Friday, November 8, 2013

I Saw My Father, and He Met My Son!

A couple of factors lent themselves to the aide of the sandman last night.
 1. We (as a family) are at a place where my father’s name is coming up a lot these days 
 2. I watched far more than the daily recommended amount of HGTV just before lights out.

The house was a buzz just as I was coming downstairs. Nothing was really a reflection of reality in the sense that the stairs I was descending, while understood to be mine in the dream, really belonged to the Victorian house number 3 from House Hunters International. 
There were contractors everywhere doing what contractors do, carrying buckets and paint brushes, never really working but in a spitfire hurry to get somewhere to do so.

Then the familiar faces started popping up. There’s Lora Baker and her husband Ron (whom I have never really met in person but imagine to look like a mix between Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec. and Al from Home Improvement) making business phone calls in the kitchen. So very nice of them to make the middle of the night trip from Georgia to work from my house.

A knock at the door produced this large, pale faced woman who insisted on coming in and sitting down. She proceeded to say that she hasn’t been in the house for years and she used to play cards with my parents. She was very excited to see them again. I was so sorry, as I am when this happens, to have to inform her that he passed away 4 years ago.

“What do you mean child-he’s right there”. And she was right. He was.

My dad, an unnamed man and I adjourned to the small table outside, away from the bustle to catch up. The conversation will always be mine and mine alone, but it was as familiar as yesterday. I could just about smell it.
Suddenly we found ourselves in a room in the house. Soft light pouring in the window and bouncing off the semi-dusty hard wood floor. I was standing in the doorway half in the room half in the hall. The unnamed man sat on the on trundle bed and my father sat on the floor like a teenager.

Around the corner and in an unbalanced hurry, a 1 ½ year old Carrie (my sister) came ripping around the corner. Wearing only her diaper and towing a head full of magnificent curls. She made way towards our location.

I told dad to lay down on the floor. “Let’s see if she sees you”.

She drunk toddler walked past me into the room and went directly to where my father’s silhouette was and draped her small body across his chest. She raised her head and looked back at me, but now she was my son. Wispy dirty blond hair and those blue eyes, turned back to my dad, laid his head on his chest and spread his arms wide in the form of the cross to put his tiny hands in my fathers and lay there…still…comfortable.


I went and sat next to the unnamed man on the bed and buried my head in my hands. I do not cry often but when I do, it is certainly for the right reasons.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Societal Benchmark-An Editorial

I am concerned!

The (not-so) recent onslaught of the figures in our direct limelight are not the same caliber people that my father had me looking up to. More overly, these people are being allowed to serve as a benchmark for where we are as a society, and the level of intelligence has plummeted.

There is a tongue and cheek movie called Idocracy, where in the future we are led to believe that we (Americans) teeter on the brink of extinction based on our diminished, if not deleted, sense of intelligence. A movie mind you that should be turned on to induce chuckle, kill two hours on a Saturday, and move on with little to no further thought. But what if we see ourselves taking giant leaps towards making this movie prophetic. Where will we be when one day we begin to water our crops with energy drinks and wonder why we are hungry.

We already know that technology has afforded us spending valuable time on anything worth while. Our attention spans are shrinking faster than Al Rokers belt size, but have we ever stopped to wonder at what cost?

The final nail in this proverbial coffin for me is the sporting headlines of Richie Incognito the bully. I understand and recognize that there is a particular brand of behavior behind closed doors in professional sports locker rooms, and it should be that way. At that level of performance, teams are families, and I for one love my brother more than most people because we have rolled around in the dirt trying to kill each other.
 But this Incognito took hazing to a whole other level, and then we, as a public, became aware of it. A Molotov cocktail.
Our attention spans have most of us reading taglines and never the content, so all we learn is the "Duh" of any given situation, and its shovel fed to us by the millions of reporters neglecting
advances in modern medicine and space exploration to break twitter scandals wide open.

We have Mayors smoking crack and then talking about it to the media with his loosened NFL throwback tie dangling from his dainty 300lb frame, we have NFL stars crashing into trees at 9am wasted with weed in the car, we have.....forget it, you understand.

How am I supposed to take any of the examples we have today in the public eye and assure my child that he can be just like him if he tries hard enough? Am I supposed to concentrate only on the fact that Brawando has electrolytes?