Category: Writing

I spaded the garlic patch on Saturday. It was too wet to till. I’m not in a hurry, yet I’d like to finish planting garlic soon. Rain is forecast all day today.

On Sunday, someone who helped edit my memoir pointed out the whole book was an origin story. Upon reflection, that seems accurate. It takes my story from the earliest times up until my beginnings as a married person in society. After that point, I drew on the origin story, and still do. However, what happened afterward was built on the foundation of my origin story, and is much different from the earlier period.

Last week I visited the new, multi-story University of Iowa clinic at Iowa River Landing for the first time. My physician and attending staff seemed competent. The facility is very nice. I noticed the presence of double-wide chairs in the waiting room and in the examination room. That furnishing is making a statement about the obesity epidemic in the United States. It’s not subtle. It did feel like I was smaller than I am when sitting in those.

I have been visiting various clinics a lot the last 3 months since I had COVID. It took me 2-1/2 hours to read everything that documented my visits and make a plan to heal. With that kind of time commitment, no wonder folks don’t always follow doctor’s orders. It’s a long and complicated process if done right. I noticed physicians often pointed to me as the decision maker. I mean, what do I know about whether I should take a medication or not? I ended up asking a lot of questions.

If you are an Iowa Democrat, Sunday’s front page article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette is worth reading. I believe much of what was said is wrong, especially the assumptions about how messaging functions in politics. All the same, one has to understand the establishment viewpoints if we want to change our politics to regain the majority. The authors rounded up the establishment for us. Here’s a link to a printed copy of the article.

On Sunday I called my Aunt who lives in Southwestern Virginia. According to my phone, the call lasted 37 minutes and 51 seconds. We had a good talk. The last time we visited in person was more than 40 years ago. We shed the preliminary pleasantries and got right into the conversation. That’s how we did it back in 1983. Unfortunately, I couldn’t answer some of the questions she asked me about my grandparents. What she asked was never discussed.

She refreshed my memory on some of the old stories, like the “Dude Hole” where the three boys (my father and his two brothers) would swim in a creek next to the railroad tracks, then hop on the train as it passed to ride through town. They found it to be fun, she said. We recounted the story of my grandmother’s death in Summer 1947. My grandfather was away in prison so they split the three boys up among grandmother’s siblings. “You can imagine, three boys! There was not enough food (to keep them together).” My great aunt and uncle adopted my aunt, who was much younger than the other three.

We retold the story of the coal mining company that strip mined the valley near my great aunt’s home. They augured out the coal from the high wall and spoiled the well. The family got no money from the mining company for ruining the water. For years my aunt hauled jugs of water out to my great aunt so she wouldn’t have to use the “sulfur water.” She updated me during the call that she had paid the fee to run clean water out to the property. Her daughter now lives there.

We discussed a number of other topics of a kind that is best left within a family. At the end of the call she said “this call isn’t over.” I agreed and made a note to call again before the end of the year.

I come to a breaking point in the narrative of the United States. When we married, Ronald Reagan was in the second year of his first term in office. He was a popular president, garnering the electoral votes of 49 states during his 1984 re-election campaign. Reagan won 58.8 percent of the popular votes that year. What he and his minions did to our country is unforgivable. This year, Donald Trump won re-election. Votes are still being counted, yet it appears he will win the popular vote at or slightly below 50 percent of those cast. Trump is expected to change American society even more than Reagan did, if that’s possible. My chosen role is to write about something other than the decline of the United States. I’ll need to write about other topics. Here is what’s on deck for 2025.

My main 2025 writing is continuing with my autobiography. This involves a daily writing and editing commitment. Sometimes I post chapters here to get feedback or to work with the language. In addition, sometimes I learn more than is needed in a chapter. The excess material can often make a solid blog post.

News not reported in other media is always popular. There will be a school board election next fall. Information I gather locally about national issues is another source for posts. Likewise, issues about Lake Macbride, public lands, extreme weather, and such are also potential topics.

I sense another transition in my views about local food, gardening, foraging, cooking, and food shopping. Cooking is a constant learning process, so there will be posts about that. I set a goal to redesign our garden and grow one again in 2025. This has been and will continue to be a rich topic.

Book reviews, rites of passage within my circle (mostly deaths of friends), travel reports, and reports on local activities of significance beyond the region are all likely subjects.

Aging in America has become an important personal topic. I will have a few things to say about health, medicine, chronic illness, Medicare, Social Security, and adjusting to getting older.

Few people in Iowa are reporting on nuclear weapons and nuclear power issues. A group is advocating for the Duane Arnold Energy Center near Palo to reopen their nuclear power plant to generate electricity for data centers. It is an important issue where I can add to the public discussion.

When I finished my graduate degree in 1981 I was increasingly aware of racism in America. It seems evident that issue is not going away. The protections of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution remain the centerpiece of our lives. In Iowa, racism isn’t talked about enough, even though it runs right below the surface of what used to be called “Iowa nice.”

2024 was a presidential election year and 2025 is not. I hope to decrease my posts about politics unless it impacts one of the other topics listed above.

Lastly, I will write about the craft of writing and what I am learning about it.

These topics seem like a lot. Hopefully they will organize my thinking for the coming year and help produce a blog worth reading.

Why are there no more geniuses?

That’s an easy one to answer. Our culture no longer recognizes people as being geniuses. But, you might say, what about Einstein, or Leonardo, or others? Weren’t they geniuses? The answer, of course, is yes they were, but we now call them geniuses only in hindsight.

Today we see people as people, innately of potential equality, with various forces at work which inhibit the realization of that potential.The case of women artists is one, there are others. There is a dangerous assumption here: that genius is a goal or state of being to which a person aspires. An individual begins a human like other humans and develops to become a genius. They go through a process, they progress. I reject this.

Genius becomes a function of being recognized as such. If a genius is “ahead of their time,” then they will not be recognized in their own time for their accomplishments. In short, genius, like all other words, is defined in a cultural context. As the culture changes, today’s geniuses might be tomorrow’s buffoons. We need a new word to describe genius. That word will not appear in the current American milieu.

~ This post was written in the author’s journal on June 14, 1981.

Rain and wind are blowing leaves from most deciduous trees, revealing squirrel nests in the canopy. Some, like the Pin Oak, hang on to their leaves until next year’s growth pushes them out. Most everything that’s coming down before winter has come down on the third day of stormy weather in Big Grove Township.

I set the election aside to focus on writing.

I’ve written about 60,000 words of the second part of my memoir. I feel I should start over. Writing the first part changed the way I look at writing memoir. I should incorporate what I learned, and will. That means a complete re-write of the outline and a chapter by chapter re-writing of the story. It will be a different book than what I first envisioned and hopefully more readable and engaging.

I left the story in Iowa City during the summer of 1981 just before President Ronald Reagan fired the PATCO air traffic controllers to break their strike. Reagan and his conservative progeny’s deconstruction of the world in which I grew up became a constant theme during my life. During summer 1981, they were just getting started.

There was a brief window of about a year before I proposed to my now spouse on Aug. 18, 1982. In that year, I lived in the Iowa City of which we’ve heard tell as a writer’s haven. I moved from my high school friend’s home to an apartment on Market Street. I found a job with the University to pay my bills. I sought to be a writer and did what many would be writers do near but not part of the writer’s workshop. It was something of a plan. It is important to recapture that time because in several ways, it is archetypal of what creative Iowans do to cope with this barren agricultural state which is increasingly devoid of creativity.

Because my focus was on writing, I have plenty of journal entries from that time to re-read. That summer, I compiled a number of my essays into a book called Institutional Writings. I printed 15 copies and distributed them to friends. I was determined to be a writer even though I wasn’t sure what that meant in 1981. Iowa City wasn’t a solution for me. It was more a transitional place.

I accomplished something significant today. I got started writing Part II. There is much to be done yet I’m moving, hopefully in the right direction.