paulmuses

The photo is dated February 29, 2020. It was the first meeting with Romanian students at the University of the West in Timisoara, Romania. They were graduate students in the Department of American Studies. It was a Saturday morning, since they all had full-time jobs; their university classes were on Friday night or Saturday. Many were elementary or secondary teachers. All spoke English.

I was part of America’s Fulbright Program, which sends scholars worldwide to do research and teach. My job was to teach about American politics.

My biggest concern that morning was walking to the Iulius Town Shopping Center after class to find an HDMI port like the one below that would work for my PowerPoint slides.

I also told my students that I would be gone the next Saturday for the Fulbright orientation meetings in Bucharest, where everything under the sun was discussed about living in this beautiful Eastern European country, except what was right around the corner: COVID.

So before our next class, all courses moved online. When the announcement came, I told Rebecca I had no idea how to teach two classes, each with 30 students, through a computer screen. I had never taught or taken an online course. In fact, it was worse.

For about a decade, until retirement in 2018, I had revised my college teaching pedagogy to remove any device, such as PowerPoint slides, between my students and me. This story explains why.

Good Teachers Are Made, Not Born

That’s me doing what I do best: talking with students.

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When I was awarded the Fulbright gig, that put me back in the saddle again. I thought I would use Powerpoint only until the Romanian students were comfortable with a more conversational American approach, thus the need for the correct port connection.

If you recall, in those first days of the virus, no one knew how long the COVID lockdowns would last. When the NBA shutdown on March 11, 2020, I knew it was serious and sure enough word came from the American state department that ran the Fulbright program that Rebecca and I should skedaddle back to the USA. When we left a Bucharest Hotel close to the airport two days later, they closed their doors, for the next year!

Ironically, the mass movement to online courses meant I could teach my students from Decorah, Iowa, my home. In the fall of 2021, with another Fulbright, and, we thought, Covid behind us, we gladly went back to Timisora and a new group of students.

Except, the day after we arrived in September 2021, a new wave of the virus spread through Romania, so the faculty at the University of West voted to go back online. Here I am, with one of my classes, in our Romanian apartment, from 11 am to 2 pm every Saturday from September through January 2022.

So, two Fulbright Awards, Spring 2020 and Fall 2021, and no personal contact with students. Fortunately, in 2021, Rebecca and I enjoyed four months in this phenomenal Eastern European country.

In 2023, I applied for a third Fulbright, to Romania, to Timisoara, to the University of the West. This one was for two weeks and a series of lectures on the American Presidential election of 2024.

Here’s the crowd at one of the talks. Gratifyingly, it included many former students I had only met online.

And you might recognize, this fellow, Ede Szabo, from the first photo of my very first class in 2020.

This was, finally, a chance to talk in person about one of Ede’s passions, American Presidents.

That’s real teaching!

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Vera-Marie Landi asks about projects, and her excellent question has gotten me pondering about a big one on the horizon.

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Last night, dead tired after a day of touring the Orkney Islands, each with a tumbler of Talisker Scottish whiskey in our room at Pentland House in Thurso, on the northernmost tip of the Scottish mainland, Rebecca and I talked about Ireland.

It was early, around 7 pm, and we were trying to stay awake to watch episode six of the Netflix series, The Vikings, about younger people pillaging both European nations starting in the 8th century. 

This was day nine of our two-week train trip around Scotland. Instead of the peaceful modern Norwegians, we’re trying to stay ahead of Donald Trump, who occupied western Ireland over the weekend.

Our conversation wandered to 2019 and a trip we co-led to Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the first photo, that’s our group of 24 standing in front of the Northern Ireland Parliament Building, Stormont.

And here we’re bunched next to a Peace Wall between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods in Belfast.

I’m showing you and me two group pictures as a reminder of the double edge of the Viking travel sword. On the one hand, we loved our group of 24 in Ireland. No one was high-maintenance except me, and even then, it was just the occasional glitch in the itinerary.

But that was 2019, when Rebecca and I were in our upper sixties, spring chickens. Now, closer to 80, and asking: do we have a Scotland Luther College (my former employer) Alumni and Friends trip in us?

We wanted to do one in 2021, but COVID nixed it. Again in 2023, this time throttled by a college President who questioned its utility. Thankfully, the current president reinstated them, and that’s where our dilemma lies.

It’s likely our tour won’t happen until 2028, when we’ll be…older, though not the approximately 5000 years of the Stones of Stenness on Orkney.

No one, not even the greatest American baseball player, Willie Mays, can do something forever. I remember watching Willie stumble in the outfield playing center field for the New York Mets in the World Series at 42 in 1973. His iconic hat flew off as it had a million times before, this time showing a bald spot. The extraordinary Mays had aged out of baseball.

This also happens to ordinary men and women. 

The trick is to know when. 

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“Do you actually use the stove during the winter?” I asked.

“It depends on what you mean by actually,” gently rebuffed the owner of Leakey’s Bookshop in Inverness, Scotland, as he handed me my purchase, a bookbag with the store name, the only thing we could fit in our suitcases. He followed up with, “How long have you been using your house furnace?”

Knowing when to fold, I asked about his store’s history. The less colorful version you can read about here.

When Rebecca and I visited Paris for three days in 2018, we still joke that we never saw the Eiffel Tower. Once you walk into the arrondisements, it’s easy to get lost.

Yesterday, at breakfast, we talked over the itinerary for our last day in Inverness and asked,

Would we take a wander around the city or hunt the loch for Nessie?

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Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001?

I was a professor in this college classroom. Where were you? And what did that day mean to you?

Decorah, Iowa (All times are Central Standard Time)

I got to my office about 6 a.m. to prepare for an 8 a.m. class. I was teaching a new course, Struggle for Freedom, that compared freedom struggles in three countries: Northern Ireland, South Africa, and America.

I finished my work in Koren Hall around 7:30 AM and strolled the 200 yards to Main and my classroom. The sun was on my back on a clear day in the American Midwest.

Always restless before class, I wanted to check whether there were enough whiteboard markers for student reports and enough chairs for the 16 of us.

I also wondered where to put the portable lectern to signal to students where I would be sitting. I put it at the end of the table facing the door. I didn’t check whether the TV would work because I didn’t plan to use it.

Tuesday, September 11, would be our 5th class meeting. We started with Northern Ireland, and that day’s topic was the role of terrorism in the conflict between Protestant and Catholic Communities.

It was an ordinary Tuesday morning on the Luther College campus in Decorah, Iowa.

Boston & New York

At 6:59 AM, American Airlines Flight 11, which carried 92 people, took off from Boston International Airport and was bound for Los Angeles.

Around the time I got to my office:

Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuiness Jr. were going through their pre-flight routines.

Chief Flight Attendant Karen Martin and Flight Attendants Barbara Arestegui, Jeffrey Collman, Sara Low, Kathleen Nicosia, Betty Ann Ong, Jean Roger, Dianne Snyder, and Amy Sweeney were overseeing the boarding of passengers.

Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Sheri, and Stam al-Sugami were among the 81 passengers who found seats.

At 7:19 AM, Flight Attendant Betty Ann Ong notified the American Airlines ground crew that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Ong provided information for 25 minutes.

Two minutes after Ong’s last transmission, at 7:46 AM, Mohamed Atta guided American Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Decorah (8 AM)

As the 15 students traipsed into Main 211, one mentioned he had heard on the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

And then, just after we started class, at 8:03 AM, Marwan al-Shehhi steered United Flight 75 into the South Tower. In 2001, no one in the class had a laptop or handheld device to see the news as it happened.

Just as Hani Hanjour maneuvered American Airlines 175 into the Pentagon at 8:37 AM, a student poked her head into our classroom and told us another plane had hit the World Trade Center.

I went to the TV in the classroom and discovered it was not working. But the world had impinged upon our orderly classroom, and we needed to see what was happening. I remembered a TV in my department’s administrative assistant’s office and told the class to follow me.

It was about 8:50 AM.

We hurried across campus into Chelle Meyer’s third-floor office just in time to see the south tower collapse at 8:59.

Seven minutes later, the passengers of Flight 93 forced Ziad to fly the plane into a Pennsylvania field instead of the US Capitol or White House.

At 9:28 AM, two minutes before my class on Northern Ireland terrorism would have ended, the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

Nineteen terrorists, four planes, 265 passengers and crew, 2712 killed, and 6000 injured on that beautiful Tuesday morning.

What did that day mean to me?

On November 22, 1963, I was in a freshman high school English class when President John Kennedy was assassinated. I remember an announcement over the intercom and a classmate joking about “who Jackie would sleep with that night.” Nothing else until the following day when I went to pay my paper route bill at the newspaper office. Everything seemed normal. No one was talking about Kennedy’s murder.

Why not? I thought. Don’t they know something terrible has happened? And then the next day, a Sunday, when we came home after Mass, my dad told us Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald.

How does a 14-year-old process these events?

Five years later, in the summer of 1968, after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, my dad came home from his work as an engineer and asked, “What was happening in our country?”

I started my sophomore year in college the following fall, and college helped me filter, distill, extract, and clarify what was happening in the world.

I was no longer that overwhelmed paperboy. I didn’t know it then, but a college professor was born from the crucible of the 1960s.

College, through its courses, professors, speakers, and midnight dorm sessions, provides context for events. Knowing something is always so much better than knowing nothing.

It’s always made me less anxious.

In the spring of 2000, I took students to Northern Ireland to study the conflict between the Catholic and Protestant communities. That pricked my interest in terrorism, a topic I never explored in graduate school.

When politics, religion, and terrorism all came together on that terrible, beautiful Tuesday, I needed to know more about what was going on in the world that would produce these horrors.

So, in the summer of 2002, I developed a new course, Terrorism and Democracy.

It was a one-off, I thought.

Instead, I taught Terrorism and Democracy every year until I retired in 2018. It became one of Luther College’s most popular courses.

What about you? What did America’s 9/11 mean to you?

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Bob Dylan’s heart was in the Scottish Highlands; Robert Burns’ was too. There’s something magical about this place that a million people visit every year. Words flow as easily as the rain.

Yesterday, stuffed into our Ghostbuster’s rain gear disguise, Rebecca and I climbed into Stuart’s coach in Portree for an 11-hour mosy around the most popular of Scotland’s 900 islands.

Stu-ART was one of those inestimable guides who knew precisely the line between talking too much and talking too little, with a perfect blend of history and humor. Our 15 van mates ranged from 30 to 77, with a mixture of Americans, Canadians, English and Japanese.

At our lunch stop at a busy cafe, with a cheese scone itself worthy of a Dylan song and Burns poem, our guide helped serve the meal and seemed to know everyone in the cafe.

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We had just stepped off the Jacobite Steam Train after crossing the Glenfinnan Viaduct, made famous by Harry Potter.

It’s hard to see in the photo, but there are hundreds of people on the bank to the right of the bridge and underneath the first arch that greet each of the four daily crossings.

Instead of Platform 9 3/4 at London’s King’s Cross Station, we boarded the Jacobite on Platform 2 at Fort Williams, and rather than broomsticks, we flew over the Skye Bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to mainland Scotland in a taxi driven by taciturn Sean, a pleasant man, who drove very fast.

When asked by our van mate John if we could stop for lunch on the four-hour trip to Viewfield House, Sean’s eyes darkened, and his head moved ever so slowly side to side.

Lord Voldemort, our hero.

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Rebecca and I are settled in a dry accommodation in Scotland’s western highlands. I know it’s Sunday because tomorrow we’re off to Skye.

My phone’s weather App gives our location as the villages of Caol and Mallaig, but we’re not duped. It’s so easy to be fooled by Mother Nature Apps. We know the closest hamlet is Spean Bridge because we detrained there yesterday and will return tomorrow.

Today, we’re going to hike in the wooded area you see below.

I’m smiling in my rain gear because around here precipitation is an hourly fact of life. At first, we resisted, constantly checking our phones to find dry interludes.

Now, we’re back from a three-hour hike in the Glen along the River Spean. Mostly a smirr, with several skliff showers. Very fortunately, no plouter or stoating on a dreich day.

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It can’t be The Odyssey because Rebecca and I are almost twice Odysseus’ forty years, even older than his impersonator, the stolid Matt Damon, at fifty-five.

Still, only a Bronze Age spear’s throw from our first destination, Oban, lies Corryvreckan, the third-largest whirlpool in the world, sans Charybdis and Scylla, Odyssey-like.

We decided on train travel for our two-week sojourn through Scotland. Not the one you see behind Rebecca in Glasgow’s Central Station, but another that arrived two minutes later, exactly on time.

Instead of a sleeper car, we’ll bed down each night in a stately B & B, like the Heatherington House.

So, for our first time in this beautiful country, we opted to follow the rails through traditional Scotland, the villages of the West Highlands, and modern Scotland, the cities of Glasgow, Inverness, and Edinburgh.

An adventure; not an odyssey.

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Three days ago, Rebecca and I walked into an old building that now houses an antique business. Its wood floors had just been polished. It was a second or two before the familiar lemon smell reached my nose. 

A day later, sitting on our front porch, talking over our September trip to Scotland, we heard the first whistle of the fall football season. 

Yesterday, a neighbor, who teaches high school history, lumbered by with Rome, Greece, the 13 colonies, or maybe all three in his backpack. 

I taught for half a century and learned to love seeing students’ backs and fronts. That’s something underappreciated about a teaching career. The routine prepares you for depletion and renewal. 

Repeating the lessons of fall and spring, nodding off and early rising, and season four of Ted Lasso.

Something every good teacher and Bob Dylan know: if you’re not busy being born, you’re dying.

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Semi-scammed again

It’s been three years since I was last scammed. An ice cream man, believe it or not, crouching in wait under the Washington Monument, just a hop, skip, and jump from the algae-infected reflecting pool in front of Honest Abe.

Imagine a con in Washington, D.C., even before the biggest con man of all returned. You can read the hoary story here.

Scammed Under the Washington Monument by an Ice Cream Man

And what I learned

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Yesterday, it happened again, sort of, and serves as the foundation for this tale about personal independence, a response to Jerv Nai Matrap’s prompt.

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I’m soon to be 77, with the history of a mother who was determined to live out the winter of her life on her terms which meant, in her house, in control of paying bills, etc. Our father, also Paul, died of sinus cancer in 1993.

Mom was like a fort, impregnable, with a moat in front and the draw bridge up whenever any of us even tip toed close to taking any of these responsibilities away. She saw Trojan Horses everywhere.

One thing my two brothers and I worried about was mom’s vulnerabilty to phone fraudsters. So, sometime in her eighties — she would live to 95, all but the final two years, in her home — Pat, who lived five miles from her, and with mom’s reluctant permission, added his name to her bank account.

Which he would monitor on her computer every Saturday morning before they went for breakfast at Panera Bread.

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Did you know you can order a DIY castle online? According to the website, the first piece is the defensive perimeter. Amazon will deliver it on Tuesday.

Kidding aside, yesterday morning, a Saturday, I did order a PDF of what I thought was going to be information about my house that would include the deed that I needed and somehow I had misplaced.

The domain, Public Records Data, in it’s header come-on, promised a plethora of information about my property. Scrolling down, without reading too closely, I discovered the cost would be $7 for the report.

I filled in the required information, including my credit card numbers.About five minutes later, I received a text with a link to the report. Once downloaded, I began to read.

Lots of data but the names and dates did not quite fit. For example, it had me purchasing the house in 2003 when I had bought it in 2000. And there was no deed.

My tightened stomach told me I had screwed up. So did Rebecca, when I told her what I had done as I handed her a first cup of coffee.

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“You did what,” she said. “You’ve got to contact your bank, and the credit card company.”

“The website looked legit,” I replied, even as a feeling of dread swept over me.

Not a complete idiot, I first went to my online bank account. There was the $7 charge from Public Records Data, out of Las Vegas. Damn. I reloaded the bank site, and a $26 charge appeared from the same company. Double damn.

Next I called the number on the back of my debit card. Fidgeting and berating myself while on hold for about 10 minutes, I explained the situation to the Visa fraud specialist. She pulled up my account, including the two recent payments, and gave me the Public Records Data phone number. She said it looked like a legitimate business.

As I worked the problem, I began to calm down. Rebecca sat on the back porch every so often asking for an update. I called Public Records Data and, with very little waiting time, got a second real person. She asked for my email address and looked up my account.

I told her I understood the $7 charge but not the $26. She replied the additional charge was for a monthly subscription to their service automatically added whenever anyone purchases a report which was, she said, in the fine print.

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I cancelled everything and asked that my information be deleted from their site. She said it would be done immediately. Two minutes later, three emails from Public Records Data described the expungement of “Paul” from the site. They even refunded my $7.

I carried my computer out to the back porch to join Rebecca, still feeling unsettled. Public Records Data was not like the DC ice cream scammer. When I looked again at its web site, in smallish print, but not hidden, it describes the service it provides, pulling public information, from third party sites, and makes no promises about the accuracy of its information.

For someone not paying close attention, like the fellow in the image, intended to mimic me, it’s easy to purchase something that really is bogus. In that sense, the company is playing on the vulnerabilities of people who are looking for easy access to the information they need.

But are older people, like my mother, like me, uniquely susceptible to this phenomenon? As Rebecca says, I’ve always acted rashly, often jumping into things before I’ve thought them through. Exactly what I did this morning.

Perhaps there’s no reason to fit a tendency I’ve had at every age into an aging narrative. On the other hand, I believe Joe Biden at some point in his first term, before the disastrous debate with Donald Trump, did age out of being an effective President. Perhaps, the same will be true for me, regarding the routine tasks of everyday life.

In other words, that some kind of cognitive and emotional intelligence decline will impair my judgment requiring unwanted interventions.

When that happens — if that happens — I don’t want to just pull up the drawbridge. I want to do like my friend, Will, who at 90 turned over to his son the keys of his car as his periphery eyesight declined.

Wisdom, perfectly aligned with Will’s years.

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