Writing Reality

  "You could have a steam trainIf you'd just lay down your tracks..."---Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' lyrics. This is not the tune that lay in my mind this morning as I reminisced about yesterday's volunteers to help on trail crew.    However, as I looked up the proper definition of sledging that song popped up. I say sledging, which is my own take on swinging a hammer that we call a "Double Jack". The Single Jack is six pounds. I know that because our regular crew of five including me and one staff supervisor are handling Harriman State Park Trails, and have to carry about four of those, two shaping hammers, along with a hoist, belay bag with heavy equipment, first aid kit, double Jack, three 18lb rock bars, a lopper, three buckets, three eye to eyes, two burlap straps, two green wrapping straps, two pick Mattox, a roe hoe or two, a bar for either the two ton or one ton hoist, the feathers with pegs for splitting rocks that we drill... s...

 Today 07/01/2016... This below story started 07/01/2011, five years ago... Sometimes, It Takes A Prayer A sunny day in June, I was getting ready to run and I saw an acquaintance walking around the block. I hadn’t seen her much, due to our schedules being busy. I knew something was up. I’d seen her husband outside for the first time the week before. He looked like death. They were not an old couple. Their children were in their twenties.   I saw her and asked, “Hey. How are you doing?” She sighed uncharacteristically, for she was not someone who complained about anything the times we’d known each other and spoken. She responded, “A little stressed.” I asked, “Not that I want to ask this personal question, but how’s your husband?” She responded, “Not good. That’s why I’m stressed. He goes for another scan in a week or so. He has cancer. We moved our daughter’s wedding up by two months. This way he wouldn’t miss it.” Here it was Thursday, June 30th , the wed...

One may wonder what would inspire someone to work hard labor voluntarily. For me it’s the love of many things. It’s the passion that won’t be broken. Because there are so many aspects to such service for me, that it may seem beyond comprehension. I’d compare it to my youthful desire to enter the military as a young child. Then for a multitude of reasons only to follow through thirteen years later at age eighteen entering the Marines. There were things that followed me throughout my life. Sometimes they were questions of how I ever gave up my over decade’s life dream to become a New Jersey State Trooper. My childhood desire to never wed—to never have any serious relationships with another human being. I desired only service in military and law enforcement nearly my whole childhood. Too the extent that even one of my Marine Corps superiors expressed to me last July, “I never thought you’d ever get married. It just wasn’t who you were. You were always a loner.” I replied, “Yeah. I know....

  This afternoon as I watched a documentary about a tragedy. I whispered an expletive followed by, “And you can go to hell. For real.” It was after William Lucas a former director of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center stated many years later in a documentary of 2020, “I would have made the same decision to launch as I had back then….” Lucas continued, “I did what I thought was right in light of the information I had, and if I were going over it with the same information I had. I’d make the same decision.” Yet it was clear that he had knowledge that the launch could be compromised if the outside temperatures were below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. It was 38 degrees at the time of the launch of the shuttle Challenger on January 28 th , 1986. Lucas repeated in the documentary that they needed to stay on schedule. I then whispered to myself, “Who were we still racing? The Russians?” I knew that they weren’t fairing well in general in January 1986. I sat back and watched as William Lucas who...

Two years ago after our oldest's Senior Awards Dinner had ended. I drove us home, feeling a sense of satisfaction, as she held her awards on her lap. She had achieved Valedictorian as my husband and I felt was a possibility. Yet, unfortunately he'd passed eleven months prior to the dinner and her graduation from high school.  When we began the drive home it was dark out. We were traveling through a wooded area when a fawn leaped out in front of our car. Fortunately, I was driving under tte speed limit, wary that such an event could likely occur.  I stopped in time and the fawn had to not only cross in front of us. It then had to leap over a challenging guardrail for its youth and size. It stutter-stepped. It tried twice to leap over the obstacle. And finally made it over the guardrail to join its mother. Two years later, the other evening, our youngest daughter and I were on our way to her Senior Awards High School Dinner. About 200 meters from the entrance to the event'...

  Regardless, Love is Kind The least likely person to hurt you, I’ve found is not a hurt person. We’ve heard in various circles, the converse. I taught our youngest recently that hurt people usually won’t hurt someone else. Let that sink in, to you the reader. There’s a difference between a nice person and a kind person. My now deceased husband pointed this out to me about a decade or so ago. I agreed. Anyone can be nice. But not everyone can be kind. You have to choose to be kind. It takes some, more effort to be kind than to be nice. It was August 2005 as I drove my dad back to my home from my Goddaughter’s christening. The drive was long and arduous. It was a Sunday afternoon, and a hot one at that. The traffic on Route 80 was quite often at a standstill that day. So, the usual near six-hour drive took an extra ninety minutes or so. The good thing was I was the driver and I have a long fuse. If it were my dad then, he would have went through a half pack of cigarettes and...

  Hatred aimed at you is most likely not about you. It is about the person aiming hatred at you. Usually that’s what it’s about when it comes to any sort of bias. My older daughter had called me on Mother’s Day which also was the timing for her once a week call together on the phone as she was now on the west coast. We discussed her exams that have passed, others coming up, her work environment and friends. In that conversation she’d brought up something about a man we’d both known—yet had few interactions with. Her one experience was when she was age eight and her sister aged six. The man’s daughter was younger than both our daughters and was being friendly and showing her dog to them. The man yelled at his daughter as if to scold her for showing the dog to our daughters. My oldest said she felt that was odd. And that the few times she saw him, it was an odd stare in her direction that he gave. I expressed to her I’d had similar experiences concerning that man. After our oldes...