The Dan Stults Liberation Front

Apparently I like to Blog. I do it a lot. It's either that or I have no one to tell my random stories to so I just tell the world instead of the one person I really wish would hear them.  However some times I'm tired and I don't want to sit up and type. I just want to lay in bed in the dark and talk. I don't get to have that luxury anymore. I have no one to talk to. So I type instead.  Dan always said I wrote papers just as if I was talking to someone. Uh K. Not sure I see a lot of difference, I mean it's not as if I'm trying to write a professional scholarly article, I'm just typing. He said he liked the way I wrote because it sounded like I was just sitting there talking to him. I wish I were sitting here talking to him.

I started hanging up stuff on the walls in our new house.  The picture above is a... ok well I don't know the technical name but it's one of those things life guards hold, It helps them save people like a giant floaty. I'm sure it has some technical name.  I hung it above our shower because I thought it would be funny, you know in case you needed saving in the shower.  I know it's a random decoration thingy, it was Dan's. Dan was a lifeguard all through high school.  This was one of his floaty things he used at the pool he worked at.  When he stopped working there to go to college he "liberated" it so it could go with him and remind him of the good times he had working there.  In most of our homes we have hung it in the bathroom, seemed the most fitting place. When I hung it up today it felt nice, like that silly old thing actually belongs in my bathroom. Dan would have insisted it go in he bathroom, although I was very clever about how to hang it.

Dan always had what one might say "a certain disregard for the rules" meaning he didn't always (most of the time) follow them.  Dan would scoff at that and say it wasn't true, he had a very high respect for the rules as long as they were good rules. It's just that he thought most rules weren't good.  So he tended to do a lot of rule breaking, but only the bad rules so it was ok. He liked challenging rules and social norms hence the long hair piercings and tattoos. Although now those are the norms, but he was one of the first to help break the stereotype.

Anyway because he only believed in 'good rules' it kind of trickled down to 'liberating' things he thought needed to be liberated. Note how they were liberated not taken. As I'm unpacking my house I realized I could make a whole album of pictures entitled "The Dan stults liberation front" among the photos would be the lifeguard floaty. We also have a sign with the swimming pools name on it and a kickboard from the pool (although technically his best friend liberated the kick board for him)

What remains of a real live tarantula. The tarantula died long ago but they shed their skin like snakes and I still have a shed skin, Dan kept it because he thought it was cool.  Dan 'liberated' that spider from a middle school science room. You see he thought that it's cage was too small and it wasn't being treated well.  So he planned an elaborate scheme which involved making the cage look like it feel over on accident and hiding the spider in a tupperware with holes poked in the lid until he got home.  Then I had my very own tarantula in my living room (in a very spacious cage) until he died of old age. Dan was very glad he liberated that spider.

Once we went to see a play at our old high school. When I was in high school I worked backstage on all the plays. I spent many many hours in those auditorium chairs. Dan was walking around during intermission and noticed some "decommissioned" chairs laying in a heap in a hallway. Well that was not a proper end to those glorious chairs. So Dan pretended he worked at the school and was moving the chairs. He moved two of them out to our car. Still have them in our livingroom. He knew I loved them and that they needed to be liberated.

We have an antique picture of a old building that he 'liberated' from a garbage can.

There is more, so much more. There was so much more to Dan. To him it really was about liberating those things. It was about Justice and doing what was right, it wasn't about rules. He was never about rules.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PTSD is not for sissys

Image
Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it? Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and h
Read more

The Floor

Image
I pulled him off of our bed and onto the floor. The 911 dispatcher told me to. She said it would help him breathe. I grabbed his ankles and pulled hard on his legs. He fell to the floor with a loud thump. I gasped at the loudness of it, but he didn’t move on his own at all. He didn't shake his head and say, “Ow, what’d you pull me off the bed for?” He didn't do anything. He just laid there. She told me to lift his neck up to help him breathe. I tried, but it was hard to move him, and I didn't want to hurt him.  I put my head on his chest again and again, I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, I couldn’t tell if that was his heartbeat or mine that I heard as he laid on the floor.  “Daddy! Wrestle with me!” she would shout, as she jumped into him and they landed on the floor. It was their favorite game. She would pound him and he would exaggerate the impact, clutching his stomach and lifting his legs in the air.  “You got me good, baby girl!” he would tell her. She would grin i
Read more

Milestones in grief

Image
                                                                Dan and I around 2011 I wrote this for a writing contest about milestones. Writing about every grief milestone would take a book and I had a word limit so I couldn't do that. I tried to do the really big ones. I have not had a particularly eventful life. When I was eight, my parents moved, but they took me with them. At ten, I had a pretty bad accident, but I came out of it fine. My husband and I met at sixteen, and at nineteen, we went against all good advice and got married. I gave birth to our daughter when I was 27.   I loved our boring, normal life. We were living our happily ever after. I was a stay at home mom, Dan was finishing up grad school. Everyone says this kind of thing at funerals, but Dan really was the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my life. He wanted to save the world: the people, the animals, the ecosystem. He wanted to make the world better, and he was. I loved our little family and couldn
Read more