What do we have in store for us?

By Dan Barber

I often think about this question. What I believe is what my father told me in a dream about two weeks after he died.  My brothers and I had to ask the staff of the hospital where he was on life support to end that support because he was never going to recover  and we knew he did not want to continue living that way.

That decision really bothered me until my father came to me in that dream. I asked him if we did right by removing his life support. He assured me it was the best thing because in his Heaven he was able to relive every joyous moment in his life over and over again as if for the first time.

I posed the title of this blog with the question “what’s in store for us” because my wife just found out his morning that her youngest brother, Bobby, had just died. We are sad that we won’t be able to see him anymore, but we are joyous that he will always be with us in our hearts. I remember Bobby as being a young child, because of my service I was separated from family for very long periods of time. We missed visiting some of our family members because geographic distance as well as the years that eventually came to separate us.

Bobby was the youngest of seven children. He was born prematurely by a very risky c-section delivery with no guarantees that he would survive for very long. The emergency c-section only gave Bobby a very slim chance at survival because his mother was dying from Leukemia. She was only able to hold her baby for a very brief time before she passed.

I believe that Bobby’s mother and father will welcome him to his Heaven and he will get to know them and he will get to relive his joys and share them with all his loved ones in Heaven.

It is very important that you “own” your family and friends… which means if you “disown” them you will have lost some very important memories and joyous moments in your Heaven.

What time is it?

By Dan Barber

What time is it... a simple question but with many answers. When I was a child and my Mom would tell be to get up out of bed and get ready for school, I might have been prompted to sleepily ask… “What time is it? She would respond, “It’s time for you to get your butt out of bed!”

Time is very important in our lives because we have a time when we are born, a time when we live, and a time when we die. Time itself may be eternal, or maybe not. The experts say that everything will end one day, but no one will be around to witness it. We weren’t around when time began, and I agree with the experts we won’t be around when the giant clock of space stops running.

I live in the desert and believe that the longer one lives in the desert the easier it is to be entertained, probably because there aren’t as many distractions out here as there are in a city.  I can sit in the shade for long times watching lizards do pushups on a hot rock. I can also stare at a huge granite boulder and wonder if it looked the same a couple of hundred years ago and will it look the same two hundred years into the future… when a giant boulder out here split in half a few years ago it was big news… at least to us here in the desert.

We have some of the cleanest air in Southern California and the night skies are light-pollution free, so I can stare off into space at night and wonder how small and insignificant we all are. When all is done and the grand ticking of our universal clock ceases the human existence will only have lasted for a fraction of a second… hopefully we will have left our mark by understanding and appreciating the time we’ve spent travelling through life, space and time.

Many philosophers in our history have sat and pondered the meaning of a lot of stuff, time being just one of the subjects. When I sit around pondering and enjoying stuff like hearing the laughter of my grandchildren playing, a clean blue sky or the antics of a desert lizard, some might think that I am just wasting my time… I don’t agree, I think that I’m enjoying my precious time because one day none of us will have any of it left.

What will they think of next?

By Dan Barber

I just discovered a new invention… a smart trash can!

Diane and I just went to the Commissary to pick up a few things we needed for our dinner tonight. For those who don’t know what a Commissary is, it’s a grocery store for military people. Anyway, Diane also needed to go to the “7-Day store”… military jargon for a convenience store that is open 7-Days a week… I am going to have to learn to speak and write using regular English when I retire next year… Sorry, I’m old and tend to be easily distracted which can cause me to ramble.

Anyway back to the new invention…I parked in a spot where Diane bumped into a cement trash can last year which caused very expensive damage to her computer operated vehicle (pick-up truck)… she is damn lucky the very expensive airbags didn’t deploy. I was able to wire her plastic bumper up to keep it from falling off and her hood wired shut so it wouldn't fly off while she was driving down the highway. The cement trash can didn’t suffer any damage.

The person in the 7-Day store who Diane reported the accident to said “Don’t worry we are going to replace those trash cans with “smart trash cans.” When Diane related that story to me today, I asked, “What in the hell is a smart trash can?” She said “it beeps when it’s full of trash.” I asked, “Can’t somebody who works at the 7-Day store like a “trash retrieval specialist” (janitor) just look in the trash can to see if it needs to be dumped?” This is an example of our conversations these days… Diane usually tells me something incredulous, and it might take me awhile to catch on.

A couple of years ago Diane bought a trash can that we don’t even have to touch to open. It has a sensor when you wave your hand over it, it opens. I explained to my younger grandchildren that the trash can in the pantry likes to eat little kids… and demonstrated it to them by waving their little hands over the lid of the trash can so it "could smell them." The demonstration scared the crap out of them and helped to keep them out of the pantry until they got a little bit older and discovered that grandpa is full of BS, rambling again, sorry.

I don’t think that I will purchase a “smart trash can” until they teach it to separate the regular garbage from the recyclable garbage, automatically roll out to the street without prodding on trash day so the “Trash Retrieval” truck driver can crush the smart trash can with a claw while he or she dumps it in the back of his or her truck.  Heck, the garbage can even stay in the can for a week as it won’t even stink… because I can line the trash can with the newly invented odor eliminating trash can liners!

I think the smart thing for the 7-Day store to do, would be to keep the cement trash cans so people can’t knock their expensive plastic “smart trash cans” out of the way so they can drive through the store… they would have to change the store’s name to a “Proceed Through the 7-Day Store”… in civilian speak “Drive-Through Convenience Store,” open 7-days a week.

Living Life One Day at a Time

By Dan Barber

The countdown has started. In the past few years I have tried to slow down and enjoy every day as it came. At times in the past I marked off days on the calendar like a mad man until a set goal or event was achieved. I finally realized by doing that I didn’t enjoy each of those days as I should have, they represented just another day.

Have you ever come to realize that chasing a goal was a lot more fun then actually reaching the goal?  Later in life I realized that if you find the greener grass on the other side of the hill you may have to mow it.

Sometimes my goals were well worth achieving. It might have been getting married, the end of a tour of duty with the Navy, it could have been graduating from a school, or the birth of a child… now it is the end of a career.  I will be retiring from the Navy for a second time on the final work day of September 2013… the first time I retired from the Navy was in July 1989 after serving 20-years on active duty. This time I will be retiring from the Navy after marking off another 20-year career, but this time as a civilian employee… in May of next year I will be getting a 40-year federal length of service pin, which will probably end up in the “junk” drawer with the rest of my career memorabilia… what is important to me is the fact that regardless of the consternation of some politicians I will start collecting 3 federal government pension checks, Navy, Civil Service and Social Security.

I look back on the days of my life thinking they have gone by in a flash… maybe I regret not taking the time each of those days to enjoy them as I might have at the time.  There are the memories of special moments in those days that I have saved in my mind that I hope won’t fade away.  For example one of those special moments I experienced was on an airliner as I was headed home from Vietnam, we were flying over the Pacific Ocean at night, and I swore to myself that I would not forget the reflection in the plane’s window at that time because it meant that I was headed home and it was one of the happy times in my life.

Maybe the days aren’t as important as the memorable moments are… the special moments we will always remember… it’s possible we won’t remember the date, time of day or even the year, but the moment will stay with us forever… when we met our spouse, (July 8, 1968… the same day I originally joined the Navy), the day when I first got to hold one of my children or one of my grandchildren.

There are the sad moments of course, but hopefully the millions of happy moments will outweigh the sad ones.  I mentioned in an earlier post that perhaps our experience in Heaven will be the ability to relive the wonderful moments of our lives as if it were the first time.  My father told me this in a dream about two weeks after he passed away… my Dad never lied to me.

That idea of Heaven sort of makes sense to me of having an eternal life without sorrow or worry, but only happiness.

When I start on my retirement career next year I may not have to mark off each day on the calendar, or even know what day of the week it is… hopefully on purpose. But I will strive every day to collect as many memorable moments that I can so one day… you know, experience them as many times as I want in my future ‘after-life.’ And in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy every working day that I have left.

What have I accomplished?

By Dan Barber

I believe that personal accomplishments come in many ways. When born we are an immediate accomplishment… of our Creator, we are also an accomplished dream of our parents and of those who will love us during our life-time.

I watch my grandchildren’s accomplishments continuously, when they learn new skills or use their imagination to entertain themselves or others. I am very proud to watch my granddaughter’s exceptional athletic accomplishments while playing fast-pitch softball… not only for her fielding or hitting skills but most importantly for the sportsmanship and kindness she shows to her teammates and rivals from other teams. All of my grandchildren are accomplished in their own way as individuals.

Other family members have accomplished skills that I can only envy… but in a way that makes me proud to be related to them.

I enjoy celebrating the accomplishments of my family, friends and co-workers. I am filled with pride when I see the young Officers and Sailors where I work when they receive recognition for their accomplishments while serving our country.  I feel a special privilege by being able to take photos of the awards ceremony to share with all.

In an earlier blog I might have mentioned that some people measure their life’s accomplishments with money or possessions. No one has figured out how to take their material wealth to the afterlife.  But we can be a bit immortal if we leave behind good memories of a life well-lived.  Will you be remembered for your kindness? I hold dear the kindness and joy my loved ones share with me, I would even say that they are richly accomplished because of that generosity of sharing with me. I can only hope that I can be remembered by my family and friends for having those same generous attributes.

Accomplishments are in us all.

What is true about our life or meaning?

By Dan Barber

The other day I had a conversation about faith with one of my granddaughters when she asked me what I believed… Did I believe in God or Science?

I explained that I believed in both because I feel that science cannot exist without God, and maybe God can’t exist without science. 

In the news recently a story was broadcast about some physicists working on trying to recreate the Higgs Boson also known as the “God particle”… or the spark that science claims created the universe in a “Big Bang.”  The scientists stated that they discovered the particle… but couldn’t really see the spark because it was rediscovered in a mathematical formula… we just had to believe they were right, in other words we just had to have “faith” that their discovery was real.

The other night on one of my favorite TV programs, one of the physicist characters told his physicist roommate that his mathematical formula only worked because he had to create several other universes to make it work.

“Faith,” another word or belief in something, or maybe the hope, that something exists without physical proof. I was told in my Sunday school class when I was a child that no one could see God, but we know that He exists, we just have to accept Him and have faith.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have a conversation with God everyday. I thank Him for allowing me to wake each morning so I can have another day of doing what I really enjoy.  I thank Him for the beauty of the Universe that he created from the wonderful “God Particle.”  I thank Him for creating this great planet for all his earthly creatures to live on. I thank Him for the conversations that I can have with my grandchildren who have the faith that their grandfather is mostly right in what he says. I thank God for the laughter of my grandchildren when they laugh at grandpa’s stories and jokes. I thank God that I can still learn from the wisdom of my family and friends.

Science says that we carry our ancestor genes, but I also believe that we carry on genetic memories. When my oldest granddaughter was a toddler I would take her out for a walk and observed when she would spot a pretty little pebble. She would stoop over pick it up, spit on it to see if it was shiny then if collectable put it in her pocket. When I was a child and my grandfather would take me on walks I remember seeing that same process, but then it was my grandfather, the avid rock-hound, doing the collecting.

Yes, I believe that God and Science are inseparable.

What is time, and how is time defined?

By Dan Barber

I just watched another one of those TV programs that tries to educate us in 60 minutes… no, not that program that has the stop watch running in the opening credits…

The program’s premise was, “Is time for real?” I don’t know if it is real or not, I do know that time is ‘relative’… old relatives think I’m young and young relatives think I’m old. My brain still thinks that I can do the same things I did as a kid, like throw a ball across a baseball field from right field to the left side of home plate on a straight line. I tried that once and only once because my arm didn’t cooperate and took about two weeks to stop aching. I tell my wife that if she tried to do that martial arts sweep kick to my face that she used to show off with, her leg would fly off from her body.

Time has a way of putting things into perspective for us. As we get older, it tells us that we have to put the brakes on to our youthful miss-adventures, for example we can’t jump off the roof of a house anymore without causing serious damage to our bodies.

Time also speeds up or slows down depending on our age. When I was 8-years old, it took the darn clock above the chalk board in my class room forever to reach the end of the school day. Also, it took forever for the school year to reach summer vacation. Then when class was dismissed for summer vacation it was a time for great celebration for us kids and Summer seemed to last forever for both kids and parents… then when school starts back in the Fall it was and is a great celebration time for the stay-at-home parents and a time of dread for the kids.

Fast forward 30 years and it is now time for the grandkids to be out of school and at home for the summer. When my daughter tells me that her kids are driving her crazy with their fighting, I just smile and say “payback is hell,” she replies by sending her fighting kids to my house for a time-out! My son also sends his kids to my house for a ‘vacation’… I’m not sure who’s on ‘vacation.’ I guess parenting is a life-long commitment.

I am now facing a dilemma. Next year I can choose to retire or continue working. My short-term memory is starting to affect my work, I can no longer multi-task like I used to. I have always made a practice of doing routine tasks immediately so I don’t have to worry about them later… the problem now is I forget that I did the routine task five minutes after I completed it… this goes on in a cycle 3 or 4 times each morning until I write a note to myself to stop!… it’s done!

I look forward to going to work every morning because the work I do I still find very interesting, I fear that I will become very bored if I stay at home everyday. Diane, my wife wants us to travel. She plans for us to buy a motor home and hit the road like Gypsies… I worry that we will get lost somewhere in Death Valley in the heat of summer and the motor home will break down. The grandkids worry that they will no longer have a place to spend their ‘time outs’ or Summer ‘vacations.’

Another worry that I have is that we won’t be able to afford to travel and we will sit around home every day getting really bored until the grandkids show up… time really slows down where there is nothing to do and there is too much to do.