One time in Afghanistan, around Christmas I think it was, we stopped over in FOB Tillman. We were doing some blasting to cut out rock so the construction engineers could build a nice new road to the top of the mountain where the FOB had an observation point (OP). It was a nice easy job, only during daylight hours, and the cooks knew what they were doing at that FOB. They left the chowhall open at all hours, so no matter when you got the munchies you could walk in and grab some chips or those little single serving microwave pizzas or some raw fruit of some kind. Our sleeping arrangements weren't so bad either, apart from the mold-and-gasoline smell that permeated them. They were old brick buildings with I-beams supporting brick roofs, and they had clearly seen some use, but we didn't have to pull guard duty, there were plenty of cots, and some MRE boxes to use as card tables.
On this particular night, we were all packed up to be ready to leave the next morning and we turned the lights off at about nine. I was asleep fairly quickly. I slept about the same as I always sleep, which is to say I woke up every couple of hours to drink some water, and every time I woke up in the middle of the night I heard a cricket chirping away in some pitch black corner of the room. Sometimes I awoke to the sound of swearing or a flashlight being cursorily swung around the corners of the room. No one put it in any serious effort to find the offending insect. Instead they turned off their flashlights, muttered some vulgarity or profanity, and tried to muffle their ears with their pillows.
In the morning the LT was tired and cranky and almost the first thing he said after lights on was (I'll pay fifty bucks to anyone who can find that @#$%#@$%^ cricket and kill it!"
"Aw, come on, Sir," I said in the voice of sweet reason. "He's just trying to find a lady cricket. All he wants is a little love and affection."
"That's all well and good," the LT snapped. "But I think after six %$^#&! hours, I'd give up."
I didn't reply to that because he was in a bad mood, but secretely I was glad no one hunted down that cricket and killed him. He was a persistent little fellow and I was rooting for him. After all, faint heart never won fair lady.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Naked Under Your Clothes
A few weeks back I posted as my facebook status “Naked I came into the world, naked I shall depart it. One could say that a truly wise man spends his entire life naked.” It got some laughs and some semi joking agreements, and at least a couple of people thought it was a disturbing image.
The truth is that it was half a thought. It came into my head for some reason on the tail end of an ER shift that was winding to a close. Something suggested the well-known quote, “Naked I came into the world, naked I shall depart it.” I’m not sure what brought it to mind, but it came into my head. At four in the morning my thoughts are often rampant flights of association and immediately I thought of the phrase, “naked as the day I was born,” and switched it to “naked as the day I will die.” I brought in the old story of the samurai who practiced death every night by hanging his sword over his pillow and staring up at it until he fell asleep. I remembered the story of Saint Francis when his father disowned him, how he stripped himself of all his fine clothes in the middle of the public square and went on naked to beg for his food and clothing for the rest of his life. As I say, these are all flights of association. They went through my mind in less time than it will take you to read the period at the end of this sentence. In fact, you probably wouldn’t even read the period unless I reminded you it was there, but you would grasp the significance of it nonetheless. My mind works somewhat the same way in moments like that. Things come together faster than I can watch, and I grasp the significance without seeing the moving pieces. So as soon as I thought “Naked I came into the world, naked I shall depart,” I said, (out loud) “I guess a wise man would spend as much of his life as possible naked.”
It’s okay. My buddy that I was talking to is used to my conversational style. He responded very appropriately, “You’re retarded.”
So now I’ve had a few weeks to allow that thought to percolate and it’s time to look at it more analytically. St. Francis is a good starting point. He grasped the spiritual principle so intimately that he exercised it literally and physically as well. He stripped in the town square and walked off without a stitch on, and for the rest of his life he counted nothing in the world his own. It’s as if he thought, “I won’t be able to take any of it with me when I die. Why lug it around here?” He was essentially travelling light. When God called him he didn’t have to waste any time packing.
I am not recommending a nudist colony, any more than I believe that kind of total detachment from the things of this earth is the norm. St. Francis was a sign. He lived in an extraordinary way to point out to the rest of us the truth, which is that eventually, total detachment must come. In the end, in death, we will be totally removed from everything in this world, so wisdom dictates that we practice such removal.
Now, just as literal nakedness is not appropriate in most situations in our world, so wisdom is not necessarily getting rid of everything we own, but certainly being ready to. Putting our possessions in their right place. A good example is my Dad. After working the farm under his father for thirty years, and then owning it himself for less than ten years, he came home one day to find the barn burned down. His response? He shrugged his shoulders and said, “God has a reason.”
When he had a barn and a herd he worked them into the dirt. He poured his blood, sweat and tears into them, fourteen hours a day, every day, for his entire adult life. When they were taken away he shrugged and thanked God, and we saw where his security truly lay. He has been naked under his clothes for many years.
The truth is that it was half a thought. It came into my head for some reason on the tail end of an ER shift that was winding to a close. Something suggested the well-known quote, “Naked I came into the world, naked I shall depart it.” I’m not sure what brought it to mind, but it came into my head. At four in the morning my thoughts are often rampant flights of association and immediately I thought of the phrase, “naked as the day I was born,” and switched it to “naked as the day I will die.” I brought in the old story of the samurai who practiced death every night by hanging his sword over his pillow and staring up at it until he fell asleep. I remembered the story of Saint Francis when his father disowned him, how he stripped himself of all his fine clothes in the middle of the public square and went on naked to beg for his food and clothing for the rest of his life. As I say, these are all flights of association. They went through my mind in less time than it will take you to read the period at the end of this sentence. In fact, you probably wouldn’t even read the period unless I reminded you it was there, but you would grasp the significance of it nonetheless. My mind works somewhat the same way in moments like that. Things come together faster than I can watch, and I grasp the significance without seeing the moving pieces. So as soon as I thought “Naked I came into the world, naked I shall depart,” I said, (out loud) “I guess a wise man would spend as much of his life as possible naked.”
It’s okay. My buddy that I was talking to is used to my conversational style. He responded very appropriately, “You’re retarded.”
So now I’ve had a few weeks to allow that thought to percolate and it’s time to look at it more analytically. St. Francis is a good starting point. He grasped the spiritual principle so intimately that he exercised it literally and physically as well. He stripped in the town square and walked off without a stitch on, and for the rest of his life he counted nothing in the world his own. It’s as if he thought, “I won’t be able to take any of it with me when I die. Why lug it around here?” He was essentially travelling light. When God called him he didn’t have to waste any time packing.
I am not recommending a nudist colony, any more than I believe that kind of total detachment from the things of this earth is the norm. St. Francis was a sign. He lived in an extraordinary way to point out to the rest of us the truth, which is that eventually, total detachment must come. In the end, in death, we will be totally removed from everything in this world, so wisdom dictates that we practice such removal.
Now, just as literal nakedness is not appropriate in most situations in our world, so wisdom is not necessarily getting rid of everything we own, but certainly being ready to. Putting our possessions in their right place. A good example is my Dad. After working the farm under his father for thirty years, and then owning it himself for less than ten years, he came home one day to find the barn burned down. His response? He shrugged his shoulders and said, “God has a reason.”
When he had a barn and a herd he worked them into the dirt. He poured his blood, sweat and tears into them, fourteen hours a day, every day, for his entire adult life. When they were taken away he shrugged and thanked God, and we saw where his security truly lay. He has been naked under his clothes for many years.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
The Shepherd
I had a man come into the ER one day. He was 94 years old. He had had diarrhea for two days, and then that morning he had felt tired and drowsy. So much so that he didn’t go out to walk his sheep to pasture and watch them all day, as he had done every day for nearly a century, with hardly any breaks. His daughter had gotten nervous and brought him into the ER. He spoke very little English, but he told his story with no frills and no fuss. It was not a big deal to him. His daughter supplied the nervousness. We drew some blood to check for all the usual suspects, i.e. infection, diabetes, anemia, etc. We hooked him up to a line of normal saline because we figured after two days of diarrhea he would be a bit dehydrated. Then we got a 12 lead EKG, which showed a rhythm that many 50 year olds would envy.
You have to picture him as I saw him, to understand. He was old, with a typical broad, Navajo face burned almost coffee brown from years of weather. He was very tall. I would bet he was once over six feet, and even now he stood with very little stoop and was as tall as I was. He wore tight jeans and cowboy boots, and a belt with an enormous buckle, a flannel button up shirt and a white cowboy hat. All his clothes were well worn, but clean, as if he had gotten dressed up to come to the hospital. When I went to look for a vein to stick him with the IV I saw that his arms were still thick and ropy, with great, gnarly veins like worms coursing under splotchy brown skin. He had the same perpetual farmer’s tan my Dad and Grandfather always had. He sat bolt upright on the end of the bed, kicking his legs like an impatient two year old, until we asked him to slide back against the raised head of the bed. He hopped his feet up onto the end of the bed and scooted on back with ease and when I asked him, through his daughter as an interpreter, whether that had made him tired, he took a deep, exaggerated breath and shook his head with studied nonchalance. “No.”
Bless his heart, that old man wasn’t giving us an inch. I rejoiced to see his pride.
So I got his history and did a physical exam. I had a hard time listening to his lungs through the thick, solid muscles of his back. His daughter said he used to be a very powerful man when he was younger. All I can say is, if I make it to ninety, may I be in that kind of shape. He told us a bit about his experiences as an artillery man in Europe in WWII, and seemed to be much more interested in that story than in being too tired to walk the sheep for one day.
We left him with a specimen cup and instructions to give us a urine specimen as soon as he could. I wanted to check for a UTI (Urinary Tract Infection). It’s always in the back of your mind for old people with unexplained sudden general malaise. But then again, so is pneumonia, G.I. bleed, septicemia, etc. You have to rule out problems by system, there are so many possible issues.
Over the next couple of ours the labs were backed up with patients and so were we, but the old Shepherd’s results came in a little at a time. I checked in on him from time to time. I listened to his lungs to make sure the fluid we were giving him intravenously didn’t go to his lungs. It can do that with old people if their kidneys aren’t working well. After a couple of hours all the blood was back, but he still hadn’t given us any urine. He kept insisting he couldn’t go, which made me suspect he was even more dehydrated than we thought, although these desert folks are probably always down a percent or two from what textbooks would consider optimum. One time I checked on him, he was sitting in the bed twiddling his thumbs (literally) with a frustrated look on his face, and he asked if he could go yet. We told him we couldn’t let him go until we checked the urine. He sighed and looked at the urinal, and then asked us and his daughter to leave. Five minutes later the specimen was at lab.
It turned out nothing was wrong with him. EKG, Chest X-ray, CBC, CMP and UA all negative. All his numbers were probably almost as good as mine. He probably just got a viral gastroenteritis and was feeling sluggish simply because of the dehydration. We let the nurses give him a sandwich and some juice and tell him he could go as soon as he wanted. He ate the sandwich, put his shirt and hat back on and left with his wide, hip swinging stumping walk in those old, beat up, carefully cleaned cowboy boots.
I loved that old man. He was a man with true greatness of soul. He had found something that he loved, that brought him peace, and he was going to do it, and keep doing it. Never mind that his life was slowly drawing to a close. The sheep still needed to go out to pasture every day. He still chose to spend every day alone out in the open air and sun of the Arizona desert, still ate the traditional diet of mutton and fry-bread, still lived and kept close to his children. Someday I think they will find him lying alone and still out on the mesa, and I envy him that death. That is a life truly lived, lived so well that not even the growing onset of death can interfere with him in his business of living his life.
That is true greatness of soul.
You have to picture him as I saw him, to understand. He was old, with a typical broad, Navajo face burned almost coffee brown from years of weather. He was very tall. I would bet he was once over six feet, and even now he stood with very little stoop and was as tall as I was. He wore tight jeans and cowboy boots, and a belt with an enormous buckle, a flannel button up shirt and a white cowboy hat. All his clothes were well worn, but clean, as if he had gotten dressed up to come to the hospital. When I went to look for a vein to stick him with the IV I saw that his arms were still thick and ropy, with great, gnarly veins like worms coursing under splotchy brown skin. He had the same perpetual farmer’s tan my Dad and Grandfather always had. He sat bolt upright on the end of the bed, kicking his legs like an impatient two year old, until we asked him to slide back against the raised head of the bed. He hopped his feet up onto the end of the bed and scooted on back with ease and when I asked him, through his daughter as an interpreter, whether that had made him tired, he took a deep, exaggerated breath and shook his head with studied nonchalance. “No.”
Bless his heart, that old man wasn’t giving us an inch. I rejoiced to see his pride.
So I got his history and did a physical exam. I had a hard time listening to his lungs through the thick, solid muscles of his back. His daughter said he used to be a very powerful man when he was younger. All I can say is, if I make it to ninety, may I be in that kind of shape. He told us a bit about his experiences as an artillery man in Europe in WWII, and seemed to be much more interested in that story than in being too tired to walk the sheep for one day.
We left him with a specimen cup and instructions to give us a urine specimen as soon as he could. I wanted to check for a UTI (Urinary Tract Infection). It’s always in the back of your mind for old people with unexplained sudden general malaise. But then again, so is pneumonia, G.I. bleed, septicemia, etc. You have to rule out problems by system, there are so many possible issues.
Over the next couple of ours the labs were backed up with patients and so were we, but the old Shepherd’s results came in a little at a time. I checked in on him from time to time. I listened to his lungs to make sure the fluid we were giving him intravenously didn’t go to his lungs. It can do that with old people if their kidneys aren’t working well. After a couple of hours all the blood was back, but he still hadn’t given us any urine. He kept insisting he couldn’t go, which made me suspect he was even more dehydrated than we thought, although these desert folks are probably always down a percent or two from what textbooks would consider optimum. One time I checked on him, he was sitting in the bed twiddling his thumbs (literally) with a frustrated look on his face, and he asked if he could go yet. We told him we couldn’t let him go until we checked the urine. He sighed and looked at the urinal, and then asked us and his daughter to leave. Five minutes later the specimen was at lab.
It turned out nothing was wrong with him. EKG, Chest X-ray, CBC, CMP and UA all negative. All his numbers were probably almost as good as mine. He probably just got a viral gastroenteritis and was feeling sluggish simply because of the dehydration. We let the nurses give him a sandwich and some juice and tell him he could go as soon as he wanted. He ate the sandwich, put his shirt and hat back on and left with his wide, hip swinging stumping walk in those old, beat up, carefully cleaned cowboy boots.
I loved that old man. He was a man with true greatness of soul. He had found something that he loved, that brought him peace, and he was going to do it, and keep doing it. Never mind that his life was slowly drawing to a close. The sheep still needed to go out to pasture every day. He still chose to spend every day alone out in the open air and sun of the Arizona desert, still ate the traditional diet of mutton and fry-bread, still lived and kept close to his children. Someday I think they will find him lying alone and still out on the mesa, and I envy him that death. That is a life truly lived, lived so well that not even the growing onset of death can interfere with him in his business of living his life.
That is true greatness of soul.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
"Arm Pain"
I had a 19 year old patient one night who came in with her boyfriend for “arm pain”. She had her left arm in a sling and she wouldn’t let go of it with her right hand. I went in to check her out after the nurse had her signed in. She was anxious and emotional, and her arm was obviously in pretty terrible pain. She had good sensory function in her fingers, good pulses and capillary refill, but she couldn’t grip my fingers with her left hand. I didn’t think it was due to a physiological defect, it was probably just too painful. It’s hard to explain, but there is a different look to someone who can’t move, as opposed to someone who simply won’t because of the pain.
I asked, “How did this happen?”
She answered, “I was lying in bed and I rolled over and hit my elbow on the wall.”
Her boyfriend cut in, “Yeah, didn’t you say you hit your funny bone? Show him where it hurts baby.”
She pointed to a spot on the ulnar side of her forearm, the bony part about three inches below her elbow. I took the sling off to take a better look. There was a swelling hematoma forming on the surface over her ulna, and the whole area was so tender and she was so hysterical there was no point in doing any more examination. It would only cause her pain and not tell me anything I wouldn’t learn when the x-ray came back.
So I went out to wait for that and talk it over with the ER Doc. See, here’s the thing. It is next to impossible to break a bone knocking your elbow against a wall. Not only that, but when you roll over and smack your elbow against a wall you hit the head of the humerus, and maybe if you are very, very skinny, the very tip of your ulna. Long before you hit hard enough to break a bone, a healthy young woman is going to put her elbow through the plaster or wallboard. Bone is a lot harder. Yeah, it can hurt to jolt the ulnar nerve, what we call the “funny bone”, but it goes away in minutes, it doesn’t break bone, and it certainly doesn’t cause a transverse fracture of the ulna three inches lower. Sure enough, that’s what the x-ray showed. One of the bones of her forearm was cracked right through, but still in place without angulation. This is what we call a defensive injury, meaning it is associated with someone putting a forearm up to ward off a blow to the head.
The ER Doc went in and showed her the x-ray, and asked her boyfriend to step out for a few minutes. He refused. The doctor asked her again how this happened. She said she fell out of bed onto the floor. He explained that didn’t make sense, and asked if someone had maybe hit her in the forearm with a stick or a pipe or something. She denied it. He explained that if she was being hit, or if she remembered anything different eventually she could come back in and we had resources for her. There is an organization here that provides free shelter to women and children in dangerous domestic situations. She said she was fine. She just wanted pain meds and a cast.
So the doctor sent the nurse in to splint the arm and fix the sling so it would work right. I went in to watch and size up the boyfriend. He wouldn’t make eye-contact with me until just as they were leaving, but right at the end I caught his eye and looked him dead on.
There is no proof, of course, and we can’t press charges without her consent. But I believe he is guilty. So I stared him down. Irrationally I wanted him to take a swing at me. He was taller than I am by about four or five inches, and heavier by at least twenty pounds, but I guarantee in a fight I would kill him, because the extent of his courage is beating up on a woman.
But if she won’t stand up for herself, there is nothing I can do for her.
I asked, “How did this happen?”
She answered, “I was lying in bed and I rolled over and hit my elbow on the wall.”
Her boyfriend cut in, “Yeah, didn’t you say you hit your funny bone? Show him where it hurts baby.”
She pointed to a spot on the ulnar side of her forearm, the bony part about three inches below her elbow. I took the sling off to take a better look. There was a swelling hematoma forming on the surface over her ulna, and the whole area was so tender and she was so hysterical there was no point in doing any more examination. It would only cause her pain and not tell me anything I wouldn’t learn when the x-ray came back.
So I went out to wait for that and talk it over with the ER Doc. See, here’s the thing. It is next to impossible to break a bone knocking your elbow against a wall. Not only that, but when you roll over and smack your elbow against a wall you hit the head of the humerus, and maybe if you are very, very skinny, the very tip of your ulna. Long before you hit hard enough to break a bone, a healthy young woman is going to put her elbow through the plaster or wallboard. Bone is a lot harder. Yeah, it can hurt to jolt the ulnar nerve, what we call the “funny bone”, but it goes away in minutes, it doesn’t break bone, and it certainly doesn’t cause a transverse fracture of the ulna three inches lower. Sure enough, that’s what the x-ray showed. One of the bones of her forearm was cracked right through, but still in place without angulation. This is what we call a defensive injury, meaning it is associated with someone putting a forearm up to ward off a blow to the head.
The ER Doc went in and showed her the x-ray, and asked her boyfriend to step out for a few minutes. He refused. The doctor asked her again how this happened. She said she fell out of bed onto the floor. He explained that didn’t make sense, and asked if someone had maybe hit her in the forearm with a stick or a pipe or something. She denied it. He explained that if she was being hit, or if she remembered anything different eventually she could come back in and we had resources for her. There is an organization here that provides free shelter to women and children in dangerous domestic situations. She said she was fine. She just wanted pain meds and a cast.
So the doctor sent the nurse in to splint the arm and fix the sling so it would work right. I went in to watch and size up the boyfriend. He wouldn’t make eye-contact with me until just as they were leaving, but right at the end I caught his eye and looked him dead on.
There is no proof, of course, and we can’t press charges without her consent. But I believe he is guilty. So I stared him down. Irrationally I wanted him to take a swing at me. He was taller than I am by about four or five inches, and heavier by at least twenty pounds, but I guarantee in a fight I would kill him, because the extent of his courage is beating up on a woman.
But if she won’t stand up for herself, there is nothing I can do for her.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Bleeding Stories
I had a 58 year old patient one night who came in because he couldn’t stop bleeding.
The first sight I had of him was when I glanced into the room where the nurse was checking him in. I wasn’t planning on talking to him, but he was sitting on the gurney with his feet towards me, and a bloody washcloth between his feet. My eye zoomed straight in to a definite blood splatter right across his crotch! Now, here’s the thing about blood. It doesn’t go up, usually. It goes down. Unless, of course, it is squirting out of something, like say, an open artery. Veins don’t squirt, only arteries do. But even if it was an arterial bleed, how would it squirt upwards from his ankle to his crotch? It took me a few minutes to get the story straight, but eventually it came out that he had been lying on his back with his leg up in the air when the bleeding started. He had been taking off his socks to go to bed and he had felt something rough underneath the sock. He scratched it and it came off and started bleeding, and he couldn’t get it to stop, so he went and stood in the bath tub and called his daughter. She came to see and she couldn’t get it to stop either, so she covered it with a wash cloth, took off her belt, wrapped it three times around his ankle, and buckled it. Then she drove him into the ER where I saw him. It’s somewhat ironic that my intervention was to teach a man in his fifties how to stop a bleeding cut with direct pressure and to scold him for picking at his scabs. Seriously though, the number of people who don’t know how to do something as simple as stop bleeding is astonishing. Even civilian EMS personnel are generally useless at stopping bleeding.
This incident led the nurse to share a story from when she was working in a trauma center in a major city (I won’t say which city, but it was in the New York, San Francisco, Houston level of majorness) and an upper class looking lady came running in at three in the morning with blood all over her face. “Look,” she said, “I don’t want you to tell anyone I’m here, and I don’t want anyone to know what happened.”
“Okay,” said the nurse. “Why is that?”
“Do you know who I am,” the lady asked.
“No,” the nurse said, “I’m a travel nurse, I’m not from around here. Who are you?”
“I’m the mayor.”
“You have a nose bleed. What’s so terrible about that?”
“I was picking my nose. People cannot know about this!”
I don’t know whether or not that ever got out, but apparently the mayor, before she left for the hospital had called her son when she couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. Then she had decided she didn’t want him to know what happened, hung up and left for the ER herself. He was worried, so he came over and knocked on her door, and getting no response, peered in through the windows. And of course, all he saw was an empty house with blood all over the floor. So he called his buddies and they kicked down the door and raided his mom’s house while she was at the ER. I wonder how she explained that one when she came home to a house surrounded by lights and sirens.
The first sight I had of him was when I glanced into the room where the nurse was checking him in. I wasn’t planning on talking to him, but he was sitting on the gurney with his feet towards me, and a bloody washcloth between his feet. My eye zoomed straight in to a definite blood splatter right across his crotch! Now, here’s the thing about blood. It doesn’t go up, usually. It goes down. Unless, of course, it is squirting out of something, like say, an open artery. Veins don’t squirt, only arteries do. But even if it was an arterial bleed, how would it squirt upwards from his ankle to his crotch? It took me a few minutes to get the story straight, but eventually it came out that he had been lying on his back with his leg up in the air when the bleeding started. He had been taking off his socks to go to bed and he had felt something rough underneath the sock. He scratched it and it came off and started bleeding, and he couldn’t get it to stop, so he went and stood in the bath tub and called his daughter. She came to see and she couldn’t get it to stop either, so she covered it with a wash cloth, took off her belt, wrapped it three times around his ankle, and buckled it. Then she drove him into the ER where I saw him. It’s somewhat ironic that my intervention was to teach a man in his fifties how to stop a bleeding cut with direct pressure and to scold him for picking at his scabs. Seriously though, the number of people who don’t know how to do something as simple as stop bleeding is astonishing. Even civilian EMS personnel are generally useless at stopping bleeding.
This incident led the nurse to share a story from when she was working in a trauma center in a major city (I won’t say which city, but it was in the New York, San Francisco, Houston level of majorness) and an upper class looking lady came running in at three in the morning with blood all over her face. “Look,” she said, “I don’t want you to tell anyone I’m here, and I don’t want anyone to know what happened.”
“Okay,” said the nurse. “Why is that?”
“Do you know who I am,” the lady asked.
“No,” the nurse said, “I’m a travel nurse, I’m not from around here. Who are you?”
“I’m the mayor.”
“You have a nose bleed. What’s so terrible about that?”
“I was picking my nose. People cannot know about this!”
I don’t know whether or not that ever got out, but apparently the mayor, before she left for the hospital had called her son when she couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. Then she had decided she didn’t want him to know what happened, hung up and left for the ER herself. He was worried, so he came over and knocked on her door, and getting no response, peered in through the windows. And of course, all he saw was an empty house with blood all over the floor. So he called his buddies and they kicked down the door and raided his mom’s house while she was at the ER. I wonder how she explained that one when she came home to a house surrounded by lights and sirens.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Hey Dad, can I help?
The muscular gentleman with the ax is my dad. The slightly less muscular gentleman on the stump is my littlest brother. Or rather, he was my littlest brother at the time. Now he is only the youngest. At nineteen he's actually the tallest of us five boys nowadays, and a good deal more muscular than he was then.
What can I say, he wanted to help cut wood. He was too little to swing the ax, really, but you'll note he has his "working man" boots on; and cast your eye, if you will, over the casual competence of his pose, carefully copied from his older brothers who learned it from our father. We wanted to help cut wood too.
I don't know how many times we got in the way, slowed down the work, messed up the projects, and just plain made a nuisance of ourselves in our eagerness to help Daddy outside. For the first few years we weren't much earthly use out there. He could have gotten things done ten times faster without us, most of the time, but he let us help out.
I was reminded of this because of a conversation I had. We had been talking about the difference between merely accepting God's will, since He is going to get His way no matter what we do, and positively embracing it. I said that we should try to go beyond merely doing what He wants because we really have to, and try to be eager about it. We should ask Him, "Hey, can I help? Is there anything I can do? Please." She said to me, "I'm afraid to want to help God because I'm sure I'll mess it up." I've felt that many times myself. It was good for me to hear someone else say it, because it's always easier to see the truth when someone else is missing it than when I am the one missing it.
I don't think God cares whether we mess up the work in our eagerness to help him, anymore than my father did. Sometimes it might have gotten a little annoying, and the work might have taken a lot longer, but my father didn't work to get the job done. He worked to raise us. We were the final cause and end of his work, so he could deal with a little chaos and delay from us. It was all about what was best for us, from beginning to end. That's what fatherhood is all about. He learned it from God. God's fatherhood is for our sake. The work He does is for our sake, and He is more than capable of doing it without us, but it would be for nothing without us. Just as my father might have gotten the work done faster without us, and it would have been a waste if we had never learned to work ourselves, so with Jesus we must "Be about our Father's business." He doesn't need us to do it. But He wants us.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
A Funny Story
Recently, we were wondering what to do for our Korean teacher at the end of the course. There are only three of us, but usually the class pitches in and gets her a plaque or framed photograph or something. There was also the baseball bat, the cavalry saber and the infamous Mae-Mae Stick (that's another story!) but she already has a bunch of both ornaments and weapons. However, in a stroke of pure genius, one of us, M, came up with the perfect plan. His wife is currently doing pottery as a hobby in a nearby town, and they have a little shop where you can go, buy the pottery, paint it however you want, and they will fire it and glaze it for you. Now, one thing you have to know about M is that he is a silver tongued bandit. I've seen him talk on the phone to operators and such, and the moment he hears a woman's voice on the other end of the line, you can hear the change in his voice. He practically pours charm through the phone line, and they eat it up. He's a pretty good guy, all round, but he has a natural talent for charming ladies, and this was one of his typically charming notions. He thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if the three of us went out there and each painted up a piece of pottery and put our pictures in the bottom of them, and gave them to Sunsengnim (that's the honorific title for a teacher or older person) so she could have something useful and cool." So just to be sure, he went out to the shop with his wife one weekend, to make sure it was going to be fun. He made himself a little cigar tray using very simple, bold colors, whipped it out in twenty minutes and congratulated himself on having found the perfect idea.
So then he had to explain to his team sergeant why he needed to get off from PT on monday afternoon.
"You're going to do what? Dude, you know if you want to skip out of PT once in a while, all you have to do is just ask. You don't have to come up with a story like that."
So that was taken care of. He then convinced B and I (I didn't take much convincing) and accordingly we headed out to this artsy little town together after class one day, in lieu of tromping around in the woods for three hours with a 65 pound ruck.
As soon as we got into town I knew exactly what we were in for, and B started having second thoughts. It is one of those old, artsy southern towns with plenty of tea shops, coffee shops, bakeries, and Obama stickers. It even has a wine tasting shop. There appears to be a building code that requires there to be at least one art shop per block, and all the buildings along the whole strip (one street, going one way on one side of the old railroad tracks, and the other way on the other side) are made of brick. I half expected to see some skinny painter with a beret and a scarf sitting at one of the corners, or perhaps a picturesquely unfashionable poet being melancholy over a bottle of wine at one of the outdoor tables. All in all, it's without a doubt the nicest town within an hour's drive. It's beyond me how it managed to remain so clean and pretty, while Fayetteville, just across post, is a total ghetto.
But I digress.
M parked across the street from the pottery shop, and we got out, B voicing his concern about how the shop looked a little on the not-particularly-masculine side (and why shouldn't it? It is owned and operated by women.) Usually he and I play the rennaisance men to M's typical Infantry Officer mentality, but this time it was B who was mentioning how it would look for three soldiers (in uniform) to go into a pottery shop together and sit down at one of those tables that looked they came right out of pre-school, and start painting pottery. And I admit, it was probably not what you would expect, but then I've always thought that it's probably not healthy to be a cold-blooded killer all the time, so, visualizing a samurai composing a haiku about cherry blossoms, I entered into the thing wholeheartedly. Besides, I haven't messed around with painting stuff since I was a kid.
We picked out a piece each, M grabbed a coffee mug, I grabbed a sushi bowl, and B got the plate since he's the artist of the group and that was going to be the center piece, with the picture of us and Sunsengnim in the middle. This was what M had been looking forward too because, while he just likes to throw things together and see how they turn out, he knew that B draws comics and other kinds of art, while I'm an uber perfectionist, so he was ready to watch and laugh as we both became totally immersed in our projects, while he finished his in record time. So we took off our blouses, and sat down at the brightly colored pre-school table with the fingerpaint trays, three big, tough Special Forces soldier wannabes, and commenced to painting. And we painted, and we painted, and we painted. Even M took longer than he expected because he hit upon the notion of doing zebra stripes, and that turned out to be more complicated than you might think. B incorporated elements from the Korean flag with his own color scheme and a fading black border around where the photo is going to be, while I experimented with a blue, watery looking idea for my sushi bowl, finishing it up with a water lily and lily pad painted on the bottom so you actually have to turn the bowl upside down to see it. The flower alone took the better part of an hour, and M's comment was, "Wow, out of control, man. Out of control."
We painted. Of course we made mistakes, and our lines weren't straight and whatnot, but as B said, it's the thought that counts. Sunsengnim is like our Korean mom. She feeds us, teaches us, scolds us, and is actually about the same age as my mom. Actually, she's the grandmotherly kind of lady, whose own kids are grown, but who isn't actually a grandmother yet, so she adopts stray kids, or in this case, soldiers who need to learn Korean. So it really doesn't matter whether the stuff is really a work of art in the end. She'll like it anyway.
A mother and her two daughters (who probably were actually in pre-school) came in, painted, and left, and still we painted. Finally, after three hours, we were finished. Actually, the other two were finished well before I was, but they waited. And it was pretty marvelous, if I do say so myself. B still wasn't sure that he wouldn't rather have done land nav, but he did say he would probably come back with his wife and kids sometime.
Now all we have to do is wait for them to be finished, and then M's wife will pick them up, and we will give them to Sunsengnim next week, which is test week. I need to get some pictures, and post them on here. I'm pretty excited.
Also kind of tired. I stayed up far later than I planned in order to write this.
So then he had to explain to his team sergeant why he needed to get off from PT on monday afternoon.
"You're going to do what? Dude, you know if you want to skip out of PT once in a while, all you have to do is just ask. You don't have to come up with a story like that."
So that was taken care of. He then convinced B and I (I didn't take much convincing) and accordingly we headed out to this artsy little town together after class one day, in lieu of tromping around in the woods for three hours with a 65 pound ruck.
As soon as we got into town I knew exactly what we were in for, and B started having second thoughts. It is one of those old, artsy southern towns with plenty of tea shops, coffee shops, bakeries, and Obama stickers. It even has a wine tasting shop. There appears to be a building code that requires there to be at least one art shop per block, and all the buildings along the whole strip (one street, going one way on one side of the old railroad tracks, and the other way on the other side) are made of brick. I half expected to see some skinny painter with a beret and a scarf sitting at one of the corners, or perhaps a picturesquely unfashionable poet being melancholy over a bottle of wine at one of the outdoor tables. All in all, it's without a doubt the nicest town within an hour's drive. It's beyond me how it managed to remain so clean and pretty, while Fayetteville, just across post, is a total ghetto.
But I digress.
M parked across the street from the pottery shop, and we got out, B voicing his concern about how the shop looked a little on the not-particularly-masculine side (and why shouldn't it? It is owned and operated by women.) Usually he and I play the rennaisance men to M's typical Infantry Officer mentality, but this time it was B who was mentioning how it would look for three soldiers (in uniform) to go into a pottery shop together and sit down at one of those tables that looked they came right out of pre-school, and start painting pottery. And I admit, it was probably not what you would expect, but then I've always thought that it's probably not healthy to be a cold-blooded killer all the time, so, visualizing a samurai composing a haiku about cherry blossoms, I entered into the thing wholeheartedly. Besides, I haven't messed around with painting stuff since I was a kid.
We picked out a piece each, M grabbed a coffee mug, I grabbed a sushi bowl, and B got the plate since he's the artist of the group and that was going to be the center piece, with the picture of us and Sunsengnim in the middle. This was what M had been looking forward too because, while he just likes to throw things together and see how they turn out, he knew that B draws comics and other kinds of art, while I'm an uber perfectionist, so he was ready to watch and laugh as we both became totally immersed in our projects, while he finished his in record time. So we took off our blouses, and sat down at the brightly colored pre-school table with the fingerpaint trays, three big, tough Special Forces soldier wannabes, and commenced to painting. And we painted, and we painted, and we painted. Even M took longer than he expected because he hit upon the notion of doing zebra stripes, and that turned out to be more complicated than you might think. B incorporated elements from the Korean flag with his own color scheme and a fading black border around where the photo is going to be, while I experimented with a blue, watery looking idea for my sushi bowl, finishing it up with a water lily and lily pad painted on the bottom so you actually have to turn the bowl upside down to see it. The flower alone took the better part of an hour, and M's comment was, "Wow, out of control, man. Out of control."
We painted. Of course we made mistakes, and our lines weren't straight and whatnot, but as B said, it's the thought that counts. Sunsengnim is like our Korean mom. She feeds us, teaches us, scolds us, and is actually about the same age as my mom. Actually, she's the grandmotherly kind of lady, whose own kids are grown, but who isn't actually a grandmother yet, so she adopts stray kids, or in this case, soldiers who need to learn Korean. So it really doesn't matter whether the stuff is really a work of art in the end. She'll like it anyway.
A mother and her two daughters (who probably were actually in pre-school) came in, painted, and left, and still we painted. Finally, after three hours, we were finished. Actually, the other two were finished well before I was, but they waited. And it was pretty marvelous, if I do say so myself. B still wasn't sure that he wouldn't rather have done land nav, but he did say he would probably come back with his wife and kids sometime.
Now all we have to do is wait for them to be finished, and then M's wife will pick them up, and we will give them to Sunsengnim next week, which is test week. I need to get some pictures, and post them on here. I'm pretty excited.
Also kind of tired. I stayed up far later than I planned in order to write this.
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