All Story Telling

These pages will reflect the art of story telling and may involve my family stories as well as history and travel. They are a hodgepodge of topics with antidotal comments, but always involve the attributes of a good story.

The Errors of my Ways

Posted on by kwundrow

We are on day five of our March to the South. For some reason, probably shear hope, I thought once we crossed the Wisconsin border into Illinois, the temperature would shoot up into the 60’s and we would crack out the Bermuda shorts, old age reference there, and bask in the warmth of the sun. Error of my ways, forty degrees and no sun yet. Here are things I now know to be truths. When you order a Bloody Mary with a beer chaser south of the Wisconsin border, If you are lucky, you get the Bloody Mary and a full size beer. Most of the time, you just get a confused look. If you try to avoid this confusion and order the classic Brandy Old Fashioned, you will need to explain what brandy is and why that would be in an Old Fashioned. Explaining to them that it is the classic super club way to make the drink, they will ask what in the heck is a super club? We have clearly left the safety of our up North culture and are now learning to adapt.

If you are keeping track of us on your US maps marked “Where in the South are Ken and Deb”, we left the St Louis area this morning, crossed Illinois and Indiana, and are now resting for the night in Louisville, Kentucky. We will lay siege to Louisville tomorrow and then head for a couple of days in Chattanooga, adding Tennessee to our list of states we have overrun. From Chattanooga we will eventually reach Atlanta completing our replication of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Unlike Sherman, we won’t stop there as we intend to eventually reach Daytona Beach before turning back North. I personally intend to continue to ask for cheese curds in bars and maybe even pickled pigs feet just to see if they can figure out from where we hale.

On a reasonably serious note, for those who are following this and waiting for the whimsical surprise, it was Old Louisville tonight. We asked about every employee of our hotel about places to see in Old Louisville only to determine that we might be the oldest residents of Louisville in the hotel and that has only been three hours. Receiving no advice from the bewildered hotel staff but honest denials, we checked the internet and Google Maps and found our way downtown for an incredible walk through several blocks of beautiful stately old mansions dating to the Civil War Era. They sat quietly nestled in boulevard style streets softly lit with gas street lamps. We followed up our walk with a stop at a corner Tavern on the Green for great drinks and very good food.

Tomorrow we have planned a trip to the Louisville Slugger factory and museum as well as a visit to the Kentucky Derby museum and Churchill Downs. I am quite excited to see the World’s largest baseball bat which though not on my bucket list could have been right up there had I known it existed. If you missed the sarcasm there, as Big Bang’s Sheldon would say, bazinga!

We lost an hour somewhere crossing Indiana and have determined we aren’t going to find it, so it may be early back there in Wisconsin but it’s nearing bed time here and we still have that World’s largest bat on deck for us in the morning. I will try to catch up with you after Chattanooga and fill you in with whatever surprises we find there. Until then, we sign off as Kentucky Wild Cats tonight.

The Gateway Arch….a little history can be surprising.

Posted on by kwundrow

We have been in the St Louis area for the past three days visiting friends in Edwardsville on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. The company has been fun and gracious as we caught up and spent time doing some good sightseeing and dining, and yes, some good refreshment times. Yesterday we took a drive into St Louis and though I have been there countless times, we took in the newly redone St Louis Arch Memorial. Where one had to try to navigate an insane highway crossing to get to the Arch, it has been replaced with a much larger park area running over the top of the busy highways running underneath.

That is just the beginning of the refurbishing. The museum entrance has been relocated to the middle of the Arch and leads down to a very expanded museum with far more history to offer. But that is not necessarily my point. What surprised us, no shocked us, was the detail in the exhibits. In the past the history of the western expansion was pretty much told from the American perspective. We needed space, no one really seemed to be there and after all, we had discovered it and manifest destiny ruled. The exhibit on the Mexican War, the US name for it versus the Mexican version, Yankee Invasion, told a different story of how we had for the only time in our history, declared a war to seize land. I do not mean to disparage the memory of those great American heroes of the Alamo, or Louis and Clark setting out from St Louis to survey our new territories west of the Mississippi, but it really shed a different light on our motivation. With Texas, it turns out slavery played a big role since the South needed more slave holding territories for their cause and then consider that neither Spanish or French law allowed for slave ownership. There was also a display that counted, through a moving time line, the number of acres the US has seized since it’s birth in 1776, roughly 1,600,000,000 acres. Most of this taken from the Native Americans through 510 treaties, all broken in time.

As surprising as these revelations were, none impacted me more than this one. Prior to 1804, when the western lands held by the French and Spanish came under US ownership and thus US laws, women were allowed full rights to ownership, representation, and legal status in all counts and courts. In one day, as the US flag was raised over the new territories, women lost all of those rights as they came under US law. Not until the 1900’s, over one hundred years later, would we begin to acknowledge those rights. I’ll leave that for you to chew on.

All of this is food for thought. I am not trying to burn the American Flag for heaven knows, we have for the most part apologized and in some small way recompensed many of our past deeds, but it was shocking to have it put into perspective. It is of course a testament to our country that a National Monument has put these exhibits there for all who would seize the opportunity to truly discover the history of our western expansion.

I feel a need to end on a positive note. Deb and I are having a great time on this road trip adventure, visiting old friends and new ones and discovering little things that we would never see from the air.

Who Knew Abe was so Famous

Posted on by kwundrow

Surely I jest. Day one of our travel experiment is behind us. Too soon to say we have survived, but it went well. We had made a decision to stop in Springfield Illinois, and having grabbed a hotel room at the Hilton Gardens, we decided to take in the Lincoln experience.

We arrived downtown around 4:30 and after pretending to know exactly where we were, one of my built in flaws, we reached the Lincoln sites just in time to miss the final tour. But, that was okay. Plenty to see anyway and a really enjoyable dinner at an 1860’s restored house / microbrewery. I had what they call the Horseshoe, better known as a cardiac arrest on a plate and since I am writing this, I obviously survived. A few micro-brews later and we headed back to enjoy some of the amenities of our hotel.

This morning, after a luxurious sleep in, we headed back downtown to complete the Lincoln Experience. The tour, offered by a skillful and humorous guide, took us through several restored homes in the intricately restored Lincoln neighborhood and ended with a very complete tour of Lincoln’s Springfield home. The fact that most of the furnishings actually had belonged to the Lincolns and that the restoration was authenticated by illustrations from the period, brought history to life. Having been a Civil War Era buff all my life only added to the experience. We concluded the tour with a private half hour conversation with the guide, who having learned we were former teachers, was eager to share more of the history. Salt of the earth I believe is the term he used for teachers. Of course we knew that. I have always managed to be a little salty.

We had expected the tour would be interesting but the detail the preservation society has put into the re-creation of the area by restoring the 1860’s style buildings as well as the removal of anything from any other period, allows you to take a walk back in history. We are scoring this as our first whimsical surprise.

We are in the St Louis area tonight and our travel experiment will continue as we explore this area for the next several days. We will stay with friends, eat great food, share stories over drinks and enjoy great company. With that said, I need to get back to the party. Give me a few days off and I will bring my readers up to date.

Let the Road Rise up to Meet You

Posted on by kwundrow

In a few days my wife and I will be packing up my Jeep and heading for the open road. We will pack on our bikes and golf clubs along with some clothes for all seasons and head south on Interstate 39. This trip is going to be different than our usual style. For my wife’s comfort, we would normally have it all planned out right down to the means of transportation and accommodations as well as site tours. On this trip we will leave almost all of that to chance and whim. I have no doubt we will survive and I have no doubt there will be hick-ups. But I also suspect that we will stumble onto several whimsical surprises. It is these whimsical surprises that I look forward to most of all.

I love my wife and have always tolerated and at times greatly appreciated her need to have plans laid out and surprises avoided, but truth be told, that is not my style. My daughters refer to any trip with dad as an adventure. I am a restless, impatient, let me see where this road leads me sort of guy. I will admit that the road didn’t always lead me where it was supposed to but I also made it to my destination somehow. The fact that my wife is tolerating this upcoming trip is either a testament to her willingness to humor me or at the least an acknowledgment that time has broken her will. I am excited for the trip to begin for only then will the adventure reveal itself.

Life is like this. We can go through it planning every step along the way seeking to avoid the surprises or we can take a more adventurous approach. Before we get carried away, remember that the lion share of my career was spent as a planner. I will be the first to acknowledge the benefit of goals and plans to meet them. It’s just that there is also a need for spontaneity. It’s a balance of the two that allows one to truly live. The goals are met in the planning and they in turn afford us the freedom to find the surprises that await us in the spontaneity. We can choose the direction we will point our vehicles or even the course we will travel, but to truly enjoy the journey, we must let the road rise up to meet us. The reward will be worth the risk. The surprises perhaps whimsical. The road can take us places we may never had considered and reveal to us experiences we would never have realized.

This Thursday we will get up, hop in our car and begin the trip, my expectations and imagination already miles ahead. I can’t wait for the road to rise up and take us where it would have us go. No need to wish us luck, we packed it in our bags.

Follow our journey at http://www.kenismsblog.com

I Rolled the Window Down Today

Posted on by kwundrow

I debated with titling this blog as I did or “It’s Wisconsin, Wait a Week”. I was headed home this noon from a meeting and when I realized the temperature outside was now in the 50’s, the window had to come down. What a glorious feeling as finally, the spring like breeze slid through my open window and cascaded around the interior of my car. All that stale winter air trapped inside my vehicle for the last four months was pushed out and replaced by the hope of sunshine and warmer days ahead.

Now to be true, we need some perspective here. Just five days ago, the temperature hovered at five below zero with a wind chill of negative thirty degrees. Spring was something we wistfully spoke of but believed had been banished forever. With a foot and a half of snow on the ground and no warming trend in sight, hope had been buried somewhere under the five foot drift marking the edges of my driveway. My lawn mower hid timidly behind my snowblower considering permanent retirement.

The irony of this is that in another four or five months, we will treat weather in the 50’s as the time to pull out our sweaters and roll the window back up. We have been slowly cooled through our long winter to the point that 50 degrees somehow feels like we should head to the beach and at the very least don a short sleeve shirt. We are conditioned, slowly and deliberately to accept our fate. When the change comes, what was intolerable before is now not only comfortable, but enjoyable.

But wait, this too is likely fleeting. Give it another week and we may be right back into winter. What we need to remember if this unthinkable possibility becomes reality, is that for even a day, spring proved that she was not dead, just waiting to push winter back where it belonged. Spring will eventually defeat winter and will bring with her the promise of summer.

So what is this all about. Simply put, our weather is a metaphor for life. About the time we are ready to give up hope, everything changes. Hope re-emerges as a warm breeze ready to renew our faith. An intolerable condition gives way to new opportunities and we are reminded to never give up hope. If you are currently suffering through a tough time or maybe just the depression of a long winter, remember that tomorrow the breeze may just swing around to the south and change will bring back renewed energy. So for now, roll down the window and let the breeze in. With it will come a promise of better weather ahead.

One Man’s Treasure

Posted on by kwundrow

I had just parked my car this morning after a masterfully executed parallel parking job in traffic, when as I exited the vehicle, I found a quarter staring up at me from the pavement. Now there are several ways to react to this found treasure. Most would likely dismiss it and possible have never risked traffic to even pick it up. After all, what does a quarter buy today…a gumball or maybe an after dinner mint? Some would pick it up just simply because it was something. Still others, like myself, would see it as an omen and maybe even a message. I viewed it as a message. A message from my Uncle Len.

Leonard Wundrow was my father’s younger brother and the source of most of the Wundrow joke reservoir. Any time that Uncle Len would stop by the farm, and that was often, we would be regaled with a litany of his jokes and stories, many I am sure, the kind my mother would have censored had she had the chance. There was never a dull moment when Len was involved.

But the story I want to share concerns Uncle Len’s past time. He would go for walks, head down, searching for the lost treasures of those who had passed before. Those little pieces of change that fell out of the pocket each time you reached in for your keys or a pocket knife or some other small tool. A penny here, a nickel there and if you were lucky the occasional quarter or even half dollar could be found if you knew where to look and you kept your eyes to the ground. Uncle Len was a pro and by the time he retired and found hours of additional time to search, a veritable force to be reckoned with. His house held jars full of coins waiting for their trip to the bank. Each day we would get the report, the tally for the day of treasures found.

Uncle Len’s secret, knowing where and when to look. Near the parking meter, outside the bar any early morning or in the park the morning after the fair. Locate the beer tent remains and the treasure could be impressive. He would sometimes take us with him and we would be shown the tricks of the trade but sworn to secrecy on his high production sites. One morning, the day after the VFW Fair had pulled up stakes and rolled out of town, Uncle Len hit the mother load. After a productive area pass of pocket dropped coins, Len found, tightly rolled up, a C note. Yes, My Uncle Len had found a one hundred dollar bill! His glee was contagious, his question possibly a bit naive. He was musing as to why any one would roll up a hundred dollar bill into such a small tube. They could of used it for a straw! He even considered using it as such to which we immediately said “DON’T!” I will leave it with you there, just as we did way back then.

We loved our Uncle Len. He was a character that kept his family and ours always on your toes. When he passed, he left the missing person syndrome in every family gathering that followed but he also left his legacy. To this day, and to a person in the Wundrow families, we can not pass a dropped coin without hearing his voice saying “you gonna pick that up?” So you see, this morning, with traffic whizzing by, I never thought twice, I bent down, stopped traffic, and retrieved the coin. Stepping back onto the sidewalk, my wife asked what I was doing. When I showed her the coin, we looked at each other and said, “Uncle Len’s watching us today.”

Legacies are the essence of who we were that we leave behind when we go. I can only hope that long after I am gone, I will have left some legacy, even if it just a quirky habit like viewing the little things as a treasure.

It would not be fair to end this story without reporting on what we did with the quarter. We left it in the tip jar at the cafe where we enjoyed breakfast and shared a memory or two of Uncle Len. Anything else would have seemed sacrilegious. Who knows how many hands that quarter will touch or what it might help accomplish. Thanks Uncle Len. One man’s treasure.

Body and Soul

Posted on by kwundrow

Body, Mind, Heart and Soul, these were the words that piqued my interest today. I am currently going through a healing process and it has become clear to me how intertwined and dependent these four terms can be.

Let’s start with body. When we are not feeling well, when we have gone through a trauma, when our body needs to be healed, we go to a doctor. They diagnose the problem, assign a regimen of medication, maybe therapy or in some cases, a surgery. The medication assists our body in healing itself. Therapy or surgery, actually repair the damage and begin the process of healing. This is a physical process and in most cases the first place our system looks for the fix. But what if this is not the only issue or possible only a symptom of the real problem.

We might need to consider the mind. The body often can’t heal completely without the healing of the mind. The mind may be causing us to deal with anxiety. “What if I can’t get better?” is the question we begin to want answered. If I want a complete recover, I need to be ready in my mind to deal with the process. Sometimes, there is no true physical issue. The phrase “all in your head” comes to mind. It is true that the perception of pain is in fact all in my head. The pain is real, but it is the mind that interprets the inputs coming from the source of that pain. At other times, the issue is not physical pain, but emotional stress, possibly to the point of depression. If the mind is to be healed, we may need the help of a professional or at least the ear of someone willing to listen and help us confront the source of that anxiety. Just as we can heal the body, so can we heal the mind.

Enter the heart. In this setting I am not talking about the heart as an organ. That would include it in the discussion of the body. I am referring to the heart as the repository of our emotions. If we have suffered a loss, we could be suffering from a broken heart. Not a heart that isn’t functioning but rather a heart that has suffered a loss too big to ignore. At times we may be walking around feeling like there is a figurative hole in our heart. The heart may be the hardest to heal. It unfortunately, at the very least, takes time. Sometimes it requires that we must find a reason to move on. We cannot replace what we lost but we can use the memories to help us find the strength to move on.

And then there is the soul. To talk about healing the soul, we must first understand what it is. The soul is the essence of who we are and who we are meant to be. It is not a physical organ. We don’t know where in the body it resides. We feel it rather than see it. We use the term, “nourish the soul”, but what do we feed the soul. I believe we feed it a dose of purpose, faith and positive thoughts. Stress, lack of faith in people or processes, hopelessness and negative thoughts or behaviors, diminish the soul.

I began this piece with the statement that these four concepts were intertwined. That to truly heal, the prescription must treat all four. To focus on one and ignore the rest, leaves us only partially healed and vulnerable to a relapse. If we are to heal the body, we must heal the mind, heart and soul as well. The prescription must include the medication or repair that the body needs, the help necessary to calm the mind and then restore it to full function, the time needed and a reason for the heart to carry on, and finally, attention to the soul to restore our purpose and provide the nourishment to strengthen us for the process. Just as the doctor will recommend a regiment of medication for the body, knowledge and understanding of the healing process, including the time needed and the ups and downs that will inevitably occur, will help to mend the mind. For the heart, the prescription must include a positive attitude, the opportunity to both face and deal with the healing and strong belief that the people around us truly care and hope for our complete healing. As to the soul, we need to want to heal. We must restore our soul to the strength it will need to regain who we were meant to be and the reason to heal.

I have, over the past several weeks, experienced healing of body, mind, heart and soul. The surgeon fixed the worn out knee while the nurses and physical therapists helped me regain my mobility. Through the early stages of the recover, I fought with the anxiety of sleepless nights, recovery that seemed too slow and the stress of fighting through the pain. The physical therapists were there to encourage me and to calm my anxiety when it would block my ability to heal. My heart was dealing with the loss of my independence and mobility, but my friends and family, and especially my wife were there to listen and remind me that they cared. Their concern reminded me I was never alone and that I could feed on that concern to find the strength to keep working toward my recovery. As to my soul, it never left me. I knew the road ahead when I had made the decision to have the surgery. Each and every person who became a part of the healing strengthened my soul to regain what I had been losing; the positive attitude that had existed before the pain had begun to diminish it.

At sometime, we all face the need to heal. When it is the body only, the process is faith in the diagnosis. But never lose sight of the other three; mind, heart and soul. Each can be dealt with alone or addressed as a group. But in any case, we don’t really need to nor do we accomplish the healing alone. Remember that the people around us are the prescription we need to complete the healing.

On the Road Again

Posted on by kwundrow

I’ve been lax in updating my progress since getting my latest bionic knee. It’s been six weeks and I thought I better say something.

I adopted a mantra along the way to answer the reoccurring question, “How are you feeling?” My response has been, “Better than yesterday but hopefully not as good as tomorrow.” Two thoughts on this. First, it hasn’t always been true. There have been days where progress clearly took one step forward and two steps back but that is to be expected with this kind of recovery. Sometimes you work the exercises a little too hard only to wake the next morning too sore to do your best rehab. Fortunately, there have only been a few of these and they seem to be fading in the rear view mirror.

The second and more random thought about this statement, is that it really could apply in general. As good as today was, there is no reason to not hope that tomorrow just may be even better. If we can approach life with this positive attitude, we won’t be likely to miss the opportunities that can in fact make tomorrow even better than today. As I said, it was a random thought, but in this shut in, cooped up, measure every little bit of progress day to day grind, two hours of sleep a night routine, one has a lot of time to think pretty randomly.

I have with my past updates tried to recognize my heroes, the surgery staff, the hospital nurses and eventually the host of physical therapists. I added to that those friends and neighbors that have, without even being asked, stepped in to clear my sidewalk and driveway, drive me to appointments and just plain showed up when I needed a little conversation break.

Today marks the six week anniversary of the surgery. I am walking without a cane for the most part. My wife/ nurse / coach / still makes me take it with me outside of the house for some added support in this weather, but in reality, I just end up carrying it. I have started to leave the house now with much more regularity and have returned to my old bad habit of going out for breakfast and consuming too much coffee. I even returned to the gym a couple of times to start building back up what I clearly lost. I will accept the new aches and pains as something refreshingly different and just my upper body muscles saying thank you.

The big progress marker, I got cleared to drive again. Deb, bless her heart, has been driving me everywhere, and I have been….well a s**t about it. It is a difficult task to be the rider when you have always been the driver and especially hard to take when my style is, to put it mildly, a bit aggressive. I have a new and far better understanding of why our elder parents fight so hard when they are being asked, mostly told, to surrender their driving privileges. Of all our independent activities, most of them have no bearing if we can’t drive. Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating for hundred year old’s out cruising the boulevards, but we all need to be a tad more empathetic when approaching that treacherous crossroad on life’s highway.

I am close to dancing, but just have a few more “stretches” to go. Their target, the PT people, is 120 degrees of bend and 0 degrees on extension. Currently my numbers sit at 110 and 4 degrees respective, close, but not enough just yet. As I near this end of my recovery journey, I want to thank everyone who has been kind enough to check on my progress and at times, to just be there for me when I needed an ear to bend instead of my knee.

With that said, I’m going to close. It seems I still have miles to log before I am caught up on my driving and right now, I feel the need for speed. Beware you drivers out there going too slow. This whole recovery thing has been slow enough.