It’s not like I hadn’t known he had been skulking under my roof for a week or so but I didn’t expect to face him like hair of the dog. By Sunday morning, his whole ecosystem had been mysteriously moved to my counter top, heat lamps, cricket snacks and all. He and I spent a lot of quality time together that day as I buzzed around the kitchen, undoing the damage from the evening’s celebration and the humans’ late-night foraging.

    To my amazement, he titled his head and followed all my movements intently. He appeared to be completely engaged in everything I did. He even stood up and pressed his little dragon feet to the side of the glass and watched with intrigue as I sloshed around the sink with my rubber gloves and stemware ((which is more interest in dish washing than anyone else in the hou    se exhibited over the holidays).

    I share that story here because Birg was new to our Christmas in 2011 and now he is a chapter in the Mitchell family album. A lot of things were new this year. In a holiday season when nothing felt right, we couldn’t trust the old rituals to mask an empty seat at our table. As it turns out, even as we were missing one of our best-loved central characters, we continued to make stories.

    For instance, the gift that we will all remember from Christmas 2011 was a three-dollar bag of peeled and roasted chestnuts that I thought would be a wonderful return to an old-time treat. Instead, it became the center of a competition to find the word that best described the smell. We finally agreed that feet came closest to the mark. Did we eat the chestnuts? No! But the visual of that crazy pass-and-sniff is now another part of our Christmas stories.

    We did return to our ritual of cutting our own tree and brought home a dandy: soft, full and fragrant. What we hadn’t envisioned was how difficult it would be to muster the enthusiasm to reinvent our trim-a-tree night. As the Big Day came creeping closer and closer, our little tree was still bare so we changed our expectations. We rewrote our holiday script. Like the bald-headed men who remind us that there are only so many perfect heads in the world and the rest are covered with hair, we decided our tree was perfect as it stood. We declared we would not cover it with lights or silly decorations that would camouflage its natural beauty. It was all a matter of perspective but it is now a tree we will remember long after all the others have faded in our memories.

    As a writer and a storyteller, every day unfolds for me as a blank page, fat and thirsty for recording the events that become my memories. I write down our stories because I don’t want them to be forgotten. I want my great-grandchildren to know their grandparents as my kids who were, at one time, dragon trainers.

    We are no longer a culture of oral story tellers and unless we write things down, our stories will be lost in just two generations. Everyone has tales to tell and my New Year’s question to you is: Who is writing your story?

    Writing doesn’t need to be a tough assignment. Don’t think of it as tackling your whole life story; think of it as capturing the stories of your life. There are no rules, no right or wrong. And there is no order you must follow, Even Hollywood knows that a great story doesn’t have to begin at the beginning; look at Star Wars, the epic tale that first hooked us in the middle.

    In my workshops, I ask participants to approach story writing as a grocery list. Start by listing two or three events you’d like to record, then make other more detailed lists about the characters and settings that shaped them. Get a handle on the verbs and adjectives that colored your memories and then reflect on the emotions you experienced or the ones you want to conjure. It’s a lot like eating an elephant; you do it one bite at a time.

    If you’d like some help in getting started, get some friends together and call me. We’ll write and play and brainstorm until you are ready to fly off on your own. Just remember: it’s a brand new year and your stories are important. If you aren’t preserving them in writing, who will be?

Copyright 2012. Mitchell Kyd. All rights reserved.

By 5:00 am on Christmas Day, I had received seven-count-em-seven e-mails from department stores and catalog companies announcing price cuts in their after-Christmas sales. Beginning December 26^th, I could save up to 70% on merchandise I had purchased just two days earlier. WTF???

What suddenly goes wrong with cookware and hunting boots that slashes their values overnight? How is it possible a simulataneous catastrophic meltdown occurred in the Godiva aisle of every single Macy’s? Did the bovine neonatal adrenal complex (a.k.a. cow placenta) in all the facial creams sold everywhere immediately turn rancid?

Just 39 days ago, Americans shopped til they dropped on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. There is some lore that even identifies that day as the traditional leap into profit season, the day that finally propels retailers into “the black”. But here we are again –and barely one month later–under pressure to take the best advantage of all the Christmas deals.

To make matters worse, the things I really need to buy now to get the best selection will not be on that sale list. Those items of course are beachwear. Hesitate ’til February to buy your summer swimsuit and you’ll be skinny dippin’. Susan Powter said it best: Stop the insanity!

There are those among you who, like me, remember when Christmas displays never appeared in stores until after Thanksgiving. Now we see them before the Halloween stuff comes out. Based on the gradual encroachment of holiday commercialism that is creeping deeper and deeper into the calendar, my calculations are that by 2027 we will have backed up Christmas marketing so far in advance of the actual holiday that it will again begin appearing just after Thanksgiving – but targeted for the next calendar year, of course. The marketing gurus and financial analysts could call it Christmas Year-Out, or Christmas YO, for short.

For the traditionalists among us, that will seem like a nice return to our childhoods but because retailers will be marketing products that haven’t yet been perfected or FDA approved, there are bound to be record waiting lines and an exponential increase in ugly shopper skirmishes. It will also intensify the pressure on all the techies in product labs everywhere.. Thousands of exploited corporate lab rats will be sequestered behind closed doors even earlier, feverishly trying to design new phone adapters and battery chargers that fit nothing else ever designed, once again ensuring that accessory packs will also be outdated in time for Christmas YO.

With this heightened (or is it lengthened?) anticipation, people will be camping out 14 months before Christmas YO to make sure they get the best deals, Occupy WalMart will no doubt become a movement and a headline – if there are actually any point-of-purchase sites remaining by that time.

“There’s a lot of bad isms floating around this world but one of the worst is commercialism,” comes that classic line from George Seaton’s film, Miracle on 34^th Street. Well said. I’m a great believer in the free enterprise system but we’ve finally gone too far.

I wish I had more time to write and convince you to take action; we could change the world together. But my mail was just delivered and I have to find my gloves and snow boats. Dollar General put their flip-flops on sale in this week’s flier and if I don’t get there by COB, all the best styles will be taken.

Copyright 2012. Mitchell Kyd. All rights reserved.

]]> http://deadmousediaries.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/go-only-356-shopping-days-til-christmas-a-rant-from-mitchell-kyd/feed/ 2 deadmousediaries http://deadmousediaries.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/may-all-your-holidays-be-rated-ncg-a-wish-for-you-from-mitchell-kyd/ http://deadmousediaries.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/may-all-your-holidays-be-rated-ncg-a-wish-for-you-from-mitchell-kyd/#comments Fri, 30 Dec 2011 02:16:19 +0000 deadmousediaries http://deadmousediaries.wordpress.com/?p=1460 ]]> NCG. Not Clark Griswold. You fans of National Lampoon’s movie classic Christmas Vacation are already enjoying a private chuckle or maybe an out-loud snort, aren’t you?   If the name Clark Griswold doesn’t conjure up a scene from this timeless,  inter-generational Christmas train wreck, your holiday pleasures are incomplete so please rent Christmas Vacation. But back to me.

At least it’s NCG has become part of our own family’s code talk, that special language that people sharing living quarters put together over the years to capture secret messages created through shared experiences. It’s like Morse Code for the dexterity-challenged.   We’ve watched Christmas Vacation so many times that we no longer need the audio; we can recite most of it line by line, although only my son gets that masterful performance correct where Clark describes his boss in delicious detail. (Cheap, rotten, no-good-, lying, four-flushing, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, over-stuffed... well, you get the picture.)

The important lesson here is that NCG has set a standard by which our family now measures all holiday chaos. No matter how bad the oversight or mishap, we are consoled when we remind each other: At least it’s not Clark Griswold.  Truthfully, it helps us remember that we really don’t have holiday disasters at our house; we have inconveniences. For instance, unlike the Griswold family Christmas, we’ve never had an exploding turkey or a Christmas lighting incident that nearly turned a favorite uncle to toast. We’ve also never used a chainsaw to decapitate a newel post or had our home invaded by a SWAT team on Christmas Eve.

Most of our holiday stories are mild by comparison and many seem to stem around plumbing issues. I am happy to report that, to date, the 2011 season has been plumbing-problem free  (unless you count the bypass surgery my husband had at Thanksgiving which I guess is a plumbing issue of sorts).  As New Year’s Eve approaches, we are just three days away from a perfect NCG rating and I am wishing the same for all of you.

I remember two Christmases in a row where an overflowing toilet created quite a distraction while the in-laws were all visiting.  (Apparently we weren’t too quick on the pick-up about what toilet paper really works best at our house.) I also remember a toilet seat emergency at my grandmother’s house decades ago.  One of the little cushion thingeys came off the bottom and caused the seat to slide off the rim when you sat down. My Pap, a fixer, came up from the garage with a solution: a piece of baler twine, a giant rubber band made from a slice of truck inner tube and a stick. I don’t remember the exact physics behind his approach but I know it had something to do with creating torque on the inner tube by turning the stick, the entire mechanism of which was held creatively in place by the baler twine. Everything worked well until my grandmother got home and found the fix unaesethetically pleasing and then the whole damn opera fell apart.  We all wobbled until after the holidays when someone could drive the 14 miles to nearest hardware store for a new toilet seat. (That’s ho things got done in the pre-WalMart era.)

Our current best story – and I’m leaving room for it to be updated and upstaged – is the the 2009 Thanksgiving Incident. Those of you who know me well know that I’ve made n0 claims as a Domestic Diva and despite my perennial night-before scurry and my continued best intentions, Thanksgiving always finds our entire family waiting in queue for a shower in that last hour before lunch gets served. That has pending disaster written all over it.

The root cause of this particular incident is still open to dispute but one of the early contributing factors was a lost pendant that may or may not have gone down the bathroom sink drain. We’ve learned since then that when you live in an old house, it’s best not to disturb the plumbing for anything less than a full-scale blockage but in our zeal to confirm or deny the existence of said pendant, somebody in our house twisted the pipes open under the sink to check. (Somebody in our house is also family code talk and is used to assign blame to a mystery being who is responsible for all sorts of unclaimed mayhem.) There was no pendant. There was also no chance of getting the two parts of the pipe to realign properly again and in a way that assured their watertight integrity.

Thanks to our vast experience with plumbing problems, this was a situation we knew we could fix. With a bucket.  And so the dribbles were caught behind closed vanity doors and the bucket was dumped regularly into the toilet bowl where the evidence of a quick-fix could be flushed away.  I can’t say how long the bucket solution had been in play under the sink before the Thanksgiving Incident but suffice it to say, it had been at least  a day or two…

During that same time period, my daughter was still wearing her hair long. Her grooming rituals were lengthy and rigorous, involving several sessions of lather, rinse, repeat and about a quart of Mane and Tail conditioner with every shower. Even the most tolerant drains can only take so much, you know what I’m saying? A back-up was inevitable. Enter my son for the final shower of the morning but facing several inches of standing water.

The events of the final 20 minutes of meal prep are a bit of a blur but I do know that I had just pulled the turkey from the oven and was standing at the kitchen counter with my mom and dad, sweet potato casserole on one side, a bowl of stuffing on the other. I had set the turkey on the cutting board and but instantly whisked it away to the other side of the counter so my dad could carve and be out of my workspace. I had barely moved the turkey when the first trickle of bath water began running down through my kitchen cabinets, the same cabinets I had taken a vacation day to clean inside and out just two days earlier.

As the three of us stood mesmerized by the waterfall that was cascading with more ferocity, my son slid through the doorway demanding a pot –not a cooking pot it seems, a bailing pot. Through some fascinating combination of gravity and water pressure and the power of a vacuum, the clog he had dislodged in the tub caused such a surge in the drain pipes that all the tub water rushed back up into the sink drain where it of course, followed the path of least resistance, out of the broken sink pipe and onto the bathroom floor. And down through the ceiling into my kitchen. And the whole way through my cupboards.  Two seconds before that, our Thanksgiving dinner had been in perfect position for a final basting of Mane and Tail. At least it was NCG, we all declared.

The next few hours after dinner were spent with mops and fans and coat hangers and drain snakes and my son finally retrieved from the bathtub drain a wad of sister hair that resembled a small raccoon.  (But it’s coat was certainly in great condition after all that Mane and Tail.) Just like the Griswold’s, we hadn’t let a little mishap ruin our holiday;  we had only added another story to the Mitchell family album.

So here’s the moral of the story: no matter what has happened or may happen to change your vision of the perfect family gathering, if your family was gathered, it was perfect as intended. And the next time your toilet overflows when guests arrive or your dogs yacks up a bone under your table during an elegant dining experience, just remember: it could be worse. Your holiday is still rated NCG.

Copyright 2011. Mitchell Kyd. All rights reserved.

I have given up on most of the things you’d like me to believe are essential to a beautiful family holiday. I am no longer drying fragile blossoms of Queen Anne’s Lace in the summer so I can place them on my Christmas tree like the parasols of tiny faeries. I’ve stopped gluing my fingers together with pine pitch while trying to weave an a charming wreath from my leftover tree branches. And I’m not baking any dog biscuits topped with bows of bacon bits.

In fact, I’d like to invite you to be part of my world; come on over and see how Christmas really gets done here, outside of TV Land.  Let’s tackle something simple, like gift wrapping, and see how well you’d do without your set director, your gaffers and grips. Follow along.

Step 1: Clear a large, flat work space such as a kitchen or dining table. Lay out your rolls of gift wrap that you wisely bought on sale after last year’s holiday. Assemble all of your related supplies that have been carefully arranged and stored in plastic organizers since last Christmas.  Arrange everything on your workspace within easy reach.

Step 2: Drive to the nearest WalMart or Dollar General to buy new tape and scissors because someone pilfered these items from your stash. While you’re out, pick up the dry cleaning, and your husband’s prescriptions; stop for milk, get the oil changed, pay the sewer bill and drop your final Christmas package at the Post Office.

Step 3: Clear gift-wrap and supplies so you can set the table for dinner.

Step 4: After dinner, lay out all your gift-wrapping supplies. Return to the car to search for the one plastic bag containing the tape and new scissors. While you’re in the car in the driveway in the dark, pick up the french fries that fell under the seat two weeks ago. Find last week’s mail that slid between the seats including the electric and water bills that are now past due.

Step 5: Clear gift-wrap and supplies from the table so you have room for last week’s mail, your checkbook and the calculator. Pay bills, balance checkbook and text yourself a reminder to stop at the Post Office again tomorrow to buy more stamps.

Step 6: Now that everyone else has gone to bed and the house is quiet, lay out all your gift-wrapping supplies and tune radio to Christmas music. Search the kitchen junk drawer for new batteries.

Step 7: While in kitchen, pull chicken breasts from freezer for tomorrow’s dinner, empty trash and wash coffee mugs left over from late night snack.

Step 8: Rush to answer another automated telemarketing call then discard the length of wrapping paper you had already cut so you can dispose of the hairball your cat presented on it in during your extended absence. Move sofa in search of the ribbon spool he gnawed, the one that triggered the hairball.

Step 9: Accept your situation. Scoop the cat litter and go to bed.

Step 10: In the morning, clear your workspace to make room for breakfast. Drive to the nearest WalMart or Dollar General and buy two dozen gift bags.

Alternate Ending: If you are on a budget, do what my husband does. Buy one fits-all gift bag. Keep all gifts in their original bags. At gift exchange time, transfer one item at a time to the gift bag and present to the recipient. Ask that the bag be immediately returned so the next recipient can be equally delighted.

So there you go, Merry Martha Freakin’ Stewart. I don’t need your ideas or your merchandise to make my holidays complete. I have my own creative brain and now, a nearby Dollar General.

Copyright 2011. Mitchell Kyd. All rights reserved.

    As we’ve been closing up my parents’ farm, a lifetime of memories has been flying past me like the pages of a cartoon flip-book. The years have now been compressed to fit comfortably inside cardboard cartons. To the observer, they are boxes of junk. To the storyteller who is packing them, the contents represent one of life’s little disparities; we often seem to blink and miss the moment but somehow still manage to catch the memory. I suppose it is like the summer peaches we boil away so we can enjoy them spread on toast on winter mornings

    In one of the many cartons of memories we’ve transported from my parents’ house to ours is a box of pine blocks that my dad cut and sanded by hand and presented to my son at Christmas 20 years ago. On the lifelong happiness scale, the blocks outscored every other gift he has ever received.

    This simple toy far outlasted the hockey table and the Nerf bazookas. It trumped the slot car track, the swing set and his first two-wheeler. Even as Santa turned tech-savvy and dropped off a Game Boy, an iPod and eventually a PlayStation, our kid still had great adventures exploring the mysteries of balance and the physics of fulcrums with his wooden blocks. No single thing has ever entertained him more consistently. What’s more, the blocks have survived the journey in grand style are still in great condition, ready to be passed along to whoever wobbles onto the scene as our first grandchild.

    It seems my dad had once again remembered a gift-giving truth that often eludes the rest of us: simple joys endure.

    As I think back on the power of that classic gift, it has made me stop and remember my best Christmas memories. It is the feelings that are created by family, constancy, and comforting tradition that stick with me now, decades after the gifts have been discarded. It has caused me to spend some time reflecting on what I might really want this Christmas and I think that it is this:

    I want to keep creating new stories that will be told at Christmas Future. I want to open my Christmas stocking and find it filled with more magic and less plastic, more wonder and less reality. While I’m waiting, I want to experience that sense of happy anticipation that is just as good as the having.

    I’m asking Santa to bring me fewer batteries and more things powered by imagination. I want my grown children to remember forever that we can travel to the green-cheese moon on a giant slingshot or just grow wings if that is more convenient.

    I want us all to be reminded that the December world has natural beauty. I’ll suggest that we tone down the glitz and replace the razzle dazzle with some old-fashioned winter splendor. I’ll ask Santa to give everyone permission to cut back on the lumens so we can enjoy more landscape luminescence. When I look back on the Christmas card my mind is painting of this year’s celebration, I want it to be timeless.

    I’m also asking Santa to give us all more face time and less Facebook friending. I think it might be nice to have more moments where we are present and fewer where we are texting TTYL. If he has time, I’ll ask that he drop off some mail for each of us with actual handwritten notes inside and make the phone ring with calls from friends who are far away.

    And finally, I’ll be saying, Santa, if you can bring me just one thing, please fill my head with the sweetest dreams of those of who will be missing at this year’s Christmas table. My memories are a simple joy and an enduring Christmas pleasure.

Copyright 2011.  Mitchell Kyd.  All rights reserved.

   My dad and father-in-law both fulfilled their pledge to protect and defend our country and they both came home intact from far away places but they never talked about their tours of duty. For my part, I had simply endured all the mandatory history classes. I should have learned about what they experienced but I was well into my career before I really got a glimpse of understanding of what it means to have earned a rank and serial number.

   What I have learned about the real battles in military service I’ve heard from my son who has devoured every article, book and memoir he can lay his hands on about military history. Surviving lack and uncertainty, overcoming sub-zero temps and scorching heat, even out-lasting boredom and bad leadership are a few of the other battlegrounds that rarely make the textbooks. In his retelling, my son unfolds the smallest details of a soldier’s life with such poignant nuance that I have to wonder if he is an Old Soul, recycling his own past memories.

   His best excavations are the stories he is putting together as a collection under the title: Ingenuity on the Battlefield. That’s where I learned that in the desperate cold of WWII, the Army beetle crushers cut slits in their sleeping bags to wear them as parkas. Soldiers slept with drained engine oil every night to keep it from freezing and they spread their wet socks on their chests as they slept so they would have dry ones in the morning.

   My son has helped me appreciate what soldiers know about small comforts. A burning K-ration box gave off enough heat to warm up a cup of coffee. A hot chocolate packet cooked on an engine block could be turned into a combat cupcake. At other times, small treats became lifesavers. A wad of gum between dog tags kept them from clinking and giving away a soldier’s position. A string of C-ration containers served as an alarm on the perimeter. A frozen mash of Tootsie Rolls made a pretty good plug for a gas tank with a bullet hole.

   My favorite of his stories is about the WWII Navy destroyer, the U.S.S. Borie. The ship was going down and had used the last of her fuel; there was no more power to even radio for help. As the officers contemplated the fate of the crew, the ship’s doctor watched a shipmate pull out a cigarette and an idea was ignited. Zippo lighters, still a hallmark of that era, were collected from the crew and every drop of lighter fluid was drained into the ship’s generator. It was enough to send one last distress call, the one that got them rescued.

   I recently spent a little time talking with a special group of vets who make up the Honor Guard of VFW Post #1599. While they each have their own tales to tell, the original men formed the group in1948 to honor others’ stories. In the early years, they were there to provide a fitting graveside tribute to soldiers who were being sent back home to their final resting place. Today, 27 members of Post #1599 from all branches of the military pledge their time to step up and bestow these final honors for veterans all across our area.

   Headed by my longtime friend George Gearhart, the Honor Guard includes retired airmen, specialists and tech-4s, sergeants, warrant officers and a major. From age 35 to 95, they don full dress uniform and appear, regardless of the weather, wherever they are needed. They will have performed more than 90 military honors this year alone. In a recent year, the service count was 145.

   When a family gathers with friends to say goodbye for that last time, the presence of the Honor Guard against a pale blue sky helps share the load for those few moments. As the shots ring out and the bugler sounds taps, even those of us who have never served get some sense of what it means to have been part of something bigger and more important: a shared experience that has earned that title Veteran.

“One for honor. One for duty. One for country,” the Captain of the Honor Guard proclaims as he presents the empty casings and the folded flag. Their stories may be ending but their service will not be forgotten.

   If you are lucky enough to get to view this year’s Veterans Day parade, cushy seat or not, watch for the Honor Guard to pass and see them as a reminder. Remove your hat, cover your heart and say a little prayer for all the men and women across the ages who have made the pledge to defend and protect the ones they leave behind.

Copyright 2011.  Mitchell Kyd. All rights reserved.

   A week before he got sick, he had driven my mom to town 40 miles away to pick out a flat screen TV, but not before he had done all his research, checked the prices, and compared the service contracts on all the best brands.

   “I’m just Jim,” he would say to anyone who tried to address him as Mr. Butts, or even James.  I’m sure the sales clerk at the flat screen TV store dealt with “just Jim” that day, too, because that was just my dad.

   My mom and I are now entangled in the mess the follows when a hole opens up and swallows a family.  If I had my way, that awful piece of legal paper would simply say this about his cause of death: “Used it up; wore it out, knew when to go so he got out.” 

   Any of you who have been reading my blog for any amount of time know that my dad has been a big part of many of my stories because he has been a huge, happy part of my life. (The Christmas Piece, A Scentimental Father’s Day Journey, Father’s Day: Gifts from Dad, etc.).  For those of you who didn’t know him personally, I can tell you that it is his blue eyes you see when you look at mine and it is his sense of humor that plays across the pages of my writing. To give you just one silly glimpse inside the man I’ve loved for 57 years, here’s a hospital story. 

   As one of his best nurses was getting him settled into his new room, she showed him how to use the call button to get her help. 

   “Jim, if you need anything at all, you just buzz me,” she said with an easy tone but deep sincerity. 

   “What if I get cold?” he asked, and I saw that devilish twinkle in those blue eyes.

   “You just call me and I’ll be here!” she smiled again. 

    “So what are you doing to do about that,” he baited. “Crawl in bed with me?” Now that was also my dad– and quite a joke for a man who still adored the woman he had married more than 60 years ago.

You can count on seeing some joy-filled reflections of him coming soon to this blog spot nearest you but for today, I am adding his obituary because so many of my regular readers have already heard this news. At the bottom you’ll also find a short poem called “Evenings at the Farm.”   I hope you’ll read it, too. 

   Yesterday on our way to make arrangements, two whitetails went loping across the corn fields in our plain view and then we spotted an eagle circling at the foot of the mountain. Between those two events, my daughter and I glanced out the car window at just the right moment to see the most amazing wreath of clouds perched on the mountains behind my parents’  farm.  I knew then that although my dad got his chance to fly away,  but he hasn’t ventured too far from us so soon.

   James “Jim” Butts passed away Tuesday, September 27, 2011 after a very brief illness. He had already celebrated 91 years of a well-loved, well-worn, totally spent life that had collected no rust. Born in 1920, Jim lived through the Great Depression and helped support his parents and seven siblings in his early years doing orchard and construction work. He also served in the Civilian Conservation Corps and assisted in the building of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Jim was a Master Sergeant in the 99th Division Signal Corps during WWII and served in the Battle of the Bulge. Following his honorable discharge, he returned to his work at United Telephone where he retired as construction supervisor after 41 years. He had stayed connected with his work crew since that time.
An avid outdoorsman, Jim enjoyed a busy life on his farm for the past 30 years as a woodsman, woodworker, banjo player, arborist, cabinetmaker, problem solver, fixer and doer. He was preceded by three brothers and three sisters and is survived by one brother.
Jim was known for his sense of humor and enjoyment of people and conversation. He was also known as a gentleman with his curly white hair and dazzling blue eyes,  After more than 60 years of marriage, he still opened the car door for his wife and daughter who will miss him greatly.
He spent the last 24 years of his life as a grandfather and instilled his love of trees, mountains and wildlife in his grandson and granddaughter and shared these same interests with his son-in-law.
Private services will be held by the family to honor this life well-lived.

Evenings at the Farm

When the sun slides down

behind the mountain,

the barn light calls you home,

a warm and familiar homing beacon.

The smell of dinner cooking

wraps around you,

a welcomed hug after a long day

spent with strangers.

Steam rises from a boiling pot,

potatoes rattle their dimpled lid

demanding your wife and lover poke them,

an expert with the old black fork.

Green beans in the kettle,

and baked apples in a pan

bubble on the woodstove

answering your question: What’s for dinner?.

We always seem to blink,

miss the moment but catch the memory,

never quick enough to know

we see the last time coming.

No matter where you roam,

the smell of cinnamon and woodsmoke

will always take you back

to evenings at the farm.

Lucky  you.

Copyright 2011. Mitchell Kyd. All rights reserved.

I know why my electrician and hair stylist each have a license; it means they have earned competency in the field where they provide me with a service and they are accountable to some higher authority for regular reviews. Even a driver’s license requires proof of some level of skill and performance, for goodness sakes! But what competency is required for a marriage license?? Zip. Zero. Nada.

When we first told my parents about our impending marriage my dad told my then-fiance the true value of the marriage license. “It only take $2 to get married,” he said with a grin, “and then every penny you make after that.” Thanks, Dad.

With the divorce rate on the rise, I’m thinking we should build some competencies into the granting of marriage licenses to make sure we’re all getting what we’ve paid for.  Instead of taking blood tests, maybe we should be able to  pass the blood-tolerance test to find out if a future spouse will be capable of extracting a baby tooth or cleaning up a kid’s bloody nose on the ball field.  Let’s make sure we are both on the same page about spending those romantic evenings snuggled together on the couch watching another gory episode of CSI after a dinner of steak tartare or hog maw.

While we’re at it, I vote for including aptitude tests in the marriage licensing process. That will help determine if a future spouse can tell the dirty dishes in the sink from the clean ones or calculate the actual value of a 20%-off coupon on an $20 item located 15 miles away. We will also know if our spouse knows what repair jobs require a plumber rather than another length of duct tape or have the correct perspective on which jeans really should not be worn in public.

Motor skills tests will evaluate the ability to properly replace a roll of toilet paper, gather the trash from all the waste cans in time for weekly pick-up or operate the TV when the remote is missing. Visual acuity exams will clear up whether your future spouse can see the dust rhinos under the sofa, find the jar of pickles hidden behind the mayo or distinguish a straight slot from a Phillips screwdriver.

A few years ago while my husband and I were on a little vacation to celebrate our 25th anniversary, my matron of honor visited our house and dropped off an anniversary card. Tucked inside were the original hand-scratched notes from our wedding vows, his and mine, the ones we had both written in secret and not shared with the other until our ceremony. It was an amazing gift and I’m not sure what amazed me more. Was it that she had the forethought to collect them from us on our wedding day? Or that she had kept them safe all those years? Or was the most most astounding thing that she had remembered where she had kept them stashed for a quarter of a century?

There were a lot of lofty, young-love hallmarks in those notes, gooey stuff about love and promises and forever-ness. There wasn’t a single thing in written down where either of us vowed to take turns getting up with a teething baby, clean up an overflowing toilet, or bundle up extra early to scrape the ice off the other’s windshield.

But all of that and more has manifested over the years and surprisingly, with just a $2 license and a blood test. We would most surely have failed a competency exam all those years ago. We got to where we are one microwaved dinner and one leaky faucet at a time so we’ve had lots of opportunities to examine the invisible ink on that marriage license.

As those anniversaries mount up, you begin to realize that only time can reveal your ability to keep those pie crust promises you made on your wedding day. It takes more than love; it requires lots of things like commitment, patience, paper towels and stain remover. Over the years you begin to discover that it’s the little things that matter. When it comes to the marriage contract, the devil is in the details –as they say–but so are all rewards.

Copyright 20 11. Mitchell Kyd. All rights reserved.

   The other notable event gives us cause to celebrate so if you need more joy in your life, perhaps you can focus on this: September 11, 2011, is also National Grandparents Day. It has anchored the Sunday after Labor Day on our calendars since 1978.

    Jimmy Carter endorsed this declaration for the United States and since then, several other countries have followed suit. Australia, Canada, Estonia, France and the U.K. have all now set aside a day to honor grandparents. A decade before us, Poland established Grandmother’s Day which is celebrated on January 21. Polish grandfathers get their celebration one day later on the 22nd.

    Whoever decided our parents’ parents should be known as grandparents certainly had their adjectives correct. The significant people in my life certainly lived up to that title. I’m happy to say my children would report the same about their grandparents, too. The only person who held a more exalted role when I was a kid was – appropriately – my great-grandmother. In my experience, the more adjectives there are in that particular title, the more fun and mischief are involved.

    For one thing, grandparents are smarter than parents. Even if they didn’t get it all right the first time around, they know enough to relax, slow down and let go on the second trip. Grandparents have experienced what parents have yet to learn: happiness simply happens. It flits in and out of ordinary days and arrives on no one’s schedule. It never hesitates for a single moment hoping someone will have a camera. You can’t predict or contain it; you can only make space in your life to allow it. When you are a parent, there is far too much planning involved to harvest all the happiness that a grandparent sees blooming.

    I believe that growing into grandparenthood is a reward for having survived parenting. I once read a great line that explains the reason that kids and grandparents get along so well is that they are united against a common enemy. That makes sense to me. Parents are always on duty. They make the rules, maintain limits, and set examples of how to be a grown-up. Grandparents are on holiday and they make magic. They are the ones who know that you must turn off all the house lights when you run the electric train at Christmas or you won’t be transported anywhere. They also know a box of sanded wood blocks will fascinate your kids for years as well as hours if you make space for it to happen, no batteries required.

    I remember watching my mom and dad with my kids when they were small and it made me wonder: Who are these people and what have they done with my parents? Everything I thought I knew about them dissolved as they melted seamlessly into their new assignment.
    My husband’s dad was instantly transformed into a man we neither one had ever met before our kids were born. It turns out his name was PawPaw. We lost him to cancer 12 years ago this week but not before some of the best stuff happened on his shift: spinning Easter eggs in a bowl of deep blue dye, chasing lightning bugs in an oversized t-shirt and splashing through the garden hose. On his watch I discovered that grandparents don’t make messes or waste the water; they are far too busy being mad scientists, dragon slayers and the tour guides for grand adventures.

    If you’re lucky enough to still have grandparents, you can honor them with your own rendition of the official Grandparents Day song. It earned a National Songwriter’s Award for creator Johnny Prill and is titled simply: A Song for Grandma and Grandpa. Can’t carry a tune in a bucket? You could always deliver a bouquet. The official flower for this national day of celebration is the little Forget-Me-Not. What could be more fitting?

    I’ll be thinking about my grandparents on this Grandparents Day and will be missing PawPaw, too. As we were closing the door on his house for the final time, I happened to glance at the full-length mirror at the end of his hallway. I had seen it a thousand times but at that last minute, something odd caught my eye. At both bottom corners, two sets of tiny hand prints remained intact, dodged by years of careful cleaning. I decided it was his last note to remind me of how well he had done his most important job. He had been a grandpa and a great one; he knew how to allow the moment and catch the memory.

Copyright 2011. Mitchell Kyd.  All rights reserved.