At a Minnesota Wild hockey game, on Thursday, December 19, 2002, between the second and third periods, in front of 18,000 fans, I stood behind the red line. There were 20 pucks laid out in front of me.  If I shot 15 of those pucks into the net within 20 seconds I would win a brand new 2003, Pontiac Vibe car. I was fifty years old at the time. 

I won the tickets to the game at an event put on by FSN at Joe Sensors Bar in Bloomington.  All three of the winners of Wild Hockey tickets at that event were asked to meet before then game in a room at the Xcel Energy Center.  There they had us draw straws. The person who drew the short straw, me, got to shoot for a car. 

I was asked to sign a waiver saying I understood they were not liable if I fell on the ice and cracked open my head.  I also signed a form stating I was not, nor had I ever been, a professional hockey player either at the National Hockey League level or the minor league level. 

I last played hockey 33 years earlier.  Pond squad hockey at Ramsey High School in Roseville, MN.  I could skate but my stick handling and shooting were terrible.   Between last playing hockey in high school and when I shot pucks for a car, I had maybe held a hockey stick in my hands a handful of times and maybe had shot an actual hockey puck two or three times.  

With ten minutes left in the second period, I was instructed to meet a person down by the Zamboni. They had a selection of about five or six hockey sticks for me to choose from.  I found one that felt good in my hands. 

He explained to me that shooting twenty pucks in twenty seconds meant that I could not wait for the puck to reach the net before I shot the next puck.    He told me to shoot the puck then shoot the next puck right away. He would stand behind me and tell me if the puck was on net or going right or left.   

The announcer explained the rules to the crowd. If I got 15 pucks in the net in 20 seconds I would win the brand new 2003 Pontiac Vibe.  He read a short promo for how great the car was. Then he explained that if I got ten pucks in the net I would win $500 dollars. If I got five pucks in the net I would win $50.  The crowd roared. He asked if I was ready in a very excited tone. I nodded. Then asked the crowd to count down with him. Five, four, three, two, one. Go.

I shot the first puck hard but it barely made it to the net.  The guy behind me said, “don’t watch it, shoot the next puck harder and to the right”.  I shot the second puck harder and I almost fell. It took a split second to catch my balance. The guy behind me said stop watching the puck, you were a little left.  I can’t swear to it but I think I got the third puck in the net.  

By the end of the 20 seconds, I managed to shoot about 15 of the 20 pucks.  Only three found their way into the net. The announcer implored the crowd to applaud me.  The crowd gave me a polite but subdued round of applause. As we walked off the ice the maintenance guy said, “I told you not to watch the pucks, you should have trusted me”. 

The Minnesota Wild (2) lost that game to the New York Islanders (4) that night.  A couple of days later I got an envelope in the mail from the Minnesota Wild with a picture of me on the red line shooting and a picture of the car I did not win. 

I wrote up a little note about the experience and mounted it in a frame along with the two pictures and a Minnesota Wild logo.  That frame sat on a bookcase in the basement for many years. I do not remember when it was taken off that bookcase and put in the box where I found it earlier this afternoon.

We have been social distancing for about three weeks now. A couple of days ago, I went to the basement to see if I could fix a hot water circulation pump that has not worked for several years. The electrical outlet it was originally plugged into had been removed when we removed the paneling last year.  So to see if it would work, I strung an extension cord to the nearest outlet.

Linda had asked me to move the extension cord in the basement before one of us broke our necks tripping over it.  On the third request, I reluctantly went downstairs pounding my feet like a three-year-old being sent down to pick up their toys.  

So dear Linda, the answer to the question as to why I didn’t take the extra minute to put the extension cord where I should’ve put it in the first place is:  By putting the extension cord over the boxes and being lovingly reminded to move the extension cord, allowed me to see the pictures and remember being very nervous standing in front of 18,000 people shooting hockey pucks for a car.   

 

The closer you look the more you will see.

www.scaleandperception.com

 

I was thirteen years old on February 4, 1964, when the Beatles, with their mop haircuts, appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and drew the largest audience ever on television. It did not take long before I grew my hair out to a mop haircut. 

Prior to the Beatles, I was into the surfer look. I was and still am a Beach Boys fan. At my daughter Maria’s wedding she and I did the father-bride dance to the Beach Boys song, God Only Knows. “God only knows what I would have done without you” takes on a different meaning between a father and daughter. But I regress.  

Back in my 11-13-year-old world, you were either a greaser or a surfer.  I was a surfer. The bottom line, going from a surfer to a Beatle wannabe mop required only a couple of weeks’ growth and a reshape. 

As I progressed through high school and into college I wore my hair longer and longer.  By the time I was a Sophomore in college, it was almost shoulder-length. Except it did not look that long because it turns out my hair is very curly when it is long.  I had long sideburns.  

Since getting my first “career” type job after college, as the years past, my hair got shorter and shorter.  It has been years since I needed a hairdryer. My Cost Cutters haircut is now a quarter-inch long on the sides and about three-quarters of an inch long on the top. 

Today, because of social distancing I am again growing my hair out. My hair is not long yet because I was getting my haircut at about 4:00 in the afternoon on the day Cost Cutters shut down in reaction to the pandemic. Having longer hair just does not seem like a big deal in the giant scheme of things.  Been there, done that. 

Every afternoon, Linda and I go out for walks.  As we do so we see kids playing in their yards. We admire the chalk art they drew on the sidewalks.  We greet and chat with neighbors about this and that along the way. The pandemic is a terrible thing but walking around the neighborhood during a pandemic is quite pleasant. 

I see my neighbors far more frequently than prior to the Stay at Home order.  We stand apart as we talk. At first, we mostly talked about having to stay at home but not so much anymore. Now it is about more normal things like yard maintenance, movies to stream, gossip, how to get out a stain and the like.  There are worse ways to spend our time. 

I chatted with the couple who live across the street and down a few houses.  They are both working from home from their corporate jobs. They are spending far more time with their 18-month-old daughter who would otherwise be at daycare. Of course, it is a blessing but it is also a challenge.  That little girl loves to be outside and online meetings are not outside. It is fun to watch and interact with them from across the street. Little Josephine now waves back when I wave at her.  

We certainly are not eating at restaurants.  Three times we ordered and picked up. Once from Chianti Grill, once from Carmello’s and once from McGoverns.  That worked well but mostly we now cook at home. We grill steaks, hamburgers, and chicken. The spaghetti and meatballs were good and the leftovers were nice.  Mix in a couple of hot dishes, Ikea Swedish meatballs we found in the freezer downstairs and we are doing fine. Some meals are better than others. However, by and large, we are doing what we told ourselves we should do for years.  Eat more at home and less at restaurants.    

Just an observation from Instagram and Facebook posts.  It feels like many of the families which were constantly running from one extracurricular activity to another are sort of appreciating not having every minute of their lives occupied with scheduled activities.  I wonder if some families will choose to be involved with fewer activities post stay at home order.

Sports are a big part of the economy.  Shutting them down is a big deal. I was looking forward to watching the MN Twins this season but I have to say I do not miss them as much as I thought I would.  It makes me wonder if sports will become less of a big deal post-pandemic.

I got to say I am enjoying all of the stripped-down music performances.  I stream music now but when I look at my old music cd collection it is filled with highly produced music such as The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Motown, etc.  Listening to an artist with a single acoustic guitar or piano singing their song is kind of refreshing. 

Pandemics are scary.  The impact of our reaction to a pandemic is something historians will study and debate. However, the grandparent in me feels maybe parents spending more time with their kids, on balance, is generally a good thing.  I sort of like spending a little less time worrying about how the home team is doing. Connecting with my neighbors is nice. As disrupted as normal is right now, longer hair than I prefer is just not very important.

 

The closer you look the more you see.

www.scaleandperception.com

 

During the summer between my Junior and Senior year of high school, I was driving to the family cabin on Rush Lake.   I rear-ended another car at speed while driving north on Highway 65 a couple of miles south of Cambridge, Minnesota. The Green Barn produce store was just ahead on the right and there was a flea market on the left.  I glanced to my left to see the flea market and when I looked back ahead, the car ahead of me had slammed on the brakes. I slammed on my brakes as fast as I could but rammed into the back of his car pushing that car into the car ahead of it. 

My head shattered the windshield.  The Highway Patrol said the accident likely would have been fatal had the sun visor not absorbed some of the impact.  When the patrolman drove me to the hospital to get checked out, he said: “Kid, by the time the lawsuits are over, you will wish you had died in this accident”.  

They asked for $175,000 and declined the insurance company’s offer of $18.000.  My life was much changed during the almost two years between the accident and the full jury trial. For almost a year I heard nothing, then various legal documents would randomly arrive in certified envelopes.  By then my dad had died. Mom had no clue what to do. The insurance company told me to do nothing, they were handling it. I was working parttime making pizzas while being a full-time student at the University of Minnesota.  Mom was working as a salad lady at Midland Hills Country Club. 

For that entire two-year period I was pretty nervous.  In the end, the jury awarded the plaintiffs $1,750 and the insurance company was happy the settlement was for one-hundredth of what the plaintiffs asked.  

Avoiding death is not the moral of this story. The moral of the story is, the worst you can imagine is almost never what actually happens. Even when the worst does happen, life goes on and the best you can do is to move forward as best you can.

Many people talk about life-changing moments.  Looking back, shattering a windshield with my head was not a life-changing moment. The highway patrolman was wrong, the lawsuit that followed the accident never made me wish I had died in the accident.  I wish the highway patrolman would have told me, there is nothing you can do to change what just happened. It was bad but could be much worse than it is. The best you can do now is move forward the best you can.  

We had to give a 3-minute speech in freshman year English class about some event, real or imagined, in our past.  The speech needed to have a beginning, middle, and end. Some comment was made by the teacher about how moving the class to cry or laugh out loud would be a good thing.  I bet my buddy Harry that I could make some of the girls cry.  

I started out by telling the class about how when I was in sixth grade, I was riding my bike on County Road B just about to cross Snelling Ave on my way to Har Mar Mall when a car on Snelling failed to stop and T-boned a car crossing Snelling on County Road B about 30 feet in front of me.  

A four-year-old girl was thrown from the car and smashed into the pavement. She screamed for her mommy with blood flowing from the side of her head and one arm was twisted obviously severely broken.  Suddenly she stopped screaming, looked at me and quietly said “help me” as she breathed her last breath. I went on to describe the scene in detail. Tangled metal, steam rising from the engine compartment.  The pool of blood, a mother trapped in the car unable to get to her dying daughter. How at first except for the girl’s screams it was silent. Then there were sirens and people gathering. I even described my terrifying nightmares that followed. 

Several of my classmates and the instructor teared up.  I won the bet. I confessed at the end of the speech that I made it up.  There had been a fatal crash where a young girl was thrown from the car but by the time I arrived on the scene, it was like an hour later.  They were towing away the cars. I never had nightmares about that accident. Back then kids didn’t wear seatbelts. I did not witness the accident but it is totally plausible I had.  If I had witnessed the accident, it might well have haunted me for the rest of my life. 

It might have haunted me but it might not have.  The reality is, even when we are at the center of the event, it is not possible to know the impact of that event on the rest of your life or even the rest of the week. 

When I drove up to the cabin on that Saturday I did not know I was about to come close to dying.  It took almost two years to know the actual result. The little girl really did tragically die an hour before I rode my bike through that intersection.  I had no idea it was going to get me an A on a speech several years later.  

We are often advised to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.  However, I am here to say what is worst and what is best is often only clear in hindsight and even then it is debatable. For sure things will be different. For sure some very bad things will happen to some very good people.  For sure there will be unforeseen consequences. However, there is no telling what will be the exact impact of a bad event.   

When we are in the middle of a crisis, knowing the future is not possible. Assuming the future will be bad is not helpful.  The trick is to do what it takes to survive the crisis and move on to make your future as good as possible. The best we can do is the best we can do.

 

The closer you look the more you see.

www.scaleandperception.com