Shallow Thoughts, by Josh Stump
Remember Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts from SNL back when SNL was funny enough to merit being a show with its own TLA (Three Letter Acronym: not really an acronym, but I’m not starting that debate again), anyway, I loved those. Things like, “If trees could scream would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.” Well, these aren’t deep thoughts, they are just a few shallow thoughts and some things that are going on that I thought I would share.
1. The Niners Win, The Niners Win, Theeeeeeeeeeeee Niners Win! I have to soak it up whenever it happens these days, because who knows when it will happen again. I have a sports blog to protect those who are less sports obsessed than myself, but I have to do some cheering now since I don’t have time to update the sports blog today. Check back on the sports blog later for my thoughts on the Niners, why you might want to watch the baseball playoffs, the fantasy update and much, much more….
2. Also, coming to my entertainment blog will be a review for “The Departed” which I saw last night. Good, good movie. I had high expectations and it did not disappoint. It is violent and intense and not to be seen for anyone looking for a feel good movie, so be warned, but if you liked movies like Good Fellas and Copland, you are going to want to see this one. Or if you just like movies that aren’t just a listless rehash of someone else’s mediocre concept long ago beat into the ground by increasingly talentless creators, then you should check this one out.
3. I just got the Zoe Music Group’s latest Praise and Worship CD “Closer.” I’ve listened to it probably 20 times or more as I always do with their CDs. We use a lot of their music at the Church where I am the worship leader and I find that I can’t really decide which of the songs I like well enough to have us learn until I listen to it a couple dozen times. The songs, I still like or like more and more, make the cut. This one didn’t knock me over the first time I listened to it, but the more I did, the more I enjoyed it. I especially like Randy Gill’s song “Mercy O God” Check it out if you get the chance.
4. I spent Saturday afternoon splitting firewood. Fortunately it is cotton wood which splits much easier than the petrified oak I split last fall. Here’s some free advice, (I’m charging you for the rest of it), if you are going to split firewood, do not, under any circumstances that don’t affect life and death, choose oak. I managed to break 3 different splitting tools trying to split it. After the third one broke, the logs actually started laughing and mocking me. Bad times. The cotton wood is much more to my liking as many of the logs actually split themselves at the mere site of the axe.
Anyway, I was splitting wood and my son Gibson was helping me haul and stack it and I was nearly overwhelmed by nostalgia. When I was Gibson’s age, my family lived in Canada. We lived outside a very small town and relied heavily on wood for heat. This wasn’t a huge problem since my Dad was mostly opposed to heating the house. In fact, my father generates more heat from his person than your standard convection oven (a trait he generously passed along, much to the chagrin of my lovely wife, who would probably prefer my natural body heat provided better incentive for me to want to heat our house). In spite of the refreshing temperature my Father preferred, we did live in the Great White North and they don’t call it white because it is all Caucasians. They don’t, do they? I don’t think they do…hmmmm.
No, I think it is because of all the beer which has that frosty white foam head. But it’s also cold there as you may have heard. So, every year my father would take us boys, along with the chain saw and splitting maul and retrieve firewood from fallen trees on neighboring property.
When I was young this activity consisted of the following:
a. Go to some clearing that was filled with really cool sticks, perfect for swords, spears and imaginary M-16s.
b. Mess around and preferably torment my younger siblings as the air was filled with the aroma of gasoline and sawdust from my Dad’s chainsaw. To this day, that remains one of my favorite odors. I thought about pitching it as a cologne idea, but then I remembered how much grief Calvin Klein gave Kramer for his “Beach” idea and decided to bag it.
c. Receive instructions from my father to begin loading the cut pieces of wood into the bed of the pickup truck.
d. Continue messing around with various sticks.
e. Receive terrifyingly stern instructions to stop messing around and start loading the wood.
f. Load wood. To me this was mostly an exercise in covering my hands with splinters as I worked unceasingly for hours leaving my sweat and my blood on the ground of the clearing as I loaded cord after cord of wood. To my father this was mostly an exercise in trying to get me to focus and stop wining long enough to load at least one piece of wood while he contemplated why it was that he had said yes, when my Mom had said, “maybe you should take the boys with you.”
To this day, though it is one of my strongest childhood memories. I probably worked a combined 6 hours doing actual work helping my Dad over the years, but to me it seems like it was a full time job for months at a time. My Dad was very patient as he unwittingly infused in me a memory of him as strong and hard working and someone who was willing to sweat and bleed for the good of his family.
It was with that in mind that I marveled at the circular patterns of life. There I stood, maul in hand, trying to get Gibson to focus for just long enough to actually get even a single piece of wood from the ground to the pile. Of course, I didn’t bring Gibson out there because of the “help” he could provide or because I needed him get the job done. On the contrary, his “help” often slows progress on a project such as this. But having him out there took a mundane task and turned it into strange sort of window into my own childhood.
And then it struck me. All those years I spent thinking about how hard my Dad made me work, I realized that it had nothing to do with the job we were doing. My Dad had things to teach us boys about work and life and being men and he did it by allowing us to help him. Of course, it seemed like strange torture at the time when I was covered in splinters and wishing I could just play in the yard, but now I treasure it. I looked at Gibson and wondered what he was thinking as we worked side by side for the good of the family. Will he remember this 30 years from now? Will it shape the way he thinks of me?
My family doesn’t have a lot of heirlooms. There are not a lot of precious things that get passed down from generation to generation. But perhaps this is what we have instead. My Dad taught me it was important to work hard for your family and it was important to him that we do that together. He taught me with a wood pile. Now I’m passing that along to my sons and pondering the symmetry of it all.
In other words, I realized that my family heirlooms are splinters and the smell of sawdust and gasoline. And if you don’t think those are the spoils of great wealth, you haven’t been paying attention.
Ok. That’s all for now.
1. The Niners Win, The Niners Win, Theeeeeeeeeeeee Niners Win! I have to soak it up whenever it happens these days, because who knows when it will happen again. I have a sports blog to protect those who are less sports obsessed than myself, but I have to do some cheering now since I don’t have time to update the sports blog today. Check back on the sports blog later for my thoughts on the Niners, why you might want to watch the baseball playoffs, the fantasy update and much, much more….
2. Also, coming to my entertainment blog will be a review for “The Departed” which I saw last night. Good, good movie. I had high expectations and it did not disappoint. It is violent and intense and not to be seen for anyone looking for a feel good movie, so be warned, but if you liked movies like Good Fellas and Copland, you are going to want to see this one. Or if you just like movies that aren’t just a listless rehash of someone else’s mediocre concept long ago beat into the ground by increasingly talentless creators, then you should check this one out.
3. I just got the Zoe Music Group’s latest Praise and Worship CD “Closer.” I’ve listened to it probably 20 times or more as I always do with their CDs. We use a lot of their music at the Church where I am the worship leader and I find that I can’t really decide which of the songs I like well enough to have us learn until I listen to it a couple dozen times. The songs, I still like or like more and more, make the cut. This one didn’t knock me over the first time I listened to it, but the more I did, the more I enjoyed it. I especially like Randy Gill’s song “Mercy O God” Check it out if you get the chance.
4. I spent Saturday afternoon splitting firewood. Fortunately it is cotton wood which splits much easier than the petrified oak I split last fall. Here’s some free advice, (I’m charging you for the rest of it), if you are going to split firewood, do not, under any circumstances that don’t affect life and death, choose oak. I managed to break 3 different splitting tools trying to split it. After the third one broke, the logs actually started laughing and mocking me. Bad times. The cotton wood is much more to my liking as many of the logs actually split themselves at the mere site of the axe.
Anyway, I was splitting wood and my son Gibson was helping me haul and stack it and I was nearly overwhelmed by nostalgia. When I was Gibson’s age, my family lived in Canada. We lived outside a very small town and relied heavily on wood for heat. This wasn’t a huge problem since my Dad was mostly opposed to heating the house. In fact, my father generates more heat from his person than your standard convection oven (a trait he generously passed along, much to the chagrin of my lovely wife, who would probably prefer my natural body heat provided better incentive for me to want to heat our house). In spite of the refreshing temperature my Father preferred, we did live in the Great White North and they don’t call it white because it is all Caucasians. They don’t, do they? I don’t think they do…hmmmm.
No, I think it is because of all the beer which has that frosty white foam head. But it’s also cold there as you may have heard. So, every year my father would take us boys, along with the chain saw and splitting maul and retrieve firewood from fallen trees on neighboring property.
When I was young this activity consisted of the following:
a. Go to some clearing that was filled with really cool sticks, perfect for swords, spears and imaginary M-16s.
b. Mess around and preferably torment my younger siblings as the air was filled with the aroma of gasoline and sawdust from my Dad’s chainsaw. To this day, that remains one of my favorite odors. I thought about pitching it as a cologne idea, but then I remembered how much grief Calvin Klein gave Kramer for his “Beach” idea and decided to bag it.
c. Receive instructions from my father to begin loading the cut pieces of wood into the bed of the pickup truck.
d. Continue messing around with various sticks.
e. Receive terrifyingly stern instructions to stop messing around and start loading the wood.
f. Load wood. To me this was mostly an exercise in covering my hands with splinters as I worked unceasingly for hours leaving my sweat and my blood on the ground of the clearing as I loaded cord after cord of wood. To my father this was mostly an exercise in trying to get me to focus and stop wining long enough to load at least one piece of wood while he contemplated why it was that he had said yes, when my Mom had said, “maybe you should take the boys with you.”
To this day, though it is one of my strongest childhood memories. I probably worked a combined 6 hours doing actual work helping my Dad over the years, but to me it seems like it was a full time job for months at a time. My Dad was very patient as he unwittingly infused in me a memory of him as strong and hard working and someone who was willing to sweat and bleed for the good of his family.
It was with that in mind that I marveled at the circular patterns of life. There I stood, maul in hand, trying to get Gibson to focus for just long enough to actually get even a single piece of wood from the ground to the pile. Of course, I didn’t bring Gibson out there because of the “help” he could provide or because I needed him get the job done. On the contrary, his “help” often slows progress on a project such as this. But having him out there took a mundane task and turned it into strange sort of window into my own childhood.
And then it struck me. All those years I spent thinking about how hard my Dad made me work, I realized that it had nothing to do with the job we were doing. My Dad had things to teach us boys about work and life and being men and he did it by allowing us to help him. Of course, it seemed like strange torture at the time when I was covered in splinters and wishing I could just play in the yard, but now I treasure it. I looked at Gibson and wondered what he was thinking as we worked side by side for the good of the family. Will he remember this 30 years from now? Will it shape the way he thinks of me?
My family doesn’t have a lot of heirlooms. There are not a lot of precious things that get passed down from generation to generation. But perhaps this is what we have instead. My Dad taught me it was important to work hard for your family and it was important to him that we do that together. He taught me with a wood pile. Now I’m passing that along to my sons and pondering the symmetry of it all.
In other words, I realized that my family heirlooms are splinters and the smell of sawdust and gasoline. And if you don’t think those are the spoils of great wealth, you haven’t been paying attention.
Ok. That’s all for now.
Comments
My mother's family had a heritage of taking care of aging parents in the home as well as being willing to help anyone on a moment's notice. I've taken Steven with me on many such errands to hopefully pass on a ministry of service.
made me think.
my mom was big on family tradition and sharing moments that could be repeated, relived, on an annual basis, at the very least. and i, in my ignorance, would fight some of those... especially the christmas cookies baking, and hanging the lights on the tree with my obnoxious little sister trying to put ornaments on first.
my dad was responsible for hard labor (mom wasn't as crafty in this area, or was she?). and for me the smell is fresh cut grass, not because of spring; and the smell of burning leaves. camraderie.
i've thought often about how natalya, an only child, an urban landscape, no yard or dog...is raised in a different family.
how can i relay my mother's sense of forever, binding our family through sentiment and affection? can i channel my dad's authoratative bearing that chores will be done, and respect is earned?
i may have to borrow a lawnmower so my girl will have the sweaty, tingling hands, grass stained shoes and the smell of dirt and green in her nose, and the memory she should have picked up those sticks and shoveled after the dog a little better. then i can tell her the lines are good and even--and the hardwork was worth everything, especially a parent's smile.
Cwinwc, sounds very familiar. Keep it up, I bet he's soaking it in one way or another.
Leslie, Natalya is welcome to come over any time and mow our lawn. Really. You don't even need to call ahead or anything. In fact, I still have more wood to haul and stack if you would like to share that experience with her. I'm here to serve.
You are one of them.
Your sons are lucky because you are helping them figure it out as well.