COLLEGE UPDATE
by Dan and Gina Henderson
Fargo, ND

I know I haven't written in a very long time but I will try and update you on how Gina and I have been doing. We are back to school and it has been going fairly well. A lot better than last semester because we were planning our wedding, working, and going to school -- in other words, very busy!

This last while we have finally gotten somewhat of a routine and are balancing school, work, and other things very nicely. I am enjoying my Junior year at NDSU with classes like Thermodynamics, Tech Writing for Engineers, Circuits, Materials, and my favorite: Mechanics of Machines.

I am still working at Case New Holland and am enjoying it more each day. It has been a wonderful experience and I have learned a lot.

We also have fun with the younger kids up here. I like to get together and play volleyball with them. Hopefully we can keep playing volleyball every Tuesday because it's a lot of fun and a good break from studying. It's also fun to have Rachel up here and get to spend time with her. I was surprised yesterday to run into Chris Chap at a store here in Fargo. It was nice to talk to him a little and see how the fairly new job up here in Fargo is going. Well it's Friday today and we are heading home for the weekend. Hope this finds everybody well.

Dan

Dan & Gina Henderson

I am thoroughly enjoying my second semester of the nursing program at NDSU. In this first month of classes, I feel like I have learned so much! My main classes include Pharmacology, Adult Health Nursing, and Client Concepts. So we're learning all about giving injections, putting in IVs and so much more.

Dan's great to help me study! I think he knows at least as much about IVs as I do! We have one day of clinicals at a hospital every week. It's been a great experience to learn first hand.

For fun, I'm also taking a yoga class.

Dan and I love having Rachel in town with us. Now we have another home on campus! We probably come relax at her place in between classes more than she'd like!

Gina

Jayce says he likes school, but school takes a LOT out of a guy...

Answers to last week's mystery pictures (click here to review them):

As I arrived downtown Portland for work each morning, I'd see people sleeping on benches, in doorways, even on the sidewalk -- often in the rain. Some huddled under pieces of cardboard or scraps of plastic. Many had collections of earthly possessions heaped into hijacked grocery carts.

I would leave my baby blue Lincoln with a parking lot attendant, who would sandwich it into a vacant city lot, bumper-to-bumper, and door-to-door, with thirty or forty other cars. Parking cost three dollars a day and I paid on a monthly basis.

From the parking lot, I walked about half a block to the shop. I was intrigued by the variety of people I would meet on the city sidewalk. I would look into their faces and try to read their stories.

Few strangers would make eye contact. However, panhandlers were the exception. Sometimes, after looking into the face of a disheveled man, I would find my hand in his clutches; and the smell of alcohol enveloping me -- as he pled, "Please man, just a quarter?"

It was difficult not to have compassion, but evident my pockets were soon emptied when I did. So, I learned not to carry any small change in my pockets. "Sorry," I could say, "I don't have any quarters."

It was a relief to open the heavy shop door and disappear inside, leaving the panhandlers behind.

The windows of the workshop were plate-glass, storefront windows. They were coated to make them into one-way mirrors. It was often humorous to watch someone rushing by on the sidewalk -- stop -- and look into the mirror to adjust his tie, or touch-up her lipstick. Little did they know that my co-worker Dale, and I, were watching from our workbenches a few feet away.

Occasionally teens would walk or skate by with green or purple hair, or faces painted white, wearing funky black clothing and unusual accessories.

In addition to the business people and the teens, there was the ever present element of the mentally ill, or drug addicted.

Ambulances arrived almost daily on our block. They came to pick up someone who had passed out on the sidewalk, or they would carry someone out on a stretcher from one of the many upstairs apartments. They entered the buildings only with a police escort.

Where we stood at our work benches, we could look across the street to an open second floor apartment window. A shirtless man often sat there. Frequently he would tie a rubber tube around his upper arm, and after finding a vein, proceed to inject himself with heroin.

At a fourth story window, on the side street of the next block, another man routinely fed pigeons on the window sill.

As the weeks passed, I watched a family of Asian folks transform a vacant store front under the heroin addict's window into a place of business. The youngest -- toddlers, up to the oldest -- grandparents, could be seen working side-by-side, day-in and day-out, on remodeling their new family business. When they were done, there was no English on the signage. Everything had been hand painted in their native tongue. It appeared to be a bar, but I never saw many visitors there.

On my hour lunch break, I would walk back to my car to eat. Walking on one such occasion, I was approaching a young man on the sidewalk, across the street from the Asian family. When I nodded a greeting to him he whirled on me as we were about to pass. He went into a racially charged tirade telling me about the expletive "gooks," and how they were taking over the city. His voice went up-and-up and he began hurling obscenities across the busy street. His eyes were wild and his voice filled with hatred. I excused myself and hastened to the fortress of my "sandwiched in" Lincoln.

When I was done with eating my lunch in the car, sometimes I would nap; sometimes I'd walk around to see the sights. On one such walk a young woman, maybe 18 or 19, rushed up to me. She had in her arms a baby, bundled-up against the cold and rainy weather.

"Please -- help me sir!" she cried desperately. "My baby needs milk -- my boyfriend left me, and I don't have any money."

Here was a real live damsel in distress! I pulled a couple dollars from my billfold and handed them to her. She thanked me and rushed away.

When I told my coworker Dale about it, he laughed at me, and assured me that I'd been duped. "She was probably carrying a doll," he said.

For several days after that I went back, on my lunch hour, to see if I could find her again. If she asks me for more money, I thought, I'll offer to go to the grocery store with her to buy some milk for her baby. Then I'll know the truth.

But I never saw her again.

Walking down the sidewalk, I was meeting a different woman. Something about her seemed unusual. Her feminine walk was exaggerated. She was wearing a red plaid skirt, high heels, and heavy make-up; I greeted her as we passed and she greeted me -- except she was a he!

Having been momentarily fooled was disgusting!

My coworker Dale laughed at this story too. He informed me that there was a whole subculture of these men, who gathered at several bars a few blocks away.

Another day on my lunch hour I watched, horrified, as a man with crutches, who had fallen on the sidewalk, shouted profanities at passers by even as he called out for someone to help him. When he tried to stand, his legs would buckle beneath him. People were walking by in both directions as though he wasn't there. No one was stopping to help him to his feet.

I couldn't believe people would really walk by like that!

But I was fearful of rushing over to help him myself. I thought, Maybe this is a time, that when in Rome, I should do as the Romans do. I walked hesitantly toward the man, but hoped desperately that someone else would help him. No one did -- until just before I got there. A middle-aged man walked out from an adjacent business place and lifted him up onto his feet. Having regained his footing, the "risen" man tottered and swayed down the street, still uttering profanities.

Back at our work benches we had a regular visitor to the one-way mirror. He was an unkempt man in dark, soiled clothing. He lived around the corner, and about half way down the block -- on a doorstep -- under the overhang of a vacant concrete and brick doorway. His snarled hair and beard were long and graying. He had a wide, flat nose, big, thick lips and thick, dark eyebrows. Sometimes he would come to the mirror just to pick his nose; tipping his head back he'd ream out his nostrils with a short, stubby finger.

More often, he'd come to visit. He'd stand almost nose to nose with his reflection in the mirror. He'd talk, and laugh, and cry. He always had his constant companion: an open bottle in a brown paper bag. Sometimes he would hold up his friend and have long conversations with it.

I always wondered, Who was he before this? Might he have been a doctor or a schoolteacher? In his misty past did he have a wife and children? What was his demon? Did he have a broken heart? Had his social drinking got the best of him? Was he schizophrenic?

In the midst of this man's conversations with himself, my co-worker, Dale, would sometimes play a mean, but funny, trick. From the inside, he would put his own face right up to the glass, nose-to-nose, eyeball-to-eyeball, with the man. Dale's face would come into the man's view and the poor guy's eyes would pop with great surprise as he stumbled backwards. He was very expressive to, and perhaps a little frightened by, this sudden vision of another man's face within his own reflection.

Sometimes Dale and I would take arm-loads of discarded artificial arms and legs, down the sidewalk, to the corner of the city block. There, he would unlock a rickety door and we'd descend down a creaky, narrow stairway into a dark, dank basement. The basement was the length of the city block, and half the width -- one cavernous room, the height of a high school gymnasium!

Dale would never venture down there alone. He had once been surprised by some "bums" who had found their way into the basement and were living there. He showed me where they'd even had a small "campfire" by burning trash on the floor.

In the basement beneath our shop, were some makeshift dividers separating off "rooms," inside which were piles and piles of arms and legs. In the dim light of a single incandescent bulb, this was an interesting collection of appendages.

On my way back to my car after work one evening, I could hear a man and woman screaming and fighting in a third floor apartment. Soon furniture, a television, and all sorts of household goods were being hurled out the apartment window. I'm not sure who was evicting whom -- but they weren't stopping to consider that there might be a pedestrian below.

My Lincoln was still "sandwiched in" when I got to the parking lot. The attendant had to shuffle cars around like pieces in some giant puzzle, until he could get mine out. By the time he got the big car onto the street, he had earned his three dollars for the day.

It was always a good feeling to get onto the freeway and to leave the city streets behind. It was about a forty minute drive along the Columbia River to our apartment in Scapoose.

Going To Basic Training
By Beaver
Part 2

The hot and tired recruits who straggled off the bus at Lackland Air Force Base were a motley looking crew. Long hair, short hair, colorful dress clothes, blue jeans -- we would be known as "rainbows" until we were issued uniforms and turned into greenies. Dandelions in a nicely manicured green lawn couldn't have been any more conspicuous, or any less respected.

A leather-lunged Training Instructor herded us into a classroom where we picked up folders with our names on them. We slouched into desks and waited. The TI bellowed nonsensical instructions to take out some pieces of paper and put them on the floor while rearranging other pieces of paper in the folder. His directions were impossible to follow. Soon paper was scattered everywhere. Quite possibly the entire reason for this exercise was to begin the process of screwing up our permanent records forever?

In the midst of all this confusion, the TI's gaze settled on a luckless farm boy from Minnesota, whom he immediately christened "Blondie." From then on, it didn't matter who earned his ire, Blondie was the one who was going to catch it. When I managed a blasé look as he chewed me out for something the guy next to me had done, he wanted to know if I thought something was funny. I couldn't think of a single thing, so I gave him my best smile until he gave up and got back to paper shuffling.

After we finished destroying our personnel records, we were marched off to our barracks by another TI, who then told us a long list of things we couldn't do now that we were in basic training. This session concluded with a demonstration of how to make a bunk, and we were sent off to our rooms to make bunks, with inspection to follow shortly.

My two roommates and I decided that the best way to make our bunks would be to work as a team, which was a good idea except that we must have been too particular as to how we made the first two bunks, because we hadn't started on mine yet when the TI got there to inspect.

There was a paternal theory on the Johnson farm that hollering instructions saved steps and saved the trouble of telling the rest of the kids the same thing next time. I thought I was used to being hollered at, but this guy was an EXPERT! He was also not one bit interested in explanations. Did he think I had been taking a nap, or what?

Well, maybe tomorrow would be better...

To be continued...

Click here to review last week's Bulletin

Thanks for the last Bulletin. I don't know how you do it, but they get better every time ! Need to get started on some other things, so will let this do for now and write more later.

Tom Miller
Madera, CA