Loading ...
A little while ago a friend of mine’s mother passed away, and much like many things in the lives of people we know these days, I found out about it on Facebook. I felt for him as you could feel his grief in his postings, but you could also see the love around him to help him through.
His grief reminded me a little of when my mom passed away back in 2008 and the love of the people around me who helped me through, especially my then girlfriend and now wife, but as this passing occurred near June 6th, what would be my father’s birthday were he still alive, I had also been thinking of my dad a lot. With those thoughts floating around my head, an incident happened that really solidified my dad continuing to influence things around me, maybe even from beyond the grave. Continue reading Maybe My Dad Hid the Puzzle Piece
I’m not a bad American. I love this country. I’m just a bad rememberer. The thing is that on the 4th of July the reminders were everywhere so how I forget remains a mystery. One of my friends posted on Facebook how she went for a five mile run and was sad because there were so few flags being flown, other people were sharing pictures of flags, taking pictures of flags, changing their profile pictures to flags, and the night before my wife said, “You didn’t put out the flag.” I replied, “That’s because it’s not the 4th of July, yet. I’ll put it out tomorrow.” I said this with all of the conviction in the world, confident in my ability to remember the next day to fly our flag.
I suppose I got it from my father. I’m not talking about my wonderful good looks, nor my nose, but my love of knick-knacks. You know knick-knacks? If you type “knick-knack” into Google you get: “a small worthless object, especially a household ornament,” with wonderful synonyms like: “trinket, novelty, gewgaw, bibelot, ornament, trifle, bauble, gimcrack, curio, tchotchke, memento, souvenir, kickshaw.” My wife simply calls them dust collectors, so I guess, I’m a dust collector, although looking at the synonyms I’m thinking of shifting to calling them bibelot if only because then it sounds fancy.
I found myself in a bell tower. I won’t go into when I found myself in a bell tower because then the story would probably be worse, but there I was. I was led to the door to the bell tower, but we thought the door was locked. The 15-year old in this 47-year old body really wanted to go into the bell tower, but alas, it appeared a little lock was there between normal-ness and adventure. Oh well. Then an opportunity came for me to be by that door again, and low and behold the lock wasn’t really locked, I opened the door and found myself, alone, climbing the stairs. But I was torn. In my head I knew I shouldn’t really be there, the initial stairs were kind of rickety, but I continued to climb. I made it to the first level, looked up the next set of stairs, and somehow continued going up.
As a Catholic and a Polish dude I was preparing for Lent. Paczki were ordered, and I began pondering the Lenten season. For years we are always told we should give something up until Easter, although the rules were always a little shady as sometimes we were told we were able to have on Sundays what we gave up, other times there was the spirit of “fasting” for the entire season. One year I did great, giving up adding sweetener, both artificial and natural, into things, specifically my iced tea and coffee. Somehow I made it through the season although I did pick up the diet soda after Easter. This season, though, I had a plan. I was going to add some things which I know kind of goes against the theory of Lent, but I felt trying to consistently do my yoga, meditation, and exercising for the season would make me a better person, but on the giving up something I went back to the old standard, giving up soda.
I have an Aerospace Engineering degree from Illinois Institute of Technology, I have made some iPhone apps, I can, or at least used to be able to play the violin, and I can cook an awesome steak, but why is it when it comes to the staple of college students everywhere, something I never actually made when I was in college, I find that I somehow suck at making Maruchan’s Ramen Noodle Soup. The discovery came a little while back when, at the request of my wife when she wasn’t feeling well, she requested I make her a bowl of soup. My immediate thought was some Lipton Cup-o-Soup, but for her she wanted Ramen Noodles.
It happened the other day. There was some candy on the counter, a bag of candy as it would be, and I was pretty sure my wife wasn’t keeping count of the number of pieces in the bag. She wasn’t home yet, but Milo was there. He did his normal greeting of lying in his bed, looking towards the door as I opened it, had a gaze of “Do I know you?”, and as I came a little closer he lifted his head a little higher, let his nose do some sniffing, and, when finally realizing it was me, he spun around a little bit then headed down to his litter box to do his business.
This past weekend I came to fully realize that I married into a family of table cleaners. Now I’m not just talking a family of table straighten-uppers, but if you gave them a cleaning rag as part of the meal you could probably just set the table right after they left and it would be cleaner than the job you would do as a waiter/waitress/buss boy/buss girl.