Dropping In

A family member dropped in out of the blue yesterday, and it made my day.  I'm rather tickled that he felt comfortable enough to do it.

It seems to me, and perhaps I'm remembering poorly but I think it's true, that at one point people were okay simply dropping by. Oh, I don't doubt that many folks still are, but it feels to me as though it's a practice not so prevalent as it once was.

I know me Grandpa Joe was good for that. If he wanted to see someone he went and saw them, to the point of stopping by when in North Carolina to visit me Grandpaw Hutchins just to do it. Just because it was a good thing to do. Now our lives have become so scheduled that perhaps too many of us don't feel right simply stopping by to see friends and family.

That's too bad. We miss deeper friendships when we don't feel free to drop in.

But maybe I'm just becoming that old man who thinks things aren't as good as they used to be. Still, I wonder.

The parallels of city parking

If I may say, and even if I may not, I'm rather good to this day at parallel parking. When you grow up with it, indeed when you've parallel parked cars without power steering (that could be a chore), you can get good at it. And in this day and age where turning radius is nothing less than remarkable, parallel parking should be easy.

So that's why it's so fascinating to me when I see area newbies struggling to parallel park their cars here in Woodbridge, where I live. You can just tell, you can smell it in the air, that they're used to driveways and parking lots where you simply pull into a space. I encountered a young woman creeping back and fourth four times this morning desperately trying to center her in a space which I guarantee you was plenty big enough to park. She even once pulled out and started over.

Woodbridge, developed between 1890-1910 mostly, lacks driveways. Being built up when cars were nowhere near on the horizon, houses are too close together to allow for driveways now. We do have alleys and some homes have garages, a luxury even us neighborhood old timers admit we were jealous of back in the day. Those lucky few had convenient places to park while the rest of us hunted up spots on the street. Be all that as it may, it still has me shaking my head at the issues others have with parking.

Teasing Mom

As we sat together on her front porch yesterday morning, Mom asked if there was anywhere to go. I said I wanted to go to Adrian. "Can I go?" she asked excitedly.

Of course I had every intention of taking her; it's what we do on Sundays. So I answered, "Sure. But it's 90 miles away and we'll have to hitchhike."

"Ok, but I'll get there faster than you!" she cackled.

I simply laughed too. I am glad she can still joke.

Anyway, we leave for Adrian, driving through southeast Michigan farm country getting there. At one point she remarked, "A lot of farms around here. I grew up on a farm."

Now it was my turn to needle her. "Oh yeah. That was in South Carolina, right?"

She could not bark, "North Carolina!" quickly enough. And the look of utter contempt she gave me was priceless.

Mr. Mechanically Inclined

They think they're helping but they're hurting. If you can't fix something you should at least leave well enough alone.

A recent customer (I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name) brought me a drain snake for repair. In so doing he handed me the long screws which held the motor together. "I'm kind of mechanically inclined, Cosgriff, so I thought I'd try to fix it myself," he explained.

Why Mr. Mechanically Inclined didn't have it fixed was beyond me, if he is so well versed in objects mechanical. And why Mr. Mechanically Inclined didn't mark the motor before he took out the long, thin screws which hold it together is beyond me too. See, these particular screws aren't applied with nuts but rather thread into holes tapped out behind the facing of the motor. They run the inside length of the motor and you apply them blind, so to speak, by feel. When I take one such motor apart I put marks at each end of the unit as guides for putting the thing back together when I complete a repair.

Mr. Mechanically Inclined didn't see fit to do that. It took me forever to realign that motor, but, by gum, I got it. And Cloyce will pay for it. Especially since the fix was indeed easy, other than not being able to readily align the motor. 

Do you what Mr. Mechanically Inclined missed?

Do you know what he missed?

A broken wire going into the on/off switch up on the handle of the unit. Mr. Mechanically Inclined missed a bloodly stupid wire broken in plain sight. It had broken right off the switch and was hanging out into mid-air.

Mr. Mechanically Inclined is paying through the nose for a repair which should have taken me 15 minutes yet pressed two hours, I'll tell you what.

Mom would never say that.

During a recent road trip I made a stop at a rest area along the freeway. I never thought of them as rest areas. They're more like, O thank God you're here! areas for me.

As I entered the lobby the custodian was at the far end, clearly having just finished mopping the floor. "Man, I sure hate to step all over your work," I remarked to him.

"I wouldn't," the man replied. "Get it dirty again. That's my job security," he explained with a smile.

I laughed. But I also thought that me Mom never seemed to care about that kind of job security when I'd tromped into hall with muddy shoes. I'd probably get swatted with the wet mop.

The Negative Man

I have been regularly watching on You Tube one Father Mark Goring, a remarkable young priest in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. A recurring theme of his is to look for the positive good and to do positive good: it will make you good.

In college, and I really should find it to reread, a class assignment was to read Dr. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Dr. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. As I recall, a story from his book was how one prisoner gave a hidden potato to another prisoner who was (if this can be imagined in such atrocity) in more dire shape. I still marvel at such a moral good coming from any given man under the unimaginably horrible circumstances of a Nazi death camp. Dr. Frankl believed that part of survival was finding something to be positive about and to do positive good.

My overriding point here is that we should strive to find, act, and be positively good. This can be done without denying the horrors of what is negative and working all along to fight them.  Fr. Mark for example when he feels angry prays to find a moral good to focus on and to do, because they're out there even in trying times. Indeed, it may be all the more important to seek the good when evil, yes, evil, seems so prevalent. But the thing is, if you seek the positive you find it.

The corollary is that if you search for the negative you will find that. If you find it you likely will wallow in it. When you wallow in it you become the Negative Man. When you then look in the mirror, will it be a vision worth seeing?

The Brick Flag - Or - Being Up North

There's always been debate among folks in Michigan about where Up North begins. For those not in the know, Up North is a term used in general as vacationland for Michigan residents. It's where we go to get away from Detroit, or any big city in the southern third of the state.

A local joke is that people from Chicago and northern Indiana think Grand Rapids is Up North. Look at a map and you'll get it.

Bur where does Up North actually begin? For Yoopers, those who live in Michigan's glorious Upper Peninsula, it doesn't start until you've crossed the Big Mac, the five mile long bridge which connects our two peninsulas. For some in the northern Lower Peninsula, you aren't Up North until at least Houghton or West Branch. Some few even argue that the Thumb qualifies. Yeah, a map might help understand this too. But for me, Up North has a very definite starting point. It's a large brick American flag on the west side of Interstate 75 about four miles past Bay City as you drive north.

One side of it is the Betsy Ross flag, the one with the thirteen stars in a circle on the blue field. The other is the current fifty star version. The brick flag is just after I-75 merges into only two lanes, another sure sign you're Up North. Most of the freeway is 3 to 4 lanes south of Bay City, with only a short two lane stretch in southern Gennesse County (which is decidedly, all will agree with  me here, nor real up north at all).

To be sure, it's still only one-third of the way to Hessel for us Detroiters. But the instant I see that brick flag (it was even constructed with a mild wave in it), I'm up north. I can't speak for others, but it fits the bill for me.