I hadn’t breathed fresh air since Saturday. Even though it was too early for mail, I opened the garage door and walked to the box. Basking in an ambient temperature of 35 degrees, surrounded by sunlight, I breathed. This winter writing life is my best life. From time to time I get outdoors to stay grounded.
This morning I awoke dreaming about California. Where did that come from? There is a post in that.
There was a 1960s trip in the family station wagon so Father could attend a union convention. Mother and we kids went along and spent time with our aunt and uncle in Anaheim, including trips to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. I wore a madras sports coat and a shirt with a Nehru collar. We visited another uncle in Simi Valley whose residence was surrounded by pastures. California didn’t seem much different from Iowa in the 1960s. Maybe that’s because so many Iowans were migrating there.
In 2006 I attended Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Our company was installing one of the Oracle transportation management software programs. The project taught me a lot about business software. This contemporaneous blog post by John K. Waters describes the conference scene:
My dogs are still barking after five days at Oracle OpenWorld 2006. The Big O took up all three wings of San Francisco’s Moscone Center last week for this humongous event, filled every available downtown hotel conference room, and blocked off Howard Street with tents and Vegas-sized video displays. About 42,000 conference attendees swarmed over three square blocks of the City by the Bay for keynotes, educational sessions, vendor exhibits, and special events. On Tuesday night, about 20,000 attendees spilled into the Cow Palace for a conference-sponsored rock concert. On the bill: Elton John, Joan Jett, Berlin, and Devo. A football-field-length stage with seven (count ’em, seven) massive video displays dominated the keynote auditorium. Conference organizers even put Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s racing yacht on display at the foot of the escalators in the North Hall. It was easily the biggest and flashiest local conference I’ve seen in 10 years of tech-trade-show hopping.
Oracle OpenWorld 2006: The Tech Conference that Ate San Francisco, ADT MAG, Oct. 30, 2006.
I stayed away from the conference at a hotel in Chinatown. Because of jet lag, I couldn’t sleep and jogged through the streets in the middle of the night. Hundreds of homeless people slept and lived on Market Street. I suppose there is a post there, I may have written it in my journal in the pre-internet writing days. What seems memorable from the conference is exposure to many of the CEOs of tech companies and hearing their views of the future of technology. I also determined one hasn’t really lived until seeing Larry Ellison on stage with a penguin.
I made other trips to California yet these two stand out. It is so far away. Most of my interaction with California originated in media experiences through actors, writers and producers who made things for mass culture: movies, television, some books and music. There was Joan Didion’s interpretation of California. It helped more than anything to form my views of the state.
Not long after OpenWorld I started on modern social media in 2007 when our child left Iowa after college. It was a way to stay in touch as they became their own adult person. Since then, social media has become a form of creative expression while learning to live in a complex world. The immediacy of it all was shocking at first, and I have grown to depend upon it as an important way to see the world. Social media includes my first blog, which also began in 2007.
More than anything I write, people read my blogs and letters to the editors of newspapers. I don’t write for the attention, although like today’s sunlight I enjoy being surrounded by it. In a way, I need it. After almost 50 years of writing in public, blog writing is just the current manifestation of my search for a way of seeing to inform my way of living. It serves. As long as it does, I will continue to write blog posts.
Before the contractor installed the driveway we parked on the chip and seal road. We specified a concrete driveway, although in retrospect, today I’d install asphalt. Concrete held up over 30 years and is good for many more. The asphalt just looks better and its dark color absorbs heat from the sun, benefits I hadn’t considered in 1993. Rain is forecast, so the concrete cracks will soon be showing themselves again. It’s just a thing in the life of a septuagenarian who lived in the same place for more than 30 years.
In the end, our home suited me as a writer. In a rural subdivision we are far from city life, yet there are enough people around to help in case of an emergency. The state park is a three minute walk with its five-mile hiking trail. Because of the lakes, there is an abundance of waterfowl. I believe we’ve seen specimens of every bird native to Iowa here. We also see most kinds of mammals, a snake or two, and amphibious creatures at certain times of the year. There is a lot of inspiration in that.
As home construction began I made at least weekly trips to observe progress. One time I parked on the street and walked over to the high wall that had been dug for the foundation. I sat on the edge and had a moment’s quiet while I looked over the footings toward the lake. I felt then this would be our home base for many years to come.
I left on and returned from a lot of trips on our driveway. Other family members did too. Travel is mostly finished except for errands and visits to immediate family.
As I begin year three of my eighth decade on Earth there is a lot to do. I have a reasonable rasher of good health, a secure home, plenty of good food to eat, and enough of a pension that finances get tight yet we make ends meet. Importantly, my ability to think remains reasonably sound, as far as I can tell. I do forget things now and then. It seems like more than I did, but not enough to worry. All of this, combined with seven decades of experience, and there is plenty of material for writing.
Writing table.
The challenge of aging, especially in America, becomes dealing with isolation. I wrote about this before. Being a writer requires a balance between isolation and being with people, so writing is a natural occupation for a septuagenarian. The scales tip toward the isolation side as we age. Without the continuous commotion of being at events or with other people, I’ve been able to discover myself in a way that was unexpected. At some point, I’ll know who I am and be ready for a new debut in society. If anyone will have me, that is.
The recent winter storm brought me indoors. For a while, I need that. I’ll also be ready for spring and trips to the vendors that support my garden. There is a lot of catching up to do. For now, I’m feeling isolation and coping with it by writing. It is the one thing I know how to do that works.
Excerpt from Charleston Receipts by The Junior League of Charleston, South Carolina, 1950.
I don’t know about this forward to a 1950s cookbook, Charleston Receipts. The unspoken part is cooks in the first verse were mostly black women, and housewives in the second were white. It is not overtly stated, but I’m certain it was implied. This book trades on fond remembrance of antebellum food culture. The word plantation is used in the names of some of the receipts (not recipes, per the author).
A large number of white women and girls worked as servants in the United States. It is possible the reference is not racist. Home cooking and cleaning were common employment for female Irish immigrants and those of other nationalities. When Grandmother left the Minnesota farm in the 1910s, she was employed as a servant in a home in Minneapolis. She worked as a cook well into her sixties. In the 1970s, people I knew in southern Indiana continued to employee a black woman as a home cook. It bothered me then, and it bothers me now. A person has to live, but not like this.
I have two copies of the book and one was missing its binder. Copies were readily available in thrift stores and used book stores. I read all the pages and saved a few from the volume without a binder to refresh my memory. There was a multi-page section about hominy, “long a favorite in the Carolina Low Country.” The section begins, “Man, w’en’e hongry, ‘e teck sum egg or cheese an’ ting an ‘eat till e’ full. But ‘ooman boun’ fuh meck wuck an’ trouble. ‘E duh cook!” I don’t recall the name of this type of language but it is stereotyped and hearkens to minstrel shows of the 1830s, which characterized blacks as lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, and prone to thievery and cowardice. Charleston Receipts is racist, although I am confident the Junior League of Charleston, which published the book, would deny it.
When I stopped in Charleston enroute to military service in Germany, I had a couple days before dropping off my pick up truck at the port. Charleston traded in slave culture then, and they do now. I saw for the first time up close, slave auction blocks, shackles, and whips used on enslaved humans. I searched the internet and found today there is the Old Slave Mart Museum that tells Charleston’s role in slave trade from 1856 to 1863. They were domestic slave traders then, one of the biggest in the country for collecting and selling human chattel.
In writing my autobiography I find the racist side of my personal history was in plain sight. I didn’t understand that then, mostly because my parents taught me a person is a person and that was that. It helped this outlook to have made a family trip to the plantation where Grandfather was on work release from prison and see my father sharing memories with a group of black men we encountered there. They seemed like old friends. It was a formative experience.
Racism never died out, although I forgot about it for a while… until I began writing my story. In that context, it is hard to miss, even in old cookbooks.
We got a dusting of snow last night, enough to use the electric snow blower on the driveway after sunrise. The forecast next week is for rain after ambient temperatures dip well below freezing this weekend. Is this the end of winter? I doubt it. I hope not.
In two weeks I begin planting seeds in indoor trays for the garden. This year I bought all nursery-started onions, so the first seeds into soil mix will be varieties of kale. Kale is a mainstay of our kitchen and the early start brings an early crop. After kale, I follow a time-tested, weekly procession of seedling starts that continues until the first week in May when I plant squash. I learned and developed this process while working for area vegetable farmers.
While I’m ready for spring, I’m not ready for winter to end. So much remains undone. I nudged my autobiography along, but have not had the long writing spells needed to finish the work this year. Based on feedback from a reader, I returned to part one for some revisions. I could easily spend another year there while part two remains in infancy. Partly this is a process of learning how to write. In part, I want to declare the work finished. The present obstacle is boxes and boxes of artifacts needing review and disposition before finalizing the narrative. I need external prompts to generate the narrative.
I began to dream during the blizzard. They have been dreams about travel, and topics I can’t remember. I don’t think much about dreams, they have little significance to me. I do notice the change in sleep patterns. For the most part, I’m sleeping through the night for a solid five or six hours.
I stand at the dining room window and look at the snow-covered garden. I have the plan about half worked out. Garlic is in the ground and I left space for a covered row on the west side of that plot. Tomatoes are planned with a return to my previous fencing method to keep deer from jumping it and eating tender seedlings. The next task is picking a spot for cruciferous vegetables. If I keep looking at the space, a plan for the rest will emerge.
Like much of my eighth decade of living, time goes too quickly. Part of me wants to apply discipline to get things quickly done. Part of me wants to take it easy, something I was unable to do much during my working years. Somehow I’ll find a balance as I understand what it means to age in America during a time of political turbulence. There is no universal understanding. We do the best we can.
When the Iowa Legislature convened on Monday, House Majority Leader Pat Grassley reprised his position on banning books in schools. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported:
Grassley doubled down on House Republicans’ efforts to remove books with sexual content from public school libraries and said Republicans may pass additional legislation to clarify or expand on the existing law.
In December, a federal judge temporarily blocked much of a law passed last year, Senate File 496, that banned books that depicted or described any of a list of sex acts from public schools and prohibited teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation before seventh grade, among a host of other regulations.
Lawmakers vow tax cuts, grieve school shooting by Caleb McCullough and Erin Burphy, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Jan. 9, 2024.
We couldn’t read Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger in K-12 when I attended in the 1960s. It was no big deal. I used my newspaper route money to buy a copy at the book store. Since when do we need government intrusion in work that school teachers, librarians and parents should already be doing? We don’t. In some ways, the focus on banning books is a distraction from a more significant problem: K-6 reading skills.
Would-be book banners argue that readers can still purchase books they can no longer access through public libraries the way I did when I was a grader. That is only true for those with the financial resources to do so. For many, particularly children and young adults, schools and public libraries are the only means to access literature.
When people talk about the “culture wars,” control of books available to K-6 students is a core issue. USA Today summarized:
Banned books are not new, but they have gained new relevance in an escalating culture war that puts books centering racism, sexuality and gender identity at risk in public schools and libraries.
A dramatic uptick in challenged books over the past few years, an escalation of censorship tactics, and the coordinated harassment of teachers and librarians has regularly put book banning efforts in news headlines.
Book bans are on the rise. What are the most banned books and why? by Barbara VanDenBurgh, USA Today, Sept. 29, 2023.
There is a basic tenant of society, supported by research, that children of less educated parents will read less and society will be the worse for it. The corollary is children of well-educated parents will read more and in so doing expand their horizons to see a better life beyond immediate family. Teaching reading in school has been a mainstay of elevating children above the social station in which they were born, creating possibilities for life that would otherwise rely upon chance and happenstance.
Government should fund programs that encourage reading, make sure funds are not abused, and then shut the hell up. Leave reading curricula to those who know it best: teachers, librarians and parents. Passing a new law revising a state book banning process is of value only as political fodder. It would not help with a more fundamental problem of reading skills in K-6 students.
On Friday, Jan. 12, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird filed notice of appeal of the federal district court’s decision to halt implementation of Senate File 496. The distraction continues.
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from my autobiographical work in progress.
In life, the world seems unknown until one lives it. Whether or not I would have found CRST, Inc. without my job search is an open question.
CRST, Inc. exploited the 1980 Motor Carrier Act that deregulated trucking and helped break the teamsters’ unions. This legislation passed during the Carter administration and was implemented during the Reagan years. While some trucking employees continued to be represented by the union, their numbers diminished after deregulation. Shippers benefited from lower costs and the expense reduction came mostly from new, non-union companies, made possible by lower wages and fewer benefits for employees. It was another feature of the Reagan Revolution.
Founded as Cedar Rapids Steel Transportation, Inc., on March 1, 1955, when I joined the firm on March 29, 1984, it was very much a “Company on the Grow.” While founder Herald Smith did not have a business education, through entrepreneurial energy, an ability to carve out a niche in the highly regulated transportation business, and a willingness to confront unions and union rules, he was able to establish CRST as a viable entity in the years before de-regulation. When the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated trucking, Smith, and people like him, took advantage of the new operating environment.
According to In It for the Long Haul: The Story of CRST, published to note the company’s 50th anniversary in 2005, CRST Inc. was the third company in the nation to secure 48-state operating authority after deregulation. Smith sought to eliminate the part of his business that was unionized, reducing pay and benefits, and creating cost efficiencies to support a lower rate structure. He did this by hiring independent contractors who owned and leased their own tractor-trailer rigs to CRST, Inc. and by acquiring companies that had non-union company drivers and then keeping them that way. This practice kept the number of union employees in decline as the company continued to grow.
By the time I joined the company, annual revenues were about $60 million and the “tough on employees” environment that characterizes many entrepreneurial businesses was evident throughout the organization. To me, it was something new and exciting, a natural extension of having served in the United States Army. I looked forward to the new opportunity.
I remember walking into the operations office during my job interview and saying to myself, “I hope I don’t have to work in that room.” In the office of what had previously been an LTL cross dock, was the core of the operation: van operations from the Midwest to the east coast, flatbed, and trip lease. Van operations had an island of workstations in the center, with additional work stations around the perimeter. A number of employees were smokers and a grey haze of tobacco smoke filled the room. The language was on the blue side, indicating an acceptable means of expression and interacting with others. It was a mostly male environment, although there were some women, most of them working in clerical positions behind a glass wall on the East side of the room when I entered that first day.
I had applied for a position in the shop, but my interviewer thought I was overly qualified for the position. He referred me to operations. The supervisor had been with the company a long time, was a Vietnam veteran, and had an office in the operations department. He interviewed me and then introduced me to the person who managed a company called Lincoln Sales and Service, which was becoming the growing, non-union part of the company.
Lincoln Sales and Service sought to hire management trainees, train them in the business and then have them open growth terminals throughout the country. All three interviewers treated me well, and with my military experience, they viewed me as having the “aggressive” personality traits they were seeking for management staff.
CRST, Inc. characterized itself in the newspaper ad to which I responded, “CRST is an aggressive, rapidly growing, major motor carrier transportation company based in Cedar Rapids. To help us in our expansion plans, we need a dedicated, career minded individual to fill a management trainee opening in our maintenance department.” Emphasis was on being “aggressive.”
I took notes after my interviews, writing on March 13, 1984: “Impressions: A good company, Iowa owned, they offer good benefits, and an entry a step ahead of other management positions I’ve been looking at. I feel the benefits of the other interviews to date.”
I was interviewed on March 12, went for a company physical on March 13 and was offered the job the same day. That night, I laid out the pros and cons: “PRO: good pay, pay incentives, location, benefits good, family owned (vs. public), I can relate to the people to whom I talked, expanding company, 65/100 of major carriers, chance for advancement, yearly evaluations, interesting, leadership, use more of my skills. CON: 2nd or 3rd shift, relocation in a year.” As indicated, I began work on March 29.
I did my research on CRST, Inc. and the characteristics of the job and company met my expectations.
…the Interstate Commerce Commission’s rigid controls on who could carry what freight at what rates over the nation’s highways were reduced almost to the vanishing point by the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and by greater leniency on the part of the commission itself. Since 1981, about 9,000 new carriers have thronged into the field. When the 1982 recession almost simultaneously reduced the amount of available freight to be handled, an orgy of rate-cutting and discounting resulted…
…Nevertheless, a few companies, such as CRST, are enlarging their volume and profits even at a time when the industry’s excess capacity still is holding down freight rates. CRST’s success at swimming against the tide is all the more notable because it isn’t one of the giants of the trucking business and because it is a full-load carrier where the competition is the hottest.
Wall Street Journal, Feb. 13, 1984.
Goals for CRST, Inc.
Keep a business journal with entries at least monthly.
Learn the basic elements of the trucking industry…sales, maintenance, administration, terminal operations, etc.
Develop as a person, increasing my ability to communicate and motivate subordinates.
Write an article about my entry level experiences.
Demonstrate my competence prior to the six month review date.
Within one month, draw up a list of quantitative goals and achieve them.
Demonstrate that I am the one in a hundred who can best do the job.
Business journal entry, March 28, 1984.
I started work on March 29 and was one of a class of 16 management trainee and new exempt employees who began training on April 2, 1984. Of the 16, Mike Gannon, now Groups President of CRST International, Inc., is the only remaining person at the company as of this writing.
It was an exciting time, and I was glad to be a part of this growing, Iowa-based company. Too, the initial salary of $17,000 per year was enough to enable Jacque to stay at home while we tried to start a family. Things looked pretty good in March of 1984. Jacque left me a note the morning I left home for my first day of work as a maintenance coordinator.
I encountered no surprises during my first two days with CRST. I trained with the first shift breakdown coordinator in the shop. He was located in the maintenance office, where I met him and other employees who worked there. I got a good feeling for the operations of the company, where they are, and what kinds of maintenance problems the drivers experience on the road. My initial impression is that these are people dedicated to getting the job done right.
[…]
Having been an Army officer, I appreciated the approach the company made to providing training to assimilate me into the company. As a company with growth plans, they recognized the need for training, and while there was not a specific training agenda, the company wanted me to think like the management team did regarding operations. At the same time, having managed soldiers in Germany, I possessed a firm sense of myself and quickly cut through the inefficiencies of my predecessor in the position to make changes to what I felt were more viable solutions to daily problems.
Having this awareness from the beginning of my employment enabled me to make good suggestions for process improvement and at the same time contributed to a disengagement from the prevailing management outlook at CRST. This would be a positive for my career in the first couple of years of my work in transportation. My stock within the company would grow in value. There was a direct consequence on my writing and home life.
Lorraine Deaton at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
While sorting my papers I made a pile of letters from Mother beginning when I left for university in 1970 and ending when I returned from military service in 1979. There are about 50 of them, containing a lot I didn’t realize when I received and read them the first time. What does a person do with such artifacts?
She wrote a lot of them while working at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Rock Island Arsenal. She mentioned writing them on her breaks, yet from the tenor of the letters, I believe she also wrote them on her work desk. It was her chance to get me caught up on family news while she was working an important job.
The early letters are newsy, yet part of them is also about her adjusting to being widowed at a young age. She didn’t date anyone new for a long time after Father died. She felt socially uncertain about attending parties solo. One summer she had a romance with someone who worked for the AAA ball club in Davenport. When he moved back to California at the end of the season, the relationship was over. The level of confidence she shared with me did not broach my consciousness at the time.
She didn’t know how to handle the fact I enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduation from university. Having lived through the aftermath of World War II, the Korean Conflict, and Vietnam, I’m certain she was concerned for my safety as only a mother could be. She attended my commissioning ceremony at Fort Benning, Georgia and talked about visiting me in Germany while I was stationed in Mainz. We never got her trip to Europe arranged.
She worked several jobs to make ends meet. In addition to her work at the Corps, she worked at a credit union and did keypunch for the American Automobile Association. She liked the keypunch work, as that’s how she got started working for the government. She could go in for her shift, do her work, and leave any thoughts about it behind when she left. Unfortunately the keypunch work was lowly paid and she soon quit because the work did not pay enough.
She often complained in the letters of how tired she was from working. She accomplished a lot after Father died yet I believe she would have been fine had the two of them had a full life together. She made clear in the letters returning to the workforce was something she was forced to do to survive as a widow.
She wrote a long letter after discovering there was an inheritance of land in Virginia. My Great Uncle Roy had been settling the estate of Patrick Henry Addington and Tryphena Ethyl Miller, my great grandparents. They died intestate and there was a matter of land to be divided among many relatives. With the death of my paternal grandmother and my father, those many relatives included me.
In the letter Mother wrote about possible plans for the land. While Great Uncle Roy had been buying everyone out to get clear title, Mother and my Uncle Gene had discussed joint ownership of our share. She described two level surfaces on what would have been our plot, where a house could be built. We would share use of the property, she proposed. Nothing came of this and during a 1983 trip to Virginia, I quit claimed my share to Uncle Roy.
Letter writing is a lost art in 2024. It is a much different thing to sit alone and write to someone we’ve known our whole lives. If I were stationed in Germany today, and Mother were still living, we’d no doubt video chat via Discord or Face Time or Zoom. She did such a good job writing letters I continue to learn from her. For the time being, I’ll keep them.
The recently finished holiday season was good for at least one thing: I spend more time writing. A funk spread over me for a few months as the garden wound down. Now, the desire to write is hard to contain. I feel some of what I recently wrote has been pretty good, both on this blog and in my autobiography. A couple things made the difference.
Perhaps the biggest is by reading more, I’m beginning to gain better understanding of contemporary affairs and connect dots. When I began using Goodreads to track my reading, the goal was to start reading books again. Somehow I had fallen away from book reading. When I made a commitment to read 25 pages per day and began tracking books read, the number of annual books read grew from 24 in 2018 to 69 in 2023. Quantity improved measurably.
Better than quantity, I’ve been able to correlate perspectives of history that didn’t previously come together. Because of my book selection process, I tend to read books with similar themes, with direct consequences. For example, the Reagan Revolution is clearer to me now that I read multiple books from different perspectives about it. As understanding deepens, it lays a foundation and context for my recent personal history. There is no reason to describe the wake of Reagan and neoliberalism, but rather assume it as background and build something positive from there. My recent letter to the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette is an example of what is possible.
It may seem like a small thing, but beginning to write Part II of my autobiography using chapters with names helped a lot. Instead of a Jack Kerouac-style automatic streaming of content from memory, the chapter titles break up the narrative and enable the reader (and the writer) to focus on one thing at a time in a long and complex narrative. This was a recommendation of a friend who read Part I early last year. It was a positive addition.
I’m filling in for Dave Bradley at Blog for Iowa until his family gets settled in Indiana. That means I have a commitment to provide at least two posts each weekend. The weekly obligation keeps me thinking about possible topics. At the same time, it helps organize the flow of ideas into buckets for that blog, this blog, letters to the editor, and my autobiography. Having a firm deadline to produce something for an audience helps maintain focus. Dave expects to be away for several months, and it will help my writing.
I deactivated my X account on Nov. 22, 2023 after 15 years on the platform. After giving Threads a thorough beta testing, I found a core group of accounts that provide diversity and interest so when I need social media, I have a responsive place to go. I would like to rebuild what I had on X: a strong group of Iowans interested in politics. It’s happening slowly, but I’m hopeful with a presidential election this year, it will come together by Labor Day. I’m still new there. The biggest change is the weight of X toxicity was lifted almost immediately. That has been good for my writing.
I don’t make New Year Resolutions yet feel like in 2024 I can accomplish a lot on my autobiography. By reading and writing more, the process gets better defined… and easier. That should make the writing better. If the holidays provided a needed boost to my writing, I’ll take it.
Newman Abuissa, chair of the Iowa Democratic Party Arab American Caucus, speaking at a peace vigil in Iowa City on Dec. 29, 2023.
I studied the Israeli Six-Day War (June 1967) and the Yom Kippur War (October 1973) while I was in the military. We figured with the Vietnam War over, the next major conflict would be over oil in the Middle East. We lifted Israeli tactics and put them into practice in our Mechanized Infantry Division in preparation for the inevitable conflict. General Norman Schwartzkopf, who led U.S. forces during the First Gulf War, served as Assistant Division Commander in the same unit I was in, although after I left Germany.
Besides that, I haven’t studied the Middle East to any extent. It has been a blind spot in my knowledge of history. A friend from high school was serving in the Peace Corps in Israel during 1973. By chance, I ran into him while leaving a youth hostel in Florence, Italy. We walked to Piazza San Marco and chatted about life since I had last seen him stateside. I don’t recall what he said about the war, but it was one contributing factor to his return to the states. When I boarded a bus to Fiesole was the last time I saw him.
A group of local peace activists held their regular Friday afternoon vigil at the University of Iowa Pentacrest on Dec. 29. KCRG-TV was there and wrote this story.
Iowa City, Iowa (KCRG) – The Iowa City chapter of Veterans For Peace held a peace vigil in front of the Pentacrest in downtown Iowa City on December 29th.
They were joined by people from the following groups: Iowa City Action for Palestine, Iowans for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Iowa Physicians for Social Responsibility, Mennonite Peace Group, Johnson County United Nations Association, and the Johnson County Interfaith Coalition who all spoke at the event.
The chapter’s co-founder Paul Deaton called for a ceasefire as well as allowing unrestricted humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.
“There is a need for peace in this world and if we don’t work for peace we won’t have peace,” said Deaton.
‘Veterans For Peace’ handed out leaflets outlining their positions, saying being critical of Israel’s actions is not the same as being anti-Semitic.
The leaflets also stated “Support for Palestinian justice and a cease-fire does NOT equate to endorsement of Hamas.”
The group holds peace vigils every Friday.
Groups come together in Iowa City at vigil for peace in Israel-Hamas War KCRG-TV, Dec. 29, 2023.
I don’t understand the Middle East any better than I did in 1974 when I ran into my friend in Florence. What I do understand is what I told KCRG-TV, “There is a need for peace in the world and if we don’t work for peace we won’t have peace.” Working for peace are words to live by.
On my 72nd birthday I reviewed last year. There was not much on my calendar. As I withdraw into whatever it is occupies my days, what remained were political events, home owners association business, trips to visit our child and my sister in law, and medical appointments. I gardened, took photographs, and went grocery shopping, yet those things don’t go on the calendar as they are assumed.
Nothing stood out and I’m okay with that.
I keep my birthday hidden for the most part. It coincides with the birthday of the State of Iowa, where I live. Celebrate that instead of one more year of an aging septuagenarian. We’ll be better for it.
If I’m granted one more year, I hope to do some good in society. While I let go of things from my past, may there be new adventures ahead. No New Year’s Resolutions, just hope for a better future.
Right now, all I can think about is snow falling on apple trees.
Journey Home 
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