Facing Mortality

As I write this, Karl is dying.  My childhood best friend is dying from cancer.

Karl has led a wonderful life.  Raised on a farm, Karl got up each morning to “chore.”  Cows needed to be milked, hogs needed to be fed, and the chickens and other animals needed daily care as well.  Then it was off to school or if in the summer, on to the tractor to work the ground, mow hay, or whatever else needed to be done.

Sometimes I would be able to help, and always marveled at the work ethic of his family.  They seemed to always have several irons in the fire at the same time, and managed to keep them all going strong.

I learned a lot from Karl in my younger days.  He had a small-engine repair shop where I learned to repair small engines myself.  He raised domestic rabbits, which I picked up on, and to this day enjoy seeing the rabbit exhibit at the state fair.  He was a fair basketball player and a follower of WSU (then WU…Wichita University) basketball on KFH radio (1330 on your AM dial).

 Sand creek flowed through their pasture.  We often would take our .22 rifles there and plink at things.  We’d camp overnight there.  We’d explore along the creek.  In those days, we were much more nimble and quick than we are now, and had great fun along the creek.

Karl had a great career in aviation.  I’m not sure exactly what he did, but he ended up at Duncan Aviation in Omaha as a company rep.  I lost track of him for many years, and only relatively recently made contact again.  Duncan has been good to him and his family, even during these dark days of cancer.

He has always maintained his faith, and although more conservative than I politically, was empathetic for those who were struggling or dealing with the bad things in life.  He and his wife were foster parents, and also raised their own kids.  Living in a modest area of Omaha for much of his adult life, Karl made it a point to leave the world a better place for his having been here.

But now he is struggling himself.  About a year ago, he went to the doctor for some unexplained internal issues, and discovered a stage 4 cancer had been silently growing within him.  Given six months to live, he continued to work as best he could, and also began therapy of different kinds.  The treatments have prolonged his life, but did not cure him.  He is now in hospice care.

Karl has always relied on God for his strength, peace, and courage.  He has cried out to God in his pain and grief much the same way as the Psalmist did centuries ago.  Family and friends have prayed for healing and now are praying for relief.  One of Karl’s last posts had this from him in it, “I am in desperate need of prayers for you to stand in the gap for me when I cannot think and need your strength when my strength does not work.”

And so we basically wait, as does Karl, for him to be called to his forever home.  And it makes me think yet again of the fragility of life, the vaporous nature of our time on this earth, and what is really important.  For, you see, Karl is not talking at this end stage of his life about how well the Chiefs did last year, or what the stock market is doing.  He’s not discussing the latest clothing trends or the hit movies of last year.  And he isn’t thinking much about international politics or the royal wedding.

No.  He’s thinking about eternity.  He’s thinking about life.  He’s thinking about suffering.  He’s thinking about the forever that looms before him.  And he’s resting in the arms of the Almighty God, drawing from Him the strength and sustenance he needs right now…and that he will experience in the full in the hereafter.

It would do us well to do the same, at least from time to time in our busy-ness and in the rat race we call living.  It would do us well to relieve ourselves of the stupidity of materialism for just a moment or two and consider what our treasure in heaven may look like.  It would do us well to evaluate our relationships and truly consider the well-being of others…even at our own expense.  Because one of these days, we will be where Karl is…facing our own mortality, and drawing on the strength of what we have laid up during our younger years.

Reminiscing (Continued)

In a prior blog, I talked about the earlier days (1950’s for me) of telephone service.  My, my, how it has changed.  Where in those days I would have given my right arm for a dial tone in my car or on my hip, now many people have never heard a dial tone.  Most of the world now has cell phones, and many have “free” phones given to them by the government so they can be connected to the outside world.

Imagine, if you will, making a long distance call in the 1950’s.  As I said in my earlier blog, to do that, one would dial “0” on the old rotary phone, wait for the operator to answer, and tell her what number in what city you wanted to call.  You would give her your own number for billing purposes; she would connect you, and you would talk to whoever was at the other end of the call.

In those days, operators had no way to know who you were when you called, unless you told her.  There was no such thing as caller ID.  The entire system was electro-mechanical, which made it impossible to tell what number the caller who was making the long distance call was calling from.

The system worked well, too.  People were very good about giving their own numbers for billing purposes.  There was virtually none of the business of giving someone else’s number, thereby avoiding having to pay for the call.

Additionally, it was relatively easy to shinny up a phone pole or attach wires to someone’s home phone line and use it for your calls.  But it just wasn’t done in any major way.

Think of today, however.  How would that kind of thing go over in today’s society?  What if today we had to tell the phone company who we were in order to be properly billed for calls?  How much fraud do you think would happen today in that scenario?  My guess is that there would be so much that the system would totally break down into chaos.

And while we’re at it, years ago, one could stay at a motel or hotel, and pay for the services when they checked out.  Now, payment up front is required, and a credit card is required to even hold a room.  What happened to society that caused an industry to effect such a change in how things are done?

And when was the last time you pumped gas, then went inside to pay for it without giving them a credit card or cash up front?  When was the last time you special-ordered something from a retail store and paid for it when you received it rather than when you ordered it?  I will ask again, what has happened to society that has caused these changes in the way things are done?

What ever happened to “key” gas pumps where you would open a 30-day account with the business and they would issue a key with which you could activate a pump that recorded the gallons of gas you pumped that month?  The station would then bill you and you’d pay the balance in full by the 10^th, 15^th, or 25^th of the following month, depending on the specific policy of the station.  I had such a key for many years.  And, by the way, if you forgot and left your key in the pump, the next guy who came to use it would take the key out and give it to the station…and NOT use it to pump his gas.  Even key gas pumps had unwritten etiquette rules…one of which was never use someone else’s key that they inadvertently left in the pump, and instead always turn it in to the station.

My boys, by the way, could go to that same station, fill up their tanks at the self-service, tell the attendant to “Charge it to Dad” and it would appear on my bill that month.  What has happened to those days?  Why can we not do that any more?

I realize that in some smaller communities, such things still take place.  People know one-another and know who is and who isn’t reliable.  People still care for one-another in those places and look out for others.  So these things haven’t entirely gone away; but their days, I fear, are numbered.  And many there are who have never had the privilege of paying for gas after pumping it or paying a motel bill when checking out.  And what a privilege it is…to be counted as one who can be trusted.

A Little Reminiscing

It wasn’t that many years ago, in the age of the AT&T monopoly and rotary telephones, that long distance calls were a kind of a big deal, and were placed much differently than they are today.  In those days, we knew nothing about area codes, 1+ dialing, and free long distance.  Larger cities had seven-digit phone numbers, and smaller towns probably had four digit phone numbers.  Some towns that were served by independent phone companies may have had three digit or five digit phone numbers.

Even though larger cities had seven digit phone numbers, the prefix was usually a name followed by the third number of the seven-number series.  In Wichita, for example, your phone number might be Whitehall 3-something.  Other prefixes might have been Murray, Temple, Amherst, Forest, Jackson, Parkview, or others.  The idea was that you dial the first two letters of the prefix, then the rest of the numbers.  So, Whitehall 3-4221 (KAKE TV’s phone number, which they still have, by the way), would be 943-4221.

And long distance?  That cost ten cents a minute or more, depending on the distance.  The farther away, the more it cost.  One never dialed long distance in Kansas until the mid to late 1960’s.  If you wanted to make a long distance call, you dialed the Operator and placed the call through (usually) her.  You told her your own number, told her the number you wanted to reach, told her whether station to station or person to person or collect, and had her dial the number for you.  Station to station was where the time started whenever the other phone answered, regardless of who answered it.  Person to person was that you asked for a specific person and the time wouldn’t start charging until that person came to the phone.  Collect was reversing the charges, and the person answering agree to it before you could talk.

Sometimes, you could tell the operator you wanted to talk to, say, Mike’s Corner Grocery in Engleville, Kansas, and she would call the local operator in Engleville and get the connection for you.  If the phone went unanswered, the operator often would volunteer to place the call for you later and ring you back when the other party was on the line.

Most towns of any size at all had a local Bell System (or independent phone company) office.  That office had central office switching equipment in it and operators stationed there 24/7.  Sometimes operators did double duty by taking emergency calls for fires, calling the volunteer firemen’s phones, and activating the local town fire whistle.

There were party lines, especially in the country.  That meant that upwards of eight phones were attached to the same pair of wires, and if one phone was busy, none of the others could make a call.  But they could listen in on the conversation, and often did.  Rings were different on the different phones.  Four of the phones would ring at one time.  The rings would be different.  One might be one long and one short.  One might be two shorts.  One might be one long.  One might be a long and two shorts.  And so on.  You knew which ring was yours, and you were only supposed to answer your ring.  The other four phones on the line rang when the ring voltage came down the other wire of the pair, and they had similar rings to the first four.  But all eight phones could hear a conversation that was taking place.

In some of the rougher countryside, phone lines sometimes consisted of the wires of a fence as it ran along a section line or road.  Or it consisted of a single wire and used the earth ground as the return path.  Neither of those options did much for reliability, but most of the time it worked, sort of.

Of course, this was in the 1950’s and early 1960’s that I recall.  Before that were hand crank phones, operators placing even local calls for people, and other such that I don’t well recall as I wasn’t living then.  All in all a very inefficient, but viable service for many years.  More in the next blog.