If you aren't able to reinvent yourself through the years of your life, you will become obsolete.  The world changes so fast anymore that it is very difficult to keep up.  And as you age, you really don't want to keep up.  You are tired of all the changes.

When I was growing up, people fixed things.  They repaired things when they broke.  That rarely happens anymore.  It's cheaper to buy a new thing most of the time.  Especially when you look at the cost of repair.  None of us know how to fix things anymore.

When I was growing up, every man in the family knew how to fix broken things.  But the things we had, the things we owned, weren't that complicated.  Now things are so intricate, you can't cope.  

Everyone I knew when I was growing up fixed cars when they broke down.  "Pop the hood," was a common phrase when you broke down on the road.  And everyone broke down on the road.  But cars were simple back then.  No bells, no whistles.  No air-conditioning.  You rolled the windows down if you were hot.

My toaster broke recently.  I bought a new one for twelve dollars.  My dryer went kaput.  I got a new one.  I had to pay a repairman seventy-five dollars to tell me it would cost over three hundred dollars to repair it.  I was out the seventy-five dollars with nothing to show for it.

And everything is digital.  I like to never learned what that meant.  Digital??  I'm not sure I know what it means even now.  Except that it means I don't have to wind up an alarm clock anymore--I threw the wind up clock in the trash.  Obsolete.  Almost everything that breaks anymore is obsolete anyway.

I think I'm obsolete.

I got this feedback from a friend of Scott, about what I wrote last week.  It's interesting.

Technically, the U.S. mint has never made pennies.  They are one cent coins and say so on the reverse.  Pennies are use in Great Britain, Australia, etc and they say Penny on the reverse.  Also, the 1943 pennies were made of steel, not tin.  The reason to use steel was that bronze (copper alloy) was in high demand for the war time effort.  The steel pennies were magnetic and would not work in the many types of one-cent vending machines at the time, including gum machines in almost every subway station in New York. During its short tenure, citizen complaints forced the one-year issue to be replaced in 1944.

And as far the one cent coin disappearing, it would not be the first as half cents were made up to about the Civil War.  (Canada quit making one cent coins in 2012).

Mills were never made by the U.S. mint even though they were authorized to do so in the Coinage Act of 1792.  Mills were issued by state governments and came in all shapes, sizes and materials.  Mills were created as a means for consumers to avoid being "overcharged" by having to pay a full penny tax on purchases of 5 or 10 cents.  As far as I know, no tax mills have been produced by any state since 1960.Technically, the U.S. mint has never made pennies.  They are one cent coins and say so on the reverse.  Pennies are use in Great Britain, Australia, etc and they say Penny on the reverse.  Also, the 1943 pennies were made of steel, not tin.  The reason to use steel was that bronze (copper alloy) was in high demand for the war time effort.  The steel pennies were magnetic and would not work in the many types of one-cent vending machines at the time, including gum machines in almost every subway station in New York. During its short tenure, citizen complaints forced the one-year issue to be replaced in 1944.

And as far the one cent coin disappearing, it would not be the first as half cents were made up to about the Civil War.  (Canada quit making one cent coins in 2012).

My daughter Rebecca says that I never write about myself--just about others.  So this week, I'm writing about me.  I don't find it particularly interesting.

The reason I kept going to college for twenty five years without a break was because the government had a rule that if you were enrolled in six hours of credit every semester without taking a break, repayment on student loans didn't kick in and neither did the interest on those loans.  So every semester, including the summer, I enrolled in a minimum of two classes--six credits.  So I didn't have to pay back the loans--which we couldn't afford to do yet.

I had a full scholarship from the colleges I attended, but with Ken and me both in school, we needed cash for cars and gasoline and such.  He had retired from the Marines.  His retirement paid the rent and utilities, but it wasn't nearly enough for two of us to go to college--and raise four kids.  We bit the bullet and borrowed money. We borrowed from the bank, the government and student loans for both of us to finish degrees and get a job.

Every time I would get close to finishing a major and graduate, I would change my major.  That way I could keep enrolling.  Keep from paying off the student loans.  I eventually had a zillion college credits.  My advisor finally told me, "Janie, you are one class away from a degree in a number of areas.  Choose one, or two, or three.  I graduated.  Zoology, Pre-med, Chemistry, education degrees and eventually later a math degree.  But kept taking classes to keep from paying off the loans.  We just didn't have the money to pay them off.

Somewhere in there another child (Jon) came along after the others were well on their way through school.  I had open heart surgery--which slowed me down, but I kept enrolling in classes.  But finally, when I was in my fifties, we paid off the loans.  I would not advise you do what I did.  It was stressful.  I learned just enough about a lot of things in college to be semi-educated.  Which is dangerous.

I wasn't a pianist again for fifty years.  Until our church lost their pianist and asked me to help out.  I did, fearfully--because I was at that point unqualified.  My fingers were very rusty.  

But my kids were gone, I was retired, and had enough time on my hands to practice again.  It was fun, but only because I didn't have to play for a choir and learn musical scores again.  Just hymns.  I played for a number of years, and actually enjoyed doing it.  I did okay.  Not great, but adequate.  Kinda like they say how you never forget how to ride a bicycle.  Only problem was that at the age of seventy-something, I couldn't look up at the hymnal to read the notes and back down at my hands as easily. Back at eighteen, I didn't wear bifocals.

After I was a pianist, I was a military spouse.  I learned tactics, air support, and a bunch of other stuff that helped me understand things like why the Russians want Crimea.  Russia needs a path to the Black Sea.  They don't have a southern port.  I learned about keeping the troops supplied with food, shoes, ammo, and other supplies.  And how Napoleon got ahead of his supplies.  I learned the lessons of "A Bridge too Far."  None of which I used, but when you have a bunch of Marines sitting around shooting the bull, you learn things.

And then I was a mother.  Four children by the time I was twenty-five.  None of them remotely like the others.  Nothing I learned from raising any of them was worth anything raising the others.  I just tried to hold on.

And when I was twenty-eight, I started college.  Which I kept at until after I was fifty because if I stopped going, I had to pay back my student loans.  I started my first professional job at thirty-nine.  I taught math at an OSU satellite in Miami, Okla for twenty years.  

And now, I am a writer.  Who knows what I'm going to be when I grow up.

  

Once, I was a pianist.  Classical music.  I had excellent teachers who expected perfection.  I practiced one hour each day every day from the third grade to the twelfth.  That's a lot of hours.  I had musical talent, but it was mostly hard work forcing my fingers to do what was required.  Now when I turn on the classical radio station, I hear and remember the music I once played.

And then I got married, left home and left hundreds and hundreds of sheets of classical music behind me.  There was no piano where I moved with Ken.  Except at the church.  So I became a hymn pianist--playing for the Pensacola choir and church,  and through the years, my fingers lost the ability to do the classical things they had been trained to do.  

That is the perfect description of a "Use it or lose it" event.  It could not be helped.  I could not maintain something I couldn't continue to practice daily.  And as time passed, I did not miss the grueling hours of practice.  And as time passed, I was content to listen to others play the pieces I had once perfected.

Did I want to be a concert pianist?  Absolutely not.  Every girl I knew in the forties and fifties learned to play the piano.  I just stuck with it.  Every home had piano in the living room.  We played because we were supposed to play.  Different eras have different expectations.  

My parents weren't financially heeled.  I have no idea where the money came from to give me piano lessons.  I have no idea where the money came from to buy a piano. 

Everything we learn to do becomes a part of who we are.  I very seldom sit down and play my piano anymore.  But I can still do it.  I can still read the music score and play the correct notes.  And by the grace of God, I don't have arthritis in my fingers.  They still do what they were trained to do.

   

When Ken was no longer able to have dialysis--it was no longer effective, and they told him he would have around three days left--all of us gathered to be with him.  He had never been afraid of anything in his life, and he wasn't afraid of dying.  He was a Christian with total confidence in the promises of God.

I told you once what he said: "I know where I'm going, I just don't know how I'm going to get there."  He was plotting vectors to fly from point A to point B just as he had done when he was flying to a target--all those years in the Marine Corps.  When ground troops depended him to arrive on target at the specific point they wanted him, at the specific moment they wanted him there.

It was pretty quiet--until the silence was broken by an airplane flying over the area.  Low.  Illegally low.  We all commented that someone was going to get in trouble for flying so low.

And then the plane returned--fifty feet over our house--the noise was deafening.  And again.  And that's when we realized who it was.  Joe Mike.  He was saying goodby in the way pilots in the military do.  With a flyover.  With a goodby.

Ken and Joe both flew in Vietnam.  Ken always said that Joe was the little brother that he had never had.

Once when I was at youth camp at Falls Creek (I was teaching all the twelfth graders in the Senior Pavilion) I had left my Bible and notes at home.  I had to have it, so Joe and Ken got in a putt-putt and flew it to me, landed in a grassy field and handed it out the window.  

They were both excellent pilots.  Joe still is.  Ken is probably directing heavenly traffic.  Plotting vectors to help the saints to arrive at their heavenly target at the precise correct moment. 

Every Friday, my cousin Ann and I go to breakfast together.  It is a lot of fun remembering things from our childhood.  We were raised by six parents who lived in housing within hollering distance.  Her mom and dad.  My mom and dad.  And our grandparents, Pops and Gran.

Neither Ann or I knew for sure who was the final in charge person, because all six of them told us what to do, how to act, gave us instructions, etc., etc...  Ann or I can always come up with a story that the other one hasn't heard before.

This morning, I told her about finding a letter in a box of stuff at my mom's house.  My mother saved everything, and when she was gone, I was the one who had to decide what was kept and what was trashed. (I saved the attic for my brother Bill to clean out when he took vacation from where he lived in China--37 years.  Medical missionary.)

Anyway, mom had saved a letter I had written to Pops before he and Gran moved to Pryor.  "Dear Pops," it said.  "Send me sawdust.  I am stuffing a sock and making a doll."  I was around five or six at the time.

Pops was a carpenter.  And when we visited the farm where he and Gran lived, he had a setup in the barn where he used the saw.  Sawdust was thick on the barn floor, and Gran and I would darn old socks, fill them with sawdust, and make dolls.  No body could afford to buy a doll during WWII. We had rag dolls.

I think that must have been my first sewing project.  I sewed for the rest of my life.  And graduated from sawdust to foam stuffing.  Ann and I had the best childhood anyone could imagine. This morning she said, "To whom much is given, much is required."  We were blessed with six Christian parents who expected us to grow up, live moral lives, serve others, and be responsible and productive.  It's a work in progress.  Sometimes I wonder if they are watching.