They are heroes. Real heroes, not the military and first responder kind of heroes, but heroes never-the-less. They are also kin.

They live about a day’s drive from here.

Stefanie is my wife’s brother’s daughter. Therefore, i’m kin. Eric Johnson is Stefanie’s husband. Therefore, he is my kin. Stefan is Stefanie’s son. Therefore, he is my kin. Naomi is their daughter. Therefore, she is my kin. They are all heroes because one, Naomi, is a super girl.

Naomi almost died during her birth. She has had difficulties to overcome since then. She has special needs. And you know what? She has overcome the obstacles. She will have to deal with them for most of her life, but her parents and her brother will help. And there is no doubt in my mind, Naomi will succeed. i have never known a couple and their son being so dedicated to the uniter, the hero. They are.

Eric is the most loving father i have ever met. His care for his wife, his son, and his daughter seems to have no bounds, and he uses that love for kind and caring discipline as well as affection to give the two young ones a better chance at succeeding. They have and they will.

Stefanie is equally loving and supportive of her family. Her love for Eric is palatable. They are a team, a good team, dedicated to their family. Stephanie is a rock. Naomi also inspired her Stefanie to write two books, I See You Little Naomi, and I See You  LIttle Andrew.The book is for helping children to understand how to relate to other children with special needs (they help the adults as well). i have written of Stefanie’s books  here before.

i don’t see them enough. That is my fault and my loss. Every time i am around them, i feel inspired, happy, awed like i should being amongst family heroes.

i didn’t forget Stefan. Can’t say i’ve seen a finer young man. Good student. Good athlete. Ready for college. Still remembers the Padre game i took him and Eric to a long time ago. But that is just the beginning. Stefan is a hero too. He, like his mother, can write. He wrote an article about his family and his feelings about his sister.  It was published today in the December Alive Magazine, a monthly publication in the East Bay (San  Francisco Bay). It made me smile, it made me weep a bit. It made me proud. After all, i’m kin to a hero. Several of them.

Special Needs Inclusion: It Takes A Village

i was just a bit embarrassed. That is what started it all.

Tonight, i was driving home from a meeting right after sunset. The drive through our neighborhood looked more like a drive through a gaudy midway with all of the lights of the Christmas decorations.

There were icicle lights in droves hanging from the eaves. Colored lights were wrapped around everything not moving. Reindeer plastic skeletons were lit with care…and abundance. Blow up figures of every animal species known to man that had littered the yards during the day, were now glowing and puffed up into Pillsbury Dough Boy wannabes. Giant presents, lit of course, were strewn over the yards. A few homes, including two of our neighbors had this new stuff, green and red tiny points of light shimmering on everything from a projection gizmo. Figures of Santa, elves, snowflakes, and Lord knows what else wandering around garage doors. This stuff was everywhere, nearly every yard.

i pulled into my driveway and there was my puny, handmade “NOEL” sign. That’s it except for the Christmas tree, a number of music boxes my sister has given our daughter every year, and a few other decorations inside the house.

i felt ashamed. No, that’s not right. i blamed everyone else for playing the “Christmas Vacation” game of greatest number of lights and decorations and felt smug for a few minutes.

It all got me to thinking in the screwy way i have of going about thinking.

i don’t like the commercialization of Christmas. i don’t like being bombarded by Christmas commercials from every media when it’s still late summer. i don’t like Christmas becoming a huge big party with lots of partying, celebration, and forgetting why it’s the reason for the season as they say. i mean i’m not a big churchgoer, but hey, even if you don’t believe, all this stuff was begun over two thousand and years ago because there was this pretty special kid born under some pretty exceptional circumstances. i mean until some politically correct yahoo tried to ignore it and rename it, our calendar year is based on when this young baby grew up and died in pretty rough fashion.

But then i got to thinking about it. Some people i know are of different faiths than Christianity. Some don’t believe. But they all love Christmas, even though some have tried to claim it’s the holiday season, not Christmas time. Sensitive souls they must be i guess. Way too sensitive to be healthy for them. They celebrate also. They light up the world. They sing carols although other yahoos seem intent on ruining that. They get together with friends and family.

And everyone of them focus on giving gifts to others. Charities of every version for every purpose weighs in and we all give to help in some noble cause.

So thinking about it in my weird way, it occurred to me that the guy who started all of this, that little baby, is probably just fine with that. After all, he really wanted the world to be better, people to be kinder to each other, to enjoy each other, to treat others as they would want to be treated. And at least for a couple of weeks every winter, most of us do exactly that.

So neighbors, shine on.

And a merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good night.

i met Amy Beth Hale once when a bank decided to dig up my football field, actually Castle Heights football field named after Stroud Gwynn. It was several years ago when that bank decided they needed a corporate headquarters where once the Castle Heights Tigers ruled the gridiron, soccer field, and track and field site. Several of the alumni of the defunct school attended the sad event and even created a formation roughly of the kind that marched into that sacred ground every Sunday for the parade and pass-in-review. i was in that pass and review roughly 160 times, not counting practice runs.

Amy’s father, Gene Hale was a professor there when i attended. Good teacher. Good man. Amy came along much later. She is currently “Director, Member Services at International Bluegrass Music Association.”

That is why Thursday night, i wished she was here along with a couple of friends. You see, my buddies, Alan and Jim Hicks, Cy Fraser, and i love bluegrass. Alan and Cy are downright aficionados. Alan plays the banjo like his mother, Miss Tarwater, played the banjo in Greenwich Village a long time ago. Cy Fraser bough a mandolin, but i don’t think he has played it very much. i own a guitar. i pluck. About once every two years. Badly. But we all love bluegrass. i teased Alan and Cy about joining me Thursday, figuring they might just be crazy enough to show up from San Francisco and Orcas Island respectively. i didn’t tease Jim because i knew he wouldn’t come from Connecticut.

i was going alone. Maureen’s annual dinner with six of her closest girl friends was  scheduled up at Del Mar for the same evening. But Wednesday night, her dinner was cancelled. It actually rained, really rained in the Southwest corner. With thunderstorms even. Now, i hope you never get caught in the Southwest corner when it rains, even a little. These people go nuts. They have no idea how to drive in the rain. So then Maureen says she might go with me to the symphony. It’s a special show. i’m glad she’s joining me.  She has second thoughts then changes her mind again. And again. Finally, she says she’ll go but is worried about the flooding. i said “Don’t sweat it.” Not the best thing to say. We go in the middle of a gully washer complete with thunder. It doesn’t let up the entire trip to downtown. Maureen gasps about every thirty seconds with a splash of water from a nearby car, a lightning strike, crazy drivers cutting in front of us, crazy drivers almost stopped on the freeway, crazy drivers period.

We make it downtown. It is pouring still. i let her out near the symphony door. i park about a block away. i’m okay because i’m well prepared unlike about seventy-five percent of the other folks living downtown walking about (for some inexplicable reason). i do fine except for the guy with a skateboard tucked under his arm dashing in front of me requiring me to sidestep into ankle deep water by the curb and i’m not that prepared. i don’t have galoshes. Finally, i am inside. Whew.

We take our seats. Some pseudo science guy who admits to be a nerd but he’s too old to be a nerd i think engages Maureen in a conversation about we might live on mars because of the surface conditions or something.

Finally, it begins. The orchestra’s composition is nearly all strings with a harpsichord for the evening’s slate is music from the 17th and 18th centuries. The first piece is just beautiful, lyrical. It’s “Chacony in G Minor by Henry Purcell, written around 1680. i now have another composer for seeking classical music.

Then what i went for is next. Avi Avital is the star artist. He plays the mandolin, a classical mandolin. His first piece is “Winter” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” concerti. Avi plays the mandolin instead of the lead violin. i am entranced. i wish for Alan and Jim and Cy and, of course, Amy Beth.

Avital played his mandolin in Bach’s Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, replacing the lead instrument the harpsichord. Again i am enchanted. Again, i wish for my friends.

Bill Monroe, Vince Gill, and Ricky Skaggs. Les Thompson, eat your hearts out. Avi is that good.

And best of all, when it was over, it had stopped raining. We drove home gaspless. And i played golf the next morning. After all, it was Friday morning.

Fat fingers got me again. i hit “Publish” rather than “Save Draft,” so it wasn’t really fat fingers. It was fat head. So now for the rest of the tale.

Those two words don’t quite fit together. Christmas. Okra.

i should have known.

Then, there was this crazy thing when i found okra in the Navy commissary at the 32nd Street base in San Diego. In late November. i haven’t seen it all year anywhere except at the North Island exchange in early October. Go figure.

i should have known.

Then, i made the mistake of looking up fried okra on the internet. Initially, Paula Deen and i had a rocky relationship.

i should have known.

i have tried frying okra, twice previously. The first time, i could not find any fresh okra in the Southwest corner, so i tried it with that frozen muck. Bad idea. The next time, i got some fresh okra, worked on it for about three hours, counting cooking and it turned out…well, not quite as bad as the frozen stuff.

So i quit the frying jag.

i came up with own recipe for okra, something roughly akin to a Cajun gumbo. It has gotten some pretty good reviews. i toss in some Tennessee Pride Sausage, and i like it. So i stuck to it. It goes really well with my mother’s biscuits or Maureen’s gourmet takeoff on my mother’s biscuits. My cornbread also works pretty well with my okra.

i made some about a week ago before i came upon this commissary okra. So i decided to try the fried version again.

For a while, it appeared this time would not be a great deal different from the other two fiascos. i blamed it on Paula Deen. i took the ingredients and mixed them as directed. The problem was i was not supposed to mix the buttermilk into the mix. i was supposed to wash the okra in the buttermilk — i know, i know “wash” is probably an incorrect description, but hell, i don’t claim to be a knowledgeable cook, just good at couple of things stolen from my mother’s extensive recipe cards and several things i picked up from others like The Alligator, Colonel Jimmy Lynch, my former father-in-law — wash the okra in buttermilk before dragging through the mix to deep fry.

When i got to that part about not mixing the buttermilk, i tried to salvage the whole thing. More buttermilk. Not mixed.

It came out of the fryer in big lumps about the size of a baseball. i didn’t include photos here because it was ugly, real ugly. i separated the lumps as best i could with knife and fork, but it still remained lumpy. And ugly.

But then Maureen came home and we tried it. It was really good, tasted as good or better than most okra i know.

So Paula, you have a free pass on this one. But write your recipes so bozos don’t mix everything together before they read to the bottom of the recipe.

Those two words don’t quite fit together.

i should have known.

Then, there was this crazy thing when i found okra in the Navy commissary at the 32nd Street base in San Diego. In late November. i haven’t seen it all year anywhere except at the North Island exchange in early October. Go figure.

i should have known.

Then, i made the mistake of looking up fried okra on the internet.