Living Hazzardously

Little pieces of our journey with Jesus

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How can a day change the lives of so many? Or Vertigo, party of one?

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How can a day change the lives of so many? Or Vertigo, party of one?

The early morning is by far my favorite time of day, everything is waking up, stretching and yawning as the sun starts its daily pilgrimage across our late winters sky. This was just another normal Sunday morning, the cool temperatures of our bedroom calling to me as the sky was still and quiet, even Drax was calm last night. I woke at my normal time, it’s Sunday, 4:15 am. The stars seem to be just a few inches outside my window, so close I could smell the spinning colors of the night sky. Wizz… zipppp… buzzzz….. Ohh goodness, I’m going to PUKE!!!! That was how my morning started yesterday, spinning colors of stars and moon, twirling like a demented ballerina twisting on her brain piercing toes and portraying the most horrific sequence of blurring, twirling, spinning visuals, the most detestable sights imagined.

Yes, I lay in bed wishing the world were not tormenting my every thought and making my every move a sequence of gut-wrenching experiences and vivid examples of torture. It’s Sunday, I blog on Sunday mornings, but this morning was having none of that. Instead, I lay in bed… counting the time…. 4:20…4:30… 4:45… 5:15, it is now time to wake up Jess. “Hunny?” I called from the pillow “Jess? I can’t get out of bed, it’s time for you to get up” with her deepest concern as she tried to wake up. “Are you ok” all I can muster is one more word “vertigo”. My day was pretty rough, but we did make it to church and back home. 

I had planned to blog about the days that led to Jess and I making the final decision to move away from everything we knew and land on this little 40 we now call home, but today I was not able to do much more than not fall over. 

I remember the day very clearly, we were having a normal day, or so we thought. Al was outside doing what he does best, looking for stuff. We had seen a few frustrating situations in the past but today we discovered we could not keep Al safe, safe from himself. As Jess watched today unfold like a nightmare, I stood by trying to understand the un-understandable situation, she started to get weak in the knees and I tried to hold her up, and Al was thinking this was a most excellent adventure, it was so fun for him. 

Let me set the scene: We lived about 800 feet from a busy commuter highway in Chanhassen, this highway carried thousands of commuters to the cities and back every day, but the buffer of elevation and trees made our home almost invisible and certainly not effectively bothered by the busy road. It was a perfect balance of convenience and sheltered quiet from the road. Next to us was an old gravel pit that seemed more like a miniature forest, a place where Al could explore and look and find all sorts of things like melted plastic mower housings, melted aluminum window frames, piles of wood, trees and rocks scattered around the winding path that lay just below the abandoned railway, but now was actually an abandoned bike trail. It was surprisingly quiet, and solitude was never begging but rather it was easily found with a comfortable spot in the backyard. 

This particular day, Al had the great adventure planned out and was implementing this marvel of fantastical fantasy. As he snuck into Jacob’s room and poked around in Jacobs’ surprisingly well-organized trunk, Al found exactly what he needed. He quickly snatched it up, tucked it into his clothing and slipped unsuspectedly out the door and down to the highway where he would make his great mission a completed quest for this adventure of great delusion. After he was done, or perhaps because he had a sense that he should stop, he slipped back into Jacob’s room and returned this great prop that was so well suited to his wondrous fantasy, now being complete in this quest, Al was back outside, and we would never know what he had been up to… or so he thought.

A few minutes later, this fantasy played out to Jess and me, she was almost ready to collapse. You see, this item that Al took was a plastic airsoft pistol (not supper real looking) and the way we found out was a swarm of 9 police cars screaming up the driveway and chasing Al down and cuffing him. All the time, Al thought he was the “Head of the Bloods and the Crips.” (Rival gangs in Las Angeles Ca.) For some unknown reason, Al thought that he was the leader of these two rival gangs. The Cops were chasing him down because he was waving a gun around at cars on the highway during rush hour.

I remember the look on Als face as he sat in the back of the car, admitting to this and so much more, like his gang colors (a sweatshirt covered in marker) his bandana that was part of his “attire of ganging stuff” and his communication with this gangs by means of microscopic messages written on tree bark by the highway. 

I remember holding Jess that night and I remember these words… “I can’t keep him safe here!”

We bought a 13-foot fiber-glass camper and started driving, looking for a new home, a safe home, a quiet 40 where Al could finally be away from the people’s stares, the hustle of the cities and be safe when life gets out of control and starts to control what we think. I had bought that little house in Chanhassen to live out my days as a bachelor, as a grumpy old man working on my motorcycle in my living room and sleeping whenever I pleased, but now, I am a stepdad and moving into the middle of nowhere to keep our Al safe, with no regrets, we moved.

I am pretty sure there is at least one gray hair with Als name on it, somewhere up there, as few as there are nowadays. My hope is to offer someone encouragement that God is in control, and If you dont feel like therre is his presence in your life, ask him today for his comfort.

May God’s love for you guide your footsteps and fill your heart as much as mine is filled tonight as I sit and finally scribble out this post.

Putting on overalls

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The years slip past like the spring rains filling the earth. The rains come and go and the day after we hardly recall their sweet aroma as they approached our dry land. I had such great plans, as the step dad days approached and I welled up with pride over raising three great sons. Plans to teach, learn, play and build a relationship with Al, Plans to build projects like the clocks we have made, the rock tumbler gems we made, the shelves for all the magical little collections of mysterious and radically unique things. 

Like nearly every person, me included, that has met Al, we find Al to be so excited and passionate about whatever it is he has an interest in, I have seen this over and over hundreds of times. Al walks into church and starts talking about rocks, the normal reaction is to think he is passionate about rocks, and you wouldn’t be wrong… necessarily… Or perhaps Al yells across the building about his favorite sports team and your immediate assumption is that he follows sports or at least this sports team, again, you wouldn’t be wrong… necessarily… Or perhaps you are a World War 2 vet and Al shows an enthusiasm to know everything about the war, you wouldn’t be wrong in that assumption either… necessarily…

Let’s take a walk into how this works, how can one person have time to be interested in all these sports teams, find the most exquisite agates and amethyst gemstones, know all there is to know about every war ever fought, be the self-taught expert in the “Byzantine” era, still play so many sports yet have time to watch every food network show ever aired? It’s super simple, He doesn’t, kind of, but then again, he does. As a “step” in dad, I have had a wonderful opportunity to see this from the inside out, I have had a few years (10 years now) of living with Al every day, to study him and try my best to provide for him the things that he can’t provide for himself, to teach him things like: pouring milk into a bowl instead of “at” the bowl, how to open the cereal box rather than “exposing” the cereal in the box… or one of my favorites, how to put peanut butter on a cracker instead of putting the crackers into the peanut butter. There are so many different areas I have worked with Al but the most evasive of them all is “thought control”.

With that being said, I feel like an explanation is the next paragraph rather than creating another long run on a sentence… (Run-ons are my favorites). Thought control is like creating the “Thought police” out of Orwell’s book “1985” but you are the government, and you need to make valued decisions on how to form this world that you can create inside the gray matter we are so fond of declaring autonomy over. When Al thinks about something it’s the only thing he can think about, even when it is not an appropriate time to indulge these thoughts. For instance, when Al is setting the table, he needs to be reminded as many as 20 times to focus on setting the table, why? It’s not a random distraction like in the movie “UP” when the dogs get distracted by a ball, or in the movie “Finding Nemo ” when the gulls are calling out “mine” at every presentation of what may be food… it’s more like 50 or more thoughts that are on a continual loop, much like the old 8-tracks, you could switch from one track to the next but you couldn’t really fast forward, you could never rewind and you had to “hunt” to find the right song… you couldn’t just “click” on the title and play that one song… now imaging the button was sticky and would randomly jump from track to track, but at the same time, wont switch tracks no matter how much you try.  Sticky buttons that would sometimes switch tacks when least desired and other times wont switch no matter how hard we try…

I really try to help Al in thought control, and he has come a long way in ten years, but imagine if you would, the road traveled is only a mile long, with ten lanes, and it is a looped highway, you can’t ever get far, but you sure do a lot of driving. I hope this helps someone out there. I hope this helps to understand that there is progress, that Al has learned a lot of thought control, and his daily “chores “are able to become more complex over time and he feels so much success at things that most of us take for granted. Here are a few successes that Al has recently celebrated, and when I say “celebrated” he is so proud of his success, and he so often yells out “MOM!!! I DID IT!!! I DID IT MOM!!” getting the bread bag twist tie off without ripping the bread bag apart. Slicing a banana into chunks using his new knife or hanging up his jacket at church without breaking the hanger, and one of my favorites, making hot chocolate from a package. 

I understand this is not an easy thing to truly put into words, it’s taken ten years for me to articulate these ideas onto paper, some days are bad, some days are good, but the step fathering is not a task to be taken lightly.

“Fathering by choice rather than obligation” is a big, big deal!!! I’m not trying to beat my own drum, but stepdads need encouragement more than they let on and your support is like the oxygen needed to keep going. 

In closing, remember the spring rains, they come and go, and everyone forgets the sweet smell after the flowers start to bloom, but the spring rains are what gives the flowers the water needed to grow. Stepdads are much like the spring rains, look for a stepdad and say a word of encouragement, they need it.

God bless and thanks be to our creator for unanticipated opportunities.  A man once said opportunity is missed by so many because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work. 

Enlightened? Party of one!

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Cash! Like the man in black, Johnny Cash.

That is my best guess at how he got his name, the “best doggone dog in the north”

When Jess and I first started dating I got a dog named Cash, he was a German Shepherd Dog and he had a few training issues, some of which I was never fully able to resolve, he was over two years old when I got him. Cash was bold, he was not the type of Dog you could just walk up to, he needed time to calm down, but after that he was so sweet and so trustworthy…. The problem was it was on his timetable. I have a very dear friend, a big “tough guy” that loves dogs as well, but he never fully trusted old Cash, even years later.

Al met Cash and immediately cash liked Al. I never had to worry about Cash and Al. They were best buds almost instantly. So this big GSD liked Al? Well, kinda not really actually. Als mannerisms were a language to a Dog that is hard for us humans to understand. The way Al moved and held his hands in relation to his body made Cash lay down and pee every time we went to visit. That’s right, Cash would lay down and pee all over Jess carpet whenever he was around Al… It took me a bit of watching to understand just why my “BIG GSD CASH” would cower and pee with Al but with my “BIG DOG LOVING FRIEND”, Cash would nip and show some level of dominance and aggression. 

There I am, learning about Al and Cash. I have had many dogs and I am pretty good about reading body language, aggression and submission. Al on the other hand did everything “wrong” in showing control, dominance and hierarchy. Al would stand over cash, arms raised and “lunge” back and forth (at least that’s what Cash thought). For Al, this was just his mannerism and Als normal daily stims, but to Cash? Al was the boss, the “alpha”, I watched closely at every interaction, making sure to read the body language of Cash and prepared to jump in and “save” Al from what seems to me to be a very risky behavior. But never once did we see aggression displayed towards Al. Others? OHH YES! Other dogs? DEFINITELY!! (I worked on this for Cashes entire life, and we did resolve nearly all his issues)

As I learned and watched I also discovered a lot about Al and how to interact with Al myself. Al does not react the same as he did back then, I have worked with Al to not approach an unknown dog with hands in the air and lunge back and forth, never put your hands on top of a dogs head you don’t know and NEVER HUG a dog that you don’t know. All the things you are not supposed to do is what Al did with Cash… I think that GSD had a special sense with Al to know he should submit rather than attack. In my opinion, it’s nothing short of watching a miracle.

In my “black and white” world of simple right and wrongs, Al has blurred that defining line and helped me see from a blurry set of glasses that things are so often not what you may have determined to be as they really are…. Enlightened? Party of one!

Our Creator built a way in the minds of dogs to just “know” somethings, well, I suppose I am still learning every day. May God richly bless your day.