A rookie's attempt at "Meals on Wheels"

You haven't lived until you have slipped and slid up and down 20 steps to deliver food to the elderly...part of the "Meals on Wheels" program. You should have seen my jaw drop when I found out I hadn't brought enough food the first time so I would have to navigate up and down the icy steps another time.

A friend of ours had surgery this week and he asked for some help. For the past dozen years, he and his wife have represented our church in delivering meals on wheels to a dozen or so elderly in Mandan.

He told us that it would take about 45 minutes. Pick up the food at the Golden Age Club at 11 a.m. and deliver it to the addresses. No problem right? Wrong.

First of all, the food wasn't ready when we first arrived. So we had to come back 20 minutes later. Then we received two larges Thermos containers. In one of them appeared to be sack lunches. I didn't look in the other. Big mistake.

So, like hound dogs looking for a bone, my wife Belinda and I set off in our car to find the first address...in a part of town we've never been. Having located it, I brought out a sack lunch and handed it to a young lady...maybe a caretaker I thought, at the address. Then I was back in the car looking for the second house a half dozen blocks away. The same scenario played out only this time an old, stooped man was waiting and looking out the door for my arrival.

"Wow, I'm getting the hang of this," I thought.

The third house was behind the abandoned Jr. High building...on the side of a steep hill. There were two sets of steps with a landing in between. It didn't take me long to figure out why the steps weren't cleaned off. The people getting these meals are often home-bound. But the steps were covered with rutted ice and very treacherous. With sack in hand, I held on to the rail and made it up the steps to the house. Inside was an elderly, frail man sitting in a chair with the TV turned up full blast. He had just hung up his phone as I entered the house.

"That was a gal calling for you," he said. "You need to bring us a hot meal along with the cold sandwich...and you need to go back to the other two houses and give them their hot meal as well."

What? I didn't hear anything about two meals...but after sliding down his stairs and checking the other Thermos, I saw that he was correct. There were as many hot meals as there were sacks. So back up the steps I went. I apologized for my error. He mumbled something, and I went back down the steps, this time holding on to the rail with both hands.

I broke the news to my wife that I had blundered and that we would need to re-track. No problem. This time we had an easier time finding the homes that we searched for the first time. To add a little suspense to the goings on, my cellphone rang so my wife got to take the hot dishes to the surprised recipients and express our apologies with her warm, sincere smile. I'm not all that good at that.

Then it was off to a pair of houses where it said the recipients were diabetic. Now, if you know anything about diabetics, they like to eat on time. And if they're blood sugar falls, they can get a little snippy. Well, that must have been what happened. Belinda took one set of meals (hot and cold) and I took the other. I was greeted at the door by a daughter who told me her mom was not so happy with the service this day because we were late and she was hungry.

By this time, I had finished polishing up my apology. So out it came...with some added flourishes. And I was off.

The next house was interesting because I had to go to the door in the alley. Inside the house was a woman who was obviously deaf because she didn't hear my knock, she didn't hear me enter nor did she hear me holler at her. When she turned around, there I was. "Surprise."

Anyway, it was all I could do not to laugh because she walked over to me with the same tiny footsteps that I had see Tim Conway take on so many episodes of the Carol Burnett show. I should've known they were based on real life, but until today, I hadn't not figured that out.

The next two recipients were at the Lewis & Clark Hotel in downtown Mandan. Once upon a time, the hotel was probably pretty classy as it's located across Main Street from the former Northern Pacific Railroad Depot. However, that day of classiness has long passed. I've been in the hotel before and it smells to high heaven.

Not wanting to get sick, I asked Belinda if she would deliver the last two meals. She agreed. So I stayed in the car with Grandpa and answered another cellphone call. After a while Belinda returned. We were done.

I asked her if the place still smelled. She assured me that it did. I told her I thought it smelled like an old sweaty gym sock. She said it smelled like years of stale cigarette smoke. We agreed that it smelled bad.

As we were driving back to the Golden Age Center to return the containers, Belinda said, "Well, that wasn't so bad." That caught me off guard.

But then I thought, "I'm sure if we do it again, it will be a lot better."

But if I learned anything from it, perhaps, it was this: "Grandpa really leads the life of Riley because he lives with us. His meals are always hot and he isn't wondering if some rookie 50-year-old will be delivering his meal 15 minutes late or giving him only a cold sack lunch when there is a hot meal that's been bought and paid for."

By the way, the hot meal looked exactly like a TV dinner.

Communication miracles

When I was a little boy, we had a party line telephone that we shared with one of our neighbors. My Grandma Van Dyke, who lived on the edge of town, had a party line phone she shared with what seemed to be hundreds of neighbors. If all her neighbors decided to rubberneck on the conversation, she would have to tell them to get off or the call would get so weak that you couldn't hear her speak.

Obviously, we've come a long way in 50 years. Now most people I know carry a phone on their hip and they aren't sharing the signal with even one other person. Cell phone conversations can be so crisp that you think the person you're talking to is in the next room and not three or four states away.

Mostly, that's because today's telephone signals are digital rather than analog. Do you remember when we had dial phones? The dial would send an analog signal to a central exchange and connect you to the right party. You could actually hear the click, click, click of the equipment moving in the telephone exchange office. Now we hear a beep, beep or perhaps nothing at all.

But that's just one of the marvels of modern communication. This holiday season, I enjoyed meeting Derek's girlfriend's family -- who live in Brazil -- through the little camera on her computer and the little camera on our computer.

The cost of the call? Well, really there wasn't a cost, at least not anything additional from the monthly Internet fee we already pay. And yet we could talk to them and look at them.

Again, I remember Dick Tracy from the Sunday comics when I was young. He had a watch where he could talk and look at someone at the same time. Man, I thought that was pure science fiction...never gonna happen. And yet, it has. Maybe we aren't using a watch, but can it be very far off if we can do it on our computers and computers can be wireless?

I'm also enjoying the heck out of Facebook. It used to be that a family had to have a reunion somewhere and it involved a lot of people driving many miles if they wanted to visit with each other. Now, through Facebook, I'm in regular contact with a lot of my family -- cousins, second cousins, children of cousins, etc. -- simply by logging on to my trusty Facebook account.

Since I'm a communicator by trade, there's no real shortage of things for me to comment on -- Grandpa, my family, politics, religion, visitors, current events, you name it. If asked my opinion, I'm NOT smart enough to be tactful and keep it to myself. So I'm sure my extended family has figured out that I'm liberal Democrat who can't wait to have the government spend everyone else's money. My motto is: "the only fair tax is the one that I don't have to pay." So if the party in power sticks it to the rich or to the bankers, I know that it won't effect me one iota -- because I don't shop at stores that are owned by rich people, buy energy from utilities owned by rich people or have a bank account that could possibly have increased fees to pay for increased taxes. In a sentence, I'm gullible enough to believe that what politicans tell me is good for me, really is good for me. They are much smarter with my money than I am.

See, there I go again, espousing my opinions. So here's to digital communciations. Don't you feel like you've just been lectured again by grumpy Uncle Steve, but it's clearer now because of modern technology.

Following in the steps of typewriters and carbon paper...

Over my Christmas vacation, I read a story about the things that are on their way to extinction. No this has nothing to do with climate change and the polar bears, black-footed ferrets or whooping cranes...this extinction is caused by the advances made in technology.

A couple things on the list seemed a little hard to believe. I suppose that's because I'm 50 and I've grown up with them, but young people don't seem to be as enamored by them as were their parents.

The first is the land-line telephone. The writer of the article believes that land-line telephones will be extinct in 10 years.

Now I remember turning 20, graduating from college and landing my first job as a reporter. Along with my first job, came my first apartment and my first phone. At that time, the phone company was a monopoly (Gasp!) and so my new phone was from the Bell telephone company. I rented my phone from them because they didn't sell them in discount stores. That was part of the monopoly deal. However, I couldn't wait to have my own phone because it meant that I would get my name printed in the telephone directory. That was a sign of adulthood...in fact, it was one of the last signs of being an adult since the drinking, voting and every other thing in the world occurred when you were 18 in those days.

Now young people don't seem to want to have their name in the phone book, so they opt for the cell phone. Even some old people don't seem to care because they have given up their land-line phones too.

However, I have adopted the "over my cold body" defense. First, if I don't have my name and number in the telephone book, I won't be bothered by survey companies and telemarketers...and you know how much I like to be called by these two bastions of society. (Actually, the word bastion was originally going to be another another word that sounds like bastion and starts with the same four letters, but I digress).

Now besides land-line telephones, the second thing on the list toward extinction is face-to-face conversation. The author of the article believes that texting (on cell phones) will replace simple, every day conversation.

Now I'm sure that what he writes he believes, because I have seen young people sitting around in the same room texting to each other rather than just talking. But seeing it doesn't make it right.

This past week, I was visited by numerous nieces and nephews along with my in-laws and my brother. You could see that the older people (including myself) enjoyed the friendly banter while the young people looked down at their crotches and continued to text each other.

My brother and I don't know how to text and I don't think we're going to learn. I'm pretty sure the same goes for my dad and my in-laws. So if face-to-face conversations end by the end of the decade, it's not going to be a very fun place for the chatterers among us.

My second grade teacher, Mrs. Cebull, identified me early on as a chatterbox. And let it be known that she was right. I'm the one who will start a conversation in a crowded elevator with a perfect stranger.

But I will not text.

So in the coming years, I will keep my eyes and ears open for land-line telephones and face-to-face conversations to see if they will disappear into history the way carbon paper and typewriters have. Carbon paper has been replaced by copiers and typewriters by personal computers, such as the one I'm typing on today. Here's to a new year and a new decade, but let me keep my phone and my mouth.

My 10 most memorable moments from the past decade

Since the "10 Most ____ of the Past Decade" are all the rage now, I thought I would give you my top 10. I didn't win any Oscars or Nobel Peace Prizes, but I still have some vivid memories.

Number 10 - Sitting in the MDU war room on New Year's Eve 2000 waiting for the Y2K Bug to crash the nation's electric grid. Of course, it didn't happen, but if it had, I was there to handle the press calls from the media. Instead, we ate snacks and left shortly after the new decade began with lights never flickering...even once.

Number 9 - In June 2006, Belinda and I joined her parents, some of her aunts and some of her sisters and their husbands on a weeklong cruise through the Alaskan "Inside Passage Way." This was a lot of fun, but it was dampened by an impending death. See Number 2.

Number 8 - Graduation from high school of our two sons. Derek graduated in 2006 and Scott in 2008. Both times I had to clean out the garage, haul tables and chairs from the church as we hosted graduation open houses. The garage may never be that clean again.

Number 7 - October 1, 2002, I began a new job with the Lignite Energy Council when I was 42. It was great because I was back in the energy industry and public relations after a nearly year hiatus. See Number 1.

Number 6 - April 5, 2009, when we got a call from our sister-in-law Sharon Doll early on a Sunday morning telling us that our neice Janelle Scheitlin was being air-lifted from Glendive to Bismarck following a terrible auto accident. Janelle was in a coma for five weeks and either a Bismarck or Mandan hospital for a few more weeks, but she is now a senior in high school in Glendive.

Number 5 - September 11, 2001, I was called by a fellow MDU co-worker George MacDonald to go to the TV studio in the basement of the Schuchart Building and look at what had just happened to one of the World Trade Center towers. As we were watching, a second plane hit the neighboring tower and the "War on Terror" was officially underway. To add to the stress, the MDU President Martin White and a small contingency of other employees were in New York at the time for financial briefings on Wall Street. Also my boss, Cathi Christopherson, was in Washington, D.C., at meetings not far from the Pentagon that was also hit by a plane.

Number 4 - July 2006, when my father flew in a private plane with his kitty Nibby and me from Roundup to Mandan to begin a new chapter in his life with my family. My family along with Todd and Darcy Schulte were bringing dad's belongings to Mandan in a U-Haul. None of us knew if this arrangement was going to work, but we knew that he couldn't live alone. He was too old to teach to clean and cook. See Number 2.

Number 3 - July 18, 2009, a triumphant return to Roundup along with my dad and family for a great family reunion at my cousin Dennis Anderson's, which was followed by a return to the Solberg Cabins along the north fork of the Musselshell River near Martinsdale. It felt like old times again. And it made me realize how much I had missed seeing my cousins, aunts and uncles who I had grown up with in Roundup.

Number 2 - June 2006, the death of my mother, Evelyn Grace Van Dyke, at the age of 82. She had been suffering for a couple of years with congestive heart failure. In February, she asked to be put on hospice and the family rallied around her in her final years and months on earth. She was a lovely, loving mother and is greatly missed by her husband, children and grandchildren.

Number 1 - October 2001, unfortunately, the most memorable day in the decade was on a Monday when I found out I lost my job at MDU. At the time, I was the corporate communications manager and had just returned from a media relations seminar in Houston, Texas. That weekend, we went to Dickinson to visit Todd and Darcy and went golfing. Never did I suspect that on Monday afternoon, I would be released from the company that I had given my heart and soul to for 16 years. The reason given was reorganization of the department. Luckily, however, our house was paid for, and our cars were, too. Within three months I was working for the Bismarck Tribune as its education reporter and within a year I was working for the Lignite Energy Council. But it was a very traumatic and emotional time. I'm so grateful for a supportive family and for my friends who meant so much to me when I needed their love and trust the most.

Alright...that's my 10 most memorable moments of the past decade. What say you? What were your memorable monents?

Hooked on Cafe World?

Wednesday morning I was sitting in front of our computer on my day off when our son Scott walked in on me and blurted, "Hooked!"

It all started innocently enough. Belinda asked me about a week ago if I would mind getting on her Facebook account and clicking on the application "Cafe World" because she had a couple of dishes that would be done cooking and she didn't want them to spoil while she was gone.

Sure, I said, not realizing what I had actually agreed to. Getting on Facebook and clicking on application were easy enough, but then I was lost. So I clicked on the "Help" and read the instructions.

To remove her dishes from the hot plates to the serving counters was easy enough, but now what to do with those red hot burners that were glowing from the computer screen? I read some more instructions and then clicked on the cookbook. Pretty soon, I was making decisions about how to run a cafe. And, like most men, I quickly ascertained that I had more skill and knowledge about this particular task than our spouses who have actually cooked more meals and spent more time in the kitchen than their husbands.

So, suddenly, I had been empowered. I had 15 or 16 dishes to choose from and they varied in time to cook and how much the customers would pay. I started out with some five minute cheeseburgers.

Yep, in a short five minutes they were ready to serve. That was easy...so I progressed on to more difficult tasks such as increasing the cafe's buzz factor. As the customers left the cafe, they would give me a thumb's up sign and the buzz factor would increase. The higher it went, the more customers I had and the more food I had to prepare. It wasn't long before I reached the maximum buzz factor of 105, which I took to meant that I was giving this game 105 percent...which is better than 100 percent.

Nuts, some of the dishes Belinda had cooking would take way too long to finish and I needed those hot plates NOW. So I deleted her dishes and started making my own.

Well, you get the drift. I have been doing this off and on now for about a week. Belinda would have something cooking, which of course was the wrong meal for the wrong time of the day. I would come to the rescue and save "Belinda's Cafe" from sheer ruin.

Now it was Wednesday, Veteran's Day, and I had the whole day off. Finally, time to really put on thinking cap and once again provide massive profits to the cafe so we could expand and buy the necessary things that would make this little operation even more profitable.

Belinda left for work and it was me and the computer. Until Scott arrived. And then he blurted out something that I didn't want to hear.

"Naw, I'm not hooked," I said with a snarl like a drunk clutching a cheap bottle of Mad Dog 20/20.

So let me explain...if I was hooked, it would be Steve's Cafe. The application would be on my Facebook. Thus, while I stay pretty well informed as to what is going on with Belinda's Cafe, I have not treaded into the "hooked" waters. At least not yet.

I could probably start Steve's Cafe, but why should I when Belinda's has already expanded, purchased more stoves and counter tops and I can hire and fire the waiters on a whim. Plus, I've got too many dishes cooking on the hot plates to start over from scratch.

You make the call? Am I hooked or am I just a good husband helping out?

Comedy through the eyes of my son

One day this week, I had to take my car into the shop for a minor repair. On the way, I encountered by son Scott who was driving home from college a little before noon. So I dropped the car off and walked home. Shortly, my wife arrived as well and we decided to eat at Fried's, a family-owned cafe on the northwestern edge of town.

Fried's is known for it's home-made German food, which I don't particularly like...so dad and I each settled for a hamburger and chips.

As usual, I scarfed down my hamburger while dad took his sweet time eating his. Belinda and Scott, likewise, were still heading into their German dishes while my plate was empty.

So it seemed like a good idea to order a slice of pecan pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it.

When it arrived, dad was still about halfway through his meal, so he surprised me when he said, "I want that also."

I asked the waitress, a lady about dad's age but twice as heavy, to also bring him a slice of pecan pie ala mode.

When it arrived, dad stabbed the ice cream with his fork and moved it to his plate. Then he proceeded to finish his meal and ice cream at the same time.

Scott is watching all of this and having a wonderfully good time of laughing, chortling and snickering as he gasped for breath. I, on the other hand, wondered what I'm supposed to do with the $2.75 piece of pie -- minus the ice cream.

"Dad, do you want the pie?"

"No, you can have it," was his reply...to which Scott begins a new round of laughter across the table.

Well, after you've just eaten a hamburger, pie and ice cream, there really isn't room for another piece of pie, especially one as rich as pecan.

Belinda asked for a take-home box. That night, she asked me if I was going to eat the pie sitting in her fridge. You know what? I was still full...of food and Scott's laughter.

But I warmed it up in the microwave, poured some milk (in place of ice cream) on it and devoured the pie.

Still, though, I'm haunted. Did dad really want only the ice cream and he thought the pie was part of the plate? Or did he suddenly realize he was only hungry enough for the ice cream and not the pie?

Nevermind, I guess...the story resolved itself and Scott was entertained once again as he watched his grandfather and father interact over a meal and dessert.

Evaporation

My boys know what I'm writing about just from the headline, but I think I'll tease the rest of the readers a little. You know how fast water turns to vapor and disappears on a hot, arid summer afternoon? Well, that's the way Chex party mix disappears at our house...especially around the holidays. That's why years ago, we began calling it "Evaporation."

Sometime around Thanksgiving, the grocery stores will start selling all varieties of Chex cereal at a discounted price. We generally don't buy the wheat Chex, but we love the rice and corn varieties. A box of Kix is good and you can also add a few Cheerios if you want along with mixed nuts and some pretzels.

I've also worked on perfecting the coating. Basically, mine is melted butter, Worcestershire sauce and some garlic powder. I've also found that cooking it in the microwave for about six minutes and stirring it every two minutes makes a fine batch of quick party mix.

Years ago when we were hooked on "computer golf" as a way to while away the winter hours, we found that party mix and Mountain Dew were just the right condiments for an afternoon of hooks, slices and birdies. The cereal disappeared faster than I could make it.

However, mine pales in comparison to my mother-in-law's. This woman has taken Chex party mix to a new level. And that's where my story actually begins.

I was reminded a couple of weekends ago how good her party mix is. She brought out a big bowl when we came to visit and it wasn't long before it was gone. I think I ate 90 percent of it. Even her pretzels, which I don't really care for, were pretty good.

She sent an empty butter container full of party mix home with us. Now, I thought I would try to ration myself and eat just a little so it would last a couple of days. However, Scott found it and devoured most of it before I could get home from work. Still, the crumbs were tasty.

Now I couldn't really get mad at him because there was a time when my mother-in-law sent a huge gallon jug container full of party mix with us to give to her baby boy -- a huge man -- who lives in Bismarck. Unfortunately, Uncle Miles only got the crumbs that time because my family and I snacked on his party mix on the 210 mile trip from Glendive to Mandan.

There's only more thing I would like to add before I close...the best present I ever got from my mother-in-law for Christmas was the jar of party mix a couple of years ago. It was delicious.