Category: Living in Society

Politics mostly social commentary.

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Living in Society

2025 in Review

Artificial intelligence rendering from my photo of a woodpile.

2025 has been a crappy year in some ways and a good year in others. On the crappy side, our president is undoing much of the good that has been in place since World War II. He and his collaborators in Iowa are changing society in a way that will have long-term negative effects. On the good side, I stepped back from society to get my own house in order so I can contribute effectively to driving Republicans out of power. The latter outweighs the former in importance.

I don’t know what happened to me during the coronavirus pandemic. I was diagnosed with diabetes mid-2019 and have been treating it by controlling diet. It is working. Things went well before and during the early part of the pandemic, but as I retired from paid work and stayed home more, maintaining my health became a challenge. In 2024, I tested positive for COVID-19 and literally felt like I was going to die. In 2025, I began to turn my health around. I started logging my meals, exercise, and weight on My Fitness Pal. My weight reduced by 12.2 percent and BMI went from 36.8 to 32.3 during the year. During a recent visit to the clinic my practitioner told me to keep doing what I am doing, so I will.

I wrote already about my writing. All I have to add on the last day of the year is I feel more confident than ever as a writer. 2026 should be a good year.

Mine is a world of ideas and reading is essential. I wrote about The Great Sort, which was the first major review of books I collected beginning when I was a grader. In the last year, I donated more than a thousand to Goodwill and the local public library used book sale. There is at least another thousand to go. The important thing about this year’s project is not the downsizing. It is development of a new way to acquire and read books.

Notably, a substantial percent of the 71 books I read this year were checked out from the public library. That was huge, and according to library data, I saved $821 by doing so. How do I get ideas for which books to read? I get newsletters from several large publishers yet a main part of it is by querying the library’s new arrivals on its website. There was more related to reading happening in 2025.

I have been on social media since about 2007. One of the uses is to find new ideas and books I should read. The contribution social media makes is I get real people’s ideas about what to read in the context of their social media account. It is a more solid recommendation than if I knew little about the referrer. Part of this is I take chances on authors with limited distribution of their work. It has been a positive experience.

The best thing about acquiring books to read this year began during the pandemic. The Haunted Bookshop is one of the few remaining used bookstores in the county. Its proprietor, Nialle Sylvan, has changed how I select books and helped improve the quality of writing I have been reading. During the pandemic, the shop’s business plummeted. I felt badly about the situation and asked her to pick $50 worth of books and I’d buy them. That worked out well enough that this year I gave her more information about what I was reading. The last batch of books she picked for me has been so engaging I had to put some of them down because I didn’t want the experience of reading an author to ever end. The writing was so good! That is rare. Long story short is if you can find a bookseller like Nialle Sylvan count yourself lucky.

I want to talk about menu planning in our household in 2025. We do it now, mostly a week in advance. This takes the stress out of daily questions about what’s for dinner. It created an environment where I could focus on developing new dishes, something for which I have ample creative energy. Who knew planning meals could be such a benefit?

In the entry box I asked, “When did I make my first message on ChatGPT?” The machine, which prefers pronouns you/it, didn’t know. More precisely, it replied, “I don’t have access to the exact timestamp of your very first message, but I do have a reliable estimate.” It was in late May this year, according to the machine’s best estimates. Sounds earlier than I thought, but what do I know. That’s why I asked.

I am figuring out how to use artificial intelligence effectively. The reason I use the words “artificial intelligence” is what I am learning on ChatGPT is applicable everywhere ai is used in my world. This includes Google, my bank account, this blog, and a host of other applications. They are not all the same artificial intelligence, but the kernel of getting information I need is a similar process in any of them. It is a helper, although I don’t usually mention I use it in the Twitch chat I frequent because millennials and Gen-Z folk are skeptical of ChatGPT specifically and ai in general. As content creators, there may be concerns about ai taking over the space and putting them out of business. The energy use is a concern as well.

People ask, “What about the energy artificial intelligence uses?” Hannah Ritchie, who I think is brilliant, posted the following around the time I started using ChatGPT:

My sense is that a lot of climate-conscious people feel guilty about using ChatGPT. In fact it goes further: I think many people judge others for using it, because of the perceived environmental impact.

If I’m being honest, for a while I also felt a bit guilty about using AI. The common rule-of-thumb is that ChatGPT uses 10 times as much energy as a Google search [I think this is probably now too high, but more on that later]. How, then, do I justify the far more energy-hungry option? Maybe I should limit myself to only using LLMs when I would really benefit from the more in-depth answer.

But after looking at the data on individual use of LLMs, I have stopped worrying about it and I think you should too. (Email from Hannah Ritchie on May 6, 2025).

For the time being, I will restrain myself by not mentioning ChatGPT on Twitch. That is, unless the chat is about ai, which it was yesterday. In those cases, I drop Ritchie’s name with a quote. Bread on the water.

Things I use ai for are related to living in the real world. How should I organize my workshop tools? How should I manage a photoshoot of a political rally? How can I improve my exercise regimen? Please explain this piece of legislation so I can understand it. Here is my schedule for starting garden seedlings, how can it be improved? How do I solve the problem of binders in a casserole that lacks eggs and cheese? Why does cornstarch get such a bad rap? The machine is quick, its access to information is broad. It uses the same language to answer that I used in my queries. I am convinced the machine has read the work of Dale Carnegie.

I asked about data privacy and the machine gave me good tips about how to use not only their service, but would apply to my internet traffic generally. Things like speak in generalities, be mindful of what you put out there, and how to use controls built into the app to minimize how much of me is out there. So far so good with this tool. I plan to continue.

The good in 2025 definitely outweighed the bad. Republicans are not going to go away, so I need to be ready for the 2026 Midterms. This cycle, I will likely use my new ai helper to be a more effective canvasser.

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Reviews

Book Review: Packinghouse Daughter

Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir by Cheri Register is a book I wouldn’t have found except for patronizing an excellent local used bookstore. They have a deal where you set an amount of money to spend, tell them your interests, and they locate books that match. I have yet to be disappointed by their choices. One of the interests I presented was in memoirs written by female authors. They likely didn’t know the story of Wilson & Company was connected to me in multiple ways.

My father worked in a hog processing facility with a kill floor and everything else mentioned in this book through to the fertilizer processing tanks. He died in a plant accident in 1969. I worked there too, for two summers while at university. I even crawled into one of the large processing tanks to help a millwright fix it, learning about lockout/tagout for the first time. The first part of the book resonates completely with my experience, even though Register was older than I am. It is useful to know this history of Wilson & Company in Albert Lea, Minnesota exists.

Register claims hesitancy about writing the memoir about Albert Lea because it was her father who worked at Wilson’s and experienced many of the issues she mentions. I don’t know who can better tell this story than such a daughter whose father worked there and was invested in the job and packing plant employee community. She did the research and the narrative is better for it. She could have gone easier on herself. Register died March 7, 2018.

I was struck by the description of people moving from farms to the city to work in meat packing. This was true of my family where my maternal great grandparents left central Illinois to live in Davenport in retirement. Four or five of their daughters worked in a defense plant making coats during World War II. My maternal grandmother did, and also worked a stint at the Oscar Mayer hog processing plant where Father and I worked. That cohort is now buried in local cemeteries. This part of the book also resonates with my experience.

An exodus from farming and rural areas continues today as agriculture has grown larger and requires fewer workers because of computer automation and changes in operations. Those who relocate, for lack of a better term, are not choosing meatpacking as a profession — or even as a job. With consolidation in the meatpacking industry and increased automation, there are simply fewer positions available. It is hard, dirty work as well. As a result, the job-driven movement from rural areas to cities no longer exists in the same way it did in Albert Lea during the period covered by this book.

I found Register’s narrative deeply resonated with my experiences. It is must reading for anyone interested in the specific history of Wilson & Company or in meat packing culture. With changes in the industry happening post-WWII era, that culture would disappear without books like this.

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Living in Society

Closing the Historical Society in Iowa City

Exterior of the State Historical Society of Iowa Research Center in Iowa City, Iowa, on Saturday, July 26, 2025. The closure of the State Historical Society Research Center in Iowa City was announced earlier this month, and its doors are set to close at the end of June 2026. The building, also known as the Centennial Building, houses millions of national and state records and is set to transfer its records to the State Historical Building in Des Moines amid funding issues for the Iowa City location. At the time of its closure in June 2026, the building will have been in use for 70 years. (Mitchell Brinkmeyer/The Daily Iowan)

It appears the State Historical Society of Iowa and the Department of Administrative Services will proceed on their plan to close the State Historical Society building in Iowa City to the public on Dec. 31. An update from Mary Bennett can be found here.

Despite the Oct. 24 temporary injunction issued by Johnson County District Court Judge Keever, based on a lawsuit filed by historians, archivists, donors, and community members challenging the shutdown and relocation; and despite an agreement between the University of Iowa and the State of Iowa to provide access to some artifacts; little has happened to resolve the conflict. According to Bennett, the best solution would be to reverse the decision to close the facility. Except for the outcome of the lawsuit, that seems unlikely to happen.

I am interested in Iowa history. I infrequently used the Iowa City facility for research, despite its proximity. In fact, it’s been more than 40 years since I set foot inside. I have little idea what content exists there whether related to my writing or not. One of the potential consequences of the closure is some historical records could be transferred to other institutions or deaccessioned under State Historical Society policies. That means, a researcher would lose access to what is currently available and it would be difficult or impossible (if they were destroyed as part of deaccessioning) to locate artifacts once housed in the Centennial Building.

I take the closure of the Centennial Building as an assault on our history, something Republicans in the government appear to feel is okay.

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Living in Society

Old Subscriptions

Covers of three Time magazine issues.

The mover’s box was quite heavy as I pulled it from the stack. Inside were mostly Time magazines from 1968 until 1972. At first they were addressed to Mother, and when I left for university, the mailing labels had my name. Teenager me thought the subscription would go on forever.

I divided them into two stacks: one in which I had some interest, and another in which I didn’t. I have interest in too many of them, so that stack will be divided again. The endgame is to pick a dozen issues to put in my trunk of souvenirs from that part of my life. I don’t want to repeat the two hours of sorting I invested on Friday by culling them again at some future date.

There were two distinct aspects of my K-12 and university education: what I learned from teachers in school and what I learned from the mass media, including television, radio, newspapers and magazines. Time had a peculiar view of national culture.

In the March 20, 1972 special issue on “The American Woman,” editors asked riveting questions such as, “What is it like to be Jacqueline Onassis?” and “How did Pat Nixon keep her cool while knocking back all those 120-proof mao-tai toasts in China?” It also provided updates on the failing marriage of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki, Julia Child cooking at the Smithsonian Institution, and how French actress Catherine Deneuve expressed being liberated.

The issue reported, “As often as not, the New Woman was a masculine fantasy.” Leave it to Time to define women in terms of how men view them. There was the obligatory (for Time) image of Hugh Hefner with two women in short shorts.

One of the photographs in the cover story was of “Girls awaiting Miss Teen-age contest call in Houma, LA.” Beauty pageants have changed in recent times, yet they have not gone away. By Time’s depiction, the “new woman” was not so new, after all.

Somehow I survived having a subscription to Time. I’m certain I leafed through each issue as it arrived in the mailbox. I will likely get upset over the coverage of the other two issues in the photo: The story of The Band because Time reportage was part of the establishment and therefore suspect. The story of William Calley because they gave him the attention of two covers when he should have been in prison. I likely want those reactions. That’s why I kept the artifacts in the first place.

I knew I had these back issues of Time. I did not look for them even a single time in writing my memoir of the period. Like other media of the day, it was background noise shaping me in ways I did not understand. To the extent they reported on a “national culture,” Time failed. They were responsible for creating an environment where Ronald Reagan could thrive, and ultimately responsible for the election of Donald Trump as president. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her Dec. 12, newsletter, about the president’s recent speech, “It seemed to mark an end for the Reagan Revolution whose ideology Trump has pushed to its brutish conclusion.”

Most of my issues of Time are bound for recycling. In retrospect it was a subscription I should have canceled before I did.

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Living in Society

Politics and Public Health

Photo by Jimmy Chan on Pexels.com

I recently met a friend for lunch. They read the chapter of my autobiography about time we shared on the county board of health, ending in 2010. Rather than continue a discussion on email, we decided to meet in person. Ambient temperatures were above freezing and that made for a sloppy day. The restaurant parking lot was full of puddles.

One of our joint projects was working to reduce toxins in the environment across the state of Iowa by advocating with other boards of health. As chair, I wrote a letter to every board of health in the state about reducing reliance on coal as a source of energy. Likewise the two of us made our case to several boards of health in person. It is difficult to know the impact we had, yet projects to build new coal-fired power plants in Waterloo and Marshalltown were killed by the public utilities after we began our campaign.

One board of health said they wanted to keep politics out of it. Is public health political? If you have any familiarity with a health department, you know it is. My friend emailed me the following after our meeting:

When we were talking about the folks in the other Health Departments I was about to say something then forgot. It was about “politics” er. the fact that public health is political — it is a social science and reflects competing interests of those who would choose to pollute with impunity in the name of their god-given right to pursue profit in their business, and the interests of the public that require clean air, water, and a livable climate.  

If we don’t these days believe public health is political we never will.  But, at the time, I thought it important to remind people of that simple fact because so often (not unlike now) people want to say things like, I understand you want to control or study or advise about…. but don’t make it political.  Yikes.  And that’s the whole story.

I think the word “political” was a precursor to “woke.”

There is nothing political about mobilizing a public health work force to deal with an infectious disease outbreak. Likewise, there is nothing political about providing clean water by using drinking water standards to regulate what is and isn’t in public water supplies. These procedures and regulations don’t come out of the blue. A political process is behind them.

Part of the board’s work was to lobby the Iowa legislature on multiple issues. I spent most of my lobbying time working to make Iowa a tobacco-free state with clean air. We also wrote letters to the editor on timely topics. When the Smoke-Free Iowa Act was signed into law, banning tobacco smoke in most public places, through effective political lobbying, the gambling industry got an exemption for casinos. We had to compromise to get the bill passed. Oh, yeah! It’s political.

Our local boards of health have been charged with leading the effort to prevent disease and improve physical, mental, and environmental health in the community. Few members of the public attended our public meetings or offered comments. Citizens should be first in line to attend these meetings and offer solutions on how Iowa can improve its public health system. Until they do, volunteer members of boards of health do the best they can to promote health and prevent harm. We even had that printed on coffee mugs.

I don’t know if it’s political but there is one area that could improve: More licensed medical practitioner volunteers are needed to supplement the work of the public health system. In an era when government spending on public health can be expected to decrease, volunteers enable us to get more work done within the existing public health infrastructure. For the number of per capita medical practitioners in Johnson and Linn counties, our performance in this area has been disappointing.

So yes, of course, public health is political. It’s the nature of the beast, even if it is rooted in a time when there was a broad consensus about what government can do to further the public good. You know, back when we were Iowa nice. Sadly the sun set on that a long time ago.

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Living in Society

A Bitter Weekend

Driveway cleared of snow on Dec. 7, 2025.

By late Sunday night, I was ready for the deathly weekend to end. An acquaintance my age, with whom I worked at a transportation and logistics firm, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. His obituary was in the Sunday newspaper. There were the shootings in the news: Brown University in Rhode Island, and Bondi Beach in Australia. Then came the apparent murders of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer in California. It was public death overload.

It didn’t help the bitter cold kept me inside most of the weekend. I cleared snow from the driveway, but that’s about all the time I was outdoors. The saving grace was the visit of our child beginning Friday. They couldn’t make it home on Saturday because of the blizzard. They left Saturday morning, then turned the vehicle around, and headed back when the Interstate proved to be impassible. The extra night was a blessing for parents.

Despite the deaths, things weren’t all bad this weekend.

  • The bean soup and cornbread tasted good and was well-received Friday night.
  • I finished reading The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon. It’s the kind of novel I enjoy reading, set in a time before electronic devices dominate society.
  • I read Adrienne Rich’s 1991 book of poetry, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991. I found it hard to access yet there was at least one relatable poem.
  • Preparing enchilada sauce began a process of re-thinking how I make it. I tried substituting a slurry of all purpose flour, vegetable oil, and spices for arrowroot as a thickener. This approach has potential. More to come.
  • Used an aging can of pumpkin puree to make pumpkin bread. The results were so-so. Next time, I’ll use pumpkin I preserved myself.
  • I drafted another chapter in my autobiography.
  • Boxed up a donation of books for the public library used book sale.

Ambient temperatures warmed to the upper-20s on Monday, which meant a break from bitter cold. I’ll work to make this week better than the bitter weekend just past. Hard to keep a positive outlook sometimes, yet we must.

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Living in Society

The Health Care Abomination that is America

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Pexels.com

Dec. 15 is the deadline to sign up on the ACA marketplace for health insurance effective Jan 1, 2025.

When I left the company and career of 25 years, securing health insurance was an issue. That was July 2009. There were no easy options, so I stayed on COBRA coverage.

The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) gives workers and their families who lose their health benefits the right to choose to continue group health benefits provided by their group health plan for limited periods of time under certain circumstances such as voluntary or involuntary job loss, reduction in the hours worked, transition between jobs, death, divorce, and other life events. Qualified individuals may be required to pay the entire premium for coverage up to 102% of the cost to the plan. (U.S. Department of Labor website).

COBRA was expensive, so I looked around. I found the Iowa Farm Bureau offered a health insurance plan which was less expensive with reasonable coverage. More than farmers bought their plan, and so did my spouse and I. It wasn’t the best policy, yet it was good enough and met our needs.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law on March 23, 2010. When the ACA marketplaces were organized, I completed an online form and found that with subsidies, I was eligible at a lower cost than we were paying the Farm Bureau. I signed up for a plan and stayed with the ACA until I was eligible for Medicare.

Today, with Medicare supplemental insurance costs, our health insurance bill for two people is about $935 per month, not including dental or vision coverage. I looked at buying a plan for dental, yet the cost of paying regular care out of pocket was less expensive. The same with vision. Eye treatment related to a health condition was covered under the health plan. The cost for this is slightly less than what I was paying for COBRA in 2009.

The poverty guideline for a household of two is $21,150, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Our income is more than that, yet many struggle to bring that much home. Health insurance on such income? Without government help people can’t afford it.

All of this serves as a long build up to the significance of today.

I previously wrote the following about deadlines to sign up for health insurance on the ACA marketplace:

To be covered Jan. 1 you have to be enrolled by Dec. 15 and have paid your first premium. At this late date, I doubt Congress is going to act on the subsidies. In fact, last week, the U.S. Senate rejected extension of ACA subsidies proposed by both Democrats and President Trump. Here is from the website:

December 15: Last day to enroll in or change plans for coverage to start January 1. January 1: Coverage starts for those who enroll in or change plans by December 15 and pay their first premium. Open enrollment continues until Jan. 15 but there would be a lapse in coverage if you wait until then.

For people who don’t have health insurance now, the Dec. 15 deadline is meaningless. Even the Jan. 15 deadline can be difficult without the means to pay for a policy. There is a lot more to say on this topic, yet Tick! Tock! Life is going by at the speed of an eighteen wheeler with the hammer down.

I agree with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders it is time to guarantee healthcare for all in the United States.

According to the most recent data, the United States spends $14,570 per person on healthcare compared with just $5,640 in Japan, $6,023 in the United Kingdom, $6,931 in Australia, $7,013 in Canada and $7,136 in France. And yet, despite our huge expenditures, we remain the only major country on Earth not to guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right. (It’s time for the US to guarantee healthcare for all, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, The Guardian, April 29, 2025).

President Obama was handicapped by the influence of insurance companies while he negotiated the ACA. It is remarkable any healthcare bill at all was enacted into law. Step-by-step, Republicans are stripping away the meat of the ACA, and will continue until all that is left is its bones, which they will grind up for fertilizer. Eliminating the ACA subsidies is just one part of a long plan to remove all the good things the ACA accomplishes.

If you look at my personal journey on retirement health insurance, it was only with Medicare that my worries about how I would pay a medical claim were addressed. Before that, my privileged status as a white male who was able to find a job with health insurance enabled me to find care. The care was never what I wanted, but I didn’t go broke because we had bills after our child was born in a hospital, or a major surgery.

It is easy to say there should be, as Senator Sanders says, Medicare for all. Getting that done in the United States is nearly impossible with the influence of special interests and their money in Washington, D.C. This is what makes healthcare an abomination in America. I know we can be better than this.

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Living in Society

Sunrise at Autumn’s End

Sunrise on the state park trail on Dec. 9, 2025.

Everyday I am out in the weather for at least part of the day. This December has been weird with heavy snowfalls coupled with spells of above freezing ambient temperatures. The talk on the trail is about how the trail surface varies with snowfall and temperature. We are all of retirement age so our concern is testing new muscles and stress on our ankles and joints. Thus far I have been able to navigate rough surfaces without mishap.

The outdoors temperature was 37 degrees Fahrenheit when I woke. By the time I was ready to walk on the trail it had dropped to below freezing. As I entered the state park, the wind picked up and snow began to fall. The trail surface had frozen unevenly around snowmobile, wildlife, and pedestrian tracks. I had to be careful to preserve my joints and ankles. I knew the weather forecast before I left home.

I’m not the only one who takes accurate weather forecasts for granted. My resource is the Weather Channel with its hourly forecasts and radar images. Mostly I seek short-term weather forecasts in order to do something like mow the lawn, take a walk, or work in the garden. Existing technology gives me accurate forecasts that facilitate what I want to do.

Hannah Ritchie is a Scottish data scientist, senior researcher at the University of Oxford, and deputy editor at Our World in Data, according to Wikipedia. Her work focuses on sustainability, in relation to climate change, energy, food and agriculture, biodiversity, air pollution, deforestation, and public health. She recently wrote the following about weather forecasting:

The potential for AI to improve weather forecasting and climate modelling (which also takes a long time and uses a lot of energy) has been known for several years now. AI models have been tested for one- and two-week forecasts with promising results. Scientists will often need to wait weeks for a complex, high-resolution climate model to run; AI might be able to do this hundreds, if not thousands, of times faster. (Email from Hannah Ritchie on Oct. 27, 2025).

Naturally, I asked ChatGPT about this, “When scientists like Hannah Ritchie say weather forecasting can be much improved with artificial intelligence, what do they mean.” As is usual for artificial intelligence, the answer was very long. Here is the crux:

When scientists say weather forecasting can be dramatically improved with artificial intelligence, they usually mean something more specific than “AI makes everything better.” They’re referring to concrete technical bottlenecks in current forecasting and the ways AI can overcome them. Hannah Ritchie, and researchers at ECMWF, NOAA, Google DeepMind, NVIDIA, the UK Met Office, and others, are all pointing to similar developments. (ChatGPT query result, December 2025).

More specifically, in explanation, the machine listed multiple bullet points:

  • Weather prediction is limited by physics-based models.
  • AI models can “learn the atmosphere.”
  • AI lets scientists blend physics and data.
  • AI makes weather forecasting more democratic. By that, it means cheaper and more broadly available than on expensive, physics-based computers.
  • AI enables longer-range and global risk forecasting: seasonal climate forecasts, agricultural and drought planning, energy-grid load forecasting, and catastrophe-risk modeling.
  • But: Scientists emphasize that AI is not a replacement for physics.

The machine summarized: forecast faster, forecast at higher resolution, run at vastly lower cost, improve extreme weather warning lead times, complement physics with learned patterns, and democratize forecasting globally.

According to the machine, consumer-scaled artificial intelligence models might be available by 2032. In the meanwhile, I’m just glad I didn’t turn an ankle on the trail this morning.

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Living in Society

Afternoon at the Tavern

Entryway to the Hilltop Tavern in Iowa City.

My veterans group asked about having a social hour at the Hilltop Tavern in Iowa City last Friday. I don’t visit many taverns yet I like folks in our group and it was located across the street from the grocer from which I needed provisions. I drove the 14 miles to the county seat, parked in the grocery store parking lot, and walked across the street to get there.

The hill in “hilltop” refers to what was known as Rees’ Hill. This is from the Our Iowa Heritage website:

The area was generally known as Rees’ Hill – reflecting the winery and wine garden owned by Jacob and Agatha Rees across from the Hilltop Tavern location. The wine garden was well known and popular with Goosetown residents during the 1880s (and likely earlier). Jacob’s death in 1889, and Agatha’s (and son Frank’s) deaths in 1893 likely resulted in the closure of the winery. For many years, the property was either unused or planted for strawberries or general nursery. This property is where the Hy-Vee grocery store and gas station exist now at the corner of North Dodge and Prairie du Chien and occupied two acres. (The Origins of Iowa City’s Hilltop Tavern by Derek (D.K.) Engelen, Our Iowa Heritage).

The tavern opened after prohibition ended and has been in operation ever since. When I entered through the door in the photo, the bar was right there on the right, maybe 20 feet from me. People behind the bar immediately recognized that I entered and inquired what I wanted. I found my friends in a large, adjacent room with three pool tables and ordered a draft beer.

My friend, a banker before retirement, brought a roll of quarters so we could play eight ball. I hadn’t played since grade school but we formed teams and racked the balls twice. None of us were talented at the game, yet it helped pass the time by encouraging conversation.

What do aging septuagenarian veterans talk about on a Friday afternoon?

One of us recently had hip replacement surgery, and that took a bit of time. I obviously know hip surgery exists, but haven’t discussed it with someone who had it. I had questions. It turned out someone else had knee replacement surgery, so that led to a discussion of the differences between the two procedures.

About that time, someone walked up to ask if we minded if he played music on what in earlier years would be called a jukebox. We didn’t mind, and one of our party asked him to play some Kenny Rogers, which he did.

Being veterans, we discussed the extrajudicial executions of people suspected of being drug runners in the Caribbean Sea, and whether Admiral Mitch Bradley, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, would be the scapegoat for the president and secretary of defense to avoid responsibility for two specific killings that were clearly illegal. We drew no conclusions.

The prior day, the Iowa Legislative Services Agency released the first county supervisor redistricting plan. The Iowa Legislature earlier voted to require certain counties that elected supervisors at-large to divide into districts. Their idea is that creates an opportunity to elect some Republicans, although the logic is based on deceptive arguments. A lawsuit was filed to stop this process. Our group agreed the court system had little time to make a decision because of the long lead time to plan an election. We were in a wait and see mode until the lawsuit is resolved.

We talked some organizational business, finished our beverages and game, and headed out. It was a pleasant way for aging peace warriors to spend an afternoon in these trying times.

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Living in Society

Sleep and Loneliness

My apartment on Mississippi Avenue was on second floor, far right window.

My experience living by myself in my first apartment after university was formative in how I approach loneliness. The one-room apartment was located in this building on Mississippi Avenue in Davenport. I would lie in bed and feel my heart beating before falling asleep. While I was alone, I didn’t feel lonely. Because of an active youth, it took no effort to fall asleep and stay asleep until morning. I wrote about this apartment multiple times:

This new apartment already begins the rebirth which is so much needed by my soul at this time. The neighborhood is quite quiet and the apartment that I rent is at the end of a small hallway off the main one. Across the street is another large house which has been subdivided into apartments and it is quite a ways away. Further up the block there is a Jewish synagogue Temple Emmanuel. The river is about three or four blocks away. It seems there are some well-to-do neighbors to the south of this building who at this time are having a dinner party of some sort. But at the same time I believe that the area is on the fringes of the poverty area which is mostly to the West and the wealthy area of town, the Heights, which is to the East. The landlord’s brother lives upstairs in the attic and he mysteriously comes and goes. The landlord said. Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s not. Ask him if you need anything, said the landlord. Time will tell as I ask God to manifest his will. My major tasks at this time are to set up my own household for what is to be the first time. (Personal Journal, Sept. 11, 1975)

On Dec. 29, 2010, I wrote a post titled A Normal Winter. It expanded on this time of my life:

It has been so long since we had a “normal” winter in Iowa that we forget what that means. Snow and cold, dry weather are de rigueur and what we have had thus far has been relatively normal. No repeated blizzards, no continuous sub-zero temperatures. A “white Christmas” that was almost storybook in the appearance of the landscape. We could do with snow cover to reflect the heat of the sun back into space.

This week I have been thinking about the first time I lived without a room mate in late 1975. I was working at the Carroll’s Dairy Store at Five Points in Northwest Davenport. While working part time, I earned $0.85 per hour and somehow could pay the rent, and other bills while I figured out what was next in my life. It turned out that what was next was joining the Army, enlisting to attend Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia and serving for almost three years in Mainz, Germany after a year of military schooling.

I lived in an large house that had been divided into apartments on Mississippi Avenue. My vehicle was a 1961 Chevrolet Impala, bought from a woman from whom it had been stolen and then returned. Occasionally, I walked the three miles from my apartment to work to get exercise, but to avoid burning fuel as well as even in 1975, it was a struggle to make ends meet on minimum wage. Seven Eleven started opening up convenience stores in Davenport and I used that as leverage to get a raise at Carroll’s.

Google map of Mississippi Avenue in Davenport, Iowa.

The single room apartment had a stove, refrigerator and sink, with a shared bathroom was down the hall. Somehow I crammed my book collection, vinyl records and all my possessions into that small space. My mother came for dinner for one of the few times I have cooked her a meal, making tuna casserole of dubious quality. We took a walk to nearby Prospect Park that evening. Cooking and entertaining were skills to be developed later in life.

Laying on the single bed I could feel my heart beating. That feeling is drowned out when there is a room mate. For the first time, I realized what it meant to be alone in the world, although I was not particularly lonely. Being alone drove me to seek out others and work on a life of my own. I started writing a journal, heard Chaim Potok speak about his then new book In the Beginning at the synagogue across the street and pursued what I believed to be the life of someone who had graduated from college. I was living a life, but driven to make something more of it. In many ways, I am pursuing that same life thirty five years later.

What I didn’t know in 1975, was how unique that time of my first apartment would be. That I would set patterns of behavior that would follow me until the present. Knowing now, what I didn’t know then, I look fondly to those few months on Mississippi Avenue, close to the river and on the edge of economic viability. While that life was unsustainable, it became a platform from which I took a bigger leap into life. I never looked back to say I would have chosen things to have been different. (Blog post on Dec. 29, 2010).

As I age, my loneliness has not changed. It may be there, yet it does not dominate my awareness. In recent years I have been sleeping through the night less often. My current project is to increase awareness of my biology and circadian rhythms. By doing so, I have been sleeping better.

Loneliness is something to deal with. I recently found this in the Washington Post.

An increasing number of middle-aged and older adults — especially those in their 40s and 50s — are lonely, according to a report released by AARP, a nonprofit advocacy group for older Americans. Among the loneliest are adults 45 to 49 years old (49 percent identified as lonely), as well as respondents who never married (62 percent); are not working (57 percent); or whose household income fell below $25,000 a year (63 percent). (Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2025).

Click here for the AARP survey.