STICKY DOORKNOBS

A few of my favorite things …

   The Christmas carol "A Few of My Favorite Things" is a favorite, more for the melody than the wish list that is recited. They couldn't make a Christmas Carol out of 'My Favorite Things' because they don't rhyme so much.  But if they did, I would list the following this – and most every – Christmas season:
   The smell of cookies and apple pie in the oven
   A child’s first visit on Santa’s lap.
   “How The Grinch Stole Christmas” (the original cartoon).
   Andy Williams
   Children’s Christmas pageants where shepherds wear Reeboks, a 5-year-old Gabriel forgets to zip his pants and a 3-year-old angel chews on her fingernails.
   The sound of pine needles falling off the homely looking tree Charlie Brown buys on “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
   Approaching cold fronts that tease us with the possibility of a White Christmas.
   Clarence Clemons’ “Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho” during Bruce Springsteen’s version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”
   Perfect strangers wishing each other Merry Christmas.
   Stores that don’t bow to the politically correct “Happy Holidays” and continue to hang signs proclaiming this is Christmastime – not holidaytime.
   The smell of incense, the wonderful symbol for the presence of the Holy Spirit.
   Short lines.
   Street corner Santas.
   Questions like “How does Santa Claus get in if we’re not home?” and “When was “Santa Claus born?” and “What happens if Rudolph gets lost.”
   Christmas ties.
   Christmas socks.
   Christmas boxer shorts.
   (OK, forget that last one).
   Funny Christmas cards.
   NFL referees who hold the yardage markers and wear the elf hats.
   “Oh Come, Oh Come, Emanuel”
   Getting through an entire holiday season without hearing “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.”
   Drinking hot chocolate while looking at Christmas lights.
   Live nativity scenes.
   When Linus says, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”
   Vince Guaraldi music.
   Cars with wreaths attached to the front grill.
   Words you usually hear only at this time of the year. Like “nestled,” “swaddling,” and “bowlful of jelly.”
   Harry Connick.
   The Jays of Clay’s “Christmas Songs” CD, maybe the best non-traditional modern Christmas album today.
   Anyone singing “Ave Maria.”
   Hay rides.
   When “The Grinch’s heart grew three sizes that day.”
   Milk and cookies left on the hearth.
   Kids who can’t go to sleep on Christmas Eve.
   Kids who normally don’t wake up until 10 in he morning that wake up at 6 on Christmas day.
   My wife, who normally doesn't wake up early but who is often up before the kids on Christmas morning.
   Buying a bicycle already assembled.
   Quiet toys.
   Family.
   Holiday greetings from one friend to another. Merry Christmas, everyone.
  

My wife should be licensed to drive a grocery cart

I have to admit one thing before we begin: For me to be introducing this subject, I have to be fairly confident with who I am.

And so I guess I am.

That said, I can admit it openly: I am a better grocery shopper than my wife. I am. There's really no need to debate it any further.

Karen talked me into going Thanksgiving grocery shopping with her over the weekend at our favorite local supermarket, the one where the chip aisle is named in my honor.

Let's see, how to put this ... Karen and I have, umm, different shopping habits. I am a systematic, meticulous grocery buyer. I chart a course, have a plan, and then I carry out that plan in a direct path that takes the least amount of time possible. Karen? She just goes and buys. There is no logic to her pattern, no method to her madness. Going to the grocery store with my wife is like driving bumper cars blinded-folded and in the dark.

It's not fun.

To make matters worse, she drove the cart Friday and I had to tag along helplessly, looking like I didn't know what I was doing when in fact I was the ONLY one between the two of us with experience in how to shop. It was humiliating for me.

I used to tag along with my mom when I was a kid. I would hunker down on the bottom rack of the grocery cart, back in the time before lawyers, when kids could ride with wild abandoned on that bottom rack, when shopping baskets were made so 6 year olds could just have a whole lot of fun. I suppose that is where my ability to shop came from. Lord knows mama had a plan and it worked to perfection. You could set your clock by when mama went grocery shopping every week. (I am not quite THAT exact.)

My ability and even my desire to shop was likely heightened even more so a few years ago when, on occasion, I would run into Ronnie Reeger, the former head football coach at Midland High who once told me he did all the cooking in the off-season, and John Ed Parchman, the head football coach who took Lee to three straight state football championships and who has a building named after him for cry aye.

I figure if these big, tough, respected football guys had the nerve be the designated shoppers in their households, it's OK if am too. And it's OK to talk about openly.

Karen has recently been tagging along with me more frequently and it has been met with varying degrees of success. Normally when we go together, we both grab a cart and go our separate ways. I with my list, she with her free-form style. Needless to say, 10 times out of 10, I am finished before her, even though I buy twice as much as she does. Frankly, it's because I know what I'm doing. I start on the east end of the store, picking up the paper goods first, followed by the toiletries and other dry good items before systematically moving up and down the aisles, left to right, in a smooth, nearly effortless, almost formulaic manner. Occasionally, I pass Karen on those times when she is with me, and she will be looking for something. Always looking for something. I, on the other hand, know where everything is. Truthfully. I may not always know the exact aisle its on, but I'll walk you right to it. It's really something I can do that I'm pretty darn proud of.

"What are you doin?" I ask as I pass her, trying to keep covered a sort of quiet arrogance that follows me on these trips.

"Trying to find the hand soap."

"Well then why are you down the V-8 aisle? Hand soap is on 22. Eye level. On your left if you're pushing the cart toward the front of the store. Its really not that hard to find."

I walk away toward the fish market, she walks toward the toiletries.

I should really do it like Jimmy does it, she is no doubt thinking to herself.

"Sheesh," I say to myself, exasperated, wondering if she'll ever ever ever learn.

It should go without saying the items in my basket are stacked neatly with canned goods on bottom and squishy items on top where they won't get smooshed. Karen usually just sort of tosses her things in her basket almost haphazardly, although oddly she has developed an almost obsessive desire for the checker not to bruise her fruit upon checkout. She will pull the cashier aside and tell him how she won't eat bruised tangelos and can he please be careful.

"Why are you rolling your eyes?" she asks as she turns and looks at me. I watch the checker roll his eyes, too.

As I mentioned earlier, we had no list last Friday night when Karen and I tag-teamed our grocery experience and picked up our Thanksgiving items. It was like a tight-rope walker trying to make it to his destination without using a balancing rod. But Karen insisted she's been prepping and cooking Thanksgiving meals for so many years now that she doesn't need a list. She can remember it all, she says.

Needless to say, I will see all of you -- at least three or four times -- this week at the store, picking up items forgotten. With my list in hand and my wife at home.

Handing down the National Parks experience to our children vital to survival of the system

Aside from the indescribable cinematic beauty of "National Parks: America's Best Idea," beyond the fascinating history revealed at almost every turn of the 12-hour miniseries, despite the characters you learned to love or jeer, there was an underlying theme of the PBS miniseries by documentarian Ken Burns that weaved its way through all the messages, images and education: the sheer joy that our country's National Parks offer when they are handed down from generation to generation.

The importance of family and shared experiences were touched on a little in several instances during the first five installments, and fully broached as the series reached its conclusion last Friday night. That Burns and writer Dayton Duncan saved such a powerful message for the end showed just how meaningful this handing down of family tradition through our parks is.

It is important to the fabric of our country that we have the parks and it was noble of those who worked together to make it happen, but it is up to us as Americans to keep the system going, and the best way to do that is to not just visit them, but to teach our children what they mean and how fortunate we are to be able to see them, or in some cases, as one writer said during the show, "to just know that they are there."

I would not have the appreciation for our park system that I do were it not for my father. The Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Mesa Verde, the Rockies, the Smokeys, Hawaii Volcanos, Mammoth Cave, Hot Springs, the former Platt NP in Oklahoma and of course Big Bend ... I now look at visits to those national parks as gifts given to me by my father and it felt as if he was watching Burns' documentary alongside me last week, a series that was as much about us as it was about anyone else who sets foot in the parks out of a sheer love of America. It will likely never fall off my list of the best things I will ever see on television.

I remember distinctly in 1970 when I was 10 finding a hollowed out rock, sitting in it and pulling out the latest copy of The Sporting News with a cover story about Pittsburgh Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillen and his infectious smile. I want to find that rock again and someday I will. I remember standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and, still today, recall just how magnificent the feeling was even though 40 years have passed. I remember Gatlinburg and how my mom loved it, and I remember sleeping in the Volcano House hotel on the rim of Mauna Kea and wondering if I would live through the night out of fear the darn thing would erupt, or poison me because of the constant choking smell of sulfur. I remember  summer after summer at Platt, a national park which exists no more under the park system but at the time meant more to me than any park in the country simply because I was a boy growing up there every June and July.

My father never stopped educating me about the National Parks. It wasn't until six years ago when I finally visited Big Bend with him for the first time. To see a grown man marvel at such beauty is a site almost as spellbinding itself and one everyone should see.

These visits to the parks are a lifelong gift that I never appreciated fully until it was verbalized during last week's PBS series. I now consider these visits among the most precious memories my dad left for me: a love for nature and for God's great natural beauty, and for a country that had the vision and the foresight to set aside land for the enjoyment of us all.

Just as I will always remember that vacation in the Rockies or those summers in Platt, I hope and pray that my son will remember hiking the South Rim of the Chisos or into Boquillas Canyon and running to the park store to buy Mexican villagers dinner for a few days. I hope our children will always remember our time spent at Guadalupe Mountains and Mesa Verde.

And I hope that one day, they will hand down to a fourth generation and teach their children how important these shared experiences are to a family.

Call your mother every day (and other nuggets of fatherly wisdom I never had time to share with you)

Our daughter left home last fall a little sooner than Karen and I thought she would. After the initial shock of her being gone had subsided, my concerns rose that she had left before I'd had a chance to teach all I needed to teach her. What if she'd stayed a little longer? Maybe I could have told her this ... Or that. Instead of forgetting all those things, I decided it would be more beneficial for me, and maybe even her, if I didn't leave them unsaid.

And so over the past few weeks and months, I have jotted down on scraps of paper, napkins and index cards a few things I might have had a chance to say to her had she stayed at home. Parenting is not done when your kid walks out the door. The opportunities to share with someone who doesn't quite know it all (but who thinks they might) are fewer and farther between, but equally -- or maybe more -- important.

Had she stayed, maybe I could have said ...

Make someone's day. Leave your change in the Coke machine.

If you take too much time off at work, you won't get that promotion that's between you and another person.

Do the speed limit. Someone's always watching.

Call your mother every day.

Don't drink too much.

Rotate your tires every other oil change.

Get your oil changed every 3,000 miles.

Always pay your insurance and your electric bill on time.

Know your doctor's name.

Learn how to read a map.

Now that you're out of the house, it's OK to get along with your kid brother.

Yes, you are making an impression on your kid brother even if it seems like he doesn't like you.

Care more about how you see than how you look.

An education is not something you finish.

Don't run red lights. Someone's life could depend on it.

Everything is temporary. Nothing lasts forever.

Always check twice when pulling out in traffic. Motorcylists are hard to see.

You want it all now. But you can't have it all now. That takes a few more decades.

Sad? Chocolate. At least it works for your mama.

If you don't know the meaning of a word, look it up in the dictionary. You'll feel smarter.

If you do drink too much, stay where you are and do not drive. Please.

Reality TV is as far from real as you will find on TV.

Pawpaw always said you need to be on a first name basis with your plumber, your banker and your auto mechanic.

Leave no doubt: Use all four fingers and your thumb when you wave to someone.

The more make up you wear the more made up you look. Be you.

Virtual means almost. Your real friends are the ones you can look at square in the eyes and tell your problems to. 

Learn to like the blues.

Bake a cake and take it to a charity. Bet you can't do it just once.

Winning feels better. Losing will teach you more.

Go for it.

Listen. Everyone has a story worth telling.

If we can't learn from someone else, we're not listening.

Smile. It immediately disarms people in a bad mood.

Smile. It gives you the advantage of your warmth.

Pointing to God when you hit a home run means nothing if you don't point to him when you're alone in your room.

Call us. We're always here.

The Eighth Deadly Sin: Cross-dipping

We sat across from each other munching on tortilla chips and talking about our day. We were joined by our daughters this night, all of us slamming back Mexican food as if we'd never seen it before. In front of us sat a bowl of hot sauce that had been described as the best in Midland by a majority of local voters, and a bowl of what can best be called puffy queso. Light, delectable, yummy. And puffy.

Suddenly and out of nowhere, my wife takes a chip from the bowl, dips it into the queso and then reaches over and dips it into the hot sauce. In its wake, her chip dripped warm cheese sauce into the cold hot sauce. I looked at it, thinking I hadn't seen what I had just seen. I said nothing.

A moment later, the scene replayed itself. Twice in the last two chips, Karen dipped her chip into two different bowls.

"Hey!" I said, my ire sufficiently raised.

Karen said nothing, but a few minutes later went for another chip.

She grabbed the chip and dipped it first this time into the hot sauce, then into the queso. In doing so, she left a trail of red in the previously undisturbed bowl of queso.

"Hey hey?! What the -- "

"What what? What's the problem?"

"Your chip. You put it in the thing and then you dipped it in the other thing. You can't do that."

"Sure I can."

And she did it. Again.

"Hey hey hey" you're leaving your queso trail in my hot sauce, it's disgusting. Stop it!"

The girls sat idly by, choosing not to become involved in this discussion. Daddy didn't raise no dummies. Instead they struck up some meaningful discussion about I think her name was Kim Kardashian at the other end of the table.

"Wait," I said as Karen headed for both bowls with the tip of her chip.

"You can't do that. You can't get your hot sauce on my cheese and then turn around in the next bite and get cheese in my hot sauce. That's just not right. Do you mix your milk and your Tecate?"

She laughed and said it wasn't the same.

"It is the same. One is from the dairy group and the other is a fine Mexican delicacy. But you wouldn't think of joining the two together. That's what you're doing here. ... with this whatever you're doing here."

"It all goes to the same place so it's no big deal," she said.

"No, no. No. No. NO!" I said with my finest flunked-out-of-debate reasoning. "It is too. Every queso eater knows the rules. Keep the cheese in the cheese bowl and the hot sauce in the hot sauce bowl. There shall be no mingling of the two. You eat one salsa dipped chip and then you eat a queso dipped chip."

"At least I'm not double dipping," she said.

"Well yeah, thank goodness for that. Double dipping is what caused the swine flu epidemic, y'know."

Karen continued her tawdry display of breaking the dipping rules as I sat by, flummoxed. I tried to ratchet up the conversation a notch, bring up the intelligence level, if you will.

"If you were a Bedouin, you'd probably mix your hummus and your Baba Ganoush."

"What on earth would you know about that?"

"Those two don't go together either, y'know."

"How would you know anything about that? Middle eastern food to you is a corn dog at the Iowa State Fair."

"Someone wrote it on my Facebook. Must be an accurate comparison. Everything on the Internet's true."

"Just eat," Karen said.

"I can't take you anywhere."

A funeral and a ball game: God Bless America, indeed

Notes from a week without equal:

When my brother David eulogized my father last week he said that losing the last of your parents forces you to grow up because you are no longer accountable to anyone.

Our Dad never had to "keep an eye on us" in the harsh sense of the phrase. We simply wanted to be good for him. And maybe that's the true mark of a great parent. Behave out of respect instead of discipline; desire instead of fear.

Growing up, my brother and sister and I  were certain to have disappointed him throughout the years, but we seldom heard words that would discourage us. Never once did my father ever say he was mad at me. He even told me when I was a child, "I'll never be mad at you. I may be disappointed with something you've done, but I'll never be mad."

It is impossible to recreate the life my father led and the example he set; the footsteps he left are too big to ever fill. I will always step into those prints and be surrounded by the mark he left on his family, on our mom and on those around him.

He had a way of touching people without even knowing it, through a simple smile or a kind word that came effortlessly, simply because he was just being himself, living the life he had been taught to live by his father, who died when my dad was just 9.

More than many things, I liked to introduce my dad to friends who hadn't yet met him, because he would look them in the eye, shake their hand meaningfully, repeat their name so he wouldn't forget it and engage them in conversation. And he would then remember what they had to say.

My dad taught his family how to live right; how to treat other people and how to do good without seeking glory. We could not have had a better example.

Yet what is good for this world is that my dad is not the only great dad. There are many just like him, thank the good Lord, who are teaching the younger generation how to prevail through integrity and high moral character. The world continues because of people like this.

---

Last week was the most memorable week of my life and I am enormously grateful to those of you who stop by here who have indulged me as I work through these memories.

My wife, brother, sister and nine other family members stood by my father's hospice bed Sunday, July 26, and watched him die, taking his last breaths as "God Bless America" faded out from a television in an adjoining room. A fitting way to go for a man who fought in World War II, loved this country, and enjoyed a good game of baseball, especially back when baseball was a good game.

We waited for four days, July 30, to bury him. It was the first available date that the D/FW National Cemetery could schedule a 30-minute burial for my father, a service that would include an emotional presentation of colors and the playing of Taps.

They say timing is everything, and as it turned out the day we buried my dad also happened to be my 50th birthday, the kind of coincidence that would at first bring expressions of sorrow and tears from others. Later, though, it became apparent, to me at least, that it was the perfect day. I was privileged to be able to honor him at his funeral. A friend pointed out the spiritual symmetry of the day and I will not forget his words: "You helped celebrate your dad into his new life and birth into a better world on the same day that he and your mother welcomed you into this world."

Looking back it no longer feels strange to say that it was the best birthday I've ever had. Simply because my father's pain was over and he was able to be reunited with my mom, who died January 13, 2006. They were married for 59 years. Being with her again was really all he ever wanted for the last three and a half years; to be with the woman he had been with for 59 years before her passing. We were all experiencing an odd mixture of sad and joy at the same time.

Those two days you would think would be enough to make the week the most memorable for many people. But we capped it off Thursday night by doing exactly what my dad would have done had he still been here, and we capped it off in the way he would have wanted us to: On the night of his funeral, five hours after he was laid to rest, 25 family members joined together and went to a Grand Prairie AirHogs baseball game.

The AirHogs were my father's joyous diversion for the last two years. My brother has even said they might have helped keep him alive a little while longer. A member of the team's front office attended my father's visitation earlier in the week, and even offered to have their team mascot attend dad's funeral. Considering the vision of a large hog with a big head and a curly tail wearing an airman's jacket, we opted to say thanks, but no thanks. It was a kind gesture, but perhaps best left as a pleasant after thought instead of an awkward reality.

As the family sat together in the sixth inning of last Thursday's AirHogs game, the giant scoreboard in center field flashed up a message: "In memory of Harold Patterson. Irving's biggest AirHogs' fan."

We raised our glasses of water, Coke and a couple of beers and toasted Dad one last time. A smattering of applause filled the section of seats where he regularly sat as those who knew him showed their appreciation one final time.

A wonderful and fitting end to an exemplary life.

God Bless America, indeed.

One final short story, if you don't mind

Four weeks ago, my dad gathered together a few family members who were in the living room of the home where he lived for the last 45 years of his life. It was late, 10 o’clock maybe, and he told everyone who had assembled that he wanted them to read something.  It was a college essay written by his granddaughter, Kelsey. Her assignment had been to write about her hero and the words she chose perfectly summed up the kind of man he was. Daddy was known for his compassion and his love for others, especially our mom. He treated everyone with whom he came in contact respectfully. If you met my dad, you were treated with respect.

When dad asked everyone in our living room that night to read his granddaughter’s essay, it would ultimately prove to be one of his last acts of kindness to others.

He had told me earlier that night, on June 30, that he had intended to go to bed early. He had an early morning the next day and he needed to go to bed and get his rest. He’d need the whole night to work on his hair, which was one of his favorite jokes. “Love your hair … You work on that hair all night?” he would ask overnight visitors when they’d get up in the morning, before they’d had a chance to ge ready for the day.

The last thing he did late on the night before he was scheduled to wake early the next morning to undergo surgery to remove a cancerous kidney -- an operation he wasn’t even sure he would wake up from – was to make someone else feel special about themselves. It was textbook daddy. And it’s why we are all so fortunate to have knowhim.

My dad would tell me and my brother and sister on frequent occasions how proud he was of us all and he would brag on us to everyone he knew about how we had each taken on active and important positions in our respective churches. But I think I speak for both my brother and sister when I say it is the three of us who are even prouder to have been called his children. 

 

God scripts the perfect ending (Pt. 2)

(UPDATE)
Harold Lloyd "Pat" Patterson

Harold Lloyd "Pat" Patterson, beloved father and grandfather passed away Sunday, July 26, 2009 in Irving, TX., surrounded by his children and several grandchildren.

He was born on March 1, 1924 in Cherokee City, AR. to Claude & Margaret (Williams) Patterson.  From 1943-46, Harold was a captain aboard the U.S. Navy's PB4Y-2 Privateer in the South Pacific, and achieved the rank of Aviation Machinist Mate-Second Class.  He was honorably discharged in May 1946 and nine months later married Betty Jo Worthington, who would be his wife of 59 years until her death in January 2006.

Harold was a resident of Irving since 1964, a member of First Baptist Church, a veteran of the US Navy serving in World War II, and an avid baseball fan, especially of the Grand Prairie Air Hogs. Harold was a dedicated stamp collector like his father before him. He was also a supporter and frequent visitor of America's National Parks, especially his beloved Big Bend and Grand Canyon, and Texas State Parks.  He loved the great outdoors and traveled frequently, including seven cruises to Alaska. The dearest thing to him was and always will be his family and his life's love, Betty. Harold also gave 37 years of his life to American Airlines where since the mid-1970's he was a Technical Training Supervisor at D-FW Airport, where he trained instructors how to teach commercial airplane mechanics.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Betty Jo Patterson; mother, Margaret Aery; father, Claude Patterson, and brother, Carl Patterson.  He is survived by his children, David Patterson and wife, Dell Anne, of Irving; Claudia Cox and husband, James, of Irving, and Jimmy Patterson and wife, Karen of Midland; 12 grandchildren, 23 great grandchildren; two brothers, Don Chisum of Colorado Springs, CO., William F. Patterson of Reynoldsburg, OH., and one sister, Mary Lou Burgess of Tulsa, OK.

The family will receive friends for visitation on Wednesday from 6-8 p.m. at Chapel of Roses Funeral Home, 1225 E. Irving Blvd. Funeral services will be at 11 a.m. Thursday, July 30, 2009, at First Baptist Church, 403 S. Main St., Irving, TX. 75060.

Interment will follow at D/FW National Cemetery at 1:30PM in Dallas, TX.

Rev. Wayne Watkins will officiate. Memorial contributions can be made to First Baptist Church-Irving Evergreen Program, the National Kidney Foundation or the Citizens' Development Center of Dallas.
 
 ---

Many of my memories as a young boy are of enjoying the game of baseball with my father. Learning the ins and outs, and ups and downs; enjoying the stories and the history, and being entertained by the sheer greatness of the game alongside my father.

Many of my questions in life come from the experiences dad had but never shared during his time as a captain in the U.S. Navy, stationed in the South Pacific during World War II.

Dad and I attended the very first Texas Ranger baseball game in 1972. I was a wide-eyed 12-year-old kid, he an appreciative man of 48 who was happy a Major League team had finally come to his hometown. We watched together in awe as Frank Howard, a huge man, homered to help the Rangers win that first game.

Ten years ago, I finally urged my dad into talking about his military service as I put together a commemorative newspaper front page for his 75th birthday. He spent the entire time talking about the good memories, the camaraderie, the trouble he and his fellow sailors would always just barely escape. He talked about the time a friend had stashed a motor scooter into his airplane's wheel well and the landing gear would hardly extract in time for touchdown. He spoke of dangling his feet out the bomb bay door and feeling the spray of the Pacific as the pilot skirted along just over the top of the water.

But he never talked about what he did in combat. Until the day he died, he never discussed the ugly part of war but you could see in his eyes through his non-answers that what he had been forced to do in the war still deeply troubled him. Dad, until the day he died Sunday, had a deep respect for human life, and a powerful disdain for war and all its horrors.

He was awarded the silver star for his bravery in combat and he loved his country deeply and dearly. He was patriotic without being political. An American without need for any further labeling.

And, as I think I mentioned earlier, he loved his baseball. And he handed that love down to his children. He was, at one time early in life, the No. 1 hose man for the St. Louis Cardinals' farm team in Springfield, Mo., until a big, young Cardinal prospect showed up at the field and knocked him down to No. 2 hose man. That kid's name was Joe Garagiola. (When it became apparent baseball would not work as a career, Dad would later turn to airplanes, where he made his living teaching mechanics how to fix 747s and DC-10s and other large jets at DFW Airport. I was always impressed with how smart he had to be to do that.)

In the last two years of dad's life he developed a passion for a small independent league baseball team, the Grand Prairie Air Hogs. My brother purchased season tickets so my dad could go watch the team as often as he wanted. They played maybe three or four miles from his home in south Irving. The Air Hogs are a team without the huge crowds that he didn't like fighting at Ranger games, and it was a team without the unnecessary side shows and sordid soap operas so often inherent with Major League teams. It was just baseball stripped down, and dad's love for the Air Hogs spread through the entire family. It was almost as if they had formed just for my dad's enjoyment in the last years of his life.

I write all of this to set the stage for what was my dad's last few minutes. He died Sunday afternoon at 3:25 at Hearthstone Hospice in Irving.

He was surrounded by a dozen of his children and grandchildren as everyone joined together and formed a circle of love and life. Standing in the midst of the death of a loved one is an indescribably powerful experience, and one of the most difficult things I have ever been a part of. But also very necessary.

Dad spent his final two days in a private hospice room. A common area for the family was just outside that room. In that common area was a television mounted on a wall. For much of his final two days, the TV mercifully remained off. On the afternoon of his death someone had turned it on but left the volume down.

As his family circled around him and it became apparent dad was in his final few moments, the sound of singing could be heard. My niece looked at me, then at others, as we tried to figure out what it was that had broken the sacred silence, and why all of a sudden the TV had been turned up. No one could explain. Soon enough, it became apparent to everyone who huddled around my dad that the song that was filling the room -- and coming from the television in the family room -- was "God Bless America" being performed during the seventh inning stretch of the Rangers game Sunday afternoon.

As the song's final notes drifted away and the song ended, dad took one last deep breath, closed his eyes and was gone.

You can learn a lot about a man by what's in the stacks of stuff on his kitchen table (Pt. 1)

You can learn a lot about a person by what's on their book shelves. Or in their music collection. Or as it turns out, on their kitchen table. Like most other families, our kitchen table was a gathering place during my growing up years. When my mom died in 2006, the table evolved into a sort of storage area for my dad's projects and important papers and favorite things.

Dad's a stacker. I noticed this weekend that he had roughly divided his important stuff into three piles. One on the left, one on the right, and a stack in the middle, where all of his most important stuff seemed to congregate, which frankly didn't surprise me. Dad always had order to his stacks. Look at his stuff from afar and it may just look like piles of stuff. Look at it up close and you see the meaning to it all.

In the left stack there were a couple of books. "The Wit and Wisdom of WIll Rogers" and "100 Greatest American Stamps." The pile also contained a photo album that looked to hold mostly pictures from the 1930s, as well as newspaper articles written by his favorite newspaper writer, and a Smithsonian Magazine.

The right pile was more a mish-mash of things rather than a pile. There was a Barlow knife (Dad was never big into knives, but he always loved his Barlow). There was also a box of pens, a flashlight, a Smithsonian magazine and the most recent copy of The Sporting News. My dad once had a passion for The Sporting News because it contained every box score of every single baseball game ever played every season, until TSN decided to change its editorial direction. Dad introduced me to all the great writers of the newspaper and loved it mainly because the seemed to love baseball as much as he did. He passed that love to me, of both baseball and the magazine. One of my earliest memories is sitting in a natural cubby-hole, formed out of rock, in the middle of the Rocky Mountains National Park, reading a story about Pittsburgh Pirate catcher Manny Sanguillen with a big picture of Manny and that killer smile of his on the cover. It was the summer of 1970 as I recall. Weird how certain things remain in your memory, isn't it?

In dad's middle pile, the important one, were 15 or 20 stamps still affixed to the corners of their envelopes; dad never had a chance to steam off the stamps. There was probably an easier way by now to get a stamp off an envelope, but it was a ritual he conducted over and over in his passion for stamp collecting. Dad loved stamp collecting largely because his dad loved stamp collecting. My grandfather was an RFD mail carrier in northwest Arkansas until he died in the 1930s at the age of 33.

The middle stack also contained an electric bill, a gas bill, a couple of medical bills, a calculator, and a TV remote that had controlled the TV he'd had before a lightning storm last month fried it. Dad always had a hard time throwing anything out. The pile also contained a letter from his church advising him of the new change in worship times, and a National Park magazine. I love the National Parks because my dad did and because his dad did, too. Funny how some things get handed down.

The middle stack also contained the Bible he has had since my mother gave it to him in 1947, the year my parents married. It was fascinating to go through and see the passages he had marked through the years. What was he thinking when he highlighted this? What had he learned that led him to draw a box around that?

One of the passages was from 2nd Timothy, I believe. It talked about being on the wings of eagles when you most needed strength. Such a good scripture they turned it into one of the great hymns of all times.

My wife Karen pointed out to me last week that when my dad went into the hospital for a simple surgical procedure July 1, he likely thought that he would return home to all his stacks; to tend to all the bills and to his stamp collection and his Sporting News, and maybe he'd even toss away that remote control when he got home. But he never had the chance to get back to his unfinished piles.

When I sat down to write this it was Sunday afternoon. I had hoped to share a few things about my dad while he was still alive. So you could say you know him, too.  But dad died at about 3:25 Sunday afternoon. My sister called me into his hospice room as I looked for the scripture he had highlighted down the hall from his room. She said his breathing had become labored. The family gathered around his bed in final minutes.

But that's another story altogether ...

The hearing ... it's always the last thing to go

   I've been told a number of times over the last week that a person's hearing is always the last thing to go. Thankfully I now have evidence to back that up.
   Almost four years ago, as my mom lay in a medically-induced coma in a hospital room in Irving, my dad, who had been at her bedside almost constantly throughout what would prove to be a life-ending illness, announced that he was going to go home and shower, something he had not done that day.
   "I need to go home and clean up a little," he told my sister, who was also in the hospital room that day. "I think I'm gonna go home and shower."
   My mom continued in her undisturbed, unconscious sedation, apparently not caring much about my father's hygiene habits at that particular moment. My sister said she'd look after everything while dad was gone and she'd call him if there was any change.
   Not long after my dad arrived home and had showered, the phone rang. My sister was on the other end. Shortly after dad had left mom's bedside, my sister reported, the nurse came in with the swab nurses use to provide moisture to a patient's dry mouth. The swab was lemon scented, and when the nurse held the sponge under mom's nose -- boom -- it woke her up from her sedated state almost instantly.
   Soon after she regained consciousness, my sister reached for the phone to call dad.
   "Daddy," she said, "mom's awake. She's awake. Do you want to talk to her?"
   My sister handed the phone over to my dad. They exchanged pleasantries and my dad was overjoyed that his wife of 59 years was back, if only temporarily.
   "You need to get back down here," mom told him. "You take more showers than anyone I've ever known."
   There had been no conversation between my sister and mother about dad showering prior to when mom talked to dad on the phone.
   That was January 2006.
   And then last Friday, something else happened.
   Dad is in a medically induced coma in a hospital in the Dallas area. As of this morning, he's been in it for seven days. He survived laproscopy two Wednesdays ago to remove a tennis-ball sized cancerous tumor from his kidney. He awoke from the surgery complication-free; so much so that I came back to Midland the same day of his surgery thinking he was fine. Two days after his surgery, fluid began to encase his heart and lungs. He is currently on a breathing machine, a feeding tube, has had two heart attacks, a touch of pneumonia and a kidney that is being described by his doctor as "sleeping." The family joined together last week to see him while we could, even though it is hard to see your father (and grandfather) on a breathing machine and a feeding tube. It is a difficult time.
   Friday night, our oldest daughter flew in from Lubbock. She, our son (formerly The Boy) and I walked into his hospital room shortly after 9 that night. Dad was still unconscious and unresponsive; more so even than two days earlier when we had first arrived, when he would at least open his eyes when he heard our voice.
   With two of the kids standing with me, I told my dad that it was OK if he wanted to be with mom again. "We'll be OK," I said. "We'll miss you, but we'll be all right. If you want to be with mom, go."
   When I said it, a tear formed in his eye, and rolled down his right cheek.
   Our daughter stepped up next to me and seconded what I had said. "If you want to be with Nana," she said, "we understand."
   Again, a tear formed in his eye and spilled out onto his cheek.
   It was the only response I had seen from him in two days.
   As of Sunday night, he remained unconscious, waiting for his kidney to 'wake up' as the doctor had put it. But no doubt, waiting for something he may long for even more than that.
   Don't think your loved ones can't hear you. The hearing ... it's the last thing to go. At least that's what they tell me.