Sometimes you're in the boat and sometimes you're on the roof

For a variety of reasons, this old joke has been on my mind:

So there's this huge flood one day, and an entire town looks like it's going to be swallowed up by the waters. And the Police and Rescue Agencies are all over the place trying to get people to safety.

So they send the rescue boat over to this house where a guy is sitting on the roof with the water lapping around his ankles, and they say "Come on, quickly, there isn't much time!"

To which he replies, "Nah, I'm good, God will provide."

So about an hour later they're zooming past in the boat and notice the guy is still there, only the water is up to his waist, almost at the top of the roof. "Quick," they say, “get in the boat; it's going to get worse before it gets better.”

"Nah, don't worry - God will provide"

An hour after that a rescue helicopter flies over the area and notices the guy, who is standing on the peak of the roof, with only his head and shoulders out of the water. "GRAB THE ROPE!" they cry "IT'S YOUR ONLY HOPE!"

"Don't worry" he replies calmly. "God will provide."

He drowns. After he goes to heaven, he is a little ticked off with God. "I had FAITH, I BELIEVED in you - and still you didn't help me"

"HELP YOU?!" God replies "What MORE did you want - I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

I've wished for help, asked for help, rejected help and prayed for help at many points in my life. It’s only when I was open to the possibility that help might appear in an unexpected form, that it transformed my life. And throughout my life I’ve tried to listen and understand when I was being asked for help. I know I got it wrong, more than once, and imposed my version of “help” when it wasn't really helpful. I'm truly sorry for that. No one ever thinks they're doing “it” wrong. If we had that level of constant self-awareness, then history would never repeat itself and our children would all be “perfect”.

As a result, asking for help, giving help and receiving help are often full of angst. I’m not talking about “help carrying in the groceries”; I’m talking about the kind of help that potentially moves you from the mess of Point A to the improvement in Point B.

I remember the time I fell apart, in a big way, and found myself on mood altering, anti-anxiety meds. I needed to pull myself together for a formal event. I sat at the kitchen table, struggling to take deep breaths, praying for help. The doorbell rang. There stood one of our very best friends with a bouquet of flowers, telling me I was thought of, cared for and loved. In that moment the cloud lifted and I successfully managed the rest of the day, and the event.

Sometimes the call for help, while inconvenient, is obvious. Dan and I were enjoying a “date night” when he got a call from his sister. Her husband wasn’t home and the elderly neighbor had called about a strange noise in her kitchen. Dan reluctantly got in the car for the 20-minute drive, introduced himself to the neighbor and went in to investigate. The refrigerator was banging away, and when he opened the door the brine in the pickle jar was boiling. Had he not answered that call for help she might have been seriously injured or died in a house fire.

Then there are those moments when we really need help, but we are so defensive and so embedded in the righteousness of our personal beliefs, or our past decisions, that we are not open to the possibility that the current situation could be altered for the better. On Sunday morning, after a gym workout, Dan and I drove past a car with a flat tire. Dan immediately said, “Do they need help”? He circled back and pulled up behind them. Dan asked the young man driving the car if he had a spare and got an angry negative response. He asked again, “Are you sure?” The driver then got out and took a look. Underneath a mountain of groceries he found a spare that had never been used. Dan pulled it out and found the jack. Dan proceeded to change the tire. I stood out in the road a bit, acting as a traffic cone in my bright pink workout shirt. Fifteen minutes later, all fixed. As we drove away we could only assume that this young man had never changed a tire and just wanted to save face. That fact that he also had two passengers, one of them a baby, may have contributed to his willingness to accept help from two older folks in sweaty gym wear.

I’m neck deep in a family situation where “help” is totally at issue. The conversation has devolved from “Every day is Ground Hog day for me”; to “I don’t know where to get help”; to “that won’t help” and now “I don’t need your help.” The event that precipitated this felt like a crisis to those of us trying to help. On the recipient end it would appear that years of poor prior life decisions have created a Mount Everest of reasons to reject help and, as a result, has redefined the crisis as a non-event. There is angst on every side. It spills over on to everyone involved, to the point that, this morning, waking up tense and angry, I rejected a sincere offer of help to get my gym, computer and other bags out to my car.

It’s true that the only person, who can change you, is you. The closer our relationship to someone, the more we want the power to say those magic words that will allow him or her to say “Yes! That’s the solution I’ve been looking for! Thank you for helping me! I’ll admit—I didn’t know I had a spare!”  

But when the solution to someone else’s problem appears to be so clear—to you—and then to be blasted for trying to help can feel like a knife to the heart. For me, I know that help can come from unexpected places and take unexpected forms. And I also know that calls for help can come from unexpected sources and have unexpected solutions. And when love and relationships are involved, the angst is unavoidable.

If you’re looking for a nice neat wrap-up here, you’re reading the wrong blog. We all deal with situations on an hourly and daily basis where we are the person in the boat, or wondering what the thumping noise is in the kitchen. Or we’re the pissed off young man, angrily responding to that nosey old white guy who thinks there is a spare in the trunk. All we can do is try to be open to the help that we may not even know we need, and keep our helicopters gassed up and ready to go.

Music that resonates:
Help - The Beatles

Is Rudy dere?

1980 was a milestone year for us. We bought our first house for $24,000 in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee. And we bought our first phone. Back then you called the phone company, they installed a landline at your house and you rented a phone for a monthly fee. But the phone company also saw a future in selling phones to customers and set up a store in the mall. Dan and I wandered in and fell in love with a retro looking dial-phone. (Push-button phones, while available, were not entirely commonplace.) The price was $180 and when we compared the monthly rental fee to the overall price it seemed worth it.

One month later we received a letter from the phone company, basically outlining the cost of the internal working parts we might want to purchase, now that we had bought the “shell” of the phone. What? Yes, that would be another $180. So for $360 in 1980 ($1102 in 2015, adjusted for inflation), we now were ahead of our peers and owned our own phone.

Two days ago, Dan called and cancelled the landline. These days, the only calls we get are from our parents and telemarketers. The phone will continue to hang on the wall, the source of many memories.

In the early days we got a lot of wrong numbers. “Is Rudy dere?” was a common call. Apparently, our recycled number (258-1503) had belonged to a very popular fellow named Rudy, as he was in constant demand. One evening we had a party and the call for Rudy came through, Dan said hang on, I'll get him. Our friends knew all about the Rudy calls and were happy to play along, picking up the phone for over 90-minutes, letting the caller know that Rudy would be along in just a minute.

There was the time Dan was helping out a friend on a Saturday and I got a wrong number from a woman who didn't believe she had dialed a wrong number. After taking that call a few more times I may have made some comment about her intelligence. She called back one more time and threatened to kill me. Home alone, I frantically called for back-up, finding Dan on the other side of town. He and his friend made it back to the house in record time, my knights in shining armor.

When Carl was just crawling his main objective was to get to the long phone cord, happily stretching it out for extended periods of time. Afraid that he'd pull the heavy handset down on his head, Dan purchased two phone cords at American Science and Surplus and made a giant loop out of them for his first birthday. Grandparents, aunts and uncles looked on with dismay as he ignored a cornucopia of gifts in favor of this new phone cord toy.

When I was expecting Hunter I went into labor early. Dan was out for the first time in a few months, with Malcolm, at Wolski’s. I used the phone to call Dan there and heard the classic bartender call to the patrons “Is there a Dan Johnson here?” When Dan got home, he called his parents house to come pick up Carl. Their phone was busy, so after several tries Dan dialed “O” for operator and asked her to break into the call (can you even do that anymore?). Dan heard his dad tell the operator he was going to have another grandchild.

Later memories include Hunter’s friends coming over to the house and needing to make a call for a ride. I’d point them to the rotary phone. More than once I'd see a kid pushing at the dial, trying to figure out how it worked. It was always a pleasure to explain the retro technology. Place your finger in the hole with the desired number, pull it all the way to the stop and remove your finger, letting it rotate back into position…repeat with each number. No lightning fast dialing, no caller ID, just basic pulse dialing technology.

We've started sifting through our belongings, making some decisions about things we must keep and things we can let go of. There are a lot of memories just looking at that phone that will never serve its intended purpose again. I’d advocate for leaving it on the wall when we finally sell, but I'm afraid the memories would hit the landfill. Instead I think we should take it with us, a metaphorical landline to many years of memories.

Music that resonates:
Call me - Blondie

It's cooler near the lake

It’s been a stupid week, and this is a rant. I also freely admit that I'm under the influence of too much Dayquil and Nyquil (and margaritas—it is Thursday) as I suffer through my second severe cold in less than 4-weeks. Here I go. I've heard and seen a lot of disturbing news today. Where to start? 

This morning, sitting at my desk, I heard on the radio that I should not wear any furry anything or leopard prints. Back into my closet to cull out more offending articles of clothing. Dan will not let me lose the leopard dress he loves so much. 

At lunch I saw an article about the coldest cities in the US. Wisconsin has the MOST of any state in the nation, even Alaska. Yes, it is cooler near the lake. (FYI, Milwaukee was #38.)

Then I read an article about the final push to turn Wisconsin into Wississippi.

On the drive home I heard about the limitations of my flu shot.

And finally, here’s the forecast for Saturday: Partly sunny. Highs in the mid 30s. North winds 10 to 15 mph.

Too much.

And that’s it. On Saturday we're on tap for the Santa Rampage. A whole lot of people, dressed in Santa suits, riding their bikes from one stop to the next. Dan’s been working on our Santa outfits, red-fleece lined sweatshirts I found at Target that will, hopefully, be warm enough to withstand the temperature, winds and wind-chill of riding a bicycle in DECEMBER in WISCONSIN.

Two pair.

Dan’s talents are wasted on this … seriously … and according to the first news article, it’s a fashion faux pas for me to wear fur anyway. If I'm going to live in a state that is a Banana Republic, I want to see bananas on trees, outside my window. And monkeys! I want fricking monkeys! I don't want an $8,000 property tax bill, I want an $800 tax bill. I want warm weather all of the time. And I NEVER want to see the name of my state on a list of COLDEST cities.

I’m sure that Santa visits Key West. I know he must. They decorate Christmas trees, hang stockings, sing Christmas carols and tuck the children in early on Christmas Eve. We could Santa rampage in Key West. Dan is talented with a glue gun and…a red bra…and red bikini bottoms…and a bit of white fur....