This past week on Indiana 25 on a school day, three students were killed and one badly injured when hit by a southbound car that did not stop for the northbound school bus waiting to pick them up.

I have been on Indiana 25 near Rochester; it’s a old-fashioned highway that goes along the east side of Wabash River terrain. I don’t know for certain, but it feels like a route that evolved from an Indian trail turned pioneer road and, as such, it does not go straight. There is a section of the road that has a lot of curves – some of them have the “S” curve signs and some of them are close together, but not actually connected into an “S” configuration.

I don’t go on 25 often; when I do it is because my point of departure makes it the most sensible – assuming the weather is good. I add that last part because every time I travel on it, I find myself thinking, “Boy, I wouldn’t want to be on this road in the dark or in slippery conditions.” It wiggles to the south in twists that you can’t ease into.

This past week, the week of the accident, Indiana was still on Eastern Daylight Time. Anyone who has read a bit of this blog knows that I do not like Daylight Savings Time in Indiana. We are as far west as you can get and still be in the Eastern Time Zone. When you add on Daylight Savings Time, it really throws things of off kilter; in fact, for years, Indiana opted out of “going on Fast Time” as we used to call it.

With the fairly recent extensions of DST until November, school mornings in Indiana are in the dark. Buses run in the REALLY DARK. Another thing from the past is that school buses picked up students from the side of the road where the kids were waiting. Routes were designed that way, and then, somewhere along the line, kids had to walk across one lane of a highway to reach the bus, go in front of it, and then board. We’re not talking county road here; we do mean highway, complete with an actual painted line down the middle.

What happened this week is more complex that just a driver going by a stopped school bus. Coming out of a curve at 10 miles below the speed limit, she saw yellow lights in the dark. Just recently one dark morning I saw yellow lights by the side of the road and knew it was utilities or construction, but still thought that it probably wasn’t the safest idea to have workmen out before it was light. I’m pretty certain there are red lights on a stopped school bus, as well, but they are mixed in with yellow.

The school bus driver saw the headlights of an oncoming vehicle but figured the driver would stop and motioned the kids, two of whom were six, across the highway. I have always stressed to anyone I have taught to drive never to trust that a car signaling a turn will actually turn; you can’t pull out until you actually see the car commit to the turn. I have stressed that in the dark car lights may or may not be closer than they seem. And it is not beyond possibility that a driver may become impaired and not stop for whatever reason.

In short, I cannot understand a bus driver motioning little kids to cross in front of a moving oncoming car.

The parents of the children hit had repeatedly complained to the school district about the bus stop regarding highway-crossing situation. However, no adult accompanied the kids to the stop – and remember two were SIX year old boys.

If Indiana had not been on Daylight Savings Time last week in late October, it would have been light when the car approached from the north. But, it was dark and in the short amount of time coming out of the curve, the driver did not recognize there was a stopped school bus in the other lane. She made a tragic error. Nothing will bring the children back, ever. She knows that. I don’t think she deserves to be vilified because of what happened. It was not a willful flaunting of the law, and she was not speeding.

I don’t believe one can ignore the other factors in play, in particular, the decision of the bus driver to assume the car would stop and the choice of worried parents to not make certain their still Santa Claus believing tykes would not encounter disaster on an Indiana highway before dawn.

Remember the impaired driver situation I mentioned? Well, this year in Fort Wayne, a police office suffered a heart attack while at the wheel of his squad car and lost control. It happens. It could have been a police officer who struck kids instructed to cross the road.

What happened this week must be evaluated in light of all the information.

Ten years ago, I had to hurry to Georgia because someone was ill; that was very important. However, I was scheduled to do an interview with someone who was familiar with Hospice here in Noble County, Indiana, and that was important as well. I knew it because Hospice had been there when Daddy had died. So, I found a corner in Georgia and did a phone interview.

And, today, when I saw someone who brought to mind an article I had written all those years ago about Hospice, my thoughts of those who work there kept poking into my day. I would think I was reading a Kindle Unlimited book just for escapism and I the next thing I knew, I wasn’t looking at the print, but hearing a voice on the phone talking about Linda Yoder, the nurse who had so devotedly helped that lady’s husband.

I thought about it enough that I dredged it up on from the depths of my computer and read it over. I don’t believe time changes the concept or the importance or the message.

I’m going to post it here:

Once you have had experience with a good hospice program, you never forget it . . . ever. And you always appreciate the job it does. Yet, it is a fairly new concept in American medical care, and when Karoline Carney at the Noble branch at Parkview Home Health and Hospice hears about an article on the program, she remarks, “Good, so many people don’t know what we do.”

I am going to be very blunt: Hospice services allow people to live as comfortably as possible in their homes while they are dying; it concentrates on quality of life and on the act of living itself while patients go through this business of saying goodbye.

Yes, it may not seem at first to be a topic that is anything but sad, but that’s not true. Hospice can give so much more than symptomatic relief and comfort; it can provide opportunities – to be with family, to participate in friendships, to give caregivers a bit of a respite.

Ann Hosted of rural Brimfield knows all about this; she has lived it. Her husband Paul – “but everyone called him Pete” – was a Hospice patient from mid-October of 2006 until May 11th of this year.

She talks about it, calling the illness a long siege. She says Pete had shingles for 2 ½ years and that the pain was terrific. When he was in the hospital beginning October 1, 2006, he was on oxygen 24/7 and a nursing home seemed to be the next step.

But that was not where he wanted to go. She says, “I said we can live with that . . . We can live with you being on oxygen. If you want to go home; we’re going home.” You hear the determination in her voice as she recalls that moment.

“The hospital would not release him until everything was set up at home – hospital bed and table, oxygen machine, bedside commode, sheets . . . everything. Our daughter called and said Hospice had brought all this to our house and he could come home.

“So we brought him home.”

She calls the nurses and aides “the girls” – her voice carries affection for them: “The girls were here when we got home and they were with us the whole time from when we left the hospital until he passed away.”
Talking about the schedule, she says, “Aides came on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the nurses on Monday and Thursday.” And, of course, they were never more than a phone call away.

“Ken (Weaver) came quite often to visit – the preacher with Hospice. Ken, the girls, all of them . . . you couldn’t ask for a better crew. They took care of him like he was one of their own.”

And that “taking care of” part was more than procedures and whatever. It was actually caring and interaction. Ann remembers Linda Yoder: “She would get down on her knees right by his chair and shake her finger at him and she would say, ‘Well, Pete, you have to do this and you have to do that.’ He believed every word she told him; he would take it from her, not from me.” She chuckles at the memory.

“Pete was in a lot of pain most of the time and they really regulated his pain medicine, and Linda really, really took good care of him in the medication field of it. I don’t know what I would have done without them.”

They cared about her as well. She says, “It (Hospice) really helped me to get away for a little bit – not that I didn’t want to be with him – but Linda told me, ‘You have to go on with your life too.’”

So, for instance, on Wednesday mornings, she knew either Joyce or Judy would be there when she left and that her daughter would be coming up from Avilla. “He was never alone for very long at all.”

The months moved on.

“He was in a lot of pain – his oxygen level – he could get maybe 15% oxygen in the end, they said.”

On May 11th, she and Pete were sitting at the table at suppertime. He had told her he didn’t want much to eat, so she made him a sandwich and brought something to drink.

She tells what happened then: “He said, ‘I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” and I said, ‘Okay, go in and sit in your lazy boy.’ So we were in there. I was right here by him and I had my hand on his heart and it was going so fast . . . he was trying to breathe so hard. I gave him a shot of the medicine that Linda said I could put in his breathing machine.

“He said, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and I said, ‘Well, just lie back a little bit . . . his heart was going so hard and he opened his eyes and tried to say something and them his heart stopped and I knew he was gone.”

He passed away about 8:30 on the evening of May 11, 2007.

“Linda told me, ‘He was where he wanted to be and he was with you – and that’s what he wanted.’”

But, you see, because of hospice, passing away in the evening wasn’t the only thing he did that day. And that is very important. Ann tells the story of that afternoon:

“He wanted to go down to our daughter’s house in Avilla – they raise Belgian horses – and he wanted to go down and see the two little babies. On (that) Friday, he said, ‘Let’s go down there and I said okay, so we went down. He sat there on the porch and talked to his daughter and I went around with my granddaughter. And he said, ‘I want to go down and see (one of the baby horses)’ so I and backed up the truck and he saw the baby and mama and we got home about five thirty.

Then the evening happened. Ann says, “My older son called my daughter Amy, and she said, ‘He can’t be dead; he was just at my house.’”

Ann then wonders, “Well, I don’t know what effort he put in it to go down and see her . . . I said, ‘Well, you have a good memory, Amy; he made an effort to come down and see you.”

She continues, ”He went to our other son’s to see him; he went to see Amy; and he would go over to the barn – just around the corner, the home place – and visit our older son . . . He couldn’t have done that if he had been in a nursing home. That’s another praise for Hospice – that he was capable of going and doing these things with his kids before he died.”

As for the people in Hospice who had cared for him, Ann says, “He thoroughly enjoyed all of the people and when he passed away, it was very hard. Some of them got to know him quite well – Linda, she had quite a time . . . “

She pauses and says, “I don’t know how I could have done without them; they are a bunch of wonderful, wonderful people and it takes special people to do this work.” After another pause, she says, “So that’s all I can tell, you.”

Well, I guess that’s great big “all” – encompassing so much: family, friends and community.

Noble County has been their community all their lives. Ann says, “My kids all went to school at Rome City and then went into East Noble and most of my grandkids did too.” All together, she and Pete have three children – two boys and one girl – and eight grandchildren.

Speaking of being the runt in a family of six-footers, Ann says, “I love them all and I don’t know what I would do without them. They are all special to me; I’m like my grandma said: “Every cow thinks her calf is the cutest.”

She chuckles and goes on, “I don’t know maybe I’m prejudices but they are all pretty special to me, grandkids and kids.
They are her future – along with her own interests.

She’s one of the Brimfield Methodist ladies of Apple Festival Beef & Noodle fame. This year she says they made noodles and cracked 5,050 eggs in two days, and she adds with a laugh, “That’s a lot of eggs.”
She will also be speaking at the Festival of Trees, the fundraiser for Hospice. “Jenny (Weigold, Hospice coordinator) said they debated asking me to speak because it is not long since he died. I asked her to let me think about it and I called and said, ‘I guess I could because I know how I feel about Hospice – nothing but good things about them and their work. I’ll say what I can and if I don’t say the right thing you can always yank me off the stage.”
Well, she’ll tell it like it is . . . and that will be just fine.

Hello out there. I have been keeping to myself. I don’t believe it’s accurate to say I’ve been quiet, more like I’ve been muttering to myself. I do not for one minute believe that is over, but just maybe, I’ll not do it to the exclusion of all other vocalizations.

Yesterday I bought a bunch of purple perennials that were 75% off; I’m gambling that if I dig holes and settle them in they might survive. Since I have a terrible record with actual gardening, I figure that had I bought them at full price I would have been much deeper in the hole financially. That should make sense, but out there in the horizon of thought, there is the question of how much I would have saved had I not purchased them at all.

I must have a different understanding of the phrase “keep it on the down low.” Oh, yeah, I have been down on a low sofa, reading and watching documentaries. And, surfing – but the kind you do with your fingers on a keyboard with Internet access.
Now, I don’t to be rash and throw my system into a “SYSTEM MALFUNCTION” mode, so I will ease off the sofa and maybe look at something that doesn’t have a screen. Thinking about it, I would say I was in a System Non-function mode; maybe I came close to not being “here” or an many would say, “not all there.”

Whatever. Horton, do you hear me?

I may be exaggerating here; I know I’m exaggerating. However, I don’t think anyone can dispute the belief that Gummy Bears are dangerous because they look so cute and have so many calories.

Let’s do what someone who has crossed the line and held a purchased bag of gummy bears in her hand. Let’s look at the label.

One bag has 326 grams of Gummy Bears (GB’s) and forty grams equals one serving which has 120 calories and there are eight servings in the bag. But those GB’s are so tasty and addicting that you just sit there popping them in your mouth and, GOSH, half the bag is gone. Just by eating cute, little, colorful guys – sometimes biting off the head first, sometimes the body – you have consumed 480 calories. Sugar.

The label doesn’t tell you the approximate number of GB’s in a serving and so you can’t count out a certain number of victims, give them names and then decide, no, you can’t eat Harry, Howard, Lewis, James and so forth. You open the bag and there they are, waiting for your pudgy hand to reach in and repeatedly grab.

I believe, since I have eaten some out of this bag, I will have to buy another bag (for scientific research) and count them. Then I will determine a serving and I will look at the little guys . . . and not be able to bring myself to eat them. That will be good for me.

On the other hand, gummy worms are not like cute little bears.

Yes, I spend my time thinking of such things.

(You will find the word “afghans” below; the computer wanted me to capitalize it, as in the plural of a person from Afghanistan. That would have been bad, although I have to grin envisioning it.)

Last week I told my grandson that I thought I had been approached by his cold virus. Having attained a certain age and an interactive relationship with viruses, I reported that I believed his cold virus had sensed dormant antibodies in me and had decided to make a quick departure after fielding a couple of sneezes.

Well, I was wrong. I would say the virus went home and got some gang members to come over and put me in my place. Yes, the sinus pain, the dripping nose, the sensation of a tight chest, not to mention the dullness of mind and flagging of muscles set up camp in me, AmeliaJake. It didn’t pay any attention to the “NOT IN MY BACKYARD” signs I had erected.

It was a slow week-end, one spent with kleenex twisted and stuck up my nose to allow me to walk around without leaving a trail. I suppose, though, discarded kleenex could be regarded as another version of a “Paper Trail.” When I was younger, we used to take a paper grocery bag and fold it over as a portable used tissue receptacle. (Most stores have gone to plastic and it just doesn’t seem to work as well.)

Yesterday, I awoke and welcomed the fact that I could take a nice deep breath and my coughing was no longer a hollow honk, but – as the medical community says – a productive churning of loose gravel. I felt better. I had to take my car for service and it was a long appointment, but I was happy, sitting there in a well-appointed waiting area, reading my Kindle.

I came home, stopped at a store, sat down to look through some papers and later found myself waking up tipped over on some afghans and thinking, “Wow, what happened to the clock?” HA! I felt not bad, but like a limp rag. I decided to make myself more comfortable on the afghan pile and turned on a documentary and later had to rewind it to the part where I had fallen asleep again.

This is all so boring for jet-setting people and pretty boring for me too. However, I’ll wager I’m not the only one who’s been on this trip.

When you collect stuff because you are interested in history, you will find, as the years go by, that the term “gradual” can have an insidious connotation. Your here and there interactions with items is cumulative. It adds up. It gets stashed in a box and then you discover you have boxes. How did this happen? I think it is something like life: you’d think, “Oh, Heavens, this is going to take forever and I am going to be soooo bored” or “Gee, is this colonoscopy ever going to be over?” Then, bam, years, decades even, have passed.

I actually remember the first day of kindergarten; somehow 65 years have passed. But then I don’t think I’d really like to do kindergarten again. I was so clueless; I remember when we went to a basketball game at the school where my dad was teaching, the teen-aged daughters of the principal kept asking if I needed to go the restroom. I couldn’t understand why . . . I wasn’t tired.

But I’m talking actually stuff right now. I’m talking ONE small box that I started digging through. I came across an old checkbook – not mine, one from Lakeside Hospital in Kendallville. (That will teach me to not get caught up in the bidding at an estate auction.)

It’s from 1916 and similar to the checkbooks of the recent past with the stub for noting what the check was written for. Apparently, however, some people – and I guess it was important when the person was the hospital treasurer – would past the cancelled check back onto the stub. It didn’t get lost.

Ah, I see that although most of the checks I found were from 1916, this one was from 1917. They were doing the same thing I do, paying the fuel and light bill. I do it online now, though, and I pay more than $8.47.

Notice the date: June 6, 1917. Who knew that 27 years later, the Allies would be landing on the Normandy beaches? Actually, the U.S. wasn’t even in W.W.I yet and no one was wondering how they were going to keep them down on the farm after they’d seen Paree.

I regained weight; I was not pleased. After some thought, I figured the best bet for me to at least make a stab at getting leaner and more fit would be to invest in a treadmill. I made the leap of faith – that I would actually use a treadmill – and ordered a really sturdy one online.

It was delivered, all 243 lbs of it and the box was bigger than I imagined it would be. Perhaps that is a result from order a LARGE beanbag and having it arrive in a small box. Of course, once I opened the box and started to unzip the cover that restrained the bag, I got an entirely new perspective on the situation.

There were instructions and they were in English, for one half of the booklet. What you were to do was stated out, at least some of the steps were. The diagrams were not those that zoomed in on certain connections and I decided it was time to turn to YouTube. That was a good idea, but it “t’weren’t good enough” – to quote a story about Bert and Maine and the Bangor Packet.

The YouTube instructions were adequate in themselves, but somewhere in the assembly, I realized the manufacturers might have thought, “Well, this thing doesn’t have to fly to the moon” and left one hole on an inner piece just the tiniest bit too small for the threaded bolt. So I took the darn thing apart and did what I should have done in the first place – I tried the bolt in just that one hole, without the pressure of any other pieces on it. That didn’t work. It didn’t work one hour later either, when the sweat was running down my face and causing my glasses to fall off.

However, after another 30 minutes, I had gnawed the bolt through the hole. I removed it, put the apparatus back together and tried to put the bolt in. It didn’t want to go. I wiggled the outer upright piece, while tying to hold the other parts steady. Somehow, I got that bolt in.

But that was only Step 3.

So I took a deep breath and plodded on, stopping only at the very last when I was supposed to insert six non-essential screws into the handholds. The screw holes were accessible through channels on the bottom side of the handlebar console. Screws fell on my face and I paused to wonder, after all this, if the treadmill would actually work.

I plugged it in and pushed the power button and, yes, the motor started to rotate the tread. I got on and adjusted the speed to .5 mph; I decided it would be better to go faster on another day.

Of course, I don’t want to set the speed too high, because the instructions did make it clear one should make certain the back end was at least three feet from a wall. I guess that means if I goof it up and tumble off the back, I won’t smash into a wall. I don’t know, though, I wonder if hitting a padded wall would not be preferable to thudding to the floor.

Gee, can you imagine me YouTubing my assembly process?

I am signed up with BookBub, a website that alerts you everyday to ebook bargains. Often enough, a bestseller with a hefty price tag will be offered for $1.99 and some books, of varying literary merit, are FREE. Frequently, new and capable authors will offer their books for free in order to build a readership. You can click through a questionnaire to indicate your preferences – so you won’t get any Zombie offers, for instance.

It has been a very useful service to me and many times I have opted for a FREE book for a quick read and an escape. In addition to bestsellers, books that are extremely well-written, but appeal to a quirky, limited audience are offered for low prices.

Today, my suggestions included a book of little-known information and piqued my interest. In the brief blurb about the book, how to milk a yak was listed. Okay, that probably wasn’t the hook to reel me in. Yak milking? I am at the present facing assembling a motorized, 234 lb. treadmill that arrived at my doorstep. It flashed across my mind that when I get this thing together, I do not want to visualize walking up a steep mountain trail to milk my yak.

And what would I do with knowing how to milk a yak? Turn to the person in line behind me at the grocery and remark that none of the tabloids I sneak a look at while waiting to reach the cashier mention the fact that such and such celebrity probably doesn’t know how to milk a yak?

Here is a bit of trivial information about me – a minor confession, if you will. I sometimes pick a long line that includes baskets filled to the brim so I can seek longer peeks at the tabloid articles. Why? I don’t know. I imagine it’s the low brow instinct in me to be drawn to the gossip people yak about.

LZP sent me the above picture for my birthday; he ordered it and then it was backlogged and then the place only shipped on Fridays and, well, it got here on 70 years + 9 days. And that’s fine. In fact, it was really a treat. Like Christmas when I was a kid- a special surprise. Der Bingle did not spill the beans – although I know it was hard for him.

LZP said it reminded him of Indiana and it is a very familiar scene to me – I can’t remember not knowing about weathered old barns. I grew up with a lot of them around; I grew up with one just to the east of us where corn or soybeans grow now. My mother told me that once when I was maybe two, they looked up to see me in my pink ruffled shorts running after my grandfather up the barn path as “fast as your little legs could carry you.” I don’t remember it, but I remember her remembering it.

Thank you, LZP. Thank you very much.