Delta is Ready When You are

In my work I used to travel a lot by air. This time of year the traveling was problematic. There were inevitably those who were completely out of control with the idea of getting their stuff and their offspring from point a to point b without losing anything or anyone. There were always many business travelers who were trying to finish their work and get home to help with the last minute details. The senior members of the airline staff were usually on leave and so many of the employees who rested on lower rungs of the ladder were called to duty. And, as you would expect, there were travelers with the joy and spirit of Christmas and those who could find a way to have a bad day at Disneyland. Part of the way I kept my heavy travel schedule manageable was by finding a way to enjoy what I was doing when I did it.

I remember a late flight one year close to Christmas when I had been the happy recipient of plate full of beautifully decorated Christmas cookies at the last minute. I had no way of putting them in any of my luggage so they were in my hands when I boarded. The lines were long and slow so there was a lot of standing and waiting while boarding. At one point I found myself standing in front of the flight attendant that stands in front of the cockpit and greets the oncoming passengers. I offered her a cookie and she accepted it so quickly I could see she was very hungry, so I offered the whole plate to her and said she could share them with the other staff. She beamed and accepted without hesitation.

When the plane was fully boarded, we taxied off to our runway, took off and reached altitude. The pilot announced the seat belt sign had been turned off and we could walk about the cabin. After he had finished the flight attendant I had given the cookies to came to me and asked me to follow her. She took me to first class, went and got my carry on and brought it to me and said. "Merry Christmas, Sir. You have no idea how nice it is to have a passenger who is giving instead of demanding. Have a nice flight and if there is anything I can do to make your flight more comfortable please just ask."

There is a lot of power in cookies

Herb Ratliff, December 22, 2011, All Rights Reserved

The Magic of Believing (Part II)

This behavior, some might call it “expectation”, and what it does, lays the groundwork for later actions. Sooner than later, there is a minor shift created by parents, television and the community at large. (It is that early work with fictional characters: The Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Leprechauns, Gold at the end of the rainbow, The Great Pumpkin and I won’t even say it but, you know who I am thinking of. (The business Anne Rice started with Vampires a few years back and now the Zombie thing has left me speechless on those issues.) It all creates a theater which asks us to withhold judgment, go with the flow and buy into the commerce and creativity associated with holidays. But hold on, there is a lovely side to this world of imagination.

There are things that happen in this world that are often not of it. The stories of these events emerge from real life and imaginary circumstances. My favorite Christmas Story is “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry. It is my favorite because it represents love so unselfish that what is given to one another is the most important material possession each of them have and it is given because each of them can see that and wish to honor it. You’ll have to read it if you want more than that.

The Saginaw News, the local newspaper in my home town, would run a serial story during the season that culminated on Christmas Day. My sister, Jo Ann read it to me before I could read it myself. Sometimes it took her an awfully long time to get around to it but, she read it. Each segment would take you to a cliff of expectation and leave you hanging on it till the next day and then the same thing would happen again. Following the crescendo of expectation the little boy or the little girl would have a magical experience that had seemed out of range before that.

There are many stories that come from believing so sincerely that the event occurs as a manifestation of that belief.  The magic is the believing. Call it faith, trust, or hope, it doesn’t matter. When you are fortunate enough to have a small child to hold in your arms during the Christmas holiday season, do it. Then, as you are holding them sit in a chair and rock and remember your childhood, your children’s childhood and your grandchildren. Now, believe that their lives will be filled with wonder and beauty and work as hard as you can to make it possible. That is the magic of believing.

Herb Ratliff, December 11, 2011, All Rights Reserved

The Magic Of Believing

In many ways life is a lot simpler when you are very young. You know who is in control. You have a pretty clear idea of what they want you to do. You have a strong sense of self and a pressing desire to meet your wants and needs.  The difficulty begins when you come to an impasse built of your needs coming into conflict with your providers belief that they know more about the importance of satisfying those needs than you. Here begins the seed of misrepresentation for self benefit. For example: Crying.

Crying is useful, necessary and conditional. It is communication that works when vocabulary is limited and need is high. There are, of course, a lot of different forms of this emotional display of dissatisfaction. We are familiar with most of them through personal experience. The problem is the action occurs without labeling. There is not a distinct cry for "I'm hungry" or "I'm thirsty" or "Ouch, I hurt myself". What crying elicits in parents is an immediate response, attention and some cuddling, warm milk or both. The satisfaction derived from this activity persuades us that crying is a very useful tool indeed. In a fairly short period of time we find that it is useful for any number of manipulations that result in cuddles and warm milk. O.K., we say, this is worth remembering.

So, crying is great until we are found out and while even being found out does not lessen the overall effectiveness of crying it does grow tiresome and can result in some distressing behavior from the tall people who bring the milk.

As we grow older, begin to wander around the house and participate in activities in our small community we discover the art and magic of believing. This is something that comes from training. We are conditioned to peak out appetites at certain times of the day for convenience and order. When we do that we expect food to magically arrive when the desire for it arises. Television soon finds it's way into the scheme of things and we are presented with a whole new world of desirable things that are made for us which can be delivered to us by the same people who bring the cuddles and milk. And you get them by being adorable or crying or both.

(So here is the problem. I meant to write a short piece on this but I find I am already over the self imposed limit I set for myself so rather that make this too long to conveniently read in one sitting. I'll finish it tomorrow. O.K.?  I hope you aren't disappointed.)  Don't cry!

Herb Ratliff, December 9, 2011, All Rights Reserved

Hiding Christmas Cookies

My mother would begin baking cookies for Christmas not too long after Thanksgiving. She baked them during the day when Dad was working and the rest of us were at school. She left no evidence of her activities and made no comments that would alert us. And, she hid them. She hid them all over the place and she must have really enjoyed it too because she did it for many years including the years that I was gone to college.

Somewhere along the way I discovered this activity and would systematically purloin the cached bounty but did it carefully so as not to alert anyone looking at the goods by moving the cookies around to suggest an untouched appearance. It was a good job but not good enough to fool the baker. And so began a cat and mouse game of hiding and snitching that lasted until after I was married. It was even mentioned during visits to the nursing facility where mom spent her last few years.

Last night I made some Christmas cookies and since I live alone there was no reason to hide any of them. They  sit willfully tempting in tin containers in the kitchen. But as I made them, frosted them and tucked them into the tins for later enjoyment I thought of mom and the Christmases past when she would make them for me and hide them and hope that I would find them.

©Herb Ratliff, December 8, 2011, All Rights Reserved