Remember The Things You Did Right!

 There will be days where everything goes to hell in a hand-basket. And it will either because you did something wrong, or despite you correctly doing everything you can control.

Look at what happened. Be honest with yourself. See what needs to be fixed, certainly. But be sure to see what you did right, because you likely did a lot of things right.

Keeping your eyes on your goals, and working your plan will get you there. But life has a way of upsetting the best plans, and the world is changing day by day, hour by hour, even minute by minute. You will need to adjust your plan to match an ever changing environment.

 And sometimes that environment changes incredibly quickly. You will get it wrong sometimes. Remember the lessons and hit it again.

I feel like I'm repeating myself. So, enough of that. 

Now, this is a steal from Dean Ing’s book, Systemic Shock, where a drill instructor is having a voluntold recruit try to disarm him (the DI) in a combat situation in order to get some badly needed gear. The recruit was tricky, and almost ‘died’ in the exercise, but –But in the after action analysis, the DI summed up the exercise by saying:

“Never mind all the things he did wrong, remember everything he did RIGHT!

Yes, You Can!

"My Son" a song to live by

 

I’ve become addicted to the ‘shorts’ that come over the smart phone.

I’ve got to do something about that. Not today, though.

Fortunately, I try to feed the algorithm information for its selection of good stuff. And it works. Occasionally I get something good.

Yesterday, I heard a song with the title of, I think, ‘The Other WayAround’; the guy was singing to his son about how much the boy looks up to him, that the (the dad) is his whole world, and the dad tells him, ‘it’s the other way around’. The boy is saying, “Don’t say that. It makes me cry. I’m crying ‘Happy Tears’. I know what he means. I hate crying, even 'happy tears'.

I can’t find the song on YouTube anywhere; I find a lot of 'other way around's, just not the right one. So if you find it, please send me the link. It'll have the lyric: "He thinks I hung the moon somehow ..." Thanks.

It did remind me of another song I’d added to one of my many playlists, and I spent much of last night trying to find it (the reason for ‘many playlists’ is to categorize and keep each individual list short. Well, shorter. It doesn’t work, and I have a long list of playlists. But I digress …). The list it was in was ‘Crazy Country’, and I found a lot of other things along the way: stuff by Home Free (a great a cappella group, btw), Cotton Pickin’ Kids, Homer & Jethro.

And Elvie Shane.

This is the long way ‘round to get to my point. The song: ‘My Son’ kinda says everything about what foster/adoption is all about. It’s not just about helping the children. It’s about filling a hole in your (my) own soul.

How do I explain this without sounding selfish? I can’t, I guess. But the making of one small person’s life as whole as you can has the benefit of making one’s own life whole as well. It’s unavoidable.

Explaining this to people can difficult.

Questions: “Which one is your real child?” They are all my real children. “Well, you know what I mean.” Yes I do. And your question is impertinent. They are all my children. You are only looking for gossip material. “Bless you for the good work you do.” Depending on the source, this one perplexes me. My wife and I are not doing this for ‘stars in our crowns’. We see a need we can meet and we are meeting it. Though people on the outside see this as charity work, it’s not. Or the statement: “I don’t understand how you can love someone who is not your blood kin.” Well, I love my wife, and she’s not my blood kin. “But that’s different!” It is, and it isn’t. But how do I help people understand this?

I think the most hurtful are the statements made by family.

After the funeral for my father-in-law another family member sat with his wife and started listing the grandkids. And left our adopted kids off the list. (I don’t think the person realized I was sitting there.)

That hurt.

I didn’t call attention to it at the time; like I said, this was the day of the funeral for my father-in-law. Nothing would have been served by my mentioning this person's omission at the time, no matter how low-key I voiced it. Mom-in-law knew the truth in any case, as one of my daughter’s children had been living in the home as sort of supercargo while my wife had been helping dad-in-law take care of mom-in-law. It’s all water under the bridge at this point.

However, that child, my grandchild, is now eighteen  and will graduate High School in thirteen days. Scary. She makes me proud.

Yeah, we fight, but we make up. I scold her, encourage her to do better. Take her to task. She takes me to task sometimes.

 Later today I’ll most likely be helping her with one last Physics assignment, and the teacher that I am, I won’t be letting her slide through it. I’ll be helping her understand how this relates to the real world around her.

And, like the arrows in the hand of a mighty man, I will help launch one more child into the world.

World, you have been warned, here comes another Hansen!

And you, child-now-grown, fly straight and true. Know that I love you, and you have added as much and more to our lives as we have given to you.

That’s the nature of generosity: as you help someone else, you build strength in yourself.

I don’t understand it; I only can state from experience that it is true.

Be Generous. Take a kid under your wing.  

Yes, You Can!

No Excuses!

New books, new ideas:

I recently found an audiobook, No Excuses; by Brian Tracy, and it spurred me to finish the update, proofreading, editing, and cover artwork for my own book. 

This is pretty much done; I still need to run the whole thing past other eyes to catch glaring and not so glaring errors. 

And add this essay.

First off, and credit where it is due, The above mentioned book by Mr. Tracy reminded me of this basic essential: I need to do the work. I am responsible. So are you.

The whole point of my book, of course is to affirm your ability. But, even more importantly, to get you off the dime and moving. So.

For on example, if you are in the artillery, you get your orders from your commander, and your sighting information from your forward observer. Then you aim, fire, evaluate, adjust your aim, fire again, repeat as necessary until the target is hit & destroyed.

Achieving your own aims is just like that: choose the goal, make the plan, work the plan, focus on the objective or outcome. Correct as needed, evaluate the progress, re-evaluate the goal. Ready, Aim, Fire! Evaluate, Make ready again, Aim, Fire! Repeat as necessary to achieve your goal.

No matter what, you are responsible. No matter if the cause of failure was at someone else’s hands, no matter if it was a (so-called) Act of God, you are responsible. If nothing else, you are responsible for your reaction to the circumstance. No excuses!

That said, I AM a good one for excuses. Even if I have ‘good’ excuses, they only get in my way. Too bad, so sad. I should pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again!

I lost my job some months ago, and ultimately deserved to. Never mind the reason; I was not performing to specifications. Anyone from the old shop who reads this, please understand, I do not blame my former work place. They did their best to keep me on, as the things I was doing right and well, I was doing very well indeed. However, I couldn’t keep my call times short.

I am slowing down, and that contributed to the loss of my former position. Again, not their fault. I was unable to find a strategy that allowed me to complete my call tasks on average in the time limit required of me.

I am responsible for that.

So, when I found Mr. Tracy’s book, and listened to it, it resonated. Maybe I didn’t like to hear the message, but the message was important, and I was open to it.

And here we are. 

I will give you a glimpse of my most recent vision:

In my immediate area we have a food desert. A thrift grocery that had been the source of food for the  area closed, and the building razed (as well as the buildings around it). Now, someone is setting to build a McDonald’s in a corner of the block. Considering the location, it should be a success. However …

What I wanted to do, and still want to do, is create a destination business, something that people not from the immediate area would want to visit. A business that, in and of itself, draws people (and their dollars) to it. Tentative project name: Nate’s Bistro and Dinner Theater.

Nearby, there would be a grocery store that would provide foodstuffs a notch above what the dollar store carries, but not so expensive as to be a hardship for the folks around to purchase. It would be good for it to have a specialty of some sort, like (for instance) a specialty bakery. This would be one more draw to bring people from outside the immediate area to our corner of the world.

And just for the fun of it, a bookstore and newsstand.

The bistro could have open mike ‘sing for your supper’ event, the theater would provide real world opportunities for the school of music and school of theater of the local university. The theater would also provide future sound and light designers opportunities to get real-world experience, and the back-stage scene shop would give makers of all sorts opportunities to make something big, as well as craft ‘show-specific’ mementos as one-of-a-kind keepsakes for whatever show being presented; these items  could be sold at Nate’s or as point-of-sale items at the bookstore.

The theater would become the primary destination, providing traffic to the bistro, and vice versa, giving exposure to the nifty little grocery, as well as an interesting brick-and-mortar bookstore for things you cannot get at the A-to-Z store online.

The nearby motels would benefit from the extra traffic, as would as the other businesses in the immediate area. As visualized, the convenience store would generally keep their clientele for the kinds of things the dollar store does best, the Gas & Go place would be the same. The in-coming Mickey Dee would not see the restaurant cut into the fast-food flow, or perhaps a little, as some would just want to sit down and take a load off their feet and dine comfortably instead of being in a rush.

All in all, making a destination dinner theater/bistro (with associated businesses) would be a good thing.

But, to achieve this, I need to have some financial resources to build on.

Hence, I need to get off the dime and be responsible. No Excuses!

Yes I Can!

So Can You!

I Share the Rock Biter’s Despair

This morning, as I sat on the edge of my bed, I found myself looking into my empty hands, cupped in my lap, and I thought: “They look like good, strong hands.”

And immediately I was taken back to the movie, ‘The Neverending Story’. But before the movie, came the book by the same title, written by Michael Ende. I read it before I saw the movie. Interestingly, it was NOT in the children’s section of the library, but in the adult section. Having read it, I agree. Even though the protagonist was a child of about sixth grade or so, and it follows him on a road to self-discovery, it is not a coming-of-age book in the normal sense of the phrase.

But I digress.

The point I’m trying to make is, in spite of all my efforts, I feel all my accomplishments slipping away from me, just as the Rock Biter could not hold on to his friends against the pull of the ‘Nothing’.

I feel that all my efforts to hang on to the good that I have done, and the good that I’m trying to do, it is all being stripped away by forces outside of my control.

In Bastian Balthazar Bux’ universe, it is reborn by his renaming of the Childlike Empress, then populated by his imagination.

The book gets deeper about this, which is why this is an adult novel, not a children’s novel. But the first movie pretty much ends at that point, and doesn’t get into the cosmic verities that Mr Ende was trying to explore.

And this rounds us back to the Rock Biter.

The Rock Biter was a large, clumsy, fearful-looking person who ate rocks for food. But he had a gentle demeanor. And he made friends easily; it was usually those to whom he was trying to befriend that had the problem.

But friends he made, and he was loyal to them to the last.

In Real Life, I am looking at how to finish out my days, and get everything accomplished: making sure I leave a legacy to keep my wife and children doing well, my wife especially. I, too, am trying to be loyal to them to the last.

In the immediate economy it’s not easy. At this stage of my life I’m trying to come up with something that will put money in our pockets, to ‘give back what the locust destroyed’. It’s not easy, and the things to do are so very different from the things I would do if this was thirty years ago.

It is very hard to say, ‘Yes, I Can’, right now. But, I can’t blame the economy, though I’d like to. I can’t blame the ‘gimme, gimme’ people, though they do their best to get in the way of those of us who have a mission to be generous by creating and assisting opportunities, to give a hand up assist to those who need that steadying hand to those who need it.

I can’t blame anyone; the only one I can hold accountable is myself.

As the sign at my desk implies, it is all about attitude.

So when you find it hard to say, ‘Yes I Can’, know that I’m right there with you.

But:

Yes, We CAN!

Chaca, When The Walls Fell

 Still no completed ghost story, but I found something you might like that I wrote February 4th, 2018, when I was trying to see myself as something more than a broken down old man. 

I'm still a broken old man, even more so, but I do have some focus of will left. With that thought came this bit from almost four years ago:

                        This Old Man (2018-02-04)

            I’m not sure how it happened.

            Usually I’m very aware of my surroundings when I’m out. Especially when I’m with my little girl. My ’little girl’ is in junior high, and nearly the height of her mother; not so little.

            Maybe that was it; she was not a ‘little’ girl at all, anymore.

             Minding our own business at a table in the park, eating a Mickey-Dee’s lunch, a group of - no a gang of boys came up and casually surrounded our table. The boys were not much older than my granddaughter.

            One of the bolder youths came closer, saying, “Hello, little chicky, leave this old man and come with me, I show you some fun!”

            “He’s not an old man! He’s my grandpa!” she shouted back.

            “Even better! You come with me and my boys will keep your old grandpa busy.”

            The gang had us circled. As casually as I could I move my legs over the bench so I was half-facing away from the table. One of the other boys came close to me and leaned in. I could smell the cigarette odor, and the smell of marijuana, on his breath. “Don’ get up, ole man, Rickie – he take goooood care of your girl for you.” He leered a half-focused grin at me.

            Someone behind me poked my shoulder, “An’ we gonna take gooood care of you, too. Don’ worry about nothin’.”

            The first boy reached his right hand out and placed it on my left shoulder, the shoulder nearest the table, “You jus’ sit right there, an’ ev’ry thing will be fine.”

            “Pa-paw?”

            One of the circling boys said, “Maybe we can take turns.” The rest of the boys chuckled, their laughter low in the throat. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the first boy (“Ricky?”) take my girl’s arm to pull her away from the picnic table.

            The voice in my ear said: This is the moment.

            Leaning back against the hand behind me; the boy behind me, irritated, shoved me forward. Grabbing my cane from the table with my left hand, and leaning forward (unwittingly assisted by the boy behind me), I punched the boy in front of me’s solar plexus, putting as much of my weight behind the blow as I could. This boy’s leer disappeared as his eyes and his mouth went wide, gasping for a breath that would not come.       

            Standing and stepping away, and twisting to face the boy behind me, I got both hands on my cane, spaced wide, pushing it at the boy’s chest, stepping in to shove as hard as I could to knock him down. He couldn’t back-pedal fast enough to stay standing and went down.

            Stepping on his chest to the most direct path around the end of the table I saw Ricky dragging my little girl away from the table. Two more boys were between Ricky and me, the one on my left waved a knife. I think he meant to scare me.

            I stepped left, putting the other boy slightly behind the knife wielder. I swung my cane hard down on the wrist with the knife, and he screamed. He also dropped the knife.

            I brought the cane back up, and grabbing it with both hands as I had before, I shoved it into this boy’s chest and he went down. I stepped on him and went at the fourth boy. He came at me like a defensive line-man, ready to push me back. I met his charge, shoving him with the cane held as a bar in front of me, then twisting to the right, I stepped left, and let him slide past me. As he went by, I kicked him in his rear and he went down on his nose.

            That was four of the .. five? six? boys in the bunch. One of whom was standing to my left, holding on to my little girl … holding a knife to her throat.

            “Stay back!” he said. He spoke through clenched teeth, his own breathing as ragged as mine was; I was near the end of my effort.

            I have to wrap this up.

            “Baby Girl,” I said, using a name from her childhood, “Baby Girl, do you trust me?”

            Her eyes flickered to a long-ago memory, and she nodded.

            As the boy was saying ‘Shut UP, Old Man’, I said, “Ess-Dee-Are.”

            She blinked, widening her eyes. I gave a slight nod in reply.

            She became dead weight on the boy’s arm. The boy, not expecting it, let her fall. Finishing the ‘Stop-Drop-Roll’ she rolled as fast as she could away from the boy. The boy stood watching.

            As soon as she was clear, I stepped in and raised my cane, still gripped in both hands by its ends, knocking his knife hand up.

            “Run to the car, child! Call the police!”

            Letting go of one end of the cane, and reaching into my left front pocket I grabbed my keys and started tossing them to her. The boy took advantage of my distraction and slashed downward with his knife. It missed my face but cut open my shirt. I felt the slash like an electric jolt through my chest as the blade bit me.

            I dropped the keys as I focused on the face of the boy. His eyes were wide, his mouth open. I growled, like bear or a jungle cat, ready to pounce on my prey. This boy-predator didn't think he was so big any more without his friends. He was back-pedaling, as if he no longer wanted this fight. 

            I certainly didn’t want this fight, but I couldn’t let the matter rest and have him regain his courage when his friends recovered. I was sure boy #2 and boy #4 were already doing so. The cane was still in my right hand; I swung it at his knife hand, intent on breaking his wrist, breaking what was left of his spirit for this fight of his own making, my own vision tunneling.

            The fight would be over in a moment, one way or the other. The shock I was feeling from the cut was combining with my shortness of breath from my exertions. I felt like a puppet whose strings were being cut, one at a time.

            I saw the rubber tip of my cane hit his knife hand. It was the last thing I saw: my tunnel vision narrowed to nothing, the roaring in my ears became a roaring silence.

            Except, I seemed to be someplace. I was talking to someone. Or they were talking to me. It was dark, and largely noiseless, apart from the conversation. It was one of those ‘what-to-do-next’ conversations.

            I found myself saying, “For myself, I don’t care, but please make sure my wife and granddaughter are taken care of.”

            The reply: “Your family will be taken care of – you’ll take care of them.”

            I expressed my doubts in wordless thought, that none-the-less was answered, “You just need to rest a while. Then you will be strong enough to continue.”

            My wordless thought continued to the shortness of breath, the pain in my chest that had nothing to do with the cut, and the general feeling of exhaustion I felt. I mentally tried to raise my arms – and could not.

            The voice, if it was a voice, returned with the sentence, “My strength is made perfect in weakness – you know that.”

            And with that, the dream, or whatever it was, ended.

            Oddly enough, the next thing was noise, the roaring in my ears was back, and pains all over were telling me I was still interfaced with my body, and the world at large was starting to make its presence known: shrill sirens, accelerations and decelerations, not to mention the ‘come-over-darlings’ of sharp turns, and things rattling with each bump. Unfocused light was sneaking in under my eyelids, and on the next bump I heard a groan. My next thought was that person sounds like he’s hurting.

            The following thought: that groaning person was me!

            The pains, instead of just nebulous ideas, started coming in from my chest, my hands and wrists, and an ouchy spot on my left pectoral.

            As I wondered what this was all about, dribs and drabs of ‘the last things I remember’ slowly snuck into my mind.

            Then I thought, “Oh. Yeah.” 

            And decided to go back to sleep.

And there you go. Fiction is as fiction does, but if it ever comes down to cases, I hope I do as well as my dream self in this story, and end up finishing the fight before I run out of steam.

I don't have a lot of steam left. 

But I do what I can. 

Yes, I Can.

Yes, You CAN!

 

Mish-mash in the MixMaster

I originally came downstairs to my 'office' to work on the ghost story some more, and found a mouse in one of the mousetraps around my desk. It wasn't dead.

So, what do you do with a mouse so broken - and it was. Flushing it down the drain seems like adding insult to injury. But how to best put an end to it's misery? I might have summoned my house cat to take over, except we no longer have a house cat. So, squarely upon my shoulders the responsibility sits.

One of the hardest things in the world to do is to watch something die, even something as small and pestiferous as a mouse. When I hunted I always made sure the thing I killed died quickly. And I always felt that pain. I made sure that I never forgot that pain. I made a promise to myself that if I ever stopped feeling that pain I would stop hunting. I haven't stopped hunting, as much as I haven't been able to arrange for the trips. In other words, my not hunting is more circumstantial than intentional. Now you know a little bit more about me.

Also know that I've been fighting heart failure for the last few years; about a year ago I had a defibrillator/pacemaker implanted. Unlike Tony Stark, I did not come back as Iron Man. Life is. The long and short of it is: I have a personal understanding of how fragile life can be.

Add to this, how do I continue to work until I can finally take retirement? My plan to work for as long as I can has taken a different twist: as long as I can now means can I at least reach the full retirement age before dying? If that had been at the original 65-years-old, I'm there, and I can retire and pace myself a little better. Unfortunately, The Social Security goalposts have been moved: I now need to be at least 66 and four months old to retire with full benefits. 

I may not get there, or I might have to quit working sooner. My current job is not that hard, physically, but can be very stressful. And I have to juggle my medication regime around it. That caught up with me a couple of weeks ago, and I ended up in the hospital. One week of pay missing as a consequence, never mind the bills. At least the food was good.

What can I do?

I can find another job. That is a give-and-take: would I get as good insurance benefits as I do now? Could I even get the group insurance?

In a lot of ways I'm hostage to the corner of the envelope bracketed by age, bills, family needs, and a few other what-have-yous. These are my negatives. It's hard to see the positives.

Especially when I see a mouse pinned and broken in a mouse trap. It kind of became a metaphor for my life. 

I hate death. I am not afraid of death, or dying; got over that a while ago. I still hate death, though.

Dylan Thomas was right: "Go not gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Yes, you can