Category: Random Semicoherent Thoughts

The second house that Ms. Boss and I bought as a couple was a house that we ‘moved’ from a lot about two miles away to a piece of property we owned. It wasn’t a mobile home or a manufactured home, it was a regular home like you’d find in any subdivision that was put on a couple of steel beams and moved to our newly-poured foundation. When they poured the foundation wall, I told them to make it two and a half feet high. Knowing that my father-in-law, brother-in-law, and I would have to crawl under the house to plumb it, I asked for plenty of space and they poured the walls just I like I asked. Moving day came on a day I had to work, so I wasn’t there when they tried to put the house on the foundation. It turns out the beams would only go so high, and they had to make a raised path of dirt right down the middle – a path they couldn’t remove once the house was in place. Unfortunately, right down the middle is where the sewer line needed to hang from the bottom of the house making it necessary to crawl through a space significantly less than two and a half feet to get to most of the important parts of the house. On my first attempt to get over to where my father-in-law was to help him out, I found this out the hard way. I got stuck… and I panicked. It took me awhile to wriggle myself free. I don’t know that I ever crawled over to the north side of the house again. It cost me more than a few dollars and favors to get things done down there until we moved.

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Our driveway at the same house was almost three quarters of a mile long. The first hundred yard were paved, but from there on, the gravel on the drive got thinner and thinner until there was nothing. While we had a four wheel drive Suburban to navigate this drive most times, it wasn’t always up to the task. One particular winter, the temperature yoyo’d for days, above freezing during the day, well-below freezing at night. It turned what was normally a fairly solid piece of our driveway into an absolute quagmire. I buried that Suburban up to the axles bringing the family home one afternoon. After getting the family out and walking them successfully home, I started digging. About an hour later, I got it unstuck and drove up the hill. For the next two weeks, we parked on the far side of the muddy spot and walked a quarter mile in. The next morning, I’d wake up, walk to the Suburban, drive it up to the house on frozen ground that was as good as pavement, take the girls to school, and drive back home. By the time we got back home, it was a impassable quagmire again. Nothing brings your attention to the weather forecast like a long, dirt driveway.

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One weekend at the same house, our youngest Bosslet, less than a year old at the time, started acting like she was under the weather. Ms. Boss took the twins to church an hour away in the Suburban leaving our eldest, our youngest, and myself at home. No big deal, right? Wrong. Once they were an hour away with their phones off in church, the youngest Bosslet had a seizure, something I’ve never seen before in my life. The one thing I knew I needed to do was get her to the hospital. The one thing I knew I had no way of doing was getting her to the hospital. While I had a car parked at the house, it was a two-wheel drive and parked on the wrong side of the muddy spot due to piss poor planning. I called 9-1-1, scooped up my youngest, told my eldest to follow me, and started hiking. I got about a third of the way down the driveway when I slipped and fell in a spot we called ‘the Big Crossing’. I sat there for five seconds, covered in mud from head to toe, and said a single word, almost under my breath – ‘help’. I don’t know who I expected to hear me and I don’t know why I said it at all, but asking for help from anyone or anything has never been something that was easy for me. I picked myself up, I picked my youngest up, and I started hiking again. It must have been some sort of sight for the ambulance, who arrived just as I got to the end of the driveway, seeing some fat guy covered in mud from head to toe carrying a baby in his arms. I swore I would never be trapped like that or in that bad of shape where I couldn’t rise to the challenge ever again. Unfortunately, it’s all too easy to forget promises like this you make to yourself.

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I worked midnights for the better part of the first twelve years that I worked in public safety. There were times, especially when I worked five days a week, that I felt like I would never have a normal life. It seemed like I was doomed to miserable on the days that I worked or the days that I was off. Fortunately, I eventually found my ‘midnight tribe’ – a group that had the same strange schedule that I did. I certainly helped to hang out with a group of people who didn’t think that being up at 3:00 in the morning on a Tuesday was a strange thing.

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The early years of the Boss Family were some pretty lean times. We had twins shortly after we were married and decided to move closer to family. No sooner had we established ourselves in our new location, our youngest came along. Working for Ms. Boss was out of the question as child care would have swallowed her income. I changed careers to make the move and was working a job an hour away at less pay than I was before. To generate some extra income, I worked a second job on nights and weekend. Monday though Friday was a one hour commute, eight and a half hours of work, one hour home. Saturday days were completely devoted to church. Saturday nights were an eight hour shift at my second job. Sundays were devoted to any work that needed to be done around the house. Our weekly food budget for six was $75. I applied for a supervisory job in the middle of all of this, only to be told that I was not what they were looking for. I can remember sitting there at times thinking “is this it? Is this all that there is? Is this what the rest of what my life will look like?” I’m happy to report today that the answer is “no”.

I’ve been writing another RST post that’s almost good to go, but it centers around the notion of being trapped. If you’re reading this, you officially made it to 2021 and should be greeted by optimism and anticipation of new beginnings, not by ‘get me the HELL out of here’.

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When I was a bachelor, the first thing I ate in my new abodes – apartments, then a house – was Cream of Wheat – a nice, big, hot bowl made with milk and a large knob of butter and several spoonfuls of sugar on top. It was always in the same bowl – dusty pink on the outside, white on the inside. I’d draw the spoon around the top outer edge where it was cooling, bring it to my mouth, and savor the sweet, buttery taste. It’s actually been years since I’ve had a bowl, but I can taste it even as I’m writing about it. As fond as the memories are, I much prefer seeing my bachelorhood behind me.

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When Ms. Boss and I bought our first house together, she had a bit of a different idea. The day after our first night in the house was Thanksgiving, actually our first one as a married couple. Our bed was set up in the first floor living room because we were still working on our room on the second floor. I awoke after a day of sleeping – I was working midnights at the time – to find Ms. Boss cooking every single recipe from that years Better Homes and Gardens Thanksgiving article. After shaking the cobwebs, I started helping. The result was the most amazing meal I’ve had for any holiday. So magical was the meal that Brussels sprouts went straight from something I would never ever eat, to my favorite vegetable. Even though our crew is mostly vegetarian or vegan these days, recipes from that meal remain staples in the Boss household almost twenty years later. Sometimes, the things you start at the very beginning endure.

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I remember very our first home cooked meal as a couple very fondly. We arrived at the beach house where we spent our honeymoon after a long day of driving. The first bags up the stairs were the groceries. Ground beef was quickly placed on the skillet before I went downstairs to grab more bags. By the time I returned, the ground beef was super brown and crispy. I opened the jar of pasta sauce, stirred it into the beef, and hoped for the best. What I got was amazing. It turns out, I discovered, that browning the meat actually means browning the meat, not making it into a gray mass. Sometimes, you just have to be patient. I wished I would have learned that lesson fully back then. To be honest, I’m still learning that lesson now.

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Lest you think all I do is eat, I have other stories of beginnings. In the earlier days of our marriage, Ms. Boss and I went to church every week. At one point, it was a three-hour ordeal getting all six of us washed, clothed, packed, and out the door. As we drove down the driveway, Ms. Boss would turn towards me and straighten my collar and fix my tie. After doing the lion’s share of the work to get the kids ready, we weren’t truly ready to begin our journey until she felt she took a moment to take care of me as well. While we don’t get dressed up as often as we once did and the children are able to take care of themselves these days, I still look forward to having her putting the finishing touches on us starting our evening together.

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How did I begin 2021? In bed. I haven’t been sleeping well lately and had been up since before 5. I woke up when one of my daughters yelled ‘Happy New Year’, heard the farm down the street shoot their guns as they do every year, then rolled back over and went to sleep. I woke this morning at 5:30, sat in meditation, journaled, solved some chess puzzles, then started working on a house project. All in all, I thought it was appropriate for where I’m at in my life at the moment.

At some point in the morning every day I’m at work – often right when I walk in the door – I sit down and write Ms. Boss a text about something I’m thankful for regarding her or our relationship together. When I started, I figured I would highlight one particular aspect of her character every day for a few days and that would be the end of it. Several months later I’m still going. Why? One of the positive lessons I learned from church is that prayers should be like finely ground incense – the more you break it down, the more you find you can be thankful for and such is the relationship with Ms. Boss. My day just isn’t complete without this.

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When I’m in a less charitable humor, you’ll hear me complain about the trials and tribulations of having four daughters – they want this, they need that, they won’t do this, they shouldn’t do that. To hear me tell it when I’m in such a state, they run the range from mildly irritating to outright pains. Then come those moments, however, those golden moments where they accomplish this or finish that or do something that shows that we’re not bad parent last after all that absolutely makes the whole child-rearing thing worth it. I am thankful, so very thankful they are in my lives and I can call them mine.

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I graduated from college in 1993 into what was at the time the worst job market since World War II. I moved straight from my college apartment into my parents basement and stayed there for six long weeks before someone hired me as a dispatcher – a skill I didn’t study for but nonetheless learned in college through part time employment. I’ve never been unemployed since. What’s more, I’ve been and around public safety communications – a profession I am proud to be a part of – for all but fifteen months out of the last thirty-plus years. The most important thing out of all of this is that I met ,wooed, and married Ms. Boss because of my chosen profession. To say that I am thankful for all of this would be a gross understatement.

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I should be dead. Three times now I’ve made decisions that should have killed me – once in my twenties because I was impatient, once in my twenties because I was drunk, and once in my thirties because I wasn’t paying close enough attention. All three times I escaped unharmed in any way. No, I don’t want to talk about them. I dodged life-altering effects of medication three times – once before I was even born because I was lucky, once in my thirties because my doctor wrote a prescription but wadded it up before he gave it to me, and once in my forties because I was cheap and asked for the twice a day dosage instead of the more expensive once a day. I’m thankful that all of those situations turned out the way they did.

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At 29 with a brand new masters degree in hand, I interviewed for my dream job – or at least what I thought was my dream job at the time – on the West Coast and absolutely crushed it. When they made their offer, I drew a line in the sand and said I would only take the job if they crossed it. After some back and forth, they said they would meet my demands, but not until the next year. I turned them down. The next summer I met Ms. Boss. What’s more, she shook up my mindset and journeyed with me down a path that led me to where I am now, a place I’m truly content. I am thankful beyond belief for that.

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My life is rich and full of blessings whenever I take the time to stop and look and assess myself with a loving heart. I could go on and on about how I’m thankful, but this is where this particular entry ends. Thank you, dear reader, for reading.

While discussing her upcoming work anniversary, Ms. Boss made the statement that it felt like she had been in her new role in her job a long time, but that it seemed I’d been in my job just a short while. I agreed with her right up to the point where we both realized that she was promoted AFTER I got my new job. It’s funny how the concept of time seems so elastic even comparing things during the same period of time.

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I recently took up the practice of meditation. I’ve tried it out several times before because people said I should, but didn’t really know why. Now I know. Meditation enhances your ability to dissociate yourself from the constant barrage of thoughts that want to take up your bandwidth including – most important to me – anger. Immediately after I picked up this nugget from a book I was reading, an opportunity to try this out presented itself… and it worked. I’ve sat in meditation every day since, sitting a little longer every week. Sometimes, the time flies by – my timer sounding at the end surprising me back into reality. Other times it absolutely drags causing me to check and see if my timer is working… with the inevitable and disappointing discovery that it is.

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As I mentioned in my last Random post, I used to work seventeen hour shifts on the regular. While it may seem counterintuitive, seventeens were almost easier to handle than my regular ten hour shifts. On tens, I used to watch the clock. On seventeens, I resigned myself early on that I would be at work forever.

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I have an objective measure of how bad a movie is. The earlier in the movie I look at my watch, the worse the movie.

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Haiku 35 talks about how I needed an app to find the moon. I wrote this because the app for my weather station started showing the phase of the moon and when moonrise and moonset were. I happened to look at it the other day while, saw that the moon should have just risen, looked up, and saw it. Once upon a time, man would have known the time of day by looking at the sky rather than the other way around.

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I know I said that Random posts would be fewer and farther between. I also know that posting two in one week is incompatible with that statement. You can thank (or blame) my bosses for this. Now that I’m commuting one day a week to work instead of five, I seem to have a lot more time on my hands.

A windstorm passed through town yesterday that knocked the top of a dead ash tree onto my roof. While I was very fortunate – a foot in any direction would have resulted in quite a bit of damage – I wanted to make sure it got removed as soon as possible. While I tried previously to get my neighbor who runs a tree service to remove it, he did not get the call yesterday. Someone willing to answer the call on a Sunday and promised to be out in the morning did. He arrived promptly at 9:00 with his crew of eight, quoted me a price of $1000 to remove it, and got the job. Half an hour later, his crew was done and on its way. What did I get for something that cost me three days pay? A tall gangly dude who could climb trees better than I can walk, a master class in chain saw work, a man who never dropped the cigarette while picking up two huge logs it would have taken two of me trips to carry, and one less tree on my house. Expensive? Yes. Too much? Probably. Worth it to me? Yes.

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My grandfather worked maintenance in an aluminum foundry. A proud union man, he worked hard for his money. A man like that deserves his vacation, right? He took it, alright, and used it to paint houses. Working with a brush in each hand, he painted as many houses as he could. He used that money to put my mother and his sister through the best nursing school in the state. He settled for no less than a BSN for both of them.

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My father sold heavy machinery in a sizable territory for a living. While most fathers spent their evenings with their families or at sports or in front of the television, he talked on the phone with the clients he wasn’t able to reach during the day. He sold during some times that weren’t all that kind to his business. Cell phones made his life a touch easier, but it was the hard years beating the bushes and building the relationships that truly paid off in the end.

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I worked as a police and fire dispatcher for over two decades. While it’s not the physical profession my grandfather worked, it does take its toll on you. The profession hemorrhages overtime and I worked more than my fair share of it. Seventeen hour shifts were a common occurrence. Unlike many others, I chose to take the pay rather than earn comp time. The I figured it, everyone’s comp time would eventually find its way to my pay check. I now work for salary in an occupation ‘adjacent’ to dispatching. If only I could earn overtime for all that I do.

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My mother and my stepmother worked – something not too terribly unusual for my generation. All three of my grandmothers worked – I include my stepgrandmother here – something a little bit more unusual. So I’m sure it’s not all that surprising that I married someone who also works hard. Ms. Boss and I met because we both worked in the same profession. Kids came relatively shortly after we were married and she put quite a bit of energy into that. After our last one was born, however, she went back to work as an eight-hour barista. Just six years later or so, she made it all the way to district manager where she became one of the best performers in the nation. She also earned her associates, bachelors, and MBA while still caring for our four daughters. When the boss she was working for wouldn’t support her moving up in the company, she found someone in another company who would. When that employer didn’t necessarily want the changes she was hired to make after all, she pivoted to another profession that made use of her best talent – her intelligence. If it wasn’t for pandemic, she would have been traveling internationally in 2020 exercising expertise in her field. Yes, she works hard, but more attractive to me, she also works smart.

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I’ve been a slave to the cellphone for the past ten years in my role as “essential personnel”. Recently, I’ve started saying “I’m looking forward to retirement” despite the fact I’m fifteen years away from it. But am I really? I worked my first full day from home yesterday because my employer told me to, and as much as I thought I’d enjoy it, it did produce some anxiety in me that I wasn’t doing “real work”. I guess I’ll just have to keep going. Besides, tree removal has to be paid for somehow.

I told Ms. Boss the other I was doing to start a podcast. “It’s going to be on haiku,” I said. She smiled in reply, but not a smile that said “that’s a great idea”, it was more of a “what in the what are you thinking?” To her immense credit, she did not say anything bad about this… plan. In fact, she told me the exact thing that I needed to hear: “If you’re going to do this, you need to do your research.” I started doing so immediately.

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I had no idea, but there’s a Haiku Society of America. As soon as they process my application, I’ll be a member. It’s not Wednesday, but here’s the link: https://www.hsa-haiku.org/

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Here’s another something I had no idea about – most modern English haiku do not have a 5-7-5 syllable pattern. Most of them actually have less than seventeen syllables, sometimes significantly less. It’s more about putting you in a certain frame of mind with a minimal amount of words than any pattern. So given this revelation, what do I do? I’ve enjoyed the act of wrangling my thoughts into a 5-7-5, but I’ve left lots of great four and six syllable phrases on the cutting room floor because it isn’t haiku. Now, however, I’m being told it would have been perfectly okay to use them. I look at it this way – using a 5-7-5 forces me to meditate on my words so that I bring the truest expression of what I’m trying to say, so I will continue to use that form. That being said, if I create a phrase that does not conform that I believe will rock you to your core, I won’t be afraid to use it. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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I’ve also learned that there is something in haiku called ‘haibun’. Haibun is a combination of prose or something ‘prose-like’ with a haiku. The two parts exist to compliment one another to immerse the reader in the experience the author is trying to create with the haiku portion. I already laid Haibun 1 on you a few days ago. It’ll take some time to get my legs underneath me to repeat that feat, but you will see it again.

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Yes, dear reader, the amount of haiku has increased in this space. That’s where my head is now. I want to present my thoughts in the most concise way possible and express myself somehow every day. Will the amount of Random Semicoherent Thoughts decrease as a result? They most certainly will. I must go where my life wills me to go and long form writing just isn’t where I’m headed at the moment. Maybe one of these days…

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grey hair falling

not a younger man

but a different one

I got my haircut today. Once upon a time this would have cost me $6. Today it cost me $50. Yes, inflation explains some of that, but there are other reasons. unlike some of my previous jobs, my current one allows me to have facial hair. As a result, I started growing my beard out this past Thanksgiving. It turns out that growing a beard is more complicated than I thought… and I lack the necessary skill set to do so with acceptable results. The barber gets part of my paycheck to do so and for once, I can afford it.

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I tried to grow a mullet once. While a senior in high school in 1989, I decided that a mullet would fit the heavy-metal stage I found myself in. My step-mother, who did my hair at my time, complied with my request and let it grow long in the back. What I didn’t understand is that the wiry, kinky hair that my parents blessed me with isn’t suitable for that kind of haircut. Instead of growing down, it grew straight back into a wedge looking thing. I have one picture from high school that shows a curl of hair sticking out sideways from the back of my head. It wasn’t the least bit pretty – business in the front, ridiculous in the back.

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I’m nowhere near a mullet these days. ‘No guard all over’ are the instructions I give the barber these days. The hair on my face is currently longer than the hair on top of my head. It’s one sure way to get the gray out.

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I did not get my kinky hair from my father -his was decidedly straight. I also did not inherit my father’s male pattern baldness, something he tried to hide with a terrible comb-over. Fortunately for all of us, my stepmother took action to save us all. She and my father visited the same hairstylist. When my father fell asleep in the chair – as he almost always did when he got a haircut – my stepmother signaled to the hairstylist to cut it off. When he awoke, the deed was done. Sneaky? Yes. Necessary? Also yes.

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My mother lost most of her hair when she had cancer. I remember her in wigs, bandannas, and other head coverings. The one image of her natural hair is from the moment she first discovered it was growing back after her first round of chemotherapy was done. Her hair was kinky and wiry and speckled with gray and nothing like what she had before cancer. I can still remember the distraught look on her face from that moment. Unfortunately, it’s one of my most memorable images of her.

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Earlier this year, I went to the BMV to renew my license. While filling out the application, the clerk asked me what color my hair was. I answered that it used to be brown, but that I also didn’t know any more. She took one look at me, said it was still brown and wrote it down. Between that and passing the vision test without glasses, I’m calling that a good day at the BMV.

I mowed the yard today. No, that doesn’t make me special – hundreds of thousands of middle-aged men in the Midwest mowed their yard today. It was about the seventh time I mowed the yard this year. Again, this hardly differentiates me from other men my age. What makes this particular mundane chore different is that up until about four years ago, there wasn’t a yard to mow at my house. When I bought my house in a neighborhood full of free thinkers just outside a college town seven years ago, you could barely see the house from the street despite the fact that it was no farther back than a normal house in a suburb. A previous owner of the house, who had purchased the house in 1958, decided that thirty-nine years of lawn care was enough and just let it go. The front yard become the province of honeysuckle, scrubby trees, and poison ivy. Slowly but surely, Ms. Boss and I beat back the jungle until a lawnmower became a necessity. Four years ago, I mowed once. The next year, I probably tripled that number. Last year I made it seven times total. This year I find myself mowing with the frequency of your average middle-aged midwestern male for the first time.

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As teenager, I was hired by the company my father worked for to mow their lawn. Thirty minutes travel there, four hours riding, two hours pushing, one hour string trimming, and the ride home made for a long day. I made decent money for a decent day’s work… until I got fired. It seems that the Gravely mower I used needed oil to run properly. I was running it downhill when it started to strain then… POW!!! When a mechanic at he company pronounced it well and truly dead, my father fired me but said I had to finish the job with a push mower first. It remains the one and only time I ever got fired. The epilogue to this story is that I got rehired four weeks later… and religiously checked the oil in the lawnmower afterwards.

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I got my license suspended when I was seventeen (you’ll need to wait for another post for that story) and found myself unable to drive the thirty minutes needed to get to my mowing job. Football practice consumed the weekdays that time of year so riding with my dad was a no go. He insisted I find a way to get there so I enlisted the services of my best friend from high school. For half of my pay for the day he drove me up and did the push mowing and trimming while I rode on the mower. Of course it rained cats and dogs the only day we could do it. I can still remember passing by him while he was push mowing the front of the building. With water pouring off the end of his nose, he flashed me a smile as I drove by. He was a true friend doing me a solid favor and I’ll never forget it.

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Ms. Boss tried to do me a solid favor in the early years of our marriage by mowing our yard when I worked a bunch of overtime. It was her first time. It was also her last time. Instead of recognizing the achievement and thanking her, I instead told her it would never pass my father’s inspection. She vowed she would never do it again and has been true to her word. I was a complete asshole and definitely deserved that.

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The Bosses lived on a piece of property in a Western state for about seven years when our children were young. Quite poor at the time, we could only afford a push mower for our 15-acre property when the sixty-five year old tractor we owned wasn’t up to the task. During the dry months, it really didn’t matter… except one place. As Erma Bombeck once wrote, grass really does grow greener over the septic tank. What she doesn’t say is that it also grows taller. I was tackling that particular chore one day – mowing the dry edges then pushing furtively into the green tangle – when on one particular pass, I pulled the mower out to find the lawnmower ablaze. Dried grass had gathered near the exhaust and caught on fire. I yelled at the kids to bring me the garden hose and made quick work of the problem and commenced to mowing again. It made an impression on the kids though. When one of the Bosslets – in second grade at the time – brought their journal home from school the next week, there was a full account at what had transpired. It was possibly one of the funniest things I have ever read. I wish I still had it around.

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The house I grew up in was the first house in the subdivision off a state highway. A huge, deep ditch lie between our driveway and the state highway about a hundred feet long. Standing at the top and pulling it up and down the side was not option since it was deep making mowing across the only option. The sides were so steep you pretty much had to stand at the bottom of the ditch and angle the mower up to get it to mow straight across. It was a pain in the ass that my step-brothers and I endured for years. As soon as the last brother left the house, my father filled in the ditch so he didn’t have to put up with it.

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Growing up, we had a Snapper riding mower. It hung around for years until after I left the house for good. There’s a picture of me riding on my father’s lap as he mowed the yard. I have very fond memories of those times.

I listen to NPR regularly on the way. Yesterday, they played an interview with Yo Yo Ma who discussed music during the times we’re having today. To close, he was asked to play his cello. He chose a tune he called ‘Coming Home’ later explaining it was by Dvorak. I was unfamiliar until he played the first seven notes. I knew the song better as the Second Movement of his New World Symphony. He could not have chosen a better song, at least for me. This song, played on the organ in the church I grew up in by my piano teacher, opened the music for my father’s funeral and provided a moment that will forever be seared in my mind forever. I cannot hear that piece of music and not be moved.

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I sang in a choir affiliated with a church for about four years. Every other year they put on a big classical music production. My last year there it was Brahms’ Requiem. Unlike most other classical requiems, Brahms chose not to use the Catholic mass as his text and instead chose verses from the Bible to speak to the living through the first six movements of the piece. The sixth movement is glorious building up to a moment where the choir challenges death’s hold over us by singing ‘Grave where is thy victory? Death where is thy sting?’ Afterwards, Brahms launches immediately into what the Germans do best – a fugue at warp speed talking about the glory and power of the Lord building up to what feels like the end of the entire piece – but it isn’t. Done right, Brahms takes that triumphant moment away from you and launches you directly into the seventh movement with no pause with a long, drawn out ‘Blessed are the dead who in the Lord shall die.’ For various reasons, we only launched directly into the seventh at the actual performance. Fortunately the tenors didn’t have to sing first, I wouldn’t have been able to. We sang Brahms Requiem the year my father died. I absolutely balled like a baby at that very moment.

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I wish that were the end of the story – the church providing a touching moment during a season of grief. The problem is that’s all they offered me. Nothing else. No sympathy. No care. Not even a single word of acknowledgement. I was to have faith in the second resurrection and look forward to the opportunity to teach him according to the government of God. My outburst of emotion would have been looked upon unkindly. I’m not with them anymore for many reasons, but that was a big one.

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I worked for a police department as a civilian employee when my father died. My relationship with the officers there was rocky at best and downright hostile at worse. My family and I lived over a thousand miles from my home town and once we were finally able to leave for the funeral, the trip was awful. Exhausted and unable to make it all the way to my hometown, we found a place that could accommodate six for the night. Winding down, I took a moment to check my work email and found, much to my surprise, an email to the entire department from an officer I didn’t particularly get along with asking everyone to sign a sympathy card for me. She went on the explain that I was having a tough time of it and needed support. After wiping away my tears, I sent an email thanking her for that support from the bottom of my heart. It reminded me of the parable of the Good Samaritan – a part of the Bible we never covered in the church I was attending.

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One person supported me throughout my grieving. That, of course, was Ms. Boss. Throughout the entire time, she stayed by my side both literally and figuratively while supporting me in any way she could. I didn’t make it easy for her. A decided introvert, I kept much of my grief inside and kept nearly everyone else at arm’s length including her. I failed to notice her own sorrow at my father’s passing in the meantime. Her unflinching support during those times is one of the many reasons why I am truly fortunate to call her my wife.

Pandemic sucks. There’s just no two ways about it – life in this world will never be the same.

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I’ve often told Ms. Boss that her eyes are the window to her soul. That’s still very true, but it took pandemic to recognize that the rest of her face is necessary to know at a glance what is going on in the mind of the woman I love.

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I was walking across the parking lot of my work the other day lost in thought, when a woman says ‘hi’ across the parking to me. I look towards her and see someone in dark chunky sunglasses and a black face mask. My ‘friend or foe’ function was a little slow to respond to the situation, so I gave a perfunctory ‘hi’ that could easily have been interpreted as ‘do I know you?’ and moved on. It was about three seconds later – after the situation was no longer recoverable – that I realized she was one of my bosses. I definitely could have handled that better.

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The previous encounter could have been worse. I ran into the father of one of my daughter’s best friends the other day and it took five days to finally realize who he was.

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I can’t hear, which is to say I can hear, but not very well. This likely comes from too much heavy metal music and wearing a headset at work for the last thirty years – different topics that will need to be addressed in different posts. I first learned that I was supposed to have a problem in 2009 when my hearing test for a job said I had problems with the high ranges in one ear. I didn’t think anything of it – no one needs to hear that high because people don’t talk that high. Fast forward about eight years when I finally get it looked at and the doctor tells me the higher ranges are necessary to understand what people are saying because they shape the voice. Over time my hearing has gotten worse little by little (my right ear is ringing as we speak) which is frustrating in and of itself, but then pandemic comes along. Take a person in the service industry, put a mask on them, then place them behind plexiglass. Next, bring in a 49 year-old dude and have him try to make a transaction. Hilarity may ensue for you, but frustration reigns for him.

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Last night, I went to pick up Indian food for Ms. Boss and myself. The counter persons accent made things I wrote about in the previous paragraph even worse for me. When he said how much our food was, I was definitely having a ‘never coming back here again’ moment. When the bill actually showed the meal to be twenty dollars less, he ended up getting a $3 tip out of it. I guess in that very small sense, pandemic worked out for him.

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I don’t just struggle with other people’s mask, I struggle with my own as well. My work requires them and I’m required to be there so I’m wearing one anytime I’m out of the office. As I mentioned yesterday, C.L. is quite a bit more rotund than he used to be and needs a bit of air to walk up the stairs – no problem without a mask. With a mask, I get foggy glasses, a mouth full of mask, and an elevated heart rate to start my day. I also barely leave the office anymore because I don’t want to put up with my mask. As result, my exercise goes down, and struggles with the mask have the potential to get worse if I embrace the sedentary lifestyle.

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I used to fancy myself a Libertarian. Despite the fact that I work for government – a very necessary part of government I hasten to add – I felt that government was too much into our lives. Then the pandemic came along and all my fellow Libertarians clamored for the economy to open back up because government was infringing on their rights. What about my rights? Sure, it hasn’t been easy dealing with all this, but I know it’s for the greater good. I just know it.