Friday, April 28, 2017

Guardian Angels, Fairies and Phenomena
By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and while staying up late to watch the ball game from the West Coast I just saw 12:34 on the clock. That is something I have been doing way too much of lately, and I believe it is some sort of phenomenon. What kind of phenomenon, however, I am not sure.

Like in the movie, Phenomenon, the science fiction theory is always more interesting than the scientific one.

In the movie, John Travolta’s character, George Malley, thought he saw a bright light coming from the sky and soon afterward his mind began to expand. He was able to read and comprehend at a super-human rate and even began to possess telekinetic abilities. The towns people thought he was subject to an alien encounter but in reality, it was a brain tumor that had “awoken” parts of his brain that most humans don’t use. The movie plays on the myth about people only using 10 percent of their brain.

Back to my phenomenon.

In the late 1990s I went through a period of a few years when I would see 11:11 on the clock ALL the time. I mean like seven or eight times a week.

At first I thought it was just muscle memory, getting into a subconscious habit of looking at the clock at the same time every day and night.

But with my cell phone, the clock in my car, the clock on my computer, the clock on my desk phone, the clock on the microwave, the clock on the VCR, the bedroom clock, and the clock on my office wall being about as synchronized as John Blutarsky’s (Bluto) when the Delta Tau Chi frat boys were planning their revenge at the Faber College homecoming parade, there were days when I saw 11:11 three different times on three different clocks.

I had a feeling this meant something, but what, I had no idea. I never told anyone, fearing they would think I was full of it or give me some reasonable explanation. But it happened SO often that I knew there was no reasonable explanation.

Something was up.

Then one day my oldest daughter was talking to her younger sister and she said that her friend claims she sees 11:11 on the clock all the time.

I was shocked! Are there others out there? Were we going to start sculpting the Devil’s Tower in our mashed potatoes?

I didn’t see it but I read where they even made a movie a few years ago about seeing 11:11 all the time, called I Origins.

When I heard my daughter’s friend was seeing it, I did something that, 17 years later, I would have done right away. I looked it up on the Internet. Apparently, it is some form of phenomenon with many opinions on what it means.

Some say it was my “guardian angel” looking after me. Some say it is fairies or some other sort of “spirit guides” who are just letting me know they are there to help me.

Regardless of what it does or does not mean, once I looked it up, saw some of the explanations, and found out that this happens to many people, it stopped happening to me. Boom, just like that, it stopped.

However, a few years ago, before my wife Terry was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, I began seeing 12:34 and 1:23 on the clock. A lot. Like, way more than I should. It was the 11:11 phenomenon all over again.

I read that seeing 11:11 is the universe’s way of urging us to pay attention to our heart, our soul and our inner intuition. It’s serving as a wake-up call to us so that opportunities are not missed in this lifetime.

But what the level-headed, practical person inside of me thinks is that it is a different kind of phenomenon, called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. The “BM” phenomenon, which I like to call it, (sorry, immature humor is still humor to me), basically states that you look at the clock hundreds of times a day and if you see 12:57 or 9:04, it means little to you, (unless you were supposed to be somewhere at 1 o’clock or at 9 o’clock), but 12:34 is interesting because of the numbers being in order, so your mind remembers that. I could just as easily be seeing 9:04 just as often as 11:11 or 12:34 and just not realize it.

The scientific explanation is not as fun as the science fiction one, and I sorta wish it was a guardian angel or fairies looking after me. Lately, I could use their help.

Patience has never been one of my strong suits.  As a matter of fact, it is probably the weakest suit I have, almost as weak as the suit with the Nehru jacket I owned when I was in the seventh grade. (what was I thinking?)

I thought I began to learn patience when my wife Terry was first diagnosed and I became her caregiver. Her loss of cognitive skills caused me to be more patient as I had to learn to help her with everything she does.  But lately I have been losing my patience more frequently, getting frustrated when she can no longer take any direction at all.

I am not sure why. Whether it be her continued decline, my frustration with dealing with that, or my recent lack of self-medicating (not even on April 20).  But for whatever reason, I have been short with Terry lately, snapping at her when she cannot do what I instruct her to do (rinse the shampoo out of your hair, put your shoes on, laugh at my jokes).

When our kids were small and they would/could not follow directions, I would often get frustrated with them and yell at them. Terry would ask me to be more patient with them but my philosophy was that if I didn’t get terse with them they wouldn’t learn and the lack of following directions would continue longer.

But things are just the opposite with Terry. She is not going to learn from my snapping at her. She is not going to learn ANYTHING. She is forgetting. EVERYTHING. We can have a conversation with someone who Terry loves, and five minutes later she will not remember who we were talking to.

I need my guardian angel to look over my shoulder. I need the fairies to shut my mouth when I begin to get angry with Terry. Because it is not Terry I am getting angry with, it is her condition. Her god-damn disease. And dealing with it for almost four years now is beginning to get to me.

But when I see 11:11 or 12:34 or 1:23 on the clock, it does remind me that I need to take a step back. To realize that there is going to be a time in the not too distant future that things are going to be much worse than they are now. And that helps me handle the latest situation that had me frustrated.

Maybe it is my guardian angel after all.

Until next time, when you see 11:11 on 12:34 on the clock, think about what the fairies are trying to tell you.

Bud 

Wednesday, April 5, 2017

For Whom the Bell Tolls
By Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I have been thinking too much about death lately.  Fun stuff, I know.

No, I don’t have a death anxiety. I am not in constant fear of my own death. I don’t really even think about my own death that much. No more than anyone else.

But a childhood friend of mine died the other day. He wasn’t a close friend, but someone I was on a couple of all-star baseball teams with when we were kids. But he was my age.

And I’m not that old.

Maybe when I was 50 years old I thought 60 was old. I know when I was 30 I thought 40 was old, and when I was 45 I knew 55 was old.  I guess 10 years older than what you are is as good a definition of ‘old’ as any. Although I recently learned a new one.

Due to my wife Terry’s extremely short attention span these days, we watch a lot of funny videos. No plot to remember, just slapstick comedy. From watching these videos, I have learned a new definition of old.

If you fall down and everyone laughs, you are not old. If you fall down and people cringe, gasp and start dialing 9-1-1, you are old.

I am afraid that, even if I am not old, I am now at the age where not only are most of the parents of my childhood friends passing away, but even some of my friends themselves are. Or at least people my age are.  They are beginning to fall to the wayside at a rate all too often.

I was looking at some old photos recently and I saw a team picture of a championship squad I played on in the early 1980s. Three people in the pix of about 20 are already dead.

And it is sad.

A long time ago when Terry first started really studying the Bible she used to tell me that when we are done with this world there will be a new system and that we will then live in a perfect world.

Several years later when she was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease, she told me that, because of her faith, her beliefs, she was not afraid.

Well, I sure as hell was, and still am. Very afraid.

Back in the early 1980s I traveled to Oklahoma for a basketball game and we faced a player named Wayman Tisdale. He went on to the pros (second player picked in the NBA draft after hall of famer Patrick Ewing) and later became a successful jazz guitarist. He had a Magic Johnson type of personality on the court and on the stage, always happy and smiling.

As a musician, Tisdale became friends with country singer Toby Keith. When Tisdale passed away at the age of 44 after losing a leg to cancer, Keith wrote a song, a tribute to his friend, called Cryin’ for Me. In the song he says that “I’m not cryin’ cause I feel so sorry for you. I’m cryin’ for me.”

That’s how I feel. When people I know or relatives of people I know pass away, I don’t feel sad for the people who die. I feel sad for the people who are left behind. They are the ones who are now hurting.

And I don’t want to be that person who is left behind, that person hurting. Alzheimer’s.org, however, along with the statistics and the doctors, say that I am going to be that person.

I always kid Terry that the song by The Band Perry, Better Dig Two, is about us. That when one of us goes the other one is going too.   She can’t live without my help in everything she does, and I can’t imagine living without her.

They say you can’t take it with you. Well, we plan on taking each other with us. But then again, you know how plans go.

You read about that happening all of the time. Someone dies and a day or two later their spouse of 50 years also dies. It happened in February to a couple who I grew up down the street from. People actually can die of a broken heart. Back in December Debbie Reynolds died just a day or two after her daughter Carrie Fisher died.

And for those who do survive their partner’s death, often their quality of life is never the same.

That is what scares me about death.

In high school, they made us read. The bastards! I mean, in high school they made us read. Thank God! But at least they let us pick our poison.  I mean they let us pick our favorite authors. Two of the authors on the list were Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens.

Hemingway seemed interesting, but he blew his own head off with a shot gun. I chose Dickens because I thought he had a really cool beard (yes, I was very mature for my age in high school), plus he was English and at that time I was still a victim of the British Invasion (Beatles, Stones, pre-disco BeeGees).

In The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens wrote “Death doesn’t change us more than life.”  I am not sure if I agree with that statement, but I do share some of his thoughts.

Lately when people ask me how my “retirement” is going, I feel like saying “It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.”

It is the best of times because I get to spend all day hanging out with Terry. It is the worst of times because of the circumstances. Because of why I am hanging out with my wife all day.

We haven’t exactly been lighting up the social calendar with excursions like many young retired couples do. Many days Terry doesn’t even want to leave the house, but I am sure that will change now that the weather is warming up. But sometimes I feel like I am wasting this opportunity.  Sometimes I feel useless, not being able to work or do things.

But Dickens also wrote that “No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”

That’s my job now. To lighten Terry’s burden. Help her function day-in and day-out. Help her laugh every day.

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor,” Dickens wrote.

Good humor. Now I am no longer thinking about death. Now I’m craving ice cream.

Until next time, enjoy the next 10 years before you too are old.
Bud