My wife and I often say that our children our are clones because they look so much like us, but it extends to personalities as well. My son is very much like me in most ways, and my daughter is very much like her mother. I have simply assumed that this is true of most children. If my experience at Scout Camp is anything to go by, that isn’t the case. In fact, my situation is downright rare.

My grandfather had a 2-1/2 foot cement statue of St. Francis in his garden, as did my father, my Uncle Sam and Uncle Robert, so it’s something of a family tradition. But living in California I haven’t had a garden except for a few years in the early 1980’s when I rented a house in Menlo Park that had a backyard. The only thing I was able to grow reliably was bamboo (a prior tenant had planted it) which I attacked periodically with a shovel (and later Roundup) to little avail. But I didn’t buy a statue of St. Francis because I was renting and a long way from owning a house.

Once I started working I began to accumulate knicknacks for my desk. In my first few jobs it was mainly functional items: a paper calendar (this was before the PC revolution put a calendar on the desktop on your desktop), pen holders, a ruler. Over time, and different jobs, vendors would deliver coffee cups and I had quite a collection: “the battle for the desktop” I would quip to them when they would give me a new one.

In the early 90’s I had an office with a door. I would keep the lights off and set my screen colors to green letters on a black screen, it was very peaceful. My boss looked in one day and saw two glowing green eyes staring out of the dark office at him and asked “what is it you do in your Bat Cave exactly?” I still use Emacs with green letters on a black screen to do most of my writing.

I was out shopping with my wife at the Ave Maria Community Book Store and I saw a 1 foot tall plaster statue of St. Francis. It suddenly seemed like a good idea for my office. In part because it made me feel closer to my family, and in part because I erroneously ascribed the Serenity Prayer to St. Francis:

God, grant me
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
the wisdom to know the difference.

When it was actually written by Reinhold Niebuhr. This was the early 90’s at Cisco (when the Internet Gold Rush was just starting), and every time I looked at that statue it reminded me to have patience with the things I couldn’t change and to focus on the things that I could.

I was in Weird Stuff Warehouse looking for some refurbished computer cables and I came across a red keyboard button marked PANIC. I had to have one, and actually bought a half dozen. One for my keyboard, one or two to keep, and a few to “install” on the keyboards of folks who would come to me with a complaint about the computer systems, “Here, let me upgrade your system with this PANIC button option, press it anytime you get into trouble. I use mine all the time.” Weird Stuff no longer seems to carry it but these folks do.

A few years later after I was shopping with my wife in a craft store–the things we do for love–and stumbled upon a tipped over pail of milk..for a doll’s house. Again, a reminder of another good aphorism “No use crying over spilled milk.” Something I was wont to do (and am still so inclined). I keep that one perched on my desk as well.

So…what “icons” do you have on your desktop?

I don’t mean to brag — OK, who am I trying to kid, I DO mean to brag — but this was a weekend of notable achievements in the Murphy Household. First off, my daughter spent her first two and a half hours behind the wheel of a car and she didn’t hit anything (if you don’t count the outside of my brain smacking the inside of my skull while she learned how to brake properly). We even spent more time on roads than parking lot. In fact, we both had fun – something that is getting harder to do for this father and teenage daughter duo. I learned an important lesson – don’t get too funny because when she’s giggling she’s not driving. We spent half an hour practicing right turns by driving around and around on a three street combo until we spent another half an hour practicing left turns by driving the other way. Then we drove to a couple of her friends houses just to show off.

While the father daughter combo was out and about, the mother son combo was in Jefferson City competing in the Missouri State K-9 Championship chess tournament where my son came in 4th in 6th grade and under. I taught him everything I know, and fortunately he picked up a lot more somewhere else. Yes, we own Searching for Bobby Fischer, why do you ask?

Tom McMahon shares what he has learned in the 15 years of life with a disabled son in a truly wonderful, makes the whole blogging thing worthwile kind of post.

One of the things he learned is that “Everybody will have a story. And Yours is not the worst story.” So I’m telling you the story of why I visit people in the hospital. It’s actually not a sad or bad story — it has a very happy, ongoingly happy ending, but at the time I didn’t know how the story would turn out.

When my daughter was three months old, she had to have an operation to correct a coarctation of the aorta. She spent about a week in the hospital. That was a very difficult time, and a big help to getting through it was all the people who took the time to come visit us in the hospital. And I’m not taking about just family. There were a couple of close friends from work, but we got a lot of visitors from our church, and people all over the area were praying for her. I ran into our pastor and a couple of elders in the elevator of the parking garage after I dropped my wife and daughter off — they were there that fast and my first thought on seeing them was I wonder who they are visiting? Most of our visitors came after work, and we often had so many we had to move to a public area. It really helped to have people to encourage us, to share with us, and to just pass the time that crawls by in the hospital with us. Since we know what it means to have visitors, we try to visit people we know in the hospital — we aren’t always successful, and we could do a lot better. So far not one person hasn’t been happy to see us, and not one hasn’t said to us “You didn’t have to come.” No, we didn’t have to, we wanted to.