It was two for Tuesday today. After two radiation sessions in one day, they added in a fluids infusion. It was a long day but it also brought me nearer to the end. With these two sessions today, I now have only three radiation treatments remaining. This means that once I walk out of radiation on Friday, I get to RING THE BELL! This is a big deal. I have invited both of my daughters to be there as I celebrate crossing the finish line.
I am not trying to rain on my own parade, but even though I finish treatments, it’s not really over. Those two weeks after that last treatment will be tough. That is the warning they are giving me. My body needs to heal now and my throat has been completely burned by the radiation. The difficulty I have eating and the amount of weight I have lost, will stand in my way. But, I’ve come this far, what’s a couple more weeks? Then there’s the question everyone asks, “will the tumor be gone?” The answer, unfortunately, will have to wait two to three months before they can do a final CT scan. Fingers crossed, the answer will be that it is gone.
This journey has been tough, even tougher than I thought it would be. Through it all, I found my strength in the incredible support I received from friends and family. So many of you prayed for me. Still others sent me periodic messages of strength. A little shout out to my sister and my cousin who sent me daily inspirations. Some of you even took over when I couldn’t do it myself. And then there was my wife, Deb. She never missed a beat. Day in and day out she was there for me. She was my cook, my stenographer, my cheerleader, and my coach. She experimented as we searched for foods and combinations that I would tolerate. She filled notebooks with the advice and directives of our seven doctor team. And when I was down, she left me daily notes of encouragement. I would not have made it this far without that support. You win battles through team efforts. Thank you everyone for all that you have done. Your encouragement and willingness to help was the strength you gave me to see this through. I had a team of doctors but just as important, I had a team of supporters.
Thanks for taking this journey with me. I would never had taken it without you.
Week four is now behind me and starting tomorrow I will have thirteen sessions of radiation to complete. Though I am feeling the best I have felt in several days, chemo session number four was rough. My counts are all low now which means I am on house arrest and I am not a happy camper. Missing so many things during the holidays is tough. You can only watch so many Christmas movies before you ache to be with friends during the holidays. With every passing day another party, another get-together, another festivity has to be skipped. I begin to list all the things I am missing. And thus, I present to you my new bucket list:
Lazy Jane’s for breakfast, possibly for days in a row, a steak, medium rare and covered in mushrooms and onions, Culvers North Atlantic Cod dinner, in the restaurant, no mask, a piece of pie, any pie, with whipped cream, lots of whipped cream, a crowded room with people having conversations, going out to a movie, sipping wine on the porch of Wollersheim Winery, trying all of the food samples at Costco and savoring the flavors. Playing with my grandkids, hugging people again, being free. I suspect you understand now that this is not the normal bucket list, but the items are just as inviting as anything on my other bucket list, the one where I stand atop Machu Picchu or maybe the Great Wall of China. If and when my health and taste decide to return, watch out Madison and surrounding areas because I’m coming. I have a lot of catching up to do and I’m hungry, very hungry.
T – 29 and holding. I really didn’t think that with the first day off, sans the Holiday, I would be wishing I had received a treatment instead. In my mind the thirty three days is a long time, but when you start counting the weekends and holidays off, it adds up to fifty days. With my first week behind me and still feeling okay, it made sense that I would feel this way and want to just keep going. I suspect I may think differently down the road, but for now it’s just another day of waiting. And so, it’s Saturday night and I want to keep fighting.
I am for the most part still fighting with the notion that I should be feeling worse. After all I do have cancer. At this point it’s biggest marker has been a scratchy throat and some headaches. There is one new development. They had warned me that as the cancer progressed and the treatments along with it, I would begin to lose my sense of taste. It wouldn’t just end, but rather it would fade. As that happened, my sense of what a favorite food should taste like would confuse my brain when it had no taste. What’s worse is that it would not only trick my brain into not wanting it, but to never want it at all. Ironically, the more flavorful the food, the worse it would be. Eventually, all I will want are foods that were already bland to begin with. Well, as of tonight that effect has begun. I shared a pizza with Deb along with some cottage cheese and to top it off, a piece of pumpkin pie for dessert, with whip cream of course. Three of my favorite things, thank you Doris Day for the melody to accompany my reverie. The result, first bite of each tasted just as I expected, flavorful and enjoyable. Bite number two began a downhill slide to something tasting flat and eventually, to needing to push it aside, unfinished and unenjoyed. As much as that pained me, it had to be hard on Deb who has always been a great cook. Not many can ever rival your mother’s cooking, yet in many recipes, she does just that., sorry mom.
I am ordained to keep fighting. I will fight through days off and I will fight with foods that want to trick me. I will be taking this one bite at a time.
It had been one of those days. It seemed like every time I got one task completed, the next one fell in my lap. I was leaving a late evening meeting, when she called. I had planned on going home and relaxing, when I saw the missed call from my daughter. My mind ran through the scenarios, ranging from just checking in to needing my help. As my finger poised over the call back option, I entertained letting it go until morning, but could I? The answer to that was I couldn’t, and I called her back.
When she answered, it was obvious she was excited about something. I gathered through her giddiness that she was with my son-in-law and granddaughter in the countryside watching the northern lights. She was inviting me to come join them and strangely, I was considering turning down her invitation. In my defense, I was tired and it was getting late. It would be a thirty-minute drive and I would have to find this field in the middle of nowhere. I had seen northern lights before and this far south, they were never that impressive, at least for me. But she was so insistent, and my decision was made.
It was all of the thirty-minute drive and without GPS, it would have been a task to find them. They were out in a large, recently picked corn field found just off a barely two-lane country road. As I got out of the car, my daughter approached. “They just stopped she proclaimed, but we are hoping they will start back up soon.” Great, I thought, this is going to turn out like all my other efforts to see northern lights. Just then it happened. It was as if someone had suddenly flipped a light switch in a dark room. The sky filled with reds and greens, shimmering and growing brighter with every passing second. There were towers of red streaming straight up like fireworks. Sometimes, the sky was filled with fan-like displays. The reds faded to orange, and then the greens filled in the gaps. It was a mesmerizing display.
I spent over an hour out there in that field. My daughter and granddaughter were at my side. We stared in awe at the night sky. The northern lights display would have been well worth the effort on its own. But, as I stood there with them, it became clear to me what a gift I would have passed up. She was insistent on my coming out. How had I not realized the true reason I had to come out there? This was what every father craves. It was her invitation to join her. The adventure is so important to her that she needs you there to share it with her.
Standing out in a corn field looking up at the night sky was special because I shared it with her. That invitation I almost ignored made the adventure sweeter, made the experience deeper, made the evening memorable. I can only hope that there will be more invitations, more adventures to share. And above all, that I wouldn’t ever fail to accept that invitation when it comes.
I confess. I am older than the smart phone. I even outdate the internet. Gunsmoke was one of my favorite shows when I was a kid. If I wanted to watch that show, I had to plop down in front of my black and white TV at exactly 7:00 pm on Saturday night. If I couldn’t be there at 7:00 pm, usually because my barn chores didn’t finish on time, then I missed it. I couldn’t record it and watch it later. I couldn’t grab the episode I wanted from the internet. And I couldn’t stream it on another channel later. I had one chance to see it.
Moments are like that. You can’t just have them back. Especially the precious ones. It was the summer Jackson turned six. We were at our lake cottage in northern Wisconsin. Just after breakfast the first morning, Jackson came to me with a plea. He asked me to help him fish. It was a logical request considering we had everything we needed to do just that. There was one problem, I didn’t fish.
At that moment I should have told Jackson that I didn’t fish. We should find something else to entertain us that day. That is not what grandpas are allowed to do. We need to seize the moment, to be present. We would learn together. We first had to retrieve the bait. This required Jackson to touch the worms, YUCK! Eventually, with our prize nightcrawler in hand, we got it mounted on the hook. Next up, casting. After two or three clumsy attempts, success! Jackson was fishing and Opa was relieved. You might even say, off the hook.
Suddenly, his bobber ducked below the surface and Jackson did what every first timer does in that moment. He jerked back on his fishing rod and to his surprise and to my shock, Jackson caught his first fish! As Jackson stood, his trophy fish held out proudly in front of him, the mandatory pictures were snapped. And I was there.
There is an often-heard phrase, “Be in the moment.” On that day, and on that dock, I was with my grandson as he experienced the thrill of catching a fish. I was in the moment. If I hadn’t accepted Jackson’s challenge, I would have missed the whole experience. I wasn’t just IN the moment that day, I LIVED the moment. I was present.
It is so easy in our busy lives to miss the moment. We are distracted by our phones and screens. While we watch them, we miss the moment happening right in front of us. The dad so focused on his football game misses his two-year old raising her arms to mimic the classic touch down sign. The dad, so busy, he doesn’t find time to play catch with his daughter. The person we meet, dealing with an illness, but we are so distracted by our own story, we don’t bother to ask how they feel. These are moments we can’t get back. We weren’t present. Just being in a moment isn’t enough. We need to be present. We need to live in the moment.
I will end with another confession, I’m not perfect. As much as I intend to, I am not always in the moment. At some point, I have executed all of those examples. It takes effort to be in the moment, let alone to live in that moment. That day with Jackson serves as my reminder to at least try.
Please understand, I am a grown man who has been around the block a few times, many times in fact. So when I am asked, “Opa is there really a Santa?” How am I, a man of logic and reasoning, supposed to answer that?
I believe the evasive answer is that children certainly believe there is. Marketers for the likes of Coca Cola, Macy’s, and every department store out there, certainly seem to believe there is. There ads certainly imply that they do. There are a dozen or more Hallmark movies. These movies feature the jolly old soul as real. He can often be found lounging about in one of those Hallmark Christmas towns. Who am I to question it?
I think that Santa is a belief, no a necessity that lives inside the heart of each of us. When we feed the imagination of a young child, Santa lives. Santa is here when we reach out to someone in need. Santa lives when we give to a charity or give our change to the person on the street corner. Santa is there when we buy the anonymous gift for a coworker or neighbor. In that act, Santa lives. We become Santa.
Children need no proof that there is a Santa. They don’t need an explanation as to how he can visit every child in the world in one single night. They need no evidence that reindeer can fly. They just know it. I know it every time I see an act of random kindness. I see it whenever someone opens their heart and their wallet. Santa lives in everyone of us. When we get old enough to question reality, we need to step into the myth.
Well its almost midnight and my grandson is fast asleep. Guess I better get those Santa gifts under the tree. So when did I stop believing in Santa? Simple answer……I didn’t.
Baby, Please Come Home for Christmas is playing in the background. I can hear my wife singing upstairs as she puts the finishing touches on her Christmas decorations. The Christmas trees are all up and decorating our home, yes, that’s Christmas trees plural. And thanks to our talented elf, aka my wife Deb, every room is resiliently staged in its own Christmas theme. Christmas lights are bedazzling my front yard, sans an inflatable Santa, one has to draw a line somewhere. And, there is snow in the forecast. It’s still a month away, but I am ready for Christmas. To be perfectly honest, I may have started counting down the days on December 26th a year ago. Who can deny that Christmas is simply the best time of the year, unless of course you’re the Grinch.
Christmas is a time of traditions. It’s a time for memories and for memories made. It’s a time for snowmen and snowballs, warm drinks by the fire, hot chocolate, and holding hands. It’s a time for inspiration, for sharing, and love. Christmas is that time of year when everyone is just a little more compassionate. Just a little more aware of the people around them. Just a little more generous with their time and their treasures. Just a little more than they might have been the rest of the year.
Christmas is a season of rebirth for me and when I say that, I mean literally a rebirth. I am once again young, if not in body, at least in spirit. It is at Christmas that I get to be playful. My grandchildren make sure of that. They get the toys, I get to play. I can’t wait to see what Jackson, Adela, Faye, and I get this Christmas. I am sure we will enjoy it. This Christmas Day the room will be covered in wrapping paper, ribbon, and bows. The walls will echo with sounds of glee, and we will smother each other with hugs. I ask again, how can one deny that Christmas isn’t the happiest season of the year?
Unfortunately, this is not true for everyone. There are families who live with need. Families with no gifts under the tree. Families not knowing for certain where their next meal will come from. For those families, Christmas will only be a reminder of the happiness they can’t find. This leads me back to what Christmas is and should be, the chance for sharing. My wife and I have been blessed. Our children and grandchildren enjoy good health. Deb and I enjoy our health as well. We have the financial ability to take care of our needs and to practice generosity. This year, just as we always do, we will pick the charities for our giving. Our children and grandchildren will also get to pick and the chance to tell us why. When we do this, we experience the true happiness of Christmas.
Each person has the right to celebrate Christmas in their own manner. I choose to celebrate Christmas with friends and family. I choose to celebrate it in the spirit of sharing and giving. I will sing along with every Christmas song they play before they stop playing them. I accept the challenge to share a smile with everyone I see and a hug with anyone that needs one. And I will tell you once again, Christmas is the best time of the year. At least it is for me.
I long ago created a list in my mind of the five daring feats I wanted to complete in my lifetime. They were in no particular order at the time, to jump out of a plane, parasail, paraglide, bungee jump, and zip line. The first one that I accomplished was to jump out of a plane. I had a friend in the Air Force and while visiting him in North Carolina, he informed me that he had begun a skydiving school and wanted to take me up. The following day, I mustered up my courage, listened to the lesson, practice jumped off a picnic table (not sure that was convincing), and the next morning I was crowded into a plane full of skydivers. Back then, they were not doing tandem, so I would be jumping alone and being a beginner, would come out of the plane at 10,000 feet on a tether. The tether being what would pull my chute at the end of a 200-foot freefall. I steeled my courage as I approached the open door of the plane and then summoned my innards to stay put. I not only managed to exit the plane, there had been some doubt, but I thoroughly enjoyed the rush and then the reassuring opening of my chute and the reasonably gentle ride to the ground. Number one was off my list.
Parasailing came next. I had arranged a family trip with my wife and two young daughters to Mexico. On day two of our trip, the parasail boat pulled up to our beach. The girls were definitely game, my wife was not, but after a brief negotiation, more so with my wife than the boat driver, we were harnessed up and getting ready to be launched from the back of the boat. My daughters were first and went tandem. Watching from the back of the boat I caught myself wondering why I had had to wait so long to do this. They sailed for some time and eventually were winched back in and then it was my turn. They hooked me in and away I went. Some seventy feet in the air, I felt an urge to show off for my daughters. I would pull on the harness and swoop from one side and then back to the other. It was on one of these graceful swoops that I looked down at my harness and suddenly realized that I was hooked to the tow rope, not with a locking carabiner, but rather a simple S-Hook. I decided it might be time to sit still, very still. Again, I survived, and the experience was well worth the time and the money. Number two had been completed.
It would be another thirteen years before I got a chance for my next bucket list feat. My older daughter and I were in Columbia visiting my younger daughter who was spending the summer in an internship for study abroad. We had barely settled in when my younger daughter informed us that she had arranged a paraglide adventure for later in the week. Paragliding, unlike parasailing, is done without any connection to the ground. It is in actuality, flying sans an engine. We would at least be flying tandem with an experienced pilot, interpretation here, a thrill junkie. Our glide would take off from the edge of a three-thousand-foot cliff, ten-thousand feet up a mountain. Our lesson, all five minutes of it, consisted of three commands that our non-English speaking pilot had learned, possibly sometime during the five-minute lesson. The first command was “walk”, the second was “run”, and the third was “sit”. I was ready, or so said my daughter, and the pilot said “walk”. So I walked, waiting for the next command, to run, all the while noticing that we were terribly close to the edge. “SIT” screamed the pilot. My mind, already racing, was asking what the heck happened to “run”. Fortunately for both of us, the pilot was so forceful in his command, I sat! And in that instant, we were airborne. For the next fifteen minutes we literally soared like a bird. We would turn on edge and drop several hundred feet only to turn again and gracefully sail upward on the updrafts coming from the valley below. There are no words to describe the sensation. The flight ended far too soon. As I checked off number three, I promised myself I would find some way to do this again. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened, but then I’m not done yet.
This morning, as I awoke to our third day on the Island of Kauai in Hawaii, I was greeted by Larry, our traveling guru, with “Do you want to go zip lining? There is an opening if we get there in the next ten minutes.” My response was immediate, “Of Course!” or some slightly more colorful version of that. We got to the Koloa Zip Line Company in time to join our group of fellow zip liners. We would be doing eight different zip lines ranging in length from 400 feet to the last one at 2,600 feet, half a mile. We were told that on the last zip line, we would hit a speed of 54 miles per hour. I was stoked (apologies for the obvious reference to my age). I was also nervous, but that soon turned to excitement. With each zip line accomplished, confidence grew. Where there was hesitation on the take off for the first zip line, it became wanting to go before the guide was even ready to let you go on the remaining lines. Each line offered the chance to try a different technique. Though I balked on the first chance to go superman (on your stomach, arms outstretched in flying mode), the next chance up, I agreed, got strapped in, and took off. Our guides were incredible, they kept us safe, challenged us to try new techniques, and bonded us as a group. As with paragliding, it ended all too soon. I had flown over a valley, a gorge, and canopies of trees. I had a blast. Number four, done.
I still have number five out there. My wife says, “And that’s where it will stay!”, but we will see. I have climbed a mountain, made it to the top of Half Dome, albeit via the trail and cables, and have so far accomplished four out of the five thrill feats I decided on so long ago. Each one of these had an element of fear that I needed to deal with, but I have found that by spending less time thinking about the what ifs and more time thinking about the sense of accomplishment and the ultimate reward of the experience, the easier it is to take that first step; the first step out of the plane, the first step off the boat, the first step off the cliff, or the first drop onto the zip line. In every case, the rest was a piece of cake! A delicious, exciting, and rewarding piece of cake.
For my birthday this past year, my daughters purchased a membership for me in Story Worth. I currently write an article a week for the collection. Each week, I get a new question to write about and at the end of the year, Story Worth will bind and publish my responses in a book to be shared with my grandchildren. This week’s question was “How did I get my first job?” What follows is my response. I felt that I wanted it added to this collection as well.
The question here is whether we talk about my first job or my first career job. My first jobs were all part time in nature starting with my very first job as a busboy for an exclusive country club. I followed that up as the weekend car wash manager and from there, graduated to a combine operator for a canning company harvesting peas. My first life skill job was that of a rough carpenter on a house building crew. Over the next eleven plus years I would work for several different contractors building homes and apartments. This job provided me with skills that I applied throughout my life. All of these first jobs were landed through the connections my father had. Though he got me in the door, it was my willingness to do more and to learn everything I could that kept me employed and often promoted. I learned through my father to make connections, to always be networking, but also to go above and beyond the job expectations. Hard work does pay off but so too does ingenuity and initiative.
My first career job was in teaching and came immediately after graduation. Due to circumstances, I graduated in December and looking for a job in teaching meant my opportunities were limited. If I were to teach, I would have to accept a midterm assignment or offer myself up as a substitute teacher. The latter was not very attractive and the former meant I had to replace someone. I threw my application out statewide and even some out of state schools as well. My only opportunity, there was a glut in teachers due to the Vietnam War, came out of a tiny town in far northern Wisconsin.
A teacher was being let go for discipline reasons and I was granted an interview along with three other math educators. When I arrived for the interview, we were all in one room. Sitting across from me were three highly gifted math students. I knew they were sharp because they had been my competition through my degree program at the university. We had all just graduated from UW Oshkosh that December of 1973. How could I even compete for this position? Listening to them talk about how they were going to present themselves, I realized they were going to sell themselves based on skill and knowledge. I had to take a different tack. I decided I would root my answers in discipline and relationship. If I could maintain discipline in the classroom, I could develop a relationship with my students. I would inspire them with my passionate belief that learning was easier in a safe and relational environment.
Loyal High School Logo
Twenty-five years of teaching later, spread across two different districts, I retired on my terms. In between I would make numerous presentations to multiple school districts, win a District Teacher of the Year award in my third year of teaching, and receive two nominations for State Teacher of the Year awards. I would develop educational games, create project based curriculum and write concept based curriculum for the district math department, K-12. My proudest achievement was that my students always knew why they did the math. On one occasion I was asked how I answer the question “why do we have to learn this?” My response was “I don’t know. I’ve never been asked.” As the saying goes now-a-days, mic drops!
I hope the take away from this piece is that who you know is important as long as there exists a relationship of trust. Networking is an important part of that relationship and will help open doors, but ingenuity and initiative will keep the doors open. Never stop growing, learn everything the job and the world have to offer. And one last piece of advice, and this too came from my dad. Whenever I wanted to change jobs, he would look at me and ask why I wanted to do that and then he would follow it up with “whatever you decide, be the best at it.” Wise words from a wise man.
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