Just a short note to our friends–Grandpa Milo had a stroke on Sunday. Currently, he is confused a lot of the time and does not have the use of his left hand and arm. He was in the hospital for a couple of nights and will be moved to rehab today. After performing diagnostics, the doctors say we will not know if and how much function will return for a few days or weeks. Uncles Rich and Jerry were with him at the hospital as Aunts Julia and Jean were in San Diego and could not get back until yesterday. We really appreciated their stepping in and helping out. Of course, Gary and Drew continue to be true champions for Dad, but also for a lot of other people. We are thankful for all of them.
Category: Milo and Sarah
I signed and returned the acceptance letter for a job offer yesterday. The company’s headquarters are in Vancouver, BC, but I will work from home somewhere in Washington State. This change is quite a big adventure for us. We should be close enough to Grandpa Milo to be able to drive him to church on a semi-regular basis. We will be closer to our kids and be able to see them more often–it is a short drive or train ride to see Kelly or for her to visit us. The job is with a good group of people with whom I have worked as one of their customers for 5-6 years. It is challenging, interesting and will require some travel (Asia, USA and Europe), but not too much after the first round to get to know customers and colleagues.
The adventure part of the whole affair, if we can make it work, is that Lorena wants to find a house to remodel close to a city center. We loved living in downtown Wilsonville when we were last in Oregon with the ability to walk to stores and restaurants. We want to try to duplicate that. We have a real estate agent who says he thinks he can find us something that fills the bill within our budget. He sent us links to places that look great. It might not work out exactly like that, but we are going to give it the old college try and see what happens. Lorena has a plane ticket to fly to Seattle on Tuesday morning to, hopefully, find us “the” house somewhere on the I-5 corridor between Vancouver, WA and Tacoma. We expect to stay in Texas until the second week of January and get back to the Pacific Northwest with our truck full of worldly goods in time to attend Grandma Sarah’s funeral on MLK day in the Portland area.
All Grandma Sarah’s remaining childern (me–Dad, Uncle, Aunt Julia and Aunt Jean–on the left two boxes of the conference call video strip at the top of this post) as well as most of the grandkids (Amy–not pictured, Kylee, Julia and Charlie–in the left three boxes of the strip) as well as some good help from Uncle’s Rich and Jerry got together for a video conference on GoToMeeting to remember Grandma Sarah and plan the funeral. Our sister Amy died of SIDS and Kelly and Christian were traveling home from Thanksgiving.
We laughed and cried, heard lots of stories and had some ideas about what we want to do. It was truly wonderful. I thought he thing that was most interesting was that each of us had a story or two that we just assumed everyone new, but when the story was told, there were some who had no idea. We have a good plan and I have a continued appreciation for the kindness of my siblings. I guess that is an additional tribute to Grandma Sarah and Grandpa Milo, too.
Aunt Jean sent me the grainy picture of Grandma Sarah and I from many moons ago. Like all the other kids, I felt like there was something special between her and and I that was unique to just us. I love that picture.
Lorena has been earning points for shopping at the Tom Thumb supermarket near where we live. She used all her points to buy a new turkey cooking pan and rack because our old pan started to rust. She is giving it double duty to cook the flan. It does not get much better than that–flan and a turkey in a free pan! Lots of reasons, big and small to be thankful.
Grandpa Milo called this morning, too. His Thanksgiving with my siblings and all the kids’ cousins will be tomorrow afternoon just because of how all the timing worked out. The reason he called is because he remembered a hymn he thinks might be good for Grandma Sarah’s funeral. We have to look up–we know the hymn really, really well, but do not know the number off the top of our heads. He sang “…we’ll gather round the throne, a victor throng” and a few more lines we could not quite make out. He is obviously very sad, but much better than a week ago. These are more things for which to be thankful–a recently passed Mother/Grandmother in a good place and Grandpa Milo who stays optimistic in the face of a very difficult time.
Just one more Grandma Sarah story (I cannot help myself). Aunt Julia sent me a chunk of an old instant message she sent me sometime last year. It reminded us that one of Grandma Sarah’s greatest qualities was her boundless kindness and efforts to help “the least of these.”
From Aunt Julia:
I just found this except on a messenger string between Ken and I on 8/4/2015. Mom was feeding a guy named Mike who used to sit at her table. He could still kind of feed himself but Mom would help him because he struggled so much. This is after she had recovered from her surgery but before she got C-dif.
“Mom helps them spoon feed people when they can’t get to everyone. I wish I would have had my camera today, it was very sweet but painfully slow since she can’t see. She would pick up a bite and push it in his direction and he would lean in a bit and she would stretch out a bit and he would lean a little more and so on until the fork reached his mouth… then I would heave a sigh of relief and the whole process would start again It took about 30 minutes for them to get through half of his plate with neither of them getting impatient or losing interest. I just about lost my mind!!!”
My brother, Uncle Doug, my sisters, Aunts Julia and Jean and I all feel good about the arrangements for Grandma Sarah’s funeral. In particular, we feel good about making sure Grandpa Milo gets what he needs. In addition to our plans to make sure someone is checking in on Grandpa Milo now in the short term, but also through the holidays and later on when things settle down after the funeral in January. The sheer number of family and close friends who have reached out to us is testament not only to those friends, but to the lifetime of good will Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah built up over many years.
There was a period of emotionally charged frenetic activity following Grandma Sarah’s death the transitioned into, for me anyway, a couple of days of phone calls with friends and family to thank people for their kindness–family, family with no blood re
lation (you know who you are), especially people who met in Grandpa Milo’s and Grandma Sarah’s living room for church meetings every Sunday morning or Wednesday meeting for decades and special friends of every stripe.
There are many things for which I am thankful going through these events. One of those is that I have truly loving siblings. They have been absolute champions in every way. They have honorably, selflessly and humbly done everything within their power to not only preserve the dignity of everyone involved, but they have done it at great cost to themselves. I love them and am very thankful for them.
Now, I am just about all cried out–at least for awhile. It is sad that Grandma Sarah is gone, but she had a great live. She loved much and was much loved. Next weekend, the family will help Grandpa Milo get some closure and in January we will look forward to saying a more formal goodbye. We will all miss her, but I can honestly say that the greatest gift she gave all of us is that “it is well with her soul.”
The photo to the left is of Grandma Sarah picking beans with her twin sister Janet’s second son Neil. It is pretty descriptive of a lot of my upbringing. Neil and I were both second sons of about the same age and spent a lot of time together at Grandma Jenkins’s (Grandma Sarah’s mom) and Aunt Janet’s house together for overnight stays and the like. More importantly though, it is a reminder that my generation and the generation before that grew up as a family that harvested crops by hand as manual laborers on farms. In my case, it was mostly beans and strawberries, but a lot of other crops in the previous generation (cherries, hops, etc.). Grandpa Milo’s family worked as migrant farm workers every summer during the harvest seasons of his youth. Grandma Sarah picked strawberries and beans in the summers of her college years (and before) to help pay her way through pharmacy school.
I probably should not tell this story in public, but it is so iconic in terms of how I think about my mother, I just cannot help myself. Both Grandma Sarah and I graduated from Oregon State University. In 1973, I moved into a student co-op directly across the street from where Grandma Sarah lived when she started at Oregon State in 1948. I wrote about that place and its connection with Ted Bundy the serial killer in a previous post on this blog. Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah lived in Newberg when I started school and I often caught a ride with friends to go back home for weekends. Grandma Sarah would then drive me the 60 miles back to Corvallis on Sunday afternoon after church. We would always stop in Monmouth on the way to eat lunch. I have been at that J’s Family Restaurant a lot of times not only for this, but because it is the same restaurant where our dear friend, Susan Rodriguez worked while she was getting her degree at what is now Western Oregon University as well as a good place to eat on the way to watch a Beavers game.
I need to give this story a little context now to diminish the trouble this will cause me. Grandma Sarah had a wonderful uncle who always went to her house for Christmas while she was growing up as a young girl. He smoked cigars and she associated the smell of those cigars with some wonderful memories she had as a child. So, when the mood struck us, we would buy a couple of REALLY cheap cigars (Swisher Sweets) and smoke them together while we finished our drive to Corvallis. She would get that twinkle in her eye that everyone who really knew her has seen when she was about to say something or do something just for the sheer joy of it even though it might be a little bit off in the eyes of those who were a little to uptight or ungracious. I LOVED those trips. They were our thing. I was talking to Aunt Julia last night and she reminded me that she had actually been there one time with us and we bought THREE cigars. I am glad she was there and can confirm my story because I think there are a lot of people who might not believe it if I did not come from someone with a little more credibility than myself.
I thought it would be good to explain the funeral arrangements we are making to say goodbye to Grandma Sarah because they are a little bit out of the ordinary. Doug, Julia and Jean who are very close to the situation and after a lot thought have decided the best way to handle this to accommodate Grandpa Milo’s capabilities would be to do this in two steps. I completely concur with what was decided as it was a kind solution and what the family feels is a fitting way to say goodbye respectfully given the circumstances. Since it was Grandma Sarah wish to be cremated we have more time than we would otherwise. In that light, this is our plan:
Step One. Many know that Grandpa Milo has Alzheimer’s disease and is not as able as in the past. It was felt that in the short term, based on Grandpa Milo’s capabilities and all of our need for some closure it would be good to do something in a much smaller, more controlled venue. To that end, we will have a small family-only dinner in the next week or so to remember Grandma Sarah and disperse the ashes in the rose garden by the pond Grandpa Milo built like they had planned.
Step Two. All of us wanted to have a traditional funeral so all the family and friends Grandma Sarah loved so much and who loved her back can say goodbye, too. Because we have time and due to a number of considerations including the upcoming holidays when it is hard to plan travel, the family thought it would be easier if we did the funeral after the first of the year. It seemed odd to us to wait so long, but someone remembered that was the way it was handled with our dear friend Beth Bellam and it not only went well, but allowed more people to make plans to be there. The next consideration was that Special Meeting rounds start right after the first of the year and end on January 15. Mom’s birthday is on January 18th and we thought that might be a good time to have the funeral and celebrate her life. We talked to our ministers and they thought that would be just fine if that is what the family wanted. We are not sure it will happen exactly on January 18th, but if not, it will be within a few days of that date. We will keep everyone posted.
Mom (Grandma Sarah) died last night. She was with Aunts Julia and Jean, Uncle Doug and two of her grandchildren, Amy and Charlie. I flew out from Texas to Seattle last weekend and was able to drive down to Portland on Saturday with Kelly to say goodbye in person. She recognized us and was able to say one or two words and squeeze our hand to answer questions while we were there. Kelly and I took turns reading the Bible to her, Psalm 23, Matthew 5-7 and the three epistles of John. Then we sang some hymns with the help of Grandpa Milo. Grandma Sarah, Kelly and I held hands and we each prayed for her. After that, she lost focus so we kissed her and said goodbye. We knew it would be the last time and were very thankful we had the chance to tell her we loved her and say goodbye.
Mom was a faithful woman who always looked out for “the least of these.” She had a great love for Jesus and He was what her life was about. It was sad to see her go, but she is in a better place.
I fly to Seattle on Thursday night for a business meeting on Friday. Friday night, Kelly and I plan to drive to Portland to see Grandma Sarah. She is eating very, very little and is getting closer to the end. This is part of the reason I have not written so much. There are lots of things happening and not so much happening. I get up every morning to go to work through the week, then Lorena and I go to the Snooty Pig on Saturday mornings for breakfast and to our church meeting on Sunday morning. In the meantime, Grandpa Milo and especially Grandma Sarah approach the end. This might be the last time I see her if I make it on time, but she might linger for longer than we expect. It is a time for introspection.
In the whole scheme of things, maybe what is going on in our lives is not so eventful. Still, it is important in the trajectory of our lives. There will be changes soon. We are not sure whether they will be a result of momentous geopolitical events or as a result of our desire to make some changes to get closer to our loved ones and/or “do the right thing.” I hope to be able to write more in the coming days about all that is in process.
Note: The picture is in celebration of National Cat Day.
I am scheduled to go out to lunch with my manager and several others today as it is my last day of work at my job here in Oregon. These are always melancholy things. My theory is that work is never as bad as one thinks it is while they are in it, but never really quite as good as they remember it after they leave. The work in this job I am leaving is not nearly as “bleeding edge” as I hoped, but it has been a great place to be to have the chance to spend a year close to Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah. I am very grateful for my time here, but look forward to some new and very interesting challenges.
We pack this weekend. We do not have much because we never got out of our fourth floor studio apartment into a house. Everything should fit into a 5×8 U-Haul trailer. Lorena took our Honda CRV to get a trailer hitch so we are all set to go. I pick up the trailer and we plan to pack tomorrow. Kiwi the remaining twin cat sister, Lorena and I should be on the road to Tempe for a visit with Christian early Monday morning.
Betty Blonde #492 – 07/05/2010
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
When we drive Grandpa Milo to church, we have time to talk with him. It is a lot of fun and we always learn something. We have to talk about things that happened a long time ago because his short term memory is not so good. Our talk yesterday, as usual was a gift to us. We talked about when he played sports in elementary school and high school in Cottage Grove, Oregon back in the 1940’s. One of my favorite stories that I have heard often was when his high school basketball was doing well, but not as well as the coach desired.
The coach gathered the team around and asked the question in what, I suppose was a rhetorical way, “Are you here to have fun or are you here to win!?”
That was probably the wrong thing to ask a bunch of extremely hard working farmer and logger boys whose brothers had just come back from fighting World War II. Sports were definitively not anything to be taken seriously. No one believed then that the “courage” and “sacrifice” required to participate in sports were a good way to build character. Nor did they believe the exercise they got playing them was anywhere close to the physical duress they experienced when working on the farm or in the woods. So, the idea that it was a builder of character was transparently wrong. That left sports as something to do for fun and, to a much smaller extent, exercise.
Grandpa answered for all of them, “We play for fun. As soon as this quits being fun, we will quit playing basketball.”
Maybe we ought to get back to thinking that way about sports again in our day.
Betty Blonde #489 – 06/21/2010
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Lorena and I enjoy our lives as apartment dwellers. We started our marriage in a small one-bedroom apartment in Boynton Beach, Florida and enjoyed that, too. We keep thinking we will move into a house soon, but we are not sure when things will stabilize with Grandpa Milo (Alzheimer’s) and Grandma Sarah. So, we continue to enjoy the ability to walk across the parking lot to Fred Meyer or (more often) across the street to Albertsons. We actually drove very little until this week when the Oregon drizzle finally hit. We are a one car family, so Lorena drove me to work in the morning. I walked a mile and a half each morning to have lunch with her at Wendy’s (cup of chili) or Subway (6″ turkey sandwich), then two miles home at night.
Lorena takes two classes at the community college so she has either homework or class every night. I work on three projects (GaugeCam and two others) beside my day job, so I have too much stuff to do, too. The reality, though, is that we are just working and waiting. Life is waiting, but usually the waiting, in our case, has been a function of our desire to accomplish something and the waiting involved work. Now though, the waiting does not have much to do with us, but the folks. We are getting stuff done, but the length of the stay in our current situation has little to do with anything over which we have much control. And still, it is nice. Since there is nothing really we can do other than be where we are and do what we are doing, we have less about which to worry than in previous circumstances. We plan to enjoy it while it lasts.
Betty Blonde #413 – 02/15/2010
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Day 620 of 1000
This is the first in a series of three posts about things that have helped me develop and sustain a career I love. The first post is about how to stay in close touch with people with whom you have worked. The second post is about how to give away free work whenever you can. The third is about how to invest significant efforts in helping previous employers, people who can never help you, and “the least of these.”
I have a career that I love. Beyond my wildest expectation, it gets more enjoyable every year. It did not start out that way. There are several simple things I wish someone would have explained to me about career and life that I did not realized until I was in my forties. This is the first of two posts about the rules I believe got me here. Of course, the rules are not the only thing–you have to know how to do the job, but the rules set things up for my success. The first set of rules has to do with staying in touch with colleagues and are listed at the bottom of this post. The second has to do with giving things away (yes, that means for free) and life-long learning. First, a little about my background and career path.
Education
Through no fault of my own, I have a great career doing work that interests me with good people. At some level I have always known it was by the grace of God because I certainly did not plan it that way. I (barely) finished a degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing in 1978. I got pretty bad grades and when I got out, surprise, it was really tough to get a job. I was a microcosm of what happens to people who study non-STEM degrees today with the exception that college was pretty cheap at the time, I was not saddled with a lot of debt, and I (again) got pretty bad grades.
I worked for awhile at nights in the mail room at a large technology company running computer reports around their multi-building campus. It was truly a dead end job, so I decided to go back to college and get a technical degree. If I had had a brain in my head, I would have done the leveling classes to get into a Masters degree program. No really great school would have accepted me because my grades were so bad, but knowing what I know now, it would have been pretty straightforward to get accepted at a good regional University as a probationary student long enough to prove that I could handle the degree. I already had a lot of the math and chemistry, so it would not have taken long if I worked hard. Later in life, I actually worked with a woman who did exactly that to get into a Masters program in Mechanical Engineering with an English degree and no math.
Career field
So, I went to a technical college and got a two year associate degree in something called Computer Systems Enginneering Technology. It was kind of a cross between computer programming and electronics. With that, I got a really good job at a company named Triad in Silicon Valley training technicians how to work on specialized computers specifically designed for auto parts store. After I had been there a couple of years, a friend told me about a program where I could pay in-state tuition in Oregon while I went to school for a semester in Guadalajara. It sounded great, so I headed to Mexico.
I made no job plans before I went to Mexico, so when we got toward the end of the semester, I started to worry because I had no money. Thankfully, my Mom, Grandma Sarah, was way ahead of me. She saw a want-ad in the newspaper for a technical writer at a robotics company named Intelledex in Corvallis. She sent my resume, I went to the interview when I got home, and they gave me the job. At that time in 1983 there were hardly any industrial robot companies, but one had been started in Corvallis by a group of the engineers and scientists who worked at the Hewlett-Packard ink-jet printer facility. Within a couple of years, I had moved over from the robots to work on something called machine vision. A machine vision system is a computer that has a camera connected to it. The system captures images of things that are happening on conveyor belts and workstation tables to guide robots, check the quality of assembled parts, and that sort of thing. That is the field in which I have worked for the last thirty years.
I stayed at Intelledex for eight years as a technical writer, trainer, applications engineer, and regional sales manager. I got to know enough about machine vision that one of our customers, the University of Texas at El Paso, invited me to start and run a vision laboratory to develop machine vision systems for use in factories in Texas, New Mexico, and Northern Mexico. While I was there, I was able to take the leveling classes I needed to enter and complete a Masters degree program in Industrial Engineering. We were successful enough that, I actually got invited to lecture to the faculty at the National University of Singapore about the program and some of our systems got deployed as far away as Israel. After that I got invited to Texas A&M to start a similar program there and to start a PhD. That program and the PhD never progressed very far because marriage and real life got in the way and lead me back to machine vision with Motorola, another of our old customers in Florida.
What made my career take off
It should have dawned on me that the reason I had the educational opportunity at UTEP and the job opportunity in Florida was because of connections I made in my work with the robot company. I left Motorola to start a business that was pretty wildly unsuccessful and needed to go back to work. I really did not know where to go, so I went back to the well and called some of my old Intelledex friends. They said, of course we will hire you. That was really a wake-up call. The people that rehired me were now at a different company, ESI in Portland, that had purchased the machine vision part of Intelledex. I realized the people I worked with before were not only just workmates, they were friends who valued what I did. Not only did we enjoy working together, they valued me for the contribution I could make.
The next big event in my awakening was initiated by the dot-com bubble. I got caught in a mass layoff due to business conditions and I found myself on the street. That really set me on heels. I had a mortgage to pay and a family to feed. I wracked my brain and called everyone I could to find a job. One of the guys I called was a camera salesman. He said he knew of a job in, of all places, Corvallis. I called the guys and guess what? It was populated with some other of my old compatriots from Intelledex. By now I start to clue into the fact that I have friends out there. It really irritated me that no one emphasized the importance of staying in touch with workplace colleagues. My rules for a great career were an outgrowth of that epiphany.
Right now, the shoe is on the other foot. Some of my old Intelledex compatriots work for me as contractors. It is nice to be on the other side of the equation and reinforces the knowledge that a job helps both the employee and the employer.
Rules for a great career
- When you leave a company (or move from one division to another) make a list of people for whom you have respect.
- Follow the careers of the people on your list and send them an email or even a card whenever they get promoted or change companies.
- If someone on your list loses their job, wrack your brain and make some calls to people who might be able to use them. It helps both the employer and the employee.
- If a company tries to recruit you and you cannot take the job, actively try to find someone who can feel the need and make follow-up contact to see if they are still looking.
- Take every opportunity possible (after putting God and family first) to meet with your colleagues and ex-colleagues in informal settings (e.g. Take them to lunch when you are in town).
Final anecdote
I received an email two days ago from what I will just call an unfriendly acquaintance. He and his wife both work in the same field as I. He saw I had a connection with a company that might be able to give work to his wife. He essentially had to swallow his pride and ask me for a favor. I will derive great joy from introducing his wife to the CEO of a company that very well needs someone like her. This will help an old friend (the CEO), create a new friend (the wife), and turn an unfriendly acquaintance into a friend. The CEO is already on my contact list, but the (hopefully) ex-unfriendly acquaintance and his wife will now be on my contact list whether the job works out or not. I plan to contact all three in the next couple of weeks to see what happens.
We received two interesting pieces of mail today. First, an invite to a family reunion for people who descend from my father’s maternal grandparents. It is in June in Oregon and I am going to try to be there with Grandpa Milo and Grandma Sarah. In the picture, I think my grandmother is the one in the back on the right side of the picture.
The other piece of mail was Christian’s official invitation to the Math Honors program.
Day 486 of 1000
My parents are getting older. Lately, my brother, sisters, and I have worked hard on getting Dad and Mom out of their rented house into assisted living. Mom has fairly normal old age dementia. Dad, on the other hand, has a fairly odd malady. It was odd enough that his neurologist has asked that he donate his brain to OHSU for further study after he is gone. At first they thought it was Alzheimer’s disease. After that, they thought it was Frontal Lobe Temporal Dementia (FTD). The PET scan showed that it was both and neither. His brain scan manifests something that is somewhat less than Alzheimer’s and something less than FTD. But the both of them together are something that is fairly rare. That is pretty much the story of Dad’s life. Both Dad and Mom have long term memories that are intact. In light of that diagnosis, I have decided to try to do some interviews to document their amazing lives.
Mom is one of the first women to graduate with a four year degree in pharmacy from Oregon State University. There was one woman in the year before her and she graduated with one other woman. There were other women who graduated before that, but that was well before her time when pharmacy was a two year program. She worked with one or two women who graduated from the two year program at OSU as early as 1917. It will be fun to interview her about her memories of these topics. In additon to that, she attended OSU with the first black man that graduated that ever graduated from there with a pharmacy degree.
For his part, Dad had a wildly improbable life. He saw the first two hydrogen bombs go off when he was a cook on Eniwetok in the army. He is journey to that position is a story onto itself. Before that, as a five or six year old child, he traveled to Portland on a bus on his own so the Dornbecker hospital could operate on a growth on his throat. He was the prime mover in a business that grew to be the largest producers of doll house kits in the world, selling to store chains such as Walmart, Home Depot, Sears, Lowes, and many others.
I hope to be able to get some interesting interviews on these topics as well as their upbringing in rural Oregon. They are a product of the logging/sawmill culture that is truly unique to Oregon. I am very much looking forward to these interviews and hope that time and health permits me to do this work over the coming few years. I took a new job specifically to be able to spend time in Oregon with my parent for this purpose. If they are willing and have the time, my siblings might add a guest post to this effort as they have made the effort to get a scanner to accumulate old photos and have memories of their own.