My Friend Dan

The man working in this picture is my friend Dan.  When he was no longer able to work at his regular job due to kidney disease, he’d spend a little time making toys and other things out of wood.  He would donate these craft items to charities that would turn around and sell them as part of fundraisers. 

A number of local churches and non-profit organizations benefited from Dan’s handiwork.  Dan beat back cancer, and had been on dialysis in recent years.  He recently lost his battle with health problems.  Those of us who knew him lost something as well. 

A mother lost a son, four sisters no longer have their big brother, a child won’t have a dad to learn about life, and two grandchildren have only memories of a grandfather.  

I lost a good friend I’ve known for fifty years.

Dan and I met on the playground behind Port Leyden Central School in the summer of 1964.  We were friends right from the get go.  In the early years, we’d go fishing, camp outside his house in the summer, and go sledding down a big hill in front of his house in the winter.  

In junior high, another friend Jerry joined us.  We were quite the threesome.  We’d buy candy from the local store, order a bottle of Coke or Dr. Pepper at the local diner, and just hang out on the borderline of mischief.  As teens, we were a three-person, Dennis the Menace.

When we were a little bit older, we got a hold of some cigars and inserted cigarette loads into them.  Cigarette loads are about the size of a quarter-length toothpick.  Little explosions are created when the cigar burns the tip of the load. 

We weren’t old enough to smoke, although there was no law against cigarette loads.  We sneaked a smoke in a booth at the diner.  When the load exploded the cigar, it looked like a cartoon as the end of the stogie ripped apart.  Why the owner never threw us out of her restaurant is still a mystery.

One night, we took a rubber snake into a local tavern.  We were not old enough to drink alcohol, but we knew the rubber snake might scare some of the older adults standing at the bar with their beer.  We cleared the barroom before anyone had the chance to throw us out.  We ran away laughing.

You could do things like that when you were a kid growing up in a small town in upstate New York in the 1970s.  

After high school graduation, I left my hometown for college.  We lost touch shortly after that.  For the next four decades, Dan and I went on with our lives.  Childhood memories stayed behind as we raised families and worked at our jobs. 

He visited me at the funeral home the time my mother passed away thirteen years ago.  I sent him a card when his dad died several years ago. 

And that’s where the story might have ended had it not been for Dan’s effort to reconnect with me.

He saw my dad in church and gave him my email address. I sent Dan a message.  He sent a message back.  For the next four years, we were in weekly email contact.   We’d call one another occasionally, and I visited with him in person when I would go back to my boyhood home to see my dad.  

Three years ago, Dan called me on the night when he made the agonizing decision to remove life support from his wife   He told me how he would help her pray every day, sometimes several times a day.  He told me how much he loved her.  The only comfort I could offer was a listening ear some three-thousand miles away.

On one of my visits, I met his two grandchildren.  He raised his grandkids for a couple of years.  It had to be a struggle given his deteriorating health, but he never saw it that way.  I saw how much the children loved their grandfather. I saw Dan’s patience in action as he cared for them without regard to his own struggles that included dialysis three times a week.

In the past four years, I never heard Dan complain about his life.  He talked about blessings.  He’d ask how my family was doing.  He demonstrated by example how to live life with dignity and compassion.

I think he knew four years ago that his days on earth would likely run out sooner than most of us.  He made the most of those years.  As a dialysis patient, he helped raise money to help build a treatment center closer to where he lived.  He was consulted on building plans.  Ironically, that center will open in a few months.  Dan never got to use it.  But others will, and that is all that really matters.

As often as death has touched people around me, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.  We accept death as part of the human condition.  But it doesn’t make it any easier when you lose a family member or a close friend.  We’ll get by, but we are changed in some way.

And we’re thankful for the time we have with our friends and our family.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced

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Port of Stockton Celebrates Eighty Years

Agriculture, food processing, and several other Merced County industrial sectors rely on the transportation and logistics systems in place throughout the state of California.  One of those transportation systems reached an important milestone this year. 

The Port of Stockton is celebrating eighty years of service to the business community.

Every Saturday this summer, the Port has been providing free boat tours to the public in celebration of this milestone anniversary.  Recently my wife and I took advantage of a two hour tour of the area served by the Port.

As our boat set off at the docks near downtown Stockton, we were impressed by the substantial investment of time and money to create an attractive vantage point of this city of four-hundred thousand. 

The city has had a lot of negative attention in recent years with the local government filing for bankruptcy, CBS 60 Minutes describing the area as ground zero of the national mortgage crisis, and general bad news about crime. 

Seeing the beautiful waterscape at the Port injects some optimism as well as civic pride.

Through the Port of Stockton, more than ninety percent of the chemical fertilizer used by the Central Valley agriculture industry comes in every year. 

More than a million and a half tons of American products, everything from agricultural goods to tire chips, to cement goes through the waterway.  The value of these products, as estimated by the Port, is over one-billion dollars annually. 

The Port says it pays more than five million dollars annually in taxes.

Before the US Housing bubble burst in the middle of the past decade, the Port hit an all-time record in the shipping of concrete. 

More than 2.2 million metric tons of cement were brought in for use throughout California and other states to feed the demand for new housing. 

Those numbers fell throughout the housing crisis, but there is hope now as we see signs of a slow recovering in the building of new homes.  Builders expect the demand for cement will intensify.

In 2011, the Port issued a report that showed the amount of material leaving the Stockton facility exceeded the value of goods coming into the facility.  While the rest of the United States was experiencing a trade deficit, the Port of Stockton activity was going against the trends.

On top of that, management is proud of the environmental initiatives that have improved the soil, water, and air in the region. 

We were shown wildlife habitats along the waterway as we passed under Interstate 5 and made our way west past Rough and Ready Island.  Rough and Ready Island was a Naval Base that was turned over to the Port in 2000.  The acquisition drastically increased the size and scope of services available to users of the shipping site.

Our cruise boat passed a number of warehouses that line the shoreline.  There are seven-point-seven million square feet of covered storage space available to users.  In addition to storage, the Port has U.S. Customs offices, scales, and an in-house police force providing security.

Both the Union Pacific and Northern Santa Fe Railroad lines run to the facility.  With rail, truck, and ship traffic, this is truly a full intermodal transportation and logistics center.

There are also a number of private homes that line the north side of the waterway.  These homes are considered prime real estate in a community that has hadmore thanits share of bumps in the midst of the mortgage crisis. 

One home in particular shows its community pride with a replica of the Statue of Liberty on display for international visitors to see as they pass through the Port.

Nearly five dozen countries have some form of trade relationship that touches the Port of Stockton.  Leadership at the Port takes pride in estimates that this community asset effectively supports over forty-five hundred jobs in the San Joaquin County area that includes Merced, Stanislaus, and other counties.  These jobs generate an annual payroll of about $180-million to the region.

We take great pride in the bounty our farmers produce here in Merced County.  Our agricultural producers know even the greatest products we can grow are of little value without a system to move these goods to the marketplace.  Excellent products, coupled with a sound transportation system, add value to what our community contributes in terms of economic activity.  

Thanks to the Port of Stockton and other transportation systems, the true economic engine of the Central Valley can be realized.

Steve Newvine lives in Merced   

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A Buffalo Bills Sweatshirt and a Season of High Hopes

photo by steve newvine

I will be pulling out my faded blue Buffalo Bills sweatshirt soon as the National Football League season gets underway.  The sweatshirt is now over twenty years old.  It never brought any luck to my beloved Bills back when I bought it in the early 1990s.  I should have tossed it out many seasons ago.  But I can’t.

In the late 1980s, the Buffalo Bills started a winning dynasty.  Back then, quarterback Jim Kelly, running back Thurman Thomas, and defensive back Bruce Smith were household names in western New York. Coach Marv Levy led a team of skilled players to several winning seasons, many division and conference titles, and four trips to the Super Bowl.  

That’s where the heartache began for fans of the team.

The Bills went to the Super Bowl four times and never won.  Each time, they came back to western New York as winners for getting into the big game.  But each time, there was an undercurrent of “wait until next year”.  

I became a Bills fan during those years.  In fact, I became an NFL fan during those years.  Before the Bills started winning, Sunday afternoons were reserved for family activities as my wife and I raised our two daughters. 

Once Buffalo became a contender, I started to carve out a little time to watch their games.  As our daughters got older, the Bills became more of a focal point in the house during football season.  I never converted the girls to full-fledged football followers, but that did not stop me from trying. 

My attempt to start a little football pool, much like the ones most work places had in those years, often found my daughters making picks without regard to the win and loss records, but more on jersey colors or interesting team names.

But it did not matter.  I had a lot of fun following the Buffalo Bills in that time of my life.  Every Sunday, I’d put on that blue sweatshirt and watch their game.  

As the Bills’ winning years started to fade from view, I continued to watch the NFL.  By the time I moved to California in 2004,   there wasn’t much to cheer about for my team.  Every season started with optimism.  Every season ended with hopes for better luck next year.  

The one thing that remained constant has been my faded blue sweatshirt.  I’ll retire it when the Buffalo Bills win a Super Bowl.

In the meantime, I have come up with some rules I’ll follow as this newest season of football gets underway:

1. I will not resign myself to believe any team that starts 0-3 is out of it for the season.

2. I will not be convinced that any team starting the season at 3-0 has a playoff berth locked up.

3. I will use the time between the end of the Sunday late afternoon game and the start of Sunday Night Football to get out of my chair and exercise.

4. I will diversify my snack food mix to include cheese curls.

5. Having kept my pre-season resolution not to care about exhibition games, I’ll refuse the temptation to talk back to the television when an announcer says, “He looked good in the pre-season.”

6. I’ll make a better effort to remember who won on Sunday when I’m watching Monday Night Football.

I will add to this list one more item:  I will continue to wear my Buffalo Bills sweatshirt every Sunday throughout the football season.

Here’s to another season of America’s game.  Enjoy!

Steve Newvine lives in Merced.

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