Laurel McHargue -- Author/Podcaster/Public Speakerhttp://www.amazon.com/Miss-Laurel-McHargue-ebook/dp/B00FQT4WO0/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Hi my friends and family!
2013 was a year filled with challenges. What year hasn’t been?
Mighty Mike continued a year of public service as the county’s Emergency Manager, 
conducting a brilliant wildfire exercise in June (earning high accolades from FEMA evaluators) and assisting with recovery efforts after the devastating floods in the Boulder area in September. After hoping that cortisone injections in his right hip would prolong the inevitable, he went under the knife for a complete hip replacement…just four days after completing his 8th Leadville Trail (LT) 100 Mountain Bike race! Although he’s not in any hurry to replace the other, he is quite pleased with his recovery and his ability to hike and bike pain-free again!
Nick has excelled in the ROTC program at UNM and continues his studies on an extended plan 
after adding a year for course work in the Emergency Medical Services Academy. He, too, competed in and completed his first LT100 race. Still not certain about his follow-on assignment after graduation, he will be working in Albuquerque until he can find a way to return to Colorado! Jake opted for the work-over-school plan and is partnering with another young entrepreneur in Boulder. His facility with computing has allowed him to do what he enjoys while providing him with the resources to live independently while caring for his pet tortoise, Givenchy.
The Lead Ass Inn hosted many visitors this year: Sarah Collier (my good friend Nadine’s 
daughter) lived with us this summer and I got to pretend that I had a daughter for a bit! Niece Andrea and hubby started off the July revolving door, followed by race friends Brent and Lisa, then Mike’s bro Mark, his wife and two girls, then Anne and Eric from VA overlapping with Sam and Derrick from Abu Dhabi (en route to Germany), and finally Sarah’s boyfriend. Whew! Talk about musical beds! Our old Army friends from long ago (Kathy, Chris, Kristen and Michael Shalosky) visited for Thanksgiving and we made the best hand turkeys ever!
I completed the draft of my first novel (“Miss?”) in March just before my Dad underwent major surgery for cancer. Dad fought the good fight, and even helped 
organize a most memorable family reunion at my sister Carol’s home in June, but ultimately lost his battle on October 4th, not long after losing his youngest brother. I was blessed to have had several visits with Dad before he left us, one on the heels of my 30th West Point Reunion. Dad’s funeral was fitting for the wonderful man he was. Mom has been a pillar of strength, and we all are grateful that she lives in a place surrounded by friends and not far from Carol. She continues to teach us life lessons as she finds her way after 65 years of living with her best friend.
Somehow I managed to find a couple of weeks to act in a friend’s Indie film (“Peace Pass”), and I published my novel through Amazon in November shortly before Mike and I decided to adopt a German Shepherd from a local shelter. Ranger (almost 3) has brought us great joy; his temperament is much like Guntar’s was (our first dog). Wishing you all health and happiness in 2014!
With love from the Lead Ass Inn–a name my Dad suggested for our far-away home.
Laurel, Mike, Nick, Jake, and Ranger
“We could turn around here if you want,” Mike says with just a hint of disappointment in his voice.
We’re not quite to the halfway point on the 3-mile Fish Hatchery loop, and our new dog, Ranger, is staging a peaceful protest. He sits in the snow staring at the pooch-booties on his paws—a gift from a friend—probably wondering why on earth “this family” rescued him from the shelter. He used to have it so easy, just laying around and getting fat.
It’s 5 degrees out, much colder with the wind chill, but it doesn’t feel too bad in the trees. I look at my dog who looks at me, and know that I must make the right decision.
“Come on, Ranger, let’s go!” I say with great, feigned enthusiasm as I take the lead back on course. We must not turn around. The sun is peeking through the trees. It’s not even snowing.
“We can take a water break at the top of the next little rise,” Mike says, happy to be finishing what we’ve started.
It is only because I now take the lead that Ranger will stand up and follow. Although he loves Mike—the one who takes him out first thing in the morning and picks up his steaming “presents”—he loves me more.
Both Ranger and I enjoy a few sips of water at the top of the rise. I’m actually sweating in my $10 gold retro one-piece ski suit, and with snow shoes on for the first time this season I’m feeling like I understand Ranger’s disdain for his treadless booties.
“This isn’t so bad, is it?” Mike asks. He loves this. He lives for this.
“Yeah, it kinda sucks,” I say, honestly.
“No way! Seriously?” he asks, befuddled.
“You know I always suck going uphill. It hurts,” I tell him, “but I didn’t turn around!”
Although I’ve lived at 10,200 feet for almost 7 years now, I nevertheless have not “gotten used to” the strain of breathing under exertion. Perhaps if I hit the gym more it would help, but even when I was doing that regularly, I still hated the feeling of suffering. In a recent Facebook status I confessed that I hate suffering, but love having suffered, which is why we did not turn around today when we could have.
Mike, who has recently had one complete hip replacement surgery and will put off replacing the other for as long as possible, looks at Ranger, who does not have the capacity to feign enthusiasm for continuing our hike.
“Hey, you’re only 21-years-old and you’re not even wearing a pack! I’m 53, so I don’t want to hear any of your shit!”
I laugh at Mike’s attempt at motivating our dog. Ranger just looks at him, looks at his booties again, then looks at me.
“We’re almost there, buddy!” I say, and although we still have a mile and a half to go, it’s all downhill. I’m actually happy now. I can walk forever if it’s not uphill.
We make it back to our car and Ranger is ready to jump in before the hatch is even up. I give him another treat—a trick my friend suggested as a way to get the booties on him—and all is right with his world again.
I remove the booties when we get home. Ranger’s feet are warm and dry.
We all settle down for a long winter’s nap.
Although the ice crystals hadn’t yet bonded over the toilet water, my always-be-prepared hubby nevertheless activated our forced gas heat this morning, 52 degrees in the house feeling too frosty even for him. By the time he returned from taking Ranger out for his morning constitution, I had the fire started and the coffee ready.
It’s -15 in Leadville this morning, the sun is sparkling off powder-dry snow crystals, and I’m trying to decide what to wear for my book launch event at our local Book Mine this afternoon.
But first I will be donating blood, and I suppose I’m more worried about my life force’s ability to flow in what will most likely be a cold room at the Mining Museum. So I will drink hot tea until I trudge over there at 1:00.
They say you’ll live longer if you stay slim and cold, but who would want to under those conditions?!
Day-dreaming of turquoise waves splashing over hot bodies on faraway beaches…
Truly tickled to be attending the 2014 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Conference in Dayton, Ohio! This will be my first official conference! Many of the Not Your Mother’s Book series co-editors will attend also, and Dahlynn McKowen (of Publishing Syndicate) will be there are a faculty member and workshop presenter!
Registration opened today, so if you’d like to join me–and a bunch of very fun, funny people–go to humorwriters.org and register soon!
I am excited to be offering a scholarship to a deserving high school student in 2014 using 100% of the profits from the sale of my novel “Miss?”
Please consider purchasing my book for yourself or as a gift (or both). With the purchase of a paperback, you will also get a free Kindle download!
I hope to make my scholarship one that students will be delighted to receive. Please help me to achieve this goal!
Perhaps being married to our county’s Emergency Manager has skewed my perception of things, but I honestly feel like I’m living one of the “lifestyles of the rich and famous.”
It’s not that his salary is fabulous—far from it. If it weren’t for Mike’s military pension, we’d both have to find better jobs. But the fact that I do not actually have to work right now has allowed me to explore my own selfish interests, and what more could a girl want?
“But what do you mean by ‘skewed’ perception?” you ask.
Well, it struck me as comical the other day that I was excited to be cooking my oatmeal on our wood-burning stove in the living room while hanging wet clothes, also in the living room, on the most excellent new drying rack I recently purchased. And that’s where being married to the Emergency Manager comes into play.
You see, even before we married 30 years ago, I knew my husband was a special kind of guy. I joined the Judo team at West Point our senior year so I could get to know him better and it was there I learned that my mate-to-be never did anything half-assed. I fell for him, hard, over and over again, and before the end of our last semester I had a yellow belt, a kajillion multi-colored bruises, and a sparkling engagement ring.
The first seven years of our marriage were wild and childless. We were both in the Army and loved our jobs. Mike’s constant never-quit attitude brushed off on me big-time, and I grew stronger and more confident in myself through each challenging experience we shared. His self-reliance was inspiring, and I learned to push myself to do things that didn’t come naturally. With my predisposition toward life as a couch potato, I thrilled myself each time I finished an “adventure race” or triathlon.
With the arrival of two strapping sons, I was the luckiest girl in the world. Even though our salary would be halved with my resignation from the Army, Mike encouraged me to transition from “Ma’am” to “Mom” (possibly my next book title), and 23 years of new challenges have passed like whispers in a whirlwind. Our sons learned that life is often not easy, and now they laugh at me (good-heartedly, I think!) when I talk about their dad’s preparations for our upcoming “black-out” weekend, which will have nothing to do with alcohol. They have yet to ask to come home that weekend.
After teaching in the public school system for several years, another challenge I honestly hated and loved, Mike once again encouraged me to pursue my dream of becoming an author—which brings me back to feeling like I’m living one of those lives. Although I’m neither rich nor famous yet, I still am able to indulge my inner couch potato while writing, and I still am able to thrill myself each time I’ve climbed a mountain or lived through a frigid Leadville night with the thermostat turned down a few more degrees.
Living with a man who practices what he preaches has kept me from the eventual ennui that creeps, perhaps, into many relationships. Sure, I make fun of his parapet of books with titles like “Fear” and “Not a Good Day to Die” and his latest, “X-Events: The Collapse of Everything,” but I sleep well at night knowing that even if I’m not completely ready for the collapse of everything yet, he is.
And so I truly am a “kept woman.” I will continue to embrace each new opportunity to shirk the easy way of doing things because easy bores me, and because I can. We recently adopted a 3-year-old German Shepard from a rescue shelter because it would have been easier not to. Being married to a man who works so that I can air-dry laundry and take a dog on three long walks each day puts me in a category deserving of my own reality T.V. show.
I’m ready, world!
I could not be any more delighted than I am right now with the reviews of my novel, “Miss?”
I am particularly proud of one by literary critic Will Lewis from The Northern Star (he is a very funny man and you should follow his blog, too: northernstar-online.com !)
Thanks, Will! http://northernstar-online.com/miss-laurel-mchargue/
I started this novel during my first year of teaching, although I didn’t know it at the time. Because I was amazed every day by what I was encountering in my classroom, I felt the need to keep a journal. No one would believe my stories otherwise.
Many years later, during the month of November in 2012 as a NaNoWriMo challenge, I began my first novel with journal entries in hand. Add one more year and my story is finished and available through Amazon as a paperback and Kindle download!
I am very proud of my novel, and hope that you will share it with others. I will be posting information about how I used Direct Publishing to make my dream come true!
Click on the following link to open a window to check out how to purchase my title!
When I look out to all of you gathered here to honor Dad, I wonder if there is really anything I could say that you wouldn’t already know. My family decided that the favorite daughter should speak today, however, and so I am here . . . speaking on behalf of all five of Dad’s favorite daughters and his most favorite girl of all, our Mom. They didn’t tell me how much time I had to speak, but as Dad is in no hurry today, I hope that you will bear with me.
Time is such a nebulous thing. We spend it, pass it, curse it, measure it, share it, and yet it remains something we can never grasp.
My sisters and I have spent a lifetime hearing how lucky we are to have the kind of family that people wanted to be adopted into, and whenever I hear the word “lucky” now, I remember Dad’s instant response.
“It’s not luck,” he would say, joking about much hard work it took to raise five daughters, however perfect we were. No, not luck. He would call it a blessing . . . and lots of hard work!
From the time we were all very young, Dad was a stern disciplinarian, a trait that would soften as he became confident that each of us would be well cared for by the men who would eventually claim us as their wives. At times he was even feared, not in a frightened way, but in a respectful way. His standards were high and no one wanted to disappoint him. He and Mom taught us how to be acceptable in public, from having us cater the many neighborhood parties they would host to sitting up straight at the dinner table. I know that those lessons made eating my meals at West Point that first year far attention-provoking, and that was a good thing!
I’m pretty sure that although we never wanted to, we all might have done things to disappoint him along the way. But there was never a time that we felt he did not love us.
“Good morning, beautiful,” I remember him saying on many occasions, perhaps because he couldn’t remember our name or even our “daughter number” first thing in the morning. I like to think he only said that to me, but even though I know that wasn’t the case, it always made me feel special.
We daughters know that he loved us and that he loved his bride of 65 years even more. His devotion as a husband, and Mom’s as a wife, made the two of them role models for many and inspired each of us to believe that the same could be possible for us. Michelle, who wishes she could be here this weekend, mentioned how Nana and Grandpa were always inseparable. There was never a Nana without Grandpa, a Mom without Dad, a Pat without Charlie.
Dad was a man of few words, no doubt because he could never get a word in edgewise with his chatty women and all the friends we would bring home, but he sure did love to laugh; and even more, he loved to make others laugh. He had a joke or funny story for every occasion and could time a zinger so flawlessly that his audience might never see it coming!
Dad was a selfless man who sacrificed much for those he loved. He worked for over 42 years at AT&T while sticking with his Army Reserve training which ultimately ensured a comfortable retirement for Mom and allowed them both the time and means to travel the world with friends and family, and to be there for whichever daughter needed them the most. I don’t believe they missed a birth of a grandchild, and were there to help several us more than once with major relocations. I cannot imagine that any of you in the audience haven’t been the beneficiary of Dad’s generosity in one form or another.
In addition to his host of loyal friends, Dad leaves behind a wife and woman stronger than any of us had ever anticipated, five nearly perfect daughters—each of us his favorite—with our husbands and our twelve children, five great-grand-children with a sixth due on what would be Mom and Dad’s 65th anniversary week (that would be why Michelle could not make it here this weekend), two sisters-in-law, six nieces, two nephews, some cousins, and a partridge in a pear tree.
We each will have our own unique “remember whens” to share in years to come, even though many of us have shared the same experiences. Family trips to Florida, to the Cape, to Nantasket . . . 7 of us in a station wagon with no seat belts! Mealtimes with him telling us in what order to eat the items on our plates—I’ll bet every child and grandchild remembers that!
“Eat some peas next, and then some potatoes, and then have some meat!”
I will remember him kicking my butt on the tennis courts in my high school days, offering his retirement savings so I could attend an exclusive school, visiting me wherever I happened to be in the world—be it Korea or Leadville, rocking my children to sleep, driving us to exotic places, dancing with mom on the cruise to Bermuda, feeding the men at the shelter, reading the names of his fallen peers at Memorial Day services, bowling with his candlepin buddies—and occasionally even winning $2, waiting to win the Lotto—probably with the goal of being even more generous to those in need, breakfasting with his friends at Easter’s, completing crossword puzzles with his Dewar’s close by, almost never missing his other favorite girls on “The Five,” and belly-chuckling over Mom’s dance routine story, even though he’d probably heard it a dozen times.
Dad wasn’t perfect—none of us is—yet his intentions always were, and certainly his love for his God, his family and his friends. He was a man of unshakable faith, unquestionable integrity, unbounded love, and in his own words, he wanted people to remember him as “serious, but humorous.”
A couple of years ago when I asked him how he felt about dying someday—I’m the reporter in the family—he smiled and told me that he would be happy to see his Mom, Dad, and little sister again, not knowing that he would also outlive his younger brother. He said he wasn’t afraid of death, but that he hoped it wasn’t time yet because he wasn’t quite ready to go. Recently he added that he’ll be happy to meet the son he never had and the older brother who spent only two days on this earth.
Ever the good soldier, Dad did what his doctors recommended, probably wanting more time—to attend the next wedding, to hold the next great-grandchild, to learn just one more word, and to share one more dance with Mom.
When Dad found out that the cancer had returned, though, and there was nothing more to be done, he stopped winding his favorite clock.
Although each of us may interpret his act in different ways (I, of course, want to think he was giving me a theme for tying together this tribute), I would like to believe that Dad finally decided it was time to live entirely in the present and to stop measuring what was passing. I even witnessed—and this may shock some of you—when he tuned out “The Five” on Fox News to spend time with a visitor!
I believe that we were all blessed with time to prepare for Dad’s next journey. Yes, we will still mourn—when we’re spending time together and waiting for his next joke, when our phone rings and we see “Mom and Dad” on the screen, when we attend the next Memorial Day service—but we will also share time rejoicing that each of us was influenced in some great way by our relationships with this generous man.
And how could any of us be sad for very long having experienced the gift of a transition time in Carol and Michael’s beautiful home where visitors and family could gaze upon the setting sun while Dad, not as interested in the scenery, could gaze upon each of us in the light of those setting rays?
Dave Sargent, Dad’s Aide-de-Camp and our adopted brother, observed that Dad was doing as much for us in his last days as we were for him, acting as if nothing were wrong, greeting everyone with a “Good Morning” whenever he woke up, regardless of the time of day, and thanking everyone for even the slightest kindness . . . a pillow fluff, a cup of tea, a gentle foot massage. He did his best to help the wonderful nurses and Hospice folks who came to help him during his last weeks.
I wonder why it is that we want to cling to the last words uttered by those we love, as if they will somehow be more significant than the lifetime of words leading up to them? In any case, I remember some of Dad’s last words when I asked him how we should celebrate his upcoming 90th birthday. A bit confused at first, remembering the joyful combined celebration we shared with family and friends just this last June at Carol and Michael’s, he said that if he makes it to his actual 90th birthday, he would like to have angel cake and dance to WJIB.
Now that Dad has left us, the time has come for those he left behind to sit up straight, to celebrate his life, to treasure his memory and to continue creating more of our own memories. Thank you all for the time and the love you have shared with our Dad.
