(Here is the original version - the director's cut, if you will - of a column that was written for the 8-19-07 edition of The Janesville Messenger. A poorly edited version ran in that issue under my byline.)
For those of you who may be regular readers of this column, you may have noticed something missing for the past month and a half. Specifically, this column.
The events of the last couple of months – a death in my family and an unusually busy time at work – led to a total breakdown in my creative process. In other words, Writer’s Block. It must come as a shock to my friends, but I literally had nothing to say.
Fortunately – or maybe not, for my friends - I found the cure. It came in the form of a week’s stay in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Never before has my vacation been so well timed or so badly needed.
And it didn’t disappoint. For lovers of the great outdoors, RMNP is paradise. We took full advantage of it, hiking over 35 mountainous miles during the course of the week. An afternoon rafting trip on some river rapids was a high point. I’ll also never forget being greeted at the top of a mountain trail by a well-aimed July snowball thrown by my son. And when we weren’t hiking or venturing about, I even managed to read the new Harry Potter book.
Shaving? Ha! My razor sat lonely and unloved as my beard grew out, revealing enough white hair to rival Miracle the buffalo. And speaking of hoofed mammals, bighorn sheep, elk and mule deer were plentiful in the park. So were stores that sold elk jerky, buffalo jerky and various other types of jerky. Apparently, jerky is the state snack in Colorado because everyone is advertising it.
Important travel tip – if you are driving 1200 miles with two teenagers in your car, make sure you have a DVD player with you. The only time they stopped sniping at each other was when they were watching a movie.
Though I did all I could to leave Wisconsin behind for 10 days, it was impossible to do so because my dreaded Blackberry – which also serves as my cell phone – was there with us. My wife begged and pleaded with me not to bring it along. She knew I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to check my work e-mail. Unfortunately, it was the only phone we own with a nationwide calling plan, so I felt we had no choice but to bring it in case of emergency – which did come, in the form of the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. We wasted no time in dialing relatives and friends in the Twin Cities to check on their safety.
As usual, she was right; I peeked at my work e-mail on a daily basis. It was a good thing too, because by the end of the week, I was getting some nasty e-mails from people wondering why I hadn’t responded to their earlier inquiries. As a courtesy, I had set my auto-responder to reply with my vacation message only once to each person who sent me an e-mail. Unfortunately, by the end of my vacation, people had forgotten that I was gone and started wondering why I was ignoring them. Of course, in the old days, someone would have just picked up the phone and called my office, but we are now squarely in the impersonal electronic communication era. So from a trail overlooking a mountain lake, I was tap-tapping my tiny keyboard explaining to someone in Louisiana that I was 1200 miles from the office.
But even that reminder of what was waiting for me back home couldn’t replace the pure joy of being able to just get away from it all. When I hear of people that don’t take vacations – and I’m amazed how many people don’t - frankly, I don’t know how they can survive. My father, a farmer, was that way. He took one day of vacation a year, to spend the day betting on the ponies at Arlington Park in Chicago. The other 364 days, he milked cows twice a day, drove tractors, shoveled manure. The only real vacation he and my mother had in 37 years of marriage was their honeymoon.
Maybe it’s all in what you’re used to, but I think that for pure mental health reasons, every human needs a peaceful yearly respite of some kind, even if it doesn’t involve a long trip.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Does Every Relationship Have Defining Moments?
(From the Janesville Messenger, 7-15-07)
If you’re a regular reader of this space, you’ll recall that my Father’s Day column a few weeks ago was devoted to my father-in-law, Loren Risse, whose health was declining as he fought mesothelioma, an incurable lung cancer.
Nine days after that column appeared, Loren lost the battle. At about the time that the presses will be printing this newspaper, I will be attending his memorial service. In fact, Father’s Day was really his last “good” day. His six children were all there with him and he still had some mobility, still had an appetite, still was able to carry on lucid conversation. The deterioration after that was rapid; it was like he willed himself to hang on as long as he could until his whole family was able to be with him one last time.
It sounds strange to say, but his death was a relief. He had been in a lot of pain for many months. During his last couple of days, his only movement of any kind was to grimace, despite being on enough morphine to choke a horse. Within minutes after he died, his facial muscles contracted to form what appeared to be a smile. I don’t think that was a coincidence.
Up to this point, I had been fortunate to avoid dealing with death in my immediate family, with one brutal exception - my father in 1985. In an eerie coincidence, my father died when I was 23 years and 9 months old – the exact amount of time that my wife had been a part of my life when her father died.
When my dad died, I was filled with anger. Angry that the doctors couldn’t save him, angry that he wouldn’t see my post-college life come together, angry that he died before my wedding, angry that he would never meet his future grandchildren, angry that my older siblings got to have him 10 years more than I did.
My immediate reaction to this one wasn’t anger; it was regret. Could I have been a better son-in-law?
Loren and I had very little in common, aside from his daughter being my wife. He loved hunting and fishing, while hunting doesn’t appeal to me and I’ve fished maybe a handful of times. Our political views were diametrically opposed. He was extremely talented with his hands, building and carving. I’m lucky when I can hammer a nail properly. Our disparity in interests didn’t lead to a great deal of deep conversation. Could I, should I, have tried to reach out more?
Maybe it’s too much to expect, that every relationship we have contain some deep defining moment or moments. Perhaps that’s the stuff of Hollywood. Maybe in the long run, it’s enough that you shared laughs over a meal or a game of dominoes, were there to help when the other one needed you, and knew how much respect was in each other’s heart.
If you’re a regular reader of this space, you’ll recall that my Father’s Day column a few weeks ago was devoted to my father-in-law, Loren Risse, whose health was declining as he fought mesothelioma, an incurable lung cancer.
Nine days after that column appeared, Loren lost the battle. At about the time that the presses will be printing this newspaper, I will be attending his memorial service. In fact, Father’s Day was really his last “good” day. His six children were all there with him and he still had some mobility, still had an appetite, still was able to carry on lucid conversation. The deterioration after that was rapid; it was like he willed himself to hang on as long as he could until his whole family was able to be with him one last time.
It sounds strange to say, but his death was a relief. He had been in a lot of pain for many months. During his last couple of days, his only movement of any kind was to grimace, despite being on enough morphine to choke a horse. Within minutes after he died, his facial muscles contracted to form what appeared to be a smile. I don’t think that was a coincidence.
Up to this point, I had been fortunate to avoid dealing with death in my immediate family, with one brutal exception - my father in 1985. In an eerie coincidence, my father died when I was 23 years and 9 months old – the exact amount of time that my wife had been a part of my life when her father died.
When my dad died, I was filled with anger. Angry that the doctors couldn’t save him, angry that he wouldn’t see my post-college life come together, angry that he died before my wedding, angry that he would never meet his future grandchildren, angry that my older siblings got to have him 10 years more than I did.
My immediate reaction to this one wasn’t anger; it was regret. Could I have been a better son-in-law?
Loren and I had very little in common, aside from his daughter being my wife. He loved hunting and fishing, while hunting doesn’t appeal to me and I’ve fished maybe a handful of times. Our political views were diametrically opposed. He was extremely talented with his hands, building and carving. I’m lucky when I can hammer a nail properly. Our disparity in interests didn’t lead to a great deal of deep conversation. Could I, should I, have tried to reach out more?
Maybe it’s too much to expect, that every relationship we have contain some deep defining moment or moments. Perhaps that’s the stuff of Hollywood. Maybe in the long run, it’s enough that you shared laughs over a meal or a game of dominoes, were there to help when the other one needed you, and knew how much respect was in each other’s heart.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
A Tribute To A Dad
(From the Janesville Messenger, 6-17-07)
Today’s column won’t delve into my usual topics of business, politics, the community, or slice-of-life observations.
Today’s column is about a man.
My father-in-law, Loren J. Risse, is a carpenter. He’s 80 now, having retired several years ago after a lifetime working for Milwaukee County, but his work never stopped. He is not the type to sit still. His post-“retirement” years have been spent working on a variety of carpentry projects, including working with Habitat for Humanity and carving birds.
Loren’s work has shaped his life. And he has used it to touch others’ lives. He built the house his children grew up in. He built his son’s house. He built his daughter’s house. He extensively remodeled another son’s house. He did several projects in our house.
Retirement did not dim Loren’s skills. Even though he got so good at carving that his work was of equal or better quality than carvings sold for hundreds of dollars, he always did his birds for gifts, never for money. Our living room is adorned with his work; a loon, a chickadee, a cardinal and an owl are daily reminders of his talent.
It comes as no surprise that Loren has always been strong in his Christian faith. Carpenters with a passion for serving others tend to stick together.
A devoted husband, a supportive father of six, Loren is the quiet, hard-working everyman that perfectly fits the profile of an American patriarch. He is the epitome of the work ethic and the devotion to family that you might expect of someone raised during the Depression. But he also has taken time to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Since retiring, he and his wife of 52 years have taken several trips around the world, seeing things that he probably never dreamed he would see while growing up on farms in rural Iowa and Upper Michigan.
Last year, when we were remodeling our dining room, Loren custom built a corner china cabinet for us. It was the first time I had noticed age having any kind of an effect on him. While he was working on it, he kept experiencing shortness of breath. Never had he been huffing and puffing like this. He commented that he felt like he had aged 10 years in a couple of months.
Little did we know at the time that our china cabinet would be his last major carpentry project. He was soon diagnosed with mesothelioma, an incurable cancer of the lining of the lung. The only cause of this form of cancer is exposure to asbestos, which he and other workers unwittingly threw around like hay bales in the 1950s.
Loren has a silent way about him, but he is a fighter. There was never a doubt that he would take this on with every means available to him. He quietly accepted the horrible side effects that came along with the chemotherapy and experimental drugs meant to keep the cancer in check.
It has been hard to see this seemingly ageless dynamo get whittled down so quickly. We had hoped to have Loren over to our house for Father’s Day, to see how we finished the kitchen and dining room project of which his cabinet is the centerpiece. Instead, we will be going to his home, as he is no longer well enough to travel.
This Father’s Day, more than any one previous, Loren will know in no uncertain terms just how much his family loves and appreciates him. Of course, he has always known it, but it probably never has been expressed as emphatically as it will be this weekend.
I encourage each of you not to wait to let your father know just how much they have meant to your life. If you need a reason, let this weekend’s holiday be it.
Today’s column won’t delve into my usual topics of business, politics, the community, or slice-of-life observations.
Today’s column is about a man.
My father-in-law, Loren J. Risse, is a carpenter. He’s 80 now, having retired several years ago after a lifetime working for Milwaukee County, but his work never stopped. He is not the type to sit still. His post-“retirement” years have been spent working on a variety of carpentry projects, including working with Habitat for Humanity and carving birds.
Loren’s work has shaped his life. And he has used it to touch others’ lives. He built the house his children grew up in. He built his son’s house. He built his daughter’s house. He extensively remodeled another son’s house. He did several projects in our house.
Retirement did not dim Loren’s skills. Even though he got so good at carving that his work was of equal or better quality than carvings sold for hundreds of dollars, he always did his birds for gifts, never for money. Our living room is adorned with his work; a loon, a chickadee, a cardinal and an owl are daily reminders of his talent.
It comes as no surprise that Loren has always been strong in his Christian faith. Carpenters with a passion for serving others tend to stick together.
A devoted husband, a supportive father of six, Loren is the quiet, hard-working everyman that perfectly fits the profile of an American patriarch. He is the epitome of the work ethic and the devotion to family that you might expect of someone raised during the Depression. But he also has taken time to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Since retiring, he and his wife of 52 years have taken several trips around the world, seeing things that he probably never dreamed he would see while growing up on farms in rural Iowa and Upper Michigan.
Last year, when we were remodeling our dining room, Loren custom built a corner china cabinet for us. It was the first time I had noticed age having any kind of an effect on him. While he was working on it, he kept experiencing shortness of breath. Never had he been huffing and puffing like this. He commented that he felt like he had aged 10 years in a couple of months.
Little did we know at the time that our china cabinet would be his last major carpentry project. He was soon diagnosed with mesothelioma, an incurable cancer of the lining of the lung. The only cause of this form of cancer is exposure to asbestos, which he and other workers unwittingly threw around like hay bales in the 1950s.
Loren has a silent way about him, but he is a fighter. There was never a doubt that he would take this on with every means available to him. He quietly accepted the horrible side effects that came along with the chemotherapy and experimental drugs meant to keep the cancer in check.
It has been hard to see this seemingly ageless dynamo get whittled down so quickly. We had hoped to have Loren over to our house for Father’s Day, to see how we finished the kitchen and dining room project of which his cabinet is the centerpiece. Instead, we will be going to his home, as he is no longer well enough to travel.
This Father’s Day, more than any one previous, Loren will know in no uncertain terms just how much his family loves and appreciates him. Of course, he has always known it, but it probably never has been expressed as emphatically as it will be this weekend.
I encourage each of you not to wait to let your father know just how much they have meant to your life. If you need a reason, let this weekend’s holiday be it.
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