40 and Counting - Two Speeds

Two Speeds….
When talking about his career as a machinist, Dad always joked to us boys about telling his boss he had two speeds. Before I give away the punch line I feel some background information is needed to build some reasoning behind this blog entry. With my limited knowledge of the type of work Dad did, it’s still easy for me to understand that Dads duties required precision, perfection, and a ton of patience, a responsibility where “getting in a hurry” just didn’t fit in. If you’re unfamiliar with the kind of work old school machinists such as my dad performed, simply picture someone trying to make a ball, hand formed with metal, perfectly round and balanced to the nth degree… an art form in itself, built by a true artist who no doubt constantly stood back and looked at his work through a picture frame made from two hard, callused hands. Knuckles bloodied from the slip of a wrench, burn holes in his jump suit from spatters of the welding gun, smashed fingers, sore feet, and aching muscles from his lower back all the way up his spine from swinging a mallet to form an unforgiving piece of steel…all things my dad no doubt experienced on a day to day basis from early adulthood to the day he retired.

“Slow” and “Stop”, the two speeds I promised to tell you, and the punch line of that joke dad told...now (at age forty) have a whole new meaning as I find myself searching for words to live by, and words to leave behind. By now, most of us in the 40 Club are busy raising families, finding our “groove” in our careers, soccer practices, and piano recitals, church, etc… most likely multi-tasking all of the above in often overlapping fashion on our daily calendars. As for me, I’m sitting here writing this blog entry while staring at my two youngest kids now in hi school, an old family pet on her last legs of life, pictures of my oldest daughter married and starting her own journey, photos of our two grandchildren, next to one more of my aging mom and dad. . Then there’s that photo of myself, gray hairs on my chin and deep wrinkles on my forehead which I call “battle scars of life” caused by stress and those multiple mountain peaks we climb growing older.

You know? Dad’s two speeds aren’t sounding bad right about now. As much as we may feel like switching into a higher gear to reach our journeys end, we should all contemplate the fact that even though the quickest way between two points is a straight line, maybe…just maybe we should take the slower scenic routes from time to time and pull over for those photo opps along the way. Maybe we should all wear Dad’s worn out ole work boots, and practice patience in life, patience in our situations, ourselves and in others. We should break out the calipers and measure where we’re at, and more importantly where we’re going, never forgetting that where we’ll end up will be as close to perfection as we strive to make it.