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Kate Braestrup is a writer, a wife, a widow and a mom. She is also the chaplain to the Maine State Game Wardens; providing comfort to the loved ones of missing, injured and dead; providing counsel to the State Troopers and Game Wardens of Maine and providing us with a little insight into both.
She has an interesting take on loss and love and grief and moving on. She seems to get what many of us struggle with. Her experience with all of those; loss, love, grief and moving on is both personal and professional.
I was particularly struck by her wholesale endorsement of the floor as the best place to grieve. That’s where people go, it seems. I know that I did. She endorses it as perfectly normal, as well as safe. It is impossible to fall off of the floor.
I was also struck by her observation, in her years of delivering the worst news a loved one could hear, that there is a cycle; the first blow of grief may knock someone down, but she is also there to see a recovery begin… to see shock shaken off and a question, a query, a request will come; where? how? can I see him?
She knows, as many of us do, that the whole grief process may take weeks, months, years, a lifetime to come full-cycle, but it starts. She sees that, and in a life full of grief-stricken moments, she also finds hope and strength and love.
She also has an interesting approach to faith. It is distinctly “un-churchy”. She believes in the god we all believe in when all hope, all faith, is lost. She believes in love. She believes that love is what brings out a community of troopers and wardens and civilians, when, at best, their search will yield something gruesome and, at worst it, will yield nothing at all.
Her book, Here If You Need Me, is available if you’re interested in reading more, but, for a small taste, you can find an excerpt and an interview here.
A couple of my recent posts have been about keeping your eyes open. In Driving Lessons, one of my major points was the lifesaving property of watching the actual movement of vehicles around you rather than the rather uncertain implied intentions of a turn signal. In Look, I wrote of the welcome reminder to simply look around you at the good that is a happening right under our noses.
And then I forgot to look.
I have had my head down for days; plowing through a large share of work that is due, getting my taxes done and sorting and filing the mass of paperwork that remains in the aftermath of IRS and State calculations, reviewing documents, updating forms and returning calls. It has occurred to me on several late night occasions that I had not written a post, but in all the churn of administrative details I found no inspiration for writing; forgetting, of course, or at least temporarily ignoring, that part of my pledge is to write something everyday.
Once again I have missed an anniversary. I started writing two years ago yesterday with two posts; as an explanation of my chosen blog header I wrote Metastable, and in an admission, in The Morning After, confessed that the act of starting a blog may not have been entirely well-thought out.
At that point I had been home, retired, for about four years. My mother had been in a nursing home for more than a year as her dementia had advanced, yet her general health was remarkably, dishearteningly good.
At that point in my life, the beast was still a mush-faced bundle of random energy who peed on my floor, chewed on my hands and pulled like a sled dog on a leash. My circle of local “friends” consisted nearly entirely of caregivers and residents of long-term care facilities. I was working a job that ultimately would leave me feeling expendable. I had things to say but no forum for saying them. My experience as caregiver felt isolating.
My how things change…
So I missed the anniversary yesterday, but today I stopped to look back and see how far I have come. Thanks to all of you who have joined me on this journey.
It is that time of year.
Pro’s are scheduling lessons and re-stocking the shop. Greens keepers are inspecting for winter damage and getting courses across the country in shape. Avid players are trying to get themselves back in shape, too.
But that is all beside the point. I can’t drive a golf ball squarely to save my life.
I really want to talk about learning to drive a car. While experience counts, some experiences are pretty costly. Few experiences are more costly than driving lessons learned the hard way, yet a number of drivers seem to get much of their education that way. One need only listen to morning drive reports to get a small sense of how much experience can help.
Throughout the winter, I took care to listen to snowy-morning traffic reports. On mornings with a few inches of fresh snow, accidents littered the roads and tangled traffic in all directions. On mornings with more than just a few inches of snow, accidents were less likely.
One of the discriminants?? Schools were closed.
It’s true that I don’t have a complete statistical analysis of this. I am also cautioned by my education in data analysis that a cause and effect relationship cannot be assumed from such an uncontrolled experiment. But strict analysis aside, it does seem likely that the lack of experience behind the wheel among the youngest of drivers, those still in school, probably contributes to the chaos on the highway.
Experience is a wonderful, if occasionally very harsh, teacher. In the case of driving, learning from someone else’s experience would certainly be an easier and cheaper lesson plan.
So who did you learn from? What did they teach you?
Although I took driver’s ed in high school in order to reduce my insurance premiums, my parents were my primary teachers. The lessons started even before I got my permit. Deciding that, if I thought I could operate a car all by myself, I would have to navigate the permit process all by myself, too. My parents let me take the take the bus downtown to the DMV. I spent much of my 15th birthday in line alone and the rest of the afternoon on the bus.
Lesson 1: You have to figure out how to get someplace before you start out on the journey.
It snowed on the very day that I got my learner’s permit. That night my father took me out to the large, unplowed parking lot of a nearby church to do some training. He showed me how to get the car into a skid and how to get out of it. Yes, we went out doing doughnuts. It was fun. It was also a valuable lesson.
Lesson 2: If you know how to get a car into a skid, you should also have a pretty good idea how not to do it, too. And if you’ve gotten a car out of a skid before, you can do it again.
My father worked downtown while I was in high school. Occasionally, I would be downtown in the afternoons and would ride home with him. Until I was learning to drive myself, I never fully appreciated some of the challenges of highway driving and changing lanes. My father’s rule of thumb was that if you can’t see the front bumper of the car behind you in your rear view mirror, you are too close to pull in front of him.
He also was clear that you should always be accelerating when you change lanes. The danger is behind you. You should be pulling away from the danger. The corollary; if you don’t have room to be accelerating, even mildly, you don’t have room to change lanes.
My father’s own words echo in my head periodically; “the guy behind you wants to get home, too”.
Lesson 3: It’s not someone else’s fault that you are in the wrong lane when your exit comes up. If you can’t change lanes safely, you go to the next exit.
Yesterday, I was driving out to an appointment. I had to make a left turn at the last light on my journey there. Because the intersection is not so heavily traveled, it does not have a turn arrow or even a turn lane, so I waited while the first three opposing cars came through the intersection. The fourth vehicle had its left turn signal on.
Phew, I thought; I can turn when he does, and I will make this light.
Except he didn’t turn. The multi-ton construction vehicle barreled through the intersection; right across my intended path. Instead of slowing to make the turn, the slight hesitation I saw was just the driver shifting gears to keep on accelerating. My little Mini would barely have felt like a bump in the road to him.
I’ve never been so grateful to have my father’s voice in my head.
Lesson 4: Watch the wheels not the turn signal.
The beast doesn’t really do many tricks. I’ve invested a lot of time and effort in mastering the basics, with limited success in many of those areas.
I have even failed to teach the beast to offer a paw in greeting; shocking in light of the fact that, in practically all other situations, her boxer-instinct is to lead with her right. Now, when asked if she shakes, I reply that it is really more of a wiggle, but you can call it whatever you want.
It’s not really a trick. More like a constant state of excitement.
You might imagine my surprise at discovering that the beast can “play dead”.
Of course, it took 10 hours at day camp today to get her to do it.
I did get up a few minutes ago. Noting a steady rise and fall of her ribcage, I am assured that she is indeed only playing.
Please don’t read any further if you are looking for enlightenment from me. I have no words of wisdom.
I spent the midday today assisting with dog training. The woman with whom I trained the beast is holding a class for deaf and hard of hearing students; the deaf population in my area being significant.
[Note: One of New York state's only eleven schools for deaf and hard of hearing for grades K-12 is located in our city school district. The National Technical Institute for the Deaf provides higher education opportunities and draws students from around the country.]
It makes for an interesting class. It’s not easy to watch a sign language interpreter, watch a training demonstration and watch your dog at the same time. Given the special needs of the class, the trainer asked for a few volunteers to help make sure that each dog handling team had an experienced dog-handler with them. I was one of those volunteers.
I am grossly underqualified.
After a year and a half, I am still trying to get the beast to fetch. Nothing exotic, mind you. My efforts are nothing like to the retired English professor who had something like 700 objects his dog could identify, differentiate between and retrieve from hiding spots. I would simply like for the beast to go find her Kong (a rubber toy with cavities in which you can stuff treats, for those of you who don’t spend your day trying to keep a four-legged friend occupied), so that I can refill it for her.
When I send her on a mission to “go find red ball”, she bounds out of the room. She gets about 10 feet then turns around; having either already forgotten her assignment or eager to make sure I am coming along. Nine times out of ten, it is the beast who patiently waits for me while I search the house for the stupid thing. It is I who stands on her head to look under the bed and the chairs in the living room.
This evening I handed her the red ball after I “fetched” it and told her to bring it. She trotted eagerly beside me all the way to the treat jar. Somewhere along the way she had dropped the ball.
My training has failed.
The beast on the other hand is getting quite good at training me.
My back door has a bell on it. I used the bell to help her tell me when she needed to go out. No matter where I was in the house, if the bell rang I stopped everything to let her out. She was actually quite good about it. I really do think it helped in housetraining.
Recently though she has begun to bait and switch the bell ringing on me. She nudges the bell with her nose, and I come to the door. Lately, she hasn’t been ringing the bell to go out…just to get me to come to the door. Then she sidles over a bit, and with a “since you’re already up” attitude looks longingly at the treat jar.
Now you know who the better trainer in my house is…
Star school is a long-standing tradition in my extended family. Informally, we have been teaching this particular series of paper folds for nearly half a century. More formally, my sister-in-law started hosted an evening party with star school as the main event 16 years ago.
My mother taught at this annual event for the first decade while I was busy roaming the planet. Since returning to my hometown, I have been the instructor for what generally turns out to be a surprisingly productive evening of star-making. That any stars are made at all is always a bit of a shock to me, especially given the usual volume of hors d’oeuvre and wine consumed, and the din of conversations as old and new friends catch up with each other.
Last night’s class was little different from many others; some new faces were there, other familiar faces were absent. The lights were on which was, for the sake of actual instruction, an improvement over last year, when a down power transformer darkened my sister-in-laws whole block. The food was, as usual, delicious and the wine and the company superb.
One new addition was the presence of my nephew and his friends; a mixed blessing perhaps. While the presence of kiddos alters the pace of instruction and the topics of conversation (not to mention putting wine glasses at peril), it was nice to see the speed with which the younger ones picked up some of the folds. It was, at times comical to witness their impatience. While the ladies would redo something that didn’t look right, or wait for a break in the conversation to ask for help, the nine-years olds, in general, launched themselves into my lap with an astonishing sense of urgency.
I can’t say that their presence made the party better, but I was at least a little gratified to see my nephew interested for the first time in learning this ridiculously impractical skill; for without him, who will teach Star School 2030???
Sure! You can find almost anything you want on the internet, but the system still has a few inherent flaws, particularly if you stray too far from the beaten path.
First off, while you can find almost anything, it is a virtual guarantee that you will not find what you were specifically looking for; unless, of course, you happen to be looking to buy books or shoes, or are looking for a new search site that will offer to search for the thing you just searched for, only not as well.
Secondly, there is a fairly good chance that what you find will be wrong.
So you’ve got that going for you.
I did learn a few things, though, while I was lost in the world wide web the other day.
This all came about because my mother and I put together a Moravian star for the church we used to attend. It hung (hanged???) over the altar during Advent one year. One of my neighbors has one hung on her front porch as part of her holiday decorations. While I have been a little lackluster in the decorating department this year, the thought did lodge in my brain that I should build another Moravian star for my own front porch or maybe my dining room; or maybe both.
“This should be easy,” I thought. “The pattern and instruction have to be on the internet.”
Yeah.
Well, no. Not so much.
I can buy any number of varieties of Moravian stars on the internet. I can learn the history of Moravian stars on the internet. When I try to ask the almighty internet how to make one for myself, I get a lot of instruction on how to buy a Moravian star, on the history of the Moravian star or how to make something other than a Moravian star.
Comically, the instructions that one gets when one asks the internet how to make a Moravian star, really are the instructions for making my mother’s white paper stars. Not so amusingly, I discovered that the experts online don’t have any better way of explaining the last set of folds than I do. While that still would not help my quest for actual Moravian star instructions, that part might have been useful to me, since it is that last step in which I repeated fail as an instructor for star-school.
So…instead of learning how to make the kind of star I would like to make, I found instructions to make the kind of star I can fold in my sleep. Instead of finding better instruction for the star I know how to make, I found that the last step is apparently unteachable.
Ack.
As a point of interest for me at least, I did learn that my mother’s white paper stars, incorrectly referred to as Moravian stars online, are actually German paper stars or Swedish paper stars or, my personal favorite, Froebel stars.
Oooh!! And I did learn that actual Moravian stars have 18 four-sided points and 8 three-sided points. I think I can safely say that, since I did not learn geometry online, I can do that math.
I was going to title this post “Finally, a Good Reason to Get Naked”, but I figured that was a good way to get filtered out of many people’s internet access, as well as attract the attention of folks who would be sorely disappointed when they read further.
I did want to pass along some health info, though.
For years, sunburn, skin cancer and the risk of future wrinkles have caused many, myself included, to, if not vilify, then at least to fear the sun. It turns out that a little bit of sunshine is not such a bad thing, after all. In fact, the NYTimes article on Vitamin D quotes medical experts who actually recommend “going outside in summer unprotected by sunscreen (except for the face, which should always be protected) wearing minimal clothing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. two or three times a week for 5 to 10 minutes”.
A critical component in the prevention of several cancers, cardio-vascular disease, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, diabetes and many other conditions, Vitamin D levels are largely a factor of sun exposure.
I may not have noticed the article but for the fact that the data that I have been crunching follows exactly along this research, cataloging the levels of Vitamin D in 50,000 folks in my hometown; most of whom have levels well below optimum.
Consider this your public service announcement for the day.
Now step away from your computer and go outside.
Gunny is the colloquial term for a Gunnery Sergeant in the Unites States Marine Corps. A good Gunny is the heart of a unit; the senior enlisted man who has walked through fire and lived to tell the tale; come back to lead the way through again; for god, for country, for the Corps.
I mentioned working with Marines in one of my squadron assignments. I said it took a little getting used to, but it was an experience that also filled me with a tremendous sense of pride. These young men and women, all imbued with a huge sense of commitment to the country and the Corps, were an honor to serve with. I can say that about both Navy and Marine Corps troops that I have worked with; so different from the smoking, cussing, skateboarding-riding hoards in my neighborhood.
These young men and women were made different from the neighborhood gang; forever changed by, first, their decision to serve and then their experience in Boot Camp. They were molded by the values of the Corps, their bond with their brothers and by the bark of their Drill Sergeant… a Gunnery Sergeant.
The Marine Corps themselves is known as “the Few, the Proud”. The smallest of the nation’s military services, they are indeed a select group. Those who promote to the rank of Gunny are fewer still. Those Gunnery Sergeants who are selected to be Drill Instructors are a very rare breed indeed. These are the toughest, leatheriest souls you may ever want to find.
I only ever worked with one DI. He was the actual drill, as in marching in parades, instructor for the Brigade of Midshipmen while I was at the Naval Academy. My senior year I was required to give up my parade rifle and carry a sword instead. As one the seniors who would be standing in front of the ranks, we had extra practice…with the Gunny. Oeuf!
After the first morning, sweating under the sweltering August sun, being barked at, corrected and made to repeat the same motion over and over again till I got it right, my arm ached, my hand was cramping, my cheek was bleeding and my shoulder was swollen.
Despite all that, I went back to my room after the first day to practice more. Getting yelled at by a Gunnery Sergeant is not fun. You really don’t want to get yelled at any more than necessary, and facing the next practice without making improvements in my performance was not an option I really embraced.
I went back the next day and did it all over again. Except this time I was a little bit better. I was no longer hitting myself in the face with my sword as I attempted to snap it back up to my shoulder. I was a little bit stronger. My aching muscles lasted a bit longer into the practice before turning to jelly. And I was a little bit wiser. I wore a sponge tucked in my bra strap to pad my bruised shoulder from the repeated strike of the sword’s blade.
I’m sure there are many among you who are asking “what the hell is so damn important about carrying a sword?”; to what end am I going to employ that skill in life? In response, I will tell you that carrying the sword is not the point. The point is to become better, stronger and wiser; as an individual and as a team.
It takes a disciplined instructor to do that. Drill Instructors are tough, disciplined men. They don’t babysit. They don’t tell you that the important thing is that you just continue to improve. They are not interested in how you feel about their methods of instruction. For a Drill Instructor, it is important that their charges learn to do the right thing and to do “the thing” right. It matters not that “the thing” is not important.
In my last squadron, the one with Marines, I worked with a Gunnery Sergeant who had applied to be a Drill Instructor. He had a spotless record and a leathery face; just the kind to inspire new recruits. He might have been a poster-boy for the Corps. I asked him, one day, if he knew why he was turned down.
It was his psyche profile. His records indicated that he “lacked empathy”.
Here’s a guy who was, officially, not thoughtful enough to be a United States Marine Corps Drill Instructor.
Talk about “the Few”…
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