What makes you who you are?

Serious

Patricia Ross, a seasoned therapist, shares a compelling story of personal transformation, drawing from the experiences of one of her clients.

In her narrative, Ross vividly portrays a person who moves from a binary existence to a more complex reality, where he starts recognizing his role in shaping his future.

Gradually, the man embarks on a journey of self-discovery, exploring his preferences and interests, thereby transitioning towards a more enriched, three-dimensional life.

Step by step, he asks why he is the way he is. As he becomes more curious about himself, he becomes more interested in others.

Patricia has written a terrific story, and I loved the three-dimensional metaphor.

Who is that person who looks back at us from the mirrors?

He’s complicated.

In big and small ways.

He doesn’t like the confinement of labels.

When even he sees only a single reflection.

If he’s that way, then you are too.

Silly and, sadly, true

For example, take another gander at that fellow in the mirror.

He doesn’t like in-person shopping because he has a hard time saying no.

Often, his first response needs to be corrected.

But the striped shirt looked good on the window model.

He also felt guilty about buying from Amazon.

Purchasing locally makes him feel superior, like owning a Subaru Forester in southwest Iowa.

Besides, clad in that shirt, he imagined himself looking like soccer great Lionel Messi on the beach in the Michelob Ultra ad.

However, he remembered that Messi, also 5’7″, wears Argentina’s vertical stripe uniform.

He found the shirt on a rack.

It’s funny how, inside the store, it appeared green.

When he tried it on, it stayed green, and what about those stripes?

Would Lionel wear horizontal stripes?

He had better text Rebecca; she’d tell him what to do.

While waiting for her reply, he spotted an orange shirt.

Orange was the color of the Netherlands national soccer team. Or was it Holland’s?

It was a muted orange, and he wouldn’t look like a pumpkin.

He’d never worn orange.

Even Darrell, the Trump supporter who lives next door, wore more colorful shirts.

Rebecca replied a few minutes later: “The green shirt is OK, the orange is better, without the red hat.”

When she says OK, I know she means no.

He’ll get a compatible cap to complete the orange outfit.

The store owner said both shirts looked good on him.

And

Buy two, and the second one is half-price.

He knew the guy was only trying to make a buck, and keeping a men’s clothing store afloat was challenging in a small town.

Back to serious

So, he bought two shirts and a navy baseball hat.

He tried to like the green and parallel stripes.

But finally gave it away.

His tiny contribution to President Obama’s spread the wealth idea.

The other day, draped in orange and topped with blue, he waved to Darrell, the Trump guy.

He wondered about all the things regarding Darrell that he didn’t know.

Darrell, who did look like a pumpkin, smiled and waved back.

Is slowing time down a good idea?

*

You begin to notice auto doppelgangers whenever you buy a new car.

“I didn’t realize there were so many silver Subaru Foresters,” I thought six years ago.

It’s funny what controls our attention.

And alters our perspective.

*

Tuesday, November 5, 2024, will be my 19th American presidential election.

This quadrennial event is on my radar because I taught politics to college students for 40 years.

Soccer has the right idea for aging fans like me. Its National Team Championships are held in four-year cycles, each lasting a month.

The 2024 European Football Championship started on June 14. Today, I will fit my life around three beautiful games.

What about even rarer events, like the 17-year cicada brood and the 20-year total solar eclipse?

I may be 94 at the next concealment of the sun.

How many of each do I have left?

*

The refrigerator you see in the photo is two years old.

Already, the deluxe ice maker is misbehaving.

With more features and technology that can break down, today’s icebox lasts a little over a decade, half the lifetime of my mother’s trusty, simpler machine.

Will I outlast even a machine that was built to break down?

Yesterday, for a Father’s Day gift, my son took me to a screening of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The two-hour film passed in the blink of an eye.

As has Ben’s 34 years.

And the 43 years from when I first sat in wonder at that boulder rushing toward the audience.

It’s already June 17th here in middle America. The summer has not officially started, and it seems half gone.

How do we slow time down?

*

Or is that even a good idea?

Occasionally, I lose track of time when I write.

The late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it being in the “flow.”

I am so immersed in what I’m doing that time flies.

It’s like watching Raiders for the second time yesterday.

Or spending time with my son.

And it’s just happened again.

Time refused to slow down, even when I wrote about wishing that time would slow down.

Is there a lesson?

*

One of my mentors, Mark Lund, gave me advice about 25 years ago that I’ve never forgotten but must continually relearn.

Mark directed my college’s Study Abroad program. I had just returned from my first trip with students to Northern Ireland, proud that I had not spent all the money budgeted for our three-week travel course.

He looked at me and said:

Students pay us for the experience. Your task is to spend ALL their money wisely by giving them the best experience possible.

The money was meant to be spent. All of it!

Why would time be any different?

Today’s random word is billion.

A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you

Today’s story is Historical Fiction.

*

6:04.30 PM

April 4, 1968

Room 306, Lorraine Motel

Martin Luther King, Jr. has lived 1.2 billion seconds.

He has only 30 more.

*

Mary Louise Hunt: “Dr. King, I’m 18, a Memphis State freshman, and I want to help. Sometimes, I feel hopeless.

Martin: “Mary, I do as well. Hope is hard.”

Mary: “Why do they hate us?”

“They’re scared, and they hate themselves. I’ve seen it in their faces.”

“How do you keep from hating yourself?”

“I can’t, Mary. I’m a child of God, just as you are. They are as well. We are their salvation.”

“Bless you, Martin.”

Living with and against nature

*

My friend Rick, who lives in the middle of our town, routinely shoots squirrels with a .22 to keep them from messing with his garden.

Taking a more peaceful approach, Rebecca lathers our birdhouse pole with Vicks VapoRub. We’ve never heard our brown and black friends cough.

Two years ago, we built a small screened-in porch in our backyard. The first photo shows the outside view.

Here’s the scene from the inside.

This perspective has gotten me thinking about my place in nature.

Especially when the skunk showed up.

Our Neighbors

We sit among deer, bats, bees, flies, gnats, beetles, and Mr. Skunk.

He surprised us as we watched him stroll across our yard under our human neighbor Hazel’s deck.

I wanted to rush outside to take his picture, but I didn’t for obvious reasons.

When Hazel, 92, called the police, she was given the number of an animal relocation service.

She called Dan, the city’s Animal Relocation Officer.

Why does our human community of 8000 need a Dan?

This photo will help you understand.

Decorah is surrounded by forest and dissected by the Upper Iowa River. The arrow shows you where Hazel and I live. Critters follow a creek bed about two blocks from our home to enjoy our garden offerings and company.

An open borders policy!

Dan traps unwanted animals and takes them outside town.

The skunk escaped two weeks of trapping, but not so for five raccoons, including this one.

An expectant mother, said Dan, as he took her away. He told Hazel the skunk likely would not return, and she would find a new trapped raccoon every morning. So, she decided to put lattice panels under her deck.

Living with and against nature

It’s not easy living with others, human or otherwise.

Is it?

Exactly who is the intruder?

Is it the skunk? Or us?

In a terrific book, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan writes about the woodchuck, his garden’s nemesis:

He was part of a larger, more insidious threat: he labored on behalf of the advancing forest. Not only the animals, but the insects, the weeds, even the fungi and bacteria, were working together to erase my garden — after that my lawn, my driveway, my patio, even my house…The forest is normal, everything else — the fields and meadows, the lawns and pavements, and the gardens — is a disturbance, a kind of ecological vacuum which nature will not abide for long.

Before I read Pollan’s book, I sometimes sat on the porch and apologized to the deer I had just shooed away from our bushes. Or the grass I refused to let grow. In the best line in a book complete with excellent writing, Pollan calls our American lawn “nature under totalitarian rule.”

Well, what I do to these guys would put Stalin to shame.

Japanese beetles were on the leaf of one of our nine little birch trees. A garden shop expert told me it was the beetles or the trees. One tactic involved a solution absorbed by the root system that, over time, will help the tree develop its defenses, like a moat around a castle.

The other tactic was slaughter with a pesticide, think machine gun.

Pollan’s magnificent book is a rationale for what he calls “a middle space between forest and parking lot.”

Nature and humans can live together without us, the ultimate intruders, either acquiescing or dominating.

Twenty-five years ago, two days after I purchased this property, I cut down a healthy apple tree. I didn’t want the rotting apples or the bugs they would attract.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

For a quarter century, I’ve been doing penance. My self-imposed punishment was planting 13 trees and three small gardens.

Come to think of it, not so self-imposed. It’s probably no coincidence that my northeast Iowa community, surrounded by forests, has developed a very environmentally friendly culture.

My community, according to Pollan, has encouraged me to act

Like a sane and civilized human…a creature whose nature is to remake his surroundings and whose culture can guide him on the question of aesthetics and ethics.

Today’s random word is cumbrous

Drabble 153: A mystery.

*

This Drabble (100-word story) was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts.

3 am at a Motel 6

“Would the glove give me away?

It won’t be the shoes. I’m wearing them.

The balls? Well, finally.

Enough is enough.

Everyone is born a murderer.

I’ve thought about it for years.

But yesterday, on the practice range.

I thought she was my friend.

Sweetie, I called her after my mother.

I liked her shape.

We felt good together.

My friends told me we made a good pair.

But she made promises that she did not keep.

And now I can’t sleep.

Because I remember the terror in the eyes

Of my cumbrous driver.”

And a memory of a lesson my father taught me

*

That’s my friend Steve on the right. We’re two 74-year-olds worn out after playing catch for about an hour. We solved the world’s problems, don’t you know?

But for me, baseball always reminds me of my father. And my first Little League home run — a low line drive over the left field snow fence at Duck Creek Park. I can still see my left leg stride forward and feel the bat make solid contact with the ball.

My first young adult taste of success.

And the lesson my father taught me about so much more than baseball.

A Big Bat and a Bag of Beans

In the summer of 1960, I was 11 and halfway through my third season of Little League. The Peter, Paul, and Mary song “Right Field” told my story: two weekly innings, the Little League minimum, one at-bat, usually a strikeout, and right field, where coaches always put their weakest players.

My father knew little about baseball except that I loved the game. Every summer afternoon, when he came home from his work as a chemical engineer, my friends and I would play Wiffle ball on a makeshift diamond in our backyard.

I was the oldest of three sons, so my Little League failure was new to him. I’m guessing he saw my sadness and lack of confidence with every strikeout. No father wants to see this in his son.

One day, he came home with an adult-size baseball bat and a bag of navy beans. After supper, he took me out to the backyard and said he wanted me to work on something every morning: holding the bat in his right hand, with his left hand, he took a bean, tossed it in the air, clasped the bat, strode his left leg forward, and hit the bean right at about the height of his belly-button.

“Repetition is important,” he said and added, “Your muscles will remember. Go through the bag, hit the beans toward the garage, and don’t clobber your mother when she’s hanging the clothes.”

That’s my father on the left, around this time. He was an engineer with Bendix Corporation in Davenport, Iowa, and worked on America’s space program. He knew how things worked, including sons.

For the rest of the summer, I covered the backyard with beans, never once hitting my mother with that colossal bat. I didn’t know it, but I was building wrist and arm muscles and honing a home run swing.

When the next summer came around, my coaches must have noticed something. They moved me from right field to third base for our first game. And in my first at-bat, bam!

More homers followed throughout my youth baseball career.

The Lesson

Sadly, I never played third base for the New York Yankees, which was my boyhood dream. Eventually, the curve ball would end my budding baseball career. Even my father had no answer for that.

He never said much about the navy bean experiment, and he never sat me down and told me that if I worked hard, I would become a better baseball player. Once he gave me a way forward, it was up to me.

Looking back, he taught me at a very early age what psychologist Carol Dweck calls the “growth mindset.” In my early Little League career, I saw my teammates hitting home runs and thought they were born hitters and I wasn’t. Dweck calls that the “fixed mindset.”

Whenever I encounter a limitation, I instinctively ask how I can improve. That’s the “growth mindset.”

Of course, it’s not instinct at all.

It comes from countless bags of beans since that summer of 1960.

Anticipating a verdict

Today’s random word is ginormous.

A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.

*

Missy, FDR’s Secretary; John, Lincoln’s Secretary.

Missy: “John, do you have the list? Is Jimmy finally on it?”

John: “Jimmy’s still hangin’ in there, so I’ve got 40 on my list.”

Missy: “They like gathering at Abe’s place and seeing George’s obelisk.”

John: “Teddy says George’s shaft…never mind.”

Missy: “Everyone’s coming, even James. Finally, a President ranked worse than he is.”

John: “If Donald’s found guilty this week, there will be a ginormous roar of joy.”

Missy: “Second only to what we heard after Barack was elected. Did you see the tears in Abe’s eyes?”

John: “With death comes wisdom.”

*

• 2024 Presidential Rankings (source)
• Thanks to Nancy Oglesby for editing.

How have you gotten from A to B?

This is me, yesterday.

All three of us — cap, gown, and me — show our age. The cap is worn-white at each of the four points, the regalia is wrinkled and has never been dry-cleaned in its 40-year life, and I retired from the college you see behind me six years ago. I knew none of the 358 students who walked across the stage, although I had taught several of their parents.

How did this wanted poster guy get to that gown guy?

A straight-line theory of life

I only remember two things from my high school geometry class. One day, our teacher, Babe Derouin, brought two fully inflated basketballs and a hoop into class and simultaneously put the two smaller spheres through the larger one.

Wow.

Babe was also the basketball coach and seemed agitated that day.

But the second piece of geometric wisdom relates to this story.

Babe said, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”

Was that also how life, not just geometry, was supposed to work? As far as I knew, my dad had always wanted to be an engineer. And my friend Ed, a history teacher.

From A — — — — — — — — — ->B

Over the years, my professor colleagues have talked about how they had always wanted to be teachers, loved being students, enjoyed school, and felt a passion for their subject matter.

None of that was true for the young college graduate in the second photo.

My path to a 50-year teaching career looked more like this curvy bike trail.

A serendipitous theory of life

In 1969, newly elected President Richard Nixon knew America would have to get out of Vietnam. The war was unpopular, with demonstrations routine across the country.

Nixon and America’s military leaders decided to move toward an all-volunteer army. The first step was the introduction of a yearly lottery that would assign a number to all American males born between 1944 and 1952. Thousands of young men, including me (born in 1949), would now know their chances of being inducted.

Numbers ranged from 1 to 365, and those assigned the lowest numbers had the highest chance of being drafted. In December 1969, I learned my number was 66. All my close college friends had numbers over 250.

However, my college deferment would only lapse once I graduated in the spring of 1971, an eternity to a 19-year-old. So I didn’t think about the draft until May 1971 when I received an order to present myself for a draft physical at the Fort Des Moines Army Base in Des Moines, Iowa.

About 40 of us got on a bus in Davenport for the two-hour trip to Des Moines, had our physicals, and returned late in the evening. I was one of only a handful who passed. The guy beside me failed his physical because he was five pounds too heavy and vowed to lose the weight.

Me? Reality had smacked me up against the head. Soon after, I received orders to report to Fort Des Moines in August.

In desperation, I tried the local National Guard. There were no openings. I thought about Canada. I had marched against the Vietnam War and believed it was a mistake. But to leave country, family, and friends for an unknown life? That was beyond the cautious me. Asking around, I learned of another option.

Although I had graduated and lost my deferment, a provision allowed me to receive one additional deferment year if I was a full-time student pursuing another degree. So, I signed up to get a teaching degree. With America’s involvement in the war winding down, that was enough time to put me out of harm’s way.

I became a teacher to stay out of Vietnam.

But that change in life’s direction, represented by the bike trail’s sharp turn, was only the beginning.

Mystery

You see, I had been a mediocre student until the stay-out-of-Vietnam year. That same geometry high school year, I even failed Civics, a subject I would teach college students for four decades.

Something mysterious began to happen during that fifth year of college. It was more than just getting one year older. Unknown to my conscious self, I had committed and made a start — not only to a profession but to a way of being in the world.

Today, I look back on a half-century of loving teaching, learning, and my subject, politics.

This love slowly grew and matured AFTER I committed myself to each.

Stephen Pressfield in “The War of Art” describes it this way:

Something mysterious starts to happen … a process is set in motion by which, inevitably and infallibly … unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.

That’s how I got from A to B.

We all need help to grow up.

*

This story was published in Illumination, a Medium Publication.

*

The Dream

I’m in the back seat of a car. The light blue vinyl seat is ripped. Outside the window, the sea is visible and rough.

My father is in the driver’s seat, his hands clasped around the steering wheel and looking ahead. All of a sudden, he turns the car toward the water.

I watch as it catapults into a crashing wave. The water seeps into the vehicle through the rusted-out holes at my feet.

In the next scene, I’m in the driver’s seat, and my father is in the rear looking out the window.

I’ve had a version of this dream many times, starting around the age of forty. I’m now 74.

Isn’t it a phenomenal dream?

I wonder if my dad ever had a dream like this.

I’m guessing he did because you can only get out of your son’s way if you’ve become a mature, loving adult.

Who then helps his son move out into the world to become a mature, loving adult.

That’s what the dream means to me.

My Father

You’ve already met my father, Paul Sr.

This was my favorite photo of him. My mother, Dody, snapped it at a Farmer’s Market in the spring of 1984, a few months before he would be diagnosed. Back then, for any above the neck cancer, they extracted teeth before radiation treatment. Though he would live for nine years, radiation and chemo would dramatically change his appearance.

That’s his weekend jacket. Even when he wore a suit every weekday, on Saturdays, when it was nip in the air, he threw on a mid-weight coat as I, the privileged firstborn, followed him out the door on the way to donuts.

My father was a chemical engineer who retired in 1980, set up a bakery in the basement, and began developing a line of bread products. My mom served as his senior financial advisor, as she had done throughout their 45-year marriage. All three sons had left the nest but served as taste testers over the three years it took him to refine his skills and product.

My favorite PJ Gardner’s Fine Bread Product was his breadstick, a perfect blend of crisp and soft.

But my favorite image of my father is sitting across a table and conversing with me. Sometimes, we’d get a little heated, like in 1971, around the family room table, sitting in those orange chairs, and arguing about Vietnam.

But, I just knew, he was listening and taking me seriously.

That’s a precious gift from father to son.

“It all starts from there.”

I’ve been listening to Yusuf Islam’s (Cat Stevens) 1971 song Father and Son. Below, I’ve linked you to the lyrics and an interview.

About the song, Yusuf says

Father and Son is as much about my relations with my father as my relations with society. It’s always been that way…That’s what I want to explain in the song. I talk about a father and a son because in fact it all starts from there.

It’s not easy to become a mature adult. We all need a lot of help to get to the point where we take responsibility for our lives. That’s what my car dream meant to me — being in the driver’s seat translates to this is my life and not someone else’s.

There are two voices in Father and Son: a father who talks to the son and the son who soliloquizes. In the second stanza, the son declares:

How can I try to explain?

When I do, he turns away again

It’s always been the same

Same old story

From the moment I could talk

I was ordered to listen

In the language of my dream, the son is stuck in the back seat. He hasn’t broken free to become the author of his life.

Even when my father and I argued — especially when we argued — he always listened. We need someone to hear us, take us seriously, and give us the heft to stand alone.

Or sit alone, in the driver’s seat.

It’s only when we can do that that we can, in turn, encourage others to become themselves.

“It all starts from there.”

___________________________________________________________________________________

Interview with Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) and lyrics to Father and Son can be found here.

Lie and Lay

This story was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts. It is a Drabble, precisely 100 words. Today’s word that must be used is laid.

*

Alan?

Ms. Fortune: Is that a cat or a dog laying on the lady?

Lying.

I would never lie to you, Ms. Fortune.

No, Alan. You should have asked if a cat or dog was lying on the lady. And it’s a dog.

Jenna?

Who laid the dog on the lady, Ms. Fortune?

What do you think?

The dog was laying on that orange box, waiting for the lady who was laying on her bed.

Lying, Jenna.

Not since this morning, to my mom, Ms. Fortune.

Bill.

I’m feeling sick. Can I go lay down in the cloakroom?

Lie, Bill.