The school district where I work officially hired a couple of new employees on Monday night, as we are wont to do from time to time. And I, as the Technology Director, was asked on Tuesday morning to create the necessary access accounts for those new employees, which I am accustomed to doing every time that we hire new employees, as we are wont to do from time to time.

I was also asked to create identities for these new employees in a system where I hardly ever create new employees. Normally, my response to a request like this would have been something like, “I hardly ever create new employees in that system. You should probably find someone else to handle that part for you.” Strangely enough though, this time, I didn’t do that. Instead, I decided that I was going to figure it out, so that I wouldn’t have to keep diverting these identity-creation tasks to someone else every time they came my way.

What I discovered, in this system where I hardly ever create employee identities, was that there was a bit of a problem at work. You see, in order to create an employee identity in this particular system, you only need a couple of pieces of information; the most critical of these pieces is called a UID, or ‘unique identifier’. The thing about the UID is that it’s made up. It’s a created, alphanumeric string that gets tied to the employee forever. Mine, for example, is MS0111, presumably because I was working in the middle school when we first started using this particular data system, although I can’t tell you what 0111 means; I can’t imagine that I was the 111th middle school staff member fed into that system at the point of its inception.

Anyhow, on Tuesday, when I was trying to think of which UIDs to create for these two new staff members, I was striking out. For example, I tried MS_STAFF_01. Already taken. And so, I tried MS_STAFF_02 and MS_STAFF_03 and MS_STAFF_04, and those were all taken as well. And, of course, I tried some other possibilities as well, but it really only took me a few times of failing at this that I decided to take a different approach. I decided to export every name of every staff member that had ever been created in this system, along with their UIDs, so I could look at the UIDs that have been used in the past, to try to establish some patterns.

This post is a ‘Story to be Told’ post, because my wife told me tonight that she likes it when I write these. However, if I went off on a rant about the mess of UIDs that I found when I did this export, if I went off on a rant about why it shouldn’t be that difficult for a group of people to follow some simple naming conventions every once in a while, if I went off on a rant about entropy as a universal force away from which there is no escape, even when it comes to data –basically, if I start ranting– I am not going to end up generating a story that my wife is going to enjoy reading.

So, instead, I’ll tell you the story of how pleasant this experience turned out to be. Because it did, strangely enough. Sure, all of those things that I just got done talking about were slightly frustrating parts of learning about the innards of this other data system, but what I came away with was a pleasant experience that hit me upside the head out of a clear blue sky.

I got to walk down a huge contact list of people that I’ve known during my career. I looked backed over my time and I saw some of the faces that I’d forgotten along the way. While I value my current coworkers, of course, I have also in the past valued some who’ve come and then gone.

Here’s how that went:

1. I was reminded of the young special education teacher in our high school, who was so tall and somewhat lumbering and goofy looking, who also had a heart of pure gold for students of all different shapes and sizes and ability levels. I’d forgotten how he always inspired me to try to do a better job reaching out to the marginalized students in our hallways.

2. I was reminded of the last Home Ec teacher in our school district, a woman whose sewing classroom is now the Tech Office where I work everyday. She was all at once solid and stern and soft and soulful. She could, in the same young person’s heart, command respect and sow (or is it sew?) love & friendship. It’s been too long since I remembered how honored I should be feeling to be working where she once worked.

3. I was reminded of the behavioral interventionist that we had at the high school, years ago, who was a five-foot-tall sixty-year-old man in cowboy boots and a don’t-mess-with-me attitude. He seemed to bring buckets of tough love with him to school every day, for use with the students who needed that stuff from time to time, but he also had a wise outlook on life and a smile that was disarming and warm.

4. I was reminded of the cafeteria cook, whose daughter was one of my very first students during my very first year of teaching. Even after her daughter had graduated from the high school and moved on, this lovely cook was still showing up, day in and day out, doing her best for the district that she loved. She had a laugh that echoed around in that cafeteria; with its often cold and sterile surfaces, that place was once quite blessed by her boisterous bellows.

5. I was reminded of the student that I had as an independent study in creative writing, who then graduated, headed off to college, came back with a teaching degree, got a job in our middle school teaching math, and then became a building principal in a neighboring school district. I was honored to have taught him, honored to have worked alongside him, and I continue to be honored to watch him making an impact even still, following his dreams in education.

I could easily keep doing this. I could easily continue to list out the names of these people with whom I’ve enjoyed a moment or two of contact during my professional career, telling you of their stories, of their bravery and dedication and love. These five aren’t even my five favorites, necessarily; just five from a list of what looks to be dozens, according to the export from the employee data system.

These contacts aren’t the professional contacts I have now, but I think I have come to realize that the ones that I have contact with now might not be the ones with whom I have contact in five years, or ten, or twenty.

So, to the two staff members who’ve joined our rank and file this week, whose names and identities I have plugged into our systems this week, might I say welcome aboard. May the period of time during which we will be in contact have me one day remembering you fondly.

May I also make the most of my opportunity to impact you thusly.

The song is Plush (Acoustic) by Stone Temple Pilots.

The song, in its original, un-acoustic form, appears on the first Stone Temple Pilots album, Core. During those initial years, STP was just starting to find their footing as a band, just as I was trying to find my footing as a freshman on a major college campus. I’ll bet I listened to that album a thousand times during that excruciating year of my life, just fighting to keep my head above the waters. It’s one of probably a half-dozen albums that I identify as part of my early college experience, in the mid-90s.

It’s an interesting song, when you hear it on the album, and if you know anything at all about the song and its meaning, according to STP front man Scott Weiland, the song is equal parts 1) metaphor for a failed romantic relationship and 2) ballad based on the news story of a kidnapping turned murder. That’s what everybody’s looking for in a hit song, right?!?! Give me a song about a murdered little girl; that’s the stuff I dig.

The song, in its original album version, is kind of catchy, in its own right. But, its upbeat rhythm and guitar-heavy melody didn’t really match up, in my mind, with the lyrics very well at all.

But then, I heard an acoustic version of the song. MTV was responsible for this new exposure, I’m sure, since STP did the song acoustically on MTV Headbangers Ball and also on MTV Unplugged. Between the two versions, I prefer the Headbangers Ball acoustic version to the Unplugged acoustic version –> too much bongo drum in the latter.

When I heard that acoustic version, it changed the entire song for me. Before –on the album– the song was a snappy little ditty, without the emotional gravity that it should have had, given the lyrical topic. But, when Weiland sang the song without all of the other instrumental noise, a little more slowly and soulfully, the song HAUNTED me. I don’t think I’ve listened to the album version of Plush more than a dozen times in the last twenty years, but I can promise you that I’ve listened to the acoustic version of the song at least a couple hundred times over those same years.

The problem with the song, and my love affair with it in its acoustic format, was that the band didn’t initially release the acoustic version on any of their recordings. Thus began the search.

Looking back on it now, I spent way too much money on bootleg CDs from STP concerts from all over the world in the years following the release of Plush, because I was trying to capture the acoustic version on a recording. Back in those days, there was no YouTube for playing your favorite version of your favorite song over and over again. Back at the end of the twentieth century, if you wanted to hear a song repeatedly, you had to have a copy of it. Come to find out, the band wasn’t releasing the song intentionally, and MTV was no help, either. I kept looking for MTV to release a compilation album with the acoustic song on it somewhere, but nothing ever came.

So, for about ten years, I searched for that song, with levels of weakening fervor, as the years went by. I bought this studio album and that bootleg CD, hoping that I was going to finally get a copy of the song. Most of the time, what I ended up getting –at best– was a different version of the same song of which I already had many copies.

Then, in 2003, when STP released their greatest hits album, entitled Thank You, there it was –> Plush (Acoustic). And I’ve been listening to it ever since. The search was over.

* * *

I don’t know if you’ve ever searched for something, but I’ll assume that you have. Now, whether that search led you through a process that took minutes, or years, the desire for the thing that you’re searching for is the original driving force. If I’m looking under the sofa cushions for my car keys, I desire my car keys. If I am looking in the pockets of all of the pants that I have in the dirty clothes pile, that hand-written note that I cannot lose is the driving force.

Sometimes, I find my car keys, while other times, that note goes through the washer and the dryer, and is destroyed.

Searches like these are pretty simple ones, and there are only a couple of possible results –> you find what you seek or you don’t.

And, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had plenty of instances where I’ve been unable to find what I so desperately was seeking, and I’ve stopped the search. That’s the way that it was with Plush (Acoustic). I’d pretty much given up hope of ever finding a recording of that song. Come to find out, according to Wikipedia, there were only a couple of acoustic versions of the song ever released, on a couple of rare and obscure recordings that are still –to this day– rare and obscure.

What sometimes happens when we give up this desperation that burns inside of us to find what is lost, sometimes, is that we come to find it, not through the anxious searching, but more as a result of that sought-after thing just kind of popping up.

The process of giving up the search gets harder, the longer we search, often because of the ‘sunk-cost feeling’ that we have; after we’ve spent time and energy and resources trying to find something, we feel like we have to keep searching because of what we’ve spent trying to find what was lost. But, at the same time, the longer a search goes on, the easier it is to quit, because we run out of the supplies –time and energy and resources– to continue.

I feel like, in many ways, we are all searching, always searching. Whatever you are looking for, I hope that you find it. I hope that your search can finally be over soon.

 

The song is Don’t Follow, by Alice in Chains. This song has been a significant song in my life for about half as long as I’ve been alive, which is a bit of time, to say the least. It all started back in the spring of 1996, more than twenty-four years ago. I was completing my sophomore year of college, set to head out on a month-long summer break trip to Europe to see some of the sights with the Notre Dame Glee Club. Just a few days before the plane was scheduled to take off, my family had a tragic death occur; my cousin Paul was killed in a freak accident at his workplace.

I forsook the opportunity to attend my cousin’s funeral because of the plans that I had to take that trip to Europe, plans that included a significant amount of money invested in the trip and my obligation to my friends, responsible as I was for performing at different venues and concerts throughout the trip. My brother gave me grief about my choice before I left, and he gave me grief about it after I got back from my sight-seeing tour. In fact, my brother played the song Don’t Follow when I got back, and he said to me, “This song was played at Paulie’s funeral, not that you would know.”

If you’ve never heard the song, it’s not one that I would suggest that you should rush out and listen to as soon as possible. It’s a sad song, interlaced with some statements on life and its pointlessness. Alice in Chains was not the band that you came out of the 90s thinking, “Man, that Alice in Chains really picks me up when I’m feeling blue.” It seems like the kind of song that would be poetically appropriate at the tragic funeral of a young man who died way too young in the last decade of the twentieth century.

I’ve often wondered how many funerals that song’s been played at, over the years. I know of at least one other.

* * *

It seems crazy to think about it –and I honestly don’t know if I ever have until just now– that my brother died about twelve and a half years later. Looking back on the two, it doesn’t seem like those two points in time were that distant from each other at all; but then again, so many monumental things happened during those twelve and a half years. We both graduated from college. He moved away, to establish a life for himself. I got married, and then he did. My wife and I had all of our children during those years, and my brother –their Uncle Steve– got to know them all, if only for a little while.

When Steve died, I was the family member who did much of the work in putting together the video montage of photos, set to music, that would end up playing at the funeral services for my brother. If you didn’t know this about him, my brother had a tendency to ‘fly the bird’ during the last moment before my mother or wife or anyone else would take a photo of him, usually with the rest of us alongside, so that putting together a funeral video of pictures of him was challenging for me for two reasons: 1) I was an emotional wreck, and 2) so many of those pictures featured his prominent middle finger.

I chose Don’t Follow as one of the songs in that montage. An angry part of me thought to myself back then, “We played it at your funeral, not that you would know.”

During the intervening years, hearing the song Don’t Follow normally either elicited in me a strong desire to flip to the next song, or a melancholic pining to just stew in the sadness of the song and what it has meant to me for so long. But, the other day, on my way home from work, the song came up in my super playlist (I call it the MegaMix), and I neither got sad, nor did I change the song. In fact, the other day on my way home, I had been flipping through songs, looking for something to listen to, and I stopped when Don’t Follow came up.

The other day, on the way home from work, I listened to that song and I smiled as I thought of Steve and our brotherhood.

I titled this post Healing because I think that there is a process of coming to terms with the death of someone, especially when they have been very close to you. While I can’t say whether or not the past twelve years have been a quick pace toward recovery, with respect to how long it sometimes takes others to fully heal from grief, I can say that it seems like I’ve done my healing. This isn’t to say that I don’t still miss my brother, or that I don’t wish that he were still here. Rather, I am saying that the grief is gone. What is left, after the rain, is a reality that I wasn’t ever sure that I would get to.

* * *

I don’t know if this is true of everyone or not, but it’s certainly been true of me throughout the years, and my wife and kids would probably agree –> music in general, and many specific songs in particular, have been significant in shaping the way that I’ve experienced most of my life. The way that music has been a part of some of my most enjoyable experiences, and the way that music has been integral in the processing of some of my greatest sadness, is a great blessing in my life.

I don’t expect that I will ever listen to that song by Alice in Chains without at least thinking of Steve, and perhaps also Paulie, but somewhere along the line, I think I turned the corner. Here’s to the healing.

 

 

As an adult, I do a lot of things that I’ve done many times before. Get out of bed, get dressed, go to work –> I’ve done that trifecta many times. Break up the fight between the kids, discuss sibling appreciation, force XYZ kid to apologize to ABC kid –> I’ve done that trifecta many times, as well. As a matter of fact, I think we end up in ruts of behavior, where we are doing things, day in and day out, that we’ve done countless times previously, without many opportunities for ‘adventuring’.

When I think of adventuring, I think that it is sometimes planned out, and other times, I think it is a spontaneous set of decisions to just exercise some freedom. This past weekend, Jennie and I took an opportunity to spend some time together, just the two of us, galivanting around Van Buren county, enjoying each other’s company. It wasn’t really planned out, and we had a great time being together, looking for adventure.

And while I suspect that it’s the case that some people are better at staying committed to adventuring than others, I know –speaking for myself– that I often fall out of the practice of being adventurous, more often than not, just because I fall into the old habits of ‘going through the motions’ and doing the ol’ ‘second verse, same as the first’ routine.

What’s even less common for me is adventuring alone; the other day, as I was starting to form the idea for this blog post in my head, I tried to remember the last time that I went on an adventure alone. It took me a few moments, but then I remembered it.

* * *

I know that I’ve mentioned this before, but in case you didn’t know, I’m a bit of a Stephen King fan. While it would be much too much to say that I’ve read every word he’s ever written down, it would not be too much to say that I am closer to having accomplished that task than most people. I’ve been reading Stephen King books for as long as I’ve been reading, give or take a few years there, in the very beginning, when my mom and dad would have been forcing me to read stuff that was less entertaining. As soon as I was able to buy my own books –we usually went to the Majerek’s bookshop in Niles pretty often when I was a kid– I would slip a Stephen King book up to the cash register counter when no one was looking and pay for it before anyone has the chance to notice.

Somewhere in the second quarter of 2017, at approximately the same time that Stephen King announced the release of his upcoming novel, I purchased tickets to an event in Naperville, Illinois, at North Central College. The event, hosted by Anderson’s Bookshops, promised to be a once-in-a-lifetime event, for you see, Stephen King is not often seen in public at events associated with his writings. But, Anderson’s Bookshops were set to bring Stephen and Owen –his son– to North Central College to speak about the book that they’d co-written, Sleeping Beauties.

I learned about the event from my official membership newsletter from the Stephen King fan club, and I got permission from Jennie to buy myself a ticket. I convinced her with the whole “the ticket doesn’t cost that much more than the book would cost, and the event includes a copy of the book, which I was going to buy anyway, so I’m really not spending that much more at all” routine –> I’m sure you’ve used the same trick before, am I right?!?!

And then, like it always goes when I pre-order a Stephen King book months before it is set to come out, there was nothing to do but wait. But, this waiting was a little bit more agonizing, because not only was I going to be getting the next Stephen King book, I was going to be seeing Stephen King in person on September 29th.

I remember, on that Friday evening, leaving directly from work to head to the Chicagoland area. I was concerned about travel time, and the one-hour time difference between the two locales. I took the drive in, and ended up eating alone in a restaurant just a few blocks from the North Central College campus, so that I wouldn’t end up being too far away. It was fun, finding a place to park my car for a few hours, walking around and adventuring.

All of this leading up to the main event.

I remember thinking that the event was going to be great –and it was, in a sense– but I also remember the experience going differently than I’d expected it to go. But, getting to see one of my heroes in person was a great adventure that I’ll not likely ever forget.

We listened to Stephen and Owen talk about the book, and it was interesting to listen to them talk about what it was like for them to work together on the project.

After it was all over, I picked up the copy of the new novel that was promised to me, as I was leaving the venue for the evening, and then I walked back to my car and headed back home. It was pretty late when I finally did get home, but I checked an item off of my bucket list that evening.

* * *

Part of the fun of adventuring, whether it’s planned out months in advance or it’s a spontaneous afternoon of meandering around, is that we are reminded that life doesn’t have to be as rigid as we become accustomed to thinking of it. While we spend most of our time ‘in the daily grind’, we can –and should– break out from the established patterns of behavior, if for no other reason than to be reminded that we have more freedom than we often think we do.

And who doesn’t love some freedom every once in a while?!?!

Somewhere in 2002 or 2003, Jennie and I decided to get a cat. At that point, we were living in our first house, on the east side of Niles, and we were thinking that, at some point in the future, we would start to make our family bigger (with children). To prove to ourselves that we were ready to do such a thing, we decided to rescue a cat.

That cat was Maggie.

We rescued Maggie from a PetSmart adoption event, if I remember correctly. We told ourselves, going into the whole thing, that we were going to try to do our best to ‘parent’ a rescue cat, and if that ended up going well, then we would take it as a sign that we were set to start thinking about getting pregnant.

But, it did not go well. In fact, if we’d abided by the terms of the loose agreement that the adoption of Maggie encompassed, we never should have had kids at all. In the end, we blamed Maggie for the way that things turned out, and since we were able to place the blame on her, we felt that we were acquitted of any responsibility in the matter. Of course, we probably could have done some things differently, but most of it was Maggie’s fault.

Says the human.

Maggie was a black and white cat, and she was fully adult when we rescued her. It was pretty early on when we felt like there was something psychologically wrong with her. Maggie seemed to be a bit of a devil-cat. Inasmuch as all cats have a certain independence within them, and most people understand that going in, Maggie went above-and-beyond in her level of disdain for Jennie and I. She rarely, if ever, seemed interested in us, unless you count her attacks on us as being ‘interested’.

Of course, there were good times with Maggie, and I’m saying this because I’m assuming that there were, not necessarily because I remember any such times. On the contrary, most of what I remember from our time with Maggie is me chasing Maggie around the house, after she’d done something that I wasn’t happy about, and Maggie running, to avoid my rage.

I think that I was under the impression that Maggie could have been trained, or at least, discouraged from behaving badly. Of course, anyone whose owned a cat before could tell you that cats do what they want to do and they’re not likely to be trained as easily as one might train, say, a dog, for example. Still, I thought that it must be possible for her behaviors to be molded, at least somewhat.

As it turned out, I was wrong.

Truth be told, Maggie was malicious. The malice inside of her may have been the result of her life –her circumstances– before she came to be ours; Jennie and I have always assumed as much. But, it’s hard enough to care for a cat when it seems to like you, or at least when it seems to be indifferent to you. Maggie’s malice was hard for Jennie and I to tolerate.

Maggie’s claws were the most intolerable, inasmuch as she used them to attack the two of us. Those same claws, when our son was born, became the reason that she left our home. While it was one thing for her to attack us without cause, it was going to be completely unbearable for her to attack our newborn child with the same malevolence.

Not long after our first child, our son, was born, we had Jennie’s sister –a veterinary technician at the time– find a different place for Maggie to live.

When Maggie attacked us, she would wait in a room that we were about to enter, around the corner, so that she could pounce on our ankles, with her claws exposed for the kill. Whenever Maggie did this, especially to Jennie –it didn’t really bother me that much, but Jennie was not to be toyed with– I would attempt to discourage Maggie from that behavior, and this didn’t ever go well.

Maggie did teach me that escalating with a dependent is never going to result in anything positive.

My memories of chasing that cat around our house are memorable because Maggie took those opportunities to step up her game; when it came to being an evil cat, she was never more evil than she was when I was trying to teach her a lesson about bad behavior.

At the end of the day, Jennie and I chalked the whole thing up to a bad experience. We made the decision to start to raise a family together, despite how things turned out with Maggie, and we’ve never regretted that decision, or any of the challenges that have come with it.

Maggie was a cat that needed something that we were incapable of giving.

In fact, we currently own two cats (and they were Jennie’s idea). People say that cats get along better when they have a fellow cat to play with, and I can certainly say that our two cats are significantly more interested in each other than they are in any of the humans in the house. They were barn cats, and barely old enough to leave their mother, when we adopted them from Jennie’s other sister –> the one who has never been a veterinary technician. By getting them at birth, we were pretty sure that they were unlikely to have any of the emotional baggage that we’ve always assigned to Maggie and our experience with her.

Sometimes, things just don’t work out. It’s not necessarily a sign of anything, and it’s not always that case that instances like these are someone’s fault. Maggie was one of those cases where it just wasn’t in the cards.

 

The home where I grew up had two outbuildings, very similar in size and layout to each other. It seems like, at some point, someone in the family said that they were guest houses or cottages or motel-style lodging buildings; since my childhood home is on a highway, the idea that it may have been, at one time, a lodging-establishment of some kind didn’t seem too far fetched to my childlike mind. The buildings, next to each other on the eastern-most acre of my family’s two-acre property, were even accessible via a side-driveway of some kind, extending from the highway and back to those two outbuildings.

They weren’t large, these two buildings, probably twenty feet wide by twelve feet deep, made out of cinder-blocks, with simple roofs and windows. They were white-washed, inside and out, and were about as simple as a building could be. 

My earliest memories of either of those outbuildings comes with chickens attached, lots of chickens, for you see, when I was very little, we raised chickens. One of the two outbuildings was a chicken coop. The chickens lived inside of that outbuilding, and they had a nice yard in front, for getting their exercise and whatnot. My brother and I would go out to the chicken coop to feed the chickens, or to gather eggs. The other outbuilding of the two was a utility shed; my father kept the riding lawn mower in there –and still does, to this day– along with other implements of destruction. My brother and I had fewer reasons to ever be in the other shed.

Then, in later years, when the chicken-raising had become a thing of the past, the chicken coop stood empty. Well, not entirely empty, since it had the nesting structure inside of it that the hens used, and a significant amount of chicken poop. I don’t know what motivated my parents to raise chickens –and peacocks, we raised peacocks too, for a while– but the motivation went away, and so did the barnyard fowl. But, the detritus remained.

At one point, whether it was my father’s intention to put his sons to work at a task that would teach them things like hard work and determination and ownership, or whether it was my brother and I who shared some vision for what the outbuilding could be used for, we set out to reclaim the space for some sort of use. It was disgusting, sweaty, mostly mindless work; scraping away at the layers upon layers of chicken poop that had formed a thick veneer over most of the flooring in the building, tearing apart the simple wooden structure that the hens had been using for nesting, trying to clean what had gone, for a long time, without having been cleaned. I’m sure that we tackled this during a summer, because my memories of that restoration are still dripping with the sweat of the task.

The shed became a clubhouse of sorts, for my brother and I and our friends during those years; we got a number of boy/young men-type things to fill the space with. I remember a punching bag and a cheap Foosball table and a weight-lifting bench. There were a couple of discarded tables and some chairs, and some discarded living room furniture –a sofa and a loveseat– that we lounged on while in the clubhouse. I also took my electronics talents and wired a sophisticated stereo system (sophisticated for the late-1980s) into the structure of the building, so we could listen to our music while hanging out.

During the part of this project that involved the finer details, like choosing where the punching bag should hang from and whether or not we would require people to know the password if they wanted to come in, we decided to name the shed, The Hotel California. We even used a small animal skull that my brother had found in the woods across the highway from our home, and we hung the skull from a nail on the front door, spray-painting ‘Hotel’ above the skull, and ‘California’ below it, to try to approximate the album cover of an Eagles album we’d seen somewhere.

This morning, when I woke up, the song Hotel California by the Eagles was the song that was in my head. That song launched this remembrance.

We had some good times, and some not good times in the Hotel California. My brother worked through a bit of teenage rage on that punching bag. I remember a couple of times, when a couple of different girls had caused him to need to assign some of his rage to an inanimate object, and he wore his bare knuckles raw on that punching bag. I remember a time when a girl caused me enough rage to put my fist through one of the windows of the Hotel California. To this day, I believe, that particular pane of the window is boarded up.

I used to build things out of Legos in the Hotel California and then, because I could, I would melt the pieces together with a disposable lighter. I did this because my brother and I ‘shared’ Legos, which is to say that I would build things out of Legos and then he would destroy those things to gain access to  the ‘special’ Legos that I’d used. Then, because I wanted the ‘special’ Legos back, I would destroy his creations and take them back. This “War of the Legos” ended in the Hotel California.

I had a friend, someone who is a regular reader of this blog as a matter of fact, who thought it would be a good idea to use notebook paper, and probably the same lighter that I used to melt Legos together, and some stolen ‘herbs and spices’ from my mother’s kitchen, to roll a home-made cigarette in the Hotel California. If memory serves correctly, we were never even able to get it to stay on fire for long enough to smoke it.

I built a rope-ladder in the Hotel California so we could climb up into the rafters and hide out. On at least a couple of occasions, I remember being in the rafters when my father would peer into the windows of the shed, looking for my brother and I. It got to the point where I would take books to read, out to the Hotel California, and I would sit up in the rafters and read, as if I were on a deserted island.

Then, just as it had changed from ‘chicken coop’ to ‘clubhouse’, it changed to ‘storage facility’. My brother and I both grew up and stopped spending time in that shed, stopped hanging out. I don’t even know what my parents use that space for, anymore, but back in the day, it was a special place.

Livin’ it up at the Hotel California.

 

I’m not going to include this review in my IOTMT category of blog posts, so I guess it’s a story to tell.

In the evening on August 13th, my wife and I bought a car on the internet. I wrote this post, later that same night, as an initial response to the experience, and it posted the next day.

Since that point in time, many people have asked us about the experience, to which I’ve often replied, “I will write a blog post in the future, summarizing the experience.”

I guess today is that day.

We bought a three-year-old car, off of a thirty-six month lease with its first owner, with low miles and a very competitive price tag. We ended up choosing Carvana because the options available on Carvana are probably going to best all but the most massive of car dealerships. We knew what we wanted, and we knew what we wanted to pay, and the choice that ticked off all of those boxes was on the Carvana website.

Which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t have purchased from a dealership, had we found what we were looking for at a dealership.

When I tell people, “We bought a car from Carvana”, they usually say, “Is that where you put a coin in and the car comes out of the vending machine?” That’s not the way it worked for us; it only works that way if you travel to one of the car-vending-machine locations. The nearest one to us is in the Chicagoland area, which isn’t exactly around the corner.

Rather, our Carvana car came to our house on a flat-bed truck.

The man who dropped it off to us that night, August 19th, had test-driven the vehicle when he picked it up, as part of an inspection process. During that inspection, Dave (not his real name) said that he found some issues, and he was concerned that the car didn’t meet his level of expectations. Dave told us, when he dropped off the vehicle at our house, that he’d already started a process for rectifying these problems. Dave said that he didn’t like that the tires were so low on tread. Dave also said that the A/C wasn’t working. Finally, Dave also didn’t like a couple of the scratches that he’d found in the paint on the vehicle.

By the time we were done with Dave, I already had information in my email inbox about the mechanical case (tires and A/C) and the cosmetic case (paint scratches), along with the steps that Carvana was going to take to repair the issues.

Now, I have to admit, when I heard Dave say, “The A/C isn’t working”, my heart dropped. I got that sinking feeling that I was being bamboozled. I was already trying, at that point in time, to remember what I’d read about the return policy.

At this point, I should say that Carvana purchases have a seven-day return policy on them. We had seven days, from the day that Dave dropped off our vehicle, to decide if we wanted to send the vehicle back to Carvana, for any reason. It’s kind of a security net.

Dave and I signed the papers on the delivery as Jennie and the kids went for a test-drive in the vehicle. Once all of that was done, Dave left. And we had a vehicle, newly in our possession, with issues.

Now, let’s talk about how that’s all worked out.

* * *

Jennie and I, almost immediately (later in the evening on the 19th), had a conversation about whether or not to turn the vehicle back in to Carvana –> “If it has issues, do we really want to deal with those issues?” we asked ourselves. In fact, we went to the CARFAX report that was included in the information that Carvana had to offer on the car. That’s when we noticed something that maybe we should have noticed before…

The car was put up for sale by Carvana in January, and then again in May.

Now, whether or not this is an actual indication that someone bought the car from Carvana early this year and then turned it back in (presumably for an existing A/C issue), it’s hard to say. Additionally, the Carvana report on the car said that it passed a 150-point inspection, one of those points being an A/C inspection, so there’s that.

Since Jennie and I were in love with several of the key aspects of the new vehicle, and we were also in a position to be able to try to work with Carvana to get the problems fixed, rather than just bailing on the whole ball of wax, we decided that we were going to commit to seeing it through. We decided early on (within the first couple of days) that we would not turn the vehicle back in to Carvana.

A couple of key components of the purchase were working in our favor, as we made the choice we made. For starters, we bought a vehicle with remaining manufacturer warranties, and I’ll explain in a minute why that’s important.

But, beside the remaining manufacturer warranties, Carvana covers all of their vehicles with a warranty of their own. This warranty, which is administered by a third-party, is meant to cover mechanical issues for 100 days after the purchase of the vehicle.

The mechanical and cosmetic issues that Dave identified as problems were going to be fixed by the warranty company (at the time of this writing, the warranty company is SilverRock).

SilverRock has ‘recommended shops’ that they prefer to work with, but you can use anyone you want. If you choose your own shop, you have to pay a deductible on each issue. We decided to use the SilverRock recommended shop, to avoid having to pay. This local shop worked with SilverRock to get us $600 worth of new tires. YAY!

From what we understand by speaking with other people about the subject, having a warranty company buy you a new set of four brand-name tires is pretty unusual. But, Carvana and SilverRock did it.

But, when we got to the place where SilverRock was going to be faced with paying for the A/C repair, SilverRock said to us, and to the repair shop that was working on the issue, “You’ve got some remaining manufacturer warranty, so you should take it to a dealership.”

Now, because our vehicle has remaining manufacturer warranty, SilverRock was totally within their rights to expect that Buick should take care of the issue. And, come to find out, the issue that needed to be addressed was a known issue to Buick, so they immediately understood what needed to be done.

* * *

We are now about ten days after the delivery of the vehicle. Both of the mechanical issues (tires and A/C) have been repaired, at no cost to us. Jennie is still deciding whether or not she wants to hand Eleanor (the vehicle’s name is Eleanor) over to a third repair shop to have these minor scratches addressed. By and large, we have been happy with the Carvana experience. We have been EXTREMELY happy with the warranty coverage by SilverRock.

Carvana is in the process of filing the registration paperwork for the new vehicle with the state of Michigan, so we should be getting our new plates for the vehicle in the mail. Until then, the car has a temp. license plate from Georgia (where Carvana is headquartered) which is good until the first week of October.

Let me finish with a shameless plug –> if you are thinking about using Carvana to buy a car, and you mention our names (Phil and Jennie Brackett), you can get $500 knocked off the price of your car, and we will get a kick-back, as well.

Finally, if you have any questions you’d like to ask, let me know.

I graduated from Buchanan High School in the Spring of 1994, and was one of three seniors from Buchanan that year to attend the University of Notre Dame in the fall. I don’t know if I ever saw the third of us –let’s call her Becky– but I saw Laura –name changed to protect the identity of someone whose permission I did not attain before the writing of this post– on and off, especially during our Freshman Year.

Being a student at Notre Dame was hard, because the expectations were high and the pressure was always on, it seemed, to meet expectations. I remember Freshman year being a difficult time, during which I was trying to prove that I had ‘the right stuff’, which is to say that I was trying to get grades high enough to merit me staying at the University.

As Freshman year gave way to Sophomore year and Junior year and Senior year, things seemed to get easier. It was either that, or the rigors of Freshman year taught me how to do the things that were necessary to be able to succeed through the rest of the journey. In the Spring of 1998, I graduated from Notre Dame with a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. I’ve used this degree almost every day since, psychoanalyzing just about every one I come in contact with (hee hee).

In high school, my brother and I were allowed to use a hand-me-down vehicle that my parents were finished with, for which we were extremely grateful (if I remember correctly). The car was a maroon 1987 Plymouth Horizon, which my brother and I lovingly referred to as “The Beast”. I have so many memories of that car that I could probably power a week’s worth of blog posts just talking about the crazy things that I did in that car or with that car.

But, as a student at Notre Dame in 1998, there wasn’t really much of a need for a car for me. Having family so close by, and having a roommate who had a Ford Escort on campus (shout out to Nate Van Gessel), there wasn’t much of a need for me to have a vehicle.

At the end of my senior year at Notre Dame, as a type of graduation present, my parents got me my own car. My dad bought the car from an old lady who didn’t drive it very much, so it was relatively cheap and relatively low miles. It was a 1991 baby blue Dodge Shadow. I’m guessing on the model year (my dad couldn’t remember it, either), and I don’t really remember anything else about her. As it turned out, she and I didn’t have a long relationship; I killed her.

During the spring and summer of 1998, I was working a couple of different jobs. One of them was as a graphic design specialist for the Snite Museum of Art, on the Notre Dame campus. As impressive as this might sound, it was really just a case of me knowing how to do more with a computer than play solitaire. The other gig was as a computer technician for a real estate firm in a Southwestern Michigan town. Between the two jobs, I was trying to make some money while I was also trying to figure out what to do with my life.

The baby blue Dodge Shadow came in handy for both of those jobs, as it turned out. I drove it from my home in Buchanan, across the state line into Indiana, to get to the art museum to do what they needed me to do. Then, I would go from there to my other job, helping people with their computer problems in a little real estate office in Cass County, Michigan.

During the driving, I listened to a lot of blues music –> I was really into B.B. King and Jonny Lang and the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band that year. To get a sense of what that meant in 1998, I had a cassette tape adapter for the cassette tape player in the Shadow, and I would plug the other end into the portable CD player that I owned, so I could play the blues CDs that I was into, at the time.

Then, on a beautiful July morning, on my way to work at the art museum, it all came to an end.

I was in a through-lane, heading through an intersection, with a left-turn lane on my left and a right-turn lane two lanes over to my right. There was a semi-truck sitting in the left-turn lane, waiting for the signal to change, while I was proceeding through the intersection. For some reason that I will never know, that driver decided that 1) he didn’t actually want to turn left, but rather right, and 2) nothing mattered other than his whims. So, from the left-most lane at the intersection, he crossed over both through lanes, to get over to the right-side curb to make a right-handed turn.

This impeded my progress.

At the time that he started this asinine maneuver, I was checking my rear-view mirror to see who was behind me. When I looked back to the forward, an entire semi was stretched across my path. There was nothing for me to do, but to hit it.

As it all ended up, I hit the last tire on the end of the semi tractor exactly in the middle of the hood of my baby blue Shadow. I can still close my eyes and see the imprint of that tire rim, shoved into the metal of my car’s hood. If I had hit the semi a moment later, I could have been decapitated as I would have been forced underneath the semi trailer that followed.

The insurance agency for the trucking company ended up paying me, since the accident was the truck driver’s fault. I used that money to buy a different Dodge, later that summer, but that’s a different story.

My father came to the gas station near where the accident happened, to pick me up and take me home. My girlfriend at the time, who’s on the couch in front of me right now, scolding me for eating Reese’s Pieces as I write this story, was very distraught when she heard about the accident. I’d never been in a major vehicular incident before that morning, so it was all kind of hard to process. And the baby blue Shadow was towed to a mechanic’s yard back in Buchanan. Later that day, I went to that yard to collect my personal effects from the car.

That was truly a more sad experience than the accident itself had been, probably in the same way that identifying a body at a morgue could be more distressing than whatever would’ve caused such a death.

Yesterday (as I write this, two days ago as you read this), my family became a three-car family, with the purchase of a third vehicle. And, much in the same way that my brother and I inherited “The Beast” all of those years ago, my children are inheriting my old vehicle for their driving needs, as I inherit my wife’s previous vehicle.

Moments ago, in my driveway, as I was removing my personal effects from the car that I’ve been driving for the past seven years, I was reminded of the sadness of removing my things from the baby blue Shadow in 1998. This post was born of that triggered memory.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Lilly and Sarah, my twin daughters, were born twelve weeks premature, in the middle of March, 2007. The edge of viability for preemie babies back then was right around twenty-eight weeks, or twelve weeks early, but we had the very best doctors and nurses working to help to keep them alive, so there was that.

Rough days, back then.

They stayed in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Memorial Hospital in South Bend for eight weeks. It was at that point in time when the doctors thought that we would be able to bring them home. So, near the middle of May, we brought Lilly and Sarah home from the hospital, still a month before their original due date, and two months after their birth.

Sarah seemed to do well, in the first couple of days home from the hospital.

Lilly… not so much.

So we called the hospital –the NICU– and described what we were seeing and they told us to bring Lilly back in to the hospital. So we brought Lilly in, and we were admitted to the Pediatric unit.

At which point in time, the staff members from the NICU seized control of Lilly, from pediatrics, and moved her back into the NICU.

THE BEST NICU IN THE WORLD IS IN MEMORIAL HOSPITAL OF SOUTH BEND.

During the days that followed, while Lilly was back in the care of the NICU doctors and nurses, they worked to try to figure out what was causing Lilly to fail to thrive at home. Different tests were run. Studies were called for. Scans of this and bloodwork for that.

Then, they discovered it.

Lilly had a congenital heart defect. Specifically, a ventricular septal defect (a VSD). In layman’s terms, she had a hole in her heart, between the lower two chambers, that caused the pumping of oxygenated blood to be less effective than what was necessary for her development.

It would require open heart surgery. She would be admitted to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis and the heart surgeon would repair the hole.

The surgery happened two days after Father’s Day, 2007. We drove down to Indianapolis on Sunday, checked Lilly in to the hospital for pre-op on Monday, and the surgery happened on Tuesday.

If you like colors, you’ll appreciate this: Lilly’s doctor in the NICU in South Bend was Dr. White (LOVE THAT MAN) and her surgeon in Indianapolis was Dr. Brown. How funny is that?!?!

The surgery to repair Lilly’s heart took most of the day on June 19th, 2007. We sat in the waiting area, with our closest family, waiting for any news that would come our way. I remember playing some cards to try to pass the time on that day, and I remember reading, but even more than those things, I remember that there never seemed to be enough information coming our way, at least not enough to keep us satisfied.

There is a binder in our house, that we were given by the staff at Riley Children’s Hospital, when we were discharged in the middle of July of that year. The binder tells every last detail of what took place during the surgery to repair Lilly’s heart, every move that Dr. Brown made. I tried reading it once. I got one sentence into it, got weak in the knees, and I swore I would never try that again.

That night, as Lilly was making her way through one of the hardest nights of her life, we tried to sleep in the hospital, Jennie and I, on recliners in the ‘Family Lounge’ that were supposed to be ‘sleeper recliners’. Whether they failed at their job, or we were a lot less likely on that night to be able to sleep soundly, who’s to say?!?!

The worst part of those first several days, post-op, was all of the wires and the tubes and the monitors, the beeping, everything that seemed to be necessary for keeping my oldest daughter alive was overwhelming. She had drainage tubes leaving her chest to drain fluid from her heart as it was healing, and she had PICC lines to supply her with medicine and other fluids. To this very day, she still has the scars from so many of those lines –into and out of her body.

But, the staff in the cardiac unit at Riley Children’s Hospital were amazing, helping us to feel comfortable, answering our questions, getting us everything that we needed. We came to know them by name, and they came to understand how deeply we cared for our daughter.

During that time, which amounted to about a month, we stayed with my brother and sister-in-law, who lived near Indianapolis at the time. We slept at their house and took shifts at Riley. Garrett and Sarah, our other children, were being taken care of by other family, back home.

The time that it took Lilly to recover from the surgery was about three and a half weeks. Part of that process was the healing of the heart after the surgery. Part of the process was Lilly, jumping through the individual hoops that demonstrated that she was on the road to recovery. One of the biggest of those hoops was the day that Lilly was able to breathe on her own, to be independent of the breathing machine that was keeping her alive.

She cleared this particular hoop, of course, on Independence Day –July 4th, 2007. Garrett was three years old at the time, and he’d come down to Indy to visit with us for the weekend. We played with sparklers in my brother’s driveway, to celebrate Independence Day. For my wife and I, Independence Day is always going to make us think of Lilly’s independence from the ventilator.

The rest of the story is pretty simple, really. Lilly made it, and has continued to thrive over these last thirteen years. Every year, in February or March, we make a trip back down to Indianapolis, so that Lilly can continue to be seen by the excellent staff members associated with the Riley Children’s Hospital. It’s worth the trip, every time, and I continue to be thankful for so much that so many did for our daughter.

It cost $1,200,000 to get my two daughters through their first four months of life –> worth every penny.

Jennie and I spent about a year apart, living in different places –a long-distance relationship– before our wedding. While we were married in May of 2001, Jennie had managed to graduate from Grand Valley State University in the Spring of 2000 with her undergraduate degree, while it took me a little longer. Truth be told, I didn’t graduate until after our wedding, since my student teaching still needed to be done.

She’d entered into the University with her transfer credits from her associate’s degree, in the Fall of 1998, while I entered in with some transfer credits from a certain private school. The humorous part of that was that I ended up having further to go to get a degree in Education, and a Teacher’s Certificate, even though I most certainly transferred in more credits than she did, to start.

No matter.

So, between May of 2000 and May of 2001, I was living in my apartment in Allendale, with my three roommates, and Jennie had moved home, living with her parents in the interim between graduation and our wedding. With all due respect to Tim, Bill, and Rob –my roommates– they were poor substitutes for Jennie.

It was rough, no doubt about it. By that point, we’d been dating
–exclusively– for about five years, and we’d been engaged for a little more than a year when she graduated (for more on the engagement story, you will need to look HERE).

Of course, it’s not that far between our hometown and GVSU, but far enough that visits were difficult. And, cellphone contracts, back in those days, had limits on the number of minutes and the number of texts you could send; it was a different day and age, but we tried to do the best we could. I was working hard on maintaining my college work load, and holding down a part-time job. Jennie was working for the IUSB Office of International Student Services. She was busy during the work week, and so was I. We would try to get together as often as we could on the weekends, but sometimes she was busy, and sometimes I was busy.

It was a dark time for me, without her presence in my life, at least not in the same way as I’d gotten used to having her nearby.

I do remember, one time in particular, when I was able to get to see her in a manner that was a bit of a surprise.

Firstly, I would never be able to get away with this kind of surprise these days, what with GPS and my phone reporting my location to Jennie any time she wants to know. But, back in 2000, I came up with a plan to catch Jennie off-guard with a little trickery.

On the day in question, I skipped my afternoon classes, so that I could have some time to escape Allendale, and head for home. I left for home and made it most of the way before giving her a call.

When I called her, I asked her to go to a favorite park of ours, because I had an idea. I asked her to go to our favorite bench in this favorite park, a bench that overlooked the river running near the park. While we were courting, years earlier, we’d spent many an evening sitting in this particular park, on this particular bench, watching the river and talking; I told her on the phone that evening that I wanted to continue our phone conversation, once she’d arrived at the park.

I told her that my idea was that we would pretend to be together, on the bench, talking to each other, as if we were on a date.

She must have thought that the idea was cute enough to pursue, since she dutifully hung up the phone and headed to the park, and to that special bench in the park.

Meanwhile, I continued my drive toward home, getting closer and closer to that same park, just as she was.

Then, after a few minutes had passed to allow for her to get to the park, she called me back, to let me know that she’d arrived, and that she was in our favorite park and on our favorite bench. The timing could not have worked out much better, for I was just a few minutes away myself.

So, for a little while, we talked about how difficult this time was, for the both of us. We talked about how nice it would be, once the wedding had come. We discussed some of the plans for the wedding, and she filled me in on how her work was treating her. All the while, I was getting closer to the park, then I was arriving at the park, then I was parking my car next to hers in the parking lot, then I was entering the park and crossing the bridge to make it to the section of the park where she was waiting.

And our favorite bench, while it faced the river that we loved to watch so much, it faced away from the entrance of the park and the bridge that I needed to take to get to where she was. As such, I continued to talk to her on the phone, as if I was a hundred miles away, when I was merely a hundred yards away, and getting closer.

So then, this was the moment to deliver my own introduction, as I simultaneously prepared to show up on the scene. I had Jennie imagine what it would be like if we could be together at that very moment. I had Jennie imagine how nice it would be if we could just spend a little time together on this weekday evening. She said that she thought it would be wonderful just to be able to see me, instead of only being able to talk with me on the phone. I took that as my cue.

I took the phone down from my ear, closed the remaining distance between me and her, as she sat on that bench with her phone to her ear. I didn’t want to scare her, so I tried my best to be gentle, as I came up behind her and softly called her name.

“Jennie…”

When she turned around, and saw me standing there behind her, I could see the amazement in her eyes. It’s a look that I hope to remember for as long as I live. The life, the joy in her expression at that moment made the drive there, and later, the drive I would have to make to get back to campus –> her expression made it totally worth any cost.

I came around to the front of the bench, and she stood to hug me and to kiss me, and we held each other like that, in that desperate embrace, for a long moment. After, as we’d had so many times before, we sat together on that bench, and we held hands, and we talked with each other –> just pleased to be in each other’s company.

A story worth telling…