paulmuses

There were six. And now there is one. They weren’t perfect, but they were mine. And one is the loneliest number.

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The first to die was Sam, a Beagle, of old age, at roughly 84 human years. He lived in the fifties and sixties, a different time, with no leash or poop bags. Mrs. Weinswag, the neighborhood crone three doors up East Street, would complain. Sam was a survivor, with wounds from a car chassis and, likely, a bobcat. In the end, he was blind and deaf and would follow my mom up the stairs one lame step at a time. One Saturday morning, my dad took him to the vet and came back alone.

Paul Gardner, Sr. was next, at 71, in 1993, with sinus cancer that took too long to diagnose. A lifelong Republican, he cast his last vote for Bill Clinton, saying the Christian Right would eventually destroy his party. He was an engineer who worked on cryogenic propellant for the Saturn moon rocket. In retirement, he made multigrain bread products and sold them at farmers’ markets. In his last few months, he built a second railing down into the basement, saying to our mother, “You’ll be in this house a long time, and I don’t want you falling when you do the Monday morning laundry.”

Dad was 35 years right about the Republican Party and about his wife of 43 years. Dody Gardner would live in our childhood home until 2016, when she started wandering outside at night, necessitating that my brother Pat, who lived five miles from Mom and who had been checking in on her every day, move her into a memory care unit where she would live in misery for a year and a half, dying of COPD at 95. Dody was a master bridge player who graduated from college in 1942 and raised my two brothers and me. When I was 13, I came home crying after fighting with a neighborhood kid. “Who started the fight?” she asked. “I did,” I sobbed. “Then it’s your problem, buster.” Her unsympathetic but perfect answer planted a seed that’s still blossoming.

My brother Pat was the youngest and stayed in his hometown, as did his wife, Sue. They were married for 49 years. He was an excellent athlete, an All-State baseball pitcher, which made his death from liver cancer at 70 last year even harder to take. It’s likely this killer cancer was connected to the removal of all of his colon except for a small piece for colitis thirty years ago. According to his oncologist, they should have tested that bit of colon every year. By the time they discovered the disease, it was too late. Pat became a regional sales manager for Sherwin-Williams and retired about a decade ago, partly to have more time to help manage our mother’s decline, with the patience of a youngest son and his mother’s no-nonsense attitude.

My other brother, Peter, born two years after me and four years before Pat, also died last year of lung cancer. Peter, a city manager, left for the south in 1974 and never returned, dying in Florida. When he was two, a car accident resulted in him being catapulted from his mother’s arms out of an open window onto a curb. I was in the front passenger seat and ended up on a grassy boulevard, not seriously injured. As a result of his injuries, Peter’s left arm and leg were malformed. Sadly, Pat and I lost touch with Peter in the last five years. After Pat’s death, I discovered Peter had been in an Assisted Living facility for two years and that his wife, Pamela, had just died. Fortunately, I was able to FaceTime with my brother many times before his death last January.

So, Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, when you ask about a family tradition, and since we are heading into Christmas season, I’m going to start playing a Christmas album my family put on the brand new 1955 stereo every season while we gathered in the rarely used living room with the decorated tree on Christmas Eve, tearing into gifts, lighting the fire, drinking eggnog, lingering for midnight Mass, salivating for my mother’s chocolate pie, arguing about whatnot, and listening for Sam’s ” Let Me In ” bark.

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Including the one inside me

Creative — Carole Olsen asks what kind of doormat we are.

This is what happens, Editor—Extraordinaire Adrienne Beaumont and master—commenter Rodrigo S-C, when you disrespect observant days. Today is National Mule Day, and I have a very funny mule joke. But nooo, I can’t give the readers of my favorite publication a Steve Martin-worthy chuckle because of this conspiracy to raise the prompt standards.

By the way, it’s also National Chicken Fried Steak Day. I’m guessing the two of you, with your hoity-toity principles, disdain this dish enjoyed at diners around America. Cooks, not chefs, serve it with instant mashed potatoes and lots of gravy to hide the mystery meat underneath. I also have a very funny Chicken-Fried Steak joke that includes imported beef from Russia, but I’ll keep it to myself.

Usually on Mondays, my favorite diner will follow up its steak-for-the-common-man special with a slice of MinceMeat Pie, bought the same day at Walmart.

Which reminds me, yesterday, I had the cyst that had erupted on my butt on Saturday, as I contemplated Carole’s prompt, removed just so I could sit on my designated diner stool, the one with carpenter’s tape with my name penciled in. My doctor said that at my age, these blisters are often stress-related. Was I worried about something? She would have told me the latest abscess joke making the rounds at the clinic, but said she didn’t want me laughing too hard while she had a sharp object on my rear end.

Coincidentally, you’ll be delighted to know it’s also National Mince Meat Pie Day. This was my mother’s favorite dessert, and I have a very funny mother-and-son Oedipus joke I usually tell on May 6, National Freud Day. Instead, I’ll jot it down on a pink Post-it note and attach it to her tombstone.

So I’m sorry, Carole; you are one of my favorite writers. I wish I had a doormat story because I have a very funny doormat joke. However, I don’t even have a dormant tale yet, but I am working on a very funny…

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A few months ago, I attended a men’s soccer World Cup game between Argentina and Switzerland, with 70,000 other spectators and a TV audience of millions.

For the next few weeks, I’ll fall asleep reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a terrific 800-page novel about traveling back in time to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy that sold 84,000 copies in its first week.

However, most of us do our thing over in the corner, out of the limelight.

Yesterday, I sat with a small crowd on a beautiful Saturday fall day, watching Luther College triumph over Ripon College, 35 to 20, in American football.

Last Sunday, Rebecca and I were mesmerized for two hours as the Oneota Valley Community Orchestra performed Letters from Lincoln and other works to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary.

With a high school auditorium about 25% full.

Occasionally, I ask myself how much my reader audience size matters to my commitment to writing. That’s the point of this story’s opening image. And to the contrast I’ve drawn between the vast audience some have and the relatively tiny numbers most experience, including me.

In the photo below, Argentina’s Lionel Messi, the world’s greatest men’s soccer player, is taking a corner kick.

What if, instead of millions, only a handful were watching, would that change his attention, intensity, or commitment to craft?

I’m guessing not, and I need to remind myself why.

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When I write, I imagine an audience of one, a fiction I use to keep my fingers moving. I think of you, in Section F, Row D, seat 4, as I search on a make-believe playing field for a synonym, rearrange a paragraph, audition titles, add a dollop of humor, and discover an enlightening simile or metaphor.

This morning, for this story, it’s whiffle ball, baseball lite, played in the backyards of millions of kids growing up, including, I suspect, America’s greatest baseball players, without an audience.

Before I played Little League with crowds of 50 or more, including my parents and brothers, I honed my skills with Timmy and Tommy in our driveway, combing Mrs. Thompson’s flower beds for foul balls and admiring our towering homers that landed on the Welches’ roof.

The game mattered, and so did how much fun it was.

Once we started playing in front of others, things changed. Often, for the better. It’s a kick to have people watch, to pay attention to what we are doing, to hear them say, “You really got ahold of that one, didn’t you?”

Or, “I love your baseball metaphor.”

Who among us wouldn’t want a Stephen King’s stadium full of new readers every week?

But I wonder: I’ve been to seven Bob Dylan concerts, and he never, ever talks to his audience, except to introduce the Band. Lately, over the last decade or so, he doesn’t allow phones because he wants the experience to be only about the music.

I suspect the same is true for him. It’s about the words and the melodies and the performance. And the audience, big or small, doesn’t matter much, except, of course, to pay the bills and probably to stroke his sizable ego.

Yesterday, my friend Steve and I played catch until our 77-year-old arms gave out. It’s all still about the game.

Our audience was the black walnut trees, two deer, and a ground squirrel.

The audience is icing on the cake. But it ain’t the cake, not for any of us.

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After three, I love the before-and-after moments. Not minutes, moments, because I fully inhabit each, in true Buddha fashion.

An hour after I arrive, warm blankets hide the untied straps of the hospital gown and the grand canyon-sized gaps.

Without hesitation, from repetition, my name and birthdate roll off my tongue.

Nurses and doctors flock to me.

The anesthetist’s blissful words, “We’ll see you afterward,” come true in the blink of an eye.

Death and resurrection.

“Peanut butter on toast and coffee, please,” I say upon arising. It’s now been 42 hours without.

The ordinary becomes extraordinary.

“Shantel, this is the best toast I’ve ever had,” I declaim.

“Four little polyps,” the doctor reports. “We’ll know more in a week.”

Soon after, freed, Rebecca chauffeurs me to the Sugar Bowl for a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream, a cherry, and no guilt.

Later today, I’ll visit a dermatologist for a full-body scan to check for cancerous and precancerous spots.

He’ll use special instruments to examine my whole body, head to toe, inside and out. It’s a preventive measure to stop something harmful from growing and spreading. 

Earlier this year, another skin specialist discovered and removed a Basal Cell Carcinoma behind my right shin just above the heel. She estimated it had been growing for five years and suggested regular examinations.

Yesterday, I joined hundreds in my small community in northeast Iowa to cast votes in America’s midterm election. Election Day across the USA is Tuesday, November 3, and early voting began on October 14.

After filling out my ballot, I placed it in an envelope, secured and sealed with a thin line of glue under a strip of paper I peeled off, and dropped into a snowballing chorus of opposition.

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If you had to leave the USA, where would you live? This sounds exactly like the kind of question a Snappy One would ask: sharp, concise, and, sadly, relevant right now.

Like our friend the slug, who is either secreting for sex or for movement. As you can see in the first photo, he’s a Scottish mollusk with a brogue this ignorant American couldn’t decipher.

Here’s another Caledonian with a definite opinion about the USA and its citizens who wander abroad.

As Rebecca and I walked past, looking for cover from the rain and minding our own business, she shouted out, startling us with the vehemence of her question: “How could you elect that man a second time!”

“How did you know?” we asked.

“Your heads were down, ashamed, I suppose, so I assumed you were from the States.”

Almost everyone we met on our two-week sojourn through this highly literate country seemed to have a definite opinion about “the corner [Americans] have painted themselves into,” as Bob Dylan mournfully sang in Mississippi.

And you do tend to take seriously people who’ve turned churches and train stations into bookstores.

Still, a few had better things to do than pay attention to foreigners. They did, however, remind me to eat more fiber.

To elaborate on some people’s feelings, a feisty local couple explained over Bobby Burns’ late one afternoon that every country has its dark clouds.

“But no nation in our memory,” said grey-haired Margaret, “has ever attempted suicide a second time after surviving the first try.”

“That’s why we’re staying put in our red state,” Rebecca and I offered in unison. “No one thought it would be this bad.”

Even to us, this sounded weak. In a healthy country, it would not have happened the first time, let alone the second.

As we left the pub, we told our new friends, “We hope something better is coming.”

We added that many of our neighbors in northeast Iowa are working hard for Democratic Party candidates in the upcoming midterm elections, and that gives us more than hope. We want to be part of this movement to take our country back, to help heal it.

Our Scottish slug friend, who I began the story with, helps clean up the environment by eating rotten matter. Like millions of others, we’re doing something similar in the USA starting today, Snappy One, by voting.

At coffee yesterday, Steve said, “Decorah’s new roundabout is now open.” So I had to see for myself.

It’s our community’s first circular intersection. Four street entry points, with City Hall and the Fire and Police Departments watching over the counterclockwise flow.

Soon, a new elementary school will increase traffic. Later today, at Rotary, two retired high school music teachers will share their plans for an outdoor concert venue in this part of town.

Twenty-five years ago, in Nottingham, England, I entered the clockwise current of my first carrefour from the left side of Nuthall Road, behind the right-side steering wheel of a Toyota Corolla.

After four fruitless loops, I finally exited onto Aspley Lane, then Bobbers Mill Bridge. From my wrong-sided driver’s perch, hugging the left curb to avoid oncoming traffic, I heard a pop and felt a bump near the front left tire.

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A few days ago—helplessly splayed in the dentist’s chair, mouth wide open—the hygienist wiped my tongue with a soft cloth. My body fidgeted as I’ve always hated cotton-like fabric in my mouth. Actually, hate is too supple a word.

Last Tuesday, at Rotary, I chose not to eat another bite of an otherwise fine-tasting chicken sandwich because the dressing had softened the bread. Truly, choice was a fiction.

Too particular, you say?

Apparently, that’s the shareable version of what my mother shouted when a two-year-old me pushed a bowl of soggy corn flakes off the breakfast table.

Eventually, even my depression-era mom relented to me and my two brothers’ food likes and dislikes.

For Paul Jr., Grape-Nuts was the anti-mushy choice. As Euell Gibbons said in my favorite commercial, “Ever eat a pine tree? Many parts are edible.”

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The worst teacher I’ve known in my 77 years was me at 23, in November 1972, at St. John’s Elementary School in Burlington, Iowa, in front of 44 6th graders, with my fly open.

Actually, the zipper incident didn’t occur until my second week. And my subjective teacher-quality ranking would’ve tied Rollie and me for first among the worst.

Sister Marie hired me in late October because the previous teacher, an older woman, had retired early after this historically monstrous class ran her out of town. I’m guessing I was the only male who applied. And, as I recalled my job interview in her tiny office, my only question was whether I could bring a Christmas tree into the classroom.

Baby Jesus wouldn’t be the only innocent in this classic three-story school building, which, Joni Mitchell’s warning notwithstanding, was knocked down three decades later to put up a church parking lot.

My boss wanted someone young, cheap, and male. I think she thought a man could control these adolescents who, it turned out, were mostly rambunctious, except for Steve, who threw a chair at me on the Friday of my first week.

My first-year salary, around $5000, fit my level of incompetence perfectly. I had taken a few education classes and spent the previous semester shadowing a middle school teacher who seemed to command control the moment he entered the room. The educational philosophy at the time, coming out of the sixties, was befriending your students.

Every night, alone in my first apartment, a few blocks down and then up the hill from the school, I quit. Creating what my education textbooks called a learning environment seemed impossible. Perhaps the innocent zipper incident was my subconscious looking for a way out.

Ironically, a couple of years later, I became good friends with the Burlington police chief, a few years older than me, but still the youngest commander in Iowa. I once mentioned the fly event to Ted, who responded that laws against public exposure required, well, actual exposure. Of that, I was innocent. However, I was still clueless about managing a classroom.

I asked Sister Marie for help. She listened, but this was also her first time as principal, and I sensed we were both in over our heads. I had to look elsewhere. Because, without realizing it, I wasn’t a quitter.

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So during my free period, I decided to roam the halls to observe what was going on in other classrooms.

This was very, very interesting. The first thing that stood out was that some teachers kept their doors open, while others didn’t. Fortunately, all the doors had windows.

One teacher who closed his door was Rollie, hired the year before, who taught science in a classroom that shared my room’s back wall. I had never known a Rollie. He was a big guy with a deep, loud voice, a handlebar mustache, and strong opinions. The kind of man who dominated a room, and the type I’d always struggled to like.

For the first month or so, I could hear him bellowing even through the thick walls. He was always slamming his door, I suppose, as a signal to students that class was starting and to pay attention. But the first few times I peeked in his window, his classroom decorum seemed as chaotic as mine, immune to his foghorn-like voice.

Over the next few weeks, a few quiet conversations in the teacher’s room confirmed what I’d observed. Rollie’s take-no-prisoners approach, the opposite of my friend-first strategy, was an abysmal failure.

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Across from my Social Science room, with my door always closed, lay Sister Ellen’s math space down the corridor, always open except during a test.

She was a stern-looking nun, one of many I had met in my 16 years of Catholic education. However, over many visits to Aunt Fawny, my mother’s sister, also known as Sister Marilyn Thomas, at the Dubuque Motherhouse of the BVM’s (Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary), I saw the other side of these kind, committed, and intelligent women whom I came to love.

Twenty-five years after our five-year St. John’s overlap, I met Sister Ellen, also an All-State basketball player in the 1950s and a lifelong BVM, who was in retirement in Dubuque. We talked about teaching, and I told her how much her little piece of advice meant to me.

From my many brief walk-by observations, Sister Ellen’s classroom seemed to purr with controlled energy. She was always on her feet, moving around the classroom, with, astoundingly, students raising their hands. Eventually, I summoned the courage to ask her if we could talk about teaching.

That led to many conversations, with the first being the most important. I don’t remember exactly how I phrased the question, but I’m sure it was something like, “How do you control your students?”

I remembered her answer word for word in every classroom I entered for the next fifty years.

You’ve got to show them you love them. And you’ve got to be firm. You can start out tough and then slowly loosen up. But you can’t go in the other direction. But always remember, you’ve got to show them you care.

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I followed Jimmy and Tommy through their back door, up three steps, into a small kitchen. Their mom wasn’t home. It was a summer day in 1960.

I was 11 and had just hit two home runs in our daily whiffle ball game, launched over my mother’s Monday drying clothes onto the roof of the Welches’ stucco house. Our infield was the driveway between their garage and ours. My two friends would move away before our baseball season renewed the next summer.

They weren’t twins. Jimmy was my age, Tommy a year younger. They went to public school; my two younger brothers and I went to Sacred Heart, a Catholic school.

Jimmy walked over to the drawer and pulled it open, revealing a space that overflowed with candy bars. I had never seen anything like it: Snickers, Milky Way, Three Musketeers, and a Bun, round instead of rectangular, with milk chocolate and peanuts, my favorite.

“Take two,” he said.

I greedily ate the Bun and put the Snickers in my pocket, not knowing exactly what I would do or where I would hide it from my mother.

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Every Friday night, my parents made popcorn and let us have pop, a treat, usually root beer, while we watched TV past 9:00 o’clock, our school night bedtime.

On Sundays, after Mass, my Dad, who never went to church, would serve us pancakes, usually dollar-sized. Our evening dinner was a roast served in the dining room, under the chandelier, with the family room TV brought in to watch Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, another once-a-week treat.

In the middle of the day, the five of us would go to Iowana Dairy, under the Iowa-Illinois Memorial Bridge, where we could order an ice cream treat for our lunch. My choice was usually a chocolate malt, thick enough to turnupside down three decades before the marketing campaign for the Dairy Queen’s Blizzard.

This was our only ice cream for the week.

And except for Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, I don’t remember candy bars ever being available to tempt us.

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A week ago, Rebecca and I flew back to the USA from Heathrow Airport in London. We had spent the month in Scotland and England. Because our Air Canada flight was scheduled to depart at 8:30 AM, we had to be at the airport at 5:30, with no time for breakfast until we settled at our gate, where I observed this sight as I wandered around looking for a toilet.

As I relieved myself and thoroughly washed my hands, an iconoclastic thought seeped into and then rooted itself in my mind. Even though this small tub of ice cream cost an outrageous amount in dollars or pounds, could I have ice cream for breakfast?

The answer came as I tilted my head back to study the selection options. It’s not easy to find Häagen-Dazs Belgium Chocolate in my neck of the woods in the USA.

So I ponied up the four pounds, with part of me hoping the machine would jam; the part that listened to my mother.

But inside me, Jimmy and Tommy also spoke.

“Take two,” they said.

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