LET THEM EAT MUSH!

Some 60 years ago, when I was a child, and long before I became a certified geezer, I would spend the weekends with my grandparents on their five-acre vegetable roadside farm. Some of my earliest memories of those overnight visits were the heavy hand tied quilts made with squares from my grandparents shirts and dresses. The quilt was so heavy that to lay under it, it was difficult to even turn over.

At daybreak, I could hear my grandfather rustling around in the kitchen getting the wood-fire stove hot enough to make oatmeal. He had a small pan that was just right for his daily preparations of mush. Silently he would eat his breakfast and then slip out into the field before the rest of the family was awake. Of course I enjoyed grandma’s bacon and eggs with toast. Sometimes we would have pancakes with real syrup. But I don’t remember ever eating oatmeal like grandpa. Only grandpa would eat the oatmeal before his morning of weeding and harvesting in the field.

As a young father of seven sons, I would try to steer my boys toward healthy living. When Halloween came around, I would offer each a dollar a pound for their candy and allow them to keep 25 or 30 pieces of candy. Each boy could earn $5-$10 for their Halloween booty. Somehow the word got out and the older boys began to encourage the younger ones to turn down the money and keeps the candy. Eventually, I wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that trick-or-treating should be abolished in the city. That definitely got a rise from many citizens as they wrote in to call me a communist and other derogatory terms.

The following week a good friend looked at me and laughed and said, “I bet you feed your kids oatmeal for breakfast.” How he knew that I will never know but he was right.

Now as I grow into full bloom as a certified geezer, I prefer, I select, and I choose oatmeal with a dash of cinnamon, topped with fruit, and a few crushed walnuts for my daily breakfast. Even on the road at hotels with a continental breakfast, oatmeal is my stay.

One may ask what have I learned in the past 60 years that I would make that a daily practice. Intellectually, I realize that Ayervada medicine, written some 5000 years ogo in Sanskrit speaks of foods that balance the body such as oatmeal. Scientifically, I could refer to studies that speak of the fiber and oatmeal’s ability to bind fats and oils to help reduce cholesterol. But all that is just chatter and talk-talk. What it really comes down to is that if I listen to my body I feel better on a breakfast over oatmeal then I do on a “truckers platter” of sausage eggs and hash browns.

I have no idea if any of my sons choose oatmeal for breakfast. I will give them another 40 years to figure that out for themselves.

But for myself, as I board a cruise to Alaska on a line that prides itself in food par excellent with eggs Benedict and Belgium waffles with strawberries and whipped cream, I will probably surprise the waiters when they asked me what I would like for breakfast. Oatmeal! The breakfast of champions and geezers!

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A CRIP!

In my youth I loved to ride motorcycles. I read everything I could about the various models in the 60s. Over the years, I owned five different kinds of motorcycles. And even though I no longer ride, I sometimes like to tell my family I am a member of a motorcycle gang called the Crips. They even keep parking spaces near the front door of our grocery store for “the Crips”. The blue sign however looks like a stick man riding a single large wheel rather than a motorcycle.

Even with my physical limitations from 23 years of arthritis I like to think of myself as independent, self-reliant, and able to fend for myself. However that is not entirely accurate. Let me explain.

My wife had an opportunity to spend five days in Oregon with her sister and sister-in-law. I encouraged her to go. She left plenty of meals in the refrigerator.  I had plenty of clean pajama bottoms, and pans and dishes laid out that I could reach. I had a son in town who checked in daily so I knew I would be good for the week.

As is my custom, I spent some time on the patio the first morning. Apparently I was not careful enough to close the sliding door quickly as I came in. I soon realized I had a fly in the house. So as I watched TV, prepared meals in the kitchen, and checked my Internet each day, I had an unwelcome companion who soon becomes my nemesis. Going to the garage and digging out the flyswatter did little to resolve our relation. I was not flexible enough to thwap the fly into oblivion. When my son stopped by for a visit, I asked him to use the flyswatter and relieve me of this curse. He beat on me without success. I sat quietly in my lift chair and pleaded for him to continue whapping me with every opportunity. The fly simply was too frisky and would not land long enough for a good death blow.  While my son thought the whole thing quite humorous, I don’t think he realized the gravity of my situation.

I next closed the French doors to the computer room and posted a sign that said, “Please keep doors closed, no-fly zone!” So like Libya, I had declared a no-fly zone in the house. But this did little good for my TV room and I had four days until my wife returned and I was feeling more desperate by the day.

My fear was that by week’s end, my wife would come home and find a husband too weak to brush the fly away from his eyes and lips just as one might see the poor in Bangladesh living with these pesky pest. I did get relief when it grew dark and if I left the lights off. I was safe in the dark. But the day belonged to the fly.

I then began to consider a new strategy. What if I sat in the bedroom and waited for the fly to follow and then run out of the room closing the door behind me. That didn’t work! He wouldn’t follow me there and I got tired of sitting on the end of the bed.

And then serendipity took over. This morning I laid my clothes out for the day and took my morning shower. As I closed the glass door in the shower, I realized that the fly had come in with me and was on the tile. Now I had him cornered! It was me with my shower wand in the shower with the fly. I was determined that only one of us was coming out of that shower alive. After adjusting the water pressure and temperature I realized that he had moved. He must’ve landed on the black metal edge of the door. So I began to spray all the areas that were lined in black.

The water mist soon raised the pest from his hiding place, and the battle was on. Moving from side to side and corner to corner, chasing the fly with my spray of water I was finally able to shoot him down. I did not want him to come back up from the trap in the drain. So I covered the drain with my foot and let the water back up an inch and release the water down the drain, certain that after three days I was finally free at last.

Eagerly I showered and dressed and phoned my wife to share my early morning success. I went into great detail of how I was able to overcome the enemy. And while basking in the glory of this post-battle debriefing, I realized that as I was talking to my wife on the phone that a fly had landed on my hand. I had no idea that there were two. All I could say to my wife was, “Come home soon! I want you! I need you!”

An Old Rusty Pail

This story was sent to me by a friend.  The author is unknown.  If you know it's origins, please let me know so I can give proper credit.  In the mean time, let us find joy in the telling.

Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.  We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out-patients at the clinic.

  One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man.  "Why, he's hardly taller than my 8-year-old," I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body.  The appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw.

  Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good evening.  I've come to see if you've a room for just one night.  I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there's no bus 'til morning."

  He told me he'd been hunting for a room since noon but with no success, no one seemed to have a room.  "I guess it's my face .... I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments ..."

  For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: "I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch.  My bus leaves early in the morning."

  I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch.  I went inside and finished getting supper.  When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us.  "No, thank you I have plenty."  And he held up a brown paper bag.

  When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes.  It didn't take a long time to see that this old man had an over sized heart crowded into that tiny body.  He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her 5 children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.

  He didn't tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was preface with a thanks to God for a blessing.  He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer.  He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going...

  At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children's room for him.  When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch.

  He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as

if asking a great favor, he said, "Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment?  I won't put you out a bit.  I can sleep fine in a chair."  He paused a moment and then added, "Your children made me feel at home.  Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don't seem to mind."

   I told him he was welcome to come again.  And, on his next trip, he arrived a little after 7 in the morning.  As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen!  He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they'd be nice and fresh.  I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. And I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.

  In the years he came to stay overnight with us, there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.

  Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed.  Knowing that he must walk 3 miles to mail these, and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly precious.

  When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning.

  "Did you keep that awful looking man last night?  I turned him away!  You can lose roomers by putting up such people!"

  Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice.  But, oh!, if only they could have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear.

  I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.

  Recently I was visiting a friend, who has a greenhouse, as she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms.  But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket.  I thought to myself, "If this were my plant, I'd put it in the loveliest container I had!"

  My friend changed my mind.  "I ran short of pots," she explained, "and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn't mind starting out in this old pail.  It's just for a little while, till I can put it out in the garden."

  She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven.

  "Here's an especially beautiful one," God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman.  "He won't mind starting in this small body."

  All this happened long ago - and now, in God's garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.

 The LORD does not look at the things man looks at.  Man looks at the
outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." (1 Samuel 16:7b)