The Clock Is Ticking!

Ok...I've got exactly 24 hours to get all the last minute stuff done, 24 hours until zero-hour, 9 am. Two appointments this morning. Submission of last minute business. Recording my epic away message on my business phone. Cut the grass. Pack my suitcase. Pack the Pacifica. Consider installing a hitch and renting a U-Haul. Kill a couple of last minute squirrels just to remind them who's boss. Drop by the bank to see if they happen to be giving away any free samples today. Have conference with Kristin to make sure she is fully up to speed on all of my ill-conceived plans for the month. Do some more packing. Consider placing whatever will not fit into a giant box and having it shipped UPS. Talk Pam off of the ledge when she misplaces one of her 16 to-do lists. Constantly reassure increasingly fragile-looking Lucy that everything is going to be just fine, even though the entire time she is casting wary eyes at the growing number of large scary bags and boxes in the staging area and thinking, " Lies. All lies. I'm screwed..."

Sometimes...dreams come true.

A couple of weeks ago I was clearing out some very old files at my office. I have a couple of file drawers full of stuff that at some point I thought was important enough to save. So every once in a while I'll rummage through to see what was such a big deal all those years ago. I found an old faded yellow pad full of dreams. No, seriously...dreams.

I had a mentor when I first got into this business, an elderly man with an almost saintly reputation for not only production, but a strict code of honor and integrity. His name was Dan Williams. One day, which according to the date at the top of the yellow pad would have been February 1st, 1989, Dan sat down with me and challenged me to write out three sets of goals. He asked me to divide them into three columns. The first were short term goals, things I wanted to accomplish over the next year. He wanted me to stretch myself, to make it a goal that I had a decent chance of hitting, but which would require a lot of effort. Then he asked me to write out my mid-term goals. These were different, these required some vision. He wanted me to try and imagine what I wanted my life to look like in ten years. He wanted me to write out difficult, life-stretching stuff. He told me to not be afraid to dream a little. Finally, he told me to write out my long term goals. For these, he asked me to dream a lot, to imagine the possibilities.

I won't bore you with all the details, because some of them were embarrassing, to be honest. Twenty seven years ago, I didn't have much in the way of confidence in my future. My goals were flimsy things, the sort of goals someone who was afraid of the future might come up with. In my defense, I was struggling in a brutal business that is insanely difficult to break into. I had a toddler at home and Pam was seven months pregnant with Patrick. I was in debt with a 12.5% mortgage with two college loans outstanding. I knew that there was a chance that Pam would want to retire from her teaching job after Patrick was born, making us a one income household. Frankly, I was afraid of the future. Of course, I would never have admitted such a thing to Pam or anyone else. But I couldn't fool Dan. He told me that one day I would look at my list and laugh. He was right.

I tell this story, because despite the laugh it gave me at my own expense...one thing stood out from my list of long term goals...."I would like to be able to take my family to a house on a lake in Maine for an entire month."

Honestly, I had forgotten all about the list. I didn't remember writing it. I did remember how Dan always was getting on me about setting the bar too low, for limiting myself with the tyranny of low expectations. "If you don't reach for great things, you'll always be stuck with the...ok." It wasn't smooth like something  Zig Ziglar would say, but I still remember it 27 years later, so that counts for something.

So, in a couple of days Pam and I will head to a house on a lake in Maine for an entire month. 

God Bless America, and God bless men like Dan Williams.

Problems? What problems?

I ran across a story the other day about a guy who lost his composure in the middle of a cross country flight. Was it because he became claustrophobic? Was he freaked out by the whispering middle eastern-looking couple across the aisle? Did he see snakes on the plane? No, no. His internet connection was not only outrageously expensive, but way too slow and unreliable.

Let that sink in for a moment. The man was sitting in a chair in the sky, hurtling to his cross country destination at 600 miles per hour in a climate controlled cabin, sipping hot coffee...incredulous that the miracle of an invention that didn't even exist twenty five years ago was not cheep and perfectly functional at 30,000 feet.

Conclusion? 21st century men are chumps.

As a disclaimer for what follows, I should point out that I speak as a 58 year old middle/upper middle class man in the United States of America, in reasonably good health and of reasonably sound mind.

But, honestly, when I look around this great big world today and consider all of the problems we're dealing with, I think...what problems? Consider...

1. The year I was married (1984 ) the Dow Jones Industrials was at 1200. Today it stands at 17,500, an astounding return on investment. But let the market drop 600 lousy points because of Brexit and we wail and moan, don our sack cloth and sit in ashes all day!

2. Billion dollar industries exist to sell us stuff to do with our leisure time, when 300 years ago, there wasn't even a word for "leisure time" because nobody had any.

3. Californians complain about the horrible traffic in and around Los Angeles. They do so inside the climate controlled interiors of automobiles equipped with more powerful computers than IBM had forty years ago. The average price of these vehicles clogging LA's freeways would make their owners the richest person within a hundred square miles of over half the land mass of the world.

4. Every night on television, somebody is trying to sell me some new medicine (ask your doctor if expressia is right for you!) to rid me of some ailment I didn't even know was a thing. Discolored toenails? A mere 100 years ago the number one cause of death was diarrhea, the cure for which now costs four bucks and tastes and looks like bubblegum.

5. Today's college students need safe spaces to run to whenever they hear disagreeable speech that offends their fragile world views. Their grandfathers at their age were scrambling for safe spaces from incoming mortar fire in some god-forsaken jungle in the South Pacific. Their grandmothers were assembling tanks in some factory somewhere for ten hours a day, seven days a week. Their great grandparents were probably hungry most of the time.

6. While the developing world's population is exploding, here in the west...the most sex saturated civilization in history, men need the assistance of little blue pills to obtain an erection. So much so that the company that developed Viagra...Pfizer, rakes in nearly 2 billion a year in revenue from it's sale.

Listen, I'm not trying to suggest that we don't have problems today. Sure, there are still bad things happening around the world and here at home. There is still injustice, racism is still with us, and even in the most prosperous nation in the world there are people who don't have enough to eat. But, in the grand scheme of the universe, our problems seem lame when compared to the daily life struggles of even our most recent ancestors. A little perspective and gratitude for our amazing luck at being alive in the year 2016 would seem to be in order.

Immigration

Immigration has become the Rorschach Test of contemporary American politics. What one thinks about it has become the great divider. It goes something like this...

# If you are pro-immigration, you are said to be for open borders, which makes you a post nation-state globalist. 

# If you are anti-immigration, you are a racist, nationalistic xenophobe.

Notice that in both of these scenarios, no distinction is made between legal and illegal immigration. Which means, charitably, that both positions are full of s**t.

For the viva l'immigration set, any nation that shuts off its borders to the free flow of the world's dispossessed is evil. Why, who are we to arbitrarily affix invisible lines on God's Earth, cordon ourselves off from our fellow man and thus shut the door in the faces of our less fortunate brothers and sisters? For these folks, the future is a stateless globe where all people live as one under one government. You know...like heaven, only without the angels. The European Union was and is the first such real world experiment in this sort of thinking. The fact that the British have turned against this future has caused no small amount of exasperation among the world's young, who fear that one of history's most civilized and accomplished nations has been taken over by barbarians.

For the anti-immigration crowd, the issue is too often painted as hordes of swarthy Hispanics seeping through every unguarded inch of our southern border with the active complicit assistance of our own government who refuses to enforce our own laws because the prospect of new Democratic Party voters is too good to pass up. Let them in. Because they have nothing, they will immediately become dependent on government. They are natural ready-made Democratic Party constituents. For many on this side of the debate, the heat of emotion comes from some ill-conceived longing for America as it used to be...Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, white and Protestant.

What's my take? It's actually very simple. I'm an American. As such, I believe in the concept of nations. One of the jobs of a nation is to establish and control its borders. Every nation has a right to decide who and how many people from somewhere else we allow into our country. We have a system of laws drafted by our elected representatives that supposedly control the flow. We have made many changes in those laws over the past hundred years as our needs as a nation have changed. This is right and proper. Yes, the Statue of Liberty stands proudly proclaiming, "Give us your tired, your poor, etc etc." However, it stands on Ellis Island, a tightly controlled entry point for those teaming masses yearning to be free, complete with uniformed customs officials. It's not a free for all.

My position is simple. Enforce the laws of our nation. If we determine that we, in fact, want to open the doors to millions of unskilled laborers...fine. Pass a law. But until that happens, enforce the law.

Back to the fact that I am an American. It's true. I was born here, as were my parents and their parents and their parents before them. Then it gets sketchy. We think that our ancestors came here from either (take your pick) Ireland, Germany, or Britain. One of those at least. What this means is that at some point back in the day, my family were immigrants, and I for one am forever in their debt. One of the great things about being American is that we have so many different types of people here. We have benefitted by the wonderful heritage of so many amazing experiences, of multiple ethnicities being represented here. The foods they brought with them, we all enjoy. The music, the art forms, the color and flair have helped make us great. We weaken ourselves if we say..stop! No more! I want the best and brightest from anywhere in the world to come here with their dreams and talents. But, I want them to come here with the desire to become Americans. I have no desire to turn our country into Yugoslavia. We need less Balkanization, not more. But neither do we need to remove the welcome mat for those who come here...legally. Two members of my family did just that. My sister in law from the Philippines, my niece's husband from Scotland. It was a costly and laborious process, but they did it, and my family is better for their efforts.

What to do with the 10 million or so illegal immigrants already here? I have no idea actually. I wish there weren't 10 million illegal immigrants here. How they got here is a great shame to the rule of law and a black mark on the resumes of those who presume to lead us. But now they are here. The notion of rounding 10 million people up and herding them back to the border has a trail of tears quality to it that no decent human being wants to witness. Any politician who says that this is what they want to do is an idiot and worse...a heartless idiot.

So, to recap. Am I against legal immigration? Certainly not. Am I in favor of an everybody gets in, no questions asked, and here is your democrat party registration form style free for all at the border? Certainly not. We are a nation and as such have a right to control both temporary and permanent entry into our country. We should do so with an eye towards what is in our economic and social interests.

A Beautiful Sermon

Pam and I visited another church yesterday. It was a mixed bag. The music was uninspired. The congregation was whiter than a Chamber of Commerce picnic in Des Moines, Iowa. But, I heard one of the most intelligent and beautiful sermons I've heard in years.

First, the music. Pam says that I'm always going to hate the music in any church unless it features the thirty hymns my mother loved. This is a pernicious lie! While it is true that I dearly love many selections from the Broadman hymnal, as a musician myself, I have no problem with any church music genre if it is performed well and the lyrics have some discernible theological message. Yesterday was practically a textbook example of everything that makes me cringe in church. The worship leader, strummed his stratocaster gently while asking us to join him in worship. This dude was movie star handsome in his skin tight t-shirt, bulging biceps sporting not one but two tattoos...suggesting perhaps an edgy past! In all, four songs were performed by his tight band, none of which I knew...which is fine. Pam rightly points out that one of the reasons I don't know any of these songs is because I don't listen to Christian radio. Point taken. She does. She knew one of them. Anyway, all four of them seemed to be churned out by the same songwriter, minor keys dominating, with Hallmark card lyrics like..."My soul will dance on the wings of freedom"... not exactly "a mighty fortress is our God" but this place didn't have a pipe organ either so... Bicep Guy bayed out lots of ocean metaphors. Life is like an ocean apparently, lots of scary waves and what not. But, the musicians involved were talented and performed each selection flawlessly. As I looked around at the people around me, only a handful were singing. Maybe they don't listen to Christian radio either.

Then the pastor stepped forward and blew me away.

The topic of his thirty minute sermon was...the Trinity, not exactly stem winder material. But towards the end of his wonderfully reasoned and presented message he used an illustration that I have been thinking about a lot since. He told us about when he spent a summer in Japan. While there he became fascinated with the culture of this ancient civilization, in particular a form of art there called Kintsugi, which translated means making beautiful art from broken things. Kintsugi artists take broken pottery and solder it with gold. The results are quite stunning:

Then the pastor observed that this is exactly the opposite of what we Christians do with broken things. If we attempt to fix them at all, it is with clear epoxy so when finished nobody will be able to tell it was broken in the first place. In other words we try our best to hide our imperfections. We plaster on a fake smile to hide our own brokenness, no place more so than at church. Then he made the beautiful point that Jesus Christ is the gold that mends us and makes us greater, more valuable than we were before. It was brilliant and made a lasting impression on me.

When we return from Maine, we will go there again.

Donald Trump Prays the Sinners Prayer?

Ok. Yesterday a reader of this blog sent me a private message informing me that Donald Trump has in recent months experienced a religious conversion. Apparently, an unnamed "evangelical leader" led the presumptive Republican nominee to Christ. This was all reported to the world from the lips of none other than James Dobson himself. Later in the afternoon, my daughter sent me a link to the story with the snarky aside, "Well, that's a relief!"

Now...I suppose there is the possibility that this news is actually true, that Donald Trump has actually accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. If so, there is also the chance that he did so for truly spiritual reasons, not merely as a sop to evangelicals in a brazen attempt to get their votes. If so, I am truly happy for him and wish him the best as he embarks on his chosen spiritual walk with the Lord.

However...and life is always about the howevers, this news practically begs for my particular brand of humor, a trait that for good or ill I have passed down to my son. Yes, I am aware that making jokes about someone's faith is fraught with danger. Some of you might very well be offended by what follows, others hopefully...will get a kick out of it. But writing a blog is about self expression and fun, and last night while going back and forth with my children about this...we had lots of fun:

Me: Can you guys imagine Donald Trump praying the sinners prayer??..."God, even though most of my life has been fabulous and I have done many great things, the best things, I can maybe understand how I may have actually sinned on occasion. And, believe me, I'm very sorry/not sorry about that. I would hope that you would have the class to forgive me. So, I would like at this time to issue you an exclusive invitation to come and live in the world class accommodation of my heart...where there will never, I promise you, be a dull moment. God, actually you are going to love living in my heart, that I can promise you...

Patrick: He has the most luxurious heart...right next to the stomach that eats the best Mexican food, which is made at Trump Tower. He loves the Hispanics. He's going to be the best Christian. He's gonna follow Jesus so closely, so closely. Closer than anyone's ever followed Jesus. It's gonna be fantastic. He might even become a missionary to CHIIIIIINAAAA.

Kaitlin: 😂😂😂😂😂

Pam: You guys are too much!! So, I can't get any of you to respond to my Our Month in Maine posts, but Trump gets multiple reactions?! 😔

Dreams

Had a lovely dinner out with my two sisters last night. I'm lucky to have sisters. Linda told us about a dream she had a couple months ago, her first dream about Mom since she passed. I have yet to have a dream about Mom or Dad since they've been gone. I was envious of her visions.

She remembers that we were on vacation, only not at the beach. Instead we had rented some grand Victorian house in the middle of nowhere. Her dream started in the upstairs of the house where Linda, dressed in her labor and delivery uniform was comforting a crying baby. Then her favorite Doctor shows up to inquire about the child. So far, sounds like a rocking vacation!!

Then she walks downstairs where she sees Mom sitting at the elegant dining room table dressed in her customary morning house coat having a rapturous conversation with my other sister, Paula. Mom had her elbows on the table with her coffee cup cradled in her hands like she always did. Everyone smiled when Linda recounted this detail because we could all picture it in our mind's eye. Only weird thing was that Mom's house coat was fire engine red! As Linda approached, she could see that the two of them were chattering away enthusiastically about something. Her dream never allowed her to eavesdrop, so the subject matter was a mystery. But Linda said that the entire scene filled her with an overwhelming sense of happiness. 

After a while Linda made her way through a doorway into the kitchen, which she described in amazing detail, every nook and cranny as clear as a painting. She saw Patrick sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, dressed in a white t-shirt and black rimmed glasses. Then Sarah appeared at the counter preparing English muffins. She turned to Patrick to ask if he wanted butter. It was the only discernible words spoken in the entire dream.

Of course, all of us immediately became amateur psychologists, offering instantaneous interpretations. Hmmm...perhaps the baby belonged to Patrick and Sarah!!! We all laughed. Why were you working on your vacation??? Thanks, OBAMA!!!

Still, I was so envious. I haven't had any sort of dream about my parents, which is better than having a nightmare about them I suppose. But, I would love to be able to see them again, even in an ephemeral dream. Mom told stories and she was great at it...a gift. I would love to hear one more.

I dream about squirrels. It's not the same.