I’m a Stripper

July 1, 2015.Reading time 4 minutes.

We all have a past. The question is, do we have a future?

I’ve been telling my lovely wife that we needed to start thinking about how we were going to spend our future together once the children leave. We are getting dangerously close now that JB is almost 15. The last thing I want is to send her to college with no plan for us.

I don’t want to be one of those couples who sits down in the empty nest, looks at each other and has no idea what to say or do. The problem is, we are vastly different people. I like things athletic – not watching them, doing them. I like running, exercising, hiking, and all kinds of outdoorsy things. I love camping! The kind of stuff that makes you sweaty and smelly.

My wife? Not so much. She’s a girly-girl, not given to athletics. She won’t run unless someone in a hockey mask is chasing her. I suggested camping where I could go off and hike a day or two and she could sit and read. No dice, she likes the comfort of her own bed and a clean bathroom.

How did we end up together? She’s a really good girly-girl and I’m a smelly but lucky guy.

Okay, but none of that solves our problem.

We both love to read, but I have yet to figure out a way to make reading a team sport.

Then it happened, quite by accident. An epiphany…

I am an excellent stripper!

Let me share with you just how we figured it out. We bought a desk off of Craigslist a while back and she painted it for JB’s room. Soon after, a few more accessories joined the room including a chair. Unfortunately, all of the new pieces were white, not the freshly-painted ivory color of the desk. Something had to change.

I am reluctant to allow my wife to borrow my tools, because they are the only thing I outright own. They are mine. But she sweet-talked me into my sander which failed to take off the thirteen coats of poly she had applied to the desk.

We needed a stripper.

I prefer making furniture these days. But before I had a shop, I used to refinish old pieces. I hate to be prideful, but I really know how to strip. I even saved some of the really strong solvent from when it was still available. I wondered if it would still be toxic enough to work. I now see why the EPA banned it because even after fifteen years of storage it tore through that poly like a monkey on a cupcake.

* * * * * * * * * *

And so I stripped like nobody’s business. She watched me strip hoping to learn so we could strip together. We talked about all of the stripping we could do once the kids left. I did tell her that we would have to strip for other people because we don’t have room in our home for all of the stripping we plan to do. And now with all of this stripping to look forward to, I’m excited about our future without kids.

(Also, I’m hoping you read the whole post and not just the last paragraph.)

The Frailty of Fair

April 25, 2015.Reading time 5 minutes.

We’ve talked a great deal about the concept of fair of late. An odd word, fair. If you look it up in the dictionary you will find it has nearly seven times as many definitions as it has letters. The one that pertains to our conversation is:

conforming with the established rules.

Children all over the world cry daily, “That’s not fair!” I have a daughter who has a justice meter and feels that everything should line up equally. If things do not, she will protest the unfairness of the situation. She gets that from my lovely wife whose righteous indignation will rise at anything wrongfully appropriated. Things must be fair.

But they aren’t, are they?

Fair is a myth. Oh, we try. We make rules and establish laws to make things as fair as humanly possible. But there is something bigger at play. There is an overarching fairness that we can’t comprehend. When we put things in their cosmic proportion, we can make things as equitable as we want to and they will never be fair – because we are not in control.

Tell the orderly little ant about fairness when he is marching in the line, doing his job and he watches fifteen of his co-laborers get stepped on by the careless human. Sometimes, I feel like that ant. I’ve seen the footfall of God land on someone I love. His concept of fair is different than mine.

It isn’t fair that Kylie got cancer. No one can explain how it happened. They told us that somewhere along the line a gene mutated and boom, a tumor appeared. Random. It isn’t fair that she started doing so well only to fall victim to the silent spread of the disease. Likewise unfair is that she had ten torturous months of treatment.

While she was in treatment, she met a housekeeper in the hospital whom she loved. Ms. Nikki made her smile. Whenever Nikki came in to do her job, she made it a point to talk to Kylie, encourage her, and always seemed to find a way to make her laugh. She was sunshine on many awful cloudy days. Early on, Nikki and I started doing a “Going Home” dance together on discharge days. I assure you, she was a much better dancer than me and Kylie always wanted to find her before we left so she wouldn’t have to endure my solo.

Kylie with her friend Ms. Nicki — Kylie with her friend Ms. Nikki

On a trip with her children recently, Nikki’s car was struck by two cars going in excess of one hundred miles an hour. Two of her children were ejected from the car and killed on the scene. The third died at the hospital a few days later. In an instant, the wonderful Ms. Nikki lost the three things most precious to her because of someone else’s carelessness. Where is fair?

Death is never fair – be it instantly or after a long illness. It leaves too much pain and too many jagged edges.

My heart cries out for Nikki – for her loss, her pain. While I am grieving my own loss, I cannot imagine hers. I pray for a peace that seems as unattainable as fairness in this broken place.

I wish I could make things fair. I never will be able to, neither will you. The only thing we can do is love those we are tied to as long as we are here and as long as they are here with us.

***********

Thank you to those who helped Kylie’s friend Nikki