Journey Home

I hope to address food in my autobiography by putting a dozen or so recipes in an appendix. That won’t be enough.

My earliest memory of food is from when we lived at the Fillmore Street duplex. I walked through the screen door from Grandmother’s kitchen, outside to the rear porch, and smelled cooking grease coming from Riefe’s Restaurant across the alley. I was a toddler. Insofar as Riefe’s became a recurring theme in my life, until it closed in 2015, I plan to write more about it and what we did there. For example, when I was an altar boy a friend and I went there for breakfast after serving Mass. A group of men from Northwest Bank across the street often met in the basement while we were there.

I’ll mention Happy Joe’s Pizza, not for the stores, but the story about Joe Whitty and his family living two doors down from our American Foursquare when he first came to town and worked at Mercy Hospital. He next worked at Shakey’s Pizza where my pals and I from Turn-Style would go after a shift. I don’t have a memory of actually eating in a Happy Joe’s Pizza restaurant, although I’ve been in his ice cream stores plenty of times.

In my files from the 1980s there are lists of types of meals and meal settings. There is plenty of material. Spargel in Mainz, my uncle’s coffee shop in Davenport, military food, fast food, catered food, Mom’s food, Grandmother’s food, the Deaton Diner… there is a lot.

There are also many snippets of writing like this:

Notes on Funeral Meals

A person at work went to his grandfather’s funeral. He chose to talk about food when I asked him about it. All home cooked, not like at Perkins.There were all kinds of food, main dishes, vegetables, desserts. They held it at the Lion’s Club after the burial.They had to hire a hall. He said the most significant aspect of it was going back to the table for food three times.

Personal Papers, undated, early 1980s

The broader narrative is not about food, though. To the extent food played a role beyond sustenance, it will be used as a narrative device which contributes to the main story. Like a pasta sauce, the volume needs to be reduced for it to be palatable.

I’m not sure how I felt about Ram Dass’ book Be Here Now by 2013 when I made this diagram. “Live now” in the center weaves a thread back to my first reading of Ram Dass shortly after the book came out in 1971.

There was a shortage of mass media and consumer goods to support the new life we believed was possible after the tumultuous 1960s. Be Here Now fed that appetite.

A writer has to have more going on than living in the moment. That’s what the diagram is meant to represent… I think. If these are some of my qualities as a writer, the one that stands out today is “utopian outlook.”

There is a utopian outlook in American society that shows itself in the manifest destiny myth, in our outlook toward business startups, in things as simple as setting up a home. We have a fundamental belief in systems and our role as chief actors in them. The example of Iowa’s remade landscape and the farms and businesses that now populate it offers no more perfect example of utopian outlooks.

Endemic to my writing process is an attempt to figure things out then build a platform of experience from which I can observe the world. I then hope to write pieces that add positively to society: letters, blog posts and opinion pieces. The success of such writing depends on a developed understanding of society combined with a utopian outlook which presumes its perfectibility. Well, if not perfect, then continuously improving.

In 2013 one part of my life had run out of fuel and money, and another was being formed from a series of low-wage jobs. As important as establishing a source of income was, there is no related box on the diagram. Money has never been that important to me, especially once I established a system to pay the bills.

I don’t think there is a western version of Ram Dass unless it was himself. Our survival depends on being here now. What may matter more is how we see the now. That’s what I’m working on as I write my autobiography.

How do we create?

Is creating work — writing, art, music, photography, film and television, radio, oral stories, events — magic? Sometimes it seems so because we can’t recognize how an end product came into being… it must be magic. Is creation the result of hard work, discipline and practice? Some of what I’ve written could have used more and smarter work.

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” Stephen King famously wrote. “There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

Over time I came to agree. Looking back at my extemporaneous writing — similar in technique to what Jack Kerouac did in stream of consciousness — it seems pretty lame. Creativity requires practicing the craft. Gaining awareness of other aspects of society is equally important to creativity. What King wrote about writing applies to other art forms.

In the 1960s and 1970s, I looked to Bob Dylan as a creative model, particularly during the time leading up to release of the album Bringing It All Back Home in 1965 through his work after the motorcycle accident with what would later become The Band. The stories of him living in Woodstock, New York, sitting at a typewriter for hours on end, and consuming the work of other musicians was how I envisioned myself.

The collaboration with Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel, who lived at Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York, and with Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, resulted in the bootleg tapes. A friend in high school secured a copy and we thought it was something. How my Dylan modeling played out over time is worth considering, but that will be later. Suffice it I knew I would be no Dylan but his work influences mine, even today. The process of his creative endeavor remains something to model.

I knew Leslie Bell mostly through my neighbor and friend John Kiley. I can remember only two personal interactions with Bell. I picked him up hitchhiking to visit a friend when he studied with Father Edward Catich at Saint Ambrose College. I also engaged his band to play at a high school class reunion. Everything else I knew about him was through someone else.

When I returned to Davenport from Germany, Bell and others had founded the Open Cities Film Society. While the films screened were less diverse that what I experienced in Iowa City where I attended graduate school, it was something available in a river city where a shoppie mentality continued to prevail among the populace. I don’t know how, if at all, Bell’s creative process influenced mine but this segment from a 2013 interview by Painter’s Bread is close to my creative process.

PB:  How do you go about making your work and what kinds of challenges have you experienced?
LB:  Since my work is improvised and doesn’t rely on models or observation, my working method requires a lot of front-loading. Film, novels, music, and life played out in real time all help me build an archive of possibilities. I certainly keep my eyes peeled when I’m out and about. The years I spent as a street photographer have helped me scoop useful experience from the broader kettle of stimuli in the form of interactions, gestures and changes in the social fabric.
In the studio, I begin with a blank canvas and no ideas. The canvas serves as a screen on which I can imagine random images, stories and compositions. I’m looking for a place to start—a strong-but-vague impulse. From that point on, it’s a process of call-and-response. I react to what’s on the canvas with a move that seems an appropriate extrapolation of the narrative, the color etc. I may not know what the painting is about until it’s almost done if at all.

Painter’s Bread, Leslie Bell Interview, Aug. 17, 2013.

Like many writers, I start with a blank page. I take a snippet from life, or a point from an outline, and type a couple of sentences on the screen. How and what I end up with is based on the “front loading” process to which Bell referred. The content seems better for diverse experience brought to the work. When adequately front loaded, the work product is better.

At the same time, there is magic to writing. When I hit on a sentence that stands out as universal, I can’t say where it came from. Such moments make the work worth while.

One has to let go of quotidian affairs while creating. Being grounded is important. It’s not always the point of a creative piece. Blending everything together takes practice… with a bit of magic to pull a good story together.

Father’s death on Feb. 2, 1969 dominated my life for a long while afterward. For years I thought it would be the central theme of my writing. I now realize it was a reality through which I had to work. It wasn’t until military service that I began to get through it.

I started several short sketches like this one using different names for the characters. While I pretended they were fiction, clearly they represented our lives, thinly veiled. This fragment captures my discussion with Father about nationality. It took place in the dining room of the American Foursquare on Marquette.

At our grade school we were divided into groups: about half were descendants of German immigrants and half Irish. A small number of us who were neither were assigned with the Irish because there were less of them. Our conversation was soon after this division. At our 40th high school class reunion I asked a classmate about division into Irish and German groups. She had no memory of it.

Being an “American” rather than a son of immigrants came to define part of my character.

The fragment below was written at my apartment near Five Points in Davenport less than two months after leaving active duty. It is edited to pull different parts of it together. I didn’t change much.

Father was a union man. He forged implements of the modern farmer at the J.I. Case plant in Bettendorf, Iowa. He was a proud man, proud of his family and heritage. He stood with both feet on the ground.

The union offered him a job as chief steward once, and he took it for a while. He asked to be put back on the second shift so he could return to school, and be his own boss, to establish himself. Father knew who he was, where he stood, and where he was going.

One night after supper, Jim Peterson went into the living room, where Father was watching the news on television, and asked, “What nationality are our ancestors?”

Father looked up and without hesitation said, “American.”

Jim asked again, “But are they Polish, like Mom’s or what?”

Yes father knew who he was and if it was one thing he was not, it was someone else’s son.

At age forty he graduated from the Palmer College of Chiropractic, the oldest man in his class. In September, death in the form of a 1959 Ford found him walking from the Case plant after second shift and brought his efforts to a different culmination.

Personal Papers, Jan. 9, 1980