Our recent trip to Scotland was magical.

Scotland was a wondrous place: beauty of the Northern Atlantic island, incredibly beautiful vistas, history, uniqueness, good eating, and wonderful people.The magic part was the six siblings and in-laws sharing each other.

And there was another kind of magic there. i have tried to capture it as it affected me with the below poem and a couple of photos (Note: i copied some of these photos from on-line images).

Culloden

a moor;
that’s what it was;
a moor
in the mist of a cloudy Scotland Highlands,
the stuff of Gothic novels,
windy, cold, rainy;
but not just any moor:
tragic it was then,
soul-stirring now
if one allows the moor to sink
into one’s soul:
the Highlanders call it Culloden now,
Blàr Chùil Lodair then,
still a reminder death is not fleeting.

the Scots and the Brits had at it,
or rather, the Brits had at it
while the Scots took it from the Brits
hard, real hard;
today, the Scots have made it a memorial,
a graveyard:
it is impressive, as a graveyard.

the battle lines are noted on many maps,
explained in the many exhibits in the modern museum,
pointed out by the tour guides,
somber though they may be;
those lines of battle formed
thirteen score and thirteen years ago
are marked on the moor by
red flags for the British,
blue flags for the bonnie Scots
who do not seem so bonnie
when one stands on the moor
where they stood back then
to create those staggering numbers
for souls gone so quickly,
so sobering it is hard to grasp
more than 1500 Scottish souls
dying in the mucky bog of the moor
in less than it takes to drive there
from Inverness today;

i walked the moor quietly
reading the plaques describing
battle lines,
stones noting the number of clansmen
underneath the sod
with mounds of mass graves nearby;
i stood quiet near the large monument
dedicated to the dead while tourists
took photos of each other standing there
not quite in reverence.

i recognized the names of friends
descended from the dead clansmen
underneath the centuries of soil,
coming upon one clan name
striking me more deeply than the others:
Fraser,
close friends in my formative years
who had a lot to do with that forming;
had we been back then
we could have been on the opposite
lines of battle, bloody carnage;
i paused,  breathed a bit deeper,
thinking of across the seas
where another country’s battle with itself
occurred about halfway between
Culloden and today;
thinking about what i thought later half a word away
observing people fleeing their native land,
risking death for them and their family
to escape fear, domination,
feeling, like at Culloden, but off the coast of Vung Tau,
a deep and penetrating sadness
from the realization
we have not overcome
intolerance, hatred, fear, carnage of each other.

i worshipped off Vung Tau, praying for a better world;
i worshipped at Culloden,
wondering if we can ever conquer ego, power, greed, hate;
i stood quietly by the marker of the clan with the name so familiar
while a tear running down my cheek was blown away by the cold wind:
there was an emptiness inside me.

My wife is in love, a new love, and it ain’t me.

You see, we’ve had a pressure cooker for as long as we’ve been married, but i don’t think she ever used it. Then, she bought a new fangled, high powered, Cadillac…er, Caterpillar bulldozer of a pressure cooker and fell in love. No, not with the salesman. The pressure cooker.

Since we got back from Scotland, the pressure cooker has been caressed by all sorts of food products and the loving hands of my wife damn near every evening. My wife loves to cook. With the pressure cooker, we have reached critical mass.

She has always loved to cook. She’s very, very good at it. She has somewhere in the neighborhood of 7,486,321,544 cook books. She has more cookbooks than i have novels and non-fiction books. Maybe not as many LP’s as i have but way too many for me to count both to prove a point. She watches every cooking show and cooking movie ever made. i eat gourmet meals at breakfast, lunch, hors d’oeuvres, and dinner (yeh, we have dinner out here in the Southwest corner, not supper like back home). i love every one of her meals. She is really good, even with stuff i’m not partial to, like chicken, brussel sprouts, and beets.

i still cook every once in a long while.  i grill steaks, salmon, a few other things. i am trying to make my grilled cheeseburgers a weekly event, but it ain’t taking real well. i smoke a turkey every Thanksgiving we’re home. i cook my own version of jambalaya i call okra with tomatoes and sausage. i cook a bunch of things my mother used to cook: meat loaf, turnip greens, biscuits, cornbread. Mine aren’t as good as Mother’s, but they are passable. When i was in my last Navy tour, i always got home first in the afternoon. When i retired (sic), i was either always home or still got home first. i cooked a lot then. i figured in her high pressure job in office interiors she needed a break when she got home. Then i realized cooking was a release for her and i stopped. This was accelerated by a brief period when we traded off, one cooking one night and the other the next night. When it was my turn, i could find all sorts of reasons to go out to eat. She stopped that. But now, unless i get a specific request, get the urge to eat something akin to what i used to eat back in Tennessee, or demand i grill the steak rather than some barefoot woman’s recipe for ruining a steak, Maureen cooks.

It was all still good until she fell in love with the pressure cooker.

Now don’t get me wrong. What Maureen cooks in the pressure cooker is superb dining. We had pork loin last night, and it was wonderful. But this love affair with the pressure cooker has some other issues. Initially, i had to be called when the pressure cooker had concluded pressuring, cooking, or whatever pressure cookers do. You see the pressure release latch is pretty difficult to…well, release. So Maureen would call me to release the pressure. No, not that kind of pressure: the pressure in the pressure cooker. But last night, she figured it out, and now, i don’t have to stop watching a ball game to release the pressure.

No, but there is another problem. You see, when the pressure cooker is pressuring, it has the need to release some of that pressure intermittently. This is when it emits the sound of orcs coming out of Middle Earth with exponential decibels. While this is occurring, Maureen lights off the thirty-year old vent fan in the kitchen at full bore for a reason i cannot fathom. i first noticed this when i scrambled out of my television watching lounge chair (Yes, it’s a lounge chair, not a recliner because my interior designer prone wife thinks all recliners are ugly and do not fit the family room decor) and hit the deck with my hands covering my head to avoid George Alley’s FFV, the swiftest on the line, “runnin’ down the C&O road/Just twenty-five minutes behind” as Lester, Earl, and the Foggy Mountain Boys used to intone. i mean the first time she lit off that pressure cooker and the vent fan, i thought engine ole number one hundred and forty-three was rumbling out of our backyard through the breakfast room headed straight for me.

Sadly, i don’t think this is going to end any time soon. She is still in love with that pressure cooker. But it’s okay.

i eat well, and last night, she told me she still  loved me.

i keep claiming i don’t like proclaimed and government mandated “holidays” honoring a person, a group, or an event. Then i turn around and write about that person, group, or event on the day we are directed they be honored.

So i am singing a different tune again. Tomorrow is Father’s Day. 

i was going to post photos and write glowingly of some wonderful fathers i have known.

Uncle Snooks Hall was not a father, but he was our second father. i think just about every child that knew him considered him a second father.

Jason Gander is one of the best fathers i have ever known. i am glad because he is the father of my grandson Sam.

Of course, one of the best fathers i know was Ray Boggs, my father-in-law.

There are many more, enough to not give me space to mention them all here.

In case you haven’t noticed, my father was…well, he was my father. i think his three children spending three weeks together in Scotland the last two weeks would have been enough of a Father’s Day present for him.

At the turn of this century in 2000, i wrote a piece about him for his 86th birthday that was published in a Lebanon, Tennessee newspaper The Wilson Post. i wanted to honor him and for him to know how i felt about him before he left us. i was not expecting him to live in good health until he was within 42 days of reaching 99. He had a way of surprising me. i am glad he did. But here is that article, with some edits, i wrote:

An Incredible Man

There is an incredible man in Lebanon.

He was born September 28, 1914. The first record of his family in America dates to 1677. His great, great, great grandfather came over the Cumberland Gap with Daniel Boone and was Daniel’s brother-in-law, marrying the Bryant sisters (this is from family oral history and not documented). His great, great grandfather moved to Statesville, Tennessee (about 20 miles from Lebanon) in the early 1800’s.

He had three brothers and three sisters. He is the only one left.

He has lived through two world wars, fighting as a Seabee in the Southern Philippines, New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands in the last one. He has lived through the depression, the cold war, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War.

He had to quit his senior year at Lebanon High School to go to work when he father contracted tuberculosis. He started as a mechanic, shared a business with his brother-in-law in the 1950’s, and then became a partner in a combination of an automobile dealership and a gas and oil distributorship. He retired in 1979.

He and his wife have been married 62 years (he passed away shortly after their 75th anniversary). Their romance continues. the first home they owned was a one-room house adjacent to his wife’s family farm on Hunter’s Point Pike. They bought their next home on Castle Heights Avenue in 1941 with the help of a $500 loan from a friend. They have lived there ever since (they moved to Deer Park, a whopping three blocks down the street in 2004).

He and his wife put three children through college. They have five grandchildren (when he passed away, they also had three great grandchildren). They have visited every state in the union except Alaska where they were headed in 1984 when his wife’s illness forced them to turn around in British Columbia. Nearly all of their travels have been by RV’s, most in a 28-foot fifth wheel. When he was 72 and his wife 69, they made their first cross-country trip to San Diego where they had spent winters since 1986 with their eldest son and his family. They have made several trips up and down the east coast since then. The fifth wheel is still ready to go in their backyard.

They live comfortably in their retirement. Most people guess his age as the early 70’s. Last month, he painted their master bedroom and sanded and painted the roof of their two-car carport. When he can’t find anyone to go fishing with him, he hooks up the boat trailer and goes by himself. Now he usually throws his catch back. When he used to bring the catch home, he would clean the fish and give them away. He doesn’t like to eat fish, just catch them.

For years, he had the reputation as the best mechanic in Wilson County. He can still fix anything except computers and new cars because he has shunned learning the electronic advances.

All of this isn’t why this man is incredible.

He is incredible because he is such a good man.

He is a willow. He bends with the winds of change and changes of “progress.” Yet he never breaks. His principles remain solid as a rock. He is extremely intelligent but humble.

He seems to always be around when someone needs help. Everyone considers him a good friend, and he reciprocates.

He is not rich financially, but he is one of the richest men around.

My generation’s fathers were family men. They lived through hard times and hard work without a whimper. They believed in giving a day’s work for a day’s pay. They kept their sense of humor. Their sons wish they could emulate them.

Jimmy Jewell, this remarkable man, remains my best friend. i am his older son. i have wanted to be like him since my first recordable thoughts came into my head over fifty years ago. One close friend said of him, “I have never had a better, more caring, more fun-loving, thoughtful friend.” It seems to be a common theme among the people who know him. That’s whom i want to be like.

My father and i have enough talks for him to know how i feel, but i’ve seen too many people wait until someone is gone before singing their praises publicly. i figure he’s got a good chance to outlive us all, but i wanted to acknowledge how much he means to me and how remarkable a man i think he is.

Happy 86th Birthday, Dad.

Unfortunately for us, he didn’t outlive us all. He stuck around for a dozen more years and continued to make everyone’s life better. He and Estelle’s last trip to my home was a year later when he was 87. i miss him every day.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.