Yesterday, I changed the sheets, vacuumed the two front rooms, and washed and dried a few days’ worth of dirty dishes. Rebecca’s returning from a week-long bike ride across Iowa.
With earbuds secured, I got to work.
Each task took, give or take, 17 minutes, the running time of Bob Dylan’s 2020 song Murder Most Foul, which can be found on page 688 of the book of his lyrics you see in the photo.
On page 941 of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, also in the picture, and the textbook used in a 1972 college class, from Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, is this line from the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the old King, who was assassinated by Hamlet’s uncle,
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder
That I underlined 54 years ago.
So we’re in the land of spirits, Dear Reader, which is exactly where Bob placed us with his epic creation.
My story is short, as I hope you will spend some of your valuable time with this most extraordinary track. Whether a fan or not, I believe it will be minutes well spent. One of Dylan’s themes is that America, on that day, never recovered, “that the soul of a nation been torn away,” and that this crime still affects the USA.
I’ve linked the lyrics to the song’s title, Dylan’s performance here, and Timothy Hampton’s (author of Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work) analysis of Murder Most Foul here.
If you’re around my age, 75, you likely remember where you were on November 22, 1963. I was in a Catholic high school study hall as a freshman student when the announcement came over the loudspeaker. What Dylan gives us, according to Hampton, is a way to
Grasp and make legible what an event feels like, what it means, from the inside.
Last Saturday, I did a 1–4 serving shift in the Rotary Pork Chop on a Stick booth during Decorah’s Nordic Fest celebration — 1000s of visitors and 100s of chop lovers. I volunteered to manage the money, still comfortable counting up sixty years later.
Because the chops were $8, there were lots of ‘two makes ten’ and ‘four makes twenty’ returns and one ‘92 makes 100 ‘. An hour into the experience, I felt 16 again. Two hours later, I felt every bit 76, my age.
Once a teenager was more than enough.
Fortunately, I had help from a lot of people, especially these three.
Wendell
My Social Security account tells me my first year of official earnings was 1965, $585. So by the summer of 1966, I was a veteran ice cream scooper at Baskin-Robbins, used to the scowls of my first boss, Wendell, the owner, who said to me on my first day a year earlier,
Paul, wherever you are in the store, I can see you.
Wendell was a friend of Del Riefe, owner of Riefe’s restaurant, where my engineer father and his friends ate lunch. My dad had mentioned to Del that his oldest son, a high school junior, was looking for a part-time job, and Del relayed the message to Wendell, who said I should come in and fill out an application.
Two years later, Del would recommend me to Pierre, the chef at the Davenport Country Club, who was looking for someone to manage the pool snack bar during the summer; two years after that, Del hired me as a weekend short-order cook while I was in college.
Early in my life, I got used to standing on shoulders. And I also began my inoculation against the silliness of America’s self-made men myth. No one treks alone.
I don’t remember my first interview with Wendell, but I do recall his three uncompromised expectations: that each scoop be precisely 3.5 ounces and that as we excavated the ice cream from the three-gallon containers, we do it evenly across the top. Even today, when I walk into the local parlor, the first thing I look at is the tubs under the glass casings, and what do I see? A lunar landscape of deep crevices. Tut Tut.
The third requirement was that we count up, not down, from the 13¢ charge for one scoop on a pointed cone to the dollar the customer gave me; flat or cake cones were the same. Try it. You’ll understand why Wendell was right.
Sharon
The lessons I learned from a demanding boss were the second best thing about my first job. The prize was my first girlfriend, who happened to be Wendell’s daughter, Sharon, who also worked at her father’s store.
By the time I was 16, I liked the theory of a girlfriend. Playboy pinups had replaced Parent Trap’s Hayley Mills in my after-dark, under-the-cover fantasies. My friend Jim shared his brother John’s used copies that we hid in the woods a block from my house.
But a real girl? She was more complicated than scooping Chocolate Mint, leveling a tub, or counting out money. The magazine models seemed so welcoming, always smiling. How do you even start with an actual person?
Fortunately, late one Saturday night, Sharon was closing up her father’s store when she discovered her car would not start, and her parents were at a movie. Desperate and seeing my phone number in her father’s office behind the large freezer, she called.
At this point in the story, I need to tell you something. I’ll make it short. A few months earlier, Sharon and I had our first date. The longer story is here. It didn’t go well. Hey, even Willie Mays struck out at first. Who does things right the first time?
Regardless, that night, when I picked her up, we sat and talked in my parents’ Pontiac, in the shopping center parking lot.
Soon after we had a second date, then a third…
Mom
When I was 12, I attended a Saturday morning school for boys who wanted to umpire youth baseball games. For whatever reason, I didn’t go back the next Saturday.
At 13, I went to the first of five sessions to become a lifeguard. During a pretend drowning, the victim elbowed me in the face, and I panicked. I didn’t return for session two.
At 16, after my first week under Wendell’s whip, I told my mom I wanted to quit. She said,
It’s too easy to quit hard things.
I didn’t.
She also said, a year later, “You know, you and Sharon can’t really get serious because she’s Jewish. You need to stop seeing her.”
Photo of a 50-year college reunion of friends by an unknown neighbor. The author is in the second row, second from the right.
I will lose another good friend too damn soon. Cancer, of course. Rick and I have known each other for about ten years, with monthly seminars in our homes — that’s the only way to describe them — where we discuss the world. His lively mind and commitments as an active Catholic and Buddhist tired me out, in the best way imaginable.
Two hours of Trump castigating at the highest level! I don’t take any of my friends for granted, not at 76.
That includes you, my Medium pal. You know who you are. You hang out in my neck of the woods and make regular visits to my online abode. I drop by your place but not as often as I should. You live across the USA and Canada, especially, with a strange (in the sense of I wouldn’t have predicted the down-under phenomenon) coterie in Australia and New Zealand.
Meeting my partner Rebecca at 60 brought another group of friends into our lives as we divided our time between two communities, new friends for each of us in each. We just spent a few days with six of them in Colorado.
Settling into one community will bring friendship gains and losses.
Our decision three years ago to spend Januarys in San Miguel introduced us to yet another chance to meet and get to know wonderful people like Rick and Julie.
Photo from January 2026 of Julie, Rick, Rebecca, and me by a bystander from England
Yesterday, I had coffee at 1 pm at a local coffee shop with a group of seven headed by Lyle, who formed this political koffe-klatch band a few years ago. Tim, Shelly, Craig, Steve, Doug, Lyle, and I met for about an hour, focusing primarily on how Iowa might tilt slightly purple this year. Hope springs eternal.
Tomorrow, I’ll meet with an older men’s book group to discuss Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, a book about the multigenerational consequences of slavery. We’ll meet at Jim’s house, who will provide the eats. Earlier in the day, I’ll play golf with Mike, Mike, and Steve as part of a regular summer Wednesday foursome. As the holes progress, the gimme putts get longer.
On Thursday, I’ll have breakfast at another coffee shop with a group of retired professors from the local college we all taught at for decades, none of whom hung out with each other while working. Will, at 93, is the oldest. I’m pretty sure I’m the youngest.
Finally, on Saturday, Rebecca and I will have dinner with Ed and Carol, who live across the street. We do this every six weeks or so, and we do something similar with Mike and Maggie.
Thanks to Peter Mammitzsch for his prompt about meeting Medium friends. A few years ago, Rebecca and I met an online friend, Peter, and his wife, Mary, in their home in upstate New York. Peter and I met as part of a crew of 10 blues and 10 reds who met monthly to listen to the other side’s political perspective. Our Braver Summit was part of a national organization called Braver Angels.
Rebecca and I were visiting her daughter and family in Boston and decided to make the few-hour trip to have lunch with Peter and Mary. It was a gratifying experience, including seeing the physical setting, chair, and backdrop for when Peter joins our virtual group. And Peter and Mary were so gracious in their beautiful home in the woods.
However, it reminded me of when my 6th-grade class visited a local TV station and saw the set where the afternoon kids’ show was staged. I remember being slightly disappointed that everything was smaller than it looked on TV.
Some vision of mine had been punctured. Afterward, I never watched that show in the same way. In a way, it was like seeing the wizard behind the curtain. Part of me preferred the myth.
So perhaps, just perhaps, I’m really OK with not visiting your home and seeing where you write your Medium stories. I prefer you to remain as you are in my imagination, Hemingway or Smiley at their desks.
Of course, if you’re ever in my northeast Iowa vicinity, you are welcome to stop by. I’ll even let you sit in my writing chair.
Photo of Switzerland vs. Argentina at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City
Around this time last year, the host cities for the 104 matches of the 2026 Men’s World Cup were announced. The USA, Canada, and Mexico were the sponsor nations, with Kansas City and its Arrowhead Stadium as one of the sites, six driving hours from our home.
I’ve been a soccer fan for 25 years, learning the game during a year my family spent in England in 1999. From that point, I’ve watched the matches on TV for every quadrennial event for both men and women.
It was time, I thought, that I go to Lionel Messi instead of him coming to me. Of course, when I purchased a ticket for the July 11 quarterfinal game three months ago, I didn’t know one of the teams would be defending World Champion Argentina, with the by-consensus game’s greatest player, and that Switzerland would be the opponent.
Sport has always been important to me. I grew up playing baseball, starting with wiffle ball. It accompanied me through my growing-up years and has tagged along as I have aged. My friend Steve and I still play catch.
Photo of me on the left and Steve by his daughter, Nikki
But baseball has always been more than a game to me. Two years before I was born, in 1947, Jackie Robinson claimed his rightful place at second base.
My only black friends growing up were baseball teammates, who my decent father, a man of his times, wouldn’t let me play with when they came over to my yard for a game of catch.
Today, Japan’s Shohei Ohtani is my country’s National Pastime’s biggest star, with Latino and Hispanic players making up 30% of major leaguers. The world has come to the game that is in my blood, even as Donald Trump and his masked minions round up, deport, and, intermittently, murder brown-skinned residents, while goose-stepping at our borders, bellowing NO ENTRY.
That’s why, on Saturday night, I loved sitting amidst a contingent of Argentinian fans.
Selfie
For the 39 days of the 2026 World Cup, the world has also come to this beautiful game. It’s a terrible reminder of what my country was and could be again.
After the game, won by Argentina in extra time, I took an Uber back to my accommodation, a 45-minute ride in heavy traffic. By accent, the driver was from Eastern Europe. It gave me time to reflect on this peak experience, which was everything and more than I imagined, and on my country.
In soccer, a player earns a red card for an egregious offense against his opponent and the rules of the game. The punishment is banishment. In this game, the referee changed a card ruling after a video review of the incident, from an Argentine player to a Swiss player.
In American democracy, elections are a form of red card to the loser.
The itch has been with him for 60 years, since Mr. Kemp rolled a funny-looking ball across the gym floor when he was a sophomore in high school.
It couldn’t be a volleyball; that was for girls. And there were no girls in his gym class or in Algebra, where Sister Laurent would again remind the sweating boys to close their knees. Maybe he’ll see Mary in the library if he can weasel a pass from Father Schmidt, who went to school with his mother.
Mr. Kemp told them he had spent the summer in England and learned about a new game that was mostly played by short guys like him.
Earlier in the week, Coach Deroin had posted the names of the fifteen boys who had made the sophomore basketball team on the gym wall.
At 5’7″, he would have been the shortest, exactly the height of Lionel Messi, whom he’ll watch tonight.
I once got into a fight with the mayor of Bettendorf, Iowa. I was 17, and it was during a pick-up basketball game 60 years ago. No fighter am I, not really; just a bit of pushing and shoving, with a middle-aged, overweight man.
Afterward, even this brain-half-formed teenager was embarrassed. As I recall, my opponent was short, too. Not that height is destiny, but I’ve always had a soft spot for Napoleon.
I get my pugnacity from my mother. Not that genes are destiny either, thank goodness, as I no longer care much for this aggressive part of my personality.
That’s why I like my Subaru Forester. It has a more humble, laid-back grille to present to the world. Unlike the AI-created version in the first photo. Here is the real McCoy.
Photo by the author
You might not be able to tell the difference. But I can feel it. This vehicle is more comfortable with yellow lights, slowing down, and yielding to the car on the right that arrives at the intersection at the same time.
My car’s great-grandfather, like Pete Seeger, preferred the acoustic Bob Dylan rather than the electric one, which he found brought out his aggression.
It’s hard for me to imagine this fella behind the wheel of my car.
This morning, the thumb and forefinger of my right hand gripped the little turn knob tightly on this lighted lamp and, successfully, as you can see, rotated it to the on position.
For the first time since May 18th, 47 days, when I was in mind and mood, if not in the desert, the scrubland border.
That’s what’s required to turn on this decades-old, creaky light fixture. It’s been my talisman to monitor recovery from the worst viral infection of my eight-decade life that attacked my whole body, head to toe, but especially my hands.
This was my right hand on day 12 of a Coxsackie virus infection, better known as Hand, Foot and Mouth disease.
Photo by the author
I’ve had hundreds of colds, dozens of bouts of flu, as a kid, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and Hepatitis B, shingles in 2000, and COVID five years ago. But nothing quite like this microbe in duration.
Origin
Three days after I picked up this moving van from an outlet in southwest Iowa, I began to feel bumps on the back of my neck.
Photo by the author
I had twice shaken the manager’s hand and used the bathroom at his service station. As I recall, I did not wash my hands, either because there was no soap or my own laziness. This bug lives on surfaces and can also be transmitted through the air by sneezing.
(During the COVID year, I was often sloppy with my mask, letting it slip below my nose. And, of course, the sloppy handwashing. Inevitably, that pathogen eventually struck, in Romania. I tell that story here.
Over the past month and a half, during this ordeal, I’ve never washed my hands more often, including this morning.)
From the back of my neck, the rash quickly spread down my arms.
Photo by the author
And then into the palms of my hands, something rare, which is why my doctor diagnosed Hand, Foot and Mouth. And then down my legs to the top of my feet. Not, thank goodness, into my mouth.
Photo by the author
My Body’s Defenses
About a week into this assault, I felt my body had become a battlefield. Red splotches appeared everywhere. Some turned into blisters. My hands began to swell, and my fingers lost their strength and dexterity.
Which also meant, well, remember the U-Haul. I had picked it up because we were moving some of Rebecca’s furniture from her home, five hours away, which she had sold, to our other home in Decorah, where we’ve lived together for many years. Our plan was for me to return and help with the move.
That was now impossible, as I was infectious and sick. Fortunately, the house’s closing date allowed enough time for my illness to run its course until it was safe for her to return. But I had lived in her home and community for fifteen years, and we had looked forward to closing this chapter together.
But pathogens don’t care about any of that. Nor, fortunately, did my body’s immune system, which mounted one defense after another, starting with mast cells that release histamine, which increases blood flow to the infected areas to help battle the disease. I’m guessing that when this army arrived at my hands, it found a dug-in opponent. In the many battles fought on this terrain, reinforcements were necessary, thus causing the swelling.
About halfway through this hardship, my doctor ordered a blood test to monitor what was going on. Coxsackie usually fades away after about a week, and that was not happening. The test showed a very high level of eosinophils, cells that fight infections. This persistence was my body’s way of saying the job was not yet done.
Especially at night, every part of me felt inflamed, a sort of low-level itch, all over but especially in my hands. For example, if I ran hot water over them — this was central command of the invading army — I felt a warmth that was quite sensual. Very strange. Unfortunately, this made sleeping very difficult, as I would move from a chair to a couch and then, finally, to my bed.
I kept reminding myself that my body was on high alert and each symptom — the redness and inflammation, the blisters, the swelling, the tiredness, the restlessness — was my body at war.
My hands
Two days ago, a blood test showed my eosinophil level was normal, indicating my immune system has returned to a peacetime state. I’m sleeping through the night, and Rebecca is back in our Decorah home. My energy level has returned to the normal baseline for my 77 years. Both hands have a bit of neuropathy that seems to be less every day. I’ll continue to employ the lamp switch test, but I’m hopeful it will no longer be necessary in a week or so.
And, yes, I now wash them almost as many times a day as I should.
No one recommends four donuts a day. Worse, the American Heart Association says Americans consume too much sugar.
Do you doubt me?
Look inside this average American Refrigerator. What do you see?
Photo by the author
It’s full of fruits and vegetables, including just-prepared butternut squash. The owners are so ashamed of us that they hide us away in a lower compartment and only pull us out for special occasions. Carbohydrates made this country what it is, and now we are being pushed aside. The newcomers are taking over.
My spies have told me that just in the last week, this family has eaten spinach, beets, potatoes (sweet for her and Yukon Gold for him), broccoli, brussels sprouts, onions, tomatoes, corn, and black and white beans.
And the only pastry was a croissant, the namby-pamby French, so it doesn’t count.
It’s not only that.
They flaunt their pro-vegetable agenda.
Photo by the author of his son, Ben’s garden
And they’re not alone. I’ve heard there’s talk of a second Community Garden. The old world has been upended. And don’t get me started on the twice-a-week Farmer’s Market and the Co-Op that buys local.
It’s all a Communist plot.
Photo by the author of Decorah’s community garden
And, mind you, it’s not just the stolen 2020 election, phony mail-in-ballot voting, and the enemy press. The conspiracy is bigger than that.
The whole system is rigged against my kind, the real American food. It really is SDS, Sugar Derangement Syndrome.
I’m sick and tired of this, and I’m not going to take it anymore.
It’s the donut, not the legume, that will make America Great Again!
Coming Very Soon: A Dunkin’ Donut Franchise in the White House, next to the Oval Office, with seating in the newly paved Rose Garden. And the arch you’ve heard about, well, I’ve decided there will now be two, both Golden.
My mom read newspapers and magazines, never books. When I cleaned out my late brother Peter’s Florida house a few months ago, I saw very few tomes, mostly about his profession: managing cities. The same was true for my youngest brother, Pat, who also died this past year, a successful sales manager.
My engineer dad read books, especially in retirement, which was cut short by sinus cancer just as he was developing a line of bakery products which he would sell at local farmers’ markets. He had piles of bread baking volumes. And he loved big idea books like Kenneth Clark’s Civilization. Funny, though, he didn’t read novels.
The first “real” book I read was Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman in 1959, when I was ten. My Catholic Grade School, Sacred Heart, belonged to a paperback book club. I remember looking forward to the days when our teacher would distribute the books we had ordered. I was attracted to adventure, sports, and the Hardy Boys mysteries.Still, today, there’s always a detective story on my nightstand.
Around this same time, my school adopted the SRA reading program. Do you remember a box like this in a classroom?
During a reading period, students would select color-coded short stories and progress up a reading ladder by answering questions. The only particular I recall is my green ceiling, two or three colors below Ann Kruse and John Roach, the class geniuses.
That solid, but not excellent, academic identity has stuck with me through fifty years of higher education on both sides of the teacher’s podium.
In my mind, I was never a natural scholastic fit, like the Ann Kruses of the world, always the guy who could stick in the scholarly Major Leagues if he worked harder than anyone else.
Instead of taking a million ground balls at third base, somehow, unbeknownst to my conscious mind, I figured out that reading would be my ticket to success on the intellectual infield.
Eight years after retirement, I’m still at it. Next January, I’m going to teach a Life Long Learning seminar on Bob Dylan in San Miguel, Mexico, where Rebecca and I spend a winter month. While I’ve been to a bunch of Dylan concerts, I don’t really know very much about him or his music.
My son, Ben, reintroduced me to Bob when he was 14 and I was 50, and we’ve attended seven concerts together. In case you’re wondering, more than 2,000 books have been written about the guy who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. I’ve got a little catching up to do.
That’s why I’m out on the practice diamond each morning before other players show up, taking extra fielding, hoping I can keep this ruse up for another year.
Because, you see, there’s always an Ann Kruse trying to take my job!
Photo of Rebecca and me on June 12, 2025, by our Cowabunga Safari leader Brian Hesse
So much of life is mental, isn’t it? A cliche, I know. But some bit of wisdom endures across time, space, and cultures because it’s true, for all.
The last two weeks, I’ve been tethered to a device that is cleaning out and helping to heal a leg wound, now free of Basal cell skin cancer. My surgeon made an incision of 2 centimeters by 3 centimeters behind the right shin, just above the heel. I’ve written about this challenge here.
A few days ago, I met a friend on a walking path close to my home. She asked me about the tube hanging down my right leg below my shorts. I repeated my story and added, “For the first time in my life, I feel old.”
Now, I’m 77, decades beyond spring chicken status. And I’ve helped bury my two younger brothers this past year. By any reasonable measure, Old is what I YAM, with or without the spinach and the medicinal crutch.
Yet this temporary tubing has inflicted a Scarlet “I” on my identity, flashing “Invalid” not only to the world but to my psyche.
Yesterday, at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, with a light rain shower, I, brace yourself, parked in one of the four clearly marked handicapped slots, rehearsing in my mind if necessary, “You see, officer, I can’t allow my right leg to get wet. I know, I should get a disability permit.”
Truth be told, if this lazy sod had spent two minutes putting on the rain sleeve cover he had picked up under a sunny sky at the same location the day before, he could have parked at one of the legal spaces across the street.
But, he kind of likes how he can work the I to his advantage, as in, “Rebecca, could we each mow half the yard this week?”
Until Rebecca said during dinner last night, firmly and kindly,
We don’t want this to become the new normal, do we, Paul?
The ‘this,’ of course, is my too easily accepted visa into the land of the frail. “That just won’t do,” she offered, “until it’s necessary. And you’re not there yet, not by a long shot. After all, a year ago, we were on Safari in Namibia.”
Bingo.
That’s why my recent health challenges, nothing unusual for a septuagenarian, have knocked me off what you might call my year-long Namibian high. You can read about our 14-day Namibian adventure here.
For this story, what I mean by Namibian high is the confidence both Rebecca, who is 74, and I got from doing something neither of us thought we could, at our age.
That’s why the photo of us under the Weaver Condominium is my favorite picture. It was taken on Safari Day 12, and it’s almost as if we are walking on air.
Every fiber of our being is more confident than when we boarded our plane in St. Louis for eight hours to Germany and eleven hours to Windhoek, Namibia. It’s like someone wound us up and let us go. If you look closely, you can see the energy key covered by our red Superman and Superwoman capes.
So, mind over matter can work, and will again, until our corporeal bodies give out. The trick is not to give in before it becomes necessary.
