I’ve always enjoyed Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion,” especially the portion of the show where he intones, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Woebegon…”

It has been relatively quiet here in my little corner of the DFW Metromess. There have been ups and downs, as usual. We celebrate the victories and we mourn our losses, sometimes with a little bit of a laugh thrown in for good measure.

For several months, we have been looking for frozen Pierogies. For those of you not familiar, think of a Pierogie as sort of a mashed potato ravioli. Ever since the onset of the “Great Pandemic,” we have been unable to find frozen Pierogies.

Believe me, I’ve looked. Had to. The better half has been wanting the things since before the “Great Pandemic” came about. The store where we do most of our shopping hasn’t had them, nor have any of the other stores near our house.

A little over a week ago, it was suggested that one of the specialty supermarkets over in McKinney might have the things, so, we trundled out to a place called Market Street in search of the elusive Polish Treat. While we were at it, we ended up picking up a few other things we had been missing from our larder. Lipton Herb and Garlic soup mix, for one. Great for seasoning things, like… Pierogies. I found the increasingly hard to find Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi. And finally, we were about to give up when the better half told me that SHE FOUND THEM!!!

There were seven boxes. They were on sale. We walked out of the store with seven boxes of Pierogies. Well, we did pay for them first. Hopefully, there are more Pierogies somewhere in the mythical “Back” for later trips to the store to get Pierogies.

Tuesday and Wednesday were “Doctor Days” for me. Saw my family doctor for a follow-up to some bloodwork he’d ordered. Everything looked good, so, after getting my flu shot, I was back down the road for lunch (involving Pierogies) and a trip later in the afternoon to have an MRI.

The MRI took a while. What made it extremely uncomfortable was the noise made by the machine. Yes, I had earplugs, but they were ineffective, making the visit an ordeal, of sorts.

Got home at sunset, was assailed by the dog Filbrix, sat down to eat supper, and before I could get in the last bite of supper, the other half noticed that the front door was ajar and that the cat had decided to fly the coop.

We spent the better part of an hour attempting to find the animal to no avail. We looked as best as we could to see where she might have gone with no results. The cat is still MIA as of the time I write this on the following Monday afternoon.

To the best of our knowledge, the cat was seventeen years old, somewhat frail and perhaps going blind. In one sense, I hope that she knew her time was short and found a place to hang out until her demise.

Part of attempting to get our geriatric cat back to the house was to put out her food and water bowl by the front door. The second morning after setting out the bowl, the food was missing. We put out a second helping of cat food. The dog Filbrix and I took our evening walk, coming back to find a ‘Possum happily chowing down on the cat food by the front door. I wasn’t too surprised at our discovery. There’s wildlife lurking nearby in what little “Green” area we have here in the immediate neighborhood. I was thankful for the thief being a ‘Possum and not one of the nearby skunks which make their presence know from time to time.

Seeing the ‘Possum gave me a bit of a smile, thinking about the first time my son encountered one of North America’s famous marsupials. He spotted a ‘Possum winding its way through the outside air conditioning units from my third-floor apartment. I was preparing a dinner when he said (loudly), “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!!!”

He’d never seen one before. Wow. I had a good laugh at the time and recall his reaction every once in a while with a certain fondness.

Anyhoo, we lost Morticia Rose, High Priestess of the Underworld. She was a good cat. For a cat.

As I said at the outset, we celebrate our victories, mourn our losses and hope for a good laugh or two at the end of the day. It all makes for a quiet week in my little corner of the DFW Metromess.

Be Seeing You!

Our house is relatively small, so sometimes I get to hear parts of conversations between Carol and whomever she is talking with.

She has been talking quite a bit lately, listening to her eldest daughter. The daughter, Jaclyn, has been living with her boyfriend for the past year, a fine fellow named Peter. Both are recovering from divorce; both have sons of about the same age. She recently changed jobs and now works for the U.S. Postal Service.

A couple of months ago, Peter had a problem which resulted in his hospitalization with a brain tumor. Supposedly the tumor was to be removed – something which didn’t happen. Instead, it was learned that only a biopsy was performed, and the tumor was the result of another cancer in his esophagus… a stage 4 tumor.

Needless to say, Jaclyn was upset. I could hear it in her voice when she called her mother. The only thing Carol could effectively do was to listen, and to be with her daughter on at least one visit to the hospital.

Peter went back into the hospital about a week or so ago. The conversation Carol and Jaclyn had on Sunday revealed that Peter has only two to four months to live.

Jaclyn is crushed.

Between having been through a probation period with the Post Office and having to deal with a reality she is not really equipped to deal with, she is under a considerable amount of stress.

Another circumstance coming into play is that her ex-husband is having his own battle with cancer (found after their divorce). She is, therefore, worried about the effect on her son having both of his “fathers” extremely ill at the same time.

I have relegated myself as a bystander in this situation. I have put myself in that role, knowing that as a man, my tendency is to offer solutions without necessarily paying attention to the full extent of the problem. That’s what men do.

I was reminded of the demise of a couple of friends of mine; one had terminal cancer, the other had early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Rob was a member of my Cursillo small group. He was also, incidentally, my Cursillo sponsor. An engineer at a government facility south of town, he was first diagnosed with esophageal cancer at about the time my son, Stuart was born. He, his wife, and his two sons were on tenterhooks for several months while he underwent treatment. In the middle of his ordeal, he suffered a heart attack. He recovered from both quite nicely and was able to attend Stuart’s first birthday party.

His recovery didn’t last. At the Cursillo Christmas party, he announced that the cancer was back, and with a vengeance. He had been given five months (more or less) to live.

Our small group supported him through the following March. He was able to participate. We prayed for him and with him, hoping that his doctors were wrong.

They weren’t.

He was gone by the end of May, leaving a wife and a pair of school-aged sons.

I was unhappy, wondering why he had been cut down at so young an age. My faith was shaken and to a degree it has never recovered.

Rob’s widow was in the same boat. He made sure that she was taken care of, financially. Within five years, she was nearly broke, having made some bad decisions along the way – decisions she would not have made if Rob had survived.

And then there’s Norm.

Norm and I met while I was between the start and the end of my college career. He was a bit of a vagabond, working radio from “Town to town and up and down the dial.” He met and married his live-in girlfriend, quipping when he first moved in with her that his parents were relieved that he wasn’t gay.

Norm and Karen became fixtures with my ex and me. They were enchanted with our daughter, Sarah, to the point that they described themselves as Sarah’s “Jewish Godparents.” (As a side note, Sarah became enamored of the Shor’s dog Adrick, which she referred to as “The dog Ad-er-ick,” which I transferred to the dog Filbrix.)

A few years after moving to Allen, Karen revealed that Norm had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. They came to visit while Norm was in the early stages of the disease. It was easy to tell that he wasn’t all there, so to speak. Life went on with occasional dispatches from Karen on the progression of the disease.

Life happened here in the Metromess, with my divorce and my re-marriage to Carol. We met up with Karen while camping at Lake Erie nine years ago. I had every intention of continuing up the road to Erie, Pennsylvania to see Norm one last time, but Karen said no… he was already too far gone.

He lasted another year. Should I say, his shell lasted another year? Regardless, I went to Norm’s wake where I was the featured speaker at what was a family gathering.

I was saddened by Norm’s passing, especially saddened by the fact that at the end, it was his shell which finally gave out. Norm was gone.

Let’s bring this around to the situation with my stepdaughter and the man she hoped to spend the rest of her life with. From her description, Peter is in a semi-lucid state. He’s not all there, as if his mind is either going or gone. He’s teetering on the edge of the abyss while his body fights the cancer within him.

Rob’s wife, Barb, described his condition as a semi-lucid state toward the end, as if he was teetering on the edge of the abyss while his body fought the cancer within him.

Same thing with Norm. Karen and I have discussed Norm’s demise on several occasions and the same imagery came from her. Teetering on the edge of the abyss while his body fought to remain alive.

We are all faced with the finality of death. Some sooner, some later. From those facing the challenge of what comes next, we get a sense of acceptance, or even surrender. Those of us who survive are, for the most part, hoping and praying that the person we love will go to “The Good Place.”

That’s where having faith can be comforting.

My study in EFM has been challenging to what little faith I have left after the demise of my friends. Much of what we have studied has shown me a faith based on previous answers to questions developed by mankind about concerning life and death. It is not my intention to rob others of their faith by what I may say or believe. I may think differently at the end of this year of EFM, or at the end of the fourth year of EFM. For now, I am where I am.

Be Seeing You.

Postscript – I wrote this piece late Wednesday night and presented it at our EFM (Education for Ministry) class Thursday morning. Less than forty-eight hours later, I received news that Peter had died. The merciful part about the final days of his journey was that they were short. It does not make the burden any lighter for my stepdaughter or for anyone else in the extended family.

This past week and a half, I’ve watched several dog videos with the same theme: Dog found abandoned, shy or distrustful of humans; Human interacts with dog, showing it love and patience; Dog responds by being everyone’s best friend ever!

Don’t you just love a happy ending?

Of course you do… and those happy endings are quite frequent, at least according to what I’ve witnessed.

Take the dog Filbrix. The American Oliohound I found abandoned about a block over on a late winter evening. I was out walking our Chihuahua when this short-haired dog came bounding up at us out of a dark corner of someone’s privacy fence. The small dog and I took the invader in, gave her some food (her ribs were showing), tried to find the owner and then took her in for “just one night.”

“Just one night” has become several years. Every week we replicate her first meal with us by feeding her one raw egg on Friday mornings, and every day I find something she does to make me say, “Dogs… Oy!”

This morning for instance, the dog Filbrix was seemingly happy about sleeping at my feet while the better half and I sat on the pair of recliners in our living/family room. I mentioned something about going to the hardware store. The dog Filbrix became alert, putting her nose in my face (while stepping on the family jewels). The other half got out of her chair and like a flash, the dog Filbrix goes and occupies where the other half was sitting.

It was, after all, the dog’s chair. The spouse was the interloper.

Dogs… Oy!

Okay. A little explanation is in order to understand why I call the dog Filbrix, the dog Filbrix. When I was three or four years old, I was gifted with a stuffed dog (with a squeaky nose and floppy ears) which I named Filbrix for no discernable reason. Perhaps it had to do with the construction going on in our corner of the north side of Pittsburgh. A reference to “Fill Bricks” may have caught the attention of an impressionable youngster like me, and the rest, as they say, is history. Later on, I found that there is a resort on the New Hampshire coast named “Philbrick’s of Hampton” (I think it was Hampton. Could be something else.). It’s doubtful that I knew of such a place at such a young age. Besides, looking at their rates, well, they were a little out of my price range.

There is more to the explanation. When my daughter was in the same age range, the first wife and I visited some friends who had a dog named Adrick. My daughter fell in love with the pooch and started to call Adrick “The Dog Add-er-ick.” Not just Add-er-ick. It was always “The dog Add-er-ick.” I refer to the dog Filbrix as homage to my daughter.

Anyhoo, I did my duty and rescued the dog Filbrix. With patience and love, she has become my constant companion. My wife thinks that the dog Filbrix adopted me instead of the other way around. Some love, some attention, and in return, a friend for life.

Be Seeing You!

My social media feed lately has seen an almost daily posting of some anti-vaxxer of note laid out on a hospital bed gasping for breath and pleading with their brethren to go get vaccinated for Covid-19 before it’s too late; like it is for me. There’s also the disclaimer that, “While we hate to see someone suffer and die…” with the admonishment that it’s about time for the anti-vaxxers to line up and bare your arms for the needle; followed by someone commenting, “When will they ever learn?”

The latest reply I put out was, “I’m not holding my breath…”

This ongoing drama reminds me of Theodore Geisel’s tale of the Sneetches. The last line in particular, “You can’t teach a Sneetch” applies here. No matter what proof of efficacy is offered, we are going to continue to see people laid out on hospital beds gasping for breath and pleading with their brethren to go get vaccinated for Covid-19 before it’s too late; like it is for me.

From what I’ve observed in my own little corner of the DFW Metromess are people who are opposed to vaccinations and other measures to curb the pandemic (and the emerging variants) are doing so because “Freedom.” I get it. Wearing a mask is a pain in the patoot. I don’t care for having a needle stuck in my arm, either, but I’ve done both for no other reason than to hope to keep someone else from having to be confined to a hospital bed, gasping for breath… and so on and so forth. It kind of ties in with the admonition of a certain itinerate rabbi from about 2,000 years ago suggesting that we should love our neighbors as ourselves.

Perhaps this resistance to protecting ourselves from Covid-19 is, as if I’ve recently heard suggested, a political thing. A thumbing of one’s nose to the current President, or it’s being done in an effort to crash the economy which would bode better for the GOP in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Given what’s been happening in the last year and a half, such a move would not surprise me in the least. One would think that the GOP would offer some constructive assistance with the Covid-19 situation instead of trying to convince us that “The King is a Fink!”

Sorry. Wrong comic artist.

Fortunately, no one close to me has contracted Covid-19 and died. My son-in-law had it, despite having had the vaccine, but other than having to isolate himself for a couple of weeks and having a few mild symptoms, he’s come away from the experience as “Fit as a Fiddle.”

A woman with whom I used to work lost her husband to Covid-19 before the vaccines became available. Her experience was heartbreaking, yet, to this day she gets e-mails and social messages mocking her from people who presumably should know better. He was just another one of over half a million people who made a positive difference in the lives of the people around him.

Then again, “You can’t teach a Sneetch!”

Be Seeing You!

A few days ago I wrote of our adventure in San Antonio where the better half and I spent a couple of nights at a hotel which was, shall we say, a little less than ideal. I won’t go into details on this writing, as those details were covered in my previous post “Dirty is as Dirty Does.”

I left the audience hanging, saying that the corporate office had not been heard from at the time I wrote the piece.

Well, I wrote to corporate a second time on Thursday and got a reply early Friday.

I felt good about what they wrote. They essentially sent me a note saying that the site manager had agreed to refund what I paid for one night’s stay, providing I contact the site manager.

After chewing the message for a while, I decided that I had one of two ways to respond. One was to be a total “Karen” about the experience, the other was to take a kinder, gentler approach. Since the Karens I know are decent people, I opted for the gentler approach.

In the e-mail sent to the site manager, I quickly went over the lowlights of our visit before reminding the manager that it had been agreed that I was to be refunded one night’s stay for our trouble. I then suggested that if the refund had not been forwarded yet, for the manager to make a donation to the San Antonio Food Bank.

My e-mail was sent, with a copy sent to corporate so that they would know what was going on.

This morning, I opened my in box to find a “form letter” from someone in corporate, thanking me for voicing my concerns and for choosing a hotel in their chain – inviting me to come again.

The latest form letter from corporate reminded me of a story from back in the 1890s where someone wrote a letter to one of the railroads complaining about bedbugs in their sleeping car.

The railroad wrote back, thanking them for bringing the bedbug problem to their attention, further telling the customer that they could rest easy that due to their complaint, the company was taking action by fumigating their entire fleet of sleeper cars, and so on and so forth.

They attached a copy of the original complaint to their response, along with a notation on the complaint:

“SEND THEM THE BEDBUG LETTER”

Somehow it seems that the practice of sending form letters in response to complaints is still with us. Maybe the idea that impersonal responses to serious (or semi-serious) inquiries has been around longer than we thought.

The name of the chain has been withheld as a courtesy to the people who work there.

Be Seeing You!

I don’t care to complain, but it seems as if I am finding things to complain about without actively seeking things to complain about.

Take a recent stay at a hotel in San Antonio.

Please.

The better half and I made preparations to go see her mother a couple of weeks ago. We bypassed our usual overnight hotel for another motel closer to the in-law’s place, in part because her brother would be staying there. It seemed like a safe bet. The hotel where we would be staying is in the same family as the hotel we usually frequented. I’ve stayed at other properties in the same chain and found them to be amicable places to stay.

I should have turned around at the first hint of trouble… booted the reservation (which had been pre-paid) and headed over to our usual digs.

The problems started at the front door which refused to open until the better half worked a trick she had picked up from her days as being a hotel maid. Never mind the seats on the “porch” which had outlived their usefulness about three years ago, and never mind the collection of cigarette butts and beer bottle caps found on the ground surrounding the porch.

We did a quick inspection of the room fearing the presence of bedbugs. No bedbugs apparent on either queen bed. We had reserved a room with a single king bed. No biggie, as it turned out.

Then we started noting little things: There was a towel stuffed into the cabinet above the toilet. The towel had apparently been used to wipe away the mold we noted around the bathtub. There were light bulbs apparently missing from their sockets – an electrical outlet without an outlet cover in the bedroom between the beds – it appeared that someone had “liberated” the battery from the smoke detector – blades on the ceiling fan in the front room had not been cleaned in recent memory.

Now, I’m not the world’s best housekeeper by a long shot. At the same time, though, I am not in the business of providing rooms for paying guests. The room where we were staying was not acceptable even by my own lax standards. There was no excuse. None. Especially considering what we paid for the room.

A complaint was forwarded to the “Home Office”. To date, all I’ve gotten is a message saying “We’ll look into it.”

Earlier Sunday evening, I got a reminder of a post by a good friend of mine where he talked about his two weeks of being “Morning Mayor” of the small radio station we worked for in southern Ohio. His tenure started the day after I was pulled into the station manager’s office and told that I was going to be replaced in two weeks by someone from a larger market who he had hired the day before.

To be honest, I was rightly pissed at the decision, especially since I had worked through one of the worst winters the town had experienced to that point. I went off to lick my wounds while my friend, Alex, got the chance to play personality radio for a fortnight.

His post described his experience as being one of the best in his life (you’re welcome, Alex) – one which he never really forgot. Reading his post, I recalled the period and my mourning the loss of a job I really wanted for three years prior to getting it.

I then read some of the comments made in addition to the post, including an entry made by me where I recall accepting the “demotion”, as it allowed me to do what I really wanted to do which was to create creative commercials for the station’s clients.

I had taken a lemon and made it into lemonade. Something I have done repeatedly in the span of my lifetime. It’s being able to roll with the punches, to adapt, which makes someone genuinely… let’s just say, interesting.

There is an entire litany of little setbacks I had suffered on the way from there to here; too many setbacks and comebacks to enumerate in a short period of time.

Two which came to mind were the events leading up to owning a house in an obscure little corner of the DFW Metromess and the more recent setback I had earlier this year.

The better half and I were living in a rental home in an older part of Allen Texas a few years back. I had just come off an injury which took me out of work for nearly two months when I got a call from a real-estate agent who blithely told me that she was coming over to look at the house so she could list it for sale. She prefaced her announcement by asking me if I had gotten the note from the landlord telling me that I needed to be out of the house by the end of the month. Never mind the detail of sending us a registered letter or even bothering to call me… I needed to be out by the end of the month with about sixteen day’s notice.

We made it out, landing on a property owned by my wife’s boss, arriving by the skin of our teeth. For the next few months, we hustled to find a permanent place to live, finally settling on a really nice place in a somewhat decent neighborhood. Truth be known, I knew enough about Real Estate law to be able to have the agent who called me on that beautiful October day to sweat out keeping her license – and I could have stuck it to the landlord for not fixing various shortcomings which desperately needed to be repaired.

But I didn’t.

I was the nice guy who put it behind me and went ahead to better things.

The rectal cancer had the possibility of being an even bigger setback. Before the good news that it was operable and that it had not spread, I determined to make the best out of the situation by rolling out my sense of humor, grinning and bearing what could have been a onerous load.

The gist of this little essay is that today’s encounter with a six-year-old post from my friend gave me some insight about what really matters in this life. Life can sometimes hand out some pretty tough lumps. It’s how one handles those lumps which defines what type of person one is.

Be Seeing You!