On our Park family website I have a collection of photographs taken by me and other family members, organized into the galleries shown on the Park Family Photo Galleries page. Several of these galleries feature nature photos. One gallery is called Shapes and Patterns in Nature, where the first photo can be found.

In May of 1971 I embarked on a trip to California which included a stop at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder CO where I had been invited to give a talk on my droplet collision research at the invitation of Brant Foote. NCAR is located in the foothills of the Rockies in an area known for high winds. In fact, I was told that NCAR had stopped reporting the high wind speed they recorded (as high as 200 mph) out of fear that the reports might cause undue concern in the city of Boulder. My visit to NCAR afforded the opportunity for a hike farther up into the foothills. On that hike I took one of my favorite photos, the black and white photo shown at right. It was taken with an old folding Kodak camera of a dwarf tree that had survived many years on a steep windy hillside. I titled the photo "Life in the Winds of Time."

Another photo I like is one I took on a 2013 visit to my sister in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I was hiking the path along the area's St. John River when I spotted the heron at left in an inlet off of the river. I like the rich brown of the bottom of the pond which the tree shadows allow us to see, contrasted with the pale color of the bird's feathers, one of which is temporarily ruffled. I use that photo as one of the rotating series of photos on my computer desktop.

Writing has never come easily for me. When inspiration has struck, it has only come about once a decade, and resulted in a modest poem. My lifetime collection of 8 poems (so far) can be seen here. My sister Betty penned numerous poems during her lifetime, many of which you can read here. When she read my poems she said she loved them all. Most of them stem from events in my life, but her favorite was Parable of the Rock, a work of fiction. (However, that poem was inspired by a rock I met, as mentioned in my Places Called Home story.)

A writing task much more intimidating than a poem is the memoir. Betty published her memoir, Little Sparrows Fall, in 2006, the year I retired from my job at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and early the next year my cousin Judith sent me a manuscript of the first 2 chapters of a memoir she was working on. That got me thinking about eventually writing my own memoir, some time in the future. I decided a logical time to work on that would be the decade between my 80th and 90th birthdays.

In 2021, a year into that decade, I thought I might approach the memoir writing by picking a theme for each chapter and recounting my life experiences in relation to that theme, from earliest memories to the present. Judith became my consultant and mentor. I wrote a story about climbing as a possible memoir chapter. Judith read it and made some very helpful suggestions. Now titled Climbing—Hills, Pine Trees, and Other Things, its current draft can be read here. Judith also shared with me some of the difficulties she encountered in getting her own memoir published. Titled The Permanent Nature of Everything, it was published in 2014. While she encouraged my memoir writing, she discouraged any thought of finding a publisher for it. Making whatever I wrote available here on the family website seemed like the way to go.

Seeing no progress in my memoir writing by the end of 2023, my wife Barbara came up with a Christmas present intended to kickstart the effort. She bought a year's worth of prompts from a company in the business of promoting life story writing. These weekly prompts led to the 34 Little Prompted Stories now posted on the bottom half of the page here. I emailed Judith about the project in February of 2024, when I had the first 8 stories posted. Her response was:

Dear Robert,

I have just finished reading your part of Little Prompted Stories. It is very, very interesting, and becomes more so as you reach into the years that we share. In it, I find out what and where you studied, and how you moved on into a job that more or less suited your skills. Your character and your resolute idealism come through all along, but naturally your observations as to what is going on around us become denser towards the end.

And what stays with me, finally, is the revelation of how much you have seen and never mentioned.

Judith

The company project had the option of buying a printed copy of the collected stories at year's end, but I thought that would be too much of a hodge-podge. Judith's response was:

Lots of books are hodge-podges. After a year of responses, you should have enough writing for a certain amount of choice, and the hodge-podge can be relatively selective. Then, when you have some material that ... you accept, even just re-reading it may perhaps offer an orientation as to what should be included and what might better be saved for a second edition. Any collective writing project needs an orientation to help hold it together, but you can't impose that until you see (and re-read) what you've actually got. And that's the exercise that might possibly provide a title as well.

I was looking forward to Judith's feedback when the year's writing was at an end. On January 13 I emailed her and other family members that the Little Prompted Stories page was finished. I don't know if she ever saw that email. It was only a few days later when email from her brother brought the shocking news of my mentor's untimely death.

It is March of 2025, I'm 85 years old, and my first bifocal glasses have just arrived. Their cost is covered by Medicare following my cataract surgery. In fact, between the two of us, Barbara and I have recently had four cataracts removed from our four eyes by the same surgeon, a young woman who looks to be not yet 30 years old. Our eye surgery experiences differed in that Barbara was fully anesthetized during surgery while I was partially anesthetized and awake. I was told that I would be able to respond to questions during surgery and warned not to move my eye. (My eyelid was restrained so that I could not blink.) We both left surgery with a plastic eye shield over the eye that had been operated on. We needed to tape the shield back on at bedtime for several days to protect the eye in case we tried to rub it in our sleep. We each had a regimen of eye drops to use on the affected eye for 4 weeks following surgery.

It was about a year ago when I first noticed rainbow halos around white lights at night. I could see them when I looked at the moon and they were particularly noticeable with car headlights. I had known for several years that cataracts were developing in both eyes, and I guessed that they were the cause of the halos. I saw such halos around colored lights as well, but they had the same color as the light. Following eye surgery the halos are gone. There was a two week period between surgeries, when one eye was done and the other was waiting, which provided a good opportunity to compare before and after. With the repaired eye whites were distinctly whiter and brighter compared to the other eye, where everything was yellower and dimmer. The surgery involves insertion of a lens after cataract removal, and I opted for sharper vision of distant objects while planning to continue using glasses for seeing things near at hand. When my eyes were tested following surgery on both eyes I was told I had 20/20 vision in one eye and 20/25 in the other without glasses.

Post surgery results for Barbara were even more striking. She had always used a contact lens with her good eye. The surgery with the proper inserted lens eliminated that need. With the other eye, with which she has never had useful vision, she was for the first time able to say how many fingers the doctor was holding up.

My new bifocals are not the first prescription glasses I've had. As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota I had glasses to help me read what was being written on the blackboard. I don't recall ever using them in graduate school. I think my distance vision without glasses had improved. I have always been able to pass the periodic vision testing required for renewal of my driver's license without glasses. I did get prescription glasses a number of years ago for occasional use, in part to correct for double vision experienced when my eyes were tired, good to have when I needed to drive at night for example. I have also used non-prescription reading glasses for some time, 1.50 magnification for seeing the computer screen and 2.50 magnification for reading a book in bed at night. My new bifocals will provide the ability to read bits of text without changing glasses, but when I settle down to read a book I remain more comfortable with the reading glasses.

In her life stories writing group last week the prompt that Barbara wrote about concerned her first cigarette. You can click on First cigarette and other smoking stories on our Little Stories 2025 page to read her entertaining story. I thought I would respond to the same prompt with the following much more boring story.

I'll start with an incident at the front door of our home in Deep River Ontario, where I lived until I was 9 years old. My older sister Betty had aroused the interest of a young man in town, one Murray Neilson, who would, a couple of years later, become her first husband. Murray came to our door to see Betty, smoking a cigarette. I was among those who met him at the door, and looking up at him I informed him, quite possibly in a haughty voice, "We don't smoke in this house." This gave him second thoughts about pursuing his relationship with Betty, he told me later.

Now I jump ahead to my teenage years. We were living in our Humboldt Ave. house in Minneapolis, and my older brother Douglas had come to visit with his new wife, Ruth. She was a chronic smoker, and she somehow managed to drop one of her cigarettes on our kitchen floor. No one else was around when I discovered it. This was my chance to try smoking! I lit it and took one puff. Ugh!! That was all I needed. I never lit another cigarette. Unfortunately Ruth continued to smoke, and died before her 65th birthday from respiratory ailments apparently related to her smoking, as Douglas has described in the Family Life 1966 - 1999 chapter of his memoir.

A final note in conclusion. During my undergraduate years at the University of Minnesota I did buy my first pack of cigarettes, but it was purely for research purposes. I wanted to investigate the movement of air around the vibrating soap bubbles I was studying. (See The College Researcher.) No smoking by me was involved. I used a rubber bulb device to smoke the cigarette and pump the smoke into the big transparent tube with the soap bubble being tested. I don't recall learning anything from the smoke.

It only takes about 5 hours to drive to Minneapolis from Madison, and Barbara and I have made that trip often in years past to visit my brothers James and Warren and families, but the COVID 19 pandemic had interrupted these trips. On the April 11 to 14 weekend we made that trip once again, staying as usual at Warren's house across the street from Powderhorn Park. Barb and I got our exercise walking around Powderhorn Lake, just the two of us or with Warren and his wife Patty. With Warren we stopped to give him a chance to rest, as he is in the process of recovering from back surgery. On one occasion we took a longer, more brisk walk around the perimeter of the park with just Patty. Barbara is walking regularly with the goal of building up strength for the walking she will be doing on her trip to Italy later this month with Casey, Ian and Layla.

Saturday's big gathering was for a fine supper at Warren's house which included Warren's son Daniel, his wife Jamie and their 2 growing children, and James with his long-term partner Rita. Naturally we had a lot of catching up to do, but the evening conversation between Warren, James and me branched into memories of Deep River, Ontario, where we lived before moving to Minnesota. This was prompted in part by memories Warren had recently written about in My Memoir, Part One in the Park Family Autobiographies section of this Park Family Scrapbook. We decided the next gathering would be for lunch on Sunday at Rita's new condo in Saint Anthony Village.

Saint Anthony Village is a small suburb nestled between Minneapolis and St. Paul on the east side of the Mississippi River. We had often visited Rita at her house in Minneapolis at Christmas time, but she sold that house in 2023 and moved to a nice condo. Our Sunday visit was the first time that Warren and Patty got to see the condo. Also joining us for lunch were Rita's son Joe and his wife Mary Jean and their son Sawyer. (Their daughter Eva was away at college.) After another fine meal I took up the conversation about Deep River memories with James and Warren once again, this time putting my digital recorder to use. You can hear the full 47 min. recording at http://parkscrapbook.us/voice/Robert_James_Warren/FamilyLore.mp3.

The most starkly differing Deep River memoires showed up in connection with our housekeeper Eve and her son Gene who lived with us. In the memoir draft Warren had written before our visit he listed his playmate Gene as Gene Sheffer, indicating that Sid Sheffer, who he thought was Gene's father, lived in our house as well as Eve. I was sure that Sid had never lived with us, and that Gene's last name was Jones. I had years earlier posted the April 1948 photo of Warren and Gene at right with the name "Gene Jones." I though Eve had arrived at our house with Gene, but James had the idea that our mother Catherine had met Eve in the hospital in Pembroke when both Warren and Gene were being born. When Warren talked to our older brother in Florida after our weekend visit Douglas said he thought Eve had arrived at our house with Gene while pregnant with another child who was given up for adoption soon after the birth. I believe our sister Betty has the most factual account in her memoir, Little Sparrows Fall. She mentions the housekeeper that I had forgotten about, Mrs. Furlong. Her account is as follows:

The photo of Sid and Eve that Betty cropped for her memoir was probably taken by our father, and originally included our mother as shown at right. The smiling faces support what Betty wrote about our mother and Eve:

James reported a surprising memory about Sid. He said that he was asked by our mother and Eve to go and look at our wooden motorboat to see if it had a hole in the bottom. He did as he was asked and reported back that he had indeed seen a hole in the boat, which was on the shore. He was convinced that the hole had been caused by Sid dropping the boat on his head, with Sid's head making the hole, sending Sid to the hospital. As you can see above, Betty reported no such incident. She said that Sid's head was injured during the war in a Japanese prison camp. When asked, Douglas said he did not know anything about a hole in the boat. You can see the size of the boat in the photo here.

An interesting side note is that our dad and his 3rd wife Evelyn visited Sid and Eve in Deep River in 1959, when they were evidently living together. By then Gene may have been going by the name Gene Sheffer. Evelyn simply wrote "Arrived at Deep River after supper. Spent the evening with Eve & Sid Schefer." with no mention of Gene. As included in the excerpt above, Betty wrote that she had heard that Sid died young. Ancestry.com has the following LifeStory entry:

Sidney Albert Sheffer was born on April 10, 1914, in Kenora, Ontario, Canada, the son of Florence and George. He married Helene Marie Granvold in 1934 in Dryden, Ontario, Canada. They had five children in 13 years. He died on July 7, 1960, in Deep River, Ontario, Canada, at the age of 46.

If this is the Sid Sheffer our family had contact with, he died only a year after that 1959 visit. The Ancestry Sidney had been in the Canadian military like ours. Betty made no mention of our Sid having been previously married. Perhaps that was something Eve never shared. The wife named above apparently remarried and moved to Montana where she had more children. I have found no record of a marriage between Eve Jones and Sidney Sheffer.

In my story Climbing—Hills, Pine Trees, and Other Things I wrote:

James remembered the pine tree on the bank of the bay and us kids calling it "the Big Tree." He said it was the tallest tree in the area, guessing it was 100 feet high. He also said he was watching the day I climbed to near the tree's top. I guess I was wrong about there being no one else around.

In the background of the photo above of Gene and Warren you can see the vacant lot next to our house under tall pine trees. James remembers the pine needles there being so deep that kids could hide beneath piles of them. He mentioned that just about every house on Beach Avenue seemed to have kids, a memory supported by the 1946 photo here.

Further around the bay past the Big Tree was the town swimming beach. We recalled that our sister Betty was hired as a life guard there, perhaps the first girl to hold the position. I think the photo at right was taken for a local newspaper story showing her with a kids' swimming class the summer that she turned 17. Warren said that his understanding at this time of what a lifeguard did was to stand on the shore and save swimmers from drowning through some sort of miraculous intervention. Only when he was older did he realize that life guards actually went into the water and saved people. James remembered collecting clams from the river bottom near the beach for a reward. He described how you could follow the clam tracks on the sandy bottom to where the clams had buried themselves. He felt the chief reason for removing the clams was that they could bite you on your toe.

The wide Ottawa River was important to our lives in Deep River in other ways as well. James and I remembered motorboat trips to the Quebec side of the river to collect flat stone with our father that he used to make our flagstone walk. What Doug remembered was blueberry picking on the Quebec side. In his memoir he wrote:

I think the power boat was Dad's favorite because he would round us all up on occasion to go blueberry picking on the Quebec side of the river at some big blueberry patch he or someone had discovered. I have to admit this was not one of my most exciting things to do but it was a family activity we were all expected to participate in so we went. I am sure I ate more than I ever gathered in my assigned bucket.

James also recalled that whenever we took the motorboat by the Chalk River plant a guard would come out and look at us through binoculars. We would wave and he would wave back, concluding that we were local people and not spies. Besides the motorboat we had a wooden canoe with an optional sail and a small sailboat we called the dinghy. Douglas would sometimes sail the dinghy with the larger yachts in a regatta. Despite being given a handicap advantage he routinely finished last. Family lore has it that on one occasion he was given a bottle of catsup as a booby prize. Only the canoe came with us when we moved to Minneapolis, where the photo here was taken.

As Doug mentions in the Deep River chapter^a of his memoir, log booms would start floating down the river each spring. Sometimes the wind would blow a boom into our bay and a tug boat would have to come and pull it out into the river's mainstream. James has a truly unbelievable related memory. He says that some of these boats had their motors in cages that allowed them to go right over the logs.^b

Winter memories of Deep River include the ice house, where blocks of ice cut from the river would be stored all summer under sawdust. James remembers being sent to the ice house to get a block of ice for our icebox, which he hauled home on a sled. He also described how ice would build up on our roof in the winter due to a lack of attic insulation. This created a danger of falling ice in the spring. He believed the ice falling from the roof was as much as 2 feet thick, which would have made that ice thicker than the blocks he hauled from the ice house. He also recalled ski planes landing on the ice of the river in the winter, causing excited kids to run out on the frozen river to meet the plane.

We also compared dog memories. In an earlier draft of his memoir Warren had used the name Trixie for our Deep River dog, but that was the name of the earlier dog we had in Whitby Ontario. Dad gave Trixie away, fearing Deep River would be too cold for a short haired dog. Trixie ran away from the new owner and was never seen again. Our dog in Deep River was a small long harried dog named Wickie, but in his memory James had combined the two names and come up with Wixie. Dad tried to keep Wickie fenced in but she got out and got pregnant. The photo at right shows James and me with a litter of her puppies that were soon given away. Wickie got sick, and Warren's memoir draft had Dad taking her to the woods be shot with his pistol, but I don't believe Dad ever owned a pistol. The only gun in the house was Doug's 22 rifle. My recollection is that Dad took Wickie out planning to shoot her with the rifle, but returned with the dog still alive, saying she had acted more lively on the outing. However, Wickie did not recover. In her memoir Betty wrote:

My new dog was a black and white Spits. She didn’t live long, just long enough to produce a batch of puppies. At the end she lay slack and misty eyed, her tongue loose to all offerings. Every three hours my father filled a hypodermic syringe with medication for her, but after three days she stretched her paws and neck as far as she could and died. I didn't know her well enough to mourn except for a life stolen too soon by the fates.

Doug mentions his model airplane hobby in his memoir. James told us of his memory of a model with a 6 foot wingspan that Douglas had begun. He said that because Doug did not have time to finish it before our move to Minnesota he had to burn it in our coal burning furnace. James and I both remembered being finger printed when we crossed the border into the U.S. but James also remembered that we were photographed. When he was processed to get an official citizenship certificate when he was ready to start collecting social security, he got to see that photograph from the last day of 1949.
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^aDeep River chapter in As I Remember It by Douglas Wilford Park.
^bThere is a picture of a boom boat here showing a cage around its propeller. This was a heavy little boat used to push logs around - much too heavy to go over any logs.

At age 85 I am pleased to be able to report that, apart from problems with my eyes^a, ears^b, nose^c, teeth^d, back^e, prostate^f, bladder^g, hip^h, toesⁱ, skin^j, digestive system^k, and blood pressure^l, I am in excellent health. Past surgeries (and stitches) have been successful^m. The photo at left is from my 84th birthday last year.ⁿ For family members seeking more details, I provide a few footnotes.
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^aAs mentioned in story #3, in January I had cataracts removed from both eyes. Colors are brighter now, halos around lights at night are gone, and objects at a distance are sharper. However for objects near at hand such as the computer screen, I seem more dependent than before on reading glasses. I still have a double vision problem at times when my eyes are tired. The new bifocals correct for that, when I use them. I've also been told that I have meibomian gland dysfunction in my eyelids. (There are 30-50 glands in our upper and lower eyelids that release oil into the tear film, preventing tears from evaporating too quickly.) If these glands do not function properly it can lead to dry eyes. The recommended treatment is daily application of a warm compress to the eyes. My eyes are often watery, rarely dry. When I think of it, I apply a warm washcloth to my eyes when I shower.
^bMy hearing continues to decline. When I have trouble hearing Barbara in the morning it reminds me to go and put my hearing aids in. Even when she is next to me in bed at night I can have trouble understanding her because the hearing aids are out by then. I'm on my second set of hearing aids, and the rechargeable batteries in this set are not replaceable. I guess that means that the hearing aids must be replaced when the batteries die.
^cI have an incurable disease, vasomotor rhinitis, also known as the runny nose disease. It showed up whenever I went outside to play in the snow during childhood winters in Deep River, and may have been involved in the respiratory symptoms that led to my steam tent treatment while I was a baby in a crib as mentioned in the 2024 story #3. It means always carrying a handkerchief with me, with a spare one in my back pocket in case I forget the one I am using from my side pocket. It also means I routinely save the tail end of each toilet paper roll I see, placing one within reach from bed, one next to my TV viewing chair, and a collection of them by my computer. Cycles of sinus congestion buildup, followed by sneezing fits as my sinuses clear themselves, are the norm for me. Besides being triggered by cold air, my runny nose is triggered by hot food. Whenever I enjoy an ear of sweet corn fresh from being steamed in the husk in the microwave, I need to have at hand salt, butter, and tissue.
^dOkay, let's talk about the Foshay Tower in Minneapolis. When I was a teenager my father got me started with a dentist there in what was then an office building. I continued seeing that dentist until I was about to leave to begin graduate school in Madison in 1961. The dentist must have been in his 60s the last time I saw him. It was an era when dentists sent dental x-rays out to a developer for processing. I heard him in an agitated discussion with his assistant in the next room. The dentist was upset, evidently because my developed x-rays had not yet come back. He was all calm and pleasant when he came in with x-rays which he put up on the display, telling me that they showed no cavities. I was convinced he was pretending that my old x-rays from the last time around were the new x-rays that he should have had. Seeing the anger on my face he asked why I was upset at having no cavities. Naturally I never saw him again. In Madison, it was some time before I got around to picking a new dentist, one whose office was in a little building on University Avenue right next to campus. It was after my first visit with him that I got the bad news - 12 cavities! I guess he did a good job on the fillings because they lasted 40 years and more. In recent years I have also had two dentists near campus, first the father and then his son. Their dental work has included an implant and a number of crowns, first gold and then porcelain. Now I am using a $15 tube of high fluoride toothpaste from that office which is meant to delay ongoing tooth decay.
^eA crisis with my back came years ago on a Sunday morning at Prairie Unitarian Universalist Society. At the time they were using white chairs with metal parts that were black. The chairs were routinely stacked along the side of the meeting hall after a service, and some stackers had trouble getting the chairs on straight. This caused damage to the side of the seat padding. I had spotted some mis-stacked chairs and was attempting to correct the situation. Two chairs at chest level were jammed together. I injured my back while trying to separate them by jerking at them. I went to the basement to lie down on a couch, but the pain persisted. I ended up spending 3 days in the hospital. Though they did not locate the precise source of the problem, they concluded that I had torn a muscle. Recovery involved rest and a series of exercises. I have continued the exercises, in bed every morning before I get up, ever since. Though my back tires easily, the exercises seem to keep me going, including through all the snow shoveling our driveway has needed and through other chores.
^fIn 2003 I had a biopsy of my prostate (needle/punch procedure) and was diagnosed as having benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). See footnote m for information on the surgery several years later.
^gIn 2010 I was found to have golf ball sized cysts in my bladder. They were removed as described in footnote m.
^hYears ago the firm mattress on our bed gave me some hip pain from arthritis, but a foam pad placed on top of the mattress largely took care of that problem. In the last year or so I have had nightly pain in my right hip for which I have been taking a 200 mg ibuprofen pill at bedtime each night. By morning the pain is often back. Lying on my back helps, but when I fall asleep that way I tend to breathe through my mouth, resulting in a dry mouth which concerns my dentist.
ⁱOnce in Minneapolis when my friend Jeff saw the toenails on my little toes he laughed at them. It had never occurred to me that those toenails being a bit pointed was unusual, but I guess he thought so. However, that is not the toe problem I have in mind. Years ago, within a year or so, I lost the toenail on each of my big toes. One toenail came off after Mischa stepped on my toe during a family ultimate frisbee game, and I lost the other one when I accidentally kicked a concrete front step while trying to separate two squabbling dogs, Rusty and Krasna, by kicking between them. The right toenail never grew back properly and has had a long term fungus problem. The left toenail looks much better but has a less serious fungus problem.
^jI've long had a minor eczema problem with the skin on each side of my nose, but my main skin problem is skin cancer. So far I've had two different kinds of skin cancer in four different places. Both were slow growing kinds of no great concern, but I see my dermatologist once a year. The first skin cancer was on the back of my neck when we were living by Lake Wisconsin. That is when I started growing a ponytail that provides some shade to that area. I generally avoid being out in the sun too long because of my susceptibility to skin cancer.
^kI have long had digestive problems that give me gas pains at night. That is one reason that I avoid spicy foods, though another is that I enjoy the natural flavor of foods that spices can cover up. In the last year or two I have had a more serious problem - acid reflux. For the most part an antacid tablet such as Tums once or twice a day takes care of it. If I still have a problem after lying in bed for a while I find getting up and slowly sipping some milk helps. If a serious problem persists we have Prilosec that I can take.
^lOn every medical visit, including visits to the dentist, they take my blood pressure. With a wrist cuff they have measured the upper value at over 160 at the dentist, but perhaps that is less reliable than the arm measurement. A few years ago there were several arm measurements above 150. We have a battery powered device at home now for taking such measurements and mine have generally been between 140 and 150. In response to the high readings, for some years I have avoided salty food, no longer adding salt when I fry an egg for example. On a recent medical visit my upper reading was below 120.
^mI guess I was 14 and about to start high school (10th grade) when I had my only major surgery, a herniotomy. The surgery was performed by our next door neighbor, Dr. White, at no cost to my father as a "professional courtesy." My cousin Judith told me that when she visited us in Minneapolis once, she did not see me because I was in bed following the surgery. She wrote about the visit on pages 179-182 of her memoir, The Permanent Nature of Everything. She thought I had had an appendectomy, an idea I only corrected by me many years later as she was writing the memoir. Perhaps neither of our mothers wanted to explain to ten year old Judith what a hernia repair in a boy involved. During my graduate school days in Madison I only recall one incident requiring medical treatment. Working in my basement lab spot late one evening I applied too much force while trying to push a glass tube through a rubber stopper. The tube broke and cut a finger on my right hand. At the time University Hospital was located within easy walking distance of the Chemical Engineering building. I wrapped my bleeding finger up and walked to the hospital emergency room, where I got the finger stitched up. Today the scar on that finger is barely visible. After Barbara and I were married I had two minor day surgeries about a year apart for gynecomastia excisions to deal with inflamed chest tissue. In at least the first case the sore spot may have been caused by a baby Robin kneeing me in the chest as I held him up while lying on the living room rug. In 2010, (having retired in 2006) I had a surgical procedure that required no external incisions, a transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP). This was done as day surgery, not requiring an overnight stay in the hospital. At the same time the surgeon broke up and removed some golf ball sized cysts from my bladder that he discovered while operating. He thought the cysts might come back some years down the road, but there has been no indication of their return so far.
ⁿOn Feb. 11, 2024, I was marking my birthday by jumping rope 40 some times (half my age) when Mischa and Evan happened to return from a outing. Though I was tired and ready to quit, Mischa persuaded me to jump a few more time so that he could make a video clip of the event. You can see that video by clicking here.

The first home together that Barbara and I had was the Wausau Home she had installed in Wildwood Bluff overlooking Lake Wisconsin. The building was assembled on a freshly poured concrete foundation. What she had not anticipated was that the moisture coming from the concrete as it cured would create a basement that she was allergic to, as mentioned in my Places Called Home story. When we shopped for a house in Madison Barbara could tell she was allergic to a damp basement as soon as she set foot in it, so I knew how important it was to deal immediately with any flooding in our basement. The house we bought in Madison is half way down a hill. We picked it in part because it had a nice dry walk-in basement. However, there came a time when our basement flooded because water backed up from the floor drain beneath the basement shower booth in our laundry room. The drainage problem was quickly solved by professional sewer rooting that removed tree roots from the drainage pipe under our front lawn, but the water had seeped under the laundry room wall into the adjacent basement bedroom. That bedroom had thick wall-to-wall carpeting. I cut out and discarded the section of the carpeting that had been soaked, but of course the rest of the carpeting then had to be removed, exposing bare concrete. To cover the bedroom concrete we decided to use vinyl plank flooring. We had recently visited a family we knew who had shown us this kind of flexible flooring that they had installed in their basement. We ordered the needed flooring in a style simulating wooden boards, and I installed it. Its appearance blends well with the room's wooden wall panels. Minor flooding due to water backing up from the same drain a few years later was easily dealt with in the bedroom by lifting up the affected flexible planks and drying them and the concrete below. The plank flexibility was also important in this location because the concrete floor on the side of the bedroom adjacent to the laundry room slopes significantly toward the drain on the other side of the wall.

The basement room across the hall from the bedroom mentioned above also had thick wall-to-wall carpeting. The carpeting in this small room is still there, making it the last such room in the house. One day after the winter frost was out of the ground I noticed a smell in the corner of this room adjacent to the external concrete basement wall, suggesting that water was leaking in. This small room had been set up as an office by the previous owners of the house. That smell may have been a factor in their decision to sell the house and build new one on the next street to the north. The room's walls are covered by wood paneling, but on the outside I found a long crack in the concrete wall opposite the corner with the smell. To address the problem, and to provide some thermal insulation, I dug down next to the wall and installed a 2 inch thick 4 x 8 foot panel of Styrofoam which covered the crack. No smell has been evident since then.

Some years after that last drain backup episode Barbara announced that once again there was water at the foot of the basement stairs. This time the concrete at the furnace end of the shop area had been flooded, with the water running all the way to the basement door that opens to the back yard, near the foot of the stairs. The water seemed to be coming from the corner of the basement where the water softener is located. I wondered if the tank that holds the softener salt had sprung a leak. The floor under it was wet. To check I emptied the tank, cleaned it out, and put water in it. No leak. Another possibility was a blockage in the drain pipe through which water from the kitchen above flows. This big pipe had a small iron open top side pipe with a trap into which flushing water from the water softener and condensate from the furnace/heat pump system drained. A blockage downstream could cause water from the dishwasher in the kitchen to overflow from the top of the small side pipe. We had Roto-Rooter come to clear out the big drain pipe, the first time we had that done since we bought the house in 1992. I was told on this occasion that the kitchen drain pipe connects to the drainage pipe from the laundry room that we had cleared out before, and from the sound it seemed evident that the connecting pipe runs under our basement floor rather than out into the yard. Hence there was no reason to expect tree roots to be causing a blockage in the connecting pipe. What the Roto-Rooter people did not do with their big rotating device was to clear out the small trap connected to the side of the big pipe.

Everything that had been soaked by the flood had to be dealt with. Cardboard boxes were discarded with their contents dried and transferred to dry containers. Everything in the closet under the basement stairs had to be removed and some things discarded. It was the first time that closet had been cleared out since we moved into the house. To guard against future floods I put a makeshift floor in the closet raised above the concrete by bricks. Electric fans were used to speed drying of the floor in the shop area and the area from the shop door to the basement door. Soon everything was dry again, but the source of the water remained a mystery. Then, a few weeks later, the floor in the shop area was wet again, with the water seeming to come from the water softener. When the softener does its thing, it temporarily opens a valve for flushing water. This water enters the open top pipe and trap described above. The next possibility to investigate was whether this flushing water was overflowing the open top pipe because the trap needed clearing out.

Taking the cover off the water softener's working parts at the top of the ion exchange column I found instructions on how to manually start a softening cycle. A test seemed appropriate. With some apprehension I decided to turn the dial to start the cycle. The flushing valve opened and the open top pipe soon overflowed. If I did not act quickly it seemed clear that the pan I had under the trap would soon overflow onto the floor. Acting decisively (i.e., in a panic), I turned the dial further to prematurely end the softening cycle. Big mistake! I soon found that the water coming from all our taps upstairs was salty. The taps had to be turned on for a time to flush the salty water out of the lines.

Cleaning out the trap now became my goal. I brought in a garden hose to spray water down the open top pipe. It quickly became apparent that if the water flow rate was above a certain level, the water backed up and the pipe overflowed. The water I caught in the pan under the trap was at first black. After some flushing, however, the overflow became clear. It was time to plug the water softener back in and hope for the best. For a time the basement remained dry, but then the shop area floor got wet again. The pan under the trap had overflowed, so it was obvious now where the water had come from, but why had flushing the trap out not solved the problem? A flat metal drain clearing tape borrowed from Ian was no help. I could not get it to go through the trap. I needed to unscrew the open top pipe from the trap, but even after using penetrating oil on the rusted connection, my biggest pipe wrench could not get it loose. After numerous attempts, what did get loose was the connection of the trap to the big drain pipe. That was the opposite of helpful because the pipe prevented the trap from being unscrewed since it (the pipe) was too close to the concrete wall, and the loose connection at the drain pipe entrance could mean that water would start leaking out there.

A drastic step was now called for. I needed to saw off the open top pipe just above the rusted connection to the trap. Fortunately Ian had a circular saw for which he had a grinding wheel that could cut through metal. With that saw I was able to cut off the pipe and unscrew the trap. Then it became clear why flushing the trap out had not been enough. Over the years the salt water passing through the iron pipe had caused a lot of rusting on its inside. The large, heavy flakes of rust shown at right had fallen down into the trap, restricting the rate at which water could flow through it.

The solution was to replace the pipe and trap with plastic parts that would not rust. I had such a trap and pipe on hand, and with the addition of some smaller plastic parts from the Home Depot store just down the road, I soon had them installed. Now everything should stay dry, right? Wrong. The connection at one end of the plastic trap was leaking. I eventually realized that a tapered plastic ring was missing from the connection, and I found I had several of the right size on hand. Once the ring was installed the leak was fixed.