It's all in the Details, but You've Got to Have Patience

Two of the greatest virtues that I learned from my dad were attention to detail and patience.  More often than not the two go hand in hand.  It took many lessons when I was younger to see how they both worked together but believe me, if you don’t learn from the lessons you will always have mountains of worry and headaches a whole bottle of aspirin won’t cure.

 There is no better way to teach someone the importance of patience and attention to detail than to put them to work laying a 1000 foot glue together waterline in the middle of a blazing hot summer in a ground as hard as concrete.   Every step of the process is a lesson in patience.  Imagine yourself sitting on top of a washing machine in the spin cycle with an unbalanced load.  Then put a couple of heat lamps over your head and a space heater turned on high at your feet.  Then grab a bucket full of dirt and throw a hand full of it in your face every few minutes and let it meld with the sweat running down your brow.  If all that isn’t bad enough, throw some silverware in the garbage disposal and turn it on.  Five minutes of that would be enough to drive you insane, but imagine 5 or 6 hours of it! 

Now sitting on top of a machine that is a kin to doing all that makes you want to get it done and get the hell out of Dodge as fast as you can, but you can’t rush it.  You have to take your time and have patience.  See that machine might be doing all the work but you still have to guide it along and keep it moving forward.  Being in a rush one might tend to try and accelerate it forward a little faster, but in doing that you lock up the drive chain and choke out the engine.  Once it knocks off, you have to disengage the chain, restart the machine, back it up a few feet and start it digging again.  It is like taking two steps forward and one step back.  You will eventually get there, but it will take you a lot longer than if you had the patience to take things a little slower. 

Once you get the ditch dug, then your lesson in attention to detail begins.  Putting together plastic pipe doesn’t take an engineering degree, but if you don’t do it right you are headed for trouble.  First you have to make sure you don’t get any dirt in the pipe.  Then you have to clean the bell of one section of pipe and the plain end of another section with a cleaning solvent that will eat the hide off a baseball and leave your hands stained purple.  That stuff won’t wash off in a week I don’t care how much you wash and scrub.  Once you get it cleaned you have to swab both ends with glue, slide them together while twisting, and hold it tight for a few seconds so it doesn’t slip apart.  Oh, don’t forget if you get dirt on it before you slide it together, you have to start the cleaning and gluing all over again.  Now multiply that process times 50 and you are ready to throw it in the ditch and cover it up.

After you have it all hooked up and backfilled you get a brief lesson in faith.  Faith that you had the patience to pay attention to all the details so that when you turn the water on and the pipe starts filling and the pressure starts building water doesn’t start gushing out of the ground like a geyser.  If you didn’t learn the first two lessons your penance is to dig up the pipe by hand with a shovel, cursing every rock you hit on the way down, cut out the bad joint and repeat the lesson of attention to detail as you make the repair. 

Now I still sometimes overlook details and patience wears thin when you have a mound of work to accomplish, a short time to get it done in, and you get flooded with calls from people who didn’t learn their lessons in patience and want you to get something done yesterday.  But every time I forget the lessons I learned long ago on a hot summer day I still curse every rock I hit with the shovel as I dig back down to fix the problems I could have avoided if I had just slowed down, paid attention to the details and had a little patience.

There is No Place Like Home

I am not a world traveler.  In fact when it comes right down to it and you start listing the places I have been, it is a pretty short list.  A few nights ago Ladybug was doing something online at Trip Advisor and it was asking her all the places she had ever been.   Not long into what she was doing she turned to me and in a very disappointed voice she muttered that she had only been to about 25 places in her life.  Well I hated to see her disappointment so I asked her to name all the places.  When she got to the end of the list I started throwing out the names of some of the places I knew we had been that were not on her list.  I even started naming the obscure places that I knew she had not remembered and some I wasn’t even sure Trip Advisor had a clue where they were.  Names like Bat Cave, Luray, Abingdon, Damascus, White Top, Yemassee, McPhearsonville, Walterboro, Frisco, Waves, Salvo, and Rodanthe, just to name a few.  I went on for about half an hour throwing out places, more near than far but names all the same to add to her small list of where she had traveled in her life.  She finally got tired of typing them in somewhere after we past 120.  We came up with a lot of places, and could have added more but in retrospect we were just putting more stuffing in our pillow to make it look fatter.

We have some true world travelers that will be paddling with us on the Hope Floats NC 2012 Tour in April.  Some have even planted themselves for extended stays around the world due in part to very intimate relationships with good ole Uncle Sam’s armed forces.  The pillows they have rested their heads on are truly oversized, not just overstuffed.  In addition to the places they have been, they also have some pretty amazing stories to tell about adventures far and wide.  Some of their stories are even borderline on miraculous in the fact that they are still alive to tell the tales.  It really makes you take a look at what you have done and where you have been in your own life. 

In the great big scheme of things I have really not traveled that far from the small town where I grew up.  I have moved 6 times in my life that I know of and each and every move has been within a stone’s throw.  The last move I made we literally carried our stuff out the back door, across the back yard and into the front door of the where we presently live.  I can walk to the place previous to the last in less than two minutes and drive to the three previous that in about 15.   I have just never had the desire to pull up stakes and move any great distance.  The few places that I have traveled just don’t feel like home, although there are a few places we have been that I could very easily see myself getting comfortable in.

I have traveled north across the Mason Dixon Line only as far as Scranton Pennsylvania on a wonderful vacation with my parents when my children were really small.  Even though people associate the South with being backwoods sometimes, Scranton was our daughter’s first experience with no indoor plumbing and a real old time out house; it didn’t go over very well at all.  Headed back south I have been in every state along the Appalachians and east, although in Tennessee I have traveled in the east and west but skipped the middle altogether.  Just because you flew over a place in a plane it doesn’t count as actually visiting.  I didn’t cross the mighty Mississippi in Memphis, but I did cross it in Vicksburg and New Orleans.  The furthest point west I have driven in a car was Alexandria Louisiana.  Kim and I drove 2 ½ hours from Baton Rouge to England Airbase, was out of the car a total of 20 minutes, ate lunch in Alexandria and we were back in Baton Rouge for dinner.   I flew into Montgomery Alabama twice and have driven clear across the state north and south but never really seen anything there to write home about.  The first trip down during hurricane Ivan, I drove from Montgomery down to Pensacola Florida where I stayed for two weeks and the second trip down during hurricane Katrina, I drove from Montgomery to Tupelo Mississippi where I spent three weeks.  I have been to Florida so many times I have lost count; I should have stock in Disney as many times as I have been there.   Savannah Georgia has become one of our favorite places to visit, if I  ever had to pull up roots, move out of North Carolina and had the money to do so, I could very easily slip seamlessly into a life there, although I would definitely need a getaway retreat back close to home so I could visit family and friends often.  South Carolina was vacation central when I was growing up.  My parents “vacation home” was a small Apache popup camper and it was nothing to get off the bus after school on a Friday and see it in the driveway hooked to the car and ready to head down to Myrtle Beach for the weekend.  Some of the best and most memorable trips I had in my youth were spent in that little six person camper.  I think my dad paid about $500 for it used, and I wouldn’t take a million for the memories we made in it.  I truly feel sorry for kids whose parents kept them sheltered and were never exposed to the outdoors.  I owe the adventurous spirit I have totally to my parents, along with many other things too numerous to mention.  The furthest away from home I have ever been was San Diego California on a relief mission with the American Red Cross.  I flew out during the wildfires of 2008 and worked for a little over two weeks.  It was just long enough for me to decide Cali For Knee might be the place to be for Jed and Granny but it is definitely not for me.

North Carolina is home for me and I honestly can say in all my travels there is no other place I would rather be.  If you made a list of the good and the bad, the scales here would always tip toward the sunny side of life.  You can always find a quiet place to relax and rejuvenate that is just around the corner from adventure and excitement.  Although some of the transplants that haven’t lived here for long are still grumpy and gruff, the exposure to polite and easy going native North Carolinians will rub off on them soon enough, or we will kick them back whenceover they came.  From the mountains to the sea and everywhere in between it is filled with places warm and inviting full of friendly people who have never met a stranger.   Though I have lived here all my life there are still places yet to be discovered that once I visit will only reinforce the feelings I have for where I live.   Dorothy can close her eyes and click her heals and be back in Kansas all she wants but my Oz is here and there is no place like home.

P.S.  Lady Bug and I set out on our biggest trip of all times an spent 19 days on the road through 13 states.  We drove over 6,000 miles round trip to Montana.  It was the best adventure we have ever had to date.  We can't wait to do it again.