Coming Home for Easter

 

The tree-shaded cul-de-sac looked familiar with neatly manicured lawns boasting the first blooms of Spring. I pulled into the driveway and turned to park under the porte-cochere. They didn’t notice my arrival, and so I parked and walked around the corner of the house. My parents stood at the doorway of their beloved greenhouse, hand in hand, observing the promises of a new growing season.

Mom’s walker was standing sentinel on the footbridge that provided access to the greenhouse—a kit structure Dad had purchased a few years earlier. It held all manner of exotic and not-so-exotic plants, the names of which I couldn’t begin to recount. But my parents knew them all by name, and my mother was gifted with the ability to coax to life anything with chlorophyll. My father complemented her skills with his undying discipline and precision in caring for the assortment. The result was a 10 x 15 oasis that harbored all manner of organisms of flora and fauna, the proof of which was an explosion of colors and new growth this early in the season.

And so they stood holding hands, my father leaning into the doorway, my mother pointing at something just beyond—a snapshot of how their time together has been for the past 69-years of their 93-year existence.

I had driven up to retrieve them for the long Easter weekend. Mom no longer drove, and Dad had finally accepted, begrudgingly, that the three-hour drive over the rivers and through the woods back to our house was a bit too much for the comfort level of his children. Never mind the fact he was nearly deaf in one ear. He was still confident in his abilities to drive, especially with a newer car “that practically drives itself,” he proudly proclaimed at his last checkup. Yet, he still insisted on driving a nearly ancient pickup truck that definitely did not drive itself.

The Easter weekend here provided my parents with a chance to see more of the family, including a recently engaged granddaughter and her fiancé, and a still somewhat shy great-grandson. Their visit, however, was too short, and the return trip home seemed to fly by. Dad commented that he noticed a lot of changes in the scenery along the way—probably a side benefit of not having to drive!

On my next visit, we’ll pull all of the plants out of the greenhouse and arrange them around the backyard, under a gazebo, and along a flagstone patio Dad laid by hand years ago. And they will sit under that gazebo and admire their handiwork and each other.

A COVID Christmas

 

So, it’s the night before Christmas, and down at the HEB
not a parking spot remains as far as the eye can see.
People are pretty jovial, in a gallows-humor kind of way,
They know there’s no such thing as Santa and his sleigh.

The bake shop is bustling, home-shoppers are hustling,
and the food samplers are holding sway;
‘Cause who doesn’t like free food while bumping elbows in the store on the night before Christmas Day?

This year’s Christmas is different in so many ways…
the anticipation of family together for a few days
has been shattered by diagnoses of COVID and such,
we’re not getting to spend that time together so much.

So, my wife swapped her kerchief for a face mask instead,
as she’s in quarantine--we must sleep in separate beds.
We watch separate TV’s, and sit five yards apart;  
this social distancing thing really is such a farce.

The stockings were hung from the mantle with care,
in hopes that our grand-kids soon would be there;
But COVID’s put a kabosh on our plans for family fare--
they’ve bugged out to Hempstead to spend their Christmas there.

We’re spending Christmas with each other and the nasty, ol' ‘VID;
watching holiday movies and swilling NyQuil, this illness to rid.
As for Fauci and the others who’ve politicized this craze--
We’ll have a Merry COVID Christmas in spite of you.

(With apologies to the estate of Clement Clarke Moore)

Adventures in Digital CRM Land

We have a new employee whose responsibilities include management of our social media accounts. In bringing her on-task and up to date, we discovered a need for updating permissions on some of these SM accounts, and I discovered, after spending three-fourths of an hour lost in the maze of the ethernet, that my own access to some of these accounts is no longer viable. 

You will understand why, after reading this treatise, O Theophilus, this revelation came as something of a relief. 

The new employee asked me to put the social media account snafu into our CRM/task management system (I’m not going to mention corporate names, but their logo is RedTail.)
I seldom use this “tool,” as I am not in the selling pool, and have no need to enter customer information. And besides, RedTail is clunky to me. 

But I digress; I opened up RedTail and commenced to begin to log-in. If you don’t regularly use some software applications—like all day, everyday—these things will forget you. Or at least they’ll forget your password…so I had to hunt that thing down. In my Evernote. 

I use Evernote everyday. I still can’t remember that password, which is scary because I use Evernote to securely store all my other passwords (and forget it, hackers--they're encrypted.) My smartphone, being smarter than me, is a safe go-to for accessing the inaccessible, or at least the less-memorable. Like passwords. 

So, I got the Redtail password, and of course, it didn’t work; gotta reset that. Reset code was sent to me, you guessed it, via company e-mail…into which I had to log-in. Logging-in to company email is not an efficient use of time. It not only requires that you remember your password…it also entails a secondary level of verification, usually in the form of a text message. 

Did that, got the pass code, did the entry, and gained access to my company e-mail so I could recover the RedTail password reset link they’d sent. The link is only good for 30-minutes. 15- of which had by now rapidly passed. 

Accessing RedTail, finally, I changed my password (and updated it in Evernote) and entered the digital world of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which is primarily used for keeping up with folks you want to do business with. Not making assignments, so far as I can see. 

Anyway, by the time I'd accessed the CRM software through three password routines for Outlook, Evernote and RedTail, I think I forgot what I was originally trying to accomplish...oh, yeah--finding the password(s) to access some social media accounts. 

Ironic? You tell me. As a matter of fact…it probably took you less time to read to this point (thank you for your tenacity) than it did for me to negotiate all those passwords and passcodes. 

My father is 92-years old this year and eschews computers with a passion.
His life is pretty simple…and blissful.