RaisingDad

  as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine RaisingDad by Jim and Henry Duchene Getting Old Is Not For Wimps (Part Two) “it’s not the bending over… it’s the getting back up” When my father thought his radio was broken ( October 2022) , and all it turned out to be was he had the volume control knob turned down, it made me laugh... but it made me sad, too.       There was a time when my father could do anything he set his mind to. At twelve he’d fix his uncle's car in exchange for the opportunity to take it for a spin. I’d bet, even at that age, he tried enticing the fairer sex with a ride in his borrowed jalopy.      When he was stationed in the Philippines during World War Two, he built a washing machine for his platoon. He used a metal barrel, a jeep, and his own personal smarts. I don't know if washing machines had even been invented then, but HE had one. I have a picture of it. He's posing next to it with a big smile...

   as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine RaisingDad by Jim and Henry Duchene Getting Old Sure Stinks (Part One) “sharing is caring, unless they’re problems” I’ve reached the age where I've gone from “old enough to know better” to “too old to care.”      Fortunately for me, my wife cares, so she makes sure I go to my various doctor appointments where I get poked, prodded, and lectured. Unfortunately for her, I’m like my mother, who didn’t care to go to the doctor or take medication, and yet somehow lived to a ripe old age.      When I explained this aversion to my buddy Maloney, he reminded me of a friend of ours who recently died from prostate cancer. Like my mother, our friend also didn’t like going to the doctor. By the time he went, his cancer was Stage 4 and already spreading to his other organs.      “If they caught it earlier,” Maloney told me, “he’d be alive today.”     ...

  as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine RaisingDad by Jim Duchene Fuzzy Consciousness “easing my way into geezerhood” I’ve reached the age where I've gone from “old enough to know better” to “too old to care.”      Fortunately for me, my wife cares, so she makes sure I go to my various doctor appointments where I get poked, prodded, and lectured. Unfortunately for her, I’m like my mother, who didn’t care to go to the doctor or take medication, and yet somehow lived to a ripe old age.      When I explained this aversion to my buddy Maloney, he reminded me of a friend of ours who recently died from prostate cancer. Like my mother, our friend also didn’t like going to the doctor. By the time he went, his cancer was Stage 4 and already spreading to his other organs.      “If they caught it earlier,” Maloney told me, “he’d be alive today.”      "See?" my wife said, also reminding me of ...

as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine RaisingDad by Jim and Henry Duchene It’s The Little Things “you’re never too old to learn” It's not the big things that drive you nuts... it's the little things.      When I first asked my elderly father to move in with us, I knew there would be a period of adjustment. What I didn't know was just how long that period of adjustment would be. Here it is, years later, and I'm still adjusting.      My father?      He's doing just fine.      My father had been the head of his household well into his 80's. Myself, I've been in charge of my own life since I turned 18, when I put what I learned in my high school geography class to use and went to college out of state.      As a kid, I learned early on that no one was allowed to touch my father's morning newspaper until he was finished reading it, and, believe me, he took a looong ti...

 as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine RaisingDad by Jim and Henry Duchene Desert Exposure vs The World “I hate to sound like an old geezer, BUT” Sometimes I feel like Tony Soprano in the very first scene of the very first episode of HBO’s The Sopranos , where he laments coming in at the tail end of the golden age of organized crime.     In my case, I feel that way about books.     I love books the way some people love their children, so it’s hard to believe they're on the way out, being replaced by an electronic media that adds little to the reading experience. Somehow, cozying in bed with a good iPhone doesn’t have the same appeal.      People these days would rather experience things on a screen than on a page. They don’t know what they're missing. Myself, I still carry a book with me wherever I go, but I'm pretty much a lonely barnacle in an ocean of phone zombies. Science fiction writers imagined many things, b...