Uncategorized Archives : Page 6 of 25 : The Aging of Aquarius

I want a daddy do-over

This past week our youngest grandson, Tyler, started high school. His parents are shocked by how fast he’s grown and I find the whole thing amusing.

Been there, done that.

I was a single parent from the time Jeremy was four years old. The term “single parent” isn’t accurate, of course. Our son had two parents who adored him regardless of our inability to continue living together. Maybe more so because of that. He was the glue that secured the broken bond I had with his mother and he still is. Karen and I remain close because our little boy is 42 now with a rapidly aging son of his own.

I’m just going to say this once because I know he’ll protest and because I don’t want to come across as a nostalgic whiner:

Sometimes I think my son is a better dad than I was. I want a do-over.

Wait, hear me out.

I’m not saying he loves his kid more than I did. Not possible. It’s just that he’s more deeply involved in his son’s daily life and activities than I was when he was little and I’m sorry about that.

Jeremy & Tyler
Theatrical nuts don’t fall far from the tree.

Aside from the obvious, that one-parent-at-a-time thing, there is a difference in us as people.

For one thing, Jeremy has a sharp mind for mechanics and can build stuff. I’m a mechanical idiot. I will offer that as an excuse for never building him the tree house I always wanted him to have. (That and the fact that we never had the requisite tree, but it still haunts me.) I didn’t have a tree house when I was a kid and I wanted one for both of us.

Jeremy and Emily are scout leaders. I actually tried that when he was little but his Tiger Cub pack of four kids broke up after two or three outings. That group was led by all dads, no moms. Go figure.

More than anything I just wish I had taken my kid to see the world when he was old enough to appreciate it and to give him cherished lifetime memories of the great times and big things we did together.

We didn’t do those things and I’m still kicking myself.

CarolAnn reminds me of all the things we did do when our boys were growing up. We took them on a cruise, we took them to Disneyland and the Grand Canyon; Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone — certainly far more in the way of adventure than either of us had when we were growing up.

Still, there are regrets and I suppose that’s true for every parent who ever watched his or her child leave the nest far too soon.

I should have taken him to New York for Broadway theater, we both love that stuff. Why didn’t I ever take him to London, for that matter? Or to Boston, the cradle of American history?

Regret is just a memory written on my brow, and there’s nothing I can do about it now. -Beth Nielsen Chapman

Missed opportunities never fade completely but like everything else you get over them, you learn to appreciate what you have and reluctantly shrug off the things you just didn’t get around to doing. Sometimes I still want a do-over but these days the thought barely passes my mind before a soothing explanation follows:

Your son is a better dad because you set the bar pretty high and taught him how to clear it.

It took me a long time to spin that story and I’m sticking to it.

Opie and me

CarolAnn and I recently cleaned the tool shed out back and evicted three rats in the process. We went to Lowe’s to get rat traps but disagreed on what kind to get. I wanted a quick kill. She wanted the kind that would stick to a rat’s feet and hold them until we could throw them in the trash because, as she rightly reminded me, the snap traps don’t always work. The rats are wily, they grab the bait and make a clean getaway. The sticky traps are a certain though torturous death sentence.

In the end my emotional sensitivity won out. She loves that about me, though she doesn’t agree. We didn’t buy either. I guess I’ll have to depend on the dogs to solve the problem.

When I was a boy my dad used to take me fishing but it upset me to hook a fish, yank it out of its home and eat it. Once Dad took me rabbit hunting in Wyoming because that’s what he did when he was my age growing up in Wyoming. He gave me a rifle, we found rabbits and I intentionally fired to miss.

I can’t face the idea of killing a creature just because it wandered into our garage or even our home. I don’t like rats or spiders but I also don’t see that I have a right to kill them. I told CarolAnn, who comes from a family of hunters, that this extreme sensitivity comes from my childhood when I fired a slingshot at a bird on a fence. I actually killed the thing, I told her. It destroyed me.

Now I doubt it happened.

Research has proven than human memories are highly fluid. The events we remember as sure as we know our names are actually reconstructed from bits and pieces of actual experience mixed with impressions from any number of sources pieced together by our emotions and imaginations. (For more fascinating insight, see the link at the bottom of this post.)

Lately I’ve been binge watching the old Andy Griffith show from my childhood and I came across this powerful scene.

I suddenly doubt that I actually killed a bird with my slingshot. I think I’ve been channeling Opie for 60 years.

Doesn’t matter. It’s why I stopped fishing decades ago. I’m not going to start again now. I still won’t torture a rat simply because it wandered into our declared space. I’ll continue to carry spiders outside on a piece of paper.

Yes, I’m a hypocrite but I’m not sorry or embarrassed. I love eating meat and fish; I have no problem with hunters and people who fish. I just can’t do it myself.

Opie’s pain is mine.

——————

If the uncertainty of memory interests you, I strongly recommend listening to this podcast by Malcolm Gladwell. It will change your view of your own life and the world in which we live: http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/24-free-brian-williams

Biometrics: killing yourself for fitness

Listen here and/or read below:

My wife wears a FitBit. It’s a device that fits on your wrist like a watch. It can measure your heart rate, how long and deeply you slept last night, how many steps you’ve taken each day and other personal fitness data. Sooner or later I’m sure it well be able to tell you your weight without making you stand on a platform we call a scale. (Now that I mention it that seems pretty archaic, doesn’t it?)

Sometimes CarolAnn comes home from work chirping, “I walked ten thousand steps today!” On sleepy weekend mornings she occasionally moans, “I only slept 6 hours and 17 minutes. No wonder I’m so tired.” My immediate reaction to these proclamations is to chuckle and then roll my eyes in something bordering annoyance. I manage to avoid both.

In a desperate attempt to be healthy we’re stressing ourselves to death.

“Felix, why don’t you leave yourself alone. Don’t tinker.” – Oscar Madison

A couple of days ago I discovered something new and it delights me because I think it may signal the jumping of the shark in the biometric self-worry industry:

It’s a smart fork.

No shit.

HAPILABS 105 Bluetooth-Enabled Smart Fork (Pink)

For 60 to 100 bucks you can buy a fork that lights up and buzzes when you’re eating too fast. It connects via Bluetooth to iOS and Android apps to watch your eating stats in real time. It will tell you how long it took to eat your meal, the number of “fork servings” (each time food is brought to the mouth) per minute and you can upload your eating data for analysis and coaching to help improve your eating behavior.

Coaching!

This is not a joke. Amazon and eBay are both sold out. People who bought it are leaving loving reviews. Here’s my favorite:

I personally loved it! Never used it to eat, but did use it with my bow to shoot and stop some bad guys during my stay in Vegas this past summer. It saved my ass! – Vilma Valdez

I seriously doubt that Vilma really bought a smart fork. She’s seems smarter than that. But I also think P.T. Barnum is laughing his ass off in the hereafter.

The junk drawer

My keys. I know what two of them are for.

I have seven keys on my key ring. I only use two of them and have no idea what the others are for. I should probably just throw them away but I if I did I’m sure I’d suddenly need one.

In our house CarolAnn and I have a lot of stuff in rarely opened drawers, on tables and counter tops, stuff we never use but don’t throw away. Pens, for example. Many have dried up and don’t work but do we throw them away? Nope. We just put them down where we found them believing, I guess, that they will eventually heal themselves and be good as new.

We also have batteries lying around, though not as many as when our boys were still living at home. Our youngest had a weird compulsion to remove batteries from every device in the house and then lose the little plastic covers designed to keep them from escaping and sneaking off inside and under the furniture. Eventually we had to tape down all new batteries in toys, cameras and TV remotes.

(This is embarrassing. Before I wrote this CarolAnn apparently organized our junk drawer behind my back. It looks neat but it’s still junk.)

The problem with loose batteries is I have no idea whether there’s any juice left in a stray Duracell so I throw it away. Sure, it’s a waste of money but it avoids the aggravation of trying three or four dead batteries the next time I need a live one.

In our kitchen we have a junk drawer where we keep stuff we don’t want to get rid of but have no immediate use for. I think junk drawers are standard features in American homes, probably in homes all around the world. In Alaska you’d probably find a lot of rusty fish hooks and blubber jar lids. At our house it’s rubber bands, business cards and bent paper clips. I think I have a yo-yo in there, somewhere in the back. Really.

“Junk drawers are the perfect resting place for the random assortment of items that you want quick access to and use often,” says organizing expert Tova Weinstock. – Huffington Post, April 2015.

(Some expert. She doesn’t even understand the definition of ‘junk’. – Moi, today)

Modern technology is adding to our pile of unusable stuff that never gets thrown away. We have a million cords and cables, old cell phone chargers and even old computers that are prohibited in the landfill. You have to find a hazmat disposal site to get rid of a computer these days.

There’s something about a judicious amount of junk lying around our house that makes me feel comfortable. It makes a house a home, as they say.

Occasionally I’ll go into someone else’s home and know immediately that something is very, very wrong. They have no stuff in sight. Everything is neat perfection. It looks like a model home; the only thing missing is a little sign on the kitchen sink reading, “Decorator item”.

I worry that the people who live there have very neat and quiet lives.

Some day, probably a Saturday morning after I’ve had an unusually long and deep night’s sleep, I’m going to wake up energized and filled with a burning desire to finally deal with all the stuff and junk in our house.

I’ll take it all out to the garage.

Don’t talk to me

This morning on our radio show (KLIF, Dallas) my friend and on-air partner Amy Chodroff and I were talking about a new service offered by Uber, the rideshare company. For a premium you can now put in an order for a car with a driver who will keep his or her mouth shut.

No, really. If you don’t want to have pleasant chat with your driver just select that option from the Uber menu on your smartphone app and pay extra.

Here’s Amy and me on the radio this morning:

Everyone under the age of 30 has grown up in a world where they can express thoughts in brief bursts of 140 characters or less without having to listen to a response. They don’t actually communicate as much as they simply swap thoughts expressed in abbreviated code.

They don’t have to talk and they don’t want to.

Every generation goes off in new directions that their elders can’t understand or follow. For all our annoyance and worries I’m sure today’s young people will grow up just fine and they will somehow make their world work, probably better than we can imagine.

And guess what? It’s not my problem.

I wish them well.

Every day is Mothers Day

Don & Nancy Williams on their wedding day, Aug. 6, 1950. I was born exactly one year later.

I’m the oldest of four kids born to my mom, Nancy Laura Webster Williams. She was still three months from her 20th birthday when I entered the world. Now, as we approach our 68th anniversary as mother and child I’m still trying to understand our indescribable bond.

Until this past year I could talk with my mother. We’d laugh and love with the sparkle in our eyes meant only for each other and with words that couldn’t begin to explain the depth of who we are together. But this past year she lost her words and laughter.

She lives but she barely knows my name and voice.

Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. – Erich Fromm

I’m not sad. Her memories of us may be scrambled but she gave them to me for safe keeping.

I remember the songs she sang at home and the silly sense of humor she taught me. I remember her hugs and kisses and all the smart things she said; the pain and tears she shared and the sunshine of her smile that followed.

My mother loves me. She has checked every box in the official Maternal Love and Devotion handbook every single day of my existence. I’m in her heart if not quite secure in her mind.

We are the science of genetics combined with all the flowery words of poets.

Today can be a good day or a bad day. It’s up to you. – Mom

We are a mother and her son.

I will tell her again tomorrow that I love her. She might not hear me but she knows.

How would you change your life?

How would you change your life if you could have a total do-over?

The big tree at Big Tree Park, Glendora, CA. CarolAnn and I lived half a block away. Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

The idea of going into the past to change history is science fiction meat and potatoes. It teaches us the time travel paradox: if you went back in time and killed your grandfather you would no longer exist and therefore could not go back in time to kill your grandfather.

Let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Just ask yourself, what would you do differently if you could?

I wouldn’t change a second of my childhood. It was a wonderful childhood. I loved my parents deeply and they loved me. Growing up in the 1950s and 60s was the ideal age of innocence, security and adventure.

I wouldn’t change my first marriage, either. Yes, we got married too young but if we had waited chances are it wouldn’t have happened at all and our son would not have been born. That would be a terrible loss for us and for the world he grew into. Besides, we were young and in love, each of us for the first time. Who would give that up? Would you erase your first love?

I have many fond memories of that time in my life. Our marriage didn’t fail, it just ended so we could both move on.

Between marriages I lived life large with a million laughs and many friends. I had those so-called wild times that people usually have when they’re ten years younger than I was. It wasn’t perfect but it was a lot of fun. I was catching up on my life lessons. I wouldn’t change a moment.

The wild times led me to CarolAnn. We met in a honky tonk. She likes to emphasize the fact that we met on a country swing dance team but the fact is if I hadn’t gone into that bar for some beers, neither knowing about nor interested in a dance team, I would never have met the love of my life.

I’ve had pain and sorrow, disappointments and screwups. Those things are important. They teach us perspective and push us into the next phase of our lives. The decisions we make, the choices of whether to turn left, right or go straight are what matters. Those decisions are informed by our experience.

If I could do it all over again I’d change just one moment. I wouldn’t climb up on that roof December 13, 1990. Falling has given me 29 years of pain and denied CarolAnn the opportunity of dancing with her husband the way we used to.

I’d change that in a heartbeat but nothing else.

What would you change if you got a total do-over?

Pleasantries in the men’s room

I had a nice, short conversation with a man named Jaime this morning. He’s one of those people you see at work nearly every day, but if you work in a building with a lot of large companies as we do you tend to just nod and smile as you pass in the hall. You rarely say anything more than just, “Good morning.”

Jaime and I nod and smile in the men’s room pretty much every day because that’s his office. He’s the janitor and doesn’t mind being called that. I know because I asked him.

I guess Jaime’s work schedule pretty much stays the same every day because my schedule stays the same. We usually meet during the 7 a.m. network news.

After nodding and smiling and saying “Good morning” to Jaime every morning I finally asked him his name a couple of weeks ago. He told me, I gave him mine and then we both smiled and went on about our business. He was cleaning toilets and I was about to use the urinal. Guys don’t shake hands in men’s rooms.

This morning I saw Jaime again and the fact that we had swapped names made me feel like I could talk with him for a moment, so I did.

“Jaime, how are you?” I began.

“Good. How are you doing?” he replied.

I told Jaime I was fine, thank you, and then I told him I’ve noticed him because he’s always smiling and seems happy. He told me he is happy and he seemed amused by the fact that we were talking. After all, I was his “customer” in a manner of speaking.

“I’ve seen a lot of guys cleaning restrooms,” I said, “but you’re the only one who always seems to be smiling,” I explained.

This is probably TMI as we say these days, but this part of our conversation actually happened while I was facing the wall tending to business. Jaime was wiping down the counter and sinks. My point being we weren’t actually making eye contact just yet.

When I was able to address him face-to-face I said something like, “I just wanted you to know I see you every morning and you seem happy.”

“Yes,” he said, surprised but pleased. “I’m a happy person.”

I said, “It shows and that’s unusual. I like that.”

As a native Californian instigating conversation with a stranger is nearly unthinkable but I’ve been in Texas for seven years now and it’s fun.

Jaime beamed and thanked me. Then he felt bold enough to brag a little.

“I’m just happy,” he told me. “I have a nice family and friends and I have a job. Why not be happy?”

He seemed very proud of his job and his happy life. I think he was also glad that I had talked with him.

Jaime made my day and I think I made his.

PS. Three weeks after I wrote this it has suddenly occurred to me that the phrase, “Pleasantries in the men’s room” could be seriously misinterpreted and is no proper title for anything proper. I could change it but I see no point, really. If the headline offended you — or was misleading in a disappointing way, I apologize. — DW 5-8-19

Are you happy?

I’ve been thinking about happiness lately. I believe we all need to check in with ourselves every so often and ask how we’re doing.

Are you happy?

The answer tends to move around a bit. We respond with shifting qualifications:

“Yes, I’m mostly happy but…”

Most people aren’t being fair with themselves. Happiness, like life itself, ebbs and flows. This moment has nothing to do with yesterday or last year when you were promoted. Right now is completely detached from your divorce or that time you were fired from a job.

Dump your baggage. Nobody is forcing you to carry it.

We’ve heard it so many times we shrug it off as philosophical fluff but I’m here to tell you, it’s true:

You really are as happy as you decide to be.

My mother impressed this on me when I was a young child. I can hear her now as plainly and lovingly as when she said it sixty years ago:

“This can be a good day or a bad day,” she said. “It’s up to you.”

Mom inoculated me from life’s disappointments and tragedies. Oddly, it took 50+ years before it became a conscious realization that I could make my daily affirmation.

I’m not always happy, nobody is. That’s the beauty of it, the ebb and flow of our lives. You can’t fully experience joy or misery without knowing the other.

“You can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes”.”
Lauren Oliver, Delirium

So many people these days seem to crave sympathy for life’s ordinary challenges like having to do things they don’t want to do or simply waking up in the morning.

I wake up groggy and tired like everyone else but I’m thankful for waking up. I force myself to embrace each new day.

Decide to be happy.

I know that’s sappy (rhyme not intended but unavoidable) but the mere fact that you find so much in ordinary everyday life to whine about is a self-imposed disregard for one immutable fact:

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wanted very much for this post to be inspirational, not preachy. I may have failed in that. But since we’re nearing the end, let me add one more idea about happiness that you can consider for yourself in your own good time:

Is griping useful? No. Is happiness infectious? Absolutely.

For your own sake and for those of us who have to deal with you and want to like you, choose happiness.

Dennis Prager often says we have a responsibility to others to be happy. I agree. To put it more bluntly:

Nobody wants to hear you whine. We all have problems. Smile and stop being a pain in the ass.

This can be a good day or a bad day, it’s up to you.
Nancy Williams