Snow Flakes Falling

Posted on 25/01/2026 by Grumpa Joe

Outside my office window, the snowflakes fall ever so gently, continuing to accumulate. My mind wanders back to the 1980’s when I sat with my children looking out at a similar scene. The temperature was a bone-chilling eighteen degrees Fahrenheit, and dropping. The coming night promised to put us into a deep freeze. The garden scenery was as pure and white as freshly laundered linen. Hey kids, “lets get dressed and go outside to build a snowman.”

“Put on your boots and snow suits,” their mother exclaimed. The three of them began digging for their snow gear. “I’ll race you,” said Steven, the oldest.”

“Mom, I need you to help me. Steve and Jacque are ahead of me.”

“That isn’t fair, Mom. Said Steve. “You are helping him just because he is little.”

“Get over it, Steve. He is only three, and he doesn’t even know what a snow suit is.” Despite Mom’s help, Mike came in dead last. She had to shake him into his sister’s old snow suit, and as chubby as he was, it was a tight fit, with the zipper a struggle to close. His older brother and sister stood laughing as they watched Mom shaking him into the slightly undersized suit. The boots were another challenge, but Mike was able to pull them on by himself. Dad was the clear winner, since he jumped into a snowmobile suit that fit him loosely. He helped the three of them finish getting dressed. Mom would dress after them and join in the fun later.

“Hey, kids, I have a better idea: let’s use the toboggan.”

I pulled the toboggan off the ceiling hooks and dropped it into the snow at the front of the garage. “Steve, you sit in front, and Mike, you get on behind Steve, and Jacque, you are the caboose.”

“Aww, I want to be first,” squealed Mike. As always, he felt the need to compete with his older brother. “Jacque, please make sure Mike does not fall off.”
“I got him, Dad, don’t worry.” As always, she assumed care for her baby brother. She often climbed into his playpen and held his bottle for him so he could concentrate on sucking the formula down.

“I’ll tow you to get started down the driveway and give the rope to Steve.” The driveway was a long, curving slope that flattened slightly at the street and continued across and down into Dover Circle, where it ended in Fleckenstein’s driveway. “Ready, here we go.” I pulled them as hard and as fast as I could for about 10 feet, then handed the tow rope to Steve. Whee! They all shouted as they picked up speed and raced to the end of Dover Circle. The whole trip lasted less than a minute, but the kids loved it.

Mom joined us just as they coasted to a stop.

At the top again, I pulled rank and sat in the driver’s position, and insisted that Mike sit between my legs in front, while Barb sat behind me. Steve pushed us to get off to a good start. As we crossed Aberdeen Road into Dover Circle, the toboggan veered sideways, and we flipped over into the culvert and rolled to a stop. We couldn’t stop laughing as we got up from the snow and began brushing furiously. “Let’s do that again,” said Mike. I helped Barb up and asked if she was okay. “I’m fine,” she said. “But you can use some lessons in driving.”

We left the toboggan to the kids while Barb and I began rolling a snowball into a snowman. Eventually, the kids got tired of dragging the sled up the hill and joined us to make their own snowmen on the front lawn.

Memories like this are great, and I am amazed that this 54-year-old flashback is still as vivid as if it were yesterday. At the same time, these memories beset me with melancholy because Barb has been gone for twenty-three years, and our daughter Jacque for 12 weeks.

Filed under: Aging, family, grief | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Create a List of Joyful Moments to Relieve Stress

Posted on 24/11/2025 by Grumpa Joe

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.

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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.

Filed under: family, Funk, grief, Memories, Motivation | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment »

Jacque-1963-2025

Posted on 13/11/2025 by Grumpa Joe

   

 

Some Recollections of My Baby Girl

    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.

Filed under: Biography, family, grief | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

Aloneness

Posted on 07/09/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Dreams, dreams, dreams, what do they mean, and where do they come from? This morning, after my 6 a.m. pit stop and return to bed, I fell into a deep sleep that was not deep enough to black out dreams. In fact, that early morning second sleep seems to be conducive to dreaming wild ones. I haven’t worked for a living for twenty-two years, yet I saw myself doing what a Chief Engineer does: manage people, discuss solutions to technical problems, and create new products when they come to the desk. The level of my activity was intense.

Then, the dream fast-forwarded to a time when the company decided to move my division to another part of the world. I was no longer doing things a Chief Engineer normally does. I was doing nothing, except purging my paper files to reduce records to what would be necessary for the foreigners to operate, which is nothing in my experience. My staff was down to a secretary, and a few engineers left to manage the move of our stuff to Singapore.

I kept coming to work, and there was less to do each day and fewer people. I saw my desk with the PC atop, but the bookcase, and conference table with chairs were gone, as was the side chair to my desk. The wall was barren of the white board where I drew sketches on countless new projects and outlined myriads of projects, but the clean space was conspicuously still there. I sat staring at a computer, waiting for some emergency from the production floor to need my attention. Behind the wall, the production floor was empty for one lonely molding machine pushing out parts automatically without any human intervention. We had to build an inventory of this part number to cover the time that the machine and mold were on a six week fast boat to the Far East.

I came in the next morning, and my desk and PC were gone, and in the corner of the office lay a pile of miscellaneous clothes from the now-empty closet. I began to daydream about the forty years I spent in this space and all the seemingly important activities I had immersed myself in to feel important while neglecting my wife and kids in the name of making a living. I was all alone in an empty office, in an empty building, my wife dead long before, and my kids dispersed all about the country, earning a living for themselves. I was feeling sadness even though I was sleeping.

The dream didn’t end there. The sadness continued to overwhelm me, but time had moved on. I was now sitting in my car parked in front of the apartment building that I looked at for years from my office window. However, the office was no longer there. In its place stood a six-unit, three-story condo building. Behind this new apartment where the factory once took up 50 acres of land there was now streets and sewers, and power poles. There was not a shred of evidence that there once existed upon this land a living breathing factory that employed thousands of people twenty-fours hours a day to make simple electrical products used by electricians around the world. The sadness kept getting stronger and deeper, and my brain finally began to sense sounds coming from the house, water running, the aircon blower spinning, and I told myself to kill the sadness, get up, and take a walk.
Here I sit, mid-day still feeling blue about life in the past that I can’t change.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, Funk, grief | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Work = Force x Distance

Posted on 07/06/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Today I explored several blogs from recently signed up followers. What amazes me is that most of them are selling something. Grumpajoesplace does not sell anything. My blog is a place where I can vent about almost anything or everything. For me writing is a cathartic drug. In times of grief writing allows me to express feelings I cannot express audibly. Writing relieves my stress when that is my issue. Writing allows me to communicate with bloggers who have become my friends over the internet, and whom I miss when they don’t comment or go missing.

I often thought about selling, but selling has never been my thing. In order to sell, I’d have to go back to work subscribing to blog sites for the simple reason of getting attention to my product. If I wanted a job, I would apply for one. Of course I am a hypocrite in this regard because I offer my books for sale on my site. In the twelve years I have done so I have sold two copies of my life story as told in games I played as a child. Today, if you actually click on the button that says “buy my book” it will lead you to Amazon Kindle books and the price is $0.00. So you will see that I can’t even give my book away, so why would I make a concerted effort (work) to subscribe to followers for the purpose of selling my free book?

On my to do list of big projects I have listed finishing a book I began writing when my wife Peggy was still alive and lucid about ten years ago. The working title is Space Rod. It is a story of a man who loses his wife and in his grief he buys an antique pick up truck which he intends to restore. Of course restoration is work, which he likes to avoid. He meets a man named Mort whose interest is also in street rods. They become friends, and before long Mort introduces the widower to Trey a man whose business it is to restore old cars. That is when the story finally gets interesting, and that is where I stopped writing to care for my wife full time. Peggy has been gone since 2019, and I am first now getting a tickle of an urge to finish this story. I picked up the manuscript a few months ago and read it to refresh my memory about the characters and the direction it was taking me. Throughout I kept mentally editing passages to clean up the grammar and to make it more readable. It occurred to me that this project is huge and will be considerable work. Do I really want to spend all that effort on something that no one will read?

Filed under: Biography, Cars, Fiction, grief, Hot Rods | Tagged: , , | 10 Comments »

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