Sixty-two years ago, I left Davy Crockett for Marilyn Monroe

*

Four days ago, I spent two minutes gazing at Marilyn Monroe in a restaurant bathroom in Guanajuato, Mexico.

You see the evidence in the photo.

It wasn’t our first tryst.

*

Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 when I was 13.

In the year of her death, I had wedged a well-creased Life Magazine cover photo of her between my mattress and bed spring. In the open, on a table next to my bed in a bedroom I shared with my 11-year-old brother, Peter, sat a new, small, orange transistor radio with earphones.

I didn’t understand why I liked listening in private to the music played by local disc jockey Lou Guttenberger and why I wanted to look at Marilyn repeatedly.

Or why I only did either in the dark.

I recall my index finger and thumb placing the earbuds carefully in each ear, first the right and then the left, clicking the tiny vertical on-button, and then unfolding Marilyn.

Our weekly vocabulary word test in eighth grade at Sacred Heart School never included décolletage, cleavage, or puberty.

Two years earlier, I had slept with my fingers clasping the fake fur of my Davy Crocket coonskin cap.

I left Davy for Marilyn.

Two years later, I hid a Playboy in a nearby wooded ravine my friend Jim had stolen from his older brother John.

Under some brush, deep enough, my old paper route customer, Mrs. Coleman, who lived next door, could not see me. She knew my mom.

I left Marilyn for a centerfold with a staple in her belly button.

Could the false teach me about the real?

Magazines were all I had. I needed to know what I was missing.

Gazing was safe.

Touch, sound, smell, and taste would come later.

My school’s nuns and priests were no help. Nor were my parents or younger brothers. I had no sisters.

*

Next, I slept with one of my mother’s discarded nylons as a stocking cap to try to straighten out my curly hair.

A friend told me girls liked guys with straight hair.

Lou, the DJ, still played songs that soothed my desperation.

The Lovin’ Spoonful asked if I believed in Magic.

I did and dreamed every night.

For a cure to acne.

*

As I finished this story, one thought came to me unexpectedly. Looking back from a lifetime away, life was easier for that scared half-man me than it was for Marilyn Monroe. Or the Playboy Centerfold.

I’m sorry for my part in that.

Our two weeks in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, demonstrate the value of balance between old and new, tried and true.

*

For my partner Rebecca, it starts with a firm bed. For me, it’s a suitable place to write in the morning.

When you travel, there’s a built-in tension between old and new. You leave the comfort of your home, routines, bed, and writing room, the tried and true, for the new.

The toe-touching left leg and the free-form right in Urbieta’s En Equilibrium.

In equilibrium.

Too much of either, and you lose

Balance.

It’s not easy, as you can see the powerful grip of both hands and the concentration on the face of Urbieta’s gymnast.

The same is true when we travel.

Our Casita

We are spending January in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. This is my first time south of the American border and Rebecca’s first time in Mexico. We live in a small house, a casita.

Here’s a view from the outside.

The window on the third floor is a bathroom connected to our bedroom. The bedroom opens into a deck with a wood-constructed covering you can see to the left of the bathroom window.

Our neighborhood, in the late afternoon, from the deck.

I won’t show you the bed, but it meets Rebecca’s exacting standards. Our tiny first-floor dining room doubles as my writing place. You can see the galley kitchen in the mirror.

Two stairs connect this floor to a second-floor bathroom and our third-floor bedroom.

Last night, two weeks into our San Miguel time, sitting with Gin & Tonics on the third-floor balcony, watching the sunset over our neighborhood, and thinking about January 2025. Apartments and houses are snatched up a year in advance, so we must decide now.

We love the location of our casita. More on that in a minute. And our Mexican hosts treat us very well. But we’ve made friends who have invited us into their homes, and we can’t reciprocate. Not comfortably. We have no room.

Yesterday afternoon, Rebecca spent four hours online on the third-floor balcony and found a larger home in the neighborhood in our price range that would accommodate our needs.

When she described her discovery, I told myself I had seen that concentrated face somewhere.

The Perfect Location and a Temptation

This is San Miguel de Allende’s central plaza, the Jardín. Presiding in the background is the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcāngel Catholic Church.

It is a seven-minute walk from our casita. We are seven to twenty walking minutes from almost everything we want to do.

Beginning with this street, just outside our front door.

We walk Aldama several times daily because it connects us to the Jardín and Bonanza, a small grocery store, the Biblioteca, San Miguel’s library, and Fábrica La Aurora. It was in this art gallery where I discovered Juan Urbieta’s En Equilibrio.

Notice the narrow sidewalk and cobblestone street. These are typical throughout San Miguel. Each presented a walking challenge. Fortunately, we brought thick-soled shoes and learned to concentrate on every step.

And we learned something else. Most other walkers accommodate. They either step into the street to let you slip by or, more often, tilt their bodies to give you more sidewalk space. Of course, we do the same.

It’s a two-step that works but requires close attention. And reciprocity. And accommodation to the other.

Here’s Rebecca today on our walk to the Járdin. See the subtle shoulder and hip movements by both.

It’s what we love most about San Miguel.

But, of course, there is a temptation at the end of this cobblestone road.

When I took the previous photo of the Járdin, I had my back to a Starbucks. Starbucks is comfort food — like McDonalds. There are also two yellow arches in San Miguel. So far, we’ve stayed away from both. But we’re not so pure and have transgressed, leaning too much toward the toe on the ring.

On two four-month trips to Malta in 2018 and Romania in 2021, Rebecca and I bought hot fudge sundaes and fries at Ronald’s place. We’d had enough of the superior Italian gelato in Malta and European chocolate in Romania. Our systems yearned for McDonald’s mediocre soft serve and fudge. The fries? Well, there’s a reason McDonald’s has long waiting lines in 119 countries.

I’m weaker than Rebecca. Yesterday, I spotted Spaghetti Bolognese on the menu of Hecho en Mexico, a neighborhood restaurant. We were with new friends, so our communication was silent. Her look was enough. I ordered something Mexican.

I need help to stay strong. I spent a month alone in Krakow, Poland, with a Pizza Hut outside my apartment door in 2004.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I’m a comfort food addict.

I remember my first trip outside America, to England, in 1987, with a group of American teachers. Before ordering the first night in a pub, one of our lot said disappointingly, “There’s nothing on the menu I’m used to.”

I’ve regretted that comment for 47 years.

Travel, for me, is an antidote to complacency.

It throws me new, I feint with old, and the tension enriches.

It helps that Rebecca is watching.

I’ve got a Green Card to the Country of the Old

*

Welcome to my world.

Let’s call it the country of the old, from William Butler Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium.

It could also be your world. If not today, someday.

I’ve got a Green Card.

Another poet, William Stafford, wrote

A passport costs everything there is.

Some days, I feel old, and some days I don’t

Every few years, I bend over the wrong way, pull the Iliopsoas muscles in my lower back right side, and feel like the old and falling apart tree pictured above.

I asked my friend Alan, 78, who is dealing with a more serious back problem, how this condition influences the way he thinks about himself.

Who am I? Am I the 78-year-old who enjoys playing golf, leading workshops, going to rotary and the film festival, or am I a person whose back pain affects my range of activities and limits my world? I now have two senses of identity; whichever one is dominant is driven by a level of pain.

Alan’s right; pain matters to identity.

So does age. Alan has had a handicap since childhood. Decades of his putting weight on one leg have now resulted in pressure on a sciatic nerve.

I first pulled my SOAS muscles stepping out of a car 40 years ago, at 34. The pain forced me to my knees. Three days later, I was fully recovered.

Now, at 74, the recovery time is two weeks, during which my identity, like Alan’s, focuses on my physical limitations, the limitations of an aged person.

Somedays, I feel old, and some days, I don’t.

This experience and Alan’s thoughtful answer have made me think about how important age is to my identity.

So, I asked other friends.

Here are some excerpts.

Age is everything to my identity. That may be because I am 78, and age and identity seem symbiotic, reflecting the other in everyday life. (Dale, 78)

Being older is not important to my identity at all. I am still working as a university professor. Mentoring students keeps me mentally and psychologically young. (Jim, 67)

Now, on the edge of 80, I live in awe of my age each day, even though many of my 80-year-old friends take their age in stride. (Ruth, 79)

Age is quite important to my identity [because] I have too many regrets and wasted years, [so] having 10–20 years available doesn’t seem the same as it did 20 years ago. (Wade, 67)

Much of my identity at this age is satisfaction in reflecting on all the different things I’ve undertaken and as an explorer of what life has to offer. (Peter, 82)

I’ve gotten to the top of the hill and got perspective. (Rebecca, 72)

Isn’t it a gift to have thoughtful friends?

Like Alan’s reply, my friends’ answers helped me develop two more ideas regarding age and identity.

They may also trigger your thoughts and stories.

Please share them in the comment section.

Chronological and Psychological Age

Jim is a university professor who plans to work for another five years. He introduced me to the distinction between chronological and psychological age.

He writes:

I mentor quite a few students, which helps keep me mentally and psychologically young. Psychologically speaking, I don’t think of myself as 67, probably in my late 40s or early 50s.

And elaborated:

The concept of psychological age is real — Pam [Jim’s wife] and I are chronologically the same age as many of the people with whom we are interacting, but in terms of our behavior and psychological age, we are much younger.

I retired in 2018 at 69 from 40 years of college teaching. At my college’s Christmas party that winter, I looked around at the crowd and, without thinking about it, gravitated toward my younger, still teaching colleagues. That’s who I identified with. I wanted nothing to do with the country of the old — not even their company.

For about a year, I did not enroll or teach in my college’s Life Long Learning program, join retired friends for Thursday breakfast, or attend the monthly emeriti lecture series.

And then, one day, while shaving, I noticed I had kept my sleep t-shirt on while lathering up. I had covered my aging torso.

I was turning away from what?

A part of who I had become. Turning away rarely works.

At that moment, I pivoted toward the country of the old.

That’s me below, in the red hat, a few months ago at a lecture by a retired colleague.

I’m also a student and teacher in Life Long Learning seminars, a regular at the Thursday morning retirees coffee klatch, and at this year’s Christmas party, looked over at my younger colleagues and felt sorry for them.

I like to visit their country occasionally.

But there’s no dual citizenship.

Experience and Wisdom

Why did I feel sorry for my younger colleagues?

My friend Dale, 78, describes one reason.

When I turned 65, my age allowed me to control my life completely.

For Dale, a ceramist, that meant new hobbies, including hiking and fishing.

In the country of the old, trails, streams, and libraries are always crowded.

My friends still in the country of the young have to go to work in the morning.

But there’s something else at play. It’s why I also lament my younger self. My friend Wade wrote about how regret looms large in later life.

Across the breakfast table, my partner, Rebecca, answered the question in the title of this story with the top-of-the-hill quote. I asked her to say more.

My life experiences have solidified my position on many things. I know more things, including that having the wrong position is okay.

Rebecca speaks for many of us.

Not all older people are wise. But many, including me, are more perceptive than we were.

Age builds a free lending library of experience.

Peter weighed in.

I have spent a lot of time in 80+ years exploring what I think the nature of reality is and have sought philosophy and science in that pursuit and with am with the conclusions I have drawn that give me satisfaction if not ultimate truth.

So, being an elder feels good.

“He Was Complete”

Roughly corresponding to my turn toward the country of the old five years ago, I started to read biographies of my sports heroes: Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali, Sandy Koufax, Bill Russell, Buck O’Neil, and Roberto Clemente.

I didn’t think much about why I was doing this until a friend loaned me a book of essays by Roger Angell, Once More Around the Park. Angell died at 99 two years ago and was considered the finest baseball chronicler. In the preface to Around the Park, he’s contemplating the retirement of relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry with these words:

He had closed the book, and in that moment had become fresh and young again, and…wonderfully clear in my mind. He was complete.

I no longer cared about my hero’s athletic accomplishments. I was more interested in the kind of people they had become.

When I get my Country of the Old passport, it will be stamped complete.

By that time, I will have seen it all.

And made sense of my life.

William Butler Yeats’s poem Sailing to Byzantium can be found here.

William Stafford’s poem Waiting in Line can be found here.

The world has turned, and it isn’t turning back

*

Two nights ago, we ate at Aga’s Restaurant in Sugarland, just outside Houston, Texas.

The WE were six white Americans who differed by age, gender, profession, and family status but shared a visible skin tone that differed from the overwhelmingly Indian and Pakistani crowd.

Aga’s advertises itself as the “#1 Indian-Pakistani Restaurant in North America.”

The proof of its claim was in our waiting time (90 minutes), the number of people in Aga’s three serving rooms when we sat down (500), and the excellent, authentic dishes.

Because of that waiting time, I walked through Aga’s three rooms to get to the toilet when we were seated. White faces made up roughly 5% of the patrons.

*

Similarly, Jenny Boucek, who you see in the first photo, is not the only woman coaching in America’s National Basketball Association. Currently, there are six female assistant coaches. (source)

Each of the 30 NBA teams is allowed three assistants. Below are the three Indiana Pacers assistants surrounding Head Coach Rick Carlisle at The Houston Rockets Indiana Pacers game a week ago.

The NBA assistant coaching room seats 90, so Coach Boucek and the five other women coaches make up a little under 6%.

The four Indiana Pacer coaches had just finished barking at a foul called on one of their players by this referee.

Dannica Mosher is one of eight female NBA referees. (source)

Out of 74.

11%

*

I’m a 74-year-old white male, heterosexual as well. I was born in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson stood alone in the batter’s box in American Major League Baseball.

My Catholic compatriot, John F. Kennedy, would break another barrier before I started high school.

When I looked back at my 1967 high school yearbook, I discovered no “girls” sports teams, only this.

Weirdly, I don’t recall a single conversation with friends, parents, or teachers about girls not having teams. Or not being coaches or refs.

Two nights after Obama was elected President of the United States, I sat next to my son, Ben, at a concert listening to Bob Dylan sing Blowin’ in the Wind.

My tears were not the only ones in the concert hall.

*

Whites in a sea of Browns, women amidst men, and a Black man joins an exclusive club.

All in my lifetime.

I felt completely at ease at Aga’s.

Boucek yelled at Mosher, who yelled back.

Obama was reelected.

*

None of this was easy.

Or finished.

And some forces are pushing back.

This competition — about change and inclusion — is now the defining feature of American politics.

But the reactionaries will lose.

Today, too many see all of this and more, not as change but as ordinary.

The way things are.

When I mentioned my Aga and Houston Rockets’ takeaways to a family member a generation younger, he looked puzzled. He didn’t notice either because he sees them all the time.

I notice them because they are new to me.

Bob Dylan, of course, was right in Blowin’. It always takes too damn long to do the right thing.

And he was prescient about all times.

Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

My perspective began to change at 70 on a bus ride in Malta.

*

We begin life needing help for everything.

We’re then taught for two decades to make our own decisions.

A lesson we repeat to our children.

Eventually, fully independent, new choices arise when we are free from kids and jobs.

Finally, we are back where we started, needing help for everything.

When did the worm start turning for you?

Have you changed your perspective about being dependent?

To do what I want, I increasingly need help. This paradox may have been hidden from me throughout adulthood. It’s now come into full view.

With some help from Priority Seating.

*

The second time it happened was on a packed bus in Malta in 2018, about an hour before I took this photo of Rebecca. The bus was so crowded I couldn’t get my hand in my pocket to take out my phone to chronicle the congestion.Malta is a tiny nation in the Mediterranean that accommodates 518,538 people on three islands, about 1/10 the area of Rhode Island. Despite having one car for every person, its public buses are always full.

My employer, Luther College, has a semester program in this former British colony. Rebecca and I supervised the study of 11 students during the spring of 2018. With our students traveling alone this weekend, we hopped a bus in Valletta, Malta’s capital city, for the 78-minute trip across the country to beautiful Dingli Cliffs.

When we eventually found the Cliffs, we could savor this spectacular view.

*

A few weeks earlier, on a crowded London Underground Tube carriage, we first heard these words directed at us by a young woman: “Would you like our seats?” With a nod, her partner seconded the invitation.

“Thanks, but we’re OK,” we replied, as Rebecca had a strap handle and I a pole. We’re both early baby boomers, so we knew chronology fit us into the older, priority seating category. But our younger-than-we-look genes had given us cover. It was shocking to discover that even our disguised selves looked old enough for priority seating.

I didn’t think much about this until we boarded that Malta bus.

Rebecca found a seat, and I, feeling virtuous and spritely, repeatedly declined seat offerings until they stopped coming. The priority seats were monopolized by a couple who appeared a little younger than me, obviously destined for Dingli Cliffs. About an hour into the bone-rattling journey, virtue and sprite long gone, I thought about pulling out my passport to plead my case to the woman who looked saintly.

As I look back, the bone-rattling Dingli Cliffs trip opened the door of dependence, a crack. Toward the end of our four months in Malta, I admitted to Rebecca and myself that I had come to dread our weekend bus trips visiting Malta sites unless I knew I would have a seat. And I didn’t yet feel comfortable grabbing a priority seat or accepting its offer.

For example, we decided not to visit the village of Melleha, the site of the 1980 film Popeye starring Robin Williams, because of the high likelihood of standing for more than an hour.

But what if we had missed Dingli Cliffs?

Or, in London, because of the crowded Underground, this painting by Amedeo Modigliani at The Courtauld Gallery?

So I began to rethink my refusal to accept a seat, to get from A to Beat.

That’s not me, but he looks comfortable and at peace.

How did he get to that place? How could I do the same?

*

In retrospect, I had started this journey on the Dingli Cliffs bus by recognizing my mortality. In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande puts it this way.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life — to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.

As my body diminishes, I will need help to keep doing what I want to maintain my life’s integrity.

To experience a birds-eye view of the Mediterranean or gaze at an exquisite painting.

Occasionally, this may require you to give up your seat to me.

I will accept it with gratitude and more than a dab of sorrow.

*

Religion divides as much as it unites.

No, I’m not referring to the Hamas-Israel War. Or to the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. However, the latter centuries-old tension is closer to my religious experience growing up.

Religious differences are dangerous in the larger world and the personal world of our families.

I’ll get to my religious worldview in a few minutes. But first, you have to know a little about my family.

Mother

My mother was a devout Catholic. Her father, who died in 1945, four years before I was born, was a Protestant who became the first nonCatholic buried in the Catholic cemetery of my hometown. Albert Thomas sold life insurance to the priests in the Diocese of Davenport, played cards with the Bishop, and was a respected community member.

One of his three daughters, Florence, became Sister Marilyn Thomas, a member of the Sisters of Charity (BVM), until she died at 103 in 2019. Throughout my adult life, I met many of Fawny’s — so named because her brother Al could not pronounce Florence — on lunch visits to the Motherhouse in Dubuque, Iowa. Over seven decades, I grew to love, respect, and honor BVM’s.

That’s me in the first photo with Sister Marilyn in 1957. Notice the Christmas cards on the wall, my mom’s handiwork.

Father

My father and his four siblings were each baptized in a different Protestant church. That’s he and my mom, Dody, on their wedding day in 1948 in front of the altar at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Davenport, Iowa.

After he returned from World War II, my dad courted my mom for two years. He agreed to begin the Rite of Christian Initiation to become a Catholic. As he told the story, he was mistreated by the priest in charge, and Dad quit, never to return to this church except for weddings and funerals.

My dad was a chemical engineer and always spoke of himself as an agnostic, someone who kept his distance from belief in a god. He died of cancer in 1993 at 71. In a final letter to his sister-in-law, Sister Marilyn, he refers to God’s plan. Did he, in the end, believe?

A lifelong Republican, he cast his final vote for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 because Dad hated the growing influence of the Christian Right on the Republican Party.

He also grew to love the BVM’s at Mount Carmel in Dubuque. They prayed for him every day during his seven-year battle with sinus cancer. He returned the favor by throwing the Nuns a pizza party about a year before he died.

Parents

While I was growing up, my dad always had breakfast ready on Sundays when we returned from mass. He had agreed that his children would be raised Catholics. I assume so because his three boys attended Catholic elementary and high schools. But I never heard my parents talk about religion. Or argue about it.

But there was tension. For example, the Protestant Gardner grandparents (Paul and Edith) and my Thomas grandmother Florence never socialized. Our family would spend Christmas Eve with Florence and Christmas Day with Paul and Edith. And my mom told us Edith favored the three Protestant daughters-in-law.

But my mom also taught her oldest son, me, at 16 that he and his first girlfriend, Sharon, could not get serious because she was Jewish. Of course, we did for two years, with me sneaking around.

The event that best encapsulates the strain from my parents’ mixed marriage was something that happened after my dad died when he was beyond personal choice. As our family filed out of the viewing room before the undertaker closed the casket, I took a last look at my dad. What I saw was a rosary wrapped around his helpless hands put there by my mom.

Though she lived for another twenty-five years, I never asked her about this. I wish I had. She must have yearned for my Dad to convert. Maybe we could have talked about her parents’ inter-religious marriage. How religious difference divides.

I’ve also thought about whether, if I could return to that funeral home anteroom, I would remove the Rosary, a symbol of the Catholicism my father rejected in life, from my Dad’s final resting place. I’m of two minds. I don’t know what Dad and Mom discussed in his last days. Perhaps he changed his mind, and the Rosary was faithful to that change.

Yet, I’m doubtful. I want to return to my father’s vote for Bill Clinton. What could turn him against the party he had voted for his entire adult life? It wasn’t just the Christian Right. It was the arrogance of absolutism — the absence of humility. I believe he saw in his final months on earth what could happen — what has happened — when one of America’s political institutions draws too close to one of America’s religious movements.

My Father’s agnosticism was not a failure of belief. It rejected the absolutism of mid-twentieth-century Catholicism and the late-twentieth-century American Evangelical movement.

Perhaps the God he wrote about in his final letter to Sister Marilyn was not the God of any particular religion. Maybe my Dad believed that no religion, particularly in its absolutist state, had a monopoly on God. It may be he was agnostic about religions but not about God.

The More

These uncertainties were my father’s final gifts to me. About ten years ago, I read The Heart of Christianity by the Protestant theologian Marcus Borg. Borg helped me understand my religious worldview and, I believe, my father’s. He wrote:

In the religious worldview, there is a nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality. This view is shared by all the enduring religions of the world. In a nonreligious worldview, there is only the space-time world of matter and energy and whatever other natural forces lie behind or beyond it.

Similarly, William James distinguished between those who believed there was a “More” beyond the material world and those who thought there was only a “This.” The rituals, symbols, and beliefs point to “More” vary by time and culture, but the constancy of the urge toward such guidance is compelling.

Comparative Religions scholar Karen Armstrong writes that religious traditions are

Like fingers pointing to the moon; so very often we focus on the fingers and forget about the moon.

I’ve become comfortable with the Mystery of God and find it unsurprising that there are 4000 religions worldwide.

How could it be otherwise?

My father gave me the gift of uncertainty.

He had felt the lash of religious arrogance and foresaw what it would do to America’s Republican Party.

And we both loved the humility of the BVMs.

Religious absolutism deepens the world’s divisions and is an instrument of hatred.

Religious humility softens the world’s divisions and can be an instrument of love.

A creature was stirring.

Christmas morning, 1956.

*

On Christmas Eve, Grandma Florence brought wrapped presents from Mom’s side of the family, the Thomas’s. She was widowed in 1945. Mom picked her up from her bungalow five miles away.

On Christmas Day, we took wrapped presents to Dad’s side of the family, the Gardners, who gathered at Grandma Edith and Grandpa Paul’s farm.

No Christmas cheer between the Catholic Thomas’s and Protestant Gardner’s.

Santa carefully placed unwrapped gifts in separate bundles under the tree for Paul, Peter, and Pat. A plate with cookie crumbs sat on the new stereo under the mirror.

Dad and Mom, in armchairs, enjoyed from across the room.

Amidst the discoveries, four-year-old Peter stood up, pointed, and said

Hey, look, over in the corner, the box is moving.

Sam, a Beagle pup, scratched, yelped, escaped, and showed us the way.

To young adulthood.

*

You can check if you wish, but I’ve mentioned American President 45 only once in 246 Medium stories, and it was in a tale about a Chocolate Pie.

Presidents Obama and Biden have been equally ignored.

This is odd for someone who taught Politics for 50 years.

After all, for Political Scientists like me, Trump ought to be the gift that keeps giving.

There’s something new every day.

Like yesterday, and the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

I’ve even been trolled by Facebook “friends” who think I should write about serious things, not chocolate pie.

They think the half-century gig wasn’t penance enough.

So I’ve been feeling guilty.

More importantly, I’ve got that moon photo.

As I took it a few weeks ago, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising started playing in my head.

Along with visions of Mr. Trump.

Because I’d been reading apocryphal stories like the ones linked below.

So that’s the first thing you ought to do.

Read each of the hyperbolic Trump stories with Creedence as the soundtrack.

The trouble IS on the way, say the experts, with many bad moons rising.

The earth as Jupiter, with its 95 moons.

The second thing, and I say this with heart, head, and gut, born of a lifetime of studying political scholars and pundits, is that no one, not me, not you, no one, has a clue today what will happen on Tuesday, November 5, 2024.

So ignore the elephant in the room. Lift the shade.

He will still be there in the morning. The prognosticators will as well.

Instead, focus on those around you and that wonderful world outside the window.

Where you might see something like this mouse.

*

More fascinating in expiration than Donald is in life.

And have another piece of Chocolate Pie.

————————————————————

Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?

He is becoming frighteningly clear about what he wants.

www.theatlantic.com

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This is what’s keeping the Biden campaign up at night.

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.

There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. So why is everyone…

www.washingtonpost.com

---

Do you have a favorite food from childhood?

We do.

Dody Gardner made three meals daily for three boys, Paul, Peter, and Pat, and our father, Paul Sr., in the 1950s and 60s.

That’s roughly 24,000 breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.

Our consensus favorite dish was her Chocolate Marvel Pie, which she served on Christmas Eve.

Why Marvel?

That’s the name on this ancient recipe card, carbon-dated to 1953, give or take a year or two.

Her unique cursive handwriting style was taught briefly in Catholic Schools in southeast Iowa in the 1920s.

You are right; it is hard to read. I was 15 before I could fake her signature on my report cards.

The translation is below.

Patience is the pie’s secret ingredient.

And yours, to earn the recipe.

Santa’s watching.

When mom died in 2017, at 96, I said I wanted two things from the estate.

This wax Santa Clause.

And the real McCoy recipe card.

Those are blood stains, by the way, as Pat did not give up the card easily.

He always said I should listen to Donald Trump.

So I did and hired The Donner and Blixon Law firm.

Who uncovered a heretofore unknown precedent.

The oldest son gets first dibs on the pie.

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Rebecca and I have already served the pie to guests twice this season, and we’re still a week away from Rudolph.

Two Catholic nun friends were in town to see the annual Luther College Christmas pageant. Catholics have the saints; Lutherans have the music. Before my ritual prompt, each said it was the best chocolate pie they’d ever had.

Another couple, skeptical at first, asked for another piece.

“Not a chance,” I said.

Because there is no national pie museum, I will donate Mom’s recipe card to Julia Child’s Kitchen at the National Museum of American History.

Her pie would come out of the refrigerator a little runny on a rare occasion. Whenever that happened, I’d helpfully quote Julia, who said the test was the taste, not the look.

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Patience was not my mom’s strong suit. Nor mine. This pie requires it. I’m sure Buddha had something to say about pie and waiting.

And you’ve cooled your heels long enough.

The Recipe

Melt and blend 1 cup of chocolate chips, 3 Tablespoons of sugar, and 3 Tablespoons of milk. (We use Nestle Tollhouse semi-sweet and half-and-half).

Cool.

Add 4 egg yokes one at a time, beating well after each. Add one teaspoon of vanilla.

Beat until stiff 4 egg whites.

Fold into chocolate mixture and pour into a 9″ baked pie crust.

Chill for several hours. (Channeling Buddha, we let it sit in the refrigerator overnight)

We garnish with a dollop of fresh whipped cream.

For your forbearance,

I’ve saved the last piece for you.

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The Suspect saw Mommy kissing Santa.

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