Starting Over

Just as a concertina began the musical Carnival! — slow, isolated, and alone — the path to writing again is picking up the rusty squeezebox and getting started. As I renew effort on this important project, I will be joined by a full orchestra with instruments, players, and settings while engaged in a jamboree of my life in the post-Reagan era. Everything that will fit in 250 pages, I will.

I learned a lot finishing the first part. Blending the past with the future, in terms of the time line was important to style. My omniscient narrator’s voice has the ability to span my entire life at once and I did. Anything else would be fakery. In the chapter on Joan Didion, I began with my discovery of her writing in while I lived at Five Points after military service, and blended my experiences with her writing through her death in 2021. By weaving the whole story into a single chapter, I both told the history and previewed what her writing meant to me. I can’t imaging splitting this story up. So it was with other topics.

The length of part one was about right at just less than 250 pages in the final book. I should keep part two a similar length despite the fact there is more to tell. Exercising disciple in sticking to a narrative is important for the research, and for the writing. I decided to hang the narrative on a timeline based on where we lived, beginning in Cedar Rapids, then Merrillville, Indiana (the Calumet), and returning to live in Big Grove Township in Johnson County, Iowa. Because the Big Grove section is so much longer, more than 30 years at present, I subdivide that with three breaks: my retirement from transportation in 2009, taking work at the home, farm and auto supply store in 2015, and the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

The second layer is tracing the history of trucking industry deregulation. This includes the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan’s reaction to the PATCO strike, and Bill Clinton’s NAFTA. The impact on American society of these things was broad and deep. My career in transportation positioned me to be in the middle of it as it unfolded. Plenty of books have been written about this. I want to write my story. I have been driving Interstate 80 to Des Moines the last few months. It is remarkable how truck traffic has changed. There is a story behind that.

The third layer is a broad brush approach to our family life in Iowa and Indiana. Ours was not a typical family life, beginning with our vegetarian food culture. We also thought differently about everything from politics to education to banking and finance to transportation to recreation. I hope this layer will be particularly meaningful to our child.

The fourth layer will be the impact of climate change on our lives and on our life in society. A changing environment, warmer temperatures, extreme weather, and public service, including my six years on the county board of health, all play a role.

The fifth layer is how my writing and intellect progressed. If I planned to focus on writing when we married, such focus diffused in the existential struggle to provide for a family. We divided labor in a somewhat traditional way, with me being the primary wage earner, and Jacque working at home during the early years. This had consequences for my writing and for our living. We had a good life, yet there were challenges.

Woven into these layers is my history of working on political campaigns, travel for business, gardening, and learning to live in the post-Reagan society leading up to the 2016 election.

Nothing is cast in concrete. This post is a start. Off we go! Now where did I put my concertina?