ocracokewaves

Paths Not Taken

The backfield at our Tay Creek farm where I am homesteading and splitting wood in my dreams

In every life there are decisions which determine what direction your life will take. I have been fortunate to be in positions where I had enough flexibiity to guide our life in certain directions. Even now fifty years after some of those decisions, it is hard to say that what we did was the right decision for us. Our decisions worked out for us but it is impossible to tell if another path might have given us an even more rewarding (and not in monetary terms) life.
I graduated Harvard and instead of going to law school, I went back to the land in Nova Scotia. Whether the neighbors ever called us hippies or not is still an open question, but my bet is that they didn’t because we had a John Deere tractor and were trying to farm the land. We were friends with hippies living in a Dome in the woods, but I worked hard to wire our house so we could have electricity and the modern coveniences that came with it
We did grow a huge garden and put up prodigous amounts of produce both canned and frozen. We butchered our own steer and hogs. We collected wild Chantrelle mushrooms from the woods. We even tended a gill net for a while.
The old house I bought and fixed up had 140 acres. Of that well over 25 acres was a cleared hayfield with a small pond. Though the woodland with it was mostly spruce, I did eventually get another piece that had some hardwood. It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that we could have kept a few cows, had a huge garden, and lived a very simple life. Looking at recent aerial photos of the property which I sold in 1976, the property appears to now have lots of gardens, more trees and little pasture though I am sure goats would be happy with what is there now. I might well have done something similar had my partner in the enterprise not been such a jerk. He married the local school teacher in our small community and devoted far too much time to telling our neighbors what a terrible person I was. While my new bride stayed with me there for a year, we were determined to move a friendlier place.
We found the better place in the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Instead of people being petty and mean, the residents of Tay Creek were welcoming, helpful, and supportive. I can think of no better place to raise a family. The community when we moved there had two country stores, three churches, a town hall, and a lot of opened minded people.
We stayed in Tay Creek for over a decade. Our three children were born while we were on the farm. Our two Labrador retrievers are buried there a long with a good chunk of my soul. This would have been an even better place to have a few cows, lots of gardens, and even fill the freezer with trout to supplement our beef.
We did not take that path, I wanted to work the soil and to raise high quality cattle, selling bulls to improve the local herds. We accomplished that goal, along with continuing to grow much of our own food. We had chickens, a Guernsey milk cow and a beautiful farm.
We eventually had to give up farming because interest rates soared to over 20% during the early eighties when our herd had grown to two hundred head. We couldn’t handle the high interest rates on our $100,000 operating loan, so we had a very successful dispersal sale. . After selling the cattle we could have hunkered down on the farm which was paid for, sold off some of the machinery, and continued to work the land, but we had three children, and we wanted them to go to college. Like many others I went to work in town after taking a few months off. My job was in an early computer store and led to a twenty year career at Apple. After Apple I worked as a vice president of a network construction and consulting firm for over a decadsa.
It has been a good life. All three children who were born while we were living on the farm have gone to college and done well. Yet as I have been watching some of the Alaska homesteading YouTube videos, I can only wonder how would things be different if we had stuck with working the land instead of keyboards. After all, I made the trip to Alaska before I moved to Nova Scotia and I even considered homesteading in Newfoundland.
Instead of that I ended up walking the halls of government as Apple’s director of federal sales. I know the people that I would have gotten to know working the land would have made much better friends than the politicians that I have met.
Still in my dreams I am splitting hunks of birch, milking the cow, collecting eggs and filling the freezer with brook trout, beef, pork and the cupboards and root cellar with homegrown veggies. We still garden in a token fashion and I still make sourdough bread but we buy more from local small farmers thsn we grown. At my age the amount of wood, even birch, that I could split would be limited.

My wife in the large hayfield behind the house at our first farm in Nova Scotia

The Evolution of a Fisherman

**Puppy Drum, a Red Drum small enough that most fisherman throw them back**

The society of fishermen (and women who fish) is far more open minded thanyour average members of the population.

In politics, the mobility between conservative and liberal groups is almost non-existent. It would be fair to say that without some extraordinary circumstance once you are born a conservative, the chances of becoming a liberal are very slim unless you get whacked on the head with a police billy club. Likewise most liberals would only become conservatives if they won the lottery and caught a bad case of greed.

Fisherman really do not care about your history unless it is fishing history, they care about what you are catching today and how you are doing it. Everything beyond that is pretty much irrelevant unless you are trapped inside a house in a blizzard and have no entertainment beyond the stories you can spin.

Actually you can be a worm dunker one day, and a dry fly fisherman the next day. No one will care except the worms. Fortunately, I was born into a Presbyterian family which if you have seen the movie, A River Runs Through It, means I should be a dry fly fisherman. For many years, that was most of fishing.

Actually, I fished with a fly rod before I was even a teenager, but I have avoided the purity of only one type of angling. I came from a long line of worm dunkers on my mother’s side. No only did they dunk worms, they also dunked shrimp and fished along the North Carolina coast for whatever was biting. They caught a lot of fish every fall that they took home to fill their freezers.

When it comes to fishing, I have tried almost any method though I now lean away from the dark side of using live bait . There is a certain point in your fishing life when catching fish is not nearly as important as catching certain fish by a particular means. While most sports seek out ways to be more productive, fishermen often seek out ways which are more difficult and which result in fewer fish being caught. Often it doesn’t even matter if you catch something or not. It is the time on or by the water and the comradeship of your fishing buddy.

I was blessed to live for sixteen years on the NC coast in what was close to fishing heaven at the time. I did catch fish to be proud of just a couple of minutes from the dock behind our home. One quest was to catch a bluefish from the surf on a light spinning rod using an artificial lure. It is not an impossible task, I had actually done it before butnfar more often from a boat than from the surf. If you get a shiny lure in front of feeding bluefish, you will usually catch something. So catching one is not a huge challenge. However, if you give yourself a short time window and a long beach to read, then the challenge becomes a little more fun.

One evenng we left our home on the banks of the White Oak for a 15-20 minute drive to one of my favorite beaches. I like it because there are rarely people there for much of the year, and I have caught fish there before. That evening we got there a little after seven PM and stayed for around thirty minutes. That was all the time I had allotted myself to catch a bluefish.

It was a great evening to be on the beach. In fact when we headed home around eight PM, the temperature was still 80F. Anyway, I started my fishing with a Gotcha plug. I probably fished with it for the first fifteen minutes with no luck. Then I switched to a gold spoon. The sun was starting to drop quickly, and I had been watching a number of jumping fish just out of the range of my casts.

I was hoping the light from the dropping sun might make my lure more attractive.It was the third cast with the gold spoon when I got a solid hit. My next cast there was nothing, but on the following cast I hooked a bluefish but it quickly threw the hook. One more throw, and I had another hit and was solidly onto a nice bluefish. It did not take long to bring him to shore. He was about sixteen inches long. I quickly heaved him back into the surf and told my wife that I was done. She could not believe that I did not want to fish more, but I had accomplished what I wanted to do and the feeling was good. I was actually using a very light, long spinning rod which was purchased more with the soft mouths of trout in mind than bluefish. Of course that added a little to the challenge.

There are always more challenges for a fisherman. One of the most exciting is catching North Carolina’s state fish, the Red Drum, on an artificial lure.

On Saturday, November 5, 2016, I only had a few minutes late in the day to fish some close-in oyster bars on the White Oak River but it was spectacularly beautiful out on the water. I managed to catch and release a sixteen inch drum and bring home a sixteen inch trout for dinner.

On Tuesday, November 8, I had almost two hours to fish the oyster rocks near our home in my kayak. I caught four red drum and one black drum. I brought home one nineteen inch drum. In ten days, I landed with artificial lures, ten red drum, the best around twenty inches and another at nineteen inches. I only kept one red drum but I kept two trout, one sixteen inches and another eighteen inches and also one black drum at fifteen inches. We have feasted on fish these last few days. Baked browned-butter, panko-encrusted drum is one of my favorites.

That is only a sample of my fishing tales. Fishing during fall of 2016 will stick in my memory. I caught some memorable fish.

Food, Post Pandemic

A feast that did not take a lot of cooking

It has been years since I spent significant time in the big cities so I cannot vouch for the state of restaurants outside the rural world of North Carolina’s Piedmont. We have some good restaurants here, but with few exceptions, most can be faulted on something, service, price, or even the quality of the food.

Like many families since the pandemic, we have cut back our in-restaurant eating drastically. We have been disappointed so many times that we often choose to not go back.

Our home-cooked meals have for the last few decades been exceptional. We were fortunate enough to eat wonderful fish like red drum and flounder fresh from the waters of the White Oak River where we lived from 2006-2021. The fish I caught was often supplemented with vegetables from our own garden.

We know what good food is. We understand what it looks like and how it tastes.

For a decade we had a cattle farm and raised most of our own food. Our kids grew up on unpasteurized Guernsey milk that I got from Rosie, our cow, every morning. Our freezer was full of beef. We had our own chickens which provided us with eggs even when they had only snow for their water.

We had wild red raspberries that grew along the rock piles by our fields. There were plenty of blueberries to be had in the fall and a wonderful strawberry u-pick near us. There were still a few wild strawberries around in those days. We harvested Chantelle mushrooms from our woods and fiddlehead greens from our marshes. My wife made butter, yogurt, and lots of homemade oatmeal bread.

Times have changed, we left our farm in 1984. We are a lot older but we still love good food. We still garden but it is only supplemental to what we buy from farmers, farmers’ markets and grocery stores. We also have relatives that garden. In 2024, I grew enough tomatoes to sell a few pounds, pay for seeds/plants and still have plenty to enjoy and share with friends.

We have all the tools we need to cook well from a sous vide stick to a gas grill, a wood pellet smoker, an Instapot, and an induction stove. The challenge is that the older you get, the less time you want to spend cooking and cleaning up. If you don’t like to cook and are not excited by going out, you have to get creative.

We use our cooking energy sparingly, often working to cook something that will last a few days. If I smoke something, we might eat off it for four or five days or until it ends up in the soup pot. A pot of beans or crowder peas will last at least as long. When I bake sourdough bread which I have been doing for over fifty years, it is usually three or four pounds of bread. We always freeze most of what I bake.

Even so there comes a time when the spirit to cook needs a rest. We have learned very little take out food even the good stuff travels well. Pizza needs to come from a place as close as possible, certainly not more than ten minutes away and it is still just pizza. Burgers are better eaten in the parking lot.

Chinese and Mexican food just don’t travel well. Even rotisserie chicken is a gamble and often too salty. The one food we have found that travels well is barbecue or smoked meat. We are lucky to live in the North Carolina where the real wood smoked stuff is plentiful.

A recent meal had crowder peas that were given to us by relatives and cooked by my wife. The brisket and smoked-pulled chicken, and collards came from Honky Tonk Smokehouse in Winston-Salem, NC. Honky Tonk is one of the hidden gems in the Triad area. The baguette was from Camino Bakery in Winston-Salem. It was a delicious takeout meal supplemented by some of our cooking and bread from a good local bakery. It is the way we have learned to give ourselves a cooking break post pandemic – find something that travels well and build a meal around it.

Reminders of the past

When you live a rich life full of challenges and adventures, it is inevitable that as age catches up with you, a different light falls on the surrounding world. I remember my mother in her later years saying that the worst thing about getting old was seeing things that you have done all your life which you can no longer do.
That happens to be a great truth. Aches and pains come and go but there is no denying that I can no longer spend a hot afternoon in the woods cutting brush or spend a whole day on a tractor bailing hay. My wife has said that I am lot like her father who enjoyed nothing more than working all day until there was not a dry thread on his body. Sometimes that meant three showers in a day, no more.
Even long after we left our New Brunswick farm, and we were living in Roanoke, Virginia, and I was working for Apple, some of my best days were clearing a trail on the side of our mountain. Our Labrador, Chester, would watch over me from a shady spot while I used my weed whip, Swedish saw and axe to clear the trail which was over two miles long.
When we moved to the North Carolina coast, there were always projects and a yard that took two hours to mow behind our push mower. There I built a green bean trellis, a garden potting table, and even a desk for my office. I built the desk in our garage, then took it apart and hauled it up to my office three stories above the garage. When we moved to the Piedmont, the desk came with us, and we had a rock wall built. There we created a wonderful garden behind it. For a couple of years I dedicated myself to the garden even as I continued to work a full time job.
Of course these activities all pale compared to some accomplishments that I managed on the farm. We built two huge barns, but there is nothing harder than running a couple of hundred head of cattle through a handling chute to weigh and vaccinate them. I lost five pounds one day doing that. One of the worst things that I ever did was to be on the wrong end of the hay conveyor stacking seventy-five pound bales of straw. I think the biggest load was 535 bales and that day the temperature was minus 28F. When I was finished that day every exposed hair was frosted.
I often think back to when my mother was in her eighties and could not longer plant her beloved winter pansies. My wife and I took over that job and loved giving her the joy of seeing the pansies grow as she did her winter reading. Because of my heart valve replacement this year I have had to cede the job of planting our pansies to my son. My hope is that when spring comes, I might be helping with the planting once again. However, life often throws you curves so only time will tell. The curve balls are harder to hit as you slow down with age.

Then There Were Three

At her peak, Maverick was named Field Commander for the Tabby Cat Alliance

On Monday, July 21, 2025, Maverick, one of the most unique felines to ever be a member of our family passed over the rainbow bridge. It has been a little over five years and three months since she joined our family with her three siblings. Maverick came into our world hissing and spitting. She was not amused at being caught in our Have-a-heart trap. She avoided it for a week longer than her siblings who were all caught within a space of hours.

Eventually she warmed up to me and showed a fierce loyalty to me and antipathy to anyone else who wanted her friendship. Our eldest daughter, Erin, AKA cat woman, gave it a valiant effort but Maverick resisted her charms and promises of treats.

Maverick did become a bed cat. For six months or so before she got sick, she would jump on our bed just as I got in bed. She would then head butt me until she got the petting that she wanted. Once in a while she would slip up and actually cuddle by my side. She often spent the whole night cuddled by my wife’s feet on the bed.

Maverick was always the first to go on our porch during cold weather. Her thick luxurious fur seemed to be more suited to cold weather than the fur of the other cats. At her prime she probably weighed more than ten pounds. She was the only one of our three female cats who could throttle Goose, our big male Tabby. Goose never pushed his battles with Maverick far because even though she was considerably smaller, she could defeat him. As the most athletic of our cats, Maverick was great at games involving chasing or jumping. She got into our garage a couple of times but unlike the others she showed no interest in exploring the world beyond our house.

Maverick was happy with her twice daily trips to the screened porch. She could be demanding sometimes asking to be fed far away from the others. She lived by her own rules and expected us to adapt to her quirks. She was never much for variety in her food. Turkey shreds remained her favorite food. She especially good at hiding. When our cleaning ladies would come, she would burrow down into the pillows on our bed until she was invisible. Sometimes in the winter she would come up and sleep on my desk or in one of the office chairs.

Perhaps the funniest thing Maverick did was while we were moving to this house four years ago. We spent a couple of nights in a hotel while we were unpacking things. We would let the cats out of their carriers while we were gone to the house during the day so they could have access to a litter box. The morning we were packing to leave the hotel for the house. We got Goose, Jester, and Merlin loaded but could not find Maverick. We were about to give up when we figured out that she had crawled up inside a box spring mattress.

Maverick might be gone, but we will long remember her green eyes and fiesty personality.

Maverick will always be our green-eyed girl

She will be missed. Maverick and I spent some time together on her beloved screen porch before she passed. It was a good way to say goodbye and refresh memories. The full story of our four tabbies is in the post, The Company of Cats.

From Farm to Apple

I have been asked serveral times how I got from shoveling manure on a farm to selling shiny Macs for Apple?
There are several pieces to the puzzle. The first factor was the sky high interest rate we had to pay on our $100,000 operating loan in the early eighties. Once interest got over 20% and the Canadian government decided that our beef cattle operation was too profitable for the subsized 2% loans that our diary famer neighbors were getting, we made the decision that we had to get out. Putting together a successful cattle dispersal sale takes time. In our case it took ten months to turn one of our barns into an auction arena and get the cattle looking their best.

We had gone from a few cows to a much larger herd in under ten years. Turns out that selling a lot of cows in a short time, a dispersal, is a massive undertaking. We would have never pulled it off without help from the community. The weather turned so rainy and cold that it looked like we were not going to get the barns cleaned out in time. Most of the men of the community showed up one Monday and worked whatever hours they could over the next two weeks until everything was ready. I remain eternally grateful for their help.
When all was said and done, we paid off all our loans except about $10,000. We did still have a lot of farm equipment which we sold off gradually, the last being our 4WD 60 HP John Deere diesel tractor with the snow blower and front end loader, but that did not happen until two years after the dispersal.
My sale was so successful that Maritime Angus Association hired me as a part-time fieldman. One of the requirements of the job was to write and mail a newsletter to the sixty or so Angus breeders acrosss the Martimes. I sat down at my college-era Adler typewriter and after a week of very hard work and some real old-fashioned copying and pasting I had the first one done. Then it took me hours to photocopy and hand address the newsletters.
I had spent my first winter of not tending cows hauling my oldest daughter, Erin, the twently miles to Fredericton to a preschool. It was too far to drive home on the potholed Royal Road and come back to get her so I found places in town to stay warm. One of them was a fledling computer store, I got to know the people pretty well. I even bought one of their TI 99/4A game consoles for the kids.
While I was writing my first newsletter, my friends in the computer store were getting their first Apple II+ machines. I was telling my North Carolina-based mother about my new fieldman job, how long it took to write the newsletter, and my hope to speed up with the process when I could afford the $3,000 for an Apple computer, Epson MX-80 printer, and some word processing software. My always supportive mother who was looking for a way to make certain that I did not go back to farming offered to buy the computer. It was probably the best investment that she every made.
I bought one the first computers that the Fredericton store sold. I took to software like a duck to water. In a matter of weeks, I knew more about the practical applications of a personal computer than everyone in the computer store combined. After three people I had talked to bought computers at the store, I became Salesman #1 in September 1982. I went on to design a course to teach smart college graduates how to sell computers. We opened four more stores across the Maritimes and within a year, I was salesmanager and had close to twenty people working for me. I spent at least a week a month visiting the stores and going on important sales calls. I still have the invoice for where I sold one Apple IIe, a 5 meg Corvus hard drive, and a couple of printers for over $20,000. I was writing simple database applications for customers that saved them time and money..
In the spring of 1984, the company sent me to the rollout of the Macintosh in Toronto. As soon as I saw Steve Jobs draw a circle on the screen with a mouse, I made a vow that I would one day work for Apple. As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for, you might get it. By November of 1984, I was working for Apple out of the Montreal office.
Things moved quickly at the dealership to push me towards Apple. The company. was operating on a shoestring and always near bankruptcy. They went searching for other product lines since Apple would only deliver computers to them for cash. They picked up the Sperry and TI MS/DOS compatibles but what they really wanted an IBM authorization. They found a white knight computer company out of Toronto who could bring the IBM authorization with a merger.
Like many mergers, the only way to make the company attractive was to cut costs. Upper level management asked me to rewrite the commission plan to massively reduce commissions and to sell the idea to the sales people.
I looked at the plan, decided that I could not in good conscience support the new commission plan so I resigned. The company offered me another job, but I was already bleeding rainbow colors and knew their focus was going to be IBM. I stayed until the merger went through.
That was September of 1984. That same month Apple started adversing for an Apple rep in the Maritimes. I immediately applied for the job and in early November I got an offer. I started work on November 26, 1984. The only condition was that we had to move to Halifax. On December 26, 1984, in a snowstorm we moved to our new house in Halifax. We got there before the furniture so that night we slept on the floor. The next almost twenty years were a wild ride.

The Wonder Of It All

Goose, our tabby cat with a permanet sense of wonder

One of the reasons that I love our big tabby cat, Goose, is that he always has a look of wonder. We could learn a few things from Goose. A few times over the years I have forgotten to be pleasantly surprised at whatever has happened, but not often.

After I went away to military high school in Tennessee in 1963, I figured out within the first three months that I could either be unhappy with what was happening in my life or I could be wonderously surprised at whatever happens next because it is often an unknown piece of the puzzle that turns out to be my life.

When I got in my car to go office to college in the fall of 1967, I left with a sense of adventure which included a promise to myself to try new things especially if they forced me to step out of my box. The Vietnam war was raging during my college years and for a while it looked like I might become a foot soldier in it. Instead once I graduated and figured out that I wasn’t going to be drafted, I immigrated to Canada.

That as you might expect was a huge decision but like many decisions in the days before the Internet, not a lot of research went into it. I was in love with Nova Scotia. The beauty and wonder of the place wrapped itself around my mind. Before I got married, I came to know loneliness even in a place as scenic as Nova Scotia. Marriage to a NC girl was another moment that surprised me and left me thinking that I was living under a special star that helped me find such a wonderful wife.

There were plenty other moments of wonder. After dispersing our cattle herd, somehow I made the transitiion to working with Apple Computer. From shoveling manure to selling Macintoshes has to be an epic career switch. Twenty years later when Apple pushed me away from the company, several people encouraged me to think about my next career as finding something that would excite me for the next fifteen years. It took a while, but I ended up helping communitieis build fiber networks. Along the way, I learned how to take a skiff out into the Atlantic and how to kayak a two-mile wide river. I spent a few years rescuing an HOA.

I always welcomed the next challenge never doubting my ability to do a good job and always approaching a new challenge with a sense of wonder. That doesn’t mean I did not have any worries. There were many sleepness nights during my HOA time. I would always wake early when I was taking someone new in our skiff out into the Atlantic. It was a big responsibility.

I recently got a new heart valve by way of a TAVR procedure. While I was afraid, I never waivered. I am still facing some medical issues but I face them with a sense of wonder that something so complex can be done without cutting me open.

I have been surprised by people all my life from the British doctor and his wife who became great friends to some of the very interesting people that I met Harvard.

I continue to be amazed by people that I meet from the young farm family working on the same farm that has been in their family for over one hundred years to the New Brunswick farm couple in their sixties still haying and keeping work horses. I also amazed by the young adults finding their way through this increasingly complex world. That they can keep moving forward when most of the cards are stacked against them renews my sense of wonder. Then there is my adult son who rose up to start doing many of the things that I was doing before my heart valve problem. I am back to driving and hope to be gardening in a few weeks but I definitely have a feeling of wonder seeing my son plant flowers. If that can happen, I think we will be able to push back on the anti-democracy forces trying to destroy our country. That of course would lead me to an immense feeling of relief.

Running Into One Of Life’s Walls

Our backyard in early spring. I feel blessed to see it again

Goose and I have been quiet but it has been for a good reason. Last Friday after my annual physical at 10 AM, I was pretty happy. My blood sugar was at its best level since we moved here from the coast in February 2021. My blood pressure was 112/68 and I had lost a couple of pounds. I came back by the house and picked my wife, Glenda, for a trip to Winston-Salem. I neglected to have something to drink while home. Since I had been fasting that was a mistake. We decided on Culver’s for our meal because I want some good french fries since it is something we rarely have. I got my smashburger, order of extra crispy fries, and a Coke Zero which is also something I rarely have. After an enjoyable lunch we went across the street to Lidl to pick up a chicken to grill and a few other things. I had paid for the groceries, got Glenda in the car and was taking the cart back to the cart corral when I started feeling not so good. I stopped for a moment and rested by sitting on one of the concrete posts. Then I went back to the car put Glenda’s rolling walker in the back of the card and started sweating. It was a hot day, well into the eighties. I sat down in the driver seat and that is the last thing I remember until I woke up with Glenda pounding on me. I had passed out.

EMS was there shortly after I awoke. I was loaded into an ambulance and transported the short distance down Silas Creek Parkway to Novant’s Forsyth County Hospital. The only discomfort during the ride was them trying to start an IV on the bumpy road. They finally gave up.

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We spent the next six on seven hours in the Emergency Area while they ran tests. I was finally told that I didn’t have a heart attack but the enzyemes that show up prior to a heart attack were elevated. They suspect dehydration played a significant role in the event.

Wednesday afternoon, I was finally discharged after a battery of tests including a heart catherization and a transesophageal electrocardiogram (TEE). My heart rhythm came back on its own. “Heart catherization is a procedure where a thin, flexible tube (a catheter) is inserted into a blood vessel and guided to the heart to diagnose and/or treat heart conditions. The TEE is a type of echocardiogram (ultrasound of the heart) where a probe with a transducer is inserted through the mouth and down the esophagus to get clearer images of the heart structures, especially those at the back of the heart.” While both procedures sound scary, they are short and painless. They take probably 35 minutes for the two of the them if you ignore the 4:30 AM bath in some sort of special prep the night before each one. The nurse was careful to use warm water the first night. The next night it cold water which was no fun. I was also on Heparin drip with IV pole for three days. Getting on the drip is also no fun since they have test your blood ever six hours until they get it right. My hands look like purple pin cushions They eventually decided I didn’t need the Heparin.

What I do need is a new aortic heart valve since mine is calcified. They are proposing a “Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) which is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a narrowed aortic valve with an artificial valve.” It’s an alternative to open-heart surgery. We have several doctor’s appointments in the next few weeks and the hope is that sometime late this month a TAVR procedure will happen. I will go in on a Tuesday morning (TAVR Tuesdays I am told) have the hour long procedure then spend a day being observed before being discharged.

I have been told that within a month, I will regain much of the energy and strenght that seems to have faded from my aging (76 year-old) body. In the spring of 2018, my total mileage for the previous 12 months 1,530 miles. The next three years, I averaged 1,100 miles. The last three years, I have only average 600 miles. On July 3, 2017, I walked 10.5 miles in one day. I managed only a few quarter miles of swimming last summer, compared to several the year before.

There are more than enough excuses, more deskwork and less time but also a problem with a sciatic nerve. I have a goal to lose thirty pounds this summer. I already have lost six pounds which I credit to hospital food.

All this makes you look at life a little differently. I was able to finish up an office project with my 10,000 cell spreadsheet and the nice GIS maps that I do this afternoon. By Sunday night I hope to finish my taxes or as I say tie up an important loose end.

I have walked well over five times what I did any day in the hospital. I cooked my own breakfast and cooked the salmon cakes for dinner – I did not partake of the gravy. Strangely the high blood sugar that I have been battling seems to relatively stable right now. I haven’t had Metaformin in a week so that is also a good sign. I think being in a hospital long term can really suck the life out of you. I feel blessed to be home with my wife and tabby cats.

I am very grateful for my wife who cared enough to pound on me and for a lady named Judy Hill, a stranger, who was there to give her support when no one else would. I am impressed with Novant’s heart team and have no concerns about letting them try to fix me. The good news is that my arteries had no plaque so with a new valve, I might get back to some serious walking. My son, Michael, and been a champ in stepping up to do whatever needed doing including retrieving our car after an Uber ride and bringing me clean clothes at the hospital.

My primary care physician and I had agreed on having my life long heart murmur examined this summer. I think that might be one thing that I can take off the summer’s list. A few residents at the hospital even got to hear it. I can consider myself lucky to have been where care was not far away.

I did meet a trump supporter technician in the hospital. My conclusion is that evenyone who works in the hospital works such long hours (12 hour shifts) that they have no time to dive deep into the news. It took me two days to find someone who had watched the NCAA basketball final.

My last thought is what if we took all the people doing billing and collections and retrained them to work in hospitals? What a wonderful start that would be on better healthcare with universal covervage. I was once told there are more billing people at Duke’s Medical Center than there are doctors. That seems wrong and from how stretched the nurses were during my hospital stay, I know they could use some help.

A final word, I have a high dedcutible Blue Cross Health supplement. It has worked well because I haven’t been sick. Any paid subscriptions that I get will be going right into a saving account to cover what I think will be a substantial deductible. It is no fun getting sick and living on a fixed income.

I can assure everyone that I will continue writing and perhaps providing some real insight into what it is like being a heart patient. With some luck, I can convince my younger daughter to plant three or four tomatoes for me. It would be a wonderful gift to be able to look after them this summer.

Fun fact, I have had two overnight stays in a hospital, this most recent one of five days and another one night stay for a liver biopsy. It was the same hospital fifty-six years apart. I still remember waking up from my liver biopsy and a cute candy-striper told me that I had mail. It was a letter from the draft board ordering me to report for pre-induction physical. The hospital was in the middle of a field then.

Goose by the way says that I should nap through it all.

Swiss Army Knife Life

I once posted a picture of this Swiss Army knife and someone made some disparaging remarks about Swiss Army knives in general. I responded back that if you have never needed a Swiss Army knife, your life was likely confined to more civilized areas than I have frequented. Even a cursory examination will reveal that this knife has been well used. I am pretty sure it went to Newfoundland with me on our little trip to the barrens. I know it went in my pocket every day that I farmed. It did things it was never designed to do and some parts are broken as a result. It never failed me. I like to think the theme of my life is lot like that beaten up Swiss Army knife.

Somehow, I seemed to be prepared for whatever challenges that I faced. Perhaps it started when I grew up the child of single mother in the fifties. I tried not ever let having only one parent drag me down. Mother always told me that if I worked hard, I could be anything that I wanted to be. She pulled herself out of red clay soils of Yadkin County, NC and got her license to be a beautician. She supported us from the beauty shop attached to the back of the house.

In a sense being an only child of a mother who worked extremely long hours gave me a push into learning how to do things I might have avoided in a more standard family. I learned the basics of cooking because if we got food on the table at any reasonable hour, I needed to be involved. It started with just sticking food in the oven, but well before I got to Boy Scouts, I was grilling half chickens on an old charcoal grill. Tinkering with things started at an early age. By the third grade it was my job to balance the check book and make sure the deposits were recorded properly. At some point I became the navigator and developed a love of maps that still bedevils me today.

Being a Boy Scout accelerated many of these interests and enhanced my love of the out of doors. By the time I left college, I was in need of an escape from the cities. Regular visits to Maine had only made my desire to get back to the land worse. The old Nova Scotia farmhouse that I bought in 1971 only pushed me harder. I had to learn plumbing and how to wire a house at the same time my carpentry skills had to get better if we were going to have a place to survive the winter.

By the time we got to our New Brunswick farm, I was ready for almost anything. With a welder and an acetylene torch, there wasn’t much on the farm that could slow me down. I always had a John Deere tractor and a Chevy 350 3/4 ton 4WD that I could lean on and some great neighbors who were always willing to help. With some local help I even built a couple of barns that are still standing 50 years later.

After the farm, I went on to sell Apple computers, learned how to manage a sales force, and how to survive a teetering small business. When I actually went to work for Apple, the second day I was on board, they gave me a tray of real 35 mm slides and said you’re presenting to 100 people tomorrow, put together a presentation. If was the first of many presentations that would define my almost 20 year career at Apple. My last days at Apple in 2004, I was director of federal sales and sat with Avie Tevanian at a federal hearing on cyber security. Had Apple stuck more with open source and the direction our team was headed, there would be a lot more Macs in the federal government and our government would have a more resilient infrastructure.

After a consulting gig with the National Lambda Rail (some called it Internet 3), I went to work at an email company and learned the ins and outs of online marketing. It was a steep learning curve with Google analytics, buying search terms, and managing an inside sales force when I had spent most of my life in outside sales.

By the time the email company was sold, we were well on our way to establishing a life on the North Carolina coast, I worked a writer and I dabbled enough in real estate to know how to mine data from tax databases which turned out to be very useful when I became a vp at a company that was building fiber and convincing people to sign up for it. My love of maps led me to extensive use of Garmin’s mapping tools both on land and in my skiff and kayak. A knowledge of GPS helped me jump feet first into ArcGIS Pro and the technical reports and maps that have defined my last dozen years.

Not long ago, my barber asked me, “How in the world did you get from shoveling manure to selling computers and then helping to build fiber networks?

I told him the answer was simple, I always believed in what I was doing and I never sold anyone something that I wouldn’t be proud of using whether it was a bull, a bailer, a computer, or a report on the state of the Internet in their county. I could have said that I had a Swiss Army kind of life, always ready for the next challenge even as I was taking a lot hits along the way.

Growing Not Controlling People

Love can make a difference

My Mother in backyard of our Mt. Airy House.

My mother who grew up as Susie Blanche Styers was part of family that had lived in and around the hills north and west of Winston-Salem since the Revolutionary War. Our first ancestor in the area is recorded on the 1790 census and is buried with his wife forty-five minutes away from our current home.
Mother’s grandfather Abe Styers ran Styers ferry which crossed the Yadkin River from Yadkin County to Forsyth County. Forsyth County, the home of Winston-Salem, was destined to be a county that pulled itself into the manufacturing boom of the second half of the twentieth century. Yadkin County would remain solidly agricultural.
Mother was born on a mill pond in the heart of Yadkin County in 1910. It was a time before electricity and when horse drawn buggies were more likely to be found on the dirt roads than those new Model T Fords. Her mother, Sallie Shore Styers, died in the 1919 flu epidemic. By the time my mother was nine years old she was cooking for the family of eight.
That presented some challenges since she was too small to lift the heavy cast iron pan used to bake biscuits each morning from the flour mixed up weekly by one her older female relatives. Fortunately, her older brother Henry would help her with the pan after he had taken care of bringing the wood inside and starting a fire in the stove.
While life around a millpond in the early part of the twentieth century might sound idyllic, it was actually a lot of hard work, and a life that didn’t leave a lot of time for play. While Walter, mother’s father, was a miller, most of the rest of the food for the large family with six children had to be grown and preserved on the spot.
There was no yard to mow, just some bare ground to sweep around the house with homemade brooms made from the readily available broom straw. Preserving food for winter was a skill mother and her sisters never lost.
The stories of watching men cut blocks of ice from the pond during the winter and haul the loads of ice with teams of horses to their sawdust insulated ice house in the ground seem hard to believe in our warming world. Yet life was very different then. They kept their milk and butter cooled in a spring house which was little more that a small building with a roof set on top of a spring flowing out of the ground.
Mother had places to go and things to do in her life so it didn’t take much time with her new stepmother before she left home as a teenager for the big city of Mount Airy, NC. Eventually she got a license as a beautician and had her own shop on Main Street. She even claimed to have spanked Andy Griffith when he was misbehaving in her shop while she did his mother’s hair.
When she was in her nineties, she used to joke that she had walked by Snappy Lunch for most of her long life and never tasted one of their pork chop sandwiches. We bought her one, and she declared that she had not missed much.
While mother made it out of Yadkin County, her sisters never did. With the determination that only a true southern matriarch demonstrates, she was determined that her nieces and nephews would have a taste of life beyond the red dirt fields of Yadkin County. She was the only one of the sisters to learn how to drive as a teenager.
I’ve been told many times by cousins that they never would have enjoyed much of a Christmas without my mother. She was famous for braving the muddy roads to get back to her sister Mollie’s house. I remember her stories of getting stuck and having to knock on the door of a farmer’s house to be pulled out.

Goose and I just sent out a new newsletter, Goose Speaks: Memories of Love, Black Friday 2024. It has more about my mother. You don’t have to subscribe to read it, and there is a free subscription that will get most of the posts.