Running Out Of Time

Running Out Of Time: The message nearly three year ago was ominous. Very aggressive prostrate cancer is not a message about life ending tomorrow, maybe not even for the next few years, but it is a message that your life is going to change. Develop a plan and execute it, and hope for the best.

So my plan was to block testosterone for two years, go through two HD radiation treatments that pretty much wipe out the gland, do 20 external beam radiation treatments, and see what happens. The radiation had side effects, but they were all within reason. The hormone block was hell, and the effects lasted for over two and a half years.

Testosterone is the chemical that my body almost shuts down, without. It is hard to describe the total loss of energy, and the way that your muscles, especially in your legs, always feel. They sort of hurt always, and they hurt a lot after a little use. The emotional ride is no less devastating. I cried more in that two years, plus, than I will cry in the rest of my life. I lost my temper with people, and spent a lot of time composing myself.

Now, the testosterone is back, but so is the cancer which was dependent upon the testosterone. Soon, it will no longer be dependent and that day could be any time now. So, next week, we start blocking the testosterone again, or we enter some form of chemotherapy. It all depends on how fast the cancer is growing. We have to find out if we can find where it is growing, it could be anywhere, and that means tests of all sorts.

No more radiation is possible. The testosterone block, if we go that route, will take me back to a world that is nearly unbearable. Chemotherapy, if we take that route, will reek it own kind of havoc. The end game is about to start, and so this couple of months that I have now are really precious to me.

I had hoped that we could use them to the maximum by spending as much time as possible with grandchildren. But, that did not happen. As a matter of fact, this has been two of the loneliest months of my life. Sarah has been in a lot of pain and spent most of her time in bed. The weekends, except for one when we went to the mountains to spend time with Stephanie, our daughter in law, and her children, have been mostly me trying to make a very quite house a friend that it was never intended to be.

So, my two months of feeling pretty good are almost over and they were pretty well wasted. If Sarah feels like it, we are going to not waste the next two weekends. Treatments should not affect how I feel that much for a while. Next weekend is a quandary. We had planned to meet Stephanie and Brian and the Children at Grandfather Mountain, but David, Kate, and the boys could not come down this weekend and they may be able to the next weekend. The weekend after that, we have reservations to meet with some of our old college friends in Boone.

But, time is running out. When we find out what is coming, we can not go back and fill the time we lost, it is just lost. I know what is probably coming, and it scares me a little. Oh, I am ready to die, if and when that comes. I have lived a full life and I understand the contract we are given at birth.  But, the twilight between now and then is coming. Feeling good is a passing moment, and entering that twilight to never see the full light of life again is much tougher than death. It is the coming of that time that I refer to when I say that time if running out.

Loved, Completely

     She lies down beside me in bed and I reach for the telephone and play Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me by Mel Carter, and we sing it together. Then we go on to Saturday Night at the Movies by the Drifters. I play My Girl by The Temptations and when we get to the those words in the song, she bellows out, My Guy. It is a ritual we repeat often.
     Sometimes, she dances for me to the music or we dance together to Mel Carter. That line, "They never stood in the dark with you love, when you take me in your arms and drive me totally out of my mind," and the scent of her hair, with her body pressed against me, is almost more than I can emotionally handle. I want, terribly, to cry.
     Sometimes the singing goes on for half an hour while we hold hands or I turn and put my arm around her. Then I say something that is so arrogant that I dare not allow anyone but her to hear, "We are so lucky to have found each other." I qualify that to make sure that I have not said that she is lucky to have found me. I am not that arrogant.
    Walking around in our yard, holding hands, I stop and turn to her and say, "We did it didn't we  Sarah?" I do not have to further explain myself for she immediately says, "Yes we did." Those visions of a good life, of children of strong character and positive outlook on life, of good friends, of helping build a community so that our children could benefit from the lives of others worthy of teaching them, of grandchildren given a great start in life, and of daughter-in-laws who loved our sons and shared their visions, all of that happened.
     How fortunate I and we have been. It is at this point that many would go into how God did it all and how all the glory goes to Him. The part about the glory going elsewhere, I have no problem with that. But, God gave Sarah and I free will and souls that no one was to enslave. He sat us free to make on this Earth the best that we had to offer. I do not want to disturb my religious friends but God did not do the day to day work that Sarah and I put into this life. He opened the door, but we had to walk through, and it is in not doing that that so many fail.
      But, for a love to grow into what Sarah and I have, there is another element of our mutual lives that had to be nurtured daily. You see, love and good fortune has to be shared with others or it is only a self serving game we are playing. Having both taught school for twelve years, we started out with a desire to share our lives with others, so it was no stretch to let that part of our mutual lives grow and become an integral part of our union.
     And, it is not just working through the Optimist Club or church, it is a total commitment to share with others wherever we are. It often takes the role of making a waiter or waitress know that they are special people. It is about getting someone we meet along the road to talk about their children and grandchildren. It is finding people who need our help and jumping in with all four feet. It all makes the bond between Sarah and I much stronger, and adds a lot of fun to our lives.
     So, when she lies down beside me tonight, there is nothing about her nor nothing about me that the other is not a part. We really are one, and that oneness is a feeling that no one can understand unless they have such a relationship. It is worth spending a life to build. It is as close to Heaven as we get on this Earth.
    

The Big "C"

     I am now in the nineteenth month of a two year hormone(testosterone) block. I have prostate cancer, the kind that get you pretty fast. My Gleason scores are nines and I had twelve of twelve positive biopsies. The treatment had to be radical, but removing the prostate was not an option. I had twenty-five external beam radiation treatments and two high dosage radiation treatments in the summer of 2014.
     The hormone block has reeked havoc on my body. Slowly I lost energy until I reached the point at which I am today. I have almost no energy and my muscles hurt when I tire them, which takes little exercise. Yet, the hardest part for me is knowing that my three sons are going to be very prone to such a cancer. I spent a life trying to pass on every good thing I could to them, and now I have to face that I am also passing on a condition that could kill them before their time.
    I joke about getting to sixty-nine in sixty-nine years and to eighty in the next year, but that is sort of what it is like. I never make judgments on how old I look, but I am constantly told that I look ten years or so younger that my age of seventy-one, later this month. But however I look on the outside, I am an old man on the inside, if old age is loss of energy.
     But, we all live two lives, the ones our bodies live and the ones our minds live, and I am still very young up there. I do not think like most old people I know. Listening to The Drifters singing songs like; "Saturday night at eight o'clock, I know where I'm going to go, I'm going to pick my baby up and take her to the picture show;" I can get all worked up wanting to relive those days. I want everybody to know and enjoy what I enjoyed then. Life was so easy then and the girl at my side was always a princess to me. We did not walk, we floated down the street.
     So now, that passionate person, that eternal optimist in my mind, it is all still there. The big "C" has not robbed my brain of one iota of the love and lust for life that filled my younger days, though it is robbed my body of so much.
     In all of the treatments and tests, only one, MRI, was an intolerable chore. Otherwise I made a lot of new friends and actually enjoyed to process. Well, the catheters were no fun for sure. But the two high dosage treatments where I was asleep for five hours each, were interesting experiences. The twenty-five external beam treatments were fun, really fun. I hated they were over and gave the five people who were there most of the time crystal Christmas tree ornaments with an angel engraved on them.
     I have a great appreciation that however bad some of this has been, there are millions of people who are going through worse physical experiences. And the ones who can do that and still be an inspiration to others humble me. I never asked, "Why me, Lord?" I hope I would never be so small. of mind and spirit.
     And, during all this, my younger brother, Kevin, still in his mid-fifties, has suffered from debilitating dementia. He can no longer take care of himself and needs to be somewhere where he can be cared for. As the old Hank Williams hymn says, "his burdens are greater than mine." I am the lucky one.
     The big "C" will never win for it can not kill my spirit. That is all that really matters.
    

Why Do You Want To Hurt Union County Schools

North Carolina Legislature and Stupid Laws:

The following is a letter I submitted to the Monroe Enquirer Journal for publication on 7/31/2013.

      

Letter to the Editor                                                                             August 1, 2013

The Enquirer Journal

      

     Most of the laws enacted by our present North Carolina legislature were expected, but a few were not only unexpected, they sort of boggle the mind.  So, here is my question, with background.

     Why did our three legislators want to hurt Union County Schools, the very magnet that has made Union County so attractive to the outside world?  The new laws will hurt our schools, immediately and for years to come. One very revealing part of the law, the part that stops payment for advanced degrees, was nothing but political payback and strikes at the core of what it is to be a dedicated teacher.

     Teachers who want to remain in the classroom have one career advancement possibility, higher pay.  Therefore the most motivated teachers will seek higher degrees in most cases. They also get national certification, which gives a small bump in salary.  People may not enter teaching for the money, but they are as motivated to earn salary as any worker.  People who have paid for the extra year of college will not come to North Carolina to teach.  We have tried for years to increase the quality of the people entering teaching, and in one stroke, that is over!

     I know the chorus to their song; “We were doing this to increase the effectiveness of our schools.”  That is absurd! 

     When I saw the part of the law that told teachers that they could not get more money for higher degrees, I remember what Mrs. Clyde Collins, assistant to Superintendent Dan Davis and my second and third grade teacher, told me in 1966.  “Aubrey”, she said, “you do not want to teach here because the people here do not care about education.”  As Yogi Berra said, seeing what this legislature did, was daja vous all over again.

     Here is an angle that really makes the decision strange.  This was suppose to be a jobs legislature.  The geography of North Carolina, with its hundreds of small towns, most of which once depended on textiles, tobacco, or furniture for jobs are what is dragging our employment numbers down. Many of these towns are dying and their unemployment rates are very high.  We do not trail other states in employment because of our tax structure, it is because our three primary industries that built these towns are gone, mostly to China. Union County and Monroe are perfect examples.

     So what is keeping Union County employment better than most counties?  People coming here to start their own businesses is a prime reason. What is Union County’s biggest draw? Far and away it has been its public schools. Our Union County legislators not only voted against our schools, they also voted against business development in the county by doing so.

     I have lived through more geniuses telling us that they know how to fix schools than I care to recount.  Early in my career, it was the schools without walls, straight from England.  Since then every savior wannabe has had some theory, with the latest being “No Child Left Behind” based on contrived data from Texas schools. Now ALAC and the North Carolina legislature have delivered this “new beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.”

     You might be able to go into Charlotte and argue that the voucher program is a good thing, but I doubt it.  For Union County, it is a loser.  There is no way you are going to get better private schools than the public schools we have here, not even in Monroe.  This decision makes no sense for our county.

     And, will these new ways of funding schools hurt the education that your children will get here in Union County?  With all due respect to the professionalism of our faculties, it has to hurt because the jobs of people have been threatened for no good reason.  I have two sons and a daughter-in-law teaching in other places, all with master degrees, two with national certification. You should hear what I hear from them.

     This breaks my heart.  Sarah and I prepared our children well for teaching if they so chose.  They want out, now!!!  The one in Pennsylvania was to move to North Carolina in a couple of years and that is now a dead issue, he would have to take a $15,000 drop in salary since he can not get paid on a masters degree here by then.  

      Every teacher has a story, and every story is built on hopes and dreams and hard work.  This legislature just told them that they do not matter.  You figure out whether your children will have as good a school to go back to this year.  It doesn’t take a genius to see the answer. Our local legislators voted to make sure they are put on a death spiral.

Aubrey Moore

3901 Wesley Chapel Rd.

Matthews, N.C. 28104

704-283-1805

Aubrey.moore@gmail.com

      

      

    

      

 

    

    

    

     I want to return to at least get one thing out of the way and to explain as best I can to my children the nature of my relationship with my brothers now that our parents have been deceased for several years.
     With Donnie, the relationship is basically unchanged.  We see each other on occasion and Nancy was there with me the day that Sarah had her operation.  I think that both Donnie and I are satisfied with the relationship as it is and I see no reason that it should change.  We are very different animals in the political and religion areas, but we are brothers first and I trust that we will both find ways to put those differences aside.
     Wayne?  Not so much.  To say that I put up with a lot of really awful things said about me by Wayne, during the time of our parents sickness, is putting it mildly.  I learned some things then that made me know that our relationship probably had come close to an end.  Wayne lives in a world that I neither respect nor feel is healthy.  While Donnie talks at his children too much and with them not enough, Wayne talks at everybody and with hardly anyone.  He is the classic dominant male who knows little more than what it takes to sate his desires, his wants, his needs, and most of all his prejudices.
     I tried to let Wayne know that after our parents were gone, the day of his entering my world with all his domination was over, and it had gone fairly until this past May. Then on my facebook page he burst forward with his childish attempt to make me look like some sort of babbling fool.  It really hurt because he did so by getting into a word battle with a fellow that I have tried very hard to befriend, an artistic fellow that I taught in high school forty years ago.  Bruce, his name, was backing up like crazy but Wayne, unaware of anything but his own need to show people how smart he is, kept coming at Bruce.
     That was the last straw as he had thoroughly insulted me in his own house at Christmas a couple of years ago by giving me some information about spontaneous generation of oil in the crudest way possible, as if he were teaching me how on the wrong track I was.  A couple of other events, also in his house, and you get the picture.  He only quit sending me anti-Obama e-mail junk when I told him that I just trashed it.  There is going to be no new relationship between us and so, it is better for both of us that it just end.
     This is a tough one.  I can truly say that there was no relationship that I had, outside of my immediate family, that could have meant more to me to be able to sustain that my relationship with Wayne.  There is not a day that goes by, and will not be until I die, that I do not completely regret that we could not find the common ground that could have led to our being friends.  But, he once told me that I could never be his friend and he listed his friends for me like a little child might to hurt another little child.
     Kevin?  I finally got tired of being ignored and used.  I, more than his mother, father, or anyone else, took care of him as a baby and small child.  Much of the animosity that Roger had for me when he was alive came as a result of my defending Kevin from him for years.  After I quit teaching and started working with our parents, I put up with his antics for a while.  I defended him from our father, when he tried to fight Kevin, who I so irritated that he got a handgun and told me that he would blow my brains out if I ever touched him again.
     I never tried harder with anyone, including my own children, to build a good working relationship, than I have tried with Kevin, but it is just never going to happen and at this time in my life, Sarah and her medical problems, two children living far away, three grandchildren that I want to see as often as possible, and just a lack of energy have made me say that if my relationship with Kevin is over, then it is over.  I love and wish he, Liz, and George all the best things in life, but I fear I will not be there to share them.
    I want everyone to know this.  I hold no animosity toward any of my extended family.  I do not feel that any of them have let me down or anything of the sort.  We grow, we experience, and we change.  I told Wayne that he was free to come to my house anytime, he did not have to call first.  If he comes, I will treat him with the same respect that I would treat anybody who comes in peace.  But, I will never enter his house again until the relationship is reset onto the basis of mutual respect.
    I have a thing about the true anti-Christ, Ayn Rand.  I have no respect for the world that she wanted men to follow her into.  Too many of our Christian churches today are really Ayn Rand temples and have little or nothing to do with the Bible that they profess to follow.  In the corporate world, it is hip to be an Ayn Rand apostle.  Our common humanity and common dependence are things of which I have always been proud to call myself a part.  I think that I have worked as hard as most men and been more independent that most who call themselves her apostles.  In the traditional and Biblical sense, I am confident that my life has been in tune with the classical traditions of humanity.  But, I certainly would not hold up my life as a model for anyone.
     The worst insult that I have sustained in my adult life was when Wayne tried to tell me that I should be like one of the Ayn Rand cone heads and do things like them.  That is roughly the equivalent of having two enemies over to dinner, slaying one and feeding him to the other to make him a better person.  I sort of knew at that moment that we had grown so far apart that there was little chance of our ever reconciling.  But, our parents final days were what was important, and then and many other times, I ceded to Wayne and went on.
    When I was letting him know that our relationship was over, I finally told him that he was a damned bully and that I spent years in mental fear of him because I really never wanted to fight him.  He did not get the message and so I called him a goddamn bully.  I think he got the message.
     I trust the reader to figure out that when two people have a falling out, two different stories will come forward as the reasons.  I make no apologies for the fact that this is coming from my point of view and that I have not been analytical of how I could have made things better.  If you want to know that, you will have to ask my brothers.

     

Hello Again Hello

I had to take off several months to get my head working again toward this blog and developing a voice for those things that have become important to me as a sixty-something year old man who is still working and involved.

I do not think that the posts will be all that much different except I have decided to not be so timid about some of the things I have to say. Maybe I feel that my time is running out and I have to be a little more forceful, or maybe I am just getting older and feel less restricted.

But, I also have interests that I want to talk about and experiences that I want to relate. I want to carry forth on some of the ideas that I developed doing the feature articles for the local papers. I want to address topics that relate to my work, custom draperies.

I will not name names of clients or identify them in other ways. Professionalism demands that I not do so. But you will definitely get to meet some people like some of my past clients and I think that you will enjoy those.

I am a story teller by nature and I have gotten to know only few people who were not worth a good story. Clients, people that I have come to know through my community involvement, students from my years of teaching, and yes, even family will share the pages as time passes.

It is good to be back.

I

I was reminded today, in the midst of one of the saddest times of recent years, just how lucky I have been in the associations that I have formed in business. The funeral of the son, and only child, of my primary business associates, Connie and Morrison Brown, was an occasion that took two people in shock from the completely unexpected event, and demonstrated to them that business customers are as good a source of strong friends as are any other aspects of one's life.

My father and Morrison worked together long ago at what was then called a Cabinet Shop, Wade Manufacturing Company. Morrison was a designer and my dad worked a bench, where the various furniture and fixtures were built. The close relationship between designer and craftsman, necessary in such a business, served Morrison well. Later as a designer in his own business, he would seek out those craftsmen like my father to help him with his projects. By the time that Morrison was doing his own work, my mother and father ran their own custom drapery shop. Their association started about three years before I went to work with my parents.

I soon bought out the drapery business and in the combined businesses, I now have a 32 year working relationship with Morrison and Connie. In some capacity, and often central to the project, I have been there in 80% of the projects that Morrison has tackled over the years. So long as I work with Morrison, then I am a part of Brown's Interiors, but having been a teacher and having a rather outgoing personality, I have developed strong relationships with many of those people.

Morrison set a standard for an exceedingly high level of professionalism on all his projects. Those of us who came in to take care of the various aspects of delivering the product sold and anticipated were always mindful that we had to maintain those professional standards. A few of us had extended contact with the customers on different levels. I probably fell somewhere below the finish carpenter and the carpet man in that respect, but my product was always the most visible, the last to be installed, and often the most anticipated. In reality, I thrived on the pressure to finish off the project with no dropoff in customer satisfaction from the day the project was given a go and a substantial monetary deposit was made. We were playing with big bucks, and customer dissatisfaction could quickly sour a whole project.

Many of the people that we have worked for over the years were at the service to honor Chess Brown, the deceased son. They came because they felt almost as close to Morrison as family. He had indeed reached across the usual boundaries of the client/designer association and become a valued friend.

And, it seems that I also had been able to pass through that line with many who hugged my neck and told me how wonderful it was to see me again, asked questions about my family, and generally showed a real interest in my life. I treasure those associations as much as I treasure the friendships that lie outside my work world.

Craftsmanship and service have taken a real beating over the last many years. The market for the really good work that is related to interior design has grown smaller and smaller. Most of us who are still in the business have seen our potential customer bases shrink by 90% or more. Many of the people who could be producing first rate products have taken to producing second rate products to increase that potential customer base. Today, I get more work in Blowing Rock than I get out of the whole of Union County. I have watched as even the wealthy have often gone the cheap, second rate, route in homes that cost them millions of dollars. It is sad, to say the least.

One of my favorite mental images took place in an apartment where a carpenter and the wealthy widow who was having work done to redo the living room of her apartment, pushed aside the clutter of reconstruction, put a linen tablecloth over a work table, and sat on two work benches to have their wine and finger sandwiches while they talked of an opera both had seen in New York. It tells me that we can indeed span the usual lines of relationships and be rewarded in the process. I have seen many variations on this theme over the years and have even had a concert pianist play classical music for me on her baby grand while I hung draperies in her large music room. That same lady's daughter walked and talked with me through the receiving line after the service. Good friends are where you are willing to make them.

Two years, almost to the date of Chess's death, Connie died from the cancer that had been there for several years.  Morrison is by himself, confused, and unable to take care of himself.  This has to be one of the saddest situations that I have ever seen.  Brown's Interiors, Inc. no longer exists and the lot of us are scattered..