Off the Grid.

Lakers-Celtics, Father-Son,Jesus-G_d, and a young Christian man from Arlington, Texas, all met tonight at a Micro-Brewery named BJ's. In a whole lifetime, you and I will have many different experiences where the beauty of life and our love for each other will also entangle a mystery. I was riding on the ever-present mystery of "Why" things happen and just happened to collide with all the above mentioned characters at the intersection of Fantasy Street and Reality Lane.

I have just arrived at my home on the campus of the University of Texas Arlington and must tell my story as I think it is a mile-post on my Journey in This American's life.

I am now writing the post so I can get to bed as I am going to the hospital tomorrow to find out why I am bleeding out again and almost certainly will have another surgery, in my never ending lifetime, of being a medical miracle and a Shepard, for My Father who Created the Vines of the Earth and the Sun that Warms us All.

My Doctor, Raymond Westbrook, wanted me to go immediately, by ambulance, to Medical Center of Arlington and be admitted through the emergency room again.
I told him I could not do that as my son Aaron and I had to do something we have planned for one year. He knows that my commitments to my son and daughter and a select few others are the most important events in my life. Being with Aaron tonight was simply more important than being rushed to the hospital and finding out my fate. I find it odd that people believe that their lives are always the most significant ones. My life is important as I do look after His Flock quietly in the background and there are those who will worry about me that I must respect. It is very wrong to play with peoples emotions and disrespect their honest concern for me as a person. I consented to hospitalization this afternoon at 4:55 PM and I will arrive sometime tomorrow at his "Blasted Emergency Room" where no one will treat me like I am an emergency anyway. It is always a bit of a conundrum when I go through life and death type events. I have done this many many times in my life.

Since the age of 18 months, it has been a lifetime of Living on the Edge. At 18 months of age I one day became terrified of our neighbor Mrs. Perkins. She apparently liked to hold me when mom worked in the yard. I remember that day and one other day when I was on the lawn and some girls from the Catholic School down the street were in a circle on the lawn and calling me and I went from one to another as they giggled. It was wonderful fun that I have remembered from that day before someone threw the terror switch on and I struggled with intense fear, became sickly and was very thin. A German doctor who was from Berlin shortly after the war, gave me steroid injections every week. I had to walk to his office after school and his nurse who was also VERY German would sadistically stab me and smile as she gave the shot. One day I was too scared to go and disobeyed my mom and just walked home. My mom really whipped me good as she had to pay for the shot anyway. Wasting money was a death sentence at our house.

I of course was terrified as a child, when I had go to the hospital. They used to not treat kids like they would an adult. Lots of loneliness and neglect came with every visit and it was not until the Great Childhood Epidemics of the Fifties that children became a major area of concern.

The Great Polio Epidemics began in America almost immediately after the end of World War II. I remember that kids on our block were just not seen anymore and there were hospitals in L.A. that only had Polio patients. On Imperial Hwy there was a hospital and they took the mostly kids outside in rocking beds that forced air into their lungs and sometimes could see the Iron Lung machines rolled out so some poor child could feel the sun on their faces.

At age 4 I first noticed in Kindergarten that kids just never came back. I think I was six when the first nasty Measles epidemic hit school and lots of kids disappeared suddenly and you knew that someone was sick as they put a large notice on the door that said MEASLES! The Health Department my mom told me put up the signs to help contagion. In the fourth grade another epidemic came through and two of my friends were gone for a long time and one, Richard, came back with a huge hearing aid and Jerry was totally deaf but we still stayed friends until 3 years ago. He died from his exposure back in the fourth grade. Just took a long time.

Chicken Pox,the three day measles, Mumps and Pneumonia's were scary but were mostly just miserably long. I caught Pneumonia pretty often since I was three, and I had what they called Catastrophic Asthma. I had heard that word before and it was not good. I really feared death with asthma. I would usually go to sleep feeling OK and would wake up unable to breath. I could not easily get out of bed at those times and would just pray to G_d, "please God one more breath."

Please God one more breath is something my 12 year old granddaughter told me she says too. She has a much less severe asthma but the fear is the same and Doctors still fail to aggressively be proactive in mollifying the fear of a child. I am not there to tell her how we will keep her safe as we no longer live in familial communities. We are more sterile and distant with our children not to mention our selves as we are digital and don't need to touch to communicate. We can just text them. U R fine.

I thought suffocating or drowning was the worst types of death as my childish mind examined it all. Superman was caught in a set of walls that were made to crush him. As the walls came together I thought oh, no, squished like a bug


Before bed mom would pray with me. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.
I was terrified saying that prayer. If I should die????? What???? I am trying to live. I am not going to die am I??? I finally was able to tell mom how much it scared me and she changed the words. Whew!

Mom grew up in an Orphanage in Estes Park Colorado. Her father was a silver miner and hit a very rich strike of silver. He went and got my mothers mom and took her to an insane asylum and paid to have her committed. This was evidently more practical than actually killing her. Women were property in the United States until 1920 when Woman's Suffrage was ratified with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Mom 4, Sister Edna 5, and brothers Miner 7, and Mark 8, were told their mom had died and took them to the Orphanage run by very strict Southern Baptist women.

Mom had it tough and I

My face was not shaped right for some reason and I had to have my jaw widened 2 inches by pressure. Dr. William O. Reiman DDS. also had too bring out my jaw 2 inches forward. He was a Professor at USC too. He also pulled my mandible (bone)less than an inch back and pulled the upper teeth back by applying pressure. I had constant treatments for seven years. My mom would ask me to come into our living room when her Social groups met at our house and she would just pull my mouth open and show the work. I felt like a cow or something..lol
Mom was proud of the success they were having rebuilding me and I was so scared of people I would learn to vanish.