine years old.  How the heck did that happen?  Today, my brother posted a picture of our parents on Facebook taken on the day that, my wife, Muri and I got married.   They looked happy and surprisingly young, mainly because they were both twenty years younger than I am now.  How the %#@& did that happen?  Our two children are grown and pushing on toward their forties, dealing with their own grown-up problems, problems that I can’t solve for them, as much as I want to be the Dad on the White Horse.

Stopping

)

Last night, on my way home from Islands Restaurant to pick up a work-free Saturday night dinner, I looked up to see the dwindling of the sunset over Anaheim Hills.  Wisps of cotton were touched with the most delicate pink against the fading blue of the evening sky behind the silhouettes of the hill-houses and a few eucalyptus trees.  I sat at the new stop-sign on Night Star Way for maybe 30 seconds, long enough to watch the colors change and snap one mobile phone picture.  In his book, Quiet Moments, David Kundtz calls such times Still Points, spaces in between the events of our lives in which we are not only mindful but in awe of the world around us.  I have several Facebook friends who nearly always Like my impromptu Still Point photos … they are people who periodically post their own and I try to remember to Like theirs.  It is an acknowledgement, I think, a way of saying, Yes, I get it.  It’s a small thing but wondrous.

Asking for It

Last week, an interesting topic showed up in my Morning Pages … two pages written without a topic or direction in mind.  Whatever comes into the head goes onto the paper … or at least that’s the plan.  While it’s easy to daydream and stop writing or to censor myself, after over fifteen years of MPs, I can usually let the words flow. The point is that starting without a topic allows unexpected topics to show up.  This week’s topic involved prayer, specifically whether we should ask God for specific things when we pray.  Looking (way) back, the childhood prayer my mother taught me went something like this: God bless Mommy and Daddy, Glenn and Patti, Nanny and Grampa, Gramma and all my aunts and uncles.  Please make me a good boy.  Amen.  I grew up on the Lord’s Prayer in which we get to ask for our daily bread, the rest being about asking for God’s forgiveness and being delivered from evil.   Sixty years later, I try to pray according to the 11th Step:  Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for His will for us and the power to carry it out.  So, for all the spiritual sturm und drang that went on in those sixty years, it seems not much has changed in my prayers.

Monday Smiles – 9/30/2013

If you’re reading this… congratulations, you’re alive.  If that’s not something to smile about, then I don’t know what is – Chad Sugg, Monsters Under Your Head

I won’t kid you.  Monday Smiles has been my hardest post of the week lately.  It has required looking away from those things in my life that are stealing my smiles and focusing on those that make me smile.   Don’t you find it odd that we often find it easier to look at the sad things in our lives instead of the happy ones?  And, please, spare me the notion that everything’s neutral, that it’s only in my head that things attain a positive or negative valence.   The family melodrama that’s been making me crazy has settled into a dramatic mini-series with an uncertain outcome.   It can still sucker me in on a daily basis if I let it.  Ants are appearing in odd places in our house, proving once again that Anaheim Hills is just a big ant hill.   Muri and I moved our date night to Sunday so I could watch my USC Trojans and we were destroyed by Arizona State, 62-41.  Sunday, we went to see Neal Simon’s Broadway Bound at the La Mirada Performing Arts Center but Muri got a migraine partway through Act Two.  We made it through the play but cancelled dinner reservations.  It was home and into bed for her.   Last night, I sat down to write Monday Smiles about Neil Simon and discovered I’d already written it as Friday Favorites 1/25/2103.   Jeez, the old memory’s going.  This morning when I did my 75 foot commute to my office, one of the cats … probably Elvis … had shredded a bird all over the carpet.   What’s there to smile about?

Powerless

I worked the First Step for the first time over 20 years ago.  I have written the words I turn my wiil and my life over to Your care thousands of times in my morning prayers.  You’d think I’d get it by now.  But every once in a while, something comes along like a big old two-by-four to the head, reminding me how hard it can be to admit that I’m Powerless. These particular two-by-fours seem to come in two varieties.  There are what we commonly call Acts of God … accidents, illnesses, natural catastrophes and the like.  Personally, I don’t believe that God micro-manages the world to the degree that Act of God implies.  I think that God set in place a universe that follows certain natural laws and that these events are the product of those laws.  I’ll leave the questions of whether God is still ultimately responsible the results of those natural laws and whether God sometimes directly intervenes for another day.  My point is that whether you call these events Acts of God or not, it’s pretty obvious that I’m Powerless over them.  And since the hand of God is involved, it’s a bit easier for me to accept that the event might fit into some Cosmic Purpose.

Hard

It is my habit to bring my Google Nexus Tablet to the breakfast table to read the day’s news.   Sometimes, I plug in my headphones to listen to some morning music (Dave Grusin, maybe, or Keiko Matsui) and watch a few news videos.   The world has changed and perhaps there’s no better way to see it than to look at a few of Norman Rockwell’s paintings of the breakfast table.
.

Take, for example, Behind the Newspaper, in which the neglected wife stares longingly into space while her husband’s attention is buried in the morning paper.  These days?  He’s got a tablet in front of him, a smartphone in his hands and Bose noise cancelling headphones.  Don’t worry.  Muri and I are very different morning people, so she’s never the spurned wife.  At breakfast, anyway.  Or consider Breakfast Table Political Argument.  Today’s version: dueling iPads with junior completely distracted from his parents argument by his Mom’s iPhone (he’s texting little Suzie down the street about their play date later).