I’m not sure how I felt about Ram Dass’ book Be Here Now by 2013 when I made this diagram. “Live now” in the center weaves a thread back to my first reading of Ram Dass shortly after the book came out in 1971.
There was a shortage of mass media and consumer goods to support the new life we believed was possible after the tumultuous 1960s. Be Here Now fed that appetite.
A writer has to have more going on than living in the moment. That’s what the diagram is meant to represent… I think. If these are some of my qualities as a writer, the one that stands out today is “utopian outlook.”
There is a utopian outlook in American society that shows itself in the manifest destiny myth, in our outlook toward business startups, in things as simple as setting up a home. We have a fundamental belief in systems and our role as chief actors in them. The example of Iowa’s remade landscape and the farms and businesses that now populate it offers no more perfect example of utopian outlooks.
Endemic to my writing process is an attempt to figure things out then build a platform of experience from which I can observe the world. I then hope to write pieces that add positively to society: letters, blog posts and opinion pieces. The success of such writing depends on a developed understanding of society combined with a utopian outlook which presumes its perfectibility. Well, if not perfect, then continuously improving.
In 2013 one part of my life had run out of fuel and money, and another was being formed from a series of low-wage jobs. As important as establishing a source of income was, there is no related box on the diagram. Money has never been that important to me, especially once I established a system to pay the bills.
I don’t think there is a western version of Ram Dass unless it was himself. Our survival depends on being here now. What may matter more is how we see the now. That’s what I’m working on as I write my autobiography.
Leslie Bell on 50th Anniversary of the Jimi Hendrix Performance at the Col Ballroom in Davenport, Iowa with a reprint of the poster he made for the concert. Photo Credit – Quad City Times
How do we create?
Is creating work — writing, art, music, photography, film and television, radio, oral stories, events — magic? Sometimes it seems so because we can’t recognize how an end product came into being… it must be magic. Is creation the result of hard work, discipline and practice? Some of what I’ve written could have used more and smarter work.
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” Stephen King famously wrote. “There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
Over time I came to agree. Looking back at my extemporaneous writing — similar in technique to what Jack Kerouac did in stream of consciousness — it seems pretty lame. Creativity requires practicing the craft. Gaining awareness of other aspects of society is equally important to creativity. What King wrote about writing applies to other art forms.
In the 1960s and 1970s, I looked to Bob Dylan as a creative model, particularly during the time leading up to release of the album Bringing It All Back Home in 1965 through his work after the motorcycle accident with what would later become The Band. The stories of him living in Woodstock, New York, sitting at a typewriter for hours on end, and consuming the work of other musicians was how I envisioned myself.
The collaboration with Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel, who lived at Big Pink in West Saugerties, New York, and with Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, resulted in the bootleg tapes. A friend in high school secured a copy and we thought it was something. How my Dylan modeling played out over time is worth considering, but that will be later. Suffice it I knew I would be no Dylan but his work influences mine, even today. The process of his creative endeavor remains something to model.
I knew Leslie Bell mostly through my neighbor and friend John Kiley. I can remember only two personal interactions with Bell. I picked him up hitchhiking to visit a friend when he studied with Father Edward Catich at Saint Ambrose College. I also engaged his band to play at a high school class reunion. Everything else I knew about him was through someone else.
When I returned to Davenport from Germany, Bell and others had founded the Open Cities Film Society. While the films screened were less diverse that what I experienced in Iowa City where I attended graduate school, it was something available in a river city where a shoppie mentality continued to prevail among the populace. I don’t know how, if at all, Bell’s creative process influenced mine but this segment from a 2013 interview by Painter’s Bread is close to my creative process.
PB: How do you go about making your work and what kinds of challenges have you experienced? LB: Since my work is improvised and doesn’t rely on models or observation, my working method requires a lot of front-loading. Film, novels, music, and life played out in real time all help me build an archive of possibilities. I certainly keep my eyes peeled when I’m out and about. The years I spent as a street photographer have helped me scoop useful experience from the broader kettle of stimuli in the form of interactions, gestures and changes in the social fabric. In the studio, I begin with a blank canvas and no ideas. The canvas serves as a screen on which I can imagine random images, stories and compositions. I’m looking for a place to start—a strong-but-vague impulse. From that point on, it’s a process of call-and-response. I react to what’s on the canvas with a move that seems an appropriate extrapolation of the narrative, the color etc. I may not know what the painting is about until it’s almost done if at all.
Like many writers, I start with a blank page. I take a snippet from life, or a point from an outline, and type a couple of sentences on the screen. How and what I end up with is based on the “front loading” process to which Bell referred. The content seems better for diverse experience brought to the work. When adequately front loaded, the work product is better.
At the same time, there is magic to writing. When I hit on a sentence that stands out as universal, I can’t say where it came from. Such moments make the work worth while.
One has to let go of quotidian affairs while creating. Being grounded is important. It’s not always the point of a creative piece. Blending everything together takes practice… with a bit of magic to pull a good story together.
Father’s death on Feb. 2, 1969 dominated my life for a long while afterward. For years I thought it would be the central theme of my writing. I now realize it was a reality through which I had to work. It wasn’t until military service that I began to get through it.
I started several short sketches like this one using different names for the characters. While I pretended they were fiction, clearly they represented our lives, thinly veiled. This fragment captures my discussion with Father about nationality. It took place in the dining room of the American Foursquare on Marquette.
At our grade school we were divided into groups: about half were descendants of German immigrants and half Irish. A small number of us who were neither were assigned with the Irish because there were less of them. Our conversation was soon after this division. At our 40th high school class reunion I asked a classmate about division into Irish and German groups. She had no memory of it.
Being an “American” rather than a son of immigrants came to define part of my character.
The fragment below was written at my apartment near Five Points in Davenport less than two months after leaving active duty. It is edited to pull different parts of it together. I didn’t change much.
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, and he took it for a while. He asked to be put back on the second shift so he could return to school, and be his own boss, to establish himself. Father knew who he was, where he stood, and where he was going.
One night after supper, Jim Peterson went into the living room, where Father was watching the news on television, and asked, “What nationality are our ancestors?”
Father looked up and without hesitation said, “American.”
Jim asked again, “But are they Polish, like Mom’s or what?”
Yes father knew who he was and if it was one thing he was not, it was someone else’s son.
At age forty he graduated from the Palmer College of Chiropractic, the oldest man in his class. In September, death in the form of a 1959 Ford found him walking from the Case plant after second shift and brought his efforts to a different culmination.
On Dec. 7 I remember our neighbor Bill who continued to witness about the bombing of Pearl Harbor until his death in 1994. Those were days before we recognized something called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Rest in Peace, Bill.
A neighbor died of COVID-19 over the weekend. The neighborhood’s rate of infection by the coronavirus has me questioning the wisdom of exercising on the state park trail. On one hand, I understand how the virus is transmitted and have taken to wearing a face mask on the trail. On the other, it’s an exposure I simply don’t need as the pandemic peaks in Iowa. What I know for certain is I will go crazy if I don’t get outside over the remainder of fall and through winter.
I made a couple of work shifts of discovery while I was indoors. While I plan to write my autobiography in 2021, I’m also not in a hurry to proceed because there is so much material. Going through it takes time and if I seek to capture a life accurately, it is time well spent.
I’ll be spending this week getting a grip on the scope of the project. I’m not comfortable I understand what’s available to me yet. I’ll be doing that and determining how to exercise as the coronavirus pandemic yields a record number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Be well.
The period after the general election and before the next U.S. Congress is proving to be desultory. About the only positive thing coming out of these weeks is the president is fading from view as each day brings us closer to a Biden-Harris administration. I don’t want time to pass quickly yet I seek outlets besides national politics for my human energy. I also take a daily afternoon nap.
Garden planning has begun and the first shipment from a seed supplier arrived yesterday. I hope to expand the garden, more closely correlate the garden and the kitchen/pantry, and grow more vegetables for the food rescue operation. In the meanwhile we’re still cooking food put up last summer and fall.
I read the first 400 pages of Obama’s presidential memoir. His first book, Dreams from my Father remains his best written with A Promised Land ahead of The Audacity of Hope. He’s a young man so I expect there will be more writing after he finishes the second volume of memoirs. I also doubt he will be as prolific a writer as Jimmy Carter became in his post-presidency period. A Trump memoir? Stand on your head if you think he will personally write one. No doubt he will cash in on the opportunity by hiring a ghost writer to tell his story, his way, and put his name on it.
I read my journal from late 1974 and 1975. In it I recorded reading many books, two or three a week and sometimes more. Today reading a book is a bigger deal. I will finish 50 or so this year, which is more than most people read, yet much less than I once did. According to the Social Security Administration life expectancy calculator I can expect to live 16 more years. At an average of two books per month that’s 384 more to read, which doesn’t seem like many given everything that is available.
I’m nowhere near assembling the planning threads for next year. There’s the garden, reading and writing. There is also our family’s wellness and home maintenance to consider. By the first of January I hope to weave something that is meaningful and fits well as we enter another year of the pandemic in 2021.
Wednesday was discovering thick layers of dust on shelved books in my writing room. A long stream of cobwebs wove its way along the top shelf of one side, through 15 toy trucks collected during my transportation career. To get any focused writing done, of the kind an autobiography represents, the books must be rearranged for quick reference… and dusted.
With all of that I managed a walk on the trail.
I’ve been writing about the closest congressional race in the country here in my congressional district. Yesterday Rita Hart’s campaign identified next steps after the results of the election were certified on Monday. She lost by six votes. Here is the unedited press release for readers as I get back to work planning 2021.
Make it a great day!
Rita Hart Announces Next Steps to Ensure All Iowans’ Votes Are Counted, Calls on Miller-Meeks to Join Effort
WHEATLAND, IOWA — Today, Rita Hart announced plans to challenge the latest vote totals in Iowa’s Second Congressional District, reflecting the need to count all votes cast in the Second District, including legally cast ballots that were not considered in the state recount process, which far outnumber the number of ballots needed to change the outcome of the election. Additionally, given the short six day timeline allotted for a state elections contest in Iowa and the volume of ballots left to be examined across 24 counties, Rita Hart plans to file a petition with the House Committee on Administration under the Federal Contested Elections Act, a decision that allows for enough time for all legally cast ballots to be considered, ensuring Iowans’ votes are accurately counted.
Since Election Day, significant errors in the counting process have led to confusion over whom Iowans in the Second District elected to represent them:
On November 6, Secretary of State Paul Pate announced a significant over-reporting error in Jasper County, triggering a county-wide recount.
Then, on November 10, Pate announced yet another reporting error, this time involving under-reported votes in Lucas County.
On November 23, the recount board in Jasper County conducted a machine recount that netted 9 votes for Rita Hart. However, at the urging of the Miller-Meeks campaign, the recount board conducted yet another recount on November 25 that netted just one vote for Rita.
Many counties did not fully review ballots to identify valid votes that the machines did not recognize, in part because of the time and burden that would have been required for such a thorough count.
Once the initial district-wide canvass was completed on November 12, the gap between the two candidates was 47 votes. After the state recount process, the margin has narrowed further to just 6 votes — making this the closest federal race since 1984. More Iowans’ votes were counted after the state recount process, but time constraints and a lack of standard rules prevented all votes from being counted. The Federal Contested Elections Act petition will ensure that more Iowans’ votes are counted.
“When the recount process began more than two weeks ago, Rita Hart was down by 47 votes. Since then, more Iowans’ ballots have been counted and Rita has continuously gained ground, narrowing the gap to a mere 6 votes. While that recount considered more votes, limitations in Iowa law mean there are more legally cast votes left to be counted. With a margin this small, it is critical that we take this next step to ensure Iowans’ ballots that were legally cast are counted. In the weeks to come, we will file a petition with the House Committee on Administration requesting that these votes be counted, and we hope that Mariannette Miller-Meeks will join us in working to ensure that every Iowans’ voice is heard,” said Rita Hart for Iowa Campaign Manager Zach Meunier.
The Associated Pressannounced earlier this week that it will not declare a winner in the race until all legal options are exhausted.
On background:
According to Iowa law, a state election challenge must be completed by December 8, 2020. That tight timeline would not allow for adequate time in which to examine the ballots and evidence needed to ensure all Iowans’ votes are accurately counted in this historically close election.
Iowa law prohibits ballots not counting in the initial canvass from being considered in a recount. As a result, there are legally cast ballots that have yet to be counted, far exceeding the current 6 vote margin in this race. These ballots that still have not been counted include ballots cast by military members serving overseas, ballots that were not counted on Election Night despite being legally cast, and thousands of unexamined overvotes and undervotes.
It is unacceptable that ballots in an election this close would go uncounted, particularly those belonging to active-duty service members overseas.
It’s never a problem to fill days with activity. Setting and working toward a broader goal is proving elusive during the coronavirus pandemic.
Activities once taken for granted are now impossible. So many people are on the lookout to prevent contracting COVID-19, causing massive deterioration of our shared social life. My reaction to the extended pandemic was reasonable: a decision to focus on my autobiography. Increasing parts of each day include such work.
In the Jan. 28, 2019 issue of The New Yorker, historian Robert Caro recounted a meeting with his managing editor, Alan Hathway at Newsday in 1959.
“Just remember,” Hathway said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.”
Caro took the advice to heart. My book won’t be as detailed as his books on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. However, it is important to read what I’ve previously written and saved. It’s important to go through the souvenirs, books, boxes and trunks that clutter our household. When the pandemic recedes it will be important to visit places and again speak in person with friends and acquaintances. It is important to give things consideration as I distill them into a couple hundred thousand word memoir.
I started keeping a journal after graduation from the university. The first volume was stolen with my back pack in 1974 at a youth hostel in Calais, France. The rest of them sit on a shelf within arms reach of my writing table. There are more than 35 bound volumes and more in photo albums, media, three-ring binders and file folders in the next room. That’s not to mention photographs, the trove of letters I wrote Mother and got back after her death, or the thousands of blog posts and hundreds of newspaper publications. It’s a lot to read, examine and consider.
I don’t know what to do except begin and let the thread go where it will. With that in mind, below is the first journal entry that remains with me.
Very sunny here today near Stonehenge, and other ancient ruins. Stonehenge yesterday brought to attention the very tourist like notions of seeing something only to tell your friends about it when you get back. It may be that these days this is the notion you should have or at least most common, but it is also a notion of which I refuse to partake. It is only a very insensitive person who will go look and come back in one hour as the tour bus takes, but then there’s hours and barb wire fence to keep you from doing it any other way. Yet here too comes the notion that since there are so many books and pictures and articles about Stonehenge why even bother the few minutes to even see the thing.
On the way from the rocks to the return bus, the drivers were talking and one said to another, “It’s too bad it started to rain. It spoiled their trip.”
Here it seems that there is such a “holiday” preconception among these drivers (and all Britons as well) that it prevents them from seeing what is really, actually there: some rocks with barb wire about them with people crowded within these premises. At any rate, I was no different from the others when I paid my 65p and walked, took some photographs, and bought some postcards which I today mailed to the states.
My experience of the 1970s is book ended on one end by graduation from high school and attending the Kickapoo Creek Rock Festival in Heyworth, Illinois on May 30, 1970. On the other is cutting up my military service identification card on Nov. 25, 1979 at a party in my apartment near Five Points in Davenport.
Life was not what I expected.
Some of my high school classmates married immediately after graduation. I expected to marry a woman, yet that would not be until later in life. Like many in my cohort I left home to attend college rather than settle down. The following ten years were a time of adventure and learning about the world beyond my home place. I sensed life would not follow a standard path.
There was an unseen momentum that led me to attend and graduate from university. Father’s death in 1969 resulted in questioning the efficacy of the life I’d been planning with him. Had I not been awarded the full scholarship through the efforts of the meat packers union, I doubt I would have attended or finished at university. My last discussion with him was about studying engineering, although he did not affirm that I should. He was busy with his own struggles attempting to turn the page from working at a slaughterhouse to passing the state medical board examination required to become a chiropractor.
Before I left home I had a conversation in the living room with Mother about whether I should stay in Davenport to help her get through the loss of Father and help with my younger siblings. She wouldn’t hear of me staying and encouraged me to leave Davenport to attend university. After working the summer at the Turn Style discount department store I left for the University of Iowa. More than any other parental guidance, this conversation set the course for who I would become.
A person does not experience life by becoming set in patterns of existence. The whole idea behind automation was the elimination of routines. By allowing standardization of products to dominate the ambitions of men, we can reach the point where society is nothing more than a group of zombie-like creatures who are willing to conform to what everybody else does. This is why European thinkers criticized the machine as a cancerous growth on humanity.
School papers, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. Fall 1970.
It seems appropriate my university coursework brought me to this conclusion about standardization. Few of us realized in 1970 what the impact of automation, branding, technology, communications, and dominance by corporate interests and other institutions would have on our lives half a century later. Part of my life has been standing up to such standardization. Even so, my 1970s were not that different from others.
I attended university, made a three-month tour of Europe, came back to Davenport for a year, then enlisted in the U.S. Army. By the time I returned to Iowa in 1979 — and collected all of my belongings from storage, shipped from Germany, and from Mother’s house — I knew I wouldn’t be long for my home town. This letter to the editor summarizes how I felt.
As a college graduate, I would like to believe that a rewarding lifestyle consists of more than a hefty paycheck with plenty of taverns in which to spend it. I would like to believe that my future in Davenport holds more than a secure family life.
Letters to the Editor, Quad-City Times, Dec. 30, 1974.
Looking back on the 1970s I see the beginnings of the same path I’m on today. While it was not a standard path it has been pretty consistent all along. I expect to continue, at least for a while.
Editor’s Note: There is a photo of my maternal grandmother sitting at the kitchen table in our house on Madison Street at my first Thanksgiving dinner. She looks on while Father carved the turkey and Mother captured the photograph. I sat against the wall between them. This post is about my return to Iowa from Fort Benning, Georgia for a brief Thanksgiving visit before departing for Europe in 1976.
Grandmother lived near or with us from my earliest memories until we moved to the Marquette Street house in 1959. After that we visited her occasionally. More commonly, Father picked her up at her apartment and brought her to our house for a special meal, holiday or event. Eventually she located at the Lend-A-Hand Club at the foot of Main Street on the riverfront.
The Lend-A-Hand was established in Davenport in 1886, part of a national network of Lend-A-Hand Clubs — a place for young women who lived and worked away from home to associate in a safe environment. After Grandmother left the farm in Lincoln County, Minnesota, she found such living arrangements, either with the people for whom she worked as a servant or cook, or in small apartments in a subdivided single family structure. In 1973 the Lend-A-Hand Club was rented to the City of Davenport and converted to elderly housing. Grandmother was one of the first residents after that. The building was listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1983.
I visited her often after leaving Davenport in 1970. I can remember her room as if I were there today. She took a couple of photographs during those visits and I use them from time to time to aid my memory.
When senior dining began at the Lend-A-Hand she volunteered as a hostess. She also used an electric skillet to cook some of her own meals in her room. I often shared meals she cooked during my visits. She worked as a cook, seamstress and housekeeper most of her life and was good at it. I keep a couple of recipes she wrote down for me in my cook book in the kitchen.
The 1970s hold fond memories of our time together. On Nov. 26, 1976 I visited and wrote this journal entry. It became important later in my life as I became involved in the local food movement. It is lightly edited because I couldn’t stand some of the usage.
Today I visited Grandmother at the Lend-A-Hand and we ate ravioli from LaSalle, Illinois. They hand pack it there. It is a treat whenever we get a chance to make some.
I wonder about the brand names which grace our pantry — Kraft, Nabisco, Campbell’s, Carnation, Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima, Libby’s, Quaker Oats, Folgers, Post, Hershey’s — and marvel at the simplicity of the containers in Grandmother’s shared kitchen.
There are milk cartons with all the ladies’ names on them; bulky, shapeless packages with owners’ names written on them; old butter dishes covered and taped shut; white and tan boxes each with a name on them. It seems fitting that the name of the consumer rather than the producer or canner appear on foods awaiting the pot.
Perhaps these women are not swayed by the numerous labels enticing them from supermarket shelves. Maybe they learned that a carrot is only a carrot, no matter who laid hands on it. But food is food and when one has it, one is grateful.
Journey Home 
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