Tag: Writing

Writing about writing, autobiography, cross posting selected work from other places.

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Living in Society Social Commentary Writing

This is not France

Protesters on the Champs-Elysees. Photo Credit – NBC News

We see a lot of customers wearing yellow safety jackets at the home, farm and auto supply store. Mostly they seek something to complete a project.

Road crews, construction workers, and tradesmen of every kind stop in wearing the bright, reflective safety gear. It is mostly men. Usually, they are in a hurry to get back to work.

The similarities between these Iowans and the French citizens protesting an increased fuel tax seem mostly external. The French are required to carry yellow jackets in their vehicles in case of a mechanical breakdown on public streets and roads. Before I began working at the home, farm and auto supply store I thought only fire fighters wore such reflective clothing.

What makes our yellow jacketed citizens different is the Trump administration is creating massive changes in financial matters that impact them and who cares? Where are the protests? For the most part Americans play the hand dealt in subservience.

Take interest rates. On our last statement before the president was inaugurated, our annual variable interest rate was 3.00 percent on our home equity loan, indexed to the Wall Street Journal published rate. Our current rate is 4.75 percent, an increase of 58.33 percent. Where is the outrage?

Take gasoline and diesel prices. On Dec. 10, the average U.S. price of gasoline for all grades was $2.511 per gallon with diesel at $3.161. During the same week in 2016, gasoline was $2.347 and diesel $2.493. The price of gasoline increased 6.99 percent and diesel 26.80 percent under this administration. With U.S. oil production hitting record high levels last month, why aren’t gasoline and diesel prices coming down?

I don’t really expect answers because I know them. Interest rates and oil prices are just not on the financial radar for most people. They are an assumed background noise. Something that has to be dealt with, but not very often. Importantly, American businesses have learned how to change things in their favor without precipitating the kinds of protests we see in France. It is a basic part of corporate pricing policies.

The protest in France is about fuel prices. During the first Gulf War I worked for Amoco Oil Company, where we were acutely aware of the global political situation as it related to discovery, development, refining and selling our products. I managed a small trucking fleet and fuel price volatility during the war led us to implement a fuel surcharge in our contracts with customers. We weren’t the first to implement a fuel surcharge but today they are a hidden part of almost every type of delivery service. Depending on a customer’s savvy, fuel surcharges can be negotiated to produce an additional margin for operations through various pricing schemes. As suggested, it’s just not on the radar for American yellow jackets. Interest rates? You gotta be kidding me.

It’s been a long time since I was in France.  I’ve never understood their politics the way I do ours. Is Macron good or bad, or just another president in a series of controversial figures? What I do know is Americans rarely make the news for our protests. That is more newsworthy than what the yellow jackets are doing in France.

Categories
Environment Writing

No Going Back to Coal

Coal Mine Demonstrators Going Down – 1950

On Aug. 10, 2016, Donald Trump appeared at a campaign event about 50 miles from my father’s home place in southwestern Virginia. He asserted coal miners would have one “last shot” in the election, cautioning that the coal industry would be nonexistent if Hillary Clinton won the election.

“Their jobs have been taken away, and we’re going to bring them back, folks. If I get in, this is what it is,” Trump said.

How do you tell if the president is lying? Check to see if his lips are moving.

There was no last shot. The coal industry is dying and the president’s efforts haven’t and won’t change that.

It is easy to dismiss his comments as campaign bluster. However, real lives are at stake and young couples are leaving Appalachia to find work in other professions and make a life. We are all driven by the need to make a living. Despite strong personal history and traditions in a place, the economics of living there may cause us to leave as it is doing in coal country where mining jobs continue to be in decline.

U.S. coal consumption is projected to decline by nearly four percent in 2018 to the lowest level since 1979, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said on Tuesday. At year-end, appetite for coal will be a staggering 44 percent below 2007 levels according to NBC News.

The cost per kilowatt hour of electricity generated by new solar arrays is less than those generated in existing coal-fired power plants. Cheap natural gas extracted by hydraulic fracturing has taken new coal-fired power plants off the drawing board. Right or wrong, the power industry is switching to gas. India, one of the top ten global carbon dioxide emitters, has cancelled plans to build nearly 14 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants with the price for solar electricity “free falling” to levels once considered impossible, according to Ian Johnston at the Independent.

There are no easy answers for people impacted by our changing energy economy. Families that relied on coal extraction to make a life will have to revisit their choices regardless of what the president does or says.

When I was coming up the home where I spent ten formative years had recently been heated by coal. When my parents bought it the large gravity furnace in the basement had been converted to natural gas. It was an inefficient way to heat our home, but it was very reliable, and natural gas was less expensive and more convenient than coal trucks plying the alley behind our house to deliver. There is no going back to coal in home heating, or anywhere else.

The sooner we generate our electricity from renewable sources, the better we reduce greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere. No amount of presidential bluster can save the old energy economy, nor would we want to. Our politics isn’t there yet, but we will act on climate change. There is an existential urgency that we do.

 

Categories
Writing

Friday Community Work Day

Autumn at Lake Macbride

Our electric clothes dryer was on the fritz.

A technician arrived Friday morning and replaced the idler pulley that had been making noise. Although long ago replaced, a washer and dryer was one of the first gifts my in-laws gave us after our wedding. A working home washer and dryer is neccessary in an American household. 

I’m glad the local company from which we bought the dryer provides service. The repair was completed well before 9 a.m., leaving the rest of the day free to occupy as I would… sort of.

After the repairman left, a neighbor who is on our well committee called to ask me to help a local well service price an upgrade to the mechanicals in our well house. He was in a nearby town and wanted to stop by enroute home to the county south of us. I said yes.

Our public water system has been using more water than anticipated when we upgraded the well about 12 years ago. Time and usage are taking a toll on the mechanicals — the pump will eventually need replacing. He secured the information needed for a proposal on a replacement pump. It was an unexpected but useful and informative interruption of the day.

Discussion of water systems with a well-known operator is a way of tracking what’s going on in the county. I enjoy this part of the work. He said he was picking up business as well service operators like the one who renovated our well exit the business.

As I showed him around the well house, we discussed the new line a subdivision west of us is running from the city to resolve the high level of arsenic in their drinking water. A couple of other subdivisions requested stubs on the line, but no one else requested service. From Thursday’s newspaper article, it’s unclear whether the city would be willing to provide water to customers beyond the initial scope of their agreement.

We also discussed the new well at the orchard where I work. The tricky part was figuring out how to drill the new well around a seven-day-a-week operation that includes a retail barn and a restaurant. They figured it out and the new well is in service.

When I returned home I sent out the notice of our regular association meeting next week along with a call for agenda items. There were other association matters to tend to which occupied my attention most of the rest of the day. The slate wasn’t really clear when I went to the kitchen to make dinner.

Working two days a week at the home, farm and auto supply store leaves me time to work in our small community. I’ve been on the association board three different times since 1995 and will finish out my term and maybe go for one more. I find the work interesting and there is plenty of it. At some point I’ll step back and let someone else lead the effort. A lot depends on how successful we are in transitioning from work to retirement during the next couple of years.

Even without a part time job there is plenty to occupy a pensioner. Staying engaged in the community is not only important to longevity, someone has to do the work. For now, I’ll be on the board to help sustain our progress and plan for the future. However, it would be great if I could leave those chores to someone else and focus solely on writing. For now, I’ll make do with early morning sessions and posting the results on this blog. However, there is a bigger project in the background, one which will occupy my time with intensity once begun. I’m looking forward to it once I finish all these existential errands.

Categories
Home Life

Music as a Young Man

Rehearsal List 1995

My story includes music, especially as I left home in 1970 to begin university. College began a period of adventure and learning that extended through my return to Iowa City in 1980 and subsequent marriage in 1982.

In following years I pivoted to providing for our family, which eventually included a daughter who had a musical training as part of her curriculum through high school. Somewhere between then and moving back to Iowa in 1993, the chords got lost and dissonant.

I had a nascent hope I could make a living playing music with no idea how that would work. The closest I came to it was when I flew to London in autumn 1974.

What would follow getting my English degree at the University of Iowa? To postpone answering that question I made a grand tour like people did in the 18th Century. With two thousand dollars in American Express traveler’s checks, a backpack full of clothes, and a satchel Grandmother made for me, I booked a flight from Montreal to London with a open return date. The trip was poorly planned and I had no clue where or what I would do once I arrived. I picked London only because English was spoken.

When I arrived at a youth hostel I met two musicians who had just arrived from New York. They had plans to find an agent and book some shows. They suggested I get a guitar and join them. I had no resume to present, just an assertion I had been playing since grade school. In any case, I bought a cheap guitar and made the rounds with them one day without rehearsals or a song list. I quickly grew skeptical, took their names, and decided to leave. It was probably best and the closest I’ll get to being a professional musician. That is, not close.

I carried my newly acquired guitar wrapped in the jean jacket I wore on the plane and headed out of London for a loop around Southern England. It included Oxford, Stratford upon Avon, Bath, Stonehenge, Salisbury, Portsmouth, Brighton and Dover. I played when I stayed at youth hostels and in parks along the way. I had no trouble meeting other travelers my age and made connections that would serve me while touring the continent. I practiced a lot to conserve funds and divert from the immediate need to find a place to stay each night.

 

Traveling alone, having my backpack stolen in Calais, going through Paris, then to Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany and Holland in rapid succession over 13 weeks made music a central aspect of my life. I got better at playing and playing with others. I used no sheet music, but listened to songs and figured out the chords in a style that suited me. I watched other musicians and learned from them. Music was not the whole experience as I took in architecture, paintings and sculpture as well. Music was something.

Music still is something. What exactly that is will result from this series of posts… I hope.

Categories
Home Life

Music Trails

Gift from Toshi Seeger

After writing yesterday’s post I located the Yamaha guitar I bought for $300 in 1970. It was under the bed, covered in dust, with two broken strings sticking out of the case. I opened it, saw the guitar was virtually unchanged, then closed the lid and slid it back under the bed.

Not yet.

Last night a friend posted Instagram video of Greg Brown, Iris Dement, Dave Moore, Larry Mossman and Ben Schmidt playing music around a dinner table in someone’s home. Instagram is not the best medium for music. Nonetheless, it captured the moment well enough to believe it happened. Maybe that’s the point more than the tunes they played.

The last time I played with someone was during a trip to Montana in July 2010. We overnighted at a friend’s remote cabin. We had played together in a band while I was at university. He had an extra guitar and I struggled to keep up with the simplest chord progressions. By the end of the session I felt my skills could come back. That’s as far as it went.

A high school classmate’s family owned an old farmstead near Bellevue. When we first went there, there was no furnace and many rooms were empty. Over years the family fixed up the place, furnishing it with second hand beds and furniture. I remember the children made quilts for the beds. I attended a wedding reception there. It made a cozy family gathering place. My friend invited me to a meet up with a group of his college classmates. He took my guitar to a remote corner of the house to play by himself. We all want to get better at what we do, as did he. They sold the place years ago.

Being a musician, even a bad one, requires practice. More practice than seems reasonable. What I found was there were not enough venues in which to perform. I’ve played at coffee houses, on stage, for small gatherings, and at least one wedding, but most of the time I played alone, or when I was in one, with the band. There is a certain self analysis in music making. Did I hit the right notes? Did I miss anything? How could I phrase that better? Practicing music is like writing in that there is always a next draft, that is, until one performs. The performance stands alone in stark existential reality.

I’ve seen countless musicians perform in person. Among the most memorable was Andrés Segovia who played in Iowa City during the height of influenza season. The audience was coughing and hacking throughout his performance until Segovia stopped playing, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and coughed back. There was scattered laughter.

Perhaps the most famous person I’ve heard perform was Sir Elton John at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Oracle hired him for the annual Open World conference attended by tens of thousands of people, including me. I was invited because our logistics company was installing a version of Oracle’s transportation management software.

During my time in politics music began to be associated with political events. When I managed a state house campaign we sometimes hired a musician to perform at fund raising events. Over time, I heard Carole King and Bruce Springsteen perform at big events for presidential candidates. I remember former U.S. Senator Tom Harkin singing “every day is a winding road” with Sheryl Crow at his annual steak fry. Can’t say I attended any of those events because of who was performing.

For now the guitar rests under our bed. It’s a question, I guess. Will I take it up to play again? It moves me toward practice and maybe performance, and that’s a form of progress even though I don’t yet know the answer. Before proceeding down the music trail I need to visualize it. With all the practice required, I don’t want to wander without a vision.

Vision comes slowly.

 

Categories
Home Life

Where Music Lived

Showing off calluses on my fingertips Photo Credit – Mike Carron

During the last couple of decades the role of music in my life diminished. There was no plan, it happened on its own, without a recognizable nudge.

My guitars and banjo are tucked in safe places around the house, protected from the elements, largely unused. I sold my Telecaster to long-time friend Dennis. It has been a long time since anyone used the piano in the living room. My shelves of vinyl, cassettes and compact disks gather dust. Since the budget cuts on public radio, I can’t find a station that plays music in a range of eras and styles. In the car, my presets are country and classic rock. For the 25-minute commute to the home, farm and auto supply store I can stand them, mostly. The last musical concert I attended was a Celtic guitarist at the local library. I follow him on YouTube and that’s where I do most of my home music listening today.

It wasn’t always so. In first grade I served as emcee for a variety show at Sacred Heart Catholic School. I wore a bow tie and rehearsed my lines carefully. There were words I never heard before in the script. I introduced performances by my classmates, then wanted to perform.

When we moved across town in 1959 I took piano lessons at the grade school. I practiced in the upstairs gymnasium which also served as an auditorium, my rendition of Brahms bounced off the walls of a large, empty room at the end of the school day. My neighbor, a couple grades ahead of me, was a guitarist and played a concert for us graders before he left for high school. I thought he was cool, and he’s now one of the few people I know who make a living as a singer songwriter.

By eighth grade I was playing guitar. On a snowy day the year the Beatles came to America Mother took me to the King Korn stamp store where she traded books of stamps for a Kay guitar. I played my first concert of folk songs in eighth grade along with some neighborhood friends.

In high school, I took guitar lessons from the late Joe Crossen who played in a rock and roll band. After that, I tried to learn classical guitar at university but my fingernails weren’t good enough to make it work. After leaving Davenport in 1970 I felt music would be part of me. For many years it was. I don’t know what happened. This is not a lament or dirge. I accept life as I find it while imagining the future as it should be.

The other day Jacque and I were listening to different versions of The Dutchman, a ballad by Michael Peter Smith. We listened to his, Steve Goodman’s and Liam Clancy’s versions and it became clear Smith’s phrasing and tempo made the better experience, evoking an emotional response. We talked about the song which has been a favorite since early in our relationship. It was surprising how good Smith’s version was, when we’d only paid attention to Goodman all these years.

I’m awake early this morning, tapping on the keyboard. My sister in law stayed over last night after a brunch with friends in the Quad Cities. I don’t want to wake the house and keep the music turned off. Neither do I use headphones because I live in the moment at my desk. If there are noises in the house — the water softener cycling, someone walking to the bathroom, the washing machine running — I want to hear it. No muffled reality for me.

I don’t know about music any more. Every so often I find a song I like and listen to it repeatedly for a while. Then I get over the infatuation. What I mostly want is a feeling I should play music again. It’s not there yet. It may never be. I have a hard time visualizing it.

I remember traveling the Mediterranean coast with a young student from Germany in the 1970s. We had Eurail passes and rode trains from Barcelona, Spain to Genoa, Italy, playing guitars in our youth hostels until the host reluctantly said it was getting part curfew. I played lead to his rhythm and vocals, it was life as good as it gets, fleeting, transitory, in the moment. That can’t be captured again in the same way. Despite years and neglect, music can live within us. At least that’s my hope in late autumn.

Categories
Writing

Leaning Into What’s Next

Finding My Way

The second half of 2018 has been weird. A burden was lifted when Social Security checks began to arrive a year ago. With them came a view that new undertakings were possible, unlike at any time since I returned from Germany in 1979.

The next big thing isn’t as obvious in 2018 as it was in years past.

Maybe removing economic worry became the impetus for a new way of seeing the world — a complete segregation between who I am and work I do in society. I’m less worried about society and the focus is now on me. It’s new territory for someone who has been steadily busy since high school. What will this next act in life be?

I think of the famous speech from As You Like It although I’m not sure William Shakespeare’s seven ages of man still apply. When life expectancy was shorter they may have been relevant (in British Society), but with a longer span our lives are more diverse and such notion of ages antique.

There have been breaks in the continuum of my life. The time before school, then schooling through high school, leaving home for university and adventure, settling in with marriage and a career, followed by a long semi-retirement leading to this year when I applied for my Social Security pension and stepped back from working except when it interested me. By that reckoning I am beginning a sixth period although it doesn’t seem so clear cut. It seems downright foggy, the path vague.

After first retirement in July 2009, I had hope of starting a new career or my own business. That didn’t happen the way I expected. The question these days is how will I spend them? Each day is an open book, often isolated from the ones before and after. It is no way for a human to live.

This all came home after apple season when I reduced my work schedule to two eight-hour shifts at the home, farm and auto supply store each week. I’m hopeful to make a positive contribution during the sixth age of Paul. Already I’m autonomously getting started with next year’s garden, more writing and reading, and plenty of cooking. However, these things are a baseline in who I am, rather than the full result — a framework the contents of which aren’t visible in the chiaroscuro of mist-filled days and cloudy afternoons. Like a batter as the baseball is pitched from a mound, what to do next will become clear as I stand at the plate and consider the sphere and its rotations as it hurls toward the catcher’s mitt.

I expect I will write my way out of this. Not today, but soon. Once I do, Katy bar the door.

Categories
Living in Society Writing

Fair Redistricting Makes for Fair Elections

Big Grove Polling Place Nov. 6, 2018

The 2018 Midterm elections are over and I’m happy about the outcome.

I live in Big Grove Precinct, nestled around Lake Macbride, and here Fred Hubbell beat Kim Reynolds by two votes of 1,107 cast in the governor’s race. Why am I happy if Hubbell lost statewide?

Compare 2018 to 2014 election results in Big Grove when Terry Branstad won the precinct with 558 votes to Jack Hatch’s 367 (951 votes cast). Overall voter turnout increased by 16 percent in 2018, and almost all of the increase favored the Democratic governor. In a precinct where Donald Trump won by 54 votes, I’m glad to see we flipped back to Democratic in the governor’s race, even if only by two votes.

My opinion on these facts: the 2018 midterms were a fair election.

People are already gearing up for the 2020 election. At stake will be something that gets to the core of what makes for fair elections, a fair way to draw maps of congressional and legislative districts.

Iowa’s process where an independent, temporary commission recommends a district map to the legislature, which votes on it, is a fair one. Iowa has avoided gerrymandered districts (like Pennsylvania and North Carolina drew to favor a particular political party) largely because of our process.

No matter who wins the legislature in 2020 we should keep our statutory redistricting process to ensure fair elections, that is, if we want to strengthen our democracy. I want that and hope you do too.

~ Published in the Nov. 29, 2018 edition of the Solon Economist

Categories
Writing

A Place to Write

Nov. 20, 2018

When we moved to Big Grove in 1993, the lower level of our split foyer home was unfinished. It remains so and may never be other than a storage area for extras from lives past — ours and our deceased relatives. As we age, we make a life in the upper level and cobwebs form over the boxes and piles filling the space below.

At some point, I don’t remember when, I took a nine by 12 corner of the lower level, installed a wall, a doorway and bookshelves on all four walls. In the middle of the room is a library table that came from my father-in-law’s estate. That is where I write. I don’t know if it is a productive place, but I’m used to it. I’ve produced a lot of words here.

My writing table is quiet, temperature controlled, and mostly dry. One time the gutters and downspout were blocked by leaves. Water came pouring down outside my window, seeping into my space. My design of having everything elevated off the cement floor proved its efficacy. It is presently a comfortable, safe place.

I used to carry a laptop around the house with me for writing. I’m over that. I’ve found it’s helpful to use a desktop in a stationary location.

What do I want to write about? That’s the better question after a place to write has been established. I’m not sure.

Whatever it is, I’ll do some tweaking of my workspace this holiday season and come out writing January first. What else am I going to do?

Categories
Home Life Kitchen Garden

Into the 2018 Holidays

Wild Turkeys in the Johnson County Lake District

This year’s holiday season is just beginning. I’ve been reluctant to turn the page on a year of transition and hesitate still.

We’re writing a Thanksgiving Day menu together and thus far know there will be our special recipes for wild rice and cranberry relish, along with sweet potatoes, green peas and an extensive relish tray split between crudités for her and pickles for me. There are roasted pumpkin seeds.

Yesterday I went to the orchard to buy Gold Rush apples for the cranberry dish. It was the last chance to catch up with my orchard co-workers until mid-December. I bought frozen Montmorency cherries from Michigan. The retail merchandise on display is dwindling down, soon to be placed in storage until next year. Should I get another frozen pie or two to last through winter? I don’t know but we have peach, cherry and apple already and once we get past the holidays anything that’s left will likely rest in the freezer. We are not dessert people and potluck season is drawing to a close.

Seventeen degree weather ended the kale run. I cut the number of plants in half this season and we still had more than could be used in a single household. We have fresh kale in the ice box and will use it in some to be determined dish on Thanksgiving. The point of all the food is the leftovers, and not having to cook for a few days.

My orchard supervisor asked me what I was doing with my weekends now that the season is finished. I didn’t have a good answer. I’ve been napping more, reading too, and preserving the abundance that still lives in our ice box. At some point I must turn the page. She asked how many we were having for Thanksgiving dinner. Like always, it’s just the two of us.

Until soil blocking begins at the farm in late February my weeks are two days at the home, farm and auto supply store and five days to do what I will. Three months to make progress on home projects among which writing is most important to me. To begin planning would be turning the page on life, something I’m not ready to do.

By Wednesday I should feel more in the holiday spirits as I have dinner planned with a friend. I’m not one to linger in uncertainty, at least I didn’t used to be. I’ll take these days into the 2018 holidays one at a time. Focused on the present, rooted in the past, and hoping for a better life afterward. Sustaining a life in a turbulent world.