Water is for Wimps!

When I was a younger guy, like age 8 or 9 or 10, I thought being tough was cool. 

I was born into a family where my parents and my sisters, at least my oldest sister, were somewhat tough. They were my definition of tough.

My other sister was more girly, not to say my older tougher sister was not also girly as well (meaning not so tough), but she was girly and tough.

And "tough" comes in different sizes and shapes and flavors, obviously.

My dad was a blue collar worker, getting up 5 or sometimes 6 times a week to put on the work boots, usually before the sun rose, going to houses or apartments or stores or warehouses that did not have heating or air conditioning, depending on the season,  and spending hours upon hours drilling holes, pulling heavy wires through those holes, nailing in outlets and switch boxes throughout the walls, basements, ceilings, and attics, sometimes as carpenters pounded their hammers and ran their incredibly loud electric saws, and then sometimes my dad and his partners would run saws and other trickily pain-inducing tools that could gash, smash, mash, or even electrocute you. Beyond the stifling new and old chambers of sweat and occasional blood and bruises, there was the mud. Boots were necessary for protection from the rain and mud, and cold and snow, and simply unforgiving parts of new construction that would grind your toes and feet into gashed objects or smooshed victims underneath your hopefully comfortable socks.

And don't forget the dangers of heights.  Almost every foundation of every new house and construction sight poses some kind of danger of slipping and falling, when dark or light, dry or wet, hot or freezing cold; some foundations with their deep basements have high 2 x 4 planks and makeshift catwalks that lead across mud embankments straddling crevasses of deep entrenched pools of mud, cement bases, gouging metal pipes or cinder blocks and their deadly re-bars. Dad could slip and fall, and sometimes wooden planks gave way as easy as the balanced footing of an everyday electrician.

Dad wasn't into camping or hunting or fishing: he was into survival. There was always more sweat than mud, always more mud and dirt and grime than blood, always more blood than tears, and at the end of the weeks and months there was always checks paying the bills.

I call that tough for three straight years. After three decades, that's even tougher.

The fact that he spent 4 years in the military learning many aspects of the trade, and also spent over two years in an impoverished jungle of West Africa added to the persona, the lore.

Dad liked Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson movies. Tough guys.

I think it took some of the edge off of a tough living, a tough work environment. Church probably helped, too.

Dad had plenty of soft sides. We all do. But I think a lot of people looked at him for his exterior, which was tough. Hard working, coarse hands, dirty work boots, that was my dad.


Mom had her own toughness. She had come up from a humble home in New England where her family was the charity case at school, she survived a tour of West Africa as a nurse, raised us kids decently, helped another dozen foster kids over the course of 5 years.

I saw her temper and fight a few times, sometimes when chasing down young snow ball throwers who had pegged our car. She could be scary when chasing some punks in her car! My mom could be tough and spunky, obviously with a tender heart but at times some rough edges. She, like many mothers, had a toughness that could be felt through actions and words.

Most nurses have to be tough, right?

My oldest sister was tough; by the time she got to high school she possessed some tough qualities of both of our parents, and a few of her own. She was four grades older than me, and despite me being rough and rumble at times with my other older sister two grades my superior, I learned at a young age to avoid any confrontations with the oldest. Like my dad, or my mom, or as I think of my mother's mom, Grandpa Nellie, she could definitely manifest a mean streak. Or, perhaps just not putting up with the shenanigans of a four-year old, or an 8 year-old, or a 12 year-old little brother.

I watched some war movies with my dad, watched cowboy and boxing films, James Bond and Star Wars and Superman, and Indiana Jones. Movies for men, tough dudes, hombres of strength and cunning. They were tough.

Tarzan the Apeman, Conan the Barbarian, Buck Rodgers of the 25th century, the Bionic Man, even real life men such as George Washington or Abe Lincoln, two American political icons, but prior to that they were tough fighter types.

The cool guy was tough. From my scriptures, there was David and other strong Bible heroes, John the Baptist and Jesus, and certainly Peter and Paul were not wall flowers; while the Book of Mormon had plenty of others, starting with Nephi but tracing through Abinadi, Ammon, Teancum, Nephi and Lehi, Mormon and his son Moroni. Modern day prophets of the LDS Church were tough men, especially the first two, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

The Church has a college football team with big burly men for a reason, too.

And then there are the American Indian icons that I devoured in elementary school:

Pontiac, Crazy Horse, Massassoit, Seneca, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Tecumseh, Oceola, on and on. These were men who led in battles and would say to each other serenely:

"This is a good day to die!"

That rang true with me as a child. Those American Indian legends were tough. They were cool.

Tough. Cool. Strong. Sweet.

Warriors. Fighters. Tough guys and rogues, commandos and legends.

Stoic and at times laconic, with a few exceptions; they put up with pain. They did heroic things.

When I was 8 and 9 and 10 years old, that's how I fancied myself. A tough kid. Not mean, not cruel, but a toughie. Or at least, strong.

I would play outside with my friends or alone, and we would play war. We would play in the ice and the snow, or in the extreme heat. We would dig up trenches in the dirt and climb trees and make rope swings and fight off known and unknown enemies from every war knowable.

In real life I valued my "toughness": my ability to run fast or  climb a tree with my strength and ingenuity, to run with a football through or around my cohorts, escaping the overwhelming force of bodies pulling me down. To be able to swim fast and stay under water long, to be able to take on a bully threatening others at school or wherever, a boy ready to pummel a home intruder when the occasion arose. Or a cosmic invader, whichever came first. Step right up and meet my wrath, buster!

Like Clint Eastwood, I considered myself somewhat of an enforcer. I did not look for fights but I looked to end them. In my thoughts, anyway.

One sunny clear day I remember crossing the park across the street from my home with my friends, we a band of intrepid soldiers following our marching orders, battling the forces of evil with our stick guns and faux grenades. In the middle of Bryan Park you are closer to trees and the running water of the creek than any dwelling, separated from reality by a collective imagination of derring-do, bravery, heroism, and toughness. One of my buddies that I always respected and thought highly of asked if we could pass by my house, which was closest, and get some drinking water.

I told him, like the tough wanna-be hardened sergeant of World War II, "Water is for wimps! Tough guys don't need water to drink. That is just being weak, drinking water. Water? You need water? Ha!!"

And thus were some of the 1970s for me, a boy who would learn other versions of tough, later on in life, and most of them did require that precious elixir: water.

But back then, as a child, I fancied I knew what tough looked like, or felt like.

Who needed water? Comfort for a parched throat or overheated body?

Nah. Water is just weakness entering the body.

Being tough? You are beyond the elements, you suffer day after day, struggle for that crazy lifestyle of blood, sweat, and tears. You live like a hero on the silver screen, but you don't talk a big game.

And you don't ask for water.

You only ask for the opportunity to be the silent, cool, tough guy who saves the day.

You don't need help. You are the help.

Life was simpler back then. Life wasn't as tough.

Indiana Football and the Hoeppners--Losing and Victory

Indiana football has had a couple of good runs on the grid iron, ever. Success  happens sporadically and mostly very many years between good runs, even decades apart.

For example, way back around 1945 I have read that the football Hoosiers had a great run and won the Big Ten. I don't know if they were playing the best teams of the best generation of yesteryear, like Army and Notre Dame and Oklahoma, or probably Harvard and Yale back then, but they did well. They did not go to the Rose Bowl, probably, because of a little thing called World War II. Details.

I am not trying to be to glib or cynical, but Indiana's football luck is affected by stuff like world wars. And not in good ways, usually. Stuff external to Indiana University and the play on the field can negatively affect the program. Some people call it snake-bit: when you have observed the Indiana football teams as much as I have, you call it life. And life can be very perplexing and vexing, or if you hang some hopes on the football Hoosiers, anyway.

Sometimes Indiana football is another term for "losing". We hate that, when it comes down to a crucial winning or losing play, or season defining game, and we predictably or inevitably come up short. There have been campaigns where on the final game of the year, the phrase "that dropped pass in the end zone to IU's most reliable and prolific receiver, falling from his hands after properly  finding him in the chest, perfectly targeted from the much maligned journeyman quarterback, has cost Indiana another bowl season." And it usually has been over a decade since they last went to any bowl.

The first football season that my parents moved to Bloomington, in 1967, the "Cardiac Kid" Hoosiers won the Big Ten and traveled to the Rose Bowl, losing to superstar O.J. Simpson and the USC Trojans in the Coliseum. They didn't lose by too much, but they lost.

This is Indiana. Never been back since. Indiana doesn't really play well enough for the Rose Bowl.

Over a decade later future ESPN College Football commentator Lee Corso lead the upstart Hoosiers to the Holiday Bowl in 1979 and miraculously won. One hit wonder against an undefeated smaller school but up-and-coming Brigham Young University, a school I would later to grow to love myself.

And BYU would do things like go on to win for decades. A lot.

But this story is about IU, so back to the losing traditions...

However, it was not all losing. A coach named Bill Mallory brought a period of sustained hope, when the Hoosiers went to six bowl games in a span of eight years, from 1986 to 1994. I was young and impressionable, and I really thought that Indiana had found its presence as a winner in college football. We beat Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State... We even beat South Carolina and Baylor in bowl victories. But not for long.

Mallory had a weak stretch thereafter, was dismissed, and then came a string of coaches that could not do it. Well, the third coach was finally doing it, Terry Hoeppner, but along the lines of IU football luck, he was stricken with a brain cancer that initially removed him from some games and then removed him from the game of life. His successor, based on Hoeppner's recruits and his widow's hopes and inspiration, Bill Lynch, led them to one bowl, the first in 14 years, where they were blown out and would not return with him. Because the real revamp coach was taken by an act of God, an infliction known as cancer.

We IU fans get that. We even know a lot about losing in basketball, a sport that IU has dominated in. But football is different. We know about losing on and off the fields of life. We lose consistently. We have been beaten every way possible. Multiple times. In a single year. And then there's next year!

Lynch tried hard. And then we got an assistant coach from Oklahoma 6 years ago. He was dedicated and he knew it would take a while to win. It took more years than I thought, but we got a winner now.

Many games  were lost in typical fashion, dropped passes, blown plays, poor defense every year.

We lost a close bowl game last December (2015); this year we gave one up to Wake Forest before upsetting Michigan State. Despite succumbing to Ohio State, as expected, there are 7 games left and some fun to be had. Expect the Hoosiers to play in another bowl this December.

I think the corner has been turned.

But alas, life is so often cruel and harsh! That Coach Hoeppner who died while resurrecting their last bowl season while painfully absent in his grave in 2007, his heroic widow graciously taking the playing field with his players as they qualified by a game-winning field goal on the last night of the regular season? Their daughter, 9 years later, in her 40s, died suddenly in a car crash on the main highway outside of Bloomington a few short weeks ago. We mourn for Mrs. Hoeppner and her family. We are sorry that life has been so hard for someone whose family toiled and sweat for Indiana University and left us early.

The current coach, the new hope of Indiana football Wilson, knew Terry Hoeppner, coached with him at Miami of Ohio decades ago. Somehow I think that Wilson knows what he is doing. He is bring a battered fan base to life.

There is hope. There is life beyond death, joy beyond despair, winning after decades of losing.

And past the real life losses of our heroes in the greater world, like Ernie Pyle in World War II, the guns at Memorial Stadium in southern Indiana can hail our grid iron athletes and its school--

and victory.

Crying For Mom Part 4: Winter

Crying For Mom Part 4: Winter

The Final Goodbye. Really?

This is the last of four installments about times of weeping, literally, surrounding some feelings and events recalled in relation to mother, my mom. It is an account of emotions and strong sentiments towards our own parents, our own lifeline. And, pray tell, it is about existence. Each segment, represented by an earthly season, fills a part of how I give tribute and recognition to my own mother, my own existence. The source of where we all come from.

All of us die; all of us are coming to grips with it. Life is transitory, like a leaf on a tree.

Some of us are closer to death than others. A lot of us are not aware of how close we are. I suppose most of us are unaware.

Sometimes our lives go on long enough, in our own brains-- our mental maps, that our worldly consciousnesses are not cognizant of how fleeting life is, perhaps how short it can be and then: we move on. We all do.

Like King Tutankhamen, our lives come and go, and most of us are not so memorialized or decorated. We are lucky to be remembered by family a mere two generations later.

As small children we become conscious and conscientious of the dead before us, especially the mythic predecessors; many of them seem present with us. George Washington, or Beethoven, or Bach, or Shakespeare; all of them seem to be present with us living beyond their graves in many ways.

Authors are ubiquitous in many ways: C.S. Lewis, or Hawthorne, or Dickens, or innumerable others who put pen to script and wrote of their lives and pains and sorrows. We incorporate their inner turmoils into our own. Actors in films and television, artists in song and music become a part of us.

We all collectively come together as a race because of our combined humanity. Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, Isabel Allende of Chile, Fyodor Dostoyevsky of Russia, John Steinbeck of the United States. We all share and meld our mental stuffs together.

Whether we believe in life after death, we do move on as sentient beings through our shared humanity, carrying on legacies and traditions, habits or precedents, efforts and results that follow us through the generations.

Some are known for incredibly dark legacies, like Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, or a Cambodian named Pol Pot;  yet some survivors and descendants of those times still hold some of these leaders as heroes and pioneers. It can depend on perspective and bias, certainly.

My own mother did not leave the biggest legacy on the earth, but it certainly meant something significant to me and few others, be we dozens, or hundreds, or possibly thousands.

Nevertheless, in recalling her, her life, her meaning to me in a small way and describing some of the emotional impact, through the literal act of crying, an act and consequent emotion of love or loss, or both, I hope to make the existence and presence of her like millions of others more meaningful, more understood, more felt.

And perhaps mostly simply reduced, I wish to not forget, to not lose the lessons and meanings of a life lived and shared. A life given and passed on.

I wish to share this with myself as a lector, and with others; whether they knew her personally or not. But the same principles apply across the cultures and generations. These are universal themes and feelings.

My mom has been buried in Daviess County, Indiana for about two and a half years now. Me, I am close to 46 years-old; I am at a point where I can perhaps better evaluate the process of accepting her departure, and maybe more than accepting it, which I did a great deal of the weeks around her actual March 4, 2014 death; putting it into a context that means a bit more to me, and perhaps to others with their own respective mothers, family relations near and far.

Close to ten years before succumbing to the liver cancer that would eventually break down her resilient body and soul, I had a time to reflect about my relationship with her, and in some ways bid my own tear-filled farewell and mourn her existence.

When I say "mourn her existence", I don't mean bemoaning what or who she is sorrowfully, or in the negative sense thinking of how awful life is without her. I mean paying respect and homage, reflecting in a poignant or meaningful way concerning who she is and what she does for me, her son, my relationship with her, the grandmother of my children, the person who gave me life, the person who is a part of me and of whom I will defer to through eternity, as a person that I hail from, inherit my humanity and much of my personality and self-understanding, from whom I derive my identity.

This particular episode happened the winter of 2004-2005, as I was visiting my distant home state of Indiana while making a life and a bit of career in my new adopted state of California, with my wife and two small girls. My mother and step-father had accepted a two year mission call to far off Indonesia. This, after a successful but in some ways troublesome mission service to Cambodia from 2000-2002.

I say troublesome because as much as they both sincerely loved the Cambodian people and the incredible philanthropic and humanitarian scope of their 18 months within that needy country, returning to their home in the first world proved problematic for my mother in regards to some aspects of her mental health. While giving her heart and soul to the needy of all classes and ranks, sharing life-essential substances to the hungry and the sick, providing to them through fantastic magnanimous educational and financial funds to lift up the poor and otherwise disadvantaged, I believe the spiritual and emotional tolls on the heart and mind can be heavy. It was emotionally exhausting. And my mom paid the price when it came to her own spiritual journey of bearing those loads, re-adjusting to her previous life. She went through her darkest and longest bout of depression in partial consequence to that 18 months abroad and the new/old life of Bloomington and America.

Reviewing her own life and experiences, thinking of mental burdens, perhaps her own poverty as the smallest of five children had something to do with it in the days of the post world war, perhaps her days as a nurse treating the malnourished and destitute of Togo and Sierra Leone, perhaps unhappy days of separation from her own children in midlife, perhaps a hundred other things that the human mind cannot comprehend or truly arrive at in diagnosing a person suffering deep depression. I suppose all of these factors were in play. When the nightly television or radio news "hurts", when normal things cause you pain, when waking up or going out do routine things do not seem appealing, I can only guess how this works as a debilitating standstill of life.

And I certainly empathize. I think that when I hear about people who go through dark depressive periods, much less my mother who I know so much better, while there is no rational explanation for why this period of "down-ness" happens, I believe they are dealing with a real illness. Not just a bad day, week, or month, but their mind and body are not right. They need healing, like anyone with a fractured limb or body debilitating sickness, like malaria or typhoid.

Moreover, it can be harder to diagnose and heal the wounded mind, for sure. Some use alcohol or other recreational chemicals to deal with mental or emotional issues and strains, others use medicine like lithium or psychiatric sessions, or getaways of some sort.

Whatever works, and unfortunately many things don't always work. At least not fast enough, in many people's estimations. I heard the true story of a successful hip-hop artist who had experienced a lot of loss and was inhabiting his own personal depressed period of feeling so low he was not motivated to do anything much, which is basically the description of someone clinically depressed. What brought him out of it, or helped a great deal? Hearing and repeat-listening to Sarah McLaughlin's "In the Arms of an Angel". He heard it on the radio by chance, and it struck such a deep chord in his soul, resonating with the pain and healing of his enormous psychic wounds, that just a simple song brought him back from a dark and injurious place where he did not feel the motivation to move on.

Who knows what heals us from such mentally distressed places? Apparently, like many illnesses and injuries, it simply requires time.

And, my mother had a history of coming back out of these depressed periods, and sure enough, she always did. But the post-mission time of Cambodia was the worst, the longest to withstand. Maybe most of a year, where mom was not regular mom, didn't want to see normal movies, had no desire to go and do normal things; she was really lacking the regular motivation to do most things. However, to her credit, she maintained a bit of her outgoing pursuits and relations.

Two years later, after finding her regular vivacious self, she and her faithful husband of then 19 years were going away for two more years, to the very different culture of Indonesia: two complete climate cycles, eight seasons on this green and sometimes searing earth, to a place far away where its foreign-ness and dangers were real, yet exciting and full of promise. A place to give, for sure.

Combined years of sickness and emotional toil would not stop her from such goals, a type of mission or objective where much more "stronger" people would not attempt, or even consider.

No, my mother was strong. Very strong. I think that for people who have never been that far down, it might be impossible to know what that kind of courage and moral strength is. I am not trying to put others down for not having those attributes, both positive and negative, but I am simply trying to make a comparative proposition of how we humans operate. Go away for two years? Not visiting with your home and loved ones for how long? To do what? Why? Who told you this was necessary? Why, again?

Others like my mom and step-father would reply: Why not? Why not go off and try and make a difference on a planet where other humans just might need an extra boost? Like a Sarah McLaughlin song. It's nice, exemplary or heroic, even, that people compose and sing and share music and do those kind of things that literally lift us out of ruts and trenches. Brothers and sisters lifting each other up, what a novel concept.

Yes, that was how my mom was built.

At that point in my life I had bid farewell to my mother a few times. As a child I would say goodbye to her for weeks at a time, she moved to other parts of town by the time I was teenager, I went away for two years as a young missionary to South America, I would leave for school and work to Utah, then later California, I would go 11 months without seeing her, typically; she and my step-father went to Cambodia but visited us on their way back to the US; I was able to see her and she my newly growing family at least once a year into the 2000s. Also, we had the intimacies of phone use in the normal non-mission time.

But a mission is different. In many ways it is a bigger separation. Emails are great, but it is not the same as your mother holding, caressing, and cooing your little ones, being the grandmother they were meant to be. Babies should have grandmothers to touch them. It wasn't the same as hearing my mom recount her recent sales of x, y, or z, in vivid detail, or the most recent updates about my aunts and uncles and cousins, other friends and acquaintances from decades past.

Two years was a long time; for me at the age of 34 I felt like that Christmas season was a big goodbye; it was heavy and seemed like a large goodbye. It was something I had experienced before earlier in life but this was different.

This farewell prepared me for bigger things to come, the bigger goodbye dates that none of us knew how much later would occur. My mother had a vivid dream where she was told that she would live to be 85. I don't now recall how old she was when she had it, maybe at age 60. She believed it, more or less, and so did I; if it had been true as we hoped to believe, that would mean she would make it to the year 2025. Here we are 11 years short, knowing how reality occurred!

Not all dreams and the messages therein come true, and that's okay. 85 would have been nice in most ways, but there are a few positives of dying at a respectable septuagenarian age; whatever the case or exact age, we all accept the times given. Maybe she would have lived to see some of her grandchildren go on missions or graduate from college or get married, have children. Some people are allowed that. It's okay, we accept it. God has His reasons, of that I am confident.

That winter break in snowy Indiana around the holidays, there was a video animated feature that my small children watched called "The Snow Man" about a young boy who wakes up and flies across the earth with a kind and miraculous snow man, visiting the North Pole and Santa Claus. It was the music that captured my attention. It was beautiful, it was serene. Called "Walking in the Air", it captivated my imagination and haunted my soul, as beautiful and clearly pure it was to me, in some way becoming an anthem representing the departure of my mom, the consequent farewell that cold winter for 24 or more months. My children would grow older, she and her husband would do their works, and we would see her again, most likely. And we did.

But something about that farewell seemed permanent to me, a goodbye to the childhood that I knew, the mother that I had known from the early warm days of the 1970s. I was becoming prepared to live without her, to go days, weeks, months, now years, without a note or a call.

At a certain point without personal contact to a close person such as your mom, the memories become shrouded and blurry, the conversations become disjointed and dim, the thousands of meals and jokes and shared moments become surreal, forgotten, misattributed, floating in the ether...

Of course I will never forget her, never forget key moments, never forget the constant supply of letters written to her "Number one son" while I was serving a mission, the thousands of conversations and dinners, and hundreds of other minutia: hugs, winks, calls, television programs or movies together, Skype chats, emails, trips, drives, visits to others, worship services, songs, kitchen dialogs, phone reminders, sitting, relaxing, laughing, crying.

No, we write about things that we know, people that we know, people that make us who we are, people who form us.

That's mom. I cried for her then, that winter 12 years ago, close to a decade before her actual passing. Before I would have three more children with my wife, and move to many other homes and locations and barracks, to be where I am this fall as I write these words, looking at darker evenings, cooler nights, changing leaves in preparation for the winter. For death. The next step.

We all have to learn to let go, to know when to say our goodbyes.

We do not know when all these things happen. We do not have to fret or worry about them, either.

Perhaps the key is to simply know that God put us with some people for periods of time, and we need to cherish their memories and imprints forever.

And if possible, have faith in that same God that He will restore all of us to as we should be, eternal lights in the heavens, loving, laughing crying.

Love you mom.

Goodbye for this winter and a few more to come, not sure how many more.

I know the birds make it through the cold months, and so do we.

Thanks so much for giving me flight. Thanks for imbuing the faith in the spring to come, after a winter or so with those leaves missing from bare branches, reminiscent of a life lived and fully resplendent.

Thanks for tears full of love, giving us all life. Thank you for the water that produces streams that flow into plants and trees, life blossoming into leaves and flowers that go floating above the earth in their brilliant season of sublime life in blue skies,  taking flight on their forward path to the next season ... forever captured in the histories of the planets we share.

I am grateful for the base of knowledge in a limitless life where we all take flight and soar on to greater climes. The cold air in my eyes brings water to the windows of my soul, and this is how I know I am alive and moving on...

"I'm finding I can fly so high above with you!"

I cry for you, for me, for your children, for my children, for our lives lived, for our lives intertwined, linked forever through the spirits of those that you caressed. Thanks, mom. I see and feel you always.

Eddie Bear, Number One Son 

2 October 2016 

 

 

 

 

Walking In The Air

Nightwish

We're walking in the air
We're floating in the moonlit sky
The people far below are sleeping as we fly

I'm holding very tight
I'm riding in the midnight blue
I'm finding I can fly so high above with you

Far across the wold

The villages go by like trees
The rivers and the hills
The forests and the streams

Children gaze open mouth
Taken by surprise
Nobody down below believes their eyes

We're surfing in the air
We're swimming in the frozen sky
We're drifting over icy
Mountains floating by

Suddenly swooping low on an ocean deep
Arousing of a mighty monster from its sleep

We're walking in the air
We're floating in the midnight sky
And everyone who sees us greets us as we fly

Songwriters: HOWARD DAVID BLAKE, AN AN ZUO

© EMI Music Publishing, Peermusic Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group

For non-commercial use only.