The following was sent to U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, and to U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
I watched the videos of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Major news media verified what I saw are real footage that depicts the killing of two U.S. Citizens who were no threat to federal agents. Good and Pretti were exercising their constitutional rights when federal agents killed them.
This can’t go on.
As our U.S. Senator I expect you to do something to prevent additional killings like this. I don’t presume to tell you how to go about that. The measure of whether you succeed will be the de-escalation of tension in states where federal agents have landed to address the administration’s concerns about immigration, including Minnesota and Maine.
As a U.S. Army veteran I am appalled by the apparent lack of training and control of these federal agents. Now is the time to put your experience in politics to work and do something most everyone can agree is the right thing to de-escalate these tensions.
Thank you for your service and for reading my note.
Should they respond, I will post the response below.
Following is an excerpt from my autobiography in progress. This passage was written to transition from our first year of marriage into what would come next. I reprised the self I exhibited at university to come up with this at the time.
I embarked on contemplation like during my undergraduate years when I would wander the campus considering Cartesian philosophy, unaware of the real world in which I walked. From this came my ideas about consumerism, professionalism, and the courage to live a moral life.
Consumerism was part of the American condition in the 1980s. It still is. I felt we ceased concerning ourselves with production of goods and values to spend more time consuming and planning for consumption. When we took paying work to earn money, we wrote off that invested time as a necessary precursor to the consumptive act. We sacrificed for work, and in the process, alienated ourselves from the main trajectory of our hope and dreams. This was unfortunate for my writing. I concluded, there is a wealth of experience around us. The time we spend doing something is worthwhile. The knowledge we gain from our experience comes at a high price…for we give our unique life for it. We should cherish our memories, and use the gift of life wisely, for there is only one for us. Being a consumer was not what I had in mind.
This is important because delayed gratification was necessary for a career. Paraphrasing Thoreau, by seeming necessity we were employed. Looking back, in 1983 we made a decision, and that led us to a different question: “What’s in it for me?” In part, this is necessary for a family to get started. In the end, I came to reject this question in favor of others. I felt we could have gone on working for the University of Iowa and built a life based on that. We were called to do more than just live a life in Iowa City.
The interweaving of the job and the experience of the job was also important. It suggests a perspective on work we can own. By accepting and nurturing this reality, I set a wedge between our family and my job. To some extent, this wedge later kept me from full acceptance in the social network of transportation’s elite. To the same extent, I was the better for it. It was a subtle, but important aspect of our decision-making.
Many themes from my journal carried through until today. I wrote about the “professionalism of modern life,” drawing a distinction between a person’s moral life and the profession they chose. I explored this in the following passage. I used the word “woman” yet have always considered the ideas relevant to everyone. Perhaps I was influenced by the first female supervisors I had had since beginning paid work in high school.
In Going Home I hope to address some of the aspects of the women’s movement that seem pertinent to Davenport. The specific issue I feel most competent to address is the way women I know have used professionalism as a vehicle for personal liberation. They have taken jobs as librarians, bankers, real estate agents, doctors, and dentists as a form of self-maturation, a way of establishing themselves in the world. This professionalization of modern life is one of the most pernicious forces I see present in the world. Not because women are the ones who are becoming professionals, but because the life of a professional is taking the place that was left by the exit of religion. The modern person looks at life as a moment in the sun, a time in which we fill the days with activities.
Creating a profession can fill a life with activities that remove us from our hopes and dreams. I called it pernicious because of how a professional lives within a society of friends. There are networks of people and within the context of the network, their lives are defined. To a degree we all do this, but it is no substitute for living a moral life. More than many another life, it can be dictated by things that lie outside the individual. The professional can commiserate with his peers, saying, “oh, I have been through that experience,” and that might be the end of it. The professional has a way of looking at the world provided, and the tendency is to look no further for a perspective. Like so many other things in modern life, this is self-alienation: a degradation of personal experience.
I viewed professionalism with the behaviors and artifacts around it as having the potential to be a hollow shell. The danger was that if a person had no moral compass guiding them along life’s path, the results personally and for society would be detrimental. At the same time, professionalism was another way of subduing our native culture.
We accept certain behavior in the context of working as a professional that we may not accept at home. Professionalism enabled people to concern themselves with “my career” instead of with the greater society. In retrospect, I did not see the society this represents coming. Given the veneer of professionalism, something would fill the empty middle.
During the time I was preparing to write Going Home, I spent considerable time researching the idea of living a moral life. As humans, we must have one. While I did not write that book, its research helped establish who I would be as we entered the second year of our marriage.
On Sunday afternoons I take it easy. By that I mean there is flexibility in how I use the time between lunch and dinner. No pomodoros. No new projects. No major decisions. I relax and take it easy.
The rest of the weeks have been productive. I have been in the zone, moving forward with my writing and other projects. For a few Sunday hours, it is a peaceful life.
In 1986, I wrote a friend, “A writer without agriculture is a mere ornament brought out in the cold darkness of winter’s holiday, then put away at the epiphany of his humanity.” It seemed fortuitous to find this as Tuesday was the Feast of the Epiphany, between finishing the first draft of my current book on Monday, and turning toward editing it on Wednesday.
I am consumed with passion to finish this work and make it as good as I can. I am also five weeks from planting the first indoor garden seedlings. For me, the relationship between writing and gardening is essential. I want to finish this edit just as garden planting begins.
In private documents I am calling this the “Great Edit,” a beginning-to-end reading which includes minor text editing yet holds off on major edits until I read the book in its entirety. I have read the chapters so many times in writing them, my tendency is to skip over them and thus accept them. That’s not what is needed. I must also resist the urge to make, as Grace Paley suggested in her book title, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, until the first read is done. I finished about a third of the text during the last 24 hours.
Some of the text suffers from “cut and paste-itis.” Much of it was pulled from my journals and letters and pasted without editing. The idea was I would get back to the work. That time is now.
The short version of the book is as follows: After completing an extended childhood and education (Book I), a person chooses the path of a writer, only to encounter societal pressure to postpone gratification in that metier. Along the way, family life, social engagement, cooking and gardening, and a career take precedence — until 2010, when the world finally turns toward his aspirations. He confronts the unknowns of the same social order in which he began, even as it comes apart. Words written must now be crafted to conform to these overarching themes.
I could never get to this point without writing the book. By that I mean the writing changed how I looked at my life. It is clearer now what all the struggles I experienced since 1981 meant. If I didn’t write another word, the journey would have been worth it for that outcome.
There will be editing and additional words, though. Also publication in some form, hopefully as a conventional book to match the one already published. Figuring that out is work for later.
Ambient temperatures in the 40s have been melting snow and ice, leaving a dead landscape. No spring hope. No winter cover. Except for the lake, it’s just dead. It’s a good time to turn indoors to my writing.
I have three chapters remaining to draft in part two of my autobiography. In the story, I just concluded leaving paid work during the coronavirus pandemic. If the pandemic did one thing right, it made a clean break between the workplace and me, forcing me to live on a fixed income. The final chapters write quickly because they are so recent. Today I created three of them, and next I write about the coronavirus pandemic plus two other chapters with working titles of “Beginning of the end,” and “New beginnings.” It shouldn’t take long to finish the first draft. Then begins the process of going through the whole book for the first major rewrite. I expect there will be three or four of those before I’m ready to publish.
After the book is ready for publication, I don’t know. I’ve been focusing on this work so long, I hadn’t given much thought about what’s next. I want to revise the first book to clean up a few things identified by friends during the post-publication period. I also must see if there is continuity without repetition. Next year I should be able to declare everything finished.
The biggest predictable issue in our lives is Social Security doing nothing to avoid running out of money beginning as early as late 2032. Benefits will be cut automatically by 24 percent across the board if nothing is done to prevent going over this cliff. If anything, Republicans in charge of the federal government are going the wrong way. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and the Social Security Fairness Act, accelerated Social Security insolvency alongside well-known demographic challenges to its structure. An answer to the question “How do I make up for this loss in benefits?” needs finding. Counting on the Congress to do something is not an answer.
What that says is I have to return to paid work. I have no regrets about how my working life proceeded and ended.
Physiologically I am changing. I know this because I adopted a new morning exercise regimen and my conditioning schedule is outpacing the ability of my soft tissues to recover and adapt. After a good couple of weeks on the new regimen, my shoulders started to hurt. This is self-diagnosed as inflammation, not a chronic problem. I believe I’m right about that. I have to take it easy for a while to let my body catch up with my ambition. Apparently I am no longer young.
In the meanwhile, it’s nose to the grindstone with the book. If I can finish the first draft this year, that leaves me plenty of time to publish a final text in the first half of 2026. That would clear the deck for returning to the workforce, something I am loathe to do, yet may needs do.
Calling this project done for now. I went through all remaining boxes in the two stacks and prepped two more boxes for the library used book sale. There are five empty boxes and a good amount of new stuff placed in old boxes. This was the first major sort of my books since they arrived in 1993 and I built the shelves. I’m satisfied I have a better idea of what is available, which was the point.
Notes:
I found the rest of my books related to slavery and African-American studies. The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois is important to the literary discussion of the United States. If a 21st Century canon was relevant or possible, he would be in it. I don’t expect to reread the book, yet it earned a place on the shelf. I studied Stanley Elkins’ book Slavery in graduate school. I would be curious to reread it, and also read the criticisms of it. Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington moves from box to shelf as well. On my to-do list is rearranging my African-American studies books.
I had more than a hundred business books. It was a really complete set as my work at the transportation and logistics company ended in 2009. The only ones I am keeping are Dale Carnegie’s books, which include one owned by my father, and an autographed copy of Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming. I picked Deming up for a buck at a used bookstore in Sweetwater, Texas during the rattlesnake roundup.
I intentionally left political books alone. I have all the presidential memoirs I know about, beginning with Truman. The next reading here is if Barack Obama ever finishes the second volume of his presidential memoir. I’m not a fan of Trump and to my knowledge, he hasn’t written a memoir from his first term. Like with Nixon, I’ll likely wait until he is dead before considering purchasing any memoir. I bought a copy of Mike Pence’s 2022 vice presidential memoir So Help Me God for a buck at the library used book sale. It is occupying the spot where Obama’s book will go when published. Pence seems to have tried to tell a normal story of that period. Will know more if I get around to reading it. Life is short. So many books with limited time.
As I approach a new year of writing, I feel refreshed by The Great Sort. I feel better aware of my stuff and know where to find things again. Highly recommend it if you have a wall of boxes hanging about your home.
For years, my books about North American indigenous culture were tucked away in a box. I decided I was wrong about them and with newly opened space because of The Great Sort, I put them on a shelf. These are in addition to the works by and about Black Hawk which I always kept out, and those of Hyemeyohsts Storm which I kept out, yet now boxed away. I wrote about Chuck Storm as we called him here. The next step is to incorporate this literature into a reading plan.
Of these books, the author that might best fit into a canon of American Literature (if such a thing existed or was possible) is N. Scott Momaday, whose House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. There are others here that remain quite good. I read what I read of these beginning in 1970 while at university. I don’t know where this is going, yet they are out and available in a prominent space. I won’t miss seeing them daily and expect to read some of them.
I mentioned the Time magazine purge. I came across a dozen copies of Harpers Magazine dated 1938 and 1942. I bought them at either an auction or a yard sale for a buck. They used to be property of the Mount Carroll, Illinois public library, yet now find themselves in The Big Sort. There are familiar authors inside: John Dos Passos, E.B. White, Peter Drucker, Margaret Bourke-White, Glenway Wescott, Eudora Welty, T.S. Eliot, Franz Werfel, and probably others I should recognize. At the stop on my desk, enroute to the recycling bin, I notice how many pages of book advertisements there are. The December 1938 issue has 44 pages by most of the major publishers. That says something about the role Harpers played in popular culture. If that didn’t give it away, the advertisement for New York department store Hammacher Schlemmer did.
There are four mover’s boxes of vinyl records which I will attempt to sell locally. I asked our child about them and there was only a single record of interest: Beethoven’s Fidelio. The ones I will keep are a small, undetermined number. I will keep the Red Gallagher album because he autographed it for me and grew up a block away from our home. I spent a good part of my life listening to these hundreds of records. While I still have a turntable, I need a new amplifier and don’t want to spend the money. Probably should sell the turntable as well.
I’m writing on Christmas Day and noticed how many empty boxes there are. The purge of books and magazines is having the desired effect. There are more boxes than things on the sorting tables. At this point, I will find something to fill most of the boxes, although I am weeding out different styles of boxes because I need them for book shipments to the public library. While I just began The Big Sort, it feels like it has been going on for a much longer time. In a way, it has.
This is the first blog post I made about Christmas on Dec. 25, 2007.
The meaning of Christmas is derived from my remembrance of the priests at Holy Family Catholic Church in Davenport genuflecting while reading John 1:14 “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…” There are many translations of this verse and the idea that an omniscient God would take human form remains a compelling idea. In order for our lives to have meaning, we should live them as Jesus did, through acts in human society.
If Jesus was the incarnate God, we are something less.
If the meaning of Christmas can be found in John 1:14, how should that affect us with our imperfections?
My Christmas story is about the coffee cup that we keep in our bins of Christmas decorations. It was a gift from Jacque and printed in the glaze are five reindeer around a typewriter consulting on a message. The reindeer at the keyboard has a red nose, and must be Rudolf. On the other side of the mug are misspelled the words “Merry Christmas,” presumably typed by Rudolf. At some point I chipped the cup and each year we discuss whether we should get rid of it because of the chip. I have always said no, although I should probably let go. The chipped cup with the animals trying to put a message into human language using human technology has become part of our Christmas tradition. Because it is so similar to the meaning of Christmas, I have trouble letting go of it. We have always ended up keeping the cup and I am using it now to hold the coffee I made this morning.
We humans can use some coffee on Christmas morning, and we need to put it in something.
When handling hundreds of books long packed away, a few will stand out. Not only do I want to keep those in this photo, I want to read or re-read them next year. It’s part of the process of the Great Sort.
While living in Mainz, Germany, I had a stamp made with my military address and Social Security number on it. Back then, we viewed the Social Security number as unique to us and if we got separated from any possession, the rightful owner could be found. It was embossed into our dog tags. We put it on clothing, imprinted it inside field boots, in books, on everything that would take ink. That was short-term thinking from a perspective of how many people today would like to get hold of that number and use it for theft and other evil purposes. Wasn’t the best idea.
A substantial part of the Great Sort has been spent searching for these stamped locators and either blacking them out or cutting them off.
It has been hard to persist more than a few hours without getting impatient and stuffing books back into another box and into the new stacks I am building. At that point I must resist the urge, turn off the lights, and find something else to do. I want this to be a final sort. I’m labeling and dating the outside of the boxes so I know what’s in them and when I last touched the books. I doubt I will return to many of the boxes.
In the display area of my writing space I have about 3,000 books. I pulled out and boxed all the books of music. The vinyl long playing records will get boxed, reunited with the others I have, and then finally disposed of. This creates more space for active books and some of it will fill with the three-ring binders I am making as I write my autobiography. It should be a more useful (to a writer) library.
I want the Great Sort to be finished by Spring. I think that is doable even as I enter seedling planting time next month, especially if I stick with it a couple hours per day. The purpose of the work is to improve how I store research materials and become a better writer. I’m hopeful at this point. all of that will be the Great Sort’s outcome.
Mailing label from the first apartment where I wrote after university.
I spent two hours rearranging poetry books in my stacks. I decided eight 23-inch shelves was enough poetry and some had to go. Now there is an eight-inch stack of poetry books awaiting disposition. Poetry measured in inches.
I rearranged the poetry so more in which I have interest rest at eye level. On top are the smaller-sized books and below that is the canon. You know, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante, Donne, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Swift, Browning, and Blake. The exception is Chaucer and Shakespeare’s plays are across the room because the poetry shelves weren’t tall enough.
The other exception, or rather objection to the canon, is where are the women? You know, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemens, Mary Robinson, Anna Laeticia Barbauld, and maybe others. They were largely erased by the male authors of the canon. I don’t own any of them or I’d fit them in.
Don’t get me started on an American canon. Somewhere in the 20th Century that broke down and can never be repaired.
This is my current life when I am not writing. Opening about 100 boxes of books and deciding which to keep and which to donate. Already I’ve taken a dozen boxes to the library’s used book sale. There will be more.
I used to stamp my name and address in every book I bought. My hands have been on books from every place I lived this month. Some of the fifty year old paper has changed. Books from the 19th century crumble in my hands. I took one old book to a used bookshop to consult about the damage. This is a practical task that should involve logic. It’s more emotional than expected.
There is material for multiple posts in this project. I have to wait and see what I get into before knowing what their subject will be. I hope you are along for the ride.
Journey Home 
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