Sherriff Meadows

Like so many others, I was saddened to learn that we had lost Sheriff Meadows. I got the call about his passing early that Friday morning while out of town. Even though I was on vacation, I had a hard time keeping my mind on the fun because my thoughts kept wandering back to my memories of the Sheriff.

When I first started working with him, I appreciated his manner. He would tell me what I needed to know. If there was something that would help me but didn’t need to be published, he was honest about that. He had a sense of humor that kept me on my toes but still made his point.

At one time, he was working on an investigation that I had questions about. It was extremely sensitive because it involved someone who was well-known. Leroy told me he would give me my information when he was ready for me to have it, and in the meantime he didn’t want anything about the investigation leaking out. I told him it was safe with me.

Wanting to drive the point home, he told me what he would do if the information got out before he was ready. He would send two of his biggest, meanest deputies to my house to draw and quarter me and then feed me to the catfish in the river.

"Have you ever seen how ugly those river cat are, little girl?" he asked me.
I laughed at him, assuring him that I had indeed seen them, and that I didn’t want to be fish bait. When the time came, he called me at home late one evening, telling me an arrest was being made at that moment, and to go write my story. I had kept my word, and he kept his.

Images and pictures and phrases and things he said to me over the years kept crowding through my head throughout the last weeks. He called me "little girl" so often that at times I wondered if he knew my name, but he never forgot Logan’s name.

He never liked me taking his picture, but tolerated it because I told him it was part of my job and part of his job. He seemed to have an expression of "can we get this done already" on his face in every picture I took of him.

If he could find a way to get out of me taking a picture of him, he would do it every single time. Which is why quite a few pictures I took in news stories about the sheriff’s department had some shocked looking deputies in them. They had just gotten recruited to stand up and take a picture they weren’t expecting to take. Off to side, Sheriff Meadows is smiling, because he just got out of taking picture he didn’t want to take.

Another thing I remember is how calm he was. We were talking on the phone one afternoon during stormy weather. He asked where Logan was. When I told him he was still at pre-school, Leroy told me to go pick him up. He told me his boys (the deputies of the department) had spotted a tornado in one area near Blytheville, with rotation in the clouds in another area. He had to get off the phone with me so he could go sound the sirens.

That memory sticks in my head because I left work, went and got Logan, and made it back to the drive-way of my home before the sirens sounded. It was probably 15 minutes from the time Leroy told me a tornado had been spotted until I heard the warning sirens.
Now, each time I hear the sirens I remember our conversation and wonder exactly how long ago rotation was actually spotted.

But I also remember that Leroy knew, even during our conversation about work related matters, that I would be concerned for my son. Yes, he needed to get his job done. However, he didn’t just hang up on me. He told me to go get my child, and get him to safety.

He took care of us first, before going on about his business. Which I guess is probably the thing I remember the most about the Sheriff. He just naturally took care of people as he went about his business.

Fighting the Fog

Yes, it’s me. I’m here. I haven’t disappeared, fallen off of a cliff, ridden off into the sunset or met with some other mysterious demise. Since it has been almost a month since I have written a column, I can understand how one would think such a thing.

The past few months have been hard ones for me physically. Writing shouldn’t be something that is hard to do, and usually it isn’t. But since my physical problems include my brain, sometimes just thinking hurts.

Since my editor prefers for me to think while I am writing, it was better for all of us if I skipped a few columns rather than writing in the condition I have been in. Trust us on this.

We just got back from another trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. That insures a few things. First, that I will be in what my husband calls the "Mayo Fog" a little longer. The Fog is a term we use to describe the week or so after my trips to the clinic. It is a long trip up and back, 12 hours one way. Mayo can do more to you in one day than most hospitals can do to someone in one week. Then we drive the 12 hours home.

My body reacts to all of that by essentially shutting down. We are so hyped up while we are there, doing everything we can as quickly as we can. For one thing, we want to be home. For another thing, even though insurance pays a portion of the actual treatment at the Clinic, nothing pays for the food, gas, and hotel bills while we are there. The faster we get it done, the cheaper it is. But mainly, I just like being home as opposed to being somewhere that the answer to every single question begins by getting poked with a needle.

We get home, and all that adrenaline fades. Completely. Totally. Into nothingness. I shut down, literally sleeping for up to 20 hours in every 24 hour period. I can do that for days, and we have discovered it is best to let me do that. If I don’t do it, I don’t recover as fast.

Eventually, the fog lifts and life gets back to what our normal is. Which isn’t normal at all, but works for us. That brings us to the second thing. I will get better. I won’t apparently get well, but I will get better than I have been doing the last few months. The doctors at Mayo did a little magic, a little switching and swapping. I am sort of a work in progress. So we have a few new options we are trying, and hopefully they will help.

The third thing may be another procedure at Mayo in June that I dread, hate, loath and detest. It hurts. Well, practically everything they do hurts, but this one is pretty much beyond my tolerance level. I don’t like it, I don’t want it, and asked my doctor not to do it this time. If the magic we are trying for the next eight weeks doesn’t work, I won’t have a choice. If it does, I will. Time will tell, and I am holding onto hope for the magic.

I already feel better. The fog is slowly lifting, and this past week has been better than the past few months have been. I guess that means you are going to have to get used to seeing me around here again.

That’s good, because I like being here.

Taxing Times

Talk about the times that try mens souls. I don’t know about mens souls, but my soul is a little worse for wear this week. I have been doing my taxes. But I feel like my taxes have been doing a number on me.

Maybe the operative word here is "number." They aren’t my thing. They never have been. Math and I have a longstanding controversial relationship. We hate each other. I try to be cordial, because we do have to get along sometimes. When I want to pay bills and balance the checkbook, for example.

Math, on the other hand, doesn’t even try to meet me halfway. It is always changing. It never says what I need it to say. It always disappears just when I need it most. When I want those numbers to expand, they decrease. When I need more, they become less. And math delights in playing hide and seek, especially when I need to balance the checkbook. A few numbers always run off and hide.

I’m a writer. I am not a number person. I have an innate distrust of people that can make numbers sit down and behave; to do what they are supposed to when they are supposed to. It just isn’t natural or normal. In fact, it scares me a little.

I have been dreading doing our taxes this year in particular. We always itemize, but we had what Turbo Tax likes to call some "life changes" this year. I have been putting it off, but I finally sat down this week to get it done.

It was a mistake. I am organized in the extreme about our taxes, because we do itemize. I save everything, and everything has a nice little folder, with labels and envelopes and sub-labels. So this should have been really simple. You just plug in the numbers, hit the buttons, and you are done. Yeah, right.

I got my stuff together, and sat down at 9:30 a.m. By 1:30 p.m., I was ready to either throw the computer or myself off the roof. We were having a distinct lack of communication. We moved this year, and in the process of moving I discovered things I thought I had right where I needed them had apparently moved somewhere else.

Every number I put in led to a new question, which led to a different piece of paper, which led to another question, which led to another piece of paper. That led to a search for more paper. Eventually, I ran out of papers I had, and had to search for papers I needed. That’s when things really got fun.

I couldn’t find what I needed, even though it should have been where it wasn’t. I detest not being able to find things. Gary had some information in his computer at work, but I couldn’t get in touch with him because he was at work. I couldn’t go forward, and I couldn’t go back. Offices that I could call to get additional information were closed because it was President’s Day.

By the time Gary called to see how my day was going around 2 p.m. things were bad enough that Gary probably regretted making the phone call. He advised that I back away from the computer. Slowly. Just walk away. Put it down. Carefully. Breathe in, Breathe out. He apologized, profusely, for ever mentioning that we needed to get around to doing our taxes. He apologized that anything as evil as taxes had ever been invented. He suggested I go take a nap. He suggested I go find chocolate. Anything, just as long as I stop what I was doing.

He promised I would never, ever have to look at the taxes again. He promised he would do the rest of them. He promised we would pack it all up and take it to a professional. He promised we would go out to eat that night.

It was not a good day. After I had calmed down a little, which took about four days, we tried it again. We found the paperwork we needed, and we slew the beast.

The taxes are finally done. Since one of the things Gary promised was that next year he would do it all, I’m not stressing about it. I am practicing, though. I may have to talk him down from the roof next year.

Valentine Views

Yesterday was one of my very favorite days. I know a lot of people think Valentine’s Day is just a created holiday to sell things, but I like celebrating love. It is easy to get so busy in the day to day things of life that you don’t take time to tell people how you feel. Having a day set aside forces you, or should, to take that time.

Valentine’s Day has always been pivotal in my life. In elementary school, we made presents for our parents, then had to give out Valentine’s to every other kid in our class, whether we liked them or not.

We got rewarded by parties back then, in the olden days, with cupcakes and cookies our moms made and brought for the party. I know, hard to believe in this modern, home-made goodies are evil day.

As a teen-ager, I held my breath wondering if "that" guy knew I existed, and would prove it on Valentine’s Day. I still remember the time in junior high school when I got brave and sent the object of my affections something to let him know he was the object of my affections.

Unfortunately, he had no clue that I even existed, and wasn’t too impressed that I did exist once he discovered who I was. He and his friends had a good laugh at my expense to my undying and never-ending humiliation. Which lasted about three days until I got mad instead, and decided he wasn’t worth undying and never-ending. Perspective is a marvelous thing.

As I got older and my affections were returned, the day got more fun. Not only between me and whoever happened to be the significant other in my life at the time, but with family and friends also. By nature, I want people important to me to know that. A day that has stores filled with hearts, balloons, stuffed animals, silly things, serious things, flowers, candy, and anything else you can imagine helps me get my point across.

The most important Valentine’s Day was the one sixteen years ago. Gary proposed that day. We had been dating two weeks. It sounds outrageous, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt absolutely normal, and right, and good.

After 16 years, I look back and wonder at the fact that when we married, I loved him. But it was nothing compared to what there is now. I didn’t think it could be any deeper, or richer, or sweeter than what it was then. But it was only a small fraction of what we have now. Sort of like wading in the kiddy pool as compared to having the entire ocean to swim in.

It humbles me. I am so blessed in so many ways. Gary is beyond description as a husband and a father. I had no doubt he would be, but he goes even further than I expected. There is love, there is honor, there is respect, there is admiration. There’s not a whole lot of obedience, on either side. Since we are adults, neither one expects it. But mainly, we have so much fun together.

Most of that fun comes from trying to get Logan to adulthood. It’s a challenge. He is a unique person, this son that is so much his father, yet so much an individual. There are very few dull moments in our house. Crazy, mixed up, and bizarre, yes. Dull, no.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s a good chance no one else would have it either, which is fine with me. It doesn’t have to work for anyone else, it just has to work for us.
Since it does, I celebrated this Valentine’s Day with my very best friend. As an added bonus, we got to watch Logan’s eyes roll and hear him make gagging and choking noises while we exchanged gifts, kisses, hugs, and other things. Part of the fun is making the kid run to his room in disgust. In our house, you get extra points for grossing out the teen-ager.

Now we just have to figure out how to top ourselves for next year. Seventeen years for us, and Logan will be 14. He may be harder to make run next year. Gary and I are a team though, and we are committed to winning. My money is on us.


*****
There are volunteers from the Presbyterian Church in my neighborhood, cleaning up the absolute mess left behind. They are doing a terrific job. They are friendly, professional, and working just as hard as they can from morning to late afternoon. They are cutting trees, hauling limbs out to the curb, and probably doing a lot of other things I don’t know about. I do know they are most appreciated. Thanks, guys!

In Praise Of Power

Power. Beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous, lovely power. We have it. After seven days, we got it back, and I will never take it for granted again.

We cheered the utility trucks as they moved closer and closer to us, and applauded the morning they were directly in front of our home. I did a happy dance and there was a great deal of rejoicing when we got power, then a bit of booing when it went back off a few hours later.

Every time I see a lineman or a utility truck, I want to pull over and say "thank you, thank you, thank you." I know better than to distract them, but I am so glad for the job they are doing for us in our time of need.

Speaking of doing jobs for us; I can’t say enough about the local emergency and volunteer workers in my particular area. The night of the ice storm, a giant tree in my yard just kept losing large parts of itself. Another tree came down on my carport.

I don’t know who all of them were. Some of them were Gosnell police officers, some were volunteer firefighters, some were utility workers with spotlights, some were Westminster Village security. All of them ran up and down the streets in this area, repeatedly, with their big lights on checking for damage.

My gigantic tree fell close to the corner of my home, and looks like, from the road, that it is on my home. I noticed a spotlight shining through my backyard from the road. Several minutes later, there were men in my yard, checking to make sure we were okay, not trapped, and the tree was not in fact on my house.

An hour or so later, I got a call. Security was letting me know that lines and poles were down in my yard, tangled up with the tree, and I needed to careful if I went outside.

Since we didn’t have power, the only show to watch was the one outside the window, and it was something to see. They made a continuous circuit with their bright lights and flashlights and spotlights, stopping to check out anything that looked dangerous. They stayed on the roads all night, up and down and around, over and over and over again. They had to be cold and exhausted. They probably wished they were in their own homes.

Added to that, what they were doing was dangerous. Trees and power lines and poles were snapping constantly, falling into the very roads they were driving. I knew it was bad that night. With the light of day, it was worse. It made what those officials were out there doing all night even more heroic.

For the guys that spotlighted my house, thank you. For the guys that checked to make sure we weren’t trapped; thank you so much. We weren’t, but if we had been I would have appreciated knowing you were there to rescue me. For the guy who called me and told me to watch out for the lines in my yard, thank you. I take my dog out at night, and may not have noticed amid all the rubble.

For every officer, every fireman, every lineman and utility worker and volunteer and official that is working to get us through this, thank you. We were in a mess, and because of you all, we are getting through it. This particular citizen appreciates it, more than I can say.