...Jet Lag

Jet lag is a lonely affliction.  Morning jet lag isn’t bad, it typically happens overseas so its a good lonely.  You wake up at 3 AM and lay there for a few minutes thinking you can fall back asleep.  You eventually resign yourself to your state of heightened alert and turn on the TV.  You soon realize every channel is a different language but you get a kick out of finding something you recognize, maybe a dubbed over action movie or a bad version of the Simpsons.  Sports highlights are always good because you don’t need to understand the announcers.  That novelty wears off after awhile and you decide to get up and see what this place has to offer.  You’re excited that you’re in a new world.  You make coffee and watch the sun come up, smiling because back where you were it is the middle of the day.  Or the middle of the night.  Either way you’re somewhere new and different.  You think about the expanse of the oceans and start tingling because you have something new to explore.  You’re alone but you like traveling alone.  Even if you’re travelling with someone else you know you have a few hours to hang out with your favorite travelling partner until you have to make an appearance.  You may go for a run.  Or take a walk at dawn.  You start planning how to make the most of the trip, you don’t have a meeting until late morning so you can hit up that cool looking coffee shop on the street.  You know you’ll be done early one day so you pick up a guide book and develop a plan to check out that palace.  Those ruins.  That beach.  Morning jet lag in a foreign country means the start of a new adventure in a new place and the less time wasted asleep the better.

Late night jet lag is different.  It's lonely.  It's depressing.  You are home after a long trip.  You’re thinking about what was left undone, both here and back there.  You’re thinking about your inbox at work.  You’re thinking about your mailbox on the street.  You have this nagging twinge of guilt.  You’re not sure why but you start to explore it.  Its completely irrational and you know it but you cant help it.  Guilt grows…did you leave a steaming pile of poo at work before you left?  Did you forget to pay your power bill?  Did you really have to skip the gym while you were gone?  Did you thank your second cousin twice removed for that really nice Christmas card a few years ago?  Did you show your mutt how much you loved him when you were twelve?  Anxiety inches in…did that meeting you were out for go well?  What time is it?  What’s the best way to organize your closet?  You move to the couch and turn on the TV, hoping that a complete review of your DVR will put you to sleep.  You think about eating but nothing sounds good.  Maybe a glass of wine?  Nope.  You lay there some more.  Episodes of Archer crawl by in 30-minute increments.  You make the far-reaching comparison that its a mirror to your life.  30-minute increments of life passing by without noticing while you’re half asleep.  Then you realize you’re being completely overdramatic.  You look back on your trip and wonder if you took advantage of it to the fullest…you know you wont always have this opportunity.  You start thinking about things that have been long buried.  A college friend you ignored at a party.  High school opportunities you passed up.  Your 2007 taxes you didn’t file in time.  What in the world is that noise and why have you never noticed it before?

Jet lag is lonely.  There’s two solutions to jet lag:  never travel or suck it up and stay on the road.  I’ll pick the road.

...March 22nd

If I’m ever questioned by a fat, sweaty detective in a cold concrete room while sitting on a folding metal chair with one bare lightbulb hanging overhead and asked where I was on March 22nd then guess what, I’m safe.  March 22nd didn’t exist for me.  Seriously, I flew west and suddenly I was missing a day.  Best.  Alibi.  Ever. I’ve had days disappear before but they’re typically associated with a pounding headache, obscene ATM receipts, and 6 hours of fuzzy, blurry, blackness.  This day, however, simply didn't happen.  I left Hawaii at 11AM on March 21st for an 8 hr flight and landed in Tokyo at 3 PM on March 23rd.  March 22nd did…not…exist.  I introduce (drum roll…) the International Date Line.

The international date line blows my mind.  I’m still trying to figure it out.  I consider myself a relatively intelligent individual but I can’t wrap my mind around this concept.  I’ve laid in bed at night wide awake suffering from 180 longitudinal degrees of jet lag and tried to figure it out.  I’ve stared at the globe in the Hemingway Corner of my house and tried to work through it.  I’ve spent more time than I would like to admit thinking about time zones and how they work.  I always make it to the Pacific before I give up and just accept that days disappear and reappear depending on which side of that imaginary line you’re on.

Seriously, have you ever crossed the International Date Line and not had your mind blown?  I don’t ask that in an elitist “I’m a world traveller, are you?” kind of way.  I ask that more as a warning of “seriously, if you haven’t crossed the international date line, beware, it will mess with your reality!”

...Allegories

So I knew this couple once.  I’ll resist the urge to put that in quotes.  Quotation marks annoy me.  People who pantomime quotation marks while speaking really annoy me.  Almost as much as laugh tracks, because laugh tracks seriously annoy me.  But I digress…

I knew this couple once.  We weren’t friends.  I didn’t even really like them.  In fact I didn’t like them at all.  They weren’t, how do you say, “accepted by the community for being good neighbors”  (WTH!  Quotation marks!  Argh!).  Well about two years ago this couple separated.  I was happy to see them split and hoped the divorce would be quick and easy.  To be honest, I was rooting for her; I hoped she would get the house and start taking care of the yard while he disappeared in to the mountains to spend the rest of his days studying zen.  Or something equally as passive.  Unfortunately that didn’t happen.  It soon devolved in to an all out civil war.  Seriously…civil war.  It turned ugly.  Real.  Real.  Ugly.  Everyone knew he was a complete asshole, but recently she had started consorting with known felons, drug dealers, and gang bangers; you know, the upstanding citizens of Cell Block I.  Fights started breaking out at all hours of the day and night.  Soon the whole neighborhood was talking about the chaos.  There were lots of discussions at dinner parties and BBQs and wine tastings about how crazy and tragic it was becoming, but no one actually did anything about it.  She started calling all her new found friends in for help.  Or maybe it wasn’t her inviting them over, maybe it was these dregs of society seizing an opportunity to turn this once-quaint cottage in to a crack house.  Who knows.  We all had our own problems and no time or inclination to figure out there’s.

Well, I’ve got this friend.  He saw what was going on across the street and thought…hey, she needs some help.  She talks about HOAs and painting the shutters and if someone would only help her kick that deadbeat out, she could exterminate that herd of possums living under the front porch, start following the by-laws and rejoin all the other fine upstanding citizens of the neighborhood.  This friend of mine is a good dude, I won’t deny that, but maybe a little naïve.  Or maybe its just that he’s new to the neighborhood and wants to prove to the rest of us how truly philanthropic he is.

So what does he do?  He gives the drug dealers and gang bangers and known felons 60 million dollars to help her take over the house.  And the real ironic part?  He had just told his kids they were going to take a 20% pay cut in their allowance because he couldn’t afford it.

Too obvious?  Ya.  Probably.

...Self-Planned Pity Parties

The only thing I want to do before I PCS this summer is go to Jumpmaster School.  OK, wait, lets be honest…maybe not the ONLY thing.  I’d also like to win the lottery; cure cancer; or find a cache of gold buried in my backyard by a hereto unknown Ponce de Leon expedition (disregard the fact that A – Ponce de Leon did not explore north of the 30th parallel; B – I would have to excavate through 3 feet of pine needles to even reach my backyard; and C – I’m pretty sure I don’t even own a shovel).  Let me clarify…the only REALISTIC thing I want to do before I PCS this summer is go to Jumpmaster School.

Well…this girl was ready to go.  Knew the nomenclature cold.  Killed the pre-test (thanks Jon for tipping me off to iron my Hook Pile Tape Lowering Line!)  Memorized pre-jump verbatim.  Three words:  Ready.  To.  Go.  One more word:  Motivated.  Not a fan of that word but Army people like it so I’ll use it in this case.   So “motivated” she sat outside for two hours prior to show time in 20 degree weather to attempt to get a walk-on slot.  I am not making this up…2 hours.  20 degrees.

I won’t expound on the gory details of why this girl didn’t get a slot.  We’ll just say it is not easy for a non-division individual to walk on to the 82nd ABN Division Jumpmaster School.  That doesn’t make this girl any less disappointed.

So what does she do?  Well, to be perfectly honest, she begins to execute the Plan B she started to devise after 1 ½ hours of standing in the cold and realizing she probably wasn’t going to walk-on this month.  She works a hard slot for the next month’s course.  She moves some duties around at work.  She pushes back her PCS timeline to take in to account the fact she will be pre-occupied for the month of April.  She basically resets the conditions that were perfect in March to make them perfect in April.  But then what?  She’s still disappointed and while enacting a plan of action appeases her Right Brain; her Left Brain still wants attention (I have no idea if Positive Thinking and Self Pity emerge from diametrically opposite hemispheres of the brain…but I bet you would have accepted it as fact if not for this aside, huh?).  So she pouts.  She mopes.  She leaves work a little early and puts on her UW fat pants and declares it a night of Taco Bell and beer until she falls asleep on the couch watching Family Guy.  This will be the perfect self-planned pity party to celebrate not getting her way at 6AM that morning yet still scheduled to get her way at 6AM four weeks from now.

And then what happens?  Her phone beeps and it’s a friend “hey, you want to go grab a beer”.  As much as she wants to pout, mope, and be fat and lazy…social interaction takes priority.  And then what happens?  He invites her to jump with them on Thursday.  OK, fine, as much as I want to feel sorry for myself, if I can’t go to JM school this month, strap-hanging on a C130 jump is a decent consolation prize.

...My Grandpa

Drinking a glass of Crown Royal tonight and listening to Tennessee Ernie Ford "Just A Closer Walk With Thee".

My Grandpa died a year ago today.  We all knew it was coming.  Intellectually we all know no one can live forever; emotionally we all wish they could.  Before his funeral, the question of the eulogy hung in the air.  My aunt blatantly admitted she couldn’t give it.  My mom was steeling herself to getting up and speaking.  The pastor gently said no one had to say anything, she could pass the family’s thoughts.  I didn’t like any of those options, so I gave it.  Below is the eulogy…

Dr Seuss said it best…Don’t cry because its over, smile because it happened.  I’m not sure if Dr Seuss realized how much easier that is said than done.  We are going to cry, hell, we’ve been crying and we’ll continue to cry.  But we’ve also been laughing this week and we’ll continue to laugh.  We’ll laugh and we’ll cry and we’ll think back on him and his life and we’ll smile.  Smile because he happened.  Smile because we had Jim Goldhahn, my Grandpa, in our lives.

Read the inside of the program if you want to get a sense of Jim Goldhahn.  He was Just A Man.  Grandpa wasn’t a great man by Lincolnian standards.  He didn’t cure cancer or invent penicillin or shoot bin Laden.  He was just a man.  But he was a man with an unmatched work ethic who worked his butt off at anything he ever did.  He farmed.  He did construction.  He ran water lines for Geraldine.  He managed the grain elevator here in town.  He and Jean raised a family of three sometimes (and from the stories I’ve heard often times…) out of control girls.  And you all know his three daughters so you understand that alone should make him qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize!  He was just a man but its men like him that make this country great.  I’m not going to stand up here and paraphrase Tom Brokaw but Jim Goldhahn, and his other brothers who served, Harold, John, Bob, Chuck and Hank, really were the greatest generation.  They built this country from the ground up and my generation has nothing but thanks, respect and love for people like Jim and his surviving brother Hank.

No kidding…its men like him that enabled America to beat the Soviets in the Cold War.  And actually if you think about it, it was my Grandpa who beat the Soviets.  I always knew he spent a couple years in Alaska in the Army but for some reason I always thought he was Infantry.  It could have been that, as an Air Force member, I assume everyone in the Army is infantry, but I thank God that I asked Grandpa the night of his birthday, exactly a week ago today, what he actually did up there in Alaska.  He told me he listened to the Russians.  And when I was looking at his discharge paperwork after all of this happened I saw exactly what he meant.  Grandpa was a teletype interceptor.  How cool is that?  Because trust me, we don’t have teletype interceptors anymore…in fact I’m pretty sure teletype intercepting is a lost art.  Grandpa was GI Joe.  Not GI Joe the Great American Hero Action Figure but GI Joe, General Issue American.  He was the kid who rode his horse Beauty around Haystack Butte on the family homestead, who married the girl of his dreams whom he met at the local post office, spilled coffee in her lap when they first met, and then almost slipped while he carried her through the mud on the way to the Junior Prom (we’re all lucky we’re here).  He was the man who answered the call from his country to spend two years listening to the Russians in Alaska and then came home to raise a family of three in Small Town, America.  I’ll say it again…Grandpa was Just A Man but he is the kind of man who makes this country great and I’ll never be able to express how incredibly proud of him I am.

You know…I asked the family what they remembered of Grandpa and what they would always remember of him.  It was things like his love of outdoors and his infinite patience as Laura continually cast her fishing rod across the creek into the trees, making Grandpa wade over to untangle it.  It was his ability to build or fix anything…even when mom came home one day after school demanding Grandpa build her an abacus in second grade to take to school the next day.  It was his sense of civic responsibility…taking Diane out to help mow the Geraldine cemetery, even though Diane kept breaking the lawn mower.  It was the yellow popcorn bowl he used for his air popped popcorn.  His green chair in Geraldine.  It was Russ and I bringing Crunch Bar Ice Cream bars to his grain elevator and getting chastised (in a good Grandpa way) for bringing an ice cream bar with rice into his wheat elevator.  It was him calling all of us Fiery Misohippuses and Yayhoos.  Teaching his girls to shoot.  And then taking them deer hunting at five in the morning.  Because mom was the oldest she got to ride in the cab while Laura and Diane were stuck in the back.  To get back at their big sister, Laura and Diane would eat all the sack lunches of liverwurst sandwiches and Big Hunk candy bars before 10 o’clock.  It was him standing on the bank of Aklee Lake fishing.  It was the peanut shell garbage can.  Or watching his bullriding on TV.  Hooking up the fifth-wheel camper to go camping out at Crystal Lake.  Raising his tomatoes in his garden that took up almost an entire city lot…You know his rows were so precise none of us would have been surprised if he had a compass and survey equipment out there to plant.  It was his Clint Eastwood lip-twitch.  And his insistence that you always filled up your car with gas before leaving town…how ironic that I almost ran out of gas yesterday on my way in to Great Falls yesterday.  It was the home built camper which was then upgraded to the Suburban named Hoopie.  It was him as a huge NBA and NFL fan but insisting he watch the games on mute because he couldn’t stand listening to Howard Cossell.  It was him and his infinite care in helping Grandma transport wedding cakes all over Montana…because really, who would have guessed Grandpa was an expert at setting up wedding cakes.

But you know, after all the memories, all of the laughing and crying and eating and drinking, what will always remain of Grandpa is his legacy.  And his legacy is his family.  Jim and Jean Goldhahn raised success.  Pure 100% success.  Out of Geraldine, MT and their small house on Main Street they raised my Mom, the Alpha Dog of the sisters, who runs the Aviation Department of the US Forest Service and is, as one Special Forces soldier named Frank Norbury put it, “the best goddam pilot whose plane I have ever had to privilege to jump out of”.  And they raised Diane, a teacher in Willow Creek, MT, one of the few remaining multi-grade schools in the state; and there is absolutely no profession more honorable or more important than teaching our children.  They raised Laura, president of Benefis hospital in Great Falls, and trust me, if you’re ever sick or you cant find a parking spot in the hospital parking lot its good to know Laura. All three of his girls approach flying, teaching, and hospital administration with the focus, commitment, passion and love you would expect from Jim Goldhahn.  But it didn’t stop there, that success has then raised more success.  Russ…who is single-handedly farming a 3,500 acre farm near Loma.  Michelle…who will graduate from MSU-Bozeman with a degree in business marketing in May.  Christopher...who just turned 19 yesterday and in his first year of college but Chris, I got to admit, I was sitting by Grandma when you called the day Grandpa passed…the most caring young man you could imagine.  And okay, because they wouldn’t let me get through this without saying where I’m at…I’m doing alright for myself as an Air Force major at Ft Bragg, NC.  I can’t complain.  And I guarantee that success will then raise more success.  40, 50, 60 years from now our grandkids will be standing here talking about us and those grandkids will know exactly where they came from.

Nicholas Sparks couldn’t have written it better.  Grandpa was there surrounded by his entire family celebrating his 21st birthday.  He was a leap year baby so we were all excited that he was finally legal to drink.  And in true Goldhahn fashion his birthday party had turned in to a four-day affair.  There we were, joking, laughing, eating, drinking.  Steaks and baked potatoes and chocolate cake with his favorite 7-minute frosting one night…Grandpa standing there making sure Grandma and I were frosting it just right…like Grandma doesn’t know how to frost a cake.  Pizza and beer a second night.  Plans being laid for the ham dinner (another favorite) over the weekend to culminate the birthday celebration…we never quite got to that dinner.

I like to think that when Grandpa lay down to go to bed on the night of March 2nd, he smiled to himself and thought “Wow, we did good with this family”.  A few hours later he and our Lord decided it was time to go, and with his wife of 62 years by his side, he called it quits.  We should all be so lucky.

I’ll go back to Dr Seuss.  “Don’t cry because its over…smile because it happened”.  So Grandma…Mom, Diane, Laura…Frankie…Russ, Michelle, Christopher.  We’re all going to cry and there’s nothing that can stop that.  We’re going to cry and miss him and every time we get together from here on out there will be a hole, a giant Grandpa-sized hole, that we will attempt to fill with tears and food and wine because that’s what we do.  Maybe some beer because when you looked around the kitchen there was always one beer drinker in a family of wine drinkers, and it was typically the good stuff like MGD.  But because we’re Goldhahn’s we’re going to fill that hole with laughter too.  Lets not cry because its over, lets remember to smile because he happened.  Smile because Jim Goldhahn made this family.  And smile because he will always be with us…until we’re back with him.

I want to close by extending a thank you to the Benefis Peace Hospice for helping all of our loved ones pass on.  Thank you to Schnider Funeral Home for helping with all of this and making our entire lives easier this week.  To Pastor Dotti and the Methodist Church, Don Hazen for the beautiful flowers, John Kutzman and Kim Owen for their beautiful music.  And a special thank you to all our friends and family who came out to show their respects to my Grandpa and support to my Grandma.

God Bless Jim Goldhahn and God Bless the United States of America.  And Give Em Hell Harry.  Thank you.