Harry's Ruminations

My last 36 hours. In 4-5pm daily meeting on Monday (that's a #win by itself), the manager in charge ejaculates a "well, shit!" in the middle of the meeting.  Turns out a 7am all-managers meeting was scheduled the next day by the CEO.  "That's never good," he noted.  #obviouslynot Tuesday, 6am, I saw this tweet .  It was real, and it was not spectactular; seventeen hundred worldwide jobs evaporated, including 350 in Lexington.  Gory details here . I came into work to a morgue.  First and second line managers were going around talking to individuals and my "talking to" seemed ambiguously in the future.  I checked on a couple guys from church and both seemed  safe, and my small group was praying for my job.  There was the appropriate level of gallows humor, but it just felt different than times we've done this in the past. By ~11am we had an "all building" meeting scheduled in our main conference room downstairs, lead by my boss. ...

I sat in this very seat a month ago a broken man, a failure. I intended  to send my pastor a quick note asking him to pray for me.  What actually happened was time disappeared, and what'd been pent up for months spewed out of my heart, down my touch-typing to an email that Scott said was too long to even attempt reading on his smartphone. The subject line:  "I'm broken..." And I was.  Uncertainty and doubt clouded me, truth and lies were my constant companions.  I put so much crap on myself that I was paralyzed to do anything about it.  I was angry and entitled, all the time.  That very week, I'd exploded at one of my colleagues in a meeting (mom taught me a great phrase for this: "Tearing your ass"), then done the same things to my kids multiple times.   I just couldn't stand...anybody. Within, I just felt shame, shame that I'd let my past transgressions leak back into my life, that I wasn't strong enough to shy away from them, that ...

"This is definitely the kind of seizure you want your kid to have." What?! She was an ER resident with an icy, direct gaze and a no-frills haircut.  At that moment, I couldn't remember her name because I was busy trying to get my wife to drink something as she held our daughter, who, an hour before, had just had a grand mal  seizure in our downstairs bathtub.  An hour or so later, our other two kids were at a friend's house, my car had a Check Engine Light because I flogged it so hard getting to UK Hospital, and we were both trying to process what happened. * * * Scalett Fever .  Those two words hit me like a ton of bricks the previous day when Whitney came home from Georgetown Pediatrics.  Immediately my mind sprang to two movie scenes:  One from Oh God! You Devil  with George Burns where the mom pleads with God to not let her baby die because its fever was so high.  Another was some dead-people movie where a kid gets thrown into an icy b...