Dad

I guess everyone reading this blog knows my dad's been fighting cancer.  He passed away last week.  He was home on hospice for about three weeks.  (The doctors predicted he'd live only one week after leaving the hospital, so we were pleasantly surprised.)  I was really glad for the chance to say goodbye. 

 In case any one's curious, here's a picture of me and my dad.

I also thought I'd post what I wrote to say at the funeral.  It's not what I actually said.  I changed stuff all around and ended up just holding the paper as a security blanket and not looking at it at all, but here's what the speech would have been if I'd read it:

There are lots of things to remember about my dad. He liked fishing, and he was always teasing and joking around the supper table. I remember once when I was maybe three or four he got me all riled up over a loose tooth. He said he'd be walking me up the isle on my wedding day and all of a sudden have to shout `It's out!'

My dad taught me about honor. Not that he talked about honor or anything -it's kind of an old fashioned word- but he lived honorably, which is much better. One thing that made a huge impression on me was when we got into debt when I was about sixteen, and dad and mom paid the thing off. Everyone he talked to told him he was crazy -that he should just declare bankruptcy and forget it, but dad believed a Christian should pay his debts so he and mom pulled together and got them paid off. The Bible says in Psalm 15 (and I'm paraphrasing) that a righteous man is one who swears to his own hurt and keeps his vow. My dad didn't talk a lot about his faith, but I think anyone who knew him knew he always did his best to follow Christ.  I'm not saying he never grumbled or that he didn't feel like Charlie Brown sometimes -I know he did. But those feelings didn't change the way he lived.

Toward the end he was really looking forward to Heaven, especially the river and all the great singing. We did our best to give him a proper going home party. 

Not exactly a goodbye

I thought I'd let people know what's going on with me.  

Dad is home on hospice -well, home to my grandma's house.  He is dying.  It's been great that our family is getting this chance to say goodbye.  Not everyone has that chance.  

We've had a lot of friends over, mostly playing and singing for him.  Mom's been an absolute rock through the whole thing.  I think being able to do nurse stuff to keep him comfortable is really helping her cope.  

Dad's been telling everyone who visits to make sure they meet up with him on the other side.  He says he'll probably be down by the river (it's mentioned in Revelations, so you know Heaven has one.)  He also says he wishes he could send us all a postcard when he gets there.  It's really comforting to know this isn't goodbye, just `so long for now.'

Heroics

I have occasionally been volunteering at CareNet, a truly awesome organization that helps mothers and expectant mothers in our community.  (And if you want to know more about them, here is a link to their web-page.)  I mention this to give background for some thoughts I had.


  Not long ago I was watering plants around the center.  It was sunny but not sweltering, with lovely shade trees.  I really enjoyed being outside.  Now here's the thing; when I was younger it would have bothered me to be watering plants instead of doing Something Important.  As a kid I was all fierce and passionate and disappointed that there weren't dragons and ogres in the Appalachians for me to ride out and slay.  (All great adventure stories happen in the Appalachians.  When Tolkien wrote about the Misty Mountains, he was talking about the Appalachians.  Even though he was English and probably never saw them.  Seriously.  Logic does not apply here.  It was the Appalachians.)  

 God really had to work on me about my gung-ho nature.  I'd keep trying to charge forward, and God would haul me back, and I'd say `what's wrong with you, God?  I'm supposed to be doing Important Things!  Why won't you let me get with the program here?'  I'd grumble and glower until the next time I could jump at a chance to have an adventure, only for God to grab me by the collar again, the way my brother grabs a stubborn goat when she sees something she thinks is food.  (Like rose bushes.)
  
I probably missed a lot of chances to make a difference because I was too busy wishing for a Chance to Make a Difference.  It's really ironic.  It's also something I'll probably always struggle with.  There will always be a piece of me that wants to be the one who blows up the death star and gets the medal in front of a huge crowd.  

It's a funny thing about heroics.  In real life, they creep up on you.  I'm thinking now about my mom, who is hanging out at the hospital with dad right now, and doesn't know she's being heroic at all.  And thinking about myself, and the things I've been doing lately because dad's sick that I wouldn't have even imagined myself doing three years ago.  

I guess the times that people are most useful -maybe even most heroic- is when they're not thinking about being heroes at all.

Just Doing Their Job

Happy Memorial Day!  

This blog post is actually about a different kind of service people, though it also fits veterans.  I wanted to say I appreciate everyone who goes out of their way to be friendly and helpful when it doesn't affect their paycheck.  

You all know from past posts that my dad is fighting cancer.  Well this past week was a bit up and down, but there were several people who gave me a lot of encouragement just by doing their jobs.  

Two of them were local Food Lion employees.  

My dad's been having trouble keeping food down, and mom sent me off to pick up something that he'd been having a little easier time eating.  She wrote down the brand and everything -problem was, once I was in the store I couldn't find it.  I had to call on a floor worker, who had to call on another employee while he was in the middle of doing his job.  They found it for me and the whole time they were very helpful and cheerful and didn't seem to mind being interrupted by a slightly lost customer puzzled by labeling.  

I don't often think about it when a store employee helps me out but that day my errand was so important that I really noticed -and really appreciated- not just the help, but the fact that they didn't seem to find me a bother, even though I was interrupting their work.  They didn't know my dad was sick.  They were just doing their job.  But it made a huge difference to me that they did it cheerfully.

The other incident was a lot more serious: a mess up in paperwork that we were afraid might prevent dad from getting proper treatment.  We all started praying, and mom started phoning, and one of the people she called got the matter straitened out so fast that it was handled the evening of the same day she called!  If you've ever dealt with paperwork, you can appreciate that this was a miracle.  We were very much rejoicing.  We were also thankful that the people involved cared enough to get right on the matter.  

People don't always see how their lives affect others, but to those who do your work well, who are willing to help the people you serve, Thank You.  And a special thanks to those out protecting our country.     

Some thoughts on Once Upon a Time

I haven't been around much lately.  As I mentioned in the comments, Dad's been going through yet another skirmish in his battle with cancer.  Also, I've been trying to do more story writing.  So my Internet presence will be a bit spotty, like that's something new.

This morning I was catching up on Once Upon A Time (keeping current with the TV shows I follow is another one of those things that has kind of gone by the wayside these past few weeks).  The show has these big themes going about parent/child relationships and abandonment and lost love and all that, but another theme that really keeps the tension going is the question of fatalism.

See, the basic premises is that all these storybook characters got sent to our world because of a curse.  There's this cool back-and-forth between the past in the story world and the present in the real world.  But since these are story characters, there is a constant question of how much control they have over their own lives.  Is it really the evil queen's fault that she's evil when every time she tries to change, something comes along to push her back into her old role?  What happens if someone's true love dies?  Is that it?  Are they destined to be lonely forever?  

It's the old Oedipus question, really.  (Not to be confused with an Oedipus complex.)  If the gods of the Greek Pantheon for-ordained that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother, was it fair of them to punish him for it?  Did they force him to commit those acts and then destroy him, or did they just know what was going to happen?  And why couldn't the Star Wars prequel trilogy have grappled with these questions? 

Well, all that's for philosophers to settle (or not.  I had Philosophy in collage, and discovered that the old philosophers mostly just make cryptic remarks so you won't notice that they're getting paid not to tell you anything).  But you have to admit, it makes for an interesting TV show.

Banjo

Hi everyone.  Sorry I haven't been around much lately.  Not only have I been busy, but I accidentally deleted this post when it was supposed to go up last Saturday.  (Sigh.)  

This is a picture of our cat, Banjo.  He showed up about two years ago at one of our family cookouts, trying to steal the food.  He was such a pest that dad jokingly said we should do like the old timers up in the Appalachians used to and turn him into a banjo.  Instead, we started feeding him.  

The picture was taken at our first cookout this year, where the only thing Banjo tried to steal was our camp chair.  As you can tell by his expression, Banjo considers himself supreme ruler of our backyard.  

Impressions of the Hobbit movie

So I finally got to see The Hobbit, and I thought I'd share my first impressions.  If you haven't seen the movie and are planning to, you might not want to read this, because it might be spoilery.

So first off, I love Martin Freeman as Bilbo.  You know how sometimes when you see the movie version of a book you've grown up with, you can't quite reconcile the actor with the character in your head?  Totally didn't happen here.  Martin Freeman nailed Bilbo Baggins -appearance, personality, everything.  The Unexpected Party was a major highlight of the movie for me, because you see so clearly that here is a genuinely nice person (hobbit) completely overwhelmed by all these strangers that he's too polite to slam the door on.  As someone who is easily overwhelmed by crowds myself, I can sympathize.  In fact, one of the flaws of the movie (in my opinion) is that we don't have enough of these wonderful character-building moments. 

I especially missed Bilbo's point of view in Rivendell.  I love the dwarves trying to cook salad, and I enjoy the council.  (Gandalf and Galadriel doing the fantasy equivalent of texting under the table when Sauruman goes into lecture mode is priceless.)  But this section is Bilbo's first look at Rivendell, the place where he returns to spends his last years in Middle-Earth, and -aside from one backward glance- we never get the sense that it makes any kind of impression on him. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I wanted to mention the troll scene which deviates from the book, with mixed results.  In the book, Thorin sends Bilbo in as a scout to see what he's made of.  In the movie, Bilbo gets pushed into going by Fili and Kili, who are panicking because some of the ponies went missing on their watch.  This was, I think, a sound decision on the part of Peter Jackson.  The movie dwarves draw on some of Tolkien's later writings which further developed the dwarf culture and their warlike nature.  The original meeting with the trolls don't fit the more serious nature of the movie.

Unfortunately, the actual capture of the dwarves broke my willing suspension of disbelief.  Jackson had Thorin surrender to the trolls because they'd captured Bilbo -but Thorin was a seasoned warrior, a dwarf prince!  He would be used to making hard decisions in battle.  I have trouble believing that he would let his entire band of loyal followers get eaten just because they threatened Bilbo.  It was like he suddenly remembered that Bilbo was the title character and he couldn't let him get killed off for plot reasons.  

Using Bilbo instead of Gandalf distract the trolls is great.  It shows that he's cunning and can think on his feet.  In the book, Bilbo doesn't come in to his own until after he meets Gullom -which is around the one-third mark in the book, but closer to the the three-third mark in the movie.   That would be way to late to have your hero just starting to do anything.

I have mixed feelings about Radagast's introduction.  My dad found his presence random and confusing, while my brother thought he added a new depth to the world-building.  I think people who are familiar with Middle Earth only through the movies might be confused by him, like my dad was.  As to the character himself, it really depends on what Peter Jackson plans to do with him in the future movies.

As for the early meeting with the orcs and wargs, I understand it from a plot standpoint.  It will make the ending feel inevitable.  I like that the lead orc has a history with Thorin.  The way they push our heroes to visit Rivendell fills a plot hole that opened up when Jackson decided to accent the dwarf/elf feud.  I get it- but I wasn't crazy about that part.  Maybe I just know the book a little too well, but that part felt like it was just an action scene, it didn't feel like a Tolkien action scene.  Let me see if I can explain... okay.  You know Tolkien is fond of the Deu ex Machina, right?  We have Gandalf's return at dawn in The Two Towers. we have Aragorn's black ships in Return of the King.  Both have a sense of divine intervention, partly because of the use of light and shadow.  Tolkien loved using weather in mood setting.  Even in the Troll scene earlier in The Hobbit you have the sudden outbreak of sunlight bringing hope (and that was masterfully filmed).  The emotional element doesn't come through with this orc raid, and I think it's because the scene isn't based on Tolkien's writing.

The scenes in the Misty Mountains were mostly awesome (especially everything involving Gullom).  I loved Bilbo's talk with (I think) Bailin.  Those quieter scenes are where Peter Jackson's directing is especially great and I only wish there were more of this sort of thing.  I did think Bilbo looked a little too comfortable with the sword in his fight with the orc, especially after he told Gandalf that he'd never drawn a sword in his life.  I also thought the dwarves should have been a little quicker on Bilbo's heels when he went after Thorin's attacker in the tree-fight scene.  But I did love Thorin's acknowledgement of Bilbo's place in their company there at the end.

Wow.  That's a long overview.  I'm sure I missed things.  Like how much I appreciate that this movie explores dwarf culture.  It gives The Hobbit a unique feel, while still keeping a sense that we are in Middle Earth.  Also, I know why most people like to see movies in theater: telephones.  We got three calls during the prologue.  And that's it.  I'd love to hear what you all thought, if you've seen the movie.