Squirrels

Every day I drive to work I see a dead animal in the street somewhere between home and the office. Sometimes they’re as flat as a pancake, sometimes they just look like they’re sleeping. It really doesn’t freak me out, even if they’re guts are sprayed out before them. I have no connection to these poor critters.

But I have to admit that when I was the driver that squished one I felt a little sympathy. About 30 seconds from my house, a crazy squirrel darted out in front of me and pulled a typical squirrel move – he zigzagged. He (and I’m saying “he” because he reminded me of a teenage boy who acts before thinking) would have easily made it across the road if he had just kept going straight across, but for some reason he decided to try to run along with me. Now I was going 30mph and there’s no way a squirrel can go that fast unless they’re Rocky the Flying Squirrel – and this guy wasn’t.

So he starts running up the road and I swear I saw him look over his shoulder and his eyes widen just before he cut to his left. I breathed a little sigh of relief as I realized I wasn’t going to hit him. Once again, if he had just kept going he would have made it, but he decided to cut back to his right, right into the path of my car. Or should I say right under my car. For another split second I thought that squirrel was the luckiest squirrel in the world because I wasn’t going to get him and then…thump. The passenger side rear tire caught him. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him flattened on the road, his tail giving one last wave in the breeze. And I felt sorry for the little guy.

How many times do we start on a path and things are going fairly well and then all of a sudden we panic and change course? It’s like we look over our shoulder, see something coming and we freak out. Instead of staying the course and making it to the other side, we change direction and run up the middle of the road. Sometimes we make it unscathed, our hearts beating wildly, and we wonder why we ever changed direction. Sometimes we get squashed by what life brings us.

My parents were great at staying the course. When things weren’t going well for us they didn’t panic. Dad just kept working hard and both he and Mom kept “trusting God”. As they often said, “As long as we have a roof over our heads, food on the table and clothes on our backs, we’ll be OK.” They truly believed that. We may not have had a lot of stuff as kids, but we always had a place to live, clothes to wear and enough food to feed all of us. And we always had each other – to play with, fight with and make up with; to learn with, to laugh with and to cry with. All that we went through, we went through together.

Somehow, when I was feeling a little sorry for that poor squirrel, I was thinking of a squirrel family waiting for squirrel Johnny to come home for a squirrel lunch. But then I realized that happens only in cartoons and kid shows, which made me think of my kids and how much I love them and miss them when they’re not around. And it made me a little more grateful for all I have now.

 

Waiting

I was on my computer the other day, waiting for a web page to load. Or should I say I was getting ticked off waiting for the web page to load. Mind you, this took all of about seven seconds. Why is it so hard for us to wait?

In the not-so-distant past, we would have been ecstatic if a web page, program or a file opened in anywhere close to ten seconds. Think back about five or ten years ago. How long did it take to get to your email so you could read your messages? I’m pretty sure it took longer than ten seconds. How about saving a medium sized document in Word? Take a break, come back and it still was saving.

How about driving? How many times has someone cut out in front of you, causing you to slam on the brakes, when there was no one behind you for a mile? Those people just couldn’t wait another five seconds. The light turns from green to yellow – do you stop even though not doing so will mean you go through a red light? Probably not. Because we don’t want to sit at the red light and wait.

Waiting in lines, waiting in traffic, waiting in the doctor’s office, waiting to buy something until you can actually afford it. As Tom Petty said, “The waiting is the hardest part.” We hate to wait; even though we’ve all been taught since we were children that “good things come to those who wait”.

Growing up in a family of eleven (nine kids plus my parents), sometimes we just had to wait. We had only one bathroom. No, you didn’t read that incorrectly. We had ONE bathroom. When someone was in there, you had to wait for your turn. Whether it was showers or just having to do your duty, you had to wait. When we went on a road trip and came home, we were calling spots in the queue as soon as we turned onto our street. “I get the bathroom first!” “I’m second” You had to be quick and you had to be bold or you had to…wait.

If I wanted something new, most of the time I had to wait. I still remember getting my first brand new, never used before, not a hand-me-down, baseball glove in my fourth year of Little League. I got it from my family saving S&H Greenstamps. It took time to accumulate enough of those stamps and I had to wait. I loved that glove, even if it was blue.

What’s my point? Just that, sometimes, it’s OK to wait. It may even be beneficial. Pulling out in front of someone not paying attention could cause an accident and land you in the hospital. Barging into an occupied bathroom could cause much embarrassment and burn images of your older aunt or grandmother into your brain that can never be erased. Or waiting just may help you to appreciate something so much that you still remember it, and all the good feelings surrounding it, thirty or forty years later.

Welcome

What makes us who we are? The nature vs. nurture debate has been going on for centuries and there is still no definitive answer. That is, unless you’ve chosen one side of the debate and won’t listen to what anyone on the other side has to say. This blog is not about that debate. No, it is about family.

I am the way I am because of the family I grew up in. I grew up in a family of 9 kids, 7 boys and 2 girls. We came in bunches; 3 kids approximately a year apart, a break of a few years, 3 kids approximately a year apart, a break of a few years and 3 more kids approximately a year apart. All this happened in 15 years. My poor mother!

Naturally, we were forever grouped together as “The 3 older ones”, “The 3 middle ones” and “The 3 little ones”. As the 8th out of 9, my older siblings still say to this day that I’m one of “The 3 spoiled ones”. Spoiled or not (most definitely NOT!), I loved growing up in a big family. There was always something to do, something going on and someone to hang with. The positives far outweighed the negative.

Sure, I didn’t have much materially growing up, but as my Dad used to frequently say, we always had “a roof over our heads, food on the table and clothes on our backs”. Above all, we knew that we were loved. Not to sound like a credit card commercial, but you can’t put a price on that. I wouldn’t trade all the toys, all the clothes, all the stuff my friends had for the family life that I had.

Since I was a kid I also liked to write, from silly stories about car driving monkeys and a character that needed help cutting his petrified hair to game summaries of the local hockey and baseball teams. I even got my own little typewriter for Christmas when I was in fourth grade! Well, actually, I had to share it with my younger brother, but he never used it. I either wanted to be a baseball player or a sportswriter (“Sorry, dear. I have to go to the game. It is my job!”).

My hope is that these postings will bring both of these aspects together. I have a deep love for family and a deep desire to write. So come back each week as I relate things that happen in my life to family – the one I grew up in and the one I have now. If you grew up in a large family, you’ll probably be able to relate; if you didn’t, maybe you’ll get a new perspective. Either way, we’ll share a few laughs.