State park trail entry point.

Journey Home

Tales from the pilgrimage.

We’re Going Home

  • We’re Going Home – Gordon Lightfoot

    Gordon Lightfoot passed on Monday. Early Morning Rain was on my playlist when I performed on the guitar. It is one of my favorite songs of any artist. May he rest in peace. Read more

  • We’re Going Home — Jim Schmidt

    When Jim Schmidt had a stroke 15 years ago, he was never the same. He almost died. Jim was one of a small number of people in this community of 7,000 with whom we could engage more deeply about intellectual matters. The stroke took that away from us. It hurt no less when he died… Read more

  • We’re Going Home — Mike Tandy

    Timbers are falling too frequently in the forest of life. Mike Tandy died on March 31 in Davenport. Our roots together were in high school stage crew. When we formed the band in 1973, Mike would sit in, playing bass from time to time. He was a good guy and always dependable. I missed Mike… Read more

  • We’re Going Home — Char Hawks

    Charlene Mae Vorwald Hawks, 93, died on Tuesday, March 21, 2023. During high school, after Father died, I got to know her son Tim and was a frequent visitor to their home on Grand Avenue in Davenport. I don’t remember when we started calling her Char. I have two strong memories of her. The first… Read more

  • The Great Shuffle

    The back seat of the Chevy Spark is loaded with boxes of books to be donated to Goodwill. Between this load and the previous two, I downsized by about 500 books. It doesn’t look like I made a bit of progress. The goal is to reduce the library so it fits in my writing room,… Read more

  • We’re Going Home — Joe Garrity

    Tracking down remaining folks from our cohort in the old neighborhood was possible. Joe Garrity died Wednesday night and his grade school classmates at Saint Vincent’s deserved to hear the news. That neighborhood no longer exists in the real world, yet I found most of them. Joe was born the day before I was on… Read more

  • Aging in America – Part VI

    Passing Down History I have conversations about stuff with our child. It is specific stuff. It is my stuff, eventually to be her stuff, at least some of it. For example, a couple hundred vinyl LPs rest on my bookshelf. A lot of good music there, a lot of great memories. The technology is old… Read more

  • Aging in America – Part V

    The neighbor who owned the grocery store in town for 40 years took to walking the state park trail in retirement. He used a cane and we stopped to talk from time to time. I was wondering where he was last Monday. It turned out he died at home on Sunday. I didn’t know the… Read more

  • Aging in America – Part IV

    For septuagenarians, an overnight visit from a child is a big deal. We prepared for weekend guests most of the week. That meant cleaning the house and making space for extra people to sleep. I emptied the vacuum cleaner dust trap many times. There were countless loads of laundry. It seemed like a miracle, yet… Read more

  • Aging in America – Part III

    The loss of social relationships as we age is expected and well-documented. Not only do we miss people who died, such as parents, grandparents, and friends, there is no replacement for relationships that stretch back in time for decades. People are gone and the sense of loss remains tangible. I find there are more invitations… Read more