Tales From The Travels

While packing my house last week I decided that I was going to do a cleansing and just purge my belongings. There were things I definitely wanted to keep and things I certainly didn’t want to pack. But, there were all of those middle area things – do I keep it or get rid of it? I pretty much decided to apply a simple rule – was it more effort and trouble to pack and move it or replace it?

Its amazing how much went out after that. In fact, I even ended up throwing out a bunch of the ‘definitely keeping’ group. We filled a large dumpster (one of the long ones), although a lot of that was stuff from the yard, sent three pick-up truck loads to the civic council for donations, and filled a large recycle bin at the city recycling center. I didn’t even keep all of my books, donating an entire car load of textbooks to the public library for use in their book sale. There were things I had been dragging around for years that went out the door.

I have to say that it was a relief. It really was a cleansing. As I was getting rid of things I kept thinking of how this or that had been weighing me down and now I was cutting myself free. Each time something went I felt lighter.

One of the more difficult decisions was to get rid of all of my scientific paperwork. I had a very large collection of scientific journals, papers, and magazines that I had collected over the last 20+ years and I had carefully cataloged and cross-referenced all of this material over the years. The end result represented hundreds of hours of work and thousands of dollars. Naturally, I planned on keeping it all. But, this stuff is very heavy. They use high-grade paper for scientific journals and it weighs a ton! So, this collection didn’t just take up a lot of room, it was also very massive. Then, as I thought about it, I realized that all of this was started before modern search engines and online formats. All of the papers in that stack were available to me via online subscriptions and interlibrary loans. The whole pile no longer had any value beyond that of recycled paper and there was no need to burden myself with all of this paper anymore. So, even though it was a tough decision, I decided to get rid of the whole shebang.

While we were doing that, I came across all of my old personal magazines, including my stack of Cosmopolitan. I use to enjoy reading Cosmo, but didn’t really have the time. Looking at the stack reminded me of how I use to use it in my astronomy class. I have a lecture on pseudosciences and talk about astrology and psychics. As part of the lecture, I would open the Cosmo to the want-ads in the back and show them how many there were. I called up Cosmo one time and found out what their advertising rates were (thousands of dollars per month), which I would share with my class and then ask them, ‘Where do you think they’re getting the money to pay for these ads?’ Obviously, they’re getting them from suckers that give up their good money to these scam artists.

After doing this in one class one of the guys in the class asked me where I got the magazine. I told him it was mine and that I had a subscription. He said, ‘That’s so gay!’ I replied, ‘Let’s be clear. This is a magazine filled with pictures of beautiful women and stories of how to find women, how to get women, and how to keep women. Apparently, you’re idea of being gay isn’t quite the same as mine.’

He conceded the point.

I decided to to put my house in South Dakota up for sale, rather than just let it sit empty for four more years while I go to Maryland. I also decided I wanted to take my household goods to Maryland with me, especially my books. So, last week, I sent my son to his mother’s during his spring break, took vacation time, and went to South Dakota to pack up my house and clean it up for sale. One of my sisters drove up from Kansas City to help out.

What we accomplished was really phenomenal. We packed up almost the entire house and really changed the way it looks. It is so much cleaner and nicer looking now than it was. I kept a clean house, but it was kind of junky with all of my stuff laying everywhere. Plus, it had suffered some damage and the repair crew hadn’t been big on cleaning up after themselves. All of that had to be cleaned up so that it would show well. In the process, we filled a long dumpster, donated three pick-up truck loads of things to the civic council, and filled a large recycle bin. All of that was done by hand.

The result of all of this work was that by Friday afternoon, after working for seven days straight, I was almost completely incapable of lifting boxes anymore, no matter how hard I tried. The fatigue in my muscles was so severe they just wouldn’t work anymore. When I got home Saturday I was totally exhausted. Lunchtime workouts had their beneficial effect and my muscles weren’t sore. But the level of fatigue was incredible.

I’ve been back home for a few days now and am finally starting to get back to normal. As I was telling my son, sometimes you feel so bad that you don’t really realize just how bad you feel until you’re feeling better. This has been one of those cases. I was feeling really bad yesterday, but I felt so much better than I did the day before that I realized I had been truly bad off. I can’t believe I was even functional the day after I got back. Although my muscles aren’t sore, I have really been in pain from the severe fatigue.

It is amazing what you can do with the human body, even if it is at the price of fatigue. We would get up in the morning and work until late at night. And, we did this every day. There were a couple of interesting stories and I’ll tell you about them in future postings.

Like many work places, we have had some treats show up in the conference room this week. I’ve made my contributions to the spread and have also enjoyed what others have brought in. Yesterday, I noticed one of the faculty members that never tries any of them eyeing the chocolate, without taking any. Clearly, this person wanted some, but was holding back. For some reason, it made an event come to mind.

Several years ago, when I was still in Vermillion, there was a new faculty member that had just started teaching at USD that semester and lived around the corner from me. One day, she had a student of her’s over and they were decorating the house for Halloween. They were on the second-story deck out back when the railing gave way and they both fell to the ground. The girl was ok, but the professor broke her neck and died.

So, do those things you’ve been hesistant to do. Give the extra hug. Make the phone call. Take that extra piece of chocolate.

You never know when the railing is going to fail.

My son was living with me and was in second grade. We lived too close to the school for the bus to pick him up, which meant I drove him to school ever day. One morning early in the school year I was driving him to school and turned on the radio to see what the time was. The news was on and they were speculating about the identity of the hijacker. That was more than I wanted to know, another plane hijacking, and turned it off.

It was September 11, 2001 and I didn’t realize that the world had just changed.

And my life with it.

I realized right away that it was Osama bin Laden behind the attack. People were talking about it being an accident, but I took one look at the clear blue skies and knew immediately that that was impossible. With modern instruments and training and that much visibility, the only way to fly a plane into a building was on purpose. When I said that, people said, ‘Who’s that?’ Not anymore. I even made a comment about how I would be getting out of the second tower if I were there.

Then, the second one hit and everyone else realized that it wasn’t an accident. Even then, though, many people didn’t get it. There was the announcer who kept saying over and over that this wasn’t an attack on the U.S.! What an idiot! A lot of people still don’t get it. They lead such sheltered lives that they think all we have to do is leave them alone and they’ll leave us alone. If you believe that, you are really living in a fantasy world and not even bothering to listen to what they are saying, not to mention taking a look at their actions. They keep saying that they’ll follow us home, and I believe them. We have stopped many attacks right here. How many more attacks do they have to make before people realize they are trying to destroy our way of life and that is what this is all about? There is no such thing as ‘leaving them alone.’

I sat that evening with with my son and we talked about it while watching it on TV. I wanted him to understand what was going on because I knew this was going to affect his life in enormous ways that were still unforeseen. I wanted him to understand how bad these people were and I had to put it in terms that he could understand. I explained how these people wanted to take away recess, because they didn’t like it. I told him how they wanted to take away cartoons and they thought Pokemon was bad. And, I talked about some of the girls he knew at school and told him how if these people were in charge they wouldn’t let the girls go to school because they didn’t think girls should be allowed to go to school. He asked about women that had already gone to school and I told him how they would kill them, just because they could read and write. He listened very quietly and we watched on TV as the Twin Towers fell, over and over.

They grounded all planes for a couple of days after that. Vermillion was just to the north of a busy flight path and you could normally see planes, day and night, heading east and west. I stood outside one of those mornings, looking at the empty, quiet sky and speculated about how long it was going to be before I was mobilized. The terror was just sinking in and I kept thinking about the people standing on the tops of the Twin Towers, feeling the roof falling out from under their feet. There was only one response – war. That meant my time to go was coming.

It took a couple of days, but Keller finally asked me what this all meant for me in regards to being mobilized. I told her she should make contingency plans. But, then nothing happened. Finally, we got to the October drill weekend without any news. But, I saw the active duty people and they were working themselves ragged. They had been working shifts practically non-stop since the attack and were just about drained out by the time we were there in October. If I ever had any doubts about what was coming, seeing them working targeting data like they were would have dispelled it.

My drill unit belonged to Strategic Command, and that meant only STRATCOM could mobilize us. Anyone else had to get STRATCOM’s permission. At the Saturday morning meeting we were told a number of people were on the list to be mobilized. These people were told to move to the side of the room as their names were called out and my name wasn’t called. I was fully prepared to go, but I really didn’t want to go in the middle of the semester. Some wit made the comment about how the people standing were INCONUS and the people still sitting were OUTCONUS, meaning those of us that didn’t go to STRATCOM would end up in the Persian Gulf somewhere.

Then, nothing happened. No word on mobilizations. It turned out the paperwork got sidetracked. So, by the time we got to the drill weekend in early November we had to go through all of this again. This time, the people were to be mobilized within a couple of weeks or days. Again, I wasn’t on the list. In fact, I was one of the senior most guys still left. So many people were being mobilized we had a meeting to decide how the unit tasking was to be distributed among the remaining people. We started out by naming people for the various jobs, but every time we mentioned someone’s name, they were on the mobilization list. Finally, it was suggested we just go through the list and mark off anyone that was being mobilized. My name was the first one read! I said they were reading from the wrong list, I was told I was stand-by. She checked the list again and said, no, this was the list of people being mobilized. And, that’s how I learned I was being mobilized. I lost interest in the meeting after that. That evening, I called Keller to let her know and then I sat down and polished off a nice bottle of wine.

I worked at making arrangements at school for all of my classes. I was able to turn my astronomy and intro physics lectures over to other faculty members. Then, I told my astronomy lab students that if they finished all of the assigned labs before I left they would get an ‘A’ for the semester, no questions asked. All but one accomplished this. The last one was this horrible woman that made every lab period a living hell. She showed up every lab period unprepared and belligerent, disrupting the entire period for me and the other students. Even with my offer, she still took the whole semester to finish the labs. I had to give her exercises she could do at home because I couldn’t be there to help her in the classroom. When I finally got them they were so bad I had to fail her. She whined and complained so much I finally gave her a ‘D’, just to shut her up. I couldn’t stand it anymore! Then, she told me a ‘D’ wasn’t’ good enough and she would have to take the class again the next year. I thought, ‘Oh, no you aren’t! Not with me!’ It was enough that I gave her a ‘C’, just to get rid of her. She was that bad!

The last class I had to take care of was thermodynamics. There was no one else that could teach this class at USD. Keller asked the other schools if they could teach it as a distance education class and they refused. A real nice little bit of team playing during a national crisis. So, I kept it. I would talk to the students via email during the week and give them homework and reading assignments. I was able to arrange my schedule so that I was working Saturday through Thursday and could drive up from Omaha once a week on Friday to meet with them. Somehow, we got through the semester. What a story they all had. I can just picture them some day telling other people, ‘You think you had it bad? Well, we had to teach ourselves thermodynamics!’

In case you weren’t counting, I was teaching introduction to physics, elementary astronomy, three astronomy labs, and elementary thermodynamics. It was a load!

The worst part of being mobilized was letting go of my son. He was living with me at the time and I had to turn him over to his mother. The day that she came to pick him up was horrible. I wanted to hang on to him and never let go. If I could just hold on to him then the world would pass us by and we would be ok. Reality had other ideas, though. His mother came that evening and took him. It was November 16, 2001, his eighth birthday

I’m sure most, if not all, of us have, at one time or another, looked at vanity license plates and thought about what we would get. They have really become popular in recent years. Virginia seems to be the capital of the vanity plates to the point that there are practically as many vanity plates as regular ones. I’ve thought about it over the years and played with various ideas. What would I get if I were to get one? Would I use my name, or maybe some code that was special only to me? Would I get one of those plates that people look at and try to figure out? But, with all the thinking about it, I never did it.

Then, one day an idea occurred to me. I checked and sure enough, it fit! I went to the courthouse and it was available, so I took the plunge and ordered it. I was laughing the whole time I was putting it on the car.

I have had a ton of fun with these plates. People will come up to me in the parking lot and talk to me about them. I’ve had people talk to me while sitting at stoplights. I was going over a toll bridge and the toll collector chatted with me about them. There was the time when I was coming in from Canada and the agent at the border mentioned them. And, of course, students come up to me all the time. They changed the plates and I had to get new ones and now one of the old ones hangs in my study while the other one is in my office at school where I get comments all the time.

In fact, I’ve had just two people make nasty comments about them – my ex and Keller, my former supervisor at USD. My ex looked at them and said, ‘What a waste of money!’ It was about what I expected from her, but you would think Keller, a physicist, would appreciate them. Instead, she just went, ‘There’s a reason they call them vanity plates!’ What’s missing in that quote is the tone of voice she used. ‘Spitting it out’ would be an appropriate description. I think she was just jealous because she never thought of it.

But, if she thinks she can get them since I’m in Connecticut, she’s mistaken. I’ve hung on to them all this time and continue to have fun with them

We rented a house our first year in Vermillion. Actually, we rented two houses that first year. We rented a house during the school year from a lady on sabbatical and she wanted it back in May. Since we had not yet purchased a house, we had to move into a second one for the summer. As it turned out, things worked out ok. Renting the house for a year gave us time to find a place to buy and in August we moved into the house we found. Things were really broken by that time and we split up by the end of the month. I offered to let my ex have the house, but she wasn’t interested. So, I kept the house and still have it.

I’m not going to go into a lot detail, it’s too personal, but I was pretty devastated by the break-up. I enjoyed being married and really didn’t want to get a divorce. I didn’t run around on my wife and didn’t even go out with the guys by myself. If I went anywhere, she was always invited to come along. Frequently, if she didn’t want to go, I didn’t go either. But, the divorce had been coming for many years and did not catch us by surprise. The pressure of infertility just to end with the baby dieing, my employment problems after graduation, our son’s behavioral problems, our deteriorating financial situation, the strain of a new town and new job, it all just kept piling up. By the time we moved into the house we couldn’t even sit down for a meal without fighting about it. Our marriage had become a shining example of why we have divorce laws. I was sorry to get a divorce and I was heartbroken that my son wouldn’t get the chance to grow up in a happy home, but I sure was glad to get out of that marriage. Some times you have to decide between a bad choice and a worse one.

I gave my ex almost everything she wanted, including primary custody of our son. I had just one requirement; she had to live in South Dakota and within 75 miles of me. She readily agreed to this, but after the divorce she began to get very nasty about this condition and called it the ‘noose’ I hung around her neck.

Even though she had primary custody, he lived with me four or five nights of the week. They just didn’t get along. Put those two in a room together and you were almost guaranteed to have a fight. They had a big one right before his birthday and she took his birthday party away from him. I couldn’t believe she would do something like that. He was in tears, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Then she left town to go to back to school. This was part of the divorce deal. She already had a bachelor’s of science degree and a paralegal certificate and made a good living with it. But, she decided she wanted to go into special education and I agreed to pay her way through school. She went to the University of Nebraska, about three hours away, so our son moved in with me full time. Things were looking up.

Then September 11th came along.

It took them a while to get their act together, but they finally mobilized me and I had to turn my son over to his mother. I was just going to Strategic Command right outside Omaha, and not overseas, but I couldn’t take care of him while on shift watch. But, STRATCOM was only be an hour away from them so I would able to see him often. We made all of the plans and she came up to Vermillion to get him. It was a difficult goodbye. It was also his eight birthday. What a birthday present. All I could think was, what is it going to take to catch a break?

Things between them just continually got worse. I wanted to get him back after I was demobilized the following July, but there was no chance of that happening. Then, I was mobilized again for the war in Iraq in January 2003 and that killed any chance at all. They fought all the time, but she wouldn’t let him live with me.

After paying for her tuition, fees and books for two years, she quit the special education program with one class to go and went back to being a paralegal, moving to Sioux Falls. Once in Sioux Falls she was able to find a sympathetic psychiatrist and got our son on drugs. She convinced this guy that he was psychotic and he was prescribing drugs without even observing our son. It was horrible to watch and I couldn’t do a thing about it. She had every legal right to do it.

The fighting between them was terrible. I was getting constant phone calls during the night and had to play referee. I would have them on the phone at the same time with both of them screaming and crying and I would try to break them apart. Some times it just became, ‘You! Go to your room and don’t come out until you settle down!’ Then I’d say to the other one, ‘And, that goes for you too!’ There was one night where this was still going on at two in morning. I had an eight o’clock class, but I was about to make the one hour drive to their house to make them settle down when they finally called a truce for the night.

My life had degenerated into nothing more than fighting. I was playing referee between my ex and my son, while fighting for my career at USD. Those two years at USD from July 2003 to July 2005 were some of the most stressful times of my life. Everything around me just kept getting worse and worse.

Then, I had to leave town. They had given me a one year term contract at the university when they fired me, and it was up in May 2005. I got a new job at the Coast Guard Academy in July and had one week to get there after being hired. My poor son took it very hard. I was barely even in New England before the frantic phone calls started up with my crying son calling me for help.

And, we still hadn’t even reached bottom yet.

Before I had a kid I really wasn’t all that interested in being a father. I don’t mean I was against the idea, its just that the thought didn’t give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. I could’ve gone without children and been just fine. My ex, on the other hand, really wanted to be a mom.

All this changed when my son was born. I found that I loved being a dad and continue to love it even now. I don’t just like the good things, but I welcome all of the hardships and sacrifices that come with being a father. Playing some children’s game is mindless for me, but it would make him very happy and this is something that would give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. I wanted to make my son happy. I wanted to do things to help him grow up to be a good man. I wanted him to respect me and look up to me. I want, some day, to look at a man and feel pride in the way he turned out.

My ex, on the other hand, didn’t like the reality of motherhood as much as the idea. I found she didn’t deal with the adversity of being a parent very well. She’s a good mother and has always done all of the things moms are supposed to do. But, I learned that she wasn’t very big on the unpleasant aspects of parenthood. Life as a father was good to me. Life as a mother was not so good to her.

A result of this is that she and our son would argue and fight all the time. This started when he was very young. He found he could stand up to her and get away with it. Instead of putting her foot down, she would fight with him about it. One time, the two of them were going at it. She wanted him to do something and he wouldn’t do it. I tried to intervene and she really lashed out at me. I put my hands up and sat back to watch the show. When it was over, he went off and didn’t do as he was told. I told her, ‘You just spent 10 minutes arguing with a three-year old and you lost!’

When we first arrived in Vermillion I thought that we were going to make it and our problems were behind us. The first semester, in particular, was very pleasant and things seemed to be going in our direction. But, the ‘honeymoon’ of our new situation began to wear off by winter time.

The fighting between my ex and my son had really become a problem by this time. I would try to intervene, but she would lash out at me with increasing ferocity. I was in a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t situation. I couldn’t stand by and let the two of them fight constantly, but if I intervened she and I ended up being the ones constantly fighting. The spring of 2000 was increasingly unpleasant for us.

Things came into focus for me in April as a result of an incident at my son’s daycare. I was giving him a bath one night and we had been playing and having a good time. As I was drying him off I gave him a hug and told him he was a good boy. He said, ‘No. I’m a bad boy.’ I asked him why he said that and he told me the teachers at his daycare had told him so. He then started telling me about all of these things that had been going on. When he reached the point where he told me of how one of the teachers had grabbed him by the face and thrown him to the ground I wasn’t just burning mad, I had nuclear fires roaring at full throttle. I assured him that he was a good boy and that I would talk to his teachers, all the while hiding my anger.

The next day was Friday and I was planning on approaching the management when I picked him up that afternoon. Instead, I found a note with his things that they wanted to have a meeting with my ex and me on Monday afternoon. I knew what they wanted to talk about, so I decided to address my complaints then. I’m sure they were clueless of how they had come between a mama bear and her cub and I wanted them to stay that way.

By the time the meeting came on Monday I was so hot that I’m surprised I didn’t melt the chair I was sitting in. My nuclear fires had had three extra days to burn and I must have been close to shooting deathrays out of my eyeballs by that time. The head of the board of directors for the daycare was there along with three of the teachers. Two of them were these sour old women that had been in daycare for well over 40 years. There certificates were hanging in the lobby and I had taken the time to read them one day. They might have been good teachers at one time, but they had left those days decades earlier. The third teacher was this young, new girl and was still energetic and active with the kids. The four of them sat on one side of this long table while my ex and I sat on the other. Our son was playing with the toys and wasn’t in there with us.

I calmly sat and listened as they told us how our son was too much of a problem and they were disenrolling him and we had to take him out of their daycare. This all took a few minutes and I didn’t interrupt. When he was done, I calmly told him they weren’t going to do a thing. We were going to leave, but our son was going to stay there until we could get room in another daycare center and they weren’t going to object. I then proceeded to tell them everything my son had told me. Then I talked about child protective services and what they would think of teachers that behaved that way. The two old bats were stunned that I would talk to them that way, but didn’t try to deny anything I said. The young girl was actually bouncing up and down in her seat and clapping. The guy from the board of directors was taking notes the whole time. It reminded me of the 60s song, Harper Valley PTA. I never raised my voice and I was very civil in everything I said, but I was clear about my distain for them and their behavior and they understood they didn’t want to pick a fight with me. They agreed to let my son stay until we could make arrangements elsewhere.

We collected our son and as we were leaving, my ex turned to me and said, ‘I can’t believe you talked to them that way!’ She was very critical of the position I took. I knew then that we were finished. It was only a matter of time. She had taken the side of the daycare over her husband and her own son. This was the end of April. We were separated by the end of August.

There was a very good daycare in town that was run by the university and had been our first choice, but it was very tough getting into it and we had been on the waiting list. We approached them now and explained the situation and they took our son just a couple days later. I had a long conversation with the director Friday afternoon about my son when I picked him up. The daycare picked the kids up when they got out of kindergarten class and as they were taking them out to the daycare van they passed one of the old women from his previous daycare. The director of his new daycare told me of how he went into this screaming rage when he saw her. This had a real effect on her. She understood what he had gone through and what it had done to him. She treated him very well and was a great help with his problems. It was very easy to see why this daycare was superior to the other one.

I don’t know if there was any relationship, but the old daycare merged with a different daycare in town within the next year and closed down.

I would like to say things started getting better, but they weren’t even at their worst, yet.