A Forced Hiatus!

Okay, just about the time I was getting my act back together with my blogging, my friends at AT&T pulled the rug out from under me. Yeah, I have still have AOL old-fashioned dial-up internet. I lost phone service briefly last month, but was back up and running in about day. This time, however, after arguing with their computer system for a spell, I was left hanging. Allegedly the problem was not with their system but with mine.

 

This latest outage occurred last Tuesday. I reported the problem and was told someone would have to come to my home to check out my wiring. In the meantime I switched jacks, replaced phone wires, tried different phones - everything I could think to do. Still there was nothing. No dial tone at all. I suspected my friendly AT&T computer system was mistaken and that the problem was theirs.

 

Having heard nothing by the next day, I re-reported the problem. This time (I suppose because of the re-reporting) I was eventually allowed to speak to a human being. I was told that a repairman would come see me on Saturday. "What - I gotta wait the rest of the week without my service?"

 

Yes, I was told, that would be the next time a serviceman would be in my area. This irked me more than just a bit because I'm not living out in the sticks. (I suppose this is yet another example of how corporate cost-cutting really means more inefficient service for customers.)  I thought about how bad it would be if I were an elderly man living alone and, say, suffering from heart disease or something serious like that and needed emergency personnel.

 

As the week dragged by and I missed my friends here at my new blog (as well as other things, like reading online newspapers), I was beginning to think about telling AT&T to kiss my AS&S. But the repairman I deal with was so friendly and helpful (even counseling me, just like a good representative should, about how much better my life would be with their DSL service, and it would be cheaper to boot), and he found that indeed the problem was theirs and not mine, plus he placed me on a new line entirely to assure I wouldn't have another problem, I guess I will wait until I investigate other options before parting company with them. Anyway, I need a land line for my mother to make her regular pace maker checks.  

 

It was yesterday afternoon before my service was repaired and the rest of my day was fairly busy, so I didn't have a chance to get back to my blog before now. With this explanation I apologize for having neglected the comments left on my last post and will try again to get back to normal with this thing. 

Radio Is Like A Time Machine For Me

The other day my alarm clock/radio - which is over thirty years old and dates back to the early days of my marriage to my high school sweetheart - went on the fritz in an annoying way. I've kept it and used it all these years because she gave it to me and it has great sentimental value for me.

 

But now the radio will not turn off. The alarm still works perfectly when set to buzz (as opposed to having the radio come on, since it is on constantly anyway). But the radio constantly playing low in the quiet of the night is a distraction to me as I try to sleep.

 

On the way home one day last week I stopped at my local dollar mart thinking I could find a good old-fashioned wind-up alarm clock. (They do still make these, don't they?) All I could find were battery operated alarm clocks. I'm swearing off all these battery operated clocks I have. They annoy the hell out of me, especially as the batteries grow weak and the clocks slowly start going awry.

 

I guess I will have to give in and go to Wally World in search of my wind-up clock (and yes, I know these can be notoriously inaccurate, too, but I always run my alarm clocks ahead a bit). I just came off a four day break from work and had the time, but it's been so rainy and miserable here, and besides that, my lady friend has been busy with baby sitting chores and work. I really don't like to go shopping alone. 

 

So in the meantime I have been dealing with the radio, which I have set on a station that plays classic rock from the 60s, 70s and 80s. The radio - which I have set the volume of as low as possible while still being able to hear the alarm go off - fades in and out: another annoyance with all this!

 

True story: the other day I had an earworm of that old song Spirit In The Sky. No kidding, it played in my head all day long. The radio had been fading out more than in on this particular day, when suddenly it came back on playing - you guessed it! - Spirit In The Sky.

 

That song was a favorite of mine and my late brother's when we were teenagers. He had the single and we played it often and sang along to it. Weird that the radio would fade in as my earworm song of the day came on, but my life has always been a bit weird anyway.

 

For some reason I can date certain events in my life with the songs that I hear, songs which were popular at certain points in my life. Kung Fu Fighting is one of many that always takes me back to my junior high school years. Chicago's If You Leave Me Now, Andy Gibb's I Just Want To Be Your Everything, and Barry Manilow's Weekend In New England were all songs my high school sweetheart (later wife) and I considered our songs. They were big when we were first going together.

 

On one summer evening, right around dusk, on one of our dates, my sweetheart and I sat parking, holding hands and listening to the radio. The song It's The Right Time Of The Night by Jennifer Warnes came on. I never hear that song now but that I'm not taken back to that summer night and thoughts of when my first love was within arm's reach.

 

And so it goes that as oldie after oldie plays, I'm taken back in time. Sometimes this painful or bittersweet. I miss many of the times of my life and would love to revisit them briefly. I quit listening to the radio years ago and now I remember why. I have to be in the appropriate mood to want to be transported back in time that way. Most of the time I'm not in that mood. When I am happy, I find those time visits quaint. When I'm depressed the way I have been lately, these sounds rend my heart.

 

I've held on to this now malfunctioning clock/radio for so long now, through three live-in relationships and long years by myself, it's almost a part of me. But I have to get another alarm clock and soon! This thing is driving me nuts. 

My Dad's Dream Of The Impossible

I had a few days off from work because of the holiday and decided to just rest and catch up on a few things. One of those things was spending some time with my mom. I don't get to do that as much as I would like.

 

We had a nice time together, but she was troubled and wanted to talk to me about some things. One of those was her divorce from my father. And in talking about this she told me a story I had never heard or known about. I'm not sure if I'm better or worse for knowing this tidbit, but I do know that this was a very unpleasant conversation for me. I guess it was cathartic for her. And she apologized again (she has before in recent years) for the pain the divorce caused me and my brothers. I confessed that it was one of the two most traumatizing events of my life (my own divorce from my high school sweetheart being the other).

 

I remember having a man-to-man talk with my dad, before his mind got too bad, in which I was trying to find out why he didn't do more to prevent Mom from leaving. I guess I had always had some hard feelings towards him about that and thought he didn't do enough.

 

I remember him telling me: "Son, when a woman makes up her mind to do something - like leave you - there is nothing you can do." (I must say that over the years I have found that insight to be generally accurate.) 

 

But my mom told me of a dream my father had and a conversation it led to between him and her. She told me this with tears in her eyes.

 

It seems my father had dreamed he was out in a field watching some people playing with remote control helicopters. As he stood there in the field watching a voice called for him to climb inside one of the copters and go for a ride.

 

Of course Dad objected. "But there is no way I can fit inside;" he said back to the voice.  And the disembodied voiced admonished him that "with God, all things are possible." A quote from Jesus, and one well known to my Pentecostal, miracle-believing parents. 

 

Mom tells me that Dad felt the dream was God's urging that the two of them should work out their differences and work to heal their marriage, "before things go too far," my dad said.

 

Through tears my mom told me that she told him she felt things had already gone too far. Now - with the benefit of over forty years of hindsight - she tells me she regrets having brushed him and his dream off so lightly. His dream did trouble her, she confessed to me, but not so much that it halted the momentum in their situation.

 

I guess my Dad did try in his way to stop the divorce. I remember - and told my mom that I did - making a similar approach to my soon-to-be-exwife that we try to set things straight between us before we got too far from the shore. I had no dream, but I know I must have felt the same thing Dad had felt: that my wife and I were going outside the will of God.

 

My pleas were met mostly with silence. Dad's were met with outright dismissal. We both suffered the agonizing emotional train wreck of having a wife walk away. For my dad that meant a years-long fall into the bottle. I did much the same thing. And both of us tried to screw our way out of our pain. Maybe that is a guy thing. I don't know. But it didn't work, and only complicated matters for both of us.

 

After a period of apostasy (my parents were dismissed from the denomination upon their divorce), my folks eventually found their way back into their religion. Dad died in the faith and I have every expectation Mom will as well.

 

I tried to find my way back. There were times I would visit churches with friends and think about returning to my faith, but I never did. I never could. It started out as anger towards God. Along the way I came to believe that I had held wrong ideas about God. But, whatever.

 

So now I know a little more about my dad than I did. His stunning fall into sin, that I could not understand as an eleven year old makes much more sense to me now. I realize that for a time Dad gave up on God and thought His promises were void. Somehow he made his way back to God. I don't think I'm smarter than my dad was about this. My dad had a skeptical streak. But I'm certain that for him it was an emotional thing. And I believe my dad could feel more comfortable with women he met in church than he did those he met in my uncle's bar and grill.

 

My mom got back right with God, too. But it has always been an uneasy truce because she definitely feels she was wrong back then. Mom and Dad made their peace with each other in the waning months of his life. She told me all about that, too, Sad and bittersweet it was.  But as I told her, what can I say, I've made the same mistakes myself. I understand my parents better, being full of their genes and having traveled along some of the same roads they traveled. The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree.    

Lessons I Have Learned From My Cats

Those of you who have been my readers for a while know that I have always had my little cat friends that live in the neighborhood and hang around with me, eating the majority (it would seem) of their meals here, and being quite chummy with me. They have been good company (if a little bit of an expense sometimes).

 

Now I'm down to just the one cat, Blackie. Blackie is a tomcat so he will probably be the last of my long line of cats. Fluffy, the little female who kept me stocked with kitties for so long died last year - much to my sadness. I had her the longest of all my little friends.   

 

Blackie is outside on my deck every morning when I get up, waiting patiently for his breakfast. Until it got so hot recently, he would be on my deck in the afternoons when I got home from work. He would walk out to the truck to greet me and walk to the door with me. I would then pet and feed him. Now he waits until the worst of the day's heat is over before he comes for supper. Most nights he sleeps on the deck, waiting for me to wake up and feed him again. 

 

As I'm typing this I'm looking right outside the window where he is sleeping. Supper is over and good, healthy digestion evidently puts him the mood for a snooze. (I would take a picture, but the batteries in my camera are dead.) 

 

I love watching Blackie sleep on the flat railing of my deck. Such a sweet little face! And when he is dreaming his little paws quiver and quake. Sometimes he stretches in his sleep and almost loses his balance. But he is quick to regain it.

 

Watching him is relaxing to me. Watching my cats "chilling out" on my deck always gave me a little perspective. I might have been watching the weather and seen that storms are forecast, or maybe a winter cold front is threatening to bring really cold temperatures and perhaps some snow. But they take it in stride, even if I worry about how I may fare through these things. Cats appear to live moment to moment, and if they worry, I've never detected it.

 

About the only moods I've detected in my cats are fear when a stranger comes (or a strange and threatening dog), which causes them to bow up and their fur to stand on end, and annoyance when it is rainy. You really can see the displeasure on a cat's face when they get wet. Cats don't seem so fond of water.

 

Life is just a hoot, I suppose, if you always know where your next meal is coming from, when you have a place to live, and if you are able to go with the flow no matter what the weather is.

 

I think Blackie may have a bit of a rough time when it comes to the opposite sex. I hear him fighting sometimes. And sometimes he gets a little banged up from it. He fights with the other tomcats because the guys in the neighborhood seem to outnumber the gals. And even at that - and I don't know how many of you know this, but - cats are into rough sex.

 

My lady friend, when she lived across the street from me, would say this one particular male cat (which wasn't mine but "loved" my female cats) was a rapist. Well, that was because the male will grab the female by the nape of the neck to hold her while they copulate. And if my cats - Fluffly, in particular - wasn't in the mood for it, she was quite good at boxing. I've seen her turn on a male right after the act. Yet she would always tease the males until they fell for her.

 

But Blackie seems to be more of a sleeper than a lover, just as his master is getting to be. More and more I look for a good meal and then a comfortable place to take a nap. I told my lady friend that that nape of the neck thing looked promising, but she wasn't very impressed. 

 

Now if I could just learn to kick back like ol' Blackie and quit worrying so much about tomorrow!