How to Eat an Elephant ~ Chapter Three: A Bird in the Hand

After dad was diagnosed with cancer, one of the things he liked doing most was just staying home and spending quality time together with his family. One of the favorite past times was playing cards. Playing cards is a serious matter for a Peterson.  When my grandmother died, we found stacks of notebooks where she kept score every time someone played a hand of Rummy with her. She even kept score when she played herself in Solitaire! Cards were serious business in my family!

A couple of things I learned from this:

 NEVER play cards with a Peterson, unless the rules are CLEARLY defined BEFORE you start the game. It seems like every time I would go visit, the rules of Rummy had changed…  do you have to pick up the whole pile, or can you just pick up part of it. If you only pick up part of it, do you have to play the last card you picked up? It is a game of evolution and if you don’t participate on a regular basis, it evolves WITHOUT you and that makes it very hard to catch up then next time you play!

When dad got sick we set up the card table in the living room and it was a permanent fixture for many months. Anyone who came to visit was invited to play a hand. I have great memories of the fun and the interesting conversations.

He liked to say he “had a dog from every country”, which implied that he had nothing to match up. I finally figured out that this really meant he was up to something and the hand was going to be quick… like, over before you realize what happened, kind of quick.

Another thing he said a lot was “A Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. I have thought about this a lot over the years. What exactly did he mean by that? In cards, of course, it meant that it's better to have a lesser but certain advantage than the possibility of a greater one that may come to nothing.

I think the life lesson here, is that we have the eternal truths that give us a certain advantage in life. We should not trade that certainty for the possibility of something greater in the eyes of the world that will certainly come to nothing.

I think that by repeating things over and over while we played cards, he was trying to send us a bigger message.

That brings me to another great lesson from the card table … the importance of family.  Family is also a certainty that should not be taken for granted and those relationships should not be traded for all the birds in the bush..

The card table was a gathering place and we frequently gathered. Once again another example of him doing the same thing over and over to teach us a life lesson… by spending hours at the card table, we formed bonds that were important to carry us through this life. It taught us that we need to gather often and enjoy those moments when family can be together, because when it boils down to it… that’s what it’s all about.

We came to this earth, to be organized in family units and help each other through the mortal journey. Some of our journey’s will take a little longer and some of us, like my sister, Brittney, came to this earth on a very brief journey. The goal is to learn the things we need to learn, while trying to live a life in such a way, that we have to opportunity to once again be gathered as a family unit on the other side of the veil.

I have thought a lot about the concept that he knew his time was limited and that perhaps he was trying to teach his kids some important life lessons by playing a simple card game and repeating the lesson over and over

The most important thing I learned from playing cards is how important it is for family time. It doesn’t matter if it’s playing cards, or sitting around shooting the breeze, it’s always good to spend time together and it’s worth every bit of effort it takes to get together.

Twenty years later my dad’s children are now somewhat scattered as we have all married and ended up in different cities and states, and the business of life prevents us from spending much time together, but we remain close in heart and I believe that the lessons of the card table had a lot to do with that!

Perils of the Deep Blue Sea

One time several years ago, Wayne and I were on a trip with some business associates to Catalina Island. On one of the days, most of the girls had gone shopping and the men had decided to do "water activities". Some went diving with sharks, some went deep sea fishing and some decided to stay close in case the girls needed something, so they went down the the water to do a little snorkeling.

Around lunch time, the shark divers got back and had some wild stories to tell to the snorkelers... As the story goes, some shark divers coaxed a seal on the back deck of the boat and a shark came up out of the water, onto the deck of the boat to grab that seal and eat it..... stories like this tend to put a person on high alert when they are doing "water activities".

Wayne  has chosen to be one of the snorkelers, and now that he was fully aware of the perils of being in the water, he was a little paranoid to say the least!!!

Someone got the great idea to purchase some frozen peas and "bait" the fish so that there would be more fish to enjoy watching while snorkeling. Someone was behind Wayne, tossing out peas in front of him.  (snicker, snicker)  With his head under water, he watched a pea start to sink through the water right in front of his face. (Keep in mind that a snorkel mask tends to make objects look larger than they actually are)  Just then a sea bass decided that particular pea would be a good snack and swam at the pea with it's mouth wide open. In went the pea and when it closed it's mouth, it was attached to the nose piece on Wayne's snorkel mask....

In fear for his life, with the shark attack stories fresh in his mind, he went on the offense and grabbed the bass and tried to remove it from his mask. Wayne thrashing around in the water, trying to remove the fish that is trying to suck his face off (or so he describes..lol) and attempting not to drown, was quite the sight. After a couple of minutes, the other guys on the shore that were watching this spectacle, yelled at Wayne, "Just stand up".

He nearly drowned and died of fear from this horrific fish attack while in knee deep water....hahahaha!

The Elk and the Wig

A few years ago, when we still lived in Idaho, we decided to take a trip up to McCall to feed the elk. We invited Wayne's mom to go with us. Let me just say, that it's ALWAYS an adventure when you are doing something with Wayne's mom!!
It was winter time and as the day grew closer, the weather got worse... especially in the mountains (which is where McCall is). We had made reservations and it was kind of difficult to get a reservation, so we decided that since Wayne had a very large 4WD truck, it shouldn't be a problem.... right?

WRONG!!!

We were ALMOST to our destination and we came to a part in the road where there is a pretty sharp turn and it's on a bit of a hill coming out of the turn. Those who live near our old stomping grounds will probably know exactly what part of the road I am referring to!!! Since it was early in the morning, the roads were still icy.... very icy....

You guessed it... we slip sideways off the road....and then stopped.... tilting sideways towards the ditch.
Since Wayne's truck precariously came to a stop right before it tipped over and because it was sooo big and because the road was icy... and on a hill... and on a corner.... no normal 4wd truck could have pulled us back onto the road...

We had no choice but to call a tow truck... or two! Did I  mention that it had been really bad weather? That meant that the tow trucks were very busy pulling other vehicles out of the ditch... about a dozen or so ahead of us on the list.
So we waited...for several hours... and tried to entertain ourselves inside the truck, since it was once again snowing. We would have gotten out and had a snowball fight or something fun, but because of where we slid off the road, we were afraid that someone else might slide off as well and that would be dangerous if we were playing along side the road.

The tow truck.. or two... finally arrived and requested that we all vacate the truck in case it tipped over while they were pulling it sideways back onto the road.(comforting thought... I was so glad they had confidence in their ability...NOT) They had to have a couple of policeman stop traffic both ways while they extricated Wayne's truck from the side of the road! So we stood outside, in a blizzard,  huddled together to keep warm,watching and holding our breath, and praying that the truck didn't slide even farther off the hill... or tip over!

Finally free, we all climbed back in the truck with lots of snow piled on top of our heads. By this time we had missed our scheduled time to feed the elk, so we got turned around and headed home. All of a sudden, the window in the back seat gets rolled down and it looked like Wayne's mom threw something out the window. I turned around to see what happened and she had taken her wig, hung it out the window to shake off the snow and plopped it back on top of her head.....hahahaha! I can only imagine what the car behind us thought... it must have looked like she was shaking the snow off a small animal or something....LOL!

We set out to have an adventure feeding the elk, but it turned into a very fun memory of a much different kind!

How to Eat an Elephant ~Chapter Two: Those Who Deserve Love the Least, Need it the Most

This would be one of those lessons that I mentioned that wasn’t really a result of dad’s battle with cancer. It is very much one of those lessons that one needed to be quietly observing to even notice.

Growing up in a small town, it seemed like jobs were hard to come by. My dad never really had a career to speak of where he did one job forever. He did what he needed to do to support our family to the best of his ability. It seemed like he was always doing odd jobs for a little money on the side. He was kind of a jack of all trades… except for plumbing! Whenever we needed a plumber, my mom would take care of fixing things and if she couldn’t fix it, she hired someone because she found it was cheaper to pay a plumber than to pay to repair the things that dad broke while he was trying to be a plumber!

One of the jobs he did was teaching alternate school. He was given a desk in the corner of the bus barn out behind the school and was assigned to try to teach the students that had disciplinary problems and weren’t otherwise allowed to attend school with the general population. These would be the kids that were suspended or expelled from school. I recall that it involved a dozen or so kids at any one time.

While I was home visiting one day, I went to see him at his little one room school and was very confused about his situation.   It was a struggle for him and it appeared, from the outside looking in, that he was seriously underpaid and very underappreciated by the students and those to whom he reported.  Later that evening, I asked him why he bothered to do it. The kids were unruly and didn’t seem to listen to him and he was being paid peanuts compared to what a teacher inside the school across the parking lot was paid. He simply put his arm around my shoulder and said. “Those who deserve love the least, need it the most.”

He was certainly not suggesting that any one of those students was undeserving of love. The point he was trying to make was that all they needed was some love and someone to believe in them to make a difference in their lives. Many of these kids graduated or attained their GED, due to the fact that he was willing to work in a job simply because he saw potential in these kids and he didn’t judge them for their poor choices or even their continued bad behavior. He just loved them.

He knew all too well what it was like to make poor choices in life and to have people love you through those poor choices and stand by your side and allow you to grow and rise to your potential.

Over the years, on a regular basis, I find myself pondering this lesson and even sharing it with others. It taught me to look beneath the bad behavior and low self-esteem of people and see the good in them and to imagine their potential. Perhaps much the way God looks at us and our shortcoming and sees the good in us and knows of the great things we can accomplish if only we could believe in ourselves. Regardless of what bad choices we may have made or how often we continue the same mistake.

Another example of this lesson was the way my dad coached little league. I remember that our summers were spent at the ballpark. My dad coached little league in the afternoons, played on a men’s league in the evenings and usually umpired any game that he was not playing or coaching. For the purposes of this lesson, I want to focus on the little league.

To say my dad was intensely competitive would be a gross understatement! He lived and died by the outcome of a sporting event. It didn’t matter if it was little league baseball, church basketball or watching the Braves on TV. His intensity and competitiveness are a whole other lesson!

But when it came to little league, he was a gentle giant. He was most definitely in it to win it, but to him, the boys were more important than the outcome of the game. He had some great players on his team throughout the years, but he also picked kids that were not the biggest and fastest kids in the pool. He loved them all and saw great potential in every one of them. He treated them equally and fairly. Many of the other coaches took things way to seriously by yelling and belittling the boys. In every other sport in his life, my dad was one of those people who took the game too serious, but in little league, it was all about the boys. Gently teaching them life lessons was more important to him than the win and regardless of the outcome, he frequently treated the team to root beer floats at the A & W after the game to congratulate them on their efforts.

Many of these boys, later in life, have commented to me on how his example and his interest in them made a difference in their lives.

“…if ye have done it unto the least of these…” comes to mind when I think of the example of how he treated the youth in the valley.

For my dad it was never about the money…. It was about being there when someone needed a person to believe in them and loving them despite their choices. It was all about the worth of a soul. He came full circle with this idea. He gave love and then, when he needed love in return, he was loved, which enabled him to pay it forward and give more love. It really is a beautiful lesson to have learned.

How to Eat an Elephant ~ Chapter One: Look for the Strawberry

There is a Zen Poem about a man who was being chased by a tiger. Coming to a precipice, he grabbed a vine and flung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, he looked down, where far below him another tiger waited to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.  Two mice, little by little started to gnaw away at the vine. The man then noticed a luscious wild strawberry growing nearby. Grasping the vine with one hand, he reached out with the other and picked the strawberry and ate it. It was so delicious.

For as long as I can remember, every time something bad happened (or when things simply didn’t turn out the way we wanted them to), dad would tell us to look for the strawberry in the situation.  I remember one time when he said that, I found myself thinking in my mind, how much I hated strawberries!!

The strawberry has become almost as famous in our family as the elephant when it comes to dealing with challenges. Sometimes outsiders have confused our little inside joke with other fruit. One time, when my sister Brittney was in the hospital in a coma, our bishop traveled several hours to the hospital to pay a visit. He asked if he could offer a prayer, so we all gathered in my sister’s room and he spoke a wonderful prayer. He prayed that we could find a cherry in this situation…. We all knew what he meant!

After the prayer, we all giggled. I suppose at that moment, laughter was the best medicine for us, so in a sense, him mixing up our little fruit parable, was a strawberry in and of itself.

Strawberries are those tender mercies in life. They don’t always have to be in a moment of trial. A strawberry can appear out of nowhere when you least expect it and make you smile. Example… just the other day, I was having a bad day, I was feeling a lot of pressure from a business we were starting up and I was feeling a little neglected. I was standing in the checkout line at the grocery store and while I was getting somewhat irritated at the person in front of me for having more than 15 items in the express line, I looked at the impulse items on the shelf and noticed a black tube of Chapstick. My dad ALWAYS had tubes of black Chapstick stashed everywhere. It was his favorite. It was a smell I associate with his memory. (That and Elsha Cologne) When I was growing up, I don’t remember ever getting kissed by my daddy without him leaving a little residue of “black Chapstick” behind. I couldn’t help but smile and think that was that I was being given the opportunity to slow down for just a moment and notice something that had been in front of me every time I visit a check stand at a grocery store, but that I hadn't thought about in nearly 20 years. At that moment I felt close to my dad… Tender mercies…. The Strawberry! (I bought that Chapstick and every time I use it, I feel like I am receiving a little kiss straight from Heaven!!)

I have often pondered over strawberries that have come to me from situations like my dad getting cancer and my sister’s drowning. I think the biggest strawberry from these events is the closeness our family has gained through tragedy and our ability to rally together through good times and bad.

I was really close to my dad and sometimes I think I would sell my soul if I could just talk to him and ask his advice. Although it may not seem like it, but there-in lies a couple more strawberries in his death.

First… I have a very real reason to make sure that I am living my life in such a way that I will have the opportunity to be with my dad again someday, when our journeys once again intersect.

Second…  Since his death, I have had the opportunity to become close with my mom and develop a relationship with her that I never took the time to develop when I was younger. Growing up, I always thought of her as bad cop. It wasn’t because she wanted to be bad cop, it’s just the way it worked out because dad was all too content to take on the role of good cop. I also now realize that she wasn’t REALLY the bad cop, our personalities were just a lot alike, so we clashed more and it was simply my perception of the situation that was distorted. So there is the strawberry… the tender mercy…. I was simply granted more time on earth with my sweet momma, so that I could have more time here on earth to develop that eternal relationship and gain more perspective and appreciation for all she sacrificed for her family. I am now the same age my mom was when she became a widow with 4 children still at home. I honestly can’t imagine how she got through it… I guess it must have been all the strawberries along the way.

So today’s lesson is this: When you find yourself hanging by a thread with tigers above and below you, wanting to eat you alive, and mice are chewing on your thin thread…. Look for that strawberry… that tender mercy….let go of the rope (with one hand), reach out and enjoy that moment!

How to Eat an Elephant

This project has been years in the making. I have always sort of known that I needed to do it… way back in the top secret places of my mind, but it just seemed so daunting to try to put it together, so I just kept burying the urge.

Recently several people have suggested to me that I should write a book, but I have really struggled with the topic. Should I write a fictional book, or a self-help book, or a biography? There were just too many decisions to really get me to focus on any one idea.

This year I started really feeling an urgency to do this and once I opened my mind and my heart to the idea, the big picture started coming together

When my dad was diagnosed with cancer, he said we would deal with it just like you would eat an elephant… one bite at a time! Our family immediately adopted the elephant as our family icon and we had posters of elephants on the wall of the hospital room and very quickly elephant figurines, pictures, music boxes, etc started popping up on desks and bookshelves and walls in our homes as a reminder of how one deals with the challenges that life throws at you.

So I decided to tackle this project the same way my dad dealt with cancer…. one bite at a time, one lesson at a time. I have fondly nicknamed it Project Elephant for that reason. . I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and as I have started writing chapters, I have realized that my main motivation is to share the stories and the things I have learned. I have decided that instead of doing it in a published book, I am just going to share the chapters on my blog, so that everyone who wants to read it will have the chance. As I publish the chapters here, I will label them all “Project Elephant”, for those of you who wish to follow along.

My idea for this “book” was to focus on some of the lessons that I learned from my dad while he was learning to eat his elephant. As I started pondering thoughts and as I reached out to family members and invited them to share their ideas of lessons learned, I realized that I had been learning important lessons from my dad way before cancer took over our lives. Many of them were not intentional lessons that he set out to purposely teach. Looking back, many of them were subtle lessons that one had to be quietly observing to even notice.

As you share this journey, it is my hope that you will be able to catch the spirit with which this project is intended and forgive my shortcomings as a writer. I like to write the way I think and sometimes it’s difficult to put into words what is in my head and my heart.

It is my intention for this project to be somewhat of a tribute to my dad as time quickly approaches the 20^th anniversary of the end of his journey here on earth and the beginning of his next adventure. In order for me to adequately express some of the lessons learned, there will be stories that are difficult to read and even more difficult to tell. Therefore, I also hope that you won’t hold my dad’s shortcomings as a human being against him. We all have a path before us on our journey here on earth. Sometimes our path is made more difficult because of our own choices and sometimes because of the choices of others, but we all have our agency and for that I am truly grateful. With that agency comes the responsibility to forgive… to forgive others, whose choices have made our own journey bumpy, and to forgive ourselves when we have caused others to stumble.