Delivering Door-to Door

As I sat in my pandemic isolation this past weekend, having less than passing interest in the Superbowl, and it’s attendant foolishness, I couldn’t help but be struck by that old saw: “what’s old once turns new again”.

 

Now it wasn’t just that those words had been etched into my brain by hearing them time and again as a boy.  My mother was forever chanting that mantra, oh, sure, in her case she was espousing platitudes to convince me that wearing my older brother’s outgrown clothes was not only perfectly acceptable, but a nod to being a fashion visionary.  I am quite certain that in my entire life no one has ever considered me to be a fashion icon.

And my ears rang with the same words as grandmother was trying to prepare me for what was to be one of the longest nights I have ever spent on a lumpy mattress temporarily elevated by a squeaky spring suspension out in the garage, accompanied by the noisy banging of the house heater, the equally loud gurgling of the water heater, and literally tons of hot rod engines and drag racing parts.

It certainly seemed to be a “family motto” as my mother’s father made the same claim as he explained why I was fishing with a string tied to an old cane pole with a bottle cork as a bobber and a piece of fat cut from the previous night’s meat instead of a nice new shiny rod and reel while out dragging carp off the river bottoms of central Oregon.

And while on the subject why in God’s name were we fishing for carp?

I had survived all of those indoctrinations relatively un-warped, at least on that account.

No, it was the constant rattle and prattle coming out of television commercials that had me keyed up.  Commercials offering “home delivery” from my pharmacy, or grocer, or even used car sales company.

Home delivery, sold as the “newest innovation” of a passionate caring corporate America.  Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon; spa’s, legal documents, exercise bikes, single meals made ahead, single meals for me to make at home, new cars, used cars, toys, planes, trains, flowers, garden sheds, and whatever else I could possibly need in my life.

And those home deliveries were not just through the mail in a “plain wrapper” stuffed in my mailbox, oh no, stuff is coming via UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS, various truckers, Door Dash, even flying drones and computerized rolling ice chests.

And if its food, who knows when the delivery “personnel” (human or machine) last washed their “hands”.

And yet, thinking back, I realized there was nothing “new” about this.  There had just been a few decades of adjustment since this was last readily available.

 

You see, as a boy, just beginning to find my way through life, I sold and delivered products door to door.  It was quite common in the 1950s and 1960s.

Among the various things I sold and hand delivered back in the late 60’s and early 70’s were:

            Flower and vegetable seeds for Burpee Seed Company

            Newspapers for the San Francisco Chronicle and the S.F. Examiner

            Brushes, brooms, mops, buckets, toilet cleaners, and cleaning supplies for Fuller Brush Company

            Bathroom and household linens, cleaners, and all manner of consumables for Amway

            Greeting cards, birthday, anniversary, and Christmas cards for some company I the name of which I can’t even recall.

            Christmas gift candles, ornaments, nativities, and kitchen towels for another outfit whose name has faded along with my memory.

            Chocolate bars and nut clusters

            Not to mention “Vandermolen’s; “Efficient weeding and detailed lawn care services””

 

And truth be told, I wasn’t making any $15 an hour at that.  But then, I wasn’t paying any taxes either.

But, that was before the politicians got involved and made it illegal for young children to have incentive.  Then they made it illegal for young children to actually go out and learn about the effort required to live up to the demands of a job, an employer, and a customer.  Before the politician’s made it illegal for kids to develop pride in their own ability, to set and accomplish goals, earn money, and save for a particular acquisition or for their future education.  Not to mention contributing to the local economies and reducing their educational debt burden thus denying the politician a wailing point about the need to “forgive” student debt.

Now of course, kids aren’t allowed to take on any of those jobs, because the politician who has to have a crisis to solve in order to justify re-election each cycle has “improved things” for us all.

 

© Copyright 2021, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved

Livermore High’s Football Bleachers

My brothers and I were born in the mid-to-late 50’s, ran wild staring in the early 60’s and had really hit our stride in the late 60s and through the mid-70s.

In our small town of Livermore, we roamed free, an experience that few children have known in the last 40 years or more, and in truth at a level that few children knew even back then.  We chased rabbits in the fields with homemade slingshots, jump shot ducks and “pinkie baited” crawfish along the arroyos; we gigged frogs in the flooded and abandoned rock quarries, fished in the golf ponds after hours and road bikes hither and yon all over the valley seeking, and mostly finding, adventures.

 

But, just about two blocks away from our house sat what was destined to become our alma mater, Livermore High School.  Foundered in 1891 it had already been attempting to bring culture, knowledge, and maturity to some 80+ years-worth of wild boys well before any of us graced its hallowed halls.  And one can’t blame Livermore High School, its teachers, or its staff for the spectacular failures it experienced in Barry, Jeff, and I.  For as alchemy proved centuries earlier, you simply can’t turn lead into gold to any high degree or with any regularity.

Now, I’m not saying that my two older brothers were troublesome, but for the longest time I thought my first name was really Ogodnotanother” by the way each of my teachers called roll on the first day of each school year when they got to my last name.

 

By our time, the campus consisted of an over-sized two story main building opened in 1931 during the height of the Great Depression, later stucco’d in 1937 as a WPA funded project, and three long single story general class-room buildings, a science class and lab building, an imposingly tall music building, and a large gym complex consisting of separate Boys and Girls locker rooms, separate full indoor wooden floored courts, and a pool that during the summers double as a community pool for the town where kids and adults both sought refuge from the triple digit temperatures that were quite common.  There was a metal shop and woodworking shop on campus as well, while the automobile shop was farther out East Avenue some mile and a half or so away from the main campus.

The property also included a baseball and soccer field off one side and a large paved basketball court, track and field, and a football field complete with steel pole and wooden seated bleachers off another side.  Each of those two areas was fully as large as the building section of the campus proper. 

As it happened, along with being very close to our house, the high school track and football field was in a straight line with one of the access points to the fields and railroad tracks that ran east out of town.  

Now railroads just seem to have a natural hold on the imagination of a boy, and we three spent a great deal of time walking those rail lines in the summers, and when we could get away from chores on the weekends as well, looking for treasures.  Rusty pieces of rail that had been bent and replaced, even rustier tie plates, old spikes, and whatever junk someone had chosen to throw out, whether off of a train, or just out of a pickup along the dirt road next to the tracks. 

We’d find upbroken soda pop bottles now and then, and even here and there a penny or a nickel that some other kid had lost.  Most of the coins I am sure had been placed on top of the track in an effort to get a passing train to squish then flat, rather like the penny crushers you see at fairs and arcades, but without the fancy embossed patterns.  Problem was, and I know this from vast personal experience, when a freight train that weighs 500,000 pounds or so comes rattling along (back then the rails were bolted together with ½” open joints or so, not welded into single pieces like now) a coin seldom sits there and waits to be crushed (most people won’t just calmly sit there either, so who can blame a penny).

Those soda bottles and pennies seldom saw home, mostly they went to the cash box of some local liquor store where we could trade in the bottle or penny for a piece of bubble gum or so.  Vut, as usual, I am drifting a bit.  I was talking about scrounging for treasures, and heck, I still have a number of old glass power pole insulators and even a couple old ceramic ones on display in my house that I found while kicking rocks along those creosoted rail ties, even though the pennies are long gone.

 

 

What with the proximity and location of the football field, my brothers and I spent a lot of time around those old wooden seated bleachers doing one thing or another.  Not sure how tall they were all in all, I know for a fact they are long gone now.  But they had most of 20 or 25 rows of seats and at the top there was a pipe railing across the back of the stand that must have topped out at 22-24 feet high.  In the middle of the “Home-team’s Side” was an added large wooden announcer’s box with wooden railed deck top for camera platform rising an additional 12 foot or so.

The whole structure was fabricated from 2” pipes sunk deep into concreted holes underneath and braced and cross braced all directions with 1-1/4 inch pipe.  Then 2” x 12” lumber was bolted down for seats and 2” x 6” lumber was bolted down for foot levels and steps.  Early on I don’t remember there being any chain link stretched across the back of those structures, and the track and field teams kept their landing mats for high-jump and pole-vaulting under the bleachers to be out of the way.

 

My first memories of playing on the bleachers are of swinging around under them in the pipe maze.  It was the world’s most elaborate jungle gym from our perspective and we spent hours pretending to be Tarzan flinging our way through the tree jungle without ever setting foot on ground.  Chase, tag, even “knock the nut” from the tree greased our hands, thickened our palms, and now and again knocked the wind out of us when we found ourselves the “appointed nut”.  Those times were wonderful in the cool dark shade offered by those bleachers on days that ran in the 100s and even 110s, even when we tore open a palm on a sharp bolt end or other metal bur.

 

But nothing ever remains the same as you grow older and those bleachers evolved as we grew up.  From expansive jungle gym they morphed into a tool when we started backpacking.  There is no exercise or conditioning quite so good at preparing you physically for carrying all your food, clothes, and sleeping gear on your back up and down mountains than running up and down bleachers until your calves and thighs screamed out an insistence that you stop and rest and catch your breath.  Good for conditioning the lungs and blood for hiking at 10,000 feet of elevation too.  At nearing 66 years of age, my calves remain the size of most people’s thighs and without any distinct layer of fat on them.  I firmly believe that is from the years of throwing papers from bikes and from running bleachers several dozen times a year in preparation for weekend and weeklong backpacking trips.

 

Then to complete the circle, as we grew into our mid-teens, those bleachers morphed back into play structures again.  Once we got old enough and strong enough, together, we three could grab ahold of the netting bags that enclosed the large foam blocks used to cushion pole-vaulters falls and drag them out from under the bleachers.  We would pull them out just far enough to use them as landing pads.

Once positioned, we would run around to the front of the bleachers, run up the stairs to the top, climb the railing, and launch ourselves out into space, freefalling, twisting, flipping, as we dropped to land safely in a cushion of foam; scramble off, and back around to the top again.

In our minds we dreamed of being stuntmen making movies, at least for a couple years, until reality wormed its way into our lives and set us all on different paths to more sure, more secure, healthier ways to make our livings.

Sometime around when Barry was a senior at Livermore high, when Jeff was a Junior, and I was a freshman; some coach, or janitor, or principal likely noticed us launching from the top of the announcer’s box and while they hollered and chased, we certainly were far too fast and experienced by then to be caught by some old man (who was then likely half the age I am now).  Once they spied us, they were certain to notice that no matter how sure they were that the pole-vault pads had been completely stuffed under the bleachers, the darn things kept creeping out.  And in a moment of uncharacteristic (for the time) concern about being sued by some parents whose kid misjudged the distance and hit dirt instead of foam, the decision was made to hold those things in place and chain link was installed with lockable gates to keep the net bags of foam from escaping ever again. 

Copywrite 2024 © Marty K Vandermolen

Rock Climbing 101

 I first began learning true rock-climbing skills along about 13.

 

Sure, my brothers and I had scrambled up and over cars, fences, bushes, rocks and steep hills for years before that time, and had spent uncounted afternoons attempting to climb around the internal perimeter of the garage walls without setting foot on the floor.  A game that somehow, regularly ended up with my skull dented by the tines of a heavy garden rack.

 

Heck, we even climbed scaffolding, bleachers, and building roofs; and to date, I am reasonably certain that the three of us were the only kids in history to be punished for climbing the 45-foot bell towers of Saint Micheal’s Church in Livermore.  Our protestations of innocent were weighted against the veracity of the old codger who lived across the street from our boyhood home, and a bit of belt tanning was used to tip the scales into presumptive balance.

 

But it was 13 years old before I really had an introduction to the sport of rock-climbing and anything that could be termed training.

 

That was the year I became a Boy Scout Patrol Leader, and I was lucky enough to be mentored by Roman Bystroff as our Patrol Dad.  Roman had been an avid climber when he was young and though the demands of job and family had trimmed his time and dedication, they had done nothing to diminish his joy of the sport.

 

 

Roman began by simply bringing along an old climbing rope he had on all of our scout trips.  Never pushing his agenda, Roman would set back and watch the ebb and flow of boys working on their skills, lashing poles, starting fires, or identifying edible plants.  Roman knew that at some point the scout outdoor skills work would devolve into some sort of boredom, expressed either as wandering off or brawls, depending on the day and the idiosyncrasies of the specific boys involved. 

 

Once that happened, the potential for a youth leader to reestablish control was virtually gone and the potential for serious injury grew exponentially.  Now that’s not a condemnation of youth leaders, but the raw truth of the matter is, as my father would say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.  The same idea holds true with boys; they can be lead, when they are willing to follow, but once their willingness is worn through, it is impossible to lead them anywhere.

 

That was when Roman would get up from where ever he was sitting keeping an eye on our progress, our injuries, and the likelihood that someone was going to be going home in an ambulance.  When he judged the time was right, he’d dust himself off, and wander over to his primitive campsite to retrieve a long climbing rope.  Perhaps primitive is the wrong choice of words, but certainly that or maybe minimalist are the best choices for Roman’s sleeping and cooking areas; he was one of the original “Leave no Trace” practitioners.

 

In all the years and on all the trips I shared with Roman, I never saw him pitch a tent.  In fact, I never saw him rope up a rain tarp.  Nope, if rain was likely or not, Roman simply laid a ground sheet on the ground, placed a ²/₃ rds pad down, and his sleeping bag.  Once rolled into his bag, if it should start to rain, all he did was to pull the extra ground sheet width over his sleeping bag and tucked it in, over his entire bag, head to foot, and over his face as well, then simply go back to sleep.

    

In any case, back to the main line of the story.  Long since, while sitting keeping an eye on us all, he had been looking over the various rocks, boulders, and dirt and rock walls within spitting distance of the campground.  It was magical to watch; Maria without an Edelweiss to be seen, Mary Poppins without an umbrella, The Pied Piper without a flute.

 

It helped that Roman looked the part, painstakingly and intentionally I realized years later.  He wore low-top hiking boots (European style), knee-length shorts, plaid shirts and always a felt Alpin hat.  He carried a leather flask “Bota Bag” instead of a canteen, and ate a simple mixture now known as “trail mix” for anything other than dinner, and often as not for dinner as well.

 

Years later I came to truly understand the reason that felt Alpin hats were so popular among climbers and non-climbers alike.  And while attired relatively similarly, you can readily tell the difference; Climbers do not have a belly that sticks out over belt or shorts, their forearms look rather like Popeye’s, and their felt hats never, ever have metal pins in them. 

 

“Wannabe’s” are fond of felt hats festooned with hat pins to show off where they had been.  But no serious climber ever did.  Cause while wearing a Felt Alpin hat may be stylish, the last thing you want while climbing is to “felt” what happens when a fist sized piece of rock lands on a pin that pierces your hat.  Felt hats provide a degree of cushion from a rock blow, but when a hat pin’s struck, it simply gets driven into your skull.

 

But they do keep your head warm during cool days, and they also provide a great place to hold “keepsake feathers” that you may have inadvertently torn out of some bird’s tail as it exploded past you while you are hanging with your feet precariously perched on tiny rock nubs, one fist stuffed in a crack, and the other hand inadvertently slaps down on a nesting Peregrine. 

 

Once your pulse rate and vocabulary settle back down, and you’ve mentally checked your drawers for dampness and any weight shift, you will see the humor in having used an extra feather or two to “row” your way slowly back towards the cliff face; propelled by the violent wagging of any feather you accidentally claimed.  And all it takes is one such event before you too will come to recognize that having your own stash of flight feathers will come in handy again someday.  But that is for a more involved story than this. 

 

As I was saying, Roman would wander back to his camp, dig a long section of climbing rope out of his backpack and stroll off to the closest obstacle to use setting up a bit of climbing practice.  We boys would naturally follow in orbit around him and next thing we would know Roman was coaching us in how to use our hands and feet and eyes to pick out nubs, projections, cracks and even some well rooted shrubs to scale whatever precipice he had selected.

 

We learned about three-point stances and grip methods; strengthen exercises, and limbering stretches as well; we scrapped up shoes, skinned knees, and quivered from equal levels of excitement and fatigue. 

We learned to use a rope from above to be “belayed” for safety while climbing.  We learned how to sit, and anchor ourselves and how to wrap the rope around ourselves when we sat “on top” and were the “Belayer”.  Through explanation, trial and error we learned how to control the tension on a climbing rope when a climber was moving up, down, or resting.  We learned the language of communication so that there was no confusion between climber and protector.

 

And then, best of all, we learned how to rappel.  There is nothing so much like freedom to a boy once he has learned how to trust himself and his rope that to walk backwards over a cliff and in controlled jumps leap out away from the cliff, control the fall rate and duration, and swing back into the cliff face with feet and knees acting as shock absorbing springs.

 

And this was no high-tech jamb nuts and ascenders type equipment rappelling either.  We learned to pretzel the rope around ourselves, using the friction of rope wrapped between the legs, up around the right side to your chest, over the left shoulder, and around under the right arm.  Left hand held the anchored part of the rope, right hand functioned as brake.  Speed was limited by the heat friction a person could tolerate.

 

Most of the boys found this a fun interlude in any weekend trip.  And activity to enjoy, but no more or no less than any other activity that Scouting regularly brought them into contact with.  But for me, those simple early days of scrabbling up 10 to 20 foot faces and launching back down again filled me with a sense of control in life that nothing else ever has. 

 

Over time I acquired a few carabiners, a couple pitons and made several crevasse nuts, slings, and quickdraws of my own.  I never could afford cams, true climbing shoes, belay devices or a good climbing helmet.

 

With experience small boulders and rock piles morphed into cliffs and mountains while I continued to climb with and without Roman’s presence and guidance for most of a decade, completely enjoying the strength, power, challenge, and confidence to be found in the vertical dimension.

 

 

   

 

Copyright © 2021 Marty Vandermolen All Rights Reserved

The Owl Hoot Trail

My brothers and I grew up in Livermore California, originally a ranch and vineyard area established in the early half of the 1800’s while California was still under Spanish Rule.  The town of Livermore finally incorporated in 1876 some 75 years before a Vandermolen set foot within the city limits.  For most of those 75 years the town had slowly, quietly, and sedately charted a course towards modernization.

I would like to point out for the record that I was not the first hooligan to roam the streets of Livermore.  Not only had my two brother’s beat me to that distinction, but so had several of the residents in Boot Hill out west of town.  

No, really, we had a hill on the west edge of town called Boot Hill, and yes, it really was a cemetery from the days of the Mexican war and gunfights, cowboys and gunfights, and prohibition and gunfights, and  well, heck, if’n you had known some of the characters around town when we were growing up, just gunfights and gunfights.

Yep, ol’ Livermore had been slowly passing time for more years than most folks had lived staying mostly the same. Then my brothers moved to town.  And there are those who would tell you the old town was never the same again.

But I digress.

The town came to be well before electricity arrived in that back country part of California.  In fact, one of the early events in the electrical field was back in 1901 when Dennis Bernal (the founder and owner of Livermore Power and Light Company) donated an electric light to light up the inside of the fire station.  That light was screwed in and the switch was thrown.  The bulb was originally rated as a 60 watt bulb and threw a glorious glow over the horse-drawn hand pumpers as they sat housed in the double bay of the brick fire house.

That was now some 115 years ago, and that light is still burning.  Admittedly its puny 4 watt consumption does little to provide safety for the firemen these days, but as the (by far) recognized oldest operating light bulb in history, that feeble glow seems to abnormally warm the hearts of the local politicians.

Let’s see, what got me started on that…Oh, yeah.  Electricity.

Since the town had been around long before electricity the residents had only three choices when it came to water supplies.  Bucket trips to the arroyos, dig a hand pump well in the yard, or for the really rich, build a windmill that would pump water up to a second story water tank.

The advantage of the elevated tank was that you could then plumb water directly into the house and do away with the whole bucket toting idea altogether.  

Ultimately Dennis Bernal did come to town and he did found the Livermore Power and Light Company and with that the city got into the water business.  The city acquired selected hill-tops (though not Boot Hill as it already served a purpose) and built water tanks on the top of those hills, sometimes on 60 foot high towers, sometimes, just on the ground.

With the electric motors they pulled water up out of wells, charged those tanks and let gravity carry water to all the households the city sold water to.  Yep, pretty soon everyone was dumping the bucket in favor of running indoor water.  And the rich were dumping their own water tanks in favor of ones owned and maintained by someone else.

Why is that important?   Well, because that meant that all over town there were these steep sided outbuildings that had 2000 gallon or so wooden tanks on top.  And those wooden tanks fell into disuse.

And after a few years of disuse, those tanks started to break open one slat or maybe two at a time.  Or several shingles would blow off the top during a storm.  And by the time Barry, Jeff, and I were old enough to get interested, most all of those old tanks had been taken over by barn owls as nesting sites.

Dad had employed my brothers and I to build chicken and pigeon coops all across the back of the garage and we were in the bird business pretty good.  Eggs, fryers, squab, whatever, if it flew and we could raise it, it was headed for a dinner plate someday.

We boys had been reading along about that time about Knights and Kings and hunting with falcons.  And while we never saw a falcon nest anywhere other than in the top of a couple hundred foot tree, we figured out while out in the early mornings throwing papers where the Barn Owls nested.  

One thing and another and next thing you know we were all experimenting with sneaking up the steep side of someone’s well house to get to the top of the tank and worm our way in to liberate baby owl.

It might surprise you to know that the best time for hunting baby owls is when it is full on dark.  That time is best for two reasons, first is that  the mother is usually off hunting in the early dark hours and second is, you don’t want any part of trying to liberate a baby owl while the mother is anywhere within earshot.

If the beak or claws miss you, the dang wings will beat your head silly.

And so, off and on growing up the chickens and pigeons uncomfortably spent time close to a feathered “friend” they would have been just as happy to have never met.

We were never allowed to keep those wild critters very long.  Usually a month or two while they finished growing their full flight feathers, or ‘fledging’ as it is known.

After that point, we had to turn them loose to remain wild.

So for a month or two most years, my brother’s and I took turns feeding voracious ripping machines odds and ends of trimmed uncooked meat and old out-dated liver from the grocery stores while their feathers developed and their flying abilities were exercised in the fairly large cage they had.

Both of my forefingers carry scares to this day, cause a baby owl that is trying to latch onto a meal tends to close his eyes and once his beak sinks in, he is of no mind to let go.

But the pain then and scars now where more than off-set by a close up opportunity to watch a bird of prey develop, both physically and mentally.  As the bird grew we switched from near rotten liver to dead mice for their diets.  And for a short time tethered live mice, until finally just live mice loose in the pen.

We used to make live traps out of 2 and 5 pound coffee cans.  WH would drill and screw what nowdays would be thought of as an “old-fashioned” wooden mousetrap to the rim of the empty can with the trigger inside the can.  Then we would use thin wire to fix 1/8th inch mesh to the trap’s wire bail, finally adding a broad trigger pad to the trap.

Once set and baited, anything the crawled into the trap had to push against the large trigger plate releasing the wire mesh to be flipped up and close of the can’s opening.

We would set those improvised traps all over town.  Some in fields with lots of tall grass and little anmial runs, some downtown in garbage canned alleys, out along the vineyards, or over by the railroad tracks.  We ran a trap string back then that would have been the envy of any mountain man of yore.

And from them would come the mice to train the barn owls how to not starve.

Our time with those owls were all too short.  But we learned any number of truths trying to raise and release those Owlets.  Remembering makes me want to build a cage and  go sneaking around a few old buildings.

©Copyright 2016 Marty Vandermolen All Rights Reserved

Life so often sneaks past us.

Or in the words of various individuals throughout the latter half of the 20th century; “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans”.

The “great choices” of life, those that carry with them true life changing results, and that shape the destiny of each life, so seldom call attention to themselves.  They come and go, dressed up as small events, tiny irritants, and miniscule frustrations.  We tend to them without thinking, and sometime later if we are lucky, we realize that we tended to them poorly. 

I’ve been lucky enough to have several epiphanies in my life that clearly and immediately rebalanced my future.  Diving into cold dark waters seeking a drowning child, hanging stuck 300 feet up an exposed granite rock face while free-climbing, looking along the sights of a loaded weapon at another human being, falling 30 feet off of a building to crush my spine, performing CPR and resuscitation breathing on a wilderness trail; each of those events presented moments of clarity for me where I realized that the decisions and actions that had led me to those points, and the decisions and actions that would lead me forward from those points, were going to be pivotal to my life.

But the most impactful epiphany I have ever had borne none of the immediately recognizable potential of any of those other three.  My most impactful epiphany occurred one evening, as I was rushing home on the highway, late, again, knowing that my wife would find ways to express her displeasure.

Like uncountable men before me, and uncounted men since I was supposed to have broken off work and been home at a prescribed time.  And with the digital clock inconveniently located right next to the speedometer, it was obvious that the car couldn’t move fast enough to get me home before I was going to be close to 2 hours late.

And like uncountable men before me, I blamed the unfairness on the world.  I was supposed to be the “breadwinner”, my wife expected me to climb the corporate ladder and provide; cars and homes, and tuitions, and vacations.  And I was doing that.  We had agreed before we wed, her job was to finish school and bear and raise our children, mine was to drop out and take the opportunity to move into management with the retail company I worked for and build a career around that.

And I had done so, hadn’t I?  I had become a department manager, and then an assistant manager trainee, and on through being an assistant manager to “first” assistant, and finally to store manager.  Each time I was moved from store to store I dug in afresh.  I learned more, taught better, harnessed experiences and built a better more rounded suit.  I was damn good at it.  I was the very pattern of retail success.

But it had come at a price.

Time.

Time away from home.

Time away from family.

Time that wasn’t my own.

And that time, the same I was racing against that night, that time had robbed me of my family, as surely as it had robbed my family from me.

For you see, I was going to be 2 hours late for my son’s 9th birthday.

And as I thought about that, while willing the speedometer to pass 80 and move on to “time travel”, I had my epiphany.

My Son.  My son was 9 years old.  When, how, why hadn’t I seen?  And being done with 9 he was entering the time in life when he would soon come face to face with pivotal choices of his own; drugs, girls, cars, college, career, all of those issues that begin to close in on people somewhere between 5th grade and 12th.  

And I realized that when he faced those choices, he was going to have to face them alone, or worse, armed only with the council of his peers.

Because, well, because he didn’t know me; and because I didn’t know him.

There was no reason to think he would come ask my advice.  For all of his awareness I was gone when he woke up, and came home about the time he went to bed.  For all of his days I worked an average 70 hours a week.  Six solid days, and often some time on the seventh.

 I had wasted fully half of my son’s life.    

I say half because my real epiphany was that after my son turned 18 and moved out (to college, or work, or whatever life brought) I would be lucky to see him another 250 days in the rest of our lives.

Think about it.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, part of a weekend here, an evening there, maybe a few days in the summer if schedules allow for coordinated vacations.  Say 8 days a year at best.

From birth to 18 years old, six thousand five hundred and seventy days.

From 18 to his or my death, maybe 250 additional.

Ninety-six percent of the time I would ever have available would be before he turned eighteen.

My epiphany during that drive was that my son was half way to 18 and I had already wasted 3,285 days 

It took some time to arrange it, but I walked away from my retail passion.  I stepped out from the known and confident into the unknown and unsure.

And to be truthful, there have been some financially rough times since.  Times were our accounts bled red ink all over the statements.

But I got involved in Cub Scouts, and Boy Scouts, and 4-H, and my son and I and daughter and I camped, and hiked, and boated, and fished, and explored.

We read together every night before bed, and built bikes and cars.  And I drove them to races and college, and theatre rehearsals.

And none of that was easy, I worried more than when I had been working 70 hour weeks.  I worried about how to make the mortgage, I worried about how to pay the bills, and buy the clothes, and afford a movie now and then.  Our income dropped by some 60%, my “vacation” tiem was consumed whit some youth group for 15 years or more, I had evening meetings schedules most nights for 18 to 20 months out ahead of me.

The house slowly fell into disrepair as I would look at a chore and say “I can do that, or I can spend some time with Bryan or Allison, and time with always won out.

Now they are grown and gone. My son lives over a thousand miles away, My daughter most of the same (when she and her husband are actually in this country).  And I am back to 60+ hour weeks and focusing on improving the home property.

And I have realized that while hopefully I have many years ahead, my best living was between my son’s 10th birthday (my daughter’s 8th) and both of their 20th birthdays.  Those were the years I truly lived.

It’s not that I am not doing now.  I am painting, and wood carving, writing books and poems; I’m building structures and growing vegetables, gardens, shrubs and myself.

But, that was when I was “Dad” and when I created time, and opportunities, and memories that will stay with my children and flow to their families.  

That was when I was fully alive.

©2019 Copyright, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved

Nature Versus Nurture Raises its Head Once Again

My thoughts were drawn back to the old “Nature” versus “Nurture” argument the other day while working on building a picket fence for the north side of my driveway.  Before I go too much farther I suppose I should set up the situation a little so that you have a chance to follow along.

Oft times while growing up my brothers, Barry and Jeff, made vociferous claim that I was not related to them in any fashion.  They went so far with the representation as to create in their own minds at least an entire experience in which I joined the family.  

According to them, one summer while on one of our father’s fabulous 24 states in 21 day tours, Barry came across me huddled under a rock in a campground out in the middle of the desert.

Note the allegory here, I wasn’t found sleeping in the rushes and thus evoking Moses; I wasn’t found sleeping next to a campfire evoking either Rumpelstiltskin or Paul Bunyon; nope, I was found under a rock in the God forsaken desert; thereby giving them license to treat me as just another dark crawly thing instead of a human being.  License they regularly took.

In any case, according to their tale Barry found me and told Jeff and Jeff carelessly spilled the beans to Mom.  And as you all know, Mom was of course far too compassionate and generous to leave me there and thus I became a Vandermolen by right of “drag-along” (kinda like how Jeff tried to get a Basset Hound one time), though not of true blood (not sure that Bassett was either) and without the choke hold of a rope around my neck either.

Based on that representation of “fact” my brothers often claimed that any tendencies that I had that were similar to theirs were only because I learned from them and not because there was anything “natural” in the behavior in and of itself.

Okay onwards to the picket fence.

Some 27 years back or there about I purchased several premade cedar picket fence sections from Home Depot to fence the yard for a dog for my son and daughter.  In the time between those fence sections have served to corral one dog, one goat, two lambs, one archery range, and a bit of garden now and then. All in different locations.

Over the years the termites have taken their toll on the pickets, posts and rails while the lichen or moss has had its way with just about all of it.  The pickets were covered in green moss, the soft grain carved concave and the bottom several inches of pickets and posts termite riddled with dry rot chasing the termites up and down the length of the rails.

What with this whole Covid pandemic and the fact that retirement is hinting at me from the sidelines I have been exploring less on weekends and accomplishing more around the house.  Now that old Dutchman who raised me (father or not as the brothers claim) taught me long ago there are two things you never want to own…the best looking place on the block, or the worst looking place on the block, cause either way you won’t get your money’s worth when you go to sell.  

So the day came when I looked at those old fence sections leaning up against the oak tree and thought: “those thigns are an eyesore and should be run to the dump”.  But along with teaching me about houses on blocks, My dad also taught me that “it not what you make, but what you don’t spend that counts” and so instead of loading them in a trailer for the dump I thought: “you know, there has never been a fence next to the driveway, I’ll just clean those up a little bit and build one”.

Cleaning up a “little bit” equaled pressure washing each linear inch of every board (all four sides) on each fence section, knocking the pickets loose from what was left of the rails, cutting up and burning the rails in the BBQ pit sitting alternately feeding the fire and hammering the old nails out of the pickets so as not to get a scratch and lockjaw (or is it hydrophobia?) and to be able to stain and then fix the pickets back into something that looked like a fence.

It was along about the hammering time that the whole nature versus nurture issue came back to my mind.  Was I busy salvaging these old things cause I was just another tight fisted Dutchman?  Or was I tight fisted because of the pattern observed as a boy growing up?

Am I disturbed that the whole topic didn’t come up when I was faced with the decision to drive to the dump with these old 27 year old pieces of termite riddled rotted wood and just buy nice fresh usable fence sections on the way home?  Honestly, no.  You see my father once had my brothers and I help him salvage some light fixtures, wire, conduit and switches from the Pleasanton Fairgrounds along about when I was 8 and I know for a fact that even though close to 55 years have gone by and Dad now lives 1200 miles from Pleasanton…he still has some of that wire and conduit with him “cause someday I might use that stuff”.

So no, it wasn’t pulling the old dead vines off of those fence sections, nor the pressure washing, nor the knocking apart, nor burning old wood.  It wasn’t even the by then planned staining (using leftover stain from the front retaining wall project), nor the fact that I was going to have to trim all the pickets and posts to new lengths, or buy new 2 x 3 for rails, and stain those too…….

Nope it was when I was picking up the nails I had knocked out of those boards.

You see, many a summer day my brothers and I spent hours sitting hammer in one hand, bent nail in the other on the sidewalk out in front of our house with a coffee can of bent nails on our left, and a coffee can of “straightened” nails on our right and an old brick or piece of concrete, or just the surface of the sidewalk as our anvil.  

We were handling one of the many chores that Dad left us every summer morning in misspent hopes of keeping us busy enough to not round up rattlesnakes, mess with the Catholic Priests, or tie up any more babysitters.

And truth be told there is a skill involved in straightening out a bent nail so as to make it usable again….To this day I am not sure what value that skill holds, but its there.  You can experience it for yourself, or you can trust me on this one.

And so after having generated a pile of some 250+ rusty nails at my feet in the area I had been nail pulling and gathering them up, I got to thinking about the proof of that whole nature versus nurture thing.

But you see, my son is already 38 and it’s too late for him to learn the skill of straightening nails (or at least straightening them for some “maybe day” project for me), so I faced a conundrum.  Do I live up to the genetic pull to invest a couple hours straightening out nails so they don’t “go to waste”?  Or do I simply throw them out?

And while I am not entirely proud of the fact that I chose to go buy new screws to put the fence together with, I console myself with knowing that by tossing those things in the garden I’ll be saving on Iron amendment for several years and so I can still claim to be living up to the Dutchman in me.

© Copyright 2020 Marty K Vandermolen, All rights Reserved

The Need for Speed - Part 1

Feeding the Need for Speed

Maybe it was the era we grew up in, maybe it was our genetic coding, and maybe it was just plain opportunity; but long before the movie “Top Gun” came out, Barry, Jeff, and I surrendered to the need for speed. 

American automobiles had begun their march towards more muscle and more speed shorty after World War II when in 1947 NASCAR was founded.  In 1949 Oldsmobile debuted the first 300+ cubic inch V8 with dual overhead cams producing 135 horse power in a 3580 lb car, or 26.5 pounds vehicle weight for every horsepower.  In 1951 Chrysler introduced the Hemi engine.  Chevy introduced the small block V8 the same year Barry was born (1955).

In 1957 the year between Jeff’s birth, Chevy introduced Fuel injection; Ford and Studebaker introduced Superchargers; and Pontiac had both factory fuel Injection and factory equipped “Tri-Power” or three two barrel carburetors on a six cylinder production engine.


But even more “mind molding” was the true explosion of American Muscle that was launched in 1964 When the Pontiac Grand Turismo Omologata’s (GTO) 389 cubic inch, 3 double barreled 348 horse powered ground pounder tipped the scales at an exciting one horse power for every 8.9 pounds of vehicle weight, only to be outclassed 6 months later by the lean 1964-1/2 Ford Mustang that tipped in at an amazing one horse for every 7.8 pounds of vehicle weight.

And the race was on.

By the end of the 60s; 5 short years later, classics like the 351 Cleveland 385 stock HP, and the Dodge 426 Hemi 425 stock HP had dropped that vehicle to horse power ration down to 6.5:1.  Several American manufacturers were turning out V8s with an astounding 500 plus cubic inches.  For you Rice rocket fans, you’d need an 8.5 liter engine to equal the size of those monsters. 

And while cars today run faster quarters than back then, it’s only because the engine armament race slowed way down in the early 70’s thanks to the federal government’s imposing tighter fuel restrictions, and then even more in the late 70’s with the first of the environmental laws.


At the same time out on the salt flats of Bonneville there was a tremendous battle raging over the fastest car on earth, primarily fought out between Craig Bredlove’s Spirit of America and Art Afron’s Green Monster. 

In 1962 Craig Breedlove became the first man to exceed 400 miles an hour behind the wheel of the Spirit of America. In early ’63 the Green Monster topped that record with a 409 mph run.  A couple months later, Spirit was back on the salt and grabbed 434 mph; late ’63 rolled around and Afron ran a 458 mph run, only to be eclipsed a week later by Bredlove at 522 mph.  1964 saw Green Monster run a blistering 536 mph, Spirit answered with 552 mph; in summer Green Monster appeared to slam the door with two successive 571 mph runs (that is about 2-3/4 football fields end to end in one second). 

August slide by, and September, then just before the end of the racing season when everyone thought the issue had been permanently decided, Craig Bredlove laid down a stunning 600.6 mph run to stamp Spirit of America firmly in the history of land speed racing (a full three football fields and an astounding 5% faster that the Green Monster).

And while Bonneville had become dominated by jet powered vehicles, the local Drag Race scene was alive with poor boy’s home built thunder machines.  Straight 6 engines and V8’s ran side by side and door to door.  There were 8 or 9 quarter-mile dragstrips within an hour’s drive of our small town and at those strips, along with the local boys, men like Don Garlits came calling.  “Big Daddy” Don Garlits had a run of speed records in the 60’s becoming the first man to exceed 170 mph from a standing start in a ¼ mile run.  Then he doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down being the first man to exceed 180, then 200, 240, 250, and 270 mph from a standing start in under ¼ mile. 

And all the while Garlits, Afron, and Richard Petty proved that this was all about the driver and the skill, and not the money.

Garlits blew up a transmission on a slingshot dragster that took off part of a foot, and during the winter break invented the rear engine dragster design that remains dominate today some 50 years later.  And a year later he was the first to start running alcohol for fuel instead of gasoline. 

Afron powered his Green Machine with a wounded jet engine he bought from a scrap dealer after a bolt had been sucked through the blades.  He pulled out the broken blades, threw them away, and reassembled the engine; balancing it by distributing the remaining blades with empty slots all without manuals or drawings, which were all classified at the time.

And while Richard Petty ultimately seemed to print money, he started out dragging a car around on a trailer from event to event and ultimately racked up any number of records on dirt tracks, figure 8s and asphalt ovals.  Petty started 1,184 races in his career, pole position on 127 races, finished over 700 races in the top ten drivers, won 200 races, 27 in one year alone, and won both the Daytona 500 and the NASCAR annual championship 7 times.
 

Yep, the times we grew up in were filled with the throaty roar of machines that existed only to turn oil, gasoline, and rubber, into sound, speed, and black stripes on the asphalt.  Machines that existed not as the engineer designed them, but as the mechanic-driver breathed life into them.

Just as Barry, Jeff, and I were beginning to wrench on cars of our own, those monster muscle cars of the early 60’s were being sold off as affordable used cars.  Ten years old, and 100,000+ miles and they were in need of much more repair than the average working man wanted to have waiting for him every weekend.

The seals were worn, the parts were loose, the bolts were rusty, and the windows leaked.  But for a few hundred dollars and some sweat and parts, a boy could have a fire-breather of his own to fuel his dreams of real speed; limited more by his effort than his wallet, and an inspiration to every other boy in the valley.

Is it any wonder then that we gravitated to the now clichéd “need for speed”?

Barry’s first car was a 1960 Ford thunderbird.  Native 360 cubic inch displacement, rolled off of the assembly line faster than the police cars of the same year.

Jeff’s first machine was a 1964 Chevy Impala with a native 327 that ended up over-bored, shaved, and fast with a capitol F.

And a few months before I turned 14 years of age I bought a 1935 Ford PU and paired it with a ‘48 Mercury flathead V8.  It was thirty five years later in the early 1980s when Detroit came out with a production engine that pound for pound developed more horsepower than that ’48 Merc.  And coupling that powerful, torquey flathead to a three speed and 4.11:1 rear end meant that truck flew from 0-55mph faster than anything else around.

I shut down Camaros and MGs, Corvettes and GTOs; home builds and custom shop rods, whatever came along.  If we were racing light to light, that pickup's rear bumper was clear out the far side of the intersection while the competition was still trying to get its rear bumper into the intersection. 


Sure, it called for time and effort.  And often enough we found ourselves making hasty repairs on the side of some road somewhere while we were supposed to be back at school.

Is it any wonder that we carried pocket knives to school back then?  If we hadn’t, our finger nails would have always been rimmed in greasy black dirt.

© Copyright 2017, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved

Old Things

I’m comfortable with old things. 

Perhaps it is because I was born to parents of the great depression.

Perhaps it is because I was born to parents from farming communities.

Perhaps it is because my parents taught me “It’s not what you make, but what you don’t spend that counts”.

Or perhaps it is because I have always been one.


I drive old cars
A 1970 VW SingleCab Pickup
A 1955 Ford F100
A 1951 Willys
A 1968 Mustang

I sail a 1965 Cal 28 sloop

I shoot old guns
A 1911 7 x 57 mm Mauser German WWI infantry rifle
A 1952 Checlosavakian pistol
A 1940 6.5mm x 52 mm Carcano WWII Carbine

I shop at Second Hand shops, Garage Sales, Flea Markets, and (my personal favorite) the dump.

From those places I’ve bought canoes, kayaks, boats, surfboards, cookware, clothes, books, decorations, tools, movies, and furniture.  All of which work, all of which I paid pennies on the dollar for, all of which were thrown away/given away/sold, not because of lack of value, but because of lack of being valued.

Old things have earned their place in history, and thus have earned my respect.  They have proven their worth in the most extreme and demanding realities, they are far more valuable than today’s flashy fashionable purchase.

More often than not, you can take a careful look at the desire and function of some old item and you can see the exact inspiration and brilliance that led to their design.

I treasure my old scout stove, now a veteran of 50 years of cooking for me in the outdoors.

I rely on my old buck skinning knife, also a 50 year veteran tool.

Heck, nearly 40 years ago I used a wood lathe that then was over 50 years old to turn the candlesticks used in my wedding.

99% of the engineering work today is just “incremental” advance of an idea that blossomed to fruition decades ago.

And while I can afford to go out and buy a brand new gun, or knife, tent or sleeping bag, backpack or binoculars….why should I when I already have the “original” in hand?

© Copyright 2015 Marty Vandermolen All Rights Reserved

Dating My Daughter

Some 25 or more years ago I came across a set of rules that a Sheriff’s Deputy wrote up concerning dating his daughter.  Never one to let wisdom slip by unnoticed, after reading them I gave them very careful consideration.

In thinking about them, I realized that he had used a bit of humor to address a subject that was very real and very sensitive between fathers and daughters.  And so, I decided to sit down and follow in his footsteps working from his draft to rework and modify a set of rules that would work for my daughter and me.

When I brought them home and gave a set to her, I can still remember Allison sitting on the hearth with her back to the hot woodstove, reading, laughing, and smiling at both the words on paper and the feelings that were behind them.

When Allison finished reading them she looked up and said: “I’d take these in to school and show them to the boys…but then I would have to spend time explaining to them that you were serious”.



Rules to Date My Daughter – as modified by Marty Vandermolen

Before I get into the specific rules associated with dating my daughter, it is only reasonable that I spend a moment or two letting you get acquainted with me.

I am comfortably over 6 feet tall and tip the scales at close to 250 pounds.  I am a genial man who likes to see everyone around him live up to their best potential, and in point of fact, in your case, I will insist on that.  I wrestle 1,000 pound 55 gallon drums around for a living; I fish, hunt, and have been known to plunge into a thicket of brush right behind some bear that stole something from camp, and have in fact retrieved every last item.  Despite all of that, my wife has been known to say; “Marty is the easiest man in the world to live with, as long as he gets things his way, and he usually does.”

Now that we know a little bit about each other (oh, yes, I know you; I was you once), let’s get a couple things clear about dating Allison.

Rule #1
My daughter’s name is Allison.  Her name is not “Mamma”, “Homegirl”, “Babe”, “Yo Bitch”, “Skank”, “Pass Around” or any other name or term currently in the vocabulary your age group uses to identify young women.  With her permission, you may call her by her nickname “Allie”.  If I hear any of these other terms used to refer to my sweet girl you will have earned an immediate response from me, her father.

Rule #2
I am Allison’s father.  You can call me “Sir”.  This is as in “Yes, Sir”, “No, Sir”, “I wouldn’t even think of it, Sir”, and “I will definitely remember this valuable advice, Sir”.

Rule #3
Do not touch my daughter in front of me as it may provoke an unpleasant and admittedly, probably overly aggressive response on my part.  You may glance at her if you like; as long as your glances are from the neck up.

Rule #4
When a woman says “No”, it means “No”.  However, when Allison says “No” it means “If you don’t immediately stop what you are doing I will tell my Dad, and very soon, when you are alone and least expect it, he will be standing behind you in the dark with a grin on his face waiting for you to turn around so you and he can have a ‘friendly’ conversation” about modifying your behavior.

Rule #5
If you stop in front of my house and honk, you had better be delivering pizza.  If I learn that you are honking for my daughter, I will come outside and twist your honker off.  The same holds true if you yell or whistle for her.  One yells at idiots and whistles for dogs…my daughter is neither, and if I for even one moment have reason to think that you believe she is, right after twisting off your honker, I will move on to other select portions of your anatomy. 

Rule #6
When you meet me for the first time, please do not feel uncomfortable if it appears that I am staring at you.  I only do that when I meet someone that I may later have cause to go looking for and it is a time honored system that has proven to minimize the potential of some innocent bystander being injured in a misunderstanding.

Rule #7
Please bring my daughter back home in the same shape she left.  This extends to the condition of her clothes as well.  Drive carefully and safely.  Protect her from drunks and obnoxious people.  Do not coax her to try drugs, alcohol, or sex.  Always be ready to throw your body between her and any type of injury flying in her direction.  It is your job to protect her when she is with you, and if she should come to anything that I would define as harm and you aren’t bloodied and bruised, believe me when I assure you; you will be.

Rule #8
Do not spread around school or to your friends any stories about my daughter, whether true or untrue.  If you do, be prepared to explain to those same people how it is that you appear to have run into a large roll of falling concertina wire in the dark or some other equally plausible explanation for the condition you will be in when next they see you.

Rule #9
I am aware it is considered fashionable for boys your age to put “hickeys” on the necks of their girlfriends.  I can only guess that it is done to show your friends how passionate your time with my daughter has been.  I would refer you to Rule # 8 above and tell you that while you may think you are communicating how passionate you can be, what you are really telling me is that you place no value on your health or well-being.  Oh, and as a side note, history has proven that full body casts are effective passion reduction devices. 

Rule #10
Allison will always have a specific time in the evening when I expect her home.  Please take this curfew seriously because I will not be able to sleep until I know that she has returned home safely.  If you bring her home too late, or God forbid, the next morning, the unsmiling camouflaged face staring through the window of your car will be mine.

Hopefully, my final comment:
Young man, if you are still reading these rules you must really care for my daughter, and I place great value on that.  Seriously, there is only one rule; “Care for my daughter, her heath, and her happiness as much as I do”, as long as you do, not only will you survive this relationship, you will have done so by virtue of proving that you are a man.

Copyright 2002 Marty Vandermolen All rights reserved

Experiencing Life

Until recently, I thought I had had a typical childhood.

If those of you who have heard some of my stories would quit laughing so loud and choking; and stop the sarcastic comments while you’re at it; I can continue sharing with the newbies in the group.


You know how it is.  You see the world from your own perspective.  And my perspective on what a typical childhood was like was certainly shaded (some might say twisted) by my personal experiences.  I had my observations of my life’s experiences, and I augmented my observations with the experiences of the closest other boys I knew growing up, and came to the understandable conclusion that an active childhood was normal.

Hindsight has brought me to understand that “Active” was a massive understatement.

Sure, the other close boys were my two older brothers, and those few lads around our home town that could semi keep up with us.


Now, it may be critical information to know that my eldest brother is only 35 months older than I, and that here was an additional “middle brother” as well; who was just about 16 months younger than the eldest, and 19 months older than I.

Yep, three boys in 35 months; kinda makes you question the over-all level of sanity that’s embedded in my family gene pool, doesn’t it?  Add to that the fact that the first was born about 14 month’s after my parents married, and that I, the last, was born before our mother reached legal drinking age.

So, while my brothers and I were not exactly of the same den’ing, we were unquestionably a single pack.


Barry felt put out being the oldest, feeling that he had to fight harder for each step forward than did either Jeff or I.  And I for one am willing to give him that; as long as he is willing to admit that some of his more spectacular failures delayed Jeff and I receiving some of those same freedoms.  So all in all, Barry had to fight harder for selected freedoms, but Jeff, and much more to the point I, had to wait regardless of our arguments for the calendar pages to fall before we were granted equal rights.
But if truth be told, the three of us were not particularly adept at waiting and tended to just reach out and do; with or without approval; knowing all the while that there would likely be a price to be paid when our actions came to light.

Now my son one time famously told his mother that “it wasn’t fair” that he “didn’t get to do the kind of things Dad did while growing up”.  His mother looked at him like he was prone to riding short buses and said; “do you really think that Dad and his brothers asked permission to do all that stuff?”


But I digress.  Growing up Barry, Jeff, and I pulled many of the stunts that I’ve since written about and many more that I haven’t even attempted to transfer from recollection to paper.

Now as most youth, I grew through my active days and moved on to a short stint or two grappling with higher education, invested in building a career and started a family.  All life events that tend to take the spontaneous “hey, let’s go and…” out of life’s pattern; well, except for those people who start every adventure with “hold my beer a sec…”..

Yep, years passed between my own childhood and the firmly established childhood of first my son and then my daughter.  And as those childhoods blossomed and I, as a supposed “adult” was drawn into Boy Scouts, 4-H and other youth programs, and I found myself sitting around campfires with various groups of other people and their children.

Now, there is something special about a campfire; a special communion of those present with each other, and with themselves.  Maybe it’s that wood magically turns into light, heat, glowing colors, and popping sounds.  Perhaps it is the curtain of darkness around the circle warmed and lit by the fire, or it might be the feeling of anonymity created by the obscuring legions of smoke that march first this way and then that around the circle and into the darkness beyond.

Whatever it is, it has been for tens of thousands of years; and it has always been around just such smoky, warm, dark enchanted circles that the art of storytelling first crawled forth from some hunter, who if we’re being honest was likely shading the truth a bit in hopes of attracting a better blanket mate; and then spread like a rampant disease throughout the tribe and virally leapt to the next circle of nighttime fire watchers.  Ultimately, it has been around the blistering red coals of night that the storytelling art has been perfected.   

And so, as first my son and then my daughter began to sit around evening campfires with friends and parents, I began to draw up recollections of things that Barry, Jeff, and I did as boys.  In an effort to encourage the kids around the campfire to stretch their imaginations and participate in the communing, I began to offer up those recollections of my youthful activities.  Little did I expect either of the reactions that were drawn forth from the gathered crowds.

Universally the youth found points to laugh about.  Now in truth, my sense of humor can be a little bit dry and I have been known to exaggerate a point or two, but the kids readily enjoyed these stories of growing up a generation earlier, often asking for some particular story to be repeated for both their enjoyment and for whatever new child was along that had yet to hear the tale.

Equally universally, the adults’ eyes sprang open like large white plates.  Eyes wide, often slightly out of focus as if they had been popped hard, on the nose, the adults sat still, listening with slowly shaking heads and gaping mouths.  With my sense of humor, I found the grinding incredulity of the adults to be incentive enough to dredge up additional stories.  You could hear the internal circuits click, pop, and ultimately short out when each adult ultimately came to the same realization; They had foolishly entrusted the lives and mental stability of their own retirement plan to a lame-brained antisocial troublemaker.

It was that second reaction that got me to revisiting my own childhood and reconsidering the type of child I had been.

It was that second “life review” that brought me slowly to understand; my brothers and I had been full on wild hellions as kids.  Not kind of, not once in a while, but day in, day out, hell raisers who, though without a single malicious thought, had left indelible tracks in the history of our small town.


I realized that I owed my parents an apology, most especially my mother.

And I owed neighbors (now long dead) apologies as well.

And I can’t even begin to define what I owed the baby sitter we tied up and threatened to burn at the stake.


 I was stunned.  Or as stunned as I have ever been by anything other than a chromed-steel bumper up side the head.

Next time I saw my oldest brother I just had to share with him the epiphany that I had had.  And yet, once again in life, he proved the relationship between wisdom and experience.  For when I said to him “You know, I just recently realized we were real hellions as kids”.

His response was; “I remember when I first came to that conclusion, but I don’t think of it as that any more, now days I just say; “we found more ways to ‘experience life’ than any of the other kids did”.

© Copyright 2019, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved

Recapturing the Wonders of Life

Just a few days ago, while poking through the dust and partially used items at one of my favorite second hand shops I found a small diary. 

I often find diaries at second hand shops.  Most have never seen a written word inside of their many pages of possible thoughts, feelings, and dreams.  Most are about five inches wide, seven inches tall, and have perhaps 190 ruled pages for thoughts and ideas.

While I am mostly on the hunt for blank paged sketch books, I purchase many of these diaries to use in drafting poems and story ideas while away from home.

But on this day, the dairy I found was unique.  First, it was much smaller than the normal, being maybe 3 inches wide by 5 inches tall.  Then there was the fact that it was much thicker with 250 or more ruled pages (double sided).  And all in all, each page had room for perhaps a total of 30 inches of writing while the typical diary offers more like 120 or more inches of line.  And finally, the dairy was titled; “Daily Memorable Moment”.


Thinking: “this will be a fun way to pen a few words each day” I happily paid the $1 being asked and took the little diary home.

Now I have been a storyteller most all of my life.  And along with being granted a fanciful imagination, I have lived with a positive outlook and been gifted with a textual memory that holds and feels details years and decades after an event. 

I’ve written stories and poems; Recounted adventures and pain, Explained morals and desires, and hungers, and gains.

And yet, when I sat down the first many nights to record my memorable moment, I found myself struggling to find a positive worthy personal experience that had happened that day to record.  Oh, the first night was not too difficult, I wrote of finding the dairy and getting it for such a reasonable price that even my Dutch forbearers would be proud.

And the second night I noted the feeling of progress as I prepared for a garage sale (feeling good about clearing some clutter out of my life.

The third day was harder, I thought and reviewed my feelings, my experiences of the day, and had to finally settle for a brief note about the joy I get driving my 50 year old VW around and seeing people smile as I pass.

But the fourth night had me stymied.

I sat, blank minded for what felt like an eternity, reaching back over the day, reviewing from above, beyond, and before each of the moments of that day.  And sill I came to grasp at empty air each time I tried to firm up a single experience that had left a memorable impact on me.  That day.

The more I thought, the blanker my mind became; until at some point, it drifted out of my head altogether and simply left me sitting there.

For long minutes I was simply blank.  My mind prepared no colors, no feelings, no ideas.
And Slowly I came to understand the core of the problem.

I like all those other “empty diarists” and much of the adult population of the planet had forgotten how to find memorable in the day to day existence of life.

What a troubling understanding that was.


In my life, I a strong storyteller had allowed my life to slip out beyond my living.  Sure, I woke up each day and tended to the things that needed doing, but in the tending, the demands had all become “mundane” and disappointing.  Leaving my life “memorable-less”.

What a blow to life that is.


The next day, I dug through some of my many dairies and found a set of three that are all alike, same pages, same colors, same covers; triplets.

And I have set about on a mission, a mission to leave behind not only the stories that I have told, or the thoughts that I have formalized such as this, but each day, the unique, the creative, the projects and the feelings that cumulatively mark my passing through this world.

Perhaps they will be inspirational after I am gone, perhaps they will never be read by a living being after I scratch pen across paper.

But in the writing, nightly, ritualistically, I have brought back into my mind the ability to find joy, wonder, and awe in the world around me.

© Copyright 2020, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved.