Category: Writing

On the shortest day of the year, I grabbed a couple of stacks and started going through artifacts of my life. The current pile is mostly cards and notes sent for occasions long forgotten. I developed a new rule: If I can’t recall who sent an item, it’s off to the shredder.

The owner of his namesake home, farm, and auto supply company used to send an annual, hand-written birthday card while I was employed there. Apparently, I kept them all. Amy Klobuchar sent a Christmas card in 2019 when she was running for president. I think she will run again. Tom Harkin’s operation was a Democratic machine and I have a couple of his Christmas cards. I am sorry to see him gone from the U.S. Senate.

My friend Ed sends irregularly arriving letters about the Veterans for Peace chapter we founded. In one was a photograph of 16 of us at the Iowa City Public Library. I pulled that out and put it on the magnetic white board next to my writing table. The group suffered a bit as the World War II and Korean War veterans died. In this month’s letter it was uncertain whether our chapter would survive.

There was a ticket stub from the June 13, 2009 performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Riverside Theatre produced the play on the Festival Stage at Lower City Park. Our child and I spent several nights there through those years, guarding the property from vandals. After our shift, we had breakfast at Hamburg Inn No. 2. I found a card from Ron Clark and Jodi Hovland thanking us for our support. One season, they both played mechanicals in Midsummer Night’s Dream, although I don’t recall if it was this performance. Theirs were some of my favorite performances in the many Shakespearean plays I have seen.

I found one of the last letters from Mother in an envelope addressed by my sister. Mother apologized for not baking a fruitcake due to complications with the aftermath of a root canal. I’m afraid the fruitcake tradition is barely alive at this point. If we were to make one, it would not be anything like hers. I believe we have family fruitcake recipes stashed away in piles and cookbooks. So, there’s that.

I found a recipe for Date Pinwheels provided by a friend from when we worked at the university. It is written in his hand. I pulled it out of the pile to stick in my hand written cookbook. My spouse and I were visitors to his apartment a few times. He was a fan of the Star Wars movies and had copies on the new technology of VHS video cassette. We watched a movie or two with him on VHS. We won’t be making any date pinwheels because one of us is vegan and we’ve yet to find a good substitute for eggs and butter in baking.

I finished the first stack and the next is a pile of letters, drafts and papers. Most of this pile is related to my autobiography. I kept most letters I received and there are many tucked away in different places. This pile has ones to which I referred in writing the first part of the work.

I printed the State of Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics Report on the Cherry Mine Disaster on Nov. 13, 1909. My grandfather worked the Cherry Mine although was not present the day of the fire which claimed 259 lives. He worked in several mines over his long career as a coal miner. I learned more about coal mining than I thought possible from reading this report. It explained the mine, how it was dug, and has a detailed description of the sequence of events during the disaster. Being a coal miner must have been a drudgery, one with constant danger of being buried alive. This is a common thread throughout my side of the family where both Mother and Father were descendants of coal miners.

Eventually I will dispose of all this paper. There is too much to leave as an inheritance. The purpose of my autobiography is to distill a narrative from these diverse documents. For now, having gone through them, they are back on the sorting table until I refer to them again. It’s a fit way to spend part of the holiday season.

Yesterday we noted it has been 41 years since our wedding. We are still together. We spend more time together and need each other as we age. In these times, that a marriage lasted so long is atypical. That’s us.

I wrote about this moment in my work in progress autobiography:

If one looks at the wedding photograph of us standing in front of the church door, right after taking our vows, it represents what happiness looks like. The day was also a unique embarkation on a search for truth and meaning in our lives.

In the moment of that photograph, on a warm December day, within a small gathering of family and friends, at a modest reception, and with a wedding trip planned, we started the journey we continue today. Words can’t capture how we felt except to say, it was a defining moment full of every potential that life offers.

An Iowa Life, work in progress.

As we age, I do most driving and in-person shopping. Together we nurture our health. Like many marriages, ours had ups and downs. I try to focus on the good as I age. There is no denying we made a happy start. This photo is evidence.

Over the weekend I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Apparently I was the only person in the known universe who had not heard of her. Printed right there — inside the front cover — are 17 other published works of her fiction and nonfiction. My copy is the 25th Anniversary Edition! I’ve been here all along. Where has she been?

I couldn’t write like her. First, I don’t think I am capable of her stylistic renderings. Second, I prefer a more utilitarian approach. Maybe number two is a reason people have trouble finishing my longer works. The book was entertaining with a couple of nuggets I might actually use. The namesake one, “Just take it bird by bird,” is something similar to what I heard long ago during a Dale Carnegie course, “An air traffic controller can land only one plane at a time.” So it has been without knowing Lamott.

I don’t need to review Lamott’s book because it speaks for itself. I posted a photo of the cover on social media and so many people commented it was one of their favorites. Besides, there are 9,858 Goodreads reviews already.

What I do want to say is it is important to take a break from writing and read a book on being a writer and all that means. At a certain point such books are an easy read with a lot of head-nodding. In a long term project like my autobiography is, one that stretches into years, it is important to walk away for a while and listen to what others say about writing to gain a sense of perspective and hope. Reading about how to write can also be a way to break writers’ block.

I’ve taken to opening the garage door and standing outside in the predawn darkness. Today, stars were out. Because of the layout of trees in the yard, I couldn’t identify any constellations. It was just starlight shining down on me with a reminder we are all stardust. To put it in more utilitarian language, the way scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson did, “The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The universe is in us.”

I’m ready to get back to writing.

My first was a handheld transistor radio purchased about 1963. I used it to listen to KSTT AM’s weekly Top 40 countdown. That year, the station moved from the Hotel Davenport to a new building at 1111 E. River Drive. When I was in high school we would drive past the station and wave at the disk jockey through the large picture window that faced the street. The corner drug store distributed paper copies of the KSTT Top 40 list and I tried to get one each week so I could follow along with the countdown. I have a couple of those in a scrapbook. The thing about radio was I could listen without the supervision of parents. If I plugged in the earphone, they wouldn’t know I was listening in bed. As a grader, that was important.

There was a large radio in the basement of the American Foursquare home from which I attended grade and high school. It was more a piece of furniture, standing taller than my waist. There was an AM dial yet I mostly used it to receive short wave signals from around the world. I spent a lot of hours roaming the dial and seeing what people said in English. It felt good to be exposed to radio signals from outside the United States. This is something I wouldn’t have done in my Midwestern life without that old radio.

I have few memories of listening to the radio in the series of Volkswagen vehicles I owned in high school and at university. I suppose I did listen to the radio, yet it made no lasting impression on me.

Upon arrival in Mainz, Germany in December 1976, I bought a General Electric multi band radio at the Post Exchange. It used batteries or could be plugged in. It gave up the ghost during the last few years, yet it produced high quality sound as I searched the AM, FM, and shortwave dials. I recall listening to live reports from the Vatican on Armed Forces Radio. The conclave of cardinals was electing a successor to Paul Paul VI and the reporter described the smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel after each vote. It seemed like a big deal when Pope John Paul I was named pontiff. It surprised everyone when he died 33 days into his pontificate.

While serving as an infantry officer, our unit had a long deployment to Baumholder for a training exercise that brought in much of Eighth Infantry Division and some of V Corps. The training was about readiness for a potential invasion of West Germany by the Warsaw Pact Armies through the Fulda Gap. I had roles to play at Baumholder, yet was also responsible to maintain garrison operations back at the kaserne in Mainz-Gonsenheim where we were based. I drove home from Baumholder most Saturday afternoons in my Chevy Truck while listening to Armed Forces Radio. The play list those days was old serialized mystery plays like The Shadow. The same playlist each Saturday helped make the 110 kilometer trip pass quickly. As each program ended, I ticked off the miles on the journey home.

In 1988 our family moved to Lake County in Northwest Indiana. We lived in a tract home in a neighborhood where all the homes appeared to have a similar design that included a ranch-style structure situated on a crawl space. Our version had a detached garage where most of my stuff lived in boxes. I had some space on the built in living room book shelves, an easy chair I received as a Christmas gift, and in the corner of the dining area we placed a word processor where I could write. I listened to local radio in our garage, mostly on weekends when I worked on projects.

Indiana, during the six years we lived there, was in transition. The heyday of large steel mills had ended and was being replaced by smaller, more efficient steel production facilities. Manufacturing across the Midwest was suffering because of the Reagan Revolution which drove it to locales where labor was cheaper. The local radio warned about developing a “steel-mill mentality” and to develop interests, especially among younger people, outside the mills.

There was a radio swap show on Saturday mornings. On it, callers would report items for sale and leave contact information. At the trucking terminal I managed, one Friday there was a theft from one of the parked trucks. The stolen consumer goods turned up on the radio swap show.

Folks in Lake County were mostly good people, although of an attitude that reminded me more of grouchy Bucks County, Pennsylvania folks than Iowans. Our daughter went to public school beginning in Kindergarten and it was a type of experience where kids, especially Hispanic kids, would be pulled out of school without notice, never to be seen in school again.

I traveled extensively throughout Indiana, visiting most parts of the state in my six years there. The radio was a constant companion even if I can’t recall to which stations I listened. About the only sure thing was listening to one of the two Chicago traffic radio stations when I had to make a trip into the city.

We moved back to Iowa in 1993 which was the heyday of Iowa Public Radio’s Saturday afternoon lineup. Programs like Thistle and Shamrock, Mountain Stage, and A Prairie Home Companion made an afternoon leading to supper time for me. It was more times than I can remember. I also listened to Car Talk while working in the garage on Saturday mornings. Listening to Iowa Public Radio on Saturdays was a thing until it wasn’t, due to budget cuts, Garrison Keillor retiring, and the coming to the air waves of local musician Bob Dorr who dominated the afternoons. To be honest, I could take only so many instances of Dorr going through his collection of vinyl LPs. It was the end of an era.

Today I mostly listen to afternoon news reports on public radio while fixing dinner, classical music when working in the kitchen during the afternoon, and to country music while driving in my automobile. The garage radio is usually tuned to country music. Automobile listening has become more important because the station to which I tune in is targeted by political advertisers. I can tell who’s got the dough for ads and who doesn’t. That, along with messaging, informs my view of what Republicans in the state are up to. Democrats don’t spend as much on radio advertising, simply because they don’t have the dollars.

The story of my radio listening isn’t just this. However, this post provides a sample of my life, something basic to my personality.

When our child lived in Colorado, before Keillor went off the air, I cooked dinner for us in their apartment with a Prairie Home Companion on in the background. It was a shared family experience that remained important to us. I value such memories. They can’t be repeated, only remembered. Memory of radio listening has become increasingly important as I age.