Category: What Can I Do

Children, Choices, Consequences, Emotional Health, Family, Generations, Grandchildren, Grief, Recovery, Relationships, Storytelling, Thoughts From the Porch, What Can I Do, Writing

The Way It Was…

gregoryjoel

It’s hard to believe September is already here. Labor Day is the unofficial beginning of Fall so the temperatures here have dropped to the nineties instead of the triple digits and we might even celebrate Labor Day with some rain. I’m hoping but it is Texas after all…

I haven’t written much lately. The heat and oppressive humidity dulled the thinking, and work has taken all the energy I may have. Getting out of sweat-soaked clothes and laying in front of the air conditioning has been norm the last month or so. It’s also the end of our fiscal year at work so evenings are filled with year-end reports and audits. It’s rare to stay awake through the ten pm weather report but that’s okay. The forecast doesn’t change in August. It’s just going to be hot and dry.

My youngest grandkids started school in the middle of last month. Things have changed since I was young. The school year started the day after Labor Day and ended the day before Memorial Day. We didn’t have Monday holidays, so we celebrated them on whatever day of the week they fell on. It seems a bit cruel to send kids back to school while the swimming pools are still open, but I digress…

I have had the privilege of picking my grandkids up from school for a couple of years now. My oldest, Baillie, is working in Alaska, but both of the others are in high school, although they attend different schools. Lucas is close enough to walk to and from Pascal High School where he’s a freshman this year. I get to pick him up on the days he stays late.

Izabella was accepted into the Visual Performing Arts program at I.M. Terrell Academy, which is only two minutes away from the farm. I.M. Terrell was the black high school for many years in Fort Worth when schools were still segregated. Moreover, it’s Ms. Opal Lee’s alma mater. She’s thrilled that Iza is there. It hasn’t hurt Iza that her grandfather works for Terrell’s most famous alumnus.

I’m reminded daily how much I love my grandkids and how much I miss their father. He would (and I’m sure that on another plane he is) be so proud of them. I hope he would be proud of me as well for being there for them. I often wasn’t there for him when he was that age. Addiction has stolen so much from us. It stole both my son’s father and my grandkid’s father. The only difference is that I get the opportunity to make living amends. Jeremy, my son, lost that opportunity on May 29th, 2020.

It’s been four years since he passed. His car still sits in my driveway: another daily reminder that I keep meaning to get to someone else, but still find hard to let go of. Grief has its own timeline. While the daily intensity of the emotion has lessened to a point, there are still days when I retreat by myself to the end of the farm to have a good cry. I don’t feel as overwhelmed as I did in the months after his death, but I still grieve. I know grief’s a process and I’m told by others that have lost children that it doesn’t ever go away. It simply changes.

I have a fellow blogger friend, Mitch, who shares his real memoirs from time to time. I enjoy reading them. I’ve often thought I should share my own stories in some way. Jeremy once told me that he and I should write a book. “Dad, no one would believe that crazy shit”, he’d tell me. Life was certainly not dull, at least outwardly. As my own addiction progressed, life became an extremely dull routine of using, finding ways and means to get more, and repeating the process over and over with greater consequences and self-hatred.

Jeremy and I found a way out and shared that path for several years until he ventured down his own path that included relapsing into active addiction. I stayed on the recovery pathway and prayed that Jeremy would join me once again. He did from time to time but couldn’t seem to stay. I miss him terribly.

I thought that maybe I too, should share some stories – crazy as they may be – in hopes that someone relates and maybe, just maybe, it can make a difference in their journey as I’m sure it will in mine. I still don’t know what to call them. It would be inappropriate to call them my “real memoir” – don’t want to step on anyone’s toes – but they are real and definitely a time of remembering. Maybe writing will ease the grief and make some sense out of the craziness.

Look for them from time to time and pray to keep me honest. One of my favorite lines from a recovery book I read frequently is that “Honesty is the antidote to our diseased thinking”.

Maybe the stories will reflect that…

Children, Choices, Consequences, Emotional Health, Family, Generations, Grandchildren, Grief, Recovery, Relationships, Storytelling, Thoughts From the Porch, What Can I Do, Writing

The Way It Was…

gregoryjoel

It’s hard to believe September is already here. Labor Day is the unofficial beginning of Fall so the temperatures here have dropped to the nineties instead of the triple digits and we might even celebrate Labor Day with some rain. I’m hoping but it is Texas after all…

I haven’t written much lately. The heat and oppressive humidity dulled the thinking, and work has taken all the energy I may have. Getting out of sweat-soaked clothes and laying in front of the air conditioning has been norm the last month or so. It’s also the end of our fiscal year at work so evenings are filled with year-end reports and audits. It’s rare to stay awake through the ten pm weather report but that’s okay. The forecast doesn’t change in August. It’s just going to be hot and dry.

My youngest grandkids started school in the middle of last month. Things have changed since I was young. The school year started the day after Labor Day and ended the day before Memorial Day. We didn’t have Monday holidays, so we celebrated them on whatever day of the week they fell on. It seems a bit cruel to send kids back to school while the swimming pools are still open, but I digress…

I have had the privilege of picking my grandkids up from school for a couple of years now. My oldest, Baillie, is working in Alaska, but both of the others are in high school, although they attend different schools. Lucas is close enough to walk to and from Pascal High School where he’s a freshman this year. I get to pick him up on the days he stays late.

Izabella was accepted into the Visual Performing Arts program at I.M. Terrell Academy, which is only two minutes away from the farm. I.M. Terrell was the black high school for many years in Fort Worth when schools were still segregated. Moreover, it’s Ms. Opal Lee’s alma mater. She’s thrilled that Iza is there. It hasn’t hurt Iza that her father works for Terrell’s most famous alumnus.

I’m reminded daily how much I love my grandkids and how much I miss their father. He would (and I’m sure that on another plane he is) be so proud of them. I hope he would be proud of me as well for being there for them. I often wasn’t there for him when he was that age. Addiction has stolen so much from us. It stole both my son’s father and my grandkid’s father. The only difference is that I get the opportunity to make living amends. Jeremy, my son, lost that opportunity on May 29th, 2020.

It’s been four years since he passed. His car still sits in my driveway: another daily reminder that I keep meaning to get to someone else, but still find hard to let go of. Grief has its own timeline. While the daily intensity of the emotion has lessened to a point, there are still days when I retreat by myself to the end of the farm to have a good cry. I don’t feel as overwhelmed as I did in the months after his death, but I still grieve. I know grief’s a process and I’m told by others that have lost children that it doesn’t ever go away. It simply changes.

I have a fellow blogger friend, Mitch, who shares his real memoirs from time to time. I enjoy reading them. I’ve often thought I should share my own stories in some way. Jeremy once told me that he and I should write a book. “Dad, no one would believe that crazy shit”, he’d tell me. Life was certainly not dull, at least outwardly. As my own addiction progressed, life became an extremely dull routine of using, finding ways and means to get more, and repeating the process over and over with greater consequences and self-hatred.

Jeremy and I found a way out and shared that path for several years until he ventured down his own path that included relapsing into active addiction. I stayed on the recovery pathway and prayed that Jeremy would join me once again. He did from time to time but couldn’t seem to stay. I miss him terribly.

I thought that maybe I too, should share some stories – crazy as they may be – in hopes that someone relates and maybe, just maybe, it can make a difference in their journey as I’m sure it will in mine. I still don’t know what to call them. It would be inappropriate to call them my “real memoir” – don’t want to step on anyone’s toes – but they are real and definitely a time of remembering. Maybe writing will ease the grief and make some sense out of the craziness.

Look for them from time to time and pray to keep me honest. One of my favorite lines from a recovery book I read frequently is that “Honesty is the antidote to our diseased thinking”.

Maybe the stories will reflect that…

Activism, Anxiety, Bad Weather, Beatitudes, Belief, Common Sense, Communication, Community, Consequences, Emotional Health, Environment, Freedom, God's Economics, Goodness, Grace, Grandchildren, Gratitude, Hope, Listening, Marginalized, Marriage, Miracles, Neighbors, Peace, Service to Others, Spirituality, Stories, Thoughts From the Porch, Transformation, Trust, What Can I Do

The clock is Ticking Again

gregoryjoel

It was sometime during the early years of the Reagan Administration. I can’t remember the date exactly, but I’ve never forgotten the events that night. It was clear and despite the city lights, the stars twinkled brightly on the late winter’s night. I had taken a moment to sit on our big front porch to take in the beauty of the evening before going to bed. I smoked my last cigarette of the day and shut off the lights as I walked through the living room, the kitchen, and down the back stairs to the warmth of our small bedroom in the basement.

Our house was an old farmhouse built in 1890 and sat on two large city lots. It was built long before the area known as Washington Park grew up around it and had much different architecture than the Craftsmen and Victorian homes that came in the early 1900s. It was small – only 950 square feet – and finished in stucco with a flat roof. It even had the old concrete path to where the outhouse would’ve been in its early years. The basement had been finished with two small bedrooms my first wife and I shared next to our boy’s bedroom. It always felt so cozy on a long winter’s night, and I rarely had insomnia issues after sliding into the inviting warmth of the covers and my wife’s arms. It wasn’t much but it was our piece of paradise in the middle of Denver’s urban sprawl.

I’m not sure of the exact time it happened but it was in the early morning hours when sleep is so deep that even one’s dreams are on hold. It was the kind of sleep that we all long for: peaceful and restful. It was also the deep sleep that made it virtually impossible to awaken with a clear mind – the mind remained in that state long after the body was jolted awake. That’s when it happened.

The long, loud scream of the warning sirens blew in the basement window; waning and ebbing as the siren made its circular motion. My wife and I sat up in bed. “What in the hell?”, I demanded as we looked at one another trying to figure out what was up.

 I had grown up with warning sirens in Texas, but there we called them tornado sirens. They were tested monthly so if they ever went off other than 1:00 PM on the first Wednesday of the month it meant you needed to head for a place in your home away from windows and doors and hold on. A tornado was nearby and may hit you soon. North Texas marked the southern end of tornado alley. Growing up in Fort Worth meant having a solemn respect for tornado warnings.

The warning sirens were also called Civil Defense sirens. You see, I grew up during the Cold War between the Soviet Union Eastern Bloc and the West. Both sides had a first-strike capability with the ever-growing stockpile of nuclear weapons. The sirens warned us of an imminent attach by the godless communists. We were supposed to file into the basements of buildings marked as Civil Defense shelters if we were downtown working or shopping (this was BM – Before Malls). If we were elsewhere, such as school, we were supposed to “duck and cover” as if our trusty school desks were to help us survive a nuclear blast. I still remember Tommy Turtle and the black-and-white instructional films (this was BV – before video) that told us how to duck low to the ground, cover our heads, and look away from the blast in case of nuclear attack. It mattered little that we were to be vaporized or brutally burned when the bomb went off. The ostrich approach was probably the best way to go…

Unfortunately, this wasn’t North Texas but Denver, Colorado. In the all the years of junior and senior high school and college I had never heard a warning siren. Nor had I ever seen a tornado in Denver, especially in the winter. They just didn’t happen then (climate change changed that scenario years later). Even if they did, the city wouldn’t be testing the sirens at three o’clock in the morning, so something was going on. I reached over to our bedside alarm clock radio and tuned in to see if there was any news about what was happening. There wasn’t. Was this it? Was this the bomb?

The Cold War had a renewed tension after Reagan was elected President. Saber rattling had become the norm and tensions between East and West were at the highest point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1963. The nuclear arms race was in full swing. I had proudly been arrested for civil disobedience at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons facility numerous times (once with Father Berrigan!). Nuclear disarmament and peace were the subjects of many a demonstration, however small those might be. Most folks were content to live in fear if it didn’t interfere with making a living and going about normal daily life. The warning sirens made everything suddenly real.

Maybe this was it. Denver would be a prime target in any attack scenario. It boasted the largest Federal center of anywhere outside of Washington, D.C. and was surrounded by Rocky Mountain Nuclear Arsenal, an Air Force Base, and several other military facilities. The likelihood that this would be our last few moments was real. My mind raced with memories of a recent movie sensation, “The Day After”.

Finally, the sirens stopped. My wife, though jolted awake by the sudden emergency, drifted back off to sleep. My boys never woke up through the whole affair. All things slowly returned to normal though I never quite made it back to sleep that night. It had all been too unsettling. The morning news carried a story about the event. It seems somehow water had gotten in a control room and shorted out the wiring, causing the alarms to go off. We were never in danger, only inconvenienced. The event was soon forgotten, and life went about as usual.

Several years later, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union fell apart and became the Russian Federation, and the Cold War was declared over. Anti-nuke demonstrations faded and the news media found plenty of other things to instill more fear and create more demonstrations over. There were new countries joining the nuclear weapon family. Although they had agendas contrary to the West there has not been the intensity of coverage, nor the fearfulness found in the Cold War years.

2024 is an election year. Many on both sides of the political spectrum say it’s the most important election in America history. I’ve lived long enough to have voted in several “most important” elections. This year really is different though, and for a myriad of reasons. I’ve heard all the arguments but the one that’s been missing is the threat of nuclear catastrophe that is now at its highest point since the 1980s. There may no longer be a Soviet Union but the Cold War between East and West has restarted and could become a “hot” war through miscalculation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication.

Authoritarian rulers like Putin have referred to the nuclear option several times over the last two years in his quest to restore Russian Empire. North Korea improves and expands its nuclear program while other international actors seek to be come nuclear powers. More and more uncertainties enter the equation.

I don’t like fear tactics and that’s not what I hope comes from this story. I hope that this is a subject to be taken seriously when considering election choices in the coming year. Whoever is elected will have the final say over whether we live together or die together. It’s important to consider deeply and prayerfully who we give that power to.

Evaluate real character and integrity. Choose those who demonstrate empathy and compassion for the common good rather than those whose decisions are made for themselves. Who holds up and lives out the values we strive for? Making America great again should be making America what it professes to believe in, and not some idea of selfish, power seekers only seek to make others do their will. Choose wisely. You lives may depend on it…

***I also recommend:

Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War available on Netflix

Activism, Belief, Choices, Community, Democracy, Faith, Grace, Hope, Love, Neighbors, Service to Others, Spirituality, Thoughts From the Porch, What Can I Do

What’s Really There…

gregoryjoel

It’s a fantastic late winter/early spring (depending on whether you use the meteorological or the Spring Equinox calendar) day here in North Texas. I’m still reeling from the time change to Daylight Savings. It always gets me no matter how hard I try to plan for it. I’m just tired and don’t want to do much of anything so here I sit on this beautiful afternoon, drinking coffee, and feeling somewhat guilty I’m not out at the farm. Not yet anyway…

I took time to read a bit and catch a couple of lectures in my schoolwork. One of the articles I read was by one of my favorite authors and bloggers, John Pavlovitz. You can find him at https://johnpavlovitz.com/  I got turned on to him several years ago and when he started a social media network for people who still give a damn about things like empathy, compassion, and loving our neighbor I jumped to join. It’s a wonderful community of like-minded but unique individuals who come together to share about politics, organized religion, racial justice, activism and social justice, among many  other things.

Photo by ATC Comm Photo on Pexels.com

It gives me hope that people are still committed to loving our neighbors and the common good. That’s in short supply these days if you listen to the media and the extremists who tend to be much louder than most folks, that is. I choose to believe that most people aren’t filled with so much hate and vitriol as the far-right, the White Christian Nationalists, or the radical left for that matter. The media eats it up though. Extremism sells…

I would highly recommend John’s work to any of my fellows who believe the God is love, the Good News is just that, – Good News – and want to follow some good direction on just being a decent person. Love you guys!

Communication, Community, Culture, Down On the Farm, Family, Farmers Markets, Neighbors, Non-Profits, Opal's Farm, Relationships, Simplicity, Texas, Thoughts From the Porch, Uncategorized, Urban Farming, What Can I Do

Everyone Needs Community

gregoryjoel

It’s been a great week around these parts. My Assistant Manager, Joey, and I were in San Antonio earlier this week for the 31st Annual Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (TOFGA) Conference. We spent two days learning and sharing with other growers from all over the state. On Tuesday, I was part of a panel discussion on Agrotourism. We’d love to thank Kristin Song from Delve Experiences and the other panel members for helping us (and you, we hope) grow our agrotourism business. We are thrilled to be a TOFGA member!

The weather here has been unusually mild for Texas in February. The long-range forecasts, both from NOAA and The Old Farmers Almanac, point to a cold spell in the middle of this month and a last frost date of March 18th. I can’t wait to start getting the Spring crops in the ground. It’s been in the upper sixties and low seventies the last week. Spring Fever firmly has me in its grip. Still, it is February in North Texas…

This has been a week about community. We had our annual membership meeting of the Cowtown Farmers Market yesterday after the market. One of the questions put to all the members was, why do you sell at Cowton Farmers Market. My reason was clear – it’s all about community.

I spent the first part of the week at the TOFGA Conference. This was my fifth one and I’ve come to know people from all over the state of Texas. I look forward to being with them every year. I often learn more from the conversations outside the meeting rooms and that makes the conference expense more than simply worthwhile. It’s a community of farmers and food justice advocates I am so blessed to be a part of.

Cowtown Farmers Market is the same – both with the farmers and with our customers. A member of the market – another farmer – made a comment yesterday that explains the ethos at Cowtown Farmers Market. He said, “I don’t view anyone else there as competition”. This same member I’ve often seen help, or even sell, for another member farmer when they were sick or needed to be off.

We don’t operate from a paradigm of scarcity. We don’t need to stress and fracture relationships through constant competition. Farmers constantly refer customers to other customers who might have something they don’t have. I have benefitted from the wisdom many of our experienced farmers shared so freely. I’ve become a better farmer and a better person by knowing them.

I’ve also come to know many of our customers because they are there every week (and they usually tell me when they’re not going to be there for whatever reason).They’re there in the cold winter and they’re there during the heat of a Texas summer. I come to know what’s going on in their lives, their likes and dislikes, and they mine. Genuine conversations start – what’d you do this week, how’s the family, or asking about something they’d told me about a few weeks ago. There’s a continuity and a sense of community you simply will never find at your local Kroger or Albertsons.

I’d love to see you all come out to the market on Saturday mornings. Come join our wonderful community. Enjoy great people, great fun, and great food! If you can’t make it there, please come out to our new farm stand at 2500 LaSalle and be a part of the neighborhood community we’re proud to be a part of. Don’t worry. The community can never be too big, and besides, there’s always room for one more farmers market, right?