Tag: #amwriting

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Writing

Local Food System Fragment

Winter lettuce salad.

When I left a 25-year career in transportation and logistics, food occupied part of my attention. Over the years my blood pressure and cholesterol levels had increased, and when I left transportation they quickly returned to normal, mostly by eating more regular food as opposed to restaurant food.

When we moved back to Iowa in 1993, growing a large garden was part of what I wanted to do with the land. We couldn’t afford an acreage, but managed to find 0.62 of an acre not far from the trail around the north shore of Lake Macbride.

I was ready to produce some of our own food, more than we had in Indiana, but not really ready to embrace local food as anything other than a kitchen garden.

The local food movement was a growing group of individual operators struggling to make a living and an impact in a turbulent world. It remains a nascent system directly tied to our consumer culture, dependent upon disposable income and open mindedness in meeting humankind’s most basic need.

I spent seven years working and living in our local food culture and can say food we consume is not all local and needn’t be. At the same time there are benefits of a local food system beyond living within the season, better taste, and knowing the farmer who produced what we eat.

In our home fall canning leads to a pantry full of soup, tomatoes, hot peppers, sauerkraut, vinegar, apple sauce, pickles and sundry items from the garden and farm. The freezer gets filled with bell peppers, kale, sweet corn, apples, broccoli, blueberries and raspberries. It is food – as local as it gets – driven by what is fresh, abundant and on hand.

Along with home processed goods our pantry has bits and pieces from all over the globe, with each serving a purpose in our culinary lives. Combining ingredients and recipes in a personalized cuisine is where the local food movement lives or dies.

More people seek processed or precooked food because of a perception there is too little time for cooking. If adding kale to a smoothie seems easy, making a stir fry using it is less so. Contemporary consumers want a quick and easy path to making meals and snacks, and don’t have the patience it requires to add many new recipes to their repertoire. Cuisine as an expression of local culture has been tossed out the window by many.

Having worked in the food system, whether at home, on a farm, or in a retail store, has been an important part of my life since retiring in 2009. I found it is a way of life to grow food for direct consumption or sales. It also became clear the local food system is a jumble, even if farmers and consumers want it to be more organized.

One operator runs a community supported agriculture project where members pay in the spring, then share in the luck of the farm, good or bad. Another sells chits to be used to buy farm goods at a local outlet framed as a “store.” Another grows specific crops to sell to restaurants, absorbing any financial risk. All of this and more leads us to a point where an onion isn’t only an onion anymore. In the end it’s not about the onion but the culture.

If someone could organize a local food system, they might make a living. That would miss the point. Local food systems are intended to cut out the middlemen in the food supply chain. At the same time, faced with a need for scalability and the tick tock of the growing season, operators might use the help of an intermediary for marketing and sales.

While some of the trail blazers of a sustainable, local food movement are well known – Alice Waters, Joel Salatin, Fred Kirschenmann, and others – a sense of coherence or agreement on basic terms seems missing among local producers. It is as if operators would rather work inside the bubble of what works for them personally as long as the farm to market system seems to work generally. In a way that is not much different from how corn, soybean, egg and livestock producers view their operations.

Where we go from here is uncertain, although I have some ideas about that based on my experience in our food system.

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Living in Society Writing

It’s Not Really Winter

Roasted Root Vegetables: potatoes, rutabaga, turnips and carrots.

On Wednesday morning the ambient temperature is in the teens. By tomorrow at this time it will be in the mid-forties. I’m looking forward to a week of freezing temperatures so I can get tree pruning done.

Not yet.

What gripes me is there is limited work to do outside yet it feels like I should be spending more time there. Instead I write, cook, read, and do chores. It’s a winter life without the winter part of it.

I spent time Tuesday night following events in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic of Iran retaliated for the U.S. assassination of Qasem Soleimani by firing a 15 or so missiles in two volleys into Iraq where U.S. forces were staying. After the launches an Iranian government spokesman said they were done unless the U.S. retaliated with additional military action. They threatened to destroy the Israeli city of Haifa as well as Dubai where thousands of U.S. troops are stationed if we retaliated. It appears the president and his key leadership team stood down after the two volleys and neither Iraqis, U.S. troops, nor coalition forces suffered any casualties. Unrelated to the missile attack, a Ukrainian airliner crashed in Tehran last night killing all 176 people on board.

The Middle East action is a distraction from the president’s Dec. 18 impeachment. Senate Majority Leader McConnell announced yesterday he would proceed with the constitutionally mandated impeachment trail without an agreement to call witnesses. At present he has the votes to support his position although that could change.

Donald Trump is the 13th president in my lifetime and I don’t recall any predecessor who appeared so disorganized and superficial in their approach to international affairs. The conventional wisdom is he won’t be impeached, despite clear evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors, because his supporters in the U.S. Senate hold the majority. Based on everything we know, the two articles of impeachment, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, are rightly promulgated. I was surprised other articles were not drafted, particularly one related to the emoluments clause of the constitution. My position is the president is as guilty as hell of the two articles of impeachment and I would like to see him removed from office even though from a policy standpoint, Vice President Pence could be a worse president.

The Republican Party has become the party of Trump and that’s not good for regular people like us. The corruption from money in politics has become overwhelming and it’s hard to see an end to it. Moneyed interests have a well-developed infrastructure to support what they want to achieve. Democrats have no equivalent response to it. If we can’t slow their progress by winning the presidency in November, it will be generations before a progressive agenda can be advanced.

What stood out to me over the weekend is about 100 people gathered in the county seat to protest the U.S. slaying of Soleimani. At the same time, that number and half again gathered for a nearby event with author Marianne Williamson who laid off her presidential campaign staff a few days previously. That tells me the populace is not engaged in the Middle East or in Trump’s incompetence.

Alice Walker wrote, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” In a scenario like yesterday, where Iranians seem like reasonable people, it seems like we’ve given the president a blank check to have his way with the Middle East. I’d feel better about that if there was any shred of evidence he or his staff knew what they are doing.

It’s winter in America, but not really. Without it it’s an open question whether we will make it until spring with necessary chores completed. We will do the best we can.

Categories
Writing

Fragments in Search of a Narrative

Draft in a Time of Typewriters

(Editor’s Note: Robert Caro instructs us to turn every page when writing biography. I don’t remember writing these fragments found in a folder with multiple typewritten drafts of each. Today they make me groan a bit. They are fiction with one foot in reality).

Fragment 1 – Jan. 9, 1980

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. He took it for a while, but ultimately declined it. He went back to school to get out of the plant and be his own boss, to establish himself.

He graduated in 1968, but death in the form of a 1959 Ford struck him as he walked out of the plant after his shift.

Those were hard years, but Jim Peterson was convinced his father knew who he was, and where he was going.

Fragment 2 – 1974

Danny Dziabas shut the door of his upstairs apartment and began walking to the sound of night creatures chirping near the house.Walking under the starlight of Orion rising. Walking from his apartment on Walling Court, near where Bix Beiderbecke had lived. Walking toward Locust Street where revving of car engines and laughter of young people muffled the night sounds. Where headlights and streetlights dimmed the rising hunter. Danny Dziabas walked to the Deep Rock Station and placed a call while a Corvette and a G.T.O. lined up at the intersection for a drag race.

As he finished his call, the traffic light changed to green and the two cars squealed away from the corner.In hot air, smelling of burnt rubber, Danny Dziabas began walking, away from the noise and light of Locust Street toward his nearly empty apartment on Walling Court near where Bix Beiderbecke had lived.

Fragment 3 – Dec. 25, 1974

When the time came Danny began looking up his friends. The first was Milton Murphy who was in possession of Danny’s books and record albums.

Danny and Milton had played together in a band called the Milton Murphy Moose Manglers. It lasted about nine months. Just as they were about to collect their pay from a party on a farm near the Wapsi River, a band mate carried the P.A. head 100 yards and threw it over the bluff into the river, ending both the evening and the band.

Remembering this and other episodes in the Manglers’ history, Danny questioned the sanity of leaving his possessions in Milton’s care in the first place. He knew it would be alright when he heard the dull beat of the base coming through the floor above the entrance hall.

Fragment 4 – Iowa City, 1973-4

In act of simultaneous co-creation Danny Dziabas skied the snow-covered slopes of Washington Street, mountainous mathematics to the left, his just crashed 1965 Volkswagen cavernous time away and in a ditch. Pirouetting on Madison Street, his toe reveals a greenery hidden by newly fallen snow.

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Writing

Book of Mormon

Wise County Virginia Civil War Group

I’ve been using the free, on line service FamilySearch to research parts of my family history. It is funded by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I call it, in a respectful way, the Book of Mormon.

My reference library has a copy of the actual Book of Mormon, replete with a photo of the prophet Joseph Smith from whose translations it was made in 1830. I’ve already opened FamilySearch many more times than the worn copy of the religious text.

Stories about early gatherings of my paternal ancestors include one about the funeral for “Aunt Stella.” I have a photograph of Stella in her coffin with someone identified as “Granny Reed” nearby. Stella was my grandfather’s sister. Oral history is no one knew anything about Granny Reed except that’s what they called her. According to FamilySearch, in the 1920 U.S. Census she is listed living in the household of my great grandfather as his mother-in-law, with an estimated birth year of 1864. Her complete name was Josephine Reed. It has bothered me we didn’t know more. Now thanks to the Mormons there is a better narrative of who she was.

When I write “better narrative” I mean the story is and continues to be a human creation. While there are “facts” to support it, there are vagaries in the U.S. Census data and oral tradition that went unrecorded. The temptation is to take a fact like a U.S. Census entry and make more of it than it actually is. As I wrote this post I found myself rewriting that paragraph time and again to refine my understanding of who was Granny Reed. I’m not sure how much more this discovery changes things.

I love the name Josephine and had we known about it when our daughter was born, it may have been entered into the pool of family names from which we selected hers. Granny Reed was our daughter’s great, great, great grandmother. It’s a fun fact yet not that relevant to our daily lives.

Somewhere in box-storage is a trove of genealogy documents collected from a man named Howard Deaton during a trip to Saint Louis. His focus was on our surname, Some of his work is relevant to our line and some isn’t. Robert Caro advises us to turn every page when researching biography. I don’t know I will have time to go through documents I have, let alone the entire Book of Mormon.

These are decisions one makes in compressing the story of a life into a hundred thousand words. If anything, the challenges of crafting a story come into high relief. What I’m writing will by its nature be a story built today with a perspective of right now. I don’t see how any biography or historical work can be anything else. There is a politics of history, a minefield of historian’s fallacies. There is also a poetry of history. What we hope to do is create a narrative grounded in something real that transcends the lived life upon which it was based.

At age 68 there is an urgency to get something down, edited and finished.

Categories
Writing

Poetry in the New Year

Moon Rise Through the Locust Tree

The end of year holidays seem to go on forever.

With Christmas and New Year’s on a Wednesday, from Dec. 20 until Jan. 7 I will have worked only two days at the home, farm and auto supply store. Yesterday I needed to get out of the house.

I found a box and filled it with discards for the public library book sale, the second such box this winter. As soon as it was filled, I drove it in, donated the contents, and socialized with friends. There will be more donations by the time I get organized for 2020 writing projects.

Afterward I stopped at a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket before finding my way home. Restlessness abated.

Who reads poetry? Why do we read it?

These are not a random questions. I have a few hundred books of poetry I’m either going to read, re-read, or get rid of. I’m interested in the 21st century case for reading poetry in a time of social media. I believe there is one.

I read poetry. When I do it’s mostly because of how I connect to the poet.

I’m thinking of Lucia Perillo who taught at Southern Illinois University during the time I was regularly visiting the Shawnee National Forest. I’m not sure I met her but the creative community there was small and tightly knit. Her poetry resonates of that time.

I’m thinking of Donald Justice who I encountered at the UPS terminal in Coralville. He was shipping books to himself in Chapel Hill, N.C., leaving Iowa.

I’m thinking of Robert Laughlin, William Carlos Williams’ editor at New Directions, who spoke about his last times with Williams at an event at the Lindquist Center in Iowa City.

I’m thinking of poets who visited and stayed at our rental on Gilbert Court in Iowa City: David Morice, Darrell Gray, Pat O’Donnell, Jim Mulac, Sheila Heldenbrand, Alan Kornblum, and the rest.

I’ve noticed there are many bad poets and plenty of good ones. If we can find ways to connect with poets, it makes time engaging and worthwhile. It smooths off the rough edges. Poetry can give us a different way of seeing our lives. We can get lost in the words, conjured images, and emotions. We need that from time to time.

As we begin a new year filled with tumult and uncertainty, I am reading again. I’m not ready to give up on the imagination. It’s there we may find relief and salvation.

Best wishes for a happy new year from On Our Own.

Categories
Home Life Writing

Last Days of 2019

Front Moving East at Sunrise on Dec. 29, 2019

Snow flurried outside the dining room window for a while. I thought we might return to normal winter weather. The thought passed and snow stopped without accumulation.

We need a good streak of very cold days to prune the fruit trees. Last year it was difficult to find such a streak yet I’m hopeful this year. I’m not going to wait for ideal conditions. I’ll take what we get in our evolving climate.

This year’s reckoning with the past and planning for the future is taking more time and effort. It’s not because I did more. The process has been more organized and thoughtful than in recent years. I’m conscious of my age and weighing carefully which projects and activities will get my attention. At the end of it I want a definite plan with time lines. It’s a better process.

While our personal lives went okay in 2019, our participation in broader society was like the wafting odors from nearby feedlots. It was hard to stay separate from the international shit storm.

As Julian Borger pointed out in The Guardian, 2019 was the year U.S. foreign policy fell apart. “Donald Trump’s approach to the world is little more than a tangle of personal interests, narcissism and Twitter outbursts,” he wrote. That’s no way to run a country, even if a majority seeks to isolate American interests from the rest of global society. We can do better than this.

Steven Piersanti wrote on DCReport.org, “Under the bankrupter-in-chief, the national debt is skyrocketing while economic growth is lagging.” Trump is running the country just like he ran his failed businesses, according to Piersanti. “The country’s economic resources are being wasted and our economic health is endangered.”

“The next 12 months will determine whether the world is capable of controlling nuclear proliferation, arresting runaway climate change, and restoring faith in the United Nations,” Stewart Patrick wrote at World Politics Review. Those things matter to everyone and positive outcomes on any of them are dubious without American leadership. President Trump, ditcher of nuclear arms control agreements, critic of the need to address climate change, and bad-mouther of the United Nations does not appear to have an appetite or the capacity to lead at home or abroad. The prospects are bleak on these fronts and more until government changes hands.

It comes back to personal planning for next year. What amount of time will I devote to addressing these problems? The overarching motivation is to remove our current federal elected representatives from office and replace them with people who understand the importance of foreign policy.

At the same time, I can’t let politics be a single thing that absorbs all my time. Regardless of the Republican shit storm, we each need balance in our lives.

It’s taking a little longer to plan this year but the premise of it comes back to my tag line. How shall we best sustain our lives in a turbulent world?

A toast to 2019, an aspirin and vitamin for 2020, and off we go into an uncertain future with the potential for great things.

Categories
Home Life

Holiday Gift Cards

Christmas Coffee

Our family holiday season begins with our Dec. 18 wedding anniversary and continues until New Year’s Day. Two weeks of slowing down, eating more traditional food, reading, reviewing the past, writing, and planning.

2019 was a difficult year. It was a pivotal year. It was a year of coming to terms. There were gift cards.

The first gift card came from the home, farm and auto supply store in the amount of $125. Receiving a gift card in lieu of a salary bonus is a leftover from when the family that founded the retail chain was more involved. The founder’s son continues to make rounds of the stores and knows me by name. He sent a personal birthday card with some bad information about how long I’d been employed. It’s the thought that matters. They also provide a paid holiday on our birthday which in my case falls during this end of year period. I made it to age 68!

The second gift card was re-purposed by my spouse. She spent the $100 gift on herself, but didn’t use the card. She gave it to me and I considered it a welcome birthday present since it was the only one.

Where does one spend this kind of gifted money? At grocery, hardware and other retail stores mostly.

Major purchases included some premium bay leaves ($8.99), a fifth of Jack Daniels No. 7 ($27.55), a Craftsman screwdriver set ($29.67), a 24-bottle case of Stella Artois ($26.63) and a set of storage bins for garden seeds ($29.67). I also got a bottle each of low-dose aspirin and B-12 at the pharmacy, jars of organic seasonings clearanced at the home, farm and auto supply store, some Boetje’s mustard (a local specialty that used to be made in Rock Island, Ill.), a package of roasted chestnuts for New Year’s Eve, and a new Craftsman box cutter to place near the recycling bin. We’re lucky to be able to afford these luxuries.

We received a screwdriver set from the best man at our wedding. Some of them had gone missing over 37 years. It was a purchase of hope as in I hope to spend more time organizing the workspace in the garage and shedding some of the duplicated and unnecessary tools accumulated at dozens of household and farm auctions. Something just feels good about having new tools. They match the ones we got as a wedding present exactly.

The price of the whisky was shocking as I hadn’t bought any for more than a decade. A recent newspaper survey showed Iowans prefer cheaper varieties like Black Velvet Whisky and Hawkeye Vodka. I don’t drink spirits very often and the gift cards were the reason I even considered getting a bottle, it’s like free money and Jack Daniels is a personal holiday tradition. Besides, the local small batch spirits were too expensive at $50 for a fifth.

I bought the beer at the wholesale club, another luxury. My favorite is Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, which my father preferred. PBR is not available there. The plan is to drink a bottle when we have pizza or chili for dinner while reminiscing about my several trips to Belgium. The case should last into spring. At that time my memories will likely be worn out and I’ll get a case of something else to ice down in a cooler for after yard work. Had it not been for the gift cards I would likely have gone without beer at home until summer.

The bins for seeds were an impulse purchase. I examined them and found there was enough space in each drawer for the packets to lay flat. It will go a long way to clean up the workspace where I sort seeds for my weekly planting sessions at the greenhouse. Now the bins need to be labeled so I know what’s in them. More work to do this holiday season.

No one got rich off my shopping spree. I feel better for the fun of unexpected shopping. Whatever anxiety I had about whether the gift cards would work was offset by the adventure in spending them. It was just enough of our consumer society to recall what it is and sate my desire to shop. That done, I can better consider what 2020 will bring.

Categories
Living in Society

Get ‘Political’ for One Night

Caucus-goer

Voters should attend the Democratic or Republican precinct caucuses on Feb. 3, 2020 if they prefer either party.

The main attraction is the presidential preference. Plus, there is more! It’s a good way to hear what’s going on inside each party without filters. Good heavens! No filters! We need that.

I live in Big Grove precinct in which the number of registered Democrats dropped by about 20 percent since 2008, with Republicans remaining about the same. According to the Johnson County Auditor’s office, Democrats currently have more voters than Republicans with 32.6 percent compared to 31.7. No preference voters are the largest group at 35.3 percent.

Our precinct voted for President Obama in the 2008 and 2012 general elections, for President Trump in 2016. What that says is a lot of no preference voters do have a preference; it’s just not for a political party. They prefer to vote for candidates they feel will address the country’s most pressing needs regardless of party. That likely remains the same for the 2020 election.

No one knows how the general election will turn out. I’m willing to bet people will continue to say they are “not political” as they did during the recent school board election. Still, there are parties; there have to be in our form of government. The precinct caucuses offer the best opportunity to find out what politics is like in a welcoming environment.

I hope voters will consider being “political” at least this one night.

~ Published in the Solon Economist on Jan. 2, 2020 and in the Cedar Rapids Gazette on Jan. 5, 2020.

Categories
Writing

A Sense of Place on Christmas Eve

Life without internet, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 1986-1987

It’s been a quiet day in Big Grove where ambient temperatures were in the 50s and remaining snow melted.

I spent most of the day organizing material for a longer piece.

The idea is to organize documents and artifacts, dating from before I was born until the present, that are currently stored in a hodgepodge manner, using three-ring binders. Having lived a stable life, such documents survive. Once organized, I’ll write and pin a timeline to a bulletin board where I can hang stories, maybe twenty of them. It sounds straight forward, but the documents and artifacts are spread everywhere in the house. I relish the work.

A sense of place will help organize the stories once written. In presenting family history, I see a couple of narratives first.

The first place will be Lincoln County, Minnesota where my maternal great, great grandparents settled in the 19th Century. I visited there only once yet while there I collected a thick sheaf of documents, artifacts and experience.

I’ll write our history coming up in Southwestern Virginia. A published family history mentions the first presence of our ancestors in mid to late 17th century. I made three or four trips to the home place, including some as a child. I have a banker’s box of documents I collected from a man in Saint Louis who spent his retirement researching the Deaton lineage. I’m not sure how much of that is relevant but it needs review. If needed I’ll make a trip back to Virginia to research important missing pieces.

The culture of Northwest Davenport played an important role in my K-12 years. I will focus on the time immediately after my parents wed until I left grade school. It was a time when the Irish and German immigrant culture was in transition to something else, although we wouldn’t see what it would become until the time Mother moved to live with my sister toward the end of her life.

In addition to family history, I expect a brief remembrance of the late 1960s and early 1970s in Davenport and Iowa City.

There will be a story about the three years I lived in Mainz, Germany while in the U.S. Army. More than anything after schooling, military service helped me learn to live on my own and exposed me to a variety of people and experiences.

I’ll tackle my transportation career and our nascent family life in two places, in Iowa City after getting my masters degree and meeting Jacque, and in Merrillville, Indiana where we lived for six years.

Other places that seem important at this writing are Colorado Springs, Thomasville, Georgia, Orlando, Florida, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Chicago, and our more than 25 years here in Big Grove.

There will be stories focusing less on a sense of place and on a broader, subject-specific narrative. It seems easiest to begin writing by understanding the collected artifacts and memories, by crafting a narrative about the place where they were significant.

I’m a long way from getting stuff organized. For now, it’s time to gather and finish making our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of chili and cornbread.

Categories
Writing

Philosophy of Stuff

Philosophy of Stuff – July 5, 2011.

We have more stuff than we need in our home.

Turns out I developed an entire philosophy of stuff back in 2011, soon after the realization we had too much stuff.

New stuff continued to pile up but we’re over that now. Culling has begun. I took a load of books to donate to the Friends of the Library book sale last week.

The impetus has been recent awareness of mortality, highlighted by the death of Mother. She did things right and disposed of much of her stuff during the years before she moved in with my sister. Many of us would emulate the best qualities of our parents. We can’t take stuff with us when we die, and what reasonable person wants to leave the trouble of sorting it to others?

We have a duty to reduce, reuse and recycle all the stuff our consumer society has wrought. These days I’m working more on the reduce part of that.

I’ve long felt an urge to go shopping when my calendar is blank. When I lived in Mainz, Germany, if I had a free weekend, I felt I should cross the Rhine River to Wiesbaden and visit one of the big box stores. Living in that large community provided different options for food and clothing from what I could find at the Kaserne’s Post Exchange. Last Saturday, after a political event, I drove straight home, resisting the impulse to head to the home, farm and auto supply store or the warehouse club without a specific shopping list. It felt pretty good.

It’s time to put my philosophy of stuff into action.

1. If I use it, or am very likely to use it, keep it where I can get at it.

2. If I can use it for grounding my writing, keep it in a filing system.

3. If it is a family keepsake, keep it in a special place.

4. If it does not fit into 1-3, pick a disposal method.

Now begins the hard work: carving out time to reduce the amount of stuff before late winter gardening prep begins. Maybe easier said than done, but this year there is hope.