Do not confuse my July tweets of the month with actual policy

Careful readers know my 8Days2Amish tweets of the month are fraudulent; they exceed the 140-character criteria. You are correct. For me, 140 characters is often too stingy, too confining. I rebel. So when I transfer the tweet to my blog, I permit myself some embroideries. You’ll see several examples of that here. 

Have a great day!

• I wonder what Socrates used to say when people asked him if he was ever going to get a real job.

• What’s it say about guys that we dread getting nailed in nuts but could spend hours watching videos of other guys getting nailed in nuts.

• The cynic in me fears N.Korea nuke news has Steve Bannon game planning '20 electoral map w/out big liberal enclave like San Francisco in picture.

• Passing of Mom has many telling me they're sorry she died. Me, I'm happy she lived -- truly lived.

• Many fret over keeping up with the Joneses. Me, I've been lapped so many times by so many Joneses, I just stay the hell out of their way, hand them cups of water and hope they'll mention me from the podium as they give their acceptance speeches.

• If you apply logic of the NRA to nuclear proliferation, won't the world be safer once N. Korea & every nation has nukes?

• I don't know if it says more about him or me, but Trump is the 1st prez in 100 years I can't imagine wearing cowboy boots.

• Considered leaving my piece of crap jalopy unlocked because only thing of value in it is stack of free beer chips from various Latrobe clubs and taverns. Decided against it when I realized how sad I'll be if they're taken. #LockHerUp!

• Unlike here on Earth, I hope in heaven -- fingers crossed -- I become blessed with the ability to fix things. But I worry in heaven nothing'll ever break and my feelings of uselessness will persist.

• When I was young, I imagined my life's line would be a straight consistent rise to great literary success. I never dreamed my line would be so squiggly with so many zigs, zags, advances and retreats or that for years at a time my line would come to complete halt whenever it came upon a friendly tavern.

• Hearing reports of increased solar flare activity always makes me want to grab a marshmallow & a really long stick & make solar s’mores.

• It’s unnerving how so many readers of crime novels think they can get away with murder because they read so many crime novels, but what really rattles is how many crime novels my wife reads.

• I, too, am outraged by video of shark being dragged, but reserve the right to change my opinion if they find a boy’s arm in shark’s autopsied stomach.

• Trump says agenda being twarted by "deep state." I know them by another name. Patriots.

• I encourage women considering breast enhancement to get just one side so it'll appeal to shallow men fond of before/after comparison.

• As way of both meeting potentially friendly ETs & gettin while getting's good, I propose Earth erect a really big For Sale sign.

• I’m going to submit to publishers a book proposal called "Profiles in Courage" about today's leaders just to see if anyone gets the joke.

• I tell people writing a book is like making a bourbon. It could be 7 years before you find out if it's any good. Maybe my next book should be about how to make bourbon.

• Recognizing the blatant fraud has made enjoying this breakfast staple impossible: hash browns aren't brown!

• I remain surprised some creative hand sanitizer company hasn't used image of Pontius Pilot as a celebrity spokesperson.

• News that Antartica is experiencing rapid melting convinces me humanity could be spared doom if someone builds a really big ice machine.

• Guaranteed some enterprising DUI lawyer right now working on defense claiming self-driving car was drunk & occupant was mere drinking buddy.

• PETA must on some level feel conflicted knowing their hard line positions are red meat to staunch vegetarians.

• Scars are life's passports to show where we've been and how we've lived.

• Boasting to friends about how little TV I watch use to make me feel intellectually superior. Now all I feel is presidential.

• Yes, I get angry about racial injustice, inequality and rampant poverty, but nothing makes me angrier than having to eat crappy pizza.

• I don't give a crap about the half-full/half-empty philosophical puzzler as long as the glass contains some bourbon & it'll be replenished. And if you’re so concerned about your glass being half-empty, I suggest you need a bigger glass.

• Our lives are like Mad Libs where key words aren't filled in until the composition of our obituaries.

Related …

July ’16 tweets

July ’15 tweeets

July ’14 tweeeets

July ’13 tweeeeets

Front page of The Bulletin! I'm seeking your best local Arnold Palmer stories

A big thank you to Steve Kittey and The Latrobe Bulletin for allowing me to use their front page to announce my new book and to solicit their readers for the best local stories about Arnold Palmer. I encourage you to purchase copies at your local Latrobe newsstand. For out-of-towners, here’s what I wrote …

(500 words)

For professional reasons, I was pleased when an editor for Triumph Books called to ask if I had any good Arnold Palmer stories.

I told him I did. I was privileged to interview him nearly 100 times since 1998, the bulk of them being hour-long, in-depth Q&As done as a correspondent for Palmer’s posh Kingdom Magazine. We were chummy enough that in 2013 he graciously agreed to provide the foreword to my book, “Use All The Crayons! The Colorful Guide to Simple Human Happiness.”

Our last interview was five weeks before his Sept. 25 passing. My last question?

“Do you believe there’s golf in heaven?”

Spoiler alert! He did.

The editor was very enthused. He thought a book based on my experiences with Palmer would be a success. I told him I was friends with a few locals who knew one or two Palmer stories that might be worth sharing.

“How many friends?” he asked.

I told him about 5,000 or so.

That’s where you, my friends, come in. 

I want to hear your best hometown Arnold Palmer stories. You can call me at 724 961-2558 or email at storyteller@ChrisRodell.com. I’m grateful to Steve Kittey and The Bulletin for offering me this space to reach out.

I have a Sept. 15 deadline for a book tentatively titled: “Homespun Stories of Latrobe & The Real Arnold Palmer.” I’m interested in hearing your stories because I’m convinced Palmer fans around the world want to know our secret.

They want to know why a legendary man who could reside in palaces around the planet chose to live and die in the same small western Pennsylvania town where he was born.

I contend it’s people like you.

It’s a story of how one small town and a big time celebrity forever bonded to forge a mutually beneficial relationship admired around the world. Palmer gushed about Latrobe, it seems, specifically because the folks here never really gushed about him. Neither Latrobe nor Palmer took the other for granted, but neither took one another too seriously, either. The mutual love was engrained, but never enforced. A man known for hitching his pants never, in the watchful eyes of observant locals, ever got too big for his britches.

I’ll try and include as many stories from as many people as I can, but spacial constraints mean I can only include the very best, which will be determined by me and my editors.

So did Arnold Palmer ever see you hit a great shot? Give you a golf tip? Did he dine in your restaurant? Did he send your daughter a thoughtful get-well card when he heard she was ill? Did anyone ever roll out the red carpet for you on vacation when you casually mentioned you were from Latrobe?

What’s your best Arnold Palmer story?

I want to hear it.

“Homespun Stories of Latrobe & The Real Arnold Palmer,” is scheduled for a spring ’18 release.

Related …

Arnold Palmer gave me noogies on Monday

Happy 80th Birthday, Arnold Palmer!

Interviewing Arnold Palmer

Playing Oakmont & Arnold Palmer says I’m the best

Kate Upton in Latrobe to visit Arnold Palmer

Yesterday, Arnold Palmer watched me golf

So what’s Arnold Palmer really like?

Latrobe abuzz: Who’ll appear in Palmer special?

Mom's going to Pitt! A body donation update

(638 words)

Got some great news the other day. Our girl has been accepted by the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh! We’re ecstatic and are already planning on stocking up on blue & gold sportswear for Saturdays this Fall.

Go Panthers!

This all comes as a bit of a surprise because our girl is 84 and she’s been dead since July 7.

These factors greatly diminish the chances of her being considered a walk-on candidate for Pat Narduzzi’s No. 24 ranked football team.

Of all the touching sentiments I’ve heard since Mom’s death, nothing pleases me more than the supportive ones about her adamant decision to donate her body to science through Humanity Gifts Registry of Pennsylvania.

People — including many doctors — are praising her for what they say is a bold act of selfless generosity. Given what she’s doing, there’s never been a more ironic use of the term “selfless.”

There is lots of sweet euphemism involved in this process so let’s be clear: my darling mother’s body will be dissected by med students in a process that takes as long as two years. Her remains will be preserved in the school morgue and hauled out any time school curriculum warrants.

Her body will give future doctors hands-on knowledge of human anatomy and how it works.

With her, they’ll see how the devastating result a simple fall can have on wrist bones weakened by osteoporosis. They’ll learn how to deftly remove cancerous tumors from elderly lungs. They’ll learn the disastrous effects pneumonia can have on senior breathing. Maybe some young genius will detect a subtle cause for the dementia that made her last decade such a challenge.

Yes, there’s a chance that the very cure for Alzheimer’s will come from the mind of Rachel Rodell.

The possibility is breathtaking, an apt circumstance for a woman who died of acute respiratory failure.

I’m not being sarcastic, either, about our enthusiasm she’ll be going to Pitt.

When this was all taking place, we were told nearby Pitt could not at the time accept the body. She’d have to go to the Lake Erie of Osteopathic Medicine — and when was the last time you heard of them snagging a bowl bid?

But this was important to us for reasons more pressing than hometown pride.

Partnering with HGRPA, recipient schools graciously host memorial services to express to surviving family members their gratitude. It promises to be a 13-hanky night.

One for me, a dozen for them.

See, until that night they’ll only think they so intimately know my Mom.

You can can spend 24 months surgically rendering her body clear down to the bones and not appreciate her spine. You can take apart her tender heart and still not know what made her tick. You can literally dig around in her brain and really not know a single thing about her.

Not until you talk to someone who loved her. It’s a role I’ll relish.

But it’s that way with each of us, isn’t it. We’re so much more than our puny bodies.

We’re giving them a 5’4, 100-pound husk of something that was once so loving. The body she’s donating has cancer, pneumonia, broken bones, etc. To medical students eager to learn about disease, it’s a real bonanza.

It’d be like someone giving you or I a new car that comes full loaded.

Alas, the really interesting part of the transaction may never be known. 

Our mother and other donors, don’t look at body donation as a gift to a particular school or set of future doctors.

The gifts they give is to all of us.

But because she’ll be at Pitt for the next two years, we’ll now have some insight if we ever sense the Panthers are playing like a bunch of real stiffs.

Related …

RIP Mom: Why feeling sad is so elusive

A stiff tribute to moms and cadavers

A galling story on useless body parts

Of poinsettias & penis bones

Insights on eyeballs

Handing it to arm transplants

Brownie points: confessions of a bad son

RIP Mom: Why feeling sad is so elusive

(643 words)

I woke up Saturday for the first time in my life without either a Mommy or a Daddy.

I remember thinking I was glad I paid attention when they were teaching me how to tie my shoes.

Mom, 84, died peacefully Friday morning at 8:05. She’d shattered her left wrist in a Sunday evening fall at her apartment. The shock precipitated a cascading raft of maladies that led to respiratory failure involving undetected lung cancer and pneumonia on top of her escalating dementia.

I’d like to thank all those who prayed she’d overcome all her deadly ailments.

I’d especially like to thank those who prayed she wouldn’t.

Her care was exemplary. The first responders transferred her to Latrobe hospital at 7 p.m. Sunday and it only took them five days to finish her off.

I hope you’ll forgive me for deviating from our scripted bereavements.

I know I’m supposed to say I wish they could have done more, that she was still with us, that I’m deep in mourning. And in some ways, I am.

Heck, I haven’t used an exclamation point in seven days.

But, honestly, hers was a very good death and just in the nick of time. She’d been slowly, but steadily and lately dramatically been succumbing to her dementia.

But with our help, she’d been able to live her last seven years on her own and free of all medical intrusions. 

Our fears when they admitted her was how drastically that was about to change.

“Our best guess is she could hang on another six months,” one caregiver said.

I’ll let you imagine just how those six months would have played out.

Instead, it was like she cheerfully surrendered.

We had one very bad night followed by two days of her being alert and feisty enough to make us all smile and laugh. I’ll most remember her in perfect pitch singing songs from “The Sound of Music,” which Josie had cranked on her iPhone.

Then it was two days of watching her sleep, the pulsing vein on her exposed neck growing more and more faint.

My brother Eric was there when she passed. He’d driven solo up from Nashville on  Independence Day and had presciently spent Thursday evening with her in hospice care, the unit to which they’d transferred her the day before.

I called him at 7:50 a.m. He said she’d awoken just once, at 9:45, and tried to get out of bed like she was intent on going on a soulful stroll. Mystics can surmise perhaps she was being beckoned to journey to some other place.

I told him I’d be over in an hour or so.

“Take your time,” he said.

He called back 15 minutes later and said she was gone.

He was alone with her when she died and reported no profound last words.

Lucky for him the situation wasn’t reversed. Had I been alone with her at her passing, I’d have claimed her last words were, “Chris was always my favorite!”

Or maybe, “Bosco!”

I’m grateful for all the kind gestures of so many friends. They uniformly tell me they’re sorry she’s dead.

Me, I’m overjoyed she lived. Truly lived.

She spent part of everyday over the past 84 years either laughing or doing something to make someone else’s life better. She was a true angel long before she became an actual one.

Death is something even basic morons can achieve. But to live and live well in these troubling and divisive times is breathtaking. To laugh, to sing, to exalt, to revel as she did, ah, these are a few of my favorite things.

Understanding these combined factors make it nearly impossible for me to feel sadness usually associated with the passing of a dear loved one.

So, yes, to me it was a very good death.

But an even better life!

That exclamation point felt so, so good.

Related …

Mom’s fallen & may not get back up

Mom’s making crazy contagious by a nose

Mom’s sad decline

Mom struggles with new remote

Yesterday was the best Halloween ever

Brownie points: confessions of a bad son

How to kill your mother (with love)

Mom thinks I work in a hardware store

My gay friend John

Last Easter, Mom nearly choked in church

Mom’s hip nipples and Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Listening to classic rock with my senile Mom

Moving Mom to Latrobe: The big picture

Mom's fallen & may not get back up

(676 words)

I’ve been the primary care giver for my darling 84-year-old mother since 2010 when she first began exhibiting signs of mild dementia. In the last two weeks under my primary care, the old gal’s been diagnosed with lung cancer, pneumonia, severe dementia and osteoporosis after falling in her kitchen and shattering her left wrist.

I think I’ve finally found my calling.

Primary care giver? Murder Inc. has nothing on me.

Oh, that poor woman.

She’s since Sunday evening been in the ICU at Latrobe hospital. She’d spent the day on our porch sipping wine and complaining about needing a nap. I took her to her apartment, settled her into her chair and told her I’d see her Monday.

Unlike many dementia patients, she was still capable of living alone, albeit with our daily visits. She can make coffee, work the microwave and — hallelujah — take care of her intimate personal needs.

It was about 7 p.m. when the neighbor from the floor below heard her fall and called 911 and me.

From my understanding, her dementia is rare in that she’s become even more cheerful than she’s ever been — and she used to make Fred Rogers seem like a sourpuss.

I’ve often said she gave me my sense of humor, which means she gave me everything.

On what was to become her worst night since, I guess, a 1982 double mastectomy, she was joking about needing wine and telling the paramedics the pain was a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. If there was pain, it was not at all evident. No moaning. No grimace.

When they wheeled her stretcher past the ladies gathered on the porch outside, she responded to their questioned concerns with, “They’re taking me to the hospital. I’m having a baby!”

I wish I could say with certainty she was joking.

The pain didn’t ding an obvious 10 until two hours later when they gruesomely reset the bones. One doctor gently held her wrist, another her fingers, and together they began gingerly tugging in opposite directions. 

I remain surprised she muffled her screams. Had she not, I wonder if I’d have run like a coward out of the room. Instead, I stood at the end of the bed messaging her feet and feeling sure I’d failed her.

We spent the next seven hours in that room with me trying to patiently respond to her deliriums about the location of her purse, her need for Kleenex, why her arm was in an annoying sling and what all these friendly strangers were doing in her bedroom. Every 10 minutes I’d literally have to wrestle this 104-pound grandmother back into the bed to prevent her from getting up to undertake various missions.

It was all so much pain and absurdity.

I’ve read how some children say they felt God’s divine presence in the death room when a loved one passes. After Sunday, I wonder if the presence I’m destined to most feel will be that of the late Moe Howard.

A chest X-ray revealed a lung cancer and pneumonia. She’s rallied from her Sunday evening lows when the doctor described her status as precarious, but an experienced nurse described her as feisty. She pegged her term at six months.

She has a living will and we’re today looking at hospice options. We have maybe three days to decide.

I told an oncologist about how the sudden onslaught of deadly diagnosis made me feel like I’ve failed my mother. He said: “Did you think under your watch she was somehow going to become younger and healthier?”

I guess in these situations we’re all hardwired to feel like failures.

I remember after a round of petty gripes involving having to devote so much free time to her care telling my daughter that if after Mom dies and she sees me crying she’ll know the only reason I’m doing so is because I think someone judgmental might be watching.

Right now, my fear is if I start crying I may never stop.

Related . . .

Mom’s making crazy contagious by a nose

Mom’s sad decline

Mom struggles with new remote

Yesterday was the best Halloween ever

Brownie points: confessions of a bad son

How to kill your mother (with love)

Mom thinks I work in a hardware store

My gay friend John

Last Easter, Mom nearly choked in church

Mom’s hip nipples and Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Listening to classic rock with my senile Mom

Moving Mom to Latrobe: The big picture