How a Man Smells

I love Old Spice. I've been a fan since my late teen years, those strange times when you think that an unnatural scent is all it will take to make you irresistible to the opposite sex. Here, some years removed from that embarrassing era, I've retained my fondness for the simplicity of Old Spice. I'm not a big user of after shaves or colognes, but I am a faithful user of Old Spice deodorants, and their after shave is top in my rotation.

I also love their commercials.

A Treatise on Marriage: Part I: "To Marry or Not to Marry: That is the Question"

 Up front, let me offer a few givens that you will need in understanding my opinions.

1. I am a Christian and everything I offer will be from that perspective.
2. In light of #1, same-sex unions are deviant and fall far outside of my discussion.
3. I believe that since the institution of marriage was designed by God, anything that falls outside this original design can succeed, but shouldn't be expected to.
4. Even the best of Christian marriages consist of two sinners, both possessing the ability to lie to and deceive the other. There is always a chance of failure, even when everything is done right from the beginning. The idea is to make your chance of failure so minimal that it would be more likely that you'll be struck by lightning or sucked into a vortex and deposited on Mars.

 

That said, let's move on...

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Marriage is a good thing. After all, it was created by God, and everything He made is good. He said so, after all, and God is the only being for whom a self-compliment is not a vain and selfish thing. It is mankind that mucked things up, and he didn't wait long to start doing that either.

Just because marriage--the art of getting along with one person exclusively for a majority of your days here on earth--is a difficult process, doesn't mean that it should be a process to be avoided. It is, as ministers of old have said, "an honorable estate." It is designed as a remedy to loneliness, a way to respectfully perpetuate the species, and the only legitimate outlet for one of the strongest drives a man can experience (more in Part III). It gives you someone to keep you warm at night, a partner in the Struggle of Life, a best friend, a confidante, a teammate. It gives you the opportunity to create something that is a part of the both of you, and have this thing endure and become a person that would never have existed had you not loved one another and both loved that child. These are some really cool fringe benefits.

Of course, some will only see the negative aspects of being married. I choose not to address any negative aspects of being married because I don't think there are any. There are negative aspects to living. Remember: we mucked things up in the beginning and we've continued to do so. Any negative aspects that a person attributes to marriage are really just negative aspects that reflect on the individual, not marriage itself.

Self-interest is what motivated that first couple, in the midst of their marital bliss, to screw it up for the rest of us. We've continued the family tradition of selfishness, from generation to generation, with even the best of people passing on a degree of it down the line. Some capitalize on it a good deal heavier than others, but it's always there. Knowing this would happen, the Creator designed two relationships that would force us to act unselfishly toward others, at least on a limited scale, or utterly fail at human relations. One is marriage. The second is parenthood.

So, marriage is good. It's good for you, and when you are committed to making it work properly, it's good for mankind. It's better than recycling, saving the rain forests or baby seals, and it's a lot better for the planet than limiting your carbon footprint. The destruction of mankind will have nothing to do with carbon and everything to do with the curse of selfishness.

So, I ask you: are you up to the challenge of saving the planet?

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Stay tuned for Part II: Not Screwing Up the Most Important Decision of Your Life

 

Appreciation

It's nice to be appreciated.

It's nice to have someone compliment your work, especially your customers.

It's nice to receive unanticipated encouragement.

It's nice to not go unnoticed.

It's nice to know that if you were gone, someone would miss you.

It's nice to have others appreciate your creative passions, be it music, photography, painting, or a well-polished xanga post.

It's nice to have at least one person love you unconditionally. That's really all you need. One person.

It's nice to have someone listen and to know they're listening.

It's nice to have someone come up and put their arm around you when you are down.

It's nice to be any of this for someone else.

My Other Grandfather

Life is full of contrasts, isn't it. Like in a black and white photograph, contrast gives depth to our lives. If everything  fell within a narrow range of normalcy, life would be boring. We wouldn't know good from evil, beauty from ugliness, sweet from sour. Life would be just a whole lot of gray.

Having just written about my paternal grandfather, I feel compelled to mention a word or two about my maternal grandfather. This isn't because of their likeness, but because of the contrast they brought into my life.

He was a perverse man. I'll refrain from graphic details here, if you don't mind, in order to both show respect and to keep this tale within tolerable limits. Suffice to say that he lived his life in a way that did not made me proud to be his grandson nor leave me with any memories that are worth recounting. In my mother's youth, he had been cruel to her and had done some things which were bad enough that I've been compelled to hold my tongue here. He continued in this vein into my pre-teen and teen years. On occasion, I crossed into this lurid shadow, and it wasn't a pleasant place to be.

I remember that he was, most of the time, a loner. He, too, tended a garden, but that was about the only thing my grandfathers had in common.

When I was a teenager, he did the one out-of-character thing I recall  in his relationship with me. He gave me a Japanese bayonet. It was old and beaten and bore marks of abuse itself--wounds from a bench grinder. This was the only thing I remember him ever giving me.

In his latter days, as he laid up in a hospital bed, himself also succumbing to cancer, my mother spent many hours by his side. It would be only hours, days later that he would step into eternity. Few words passed between them. Mom seized a moment when he was conscious and had his wits.

"Dad: I just want you to know that I forgive you."

Though I don't know the details, or whether there were other words spoken or tears or hugs, she told me that he responded:

"I'm sorry."

In the light of all my mother's flaws, her forgiving this dark-hearted man at the end of his wasted life will be what forever defines her in my eyes. She endured dark times, both of and not of her own creation, yet held no bitterness against this man who orchestrated many of those dark times. This also gave me a small portion of respect for my grandfather, who carried the weight of his sins for most of his 70-plus years. Here at the end, when a man's heart can be at its hardest, he made his amends, even if only in his own passive way.

Not long after this encounter with Mom, he slipped the surly bonds of this earth. I'm not curious to know what passed between him and his Creator at the throne. I have no evidence to show that it would have been a favorable encounter.

To an extent, we are who we are because of the people we've known. Whether we use people as an example or an example to avoid, they can influence us in small, unknowable ways. In this, my grandfathers were both examples to me.

My Grandpa

In the early '80s, my paternal grandfather was suffering with lung cancer. He had been a smoker, dropping the habit when he had a massive heart attack some 10 years earlier. Whether related to his smoking or unrelated, the Big C eventually hit him in the lungs with both fists. The doctors deemed it as inoperable and began zapping him with radiation, hoping that the tumors might shrink. They didn't, at least in any helpful way.

One of the last times I remember being with my grandpa was when I drove him to Humble for a radiation treatment. We got in the car and he locked his door, but then my grandma and her sister from California came over to the door and tried to tell him something. We could hear them saying, "Unlock the door! Unlock the door!" My grandpa heard them, but pretended not to understand. "What? What?", he said. I thought that was the funniest thing.

The radiation and the cancer had already weakened him. He moved around slowly, lacking the energy of earlier days. His former body had become a frail spirit, wrapped in skin and bones. He had been a voracious gardener since his retirement and was always working on something. Grass didn't grow under Grandpa's feet, nor in his garden.

He grew sugar cane. We would cut down a stalk, peel off the hard, bamboo-like outside, and chew the pithy insides to get the sweet juice, later spitting out the pith when it was void of goodness.

He grew peanuts. Late in the evening, he would pull up a couple of vines, hose all the dirt off of them, harvest the peanuts and roast them in the oven. He would then sit in his easy chair, listening to baseball on the AM radio and eating his freshly roasted peanuts.

He planted some kind of hybrid blackberry vine in his garden, which grew the fattest blackberries I have ever seen--some as big as strawberries. Grandma would make a blackberry cobbler from them, and if you dumped a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top of a hot helping, you would see visions of heaven and a choir of angels.

He would take my brother and I squirrel hunting. On one occasion, he pointed to a squirrel in a big oak tree, but we couldn't see it. He tried again to point it out. "Follow that limb, then go left, then look just above that small clump of leaves." Still, the squirrel remained camouflaged, ensconced in his lofty palace. "Here: I'll just fire a shot and scare him out." 

BOOM!

Plop!

"Oops!"

I was a college student in 1983, just 20 years old. I remember receiving the call in my dorm room. My brother and I, plus my male cousins, were the pallbearers.

Neither my wife nor my children ever knew Grandpa. It will be their loss, for he was the finest of men.

Laid Bare

There was a knock at the door. I, finding myself busy at editing my latest mediocre xanga post, didn't want to answer the door, but I did.

"Who is it?"

"It's me: Your Past. Can I come in?"

"No. Not tonight. I'm busy. Tell you what: let me call you next week. OK?" I had no plans to open the door, now knowing who was there.

Without a response, Past left. My put-off was a transparent and open rejection of his dropping in unannounced. Since it still succeeded in getting rid of my unpleasant "guest", I was pleased . 

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I tell my friends today that I don't really have "glory days" to relive, as my life has gradually gotten better. Looking back isn't always a pleasant prospect.

We all have unpleasant memories of earlier years. I certainly do. My parents had a rocky relationship as I was growing up, separated repeatedly, each departure holding the threat of divorce. I don't know all the dark secrets, but part of my coming-of-age was realizing that my mother was adulterous. Over the years, I came to realize that there was more than one such indiscretion. Goodbye, childhood. So long, innocence.  Welcome to the world of grown-ups, where the reckless actions of people can hurt others more keenly than blade or bullet.

To understand my mother, I had to understand her past. The sorrows she endured in her formative years made mine seem pale. The stories of her trials ultimately reached me through my wife, my mother finding it easier to confide these dark secrets to her rather than to me or my brother. I can forgive that. The past doesn’t excuse the future, though. It may explain it, but we all make choices. At any moment, one decision can change the direction of our lives, either leading us toward sunnier climes or down darker paths, lined with more regret, sorrow and despair. She made her choices and, for the rest of her life,  struggled along in a darkness that she herself had created.

Bitterness was always right there, waiting to sink its teeth into my neck. There were struggles he and I had, and I’m ashamed to admit that he got the best of me from time to time. Ultimately, I emerged the victor. I chose to break the cycle. I turned toward those sunnier climes to soak up some rays. Break out the shades!

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 Sometimes, when Past drops in unannounced and I’m not creative enough or quick enough to keep him at bay, he barges in and quickly monopolizes the conversation, preferring the most unpleasant topics. Why is it that this fellow doesn’t have a happy tale to tell?

 “Let’s talk about your failures, shall we?”

 “Let’s not. How about those Cowboys?” I feign interest in shallow sports talk, something that those who know me immediately recognize as a ploy.

 He persists in his tale-telling, bringing up moral failures, embarrassing moments, and any other event that showcases my human frailties in HD. He continues to talk, unfazed at how we are trying to ignore him.

 We? Oh, yes. Sorry. There is another friend in the room. I usually prefer his company, but we don’t spend as much time together as I would like. I’m often wrapped up in my own plans and find myself too busy to hang with him.

 “You don’t have to listen to him,” my friend says of Past, my not-friend. I agree.

 Interrupting Past, who hasn’t shut up since he came in, I get a surprised glance.

 “Past: you have to leave.” He starts up again, hitting the speed bump without slowing.

 “Now!” I show him to the door. When he’s on the other side, I close the door and throw the bolt.

Things are quiet. My friend and I can talk now. He is a soft-spoken fellow, never one to shout above a loudmouth like Past. I’m always glad to have these conversations. Just being around him makes me realize how much better life is now. All those things Past talked about tonight? They are far away—as far as the east is from the west. They only bother me when he brings them up.

We talk. About good times. About the future.

 

NEEDTOBREATHE at House of Blues

Here's a video someone took at a NEEDTOBREATHE Soundcheck Party on October 15, 2009 at the House of Blues in Dallas.




You will notice at 5:03 that Hannah and yours truly come into the frame for a short second of Youtube fame.