Making the Case for Cats

I’m not anti-dog, but I’m pro-cat. Found these two contrasting videos on YouTube over the weekend that further solidifies my positions:

Remember When Blockbuster was a Place?

I'm making final preparations for the CLASS Christian Writer's Conference next week in  Abiquiu, NM, so a few scattered thoughts seem appropriate today.

Remember when Blockbuster was a place? It has shrunk to the size of an ATM.

Someone googled "good alf quotes" this morning and ended up here. Melmacians of the world, unite!

It's a good thing I have email. If I didn't, I wouldn't have been notified by several people over the past 24 hours offering me a total of $43 million. Now I just have to figure out why these great offers keep going to my SPAM folder.

If you haven't already seen Secretariat, go. Yes, reviews at CNN, NOLA.com, EW, and probably a dozen other places say the movie is hokey. I didn't see it that way.

Conan returns to the air next week. I might be the only person on the planet who is lukewarm about his comedy. But I'm always impressed with his attitude. I loved what he said about not being cynical on his final Tonight Show all those months ago and I love what he's saying now about his new show.

Nerf Footballs, Spitballs and Great Memories

The football spiraled past my office window yesterday afternoon. I had to get up and take a look. Three boys were tossing the ball around in the street – in the exact same spot that I used to play catch with friends 30 years ago. I live in the house I grew up in and my neighborhood has changed since I was a boy.

There aren't a lot of kids around. And I certainly haven't seen any playing catch on the street in which I spent so many hours working on my own spiral as a kid. But seeing it happen yesterday reminded me of two incidents I haven't thought about in years.

The first one occurred when I was probably 15. We were playing two on two touch football in the street in front of my house. My best friend and I were matched up against a couple of other friends from my neighborhood. I was always the quarterback for my team – not because I had a great arm, but because I had a big body and that doesn't make for receiver material. My best friend was always the receiver.

I don't remember the score. I just remember my friend running a post pattern. He ran track in high school, so he was fast, but we'd played together often enough that I could judge his speed well and I knew how to lead him. I launched the Nerf football high in the air, envisioning him running under it and snagging it for a touchdown – just like we'd done so many times in the past.

I took a couple of steps back after throwing the pass and then I glanced at the place where I thought he might snag the pass. I didn't like what I saw – a parked van. About a second later, my friend ran into it, injuring one of his knees. He shook it off, because that's what kids do. And after we realized he wasn't hurt, we laughed. How could we not? Although, I wonder if he still feels the effects of that play? I hope not.

Around that same time period, I played baseball in the street in front of my house with a friend who was a few years younger than me. I'd been reading a book called Me & The Spitter by Gaylord Perry, in which he confessed to throwing a spitball when he pitched in the major leagues. He even went so far so to explain how he got away with it. If he got away with it in front of all those suspecting eyes, then surely I could too, especially in a friendly neighborhood game.

I donned my hard plastic Kansas City Royals' batting helmet the next day, but not before dabbing a little Vaseline on the corner of the bill. As I tugged on my hat, Vaseline rubbed off on my thumb and I worked it into the ball before delivering the first pitch. We used a soft rubber ball, so it wouldn't take much to make it slippery, which would make it difficult to hit.

My friend fouled one pitch back, he swung and missed another one. Around the third or fourth pitch, with Vaseline beginning to accumulate on the ball so much so that it began to shine, my friend went to toss the ball back to me and that's when he got suspicious.

"Hey, what's on the ball?" he said.

I shrugged.

"It's all sticky."

"I don't know," I said. "Toss it back."

"There's junk sticking to it."

"Just toss it back."

I "adjusted" my cap again and added yet another layer of Vaseline to the ball. He popped the ball up, rather weakly, and I caught it.

"Alright," he said. "What's going on?"

I didn't think I could hold my laughter in much longer. I was right. I eventually let the cat out of the bag and again, we both laughed.

The old street holds so many memories. There was a large, tar-like defect in the cement in the shape of the pink ribbon you see for breast cancer awareness. We used that as home plate. We used the tree in my yard for first base (we simply touched it).We used a little twig of a tree in a neighbor's yard for third base. It didn't exactly line up with the first base tree, but nobody cared. We only needed to supply second base. Sometimes it was somebody's shirt or unused baseball glove. Whatever we had, we just tossed it in the middle of the street – somewhere close to where second base should be. We just made due.

I don't know if we had the time of our lives or not. I hate to over-romanticize the past. I do know we had fun. And we laughed. And we made great memories. I just hope the three kids I saw tossing the football around on that same street yesterday had as much fun as my friends and I did.

The New Era Jotter from Ireland

The New Era Jotter doesn't look like a notebook that will stand the test of time. All four corners are tattered, the pages are dog-eared. The cover is ripped and wrinkled. The two staples holding it together are rust covered. But the "fine cream laid paper / Irish Manufacture" held up just fine.

On the second to last page, a history lesson is dated – in pencil – March 1920. As I gently flip through the pages, it is clearly a school notebook. A note we received in the package from Ireland from a relative says the Jotter belonged to Mickey John O'Connor – the brother of the man who fathered my mother.

The first page, written in beautiful, sweeping cursive, chronicles the geography of Ireland, broken into four parts:

(a) Northern Ireland

(b) Ireland east of the Shannon

(c) Ireland west of the Shannon

(d) Southern Ireland

The second page is from a history lesson about King George IV. About half way down the page, my uncle makes these comments about the king:

Reign of George IV marked a long period of reform. Government attention on Europe. Peace at the Industrial Revolution, necessitates a change of energy in the direction of home affairs. Progress was made in matters of free trade, religion and the extension of the liberty of the subject.

A few pages into the Jotter, my uncle recorded a French lesson. In between the geography and French lessons, he figured arithmetic:

Unfortunately, my uncle didn't record any personal thoughts in the Jotter – probably because he wasn't allowed to. The Jotter was reserved for school work, but I would have loved to read his take on Ireland in 1920 – especially since Ireland was in the middle of its war for independence. But I'm just happy to be able to read any handwriting from a relative from that era.

Included in the package was a geography book, a grammar book, a "war work" ledger, an algebra book and a picture of my great grandmother Mary as a little girl – whom I never met, nor even heard of until now.

The war work ledger "commenced 1st May 1917." According to note enclosed in the package, the ledger belonged to Matthew O'Connor, my great grandfather, who I never had a chance to meet.

I really can't understand a lot of what I see in the ledger. Take for example, these rather detailed diagrams:

And the ledger contains page after page that looks like this:

Then I ran across these two pages and my throat tightened. It's written in pencil and extremely hard to read since it is so faded. Here's a couple of pictures of the pages, followed by my attempt to figure out what it says:

Sir,

We the undersigned beg to bring before you the inadequately low rate of pay most of us are on, in fact it cannot be described better than starvation wages at this present juncture for we cannot buy the food necessary to supply energy for the work.

A man with a family of 6 to 8 cannot support them without going on short rations himself and it would be less than human if he took from his family what they wanted more than himself.

We would not take up your valuable time by enumerating the different prices of food and clothing. Suffice it to say that [some indecipherable dollar figure] before the war is not equal to [some indecipherable dollar figure] so that a man on [some indecipherable dollar figure] now is only equal to a man on [some indecipherable dollar figure] in war time and we need not inform you the average man had not much to spare at any time no matter how frugal he may be inclined.

We are in a bad way here and accept you can do something our case is hopeless but we look forward in hopes of help from you.

I don't see any names listed after that, so I'm wondering if this was a rough draft. And I'm wondering if it was ever sent. And, of course, I'm wondering if these men ever received a response to their plea. It's gut wrenching to think about – especially knowing that this is my great grandfather's ledger.

A page or two further into the ledger, is an "artillery map" of Dublin. It's not really a map as much as it is a listing of last names followed by a time period (9 1/2 days, 6 1/2 days). Do those time periods represent the amount of time each man has served in a particular campaign? Do they represent how long it would take each man to reach Dublin from his currently location? Do they represent how long it has been since he last ate?

It's hard to know, but even though I don't understand a lot of what I see in the package, I'm so grateful to have a snapshot into the lives of my relatives from Ireland – some of whom were born in the late 1800s. It would be the equivalent of one of my relatives from another country stumbling across this blog in the year 2,100. Seems crazy to even think it's possible.

Two Weeks Notice

Dear Doctor, I'm writing to give you
your two weeks notice.

Helen was tall and slender and full of smiles as saw my mom walking down the aisle. They hadn’t seen each other in months. Mom had been off work after having a stroke and this was her first return visit.

It was just a visit, but Mom was letting her co-workers/friends know she would be back. Tears flowed that day. And why wouldn’t they? Life is hard and bad things happen to good people and that's all the more reason to celebrate the victories.

I think Helen recognized my mom’s fighting spirit. She recognized it because she possesses a ton of it herself. Her life has been full of hardship.

She has heart problems – partially blocked arteries. One of her sons was killed years ago in a train accident. Another one of her sons has physical challenges as a result of the injuries he sustained during that same accident. And her marriage did not end well, through no fault of her own.

Recently, she was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. For the past four weeks she’s been undergoing radiation treatments. She cannot afford to miss that much work (who can?), but cancer doesn’t care. Thankfully, many of the people who know Helen do care and they held a couple of fundraisers for her.

This past weekend, I asked Mom how Helen is doing. She told me a great story. In spite of undergoing radiation treatments for the last month, and being unable to speak, and spending a lot of time in bed when she’s not receiving treatment, Helen wrote a letter to her doctor. She gave him his two weeks notice.

She isn’t replacing him. Instead, she was telling him that the medical profession has just two more weeks to attack the cancer inside her. She didn’t write the letter out of spite, but instead, she did so out of a spirit that says she will endure the full six weeks. But no more.

Apparently it moved her doctor so much that he is going to frame the letter. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he doesn’t point future cancer patients to the letter, saying, “This won’t be easy, but you can do it – just like the woman who wrote this letter.”

#86 Fireplaces

Continuing with the 100 life-enriching little nuances series …

We had a fireplace in the first house I can remember living in. We lived in a wooded area, so periodically my grandfather and I would jump into his GMC pickup truck and drive down into the field to look for large branches that had fallen.

When we found some, my grandpa started his chainsaw and made quick work of the branches – cutting them into firewood size chunks. Then we'd fill the back of his pickup and head back to the house.

I only remember doing this a few times, so I have no idea how the firewood got there normally. Maybe my grandpa rounded it up without me. Or maybe my dad handled it.

During the winter, my mom drug the firewood in and to start a fire. The noise made more of an impression on me than anything. Is there a more soothing sound than the crackling of a fire?

The house I live in right now doesn't have a fireplace, but I think I'm going to order a fireplace DVD to play on my TV this winter. It sounds sort of hokey and city slicker-ish, but I found this fireplace video on YouTube yesterday and I let it play all the way through twice and it was calming.



I'm already imagining myself sitting down with a good book this winter while something similar to this video plays on my television in the background.