My Dad, Vince Adametz, passed away on December 21, 2020, of COVID-19 complications, at the age of 97.5.

He was the best Dad I ever had (for the record, he was the only one, but that doesn’t change my feelings on the matter).

I remember all the times he left work to get me at school when I got ill. Helped me with school work. Kept me out of Trouble. All the things he taught me.

Some of those things he specifically taught me, like woodworking and how to fix up a house (a friend of mine once remarked that our house was always under construction), and how to be a good helper. Those skills have stayed with me even to this day.

Some things he taught by example. He and Mom always worked together around the house, did the shopping together, and my Dad never gave a thought to my Mom driving our pickup truck back in the 1970s when the idea of a woman driving a pickup truck would raise eyebrows all over town.

He got me my Big Break into IT. He was working for Digital Equipment Corporation, and would take me into the office on Sundays where I could play around with the computers. One day he showed me some paperwork he had to do that involved a number of calculations, and asked if the computer could do that. I wrote an application and my IT career took off.

He never talked much about his military experience until after the dedication of the World War II memorial. We watched that together on TV, and afterwards he began to tell his stories. I threatened to videotape him, but instead he wrote it all down. You can read ahout his exploits, in his own words, right here, and hear his own words in a presentation he made at a local elementary school in 2013 here. I was amazed by some of these stories. Here’s this parental figure, the one was making me do my homework and eat my vegetables, and now I learn, Wow! Running a flame thrower??? How Cool is that??

He often told the story of when he first went overseas to join the war in Europe. He was in Oran during Christmas, and went to Church Sunday, went to Midnight Mass, and then on Monday for Christmas Day. He, on his knees, prayed to God, “they gave me this rifle and said to kill or be killed, I don’t know where I’m going, watch over me, guide me”. You know, he spent 2 years in actual combat as an infantryman, one of those guys on the front lines in foxholes with a rifle and a helmet, and he got through all that with hardly a scratch. I observed that two significant medical advances became available right around the time he needed them; I do not consider that a coincidence. During some of the tough times I’d seen him through I pointed out that God has been taking care of him, and He ain’t gonna walk away now, and I believe God is still taking care of him. I hand over my caregiver role to Him.

In this time of pandemic, I was not able to visit him when he went to the hospital, but all the reports I got indicated that he was not in much pain, and the whole thing, from detection of symptoms to the end was less than 5 days. A Nurse, Jane, at the hospital was with him at the end.

I believe there is a plan behind everything that happens. I also believe that miracles do happen, but do not always serve a purpose that we can see, so maybe they don’t seem like much of a miracle. My Dad often talked about looking forward to the time when he would be united with Margaret, his beloved Wife, who he was true to all the way to today and beyond. Maybe the Christmas Miracle, on this Winter Solstice, is that he is now reunited with his beloved.

In significant ways he made things easy on the rest of us. He made his own decision to stop driving, for which I am forever grateful. Now another of his decisions is helping us even now. His wishes were to not have a funeral; his only desire is to be cremated and put with his Wife. Under the current circumstances, we will proceed with the cremation, but put everything else on hold. Once it becomes safe to travel and gather, we will have a memorial service and celebration. Watch this space.

He is missed by his three children, two grandchildren, godchild, and countless others.

For this Thanksgiving, I was able to orchestrate a video call for a bunch of family members. That got me thinking about more things that are just different this year, and some things that need an update.

“Over the river and through the wood” seems a bit dated now, so:

Over the wifi and through the net —
To Grandfather’s screen we go
The router knows the way to send the stream
through the firewalls and filters

Over the wifi and through the net —
To Grandfather’s screen we go
We would not drop packets
for ’tis Thanksgiving Day

Over the wifi and through the net —
Oh how the links saturate
It buffers the stream
As over the internet we go

Over the wifi and through the net —
and straight through the ISP
We retransmit and buffer
it is so hard to wait!

Over the wifi and through the net —
When Grandmother sees us in HD
She will say “O, dear, the children are there,
send a FedEx for everyone.”

Over the wifi and through the net —
now Grandmother’s desktop I spy!
Hurrah for the fun! Check the tracking!
Hurrah for UPS!

So sometimes a collar bone just doesn’t want to heal up and weld itself back together. It happens. What that means depends a lot on how the ligaments an whatnot are able to hold the bone in place. If it moves around too much, then it hurts, or sets up all sorts of grinding an popping that can be intolerable.

To help assess that, the doctor ordered some Xrays with me holding something reasonably heavy with my hanging down. The shoulder did fine with that, but my elbow was screaming because it had been bent up in the sling for 2 months and now had about 4kg pulling it straight.

Apparently my bone stayed put well enough that this might not be a problem. The disconnect in the bone might result in a slight, maybe 10%, loss of strength in that shoulder, which, according to the doctor, wouldn’t be noticeable unless I was pumping iron or something (I might develop a right-turning tendency in flight and have to compensate with a left yaw).

The plan now is to get the arm back into service with some PT (Physical Therapy, or what my co-worker calls Pain and Torture). During the first session I could see some immediate improvement in my range of motion. The doctor made use of the arm sling optional: if the arm gets tired and needs to rest, I can use the sling, or if I’m in a situation where my attention might need to be elsewhere and I might therefore make a sudden inadvisable move. In the meantime, I’ve got exercises to do at least daily to stretch and improve the range of motion and to improve strength.

Stay tuned…

“What is the sound of one wing flapping?” Since both wings are almost always flapped at the same time, the answer is “pretty much like two wings flapping, just less so”. But when you don’t have full use of both hands, things get a bit more complicated.

My recent injury left me unable to do much with my right arm. I could use the hand, but only if I could get it to what I wanted to handle without moving my arm. There’s a lot of things we do that call for two hands, and if you’d asked me six months ago what would be a problem and what wouldn’t, I would not have gotten it half right. I’ve developed a good bit of empathy for those who really don’t have both hands.

There are, of course, a lot of things that aren’t a problem because they just don’t require two hands: opening a door, using the TV remote control, using a phone, typing (if you’re not in a hurry), eating a sandwich, etc…

Then there are things that can be done, but require some modification. Getting a glass of water: you can’t just hold the glass under the faucet and open the tap. You have to turn on the water, then pick up the glass and fill it, set it down, then turn off the water (this also grates on my sense of resource efficiency). Carrying stuff into the other room might require multiple trips, where as before you could just pick up the laptop, its power supply, and your yogurt and head off. Opening a door might not be a problem, but carrying stuff through that door might be. These things require extra planning.

If it’s your dominant hand that’s out of service, things like writing and eating become problematic. While I’ve gotten better at filling in crossword puzzles with my non-dominant hand, at first I had to be very deliberate about holding and moving the pencil (no, I don’t do crosswords in ink). I thought carefully about how I wrote normally and tried to replicate that, in mirror image, with my other hand. Eating was somewhat less of a problem, but still took some mental effort.

Speaking of eating, you can’t use a knife and fork at the same time. Most people think it’s fine to pick up a chicken leg with their fingers and chew into it. I’ve come to believe that applies to steak too.

Hair can be a problem if it needs more than a bit of combing.

I’ve reconsidered the necessity of some things. For example, my home office has two computers, two cell phones, a desk clock, and a clock radio, all of which are perfectly happy to give me the time of day. So why bother with a watch if I’m going to be there all day? Similarly, I’m not going out anywhere, the cat doesn’t care what I wear (or don’t), so as long as my webcam isn’t aimed to low….

And then there are things that are just not an option. Cleaning and cutting up vegetables for my salads requires two hands. Hauling my trash to the landfill. Mowing the grass (my mower is light enough I could probably maneuver it ok with one hand, but it takes two to start it). These are things that I’ve had to rely on others to do for me, and I’m grateful for those people, which includes paid services (those people who can’t work from home during this pandemic) as well as neighborhood volunteers. A tip ‘o the hat to Joe, Deb, Bud, David, Sharon, David, and the others whose names I didn’t think to write down and apologize to for not doing so, for jumping right in when word got around.

We use labels a lot. To an extent, this is a good thing. A label tells me that a can on the shelf contains soup, or beans, and not paint thinner, which is something I’d want to know if I was hungry, or had a paint brush to clean. A label tells me that tube contains toothpaste, and not super glue (wouldn’t want to mix those up!).

However, a label only tells you what it says. A label that just says “toothpaste” doesn’t tell me if it’s mint, wintergreen, tarter control, or super whitening. To get at those things, I have to dig a bit deeper, maybe to a more specific label somewhere, or just open the cap and see.

Even a specific label might not tell me what I need to know. Do I actually like wintergreen toothpaste? The label doesn’t tell me that. To find out, I have to open up the tube and try it. Only having done that, can I assign some meaning to “wintergreen” (bleah, or yum), when used by a particular brand, and proceed accordingly.

The more complex, or nuanced the item is, the less helpful the label is. “Chicken noodle soup” tells me some things about what’s in the can, but it doesn’t tell me how much chicken is mixed in with the noodles, It only gives a very general idea of what it tastes like. To really get to know the soup, it has to be taken into my home, opened, heated in a bowl, and tasted.

How much more complex are people than soup? And yet, we label them like crazy, and hang a lot on those labels. I might be labeled an “IT system administrator”, but does that really say anything about what I do during the course of a work day (or, occasionally, night)? Yeah, it has something to do with computers, but what use is that? It doesn’t say anything about the storage networks I administer, servers, storage arrays, audits, security systems, air conditioners, 3-phase power systems, and a host of other things I deal with all the time (yes, all those really are things that are part of my IT job). Those who hang everything on that label of “IT system administrator” are missing a whole lot of what that really goes on. I’ll leave the subject of how this affects my relationship with my managers and HR for another day.

Of course, we carry a lot of labels. But even taken together all those result in a poor description of who and what we are. Maybe I have the label “kayaker”, but does that tell you where I like to paddle (hint: it ain’t white-water), or what I like to take along to eat, or when I like to paddle? Again, the labels fall far short of who we are. Like the chicken noodle soup, it takes some work to understand us at all.

There’s been a lot in the news lately about gender labels. We hang so very much on those labels, but like the soup can label, it’s very limited in it’s ability to tell you much at all about a person, if it’s even relevant at all (which, most of the time, it isn’t). Race labels are just as bad. We associate an absurd amount of information with those labels, but it’s like saying that because it’s labeled toothpaste, it’s wintergreen super-whitening and I like it.

So, let’s be a bit circumspect about labels, and be careful to distinguish what the label says and what it doesn’t. Sure, sometimes the labels help us…. if I’m looking for someone to fix my Cessna, I can skip right over those cubicle-dwelling clean-fingernailed “IT system administrators” who wouldn’t know a ratchet from an igniter plug… Oh wait… I AM an aircraft mechanic too (and do know the difference between a ratchet and an igniter plug). Maybe we should ditch the labels altogether.

A friend sent me a story that got me thinking. I know, sometimes I just can’t help it. Warning: this is a bit of a rant.

As the story goes, a man was in a hurry to get through a supermarket line because he was on his lunch break and didn’t have much time. People weren’t too enthusiastic about letting him go ahead, but were curious why he was buying all these toothbrushes and toothpaste. When he explained that he was taking them to a nearby shelter where people evacuated from a wildfire were staying, and how nobody ever thinks to take a toothbrush when they have to evacuate, they all stepped aside and let him through. And soon everybody was buying something for the evacuees. The store owner even donated goods for the shelter.

I’m still hearing of stories like that from the floods that hit my own state of South Carolina over a year ago, and more recently the wildfires. Many, many people stopped and helped each other, often with little regard for their own property or even safety, working to make sure everyone was safe and taken care of. It seems we’re at our best when things are at their worst.

This time of year so many people volunteer to serve meals to those who have no food. People open their doors to neighbors who are alone. Charities are bolstered by people’s generosity. Toys are donated by the truckload.

Why?

I know what you’re thinking: of course people help each other when they’re in trouble. That’s not what I’m questioning. Turn that around.

What I’d like to know is, why do we do these things just when there’s a calamity, or a certain date shows up on our calendars? We’re pretty good at stepping up when disaster strikes (at least as individuals), or the “season of giving” rolls around. But what about the rest of the time? Why can’t we have at least some degree of that caring, that what-can-I-do-to-help attitude, all the time?

We fuss and fume about the way that idiot up the road cuts their grass, but if there’s a fire, illness, or some other catastrophic event, we can’t do enough to help them. Then, when it’s all over, they’re back to being an idiot. Ok, maybe there’s good reason they shouldn’t cut their grass that way, but that doesn’t make them an idiot or not worthy of our care and consideration.

I’m not saying that we need to call out the National Guard every day, but I think there are plenty of opportunities to help each other out in smaller ways. Maybe you see someone in the supermarket checkout line who’s a little short of cash for their bread and milk. Maybe someone could use a hand carrying or picking up something. Maybe a neighbor is having car trouble and could use a ride or two. Maybe you could hold the door and smile for someone. If we’re so concerned about our neighbor’s safety when a tornado hits, shouldn’t we be just as concerned as we drive by their house where their children are playing?

Wouldn’t the world be a whole lot better, wouldn’t YOUR world be a whole lot better, if we stop calling each other names and instead said “Can I give you a hand with that?”

Rant ends.