Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
I looked back at the stories I wrote this year and found it a bit interesting in retrospect. My motivation for writing these stories is completely self-serving. If you read them and enjoy them, thank you. Feel free to let me know if you like them. I’m always surprised and impressed when someone tells me they read my work. If you don’t like my drivel, you don’t need to tell me that. My mother once told me, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything”. That always stuck with me. All the negative comments are one of the things I like least about Facebook. C’mon people, just sweep on to the next post if you don’t like it. It seems as though the mean-hearted and naysayers have taken over. I’m on Facebook myself a lot, and I make an effort to avoid getting nasty. My stories are purposely positive in nature, and I try to avoid smack talking specific people. I might get near that fine line occasionally, but hopefully I am successful in not crossing it.
I’m just an old man that likes to reminisce. Most of my narratives are true reflections of traveling through eight decades of life on this crazy granite planet. I’ve done a ton of interesting things, and it’s fun for me to remember those days. I try to infuse levity, as I don’t take myself that seriously. These things were interesting for me as opportunities, not as wonderful accomplishment that I have achieved because I’m so great. Trust me, nobody is more critical of me than me. (There may be a couple of exceptions to that). My humor is quite sarcastic and there are people that don’t get it and dislike me for it. That is unfortunate, but I have learned to accept it as my burden to carry.
I started writing for the newspaper back in 2015, when I retired from my retirement job. That was in Dixon, California. When I moved to Oklahoma, I wrote for the Sapulpa Times. This year I was writing for the Sapulpa Herald when they merged with Sapulpa Times, I moved over with Micah. When the merger fell through, I continued to write for Micah, back with the Sapulpa Times. Since the Times does not publish a hard copy newspaper, I’ve started saving these stories and plan to print them in book form. I have been saving my newspaper stories for years as newspaper clippings in multiple binders. I can’t continue that with internet stories.
I’ve written about my bucket list activities, things that excite me like the Arts (music, photography, drawing, writing). I’ve written about home improvements and landscaping, deforestation of the neighborhood and varmints. I write about my daughter and the things she is doing as a California transplant in Oklahoma and her Green Acres lifestyle. I’m a certified car guy with specific interest in Studebaker’s contributions to transportation. I am a retired postal employee who has done many different things in 36 years of working for the USPS. I’ve written multiple articles about that. I write about life in Oklahoma and how it is different from a lifetime of being a Californian, extreme weather incidents being the big stories there. I’ve done other jobs in my life that were considered moonlighting for me, but now they call it side hustling. I’ve written somber obits about people that were important to me and have gone ahead, and I covered the injury to my wrist pretty extensively. My most favorite subjects are silly looks at life as an old man. Probably my favorite this year was “The Fall Guy”. That was my self deprecation about being a clumsy old man now. I thought calling myself a “Fall Guy” was more manly than what it was really all about. The biggest story for me was the hard copy book that I had published. It was a Christmas 2021 gift from my daughter that took me a year to finish. Getting hands on the finished product was a big thrill for me.
While I fully believe that people who read my stories probably don’t really care about the content, it is therapeutic for me to take the effort to write these things down. My dream is that one day when I am dead and gone, my children or grandchildren will find these binders and books and take interest in how their Dad or Grampa thought about things. I wish I had a bookshelf full of what went through my father’s head. I would read every word and cherish it.
