It was 4 years ago today that Bella came into our lives and our hearts. We adopted her as a rescue puppy from a litter of 8 that needed homes, and she has brought so much love and affection and companionship to us.
We love having her as a member of our family.
Many things happened around the world in 1925.
April 9th, 1925 was a Thursday, just as it is this year.
On that day Babe Ruth, outfielder for the New York Yankees, would be rushed to the hospital for what would end up being ulcer surgery 8 days later.
I don’t have a photo of my father as a baby, child, teenager or young adult, but I do have this photo of him with my mom and my younger brother, taken in 1962.
And in the small town of White Springs in the northern part of Florida, not far from the Georgia state line, my father, James Edward Wetherington, was born.
He would have turned 90 years old today, had he not passed away 15 years and 4 months ago in 1999.
It’s hard to remember if there has been even one day that, in some form or fashion, he has not been in my thoughts. When I put something back where I got it from, I hear him saying, “Put it back where you got it.” and when I turn off the lights in a room I’m leaving I hear him saying, “Boy, I work for the gas company, not the electric company.” as clear as if he’s there.
And everything numerical was always 40, such as “I’ve told you 40 times not to do that.” or “I guess you’ll be 40 years old before you listen to me.” so of course a few years ago I suddenly found myself doing the same thing without even thinking about it.
What I also found was this post from a decade ago on the occasion of my father’s birthday when I had a different blog.
Dad, probably in the mid-80’s, lying on the couch shirtless with a kitten he and mom had recently adopted.
April 9, 2005
Happy 80th
My father would have been 80 today, had he not died 5 years and 4 months ago.
Sometimes I entertain the “What if?” visitor in my mind and today as Ann Marie, Mikey and I spent part of the day with my mom, I wondered, “What if dad were still here?” I wondered if things would be different and if so, how different? The sad truth is that the stroke he suffered some 15 years ago took away a lot of who my dad was, or maybe it caused him to lose the ability to express who he was. And this is where the heart and memory play tricks with you (or perhaps are kind to you) because as I wondered “What if?” the image of my father is as he was before his stroke. A twinkle in his eyes, a smile on his lips, walking under his own power, speaking clearly, able to use both his arms and able to think and make use of his full faculties. Then the mind taps you on the shoulder and points out that his last 10 years were nothing like that and your eyes tear up, your breathing catches and you silently curse what life and fate fashioned in that regard.
But here’s to the hope dad; the hope that you are somewhere in which all is good in your existence and you are happy. I love you and miss you still.
Happy 80th Birthday, dad.
And so, on this Throwback Thursday when I note that my father was born this day in 1925, it is Happy 90th Birthday, dad. You are loved, remembered and missed.
My maternal grandfather was color blind. He could only see shades of gray. Life for him was like the black & white TV of my youth. It did no good to describe colors to him; how could it? You can’t picture something you’ve never seen. To say “The sky is a beautiful blue today.” to him was like saying “The sky is a beautiful sygjkpwts.” to you. Neither of you has a reference for that description. I remember how sad I felt when we got our first color TV because I knew, while we were “oohing” and “ahhhing”, the picture looked no different to my grandfather than if we had been watching our old black & white TV.
I fared a bit better than my grandfather. I am partially color blind; a condition known initially as Daltonism but now referred to as Deuteranopia. I have difficulty with some colors and some shades of colors. When I was in the first grade (why it never came up when I was in kindergarten, I have no idea), my teacher asked me why I was coloring the grass in the picture brown. I said, “Because that’s what color it is.” and thus began my journey to discovering that not all colors were truly as I perceived them. Grass looked brown to me, whereas a lime did indeed look green, but the green of a traffic light looks almost white to my eyes. Most of my difficulty is in the red-green spectrum, but sometimes shades of purple look blue to me and lighter shades of orange appear yellow.
However technology is a wonderful thing when it comes to evening out the playing field, so to speak, for everyone. Enchroma, a company that makes glasses to boost color vision, and Valspar Paint Company, have teamed up to create the #ColorForAll campaign, which aims to create glasses for the color blind.
Take a look at the video here and watch what happens when color blind people see color for the first time. It is very touching, like it is when you see someone who is deaf hear for the first time.
I really wish my granddad could have experienced it.
Recently I had to get a new driver’s license and the Department of Motor Vehicles asked if I would like to be an organ donor, a question I’ve been asked before in years past. My answer has always been, “Yes!”
I have long been a person who does not care what happens to my body after I’m dead. When I was a much younger man I sort of thought I’d be buried somewhere, but over the years my preference has been to have my body cremated. I worked in the funeral home business for a couple years about 35 years ago and while I have the utmost respect for those who practice that art, I also have no interest in all the “stuff” that has to be done to make a body presentable for a viewing/funeral service. It’s (for me) a waste of time, effort and money. Just reduce my body down to its base amount of mass and then scatter the ashes and bits of bone somewhere (at the moment I’m leaning toward the creek that runs through Wolf’s Haven) or, if you feel the need to have some “part” of me around, stick an urn with my ashes on the fireplace mantel.
But, all in all, I don’t really care what happens to this old body.
Unless I have the opportunity to still help someone after my death by either donating organs that will save, extend or improve someone else’s life. Then my response is, “Take whatever you need, ‘cause I sure have no use for it.”
But I also remember, long before DMV’s across the country started allowing people to donate their organs, that when I was younger I planned to have my last will and testament indicate that I wished to donate my body to science. Usually if you donate organs then you cannot donate your body to science as they typically need all of it for medical research, etc. In fact, back then I was only aware of the medical student research possibility when donating your body, but there are quite a few more opportunities for research uses of your deceased body.
As this informative article points out, your dead body can be used for everything from med student cadavers to being a crash test dummy to being a “resident” of a body farm to an actual museum display piece and several other uses that provide helpful, sometimes invaluable, data to those who research the human body and how various environmental, physical, or bacterial events can impact (literally, in some cases) the human body.
I’m sticking with the organ donation route as that seems to be a way to help the most people, but it would not bother me in the least if, after harvesting as many usable organs as possible, the remainder of my dead body was used to make science better. And if some disease ravages my body making organ donation improbable or impossible, then donating my body to science moves to the head of the line.
Have you given thought to organ donation or donating your body to science? Which way do you lean?
Man, I have gone downhill in a hurry these past 18 years, but Cindy is still as beautiful as she was the day we married.
As I mentioned a few days ago on Throwback Thursday, it was 18 years ago today that Cindy and I were married in the presence of a few friends and family members in the backyard garden of her parents’ home. It was Easter Sunday and though we don’t observe that religious holiday, our wedding did definitely signify the new beginnings that Spring represents, for both of us.
I look back and marvel that it has been that long because it seems in so many ways like it was only a short time ago.
We have two songs which came out during the 6 months before we were married that we claimed as “our songs” and had played throughout our wedding ceremony.
The video below, “When You Love A Woman”, by Journey is one of the songs we had played at our wedding. It had just come out shortly after we met 6 months earlier in 1996 and we slow-danced to it SO many times in the old JD Penguins’ lounge where we met on Halloween night, 1996.
“When you love a woman, you see your world inside her eyes.”
The song “I Finally Found Someone” by Bryan Adams and Barbra Streisand was part of the soundtrack for the movie “The Mirror Has Two Faces” which hit theaters on November 15, 1996, 2 weeks after we met. This was also a song we danced to more times than I can count and had played on the day of our nuptials as we said our vows.
Today we’re driving over to Daytona for a couple of days and nights at a hotel on the seashore so Cindy can awaken to some sunrises on the beach, something she just loves to do and experience.
Four days from now, Monday, March 30th, will mark our 18th wedding anniversary. Today’s Throwback Thursday takes us back to 1997 to remember that special day that Cindy and I took our vows in her parents’ garden surrounded by our family and friends.
The quality of the photos taken that day were not as high as I would have liked, so I have left them at their original resolution and combined them into the collage below.
It’s difficult to believe it has been 30 years since “Easy Lover” was released. That’s half my lifetime ago! But it’s still one of the songs on my “Favorites” playlist to this day.
Back when it was first released I was already a fan of Genesis, the band Phil Collins was a member of, and Earth, Wind and Fire, the group that Philip Bailey was a member of (though as I recall I did NOT know Mr. Bailey was a member of that group until my younger brother told me one time when we were listening to the song on the car radio).
Unlike most music videos of the day (remember MTV and VH1, when they actually played music videos?), which typically tried to tell the story of the song in their video, “Easy Lover” was essentially, as Phil Collins points out in the short intro, a video of them making a video.
“Easy Lover” reached the number 2 spot on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and won an MTV Video Music Award for Best Overall Performance in a Video in 1985.
<In my radio DJ voice> Here’s your blast from the past, “Easy Lover” by Phil Collins and Philip Bailey.
In addition to the photos highlighting my mother-in-law in the Moving Day Parkinson’s Walk post last week, I had also taken many other photos of family members and the surroundings at Crane’s Roost Park. Here are some of the best of those photos.
My beautiful daughter with my oldest grandchildren, Heather and Mikey.
Heather at the Arch of Balloons that marked the starting point of the walk.
My mother-in-law with one of her granddaughters, Casey, posing for a picture.
My middle granddaughter, Abby, enjoying the walk…for now.
Left to right; Heather (listening to her iPod), Cindy, Ann and Abby (doing some kind of impression…maybe of Granddad).
Grampy (my father-in-law) pushing Granny (my mother-in-law) with Abby in Granny’s lap as Cindy (Grandma) looks on. I decided to make this one Black & White to emphasize the light and darkness.
Heather decided to take a break and lie on the steps after the first lap.
A Black & White version of the same photo.
Mikey and his mom relaxing after the first lap.
A Black & White version of the same photo. I like the effect here much better than the color shot.
Abby and her mom Amber walk through the Balloon Arch to start the second lap.
From right to left; Cindy, her mother, her oldest brother Ed pushing the wheelchair, her older brother Paul, and in the background you can see Mikey, Ed’s son Dusty and Dusty’s wife Leslie as they start the second lap.
A shot of the walkway that takes you over Crane’s Roost Lake at the Park.
At the end of the walk, Granny smiles while Abby enjoys a bottle of water.
This week’s Thursday Throwback recalls Cindy’s retirement from Disney party this week in 2010. Her mom and dad, to her right in the photo, were able to attend as a special surprise for her, and she is surrounded by many friends and co-workers.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Moving Day National Parkinson’s Foundation Walking Benefit. That walk took place yesterday at Crane’s Roost Park in Altamonte Springs and my mother-in-law, Kay Perkins, who has Parkinson’s (as did her late father, Charles William Kinney in whose honor we walked) was well represented by her family, the Perkins’ Pack.
Below are photos and a video of the morning’s event.
Part of the crowd getting ready to walk around Crane’s Roost Park Saturday morning, March 14, 2015.
My mother-in-law, Kay Perkins, getting her official t-shirt, with my father-in-law and their daughter (my wife) Cindy.
The Perkins’ Pack team gathered together before the walk to surround my mother-in-law with love and support.
No, they’re not being rude. They just want to show off their official “Perkins’ Pack” logo T-shirts.
The first participant bursts through the banner to kick-off the event.
Kay Perkins and her family approach the balloon arch to begin their walk.
Annnnndddddd, we’re off!
My father-in-law, who is a young man of 80, pushed his lovely bride around the first mile lap. Other members of the “Perkins’ Pack” team follow in their wake.
My granddaughter Abby, 5, hitches a ride with her great-granny.
My brother-in-law, Ed, takes his turn pushing his mother’s wheelchair with his wife at his side.
Team “Perkins’ Pack” gather for a post-walk photo.
Below is a short video of the walk. It was great for all of us to get together for this worthy cause in support of our much-loved matriarch and in honor of her late father.
