A Lesson in Humility from America’s Greatest Coach

A NOTE TO THE READERS OF MY WORDPRESS BLOG. I NOW WRITE ALL MY STORIES ON MEDIUM.COM. BECAUSE IT COSTS $5 PER MONTH, I AM COPYING AND PASTING THEM TO WORDPRESS. BUT NOT EVERYTHING TRANSFERS PERFECTLY. THAT’S WHY YOU WILL OCCASIONALLY SEE SOME EXTRA MARKINGS OR HIGHLIGHTS.

THANK YOU FOR READING MY BLOG.

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I’ve just finished a terrific book on the person many consider America’s most outstanding coach, John Wooden.

Wooden’s greatest player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, wrote Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court a few years after Wooden died at 99 in 2010.

Abdul-Jabbar, 76, has written over 50 books; Wooden wrote over 20.

Coach Wooden began his adult life as an English teacher with a love of poetry that he would routinely quote to his basketball players over his 29-year coaching career.

He also wrote poetry as, in his words, an amateur. He said about his poetry efforts,

“Good words in good order is good enough for me.“

I thought about Wooden’s words about writing yesterday when I read this beautiful quote by 

Michelle Scorziello

“When a writer conveys something universal and true, something so fundamental to being human it’s as if a little rent in the universe appears and a kindred spirit has grabbed my hand. The right words placed in the right order can unleash profound affinity. Even more impressive is when the writer’s words are direct and seemingly simple.“

Scorziello’s quote with the vital sentence boldened by me refers to why an essay by Nobel Prize winner Herman Hesse works so well. There is that phrase, again, right words in the right order.

To Scorziello, Hesse’s words “were writing gold, but I could only produce base metal.” I feel the same way about my writing. I read better writers daily, including Wooden, Abdul-Jabbar, and Scorziello.

What do I do about that fact?

When Wooden sat down to write poetry, did he sit in the shadow of Kipling, one of his favorite writers? Is that why his quote concludes with “good enough for me”?

And what about an ordinary coach thinking about her career? Does she sit in the shadow of John Wooden? Or an average NBA player with Abdul-Jabbar’s 38,387 points looming over him? Or Jabbar, now the second fiddle in the points record book to Lebron James.

Did Shakespeare loom over Kipling’s scribblings? Who did Hesse consider his writing master?

For me, I’m in awe of this description of Ted Williams’ last home run from Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu by John Updike:

“Williams swung again, and there it was. The ball climbed on a diagonal line into the vast volume of air over center field. From my angle, behind third base, the ball seemed less an object in flight than the tip of a towering, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it was still in the sky. Brandt ran back to the deepest corner of the outfield grass; the ball descended beyond his reach and struck in the crotch where the bullpen met the wall, bounced chunkily, and, as far as I could see, vanished.”

Good words in good order, turbocharged. I could no more write that Updike paragraph than an ordinary college coach could win Wooden’s nine national championships.

Like Michelle Scorziello, I’m confronted daily with a bittersweet fact: I read better writers than me. They offer me hints about how to put words in good order.

In the film Amadeus, a lesser composer, Antonio Salieri, is driven mad because he can’t take his eyes off the gap between his work and the efforts of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Good notes in good order was not enough for Salieri.

How do you manage the tension between the ceiling set by the writers you admire and your lesser efforts?

I occasionally try this mental trick; let’s call it the fly-on-the-wall maneuver.

I become the fly and observe myself sitting in my writing chair, tapping away at the keys on my MacBook Air. John Updike is sitting in the corner, looking out the window, writing in a notebook. Walt Whitman is sitting on his shoulder.

This image always makes me smile.

And brings me back to the task at hand.

The production of which is good enough for me.

What about you?

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A NOTE TO THE READERS OF MY WORDPRESS BLOG. I NOW WRITE ALL MY STORIES ON THE WRITING PLATFORM MEDIUM. FOR NOW, I AM COPYING AND PASTING FROM MEDIUM TO WORDPRESS. THE HIGHLIGHTED SENTENCES ARE FROM MY MEDIUM READERS. I CAN TAKE THE COLORING OFF.

THANK YOU FOR READING MY BLOG. PAUL

Rebecca and I will spend next January in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. We wanted to escape at least one month of another cold and snowy midwest USA winter. Arizona, California, and Florida did not appeal. We wanted someplace new, outside America.

This now seems natural to search beyond our country’s boundaries. But it wasn’t always this way for me. As I write this story from the comfort of our home, it still isn’t instinctive.

I’ve broken my trek toward globe-trotting comfort into six vignettes.

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#1. I traveled outside the United States for the first time in the summer of 1987. I joined a group of teachers and their families on a two-week trip to England. On our first night in London, a few of us ate dinner at a pub close to our hotel. As we finished the meal, one couple complained that the food didn’t taste like they were used to, and the beer was warm. Even as a novice traveler, agreeing silently with them about the beer, I thought this was not a good attitude.

And I vowed to myself that I would learn to manage this tendency and develop a habit of comfort with new things. As a guest, I must do my best to learn about a region’s culture, values, history, and cuisine. I need to leave myself at home.

#2. In the summer of 1999, Richard dropped me off in Nottingham’s city center and said, “When you finish exploring, why don’t you take the bus back to our house? I was in Nottingham to direct Luther College’s year-long program in this north-central English city. Richard was the previous year’s director and would spend a few days showing me the ropes. Eleven students would follow in September. My tasks before they arrived included working with Nottingham University on each student’s academic schedule and planning four group trips around the United Kingdom.

But my first responsibility was learning how to get around this city of 300,000 so I could guide the students when they arrived. After Richard left, I recall standing on a busy corner in the Nottingham city center with a house address in one hand and a bus timetable in the other and feeling overwhelmed. One year later, the day before David, the following year’s director was to arrive, I walked from that same city center spot three miles to the director’s house without a map or bus schedule. All good things take time. Learn to live with uncertainty.

#3. Directing Luther’s Nottingham program sparked an interest in global experiences that continues today. Two years later, in August 2001, Mark faced me across the breakfast table at the Imperial Hotel in London. Mark was the director of what was then called Luther’s Study Abroad Office. Mark and I had come to London and Ireland to spend four days scouting locations for a January 2002 three-week study course with students I would lead. “What’s first on our agenda?” asked Mark. I looked at him and said, “I have no idea.” Fittingly, he gently chided me and said, “It’s your responsibility to plan these courses.”

Over the next decade and a half, I would plan, lead, and execute five January study away courses to Northern Ireland, Ireland, and England, in 2002, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015. And in the spring of 2018, in my last semester before retirement, my partner Rebecca and I would direct Luther’s semester program in Malta. As part of the Malta Program, we took our 11 students on group trips to Italy, Morocco, and Croatia that were planned, organized, and led by Rebecca and me.

In the fall of 2019, Rebecca and I co-hosted a Luther College alum trip to Northern Ireland and Ireland to study Peace and Reconciliation. And in the spring of 2020 and fall of 2021, I served as a Fulbright Scholar at West University in Timișoara, Romania.

I loved classroom teaching, but living and traveling with students in another country was my career’s most challenging and rewarding experience.Somehow — Luck? Fate? — I landed at a college that valued faculty travel and delivered mentors who showed me the way. They let me fail and fail again. And helped me scratch an itch I didn’t know I had.

Being a competent global traveler has become a part of my identity.

#4. In the fall of 2021, Rebecca and I visited the family of one of my Romanian students. Alex’s mom and dad, Gabriela and Marius, and sister Cosmina lived in Reșița, about an hour from Timișoara. Over lunch, Rebecca talked about how one of her daughters had married an Israeli-Jewish American. After she told this story, Marius looked at her and said, almost apologetically, “That could never happen in Romania; America is 30 years ahead of us.”

About a week later, I told this story during a guest lecture in a colleague’s class. My colleague responded by saying her grandfather had married a Jewish Romanian. She then asked for the hands (the course was taught online) of students who knew of Jewish family members. It looked like about 20% of the class raised their hands. For the rest of the hour, the class discussed Romania’s silence. I listened and silently thanked Alex’s family for triggering this educational moment.

I reminded myself that a traveler gets to know the local people. And listens more than speaks. And respects people, government, and institutions at their current level while garnering new respect for cultural pluralism.

#5. Our guide was a Sinn Fein politician on the 2019 alum trip to Northern Ireland and Ireland that Rebecca and me organized and hosted. Michael arranged a visit to The Belfast Police Museum that honors The Police Service of Northern Ireland. As our coach pulled into the parking lot, Michael said, “I’m sure I’m the first Sinn Fein political official to enter this museum.” As we walked through the museum, I saw how tense Michael was.

Afterward, on our way to Derry, he talked to us about what it was like growing up as a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland. Later in the trip, we spoke with a Protestant minister about his fears of living as a part of a united and Catholic Ireland. Like Michael, as he talked, I could feel his tenseness.

The 2019 trip was my 6th group trip to this region of the world. Whenever I walk again through the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods of Belfast and Derry (Londonderry to Protestants), I am reminded of the power of tradition and history. The more travelers know of a country’s history and traditions, the more they will see and feel like I did with Michael.

#6. Two Romanian classes were moved online in the Covid spring of 2020 after two in-person sessions. This was the first time I had taught an online course. Zooming, to me, was something Mighty Mouse did. Once it became clear that COVID was sticking around, I had no choice but to adapt and learn. Travel has taught me to expect the unexpected. It will likely happen.

Two weeks before every global trip, I get anxious. This feeling will hit me as we prepare for Mexico next December. I’m sitting writing this essay on our front porch. The sights, sounds, and smells are familiar. There is a little in me of that couple with the wrong attitude I described in story #1.

But there is more to life than familiarity. There is challenge and newness. I’m comfortable with both feelings.

What about you?

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I walked by this sign a few days ago and have been thinking about it. Later the same day, I read there were 90 million refugees worldwide. These people have been forced out of their homes often by some violence. Sixteen million are Ukrainians, half displaced inside Ukraine and half elsewhere in Europe.

What would it be like to load all you could fit in your car and leave everything else behind, wondering when or if you would ever return?

Russia’s War on Ukraine has caused massive suffering. Sixteen million individual souls have their lives disrupted. Is there anything more cruel than that?

Cruelty is the bane of the world. It is hell incarnate.

Ukraine, NATO, and America are fighting a defensive war against Russia.

To stop the cruelty.

What if, today, war is the only answer?

More cruelty to stop the cruelty.

Yet I believe Gandhi was right when he said:

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary. The evil it does is permanent.

Russia’s war, Ukraine’s response, and today’s cruelties played forward.

Alas, the world will not bow to ONE ANSWER.

*

“I can’t help but wonder how things might have turned out had you not been white. I wish kindness were colorblind.”

This quote was from a reader responding to a story I wrote a week ago titled “A Breakdown on Highway 63 and the Kindness of Strangers.” You can find the story here.

I’m a 73-year old white male.

This is my response to the reader’s comment.

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A new condominium complex squats two blocks from our Decorah, Iowa home. On a warm winter weekend in 2020, Rebecca and I wandered down and slow-walked through one partially finished unit. The wood framing was in place, and the house wrap had been put over the external walls. We walked through the doorless entrance to see the floor plan.

We liked the little porch on the west side, chatted about what the kitchen would look like when finished, and were astonished at the asking price for such a small place. Once or twice one of us said we shouldn’t be trespassing.

But we never worried that what happened to Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man, who was simultaneously walking through a construction site in Brunswick, Georgia, might happen to us. That three white men would catch a call to the police dispatcher and come looking for us with a loaded shotgun.

The three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery were convicted of a hate crime, with evidence including the use of racist language in text and social media communications. The jury agreed these men went after Arbery “because of his race and color.”

We had other concerns, but not that one.

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A few days ago, on Decorah’s Trout Run Bike Trail, I was almost run over on a switchback by a rider on a bright red E-bike. E-bikers go faster, so they have to pay close attention to trail etiquette. When Rebecca and I stopped to rest at the top of the hill, we talked about flagging this guy down if we saw him again and asking him to follow the rules stated on the signs.

We never worried that what happened, also in 2020, to Christian Cooper in New York’s Central Park might happen to us. The Decorah e-biker might respond to our request as Amy Cooper (no relation) responded to Mr. Cooper’s request to follow park rules by calling 911, saying, “An African-American man is threatening my life.”

We had other concerns, but not that one.

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Late one Saturday night in the fall of 1969, a group of college friends loaded a couple of six-packs of Grain Belt in a car, drove to an isolated county road, and parked. We were 20, and Iowa’s drinking age was 21. Barrie, Denny, Mike, Ed, Jerry, and I were tucked in my big-finned 1960 Chevrolet Impala.

On Friday night, the five of us had seen the film Night of the Living Dead at the Drive-in, so we were on edge about Zombies. A thick car mat covered a rusted-out hole on the passenger side floor to keep the exhaust from seeping in. We cracked the windows.

We’d done this before, and someone always joked about the police to relieve the tension. Our luck, however, ran out as a flashing red light brought my eyes to the rearview mirror. Mike yelled that he’d heard the police couldn’t charge us with possession if we threw the beer out of the car. So that’s what we did.

With that foolishness out of the way, the two officers, one on each side of the car, politely asked us to stand outside, where they patiently wrote down our names and addresses. And then asked us to pick up the scattered cans and put them in a sack that they placed in the patrol car trunk.

Death by zombies, asphyxiation, or our parents were all on our minds.

But not by the police.

Who killed George Floyd the same day Christian Cooper met Amy Cooper two months after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered walking around a construction site while Black.

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I worried about many things when my car broke down. Why did the car overheat? Was the engine permanently damaged? Could I get a tow truck to take my car and me forty miles to my hometown? How long would I have to wait?

If this had happened to you, you might have had other worries. If you were black or brown or a woman, that might add another layer of anxiety. Or layers.

In the summer of 1972, five years after that Grain Belt fiasco, I drove my first new car, a yellow Toyota Corolla, to Washington, D.C. I was feeling my oats, by myself, on vacation. Early in the morning, I had left my parent’s house in Davenport, Iowa, not knowing whether I would take Interstate 80 west to the Rockies or east to the Lincoln Memorial.

I got to D.C. late the second night. I had the address and phone number for Motel 6 but no Navigator or city map. I drove around for about an hour, just gawking at the sites, with the Capital Dome as my loadstar. I started worrying when the Dome moved from being on my right to my left.

I needed to stop and ask for directions.

But I saw only black people.

I had other concerns. Now, I had this one.

Of course, my worry did not bear fruit.

I stopped at a gas station and, 15 minutes later, pulled into my motel.

I had the same experience in the same area thrice during my stay.

*

Two weeks ago, I was treated kindly on an Iowa highway.

How would I have been treated if I was black or brown or a woman?

Or younger?

A reader wishes for kindness to be colorblind.

Often it is given freely as it was to me by three whites in Northeast Iowa and three blacks in Washington, D.C.

Most Iowans would respond to a human in need on an Iowa highway with kindness in 2023, regardless of race.

BUT

In America, my race has shielded me from what James Baldwin called “the millions of details 24 hours of every day which spell out that some lives matter more than others.”*

That’s a burden I have not had to carry — a worry I did not take into my daily life.

It’s a kind of innocence.

That can be another form of blindness.

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*From Nicholas Buccola’s The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William Buckly Jr., and the Debate over Race in America.

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Although it was invented in the early 20th century, the American gas-powered lawn mower became popular after WWII.

I was born in 1949, so we’ve grown up together.

When I was 10, we started playing together every Thursday during the summer. Mom and Dad thought two brothers were not enough.

We’ve been close ever since.

The guy who owns the local hardware store a block from our house tells me he sells more battery-operated than petrol-fueled mowers.

On the sidewalk in front of his store, he displays only the electric cutters in their trendy green outfits. One step away from the ash heap sits the only fossil fuel machine toward the back of an attached shed.

Out of sight.

I’m not so different from my dated mower.

“Is the grass thicker this year?” I thought just before I took this photo. I was huffing and puffing more than I recall having to do last year.

Still in sight but fading away.

Palm 90:10 says:

The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty…they are soon gone, and we fly away.

Soon, I will be gone.

Just like my lawnmower brother.

It’s the way of the world.

*

I remember watching with friends late at night on July 20, 1969, the touchdown of the Apollo Lunar Lander Eagle.

The journey from the Earth to the moon’s orbit took the Apollo 11 crew of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins three days. After another day orbiting the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin guided the Eagle to the Sea of Tranquility. It took 6 hours and 39 minutes.

Lunar Landers began their journeys from a long distance. They arrived infrequently. Between 1969 and 1972, there were six lunar landings. When they did, it was with a flourish.

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Yesterday was back on the college campus where I taught for 33 years. It’s final exam week. Students were out and about, talking on their phones. From experience, I know many were talking to a parent.

Helicopter parenting, I thought.

A helicopter is always close by.

Hovering.

Lunar Landers are different

Perched above the Saturn V rocket, the Eagle was 238,900 miles from the moon.

When I arrived, it did not hover–and soon departed–rarely returning.

*

My parents were more like Lunar Landers than helicopters. I was raised in the fifties and sixties. My mother was a stay-at-home mom who watched over her three sons from afar.

Without a hint of hovering. Except on yard work Thursdays during the summer.

My father was an engineer whose company, Bendix, helped design the landing gear for the Eagle. My dad, pictured on the left below, worked on the Saturn V fuel systems.

He spent a lot of time in Houston during the 1960s.

On a typical summer day, Would say goodbye to my mom in the morning, mount my bike with baseball mitt hooked over the handlebar, and spend the day playing in a local park with friends. She knew where I was going but I don’t remember her ever asking what I did. Or me telling her.

I asked Barrie, a friend my age, about his childhood parental experiences. He described one experience.

I would leave our west-end home by 5:30 a.m. to serve morning mass at the Kahl Home. My mother was undoubtedly aware of my early morning trek…but it was not until later reminiscing she learned I would often hop on a slow-moving freight train to quicken the trip.

Sometimes, I wanted my mom to hover. There was the day I started a fight with another paperboy who picked his papers up at the same corner. I’m still trying to remember why. I took the first swing, he was tougher than I thought, and I went home with a cut lip. “Paul, you’re just going to have to learn how to handle your own problems,” said my mom when I complained about getting beat-up.

Around the same time, my dad sent me the same message, strangely, in almost identical words. My 6th- grade teacher and I did not get along. Exasperated one day, she pushed me into the cloakroom against a coat hook. I went home with a Band-Aid on my forehead.

This time, the Eagle landed. That evening my non-Catholic, agnostic, and Apollo Space Program father went to talk with Sister Robert Cecil.

Returning an hour or so later, my dad said to me:

Paul, throughout your life, you will meet people you must learn to deal with. Sister Robert Cecile is one of them.

*

There are many routes to successful parenting–helping mold children into adults who take responsibility for their lives.

Adults who no longer need a Lunar Lander or helicopter.

My mom and dad discovered one of those paths.

That’s one tiny benefit to humankind and one giant leap for me.

*

This is our front porch.

It is perched on a little mound set back from the side walk.

On the busiest street in town.

Here is our back porch.

*

It borders a less busy street.

Also, set back from the side walk.

And sits a few feet off the ground.

On our porches, simultaneously, we are separate from and a part of the world.

*

I love sitting on a screened-in porch. It protects me from insects and from being too close to you.

You know who you are.

You’re different from me. Let us count the ways. It’s easy in America today.

On my porch, I can see you but not know you.

You can do the same.

We wave.

Chit chat.

“A beautiful day for a walk.”

“Is she your grandchild?”

“What kind of dog is that?”

*

If the world had a front porch like we did back then

We’d still have problems

But we’d all be friends

Treating your neighbor like he’s your next of kin

You know, like weird Uncle Albert.

There’s wisdom in those words from Tracy Lawrence’s If the World Had a Front Porch.

Today, we think we know our neighbors.

From the stories in our minds created by the images fed to us by our screens.

WE KNOW THEIR GOD.

WE KNOW THEIR POLITICS.

WE KNOW THEIR STRANGENESS.

But we don’t.

We’ve never been closer or farther away.

But from the safety and distance of our porches, we develop the habit of seeing the ordinariness of people without judgment.

No, that’s not the whole truth.*

If you are being beaten up, I will come to your aid. If you are doing the beating, I will call the police.

It’s live and let live.

Maybe, occasionally, a droplet of curiosity bordering on judgment.

“Why do they fill those plastic containers with water weekly in the park across the street?

But mostly on our streets, from our porches, we get along by not knowing or caring too much about the strangers we see.

Those are hard truths.

Not part of the Gospel or Torah or Koran or Bhagavadgita.

But necessary civic habits.

For Americans in the 21st century.

*

Thanks to Michael Walzer for this insight found in The Struggle for a Decent Politics

When I was 15, I cut up one of my mother’s discarded nylons and coiled it around my head at night. I wanted curly locks to be straight –The Beatles and not Tom Jones.

Freud would have a field day with the nylon. But sometimes, a cigar is a cigar.

The frightening photo above was taken for my college graduation in 1971. That was two years after The Cowsills’ top ten hit Hair with these words:

Give me a head with hair

Long, beautiful hair

Shining, gleaming

Steaming, flaxen, waxen

By this time, the Beatles were no more. Instead, my hair model was Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo in the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. On the parental front, I had gravitated from my mother’s legwear to my father’s disdain about my hair’s length. Nothing stayed the same for long in the sixties.

The photo below shows me with Rebecca at my 50-year college reunion.

I’m finally at peace with my head and face hair. My father would be proud. My mother’s old nylons could be turned into an onion/garlic rope.

But I’m still grooming as much as I did 50 years ago.

Because The Cowsills were wrong when they told us hair “would stop by itself.”

It doesn’t.

Worse, it now sprouts in places it never has before. At 23, birds could nest–thanks again, Cowsills–on top of my head. Now, my ears could be a condo duplex for a pair of hummingbirds.

Unless I trimmed & trimmed & trimmed.

What is it about men and their hair?

Below are my grooming instruments.

When we travel, I dump them into an airport-approved clear plastic bag. TSA pre-check is a godsend.

We visited the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum a few years ago. Lo and behold, a close-up profile of President Kennedy sitting beside a pool showed the elegant JFK with a tuft of hair protruding from his right ear.

Science suggests growing ear and nose hair in older men might be related to testosterone. (source) That was more than splendid for John. For me, we all have burdens to manage.

Yesterday, sunny, standing late afternoon at a west-facing window with the magnifying mirror pictured above cupped next to my left ear, the little silver battery-operated razor in my right hand, I was thinking about Ricky Gervais’ Netflicks series After Life that we finished the night before.

After Life is about death, among many other things. What about my ear and nose hairs after death? Rumor had it they continued to grow. Fingers and toenails as well. Mr. Rumor was wrong again. After death, our skin retracts, making it look like our hair and nails continue to grow. (source) But they don’t.

Hair growth after death was my #2 reason for cremation.

But what if forensic science is wrong?

Fortunately, my #1 reason still envelops.

I’ve seen the 1988 Dutch film, The Vanishing.

Hair-Raising.

Jimmy Buffet & Rebecca were right

*

That’s Rebecca in the bright blue coat on the left. I’m the guy in the cap next to her. We’re with a group of Fulbright Scholars in Romania in the fall of 2021. Dwarfing us was Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s white elephant Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest. We are at a Fulbright orientation. After this weekend, the group would spread out around Romania.

I taught American Politics at the West University of Timișoara. Rebecca used the Romanian she learned from two years of intensive study on Duolingo to help us maneuver around the beautiful country.

I took this photo the day we arrived in this western Romanian city.

Rebecca weighed a ginger root at Kaufland’s supermarket, a two-mile walk from our apartment. The scale’s directions were in Romanian. She passed her first language test, but it wasn’t easy, particularly with a mask. The N95 fit snugly around her nose and cheeks. Rebecca’s son Jonathan, a nurse practitioner, had smartly sent her a pack of state-of-the-art covers. She was Anthony Fauci’s poster person for proper masking.

Me? Well, this was my sordid story.

The Slow Train to Suceava

On Monday, November 1, 2021, I joined 16,000 others in Romania who tested positive for COVID-19. Romania was smack-dab in the middle of its 4th COVID wave, with 500 deaths every day in this country of 19 million. I felt lousy for a few days, so we went to a Romanian doctor one of my University of West colleagues recommended.

When she texted the positive diagnosis the next day, I was shocked.

How could this be? I’m twice vaccinated and wear a mask. “I know this is somebody’s fault,” whines Jimmy Buffet early in Margaritaville. I thought the same thing. In Romania, where 63% were not vaccinated, blame was easy to find.

I likely got COVID on a train trip from Timișoara to Suceava. But back to Jimmy and his signature song. At first, he agrees with others that a “woman is to blame” for his troubles.

On the Timișoara to Cluj train–the first arrow in the map–a young woman and child minus masks walked by us to their seats. There were also the three maskless male loggers who got on the Cluj to Suceava train–the second arrow–and hung around for a few stops in the aisle about 10 feet from where we sat.

Eventually, Buffet gives up the search for blame, accepts it, and concedes, “It’s my own damn fault.” In the song, his wisdom comes from a therapist. For me, it came from Rebecca.

“You’ve been wearing that cloth mask that doesn’t protect you. And I’ve been telling you that for over a year.”

This was a Margaritaville moment for me. Rebecca had worn the super protective N95 mask that fits snugly for months. Here’s another photo where her face cover fits better than the coat she tried on at Illius Town Shopping Mall.

Yes, I know. She’s protecting herself, me, and others. In contrast, I was sloppy, settling for comfortable cloth covers and letting them slide down my nose. On the slow trains to Suceava, my lame armor was a limp mask halfway down my nose. I felt smug with my two vaccine jabs on the many bathroom trips down the aisles.

You’ve been patiently waiting for this moment. Here’s the default me.

The poster person for how not to wear a mask.

Rebecca was mad

We’d been in Timisoara for a month and had established a routine. We walked two miles to Kaufland’s with our four bags. Then we discovered a Farmer’s Market. That’s Rebecca filling one of our bags with fresh produce.

We made one trip to Kaufland’s and one to the market each week. And we loved our late afternoon happy hours at an outdoor bar in Timișoara’s four beautiful Piatas (squares). Or along the enchanting Bega River. Two reasons why this city was named a European City of Culture in 2023.

Now our outdoor times were on hold for two weeks. And Rebecca would have to lug heavier shopping bags back from Kaufland’s and the market. You get the picture.

Fortunately, our apartment had two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Below is the main bedroom. Look closely, and you can see the top mattress was misshapen.

That’s because we laid two twin mattresses from the other bedroom onto the queen mattress, which was too hard. Below was the additional bedroom sans mattresses.

I know what you are thinking. No, Rebecca didn’t make me sleep on the slats. Nor did he send me to a hotel.

What we did

The Romanian government took COVID seriously. My students told me stories of how the Timișoara police would contact each positive-test person. A squad car would stop by daily, expecting the sick person to wave from the window. So I couldn’t cheat.

My symptoms were fever, fatigue, congestion, and loss of smell. Our apartment refrigerator offered the perfect smell test. We had tried everything to get rid of its odor. I poked my head into it the day I was diagnosed. Nothing. Eerie.

Later that day, I pulled my side’s twin mattress into the spare bedroom for my two week sentence.

Rebecca’s anger was clean, pure, and short-lived. It’s always been that way. At our little dinner table, we sat across from each other that first evening. Six feet apart.

She spoke, and I listened.

The next day, for lunch, she walked to a restaurant she had wanted to try, enjoyed a noon-time glass of wine, and wandered around Timișoara’s city center.

A prepared for my Saturday online classes.

On the 4th day, my fever died. On the 5th, the refrigerator’s sickening smell was back. Wonderful.

Rebecca shopped at Kaufland’s and the farmer’s market lugging home two heavy bags each time.

On the 14th day, we walked through the city center to one of our favorite restaurants.

I kept expecting one of Timișoara’s finest to put her hand on my shoulder.

We each had our N95s snugly around our noses.

And Rebecca never got COVID.

No thanks to me.

*

When I was growing up in the 1950s, my friends Timmy and Tommy lived next door. One summer day, we were in their kitchen. Their mom was at work.

Timmy pulled open a drawer packed with candy bars. This was the first time I had seen anything like it. A kid’s dream comes true. There were Snickers, Milky Ways, Three Musketeers, and Baby Ruths. These guys, I thought as I walked through their backyard back to my house, could eat a candy bar anytime they wanted. My mom met me at the back door and reminded me it was a yard work day on Thursday.

And took away my Snickers. But didn’t find my Baby Ruth.

After Sunday Mass, sans my agnostic father, my family always went to Iowana Dairy for ice cream lunches. Our family of five would sit at the counter, each ordering an ice cream Sundae, Malt or Shake, or Banana Split.

What does ice cream mean to me today?

Controlled indulgence.

Aristotle’s Golden Mean.