patriarch

one of my earliest memories is a trip to a hospital in terrell, tx. i was three or four years old and riding around on my fathers hip when we, as a family, gathered around the bed of J.P. Oden Sr and watched my grandfather say goodbye to his dad. i think that's what stuck with me, not the foreboding mortality, not my cousin kyle teasing me about brains kept in jars, not the fragile old man lying in bed tied to countless machines, but my grandfather calling that old man "dad."

that is all i remember about J.P. sr, but today as we gather around J.P. jr in an eerily similar fashion, i remember my grandfather in a very different way. it's hard to tell if my memories of the room in terrell are being sharpened by these similarities or if i'm trading details between today and yesterday, granddad looks so much like his father that it almost feels like the same experience.

Johnny Oden lived more in his first twenty years than i will in a lifetime, perhaps that can be said of his whole generation, but granddad had it in spades. born in montague county, tx in 1924, he is the quintessential depression baby: tough, frugal, and with a wisdom that comes from seeing the world change around him.

in 1937, granddad was a boy scout living in longview when he got his first taste of adulthood. that year, a gas leak at the school in new london, tx, caused an explosion that killed and buried the children of an entire town, and at thirteen his boy scout troop was called in along with national and state guards to pull bodies from the rubble. no one in the family would hear him talk about it until 2006.

in 1941, shortly after the attack on pearl harbor, johnny lied about his age and color-blindness to enlist in the navy. serving as a pharmacists mate on a warship he sailed around the world three times and put in at ports in asia, austrailia, the phillipines and pearl twice before the end of the war.

in 1945, after dating for six weeks and four days, he married my grandmother and they loved each other for over 64 years. they raised two sons, saw six grandchildren and, currently, eight great-grandchildren. he worked lots of jobs through his life, from milkman to truckdriver to traveling saleman, whatever it took to provide for his family; they never did without.

my grandfather was one of my heros, he never said anything that he didn't have to but he always told us he loved us. he was baptized in the thirties in a muddy creek off of a red dirt road in east texas. he seldom talked about God but he taught me how to pray, he prayed over every meal in his house until i was 16... when he started to ask me to do it, a responsibility i was hardly ready for. he taught me to fish, tie a knot, and be a man; to love your family and do whatever is required with dignity and honor.

today was so alike that day in terrell, but so different. the baby on his dad's hip belonged to my sister, kyle talked mostly about his daughter and not brains in jars, and no one was surprised by the love and admiration shown to the patriarch i've known all my life.

As we prayed over him today, his last with us, we said the Lord's prayer the way my father taught us and a prayer very much like the one i'd heard my grandfather say all my life: that God would guide us, protect us, and forgive us our many sins.

amen...

sleep deprivation results in...

when i was young i had a blanket, it was yellow and had a brown dog on it. it wasn't expensive, it wasn't particularly nice or even that clean most of the time, but until i was four or five it was never a considerable distance away from me. people would call such a talisman a security blanket, as if to imply there was some insecurity in a child that is resolved by having access to a familiar object, but this was different. i didn't feel insecure or incomplete without my blanket, i, instead, felt guilty about the blankets feelings of neglect or abandonment. i actually felt bad about leaving my blanket behind... that's just weird.

perhaps it's the result of my being incredibly sensitive and caring about the people and (ahem) things around me, but more than likely it was just an obsession that was developed out of habit. an obsessive personality can be a dangerous thing. i say "can be" because it also has it's uses. one of my favorite obsessives is tom morello.

morello is known to most as the innovative guitar player for Rage Against the Machine and later Audioslave (arguably the same band minus Zak DeLaRocha), but before he was the socially informed, anarchist rocker morello was a sociology student at harvard university. this ivy league iconoclast picked up the guitar relatively late in the game, in his late teens, but his passion was undeniable. one day a friend and fellow picker suggested, "tom, if you practice one hour a day, you WILL get better." so an hour a day it was, every day, and morello did improve.

but i have not told all... morello logically deduced that if his playing improved in an hour a day, two hours a day would improve it twice as fast. After several weeks he was surprised to find that he was improving considerably more than twice as fast on the double time, so he stepped it up the three hours, four hours, five hours, and finally six hours a day. come hell or high water, tom morello practiced guitar for six hours a day, everyday while he completed a degree in sociology at Harvard. his obsession was such that despite 103 degree fever and a final exam the next morning, he was obliged to begin his regimen at 2:00 am in order to satisfy his routine. it was this grueling training that gave him unbelievable prowess and ingenuity, making him instantly recognizable in his music.

i wish my own obsessiveness was that focused, but it has help me in several areas.

while i did, at one point, practice guitar for up to four hours a day, clearly my sessions weren't as productive, but it, doubtless, built the foundation for the meager understanding i have today. i have been known to adjust a kick drum mic almost constantly for an entire show, or even an entire weekend, until i find the EXACT sound i like. i have, in the past, written long, wordy articles about completely random thoughts and blurbs that run through my head and publish them on semi-public forums just to try and remember how to write.

besides, until someone slaps me with a restraining order, how could my obsession get me into trouble...

totality

Assume you have two men, one builds cars and the other works on the assembly line at Ford motors. Did you notice the difference between these two men? while it could be argued that both build cars, the flaw in that argument is totality. only the man who builds the car from the ground up has the big picture, total control over quality and creativity. mr. assembly line is all about routine.

is routine bad? of course not, patterns exist to make things understandable. most people don't have that big picture knowledge of anything, we might have partial knowledge of many things but that non-pervasive element of totality remains elusive.

tonight i was asked: why? why do you work seven days a week? why don't you fight for those days off, days that could be spent living and not working?

i immediately rattled off the half dozen rationalities that keep me from asking that question myself: no one else was available, i was asked and that's enough, it's my responsibility, etc. these answers smacked eerily of excuse, lacking any substantive reason. further query was necessary...

i can boil it down to two reasons, respect and pride. there are two groups of professionals that i deal with: those i respect and those i work with. those i work with are just that, people who do similar tasks as i do and look forward to friday and payday. these people aren't flawed, they just operate differently than i do.

the people whom i respect drive me to work longer, smarter and harder, encouraging me to reach that totality i require, the big picture. they expect excellence, perfection, everything you have, a pride in your work as a hallmark you leave behind.

the problem is that, like most men, i have so much of who i am wrapped up in what i do. working with these people make me better at my job, my job defines me as a person, so being better at my job makes me a better person? noble but shortsighted at best. i want more...

"...You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet..."