We have nothing to do with the when, where, why, what, or who of our birth.
You and I are stuck with each other. And the 7,846,000,000 others who, through serendipity, live in this time.
For 74 years, the five W’s of my existence have been less important than the 6th question I learned in grade school geography,
So what?
What do I do with the life I’ve been given?
How do I treat you? And you?
Two weeks ago, I met a new neighbor. Ismail was born in Algeria and owns an online business helping to develop small businesses in Kyrgyzstan. His wife is an administrator at the local college, and their pink-haired teenage daughter attends the local high school. Ismail is Muslim.
Yesterday, across from Hy-Vee grocery, I noticed for the first time a tiny van with this sign: El Salvador Pupusas.
In Postville, Iowa, 15 miles away, Somalians and Mexicans labor at Agristar, a meat and poultry plant.
By the year 2050, 15% of Iowans will be Latino. (source)
Different-looking humans have arrived in this little corner of this little state in the middle of this enormous country.
Of course, human is an abstraction.
Pumpkin, too.
Humans haven’t arrived, but Ismail has.
And Maria.
And Mohamed.
Whether human or pumpkin, each of our particulars matter.
However, if you cut open the pumpkins on that rack, I’ll wager the inners will look the same.
Rebecca and I set off for some gravel road rumbling on a sunny, warm, early fall morning. Sunday was the final day of the Northeast Iowa’s Artist’s Tour. You can take a virtual tour here.
Our second stop was Paul Baughs’ Woodworking, about 10 miles outside Decorah, in the northeast corner of Iowa. If you love this art form, look at Paul’s work.
We pulled into a driveway in a cloud of dust. Two late middle-aged men were sitting in those ancient webbed folding lawn chairs. One guy went into what we assumed was a workshop.
Tom greeted us with, “I always know when guests are coming because their vehicles sound different on the gravel.” It turns out that Tom lives in Decorah, fishes in a stream just down the road, and met Paul two years ago. And, yes, locals drive faster on gravel.
Just off Tom’s right shoulder was this sight.
Photo by the author
So I’m forming an impression of the owner of this property — ancient lawn chairs, this hoop, and concrete slab, not Hoosiers-old but still kept in service. Nothing wasted.
Finally, we walked into the workshop and met Paul.
Photo by the author
Paul studied art in college and learned carpentry at Iowa’s Amana Colonies’ furniture store.
Don’t you love seeing how people work? The configuration of the wall of tools was itself a work of art. After a few minutes of chit-chat, Paul invited us to his house but asked us to give him a few minutes. You see the house in the first photo. And a close-up below.
Photo by the author
Tom walked us down the path and remarked that the house was a 40-year art venture.
Paul filled in the rest of the story. He, his wife, and two young sons moved to the area four decades ago. They purchased the land that included a dilapidated cottage. Paul slowly tore down and rebuilt it while it served sometimes as “barely a roof over their heads.”
Every scrap of the old place was used in the new creation, including this railing.
Photo by the author
I’ve been thinking all week about Paul and the other artists we met last Sunday. How best to understand what they do for us. Because they are all doers.
Artists create and offer gifts that did not exist before. Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, calls this love, which he writes is
An activity, not a passive effect…In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving and not receiving.
Artists “have developed a productive character…acquired faith in their powers [and] the courage to rely on those powers.”
It’s easy to forget how most of us are surrounded daily by these offerings.
For example, in the photo below of love objects from our home, Jim carved the phone holder, Pat molded the plate that holds our soup spoon, and Rick threw Rebecca’s favorite coffee mug.
Photo by the author
It’s hard to stop once you look at what others have done for you, and you don’t stop with art.
James Earl Ray shot and killed American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968. Ray, a volunteer for George Wallace’s segregationist Presidential Campaign, stalked King for weeks, from Atlanta to Birmingham and, finally, to a boarding house room in Memphis, across the street from the Lorraine Motel.
Sighting King leaning on the railing outside Room 306, Ray fired one shot at 6:01 pm 207 feet from a Remington Model 760 with a Redfield 2X-7X Scope. The bullet smashed into the right side of King’s face and neck. He would be declared dead one hour after an ambulance ride and medical treatment at a local hospital.
The Lorraine Motel Civil Rights Museum site was the first stop Rebecca and I made two years ago on a tour of Civil Rights museums in the American South. I took several photos of the assassination site, but this one is my favorite because its tilted angle illuminates my 55-year-old memory of King’s killing.
Two months after Ray shot King, on June 5, Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Senator and presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Kennedy had just won the California Primary. Sirhan, a Palestinian, was angry because Kennedy had supported Israel’s Six-Day War.
I had just completed my first year of college and was living at home. My father, an engineer with the Bendix Corporation, settled after work on the pull out couch in the TV room that doubled as my parents’ bedroom. My mom was downstairs cooking dinner. My brothers Peter and Pat were outside. Dad and I were watching Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. I was on the carpeted floor in my usual pose, with my right arm and hand propping up my head, tilted upwards toward Walter.
Who proceeded to recap the 18 hours since another Kennedy and public figure had been gunned down. At the first commercial break, my silent American, Republican, and unflappable father said so quietly I asked him to repeat it.
“What is happening to our country?”
The OUR stuck out. I sat up straight.
My political education had begun.
Was there a moment when you wanted to know more about what was happening in the world outside your family and friends?
READERS OF PAULMUSES.COM THANK YOU AGAIN FOR VISITING MY WORDPRESS PAGE. I’M NOW COPYING THE ARTICLES THAT I’VE WRITTEN FOR MEDIUM.COM. THIS STORY REFERS TO A MEDIUM PRACTICE OF GIVING SOME OF ITS ARTICLES A BOOST MEANING IT WIDEN’S THE STORY’S VISIBILITY. I HOPE YOU ENJOY IT.
*
“We’ve selected your story to be boosted.”
What a pleasant surprise on an early morning in August.
My reaction went from gratitude to shock as the claps and comments poured in.
This story was still getting read 18 days later, the length of the most extended Space Shuttle mission.
I know many of you get 4K claps & 84 comments routinely. But not me.
I felt like I did after my first Little League home run settled into my psyche. I was 12 in 1961, and it was a line drive shot over the left field wall. I can still feel the bat’s wood against the ball, sweet. And see the ball clear the snow fence in Duck Creek Park’s brand-new Diamond #2.
I had worked hard to become a good hitter, but success at something that mattered to me was new. I had just unwrapped a Christmas morning gift.
And began to play with my new toy.
How do you respond to success?
Have you ever seen the 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate? Redford plays a long-shot Senate candidate who has just won the election and asks his campaign manager, “What do we do now?”
You can watch the short scene here. And the film on Amazon Prime. It’s a terrific political yarn that has aged well, but Redford’s dazed look and burdened question has stuck with me for fifty years.
Success, however we define it, is easy when it’s beyond our grasp. We can pour any sentiment we want into it. Yep, if only I get that, I will be happy.
My homerun happiness lasted one day.
The day after, a Saturday, I played pickup baseball with teammates on the McKinely school playground about a block from my house. A few fathers were watching from a house porch across the street. One came over and said about my homer, “That was a nice hit. The first is always the hardest. The second will be easier.”
All of a sudden, my new toy needed to be more. Puff the Magic Dragon was the same. But I was changing.
I hadn’t given a second dinger a thought until my friend’s father acknowledged me. I loved that feeling even more than I loved the feel of the bat against the ball.
Desire to please that man on the porch became a part of my world.
Puff was left behind.
*
Sixty-two years later, it’s happening again. Last August, a Medium editor exited her comfortable porch chair, strolled to the playground, put her arm on my shoulder, and whispered in my ear.
“If you can do it once, you can do it again.”
Of course, the Full Frame editor who selected my story said no such thing. But that’s what I heard.
It has been repeated many times since I was 12.
The man on the porch became a part of me — a chorus in the play of my life.
The feeling in my hands when the sweet part of the bat hit the middle of the ball, the perfect swing, was replaced by something outside myself, who was let in through the front door and faded into the woodwork.
You, dear readers, and precious editors are now the culprits.
*
Fortunately, I’m no longer a child. I’ve put away Puff and the tendency to try to please you instead of me.
Sometimes, I succeed.
Do I hear a cheer?
When I started this story, my first thought was not crafting a perfect sentence, the writer’s version of a homerun. It was directed at you. I wanted to please you. To get you to come off that porch and acknowledge me. To feel your admiration.
Of course, more often than not, you stay on the porch. And say nothing.
My desire goes unrequited.
But occasionally, I’m reminded of how good it feels on that rare occasion when you do cheer. That first Boost felt so good.
I’m tempted to take my eye off the ball, turn around, and look for the man on the porch in the crowd.
Or, at the keyboard this morning, to think not about the first sentence but an editor with a Boost gift in her pocket.
It’s all an illusion.
*
I hit two more Little League home runs. And a bunch more in my mid-teens before the curveball ended my Major League ambition.
I loved the cheers and relished each moment when my teammates met me at home plate.
The man on the porch? I never saw him again but always pictured him in the crowd.
As my professional baseball ambition faded away, other desires took its place.
For each goal, I needed to please others. That’s the way of the world.
It can never be just about the ball or the keyboard, my swing, or my words.
There’s always a man on the porch.
But now I’m older than he is. I listen politely. Hold her judgment lightly.
And then step back into the batter’s box — focused on the ball.
“Solid,” wrote one of his old teachers in a confidential letter of recommendation that Paul and his non-tenured colleague Ron read when they broke into the Department Head’s office late one night in the spring of 1985.
I’ve grown to like him.
But sometimes, he can be a tyrant.
The Putin of his little world.
A nasty piece of work. Self-involved.
Oh, he hides it well behind that self-satisfied smile.
Take yesterday, for example. He perfectly timed the six-minute drive down Water Street in his Subaru Forester, arriving at the bakery at 6:31 a.m. The pecan rolls should be ready; Paul will be first in line.
It’s his second Forester, by the way. The first was a lemon. This one, five years old today, has a brand new air conditioner. Paul wrote about that fiasco here.
He wrote about why he finds self-promotion difficult here, here, and here.
Who’s he trying to kid?
About that second flawed Forester — he thought about a Buick Encore. It gets better gas mileage and is friendlier to the environment in other ways. It’s air conditioner probably would have lasted longer than five years. Most of the Republicans he knows drive Buicks. So did his father.
Paul’s a liberal boomer; a Buick doesn’t fit the image. He likes thinking he’s counter-culture.
A Subaru Outback had taken his spot in front of the bakery, so he maneuvered around the parking space reserved for bikes in front of the Sugar Bowl ice cream parlor to a place in front of the Montessori School set up years ago in a building that used to house a photographer’s studio.
This delay puts him fourth in line behind a men’s book group trio but close to the table where the day’s Des Moines Register sits. Except today, there’s no sports section.
He feels his left pants pocket and discovers no phone to distract him.
And thinks, why is the barista taking so long to prepare the book guys’ specialty coffee orders?
Then, the owner comes up the aisle from the kitchen and announces the Pecan Rolls will be out in about 10 minutes.
Paul smiles sweetly and says, well, at least they will be fresh.
Paul’s air-conditioned Forester arrived home around 7 a.m., just before Rebecca woke. Coffee would be ready for her.
That’s his coffee cup on the left and Rebecca’s on the right, with fresh Carmel Pecan Rolls.
Photo by the author
Notice that the Pecan roll on the left was bigger.
Paul did.
Which one do you think he took?
*
I’m so damn self-interested. Even today, when I volunteer at Decorah’s Food Pantry, I will feel good about myself doing good. The late Indian Catholic Priest Anthony De Mello, in Awareness, writes that there are two types of selfishness,
I give myself the pleasure of pleasing myself; that’s self-centeredness.
I give myself the pleasure of pleasing others, which is more refined.
De Mello says humans are naturally self-centered because they focus on self-preservation.
How does one become aware of how self-oriented he is? DeMello’s technique is self-observation, looking at myself like I would look at someone else.
Self-observation is different from self-absorption, which is self-preoccupation.
I wrote this Pecan Roll story in 3rd person. That technique puts me at a psychological distance from this guy, Paul. It is a humbling experience because I see just how self-involved I am. I’m no more counter-culture in this Subaru capital of Iowa than my Republican friends are with their hoity-toity Buicks.
But before I wrote the story, I observed Paul this early morning.
That’s why I didn’t beat myself up for wanting the larger Pecan roll. Forewarned is forearmed.
Following DeMello’s 3rd-person self-reflection approach, I am more in control of how I decide to act on my self-preservation feelings.
So I took the smaller pastry, preferring to feel good about my generosity rather than guilty about my self-centeredness.
And even better when Rebecca said why don’t you have the bigger one.
Yesterday was a sunny, beautiful, late summer day, so I strolled through the cemetery across the street from our home in southwest Iowa and thought about what the dead might teach the living about life.
*
I’m a retired political science professor. Two colleagues and friends — both retired profs, one in Modern Languages, the other in Communication studies — and I will teach a Life Long Learning Seminar this October titled Conversations about Death, Dying, and Living. We’re in our seventies.
Our previous employer, Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, runs four seminars yearly. In addition to our topic, this year’s menu includes Liberty, Rights and the Supreme Court, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theologian of Resistance, and Let’s Dip our Toes into Micro-History.
This is a photo of a seminar on America and Race we taught last fall.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
Thirty-five people are enrolled in the Death class. That’s all the room holds. The age range is 50 to 98.
Why this topic?
It’s a little unusual as someone with expertise in the subject matter teaches the typical seminar. That’s not the case with Alan, Ruth, me, and this course. But we have invited experts to be guest speakers.
The primary reason for our interest is that death has gotten our attention. Not only because we know people who have died or are dying but because, at this point in our lives, it — death — sits in the corner, stubbornly refusing to go away. When we were younger, we could ignore it or deny it.
Ernest Becker wrote a famous book decades ago, The Denial of Death, about how most human cultures enact sophisticated methods to avoid facing the inevitable. It sat collecting dust on my bookshelf. I read it forty years ago and reread it last year with older and more open eyes.
How do you stop ignoring something that refuses to go away? We’re academics, so our solution is to study it and then talk about it with others. Of course, while we were doing this, one of Ruth’s friends died. Martin was 90, and Ruth and others were at his death in a circle of prayers and goodbyes.
Thus, the Death, Dying, and Living seminar was born after months of reading articles and books, previewing films, surfacing speakers, and planning meetings
The class will meet each Wednesday in October from 9 a.m. to noon. You can see from the photo above that we have a comfortable room with plenty of light. The obligatory picture of Martin Luther hangs over us. He might not like all he hears.
Mr. Death will sit quietly in the middle.
But the rest of us will engage in lively conversation.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
These topics, texts, and speakers will guide our conversations
Session 2: What is Quality of Life and Quality of Death?; Text: Wendell Berry, Fidelity; Guest Speaker, Dr. David Baaken (physician)
Session 3: Who Has Control?; Text: the film Jack Has a Plan; Guestspeaker, Brecka Putnam (Howard County Hospice)
Session 4: What happens after Death?; Guest speakers: Scott Helms (Director/Owner Helms Funeral Home); Pastor Michael Wilker, First Lutheran Church
Life
Some day, I will no longer be. Death is when I no longer am. Until that moment, I can change. I am still becoming.
Life Long Learning means that we do not stop learning when we are no longer students. As long as we have life, we can grasp something new.
Ivan Ilyich, the protagonist in Tolstoy’s terrifying short novel that begins our seminar, discovers only in his last moments “that he had not lived his life as he should have done.” Ilyich is dying poorly because he has lived badly.
Tolstoy forces us to consider the question, what does it mean to live well?
In Fidelity, Burley, 82 years old, is dying in a hospital. His son, Danny, believes the machinery and impersonality of this institution is an insult to his father’s life: “There are many degrees and kinds of being alive. Some are worse than death.” This belief drives the plot of Wendell Berry’s short story.
Berry forces us to consider the question, what does it mean to die well?
Jack Tiller has had a brain tumor for 25 years. The Jack Has a Plan documentary chronicles his three-year quest to end his life. It’s an extraordinary film encouraging viewers to ask who should control death.
In our last session, we consider the afterlife for the family and friends of the person who has died and for the person herself. Funeral and burial options are expanding in the USA.
And, finally, what do people think happens after they die?
I don’t think so. I heard no birdsong when I opened our back door at 4:05 a.m.
Truck traffic on Water Street is my alarm clock.
I think only Garrison Keillor and I are stirring. He wrote about getting up at 4 a.m. here. I haven’t read his story yet. It would be like batting after Willie Mays. Writing is hard enough without having a schoolmaster with a sharp ruler looking over my shoulder.
I’ve got a friend who interviewed Keillor during Prairie Home Companion days. My friend tells me Garrison would re-write sketches thirty times. I’ll read his story later.
I’ve been getting up early for most of my 73 years. That’s just how my body works. When I was a kid, my parents let my brothers and I stay up late on Saturday nights to watch Creature Features, horror movies with monsters. As far as I knew, Frankenstein, Dracula, and Wolfman wreaked havoc forever. I was fast asleep when they met their dastardly end.
I’ll bet you are interested in my 4 a.m. routine. This photo, taken 90 minutes ago, sets the stage.
Photo by author
I’ve already had three sips of coffee. Otherwise, none of this is possible. So, making coffee is the first thing. Last week, Rebecca and I visited her daughter and family in Boston. I wrote about it here. I’m also up early when traveling and always scout out the kitchen layout. Only cats Wilber and Orville joined me for coffee at the dining room table.
The white mug is mine. The black one with the brown interior is Rebecca’s. She will come through that door to our bedroom at 7 o’clock. About 6:30, I will put another pot of coffee on.
Notice the laptop and phone on top of the kitchen counter. Those are Rebecca’s. They are now recharged and ready for her when she wakes up.
Now, I’m settled into the brown chair you see straight ahead. My feet are on the footrest, and my 2018 MacBook Air rests on a lap desk. It is 6:30. Time to make Rebecca coffee.
I’m sure Garrison is sitting ramrod straight at a desk in his home office.
On his 8th revision.
What does he do when he comes to the end of a story but thinks he should write more?
Does he change perspective?
Photo by the author
I’ll bet he does.
My partner Rebecca sits in this chair. We’ve been together for 13 years. We were looking for red flags as we got to know each other. That’s what you do when dating later in life.
Rebecca worried about my early morning rising. What did I do? Was I ruminating? I assured her it was just my body clock. Throughout my 40-year academic life, I developed the habit of doing all my coursework in the early morning hours.
So here I sit, just outside our bedroom. Rebecca long ago learned to enjoy having the whole bed to herself — the coffee ready, with her devices charged.
I revise as I write. I’ll assign myself the equivalent of three rewrites.
This story is ready to submit.
Now I’ll see what Garrison has to say about 4 a.m. He probably knocked it out of the park, just like Willie.
Paul Simon was 26 in 1968 when he wrote about two 70-year-olds sitting on a park bench. I was 19 when I first heard Old Friends and these words.
How terribly strange to be 70.
I’m soon to be 74, and my partner Rebecca is 72. That’s us in the photo taken a few days ago by Rebecca’s daughter, Emily.
These two seventy-year-olds were sitting on a park bench after walking three miles. Not in the round-toed high shoes of Simon’s song, but sleek, well-buttressed walking shoes.
70 isn’t strange. It’s also different from what it looked to Simon in his twenties.
On our park bench in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Rebecca and I were reminiscing about our week-long visit with Emily, Aviv, Ilan, Sivan, and cats Orville and Wilbur. You are right, the Wright Brothers, as Emily’s spouse Aviv is a pilot.
Don’t worry, I will show you only a few photographs illustrating some highlights of our trip. But before I begin, please listen to Old Friends and read the lyrics to get the full effect of contrasting Simon’s vision of 70 with our reality. I’ve placed each below.
Minneapolis
Because our flight to Boston was scheduled to depart at 6:30 a.m., we decided to spend the night in a hotel close to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. We live three hours away in northeast Iowa. And we also wanted to visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Photo of Rebecca and me by a young woman who must be an aspiring photographer as she moved us off-center
Peter Blume’s 1926 Maine Coast was my favorite painting. There are so many questions.
Photo by the author
Rebecca’s favorite was Peeling by John Wilde: “I liked this painting because I have been working on drawing hands. Also, it is quite sexy.”
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
We’re not quite ready for Simon’s sunset yet.
Boston
Up at 4:30 a.m. for the flight to Boston that would arrive around noon. We purchased tickets for a 4 p.m. Boston Red Sox — Houston Astros game earlier in the summer. Emily, Aviv, and the kids picked us up, and we hung around Fenway Park until the game started.
Let me introduce you to the Hods: Aviv, Sivan, Ilan, and Emily.
Photo by the author
And the most famous outfield wall in American baseball history.
Photo by the author
As the Hall of Fame announcer Harry Caray used to say, “You can’t beat fun at the ballpark.” We stayed to the last out and were not too disappointed that Houston beat Boston 7–4. Rebecca’s son Jonathan lives in Houston, and we will visit him and his family in December on our way to spend January in San Miguel, Mexico.
Boston traffic after the game was heavy, so it took Aviv about 40 minutes to drive us to their home in Marblehead, along the coast, northeast of Boston. It was about 9:30 when Rebecca and I settled into their comfortable guest room, 16 hours after our day had started.
Marblehead
Emily and two friends with their kids had planned an outing to the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary for Friday. Rebecca and I decided to tag along on this hiking and bird-watching adventure. In the photo below, part of our group prepared bird seeds for Chickadees.
Photo by author
With this result, for Rebecca.
Photo by author
OK, I know, I’m wearing out my welcome. You’ve been very patient sitting through photos of our trip. We did some other stuff, and I’ve got more pictures. But enough is enough.
I’ve made my point. For many of us, twilight years, or whatever term you prefer, are not what we thought they might be like when we were young. Most of our friends are over 70, and they live active lives.
They do so because the sunset IS CLOSER. Simon’s shared fears do include death. That’s why two colleagues (each is 78) and I will be teaching a Life Long Learning Seminar this fall on death, dying, and living.
As death comes closer, life becomes more precious.
Postscript
Paul Simon is 80, and Art Garfunkel is 81. What would they talk about if they were sitting on a bench today?
Old friends, old friends Sat on their park bench like bookends A newspaper blown through the grass Falls on the round toes Of the high shoes of the old friends
Old friends, winter companions, the old men Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sunset The sounds of the city sifting through trees Settle like dust on the shoulders of the old friends
Can you imagine us years from today Sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be 70
Old friends, memory brushes the same years Silently sharing the same fears
I took the photo of our northeast Iowa community from a bluff about a mile outside town. You can see the Winnishiek County Courthouse Clock Tower on the right and Saint Benedict’s Catholic Church Steeple just to its left.
State and church are separate.
Our community of 8,000 has 20 churches, a Zen Monastery, and a Quaker Meeting House. The closest Synagogue and Mosque are 60 miles away, in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
I was born in 1949. My mother was raised a Catholic, and my father a Protestant. Before marriage in 1948, my mother asked my father to convert. He soon withdrew from the Catholic program because the priest insulted him, and my dad was not a believer. But he accepted that his three sons be raised Catholic.
When my father died of cancer at 71 in 1993, as my family was leaving the funeral parlor before the casket was closed, I looked back for one last look at my dad. I saw my mother place a rosary through the fingers of his defenseless hands.
She had never forgiven him for not converting. Or maybe she thought a rosary might save his soul.
I never asked her why.
But I’ve not forgotten that image.
*
Through its human institutions, religion provokes powerful feelings of longing, belonging, and exclusion. Though I have not been a practicing Catholic for over fifty years, I still feel its power when I enter one of its churches.
America’s Founders knew European history, particularly the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and understood the power of religion to divide. (source)
That’s why the first words of the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights were about religious freedom.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise.”
Religion provokes powerful feelings.
So, the government shouldn’t take sides.
Separating religious institutions from government is a worthy ideal.
Photo by a kind barista at Barista Coffee House in Houston, Minnesota
Don’t we present well? You’ve seen this group before. I wrote about them last year in a story linked here.
You could call us senior citizens. We’re all over 66, with most over 70 and a few within shouting distance of 80. That’s me in the second row, white shirt and sunglasses, shaded by Ernie.
To my left is Bill, who, a month ago, spent a week riding his bike across the state of Iowa. He was joined on that mission by my partner Rebecca, in pink and sitting in front of Bill.
You could call us senior citizens, but I wouldn’t. Ernie would lead the charge. It would be slow but not pretty.
No, perennials is the better label. Read about why below.
The photo was taken last week in Houston, Minnesota. Our group of 16 had just ridden our bikes 31 miles from Lanesboro in southeastern Minnesota to Houston on the Root River State Trail.
We left Lanesboro an hour earlier than planned because the temperature was predicted to reach 100 by noon. That photo was taken at 11:30 a.m., with the shade tree you see making the 99 degrees feel like 99 degrees.
When our cars and trucks carried our bikes and us back to Lanesboro, it was 102.
Along the bike route to Houston, we met two obstacles.
The first was a rattlesnake curled up in the middle of the trail. When one of us tried to take a photo, Mr. Snake had slithered off the path. Later in the day, I asked the owner of our hotel about the rattler. He said he could not remember the last person bitten and that the local hospital no longer carries the expensive serum.
The second hurdle was a hurdle — a large tree that came down the night before covered our path. You can see the assembly line we formed to lift all the bikes over and through the branches.
Photo by Theresa Eason
Perennials know how to organize, cooperate, and cope with unexpected circumstances.
That’s Brenda in the white shirt at the end of the line. Do you see her bike? It’s an E-Bike with an electric motor and battery that provides pedal assistance. Thirteen of our group have transitioned to motorized bicycles in the last few years. More on this below, but E-Bikes were a heavy lift through that maze.
The only holdouts are Bill, Rebecca, and me. Bill and Rebecca are bicycle purists, so they have not considered this option, even with last week’s steamy temperatures.
Me? I temporarily went to the dark side on another group bike excursion in Missouri earlier this summer. You can see that 60-pound E-sucker below.
Photo of an E-Bike rental by the author
Pedal-assisted bikes weigh about twenty pounds more than regular bikes. See the relatively broad kickstand. With this bike, I could get a pedal boost of up to 28 MPH. It also included a throttle that I used occasionally. When I applied the hand brakes, the motor was disabled. The oblong battery required recharging after 60 miles.
I rented an E-bike to test the motorized bike experience and my reaction to what I consider an age-related accommodation. The weightier cycle took some getting used to, particularly when braking and maneuvering through narrower parts of the trail.
But I loved the confidence it gave me when applying the boost going up a hill or into the wind. And that little rain storm that hit us five miles from our destination, I throttled up to 28 miles with no care in the world.
Our E-Bike friends tell us the pedal assist keeps them on the bike trail. The photo below was taken after another day of biking in Minnesota — 21 miles with a cool 90-degree temperature.
Photo by our kind server at Rubaiyat Restaurant in Decorah, Iowa
My mother lived to be 96, stubbornly refusing most age-related assistance. I use the word stubborn intentionally, as even six years after her death, my two brothers and I talk about how difficult she often made life for those around her. If only she had gotten a hearing aid at 60, we say, and then trail off as the older we get, we are slowly coming to understand her perspective.
Admitting the need for a hearing aid meant accepting the inevitability of bodily decay, of death.
Who wants to go down that path? Isn’t it better to resist?
Our friends’ E-bike experience suggests another choice. For most of them, without the E-bike, they would not have ridden on either day. And if they didn’t ride, neither would Bill, Rebecca, and me. And there would have been no Missouri bike adventure. All of a sudden, life can get smaller.
Who wants to go down that path? Isn’t it better to resist?
When you think about it, at every stage in life, not only in our last quarter, we are constantly adjusting to what life throws at us. I yearned to play varsity basketball in high school, dreamed about it, and shot basket after basket at the hoop my dad hammered into the side of the garage to make it happen.
Yet my 5’7″ frame blocked my way every bit as much as my declining muscle mass and energy signal that an E-Bike is just around the corner. I decided to join the swim team.
