Every once in awhile a moment occurs that is special. One of my motivational teachers put me onto keeping a list called “Warm and Fuzzy Moments.” Moments come along that make us feel good. The moments are special. Sometimes it is an unexpected card from a friend, or a “thank you” for something you did for someone. By recording the moment one can occasionally review it and feel good all over again. This technique is especially helpful when I am stressed out and not feeling good about myself. I can remember all the times when I received something unexpectedly for a positive action I took unconsciously.
Recently, one such moment occurred while I was walking on the path near my house. I was totally zoned saying the rosary and listening to the songs of the birds. I felt a presence near me, but kept walking. Sometimes it is another walker or a runner who silently approaches from the rear. Many times I never hear or see the person until they are next to me. This morning it was a deer. Not a fawn, nor an adult mature deer, but a teenager. It sported the beautiful honey brown color of a springtime deer without the baby spots of a fawn, or the antlers of a buck. He/she stood just above my waist in height.
I was totally surprised and amazed that this beautiful animal should come so close to me and walk along my side for a few steps. She finally picked up the pace and trotted out ahead of me and off into the brush along the side of the trail. The encounter lasted only a few seconds, but it is etched into my mind as a “warm and fuzzy” moment. It is written on my list.
My deceased wife Barbara loved deer. Could this magnificent animal been sent by her to tell me that she is well? Did God chose to let this creature wander into my path to make my day? What ever the reason it happened, a freak of nature, a coincidence, a sign, it made my day.
I recommend to all goal achieving people on this earth to keep a log of their “warm and fuzzy” moments. The moments relived will pick you up, and help you through the times you are low and not feeling good about yourself.
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? That is a question I have asked myself for the past seventy years, and I still don’t have an answer other than right where I live now.
There is something about living where you were born that seems to establish a tap root that is hard to pull up. All my life, I have traveled to places that I thought were better than where I live. It all began when my wife Barbara and I were on our honeymoon. First of all, the honeymoon was our very first trip away from home. Our destination was Florida. We loved the Florida weather along the Atlantic Ocean. What we didn’t like about Florida were the yearly hurricanes. The following year we ventured to California via Volks Wagon Bug. The smog in the Los Angeles area discouraged us from moving there, although I did go on a job interview with an airplane manufacturing company. One look at their engineering department turned me off. It was a giant room the size of two WalMarts back to back with rows and rows of drafting tables staffed by white shirted engineers designing parts. Up to that point in time, I yearned to live in LA and work for an engineering firm. The sight of that room caused my brain to lose the idea of working there forever.
On our way northward from LA, I aimed the Bug toward San Francisco, playing Tony Bennett’s latest hit song,
The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay The glory that was Rome is of another day I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan I’m going home to my city by the Bay I left my heart in San Francisco High on a hill, it calls to me To be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars
The morning fog may chill the air, I don’t care My love waits there in San Francisco Above the blue and windy sea When I come home to you, San Francisco Your golden sun will shine for me
When I come home to you, San Francisco Your golden sun will shine for me
We never stepped into San Francisco to see what everyone was singing about. Our itinerary was closing, and we had to move. However, the Bug topped out at 65 mph and needed to be goosed on the uphill segments, which were numerous. My last great vision was of Lake Tahoe before we called it quits in Reno, Nevada. Crossing Nevada was joyless. Just straight roads with endless hills between barren mountains.
As a young family, we enjoyed visiting Michigan, especially along the western coast of Lake Michigan, and we spent many weekends visiting my parents on their farm. We could have lived there, except that the winters are as brutal as those in Illinois. After many trips to the western states, we changed direction and headed east toward the Atlantic Ocean. The one thing I noticed is an abundance of dark green forests and lots of hills. What I didn’t experience is a driving force to want to live in the highly populated eastern part of our country.
After my son moved his family to Texas, I got to tour his state more extensively. The central part of Texas, with its hills and lakes, is beautiful and could convince me to live there.
We decided to treat ourselves on our anniversary by visiting Hawaii. There is no doubt, I could live there on any of the islands, but the Big Island was where I’d want to settle, even though we had the most fun on Maui.
Later, Barbara and I began traveling to Europe. Our first tour was to Britain, which consists of England, Scotland, and Wales. Those places are nice to visit, but they are not for me. My work took me to Germany several times, and I fell in love with the countryside and the small villages scattered throughout the country. I studied German in high school and could speak a few words, but the language would prohibit me from living there. On one of those business trips, my boss planned a visit to our factory in Avenzano, Italy. We spent all of twenty-four hours there, and I fell in love with place.
Throughout my travels, I have never been able to decide where to live next. Each time we visited somewhere, it was during an ideal time. For instance, we saw Hawaii during the summer, but never during the rainy season. The same held for Singapore. Canada is great during the summer months, but it is snowy and cold for the rest of the year. Iv’e never been to Alaska so I can only guess that living in six months of darkness would make me go crazy.
The choices of where to live are endless, and there is always a downside to every place I have ever considered to become my home. And I have always decided that I have a little bit of everything I have seen in the world, so why not just stay here in Illinois.
In conclusion, I have decided that at my age, the next place I want to live is Heaven.
When Jacque was born, we placed her in a crib that had formerly belonged to her brother, Steve, who was born eleven months ahead of her, and that is the instant she became his lifelong competitor. She must have received his vibes from the mattress. Throughout her life, she competed with Steve—anything Steve did, she had to do too. Never once in her lifetime did we set a challenge vocally. This competition lasted through grammar school, high school, and college. She finally beat him by getting a master’s degree in nursing.
Throughout her lifetime, she was never satisfied with her personal achievements. Near the end of her grammar school years, she picked up a love for the Spanish language. One year, when she was about fourteen, she bugged Barb and me to allow her to attend a two-week language camp in Minnesota. Eventually, she broke us down, and we let her attend. I remember we put her on the airplane and came home with tears in our eyes. She came home two weeks later speaking Spanish. From the time she got off the plane in Fargo, North Dakota, near the Minnesota border, she was required to speak only Spanish until she returned home, and we insisted that she talk to us in English. It was during this period that she joined a pen-pal program and began writing to a young man from Spain called Juan Carlos. As far as I know, they are still at it.
When she was fourteen, her mother, Barb, was diagnosed with breast cancer. That is when she began working in a nursing home. A year later, she set her goal to become a cancer nurse. After proving to me that she had been accepted to the University of Illinois, she decided to attend St. Xavier University, which is located three miles from home. She became a nurse, and her first job was at Resurrection Hospital in Niles, IL. About a year later, she found a position as a nurse in the stem cell research program at Rush Hospital in Chicago. By that time, she had enrolled in the master’s program at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. She worked at Rush full-time and commuted to DeKalb for classes. After a semester of that stress, she decided to quit work and attend school full-time until she completed her degree. Barb and I traveled to DeKalb to witness our baby girl get her master’s degree in nursing.
Somewhere in time, Jacque traveled to Spain to meet her pen-pal, Juan Carlos. They toured Europe for six weeks by car. Later, he came to America, and she drove him around our country.
She never returned to Rush but instead joined the VA Hospital in Maywood. There she was in her element, taking care of cancer patients. One of her notable memories was to accompany a seriously ill vet to Washington, D.C., by private air ambulance to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. She had a knack for comforting vets dying from cancer.
It was at the VA that Jacque met her lifelong friend and travel companion, Kelly. The two of them visited New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and other countries along the way. On one trip, she was to meet Kelly in Tokyo on their way to visit her cousin Claudia, who was stationed with the Navy in Okinawa. Somewhere over Canada, her airplane lost an engine and rolled on its side 90 degrees before the pilot was able to correct it. She was grounded in Anchorage, Alaska, for three days while a replacement engine was air freighted and installed. Eventually, she hooked up with Kelly and Claudia to tour Okinawa.
In 1990, I was still working at Panduit when my boss presented me with a challenge: go to our division in Singapore and teach them how to maintain our cable tie molds. I had previously turned down this challenge, but I finally decided to accept it. I made the trip three times over the next eighteen months. On my last trip, I asked Barb to join me at the end of the three-week stint so that we could take a vacation together in the far east. She was reluctant to travel so far by herself. She talked Jacque into traveling with her. It turned into a great time. Jacque brought Barb to me, and the three of us traveled together to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. Without Jacque, I would never have had this time with Barb.
To this day, I don’t know precisely how Jacque met her partner, Jeff, but I’m sure he can tell the story better than I could. All I can add from this point is that she got lucky when she found him. Together, they were a match made in heaven. Her desire to travel waned from then on as she accepted the new challenges of marriage, motherhood, work, and pursuing her PhD. The doctorate was put on hold so she could fight the cancer. In the end cancer beat her.
Those long, hot summer days on the farm challenged my imagination to the limits. Every day I had something to do, yet it felt like I had nothing to do. I call that boredom. One of my favorite daydreams was to be a pioneer. I dreamed of carving out a place to live in the wilderness. My games all centered on pioneer life.
The back acreage on the farm was very wild. Gramps had a small vineyard and an apple orchard, followed by a field of blackberries and another of boysenberries. Behind that, the farm was more primitive. My seven-year-older brother Bill has a different recollection of the farm. When he was my age, Mom and Gramps tilled the entire acreage. They kept chickens, pigs and a cow. Gramps also had a horse named Nellie. By the time I was born and old enough to recall, the neat little farmstead had reverted to nature. It was wild and very overgrown. Witness lines still defined the fields. A path coursed between them, but not much else.
The soil was extremely sandy and dry up to the edge of the woods. At that point, the terrain dropped into a wetland. The grasses that grew there were easily two feet taller than me, and the large swarm of Mosquitos and bugs attacked me each time I went exploring. The forest folded around the wetland. A creek wound its way out of the grasses and disappeared into the forest, dividing the property. The geological map of the area indicates that the creek is intermittent, meaning it dries up during the summer. I never saw it completely dry, but often I could jump across the flowing water. Most of the time, crossing the stream meant finding a log jam to balance on as I stepped from log to log. It was never really deep water, but who wanted to get wet. If I came home with wet socks and shoes, Mom would know and lecture me on the dangers of being in the woods alone.
Once across the creek, I climbed a sandy knoll and came out of the woods into a sandy lea. The forest again surrounded the opening. It was in this clearing that I explored the fringes near the trees. I often picked up items of interest as I walked. One time, I picked up a funny-looking grey stone. The surface looked chiseled. I didn’t think much of it at the time so I dropped it into my pocket and forgot about it.
As I explored the woods and the clearings, I was always on the lookout for animal tracks. Yet, in all the years I spent on the farm, I never spotted a wild animal. I found tracks in the sand every time I explored in the back. Deer tracks were abundant, and once I found some huge, wide prints that I imagined were from a bear. Most likely, they were from a large dog.
Later, I pulled the stone from my pocket and looked at it more closely. Every day, I looked at the stone. Finally, I realized that I had found an arrow point. That really got my juices flowing. My play shifted from pioneering as a settler to that of the Indian. I hunted the forest for slender Sassafras trees, which I fashioned into a bow and some arrows. The best I could find were sassafras trees. They were very straight, but brittle. When I put tension on the stem to bend it into a bow, it would snap. Gramps watched me, and noticed my frustration. He disappeared for a short time, and came back with willow stems that were the right size. They were very flexible. He helped me make a bow. Making the arrows is another story. Finding stems that are perfectly straight without a bend or a kink is very hard. I did the best I could to make arrows from both sassafras and willow. I stripped all the leaves and the bark from the stems, then notched the heavy end to fit the string. The bow and arrows took me several hours to make. I could hardly wait to test them. My arrows didn’t have a flint stone tip or a feathered quill. When I shot one, it cartwheeled or flew sideways till it dropped. Playing this way taught me that the Indians knew a lot more about making bows and arrows than I did. It didn’t occur to. me that they spent generation after generation perfecting the art on a daily basis. Nor did it dawn on me that when the weapon is the primary means to secure food, the hunter tries harder to succeed. My attempts to make a bow and arrows went on and off that summer, and a few summers after that.
Each time I uncovered an arrowhead, my interest in making bows and arrows renewed. The year after I found my first arrowhead, I came upon another one. This time, I picked it up much closer to the house. The new one was easy to identify because it was more complete and had grooves at the base for tying it to the shaft. It was in excellent condition. Only the tip of the point was missing.
Indians were skilled at tracking animals, so I began to do the same thing. Whenever I found deer tracks, I followed them until I got lost in the brush. It wasn’t long before a pattern emerged, and I knew exactly where to find tracks. Even with all of my tracking and traipsing through the woods I never spotted a living animal on the farm.
Years later, after Mom and Dad retired to the farm. Dad told me that he saw deer come up into the yard to eat apples from the trees in the orchard.
Today, I planned to get a number of things done. It started with a breakfast omelet loaded with chopped garlic, onions, and accompanied by wheat toast and coffee. Cooking the omelet was a good thing, and provided me with a sense of accomplishment followed by the reward of eating the omelet. Next, I watered my house plants, and soaked my orchids under the spray on the sink. I sent my daughter-in-law a birthday card. The kitchen was calling me back, so I chopped onions, garlic, carrots, celery, and put them in a large pot with green peas and a ham bone loaded with meat. Once the goodies were covered with water, I put the soup on the stove to boil and simmer.
While the soup cooked, I mounted a fixture for my new flat screen TV. At this point, my day slowed to a crawl. My son-in-law came over to finish installing an electrical outlet for the TV. Jeff is one of my favorite people so I spent time talking with him about ponds, and his HVAC business. While he worked, I sat reviewing my monthly bills so I could pay them off. Jeff disappeared for a short time, but came back with my grandson. I actually got a chance to work on homework with my namesake.
After a brief review of the meaning of antecedents on the internet, my grandson and I were underlining pronouns and their antecedents when the phone rang. It was the leader of my Wednesday night mens group asking if I minded if we brought the wives with us this evening. I immediately responded that it would be fantastic to bring the wives.
My list of goal steps for the day went to hell this afternoon, but I can’t get into a snit about it because the activity that came to me was more important than my original plans. How much better could it get? Visiting with my oldest grandson, followed by dinner with my wife and friends. Goals are good, but fun with family and friends is better. Visiting with family and friends is one of my “high payoff activities.” In fact it is number one on my list. This activity carries the highest priority and is the most important thing in my life. All else pales in comparison.
