Garden work made me tired this week. It took multiple days to prepare and plant the tomato plot, and it is not finished. Other plots are prepared for specialty crops like fennel, okra, peppers, kale and the like, but I can’t get around to putting them in the ground. So it goes with a septuagenarian gardener. Things are slowing.
Election Interference Trial
The biggest news this week, upon which I will spend the least time, is the New York trial of former president Donald J. Trump. I tend to agree with actor Robert DeNiro, who said, “I don’t want to be talking, but I am so upset by it. I have to say something. This is my country. This guy wants to destroy it. Period. He’s crazy.” Read “Keep Hope Alive” for my longer take.
Writing
It seems clear once I finish the current read-through and editing, the next step for my autobiography is preparation to print it for private distribution. That means making about ten or twelve copies as a first run so I can call it done. Font type, page layout, line spacing, long quotation formatting, grammar and punctuation consistency, and more need to be addressed. I should have a professional read it and provide advice, yet I don’t have funds to do that presently. The goal is to have the finished book in front of me later this year.
Part two has more words than part one already, yet most of it is in very rough form. When I’m ready to start, the outline needs completely re-done. This would be followed by a serious write-through. Part of the reason I stalled on part two is the amount of background documentation is tremendous. Journals, notes, files, recordings, and more are stuffed in boxes waiting for me. That’s not to mention more than 5,000 blog posts. I don’t expect to turn every page, yet I must turn a lot of them. The main initiative to do a write-through will be during the hot days of summer and the coming fall and winter.
First things first. I need the first book in hand as soon as is practicable.
Israel-Hamas War
There has been devastating loss of life in Palestine. U.S. policy enables it. Here’s hoping the president addresses this in a meaningful way. He encouraged Hamas to accept the following proposal. Let’s hope all parties can soon agree to a way out of the violence.
“It’s time for this war to end, and the ‘day after’ to begin,” Biden said in remarks at the White House May 31.
Mottled shadows of grasses against a piece of cloth.
I hung a piece of cloth over the lower level windows across from my writing table. As the sun rises, shadows dance on it: insects, long blades of grass, and lately, a hummingbird suspended in air as they are while searching for food. It feels I’m living in Plato’s allegory of the cave and I’m fine with that. It is a reminder the world in which we live is not a lie. I’m not chained in place. I’m free to go outdoors, see the hummingbird, and not be blinded by the sun.
I bought mini-blinds to put on that window, like the others in the lower level of the house, yet am glad I didn’t install them. There is a constant show on the window covering for dreaming. We humans need dreams.
The garden ground is too wet to work this morning. It seems unlikely to dry by noon. If the lawn dries sufficiently I’ll mow. There is plenty of indoors work to do if it doesn’t.
Our go-to, easy-to-prepare dinner is tacos. I made them last night, based on the recipe I wrote a few years ago. Instead of yellow onions, I used spring onions. Instead of garlic, I used garlic scapes. Instead of frozen kale, I used a mixture of fresh Pac Choi and collards from the garden. Such seasonal variations make tacos one of our favorite meals. They always taste a little different, in this case, fresher than normal. We prepare the dish often.
This week, Major League Baseball added the Negro League statistics to the record book. It changed some of the rankings. Josh Gibson beat Ty Cobb in highest career batting record. Gibson beat Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Hugh Duffy in other categories as well. When I was a kid I didn’t have a baseball card of Josh Gibson and was not aware the Negro League existed. For me, Babe Ruth was it. Until this year, we found he wasn’t. Here’s a link to the Washington Post story.
There are good and bad things about this week. In the good category, it rained four out of seven days, alleviating local drought conditions. In the bad category, it rained four out of seven days, making the ground too wet to work in the garden. There is now a race to get seedlings into the ground before they get too big in their soil blocks. I plan to focus on tomatoes first.
Editing
Each time I edit my autobiography I find chapters that need work. The positive is I get further into the edit without stopping to do anything but correct typos and grammatical errors. There are clinkers, though.
I am not satisfied with the narrative about time in the military. I assembled the right quotations from my journal and papers. They can flow better. I reread them after a sound sleep and they do tell the story. The issue is I have many versions of the story of being in the military I have told and would like to tell. For my autobiography, I need to choose one.
I should be able to re-write the entire book as needed and prepare it for self-publication. If all comes together as planned, I should have a printed book by early next year.
Gardening
I’m usually finished with garden planting by the end of May. Not this year. The combination of rainy weather with increased limits on my stamina has me way behind. Even so, what was planted shows progress. Scapes are beginning to emerge from garlic plants. I got a few cabbages and kale in the ground. I weeded onions in time to save them from being dominated by weeds. The covered row is up and the seedlings under it are doing well. What is planted is growing. I just need to be closer to the finish line than I am.
Memorial Day
I did not do much this Memorial Day weekend. I have written about the holiday a lot on this blog. Here is a passage from a 2022 post: “Freedom has a cost, and there is no more salient aspect of it than the sacrifices men and women made by giving their lives in military service. Memorial Day celebrations are tempered with a feeling of loss, isolation, and sadness this year.” That seems always to be the case.
I am not aware any of my ancestors died while serving in the U.S. military. Our family is lucky in that. My maternal grandfather served in the U.S. Army and shipped out to France just before the Armistice was signed at the end of World War I. He did not see combat. Noting Memorial Day seems important nonetheless.
Memories of Summer
My summer is increasingly comprised of memories. Lately, the heat has been unbearable, drought too penetrating. I turn inward and indoors, like I did in this paragraph from a 2008 post in the first year of this blog:
I think of Ricard drunk in the non-commissioned officer’s club in Vannes on the West Coast of France. Of the overnight ride in the sleeper berth and waking in Paris to change trains. Of the trip to visit Gothic cathedrals in Amiens, Rheims, Rouen, Notre Dame, and others. Of the American cemetery at Normandy Beach. Of the landing near Calais where my backpack was stolen from a youth hostel. Of the rive gauche and Montmartre and le Big Mac. Of leaving France through Irun to see the running of the bulls in Pamplona, then swimming in the bay off San Sebastian.
Le week-end d’été, Aug. 1, 2008.
The garden occupies me and blocks other activities. Hopefully the weather will dry up long enough to finish getting it in. In the meanwhile there are plenty of memories to keep me busy indoors.
Iowa House candidate Jay Gorsh speaking beneath a pergola with wisteria.
Saturday afternoon I attended the campaign kick off meeting for Jay Gorsh in Williamsburg. The event was lovely. Shade in the backyard, combined with a gentle breeze, helped us forget the ambient temperature was 87 degrees. It was a good gathering of new and old friends.
Shorter Shifts, Slower Progress
In between rain and sunshine I spent three solid shifts in the garden. The challenge is always weather, yet this year my stamina has been wanting. Five hours at a time has been my limit, especially when ambient temperatures are above 80 degrees. As I enter the final push before Memorial Day it seems unlikely everything will be planted by then.
Des Moines Neighborhood Sounds
While visiting my sister-in-law we discussed neighborhood sounds. I’ve hear the rooster that lives close by. There are typical yard work and mowing sounds. People tend to fix up their own homes there and the sounds of hammers, saws, and drills can be heard from time to time. She reported a nearby garage band playing. Acclimatizing oneself to neighborhood sounds is a part of fitting in, especially to one that was established more than a century ago in the capital city.
June 4 Primary Election
The consequential county races in the June 4 Democratic primary are among the five supervisor candidates. After thought and consideration, I decided on my three and put out their yard signs.
June 4, 2024 primary yard signs.
County primaries are quirky in Johnson County. There are a lot of factions and groups. For example, people in the labor movement favor Royceann Porter. A group of young progressives favor Mandi Remington who lost her bid for Iowa City City Council last November. Long time state legislators Mary Mascher and Kevin Kinney endorsed newcomer Bob Conrad. Rod Sullivan and Lisa Green-Douglass have served and are known entities. Sullivan seems like a shoe-in and it’s jump ball for the other two seats by the other four candidates. As they say, we’ll see what happens.
Black Hawk War
I began a reading project about the Black Hawk War. The first book is John Wakefield’s History of the Black Hawk War. Halfway into the main narrative, I’m not sure what to make of this racist tome. Likewise the inventories of forgotten men who served in military leadership has little relevance in 2024. One note is that a few years after settling in Illinois, a group of white pioneers was surprised that Black Hawk disputed their claim to the land and invaded from west of the Mississippi River to take it back. There are five books in the collection I created.
I need to get cabbages planted as they are growing too big in the greenhouse. Most vegetables in the greenhouse need to go into the ground soon. That will be the work of the coming week.
However people want to portray their loved ones in a newspaper obituary is fine by me. It is great people continue to use obituaries as a form of expression. I understand the cult followings people have: for a sports team, a political party, a brand of consumer products, and the like. Want your recently deceased loved one in a photo of them wearing a Busch Light logo on a ball cap? You be you. Anymore, anything goes in an obituary.
It is okay to run an obituary in the newspaper without a photo. In fact, that may be the best practice. I’m not big on fakery in presenting a self-image. I have a hard enough time determining what is my own personality, let alone how that should be represented in an obituary photo. It was only the growing number of men donning ball caps in their obituary photos that got me thinking about this.
I own a lot of ball caps. If my survivors print a photo of me in the newspaper with my obituary, I hope it is not one with me wearing one of them. First of all, which one would they choose? I would likely prefer the one from a portrait of my Sears and Roebuck little league baseball team. I suppose people would recognize me. It would speak to the potential of youth.
A current hat wouldn’t be good as I wear them in the yard to absorb sweat while gardening or doing yard work. My current fave is a commemorative cap from when we moved the Standard Oil and Amoco paper archives from Chicago to a salt mine in Oklahoma. That project was a really big deal, yet I wear the cap because it has ventilation for heat from my head to escape. It is not a statement of anything.
I wrote the obituary for my survivors to use. It is 210 words with the briefest of traditional items. There is a sentence about my education, one about military service, one about marriage, and one about my formal career. I wrote a sentence about retirement. Just the facts in tightly written prose. One omission is a photo. I must remedy that so my death is hassle-free for those who survive me, yet am loathe to do so.
The easiest thing would be to visit a professional photographer and have them take a head shot. Maybe fancy it up with a white background so it shows well in a black and white newspaper. The issue causing delay is that living on a pension finds more interesting things on which to spend my limited funds. For example, I could buy a new hoe… something I could actually use. An obituary photo hasn’t even made it to my to-do list. If I do visit a photographer, I won’t be taking any ball caps.
Portable greenhouse with roughly 700 plants started from seeds.
This week was hit or miss regarding weather. Some days were drop-dead gorgeous with ambient temperatures in the low 70s and blue skies filled with large, cumulus clouds. Other days it rained and rained and rained. Conditions were never that good to get the garden planted because there was too much moisture in the soil. The portable greenhouse is filled with seedlings ready to go into the ground.
Feeling Alone in the Universe
There is nothing like looking at the sky to make us feel alone in the universe. The sky was exceptionally cloudless Saturday night when I was out to watch for the aurora borealis.
Northern lights, or the aurora borealis, were visible around the area, just not near where I live. I explored the neighborhood to find a place with a broad expanse of unobstructed sky so I could attempt to view them. I stayed up late to witness the phenomenon, yet my naked eyes couldn’t see it.
The forecast was “very likely geomagnetic storming will persist through the weekend as several additional Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are in transit to Earth’s outer atmosphere…” It sounds scary, yet it Earth doing what it evolved to do.
Instead, I looked at the stars on a clear spring night and contemplated the meaning of being alive. It was more blessing than curse.
Hall of Fame Awards
My friend Bill invited me to join him at the 2024 Johnson County Democrats Hall of Fame Awards event in Coralville. He was being inducted for his long political activism as business manager for an electrical workers union. I was happy to sit at his table during the event.
I flipped the program and saw the list of past Hall of Fame honorees printed on the back. So many friends were inducted. A significant number of them died since their induction. I wouldn’t normally go to an event like this, yet am thankful for the opportunity.
Trump Trial in New York
I’ve been following the Donald J. Trump trial for election interference. He was indicted under New York law for falsifying documents to avoid publicity about an affair with a woman who made adult films. My standby code of living is if you are male and don’t want people to know about an affair, keep your pants zipped. It seems clear from the trial the 45th president has no regard for the rule of law. A highlight this week was when his lawyers asked the judge to lift the gag order so he could respond to the woman with whom he had the affair. The proper venue for doing that would be for him to give testimony in the trial, the judge ruled. The prosecution is nearing the end of making their case.
Immigration
I have more to say about immigration. I started re-posting two of my old articles about it on Saturday. It turns out I wrote a lot of them since beginning this blog in 2007. Around 2010, I worked with a group of clergy to get the City of Iowa City to declare itself a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. That’s the opposite direction our current government is pursuing. Never mind that the city did not adopt such a policy. It has been a bug-a-boo among Republicans for a long time. Immigration is something about which everyone has an opinion yet few are willing to resolve its problems.
Kitchen-Garden
With my spouse gone for the week my cooking has been different. I made pizza, a casserole, sandwiches with French-style bread, and tacos my way (which is spicy). I cooked through this phase and am ready for her to return this week. On Sunday I bought a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream from the local grocer and ate it for dinner.
Jack Daniels Whiskey
I have a fifth of Jack Daniels Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey in the house. I’ve had it for many years and it is half gone. This week I poured some over ice and sipped it until the ice melted and the liquid was gone. The main benefit, other than a brief, fleeting, alcohol buzz, was that I slept through the night for seven straight hours. I did enjoy waking with the realization I slept through the night. Whiskey has gotten too expensive to buy, so I plan to make this bottle last.
There are a lot of moving parts in my current life with the biggest being to get the garden planted. After plot three, there are four more to go. It seems like a much bigger job this year compared to last. I’ll keep at it.
Trail walking between rain showers on May 9, 2024.
While walking past the boat docks between rain showers, a neighbor hailed me and asked, “Is the drought over?” I replied, “With the rain we’ve had in the last ten days, I hope so.” Because I was on the association board for so long, many know me by name, although I have to ask them theirs. I don’t mind asking.
I took this photograph during my Thursday trail walk. I’ve been trying to take a decent photo of this barn for 30 years. This one isn’t it. I’ll try again.
I turned on my bird identification app and in 30 seconds, it identified eight different birds. Halfway into spring that seems about right. Fish continue to spawn near the foot bridge. Joggers, dog-walkers, bicyclists, and walkers were out on the trail in the couple hour period between morning rain and afternoon showers. I’m glad to have made it outdoors when I could.
While my vegan spouse has been away I’m fixing dinners she can’t eat. Tonight it is lasagna with home grown spring onions and ricotta cheese. I’ve been thinking about this dish for a week. It is baking while I write.
I counted seedlings in the portable greenhouse. There are 750. It seems like a lot, and if I had to buy them at the store it would be a substantial investment. I check on them multiple times a day.
My idea of a garden is to grow as much as I can for the kitchen and give the rest away. The food bank always needs donations. Neighbors welcome fresh vegetables in season. If the rain would let up, I could start transplanting more to the garden. Thursday was a bust day for gardening. Friday is looking better.
We should know when my spouse is returning home today. I hope it is soon.
If HRH the Prince of Wales can’t make a go of organic farming, I don’t know who might. In his 1993 book Highgrove: An Experiment in Organic Gardening and Farming, he and co-author Charles Clover lay out the expenditure of resources, including consulting from prominent Brits with expertise in gardening, animal husbandry, and farming, to convert his estate in Gloucestershire to organic production. While there were successes, the end result was they couldn’t completely and satisfactorily convert it.
Highgrove had three rules: convert from conventional to organic production cheaply, deal with the public direct when possible to keep prices down, and add value.
How does a farmer add value to their crops? One of the approaches Highgrove made was using organic grains to bake bread for retail markets. It was more expensive, but with the prince’s imprimatur they found entree and some sales.
Highgrove could not solve some problems with using all-organic bread ingredients grown on site. They had to blend Highgrove wheat with high protein, organically-grown Canadian wheat to produce the soft crumb British bread-eaters crave. There were also no known producers of organic palm oil needed to “give good loaf volume.” Prince Charles decided to go to market with some compromises, sufficing to say the bread was made using organic flour grown on the property and branded as the “Highgrove loaf.”
While we don’t need to be the future king of England to know it, adding value to common commodities is a ubiquitous practice. It is the foundation of capitalism. Have a few hundred tons of wheat? It will be worth more if it is turned into bread, biscuits and the like. Such added value and the revenue derived from it is used to offset higher input costs for organic vegetables and grains.
The book was a solid read, recommended for those in the contemporary discussion about alternatives to food production based largely on chemical inputs. While the Highgrove story is interesting in itself, it is a long setup for my main topic. What are we made of?
…in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Genesis 3:19, King James Version
While our lives are nourished by bread and everything around it, we are not the bread we eat.
Most of the elements of our bodies were formed in stars over the course of billions of years and multiple star lifetimes. However, it’s also possible that some of our hydrogen (which makes up roughly 9.5% of our bodies) and lithium, which our body contains in very tiny trace amounts, originated from the Big Bang.
The Natural History Museum, London.
We are stardust, literally.
We are stardust We are golden And we’ve got to get ourselves Back to the garden
Woodstock, Joni Mitchell
We are such stuff as dreams are made on…”
The Tempest, William Shakespeare.
I need to sleep more, think less, and get in the garden. Now that rain let up, maybe I can.
Lilacs planted shortly after moving to Big Grove Township in 1993.
The week began with delays getting into the garden. Life’s exigencies required attention and garden work was pushed back. There was also rain. There is time before last frost, but not much of it.
Dental Care
Tuesday began with a dental appointment. My dentist sold his practice to a large dentistry operation in 2017. I don’t like outlasting medical practitioners yet as a septuagenarian it happens more than I want. The new group, a large company based in Waterloo, seldom treats me with the same practitioner whether it be hygienist or dentist. Each appointment offers a different vibe and I don’t like it. I mean, I’m used to dentists practicing on their own or with a partner or two and not a constantly revolving carousel of practitioners. I don’t know their business model, yet I suspect the pay is low and the assembly line style of operations yields a lower cost for the owners. It is not patient-centered care.
Trip to Des Moines
It rained on Thursday, making it a good day to take my spouse to see her sister. The rain let up west of Williamsburg and water was standing in Iowa’s neatly rectangular planting areas. Looks like farmers had been in the fields and maybe planted some corn. As we progressed into Des Moines, the state capitol construction scaffolding had been removed from the smaller domes. It was an uneventful trip. The longer I drive, the more I like that.
District Convention
The First District Democratic candidate for Congress was not present at Saturday’s district convention in North Liberty. Iowa political districts are designed around the congressional seat and I have an old-school expectation of hearing from the candidate in person, and getting a chance for a brief side-conversation. I have become a dinosaur. It was not to be.
Absent the candidate, I’m not sure what, besides necessary elections to the state and national conventions, we accomplished. The morning was consumed by a presentation from a third party grassroots group, and an explanation about why we would be using ranked choice voting for the elections. We would likely have saved time if we had skipped these presentations and gone directly to voting.
The third party person gave a presentation that divided campaign work into three buckets: Grassroots groups who would do much of the work around getting voters to the polls, county parties responsible for centralized communication, fund raising, and party organization, and candidate campaigns, which work mostly on their own to secure votes needed to be elected. This division is both useful and problematic.
Do people need something to do in a political campaign? Beyond making sure one is registered to vote and casting a ballot, one can get involved with campaign work, if interested. When Iowa lost first in the nation status after the computer application debacle in reporting results to national media in 2020, we also lost funding from the candidates who spent heavily in the early states to garner attention for their campaigns. Likewise, because Iowa Democrats are in a significant minority, expenditures from the president’s national campaign are not expected. There is work to be done, yet it isn’t clear how such work should be described and assigned to mostly volunteers.
Endemic to the current party structure is a misdiagnosis of key issues to a campaign. More than anything else, politics has gotten local. In Big Grove Precinct, the electorate is divided. During the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won over Joe Biden 671 votes to 637. In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton 575 votes to 529. Barack Obama won here in both 2008 and 2012. My precinct has a divided electorate and has recently been won by both Democrats and Republicans. While new people moving to our area lean Republican, the key issue is how does an organizer build a Democrat majority at the polls, recruiting votes regardless of party?
A speaker at the convention looked around the room and suggested the dominance of white-skinned, grey-haired delegates is the problem with the party. Whatever. Had rain not been forecast during the convention hours, I would rather have been working in our yard. The trouble, as I experienced recruiting a replacement for my position on the county central committee, is literally no one is willing to do the work to provide steady volunteer work for local Democrats. That’s a much different problem than skin tone and hair color among people willing to show up on a spring Saturday.
My problem at the end of this week was it was May 5 and so much work remained to get the garden planted. We may have had the last frost and I simply don’t realize it. I am determined not to be distracted during the upcoming week.
I use a service called blog2print to make a paper copy of my blog. That is, I used them until Tuesday. In an email, they wrote,
All good things must come to an end
After delivering hundreds of thousands of blog and photo books over the years, it’s time for us to say goodbye. Before we close our digital doors on May 15th, stock up and save 50% off everything!
I ordered books of my 2023 posts plus everything through April 30 this year. I like having matching sized, similarly styled books of what I posted. That won’t be possible going forward, at least through this company. The books are for the inevitable day when I make my exit from the online house I built.
I renamed this blog Journey Home on January 20, 2020. On March 11 that year, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Also that year, I made the last payment on our child’s student loan, and ended a long career of working for someone else to retire. 2020 was a year of change.
On Feb. 3, 2022, the governor extended the state’s Public Health Disaster Emergency Proclamation on Feb. 3, announcing it will expire at 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 15. After that, she said, the coronavirus became normalized in daily, routine public health operations. Whatever she said, the coronavirus lingers in society today.
It is time to re-brand this blog, not only to put the pandemic in the rear view mirror as much as is possible, but to mark a new purpose as I write. As I work in the garden this May, hopeful consideration will be given to what is next. The expectation there will be something next is the human condition. A gardener has confidence spring work will produce a fall harvest, and so it is with my writing.
I relish the changing patterns of life. It is possible to get too comfortable, so whatever the source of change, I expect and embrace it. While I don’t like changing how I save my work, I am also ready for the future… and to get the next garden planted.
Journey Home 
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