Ned Luce

You have done it, too. There are those minor crises in life we avoid one way or another, by action or dumb luck. At least we think they might be crises but they really are not. For example:

I begin with last week when I really needed a haircut and Sonja, the local “barberess” extraordinaire and proprietor of the “Bayside Barber Shop” took some well-deserved time off. That’s what she told me anyway. I was then forced (really?) to head to Sunriver in Oregon with BJ and the families of our children for a few days looking like Dave Douglas in the movie “The Shaggy Dog.” With luck by the time you read this I will have found a sheep shearer with a few minutes. Crisis endured.

On the way across the Hood Canal Bridge early last Tuesday at the beginning of the aforementioned trip, we experienced the thrill of the wind moving the car and the waves crashing over the bridge deck. The bridge was closed about fifteen minutes after we made it to Kitsap County on our way to Oregon, feeling fortunate to have avoided that mini-crisis.

Our Rotary club foreign exchange student was recently performing at the Chimacum High School. Jennifer, the student, is in the high school choir while her host mother Judi Smith is in the Choral Belles. I should have gone to support Jennifer at the high school but I already had a poker game scheduled. BJ, Anne Burrell-Smith, Julie Umbreit and others went and enjoyed the annual concert. My crisis (?) solved.

I am reading “The Last Wilderness” by Murray Morgan, originally published in 1955. It is a history of the Olympic Peninsula with rich descriptions of the challenges and motivations of people living and moving here for the one hundred years after the 1850s. Of particular note was the logging industry dominated by Pope and Talbot and its effect on Port Ludlow and the rest of the peninsula. At the time of writing the book Morgan says, “About ten persons live in Ludlow now. It is again, as Shipwright Hall described it in 1881, ‘a lonely place.’ But in its day, Ludlow was queen of the lumber ports.” At this time, this writer says it really would be a crisis to be lonely in Ludlow with all of the organizations, clubs, etc in which one can participate.

On the trip to Sunriver one of the cars had a Thule roof box with a lock on it. After a day of skiing at Mount Bachelor the ski gear was loaded into the box and the car headed back to Sunriver for the night. Yep, you guessed it, at arrival the key to the box was nowhere to be found and the wet gear needed to be retrieved. After an exhaustive search of the car, jackets, ground, etc. a significant frustration level took over. A decision was made by the driver to return to the parking lot at the mountain to search for the key. Let’s see, a large dark parking lot. What are the odds? Yep, he found it and another crisis (?) was avoided.

The most relentless crisis is the one you probably face down with me every day. It is the continual ticking of the clock of your life. Then, every year you get reminded of it as people celebrate (?) the annual measurement of the time on your clock that is your birthday. Some of us even make public notice of the occasion as I am doing here on the occasion of my birthday. You might note a few others who celebrate the day. Folks like Don Whipple, Peggy Kulm and Elvis Presley are in that group. (Actually, Elvis celebrates quietly because he likes that folks think he has passed away.) The crisis of getting older is easily solved when, as Will Rogers says and Jim Brannaman does, “you reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.”

Love a curmudgeon and have a great week!

(Ned Luce, a retired IBM executive, never lets a crisis go to waste.)