When I was driving home from a meeting today I was listening to my radio or actually a CD, and the song going to jail for justice came on. And as usual when I hear songs like that I think about things and I think about whether or not I would be willing to go to jail for justice. There are hundreds of stories on the Internet about people who did this. Their causes are many and varied. Some of the causes I could understand, other of the causes made no sense to me. There are still people going to jail for the way the colonists treated the Native Americans. I certainly don’t agree with the treatment that was given to the natives, but I’m not sure that’s a cause I would choose to go to jail for. Probably the group most willing people to go to jail for what they believe are the PETA people protesting about the way animals are treated in our country. One priest is willing to go to jail to call attention to the way children are treated in his country. Over my many adult years on the planet, I have wished I was in places where I could demonstrate for justice. I think I would willingly have participated in the demonstrations at Tieneman Square in Pieking, or the demonstrations in Chicago against Mayor Daley.  Do any of you guys out there have a cause you are willing to go to jail for?

These people were willing to jail to bring about attention for the ways baby chicks are treated.

Most of the graphic pics of the protests I remember were long gone.

keep the faith

david

Hello: I just finished teaching a class called the minor awareness program. This program is designed for people who are under the age of 21 and got caught either consuming or carrying alcohol. The structure of the program is built around the theme that if you break the law it will haunt you forever and if you complete this course it won’t be on your criminal record. It is interesting that in the state of Missouri, the crime of minor in possession is a class a misdemeanor, which is the most serious misdemeanor. The first DWI in the state of Missouri is a class B misdemeanor which I think is kind of convoluted thinking. My approach to the class is not a legalistic one but centered around the fact that one evening of revelry can haunt you for the rest of your life. Death by alcohol poisoning is alive and well in America and England. In need of you guys who know me, probably wouldn’t consider me very moralistic which would probably be a pretty good view of who I am. My parting message to my classes is always “friends and life are precious, take care of yourself and take care of your friends, and don’t let one binge session change the course of your life forever.

I introduce to the class as an aging hippy and heck they might even suspect that I have done a drug or two.  I was thinking the other day about how we used to dress and I looked for a picture to show you but for some reason couldn’t find one. I dressed fairly normally for work and not quite so normally party. Love her made me wild, bright looking bell bottom pants to go along with my tie dyes and earth shoes.

I would have happily worn any of the following shirts.

This would have been my favorite.

This reminds me of dancing sun

and this is my favorite color combo

Howeva, my tie dye shirts did not look like these, they definately looked like a project for a kindergarten class.

keep the faith

david

I posted a 50 year old set of wedding pictures couple of blogs ago. Here is how we look now or at least how we looked on our anniversary.

I was reading a blog by anthony the other day and he was talking about a Coney Island Parade where the women painted their breasts for the revelry and you tube took it off the air.  Then I saw on U tube that every year a bunch of couples go to the caribbean to get married Nude.  I thought that was cool and found out that it happens in the States also.

well almost nude.

I thought to myself that I could easily do that being alive and participatory in the 60′s.  Could any one else out there do that.

Annd if you really look at it not many people would want to.

I have been driving since the 50s and had never really noticed that when you are stopped at a stop light and watch the wheel on the cars whizzing by you can have a semi hallucinaginic experience.  It was amazing and now I have a new way to occupy my time whilst stopped at a stop sign.

Imagine this spinning at 300 rpm or so

keep the faith

david

When I was contemplating what to get the lover for an anniversary present I decided to give her an iPod with 41 albums of her Irish musique (that is an actual word) and 2500 pictures of her life over the last 70 years. Needless to say, my scanner got a massive work out as did Photoshop. It is amazing that some of those old faded pictures look better than they did when they were taken. I added a few bells and whistles like a bird identification program, a Koi Pond and a weather update and all the places she has relatives and friends. I think she was tickled because I didn’t see it anywhere but in her hands for the first couple of days.

A lot has happened in the time period since I have written regularly on Xanga. I went through four or five months of doing almost nothing on the computer. I have good intentions of getting back to regular writing, but to quote a famous saying. “The road to the couch space with good intentions”.

I found out when I did the wedding that I cleaned up nicely. Picture coming soon.

There was a young man from Crete, who dreamed he undressed in the street, the best of the joke, came when he awoke, and found he had mud on its feet.

Here is my all-time favorite picture of lover.

Keep the faith

david

See this gorgeous creature!

She married this guy.

Together they looked like this.

Our honeymoon was one night at the Rambler Motel in Hutchinson, Kansas on June 4th, 1959. lol

keep the faith

david

Hello Xanga people. It is Sunday afternoon and we are getting ready to head for lovely western Kansas. It’s kind of a strange feeling when the last of the parents and the last of the aunts and uncles have passed away, because then the kids are the older folks and it’s their turn. Thursday evening with readers sister passed away sitting in her chair. Of all of the living kids she was the least likely to pass away because she was in the best health of any of us. I might send you a picture or two from western Kansas but not many because it would bore you to death. Keep the faith.  David

Wow. It looks like it has been over a month since I wrote on Xanga. And it only looks that way because it has been over a month since I wrote on Xanga. It has been one busy month for this old fart. I wrote earlier that my grandson and granddaughter had asked me to officiate at their wedding. I got an ordination certificate and Charlotte sent me a sketch of what she wanted. As you will see from the pics it was an outdoor wedding. I spent many hours putting the stuff together and in my estimation the wedding was incredible. When you’re doing the wedding you don’t have time to take pictures in the formal ones are not ready yet so I will send a few that lover took.

.

Here are pieces from the wedding

Introduction of wedding and family followed by the ceremony most of which is listed below.

 The initial poem

Here is a tribute to charlottes grandmother who passed away before the wedding.

When I first met Charlotte, it wasn’t long before I knew of this special deep bond that she had with her grandmother. Charlotte said that this day would not be what it was if it weren’t for this very special person. I would like to quote a paragraph from Charlotte about her grandmother.  “And I quote my dream wedding has always been to be married on the beach in a white sun dress with no shoes. However, my grandmother has also always been part of that dream. Unfortunately, when Ryan proposed, she was sick and unable to travel. He asked her to be our flower girl because she was 80 years old and had never been in a wedding. We planned the wedding with her in mind and many of the nice little touches were thanks to her input. When she died, she told us she wasn’t ready because she wanted to go to my wedding. She talked about it all the way up to the day before she passed away. It was something she really looked forward to. The wedding has given us an opportunity to get all of our loved ones together and to spend a lot of time thinking about our special day. It’s been an amazing experience and I believe it was my grandma’s final gift to us. I know she’ll be there in some form or another and it would mean a lot to me to acknowledge her and honor her for that gift

As a tribute to Charlotte’s grandmother and both Ryan’s and Charlotte’s family and friends Let Us Bow our heads in prayer.

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy .

O Divine Master,

Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

here are the readings, ceremony and vows.

Good friends are treasures. Good friends are forever. Every now and then a very special person comes into your life and you know that you have received the greatest blessing that the universe provides. For years, I had a poem on my wall that read.

          A damn good friend

a friend is not a feller, who is taken in by sham

a friend is one who knows are faults, and doesn’t give a damn.

I have a friend like that, her name is Etta Kay and she is always there for me when I need her and she is always there when I don’t need her. It makes no difference what time of day or night I call her, she is always there, always cheerful and never conveys the message that I called at an inappropriate time. She is a combination, computer whiz, confidiant, always ready to talk about Lady Bears basketball, her chosen family that she loved dearly, any computer problem (from the dreaded blue screen of death-to the pickiest little problem), her beloved parrot and anything else that comes to our minds.  Not only is she open to deep intimate sharing on my part, she is able to share with me from her heart. She has a very special friend named Susan, who is also a treasure in my life. 

I receive from her one of life’s greatest blessing, that of true friendship.

It felt right to print this  in the present tense.    BUT

ETTA KAY DIED LAST NIGHT  AND GOD, DO I MISS HER.

keep the faith,

david

71 years on the planet continued.

After graduation we moved to Wichita Kansas, my wife started nursing in the hospital I went to work as a news photographer for KA KE TV. It didn’t take long to tire of chasing ambulances and that job only lasted five months. I then became an insurance adjuster which was an okay job. I knew it wasn’t a career for me but the salary was double the slave wages of the TV station. It was an okay job and I made some very good friends there. It was incredibly easy to party every weekend and I loved easy. I traveled the country on storm duty, which led me party every night. One of the saddest days of my life was in November when JFK got shot. He was my hero. In 1965 I decided to go back to graduate school and just before we sold our house and packed our goods for the journey lover(who was never supposed to be able to have a child, got pregnant). My assistantship fell through and lover was going downhill under her workload. We quit school and I went back to the insurance adjusting .company and stayed for three years until he instituted the G.I. Bill and our first child was born.  This was an exciting and wonderful time and we got our financial life back together in a couple of years. I enrolled in graduate school and got my degree in 1967. I loved graduate school, found it quite easy and decided to stay for my PhD. I didn’t score well on the graduate record examination and entered with the understanding that I would bring my test scores. This was the time the riots over Martin Luther King’s death and our apartment was very close to the riot area. I was counseling at Richard’s Gabeur Air Force Base got stopped for violating curfew eight times in a 10 mile stretch. We decided it was a wonderful time to leave Kansas City and I got a job as a housing director of the University of Minnesota-Morris starting in the fall of 1968. These were my favorite alltime years because I love hippies and became a whitecollar one. Everyone in Minnesota drinks so I was living in heaven the next 10 years were my happiest so far especially when I moved over to the counseling center. We adopted a 6 year old boy in 1972 and my youngest miricle child was born in 1975.My job there ended in 1975 and I hung around for three years and started a woodworking shop. I had no skill or interest in what I was doing and we decided quickly that this was a good time to leave the tundra. We settled in Springfield Missouri and my life was not working, heavy drinking every night and no sense of fulfillment. My option was either suicide or getting my ship together so I went off for four months to a growth center in Kentucky. This was an incredible metaphorical death and rebirth experience. I arrived there as a broken person and left with a new perspective on life. I never drank again and decided I would go five years without drinking and then became an alcohol counselor. I worked in a couple of treatment centers in the mid-80s and started my private practice in 1987 my life was incredible until I messed my heart up skydiving in2001, and suffered a down period health wise .  My pacemaker turned me back into a functioning human being and I did okay through two major and three minor surgeries, but locked myself in a survival mode until just recently when I came alive again.  Now I’m ready to renew the passion in my life.

Thanks for listening and keep the faith.

David

At midnight last night, I completed my 71st year on the planet. It has been an interesting journey and I think that I have been truly blessed. I’ve had good times and bad times and I probably blogged more about the bad times and good. I’ve pretty much taken the good times for granted. I did some pretty stupid things during my 27 years of heavy alcohol consumption, but they all seemed a normal part of life at the time. As I look back at my life, there’s not much I would change.

I was born in Amarillo, Texas in 1937. My parents apparently survived the depression with a minimum of angst. my daddy graduated from Texas A&M in the 20s, worked for the Texas State Hwy., Department, became an administrative officer on the CCC camp and was called into the Army prior to World War II.

I have some memories of my early life. My earliest memory was up five years of age when we lived in a big brick house in Fort Riley, Kansas.  I remember the day Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited the troops at Fort Riley. Jackie Robinson was an officer in my father’s unit. My father was the executive officer on the last segregated unit in the Army.

My life wasn’t particularly stable during the war years. We followed my father from Army base to Army base and really understood the concept of “no vacancy”. We lived in rundown houses or shabby tourist courts for 2 to 3 years. I remember Watlington’s tourist court in Lexington Kentucky. I broke my arm when I fell off an orange crate when I was giving a speech, pretending I was Franklin Roosevelt. We had a hot plate and an ice box and the Iceman brought a 50 pound chunk of ice every day.  I went to twelve schools in three years.  My dad went overseas in 1943 and we moved to Wichita Falls Texas to be close to my mother’s sister. Aunt Lucy had a huge house in the wealthy part of town and we lived in a cracker box across the tracks. It was a long couple years.

Dad got out of the Army in the summer of 1945 and we moved to Garden City Kansas which was the first real home I had ever known. I remember several things about 1945. Bread was five cents a loaf, hamburger meat was $.26 and we could go to a doubleheader movie on Saturday afternoon. $.25 paid for the movie, a box of popcorn, and a Coke. I was eight years old that summer and got my first bicycle which was a JC Higgins model. My first school was Hutchinson school and I got beat up by the school bully, Frank Karp, on the first day of school. My teacher was named Mrs. Wadsworth. We lived in a small house on Hazel Street while dad was getting our new home built. I was in seventh heaven. We were driving a blue 1941 Dodge which we had until 1953. During this time. The gasoline and sugar was no longer rationed. My first girlfriend was Eleanor Parker who lived in Wichita Falls. I didn’t really miss her but often wondered how her life turned out because she lived in the same messed up  neighborhood that we lived in. It took about a year to get into our new house and I changed schools. My favorite place to hang out with the Penny arcade which had a variety of pinball machines costing a penny apiece for a game. That was the year I went to my first football game as I have never seen one before. My days were spent playing, in the evenings we listened to radio programs. I remember: Mr. Dist. Atty.; Fibbor McGee and Molly; The Shadow; the Jack Benny show; and my favorite was Your Hit Parade. The number one hit that I remember from 1948 was “Buttermilk Sky. It seemed like the Protestants lived on one side of town and the Catholics on the other but there was never any friction. I didn’t get to meet any of the Catholic kids until high school because the Catholic school only went through junior high. Garden City had the world’s largest free municipal swimming pool and I went every day in the summer. Admission was free but if you wanted to rent a basket for your clothes it cost a dime. Harry Truman was president of my favorite movie stars or Jimmy Stewart in June Allyson. Garden City was a town of about 10,000 and the closest large town was 150 miles away. We very seldom left town, maybe twice a year and I was free to roam the streets of Garden City Kansas until bedtime. My first car was a 1948 Chevy with a dented right front fender. It costs $95 and didn’t run very well. The airplanes all had propellers, farmers used to drive their tractors home if they lived in town. I didn’t have a date that I can remember during all of my school years until the last half of my senior year when I started dating Georgia Dillon. I was the fry cook at a steakhouse from my sophomore year until I graduated from high school. The restaurant was called the old corral. It was owned by Chet and Ruth Graham. I made $.85 an hour thought I was in heaven. Chet and Ruth loved to drink and would buy me beer anytime I wanted it. Gas was $.25 a gallon when I was in high school that movie was $.50. I was loud and rowdy but seldom got into trouble. I was invited to a gang bang but had no interest in that because they didn’t have booze. I went to Kansas State in the fall and had an incredibly good time. I didn’t make as C. point average the first three semesters and got drafted. The alcohol was wonderful. K-State  had the worst football team in the country and one of the best basketball teams. Our star player was Bob boozer and KU had Wilt Chamberlain. I shook Wiltsl hand and at that time he was 7’1″ and looked pretty skinny but I was 6’5″ and weighed a hundred and 61 pounds. The summer before I went to college my friend Don Sooby and I took a road trip to Texas. On the way back we stopped in a roadhouse in Texarkana Arkansas and the performer was a country singer by the name of Elvis Pressley. I bought him a beer and he tipped the bottle at me. I didn’t get to shake his hand because there was chicken wire between the patrons and the band, as roadhouses got pretty rowdy in those days. I met the love of my life my sophomore year in college. We were together 4 to 5 months before I went into the Army.  I was convinced that we would marry when I got out of the Army but she was not sure. Basic training was at Fort Bliss in El Paso Texas. I never went to Juarez Mexico because beer was a dime at the PX. I remember college tuition being around $200 a semester. I went to Fort Chaffee Arkansas for advanced training and became a clerk typist. I had a short leave and left for Germany in April of 1957. I blissfully drank my way around most of Europe. Amsterdam was my favorite city for debauchery. I came home in February of 1959 went back to Kansas State and visited lover in Emporia Kansas every weekend. We planned to marry after college but I could not wait that long so we married in June 1959 and I transferred to Emporia state University. I loved college andwas a radio TV major. We partied every weekend  and had a marvelous time

It’s getting late so  I will finish this tomorrow

keep the faith

David