Grace Notes

This has been a rough week. Everyone has them. Maybe you’re having one too. Today will be long and stress-filled. Four appointments and a ton of calls to make. Hump day, they call it. Indeed. When you’re in the midst of a week like this it’s easy to lose sight of the little blessings of life, those grace notes that slip through the dreariness and help light your way. Here’s one that happened Monday afternoon.

Every year when we go to Maine we always buy little gifts for the kids next door. One of them, Kennedy, is especially artistic, so this year we found this really cool origami kit that came with everything needed to make origami flowers of all kinds. Pam thought it would be perfect for her so she bought it.

Monday was the first day of school. Around 5:30 or so the front door bell rang and there was Kennedy with the most adorable smile on her face. She had a flower in her hand and extended it to me. “This is for you. It’s a poppy.”

She then proceeded to tell me all about how she made it and how much fun it was, and that there were plenty of other flowers she is going to make. I asked her how her first day of school went and her face lit up. “My teacher is really nice. She says that her classroom is her kingdom and when she wants to get our attention she says, “Hear Ye, Hear Ye!” And we all have to say together, “Long Live the Queen”.

The entire encounter was over with in fifteen minutes. She went back to playing in her front yard with some other kids and I went back to whatever it was I was doing. But now, as I worry about what this day will bring, I look at Kennedy’s flower that Pam placed in a little blue vase and it makes me smile.

Sometimes the way we cope with difficulty is by stopping to appreciate the simply things. Things that are lovely, sweet and true.

Thanks, Ken

Coping With Stress in 2022

My profession comes with mountains of stress, the kind that never goes away. It is hard to measure or quantify. There are times when it feels greater and more debilitating than others, but it never ever leaves. When I was younger I seldom thought about stress. Of course back then I had fewer clients with far less invested. The stakes weren’t as high. As I have gotten older and the business has grown stress is much more front and center. I am consciously aware of it’s presence at all times. To cope with it I have developed strategies to manage the stress, most of them without even realizing what I was doing. It is only in retrospect that I have come to realize what these coping strategies are.

What are my symptoms? What does stress do to me? Lots of things actually. Over the years I have experienced debilitating headaches, dealt with migraines for several years. Thankfully, those days are largely behind me. I have had bouts of insomnia, still do at times. I’ve experienced digestive issues with no known physical cause. There are other physical symptoms that I will leave out of this discussion. On the psychological side of the equation, there are seasons of great doubt. I doubt my own skill and abilities, despite a 40 year record of relative success. There are occasional and thankfully brief periods of intense fear, some of it irrational. It always passes, but each episode leaves a mark. I have managed these stress related symptoms privately. I have always considered them as part of the price of admission for work in my chosen field of endeavor. While, as a younger man, I could shake it all off by listening to a motivational speaker or watching a ballgame, once I reached my late 50’s, none of the old tricks worked any longer.

It occurs to me that one of the coping mechanisms I developed was…Maine. While Pam and I have always gone to Maine for a week or so every summer for over 38 years, it was seven years ago when we began to go for four weeks at a time. In 2016 I made the unilateral decision to rent a house on Hobbs Pond for an entire month. Since that year we have stayed for even longer stretches of time during the summer and fall. In 2022, by the time we are finished, we will have spent eight weeks in Maine. Although I truly enjoy our time there, what I have come to realize is that a big part of me needs longer and longer stays. Time in Maine disconnected from the grind allows everything to heal. The tension built up over months and months slowly drains out of the system.

But even with eight weeks in Maine, that leaves the other 44 weeks. The single hardest thing about my work is that I find it nearly impossible to close everything down, to turn off the part of my brain that thinks and ponders and second guesses the decisions of the day. I said nearly impossible. There is one thing that I have found that works. there is one thing I can do which always sweeps work thoughts away.

Writing.

Over the past decade I have written over 2,650 posts on this blog. I have written over two dozen short stories, and as of a month ago, four novels. It isn’t my job. Although lots of people read this blog, only a handful of people have ever read any of my novels or short stories. So I must ask myself why I spend so much time writing. The answer should have been self evident to me long before now, but I suppose self-deception is the easiest kind. The reason I write so much is because when I’m writing, everything else gets blocked out. Work concerns vanish into thin air once your mind wraps itself around the creation of a story. So, for me, writing is an effective mental health therapy. Maine is an effective mental health therapy. Even though eight weeks in Maine is awfully pricey therapy, writing costs me nothing.

The Husband Store

Husband Store

A store that sells new husbands has opened in New York City, where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates:

You may visit this store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the value of the products increase as the shopper ascends the flights. The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor, but cannot go back down except to exit the building!

So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:

Floor 1 - These men Have Jobs.

She is intrigued, but continues to the second floor, where the sign reads:

Floor 2 - These men Have Jobs and Love Kids.

"That's nice," she thinks, "but I want more."

So she continues upward. The third floor sign reads:

Floor 3 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, and are Extremely Good Looking.

"Wow," she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going.

She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 4 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Good Looking and Help With Housework.

"Oh, mercy me!" she exclaims, "I can hardly stand it!"

Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads:

Floor 5 - These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop- dead Gorgeous, Help with Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak.

She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the sixth floor, where the sign reads:

Floor 6 - You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.

PLEASE NOTE:

To avoid gender bias charges, the store's owner opened a New Wives store just across the street.

The first floor has wives that love sex.

The second floor has wives that love sex, have money and like beer.

The third, fourth, fifth and sixth floors have never been visited.

Fresh Observations

Here are a few things that I have come to realize recently:

* Peter Pan and Skippy are poor substitutes for Jif.

* Watching the number one pitching prospect for your team make his big league debut and proceed to hit three batters and give up seven runs in four innings is depressing.

* Listening to the entire Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast on the drive home from Maine is at once fascinating and horrifying.

* When the stock market rises 11% over the six weeks you are in Maine, then drops 5% the first week you return it makes you wonder about the cosmic correlation.

* Lucy was not born to live in the suburbs.

* Watching people who were all for government bailouts of banks and gladly cashed their stimulus checks argue against the moral hazard of bailing out college loans makes you grateful for the rarity of your own moral, economic and political consistency on the subject of government bailouts.

* The air smells better in Maine.

* The new Elvis film is one of the saddest stories ever told.

* Getting back into running in Virginia humidity is a form of self hatred.

* “In Essentials Unity, in Nonessentials Liberty, in all things Charity” is perhaps the finest summation of a church’s doctrine I’ve ever heard.

* How is it that a person can go away for six short weeks then forget how to run his own coffeemaker?

Social Media is About to get Hilarious

Back in April of this year I wrote this:  https://doug-thetempest.blogspot.com/2022/04/here-are-just-few-random-thoughts.html.

With today’s announcement by the Biden Administration of their college debt forgiveness program, I fully expect that social media platforms will soon be exploding with invective from all quarters, from the left for being too timid, from the right for the audacity of asking the taxpayers to pay off debt obligations entered into by willing adults. It will be brutal and unrelenting for a few weeks, then we will all move on to the next outrage. Can’t wait for the creative meme war!

It is worth noting that my biggest objections and worries from the April piece noted above, which appeared in the next to last paragraph, were both addressed by the administration…proving clearly the massive weight carried by The Tempest in shaping public policy. 

This is one of many problems that come up in the course of politics where I feel that it is impossible to craft a perfect solution. Every proposal for fixing some things is flawed, because the problem is complex. We are the largest consumer economy in the history of planet Earth. As such we can simply not afford to have an entire generation opt out of consuming because of a crushing college debt burden. If that happens we all lose. On the other hand, forgiving loans, comparatively speaking, is the easy part. The hard part is passing along the 300 billion dollar price tag for that debt forgiveness to the American taxpayer. How will the non-college educated crowd feel about that? Not to mention the college educated crowd that somehow found a way to pay off their loans? It is a no win situation for anyone proposing a fix.

I have great sympathy for the folks who say, “Look, you signed up for a loan. You understood at the time that loans have to be repaid. So why should the government or anyone else have to come along and bail you out?” Excellent question. However, we Americans aren’t always opposed to governments bailing out those who make dumb decisions with their money. In my lifetime the government has at various times bailed out the following:

- New York City

- Chrysler Corporation

- The Entire Savings and Loan industry

- Bank of America

- Wells Fargo

-The Stock market in the Panic of 1792…thanks, Alexander Hamilton!

- Bear Stearns

- Home Mortgages of one million Americans in 1933

- AIG Insurance Group

- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

-  Penn Central Railroad

- Lockheed

- The entire American Airline Industry after 9/11

- General Motors

- Ford

- Citigroup

- Small businesses via the TARP bailout of 2008

This is nowhere near an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. I mean, how do you think we have accumulated a 29 Trillion dollar national debt? So, its not that large scale financial bailouts are anything new. It’s just that the beneficiaries of this particular bailout are people that at least on some basic level should have known what they were signing up for. 

My background, education and experience leads me to be against any sort of bailout both on economic and moral terms. But that’s in a perfect world where trade offs are not required. In the world where we actually live, bailouts have become like the air we breathe. (Did you cash your relief checks from the government during COVID?) Still, when I look at this list of bailout recipients I must ask myself this question. If my government is going to bailout out anyone would I rather they bailout young, college kids with their entire lives ahead of them…or the arrogant, amoral morons who ran AIG, Bear Stearns, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? While many of the college graduates who will benefit from these bailouts may have made bad life planning decisions, they didn’t line their own pockets through malfeasance and greed. Besides, what will most of these graduates do with their newfound financial health? Probably go out and buy a house, or a car, or some decent furniture. They may even have the confidence to start a business. On the other hand what did most of the suits at Citibank do with all that bailout cash? probably bought that fifth vacation home in Barbados.

So yeah. This is a tortured fix to a giant problem, and absolutely nobody is going to be happy about it.

But, Facebook is gonna be hilarious for a couple weeks!

A Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Back in April of 2019 we were all in the midst of the COVID pandemic. One morning I was leaving my office after an abbreviated visit and happened to take note of the beautiful bank of flowers across the street from the entrance to our parking lot. Back then, everyone was noticing the beauty of the natural world, since being quarantined felt so artificial and confining. That particular morning I stepped out of the car, walked across the street and took this picture…

On the other side of this lovely bank of purple flowers was a thick forest of poplars, cedars, oaks and pines. I remember thinking at the time how odd it was to have such a beautiful natural environment directly across from our offices.

Then suddenly, a couple months later a sign went up announcing that a new development was planned for our little idyllic slice of nature, but since it was COVID nothing happened for months and months. Finally in January of this year we arrived on a Monday morning to discover that over the weekend, the developers had been busy…

It was such a shock to my system seeing the land stripped bare. A light dusting of snow had fallen overnight making the landscape feel almost lunar and even more desolate.

Then, this morning, after being away for six weeks, my system was given another shock when I crossed the overpass of Interstate 64 on Church road and saw what had happened while I was in Maine…

I learned that this development would be apartments. Just behind this structure is a giant parking deck that can’t be seen from the road.

Of course, there are two ways to look at something like this. One way is to view this as a loss of something. I will no longer see the purple flowers. I will never again wonder what might be lurking within the dark woods that used to stand at that spot, old and mysterious. But a second way to view this new building is as a sign of progress. These apartments will provide a place for individuals and families to live. Where do you live? A house? An apartment? If so, what was there before your house was built? Every place I have ever lived at some point in the past was part of a deep dark woods, or a cow pasture, or a wind swept field of flowers.

For me though, I suppose I feel the loss more than the gain. Perhaps if I was twenty-something and looking for an affordable place to live for a while I would feel differently. When I look at the green insulated exterior walls are all I can think about is how much longer it will take me to turn left out of our parking lot. I wonder if they will have to put in another stop light. I wonder what kind of clientele this apartment complex will attract.

But the thing I will miss the most is the flowers in the spring. They were a glorious sight to see every April.

On the other hand, maybe a child born to a young couple living in that building might one day find a cure for cancer.

…but I’ll still miss the flowers.

 

Good Things Are Coming

We made it back home safe and sound yesterday afternoon after an uneventful two day trip. Lucy, as usual, travels like a boss. Much better than either of us do. As is always the case, our house seemed huge when we walked in the door, each room bigger than we remembered. This morning I had to think for a minute to recall how to make coffee. But eventual it all came back to me like muscle memory that had atrophied. It felt good to settle back in to our home. We are lucky to have a place that we love to go, and a place we love to come back to.

There’s no telling what awaits me at the office this morning. Whatever it is I’m sure that Kristin has it all organized and laid out perfectly on my desk. Although I have not missed the work, I have missed the people there. It will be good to see them again, to begin anew my daily harassment of each of them. I’m sure they have missed it.

So, Pam had gone to the grocery store and I was unpacking when I hear a knock on the door. It’s Kennedy from next door, she’s the artistic middle child who is always painting, sculpting or knitting something. I have accumulated quite a collection of her work over the years. I’m keeping them all since one day she will probably be famous and they will be worth a fortune. Anyway, I opened the door and there she was on my front porch with her hands full of stuff she had made. I sat down on the steps and listened to her explain how she made each one. For me there was a coaster that she made at pottery class. For Pam there was a potholder she knitted, and then there was a bag of warm chocolate chip cookies…

My heart melted. First of all, she’s in elementary school yet has the skills to create this type of art. The coaster is a dog’s paw of her own design. That she would choose that to make for me is adorable. She knows how much I love Miss Lucy, I guess. But beyond the merits of these things as art is the thoughtfulness, the kind and tender heart, her desire to…give. Her little sister Sully and her big brother Cash are the same way. Their parents, Jamie and Stu, are killing it, even though they don’t think so half the time. Like all parents they are overwhelmed by the responsibility and the hard work involved in raising kids today. But they are doing something right!

I had planned on giving each of them their Maine gifts last night, but by the time we had finished dinner I was pooped. So I will go over this afternoon.

I often think about this culdesac where I live and the kids that have been raised here, including my own. Among them are one who wound up at West Point, another at the Naval Academy. There is a girl at JMU, another girl in high school who has been the go-to dog sitter and baby sitter for the entire street. There are two beautiful little ones down the street with blond curls and radiant smiles who we have gotten to see grow up from strollers to bicycles. Then there are these three knuckleheads next door who have squirreled their way into our hearts since the day they moved in.

It’s one of the reasons we live here, that we have stayed here. I watch these kids grow up, watch their parents raising them and I take heart for the future. Good things are coming.