R.P. Nettelhorst

Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee is a classification of coffee grown in the Blue Mountains on the island of Jamaica. It is a very mild coffee which lacks the bitter aftertaste one endures with most brews. The Blue Mountains of Jamaica are located between Kingston to the south and Port Maria to the north. Rising to 7500 feet, they are some of the highest mountains in the Caribbean. The climate of the region is cool and misty. It rains a lot. The soil is rich with excellent drainage. Nearly perfect conditions for growing coffee.

The Coffee Industry Regulation Act of Jamaica specifies what coffee may use the label Blue Mountain. Generally speaking, coffee harvested from the Jamaican parishes of Saint Andrew, Saint Thomas, Portland and Saint Mary may be called Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee if it is grown at elevations between 3,000 and 5,500 feet. Thus, there is only a very small amount of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee in the world.

It is not a kind of coffee I drink very often. In fact, years–even decades–will pass before I imbibe.

And there is a very simple reason for my general estrangement from the best coffee I’ve ever drunk: given its rarity, it is incredibly expensive. It goes for anywhere between thirty and forty dollars per pound. Ouch! On the amount of money that I have to spend each month, the cheap store brand that sells for around a dollar or two a pound will be just fine, thank you very much.

When Lancaster experienced record low temperatures a few years ago, the pipes in our church building froze. This was not a good thing. When they finally thawed out, just as our morning worship service was about to start, we discovered that a pipe above the hallway outside one of the restrooms was leaking. We quickly shut off all the water to the building.

My task on the next Saturday morning was to repair that pipe. Or at least try. My motivation: that way we would have water in the building on Sunday morning—meaning that we would be able to make coffee. The cheap dollar a pound variety, of course. My church is not exactly flush with cash, either.

I had brought my tools for working with pipes with me when I arrived around ten in the morning: a butane torch, solder, flux, a jigsaw with a metal cutting blade, a hacksaw, and an extension cord. I met our pastor, Don Patterson and we got to work on trying to fix the problem. I got the ladder from the shed and then climbed into the attic where I could see two obvious holes in the copper.

So, we drove to Lowes and picked up a couple of clamps—metal clamshells with a rubber section that can be put over a leak in a pipe, then bolted shut. There were already five such clamps on that length of pipe, so this wasn’t the first time such a fix had been made up there. So I attached the two clamps we’d gotten and Don turned on the water. I immediately saw three smaller leaks I had missed before. He turned the water off.

Then we made another trip to Lowes, to get more clamps. Four of them. I used them all and found out about two more leaks left after we turned the water on again. Lowes had no clamps left, so we traveled to Home Depot. We found two there. I attached them. Don turned the water on. Still more leaks appeared.

Don went to a hardware store in Quartz Hill and found three clamps; however, only one of them was the right size. That left one unclamped leak. So we drove to two other hardware stores. No clamps in either place. All sold out. But we did find some epoxy stuff that was supposed to fix leaks.

I tried that. It didn’t work.

So what to do? I had two ¾ inch clamps which didn’t fit the ½ inch pipe. But, by folding some extra rubber strips, I managed to jury-rig one of the clamps and actually made it work.

Don turned the water back on. No more leaks! At last! I looked at my watch. It was 4:45 PM. All done. Well—except for making an unplanned repair to the ceiling in one of the classrooms. I had earlier slipped and plunged my knee through it. Thankfully I did not fall through the ceiling and land on the floor—although that would have made for a much funnier story.

Sunday morning before Sunday School, I learned that Don had told everyone about my fix-it job the day before. He had blabbed it from the pulpit during announcements at the first service and told everyone that they should bow before me in thanks. As I was making coffee in the kitchen, I commented to someone that my real reason for fixing the pipe had just been so I could drink coffee.

“Tell me,” said our music leader, “what’s your favorite kind of coffee.”

I admitted my fondness for Jamaican Blue Mountain.

“Then I’m going to go get you some.”

I warned him that it was very expensive, but he was not to be deterred.

Therefore, I was soon able to renew my acquaintance with the best coffee on the planet. A broken water pipe and a long day of volunteer work had turned out to be an unexpected blessing after all.

In many respects, living with and caring for a mentally ill person is like living with any chronically ill individual. The condition does not change much from day to day, and they require constant attention.

Some chronically ill individuals are bedridden. Extra effort is required to ensure they take their prescribed medications. Some need help with even the most basic activities: bathing, feeding, brushing of teeth—even going to the bathroom.

A friend of mine was a live-in caregiver for a bedridden woman who was very old; when he first started working with her, she could get around with a walker. Soon, she became confined to a wheelchair, though she could move it herself. But as the years went by, she became increasingly immobile, while the other things she could do for herself became ever less.

Until the end, she was able to feed herself, but my friend became responsible for making sure she could get to the toilet, could get from her chair into her bed, and even to bathe.

For a few years, he was able to take her with him to baseball games—she was a big fan of the Dodgers—and to a few other events, such as weekly church services. But eventually, she could no longer go anywhere. By then, because of her condition, he could leave the apartment for only very limited periods of time. Occasionally he could get a day away—but only when he could get a substitute care worker to take his place. Otherwise, he was limited to brief trips to do the grocery shopping or the running of a few errands—and never for much more than an hour.

Other people with chronic illness merely need to be watched and sometimes directed; or given extra aid now and again: perhaps picking them up and taking them to weekly physical therapy sessions or other appointments, reminding them to take their medications, and checking to make sure they are eating properly.

My youngest daughter, a teenager, is now on an antipsychotic medication. She is not bedridden. She can visit friends, do occasional sleepovers with them, or have them come and stay with her overnight. This is an improvement on where she was two years ago. Then, she could not be left alone at all; in fact, it was hard to even go to sleep at night because of her tendency to sneak out of the house. In contrast to my friend’s elderly patient who steadily declined, my daughter’s condition has improved and continues an upward path. Her psychiatrist is pleased with her progress.

My daughter now sleeps through the night and no longer tries to sneak out or run away. But she really cannot take care of herself; and because of her emotional volatility—much better and less extreme than it used to be thanks to the medication—we still cannot leave her alone for more than two or three hours at a time. Sometimes she is stable and patient and clear thinking and all is well; other times she explodes in an extended rage over the most minor of inconveniences, such as misplacing her iPod or simply being asked to take an empty glass back to the kitchen. She is not always very good about distinguishing between fantasy and reality. She’ll start perseverating on a topic, making up scenarios and events that never occurred in her attempt to explain her situation or emotional state. She’ll invent memories of incidents that never occurred. She is quick to assume that a missing item has been stolen and to assume that those around her are purposely trying to make her miserable.

Thankfully she is no longer violent. Since being placed on her current medication she no longer breaks out windows or punches or kicks holes in the wall; she no longer hits me or kicks me or bites me. However she is periodically verbally abusive, prone to cursing, and prone to fits of raging and yelling. These verbally violent outbursts, with an occasional slammed door sometimes arise from no discernible outward cause. Her reactions are beyond anything a normal adolescent would experience; given that she has two older sisters, we well know how teenagers can be. How my youngest daughter behaves is something else altogether.

She cannot go to school because she cannot cope with the social interaction. She is incapable of distinguishing between a genuine friend and those who wish to exploit and harm her. She has no ability to properly judge character and tends to believe whatever someone tells her. Her anxiety in a normal classroom escalates to the point she cannot function. Therefore, she must be on independent study at home. She gets work from her high school each week, relies on me to help her, and then goes to the school only once a week to take tests.

Living with a mentally ill person is stressful and exhausting. It is rare that we get any break from it. Our hope is that the improvements we are continuing to see, and the ever longer periods of normal behavior, will continue as she matures, as she maintains her therapy and psychiatric treatment, and as the medications do their work. It is likely, however, that she will have to take these medications for the rest of her life, much as a diabetic is forever dependent upon insulin injections.

Just about everyone has heard of Murphy’s Law: “If something can go wrong, it will.” And then there are the various well-known corollaries: “Murphy was an optimist.” And, “If something goes wrong, it will happen at the worst possible moment.”

According to Arthur Bloch’s book, Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go WRONG, published in 1977, the law’s namesake was Captain Ed Murphy, a development engineer from Wright Field Aircraft Lab working at what is now Edwards Air Force Base in 1949. Block published a letter he had received from George E. Nichols which stated that Captain Murphy was frustrated with a strap transducer that was malfunctioning because of an error in the wiring of the strain gauge bridges. He remarked, according to the letter, that “If there is any way to do it wrong, he will” in reference to the technician who had wired the bridges. Nichols said that he assigned Murphy’s Law to that statement and all its associated variations.

Murphy’s law grew out of frustration, and it is usually cited with amusement when something gets messed up. It is a mistake, however, to take the law seriously. It shouldn’t even be taken as a rule of thumb. Because if Murphy’s Law were really true, if it really were one of the laws of physics, then nothing would ever go right. Life would be one huge snafu. Airplanes would not fly, and if they did, they’d fall out of the sky or run into mountains every time they did get off the ground. Cars would never start, and your computer would never boot up right and if it ever did, it would crash and lose every document and every bank transaction that you ever made–especially those that were most critical. Your bank account would then be drained of all its funds by Nigerian princes. Those Nigerian princes would, of course, immediately go to jail—since their attempt at amassing wealth, following Murphy’s dictum, must fail. And then those Nigerian princes would escape the prison, since that would be the last thing their jailers would ever want. But then, those escaped thieving Nigerian princes would promptly fall off a cliff and be consumed by ravenous wolves–who would immediately keel over from food poisoning. And so on.

Murphy’s law is easily falsifiable. For instance a friend of mine about three years ago asked me to build a computer for him. This necessitated a trip to Fry’s where we succeeded in getting all the parts needed to build a computer: a motherboard with CPU, a computer case, memory, graphics card, sound card, hard drive, DVD-RW drive and so on. With the purchase of the CPU, we were able to get a copy of the latest version of Windows on disc at a discounted price.

When we got back to my house, I assembled the parts easily, and then turned the new machine on. It booted up fine. The disc that came with the hard drive did its job of preparing and formatting the new hard drive for use and then the computer assigned the normal C and D drive letters to the hard drive and DVD-RW respectively.

When I put the Windows disc in the drive, the computer found it easily enough and began the rather lengthy process of installing the Windows operating system. It proceeded smoothly, without a hiccup, locating the sound card and graphics card and installing the right drivers for both. After the various reboots that Windows does during an install from scratch, the system came up and worked just as it was supposed to.

In putting a new computer together from scratch, the number of things that can go awry is rather high. When installing Windows, many glitches can easily occur. And yet, on this occasion, nothing went wrong and everything went right.

In science, when experiments are done it is not to prove theories right, but rather to prove them wrong: to falsify them. And all it takes for a theory to be falsified is for it to be wrong once. People were certain all swans were white. But it could not be proven true, since one could not examine every last swan in existence. But it was easily shown to be false when the first black swan was seen in Australia.

Thus, Murphy’s law is falsified every time something goes right: when you stop in time, instead of running into the child chasing the ball into the street. When the Dodgers win a baseball game. When the Clippers don’t lose. When you repair a lamp without electrocuting yourself. When you still have a job at the end of the week. When you pay off a debt. And so on. In reality, most of the time, things do not go wrong.

That’s why it’s news when there’s a school shooting, instead of when there isn’t.

For most of my life I’ve found it very difficult to tell people no. No matter how busy I might be, I seem to always want to help my friends or family if they need something done. When I was in college I discovered the hard way that saying no is sometimes the right thing to do.

Back in the dark ages before computers, we used these large bulky and noisy devices called typewriters. I had come to college with a nice electric one and I made it a point to get my papers done early so that I would not have to stay up late the night before, unlike so many of my fellow classmates. Toward the end of the first semester of my freshman year, I was quite proud of myself for having my paper for biology class done a week early. I congratulated myself on how I’d get a good night’s sleep while I listened with little empathy to the other students moaning about how they were going to have to pull “all nighters” in order to get their papers done.

One of my classmates had asked me to type up his biology paper for him. I offered this to my friends for a nominal fee, far below the going rate, more as a favor than as a means for generating income. He assured me he’d have the paper to me early in the afternoon a day before it was due. I typed fast, so it wouldn’t take me much more than an hour, if that, to type up his ten page paper, with footnotes and bibliography.

Unfortunately, I discovered that this particular friend was a procrastinator. He gave me the first four pages of his handwritten paper about eight o’clock the night before it was due, assuring me as he gave them to me that he’d have the rest to me within an hour.

Hah.

His optimistic pronouncement was inaccurate. Instead, he delivered the paper to me a page at a time, dropping off the last sheet about four in the morning.

Instead of getting a good night’s sleep, I very nearly ended up pulling a dreaded “all nighter,” catching an hour here and there as I awaited each page’s delivery.

From then on, for any future papers, I insisted that he give me the entire thing, not page by page—and he had to have it in to me by six PM the night before it was due or I simply wouldn’t type it for him. I had learned to say no, at least to him, from that night on.

He actually didn’t ask me to type papers for him very often, as a consequence. But I got a lot more sleep.

The lesson to sometimes say no didn’t really stick. After college, I’ve generally said yes to my friends and family members who request help from me. I’ve frequently helped people move, a task that I positively despise, whether it is moving an entire house or just helping someone relocate a refrigerator. I’ve helped people install various electronic gadgets, from televisions to stereo systems to new computers. I’ve even built new computers or cobbled together machines from random scattered parts.

A few years ago, I helped my wife’s parents do some more renovations on their house, which included installing new ceramic tiles in their bathroom and laundry room. One very long weekend, I pulled up the old linoleum in their upstairs bathroom in preparation for eventually installing tile in it. That same weekend I also replaced the corroded valves under their bathroom sink, and I replaced the old sink with a nice new one. This required removing the old sink, its pipes and its faucets. Then I had to cut the opening in the fake marble top to accommodate the new sink, since it was a couple inches bigger around than the old sink. I quickly found myself and the bathroom coated with white plastic dust.

Much of the weekend’s labor consisted of trying to find the parts and tools in my in-laws’ messy garage, or making trips to Home Depot to pick up what they hadn’t already purchased. Late that Sunday night, still dirty and smelly, I finally left for home just moments after I had finished with the sink. I had a two hour drive ahead of me.

Within moments of walking through my front door–still coated with white plastic dust and wanting nothing more than to take a shower–the telephone rang.

On the other end of the phone was a friend who was having trouble with her computer: it had gotten infected with a bit of malware that was blocking her ability to install a new anti-virus program. I spent about a half hour on the phone diagnosing things and finally told her to bring it by in the morning. This despite the fact that at the time I was under deadline for a book. Only then, did I finally get my shower.

Monday morning, after about an hour’s work, I was able to solve her problem and get rid of the virus in her computer.

If I know I can fix something, or do something, to help someone, I’m generally not willing to say no. Besides, I still managed to work on my book and I remained on schedule. Despite rarely telling people no, I still somehow always get my own work done on time. Showers and sleep, however, are another thing. Perhaps someday I’ll learn to say no. Probably about the time I learn how to overcome feeling guilty from knowing I could help someone and then turning them down.