I went on walkabout to capture a bit of spring. Here are four photos from my journey.
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Spring is Budding
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Saturday Restlessness
I can't shake it...
Here with me is...
a feeling of tension.
I am okay...
I am going forward in time.
Yet I am restless
going forward in time...
Passing through cultures and societies,
accomplishing things:
doing laundry,
vacuuming,
or cleaning the closet...
all satisfying.
I washed dishes
and prepared burritos for lunches next week.
I have accomplished this.
But I need more.
~ August 3, 1991 in the Calumet
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Places to Create
A writer needs a place to work. Somewhere safe, secure, and with adequate room to spread out. I’ve written in my share in public places: restaurants, coffee bars, grocery stores, and parks. These locations serve for a moment, but eventually we need to return to a home base. Since 1974, I found many of them, including my drill sergeant’s office at Fort Jackson, S.C., an apartment not far from the Mississippi River, in the lower level of the first place we lived after our wedding, and others. Five of them stand out.
Five main places I wrote, where I felt I had a writing space, are as follows: In my Bachelor Officer Quarters in Mainz, Germany; my apartment at Five Points in Davenport; my apartment on Market Street in Iowa City; in the garage behind our house when we lived in the Calumet; and finally a very long spell, maybe 30 years, in the room I built on the lower level of our home in Big Grove Township. All of them afforded reasonable quiet, and freedom to write what I wanted. I took advantage of the spaces as best I could.
After seeing the Pablo Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1980, I became enraptured by his artistic process. Before his 1973 death he was exceedingly successful. David Douglas Duncan’s 1980 book Viva Picasso: A Centennial Celebration 1881-1981 depicts Picasso as he created his work. From these photographs I took inspiration for my own studio stolen from small spaces where a busy family lived.
When I lived near the main railway station in Mainz, Germany, my apartment had two large desks which I pushed together to use as a writing place. My apartment was at the end of the hall in a building called the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. As a corner room, it was fairly quiet. My schedule had me away from garrison for two to three weeks at a time so part of what I did there was spread out mail and make sure what needed addressing was. I received and wrote a lot of letters. I had a big map of the region pinned to the wall. Next to it was a large bulletin board, and then an American flag I used when we road marched with armored equipment on the German Autobahn. While I wasn’t there much, I felt like a writer when I was.
I left the Smith Corona portable typewriter Mother gave me to use at university in storage and bought a new Olympia portable typewriter in Mainz. I used a blue three-ring, loose leaf binder to keep my journal. The chair had a straight-back, dining room-style. Behind the desk was a bookshelf I made from planks set on wine bottles I had emptied out by drinking the contents. My source of news and information was a multi-function AM-FM radio that could also receive short wave signals. I was still trying to be a musician so I bought an inexpensive guitar at a local music store. In the early years I had no telephone or television. About year into my tour of duty I went to the German phone company and had a land line hooked up, not that anyone called me while I was there. This writing space was my escape from serving in the military.
The image above is my writing space at Five Points in Davenport. I wrote previously about this apartment where I pulled my life together after serving four years in the military. I was determined to be a writer. Note the oak desk. I purchased it when I arrived in Davenport after living in Germany. It followed me until the present day, although it is used mostly for storage and layout space today.
I recently described my apartment on Market Street in Iowa City here. It was a transitional space from youth into marriage, although I had no idea that’s what it was when I lived there. I did know I was a writer.
When we lived in Indiana, the house we bought did not have space for my writing. I moved to the garage. This was problematic when it was cold because there was no insulation. I bought a construction heater and had a local propane service deliver a bottle which I leaned up against an exterior fence. It was very noisy as it burned the fuel.
I’m reading my journals from Indiana and more than any other prior period, I produced writing that stands up to the years since then. I developed the idea that a creative person had to integrate all aspects of their life into one continuous band of creativity. My garage was an escape, yet it brought together my work life, my home life, and everything else I did in the Calumet. This was a significant change.
In a discussion with our child we came up with a name for the place, The Deaton Family Workshop. I did some of my creative work on the word processor we brought from Iowa, which was located inside the house between the dining area and the living room. Still, the garage was my main creative studio.
Finally, There is my current writing space. I use a chair I bought for a dollar at an auction, and a library table inherited from the father-in-law’s estate. I described building this place in a post called, A Place to Write. It has well-served the writing process.
Each place I wrote is important. The hard part was to envision that I am a writer. Working a career in transportation and logistics distracted me from that. Now, though, I can focus on the actual writing. In the main, given a space, that’s what my life has always been about.
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Tools to Create
When I began writing after university I used a bound journal to enter my experiences. In the 50 years since those first beginnings, the technology changed, and with it, the type of writing I did.
I migrated from bound journals to a loose leaf binder in the military. This was a faint image of the famous journals in literary history, Samuel Pepys for example. I spent a lot of time recording my thoughts and evolved continuously in how I presented myself.
When we got our first home word processor in 1987, I worked at my writing with the intent of making a completed text I would use in another application. I produced letters mostly, but a few journal entries. I also maintained the format of my earlier journal-writing. The word processor replaced the three typewriters I accumulated.
We bought our first home computer on April 21, 1996 and installed it in the kitchen where the extra phone jack was located. We connected to the internet via dial up. I had used computers at work, including for email, but having a home computer was a revolution. Thus began a period of experimentation with online writing.
In 2006, a group of consultants from Hyderabad, India convinced me to move to a new email platform called Gmail. At the time I needed a referral to get into Gmail, which the guys gladly gave. I spend as many hours drafting emails as I do other forms of writing. Email changed how I did correspondence forever and for the better.
As our child finished college in 2007, I joined the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch. I stayed on both for a long time, yet terminated both in the revival period of American oligarchs, Twitter in 2024 and Facebook in 2025. Social media became a creative outlet as well as a news source. I continue to post on BlueSky which rose in the wake of the transition of Twitter to X. For now, I expect to continue.
Also in 2007 I posted my first blog on the platform Blogger. Eventually I transferred to WordPress which seemed more user friendly. Even though I wrote thousands of blog posts, I printed them out in book form using a service. The concern about hours and hours of creative effort vanishing into the ether because of an electrical failure or an errant keystroke has me seeking the comfort of paper.
Today I write book-length projects in Microsoft Word, which I began learning while I was working at the oil company. At the time, it was MS-DOS based and not nearly as functional as it is today. Microsoft Word facilitates saving single documents so I don’t lose them. It also provides a form of security that seems less available on the internet.
Creative people need tools to create. In my case it was basic pen and paper for the first 20 years. After personal computers came along, the whole world of writing changed, not only for me but for everyone. I would not want to go back.
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This Studio
This studio...
is a place for creative endeavor
is only a studio...
a place for solace
by my declaration...
from this quiet place
that it is so.
~ Sept. 9, 1990
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Creative in Indiana
The home we bought in the Calumet region of Indiana was situated in a subdivision called Lincoln Gardens. Everything was about Lincoln, it seemed. We could hear traffic on the Lincoln Highway, U.S. Route 30, a few blocks from our home. My employer was Lincoln Sales and Service after the highway. We moved there in January 1988.
The first two years were a unique time in my life. I was hired by the trucking company in part because I had been an infantry officer in the U.S. Army. My first supervisor was a Marine who served in Vietnam who was looking for a certain type of “aggressive” individual. He hired me right away. The transfer to Indiana seemed like part of the deal. It was either go to Indiana or find a new job.
I was interested in providing for our young family, so I transferred to the Calumet. I was interested in being creative. As often as I could, I escaped into our detached garage and let my imagination flow. I wrote about this in a notebook filled with automatic writing:
The garage is my refuge in a time when my life is complex and difficult. The raw materials of lumber, papers, and cultural artifacts are everywhere, along with the tools to make them into my creations. Like this booklet. I find hours of distraction possible there. A clutter of colors, shapes, textures, and cultural objects. It is no wonder the trip to the garage took so long. I was engaged in other things there, distracted from the endeavor at hand. (Excerpt from an automatic writing piece, Sept. 9, 1990).
Our family has been able to build a long history together. They always supported my creative energy even if it caused me to withdraw from life from time to time.
If there was anything aggressive about my personality it was the drive to live a creative life on my terms. I was okay if there was an audience of one, resigned to it if that had to be. Yet during that period, I tried to create things with a broader circulation. When I wrote this piece, I had left the comfort of an Iowa trucking company and began work at the ninth largest corporation on the planet. It was as if I severed myself from every Iowa thing. It was go-time as a creative artist and writer.
Comes a time when we must trod the boards and perform the role in which we cast ourselves. For me, it is a role of my own creation in a theater of my own design. The individuality of the words spoken alienates most of the people who know me in other social settings. I write for the ages, not for today’s people. I would enjoy the financial success of a Michener, a Bellow, an Updike, but that may never come to pass.
Instead, from my outpost in Lake County, I produce works, texts to be sent out. Items created in the midst of many social forces. Items that, in some cases, are so idiosyncratic that they might have little worth beyond the borders of my property. But slowly, texts are created. Not many, not quickly, but they mount up, one-by-one. (Excerpt from an automatic writing piece, Sept. 15, 1990).
I have living memory of weekends in our Indiana garage. I hoped to create an art form that would combine all aspects of my creative energy and experience yet have broader appeal. I was hardly successful. Perhaps the best success came from setting aside creative endeavor and taking our child to go swimming on a Saturday afternoon.
I was privileged to be part of a close family, one willing to do things a bit differently than other people who lived in our region. A life based on my creative impulses moderated by the logic of my spouse and our child’s youthful innocence. That nurturing environment helped me to be who I am.
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Week Eleven
Today marks eleven weeks since the inauguration. Who knew we would be where we are? I’m not really sure where we are.
Of the many reckless changes the administration made, the following are most concerning to me: elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services; changes to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; threatened changes to the Smithsonian Institution; defunding NOAA; vast cuts in medical research funding; all the programmatic changes to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security; and of course, the reconciliation bill that moved through the U.S. Senate over the weekend providing stunning tax cuts for the well-to-do in society by borrowing money to pay for them. The hits against what we once thought was good keep coming.
On Saturday, millions of people, in all 50 states, demonstrated against the administration’s changes. Crowd estimating is an inexact science yet some say 5 million people showed up. The demonstrations appeared to be peaceful. The president was busy at his golf club, so I doubt he was engaged. The resistance is getting stronger.
The government was stable under Biden. The next president introduced uncertainty about the future. There is no perceptible benefit to the increased instability and uncertainty of our government. We now have a society in which the rich get richer and the rest of us can fight over scraps. Here’s the thing, though. Out of those scraps we will make a meal to nourish and sustain us to make our lives better than we have ever had them. Above all else, we must persist on the path toward righteousness.
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Tomatoes in Big Grove
On a cool Saturday morning I planted 20 varieties of tomatoes on my bench in the garage. There has been a home-garden tomato crop at almost every place we lived since we married in 1982. I am a couple days late getting seeds into channel trays compared to last year. If all goes well, there will be plenty of tomatoes, beginning in August. I know how to produce a crop.
After noon I watched the BlueSky hashtag #handsoff. Users posted images of Hands Off! demonstrations from all over the country. It was a decent showing of people opposed to the administration, more protesters than usually turn out for nation-wide protests. There is a lot about which to be upset. I did not attend one of several events within half an hour drive of home. I decided an hour’s driving could be better spent.
Instead, I had a 50-minute phone call about unions during the Reagan years. I forwarded a chapter of my memoir in progress to a friend who was a member of the United Auto Workers union during that time. It was a good conversation about things we don’t usually discuss.
After getting his masters, my friend got a job as a teacher in the Saint Louis area. He rose to become president of the National Education Association local. He told me his Sheryl Crow story. Crow had worked as a music teacher for the district and wanted to cash in her pension to head out west. There was a recommendation she leave it in place in case she needed to start over. Of course, she didn’t need that. His Sheryl Crow story is better than mine, which is I heard her play at the Senator Tom Harkin annual steak fry on Sept. 19, 2004.
I had a restless night Friday. The U.S. Senate protected the billionaire class and left the rest of us behind, voting in favor of the reconciliation bill early Saturday morning. Next the bill goes to the House. Its future there is uncertain. The Republican majority is so thin that Texas Governor Abbott is postponing a special election in Houston to replace U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner who died in March. His action takes one Democratic vote off the table. We are in the hard ball league with our politics, where nothing matters except for the income of the owners. We are not the owners.
Cool ambient temperatures kept me out of the garden again. Soon, though, I’ll get out there and dig this year’s plots. Probably, there will be tomatoes. One never knows, yet we plant the seeds.
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Korean Grocery
Someone shared a photo of the interior of a Korean grocery store in Niles, Illinois in a social media post. I had to visit the next time I was in the area, so this week, I did. The experience was a bit surreal.
For the first time in a long time, I entered a grocery store and left without buying anything. It was the H Mart in Niles, an Asian Grocer larger than the American grocer I frequent near home. They had aisles and aisles of foodstuffs with Korean lettering on the packages. Two of us walked from end to end to see what was on offer. It was a lot. It would be easy to drop $500 in one visit and not scratch the surface of what was available.
There was a food court near the entryway. It was well past the lunch hour when we arrived, and two hours until supper time. I would have thought someone would be eating, yet few were. Every person behind the counters was not doing anything, just standing or sitting, I suppose waiting for a customer. The store was almost empty of customers on a Wednesday afternoon.
At the other end of the store near the exit was a row of other kinds of merchants, such as the nail salon that stood out. In between were well-stocked, well-faced shelves. There were a couple of stockers, who each had a single box of a product to refill a shelf. This is unlike our grocer in that here, the stock person fills a large flatbed cart with dozens of items which are wheeled to the floor and parked while the entire aisle is re-stocked. Maybe it’s a cultural difference, although I’m struggling to figure out why.
There was a lot of seafood, reminding me that marine life everywhere on Earth is under pressure from over fishing. There were many kinds of pickled products, including kimchi and daikon radishes. I wouldn’t know how to choose one type of pickled product for a meal among so many options. There were small shelves of U.S. company products. Notable was a wide set of shelves of Spam products, actually multiple sets in different locations in the store.
South Koreans eat lots of Spam, according to National Public Radio. It is the second-largest consumer of Spam in the world, eating roughly half as much as the United States, which has six times as many residents. U.S. soldiers introduced Spam to Korea during the Korean War. Dishes such as Kimchi Spam Musubi, Bibimbap bowl with Spam, and others are considered to be delicacies. When my uncle was stationed in Persia during World War II he ate so much Spam in his rations he never ate it again after military service. To each their own, I suppose.
The reality of H Mart did not measure up to the internet posting. In person, it seemed a vast, well-stocked warehouse for people with a specific culinary interest. How does one decide which pancake mix to choose when there are so many? Maybe there are too many varieties. Inside H Mart it is a world of its own.
They even had boxes of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, with the iconic figure on the box, from before Pepsico took a step into the future of racial equality and removed her. Quaker Oats, a subsidiary of Pepsico, may have felt it was doing the right thing by removing the aunt’s image. In the bright neon lights of the store there was consumer comfort in seeing her image persist. Maybe they got the message about DEI and put Aunt Jemima back in her place.
I found the visit fun, the most fun I’ve had in a while. I don’t get out much. Since I didn’t buy anything, it was cheap fun. I don’t know if the internet ruined me for experiences like this. I would never have seen the inside of H Mart without that social media post. It is one more bit of reality incorporated into my online world view. I just need to develop a taste for kimchi and I’ll be set.
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Book Review: The Ministry of Time
Large crop fields have been worked along many of the roads I traveled to Chicago this week. Ready or not, the season turned to spring. Next on my indoor planting schedule is tomatoes, followed by cucumbers and squash. I’m waiting for conditions outdoors to improve to tear down some of last year’s garden and prep the soil. It’s how I’ve learned to be a gardener.
I finished reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I wrote a book review on the Goodreads social media platform:
The public library had this book and I heard about it from Barack Obama’s reading list. It was a fast-moving, engaging read. The 20k+ reviews already written on Goodreads are a trip and highly recommended. Here is a link to the page. Couple things to add:
- The main value of this book is the author’s use of language. It is right on the surface and had me looking up things she wrote for usage. Most fiction I read does not engage like this. The writing worked sometimes, and sometimes not. I found this invaluable to my own writing.
- Did not care for romanticizing tobacco use. Too many friends who died of lung cancer.
- Lord Franklin’s search for the NW passage is being rediscovered. Not sure this fictionalized version helps or hurts. Probably not positive to actual history.
- Hard to put down once started.
- The imperfect character of the female lead was compelling.
- Author’s summary of how she created the male lead from the historical record is a must read.
Rated 5 stars because among dozens of fiction books read in the past several years, this one stands out with enduring quality. It is likeable because it is different.
Give it a go!
I’ve been away from my writing computer for two days. It’s time to get back to work on my memoir. Thanks for reading.
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