Re-established Interests- Amateur radio

Saturday, June 6, 2020

Somewhere back in time, shortly after meeting my wife Judy, I told her that I had always wanted to be an amateur radio operator. This was in part due to one present from “Santa” when I was a kid, a cheap pair of walkie-talkies that worked fine if the two users were still in normal hearing range of each other. In other words, they didn’t work at all. But they did receive an amateur radio operator somewhere in the neighborhood. “KC6DNQ calling CQ 10 meters . . . Kilowatt-Charley-6-Denver-Norway-Quebec calling CQ and listening.” I wanted to know who this was, but more what he was trying to do. What was CQ 10 meters, and why was he calling it? My father was a bit savvier in his earlier years, knew this was an amateur radio operator, and the next Christmas gifts included books on radio theory and Morse code, required to get a novice amateur radio license. It took many years to get up the nerve to take the course. And it took a bit of a nudge from Judy.   

Back then, Judy commuted by bus to a hospital where she was a physical therapist. She heard from one of her bus-mates that they would be offering a novice amateur radio class at the college soon. I signed up. I had always shied away from trying this before because of the code requirement. It was only a five-word-per-minute test you had to pass, but starting from zero words, it might as well have been 100 words per minute.

There was also a theory portion. That was easy because I was more interested in that part. In the end, on test night, I just barely passed the code portion. And I remember I only passed because I was able to hear part of what had been sent and guess the rest. More important to me than how I passed (barely) was having my amateur radio ticket. And I got it before the FCC dropped the code requirement, a distinction that was important to me because I wanted my license before that requirement was scrapped, and I would always know my I received my license when that was still required.

For the most part, I never had time to devote to the hobby since then. I had noticed that most of the amateur radio hobbyists I met then were retired. I was barely 30 then. But now I have the time, and I am more or less retired.  

Anyway, earlier I dug out two of my radios (three if you count an old CB radio, I bought the day of my Technician test, that was doctored to work on the ten-meter band (as in CQ 10 meters). I actually was able to talk to someone in the Philippines back then. But I am rapidly remembering, there is no such thing as a cheap walkie-talkie. Who knew?

Back then, things were quite active. The people I knew in amateur radio were retired. Judy suggested at some point that maybe I would have more time for it when I retired. Oh well. It turns out she was correct about that. But, so far, everyone is gone, retirement age or not. I have only sampled a couple of the two-meter “repeaters,” as they are called, but they used to be very active on the VHF frequency range. Now the only voice I generally hear is the repeater ID.  

To hear anything at all, I had to operate on two of my Alinco radios, a DR600 and a DR1200. Frequency memory was maintained by a battery for those back then, said to last for five years. It has been more than twenty years since I had used either of them, so both batteries had to be replaced, a simple matter of ordering the tabbed batteries, removing the case of the radio, and locating the place on the circuit board where the batteries lived, unsoldering the old one, and soldering the new one in place. It should have been easy, but remember it is me and my technology issues I am talking about. That, and I find my hands shaking to be an additional issue at times. (Oh, and this- When soldering on, it is very important to always remember that the hot end of the soldering gun is not a handle. I won’t ever make that mistake again….)   

It turns out not all tabbed batteries are the same. The tabs on the new batteries were nowhere near as good as the old ones, so I found it easier to solder wires to the circuit boards, run them outside the case, and then solder the batteries to the ends of the wires. One patient is recovering nicely. It is too soon to say what may have gone wrong with the second. Not that I need two radios. I used to keep one in my car and one at home. That isn’t necessary. I am happy enough that one of them works again. And the only reason for that is that this was an old interest of mine, and now that Judy has died, I have been checking into the hobbies from my past that still interest me. 

Of course, that isn’t the end of the story. I heard a discussion about the main repeater I use switching to “digital” mode soon. Of course, digital is a new technology for radio, and my old ones won’t do that, much like when TV broadcasting switched to digital, it required upgrades to viewing apparatus. At the moment the switch is made, I would not be able to hear anything at all if the signal were digital and my radios were unable to process it.

OK, I admit I had to get a new Yaesu FTM-400XDR radio after almost burning myself replacing those batteries. It is digital-ready, and instead of batteries to hold the settings, I can write the settings to an SD card, as used in many Smartphones today.  

In my defense, this is one of my few vices.

I also have a new 10- to 12-meter radio and an antenna to be delivered soon. I can already use a segment of the ten-meter band. And what about the 12-meter band? That may be why I would be upgrading my license again.

After installing the radio and antenna, I plan to be calling CQ on 10 meters myself. “CQ 10 meters- This is N6WII; November-6-Whisky-India-India calling CQ . . . And listening . . .”

(Note that the call letters listed here are both mine. N6WII is my current call, and KC6DNQ was my original Novice call. The call letters of that first station heard on my Christmas present walkie-talkie are currently in use, and I decided I should not use those in this piece, although I will always have them stuck in my head.)

Surprise ! (or not)- Now

I am not sure how the hat fits into my growing suspicion that a surprise party is planned for my next birthday. Maybe it is just a classic use of misdirection on Judy’s part. Or maybe it is a poltergeist. Maybe I am just crazy. And it could be a combination of the three. How does a hat I have not worn in ten years or touched in, I don’t know how long, have anything to do with a surprise party? I will get back to the hat later.

I have mentioned before that I have a birthday coming up soon. And I am fine with that. I am also fine with the fact that, most of the time, nobody remembers it or acknowledges it beyond the occasional card or phone call. Over my lifetime, I have had plenty of time to get used to missed birthdays.

Ten years ago, Judy planned a surprise party for my fiftieth. And it worked. I did not suspect a thing. Well, maybe at the last minute or so, I started to suspect when I recognized a couple of cars in the restaurant parking lot where we were supposed to have a quiet dinner together.

It could have been an episode of the old television show, “This Is Your Life,” or maybe the Dean Martin Roasts of the 70’s, but without the insulting comments. She had found people I have known from every part of my life, both major and minor players from my past and present. Somehow, she had found them and gotten them all together in one place at the same time. Surprise!!!! It was perfect. Then.

It was perfect to have that one-time event; however, I never saw any of the party-goers after. And truthfully, it was the last time I had seen or even heard from some of those people. Why try to duplicate perfection? You do not do an updated version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That is one argument I could have given her when she mentioned a month or so ago that she wanted to do a surprise party for my sixtieth. You realize, of course, if I know about it, it sort of ruins the surprise? She did, but she also said she needed my help to pull it off at all, surprise or not.

She promised it would be a small number of our closest friends. By then, she had come up with a list of 15. I tried to talk her out of it. I am not sure I can handle the stress of a large group at this point, friends or not. She assured me it would be fine and I should not decide yet. She said, “Sleep on it and tell me tomorrow.”

Well, by “tomorrow,” I was even surer I did not want to do it, no matter how few people were on the list or how they fit into the continuum of my friends. I had decided to tell her to stop planning the party, no matter the size, when she brought it up again. By then, the number of invitees had jumped to more than 30. “I thought of a few more people to invite,” she said. I said that I really did not feel up to 15, and now, at 30 or more, it really was not any better for me. After a long talk, I thought I had gotten through to her that I was not the same person I used to be. I thought the surprise party idea had died. And, it still may be dead.

But I have noticed a few things that made me wonder. For one thing, she has not mentioned the idea again, and it is unlikely that she would give up on something like this. There are phone calls she is hiding from me. I have walked in on conversations she has had, and all participants have quickly stopped talking and looked up at me, as if caught stealing cookies from a cookie jar. I have overheard phone calls about ice cream and restaurants. The list goes on.

Then there is the hat. I promised I would get back to the hat. Like I said earlier, I have this hat I have not touched in several years. I do blow the dust off when I think of it, but I stopped wearing it long ago. It was never the right size, and it felt funny to wear.

I had been out on a weird Sunday errand, which also made me suspicious, since it is a day I usually stick around the home unless we both go out for some reason. When I returned, I went in to change back into my lounging-around-the-house clothes. I picked up a T-shirt to wear, and the hatband of the hat in question fell on the floor at my feet. It seemed so out of context, I did not recognize it at first. The hat usually stays on the top of a hat rack next to the bed. It would be virtually impossible for it to jump off the hat and over to the floor on its own. Yet, there it was at my feet.

I looked at the hat and noticed it did not seem to be exactly in the same spot it had been. I know, how can I be sure it had been moved if I have not touched it recently? I am not sure I have a good answer. It just looked wrong. It was turned slightly from its original position. You notice small things like that when an item hasn’t moved for a long time.

I have to guess that the hat was removed, turned upside down over my clothes, and that the hatband fell off onto my T-shirt, unnoticed by whoever flipped it. Replacing the hat, they also did not notice the missing hatband or that, when replaced, the hat was rotated just a bit from its usual placement.

I know who did it. I just do not know why or how it relates to the possibility that a party is planned. But I have to conclude that the hat means something.

Yep, I go for the “crazy” conclusion too.

Birthdays- Now

Most people who know me, even my friends, have no idea what day my birthday is. It is not like I have not told them before. They just have other things on their minds when I tell them. Or other things on their minds on the day. To be fair, I rarely do much, if anything, for them on their birthdays either. Some of this is a conditioned response. Odds are, if someone forgets my birthday, I will eventually forget theirs. That can be the start of a short but vicious circle.

Part of my forgetfulness is probably because birthdays seemed to be of only minor importance to my parents as I was growing up. At least, my birthday seemed less important than others in the family. Maybe that was because of the day it falls on. Or the fact that much of that day, they may have been hungover.

You all know this day and love it. This is because most workers get this day off every year. A good number get it off with pay. If you must work on this day, you may well get a pay differential of some type. My mom used to tell me that no matter what else, I would always get a paid day off on my birthday. I guess she probably knew I wouldn’t be in a profession that required me to work that day. At the time, though, she may have only been trying to make me feel better, particularly when they seemed to forget to do much of anything for my special day. No present? Not a problem. No cake? Hmm, maybe that is a problem. “Oh, did I tell you that you will always get a paid day off on your birthday?”

She was right about my being paid to be off on all but one occasion. There was one time in my working career that I had to work on my birthday. This one time, I was required to work to verify that everything was really OK after the computerized clocks rolled over into the year 2000. OK, I guess that gave it away. The fixes for the now-infamous “Y2K computer bug” had to be checked and verified to work before running jobs for real in the first work week of the new millennium. Not only did I get paid, but I got paid double-time for less than a full day’s work. My mom would have been proud of me.

I mention all of this now because this approaching birthday is a milestone of sorts. In fact, it is a major milestone. I must be old if I am talking about “major milestones.” This one is my 60th. I am just letting you all know far enough in advance to be able to get your shopping for my presents done before all of the lesser upcoming holidays push my birthday out of your awareness, and yes, even your memory. What’s that? You did not plan to get me anything for my birthday? Not even a card? That’s OK, really. You are in good company. As I said earlier, very few of the people I know plan to do anything either.

11/22/63- Now and Then

11/22/1963

I can’t believe we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. Well, maybe I believe that much. I just find it difficult to believe that I am old enough to remember this date.

As a class, we had all gathered with everyone else in front of our school’s only television to watch his inauguration a few years before. My classes followed things in the news. We may have known in advance that Kennedy would be in Dallas on this day.

I had had a dream the night before. In the dream, I found myself standing in an office in front of a vacant wooden desk. There are various framed family photos on the desk, and one of them is face down. In the background, I hear a woman sobbing. I look to my left and see an empty wooden rocking chair. I wake up.

The morning of the twenty-second, school goes on normally, at least at first. We are in our separate reading groups. At some point, I remember our school principal coming to my classroom door and motioning to my teacher to come out. When she comes back, she is visibly shaken. She calls us out of our groups to return to our usual seats.

She tells us that something terrible has happened. I know right away that this must involve President Kennedy.

She goes on to say that what has happened is maybe the worst thing that could have happened. I know then that he is dead.

She tells us the news, and the class gasps. One girl screams. Another starts to cry. We are released to go home, having been told that details are still sketchy as to how this happened.

I wonder how I knew, right before my teacher told us, that she would give us this particular earth-shattering news, and I remember the dream I had. I have had other precognitive dreams since, but nothing of this noteworthy historic nature.

And fifty years later, people are still wondering if what we know about this event is really how it happened.

Goodbye old friends- Now

You were right. The chainsaws have not stopped yet.

I am sorry to have to be the one to tell you.

They are taking down the pecan now. At least you are not here to see it go, but you will no doubt see its end.

It was the poplar they destroyed earlier. Now the hawks will have no home to come back to.

My tears are for our old friends and how their loss will impact you. And for the hawks who have lost their home today.  

And for everything else.

Back to Kindergarten and later to High School- Then

One day, while in Kindergarten in Santa Venetia, during show-and-tell time, Jan, the girl who sat across from me at my table, brought in a souvenir from Disneyland- one of those caps with the huge feather that stuck out of it. She loved that thing and was happy to share it with us. She had brought it back from a family trip. It was special for her. The only time I had been to Disneyland was when I was too young to have any real memory of it. I was still in a stroller. I do think I remember eating this sweet watery stuff. I think it was one of the first times I had eaten watermelon. Anyway, here was a person who had just been there. I sort of liked that feather cap, too. Maybe I could get one if I ever went back to Disneyland. After show-and-tell, a guy named Robert took a pair of scissors we must have been using for some arts-and-crafts project and cut that feather into shreds. This upset Jan greatly, which upset me too.

The teacher must not have thought it was such a big deal. I do not remember her asking who had done it. It was just a bit more of a disruption than she wanted to deal with, or maybe she saw who had done it and decided not to press it just now. Well, I decided to do something about it. I kicked at him under the table. He made a big commotion about being attacked. No one else said a word. We were all sitting there like angels. The teacher evidently had had enough of Robert causing trouble that day, so she took him to the principal’s office.

Ten years in the future, Jan’s memory of this event would be the key to her knowing I was not just another high school jerk trying to pick her up. But that is another story. There is another girl who had my interest at that time. Gale. There were always girls I had little crushes on over the years, but she was the first, until much later, who had a pet name for me. It was “Boo Boo.” OK, no need to laugh. We were only 5. I think I had it bad for her. What did age matter? I knew when I was hung up on someone. I did not know why I was interested, just that I was.

Before I get too far along, nothing ever came of this other than being a playground “romance.” She may not have been as aware of the impact she had on me as I was of hers, but we will never know what might have been. After that school year ended, my family moved to San Rafael. Currently, Santa Venetia is part of San Rafael, and students can be bused between the two. Back then, we might as well have been moving to another country. I never saw her again, or Jan for that matter. Of course, sometimes you can never say “never.”  In high school, I met up with Jan again, and a bit after that, I found out what had happened to Gale.

In my freshman math class, I sat behind a girl I met originally when I moved to San Rafael in the first grade. Her initial claim to fame for putting her in this writing is that I got in trouble once for helping her cheat on a make-up test of some kind. Laurie was nice, but not the best of students- in the third grade anyway. She had been out sick and had missed a test. She was scared, she wasn’t ready, and for some reason, I agreed to show her my already-graded test paper so she could check her answers. Yeah, right. Suddenly, she was a lot smarter than usual, and I was the one on the hook.

She was not quite devious enough to miss her usual amount on the test, so she would not raise suspicion. Plus, she was done and handed in her test way too fast. Needless to say, she was caught, and she quickly pointed out her accomplice. My teacher was shocked that I would do something like this. I promised to never do it again. It was the first time, and would not be the last, that I went out on a limb to help a lady in trouble. I never helped her again, though.

Back to high school math. Sitting across from Laurie was a girl named Jan.  They seemed to be friends. People made friends quickly back then. All it took was seeing the same face a few times in different classes, and you had a friend for life. So, Laurie and Jan were friends, at least since two classes earlier. Of course, I had known Laurie long enough to have a history with her, and I knew that Jan was from somewhere else. She had not been in my school before- not Junior High anyway, but I knew there was something about her that seemed familiar. Then, she gave me the clue. Or maybe Laurie did, I do not remember. The clue was that she lived in Santa Venetia. The school district had just decided to allow Santa Venetia kids to go to San Rafael schools if they wanted to. Could there be another Jan my age from there?

That night, I went to my collection of school class pictures and found my kindergarten class. There she was. The next day, I mentioned to her that I thought she seemed familiar. I think she must have heard that one before. She thought I was trying a line on her. (Even back then, I could have done better than that.) No, I mean it, were you in John MacPhail School in 1959? She said she had been, but she still did not remember me. The next day, I brought in the class picture and pointed her out. She then recognized my picture and realized I was not just a bad pick-up artist. We really had gone to a different school together. In our remembering things about “then,” we remembered the feather incident. We have been friends ever since.

Catching up with Gale was not such a happy experience. In our reminiscences, I had asked Jan if she knew what had happened to a girl named Gale from our class. Jan told me that Gale was in an accident around second grade and had a pretty tough time for a while. She did not know where she was currently. I was to find out more about her when I was a junior.

I was a school photographer and was in demand from time to time to photograph non-school events. One of those events was the installation of a new “Faith” in the Rainbow Girls. I had no idea then, and still do not know anything about any of that, but not knowing the event you are taking pictures of does not stop you from taking the pictures. Of course, as I found out, I could not view or take pictures of the event itself, but I could take pictures in the lobby of those involved before the event.

The “Faith” of this ceremony was that same Gale from kindergarten, who had called me by a pet name, and made me hate my parents for a short time for moving me away from her. She was almost as I remembered, just older. But there was something that I could tell was still not right about her, although it was hard to pinpoint. And she had no idea who I was. I think she briefly thought I was trying to pick her up, just as Jan had initially. But once I mentioned having been in her kindergarten class, she smiled at me and said she was very sorry, but she could not remember anything that far back. Her accident had been severe enough that she had never regained her memory of anything that preceded it. I told her I was sorry it had happened to her, and I was glad she was OK now, and I took pictures of her and her other Rainbow Girls. This time, at least, I was able to say goodbye, and, as it turned out, I never saw her again after that. On the bright side, I was paid to take the pictures- and I did not even have to process them. They were in color anyway, and I only knew how to do black-and-white. I wish I had a copy of one, though. It would allow her to have aged in my memory. To me, she will always be that 5-year-old girl in kindergarten who I chased on the playground and jungle gym, and who called me Boo Boo.

Walking to school with bullies- Then

For my first through 12th-grade school career, we lived in a fairly nice area of San Rafael, on the edge of the Dominican area, but not really in it. The Dominican area refers to the neighborhoods closest to the Dominican Convent, back then anyway. I am not sure the convent is still active, but there is a college there now. This was a desirable area, but we were not quite in the nicer part. We were a bit on edge, down over a ridge from the hill that was on the border. If we had been a bit further up the hill, or anywhere in the sight of the convent area, it would have been obvious we were in the Dominican neighborhood. But we were too close to the commercial area of town. This was a plus for my mother, who had to walk where she had to go during the week when my father was not around to help with errands. And that was most of the time.

It was good for us too. Elementary school was only a 10-15 minute walk, depending on how slow you took it, or how many people tagged along in groups, slowing each other down. Most of them did not take the last little dip out of the hills like I did. Not that this was a real big deal. I knew some kids came from more financially stable families than I did. And I knew there were a few who were in far worse conditions.

There were those on bikes. Sometimes they would walk the bikes along with those of us who did not have them. Then there were car people. I could see the use of cars in bad weather, but these guys were always dropped off. Come to think of it, I do not remember getting rides even in bad weather. It must have happened at some point. But walking was what I did. No rides in the car for me. No bike for me. I did not even learn to ride a bike until 6th grade or so. And I did not have my own until I was old enough to get a job and buy a used one, which I still have.

Junior High was about 2.4 miles away. If it had been 2.5 miles, I would have been able to ride the bus. The cut-off point was about two houses farther down my street.   Because of that, I had to either walk or walk. At the time, my father worked about a half-mile from the school, so I rode with him to work in the mornings, and then walked the rest of the way. I got to walk the entire distance home.

High school was easier since it was only two blocks away.

Walking to Elementary School was not always without incident. Some kids just would not adjust well to anyone who was not in their group or who was not quite like them in some way. For a while, it seemed I had a small group of hill kids after me. It was like they didn’t want me on their hill, not even to get to school and back. I could handle them just fine, but it did get old. Name-calling, pushing, and the typical things kids do to assert the feeling that they are better than someone else. Of course, this was much milder bullying than anything suffered by today’s kids.

At some point, this taunting spilled over onto the playground during recess. At this point, it had become a bit more physical. They would actually grab me from behind, and while one held my arms, the others would poke at me from the front, threatening to grab parts of me that I knew would hurt if grabbed. Of course, with odds like that, I was always going to lose except for this one time. One time, when one of them came up behind me and grabbed my arms, I fought back. It must have been before he got both arms, because I had a free arm, and caught the guy by surprise when I quickly jabbed my elbow down into his stomach. This must have been a total shock to him.  

They never bothered me again.  

A dream of a deceased friend- Then

Cecilia was one of the first friends I made on my own when I moved here. 

I met her at a local bagel shop where she worked. After a few days, I got up the nerve to ask her out. She already had plans to marry. This news was a bit of a disappointment, but at the same time, I knew her, and that was just fine with me.

I had not really known her long when she invited me to her wedding. The night before the wedding, I had a dream that I arrived in Napa a bit early and went into a cafe near the church to kill some time. She came in and sat across from me. We had coffee and talked about the wedding. She started crying because, as she told me, her time here was to be so short. Then, I figured she just meant that she had to go get dressed for the ceremony.

The next day, when I arrived in Napa, I saw a couple of restaurants in sight of the church. I am not sure I found the one that might have matched the dream, but I thought about it as I sipped a cup of coffee, waiting until it was time to go to the wedding. Unlike the dream, Cecilia did not come in to visit with me. I am sure she had other things to worry about.

In the receiving line after the ceremony, she introduced me to her friends as her soul mate, or the one she would have had one last fling with before getting married, or the one she would have married if she had not met her husband first. I am not sure I would have been satisfied to be just a last fling.

This is getting way too sad to write about now, even after more than 30 years.

Cecilia and her husband were building a life together. Part of it included me, for a while. I helped them put in their kiwi orchard. They invited me to dinners on many special occasions, and sometimes just because I was a friend. We went to Halloween celebrations downtown when it was still just a local party. We went tubing and on bike rides. We watched football. We talked.

She was beyond happy when I found someone she could tell made me happy. She did not know my entire story, but she knew that I had been hurt by things in my past, and she could see that I was truly happy now. But now that I was in a new relationship, we went through a time when we did not see each other as frequently as before.

Cecilia was teaching horse riding and trying to finish school so she could become a veterinarian. And she had a part-time job at a local tack-and-western-wear shop. Judy and I ran into her near that shop downtown one afternoon. Cecilia told us she planned to get together with us soon, just in case something happened and we never saw each other again. As it turned out, we never did see her again.

Cecilia was killed by a drunk driver a short time later. Up to that point, I had never bothered to wear my seat belt in any vehicle I was in. That changed after what happened to Cecilia. She had been transporting two students home after a horse riding lesson and had made sure they both had their seat belts fastened. A vehicle driven by a drunk driver went into her car, head-on. She had not bothered to secure her own seat belt, even though it was a rule with her that her passengers must be belted in. There is no guarantee she would have made it if she had worn her seat belt, but she would at least have had a chance. Her two passengers got out with only minor cuts and bruises.  

Thinking about the dream, and her feeling that something might happen before we saw each other again, well, what can I say? Sometimes life is very sad. And sometimes it almost seems that we know in advance that certain things might happen, like my feeling that I had to get past that car going to Big Bear. Now the dream about Cecilia’s time here being short, and her own feeling that something might happen before we saw her again. Like so many other things.

Hello Cecilia. I will always remember you.

I have very odd dreams at times. After Cecilia died, I had a few dreams that involved her. I would dream I was visiting her house. Her husband would be there, but Cecilia would not. I had no sense in those dreams that she had died. She just was not around.

Then, once, she interrupted a dream I had been having about my days back in college. I was about to leave Mulford Hall, the main Forestry building at U.C. Berkeley, when there she was, walking up the stairs and opening the main doors as I was headed out. I did a double-take in the dream. Suddenly, I was very aware of things: where I was, who she was. None of it jibed in my head, since I knew two things. If I were really in Berkeley, she should not be there because I did not know her back then. And the big kicker was that I knew she had died.

Sometimes things in dreams do not jibe, and you just go on knowing that it is only a dream, if you even know that. This time, it occurred to me that this must be a dream. When I realized that, the building, the outside world- it all faded into nothingness. But Cecilia was still there and still coming towards me.

There I was, stammering, ‘why are you here, how are you here, are you really here?’  She came up face to face with me, grabbed my arms just below my shoulders, and said forcefully, ‘I want you to know that I am OK. There is something I have wanted to do for you.’ And then, without saying anything else that I remember anyway, she pulled me towards her. We were already about as close as we could be, but she pulled me closer, and then we merged together. What followed was warmth, tingling, swirling flashes of light, a feeling of floating, of being me, of being her, of being us together. Then it was over.

Whether there is anything to the belief some have in an afterlife, who knows? If there is no afterlife, then this was just a very beautiful dream about a deceased friend. If there is an afterlife, maybe she really came to me to tell me that she was OK. One thing, though, before this, I had been having trouble with grieving her loss. And dealing with her loss became easier after this experience, dream or otherwise. I have had no further dreams of her of any kind.

Assuming there is no afterlife, maybe the way this works is that at some point, your subconscious mind literally merges the known memories and feelings for a deceased person into your own mind. Maybe this dream represented that merger. I can accept that from a scientific viewpoint. But part of me still wants to believe that it was really Cecilia who visited me that night.

And that she is OK.

First parking ticket, and a new car- Now

A few weeks ago, I got my first-ever parking ticket. It was actually the first ticket of any kind I have gotten the entire time I have been driving. This was traumatic to some extent. My perfect record was gone.

This includes a couple of years when I was driving professionally, first as a messenger/delivery driver in San Francisco, where all the other drivers had speeding and parking tickets eating into their profits. I took it slow and was careful where I parked. I made decent money and did not have to pay any back in fines or higher insurance premiums. This job was followed by brief stints as a cab driver and a blood lab courier. All with no tickets.

The closest I ever got to a ticket was down around Monterey as I was heading to a delivery. I had misjudged a “dip” at the end of a driveway and was going a bit too fast. Hitting the dip must have cracked one of my headlights. It was not quite dark yet, but my lights were on. I had not really noticed the problem yet.

I saw a police vehicle approaching in the oncoming traffic. He did a U-turn after passing by and pulled me over to inform me I had a bad headlight. He must have been able to tell it had just happened, and clearly, I had not intended to disregard vehicle codes even though my truck was in pretty rough shape otherwise. He gave me a fix-it ticket. Those don’t count unless you ignore them. And I did not ignore this one.

I could not ignore the parking ticket either.

I really had thought I had plenty of time on my meter. Some of these LCD display meters are evidently a bit touchy. Although it looked like I had 42 minutes on the meter, it turned out to be more like 12. I will never actually know, though. What I do know is that I took my time in Peet’s that day, never thinking that I would be in any way late getting back to my car.

When I left to continue my errands, there it was under my wiper to greet me.

I am not saying that this ticket in any way informed my desire to get rid of this car. That was totally a coincidence. It just worked out that way.

My car was a nearly 10-year-old Prius. It was doing fine as far as anything I knew, anyway. But with a hybrid and its multitude of electronics and computers, how would I really know? The truth is, it was starting to make me nervous.

You always hate to hear noises you cannot understand. Some of the noises, I had even asked about. I was told to ignore it; it is not important. I could still hear this noise, though. It can’t be good if you still hear the noise, whether or not you are told to ignore it. 

A Prius makes some noises that are totally different from any other car, and that’s normal. It is the additional ones or the lack of the normal ones that you have to worry about. It was not just about the noises, though.

At ten years old, things start needing replacement that can add up to a bit of money. This is a bit more disconcerting when you are dealing with a car that is more complex in its basic engineering than a typical non-hybrid car. Plus, they have all the other stuff to worry about that a normal car has. It is a double whammy. No way to win, especially when mechanics tell you that the noise you wanted him to check is nothing to worry about. Does he know any more than I do? Really? It is not his car. He will not have to pay for the repair, no matter what the noise turns out to be.

The tires were pretty much done, also. And I never liked them, so anything I found to replace them would have been even more expensive than they were. And with my luck, a few months after buying a new set of tires, that noise I was trying to ignore would turn into something catastrophic. Or I would just decide to buy a new car anyway. Then the new owner of my trade-in would have a tired older hybrid with great, low-mileage tires and a few other fixes. But it would still be making that noise no one else cared about.

You can see the dilemma I faced. I had to replace it before it got beyond repair.

I bought the new Prius on Saturday. I drove by the dealer’s used car lot the following Monday morning, and there was my old Prius right out in the most prominent spot in the lot. I have to say, it looked pretty good. It was clean and polished. The fogged-over headlight covers had been cleaned up. I could not tell if they had replaced the cracked fog light. Both the cracked fog light and the foggy headlight lens were known defects in some 2004 Prius cars. The problem with mine was that they did not go bad, even though the dealer would still have had to fix them. I wondered about the various noises and whether the mechanics had realized they could easily make them go away, so the new owner would not ask about them. Maybe it was not really such a tired old Prius after all. I was tempted to stop in to visit, at least to see the asking price. But I had already passed the entrance. On the way back would be better. Maybe I could find the entrance in time, going the other way.

I guess there must be quite a market for used hybrids. A few hours after seeing it on the lot, on the return trip, it was already gone.

If the new owner of my old car is out there, I hope that your new/used Prius serves you as well as it did me. And I hope that the noise I was worried about was as minor as they told me it was.  

It was really not such a bad car.

One summer later, and the end of my forestry career- Then

I was divorced, had no job, and was living on fumes of my new bank account. One more forestry job awaited me. This one was in Placerville. Scott, my crew leader the summer before, up at Big Bear Lake, would be my crew chief again. I was not really into any of this anymore. But I had to work. I had to do something to get my mind off of what had become my life. Instead of determining what had killed the trees as we had the previous summer, this job was all about finding out why trees do better in some areas than in others. The part of this I never liked was selecting the healthiest tree in the area to cut down for closer study.

The competition to get forestry jobs must have been stiffer than I knew. We had an OK crew. We worked pretty well together, as a rule. But when my Forest Service boss came up to see us in the field, suddenly no one would do what I suggested. Nothing says trouble to your supervisor faster than if the people you are in charge of refuse to do what you request in this sort of fieldwork. They had never had trouble when I was doing this before. And when they had their turn for this part, I never questioned their decisions.

This, I would find out much later, was a calculated attack on me, designed to ensure that they would get a job next year, at my expense. It worked. The next year, I re-applied for this job and was turned down. Scott thought it seemed fishy to him that I wouldn’t be rehired. He spoke to the other crew members, and they admitted to setting me up to look bad in front of my boss. My boss reconsidered after Scott spoke with him about it, and they later called to offer me the job if I still wanted it. I turned him down. My forestry career was done. But it was good to know that Scott, who had left me to almost die on a hillside in San Bernardino, had gone to bat for me.

Part of the reason I gave up on forestry was that I had had it with the lifestyle and job uncertainty. I would spend all “off-season” trying to convince a potential employer that I was done with forestry, so please hire me. Then I would have to dump that and go to a forestry job if they called me. I also disliked the politics of the job, having such an impact on whether you worked or not. Add in the remote areas you would have to work in, where you would have to work near people who seem friendly until they are up against you for the same limited job opportunities. It just stopped being fun, if it ever had been fun.

My last summer forestry job in Placerville was about healing myself. I took a step towards that by telling myself I was not to blame for what happened to my marriage. I took a giant leap backward by agreeing to go on a date with a friend of a friend of a co-worker. I had been told this friend was not involved with anyone. This turned out to be false. I was told she was looking for a nice guy. Evidently, that was not true either.  

I asked her out to dinner. She accepted the invitation. We talked. We ate. We laughed. I felt better after my past few months, in which I felt I was slowly dying inside. Back at her place to say goodnight, she moved in to kiss me. And it was not just a friendly kiss on the cheek. Not that it was an all-out passionate lip lock, but I do not kiss like that unless it has the potential to be serious. Putting it with what we had said about spending more time together, I got the idea she wanted to spend more time with me.

Evidently, that was the last thing on her mind. After a week of not returning my calls, the mutual friend filled me in. She was just using me to make her boyfriend pay more attention to her. She had not really wanted to go out with me, but did so in order not disappoint me. That is always a real boost there. Just what I needed to hear after my marriage and how it had died. 

Hey, just say no. The rejection upfront can be tough, but not as much as being rejected after you think there is potential for something in the future. And knock off the kissing unless you mean it the way it seems. Was it payback for the dinner? I would rather not be paid back that way. If payback is needed, I take cash or checks with a photo ID. As you can gather, I never had a chance to tell this woman how I felt about our very brief dating adventure. Anyway, what was I thinking? I clearly could not be ready for anything like this yet. I found out a bit later that she had done a similar thing to Scott. But Scott, being more of a player than I, got a bit more involved than I did. He was just what she was looking for to make her boyfriend jealous.

Overall, it was a calmer summer than the previous one. No near-death plane or car trips. No ring-loss or wife-loss experiences. If you don’t include my co-worker stabbing me in the back, or my brief return to dating, it was pretty boring.