Suebob's Red Stapler

Reverend Bonnie had a mad idea. She wanted a bunny garden at our church and she would not be dissuaded.

I said to our church Board President “A bunny garden? Really?”

He said “I don’t know either, but she does so much and it makes her happy, so I’m all for it.”

Plans were made, a corner of the garden was cleared, a structure was built, and the church went through an almost ridiculously rigorous adoption process to secure two spayed and neutered bunnies. We had our bunny garden.

Now the bunnies needed names. Bonnie said that the congregation should choose the names and a friend and I were put in charge of the process. We had fun with it, making an announcement in church on Sunday asking for prospective sets of names, one for the male bunny and one for the female. We ended up with a stack of index cards bearing suggestions (Mickie and Minnie, Petal and Blossom, etc.), which we narrowed down to five possibilities. People voted on their choice among the five.

We came up with a statistically unlikely event: a three-way tie.

I sent Reverend Bonnie an email asking her to break the tie, since the whole bunny thing was her idea in the first place.

She called me the next day. “I know this doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I told the congregation they would choose the name, so I don’t feel right choosing the name. We need to have a run-off.”

So with much laughter, we had a runoff election and chose the winning names, which were based on writers important to our denomination: Waldo and Emma, for Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emma Curtis Hopkins.

This tiny matter of naming bunnies gave me even more respect for my beloved Rev. Bonnie. Her integrity prevented her from fudging even on this little thing, that’s how important it is to her to stay true to her word. Now when I confront an event where I have to make a difficult ethical or moral decision, I think about telling Reverend Bonnie about my choice and imagine her reaction. This is true leadership – she has impressed me so much over the years that she is my touchstone even as I live thousands of miles from her.

And what did the bunny garden mean to the church? Well, people started going behind the building more to visit the bunnies. They noticed that the garden area needed improvement, so they put in a lawn and benches and flowers, beautifying the back of the church and making it a place people hang out. The bunnies needed food, so an amazing congregant put in a vegetable garden on the church property. There were more vegetables than the bunnies could eat, so extras were distributed to people who needed them. And everyone loves visiting the bunnies.

We talk a lot at church (now via Zoom) about kindness – Bonnie calls the church “the kindness cathedral” and the ripples being kind produces. Our silly bunnies produced ripples far beyond the original idea. Reverend Bonnie’s wild notion made big changes happen and brought people together. Not so crazy after all.

Image by Rebekka D from Pixabay

Bruce Sinclair Swasey taught me the power of welcome. I had an inkling before, of course, but Bruce was a real sensei of the art, wielding his skills with grace and sincerity.

Bruce was what you might describe as a charming old gent. He favored baggy pants, suspenders and golf caps. He was always studying something. He spoke terrible Spanish and Korean with enthusiasm and conviction, deploying it on hapless busboys and customer service representatives. He often stayed up all night in a house that was festooned with papers and notecards, working on advanced math problems he created for himself. He had a roving, curious mind.

He had been in the military, he had been an engineer, but Bruce’s real talent lay in making people feel welcome.

He belonged to six or eight Toastmasters groups at a time, and he was the unofficial greeter. He made sure each new person that walked through the door felt like they were in the right place.

He had studied techniques for remembering people’s names. He told me to say the person’s name three times when you first met them, then mentally write their name on their forehead. He rarely forgot anyone.

He remembered details about people – relations, jobs, anniversaries, health issues. If you got to know him well, you could expect to begin receiving Bruce Mail – big envelopes of articles, poems and writings that reminded him of you. I had a file in my cabinet simply labeled “Bruce” for all of these missives.

I saw Bruce angry once in all my years of friendship with him. He brought a friend to Toastmasters and no one greeted the friend. We heard about it at the end of the evening, his face red and his words sharp. He couldn’t believe we were so rude, and he was right.

Bruce’s gift to the world was a friendly face saying “There you are!” when we came through the door. Isn’t that what every human wants – someone to be glad when they are there?

Bruce passed away some years back, but I think of him daily. I try to honor his memory by being the one who welcomes others, and I imagine that there are many others doing that as well, all because of the example Bruce set. He made my life better by welcoming me, but he continues to make it better when I welcome others, because seeing others happy makes me happy, too.

We could all do with a little more welcome. I challenge you to be like Bruce and welcome someone this week.

The Beatles have been with me ever since I have been conscious. I was a toddler when they became famous. The first book I ever bought – at my school’s Scholastic Book Fair – was a paperback of all the Beatles lyrics. I spent hours reading them over and over, trying to parse their meanings.

When I was young, everything the Beatles did was news. Their music was the soundtrack of my life.

Because I had heard Beatles music so much, I rebelled a few years ago and started boycotting. I figured I had heard those songs so many times that I would be fine never hearing them again.

It’s probably strange, then, that I recently sat down to watch all 7 hours and 48 minutes of the documentary series “Get Back,” which is mostly footage of the Beatles practicing for their last album. But I did it, and I’m glad I did.

I liked it for a variety of reasons. First, it was lovely to see the Beatles as they were, free from all the hype, myth and speculation that surrounded them and that has persisted until now. The footage shows that they were at heart just musicians who really, really loved to play.

During their practice sessions, they spontaneously drop practicing their songs to launch into joyous, silly versions of numbers by Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash and others. It’s clear from their schedule that they should be urgently practicing their music so they can produce their album, but they can’t help themselves. They are playing because it is fun and it is what they want to do more than anything in the world. Every time they slam into some old rockabilly tune, they are grinning and laughing.

They also play at songwriting. They are unafraid to start playing songs in front of each other that aren’t fully formed yet. Some are barely begun. This spoke to me because I always want to have all my bases covered before I present my work to others, nervous that it won’t be perfect.

John and Paul just blare out tiny bits of song over and over, substituting mumbles for words, building the composition, growing and embroidering and changing so fluidly. “Get Back,” one of their most famous songs, comes together during a break as Paul fiddles on the guitar, then gets played and replayed, changed and improved over the next three weeks into the hit song we have all heard.

There is a lot of love between them, that is clear. The flashback scenes remind us that John, Paul and George have been playing together since they were young teens. They each have their own role. Paul is the leader and the poet, willing to keep sculpting songs as long as it takes to achieve perfection. John is the jester, always showing up late, making jokes and playing with language, changing lyrics to make himself laugh. George is the mystic, quiet and thoughtful, observing everything. And Ringo is the steadfast workman, showing up early, staying on task.

Another joy of watching the documentary is the nostalgia factor. The Beatles, for all their success, had so little management or business wrapped around them. If they had that level of fame today, they would probably have a team of dozens working on management and marketing.

It’s stunning to see how shy they were in front of the cameras and to realize how abnormal it was back then to have people filming you. Even if you were quite famous it was weird. The Beatles awkwardly joke about it the whole time. They mug for the camera, wave at it. In 2021, toddlers are used to being filmed and know how to strike a pose.

They discuss their plans for a concert vaguely the whole way through the month that the documentary covers, but it never becomes concrete. No one gets very upset about this. They don’t even know if they’re going to do their famous rooftop concert until the day before they do it. No team of marketing and finance people is screaming at them. No attorneys are reviewing terms. They are just allowed to bumble their way through. It’s like this is a fifth-grade play, not the biggest music group of all time.

I also loved seeing the 60s fashion as it was, too. George is one stylish dude, appearing in purple satin ruffly shirts and striped bell-bottoms. Ringo is often on trend, showing up for the rooftop concert in a red vinyl trenchcoat. Paul is in his bearded farmer phase, and John tends toward shaggy furry things.

The middle episode starts to be depressing. The band was mired in an endless swirl of practice and indecision. The documentary began to drag, as nothing seemed to be happening. Everyone seemed checked out and a little sad. George even quit briefly, simply saying that he would see them around the clubs before walking out suddenly.

George came back a few days later. Then a miracle occured – pianist Billy Preston showed up. He was just in the neighborhood and dropped by to visit the new Apple studio. The Beatles asked him to sit in and suddenly everything burst into technicolor with Preston’s infusion of talent and soul. It’s like watching a garden spring back to life after a drought. The Beatles started to have fun again, and Preston kept coming back every day.

There was a bit of talk about asking Preston to be the fifth Beatle, but the idea got shot down by Paul, who said that it wass difficult enough to make decisions with four of them. I think he doomed the Beatles at that moment. Billy Preston was the best thing that ever happened to them. Not only was he a genius on keyboards and vocals, but his sound filled in and lifted theirs. Everyone could feel the difference. Their music became joyous again.

The last documentary I watched before this was Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana.” It was a good contrast. Taylor seemed to have a precise vision for her songs, always. The Beatles had a drug-fueled, loosey goosey approach to making an album.

The Beatles documentary inspired me. I took from it the lesson of focusing on fun and joy while being creative. Don’t be afraid of throwing a silly little start out there and building on it. The process is as important as the outcome. Don’t expect perfection the first time around, or the seventh, or the thirtieth. Just let it be.

When I woke up last Friday morning, I heard the wind howling and thought “We’re not getting out of here today.”

Denise, our hostess, checked the weather and told us the wind was only blowing 22 mph. The plane wouldn’t leave if the winds were over 35 mph. The winds were supposed to keep getting stronger and were predicted to be 35 mph at 10 a.m. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 9:30, just before sunrise.

I was out of ramen, my underwear were all used up, and I hadn’t had cell service since we got there. I was ready to go home.

I never thought I would find myself in a native village in rural Alaska, but that’s where I spent the week. Population 900, the town is on the Lower Yukon delta. It takes 3 airplanes to get there – a jet to Anchorage, a smaller jet to Bethel, then an 8-seat air taxi to the village.

Two years ago, I was working for a Fortune 50 company, supporting executives who had 10,000 employees in their departments. Now I was giving a presentation to 5 Yupiq Tribal Council members in a community center with cracked linoleum flooring in the most remote place I had ever been.

I couldn’t have been happier.

My friend and I went there to see the progress on a big project funded with money from a grant she had written. The grant not only paid for construction of a beautiful dock that will make unloading barges much less treacherous and will save the river banks from eroding, but miles of hard-surface roads in a community that had only had muddy, rutted roads before. Everyone kept taking us around to show us the lovely, new roads. Little kids rode 4-wheelers towing their friends on sleds. Dogs ran alongside us, some barking happily, others a little menacingly.

The town is tiny. There is one hotel located upstairs in the Community Center building. It has six rooms and bathrooms down the hall. There is one restaurant, and that is a rather new development. Some homes still don’t have running water or sewer service. People still get their food by hunting, fishing and gathering. Few people have cars, because there isn’t anywhere to drive except around town – there are no roads connecting the town with anywhere else. People ride 4-wheelers or snow machines or walk. The only way to travel there is by a small airplane, or on a barge during the months when the river isn’t frozen.

Denise is part of the construction crew. She is my age, tall, thin and strong. She has been working in rural Alaska her whole adult life. She has a home in Florida but doesn’t mind spending her days in the gravel and mud. “I really care about this,” she says.

Life is so funny. If you told me two years ago I would be doing this, I would never have believed you. Now I wake up every single day thinking about Alaska and how to help the Native people there get what they want.

We got out at 9:40 and flew at about 2700 feet, under the cloud layer. I knew the elevation because I could see the tiny plane’s instrument panels from my seat. Everyone could. The inside of the windows kept icing up. We landed in Bethel and the pilot said “I hope it wasn’t too warm back there for you!” Haha. I was wearing leggings, jeans, snow pants and had a little lap robe, along with my gloves, scarf, hat and neck gaiter, so I stayed warm enough.

There was a guy at Bethel checking his luggage that included a massive moose antler rack. Of course there was.

The flight to Anchorage gave us views of the frozen rivers, Denali and a couple glaciers. I got tears in my eyes seeing them because it was a glorious, beautiful experience I never thought I would have.

God is good. Alaska is huge, and I left a piece of my heart there when I climbed on that tiny plane.

I took a 15-minute shower and then used my shower squeegee on the glass doors.

Wow, exciting, Suebob, thrill us with more of your tales!

Well, it IS exciting to me, after three years of taking military showers (water on, water off, soap up, water on to rinse) in the RV. I’m taking longer showers and squeegeeing the shower doors because I bought a mobile home in Washington! And it has a big water heater, a proper shower, and best of all, water pressure!

Here’s how it happened: I left Oregon at the beginning of May, once I was fully vaccinated. I had been thinking about heading back out on the road again, but my sister had a medical issue and I decided to come up here in case she needed me.

I stayed at an RV park and visited my sister a lot. I liked the area. Close to Seattle but not a big city. A charming historic downtown. Diverse. Decent museums and botanic gardens close by. A coffee hut on every corner.

I started noticing my sister’s mobile home park was full of nice people and mobile homes prices were really reasonable. I looked at one, but it wasn’t right for me. I kept an eye out.

One of my criteria for living somewhere is the answer to the question “Would I be happy driving up to this place?” I once lived somewhere that caused my heart to sink and me to yell “Oh crap!” whenever I came home, and I never want that feeling again.

Sometime not too long ago, I thought “If I had a house, I’d want it to be grey and white.”

Cue a small grey and white mobile home coming up for sale. Old. Single-wide. But the owner had done a lot of improvements – painted some of the inevitable faux wood paneling white, installed new fake wood flooring in some rooms, renovated the bathroom.

I made an offer on the spot. The seller was motivated to move because she was going to Missouri to live in a tiny home and wanted to get there before winter. So in two weeks, I was handing over my savings and moving in.

The owner agreed to leave the beds and some furniture. That she did. She left 2 beds, a leather couch, three bookcases, 2 dressers, kitchen chairs and stools, a 40″ TV, stereo, washer/dryer, fridge, lamps, bakeware, glasses, cups, lawnmower, weed whacker, patio furniture, 2 portable ACs, gardening tools, potted plants, and curtains. All I really needed to bring was some pots, plates, bowls, bedding and clothing (and she apologized for not leaving bedding).

It was so well-furnished that the day I moved in, I had houseguests from Ventura, up here for a memorial service. It was perfect to have people help me break in my new home.

What about Gladis? There is a storage lot right here on site, and I take her out for a weekly jaunt. We’re heading back down to Oregon in 2 weeks to take care of some business. And she and I have more adventures planned.

So now I’m busy making my mobile home a home. My stuff is on my way from Ventura after 3 years in storage. And if I ever I get sad about not being on the road right now, I can go hop in the shower and stand there for a long, long time.

This was a post I wrote and have since updated as part of a project to honor those who died on 9/11/01 as part of the terror attacks. For the 20th anniversary, here it is again. May Mr. Bauer’s family and friends be surrounded by love today and every day.

The victims. We hear it over and over again about Sept. 11, 2001. The 2,996 victims.

The person that I am writing about, W. David Bauer, Jr., may have been a victim for one short moment of his life. But for the rest of his 45 years, he was clearly a winner. From what I have read about him, he was a player and a competitor, someone who took to the field of life with gusto and determination and who gave it all he had.

In the NY Times tribute article, it mentions that he competed in a triathlon on the weekend of Sept. 8-9, 2001 before coming home to watch his sons play football and then to grill steaks and to drink good red wine with his family and friends.

He also played football in college at Villanova and was inducted into their Hall of Fame. One of his friends from college said “His nickname was “Superman” because he could catch the bullet passes of our starting quarterback, Brian Sikorski, with one hand, either hand!”

He also had a lifelong love of basketball and volleyball. His teammate Tom Dooley said “I knew David as a competitor on the basketball court when we were both well past our prime playing days…[He] was a gentleman of the highest caliber on and off the court.”

Mr. Bauer played professional football as a linebacker before being sidelined by an injury.

In business he competed and thrived. He climbed up through the ranks at Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston before becoming head of global sales for eSpeed, a division of Cantor Fitzgerald located on the 105th floor of the North Tower. He was one of 658 Cantor employees who died in the World Trade Center.

He also contributed to his community. He was a past President and Founding member of the Villanova Financial Club. He served on the Board of Family & Children’s Services and he and his wife were honored with the Helen Hoffman Award for Community Service. He was a member of Holy Cross Roman Catholic Church in Rumson, N.J., where he lived.

Mr. Bauer, who was 45 years old at the time of his death, was married to his wife Virginia “Ginny” and had three children, David, Steven and Jackie, who were 16, 14, and 12 when he died. He and Ginny had met in third grade.

So this is a man who lived, who really lived. He was someone who made good things happen for himself, his family and his friends. The type of hard-working, hard-playing family guy who is the backbone of our country and whom you would probably love as a neighbor.

Since Mr. Bauer’s death, his wife has become a leading advocate for the families of victims of 9/11.  and has since remarried. His children followed in their father’s footsteps, becoming championship athletes in their own right.

My very best wishes to the Bauer family. I am sorry for your loss and I hope this tribute did Mr. Bauer justice.

Here is a link to the 2,996 project.

I decided to start beekeeping. I wanted to start small, so I just got one.

Not one hive, one bee. A very good bee, though.

I was in the swimming pool and I saw her and bobbed over to check her out. There are often bees in the pool. Most are dead. She was very much alive and was frantically spinning around on her back.

I fetched a toy that a child had left on the pool deck- one of those weighted things that kids dive down to retrieve from the bottom of the pool. It looked like a tiny orange bucket with blue rubber wings. I scooped up the bee and sat her on the pool deck to dry.

She clung to the tiny bucket. I blew on her wings to dry them. At the end of my workout and shower, she was still just clinging there, looking quite dry. I realized her ordeal in the water may have used up all her energy. By then, it was almost dark and the flowers were closed, so I gently carried the bee back to Gladis and sat her, still on the toy, on the hood.

I went and fetched a little wooden knife and daubed honey on it. I presented it to her and she eagerly stuck her mouth into the honey and drank and drank and drank. I removed my glasses to watch her.

When I went inside, she was still drinking. I thought she might be too damaged to last the night, but I was glad to give her one last fabulous meal.

I looked out in the morning and she was still there. It was very early. But then when I checked in another couple hours, she was gone.

I don’t know why I went to all the trouble and got invested so much in this one tiny bee. The world seems so crazy and out of control that it was good to focus on one small thing.

What is your one small thing this week?

Image by Cocoparisienne at Pixabay.

Thanks to inspiration from my friends Kizz and Cindy, I decided many years back to set a goal of visiting 100 museums. At the time, I believe I had already visited about 45.

When you live in one suburban spot, visiting 100 museums is difficult because you have to travel every time you want to see a new one. When you travel all the time, it becomes considerably easier. On my trip around the US, I visited museums large and small as often as I could. A lot of this depended on location and parking.

Then I came home and Covid hit. My museum count over the past year: zero. The last museum I visited was the Cesar Chavez National Monument & Museum last March, number 98 on my list. When I visited, I was already worrying about the virus and the lady at the front desk told me she thought they would be closing down any minute.

Fast forward 14 months. Fully vaccinated and feeling fine, my sister agreed to visit the Tacoma Museum of Glass with me last weekend. It’s worth a visit. First, there is the famed Chihuly Glass Bridge (see above), which is thankfully above, not below you (I ain’t walking on any glass bridges). And then the museum is full of glass, both modern and historic. The Rene Lalique exhibit was a treat.

My favorite part, though, was the hallway to the bathroom, which is lined with kid drawings turned into works of glass by the masters in the museum’s hot shop as part of an educational program. Kids have unlimited imaginations and the glass workers did their drawings justice.

While on the tram back from the museum, I saw another museum I wanted to check out, Tacoma Art Museum, which I visited this Sunday. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that made 100 museums! TAM also has a big glass collection as well as paintings and sculpture.

The exhibit that caught my fancy was a big gallery filled with works chosen by small groups comprised of museum employees, volunteers and community members, including youth. They got to choose 3 works each from the permanent collection for display. The show was diverse, interesting and bridged styles and time periods. I think more museums should do this.

It took me 60 years to visit 100 museums. My next goal is 200! I wonder when and where that will be.

Highly recommended museums:

Corning Museum of Glass, Corning NY

Taos Museum of Art at Fechin House, Taos, NM

Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, SC

Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

Rosicrucians Egyptian Museum, San Jose, CA

Exploratorium, San Francisco, CA

The whole list of museums I visited is on the “Life Lists” tab – keep scrolling down.

Yesterday I made a mistake. I mentioned to a guy at the gas station “I think I have probably made every mistake with an RV that one can make.”

I ANGERED THE GODS.

My brother-in-law and I call stupid, physical mistakes that result in a mess “Moe Larry Cheese.” I’m not sure why, but it is related to this episode of The Three Stooges.

We say “I Moe Larry Cheesed today,” and the other person settles in for a story.

I Moe Larry Cheesed.

I went out to do errands in Gladis (my RV) and then to do laundry. When I got done, the inside of the RV was full of grocery bags, Amazon boxes, laundry baskets, things placed in the sink so they wouldn’t fly around while I was driving. It was a mess.

I came back to the RV park and plugged in all the things – turned on the propane, the electric, hooked up the water and turned it on, then last, the sewer pipe (which we RV people charmingly call “the stinky slinky”).

I was outside talking to Nice Neighbor Peggy about her lilacs, which are setting buds quite nicely.

I walked around the RV to the side with the door and saw water leaking out from near the rear wheels.

Huh? Water? I started running like a cartoon character, my feet spinning in circles.

MOE FREAKING LARRY CHEESE.

One of the items in the sink had pushed on the kitchen sink handle, turning the water on. The handle being on wasn’t an issue when I was driving, because the water pump wasn’t on, but when I connected the water hose to the RV park water, the open faucet started flowing.

A plastic box in the sink was sitting at an angle, directing a waterfall directly into…the stove. Onto the floor. Down through the stove vent into the pots & pans cabinet.

Lots and lots and lots of water.

I mopped and cleaned and soaked up water with towels for about an hour.

As we say in this situation “Well, the floor needed to be mopped anyway.”

What can we learn from this story?

NEVER SAY YOU HAVE MADE ALL THE MISTAKES, BECAUSE THE GODS ALWAYS HAVE ONE MORE MISTAKE.

I have plenty of mistakes left to make, you hear me?