I have everything.

   I was reminded tonight that I have absolutely nothing in my life to complain about. I am a selfish jackass for even thinking of whining over things that don't go my way, my job, my schooling. My entire life and everything in it is a gift and I cannot fathom how I could be worthy of it. I sit here shaking as I type this. I am overwhelmed at what I have been given and disappointed in myself that I could look at all that I have and not see the miracle of it.
   I experienced horror tonight. For some reason I was thinking about friends that I had gone with to High School and decided to search around a little. I found the facebook page of one: a friend from my band geek days. Her page was filled with people expressing sympathy and heartfelt expressions. Someone asked her what the address was for her blog, as she wanted to follow what was going on. I looked up my old friend's blog and began to read about her husband's battle with cancer. She has posted pictures from day one and has kept the blog for over a year now.
   She, along with the rest of her family, is brave and faithful. She writes about her husband being unable to speak, losing his mind, alternately crying and praying to God to take him, and then being filled with rage that comes from nowhere and is taken out on his family. She writes about her husband whispering to God over and over to help him face the pain, while she holds him and tells him that God is already helping.
   Absolute horror.
   I thought myself to be somewhat enlightened, as to what really matters in life. My beautiful wife who puts up with me, and has agreed to be by my side for eternity, come what may. My treasure, my little boy who meets me at the door when I get home from work and tells me that he's so very glad that I'm home. My stepson who, at times, I don't know how to relate to him, but I try to be a good for him though I fail as often as not.
   But trying to put myself in my friend's shoes was too much for me. Darkness, dread, terror and horror.
   I have no right to be unhappy. I have no right to complain. My life is a dream.

I'm too evolved for your "humor".

     WARNING! POOR TASTE FOLLOWS!    
    I seriously believe that my sense of humor has evolved light years ahead of most everyone else. This is because sometimes I will say something so incredibly funny, so diabolically witty, that other people's fragile psyches just can't accept it. While I laugh hysterically, sometimes other people will just furrow their brow in an effort to keep their brains from literally exploding and oozing out of their nose. I think I was born with this enlightened sense of humor, and sometimes, it is a sorry burden that I bare.
    Let me turn your thoughts back to my youth, and I shall endeavor to relate the first time that this gift of mine became apparent.
    I was a band geek in High School. Except in my school, that made you one of the cool kids. Really, it's true. We even had groupies. I also had a mullet, so I was basically burying the needle on the awesome scale.
    I was also in Pep band. Pep band is for geeks who think that kids who take choir still drink breast milk. And if you were a madrigal, there's a good chance that a member of the Pep band slept with your mom.
    One of the songs we had to learn for Pep band was "Louie Louie". This was your basic pep band fare, and if you couldn't learn this song in one day, you had two choices: the percussionists could either practice on your face, or you could go listen to the madrigals. Most people chose the face drumming.
   The version of "Louie Louie" that we played was by the group, The Kingsmen. Remember that. It's vital to this stupid story.
   So one day I found myself in seminary, quite by accident I'm sure. We were reading about two ancient groups of people. One group wanted to elect judges as their form of  government. They called themselves the Freemen. The other group wanted to raise a king, and they called themselves the Kingsmen. I know what you're thinking! You're thinking, "Oh Grim...you didn't." Well the answer, gentle reader, is that I sure as poopy did!
   As soon as the kid reading said the words "The Kingsmen", my overactive neurons fired off an alert that an impending joke was making it's way across the peaks and valleys of my brainmeats, and would soon be exiting somewhere around my vocal cords. As you can see, I had no control over this outcome whatsoever. In a loud clear voice, I said to the rest of the class, "Hey didn't they sing Louie Louie??"

   Silence.

   Nothing. Not even crickets, like you hear in movies.
   For the next few seconds, I could barely contain myself. My brain was on a comedic high. I marveled at my own sheer genius and struggled to maintain my mortality from the transcendent comedic value! I have never guffawed before, but had I had some encouragement, I might have experienced an actual guffaw!
But no, these slope headed mutants in my class just looked at me as if I had just recited the Pledge of Allegiance in Swahili or something.
I just sorta slunk down in my chair and tried to look as un-genius and inconspicuous as possible.

There were innumerable other episodes like this to follow, but what finally drove the point home was when my wife, as a reaction to my teasing her about something, hit me in the head with a loaf of garlic bread and I told her I was going to call the cops to report an assault with a "breadly" weapon.
Breadly...weapon.
Yes I said it, and I think I squirted Coke out of my nose shortly thereafter because I laughed about it for like three weeks after that. My wife, of course, gave me this deadpan look, turned, and walked out of the room.
This is when I finally came to the conclusion that my sense of humor must be just too evolved for mere mortals.
Sad really. But I take it one day at a time, you know.

The Small Things

     If you were to die today, how many people do you think would notice and or care? Can you count them on one hand?
     Are you sure about that?
     For the past several years, a man named Tom has walked past my desk at work and stopped to chat. He is usually smiling and does his best to come up with a funny story to tell me. These stories are some times of his past, some times of things that have happened recently. The humor is not in the subject matter so much, but in their telling, of which only a middle aged black man from the south would be capable.
     I learned of his cat, "Boris-Anne", so named because Tom thought that Boris was a great name for a male cat until the vet informed him that Boris was female.
     I was told of the time he decided that the tires of his truck were low. He pulled into a gas station and up to the air hose. After putting air in one tire, he used a tire gauge to check the psi. This is what confused him. He saw "psi" and wondered what that meant.
"So ah thought to mahsef, hmmmm. Oh ah know! Put. Some. In!"
Sometime later he was informed that psi stood for pounds per square inch, at this he looked at me with his eyes wide, put both hands flat on my desk, bent his knees and said, "Ah dint know!!"
   These stories were usually prefaced by his usual greeting of, "Ah think you should jus' go ahead and go home. Ain't nobody gonna know you left. Jus' put yo stuff on the des' with a note that says 'Use it if ya need it'."
Sometimes after that he would look at the picture of the director, hanging on the wall (her name was Debbie and he wasn't fond of her) and say, "Ah still think we should play 'Hide Debbie'! Ah'd jus' hide her picture in someone's cubicle and they'd siddown and see her picture and go 'AHHHHHHHH!!!'" Again, with his eyes wide and knees bent. He also might, once again, invite me to go with him to Draper the following Saturday to visit his "friend" in prison. This friend was convicted of double homicide. I would always turn down Tom on this offer, and he would always try to argue reasons why it would be fun.
   Occasionally he would have to talk to customer support from some company or another, and after getting frustrated with the person to whom he was talking (he'd tell me) he'd "Tell that witch that if she dint hep me, I'd drive down there and pull out her hair weave!" This while making grasping motions with one hand.
   At one point, he made sure to teach me the "I Don't Care Song", which consisted of one verse, sung over and over while bobbing up and down and from side to side: "I don't care. I don't care. Zoom zoom zoom. Bing Bing Bing." This was the song to sing when dealing with people who usually needed their hair weaves pulled out.
   When he saw that he either needed to go home or get back to work, whichever the case, he would wave to me and say, "Well, ah guess ah'd betta go before they catch me. See yaaa!"
   I started dating my wife in August of 2003. I was just beginning to get to know Tom then and he would ask how things were going with us, on occasion. Sarah and I were later engaged and I gave Tom an invitation to the reception. I remember being at the reception and seeing his bald, bespectacled head come down the walk to the reception center. He was impeccably dressed, as he was a man with class. He came in, expressed his congratulations to my wife and I, and sat down at a table next to my 86-ish year old grandmother.
   My grandmother was raised in Wyoming, Utah and Idaho and still had the mentality of a depression -era survivor. She had not a single prejudiced bone in her body. However, when and where she was raised, people of different ethnicity did not mingle.
   And here was Tom sitting next to her, giving the place some needed color (and I don't mean just his skin) to all of us stiff white folk. I think Tom sensed that my Grandmother was a little uncomfortable, because (as I later found out from both of them) he very politely looked at her and said, "And how are you?" My Grandmother replied, "I'm very good, thank you."
To which, Tom replied, "Would you like to dance?" while pointing at the dance floor. My Grandmother didn't know what to think until Tom gave just a slight smirk. My grandmother then burst out laughing and continued until she was in tears. Later on, at work, Tom told me "She was a lovely woman, and ah was jus' bein' polite."
Tom gave my wife and I an 85 dollar rotisserie as a wedding gift.

Tom died of heart complications two days after Christmas. He'd had a heart valve replacement and had come back to work for half days, after three months recovery, and appeared to be his normal self, along with some new stories about how he had given the nurses a difficult time.
The following is what pains me: Tom had no family. Apparently, for reasons that are not important, his family had disowned him and he moved to Utah, never speaking to them again. This was roughly 30 years ago. He was alone every Christmas and Thanksgiving. When he died, no relative could be found to claim his body and the mortuary had to take responsibility. His next door neighbor had to be named executor for his estate, and his emergency contact information was his work address and phone. His friends, his coworkers, cleaned out his desk with tears streaming down their faces.
It could, of course, be said that Tom's family was us. But the tragedy is that I don't know if he knew that. I think, because of his reluctance to get really personal with anybody, that for some, he is a case of 'don't know what you got till it's gone.' And I find that to be almost unbearable.
Everybody matters, to somebody. Even if it's the person at whom you smile when you walk in to work. It is the small things, that make you memorable.

I'll miss you, my friend. Thank you, and go ahead and go, before they catch you.

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