The Iowa story of the Red Delicious apple is best told on the Stark Bro’s website. What stands out to me is that 1893, the year of the first International New Fruit Show where Jesse Hiatt of Peru, Iowa exhibited his chance seedling, the Hawkeye apple, also saw the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Exposition embodied the late nineteenth century’s drive to catalog, classify, and display the world’s cultures, species, and artifacts—a hallmark of the Age of Imperialism.
Clarence Stark was not a fan of the Ben Davis apple widely planted in Iowa and the Midwest at that time. While Ben Davis stood up to winter, grew almost anywhere, and did not bruise easily, it lacked flavor. Stark literally got on his horse and went out to find better. When he found the Hawkeye at the New Fruit Show, he immediately liked it. Somehow Hiatt’s association with it had gotten lost. The two came together at the second show.
Clarence was elated. He could not get to Iowa fast enough. The Stark brothers made the trip immediately and bought the sole rights from Hiatt, named the apple “Stark® Delicious” (only after naming ‘Golden Delicious’ in 1914 did it become ‘Red Delicious’) and secured a registered trademark. (A Delicious Discovery: Red Delicious Apple, Stark Bro’s Nurseries and Orchards).
That Red Delicious was first found in Iowa is the reason I planted it in my backyard in April 1995. It has been a good tree. Even with large parts of it damaged in wind storms and the Aug. 10, 2020 derecho, it produces an amazing amount of fruit every other year. If Stark Bro’s propagated it to the extent flavor was diminished after adapting the cultivar to mass markets, the tree in my backyard continues to produce great-tasting fruit. I’d say they were delicious, but that would be too punny.
I am thankful to have planted this Red Delicious tree 30 years ago. It came from a time of robber barons seeking to buy anything of value and profit from it. To a minor extent, Stark Bro’s did that as well. As the apple business changes, stores are less reliant on Red Delicious. Because of the flavor, I wouldn’t trade my tree for anything.
On Oct. 1, the machine at ChatGPT told me I had used my allowance of queries for my free account. It was fine. It offered me a lesser quality query until my account reset. I logged out instead and quickly found other things to do.
After re-reading my post about using AI, which includes an essay I asked the machine to write, I decided it was a good call to refrain from using ChatGPT in my autobiography. The main issue is it relies on what is available on the internet on a given topic. Because my autobiography is being written from journals, photographs, memories and other in-real-life documentation, such information is not available for the machine to read. It will produce a present-biased, internet-derived account about whatever I ask about my life. That is not what I want in this project.
While it did a reasonable job drafting something from the contents of this blog, it only knows me that way and that is a deficiency that cannot be easily corrected. For example, I asked the machine to write a brief autobiography of me. It’s response tells the story: “I couldn’t find enough reliable public information to write a full, detailed 1,000-word biography of Paul Deaton of Iowa.” This was despite my essay of that name, which lives on this blog and is my most popular post since I began in 2007. Either the machine is lazy, or it has programming that discourages this type of query. This discovery of the limits of ChatGPT is of value.
What can I use ChatGPT or another AI program to do? I see three applications based on asking these questions of the machine.
Give me ideas in how to use ChatGPT as diarist. I have been journaling since 1974 and the evolution of styles and content is striking. They developed over time. Naturally the machine wants to talk about events in my journal all day so it can learn as much as possible about me. I won’t do that, yet the occasional query can help me find direction in that kind of writing. It also made these suggestions for how to use the machine: “The key is deciding whether you want me to be: An analyst (finding themes and patterns); A recorder (storing entries); An editor (shaping them into narratives); or A mirror (asking questions back).” Even though I am alone when journaling, I don’t need a machine partner with which to interact.
What are some ideas for vegetarian and vegan enchiladas? Using ChatGPT to determine what to cook and eat seems solid. I entered on-hand ingredients and the machine suggested a specific recipe that used them. It provided grouping of ideas by flavor-type, such as hearty and savory, bright and fresh, protein-rich, toppings and finishing touches. So often, my ideas are pulling out a familiar cookbook and paging through it. AI could be an alternate way of figuring out what’s for dinner. There is value in that.
What are some ways to balance household work for today? I also entered tasks for the day. Personal productivity is important and the machine gave me useful ideas on how to structure my day. Because we are creatures of habit, we need to break out of what we do to improve how much we get done in a day. AI did not hesitate to tell me I scheduled too much to do, suggesting tasks that could be done tomorrow. It also changed how certain tasks were scheduled in the day, for example, moving cooking to the afternoon and spreading meal prep throughout the day. Going forward, I expect to use AI to help restructure how I spend my time. It may get to the point where I’m satisfied with how my new daily schedule is going. If so, then I will step away from AI for a while. I do know I was productive but exhausted by mid afternoon the first day I tried using an AI planner. This despite more scheduled rest and recovery time throughout the day.
It seems important we get AI out of our system. Like with everything, moderation of use seems essential.
Early steel cage wrestling match. Photo Credit – Online World of Wrestling website.
In July, word came from the president he was considering a cage match wrestling event to be held on the White House lawn. As the Skydance – Paramount merger closed on Aug. 7, and UFC signed an exclusive deal with Paramount+ four days later, the UFC match to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary appears to be inevitable and will be aired on Paramount stations, including CBS, the former home of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.
Trump’s affection for professional wrestling is well known, as is his induction into the WWE hall of fame in 2013. Regardless of concerns about propriety, a cage match is an expression of the president’s character. The event is expected to host some 20,000 of his closest fans on the lawn and be available to countless others via the internet. From where do cage matches come?
The American Wrestling Association (AWA) was a professional wrestling promotion based in Minneapolis from 1960 until 1991, according to Wikipedia. It was founded by Verne Gagne and Wally Karbo, originating as part of the Minneapolis Boxing & Wrestling Club. Unlike modern professional wrestlers of the WWE, Gagne was an amateur wrestling champion who was an alternate on the U.S. freestyle wrestling team at the 1948 Summer Olympics. He ran the AWA with a conservative sensibility, Wikipedia said, firmly believing that sound technical wrestling should be the basis of a pro-wrestling company. Cage matches reflect no basis in technical wrestling as Gagne had come to know it. I submit they are about the fans.
Father and we kids attended a professional wrestling match at Municipal Stadium in Davenport. The stands were not packed although because of the popular Saturday morning television program, All Star Wrestling, the event drew a good-sized crowd. Patrons were unruly, with arguments breaking out among them. I almost got into a fight after mouthing off to a stranger. That day there was a cage match during which constructing a cage of chain-link fencing was part of the spectacle. Was that real blood when one wrestler crushed another against the cage wall? It was hard to say from the bleachers. Young women would visit the motel across the river where the wrestlers stayed and attempt to accompany them on tour. Such plebeian entertainments were typical in my home town. This is a crowd that later would evolve into MAGA cult members.
Once one admits a cage wrestling match is not sports, then what kind of spectacle is it? I have to believe we could all be pursuing more constructive use of our time. It’s a free country, though, and a wrestling star is president. Celebrating professional wrestling is just one more way our culture is getting away from us as the country marks its 250th birthday.
Cooking collards with onion, jalapeno pepper and garlic.
News this week was that Substacker Bari Weiss will be taking The Free Press to CBS, where she’ll become editor-in-chief of the news division. Ana Marie Cox had comments about this:
If the Free Press leave Substack, it would be an enormous hit to the platform. Their 10 percent vig generates $1 million a year, representing roughly 2.5% of Substack’s total annual revenue (estimated around $40–45 million).
As a reminder: Substack has never turned a profit, and yet it’s still valued at $1 billion based on VC rounds. I’ve argued before in this newsletter that Substack cannot make money if it stays true to its promise of being a home for independent journalists wanting to preserve their voices. It’s a high-minded and laudable goal—one I’ve been seduced by myself, and one that has drawn many writers I deeply respect—but the business pressures don’t align with that vision.
Sooner or later the gravitational pull of investors will drag the platform toward something else entirely: the “YouTube of newsletters,” with all the churn, AI slop, engagement bait, and radicalization that implies.
Losing The Free Press wouldn’t just be a big financial hit; it would accelerate the enshittification. (The Freed Press, by Ana Marie Cox on Buttondown).
In that context, I remain 75 percent sure I will move my public writing to Substack beginning in January 2026.
My issues with WordPress are two.
The main contractor through whom I got my WordPress blog printed went out of business. Replacement services are much more expensive. With Substack I get an email every time I post, so there would be hard copy backup by printing it out. Not ideal or fancy, yet it would work. I am old school and know how to operate a three ring binder.
Secondly, I get way more views on Substack than WordPress. This is a major factor behind my move. Partly, they track them differently and one viewer can make multiple “views” on a single post while reading it. Even with that, the numbers are too great to ignore. After all, the reason we write in public is to be read.
Yes I have read Cox’s multiple issues with Substack, including all about the Nazi sh*t there. I can live with that, I think. If I can’t, I’ll do something else. I looked at Buttondown, Cox’s current home, as an option. I am not famous with a large following as she is. I need the density of people I know on Substack. I have three months to get ready.
Changes will be coming for pauldeaton.com. I don’t want to lose the domain, so I plan to take the current content private and reassign the domain to one of the spare blogs I keep in the background and put that in public. I still need a place to post letters to the editor and cross post written work I do for other sites. Substack does not seem like that kind of place. While I have the paper archive, I use the blogs I’ve taken private to search easily. I have hidden posts from multiple platforms loaded on WordPress going back to 2007. That site will always be a resource.
My view of this may change once I finish my autobiography. If my eyesight deteriorates, that would be a factor and I would likely stop writing in public. Moving to Substack appears to have more rewards than risk. Now I need to get the rest of the way there. This week’s news did not help.
On the last day of September I walked through the greens plot and picked what looked good. It included this kale plus a generous amount of collards and chard. While it was challenging to push through the tall foxtail weeds, at the end of season I leave them so small birds can light on them and eat the seeds. I washed and stored everything we did not eat for supper in the refrigerator. Wednesday morning for breakfast, I cooked and ate a bag of collards picked on August 30. Cruciferous vegetables store well in the refrigerator, although the oldest should be used first. They truly are a mainstay ingredient in our kitchen garden.
On some days I sit at my desk without an idea of where I will go with the day’s writing. I do sit down, though. Perhaps that is a sign of habit and discipline of the kind required by a writer. I am mostly sure I will ground what I write in some kind of local reality, like the greens harvest I just finished.
As I have written before, this blog is a way to get my writing juices flowing. I keep the posts short so they can be finished early in the day and I can move on to whatever creative endeavor is next. As fall progresses, that is usually a couple of hours writing and editing my autobiography. It also includes other work around the property. Writing is the foundation of my current life.
Writing in public is distinguished from producing a journal, email, or other private writing. This blog serves that purpose and because I get feedback in the form of comments, contact from people I know via telephone, text, or email. Each post is a work in progress after it is posted. While most posts remain unmodified, the conversations I have result in changing wording or changing how I think about a topic. My writing here is the public facing part of my life. It is essential.
Some call my writing political, yet I don’t know about that. When I write about politics, my personal experience and perspective are adjacent to it. It is better to criticize the administration about inflation by talking about how much the cost of a home-brewed cup of coffee increased this year than talk in vague generalities influenced by journalism and social media. In the end, political topics must necessarily be grounded in this place I call home to be meaningful.
I didn’t know I would be harvesting greens on Tuesday. I didn’t know how far I would get in the apple harvest this week. These are pragmatic unknowns with which a writer lives every day. Through practicing the craft of writing, without presumptions of what it should be, we can get better at it. That’s something I hope I am doing.
After finishing Tim Berners-Lee’s new book, This is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, I was inspired to use ChatGPT as an experiment. I typed in the following ask:
Write a 1,000 word essay about local food using the style and information on the website pauldeaton.com
Within seconds, the text below appeared. I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I can see why writers might use AI to help draft a chapter. This essay provides a perspective which I recognize, yet doubt I would come to through analog writing. (Is analog writing a thing?) There are faults which could be corrected. However, it is not wrong about me and what I write. I don’t plan to use the tool in my current project, yet it is very powerful when a person has a lot of words on the internet for the machine to read and digest. So, I don’t reject AI out of hand. I will cautiously take one step at a time and refrain from using it in finishing my autobiography… if I can. Like so many things on the internet, AI could be highly addictive, especially for a writer.
The rest of this post is verbatim what ChatGPT returned to my screen in a couple of seconds. Note the final question asked by the machine: “Would you like me to refine it?” A characteristic of AI is to enter a conversation with the human operator. In doing so, it learns more about me.
Below is an essay of about 1,000 words on the subject of local food, written in a style inspired by Paul Deaton’s Journey Home blog (and related posts). I try to echo his reflective tone, his mix of personal detail and philosophical reflection, and his attention to the seasons, the garden, and the kitchen.
Of Soil, Seasons, and Sustenance
In early morning light I walk through my garden plots, hands deep in cold earth, turning over soil that has held the memory of past seasons. The hoses lie coiled; the beds rest after summer’s rush. When I pause and look across my rows of tomatoes, garlic, beans, and leafy greens, I sense not just vegetables but time itself — time rooted, slow, generative.
This is what local food means to me: not simply food grown nearby, but food grown in place, over time, in conversation with weather, insects, soil, and the gardener’s own persistence. To eat locally is to internalize part of that conversation. It is to bring pieces of place — rain, sun, dirt — inside one’s bones.
Paul Deaton often writes of the kitchen garden as both laboratory and refuge. In those posts he describes the mundane tasks — turning compost, sowing seeds, cleaning up tomato vines — as acts of attention. The kitchen is not separate from the garden; it is its complement. In that sense, local food doesn’t stop at the fence line, but continues in the pot, the canner, the pantry jar. Journey Home+2Journey Home+2
The Kitchen as Local Food Stage
When I bring into the house the first ripe tomatoes, or the last garlic bulbs from the fall plot, the kitchen becomes a stage for place-based transformation. I peel, slice, simmer, strain, and jar — each act a small reenactment of the garden’s season. The moment when the steam rises from tomato pulp is a moment of alchemy: heat, time, and elemental ingredients turning into something new.
Deaton often describes his canning rhythms — “the food part of summer winding to a close,” or “the last batch of tomato sauce being water‑bath canned” — in quiet, observational prose. Journey Home+1 He lets us sense the boundary between high summer abundance and autumn’s preparation. I borrow that rhythm. My afternoons in September are measured out by jars of applesauce, bushels of apples, trimming garlic, and sealing my harvest for cold months ahead.
Cooking from local food isn’t always showy; it can be beans and cornbread in midwinter, the loaves made with local honey, greens wilted with garlic. Deaton reflects on cornbread and beans as a winter staple — simple, elemental, deeply tied to place. Journey Home In this way, local food reveals its best character not in a restaurant’s plating, but in the humble daily kitchen.
The Limits of Purism
One of Deaton’s recurring themes is that he is not a purist. He recognizes that food is a global network: seeds, seedlings, crop varieties, even herb species often originate elsewhere. “The seeds and seedlings come from elsewhere and not here,” he writes. Journey Home He also buys from grocery stores when local food doesn’t fill a need. His local food commitment is pragmatic: he uses local produce when it makes sense and does not punish himself when supply or variety fails.
I feel the same tension. I plant tomatoes and herbs from seed lines that may have come from distant catalogs. I may buy citrus or imported olive oil when I desire it. Yet each time I choose local, I am bending my habits toward place. The import becomes the exception, the local the norm. That shift is more meaningful than any exuberant purity.
The Social and Ethical Layers
Local food is never just about flavor or self‑sufficiency. It carries ethical weight: support for small farmers, resilience against long supply chains, connection to land, and engagement with community. Deaton engages these ideas in his reflections on SNAP (food assistance) cuts in Iowa, and how those cuts affect local food security. Journey Home For him, local food is one element in a larger food justice vision — but not a cure‑all.
In rural and semi‑rural places especially, local food systems depend on many hands: farmers, gardeners, home cooks, neighborhood buyers. Each weekend farmers market purchase is not just consumption, but a signal of value, a vote for sustainable practices, a thread in the local economy. Deaton captures this when he writes of the “local food Saturday” practice and how home cooks can sustain the system by shifting from passive consumption to deliberate purchasing. Journey Home
Moreover, local food faces real stresses: unpredictable weather, drought, pests, and the sheer labor it demands. Deaton often references risks — frost, hail, deer, insect pressure, soil variation — as part of the bargain for local food. Journey Home+1 Writing about spring apple blossoms, he says that a gardener must accept risk; soil, insects, weeds, and weather are adversaries one cannot fully control. Journey Home To grow locally is to live with uncertainty, to welcome failures alongside successes.
The Season’s Pulse and the Gardener’s Time
One of the most compelling dimensions of local food is the rhythm of seasons. Deaton’s posts frequently reference the shift from tomato season to apple season, from summer growth to autumn canning, from garlic planting to winter rest. Journey Home+2Journey Home+2 These transitions are not merely calendar markers; they are lived experience. The gardener’s year is cyclical, anchored in soil and solar altitude.
When the first frost is rumored, the gardener scrambles to harvest, to finish preserving, to plant garlic, to clear beds. Late summer’s leisurely abundance gives way to urgency. The quiet months that follow are a time of reflection, planning, seed catalogs, mending tools, imagining the next season. In that sense, local food is also a temporal discipline — a practice of waiting, hoping, recoiling, and renewing.
A Plate from Place
Let me imagine a meal drawn from local food in mid-October. I begin with a soup made from butternut squash, carrots from the late beds, onions cured in September, garlic cloves peeled by hand. The broth is made from vegetable scraps I saved, simmered slowly and strained. I stir in chopped greens from the day’s harvest (perhaps kale or collards), plus beans I dried earlier in the season. On the side, I slice a loaf of bread sweetened with small amounts of local honey; I drizzle olive oil lightly over the soup and sprinkle with fresh herbs grown in a protected bed or pot.
Nothing in that meal arrives by miracle. Each element carries a history: soil, sun, rain, human hands. The flavors may be modest, not shocking or exotic. But the meal is deeply rooted. To eat it is to commune with time and place.
Deaton would say that the dishes prepared are different every year, depending on yield, weather, soil, pests, and human chance. He writes: “Each iteration of a dish, prepared in a moment of time, has consequence in our lives.” Journey Home And indeed, the same set of ingredients in one year may taste quite different in another — the tomato sauce richer one season, thinner the next; the apple sauce yellower or more tart; the squash roasted or stewed.
Recipes and Remembrance
Deaton’s style often weaves together recipes and memory — a bowl of pear butter, the last tomato soup of the season, applesauce handed down in a red, hand‑written cookbook. Journey Home+1 In his writing, the recipe is not a static text but a memory enshrined. The act of cooking becomes a bridge between past and present, between table and memory.
In writing about local food, I am drawn to the same: memories of the first tomato, the smell of drying garlic, the sweetness of a just‑picked peach. I want, in essays, to tether my future eating to those memories — so that the next season, when I pick tomatoes or press apples, I carry forward not just horticultural knowledge, but emotional resonance.
Toward a Local Food Attitude
If local food is more than marketing, more than a label, then it is an attitude — a posture toward food, place, and time. That attitude says:
I will pay attention to what grows well here, and plant accordingly.
I will observe what fails, and adapt.
I will put time into preservation, so that abundance extends.
I will support local farmers by purchase or labor.
I will, when necessary, balance pragmatism with place — buying something from afar when it adds meaning or variety.
I will think of food systems not as abstractions but as networks of neighbors, soils, kitchens, and markets.
In the end, local food is not an ideal to reach but a practice to inhabit.
In closing, I return to my garden in the faint light of dawn. The air is cool, the soil damp. I lean over a row of lettuce and pick leaves for breakfast. Each leaf is small, tender, flavored by dew and morning. I wash them in a bowl, spin them dry, and dress them lightly. I take a bite. The flavor is subtle but rich, tied to place. The pulse of local food beats in that bite.
Paul Deaton’s writings do not prescribe a local food gospel — they invite you into a season, into a plot, into the kitchen, and ask you to see how your life might grow in relation to soil and sun. For those of us who garden, cook, and eat here, the local is not an abstraction. It is the everyday, the quotidian, the place we inhabit in taste and time.
May our gardens be generous, our kitchens lively, and our plates full of place.
If you like, I can polish this essay further, adjust tone, or tailor it to a particular region or audience. Would you like me to refine it?
It feels necessary for Kamala Harris to have written 107 Days. I’m glad she did. It was a quick read that touched the high points of her short presidential campaign. Hearing the story, in her voice, is important. It’s essential reading for anyone who follows presidential politics.
I make it a point to read or be familiar with every presidential memoir going back to Harry Truman, who was president when I was born. While Harris lost the 2024 election, she is part of the story of Joe Biden’s presidency and his eventual dropping out of the race for re-election. 107 days is not long enough for a modern presidential campaign and while Harris’ campaign staff worked diligently and smart in her recounting, they couldn’t get her across the finish line.
Harris chose not to make this a detailed account of her campaign. I respect that choice. It is a high level view full of her reactions to main events as they unfolded. There is value in that.
Even before it was published there were reviews out there. I don’t want to repeat, deny, or defend that work. My statement is if one is interested in U.S. presidential politics in the 21st Century, you should have 107 Days on your to be read list.
Restaurant where we held our 55th year high school class reunion on Sept. 25, 2025.
The combination of a punk reaction to my influenza shot and massive intake of information at our high school class reunion led to Saturday being a challenging day. I made it through the fog and by 4:30 p.m., felt like doing stuff. In quick succession, I finished yesterday’s post, canned a batch of applesauce and apple juice, and worked on laundry I started in the morning. In retirement, that makes a busy day.
Our time together at our high school class reunion Thursday night was precious. I don’t want to let go of the conversations. There are only so many of the 8.2 billion people on this jumping green sphere with whom an individual shares a life’s experience. Grade school and high school mates are unique in that regard, in my stable culture, anyway. Through conversation I became aware of developing a tunnel vision of my own history by focusing on a subset of experiences to produce an autobiography. The reunion opened my eyes to a broader experience that exists, of who I was and who I have become.
When we dig ourselves into a tunnel of memory, it seems useful and important to find our way out into our broader experience. I believe the brain captures our experiences yet some of them get relegated to places where they don’t get our attention. Too, our way of seeing filters out parts of our experience so we remember only the filtered events. John Berger said what I am trying to say more directly in his book Ways of Seeing:
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. (Ways of Seeing, John Berger).
Our class reunion helped me be more aware of the surrounding world, one that is specifically relevant to me and my classmates.
In addition to memory, my writing focuses on journals, letters, photographs, and blog posts created over a period of fifty years. For every detail captured, there are multiple that exist elsewhere if I can summon them. Talking to people with shared experiences is one way to do that.
A five minute conversation listening to a classmate that worked for an insurance company for 40 years, or another who lived in California for a similar amount of time then returned to Iowa and married a classmate, are ways to do that. Reading an email about how one classmate recruited the widow of another to attend is the same. The easy familiarity of one with whom I played basketball in the grade school playground is another. Spending time with someone who was a neighbor to a close friend I lost in an auto accident shortly after graduation is another. All of these remind me of the broader, yet common world we inhabited, at least for a while. We now inhabit the present together, at least on Thursday night we did.
I don’t seek to wax nostalgic about my high school experiences. The recent conversations remind me of who I once was and help to become a better me in the present. It’s no wonder I don’t want to let go.
Three things of note in my life happened in the Hotel Blackhawk in Davenport. My father met John F. Kennedy in this building. When I was coming of age, I had dinner here with Father and a union organizer named Clarence Skinner. My spouse and I spent our wedding night here. All were memorable events. At one time, my maternal grandmother worked as live-in household help for the then owner of this hotel, doing cooking and cleaning.
In the shadow of this building our high school class celebrated our 55th year reunion. As the sun set I stood at the entryway to a restaurant across the street to greet classmates and direct them to our area inside. It seemed a good time was had by all.
I had conversations with classmates, many of whom I have known since grade school. Some remembered a version of myself I’d forgotten. Here are some snippets. First names only.
John left our high school and finished at Davenport Central. He told me he thought I was the smartest person in our class. I replied the girls were smarter. In high school I went to John’s family home and got my best exposure to folk music. They had a record player and played Peter, Paul and Mary and others. These visits were part of the nascence of my interest in playing music. John worked a full career as a surveyor.
Tony and I reminisced about how he would walk out of his way to our family home to walk with me to grade school. I don’t recall how we started, but it was a dependable part of my young life. We were good friends, although we fell out when I left Davenport in 1970. Tony retired and is now a part time, self-employed photographer.
Tom and I spent a lot of time together. We hung out at the Cue and Cushion, which was a pool hall located in Northwest Davenport. I was not an alcohol drinker in high school but Tom was. He swiped booze from his father who had taken to marking the level in each bottle kept at home. Tom would take some and refill it with water to the line. He recalled how my mother would drive us to Credit Island and drop us off to play golf. We played round after round until Mother returned to pick us up. Every time I encounter Tom these days it is a positive experience. He retired at least ten years ago.
Barb called me aside to talk about politics. Her question, which she asked in an agitated manner, was “What are the Democrats doing?” I offered an answer but it was not a very good one. Everyone in our cohort is political to an extent. They do a good job, unlike me, of keeping it hidden. Barb and I have always gotten along well. She was our homecoming queen and recently lost her husband.
Tim was class president. We have done things together over the years, although I resist his invitations to play golf with a group of classmates. Despite childhood interest, I really can’t play. When he arrived, I told him about my father meeting JFK at the hotel. He replied with a story of how he inherited the tools of a grand parent and inside the tool box he found a personal note from Ted Kennedy thanking his grandfather for a political donation. He and his family are political. Joe Biden wrote about his sister in one of his books. Tim is an attorney, supposedly retired.
Therese and I haven’t seen each other for a long time. She wanted to talk about a trip we made from the University of Iowa to Terre Haute, Indiana to visit friends from high school. Her friend Renee worked at a K-Mart there and my friend Sara was attending Saint Mary of the Woods College. I don’t recall details of the trip in my Volkswagen beetle, but Therese said she slept most of the way down. She remembers me as an aspiring artist. I did ceramics and sold my wares at the Thieves Market on the bank of the Iowa River. She bought a vase I made for her mother. When her mother died, she got it back and noted my initials fired into the bottom of it. Being remembered as a creative at university was unexpected. I explained the artist thing didn’t really work out. She’s living in Connecticut and came back just for the reunion.
Mike was on stage crew with me and retired from being a pharmacist a number of years ago. His company offered early retirement and he took it without hesitation. I couldn’t do that job yet he made a career of it. He volunteers with a local food pantry, so we compared notes. They offer food once per month, and when they do they select items and put them in a box before clients arrive. It is different from the supermarket-style shopping we offer at our food pantry. He and his spouse stayed at the Hotel Blackhawk, redeeming some points he accumulated from frequent travel. He was the first person to RSVP he was coming to this reunion.
Kirby was wearing a knee brace that night. When we got into a conversation, I asked, “Weren’t you wearing a knee brace in high school?” He replied yes, but it was the other knee and he showed me his scar from surgery to fix it.
When you know people since childhood, it is easy to start a conversation. That’s what I did for four golden hours. I feel a better person for it. Interaction like this has more meaning as we age. I feel lucky to have been able to attend.
Journey Home 
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