Jump to content

-Gramps-

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content Count

    591

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    8

Blog Entries posted by -Gramps-

  1. -Gramps-

    The Course of Dreams

    By -Gramps-,

    If you have been reading my earlier blog entries, you know that I have said that a motor coach will improve your life, if you let it. I said it will improve your life in many ways. Your coach can take you to places you might not think to go to if you traveled like most "normal" people, carrying your bags and staying in hotels. It can also help you to make friends. Recently for Diane and I, our coach has done both.
    This has been a rough year for the two of us. Mike, my best friend and business partner for the last 10 years, discovered last Christmas that he had stage-four lung cancer that had spread to his stomach and esophagus. He had to virtually quit working and just try to survive. I took over the whole work load and tried to make an income for us both. So, while Mike went for radiation treatments and lived off smoothies and Ensure, I took care of our customers. This lasted for three months.
    During the week of March 20, while Diane and I were in Florida visiting my daughter, her husband and son, Mike went into the hospital on a Friday and died two days later. He had just collected a large check, the final payment on a large install we had done some two months earlier. He deposited it into the bank that same Friday morning. He died and all accounts were immediately frozen by his bank. He left no will or instructions of any kind as to how his affairs were to be handled. This caused a lot of problems. I can only assume that because of his illness, his books were, to put it mildly, a wreck.
    It would take another two months almost from the day he died for me to help his family figure out what he owed and what was owed to him. I helped him start his own business and now I had to close it out.
    It was heartbreaking to scan his list of jobs and to remember the projects we had worked on together for so long. It was also stressful for all the months of his illness and for the two months afterward to not have any income from most of the work we had done together. It was a huge relief the day in May that his daughter was finally able to pay me for the work I had done for Mike, but at the same time it was killing me that my friend for 20 years was gone.
    Diane didn't know what she was going to do to help me get through my terrible depression and anxiety over losing my friend. His death was taking a part of me with him. It's funny, but when my wife's father died that was one of the things I was worried about for her, that his death would kill part of her. However, she remained strong the whole time and now here I was, making everyone around me almost as miserable as I was.
    It was on one of my lowest days when our friends Gary and Janis called and said they were looking at a new coach and wanted to ask some questions about ours. Helping them purchase a new coach was just the right therapy for me. If you read my first blog entry you know that I said they were a Godsend. Now you know why. I lost one friend and God sent me, us, two new ones.
    Diane and I took a short trip with Gary and Janis and we managed to get to FMCA's GEAR rally in Richmond, where we had a really good time, joined the Colonial Virginians FMCA chapter and made some great new friends. Once those two trips were done, I found I was so far behind in servicing and paying company bills that I really needed to work hard for the next few weeks. By mid-July I was caught up, but as a result I was ready for a break from it all.
    We thought about attending the FMCA rally in Bowling Green, Ohio, but we could not be sure to get there on time, so we decided it would be better to find someplace closer. Diane had visited a booth at the GEAR rally that was giving away three free nights at a brand-new motor coach resort in Galax, Va... She suggested we call them. I wasn't all that enthusiastic about it. What's in Galax? I knew it was close to the Blue Ridge Parkway and also it was not too far from where my parents live, so why not go there for awhile? Diane called the resort. Barry, the owner and developer, said come on out and visit us.
    We went to Deer Creek Motorcoach Resort expecting to stay for about three days.
    We stayed for two weeks.
    I fell for the place as soon as we drove through the gate. The whole resort was laid out like a big green map right in front of us. On the far end was a big hill with green grass and many grazing cows that stretched up to a wonderful blue sky. The asphalt access roads are all three times wider than a coach. Most of the sites are not yet developed, but they were all grassed over waiting to be bought and the pads poured. Rock-banked creeks cut across the resort adding to the whole lovely look of the place; plus, they make a great sound.
    Next to the gate is a handsome log clubhouse with a green metal roof and mini golf course. Just on the other side of the clubhouse is a beautiful nine-hole golf course. Just to the other side of the golf course is Deer Creek Rv Resort.
    We parked in a guest lot (number 3), a pull-in right next to a running creek. We hooked up, set up the patio. I grabbed a beer and took a seat and just took in the view. It took all of 10 minutes just sitting there for me to feel the tension and anxiety of the past few months just start to fall off my shoulders. I started to feel very much at home.
    There were not many coaches there -- five, and six counting ours. The owners saw us arrive and soon they started walking over to say hello: Beverly and Dan, Shirley and Sheldon, Ron, Gordy and Judy. Barry, the developer, came by and soon we learned that he was going to pick up his new-to-him 94 Marathon coach in the next few days. He planned to fly with his wife, Laura, to Florida, and drive it back. It would be his first RV. He was a bit nervous but I assured him he didn't have much to worry about.
    We soon found out that all the owners get together on a regular basis at the the clubhouse for a potluck supper most every weekend, if not sooner. To make a long story a bit shorter, I ended up grilling for everyone, twice! Steaks one night, chicken and waffle sandwiches with home frys and grilled corn on the cob another night. The ladies did the shopping, and I did the cooking.
    My parents came to visit us the first weekend we were there. They stayed in the coach. We went to the Smoke on the Mountain State Barbecue championship in Galax. On Friday we antiqued and ate barbecue. It was so good we did the same thing all over again on Saturday. We played mini golf. I also played golf with my parents. My Mom is in her late seventies and my Dad is in his eighties and both had a blast out on the course. It was a great visit, one of the best my wife and I have had with my folks for a long time.
    The next weekend, Gary and Janis drove their coach up and backed into lot number 2. They went with us to visit the Blue Ridge Parkway, Mt Airy, also known as Mayberry, and the Shelton Winery located not far away. Gary and I hit the links as well.
    During the week between visits from family and close friends, I made new ones. I also installed Wi-Fi for the resort at no charge for my labor. Everyone was being so kind and generous to us; I wanted to do something in return. I flew kites (I collect them). Diane and I played Bocce. We went hiking and explored other nearby towns.
    My friend Mike was a devout boater and fisherman. He also loved to golf. I went boating with him once. We talked about going on a fishing trip and staying in the RV. We also talked about golfing together but it never happened. We ran out of time before we could do either one.
    So, I thought about Mike while I was out on the course. Most of the time I was the only one playing. I had the nine holes all to myself, well, almost to myself. I felt like Mike was there with me, on this course of dreams, laughing at me when I shanked the ball really badly.
    We have been back to Deer Creek since that time. We are hoping to buy lot number 3. I am also hoping to improve my golf swing. I am getting tired of Mike laughing at me!
    The following pictures should show you why I think this place is special.







  2. -Gramps-
    Rule 4: Owning a motor coach is a never-ending learning experience -- continued.
    Well, I had so much fun coming up with a list of things that I have learned over the five years that my wife and I have been motorhoming, I figured why not write down a few more? So here goes:
    I have learned that men need a precise set of directions when parking the coach.
    And women know just how to give them. For example:
    "I SAID STOP! STOP! DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT STOP MEANS?"
    "DON'T BACK UP, YOU WILL HIT IT AGAIN!"
    "NO, NO, YOUR OTHER RIGHT!"
    "JUST LOOK AT WHAT YOU HAVE DONE NOW!"
    It's always the other person's fault when you miss your exit or hit a tree.
    The people camping next to you will find out first that you forgot to shut your black tank valve.
    My grandkids think the term "stinky slinky" is really funny.
    My wife doesn't like the way our all-in-one washer-dryer ties HER underwear into knots.
    A small speed bump can throw dishes around the coach. A big speed bump throws the dog around the coach.
    Old tube socks make great bottle savers; just make sure they are clean. I'm talking about the socks.
    Don't drive on the zipper, it's scary and you may lose a lug nut cap.
    While going down the road, I don't like hearing, "What the heck was that noise!?". even when I am the one saying it.
    If Wal-Mart doesn't have it, I must not need it.
    It burns me when the RV spots at Cracker Barrel have a car parked in them.
    It burns me even more when the RV spots at Camping World have a car parked in them.
    Sometimes when driving under an overpass, I get the urge to duck!
    My wife will not let me stop at South of the Border and buy anything.
    It's been over a year since we purchased our coach and I am still finding loose screws floating around inside.
    If you don't pack up your patio the night before you leave, it will rain.
    Quick disconnects are great on the water hoses except when you forget to turn off the water before disconnecting.
    I have learned that:
    Before pulling out of a campground, if your generator is off and your roof air is running, you may have forgotten to do something.
    I have a very tough shore power surge protector. How do I know? Because I dragged it down the road once and it still works great!
    I believe that some interiors of motor coaches were designed by people who smoke something more than just tobacco.
    At some point during a long trip I will bang my head on a slideout. It's going to happen, I might as well get used to it.
    The dash AC is always too cold for the pilot and not cold enough for the copilot, or vice versa.
    Most coaches have the dash radio positioned where no one can easily read it or adjust it (without falling out of your seat).
    I would rather be out in my coach than take a cruise or a trip to Europe. That's good, because I own a motorhome and can't afford to take a cruise or a trip to Europe.
    A bad day motorhoming beats a day at home in bed with a kidney stone (I had one of those two weeks ago).
    Fuel is always too expensive no matter what the price per gallon.
    A Ham and cheese sandwich in my motor coach at a rest stop on the way to somewhere tastes better than it does at home.
    I have learned that when I am home (in the stick house) I am always counting the days until I am on the road again with my beautiful wife and the pup.
    Feel free to comment and add to this list of "learned" things.
    Oh, Remember Rule Number 1!
  3. -Gramps-
    This part of my past is very hard for me to write about. I guess that is why I haven't blogged for over a month and it has been even longer since I wrote the previous part of this story. I guess I am afraid I run the risk of having people read this story and think I am crazy, just like the people in our church, close friends, and eventually family thought my whole family was crazy. They all thought we had "gone off the deep end." I am not sure what good, if any, these words will accomplish. But like my father, I am a writer, and as such I feel compelled to continue typing and let the reader be the judge.
    From Wikipedia:
    A miracle is an unexpected event attributed to divine intervention. Sometimes an event is also attributed (in part) to a miracle worker, saint, or religious leader. A miracle is sometimes thought of as a perceptible interruption of the laws of nature. Others suggest that God may work with the laws of nature to perform what people perceive as miracles. Theologians say that, with divine providence, God regularly works through created nature yet is free to work without, above, or against it as well.
    A miracle is often considered a fortuitous event: compare with an Act of God.
    In casual usage, "miracle" may also refer to any statistically unlikely but beneficial event, (such as the survival of a natural disaster) or even which regarded as "wonderful" regardless of its likelihood, such as birth. Other miracles might be: survival of a terminal illness, escaping a life threatening situation or 'beating the odds.' Some coincidences are perceived to be miracles.
    I have heard the word miracle tossed around a lot. It is used to describe someone surviving a bad car crash (I used it myself after I was in a fiery car wreck in California-but that's another story) or a plane crash. I have heard someone talk about the miracle of surviving cancer. I remember the Miracle Mets and the USA Hockey Team and the Miracle on Ice after the 1980 Olympics, but how many people have experienced a "see it with your own eyes" miracle of Biblical proportions and suffered the consequences of such a miracle? Not many in this land. When I was a child I wished for one, I prayed for one and I got one. I had no idea what would come along with it.
    The morning after Penni was healed I floated off to school. I figured I could tell everyone about this life changing event. I believed that all who heard my words would believe me and would be just as excited to find out that God is real, just as real as I knew Him to be.
    I, being naive, could not have been more wrong.
    As I was walking to school, my Dad was struggling with his own thoughts about the night before.
    I think it is told best with his words.
    I remember the night, every bit of it. I lay facing one wall and Catherine lay facing the other and we didn't say a word to each other all night. I don't know if there was any sleep or if I froze in one position and allowed my body to rest a bit, but I managed to get up the next day and go on to work.
    At work, I tried unsuccessfully to bury myself in whatever I was doing. My mind was preoccupied and I don't know what I did. I'm a metal smith and I might have made cornbread that day, I don't recall. In my mind was a turning and churning of "what if, what if? and if it isn't?, if it isn't?" and how to handle it. This went on until about 10 o'clock in the morning.
    Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I got to a telephone, called home, and when Catherine recognized my voice, in tears she said, "It's healed. And it looks great!"
    I don't know what my answer was to her, if I answered her at all. I managed to get through the rest of the very long day.
    I managed to get home at my usual time about 4:00 P.M. and as I pulled in the driveway, the screen door opened and this little 18-month-old girl came running out. Because of her foot, it had not Penni's nature to run on cement--she had always walked very cautiously. But she came running out and when she got to that little step in front of the house, she just passed right on down, past me and around the car, back up the step and over the door, turned around and came back down the step and around the car and back up a couple or three times before I could get hold of her. Finally she just came running up to me and I picked her up. I don't recall saying anything to her. I just remember picking her up and realizing then a kind of peace--that it really had happened, that this was no fantasy anymore.
    I walked into the house and I don't even know what conversation went on between Catherine and me. All I can tell you is that we were realizing that we'd had a visitation from the Lord in our home. It was Wednesday and we were going to church that night.
    We only lived four blocks from the church. We would often walk, but most of the time we drove because of Penni. That night when we started to get in the car, Penni said, No. She wanted to walk. As usual, I reached for her finger, but she shook her head and started running on down the street ahead of us....all the way to the church. I saw a whole new personality in the child. She was trying out new feet.
    I knew that one of the things we had to do was deal with Derrick about it because he didn't totally understand what had happened. He had seen us through the hassle of Kam's leg in a cast, for the same situation. He had also seen us ministering to Penni with corrective shoes, putting them on the wrong feet, and always helping her across the sidewalk, and holding onto her finger and so forth.
    When we did sit down to talk, Derrick explained in detail what had taken place when he had gone in that night to pray for her. He related that he had picked her foot up in his hand. Penni's foot had had no instep at all; it was twisted in at almost a 90-degree angle toward the other. He held her foot in his hand, which was similar to the therapy we had done before. In his hand he felt the muscles shape and move back where they were supposed to be. As he held Penni's foot firmly in his hand, he said it was almost like it wanted to force his hand open. He knew it was God because he had been exposed to a healing a few moments before on television. For a fourteen-year-old child this was a tremendous experience.
    We talked about it, and yet we knew we had to put it into perspective. We had to figure out what we could do with this, what we were supposed to do. I guess my question was Why? Why me? What had I done to deserve this? What was God looking for in my life that He would come and visit my home? What was it all about? What was my obligation now?
    I had not been taught this; I had not been exposed to this type of thing. It was not something that one could just get up before the church where we were going and testify about. I realized that there would be some problem with their accepting it, and yet there would also be a lot of problems with my denying it.
    I finally said to Catherine, "I don't know why, but God wants our attention and we'd better give it to Him. Above and beyond all other things that might happen in our lives at this point, we'd better give God our attention."
    So we pledged to do that.
    I found out real quick that some people didn't want to hear about this miracle. I found out at school the first time I tried to tell my friends in study hall. Some looked at me like I had gone crazy; some told me to shut up. One said he didn't believe in God so he could not possibly believe my story of a miracle. After telling me this, he got up and moved to the other end of the table.
    It wasn't long till the word got around the ninth grade that Derrick Parker was now some kind of religious nut. It was like being back in Denton, sharing stories of my traveling to Washington and being told "No one has ever been to there, it's too far away!"
    The hardest part was being cold shouldered by my friends who knew my sister, who could see for themselves but still said there is no such thing as a miracle.
    I didn't get it. How could one deny what one could see with one's own eyes?
    Apparently it was pretty easy to do, even if you attended church with the people who "claimed" to have had a miracle. It was even easier to deny what your eyes told you if the pastor of that same church didn't believe in miracles either.
    I wish I could tell you all the things that transpired after the people in the church saw my sister running up and down the hallways, climbing steps and being a normal, active eighteen month old. The things that transpired were shocking to me. We became the epicenter of a controversy.
    This controversy erupted out of the maelstrom of questions this miracle created. These questions were about the power of God and what our church believed.
    Let me some up the questions this way:
    Is God real or does the church just give lip service about him? Does God use His power through His Son Jesus like it says in the Bible or are we coming to church every Sunday for a Mythology-History lesson?
    The church split into two groups, those who believed what we told them and believed their own eyes. The second group, unfortunately the larger of the two, was composed of those who thought we were some kind of troublemakers and denied what their "lying eyes" told them.
    The pastor of our church was the leader of the second group as my Father soon found out.
    We were totally aware that God wanted to get our attention, so we were leaning in that direction like we never had before. Above and beyond anything that our church was teaching, above and beyond anything we had been taught in our lives, we were seeking the will of the Lord. By doing that, we were getting involved in home meetings in our house where we had prayer and studied the Full Gospel. We could feel the tension in the church growing like an epidemic. It wasn't just us, but we seemed to be the center of it.
    The word was getting out about Penni's healing. Anytime something like this happens, there's an aftermath. In an aftermath, there is some good and there is also some onslaught from the enemy. Our little Baptist church was very conservative in its doctrine with gracious, lovely people; but this was not a part of their program.
    Peggy Stewart, (one of our church Bible study friends) came to me one day and said, "Clay, you must tell the pastor." Well I knew already that I had to tell him because the evidence was there. I knew he was not the type of person who would understand with a lot of sympathy what was going on with us, so this was not going to be an easy task. He and I saw things a little differently and he knew anytime that I approached him that "Here comes the thorn in my flesh."
    I sought the Lord and prayed, Lord, You know where I'm coming from and You know what I'm facing, so if You really want me to tell him, tonight when we go to church, let him be available. This was not normally the case; he was very reserved and did not come out and mingle with the people a lot.
    That night when we went to church, we started down the hall and looked into the Sunday school office and there sat one person: the pastor, looking through a new Sunday school quarterly. It didn't seem like he was too engrossed in anything, so I stepped inside and said, "Pastor, may I talk with you a minute?" He said, "Sure you may." I imagine he already had some idea of what was taking place.
    I started from the beginning. I didn't hide any of the terminology and I didn't pull any punches. I told him that we had been watching The 700 Club with Pat Robertson and we saw a healing take place before our eyes on the television. Without taking a breath, I added, "and Jim Bakker turned and explained to the audience what God had done and we all heard. Derrick then went down to Penni's room and prayed for her and her foot was healed. We don't know why, but God has visited our home and we know it's real and we're gonna lend ourselves to Him and we're concerned about this church. I would like to have an opportunity to stand and tell the whole thing to the church so that there will be no rumors". I just spit all this out without giving him a chance to make any comment in return.
    Finally, when I gave him the chance, the pastor said, "We've not known your little girl that well, so we can't be sure of wha's happened. Since you haven't received a confirmation from the doctor and we plan our services quite a ways in advance, there's really no time or room for this type of thing, so I couldn't allow it to happen. And another thing, I need to talk to you further about what's going on at your house. We don't want any trouble in this church, so I want you to make an appointment when we will have more time to talk about this."
    That was the end of this conversation. I still had a lot to say. I made an appointment to came back.
    I thought that I was prepared to take my stand and to be firm about what I was going to say to this Baptist minister. It didn't take courage; I was anxious now. I wanted to go in and tear things up. When I got in his presence, I was ready to take my stand.
    The pastor has his own stand to take.
    "Clay, you know we're a Baptist church around here. I don't know how much you know about our denomination's background, but the Baptist church is a well-established church, one of the largest in the nations, led by men of many years of Bible research with many degrees and awards, men that stand strong and tall and are well-versed in their field. They are heroes of our time in the entire church world. They've set up the bylaws and the doctrines and of them we can be proud. They're our heritage."
    He continued, "What you are saying to me is not for us today. The healing as you've described it, is not a part of our doctrine. We Baptists, of course, believe in healing, but through the modern means that God has provided in this day. You see, in earlier times, doctors and hospitals and nurses were not available, so certainly Jesus intervened and He met the needs of His people just like we're meeting the needs of our people today, but through modern medicine means."
    He was very polite, very precise. He had done his homework, no doubt about it.
    "So, you see, Brother Clay, you're being swept into an emotional fantasy which is not for us and it will bring trouble, not only to your family, but to the church. And I will not allow it to disrupt things herere while I'm the pastor. It will bring nothing but trouble, and I'm asking you to be careful if you want to continue as a part of this church."
    I was starting to boil a little bit, I guess, because I knew what I was after and I was being careful what I was listening to-very careful. I was finding things in the Bible that confirmed all I was hearing from Pat Robertson and other Full Gospel ministers, so I was waiting for my turn to lash back. Just before I had a chance, the telephone rang.
    The pastor turned and talked for a few minutes and when he got off the phone he said, "That phone call requires me to leave. But we'll pick up right where we left off in a few days."
    A few days, a lot can happen in a few days. You can loose friends, your church, maybe even your family.
    I have to admit that of all the thoughts that could go through the human mind, I was battling with "What have you gotten your family into? What is all this that you have done?"
    I was getting letters from my family saying, "It's okay to be religious, but you can go off the deep end." I was getting letters and calls from Catherine's family that said, "What âre you two into? What's going on? What's happening?" I was trying to be very discreet in my explanations to them. They were Baptists too, you see, and I knew I had to be very tactful in any explanation that I gave. Fact and truth are always the best measures to take, so I wasn't denying anything, but I was being very careful in the way I approached my explanation.
    Catherine called me one day at work and I knew something was not right. She said, "We've got to go back and see the pastor."
    So we had another conference with him one evening and in that conference the conversation that Catherine had with him was not connected with reality and I finally reached over and asked her to be quiet and I said, Pastor, we'll end it here. We won't bother you anymore. We'll just do what the Lord wants us to do."
    He made some request that we not bring this back to the church anymore. I said, "Well, if the Lord asks us to stay here, we won't have any choice."
    The next night the deacon board came to our house.
    "Can we talk to you for a while?"
    I said, "Sure, sit down and make yourselves comfortable."
    "The pastor has asked us to come and to make sure that you not bring any more of this Full Gospel issue you and your wife are involved in back to our church. If you can't get yourselves uninvolved with this and just be a good Baptists,"
    One deacon would start to talk for a minute and he'd ask another one to explain. It was like they had a final blow, a package, that they were to deliver and no one had the courage to lay it on us. Three or four of them talked. I had asked them to sit down but only a couple sat down and the others were kind of pacing around.
    They continued to gave me a pretty good spiel about how much trouble we were causing....followed by "we may have to ask you not to come back."
    Finally I said, "Are you trying to tell us that the pastor has sent you asking us not to come back to the church unless we deny what has happened?"
    They said, "Well, that's pretty much the story."
    "Go tell the pastor he has no problem, we won't be back."
    They left our house.
    I can't exactly describe the realization that this was God. It was a heartbreaking experience but at the same time there was peace.
    After the deacons walked out, Catherine and I didn't discuss it a whole lot, but we went on to bed.
    It was now about Thanksgiving week and my wife's family was coming up to visit. I think what was bringing them to visit was curiosity more than need to visit with us. To be perfectly honest, I dreaded this visit, because it was not a time when we needed outsiders. There were many things that we needed to face.
    A few days efore the family was to arrive, Catherine called me from work and she said, "I need some help, I can't handle it. I don't know how to clean up the house."
    I came home and realized that, emotionally, she was not able to handle the very basics. I knew something was seriously wrong. I started relating back in my mind the break that she had had in the pastor's office and I realized that she had not been herself since.
    I took her to the emergency room at Boone Clinic and we got no consolation at all. I took her to see our friends Bob and Peggy Stewart and they prayed and Bob called me upstairs and said, "Clay, you need to get some professional help. We can't do anything. I didn't want to admit that there was something wrong, but yet I knew there was. I called and explained the situation to Pat Robertson and he said, "Get her out of town. Take a trip, go somewhere."
    My car was in trouble, so a neighbor let us have his car. We went up to Richmond and it was a night of horror. I had not slept Friday or Saturday night because I was attending to her. She locked herself in the bathroom. She attempted to somehow open the windows of the Holiday Inn on the sixth floor. Driving home, we came through Williamsburg and the boys wanted to go in and see a movie. While Catherine and the boys were watching it, I slept through the whole thing.
    It was a terrifying time in Richmond. The trip there was mostly quiet, the kind of eerie quiet before a storm. We checked into the hotel and then went next door to a Chinese Restaurant. I loved Chinese food, and I still do, but that dinner was without taste that night. We went back to the room and Dad gave me some change and told me to take Rod downstairs to the game room.
    We played some pinball, and some kind of computer quiz game, roamed around the lobby for awhile and then went upstairs. I don't remember sleeping much that night. The next morning I woke up to my sound of my mother screaming.
    "The world is gone!....Open the window and you will see that there is nothing there!"
    I ran and pulled back the drapes from the big window and told Mom that everything was just the same. Rod started to cry.
    "What's wrong with him?" Mom wanted to know.
    "He had a nightmare Mom, don't worry about it."
    We were all having a nightmare.
    After we checked out of the hotel, we walked down the street to a breakfast place. I knew I needed to eat something, and thinking this may be my last good meal for awhile I ordered a big omelet. We said a prayer and I ate with gusto, like I was worried someone would take it away before I could finish. Dad reached across the table, grabbed my hand and told me to slow down and taste it. I looked up at him and with a shaking hand grabbed my glass of water. I knew it wouldn't help anything if I lost control
    The drive home was not so quiet as the trip up. After we left Williamsburg we crossed the James River Bridge. As we reached the high drawbridge, Mom screamed that the bridge was out and dove to the floorboards.
    That was it, for me. I burst out in tears and then Mom became calm.
    "What's wrong with him?" She asked.
    What was wrong with me? I was watching my whole family come apart.
    After we came back home, I took Catherine over to Portsmouth Naval Hospital on the pretense that we were going to visit a friend who was there. I went in first to the emergency room and pleaded with the doctor.
    "We've got a problem. My wife is having a nervous breakdown and I need some help bad."
    "Well, bring her in."
    I don't know whether or not you've ever dealt with someone who's going into a total nervous breakdown, but one moment they're perfectly normal and the next moment they're someone that no one knows and the next moment they are normal again.
    In the emergency room Catherine talked with the doctor and she seemed perfectly fine so he looked at me as if to say, what are you trying to do to your wife? I walked up the hall and prayed, Lord, there's nobody else that can help me but You.
    At that point, Catherine made a statement to the doctor that was totally disconnected from reality and he said, "Wait a minute." He started making some arrangements and gave her some medications and said, "Take her on home. This medication will cause her to sleep. If you need to sleep, you take some also." I said, "I don't need a thing."
    "If you have any problems, call me back." said the doctor.
    We went home. Our folks came and it was a horrible two days that they were there. I cooked the Thanksgiving dinner and I wouldn't have wanted to eat that turkey because it might have had the marshmallows inside and the stuffing in the banana pudding. We got through the days but our relatives couldn't communicate with Cathering...They realized something was seriously wrong.
    On Saturday morning they left, didn't say a word to me, but on Monday afternoon two of her sisters were back with a whole different attitude. They didn't come back questioning and trying to slaughter me, they said, "Clay, something is wrong and we came back to help." In the meantime, I had already called the hospital and made arrangements to have Catherine admitted.
    One of the sisters stayed with the children and the other sister and I took Catherine over to the Naval Hospital on a Monday afternoon during the peak of the rush hour traffic. It was rainy and foggy and a setting for a mystery movie is the best way I can describe it. They gave me the paperwork and we headed from Portsmouth Naval Hospital to the psychiatric hospital.
    Bayberry Psychiatric Hospital sat way down in the deep woods of Queen Street and there was moss hanging down all around and a swamp that surrounded three-quarters of it. Its physical surroundings couldn't have been worse. It was the longest, hardest trip of my life through all of the traffic and the rain and every red light was red in my favor. I finally pulled up to this great, big steel-barred door and rang the bell and somebody came out and opened it his deep low voice said, "Y-e-e-e-s-s?"
    I gave him my papers and he said, "Come on in."
    They talked to us and finally they completed all the paperwork. When they asked Catherine if she would sign herself in, she looked at me for direction. By now, she would do almost anything I said and nothing else. If I said, "Comb your hair" she would comb her hair. If I said, "Put a little lipstick on she'd put a little lipstick on. I wasn't always sure where she'd put it, but she'd put it on. If I said, "Wear this" she would put on her dress. She might put it on backwards, but she'd put it on. So I was tending to a person who was almost a robot. So when they said, "Mrs. Parker, will you sign yourself in?" She looked at me and asked, "Is that all right?" and I said, "Yes, sign your name right there. Sign yourself in."
    They took her back to the back and came out with all of her clothes, her hairpins and everything, and handed them to me. That was my darkest hour.
    To be Continued of course.
  4. -Gramps-
    I went into the waiting room and had a good cry. My wife's sister held me tight and she said, "It's all right. We don't understand, but we love ya and we'll see you through it and it will all be all right. Clay, you're a good person. We don't always agree, but you're a good person."
    She had come on my side enough to minister to me. The sisters went back home with the two girls and left me with the boys. The doctor said, "Make your arrangements to care for your family for several weeks, several months, maybe forever because this is a very serious case."
    I believe that it really would have been easier to take my wife to her grave than to leave her at that hospital. If that had been the case, I would have had no choice; it would have been a decision that was finally made. But the unknown and the wonderings and the whys of reality were very difficult.
    I remember thinking this as I sat by myself for a few minutes afterward. The house was quiet and the boys and I got together and had a talk. I remember Derrick, age 15, and Rodney, age 13, saying, "Don't worry, Dad, we'll make it. Everything will be all right."
    I called the pastor of the church because I knew it would spread throughout the neighborhood very rapidly. I told him what had happened and he said, "I was afraid it would come to this" He made some effort to tell me how he had warned me. I just made the conversation as short as I could, tried not to be rude, and got off the phone.
    Catherine's sisters agreed to keep Kam, and Penni, as long as necessary. I am sure that when they finally arrived in Denton, North Carolina it was a chance for the whole family to come by and examine Penni's new foot. They knew about the healing, so I have no doubt that they questioned everything. Whenever the Lord has done something, it will stand up to questioning. If the Lord has moved in my life and I have been healed or delivered or set free of something, I can bear the brunt of the questions because when His glory is manifested, it will stand the test.
    The boys and I tried to start putting things together a little bit in order that we could just live. They saw the predicament that I was in and they were very good. I would go over each night to visit Catherine and they would stay home and do dishes and fold laundry. I would come home from work and we would all pitch in and start cleaning and try to keep things as near up to par as we could. I just felt like this was necessary. The Lord was good even in times like this, because I didn't have the physical strength to face people at work or anywhere.
    I was a metalsmith and, as I recall, an expert welder. As it happened, I was the only welder around and there was a big project at work that required my skills. For the first several days, they put me back in a welding booth to do some work. It was an opportunity for me to be by myself and hide my face behind the welding helmet and cry inside. God just allowed that as a hideaway for me for a while.
    As the word passed through the church, a dish garden came to my house on behalf of Catherine's illness and was left on our steps. The doorbell rang and no one was there when I answered it, just the dish garden. I supposed it came from the ladies of the church. We kept it around for quite a while, or pieces of it, as a reminder to pray for them.
    We had a few friends that kept calling. Of course, Bobby and Peggy came over each day to check on me and she pitched in and helped prepare food and so forth. But I was numb, I couldn't pray, I couldn't read my Bible. There was just a numbness inside. There's no other way to explain it. I just kept going step by step. I tried not to ask "why?", I tried not to ask "œwhen?", I just tried to keep the things that I had to do done and somehow or another I would sleep. It was almost like I would turn everything off and I'd finally go to bed and sleep.
    The only thing I could do was watch the 700 Club. They called me and said brother Pat wanted to see me. He pulled me into an office and we sat and talked for about forty minutes and cried together and prayed together. He gave me a ray of confidence, of hope, and said, "God will not allow these things to end up in this situation" He's a Deliverer."
    Though I was still numb inside, I kept hearing this from a man who I respected. "God is a Deliverer and He will not allow things to remain in this state." Pat was a very precious friend.
    On the 700 Club each night, if I had not called in to give a report, Pat would ask, "By the way, have any of you counselors heard from the brother whose wife is in the psychiatric hospital?" If there was no report he'd say, Brother, if you're listening, give us a call. We want to know how she's doing." So I would call and he would read it back over the air. This was encouraging. He said, "I want you people to fast and pray for this sister."
    I remember one night Pat came on strong against pastors who were mistreating their people who were filled with the Holy Spirit and believed in the Full Gospel. He poured it out heavy-real heavy. By realizing that there were some people on my side, it didn't change me within, but it gave me a ray of hope. I continued to just hold on.
    I would go over to the hospital to visit Catherine and, of course, they wouldn't let me in to see her. The first few trips I could hardly find anyone who knew she was there. I would go over and tell them I was there to see Catherine Parker and they would say, "Who?" I'd say "Susan Catherine Parker." So the lady would go back and say, "Yeah, she's here." And I'd say, "Well, may I see her?" And she'd say, "No, you can't see her. She still in solitary."
    "What's the report?" I would ask.
    "Well, no change," would be her response.
    I finally had a session with the caseworker that, I suppose, was the psychologist. He took down a history of the troubles that we'd had in our marriage, and the troubles Catherine had had as she was being raised as a child, and what might have brought this on. He asked me an awful lot of questions. I didn't get a chance to ask him any.
    Finally I had a talk with the doctor who happened to be a very devout Methodist Christian. He had some understanding and I felt freer in his presence. He said to me,
    "Except for what God can do, make your plans for your wife never to recover because it's one of the most serious cases I have ever seen that has come on without a history. Many times there will be a history and you will see it come and go, but there's no history of this in her family, no history of it in her life."
    I said, "How long?" He would give me no estimate of how long she would be confined.
    She was not in a coma, but she was totally unaware of reality; all of her talking was disconnected from reality. They had asked me for pictures of the family, so I took pictures of our kids. They did what passed for a brain scan in those days and they showed her those pictures among other pictures that they had. There was no reaction, no change, when she saw a picture of her own children. I found out later that she saw no difference between pictures of her own children and those of a stranger.
    One night that I was there, a little nurse who heard me ask about Catherine asked, "Are you Mr. Parker? Come with me."
    She called me back to her desk and she started telling me, "There is something different about your wife. I'm not supposed to tell you this, but I just have a feeling that she's going to be all right."
    Whenever I would come there for a visit, she would always meet me, call me back, and give me a little briefing. All of this took place over a few nights, but it seemed like months.
    One night sometime during the first week, I came back home from the hospital, laid across the bed, and cried out, "Lord, why?" I cried--not with tears, but with a total spiritual effort and said, "Lord-help me! He heard my cry and spoke to me and gave me a clue as to when she would come out of this "coma" or whatever it was that she was in. And then He clearly told me when she would come out of the hospital. It was so clear that I got up, turned the light on, and marked it on my calendar. As I recall, I marked a Tuesday.
    The next time I went over, they said, "Your wife came to today; she called for some help and said she wanted to know where she was."
    Catherine realized what was taking place around her. She related to me later that when she came to, it was like she had been asleep and woke up. Although she had been in the same little room now for five or six days, she said she did not recognize her surroundings. She thought she had been kidnapped and that I didn't know where she was.
    The nurse said, "She came to, she knows where she is, she's answering questions," I said, "May I see her?" The doctor told me I could see her tomorrow.
    Well tomorrow was her birthday, that's what the Lord had told me: that I would see her on her birthday. I asked if I could bring the boys.
    On December 10, 1968, we went by the supermarket and got her a little cake and some cards. We knew we couldn't take her any gifts but we could do that. They gave us a room where we met and she just seemed to be so much herself. I thought, "Well, praise God, it's all over."
    We talked and had a real good visit.
    The next day I went back to see her knowing everything was going to be all right, but she did not remember our visit the day before. It went on this way for quite a while. I could see her, but she wouldn't remember my being there the day before. All she would know was just me at the time I was there.
    In the middle of all of this, there was a flu epidemic taking place. First Rodney then Derrick and then I came down with the flu. We had to call for some help, so my sisters came up and helped us a bit, and they went over to see Catherine. I look back now and see that the Lord was exposing so many people to what was taking place.
    After the Lord told me when Catherine was going to get out of the hospital, it brought hope. When I would go back day after day and see that she didn't remember, it brought discouragement again. I don't remember if I said, "Lord, but You promiseed!" There didn't seem to be eneough improvement.
    It was getting close to Christmas. Holiday cheer and our present situation seemed mutually exclusive. I couldn't think about Christmas trees, presents or anything like that. I was having enough trouble just getting Rod and myself to school on time.
    One morning I just felt terrible. I couldn't think straight and I was an hour late to school. I think I should have stayed home because at the end of the day I was sick as a dog. I kept the flu for two weeks and missed a lot of school days. My brother came down with it also and poor Dad had his hands full. I remember one night after work around bedtime, he lost his temper over something simple and used words I had never heard him use before or since. It shocked both Rod and me. Dad apologized and we said our good nights. I could have sworn I heard him crying in his bedroom.
    As the days went by, and Christmas was just a couple of days away, our Aunt Hazel, who had been nursing us through our sick days, left before she came down with it herself. We boys managed to put up a tree, hang a few decorations on it, including the old antique glass balls. Dad and I made a wooden model of the Apollo Eight Command Module and I hung it from a string that was tied to the top of the tree across the high peaked ceiling of our living room to the top of a closet where I had placed a globe of the moon. Each day as the mission got closer to the moon I moved the model to mark the occasion.
    Christmas Eve came and my Mom was allowed a visit home. I am not sure she knew where she was, but we tried to make the best of it. I like to think it was a new beginning, for the Parker Family. I held on to that hope while I listened to Astronauts Landers, Lovell and Frank Borman read from the book of Genesis.
    "In the Beginning, God created the heaven and the earth...."
    The Lord and I are talked and I said, "Lord, send her home in her right mind and I will do whatever I have to do to make sure this never happens again."
    I guess I had been somewhat of a chauvinist as a husband and had stood my ground "this is your job" and "that is mine" and so forth. I don't think I was too hard-nosed about it but....
    I needed to receive mercy. In order to receive mercy, I had to give it. I had to learn mercy, learn compassion, and learn sympathy and patience and many other things.
    The doctor had talked to me about what they were doing for her and then told me about the treatment they do for mental patients. He said, "We don't know how to treat mental patients yet, we're just doing some ball-park guessing as to what we can do. We're going to try some shock treatments electrical shock and insulin shock."
    One day I went over there to visit and she came out with all of her get-well cards in her hand and she told me some things that had happened to her while she had been in the hospital a few days before. I saw that she had moved into a new state, that she was starting to stack up one day on top of the other. When that happened, they allowed her to come home.
    I brought her home for a few hours one Sunday and when I did, it was like she had never been there before, because on the way over she kept saying, "What's the name of our street? What does our house look like?" and asking questions. As as soon as she saw our house, it snapped back into her memory again.
    On one of the visits she said, "Let's get in the car and drive around to all of our friends' homes so I can see their houses and that way I can remember what they look like." We had a picture album of our church, so we sat down and she would read and look and say, "Oh, yeah, I remember,I know them!"
    Once when I went over to visit her in the hospital, she and her roommate (who was about in the same state) were laughing and they said, "You know we can't even remember our children's names?" So I took pictures her pictures of the kids, and went over each one's name, and how old they were.
    I took pictures of her sisters and showed them to her and told her who they were and which getwell cards were from whick sister. The shock treatments had totally destroyed all memory. It had to be fed back in. It's like a computer where someone has pushed the delete button and then you've got to put all the software back in. I believed we could do it together.
    The doctor was encouraged and said to me one day, "She is responding 100% more than we expected to these treatments, so you're going to be able to take her home."
    He gave me a date. I don't recall if he said "a week from Saturday" or "next Saturday." I felt like she was ready to come home. Of course, I was anxious and I could see that she needed me and I needed her and the boys needed her. I felt like if we could just get back together again, that everything would be all right.
    The day came when I was to go pick her up. I made some quick preparation and went over there to find that no one knew that she was supposed to be discharged from the hospital. The doctor had signed no papers, left no word, and he was out of town until late the following Monday night. This was the first time they had really let me down on things they had promised. I was so despondent. They wouldn't even let me see her that night. I came back home and had a tough weekend.
    Early Tuesday morning I called and said, "Dr. Pyle, you promised me I could bring my wife home this past Saturday and I went over and..."
    "No, no, I didn't. It was Saturday..."
    He gave me a date that was for the next Saturday.
    "No, you told me last Saturday." I was getting a bit frustrated.
    "No, it's next Saturday. Let me pull her chart."
    He went and got her chart and said, "you're right...I did tell you last Saturday. I am so sorry. Why don't you come get her today?"
    I was at work and as soon as he said that, I hung up the phone, went and told my boss, got off and headed home. I started straightening up the house a little bit and looked and realized that I hadn't turned my calendar. When I did, I noticed it was Tuesday and there was a big red circle around today's date! So I knew that God was the Deliverer and He was working it out.
    I got everything ready and went over after her. The traffic was heavy and I stopped at a stoplight. I looked over at the Bible lying on the seat and read Mark 19:2 where it says "Now go and tell your friends what great and mighty things the Lord hath done for you."
    God is a Deliverer. When I look back and see all the things that we went through and then remember the moment when I looked at the calendar and saw the mark around the day, I knew Who was in charge and that He had made available to us the strength to go through the trials. And I know when He said, "Go and tell your friends what great and mighty things the Lord hath done for you." that he was talking to me.
    It was good to have Mom home but it wouldn't be easy. I spent many hours trying to figure it all out. I take that back. I have spent years trying to figure it all out. I believe that the loss of two parents, a bunch of stressful life changing moves and then this wonderful, inexplicable miracle and its aftermath was just to much for the mortal mind. But all is well that ends well isn't it?
    That's it. Part Four done. Why, why have I felt the need to write about these things? I don't know. Maybe I have thought about my own mortality a bit more after losing my close friend a year ago this week. And when one thinks about one's mortality, then memories come flooding back. Or like my Dad it is just Mark 19:2 talking to me.
    Hopefully there will be nothing but rving related stuff posted here from now on. But don't bet on it.
  5. -Gramps-
    It is the 100th anniversary of the RV industry, so it seems appropriate to make a trip to Elkhart. Actually, I had no idea that it was or is the RV Centennial until I walked through the doors of the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart, but I am getting ahead of myself.
    Diane and I, along with our friends Gary and Janis, have been planning on a trip to Elkhart, Indiana, for some months now. We were hoping to go there this past March 2, but the weather gave us all cold feet. In some places in Ohio there was over 30 inches of snow on the ground and our coach lot at Deer Creek in Galax, which we wanted to visit on the way back, had over 70 inches laying on it. I figured that since a snow plow, not being standard equipment on a motor coach, and would be needed to park on our lot, made a trip postponement necessary. We made plans to leave for Elkhart on April 9.
    Oh, the purpose of our trip was to visit Elkhart Service and Collision. Both our coaches were in need of some major slide out adjustments. Gary's coach had trouble with both the main and one bedroom slide. My coach's main slide out had never functioned correctly. BAL, the RV products division of Norco Industries, the designers of the cable driven Accuslide were planning on sending over a tech or two to work on the slide outs themselves. You can't beat factory direct service. Not to mention it's hard to get. Now this trip had a twofold purpose. In addition to the slide outs being repaired, we both had a long list of things we wanted done. Nothing on our lists was too major, but still necessary.
    The first of April showed all the signs of being a good weather month. We had ninety degree weather a couple of days before we left. Thursday, the day before our planned departure, I was making an emergency computer network install at the Trellis Restaurant in Williamsburg. I left poor Diane at home to pack up the rig by her self. This type of arrangement happens all too often, but that is the nature of running one's own business I guess. I made it home around six o'lock and spent the rest of the night loading up my clothes and the heaviest of the food stuffs into the coach. Our plan was that the only thing we would have to do the next morning was back out of the driveway, pull into the church lot next door, hook up the Saturn and be on the road by nine. We would not have to stop for gas, propane or anything else.
    We had the coach ready to go by 8:55. That is a new record. At 9 on the dot Gary called to see how we were doing. I told him that we were pulling out right then. Diane and I said our normal prayer for a safe trip, and started on our way. We met Gary and Janis, as planned, at the Monitor and Merrimac Bridge Tunnel inspection station. We both turned off our propane tanks and headed through the tunnel. ( It should be named the Monitor and Virginian tunnel, in my opinion, but if it was you couldn't call it the M&M tunnel which has a nice ring to it.) We kept in touch with each other with family radios.
    We traveled down I-64 for some 20 miles or so till we arrived at the first rest stop. There we turned our tanks back on and then continued. We were headed to Beckley, West Virginia. Our journey to our first overnight stop was almost uneventful. Almost.
    The drive west on I-64 was really nice. Spring had sprung. There were red buds in bloom, the trees were turning green, and daffodils by the hundreds were showing off their yellow heads along the road side. Both our coaches made it up Afton Mountain, west of Charlottesville, across the intersection of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Skyline Drive.
    We turned south down I-81/I-64. It didn't take long to get to I-77/I-64 where we again traveled west, on to Beckley. We planned to stay at a small campground run by the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine. This is a nice tourist spot where you can take a mine car tour of an actual coal seam led by a veteran miner. We would have liked to do just that but we didn't have the time.
    Once we exited I-77 things became a bit dicey. Our gpses? gpss? I am not sure what the plural is, they both went crazy. We had conflicting directions and so we had to choose who was right, Tom or Ms Garmin. We choose Ms Garmin, but it turned out that neither gps was capable of giving good directions.
    We ended up going down a very small street barely large enough for two cars to pass each other. Gary was leading as we came to some kind of police check point. I don't know what they were checking for, but they waved us through. Gary made a right turn down an even smaller street that was also very down hill. Diane told me to ask the policeman for directions. This request came a bit late to help Gary and Janis, but it was still a good thing to do. I opened the window and asked the policeman if the right turn was the way to the Beckley Exhibition Coal mine.
    "You don't want to go that way!" He responded.
    He said this with a lot of emphasis so I immediately began to think that my friends and our coach's twin were headed for trouble.
    The policeman gave us more directions.
    "You need to go straight ahead to the next light, take a right and follow the signs. You can't miss it."
    We continued straight ahead. Diane radioed this info to the other coach. We went to the first light, turned right and found ourselves in downtown Beckley.
    Gary found himself in a tight neighborhood with small streets with telephone and power lines hanging almost lower than the coach's air conditioners. This made maneuvering a bit of a drag.
    There was nothing we could do for them except hope for the best, and find a spot to wait for them to disentangle themselves from a small place.
    We pulled into a food mart parking lot located alongside the narrow street that led to the campground.
    We waited about fifteen minutes, but it seemed like half an hour. As soon as Gary and Janis came into sight we made a very tight left turn. I held my breath as I maneuvered the coach around the grocery store sign.
    One thing was sure: We didn't want to miss this place and drive past it, so my eyes were peeled to the streets on our right. At a curve in the road we came along side a telephone pole that was very close to the right curb. A couple of feet past the pole was one of those small campground signs, the kind with the trailer on it, the word campground and an arrow. This arrow was pointing up a very steep hill. I stopped. There was no way I could make that turn.
    "There is no way we can make that turn," said Diane. "We are supposed to check in at the mine, which has to be up ahead. Let's keep going."
    I agreed to that so I started to pull forward. As I did I heard something funny. It was a scraping noise of some kind.
    "STOP! STOP! You are caught on the pole!"
    This terrible but very necessary instruction from Janis emitted from our radio.
    I quickly stopped, and of course thought to myself:
    "What have I done now?"
    I exited the coach expecting to see the side of it crushed like an empty tissue box. Gary was already outside. I looked up to see the pole nesting itself in the 1-foot-wide space between the patio awing and the bedroom topper awing. Two telephone guy wires were broken and caught up in the awing as well.
    There was no damage to the coach itself. We had 1 inch between the pole and the side of the coach.
    This would take some kind of driving to get off the pole. I had only one idea how to get away from it. Do the opposite of what put the coach there in the first place. I told Gary that I was going to turn my wheels hard to the right and back up, toad and all. Then, if we were lucky, the coach would be clear and I could pull it forward. He agreed that it might work and he would give me instructions on the radio. Diane and Nickolas decided to watch from outside so they exited the coach. Now it was up to Gary, myself and some prayer.
    I got back in and used the UFO 55-degree turning ratio for all it was worth. With Gary giving me precise instructions and to the amazement and amusement of many people living along the street we inched that big monster back and forth until it was clear of the nasty pole. I did have to force one driver to back up quite a ways but he looked like he enjoyed it. I continued the one block up the road to the Exhibition main entrance.
    Diane and Nicolas hitched a ride with Gary and Janis. No, I didn't forget her.
    I parked the coach and made an inspection. It seemed that the pole pushed the bedroom topper out of position. It was now back about two feet and the topper was obviously being pulled in a direction it didn't want to go. It looked fixable and after all we were heading for a repair facility.
    At this point I just wanted to park it, eat some dinner, have a beer (now you know what they are really for) and call it a night.
    We did all the above. First we had the fun drive back down to the offending pole where we made a left turn up the steep hill to the campground. It was small but not a bad place. Gary and I repaired the bedroom topper. It took a while to get it back into position. I discovered that the plastic cover at the top of the left patio awning arm was cracked. I felt very thankful that that was all the damage there was. I figured that ESC could take care of it with no problem. I hoped so anyway.
    For the most part it had been a good first day. It ended with a bang, so to speak, but hey it was an adventure. Tomorrow would be another day. The mountains of West Virginian awaited us, then on to Ohio and Indiana.
    But first......a stop at Tamarack.
  6. -Gramps-
    It was an amazingly (is that a word?) fun thing to watch that ball zoom over the fence, but I, we, still have a game to win.

    The Last Inning (The Giants and the Phillies-Part Two)
    Once again, I have to corral all my players back into the dugout. They are still whooping and hollering and Chris is really pleased with himself.
    "Did you see that coach, did you see that? Blam! Right over the fence. Sorry I hit your van, coach."
    I hadn't noticed that the ball bounced off MY car!
    "Hey, that's okay," I said. "I'm just glad that you hit it out of the park, it was great. Now take a seat and let's win this game."
    Chris ducks inside of the dugout, but before he sits down he grabs the wire fence, gives it a good shake like a caged animal and yells at the Giant's pitcher.
    "Hey Pitch! That's what you get for laughing at me!"
    The whole park hears that outburst.
    I can't let that go, so I turn around.
    "That is not necessary, Chris. We don't gloat. It is not good sportsmanship. You will apologize to the pitcher now."
    "Sorry Pitch!" Chris yells again.
    "Coach, you need to get your team under control!"
    "No problem Blue, I am taking care of it."
    I ask myself, "What is the ump's problem? He seems to be a bit slow today."
    "Chris, after the game you make sure you shake the Pitcher's hand. Understand?"
    Chris, looking a bit deflated, sits down.
    The ump walks over and hands something to Chris.
    It is the home run ball.
    "Great hit, kid."
    Chris's face lights up.
    "Thanks, Ump!"
    The ump nods and says "Batter up!"
    I send Jeffery to the plate and tell him to go get a hit.
    Jeffery, grinning, jogs over to the batter's box.
    "Play Ball!" yells the ump as he pulls down his mask.
    Jeffery stands there and takes six pitches, three are strikes, without moving his bat a bit.
    Bottom of the fifth
    Phillies 8, Giants 2
    I do not want to let my team relax too much. This is Little League. Earlier in the season the Cubs scored seven runs on us in the top of the first. We beat them 20 to seven. We could have scored more if the 13-run mercy rule had not stopped us. Things can happen, so I just want to shut the Giants down and end this.
    As Joel heads out to the mound I tell him to keep on pitching the same way he's been doing it. He nods at me.
    The Giants leadoff is a big lefthander. Joel throws the first pitch a bit outside, and the batter fouls it back. Joel throws to the same spot. This time the kid looks at it.
    Ball one.
    Chris, who is now catching for Joel, shifts and gives Joel an inside target. Joel throws; the batter swings and takes it for a base hit over CJ's head to right-center field. Both Jeffery and Ian make a mad dash for the ball.
    I swear, because they argue over who is going to get it. By the time they figure it out, the runner is way past first.
    Ian tosses to CJ, who turns toward third, but there is no play.
    The leadoff is safely on third.
    "Shake it off Joel, no big deal, just get the batter!"
    Giving up a triple does not faze Joel. He throws his next three pitches for strikes. The batter goes down looking at the third one.
    One down and two to go. Play is at first but we have to guard the plate.
    The next batter goes for the first pitch. He hits a high pop over the first base line. Chris is on his feet in a second, follows the ball and catches it in front of the bleachers. He turns and looks at the third base runner.
    Two outs and one to go.
    I don't know how Joel is doing it, but he bears down and throws three hard inside fastballs. He makes the batter look like a deer caught in the headlights. Three pitches, three strikes, backwards K.
    The Inning is over.
    That triple was the best hit the Giants have had all day and Joel made sure it counted for nothing.
    Top of the Sixth
    The Score is still Phillies 8, Giants 2.
    Shawn leads off. He fouls the first pitch (good for him!) and then takes four straight pitches, all balls.
    Jonathan is up next. First pitch is a ball, second pitch outside for ball two. The third pitch hits my batter right in the helmet. It doesn't bug him a bit as he jogs happily to first.
    The pitcher and Zac get into a bit of battle. Zac fouls off the first two. The pitcher throws two for two balls. Zac fouls off another one and the pitcher heaves two more pitching errors. Zac heads to first.
    WC virtually repeats Zac's at bat and earns a walk with no place to put him.
    Shawn comes home.
    Phillies 9, Giants 2
    TJ walks on five pitches, and Jonathan scores run number 10.
    Ian, well Ian just stands there and swings and misses the last pitch he gets, the third one.
    The Giants have one out on us. They are now facing the top of our order with bases loaded. Not good for them. Not good at all.
    The Giants pitcher knows things are not good and that knowledge must make him really nervous. His first pitch hits Matt in the side, and he reaches first as Zac crosses home plate.
    Phillies 11, Giants 2.
    Matt is on first, TJ on second and good ole WC on third. CJ, who is on deck, moves to the plate.
    I am standing behind the backstop just in front of the first base side dugout. I can see WC on third base and I am watching him and my other runners. They are set and ready to run on contact.
    CJ can hit and I know he wants this one bad. He fouls the first pitch. He hits the second one to the outfield past first base but it lands foul.
    Everyone on my side of the field is yelling so loud it hurts my ears.
    The next throw is in the dirt. The catcher scrambles for the ball. The pitcher runs in to cover the plate.
    My third base coach is waving WC home, but he hesitates.
    What is he waiting for? Run!
    WC breaks for home but that seconds hesitation may cost him.
    The catcher throws the ball to the pitcher, who steps in front of the plate just as WC runs into him. They go down together. The pitcher comes up showing the ball.
    "He's out!" Yells blue.
    WC gets up and starts arguing with the ump.
    "He was holding me!"
    I walk over as my third base coach comes running in, grabs the umpire and points back to the Giant on third base.
    "Ump, he grabbed my runner's shirt! WC would have been safe!"
    The Giants coach is now out of his dugout and we have a real "situation" here.
    "Come on, Ump, this is crazy."
    My base coach is not going to take this.
    "Ump, I am telling you. My guy was interfered with."
    The Ump looks at everyone.
    "I didn't see it. The runner's out!"
    WC looks very unhappy. He pulls off his helmet and tosses it toward third base.
    The Ump takes one look at that and tosses him out of the game for unsportsmanlike conduct.
    My base coach just shakes his head. My parents and players are booing the umpire.
    I tell everyone on the bench we still have one out left and the bases are loaded.
    I tell WC that he did great the whole game, but he should not throw his helmet or his bat.
    He tells me he is sorry.
    I was feeling bad about the Giants situation, but after treating WC like that, I have lost my sympathy.
    First base is open, with two outs.
    I grab CJ.
    "Look, it's 1 and 2, with two outs. Get on first anyway you can."
    "You got it, Coach."
    CJ is a team player. I know he wants the big home run, but now he settles down to business.
    The pitcher doesn't. He throws four straight balls. CJ is on first, bases are loaded again.
    "Way to watch em CJ!"
    Joel is up. He wants to round the bases and he will wait for the pitcher to make a mistake again.
    It is a battle, but Joel has the first pitch advantage. It is a ball way outside. The second one Joel fouls off. He fouls off the third. The count is 1 and 2. The fourth pitch comes in, low and inside, ball two.
    Joel steps out of the box. He adjusts his gloves, takes a couple of swings and steps back in. Here comes the pitch, way high for Ball three.
    The Giants coach calls time. His pitcher walks over to the base path. I can't hear what is being said but both the coach and his player look agitated.
    They don't want another walk, they only need one out, so they need to put the ball in play and get the easy out.
    Here we are again, 3 and 2. Pitcher throws and Joel fouls it. Pitcher throws again, same result.
    The tension is thick in the air, spectators on both sides are yelling to their players. Everyone is on the edge of their seats, waiting for the next pitch.
    This game is really fun. My son is up to bat. What could be better than that?
    The next pitch is slow and hangs over the plate. Joel hits it and runs for first. My base runners take off at the same time. It is a long, slow fly into left right field. It lands between the two outfielders; both are running for the ball. By the time they get there Joel is halfway to second base. TJ crosses home plate. The Giants second baseman is frozen on the base path. Joel pushes him out of the way and crosses second. Matt, between second and third, needs to pick it up or Joel is going to run into him and CJ. I see the throw coming in as the second baseman wakes up. He takes a couple of steps into the outfield to catch it. Joel is almost at third. Matt and CJ make it home.
    My players start pouring out of the dugout.
    The Giants bench is yelling to the infield.
    "Throw it home! Throw it home!"
    Joel rounds third. He might not make it! The throw comes in but it is way too high. It sails over the catcher's head.
    The Phillies rush home plate and surround Joel as he crosses it. The folks in the bleachers are jumping up and down. The guys practically carry Joel off the field.
    Phillies 15, Giants 2.
    We have a 13-run lead. Mercy Rule is in effect. The game is over.
    Not quite yet.
    The Giants coach rushes out of the dugout yelling at his catcher, who has retrieved the ball, to tag the plate. He is claiming Joel didn't touch home. Joel says he did. Joel's team was all around him, so I couldn't see the plate at all.
    The Ump just stands there.
    "Blue, I'm telling you he didn't touch the plate." says the Giants coach.
    I am thinking that I would never pull this kind of stunt on his team. There is no way that the ump is going to call out a kid who just scored an inside the park grand slam.
    "Runner's out!" The Ump yells.
    "Come on Ump, he ran all over that plate and everybody knows it!" My third base coach is getting mad.
    The Ump has made his call.
    "Play Ball!"
    Back in the dugout I lean down to Joel.
    "You did step on the plate didn't you?"
    "Yea coach, I did. I know I got a home run ... but its okay, we are having fun, let's just play ball."
    "So what you are saying is; let's give them one more at bat and show em what we are made of?"
    "Yea, coach, we don't let up, Joel will get em!" says Matt.
    I am very proud of my team and we are having fun.
    What could be better than that?
    "Okay. Phillies hit the field!"
    They run out of the dugout with a yell. A couple of parents come over to me, including Diane.
    I walk with them back to the bleachers and shrug my shoulders at the parents.
    "Hey coach, what are going to do about that?" one father asks me.
    "Nothing, the guys want to keep playing."
    They did. With his team yelling the whole time and the Phillies fans adding to the noise, Joel worked three Giants batters, including two from the top of the order, to a 2 and 2 count before he struck them all out. The last two went down without swinging. With the last out the team gives Joel a hugh cheer.
    The game between the Giants and the Philles is now officially over.
    Phillies win 14 to 2.
    The scorekeeper from the Giants walks over to Diane to compare scores.
    Diane looks at him.
    "I don't know how you are scoring it, but my son got a grand slam."
    "Yeah, he did and he also got three up and three down, quite a kid you have there."
    "Thank you" is her smiling response.
    Joel got his grand slam (off the record), and Chris got his big home run. I coached a game that, obviously, I would never forget.
    Years later, a few days after Joel was graduated from William and Mary, Diane, Joel, Nickolas and myself were staying in our motor coach at the Stone Mountain RV Resort outside Atlanta, Georgia. One day, during our stay, at around 5 p.m. Joel and I were sitting just above first base at Turner Stadium (named for my old boss) in Atlanta. We were watching the Braves take on the Florida Marlins. It wasn't a very exciting game but it was a beautiful June night. Like that time from years before, I was at a baseball game with my son. We were having fun.
    What could be better than that?

  7. -Gramps-

    Why Don't He Write?

    By -Gramps-,

    I know someone must be asking that question. I have asked it myself. I don't have a good answer. The bad answer is that there have been lots of distractions the last few weeks. The first distraction being caused by the need to look after a pup named Nickolas.
    Diane and I decided to subject him to some pretty extensive surgery that, thank the Lord, appears to be mostly successful. He is missing part of three ribs, some chest wall and a big malignant lump on his side. I have been amazed at how quickly he has recovered. However, a problem still remains. The shock of surgery seems to have made an old dog older. Since coming out of recovery he has an extreme thirst, and as a result of that, well, he doesn't always make it outside on time, and he can't make it through the night at all without waking up wet the next morning. That has required us to put him to bed wearing some special waterproof doggy jockey shorts. Nickolas doesn't like the idea that he is wearing diapers, so we don't use that word around him if we can help it.
    Our pupster looked awful after surgery. His back and side were shaved and he had staples running from his belly to his back. People looking at him just cringed. When I looked at him, I just hurt. We lived full-time in the coach for almost 10 days at Deer Creek after he came home. He spent four days at NC State School of Veterinary Medicine in Raleigh, North Carolina. We needed to keep him in a confined space. No, running, no jumping and no climbing stairs was allowed. He went in and out of the coach on a portable ramp. It was not fun for him or us.
    Things improved rapidly and he received a good report on his last visit to the vet school, which took place on our way home from Galax. We spent the night in the State Fairground campground. We were all alone in that huge place. It was just across the street from the school, so staying there could not have been more convenient.
    Since coming back to our stick house, things have been very busy. Lots of phone work and customer service calls (nothing new there). We have also had to make lots of follow-up calls to vets, trying to cure our dog's incontinence problem. Now we are looking at the possibility of Cushing's disease, or Addison's disease or diabetes or maybe just old age. No one knows for sure, even after a lot of blood work, urinalysis and other things that keep draining funds from our retirement account. Poor Nickolas remains in an agitated state, never knowing when the leash being clipped on means that the car will take him to some location where unpleasant things happen.
    I have a theory that Nickolas needs to be left alone. Let him get over the loss of ribs, muscle, and having a lot of pain and confusion. Treat him like a normal dog and he will heal himself.
    No one really liked my theory, for awhile. Finally the decision was made to treat his "leaking" problem with drugs and see how that goes.
    We have a FMCA international rally to attend this weekend. It is the Workhorse Chassis Motor Club rally and I am the host and rallymaster. I have been working on this rally for over a year and I know that Nickolas is looking forward to it as much as I am. The rally takes place at Camp Hatteras in Waves, N.C. Nickolas loves a good romp on the beach and, by golly, I'm going to see to it that he gets one.
    He has comtributed so much to our lives.
    The whole point of his surgery was to try to make Nickolas' life last a lot longer. I am praying that his life continues to be a good one.
    I owe Nickolas at least that much.
    Gramps
  8. -Gramps-
    As I write this our precious Nickolas is fading from this world. I gave him the pill that will allow his suffering to end. It is the hardest thing I have ever done, but I had to do it. He has been sick for five days now. He could not hold down any water or food.
    This thing came on so suddenly. We rushed him to the vet where they could not find the cause. It would take blood work, more needles more pain and maybe even more surgery to even begin to find out what is wrong. .
    It was impossible to put our loving dog through that again. Something just didn't come out right after the surgery to remove that awful lump from his side. He couldn't control his bladder, he started to loose muscle tone, and he drank water by the cupfuls. We put him on PPA, a very powerful incontinence drug and that seemed to help. For awhile he seemed to make an effort to be his old self, but I could sense he was depressed and he started to fade before our eyes.
    I prayed constantly for him. I have not had a conversation with God like the ones I have had the last couple of days since my son was born. I almost lost Joel and my wife back then, but God answered a sinner's prayer and because of the combined work of God and the doctors, my son and wife were made well and whole.
    This time my prayer is not getting the response I hoped for. Nickolas just got worse. Does that mean that God is not listening? Does it mean he doesn't care to exercise just a little bit of His universe creating power to fix my little dog? I can't answer that in words. God is who HE is, faithful to the end. I know that He loves me, my wife, and my dog. Sometimes, in the midst of a tragedy a bigger thing may be happening.
    Our dog is so, so, sick but once again Nicolas is giving something special to me. He looks me in the eyes and I can see appreciation and love. I know that its there. I cannot make him whole but he trusts me and Diane to look after him. My prayer changed from "God heal him!" to God help me to help him.
    I will admit that I do not understand why my simple prayer is not given the answer that it asks for, but I have to look to God the same way Nickolas looks at me, with simple trust. That's all I can do. I am grieving, but if I get angry, then I loose more than just my pup; I loose my relationship with The God of the Universe who sent His Son to make things right between the Father and me. This will be Nickolas' last gift to Diane and me. She and I have held hands, held each other, and prayed together with more passion than we had in years. That is surely a good thing.
    We will rise above this loss, this huge loss. It will not be easy but it is what Nicolas wants us to do.
    A few minutes ago Nicolas asked to go out into our yard. He layed down in the grass, which is something he never does. I could see him smelling the air, the birds were singing and suddenly there were more of them than usual and Nickolas just watched them fly around him. I think he was saying goodbye to this life. He was preparing himself to leave this earthy place.
    Right now he is asleep on our deck. Unless God does work a mircle I do not expect Our wonderful dog to wake again.
    It will be so hard to live without our Coach Buddy, our friend, my wife's shadow, her constant companion. But live we will.
    So help me God.
    Goodbye Friend, you were so loved.
  9. -Gramps-

    At Rest.

    By -Gramps-,

    Nickolas is gone to the place where good dogs go. His life on this earth ended just the way he wanted it to end.
    In memory of him I reprise these words:
    The Human Whisperer
    Nickolas, the family pupster here!
    I asked Dad if he would let me post again. Last time, I hijacked his blog and posted on the sly. This time he said okay.
    I wanted to leave him and Mom a note. They may need what I write here one day.
    I am almost 85 years old now, in relative terms, and so I can say that chances are I have a little bit of time left, but only a little.
    I don't worry about the end of my life. Mom and Dad do that for me. They comment on how white my face is compared to how it used to look. They talk about how slow I am to get up from my nap in front of the TV. They don't like for me to wear myself out going up and down the coach steps.
    They concern themselves with how hot I am, because I pant a lot. Mom bought me this slick blue water-filled pad to help keep me cool. I am not crazy about it but I sleep on it, and that makes her feel better even if it doesn't do much for me.
    They really worry about a tumor that is growing on my left side. They talk about how much they hope it isn't cancer, but if it is, what they can do about it?
    Mom and Dad, especially Dad, could stand to learn a bit about life from me.
    Like I said, I don't worry. I don't worry about that lump or much of anything else.
    I don't give much thought to the squirrels that I can't chase around the back yard anymore. Actually, I never worried about them when I was younger, either. The moment one takes off up a tree, that's it for me. I find something else to think about-like breakfast.
    I can say for sure that life is far too short to spend time worrying about anything, except dinner.
    I love both of my people a lot. They have always given me a good life. I still have a good life even if things are changing. I can't hear much of anything anymore. I used to hear the brakes on Dad's old truck three blocks away. Mom was always amazed when I went to the door to wait for him, long before he pulled up in front of the house. Now I am sometimes surprised by him at the door instead of the other way around. But that is okay. I still follow him to his office desk, furiously wagging my tail, and he never fails to give my back a good scratch.
    Sometimes Dad is so tense when he gets home at the end of the day. I know it is my job to do something to help him, so giving the dog a good back scratching does as much, if not more, for Dad as it does for me.
    There was a time when Dad and Mom were saying something about Dad having a kidney stone. Dad was in pretty bad shape. I saw him on his knees next to his bed. He was sweating and moaning. The pain was so intense that Dad was starting to panic. I jumped up on the bed to be near him. I kissed his nose and then lay down.
    He put his hands on me and buried his face in my side. I did what I was supposed to do, I soaked up his pain. It took a little while but Dad calmed down and I could sense that he started to feel a bit better. I usually stick close to Mom, but Dad needed me, so I stayed right there with him for the rest of the day.
    During our last trip out in our coach (I like to call it the Bus) Mom and Dad watched this movie about a person who helps to heal horses. This person is called a horse whisperer. Dad says that I am a Human Whisperer. I am not sure what that means, but if being a Human Whisperer means being there for my people, reminding them that life should be lived mostly in the present and that love and kindness are what keeps us going, then that is what I am.
    I love my people. They are like gods to me. They are bigger and stronger than me and I trust them to look after me. I hope my love for them is a reminder that there is a greater power that is stronger and bigger than they are who loves them, too. I think it does.
    Many years ago we were on a camping trip, in a tent; this was before we got our fancy bus. It was a beautiful fall day and Dad grilled T-bone steaks for their dinner. The smell was great. I knew that they would share the best part of these wonderful smelling things with me.
    They would give me the bones.
    I was so excited to get one. Dad looked at me, happily chomping away, and then he looked at the mountains around us and the woods with all its bright colors.
    "This is just a bone", he said.
    "What?" Mom asked. "What are you talking about?"
    "This life and this world is just a bone" Dad said. "This is just a taste of what God has in store for those who love Him. We should learn to love life and Him more."
    When the end of my life finally comes, just before I take my last nap, I hope the last thing I see is the love for me in the eyes of my people. I hope the last thing I feel is my Mom rubbing my head and my Dad scratching my back. I hope the last thing I do for them is to whisper that I love them and that life is good, keep on living it well, and thanks for giving me such a good one.
  10. -Gramps-

    Who Is Rescuing Who?

    By -Gramps-,

    Or is it Whom? Never mind.
    I can't remember the exact quote, but at the end of the movie Seabiscuit, there is a line something like this:
    We may have saved a banged up life, but the truth is we found each other and he saved us. The truth is we may have saved each other.
    The words printed above are most likely very misquoted, but still, that line describes what has been going on around my house for the last three weeks. Diane and I took a simple trip in the coach, found a dog who has been moved from place to place, took him in and our lives have gotten better, so much better since. So the question is: who is rescuing who?
    Mr. Beasley formerly named Bailey, now known officially as Theodore Beasley Parker but lovingly called and answers to "Teddy Bear"; is now a wonderful member of our little family.
    Teddy loves the cat, can't wait for Joel to get home each day, loves flushing birds out of the bushes in the back yard, likes to front paw counter surf (we are working on that), can't stand going into his crate, but settles down quickly, loves yogurt (don't tell Diane that I share it with him), loves to go on walks, needs to be groomed, loves Diane's heart shaped home made dog biscuits, and is fascinated by all her Christmas snowmen.
    According to his paper work, he is three years old, almost. He seems more like two. He has high energy, runs around the house, zooms around the yard, watches the Dog Whisperer and when a dog on the TV goes off screen, Teddy runs and looks behind the set trying to see where it went. He makes us laugh. He is medicine for our souls.
    Teddy has separation anxiety. He howls when one of us leaves the house. We are working on that as well. He doesn't like being groomed but Diane, with a handful of liver treats, is successfully helping him overcome his dislike of that activity.
    It is so obvious that the two of them are developing a very close relationship.
    There have been a few rough moments in the last three weeks but nothing all that dramatic. He snapped at the lady vet who was checking him out the day before we decided to adopt him. A trainer at the vet's office thought he might have some aggressive tendencies, but I disagree. I think Teddy is just simply afraid. He was boarded for long periods of time at a vet clinic while his owners traveled for days to football games and such. He has been left for weeks at Doggie Day Care facilities. I think he thought he was about to be left behind..again.
    We have no intentions of ever leaving him with anybody until he knows that we will be coming back to get him.
    The day after Christmas we are heading to St Augustine. The three of us are looking forward to that long coach trip. We will be celebrating the arrival of the New Year while walking the beach. The next day, we are off to Fort Wilderness for five days. Nickolas loved that place.
    I am sure that Teddy will too.
    Teddy had no idea how his life was about to change that Saturday after Thanksgiving when we saw this long legged dog for the first time. We had no idea how our lives would improve when we took him in to live with us.
    So the answer to the question is obvious. We are rescuing each other.


  11. -Gramps-

    Off to Florida!

    By -Gramps-,

    The Night Before.
    It will be a day later than we planned but we are going to St Augustine for New Year's eve. We will do our best to make up the time that we lost. We lost it due to ten inches of snow or maybe it was twelve? It will be a long day on the road tomorrow. Hopefully we will pull into North Beach Campground late Wednesday instead of early in the day. Jeri, Tom and Dilly will arrive sometime Thursday Morning.
    I think that due to the snow eating the start of our trip, I will add an extra day onto our stay at Fort Wilderness and leave next Saturday Morning instead of Friday. What's another sixty four bucks?
    The snow is quite amazing. It is supposed to be the third biggest amount since records were started back in the 1880s or sometime close to that. We certainly have never had this much snow for Christmas in my lifetime.
    Fortunately I pulled in all the coach slide outs the night before. I didn't like the idea of climbing up on the roof and sweeping snow off. That seemed like a risky thing to do.
    I did my best to keep the coach warm. It was was not that hard to do. What was hard was thawing it out after the 12 volt water bay heater failed. The fan would blow but no heat at all. I had to put a 120 volt ceramic heater in the bay and keep it hot for quite a while. Once the water started flowing again I tuned it down to a balmy 70 degrees.
    So if all goes well, we make it down our icy street to the church parking lot where I hook up the car and then to the main road outside our neighborhood, we should be on our way to just south of Florence, South Carolina and spend our one night on the road.
    Well I need to make this short because I am still packing up the rig.


    Check back later, you never know what you might find here!
  12. -Gramps-

    40 Years

    By -Gramps-,

    Diane and I have discovered that living in a motor coach simplifies our life. We don't find the small space to be confining. Quite the opposite, it is liberating. Our motor coach frees us from thinking about so many things. She and I normally operate in two different worlds. Diane's world concerns the house, the two men, the cat and the dog that live in it with her. My world revolves around my business, my computers, and my online friends. Most of the time we are in two different parts of the house or we are in my office sitting at two different computers. We share the same room when watching TV, but there is not much conversation and it isn't unusual for us both to fall asleep while NCIS or Castle or some other program rumbles on in the background.
    When we travel in the coach we rediscover each other. We are not on the same couch but we are just feet away from each other looking out the same big window. Teddy is sometimes on Diane's lap watching the world fly by with us. We have hours to just "sit and talk." We do plenty of that. We may review the things that have happened in our lives, we talk about our past, our memories and there are lots of those, or we talk about our future and how uncertain it is. We talk about God, our kids, our extended families.
    When you boil it all down, the coach helps us to remember just how much we love each other and how long we have been together, and we have been together for a long, long time...
  13. -Gramps-

    FIRE and RAIN

    By -Gramps-,

    Fire and Rain.
    That is the headline of our local paper this morning. I thought of it as the title of my blog entry days ago, but I wasn’t fast enough to use it first.
    The headline sure fits our present situation. The Dismal Swamp has been on fire for weeks. The fire has thrown a big cloud of smelly, acrid, blue smoke that moves around which makes being outside an unpleasant experience. The only hope to ending the fire was a time of heavy continuous rain. Well, we are getting that now, as I write this.
    It has been some week for my family. It reads like the plot of some bad short story...”The Parker Family Saga” written with 2000 words or less.
    Here is the synopsis:
    Saturday….Mom of wife dies from Stroke.
    Tuesday….Daughter has really big baby.
    Wednesday…Family (minus daughter) attends funeral of Mom of Wife
    Thursday….Father of family goes back to work and hopes to finish 2 month long project.
    And has to make hurricane preparations at same time
    Friday….Father visits customers to help batten down their phone systems and still works to open a large medical practice. Comes home and does as much as he can to get ready for a hurricane.
    Saturday….Father sits in from of computer and writes blog, hoping to post soon in case power goes out.
    Sunday...gives thanks to God that family made it through one crazy week.
    Also gives thanks that the Fire is out and the Rain is gone
    Makes for quite the story don't you agree?
    Derrick
  14. -Gramps-

    Family

    By -Gramps-,

    I believe that I am a pretty good motor coach pilot. I still believe that, even though I hit my mailbox while making a sharp turn into our driveway. Obviously I didn’t pull up the street far enough and turn sharp enough, but no real damage done, except to my pride.
    My car driving skills while making service calls … that is another thing altogether. I tend to talk on my cell too much while driving. I get distracted by the radio, the voices in my head, and the vehicles in front of me. The last thing really bugs me. I can be behind a dump truck, or a bus carrying seniors, while talking to a customer on the phone and I will blindly follow the bus down some street and then wonder how I got there.
    If you were to ask Diane about it, she would say that I followed it because I couldn’t help myself, that I did it instinctively, like a salmon swimming upstream.
    “You think so?” I would say to her.
    “Yep,” she might reply. “You are an old man and subconsciously you know you should be on that bus.”
    “Very funny. So how do you explain my following a dump truck?”
    “I can answer that. Because when you have rocks in your head you are magnetically attracted to trucks hauling large quantities of the same material.“
    Well, I don’t make stupid driving decisions when driving the coach. Not many, anyway. Our first year as owners of a motor coach was the worst getting into scrapes which included hitting a fence (actually the fence hit me), a mailbox, a tree, a tree, (no that is not a typo) a rock or two (they hit my coach windshield). I think that is about all. Oh, I ran over a low rock wall with our second coach, the one we have now, and I hit a telephone pole (actually the pole hit me).
    If I were to list all the mishaps including bangs, bumps, holes, rips, and things that make you say, “What the heck was that!” along with all the things that break on their own … I might have to ask myself the following question:
    What in the world has kept me in the RVing (motor coaching) world for the last seven years?
    That question is easy to answer.
    Family.
    It is the people we have met, the friends we have made that keep me looking forward to hitting the road again even though I might hit something else or it might hit me.
    We RVers, we motor coachers, are a rare breed. I don’t know how to explain it to people who don’t do what we do how easy it is for us to make friends.
    Just the other day I was at a Sonic Drive In next to a Lowes. At the edge of the Lowes parking lot was a good -looking 36 foot motor coach. It had its jacks down and its slideouts extended. Sitting in a lawn chair on the grass was a man named Bob and his black lab. Bob was taking it easy, smoking a cigar and seemed to be without a care in the world.
    I walked over and started talking to him. When I told Bob I was a coacher as well, he gave me a big smile and started telling me about himself. Bob was visiting his daughter, a Navy officer, who was soon to be deployed to the Middle East. He and his wife had traveled from Arizona to see her. I told him about myself, my family and my coach. We talked for over an hour and parted as friends. Something tells me I will see him again one day.
    I think we have the old American pioneering spirit still living in us. We are descendants of the people who loaded up their covered wagons and headed west. They would rally up at some fort on the trail. They shared food, and drink and stories.
    These stories were about their journeys and the friends they made along the way. They would make new friends as they would travel together. If someone’s wagon broke down, or a horse died, they would pitch in and help their fellow traveler in need.
    We do the same thing now. I have helped repair a stuck Workhorse or two. My wife and I have been to lots of rallies and fed lots of people. People have looked after us. Our coaching friends on the forums, at campouts and especially at Deer Creek Motorcoach resort helped us though some tough times this last year.
    I don’t think that Barry and Mario had any idea what kind of community they would be giving birth to when they conceived the idea of building a motor coach resort. Deer Creek is more than a resort with clubhouse, golf course and a lot of handsome coaches parked on pretty lots. It is not just a resort … it is a refuge. It is a fort full of good people.
    We are family. I would not give up this life for anything. I will continue to hit the road and take the risk that something unexpected might happen. Most of the time that unexpected thing is good, like meeting someone like Bob and making a friend, possibly for life.
    That is the best thing about being a member of the motor coach Family.
    Hopefully I won’t have to buy a new mailbox anytime soon.
    Gramps.
  15. -Gramps-

    Bicycle Built for Four

    By -Gramps-,

    Last Friday morning I headed out to Lowes to buy a couple of things. I needed a flush valve seal for the low flow toilet in the bathroom next to our bedroom. I put off getting one for days just because I hate anything to do with plumbing. Plumbing is wet and it leaks and it frustrates me. However, a water bill that is bigger than it should be due to a bad toilet frustrates Diane so I found myself at Lowes buying the seal, some light bulbs (the old fashioned kind). I also picked up a Roman Shade for the coach bedroom door window.
    Diane didn’t want me to get one of those yet, not until she could shop with me. I wanted one right away because we were leaving later that afternoon in the coach with our grand boys for a little weekend camping trip to the Virginia Beach KOA. We needed the shade because Teddy Bear tore up the mini blinds that use to hang on the bedroom door. We had accidentally closed the door before we left Teddy alone in the coach while we took a trip to somewhere. He likes to sit in the bedroom chair and look out the window. He tried to open the door and in the process bent the blinds beyond repair. It didn’t matter that much, because we never liked them.

    So I came back with a shade. Diane was going to hang the dog blanket over the window for some privacy but the shade was on sale so I hoped the low price would compensate for a color she might not like. She frowned at me when she saw it, and reminded me that we were supposed to look together but she also said that it didn’t look all that bad.
    So I avoided that problem, and then tackled the leaky toilet. I did manage to fix it pretty quick so we packed up the coach and waited for the boys to arrive.
    Christine, Rob and little Brooklyn along with Carson and Austen pulled up around two in the afternoon. By two thirty, the car was hooked up and we were on our way to the Beach.
    It took about forty minutes to get parked on the site. The boys went exploring while I hooked up the coach and set up our patio. Then I hung the Roman shade. Diane actually thought it looked good. I was relieved.
    Once that was done, I went looking for the boys and found them on the basketball court. We played Cow, then Bird, and no matter what I could not beat Carson. The old man can’t out shoot the eight year old.
    They talked me into trying the giant jump pillow. This is a very large air filled trampoline. I gave it a whirl but I didn’t stay on it long. I figured if my knees gave out my butt would take a big bouncing whack. Actually, it was fun. You can get quite a bit of height, enough to do flips (Not Me!) and there are no springs to trap you and then break your leg.
    I fired up my Char-Griller kettle and I put chicken breasts with rice and mushroom soup wrapped in foil on the coals. Forty minutes later when had tender chicken, with rice and steamed broccoli for dinner. I used the coals to start a fire in the ring. Austen had procured the wood from the camp store earlier. We roasted marshmallows and made smores.
    After all the dinner stuff was cleaned up the boys came into the coach to watch “Back to the Future’ part one. They had never seen it before. It was fun to watch a movie with the boys about 1955 set in 1985. All of it was a trip to the past for them, big video cameras, Sony Walkman cassette tapes and all as well as Mr. Sandman and black and white television sets. The line in the movie “Who the heck is John F Kennedy?” is ironic for a number of reasons. They want to watch part 2. They will both find out the future, now their present, didn’t turn out exactly like the movie predicted.
    Saturday morning arrived clear and cool. It was going to be a glorious day. We all had sausage and egg biscuits nuked in the microwave, except for Teddy Bear of course. Then the boys took off for the jumping pillow on their scooters. I decided to make some minor repairs to the coach.
    I climbed up on the roof with needle and thread and repaired one of the bedroom slide out toppers. Then I waxed and buffed a section of the roof. I had some samples of RV wax-cleaner and I just wanted to see what they would do. Not that much it turned out. That reminds me I need to climb back up their and buff that stuff off.
    After my trip to the roof, I tightened up a loose bolt that holds the bay heater element wire to the snap fuse. I think that it being loose was the cause of the heater not blowing warm air last winter. That resulted in a frozen water pump. I would like to avoid replacing it again this winter.
    Diane and I let the boys set their own schedule for the morning. We figured as long as they were having fun…then we could have some time to ourselves. Both of us opened e-books and read most of the morning. I was trying to get through “Endeavor in Time” a Christian novel about time travel. It wasn’t written very well at all. The author borrowed from the TV series “Quantum Leap” and I think he should have left it alone. I finished the book and parts of it were okay but that is the best thing I can say about it. “The Door into Summer’ written in 1955 is a much better book if you want to read a time travel novel. It too has some predictions about the future that didn’t work out the way the author envisioned. That is part of what makes it fun.
    We read until lunch time which was the same time the boys came back to the coach.
    After lunch, all of us piled into the car and headed for the Virginia Beach boardwalk. After we parked we walked to a bicycle rental stall at 11th and Atlantic. We rented a surrey, one of those four person pedal cars. Diane had a coupon for the rental and we bought an hour for half the normal price.
    Carson and I took the front seats, Diane, Teddy Bear and Austen sat down in the back. We set off down the bike path.
    Pedaling that thing was hard work, plus the brake didn’t function. We could only stop the rig using the Flintstone method.
    I found out real quick that Carson was not much help propelling the coach as he could not reach the pedals. Teddy Bear was not comfortable riding on Diane’s lap so we decided to rearrange things a bit. Carson and Diane switched seats, Teddy went in the baby seat all the way up front.
    That worked out really well. The dog seemed to like being in the basket and he got lots of attention from the people we passed. Carson could stand up on the pedals in the back and so he became more than just dead weight. He became the afterburner. Whenever I called for "Turbo power", he would hit the pedals and give us a sudden burst of speed that didn’t throw us back in our seats but still moved us along at a much faster pace.
    We pumped that thing for an hour. It wore me out, but it was a lot of fun for all of us. As we were pedaling along we watch people horse back riding, and kite flying. We saw one person on an electric unicycle. We passed other surries and gave the passengers a big wave as we went by. We sang as we rode. It was a good hour.
    We returned the bike and then went to the closest grocery store for some ice cream. While there I bought some of those packaged adult juice boxes….Mar-Go-ritas or something like that. You put em in the freezer, until they get slushy and then serve them. You have to squeeze them to get the good stuff out. I bought them for all the adults coming for a cook out that night.
    Once we were back in the coach I served up some pretty good coffee ice cream to Diane while the boys and I had some Chocolate Truffle. Then Carson and I hung a string of rope lights that had been on the ground, from the patio awing. About the time we finished Christine showed up with sleeping Brooklyn. They left her with me while everyone else went back to the bouncing pillow.
    As soon as all were gone, Brooklyn woke up and started screaming at me. I guess she might have been hungry but there was nothing I could do about that. I couldn’t find her always near pacifier either. The only bottle I had was in the freezer and it contained booze. I thought about it but I figured if I drank a Mar-go-rita, it would only dull the pain in my ears for a second or two. So I paced around and patted her little bottom until help arrived.
    Christine took her from me, laid her on the dining table to change her and Brooklyn immediately shut up and began to smile.
    If I had known that putting her flat on her back and letting her kick her feet was all she wanted well, I could have done that.
    We all sat around and talked for awhile and then I fired up a chimney of coals for the grill. Joel and his girl friend Ashley were planning to come for burgers and baked sweet potatoes.
    I threw some Bubba Burgers on the grill, started a camp fire and put the Beatles in the coach CD player.
    When Joel and Ashley arrived I handed them each an adult juice box. Ashley, who had never been in the coach before, got the ten cent tour.
    Dinner was good. The conversation was good. Smores afterwards were good to.
    The evening flew by and soon the boys, Diane and I were left alone in the coach. We hit the bed around eleven.
    Sunday was simple. We packed up and were out of the KOA by noon. Home by one, boys gone by three. A quick weekend but it was really nice. Carson and Austen loved it. Christine got some time to herself, as much as you can get with a newborn daughter. Diane and I got to spend time with our grandsons.
    There is nothing wrong with that. I look forward to taking them out again.
    -Gramps-
  16. -Gramps-

    It's Smokin!

    By -Gramps-,

    Our sixteen pound turkey is currently relaxing inside my electric smoker. It has been getting the smoke and steamed beer treatment for about two hours now with four to go. I keep checking the remote thermometer and making sure that the bird doesn’t finish its spa treatment too fast. This takes a lot of patience on my part but it will be worth it.
    Patience is the key, not just for smoking a good turkey but also to enjoying the Motorcoach lifestyle. In case you don’t already know it, rule number two of my rules for owning a Motorcoach is:
    Keep your temper on a very short leash or when owning a Motorcoach, patience is not only a virtue but a necessity.
    You can read more about this rule here:
    http://community.fmc...r-coach-part-2/
    Patience pays off in the long run. Exercising it will greatly improve your disposition and turn a bad situation or a coach you don’t like into something positive.
    Two weekends ago, Diane, Teddy Bear and I attended our annual Good Sam’s chapter ThanksMas party. This is our combination Christmas and Thanksgiving celebration. We eat, play games, eat some more (a lot more) and talk a lot. As at any gathering of motorcoachers (and that is what we are, no trailer owners in our group) we talk about our passion for motorcoaching. When talking about motorcoaching the conversation will include mishaps, repairs from said mishaps, the cost of those repairs and the advantage of buying a used coach over a new or vice versa. We enjoy the subject of motorhoming so much that I read all my one liners from Rule Number 4 for motorcoaching which caused a few flying elbows between husbands and wives as well as a few red faces.
    You can read more about rule #4 here:
    http://community.fmc...r-coach-part-5/
    The whole weekend made me realize that Diane and I are really at home in our coach.
    It didn’t start out that way. There was a very long list of things that were wrong that came with the coach and a number of things that went wrong later. I could have gotten mad and said:
    “This is a brand new coach and it shouldn’t have these troubles. I wish I had never bought the darn thing.”
    Actually I did say that a few times but I remained patient and did I what I had to do to get all the malfunctions functioning.
    My patience paid off. Our coach is now a very good one.
    My fellow motorcoachers in our club have learned the same thing. Stick it out, be patient, don’t expect everything to always be perfect. Just like life, that isn’t going to happen and you will only make yourself angry if you don’t learn to be patient and roll with it, whatever it may be.
    There will be troubles with your coach. Just be thankful when it works and for the friends it has helped you make and the places that it has carried you to.
    When people ask you “how’s your coach doing? “; you can answer “It was a turkey but now it’s smokin’!”
    Happy Thanksgiving!
    Gramps.
  17. -Gramps-
    It has certainly been awhile since I posted anything having to do with motor coaching. I guess I could just ignore that fact and just post like I don’t have a care in the world and no time has gone by at all since my last new entry. I won’t do that, however. I will tell you that Diane and I have managed to make it to some chapter campouts where we had some weekend fun with our fellow FMCA and Good Sam members, while still longing for a good long trip on the road.
    Three weeks or so ago we finally got our wish, sort of. We also got the opportunity to practice one of my rules for owning a MotorCoach.
    Rule number 2, to be exact: Keep your temper on a very short leash. Or, when owning a motor coach, patience is not only a virtue but a necessity.
    I had some time between jobs, so Diane and I took advantage of that fact and quickly packed up the coach for a trip to Florida to see our daughter and her family, which includes a brand-new grandson. For nine months we had been hoping and semi planning to take this trip, without knowing exactly what day we could leave, so when a chance came our way to take off, that is what we did.
    We left on April Fool’s Day. If I were a superstitious person, I might have chosen a different day to roll down the road.
    Our first stop was to be Greensboro, North Carolina. We needed to stop at Terry Labonte RV to repair a couple of things that had gone wrong with the coach. Maybe a better way to phrase it would be that we needed to fix things that were going wrong with the coach. We kept having this nerve-wracking alarm go off on a regular basis. It was a combination of an ABS alarm, a hydraulic brake alarm and an auto park failure. Alone, none of these alarms was much fun; together I figured that they were a recipe for big trouble. I was correct about that.
    Usually after this alarm would rear its ugly head -- which manifested itself as a bunch of flashing lights on the instrument console, sometimes accompanied by a very irritating unending beep -- I would pull over at the earliest safe spot and restart the engine. This would clear all the nasty little messages and lights and we would continue on our merry way.
    We were less than a mile from the intersection of U.S. 58 and I-85 South, when the alarm went off with a vengeance. I pulled off the road onto an access road to a closed Wal-Mart parking lot. We found ourselves between a bank and an Arby’s when I stopped, put the rig into "Park," shut off the engine, turned it back on with the hope of having all the noises and flashing lights gone, if not forgotten.
    Hoping does not always work. I restarted the engine, but the alarms were still very much there and the coach would not come out of "Park."
    We were stuck, broken down on the road.
    “Diane, we are not going anywhere today,” I told her.
    She and our dog, Teddy Bear, just looked at me with “What do we do now?” expressions on both their faces.
    I had no real idea what to do. It was Sunday, for Pete’s sake. There would be no one at Workhorse to answer the phone. We currently were not using a road side service, and even if we were, it was still Sunday.
    I called a friend, my daughter Jeri, and my parents. The first call was to Mike Pelchat, former Workhorse Ambassador and a person who knows quite a bit about the UFO chassis. We discussed a few possibilities about what was wrong and what to do about it. We both agreed there was not much we could do today.
    We sat and stared at each other for a while. I did turn on the inverter so we could watch a bit of TV to help pass the time. When dinner time arrived I walked over the Arby’s and purchased a Rueben for myself and a Turkey sandwich for Diane.
    At nine I extended curbside bedroom slideout and we hit the hay. We knew we needed to start making phone calls very early the next morning to tow companies, service centers and manufacturers, but not necessarily in that order.
    At nine thirty there was a knock at the door.
    “Who can that be?” asked Diane.
    I knew who it was. I opened the door to see two policemen standing on Arby’s grass.
    “Are you planning on sleeping here tonight?” one of the officers asked me.
    “Well, yes we are.” I responded. “But not by choice, we are broke down.”
    “Oh, sorry to hear that” said one of the officers. “You are planning to do something about not being here long?”
    I told them that I would be contacting a tow company in the morning and hopefully we would not be there long at all. I also told them it could have been worse….we could have been stuck at the stop light on 58. I hated to think how much fun that would have been, my coach blocking lots of trucks and cars on their way to who knows where.
    The officers told us that they were about to come off shift and would let the next one know our situation and they would keep an eye on us to make sure we were safe. I told them I appreciated that very much.
    I closed the door, locked both locks and went back to bed.
    I actually slept thru the night.
    The next morning we called Terry Labonte RV, and once transferred to RV and truck service, Pal Dojcsak the Service Manger answered the phone. I explained our situation, and Pal said the best tow company to pick up our rig and bring it to Greensboro and their shop would be Ray Harris towing. I called them and agreed to pay for a large bill.
    Now, I know it might have been best to have road side assistance, but that is something I did not have at the time. During a previous road side problem with our first coach, I found the roadside assistance that we had at the time (AAA with RV coverage) to not be much use towing a 36 foot motor home. First the call back took hours and when I finally did get a call; I was informed that there was no one available to tow the rig for days, if at all. Lucky for us we were able to continue on our way without a tow….but that is another story.
    So I never renewed, and did not subscribe to any other service. Plus I had heard of so many horror stories about towing pushers, (especially a UFO) that I figured if anything did happen; I, as the tow-ee would be better off choosing the tow-er myself instead of being locked into some network outfit.
    In theory and in practice I may have been correct.
    Andy, from Ray Harris Towing arrived on site at 10:45 about two and a half hours after I called. Once there he went to work. He attached the truck to the coach; I jacked up the back wheels so he could disconnect the drive shaft.
    Then things got a bit tricky. He asked me to take the coach out of park, and I told him that could not be done. The auto park would have to be manually disconnected and the instructions in the manual were not quite right.
    I made a second call to Mike Pelchat.
    Mike had the proper instructions for disconnecting the auto park on an R-26 coach. He talked to Andy and about thirty minutes later we were following our big silver box down the road.
    We arrived at Terry Labonte RV around one pm when we were hoping to be there early in the morning. Needless to say we lost our appointment time and had to go to the end of the waiting line.
    While we were waiting, Andy had to go pick up another coach. Some tow company had towed it to the wrong site (they took it to Terry Labonte's paint shop, which was some miles away). Andy went after it only to discover that the tow company driver neglected to disconnect the coach drive shaft. Hopefully the owners, who had a busted radiator, would not also have a busted transmission. Andy jumped a curb with the rear end of our coach, which scared me, but no damage was done. Other than that I think he did a great job of getting the big rig where it needed to go.
    We hung around the coach for the rest of the day. We had lunch, Diane read her Kindle and I walked over to the RV sales lot to just visit and try not to think about when we might be back on the road to Florida.
    Around four thirty we packed up the car and headed for the La Quinta just up the street. It was the only pet friendly place around, except for our coach, and we could not spend the night in there because it would be locked up behind a security fence.
    There isn’t much exciting to say about how we spent our time in Greensboro. It took four days to get the coach repaired. Late Tuesday afternoon, Bruce Sweeney and Jim Smoot discovered, with help from Eric McCann (who is also a friend of mine) at Workhorse that the ABS pump was, in layman’s terms blown, and would need to be replaced. That meant waiting for parts which in turn meant Thursday morning before the main repair could be made.
    So now I had the opportunity, once again, to practice my own rule number 2 for owning a Motorcoach. That rule almost needed to be tattooed on the palm of my hand, so I could see it a lot over the next few days.
    We had a not always pleasant night at La Quinta, however having a hot shower felt really good. We had carry out from Chick-Fill-A, which consisted of salad, sandwich and chicken noodle soup.
    We ended the evening with some TV and I spent the rest of night having nightmares about coaches being towed over curbs and rolling into ditches.
    The next morning we had the continental breakfast in shifts. Diane went first. I went next and brought some hard boiled eggs, yogurt, along with a biscuit and some pretty stiff gravy back to our room. .
    After eating we headed back to the service center just to check on the days agenda. There was not much to tell us as the coach had three others in front of it. We would not really know anything until very late in the day.
    We decided to kill some time at Camping World. I wanted Diane to take a look at the Rand McNally RV GPS and who knows; maybe we would find some bargains there as well.
    We went, we looked, and we did not buy the GPS because we had a gift card that we left behind in the coach. We visited the local Farmer's Market but nothing there grabbed our attention for long.
    We jumped back in the car and drove to Lexington, North Carolina where we planned to do two things: one. buy some locally made Conrad and Hinkle Pimento Cheese. It is the best Pimento cheese on the face of the earth. I love the stuff. We also planned on meeting my Mom and Dad for lunch and just spend some time together.
    We did just that. Diane, Teddy and I walked around downtown Lexington for awhile before Mom and Dad arrived. Then we had subs from the local Italian restaurant which we ate outside. I wanted a beer to go with them, but that was not possible because we were in a dry county. Oh well.
    After lunch we bought two quarts of Conrad and Hinkle, some ginger ale, I threw the cheese into a freezer bag along with some ice and we then went shopping. We visited a candy store located in a hundred year old building with creaky wooden floors. The hand made fudge was out of this world and Dad bought some for Diane.
    We said goodbye to Mom and Dad and drove back to Greensboro.
    We came back in the afternoon and our coach, at the last minute before closing, was moved out from the fenced area to a spot with power. We now had our home back to a useable state if not a drivable one. We were rescued from another night in a hotel. For awhile it looked like we were going to have to visit the La Quinta again. The tech was having problems with the auto park and connecting the system to read the codes. Having been told that, it sure was a relief to see the coach move to its parking spot.
    Bruce told us that he had been getting a lot of help from Eric at Workhorse.
    Wednesday the fourth of April was a very hot day. We had the coach all to ourselves that day and going somewhere did not appeal to us. Jeri, our daughter, checked into the hospital very early that morning. We had hoped to be there but obviously we were not. We would have to sit and wait for the arrival of our new grandson from the comfort of our coach while it sat in a parking lot.
    I decided to pass the time by cleaning our Vue. It really needed it. I washed it with Armor All extreme shine detailing stuff, vacuumed the carpets and shampooed them and everything else on the inside. During this time I decided that I needed some shade so I rolled out the electric awning and about half way out it made a loud banging noise and then fell open the rest of the way.
    That did not sound right, so I tried to retract it and it would not move.
    It was pretty obvious that the awning was broken. Oh well. I figured that it was small potatoes compared to a massive brake failure and it picked a good time to fail. We were parked in front of a repair facility, not going down the road. I walked into the office and informed Pal we had another problem. Pal sent Scott Frunzen, the same person who prepped the coach four years earlier, to come over and have a look. Scott discovered that the motor shaft was stripped. Another part would have to be ordered. Do want you have to do, was my response.
    I went back to cleaning my car.
    Around four, Pal stretched a garden hose a very long way over to our coach so that we could fill our fresh water tank. This took some time and while Pal and I were standing outside just shooting the breeze, Diane came out with some really good news.
    Gavin Thomas Wheeler came into the world just after four. Both mother and newborn boy were doing just fine. She then showed me a blurry picture on her not so smart phone.
    Pal, who has a set of very young twins at home, said congratulations.
    Not a bad ending to the day I guess. Before the day ended for the techs Scott had to roll a scaffold over to our coach so that he could roll up our awning and tie it off. A big storm was on its way.
    It rained like crazy that night with lots of thunder and lightning which Teddy hates as much as he does motorcycles.
    The highlight of our next day was a trip to Wal-Mart for some things, food and new cups along with a baby gift for our new grandson, whom we still hoped to see soon, and back to Camping World.
    We took advantage of Good Sam's roadside assistance being offered on sale on site. The staff member who helped us was well very helpful. We also purchased the Rand McNally RV 5510 gps.
    I was not happy with our old Garmin. It got us lost the first trip to Camping World. It kept turning us in circles because it did not recognize most of the streets we were on. I was ready to throw the thing out the sunroof along with my smart phone and Teddy Bear who kept barking at passing motorcycles. Diane was ready to throw me out the roof from fussing about the Garmin and the dog.
    On the way home Diane played with the new GPS (she loves it by the way) and we bought some Dunkin Doughnut blueberry Munchkin holes for the techs. We figured they would be more fun to hand out than cigars.
    Our coach was not in its spot when we arrived. We sat in the car and played with the GPS.
    We had some good news waiting for us, the ABS break pump had been replaced and the awing was now repaired as well. The next step was to bleed the brakes, which was a long, complicated and critical process. Once that was done the coach would be parked again and hopefully, the next morning we could be on our way.
    The brakes were bled successfully, the coach was taken on a test drive by Pal around the lot, and then they told me to take it for a longer one.
    I climbed into the coach. The generator was running so that Bruce’s laptop could stay connected and running which would allow it to capture any errors that the Engine Computer Module was generating.
    I took it for a spin and worked the brakes pretty hard. They felt great, like new.
    Everyone was happy with the result.
    The next day, Friday, the guys checked the coach air conditioning, which was not cooling. They discovered that it was low on coolant but there were no leaks and all was good to go once the system was recharged.
    We saw the coach come out again. We paid the bill, the part for the brakes was covered by Workhorse (thank you Eric!) we gladly paid for all the hard work the guys did, we had lunch and then at noon we hit the road. Almost.
    After eating lunch, I hooked up our tow only to discover that none of the lights would work. It took me awhile to realize that I had put the coach end of the electrical connection in the socket upside down. Stupid of me I know. Once that was fixed we were on our way.
    The guys at Terry Lobonte RV really came through for us... Eric McCann at Workhorse, Mike Pelchat, Andy from Harris Towing, they all played a huge part in getting us back on the road in time to see our new grandson.
    I can’t thank them enough.
    Well, my next post will be about the trip from Greensboro to Florida and back. It will be some fun reading with pictures. Hopefully I can keep the days straight. Stay tuned to this channel.
    Gramps.
  18. -Gramps-

    Here Be Dragons!

    By -Gramps-,

    It is commonly believed that early geographers used this phrase to mark the uncharted areas of their maps. They had not explored these areas and therefore assumed them to be dangerous. The actual wording was Hc Svnt Dracones. The mapmakers would put images of sea monsters on the edges of the map because it was the best way to say there is bad stuff “out there”.
    This past August 2nd I turned sixty years of age. I am now entering into uncharted territory. It is for me anyway. Others have been there before me and can offer me some advice as to what I shall be facing. When I was a newlywed man of nineteen, I was also moving into uncharted territory but I did not foresee trouble or hardship. I saw a bright future, full of promise with the hope of La dolce vita, the sweet life. In many, many ways at times, it has been just that, but there have been dragons to face along the way.
    The majority of us live our lives somewhere in between the sweet life and the habitation of dragons. We come into this world empty headed (and that is a good thing) and as we grow we learn that life has its pleasures and its pains. We get married, have kids, go to work, and have passion for it all, only to discover that we have to struggle at it. We have to slay the dragons of work or lack of it, sickness, losing loved ones, suffering financial setbacks.
    .
    I have said before that owning a motor coach can improve your life if you let it. Sometimes I think we have to spend a part of our life, including our bank balance, to improve our coach. It can become, if we are not careful, a dragon in the driveway.
    In July we headed to our spot in the mountains. We had hoped to leave our house by July 1, but were delayed a couple of days by business problems. Those problems were not easy to overcome but we did and we were happy to finally reach our lot and park.
    It rained almost every day for the next 19 days. In total our coach was soaked by thirty five inches of wet. One morning I discovered mushrooms growing out of the bottom of our main slideout. This caused me a few moments of uncertainty. The repair of the obvious leak didn’t go so well. I learned two things…..capillary action can cause a lot of mischief and use the right kind of screw when repairing a slide out floor or you might not get the slide out to slide in….or out.
    At the same time our Vue sunroof starting leaking. This required a trip to the local Chevy dealer where the problem was resolved for very little cost.
    After two days of repairing broken cables, drying out rotting wood and car carpeting I was thinking I was tired of feeding the dragon. However, the day after we repaired the coach and the car the sun came out.
    Diane, The Bear and I took a long ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway and we soon felt that life was kind of sweet again.
    We brought our coach home in late July. Soon after I learned that my daughter Jeri and her family would be coming up from Florida for my birthday. I was quite surprised and pleased to hear that. My kids threw me a surprise party. My Mom and Dad were there, my brother and his wife, and most unexpected our friends Gary and Janis, who I am always glad to see.
    I will see them tomorrow as a matter of fact.
    The four of us are hosting our FMCA chapter Christmas party/rally in December. The theme of this party is “It’s A Wonderful Life!” We plan to show the movie on Friday night along with food, including lots of popcorn, and beverages. Saturday Morning will be a big breakfast, and dress up Saturday night we will serve traditional Christmas fare. During dinner there will be a “It’s a Wonderful Life” quiz. A bell will ring a question asked and the table with the most correct answers will win the contest. The winner’s prizes will be determined later. Also we plan on having a reward for the best period costume. We want everyone that attends to dress like it is the forties or any other year that the movie takes place in. I think I expressed that the best way.
    This should be fun, if all goes well in the scheduling and preparation. If I have to keep some dragons at bay to do it I will.
    I look forward to all our chapter meetings. The one in December, I have to admit, I am looking forward to more than usual. I need it. I have a couple of dragon bites in my backside and that coming weekend in December will help to reduce the pain.
    It is a lot of work to try to make life (and that includes owning a motor coach) sweeter, all of us know that. It doesn’t get any easier with age now does it?
    Enjoy your life and your coach,
    Derrick.
    Gramps.
    PS Now that I have my fingers back on the keyboard again, I suspect that the gap of time will not be as long until I post again.
  20. -Gramps-
    Number 4. (Maybe the Last Rule!)
    Owning a motor coach is a never-ending learning experience.
    And just when you think you know it all, you find out just how stupid you really are.
    I have learned a lot about my coach, more than I ever wanted to know. I have had to study the mechanics of my engine, my slides, and my power seats as well as learn how it is wired for Surround Sound and cable TV. And, how it is plumbed including the ice maker, the fresh-water tank, the whole coach water filter and on and on. I have had to learn how to drive this big thing, including parking, turning, merging and more.
    I have learned that trees and rocks are harder than fiberglass.
    I have also learned, in no particular order, that:
    It is easy to lose arguments with inanimate objects located at various points inside and outside of my coach.
    Coach dealer mechanics are just like me -- they don't know as much as they think they do, which is why I have had to learn more for myself.
    Don't wait to consult the owner's manual. Read it before you start breaking something you are trying to fix. You might find out it is supposed to work that way!
    Two helping hands are better than one, especially when one of the hands is controlled by a brain other than your own.
    Still, the best helping hand is the one at the end of your own arm.
    Most things that break on a motor coach cost $650 to fix. Having owned two coaches I have had to:
    Replace a bent jack- 650 dollars.
    Replace two slideout toppers: dealer cost 650 dollars (I did it myself with some helping hands for a third of the cost).
    Have a non-square slide out modified so it would actually slide all the way in: 650 dollars.
    I have learned that when your rear end gets in a fight with a coach closet mirror, your rear end will win.
    I have learned that when my big motorhome gets in a fight with my little mailbox, the mailbox will win.
    I have learned that screws are better than staples for keeping things in their place (see above).
    Having friends with the same coach really helps trying to figure out if something is really broke or not (like a hard-to-open pantry and entry door).
    Wal-Mart has everything that the smart camper needs, like lots of beer.
    Don't throw any small plastic or metal things rolling around in your coach away until you find out where they go and what they do. Put them in a special drawer so you can find them later.
    I have learned that the tool you need to fix the problem you have is the tool that is still at the store.
    When emptying your tanks, at least two people will walk over to talk to you.
    I have learned that I find my self looking for the locations of the nearest Wal-Mart and Lowes no matter where my RV is parked at the time.
    Own good tools, not cheap ones. Why waste your money or your CCC?
    I have learned that CCC doesn't actually stand for carrying crappy cargo.
    I have learned that I sometimes have way too much crap; I mean cargo, in my coach.
    A 10-cubic-foot RV refrigerator is way too small when I load it.
    A 10-cubic-foot RV refrigerator is huge when my wife arranges its contents.
    I have learned that a cheap sewer hose and hot sand don't mix.
    I have also learned that a brown sprits bath from a sewer hose with hundreds of pin holes in it may be funny to a couple of people but not to me.
    .
    The day after you empty your overflowing special little parts drawer, you will open a cabinet, or crawl under a seat or something and then you will say, "Oh, that's what that strange little screw was for."
    Protect All really does work when used outside of its container.
    Washing and waxing a coach, aside from making it look nice, is great exercise.
    The day after washing and waxing my coach, I can't lift my arms above my head.
    I have learned that when a rear engine right access panel is open while going down the road, it makes your right turn signal and brake lights pretty much useless.
    All the above things are not so funny when you live through them, but then I think that one of my rules is about being patient. That is much easier to do if you have a well developed sense of humor. So if you don't have one of those, I suggest you learn where to get one!
    Try Wal-Mart, they have everything. Oh, Remember rule number 1!
  21. -Gramps-

    A Different Perspective

    By -Gramps-,

    Woof!
    The last two entries of this blog have been kind of serious and sad. Too much for me, to tell you the truth. I think we should go back to having some fun. Gramps' rules for owning a motor coach, especially number four, are just that. So, in order to lighten things back up, I have decided to hijack this blog and post one entry for myself. I don't think Gramps (I know him as Dad, but he really is my person) will mind all that much.
    This entry is about Motor Coaching, but from a different perspective.
    I love traveling in the bus, as Mom (Diane to you) calls it. I love watching my people load the bus up with all kinds of interesting things. I think they carry too many things out there, but it isn't my place to suggest they may be over packing. I love to see what goodies they are bringing, especially the things that go into that big cold black box they call a fridge (it doesn't look like the fridge in the house!).
    Dad is a sucker for a couple of big brown eyes, so I usually end up sharing things like cheese and sardines with him. I love sardines. He split a beer with me once. I didn't like it. It tasted bitter and it made me sneeze. You may have read that on one occasion, he "shared" a lot of Turkey Soup with me. Now, that was a happening feast that a creature like me usually only gets to dream about!
    After awhile it makes me dizzy, all the trips out to the coach, boxes of cans, and crackers and clothes and stuff. I am always told to stay by the front door while they march back and forth to the coach parked in our driveway. After about 10 of these trips I can't stand it anymore, so I make a dash for the coach steps. Mom and Dad usually fuss at me a bit; sometimes they let me into the coach. Usually they send me back to the house. I will admit that I don't like that.
    When they finally get everything loaded, and checked and then double checked and I hear the word that it's time to hit the road, I am more than ready. At my age the steps can be a bit rough on the ol' back legs, but I get excited and take them two at a time. I have one responsibility, so the first thing I do is head to the back of the bus where a big white container with an air-tight lid is stored. That is my supply of chow and it better be there. The trouble is, I have not figured out how to let the folks know if it isn't. Well, so far after five years of checking, I haven't needed to. But you never know, there could be a first time!
    Moving down the road in the coach is great. I sit on Mom's lap and that gives me a terrific view out of our huge windshield. I love the air that blows on me, too. Dad makes it cold somehow. He must be a genius. Mom doesn't always like it as frigid as Dad, but with me on her lap she puts up with it.
    Sometimes I push a button next to Mom's seat just to see what happens. Usually Dad will say something like, "Why is your map light on?" or "Hey, what's going on ... the shades are coming down!" He gets really excited when the step cover starts opening on its own.
    I sometimes get sick in the car. I don't know if that is because it is a small moving space or if it is because sometimes I do not care for where it takes me, like to see Miss Vickie, that woman who hoses me down and then sticks a blow dryer in my face! But, the coach is a very different thing. It is relaxing. I can get down from my perch on Mom's lap; sleep on the couch or on my pillow on the floor or just grab some water if I want it. Try that in a big truck pulling a trailer ...
    Oh, arf ... I have to end this for just a minute. I hear Dad coming down the hall and I do not think he would be pleased to see me messing with his computer. He yells at the cat when she jumps on the keyboard, and yells really loud when he is writing at the time. Oh, in case you were wondering, the cat never travels with us. She hates the coach and would just hack up a big yellow hairball or two and leave them on the dash, right where I like to sit. Got to go ...
    I am back!
    I am not sure what else I can tell you. This is my first dog blog, after all, and writing is not that easy. Let me think of something else, oh ...
    I have enjoyed most all the places we have been. I love visiting rallies with lots of other coaches (hey, I get invited in all the time!) I love meeting other people, both two and four leggers. I love hiking with Mom and Dad on a trail through the mountains. The smells are exciting. I like the ocean, well running on the beach to be precise, the water I don't care for. Now when we travel to the beach, my Mom gets out my (I don't claim it!) tropical shirt and puts it on me. I can stand the shirt, but the hat ... one day when no one is looking I plan to chew that thing into tiny pieces!
    My favorite place to travel to in the motor coach is, for the most part, wherever my people are headed, but there is one stop that is really great: our new home in the mountains. It is the one place where I get to run around without my leash, and the other people there ... well, they are wonderful friends to my people. I have a friend there as well. Her name is Godiva. At mealtimes, everyone shares all kinds of tasty things with us both. I do prefer Dad's cooking. Now I am thinking about that soup again!
    I need to wrap this up, so:
    Here are my rules for owning a motor coach:
    Do not leave home without the dog in the coach.
    Do not leave home without the dog's food in the coach.
    Do not leave home without the dog's food bowl in the coach.
    Do not leave home without the dog's water bowl in the coach.
    Do not leave home without the dog's treats in the coach.
    Do not leave home without the dog's leash. It makes the person I am leading feel safer.
    Do not leave home without the poopy bags. I don't really care, but Mom and Dad don't think I should leave stuff on the trail for some reason.
    Go figure.
    Nickolas

    I hate the hat. But I love Mom!
  22. -Gramps-
    I said that 1968 was a tough year for my family. It was. It was also a tough year for the whole country. The Vietnam War was going badly. Bobby Kennedy was killed. Martin Luther King was killed. There were riots, anti-war demonstrations. Everything and everyone seemed stressed out. Some say the only thing that saved 1968 from being a total loss was the Apollo Eight mission around the moon. I will always remember the Astronauts reading from the book of Genesis and reminding us, me, who was, who is, still in charge.
    Eighteen Months Part Two.
    I could name this entry Fish out of Water (in more ways than one) because that is exactly what it felt like.
    It didn't take long to realize that we came from a different world and that we would not fit into this small town.
    I got along fine with my Denton cousins and their families, but that is where it ended. It is always hard to come into a new school halfway through the year, but to come from a school with twelve hundred students to a school with less than a tenth of that amount was more than rough.
    I caught it from every member of my class. I didn't think like them, I didn't dress like them and I certainly didn't talk like them and they constantly reminded me of those facts. They didn't believe that the school I left was as big as it was and that we changed classes six times a day. They had no concept of large grocery stores, shopping malls, large airports, aircraft carriers, or anything much outside of their community. The biggest thing for some of those kids was to visit Thomasville, a somewhat larger town nearby that made lots of fine furniture. There they were awed by the Big Giant Chair, in the center of town. I told them I had been to Washington DC and seen the big giant capital and all I got in return was a bunch of boos, calls of liar, and some line like "No one has ever been to Washington, it's too far away!"
    Worst of all they called me a Yankee. I hated that. I told them they had no sense of history. I reminded them Virginia was the home of Robert E. Lee. I also reminded them that during the War Between the States (Lord help you if you call it the Civil War), Richmond, Virginia was the capital of the South! But that didn't stop them. They didn't seem to know anything about the Mason-Dixon Line or Petersburg, or Cold Harbor, or much else. I became the official Yankee of the class and there was nothing I could do about it.
    I didn't make things better for myself when I said that when General Sherman made his march to the sea, he took his army around Denton instead of burning it down because he didn't want to do the South any favors.
    I was sent out to the hallway for that remark.
    Things were no better for my brother. One day he took a large piece of lava my father picked up when visiting Mt Etna in Sicily, to school for his fourth grade show and tell. He showed it, told them about it, and the class ridiculed him. They said something to the effect that he was nothing but a story teller cause that stupid old rock could not have come from Mt Etna, "Because No one has ever been there, it's too far away!"
    Some kid in the class said in his best southern drawl, "Now I bet you will be telling us your old man has been to that big Volcano in Hawaii, what's it called Mt Killawhale or something?"
    "You mean Mt Kilauea? Sure, he has been there a bunch of times."
    That did it. With shouts of "Liar, Liar pants on fire!" my brother found himself at the wrong end of a ten year old fist.
    For show and tell at dinner that evening, my brother's exhibit was a black eye and a note from his teacher saying that my Mom's son was being a class distraction.
    We were The Yankee and the Class Distraction. The boys on the Porch.
    It didn't help that during this time, our father was rarely seen by either of us. He found a factory job in Salisbury with a company called Fiber Industries. They manufactured polyester thread, which they sold to numerous other manufacturing companies, such as Hanes, Burlington Mills and others. Polyester pants were popular in those days, so the factory ran twenty four hours a day; seven days a week and my father worked the swing shift. Some days he worked noon to nine pm. Some days he worked three to midnight, or midnight to nine am, but never nine to six. During the evening, when we were home from school, he was either working or sleeping.
    We saw each other on the weekend a few times, but on those days we were usually on our land clearing trees, trying to get the spot ready for our new home. Living on the front porch and in one bedroom of my Grandfather's house was becoming old really fast.
    Once our terrible school year (we had the grades to prove it) was over, things improved some. Dad was still working strange hours with lots of overtime, but now that we were out of school we did see more of him. The family savings was growing, but the nest egg was not allowed to get too big because it was necessary to make a couple of trips back to Norfolk to repair broken pipes and a broken bathroom wall, courtesy of our renters.
    Rod and I were starting to turn into country boys. We ran around barefoot, raised chickens, got ourselves a big dog and I bought a rifle. It was only a bb gun, but who knows what I would have wanted next. I was starting to adapt to my surroundings, but I am sure Dad was not. His peace of mind was starting to wear out. He wasn't comfortable with how our lives were changing. Five months and no new home, and it would not be long before another school year would be upon us, and being a long distance land lord only added to his unease.
    In late June of 1967 we made our big trip to Montreal, Canada. It almost didn't happen. A few weeks before we were scheduled to leave, my brother came down with a case of viral pneumonia. It wasn't his first time, quite the contrary. This was something he got quite often. He would cough, and hack, run a fever and his lungs would get so full of fluid that he had to stand on his head to drain them. It took him about two weeks to recover from this episode. I was afraid our trip was lost, Mom and Dad said not to worry, but I could hear them at night, discussing the very strong possibility that we would not be going.
    A few days before the trip Rod's illness seemed to get worse, and then I got sick. I suppose it could have been the stress of the idea of not making the trip of a lifetime that caused me to get ill. I had a blazing headache, a terrible sore throat, and plenty of nausea. One hot night, I couldn't sleep, and my head hurt more than it ever had. Dad, having two sick boys to deal with, figured that if one of them was unconscious, maybe we would all feel better, so he gave me a Darvon capsule. It did make me quiet, but it may have mixed with some cold remedy that I had also taken, or I may have been allergic to it. I don't know. I do know I had a terrible reaction to it. It didn't start out so terrible, but something was wrong. During the night I felt like I had water running down my face. It was really strange. I ran a hand over my face in the dark. My cheeks felt large and spongy and I could feel bumps on them.
    I got up, ran to the other end of the house, to the back porch and then to the bathroom. I turned on the light, looked in the mirror and starting screaming my head off.
    I looked like something from a cheap horror movie. My face, arms and chest had broken out with large hives. Big red welts with white bumps covered my face as well. My cheeks had swollen so that only the end of my nose was visible. One eye was swollen shut; the other was red as an apple. I looked, in a word, hideous.
    Dad reached the bathroom first, took one look at me and went white as a ghost. Mom came up behind but he wouldn't let her see me. She insisted, pushed around him, saw my face and started to laugh. I know now that it was hysterical laughter, but at the time I could not figure out what was so funny. I told her so too.
    "It's not funny!" I wailed. "Look at me! I think I'm dying!"
    "You aren't dying" Mom responded, "You look like you stuck your head in a bee hive."
    Actually, that was a pretty good description, but I didn't appreciate its accuracy.
    I threw up.
    Not a pretty picture, a big red swollen head spewing all over the bathroom.
    Mom stopped laughing. "Clay, I think you better take him to the hospital."
    Dad, thinking the same thing, got me cleaned up and half carried me to the car.
    It was thirty miles to the nearest hospital in Lexington. I had my head in a trash can the whole way there. Dad drove like a mad man.
    If we had lived in Norfolk, a trip to the hospital, civilian or navy would have expected results. You would go to the emergency room, see a nurse, then a doctor, be poked, prodded, a thermometer jammed under your tongue, blood pressure taken, what ever. The main thing is you would just walk in and see somebody.
    We arrived at the Lexington hospital. There was no emergency room. We had no choice but to go to the front door. By this time I was feeling very dizzy and light headed, and my heart was racing a mile a minute. Dad had to carry me.
    The door was locked. No one in sight but there was a door bell. Dad pushed it and finally someone came to the door. The person was a janitor not a doctor. He said can I help you, and before anyone could answer, he took one look at my face and well, seemed to get sick himself.
    He pushed open the door, grabbed a wheelchair that was close by. I ended up in it and found myself being pushed down the dark green hall to a desk where a nurse was sitting looking over a clipboard. She looked up. My face sure could produce a powerful reaction.
    I looked at her. She stared at me. Along with the big nasty hives, she saw something in my face, because she quickly opened a drawer and pulled out a plastic container and handed it to me.
    Yes, I threw up again.
    "Oh my stars honey, you sure are a mess, let's see what we can do to help you."
    Her kind voice seemed so distant.
    She asked my dad some questions, about what medications I took, what I had to eat and so on. She took my blood pressure, and stuck a thermometer under my tongue, which wasn't all that easy considering how hard I was shaking and how stiff my jaw was. Then she picked up the phone and called the doctor on call. After about a minute, she got up went to another room and came back with a tray on which lay a syringe and a cotton ball. She rolled up my pajama sleeve, dabbed the alcohol soaked cotton ball on my arm and then stuck me with the needle. Whatever was in that syringe started working almost as soon as she squeezed it.
    My heart rate dropped, my nausea went away, and at that moment I just wanted to go to sleep.
    The rest of the night is just a blur. I remember waking up the next morning, feeling well, a bit hung-over, and hungry. I made my way to the breakfast table where I proceeded to frighten my sisters, which tickled my grandfather. Obviously I was still a handsome sight, as handsome as Quasimodo. It didn't take long for the cousins to hear about the new face in town. The two oldest girls, Dawn and Pam, decided to look after me. They told everybody else to have a look and then leave me alone. They fed me lemonade, and iced down my ugly fat face. In a few days I was a good as new.
    At the end of June we left for Canada.
    I will tell you right now that our vacation was absolutely great. We stayed in hotels, rode Monorails, and trains, roller coasters, a Hugh Ferris wheel, ate out, went shopping in large malls, saw, heard, touched and experienced things at the Expo that were fantastic. We concluded the trip by staying with old Navy friends in a cabin on the shores of a beautiful lake, Otter Lake, in Ontario to be exact. We went boating and fishing. The only bad thing was the kids we met, thought that Rod and I talked funny, like real Southerners. They would come over to our cabin just to hear us speak. I found it amusing, but I don't think my parents did. Well, Dad didn't anyway. The trip gave him time to think. He was thinking it was time to make the trip home. Home to North Carolina, but ultimately back to Virginia.
    Our Canadian adventure ended all too soon. We headed back to North Carolina.
    July soon ended. We did have some good times. We hiked, fished, and went swimming. Papa killed some of my chickens and we ate them, well that part wasn't so good.
    Dad gave notice to our renters that we would be coming back. We gave notice to our relatives that we would be moving back to Norfolk. None of them wanted us to leave. Papa, my normally strong grandfather, broke down and cried. My Mom was miserable. She knew it was the best thing to do, but she didn't want to give up her dream of being close to her family while living in her house in the woods.
    Sometime around my birthday, in August 1967, Rod, Dad and I went back to our home in Norfolk. We would spend the next two weeks scrubbing floors, cleaning out cabinets, painting walls in order to get our home back in order for the girls.
    It was a tremendous amount of work. We cleaned during the day, slept on the floor at night, ate off paper plates. It was a male bonding time. We made the house ready and just before the start of the new school year, Mom and my sisters arrived. At the same time, the moving company that back in February, moved all our stuff out and put it in storage, now moved it all back in.
    It took us some time to unpack boxes, get settled in, enroll in school and try to pick up our Norfolk lives where we left off. It wasn't easy. Dad spent a lot of his time looking for employment. He was hired by a commercial heating and air conditioning supply company but it wasn't much of a job. In late November he found a Civil Service position. He went back to working on navy aircraft. He would speed the rest of his working days in Civil Service employment, driving to the same base that he retired from, and happy to do it.
    Christmas 1967 is not a time I remember many details about, except we were broke, again. I remember participating in my high school Concert Chorus Christmas cantata wearing dress shoes I borrowed from Dad. We drove past the ships on Christmas Eve; at least I think we did. I am sure Dad put out presents for the girls. The old glass ornaments were on the tree. 1968 looked like it would be a good year, nice and quiet. We were back in our home, had our old friends back, we were back in our neighborhood church, same neighborhood schools we could walk to. All seemed right with the world.
    February ... Soon it was one year from the day Dad retired from the Navy.
    We received a call from Denton. Papa had a stroke.
    We rushed back to Papa's house.
    It was so sad to see my Grandfather, who had been so active, looking after his farm, his animals and all his grandkids, including us, not able to do anything for himself. We had to leave after just after a couple of days.
    He would only live a few weeks. It just didn't seem real, another trip down to Denton for another funeral. My Mother was devastated. It was crowded but quiet during the drive down. Mom quietly cried almost the whole way. When we pulled into the driveway of Papa's home, our home just a few months earlier, she broke down. There was nothing I could do except hug Penni, who just didn't understand what was happening.
    We were there for about four days and it was time to leave again.
    My poor Mom now had lost two parents, her dream house and her family all in less than eighteen months. We had also pulled up roots twice during that same time. All of us were sad, exhausted and not sure what our future would bring.
    My grandfather's death was a sad time made even sadder when it was discovered there was no will and as a result the family decided to auction off everything he owned with no exception. So in March we made another trip to Papa's farm to help with the auction. I asked for a birdhouse that Papa helped me build that I had left hanging under the eves of one of his barns. No, that had to auctioned off as well. I tried to buy it myself but three dollars wasn't enough.
    Something happened to us as all of Papa's possessions were being carried away by strangers. We all felt like a part of us was leaving as well.
    We made our way back to Norfolk and once there a dark cloud settled over our family, over my Mom and over me. Mom struggled with grief and guilt. I struggled with her and with school, I argued with my teachers and both my parents and my siblings. I became impatient and angry, and Mom didn't know how to deal with me and became even more depressed. Dad tried to hold everything together but it was almost impossible. From March to May things got really bad.
    We truly needed a miracle.
    We received one.....
  23. -Gramps-

    The Rally

    By -Gramps-,

    When I write a blog entry about a current trip in our coach, I tend to just write it in a matter of fact style, like the following:
    Well a lot has happened in the last week. Diane and I hosted an FMCA chapter rally at the Deer Creek RV Resort in Galax, Virginia during the last weekend of July. The campground Is located just across the golf course from our home at the Deer Creek Motorcoach resort. Some people call the golf course Derrick's Nine Holes, because I am the person who plays there the most.
    We had fifteen coaches from the Colonial Virginians show up for the rally.
    The rally went great, for the most part. We arrived on Wednesday evening and our fellow Colonial Virginians started arriving on Thursday afternoon. Thursday morning Diane and I did a lot of shopping at the local Wal-Mart (where else would we go?) for lots of stuff to provide a full meal for everyone on Friday night. We left the store with hamburgers, hot dogs, sausages, potato salad, cole slaw, baked beans, cookies and a lemon cake. Our co-hosts Bob and Stephanie planned breakfast for Saturday and Sunday Mornings. For Saturday morning breakfast, we had French toast sticks, pancakes, sausage, and fruit. Sunday was a continental breakfast with Danish, Bagels and Saturday's breakfast leftovers. Saturday night everyone went to a wine and cheese party at the Deer Creek Motorcoach Resort (Not the one in Florida) clubhouse. That was followed by a pot-luck supper. We had a golf tournament planned for Saturday Morning but due to drizzle and fog we had to cancel. Those who planned on playing didn't mind. We all enjoyed the cool mountain weather, which was a nice change from the terrible heat back home.
    Not much emotion or story in the above. Let me try to add some of that for you.
    I have been working pretty hard lately. No days off for some six weeks and that includes July fourth. Even with all those work days I have still been under quite a bit of stress to get it all my projects done. I know, that seems to be a recurring theme in my blogs: Stress. It seems to be the nature of my business and my nature to let stress sometimes get the best of me. I am working on correcting that. I would like to save the best of myself for my God, my dear wife, my kids, my rving friends as well as other friends and of course, my dog.
    Unfortunately there wasn't much of the best part of me on the day we left for the rally. We pulled out a bit late in the morning, and just as we hit the road I discovered, actually Diane informed me, that she turned off the fridge because it was alarming. There was no propane flowing to it, even though our tank was full. At the same time I discovered that the dash air was not cooling. These two problems started to make me hot. I asked her why she didn't tell me this before we left. She said she didn't want to bother me, I was getting customer calls all morning and she didn't want to add to my problems.
    Add to my problems? No dash air, the propane is not working? How could that add to my problems?
    I knew that the immediate, but temporary solution to this was to turn on the generator. This would allow us to run the fridge and the roof air, but all I could think about is how much is this going to cost me to get these problems fixed? I stared to over think this situation and this fueled my soon to get worse state of mind. After all it was going to be one of the hottest days of the year with no dash ac. I just got back from a long trip to Elkhart to fix the slide and now two more problems. When will it end?
    Maybe my blood sugar was low from skipping breakfast. Maybe I was just worn out from all the work pulling cables through hot fiberglass insulated ceilings for days on end. Maybe it was because this has been a tough year to find work, get it done and then get paid for it. Maybe it was because I was worried about our dog, who was scheduled for surgery the Friday after the rally. Maybe it was all the above.
    I lost it. I ranted about my business, the coach, and only God knows for most of the drive to Galax. Diane, bless her heart, just sat there and hardly said a word. She just let me vent. I don't remember most of what I said. I am sure it wouldn't be worth repeating anyway.
    When we started to climb I-77 just north of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I finally calmed down. I looked over at Diane and apologized for being such a jerk. She had tears running down her cheeks and she managed to mouth the words, "its okay" to me.
    I didn't say another word until we reached the gate to the Motorcoach Resort. Diane pushed the remote, the gate opened, we drove through and it was like a switch was thrown. I started to feel better. We set up "camp". It was after six thirty by the time we finished. We went to dinner with our neighbors Judy and Gordy. They both noticed that I was looking a bit ragged, and Diane calmly told them I had been working hard lately, to put it mildly.
    For most of the night I lay awake thinking about the day's drive.
    The next morning I was swamped with phone calls from multiple offices belonging to one customer. Diane and I were at the Wal-Mart at the time, I was shopping for golf balls when the first call hit me. The problem was not with my equipment, it was with their internet provider. I told them that, but they wanted me to take care of it because they didn't know how to talk to the great big nasty internet company.
    It took me until eleven pm that night making phone calls, but I did get the ball rolling to solve the problem for them.
    Friday I was determined to give all my attention to the rally. I managed to do that. I helped people check in, set up tables, did a bit of decorating, set up a sun canopy and my grill. I cooked forty some hamburgers while Bob did the dogs.
    We had a great meal for everyone. The food was good and the service was quick. Afterwards we talked about the golf and mini golf match, and reminded everyone where Saturday's meal would be served. I was beat and left for the coach while Diane played tiles.
    Saturday's breakfast was great. Saturday's weather wasn't. It rained all day. Actually I think it rained the next three days off and on. I wanted to have the golf match but what's a little rain when you are in the Blue Ridge Mountains? We all made the best of it. Some people went sightseeing; some just sat around and talked. I sat around and listened to the people chat. I wanted to be reminded that the world isn't just about me. That is one of the ways owning a coach has improved my life, by allowing me to be involved in other lives outside of work. It's like medicine to me. I need to remember that.
    Saturday night we had the wine and cheese party. I answered questions about Galax and the surrounding area. I also answered questions about the resort.
    After dinner I provided some minor entertainment. I told them all about my FMCA blog with its rules for owning a motor coach and then I read rule four to them. I will remind you that rule four is "Owing a motor coach is a never ending learning experience". Rule four also includes a bunch of one liner, truisms, that some people find quite funny. Fortunately all the guests at dinner did the same.
    Sunday morning was foggy but not for long. By noon most everyone had left. Everyone said they had a great time and hoped to return next year.
    Monday, August second, was my fifty seventh birthday. The best thing about it was that I wasn't working. We didn't do much that day but sit around the coach, do a bit of walking, and we went to dinner in town. The food wasn't all that good but the company was great.
    The next day Diane and I drove into Sparta North Carolina and found something that we both liked. A store with Columbia clothes on sale for half price. I bought a bunch of nice things. We came home and ate leftover hamburgers, watched a bit of TV and called it a day.
    Wednesday had a different feel about it. Diane wanted to do laundry and clean up the coach a bit. She planned on leaving the next day for Raleigh, NC to stay with her cousin Elaine. From there she would take Nickolas to the NC State School of Veterinary Medicine. Nickolas was scheduled to have a malignant tumor removed from his side. This could be an extensive operation with loss of some chest wall and some sections of ribs.
    I planned on staying behind to work on the Motorcoach resort's WIFI. That was okay by me considering how much I dislike hospital waiting rooms.
    I had already ordered a new high powered access point that hopefully would broadcast to the fartest end of the resort. Diane left with Nickolas just after lunch, so I found myself all alone.
    I made arrangements to borrow an extension ladder and so just after Diane left I was at the top of it mounting the new transmitter. All was going okay until a big thunderstorm came out of nowhere. Lightening chased me off the ladder. The rain started coming down in buckets and then we lost power.
    I managed to mount the transmitter but without power I was done. My WI-FI install would have to wait.
    Fridays are usually pretty quiet for me. Not many phone calls. The Friday of Nickolas surgery was no exception. This was a good thing. I wasn't in the mood to talk much anyway. I thought our pup was going to be in the OR early, but it didn't happen until six that night. He came out around nine. Diane called me to say that everything went well. The doctors wanted to keep him there until Monday. My time in isolation would be a bit longer than expected.
    I didn't do much the next two days. I finished a book, watched some movies, made some minor repairs to the coach roof and unstopped the propane line. That was about it.
    Diane and Nickolas arrived back here at Deer Creek about two hours ago. The poor pup looks a bit scarred and stapled but he is doing well considering.
    We will be here a few more days. We need to give the dog a bit more time to recuperate before we head back to the heat in Tidewater. Once we get there its back to business, the coach will stay parked for a couple more months. I do need to get some Freon for the dash AC.
    Didn't I mention that? According to our resident RV doctor, there is nothing wrong with the dash AC that a good dose of Freon can't fix. It seems I got upset over almost nothing.
    I am working on that.
  24. -Gramps-

    The Candle

    By -Gramps-,

    In late November of 1990 I received my December issue of Reader's Digest. I read all the humorous parts of the magazine, and one cover story and then promptly stuck it on a shelf with all the other issues that I still had in my possession.
    Soon it was Christmas. At that time all of my three children were young. Christine was fourteen, Jeri was eleven, and Joel was five.
    It was a tough time for us. I was unemployed. I had been without work for almost two years. The country was in an economic recession and things didn't look too good for the coming year. I was not sure what to do. I was taking all the temporary jobs I could find. These jobs actually came from an agency that offered part time work to technical people. I installed a mri, worked for other phone companies installing microwave systems for the Navy, installed voice mail systems, whatever I was offered. Diane helped with the cash flow by working as a demonstrator for super markets, frying sausages, handing out flyers and samples of cookies, that kind of thing. Together the two of us were just getting by. Unemployment compensation was not something we were interested in, even if it paid as much as our combined pay checks.
    There would not have been anything for the kids if Diane and I had not decided to spend the traditiononal Christmas money given to us by Diane's dad on just them.
    The girls knew that our financial situation was bleak so they were not expecting much on Christmas morning.
    They awoke and were very surprised to find a brand new Nintendo attached to the TV.
    There were also some new clothes, Disney videos, Fisher Price Dinosaurs for Joel, and candy for everyone stuffed into stockings.
    We had to tear the kids away from the Nintendo for breakfast. After a meal of home made muffins, eggs and sausage (we had lots of that) and orange juice we went back to the living room for a reading of the Christmas story.
    We had a great morning in spite of being as poor as church mice or something like that.
    The morning was really good, much better than expected, but I was still anxious about the coming weeks. I was fighting discouragement.
    I was not sure why but I had the urge to read something for myself. I got up from my chair and and got the copy of Reader's Digest that I had stuck on the shelf weeks before.
    While Manheim Steamroller was playing on the stereo, I began to thumb through the magazine looking at the condensed Christmas story collection that it contained.
    I came across a story written by a prisoner in a Japanese concentration camp. After a paragraph or two I knew that I had to read it to the family. Silent Night began playing just as I started. It was amazing how the music fit the words as I read out loud. I began to think that this moment was not an accident.
    This is the story:
    The Candle
    "We were barricaded into a dank shed ringed with barbed wire in a Japanese concentration camp called Si Ringo Ringo on the east coast of Sumatra. Outside the tropical sun blazed by day and a huge moon filled the fantastically starry sky by night. Inside the shed was perpetual darkness.
    There were people living in that shed. No, 'living' is the wrong word. We were packed away there. Sometimes we could see beyond us little sparks, as sun or moon flashed on patches of barbed wire that hadn't rusted over the years. For it had been years now - or was it decades? We were too sick and too weak to care. In the beginning, we thought about such things as the day or the hour. Now, eternity.
    Beside us and in front of us, men died - from hunger, from disease from the ebbing of the last ray of hope. We had long stopped believing in the end of the war, in liberation. We lived in a stupor, blunted, with only one remaining passion that flew at our throats like a wild animal: hunger. Except when someone caught a snake or a rat, we starved.
    There was, however, one man in the camp who still had something to eat. A candle!
    Of course, he had not originally thought of it as food - a normal person doesn't eat candle wax. But if all you saw around you were emaciated bodies (in which you recognized yourself), you, too, would not underestimate the value of this candle.
    When he couldn't stand the torture of hunger anymore, the prisoner would carefully take the candle from its hiding place, a crumpled little suitcase, and nibble at it. He didn't eat it all. He looked upon the candle as his last resort. One day, when everyone was utterly mad with hunger, he would need it.
    To me, his friend, he had promised a small piece. So I watched him and his suitcase, day and night. It became my life's task to see to it that in the end he would not eat the entire candle by himself.
    One evening after counting the notches he'd made in a beam, another prisoner mentioned that it was Christmas. In a flat, toneless voice he said, 'Next Christmas we'll be home.' A few of us nodded; most didn't react at all. Who could still cling to that idea?
    Then someone else said something very strange: 'When it is Christmas, the candles burn and there are bells ringing.' His words barely audible, as if they came from an immense distance and a deep, deep past. To most of us, the remark had no meaning whatsoever; it referred to something completely out of our existence.
    It was already very late, and we lay on our boards, each with his thoughts - or, more accurately, with no thoughts. Then my friend became restless. He crept toward his suitcase and took out the candle. I could see its whiteness clearly in the dark. He is going to eat it. I thought. If only he won't forget me.
    He put the candle on his plank bed. What now? He went outside, where our captor's kept a fire smoldering. Then he returned, carrying a burning chip. This little flare wandered through the shed like a ghost. When my friend reached his place, he took the chip, the fire, and he lit his candle.
    The candle stood on his bed, and it burned.
    No one said a word, but soon one shadow after another slipped closer. Silently these half-naked men with sunken cheeks and eyes full of hunger formed a circle around the burning candle.
    One by one they came forward, the vicar and the parson, too. You couldn't tell that's what they were, for they were merely two more wasted figures, but we knew.
    'It's Christmas,' said the parson in a husky voice. 'The Light shineth in the darkness.'
    Then the vicar said, 'And the darkness overcame it not.'
    That night those words from the Gospel of John were not some written word from centuries ago. It was living reality, a message for each of us.
    For the light shone in the darkness. And the darkness didn't conquer it. We knew this not because we reasoned it out at the time, but because we felt it, silently, around the piercing flame.
    That candle was whiter and more slender than any I have seen since. And in the flame (though I'm sure I can never describe it, not really - it was a secret we shared with the Christ child) we saw things that were not of this world. We were deep in the swamps and the jungle but now we heard the bronze sound of a thousand bells ringing and a choir of angels singing for us. Yes, I am perfectly sure - I have over a hundred witnesses. Most of them can't speak anymore; they are no longer here. But that doesn't mean they don't know.
    The candle burned higher and higher, ever more pointed, until it touched the very roof of the dark shed, and then it went on, reaching to the stars. Everything became full of light. Not one of us ever saw so much light again.
    We were free, and uplifted, and we were not hungry.
    Now someone softly said, 'Next Christmas we'll be home,' and this time we knew it was true. For the light itself had given us this message-it was written in the Christmas flame in fiery letters. You can believe it or not; I saw it myself.
    The candle burned all night (yes, I know there is not a candle in the world that can burn so long and so high), and when morning came, we sang. Now we knew that there was a home waiting for each of us.
    And there was. Some of us went home before the next Christmas. The others? Well, they were home as well. I helped to lay them down in the earth behind our camp, a dry spot in the swamp. But when they died, their eyes were not as dim as before. They were filled with light, our candle's light, the Light that the darkness did not conquer." (The Candle, c'77 by Hollandia, printed in December 1990 Reader's Digest Magazine, pp. 69-71, ubp).
    I was so moved by the spirit of the man who wrote this story that I could not finish it without tears. I thought that if he could have this kind of faith in the middle of such dire circumstances, that I could have faith that our New Year would be better. I could have the faith that something would happen to change my family's fortune and circumstances.
    I was right. The following March I started a little company that I called LINK voice & data. It would be a struggle but we got it off the ground and soon it will be twenty years old.
    We still read The Candle at Christmas. Jeri reads it on Christmas morning in her home as well. It still makes me cry.
    Maybe you are going through a rough time now, or know someone who is. This is the day for remembering that the light of God can overcome any darkness. God can bring you, your friends or your family out of any situation you are in. He can bring you into the light!
    God bless and Merry Christmas!
    Gramps
  25. -Gramps-
    Just a note about what is coming next. . . I know that this story has gotten long, but it is about to get much longer. You might want to get cup of coffee or take a break before you continue.
    You are about to find out that I have set you up. I have spent a lot of time and words to set you up for a story that I wrote twenty five years ago. It was the first serious short story I have written as an adult. I submitted it to Guidepost Magazine and just basically forgot about it. After a few weeks, I received a call at work,
    It was from an editor at the magazine. He told me that he didn't usually call a writer to tell them that their story had been rejected, but he was making an exception in my case, because he felt strongly that the story should have been printed but he was overruled by the editor in chief. He went on to tell me that my story had caused the biggest argument the magazine had ever had over whether to publish or not. They wanted me to change a few things in it but this editor felt it would change the story to much and at the time I agreed.. He was very sorry to disappoint me; everyone agreed the story was very well written, by a "trained wordsmith", to use the words of the editor in chief. He asked if I had written anything else. I said no, the conversation ended and the story sat in a drawer for years. I took it out of the drawer a few months ago, dusted it off and made a few changes to it.
    Here is the story of the miracle that came to my family, just when we needed it. Take a deep breath and don't read it too fast.
    A Night in May
    We all have life defining moments, a moment that changes us and helps to make us who we are.. It may be for good, or for bad. We said yes to something when we should have said no. We stopped when we should have gone. We sat when we should have gotten up. Sometimes we run away from them. This is about one of those moments that happened to me. It was a moment in time when I got up.
    You may choose not to believe what you read here, that is up to you. I will tell you this. It happened just the way I have written it.
    My Mom and I argued that night. Was it a Tuesday or a Thursday? I don't remember. I do remember that it was sometime in May, 1968. I was fourteen years old, halfway between the time I first thought I should be treated like a man and nobody would and the time my parents thought I should act like a man and I couldn't.
    What did my Mom and I argue about? Was it clothes or grades or just my "attitude"? It must have been aright big fight because I remember doing what I usually did afterwards. I took a long hot shower, the kind where Mom would bang on the bathroom door, rattle the doorknob, and remind me that there was a water shortage or would be if I didn't hurry up and get out of there. No response from me of course. Ten minutes or two yells later, whichever came first, I would turn off the water as the words "it's about time" seemed to slide underneath the bathroom door.
    I will admit that I was not the easiest teenager to get along with. I was a know it all, stubborn as a rock, and at times just plain unfriendly. Simple things gave me a lot of pleasure, like removing my brother from his bunk bed, the top one, with a well placed kick in the middle of the night, or attaching a clothespin to the tail of the cat next door in order to watch it run in noisy circles.
    I did not do these things very often but my parents could not understand why I did them at all. I didn't know why either. I did know that something was wrong. I was frustrated. I was anxious. I was bored. I didn't like life. I certainly didn't understand it. Why was I here? Why was anybody here? Is there a God? Lots of questions like those constantly rolled through my head until I thought I was going crazy,
    It was usually in the wee hours of the morning that I would mull the possible answers to life's profound questions around in my brain, until out of frustration I would send my foot to the unseen, but still perfect spot, over my head which would send little Rodney flying to the floor where he would land with a thump, a wail, and a "Be Quiet In There!" from the room across the hall. I would respond by wrapping my pillow around my head trying to shut out everything. The questions with no answers just keep on coming.
    I finished my shower this particular evening, dried off and shoved the unfolded towel over the rack. As I was putting on, what I considered to be my unfashionable bathrobe, I looked at myself in the mirror. My face looked tight and drawn. The argument lines were still on my forehead and around my mouth. There was the red beginning of a zit forming over the right eyebrow,
    "Great that's all I need." I thought. "The girls will really like me now."
    I turned to leave the bathroom and stubbed my big toe against the door just as little brother was coming in; loudly claiming he couldn't hold it any longer. He also bet there wasn't enough water left to flush with. I cuffed him upside the ear and strutted angrily down the hall. I passed by my little sisters' room.
    They were both asleep. Kam was in her bed and Penni, the younger one, in her crib. Both girls were born with a twisted foot. Kam wore a cast for about a year and then wore corrective shoes so she was now cured. Penni's right foot was twisted so badly that she could hardly walk. She was due to have a cast put on her leg and foot in just a few days. She was a very active eighteen month old so the cast was sure to make things unpleasant for her. I loved my sisters very much. However at that moment as I passed the door of their room I was not thinking about them. I kept on walking.
    When I reached the den I sat down hard on the opposite end of the couch from my parents, folded my arms and stared blankly at the new color television. I couldn't stand it. They were watching that nutty religious channel again.
    I didn't mind religious things. Not a whole lot anyway. Well maybe I did. My Mom and Dad had been taking me to church all my life. I thought it was the right thing to do but I also thought it was boring. When I was small it seemed more important and frankly, then it was more fun. I liked the summer church programs with the games, the cookies and juice. I listened when I heard the stories about Noah, Sampson, David and Goliath. One thunder stormy Sunday night when I was about seven years old I asked my Father what dying on the cross must have been like for Jesus.
    "Did he hurt bad?" I asked.
    I don't remember the words that my father used. I do remember that while he talked I could almost smell the dust on the streets of Jerusalem. I could hear the shouts of the soldiers and the cries of the people as Jesus stumbled his way to the hill. The hammer struck the nail. The cross dropped roughly into the ground. As Daddy spoke the sky grew dark, the lightening struck and Jesus said, "It is finished." And somehow I knew that this had something to do with me. This terrible death of a man who healed children, made the blind to see, and the dead live again, had something to do with me. What, I wasn't sure.
    Not long after that, I was baptized and became a member of our church. It felt good for awhile. For a few years I continued to believe and to grow. Then something inside of me began to change. Church became a place to talk, to meet people (girls), to show off new clothes, and to complain that it was boring. Religion just did not have my attention.
    Religion didn't have my attention but this television show sure did. As I watched, I could tell the small studio was full of people. They were praying. I guess that's what it was. I had never seen anything like it before. Their arms were in the air. They looked at the ceiling a lot. They prayed out loud and I do mean loud. They moaned and swayed together. It made me feel very strange.
    A man named Jim, kind of small, with his hair slicked back and carrying a microphone seemed to take center stage. Two more men, a tall one and another one moved over next to him. The small one motioned to a lady who was standing off to one side. She was carrying a young boy who had a brace on one leg. On the same leg he wore a built up shoe. Obviously that leg was much shorter than the other. The boy also had one arm that was thin and twisted. He kept it pressed up against his chest.
    I found myself leaning forward on the couch. A piano began to softly play. Then the three men did something I had also never seen before. They put their hands on the little boy and starting praying. "Heal him Jesus. . . . Heal him God."
    I didn't like it at all, yet it was so compelling at the same time. The men started praying in some kind of Arabic sounding language. That really made me nervous. The piano began to play a melody that seemed to follow the sing-song pattern of the prayers of the men. The people in the studio joined in.
    One of the men asked the lady to put the boy down and when she did he began to walk, hesitantly, and then with greater speed. Then he started to walk unevenly, a kind of side to side gait. The camera took a tight shot. My mouth went dry. In awe, I realized that right in front of my eyes his short leg was growing!
    The lady looked absolutely shocked. She picked the boy up and hugged him. The people were shouting now. The music swelled and then as if on cue it stopped.
    The man named Jim held a pencil in front of the little boy. "Take this," he said. The boy reached out with his good arm. "Noâ€, he said, "I want you to take it with your other hand."
    It was obvious that the little boy had to think about this. He paused for a few seconds. I held my breath and then as if in slow motion he straightened out that little shriveled up arm and with a firm grab took the pencil.
    The people let out shout of joy that shook me to my soul. I breathed in a lung full of air. My eyes began to fill with tears.
    Then the man named Jim turned and faced the camera. He seemed to be looking right at me.
    "What just happened is real," he said. "Very real and it's just the start. Jesus wants to heal children tonight. He is going to heal children tonight, sick children, and crippled children. They will walk. They will see. They will hear."
    Then this little man with the round face, funny smile and slicked back hair pointed his finger at a boy sitting on a couch and changed his life forever.
    "Parents, go and pray for your children. Big brothers go and lay your hands on your little brothers or sisters and do it now! "
    Suddenly, without thinking, I got off the couch, ran down the hall, made a sharp left turn into my sisters' room and stopped in front of Penni's crib where her little form was asleep under her favorite blanket.
    My mind went blank. What do I do? Touch her. I did that. Maybe I should put my arm in the air like those people. I did that. Now ask God in the name of Jesus to heal this crooked little foot. Yes. I will. I did.
    "Oh please God, please, Jesus, please, please make her foot well." It was all I knew how to say. It was enough.
    I began to shake. I began to sweat. My knees became so weak I thought I would fall. Then a feeling or maybe it was a kind of presence seemed to be in me or around me. I became calm and peaceful on the inside while still shaking on the outside, and I started to cry. I felt like I was not me anymore. Somebody that was me, but not me, took my place and this somebody was better, cleaner, a new person. And this new person knew that Penni's little foot was now perfectly fine.
    I'm not sure how long I stood there. I was surrounded by something very special and I just keep breathing it in. After awhile I knew the moment had passed. Feeling a little weak and still trembling, I went back to the den to tell my parents what had happened.
    The next day watching Penni run around without the need to hold someone's hand was an amazing, wonderful sight. Just as wonderful was the change in my family and in me.
    For a short while I had been connected to something infinitely great. It was a power older than time itself. I was no longer centered on myself. I was at peace.
    The questions that haunted me no longer needed answers.
    But the story isn't over yet...
×
×
  • Create New...