We have lots of exceptionalities in our family tree.

LOTS.

I can get lost going down rabbit holes for days when it comes to the DSM-whatever-edition-R. And that’s just the psychiatric branch. Add in medical/physical and oh boy…. I have the educational background to discuss these exceptionalities due to my M.S. Special Education, but I also have the practical in-the-trenches background for most of it.

So what’s this blog post about?

ROUTINE.

Many exceptionalities like routine. Routine is comforting. Routine is predictable. Routine is a good thing when it comes to exceptionalities. I can create routines and charts and schedules for days.

Do I? Nope.

I grew up with routine. Knew a lot of people in my family tree had some peculiarities that I later learned were symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Did you know there are many kinds of OCD? My family exhibits many forms of OCD, because what is the fun in finding a lane and sticking to it? Luckily most family members only have one variety, not multiple varieties in one body. This makes it a little more manageable. We let Grandma B cut every piece of paper in her house into 1-inch squares, because it hurts no one. Manageable.

So routine. You could set a watch by my dad’s morning routine. He put his pocket contents in his jeans in a set order–coin pouch, pocket knife, wallet, keys, handkerchief (folded precisely), plier holder on belt. He shaved his face in a set pattern. He stirred his sugar in his coffee a certain amount of times and clinked the spoon on the saucer and set it down facing down on the napkin that he had folded lengthwise. His handwriting was very distinctive because he used a small ruler that he kept in his shirt pocket with his pen–the bottom of every letter was a straight line and he went back and added any necessary downstrokes if he didn’t write in all capital letters. In the evening, we watched the 5 o’clock news, ate supper, watched the 6 o’clock news, and the TV went off at 8 PM. We went to our rooms, and the whole house was in bed and falling asleep at 9 PM. All of my friends were under strict orders to not call after 9 PM or they were going to get scolded by whichever parent answered the phone, because the phone was downstairs and my bedroom was upstairs.

I grew up and went on my merry little way to college and all of the mayhem that ensues from that. There is no routine in college. There is no routine as a young adult. Buckle up, buttercup, and hang on. Luckily, along with routine, my family did raise me to be pretty flexible and adaptable.

Started my own family and my first husband had no routine. My sons learned to switch gears and roll with new plans quite well. It worked for us. My kids were creative and dramatic and intelligent and just had a joy for life, and we ran with it.

Then I married my second husband, and we didn’t know what his son’s official diagnosis was, but we knew he would greatly benefit from routine.

Had to sit my husband down and tell him “sorry, no can do.” If we combined families, his son was going to get thrown into what would feel like sheer chaos; his boundaries and notions of “how it should be” were going to be stretched to the snapping point. But to be perfectly honest, his son needed some boundary redefinition to be a functioning member of society. We now know that the diagnosis is high-functioning autism and schizophrenia. He had grown up for 7 years in a bubble where he was the center of the universe and thought the fireworks on the 4th of July were for his birthday. He thought his new brothers were toys that he could just set on a shelf and walk away from when he was bored and they would stay put until he came back to give them a strict script to follow. There was great angst when they informed him that trains could be played with in ways other than just lining them up by color. No, he didn’t get a $20 toy every time he set foot in Walmart. No, leftover french fries didn’t get shoved into couch cushions. No, McDonalds wasn’t the only restaurant that existed. No, he didn’t have to be the first person to enter a vehicle when we went somewhere and please stop throwing your siblings to the ground to be first. Know what his favorite food is now? Chinese. It worked.

So yeah, routine. Didn’t happen.

But apparently in some ways it did. You don’t realize you have “always done something that way” until you don’t.

Tater tot casserole–toss the tots on there all willy nilly one time when you are in a hurry and you suddenly find out that you have always lined them up in rows and now it just doesn’t taste the same.

Try to treat the family to name brand chicken nuggets and you find out they only want the generic ones because the name brand ones don’t taste right.

Get child C up at 6 AM and suddenly you find out that no, child A and B get up at 6 and child C and D get up at 6:30 AM–geez, get it right, mom.

Every day my husband asks me what my plans are–every day I answer “No idea.” If I know, I tell him, but that is rare. We fly by the seat of our pants around here and flip around on a dime. This is why when our son gave us 3 hours’ warning that he was graduating and walking the stage in college, we dropped everything and got there to watch. This is why some days I take 3-6 trips to town–we live “in town”, but our town has zero amenities where it counts, so “town” is the city 30 minutes north with a grocery store and all of that jazz. This is why I pay for AAA membership for all of our kids, because cars like to throw a monkey wrench in plans without warning.

Does everyone handle changes in plans well? For the most part. More than once, my mom has helped me cover bases when I overbook myself and commented “You weren’t raised this way.” I look at her and say “Yep.” But my kids are adaptable and experts at quickly problem-solving a crisis. They know they can collapse later and regroup. Some of them prefer a plan, and I try to give them one when I can, but sometimes they have to fight through an anxiety attack while we are flipping a u-turn and heading off to put out a fire before returning to our regularly scheduled programming.

So my kids haven’t grown up with a lot of routine. But when I watch them handling whatever life throws at them, I’m very proud. They are awesome.

So I see that I am 2 weeks behind on this blog challenge–kinda figured that would happen when I agreed to participate, because life is rather unpredictable around here. This is unfortunate when you live with many people who would greatly benefit from routine that is set in stone. Hmm, looks like I just figured out what to write about next….

So–recipes that use 5 ingredients or less. People who write 3 ingredients or less cookbooks are my people, but we will go with the 5-ingredients or less criteria to give ourselves a little wiggle room. Half the time the 3-ingredient ones are lying anyway when you get halfway through the recipe and they say “add salt and pepper”–THOSE ARE INGREDIENTS.

I spent a good chunk of the past couple decades wrangling 4 kids and sometimes their friends while juggling multiple sports schedules and numerous health crises. Meals and other edible necessities needed to be simple and fast.

Need an edible holiday treat to hand out to special people in your life?

PEANUT CLUSTERS

1 jar SALTED and ROASTED peanuts

1 package chocolate-flavored almond bark

No, no, no–put that double boiler nonsense away and get a microwaveable bowl. Microwave the almond bark in 30 second increments until it melts (usually around 2.5 minutes). Stir in the peanuts and drop in blobs on waxed paper and let them cool. Done.

Need an easy baked good?

PEACH COBBLER

1 large can peaches (don’t you dare drain them)

1 box yellow cake mix

1 stick butter

Dump the peaches and juice/syrup in a 9×13 baking dish. Cover that with the DRY cake mix. Drop pats of butter all over the cake mix. Bake at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes until golden brown. You can eat it hot or cold–pairs great with vanilla ice cream.

Craving pumpkin spice something?

PUMPKIN CHOCOLATE CHIP MUFFINS (or cookies, you do you)

1 can pumpkin filling

1/2 bag chocolate chips

1 box spice cake mix

Mix the 3 ingredients together and either drop them in mini muffin tins or plop them on cookie sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes. Yum.

Too heavy on the desserts? Fine, let’s throw in a savory–

NO PEEK DINNER

1-2 lbs beef stew meat chunks

1 packet onion soup mix

1 large can cream of mushroom soup

Throw the ingredients in a crockpot and stir them together. Cook on low 6-8 hours. It’s done when the beef is fork tender.

Serve over rice or mashed potatoes.

Keep it simple in the kitchen and spend time enjoying your family. ❤

The other day, one of my kids asked what our hyper-fixations were currently.

Yes, our family dives DEEP when we take an interest in a topic. This a cultural norm for us. Some of our hyper-fixations are lifelong; others last until we move on to a new one. When my family members get fascinated by something, they lock on.

Some of my family members’ topics of curiosity: Elvis, WWII, Bones series, many other TV series, Van Gogh, basketball, video games (many genres), cowboy shows, crafting (many forms), home brewing, baseball, football, comic books, angel figurines, trains. This is by no means all of them. I only have a 20 minute window to get this blog written.

According to my mom, my hyper-fixation is bloody corpses because she passed by me reading a few too many forensic investigation books in the past couple months. Our library is remodeling, and the first stack I stumbled upon was the section on true crime, so that is what I have been bringing home and reading. Is this a new interest? Ha.

When I was in junior high, I was fascinated by vampire tales and reading about real-life vampires–my mom would tell my classmates to not worry about whatever book I was glued to, I was really quite harmless. When I got to high school, I read everything I could get my hands on about Charles Manson and his atrocities. I am quite happy that man and his followers stayed in prison for the rest of their lives (most of them), but it was riveting reading. As an adult, I still find forensic science fascinating and like to read about it. It’s really no wonder my children like to watch Bones.

I don’t know if I would call sketching a hyper-fixation for me. It is a hobby, and I spent many hours practicing, drawing the same topic repeatedly until I was happy with the result. I like to go to art museums, but I don’t know every little biographical detail about artists or their works.

Gotta say cats are definitely a passion of mine. I laid eyes on my first cat when I was a toddler, and that never went away. I haven’t been cat-less since I was 3, and it will probably stay that way unless I get stuck in a home when I am old.

Music–yep, that is probably a hyper-fixation. My preferred genre that I tell people is 80s hair bands. The genre many people don’t know about is 50s and 60s bubblegum pop and do-wap. I also like barbershop quartets and a capella groups. One era I really am not a big fan of is 70s–there are songs here and there that I like, but they are rare. But 80s hair bands… I listened to songs repeatedly and wrote the lyrics down. I drew the artists’ tattoos. I created word search and crossword puzzles about bands and artists. I plastered my walls and ceiling with their posters. Yep–probably know more than the average GenX about some hair bands.

I don’t think hyper-fixations are a bad thing. If you are interested in something, go learn about it! Life is about learning and exploring, so drink deep in the fount of knowledge and pop culture and enjoy yourself. Eventually you might stumble upon someone else who shares your interest, and that is a glorious thing.

The other night we were watching the news and there was mention of suicide rates among farmers. My daughter looked from the television to me and asked, “Is that really a thing?” It was at this moment that I realized that my children have been raised far removed from the very agriculturally-focused rural environment I grew up in in northwest Kansas, and that history books gloss over or completely ignore the farming crisis of the 1980s.

Yes, it was and is really a thing.

Back in the 80s, quite a few factors played into the failure of family farms.

Drought was an ever-present threat that destroyed crops before they ever made it to market.

Foreign trade was also a threat to the family farmer. Our government was bending over backwards to kiss the hind ends of world leaders overseas by buying their crops to inject money into the foreign economies. This meant that our crops were worthless because there was too much surplus and that drove prices down. The government implemented a CRP program that paid farmers a small amount to plant a crop and then plow it under and show proof that the crop had been destroyed. I always thought that was really messed up. But farmers had no choice–they had to play along in order to get any money at all. It was a common joke that wives worked in town to support their husbands’ farming hobbies–but it wasn’t entirely a joke.

Farmers relied on banks to loan them money to buy the necessary equipment with the understanding that the loans would be paid with the profits from the crops. When the crops failed, the farmers didn’t have money to pay the banks. The banks then foreclosed on the farms and auctioned off the lands, livestock, equipment, and everything else the farmers could claim as their own.

And this wasn’t big, faceless corporations–this was your neighbor or cousin or father-in-law down the road. The farming communities are small and tightknit. Everyone is related or went to school with each other or all of the above. So when Farmer Joe couldn’t pay the loan at XYZ Bank in town, it was his second cousin on mama’s side calling him to let him know that the appraiser would be out next Tuesday to get a list for the auction notice. As you can imagine, people got pissed. There was one farmer who became known nationally because he got so mad that he didn’t take the notice lying down. He met the sheriff with a loaded gun and backed him right off of his property while it was still his property. He and others fought for their right to own their farms and not have their only way of life stripped from them.

But the auctions still happened. The lucky ones had their wealthier friends bid on their equipment and return it to them so they could keep trying to beat a living out of the land. The rest of the farmers just stood by weeping internally or outwardly as complete strangers descended like vultures and snapped up their equipment for dirt cheap prices. Corporations bought the land and divvied it up for development, ending family homesteads that were founded a century before.

And the suicides started picking up speed. At first it was sporadic and could be written off as at outlier. But soon it became apparent that this was a true crisis in the rural farming community. If your dad or brother said they were going to go check cattle or see how the crop was coming along, and they didn’t return home by dark, you went looking for them and were scared about what you might find. It was an ever-present concern.

The farming crisis of the 80s hits close to home, because our family didn’t escape it. My dad was working for his in-laws on their family farm, and slowly buying his own equipment and livestock in anticipation of the time when my grandpa would retire and Dad would take over the operation as his own. But there were years of bad crops and bad prices and poor livestock, and also some underhanded dealings from people my dad thought he could trust. And in the end, he lost it all.

With the loss of the farm, Dad lost his purpose in life. I have always considered myself lucky that my dad didn’t become an alcoholic until I was a junior in high school, although I grew up around other family members who were alcoholics, so the damage was there. But until my junior year, I wasn’t living 24-7 with an alcoholic. Let me tell you, it is terrifying. The man I knew was a shell of himself and completely taken over with depression. He coped by drinking, and he was an angry drunk. He was mad at the world and mad at himself and everyone else. We knew when we came home and he was already sitting at the kitchen table with his vodka and Mt. Dew that we needed to just quietly walk through the kitchen and up to our rooms. If we were lucky, he was so far gone that he soon staggered off to bed and we could quietly come downstairs and find food. If not, he would call us back into the kitchen and start berating us about whatever he was fixating on at the moment. We made sure we got our chores done and stayed clear of him as much as possible. On the worse nights, I would lie awake for hours and worry that he was finally going to have reached the end of his rope. Because Dad loved his family, and in his mind, he would have thought it was doing us a favor to take us out with him. I didn’t particularly want to be part of a murder-suicide, so I spent a lot of nights praying and lying awake wondering what I was going to do if I heard him opening his gun cabinet and then coming up the stairs to our bedrooms.

Dad never got to that point, but I still consider his death decades later to be a suicide due to the farming crisis. Alcoholism is a long, painful way to die. Near the end, he developed varicose veins in his esophagus along with the cirrhosis of the liver and fluid retention. But he kept on drinking, taking in the poison that would kill him eventually. He quit for a few years, and I was very grateful for that–finally, my children got to know the grandpa that was the dad I grew up with. But it didn’t last, and he went right back to his slow march toward death and the release from all of his torment. He just wanted it to end, and I resented that attitude. I wanted my dad to enjoy living, not will himself to die.

It took him 28 years to reach his goal. 28 years is a long time to work on killing yourself. But he gave up on life when he lost the farm. Farming gets into a person’s blood and becomes their reason to exist. I watched all of the farmers around me struggle every year against the elements and sometimes just sheer luck that made or broke their bank accounts, and I resolved then and there to never marry a farmer. I couldn’t handle the risk and the constant stress. And watching my dad kill himself one glass at a time for 28 years did nothing to change my mind about this. Farming is necessary and I appreciate that there are those who still work hard to provide for our families, but I don’t miss it.

I don’t think I can really do justice to the blog challenge prompts for the next 2-4 prompts, so we’re going to veer off into other topics that I find on blogging topic lists.

First up– “How To Be A Morning Person”!

Don’t.

OK, I am biased–I come from a long history of completely disregarding standard bedtimes.

Got a new book to read and a flashlight? Let’s knock out a few chapters after lights out!

Wind whip a branch against the bedroom window on the second floor after a serial killer was caught a few miles down the road? Looks like I’m staying up til day break!

Too much Pepsi not mixing well with reading the latest Stephen King horror novel after dark? Why yes, I do believe I will pull out the sofa bed and watch the Weather Channel until the sun rises!

Now, not everyone in my family has my atrocious sleeping habits. I was fascinated when I would sleep over at my granny’s house and she would be up drinking coffee and getting on with her day at 3 AM or earlier. I learned to sleep through her activities, but it was still fascinating.

One thing I learned in college and young adult life was that I was not a true night owl–night shifts make me sicker than a dog. Past 10 PM, I start fading. By the time the sun comes up during a 11 PM-7 AM shift, I am trying desperately to keep my eyes open and string coherent sentences together. And then when I get home, I CAN’T SLEEP! My body’s clock is completely scrambled and I have to drink copious amounts of caffeine and snarl at anyone who tries to make me exert brain power. However, I did find out that a split shift of sleep works great for me. When I had a college paper route, I would go to sleep at 10 PM, wake up at 2 AM and throw papers for an hour or two, crawl back into bed at 4 AM, and be up and fully functional by 9 or 10 AM.

Know what time I wake up these days? Somewhere between 6 AM and 9 AM at the latest. Know what ruined my ability to sleep in til 10 or 11 AM?

Kids.

No, not having them and being up early because babies don’t sleep for long.

School.

When your kids are school age and you spend a solid 13-20 years getting them up and out the door by 7:30 AM, apparently the body adjusts.

Traitor!

I was spoiled for the first couple years that I was married to my second husband, because he is one of those crazy morning persons who is up and raring to go at 6 AM. So he didn’t have to twist my arm to let him get the kids up at 6 AM and get them fed and dressed while I slept in until 7 AM. You just have at it, buddy.

Then he had a mini-stroke and developed a seizure disorder and everything went kablooey. So I had to return to wake-up duty, getting the first shift up at 6 AM for their baths and showers and the second shift up at 6:30 AM to rinse and repeat.

These days I don’t have little ones who need to be woken up–they can set their own alarms. But I do have 5 indoor cats who rotate throughout the night. I start out the night with Leo sleeping on my side and sometimes Nougat at my feet. I wake up at 3 AM to use the restroom, and Toby moves to beside my head and Nemo hops up on my side. By 6 AM I have William staring down at me and murphing to make sure I know it’s time to get up and join the rest of the family and get him his morning drink of water from the faucet. Keep in mind, he has already gotten multiple drinks of faucet water from my mom who gets up at 5 AM. So I roll out of bed and start drinking iced tea to fuel my day while he daintily swats the water with his left paw and licks off the droplets.

Mornings–solid 3/10. Do not recommend.

I need a nap.

I’m a week behind on the blog challenge, so here we are–last week’s prompt was to create a list of 30 things I would like to do before I am 60. That’s less than 5 years away, folks, so let’s get crackin’. But I have to keep this list to things I can do–not stuff I want other people to do. That’s not a cool thing to demand.

1. Meet, hold, and/or own a Maine Coon cat.
2. Meet, hold, and/or own a Rag Doll cat.
3. Meet, hold, and/or own a Himalayan cat.
4. Meet, hold, and/or own a Norwegian Forest cat.
5. Get a stair lift installed so I can enjoy trips to our basement again.
6. Get whatever adaptive equipment is necessary to enjoy sitting and taking a bath instead of a shower.
7. Visit the Orphan Train Museum in Concordia, KS.
8. Crack the genealogical wall that is my husband’s great-great-grandfather John D. Smith. Don’t name your kids basic names, people.
9. Gather the documents necessary to have my daughter formally recognized as a descendant of Governor John Winthrop.
10. Visit Salem, Massachusetts.
11. Visit a warm ocean–sorry, NW Pacific. I love Oregon, but that was COLD.
12. Learn how to make a flat friendship bracelet, because so far all of mine twist.
13. Get a passport.
14. Visit Canada.
15. Visit England.
16. Successfully bake a loaf of bread without using a bread machine.
17. Publish several of my works in progress.
18. Take a trip on an Amtrak train.
19. Afford the Dupixent shot so I can breathe like a normal person. Marking this one off because it turns out my cough is cancer, not asthma–go figure. So now I am getting a lanreotide shot every month instead of the Dupixent one they thought I needed.
20. Go completely gray and then dye my hair purple.
21. Pipe a rose with frosting.
22. Finish the painting of Jon & Becky’s wedding kiss.
23. Visit the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia, PA.
24. Visit the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, MO.
25. Relearn how to play “Home Sweet Home” on my synthesizer.
26. Finish this damn list.
27. Visit Sea World or some other big aquarium.
28. Re-pierce my ears.
29. Get a 1″ button maker, because sometimes 2.25″ is a little excessive.
30. Visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland, OH.

Well, looky there–already scratched one thing off of my list!

3/29/2025–Decided I should periodically revisit this post and mark off anything I have done to keep me motivated to do them. Ten percent complete, folks! 34 months left until I turn 60, so some of these will most likely not happen. I am nowhere near going completely gray, but we shall see.

12/20/2025–Crossed off 2 more! We’re gaining, crew!

Ran across a term recently–“weaponized incompetence”.

According to Psychology Today, “Weaponized incompetence, also called strategic incompetence, is when someone knowingly or unknowingly demonstrates an inability to perform or master certain tasks, thereby leading others to take on more work. This generally occurs in two domains—in the household, between partners, and at work, between colleagues.”

Gotta say, I do prefer the term strategic incompetence over weaponized, but at the end of the day it shakes out to the same thing–annoying.

I don’t know if you have ever run across this phenomenon, but I have. I also will admit to having used it–it’s embarrassing, but it happened.

The first time, I was all of 4 or 5 years old and I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that my mom was very ill and my aunts and uncles were admonishing me to “be more help around the house to your poor mother because she might die,” and my brain translated that into “if I can’t do something so my mom has to do it for me, then she can’t die because she has a purpose to stay alive.” Children’s brains work in weird ways when it comes to logic. So it annoyed the crap out of my mom, but I did the very minimum of helping out around the house when it came to dishes and dusting and whatnot. Guess what–she’s about to turn 78 and she can still run circles around me as long as she doesn’t break her ankle in 4 places again. We know now that she has a mitral valve prolapse and her heart likes to tap out a rhythm that isn’t conducive to filling a person full of verve and vigor, so she spent the majority of my childhood napping or visiting the local hospital until they got her sorted out. When I hit my teen years and she was lying in a hospital bed in traction for a pinched nerve, I would pick up the slack and do dishes and laundry as long as no one thanked me for it–in the spirit of the brownies I read about in fairy tales, I was doing what needed to be done, not for the praise. Praise still grates on my nerves when I do something that simply needs to be done.

The next time I deliberately feigned incompetence will be familiar to many a reader–the old “Oh, poor helpless little ol’ me can’t possibly do this and needs a big strong someone to save me” to make a love interest feel needed. Sometimes I legitimately can’t do something–if it involves brute strength or climbing heights, count me out. But I can assemble furniture, hang pictures, etc. If I can find a YouTube tutorial, I can swap out simple headlights and taillights on cars. I tried to not seem too competent when I first married my second husband because my first husband had an inferiority complex bigger than Texas, so I asked him to replace a magnetic catch on a cabinet door. 3 hours later he was cussing and sweating and briefly left to get a different screwdriver. I deftly screwed in the 2 screws, and when he returned 5 minutes later, I told him he had gotten them started with the holes he made and I was able to make it work. Lesson learned–if it involves tools, I will just do it myself in this marriage or hire it out to professionals.

It annoys me when I recognize that someone is deliberately claiming incompetence so I will just do something myself. It’s a normal developmental stage in children when they fall to the ground in frustration and wail that they can’t possibly do XYZ themselves the first time they encounter a task. I can deal with that. It just takes patience and encouragement and demonstration and practice to build their confidence and muscle memory. But when a 40+ year old claims they can’t possibly call the doctor and set up their own appointment or find their way to an office in a town with all of 20 streets, I call bullshit. Oh, you’re busy? Me, too. You don’t know where it is? Here’s a map, or better yet, the Google Maps app on your phone that shouts directions as you drive. You were able to walk in to the gym and set yourself up a membership but now you don’t know how to get it canceled? Walk yourself right back into the gym and up to the membership desk and they will help you with that. You don’t want to because you are embarrassed? Not my problem.

Do I always call people out on their BS when they claim incompetence? No. Sometimes I have nothing better to do. Sometimes it’s faster if I just do it myself so I can get on with my day. Sometimes I counter by claiming it’s going to take me hours so I can do it in about 30 seconds and then be left in peace for hours so they don’t disturb me when I’m “busy”. Maybe I need to get a shirt that says “do not disturb” and wear it when I am just not feeling it. Oh yeah, I can make my own t-shirt transfers, so I don’t need to farm that task out to anyone but myself.

Cheers to being a strong, independent person–we might be exhausted, but by God, we got ourselves into it and we will get ourselves out of it.

I know you can’t see it, but mentally I am doing my happy dance. It’s concert season, the most wonderful time of the year! I am really fortunate that my children love music as much as I do, and they also enjoy attending concerts–I feel really lucky that I get to tag along to some of them. In the next 10 days, my daughter is attending 3 concerts in 3 states. I get to take her to 2 of them, and one of her brothers is taking her to another one. As we prepare for these concerts–and yes, there is preparation–I remember the concerts I went to as a young adult and what our “preparation” was. My kids’ concert experiences are a little different from my own back in the day.

I saw some pretty big names at fairly local venues, which is nearly unheard of now. Our nearby county fair had a lineup one night of thrash metal bands that actually still exist.

For a $10 punch card, we could watch 3 nights of concerts, which is why I got to see Steppenwolf on a dusty little stage for next to nothing. One summer, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were promoting her movie “Light of Day” where she played a member of a little garage band by traveling around the country playing in the smallest bars and venues they could find–my cousin heard about it, so we piled into the parents’ Bronco and headed to a pasture north of the highway exit and watched Joan and her band perform on a flatbed trailer stage behind a storage shed.

For bigger concert venues, we had three to choose from–the Expocentre in Topeka, the Bicentennial Center in Salina, and the Kansas Coliseum in Wichita. This was pre-internet, so the only way we learned about upcoming concerts was by watching for announcements in Circus or Hit Parade magazine, listening to the area radio station (which was heavily biased toward country music, and that was not what we wanted to see), or visiting the local record store when we were in the big city of Hays. The Brass Ear was where we got our fix–posters, t-shirts, albums, cassettes, and the newfangled compact discs even though we had no way of playing them. This is also where we bought concert tickets if they were lucky enough to be an outlet retailer for the shows we wanted to see. From my days as a ticket manager for the Major Concert Committee at Fort Hays, I learned that ticket outlets were given specific lots of tickets and a seating chart with those tickets marked off. When someone walked in and asked about a show, the clerk would pull out the bundle of tickets and the seating chart. The customer would choose their seats and the clerk would mark the seats off as sold on the chart and hand them their tickets. Tickets were dirt cheap back then.

On the day of the show, we would gather up whatever friends were going along and we would pile into the Kitty Cat Concert Car.

My 1974 Manta Luxus Opel could only seat 4, and my 6’8″ brother always got shotgun so he could have some leg room.

If we were going to Salina, we were set–Aunt Mary and Uncle Donnie lived there, so after a concert we could quietly enter their house and crawl into the beds they had upstairs and sleep for a few hours before driving home. If we were going to Topeka, we had either my parents or grandparents to give us a place to sleep after a concert. If we were going to Wichita, we were out of luck–it was a 3-5 hour drive that got us home around 3 AM. Unless it was the infamous blizzard of 1987–it took us almost 9 hours of creeping along at 20 mph to make it home safely. To make matters worse, we had thrown my cassette case in the trunk and it was frozen shut, so we had to listen to AC/DC’s Bon Scott sing “Ride On” for hours and hours–if I never hear that song again, that is OK by me.

We always tried to head out early for the Wichita shows so we could stop at Derby and eat breadsticks at the Pizza Hut. Breadsticks were a new menu item, and they were cheap. Then we headed to the Coliseum and parked somewhat near the end of the lot so that we would be able to get out quickly after the show. We would walk around the building repeatedly until we found a door open so we could gain access to the venue as early as possible. If we were lucky, we got to watch the roadies do sound checks; since I had no interest in sleeping with musicians, I didn’t feel the need to try to sneak backstage. We took binoculars because we didn’t get seats particularly close to the stage. Binoculars were also handy during intermission when we scanned the crowd to see if anyone else from our hometown was there. I always checked out the merch booth and bought a $5 pin; the shirts were too expensive for my taste. Besides, I already had a shirt of any band I wanted to see that I had gotten from The Brass Ear or Mother Earth. My concert attire was always the same–black band shirt, ripped blue jeans, knee-high moccasins, and long crimped hair. It felt like home to be surrounded by like-dressed people at these concerts, since no one else dressed that way in our little town.

I’ve been taking our kids to rock concerts since they were little. It doesn’t happen often since ticket prices are astronomical these days, but they have seen Poison, Def Leppard, KISS, Alice Cooper, and a few others. The prep is a little different, thanks to all of the increased security measures and internet access. We order our tickets online unless I am really irritated at the Ticketmaster mark up and drive to the venue to purchase them there ahead of time. We don’t bring binoculars anymore and keep minimal stuff in our pockets. There is no getting in early unless you pay for a meet & greet, but that is cool, because my kids have gotten to meet some of their favorite artists this way. We also get to the venue early if there is not assigned seating so that the kids can stand a better chance of getting close to the stage by standing in line for 3-5 hours before the doors open. We have to pay for parking now, and I also pay for a hotel if we are driving a long distance to a show. There are perks to being an adult. The venues are very nice to us old people; since I can’t stand for long periods of time, I always email the venue ahead of time and they are happy to provide me with seating. Some venues put the handicapped fans right up next to the stage, which I think is fantastic. Often, I get parked along the side or in the back, which works for me–I’m there to listen to the music more than watch the performers. I have learned that I am an oddity at many shows–the other parents around me spend their time getting drunk and complaining about being “stuck” listening to the show because their kid just had to see the band. They seem surprised that I genuinely want to be at the shows–my kids have good taste in music, and I enjoy hearing it performed live. I honestly am looking forward to the shows we are going to see over the next couple weeks. I may have to do my headbanging mentally these days, but ROCK ON!