I Hate The Wind

My father always hated the wind. He could stand for hours in the rain, the cold and the blistering sun but would be in the house in minutes if it was windy. I don't mean a gentle breeze, I mean sustained winds of 12 mph or more. Since the last years of his life he lived on an island in Puget Sound on a hilltop there was plenty of wind. There wasn't a time that I visited that he didn't complain about the wind. Now I have to admit that at the time the wind didn't bother me me all that much but those days are behind me now. In the 11 years since my father died I guess I have aged more than I thought. The wind now cuts right through me and chills me to the bone. Right now it is 53 degrees in Boise but I'm wearing my Carhartt lined work parka to walk the dogs. I can just hear my father as I'm thinking that it is the middle of March damn it and I should be wearing a light jacket to do this. But there is that damned wind. I can hardly wait for Summer with its heat so I can start to complain about the 100 degree days.

St. Patrick's Day

I had corned beef hash and eggs for breakfast today in honor of St. Patrick. It seems odd to eat a rather British meal to celebrate an Irishman. Oh wait, St. Patrick is British. I think that is all I'll do to honor St. Patrick today as I never have been a big drinker of green beer or whiskey.

When I was a child mom always made a boiled dinner for St. Patrick's Day. She would get out the pressure cooker and in would go the potatoes, cabbage and either beef or a large ham. Ham was my favorite. To this day I will always try boiled cabbage at any place that serves it, I love boiled cabbage.  Irish food is rather bland and that may be why they like the beer and whiskey.

Mom would like to listen to some Irish folk music but I always thought it was so sad. Then I learned something about Irish history and can understand why the music is so sad.  So I will eat my hash and think of my mother and that will make my St. Patrick's Day just about perfect. ERIN GO BRAUGH.

Ten Years After

Ten years ago today my father died. It was expected but still came as a terrible surprise when the hospital called and said he had passed. I wasn't totally prepared for the hole his passing was going to make. I had to call my mom at my sister's house and tell them. That was the single hardest phone call I ever made. What made the whole experience even harder was the fact we had just been to the hospital to see how he was doing and if we should move him to a nursing facility. Dad was going to die it was just that nobody could say just when. We had been told as little as a week or as much as two months. So when I got back to my parents house and the phone was ringing to say he had died shortly after we left, I just couldn't deal with it.

The next few days were busy with making all the arrangements for his funeral. I helped write an obituary, picked music for the funeral, helped call our relatives and a thousand and one other things. I spoke at his funeral, which was really hard hard to do without just breaking up. I was so busy that it wasn't until I was driving home to Idaho from Seattle about a week later that I started to cry. I think I cried for about 100 miles. I'm crying now.

The one thing that most people didn't know or understand about my dad was he was a very shy man. He covered it with stern looks and short pointed statements. He wasn't a very touchy hand holding kind of man. He was always the one standing rather stoically with his hands crossed and a far away look in the all our family pictures. He could be a very hard and unforgiving man which sometimes made him hard to like. As a child I always thought that he must have been born 50 years old and never had been a child. I had a difficult time seeing him as a 5 year old climbing telephone poles and refusing to come down. I couldn't see him chasing cats and rubbing salt into the neighbors screen door. But grandma Tangen said he did all that and more. There are only 3 pictures of him as a child that I have seen. In one he is about 4 years old and wearing what looks like a dress. In the second he is about 9 and has a great big smile and his brother is crying. In the last he is 11 and helping to build their new house in Grand Forks. So I was always sure he had never been a child. I'm not sure when or why he became so shy but as he grew older he did or so said grandma.

My mom was about the only woman my dad spoke with on a regular basis. He didn't have a lot of friends male or female but those he did he held close and thought very highly of. He was a strict father. There were rules and he and mom enforced them very closely. Surprisingly of the two my father was the most willing to bend the rules on occasion. I was the oldest and believe me the rules and I got very little slack. My brother had an easier time of it and that always rankled me. My sister had a very tough time with dad and it colored their relationship. Dad rarely gave my sister any wiggle room and in fact he got a job as a teacher at her high school just to keep an eye on her. I told my sister one time that while she didn't have to forgive dad for the things he did she had better learn to forget what happened if she wanted to have any kind of relationship with dad. She worked at it and things did get better but they were always tense.

I miss my dad. I miss him as much today as I did ten years ago. I still talk to him and I wait patiently for an answer. They are getting harder to hear with time. I have one tape with his voice on it but I still can't hear him. He does show me things. I can feel him pointing out things in the landscape and the colors of the sunsets. He was an amateur astronomer and I still look at the stars. When woodworking I will hold or touch his old square, level and table saw and sometimes he will show how to fix or build something. I just miss talking to him. I never did get to say goodbye.

The Weather

I was at the grocery store and we were talking about the weather and how wet it has been here in Boise. That conversation got me thinking about my aunts and uncles. They were all farmers in North Dakota in the Red River Valley. We visited every Summer for the first 18 years of my life. There was never a time that the talk with my uncles didn't revolve around the weather. It went something like this:

Too hot, too cold
Too wet, too dry
Too little, too much
Too soon, too late.

And that pretty much describes the weather.

"00" Review

Okay, this is for you, Mike Peterson.

2000 My father takes ill in April and dies in August

2001 My grandson Carter Alexander Tangen is born in December

2002 Oldest son deploys with Idaho Air Guard to Oman

2003 Youngest granddaughter Christina Jane Tangen is born in January

2004 Not sure just what happened this year but I'm sure work started to suck real bad

2005 Oldest son deploys with Air Guard for 5 months in Qatar and 5 months in Germany

2006 Blood pressure is at highest levels ever for me

2007 Start taking insulin for my Type 2 Diabetes

2008 Oldest son deploys with Air Guard to Cyprus for 5 months. I retire after 24 years as 911 operator

2009 Oldest son deploys with Air Guard to Iraq. My blood pressure is down in the good range and my blood sugars are in the target ranges finally. It only took 18 months of retirement. Now if I could only lose some weight.

Even with all of this I thought the 2000's weren't all that bad. Sure there was lots to worry about and the world was a very unsafe place but you know life goes on. To quote my favorite song writer "Some of its magic and some of its tragic but I had a good life all the way" Jimmy Buffett. So that's the way it is.

The Fire is so Delightful

I sit here watching the snow and thinking how glad I'm that I have retired. I can just imagine what it is like in dispatch right now. The phones ringing and ringing and the continuous chatter on the the radios. I had thought that I would miss the excitement and the hustle and bustle of dispatch but now I'm just glad to be home and watching the snow and warming myself by the fire.

I just about hear the phones and people reporting accidents and slide offs. I can hear people asking when the officers will arrive at their fender bender. I can just imagine the news media calling and asking how many calls there have been. Officers calling wanting to know when the wrecker will get to their location. I can hear the admin operator calling the tow companies over and over requesting wreckers and ETA's.

The radios will be going crazy. Calls being dispatched, units going on location and status updates being given. Officers asking for wreckers, demanding ETA's and wanting sanders and deicers. Everyone demanding first priority on sand and never understanding that ACHD doesn't drop everything because an officer wants sand at his location or that bridge or overpass. I can almost hear the tempers rising and nerves fraying.

The weather outside is frightful
but the fire is so delightful and
since I've no where to go
Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow.

Writing or Something Like It

It sure has been awhile since I have written here and I'm not really sure why. It sure isn't as if I have nothing to say. I do have a problem sometimes getting out a coherent thought. That may be because I don't write enough. I remember just about every English teacher I had saying that you had to write everyday to ever get good at it. I was listening to NPR yesterday and they were interviewing an author that said writing is a solitary endeavor and that was what made it so hard to do. However, going off by yourself and writing for at least an hour a day for 21 days was the only way to get going. He said that somewhere in those 21 days a light bulb would turn on and writing, while still hard would at least become more understandable and then possibly easier.

I don't really fancy myself a writer but I do have something to say. While I'm not sure just what it is I do believe that it is important to leave something behind that your ancestors will be able to look at and maybe feel something of what you and your life were like. It doesn't have to be anything profound because lets face it how many of us really are all that profound. So I'm going to strive to write a coherent, well thought out paragraph everyday about myself and hope that in the future someone will be able to understand me just a little bit. Some of it I will post here in the hopes that it will outlive me and go into some timeless archive to be accessed by future Tangen's. A bit of immortality and that is something we all want.

4th of July

I sit here listening to all the fireworks going off in the neighborhood and find myself wondering just what sort of recession is this. My next door neighbor has been setting off fireworks for the last 60 minutes and not just the safe and sane stuff. They have launched at least 20 aerial rockets and those are not cheap. In fact I was rather bummed out about not going to see the big show downtown but I need not have worried. The show in and around the neighborhood is spectacular to say the least. It is nice to know that I don't have to spend a dime but can see a great display of aerial fireworks while sitting in my front yard.

Rob called this evening and he is still at Al Asad in Iraq. He was supposed to have left today to start his journey back to Boise. They were grounded by a sandstorm but should get out tomorrow. They will be going to Qatar to await the rotator. He says he will be back in Boise on the 12th of July. No reason why they will have to wait so long in Qatar but at least he is out of Iraq. He says this the last time he will volunteer for a deployment.

I did get a very pleasant surprise today. I heard from a friend from way out of my past. He found me because of a comment I had left on a fan site about Seattle radio stations on Facebook. He is Joey Fleischauer from Spokane. He is two years older than me but he was my best friend in the world at the time. I have often wondered about him over the years and to hear from him after 54 years is real surprise. I have written back to him and will have to try and see him. He is living in the Seattle area and is using the name Joe Micheals. It is sure becoming a smaller world.

The Life Not Lived

I have always thought that crying at the movies was a female only occupation. Today I found out differently. Apparently 56 year old men can cry at the movies also. Lets backup a little here. Caroline and I have not had a weekend with Carter in a month. We made the arrangements and picked Carter up at noon. We went to see the movie Up. A Pixar movie is always a good bet and this was no exception. It is the story of Carl Fredericksen, who at age 78 not only feels but knows that the life he had wanted to live had passed him by. Aided by an 8 year old wilderness scout, Russell, Carl goes on the adventure he had always dreamed of having. That by itself is pretty poignant stuff but not the stuff of tears, at least for me. For me that came in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.

The movie starts with Carl as a young boy at the movies watching a newsreel of his hero a world famous adventurer and explorer. Cut to Carl walking home and living his own adventure in his head on the way. He meets a young girl with the same interests and well one thing leads to another. The next five or more minutes is a montage of scenes of their courtship, marriage, discovering their inability to have children and the sadness of that and then the rediscovering of their earlier passion for adventure. They start saving for the trip to their first adventure and then how life gets in the way and slows and finally stops their dream as they do the responsible thing. When Carl finally has the money for their long forgotten trip his beloved wife takes sick and dies. Carl is left alone to wonder just how it all happened that his life just passed him by. At that point the tears start.

I'm no Carl Fredericksen but there is a part of my life I never took the chance to live. I grew up reading National Geographic and reading about Lowell Thomas, Admiral Bird and John Wesley Powell. I wanted to take pictures or make documentary films of all the exciting places and exotic animals there were in the world. Of course I got married too young and joined the military to avoid the draft and so there went 5 years of my life and then we had the boys. So I did the responsible thing and got a job and worked at being a family man. Then one day I saw an add for a entry position with a documentary film company in Seattle. So on the way home from work I talked with them. They were interested in me and liked the pictures I had made over the last several years. I never breathed a word of it to Caroline. The job would have been low paying and required lots of travel and time away from home. So I did the responsible thing and put it out of my mind.

Today while watching the montage of Carl's life I remembered that long forgotten chance and choice and so the tears. If you are at the movies and see a middle aged or older man with tears on his face don't laugh and think he is an old softy. It just may be that something in the movie hit a little too close to home and he is just remembering a long forgotten part of his life and is wondering what amazing adventure he missed.

Contrails and Black Helicopters

I was listening to Idaho Talks Back Live this morning and was hoping to hear something good. This was open phones Friday and the talk is on any subject so I had my fingers crossed. I was surprised when every caller mentioned something about the contrails in the sky. It seems these are part of a government conspiracy to either control the weather or our minds. It seems that the government has a fleet of secretly modified jet aircraft that can either spray mind control chemicals or drop aluminum oxide to make clouds that can cause rain, global warming or increase the rates of skin and other cancers. Who knew that our government which can't control the economy or devise a plan to defeat Al Qaeda and capture Osama bin Laden could do this and keep it secret. Of course this is all part of a bigger plan by the United Nations to institute a World Government. This is so patantly absurd that I can hardly keep from laughing myself silly, but then again there was a large black SUV that followed me and now there is a black helicopter hovering over the backyard.