Celebrating – Snail Trek Blog

Curtain Call

In sleep, Dad might wander a path, inhaling the fragrance of pine trees, or he might revisit familiar, cozy places he held dear. But now he was aging, and naps brought confusion instead of release. His body faltered, and he grew irritable. A uniformed nurse at the assisted-living facility stepped in to give him medication, easing his agitation. As his mind relaxed, so did his muscles. Soon, his lungs would forget to expand; finally, his heart would forget to beat.

We were still on our way to see him when the message arrived—Dad was gone. Only the night before, we had returned from visiting our daughter and her family halfway across the country. I kicked myself for poor timing: I had missed Dad’s departure from Earth by forty-five minutes.

At 106, Dad would often ask, “Why am I still here?” He had lingered on, outliving friends and family. Each time we parted, we knew it could be our last. Still, we shared a secure peace; if it were our final goodbye, neither of us would have regrets.

We cared for him during the nine years after Mom died. Many weekends meant a two-hour drive to see him, tending to his needs, followed by a weary drive home—and then preparing for another long workweek. The rhythm repeated, week after week.

During those nine years, Dad cared for us, too. His humor cleared our career-compressed fog. His devotion to beauty, art, and faith pressed us to look inward, outward, and upward. He remained delightfully quirky: every dog he greeted received a firm rumple of its nose pressed lovingly together. While he never received a nip at this greeting, the canine communion mystified both the unsuspecting dog and its surprised owner.

But eventually, like his own father’s gold pocket watch, the spring broke. No amount of winding its crown would have any effect. Its time, like Dad’s final nap in his small bedroom, had run out.

But this was not Dad’s first dance with death; it was his curtain call. Fifteen years earlier, while shopping at Costco, he left us the first time.

He had stood in the long prescription line among other shoppers, heads bowed over lists and membership cards. Suddenly, Dad simply tipped over—a toppled mannequin. Like a felled tree, without flexing to break his fall—he was dead on his feet. His heart had simply stopped, as if to say, “I’ve had enough.” Flat on his back, the fluorescent ceiling light cast a blue tint on him, contrasting the red blood draining onto the concrete floor from beneath his head.

On his way down, he had nearly struck the woman standing behind him—a providentially placed nurse who immediately began resuscitation. Then, paramedics—shopping a few aisles over—rushed over to help, trundling him into their ambulance, lights ablaze and sirens wailing.

When Dad’s head had hit the cement floor, ever the artist, he might have enjoyed a foretaste of the beauty offered by his beloved artists—Monet, Klee, and Van Gogh, ushering him into God’s ultimate glory, appearing just ahead. Earth’s painted canvas retreated behind him, while before him stretched a new, unending one.

Then came the command: “Clear!” as the ambulance team attempted resuscitation. Somewhere between Costco and Sharp Memorial Hospital, the EMT’s defibrillator jolted Dad’s heart alive.

The glorious images on the divine canvas faded from Dad’s vision. It dissolved into cold stainless steel, a vinyl gurney, and IV drips as Dad shuttled back to Earth, bouncing along in the ambulance.

Revived, he arrived back from his first death.

Dad’s later years were bookended by his two deaths—the first in Costco, into the waiting arms of a nurse and ambulance crew, the second, the curtain call, in his cozy assisted-living bedroom.

The Psalmist reminds us, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places.” Certainly, Dad’s lines had fallen in pleasant places. His life’s boundaries had quietly expanded, stretching out like hidden markers beneath the snow.

My father leaves us his story, this dog-loving artist marked by a star-shaped scar on the back of his head. And he would ever encourage us—no, he would insist— that we keep asking ourselves his favorite query, “Why am I still here?”

Still Together

As I turned into the military cemetery, I was happy to know that Wes Dahlberg, my dad, and my mother, Dee, would finally rest together.

Their cremated remains sat side-by-side in my car’s back seat. Dad’s brass and mother- of-pearl cremation urn gleamed like a new sculpture. My mother’s identical urn showed nine years of tarnish as it awaited my father’s remains. All was now ready for their burials.

Inside the glass welcoming room, the muted military décor celebrated the service of those buried here. The receptionist sported an irreverent shock of fluorescent pink hair, a comedic contrast against drab military hues and the respectful displays of flags and military insignia.

He ushered me into the next room to complete the burial forms. “Is there anything I can do for you? Water? Soda? A candy bar? Goodness, I’m sorry for the long delay! You’ve been so understanding! You’ve made my day!”

Suddenly, I heard two familiar, though dead, voices. Like the cemetery voices in Thornton Wilder’s play (and movie), Our Town.

First, I heard my dad say: “Wow! Look at that hair! A beautiful shade, but perhaps it needs a bit more purple!” Dad loved extravagance and color.

Then, Mother’s voice: “Oh! How wonderful! We’ve made his day! And he is so patient and so kind to us! Let’s thank the Lord for him. Who wants to pray?” Dee Dahlberg always saw the best in everyone.

Before any of us could entreat the Lord’s blessing, Kyle, the attendant, walked in from his tidy office, dressed in suit and tie, administrative duties in hand. Kyle’s Louisiana accent graced his instructions.

As we chatted about his Louisiana roots after the service, Kyle admitted they could not even consider buying a home in California. Maybe he should have stayed in the South, he pondered aloud. We could see it had been a tough slog.

“Poor man!” exclaimed Mother. “With a family to raise! Let’s give him a little offering!”

“Louisiana,” Dad chimed in. “What a place! The architecture is just … odd. Half French, half Southern Colonial, and half … who knows what! I’m glad we’re being buried in California!”

Finally, at the burial site, the gravedigger met us. Ricky, a grinning, enthusiastic, and energetic man, seemed unbowed by his somber responsibilities.

“I love my job!” Ricky said. Even after digging war veterans’ graves for most of his life, he still loved it. “These are war veterans, and I’m the last person who gets to honor our heroes.”

Upon discovering Dad was 106 years old, he stood erect. His face morphed from joyous to resolute.

“A hundred and six years old? I never buried nobody that old! No, sir! Wow, what a life! What an honor!”

He gently placed Mom and Dad’s urns into plastic bags, and then into the holes we watched him dig. Then he invited me to take a photograph.

“The headstones will be dug into the soil exactly 26 inches deep,” Ricky explained. They’ll arrive in a couple of months.”

“Hey,” Dad piped up, “What’s going to be inscribed on my headstone?” Ever the lifelong artist, we had expected his curiosity and wanted to please him.

I answered, “He Discovered God’s Beauty in All Things.”

“I love that,” he choked. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“What about mine?” Mother asked.

“Yours will say, ‘Loved God, Loved Others, Finished the Race.’”

“I did, you know! I really did love everyone. I sure tried to!”

“I know, Mom,” I assured her. “You did a great job.”

“One more thing,” she added. “Before you leave, could you place some Gospel tracts around the headstones of our new neighbors? We want them to know we’re all in this together.”

Wandering

With the determination of a Muscle Beach body builder, the pale green lizard performed pushups on tiny arms, intending to draw admiration from an adoring female. Instead, with no comely female Reptilia in sight, it drew only my attention, as it pushed hard up and down against a warmed rock. The superheated West Texas summer attracted few visitors. As we hiked along a nearly indecipherable rocky path, the sun baked both the lizard and ourselves. Still, we bet against the midday scorch. The vast desert would provide the wandering adventure we sought.

Beginning our trek at midday just as the thermometer eclipsed one hundred degrees, we realized we were out of our element. Carrying no water with us, we firmly cemented our novice status. Never mind, it would be a quick hike. Upon returning to our car at its completion, freezing air conditioning would await us. So we tripped onward, energized that we were the lone brave souls wandering through this hostile world. Occasionally, a surprised rattlesnake hastily retreated across our trail. Jackrabbit scat baked along the stones marking the trail’s edge, though we noticed the trail markers growing increasingly rare and random. Once reassuring, the pathway eventually disappeared altogether. We searched for clues. Was this a stone arrangement pointing forward, or the burial marker of previous hikers, wanderings that would prove to be their final wilderness hike? Five miles into our hike, we were lost, so what to do next? Should we soldier onward hoping to discover the markers again, or would we attempt an uncertain recovery and retrace our steps? With no water, no trail, and 105 degrees of scorching heat, we were like wandering Jews—minus the water from the rock, the manna, and Moses or Joshua.

By definition, wanderings stretch boundaries and challenge limits. Good wanderings hold adventures and untold stories, yet they can be scary and hold danger. Songs are written in their honor:

“My father was a wanderer,

And it’s also in my blood,

So I happily wander as long as I can

And I wave with my hat

Valeri, valera,

Valeri, valera ha ha ha ha ha,

Valeri, valera,

And I wave with my hat.”

Frankly, it sings much better in the original German lyrics. Nonetheless, the song accurately describes my own father. When he passed away last year, aged 106, my Artist-Father proved to be a wanderer to the end. Left-brain required tasks were not his thing. Without the aid of a check-writing coach, he would stare uncomprehendingly at his checkbook. But even though aged, by changing his mental channel to his impassioned world of art, he would defy gravity, rise and hover over his wheelchair, balance against the walker that held his paint palette, and stab at his wall-hung oil paintings. Brush in hand, he would improve them yet again! Precarious, yes. Inhibited, no. Dad never learned to stay on the beaten track or, for that matter, off his little apartment’s walls.

Can we recall the last time we wandered off the beaten track? Perhaps to our loss, many of us learned early on to stay ruthlessly on track and to avoid coloring, painting, or wandering outside the lines.

I recently installed a 100-watt solar panel on the roof of our 17-foot camping trailer that inhabits the driveway. Thus equipped, she can charge her battery unaided. It was a sort of “put a ring on it” moment, lending our relationship full empowerment. Now she can hum and buzz with glorious self-generating power, our energized equal as we wander roads, whether paved or dirt. I felt I had breathed new wandering life into our little Pinocchio.

Of course, our tiny trailer offers no equivalency to the wanderings of bold explorers. Instead, she provides us with our-scale wanderings, helping us to dial in randomized mixes of people, places and events. Sometimes, we are led on a leisurely stroll through the woods beneath ancient oaks with deeply scarred bark, moss-covered stones cradling a brook’s clear and crisp waters. At other times, our trailer delivers us into a different kind of wandering—an unpredictable Vitamix concoction of unexplored places and previously unknown faces. They are random wanderings, though afterwards we wonder if they were indeed very random. Long after these events occur, the retelling begins with, “Do you remember when…” and the warm joy of familiarity tickles our brains once again. We embrace these wanderings as being somehow sacred, each retelling resurrecting a precious, sweet nectar.

Our hiking path having disappeared in the vast West Texas desert, we rambled blindly on, sunbaked and lost, our wandering adventure grown not so sweet! By now, with sun blazing and deep concern setting in (yes, we might call it “panic”), I happened to recall one steady feature during our hours-long wandering mishap: for miles behind us, a lone utility line had bisected the cloudless sky. I now recalled observing it even from the now-distant plot where we had parked our car. I surmised that we could now follow that power line, straight as a prickly pear thorn, leading us back to our trail’s beginning and the safety of our car. And so it did. Found again! Joy and relief at being alive!

There is a counterpart to wandering: restoration. Restoration, that essential element that salves and strengthens us upon a return from wandering, can be easily underestimated. Yet restoration is the most critical component for wanderers. Returning from wandering in a desert, whether actual, relational or emotional, demands commemoration. Restoration after wandering through an illness, from captivity, and return from grieving, all deserve uncommon celebration, the sort held for soldiers returning from war.

And for those friends who have helped us both to wander and to return from wandering, we also owe uncommon celebration.

Like the utility line, they help to guide us onward toward wandering, and afterward, homeward, toward restoration.

Love Poetry

The saxophonist lifted the instrument to his lips, testing the valves and mouthpiece. A ragged chirp signaled that his breath had indeed found its way through. The musician took two abrupt steps to his right and poked his finger onto a keypad. An audio track came alive, pushing his humble audio speaker to its full, if meager, capacity. He rotated two steps leftward, and he was off, saxophoning the melody line along with his pre-recorded ensemble bandmates.

Considering the setting, a pre-Thanksgiving Day banquet at an assisted living facility where my father lives, his performance was an adequate, perhaps admirable rendition, even when he switched over to his clarinet. It evoked memories of my father-in-law, Jack, who had played clarinet in a jazz band; I imagined his full head of dark hair, boyish grin and vigorous tap-tapping of shoe upon the dance floor.

Perhaps our friend, the current saxophonist, should have stuck with his micro-woodwind band and accompanying recorded track instead of attempting to croon. His vocalization gift was modest indeed; his singing voice wandered far afield. He plastered notes randomly, mercilessly splattering them all over the musical scale. Up, down, sideways, front-ways, back-ways in fits, the notes fell. Meanwhile, the accompanying pre-recorded track galloped happily away on its own, untethered from his vocalizations.

Little did his captive audience care. A frail woman in a wheelchair clapped and cheered along with the others in the modest audience, reliving each half-century old song the musician could muster. Another woman’s plaid red dress proclaimed “Snuggle” in bold white script, topped with a gold necklace. Below her chestnut-brown dyed hair, her deeply-lined face drew into a grin. After all, these were their songs, the songs they danced to before arthritis, before dementia, and before taking up residence in this assisted-living home. Their days of dancing may have been behind them, but the music liberated the melodies deep within. Their souls were set loose.

Besides the music, not everything else progressed smoothly at the retirement home Thanksgiving party. While my wife and I sat at our assigned table with my father in his wheelchair, the elderly gentlemen seated at the four-top next to us struggled to hear one another. Outbursts of exasperated attempts at dialogue succumbed to long rounds of silence. When the man nearest me attempted to pull his wheelchair up to the table, an unfortunate imbalance of plate and food ensued. There was a moist ku-thump as his full plate of turkey, brownish dressing, pale tan gravy, contrasting ruby-red cranberry sauce, and a dollop of pale-white mashed potatoes catapulted off the table and onto his lap. No one else even noticed before he pushed the contents from his thighs and onto the floor.

Nope. No one noticed, and no one cared. It’s the behavioral norm here, a beautiful norm. The wayward musical renditions could have shut down a cheap bar. But not here. Food spills onto trousers and carpet—who cared? No one cared. Survivorship builds callouses against the irritants that take down weaker folks.

None of that stuff really mattered. None of it.

Ah, there! Can you see them, the couple sitting at the next table, just beyond the heads of my father and my wife? That’s what really matters.

It was there I watched a drama unfold. One of the guests at this special Thanksgiving table was a tall, handsome, slender man with a shock of glowing white hair so thick it would choke a comb. I had noticed him earlier in the evening. He was the sort of man who, in the days before such promotions were banned, might have posed as the Marlboro man in a cigarette commercial. He carried himself casually, easily chatting with residents around the dining room, putting them at ease.

Beside him at the table, unable to speak and immoveable except for her head, sat his wife. A crimson blouse, tucked neatly into her wheelchair cushion, peeked from beneath a chic black sweater. Spoonful after spoonful, forkful after forkful, her visiting husband patiently raised her Thanksgiving dinner to her lips, pausing from this priority to stroke her hand and occasionally chat with the other table guests. Then he would turn again to his wife to feed her, and each time he did, a grin from a much-younger version of himself took over his face, reviving the same smile that possessed him the first time they met, decades ago.

It was poetry. Each serving he offered her was a new line of a love poem.

Eventually, the meal concluded, and the white-haired man disappeared, pushing his wife’s wheelchair to her room. When he re-emerged to descend the steps to his car in the parking lot, I quickly followed him outside into the brisk night air. I touched his arm, and surprised, he turned toward me.

“Sir,” I haltingly began, uncertain how to express my admiration for the love poetry he had displayed for his wife, “I’ve been watching you during the entire Thanksgiving meal. I watched every bite of food you served your wife. I watched you stroke her hand and talk gently to her, even when she could not respond back to you. I wanted to tell you I saw all that, and it deeply affected me. Thank you for showing me…” What I said immediately felt put on, too weirdly magnanimous, clumsy, and I wanted a second chance to say it better.

“We’ve been together for 53 years,” he responded. “She’s taken care of me during all those years. And now it’s my time, my opportunity, to take care of her.”

It was dark outside. He couldn’t see my eyes moisten as he reached to shake my hand. I wandered back into the dining room, knees weaker, but a stronger person.

Appendix Street

No street lights illuminate my little street. The seventeen houses were built among orange groves before streetlights were commonplace. The oldest homes on this dead-end little lane date from the 1920’s. At night it is pitch black, a charm contrasting the white-light of the surrounding streets.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

Like an appendix whose bodily service seems useless, this seeming inconsequential one-block long neighborhood means little to the town’s population. But here, intimacy is rewarded. Its members know of the life, and the death, of their neighbors.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀

In the past few years, this small road has lost seven of its friends and neighbors. This seems a high death ratio, but perhaps because of its tiny population, the residents actually know all their neighbors. On Appendix Street, there is no second block.⠀

The residents all know each of these seven departed ones: the car mechanic with the failing heart, his school counselor wife with lifelong lung disease brought on by smoking parents, their policeman son with years-long debilitating pain due to an on-duty injury, Disneyland’s lighting and illumination engineer, the middle-aged son succumbing after surgery, the college professor whose heart gave out at his dinner table, the life-long teacher whose final stroke felled her. The homes of these last two neighbors faced directly across the street from each other; their obituaries appeared in last week’s local newspaper, directly across the page from each other.⠀⠀⠀⠀

The mulberry tree holding the neighborhood rope swing once stood in our front yard. The tree has died, and now nothing will grow in the soil in its place. A friend, a landscaper, informed me that a new tree cannot be planted exactly where a former tree has died. The decaying roots of the old tree still produce enough heat that a new tree cannot live in that same place.⠀⠀⠀⠀

We are all some kind of standard-bearer. The deposit of our lives, the standards that we carry, possess a permanence that a succeeding life does not replace. Each life deposits the labor of a life sowed, and for that, the other lives on our little street will not be the same.

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.

99-½

Dad, at age 99-½. In age, as in youth, we count by half-years.

Too often, we take the whole number in-between years for granted.

Candy Canes, Bats and Angels

One of the better veggie burgers in town is served in a restaurant that shares two names, honoring the two restaurants that merged some years ago. Retaining both names meant creating a hybrid menu representing the best of both restaurants, so the selections range from burgers to an extensive assortment of Mexican dishes. Behind the restaurant is a popular hangout for young folks, where, before she became a well-known artist, the young singer, Jewel, would sing and strum.

Anticipating a veggie burger banquet, we entered the dual-name establishment, but suddenly sensed that something was amiss. Bright, jagged patterns of red and white stabbed the ceiling, displacing its usual drab comfort. An unexpected, inexplicable army of candy canes exploded above us, the display grabbing and gluing our eyeballs upward. Thousands of candy canes dangled from the ceiling, the beams, the air conditioning ductwork, the wiring.

What could be the meaning of this candy cane convention?

Gradually, the obvious dawned upon me: it was a holiday thing. The restaurant staff had taken a break from their bleak chores of battering chicken fried steak and eyeing and peeling potatoes, indulging instead in hanging cratefuls of holiday candy cane decorations in every hang-able niche.

The display was impressive. They hung from the rafters like inverted bats, awaiting their chance to fly.

Indeed, from beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, in the dark of night sometime after the setting of the sun and the welcome gloom of the moon, the world’s biggest urban bat colony emerges for their daily feeding. In one night alone, the 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats will consume 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of insects.

Unlike the unpredictable appearance of the restaurant candy canes, these bats are a permanent fixture, giving relief from an otherwise Moses-scale plague of insect life. We can only imagine the misery of living without this batty multitude, giving us an umbrella of bug protection.

Another far more ancient and intimidating population, a legion of invisible Heavenly Hosts, also invades our world. It moves without the candy cane flash of seasonal restaurant décor. It lacks the predictable routine and daily schedule by which an under-bridge bat colony is controlled.

Instead, encampments of the Angelic Community are neither regulated by temporary seasons of celebration, nor are they governed by the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon.

Their place above the rafters of our world, the firmament, is never ending. And in the moment of our greatest need, these sentinals are spirited as emissaries, so that in a crowded but often lonely world, we are not left alone.

Notes on Trees

This year’s Thanksgiving festivities brought out the best in some of us.

Someone attached partially-completed notes to trees, a park bench, and anywhere else they could draw attention in front of one of our favorite little eateries.

The creators of the notes began many of them with, “I am thankful for…” with a blank space left for passersby to complete with their own words, while some were intentionally left blank, awaiting creative and heartfelt comments.

The note about friends is hard to beat.

But here are some other suggestions:

Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now. ~A.W. Tozer

O Lord that lends me life,
Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness. ~William Shakespeare

Got no check books, got no banks. Still I’d like to express my thanks – I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night. ~Irving Berlin

Zombies in Hollywood

I first learned of the famed corner of Hollywood and Vine while reading a Dennis the Menace comic as a young boy. The famed Taft Building still stands here, once home to offices of the silent film era’s movers and shakers including Charlie Chaplin and Will Rogers. Nearby, of course, are other landmarks such as the Capitol Records Building, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Hollywood sign and Graumann’s Chinese Theater.

And then, there’s this. A few weeks before Halloween, these early celebrants paraded on this famous corner of Hollywood and Vine—in fact, the Zombies were on parade. They groaned, they grunted, they limped on wounded limbs. They stared their otherworldly, blank stare into my eyes. And then, to my relief, they moved on without capturing me to join in their ghoulish procession.