Oh, Dad! I inhaled when he removed his Air Force cap. Tufts of silver and black hair fluffed up in patches on his head while the rest was bald. I looked at him, I mean really looked at him for the first time since he started chemotherapy. He’d lost weight. Which was probably good since his spleen weighed 12 lbs at the time of his diagnosis. His arms, so strong just a few months ago, appeared now to have too much skin to cover their sinewy length. His broad shoulders, which once paraded a little me like a princess up the steps to be tucked into bed were now slumped, no longer able to fill out the polo shirt that covered them. His pants were too big too. The belt made the top of the khaki’s ruffle around his tucked in polo and the bagginess of them made him look more Cirque than Chic. But it was the hair that broke my heart.

“It was falling out anyway so I tried to shave it off myself.” My father admitted, “But I didn’t do a very good job of it.” And he smiled embarrassed, this act endeared him to me more than any I love you could have done in that moment.

“Do you want me to fix it for you?” I asked him, dropping my purse and car keys on the dinning room table and already walking toward the hall closet for the clippers.

“If you don’t have anything better to do…” And I didn’t.

“The doctor said the tumor is shrinking.” He told me. He was now seated on the edge of the bathtub, head poised over the sink.

“That’s great news!” I smiled, allowing my heart to relax a little as I oiled up the clippers “So you and mom will be going to Texas next winter after all?”

“I’m not going to get better.” He told me, reaching out and placing a hand on my shoulder. “This isn't that kind of cancer.” Our eyes locked and we were both quiet for a time.

“Well, that sucks.” I finally said. My voice held all the same emotion as if he just announced an expensive car repair bill. He nodded then leaned his head over the sink. I took longer than I needed to shaving his head, blinking back tears but not shedding them.  I did this for him, it seemed important to not cry. I watched as silver and black strands of hope collected in the sink basin.

“All done?” He asked when I finally turned off the clippers. His tone said nothing unusual here, just getting a haircut from my daughter.

“Done.” I responded by rote. He didn’t even look in the mirror; he just ran his hand over his scalp and walked out of the bathroom. I knew he did this for me.  I turned the water on in the sink without thinking and a heartbeat later wondered why it didn't occur to me to save a lock of his beautiful silver and black hair. I took my time cleaning up the clippers and putting them away.

When I came out I smiled up at him and appraised my work. “Looks good.” I told him. Nope…nothing unusual here, Dad.

“Yeah?” He didn’t really ask, but I nodded anyway. “Good.”

Imagine this scenario. You're sipping on your coffee enjoying the peace and tranquility of the last fleeting moments of summer. You're out in the wilderness, away from the craziness of traditional consumer driven civilization. You're actually feeling pretty satisfied and morally superior because you've just finished washing your dishes, laundry, and hair with the same bottle of good old Dr. Bronner's (you had an ecological conscience after all before it was easy to be Green). Your iPod is pumping Instant Karma directly into your ears. You're rocking out to the "Working Class Hero" and thinking blasphemously that it might actually be better than the original.

You're thinking that surely this is the pinnacle of existence when your thoughts are interrupted by the high pitched enthusiastic squee of your name. You look up and in disbelief see familiar faces walking toward you. These are the last people you would expect to run into camping on a volcano…and not just because they're about two thousand miles

from where you left them.

"Huh?" Is all you can manage…you haven't finished your coffee yet, so no one can really expect your higher brain functions to be operating.

"It's so good to see you!! What are you doing here??? What have you been up to lately???" they want to know. And this is irritating because they're genuine in their curiosity and well wishes, and you know you can only disappoint them with your lackluster weekend.

"Uh…I went into Seattle last weekend. How 'bout you?" you answer honestly.

"Oh," and she whips out her digital camera to show you pictures, "We just got back from Darfur." Darfur, huh? Figures. Couldn't be something like Starbucks. No. Friggin' Darfur. You glance down at your iPod no longer feeling morally superior and comtemplate telling them you bought the CD, then realize that would just sound lame.. So…how do you respond to easing the human suffering of thousands?

"Um…I got a Krispy Kreme while I was in town."


My home town is a tiny little German community quite literally in the middle of nowhere. The grocery store doesn't take credit cards; you can charge on family name alone. The little café has two kinds of salad, potato and macaroni. The sign coming into town says "Willkomen" and it is as big an insult to be called a hunyuck as it is a redneck

I tell you this to give you an introduction to the general mindset of the community. I had the misfortune of sitting next to a couple of these above mentioned hunyucks during my hometown Independence Day celebration. Now, because these men had the "right name" (small towners will know what this means), there were no consequences to the actions I am about to describe.

After the annual fried chicken dinner is over, there's not really much to do at the fairgrounds beside listen to the polka band and the "talent" show until it gets dark. These inebriated men, sitting about five feet away from me, decided to take it upon themselves to give a little pre-show. From time to time, they would take a stick of dynamite, light it, and throw it off away from the crowd where it would explode like a mortar causing furrowed brows and evil eyes from women hovering protectively over their children. Most shocking to me is the lack of response from the crowd patrolling police! C'mon people, this is a public park and there are children here. You can't have kids with bottle black jacks (those are dangerous), but let's let the men play with dynamite! I digress...

I cannot help but overhear them talking. As I mentioned, they were drunk so they had no control over the volume of their voice. They are telling some friends about there escapades from the night before. They had gotten their hands on some Vietnam era smoke bombs. The red and green kind used to send signals by soldiers. How they got their hands on these is a mystery. It is entirely possible they picked them up at a garage sale from some dear woman who had been using them as Christmas tree ornaments for the last fifty years.

Regardless, the story they recounted is such: We been throwin' em at folks all night. The red smoke id clear and we'd throw a green one. Folks'd cheer and we'd do it all over 'gain. Well, we got t'hold of this funny lookin' one that didn't say if it were red er green. We decided "what t'hell" pulled the pin and tossed it out t'where we threw the others. (He paused to give a long drawn out belly rumbling belch while I held my breath thinking that if he'd thrown a live grenade, surely it would have been on the news.) Well…It didn't go off like we s'pected… (Another drunken burp)…All of a sudden this yellow smoke started pouring out over the crowd. People was coughing, people was getting sick all over each other, and then comes this kid on a four wheeler, drove right through the middle of it and wrecked, fallin' out the seat…(by this point the man was near tears he was laughing so hard)…It was teargas in at grenade! We teargassed 'em! (At this, his drunken friend joined in the uproarious laughter)

Most horrifying of this entire experience was these men had already reproduced! Their wives were standing, listening, and shaking their heads. The one cradling a baby rolls her eyes; the message seems to convey "Boys will be boys." I couldn't believe it! Honestly, a man drops his iPod in the toilet of an airplane and is detained by homeland security for hours but a couple of good ol' boys teargas a crowd of innocent spectators and no questions are asked??? I really hope this was all just a tall tale he was telling his buddy!

So what's the moral of this story? If you find your self taking a wrong turn off I-80 and start to hear dueling banjos or the oompah of polka music turn yourself around, get back on the interstate and keep driving. Darwinism has failed.




Christmas with my family is a lengthy event that actually begins about a month before hand. It begins with my mother, sister, and I gathering in mom's spacious farm house kitchen. The walls are painted butter yellow and the red and white checkered curtains accent her Kitchen-Americana hot pads and cutting boards. We gather there to begin the holiday baking. We start with the most annoying Christmas cookie ever devised. Klugens.

A klugen, it is a small, dark, crunchy German cookie that tastes and smells like black licorice. I say it is the most annoying cookie to bake for a couple of reasons, if the dough isn't the right temperature they won't turn out properly. The recipe (which cannot be halved, quartered, or otherwise reduced—woe on you if you should attempt such folly) makes about 600 cookies. For the first two reasons, it takes roughly a month to bake Klugens. But mostly these are the annoying cookies to make because the recipe is in German.

This wouldn't be a problem if I spoke or read German, but that skill left our family several generations back. It is now up to my father, who picked up a few fragments of the language while he was in the military, to translate this generations-old recipe. He takes painstaking measures to assist us…not painstaking for him, but for us.

He will lumber into the kitchen with his cane, hook a chair back with the end and slide it to the counter next to the coffee pot. He is perfectly situated to be completely in the way, and heaven forbid we should request he take up residence elsewhere. We need him, after all. Zucker, that means Sugar. Really, couldn't you figure that out on your own??? Give me a harder one. Don't you girls have this recipe memorized yet??? I've asked my mother on several occasions why we don't just write it down. Her response is to the point as she stares over the rims of her bifocals at my father. When your father no longer translates the klugens, we no longer have to make them. So we continue; my father te-heing in the corner over his own import to this endeavor while my mother and I add ingredients and beat the dough until our arms burn with fatigue.

Next comes Christmas shopping. My father has only recently discovered the convenience of shopping online, which cuts down on the number of shopping experiences we have with Dad. He usually meets either my sister or I (never both at the same time because all you kids ever do is bicker) at the mall. We walk into the Sears automotive department (because that's where the best parking is, according to my father) and he swings his cane wildly from side to side pointing out particular items and nearly cloths-lining small children. He cackles at my admonishments and tells me that they shouldn't get in the way.

Christmas shopping with my mother and sister, on the other hand, is equally as painful. We meet at the fountain in the middle, because we are all busy women with many presents to buy and we are serious about this business. I am on a mission: Get in, get the gifts I have already written on my list, and get it over with in as little time as possible. Unfortunately my mother and sister don't subscribe to the same battle plan.

They shop in a sensory extravaganza where you move through the store at the pace of two millimeters a minutes. My mother, a short blueberry shaped woman in her wool overcoat exclaims every few minutes at the good deals or unique merchandise. My sister, who is worse than my mother, has to touch everything. It doesn't matter if you quickly thumbed through that rack looking for that cashmere scarf you have on your list, you may have missed something and it is her God-given right to point out the error in your ways.

She will yell your name across the store, like a pet owner calling a dog and you have no choice then, because she will continue to yell your name growing louder and more annoyed at your lack of obedience. You have to stop, go back to where she is (usually about five feet from the entrance as she shops at a snail pace) touch the merchandise, feel the texture, smell it, and oooh and aaah over her good taste. If she doesn't think you've admired it thoroughly enough, she will bombard you with cornucopia of questions. Isn't it pretty? Don't you think Aunt Cleo would love this? Do you think this will match that white shirt I wore on Thanksgiving? Four days after you have entered the mall, you might be allowed to move on to the next store.

Finally, all the preparation for Christmas is over. The only thing left to do is gather the entire family for the feast. My sister and I, with our husbands in tow, head to Mom and Dad's Christmas Eve. My mother has recently become a little bit like the Queen Mum where church is concerned. She starts worrying early morning about the evening service. When most other mothers are baking copious amounts of homemade bread or straightening garland on the tree, mine is leaving roughly three messages an hour on my cell phone. She is wanting to know if I'm on my way yet, did my battery die because I'm not answering, am I out of reception because I'm close to getting there and reminding me, near panic stricken, that we only have two and a half hours to get to the church fifteen minutes away.

She says it is because the church fills up so fast and she doesn't like the metal chairs. I suspect it is because she wants to show us off. For years it was just my mom, sister, and I attending Christmas Eve service. We sat quietly in the folding chairs at the back or crammed into a pew with another family so large they have spilled over to take up three and a half pews. Now, since my sister and I are both married, it's get there early and sit right up in the front. Our family takes up an entire pew and not comfortably…being squished together is a badge honor my mother wears with pride.

With service over, we head home for a Christmas Eve feast. A feast that does not include any of the baking we have been doing for weeks on end, as the cookies are for Christmas. This is a small meal, by tomorrow's comparisons. My father complains about not being allowed to eat any of the cookies, set out for admiration. My mother explains by rote that he will spoil his appetite.

My mother has also started doing something strange at dinner. Whenever my sister, our husbands, Mom and Dad are all gathered for dinner, Mom says the blessing and then begins to cry. Mom's contradictory emotional display is an uncomfortable moment for all of us. We make jokes and tell her it's okay that she didn't make gravy, or blame each other for making Mom cry. She laughs, excuses herself and is back in a flash with some brown-and-serves fresh from the oven.

After the last dish is hand washed and put back in the china hutch, its present opening time. Opening a gift is on Christmas Eve is a tradition that goes back to when my sister and I were little and it was too hard to be good and wait until Christmas day to open your gifts. We were allowed one or two presents the night before. This year, mom was more excited then the rest of us. She grew impatient at our lack of enthusiasm and grabbed her pile of gifts, took them to the other room, and started opening them without the usual crowd participation, which outraged and amused us all at the same time.

The next day, it's a fight for who gets to use the one and only bathroom at my parent's house, and how long they've been in there, and when are we going to open the rest of our gifts? It is always an ordeal to get my father to open his gifts. He pretends not to be interested in them. It's a spectacle where we have to coax, encourage, and bribe him to open his presents and an even bigger ordeal to get him to hold it up to the camera without covering his face. There is nothing like a little family togetherness to make a bunch of adults act like children.

We skip breakfast and pile in to our cars to drive even further out of town, skipping lunch too, to spend the holiday with Dad's sister and her family. She is the oldest woman in our family now, and a sort of unofficial matriarch. What she says the family is doing is what the family does. The kind of woman that, if she were church-going, that would call you up and say I didn't see you Sunday morning, are you feeling well? And you would lie and say you were not and then be ashamed to the bone for being too hung over to attend service.

We arrive mid-afternoon, famished to near faintness. The house (which has two kitchens) smells of a million warm and wonderful things to eat. None of these things are we allowed to touch. There is a certain order to everything. You can't eat now or you will spoil your appetite. Didn't I mention earlier that our entire family starts cooking for this very event about a month prior? So you salivate over sugar cookies you can only look at and smell baked ham that will not be ready for a few more hours.

When the feast is finally prepared; something deeply primal takes control over your body. It is possible to practice self restraint just long enough to walk around the buffet and grab a sampling of the ten million dishes, the ham and the duck, the dilled carrots, the mashed potatoes (with gravy this time) and the seventy five types of holiday bread. Unfortunately, by the time you sit down at the table (my husband and I it is still the kids table because there are no more kids in our family—but this sometimes gets me out of doing dishes so I don't mind) you ravenously eat yourself into a food coma. At this juncture, there is a loss of roughly one hundred IQ points because all blood has been diverted from the brain to help in assisting a now happy digestive tract.

This is the culmination of the holiday, the grand finale. Even opening more presents after this doesn't compare to the actual event of good food and good wine. This is where the memories are shared and the stories are told. This is where photos are passed around the table after the forks and knives are still. This is where women with Q-Tip hair styles stand misty eyed behind the lenses of their Kodak. These are the events that make Christmas really Christmas. I hope yours was as wonderful and quirky as mine.

About this blog

It is always the way; words will answer as long as it is only a person's neighbor who is in trouble, but when that person gets into trouble himself, it is time that the King rise up and do something.
- Personal Reflections of Joan of Arc

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