It was a long time getting to Letters from the Country by Carol Bly. My copy is a discard from the Lake County Indiana Public Library where I picked it up from a used book shelf. We moved back to Iowa in 1993, so the purchase was more than thirty years ago. Attracted by the idea of letters from southwestern Minnesota, where my family bought land from the railroad in 1883, the book failed to stand up to time when I recently read it. If its insights and comments were relevant when it was written in the 1970s, such relevance escapes the reader in a time of internet connections, processed food, sports utility vehicles, and 24/7 right wing talk radio.
There are some truths buried in this time capsule of a book, particularly about how rural people interact with each other. It is a learned protocol of avoiding difficult things in life. Things like problems that have complex solutions that are not obvious, or telling someone “thanks for sharing ” immediately after they spill their guts about something intensely personal that affected them greatly. Away from the distractions of large cities, there is a sense that people have to live with each other and therefore don’t tend to burn any bridge with someone they might see in the neighborhood, or at the convenience store, library, or American Legion. For the most part, this means avoiding talk about politics unless one knows the politics of everyone in the room.
People don’t take well to being told what to do or how to live their lives. Bly’s book is full of that and partly, it’s why it seems outdated. Times have changed. She writes about bringing intellectual pursuits from the city to rural areas, which is a noble idea. Today, folks just get into their SUV and drive to Chicago to see the latest exhibition at the Art Institute. Or they fly to New York to see what’s on Broadway. For the time being, arts and the humanities are taught in rural public schools. The annual cycle of K-12 school musical, dramatic, and literary productions are part of the fabric of rural society. The direction our politics is heading may remove these topics from curricula in the near future to focus on skills needed to get a job, raise children, and get along well enough to not rock the boat of social mores.
Some of the letters mention the frequency with which rural folk write their congressman. Not writing is a sign of a decent level of satisfaction in the community. That’s why, Bly wrote, rural folks don’t write that many letters. If current elected officials seem out of touch with reality, it’s not because they don’t know what’s going on with citizens. They choose to address their concerns while adding a layer of indoctrination in the new ways of a national conservative culture. Why talk about poor air and water quality — real problems in Iowa — when citizens can be scared by tales of bogeymen laden with fentanyl illegally crossing the border with Mexico. The latter pays a political premium.
I didn’t dislike Letters from the Country. I do want to say more than “thanks for sharing” to the author. What I will say is it is good to read Bly’s analysis of what’s wrong with country folk and their way of life. Maybe it just needs updating. That would be a fit project for someone to take as long as it is not me.
“There comes a time maybe every six, eight generations where the world changes in a very short time. We are at that time now, and I think what happens in the next 2-3 years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next five or six decades.” ~Joe Biden, Nov. 2, 2023
In the midst of political turmoil — both at home and abroad — it’s now or never that we rescue our falling democracies. The window to preserve and advance Democratic ideals is closing as authoritarianism envelopes the land. As Biden indicated above, the next couple of years will be pivotal.
I plan to do something in the next year to help Democrats win elections. Even though state legislative races in my districts are likely lost causes for Democrats, there is much good to be done elsewhere. If nothing else, I plan to work to re-elect Joe Biden and push Christina Bohannan further than she could make it last cycle. That’s a starting point. The problems we Democrats face are deeper than that.
People don’t have common sense. Common sense itself has flown to warmer climates leaving a settled landscape where industrial methods of crop production yield fuel and food hardly palatable for humans without feeding it to some food processor or biological intermediary like hogs, chicken, sheep or cattle. We have become proselytes of the party of “what’s in it for me.” As long as our interests are protected in politics, we are satisfied to turn our heads to avoid what else we might see.
We may well be at the point where traditional methods of winning votes are no longer relevant. When I knocked doors during the 2020 election, to a person, everyone had made up their mind whether they were voting, and for whom. They also had decided how they would spend their political time during the campaign. Everyone was influenced before I got there, and it wasn’t by another person like me who knocked on their door previously. More than any time I recall, broader influences are at work in society and they impact our elections. In 2020, Donald J. Trump beat Joe Biden by 128,611 votes in Iowa. I look around my neighborhood — dominated by Republicans I know — and this margin of victory just doesn’t make sense. Without understanding the forces at work in society, it’s difficult to know what we should do to bring common sense back to Iowa voters.
I’m on the county party’s central committee mostly because no one else in my precinct will take the seat. The second seat from our precinct was not filled for lack of a volunteer at the last caucus. I missed the last two central committee meetings, mostly because even though they were on my calendar, I spaced them off. I used to be diligent about keeping appointments, yet when it comes to a political organization that lost relevance to common voters like me, attending meetings is not a high priority. The organizational structure is not going away, yet it needs to gain relevance and soon. There is less than a year until we vote in the 2024 General Election.
What is it possible to do to save Democracy from the authoritarians? I don’t know yet intend to find out.
Trail walking on the state park trail on Oct. 30, 2023.
Content creator is an upcoming profession that employs many according to a Washington Post article titled, “Millions work as content creators. In official records, they barely exist.” Authors Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz assert, “Millions have ditched traditional career paths to work as online creators and content-makers, using their computers and phones to amass followers and build businesses whose influence now rivals the biggest names in entertainment, news and politics.” Goldman Sachs forecasts this sector of the economy could generate half a trillion dollars annually by 2027. It is a thing!
Not so fast! I don’t see many financially stable folk living on revenues generated from content they create for a website, streaming service, substack, or podcast. Roughly 12 percent of participants in a recent survey of content creators indicated annual earnings of more that $50,000, according to Harwell and Lorenz. 46 percent said they made less than $1,000. It may be true some are earning a living as content creators, and some earn a lot, but rivaling the biggest names in entertainment, news and politics? Please.
Cutting the cord from a single employer job and venturing on our own is possible. I did it more than once in 55 years in the workforce. To me, breaking loose is mostly about developing a sustainable lifestyle without working a “big job.” It is individualistic and empowering. It relies on others much differently from working for a large company. It will drain your personal bank accounts more quickly than you can log into Twitch. It is something of a dream.
When I retired from a transportation and logistics career I started a small consulting firm with me as the only employee. The idea was to take contracts to do work in the peace and justice movement that would help pay bills and become a platform for bigger, better things. To supplement my income, I took any kind of transactional work, including newspaper freelancing, farm work, jobs through a temporary service, and others. While I had the organization, I found it nearly impossible to have enough jobs in the pipeline to stay busy and generate needed income. In the end, I retired on my Social Security pension with Medicare as my health coverage and do my content creation on that financial platform.
A piece of advice I gave someone pursuing a content creator career was to get 10 years in with a company or companies that paid/withheld Social Security taxes. With a potential worklife of 50+ years, spending ten of them in a company that participates in Social Security seems very doable without infringing on creativity. I also said they should wait until full retirement age before filing to collect benefits so as to maximize the monthly pension payment. The response was predictable: “Is Social Security even going to be around?” Who knows if Social Security will change from it’s current process? There is not enough money to pay full benefits after 2033 without Congress changing something. Medicare begins to run out of money in 2031. So many people rely on these programs, it’s hard not to image the Congress doing something to secure them for the future.
At our core we seek a way of living that meets our needs. While we don’t seek to join a cult, we do have an impulse to gravitate toward support groups that are not necessarily just family. Utopian movements of the 19th Century were communal in nature. (The Library of Congress lists some). I think of Brook Farm, the Shaker Community, Rappites (a.k.a. The Harmony Society), and the Amana Colonies when I think of utopian communities. They followed the impulse to break away from broader American culture and join together to better meet common needs. Longer term they were all unsustainable, yet people seek this form of community today in different ways.
My experiences with the millennial generation revealed a different kind of pursuit of being part of a community. Large group activities were commonplace when millennials were in their 20s. They persisted through the years. While members found what today seems like traditional jobs with a commute, workplace, payroll, and benefits, they bonded together in a way that had a separate trajectory from a single person-single job career. It was antithetical to the rugged individualism of myth and legend, especially after 1981. With good employment being harder to find, it is no wonder people cut loose and become individualistic entrepreneurs in the context of a larger group. Being a content creator can be attractive in a society that has comparatively few outlets for creative impulses. Like my small consulting firm, content creator is an umbrella organization to do many different things.
Being a content creator is viable for some. The challenge is to develop enough income streams so as to have a financial base to pay quotidian bills like rent, groceries, transportation and utilities. The temptation is to take a big job to accomplish this. At the same time, if done well, a big job demands a full share of one’s daily energy. I wrote about this in my unpublished autobiography.
We had a discussion with a friend of hers about how she had to give up her artwork after taking a job at John Deere. She was tired after work, raising a child, and found little time or desire to make art. I knew if I took a full time job, I might find myself in the same situation.
An Iowa Life, unpublished manuscript by Paul Deaton
I found myself in this situation several times, notably when in 1984 I began my career in transportation and logistics. Being creative and managing creative content that generates income are both difficult when working as an exempt employee in a management position. One makes a choice to live this way. I’m not sure being an effective content creator is possible in this type of work environment.
I think of the 46 percent of content creators who in the survey earned less than $1,000 per year. It is impossible for an American to live on this amount of money without significant support from others and other institutions. Some books have been written explaining how to do this. Yet what seems evident is turning the dream of freedom from economic needs to pursuit of content creation in a transactional society is possible only with more boilerplate opportunities to earn income than there are. Finding and developing such a community is the necessary first step many content creators stumble into. Recognizing it up front would save time and provide a better path to success.
What I’m describing is utopian, although not the way the 19th Century utopian movements were. Maybe a better descriptor is “communal.” Whatever one calls it, it is a dream until proven viable and sustainable in a transactional society. If it were easy, we’d all be content creators.
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson is a must read for anyone following the contemporary discussion of conflict between the liberal consensus and movement conservatism. If you don’t know what those two things are, Richardson takes the reader through how they came about, beginning with the founders. She explains why the discussion is important to American democracy. The liberal consensus has been under assault since Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president in 1981. To a large extent, conservatives have been successful in beating back the liberal consensus.
The benefit of reading this book is it takes political things we mostly know about and frames them in a narrative that both explains them from Richardson’s singular perspective and makes sense. To the extent she is preaching to the choir of readers who already understand the liberal consensus, how it came about, and why wealthy Americans are dismantling it, the book stopped short of expectations. There could be more calls to action to satisfy us. However, the important aspect of the book is that most modern adults haven’t lived through the Reagan years and their aftermath. It serves as a primer for millennials and more recent cohorts who now comprise the nation’s largest living adult generations. The book is not directed to boomers, although we will read it, but to younger Americans. They will have to take action to defend or re-invent the liberal consensus simply because my generation is dying off.
Part 2, The Authoritarian Experiment, is an important narrative about the rise of Donald Trump and a popular history of his administration. Many words have been written by others about this, yet what I found lacking in other accounts, and Democracy Awakening addresses, is a basic timeline and explanation of the shit show that was the Trump presidency. Many people stuck their heads in the sand from the November 2016 election until the present because they found it incredible that Trump’s outlook and minions would prevail. Indeed, with the election of Joe Biden as president, forces of authoritarianism were held back.
Democracy Awakening was a fast read, I finished in four days. I recommend it to anyone concerned about the future of our democracy. It seems unlikely the book will be the definitive history of that period. At the same time, it is what we need to inform our political action during the 2024 election cycle and beyond.
I also recommend subscribing to Richardson’s daily substack, Letters from an American. It is a blend of history, journalism, and analysis of current events. It is one of the sane bits of writing coming out of the explosion of disinformation in our media sphere.
The election is three weeks away and it will be anti-climactic in Big Grove Township. There are two candidates for two open school board seats and that’s it. The incumbents are competent people and they earned my support this election. We haven’t decided when and where we will vote, yet in all likelihood it will be at our regular polling place on election day.
Our household is following the news and we’re looking for some positive light. It has been in short supply. It seems the Middle East War will expand beyond Hamas and Israel despite President Joe Biden’s competent management of American support for Israel and the Palestinian people. Expansion of the conflict is not certain, yet there are so many players and so many years of hostilities and conflict, dodging a broader war seems impossible. It is not a good, short-term sign that Israelis are turning against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right wing divisiveness at this moment.
In the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans have yet to elect a speaker after removing Kevin McCarthy on Oct. 5. We have until Nov. 17 to pass a budget or the government will face another cliff and need to pass a second continuing resolution. I’m okay with the Republican plan to pass individual spending bills instead of an omnibus or minibus bill. The clock is running out on their ability to do so and gain U.S. Senate agreement.
Iowa is literally turning into a sick place to live. Our leading causes of death (2021 data) are heart disease and cancer. Iowa is ranked 16th among the states in deaths from heart disease and 24th from cancer. Since 2021, data from the Iowa Cancer Registry indicates Iowa has the second highest incidence rate of cancer in the country. With harvest in full swing, particulate matter in the air is at high levels, afflicting people with respiratory diseases. A report released yesterday indicated Iowans’ incidence of COPD is higher than the national average. Rates of chronic lower respiratory diseases in Iowa are the fifth leading cause of death.
It is important to keep hope alive, despite the challenges of doing so.
Barack Obama at the 2006 Harkin Steak Fry. Photo by the author.
Editor’s note: This post is from Nov. 10, 2008, written after helping close down the county Democratic party campaign offices. It captures the hope of that time. Hope remains, but is a mere ember these days. Electing Barack Obama president changed my life and those of many others.We must keep hope alive.
Even I got teary eyed after the election this year, only it did not hit me until I was southbound on Highway One heading to help the county party clean out the offices. And there I was, passing the recently harvested bean and corn fields, large round bales of corn stalks resting in the fields and tears started.
A political life that had been stolen from us and was regained on Nov. 4. The theft began in 1968 with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Then Nixon took the 1972 election from George McGovern using underhanded tricks that ultimately led to his resignation from office. Carter, he was better than the alternative, but his one term presidency was more a staging ground for the rest of his life as something else. The Reagan years were darkness with a veneer of pleasantry on it: good for Republicans, but not for the country as well being never trickled down to where we lived. When Clinton was elected, a new kind of politics came into being led by James Carville, Karl Rove, Mary Matalin and their ilk. It purloined our best hopes for unity as a nation and pitted red states against blue states, Republicans against Democrats, liberals against conservatives. It is difficult to forgive Clinton and Bush as their presidencies were cast in this same mold that led us to our current life in society. If we thought life was better under Bill Clinton, it was because we had become used to settling for less than what was possible. On election night something changed.
I went to bed shortly after the speeches. Obama already appeared weighted down by the impending responsibilities. At work the next day, I heard the backlash and denial of co-workers with nothing good to say about the outcome of the election. But now, with some rest and clarity, I am beginning to believe that we can change the course of our society and its place in the world.
What brought me here was the trip to Colorado where the support for Senator Obama was evident everywhere. It was reading the nightly posts from political friends on Twitter and Facebook, the messages indicating that we were registering a record number of voters and winning in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Nevada. It was the web site FiveThirtyEight.com which told the story that I was hearing, that we would have a big win in the electoral college. Above all, what caused me to believe in the possibility of change again, was the abundant evidence that I had become part of something bigger than myself that sought to serve the greater good. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” This realization caused the tears to come.
And as we began the work of putting the artifacts of the election away, some to storage, some back to the candidates, some to recycling and to charity and some to the landfill, Ed and I shared the remainder of a bottle of whiskey we found in the office. We drank from the same cup. Ed pointed out that veterans get a free breakfast at HyVee on Tuesday as recognition for their service on veterans day. And so the campaign is put up, and the volunteers and staff continue with their lives and the real work of changing the world begins. We can all be a part of this.
There is political action in the county this weekend. The university homecoming parade was Friday and the county Democratic party had an entry. Today is the prep day to set up tables and chairs at the fairgrounds for the annual fundraiser. Sunday is a day for canvassing, followed by the annual fund raising barbecue. The planning committee is bringing in a popular podcast creator from Missouri as the keynote speaker. While there will be mostly political positives this weekend, my participation is limited: I bought a ticket to the fundraiser yet won’t attend except to drop off 32 servings of dessert. That will be that.
I’m losing interest in local politics. Beginning in 2016 my precinct turned Republican. In addition, interest in Democratic politics is not what it was in 2004 when the electorate was fed up with President George W. Bush. The elections of 2006 and 2008 were glory days for local Democratic politics. We won our congressional seat and the presidency. Republicans began clawing back majorities in 2010 and today dominate the area. A constant barrage of conservative media has many voters tuning out of politics. I’m not, yet am at a loss of what I can do differently to turn the tide given the general lack of interest.
My plan is to finish my term as a central committee member, then relinquish the position to whomever shows up at the January 15 precinct caucus. We already carry one empty seat on the committee. Mine will make two as I have low expectations anyone will step up to the position. It is a thankless job.
It’s not that I’m uninterested in politics more generally. The disconnect is in the diminished role politics plays in daily conversations with friends and neighbors. There is plenty of work to be done just to live as a retiree. A person has to set priorities. Voting and staying informed about issues will remain a high priority. Canvassing for the party and attending central committee meetings and other party functions will not.
Our local weekly newspaper published its annual report this week. The Solon Economist presently distributes 640 copies per week. For a city of 3,000 with a surrounding population of another 10,000, that’s not a lot. It reflects the general loss of interest in civic affairs and the economics of competing with online information sources. The publisher wrote an article in which he suggested we contact our member of congress regarding HR4756 The Community News and Small Business Support Act which was introduced in Congress in July. I dutifully wrote a message to my congressperson raising awareness of the bill. As long as there is a local newspaper, I’ll continue to subscribe and try to help. It is an important part of our local community.
My turn from politics has been a long time coming. It is the last external commitment from which I turned since retiring. Instead, I’m focused on preparing the garden for winter. I hope to plant garlic next week and organize the hardware of cages, stakes and fencing for winter storage. We wrote a task list for the house and there is more to do than resources currently permit. That’s not unusual when we’ve lived here 30 years. I know what happened to the rest of my interests outside our home: life changed and politics changed along with it. I plan to accept the change and live life as best I can.
Banned Books Week, sponsored by the American Library Association, is ongoing. At the same time, states like Montana, Missouri and Texas severed ties with the 150-year old institution as part of a public debate over what and how to teach about race, sex and gender. Like with public attitudes about vaccines and climate change, the ALA is caught up in larger social movements driven by ignorance and stated religious and racial preferences. Banned Books Week took on a different meaning this year.
Books about LGBTQ people are becoming the main target for book banning. Citizens don’t want their children exposed to that in any form. A large percentage of complaints about books come from a small number of highly active adults. Their impact has been nationwide.
The larger question is whether public libraries will survive. If the content of K-12 school libraries has some basis in how sex education, race and gender roles are taught, public libraries are designed to serve the broad needs and interests of the citizenry. To understand whether public libraries will survive, we must look at how they originated. The following 2015 article by Ben Young from the Solon Public Library website describes our local library’s history originating with a young women’s club and voluntary funding through donations.
In the mid 1960’s, to serve all members of the community all year round, the Solon Young Women’s Club established a library in Solon. In its earliest days, the library was beneath the downtown bandstand. It had no windows, and whenever it rained, water would run from one side of the library to the other. The library was funded from cookbook sales, local businesses, rummage sales, the City Council, food sales, and a stage show. Most of the books were purchased or donated by individuals around the Solon area.
The library was staffed with volunteers from the Solon Young Women’s Club and the Solon Study Club. At first, the library was only open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, usually in the afternoon. To promote the use of the library, it would also open its doors whenever the Solon High School had band concerts on Wednesday evenings.
In 1967, the City Council voted that the library would come under the sponsorship of the City of Solon and thus, the Library Board was created. A year later, the library moved across Main Street into the old print shop that is now Solon Swirl. A few years later when that building was sold, the library relocated to its third location which was the former Solon jail and firehouse on Iowa Street.
Space soon became limited with the growth of the community and the Library Board initiated plans for a new building. After several years of fundraising and planning, the Solon Library moved to its current location at 320 West Main Street. The building had its grand opening ceremony on June 24, 2001.
The conversion from volunteer staffed and publicly donated funding to government supported was significant. In addition to providing a stable financial platform and human resources management system, a direct connection to elected officials that didn’t previously exist was formed. Support for our local library continues to remain strong, but the new political element could mean loss of funding and other restrictions as political winds change. They are changing in many parts of the state and country.
In my interview with School Board Member Jami Wolf, we discussed the fact that book banning has not been elevated to the board. Hopefully teachers, librarians and parents will work through any questions about library resources without such escalation. That’s as it should be.
Cutting off the ALA is a mistake for states that choose to do so. The ALA provides a modest amount of funding for programs, and does good in underfunded libraries, especially in rural areas that have trouble affording books, computers and other library resources.
Iowa and other states should resist severing ties with the ALA for political, cultural or policy reasons. By establishing a dialogue with the ALA, states could resolve issues for which the organization has resources to help. In a time when every community is concerned about costs, severing ties with the ALA would be akin to cutting off one’s nose to spit one’s face. That is this years message during banned books week.
Chicago Skyline from McCormick Place. Photo by the author.
Signs along Interstate 88 in Illinois mark the Ronald Reagan Memorial Highway. Officially designated as the Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway, whatever it is called, it is one of the better-maintained, low traffic roads in the Midwest. I made a day-trip to Chicago using I-88 on Tuesday. Partly because of that highway, a day trip to Chicago by automobile is possible.
I drove all the way from Big Grove to the DeKalb Oasis without stopping. The DeKalb oasis was constructed at milepost 93 in 1975, prior to the route’s designation as I-88. Our family has been stopping there since we lived in Lake County, Indiana in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Besides clean rest rooms, gasoline sales, and multiple fast food vendors, what I appreciate is the long circuit a walker can make around the indoors perimeter of the building. It is air conditioned and great for stretching after a long time sitting in an automobile. I also use the stop to consult maps and plan my final drive into Chicago, a necessary step for good navigation into the city.
The tolls in the highway’s name are now paid without stopping. A driver sets up an account on line, cameras take a photo of the license plate, and the charges are automatically billed to credit card. It is a pretty slick deal. I wonder how the labor union felt about losing toll-booth attendants with this convenient automation.
Apparently, once a person is a Chicago commuter, they are always a Chicago commuter. Listening to the rapid-fire WBBM radio traffic report “on the eights,” I picked up an accident near the Park Ridge exit close to Touhy Avenue, right where I was going. I made my exit from I-294 on Balmoral Drive and finished the drive on back roads. Why yes, I feel pretty good about it and was on time to my destination.Years of commuting into Chicago sticks with a person.
Farmers were harvesting corn and beans on Tuesday. A lot of soybeans were already in the bin, based on fields I passed. Combines in the field were harvesting beans 4:1 over corn. With temperatures in the upper 80s and no rain, it was a good day for it. The erratic levels of the Mississippi River are causing headaches for soybean farmers. This is go time for soybean barge traffic and low water levels slow traffic. A majority of exported soybeans normally move on the river in October and November.
I couldn’t live in the Chicago area again yet a day trip was pretty satisfying. I don’t know how many more such trips I will make. If they are like yesterday, I won’t mind making them.
While in the kitchen making soup this week, Iowa Public Radio announced new weekend news programming. Someone had to be removed to make room in the lineup. It was sad when they announced it was Fiona Ritchie whose Thistle and Shamrock I’ve been following for many years. She has been a mainstay of my weekend radio listening. The only remaining folk music program will be The Folk Tree with local host Karen Impola who arrived in Iowa from the East Coast in 1990.
Since Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion transitioned and then ended, the statewide public radio station had been cutting purchases of outside programming for weekend listening. Today much of the afternoon lineup is locally produced. Some of the replacement programming is good, others not so much.
I could get my Fiona Ritchie fix by streaming her content, yet that’s not the same as live radio: turning on the radio and accepting what is programmed while preparing dinner or doing dishes. To make streaming work, I’d need a device that connects to the internet with me in the kitchen. We have Wi-Fi, yet I’m not ready to give up radio just yet. It means something for the broadcast to be received live while I’m working.
Most public radio news programs are intolerable. While they mastered a format, the content has been less than engaging. The reporters are too familiar with themselves and less focused on listeners. We did donate our last two used automobiles to Iowa Public Radio, so I feel a sense of investment in what they do. It has not been a happy experience of late.
I can live without Fiona Ritchie like I live without Keillor and the rest of the former weekend lineup. Living today isn’t what it was when we moved to Big Grove Township in 1993. It stabilized, yet I can’t say it’s better. Thistle and Shamrock is one more piece of a past life receding into memory. It’s the part of aging I don’t enjoy. Thanks for the time together, Fiona Ritchie. Best wishes for a bright future.
Journey Home 
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