crdahlberg

The Stewardess

Jan’s inaugural stewardess commission was on the World War II “Gooney Bird,” the twin-engine DC-3. They began flying in 1935. They are still in service to this day.

So is ninety-something, Jan. Over breakfast, she recalled her favorite flight crew.

“In those days, the unpressurized planes flew low. On long flights, our two mischievous pilots would open their cockpit windows and deploy long strands of chicken bones, all tied together with string. They let out enough line so the bones would hit and clatter against the windows of the unsuspecting passengers, provoking shock and dismay, while traveling at several thousand feet altitude.”

“I suppose turkey bones would have been too big and heavy for the fragile windows!”

Jan eventually graduated to DC-4’s, and to DC-6’s. The latter contained sleeping berths for upscale passengers, reminiscent of the era’s train transportation.

Based in Los Angeles, she served Hollywood royalty: Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Hedda Hopper, Walt Disney, John Wayne, Barbara Hutton.

Jan lived in a stewardess dormitory, where a visiting pilot ran into Jan quite by accident when he lost his way, arriving at the wrong dormitory; Jan was smitten.

One day, after making repairs under the hood of her Model A Ford, which she had purchased from another pilot for $125, Jan drove across town to visit him. He invited her to Tucson, where he was based. So she spent the next several weeks “visiting her grandmother” in Tucson. Two months after they met, she married her sweetheart pilot.

“Did that turn out to be a good thing?” I was incredulous. She curled her index finger to meet her thumb, forming an “O,” as in “perfect.” “We had an amazing life together. We traveled to every part of the world. Greece! We loved Greece!”

Later that afternoon, accompanying my father down the hall, we once again ran into Jan. “Didn’t we meet you yesterday?” asked my Dad. Good try. I suggested to him that it had been just that morning.

Jan’s son, John, who happened to be visiting her, accompanied her down the hall. We introduced ourselves, yet I felt I already knew John.

After all, we could both recite Jan’s fondest stories.

The Patent Lawyer

Chuck stared blankly after he placed his breakfast order. “No, I’ll take the cold cereal instead.”

Sometimes, Chuck’s esophagus blocks his food. It gets stuck—“right here.” It remains there until he eats again, when it may journey up into his mouth again. “And there’s not much that’s coming out the other end, either,” he explained.

“Do you still drive?” I asked the 98-year old, trying to change the subject. I could still imagine the taste of the food, the second time around.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t want to meet another driver of my caliber on the road!”

Chuck had fallen prior to his move into the retirement home, landing on his head. 30 stitches patched him up. The fall had reduced his short-term memory, and he now required the use of a cane. So, in his mid-nineties, he reluctantly gave up golf and tennis. “Tennis doubles is a wonderful thing. Don’t need to cover nearly as much court!” I guessed so; I had given up on tennis three decades ago.

Chuck was a patent lawyer. The precise details of every patent were still packed in the back of that cranium. Long-term memory was definitely not a problem.

“You know how a ship being attacked from an aircraft has to take three readings on the location of the plane and its angle of attack before you can aim, load and fire a 2.9-inch shell from the ship’s deck?”

Of course. Everyone knows that.

“You have time to take two readings. By the time you try to take the third reading, you’re toast! Up in smoke! No one could figure out how to take that third reading in time.”

Chuck’s client had figured out a way to accomplish this, using a sort of scrabble board contraption.

Another client developed an invention that produced weird electrical waves. Whenever Chuck inadvertently left his lunch near the gizmo, his lunch got hot. “You’ve got the descendent of this in your kitchen. It’s called a microwave.”

Just then, two men dressed in black suits made their way down the corridor, a black gurney between them. All they lacked was a body.

Chuck smiled. “What do you expect?” he asked rhetorically. “Just take a look at where we live.”

With that, cane in hand, he headed down the hall, as if he were hunting down a new tennis partner.

The Diamond Sorter

At 85, Art is a youngster compared with my 101-year old father. For breakfast, he’d have the waffles, Dad wanted oatmeal and poached eggs, all easy to chew.

Saturday at the retirement home means a two-hour drive each way for me. The breakfasts are routine, except for who is assigned to sit with us. Today, it was Art, a two-week resident newbie.

At the end of his Korean War service, Art’s home became the hospital for a full year. When he was released, he was still a teenager with no job skills.

He took a vocational skills test and discovered he possessed a hidden, latent talent: sorting.

Art could sort anything. He could detect the minutest differences. Sizes. Colors. Shapes. Anything. Think it’s tough to tell one leaf from another? Art doesn’t; he’s a born sorter.

His unique skill landed him a job as a trainee in a jewelry company where he was given plenty of stuff to sort: all of them diamonds. Thousands of them, and they all needed sorting by color, cut, size, quality.

His proficiency eventually made a way for him in the jewelry wholesale market. His skills had brought him into the limelight, into the big time, and into one of the most exclusive communities of Los Angeles.

He lived there all by himself. His wife had left him fifty years ago, though they have still never divorced.

Halfway through Art’s waffle breakfast, Edna, stopped by the table to greet us. She stood directly next to Art. But Art couldn’t see her. He only turned his head when he heard her voice.

Macular degeneration has stolen most of Art’s once-legendary gift of visual discernment. He feels lost in his new environment and misses his former neighborhood. He could have become a bitter man.

After breakfast, I fixed his television for him. A baseball fan, Art was suffering withdrawal. When I got it to work, he pumped his fists in victory, and we hugged triumphantly.

“It’s been a good day,” he explained, “for two reasons. First, you fixed my TV so I can watch The World Series! Second, because your dad called me an Old Geezer. Because that’s what I call myself! I love that! We Old Geezers gotta stick together!”

Parades

Whenever there is a parade, a cause is being celebrated. The paradester—the person marching or partaking in it—might be a shirtless, over-the-top-costumed, July 4th paradester perched upon an itty-bitty Lilliputian scooter.

Mardi Gras parades frequently display debauchery, notorious misbehavior from which the participants frequently awake the next morning, incredulously inquiring, “I did WHAT?” A string of plastic beads is a mute reminder of the previous evening’s events.

Parades are not always events of joyful celebration. While parades can honor, they can also powerfully protest, or rally to a cause. Diseases. Politics. Belief systems. Being part of a parade joins us to something bigger than us—a bigger purpose.

Parades remind us we are ever on a journey. Despite the sometimes monotonous cares and numbing routines of daily life, we nonetheless are never static. We are always on our way somewhere, celebrating something, whether admirable and honorable, or not. As long as we’re alive, we’re in a parade.

Yes, we’re always in a parade of some kind. We’re going somewhere. Moms. Dads. Kids. Leaders. Followers. Through our chosen beliefs and behavior, we’re all subscribing to something, some agenda, some idea, some principle, though we may not always recognize it.

Our presence in that parade, whichever parade it is, suggests a kind of endorsement, as we say “yes” to something far bigger than ourselves.

Silver Streak

A 1949 Pontiac Silver Streak doesn’t just sit there. It lounges like a pregnant golden retriever, faithful, comforting, and swollen.

In 1956, I sat in the back seat of my uncle’s Silver Streak–uncle, aunt, mom, dad, brother, cousin and I all fit into that lump of a car, a trundling loaf of sourdough bread.

Fireflies lit up Ohio’s evening sky. Through the Silver Streak’s window, I watched them dance between me and the corner gas station and the stop light, which had advanced from amber to red as we came to a stop.

Instantly, the peaceful scene transformed. Behind us, tires howled; headlights glared, swerved, bounced. We lurched violently. Suddenly stilled, the headlights stared cross-eyed at the Silver Streak’s enormous trunk. All was silent, except for Uncle Chet, unrefined vocabulary seething in his breath.

Then the yelling began. First Chet, then the guy whose bumper had mangled our trunk. I don’t know how drunk a skunk can get, but he was all of it, and then some.

Chet dumped change into the gas station’s pay phone and called the cops. Meanwhile, the drunken driver somehow lurched into his car’s driver’s seat and blasted headlong down the country road.

Within minutes, a puzzled cop arrived. As Chet spilled the details to him, the policeman’s radio crackled. It was a quick call. “Which way did he go?” he bellowed. “The guy that hit you is the man we’re looking for!”

Long after the fireflies had extinguished for the night, Chet’s Silver Streak somehow crawled home with all of us still in it.

We all recognized the next morning’s newspaper headline story–drunk hits car at stop light, then speeds off.

But we could not have known the rest of the story.

The drunk man, car trunk filled with loaded firearms, so drunk he called his family, telling them he was coming to kill them all. On his way, drunk man’s car collided with our Pontiac Silver Streak. Discovering that his family had fled, he burned the house down. Drunk man was arrested for attempted murder.

Inside, in Chet’s house: us, greatly relieved.

Outside, in Chet’s driveway: the Silver Streak, bruised and heavy, a lump of a car, faithful, comforting, and swollen. And fireflies.

The Bus

When my young grandsons could no longer tolerate waiting for the grownups in the wine tasting room, we all stretched our legs and exited through the side door to the Texas Hill County acreage surrounding us. The rest of the family tumbled across the tree-shaded field to the goats and miniature horses gathered along the wire fence, awaiting each visitor’s customary food handout and head scratch.

Holland and I stayed behind to investigate the aged double-decker English city bus standing at the edge of the field, an ancient other-worldly sentinel, guarding a place to which it did not belong.

Visiting neighborhoods where we once lived is to return to the remnants of an earlier time, re-living cherished memories. It’s the same for this bus, shuttling strangers who forged deep friendships. We wonder at the passengers and the stories they once shared.

I recalled my own bus-riding chum, Joe. Why did every traveler on that bus know, like, and repect Joe? Self-deprecating, he wore a grin that possessed his entire face. Chicken-foot wrinkly skin embraced his blue-hued eyes, eyes that laughed and invited others to enjoy the silent joke. Joe was a toucher, not the kind of toucher that the news reports about. His was a hand on the shoulder or a gentle finger upon the humerus to let you know he was listening. Joe carried lunch in a backpack, a ritual since he began riding the bus after suffering a seizure, ending his freeway automobile commute. Will Rogers is famously quoted for never meeting a man he didn’t like. I believe in Joe’s case, it was true. Though he never finished high school, his bus ride transported him to his job as the COO of one of the state’s largest ice cream producers.

Humble man makes good.

Not a bad legacy for any of us.

The passengers from this misplaced English bus in a Texas Hill Country winery are long gone, taking with them their friendships and memories.

All who now remain are grandson Holland and myself. As I glimpse his tiny face in the abandoned bus mirror, I sense we are creating our own private history together.

I think it will be a good one.

Not a bad legacy for any of us.

Colonoscopy

The Winter Olympics have the luge event, toboggans violently hurtling tightly-fitting passengers down a tube of pure ice, slick and smooth as a child’s slide descending from an ice castle.

Instead of the luge, doctors have the colonoscopy. Like the luge, it requires guidance using surgical precision, and it necessitates traversing a long and winding passageway. Unlike the toboggan, the required equipment carries no passengers along its slow, meandering course. It delivers hi-tech equipment, snapping pictures, snipping samples, and performing minor medical corrections along its medical mission.

I’m now in the hospital’s gastro-intestinal waiting room. All around me there are procedures underway. Sloth-slow devices are creeping carefully along, fiber-optically photographing dark tunnels of colonoscopic flesh.

Meanwhile, in my waiting room, overhead televisions project the Winter Olympics, competing athletes performing sports perfection. If I’m fortunate, a luge event will be displayed on my television—sleds slicing breakneck down icy tunnels. At the eventual conclusion, a winner will be declared; medals will be awarded to the athletes atop a victor’s podium.

At the end of today’s event in my G.I. waiting room, a drugged patient with temporarily impaired memory will emerge and be rewarded with tourist-like photographs snapped along the slow, abdominal journey. Unlike the Olympic festivities, there will be no victor’s podium ceremony. No anthems played.

Well-deserved praise goes to the eventual breakneck-speeding Olympic luge champion–national flag unfurled, anthem playing in triumph.

And hail to the slow-motion, sloth-speed, fastidious colonoscopist for polyps discovered, removed, and clean bill of health restored. Surgical gown discarded, the hospital speakers page this doctor, urging him to yet another slow-motion, high-performance venue.

Watch Your World Fall Apart

Willie’s Joint, near downtown Buda, Texas, features a giant, oversized Jenga game. Players pull out the blocks that seem to be supporting nothing, one block at time, and put them at the top until the whole mess collapses. If you’re the one who causes the collapse, you lose.

Especially during holidays, life imitates Jenga. Hosting family and friends and juggling meal and schedules stack up. Extricating the time to add one more task puts us into Jenga-collapse territory.

We’ve changed our ways to some degree. We’ve pared down our Christmas gift-giving. Our miniaturized plastic Christmas tree sits atop a corner table. Whittle down, whittle down. We’ve gotten good at it, and not just at Christmas time. We don’t want Jenga-collapse. The few important blocks stay at the bottom.

Fewer blocks!

Streamline! Invite the neighbors over? No way!

Spend time watching that time-wasting event on TV? Heck, no!

Efficiency! NOW we’re getting rid of those non-essential blocks!

Finally! We’re down to eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet! We’ve got all that other annoying activity out of our lives! We’ve pared down to hardly any Jenga blocks at all! Victory!

We sit in the silent living room, staring at the interior-designer-approved grey walls. No neighbors to entertain. No jangling cell phones. No nothin’!

That’s when I start missing all the blocks we removed to get to this place. It dawns on me that Jenga did us in. All the activities and distractions that made our lives so much fun are now gone. All our time-wasting friends are gone. They’re precisely where we put them–at the top of the Jenga tower with all the other non-essential things, and out of reach.

Our Jenga base has been reduced to exactly one block wide.

With trepidation, I barely touch that one remaining Jenga base block so as not to destroy the fragile construction.

Then, with one violent motion, I yank it free.

Three in a Row

If you look up “Tic Tac” on the Internet, you are directed either to sites about the breath mint candy, or to an investigation into a mysterious UFO dubbed Tic Tac by the Navy pilot who spotted it.

Won’t go there.

By adding the third word, “Toe” we refer to the game we know as “Tic Tac Toe”. Three words in a row spell the name of the game. Completing three in a row also happens to makes you the winner in this game.

In this huge plastic variant, son-in-law, Randy, and grandson, Linus, seem to be working it out. Tic-tac-toe.

As it turns out, Aristotle believed that friendship is also a three-across proposition, another sort of tic-tac-toe.

Aristotle names the first friendship “accidental” friendship, and it’s easy to fall into. It’s the person you happen to sit next to in an assigned classroom seat, or a person you wind up with on the same train car together, day after day. When the class ends, the travel ends, or the job ends, the friendship fades.

The second friendship is pleasure-based upon mutual interests, and it’s also not hard to discover – I like a certain sports team, and so do you. Or maybe we both rave about the latest movie, or automobile, or restaurant. But then we move on. The friendship based upon mutual interests was good while it lasted.

The third kind of friendship is harder to build. It involves mutual effort and endurance. This third-in-a-row friendship is the tic tac toe winner. It’s called The Friendship of the Good. It values the virtues and qualities within the other person. While these friendships take time to build, they grow more valuable over time, and are long-lasting. They rest on a foundation of mutual esteem and faith. Their value deepens after both persons have been seen both at their best and at their worst. They are some of life’s finest rewards.

Two out of three – “Tic Tac,” brings candy or a UFO story. Or transitory friendships.

But finding The Friendship of the Good completes the “Tic Tac Toe.” And that’s what makes a winning combination.

Holding On to Memories

Holding on to Memories.

I don’t know what’s going on in grandson Linus’s head. The dump trucks, the jungle gym, the soft, cushiony wood chips all conspire to create a place in his Thought World that he might play back hundreds of times, spanning many decades. It could be the beginning of a warm, embracing memory.

Memories. Some are so powerful, others so fleeting.

My earliest memory is sitting at a stainless steel dinette set in our kitchen. It was lunch time, and my high chair seat was pulled close. As she navigated the spoon toward my closed mouth, my mother teased me to open up.

“Here comes a car. Open the garage door! Here come the cows! Open the barn door! Come on! Here comes a plane, coming in for a landing!”

I remember that. The chrome chair legs, the red vinyl cushions, the white plastic table top with abstract grey squiggles. Like yesterday.

But ask me what I did last weekend. I’m clueless.

Memories are weird that way.

One time I caught myself in the garage, in my underwear, carrying a flyswatter. And I asked myself, “What am I supposed to be doing in the garage in my underwear with a flyswatter?’ Never came up with the answer.

Don’t tell me it’s never happened to you. I won’t believe you.

This week I heard a riveting news story. Researchers are discovering that as we age, two particular brain waves get out of synchronization when we sleep. Not by much. By milliseconds. But those milliseconds are critical to long term memory. Without this highly coordinated fleeting brain wave dance, the memories get lost. Short term memories never have a chance to be converted into long term memory.

They will not make the trip from short-term ephemeral experience into permanent, vivid long-term permanence. Access to that memory fades away.

I wish I could remember everything I once knew. I wish I could recall everything that I once experienced. I’d be the most brilliant and interesting person on the block.

But it sounds like that’s not going to happen.

That’s why we need photographs and journals to help remind us of the short-term stuff that lost its way.

More than that, that’s why we need our friends, so we can re-live the good times together.