Tired of Winning

I’m getting tired of my daughter winning. Perhaps an explanation is in order.

Ever since she became a teacher in the public school system she has been winning awards. First it was first year teacher of the year finalist, then new teacher of the year when she moved to another state. After that she won district teacher of the year. Now, her school is winning awards due in no small part to her efforts in the classroom.

But, in the public school system they do things totally differently than they do in the private sector. In the private sector, when you perform at a high level they send you, all expenses paid, on exotic trips. You do a great enough job at something in the private sector and they stack dead presidents in your bank account, give you stock options and raise your pay to keep the competition from swooping in and stealing you. In the education business, when you win something you get the privilege of adding five new responsibilities to your work schedule for exactly zero additional compensation. Your school’s test scores go through the roof? Congratulations!! You get to put together an hour long power point presentation to teach all the other teachers how you did it and make your presentation on Saturday...when you were planning on grading papers. Win teacher of the year? Awesome, your reward is a three year commitment of being paraded around the district like a prize pony at the state fair giving speeches and posing for pictures...when you were planning on working on lesson plans. Then, once the administration realizes what a gifted speaker you are, you’re picked to make every presentation that comes up for the rest of your natural life.

If you’re my daughter, you do all of these things with a smile and 110% effort because that’s who you are and you know no other way to operate. You remind your father that teachers aren’t in it for the income, but rather for the outcomes. I am at a loss of how to respond to such a statement. Why in Sam Hill aren’t teachers paid more income when they produce better outcomes? Instead, public schools have a system that actually produces negative incentives for excellence. “You sure you want to be teacher of the year? I mean, it's a shiny trophy and all but it adds seven extra hours to your work week for three years.” On the other hand it will look good on your resume when you eventually burn out and start looking for a job in the private sector so you can have your weekends back.

Dumbest thing I’ve ever seen...

Out With The Old...

Yesterday morning at exactly 8 o’clock, a guy named Kory showed up at my door with two large tool boxes which he sat on my front porch. Kory, a man of few words, informed me that he and his young assistant were here to install my new carpeting. This short declarative sentence would be the only words to pass between us. I asked if there was anything he needed for me to do before I went to work to which he replied with an emphatic head shake...no. I barricaded a very nervous Lucy downstairs with a series of gates and headed into the office. Around 11:30, I returned to this...

These dudes had disassembled practically every piece of furniture upstairs and crammed it all into our bedroom. They were laying down carpet like their very lives depended on it. When Pam got home from work around 4:00, Kory and his helper were long gone, with my check for $1,150. Pam was thrilled with the result..

Of course, the big question would be...how would Miss Lucy like the new carpet? When released from her downstairs jail, she made her way warily up the stairs and began her sniffing tour, walking very slowly, tail down, ears back, looking for trouble. Despite a generally favorable reaction, we soon discovered that although the new carpet is sooo much softer and comfortable under foot than then old stuff, where does she still insist on making her headquarters???

Add It To The List

This morning, I’m up earlier than usual. Carpet installation day has arrived. The downstairs of our house looks like an episode of The Hoarders. Lucy is in high anxiety mode as a result. It promises to be a crazy day.

So, I opened one of my favorite sites on my laptop and was greeted by a screaming ad that asked the question...Worried About Your Liver?

Ok...I must here confess to you that never once in my almost 62 years have I ever given my liver a moment’s thought, so the answer is “No”. But, thanks to this provocative question at the bottom of my laptop screen I’m thinking...Wait, should I be worried about my liver? I mean, I have never been a heavy drinker, but who knows...maybe there’s some new liver threat out there that I am unaware of. I decide, oh hell, why not be worried about my liver?! I can just add my liver to the ever expanding list of body parts about which I am gravely concerned.

So far that list includes but by no means is limited to:

1. Weird bump on my left kneecap that hurts like nobody’s business when I lean it against something.

2. Three random hairs that have begun to grow on the end of my nose. I mean, what the heck?

3. The strange thing that’s going on with two toenails on my left foot.

4. Why in the name of all that is holy is my right eye all of a sudden turning on the water works?

5. Why is my back always tight, as if it is on the brink of locking up?

6. What’s the deal with this little skin fart thing that has sprouted on the back of my left thigh?

7. It is no longer tenable to say that my hearing is “fine.”

8. My left foot is home to some sort of nerve thing that burns like fire and will not allow me to point my toes outward.

9. Now, dry-mouth is becoming a thing.

10. Short term memory completely unreliable, long term memory highly selective.

11. My liver

So, thanks to the demonic parasites who inhabit Madison Avenue, I have a new concern, my heretofore blissfully ignored liver. Of course every item on my list is probably irrelevant since the Coronavirus will kill me long before that skin fart thing becomes an issue.

Lucy’s Meme

I woke up around 4:30 this morning and noticed that Lucy wasn’t sprawled out at the foot of our bed taking up every square inch of leg room like she normally is. I got up and made a trip to the bathroom, then couldn’t find her anywhere else upstairs. Odd. Not like her. So, I walked downstairs and found her messing with my laptop...

She immediately closed it and sheepishly slunk away and back up stairs while I admonished her. “How many times have I told you to leave my computer alone!!”

We both went back to bed. When I woke up at 6:30 and opened my laptop, I found this...

What am I going to do with this dog?

Being a Blessing

It is one of the inevitabilities of life that the older we get the more accustomed to death we become. Now that I am in my 60’s, most of my friends and clients are also in their 60’s, which means that each year I hear of death and disease far more often than I did 30 years ago. This past year has been especially difficult in this regard, having lost four dear clients over the past 8 months. By now it should not surprise me, I shouldn’t be so shocked by mortality...but I still am.

Far too many times recently a grieving widow sits across the desk from me at my office clutching a tissue as she sorts through the relentless stack of paperwork authenticating her loss. Whatever words of mine intended to encourage fall flat. I try not to make it worse by saying the wrong thing or something too flip, desperate not to make matters worse. It is not a skill that improves with practice. I am just as halting and awkward now as I’ve ever been around grieving people.

I hate to admit such a thing, but when the deceased was a difficult person...its easier. There is a part of me that thinks that some sort of divine justice has been served. I know that this is a horrible, judgmental notion, but it comes anyway. What’s far more difficult is when the loss is some wonderful, loving and caring human being. The person sitting across the desk from me is not anguished over the fate of their loved one, just devastated by longing and overcome by the prospect of life without them. Their faces are darkened by the specter of loss. The financial problems that my work solves offers them no cure for loneliness. 

My friend with cancer recently received great news after her surgery...no cancer found in her lymph nodes. But her cancer is a relentless and persistent enemy. Her doctors want one more year of chemo to guard against its return. So she will face it because she wants to live, has so much to live for. She fights with grit and tenacity. I cheerlead with stupid jokes, feeling more and more useless as she plows on valiantly through every setback in her path.

Why does it all make me so angry? What right do I have to anger in the face of mortality? It is the way of the world. People are born and people die every single day. The important part is what we do between these two events. I know this in my head, but when presented with death and dying, a part of my heart rages at what Dylan Thomas called...the dying of the light.

My dad used to tell me that my goal every day should be to “figure out how to be a blessing to someone today.” In other words, every day we live should count for something more than merely making a living. Life should be so much more than pursuing our narrow self interests. Some days are easier than others. Dad was a natural at being a blessing to others. For me it takes intentional effort. But in this season of life where it seems each day brings fresh news of loss, it’s more important than ever for me to get the hang of this being a blessing business. People are depending on it.

The Evolution of My Addiction

I had my very first cup of coffee on the morning of my 13th birthday. The rule in the Dunnevant house was no coffee until you became a teenager. So, I saddled up to the breakfast table and watched Mom pour me a cup from the silver percolator coffee pot that looked like this.

I loved the smell, and had long looked forward to becoming like my dad and taking mine...black. That first sip was one of the most profound disappointments of my short life. Of course, I wasn’t about to let my mother know. I finished that first dreadful cup in what, up until that time, was the single bravest act of my life. As I drank I remember thinking, Are you kidding me? This stuff is horrible! How do they stand to drink this every single morning of their lives?? It was the first time I entertained the prospect that grownups might not, in fact, be very smart after all. Of course, eventually I grew to love coffee, but the evolution hit another snag before beginning in earnest.

A couple years later I was spending the weekend with some friends. Saturday morning, I gathered around the breakfast table with my buddies and watched one of their Moms plop one of these on the table in front of me...

Ahh yes, I was about to discover that the only thing worse than percolator coffee was instant coffee. But, following the lead of my friends, I spiked it with cream and a teaspoon of sugar, which served the purpose of helping me stave off the embarrassment of not finishing the stuff.

But, then came my college years and this...

These were the years of 4 hours of sleep a night, if I was lucky. The warehouse where I worked had this stuff next to a tea pot with scalding hot water and styrofoam cups. After a couple hours of building wooden pallets I would pour my first cup...cream, no sugar. At quitting time I poured another and drank it while driving home to fortify me for a long night of studying. I was ignorant. I didn’t know any better. Then I met Ron Roop, my sister’s new boyfriend, who introduced me to this...

It was my road to Damascus moment. The scales fell from my eyes. I discovered that coffee came from actual coffee beans, and not freeze-dried crystals!! My first cup of freshly ground coffee was something called Kona, and I was transported to a whole new world. The rest is history.

I bring all of this up because of a recent trip I made into that great symbol of consumer excess...Starbucks. The only time I ever go there is to buy one of those fancy coffee drinks for my wife and her teacher friends. There’s a Starbucks right up the street from where she works, so recently I went in to pick up something for her. Usually I order whatever the featured special is, for one simple reason—there is a brief description of what it actually is. But on this day, there were no specials, so there I was scanning the menu boards trying to make sense of the smorgasbord of ridiculousness that was before me. Because Pam and I both are on something resembling a diet, I decided to go with something that had the words non-fat in the description. Later, I discovered that whatever it was I bought her was positively dreadful. It was the thought that counted.

But it got me to thinking. How in the name of all that is holy did we get from this...

To THIS...

...in fifty years? Progress? Marketing? Capitalism? Or just simple addiction?

Think about it...while I go pour a cup.

Cleaning Out The Museum

Yesterday was like a day at the museum, actually more like a day in the basement of the museum. See, after 21 years in this house we are finally replacing the carpeting upstairs. In order to do so, we have to clean out five closets. They are as follows:

Study closet—the place where the archives of our entire lives can be found, including the paperwork from every trip we’ve taken, every lesson plan Pam produced during her teaching career as well as every single document produced during her 13 years of working in Children’s Church at Grove Avenue Baptist Church.

Toy closet—every Halloween costume our kids ever wore, every Discovery Toys game they ever played, two armored divisions of army men, every Disney VHS movie ever made, the obligatory slinkie, American Girl paraphernalia, every CD of every choir concert either of our kids ever performed in.

Patrick’s closet—you just don’t want to know.

Kaitlin’s closet—what you would expect to find in a closet shared by Anne of Green Gables and the Baby-Sitter’s Club President.

Our closet—the only one of the five being used daily so the only one not a complete disaster.

By the end of the day, I had hauled four absurdly heavy giant contractor-sized black garbage bags outside to the garbage, made one trip to Hope Thrift with a car full of donations, and dumped $92.52 worth of coins into The Coin Machine at Publix’s.

Along the way, Pam would take photographs of items she either didn’t recognize or was unsure what to do with. We have caught grief from our adult children in the past for previous purges, and were taking no chances this time around. So Pam would hand me something and say, “Hold this!” Then she would take a picture and send it to the kids. Here are two such photographs:

My daughter laughed at one of these and replied...Dad’s face!!! Hahahahaha...

I fail to see the humor.

Along the way, we found our Passports, which was nice. Also, I stumbled across a sizable stack of short stories, forty year old journal entries, and a shocking amount of poetry with my name listed as the author...very little of which I remember writing. Several times, I found Pam sitting on the floor cross-legged amidst a pile of papers, lost in thought and close to tears. At the end of the day, as we sat in a booth at Casa Grande eating supper at 8 o’clock, we both were lost in thought at the trail of years we had just plowed through. It was the smallest artifacts which prompted the strongest feelings...finding Patrick’s Boy Scout troop badge, the three ring binder Pam put together for Kaitlin’s college search trip, and these two hand made treasures... 



This was how she spent her weekends leading up to the arrival of our two kids, back when cross-stitching was a thing. 

Over tacos we thought about our lives together, what a whirlwind it has been. Where in the world did we get the energy to make it through Little League, choir concerts, field days, back yard Bible Clubs, ski trips, summer camps? And that’s just the pathos produced by TWO CLOSETS!!

Here’s the advantage of finding, loving, and holding on to one another for 36 years. On a cold night in February 2020, we can smile across the table at each other and silently know that it’s been a good life, one that we wouldn’t trade for anything.