Category: Writing

Reverse side: Made by Dexter Press, West Hyack, New York. Published by Mennonite Historical Society of Iowa, Kalona, Ia. 52247. Old Order Amish and conservative Mennonite daughters wear traditional plain homemade dresses familiar throughout 450 years of Anabaptist history. These are the children of a buggy maker living and working near the Kalona Cheese plant of Twin County Dairy, Inc., Highway 1, Kalona, Ia.

Two girls posing for a photographer who had permission to take their picture. There has been more than a little controversy about photographing Mennonites and Old Order Amish. It is permissible with the former, and against views about graven images with the latter. The images are well-circulated.

I used to visit the Twin County Dairy when bicycling from Iowa City. Cycling alone for the exercise, I would stop and buy cheese curds at the dairy. That is, if it were open. Often my trips were predawn when the glow and flicker of kerosene lamps came from house windows and the doors of barns. I no longer travel to Kalona as I learned how to produce almost everything I formerly bought at Stringtown Grocery and other shops scattered in the rural area.

Twin County Dairy, established by a group of Amish and Mennonite farmers as a cooperative in 1946, was shuttered in 2014. Kalona Creamery, a part of Open Gates Business Development Corporation bought it the following year. Their businesses included Kalona Organics®, Kalona Farms, Farmers Creamery, Awesome Refrigerated Transit of Iowa, and Provision Ingredients. I don’t know if they have a retail store that sells cheese curds. Since there is a creamery a few miles from home, I have no need to go and find out.

Author David Rhodes wrote about the area in his novel Rock Island Line. I have a library copy of the first edition, published in 1975. No doubt I bought it at a thrift shop. There is a rubber stamp inside the front cover that reads, “Outdated Removed from Circulation.” Young girls in the Mennonite community and their photographs won’t become outdated any time soon.

Reverse side: Washington Skyline, Washington, D.C. Located on the axis of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, the Capitol Building is shown in the foreground with the Washington Monument illuminated in the background. See the U.S.A. in a Chevrolet. As you travel ask us.

Life would have been simpler if I had stuck to the same path as friends in high school. Maybe follow a narrative such as after school and military service find a job, raise a family, work it until retirement, then settle back and relax in the golden years. Simple.

Actual living was not simple. While many in my cohort married and started a family immediately after high school, I did not and that made a difference.

The trauma of being injured while young, and the subsequent hospital stay, removed me from conventional pathways. I wrote about it in 2009:

My earliest defining moment was the day, at age 3-1/2, when a swing-set set up in the basement of our Madison Street home collapsed and injured my head. My parents were horrified. I remember the pool of blood on the basement floor, holding the thumb of the ambulance driver, taking ether dripped into a funnel to anesthetize me for the stitches to mend my gashed head. I am lucky to be alive. What I learned through the injury and recovery in the hospital was that there is an infrastructure of knowledge and caring to support us when things happen. I watched the routines of the hospital staff, the doctor checking up on me, changing room mates and bed linen, daily visits from my parents and the handling of my propensity to get out of bed and walk around. This experience assured me that although we are vulnerable, we are not alone.

Over the years, Doctor Kuhl would examine the scar on my forehead and talk about my recovery when I visited him in his office. Today, I don’t think of the scar, and suspect most people do not even notice it. What I do think about is that while we are not alone, we must be part of a society that helps protect those who are most vulnerable, including the injured and infirm. When I was very young, I made a withdrawal from this bank and now the debt needs repaying.

Big Grove News, Jan. 18, 2009.

Little has changed since I wrote this. While I relied on the infrastructure of society, at high school graduation I had neither the interest nor skills to get married and start a family. I went to college instead.

In late 1968 or 1969, I sought Father’s approval while figuring out what to do after high school. Maybe I would study engineering, I told him. The practical, rational approach of an engineer to problem-solving was appealing. He neither approved nor disapproved. He looked surprised it was on my mind. He was completing his own education and perhaps was preoccupied. He would be gone soon afterward.

During senior year in high school we made a class trip to Washington, D.C. and New York City. It was my first trip on a commercial aircraft. We saw the U.S. Capitol and Washington monument depicted in this postcard at about the time it was printed. We played cards for nickels and dimes in our room each night. My winnings paid for incidental expenses through New York. In some ways the class trip was the beginning of living on my own and experiencing the world outside my home town. It seems appropriate it would start with the nation’s capitol.

My life divides into segments: preschool, education, work and family, moving to Indiana, and moving back to Iowa. Each was important for different reasons. As I went through time I didn’t know how each step would unfold.

My education, including military service and graduate school, had the momentum of youth. When I finished school at age 29, I was ready to do great things. Available opportunities were a disappointment. The trajectory of youth found me alone and unsettled, without a career or path forward. I would have to make my own way and that complicated things. In retrospect it was a good complication. If I hadn’t left my home town permanently for university, life may have been simpler.

I’m glad my circumstances gave me the chance to leave home and be different.

This postcard is intended to be a joke. I love it for its gossipy nature. It was written in pencil and the script has all but faded away. The postmark and address are illegible. If there was a written message, it is gone. Names are written next to the figures in the image, but can’t be read. It is reflective of a forgotten time of white privilege.

What world does this represent? The man and women are unlikely married and that alone is noteworthy according to the sender. If Facebook existed at the time of the postcard, an appropriate comment and discussion thread would be forthcoming.

I have used Facebook since March 2008 to stay in touch with our daughter after her move to Colorado after college. She encouraged me to join. I have no regrets.

To feel better about Facebook, I limit use of the platform. I cross post from Instagram, serve as admin for two private groups, and occasionally post some of my writing there. Most of my daily activity is checking notifications and responding as briefly as I can. I respond with a vague notion that friends who show up in my timeline will be those with whom I interact.

As part of my usage, I curate the “life events” part of my profile some Sunday afternoons. At first it was a timeline of selected musical concerts I attended. Eventually I added other significant events like an audience with Pope Paul VI, buying our first home computer, and selected key moments of engagement in society. I work on it from time to time and it encourages me look up dates and record them as a reference for my autobiography. Because I isolate myself from most of what is toxic about the platform my list of grievances is short. The private group with neighbors is particularly useful in my role as president of our home owners association.

While white privilege persists, societal attitudes reflected in this postcard do not. The circle of people with whom one might share such a titillating message is limited to a small subset of those we know. Most think the better of mocking young love in an age where joy is stripped from many aspects of life. We encourage behaviors of white privilege and keep such thoughts to ourselves. The better behavior would be to determine how to recognize and purge white privilege completely from our thoughts and deeds.

The postcard is distinct. Coming from the time it does, I appreciate the ideas behind it. That taunting, juvenile assertion more often found on the playgrounds of graders than in adult society.

To read all of my posts in the series, click on the tag Postcards from Iowa.