'Tis Folly To Be Wise

I got out of bed much earlier than usual on a recent Saturday morning. By 6:30 I was dressed in a winter work coat, gloves and a hat and was heading out to the goat pens. It was dark. The goats were still huddled in their shelters in small congregations of shared body heat, relatively comfortable against the sub-freezing temperatures.

Gum Drop and Clarabelle were not pleased, and they loudly voiced their complaints as I put a collar on each of them and led them out of their pen toward the truck, which was already running to warm up for the long drive. I lifted the girls into a crate, then went back for Sissy and Afton. They, also displeased at being so rudely awakened, dug in their feet and bawled as I half dragged, half carried them to the truck, where they took their place in another crate next to Gum Drop and Clarabelle.

We were heading to the goats’ new home in Livingston, Montana; 500 miles and, by my calculations, at least seven hours away if the weather cooperated.

With everyone loaded, I trotted back to the house, changed out of my work clothes, grabbed a bag of snacks we prepared the night before, and woke my wife, who was joining me for the trip. Within minutes we climbed in the truck and pulled down the driveway. Gum Drop and Sissy simultaneously bleated “Byyyyeeee!” to the herd they were leaving behind and someone cried back to them as we pulled away “Byyyyeeee!”

By 9:30 we reached Pocatello, Idaho, where we had decided to stop for breakfast and a quick break. I know many of you will not agree, but I believe there is only one place to stop for breakfast on a road trip. That’s right – McDonalds. “An egg McMuffin, a sausage biscuit, three hash browns, two orange juices and a large Dr. Pepper to go, please.” We were heading out the door and back to the truck in record time.

Clarabelle now resides in Livingston, Montana

Then: the unexpected.

Occasionally, when we are not looking for it, not expecting it, not ready for it, something happens that can change us. We can choose to not let it change us. When we realize it’s coming we can make a head fake and go the other way, let it glance off us, or just run like heck in the opposite direction. But sometimes we need to let it hit us. We need to take the full impact of the experience, like an over-filled water balloon dropped by our little brother from a second-story window.

Although she was yet to realize it, that is exactly what my wife was about to do.

As we walked across the McDonalds parking lot toward our truck, two women got out of their car. They appeared to be a mother and her grown daughter. In an instant both SueAnn and I realized that the daughter had Down Syndrome. And in the next instant, we realized she was headed directly for us at a pretty good clip, exclaiming “GOOD MAWNING!”

“Head fake!” I thought. I moved to one side and acted as if I did not see the woman coming toward us. I was not going to let this interaction happen. Far too uncomfortable. Too much trouble.

Not my lovely wife.

“Good Morning!” SueAnn said, mimicking the woman’s tone, if not her enthusiasm.

“I’M TRACY!” shouted the woman.

I caught her mother’s eye and tried to give her a knowing wink, while still making evasive moves toward the truck.

“Hi Tracy. I’m SueAnn.” my wife replied.

The water balloon was falling from the second floor! SueAnn had to see it. She was about to get soaked by a life surprise that could still be avoided.

“HI SUZANNE! CAN I HAVE A HUG!”

Oh! Too late.

Tracy raised her arms. SueAnn responded in kind and embraced this once stranger, now beloved friend in the McDonalds parking lot . . . in Pocatello, Idaho . . . at 9:30 . . . on a cold winter morning.

I glanced back at the woman’s mother. She gave me a closed-mouth grin while slowly shaking her head and rolling her eyes. But she did not seem to do this out of embarrassment or frustration, but rather an enlightened resignation that this simply was her daughter, shouting and hugging and all. I realized I was giving her the same look back – this simply was my wife.

As the last GOODBYEs and HAVE-A-NICE-DAYs and their accompanying exclamation points floated away into the cold, we got back into the truck. I looked at SueAnn. She looked at me. We started to laugh; not at Tracy or her mom or at each other, but at the shear and simple joy of the moment. As we laughed and smiled I let some of the surprise and simple pleasure roll off SueAnn onto me, and I regretted not taking the full impact when I had the chance.

Tracy changed our day. She offered us a moment of pure joy, pure happiness, bliss. As we drove out of Pocatello, I wondered out loud if Heaven might not be the best place in the universe because when we get there we will all have Down Syndrome.

And I was reminded of a few stanzas from William Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations on Mortality.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,

He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

It may be true, as Wordsworth proposes, that the world compensates for lost innocence with experience and wisdom. Sometimes I wonder. But for a few fleeting seconds in that McDonalds parking lot I would have agreed with Thomas Gray instead: “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.”

Is Your Neighbor a Cowboy?

My next door neighbor is a cowboy. A genuine cowboy. Sure, he has worked in real jobs most of his life, but such is the fate of most cowboys these days. It’s hard to make ends meet on a cowboy’s wage in the modern world.

You might think it’s rather difficult to find a real cowboy, and if you do you are right. But in case you ever need one (and I have found them very useful to have around at times), I’m going to tell you the secret to determine if a person is a 100% bona fide cowboy. Here is the process:

First, find a person who looks and acts like a cowboy. Odds are that will disqualify him immediately. But don’t give up quite yet. If he meets this criterion, move to the next step.

Second, he must have cows, a good horse, and a saddle. See if he has cows. If he doesn’t have cows, he must have a good horse. If he doesn’t have a good horse, he must at least have good saddle. Check to see if his saddle is well-used and well-taken-care-of. If it is, go to the next step.

Third, ask him if he has ever turned a bull calf into a steer. If the answer is “Yes”, go to the final step.

Fourth, ask him if he is a cowboy. If he says anything other than “Yes”, you have found the genuine article. Examples of acceptable answers are “No.” “Well . . .” and “Pardon?” If he says “Yes”, he is not a cowboy. Find a new candidate and return to the first step.

Note: In the fourth step, the only case in which “Yes” is an acceptable answer is if your candidate follows it immediately with a gruff “What are you?”

Knowing When to Say When

Records of the ancient Greek Olympics speak of phenomenal long jump distances of 40 or 50 feet by some of those naked Greek Olympians you’ve heard about. For many years it was widely accepted that the distances were simply false; nothing but fables designed to glorify the Greek athlete to future generations.

Then some -ologist found some interesting rocks and came up with a theory.

He had been digging around in Greece and found several pairs of large stones with what appeared to be handles carved in them. One thought lead to another and this is what the guy figured out: The stones were used by the long-jumpers who would run with a large stone in each hand. At the point of takeoff, while still holding the stones, they would thrust both hands in front of them in an upward swinging motion. The added momentum from the heavy stones would then carry them farther than they could have jumped without them.

The only problem with this theory came when test athletes were unable to duplicate the historic distances using the described method. But that all changed when one of the athletes had a brainstorm. He attempted jumping with the stones, but at the apex of his leap he swung both arms quickly backwards and cast the stones behind him as hard as he could. This action propelled him several yards farther than any of the athletes had jumped on previous attempts. With practice, several of the athletes were soon matching the distances recorded in the ancient records.

When I heard about this interesting discovery, it reminded me of something I experienced while living in Sweden many years ago.

A kind Swedish family who lived near a lake had been feeding a family of swans for several weeks. The two adult swans had been raising three cygnets (baby swans) all summer, but the Swedish winter was setting in. None of the family of swans would leave because one of the cygnets had deformed wings and could not fly. I told the Swedish family that if the swans did not fly soon, they would freeze in the forming ice and die.

When they asked what I thought they should do, I told them that I thought the cygnet with the deformed wings would have to be killed. The family bond of swans is so strong that the two adults and the other two cygnets would stay and freeze to death rather than leave the deformed cygnet alive and alone. The family scoffed at my suggestion and continued feeding the swans, hoping they would fly south before the lake began freezing.

About a week later, one of the family’s neighbors came upon the poor deformed cygnet barely alive, frozen in the ice. The other four swans were close by but had managed to free themselves by beating the ice with their strong wings. Mercifully, the neighbor shot the cygnet. The next morning, the family of four swans left the lake, flying south for winter.

So what do these stories have to do with anything?

Well, I’m not going to claim they are metaphors. And if they are, they are far from perfect. They just remind me that we all carry around things that we would be better off without. They may even be things that seem valuable, or that were once valuable; things that helped us get somewhere or achieve something, but have since become nothing more than heavy stones dragging us to the ground.

Maybe it’s that old shirt that just doesn’t look decent anymore. Maybe it’s a memory of a fight with a loved one from months ago. Maybe it’s envy or spite or fear or guilt. Whatever it is, kill it. Throw it behind you as hard as you can. In doing so you may find you propel yourself farther and faster than you ever thought possible.

A Cactus Ain't So Prickly

 Blogger's Note: The following poem is a favorite by my good friend and cowboy poet, Grizzly Hackle. It is published here with his permission.



A Cactus Ain’t So Prickly

by Grizzly Hackle

A cactus ain’t so prickly if you love it fer its thorns.

A longhorn cow’s quite lovely when y’appreciate her horns.

I’ve never found a stock pond too polluted for a dip

While on a summer cattle drive or cross-country cowboy trip.

Sometimes a girl’s purtier when her hair ain’t combed just right.

Besides, who’ll see her hair when the lights go out at night?

Sometimes it seems in life we start to noticin’ the bad

When we really should be lookin’ for the better things instead.

Don’t get me wrong. The world is full of things that ain’t so nice,

But every time I find one, I count a good thing twice.

Anyway, what good’s the summer sun ashinin’ in the sky

If you ain’t been cold and wet and wanted to be dry?

"Nadine" - The newest member of the herd.

The Miracle of Time

I don’t think I’ve ever been called a “techie.” Although I’ve spent most of my career in Sales and Product Management for technology companies, I still prefer a shovel in my hand to a cell phone. Like many people, however, I am consistently amazed at the technology that has been developed over the last 15 years or so. One of my favorites is Google Earth.

It is amazing to me that I can sit in bed with my laptop and peer down at my own house in a photo taken from a satellite orbiting miles above the earth. Then, with a few clicks on the keyboard, I can jump over to my favorite beach on Maui or my childhood home in Portland, Oregon. It is absolutely incredible!

So it has been with some techie-like anticipation that I have been waiting almost three years for Google to update the photo of my property.

Two years ago we built a new house on our little farm in Northern Utah. It replaced the manufactured home that was on the property when we bought it back in 2004. Once we moved into the new house, built just a few steps to the west of the existing home, the little double-wide was ingloriously cut open like a trout and hauled away in two pieces to take on its new calling as a cabin in the mountains of Wyoming. I do not miss it and neither, it seems, does Google.

Two weeks ago I pulled up Google Earth and clicked on our address. To my delight I zoomed in and found an updated photo of our property that includes the new house. Even more delightful was the fact that I could tell from the picture the day on which it was taken – June 18th, 2010.

Take a look. See the green truck with a red trailer parked in the driveway just south of the garden. That truck and trailer were only parked in my driveway on June 18th. It was the day I hauled goats to the fairgrounds for our annual Utah Dairy Goat Association goat show. The only other time the trailer was attached to the truck in my driveway was at night on the 19th, and clearly it is very much daytime in the photo.

Neat, huh?

But as I looked further, I found something even more interesting. The vegetable garden (that big patch of dirt with some faintly visible rows and mounds in the lower left of the photo) was still almost entirely bare in the picture. But how could this be? I had been watering the garden and pulling weeds earlier in the day and it looked nothing like that.

The day I found the new picture on Google Earth was just over four weeks from the day it was taken. By the time I saw the photo, I had already cut Swiss chard once and it was growing a second crop. The corn had tassels and was as tall as I am, the sunflowers even taller. Tomatoes and squash were setting fruit. The Zucchini was tumbling out of the garden as if off a production line. How was it possible that four weeks earlier the garden was almost bare? It took me a few minutes to justify the picture taken just a few weeks before with the current state of the garden.

Then it settled on my mind. It was simple. It was the miracle of time. When comparing the picture with the actual garden, the change seemed miraculous. In the same way you are amazed at the change when you run into someone who was years younger the last time you saw them, I just couldn’t quite believe how the garden had changed in the four weeks since the photo was taken.

If I were to take a sunflower seed and place it in the dirt on a Friday night, would you believe me if I told you that by the next morning it had grown to be a plant of 7 feet tall? Of course not. So why does it not amaze us that the exact same thing happens, but just takes a little longer, as a matter of fact?

A broken arm healed in an instant is an unexplainable miracle. A broken arm healed in 8 weeks is . . . well . . . it just is. A boy grown to be a man overnight a la the movie Big is Hollywood fiction. If it happens over ten years, we don’t think to be amazed. You get the idea.

Take time out of the equation, and you often get what we can only call miracles.

So be patient. Wounds will heal. Pain will subside. Troubles will pass. Things will change in miraculous ways – with the passing of time.

All's Well That Ends Well

Talk with folks who train horses and they’ll tell you some interesting things about the way a horse’s brain works. First, a horse has a very short memory when it comes to connecting two events, or, rather, connecting cause and effect. Second, a horse tends to remember the way things end, but not much about the way they start.

Since I began working with horses about 15 years ago, I have tried to use these horse tendencies to my advantage. I always offer reinforcement immediately. My rule is a two-second rule. If the horse does something I want it to do, I offer positive reinforcement immediately. If it does something I don’t want it to do, I make sure that the horse knows within the count of two that the behavior is undesirable.

In training sessions, I always make sure that I end with something positive. If I am working on backing up, for example, and the horse has been refusing to do what I ask, I never, ever end the session with a refusal from the horse. I make sure that the horse gives me something. Even the smallest of steps in the right direction gives me a chance to reward the horse and end the session on a positive note. The horse is then prone to remember that training is good because it ended good, even though the majority of it was bad.

We have found that these techniques are helpful with other inhabitants of the farm as well, namely the dairy goats.

Like most livestock, goats require routine care that can be uncomfortable or even painful for them. Besides the twice-daily milking, they must occasionally receive medication and vaccines, have their hooves trimmed, or even be tattooed. We have employed a simple reward system that helps make the goats very easy to work with in all these instances. It is as follows:

When you are done you get a cookie.

I told you it was simple. Here’s how it works inside the goats brain:

Hey, that guy is coming to get me to take me into that white shed. Cool! I am going to get a cookie! I love cookies! Cookies! Cookies!

I proceed to take the goat to the shed for milking or trimming or vaccinations. It really doesn’t matter, because when I am done I give the goat a cookie. The goat returns to its pen:

I got a cooooookie? I got a cooooookie!

You get the idea.

“But wait,” you say. “I don’t train animals. I don’t even have a dog. What does this have to do with me?”

Imagine my amazement when I discovered that we, as humans, do the exact same thing as horses and goats when it comes to remembering events.

A study was performed in which volunteers were required to undergo two separate experiments in random order. In one experiment, they held their hand in a tub of water that was exactly 57° F for 60 seconds while continually recording with a dial their level of discomfort. In the other experiment, the same volunteers held their hand in the same tub of water for 90 seconds. For the first 60 seconds, the water was held at 57° F, but then secretly raised to 59° F over the last 30 seconds. In this experiment the volunteers also recorded their level of discomfort just as they had on the first.

What were the results? Well, the initial results were exactly as you would expect. In the 60 second experiment, participants recorded a level of discomfort that was moderately high. In the 90 second experiment, they recorded an almost identical level of discomfort, except it lasted for 90 seconds. So, in aggregate, the participants experienced 50% more net discomfort in the 90 second experiment than they did in the 60 second experiment.

But this is where it gets interesting.

Several weeks after the experiments were performed, the participants were told they would have to undergo one of the experiments again, but they could choose which one. When offered the choice, 69% of the participants chose to undergo the 90 second experiment. Why? They said they remembered that the longer experiment was less painful. The fact that the 90 second experiment had ended slightly less uncomfortably than the 60 second experiment made a large majority of the participants remember the entire event as less painful.

So if perception is in fact reality, we humans have brains that at least in some ways work just like our animal companions'. Kissing a booboo makes it go away, a lollipop from the doctor makes a shot hurt less, and all is well that ends well.

You Never Know Who’s Going to Buy an RV

My friend Matt is a dude. Not the kind of dude who tucks his jeans into his boots or wears a straw hat to a horse show in the middle of February. Matt is the kind of dude you might find sitting on a Southern California beach, soaking wet and covered in sand with a surfboard at his side; or maybe in line for the chair lift at one of Utah’s great ski resorts, wearing a classic tuque with the newest flavor of snowboard strapped to his feet.

If a toy has been made that glides, rolls, skims, jumps, peddles, paddles or slides, Matt has owned at least two.

And Matt is generous. In the almost two decades we have known each other, I have been dragged behind his boat, ridden his motorcycles, and borrowed his snow shoes a dozen times or more. For several years, Matt even kept a beautiful wooden canoe and two paddles not so subtly hidden in the main stairwell at his office so that anyone who wanted to could enjoy a paddle around the small decorative pond just outside the cafeteria.

In short, Matt is one fun guy to hang out with.

But don’t think Matt is the classic slacker. He isn’t. He is a well-educated, highly-skilled engineer and businessman who has made a fine living in the software industry. This is where the RV comes in.

In 1997, Matt and I were both working for a small software company when it was purchased by a much larger company headquartered in Japan. As part of the acquisition, the executives at our company arranged for a certain amount of money from the purchase to be set aside for the employees. Each employee got a certain amount of this “start happy” money based on tenure, position and current salary. Because Matt had been at the company for several years and was an integral member of the management team, he started quite a bit happier than most of us. With his windfall cash, Matt decided to top off his toy collection with a piece of equipment he had wanted for some time: a motor home.

After a few weeks of investigation and research, Matt and his wife got up on a beautiful Saturday morning and drove to the RV dealership just a few miles up the interstate from where they lived, fully intending to buy a motor home; a very nice motor home; a very expensive motor home; with cash.

They were in every way a salesman’s dream that day, with one exception: they didn’t look the part.

I can picture what they must have looked like that morning. Matt was probably wearing leather sandals and some faded khaki cargo shorts, topped off with a souvenir t-shirt from a recent mountain bike rally, road race, or one of the local micro-breweries; his not long but longish dark, wavy hair and scruffy beard making him look even younger than he was. His wife certainly matched him in attire as they both walked onto the RV dealership lot with a certain casual, “just looking around” demeanor.

For two hours they walked in and out of RVs, trying to decide exactly which one they liked best, while one of the salesmen occasionally trotted by and asked “How ya doin’?” or “Ya doin’ alright?” Not once did the salesman ask them what they were looking for or if he might be of assistance. Not once did he acknowledge that they just might be two people who would, in fact, buy an RV. He was too busy with customers who, by his assessment, were more likely to be buying. In fact, in the two hours they were at the dealership, no one even bothered to introduce themselves or ask them their names.

So Matt and his wife did exactly what most of us at some point in our lives have wished we had done, but didn’t. They got in their car, drove 30 miles to the next nearest RV dealership and bought their new motor home. When he got home that evening, Matt called the inattentive salesman from the first dealership and told him exactly what he had done and why he did it.

As someone who makes a living as a salesperson, I can tell you that the salesman who got that call was sick for days thinking about what he missed through his poor judgment and inattention.

Since the day he recounted it to me, I have turned Matt’s experience into a life motto. In both my professional and personal life. I try to carefully examine the manner in which I judge people based on their outward appearance or demeanor.

Have I missed making a new friend because someone didn’t fit into my rigid definition of friend?

Have I mistreated a stranger because they were too different from me?

Have I lost a business opportunity by assuming that the person on the other end of an email or phone call just wasn’t the kind of customer I was looking for?

When I catch myself making these kinds of decisions, I stop and remember my friend Matt at the RV dealership on that bright Saturday morning . . .

. . . and I remind myself that you just never know who’s going to buy an RV.