Growing Old Ain't For Sissies

NUMBER ONE HUNDRED ONE
On The Road 2
Travels With Gramps - Flying Northwest Air

This is a two puddle-jumper trip from Rockford Regional to Detroit Metro to Lexington. The first leg is great—50 seats and 14 passengers. Just before we arrive our friendly stewperson Keith asks us all where we are headed from Detroit and proceeds to tell us all which gate to look for. Mine is C-7.

We land and disembark at B-10. I have an hour and fifteen minutes so I take a long leisurely walk to C-7. Since good ole Keith urged us to check the monitors, I check 3 along the way. At C-7 I find a seat with good light and stick my nose into a book ("Metaphor, Analogy, and the Place Of Places: Where Religion and Philosophy Meet." This is a marvelous but weighty tome best read in solitary confinement, or an airport waiting for a flight.) There is no sign listing flights at C-7, it seems to be one of a bunch of gates just cut into a long corridor wall. But there is a desk and a ramp and a door and a plane sitting outside. There is also a gate agent trying to look busy and I overhear her tell several passengers that this is the gate for 2811 to Lexington.

After about a half hour I look up to see the pilot and the stewperson come through the door and down the ramp. They are grumbling about changing planes, and leaving from gate C-39-- somewhere yonder, out of sight. Being a seasoned traveler, I decide to stop assuming and ask the agent at the desk, who is looking busier than ever.

I catch her just as she is about to desert her post. She seems bothered with the interruption and doesn’t seem aware that there are 30 people sitting there expecting to go to Lexington. With a sigh, she checks her computer and says, “Oh, that flight is departing from B-10.” I suggest she tell the rest of the folks and start the long walk back. I still have plenty of time but the two people who had been dumped there from wheel chairs were in trouble and I don’t think they ever made it to the new gate in time. (I suspect Northwest had taken the chairs back to the Rent-a-chair place.)

At B-10 there is a nice sign up over the desk, 2811-LEXINGTON-10:53. Not bad, I think, since the original departure was to be 10:43. I pick a seat where I can keep an eye on the board, just in case they change it again without telling us. There is a very efficient agent at the desk busy on the phone. It seems she is hearing about the problem of finding two wheel chairs and getting those handicapped folks to the gate. There is another problem of some sort down the way at B-12.

Soon the agent goes off to B-12. Ten minutes later the phone starts ringing and eventually two other agents walking past stop and one answers the phone. She informs us there will be a 30-minute delay for maintenance. Ten minutes later our original agent stops by for several minutes then disappears again and is shortly replaced by a 4th agent who is just in time to get the word from the mechanic that the plane is ready to go.

She announces that we will begin boarding—then the phone rings again and she has to retract her announcement. It seems the paper work must first be completed. Maybe they got this plane from Budget Rentals and have to charge back the wash and the repairs.

Finally we are aboard and off. Our stewperson is a chunky, slightly Rubenesque Scandinavian named Bridget. She calls us “you guys” and apologizes for the screwed up gate agents and the general confusion. She bounces through the formalities and we take off.

I am near the back of the plane so she gets to me with her little drinks trolly quite late in the 45-minute flight. Across the aisle is a handsome college student who asks her if she has change for a twenty. They have an extended discussion about 20’s and 10’s and the weather in Minneapolis as compared to the weather in Lexington, and where he got his great tan. Finally he rummages around in his pocket and comes up with 5 ones and a 5, $10 for a five dollar beer.

She is impressed and confused by this. She tries to give him two beers but he insists one only one—he is tipping her. This moves her so deeply she almost forgets the rest of us. On her next trip down the aisle her hair, which had been messily grabbed up in a big clip, is combed and hanging down to her shoulders very nicely. She spends the rest of the time lounging around her benefactor and we almost make it to the ground with the trash still in our hands.

Panicked, she hurries up the aisle with her trash bag and flops into her seat as we hit the runway. Then she gets on the speaker and announces, “Welcome to …… where were we going? (a passenger tells her)….oh, yeh, Lexington—the local time is……1:05 PM.” (It was actually 12:12 PM.)

The really interesting thing about the trip was that in spite of the Chinese fire drill in Detroit, with all the huffing and puffing and switching around, the wheels hit the runway to the minute of the original schedule—12:05 PM.

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Moral: When traveling by air always pack your sense of humor and a large dose of patience…and don’t pack anything sharp because the screeners will take it away and sell it by the pound on eBay.

NUMBER ONE HUNDRED
On The Road 1

Travels with Gramps-On The Road

I am 500 miles into the 600-mile drive to Rockford, Illinois. Les Miserables is going strong on the stereo, the sun is shining, the traffic is light, and the new Warf van is humming happily along. It is going so well I almost feel guilty, with Joan home painting the bedlam room.

On 74 West I start seeing signs—CONSTRUCTION AHEAD, EXPECT DELAYS—and then soon, 39 NORTH, ROCKFORD, USE 74 WEST (Woe is me, I took the long way around Chicago just to avoid this!). For about 10 miles the signs are pretty consistent. Then, as I come out of the construction maze onto 74 West I see a big sign—ROCKFORD, 39 NORTH, 1 MILE. Wonderful--I have escaped the orange barrel monsters and am on my way with a straight shot to my destination.

A mile passes and there is no 39 North--then a second and a third and a fourth. By mile five I suspect I am on my way to Peoria so I pull off at a little town. Carlock is so small there doesn’t seem to be even a Mini-mart there. I consult my map and see what looks like County Road 9 going north out of town where it hits an east-west highway that will get me back to 39 North.

Cruising through the town and into the country a ways, I find several roads but no signs. Back in town I stop at the library, which is supposed to be open but is closed. The post office next door is unlocked. If anyone should know how to direct me, surely the post-person should.

Inside I am greeted by a friendly Japanese lady who just barely speaks English. Showing her my map and asking her where I will find County Road 9 out of town, I eventually learn that she doesn’t have the faintest idea—she is only sure of one thing—she knows where the Mitsubishi plant is and is sure that if I go back there I will find the right road and be on my way. Sadly, I remember passing the Mitsubishi plant, it was right in the middle of the mess where I lost my way the first time.

Inquiring about a service station, I find there is one in town I missed coming in. There, O frabjous day, I get directions—go two towns West (Don’t take the freeway, it is under construction) and turn North. Go one town North and turn East. At El Paso you will hit 39 North and be back in business. 25 miles later I see the B.P. lady did know what she was talking about and I am back in the groove.

39 North is wide and relatively new and I am making up for lost time—for about 20 miles. Then things slow to a crawl. There has been an accident up ahead. In the next 40 minutes I manage to cover about 3 miles. Finally I come upon the scene of the accident. The only evidence is a deep scrape in the medium turf surrounded by officers looking down and gesticulating, their five cruisers parked willy-nilly across one lane and the shoulder. The officers are apparently trying to reconstruct the accident. We are all diverted off onto the shoulder to get by them.

I finally arrive at my destination, weary but thankful that I made it in one piece.

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Moral: if you take the long way to avoid the orange barrels, it will become the longer way because of other orange barrels—but you will meet interesting people and see strange sights.

NUMBER NINETY-NINE
Mother Nature Is Not A Feminist

The latest thing giving mainline feminists the vapors is a new book by Steven E. Rhoads, "Taking Sex Differences Seriously." Rhoads is a professor of Public Policy at the University of Virginia.

Drawing on extensive scholarly research in history, biology, sociology, child development, psychology, and economics, Rhoads examines a range of evidence about the biological basis of sex differences and in an appropriately objective manner notes the intractability of certain basic facts.

One basic fact is that men’s and women’s brains are structured differently. Here are some of the examples he gives:

-Three day old girls maintain eye contact with a silent adult for twice as long as boys.
-One week old baby girls can distinguish an infant’s cry from other sounds, usually boys cannot.
-Five month old boys are more interested than girls in three-dimensional geometric forms and blinking lights.

These very early differences (and many others treated extensively) give lie to the feminists’ contention that any distinctions between the sexes’ traits, values, interests, skills and behaviors arise from societies’ rigid gender roles, which channel people’s thoughts and actions in stereotypical directions.

Feminism has largely succeeded in shifting the field of discourse from “sex differences” to “gender differences” and they have convinced themselves that all gender differences are socially created and conditioned. This is a foundational idea in their ideology and they are so committed to it that they get their knickers in a twist whenever there is any public reference (especially in the halls of Academy) to the fact that there are fundamental differences between men and women—remember the trouble Harvard President Larry Sommers got into with the self-appointed, publicity seeking gender warden from MIT, when he actually talked about simple biological facts.

Many critics of feminism have agreed, “Mother Nature is not a feminist.” This book goes a long way toward clearing away the feminist smoke and mirrors and reminding us that “just because you put your boots in the oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits.”

When I was a child, “Mother Nature” was a polite, non-religious synonym for “God.” In reality, she still is. Although the feminists have tried to turn her into the “Earth Mother” or the ‘Goddess,” they have not succeeded in selling her their “gender” gobblety-gook. Whatever they wish she was, she regularly jumps up and bites them in their pretensions and it always seems a nasty surprise.

Although the battle of the sexes is the only conflict in which each side regularly sleeps with the enemy, that isn’t the feminists’ biggest problem—getting the enemy to do the laundry and the dishes is bigger. Biology militates against total equality in domestic duties and the feminists’ revolt against biology can do nothing to change this. “When you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.” For the most part these splinters have created an angry, hostile, frustrated group of women who pretend to be liberated but in reality are in bondage to a false ideology.

In the end, our differences should not be the source of bitterness or resentment, but as the Creator intended, the recipe for genuine complementarity of the sexes.

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"God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female He created them." Genesis 1.27

NUMBER NINETY-EIGHT
Whistler’s Grandmother

On Friday evening, March 29th, Women For Life of Lexington gave a dinner for 380 friends. It was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Abortion Alternative Pregnancy Help Center. Wayne Smith, retired pastor of Southland Christian Church, the man who got it all started, was the Master of Ceremonies. Bob Russell, pastor of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville was the keynote speaker.

There were quite a few numbers tossed around but the one that we really celebrated was 1,500—the number of babies saved from abortion during these years. There were many others we do not know of, and numberless women exposed to the love of God in the staff, and many, many who became believers through the witness of the staff and volunteers.

On the stage there was a large print done by April, a local well-known artist. She had come to the center eight years ago, decided to keep her baby and given her life to the Lord. She is now married to a good man, has a fine young son, and has nothing but good to say of those who were there when she needed them.

A framed copy of this print, accompanied by a few kind words, was presented to some of the folks who were involved in this ministry in a special way:

-The Founding Pastor
-The Four ladies who formed the original organization and who are still active in it
-The lawyer who has helped them through all the legal hurdles the whole time
-The Doctor who provided the medical expertise, guidance and inspiration
-A nurse who came with an ultrasound and enabled them to become a clinic
-And an Executive Director and his wife who came at a very difficult time (that was us)

When we arrived at Women For Life they were in the doldrums. They needed more space, more money, better communications, and a more effective Board of Directors. I was able to cut costs, find new money, lay out a long range plan, reorganize the work, and enable the move into a better facility closer to the university.

I was also able to help the Board to maturity consistent with the state of the organization. While this was going on, my wife Joan was treating the facilities like our home and the staff like our children. She cleaned and wallpapered and carpeted and baked for the women who were in the front lines day by day. She loved them dearly, prayed for them regularly and still does.

With this done, by God’s grace, I found a woman to take over as Executive Director. She took the organization on into the future and is still leading it with wisdom, compassion and enthusiasm.

Now, about Whistler’s Grandmother. This is my child bride of 50 years waiting for the punch line of one of Wayne Smith’s jokes. He had just told one on the women, this one was on the men. I didn’t get it all but it seems a man was challenged by his friends to show his spouse who was boss. He walked in after work and began to lay down the law.

“First,” he said, “I am going to sit down in my big chair and you are going to take the shoes off my aching feet and bring me the newspaper. Then, when I am ready, you will bring me my dinner, and when I am finished I want you to run me a hot bath where I will take a good, long soak and wash my dirty hair.

And then,” he said to her, “do you know who is going to dry and comb my hair nicely?”

There was a long pause…”The undertaker?,” she asked.

When I took this picture, the punch line had not yet arrived.

It was a very fine evening a good time was had by all.

NUMBER NINETY-SEVEN
Spring Bouquet

My recent blogs have been pretty curmudgenly.
Here is a breather—a Bleeding Heart
Between a Princess and
An Emperor.

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“Why worry about clothes? Look how the wildflowers grow: they do not work or make clothes for themselves. But I tell you that not even King Solomon with all his wealth had clothes as beautiful as one of these flowers. It is God who clothes the wild grass—grass that is here today and gone tomorrow, burned up in the oven. Won’t He be all the more sure to clothe you? What little faith you have. So do not start worrying: ‘Where will my food come from? or my drink? or my clothes?’ (These are the things the pagans are always concerned about.) Your Father in heaven knows that you need all these things. Instead, be concerned above everything else with the Kingdom of God and with what He requires of you, and He will provide you with all these other things. So do not worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own. There is no need to add to the troubles each day brings.”
Matthew 6.28-34