"It is what it is..."

On March 16, I left my hospital room, my wife and dad for a little exploratory surgery known as an angiogram. As I was being wheeled downstairs to see if I had blockage or a heart attack, the only words I could think of was "it is what it is...and we'll make the most of it."

You can't believe my joy to hear the cardiologist say that I had no blockage and had not had a heart attack. This gives me a better chance for a recovery as none of my heart had died from lack of oxygen. What I did have was cardiomyopathy, which is a diseased heart muscle. In my case, the cardiologist said it could have been caused by a virus. My heart was weak, scarred, enlarged and beating irregularly.

Still, I was uplifted by the number of heart medicines and the people I know who have made miraculous recoveries from heart failure.

My saga begins probably back in January after we returned from Hawaii. I don't remember being short of breath when we walked the breadth of Waikiki, but I do remember being short of breath when I saw my pulmonologist in Bismarck. He oversees my CPAP machine, which reduces my apneas when I sleep. I think that appointment was January 18 and at the time, I chalked up my shortness of breath to walking up a hill in the cold January air.

My next excursion to a doctor came at the end of February when I thought I had bronchitis, which is something I have a proclivity for. My doctor prescribed a steroid and an antibiotic, much like he had in the past. But something was amiss as I went in a week later to find my ankles and feet had swollen. This time he added a week to the antibiotics since my lungs were still filled with gunk and changed my water pill to something stronger.

Still, I felt my condition worsening and a week later went in again. This time, however, the doctor found that my heart rate was more than twice as fast as normal. Thus I earned a trip to the hospital.

There I  had x-rays, an EKG and an echocardiogram along with the angiogram to determine what was going on with my heart. Three days after entering the hospital, I was more or less being tested to my tolerance and how well the different heart medicines would perform. To do this, I had to wear a heart monitor and have my blood checked every so often.

Now I really can't say enough good things about the nurses and doctors working on my case. They did their best to make me feel at home, but a small hospital room is not my home and you don't enjoy many freedoms when tied by a four-feet length of plastic tubing to an I.V. pole.

So when my release came on March 21, I was more than ready to go home. The last thing to be removed was the I.V. from my left arm. I had been stuck like a pin cushion as my veins wanted to "roll" or "collapse" about as soon as a needle came in contact with them.

Now I'm recuperating at home and learning all about my new low sodium, water restricted, low calorie diet. It will probably be a couple of weeks until I return to work. However, when I do, I hope my body is in harmony and my heart is beating properly.

A lot changed in the last week. I look at it as having "crossed the Rubicon."

I just thank my lucky stars that I have a supportive family, co-workers, friends and a great staff of medical experts who work very hard on my behalf.

Thank you to all who whispered a prayer. It wasn't the least you could do, it was the most. And I'm very grateful.

Yellow roses

Christmas 2005 was bittersweet. We were at my mom and dad’s home in Roundup for the holidays. Mom had recently fallen in the middle of the night and half of her face was black and blue. This one morning she was sitting in her favorite chair when she reached in her pocket and pulled out a $10 bill. She told me the money was from her sister Ginny, who lived 50 miles away in Billings. Ginny wanted to buy her some flowers for Christmas so she sent the money to mom, who now made the request to me.

I took the money and went to the local florist in Roundup. I knew that $10 was a lot of money to my Aunt Ginny and I also knew that my mom liked beautiful flowers, especially roses. So I added some money to the kitty and brought back a bouquet of roses for mom. She was surprised and said, “I don’t think you got these roses with the money Ginny sent.”

I shook my head and told her that it wasn’t the amount of money, it was the thought. Ginny was thinking a lot about her sister to send $10 for flowers. Both her sister and I wanted mom to have a special bouquet of flowers so we pooled our resources. Did she like them? You bet, and she posed with her flowers like a blushing bride even as her discolored face told the story of how fragile her health had become.  

Mom had a myriad of health problems. She was diabetic and she had congestive heart failure. She ate a handful of pills with every meal and required shots of insulin to moderate her blood sugar. She was receiving invasive treatments at the Roundup hospital to remove the water from around her lungs and heart. This had been done every two months, then every month, now it was every two weeks. She was short of breath and lacked oxygen in her blood so had to be hooked up to an oxygen machine day and night.

Still, it seemed, mom’s family was in denial about how sick she really was. My dad, who had become nothing but skin and bones as mom could no longer cook, kept waiting for her to recover so she could bake him a pie and make meat and potatoes just like she had for 60 years. He wasn’t the only one in denial. Somehow, it seemed, we all believed that mom was somehow going to shake this and get better. After all, when you asked her how she was doing, she always had the same canned answer, “I think I’m doing a little better.”

This mirage would shatter the first week of March of 2006. My sister Janet, who lives in Rapid City, had gone home for a visit. In the middle of the night, mom got out of bed to use the bathroom and collapsed because her blood sugar had crashed. Janet called the EMTs to get an ambulance. Her second call was to me, and I lit out for Roundup – an eight-hour drive.

Upon my arrival, I sat in the hospital room with Janet, dad and mom. Later in the day, Janet left to return to her family in South Dakota. However, before she left, mom told all of us that she had wished Janet hadn’t called for an ambulance and that she had died last night.

Believe me, that’ll get your attention.

The next day was a Thursday. As I made dad breakfast at our house, he told me he wasn’t feeling well so thought he would stay home from the hospital. So I went to visit mom by myself. When a doctor arrived, he said we had some choices. We could put mom into the nursing home as she needed more care than dad could provide, or we could put mom on hospice and she could go home. The hospice nurses would see her several times a week plus provide other services. The main point, however, was that mom would be going home to die and would never be in a hospital again.

Earlier in her life, mom had worked at Roundup Memorial Hospital as a cook. But now, the hospital had become a chamber of horrors for mom. The nurses were pricking her with needles, the therapists were asking her to do this or do that…and to top it off, a sweater she had gotten for Christmas had been stolen from her room during the night. Mom was perpetually cold. At home, dad had the wood stove burning in the corner of the livingroom and the indoor temperature simmered at about 80 degrees. Still, mom would always be wearing a sweater…about six feet away from the stove. “Willis,” she’d say, “Put another log on the fire.”

When the doctor left her hospital room, I asked mom what she wanted to do. She didn’t say she wanted to be put on hospice. She told me, “I want the second thing the doctor said.” Somehow, it seemed her decision had become “the word that need not be ever uttered.”

To mom, it must have seemed like the weight of the world had been lifted from her shoulders. She now knew and accepted that she would be dying, but dying at home, in familiar surroundings. The rest of the day, mom sat in her hospital bed and recounted story after story to me. Some of the stories were about my brothers and sisters and some were about hers. It was as if she wanted to share her most hidden secrets, plus she wanted to tell me exactly how she wanted her memorial service and where she wanted to be buried in the Roundup cemetery…as close to her brother Vern Anderson’s grave as possible.  

I signed the hospice papers for my family and the next day, a Friday, mom went home. The nurses appeared, a hospital bed was set up in my parent’s bedroom and – it seemed – the countdown had begun. Normally, someone on hospice is given less than six months to live. Mom would die in the middle of June…early one Monday morning. In the interim, all of her five children had the chance to see her and support her. My middle brother Randy, for instance, literally spent a month sleeping at the foot of my mom’s bed at night waiting on her every need. During the day, my youngest sister Susan was mom’s shadow. After that, we hired ladies to come in and care for mom. These were some of God’s special angels. They would cook for her, read to her, play cards with her, even sing songs to her.

In May, mom celebrated Mother’s Day and among her gifts were yellow roses from my niece Karen, who at the time lived in Seattle, Washington. Mom loved her roses. A couple of days later was mom’s 82^nd birthday and she received 82 birthday cards…some from the people now reading this blog. But by the first of June, we knew mom wouldn’t be with us long. It was simply a matter of time.

I brought up the flowers because I want you to know her family is still buying her flowers. Probably like you, we buy our deceased relatives flowers every Memorial Day. For mom, it’s roses. However, the flowers are not only a symbol of our love. But they are a remembrance of a wonderful mother and wife and grandmother and cook and housecleaner and army wife who lived through the Depression, who married a soldier in World War II, who bore six children, five of them who lived, who loved every moment of life and never thought about dying until one afternoon in March sitting in a hospital bed.

But if there’s a point to my story, it’s this. The flowers that will always mean the most are ones we give to our loved ones when they are alive. Don’t wait for Memorial Day to think of buying flowers. Valentines Day, a birthday, an anniversary or just-because-you-care-day…are all the best times to remember our loved ones with flowers. 

Hooked again....Family Feud this time

Those stupid game applications on Facebook are annoying. In the fall of 2009, I found myself hooked on Cafe World. After making it through the winter vacation where I cooked, served and single-handedly captured first place in the world of computer cafes, I went cold turkey. I swore off games on Facebook...that is until this past Christmas vacation when I started playing Family Feud.

Now my family has a weak spot for this game. We've been playing it on the computer for several years. However, we eventually tire of it until someone remembers we have it downloaded and we start up again.

But at Christmastime, Scott was playing Family Feud on his computer only it wasn't the downloadable game. It was Family Feud on Facebook. So you can compete against your friends.

Pretty soon, I was playing, Derek was playing and Belinda was playing.

Then they got tired of it. Then it was just me playing...on my profile, Scott's profile, Derek's profile and Belinda's profile.

That's right. I'm keeping up my end of the bargain by playing at least eight games of Family Feud every day. This has been cutting into my hours of watching Fox News or reading the political news on The Hill and Politico.

You start on Monday morning with everybody's score the same - zero. And by Sunday night, one of the four Van Dykes has consistently been the winner. That's because one of us is always moving to a higher level sometime during the week and getting a bunch of bonus games to play. Belinda, for instance, got eight bonus games this morning. Although, she probably doesn't know it because she doesn't actually play.

So I must have been playing Family Feud most of the morning. As it stands now, Belinda is in the lead, followed by Derek, then me and then Scott. However, in actuality, they are all me.

I seem to have an addict personality...especially when it comes to Facebook game applications.

So once again, I'm going to have to swear off Family Feud on Facebook, just as I did Cafe World.

I'm sort of the Charlie Sheen of Facebook games. "Yeah, I could live without Family Feud, but life would be boring."

Well, actually, no...life would probably be more interesting if I wasn't playing so much Family Feud. I might have more time to blog. Or write my speech for the upcoming Toastmasters contest.

So, I'm laying it on the line. I'm giving up Family Feud. Now if only Charlie Sheen could give up cocaine and porno stars.

By the time this blog is published, my addiction will be over. However, it was fun while it lasted...two months. My head is now full of useless trivia that I learned by answering questions that all began the same way: "We asked 100 people what dogs do in public that humans would be embarrassed to do."

In case you don't play Family Feud, the top answer is "Pee on a tree."

A little tin press

A question you hear a lot when you’re a child is, “What do you want be when you grow up?”

For me, the choice was self-evident. I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. When I was about 10 or 11, I bought a toy press from a store in my hometown that sold gifts, cards and toys.

The printing press was made of tin and had little rubber type that you could put on a wheel and turn it to make an impression on a piece of paper. It was time consuming work and based on technology that even in the 1970s was out of date. However, that little press did what it was intended to do – it sparked my imagination.

By the time I was a freshman in high school, I was writing up sports stories about our high school teams for our hometown newspaper, the Roundup Record-Tribune. My senior year in high school, I was the editor of our school newspaper and had chosen the University of Montana as my college because they offered degrees in journalism.

A high school guidance counselor encouraged me to start college during the summer after my graduation. He pointed out that my high school had less than 200 students but the University would have about 8,000 students. He didn’t want me to have culture shock and drop out, so suggested that I attend summer classes – mostly with teachers who were coming back for continuing education courses – and I would be better prepared for classes in the fall.

This was a grand idea. Missoula, Montana, in the summer is a treasure trove of activities and I soon was involved in many of them including a Sunday morning softball game on campus. It turned out many of the players would later be my professors, so it was a good way to meet them.

After my freshmen year, I again went to college in the summer, which allowed me to graduate from journalism school in three years.

My first job after college was as a reporter in Beach, North Dakota. I soon discovered that a month actually working for a newspaper taught me more than college did in three years. I was covering city government, writing engagement announcements and even taking pictures of automobiles for newspaper advertising. The one thing I wasn’t doing was writing sports. So after six months, I decided to quit, go live with my parents and search for a job as a sports reporter.

My goal was to work for the Billings Gazette. But alas, after a two-month search, I landed a job in Alliance, Nebraska, writing sports. This was a short-lived job. After two-days, I quit. I found that the publisher had lied to me about my wages and benefits package so I re-packed everything I owned into my car and drove back to Roundup to live with my parents again.

A month later, I got a call from a newspaper publisher in Baker, Montana, who wanted me to be the editor of his newspaper. The editor of the newspaper in Roundup had put a good word in for me, which resulted in this job offer.

I snapped it up and moved to Baker, a town about the size of Roundup and one that had many of the same interests and both revolved around the oil exploration and production businesses. Still I wasn’t writing sports, but I found living in Baker very comfortable. There were lots of young people because of the oil boom and I liked to party with all of them.

Two years later, I was offered a job with Mid-Rivers Telephone Cooperative in Glendive. This marked a big change in my career because I left newspapers and moved into public relations. However, reflecting on the change, I really didn’t realize it at the time. I actually applied for the job in the first place because I thought it might bring some opportunities for my Baker newspaper to do some printing jobs for the cooperative.

Luck was smiling on me, because my neighbor in Baker worked for the telephone cooperative. And while my neighbor had a reputation for hating everyone, he liked me. That was partly because I was a part-time bartender in Baker at his favorite watering hole - the Windjammer.

After three years in Glendive, I found myself married to a gal who played on the same volleyball team as me. One day I told her that if MDU had a job opening in their communications department, I would apply. Even if it meant moving back to North Dakota. I had met a lot of MDU employees both in Baker and Glendive and I liked them all.

Well, that weekend in the newspaper, there was a job opening at MDU and I applied. I was one of about 90 applicants. A fellow by the name of Jon Metropoulos came to Glendive to do a first job interview. As luck would have it, I went to college with his son who also attended journalism school. I must have misunderstood Jon because somehow I though there was only three people who had applied for the job. Well, this gave me a lot of confidence as I thought I had to be better than the other two. Perhaps, Jon was telling me that they would narrow the field down to three and interview those three in Bismarck.

A week or so later I got a call asking if Belinda and I would come to Bismarck for a second interview. So we stayed in the Kirkwood Motor Inn, had our interview, had a nice dinner on MDU and I thought if nothing else, it had been a nice weekend. About a week later I was offered the job. I started in December 1985 as the editor of the utility’s employee magazine.

A lot of changes occurred in the ensuing 16 years and by 2001, MDU was no longer simply a regional utility and I was no longer the editor of the employee magazine. I had been promoted a couple of times and was working as manager of the corporate communications department. Until I wasn’t. I had been downsized. So in February of 2002, I took a job as a reporter for the Bismarck Tribune writing education stories.

This job lasted until September. However, being a reporter again was a shock to my system. The biggest shock was the cut in pay. I was making less than half of what my salary had been.

In October 2002, I went to work for the Lignite Energy Council, where I continue to work today as the vice president of communications.

My wife and I have lived in Mandan for 25 years and we’ve been married for 25 years. We’re the parents of two adult sons and life has been good for us. And to think it all began with a little tin press that I bought at Annie’s Gift Store in Roundup. 

A little Polynesian culture

Last week, I took my fifth trip to Hawaii but my first actual "vacation" to the islands. I think this was also Belinda's fifth trip so we are "veterans" among the Hawaiian tourists.

We speak the language of tourists very well. We know to say "Aloha" for hello and "Mahalo" for thank you. We know that "Pupus" (pronounced poo-poos) are appetizers and "Pipis" (pronounced peepees) is beef. That "Luau" is a feast but "lua" is a toilet. That entrances to toilets  read "Wahines" and "Kanes" instead of Men's and Women's. Luckily, there are often drawings on the entrances as well.

One of the most important things to know about the islands is how isolated they are -- sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They are about 3,000 miles away from the west coast of the United States, and yet they are closer in distance to the United States than any other large land mass.

The islands are considered part of "Polynesia", which also includes other islands in the Pacific including Easter Island off the coast of South America and New Zealand, which is near Australia. There are about 1,000 islands in the Pacific that make up Polynesia. Since it would take months and lots of dollars to see all the islands, a simple way to get a flavor for the different islands is to visit the Polynesian Cultural Center on the east side of Oahu.

The Center is part of the Brigham Young University in Hawaii, so a lot of the people you see there are attending college from the various islands, such as Tonga, Tahiti and Samoa.

It's hard to know where the people that settled these various islands came from originally. Were they originally Asian or from South America? One things for sure, they were an adventuresome bunch to take to their homemade sail boats and float for thousands of miles on the high seas. How they ever survived is beyond  me.

Still, there are some similarities between the various cultures, which leads me to think that there must have been some trade between the islands. Perhaps a trader landed in Fiji after a stay in Hawaii. He would remember that he saw the hula dancers and might suggest that Fiji natives take up the dance as well. But since he has a poor memory, he can't remember all the movements or the color of their garments so they improvise.

Thus it comes to us today that the dancers from the various islands all have sort of the same dances but with different hand gestures, hip shakes and costumes.

Another thing to remember is that at the same time George Washington was commanding the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War against Britain, a war chieftan by the name of Kamehameha was leading his invaders with clubs and torches and burning the little grass shacks and chasing the natives over cliffs as he united the islands under his command. A statue of King Kamehameha stands across the street from the present day capitol of Hawaii in downtown Honolulu.

In 1778, the English explorer Captain Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands and promptly named them the Sandwich Islands. So in 1866 when Mark Twain visited paradise, he called them the Sandwich Islands. However, eventually the native name of Hawaii became the prominent moniker.

After Cook came the missionaries who decided the natives needed to dress better so they gave them white shirts to wear. The natives didn't like the blandness of the white shirts and painted strikingly beautiful designs on them that were the forerunners of today's "Aloha" shirts.

There are many other unusual stories about the islands, including the role of the Dole family -- known for their pineapple plantations -- into persuading the United States to make Hawaii the 50th state in 1959.

Today, a visit to Hawaii will acquaint you with people from throughout the world. A bus trip from Waikiki to a Luau will include people from the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan....to name a few. There is no majority race in Hawaii. Everyone is a minority.

The U.S. has several military bases on the islands so you can also meet a lot of people in the service as well. They will be from all 50 states -- and I think they all enjoy their stay in the islands.

So practice up your Alohas and Mahalos, and save up for a trip to paradise. We've been to the islands in the summer and winter and there is no difference in temperature, the amount of daylight, etc. It's always nice in the islands. The flowers, the people and the natural beauty all welcome you to a wonderful get-away.

Lessons about happiness from an expert

Everyone wants to be happy. But it seems fewer people actually are. So, I’m going to try to change that by calling on a happiness expert – Happy Gilmore.

Happy Gilmore is the name of a 1996 movie comedy starring Adam Sandler, but its also the name of the lead character, a misguided hockey player trying to save his Grandma’s house from the IRS by becoming a pro golfer. Along the way he encounters a golf coach who’s missing a hand because an alligator bit it off. He also competes against a much better golfer by the name of Shooter MacGavin, and he gets into a slugfest with the old TV game show host Bob Barker.

So what can we learn from Happy that will make us happier in our own lives? I think there are three things we can learn.

The first, and probably the most important, is that we need to control our emotions. There’s a scene in the movie where Happy is standing at a bar and is being taunted by his arch nemesis Shooter MacGavin. Happy breaks a beer bottle and threatens Shooter while gripping the neck of the broken bottle.

Suddenly, Happy’s almost angelic girlfriend, Virginia, shows up and asks Happy what he is doing holding a broken bottle in his hand while his temper is flaring. Happy puts on a happy face and says, “I am just looking for the other half of it. Here’s a piece and here’s another piece.”

Sometimes we are going to be taunted by people and events that are going to be difficult to deal with. It’s easy to lose our temper. But the wiser choice is to learn to hold our tongue. It’s been said that grace is keeping your head when everyone else is losing theirs.

Let’s be graceful. And let’s keep our tempers in check. A day later or even an hour after we’re mad, we often look back at it and laugh or admit that it wasn’t worth getting mad about.

Second, we need to be ourselves and quit trying to be what others want us to be. For Happy, he was an unconventional golfer. In fact, he admitted that he was really a hockey player. Actually, he was a bad hockey player but a pretty good, unconventional golfer.

He could drive the ball farther than anyone on the pro circuit because he hit the golf ball the same way he would hit a hockey puck. He also didn’t use a regular putter. He used one the size of a hockey stick. Who knows…maybe it fit his hands better or made him more comfortable on the greens. The results are what counts and at the end of the movie, it’s a putt with the big putter that ricochets around a bunch of twisted pipes and bounces off a Volkswagen to win the tournament and save Grandma’s house.

I know all about this one. I stand out from the crowd because I write right-handed and do everything else left-handed. It would be no easier for me to learn to write left-handed than it would to learn to throw a baseball right-handed. We are what we are. Let’s accept that.

We need to keep our temper in check, we need to genuinely like ourselves the way God made us and we need to keep the right sense of perspective.

There’s a scene where Happy and his caddy – formerly a bum – are looking out at the fairway from a tee box.

Happy says, “Looks like a slight hill.” His caddy adds, “Yeah, and there’s a slant to the left.” Happy replies “Naw, it just looks that way because you only have one shoe on.”

It’s hard not to laugh at that. But how many of us are like the caddy. We’ve seen things from only one perspective so long that it looks right to us.

That is, until someone comes a long and turns our world on end because they look at things a little differently.

I have an older brother who use to make a lot of money as a welder in the oil fields in central Montana. As a welder, he worked around some of the toughest men in a tough industry. That’s why they call them roughnecks.

Today, my brother watches high school kids in a study hall in western Montana – many of whom are sent there because they are disruptive in class. In the world of high school, they are the worst of the worst. To my brother, they are about as troublesome as a lone cloud on a sunny day.

While teachers and administrators in the school think these kids are unruly or incorrigible, to my brother, they are no different from him when he was their age. And because he likes them, guess what? They like him to.

That’s why the principal of the high school asked my brother to leave his position at a middle school to take a similar job at a high school. I’m sure the teachers look at my brother and wonder if he isn’t looking at the world with one shoe off, but for Randy, he’s looking at the kids the way he wished high school teachers had looked at him. 

Who knows, these kids might end up getting married, buying a home, starting a business and raising a family….just like Randy did. And, really isn’t that what life’s about? High school is not an end, it’s a beginning.

So let’s learn from Happy. We’ll be happier if we control our emotions, accept ourselves as we are, and learn to accept other points of view as being as valid as our own. 

A Christmas we would never forget

Before I get to Christmas 2007, let me tell you about what happened in May that year. Dad had fallen down and a heart specialist recommended that he get a pacemaker. So we made arrangements with a surgeon at MedCenter One in Bismarck to implant the device.

On the appointed day, we took dad to the hospital for the procedure. They wanted him to come in at 6 a.m....before he ate breakfast.

As he's waiting for the surgeon to arrive, a nurse begins to ask dad several questions about his medical history. She asked him if he ever had a broken bone, ever had hepatitis, did he have high blood pressure, etc. Dad politely told her that he never had any of those things, although he was sitting in front of her with two broken fingers from when he fell. So I chimed in and told her the correct answers. Yes, he was a hepatitis survivor and he did have high blood pressure and a few other ailments.

Finally, she asked dad if he'd been to any foreign countries in the past couple of years or had any blood transfusions. Anyway, dad looked at me, then he turned toward the nurse.

"I want to tell you 'No', but that fella over there keeps piping up and contradicts my answers," he said.

His answer struck my funny bone and I began to laugh. Pretty soon, he was laughing also. So was the nurse.

Dad's memory isn't what it used to be, and some times the results can be very humorous. But it's not all his memory either. Like other people his age, he doesn't see and hear as well as he used to...and his patience has completely worn out.

So now let's jump back to Christmas 2006, his first holiday season in Mandan. Actually, it was Christmas Eve service and all the lights were turned out at the United Methodist Church as we were singing "Silent Night" by candlelight.

Much to the delight of my boys and my utter terror, dad was getting dangerously close to the hymnal with his lighted candle. As it turned out, he didn't start the pages on fire, but he did manage to drop a lot of candle wax into the music. I was wondering if the hymnal would ever be opened again after the book was closed on all that hot wax.

Now skip ahead a few months and we're at a country church where a funeral for one of Belinda's uncles is taking place. As often happens at these little churches, the priests who have served the parish all came back to play a role in the memorial service.

Some of the priests looked like they were older and more feeble than dad who was sitting in the second pew...right behind the deceased's brothers and sister -- also known as Belinda's mom and uncles. As one of the priests fumbled for his place in his old black, dog-eared prayer book, Mr. Patience -- standing next to me -- started drumming his fingers on the back of the pew in front of us.

In a few more seconds, his fuse had completely burned out and he said, in a nice loud, irritated tone, "He can't find it. He can't find it. He can't find what he's looking for."

You know, it's hard to laugh in church, especially at a funeral. But it's even harder to stop laughing.

Now come with me to Christmas Eve 2007. The Methodist church was packed and it seems that everyone had something to do. For my family, we were charged with lighting the Advent candles. As it was the last night before Christmas, there were five candles to light.

After our experience the year before, we didn't think it wise to have dad touch any candles. So we asked him if he would read the Scripture. It was from the second chapter of Luke. You are familiar with it as it's the same Scripture that Linus reads on the Charlie Brown Christmas Special every year.

There was Scott, Belinda, Grandpa and me. We decided to practice this whole lighting the candles, reading the Scripture, saying the prayer affair before the actual service and it's a lucky thing we did.

I had the second chapter of Luke printed out in nice big print for dad to read. And then he came to the part where Joseph is traveling from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem, the town of David with his betrothed, Mary, who was expecting a child. This is where dad decided to read between the lines as he blurted out, "I bet that wasn't even his child."

Now for you heathens who have never read the Nativity story, dad was right. It's isn't Joseph's child. It's the baby Jesus, the son of God. But still...you don't want any ad-libbing during the lighting of the Advent wreath...especially if the extra words sounds like some sort of conspiracy theory hatched by road agents in ancient Judah.

So the question was this: do we trust dad to read the Scripture and hope that he remembers my warning about just sticking to the script, or do we trust him with a lighted candle in front of a packed church?

The answer was to give him the reading. And he did it wonderfully. The worshipers that night were very complimentary about how well dad had handled that passage of Scripture, especially the name of the governor of Syria -- "Quirinius."

Dad got the accolades he deserved....but if the crowd had only been there 30 minutes earlier for practice, it would have been a Christmas no one would have ever forgot.