A steady, westerly wind blew the last few days making the daily bicycle trip more challenging. I wore a hat under my helmet, a pair of gloves, and a sweatshirt to hold against the chill.
It has been good riding on the trails near our home since I changed the front tire and tube on Monday. I’m finding a 40-year old bicycle needs constant repairs and enjoy diagnosing problems and resolving them.
I have been thinking about participating in an event-style ride next summer, although I need to train for it if I do. Maybe a century ride, or a day of RAGBRAI if they resume operations. For now my attention turns toward winter. The change of seasons is in the air.
The orchard has the last apples of the season available this week. I picked Gold Rush from trees and got Jonathan and Enterprise in the display cooler. Gold Rush and Jonathan are for storage and the Enterprise will be converted to apple crisp or apple sauce during the next couple of days. It is hard to believe the season is already at its end. I am happy to have the nearby orchard to fill gaps in our home apple growing culture.
With cooler weather I turn from finishing the work in the yard and garden to creative work indoors. I filled in a couple of blanks on my autobiography outline yesterday. I hesitated to re-start the project during gardening season because I didn’t feel ready. With the combination of the coronavirus pandemic, a forced retirement, and winter’s approach I feel more ready than in a long time.
Politics took a holiday yesterday. There were at least four televised events yet I viewed none of them. On my to-do list is to obtain a digital television and set it up. The analog ones don’t really work. I am loathe to turn them on. Because I voted already my interest in details of candidate positions is waning.
It will be different if Joe Biden wins the presidential election. Having someone who uses reason, logic and careful deliberation for process will be refreshing yet something to which we haven’t been accustomed the last four years. The coalition of supporters Biden brought together is broad and deep. There will be Republican resistance to a Biden administration, yet any more, that’s to be expected and most people realize it. The moderator of Biden’s televised town hall meeting asked him what he would do if he loses the Nov. 3 election. Biden’s response, “I won’t lose.”
There will be wind but no rain according to this morning’s forecast: a fine day for pedaling against the wind. Such resistance is important to human progress. It makes us stronger and builds stamina. Both are qualities needed for the road ahead.
Editors Note: This is from a work file that resulted in the photograph and related art pieces. The main object was a mason jar with a print of this photograph and a poem inside. The poem can be found by clicking here. I was employed at Amoco Oil Company at 200 East Randolph Street in Chicago on Oct. 27, 1990 when I wrote this. By leaving work with an Iowa-based transportation and logistics firm I really had cut the cord on my Iowa roots, intending to go on living with our small family in Indiana or wherever life took us. Part of that new life would be what I called creative endeavor, or creative work with specific outputs. This piece marks a significant commitment to creativity. The text below is transcribed from my hand written notes without changes. It is only part of the document.
This piece is about hot sauce, but about more than that. It is about my vision as a person, family member and citizen of the global village for the next five years. But it is about my recipe for hot sauce, how I first learned it, and about my philosophy of life and art. First there will be the mason jar. Acquired at auctions mostly, and stored in our house. A container in which to put hot sauce.
The photograph of the ingredients a moment in time with my camera in the sun. Specific pieces of vegetables that gain significance when I take their image down on film and reproduce it on film. The instructions, so someone could make the hot sauce, then my written piece about the genesis and my vision.
The aspects, combined with the mail package and handling by the U.S. Postal Service represent a product of my creative endeavor.The first creative work for presentation to my small group of friends.
Not true really. Next in a series of creative endeavors is more like it.
Coping with modern life. It is not easy. In modern life, I have chosen to be an original, and in so choosing, have limited my contact with people outside work. I have become accustomed to staying within the borders of our property here in Lake County. I have taken to gaining weight. I have a vision of being a creative person who makes a significant contribution to society. That has long been my goal. But as another warm season comes to a close, I see I have accomplished little. The work with Amoco takes much of my time. I need to do better, work smarter, to allow more time for these home activities.
And all the while I ponder these things we get older.
In his book What Unites Us, former CBS news person Dan Rather refers several times to the “neighborhood where I grew up” in Texas.
This narrative meme should be abandoned by anyone who is serious about autobiography because the plural form of neighborhood is more accurate. In addition, growing up is not a linear process. We don’t “grow up” in a single way or in a single place and magically become a “grown-up.” The communities that surrounded our lives in the 20th Century were not homogeneous. They were diverse and less rooted in place. To root autobiography in place seems arbitrary. The narrative force of this meme casts aside our diversity of experience. We shouldn’t do that if we seek to be true to ourselves.
Our mind doesn’t stop growing as Rather points out. I had formative early experiences and it seems normal to emphasize them. I’ve written about getting injured when a swing set collapsed on me at age three and a half. That experience combined with my arrival at the hospital, taking ether through a funnel, and a lengthy stay had an effect on me that persists. There was a lot else going on at the time. I like to tell this story yet is it most representative of what makes me who I am? Probably not.
Writing autobiography means setting aside favored tales like my injury and hospital stay. It would be hard to write a memoir and leave it out. However, there were more significant influences by 1955. By then our family had moved to Madison Street where we lived only a short time until I finished kindergarten. Next we moved to a rental near Wonder Bakery for most of my first grade year. Then, in 1959, we moved to Marquette Street where I lived through high school. The house on Marquette represents a significant amount of time yet to characterize it as the “neighborhood where I grew up” is not accurate. I was well into personhood by 1959.
Part of autobiography is a timeline. It doesn’t have to be the main attraction. I’ve struggled with the single, time-based narrative and seek a way to articulate something different about how I “grew up.” Rather’s book raised awareness that one should really use the plural form of the word neighborhood. Or use something different like communities, or cohorts, or cultural nests, or something. Growing up meant experiencing many different kinds of social settings.
When Mother attempted a memoir she rendered it to a single narrative. It really didn’t work and she abandoned the project after a few pages. While there is always a timeline to autobiography, I don’t feel that’s the hook on which to hang a life story. Passing time moves a narrative along but complexity is sanded off in the woodshed.
I like Rather’s book well enough. It cost $2.10 on Kindle (cheap). It’s an easy read that touches on many areas of modern life that seemed important in the last century and are diminished in this. To the extent it inspired this post it was worth the purchase price.
While riding my bicycle around the trail system I press against the edge of a boundary. It is mental, not physical.
I feel trapped in a cage, ready to break out.
June 18 was the first bicycle trip. I don’t remember where I went. The scale told me this morning I dropped two pounds since then. The purpose of increasing daily exercise wasn’t weight loss though. It was a way to deal with my diabetes diagnosis.
Since seeing my health practitioner in June I developed five types of exercise to get my heart going, produce a sweat, and support whatever magical physiological workings reduce blood sugar. I missed only three days of 25 minutes or more of exercise that included bicycling, jogging, using a ski machine, walking, and sustained gardening and yard work that produced a sweat. Combined with watching my carbs, eating fewer big meals, taking Vitamin B-12, an 81 milligram aspirin, and a cholesterol drug, my numbers came down to a more normal range. If I went to a physician today I wouldn’t be diagnosed with diabetes.
I’m ready for what’s next.
Part of me wants to ride and ride the bicycle. Mostly I run one of four five-mile routes and once or twice a week ride 10-14 miles. I have no interest in riding across Iowa with the tens of thousands who do so most years but I’m pressing the limit. I want more.
Desire is balanced by caution because of my age and the age of my 40-year old bicycle. Bicycles are always needing repair, adjustment, and maintenance so I’ve learned new skills and identified a bicycle repair shop. Even though I don’t work outside home there is a lot to do and I can’t afford a two or three-hour daily trip just because I’m restless. My lower body is strengthening and my jeans fit better. For the time being that may have to be enough.
During the days before the Nov. 3 U.S. general election the limits of my range are more profound, the cage more tactile. A lot depends on the election outcome. If Trump and Republicans do well, there is one course. If Biden and Democrats win there is another. I expect the results to be mixed in Iowa. There is a broad Republican base where Democrats win majorities only when everything aligns. Recent polling showed Biden leading Trump by 14 points in national popular vote polling. Hillary Clinton led Trump by 14 points in the same polling exactly four years ago. Political work remains this cycle.
With cooler weather approaching I’m not sure how much more outdoors exercise I can accomplish before winter. I have a good start on the ski machine and expect that to be my daily regimen until it warms again. Between the plan and reality comes a shadow.
For now, I’ll continue what I’ve been doing. At the same time this bird wants its freedom and to break loose from restrictions of a cage where we’ve been living too long. Not today, but soon.
Turn around at Lake Macbride State Park, Saturday, Sept. 26.
While waiting for Joe Biden’s first presidential debate my mind was not on politics. I was wondering what to do after the election.
I returned in memory to a trip I made to Philadelphia in September 2001 after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the day an airplane laden with terrorists and bystanders crashed in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Passengers on my flight were few, with most seats open. The country was still in shock although I had business to attend. While driving to the Cedar Rapids airport I heard the president was also planning a trip to Philadelphia that morning, his first trip after the terrorist attacks.
Because of the president’s visit our aircraft entered a holding pattern as we approached Philadelphia. It lasted a long time, 45 minutes or so. When we were cleared for landing and did I entered a changed world, eerily quiet. I rented a car and drove to our operation on Grays Avenue. There were law enforcement officers on every corner. I encountered the Bush motorcade heading back to the airport on the opposite side of I-95. It was a turning point in my support for the president after the attacks.
The question I find myself asking today is similar to what I asked myself that grey day in Philadelphia. What will be next? An honest answer today is I don’t know. A lot depends upon the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.
Yesterday the other shoe fell as the Walt Disney Company announced layoffs for 28,000 workers in Florida and California. After cast members were on furlough for six months this is an unwelcome announcement. Airlines will soon follow suit with layoff announcements. Cruise ships haven’t figured out how to operate post-pandemic. People aren’t going to the movies as they did. Government has done a poor job of containing the coronavirus and people do not want to join the more than one million people world wide who died from COVID-19. Everyone is cautious and it is unclear if or when we will do things again that once seemed so normal. If the travel and entertainment industry can’t figure it out, there’s little hope for us until well into 2021 or maybe 2022.
In the meanwhile we are in survival mode, conserving resources and making do. Every extra cent from our pensions is used to pay down debt and keep our credit lines open. The August 10 derecho resulted in $1,200 in direct expenses for us. We got off easy compared to many. The unresolved stress of the elections works against our best intentions. It will be worse if Republicans win.
In all of this we must find hope enough to find our way out of the darkness while remembering the darkest hour is just before the dawn. It is hard to find hope when we’ve been up all night.
A high school classmate died on Sunday. In 2013 he sent a copy of a 54-page draft of his memoir for editing.
I didn’t offer much because his writing was good and it was his story, not mine. Our life experiences were different, tied together by four years we spent in high school together in a cohort of 262 students. If it weren’t for social media we would never have collaborated.
My life has been lived in the second half of the 20th Century and the first quarter of the 21st. I want to tell that story, although I’m not sure how badly.
I wrote many words about my life and part of the task of a memoir is pulling that writing together. It seems important, not urgent. I have a question: what have I done the story of which hasn’t been told by someone else? Not much when we think about it.
Today I see a memoir in two parts. One, a collection of past writing and historical analysis that tells the story chronologically. The second, an analysis of important life events from today’s perspective. Both parts will become big projects.
The first reason for a memoir is to record a history for our daughter. The second is to understand it myself. I doubt my life has much significance beyond family. Although I’ve done a lot, I’ve been a reflection of contemporary times rather than shaping them. I’ve been a regular guy trying to get along and that’s not too special in the broad scope of society.
For the time being I work on a couple of community projects and plan to address the memoir after the Nov. 3 election. A lot depends on the outcome of the election, including whether or not progress is made on a memoir. Here’s hoping for the best.
From drought to rain the last week has been unrelenting.
The garden continues to produce and grass is growing again creating another task once the landscape dries.
Doesn’t look like drying will happen today.
I am helping the local political party distribute campaign yard signs. There are few parts of the county north of the interstate highway I don’t recognize. I’ve gotten requests from voters on some new streets yet when I look for them the same roads and streets are in memory to find them. I remember a lot of door knocking from past political campaigns.
I stopped to refuel my 1997 Subaru Outback. At the convenience store no one was wearing a mask. Not a single person. I couldn’t see through the window whether the cashiers were, although I hope so. Keeping my distance at the fuel pump I sanitized my hands once back in the driver’s seat. Risk avoidance is a key part of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. I resisted the temptation to go inside and buy a Powerball ticket.
It’s just as well it’s wet outside. I have an indoors project with a deadline and it’s easier to avoid distraction when it’s raining. I’m about to make my second French press of coffee for the day. It may not be the last. I’m digging into the history of our community. There’s a lot of food for thought and memory. It should keep me busy all day.
(Editor’s Note: This article was first posted Sept. 25, 2011 on my blog Big Grove Garden. It is about missing mainstream culture in the late 1970s and captures some of my life while living in West Germany and epiphanies while visiting San Francisco where I jogged on Market Street in the middle of the night, saw DEVO and Sir Elton John perform at the Cow Palace, and stayed in Chinatown while there to attend Oracle Open World in 2006. It is presented unedited.)
By the time I returned from a Cold War West Germany in 1979, I had missed a lot of the music, movies and other artifacts of popular culture of the late 1970s. Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, Talking Heads, Blondie, Sex Pistols, the Cars, the Clash, The Ramones and DEVO, never heard of them. In movies, Blue Collar, Star Wars, The Deer Hunter, Kramer vs Kramer, Norma Rae, Taxi Driver, F.I.S.T., Saturday Night Fever, All the President’s Men, and Dog Day Afternoon were all beyond the ken as instead, we viewed repeated screenings of Patton in forests near the Fulda Gap, our projector powered by generators.
Most of us did not even own a television while we were stationed overseas, preferring to get together at the officer’s club or go hiking and rock climbing in the nearby Taunus mountains during rare times when, for a few hours, we could get away from being a soldier. My vacuum of experience in popular American culture is between the bookends of Jaws, which I saw with house mates when living in Davenport and Annie Hall which I saw in Amsterdam subtitled in Dutch while on leave from my post in Mainz just before returning to Iowa. In retrospect, missing these shared popular culture experiences was a formative influence. Even missing the start up of Saturday Night Live was important.
Instead of music and movies, I took in the stuff of life. The politics of being an occupying force leftover from World War II was real. One of my buddies went on missions to East Berlin where he talked with Soviet soldiers to see what they were up to. Mostly, it appears, they were drinking vodka and we never worried about the threat they may have posed to the West. One time we chipped in and he brought us hats made in East Germany. I still have mine in the closet, as it is very warm.
Our battalion had a severe drug problem. Almost every soldier had some connection to use of heroin or hashish. It was so prevalent, and our enforcement capability so limited, that we would bust someone caught in the act more to ruin their Friday night than send them to jail. Often soldiers caught using drugs in the military were sent to the Community Drug and Alcohol Counseling service. Turned out the counselor supplemented his military pay by selling heroin to his clients. Heroin purportedly coming from Afghanistan through East Germany. Looks like both sides of the Cold War had their problems with substance abuse.
By dealing with existential realities in the military, I was spared the evisceration of everything I knew from growing up in a union household. Popular culture reflected that. The late seventies were a prelude to Ronald Reagan’s supply side economics, and notably the PATCO firings that were a continuation of the assault on unions that began under Nixon. It would have been tough to witness all of that. While I missed the first run of DEVO, I did finally catch up with them.
I got a chance to attend Oracle’s Open World in 2006 while working at a logistics company. It was a time on the cusp of the explosion of hand-held devices and cloud computing we are in the middle of today. Gavin Clarke wrote about the event in The Register, whose tag line is, “Biting the hand that feeds IT.”
More than 40,000 delegates will flood downtown San Francisco’s hotels, restaurants, and transport system, drawn from the developer, customer, and partner ranks of the 21 companies Oracle bought since January 2005 plus those using Oracle’s own middleware and applications.
Keynotes from […] AMD’s Hector Ruiz, Cisco’s John Chambers, Hewlett-Packard’s Mark Hurd, and Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz, plus Dell chairman Michael Dell, and Network Appliance president Tom Mendoza who will no doubt pay some kind of homily to the power of their relationships with Oracle on servers, virtualization, and software […]
Even the entertainment is big: […] it’s the rocket man himself Sir Elton John.
Somewhere on one of the numerous venues arranged by the conference organizers within San Francisco’s Cow Palace, along with Sir Elton John, a dozen bands, circus acts and contortionists, I saw the band DEVO perform for my first and only time. They played Secret Agent Man among others I did not recognize. It made me glad I missed the 1970s culture of the De-evolution of American life that was tied so closely to corporations making things like Goodyear tires in DEVO’s home town of Akron.
I was still on Iowa time at my hotel in Chinatown near the Moscone Center. I went jogging on Market Street in the early morning, encountering an army of homeless people, socializing and sleeping in cardboard boxes and under blankets on the sidewalks. As I ran, I wondered how the popular culture of the 1970s became one more thing to be marketed and bought by consumers. In doing so, it bred a deep cynicism that penetrates our culture today. It also gave rise to today’s self purported “new revolutionaries” of the Taxed Enough Already party, who too have become one more thing to be marketed by the corporatists at Fox News and NBC Universal.
As the sweat built and I headed back to the hotel, missing the late 1970s popular culture did not seem so bad. It enabled me to hope that as a society we were better than this, and that life was about more than militarism, poverty, sex, drugs and rock and roll. For that I am grateful.
A lot is being made about the differences between voters who live in rural parts of the state compared to those who live in our cities and urban areas.
It’s a false distinction. The same social, economic and political forces are at work no matter where one lives. None of it favors regular people like us.
Why does everything cost more? Why do we have to drive so far for health care? Why is our broadband inconsistent at best if we have it? Why can’t farmers sell milk for at least the cost of production? Why are there patents on seeds? Why does new farm equipment cost so much? Many questions, few answers.
Why do more than half of working people in predominantly rural counties work in another county? The answer to this is easy. Farming does not pay unless one is a big corporation. Someone in most farm families has to work outside the farm to make ends meet and such jobs are mostly urban.
When people say of politicians, “We need someone who understands the rural areas,” it is true. It is also code for something: hard work, poverty, a lack of economic justice, and a type of Christian religious faith. For the most part it is about being a Caucasian farmer.
Of recent writers, Sarah Smarsh came closest to capturing what being rural means in her book Heartland: Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. The book resonated so closely with how I grew up yet I lived in Iowa’s third largest city. There are differences between the urban county where I grew up and the rural county I know best (Cedar County). Those differences are not significant. Try telling that to someone who lives in a rural area and you’ll find self-righteousness and resentment.
I won’t resolve this false dichotomy. Just as Jack Kerouac’s more conventional first book, The Town and the City gave way to the “spontaneous prose” of On the Road, it is difficult to focus on it for long when so much more about society is engaging.
Suffice it the assertion of ruralness isn’t about being rural. It’s about having dignity, justice and equal treatment under the law. It’s about a return for the hard labor so many farmers invest as part of their lives. At some point labor should be rewarded for its sacrifices instead of return on equity going to the richest people and corporations like Monsanto, Cargill, John Deere, DuPont and Archer Daniels Midland.
Iowa’s well-developed road system is partly to blame for the rural-urban divide. Because of inexpensive gasoline it is easy to drive to a metropolis when shopping for food, building products, household goods and clothing. When there are no rural jobs, a commute of less than an hour might produce income far above what farm earnings can be. Americans, rural or urban, are at a distance from producing their own food, shelter and clothing. Let’s face it. Who wants to live like Old Order Amish? I’ve met enough young people trying to escape that life to say not many. Yet we still see horse drawn carriages using Iowa’s rural road systems.
Use of the rural trope drives me a bit crazy. Not crazy enough to call the suicide hotline, yet enough to be a catalyst. The thing about catalysts is they can get us to where we should be going faster, the way iron is a catalyst for making ammonia. If people who live in rural areas want to get ahead, they need to steel themselves against language that would divide them from the rest of us. That includes their own language. We are stronger together and fabricating a rural-urban divide is counterproductive. That is, if we want society to advance toward something positive.
~ A version of this post appeared in the Sept. 13, 2020 edition of the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
A breeze blew off the lake as I walked the mail to the box on the road. It didn’t rain last night and we really needed it.
The garden is getting close to the end although I’d like to get more peppers, tomatoes and greens before the drought destroys it. I water daily, yet a good soaking rain would be better.
There is almost no chance of precipitation in the next 24 hours although the cold front moved in as forecast. The path of hurricane Laura, now a depression, turned east at Cairo then is following the Ohio River valley across West Virginia and Virginia to the Atlantic coast. We missed any rain from that system.
It will be a day to catch up on outside work.
A couple from the COVID ravaged metropolis around the county seat stopped by our house to deliver campaign materials. We all wore masks. I gave them garden tomatoes. Progress toward the Nov. 3 election continues.
Our county has a high COVID-19 infection rate, the highest in the state. Iowa leads the United States in infection, which leads the world. Our local epidemiologist said what we are seeing “is unchecked spread without a statewide prevention plan.” The governor reiterated yesterday, “I’ve been very clear on that.” There will be no statewide mask-wearing mandate and only selected restrictions based on criteria that targets certain counties. The state universities brought students back this week. It was an unmitigated disaster at all three of them.
Our family had a chance to catch up on video conference yesterday. We noted that Florida has given up its position as worst in the coronavirus pandemic to Iowa. Not really good news for any of us. The government’s handling of the pandemic has been bad at the state and federal levels. Florida’s economy relies on tourism which the pandemic hit squarely. Just as I refrain from visiting the county metropolis, people are avoiding trips to Florida for vacation. I don’t know how the tourism and entertainment industry finds it way out of the pandemic despite the fact smart people are working to figure it out.
Except for my daily exercise I don’t plan to leave the property today. What I’m hearing is the pandemic will continue until at least Easter and maybe longer. We have five homemade masks and should make more.
Journey Home 
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