"Loving the Unlovable," by CD Burr

  

Chopper hopped into my suitcase when he was a puppy (2012)

My 8-pound Yorkshire terrier, Chopper, turned 13 on March 2025 and is my constant companion. He is nearly blind now and can't hear me when I stand behind him and call his name. His personality, however, hasn't changed much since I wrote the following essay in 2017.

For over forty years, our family has raised loyal dogs that we have adored. One would bring us the newspaper early in the morning, and another dog played the piano, fetched balls and frisbees, and prayed. We've been companions with a Shetland Sheepdog, two mixed breeds, a Keeshond, an Irish Setter, and three Schnauzers. All of them were obedient and well-behaved. 

Our current dogs are two Yorkshire terrier littermates, . . . and one of them has broken our record of trainable dogs. 

At ten pounds, Clark W. Griswold "Grizzy" is obedient and cuddly. However, his eight-pound littermate brother, Chopper, detests cuddling and has won the title of "most untrainable and stubborn dog" we have ever loved.  He constantly tests our patience.   The jury is out on whether he is cute, with his enormous ears that spread out, turning him into a Yoda-looking creature with tufts of hair on the pointed ends.  

After five years of us tempting Chopper with doggy treats, chicken, and steak, he refuses to go outside through a perfectly lovely doggy door that swings open to a perfectly lovely grass yard.  He won’t do it.   He prefers a pad indoors or the carpet in the basement.  Grizzy has no problem with the doggy door, popping in and out all day.  

On a summer day, Chopper often sits down before we leave our driveway, creating tension on the leash. Like a furry, long-eared mule, this tiny critter with two-inch legs pulls on his harness, refusing to continue our walk.   He most likely heard a locust, and we wait patiently while he hunts through the grass for his favorite snack.  After clamping his teeth together and imprisoning his prey, Chopper proudly holds up his head and allows us to continue, the insect madly buzzing inside his mouth. At some point, he chomps down and finishes his snack.   Later, I find lacy, iridescent locust wings that he coughed up on the kitchen tile.  

Chopper’s independent, stubborn nature also creates a challenge with commands.  He ignores “stay” when I open a door to the basement and soars down the steps, yipping and running wildly around the pool table like a mad monkey and charging off into the downstairs bedroom—another preferred, adopted bathroom of choice.  He doesn’t cease barking on command and yips and yaps at squirrels, birds, joggers, bicyclists, my piano playing, the doorbell, the garbage trucks, and the neighbors when they are trying to enjoy their pool.

Chopper is also bipolar—sweet one moment, grooming his brother’s ears, and then later, without warning, he begins a deep-throated growl.  He dons a demonic, red-eyed glare and begins creeping toward his brother, snarling with vampire-bat fangs, and then attacks Grizzy, who was sleeping peacefully on the sofa.

And yet, on my most unlovable, ugly days, he greets me with a multitude of kisses on my toes and ankles when I walk into a room, teaching me the importance of loving the unlovable.  During his calm moments, I often look into the adoring brown eyes of my Yoda-mule-monkey-vampire-bat of a dog, pat him on the head, and say, “Good boy.”

CD Burr

First published on Elders Speaking Group blog   10/17/2017; edited on 05/07/2025 

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Child Labor--An Egregious Business Practice of the Past?

Library of Congress photo and description:   "Manuel, the young shrimp-picker, five years old, and a mountain of child-labor oyster shells behind him. He worked last year (1911). Understands not a word of English. Dunbar, Lopez, Dukate Company. Location: Biloxi, Mississippi." photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, 1874-1940.

Is child labor an egregious business practice of the past, where children work long hours without breaks or work in hazardous conditions?  

While much better than a hundred years ago, child labor continues in my grandchildren's lifetime. 

Consider the following quotes from the Department of Labor website: 

"Since 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor has seen an 88 percent increase nationwide in children employed illegally. In fiscal year 2023, federal investigators identified 955 child labor violations nationwide with 5,792 children at risk – including 502 working in hazardous occupations illegally – and assessed more than $8 million in penalties for employers found in violation." 

"In fiscal year 2024, we concluded 736 investigations that found child labor violations, a 23% decrease from the previous year. We found 4,030 children employed in violation of the law, a 31% increase since 2019, and assessed more than $15.1 million in penalties, an 89% increase from the previous year."

The violations include children under 18 working six days a week, running hazardous machinery such as meat-processing machines, 14-year-olds driving forklifts or vehicles, and breaks only if the child works an eight-hour shift. 

According to the EPI (Economic Policy Institute), six states have tried to weaken child labor laws, but advocates are fighting back.   The Guardian reported that in March 2025, the Trump administration abolished US funding for nearly 70 programs that fought to end trafficking and child labor in other countries.

The lure of cheap child labor is greater than ever.  

Find your cause and demand decency.

CD Burr

This essay also appears on Elder Speaking

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Grandma Burr warned “Never Trust Russia!” by C.D. Burr

 

 Grandma Marie Burr's brothers: Gottfried and Friedrich Bamesberger, 1896 

Until she died in 1967, my husband's Grandma Marie Burr occasionally shared old photos of her handsome brothers in their Russian uniforms. She described her anguish at their disappearance around 1913 and the hard times she experienced as a young mother in Russia (now Ukraine).  She recalled the tensions of the early 1900s -- how the Russians took their land, dissolved their German community of Klein Neudorf, and sent her brothers to the salt mines with life sentences. 

In the early 1800s, Russia promised hundreds of German immigrants free farmland, autonomy, and no compulsory military service.  However, several generations later, after the 1905 Russian revolution, updated policies displaced thousands of families like the Burrs and Bamesbergers. In a heavy accent, Grandma Burr ended her stories of life in southern Russia with a warning:  "Never trust Russia!"

Marie was pregnant when she immigrated to the United States in 1913, debarking on a ship from Hamburg, Germany.  Accompanying her were her husband, Michael, and six children--a seventh deceased child remained behind in a grave.  Six more children were born in Cheyenne County, Kansas, including my father-in-law, Albert, and her last child, a son who died in infancy.  Marie was a widow in February 1925 when she buried the infant on a windswept hill in a cemetery next to the Salem Lutheran Church. Michael had died four months earlier. 

Twenty years before the Burrs arrived, my Zimbelman ancestors, with four sons and three daughters, emigrated from Rohrbach, Russia/Ukraine. Michael and Katherina had buried seven children on Russian soil and moved before their oldest son turned 21, the age for conscription into the Russian army.   The Zimbelmans settled in Cheyenne County in 1893-- each son eventually cultivating substantial farmland with Russian wheat seeds.  

I am grateful for the sacrifices of our ancestors, immigrants from a hostile land that is once again filled with people suffering from Russian aggression.

I pray  . . .

            --for peace in Ukraine, home of our ancestors, Michael and Marie Bamesberger and Michael and Katherina Zimbelman,

            -- for all displaced persons who have emigrated from violent homelands,

            -- for compassionate government immigration policies because, through our ancestors, “we were once strangers in a strange land.”  (Leviticus 19:34)

--Gratefully submitted by CD Burr

This essay first appeared on Elders Speaking 8/27/2024   Grandma Burr Warned

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"Papo's Hill" A painting and tribute to Albert Burr by CD Burr

The year before my father-in-law, Albert, passed away, I drove him out to the farm where he grew up north of St. Francis, Kansas.  The ground upon which he lived into his teens is rolling, rocky, and not quite as promising as neighboring farms bursting with abundant wheat and corn fields. 

No stately barn rests on the Burr piece of land, which is now littered with several decaying wood frames and fence posts.  Albert pointed out where their horse was housed in a squatty, leaning, bare-bones barn.  He described fruit trees that once grew behind the boarded-up house.   As a boy, he gathered eggs in a now-roofless chicken house, and eighty years later, he could still shake his head when remembering the dreaded job of cleaning the separator in the tiny cream-separating house (about twice the size of the outhouse).  In the family album, there is an old black-and-white photo of Albert with his dog, Pete, in front of this small building.  

As we drove around the yard, Albert spoke fondly of his home and the great times he had as a boy: a swimming hole not much larger than a ditch, the sticker-laden ground near the hog pen where the Burr Boys played baseball, and a quarter-mile-long hill that sloped into the yard.   He said that the hill was perfect for sledding.  Kids would come from neighboring farms – twenty or more — and use grain scoops as sleds.  Because it was dark, their parents would line up along the snowy hill with lanterns so their children could see the path. The scene must have been magical.  

As Albert weakened and made several trips to the hospital, I decided to paint the sledding-by-lantern-light scene that Albert had described to me almost a year earlier.   I hoped he could see the painting of “Papo’s Hill” before it was too late.   

In June,  Albert was admitted for his final stay in the hospital, where he waited to be transferred to the retirement home.  When I showed him the painting, he lacked the strength to speak, but his face glowed, almost like the lanterns on the canvas. He smiled and nodded.

Our dear father and Papo died June 16, 2014

This tribute first appeared on 12/12/17 on the Elders Speaking group blog.

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Before childhood vaccines: "Our Darling" Cemetery marker (1924)

 

                                                    "Our Darling" Inez Pearl Daniel

My great-grandparents--Alonzo and Evie Daniel--buried three children who might have lived if vaccines and antibiotics had been available. My grandpa's baby sister Inez died during one of the epidemics raging through Tennessee that year (influenza, measles, malaria).

Most healthy kids today might survive these diseases without vaccines, but why risk extremely high temperatures, encephalitis, and pneumonia? Or spread a potentially deadly virus to others with compromised immune systems?

                                               "We Will Meet Again"  Anita Ann Daniel

According to the United States Mortality Statistics of 1926, rural Tennessee recorded the following deaths among white men, women, and children:

Five-year-old Anita Ann Daniel was one of them.

• 362 deaths......Typhoid and Paratyphoid fever
• 86 deaths........Malaria
• 3 deaths..........Smallpox
• 218 deaths......Measles
• 24 deaths........Scarlet Fever
• 226 deaths......Whooping Cough
• 205 deaths......Diphtheria
• 1090 deaths....Influenza
• 26 deaths........Erysipelas (bacterial skin infection usually caused by Streptococcus pyogenes)
• 15 deaths........Meningococcus meningitis
• 1658 deaths....Tuberculosis (respiratory)
• 48 deaths........Tuberculosis (Meninges)
• 150 deaths......Tuberculosis (Other)
• 742 deaths......Cancer
• 60 deaths........Rheumatism

Why so few Smallpox deaths? There was a vaccine for it.

"In heaven there is one angel more" Bobbie H. Daniel

Penicillin and antibiotics might have saved Bobbie, my grandpa's 12-year-old brother, who suffered from a series of kidney infections and "bad tonsils."

What about autism and vaccines?  My 39-year-old daughter has mild autism, which wasn't diagnosed until she was an adult.  When she was a child, psychologists diagnosed only the most severe forms of autism.  Nevertheless, I suspected autism and despite what special ed teachers and school psychologists surmised, I did not think she would "grow out" of the social awkwardness and learning disabilities.  

Thirty-five years ago, I listened to rumors about vaccines and autism and wondered if all of those childhood vaccines may have contributed to her delays.  But I was hesitant to embrace those rumors: My little girl had shown signs as an infant--long before her series of vaccines.  I observed other children in our family, neighborhood, and classrooms who were required to have childhood vaccines to enter the public school system. I thought they all seemed "normal."  As science debunked the theories of vaccine-induced autism, I dismissed those theories and continued immunizing my children.   

From my own experience raising an undiagnosed autistic child in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I am convinced the rise in autism is due to an increase in diagnoses over the past twenty years.   

A shorter version of this essay appears in the  Elders Speaking group blog.

All photos taken at Cedar Valley Cemetery (TN) by CD Burr

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