My new baby..

           Men are funny creatures. We trade our days to obtain some type of security for our families but  almost every single one of us has some " thing" that is special to us, an inanimate object we call our "baby".

           For many it's a car. For some it is a set of golf clubs while others save that name for a rifle or four wheeler. It is always something they can spend time with alone, repair and polish with the care a mother shows for her first born child.

                Mine is an old 500 lb, 1931 South Bend metal lathe that I bought for $100, covered in grease and grime with many of the moving parts frozen up. It had an industrial motor that is 3 phase and cannot easily or inexpensively be connected to most home wiring. Main drive belts are missing and the one that is still present is cracked almost completely thru. It is a precision instrument that can create precision pieces and came to me completely abused and unusable.

                            I love this thing!

                  I love this the same way I love old, dilapidated homes I drive by or rusted, dented classic cars, seeing the hidden potential and worth that most everyone else misses. I always underestimate the work, money and time it will take to place these "things" to their former glory.

             I don't think that is entirely true. In my heart I always know. Sometimes it just does not matter.

                     I write often of my Wonderful Wife, who does not share my infatuation and innate twitterpation with these things. She is an amazingly organized woman who has an inborn aversion to clutter and all things so obviously unrepairable.

                         I love her deeply although we are from different planets ....

                      So I have spent quite a few hours taking this unit apart and cleaning it. It is mostly together with another motor ready to be installed that will work with our electric system. I have reassembled the cross feeds and taper unit after lubing. Not much money has been invested but some sweat equity has. Also, I have a bad habit of "just going out to look" in my good new shorts and forget as I start working on " one more thing". That is mostly a lie. I usually know what I'm wearing but think by some miraculous intelligent design intervening, that I will stay clean.

        That has not happened yet.

              There is a part or two I still will have to pick up on E-bay. Nothing expensive.

                 The really crazy thing about this is the technology on these lathes are basically the same today as 100 years ago. Trade schools still use excerpts from training manuals from the 1920's. The old ones reconditioned are actually better quality than new.

  When I worked nights as a shift electrician, the supervisor called me "Iron Man". 

       I asked why one night and he explained that any time there was welding, torching or machining that needed to be done I pushed, shoved, cajoled and blackmailed the mechanics and machinists to let me do it. I followed one old guy like a puppy dog because he was willing to teach me his trade. I eventually took BOCES courses in machining and found I was already taught 95 percent of the material by him. He passed away last month but what he taught me will be passed down at least one more generation.

              Some people farm and garden to be self sufficient. I am setting up a shop to be.

    We live in a disposable world. I want the ability to repair or build what I want. I own a treasured set of Popular Mechanics encyclopedias from the 1950's. It shows how to make EVERYTHING !

       My Wonderful Wife thought I should have tossed them a long time ago.

  Like I said, I absolutely love this woman and adore her more than words can describe.

            But I'm keeping the encyclopedias....

               

Obedience..

                My Pastor said in a recent sermon that that Adam disobeyed God within pages of being created, in the First Book of the Bible. Don't eat of the Tree of Knowledge, all else is yours...

      Adam did it anyway. He blamed Eve, he blamed the serpent. He sinned in complete defiance of Gods single command.

                  I understand Adam. As a Christian man I feel that I should claim I have no idea how he could do this ( at least that is how I think I should feel towards Adam).

        The sad fact is that I do understand. 

              I am a sinner who God has in His Grace, allowed to be broken enough to surrender and repent from a life of sin. But I am still a sinner...

                    This life can be so difficult. It seems for every two steps forward the Lord brings me, I choose to step back one and a half. I am nothing like the man I was and the sins I commit these days seem so much more trivial, but all sins are equeal in Gods vision.

            I want to call this a fixed game, but it is neither.

           Jesus died for me. They may have been shooting craps at his feet when he was on the Cross as a substitution for me, but what He did for humanity was as real as can be in this life and the next.

   It was not a game.

        Until He came and died for our sins, there was no real choice. No one could follow the Law completely and earn Salvation. Jesus was prophesied then but not yet born in that manger or nailed upon that cross. The " Game " then was fixed.

          Jesus " unfixed" it. He won it for us by His sacrifice, being the only one capable of making it.

Then he invited us all on his team, after He had won the endgame.

       It's not a game, I know, but I'm being allegorical ...

                My point is that I find sin now that did not seem to be sin to me years ago. It may not be as much sin of commission today as as sins of omission. It may not be actions but thoughts. It may be sins of the eye and sins of the heart in place of physical transgressions...

            So I still sin and still need to repent and ask for forgiveness.

                    Jesus knew this about you and me and every single person he died for and did it anyway.

    He saved us for the wretches we were but also for the sinners we would still be. He knows our souls and hearts and every hair on our head and every evil and impure thought we would ever have..

    And died for us anyway...

          I understand Adam. He did not have the Holy Spirit but he saw God and walked and talked with him in the garden.

     I plan to speak with him in Heaven. I'm not exactly sure what I will say. I hope it is something like " I love you brother. I understand. No hard feelings".

      

           

What Jimmy Buffet forgot in his songs...

                   Before I start, let me explain that I love Jimmy Buffet songs. I listened to him constantly for a large portion of my life and even moved to Key West as a sort of pilgrimage to the lifestyle he sang about. I had the T-shirts and towels and actually made the cheeseburger in paradise, so please any parrot head out there reading this, don't take offense.

             Although my heart has the song of Jesus, there is still a low acoustic calypso background to it and Jimmy himself humming along with the chorus.

           I listened recently to some of my favorites, " Tin cup for a chalice", "He went to Paris", "Trying to reason with hurricane season" "Cheeseburger in paradise" and of course "A pirate looks at forty".

       Any man who can write a song that hits in the top forty about a cheeseburger is just O.K. with me.

          So like I said, I tried the life.

                It may not have been done completely how he wrote, as I did it sober and in my mid thirties, past my crazier years. 

             I loved the freedom of beach combing on whim, heading out to the open sea at a moments notice and diving for your own lobster and snow crab claws and fishing deep in the ocean for dinner. That was one of the greatest experiences of my life, but still something was not quite complete...

             I moved there with my 1987  Ford F-150 truck loaded with tools in the back, my old Navy sea bag packed and about $1000 in cash in my pocket. A few months earlier I went down to visit my brother who had moved there two years before. Watching the ocean gently lapping the shore at night, I knew I was supposed to be there. It was a week long vacation and I came home giving my boss two weeks notice. He asked if I needed more money to stay and I told him no, that I just did not want to look back in my seventies saying " I wish I had...".

         Who could argue with that?

       I sacked out at my brothers for a week and found a room at a boarding house across the road from the ocean. A couple days later I found a job wiring a fishing boat. Then I fullfilled a longtime dream of working on boats, for a Cat and Detroit dealer, repairing charter and cruisers engines. 

         I kayaked almost daily thru the mangroves and out past the sight of shore.

            Somewhere inside a peace was made with myself. I was fifty pounds lighter, tanned and happier than I'd been in my entire life. I looked out across the ocean that I intimately loved and knew one undeniable fact..

               It was time to go home.

            I was into my second year there and realized that I truly had needed this time, this life. I needed the quiet and solace to allow God a deeper foothold into my soul. He did not need me to take it to accomplish this, but I think out of love and kindness he answered my souls prayers on the surface, of the ocean and the sand.

         I did not know that He had greater plans for me and that He would answer my souls deeper prayers, the ones I was not yet aware of.

                Two weeks after returning home to N.Y. I had a dinner with my soon to be Wonderful Wife at a mutual friends house. A few months later we were engaged and in that same year, married.

       Jimmy Buffet missed this in all his songs....

          He sings about the freedom of the ocean, of sails and adventure and an untethered peace.

              I now have been married over a dozen years and have been graced with an amazing family.

         Since then I have swum in the ocean a handful of times. There is no more beach combing at whim but there is an amazing woman I call my Wife and three exceptionally wonderful boys. I have found the true longitude and latitude of Paradise.

     I hear Jimmy's songs now and I realize what he missed..

          

             

            

What to be

             At dinner the other night, my oldest boy Nicholas said that by eighth grade, kids have to know what they want to be when they graduate high school. I kind of laughed, and was  about to explain to him that no one knows what they want to be at that age ,when he said " I'm serious".
            I started thinking about what I hope he will be as he travels forward..
               I would wish him to learn all those things that piques his curiosity, those personnel  questions that are so different in all of us, but are present in everyone.
    For some it is art, others it is in music or physics or for some it is even fishing. I hope that he finds those answers and I hope every answered question creates new unanswered ones.
          I hope he finds the love of a good woman he will call his wife and knows the security of a soulmate. I pray he knows the joy of his children's laughter and maintains that feeling of Gods unconditional love. I wish he cherishes the blessing of great old and new friends...
              He is speaking about career and I am talking about something completely different. There are some who manage to combine the two, but most of us, I think excell in one area or the other. I am sure there are some that are equealy good at the office and at home, but usually the heart of a man only lives in one of those two places.
                 The age old question of whether to work to live or live to work is one of  the most important  he will ever have to answer because it will define him. An old friend advised me long ago that I would either live as I believed or would end up believing as I lived.
       My beliefs today define me.
            Today I believe my greatest treasures are my God and my family. I like my job on most days but it is by no means an unquenchable love affair. I would miss it if it disappeared, but would just start looking for another one. Most of what I do at work is the same as in any of a thousand other places. It would just be a change of location...
          I suppose what I am saying is that I wish him to BE a good man and that I hope he learns a trade he likes and HAS a good career. I doubt right now he can see the difference but hopefully, thru experience and and minimal tumbles, he eventually will.