Nancy Dickerson, (aka, the Nag) is the name most of my family and friends use when referring to me, but for years I have answered to Mrs. D when students needed my help.  Although my students pop up in almost every place I go these days, I really miss my classroom and being involved with education.

Back in the 90s our family discovered computers and I became involved with the AOL area sending out teacher pagers to various instructors who volunteered to teach on AOL.  Reading the questions and then all the answers was better than years of education, but I still went ahead and got that master’s degree in English.

Currently our three children have produced four grandchildren for us to enjoy as Paw Paw and Ma.  My husband, Fang, is a retired Caterpillar mechanic.  He is also a talented do-it-yourself person.  We have totally rebuilt our house since his “retirement.”  He also added to his technical education by taking a course in computers and electronics and has accomplished more with his nine months of instruction than I have with six years of college.  Somehow “hands-on” education makes more sense to me now than learning how to read Old English.

The articles that I intend to write for Slightly Creaky will include the attitude that has grown up in my Texas roots along with some tongue-in-cheek remarks that will hobble any high horses I might care to ride.  My opinions are my own; my reasoning is erratic at best; and my witticisms are an acquired taste.

2011

January: The Nursing Home                            A Little Beauty’s Point of View
February: Paw Paw Pollard Poetry                To All Things a Season
March:A Serving Attitude                                Pine Boxes and Other Buckets
April: Addictions and Other Social Ills           Can You See Me Now? .
May: Evacuate                                                Up to Our Elbows in Alligators!
June: No ChildLeft Behind                              To Day, While It Is Called Today
July: The Grand Life                                        Cabin Fever
August: A Hundred Years from Now             Clutterbugs and Other Vermin
September: Just How Dry is It?                    Wildfire—NOT the Name of a Horse
October: A Stitch in Time                               LOUD—But Not So Clear
November: An Old Friend                              Freebies
December: A Fresh Perspective                    The Great Depression Rides Again!

Click here for articles from 2008 to 2010
Click here for previous articles from 2011

Starting January (2012) we will again start a new Web page for Nancy's articles.

From Texas: Just How Dry IS It

Texans, and most folks from the Southwest, make jokes about the weather conditions on a regular basis whether the icicles are two foot long or the mesquite trees have learned to whistle for the dogs. But the combination of drought, extreme heat, and wildfires has just about got the goats of the most grizzled old timers—much less any of the younguns who never had to get by without using all the water they could waste. History making summers are not usually what Texans brag about when it includes the loss of crops, the loss of entire herds of cattle, and burned pasture lands as far as the eye can see.

Last year started out with a nice wet spring that provided extra vegetation in every canyon and bar ditch along with the pastures. Then the drought began to curl up every blade of grass and fold up every leaf on the trees. Winter was not very helpful as far as moisture was concerned. Ice storms don’t usually provide that much moisture. By spring of this year, farmers knew their wheat was not going to do much, if anything, without rain. And they were right on the money—they didn’t get the rain and the wheat crop was a loss. Some farmers lease out their wheat fields to ranchers for weanling calves to fatten on before they let the wheat go to seed. This year, any fields with wheat could not support more than a few dozen head of calves. And then the wheat was gone.

In North Central Texas we grow peaches, berries, plums, and other assorted goodies like melons and garden vegetables. Our farmers’ markets always have been a source of pleasure and pride to this area. This year the produce has been considerably less plentiful and much more expensive than in the past. But those who are not real farmers and just always grow their own vegetable gardens have had little success in caring for even a few plants. One lady in Archer City (just south of Wichita Falls) said that not only did they not have any crops grown this year, no one was able to have a garden. The ground was too hard and the heat too extreme to allow growth. Anyone who buys all their vegetables out of cans or the frozen food section would not understand what a blow that is to those who spend the entire summer enjoying fresh squash, tomatoes, black-eyed peas, and corn on the cob right from their back yards. In their own estimation, folks in the Southwest eat ‘high on the hog’ and better than most kings and presidents. But this year has changed more than our gardening habits.

Wichita Live Stock Auction barn near us has a capacity of 3500 for their weekly sales on Wednesdays. In July of this year, they have been at capacity or right at capacity at least twice. They confirmed that several ranches had sold entire herds because the stock tanks were dry and the grass non-existent. It takes about 10 acres a head to keep good cattle fat enough to produce healthy calves and make it through our winters with only some hay and cattle cubes fed during the hardest months, but without water, it is impossible to keep cattle or horses. In fact, Judie Brunson of Shy Donkey Farm found it necessary this summer to re-gift a few donkeys to those who had a way of keeping them fed and watered. Judie buys round bales of hay—when she can find them—at $110 a bale per week. Then she still feeds grain and Strategy pellets (a mineral and vitamin supplement) because her animals will not get anything out of the few blades of real grass that are still growing on her place. Those animals are well loved and cared for, but their cost per month will continue to be a drain on her resources simply because it is almost too late for the pastures to come back even if rains come now.

Not every animal has been as fortunate as those on the Shy Donkey Farm. Just recently we called the Clay County Sheriff’s office to report starving horses in a nearby town. A Quarter Horse is a large animal, and it takes at least a bale of hay a week if it is not otherwise fed and has no grass for grazing. Keeping an animal penned up without feeding it can only be seen as cruelty. Even when I was young and foolish, I took my horses to pasture or staked them out where they could graze near our house. In the fifteen years that I kept horses, we never had one get loose or be mistreated by passersby. In fact, several people who had overgrown gardens asked me to bring my horse to use as a lawnmower during the summer. Maybe this drought has been around long enough that no one HAS any grass that needs to be mown.

For those who don’t think this drought in North Central Texas and states to the north, east, and west of us will have any effect on them, think again. When ranchers sell off breeding stock, they lose at least two years of ‘wages’—if one can consider the price of calves to be wages. A cow carries a calf for nine months, and if she does not have good pasture or feed, she runs a risk of losing the calf or having an underweight calf. If she loses the calf, the rancher has to feed her for ‘free’ without any return on the price of the feed. When ranchers have to sell off all the breeding cows and heifers, it will take at least two years to recoup any of the expense of buying back the cows and making a crop of calves—that is, IF the cows are already bred when he buys them. Now that sounds like the rancher’s problem, but the reality is that those calves have a price on them in the meat department of the local stores. A calf has to be at least 1500 pounds before it makes a good slaughter weight.

A good vegetarian would be giggling up his or her sleeve at this point, but a drought has an effect on vegetation and anything that grows, so the price of squash, corn, soybeans, or any other high protein food will not go anywhere but up during a drought. And what affects the Southwest also affects the rest of the country. In fact, without the trees, milkweeds, flowers, and assorted vegetation that usually grow so abundantly across the Southwest, both butterflies and hummingbirds risk starvation and dehydration in migration. This year saw one nest of blue jays that died in the nest during a wildfire in our neighborhood, but even without a wildfire, birds have not found enough insects to help them feed their young, so no new fledglings have filled the air with songs and the usual chatter among the birds. Not having mosquitoes buzzing around might be nice for us, but the purple martins and nighthawks depend on flying insects for their food. Bats, spiders, and even some wasps depend on flying insects. About the only really good thing about this drought has been the absence of the great mounds of fire ants.

Wichita Falls remains on stage 1 for water rationing, but some smaller towns in the area already have instituted stage 3 rationing. One of the biggest problems in the area is the result of the extreme heat and the buckling of the ground that breaks water mains. It is bad enough that only the cold water side needs to be turned on to get a hot shower, but having the water abruptly stop flowing is an altogether different matter. At one point, Wichita Falls had water crews working 24/7 to repair and replace water lines that had broken from the shifts in the ground.

Years ago, back in the 60s, Wichita Falls ‘annexed’ several thousand acres of land in Clay County in order to build the huge Lake Arrowhead. The political and social fallout was tremendous at the time, but the lake has certainly more than proved its worth. Little towns like Byers, Texas, close to the Oklahoma border on Red River, get their water from Arrowhead and mix it with well water from their own land. Without Arrowhead, this entire area would be like the chicken farmers in Arkansas who had to haul in tank trucks of water at $800 a load for their chickens. Guess what that little bit of extra water will cost at the market!

Finally, the extreme heat and our high winds have brought a great danger to this land we call home. Even if aging electrical lines are not to blame when they are blown together and arc into whatever vegetation is available, the slightest mistake—a car pulled over on the roadside with a hot muffler touching some weeds—can make what is left of the land a charred, bleak expanse for all living creatures. The Possum Kingdom fire near Graham, Texas, 60 miles south of Wichita Falls sent fog-like smoke throughout the southern side of town. Lake Wichita looked as if it were covered in fog. So much land has been burned that the wildlife in those areas has had to forage in places they are not normally seen. Crestview Cemetery on Highway 79 has an entire flock of geese that have decided that the watered grass just meets their needs under the live oak trees next to the tombstones. Yesterday we saw a big buck that had apparently decided to join the geese in grazing, but he didn’t quite negotiate the highway when he went back to hide in the mesquite that morning. It’s a hard life in this land. But it is home.

SEASONS        

Going back again is never the same;
There’s no good place to begin.
Time and Nature are not to blame
When the changes are within.
Yet the land I roamed as a child—
Its ant-infested grasses,
Canyons, by wind and water filed,
Where only lizard or coyote passes—
This land, I still feel, is home.

From the hill above the farm,
Where mountain boomers ruled the rocks,
Never feeling any alarm,
I watched the seasons pass—
By colors and flocks.
I felt warm familiarity in the field lark’s whistle,
Granddad’s coffee to start the day,
A vase of wild purple thistle,
And Great-grandmother’s voice heard to say,
“This land, I still feel, is home.”

The coyotes howl from the hollows,
And the larks still sing in the fields,
But the house stands open to swallows,
The doors locked with mud dauber seals.
To Nature such subtle changes are just a matter of seasons.
Time alone rearranges memory’s loving reasons.

See nancy's facebook Page for photographs of living with the dry-weather fires in Texas.
These pictures are from (and copywritten by) Lisa Carden who
lives five miles from the fire in the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge

Wildfire—NOT the Name of a Horse

Wildfire—NOT the Name of a Horse

I heard my horse scream and could tell she was running full speed around her pen. It took some help from a friend who was visiting for us to be able to catch her and hold her. It was when we finally had her by the head that we realized that the screams were coming from a fire-engulfed two-story house just over from ours on the cross street. We knew the man well whose screams were so hair raising. Death had never frightened me, but that night dying became a terrifying reality.

I wrote the description above some time ago, but the realities of what a fire can do remain fresh in my mind. This spring we learned that smoke from a wildfire can be just as damaging as flames—death from smoke inhalation means that the lungs can’t carry oxygen to the blood because of the contents of the air—cyanide or other harmful gases that come from fires. And the rain of soot into the air even days after a major fire can continue to poison the air for those nearby. So it is not just the stench of burned livestock and other animals that should keep us out of a burned area.

This year Texas fires have destroyed at least 1,400 homes. Millions of acres of rangeland—read grasslands for cattle and other stock—have burned as well. Now, these last two sentences sound like just so many statistics unless one lives through the loss of the homes or the death of friends or family. Statistics don’t usually cause us to weep or otherwise become involved emotionally. At the same time that Texas burned, the East Coast was dealing with a hurricane and the attendant flooding caused by excess rains. We watched the news and felt so very sad for those whose homes and belongings were either inundated with the flood waters or blown away in the hurricane. Yet it was possible that some of those folks could at least find a few belongings in the aftermath. Not so in a fire!

When a huge tornado blew through Wichita Falls in 1979, folks found things in some really strange places. A fiberglass steer that was used for advertising for a local restaurant ended up in the Waurika Lake in Oklahoma. We still giggle over the catch of some fisherman up there in that neck of the woods. A Volkswagon ended up in the second story of our children’s school; and one highway was lined with downed electric lines so that it looked as if a huge picket fence kept the cars in line. Oh, strange things happened the night of April 10, 1979, but we mostly picked up the pieces as a community and got on with our lives.

Getting on with your lives can be much more difficult when entire communities burn to the ground. Try to visualize what your neighborhood looks like. Would you say that 100 homes are in your little neighborhood? Look at your city map and see how many homes and streets would be involved if 100 of those homes were removed. Now try to expand that times 100 again. That is only 1000 homes—times all the folks who live in those homes. Now multiply by two.

People and numbers simply don’t equate when lives are disrupted or taken. We can’t take lightly the effect of disasters upon people, the communities, the states and the economies of those states. Oh, the disasters may give jobs to those who help rebuild the communities, but an enduring sadness lingers long into the future. We can help ourselves by landscaping with fires in mind and by better equipping our volunteer firefighters, but even wide firebreaks on every pasture in the state will not stop a wildfire driven by high winds in an area already scorched by drought. No, fires are just a part of life just like storms and floods. Science has accomplished getting man to the moon, but we still can’t put out a fire effectively or channel excess water quickly away from areas already soaked with rain.

Texans used to joke about sending our favorite oilfield firefighter down to put out the fires of hell. We just knew that Red Adair could put out ANY fire! But Red has long gone on to glory, and the droughts remain to plague us. For the time being, we have to await news of another tropical storm to bring us cooler weather and the rains we needed months ago. Oh, and the wheat crop is a loss again this year, so prepare to pay a bit more for your bread. What happens in Texas DOES matter!

A Stitch in Time

A Stitch in Time

Recently a young friend asked for some of the history on the women of our family with reference to their sewing skills. It did not seem too important to look up the years these women were born, but suffice it to say that my great-grandmother used the thread from flour sacks’ binding as her sewing thread and crochet thread for years. She and the women of her age did not have a Wal-Mart, a JoAnn’s, a Hancock’s, or any other specialty sewing shop when they needed cloth, thread, or needles. In fact, in the display window of the foyer of the Clay County Memorial Hospital (Henrietta, TX), the museum has on display a very pretty dress crocheted with the string that was used to bind packages back before paper sacks were invented. Women were just pushed by necessity to become inventors and adapters.

For years the women in my family made every stitch of their own and their children’s clothing. My mother said that the first time she ever sewed anything, it was a pair of ‘bloomers’—the forerunner of our modern panties. And her mother made her own ‘over the shoulder boulder holders’ long before Playtex ever crossed anyone’s heart. Style may have been an invention of the working woman outside doing chores in the heat while trying to keep up with small children and still feeding the baby. My great-grandmother Camp said that she went out and milked the cow one morning and went back inside to have her baby. Then she had to get up and go feed the chickens and milk the cow again that night. I just can NOT imagine that kind of life!

But then, Grandmother Camp left a legacy of stitches to her daughter and great-granddaughters. One quilt top she pieced together from pieces left over from flour sacks after she had made little dresses for her only surviving child. The quilt top was pieced together with the little white cotton bags that her husband’s tobacco had come in. She even made use of the drawstrings on those sacks. When the quilt top was handed down to me, my mother-in-law Joy offered to quilt it for me. Eventually that quilt will be handed down again to my daughter. A few years ago I gave a Dutch Doll quilt to my granddaughter. The little dolls were set together by my great-grandmother Kennedy and sewn into a quilt top by her daughter-in-law Connie Kennedy. My mother sat in her little rocking chair and rocked each doll as it was finished. When I was a girl, Mother and I sat down and quilted that top, and she gave it to me after I married. I suppose a family history can be put together in stitches just as easily as in any genealogy.

Baby clothes that mothers sewed at home were handed down for generations, and our family is not all that different except that at least one great-grandmother had her house burn down around her at least twice. It is pretty difficult to keep anything special after a fire. And too, the other great-grandmother had to move from place to place and from home to home after her husband died. That, too, was another thing that happened to grandmothers at one time. My great-grandmother Camp embroidered and taught me how to do it as well. Mother taught me how to crochet and to sew a straight seam. So our children were dressed with baby clothes made by their Grandmother Pollard and embroidered by their mother. Unlike my grandparents, we have been blessed with roots in one spot so that our grandchildren think that this old hill under the elm tree is part of the family and has been since THEY were babies. And now those baby clothes have made the rounds of all the little boys and one little girl among the grands.

Although I made some pretty dresses and some little jumpers for our children, it seemed that life kept us too busy to sew things like prom dresses. My mother made all my clothes as I grew up including a prom dress and eventually my wedding dress.. Our daughter has put her talents to use in recovering furniture that would otherwise have had to be tossed and keeping the knees in her boys’ pants. She also quilted a top for one of her sons because he wanted a special top for his bed. With her busy life, that had to have taken some patience. No, she didn’t have a cow to milk or chickens to feed, but she had to drop off two boys on different schedules at different schools and then pick them up again.

Life has certainly changed from hoeing the garden and putting up jellies to driving all over heck and half of Georgia just to keep things going! Instead of stitching her life together with lines of thread and lace, our daughter will probably look back someday and try to remember which truck or car she had to drive to keep which child in school. But someday that son will look back at that quilt and remember that his mother took time out to make it just for him—stitching in love.

LOUD—But Not So Clear

LOUD—But Not So Clear

An auctioneer can verbalize—note that verbalize is not the same as talking—at a speed that is too quick for most of us to understand unless we are auction habitués. And the infomercial on TV gives a spiel at too many words per minute with repetition of the phone numbers and wonderful pricing in something like 30 seconds flat. Perhaps our brains don’t need to actually hear all of the words to get the message anyway. Then we have seen the silly little paragraph that spells every other word backwards or something. It seems the brain only needs to see the beginning letters and a certain word order to understand the gist of the message. While that is very interesting—maybe even enlightening—no one has to sign anything or pay for anything required by reading that particular paragraph. And finally we can judge for ourselves if a sports contest is going well or not by the expression on our mate’s face as he (or she—to be fair) is jumping up and down on the furniture. The matter of the score is actually immaterial.

Of all the things that can be vaguely understood or can be ignored out of hand, some things really do take a certain keenness of perception. Generally anything that has to do with money would fit in that category needing concentration and attention—with the exception of anything that has to do with the IRS which already defies understanding or logic.

Somewhere around October 15 this year, the opportunity to adjust one’s Medicare prescription plan and/or one’s supplemental insurance presents itself. Today we “plugged in” all the prescriptions that Fang uses to keep him percolating and pert. Now that alone can be interesting as the pharmacy does not spell out all the particulars of each of those drugs. Invariably there is a Z or an M or some such little add-on to go with the name of the drug. The insurance company wants those little details before it will register the dosage and suggest a price for a month’s supply.

Arguing with a computer-generated form does about as much good as suggesting to the dog that he not chase cats. But for all the deterrents thrown in one’s way by computer forms, they are not nearly as daunting as trying to understand the phone menus that ask one to choose between needing information for enrollment, a membership status, a requested shipment of medications, one’s shoe size, and perhaps a representative if one is willing to answer a couple of questions and is willing to realize that enrollment information cannot be considered actual enrollment until January of 2012. Does that sound like a menu or what?

Then we can get down to actually talking to representative who is probably sitting there rolling his/her eyes as he/she talks to yet another old fart or fartette who has no idea how to go about just getting on the computer and enrolling in a new program for prescription drugs. Now, to be fair, one lady was very helpful and did actually slow her speech down to about 45 rpm after I told her that she spoke much faster than my ears could listen. Then when she looked up an unusual drug, she came back at the high speed again and only slowed down after I gently exclaimed, “Whoa!” It made me wonder if the company pays them by the client rather than by the hour so that confusing one person and blowing off another could make the representative more money than simply being courteous enough to explain things slowly.

Do our ears get older or our brains slower? Or both!

Today was another day so another phone call to one final company resulted in a young man’s attempt to get me to schedule a real person to come out and sit down to explain the program—especially since it was “so simple” to use the computer program. The inference was that we were obviously too senile to use the computer program. Then he had the audacity to ask me if he had been courteous on a scale of one to five. ARGH! I rolled my eyes heavenward and said, “You’ve been fine, Honey.” How’s that for a non-answer? Then I looked up the company on the computer. Their site is having problems today. Joy to the world! I can put that off until tomorrow.

Medicare is a wonderful program. The supplements available make it possible for a senior to go have a drastic surgery and come home paying absolutely nothing out of pocket beyond the monthly charges for Medicare and the supplemental policy. The part D of Medicare has not always been around, and we know from experience that the medications prescribed can be a major drain on our income. When it is possible to use the generic drugs available, we always choose those. Brand names mean nothing if something else works just as well. However, those high-dollar drugs, called tier three drugs, just happen to be the only ones available in three categories: Travatan Z, Lipitor, and Lantus SolarStar. When Lipitor goes generic, all the high cholesterol folks can do a little dance.

But somehow I don’t think the other two drugs are going to get any cheaper anytime during our lifetime. SO, one representative was kind enough to suggest that I write or call the pharmaceutical company that makes those two drugs and ask for coupons. That actually makes sense! We shall see what happens on that front, but meanwhile, we have to decide if we can find an insurance company for the prescriptions that will actually pay for those three drugs or at least pay a significant portion of the cost of those drugs. The current cost of the Lantus SolarStar just about gives our bank account a shivering fit under our current prescription program.

Someone suggested that I create a spreadsheet to compare the costs of the different companies along with the coverage of the drugs. I wanted to say, “You can spread sheet if you want to!” But I didn’t say anything; my momma taught me not to say things like that to people.

An Old Friend

An Old Friend

He has lived here for thirteen years—not long in some ways.  He hasn’t ever learned to drive the truck, but the passenger seat has him imprint on it.  He really prefers the windows down, but he doesn’t complain.  He really likes the drive through at McDonalds and at the bank because he enjoys flirting with the girls.  Typical male!

When the grandchildren learned to drive the lawn tractor, he would ride in the trailer behind them and give his advice about their driving.  The children seldom paid any attention to his views, however.

He is a friendly sort, but he has his limits.  Not many people would be silly enough to try to argue with him.  When he rides shotgun in the truck, it is HIS truck.  I guess we all tend to be a little territorial.

We love this guy.  But sometimes we have to do what is best for our friends even when it makes our hearts ache.

I started writing this tribute a few years ago and could not stop crying long enough to finish it. Yet now we have a little better perspective on the life of this old friend. Even my dad, as forgetful as he has become, remembers Baloo Nando as the guardian of the hill, caretaker of the grands, and ever-present furry rug. Baloo welcomed our current dog when Harley was just a pup and a nuisance to a grown dog. But the pup learned how to be more obedient and calm around the older Chow Chow. Baloo never snapped at him even when Harley was his most irritating. That might have been an indication of patience, or maybe the older dog just didn’t feel like messing with the pup.

We have discussed several times whether or not dogs go to heaven—or over a rainbow bridge to a perfect dog world. I think it was James Thurber who said that if dogs didn’t go to heaven, he didn’t want to go there. I have felt that way about at least one horse who loved so deeply that he might as well have been a dog and lived in the house! And then there was the donkey who would have slept on the back porch if we had let him.

Throughout our lives we connect to animals to one degree or another. They help us laugh, love, cry, and learn how to handle our emotions better than just about any other entity. We have read about how animals help us to lower our blood pressure and help us overcome loneliness and depression to some degree. Recently we have seen programs on horse training by prisoners wherein the horses were gentled with patience, persistent calm, and a routine that removed the terror from contact with humans. And then there is the program that allows prisoners and those who have to do community service to help in the humane society kennels with dogs and cats or other animals. Something about animals gives back to us even when we don’t deserve their special gifts.

Animals that are taken into a family deserve to be treated with the same love as any other family member. My husband still often thinks of his first cow—Shirley. No, she never came in the house, but he pampered her and she let him ride her around the cow lot as if she were a horse. When his parents moved to the farm, Shirley went along to stay with the other cows since Fang could not exactly keep her in the back yard. But she would come to the fence for treats every time he called her to the fence when he was down on the farm. Our children even sat on her back after they were old enough to sit astride. Is there a rainbow bridge for cows? Who knows? But that old cow probably gave my husband just as much pleasure as any dog or cat could have at the time.

Animals of any type are a responsibility. This world is just too complicated for animals to run loose the way some children do on the streets. Expensive, time consumptive, and even restrictive of our life styles, animals still give so much more than they require. Sometimes we take them for granted, but that is true of other family members as well. The dogs, cats, and canaries hardly ever show resentment and just show gratitude for the attention they are given. One wonders if pure love can even be resentful if these animals’ attitudes are any indication of what we should be like in our lives. And if we shirk our responsibilities for just a while and fail to give them what they need, they never seem to hold it against us. That is probably why people CAN ignore their animals. How shameful are we to not give to them what they deserve!

An older friend wrote a poem for my son and me when he was getting close to the end of his life. We had discussed sitting down among the flowers under a tree and having old friends--our pets--at our knees, romping around and sniffing celestial scents or chasing each other around in fun. We really don’t know what to expect in this life, so the next is anyone’s guess. But Tad Lawson had as good an attitude as one could hope for. For my part, I am hoping my old friends and “family” are beyond the gate.

Another Thanatopsis--
Adolphus "Tad" Lawson, copyright Dec. 2, 2005

When, in the course of human events,
We find us drawing near the fence
Between this life and possibly
Another we must wait to see
We eye the fence and speculate
On what we'll find beyond the gate.

It matters not what sacred text
We've read, we don't know what is next,
For every one you see in print
Was edited, to some extent,
By what some priest or scholar thought
To have it say what he thought it ought.

So I will follow my own light
I'm certain I know wrong from right,
And if I chose the latter way
I have no fear of judgment day,
I'm only curious to know
Just where I'm going, when I go.

So there!!! Tad

Freebies

Freebies

The latest big envelope from yet another non-profit agency has arrived. This time it might have been the DAV or maybe the Doolittle Parakeet Preserve. Or maybe it was the ‘Keep the Kangaroo Down’ Foundation or Retired Hooters Ranch or something of that nature. After a few of these envelopes arrive, one looks about like the other. But they all arrive with their very own guilt trip. At some time or other, we made a donation to someone or some organization. It must have been years ago because for the past five or six years we have narrowed down our donations to one agency: the local food bank. We KNOW where this money goes and how much it can help someone right here in our neighborhood.

All the charitable organizations are worthy in their own ways. But the local food bank just asks us to donate what we can without adding any guilt trips or giving us a notepad, a selection of greeting cards, or a Native American trinket to their request. And more address labels are about as needed as dust bunnies and are about as necessary. Besides, in order to actually include more than a few labels in the guilt trip, they have developed a size of print that requires an electron microscope just to read the address. At our age, we need LARGE print.

Today I started to shuffle through a few of these greeting cards when I began to wonder how I could make better use of them. Now we do send a card off occasionally. Each year Fang tries to outdo himself from the year before when he searches out something hilarious for the daughter-in-law’s birthday card. This year we will look at the local lumber yard for her card. Don’t ask. It only gets more complicated.

One year we bought a birthday card for our youngest son’s birthday; then I forgot to send it. In fact, I think we even forgot his birthday that year. And we have never heard the end of that one! The grandchildren have given up on hearing from us on their birthdays. It is not that we don’t care; we simply can’t remember. But usually someone in the family reminds us that the kids got a year older. But I digress from the topic at hand—Freebies!

Someone needs to come up with a plan to make good use of all these cards: happy birthday, get well soon, season’s greetings, happy ho ho, so sorry you moved, and the like need a new home other than a box in my office. Even the Post Office should encourage us to make good use of these pretty cards and sentiments. Mailing the things might just put the Post Office back in the black!

Let’s see; if one out of ten folks gives ONE agency a donation and that agency lets three more know that that person donates—this sounds too much like one of those math problems that requires algebra or some other kind of mathematical thinking. Let’s just imagine a tree a day to produce greeting cards, labels, notepads, and any other paper product like stickers that gets put into the guilt letters. Now the letters are seldom ever only one page. And an envelope correctly addressed to the agency (without postage, of course) goes inside that nice fat envelope full of notepad, address labels, or whatever. Finally, one nice shiny little piece of paper with a final message from a worthy person asks us to consider this gift one of the most important we could make this year. Dad gum it! If I can’t remember our grandkids’ birthdays, do they really think their organization is going to hear from us?

If anyone can think of a good home for these very nice piles of greeting cards, I will be happy to donate an entire box. And no, the address labels won’t be included.

Note from Slightly Creaky: Before you donate to any charity, check their reliability at the Better Business Bureau's Start With Trust site.

A Fresh Perspective

A Fresh Perspective

Once in a while something comes along that makes life more interesting and meaningful.  When we are younger and more inclined to be emotional, we might become infatuated with someone or something that will be the center of our interests and efforts.  Some men—and more recently, women—become totally immersed in some kind of work or career.  When a little more water has crossed the creek beds of our lives, it takes more than a career or someone with a seemingly wonderful personality to excite or interest the average grey-headed man or woman.

Years ago I was asked for my definition of success.  At the time I was attempting to illustrate my ability to write a five paragraph essay without making any grammatical errors.  But I still remember now how the elements of success seemed to be centered in community rather than in personal accomplishments. 

Of all the individuals that I have known who were able to buy, sell, or otherwise manipulate wealth into an impressive form of power, not one would have influenced my life more than a simple teacher who encouraged me to read.  That teacher offered me books that were not yet on the shelves of the county library.  She offered me the greatest gift:  she believed in me.

Sometimes I think we forget that we are part of a community.  We concentrate too deeply on our own personal needs or dreams so that we lose sight of a greater good.  If each of us were to give back to ONE person a random gift of appreciation, a good book, a helping hand, a kind word, would the world suddenly become a better place?  Honestly, I have my doubts, but random acts of kindness are much more likely to help us as individuals to have a better outlook on life—whether we are the recipient or the donor.

A recent conversation with a man who has a larger vision of community made me wonder if it is possible to develop a pattern for something special that would benefit our entire nation.  While Ronald Reagan humorously attempted to tell us that we should run and hide if someone from the government said that they were here to help, it is just possible that a pattern for a system of self-help could be the answer to some communities’ problems.  A state-wide regional approach to committing resources to problems could alleviate some of the burdens through sharing the costs for training, education, or oversight.

Each community has its own particular set of problems: crumbling, decaying, trash-strewn landscapes; lack of health care facilities; lack of recreational facilities for young people; lack of locally-owned markets for foods and other necessities; lack of libraries and good daycare; lack of jobs. Oh, look at that last entry—lack of jobs. What would happen if the landscape became part of the economy? What if young people were given the training to become medical assistants, daycare providers, or cashiers and stockers in their own stores? What would happen if the store also happened to have a lending library of used books?

It seems that each of the categories mentioned has some kind of regulation constraining any ease of development within a community, yet communities have something that no rule or regulation can completely dampen—communities have spirit. Another thing many communities have is some older people who have experienced just about every level of education and professional duty mentioned. The retired librarian can teach young people how to develop a system of keeping whatever books they are given in an orderly manner. A former grocer can teach others how to manage both dry commodities as well as fresh foods and how to find the best sources for each. A nurseryman or woman who loves plants can encourage the development of gardens and flower beds. A retired nurse can begin the process of teaching medical procedures. Almost any grandmother can teach other women how to care for multiple babies and toddlers.

Any community that develops even in one area will find a pride and sense of ownership in not only the physical aspects that others see, but a sense of pride in the ones who have learned to be more than just another number among the unemployed. What teacher has not felt pride in his or her student who has managed to ‘get’ the lesson? And a clean sidewalk and flowers may not seem like a big deal in the overall picture of life, but to one community, even just a small patch of pride can make a big difference.

Too often what we hear about ‘community developers’ turns out to be some organization that makes noises without the benefit of making changes that matter. Resentment develops among those who actually live in a community when they find that they are being ‘directed’ by someone who drives away at night before the sun goes down. Making changes in a community is not entirely about providing much-needed wages. Oh, helping a community to obtain a grant to supply them with a better source of water will make a big difference. But it is more important that the members of the community ‘own’ each change and even the details of their development.

Years ago most small towns had ‘city fathers’ who helped to plan the changes that led to better schools, better fire departments, better lakes or water lines, and other community essentials. No little town needed a lot of ordinances because common sense dictated that folks had to get along with their neighbors. Dogs had to be vaccinated; livestock had to be kept off the roads; and children were rounded up and sent to school after summer was over. Today our cities are bigger so that inner-city communities are sometimes larger than small cities once were. But we still need those who can plan for the future.

Each city has within its boundaries many possibilities—and responsibilities. No central government can touch on each situation as well as those who are within arm’s reach. And reaching out to improve a situation can be interesting at the very least and meaningful in the long run to those who become involved. But someone has to set the pattern of involvement. The heads may be gray and the hands not as strong as they once were, but experience and a giving attitude may provide that one invaluable gift to our nation—a belief in ourselves. True success, like true religion, is love for our fellow man.

The Great Depression Rides Again!

The Great Depression Rides Again!

Several months ago an older man my dad did not know wheeled his chair up to Dad and asked him how he made it through the Great Depression. They then exchanged stories of how very difficult that time period was for their respective families and what they were able to do as youngsters to help their families. Some of the things our parents told us about that time period were pretty sad—and sometimes pretty funny.

Folks from the rural areas have always had a totally different outlook on life than those from more urban settings. For one thing, living close to the land and depending on it for a living convinces one on a daily basis that life is anything but a sure thing. Those who live in the city and take it for granted that life will always look the same just have no perspective on the ephemeral quality of our lives. The one attitude most rural folks have is the certitude that they are part of a community—a social safety net of friends and family. Urban dwellers do not seem to have that same sense of community or the sense of social stability that grows from knowing and working alongside one’s neighbors.

The Great Depression seemed to level out the social standing of just about anyone who lived through that time period. People went hungry; people went broke; people lost everything they had. Those who actually had a job during that time were very thankful for whatever they had. My grandfather, a five foot tall hunk of muscle, had to use every one of those sinews to work a team and dig oil field slush pits. He made a dollar a pit. Sometimes it took two days to dig it down to the right depth and out to the right width. And sometimes a horse came up lame.

Daddy tells the story of the folks all trying to sell their eggs to the little store in Petrolia in order to get some cash. The store keeper finally had to start turning away the people who came with eggs. They sat down on the curbs not knowing what to do. No one had any money. Granddad was just as discouraged, but he decided he could at least throw the darned eggs. For generations the egg fight on the main drag of Petrolia was a story handed down. It seems even the store keeper got in on the egg fight and brought out more ammunition in the cases of eggs that he had bought from all the folks in that area. Now that is one kind of ‘Occupy Main Street’ that made a lot of sense to people at the time!

Years ago I was surprised to hear that dairy farmers were pouring out the milk rather than sell it so cheaply that it would not even pay for the cows’ feed. Wheat, corn, and other commodities have to at least pay for the seed, the fuel for the tractors, the fertilizer, and at least enough profit to pay the basic bills for a farmer. Real farmers live with the realities of the forces of nature. Some farmers can make a decent profit and reinvest in their farms over a period of time so that it may seem that they have more than their share of the good things in life. But they worked for those things. The same goes for ranchers who deal with livestock and the markets for their stock. Nothing is certain about this way of life.

In the past, it seemed to young people from small towns that they could always find a job in the nearest big city. Young men from Petrolia went to Wichita Falls. Young men from Wichita Falls went to the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex. Women went to school and became nurses, teachers, or wives—or both. Currently, women who have become teachers may or may not be able to find a job. The nursing profession is slightly more stable, if more demanding in terms of hours and atmosphere. Women who are aides or medical assistants are not as well paid and not as sure of employment. But the medical profession still has more opportunities than the teaching profession. And marriage is anything but stable in today’s society.

Young men who look for employment without the education or training for a specific field are about as likely to find a decent job as Texas is likely to get rain in July. No matter how many high grades a person makes, no matter how good his or her computer skills may be, the jobs available currently require training or specific skills that are not taught in our high schools—or in colleges apparently. And the trade schools are not preparing their students any better than the high schools or colleges. But that is a different tale altogether.

Perhaps defining ‘decent job’ might be helpful. Stable, long-term employment brings to mind the consideration of adapting one’s skills, determination, and dependability into an asset for a company. By the same token, one hopes that the company will appreciate the individual’s dedication and consistency by retaining and rewarding one’s efforts. The basic problem today is not that employees demand too much in wages or hours but that most companies have little room to negotiate when their products fall from demand. The ability to improve a process for making Styrofoam cups won’t help a company that can’t sell their products to a large market. So the employee who designs the process may not even have a job, much less a bonus for his ingenuity.

San Antonio Shoes is probably not a very large company in the greater scheme of things, but their employees have stable jobs. The products are made in America with both skill and craftsmanship. Several teachers I have known throughout the years swear by the comfort of their SAS shoes. Customer satisfaction makes a big difference in how well a company does on the balance sheets. Obviously, not every company’s product is going to come out of leather and heavy duty threads, but the principle is the same. We bought a car shed the other day and were told that it would cost $100 dollars less than the posted cost. The reason given: the company, out of Texas, by the way, got a great deal on some American steel and passed the savings on to their customers. Now that is the way to do business. They make a profit, but they are not being greedy.

The profit motive and greed are two different critters. The Great Depression came about because of some complex problems that were exacerbated by greed and gambling. Many of those same kinds of problems exist today on an even greater scale because of social developments. Just as it was in the days of the Depression, jobs are non-existent in some areas. It is not just Detroit that looks like a battleground of epic proportions. Plenty of work exists in the sense that much needs to be done to clean up cities and rebuild communities, but no one will lift a brick today without the promise of payment. Stores will not build in lawless areas where utility services are uncertain. So no jobs will be available to a young—or to an older—person in that community.

If there were a market for bricks and weeds, I wonder how many people would get out there and stack bricks or pull weeds today. That kind of work would have to beat digging a slush pit with a team of horses and a metal slip that weighed more than three men. It would also beat the wages of the poor women in India who sit among cast off electronics digging apart the plastics to get to the precious metals for a few pennies a day. Maybe an attitude of gratitude is what we need in America to face this new-age depression.

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