Letters from my father

My Dad didn't talk too much about his past, a feature that may well have something to do with the fact I don't know that I ever asked.

Since my mom's death a little more than a week ago, I've vowed not to leave a pile of  junk for my family to pore through.

Things that seem important at the time they were squirreled away, aren't really that important. Did I really need a dozen or so annual Oshkosh AirVenture official programs? I think not. So out they go.

I do recall, however, an anecdote about famed Berkshire congressman Silvio Conte, who died back in 1991 (aside: he came to our wedding). Upon cleaning out his sizeable desk in Washington -- he was ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee -- they found an entire drawer filled with nothing but drawings and notes from his children and grandchildren, archived through his 32 years in Congress.

That seemed like a nice thing for people to find -- proof that they mattered.

In my den, the bottom drawer of my file cabinet is filled with drawings and notes from my children. Don't tell them; let it be a surprise in the not terribly distant future.

Over the past few years, my mother has sent back to me, things that she either saved during my childhood, or things I sent her during my adulthood. Most of them don't matter much to me. But they mattered to her and this was her way of saying these things mattered to her.  This is the language the Collins clan speaks, what with sons not asking questions when they had the chance and all.

In the process of throwing stuff out today, I came across The Book of Myself, which I believe Carolie and I gave to my father one year for his birthday, to encourage him to tell his story.

My dad was big on diaries and documenting his day.

This book, however, asked a question on each page, the totality of which would be the Book of Himself if the person answered the question in the blank space provided.

My dad was not a big fan of following instructions, however.

On the page titled "One of my dad's strongest traits was..." he wrote:

"Transplated 30 boxes including Rutgers-Marglobe Tomatoes plus butternut squash. Repaired gas leak in greenhouse. Eileen went to Spags today."

"May 5, 1997," he added so that we would never forget the great butternut squash planting of 1997 in my family.

On a page on which he was to answer the question, "The Best Part About Marriage Is...", he reported that it was Monday January 3, 2000 and that it was "unusually warm outside" and that the person who had been renting my grandmother's trailer had brought him $375 for the rent. In cash.

Nothing says lifelong romance like some greenbacks you don't have to report to the IRS.

It's the most Greatest Generation diary in the history of the Greatest Generation.

Anyway, I was cleaning out a book case, denying my children and future heirs the chance to read about what was to happen at the 2009 Oshkosh Airventure, when I found these two pieces of paper tucked in the book.

My father's life. Or at least his childhood.





(You can click on the images and get a bigger version)

My father, you can probably tell, wasn't much of a storyteller. I don't know when this was written, but clearly it was a time when he wanted his story to be known, if not then, at some future date, perhaps. Now, for example.

As we clean out my mother and father's house for a last time, I'll be digitizing all the documents and photographs for whomever in the future might want them. Better, I suppose, than piles of shoeboxes and old albums.

I've got a few of those with my story, too, though one of my retirement projects is to get those reduced to the digital form.

I've lamented for years that my former employer ignored 20 years of my calls for its digital archive to be preserved before it fell to dust with web site redesigns and changing technology that made it valueless. The last dozen years of my life is tucked in there too with a blog whose archived future remains somewhat cloudy.

Then there's this blog too, which, of course, Google could decide to terminate at any time.

We are told that younger people today don't want any of their parents' -- or grandparents' -- stuff. The technology that allows us to capture every 7 seconds of our lives, is also the technology that makes it easier to delete it all.

History vanishes at an ever-quickening pace, making it harder for the future to know that we were once here.

Planting squash.

Ruth Eileen Collins, 1922-2019

When my kids were very young, they were subjected , over their strong objection, to the wanderlust of their father, who likes to find out where roads lead. These came to be known as "Dad's Dumb Detours", but it wasn't until 2005, when my mother was visiting a year after my father died, that I realized the source of this curiosity.

"I wonder where that road goes?" I said to her as we pulled out of a parking spot overlooking the Mississippi River in Hastings.

"Let's find out," she said.

Ruth Eileen Collins, 97, who died today, imbued that curiosity in at least her youngest child, who did OK with his mother's inheritance.

Nobody ever wondered what my dad saw in his wife. She was drop-dead gorgeous start to finish

In that same visit, we hit on many of her "loves". She loved going to the horse races. Her own father, who left her mother when she was young, lived a life of harness driving, horses, and hay.

Picking the ponies

Mom wasn't much for handicapping. She bet a horse if it had a nice name and usually came up empty. In her trip to Canterbury Downs, however, she did OK.

Displaying our winnings

Years later, I asked her what she wanted for Mother's Day. Growing up, all the siblings knew what was coming.

"I want good kids," she said.

"What else?" we'd plead, looking for a more realistic alternative.

She got her wish, although it took some time.

But that wasn't the answer I got the last time I asked the question.  "I want to go to the horse races," she said. So we did. One of the last visits anyone made to Suffolk Downs.

She had dreams, she revealed while we flew a Piper Warrior over Sleepy Eye, Minn., that year.  She said she always wanted to be like Amelia Earhart.

"Fly the plane, Amelia," I said as I took a picture of that moment.

A Piper Warrior is not easy for an 83 year old woman to enter. By then, it was too high a step for her to reach. But she wanted to fly with her son, so she backed herself into the wing and rolled herself up the wing and into the lone door of the aircraft.

We ended up landing at a small and quiet airport in Fairmont, Minn., where we sat on a bench surrounded by cornfields, snacking on crackers we found inside along with a refrigerator full of soda. A lone tractor in the distance was the only sound as she said the scene reminded her of growing up in Mt. Gilead in central Ohio. She seemed the happiest I'd seen her in years. Though she'd spent most of her life in New England, her inner child was at home on the prairie.

She never became Amelia Earhart, of course. 

She graduated from high school -- Gold "F", which was a perfect 4.0 GPA at Fitchburg High School -- became a hairdresser and during World War II, met a man from Ashtabula, Ohio while at a dance at Whalom Park.  He was stationed at Fort Devens before heading to England, where he was a medic at a B-17 base.

At their 60th anniversary in 2002, in lieu of a toast, I -- being a radio news talk show type -- interviewed them at the luncheon in their honor instead.

"What was the first thing he said to you at the dance?" I asked. But she would not answer.

Interviewing Mom and Dad at their 60th anniversary celebration (2002)

It was not until a few years ago when she called me one afternoon and explained why she couldn't answer the question in front of a restaurant  full of people.

"He said to me, 'I can't dance with you; you're married," she said.

I didn't pursue it  but she obviously wanted to get that off her chest. But, really, it was none of my business and I never mentioned it again, although I did recall at the time that when I called her to tell her in 1980 that my then-wife and I were divorcing, she revealed that she had been divorced too.

Arriving at 95th birthday celebration (2017)

These things have a way of working out. She and my dad were married for 62 years. When he died, we kids got to see the love letters he sent her constantly from England, where he documented his desire only to return to his bride.

He applied for the Officer Candidate School, not because he wanted to be an officer, but because he could return to the States and be with her.  On November 22, 1943, he was notified that he made it into the program and would be coming home.

He never did become an officer, though he moved from base to base and she, of course, followed. She made hose clamps for bombers and fighter planes in a factory in Rockford, Illinois and was proud of the fact she made pretty good money doing it. They lived in New Jersey and New York for a time during the war and always remarked that the people of New York couldn't do enough for people in the service.

When I  moved to New York in the '80s, I felt better about the city because of that.

A wartime letter. Click to enlarge

In her later years, she read all of her husband's wartime letters. Then, a few days later, would start reading them again.

She kept one other letter nearby. The one from his mother, pleading with him not to marry her, and citing whatever flaws she felt didn't meet her standards.

The love in those letters isn't something kids would typically recognize in parents; that's just the nature of things.

But I saw it in 2003, when she and my dad visited us for what turned out to be the last time together.  Dad was pretty much blind and couldn't walk very well.

I emerged from my room and stumbled on them in the living room; he in the rocking chair, she on her knees tying his shoes.

Between the two of them, they provided a childhood that was perfect in so many ways. She got up early to take her youngest kid to hockey practice, and drove her daughter from one county fair to another in the summer, taught her kids to live on their own, and -- as a friend of mine described it -- "sat shotgun" for them all until the day she died.

Watching the Mississippi River go by in Red Wing 2005

She raised her kids and managed her home while working as a hairdresser in a shop dad built in the basement.  She could garden with the greats and keep a grudge for  years over a perceived sleight in the gladiola judging at the Lunenburg Grange Fair.  She could play the piano even though her husband -- for reasons never fully explained -- painted it pink one year.  She could live with the pain of burying her husband,  her oldest son, and a granddaughter, and put a foot in front of the other, because "what else can I do?"

She loved the ocean and, in particular, a small trailer on a spit of land on Plum Island in Newburyport in which, somehow, a couple and their five children lived until being turned loose to explore each morning.

Twin sons, the last of the brood, did not stop mom from enjoying the beach

The trailer, beachfront property by then, was extorted from them by the brother of the local police chief who vandalized it until they sold it for $5,000, eventually giving each of the kids $1,000. I used it to buy my first car.

The multi-million dollar home that went up in the trailer's place, still stands.

In September 2016, she wanted to go to the beach one more time, so I took her back to the Parker River Wildlife Refuge (one of her favorite spots which we referred to as kids as "the other end of the island"), she couldn't walk well but we made our way up the boardwalk and there we sat for a half hour, looking out at a glorious past. (longer version here)



Before leaving the island, we stopped one more time to look at the spot where the trailer was. If she was bitter about it, she didn't let on.


Mom wanted to die in her house and got her wish. She was still in control of her faculties enough to be disgusted by the Boston Red Sox and worried about who would rake her leaves, and still winning at Rummikub, mostly because her visitors had been warned about the perils of beating her at any game.

Her father had helped build her home for her by taking down a piece of the barn. She and her husband lived there for 62 years, she raised her family there, and there was never a more stubborn Yankee than Eileen Collins.  She was not going to leave that home.

And so her children did everything they could to keep her there against the advice of others, and, I hear, the scorn of a few. But she had more than earned the right to stay.

For Ruth Eileen Collins, the most inviting road was always  the one that led her home.

'Thank you for sharing her with us'

As my mother in law's Alzheimer's progressed in the last few years, I never quite resolved a nagging question as the neurons continued to go silent, taking not only memories with them, but the filters that mask a side of people we may not have previously seen: Am I seeing what is part of a person or just the symptoms of an illness?

Oralie Thurston was as proper a Yankee as New England ever produced, a kind and thoughtful woman whose partnership with her husband, Don, set a standard in faithfulness and love; a woman who loved her church before it closed, wrote an endless convoy of notes and letters to friends and loved ones, and volunteered at the local hospital so a little less horribleness could infiltrate the lives of people in her northern Berkshire County on their terrible days.  She was generous and kind and if you didn't know any better, you might think her a bit of a pushover.

When she had a dinner-time dispute with another guest at her first memory care facility last year, banged her cane on the table and shouted, "do you want a piece  of this?" it might well have been the Alzheimer's doing the talking. Or it might have been an important glimpse into a hidden reality: Oralie Thurston, who died from the disease on Wednesday September 18, 2019 a little after 12 noon, was  Yankee Tough.

Oralie was one of the few passengers who wasn't nervous when she went for a ride in my just completed airplane. She had, she revealed on the flight, taken many rides in a small airplane of a doctor friend in Vermont.

You didn't want to disappoint Oralie, a daughter of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. A withering glance or other hint of disapproval could make a person wonder if he had an ounce of goodness himself.

Walking into the hospital room in White Plains the day after Sean was born in 1985.

I knew that before I ever met her because I already knew her daughter, whom I met in the late '70s at WBEC in Pittsfield, where I was a news guy, and she wasn't. The story goes that at first we didn't like each other that much but, truth be told, that's not  entirely correct.

Because she didn't have 40 hours in being an "FM disc jockey" (back then, being such a thing was the epitome of "cool"), the bosses made her help out in the newsroom, where she became the first of dozens -- hundreds, really -- of people in the radio business to experience my ability to be a dickhead, at least where news is concerned. And yet, she persisted.

We were a close group, those night people at the station, and we had our minimum wage fun. I'd sit in her studio from time to time to chat with her during her long album sets, and awhile after my then wife (the "marital mulligan" I call her) decided to have an affair with her boss and announce my role was no longer needed, we became a couple.

Oralie Lane and Donald Thurston

I'm not sure Carolie, who by then was working at a radio station in Middletown, Conn., ever told her mom that when she'd drive up to to visit her in Clarksburg on Saturdays, it was only after spending Friday night at my place in Cheshire, Mass.  Oralie wasn't the type to like that sort of thing. Besides, there was another problem: I was divorced, or at least soon to be.

I suspect, whether she acknowledged it or not,  this was a significant concern for Oralie when it was finally revealed that Carolie was dating a divorced guy she hadn't yet met. But as the story goes, when Carolie tells it anyway, one evening during conversation about it, Oralie said, "you love him?"

And when Carolie said "yes", that was that.  She trusted her -- as much as a mother is allowed to trust the romantic adventures of a daughter.

I don't remember the first time I met Oralie or the equally friendly, if intimidating, Don. But I know I was met at the door of their home by welcoming smiles. It was always that way at the Thurstons. They met you at the door. They smiled and hugged and embraced you as if you were their own until one day, you were if you weren't already.

During any holiday, she set a place at her table for the elderly and lonely.

When you left, Oralie would stand in the driveway and wave. And God help you if didn't wave back. When the kids were born, a vanload of Collinses waved until we were down the road and out of sight just in case she was still watching.

The years were good to Oralie and her family until they weren't late in life. Don had Parkinson's and died in 2009. Oralie's memory started to go some years later and she moved into an assisted living facility in Williamstown, Mass., which was good enough until last year when she needed more of a daughter's attention, which her daughter courageously and unfailingly provided because Carolie Thurston Collins carries the strength and love gene of her mom.

Carolie got Thanksgiving with her, then Christmas, then Easter, then a last Mother's Day.

There was grace in the dying light. So much grace.

When death was imminent in the last few days, Carolie stroked her mom's forehead, played Moonlight in Vermont on the CD player,  and waited.  Nearly 10 days passed.

"She's getting her energy from somewhere," the nurse said.

On Wednesday afternoon, according to Carolie, Oralie, who abhored silence in a room, opened her eyes wide, scanned the ceiling, took a deep breath and was gone. Whatever she was seeing in her last moments from a dimension she made better in her 92 years living in it, she wanted a piece of it.

Nurses, aides, and managers at Woodbury Senior Living, and nurses from St. Croix Hospice stopped by to see her one last time. I wished they could have known her before her disease, I occasionally mentioned, but it was clear that, by whatever way comes with their expertise and insight in their chosen paths of helping people with Alzheimer's pass from this life, they did.

"Thank you for sharing her with us," they said in a way that wasn't rehearsed, but seemed to come from a place that was very much in the spirit with which Oralie lived and loved: with a whole heart unleashed.

When the funeral home came to take her away, the staff paused in the lobby to honor and mourn her.

When the van drove away, we waved. Just in case she was still watching.

Lyft Chronicles: Grow up

I drive Lyft and I'm not exactly sure why. Sure, I need about $400 a month to pay for my Medicare coverage, which is pretty important because I'm not drawing any Social Security until at least next May, when I reach my Social Security full retirement age.

But I like stories and watching the human condition, and while I think MPR pretty much beat the enjoyment of writing out of me, I like these stories now in their anecdotal form -- the form where I don't have to do much work to tell them; the form where they are a mere springboard to bigger, occasionally deeper thoughts.

I didn't have any Minnesota Twins games to work last week or this, so I needed to get out yesterday and drive a little bit to make a few bucks, and two rides served as bookends to reach this big and deep thought: people need to grow up a little when it comes to relationships.

This is a pretty easy conclusion to reach even if strangers weren't hopping in the car. I'm watching my wife watch her mother die.  The other afternoon, I watched her stroke her mom's forehead as she tried to get her to rest, and have a few minutes when she wasn't saying "help me."

It's hard to take anything else particularly seriously in those moments or for days afterward, which is probably why I have so little patience for the drama we insist on putting ourselves through with one another.

Like the woman I picked up  at a hotel in Plymouth, for example, who didn't have time for niceties like "hello" when she hopped in. She was in the middle of a conversation with whomever she was trying to salvage a relationship with.

I only heard one half of the conversation, which lasted the entire 15 minute trip with few details other than she she cited a litany of grievances -- some real, some imagined, perhaps. She alighted with nary a "thank you" as she was still issuing her demands upon her exit.

Hours later, I swung by a park-and-ride lot for the State Fair shuttle buses to pick up a young man who had nothing to say when he got in the car.

"30th Avenue?" I had to repeat several times at increasing decibels before he pulled the earbuds out.

"30th Avenue?" I repeated.

"Yep," he said, reinstalling the plugs so that he could continue the conversation he, too, was having with someone with whom he was having a relationship.

His complaint was that the person at the other hand end of the line always talked about something with which he had no interest. He found that disrespectful of what he cared about, whatever that was, but I'm going to guess what he cared about most was himself. It was hard to tell whether he was ending his relationship or still saw embers of hope in it.

I never learned what it was he/she talked about too much but I did learn that it "didn't turn him on" and "there's much more to life" than whatever he had to listen to too much.

He/she must have said that he never said he loved him or her.

"My love is my actions, not my words," he said as we drove in the midnight darkness over the Lake Street bridge toward the destination that must not be named.  He explained that all of his life -- I'm guessing 24 years or so -- people have told him one thing and done another, and let him down, so he was done with the meaning of words.  He was telling her that her words meant nothing.

I was thankful for the darkness, which prevented him from seeing my rolling eyes.

I wanted to grab the phone and tell the secret caller that he/she should run, not walk, from this guy.

I wanted to tell my rider that my mother in law is dying, that my wife of 37 years strokes her forehead to ease her way into another place that may or may not exist, not that it really matters because  life is the right now and the way we give of ourselves to people we love, asking nothing in return but the privilege of being in the presence of such love.

The young man who may never experience such moments was still issuing his own demands as he alighted.

"Thank you," he said over his shoulder.

"Have a great night," I said so he could hear.

"And grow up," I said so he couldn't.

A fatherhood timeline

It was Father's Day today and the tributes to dads across social media can make a lesser mortal believe he could never be a halfway decent father. How could anybody live up to these testimonials?

Here's a secret, kids: we were just winging it. We'd never been fathers before and, sure, we learn a lot about being a father by our fathers but when we're young, we have only one goal: not to be our fathers.

And then kids come along and right around the time we think we could write a parenthood book, our kids turn into, well, the kids they're supposed to be at a particular age and we wonder what it is we did wrong to be so much like our father and could we please get a do-over and be better this time?



And eventually we reach an uneasy truce with each other and they go off to be the people they're destined to be and we're left with something not quite approaching satisfaction at a job well done, but an appreciation that they didn't die or -- if we're really lucky -- they didn't go to prison.

And then one year it's Fathers Day and they call or stop by and during a conversation on the deck over drinks when they acknowledge they didn't really bang up a car way back when by doing wheelies in the snow but took a corner too fast while drag racing and we don't care because they are alive, you love the everloving crap out of them, and we notice something else -- something different -- while we watch our children in their adulthood on the deck -- the ones who hold your DNA and then ones you picked up along the way: they're just the tremendous people the world needs desperately and we and our partner (again, if you're lucky) did a hell of a job.

And then they tell us that.

And then -- and only then -- do we get to experience the real euphoria of being a father.

All because we were just winging it and doing the best we could.

Thanks, Dad.

Coming up for air

Photo: Nate Ryan

A few years ago, when Meniere's Disease was leaving me in desperate shape and a doctor in Woodbury had pronounced that he had done all he could, which wasn't nearly enough, I sat in the office of a young (to me)  neurotologist who was my next best hope.

"I love you and Mary on The Current," he said as he walked in the door, just prior to introducing himself.

That's when I knew we'd become great friends.

A few weeks ago, "Bob" stopped by an open hangar door (I always leave the hangar door up to encourage people to come chat) at Fleming Field in South St. Paul. Bob is welder for Metro Transit. He's just a few years younger than me.

He likes airplanes.

And Mary Lucia.

On his last visit, he told me about listening to the 4:20 "newscast" while under his welder's hood, working on the busses that take you home.

And there you have the secret of The Current and, in particular, my friend, Mary:  there is no limit, no template, no pigeon hole into which its -- her -- listeners can be placed. Welders. Scientists. Old people. Young people.

Why? Because in an age in which we are a technological arm's length from each other, she breaks through our differences and stations in life and speaks only to us.

I know that when I talked to Mary in the few minutes we spent each day, I not only had her in my vision, I had Bob, and my doctor, and all the people who took the time to say "hello" over the years (and certainly drop messages to me the other day)  in my mind. I could see all of them listening, and it's always been that way whenever I was on the radio.

I've never asked but I suspect it's that way with Mary, too. How can it not be? Just listen to her. She's talking to you.

When Mary came down to my third floor cubicle the day she returned from her leave in November 2015, I didn't think it unusual at the time, even though she rarely -- never? -- visited the third floor.

So when she was wrapping up our time together last week and said that I was the first person she sought out, that was the first time I put the significance of her visit together. That was the moment I had to take off my glasses and wipe my eyes. That was the moment we lost it.




She pushed the button to start Ella Fitzgerald's version of "One More for the Road", turned off the microphone, and we hugged. We hugged for a good long time.

"Do you remember the last scene of the Mary Tyler Moore show," I whispered.

"The one where they all group hug to the Kleenex box?" she said. And we laughed.

We walked out of the studio -- I think Mary was heading for a well-deserved smoke break -- and there was the Current staff with champagne. I needed to hug again.


Photo: Nate Ryan

I'm not a hugger. At least I wasn't.

But being told you mattered during a person's worst times is an honor that I'd never felt before and, though I was already missing my time with Mary before our segment was even finished (note the last question in the interview she did with me a few weeks before our last show), it constituted a moment that sears into the soul.

It was the moment I learned I wasn't who I thought I was.

The Last Bob and Mary

It'll take some time before I'm able to write properly about my penultimate day in the radio business, which culminated with a 2 1/2 hour broadcast  with Mary Lucia on The Current.

The entire day was like attending my own funeral and being able to hear the eulogies.

But as great as it all was, nothing was better than spending my last days I'll ever spend on the radio, with Mary.  You can hear the entire broadcast here.

We had our Bette Midler and Johnny Carson moment. It was real. It was perfect.

In the shadow of a dying light

Last week I made public that I'm done with the business of radio, and my mother in law didn't recognize my wife when she showed up at the hospital to see how she's doing.

There's an intersection here, somewhere, though I  struggle to find what it is.

We moved Oralie to Minnesota last summer, her Alzheimer's had made living on her own in the Berkshires problematic, and while my brother-in-law can provide the kind of help and support only a man of his boundless decency can, only  a daughter -- at least this daughter -- can provide the kind of attention and love that a dying light requires.

In the six months since Oralie arrived, I've seen a grace in the dying that I hadn't earlier recognized, and with each bit of patience, with each  attention to detail, with each far-off look that told me Carolie is off with her mother's worries, I increasingly wondered what I'm doing looking for meaning in such trivia as daily news.

I've never had the kind of relationship with my employers that a lot of people do. I like many of the people I work with, loathe one or two others, and cash a paycheck every other Friday. It's a business, not a family.

I loved radio, I enjoyed writing, I found an occasional creative satisfaction in the turns of a phrase, read by by, maybe 1,000 people who'd forget it shortly thereafter. But the job of our jobs is to fund our lives.

"A paycheck is what you get in exchange for your life's energies," an author of a book on how to retire after 30 and live the good life in Vermont once told me on a talk show I was hosting on MPR.

She was mostly full of shit in her book (the secret to retiring in your 30s is to become a millionaire in your 20's), but not that. Your job is not your life.

My job was to make enough money so Carolie could do the things she does that changes people's lives.   This reality became clear years ago when she told me about her day; a young woman, possibly pregnant, addicted, and homeless -- if I recall correctly -- showed up at her office for help.  She was an  impossible task.But by the end of her day, Carolie had her housing, health care, and food.

"I wrote a blog today," I said.

Carolie no longer has that job; the county and hospital that ran the program for that sort of direct aid and results, decided there was better money spent somewhere else. She moved on to another job where lost causes can get a day's hope.

But watching her with her mom is clearly an extension of the goodness and love she brings to her job.  Her patience seems inexhaustible, though I can also see the damage of watching your mother slip away.

Mine is 97. And I haven't seen her in a year.   I write a blog. My performance review is based on page views. My workplace doesn't staff the blog when I'm gone.There are no page views when I'm gone.Ergo, I don't go away.

That's absurd and I know it's absurd, and yet, I let something insigificant define my place on the planet.

When my Meniere's Disease spread to the "good ear" in November, my "eureka" moment came during one of the wretched night of vomiting from the constant resulting vertigo. "What are you doing?"

The next day I told the boss that May 31-- my 65th birthday, the day I would be eligible for Medicare -- would be my last.  I can't do the things I need to do to write at a high level (involving phone calls I can't hear, and interviews I can't participate in).  But even if I could, it no longer serves an appropriate purpose.

I have other things I can do. I love ushering at Target Field. I love driving people with Lyft (every evening is like I'm doing a radio talk show with open lines again), and,  of course, I love building airplanes.

But what I really want to do is be a better backstop for a woman whose mother didn't recognize her last week. 

Oralie is a delightful, proper, polite yankee woman whose Alzheimer's is removing a filter one by one.  She had suddenly hit another resident in the  $7,000 a month  memory care facility that believes the answer to everything is to call an ambulance and send elderly people to the local ER and let it be their problem.

So for the last week, she's been in a geriatric psychiatric unit in St. Paul, getting the attention she needs.

That's where Carolie showed up the other day, and  announced to her mom that she is her daughter.

"You're my daughter?" Oralie replied, never quite making the connection.

An illness has broken out in the unit now, so everyone is quarantined.We can't visit.

When Carolie called yesterday, Oralie took the phone from the nurse and said, "I can't talk now, I've got a fishing rod in my hand and I'm reeling in a big fish. Bye!" [click]

My wife is good at resuming normal activities and if you weren't paying attention, you'd marvel at her resilience. But she is not resilient.  At least not that resilient.

After yesterday's matinee of Noises Off at the Guthrie Theater, we stopped into a nearby restaurant, and when the food was delivered and we started to dive in, her eyes said she was somewhere else.

"You OK?" I asked.

"My mom," she said, no needing to say anything more.

Though she's never said anything, I can hear what's going on in the mind of a daughter of a woman with Alzheimer's. "Is this what's next for me?"

I can't think of much that's more torturous.

In the coming weeks, we hope to move her mom to another facility closer to Woodbury, one that is better at putting the "care" in memory care.

What's coming will be tragic,exhausting, and, ultimately, full of grace, but require an investment of our life's energy that we exchanged for a paycheck.

I've still got plenty to spend.

When you laugh instead of cry

This week I found some of my old favorite pictures that were taken in the film-era and started digitizing them. Not surprisingly, it brought back plenty of memories for me, and, as it turned out, for my oldest son who saw this one on Facebook.



That's his grandfather, who died in 2009. Don was one of my son's biggest champs, particularly at a time when, kids being what they are and all, it was tough to find people to stand in your corner.

"This photo is my second or 3rd favorite with Papa, but only because he will always have that arm on my shoulder in support and unconditional pride," my son wrote on Facebook.

Then he wrote me a note about a slideshow tribute I created for him when his grandfather died.

"You told me the point of said death slideshow was to watch it until one day I smile instead of cry," he recalled. "When is that day?"

I don't know, I said, I'm not quite there yet myself.

It was 12 years ago on Monday that my own father died and when I was looking for pictures to digitize, I came across this one.



When I saw it, I burst out laughing. Because that was my father.

When is that day coming for you, son? Someday.

On my son's 30th birthday

Old people tell young people all the time that life is short and passes fast and young people don't believe it. It's been that way since the earth started turning.

My son, Sean, turned 30 today and while it seems like it was only yesterday, more reflection reveals how much has been packed into those 30 years.

When he was a baby, Sean wasn't really into being held and rocked. As a toddler, when you picked him up to hold, he'd go limp so he'd slither back down. Sean was always in a hurry to be on his own.

Of my 62 years, I've spent almost half of them now thinking about Sean, off somewhere being on his own, and worrying about him and his brother. As I've written before, the Collinses come from a long line of worriers. It's what we do, even though it accomplishes nothing.

But your children are capable of constant surprises.

Like this one that occurred at Oshkosh this year (the picture above was taken at Oshkosh).

The night Sean and I flew over for the second half of AirVenture (his brother, Patrick, and I had flown over for the first half), we walked over to a restaurant on the other side of the airport, for which there was along line. We were invited to cool our heels at the karaoke bar outside; and so we did.

Sean, who I think is the type not to put himself "out there"(like his father, to a degree), grabbed the list of songs and searched for a proper victim.

I told him I was surprised he'd get up in front of people and sing. But he said he had a friend who took him to a karaoke bar not long ago and got up to sing. And he said if she could do it, then he could too.

And so he did, and while the Doors' People are Strange might not have been exactly pitch perfect, it was perfect, nonetheless.

And that's the way our children are. Like the rest of us, they are not perfect. And yet they are.

When times are perfect

Back when my two sons were very young (10 or 11 or so), I shared a pair of season tickets to the Minnesota Timberwolves with some people at work. It provided a good opportunity to spend some time with each kid.

At the time, the Timberwolves were a pretty good team, thanks primarily to a 19-year old kid named Kevin Garnett.

The games were fun, but incidental to the goal -- time. Good times.

On several occasions, the times were perfect. I'd be sitting watching my son -- both of them at different times -- full into the moment, late in a game, standing and cheering with the rest of a sold-out house.

"This is perfect," I would think to myself. "I want this feeling to last forever."

It didn't last forever, of course. Perfect times are few. We do the best we can, we deal the things life throws our way and we move along.

I've had season tickets to the Timberwolves for many years since, although I gave them up this season because the quality of the product hasn't been very good, even though the goal stayed the same -- spending time with my kids.



But last week, the Timberwolves made a trade, to bring Garnett, now almost 39, back to the city. And Sean, and Patrick and I had already made plans to attend the game on Wednesday night, days before we knew that for the first time in more than a decade, the good times were possible again.



We struggle to explain these moments -- and the Garnett return in particular -- to those who don't follow sports. Yes, it's about a game, but it's also about moments.

My oldest son, Sean, almost 30 now, dug out the foam finger with "#23 KG" scribbled on it. Garnett had given him the autograph when he was 19, when Sean was 10. Patrick, soon to be a 27 year old, brought his passion, which he's brought to every day since the day he was born, I think.



And together we went back in time. And as Garnett lifted the crowd for more than two hours, the crowd lifted us.

At various times, I watched my 30 year old and my 28 year old stand and cheer with the sold-out house. And I sat and thought, "This is perfect. I want this feeling to last forever."

Meeting Ernie Crippen

Sixty-eight years ago tomorrow, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, three days after it dropped one on Hiroshima. The day will go unmentioned, just as the anniversary of Hiroshima generally went unrecognized on Tuesday. It wasn't long ago that the end of war in the Pacific had significance for a country that shared the experience of a world war. But those days are gone and the few people left who lived the history soon will be.

That's why I don't turn down any opportunity to talk to the people who fought the war in whatever capacity; there aren't many left.

So when Ernie Crippen of Buffalo started a sentence in our conversation yesterday with, "when we were being bombed and strafed on Guadalcanal," I was immediately aware that it was the first -- and probably the last -- time someone will ever say that to me, just as I was similarly aware last week when a veteran in Luverne showed me a scar and said, "I got that parachuting into Bastogne."

We get many opportunities in our lives to learn history from those who live it, but we take advantage of precious few of them. And time, as it has forever, is running out. Mr. Crippen has the benefit of his children, Mike and Amy, who have helped him preserve his history.

Crippen, 91, like thousands of other Minnesota kids, saw the military draft coming in 1942 when he was cutting timber in Bemidji. So he joined the Navy for a six-year engagement as a Seabee -- the Navy's construction brigades.

"The fighting was mostly over when we arrived on Guadalcanal," he told me while I leafed through his meticulously-kept scrapbooks yesterday. And by "mostly over," he meant, except for the occasional attacks by Japanese planes trying to kill him. In April 1943, he wrote in an autobiography, he was part of a crew unloading supplies from a ship offshore when an attack came. All the regular crew had gone ashore, so the Seabees took the ship into open water, shooting down one plane in the process. Some of the men shielded themselves from bullets with the only thing they had nearby: canvas.

You don't get a lot of stories like that from kids in Bemidji anymore. Or about the time Bob Hope and Jerry Colonna sat with him at dinner before a USO tour, the bugler who got into trouble for playing "Blues in the Night" instead of Taps or about being told he was to be part of the U.S. invasion force of Japan. "We were told the casualties might number 750,000," he said. "It was sobering."

"What was the last thing your father said to you before you went off to war?" I asked.

"I remember it clearly," he said. "We were sitting at the depot in Bemidji and I said, 'I might not come back.' He said, 'You have to turn that around and think different.'"

The atomic bombs brought Japan's capitulation. A month later, the kid from Bemidji was working the docks in Sasebo, Japan, a bombed-out former Japanese Navy base. And a few months after that, he was walking through what was left of Nagasaki.

"It was amazing to me at the time that something dropped from the sky could turn steel and concrete into nothing but dust," he said.

He couldn't show that picture to anyone until he got home to Bemidji. The military didn't allow anyone to send photos of the destruction home. Technically, servicemen weren't supposed to have cameras, but, as he had during the rest of the war, Crippen kept notes and pictures, knowing that someday he'd be sharing it.

His stops read like a who's who of war in the Pacific: Guadalcanal, Saipan, Tokyo, the rest of the Solomons, New Caledonia, and the Aleutians.

For the veterans of it, World War II was life's biggest paradox. A gruesome habit of nations' instinct to kill another's soldiers provided the opportunities to see parts of the world most people will never see, and a seemingly endless number of friendships that survive through post-war "real life," which for Mr. Crippen included years as an engineer for MnDOT and a wedding photography business with his wife.

But there's no such thing as "endless" in life. As he showed me a scrapbook of his pictures, Crippen noted that most everyone in it is dead now. His construction unit stopped its annual reunions in 2006; There weren't many people left or able to attend.

But next week, there'll be one more. A few weeks ago, the family of an Indiana man found Crippen after a search. The two men had served together. The man from Indiana recently had a stroke and wanted to see Crippen again. Next week, they'll meet halfway -- Iowa -- and turn back time.

Mr. Crippen will bring the scrapbooks and history in the first person with him.

(This post was originally published in Minnesota Public Radio's NewsCut blog)

The sidewalk

The construction crew arrived today to take out the old blacktop driveway that I have been trying to nurse through another season for the last 10 years. But it is finally time for it to go; it will be replaced by a concrete driveway instead.

I looked out a few minutes ago to see how they were doing, and as luck would have it, they were just digging up a small piece of concrete that I poured many years ago to extend the driveway.



It wasn't a particularly good job but that little 2x4 slab of concrete has always meant a lot to me, because my son Sean and I built it.

Sean was pretty young at the time, maybe 7 or so, an age when most kids have the attention span of mice. But like the sidewalk we built out back one year, he was all in on the project. It was hot, hot enough to make smart people head for the AC. And he had every reason to. But he stayed and he dug and he mixed cement and he breathed dust and he got dirty and he built a sidewalk with his dad.

It was the way he subsequently approached every job and task he ever had. He was all in.

The new driveway and sidewalk will be a big improvement over what's there now.

But I'm going to miss that slab.

The need to win

I accept as a casualty of my age that I am more prone to believing that elements of our cultural past have lessons for our cultural present, but there is no way for me to avoid the conclusion as I've read this week's outstanding Star Tribune series on the money in youth sports. Fat cat boosters and parents who want their children to win have transformed the nature of the game. Advocates still tell us that high school sports, in particular, can teach children valuable life lessons. Here's the life lesson we should learn from the series: Don't let adults run youth sports.

Over the course of three days, the series has drilled a constant message from the "haves" and the "have nots." It's unfair, it has said, that some teams have more money -- and thus resources -- than others. The sadness of the series is that few people involved have noted the cultural calamity of our need to win.

There are only three things that people have said to me over these years that I have not forgotten. After I graduated from college and was looking for work in a fleeting period in our history when we weren't fighting other counties' wars, my father said, "If you want job security, join the Army."

An ex-colleague, at a reunion party for a radio network where I once worked, casually remarked, "Man, we were glad to see you go."

And a coach of a summer club hockey team said to me, "because I want to win."

I played high school and college hockey, and that sounds more impressive than it really is. I made my college team because I was the only player who could skate backwards. I beat out 30-40 other schoolmates in high school to be the last guy on the team. I didn't play much and when I did, the game was usually over. In my sophomore year, my team was 0-19-1, having tied the last game of the year. I didn't play much; my undistinguished career featured eight years of organized play, no goals scored.

To my knowledge, the only picture of me in action is this one. I'm number 5. Playing the bench like nobody's business.



In my junior year, I was recruited to play a summer league team. A family acquaintance was the coach. Because the team was mostly made up of my high school team, I, again, didn't play much. Midway through the season, we held a lead against some team I don't recall, it was late in the game, and I wanted to play. This was a summer recreational league.

"Can I play?" I said to the coach.

"Not now," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I want to win," he said.

I never went back for another game.

I have few recollections of any of the games my teams played now. But I recall with ease, the pick-up games on a pond across the street with my pals in the neighborhood, and my hockey-loving older brother, who died a year ago. A neighborhood hockey rat didn't have shin pads -- "Termite" was his name (we had nicknames for kids back then) -- so he taped comic books to his legs.

Youth sports were the park & rec games in the ballyard behind my house (since turned into a soccer pitch, but that's another story). It's been more than 45 years since I stabbed the vicious line drive shortly before it hit one of the Shaw twins' face. I can still see the expression on his face. They're both dead now; someone said drugs were involved.

But there was a joy to being a kid playing youth sports and we have ruined that joy in the name of teaching kids life's lessons.

The ballparks in my neighborhood now are mostly empty. The kids are playing down at the big sports complex in front of the same sorts of parents I became, who lament that the traveling teams from Edina have better uniforms. After some games, as I recall, the coach -- whose son usually was the starting pitcher -- navigated a sea of parents wanting to know why their kid wasn't playing.

He didn't say "because I want to win," but he didn't have to. Winning was the point. Winning is still the point.

A few weeks ago, the Twins made a big splash out of showing a 20-year-old movie on the scoreboard. The Sandlot embodied the childhood games some of us are lucky to remember. On Twitter, an acquaintance objected to the fuss people were making. "It's not Citizen Kane," he said. And, he's right; it's not. But Citizen Kane never reminded us of the role of childhood games before my generation grew up to ruin them.

No doubt the takeaway from the Star Tribune's series will be that the "have not" teams should get more money. Here's an old man's idea: Give all the teams no money. Point to the field, and tell them "go have some fun on your own."

That's a quote they'll remember forever.

The regret of the 'no-go' decision.

Sometimes, I think I'm too risk-averse to be a pilot.

For the past six weeks, I've been planning a trip to Arizona with my youngest (25) son. We're both big Cleveland Indians fans and wanted to spend a couple of days watching the Tribe. My friend, Darwin Barrie, offered to put the RV-7A up at his airpark and give us his truck for the week to use.

And so began weeks of planning for the trip, which -- for me -- consists of six weeks of worrying, playing "what if?". I pored over the charts and established the best route. I consulted with Darwin on the best approach into Phoenix' airspace. I'd go to sleep at night thinking of the approach and memorizing every mile of the route, the fuel stops, and the time.

Last fall, I met a gentleman who was kayaking from the Northwest Angle of Minnesota to Key West. Daniel Alvarez started in June and hoped to reach Key West on New Year's Eve. He actually reached it last week. But when I talked to him at the time, I was planning a trip to Massachusetts. "I'm a little nervous about it," I admitted to him.

"If you're not a little nervous," he said, "you're not going far enough."

As I prepared for this trip, I heard his words. Constantly. The nervousness was fine, I told myself, because I'm going far enough. It's good.

About two weeks ago, the weather discussions at the National Weather Service regional sites (they reallyare very interesting and informative reads) began to encompass the departure weather -- today -- and more "worrying" as the "what ifs" grew to encompass every section of the route, weatherwise. What are my limits? What are my alternates? How prepared am I to make the no-go decision?

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure that far out what the weather will be, which necessitates more "what ifs."

Although a blizzard came through Minnesota yesterday, I was fairly confident we'd be able to get out of here this morning. (I'd already scrapped a Monday departure last week on the basis of the the weather data I'd been gathering for a week and analyzing every four or five hours). The gusty winds were to die down to about 20 knots this morning, I checked the airport yesterday and they'd done a good and quick job removing the blowing snow, and the sky was supposed to be scattered clouds at 2500 feet. It would be cold, but I was fairly sure we'd survive the three-hour trip in high headwinds to Lexington, Nebraska, our first fuel stop, and be able to get out of there before the winds were forecast to pick up there. The rest of the trip looked weather-good. I started dreaming about being one of those people who posts trip pictures on Van's Air Force.

I'd earlier been concerned about getting Patrick home in time for a shift he had scheduled on Sunday, and a test at school (he's in the nursing program) for Monday. So I bought a $550 refundable one-way ticket on Southwest from Phoenix to Minneapolis for Saturday for him, and figured if need be, I could stay in Phoenix for a few extra days and fly back alone. But at least he'd be back in time.

Otherwise, we'd plan to fly back on Friday, maybe Saturday if the weather was good from there to here.

He was excited for the trip, especially with temperatures here 20-30 degrees below normal for this time of year. All of Minnesota is experiencing seasonal disorder, as is custom, and a couple days of watching baseball was the perfect antidote. It would have been a fabulous flight down and a great experience between father and son to remember forever.
This is why I built an airplane.

I spent yesterday on final preparations for the plane, plugging in the engine heater, organizing what's staying and what's going, and trying to figure out how close to gross weight we'd be. As it turns out, I learned just how quickly two 170-pound pilots and baggage can exceed the 1800-pound limit on an RV-7A with a full load of fuel. It'd be close.

Late last evening, flight plans filed, plane ready, peanut-butter sandwiches and water packed, I made one last weather check before a go-no go decision, only to discover the weather discussions from the National Weather Service sites from the Texas panhandle (Dalhart, TX was a fuel stop) all the way to Minneapolis began mentioning precipitation and clouds for Thursday into the weekend, where they had mentioned none previously.

But it's impossible to know at this early stage what sorts of clouds and what kind of precipitation. Steady rain? Showers? Low clouds? High clouds? Clouds I can snake around or clouds that keep me on the ground? Clouds that might entice me to fly scud? There was no way to know for sure. Then I read that the two main computer models -- one from the U.S. and one from Europe -- disagreed on what might happen. The European model was suggesting the system would stall over the Dakotas through Monday. The U.S. model was suggesting it might not.

Now I had to make a decision: Which one to believe? In previous analysis of weather discussions, I felt the European computer models were more accurate, so I chose to believe them.

Then I thought about trying to fly home, and running into ice, or low clouds and not being able to find a way through. I started to think about Get Home-itis, when the urge to get home forces pilots to make bad decisions. I thought about forcing Patrick to get in a plane on Friday to try to make it home before things (maybe) got bad -- and then getting stranded in Kansas, with him missing his work shift and his test -- rather than waiting a day and putting him safely on an airliner, and I thought about me sitting in Phoenix waiting for springtime weather to be good from Phoenix to Minneapolis, paying for a motel, not getting back to work on time at a place that isn't as excited about what I do as it once seemed to be.

And then I called the trip off.

I called Patrick and told him. "It's OK," he said, although I knew it wasn't. He's already scheduled the days off. He'd already given his car away to his girlfriend to use because hers is on a bad tire. He'd already packed. He was looking forward to the experience, and somewhere along the trip, I was going to teach him the ins and outs of flying.

His goal on the trip was to play catch with his father on the hill beyond the right field at the Indians' park in Goodyear (even though they'd be on the road for the two games we'd watch, but the Reds play at the same park). "Don't forget to pack your glove and ball," he said a few days ago.

The day this morning dawned bright and sunny, though cold and windy. But it's a beautiful day to fly. "All that worry, and for what?" I said to myself as I set one foot out of the bed, and then another. My back was aching from yesterday's snow shoveling. I read the paper then sat in the rocking chair by the front window, bathing in the sun, and found myself thinking, "I'd be landing in Lexington right now."

And that's my punishment for the next few days. I'll watch the Indians game tomorrow and think "I'd be there right now," and even worse, I know my son will be doing that too. I will spend them wondering if I made a bad call.

Although I'm hoping a blizzard comes flying through the Plains on Friday on into Monday, it wouldn't surprise me if the weather turns out to be flyable, which will be an even greater punishment -- the knowledge that we could've done the trip and we missed out on a great experience. Together.

We're taught early in our flight training to use good judgment, and that many pilots have regretted trying to fly when they shouldn't.

But they don't tell you about the other kind of regret. The regret that maybe I was too cautious.

The regret that I missed one more game of catch with my son.

Who roots for the sea?

It's funny how the news can take you back to being 8 years old again.

This is the picture-of-the-day for the storm that's hammered the East Coast today. It's on Plum Island, a long spit of sand that runs along the north shore of Massachusetts, on the New Hampshire border.



The house, as you can imagine, is a goner. The people who own it are at their house in Florida and that'll have to do. Their old house, and the land on which it once lay, belongs to the ocean again. (See some amazing pictures in this Facebook album)

That's the way it works on Plum Island. And yet, people keep building as close to the ocean as they can.

Plum Island, which sits in the town of Newburyport, was a working-person's enclave back in the day. Newburyport was a fishing and shoe-making town until the '60s, when textile companies abandoned New England for the south. Now, it's high-priced real estate for the wealthy.

I know that because when I was a kid, we had the oceanfront lot. We were the '50s and '60s pre-wealthy inhabitants.

Our home, though, wasn't the multi-million dollar structure here or the type that, no doubt, are on either side of this home, awaiting their own fate. It was just an old trailer in which somehow, we fit seven people. When you were a kid on Plum Island back then, it wasn't about your fancy house, it was about exploring what was around you. My parents would turn us loose in the morning and we might come back by dinner.

There was treasure to find that washed ashore overnight, the occasional tuna that was hoisted down at the Keezer boat works when someone got lucky, the bike to ride to Fred's variety to pick up an Archie comic, sea worms to dig and get rich selling, and, occasionally, the spectacle of the drowning victim being hauled ashore from the Coast Guard cutter.

The Simmons family -- he was a milkman -- had the little cottage in front of us until the sea came calling and they moved it back a half mile or so to escape it. The Burkes had a little pink house across the sandy road, until they -- and we -- found it tipped upside down on the beach one spring. It had fallen into the path of an angry ocean and, apparently, nobody had noticed until it came time to open the cottage for the season.

That happened all the time. Like taking attendance at the beginning of class, we'd start each summer by determining what homes were no longer where they once stood.

The town tried everything to stop the ocean. Rocks, bigger jetties, old cars, truckload after truckload of sand, and for a time it seemed to work, but nature can be very patient. Even the sprawling Coast Guard station next door gave up and moved a little farther inland. In the end, you just can't shovel sand against the tide.

We never got much of a chance to find out how our own plot would fare against it, though. A few years after the Simmonses moved their house, something else came calling -- a man with money to make. He had offered my dad money for the land, but my parents wouldn't sell. He loved the place and so did their five kids.

The next winter, someone took an axe to the trailer and, probably not coincidentally, the man called my father asking if he was interested in selling now. He was. And so a prime piece of beachfront property went for $5,000. I was too young to understand what a bitter pill that must've been for the old man.

A few weeks later, the trailer mysteriously burned down -- the guy said he was working on the plumbing with a torch at the time -- and in its place rose a multi-million dollar home, which as far as I know, still stands today.

The same thing happened up and down the beach. The old cottages gave way to the big homes, the working-class was mostly pushed out, leaving a generation of boys -- now old -- feeling only a little bit guilty and not at all proud of occasionally rooting for the sea.