User Posts : The Southwest Voice

There is pain... still

I watch the images of the attacks played back on TV and I am split. Part of me wants them to stop showing the scenes. We have pictures from almost every angle, both ground and air, of the tragedy unfolding. We see the stills of the people... the firemen, the police officers... the people who are just dazed trying to figure out what they are becoming part of... and those dying. The people who, while trapped in the buildings took the only option they felt they had left and died on their own terms, having made piece with whatever belief they follow.

Even now, seven years later, there is a hollow place that forms in the pit of my stomach when I think of all those lost and all those left behind to mourn and when I think of the sheer scope of what happened to us then.

I watch the pictures, the videos and hear the recordings of the people making their last calls and the recordings of the radio traffic between the firemen and policemen... and I wonder, should they keep playing this over and over again. How is this helping us?

Unfortunately... yes, I think they should and on every channel. If for no other reason than to help us understand and remind us that this is something that happened that we must never forget. We must understand that this tragedy, while it happened in New York, happened to all of us and for that one moment in time, that one part of history, we all were united in the pain of loss.

I will continue to watch the coverage each year. I will cry and I will say my silent petitions for those lost, those mourning and those who will never know and I hope that you too, will join me.

Forty Septembers

There are many ways to look at it…

Forty trips around the sun…

280 -/+ dog years…

480+/- full moons…

Forty Summers/Winters/falls/Springs

The fact remains that today I celebrate the fortieth anniversary of my birth. A fact that is thanks in large part to my Mom, of course, my friends and family, for all… always being there for me when I needed them.

Birthdays have always been a sore subject for me. I will not go into the details, but for those that know me, you also know my reasoning. In fact, I did not really start learning to enjoy my birthdays until I met the woman that is now my wife. This is not to say that my family and other friends did not help, but sometimes your spouse can convey thoughts and ideas that the rest of your family cannot.

As I look back on my life up to this point, I worry that I may not have done all that was expected of me. That is more of a philosophical question than anything else, and thusly has no correct answer. It is more a question about my role in the universe and if I am living up to my part in it. Have I achieved that which was expected of me. Is this all there is? Is there nothing more?

Looking at the average life span of a male American, it would appear that I have reached about the half-way point in my journey of life. The point where we should look around, make sure that we are still heading in the direction that we want and expect, make any corrections to our heading, then weigh anchor and set sails again.

I am not depressed about forty. In reality, it is only a number, unless I make it out to be something else. I do look at what I HAVE done with my life and think that I should have tried harder, pushed myself more, taken more chances, made more friends, not let go of as many as I have. But there is a lot of life left, and the road is entirely uncharted. We never know what is waiting around the next corner, or where life will take us tomorrow, the day after, next year, or any time afterward.

Forty is not a big number. When I look at my age, I alway think of what Chiun said in the movie “Remo Williams: The adventure begins.”

“For a plum, I am old beyond my time, for a mountain, I have not begun my years, for a man, I am just right.”

When I look at aging and the process of “ripening”, I have gotten in the habit of looking at a good friend of mine named Russ. If I can be half the person and live half the live that he has, by the time I am his age, then I will consider myself to be lucky.

In closing… I do not really could my life in years. I have learned that you should count your life in the friends you have made and the loves you have known, both those you keep now, and those that have moved on to other things, or have slipped away forever. I am learning not to dwell on the bad things I have experienced, but accept them as lessons learned and embrace them as part of my life, every bit as important as the good things, and in some cases, maybe even more so.

We are all learning, right up until the day we die. So you might say that we are all incomplete works, each year we are just adding a new feature.

Songs that men probably should not sing... aloud anyway.

Admit it guys… there have been time that you have been sitting at home, or in the car and a song has come on that you cannot help but sing along with… but is not meant for a guy to sing.

Unfortunately, I too am guilty of this. There have been a couple times I caught myself, being a big fan of ABBA singing something like “Gimme Gimme Gimme” when it comes on the radio. Granted… I will try, when I think about it, to edit the lines to say woman… so the result is no longer the “Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight” that are the real lines of the song.

There are many other songs that are like this. Written from the point of view of the woman and sung by a woman, yet they are catchy enough that we all tap our toes and sometime sing along.

I was driving the other day and heard a guy in the car next to me singing Gretchen Wilson’s “Red Neck Woman”, and it looked like he was really getting into it, until he saw me watching him. As I turned and looked forward again I heard his radio tune to a talk show and he was no longer singing.

Then there are the songs that guys sing when they do not know the meaning of them and the people that do sit, put their head in their hands and groan. I used to have a friend that loved a song by the Kinks called “Lola”. He used to say that it was a song that he would dedicate to his wife and reminded him of how they met. This confused me, because anyone who really LISTENS to the song will realize that is not a song that many women would appreciate. When I explained this to him, he ignored me. I am all for having the occasional romantic song in your life, but it might be a good idea to select one that you know the meaning behind.

Then there have been the times I have seen women singing songs that were meant for men. Yes, ladies… you are guilty too. Like a time I was sitting in a bar, out of town, having dinner… I noticed a young lady singing Dierks Bently’s “What was a thinking?” to herself and she was really getting into it, too.

Like I said… we are all guilty of doing this from time to time. I know it will never stop and sometime we just do not realize that we are singing the song until you notice that people are looking at you like you like you just belched in church.

So… keep singing… because the rest of the world needs a reason to laugh.

Treat them like Heros...

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting a person that was old enough to be my son, yet in his few years on this Earth, he has done more to be proud of than I might ever do in my life.

This was whille my wife and I were dining with friends at "Cool Hand Luke's" in Santa Maria. We saw the waiters and waitress' start connecting tables together for a large group. We were worried that this was going to be one of those loud, roudy bunches of kids or adults that like to come in and disturb everyone. When the group came in and sat down, they were young and the were a little roudy, but they had very good reason to be.

As it turns out, the table was occupied by the family of a Marine who had just returned from Iraq. They had all come in to celebrate his return. Once the word got out that this was why they were there, several people, myself included, went up to meet and shake hands with this "kid" and to tell him that they were proud of him. All the while he was beaming like he just scored the winning touchdown.

If I had been able to afford it, I would have paid for their entire meal if for no other reason than that of respect for him for being a Marine and for the honor of celebrating his return with his family.

In a past article I wrote a piece about Random Acts of Kindness... if there are any groups of people that are most deserving of these, it would be our soldiers, all of them. So I will ask you all one favor. If you have the means and happen to see a soldier in a restaurant, bar, coffee shop, etc... buy them lunch, a drink or just walk up and say thanks (unles it is a Marine, then say Sempre Fi! ). We all owe it to them for all they do for us. It may not seem it, but they are the ones punching the time clock for all we are free to do as Americans.

So if I buy the album, do I have to take the baggage?

I recently heard a song by Amy Winehouse and discovered that I really like her music. So I mentioned this to a couple people I know, who immediately started telling me about all the recent news she has been involved in.

Tell me… how should this change how I feel about the music? Granted, if I found out that she was using the profits from the sale of her CDs to organize a crusade to kill kittens and puppies with baseball bats and chainsaws, or anything else for that matter, then maybe I would be hesitant to buy one of her CDs.

The fact is that her baggage and issues are just that, hers. By purchasing her CD, in no way do I make myself party to her problems. I am merely buying the CD. She will continue to have whatever problems she has whether I buy it or not, so why should I not?

Unfortunately I also feel this way about other artists that seem to draw media attention like so many moths to a bright light. People like Brittany Spears and such… regardless of how many albums are purchased or videos are sold, then are still going to implode taking their career, if you could call it that, with them. With people like that, fans are merely a doorstop, holding the door open a little longer but eventually it will close.

When I buy a disk, it is because I genuinely like the music itself and because I will not buy a CD until I am sure I will like it, you can surmise that it takes me a while before I break down and get it.

Artists are just what they are. They belong to a class of people that are not too much unlike very bright stars. They burn brightly for a short period of time, then collapse on themselves and either become burned out embers of what they once were… like Milli Vanilli, or becomes so dense that not even like can escape… we will not talk about those ones.

No… When I buy the CD, I could care less about the situation of the artist. Their music, if it is truly well done, stands on it’s own merit. That is all that is important to me.

All that said, if you like that bluesy, soulful sound that you remember from the late sixties and early 70s, then listen to “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse. Very good.

Who are we becoming?

Recently there was an event in Hartford, Conn. that has me worried.

This is the news piece, please follow the link for the story.

A man crossing the street is hit by a car while they are, by the sounds of it, playing a game of cat and mouse. Chasing each other through busy streets.

The fact that he was hit at all was bad enough, but what makes it worse is that while the man lay in the street, people just watched. No one lifted a finger to help, short of calling 911 to get emergency crews out. It was very likely that another car could have come along and hit this fellow. The video and the stills clearly show that people did see this man, and while taking the time to gawk, took no measures to stop traffic or make sure that nothing further happened to him.

Right here I would like to step out of the calm way I usually talk and just ask, what the HELL kind of society are we becoming? Is it more important for us to take pleasure in someone else’s agony than to lend a hand, or at the very least stop further injury or suffering? Even if someone had gone so far as to pull their car out into traffic to protect this guy, or as simple as kneeling next to him, holding his hand and telling him that help was on the way.

Now… of all those people on the side of the street, I wonder how many pulled out there camera phones and took pictures of this man laying there. How many of those same people stood there wondering if someone else was going to do something, or said to themselves that someone else would take care of this.

THAT is the problem. We have become a society that is waiting for others to do something, and not taking action ourselves. You will probably argue with me on this, but when you look at the stills and the video, how many people are standing there watching, and not doing a darned thing to help the man? How many people do you see go out and see if there is anything they can do?

Everything is an episode of Survivor or Real World to people these days. People are too busy watching and enjoying the pain and suffering of others to get involved in something as meaningless as, oh, I don’t know… SAVING A LIFE! They see it happen, think, “Man, I am glad that was not me!” then go home and sit in their chair and watch the news of the event, then see the person there. They might go so far as to say to someone, “Yeah, I saw that happen.”

There was a time when more people used to give a darned. When you saw something happen, and sprang into gear and tried to help. I know of one person, personally, that did this. He lives in central Utah, and was there when a child was hit backed over by a van. He did all he could, but was not able to save the child. THAT is the type of people that we should all be. Willing to help when the time calls for it. He may not have been able to save that child, but I have to think that there are two things that happened… First, he took a chance to save a life, and he did his best. Second, maybe somewhere in the little consciousness that ebbed from the child, she knew that there was someone there trying... caring.

That man, Arce Torres, laid in that street and waited. He may or may not have known that there were people around him, treating him like the latest side show, or an errant cat that was hit by a passing car. He may or may not have felt that no one there cared enough to try and help him. But if there had been even ONE person that had been a stand up guy, or gal, like the one I spoke about with the child and the van, then Arce would have known someone was there who cared about him and wanted to see him safe, and that might have made all the difference.

It angers me that so many people out there no longer care about strangers the way we once did. That we have to fear getting involved in something just because we do not want to become inconvenienced by what might happen if you help a person in need.

If any of the people that stood there and watched this happen, and did nothing to help, happen upon this article, and read this. I do hope that I am wrong, and there is a hell… because if there is, then there is a special place in it for you, I am sure. You should all just hope that if something like that happens to you, that the people who show up are kinder than you were.

That is all… At least all I have the stomach for at this time.

Random acts of kindness... At gunpoint

There are two movements in this country that seem to be pushing the whole “Random act of kindness” philosophy, at least that I have had direct, personal experience with. Those that just go out and profess that we should occasionally do it and then do it themselves to lead by example, and if you follow suit, then great. Then there seem to be the ones that are militant about it.

Like any militant group, I see these people as bad examples of the parent group. There is nothing wrong with doing random acts of kindness, I think that it follows that whole “pay it forward” program, whereby helping one person, they will help another and another. I honestly believe that something a simple as smiling and saying hello to someone you do not know, might help their day. Unless you live in New York, then you will get mugged.

It amuses me when I hear people come out, and granted, they are not common, at tell others that they need to go out and practice random acts of kindness, and they should try and do “x” number a day or week.

If you set a goal, or quota, does that not make it so it is no longer random? Isn’t that like a loan officer taking up a policy of at least one loan a day, or a car sales person treating it as novel to make one deal a week?

The point of the whole random act thing is like what happened to me once. I was in the drive thru at a Starbucks. I had already placed my order and gotten to the window to pay, when the “Barista” advised me that the car ahead of me paid for mine and the person behind me. That did two things. First, it floored me, since it was my first time being a recipient of one of these acts, and second, it had me in the mode to do the same for another. Face it, when someone does something like that for you, it generally has a tendency to put you in a good mood, in some cases makes you want to return the favor.

Forcing or shaming a person into doing a good deed or act really accomplishes nothing. People are more apt to give generously if they are doing it anonymously or just because they see a sudden need, and have the means to do it. Personally I like to give “voyeuristically”. I like to see the reaction on the person’s face, but not let them know who it was that did it for them. I get to see the joy, and I get to know it was me that caused it, without the embarrassment of the person thanking me, or the awkwardness for them of thinking that they NEED to thank me.

So the title of this was a little misleading… no one has, to my knowledge as of this writing, been forced to preform a “RAoK” at gunpoint, but I do wonder if there will ever be a time when the whole Robin Hood mentality comes back around.

Imagine… you are standing in line at your favorite store, and you feel something in your back. A whisper comes to your ear… “See that woman at register 10, the one fumbling for exact change?

You nod your head.

“You are going to slip this here cashier a c-note and tell her to go over an pay for that woman’s groceries, right?” and he jabs the gun in your ribs.

“Sure…” You hand the woman the bill and give her the details, and she walks off. You turn around and your new friend is gone. About that time you hear the woman yell… “Hey Billy! Go get us another three twenty-four packs of Coors!!!”

Seriously though. If you have the means, sometime, pay for the guy or gal’s coffee in the car behind you, or something like that. I will not hold a gun to you, I will just make it a suggestion that you try. No pressure.

An addiction divine...

What is your addiction??

There once was a time when coffee was old hat. It is what your mother and father drank at the morning breakfast table, or after dinner.

These days, with the help of such storefronts as Starbucks, Supreme Bean and the like, coffee is as popular as soda and tea. It is not just the drink of choice for adults anymore either, you see all sorta of people ordering drinks there from all ages.

One occasion that stands out for me is when I was in Monterey on business, I went to a Starbucks… the one in the Del Monte Center, for those of you that know the area, and I saw a kid… maybe about 10 or 12 years old, and order a Cafe Mocha with an extra shot. This floored me… I was not aware that coffee drinks like this were that popular with kids. So… being the kind of guy I am… I went and asked the “Barista” about this. She told me that there are several kids that come in.

I am not so sure I am happy about young children drinking coffee. When I was a kid, I would never have considered drinking or ordering a coffee. I had tasted it once, but at the time I thought it was disgusting. Yet my father and mother could always be found with a cup of coffee and a cigarette after dinner and pretty much the same for breakfast… but I did not care for coffee at all… that is until I joined the Marine Corps. In addition to various other things, they trained me to like Coffee. I especially enjoyed the coffee at the end of the day, when the big urn had been sitting all day and that last little bit of coffee was in the bottom of the urn… you had to tilt the urn a little to get that last little bit out. Oooh Yeah!

Me? When I order my coffee at Starbucks, I ordered something called the Triple Red-eye… This is basically a very strong coffee and three shots of espresso. Let me put an amendment to that… I DID order this until just recently when my doctor politely told me to lay off the coffee… especially after a blood pressure of 140/110. So these days I am ordering decaf… and I am almost through the withdrawals.

So, again, what is your take on children being allowed to order these coffee drinks, and what do YOU order when you order coffee?

Things we miss...

As I grow older, I also find myself longing for the things of my youth. Things that I know I will never see again except in my memories. While most of these memories are scarred by the passage of time, many are still intact, but when I say scarred by the passage of time, I do not mean that in a bad way. We all distort things as we get older, it is just part of being human. Certain things are worse now than when you were a child, people were nicer, times were better, etc…

In reality, and taken in context, things were probably about the same then that they are now… but there are things that change…

When my family moved to a little town, no too far from where I live now, called Taft, the door had a very basic lock on it, but we never worried about using it too much. The community was small enough that we never had to worry so much about people breaking into the house. We knew all our neighbors and did not have to worry about any of them being criminals or the like. One of the down sides about living in a community like that is that you really do know EVERYTHING about your neighbors. While I was really too young to know it at the time, my mother told me, many years later, about some of the things that happened in Taft. Some good, some bad and some just strange. In short, I miss the security that I felt as a kid growing up in a town like Taft. Yes… at the time it was considered a backwater little hick town. But I cannot say that this is always a bad thing. Sometimes smaller is better!

Here in Bakersfield, Ca. as I was growing up, there were miles and miles of farmland and open fields around the apartments that my mother and I lived in. You could walk for miles in the fields, and except for one farmer that would send his dogs out after you, no one would ever really bother you. Later we even found out that the dogs were not all that bad. They would bark a lot and growl, but when you started talking to them, they would wag their tails and let you pet them. We would go catch crawdads in the canal, and then let them go. Nowadays the same area is overgrown with low income housing, school, fast food and high density housing. The farms, fields, canals and dogs are gone. If you walk through this area at night, you better have a gun or be able to run real fast. It is not the peaceful neighborhood I remember.

I miss Sambo’s restaurant… There used to be two locations here in Bako, but they both closed down. I recently learned that there is one Sambo’s remaining in Santa Barbara, and I desperately need to go there, if for no other reason , than to capture a little of the past.

I also miss the clothes that we used to wear back “then.” I remember my father’s “Leisure Suits” that he used to wear… especially the lime green one, and the peach colored one. The wide ties and the wide collars. I was certain that if my father jumped off a building that he would fly because his collar on his shirt was so large. Then there was my mother’s bell-bottomed jump suits with the bright colors and the paisley designs on them, complete with the large belts and her “go-go boots.” I remember that I had my own, child’s version, of a leisure suit made by a company called Billy The Kid. It was a brown corduroy get-up with bell bottom pants and a checkered shirt.

There are so many things that we remember from our youth, that we will never see again, or that are too difficult for us to see again. This is, unfortunately, just part of growing older. There is nothing that we can do about it but remember and share with others that also remember.

The good thing about memories is in the sharing. Sharing your memories with others is great, because the stories change as you grow older. The fish get bigger, the fires get larger and the trials and tribulations that you went through get legendary. Before you know it, you are sounding like your grandparents did, and then it hits you… You have become one of those old people you used to chuckle about behind their backs.

Don’t worry though… you can live happy in the knowledge that you will not be the last to come to this realization.

Where does the sky end?

When we are children, we ask some interesting questions of our parents. I am not certain why, but over this last weekend I remembered one that I asked my father. This was more years ago than I care to mention, but I must have been about six or so. I remember looking out the window and then asking him, “Dad… where does the sky end?”

I cannot recall what prompted the question or where I came up with the concept, though I suspect that it may have something to do with all the reports in the news at the time of the Apollo and Skylab missions. I always did seem to have my head in the stars as I child.

The question itself though, thinking about it now that I am older, and somewhat wiser, is one that could be both a philosophical and astronomical question, but for now, I would like to look beyond the science of the question and look at the meaning that I saw as a child.

We all know that the “sky”, or what we perceive as the sky is nothing more than the affect of the sun’s light being defused by the various components of the atmosphere… oxygen, nitrogen, argon, etc… But when you are a kid, you do not know or care about all that. The sky is something that you see as full of adventure, a place where planes fly to far off lands or battle against other planes, where rockets stab the heavens to go even farther into the sky (for me, as a kid, the sky stopped somewhere past the stars.)

It may sound a little “Norman Rockwellian” but I can recall watching the clouds in the sky and thinking of the shapes that the clouds made. Sometimes animals, sometimes structures, there were even a few times I can recall seeing faces in the clouds thinking that God was drawing pictures for everyone to see. Then there were the nights… Not so much in Taft, the town where I spent part of my childhood, but in Bakersfield, there was a large field behind the complex I lived in. We all called it the “Greenfield”, simply because it was green, and there where no houses or anything there. In reality, it was the corridor for the high voltage towers that fed part of Bakersfield and then went on south to another community. This was where most of my adventures took place until I was about fifteen years old.

I would go out and lay on the grass at night or early evening, and just watch the night sky for hours, sometimes not getting back in until late. This was at the time it was safe to do things like that for a person of my age and not have to worry about anything bad happening. The sky was still pretty clear in the area I lived, back then, and light pollution was still quite low. I would see so far that I started wondering what all was out there, so, like most kids, you start imagining. Because of my mother, I had no illusions about what was in the sky. I understood at a very early age what stars were, and how far away they were, and that there might be other planets just like earth near those stars, but as a child, it is still hard to imagine the sheer enormity of the universe, so in my minds eye, these were all still part of my sky. I would think of the creatures that might be on those planets, and the ships, cars, planes and spacecraft they probably had. Then I would think of what would happen if I ever got to meet one of them someday.

The fantasies I had were only fed further when shows like Space:1999, UFO, BattleStar Galactica and syndication of Star Trek came to television. They fed my desire to imagine what else was out there. Then came Close Encounters, Star Wars, and the Trek Movies. If you ask anyone who knew me at the time, you would probably get a pretty resounding “Sam’s head was always in the clouds” from all of them. It should be noted that I have not changed much… My head is still out there, somewhere. I think if I ever do become completely grounded, then that is about the time I will be pushing up daisies.

So… to the original question that I posed to my father so many years ago; “Where does the sky end?” Unfortunately, he did not have an answer for me. While I loved my father a great deal, he was not the most openly imaginative person. At least not to me… this is not to say he had no imagination, we all do. Sometime we just never find an outlet for, or a way to express it to others, especially our children, in many cases.

Looking back, I do not recall ever asking anyone else this same question, though, as kids, our thoughts are traveling so fast that our mouths can rarely keep pace, and thusly some of what we say or ask gets caught up in the tides of time and drowns. Why this one question stayed with me, I do not know. Maybe the answer that I was looking for was more in what was not said than what was said. Is it possible that, without speaking, and my being too young to understand, that my father DID answer the question? We will never know, I suppose.

Where does the sky end? Why should it? If we look at the question with science, then the sky, as we understand it, only changes from atmosphere to space, but does not really end. If we look at it from the point of imagination, then why should it end? Why can it not go on forever, and take us to other worlds that are only limited to our imagination? I read books like Narnia and the Golden Compass, and I think of what questions inspired those people to write such deep stories. It had to start with something, and maybe it was nothing more than a question to someone’s father or mother, answered or not.

Where does the sky end? It does not… as long as you do not let it end.