Category: Writing

Following is a description of how I spent the bicentennial in 1976 from my book An Iowa Life: A Memoir. I was on military leave, in between Officer Candidate School and Infantry Officer Basic Course. This year is the 250th birthday of America. I’m not feeling celebratory and wish I could go back to those days when I slept on mother’s front porch through the holiday, away from neighborhood noise.

I stayed on at Fort Benning to take the Infantry Officer Basic Course and attend jump school. After OCS, life was less stressful as I prepared for my assignment in Germany.

I felt the beginnings of transformational change from being an observer of society to a participant.

I see myself more as a player in the show than as an observer and critic. I, too, am a pilgrim traveling on the road to Canterbury with the others. I am beginning to chip the yellow stains from my teeth in preparation for a big smile in greeting the people and animals I see. Life is alive again, and my spirit is tuned into the wavelength of the people again. (Personal Journal, Fort Benning, Georgia, June 6, 1976).

I spent the Bicentennial Independence Day at home in Davenport,

If you stop by my mother’s house you still may see the red, white, and blue décor where I slept this week during my leave time.

After running around the Assumption track a few times, I returned, bathed, and lay down on our ancestral glider. The glider where girls I have crooned and plots have made. I tried to read N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize winner but nodded as I have so often done, waking with an urge to set ink to paper about an event from the past.

So, with Grandma sleeping inside and green maple leaves surrounding me, I will recount the vision I have just had.

Several years ago, while we were still in school, Tim Hawks invited me up to his family farm house near Belleview. Some friends of his from Georgetown were visiting and I brought my guitar along to make a little music. In DeWitt, I believe, we stopped and bought a kite to fly once we got out to the farm. When we arrived, we were greeted by the cat who had the house to himself for quite a while and was anxious to make our acquaintance. In we go and carry whatever it was we brought with us inside and got the heater going to provide a more comfortable evening for us. After this and a slight tour, we decided to go outside and fly the kites which we managed with little difficulty: one regular and one box kite. For some reason we decided to leave the kites out and reel them in in the morning before we left. As it got dark, we retired to the inside where we settled down making a little music together, Timothy disappearing to the upstairs after a while with my guitar to make some music on his own. When we woke the next day, we discovered several inches of snow on the ground and that our kites had come down. After a breakfast of pancakes, we policed up the kites and made our way back the treacherous road to the highway, our adventure on the farm complete. (Personal Journal, Davenport, Iowa, July 5, 1976).

When I returned to Fort Benning, I found spare time to write in my journal.

The portion of my autobiography after leaving a transportation and logistics career looks a lot like the ice in this photograph. Parts of it are smooth, yet thin, because only recently it was open water. Parts have frozen and thawed so many times it is difficult to determine where the surface could support a human. This morning, I stood on the bridge to where the boat docks will go this summer and felt I didn’t know what I was writing.

I haven’t given up. I’m deep in 2010, which was a pivotal year across my life in writing, politics, home ownership, work, and family life changes. I felt economic pressure from leaving a regular paycheck combined with depletion of savings. In my life, however, money was never anything to fret about.

The backlash to the election of Barack Obama was severe that year. It took less than a year, yet Republicans demonstrated they viewed little about Obama’s election as permanent, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which was signed into law that year. They reorganized themselves around right-wing figures while blocking and undoing the good things Obama did. That struggle continues.

I held a job trying to get U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley’s vote for the New START treaty, something D.C. lobbyists for nuclear abolition thought possible. When the Senate ratified the treaty on Dec. 22, 2010, we had not won Grassley’s vote.

There was a long automobile trip west to the high plains with a lifelong friend. Upon my return, I helped organize a 40th year high school class reunion which put me in touch with people I hadn’t thought of for decades. These were both positive and re-established my roots. I had a lot of material originating in 2010 and crammed as much as I could into a single draft chapter. Perhaps that was not a wise tactic.

The best approach to this revision may be to not work at all. Let everything sit for a few days. Focus on other projects and forget about writing. For this book to be any good, there is no deadline, even if I still want to finish by the end of this year.

I set it aside, thinking, maybe I could use a nap. I read in David Morrell’s book about writing, shaved, showered and re-started my day. I already feel the better for it.

Short post today. I haven’t considered my early days on Blogger and WordPress until now. They were outlets for all kinds of writing.

Been working on a chapter about the early years of social media and blogging. This paragraph needs work yet it captures one way I used the platforms in those early blogging days.

When I began blogging in 2007, I had no idea where it would go. I wrote more than 5,600 posts since the beginning. For a long time, it was the only writing I did each day. It became a writer’s workbench to test ideas and how to express them. Some days the posts were cringe worthy. Some days I touched the sky. Part of me would like to return to handwriting paper journals the way I did before 2007. Part of me does not.

I also re-wrote the first paragraph of the chapter. Next I will re-do the rest.

I also mention social media in it. I was active on half a dozen platforms and joined Facebook in March 2008, after which made this brief post:

Tonight I joined Facebook. Yikes! Facebook connects us to people we have not thought of in years. In some cases we haven’t made contact in over a quarter of a century. All within a couple of hours. From moment to moment, the number of “friends” builds. What to say on the site? What elements to show? What pictures to place? How much time to spend? When a friend accepts the invitation, it feels good. The wave has broken, now I’ll ride it in.

If there was excitement at first, when our child stopped posting there I lost interest. It took a while yet in 2025 I deactivated my account. My problem was the contrast between lots of activity and the loneliness I felt as a result of being increasingly away from the real world. There is a kind of relationship on social media, I determined it was not a good one.

The purpose of the chapter is to figure out the meaning of all this. Maybe I will.

Ambient temperature was to climb to 60 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday. It made it to 61. Spring is in the air, even if that thought is not rational given the calendar. I sat down and outlined the path to finalizing my book.

I finished the initial draft on Jan. 5, and am 37 chapters into the first pass of revisions. What are reasonable next steps toward publication? I laid them out.

It will take two to four weeks to finish this pass of the remaining 12 chapters. After our child leaves Iowa after college in the story, the chapters have a different focus. I wrote them quickly, now I must revise them slowly. Given three to four hours of early morning darkness, that should be doable. With each passing day, I lose darkness, yet I will persevere.

After this pass, I plan a structural review. The purpose here is to ensure the book has continuity, that it is going somewhere with intent. I laid out a sheet of 8×11 paper with a chapter title on each, and arranged them in the current order. On each sheet I will define where the chapter starts, where it ends, and then summarize in a sentence or two what story movement is included. I already see some order-switching at hand.

Once structural concerns are addressed, it’s time for a reality check. Is the book saying what I want? Is it meaningful? Once those questions are adequately addressed, it is time for a second pass with re-writing, if needed.

This pass leads to proofreading and getting the book formatted for a local printing in either spiral or comb binding. I will pick the printer and make a dozen or so copies for early readers.

If everything comes together, by Memorial Day, manuscripts have been distributed to a small group of trusted readers whose screening process answered the questions: Did they read the first book when delivered? Did they provide meaningful comments? I have a couple of new readers in mind, with whom I’ve had conversations about my book, yet haven’t read it yet. While I will be in a hurry at this point, the book then becomes potential summer reading for this group.

The next goal is to collect feedback as it comes, in whatever format it is. No later than Labor Day I enter a decision table: Do I print privately as in the first book, or take steps to use a printing service to make the book into various formats: eBook, paper book, and audio book and distribute more broadly? The answer to this question is not made and I would be happy with either outcome.

The three to four hours of writing each day leaves plenty of time for a life. In my eighth decade, every bit of life is important.

Here is the draft preface from my autobiography in progress, with working title, A Working Life: A Memoir. It is a record of lived participation in work, place, institutions, and time. The book will be as good as I can make it, and with diligence, finished this year.

PREFACE

My story resumes after returning from visiting friends in the American South to Iowa City where I would work as a writer. I just finished my master’s degree and had enough resources to get started.

The first book, An Iowa Life: A Memoir, reflects an extended childhood and education. Next, I began writing.

I take you with me as our family moved to Cedar Rapids, then to Indiana and finally back to our present home. When our child left home, and then left Iowa, the story breaks loose into individual essays about ways I lived, worked, and engaged in society.

When I began work at CRST, Inc. I had no career plan. What I learned though my work in transportation and logistics was the country was changing. Industries repeatedly restructured and I spent years listening to thousands of people explain what had just been taken from them. The experience changed me.

To indicate passages drawn from journals, notes, and my public writing, I use italics.

I have limited names and altered identifying details for those who are not public figures.