Forever

We have a couple of amaryllis that have just seemed to outdo themselves this winter.  Each of them has grown two stems of flowers.  One had a four-flower stem and later a five-flower stem; the other grew both stems at the same time and had eight lovely flowers all at once.

Amaryllis are relatively inexpensive and easy to grow.  They are much harder to get to bloom the next year, however.  I have a bulb I have tried to get to bloom for about three years now, and so far all it does when it comes out of dormancy is set out leaves.  Not a sign of a flowering stem in sight.

Yes, I’ve read about how to get them to bloom again.  But something just isn’t right.  So each year we buy another amaryllis in a pot and enjoy the flowers.  But now I have four bulbs, two of which have bloomed, one which has sent out leaves, and one which has some green on the end of the bulb, but hasn’t done anything yet.  Of course, I hate to throw anything away, and probably will set them out this summer to bask in the warmth and breeze.  Then I’ll fumble around with them and try to get them to bloom this winter.  But in the end, we’ll probably end up buying one or two more that we know will bloom for us.

My aunt Dorothy knew how to make amaryllis bloom from year to year.  When they were living at home, she had several bulbs she would coax into blooming from year to year.  She said it wasn’t hard and told me how she did it.  I thought I did the same thing, but evidently I don’t hold my mouth right or something.  Because it just doesn’t work for me.

Flower bulbs are magical things.  Just think of all that is in an amaryllis bulb.  Beautiful colors, delicate flowers, sturdy stems, a reproduction mechanism, and nourishing leaves all are packed into a bulb that gets its nourishment from dirt, water, and the sun.  There are also sensors of some kind that can tell when water, warmth, and sunlight are present in the right mixtures.  And when that happens, it signals somehow for the bulb to grow.

Flowers, though, are like everything else on this earth.  They eventually decay and die.  Even the most beautiful of flowers eventually turns back to the dust from where it came.

And so it is with everything else in the world.  Trees, houses, automobiles, animals and people; we all eventually turn back into the dust from whence we came.  (I think Twinkies [R.I.P.] may be the only exception to that.)  Even rocks…the great granite mountains…will eventually, they say, turn into soil and dust.

And so it goes.  We do well to remember that even though we have things to do today, and places to go today, and people to see today, one day we too will turn back into the soil and dirt from whence we came.  And the souls and spirits that inhabit us will go somewhere else, there to wait until thry are united with, as the great Apostle Paul said, “the imperishable.”

When we remember that we are here for but a breath of time in the great scheme of things, we tend to look at things differently.  We tend to think differently.  We tend to interact with our world differently.  And that’s a good thing because our time here is so short compared to the forever that is coming.

If we don’t prepare for the forever in the here and now, when will we do it?  Or will we lurch into eternity forever unprepared for what lies ahead?

The Best

I came into work this morning, and as I walked inside the building and went past the north entrance, I saw out in the parking lot a truck with a man-lift on it.  Several men in hard hats were around the truck, and one of them was in the lift working on a security light on a pole in our parking lot.

I watched for a bet, and it became apparent that they were finishing up their project.  My guess is that they hadn’t been there long anyway.  The man in the lift finished what he was doing on the lamp, put the cover back on and fastened it, lowered the lift to the ground, and got out.  As he got out, he unfastened a couple of safety straps.

Another man and he took the tools and materials out of the lift and put them in the truck.  Another man swung the boom around and “parked” it on the truck where it was supposed to be when the truck was moved, and brought in the leveling feet that kept the truck steady.

Then the man who had been in the lift walked around the truck and picked up the orange cones surrounding the truck, walked toward the cab, spit on the ground, got in the truck, and drove off.  Another man stayed behind the truck and made sure the man didn’t run into anything as he backed up to get out.

No big deal.  This happens multiple times each day in a city like Wichita.  Workmen doing something outdoors, many times with some kind of large equipment, is a rather frequent occurrence.

I say all of this, and blog about it, to say that I sometimes wish I had been one of those kinds of men…large, muscular build, rather gruff-looking.  The hard hat wearing, spit on the ground type who climb on to a chunk of iron the size of a house and move the controls in a dance that builds, renews, and accomplishes.  I’m not that way, though, and at this stage of life will never be that.  I do have on my bucket list to operate a backhoe one day…and I did farm back in the 60’s, but that’s about as close as I’ll ever come.

Some of these men may be rough on the outside, but can do some of the most delicate moves with huge machines.  I knew a man in my hometown who operated a backhoe for a living.  His hoe wasn’t one of the gargantuan things you sometimes see.  It was a smaller one fastened to the back of a smaller tractor.  But he could operate that hoe in such a way that most folks who watched him (and many stopped to do just that) were mesmerized by the movements and what he was able to accomplish.

I have to think that Gene could feel what was happening down in the hole at the end of his bucket in his hands as they operated the hydraulic controls.  More than once I saw him gently find a buried pipe of some kind and work around it, exposing it without cutting into it or breaking it.  And he did it all by feel.

His bucket moved as if it was alive.  And you would have sworn if it had eyes painted on it that it WAS alive.  Never a jerky motion (unless that’s what he wanted to do to accomplish some task), never unnecessary movement, Gene was the best backhoe artist I’ve seen (and probably ever will see).

He was also the resident grave-digger.  The sides of the grave hole were straight and on the mark.  They were always clean with no dirt messing up the area.  He knew more about cemeteries in Harper County and the surrounding area (including northern Oklahoma) than anyone else, and has helped bury scores of his friends and relatives.

Gene doesn’t dig anymore.  His hoe sits silent on the lot where he last parked it.  Oh, he’s still around, I think.  But he’s 89, according to the Internet, and just doesn’t do that anymore.  I have to think that most people would probably look at his life and say that he was just a grave-digger and backhoe operator.  But there’s more there than that.  He was the best there was at what he did.  He always dug the best hole he could dig.  He always did the best he could do to help others do what they needed to do.

And I hope that in my vocations, people said the same thing about me.  I’ll never operate a backhoe for a living.  Nor will I ever wear a hard hat, spit on the ground, and haul myself on to a chunk of machinery the size of Texas to go to the next job.  I may have been just a maintenance man, or just a helper at the school, a minister to seniors, or just an engineer at the radio station.  But I would like to think that I did the best I could do and tried to help others do what they needed to do as well.

And the most blessed thing I’d like to hear one day is, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”  That, dear friend, will be heavenly.

I Can't Wait!

As I’m sitting here wondering what I will write (the well seems dry today), I can hear the every-second ticking of the battery-powered clock on the wall right behind me.  “Each second that goes by,” I say to myself, “Is a second I can never recapture or use again.  How did I use the seconds that have gone away just in the last minute or so?  And just what is a second, anyway?”

Now, that’s rather heady stuff for someone who is weaning himself off of caffeine this week and hasn’t a thing to write in a blog.  The notion that I can at once be empty of thought for a blog I’ve done about every week since 2005, but at the same time ponder the passage of time and the space-time relationship is actually rather stunning, in my mind.  And the fact that the second has been defined as, “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom (at 0°K, or absolute zero)” didn’t escape my notice either (although I haven’t the foggiest notion what that means, how they measure it, or why it’s that important).

So, in the interest of relating the space-time relationship to blog-writing in some fashion, I’ve decided to write about time, the passage of time, and how that relates to the universe, at least the universe I’m in (which is much, much smaller than the OTHER universe).

We waste a lot of time, it seems.  We stare at the computer screen for hours on end.  We watch insane, or just plain stupid TV shows all evening.  We daydream.  We procrastinate.  And we dawdle.  Oh my, how we dawdle.

We many times wish we were anywhere except where we are, and that we were doing anything except what we are currently doing.  We put weird things out on the Internet via Facebook, Twitter, or some other medium (blogging, perhaps) that no one understands and fewer care about.  And we wait.  We wait at traffic lights.  We wait at the doctor’s office.  We wait at the checkout line at WalMart or Dillons.  We wait for someone to get out of the bathroom so we can use it.  We wait at the ATM drive-up.

Then, as if to ameliorate the waiting, we hurry to the next checkout line, or the next traffic light, or the next appointment…there so we can wait yet again.  I have to wonder if Anyone is watching “out there” and is doing some serious soul-searching regarding why He made us and the rest of the creation.  And if we could see ourselves as we really are, we probably would shake our heads, do the tsk tsk thing, and write ourselves off as incorrigible.

So, having been duly prompted by the ticking of the clock behind me, I’ve managed yet again to create words that have some kind of meaning and purpose, although in re-reading them I’m not sure of that.  Hopefully you will tune in next week when I hope to have something of some importance to say.  That will be in 604,800 ticks of the clock, and 5,559,703,694,496,000 oscillations of the cesium atom at rest.  I can’t wait!

We're All Getting There

Have you noticed, when you drive on a busy road or multi-lane freeway of some kind (Kellogg Ave is a good example here in Wichita), how people behave when they drive?  And that you, if you are observant, can pretty much tell what someone will do in a given situation even though you don’t know that person?

For example, let’s suppose you are driving on a four lane road, in the left lane, and someone ahead of you slows down and signals a left turn.  They have to wait for oncoming traffic, so they stop.  Two or three people who have been in the right hand lane for some time go on around the person stopped to make a turn.  Those people probably will: (a) stay in the right hand lane after they pass the stopped car, or (b) turn into the left hand lane after they pass the stopped car.

You know the answer as well as I.  They most likely will move into the left hand lane, speed up some, and enjoy the “emptiness” of that lane, even if they have to go back to the right lane in a short time to make a turn.

Let’s try another one.  You are in the middle lane of Kellogg Avenue, a six-lane freeway.  There is moderate traffic around you, but your lane ahead of you is clear for about ¼ mile or so.  A vehicle has been behind you for some time, going about your speed.  He has had several opportunities to pass around you in another lane, but has chosen to not do that.  You assume he is happy going about the same speed you are traveling, and things are fine.
You get to the place where you need to get into the right lane to make a turn off after awhile.  You do.  What will the car behind you do?  (a) Keep going the same speed, or (b) speed up until he takes up the empty space ahead of him.

Again, you know the answer.  Most likely, he’ll speed up until he comes up behind the traffic ahead of him, then slow down again.

My guess is that 8 times out of 10, these things happen just as I described.  So why are people so predictable?  What is it about people that makes them do these things?  My guess is that when you’ve figured out why YOU like to also do these things, you will have found out why all the others like to do them as well.  Because when YOU are in these positions, you like to do the very same things in the same ways I described, don’t you.  I know I do.

My own unprofessional opinions of the situations above are of no concern, although I do think the scenarios have something to do with superiority, control, and a sense of self and entitlement.  These quirks in our driving habits betray our nastier selves, sometimes, and these situations are “acceptable” ways to do that.  Just as beating the light, racing to get ahead of someone at the “on” ramp, or changing lanes in front of someone rather than behind someone are ways we ding at and get our superiority jollies at the expense of others.

And I think that the older we get, for the most part, the less important those things are to us.  Which may well be why older people seem to take forever to do the things that make the rest of us nuts.  They still write checks at the supermarket, for Pete’s sake, and don’t start to make out the check until all the groceries have been rung up and totaled, and they’ve regaled the poor cashier with the story of how they found their false teeth this morning after losing them the day before.  They move very slowly when pulling into a parking space, or backing out of one.  They take up the entire width of the corridor with their canes and walkers, not thinking about the traffic jam behind them croaking from having to wait.

I’m getting there myself.  I’ve joined the International Society of Curmudgeons and have my framed certificate of membership hanging on my office wall.  It has become my pride and joy because now I can just point to the certificate when someone dings on me about being slow or disrupting the smooth flow of something.  That certificate answers all questions and brings about the silence I so much enjoy.  And they know that I’ll not change just for them, nor will I even care that they are so worked up about my impeding something they thought was so important.  It’s like they’re talking to the wall, and when they see the certificate, they know that won’t likely change any time soon.

And if you’re one of those who are put off by people driving only the speed limit or wanting to make a left turn, or someone paying by check, just remember that you’re on that march to older age too.  One day, you’ll get there and you’ll have your own curmudgeon certificate that you can use to snub your nose to the world…and that will be a wonderful day.

What Is Really Fascinating

I recently placed an order on-line from my office at work.  It was an order that was paid with my personal credit card.  I finished the order, clicked “submit”, and got the screen that says something like “Thank you for your order”, etc.  A few seconds later, my phone dinged, telling me that I received an email confirming my order.  A couple of seconds after that, it dinged again, telling me that my credit card had been billed.

I went into the church secretary’s office to retrieve a copy off of the copier, and paused to tell her that I continue to be fascinated no end by the fact that I can order something on line and just a few seconds later my phone will ding to tell me both that I have an email which confirms my order, and will ding again to tell me that I have an email telling me my credit card has been charged.

She told me I needed to get out more.

I laughed and agreed that was possibly the case.  But (and I’ve talked about this before), the technology that makes it possible for all of this to happen is to me just a wondrous, almost magical thing.  I’ll not regale you at this point with stories of the “olden days” when I would have given my right arm for a dial tone (many of us probably don’t know what that is anymore) in my car, let alone on my hip…to say nothing of instant communication via email, coordination of technologies and other modern marvels.  I’ll let that pass, for now.

Lest we think that we are the only generation with wondrous happenings, I want to remind you that every generation had it’s wondrous moments.  I am amazed, for example, that in my grandfather’s day, people loaded up everything they owned on a covered wagon, or in the box car of a train, and took off for God-knows-where in the middle of nowhere to start a new life consisting of backbreaking work, foul and dangerous weather, deprivation and totally at the mercy of the environment and elements.  Yet they persevered, built farms, factories, and cities, towns, schools, railroads, highways and byways while at the same time building families and a legacy unmatched.

I am awed by those who lived through the Great Depression, who stood in bread lines and unemployment lines; who made do by raising garden and farm produce, bartering for what they needed.  They saved literally every nickel, and considered having a dollar to be a great blessing.  They worked in WPA projects building shelter belts, highways, bridges, buildings, and public infrastructure.  They were comforted by President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” on the radio, and knew what it meant to do without so others would have.

I marvel that men and women in my mom and dad’s day signed up by the millions for military service, willing and ready to be shipped off to North Africa, Italy, Great Britain, Guam, the Phillippines, Iwo Jima, or wherever else they were needed.  They were shot at (and shot up), shot down, drowned, tortured, murdered, sleep deprived, maimed, disfigured, and forever changed.  Yet they continued, confronting Evil itself face to face, and Evil blinked.

I remember with wonder the times of my generation in its younger days, when men and women took up causes such as segregation, war, affirmative action, voting rights, and others; when they went to the moon and came back, when they worked diligently to reverse the unbridled manufacture and deployment of nuclear weapons and promote peace.  At the same time, others fought and died in a jungle half a world away for a cause no one was certain about, but some knew better, yet continued the status quo and the carnage.  Some were imprisoned in camps of the enemy, yet persevered.  Some died there.  Some came back.  All were heroes.

So it’s not necessarily only the “gee whiz” factor in the immediate notifications and coordination of communications services I find fascinating.  It’s the human spirit and the abilities we’ve been given to create, produce, craft, and build.  It’s our ability to change and make things better.  It’s our fortitude and perseverance.  It’s the blessings of God that rain down upon us no matter whether we’re in a covered wagon or a spacecraft orbiting the moon.

That is what is fascinating.