Pendulum Swings

It’s that time of year when I fall asleep at night listening to the crickets. According to The Farmer’s Almanac you can determine the temperature by counting the number of chirps in 14 seconds (I always thought it was 15) and then add 40 (again I was wrong - I had that number at 45).

To accomplish this you need another person to count or have a stopwatch for this scientific experiment. You should also verify your findings with a reliable source – a weather channel or Web site, even a thermometer should do the trick – but by then the whole house is awake and everyone wonders what you are up to when you should be sleeping. Oh yeah - the hotter it is the faster you have to count.

Sometimes it’s too hot to sleep without the air conditioner on. Usually though a fan can do the trick. I like the cool breeze and the dull hum it emits. Growing up in a house without air conditioning meant a fan or two was usually spinning during the summer time.

Mom would have a fan moving the air around so we didn’t choke. We only had two fans (a large floor model that could change your voice when you spoke into it, and a smaller table top model). My sisters got the small one for their room; the other sat in the hallway between the room I shared with my brothers and my parent’s room.

We had the back end of the fan because Mom said it would pull the hot air out of our room. I guess she forgot about the windows being open and all of that hot air just waiting outside to stifle us as it was dragged across our beds. I think that either she wanted Dad to be cooler so he could sleep, or she was trying to amplify our voices with the fan so she could learn all of our secrets. Either way we were hot.

Now when I am having a restless night’s sleep I turn the chime off on the grandfather clock – otherwise my sleep is interrupted four times an hour – or I find myself counting the bells when the clock rings on the hour. As I ponder the pendulum which is kept swinging by gravity’s pull on the weights in the clock I think of Isaac Newton (not really – but humor me).

Newton was the guy who thought of gravity when he observed an apple fall from a tree (or being dropped on his head if you prefer the cartoon version). He also developed his three laws of motion. Maybe Newton was also kept awake by a clock.

In his book “Inventions and Discoveries,” Rodney Carlisle wrote that Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch mathematician, “…had published a study of the pendulum clock … upon which Newton later formulated the complete laws of motion.” Newton’s Third Law of Motion states: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

On October 30th, 2008 just a few days before he was elected President, Sen. Barack Obama said at Missouri University in Columbia. “We are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Missouri is “The show-me state,” and President Obama has showed Missouri and the rest of the country that he does indeed mean to change our country.

But when things are pushed too far, the pendulum swings back the other way hard and fast. I think this is what is happening in this country. The citizens are sensing that things are getting out of balance and are pushing back. It’s time.

Leave A Wake To Support Others

Sunday my family and I spent the day at my wife’s brother’s home on Sugar Lake. Well, technically his house is not on the lake, it sits near the shore where the waves created by the wake of boats lap irregularly – but why go through all of that fuss explaining it when most people know what you mean.

I guess that most everyone in Minnesota knows somebody who lives on the lake where they are welcome to hang out on a beautiful summer day. Sunday was one of those days. The weather was almost perfect – partly cloudy with temperatures in the high 60’s.

One of my favorite summer activities is to ride on a boat and cruise the shoreline looking at the lake homes and cabins. I try to arrange my social calendar so that this happens more than once a summer. I am struck by the immense variety of dwellings. They range from the seasonal campers and rustic sixty-year old cabins, to the estates of the very wealthy.

The variety of boats also catches my attention. But instead of embarrassing myself by attempting to impress you with my limited knowledge of the many styles of watercraft, allow me to do so with just one particular type of boat: Wakeboard boats.

Wakeboard boats are designed to displace large amounts of water which results in a very large wake behind the boat. So instead of being strapped into skis, the person being pulled stands or kneels on a “board.” This combination of boat and board allows for tricks and stunts not easily accomplished with a typical ski boat. Sunday I watched a guy “surfing” behind a boat. What I found amazing was that this guy was keeping up to the boat without the use of a rope. I have to get out more.

I have been going up to Sugar Lake for about thirty years. My first time was with my girlfriend to visit her grandparents at their lake cabin. Over those thirty years the ownership of that cabin, which has grown and changed to a year-round home, has passed from father to son twice. During that time my girlfriend became my wife.

Thirty years ago I was in college at St. Cloud State University when I shook Ted Kennedy’s hand. He had just finished delivering a speech to an audience of college students. The next day in my Speech Communication’s class most of us could not recall what the Senator had said, but we defended our shortcomings by saying “the delivery was amazing.”

By now we all know that Ted Kennedy passed away recently. Last week there was an article in Politico titled “The wide wake left by Ted Kennedy’s legacy.” This serious article pointed out the void that will be felt by the passing of a man with forty-seven years in the U.S. senate.

But I think that his sister’s passing is just as significant. Eunice Kennedy Shriver also died this past August. She is credited with founding The Special Olympics in 1968, the same year her brother Robert was killed. The Special Olympics now has over 3 million athletes in 150 countries.

The Kennedys, with John, Bobby, Camelot and all of that were America’s royalty. I think my Mom saved every Life and Look magazine that had a Kennedy on the cover. But now with two more of the family gone that era is slipping away.

Our lives are like boats that create waves which role and roil across the water with an ever-increasing span. We should try to leave a wake that supports others by our presence.

Health For Sale

This column is too controversial for some readers. Last week I compared President Obama’s 1,000 plus page proposal for our nation’s health care to a clogged freeway with no exits. I still like that analogy, but naturally everyone does not agree with me. After the column appeared in the paper someone suggested to me that my opinion, now made public, was biased because of my occupation. They had even written a letter about it.

This person told me that because I am an insurance agent I never should have written about the government’s attempted takeover of our health care system – or at the very least, I should have mentioned what I do for a living.

I like the English language – both spoken and written. I try to never be misunderstood, just ask my family and friends. I am certain that I drive them crazy as I constantly seek the right word, and all too often suggest a better word for my conversation partner. I will seek clarity to the point of annoyance. Welcome to my strange little world. But last week I may have failed in that area. It wasn’t what I wrote in my column, it’s what I didn’t.

I should have disclosed that people can purchase health insurance from me. This is my fortieth column (counting the twelve that appeared in the “Minneapolis Star-Tribune), and I’m pretty sure that this is the first time that I have mentioned how I make my living. That has been by design. Newspapers have advertising departments and this column is not ad space – so I have chosen not to take advantage of my editor’s good graces by selling my wares in these six-hundred words. I will not change that. Nor am I likely to change my perspective – but know this for sure: this column will never be a place to protect my personal interests by promoting a position in which I seek to pad my pockets.

But I wondered – have some of my past columns been tainted by my own dark secrets? It’s time to come clean. A couple years ago the “Minneapolis Star-Tribune” ran my column on the shameful way people litter. Well, to be perfectly honest I have littered myself. Occasionally I will spit my gum out the window of my truck – but only in unpopulated areas when no one is looking. I’m trying to quit.

Once or twice in this space I have expressed my displeasure with the way smokers are being treated as second-class citizens. I don’t smoke, but I do keep a box of candy cigarettes in my desk for fun – so I guess in a way I was being biased. Sorry.

My column about turning fifty years old was just a thinly veiled attempt to get more birthday cards. I’m embarrassed to tell you that it didn’t work. My story about the mythical man in the icehouse is the first part in a book series I am planning: Jerry and the mystery of the vending machines.

When I wrote about the Scott County Fair a few weeks ago I didn’t mention that my wife enters a lot of stuff (baked goods and vegetables) in the fair. I guess this could be perceived as promoting her seasonal hobby. I’ll be more careful next year (the fair, just outside of Jordan, is usually held the 4th weekend in July – watch this space).

I understand that there are three things you are never supposed to talk about because they are too controversial. I have covered politics; next I may tackle religion – but the third one? No thanks.

Road With No Exit

The other day I was about to get on Interstate Highway 94, but instead of a fast-moving freeway I saw two-lanes of cars sitting motionless all the way to the horizon. Because I refuse to voluntarily submit to captivity on a road that isn’t advancing and offers no options for an exit, I pulled over and stopped.

I knew this particular stretch of highway well. It was the route I took back and forth to college when I was learning how to change the world. The next exit was too far up the road to hope for another opportunity to get off anytime soon.

I could follow the other sheep to slaughter where I would sit on the highway going nowhere for hours, or I could back down the entrance ramp and look for another way home. My wife, being the law-abiding type, strongly voiced her opposition to my exit plan. I like to comply with her requests when I can. I don’t advocate breaking the law –including traffic laws, but to add my vehicle to a monstrous traffic jam would have been irresponsible.

When I got off the ramp I noticed cars and trucks were leaving the highway in a slow parade and were now exiting the entrance ramp – kind of like walking down an escalator that is going up. I was pleased to see that others were also not content to just sit there, but instead chose to try and improve their situation. We may still have enough rebels in this country after all.

So after I got off the ramp I got on a beautiful back country road and headed in the general direction of home. We drove through several forgotten little towns with their distinctive identities; one had an old flour mill sitting serenely by a small river. We could even roll down the windows and enjoy the summer day without being blown apart by 75 mph winds.

It’s nice to have options: The option of what road to take, where to live, work, worship and how to control your own health care. But the freedom of choosing your own health care is under attack.

President Obama has been pushing very hard to get our country to adopt his public option for government run health care, that if enacted would eventually eliminate all other options. The proposal, over 1,000 pages long, is filled with rules and regulations concerning you and your family and how the government will wrest more control of your own lives.

I understand that the current way we pay for our health care is flawed – but let’s not reinvent the wheel just because the tire is flat. But when I see the pressure, the coercion behind this rush to take over our nation’s health care I keep coming back to the same question: Why? Why is there so much effort being extended to take over one-sixth of our economy? I believe it is because the government wants more power and control over our lives.

Try to exit that road once you’re on it. It would be slow, crowded, poorly maintained and stacked with toll-booths. Our health care would only go one-way – just like an interstate.

Within the past few days President Obama seems ready to temporarily shelve his idea of government-run health insurance. It appears that the voice of the American people may be making a difference. I guess enough people finally said “no you can’t,” and got off the Obama highway.

No one wants to voluntarily submit to captivity on a road that isn’t advancing and offers no options for an exit.

The Ice Man

It’s a hot August night, so I put on some Neil Diamond and grab a drink. I usually won’t add ice to a drink. I like to let the temperature of the drink stand on its own – no need in trying to affect change just to suit me. If it is served right out of the box or bottle – well so be it. It may be a lazy choice, or it might be due to a childhood experience that has stayed with me.

I grew up in a neighborhood where fun and adventure was always available. There were abandoned brewery caves, horses corralled next door, a farm down the street, vacant lots, a tired-out gravel pit, a livestock sales barn, the river, an empty church with a full cemetery, highways and alleys, 106 kids and Hespy’s.

Hespy’s was a gas station on the corner of two busy streets. There were usually two uniformed men working there – Hespy, the owner, (a shortened version of his last name), and his faithful mechanic – Vern, I think. They proudly pumped Texaco brand gasoline.

Our lawn mower ran exclusively on Texaco gas. When the need arose I would grab the red one-gallon metal can marked gasoline and bike down to Hespy’s. Because it was a full-service gas station, Vern or Hespy himself would fill the can and take the 35 cents. While they did that I would check out the candy machine.

They had the best candy machine in town. For a nickel you could buy a candy bar the size of your arm. The machine was tall with a big dial on the side to rotate the display. Once your selection was brought into the right spot, you pulled the knob to release the sugary goodness. I would ride home with one hand holding the full gas can, the other hand maneuvering the bike, and my mouth full of candy.

But the single most vivid memory of Hespy’s involved the icehouse. Behind the gas station was an icehouse where you could buy ice in two different sizes: the block and the bag. Other than for ice-carving I still don’t fully understand the need for a block of ice.

As little boys my brother Dan and I would often go along with Dad to get ice. The short trip chilled us with fear and foreboding as Dad would fire our imaginations with stories of the little man that lived in the icehouse. If you gave him enough money he would give you some of his ice.

A vision of a Rumpelstiltskin-type character inhabiting the icehouse was usually more than enough to keep the two of us away. But one time we had worked up enough courage to seek a little adventure and see if this was just another of Dad’s stories.

We rode our bikes over to Hespy’s and slowly approached the icehouse. In addition to the smaller door where the ice was delivered there was a larger door – which we guessed was how the iceman got in and out.

Dan knocked on the door to test the truth of Dad’s story. We stood there for only a few seconds before the door slowly started to open. That was the only proof we needed – the iceman was coming. We screamed, jumped on our bikes and pedaled for our lives.

I don’t know who opened that door forty years ago. My friend Mark likes to remind me that “ice is life’s least expensive luxury.” But whenever I am offered ice for my drink I feel a familiar chill run down my back.

“No thanks,” I say.

Cash for Clunkers

I like to start my day with a cup of coffee, and if my wife Rhonda is hanging around the kitchen, I am also offered a tall glass of tomato juice. I don’t really like tomato juice, but I drink it because my wife poured it for me, even if it causes me to shudder and shiver as I swallow it.

I get the same convulsive reaction when I try to swallow the economic elixirs sold by modern day snake-oil salesman dressed up as politicians. They travel from town to town where they put on their town-hall meetings. There they promote their products which promise to cure everything from hair-loss to job-loss, recession to depression, and stomach gas to greenhouse gas.

The Cash for Clunkers program is our federal government’s latest con in their attempt to get us to voluntarily transform our country. For the last couple weeks I have been scrutinizing my vehicles. Within my stable of V-8s I think I may have a clunker or two. That is of course if I am to embrace the government’s new definition – which of course I will not. A vehicle with a model year of 1984 or newer which gets 18 miles per gallon or less is now considered a clunker by our federal government. They want to get these large, safe family-sized vehicles off the road – and they will take your money to do it.

I know people who have taken advantage of this new plan – I don’t blame them. But let’s consider the future consequences of this program. When a vehicle is sacrificed to appease the environmental gods, the government requires that its engine and drive-train be ruined.

Never mind that good quality used cars and trucks are being destroyed in the name of progress. Never mind that some people simply cannot afford to pay for a new vehicle – even with a sizeable trade. These disadvantaged folks, who working two jobs in an attempt to make their own way, will no longer be able to find that “good-used car” down at Bob’s Bargain lot, because that car has been wrecked by the government with your tax dollars.

Never mind that the local repair shop will have fewer older cars and trucks to work on. Never mind that the used car market will be screwed-up for years to come. Better gas mileage is a noble aspiration – but it should not be forced. When the government artificially inflates a market it blows up. The housing market’s bubble burst, the same will also be true in an artificially inflated auto market.

The idea of trading in cars and trucks for more than they are worth really took hold with some people. People like a bargain, especially when their government is the one being loose with the purse strings. But the folks in Washington grossly underestimated the response to their offer. The Federal government’s Cash for Clunkers program, which started with $1 billion of your money, has now tripled the amount to $3 billion. Please remember this ridiculous margin for error whenever anyone talks to you about government controlled anything (health care, bail-outs, taxes etc.).

If this pattern of hope and change continues unfettered we will someday realize that when we traded our clunkers for cash we unwittingly gave away our freedom and liberty. The government is tightening its grip on what kinds of cars and trucks are built, sold, driven and destroyed. When the last big block Chevy Truck is silenced slap yourself in the forehead and say “I could have had a V-8, but I let the government take it away.”

County Fair

What is there do in Minnesota in the summer time? The answer is not that simple as there are many choices available.

There is fishing and camping of course – neither of which I like well enough to plan for. I usually like to be spontaneous – but with a little planning you can find a fair or festival to attend every weekend. But, this week you should start with Derby Days in Shakopee. In addition to the parade, there are free concerts, a car show, sidewalk sales and other activities. Derby Days is Shakopee’s own fair - so get out and enjoy it.

Last weekend it was the Scott County Fair. My kids are past the 4-H years but I still go to the fair once or twice a season. This year was no different. I looked at the tractors even though they wouldn’t let me sit on them and play farmer. I also had fun walking through the travel trailers and motor homes. Here I was allowed to sit and play camper, but they wouldn’t let me use the bathrooms. I had to find one of those lovely portable models for that task. There are so many rules to follow.

Of course most county fairs have a midway. Here colors and lights come together to form a family-friendly fantasy land. All traveling fun-shows offer the same opportunities. You can spin your self sick on rides that are torn-down and put-together every five days or so as they rotate from town to town. But if making your self nauseous doesn’t appeal to you, there are games where you are promised to win a fabulous prize every time you play.

I cruised through the Commercial, 4-H, and the Creative Arts buildings. My wife Rhonda likes to look at ALL the stuff in these buildings. But if I spend too much time there, things start to happen to me: I begin to vegetate viewing the carrots and cabbages; get quite sleepy concentrating on the quilts; and get bored with the wood projects. It’s just me, but I need to keep moving so I don’t get stuck in front of the preserves.

But it is the barns that make the fair (I’ll get to the food in a minute). In my opinion the animal barns define the fair. It is because of these structures and their contents that fairs even came to exist. Here you can get close enough to touch and smell the animals

When I stopped in at the swine barn they had one particular plump pig in his pen. You could guess his weight and win a prize. I don’t do well at those contests as I don’t want to risk insulting the poor pig. I usually guess in the low hundreds – you know to encourage the pig into shedding some of those extra pounds. They don’t need all that sloppy fat.

From there I walked to the pork producer’s stand and grabbed a pork burger. Yeah, I know – it’s a strange turn of events. I had also heard from a very reliable source that the pork chop on a stick was worth the money. It was perhaps the finest pork chop I had ever tasted. Granted $5.00 is more than enough for such a treat – but if we don’t do our part the terrorists win.
The irony of it all hits me. You can walk from barn to booth and eat what you just saw - with a few exceptions. I’m hoping that the horse barn is one of those exceptions. It’s best not to ask too many questions though.