Chris Loehmer Kincaid's Blog, page 110
July 14, 2017
Flashback Friday - Old Machines
I don’t know why, but I found these pictures of my grandpa, working on the roads, so fascinating. Back when these were taken – I’m guessing the early 1940s – these trucks and machinery were probably pretty cool. He-man stuff. Larger than life for a lot of people. It's a wonder the equipment we've used over the years.
I’m not the one who circled grandpa there in the middle.
With all of our modern-day technology, it’s hard for the younger generation to picture how their grandparents and great-grandparents survived such a life.
This is grandpa working on the well in front of their house. I don’t know what he’s doing, but whatever it was, he had to do it by hand and by himself. No specialist to call in. Seems he was also always wearing a hat.
I never met either of my grandpas. My dad's dad died shortly after they moved to America. And this one - my mom's dad - passed away three years before I was born.
This is rather a random picture, I realize, but it was in the same pile, so I thought I’d add it. Love those old cars!
I’m not the one who circled grandpa there in the middle. 
With all of our modern-day technology, it’s hard for the younger generation to picture how their grandparents and great-grandparents survived such a life. 
This is grandpa working on the well in front of their house. I don’t know what he’s doing, but whatever it was, he had to do it by hand and by himself. No specialist to call in. Seems he was also always wearing a hat. I never met either of my grandpas. My dad's dad died shortly after they moved to America. And this one - my mom's dad - passed away three years before I was born.
This is rather a random picture, I realize, but it was in the same pile, so I thought I’d add it. Love those old cars! 
July 12, 2017
Scene 1 from the discarded files
As you may or may not know, my first novel, “Where the Sky Meets the Sand”, is in the process of being published. I don’t have a date yet when it will be available, and I suppose that’s why I haven’t been spreading the word as much as I should. It is the story of an American woman and an African boy. When I first started writing it, I switched back and forth between not only the woman’s and boy’s point of views, but about five other people as well. It became rather cumbersome and confusing. I had to cut out some of the various character’s stories, but didn’t delete them entirely. Those words, those other perspectives, remain on my laptop. I thought that maybe, in prelude to the release of the book, I would start sharing some of those scenes here. The boy’s point of view The boy didn’t know how long he lay on the floor of his mother’s hut. He knew that she was working around him, cooking meals, making chai tea. He knew that sometimes she knelt next to him and poured goat’s milk, mixed with cow’s blood, down his throat. The bleeding had stopped but the pain continued to pound through his entire body. He was afraid that he would never be able to walk again. He was more afraid that no one in his tribe would speak to him again. Then one night, when everyone was fast asleep, he rolled unto his belly and pushed himself up onto his knees. He rose on wobbly legs and took a tentative step. He discovered it wasn’t as bad as he thought. Walking actually helped, it made him feel alive again, it forced him to breath. In silence, he filled a cloth bag with several pieces of chapati, the flat fried bread which they ate at most meals, and some strips of dried meat. He tied the bag along with the knife to his side and reached for a long stick which was leaning against the wall outside.He knew what he had to do.
These boys, from my first trip to Kenya in 2006, were the physical inspiration for the boy in the story.
These boys, from my first trip to Kenya in 2006, were the physical inspiration for the boy in the story. July 9, 2017
Finding Hope
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. (1 Corinthians 13:13a, New International Version)I know you’ve seen those words before. I know I’ve blogged about them before, probably several times. Usually when we see this verse, "love" is the word we focus on. Coz the next words read, But the greatest of these is love.
Today however, the greatest is hope.
As you read this, I am heading home from another Lifest. On Thursday night, Bob Lenz, the founder of Lifest, spoke on the main stage about hope. He posed the question, when things are bad, really bad, how does a person find hope.
When you lose your job, when you are hit with unforeseen bills, when you are diagnosed with an incurable cancer, when your spouse leaves you, when any of these things – or worse – happen to a loved one. When you find yourself in a hole of sadness, where there is no way out. Where you have lost all hope.
Where can you possibly find hope? Right where it’s always been, between faith and love.
Lord God, Jesus Christ, thank You for always giving us hope. In the darkest of times, You are the Light which will always shine. Amen.
July 7, 2017
Return to Hell's Gate
I was looking at previous blog posts as well as pictures from my trip to Kenya this spring, and just realized that it has been three whole months since I was there. In some ways, it feels like it was yesterday and in others, it seems like a lifetime ago. Also, as hard as it seems to believe, I have only posted a fraction of the pictures I took.
Last time I wrote about Hell’s Gate National Park, we were still in the gully. I had traversed a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, but I still had a lot of hiking ahead of me.
The beauty, however, continued to make it worthwhile.
This is the wall I slid down and sustained my visibly worst injury, scraping all of the skin off my left elbow and a small patch off of my left side.
Another obstacle.
Took it like a champ. I am still just plain too old for this nonsense.
The very last wall to climb. I took a rest before clambering up this one. It was no worse than rocks I’d climbed in search of waterfalls back home, but it had been a long morning. Yes, it was still morning; our day was not nearly over.
The view made it all worthwhile, though. Eventually I will blog about lunch and the rest of the day.
Last time I wrote about Hell’s Gate National Park, we were still in the gully. I had traversed a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, but I still had a lot of hiking ahead of me.
The beauty, however, continued to make it worthwhile.
This is the wall I slid down and sustained my visibly worst injury, scraping all of the skin off my left elbow and a small patch off of my left side. 
Another obstacle. 
Took it like a champ. I am still just plain too old for this nonsense. 
The very last wall to climb. I took a rest before clambering up this one. It was no worse than rocks I’d climbed in search of waterfalls back home, but it had been a long morning. Yes, it was still morning; our day was not nearly over. 
The view made it all worthwhile, though. Eventually I will blog about lunch and the rest of the day. 
July 5, 2017
72 years ago, and then some
I’m presenting Flash-back Friday two days early. I’m sandwiching it between the Fourth of July and the sixth of July for a reason.
Yesterday was Independence Day, the day we celebrate our freedom. As you may recall, my dad and his family came to the United States from Germany in 1924. During and following World War I, life in Germany was incredibly hard, everyone was living in poverty and oppression. When Dad’s family lived through the Great Depression here in the US, they felt that conditions here were still better than what they left behind.
His mother lived a hard, tiring life. This is the oldest picture I’ve found of her. It is dated the 1920s, but I don’t know where she was living at the time or who the child is with her.
This is her passport picture from 1924. I guess no one takes a good passport picture.
This one is from 1955, when she was vacationing in St Augustine, Florida with my family (before I came along). I think Mom said it was the only vacation she ever took. She would have been 67 years old then. She looks much older, doesn’t she? A hard life will do that to you.
These next two photos rather confuse me. The first one is supposedly of my dad, is dated January 11, 1923, and says the dog’s name is Prince. Dad would have been eight years old at the time and still living in Germany.
This one is of Dad and his younger brother Frank. Dated May 29, 1929, when they would have been living in Chicago, I think. Doesn’t he look like he’s wearing the same sweater as in the previous picture though? Had he really not grown much in six years? Or was that just the popular style of sweater and he just kept getting them in a bigger size? Or is one of these pictures not of my dad? Any thoughts?
This one is of Dad with Frank again and their older sister Clara, also taken in 1929, so also in Chicago. Doesn’t Frank look like Farkus from “The Christmas Story”?
There might be more pictures of Dad somewhere between then and 1945, but this is all I got so far. Here he is looking dashing as ever.
Here he is in front of his school bus. Which is significant. I probably have told you this before, but he was Mom’s school bus driver. I’ll save the story of their first date for another time.
Why I wanted to share this now though is because, shortly after she graduated from high school and shortly after she turned 18, they got married on July 6, 1945. 72 years ago tomorrow.
And this is where they spent their honeymoon.
Yesterday was Independence Day, the day we celebrate our freedom. As you may recall, my dad and his family came to the United States from Germany in 1924. During and following World War I, life in Germany was incredibly hard, everyone was living in poverty and oppression. When Dad’s family lived through the Great Depression here in the US, they felt that conditions here were still better than what they left behind.
His mother lived a hard, tiring life. This is the oldest picture I’ve found of her. It is dated the 1920s, but I don’t know where she was living at the time or who the child is with her.
This is her passport picture from 1924. I guess no one takes a good passport picture. 
This one is from 1955, when she was vacationing in St Augustine, Florida with my family (before I came along). I think Mom said it was the only vacation she ever took. She would have been 67 years old then. She looks much older, doesn’t she? A hard life will do that to you. 
These next two photos rather confuse me. The first one is supposedly of my dad, is dated January 11, 1923, and says the dog’s name is Prince. Dad would have been eight years old at the time and still living in Germany. 
This one is of Dad and his younger brother Frank. Dated May 29, 1929, when they would have been living in Chicago, I think. Doesn’t he look like he’s wearing the same sweater as in the previous picture though? Had he really not grown much in six years? Or was that just the popular style of sweater and he just kept getting them in a bigger size? Or is one of these pictures not of my dad? Any thoughts? 
This one is of Dad with Frank again and their older sister Clara, also taken in 1929, so also in Chicago. Doesn’t Frank look like Farkus from “The Christmas Story”?
There might be more pictures of Dad somewhere between then and 1945, but this is all I got so far. Here he is looking dashing as ever. 
Here he is in front of his school bus. Which is significant. I probably have told you this before, but he was Mom’s school bus driver. I’ll save the story of their first date for another time. 
Why I wanted to share this now though is because, shortly after she graduated from high school and shortly after she turned 18, they got married on July 6, 1945. 72 years ago tomorrow. 
And this is where they spent their honeymoon.
July 2, 2017
Really Having Freedom
So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. (Galatians 5:1 New Living Translation)
It’s that time of year where Freedom is the popular word. With Independence Day on the horizon, everyone in America is out celebrating their freedom – their freedom mostly to have cook-outs, attend parades and shoot off fireworks. Never the less, we shouldn’t take our freedom for granted and we should remember the freedoms our forefathers instituted.
One of those freedoms, of course, was freedom of religion. We have the freedom – the right – to practice any religion we choose. Many people these days interpret that to be freedom from religion, meaning they just don’t want to hear about anybody else’s beliefs.
But that’s not where I really wanted to go today. The verse above is the first verse that popped up on my Bible search of the word freedom. One of the things that turns people off about religion is all the rules, the laws which no one can keep.
If you know your Bible at all, you know that the Old Testament is full of laws which the Jewish people were expected to keep. There’s no way that anyone could keep all those rules, or even the ten commandments. Then along came the New Testament and the new rule – the one and only rule any of us need to keep.
Jesus died for our sins. Our sins – all of God’s commandments that we break – were keeping us slaves, keeping us from being free. Once Jesus was crucified on our behalf, he took the punishment for all our sins, for all time. He set us free.
If you don’t want any religion in your life, if you refuse to be a Christian because you don’t like all the rules, you don’t really understand it. Sure, you should follow certain protocols and doctrines, because that’s the way to get alone with people and God wants us to love all people. But the only commandment you have to keep is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’. (Luke 10:27)
Thank You Lord God for allowing me to love You and be loved by You in return. Amen
It’s that time of year where Freedom is the popular word. With Independence Day on the horizon, everyone in America is out celebrating their freedom – their freedom mostly to have cook-outs, attend parades and shoot off fireworks. Never the less, we shouldn’t take our freedom for granted and we should remember the freedoms our forefathers instituted.
One of those freedoms, of course, was freedom of religion. We have the freedom – the right – to practice any religion we choose. Many people these days interpret that to be freedom from religion, meaning they just don’t want to hear about anybody else’s beliefs.
But that’s not where I really wanted to go today. The verse above is the first verse that popped up on my Bible search of the word freedom. One of the things that turns people off about religion is all the rules, the laws which no one can keep.
If you know your Bible at all, you know that the Old Testament is full of laws which the Jewish people were expected to keep. There’s no way that anyone could keep all those rules, or even the ten commandments. Then along came the New Testament and the new rule – the one and only rule any of us need to keep.
Jesus died for our sins. Our sins – all of God’s commandments that we break – were keeping us slaves, keeping us from being free. Once Jesus was crucified on our behalf, he took the punishment for all our sins, for all time. He set us free.
If you don’t want any religion in your life, if you refuse to be a Christian because you don’t like all the rules, you don’t really understand it. Sure, you should follow certain protocols and doctrines, because that’s the way to get alone with people and God wants us to love all people. But the only commandment you have to keep is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’. (Luke 10:27)
Thank You Lord God for allowing me to love You and be loved by You in return. Amen
June 30, 2017
Flashback Friday - who could throw these away?
I have yet to make a dent in the boxes of old pictures from my mom’s apartment. Every time the subject came up when she was alive, she would say that she should just throw them out. As I’ve started going through them, I have thrown a few out, but very few. Most of them, no matter how faded or bent they are or whether or not I know who the pictures are of, each one is a precious memory of a precious time in someone’s life.
I’m going to start posting a few of them here periodically. I may have shared some of them before, but I’m not going to look back at every one of my blog posts over the last few years to figure out which ones you may have already seen. But anyway, I don’t know if or when I will ever get done scanning them all.
One of the oldest pictures I’ve come across so far. This is my great-grandma; my mom’s grandma.
My mom’s parents worked together at a logging camp in the Northwoods – he as a logger, she as a cook. I could be wrong but I think that Grandma is the second woman from the left and Grandpa is next to her. According to the back of the photo, the little boy is their son, my Uncle Robert. If that is the case, the picture had to be taken around 1918.
Grandpa with my Uncle Robert and Aunt Helen, in front of their first barn, around 1929
This is the earliest picture of my mom, as a baby, in 1927, being held by (she thought) one of her cousins.
My mom with her mom around 1937.
Grandma and Grandpa in 1942, I think in front of their house.
I love this picture. The favorite that I have found so far. Mom and her friend Marion Paul, sometime in the early 1940s, on the Big Rock in the woods behind the house where I grew up.
So, like really? Who would want to throw these pictures out? Or at least not until after they were scanned into the computer and saved.
I’m going to start posting a few of them here periodically. I may have shared some of them before, but I’m not going to look back at every one of my blog posts over the last few years to figure out which ones you may have already seen. But anyway, I don’t know if or when I will ever get done scanning them all.
One of the oldest pictures I’ve come across so far. This is my great-grandma; my mom’s grandma.
My mom’s parents worked together at a logging camp in the Northwoods – he as a logger, she as a cook. I could be wrong but I think that Grandma is the second woman from the left and Grandpa is next to her. According to the back of the photo, the little boy is their son, my Uncle Robert. If that is the case, the picture had to be taken around 1918. 
Grandpa with my Uncle Robert and Aunt Helen, in front of their first barn, around 1929
This is the earliest picture of my mom, as a baby, in 1927, being held by (she thought) one of her cousins. 
My mom with her mom around 1937. 
Grandma and Grandpa in 1942, I think in front of their house.
I love this picture. The favorite that I have found so far. Mom and her friend Marion Paul, sometime in the early 1940s, on the Big Rock in the woods behind the house where I grew up. 
So, like really? Who would want to throw these pictures out? Or at least not until after they were scanned into the computer and saved.
June 28, 2017
Primates in the Park
After visiting a crocodile farm, a giraffe center and a baby elephant sanctuary, on a Sunday back in April in Kenya, when our driver Samson said we were going to last go to the monkey park, I thought it would be another organized zoo-type place. We pulled up to the City Park and still I thought there was going to be various monkeys all behind bars somewhere in that park.
Wrong.
On the drive, there, Samson stopped and purchased bags of peanuts from a street vendor. I didn’t think much of it; maybe he was taking them home to his kids, until he started handing them out to us in the parking lot of the park. I still wasn’t thinking much of it – was I just exhausted by then or just overwhelmed by seeing all these animals all day?
We walked into the park and within just a few moments, Sykes monkeys began cautiously approaching on the ground and jumping through the trees. As soon as they realized we had nuts on us, they went nuts, begging and stealing as much as they could.
Samson showed us how to do it.
Most of the females were mommas with babies clinging to them.
At first Rachel wanted nothing to do with the monkeys, but she warmed up to them after a while.
Everyone else took their turn as monkeys jumped on their shoulders and snatched whatever they could.
Kenzie was probably the most enamored with the little primates.
After already enduring more than my share of accidents on this trip, I really didn’t want to risk having one of them scratch my arm wide open or give me rabies. Instead I let this little mommy stay on the ground and eat gently from my fingers.
Wrong.
On the drive, there, Samson stopped and purchased bags of peanuts from a street vendor. I didn’t think much of it; maybe he was taking them home to his kids, until he started handing them out to us in the parking lot of the park. I still wasn’t thinking much of it – was I just exhausted by then or just overwhelmed by seeing all these animals all day?
We walked into the park and within just a few moments, Sykes monkeys began cautiously approaching on the ground and jumping through the trees. As soon as they realized we had nuts on us, they went nuts, begging and stealing as much as they could.
Samson showed us how to do it. 
Most of the females were mommas with babies clinging to them. 
At first Rachel wanted nothing to do with the monkeys, but she warmed up to them after a while.
Everyone else took their turn as monkeys jumped on their shoulders and snatched whatever they could. 
Kenzie was probably the most enamored with the little primates. 
After already enduring more than my share of accidents on this trip, I really didn’t want to risk having one of them scratch my arm wide open or give me rabies. Instead I let this little mommy stay on the ground and eat gently from my fingers. 
June 25, 2017
Got it Figured Out
My Tuesday morning Women’s Group has started reading the book, “God Speaks Your Love Language” by Gary Chapman. As with any book I’ve read lately, it has taken me awhile to get into it.
The five love languages are supposedly 1) words of affirmation, 2) quality time, 3) acts of service, 4) gifts and 5) physical touch. Even before I took the quiz, I knew which one was me and which was not. But even knowing that, I think that at certain times and with certain people, your language is going to be different. Or even if I am acting on, say, the language of acts of service, I really want the person on the receiving end to utilize quality time.
Or maybe I am just being complicated.
In any event, I’m still on chapter 3 in the book, so I shouldn’t act like I have all the answers, but I do know that God has all the answers and He knows what to do to make me receptive to Him.
This past week I wrote not one, but two rather gloomy posts here. I’ve not been to the point of desperation, even if it sounded like it. I know that God is still out there and that He hasn’t given up on me. I know He still speaks my love language but I hadn’t figured out why I wasn’t hearing it.
I got in my car the other day after work, turned on the radio and the Newsboys were just starting to sing “It is You.” My favorite Christian song. Takes me right back every time I hear it. Every single time. Back to a time when I had it all figured out. Which maybe hasn’t been much the last five months, but I figured it out the other day in my car listening to this song. Again.
Thank You, Lord God, for always speaking my love language. I’m sorry that sometimes my sinful nature or the sinful nature of the world gets in the way. Help me to remember, though, that You will always continue to speak to me, in the language that I know. Amen.
June 23, 2017
How Things Really Pass
Believe it or not, I hadn’t vented last time abouteverything going haywire with my life. I thought I should finish up that rant and then move on. On Tuesday, I complained about the day job, mourned my mom’s passing, missed Kenya and fretted about “Where the Sky Meets the Sand”. After I hit the publish button, it dawned on me that – as hard as it seems – I missed a few things.
Such as the various aches and pains which have settled throughout my body. The left Achilles has been going on for four long years now. The back, though not nearly as insistent, has that beat by nearly thirty years. The fingers and hands have more bad days than good ones. I don’t know what it means, but the pain seems to move from hand to hand and finger to finger. The only consistent one is the right middle finger which has been locking up for a couple years now.
But I shouldn’t complain as I haven’t had any migraines for at least a year.
Yet another thing that’s been going on has to do with my affiliation with the state society of medical assistants. I’ve been a member for – it must be – 28 years and have been either a committee chairman or officer for at least half that time. The last couple of years, since I don’t have time for a big commitment, I have only been a member on one of the committees. My main duty is to maintain the email accounts for the 32 officers and committee chairmen on the executive committee. Really the only time of year that I have much to take care of is after all the new people take over and they all need access to their email, and I have to change all the passwords, make sure the accounts are working, send the information to all these people and talk them through the process if they have problems. And of course, that time of year has been the last month.
Even then, it’s not a huge chunk of time, but it is still something I have to take care of when I really only want to lay in the sun during the day and curl up in my bed at night.
With all this going on, you would think that I wouldn’t worry about my weight, coz who has time to eat. Not the case. When a person doesn’t have time to cook, it doesn’t mean they don’t have time to eat. They don’t have time to eat healthy, but they sure can find junk food in a heartbeat.
And I know that eating right and getting enough exercise are two of the things which make a person feel better in general and can help them cope with stress. Yet those are the two things which get the least amount of attention. Of course, with my initial complaint in this post being the chronic pain I’m starting to have, things like running bring on more pain. But I know that the correct exercise done consistently is really going to help that.
I will power through all of this though. This too shall pass. As the saying goes, it may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.
Thanks everyone for putting up with me and supporting me. Next time I post here, I will be upbeat and back on track. Promise.
