Katie Tritt went to sleep on Sunday and didn’t wake up. Yesterday the family announced her remains were donated to the University of Iowa College of Medicine. There will be a gathering in late February. On Saturday she attended a sports event and was living her best life. Now, she’s gone.
I didn’t know Katie well after she graduated high school in 1968, yet she and her family were a significant part of my growing up in Northwest Davenport. Her obituary is here.
When I think of life with my family before college, Katie was a person who made good where she was born and lived her life. There is something positive about that. She was a good person.
She worked her first job at the Dairy Queen at Five Points in Davenport, where all of us kids went when we could. She attended the same high school I did, two years ahead of me. She graduated from the University of Iowa, after which she taught school in the public elementary school where I attended Kindergarten and in the parochial grade school where I attended seventh and eighth grade. She was a substitute teacher until she passed. She was active in the community as an adult, in a way I was not destined to be.
When my spouse and I married, Mother held a reception for us in her home. Katie attended and we have some snapshots of her there. Even in 1982 there was a sense of neighborhood where we shared obligations to each other. The neighborhood as I knew it no longer exists.
Death strikes closer as we age. I hope the rest of my life can be as good as Katie’s was. May she rest in peace.
Before the contractor installed the driveway we parked on the chip and seal road. We specified a concrete driveway, although in retrospect, today I’d install asphalt. Concrete held up over 30 years and is good for many more. The asphalt just looks better and its dark color absorbs heat from the sun, benefits I hadn’t considered in 1993. Rain is forecast, so the concrete cracks will soon be showing themselves again. It’s just a thing in the life of a septuagenarian who lived in the same place for more than 30 years.
In the end, our home suited me as a writer. In a rural subdivision we are far from city life, yet there are enough people around to help in case of an emergency. The state park is a three minute walk with its five-mile hiking trail. Because of the lakes, there is an abundance of waterfowl. I believe we’ve seen specimens of every bird native to Iowa here. We also see most kinds of mammals, a snake or two, and amphibious creatures at certain times of the year. There is a lot of inspiration in that.
As home construction began I made at least weekly trips to observe progress. One time I parked on the street and walked over to the high wall that had been dug for the foundation. I sat on the edge and had a moment’s quiet while I looked over the footings toward the lake. I felt then this would be our home base for many years to come.
I left on and returned from a lot of trips on our driveway. Other family members did too. Travel is mostly finished except for errands and visits to immediate family.
As I begin year three of my eighth decade on Earth there is a lot to do. I have a reasonable rasher of good health, a secure home, plenty of good food to eat, and enough of a pension that finances get tight yet we make ends meet. Importantly, my ability to think remains reasonably sound, as far as I can tell. I do forget things now and then. It seems like more than I did, but not enough to worry. All of this, combined with seven decades of experience, and there is plenty of material for writing.
Writing table.
The challenge of aging, especially in America, becomes dealing with isolation. I wrote about this before. Being a writer requires a balance between isolation and being with people, so writing is a natural occupation for a septuagenarian. The scales tip toward the isolation side as we age. Without the continuous commotion of being at events or with other people, I’ve been able to discover myself in a way that was unexpected. At some point, I’ll know who I am and be ready for a new debut in society. If anyone will have me, that is.
The recent winter storm brought me indoors. For a while, I need that. I’ll also be ready for spring and trips to the vendors that support my garden. There is a lot of catching up to do. For now, I’m feeling isolation and coping with it by writing. It is the one thing I know how to do that works.
Excerpt from Charleston Receipts by The Junior League of Charleston, South Carolina, 1950.
I don’t know about this forward to a 1950s cookbook, Charleston Receipts. The unspoken part is cooks in the first verse were mostly black women, and housewives in the second were white. It is not overtly stated, but I’m certain it was implied. This book trades on fond remembrance of antebellum food culture. The word plantation is used in the names of some of the receipts (not recipes, per the author).
A large number of white women and girls worked as servants in the United States. It is possible the reference is not racist. Home cooking and cleaning were common employment for female Irish immigrants and those of other nationalities. When Grandmother left the Minnesota farm in the 1910s, she was employed as a servant in a home in Minneapolis. She worked as a cook well into her sixties. In the 1970s, people I knew in southern Indiana continued to employee a black woman as a home cook. It bothered me then, and it bothers me now. A person has to live, but not like this.
I have two copies of the book and one was missing its binder. Copies were readily available in thrift stores and used book stores. I read all the pages and saved a few from the volume without a binder to refresh my memory. There was a multi-page section about hominy, “long a favorite in the Carolina Low Country.” The section begins, “Man, w’en’e hongry, ‘e teck sum egg or cheese an’ ting an ‘eat till e’ full. But ‘ooman boun’ fuh meck wuck an’ trouble. ‘E duh cook!” I don’t recall the name of this type of language but it is stereotyped and hearkens to minstrel shows of the 1830s, which characterized blacks as lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, and prone to thievery and cowardice. Charleston Receipts is racist, although I am confident the Junior League of Charleston, which published the book, would deny it.
When I stopped in Charleston enroute to military service in Germany, I had a couple days before dropping off my pick up truck at the port. Charleston traded in slave culture then, and they do now. I saw for the first time up close, slave auction blocks, shackles, and whips used on enslaved humans. I searched the internet and found today there is the Old Slave Mart Museum that tells Charleston’s role in slave trade from 1856 to 1863. They were domestic slave traders then, one of the biggest in the country for collecting and selling human chattel.
In writing my autobiography I find the racist side of my personal history was in plain sight. I didn’t understand that then, mostly because my parents taught me a person is a person and that was that. It helped this outlook to have made a family trip to the plantation where Grandfather was on work release from prison and see my father sharing memories with a group of black men we encountered there. They seemed like old friends. It was a formative experience.
Racism never died out, although I forgot about it for a while… until I began writing my story. In that context, it is hard to miss, even in old cookbooks.
I met Finn Harries in Cedar Rapids at Al Gore’s 2014 Climate Reality Leadership Corps training. The diminutive Brit showed up only for the days Gore gave his Inconvenient Truth lecture. Harries and his twin brother Jack had millions of subscribers on their YouTube channel JacksGap. With a fame of his own, Finn Harries had specific intent in attending the Iowa training.
During the last ten years, the brothers developed a process to address the climate crisis. Finn is working on regenerative agriculture and Jack started Earthrise Studio. The transformation of their YouTube channel is ongoing at Earthrise Studio.
This channel is currently undergoing an exciting transformation. In 2011 we launched JacksGap, a creative storytelling project featuring short travel films by Jack and Finn Harries. Since then we’ve been on the most incredible journey covering stories all around the world and increasingly learning about the significant environmental issues we face. Today 10 years later we are re launching this channel as Earthrise, a digital media platform and creative studio dedicated to communicating the climate crisis. Earthrise tells stories for a new world. Radical stories of hope, of new possibility. Stories from the future that help us navigate the now. We’re so excited for this next chapter and hope you’ll join us!
Their channel has grown to 3.63 million subscribers.
On Tuesday, Jan. 16, I received this email with a link to their first video about fossil fuels. Please take 11 minutes to view it. It presents a different picture of the geopolitical impact of fossil fuels and leads into the same discussion about renewables.
A year ago, we set out on a journey to investigate the origins of the global energy crisis, an issue that took the world by storm and resulted in extortionate energy bills for people everywhere.
Fast forward to today, we’re so excited to share that the first episode of POWER has just gone live on our YouTube channel. But first, a quick recap on how we got here…
February: We decided to make a series about fossil fuels.
March: We went to our audience to crowdsource questions.
April: We began writing the series.
July: We kicked off production in our new filming studio.
December: We wrapped filming.
Yesterday: We held an in-person premiere for our community.
Today: We hit upload on Episode 1, and you can now stream it on our YouTube channel using the link below.
Has the Iowa Democratic Party hit rock bottom? At Monday’s poorly attended precinct caucuses, small groups of long-time Democratic attendees kept political embers glowing. Although we hadn’t reached “rock bottom” one could see it from there in the dim light of a fire that long ago burned through most of its fuel.
For comparison, in 2012 when President Obama was running for reelection, also the year comparable to 2024 when President Biden is running for reelection, we had 12 people at our precinct caucus. This year we had three. Combine low caucus attendance with the fact as of Jan. 12 only 8,000 Democrats had requested a presidential preference card from the state party, and it was enough to make a pail of water turn sour. Erin Jordan of the Cedar Rapids Gazette caught the mood at Iowa City Precinct 17 where Democrats had trouble filling their delegate seats to the county convention. The caucus chair called out individuals by name to recruit volunteers.
It’s not that Republicans had great caucus turnout. They didn’t. Donald J. Trump received 56,206 votes in the Iowa Republican caucus, or 7 percent of registered Republican voters. Hardly a mandate. The state had 752,249 registered Republicans on Jan. 1, 2024, and only 110,298 (15 percent) caucused. Half of Republicans who did vote wanted someone other than a Florida man facing 91 criminal counts as their presidential preference. Even Koch Industries, a powerhouse in Iowa through their shadow presence in Americans for Prosperity, was financially supporting someone else. The Republican performance definitely did not show strength. Unlike the national media we shouldn’t put too much stock in Trump’s win.
What about the vast majority of Iowa’s estimated 3.2 million people? They were not a part of this year’s caucus activity. To climb out of the hole in which we found ourselves, Democrats need a new way of thinking about politics. It must be focused on all Iowans, not just aging party activists.
Boy howdy! That’s not going to fly with the aging cohort of party regulars!
Iowa Democrats have the right idea. The slogan they wrote, “People over Politics” is the right one for this campaign because it hits on the need to address the majority of Iowans’ needs and wants, rather than a small minority. It is not enough to repeat the slogan, check off the box, and return to politics as usual. Something has to change.
Young people have a lot to lose in the 2024 election. When I talk to people in their twenties and thirties, they are angry with how our national politics is going. In particular, the treatment of Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War has them angry with President Biden and with Republican alternatives. They definitely plan to vote. Their issues make it more complicated than a choice between the Democrat and Republican running for president. As an elder, I caution about the complexity of Middle East politics. They don’t want to hear it. What is lacking is adequate direction from Washington to end the conflict and stop the genocide of Palestinians. Such young people are not motivated to join a political party. They are not motivated to support Biden. They simply want the president and the elected government in Washington to offer viable solutions now.
“The people of Iowa appreciate balance in the federal government and the state government,” said Rita Hart, chair of the Iowa Democratic Party in the Washington Post. “It is out of whack here in Iowa because Republicans have been in power for too long, and they have overreached.” I can say from my experiences with young people this seemingly reasonable statement is what’s out of whack. We need less characterization of the electorate in national media and more action to deliver positive results to more people. The elder in me says stay the course and let Hart lead. The young person in me wants to upset any existing balance and get a new set of scales.
I stay in touch with some in my Iowa high school cohort which entered its eighth decade of living. A common sentiment among them is “Oh Iowa. What are you thinking?” At its core, the concern is one for the future. A reaction to the Trump win like this can only be from consuming conventional news media. Our current national and local media environments have lost interest in the common good and propagate whatever content garners eyeballs. We need a new way of seeing the news and what we are doing now isn’t it. I am devoted to Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American because it injects each day with a dose of the logic, reason, and perspective of a historian. Many in my cohort have not heard of her. Indeed, her one voice is not enough.
Donald Trump Jr. said, “A win is a win” on caucus night. I used to look at elections that way. When a party can’t draw enough people to a meeting to fill convention delegate positions, the system is not working. While I enjoyed conversations with my old friends at the caucus. Iowa politics has to be something more than a social hour. Unless we make it so, the embers will finally be extinguished. I hope to do my part in creating change we need using my platform. What about you readers?
We got a dusting of snow last night, enough to use the electric snow blower on the driveway after sunrise. The forecast next week is for rain after ambient temperatures dip well below freezing this weekend. Is this the end of winter? I doubt it. I hope not.
In two weeks I begin planting seeds in indoor trays for the garden. This year I bought all nursery-started onions, so the first seeds into soil mix will be varieties of kale. Kale is a mainstay of our kitchen and the early start brings an early crop. After kale, I follow a time-tested, weekly procession of seedling starts that continues until the first week in May when I plant squash. I learned and developed this process while working for area vegetable farmers.
While I’m ready for spring, I’m not ready for winter to end. So much remains undone. I nudged my autobiography along, but have not had the long writing spells needed to finish the work this year. Based on feedback from a reader, I returned to part one for some revisions. I could easily spend another year there while part two remains in infancy. Partly this is a process of learning how to write. In part, I want to declare the work finished. The present obstacle is boxes and boxes of artifacts needing review and disposition before finalizing the narrative. I need external prompts to generate the narrative.
I began to dream during the blizzard. They have been dreams about travel, and topics I can’t remember. I don’t think much about dreams, they have little significance to me. I do notice the change in sleep patterns. For the most part, I’m sleeping through the night for a solid five or six hours.
I stand at the dining room window and look at the snow-covered garden. I have the plan about half worked out. Garlic is in the ground and I left space for a covered row on the west side of that plot. Tomatoes are planned with a return to my previous fencing method to keep deer from jumping it and eating tender seedlings. The next task is picking a spot for cruciferous vegetables. If I keep looking at the space, a plan for the rest will emerge.
Like much of my eighth decade of living, time goes too quickly. Part of me wants to apply discipline to get things quickly done. Part of me wants to take it easy, something I was unable to do much during my working years. Somehow I’ll find a balance as I understand what it means to age in America during a time of political turbulence. There is no universal understanding. We do the best we can.
Caucus-goer signing nominating petitions at the 2010 Iowa Democratic caucuses.
I counted 22 people present for the 2024 Democratic caucuses at Lakeview Elementary School on Jan. 15. Our location had five precincts. It was a good gathering of old friends. “Old” is the operative word. Age of participating Democrats is a problem for the Iowa Democratic Party. Well, that and this cohort is dying off, depleting our numbers. A couple of new faces were present, so that was good. We kept the embers of the Iowa Democratic Party going for another election year.
Our age was a constant companion during the caucuses. Doors opened at 5 p.m. for set up. People began arriving shortly after that for the 7 p.m. event. Set up didn’t take long and there was a lot of catching up to do. I talked more about Ohio politics than about Iowa. I noticed the average age of those present and was told to stop complaining and volunteer. We discussed the changes in door knocking over the years. One friend said if they went door knocking they would have to use their mother’s walker to get around. Someone suggested the reception at the doors might be better if they did.
The state party has kept the mail-in presidential preference vote a virtual secret. A few long-time Democrats at the caucus didn’t know what to do to get a ballot. We remedied that right away. According to the Cedar Rapids Gazette last Friday only about 8,000 ballots had been requested statewide. When we consider there were 176,352 initial alignment votes in the 2020 presidential preference vote, the response this year is underwhelming.
There were three of us in the Big Grove caucus. I chaired and made quick work of party business. We elected myself as chair and a friend as secretary. No one wanted to be on the county central committee and we only elected one of three delegates to the county convention. No one volunteered for convention committee work, except I told the organizer for the arrangements committee I would help at the convention. She was in another precinct at our site. I read the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion statement to meet the requirement. We signed, sealed, and delivered the documents to the box destined to go to the county seat that evening.
The weather was cold, yet not that bad. The roads were plowed and although there was some ice on them, an experienced driver could navigate safely. Weather was not what kept Democrats away from the caucuses. The Washington Post released an article about the issues. Here’s a taste of it:
At this time in 2020, Democrats held three of Iowa’s four congressional seats. They had three statewide elected officials, and they were just kicking off the Democratic presidential nominating process.
Four years later, Iowa Democrats have no representatives in Congress, only one statewide elected official — the state auditor — and their prized spot at the head of the nominating calendar has been ripped away from them.
Beyond that, they have seen former president Donald Trump twice carry the state by comfortable margins after victories in 2008 and 2012 by Barack Obama.
“It has been painful for Democrats in Iowa,” said Scott Brennan, a former chair of the state party.
As Iowa Republicans began their party’s presidential nominating process with Monday’s caucuses, many Democrats concede that their party has hit rock bottom. The state, once a presidential battleground, has joined Ohio, also a longtime swing state, in moving to the right. Few expect the Democrats to be competitive in Iowa in the presidential race in November.
Our group of oldsters kept a party on life support going for another little while. I don’t agree we hit “rock bottom,” yet one could see it from the 2024 Democratic precinct caucuses.
Saturday the snow stopped and I blew the driveway for the fifth or sixth time this week. Yes, that’s right, I can’t remember how many times. The work went quickly and with the snow finished for now, all I’ll have to deal with is wind-blown drifts.
Attire is a thing during a blizzard. For outdoors work, I donned my Star Wars Mos Eisley t-shirt, my Chicago Bulls sweat shirt from when Michael Jordan was playing, relatively new Levis blue jeans and J.C. Penney rubberized boots, a scarf Mother knitted me while I served in the military, a stocking cap from that same era, and a Carhartt jacket bought on sale when I worked at the home, farm, and auto supply store before the coronavirus pandemic. Working together, it all kept me warm as the snow flew around my electric snow blower. I did feel a bit like a walking logo store, yet I’m not going to get rid of serviceable clothing.
Sunday started with ambient outdoor temperatures below minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. With no reason to go outdoors, I kept the garage door closed while we regulated indoors temperatures. The new furnace worked well and the space heater took the chill off my downstairs work room. There was a two-hour planning session with our child and the rest of the day is for planning the beginning of the year for me. In a stable environment, what the weather does is less of a worry than running out of time.
We take days like these in stride. Without a paying job, what the weather does has less impact. The blizzard provided a reason to stay indoors and work on long delayed projects. Later today I must venture to town to lead our precinct caucus. The blizzard will keep all but the most devoted from participating. Some years it is like that, blizzard or not.
When the Iowa Legislature convened on Monday, House Majority Leader Pat Grassley reprised his position on banning books in schools. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported:
Grassley doubled down on House Republicans’ efforts to remove books with sexual content from public school libraries and said Republicans may pass additional legislation to clarify or expand on the existing law.
In December, a federal judge temporarily blocked much of a law passed last year, Senate File 496, that banned books that depicted or described any of a list of sex acts from public schools and prohibited teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation before seventh grade, among a host of other regulations.
Lawmakers vow tax cuts, grieve school shooting by Caleb McCullough and Erin Burphy, Cedar Rapids Gazette, Jan. 9, 2024.
We couldn’t read Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger in K-12 when I attended in the 1960s. It was no big deal. I used my newspaper route money to buy a copy at the book store. Since when do we need government intrusion in work that school teachers, librarians and parents should already be doing? We don’t. In some ways, the focus on banning books is a distraction from a more significant problem: K-6 reading skills.
Would-be book banners argue that readers can still purchase books they can no longer access through public libraries the way I did when I was a grader. That is only true for those with the financial resources to do so. For many, particularly children and young adults, schools and public libraries are the only means to access literature.
When people talk about the “culture wars,” control of books available to K-6 students is a core issue. USA Today summarized:
Banned books are not new, but they have gained new relevance in an escalating culture war that puts books centering racism, sexuality and gender identity at risk in public schools and libraries.
A dramatic uptick in challenged books over the past few years, an escalation of censorship tactics, and the coordinated harassment of teachers and librarians has regularly put book banning efforts in news headlines.
Book bans are on the rise. What are the most banned books and why? by Barbara VanDenBurgh, USA Today, Sept. 29, 2023.
There is a basic tenant of society, supported by research, that children of less educated parents will read less and society will be the worse for it. The corollary is children of well-educated parents will read more and in so doing expand their horizons to see a better life beyond immediate family. Teaching reading in school has been a mainstay of elevating children above the social station in which they were born, creating possibilities for life that would otherwise rely upon chance and happenstance.
Government should fund programs that encourage reading, make sure funds are not abused, and then shut the hell up. Leave reading curricula to those who know it best: teachers, librarians and parents. Passing a new law revising a state book banning process is of value only as political fodder. It would not help with a more fundamental problem of reading skills in K-6 students.
On Friday, Jan. 12, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird filed notice of appeal of the federal district court’s decision to halt implementation of Senate File 496. The distraction continues.
Driveway covered with snow a few hours after clearing it. Jan. 9, 2024.
A blizzard is welcome these days, especially when one works from home. They remove most temptation to leave the property and go to town. We become isolated as much as is possible in the time of broadband access and mobile telephones. Diet changes based on what is in the pantry and freezer. Like most modern middle class families we keep a lot of extra food on hand, so we are ready to survive, come what may.
Is there gasoline for the generator? Check. Is there enough store-bought bread? Check. Is the snow blower positioned near the garage door with extension cords? Check. Is there extra drinking water in case the well goes down? Check.
Wednesday morning I made ramen my own way. I bought a 24-package box of Maruchan brand ramen noodle soup. After looking at available options, I picked soy sauce flavor, hoping it was vegetarian. It wasn’t. One of the ingredients in the flavoring packet was “beef extract,” whatever that is. I discarded the packet and made my own with one cup tomato juice, and a combination of white miso paste, vegetarian worcerstershire sauce, and home made hot sauce. It was surprisingly sweet and delicious.
My neighbor came over to help clear the end of the driveway where the plow pushed snow from the street. The two of us made quick work of it and decided we didn’t need further exercise for the day. We are both retired and need daily exercise for health reasons. The blizzard broke up the routine of trail walking.
I recently read a book titled, Blizzard by Phil Stong, written in 1955. The story is of a farm family in southeastern Iowa during a blizzard. So many neighbors and friends stopped by during the storm, it seemed very communal. I suppose that’s the way it was on a farm back in the pre-internet days. For the most part, today it’s the two of us alone in the house making do.
On day two of the storm I drove across the lakes to Costco and wore a mask indoors. There were others doing so, although very few customers were inside. Staff was talking about who would be released first to go home. The risk of contracting the coronavirus seemed minimal. I wore a mask anyway.
The car radio was filled to the max with commercials promoting 45 and Nikki Haley, but no one else. Absent adequate and recent publicly released polling it’s hard to say who will win the Republican caucus vote. It will be one of those two, I believe. Of course, the Democrats are not voting for president on caucus day.
More storms are lining up the rest of the week and we shouldn’t have to go out until they finish. For now, it’s a matter of getting the mail and seeing whether delivery trucks make it through. It’s the newest version of Iowa winter during a blizzard.
Journey Home 
You must be logged in to post a comment.