"Maybe Christmas doesn't come from a store..."

--Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas

When I was 8 years old, my grandmother died.  She died in October if I remember right, and for Christmas that year, my Aunt Laura flew us up to her home in New York for Christmas.  How in the world my mother took three small kids through the Atlanta airport is beyond me.  

My Aunt Laura lived in Pound Ridge, New York at the time.  Around the corner lived Fred Gwynne, who played Herman Munster.  It was a nice neighborhood!  Her house was perched on a hill overlooking a picturesque creek running through the woods.  It was straight out of a Hallmark gift card. I'd never seen so much snow in my life.  I can still remember my mom waking me up to come to the window to look at deer in the back yard.  I also remember feeling like her house was gigantic--much bigger than the 1200 square feet I grew up in.  Tall ceilings.  Fireplaces.  The opulence made an impression on me.  Maybe too much of one, but anyway...

For several years after that, Laura would send us Christmas ornaments each year.  They were always one of a kind and each year of my childhood, when we put up the tree, we always talked about what year we got each ornament.  Just typing that last sentence brings back a LOT of Christmas memories.  

Of all the ornaments I ever got, my favorite was this one.

I'm not sure why it was my favorite.  I've only ice-skated once, and I held onto the wall as I went around the rink in Eastdale Mall at a blistering pace of .06 mph.  Maybe it's because I wished I could ice skate.  Or maybe it's because it represented the fantasy world that we all have in our heads--the world of make-believe...the world of what we wish we had but don't.  Wait...that's crazy... it's just a piece of wood!  Right??

Christmas, to me, has always been about wonder.  The wonder in a child's eyes as he sits on his grandparents' couch thumbing through the Wish Book from JCP or Sears.  The wonder of a parent as she waits eagerly for her son to get home from Fort Drum.  The wonder of believers who still to this day marvel at the idea that perfection would leave Heaven and come down to this dump of a place called Earth.

And every time I open the box of Christmas ornaments, I am one year older, and the sense of wonder that I feel is somewhat different than last year, but yet the same.  I wonder at my kids' wonder.  I watch them stare at the presents under the tree, eagerly awaiting the tearing open of the wrapping paper.  It's truly awesome to give.

And yet, at the same exact time, Christmas has always been slightly tinged with a smidge of sadness. It's a time in which people really struggle.  With loneliness.  With anxiety.  With sadness.  With missing a family member.  With debt.   Divorce never seems so real as it does on a holiday.  The first Christmas after losing a loved one is always the hardest one.  And God forbid that we lose someone ON a holiday...but it does happen.

So...there's wonder and amazement...and there's sadness.  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...right??

It's all about focus and perspective, really.  I have learned through hardship that God can reveal amazing things in life even through the darkest darkness.  I just have to look for the good, and once I find it, stare at it!!!

This week, there will be a Christmas parade.  It will be filled with wonder, and it will be an awesome celebration of community and Christmas.  But that's 88 hours away! What about the space between now and then?  There's wonder in all that space, too!!  The smile of a student who is having a good day.  One person giving another person the parking space.  Cookies in the faculty lounge.  Walking into the Dixon Center, and being greeted by two co-workers who tell you how they are already building storage shelves in your equipment truck.  The trash you sweep up that reminds you of family being at your house.  Trying out for a play and having a blast.  Andalusia going to the semifinals. A brief conversation with a kid you don't even know about how awesome bicycles and motorcycles are.  Your son making a great score on test he thought he'd bomb. The jokes your kid tells on the way to school.  It's all WONDER.  All of it.

We spend a lot of time and energy waiting for the next "thing" to occur or the next "time" to arrive, and wow, what do we miss in the present, and if you add that to the commercialism that Christmas is wrapped up in, well, we're just a stone's throw away from the Klonopin!! That's no way to live.  We need to re-focus.  We need to remember why Christmas is and what Christmas is.  And what it's not. We need to go back to square one and start over.  Hey, I'm all about capitalism...it drives our economy, after all, and as a state employee I benefit directly from all the tax dollars...but how's about some balance, K??


So, maybe Dr. Seuss was right...maybe Christmas doesn't come from a store.  Maybe it's something more.  Merry Christmas, people!  I'm thankful for you all.

"Just breathe."

--Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam

I first knew Pearl Jam's music by way of Josh and Ben Bates and John Ossenfort.  Thank you, guys, for introducing me to this monumental band.  

A few weeks ago, I was standing on the sideline of Andalusia's football field waiting for the game to start.  I was talking to a friend of mine who had recently judged a band contest and he was a little bummed because he felt like he had made the wrong call on a Best-In-Class award.  I thought about how many times I've judged and later felt like I made the wrong call.  He continued talking about how it had bothered him for the whole week after, and while I appreciated how much he wished he'd made the "right" call, I motioned up at the moon, and said "well...there's the moon, right where it's supposed to be...so I guess the world went right on like it was supposed to."   He laughed and understood the point I was trying to make...at least I hope he did.  

We get so wrapped up in the RIGHT NOW, and by "we" I mean me....

So many times, we take the issue that's right in front of us, and with the help of stress, anxiety, panic, Satan, maybe Congress, or the news media, we make that issue out to be the equivalent of the Titanic sinking or Pompeii being covered by volcanic ash or the 18th championship.  To be fair and honest, there are times when this is true.  Cancer sucks.  Death sucks.  Divorce sucks.  But most of the time,  the things that I stress over won't even matter in a few hours...let alone tomorrow, or next month, or in eternity.  

But OH MY GOD do I/we ever stress over them in the "right now!"  

When the stressors come, and they come every day, in every size, shape, color, religious affiliation, and political alignment, how in the world are we supposed to deal with them???  It seems like the media is a barrage of negativity.  I supposed I could turn the TV off, but then I wouldn't get to hear about Megan Kelly and Donald Trump.  Darn.  I guess I could shut down social media.  Laughable at best--I know myself well.  What are we to do....???

I believe it was that neurotic, brilliant, although CRS fish, Dory,  who said "just keep swimming."  God, I hate that fish...LOL. But I love that movie. And that message.  We have to just keep swimming.  Or as Eddie Vedder said it, "just breathe."  Just. Breathe.  Did it ever occur to you that you are not required to respond to every single stimulation that comes your way?? I mean, it's not in the Constitution of being human. But I certainly react to them as if I must react to them right this very minute.  I simply cannot stand to have a notification on my phone that I have an unread email or text.  I. Must. Get. To. That. Thing. This. Very. Minute.  My God, that is exhausting.  Just breathe, Johnny.

I'm overstimulated to the point that I can barely do this.  I go at a breakneck pace most of the time, and it's my own fault.  The demands I feel for giving an instant answer or a response are at a boiling point and I doubt I'm alone in this.

In the movie Lean On Me, the school principal Joe "Crazy Joe" Clark is jailed at one point, and a school board member is trying to convince him to apologize about something I can't recall right now, and he tells Joe "you have to!"  Joe's response is absolutely epic:  "I ain't gotta do anything but stay black, and die."  Priceless.  Truly priceless.  All the "things" on my to do list...they're just things I THINK I have to do, and sometimes I wonder if I don't make lists just so I can say I crossed things off my list?!?!  So, who's really neurotic? Dory? Or Johnny??

Y'all have a good Thanksgiving.  Thanks for reading.  God Bless!

  

"I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight."

Remember this?  I do.  Somehow.  The title of my blog is pretty accurate: I am random.  My brain is random...why in the world I bolted awake one night recently thinking about 1994 is beyond me but I did. 

When this catalog arrived at 308 Perry Street, I was still living at home.  I was taking the year off from school and I spent Monday-Thursday working at Food World from 8 a.m. til 2:00 p.m.  My brother Thomas was in basic training at Fort Benning, GA (E-2/58, Sand Hill), on his way to becoming an infantryman in the US Army.  My sister Jeremie was a junior in high school.  

At that time, I had absolutely no direction in life.  Zero.  I remember being jealous of my friends who were at Auburn while I was "stuck" at home.  In those days, I had only a vague, cloudy vision of what I wanted in life, and to be totally transparent with you, what I wanted was really short-sighted and dismal...I just wanted to get by.  There's a whole back story as to why that is and maybe, one day, I'll put that down on paper.  

In December, 1994, my mother had a heart attack.  I was camping on some land that John Ossenfort's family owned.  To be specific, I was sleeping beside a pond that is now surrounded by beautiful homes in a subdivision near the end of Lindsey Bridge Road.  With me were Josh and Ben Bates and John Ossenfort. Around 11 pm, we see headlights, and at that time, there was NOTHING in that area but trees.  Bill Ossenfort pulls up to the campsite, gets out of the car and says "Johnny, you need to go to the hospital.  Your sister called and she was crying and your mother is headed to the hospital in an ambulance."  Jeremie was 17 at the time.  I can still feel the guilt of having been away from the house when it happened.  Mom wound up in Dothan under the care of a great cardiologist, had a great recovery, and enjoys her grandchildren....

My wish that Christmas was for mom to recover.  Mom's wish was for Thomas's plane to land safely at Birmingham--his airline had 2 crashes in the weeks leading up to his flight.  Can't really say what Jeremie's wish was, but I suppose it was something along the lines of her mom getting well also.

Fast-forward 24 years....I haven't seen a JCP Wish Book in a long time but I still have wishes.  If I designed the Wish Book, it might look like this.

Page 33.  My dad would still be alive and kicking.  And he'd love to spend time watching his grandchildren grow up.  He'd probably still be in contact with Stephen Tuttle and Greg Wicke and we'd probably travel to see them. 

Page 99.  Autism would be something that isn't stigmatized.  You would be able to order a "no longer seeing posts on facebook about kids who are different being mistreated or shunned."  And it would have free delivery.

Page 115.  Divorce would never occur. 

Page 257.  Parents wouldn't age and their health wouldn't decline.  

Page 301.  On this page, I'd find that Grey Sharpe didn't die our junior year.  He'd be in the Army to this day, probably running the place.

Page 373.   A full page of second chances.

Page 405.  People would truly know their value.

Page 467.   All the answers to all the questions that my children have but I don’t seem to be able to answer.

Page 502.   The cure for cancer.

Page 503.   A government that actually works for solutions to our country‘s problems as opposed to hurling insults at each other across the aisle.

Page 599.   Forgiveness truly applied.

Page 607.  Hope where none seems possible.

Page 665.   An endless supply of amazing music.

Page 725.   That one present that I always hoped for but never got.

Page 773.   Knowing that my children will be successful parents and grandparents one day.

Page 811.   A  Bell  206 Jet Ranger and enough money to own/operate it. (Hey, I like helicopters! LOL)

 I hope you get what you wish for.