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..

Health Insurance Death Sprial

Get away from healthcare and let the insurance system die a natural death in the marketplace. What we are watching as insurance premiums go up and up is actually what Paul Krugman called its "death spiral." The announcement by one provider that it would raise the premiums of all the independent insurance holders in California by 30% is a statement that their model is failing. In fact, it failed long ago by any honest assessment.

Why is Wellpath raising the premiums by such a large amount. Irritated at Fox News for suggesting that they were doing nothing but giving the Democrats red meat in this battle, one Wellpath executive told the Fox listeners why this was happening. Of course no one listened. This attempt to bring needed repairs to our system has produced nothing but hypocricy, irrational screaming, and outright demogogory on the right side of the political aisle. What is it that these people will not face?

Here is what the insurance executive tried to tell Fox News. At the present level of premiums, so many well people have decided to go uninsured that the ratio of well to sick has fallen and thus put more pressure for taking care of the sick onto the sick. In other words, if you have medical needs and buy insurance, then the amount of your medical bills that you are going to have to pay has risen because there are less well people in the pool to help pay your bills.

Here is what the insurance executive did not tell Fox News. At the elevated premium level after the 30% increase, Many fewer people will buy insurance, because they can not afford it, making the burden heavier on the sick, which will produce more increases, which will lead to less people buying insurance. The death spiral actually started about fifteen years ago and is accelerating. In the last year, two million more Americans have been dropped from the insurance premium paying population, either by the companies because they were costing too much or because they found they could no longer afford the premiums. Flush your toilet friends and see what is happening to the system that we have.

Indeed, market forces are going to be the downfall of the health insurance industry if we do not interfere to prop them up, and that is what the present Democratic bill has done. Forget all of the garbage about Obamacare and all the other mindless chatter about people in the government deciding who gets what care. That is the garbage of the mindless. What is happening is that we are seeing that the marketplace can not adapt to contridictions that are inherient in the whole health insurance and healthcare monster. When maximums are achieved at one location it is only because of extreme and undesirable deficiencies at another location in the complex system. When profit is the primary motive of all business interests involved, then "you win-I lose " situations multiply. When you ask some guy in Des Moins to pay $1,500 per month so someone in Kansas City can be cured of cancer, and then next year you demand $1,950 per month from that man because the guy in Chicago quit paying the $1,500 he was paying, and the next year to ask for $2,400 from the guy because the guy in Dallas also quit paying his money, then the guy in Iowa is going to figure out sooner or later that he is getting suckered. Many of our citizens have already figured that out and more and more are doing so. That is the death spiral.

So, I propose that we get as far away from health care as we can get. I openly suggest to all who see themselves as non-users of insurance benefits to quit paying the tax, since it is optional. Let this system die a natural death inside the free marketplace, because, left to itself, it will die. Moreover, it will do so within the next ten years. Put all the money you might put into health insurance into a healthcare savings account, barter, deal, and do whatever you have to do to reduce the costs you do incur. It is time to let these self righteous ideologues and their system die. Let the marketplace work.

A Little Loss of Courage

Merle Haggard sings a song he wrote, "Mama's Hungry Eyes", in which he has the line, "just a little loss of courage as their age began to show." Over the last several years, and especially as it applies to my own father, this line has hit home in ways that I never would have considered. There are often a lot of ways to describe a single series of events, and the poet that finds the most meaningful or tersest description certainly may own rights to the naming of that series of events. I think that Merle owns the naming rights to the events that I saw in my father, and am sure are repeated in the population over and over.

My father, like most people, was many people and I certainly do not have ownership of the total Clyde Moore. But, no one can deny that he was a driven man who saw the world as standing in his way. His central daily task was to use machete, fists, verbal assault, or whatever it took to cut for himself a way through that jungle growth that was composed of every kind of vine hostile to his ambitions. He was a fighter and his first thought about you or anyone else that he encountered was that you were put there to be outdone, outsmarted, out-fought, or outworked.

Sometimes I use the word "bully" to describe him. If you show me your definitions of a bully, then I can certainly show you how Clyde Parks Moore fit those definitions. The thing that bothers me so much today is that I can also show you those same characteristics in varying degrees in all his sons, including me. But, the word bully has such a limited scope, and omits so much of the man, that to just call him a bully would be unjust, and simply not sufficient.

So what happens when a man with the drive of my father finds that he no longer has the physical and mental prowess to meet the world on his terms and must subjugate his will to the will of others? What happens when he finds that it is not his drive but his undeveloped skills of negotiation that will best help him accomplish his goals? What happens when he has no choice but to wait upon others and their schedules to get the help he now has to have to simply get from here to there?

Before I go on with this, let me say that as my father was in the throes of his severe loss of abilities, just when he had to rely upon others for help, there were complicating factors with my mother and her condition that set up terrible clashes between he and I which should never have happened. But, I was the last person that my father gave up on bullying for a bunch of reasons, and those clashes happened. I am not writing this as some sort of absolution of my own sins. I should have been smarter, but I was not.

Nothing about my father's last years bothered me so much as his giving up on the courage that drove him for so many years. He began to surrender that courage at the age of 62 because the government had told him that they would be somewhat responsible for him at that age through Social Security. By the time he was 65, he had made the transition to retired, and he never pretended to be anything but retired in the 24 years he lived after that. The word retired carries with it the justification for the surrendering of courage, and so he let it slip away from him long before there was any physical reason for him to do so.

My father spent a lot of time in his years between 62 and 89 playing the role of the senior citizen. He traveled on buses with his friends. He attended a weekly meeting of senior citizens and served as its co-president twice. He and my mother developed friendships and got together regularly with others their age to play card and board games. He worked in his shop making all sorts of wood items, something that he was sort of a natural at doing. His work was beautiful. and imaginative.

For 27 years, that was my father's life, mostly because the government had set up programs that allowed him to lose courage, lose vitality, and lose desire to get any of it back. Those 27 years equals the total of the years of my brother and his son, who died early due to cancer. What Merle Haggard described as a little loss of courage, my father, because the government told him he could, surrendered as if he were going to be able to simply molt like a bug and take on a new and better skin.

The contrast with my mother was striking. She worked until she was past 80 years of age and was suffering from dementia so badly that she could not and did not desire to perform. She may have done so to earn the money they needed to live the life they wanted to live. She may have done it to make sure that I had workers. She may have done it simply to remain vital, but she did it. She never gave up on the person that she had been all her life. She never lost courage.

As we go through the wars to get this country back to working for its citizens by getting its citizens to work for it, we have to face the notion that there is some magic age when we define people as insignificant, but very worthy of our support regardless of the cost. We are wrecking our economy by sending $7 upward in our society for every $1 that is sent downward. This has to stop or we will not have a country much longer.

I have seen the forces within my own family to not only keep this up but accelerate it. I have watched, and participated, as rather than take on "family responsibilities" we relegate those responsibilities to the government. I have watched as my siblings denied the moral obligation to limit the taking of government money by allowing a natural death to happen. This is not a problem that "they" are causing. It is a problem that "we" are causing.

In an ideal world, I have no idea how my father's last 27 years would have played out, and I do not want to know. This is not an ideal world, never has been, and never will be. But, knowing that nature will create those conditions sooner or later which will lead to "a little loss of courage" why do we speed up the process? Why, if the government is going to get involved, is it not encouraging people to delay that process until nature demands it? Why do we give people the tools to give up courage early when those tools are bankrupting us?

God bless every one of you who is 65, or 70, or more, who goes to work on a regular schedule and maintains his or her vitality. My Aunt Lib, who also worked for me, worked on until she was about 87. She always said that if she stopped then she would just die. For her the choice was work or die, and she worked, God rest her soul. If only there were tens of millions of others out there like Aunt Lib, then we could get our country back. If only.....