One of the temporary after-effects of my wife's bout with hepatitis years ago was some memory loss. Now, I forget a lot of things and I don't have an excuse. Well, for a while, my wife had a great excuse for forgetting some things, because that memory loss had some real effects. Like the day she left the pot of water on the stove to boil. She promptly moved away from the kitchen and forgot all about it. She told me she even forgot about it after she smelled something burning. So, she went all through the house; checked the dryer, checked the furnace. "What in the world is that burning smell?" Well, when she finally decided to check the kitchen, you can probably guess what the scene was. Oh yeah, there was no more water left in that pot; it had boiled dry. The burner was red hot; the pan had become part of the burner. It was bonded to the burner. It literally had to be broken off. Yeah, she needed some heat to do her job, but not that much heat!
When our family got ready to leave for a trip, I usually had some pretty good help loading the car, because everybody was eager to leave. Now, when we pulled into the driveway at the end of the trip, it was a little different. All of a sudden I noticed that I was carrying a lot of things and I didn't have much company. There are five members of our family, but invariably when it was time to unload, I ran in the house and found...let's see, there's one on the phone, one in the bathroom, one opening the mail, one in their room, and one carrying the load. That was me. I'd be in the kitchen yelling, "Help!" as I staggered in with things hanging from both shoulders - doing my impersonation of a mule, things in my arms, my hands, my teeth. It's frustrating to have a load to carry and nobody there to help.
It's kind of hard to think of any good news when you just broke your hand, but there was some. Yeah. My wife learned that when she was in an accident in our car with two of our children. They were rear-ended. The car was parked, somebody slammed into the back of them, and the result for my wife was a broken hand and six weeks in a cast. Well, she was unable to use her working hand; her writing hand even for about a month and a half.
My wife, my son and I were walking across a parking lot talking. All of a sudden the people who were walking in front of us whirled around and the lady said, "I know that voice!" Well, I'm always afraid when somebody says that to me; I wonder if it's like somebody I like, you know, I owe money to. But this does happen every once in a while, and sometimes it's someone I do owe money to, but more often than not it's someone who somehow has come into contact with this particular voice over the radio, and usually on a lot of occasions.
So I'm in the backyard with our six-year-old grandson when, out of the blue, he says, "Grandpa, I'm going to be married someday." Oh boy. My brain is in high gear; I'm searching for something wise to say as grandfathers are supposed to do. My grandson saved me - with five little words, "But it's up to Jesus." Oh boy. Here we go with melted grandfather in the yard. That little conversation has replayed in my head and my heart a dozen times since then.
I guess it's possible to get lost in a computer. I'm lost as soon as I turn on a computer, but that's not what I mean. What I'm describing happens to people who really understand computers. There was a Newsweek article a while ago that talked about how some business leaders were complaining about this emerging problem with some of their computer people. They were talking about computer technicians who just kept going deeper and deeper into programs, and spending lots of time on sophisticated functions that didn't really have anything to do with getting their job done. One of them had an interesting name for it - "the rapture of the deep" they called it; lost somewhere in that computer; making the computer an end in itself rather than what it's supposed to be, which I think is a means of getting a job done. You know, some people get lost in the Bible too.
I got to thinking the other day about some of the close calls in my life; those moments that could have been my last, but obviously they weren't. There was the night that a drunk driver totaled our car with all of our family in it, but thank God it didn't total us. I was driving. We could have died; we didn't.
Buck Helm - yeah, that name was one light in the darkness of October 17, 1989, which was the day of a tragic San Francisco earthquake. It was the day that the whole freeway collapsed, burying scores of people. And just when the rescuers thought there was no life left to find, an engineer spotted movement under one heavily damaged section. Under there they found, still alive miraculously, Buck Helm, a 57-year-old longshoreman. Now, he had survived for four days in that rubble. It was such good news, and I think that's why we felt so sad when word came four weeks later that Buck Helm had died suddenly in the hospital. He was rescued, but he was lost. We can't always hang onto what we save.
Oh, every child loves a circus. And I think there's a child inside of all of us that never grows up. I still love the circus, don't you? I've always been personally fascinated by those death-defying artists from the high trapeze. Hey, wait a minute, I feel like a ring master. I'm trying to get the job, anyway, today. They leap, perfect poise, grace, one trapeze to another, until they end up safe on that platform all the way across the arena from where they started. And I guess you could eventually get used to hanging onto a trapeze, and you'd feel comparatively secure as soon as you reached the next one. My problem would be the time between trapezes. Yeah, that would bother me. Actually, it bothers all of us.
I think I first remember hearing about it on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. And most people listening are going, "Say what?" Yeah, we're talking the 1950s, and it was a show that most teenagers watched. And I of course, was only two at the time. But it was predictable that a teenage show was going to have as their primary advertiser a company called Clearasil.
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