Happiness In The Midst Of Sadness

Although this was a day of sadness, the joy of a Christian family can go a long way to offset those things that seek to drag us down.

I counted around 147 names in the sign in book, which most of the immediate family did not sign.  Generally, you’ll will miss some sign in people, so we probably had at least 175 people at dad’s funeral.  There were many that actually wished that they could be there but had issues and things that came them from coming.  In some cases, like my wife, their husband’s deemed that their children had cried enough, and did not wish to turn this into a greater time of sadness. 

Doug did an excellent job of preaching the message of the gospel using examples from my father’s life.  It was impossible to leave the service and not know that Jesus is an option for your life.  Doug had taken some excellent notes off of my blog on Dad’s life, and I actually had people tell me afterwards, “I had no idea that Doug knew your Dad so well.”  There were a couple things that went wrong, just as the room had so many people in it that it got very hot, so the funeral home worker opened the side door and Doug’s papers all went flying as a gust of wind came in.  Hillary ran to the front to pick up the papers.  On top of this incident, Doug also had his cell phone go off.  Doug was embarassed after the fact, but some how I like both of these incidents.  It seemed like more fodder for the stories of the Deffenbaughs.  All in all, I was very happy with how Doug preached.  He’ll have married all three of my sister’s children, and burried my father.  Perhaps, I should have him marry my kids as well.

Generally, there were four groups of people:

1. The family

2.  The Apostolic Faith Church (some Seattle and even some Portland)

3.  The Eastside Free Methodist Church

4.  The friends he made in Port Orchard

The group that sent me into tears was all the friends of the family from East Side Free Methodist.  In retrospect, the church was very dynamic and had created a very strong bond of the people that were there.  East Side was like a rocket that shot up high and grew fast, only to have the church come down just as quick.  The church ended up disbanding, but all the people had remembered the spirit of God that was there, and wanted to say their respects to Dad.

The best part of the service was when Doug opened up the mike, and Don Smith said, “I have a story.  I was with Don at Oregon State University, and one day he decided he wanted a massive desk in his room so he recruited me to carry it in.  The desk was too big to fit in through most doors, and when we got to the elevator, we found out it couldn’t fit at all.  So, Don did the only reasonable thing and took the elevator doors off.  We never could figure out how to get them on again.”

Finally, Doug was going to wrap it up, and I signed that I want to say something.  I went to the front, and I took off my glasses and I closed my eyes.

“I’m not going to look at you all,” I said.  “If I do, I know that I’ll recognize faces and start to cry.  But I have two things to say.  The first is that if you have a story, please go to deffenbaugh.wordpress.com and enter the story.  I will pass this down to my grandchildren, and this is a favor to us.  Secondly, I talked to Dad every week, and although I may not know your faces to your names, there were only two things that he cared about, things and people.  And he loved to tell me stories about every one of you and how you influenced him.  I thank you for your gift of friendship.”

My sister also got up to say a few words, but I can’t even remember what she said.  I’ll listen to the tape later.

Afterwards, many people came up to me.  However, two stuck in my mind.  One was a house cleaner that dad asked to clean the house after my mom died.  Her eyes were red, and she had been crying.  She gave me her name, and I said that she needed to give me details, as I didn’t recognize it.  She said that she cleaned my dad’s house. 

“I know you,” I said.  “My dad use to talk about you all the time.  He called you his little dynamo because you did such a great job.”

She burst into tears, and was sobbing.  She hung onto and cried, and I reach down and whispered in her ear and I said, “You have no idea of what a comfort you were to my dad.  He knew that he couldn’t cook a meal to save his life, and while he could stand a dirty house, he couldn’t learn to clean after himself after not doing it for 79 years.  When my mom died, you can into the house to make it comfortable for him again.” 

She cried all the greater, but she and I knew it was true.  My dad loved his house cleaner for a simple job done well, and she knew that she was precious to him.  It was a great compliment to both.

The other person that sticks out in my mind was a young lady that came up to me and said, “I’m xxx, and I knew your dad.  I just wanted to say hello.”  She paused and she would have left, but I knew that wasn’t all of it.

“There’s more,” I said to her.

Her face grew both happy and sad, and she said.

“I went to his church, and while you don’t know me, I started to go the church right after I got divorced, and I had a two year child.  I don’t know if you know, but divorced women with two year old children are not embraced by anybody.  However, I sang at front of the church, and your dad would greet and embrace me every service.  He said that he loved my singing, and one time he told that he was there for two services, just to hear my sing again.”

I looked at her, and I said, “My dad had a gift for music, and I never knew him to say that something was good when it wasn’t.  You have a gift of song, and you touched his life.”

She started to cry, and I gave her a strong hug and patted her on the back.

“You’ll never know how he touched me,” she said.  And then she turned and left. 

After the service and many tears, we came home.  The place was packed, and Hillary started to play hymns after I did some my improtu piano compositions.  Hillary can play nicely by ear, and I think that there is a little bit of my mom in her.  My sister says that her playing reminds her of mom, and it touches her heart.

No One Wants To Be A Fatherless Child

I always thought my dad was a very tough man.  I mean, when I was a boy, I was helping him with the farm and I had a sickle in my hand.  He was working by me, and I swung the sickle as he moved his hand, and it cut deep inside of heel of his hand.  I was mortified.

“I knew you were going to do that the way you were swinging that thing,” he said as he stamped in doors, but he never cried and after that mad statement, I heard nothing else.  All I saw was the blood in the rough wrapping when he came out of the house.

I remember the first time that I heard him cry.  We were driving together up to my grandfather’s funeral after visiting my sister at Stanford.  Somehow, mom went over first to comfort the family, and dad and I had to go later.  I had been told that grandpa had died, and while I was sad, I also knew that we didn’t have to be too sad, since we all went to heaven.  However, as we rolled into Portland, suddenly my dad started crying in the car.  I mean really crying, and he reached for the kleenex box, and I handed it to him.  I remember being absolutely shocked, as I had never seen dad ever cry before.  It didn’t hit me at first, but I realized that day that my dad really loved his dad.  Before that day, I thought my dad only dealt with my grandparents out of duty.  I found out that it was out of duty and love.  Heaven is a comfort, but no one wants to be a fatherless child.

The cruelest thing about modern technology is how you can’t hide from it, and while I did not bring my own sons this week, I find that I have recreated my father’s legacy.

Mind you, I’ve tried to be a pretty stoic guy about my father’s death.  When my mother died, I was sad, but a large part of my sadness had to do with the fact that I felt bad for my dad.  Here his wife of many years, who there was no doubt that he missed greatly, was gone.  I would have been sadder, if I hadn’t known how sad my dad was.  His grief, hid my own.

However, on this go around, I find myself gripped from time to time with the thought “I don’t want to be a fatherless child.”  I try to push this down.  After all, I am more than 40 years old.  I have left all of my childish things behind, and I am an adult with children of my own, but sometimes you can’t hide.

As we went along the path of making arrangement for the funeral, my sister determined that we should try and put together a slide show.  Now, most of the things that we do together as we plan for our next stage of our life is pretty much my lead, and her follow.  However, on this one, she pushed just enough to get me going.

Now, we are at a house out in the sticks, and I am far away from all of my normal computer equipment with my scanners.  I do pack, at almost all times, a digital camera.  I guess that I picked this up from my father, who had a Leica camera that he carried everywhere with him from the age of 15 to 50.  The interesting thing is that he took slides, and a a Leica camera with kodachrome or ektachrome was an awesome piece of technology.  So, once I got going on my sister’s slide show, I knew where to go for other material.  I found my Dad’s slides.

So, without any scanner or real tools, I found a table top for some picture photos, a white wall for the slides and a tripod.  Then I just started taking pictures of the pictures.  Knowing that I was running out of time, and the project would be all the better for having more people involved, I told my sister that we were calling her niece.  My niece oozes competence, and although she never used Microsoft Photo Story, she was able to download it and go.

Now, I selected down 200 photos, and she had some family photos herself.  My niece started to go at her end.  The only problem is that she is in Florida, so we quickly setup a Skydrive, and started to transfer the slides to her.

The net sum is that she delivered a product tonight, and basically every time that I see it, I cry.  The transfer from the slide to the wall to my camera happened exceptionally well.  Combined with a few well placed tunes, and things are triggered inside of my gray matter.  The images of my dad as a young man simply reminds me of myself, and it just drives me over the top.  Seeing myself as a small boy in my mother’s and father’s lap, make me want to hold my own children so much.  Watching scenes from my childhood home, makes me want to fly home tonight, and walk into my own house.

We are our parent’s children.

And Then There Was None

This is a picture of my father, and my son. Both of them were born on Dec 31st, so we would always celebrate both birthdays together every year. Sadly, we will only celebrate my son’s birthday this year, because today my father took his last earthly breath, at 11 am after his Grandfather clock had struck its last chime.

As a Christian, we can take great comfort in having the hope of a resurrected life after death. As an earthly human, I will miss the phone calls to my only father on earth.

We would talk about politics, economics and what I should do at my job. My mom used to say that these phone calls were my dad’s favorite thing to do. I know that it was my favorite. I remember coming back from an international trip one time. After I landed at LAX, and after the events of the trip, I decided that I would call my dad on the way home to discuss what had happened, the various customer issues, and the products that I was marketing. After talking for 30 minutes, I hung up. I heard a low whistle from the front of the Limo that was taking me home.

“Were you talking to you dad?” the Limo driver asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I wished I could talk to my dad like that,” he replied.

Life was not rosy all the time. Living in my family was not easy as a child for my sisters or myself. Mainly because my father was the son of the depression and my grandparents were an unbelievably tough parents. Mind you, it’s not that my grandmother and grandfather didn’t love my dad, or that our dad didn’t love his kids. But life was different back then. Life wasn’t soft or cushy. Life was about doing your job and working hard. Children were expected to be little adults in our family. Our father raised us in a similar fashion as his own parents raised him, we were expected to work on the weekends, work after school, and get only the best of grades. As much as was expected of us, in his mind, he was much easier on us versus what he went through as a child, and he was right in this belief.

My father was the second of two boys, and most people never understood my dad because they didn’t understand his family, and they didn’t understand how my dad, the second child, was in such a contrast to the first child.   My uncle, the first child, his brother, was born with a closed colon. My uncle, his brother was considered a baby born alive that was soon to die. It was an age where the idea of constructive surgery to save a baby’s life was not understood. However, the family was deeply entrenched in a Church which may have struggled with the concept of grace and freedom in Christ, and yet had the power of God flowing through their Church. My great grandmother believed that my grandmother had not given the child to the to the Lord, and so she came to my grandmother.

“Honey, you need to give this child over to the Lord,” she said, “If the Lord wants to take him home, you need to allow God to do that.” However, my Grandmother didn’t want to say that my Uncle was the Lord’s. After a day of reflection, she gave the child up and said “Lord, if you want to take this Child home, please take him.”

He pooped within the hour, and was saved.   When my Dad would tell the story, his voice would break.  There was several times when the Lord intervened in his life, and while he was not born, he would tell the story as if he was there.  Everyone recognized the miracle that had happened, and my dad was told the story when he was born.  And while my dad’s brother went on to become a long distance runner and strong while in college, the image of him as the weak baby and the sickly child always stuck. So, my grandparents never asked much physically of my uncle. Combined with a gentle spirit and the ability to not provoke my grandparents, he generally was the good kid growing up.

My dad, by contrast, came out of the womb as a walking, talking, break everything in the house son. He told many stories of how he visited the “rod of correction” as he would take apart watches to see how they worked (and having the spring exploded and ruin the watch). He would take wheels off of the trains and ruin these toys. When my grandparents told the boys that they couldn’t cross a line in the street, it was my dad that always heard his brother running upstairs to say, “Brother crossed the line! Brother crossed the line!” My dad was in his 80’s, and he would laugh about being the one to cross the line. When my youngest son, who can be a bit wild time to time, would break something, my Dad would always say, “Don’t punish him too hard, it reminds me of me.”

Dad being the strong one was the one that would be forced as a young boy to accompany my granddad to his construction sites. My grandfather had started “Deffenbaugh Sons Construction” and while his brothers were workers, granddad was the boss, and he was a pusher with a gift for making houses. My grandfather’s ability to frame houses and make anything was legendary. My dad was his son and free labor, and he would run him at the construction sites from morning to night. At a young age, my dad knew how to frame, how to plumb, and how to run electrical wires. His brother, still considered the weaker from the incident as a child, could stay at home. There was no greater of a contrast.

The depression hit in 1930, and Grandfather’s line of credit was shut down. Grandfather owed $5000 to his suppliers, which is close to $100,000 today, and when he couldn’t get construction loans, there was no way to continue the projects. While most people simply filed for bankruptcy, granddad thought this was wrong, so he paid all his suppliers what he owed him during the depression. However, he no longer built houses. Grandfather did all types of jobs, one of which was getting the highest civil ranking possible when he picked up a job in the Forest Department.

When dad was 15 years old, it was toward the end of the depression. Grandfather, who quit schooling after the 8th grade so he could go to work to make a living because his father was a drunk, had found him a job in the Forest Service. (Because of my drunk great grandfather, my grandfather, my dad and myself have never drank alcohol because we have seen how alcohol can destroy families.) My grandfather made sure that my dad and his brother never went hungry and was honest as the day was long, but grandfather was a tough man. My grandpa had left school to work after 8th grade, so his son could certainly work a good job for the Forest Service when he was 15. So my father, hardly 15, was off packing mules and supplies to the front line guys making roads and fighting fires. As a young kid, he was thrown in with 20 to 40 year old men. Many of them hard from living life on the road and away from their family. He said that he had to sleep on his shoes, or the other guys in the camp would steal them.

After being in the woods for multiple weeks, he said that he got home sick. So, he hitchhiked back into Portland to see his folks. When he showed up at the front door, they scolded him.

“No sense in coming home, when I went out and got you a good job,” my grandfather said. He wasn’t being mean. My grandfather was trying to teach him the ropes. He was trying to teach him to be independent and tough.

If my dad was hard on his kids, it was nothing like what he went through.

Dad went to Oregon State University, and worked in a gas station to put himself through college.  My grandpa was ambivalent toward college.  Remember, he did fine with his 8th grade education. This was to be a point of conflict for the rest of my dad and grandpa’s life. Grandpa thought that his son was always trying to show himself smarter because he had a college education. My dad always knew this was a silly issue, and he eagerly wanted his children to go to college. My dad was independent at 17 and getting his degree.

He said that “I did my college homework on the bus going to school. Math was the simple subject.”

I have never, in all of my life, met a man with a more natural aptitude toward numbers. Even while I got into college, I got stumped on a problem.  My dad after not seeing a calculus book for 30 years, sat down and quickly remembered how to do the math problem. He would roll numbers around in his mind, and spit out estimations like some type of an iPhone app. While my Mom had a gift of humanities, grandpa was a walking calculator.

He was in college when a day that would live in infamy hit. He said that he was in his dorm room, with his roommate that smoked like a chimney, when he heard that “the Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor” on December 7th, 1941. So, he graduated from school, but enlisted in the military rather than be drafted. Since he was a bright young man, they decided to put him in the Air force. They needed meteorologists, and they trained my mechanical engineering dad to forecast the weather. All of his life, he would look at the weather forecasts and do a better job than the TV weatherman. They had contests for the recruits to see how they could predict weather patterns, and no surprise, dad was good at the Northwest, so they put him in the Northwest.

During this time, he took a trip to California to visit the homeland of his Church, the Apostolic Faith Church. This church came out of the Azusa Street Revival in the early 1900’s, and Los Angles was always considered fondly, even though the Church headquarters was in Portland, Oregon. This particular church branch is highly unique in its teaching. It was Methodist in its theology (free will reigned as all important). It was Holiness in its application (no smoking, no lipstick, no movies, no television). It was Pentecostal in its beliefs (healing of the lame, the cripple and speaking in tongues often happened). And it was conservative in its services (no speaking in tongues in the big assembly. No standing. An orchestra would play in the front of the church every Sunday the old hymns.) Because of the strange and unique features of the Church, no other Church was anything like it. However, it could be clique-like in its overtones and saw its fair share of politics. However, Dad was 100% part of this church and bought into the way it operated.

On the trip, he went to a social gathering for the Church with young men and women. Both my mom and dad were at that party.  Mom said that the military boy (my Dad) had all the stories and laughter revolving around him. He was an exceptional pianist, and she was intrigued. Dad also heard that my Mother was playing the organ, and if I remember correctly, he went to Church to hear her play. He thought she played quite nicely, and thought that maybe he should figure out if she was the type of girl he should pursue. So, he then went on to try to find out how smart my Mom was, and when he found out that she was valedictorian of her class, it sealed the deal.

Later in life, he often said that marrying a dumb wife would be dumb.  He would explain how he check out my Mom’s smarts before getting emotionally involved.  Later in the relationship my mom found out my dad had been asking about how bright she was. She was quite mad, and she would say, “What happened if something happened to me after being married and I became dumb?” Dad would always say something like, “Honey, it’s different after you’re married. I was just checking out before.”

The budding romance started to falter, however.  My mom’s father had died, and my mom, who was courting my Dad after the Los Angles meeting via mail, started working full time to bring home enough money to feed her family because she was the oldest in the family.  As the oldest, she was going to provide and she said that she felt guilty buying stockings for work because she couldn’t give this money to her family. My dad would later say that he worried that my mom was literary giving herself malnutrition during this time, because she saw food as a luxury. He wondered if this impacted her whole life. During this time, she not only wasn’t eating right, but she stops sending letters to my dad.

When the mail dried up, dad was heartbroken and hurt. The few letters he wrote were not returned. He would make the military guy, who delivered the mail, empty the mail sack every time to make sure he had not missed a letter from my mom. They stopped communicating.

However, the war final was over, and my aunts and uncles started to get old enough to also provide for the family, and my mom and dad met again.

“Do you want to get together,” asked my Mom.

“If we get together, we’re getting married,” said my Dad.

[The following fourparagraghs are an additon to the original story 11/1/2009 after my sister brought up the following]

My mother was serious about my father, and she decided that this really was the man that she loved.  However, she knew that dad was raised right, and that dad even knew who Jesus Christ was.  However, my dad had not given over to the will of the Lord.  Those of us from the methodist background have a term that we call “backslidden,” which means that somebody has fallen out of step with God.  If somebody dies during this stage, it means that they go to God without forgiveness.  Now, I do not know if dad was backslidden.  I doubt that mom would have even dated him if he was backslidden, but mom knew that dad hadn’t really given all of his life over to the Lord.  She also knew what type of a man my dad was.  My dad would rather face hell fire and damnation rather than admit that he was wrong about something.  All the Deffenbaugh’s had a very strong backbone, and a strong inability to say that they were wrong.  It is a fault in the family.

However, when they do admit they are wrong, it is because they know that they are truly broken and contrite of heart.  My mom knew that my dad could not lie to her or to the church.  She told him, “I’m not marrying a man that doesn’t have the right relationship with Jesus.  I’m not marrying you unless you go down in front of the church and confess the Lord Jesus as your savior.”

For some men this would be a disaster.  They would lie to themselves and to their wives to just get what they want.  This is a story that my mom would tell and my dad would agree to, but even years after it happened, dad didn’t want to talk about it much.  My dad knew that he hadn’t given his life completely to the Lord, and he may of remembered what his grandma Deffenbaugh told him so many years when he heard the story of how his brother was healed.  I don’t know what was going through my dad’s head, because he never told us.  What we do know is that my dad rededicated his life to the Lord, and my mom saw him go down to the front of the church, and come back with the right relationship with the Lord.  “I was there,” my Aunt Norma said at my Dad’s funeral. 

I don’t know that I could recommend this method to any couple that I know, but I think that this was a risk free thing for my mom.  My mom had a sixth sense about those that she loved, and she knew that as a wife the one thing she would never let her man do, would be to back away from the salvation found in Christ Jesus.  During his whole life, my dad loved his salvation, but for most of his life, his salvation was made richer by his wife.  And if it was my mom that encouraged him to go down that aisle, it was a decision that he made, and made him love his eventual wife all the more for all the days that he knew her.

He walked the aisle.  They got married, and Dad was proud they were both virgins.

The fact that my Mom and Dad got married must have caught everybody off guard.  My father had a short temper, and often said things that he would later regret.  His wife would never say a bad word about anybody.  Her family generally came from stock that reflected the gentle side of human nature.  If somebody stole something, her family might say “well you never know if that person needed the money more than us.”  My dad would have grabbed a 2 by 4 and gone after the thief. Occasionally, his loss of temper resulted for the good.

An example is from when they were first married: my grandmother on my mom’s side never had much money, but what little she had, she would share.  If she had an house, any one could ask her for a nights stay.  In one instance, my mom’s mother had a family that was living with her.  My grandmother had given up her bed to the couple, and she was sleeping on the couch and sewing shirts to make ends meet.  (My grandmother sewed shirts for Sammy Davis Jr and Clark Gable in Los Angeles, but since her church didn’t allow her to see movies, she had no idea of who they were.  She had a gift with a sewing needle and was in demand.  She admitted that Mr Davis was very nice, but Mr Gable was no fun to be around.)

My dad was visiting his mother-in-law and saw this family homesteading in her house.  He went into the house, blew his fuse, and threw them out of the house.

“They were living off of a widow,” he said.

My mom said it was one of the best things that my dad did when they were first married.  She knew that it was the wrong thing for these people to leach off of my grandmother, and while she could have never of throw that group out of her mother’s house, my dad did it effortlessly, and felt no guilt about it.

Even my grandmother was grateful, but at the same time, she felt that my dad was tough on this family without a job.  If it was up to her, she would have left them stay since they had a tough life.  I asked her about the incident when I was only a child of 11 after I had heard the story one day in the car from my mom and dad.

“Your dad is a hard man,” was the only words she wanted to say.

Dad was so involved in the church that he decided to become a lay teacher. As my mom would tell the story, they were part of the church, and the services and events that dad would hold were very well attended and growing. As a matter of fact, it became apparent that the senior pastor of the church was getting smaller and smaller groups to his services and the off night events led by my dad was getting larger and larger. Then one day, the senior pastor came in and announced to other people on his staff that my dad “had lost the Spirit of The Lord in his preaching.” Overnight, my dad was told that he couldn’t lead events, and his career as a lay pastor was broken. He told various flavors of the story all the years of his life. It broke his heart, and ended up turning him out of his chosen church, as nobody in the senior management of the church checked on the events. Although this was filled with pain, it got him out of the ministry, which I believe was the best for his life. When I was a young man I thought I might want to be in the ministry, and dad came in and clearly called out that he would not stop me, but I needed to feel the call of God calling me out. “I believe you can’t force your way in,” he said. He had tried, and he had failed.

Now, it would be easy for some to blame the Church that dad went to for the unkind words that he received.  Perhaps, some in the church might recognized that my dad had a bit of an ego, and I’ll never know if dad was too aggressive.  This is not the point.  If you knew him later in life, you would recognize that not to use his skills in business would have been a vast misuse of his talent.  Although struggling in his church, he loved his church, and even years later, he would reflect back kindly and with passion on the lesson of this church.  Although he may have had hurt still from those many years ago, I could see that it was all by the hand of providence for the best.

Even with these problems, it was an easy life at first being married because dad was hired by Shell Oil, and he was perceived as an up and comer. After being there for a couple of months, they told him that he needed to go to the library and find all the resources so Shell could start refining asphalt. As a young engineer, he came back with the solution, and the plant went on to add this process to their output. They told him that he had a very bright future and would probably end up being the senior engineer (the top technical person at the plant), but my grandfather needed help on his farm, so Dad decided he needed to help him out and he quit Shell Oil.

So, after being in the Forest Service, after being in the Air Force, after being a Meteorologist, after being a preacher, and after being an oil man designing refineries, he became a farmer. Dad read every science book on farming there was. My Grandfather, with only his 8th grade education, would read everything, but couldn’t do the science. However, when the mint on the farm started throwing off 3 times the previous yield, my grandfather knew something right was happening.

My dad and grandfather would get along great. However, my grandmother always wanted to help my dad and mom run their life. So after turning around the farm (and hurting his back in the process), dad knew that he needed to get his wife away from his mom. My grandmother was loving but controlling. However, my grandparents felt abandoned, and when my dad left the farm, he had nary a cent. My grandmother’s brother and his wife, “Uncle John and Aunt Edith” took in the young couple in their house in Seattle. Mom would almost always be in tears when she describe this time, as he was so thankful that somebody took them in.

So mom and dad were in Seattle, and dad was bright and interviewed everywhere. Except for Boeing. He did not want to get a job at Boeing. He heard bad stories about them. He heard they were big. He looked everywhere. And when all job avenues closed down, he said he came home one night.

“I took my hat off my head and was throwing it on the shelf, and I told your Mom, ‘Well honey, maybe the Lord just wants me to work at Boeing, and if that’s what he wants, I guess I should go,’” he said. He said he gave up his will to God’s will. And as soon as he said it, he felt the power of God come down on his shoulders and he began to cry like a baby. He told that story many times to me, and each time he describe the hat going onto the shelf with a mime of the action, his voice would break and he would catch himself before he shed a tear. 50 years after the fact, the same emotions.

He went down to Boeing, and they hired him immediately to work manufacturing engineering. However, by this time, he had two young girls. He needed more money to get a place to live. He heard that they were hiring in finance, and he said, “I only wanted to know one thing. Were they paying overtime?”

They were and he moved. He went into estimating contracts, and became extremely successful. He had up to 1,300 people working for him at one time. He setup Boeing’s plant in Huntsville, Alabama.

“They told me that they’d make me a Vice President if I moved to Wichita, but I couldn’t see moving you kids,” he told us. Tough man. Soft heart.

So, he continued to work at Boeing, but he said that he needed some future earning power. He always listened to my grandfather. As I said, my grandfather was tough, but he loved my dad. They fought, but he loved my dad. He basically left him without a penny after the farm, but he loved my dad. For instance, when dad bought a piece of land to build his first house, my grandfather came down and put weeks of free effort into helping my Dad build a house on it. All for free.

Now my grandfather was filled with prudence and entrepreneurship. Grandpa had bought business, lands and apartments. So, when dad said that he needed some investments, my grandfather offered his advice. Part of this was to buy my grandfather’s old farm. Many years later, when the farm turned out to be an incredibly lucrative investment, some in the family thought that my Dad had some how cut out his brother. My Dad used to tell me, “I offered it to my brother first, and told him that I was going to buy it if he didn’t. Your uncle laughed at me and basically said that it was a useless piece of land.”

The land was in Vancouver, Washington. Dad had read in the newspaper that the long term plan for the area was to have a bridge to Portland in the next 20 year. He knew that the land value to sky rocket some day in the future after the bridge came in. So he bought the land. Many years later, it was worth millions of dollars. Many people will say, “Man don’t you wish we have bought this land 20 years ago?” Dad was the man that did it.

He had this investment, he had other investments. He bought apartments and nursing homes. When he finally retired from Boeing, he had enough. He was 60 years old, and he “retired” to his 20 acre spread on Puget Sound with my mother.

Retired to most people means golfing. To Dad it meant taking a piece of land and turning it into a little piece of heaven. So while he would put in roughly 25 years at Boeing, he would end up putting in 24 years as a full time job of recreating 20 acres on Puget Sound. I could not begin to describe everything that he did, but, as an example, when my Mom stated she wanted the house that was on the property to be their permanent home, Dad decided that it was a bit too small, so he propped up each of the four sides and pushed the walls out. He did things that most men would never consider doing.

Then 6 years ago he lost his wife of over 50 years. She was 79 years old and still playing the Organ for church all these years. Her death was amazing. They had a church group at the house, and they were singing hymns. My Mom, who was playing the piano, said “I’m dizzy,” and passed out. She died within 24 hours of a brain hemorrhage. We thought the loss of his wife would kill him, but while he was down for about a year, he came back. He found his friends, made his property shine, and was delighted when my Children would spend their summer vacations at the house with my wife. I always asked him to come to California, but he said he wanted to die in his Port Orchard house.

However, 4 years ago, he called me on the phone.

“My lungs aren’t that good, and they think that asbestos got into my lungs and it is going to kill me,” he said.

Somewhere in the years, he was working in the refinery. Asbestos was everywhere, and he said that he had often been covered in fine fiber. While we close down a house today if a little is found in the ceiling, he had been breathing in asbestos dust. After all these years, the fibers were cutting his lungs apart. While he could still argue the finer points of the economy, his lungs were giving out. I had my wife and kids spend an extra long summer vacation with him this year, as I expected that maybe I would only get one more year out of him. When I visited him a couple of months ago, he would sit in the kitchen in front of the big window that overlooked the Puget Sound, and we would talk just like we had for the last 40 years of my life. He would watch “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” with my kids every night and guess the answers. My Dad and I even went around on his property in his motorized golf cart. While he didn’t want to walk very far, we would talk about everything. He would describe the buildings he wants to build, and the changes that he wanted to make to the land. So, when he said he wasn’t sure he would last over 6 months, I was sure he was wrong.

But my sister called me on Thursday to say that dad couldn’t get up the stairs, and that his helper had found him in between the floors. So, they got him into bed, and they called hospice. Hospice put him on a morphine drip, and while my sister was driving to his house, he died. Not 5 paces from where his beloved wife had taken ill and lost conscious just 6 years earlier.

And while I have a jagged hole in my soul, and my heart feels as if it will break, I recognize that it was a life well spent, and I know he ended up doing exactly what he wanted to do.

He died in his house today next to where his wife had left his side.

Although there is grief in passing, I know that he had many books on the scriptures, and I saw him many times by the side of his bed praying. Death had no fear for him, and when I go, I hope that I can go the same way.

God is good.

Morning Ride

Here I am riding to the local park.  As you can see, this is my mountain bike cockpit.

I have a week off, and I am hoping that I can get some stuff done around the house.  One of the challenges with my current job is that I pretty much put our 100% during the week.  By the weekend, I am blitzed.  I generally do nothing other than websurf and watch some videos.  If this wasn’t helpful, I wouldn’t do it.  However, after a weekend of doing nothing but what I want to do, I find that I can show up at work with my batteries at 100%.  So, I am on a treadmill of discharge/charge/discharge.

While this doesn’t make for the best family time, at least I know that I am providing for my family.  However, what really gets to me is that all the stuff that I would really like to do simply does not get done.  So, I decided that I am going to try to get engaged on all the stuff that I want to do after I’ve had my normal down weekend.  One of the first things for me to get going is to get some type of physical activity in to get the day going.  Thus this is the mountain biking that you can see above.

My son, who is getting bigger and stronger all the time, decided to go with me.  On one very steep hill, he eventually went blasting past me.

The hill may not look steep in this picture, but believe me, I was walking.

I came back and disassembled my wife’s mountain bike since it has two flat tires, and if I don’t change them, then will stay flat forever.  At the same time, I took off the door hinge on a busted door.  I am starting to get ready to do work, which is cool.  I hate having a bunch of stuff undone around the house.

The only problem that I had this morning was my cramping quad and hamstring.  I did some nerve damage to myself a couple of years ago running too much.  Now, everytime that I start to run, I get the feeling that my quad is going to cramp.  While this feels like this, I have to thing that it is nerve damage because it comes on way to quick to be anything else. Generally, I don’t care because I can still bike.  It must be some compression on the spine that does it.

However, the mountain biking was so hard this morning that I felt my right quad start to go into cramps.  Since I would like to ride this route every day for a morning starter, I am scared that I’m only going to get worse from here.  I can still feel some soreness as I sit here and blog.

We’ll see tomorrow.

6 Week Gap

I’ve been up since 5am this morning.  Finally, as I think about going to work, I decided that after 6 weeks, I would post something to my personal blog.  While I have a few people visit this blog from the family, the reason to put something down on web page is really for myself.  And this post is really about my faith and my own path in life.

There has been some changes during the last six weeks.  After spending almost 7 years in my job in the marketing group where I work, I’ve move more into a engineering/business processes job on the engineering job inside my same company.  Without going through the details, divine providence has led me to this spot.  It was the best match for what I am doing inside of my current company.  However, there is emotional overtones as I leave a different part of the business.  I will no longer have “marketing” on my business cards.  Instead, I will have engineering on my business cards.

One of the best parts about my new job is my supervisor and my supervisor’s supervisor.  They are really smart and driven personalities that fundamentally have a thought process that I resonnant with.  It is a very good match.

However, I am still deeply going to miss what I was doing.

So, the thing to remember through all of this is the idea of divine providence.  While I enjoy my new team, this is not strictly the path that I saw myself on.  So, this is a new direction, and while I am going to work hard and construct value out of my current job, I am not sure if this would have been the perfect career choice for me if I was able to pick my own path.  In this way, I am very similar to what I’ve been listening to on my Jon Coursen podcasts.  Jon has been going through King David’s life.  If you want to pick somebody that is an example of a hero of the faith, it is King David.  David’s life is in clear contrast to Saul.

I believe that one of the key characteristics of why David was called a man’s after God’s own heart is his ability to simply accept whatever came his way.  Contrast this with Saul.  Saul could not stand to have his career challenged.  David was told at a young age that there was a plan for his life.  He was to be King.  David had this amazing ability to say, “I have a plan in my life.  I know what is it.  I will wait until it has been given to me.”  He simply did not fight divine providence.  Realize, that things many time looked absolutely horrible for him.  He had a little early career success, then he was fired from his job.  Even worse, his old boss, King Saul, came after him and was trying to kill him.  By all rational thought, David should have been killed by having the most powerful man of his land trying to kill him.

King Saul is interesting in the same way.  He was told that he was doing the wrong thing.  He was told that he was to be moved aside.  Saul had the reaction that many of us have.  He fought the move.  He manuevered.  He manipulated.  He did everything in his power to hang on.  Because of this approch, he and his key children died.  All because he tried to fight providence.

So, to me, the message is clear.  We are presented with God’s path every day.  We can choose to fight against the path, or we can walk the path.  I am not saying that I know how to walk the path perfectly, but I purpose that I will do it the best I can.

Two Gear Theo

This is me looking at my broken derailleur shifter.  This is all the evidence of a rather tragic occurrence this morning.  I’m biking into work, and about 2 miles away from work, my rear derailleur slips into the lowest gear.  I try to shift it out of the lowest gear (high gear) and it just won’t go.  So, I reach down and try pulling on the cable.  Since I ride a Mountain bike for commuting (and most road bikes are like this now), there is a section of the wire that is exposed.  As I am pulling on the cable, it simply slides out of the housing.  I realize that my cable is broken.  I only have the high gear, and there is one big hill before work.

Some how, with a bit of help from my motor, I make it up over the hill  and into work.

You can see the detail of th break below.  The end of the cable is stuck in the shift lever.

I contemplate a couple of ideas.  There is a bike shop about 3 miles away from work.  I could ask somebody at lunch to take me to the bike shop, or I could ride (very slowly on my busted bike) to the bike shop.  However, I think about it for a bit, and I pull the old set screw trick.

You may ask “what is this trick?”  If you look at your rear derailleur there are two screws in the back of it.  If you have a Shimano derailleur, it is very simple.  The high screw controls the high gear.  The low screw controls the low gear.  If you screw in the high gear screw, it moves the derailleur so that it hits a stop and goes no further.  This is why the derailleur stops and doesn’t go into the spokes or into the end nuts.  Sometimes it get misadjusted, and you have just those problems.

The thing is that you can screw in the screw until it can’t even get to the highest gears.  This is what I did, and I got the bike into about 4th gear.

I could now use two front gears.  This allowed me to bike home.  The gears were basically good around 12-16 MPH.  However, beyond this, you either pedalled way to fast or too slow for comfort.  I got home, and I spent about an hour fishing out the end of the broken cable.  I finally had to take the end housing apart.  However, I think it is good enough for biking tomorrow.

I now love my gears, and let me clue you, old men need more than two gears.

Pool, Kids and Sunrise

Here I am all shaded up and walking into the local pool.  My wife has been pretty gung-ho for swimming in the morning.  I think that she felt that she was getting too old for running every day, and some how she’d end up hurting herself.  She doesn’t want to bike, because she’s afraid that she’ll be killed (and explaining why she always says that “I’ll be praying for you” whenever I call to tell her that I am headed home.)

So, a couple of years ago, she was going to our development’s pool in the morning to swim.  As she was doing her own work out, there was the master’s swimming club next to her.  They watched her coming every day, and pretty soon it was “hey, why don’t you come and join us?”  After a little bit of thinking about it, she decided to join them and now I get to hear stories about Coach Todd and the unofficial leader of the group Morgan and his wife.  Actually, they are very nice people, and if I wasn’t trying to bike to work, I may be with her in the morning.

She had a swim meet this weekend, and she wanted us to come down and count laps for her.  She knew that the older kids wanted to stay home, so I just bought the younger.

You know, you really don’t have to stick around your kids much to realize how cute they really are.  Now mind you, they get into problems and fights, but where else are you going to find kids that are so cool.  Even better, they came from my wife and myself, and you can see little bits of pieces of the woman I love and myself in them.

The day was just a tiny bit nippy, and I really didn’t need to wear shorts.  The heats were taking a while to get going, and the kids played around on the bleachers and stuff.  My wife was swimming the 1000 meters, which is 40 times 25 meters (or is it a thousand yards?  I’m not sure.)  Anyways, I was supposed to hold an underwater sign with numbers on it to help signal the number of laps.  If she was going too slow, you wiggled the sign up and down.  I thought this was dumb, as you are always going to slow in any race.  My wife wanted to do 1:30 100 yards.

She a funny one.  She always get nervous before any race.  Now, you think that being in her 40s, she would have gotten over that.  I mean that shes done hundreds of races, and now it really doesn’t matter what her time is.  However, she still gets nervous, and needed to use the bathroom several times.

She finished in 15:55, which I could never do.

As I stated, however, I am biking in the morning.  Unlike looking at the bottom of a pool, I get to see stuff like this in the morning, as I was going into work the other day.

I think I’ll keep my biking route.  By the way, since I had to reinstall my power meter, I want everybody to know that a PC-48 chain has 114 links with the superlink and weights 310g.  This means it has a length of 1448.

One of trivia questions one may need to know.

What Would Jesus Not Do

A friend of mine sat across the table tonight, who is not particularly religious, and said “What would Jesus do.?”

After further reflection, I am sure that Jesus would not do what I did today.

This is one of those days when you wished that you could go back in a time machine and relive the experience to do it again.  So let me take you through the history.

About 2 years ago, I made a bet with somebody, that worked in my group at work, about how the real estate market was going to do in the next year.  I am not real estate crazy, but this person,  had just self published a book on how to gain wealth, and one of the things that he never talked about was owning your own house.  I made the point to him that owning a house was basically federal subsidy due to the tax break.  However, he said, “Well, I just think that there is a bubble, and I can save money by not buying now.”

So, I made a simple bet.  If the marekt for a standard 2000 sq foot house fell 4% in one year, I would pay him a fairly small amount of money.  We talking about  an hour worth of wages for me.  The amount of the bet was not important.  A matter of fact, I was extremely sure that I was going to win the bet, and I had already purposed to not collect on it.  This was to be an object lesson.

However, rewind the clock one year ago, the market was just about to sour.  Mister Brainiac (me) had gone from a sure thing to somewhat questionable.  However, I had made a very specific bet (based on data in the local newspaper) that a 2000 square foot house would fall 4%.  Generally, the market for high end houses fall first, and at the end of the bet, we could not find the data.  When the bet was done, my standpoint was that neither of us won because there was no data.  If anything, the market was almost right on top of the bet.  No clear winner.  However, 5 to 6 months later, the market went into a free fall.  At this time, I said, “well, I’ll pay you.”  I figures that even though there was no data, the general tone of the bet was won by the other guy.

However, the other bettor had left our company, and he said, “You know, I now have a web based business.  Just buy an order from me for the amount of the debt.  I get an order.  You get goods, and we both win.”

I told him that this was a great idea, and I would do it.  However, work was so busy, this got put onto my todo list, and it was promptly forgotten.  Mind you, this was my error.  It was something that I said that I would do that I didn’t do.

So, I come into my office today, six months after I said I would place an order, and  I hit my voice mail, and the guy that “won” the bet leaves a voicemail.

“You owe me the bet money, and it has been a year since the conclusion of the bet.  You have not paid.  So, here is my address, and I want you to mail me a check for the amount.”

Let’s me simply say that I was miffed.  Really, miffed.  So, I wrote him an email.  I stated that their was never any evidence that he won the bet in the first place, but I did say I would place an web order.  So, he had two options.  The first was to give me any proof that he originally won the bet.  The second was to take the web order.  If he could show the first case, I would gladly pay.  Otherwise, I would do what we agreed to.

I’m in my office an hour later, and he calls.

“Hey, man how you doing?” he asks after not talking to me for a year.

“What you want?” I answer

“Well you own me money,” he says.

“Listen show me you won the bet, or I’m going to place a order on your website right now.  You choose.”

He then starts to lecture me on how its been a year, and how I need to pay him money.  I say that that wasn’t the deal, and he had two options and pick now.

“Well the web, but….” he starts to say.

“Thank you.  Good bye,”  I said.  Because now I am just steaming.

I place the web order, and write him an email to remove me from his contact list.

He writes me back, “A shame we did not get a chance to chat, as I left you my number this morning and alternatively would have been willing when I called again just now. You were the best manager I served at….  The bet was finished over year ago. I sent you several messages…”

I wrote him back, “Let me lay this out for you.  I never got any messages.  Never.  I sent one message in Nov 2008 to confirm that I was going to buy something from the web, which I did forget as things stay hectic.  If it were me, a (bet) would not be worth ending a friendship.  I would suggest you look into Spam filters.”

See, I think he may have sent me some stuff, but I think the spam filters caught it and I never saw it.  So, basically, the only thing that I ever got from him was a nasty voicemail today.

Still steaming a bit, I went out to dinner with a good friend tonight, and told him that I was peeved, and I explained the story.

“Why would anybody want to end a friendship over an insignificant bet?” he asked.

He then paused.  Out of the blue, he said, “What would Jesus do?”

I gave him an answer, but I know that I didn’t do what Jesus would have done.  In this case, I think it would create a very bad message to give my bet person the full amount in cash.  We had a deal.  I blew a deadline, but this guy was basically just mean.  Giving in does him no good.  If your kids nag you about giving them candy, the last thing you do is give the the candy.  Giving in makes things worse.

However, I knew what was right, and I should have not lost my temper.  I should have immediately placed the web order.  I should have apologized for having it slipped my mind, but not allow my bet buddy to dictate what I owed him.

Then I should have shaken the dust off my feet.

Hanging with bad influences never helps you or the bad influence.

Day 3 of the Vaction: Listen to the Costco’s Tire Guy

Today is the third day of my vacation.  I guess that I’ve done something that I needed to do every single day.  Day one was the buying and installing of a dishwasher.  I’ve already written about that.  Day 2 was the rebuilding of my PC.  Admittedly, Day 1 and Day 2 tasks were a little smunched together.

The other task that I have is to buy new tires.  Really, the old tires still have some life left in them.  Probably I could geet another 10 to 15 thousand miles except for the wife.  She’s driven the car a couple of times in the rain, and she feels a little bit of slipping or hydroplaning in the car.  I am not convinced that the depth of tread is making that much of a difference, but when she gets that look in her eye, I don’t argue.

I actually came down on Monday to get tires, but theere was a 3 hour wait.  I decided that this was too long, so I asked the Costco guy how the wait was in the morning.

“What you really need to do is get here about 15 to 20 minutes early and just wait outside the door,” he said.

It sounded like a pretty good idea, and I think that I would have done it if I had not been busy this morning.  However, I was a bit late as my wife wanted to check out account balances online.  When I’m not at home, she’ll call people.  However, as soon as I am home, suddenly everything becomes “can you check this online for me?”

She is not much of an online person, and I told her unless she really wants to learn how to use the internet, I really would rather not have her doing a bunch of stuff on line where somebody could phish her.  She is happy with her email.

However, I had not set up all the credit cards that she wanted, so I went about getting my credit cards locked in, and I updated my SplashID database.  (I should write about SplashID sometime on my serious blog, but it is truly a neat app for the Palm an PC.)

By the time that I had gotten everything done, it was too late to show up early.  So, instead, I thought to myself, “I bet that I’m a lucky guy.  If I show up at 10am, I bet the line won’t be that bad.”

I show up at 10am, and there are about 8 people in front of me waiting at the door.  I guess that they  listened to the Costco tire guy.  By the time that I get in the door, pay my bill, and get in the waiting line, it is 10:30am.  So, I have waited 30 minutes just to get to the front of the line.  What is worse is that the wait time for new tires for the first people is just 1 hour.  By the time that it got to me, it became 2.5 hours.

The cool thing about my geeky lifesytyle, however, is that I have my Palm and my scriptures, so I ended up catching up on my Bible reading while waiting in line and a bit afterwards.  I then went outside to write this blog, as I sit in the outdoor hotdog area.

Then again, I wouldn’t need to write about waiting at Costcos at all….If I only listened to the Costco’s Tire guy in the first place.

All Washed Up

If you are wondering, yes that is me on the floor.  If you look behind me, you’ll see the object of my affection.  Our dishwasher, or should I say our freshly bought dishwasher off of Craigslist.  You wouldn’t be able to tell much of a difference between our old and new dishwashers because they are the exact same model.

Pretty mundane looking isn’t it.  If you look close at this photo, you’ll be able to see that I put in a shim at the top of the dishwasher to block in the appliance.  This is necessary because up top on the dishwasher there are two little metal straps to screw this into the top of the frame.  I am telling you this incase you ever need to remove a dishwasher.

The real trick on this one is the fact that the guys that installed the dishwasher did not install a flexible tube.  Instead, they decided that they could take some copper tubbing and just stretch it enough so that it could just barely get to the front end of the dishwasher.  The front of the dishwasher has a fitting for the hot water pipe.

Now, if you knew how the dishwater was installed, you would have unscrewed the bottom pannel, the way that I have it here.  You would have then looked at the copper tubing and you would have said, “My, my, this is stupid, if you try and pull out the dishwasher, you be pulling against the copper pipe.  However, I did not have instructions, and, yes, I was reefing on the thing trying to get it to come out even though it was attached to the wall.  Luckily, I finally figured it out.

If you look under the dishwasher, you can see just how tight the copper tubing is.  It actually goes to the back of the cabinets, then if takes a right.  What it does is actually sneak through the corner of the cabinets and jogs over to the kitchen sink.  So when I was pulling on it, I was actually both pulling the cutoff valve and I was bending the pipe.

Although the pipe was bent, I could tell that it still could flow water.   I assembled it, let it sit over night, and the dishwasher seems to be running just fine.

As I said, I actually got the dishwasher off of Craigslist for $150.  Normally, dishwasher run somewhere around $500.  This was an okay one, and the couple that were selling it replaced it with a stainless steel one.  The dishwasher had been used a very, very little amount.  My wife said, “Man, that just looks new.”

I guess that somebody would have charged me $100 to put it in.  So, I saved around $450.  But I burned a vacation day to put it in.  However, what else are vacations for?