My Ramblings

The following is a rewrite of a story about the life and death of one of our family’s pets which I wrote a couple of days after he passed away: Our family’s beautiful, good, and kind dog, Duke, had to be put to sleep on June 1, 2010. His hips just gave out on him due to arthritis, in spite of the fact he was only about five years old. Duke was the best dog we could ever have asked for. He was friendly to all (except cats, squirrels and the cocky bulldog, Hank, who lived down the street). Duke patrolled his domain (our backyard), ever watching to protect us. Not even low-flying aircraft were safe from him. Police helicopters and airplanes fled his barking. Duke fully believed he was the protector of our family and was always eager to prove it (especially if he thought one of us was watching). He would run out to bark at enemies real or imagined. Duke greatly loved us and we loved him. He was a big, 100+ lb., slobbery red-nosed pit bull who thought he was a seven lb. lap dog. Some

I mentioned in a previous post that I have done some traveling. When I was younger, I loved the thought of visiting certain places in the world, something I never dreamed I would do because of the cost, that no one in my family had ever traveld outside the US and my general ignorance about the process. I took my first trip overseas after I was married to Linda and it was  somewhat of a surprise how it came about. In 1985, Linda and I, along with our toddler, Daniel, drove up to Oregon to visit various friends we had met in our college days. One stop was in Cottage Grove to see Debbie and Gary Williams and their son Jesse who was close to Daniel's age. Gary and I had been roommates at San Jose Bible College and I recall he sometimes spoke about his travels to Aruba and Tahiti. One afternoon, Gary and I were sitting in his study and our talk turned to Tahiti and how fun it would be for us to go there together. On the spur of the moment we decided to each go and ask the other’s wif

February 19, 2013, will mark the one year anniversary of the death of a good friend of mine, Tim Crownover. Tim died. I’ve been told, from a heart attack; however, I do not know the details. Late on the night of February 19, 2012, I was called to the hospital he had been taken to, but he was gone from this life already. I was allowed into the ER where his body lay on a gurney. He did not look dead, only asleep. I held his strong, rough hand and momentarily stroked his hair. It broke my heart that he was gone. I wrote the following words and read them to the packed house at his memorial service: Every person in this room has one or more Tim stories. I have many so here a just a few of mine: I met Tim when we were 10 years old. I moved into the side of town he lived in during the summer of 1966. One day I was walking home from Richland Market down Ninth Street when I passed by his house. Tim and Ron Megee were shooting pool in Tim’s garage. As I walked by, they said hello to me and

It began again last week; missing my son very deeply. I was listening to a song on my iPhone; “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” by the Hollies.” Now, the song does not particularly make me think of Daniel, at least not before that day. In fact, the song reminds me of high school because the phrase, “he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” was used in my Senior yearbook and I almost always think of that when I hear the song. However, it hit me in a different way last week. I had to sit down on my bed and cry as I listened to it. Other music also causes me to think of him including the Black Keys and Mumford and Sons because Daniel was the first one to tell me about these two groups. He was repaying the favor because when he was a kid I introduced him and all three of the girls to the music of Roy Orbison, The Traveling Wilburys and Percy Sledge. All our kids loved Percy’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” even though they didn’t get the lyrics right. Somehow, the phrase, “trying to hold on to your hi

When I wrote about my sister, Tina, I mentioned in the last paragraph that she gave birth to two children. The youngest is a boy. I will not divulge his name because of his right to privacy. I will say that he is 17 years old now. Tina had him when she was in prison at the California Rehabilitation Center (CRC) in Norco, CA. I recollect that he was two days old when CPS took him to live with his foster family. He has remained with them his entire life. I have only seen him a handful of times but not because I haven’t tried. He actually only lives 20 miles from me but is not interested in having a relationship me. I don’t blame him and I hope we will reconnect someday. Tina’s oldest child is Meagan Nicole Faddis and she is now 22 years old, and she has quite a backstory. As I have said, Tina was a heroin addict. She believed that, due to her drug abuse, she was sterile and unable to have children. She was five and a half months pregnant with Meagan and using heroin daily when she dis

As I have previously written, I was in the sixth grade when my father died. In the summer of 1970, between the seventh and eighth grades, Mom took our family on a vacation to visit my Dad’s brother, Tom and his family. I believe now that, by this simple act, she was trying to provide a “normal” childhood for her kids. Uncle Tom was a logger and earned a good living as a timber faller. He lived with his wife, Rosie and their children, Tommy, Kenny and Tina, in Happy Camp, CA. The population of their town was under 1,000 and it is located west of Yreka on Highway 96 in a remote area near the Klamath River. That vacation was one of the most fun and exciting things our family had ever done. Several of those days, Mom and Aunt Rosie took all of us kids to a great swimming hole on the Klamath River. We took a picnic lunch and spent the entire day there. We went swimming, explored up and down the river and skipped rocks on the water. Someone had tied a two by four foot board to a tree br