Dead of Winter
It’s another cold winter’s day here in our little piece of paradise on Earth, this perfect place we call home. The weatherman told us today that the temperature was colder right here, right now, than it was in Nome, Alaska. For the end of January, that’s pretty cold, my friend. And to add insult to injury, we’ve got what’s called a “panhandle” low coming in tomorrow evening that’s forecast to dump from 4 to 12 inches of snow, the amount depending…
Of course that’s the delimiter, the weasel word – depending. It’s the weatherman’s “get out of jail free” card. If the low goes a wee bit more north, we get the smaller amount of snow or maybe even rain. If it’s a wee bit more south we get walloped with much more of the white stuff. Of course the weatherman is always dealing with probabilities, with maybe this or maybe that. Being an old weatherman myself, I always side with the guy making the forecast. I’ve been there and know how much work goes into the seemingly effortless presentation on the nightly TV news. But I also know there’s a lot of s.w.a.g. involved. Swinging Wild Ass Guess.
I really don’t worry too much about the weather any more. I know that wishing and hoping that the weather would do “this” or do “that” is always an exercise in futility as the weather will be what it will be. It’s really not a giant matter to me any more, either, as I’m retired now and don’t have to fuss with going to work in the inclement weather. But my wife and son are still working, so they’ll have to fiddle with it.
Good luck! Just don’t wake me.
But of course they will if need be. I’m not going to get off the hook that easy. So we’ll see how Sunday night/Monday morning turns out.
I’ve been doing a lot of painting these past few weeks. The interior walls of my house have needed a fresh coat of paint since… hell, probably since Ronnie Raygun was our Commander-in-Chief or thereabouts. So since I’m no longer gainfully employed, I’ve decided to finally tackle this task.
To my joy I’ve rediscovered that “painting the house” is a lot more involved than just putting paint on walls. A lot more! First you move the furniture; then remove all pictures, clocks, sconces, paintings, candles, et al from the walls; then spackle up all the holes; then sand the spackle and any other rough spots on the wall; then tape up all the places you don’t want to paint; then apply the paint to the trim areas – around outlets, windows, doors, etc.; then use the roller to paint the bigger areas; then, since I was painting woodwork also, remove the tape and retape before painting the woodwork; then paint the woodwork; then remove the tape and touch up all the boo-boos you made during the previous 19 steps. Then you put all the pictures, clocks, sconces, paintings and candles, et al back on the wall and return the furniture to their original places. And since there is very little room in my house to move furniture, you do this three times for each room.
Pardon me while I catch my breath!
I didn’t remember it being quite this hard the last time I painted. Of course, like I alluded to previously, that was some (many) years ago and I was… well, quite a bit (a lot) younger. The old muscles and the bad back that I tend to these days are handicaps that weren’t an issue back then either. Now they are and my bed is a very, very welcome place at the end of the day.
My previous jobs have all been computer-related office positions, so the physicality of my life has been minimal. So now I’m paying my dues for most of a lifetime of soft office chairs and comfortable keyboards.
But you know what? That’s OK! No one’s got me on a clock now and if it takes me two or three days to do a task instead of one, that’s fine too. It’s getting done and the result is quite pleasing, at least to my eyes. Being as this house is over a hundred years old and there isn’t a square corner or flat surface anywhere, the suitability of results can be very subjective. So let me just say that it is pleasing to me, so if it isn’t to you… well, so be it.
The paint I bought to accomplish this task was supposed to be low-to-no VOC’s. VOC’s are volatile organic chemicals – substances that allow large amounts of molecules to escape from the liquid through evaporation and sublimation. These vapors can make you ill. Gasoline is a good example of a high-VOC substance. Apparently my paint is a low-VOC, not a no-VOC. I started feeling a bit icky today and have attributed it to breathing the vapors of the paint for too long at a time. I guess I’ll need to watch my exposure to the paint in the future since I won’t be able to ventilate it to the outside like I could do in the summertime.
Too damn cold! (see earlier paragraphs!)
The weatherman also said we’re very near the climatological center of winter – the coldest most miserable time, so the outlook for the future is warming and nicer. Of course that’s speaking climatologically, not two days down the road, which, as you might recall, is when the snowstorm is due. So to sum it all up, there’s a lot of winter left in this ol’ year, bucko.
People still ask me occasionally how my retirement is coming along. Am I liking it? Am I enjoying it? Am I ready to go back to work?
My answers were and still are - yes, yes and no, but as time goes by, it’s like answering other rather no-brainer questions. Do you ask a fish if he likes the water? Do you like having two hands to do stuff with? Do you like that the color of snow is white and grass is green? Hmmm… Yes? No? I guess?
Being retired, for me, is about as noteworthy nowadays as being employed was a few months ago. Just pretty much the way things are. I compare it to being married. The first few days (or weeks or months) after being married are unique, strange and very, very different than being single. Then it becomes status quo. It becomes the ocean you swam in.
I guess being retired is getting to be that for me. Status quo. Same-same. Non-remarkable.
Do I miss work? Naw. Very little. I do miss the folks I worked with. At least most of them – some more than others. But going into an office and doing the same thing over and over and over again ad infinitum? Do I miss that?
Not a bit.
I have found out, however, after I retired, that I needed to find a purpose for getting up each day, something to occupy my mind and my body. It might be as simple as going to the gym and getting in a bit of a workout. Or cooking something a bit out of the ordinary for supper one day. Or possibly even painting my doggoned house! Some reason for my continuing existence. I recently read something that spoke to me on that topic and which put some focus to this need, this drive. The entire article boiled down to a three-word question that you needed to answer every day. The question simply is: Did Today Matter? Can you honestly say at the end of the day that what you did that day mattered? And if it didn’t, what will you do about it tomorrow?
Sometimes the deepest philosophical questions can be summed up very simply. Did today matter?
I wrote those words down and placed them on my computer monitor. I now end my days looking at it and answering the question as best I can. Yes, I think so or no and I need to do better. The mattering can be as monumental as deciding to quit smoking or to get married, to as inconsequential, but still meaningful, as always thanking your wife for her labor in making you a meal. Or calling a friend who you know is a bit down to just chat for a while. Or to take a pain-reliever, drink fluids and get plenty of rest when you’re ill.
All those things matter.
So another cold winter blusters and moans outside our windows, trying to make you believe that winter is all there ever is, was or will be. But the smell of fresh paint on my old walls and the mouth-watering smell of my wife’s pot roast cooking in the kitchen lets me know that all’s well, all’s as it should be and spring surely is “just around the corner.”
Three Strange Ones
It had to be sometime in the winter of ‘69-’70 or thereabouts. I’d gotten out of the Air Force late in ’69 and had moved back home with my parents and brothers. I moved back home not because I didn’t want an apartment and a life of my own, really. It was just convenient, a comfortable place to settle for a bit while I figured out what was what, where I wanted to go and how I wanted to proceed with my life. And it really was nice being back with the family again in my old room after living in a barracks for four years.
Sometime during the cold part of that year there was a movie that came out which everyone was talking about. From all the buzz going around it sounded like a good one, so one night I headed on down to the movie theater. It was an evening show and it was dark when we got there and, of course, dark after we left. I say we because my dad accompanied me to this particular movie. Mom wasn’t interested, if I remember correctly, so dad had chimed in and said he’d kinda like to go too. I was glad for the company, to be honest, so we headed on down to see the show.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the movie “Easy Rider” or not, but it was quite a movie for its day. Two motorcycle riders from Los Angeles traveling to New Orleans in search of America. Peter Fonda played the part of Wyatt and rode the lean chopper with the ape-hangers and the red, white and blue American flag gas tank. He also had a matching helmet with the American flag motif and a leather jacket with an American flag on the back. Quite a patriotic look you might say.
Remember that jacket.
His partner, Billy, was played by Dennis Hopper, pre-“Apocalypse Now” days, riding the other chopper with the short straight handlebars and wearing a fringed-leather buckskin jacket and kind of a floppy cowboy hat. Now these two guys were definitely counter-culture for the time. Hippies, perhaps you might call them. On their way across America they encounter bigotry and hatred from the small towns they rode through. The residents hated and feared their non-conformity. They did drugs, spent a little time in a redneck jail and picked up a liberal alcoholic lawyer, played by Jack Nicholson, who joined them on their way to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. A terrible fate awaited one of them on a back Dixie road that would lead you to the conclusion that death is the only real freedom.
It was an emotional roller-coaster ride for my dad and I. The movie was great and the music was mostly ’68 rock – Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild”, The Byrds “Wasn’t Born to Follow”, Jimi Hendrix “If 6 was 9” and a number of other great ones. We were totally satisfied with the movie as we walked out among the last group of moviegoers. Our car was parked across the street from the movie entrance and facing it. We got into the car and sat for a few minutes, probably talking about how cool the show was and more than likely smoking a cigarette while we chatted. Just as we were about to start the car’s engine and head on home we noticed a figure coming out of the closed movie theater’s front door. All was dark except for a couple streetlights casting some rather dim light on the sidewalk. The figure walked up the sidewalk from our right to our left, and when he was past us a bit we noticed he was wearing a leather jacket. With an American flag sewed on the back of it. He turned the corner after a few moments and was gone.
Dad and I looked at each other. We’d both seen the figure and his outerwear. We’d both seen the American flag.
We’d not seen the person in the theater.
Could it have been…?
In the years 2001 through 2014 I worked for a county water department in their computer room. I watched the computer that monitored the water system, made sure the chlorine was adequate and that all the necessary water was available for the customers and safe to drink. I also answered the trouble phone and dispatched crews to fix water and sewer problems. I worked second shift, 4 o’clock to midnight. Some nights I had company and a second operator worked along with me. On Thursdays and Fridays, however, I worked alone. The rest of the county employees all left at 4:30 and then it was just lil’ ol’ me for the rest of the night.
Early in that decade-and-a-half I worked there, one of the midnight shift operators, a lady, lost her husband in a gruesome motorcycle accident. It was a terrible time for her. Most of the county came to the gentleman’s funeral and the lady was quite devastated as could naturally be expected. During her mourning period she heard about a place that made custom teddy bears that were supposed to help with the grieving process. They were called therapeutic teddy bears and could be dressed like the person who had passed away. My lady friend’s husband had worked at an auto parts store, so she had the bear dressed in the easily-identifiable vest that all the auto supply guys wore. It was actually kind of cute.
She brought this bear in to show all of us other employees one evening and left it there until she picked it back up the next night.
Remember that bear.
The office I worked in had a number of cubicles and a large amount of maps hanging on the walls depicting various parts of the water and sewer systems in the county. This office also was known to occasionally make odd noises during the nighttime hours. We all knew it was just the building expanding and contracting as the night ebbed and flowed and generally paid little heed to it.
The night the bear sat in the desk behind me was one of the noisy nights. Much more so than normal. I was alone that night, most of the lights were out in the room I worked in and, to be honest with you, the doggoned bear was creeping me out a bit. More than a bit, actually. As the night progressed, the thumps, cracks, bangs and other noises were much more prevalent and noticeable than “normal”. The maps hanging on the walls rustled and rattled much more than “normal”.
Just as if someone was walking past them quickly.
And the feeling of a presence was disturbingly real.
I recall sitting in my chair with my back to the room and listening. I was aware, perhaps, of an otherness nearby, but was also sure it was not malevolent, not evil in any way.
Just a presence somewhere behind my back.
I recall distinctly saying aloud that I knew the lady’s husband’s spirit was surely there and that it was welcome to stay for a while but this was not its time or its place. I continued to read my novel, an activity that we were allowed to do during quiet times at night, and did my best to ignore the maps rustling and the bumps that were there that night.
And continued to feel the presence of…?
The next day I compassionately told the lady to take her cute little teddy bear home with her. I needed no more company from it or her late husband.
Of course it was probably just the air handler making gusts that rattled the maps and it was probably just the brick building settling a bit more than usual that night.
Perhaps…
In 1969 I was stationed at Howard Air Force Base in the Panama Canal Zone. I was an Air Weather Observer and split my work between the Base Operations Building down on the base and up in the control tower. The tower was manned 24/7 by at least one aircraft controller and always one weather observer.
One dark midnight shift I was working in the tower, drinking coffee, quietly chatting with the controller and keeping an eye on the darkness around us when the radio crackled and a voice from the GCA radar operator was heard. His job was to watch the skies on his radar screen from his building down near the runway and to help approaching aircraft line up with the runway and to land safely. GCA stands for Ground Control Approach.
“Tower this is GCA. Do you have any inbound traffic?”
The controller double-checked his schedule, making sure that the only traffic inbound wasn’t due for many hours, picked up the mike and responded, “Negative. Nothing at this time.”
GCA said, “I have three targets about two miles west of the base heading southbound. Can you confirm?”
The controller and I stepped out on the catwalk that circled the whole tower and scanned to the west, me with my bare eyes and him with binoculars. It was dark, quiet and there was nothing to see. We watched for several minutes and listened closely.
Back in the tower the controller told GCA that we had seen nothing.
GCA said, “The targets have now turned left and are crossing the approach area of the runway within a half mile.”
We again exited the tower and scanned the dark skies, concentrating to the south. Still nothing.
And there never was anything to see that night. No lights, no aircraft noises, nothing.
Not even any birds.
Sure, it could have been a Panamanian army flight going around the base which we’d not been notified about. It had happened before. Rarely, but it had happened. But three targets? And noiseless?
It could have been that. Maybe…
So what am I trying to accomplish recounting to you these three stories, gentle reader? To make you believe in ghosts? To describe a UFO encounter? To insinuate that a movie actor had walked out of the screen and left the movie theater through the front door?
Of course not. Or am I?
In any case, stories like these do demonstrate that there is a LOT more going on “out there” than can easily be explained. A LOT more. And that our neat and tidy universe probably isn’t so neat and isn’t so tidy.
Sleep well tonight, my friends.
