72 years ago, and then some

I’m presenting Flash-back Friday two days early. I’m sandwiching it between the Fourth of July and the sixth of July for a reason.

Yesterday was Independence Day, the day we celebrate our freedom. As you may recall, my dad and his family came to the United States from Germany in 1924. During and following World War I, life in Germany was incredibly hard, everyone was living in poverty and oppression. When Dad’s family lived through the Great Depression here in the US, they felt that conditions here were still better than what they left behind.

His mother lived a hard, tiring life. This is the oldest picture I’ve found of her. It is dated the 1920s, but I don’t know where she was living at the time or who the child is with her.

 This is her passport picture from 1924. I guess no one takes a good passport picture. 

 This one is from 1955, when she was vacationing in St Augustine, Florida with my family (before I came along). I think Mom said it was the only vacation she ever took. She would have been 67 years old then. She looks much older, doesn’t she? A hard life will do that to you. 

 These next two photos rather confuse me. The first one is supposedly of my dad, is dated January 11, 1923, and says the dog’s name is Prince. Dad would have been eight years old at the time and still living in Germany. 

 This one is of Dad and his younger brother Frank. Dated May 29, 1929, when they would have been living in Chicago, I think. Doesn’t he look like he’s wearing the same sweater as in the previous picture though? Had he really not grown much in six years? Or was that just the popular style of sweater and he just kept getting them in a bigger size? Or is one of these pictures not of my dad? Any thoughts? 

 This one is of Dad with Frank again and their older sister Clara, also taken in 1929, so also in Chicago. Doesn’t Frank look like Farkus from “The Christmas Story”?

 There might be more pictures of Dad somewhere between then and 1945, but this is all I got so far. Here he is looking dashing as ever. 

 Here he is in front of his school bus. Which is significant. I probably have told you this before, but he was Mom’s school bus driver. I’ll save the story of their first date for another time. 

 Why I wanted to share this now though is because, shortly after she graduated from high school and shortly after she turned 18, they got married on July 6, 1945. 72 years ago tomorrow. 

And this is where they spent their honeymoon. 

Really Having Freedom

 So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. (Galatians 5:1 New Living Translation)

It’s that time of year where Freedom is the popular word. With Independence Day on the horizon, everyone in America is out celebrating their freedom – their freedom mostly to have cook-outs, attend parades and shoot off fireworks. Never the less, we shouldn’t take our freedom for granted and we should remember the freedoms our forefathers instituted.

One of those freedoms, of course, was freedom of religion. We have the freedom – the right – to practice any religion we choose. Many people these days interpret that to be freedom from religion, meaning they just don’t want to hear about anybody else’s beliefs. 

But that’s not where I really wanted to go today. The verse above is the first verse that popped up on my Bible search of the word freedom. One of the things that turns people off about religion is all the rules, the laws which no one can keep.

If you know your Bible at all, you know that the Old Testament is full of laws which the Jewish people were expected to keep. There’s no way that anyone could keep all those rules, or even the ten commandments. Then along came the New Testament and the new rule – the one and only rule any of us need to keep.

Jesus died for our sins. Our sins – all of God’s commandments that we break – were keeping us slaves, keeping us from being free. Once Jesus was crucified on our behalf, he took the punishment for all our sins, for all time. He set us free.

If you don’t want any religion in your life, if you refuse to be a Christian because you don’t like all the rules, you don’t really understand it. Sure, you should follow certain protocols and doctrines, because that’s the way to get alone with people and God wants us to love all people. But the only commandment you have to keep is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’. (Luke 10:27)

Thank You Lord God for allowing me to love You and be loved by You in return. Amen 

Flashback Friday - who could throw these away?

I have yet to make a dent in the boxes of old pictures from my mom’s apartment. Every time the subject came up when she was alive, she would say that she should just throw them out. As I’ve started going through them, I have thrown a few out, but very few. Most of them, no matter how faded or bent they are or whether or not I know who the pictures are of, each one is a precious memory of a precious time in someone’s life.

I’m going to start posting a few of them here periodically. I may have shared some of them before, but I’m not going to look back at every one of my blog posts over the last few years to figure out which ones you may have already seen. But anyway, I don’t know if or when I will ever get done scanning them all.

One of the oldest pictures I’ve come across so far. This is my great-grandma; my mom’s grandma.

 My mom’s parents worked together at a logging camp in the Northwoods – he as a logger, she as a cook. I could be wrong but I think that Grandma is the second woman from the left and Grandpa is next to her. According to the back of the photo, the little boy is their son, my Uncle Robert. If that is the case, the picture had to be taken around 1918.  

Grandpa with my Uncle Robert and Aunt Helen, in front of their first barn, around 1929

 This is the earliest picture of my mom, as a baby, in 1927, being held by (she thought) one of her cousins. 

 My mom with her mom around 1937. 

Grandma and Grandpa in 1942, I think in front of their house. 

 I love this picture. The favorite that I have found so far. Mom and her friend Marion Paul, sometime in the early 1940s, on the Big Rock in the woods behind the house where I grew up. 

 So, like really? Who would want to throw these pictures out? Or at least not until after they were scanned into the computer and saved. 

Primates in the Park

After visiting a crocodile farm, a giraffe center and a baby elephant sanctuary, on a Sunday back in April in Kenya, when our driver Samson said we were going to last go to the monkey park, I thought it would be another organized zoo-type place. We pulled up to the City Park and still I thought there was going to be various monkeys all behind bars somewhere in that park.

Wrong.

On the drive, there, Samson stopped and purchased bags of peanuts from a street vendor. I didn’t think much of it; maybe he was taking them home to his kids, until he started handing them out to us in the parking lot of the park. I still wasn’t thinking much of it – was I just exhausted by then or just overwhelmed by seeing all these animals all day?  

We walked into the park and within just a few moments, Sykes monkeys began cautiously approaching on the ground and jumping through the trees. As soon as they realized we had nuts on us, they went nuts, begging and stealing as much as they could. 

 Samson showed us how to do it. 

Most of the females were mommas with babies clinging to them. 

 At first Rachel wanted nothing to do with the monkeys, but she warmed up to them after a while.

 Everyone else took their turn as monkeys jumped on their shoulders and snatched whatever they could. 

 Kenzie was probably the most enamored with the little primates. 

 After already enduring more than my share of accidents on this trip, I really didn’t want to risk having one of them scratch my arm wide open or give me rabies. Instead I let this little mommy stay on the ground and eat gently from my fingers. 

Got it Figured Out

My Tuesday morning Women’s Group has started reading the book, “God Speaks Your Love Language” by Gary Chapman. As with any book I’ve read lately, it has taken me awhile to get into it.

The five love languages are supposedly 1) words of affirmation, 2) quality time, 3) acts of service, 4) gifts and 5) physical touch. Even before I took the quiz, I knew which one was me and which was not. But even knowing that, I think that at certain times and with certain people, your language is going to be different. Or even if I am acting on, say, the language of acts of service, I really want the person on the receiving end to utilize quality time.

Or maybe I am just being complicated.

In any event, I’m still on chapter 3 in the book, so I shouldn’t act like I have all the answers, but I do know that God has all the answers and He knows what to do to make me receptive to Him.

This past week I wrote not one, but two rather gloomy posts here. I’ve not been to the point of desperation, even if it sounded like it. I know that God is still out there and that He hasn’t given up on me. I know He still speaks my love language but I hadn’t figured out why I wasn’t hearing it.

I got in my car the other day after work, turned on the radio and the Newsboys were just starting to sing “It is You.” My favorite Christian song. Takes me right back every time I hear it. Every single time. Back to a time when I had it all figured out. Which maybe hasn’t been much the last five months, but I figured it out the other day in my car listening to this song. Again.

Thank You, Lord God, for always speaking my love language. I’m sorry that sometimes my sinful nature or the sinful nature of the world gets in the way. Help me to remember, though, that You will always continue to speak to me, in the language that I know. Amen.   

How Things Really Pass

Believe it or not, I hadn’t vented last time about everything going haywire with my life. I thought I should finish up that rant and then move on.

On Tuesday, I complained about the day job, mourned my mom’s passing, missed Kenya and fretted about “Where the Sky Meets the Sand”. After I hit the publish button, it dawned on me that – as hard as it seems – I missed a few things.

Such as the various aches and pains which have settled throughout my body. The left Achilles has been going on for four long years now. The back, though not nearly as insistent, has that beat by nearly thirty years. The fingers and hands have more bad days than good ones. I don’t know what it means, but the pain seems to move from hand to hand and finger to finger. The only consistent one is the right middle finger which has been locking up for a couple years now.

But I shouldn’t complain as I haven’t had any migraines for at least a year.

Yet another thing that’s been going on has to do with my affiliation with the state society of medical assistants. I’ve been a member for – it must be – 28 years and have been either a committee chairman or officer for at least half that time. The last couple of years, since I don’t have time for a big commitment, I have only been a member on one of the committees. My main duty is to maintain the email accounts for the 32 officers and committee chairmen on the executive committee. Really the only time of year that I have much to take care of is after all the new people take over and they all need access to their email, and I have to change all the passwords, make sure the accounts are working, send the information to all these people and talk them through the process if they have problems. And of course, that time of year has been the last month.

Even then, it’s not a huge chunk of time, but it is still something I have to take care of when I really only want to lay in the sun during the day and curl up in my bed at night.

With all this going on, you would think that I wouldn’t worry about my weight, coz who has time to eat. Not the case. When a person doesn’t have time to cook, it doesn’t mean they don’t have time to eat. They don’t have time to eat healthy, but they sure can find junk food in a heartbeat.

And I know that eating right and getting enough exercise are two of the things which make a person feel better in general and can help them cope with stress. Yet those are the two things which get the least amount of attention. Of course, with my initial complaint in this post being the chronic pain I’m starting to have, things like running bring on more pain. But I know that the correct exercise done consistently is really going to help that.

I will power through all of this though. This too shall pass. As the saying goes, it may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.

Thanks everyone for putting up with me and supporting me. Next time I post here, I will be upbeat and back on track. Promise.   

Feeling like Humpty-Dumpty

I went to bed last night not able to decide what to blog about today – our camping trip last month, our trip to the Brewers game last weekend, more about my travels to Kenya in April or maybe just a complaint about the crazy weather we’ve been having or even world events. I woke up this morning thinking that instead of all of that, it was time to come clean about how I’ve really been feeling the last five months.

It started around the first of the year when we started losing people at the clinic where I work. When fully staffed we are at four physicians and four advanced practice providers (i.e. nurse practitioner or physician assistant). Right now we have two NPs, two full-time doctors and one doctor working three days a week. A new NP just started, but she is not up to speed yet and won’t be for a while. We have two doctors coming in to help out a few days a week, but they are mostly seeing walk-ins and not really picking up the slack of our regular patients with their chronic needs.

You would think that at least this would mean we have plenty of help with these few providers, but we have lost as many patient care staff as we have providers. Also, management has made cuts to some of our ancillary staff as well, so those of us who are left are doing multiple jobs.

And finally, add to that that we went to a new electronic medical record on February 14. No one cares too much for the new system. Everything we do in it seems to take a few extra steps and I am getting too old to remember all of that. I come home late from work every night wanting to do nothing but crawl into bed.

Then, as you know, the very next day, my mom passed away. I was ready for it and have written about it here already. I know that a person doesn’t just get over the death of a loved one and I have to deal with it over time. Shoot, I’m still not over Dad dying 24 years ago or Pat 18 years ago. I suppose that’s part of the problem. How many people can I keep stored up in my heart without giving them wings to fly free?

I really, really, really thought I was coping, though. Then I went back to Africa. Only people who have done volunteer work in a third world country can understand what kind of a loss one feels when they return from such a trip. And having returned from Kenya four times now, each time that feeling is stronger.

Since October the one bright star on my horizon has been that my first novel, “Where the Sky Meets the Sand”, was going to be published this spring. However, through a series of events on not only my publisher’s part, but mine as well, that process continues to get moved back. All of the internal work on it is now done, I am just waiting for the cover to be finalized. But I still don’t have a date for when it will be released. I’d like to start marketing it, but without that date as well as the finished cover, it makes it tough. Besides, along with not feeling like doing anything else, I don’t feel like doing that.

So, my to-do list, which I have not been tending to includes: marketing that novel, scheduling some book-signings, writing a business plan for my writing career in general and that book in particular, cleaning the spare bedroom where a bunch of Mom’s stuff ended up, scanning all the old family pictures I inherited from Mom, starting to plan the next trip to Kenya with Tumaini Volunteers, promoting Tumaini Volunteers, setting up some arts and crafts sales for Tumaini Volunteers, finishing writing the second novel that I am half-way done with, trying to work out and getting in shape and I am sure there are about ten more things I should be doing.

So, yea, it’s overwhelming and I try to sit back and not worry about it all. Try to just enjoy the simple things, appreciate family and friends, my house, my yard. But I feel like Humpty-Dumpty – just don’t see how the pieces are all going to fit back together. Hoping that getting it off my chest is cathartic. 

But right now, I really should be getting ready for work. I will keep you posted.