This is my first attempt to grow onions at home and there’s a lot to learn. Once the seeds germinated, I moved them upstairs into sunlight. They grew long and spindly, laying down over each other in the tray. Carefully, I trimmed the tops to about two inches and they sprung up. The expectation is they will start to right themselves and grow more vertically. The backup plan is to buy and beg some onion starts in case these don’t mature. For the time being I’m not giving up on them.
This weekend was unsettling beginning with Friday’s news that OPEC couldn’t reach consensus on reducing crude oil supply. Russia dissented. In response, Saudi Arabia decided to slash prices and increase production by as many as 2 million barrels per day.
“This OPEC summit was among the worst meetings I have ever seen during the history of this organization,” Bijan Zanegneh, Iranian petroleum minister told reporters on Friday.
Oil prices fell so far, one could purchase two barrels of crude for less than the cost of a liter of Purell hand sanitizer in Manhattan.
Futures trading in the 10-year U.S. Treasury note yield dipped below 0.50 percent for the first time ever last night. It should be hella day when markets open this morning. One aspect of our being in debt is we own no stocks and therefore are insulated from daily market peaks and valleys, but still…
Speaking of hand sanitizer, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds announced last night the first three cases of coronavirus have been diagnosed in Iowa. The individuals live in our county seat and have been quarantined at home. I’m weighing whether or not to attend meetings in town this evening because of it. National leadership on identifying the emerging risks of coronavirus, and doing something to prevent a national crisis over the pandemic, has been absent. Our local warehouse club was rationing basic food stuffs, even though few Iowans seem likely to starve if they have to stay home for a while to avoid contact with the disease.
Also Sunday night, Yonhap News Agency of South Korea reported North Korea launched three projectiles toward the East Sea. The projectiles are believed to be missiles being developed as a result of stalled talks over denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. The U.S. is not leading efforts to rid the north of nuclear weapons, but rather seeking to distract us from our own nuclear complex modernization and testing of new nuclear weapons. American leadership is absent in compliance with Article 6 of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
Changes announced this weekend include the orchard where I worked the last seven seasons. On Friday they posted job openings for my manager and the bakery manager, who have worked there since before the current owners bought it in 2009. There have been discussions about extending the season to include other activities and produce for a couple of years. It looks like plans are coming to fruition (yes, that’s an apple joke), which means changes in staffing to accommodate new demands.
We’ll see if I’m invited back for the fall season, and if I am, whether I would work for a new manager in a new retail environment. Our personal situation has changed since 2013 when I first applied for a job there. The changes at the orchard are evidence of the shifting sand of a small business trying to survive in a competitive marketplace. If the job ceases to be fun, I won’t return.
Why all this now? It may be the beginning of all the wheels coming off the wagon of society. Whatever the causes, it is going to be a rough ride at least through this year, and maybe for a lot longer.
When I returned from my Sunday shift at the farm I walked the garden. It’s still pretty barren, garlic hasn’t begun to emerge. The plot where I sowed lettuce was dry with a few deer footprints in it. I went to bed worried about late winter drought. When I woke there was rain against the bedroom window. Welcome relief from the dry spell and a sign that all hope is not lost.
Georgia Southern Collard, Ferry-Morse, 75 days. Pak Choy Toy Choy, Ferry-Morse, 30 days. Teton Hybrid Spinach, Ferry-Morse, 45 days. Cilantro, Ferry-Morse, 28 days.
Space is beginning to fill with trays.
I delivered a box of flower seeds for the farm’s coming garden class at a local food pantry.
We talked, a lot, about everything. We were chatty.
I enjoy my time with eight people talking and seeding trays of soil mix. I don’t say a lot, just do my work and bask in the sounds of another day on the farm.
The lamb count is now 40 and there are five new goats.
The 2012 general election marked the end of a personal era.
Working on campaigns drained our financial reserves and we would need income to meet our obligations going forward.
The following winter was a time of reflection and adjustment.
2013 began a work period where writing occupied more of my time. That, combined with low wage work, became a way to get along. We never made enough money as I worked those jobs. They bridged the time between leaving my career and beginning Medicare at age 65 and Social Security at age 66. What made our survival possible was a foundation created by my 25 years in transportation combined with Jacque’s income from the public library. It was tough going during the transition but we made it.
Our move to Big Grove Township was predicated on a few things: we needed a place to live, my job in Cedar Rapids, being centrally located near other job opportunities, schools for our daughter, two working automobiles, and being a distance from the office. Over time, and by 2013, those things changed, raising new questions:
Do we want to move to town?
What kind of work will be next for us?
Is there a way we can work without a commute?
Is this home right for us as we age?
Will we be able to afford living here?
We decided the best approach was to stabilize our lives here and we did. Working at home was difficult but straight forward. I wrote about it in a Dec. 29, 2012 journal entry:
Part of work is forcing myself to come into my work area and sit. The kind of discipline that Norman Mailer wrote about. Not being distracted, or leaving the work area. Just working to the detriment of all other activities.
It is not always easy to do this, but do it I must, and for more than an hour at a time.
I felt an urge to go to town. It is similar to the urge I felt when living in Mainz. That often led me to shopping or walking into the downtown area. I resisted it today, even though it was complicated by the new $50 bill my mother sent — itching to be spent. It was a major accomplishment to resist the urge to go “elsewhere.”
The low wage work I pursued was readily available in the area. My criteria was to work for a company with a professional payroll department where I could count on wages being paid accurately and in a timely manner. I didn’t give much thought to the physical requirements of the jobs, although they mostly required standing on concrete or other hard-surfaced floors. I worked as a temporary laborer, as a product demonstrator, and in 2015 wound up at the home, farm and auto supply store which offered full time work, health insurance and a reasonable work load. I also worked as a proof reader and freelance correspondent for local newspapers.
Most significant among these jobs was a chance to work with people much different from those during my transportation career. If I didn’t bring home much money, I met many new people.
Weathering the last seven years was the kind of accomplishment few people point out as a highlight of life. We did what was needed to survive. Now that it’s over there are other things to do, including the “good stuff” in the diagram from my journal. We now have a chance to figure out what that means.
My ancestors first landed in North America in what today are the states of Virginia and Minnesota. I don’t know of any other connections but those two states.
My Virginia origins have obscure beginnings in the 17th Century. My Minnesota origins are tied to specific immigration from Poland in the 19th Century after the Civil War. I know a lot about these lines, but not as much as I may think.
Genealogy has been faddish for me. For a while a rush of interest. Then research halts and things sit for months or years. I enjoy discovering new artifacts, like the recent discovery of my parents’ wedding announcement in the newspaper. Such joy is insufficient to turn me into a consistent miner of artifacts and information. It’s been a hodge-podge endeavor from the get-go.
I hope to sustain an effort with the current memoir project. That means getting organized, developing a writing plan and sticking with it.
It is hard to determine a timeline, but necessary. Equally difficult will be choosing which parts to write about and in which order. I need to be in a place where the outline is finished and broken down into 1,000-word bites for drafting. I don’t know how long it will take to draft, edit and proof 170,000 words. Longer than expected, for sure.
The general rule is to write 1,000 words per day. By write, I mean draft because editing will take multiple amounts of the time drafting will. I expect as many as a dozen revisions, probably more. Likewise proof reading is important and time consuming. One has to get outside the narrative to a place where the literal words on the page mean nothing except for their correct spelling, grammar and elimination of redundancy and extra words. These things take time.
A couple of hours can produce 1,000 draft words with this type of work. That assumes a proper outline and work plan that puts the research into a semblance of order. It’s possible to do that.
So five steps: organize documents and artifacts, prepare an outline, create a first draft, edit and revise the draft, and proof read.
This spring is shaping up to be busy with the part time job at the home, farm and auto supply store, gardening, farm work, political work, community work, and the Food Policy Council. Somehow the memoir project needs to find a space. (I always forget to mention family. Why is that?)
I plan to continue writing this blog most days, but need to add a period of daily time to organize for writing the memoir. The photo above is a first attempt to get something on paper. There will be revisions as work continues to sustain this project.
Elizabeth Warren at the Iowa Memorial Union, Iowa City, Iowa, Dec. 2, 2019.
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren suspended her campaign to become the Democratic nominee for president yesterday.
I will support the party’s nominee as he emerges from the summer convention. It chokes me up a bit to use the pronoun “he,” but I will support him.
More to the point, it became tiring to say the same thing over and over again during the last six months: “If Democrats don’t nominate a woman for president, we’ll never have a female president.”
While the statement is true — I don’t see Republicans nominating a women this cycle or for the foreseeable future — inherent misogyny among women and men prevented any of the highly skilled and credentialed female U.S. Senators from garnering the nomination.
To refresh our memories, they were (in the order in which they dropped out) Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. I had issues with each of them, and that’s to be expected. The good news is they all returned to the senate, and their senate seats were never in jeopardy in their current terms.
There were and are good reasons to consider the men in the race for the presidential nomination. There are also reasons why two men advanced beyond Super Tuesday unrelated to misogyny. There is something there though. An attitude, belief, outlook, or whatever, that informed people this cycle was not a woman’s turn to get the nomination. Maybe I have some of that inside me and just can’t recognize it.
So we go on.
Here’s the email Warren sent to me and countless others yesterday morning. I felt sad as I read this in the break room at the home, farm and auto supply store. I was sad enough to recognize the feeling. Elizabeth Warren won’t be president in 2020, or probably ever. It is reassuring she will be in the U.S. Senate and has never stopped working for us.
Paul,
I’m going to start with the news. I wanted you to hear it straight from me: today, I’m suspending our campaign for president.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for everything you have poured into this campaign.
I know that when we set out, this was not the news you ever wanted to hear. It is not the news I ever wanted to share. But I refuse to let disappointment blind me — or you — to what we’ve accomplished. We didn’t reach our goal, but what we have done together — what you have done — has made a lasting difference. It’s not the scale of the difference we wanted to make, but it matters — and the changes will have ripples for years to come.
What we have done — and the ideas we have launched into the world, the way we have fought this fight, the relationships we have built — will carry through for the rest of this election, and the one after that, and the one after that.
So think about it:
We have shown that it is possible to build a grassroots movement that is accountable to supporters and activists and not to wealthy donors — and to do it fast enough for a first-time candidate to build a viable campaign. Never again can anyone say that the only way that a newcomer can get a chance to be a plausible candidate is to take money from corporate executives and billionaires. That’s done.
We have shown that it is possible to inspire people with big ideas, possible to call out what’s wrong and to lay out a path to make this country live up to its promise.
We have shown that race and justice — economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, criminal justice — are not an afterthought, but are at the heart of everything that we do.
We have shown that a woman can stand up, hold her ground, and stay true to herself — no matter what.
We have shown that we can build plans in collaboration with the people who are most affected.
This campaign became something special, and it wasn’t because of me. It was because of you. I am so proud of how you fought this fight alongside me: you fought it with empathy and kindness and generosity — and of course, with enormous passion and grit.
Some of you may remember that long before I got into electoral politics, I was asked if I would accept a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was weak and toothless. And I replied that my first choice was a consumer agency that could get real stuff done, and my second choice was no agency and lots of blood and teeth left on the floor. In this campaign, we have been willing to fight, and, when necessary, we left plenty of blood and teeth on the floor. I can think of one billionaire who has been denied the chance to buy this election.
And we did all of this without selling access for money. Together, you and 1,250,000 people gave more than $112 million dollars to support this campaign. And we did it without selling one minute of my time to the highest bidder. People said that would be impossible. But you did that.
Together, we built a grassroots campaign that had some of the most ambitious organizing targets ever — and then we turned around and surpassed them.
Our staff and volunteers on the ground knocked on over 22 million doors across the country. We made 20 million phone calls and sent more than 42 million texts to voters. That’s truly astonishing. It is.
We also advocated for fixing our rigged system in a way that will make it work better for everyone.
A year ago, people weren’t talking about a two-cent wealth tax, Universal Child Care, cancelling student loan debt for 43 million Americans while reducing the racial wealth gap, breaking up big tech, or expanding Social Security. And now they are. And because we did the work of building broad support for all of those ideas across this country, these changes could actually be implemented by the next president.
A year ago, people weren’t talking about corruption, and they still aren’t talking about it enough — but we’ve moved the needle, and a hunk of our anti-corruption plan is already embedded in a House bill that is ready to go when we get a Democratic Senate.
And we also did it by having fun and by staying true to ourselves. We ran from the heart. We ran on our values. We ran on treating everyone with respect and dignity. But it was so much more. Four-hour selfie lines and pinky promises with little girls. A wedding at one of our town halls. And we were joyful and positive through all of it. We ran a campaign not to put people down, but to lift them up — and I loved pretty much every minute of it.
I may not be in the race for president in 2020, but this fight — our fight — is not over. And our place in this fight has not ended.
Because for every young person who is drowning in student debt, for every family struggling to pay the bills on two incomes, for every mom worried about paying for prescriptions or putting food on the table, this fight goes on.
For every immigrant and African American and Muslim and Jewish person and Latinx and transwoman who sees the rise in attacks on people who look or sound or worship like them, this fight goes on.
For every person alarmed by the speed with which climate change is bearing down upon us, this fight goes on.
And for every American who desperately wants to see our nation healed and some decency and honor restored to our government, this fight goes on.
When I voted on Tuesday at the elementary school down the street, a mom came up to me. She said she has two small children, and they have a nightly ritual. After the kids have brushed teeth and read books and gotten that last sip of water and done all the other bedtime routines, they do one last thing before the two little ones go to sleep: Mama leans over them and whispers, “Dream big.” And the children together reply, “Fight hard.”
So if you leave with only one thing, it must be this: Choose to fight only righteous fights, because then when things get tough — and they will — you will know that there is only option ahead of you: nevertheless, you must persist.
You should be so proud of what we’ve done together — what you have done over this past year.
Our work continues, the fight goes on, and big dreams never die.
A friend grows straw for the home, farm and auto supply store and he isn’t in the fields yet. The ground is frozen.
In addition to producing wheat straw he grows commodity crops and has a tough row to hoe… literally.
I enjoy interacting with him and his crew as they remove a hundred bales from a gooseneck trailer and put them on pallets. Once re-stacked, I move them indoors with a lift truck.
I have been drafting emails to groups of which I am a part since I woke. Gotta stay on top of all that so when the ground thaws I can get my spade in it. Not yet… but soon.
While Super Tuesday elections and caucuses happened I was working on an outline for my nascent memoir. It’s one of many drafts.
As readers may have noticed, I’m posting almost every day on this blog. What’s lacking is getting a grip around my personal history so I can finish a longer autobiographical piece. With the recently discovered trove of letters I wrote to Mom, a lot of pieces from college until moving back to Iowa in 1993 are coming together.
I’ve forgotten more than I’ll ever know, so whatever I produce should have application beyond family and friends. I plan to tell the story as best I can once determining what it is.
That last part is important. I’m not used to telling my story other than recounting brief incidents in a long life. More thought about what my story is will be in order.
Some decisions have been made.
As far as length goes, 70,000 to 100,000 words. I have a 25,000 word fragment from a few years ago, and that will be edited down to fit the new narrative. There are many fragments in my files.
There will be two parts. The first part will be a chronological story that sets my life in a context of family, education, and public events. I don’t know the breaking point but it will likely be one of three: Father’s sudden death in 1969, enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1975, or finishing graduate school in 1981. I’ll write about all of those. Depending on the narrative, emphasis will vary.
John Irving is the model for what I want to do in this book as a writer. I plan to begin with the last sentence of the book and write toward that end. In coming weeks I plan to work on that last sentence.
Material for research seem abundant. Mother and her mother took a significant number of photos during my earliest years. There are enough to help remember what happened and when I gained awareness of a world outside myself. Likewise the internet is a resource for old clippings, genealogy, photographs and maps to fill in some of the gaps. Much of this early section of the book will be based on memory, which while fading, remains strong in many areas.
School life was important although aside from some of my undergraduate work there are not a lot of remaining written documents or artifacts. There aren’t many photos either. The focus here will include the few documents that survived coupled with memory. I attended five different schools in K-12 and each will have a place in the narrative. I’m most sensitive to the closeness I felt to grade school friends and how that changed when the nuns split some of us off in a separate class because they felt we were “college-bound.”
After undergraduate school I began writing journals and there is a continuous written and photographic record beginning 1974-1975 until the present. At that point the narrative will turn to what I’ve already written for source material. There is a lot of it.
The second part of the memoir is up in the air. The idea of the first part is setting a context for actions in the second part. A key event in Part II was my return to Davenport after military service and the brief time I lived near “Five Points,” the intersection of Division Street, West Locust Street, and Hickory Grove Road. I plan to write in detail about those months from November 1979 until summer 1980. It is a good fulcrum on which the pivot the narrative.
Part II will be more thematic, centered around family, work, travel, politics and intellectual progress while writing. How did I become a person who spends a couple of hours writing before beginning each day? While I disliked President George W. Bush immensely, I liked the format of his presidential memoir “Decision Points.” Perhaps something like that, but as I said, it’s up in the air right now.
There is an impetus to write this memoir now and while not close to final, yesterday’s work on an outline moved the enterprise forward.
With Elizabeth Warren at the Iowa Memorial Union, Iowa City, Iowa.
I’ve been saying for some time that Super Tuesday — the day 14 states, American Samoa, and Democrats Abroad hold presidential primary elections and caucuses — is the decider for who is viable and who is not in the Democratic presidential primary race.
After mixed results in four early states, the field is down to four main contenders: Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. After today’s voting we’ll see if Bloomberg and Warren remain viable. We’ll see if Bloomberg’s late entry coupled with spending hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money will get him in the game. We’ll also see if Warren’s ground game of political organizers is relevant to our modern politics. The expectation from national media and polling is the race will sort into a confrontation between so-called establishment or moderate Democrats backing Joe Biden, and the non-Democrat progressive Bernie Sanders. I suppose readers know all of that by 4:20 a.m. on Super Tuesday when I’m writing this. I hope there is a clear winner after votes are tabulated.
My plan for Monday did not include dealing with friends and neighbors freaking out over the possibility of a Sanders nomination. What I’m hearing in Big Grove Township is mostly fear that if nominated, Sanders would lose the general election, that he wouldn’t gain the support needed to prevail. Folks were urging support for Joe Biden, who is an equally flawed candidate. My chips were all on the table long before yesterday. The Iowa Caucuses are over and I stood with Elizabeth Warren with no regrets. I made another financial contribution to Warren’s campaign last night and drank a shot of whisky over ice cubes made from the Silurian Aquifer. What a day!
If we review who’s left in the Democratic primary, the top tier is comprised of septuagenarians I ruled out early in the process. I felt we needed new faces to breathe fresh air into the meandering beast the Democratic Party had become. Regretfully, none of the new faces who entered the race had staying power. Some of them, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke, rallied around Biden last night in Dallas, Texas.
In addition to it being freak out Monday by the lake, a number of high profile Biden endorsements were released in advance of today’s voting, including Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer and Susan Rice. Biden is winning the endorsement game with eight current U.S. Senators, 21 former senators, and more than 50 current U.S. Representatives. A question we have to ask ourselves is how much do endorsements matter in 2020? They certainly contributed to the freak out phenomenon going on around here.
When asked, my friends said they would support and work for whoever is the Democratic nominee at the national convention this summer. If it’s Biden or Sanders, they are concerned about losing the general election. Nontheless, to a person they will support our nominee. I don’t know if I talked any of them off the ceiling yesterday because this freak out is not about reason or logic.
What was disappointing was the statement one person made that this was not the year for a woman to win the presidency. If not now, then when, I asked. If we don’t nominate a female for president, there will never be a female president. Their arguments, based on fear of losing the general election, did not hold water.
Maybe Trump was right to focus on Biden in the first place. If that’s who we choose over reasonable and serious objections, Republicans have a well developed plan to win against him. That’s not a case for nominating someone else, I’m just saying.
Today voters will decide who moves forward. It’s now or never for Bloomberg and Warren, assuming Sanders and Biden have reasonable showings. The worst that could happen is the electorate is not of a single mind about who should be the nominee. That would drag the process out for the rest of March when we could be consolidating around a candidate. That’s a flaw in Iowa going first: in 2016 and 2020 we did not produce a clear winner.
I’m ready to get beyond Super Tuesday as soon as the votes are counted. There’s a lot to be done in the coming months and we need to get after it. Hopefully the freak out will abate and we’ll know where we stand. Perhaps that’s too reasonable a wish in the new era of politics.
Today I planted Belgian lettuce. There is nothing particularly “Belgian” about the seeds. According to my maternal grandmother it is called Belgian lettuce because it is planted March 2. It’s the tradition and that’s that.
I planted arugula as well because when everything is mixed together in a salad it will taste great. I planted:
Lettuce
Mesclun Mix of Seven Varieties, Ferry-Morse, 40-80 days.
Journey Home 
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