This January I’m thankful to have gotten back into the writing groove so quickly. I finished the first draft of my book and am a third finished with the first major edit. The narrative and language keeps getting stronger. If I did nothing else, that would be an accomplishment.
I managed to get outdoors for my 30-minute walk every day but one. In past years I struggled to get exercise during winter but I remedied that. Among other things I remedied was sleepless nights. After using artificial intelligence to generate some ideas, I developed my own process to fall asleep and stay asleep until it is time to get up. I’ve now been getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night.
Reading seven books this month was in line with my plans. February should be another good month, especially if it stays cold.
Friday I attended a visitation for a friend’s spouse. The older I get, the more I feel a sense of loss regardless of how long or how well I knew the deceased. Luckily several other people I knew were there and we were able to talk about more than a few common things. We could go on living.
The current schedule is to start the first garden seeds indoors on Feb. 7. The year is rushing toward us with unrelenting fury. A lot remains to be done before spring’s promise arrives.
On Monday, Feb. 2, beginning at 7 p.m., the Iowa Democratic Party precinct caucuses begin the trek to the 2026 midterm elections. We will talk about issues, sign candidate nominating petitions, elect members of the county central committee, and pick delegates to the county convention. In the turbulence that has been the last 12 months, it is difficult to predict turnout. As a precinct captain, I am concerned about that.
It seems obvious our politics is moving away from political parties. A person does not need to be a Democrat to be outraged by the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Likewise, showing up at a memorial or demonstration is speaking up against our government in what can be a non-partisan way. The caucuses are where the rubber meets to road in politics, and if people believe they no longer need a political party it has consequences.
One of my favorite movie lines is from Casablanca, in which Captain Renault says, “Major Strasser has been shot… round up the usual suspects.” From years of working in local politics, I know most of the usual suspects who will show up on Monday night. Here’s hoping they and others do. Regardless of who shows, we will get the engine rolling toward the midterms.
A group of us met to do a walk through of the elementary school where our group of seven precincts will hold caucuses. All of us have been working on Democratic politics for a long time, including one person who started during the 1972 Iowa caucuses. Experienced hands can make the process go smoothly. The weather is forecast to be warm, our leaders are energized. It should be a good night.
Family lore was we were kin to June Carter Cash, who was married to Johnny Cash. We had common family trees in southwest Virginia and for years, I called her a “shirt tail relative.” I descended from a line of Addingtons and so did she. I had an hour before having to get to the kitchen to prepare dinner so I typed in the ChatGPT chat box:
Genealogy question: I am descended from a person named Thomas Jefferson Addington who lived in Wise County, Virginia. He was my great grandfather. Family lore is June Carter Cash (spouse of Johnny Cash) also has an Addington from our area in her family tree, that she was or is descended from Addington line. What do you know about that and what are ways for me to learn more.
Long story short, AI determined, with additional information from me, that Cash was either my fourth cousin, once removed, or fifth cousin depending upon how the actual family tree branched out. By knowing my line traced back to William Addington and Margaret Cromwell, a founding family of the Trans-Appalachian frontier, and with the large language model’s vast access to public records, it took hardly any time of back and forth for it to draw this conclusion.
The key piece of the puzzle, which AI did not have, was a book called The Stallard Connection: A Family History edited by Nancy Clark Baker, Gladys Julian Stallard, and Margaret Russell Stallard, published in 1981. These women did legion work to assemble the information in this 900-page record of names, births, marriages and deaths, along with photographs and stories. It has been sitting on my book shelf since Mother gave it to me.
I lacked the ability to put the pieces together on my own. Artificial intelligence was helpful in that regard. After six rounds of back and forth I comprehended what years of studying the book and talking to relatives couldn’t effectively explain: What was my family tree and why was it important in history. At the end, I asked AI to write a narrative of the Addington-Cromwell part of the family tree. In less than a minute it produced the following.
William Addington and Margaret Cromwell: Founders of the Virginia Addington Line
The Addington family in southwest Virginia traces its beginnings to William Addington and his wife, Margaret Cromwell, who stand at the head of nearly all documented Addington lines in Scott, Wise, and surrounding counties. Though the surviving records do not reveal every detail of their lives, enough evidence exists—supported by county records, family histories, and consistent descent patterns—to place them firmly among the early settlers whose children helped populate the Appalachian frontier.
William Addington was likely born in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, probably in Virginia or the Carolinas, during a period when families were steadily moving south and west in search of land. His wife, Margaret Cromwell, came from a family name that appears frequently in early colonial and frontier records, suggesting established roots and connections. Together, William and Margaret formed a household that would become the nucleus of the Addington presence in the region.
By the closing years of the eighteenth century, the Addington family was part of the great westward movement into the upland counties of Virginia. At that time, Washington County, Virginia encompassed a vast area that would later be divided into several counties, including Scott County. It was into this evolving landscape of shifting boundaries, newly formed communities, and frontier conditions that William and Margaret raised their children.
Their sons and daughters grew to adulthood during a period marked by land clearing, subsistence farming, church formation, and the establishment of local governance. Records and later family histories consistently show that William and Margaret’s children married into other early families of the region, forming kinship networks that provided stability and continuity in an otherwise demanding environment.
One of their sons, William Addington, born circa 1784, carried the family line forward by marrying Sarah Stallard, a member of another prominent early family of Washington (later Scott) County. This marriage not only continued the Addington name but also cemented ties between families who shared geography, labor, and responsibility for shaping the early community.
Through these descendants, the Addington family became firmly established in southwest Virginia. By the early nineteenth century, multiple branches of the family were present in Scott County, and later in Wise County, appearing in census records, land transactions, court documents, and church memberships. These records reveal a pattern common to Appalachian families: close proximity among relatives, repeated given names across generations, and a gradual westward drift as new land opened.
The importance of William Addington and Margaret Cromwell lies not in public prominence but in continuity. Their legacy is measured in generations rather than monuments. From their household came farmers, soldiers, musicians, and community members whose lives intersected with major events in American history, including westward expansion and the Civil War. Notably, different branches of their descendants would eventually include both local families of Wise County and the Addington line that produced Maybelle Addington Carter, linking the family to a broader cultural legacy through her daughter, June Carter Cash.
Family histories such as The Stallard Collection, written close to the people and places they describe, preserve this origin story with a clarity that official records alone cannot provide. While gaps remain—as they do in all early genealogies—the consistency of the Addington descent from William Addington and Margaret Cromwell across multiple lines strongly supports their role as the founding ancestors of the Addington family in southwest Virginia.
In this way, William Addington and Margaret Cromwell stand at the threshold between colonial America and the Appalachian frontier, their descendants carrying forward not only a surname, but a shared regional history rooted in endurance, kinship, and place.
-o0^0o-
I take everything artificial intelligence says with a grain of salt. However, from my study of the Trans-Appalachian frontier, family history, and American culture, the narrative as written is not wrong. I need to set it aside and take another look in a week or so. By the way, I did prepare dinner on time.
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere I am on the internet and January has been a month of learning to use it. This post includes my experiences with some of the artificial intelligence tools, including Rufus on Amazon, AI Overview in Google Search, and ChatGPT. The brief comment I would make about any of these tools is we must change how we interact to be effective. This isn’t your parents’ Google search any more. Without doubt, AI made my life better. We must ask better questions.
WordPress uses artificial intelligence on its help screen. The paradigm is simple. Define your role and frame what you want. For example, “I am a site admin and don’t have a lot of programming experience but I’d like to set up a new site and transfer my domain to it.” WordPress AI frames its response in terms of the request, often using the same language. This is ultra simple and important to every AI platform. That is a key learning point.
My main learning this month has been to ask any artificial intelligence tool better questions. Google and other search engines have trained us how to use them for decades. The old ways of entering a few related nouns or a simple phrase do not serve us as well going forward. Because AI has been trained on an enormous portion of human-written text, part of our queries must include minimal framing of questions. For example, I wanted to use a photograph as the basis for ChatGPT to render it in the style of Claude Monet impressionism with oil paints. It did a reasonable job of doing so. This kind of role-defining for our AI interface seems subtle at first, but more so it seems fundamental to the new approach needed to maximize our value.
Amazon sells stuff and uses an AI platform named Rufus. Even here query framing matters. The same type of role playing is important, yet roles are likely similar for everyone — we mainly visit Amazon to buy stuff. I asked Rufus, “Based on last year’s purchases, what are my buying patterns?” It listed Brand Loyalty, Shopping Style, and Household Profile. It identified me as someone who uses the account to shop for myself, incorrectly identifying me as a single-person household, which surprised me, since my spouse and I have linked accounts. Rufus also identified me as “price conscious but quality-focused” because I bought some Made In cookware. It also noted I am an active cook, based on buying Mexican oregano, canning jars and rings, and the aforementioned cookware. I likely used Rufus the least of the AI platforms mentioned.
With the broad database inherent in large language models like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview, our queries must include a way of paring potential answers down. To make our intent clear, state our goals for the tool, and most importantly set constraints. One of my favorite constraints is to write “I have 30 minutes to work on this so give me the top 3 findings,” or something similar. If I know something about what I am querying, I mention that as well. AI can provide its reasoning, and there’s no harm in asking for it.
I am still learning, yet with the long discussions I have with ChatGPT, the tool remembers what was previously said within a single chat. This is something I tend to forget when my follow up query is a week or two after the initial one. One evident thing is I need a better skill set when it comes to querying AI tools. Eventually, better AI queries will become part of a standard tool box for using artificial intelligence.
Photograph on Jan. 26, 2026.AI rendering of photograph.
The truth or reality behind these two images is unknowable. I believe in a Cartesian view of humanity in which the phrase “I think, therefore, I am” indicates the isolate self, reaching to others that potentially exist, through the veil of Maya. The minute I captured the photograph on my mobile device, it left the plane of reality. The artificial intelligence rendering of it in a Monet-style impressionism is merely a variation of the original. The underlying reality of that sunrise is no longer knowable. Even I have only memories that have decayed for eight hours as I type this.
These images reflect an actuality I remember, yet not reality. Shakespeare famously had Hamlet say, “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Perhaps Shakespeare assumed the mirror was a neutral conduit for reality. For purposes of an Elizabethan play making that assumption may have been necessary and fodder for audiences who knew otherwise to react.
Images such as these have a use in social media and blog posts. Those who followed my blog the last few months often saw sunrise photographs at the header. I post them on BlueSky, as well. They represent a shorthand of my experience on that date at a specific time. They are largely throw-away images even if some of them are quite fetching. The point I am making with this photograph and its rendering is a new day is dawning in which we can be better humans with new chances. That, too, is an interpretation, something worth hoping for.
I’m a bit infatuated with the image rendering capabilities of artificial intelligence. Of the five photographs I tried, only two were keepers, and then only for long enough to post them on one of the platforms I use. While that moment in which I captured the rising sun is no longer knowable, it was as real as anything can be. My Cartesian model notwithstanding.
The following was sent to U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, and to U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
I watched the videos of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Major news media verified what I saw are real footage that depicts the killing of two U.S. Citizens who were no threat to federal agents. Good and Pretti were exercising their constitutional rights when federal agents killed them.
This can’t go on.
As our U.S. Senator I expect you to do something to prevent additional killings like this. I don’t presume to tell you how to go about that. The measure of whether you succeed will be the de-escalation of tension in states where federal agents have landed to address the administration’s concerns about immigration, including Minnesota and Maine.
As a U.S. Army veteran I am appalled by the apparent lack of training and control of these federal agents. Now is the time to put your experience in politics to work and do something most everyone can agree is the right thing to de-escalate these tensions.
Thank you for your service and for reading my note.
Should they respond, I will post the response below.
On Thursday, Feb. 5, Senator Joni Ernst emailed the following response to my letter. It is posted in its entirety.
Dear Mr. Deaton,
Thank you for contacting me about federal immigration enforcement. It is important for me to hear from folks in Iowa on matters like this.
No doubt Americans have firm disagreements on immigration, but it is essential for all of us, regardless of our political beliefs, to remain united behind a shared desire for the best future of our country. While I support Americans’ right to protest peacefully, no disagreement justifies violence.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data show Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) law enforcement officers have faced a dramatic rise in violent incidents and threats while carrying out their duties over the past year. Reported figures include a 3,200 percent increase in vehicle-ramming incidents, an 8,000 percent increase in death threats, and a 1,300 percent increase in assaults against officers.
These alarming trends underscore the critical importance of enforcing existing laws intended to secure the border and preserve the integrity of our immigration system. During prior administrations, ICE encountered fewer violent confrontations, in part due to many apprehensions occurring within the controlled environment of local jails after criminal aliens had been detained by local authorities, enabling safer ICE transfers. In the last several years, however, cities including Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, have adopted “sanctuary policies” directing local law enforcement to disregard ICE detainer requests and decline arrests involving individuals otherwise eligible for removal. Sanctuary policies have complicated federal enforcement efforts and, according to DHS data, coincide with a sharp rise in threats and attacks targeting immigration officers.
As you know, federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, fatally shot Renee Good and Alex Pretti. While the U.S. Senate lacks jurisdiction over any pending investigations involving the actions of individual ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel, please know I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is currently leading the investigation into the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti.
Following these incidents, White House Border Czar Tom Homan reaffirmed the administration will keep immigration enforcement efforts targeted, prioritizing public safety and national security threats in our communities. In Minnesota, federal officials have been working with state and local partners to improve coordination, strengthening the safety and efficiency of immigration operations for law enforcement officers, community interactions, and detainees.
I recognize folks have strong feelings about these incidents, and I understand the emotions these tragedies evoke, as any loss of American life carries immense grief for families and communities. As a member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I have the opportunity to engage with my colleagues on these topics. On February 12, the committee will hold a public hearing with leadership from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, CBP, and ICE. This hearing is available at https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/ .
Should legislation on related issues come up for a vote, I will keep your thoughts in mind. I also welcome any additional insights or concerns you may have, as I always enjoy hearing from Iowans.
It wasn’t a whim from the great beyond that led me back to William Carlos Williams, but the practical matter of finding shelf space in my writing room. Williams has been important most of my adult life, beginning at university. In the mid-1980s, when I lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a home to Grant Wood, I wrote:
Also on my mind was the idea of the professional who wrote or was creative as a sideline. Grant Wood was one, teaching at the University of Iowa to support his painting. I thought of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens who worked as a physician and insurance executive respectively. I thought about David Morrell, whose class in American fiction I took while he was writing the books First Blood, Last Reveille, and Testament.
At that point in my development as a writer, while working for a large transportation and logistics company, I was determined to be the transportation equivalent of William Carlos Williams. I proposed to find life in what surrounded me and reduce it to words and images. I stole moments away from family and work for creative endeavor that was and remains important to me.
It is time to re-read William Carlos Williams.
The practice of medicine made Williams’s poetry possible—not as patronage, as I once thought, but through its effect on how he saw things and worked. Being a physician enabled a perspective that shaped his native impulses to write about what he saw, and what language he used. It enabled his resistance to the literary professionalism of his time, rendering him outside mainstream literary culture of the 1920s and ’30s.
What I like most about Williams is his attention to a certain kind of reality, the same reality that underlies much of my own writing. Williams clearly influenced me, although I never felt the security of a profession that he manifested in his writing.
Returning to Williams in my eighth decade is partly to better my understanding of him, and partly to revisit some of the decisions I made about the role of reality in my writing. I decided to start with these four works: Spring and All, Selected Poems, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, and In the American Grain. I read them all previously and hope for new insight. Let’s see where this goes… does my early read of Williams hold… or does it not?
Following is an excerpt from my autobiography in progress. This passage was written to transition from our first year of marriage into what would come next. I reprised the self I exhibited at university to come up with this at the time.
I embarked on contemplation like during my undergraduate years when I would wander the campus considering Cartesian philosophy, unaware of the real world in which I walked. From this came my ideas about consumerism, professionalism, and the courage to live a moral life.
Consumerism was part of the American condition in the 1980s. It still is. I felt we ceased concerning ourselves with production of goods and values to spend more time consuming and planning for consumption. When we took paying work to earn money, we wrote off that invested time as a necessary precursor to the consumptive act. We sacrificed for work, and in the process, alienated ourselves from the main trajectory of our hope and dreams. This was unfortunate for my writing. I concluded, there is a wealth of experience around us. The time we spend doing something is worthwhile. The knowledge we gain from our experience comes at a high price…for we give our unique life for it. We should cherish our memories, and use the gift of life wisely, for there is only one for us. Being a consumer was not what I had in mind.
This is important because delayed gratification was necessary for a career. Paraphrasing Thoreau, by seeming necessity we were employed. Looking back, in 1983 we made a decision, and that led us to a different question: “What’s in it for me?” In part, this is necessary for a family to get started. In the end, I came to reject this question in favor of others. I felt we could have gone on working for the University of Iowa and built a life based on that. We were called to do more than just live a life in Iowa City.
The interweaving of the job and the experience of the job was also important. It suggests a perspective on work we can own. By accepting and nurturing this reality, I set a wedge between our family and my job. To some extent, this wedge later kept me from full acceptance in the social network of transportation’s elite. To the same extent, I was the better for it. It was a subtle, but important aspect of our decision-making.
Many themes from my journal carried through until today. I wrote about the “professionalism of modern life,” drawing a distinction between a person’s moral life and the profession they chose. I explored this in the following passage. I used the word “woman” yet have always considered the ideas relevant to everyone. Perhaps I was influenced by the first female supervisors I had had since beginning paid work in high school.
In Going Home I hope to address some of the aspects of the women’s movement that seem pertinent to Davenport. The specific issue I feel most competent to address is the way women I know have used professionalism as a vehicle for personal liberation. They have taken jobs as librarians, bankers, real estate agents, doctors, and dentists as a form of self-maturation, a way of establishing themselves in the world. This professionalization of modern life is one of the most pernicious forces I see present in the world. Not because women are the ones who are becoming professionals, but because the life of a professional is taking the place that was left by the exit of religion. The modern person looks at life as a moment in the sun, a time in which we fill the days with activities.
Creating a profession can fill a life with activities that remove us from our hopes and dreams. I called it pernicious because of how a professional lives within a society of friends. There are networks of people and within the context of the network, their lives are defined. To a degree we all do this, but it is no substitute for living a moral life. More than many another life, it can be dictated by things that lie outside the individual. The professional can commiserate with his peers, saying, “oh, I have been through that experience,” and that might be the end of it. The professional has a way of looking at the world provided, and the tendency is to look no further for a perspective. Like so many other things in modern life, this is self-alienation: a degradation of personal experience.
I viewed professionalism with the behaviors and artifacts around it as having the potential to be a hollow shell. The danger was that if a person had no moral compass guiding them along life’s path, the results personally and for society would be detrimental. At the same time, professionalism was another way of subduing our native culture.
We accept certain behavior in the context of working as a professional that we may not accept at home. Professionalism enabled people to concern themselves with “my career” instead of with the greater society. In retrospect, I did not see the society this represents coming. Given the veneer of professionalism, something would fill the empty middle.
During the time I was preparing to write Going Home, I spent considerable time researching the idea of living a moral life. As humans, we must have one. While I did not write that book, its research helped establish who I would be as we entered the second year of our marriage.
This week was the one-year anniversary of the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump. In my view, he and his sycophants can not be forgiven for the pain and suffering caused in 12 months.
Long before he was president I knew of an association between him and Jeffrey Epstein, convicted human trafficker, child sex offender, and serial rapist. I didn’t know the extent of Trump’s involvement, just that the two of them associated freely. Apparently more specific evidence of his transgressions and potential crimes are available within the Department of Justice which refuses to release the Epstein files even though the Congress passed a law requiring them to do so more than 30 days ago. Trump is unforgiven for his stonewalling.
In dismantling USAID, the U.S. government is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths among people who relied on the largess of the world’s richest country. According to Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, hundreds of thousands of people have died for want of USAID. Trump is unforgiven for his inhumanity.
On July 4, 2025, Trump signed H.R. 1, a budget reconciliation bill that did untold harm to families across the country. Among other things, it cut $793 billion from Medicaid and $268 billion from the Affordable Care Act, resulting in over 10 million people becoming uninsured; and $200 billion from SNAP putting 5 million people at risk of losing their food assistance. Trump is unforgiven for his cruelty.
Also in H.R. 1, Trump increased the budget for immigration enforcement by $170 billion and unleashed an undisciplined and violent DHS on several states. The violence, including against U.S. citizens, is difficult to fathom. At least one death caused by DHS has been ruled a homicide. Yesterday, his immigration thugs invaded the State of Maine. Trump is unforgiven for his violence.
In the U.S. Army we called poor operations a goat screw, and certainly the attempted implementation of DOGE by Elon Musk was that. He cut funding in places like our local public library only to have the courts rule his actions were illegal. This back and forth left librarians in a quandary about how to maintain service during the tumult. The same holds true for other institutions cut by DOGE. Trump is unforgiven for his chaos.
One of the blessings I feel in my life is the heroism of the Greatest Generation in World War II. More than 50 million civilians died during the war, along with more than 20 million military personnel. Out of that conflict the world came together, forming the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Since then, Trump has been tearing those institutions apart, despite the many benefits. Trump is unforgiven for being a war monger.
Is there any positive side to this? The only one I can see is I know who I am, and this isn’t it. It is motivation to make change in our government which could then take action to change society for the better for everyone. It’s past time to get to work.
Journey Home 
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