Posts Tagged ‘friends’
Friend Blessings
I have been blessed with a true friend in Gary Larson, my trekking buddy and cycling comrade, who has welcomed Cyndie and me into his semi-annual gathering of long-time friends for their music parties. Last Saturday we joined the gala event for a fine dinner followed by some spontaneous music making. Dessert was so spectacular that Cyndie paused to capture it in a picture.
It is an interesting challenge for me because I never mastered the finer points of music theory which would allow me to actually know what chords to play for a given key. When attempting to play along with somebody in an unrehearsed performance, I am left to hunt and peck for something that sounds right. They have been polite to accommodate my shortcomings and we forge ahead together for a very enjoyable session.
Here I am with Peter on mandolin and Mike on banjo. We are performing the obligatory opening number… tuning. Since I rarely seem to know what chords to play, my first cheat is to look over at the finger position of the other players. However, if they aren’t playing a guitar tuned the same as mine, what I see doesn’t provide me with information I can use. It adds to the excitement.
One of my favorite things to do is harmonize when singing. It can be a bit tricky since I usually don’t know the words to the songs, and often find myself guessing about the intended melody.
I complicated things a bit on this occasion, since I was well into my little experiment of playing doctor with my asthma condition, and in its untreated state, I was suffering from a compromised lung capacity. (See yesterday’s post, if you haven’t already.)
In a beautiful demonstration of true friendship, Gary called me yesterday, after reading my post, to offer some perspective about treating an affliction like asthma. I was pretty uncomfortable all day long with pressure that felt like someone was sitting on my chest, and my persistent clearing my throat with a regular cough interval, was annoying me for how annoying it must be for everyone else. I decided that as soon as I got home from work, I was going to resume my regular full dose of control medicine that I have been prescribed.
I may not know what my ultimate un-medicated situation would be these days, but I do know that my asthma is treatable. Whether or not I am currently experiencing the worst it would get, I think my experiment has proved well-enough that I am a legitimate candidate for medication to control my condition.
Thank you, Gary, for taking the initiative to call and share your thoughts. It is what a friend would do.
Fun People
Let’s hear it for fun friends. Think about it. People who you consider fun, you probably also think of as being funny. We all benefit from laughter.
This morning, on the weekly television program, CBS Sunday Morning, there was a feature segment on comedian/actor Chris Rock. As it ended, I was left with the feeling that I wanted to have Chris Rock as my friend. That isn’t likely to happen.
I already have many friends that are fun. In an instant, I became aware of how my regular daily activity, especially when my wife is out-of-town, plays out lacking in the people I appreciate for their characteristic of being fun. People who radiate fun energy, cultivate fun attitudes, and display an artistry for being funny.
I have long known that my sports activities provide much more than physical exercise for me. I play sports with fun people. Beyond that small percentage of time every few days each week, I experience a lack of interaction with people who emit beams of the ‘fun’ mojo.
How much of your day-to-day life is lacking in healthy doses of fun people? It is telling to every so often take measure of our relative environment. It provides a reference measurement to highlight our surroundings and bring awareness to the things that are impacting the water we swim in, the air we breathe, the views our eyes see, the words we hear.
I want to increase my daily exposure to fun people. I wonder, do you think Chris Rock would be interested in taking a job in my industry in Minnesota?
Friendship
Much as it may seem that the miracle of friendship is manifest in the way our friends support us in times of need, the bigger miracle worth noting may occur at the moment we allow ourselves to actually ask our friends for help. I think most of us recognize the difficulty in determining when it is time to ask.
I’m reminded of a thought that occurred to me last weekend when I was biking with Jack through the woods in Wisconsin:
How do you know when you are carrying too much speed into a corner?
The answer is, you don’t know you have too much speed until it is too late and you are unable to stay on the trail through the end of the turn. “Oops, should have applied the brakes a bit there!”
How do you know when it’s too late to ask a friend for help?
It is never too late to ask.
My Communities
I am feeling particularly grateful for all my communities lately.
Com • mu • ni • ty: (noun) 3. a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
First, and most recently featured here in my previous two posts, there is my online community, Brainstorms. Next, there is the group I am missing the most right now, because I normally get to see them three times a week, my LIFA (Lifetime Indoor Football Association) soccer community. Rehab on the strained hamstring is commencing into the 2nd phase, so I hope to rejoin you all before the snow is completely gone.
Then comes my cycling community, which primarily is made up of the folks who I have met through participating in the annual Jaunt with Jim biking and camping week in June. It consists of approximately 150 friends whom I spend an intimate week among, and then, for the most part, don’t see again until the following year. Each year, on the first night of the ride, when we re-meet all the familiar faces, it is as if we have hardly been apart. Luckily, after having done this ride many times, I now also have a subset of friends from that larger group which I remain in contact with throughout the year and with whom I enjoy sharing a wide variety activities, interaction and support.
There is one other athletic community in which I claim membership: Floorball. Once again, due to my hamstring injury, I have been unable to participate for a few weeks, but they are a unique group with whom I share a special bond of love for playing this customized version of floor hockey in the evenings on Wednesday nights in the winter.
Interlaced within a couple of those communities are members of my group of life-long friends that I grew up with in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I often see that group as overlapping one last community I will mention, easily defined by one word: family.
Our communities enrich and support us in a multitude of ways and play an important role in nurturing our better health and well-being. Within a community there are opportunities to serve and to be served. Together, those two simple tasks provide connections that sure help me to exercise critical aspects of my deeper mental processes.
As a reader and viewer of my postings here, it is more than likely that you are a member of one of my communities, or possibly only slightly removed, and as such, I salute you for all that you provide me in so many valuable ways. Here’s to community.
Trip Report
Public Art in Pioneer Court, God Bless America, Sculptor: J. Steward Johnson - Installed: Dec, 2008
Did I mention that I was going to Chicago for the weekend? Cyndie and I and our good friends, Bob & Kris and Mike & Barb, reunited for a January weekend in Chicago because someone spotted low airfare specials again. Our calculations revealed that the last time we did this was 3 years ago, in 2007, when we attended a performance of the play “Wicked” and watched a downtown 3D fireworks show over the river. The keynote event this year was a show at the Second City comedy theater. It was a gas! A bit tricky to discern if we were witnessing an early performance of someone who would someday show up on SNL or make it big in the movies, but the ensemble was very capable and highly entertaining and the skits were definitely funny. They finally got me laughing to tears, even though the topic of the cab driver explaining to the imaginary passengers (the audience) behind him, why the fares keep going up, wasn’t specifically that funny. It was his delivery. The timing he executed to deliver the repeated intro line for the next gag seemed to do the trick for me. Throughout the night they employed the craft of weaving independent skits, on-again, off-again, among other scenes, to squeeze extra laughs out of one idea, just by returning to it later to add one more comment or interaction. Very effective. Very funny. Highly entertaining!
My mauled open-face Reuben at Lou Mitchell's
We also visited Lou Mitchell’s Restaurant and Bakery at the start of Route 66, played $3000 guitars that are delivered upon request to the rooms of guests of the Hard Rock Hotel where we stayed, connected with our son, Julian, and other friends at the ESPN Zone to watch the NFL Vikings defeat Dallas, and followed a tip to a 1920’s speakeasy style cocktail bar, The Violet Hour, and then Francesca’s Forno in the Wicker Park neighborhood. We ate too much and tried to walk some of it off, but often took cabs or the CTA. For a person who doesn’t drink alcohol, I spent more time in bars over the weekend than I regularly visit in a couple of years. The Violet Hour, in particular, makes a seriously enticing ‘mocktail’.
Thank you, Southwest Airlines, for giving us these opportunities. They did a great job. And, once again, Chicago was a great host, even given the gray and somewhat chilly January climate. We are talking about considering altering our focus to start watching for cheap January airfare deals to warm destinations, but then, everybody does that. That’s the very reason it ends up being so cheap to go somewhere like Chicago.
The entrance to the Violet Hour. Seriously.
Creating Christmas Memories
This is what Christmas is all about. There is no comparison for the little ones who are just learning the wonderful moments that make up the gathering of loved ones for festive foods, bunches of laughter and, of course, the giving of gifts.
About 22 years ago, with just our little 1-year-old daughter, Cyndie and I moved from our home in Minneapolis back to the suburb where we grew up. In Cyndie’s search for local baby-sitters at that time, she decided to check with the nearby churches to see if there was anyone they might recommend. She struck gold. We didn’t know how lucky we were at the time, but it seemed pretty great that there was a young girl who lived within walking distance that they referred us to.
Melissa rather quickly moved from just baby-sitting to more extended child-care and then our summer girl and ultimately became a natural extended member of our family. She not only took care of our kids when they were young, she stayed connected as they grew and went off to college. She stayed connected even as she grew up, got married and started her own family.
Last night we kicked off this year’s Christmas events with Mel’s family, over to our house for dinner and presents. What a treat to have people like this in our lives to share the love of family and the nurturing of children toward healthy, happy developing individuals. We are truly blessed.
We have a pretty funny tradition that has unintentionally developed between Cyndie and Mel’s husband, Greg. It started quite a few years ago when Cyndie gave Greg a snow-globe ornament that she had seen in a catalog. When he got it all unwrapped from the protective packing material, the little scene inside that was supposed to be a quaint winter landscape was revealed. It looked kinda spooky. What was supposed to be a tree that had lost all its leaves, looked more like a tree that had lost its life, …years ago. But this snow-globe was a deluxe model. It came with sound-effects. We found a battery and turned it on. I think it was supposed to sound like wind, and occasionally, a crow calling from the dead tree. It sounded as spooky as it looked and the squawking conjured up visions of horror movies more than anything pleasant about winter. I can’t imagine what Greg must have thought about this family that Mel had gotten mixed up with. He ever so graciously navigated receiving that lemon of a gift and it has become a great source of laughter ever since.
Poor Greg must flinch whenever he learns it is time to visit the Hays family for a Christmas gift exchange again. This year, Cyndie gave him the option, before he even opened his present, to exchange it for a gift card to Home Depot. He politely took her up on the offer after he saw the plastic mold of the front end of a 69 Corvette with a 3″ wide piece of glass that rests on top to make a shelf to hang on the wall. Um, I guess it looked a lot more impressive in the catalog.
A Thanksgiving Memory
I can’t help falling into my usual cynical attitude about a holiday that celebrates this country’s good fortune of decimating the tribes of original nations living here and building massive wealth and success on the backs of immigrants, many, if not most, of whom were mistreated as slaves. At the same time, I have nothing but fond memories of this day of family, friends, power lounging, game playing, football watching, over-eating, Christmas-season launching fun.
I particularly recall a neighborhood football game when I was a young teenager. We often played games with whomever was available, usually with limited success on adequate numbers. On this day, not only did we have plenty of players available, since it was a holiday, we even had spectators showing up to watch us. It was the absolute best! Until I got hurt. I don’t recall the exact mechanism of injury, but I bruised my tailbone something awful. At the time, I figured something might be broken. I cried. That is brutal for a teen boy to do in front of such a big audience. As I gingerly walked off the neighbor’s yard, headed for home, my sister, Linda, took a photograph of me that captured the moment, eventually helping sear it in my mind evermore.
That moment is closely followed by a vivid recollection of trying to sit at the dinner table on the hard chair for the traditional Thanksgiving feast. It required a pillow. For some reason, the second memory is a view outside of myself, seeing me try to sit down on the chair. I understand why I might remember how I looked walking off the neighbor’s yard because of the photo, but I find it curious that I have remembered the image of trying to sit down on that chair from a similar vantage point, instead of from within as I experienced it.
This year, I am thankful for all the blessings I am able to enjoy, and I continue to regret that it comes at the expense of others less fortunate than I. It’s as if our society is just another variation of a Ponzi scheme. It’s no wonder that I have always loved and hated this holiday at the same time.
Look at that! I can’t commit to one feeling or the other and a story about my ass hurting, all in one post.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Cycling Psychodrama Dream
Yesterday I enjoyed a lunch date with friends whom I most often see at our annual week-long bike trips, and for some strange reason this morning, I woke from a classic themed dream about being ill-prepared at the start of one of those trips. In a way, the details don’t matter, because the general impression of anxiety, over things not being in order, form the bulk of the focus, but the details do tend to have a certain entertainment value.
It began with the normal brief bike ride from the first overnight camp where we park our cars to the place where we will have breakfast. I found myself riding off of pavement, intending to cut a short distance across grass, but suddenly the area was too soft and wet to ride easily and even though others made it just fine, I ended up doing a loop in a struggle to navigate the situation and remain upright. I was not in the best gear to achieve this and wasn’t prepared to shift. How entirely dream like.
Then the dream kept going toward that ever more extreme pattern of bizarre. I was leaning my bike to park it in order to join everyone for breakfast when I noticed the back wheel was way too far forward and closer inspection revealed the crank and pedal were no longer attached to the chain ring (I’m sure this was a subconscious homage to my good friend, Gary Larson, who actually suffered such a fate while riding on the trip last year), and then as if that wasn’t enough, the right half of my handlebar was no longer attached; as if it was a two-piece part to begin with.
From there the dream became a challenge of trying to locate the Penn Cycle repair van, which was outside some doors for a moment and then gone as if he had left to get some breakfast of his own. It continued with my walking in to try and tell someone my situation and that I wouldn’t be riding the first leg. Then I was trying to navigate the breakfast with more classic dream characteristics of not being able to find what I’m looking for, and instead, being continually presented with additional challenges like suddenly being outside in my socks and then perched on a flimsy staircase where the first step appears to be straight down and too far for my reach…
All in all, pretty entertaining little dramas, from the perspective of now being awake and able to recognize they aren’t real. I don’t have any planned trips currently on my mind, so who knows what it is that transposed my wonderful lunch with cycling friends into the cycling dream of anxieties. I think it is a good thing that the weather has turned a bit too chilly to interest me in going for a ride for a little while now.
Lucky Guy
I’m feeling really grateful lately for a lot of things. Mostly, people who have enriched my life. I’m a lucky guy. Lucky to know so many special people with whom I have been able to connect and who join me in discovering the subtleties and nuances of ourselves and the world we are in. I was born into a family of siblings, and to our parents, that have certainly made me who I am today, and they have all always been a step beyond ordinary. As time passes, I am learning more about what that has meant for me and how it contributes to the person I have become.
I am lucky to have Cyndie and my two amazing children. Those of you who know me understand how lucky I am to have Cyndie in my life. And I’ve said many times that my children have taught me more about myself than I wanted to know at the time, but that I now am eternally grateful to have learned; and who better to learn from? I have also been blessed by knowing and becoming a part of Cyndie’s family.
I am lucky to have a friend in Gary, a connection that was somehow made before either of us were aware of it, so at the time we met, we were both sure we already knew each other. Lucky to have discovered Pam on the trek. The whole group I traveled with have me feeling like I’ve won a lottery. Then, looking at the big picture, I’ve won that lottery of wonderful groups over and over. My soccer friends, cycling friends, Brainstorms’ virtual friends, lifelong EP friends, coworkers who became friends. What luck! I sometimes feel I don’t deserve to know people like Eapon and Chris and Andy. Rich, Steve, and Curt, Julie, Rhonda and David, Suzanne, Ann. Thank you, Laura, for allowing me to be a friend. Howard and Judy, Grace, RJ, and Ian in Portugal and Walter in New Zealand. David, Paul, Steve, David, Kevin, Todd, and Eric. Hal. Jodi and Jody. Kym. My other Gary. Murph, JC. Some of you I don’t see so much any more, but you’ve made a lasting impression that keeps you in my thoughts. You continue to contribute to who I am and to my feeling of being a lucky guy for knowing you.
Some folks say you make your own luck. If I have, I would be happy to take credit, but my thinking is, “How lucky is that?” As in, I am so lucky, I even lucked out and made some of my own, without even realizing it!
You are all good people. The named and the still to be named. Did I mention Warren? Or Ed! There are two Eds. And John. There are quite a few Johns. Katie. Judy, Linda, Elliott, Mary and David. Elysa and Julian. In this moment, I am thinking of you all.
I am a lucky guy.
Relative Something 