Author: Paul Deaton

Categories
Writing

Solon Station

Solon Station
Solon Station

SOLON— Solon Station is a place to grab the special and go when on Main Street at lunch time. At 1:40 p.m. they were still serving— a cheeseburger basket for $6. I took a seat at the worn wooden bar and checked in on my mobile phone while waiting for the bartender/cook to prepare my plate.

Cheeseburger Special
The Special

Pub grub is about our local culture and Solon Station typifies the genre. It is industrial food service fare, cooked fresh, and served up with one’s favorite beverage. The menu is a limited selection of appetizers, sandwiches and pizza. There is a Sam Adams sandwich sign featuring the daily special, which in good weather can be found outside on the sidewalk.

Back Bar
Back Bar

I asked the bartender whether the increased competition for food and beverages on Main Street was affecting business. She said they were doing okay.

Neighborhood bars are a place where the idea of fun is “cold beer on a Friday night. A pair of jeans that fit just right. And the radio on.” Solon Station is a place to go for karaoke, buckets of beer, cup nights, and when one needs a break from the fam. Check out their Facebook page for more reasons to visit.

According to the bartender, the back bar is the original and is lined with bottles of popular spirits like Templeton Rye, Patrón, Jameson, Tanqueray, Stolichnaya and Maker’s Mark. Nothing too fancy here. Solon Station is an example of what remains of neighborhood bars in the area.

Sunlit Alcove
Sunlit Alcove

Sunlight illuminates an alcove near the entryway— the place to hold a meeting, or play cards on a slow afternoon. It is reminiscent of small bars and restaurants more likely to be found in Europe than a bedroom community like Solon.

As the saying goes, “come visit Solon Station for great service, cold drinks and hamburgers so good, you’ll become addicted.” In more than twenty years of living outside of town, I haven’t made many trips to a bar. After yesterday’s visit, Solon Station may be a more frequent stop on this native Iowan’s itinerary.

Categories
Home Life

Wintry Trip to Town

Snowfall in Big Grove
Snowfall in Big Grove

LAKE MACBRIDE— The sound of scraping entered the house and overpowered the muffling noise of the furnace fan. It will require work to get to town for a meeting. At least the snow plow did its part.

The driveway is snow-packed from the car tires, so whatever fell last night won’t be easy to remove. Work was planned for indoors this morning: to write a story for the newspaper. Snowfall is a happy coincidence that will break the quiet and be part of today’s process of fresh air, physical labor and writing. It’s as good as it gets.

Whatever funk descended upon me in December is gone. The new jobs, the promise of spring, and hope that a sound financial platform will enable better writing portend great things. Here’s hoping I’m equal to February’s promise.

Solon During a Snowstorm
Solon During a Snowstorm
Categories
Home Life

Another Winter Storm

Seeds Have Arrived
Seeds Have Arrived

LAKE MACBRIDE— People have been talking about the coming storm like they never experienced an Iowa winter. Yes, we should be safe… but what else? On wintery days, I drive Jacque in to work so she doesn’t have to broom the snow from her automobile after her shift. While back at home waiting, I’ll make a dinner to be heated up when she returns, and begin garden planning. There are about 50 kinds of seeds including 36 purchased this year to be plotted out on a chart, but first, dinner.

Pecos Pasta
Pecos Pasta

We make chili in big batches. To use some of the leftovers, we make a dish called Pecos Pasta. It is simple. Take a cup of dried elbow macaroni and prepare according to the instructions. Drain the noodles and pour back into the pot. Add one quart of leftover chili, one cup frozen cut corn, and heat until the mixed begins to boil. Turn the heat down to low simmer, and top the dish with shredded sharp cheddar cheese. Cover with a lid and heat thoroughly until the cheese melts.

I’ll drink a beer with Pecos Pasta when we have them, but last year’s case is long gone, so water will suffice (Note to self: put a quart of cider in the refrigerator). A quick and tasty meal that satisfies as the wind howls outside.

Only two dates are sacrosanct in our garden: March 2 and July 25. The former is when “Belgian lettuce” is planted, or as soon as the ground can be worked thereafter. The idea is to broadcast last year’s leftover lettuce seeds and see what germinates. I don’t know why it is called Belgian, except that’s what my maternal grandmother called it. The latter date is when to plant the fall crop of turnips. In our garden, turnip greens are a primary crop used to make soup stock by the gallon. Besides those dates and crops, everything else need looking up and planned. There is plenty of work to keep me busy until the end of her shift.

This morning I began working on our income taxes, and it looks like we sent in enough early payments last year to receive a small refund. I report all of our income and pay taxes on it— some don’t, but I do. As a self employed writer and farm worker, my business tax rate is 15.3 percent of 92.35 percent of income. For example, if I earn $1,000 dollars, the tax rate applies to $923.50 and amounts to $141.30, or 14.13 percent of the total.

The Internal Revenue Service began doing this to capture people who work like employees, but are considered to be independent contractors by the company from whom they are compensated. Seems to me they could be chasing some of those corporations who make the big bucks and pay no taxes instead of folks like us trying to get by. In the end, our overall federal tax rate, including the business tax, was 4.7 percent of total income, so not much to complain about here. It is well worth it to participate in our society.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Where Will We Secure Our Food?

Garden After First Snowfall
Garden After Snowfall

LAKE MACBRIDE— A common belief about our food system is it’s a struggle between conventional and organic farming. Or, another way to frame it is industrial versus sustainable farming. To embrace any one of these over the others is a step down a slippery slope. According to the much hated agribusiness Monsanto, “the biggest problem with the debate over ‘organic’  and ‘conventional’ crops is that it suggests there are only two ways to grow food: a ‘good’ way and a ‘bad’ way. The reality is far different.” If a person knows anything about agriculture, it is easy to agree.

The global food system cannot be accurately characterized as any one thing because a transition to a sustainable food production model, one that can feed a global population expected to reach 9.6 billion people (potentially within my lifetime), is more complicated than any either/or scenario. In order to produce enough food, agriculture has to be diverse and scalable, but locally replicable. What does that mean? What it doesn’t mean is a bunch of Iowa farmers getting rich by exporting corn and soybeans overseas.

My friend Ed Fallon, organizer of the Great March for Climate Action, posted on Facebook, “it’s important to find ways to keep one’s food budget affordable while not violating one’s principles. For me, a combination of growing my own food, buying directly from local farmers, barter, and shopping at my local grocery store… keeps my food budget on par with what most people spend.” Whatever one thinks about Fallon, in this simple post he describes a food system that is sustainable, replicable and could be scalable.

A simple truth is that consumers, including home gardeners like me, should consider a food system that favors locally and sustainably produced food. The idea that we should exclude anything from our food system represents a step toward the extreme we shouldn’t take. Freshness and seasonality play an important role in developing a local cuisine and cuisine engenders life and makes it worth living.

The thing is, the cuisine I develop in Big Grove may be different from what I would develop anywhere else on the planet, based on what’s available. Fallon’s example relies upon supplementing one’s personal effort to secure food, and includes a commercial retailer. The one he mentioned in his post is a sponsor of his webcast program, but I don’t believe it matters a bit to substitute any retailer who is at the end of a world-wide food distribution system. In my case, I use several grocery stores to secure food I can’t get in my garden or through bartering. What matters more toward sustainability is decreasing reliance upon any one source of food when stocking the pantry. As Fallon indicated, it is possible to do so without violating one’s principles.

When we consider the meaning of my tagline, “sustainability in a turbulent world,” a local food system is as important as anything else we do. We have to eat to live, and while food obsession would not be a good thing, our outlook toward a local food system is as basic a need as anything. It is better to be inclusive of everything because as we develop a system of production, outside purchases, bartering, preparation, preserving and cooking food, the potential exists to sustain ourselves more locally. From a global perspective, each iteration of such a process is what makes a local food system scalable. This more than any one agricultural process or crop production system.

I’ll leave the macroeconomics of food production, packaging and distribution to others. What is more important is how individuals leverage what exists to improve the quality of their lives: a complex web of interdependence that is often forgotten, but remains as important as anything during our brief lives on the planet.

Categories
Work Life

On Minimum Wage

At Sunset
At Sunset

LAKE MACBRIDE— The talk of raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, as President Obama suggested in his state of the union address, is from another country. He means well, but at $10.10 per hour, a life is hardly sustainable, even with overtime. What would better serve low wage workers is lifting the entire economy, combined with reducing regulations that hinder the efforts of small scale entrepreneurs. Where I live, the future is not about wage rates as much as it is about putting together a life that may include a job or jobs, but is not dependent upon them. Sustainability will be about creating local answers to the question, how shall we live?

The current discussion about wages is not really about sustainability. It is about boosting income for lowly paid workers. There are arguments that posit a relationship between increasing the minimum wage and reducing poverty. If increasing the minimum wage is an anti-poverty program, then I’m all for it. Especially if we agree that the action would not address the overall struggle people have to exit working poor status. Unless our elected officials index any potential increase in minimum wages to a formula that tracks buying power, all that will have been accomplished by raising the minimum wage is to throw the working poor a bone for today’s soup pot.

When I was a child I asked my father if we were poor. He said being poor was an attitude, and he did not consider our family to be poor. As I wrote elsewhere, “I had a normal city childhood among people who never had much money, but had a well defined culture centered on family, work and church.” It’s the presumptions about how today’s culture is defined with regard to the minimum wage that drive me mad.

Robert Reich has written that wages should track the economy. He said, if people have money to buy things, the economy does better. Government plays a role in stimulating the economy by making monetary payments to individuals through social programs, giving them more money to spend. Yet, most people I know don’t look at living with the same macroeconomic view Reich espouses, and are not fans of consumerism. Everyone wants to be a global strategist, but few want to apply equal skill and energy to improving life on a more granular level.

The analysis local people use, one that starts spending the new money that an increase in minimum wages would generate on education, training and the like, is ridiculous. People who are working poor, or living from paycheck to paycheck, already know how they will spend any extra money that comes into a household budget. The annual five or six thousand dollars we are talking about, in many cases, has already been spent on loans, medical bills, using credit cards, and incurring other forms of debt that are part of how people make cash flow without adequate income. To say that a $2.85 per hour increase in minimum wages would enable the working poor to exit poverty and join the middle class reflects a basic lack of understanding of the situation.

Advocating for an increase in the minimum wage is okay for those who are financially established, but it is a middle class progressive perquisite. Where I have trouble with it is in differentiating myself from the rest of the people on the planet as someone who is better than anyone else. I don’t do everything I would in the community; I wish I could do more. I also believe someone has to be working on a granular level to find a sustainable, replicable answer to the question, how shall we live? There is not much pay in doing that.

Categories
Writing

First Story Filed

Newspaper Office
Newspaper Office

LAKE MACBRIDE— The newspaper where I proofread offered me an opportunity to write a few articles on city council and school board meetings. I filed my first story yesterday morning and it was more work than I anticipated. By the end of a 5-hour writing session, my shoulder was sore, and I was reminded that journalism requires a different kind of energy and intensity. One down and four more to go during an initial, mutually agreed trail period.

I attended the Iowa City Community School District Board of Directors meeting on Jan. 28, and took notes while making a voice recording of the meeting. Getting to the meeting and attending took the better part of four hours. What surprised me was how little work actually got done at the formal board meeting. There was no substantial discussion, only ratification of work that occurred outside the meeting.

The operations committee meeting that occurred after the formal board meeting appealed to my inherent process orientation. It went on for more than two hours, and I felt engaged the entire time.

The budget assumption presentation was particularly enjoyable and I interviewed the district CFO afterward. Because of story length constraints, the budget information ended up on the virtual newsroom floor. What I noticed about the Iowa City school district is they are spending money like they have it. Because of the strong tax base they do have it.

We’ll see how this project goes, but I hope to become more efficient in producing stories, to reduce the investment of time, and to get better at writing news articles. The financial contribution will be, as my editor described it, “pocket change.” It will be another check predestined to go toward sustaining a life on the Iowa prairie.

Categories
Juke Box

Juke Box: Angie

Categories
Milestones

On Pete Seeger

LAKE MACBRIDE— Pete Seeger died on Jan. 27, 2014. He influenced my life, and so many others. Others have written obituaries, including the New York Times and Singout!

I’ll remember him for his song Abiyoyo, and so many others.

Categories
Writing

Meditation On Writing

Bison at Yellowstone
Bison at Yellowstone

LAKE MACBRIDE— Journal and blog writing is an open book filled with blank pages and freedom. There are few rules, and readership is limited, even when posting publicly on the Internet. Sometimes a writer wants to be read, and others, not so much. There is a formative urge that drives us to understand our world through language. Not everything we write is suitable for framing, in fact, most isn’t. We are driven to write, and occasionally to be read.

In the darkness of night, by the glow of the laptop, it is quiet. Mistake not this silence and solitude for separation from society. What we sense of the world is from constant acculturation beginning before our birth. If we write well at all, it is because of engagement in a world beyond the walls we see. There are no walls, there is no other, only the one of which we are all a part.

Categories
Living in Society

Tobacco Control in 2014

Gauloises CaporalLAKE MACBRIDE— When I was in the military, I bought my first and only packs of cigarettes. I tried a few puffs, and never had another. Tobacco control is a complicated issue that affects much of society, and has little to do with one person’s choices about tobacco use. It is one where tobacco control advocates need to stick together.

Tobacco products are readily available to anyone who wants them today, despite restrictions on sales to minors. Tobacco is a legal, addictive substance, the use of which is widely accepted. The disease treatment costs of tobacco use have been quantified, and tobacco use presents a tangible, persistent and preventable threat to public health.

Both of my parents smoked tobacco when I was a child, and until the Iowa Smoke Free Air Act was passed in 2008, the air in many public places contained tobacco smoke. We don’t hear as much about tobacco issues these days, despite the ubiquitous presence of tobacco products in retail stores. The legal struggle between tobacco companies and tobacco control advocacy groups has continued, but has largely gone silent.

In Iowa, the coalition of tobacco control advocates includes the American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Stroke Association, American Lung Association, the Iowa Tobacco Prevention Alliance (ITPA) and Clean Air For Everyone Iowa Citizen’s Action Network (CAFE Iowa CAN). I was previously a board member for the latter organization. The work of this coalition is focused on securing government funds for a comprehensive tobacco control program.

In a December 2013 letter to legislators, the group wrote,

Smoking cessation efforts are essential public health initiatives that both directly and indirectly impact our entire state.  Statewide programs that are funded through the Division of Tobacco Use Prevention and Control can help reduce the enormous financial toll attributed to tobacco related use, not to mention the 4,400 Iowans who die each year from usage. Annually, tobacco related disease costs Iowans nearly $3 billion, of which $301 million is billed to Medicaid. To substantially reduce this expenditure, the CDC recommends Iowa appropriate $36.7 million annually to properly implement a comprehensive tobacco control policy.  However, last year the division only received $5.3 million.

Governor Branstad’s budget proposal would reduce expenditures in the tobacco control program by $75,000, with reductions targeted to printed educational materials and social media funding. It is a small percentage of the total, and depending upon who the governor appoints to fill the vacant director of the Iowa Department of Public Health position, the proposed budget should have support. It is a modest budget compared to the CDC recommendation.

What is at issue during the remainder of the 85th Iowa General Assembly is regulation of e-cigarettes, which are currently unregulated. Tobacco control advocates want e-cigarettes regulated as a tobacco product, something the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would like as well. The tobacco industry is working toward creating an environment where e-cigarettes are socially acceptable, are widely available, and can be used everywhere.  At the beginning of the legislative session, the issue was largely off the radar of legislators who were focused on the youth prevention aspect of this issue. Tobacco control advocates are expected to change that, and are trying to pass legislation they can support.

There are at least three bills pertaining to e-cigarettes written by the tobacco industry (companies like Altria and RJ Reynolds). In parentheses are the tobacco control advocates’ concerns with the legislation as written. The bills were all introduced by Democratic legislators:

HF 2034, which will define e-cigarettes as other tobacco products, regulating them like most other tobacco products. (In this bill, e-cigarettes are not rolled into the Iowa Smoke Free Air Act).
SF 2038, prohibits the sale of e-cigarettes to minors. (The bill doesn’t define e-cigarettes as other tobacco products).
SSB 3101, prohibits the sale of e-cigarettes to minors. (The bill doesn’t define e-cigarettes as other tobacco products).

Like with any legislation, the pro- and anti-tobacco control lobbyists will advocate with legislators to get favorable wording in any potential law. I have lived in Iowa long enough to know that the probable outcome of the legislative initiative may be for Iowa to wait until the FDA rules on e-cigarettes, then deal with the regulatory issues. I’m not hopeful the legislature will pass any of these three bills this session. Preventing the tobacco industry wording in them would be a victory of sorts for tobacco control advocates.