Eternal Happy Memories

By Dan Barber

There are vacations where people can visit an attraction in a location away from their home then there are “staycations” where people can just stay at home from work and relax.

Since I’ve grown old and retired I’ve gotten bored with my permanent staycation. But I’ve always gotten bored easily anyway except when I’m with my loved ones. I’ve even got bored while living and working, without my family nearby, in exotic places around the world where people spend thousands of dollars just to visit on their vacations, “to get away”…places like Hawaii, Italy, The Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and many great places in the Continental United States.

When my wife and I were physically able to hike we’d pack a picnic lunch and hike out into the Joshua Tree National Park, pick out a giant boulder where we could sit in solitude and eat our lunch. Since retiring  my wife and I have tried hiking in the national park that borders our backyard, but the older we get the shorter the hikes become and they are no longer very challenging…unless we’re walking up a slight incline. 

My ideal setting for daydreaming.

Just sitting alone by my pool while drinking a cold beer, gets old without my wife sitting there with me or with the grandkids hanging out in the pool playing, fighting and splashing water on me.

My favorite vacations now are “mind vacations” or daydreams where I can enjoy the past, present or future. All that’s required is a comfortable chair, a good book or a research project or an imagination, and of course, a good supply of fond memories.

My wife and I do have a favorite historical road trip we take once in awhile. It is a relatively short drive from where we live in Twentynine Palms to the Kelso train depot in the Mojave Desert. There is no admission to a beautiful old restored California Spanish style building that houses artifacts and photographs from the heyday of passenger train travel…it’s like taking a mini-vacation back in time.

Other vacations that I’ve enjoyed were meditation vacations, where I would take a week off from my stressful job and just sit in a lawn chair every day for a week and observe the events in my neighborhood. I also enjoyed just watching my children at play or the grass growing.

I once took a bowling vacation where I went bowling every day for a week…but that one gave me a big blister on my thumb.

One time I took a week off from work and allowed my children to pick a different location every day that was close enough for a short road trip from our home in San Diego…we visited the museums at Balboa Park (twice), spent a day at the beach, picked apples in the mountains, visited the San Diego Zoo and rode inner tubes down a creek on an Indian reservation in the nearby mountains that was much better than any water park.

When my children were young they would take turns accompanying me “one on one” on business trips where they could chose a location for a short visit near my destination….my daughter’s choice once was, a mall! My oldest son wanted to visit an old car junkyard he spotted along the road.

Some of my vacations in history are also made possible through my research in my family’s genealogy. 

My 3^rd Great grandfather Martin Hirsch (later changed to Hersh) homesteaded a farm in Missouri in the 1850s just a short distance out of St. Joseph. That historical vacation was kind of hard because of the extensive research I did to make the family connections and to get the “feel.” It was fun but still a great challenge mentally to try to understand that environment, where just about everything in nature could be deadly to anyone except my very hardy ancestor.  I imagine that present-day Amish farmers have it much easier as compared to the challenges Martin Hirsch faced in trying to clear the land to create a productive farm from scratch in the wilderness of Missouri.

Taormina Sicily with Mt. Etna in the background where
  I lived in a small village called Bel Paso with my family. 

Photo by Evan Erickson.

I enjoy my “memory” vacations even those when at times I was homesick for my wife. Once I was sitting at a table at a sidewalk café with my toddler son in Taormina Sicily overlooking the Messina Strait, sipping a cold soda on a beautiful day, waiting for the ferry that would take us across the strait to the mainland of Italy. I was wishing my wife could see what I was seeing but it was a good memory because my son and I were on our way up to the U.S. Naval Hospital Naples to see his Mom and spend the weekend with her where she was waiting for the birth of our second child. My son and I had to return to our home in Sicily after the weekend because I had to return to work.

Chania, Crete (Souda Bay.)

Another time I recall walking through the open marketplace of Chania, Crete wishing my wife was there with me to see the things I saw. She would have gotten a kick out of that experience because of her Greek heritage.

Music can also take me back, Whenever I listen to Fleetwood Mac’s instrumental “Albatross” it puts me in mind of the time I was sitting on the beach in Hawaii watching my wife on her surfboard waiting for a wave and thinking those guys on their surfboards out there by her better not be trying to pick her up! I was not out there with her because I have a phobia about being eaten by sharks so I was not going to tempt them (the sharks) with my presence that day or any other day.

Another favorite memory vacation is when I was stationed in Puerto Rico my kids needed to learn how to swim so they could snorkel in the clear water at the beach near our house, so we spent a lot of time at the community pool near our house. My daughter confessed to me years later, as an adult, that she and her little "boyfriend," they were both about 5-years old at the time, snuck out after dark climbed the fence of the pool and went swimming.

Puerto Rico was also the scene of the "great blue crab invasion" that terrified my wife. There must have been hundreds of the huge critters that were making a pilgrimage across our yard at the time. They are a protected species so we weren’t legally allowed to catch them for dinner, or run over them with our car. However, In the Aleutian Islands, we did buy freshly caught large Tanner crab directly from the boats that harvested them from the Bering Sea that same day. 

My sons were more than happy to catch Salmon out of the surf off the beach behind our house or in one of the local creeks during the annual Salmon run for our freezer. Also, in the summer, we would take a family outing to the tundra where we could harvest Tundra Berries to take home so we could preserve them into Tundra Berry Jam as a family project.

My kids at the Pet Cemetery at
Adak, Alaska.

My future dream vacation is, of course being able to spend all eternity in Heaven where I will relive all of those favorite times over and over again as if for the first time.

I mentioned in an earlier post about my father coming to me in a dream a couple of weeks after he passed away. I asked him if he could come back to life would he. He told me no way because in Heaven he was able to relive all of the happy memories in his life as many times as he wanted just like they were the first time he experienced them. He was having a ball reliving the happy times of his life.

As a habit, I listen to 60s music from my youth whenever I write. In the song “MacArthur’s Park” by Richard Harris he uses a metaphor about the fear of a memory fading away,

“MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain

I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh no, oh no, no, no, oh no”

I believe that human consciousness never fades away, even after death. My hope is I will get to live eternally with my wife in our termite eaten tree house in Hawaii where our loved ones will make frequent visits in our memories and not melt away in the rain or darkness.

Please, rock the boat!

By Dan Barber

I’m sure most everyone has heard the expression, “don’t rock the boat.” Guess what? We are all on a rocking boat. That is a good thing because I see a lot of people waking up from a long slumber of just going along to get along.

Our free society is experiencing an evolution of change that some view as a revolution. We need to be aware of who the leaders of the revolution are so we aren’t thrown from the rocking boat into the sea of a tyrannical society.

Controlling communication is the mark of tyranny.  Protecting the free flow of communication is the mark of freedom.

Truth can be viewed as a fluid thing depending on the audience. We all have our filters that are created in our social environment. Smart but evil people can manipulate those filters to create a following… that is how religious cults or political action committees are founded. Most people know how futile arguing political or religious views can be with a close-minded individual.

Our country was created by some people who can be viewed as scoundrels or evil in our current societal norms but to the social standing of these people at the birth of our nation they were viewed as virtuous leaders. 

Whether viewed as virtuous or a scoundrel the founders of America did us a great favor, either by accident or intentionally, through the creation of the Constitution by putting “We the People” in charge of our own destiny. Every employee of the Government to include uniformed military people must take an oath to protect the Constitution from all enemies both foreign and domestic…notice the oath does not say to protect the country…but to protect the legal document that guarantees the rule of “We the People.”

Since the founding of our country, we’ve had elected civil servants who’ve tried to manipulate our representative form of government to suit them or the powerful puppet master entities they represent. Our only hope of preventing our rocking boat, from being swamped by a powerful manipulator is to have a knowledgeable electorate (We the People).

We the People elect our civil servants to represent us as our legislators and executives thereby I believe non-partisan civics should be a required course of study along with reading, writing, math and social studies.

Some might find the stupidity of people regarding politics in “man on the street” interviews as hilarious, I view them as terrifying. Please be smart in using your vote to select our elected leaders.

Do you #Care?

By Dan Barber

Needing someone to care is ingrained in every human being…and stepping back from my own selfish human needs and taking a long view of others who don’t have anyone to care or to love them makes me feel sad.

It doesn’t take much effort to acknowledge others…eye contact, a smile or nod could help make someone’s day. However, human contact can be tricky. My attractive daughter told me that she and her equally attractive friend can’t make friendly eye contact or smile at men while running routine errands. That behavior could create a situation that causes the man to make an unwanted advance toward them. Also, if a spouse witnessed their significant other smiling at someone of the opposite sex could cause trouble.

Now our society has made human interaction even more difficult because it has been reengineered to the point where confusion ensues in how to politely address gender when speaking to a stranger, i.e. do you address them as Ma’am, Sir, or Hey you?  It’s especially terrifying in a public unisex bathroom!

Writers are now encouraged to call everyone “they” to avoid confusion and to save column inches in the editorial hole of a publication. This makes me think “they are out to get us.” It can be politically incorrect or uncomfortable to ask “who is they, so don’t ask.”

We can now watch a television newscast report of a serious criminal running loose in our community who is armed and dangerous and “if you see this person, stay clear of them”…a physical description is now politically incorrect to report… sorry, you’re on your own.

Other situations of human contact can be deadly. Without the anthropological or social knowledge in some environments, an innocent attempt at conversation as simple as, “Hi, do you live here” can lead to a violent response…especially if the person was the subject of the above newscast or a member of the local street gang.

Cultural differences can also lead to racial misunderstandings. I am a white man who wishes I could find the privilege that some people say us white people have. Don’t get me wrong, I know from the history of our country people have been severely mistreated. As a child of the 50s, I saw people being mistreated just because they were the “wrong” color. Then as a teen of the 60s I witnessed an uprising of the human spirit. I heard about a quote from a speech Dr. Martin Luther King gave about his dream that one day everyone would be judged on the merit of their character not the color of their skin.

In the four decades since that time we have gone through an upheaval in social changes not to cement Dr. King’s dream into our social norm, but to reverse the meaning of that dream to “I deserve special treatment because of the color of my skin.”

Jim Crow laws ruled the South for 100 years. The only comfort that blacks had during this period was maybe the segregationist rule of “separate but equal.” According to Wikipedia, “Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law that justified and permitted racial segregation as not being in breach of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, and other federal civil rights laws. Under the doctrine, the government was allowed to require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be separated along racial lines, provided that the quality of each group's public facilities was equal.”

Do we really need separate things today based on race and expect them to be equal to everyone’s interests or understanding?

Are we going back to those “bad old days” because we are afraid of losing our cultural identity or just in need of someone to care about who we are?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just be judged on the merit of our character?

Saturday Morning Post: Whatever happened to human contact?

Saturday Morning Post: Whatever happened to human contact?: By Dan Barber Looking back my initial phobia about the potential advances and dangers of computer technology was spot on. I was alw...

Whatever happened to human contact?

By Dan Barber

Looking back my initial phobia about the potential advances and dangers of computer technology was spot on.

I was always afraid of the questions the geeky looking, yet super smart young people posing as sales clerks in the computer stores would ask me while I was shopping around for my first computer. I was afraid of sounding stupid when they were asking me what I wanted to do with my computer. “Huh…plug it in and look up stuff on the interweb.”

What really amazes me is how the U.S. Government made me into a web designer/webmaster…just because I knew how to type, spell and maybe put together simple sentences as a Public Affairs Officer and former Navy Journalist. 

I couldn’t convince my bosses at the time to hire one of the geeky looking, yet super smart young people at the computer store to do those chores...probably because they wanted too much money to work for the government.

I am one of you…wondering what in the heck went wrong with our government’s management of websites. I believe the answer to that is “a lack of knowledge combined with the fear of the dangers computer technology and budget constraints.”

One of my responsibilities as a Public Affairs Officer was to approve anything placed on our public facing website. In an effort to save money my bosses decided that if I was the approving official for our website then I could learn how to design web pages and also be the webmaster. That meant that I spent the last 15 years of my career arguing with people about why they couldn’t put something on our website!

I have discovered that it is darn near impossible to take care of any kind of business today without the use of a computer…no need to speak to another human being face-to-face at all!

Want to buy a new suit?  Don’t know your size? No problem, instead of having a tailor there to measure you, just take your measurements as instructed by the suit-selling.com (ss.com) store so you can feed those measurements into their database. Of course, you’d also need to select the color and available material for your new suit, but instead of rummaging through the various color and material samples at a store, you can just click on the good looking suit model on your computer screen and match the color and material samples that are available at ss.com.

You can then enter your credit card information over the ss.com “guaranteed to be secure” internet connection for payment. When payment is received your new suit will be shipped to you within two business days.

Two weeks later you log on to ss.com to find out why you haven’t received your new suit yet, even though the payment was received by their company. After reading the “frequently asked questions” on their website, you are directed to call a customer relations line because apparently your question wasn’t frequently asked…finally, a very friendly human being to talk to whose primary language is not your language comes on the line. They try hard to assure you that your problem will be taken care of immediately and if you aren’t satisfied please visit their website at ss.com.

A week later an individual working in a warehouse owned by, a geeky looking, yet a super smart young person, uses a faulty scanner to locate your new suit off the shelf and sends it along on a conveyor belt to be packed for shipment. Soon your dusty new wrinkled suit is dropped off by your front door.

If your new suit hasn't been stolen by the time you get home from work you excitedly open up the box to try on the suit…only to be disappointed that it does not look the same on you as it did the good looking suit model on ss.com website or it’s the wrong color, material, size etc…

You then go on ss.com where once again you are directed to the frequently asked section to file your complaint, only to discover that your complaint isn't frequent enough to be listed before you can call their customer relations expert located in Bangladesh! 

There isn’t a salesman standing in front of you to yell at or punch in the nose so the next best thing is to punch out ss.com on your computer monitor.

Now you are back at the computer store to purchase a new computer monitor, where a geeky looking, yet super smart young person ask you “what kind of monitor do you need?” 

Based on the number of computer monitors you go through you might want, “a cheap one.”

#Hollywood egos are out of control

By Dan Barber

As a regular person who enjoys escapism through watching movies and TV programs, I am starting to run out of stuff to entertain me.

This should be a warning to those people who strive to work in the film and television industry. Don’t piss off your audience to the point where they no longer like you.

I understand that to be an actor takes a person with a huge ego who needs constant feeding from adoring fans. But the nature of the beast is once the actor becomes overwhelmingly successful it becomes difficult for them to live a private life.  That causes a danger to the individual of having their character flaws exposed from many sides. If an individual starts believing their own publicity releases as being God’s gift to the masses they run the risk of destroying their own employability in the entertainment industry.

Most people, regardless of occupation, like recognition for the work they do. But, most people view those who seek or ask for recognition for their work as being flawed…or they work for an incompetent boss.

How many times have you walked into a nice office building and noticed a clean mirrored shine to the lobby floor? When I see that, I think of the custodian who labored the night before to make that floor shine and hope that the individual takes great pride in their work. Also, I hope the trust in the business I have to conduct in that building is honestly reflected in that floor.

Perhaps I’m being manipulated into believing falsely. Maybe the custodian who labors in that building fears the loss of their job if there is a flaw anywhere in the floor. If that’s the case, should I be concerned about the business I need to conduct in that building?

The older and wiser I get the more pessimistic I become. Maybe I’ve outgrown my sense of naiveté like I’ve outgrown my sense of immortality or my sense of trust in self. When I was young I could climb a ladder or tall fence to gain access to my roof to make repairs to a leak without fear of failure. Now just the thought of doing that scares me.

My advice to actors is to be honest in your craft and talent because if you have to rely on a writer to create your “shiny” personality then you're doomed to failure because you will eventually be exposed as a “dull” phony in your industry. 

Also, you should avoid being used to manipulate political partisanship; that risks ticking, off at least half, or more of your audience from the start.

Instead of asking or demanding recognition that you may or may not deserve, strive to provide through your chosen occupation the quality and believable escapism your audience deserves. Make us laugh, cry or cheer with your performance don’t make us cringe from your exposed faulty personality.

I am running out of a source of entertainment to help me escape reality.

We are so screwed

By Dan Barber

It seems that from the number of FB posts people are more interested in what they are having for dinner than being interested in why other people are going hungry.

I suppose social media is allowing people the opportunity to escape this bleak reality by counting the number of “hits” or “likes” on what they post.

I’ve also noticed that more and more people don’t much give a damn about serving other people unless there is something in it for them. Our society has turned itself upside down because we the people have allowed the wrong people to manipulate all of us. I get messages all the time from enterprising individuals inviting me to sign up for their service (at a monetary cost) which promises thousands of “hits” or “likes” for my posts. I’ve never believed in buying friends or even asking for recognition…neither of those options is worth having.

I have become jaded with a pessimistic outlook rather than an optimistic hope. The older I get the crankier I become. Perhaps it’s because of our upside down society. I apologize to anyone trying to be nice to me and I just nod and smile without returning a genuine nicety, it is becoming harder for me to separate patronizing bull stool from genuine politeness.

On this day, I mourn the death of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream. With President Obama, we had a promise of something better… of hope and change, but it turns out our first black President was still just voted into office based on the color of his skin…not the merit of his character. Because of that, our entire society is in danger of collapse.

In the news today, I’ve read that just 62 people are wealthier than half of the world’s population combined. How did that happen? Interest-free loans to the world’s largest banks from “we the people” and blind trust in some of our media and politicians to protect us, that's how.  .But it gets worse because we’ve failed to learn from history by allowing economic policies based on fantasy and lies we may face another depression worse than we faced earlier in the 20^th century.

The only way we can recover is to study many sources of information. 

One example of blatant bias is "New Yorker" writer; Jane Mayer's effort to demonize one political ideology in her book “Dark Money” through her connection with the liberal media. 

If one is to inform readers about the history of wealthy dynastic families and how they affect politics today it is important to address all of them not just cherry-picked favorites. 

This is how the media can endanger our freedom in America. We need an honest debate between ideas not propaganda in an attempt to empower a tyrannical government. We the people must look at all sides of issues to decide what's best for us. When the media fails to honestly inform and in the process looses all credibility who are we going to trust. If Mayer wanted to do a history lesson she should have mentioned that Roosevelt’s family seed money for their wealth came from the Opium trade in the Orient; the Kennedy family seed money for their wealth came from rum running during prohibition; currently, the Clinton's political and family wealth is likely from influence peddling with foreign governments through their foundation.

My tip to keep from being manipulated is to pay attention.

How can we tell if the lunatics are running the asylum?

By Dan Barber

How can we tell if the lunatics are running the asylum? The short answer is, just look around.

Obama's promise of a transparent administration seems to have come to naught.  Now he’s looking around in the dark trying to fix his own failed policies that have all come home to roost in his final year’s challenge to save his own legacy.

Enough of the tired, but appropriate, clichés.

Obama picked all the wrong examples to try his hand at social re-engineering. Remember his attempt to smooth over the racism misunderstanding early in his administration with a “beer” summit between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cambridge police Sergeant James Crowley who was only trying to do his job of protecting Gates home?  The absent-minded professor forgot his house keys so he was trying to break into his own house. Sergeant Crowley didn’t know that the break-in underway was being committed by the homeowner. And the homeowner thought that it was beneath his professorship dignity to comply with the law officer.

That example” blew up” in Obama’s face when he picked sides with a “knee jerk reaction?  

Important policy decisions only became worse as time went on because then we had the “Hands up, don’t shoot” false narrative from Ferguson, Missouri that did nothing for the good people who lived and worked in that community. However, it did provide some great “theatrics” for some uninformed people, politicians, athletes, and performers.

The good people of Chicago are now all fired up about canning their mayor, former White House Chief of Staff and good Obama friend Rahm Emanuel for how he is ruining their great city or not…who knows what Chicago politicians are up to these days, maybe someone should ask Oprah or even Bill Ayers or Bernardine Dohrn who were leaders in the violent and extremist Weather Underground group in the sixties. Obama said that his political career was born in Ayers and Dohrn’s Chicago living room and he attended Reverend Wright’s Chicago church with Oprah.

The president's push to reform America’s much-needed healthcare industry and to control health care costs has only managed to punish patients and healthcare providers while enriching huge insurance companies.

Obama made some talking point promises to Americans that couldn’t possibly come to pass with how the Affordable Care Act was written, even though he emphasized each point with a PERIOD?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Jonathan Gruber, the administration and Democratic legislators, architect of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) who stated in a recorded conference that the administration had to count on the "stupidity of the American voter to get the act to pass." 

People are still dangerously obtaining routine health care services in Emergency Medicine Departments everywhere because they can’t be turned away. And many working people still can’t afford to purchase health care insurance. Because of that, our government is taking a fine from those people through the Internal Revenue Service so that revenue can be turned over to the health insurance companies who are providing insurance coverage to those who can’t or don’t work…but it is still not enough because of the apparent failure of so many “non-profit” health insurance exchanges.

The Obama administration, including the Clinton, State Department lied to Americans and the families of the people who were killed at the Benghazi Embassy attack. The initial talking point was that protesters angry over an obscure video, not terrorists caused the attack until public outrage of a blatant lie changed the Obama narrative. Then the liberal media tried to provide cover for the administration's lies with nonsense about the “Fog of War.” Also, liberals and some Democrats were accusing the Republicans of being mean to their heroine Clinton in Congressional hearings for trying to find out what really happened. 

In my required high school civics class, I was taught that our Congress is supposed to provide oversight of government activities, what happened in the last 50 years?

Then there was the Rose Garden celebration announcing the rescue of a “heroic soldier” lost in Afghanistan and held captive by the Taliban for 5 years. In the speech, Obama failed to mention anything about the swapping of five high-profile Guantanamo war prisoners for one US Army “alleged deserter." From the looks of things, Sergeant Bergdahl's (promoted during his stay with the Taliban) Court Martial won’t be concluded until Obama is out of office.

Obama’s “optics” was also way out of focus when he expressed his outrage and “heartfelt” feelings for the family of the beheaded journalist by ISIS at an impromptu news conference, then moments later teeing off at a Martha’s Vineyard golf course.

Ignoring and hiding from bullies (extremist) or trying to become friends with them (Iran) will not make them go away...it will only encourage them to continue their effort to rule over the weak everywhere. Perhaps Obama should take a cue from Teddy Roosevelt when he said, “speak softly, but carry a big stick.” 

Hint: Keeping a Carrier Air Wing and support ships parked in the ocean near troubled spots in the world gives great backing and strength to our diplomatic missions.

Our lazy or biased media in collaborating with any political ideology by allowing an ongoing false narrative to push the favored message of the day is dangerous for freedom loving people everywhere. 

Sometimes the growing malignancy of dishonest journalism is exposed on social media, which really ticks off those "established" J-school scholars.

Yes, Obama does have several serious challenges in his final year in office… but they are of his own making.

OK…I lied about the clichés, but only because we managed to elect a political cliché into office rather than a fresh and enthusiastic young person who offered “hope and change.”

Have a Majestic and Magical New Year!

By Dan Barber

Well, another year has passed. In the “big picture” what does that mean?

We are just a speck in the infinity of time and space traveling on a planet that is speeding through the universe along with our galaxy at nearly 830,000 miles per hour which means in the past year we have travelled a distance of more than 72 million miles…if my calculator has it right.

In addition, the earth has been spinning at the equator at around 1,000 miles per hour and orbiting our sun at more than 660,000 miles per hour. That is something that can make us dizzy, if we felt the motion.

Some people expect magical things to happen in their lives during the New Year. I posit the view that magical things are already happening to people all the time. We have an opportunity every day to witness a beautiful sunrise and sunset. In my own case,

I can view the majesty of millions of suns shining in the dark and clear desert sky. We can welcome the birth of our children and grandchildren giving us the opportunity to exist until the end of time. Everyone has the chance to find love or to live their lives in whatever fashion they chose.

To all, I wish for you to take the time to have the majestic and magical New Year you expect!

Happy Christmas Memory rerun: What I didn’t get for Christmas was the best gift of all

By Dan Barber

When I was six years old I asked Santa for a sled… When Christmas morning arrived I was bitterly disappointed because Santa mixed up my request. Instead of a sled, I got a pair of skis!

I lived with my family in Iowa at the time and I knew even at 6-years old that Iowa didn’t have any mountains where I could learn to ski! We had miles of corn fields, but not even a large enough hill as far as I could tell where I could use my new set of skis. We did have small hills that would work great for a sled, though!

To add to my disappointment that year I had begun to suspect that my parents were responsible for my Christmas gifts, not Santa! Mom was always so excited about Christmas and us kids getting gifts she would always break down and ask Dad to ask Santa to give us at least, one early gift if we were good. I kind of suspected that wasn’t an approved Santa rule, but I played along anyway because I always tried to be good so I could get an early present.

But on this particular Christmas morning after my Father, seeing my sad face about not getting a sled reassured me that we would put those skis to good use.

I had come to suspect that my Dad wanted me and my two brothers… no sisters or baby brother yet, to be athletes or bronc-busters because the previous summer he obtained two really mean untrained Shetland ponies. He told us that we could train those horses to give us rides. Our backyard became the hangout for all of the neighborhood boys. We would lasso one of the ponies and drag it to the picnic table and take turns trying to ride those mean horses. When we were thrown, which was all of the time, those horses would try to kick us, stomp on us or try to bite us before we could scramble back up on the picnic table! We never did train those ponies to give gentle rides like we were used to getting at petting zoos or carnivals. But Dad did convert our large garage into a horse barn to keep the ponies in during the winter.

That “barn” also became a great play area for us because we had hay to keep us warm during the winter and for the ponies to eat and straw on the dirt floor for the ponies to poop on. One of my jobs was to clean out the horse poop and pile it up next to the garage or barn so Grandpa could use it to fertilize his plants.

That “barn” also became an important part of my Christmas story.

To remedy the “no mountain to ski on in Iowa” my Dad started building a “ski ramp” from the roof of the barn to the back yard… he worked on it every afternoon after work and for a couple of weekends until he finally had it finished. My Mom was really worried about the dangerous looking thing in our back yard, but Dad reassured her not to worry because he would try it out before letting us kids play on it. Keep in mind that my Dad had never skied a day in his life, but he figured that he’d seen it done on TV and it didn’t look all that hard. Our Mother had totally gone gray haired by the time she was 30 years old. Dad said a lot of people go prematurely gray, Grandma said she went gray because of our Dad and us boys! By the way, Mom’s favorite color of hair dye was red.

Dad shoveled snow on our ski ramp and packed it down, I thought it looked kind of dangerous too. But after Dad piled on what he thought was the right amount of snow, he carefully surveyed his work, told us kids to stand back then he put a ladder up to the eve of the barn and carefully climbed up to the peak of the garage. He sat down and strapped on the skis. These skis were designed for really beginner kids from the State of Iowa… no ski boots, no bindings, no ski poles! Dad tested them to make sure they were properly attached to his feet, he then stood up and immediately turned around backward and slid off of our barn roof and landed in the snow-covered pony poop up next to the barn.

We kids were really concerned, we’d never seen anything like that before, Mom was really strange that day she was laughing and crying at the same time. Dad carefully got up, brushed the snow and pony poop from his backside and limped into the house and refused to allow Mom to call the doctor. But, before going to his easy chair, he did tell us to stay away from that dang ramp because it was too dangerous for us to play on.

We boys spent the rest of that Saturday trying to nail those skis onto a box so we could build a useable sled.

I didn’t get what I had asked for that Christmas I got something much better, knowing that I had loving Parents who really cared.

Merry Christmas to all!

Happy Birthday and Happy Anniversary Punkin!

By Dan Barber

The fun part of genealogy research is when searching through our ancestors roots we discover distant twigs on a family tree that spans an entire nation and maybe spreads across the oceans to foreign lands.

If the anthropologists have it right we are all related through our human DNA.

When I discover a “cousin” in some location where I have visited I think wow so close I wish I’d known then what I know now.

Perhaps our lives are planned out for us before we are born. I graduated from John A. Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, California in June 1968. Just a month later, on July 8, I obligated to join the United States Navy and met my future wife on the same day. How that happened is easily explained,  I visited my cousin Dale to tell him what I’d just done at the Navy Recruiting office in La Puente, Calif.

 To help out my other cousin Linda’s, new husband Lou, who she just eloped with to California from Nebraska I volunteered to drive him around so he could find a job.  Lou’s old car had broken down, therefore, the need for a ride to find a job so he could get his car fixed so I offered to help out. Lou said, “Hey, why don’t we stop in the Armed Forces recruiting office to see what they have to say.” 

The Navy Recruiter sold me on a career with the Navy, but Lou and Linda decided to move back to Nebraska to pursue other career opportunities, and to raise their growing, and successful family.

My future wife, Diane, was visiting her sister Cathy who was married to my cousin Dale. At the time, Dale and Cathy were living in an apartment in Baldwin Park, Calif. Diane was attending Poly Technical  High in Van Nuys, California and lived in the San Fernando Valley and I lived in the San Gabriel Valley. Geographically we were separated by about 50 miles with the huge city of Los Angeles in between. Diane was born in Santa Monica, California and I was born in Nebraska. The odds of us meeting were astronomical. On top of all that, in six months I was going to enter Navy Boot Camp on January 15, 1969. But in the interim everything worked out and we were married on December 13, 1969, in Norwalk, California.

At the time, I was stationed at Barber’s Point Hawaii. No, I couldn’t find any family connection, in my genealogy search, with old Captain Barber who sometime in the 1700s got lost and crashed his sailing ship into the point on Oahu that carried his name.

Because Diane was born in Santa Monica and grew up at the beach surfing she was thrilled to join me in Hawaii! We enjoyed a year-long honeymoon where we lived on a small farm, owned by an ancient old Japanese couple. We stayed in a cottage eaten up by termites and was only held together by the surplus paint I would drag home that Diane kept slathering on the place to make it look presentable.

The color was whatever was available from the dumpsters behind the hangar where I worked. It was the 60s so psychedelic was the "in motif" with alternating blue and yellow ceiling tiles and green trim around the windows and doors. Once, when I came home from work I sat down on the “throne” only to find myself stuck…Diane failed to warn me that she had just that afternoon decided to paint the toilet seat! She thought it was funny… however, I got a laugh once when I came home from work and found Diane stuck between two refrigerators we had in the corner of our living room. She fell there while painting the ceiling…again. Note: we had two refrigerators where we stored our food to keep the bugs and termite wings out of our food.

One time our Granddaughter overheard me tell Diane that if our heaven is where we spent our happiest time on earth then maybe we could spend our eternity in our Hawaiian cottage.  Our Granddaughter asked if she could come too.

Our Hawaiian home was a real paradise… we had a 10” black and white TV that we could squint at to watch the original “Hawaii Five-O” and wonder where those scenes were filmed. We had a large pillow we sat on in front of the TV. We also owned four wooden boxes that served as moving boxes when not being used as a bookshelf.  We could carry all of our earthly possessions in those boxes and they fit neatly in the back seat of our Volkswagen bug. Mr. and Mrs. Onahara supplied the two refrigerators and an ancient double brass bed with a lumpy mattress that made a huge racket “when we turned over in our sleep.”

I think that Mr. and Mrs. Onahara adopted Diane because she actually loved helping them take care of the farm animals. In the mornings, I would head off to work at NAS Barber’s Point and she would help slop the pigs, milk the goats and feed the chickens and a bull named “Fred.” After her farm chores were done, Diane would head off to the beach with her surfboard and her neighbor friend Laura. The beach was just across the Farragut Highway from where we lived in Waianae.  

Being in the Navy, we couldn’t expect to stay in any one place for very long. I received orders to report to a squadron at Whidbey Island, Washington. Shortly after our arrival there Diane found out we were pregnant! We were assigned Navy housing in a small cottage on a hill with a postcard view of the small town of Oak Harbor. I was promoted to Second Class Petty Officer so the Navy decided that we had to move to “better housing” which turned out to be “lousy housing” because we lost our postcard view and moved very close to the noisy runway at NAS Whidbey Island.

In December 1971, we celebrated our second anniversary and a month later our son Brian was born. Shortly after that, I deployed with my Squadron to Vietnam.

After about four months on deployment, a career counselor in my squadron informed me that I could reenlist in the Navy while in the war zone to get a “tax-free” bonus and orders to someplace else…done deal! I got my tax-free bonus and orders to NAS Sigonella Sicily.

Diane and I used most of the bonus to buy a new car (Ford Pinto) and a bunch of baby furniture to include a new washer and dryer…Diane only used disposable diapers on long trips, around the house Brian wore cloth diapers with rubber pants. Diane has always been very conscious of environmental hazards facing humans, except for sharks while surfing…she never thought about them back then. She left that worry up to me.

While in route to New York to ship our new car and catch a flight to Italy we stopped off in Arkansas for a visit with my paternal grandparents who had yet to meet their new Great-grandson and granddaughter-in-law.  Of course, my grandparents were interested in Diane’s family. She mentioned that her father Thomas Politz was from Greece and her maternal Grandparents names were Donald and Bernice Deeds, all now dead. My grandfather said that he had a buddy in Nebraska when he was a child by the name of Don Deeds…we thought what a coincidence.

Years later while working on our family history, I discovered in the 1910 Census  that my wife’s maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather, were in fact, neighbors when they were children living in Nebraska.

While in Sicily we celebrated our third wedding anniversary a month earlier on November 15th we were blessed with a second son, Christopher…perhaps we were influenced in naming him after another famous Italian, who got lost searching for a shorter sea route to India but instead “discovered” America.

Christopher was born at the Naval Hospital in Naples, Italy because, at the time, Naples was the only place in Italy where military people could have babies delivered. Diane’s doctor sent her there two weeks before the due date of our new baby to make sure she was at the hospital. The nickname for all of the pregnant women waiting for the birth of their children was "The Belly Brigade"… Christopher decided to show up two weeks late!

Diane expected me to keep Brian’s diapers laundered in her new American made washing machine that ran normally on American 60 cycle power… but ran real slow on Italy’s 50 cycle power…when the power was on. 

Diane instructed me to keep Brian clean and to keep a supply of clean diapers ready for frequent changing while she was off to Naples Italy to give birth to our second son. I had to hang the laundered diapers off our balcony like all the other Italian ladies in our Italian neighborhood did to dry. I didn’t see any husbands out hanging laundry.

 On the weekends, Brian and I would take a road trip from Sicily to Naples to visit Mommy.  I would drive our Ford Pinto as fast as it could possibly go up the auto strata while really fast German and Italian sports cars zipped past us. 

I still catch hell from Diane today, over 40 years later, for allowing our near naked two-year-old son wearing a droopy diaper and his ever present Army hat to become stinky and sticky on our road trips where I had to allow him to try to pluck out my arm hair. If I told him to stop, he would just start crying brokenheartedly. She even accused me of allowing Brian to become un-potty trained while she was gone… I swear I didn’t know he pooped in his Lincoln Log container while I wasn’t watching!  Those memories are still precious to me.

While in Sicily, I decided to try to teach myself how to write. It was an uphill battle to change myself from being borderline illiterate to literate. One of my shipmates in Sicily can attest to the fact that I was not a literate person. Once,  while on a Temporary Additional Duty assignment to Crete, with my shipmate and hotel roommate,  Joe, grew increasingly irritated with me while I was reading my English textbook out loud and had trouble pronouncing the word Adjective.  Actually, it was Joe’s fault that I became a writer. I once overheard him tell someone that I was intelligent! I wanted to prove to him and myself that I was.

Diane spent hours, days and weeks trying to help me master grammar. Thank goodness there were some really good editors who helped me out in my eventual career as a Navy Journalist, Publisher and finally as a civilian Navy Public Affairs Officer.

After a couple of years living in a wonderful and beautiful place, we had to say goodbye and head back to our “civilization” in California. Shortly after returning home we found out that we were going to have yet another baby. Our daughter Kimberly was born in Escondido, California on Friday the 13 of August… a blessed day for our family and four months before our sixth wedding anniversary.

I could go on about the experiences we had of being assigned to some great and some horrendous duty stations, but year after year 20 years flew by like nothing. Diane became a pretty good handyperson able to fix broken appliances as needed. She would haul kids to school, practices and to doctors appointments while she was not feeling well… it was the job of a Navy wife to take care of the family while I was off doing something else. I didn’t mean to take Diane and our family for granted because they gave me everything and they made my life have a purpose.

We had our ups and downs, but mostly ups because we had our family.

I thought that after I retired and settled down in the dusty little military town where I now live, my children would find their own adventures far from Mom and Dad. I was wrong, they also choose to live near Mom and Dad in a dusty little military town...I like to think of that as a tribute to the closeness of our family growing up in the Navy.

My children grew up strong and successful and despite moving as Navy Brats every couple of years they made lasting friendships with other Navy Brats and still talk and visit them when possible.

Just a couple of years ago I asked my daughter Kimberly what she remembered growing up as a Navy brat. I expected her to tell me about all of her adventures, but instead she said that she remembered me being gone all the time.  

I’m home now.

Happy Birthday, Punkin 12/12/XX and Happy 46^th Anniversary 12/13/69! Congratulations on making such a wonderful family as ours!

Love you!