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.
Photo by the author
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.
Photo by the author of Leakey’s Bookshop in InvernessPhoto by the author
Still, a few had better things to do than pay attention to foreigners. They did, however, remind me to eat more fiber.
Photo by the author
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.
Photo by the author
“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.”
Photo by the author
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.
Photo by the author of a neighbor just down the street from our house
Photo by the author of the first roundabout in Decorah, Iowa
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Photo by the author
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.
Do you believe in reincarnation? Though I’m not a Buddhist or Hindu, I am agnostic, so I can speculate.
Three days ago, Rebecca and I came back from a month-long vacation and found unwanted guests hanging around our kitchen sink, garbage disposal, and recycling bin.
As I sit in my writing chair at 4:17 AM, one of those guys wobbles across my computer screen. I say wobble because apparently the Midwest USA drain gnat has weak legs. Sort of like me, at 77. When I magnify the picture, I can make out a spindly limb.
The corpse preserved in Rebecca’s photo was executed using this cellophane-wrapped card — you can see the light reflected — which is the perfect midge-killing machine. It sits at my right hand. On my left, lie Whoosh and a microfilter screen cloth that together will erase the evidence.
Does this little fellow understand how unique he is — the canal boat cat with a mustache? I suspect it’s an identity he’ll die with.
Like you, I’ve been many things, some briefly, a teenage ice cream scooper, and others permanently: a son, father, partner, and teacher, even in retirement.
Last night, this former teacher met a former student after a twenty-five-year lapse. Ujjwal reminded me that his parents, traveling from Nepal for their son’s graduation, had given me a thank-you gift that sat on my office shelf among other offerings.
It was a poignant reconnection that happened by chance in a restaurant and lasted around fifteen minutes.
Befitting my 77 years, it took me a moment or two to recall Ujjwal’s qualities as a student in the one class he took from me. Interestingly, he’s now a professor.
Photo by the author of Nottingham’s Turquoise Line #79
My father and mother took their three sons on one vacation each year when we were growing up in the 1950s and 60s. I remember three or four station wagons, including one with the back seat facing the rear, with first dibs to me, the oldest.
No seat belts, no harm, even when we were rear-ended at a stoplight somewhere in North Carolina. It jolted me enough that I dropped my Superman comic book, but the car only dented the heavy steel bumper.
My engineer Dad wasn’t a small talker, and at 12, I was still listening. “The Interstates will destroy public transportation,” he said during breakfast at The International House of Pancakes.
I thought about his offhand comment as Rebecca and I traveled around Scotland by ScotRail and then rode BritRail to Nottingham, England, which we explored on City Transport Tourquoise Line 79.
Photo by the author of Viewfield House on the Isle of Skye
Rebecca and I have just returned to St. Louis from 15 days in Scotland and 13 in England. Today we’ll drive to our home in northeast Iowa.
Yesterday, when we boarded Air Canada at 8:30 AM at Heathrow Airport in London, it was 60°F, and when we landed at 2:30 PM in St. Louis, it was 88°. After driving six hours north, when we pull into our Decorah driveway later this afternoon, it will be 60 ° again.
So, temperature-wise, over the past day, we’ve gone from fall to summer and back to fall.
When I suggested the favorite season prompt to Adrienne Beaumont during the August heat of the Global North, I had in mind that September represents a transition month for everyone in the world, with significant weather changes beginning that last roughly a quarter of the year.
In most areas around the world, the leaves change color and fall off, precipitation shifts, and temperatures modulate. After a changeover, a period of continuity sets in. This, in opposition to the previous season, prepares us for the next cycle.
So even if we don’t leave our homes, nature builds variety into our lives. And, in a bit of a paradox, reminds us of the continuity of change.
A lesson reinforced when we travel.
Especially to Scotland.
I took the first photo on day eight of our trip to Scotland, wanting to capture the clouds parting and the sun’s presence. I knew that if the sun had really disappeared, that story would have knocked Donald Trump’s shenanigans to the below-the-fold headlines of the front page of the New York Times.
For the first week, spent in the Highlands and on the Inner Hebrides islands, the sky took on this ominous beauty. You’ll have to be content with the picture, which is likely worth more than even a poet’s words.
Photo by the author
A week later, on the eastern side of this beautiful country, over the Cairngorms National Park, the cloud blanket brightened and lightened, but still did its water-distribution job, soaking everything inside my waterproof backpack.
Photo by the author
I wrote about our experience getting lost in this vast expanse, where we walked fourteen miles, took 31,000 steps, and spent over six hours confusedly reading maps and taking wrong turns.
And, to the point of this story, encountered what seemed to us like each of the four seasons. When the sun peeped through, we shed both our rain and fleece-lined jackets. For an hour or so, the wind peaked, and I pulled out my backpack gloves and stocking cap as my 77-year-old Raynaud’s syndrome hands were turning blue.
During the schmirr periods of rainfall, a light mist, I was reminded of walking through Palisade Park in the early spring in the American Midwest. But when the rain got heavier, both jackets were needed, and our back-home October fall chill was in the air.
If you’re around my age, you’ve accommodated to the continuities and changes taught by a long life.
These lessons are a gift of old age. We’ve learned well what nature, through seasonal changes, relentlessly teaches us.
Scotland, however, is the perfect short course, the Cliff Notes version of The Four Seasons.
Photo by the author of the Glenfinnan Viaduct (Harry Potter)
“No one’s ever got lost on this hike,” said Steve, our Dalrachney Lodge host in Carrbridge, as he picked us up on the lightly traveled A938 a couple of kilometers south of town.
Cairngorms National Park covers 10% of Scotland, and when Rebecca and I had reached the end of the path, with a river on the left, instead of on the right, and no bridge, I said, unhelpfully, “We’re screwed.” She, in character, turned around to retrace our steps. My only goal now was to keep her in sight.
It took us another hour to find a bridge and then, finally, the clearing where Steve had dropped us off six hours earlier.
My dying phone showed 31,722 steps and 14 miles, which broke our ten-mile record set in Malta eight years ago, when we were sexuagenarians. Debriefing with our rain-soaked maps two hours later over fish and chips for salt to help us retain water — recommended by a Canadian doctor also training around Scotland — we concluded that after we passed through the chicken coop property, allowed in Scotland, we took the least trampled path, and that made all the difference.
Photo by the author
This was the 12th of a 15-day Grand Tour of Scotland by Train planned by McKinlay Kidd. We began in Glasgow and finished in Edinburgh, with two- and three-night stays in Oban, Spean Bridge, Portree (Isle of Skye), Inverness, Thurso, Carrbridge and Pitlochry.
In one sentence, the itinerary offered us the traditional Scotland of small villages and the Highlands, and the modern urban, with trains that ran on time.
Photo by a kind stranger
I’ve picked a few highlights and promise to be short-winded; it’s the Scottish way.
Our first overnight, in Oban, set the Highlands’ tone. I now understood how this part of the world captured the hearts and imaginations of Robert Burns and Bob Dylan.
Photo by the author
Throughout Scotland, we stayed in large mansions turned into B&Bs. This is Viewfield House in Portree on the Isle of Skye. Our room was in the renovated stables in the back, up a flight of stairs, with slanted ceilings; very cozy.
Photo by the author
During a tour of Skye, David, the physician I mentioned above, asked our guide for the name of this waterfall.
Photo by the author
Stewart (Stu ART), who rebuilds guitars when he isn’t steering a van on the twisty, shoulder-free, one-lane roads of this large island and captivating a multinational group of twenty, and who seemed to know everyone and everything about the Inner Hebrides, said, “I have no idea, as we have so many waterfalls no one has felt the need to name them.”
Even I can’t mess up this picture.
Photo by the author
It rained every day, usually a smirr (light), never a slotin (hard). We came prepared.
Photo by a kind stranger
Scotland is a literary country. We found bookstores everywhere, including Leakey’s in Inverness, with no chairs and a delightfully laconic owner who responded to my churlish “Do you use the wood-burning stove in winter?” with “Do you heat your house in January?”
Years ago, in Morocco, with a group of college students, our guide, Mohammed Oujrid, turned to us after he got in the van on the first day and said, “Repeat after me: we’re travelers, not tourists.”
By that he meant we weren’t going to move around his country in a bubble. We were going to connect with Moroccans.
That’s what we did on the trains. As you can see with Rebecca and her seatmate below.
Photo by the author
Those are the precious connections we found at the end of the Scottish rainbows.
