Parents, share with your children

I was studying Scripture readings for Sunday and watching CNN while waiting for the oil to be changed in my minivan last week.

There was an elderly man and woman in the service lounge with me. Slowly a conversation grew around the terrible events that were being covered in San Bernadino, California by a multitude of experts on terrorism, Middle Eastern affairs, firearms and homegrown extremists.

The elderly lady said that this news of mass shootings now hits about once every two weeks.

"They're breeding each other, inspiring each other," I opined.

The skinny, auburn-haired woman and the older, rotund man with half moon eyes that disappeared in his smile began to talk about how the world has changed. They spoke of where and how they were raised, she on a farm in the Midwest and he on a farm in Appalachia without running water or electricity for a good portion of his childhood. He mentioned how he told his grandchildren that as a boy his family didn't have television, and they asked him, "What did you do, Grandpa?" He began to shrug...

"We chased each other on our bicycles," said the woman with conviction, finishing his story, adding that her family also didn't have television for a lot of the time.

"Kids need those stories," I acknowledged. "It's great that you share them with your grandchildren."

I told them how I grew up in the boonies of Tennessee and how my children don't know anything similar to what I experienced as a child. They both nodded.

"We ate meals together every night," said the gentleman then. "That's when we talked about things like, 'Do we buy new carpet for the house or take a vacation?' And it was almost always the vacation," he added, laughing.

The gentlewoman nodded her head. "We came home every night to a hot supper. Kids nowadays are always rushing."

They talked about their children's families. The gentleman said that if his son's family sits down to a meal together once a week, it's a miracle. When he visits his son, he almost has to make an appointment to see the whole of his son's family at one time.

The gentlewoman nodded. It was similar in her own children's lives.

I - probably a little overzealous - shared my view that kids need that interaction time within the family in order to learn how to be people. They can't learn that well from YouTube, their phones or any other screen (except for Sesame Street, perhaps).

After that they began to talk about prayer in schools and the Pledge of Allegiance and solid moral instruction and etiquette in the workplace, and I just listened intently to two people who probably had more than a quarter of a century on me.

Yes, the topics were similar to what every older generation bemoans in the new, but they were right about family. Humans need family. They need familial love and attention, dinner table conversations, and chasing friends on bicycles. We were not made for our phones or any other alluring screen. That interaction will only ever go so far, and it does very little, I believe, to develop our emotional quotient. We need the human touch, so to speak.

Listening to my elders talk was a pleasure. I enjoyed their tales. It helped me forget the big, scary, inhuman world for a bit.

Stories can do that.

Just recently at a Thanksgiving after Thanksgiving dinner at my friend Geraldine's house, our friend Kim shared scenes from her childhood in Colorado, tales I had never heard of times that she still considers some of the most fun in her life: growing up under the mountains in a small apartment, sledding often, going without some things but not missing them one bit because of the adventures she relished as a youngster in that beautiful part of the country.

I joked at my friend's Thanksgiving dinner that my kids know all my stories, that I tell them over and over. If I start to talk about our dog Reuben and his good but annoying friend Mandy, they respond easily with, "Oh, yeah! Mandy was always bugging Reuben!", and they even know the color of their fur.

For my part I still remember many of my dad's stories from his dangerous, exhausting days of working on the power lines in the West, and the laughter and gasps they produced in us children. I can tell you the names of his powerline buddies. And I cherish the memories shared of how, when and where Mom and Dad courted as teenagers.

And this is part of what I think those two lovely people were saying in that service lounge while we waited for things to be fixed in the world. Family dinners at the table and slower times with mostly each other's company for amusement generated and gave room for sharing stories, stories that lightened the mood, that told of hardship and recovery, that comforted, that warned, that guided and enlightened, that communicated values.

That spread joy.

Stories are important. Not as vital as family, but they are our heritage, something precious we have to pass on. Yes, I know I'm biased, but tell stories to your children. Tell them to your friends. To the people in the car service lounge if it's not too awkward. Tell them to the world! No one else can share the memories you have. And you can only share them if you slow down and unplug over a meal or even something as simple as a cup of cocoa.

Especially at this time of year, I hope we don't forget that one of the best things we can give to our children and each other is these unique stories.

And may we ever find new opportunities to weave each other into new and pleasant ones.

(Seemingly Endless) Days of the Condor

My daughter Hillary is on vacation, visiting her sister Vinca in Virginia this week and asked me to write a guest post.  So, while she views the monuments in D.C. and tromps the fields of Gettysburg, I will sit at my desk and slave away, dredging up old memories, just for her.

When I was younger, I worked in powerline construction; you know, those giant steel and cable behemoths that crisscross the country delivering massive amounts of electricity.  In those days, we built EHV powerline mostly out on the great plains.  It was an attempt by the government to connect the entire country on a grid and eliminate the plague of blackouts that were then occurring in the NE United States.  (If you live in the NE and are old enough to remember those days, well, you're welcome.)

One of the most dangerous jobs in what was overall a very dangerous profession (the only professions with a higher mortality rate in those days were combat soldiers, astronauts, and race car drivers), was cutting in dead-ends.  A dead-end is a structure constructed at a point where the line has to make a turn so sharp that it won't facilitate continuous conductor cable.  The conductor must be cut at this juncture after it has been connected almost horizontally to the dead-end structure by strings of insulators (or bells, as we called them, because of how they look).  Great loops of aluminum conductor are then slung beneath to connect up with the phase running off at a new tangent beyond the structure.

We all hated and dreaded cutting in dead-ends.  It required the lineman to sit on the wire while maneuvering extremely heavy six-bolt stays onto the bundled conductor and attaching them by screwing them down hard onto the conductor with a torque wrench.  The six-bolts would be fastened to the structure in order to keep the line under strain so that it would maintain its proper sag.  Then the conductor would be cut between the six-bolts and the tower and the groundsmen would send up another extremely weighty hydraulic device called a press.  With this, the lineman would press a sleeve with a ring on the end onto the conductor by which the conductor could then be permanently attached to the structure.  

Sometimes the line would be lowered after it was cut (though kept under strain) and the pressing of the sleeve done on the ground, a much safer and easier method.  Just as often, however, usually because of the configuration of the right-of-way, the pressing had to be done in the air.   

All this while, the only thing holding millions of pounds of aluminum and steel in place was an operator's foot on the brake of an immense machine known as a puller.  Oh, yes, there was an emergency brake, too, but this was a huge cumbersome thing and seldom used.  Men in a hurry to build big things tend to cut the corners where they can.  Besides that, our company's puller was an out-dated, even ancient thing, which we all suspected had been first built thousands of years ago and used up and worn out by the Romans or maybe even the Hittites.

I personally knew four men that died on the job in those years and two of those deaths occurred while cutting in dead-ends.  Believe me, when tons of thick aluminum cable, held under tremendous strain, comes loose, it tends to ravel and twist as it recoils back up the line, seeking the drum from which it was unreeled.  Gathering up the unfortunate lineman's remains for a funeral is a sad and often messy task. 

Eventually, someone from OSHA came by and forced our company to come up with a better solution for cutting in dead-ends than simply hanging a lineman out there in perilous space where old man death could draw a good sharp bead on him.

The company's solution was to acquire another incredibly ancient Hittite machine - a high-lift truck capable of extending a bucket containing two men up to eighty feet in the air.  The massive truck had once been called an Eagle by the manufacturer - we knew this because those of us with better eyesight could just make out the smudges of painted letters that had long ago faded into the metal.

The Eagle was a loathsome beast, contrary, undependable, dilapidated, and scary.  Sometimes, as if on a whim, with two lineman stuck up there at the end of its fully extended boom, it would decide to re-adjust the pressure of its hydraulic fluid and drop its boom three or four or sometimes ten feet.  You know, just for the hell of it.

Needless to say, this peculiar habit of the ancient animal made us all more than a bit skittish.  (And caused us all to heap abuse upon the poor operator, who of course never had a clue as to why the machine acted like it did.)

We finally decided that it wasn't an "Eagle" at all, but something extinct or at least nearly extinct.  So, we renamed it the "Condor".

Those of us on the clipping crews, responsible for permanently attaching the conductor to the structures, came to fear and despise the thing and our skittishness eventually devolved into terror.  How we all hated to see a dead-end structure show up on the line!, especially if it might be our turn to take a ride in the Condor.  That ancient beast became the stuff of my nightmares, and by the haggard, weary look of my comrades most mornings, I knew that it haunted their sleep as well.  We even began to long for the old days, when we sat on the wire while we wrestled with six-bolts at dead-end structures.

One day, it fell to Wamsley and me to take our lives in our hands, ride up on the end of that worn-out, bouncing boom and cut in the dead-ends.  It actually wasn't too bad that day, for the way that the truck was situated, the upper arm of the structure was right to our left, within reach, and most of the lattice-work mass of the lower half of the structure was directly beneath, fifty feet or so below our position, cutting off our view of the ground even further below where the ancient beast might seek to deposit us in rude manner at any second. 

We had the six-bolts positioned on the wire and were working to secure them to the conductor when the Condor decided to have one of its moments.  

Abruptly, the bucket dropped.  I stared at Wamsley, wide-eyed, and he looked back at me in like manner.  He was a lean, wiry fellow, with a tendency to squint, which made his eyes appear small.  Usually, all one could see of Wamsley's eyes was only about half of his brown irises with little triangles of white to either side.  This day, however, I could see all of his irises, plus a fair amount of white all the way around both of them.  His eyes, I realized, were actually quite large when one got a really good view of 'em.

We expected the bucket to stop, as was its wont, but it kept going.  In a fraction of a second, I realized that this was it - the machine had utterly failed and wouldn't stop until it, and we, were buried upon impact deep in the earth.  Somehow, we had to get out.

Dead-end towers look rather like big X's, with the feet splayed out to hold the structure up and the arms, to which the conductor is attached, reaching up and out to either side.  The upper part of the structure was just then passing by the bucket on my side.  Instinctively, in a spasm of self-preservation, I leapt from the bucket, catching the lattice-work with my left hand.  At the last instant, I thought of Wamsley and reached for him as I took my leap.  His safety strap was hung over his shoulder and my fingers caught it, grasped it, and my hand formed a fist.

The bucket of the Condor continued to fall, finally grinding to a shuddering halt on the leg of the structure thirty or forty feet below.

There we were, seventy feet in the air; me hanging onto the steel lattice of the tower like grim death with my left hand, and Wamsley dangling at the end of his safety strap, suspended in space from my right.

He gazed up at me as he twisted slowly back and forth and his face grew sad.  "We're all gonna die, you know.  Sooner or later that damn thing will kill us all."

"I know," I replied through gritted teeth.  "But not today."

We decided after that episode that the Condor wasn't a condor at all.  I mean, there are still a few of those birds extant out in California - right?  No, our beast was something more ancient still, something truly lost in the deeply layered age-old dust of history.

It occurred to us that it was, in fact, a pterodactyl.  Truly extinct, a denizen of pre-history.  So we re-named it.  The Pterodactyl it was from that day forward.  And still, though a member of a species that hasn't been seen on earth in many multi-millennia, it persisted in terrorizing us endlessly.

One day, I'd had enough.  I went to the shop and found a can of black spray paint.  After work, and after dark, when the crews had gone home, I hung around til the show-up yard was deserted and then I painted its new name up along the side of the boom.  In great, bold letters. 

Pterodactyl.

Later, when I became part of management, I understood that companies that construct powerlines have clients - the various power providers in the various states, and an image of professionalism must be maintained.  Having your men deface company equipment, especially when that defacement can be construed as demeaning to the company, is really not a desirable thing.  But at the time I did it, I didn't know this, and truthfully, might not have cared.

The next day, the general foreman of our crews, a huge man named Marlatt, found me where I was clipping in a phase up on a structure and yelled up at me, ordering me to the ground immediately.  Now - dammit!

Once I was on earth, he proceeded to chew me up one side and down the other for defacing company equipment.  He threatened to fire me.  I believe he even threatened to kill me.  I took it all as stoically as I could.  Finally, he paused and asked me what I had to say for myself.

I struck as casual a pose as I could muster.  "How do you know I did it?"  I asked.

He went red (redder) in the face.  "Cuz you're the only one of these lost souls with enough education to know how to spell a word like that.  And it is spelled right - I checked."

My penance consisted of painting over my offense with white paint and even sprucing the old beast up a bit.  It didn't matter.  The guy from OSHA eventually came back around and ordered the thing off the job (our theory was that this particular inspector was actually thousands of years old and had first encountered our hapless machine in ancient Mesopotamia or perhaps the land of Uz).  So, the Condor went away, its days finally over.

I seldom have nightmares these days about those days of the Condor - in fact, the nightmares may have stopped completely. I haven't had one now in, oh, I don't know, ..... four or five days.

Have fun in Virginia, Hoodoo.