Call Rebecca a Tree Hugger, and she will look you in the eye and say, in a combination of steel and sweet, “Well, thank you very much.”
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I read somewhere that we pray for ourselves and not for God. Bending the knee, bowing the head, or raising the arms to something greater than us is a good way to reduce our human egos.
The same might be true for hugging a tree. This photo was taken in 2021 in the Bukovinian Carpathian Mountains in northeastern Romania, where Rebecca and I spent the fall.
Florin Floriol, our guide, is telling us about the physiological, psychological, and spiritual benefits of a tree hug for humans. You can read about these blessings here.
Rebecca comes from a family of huggers. Here she is with her brother, Mike, and sister, Pat, in 2017.
Photo by the author
I don’t. I never saw my maternal grandmother hug anyone, including my mom, who wasn’t inclined toward a squeeze either. The same for my dad’s parents, Paul and Edith, and their five children, all growing up in the 1920s and 30s.
I’m 76 and have ever so slowly become comfortable embracing humans and nature, both in fact and in heart.
Photo of Rebecca and me by guide Ludovic Satmari on the border of Romania and Bulgaria
Regarding nature, I’m still angry about this act of destruction.
Photo by the author
Six years ago, my neighbor had this beautiful three-crowned tree destroyed. I asked him why. He said it was rotting. I saw no evidence from the leaves or the trunk.
THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED IN MEDIUM’S THE DAILY CUPPA, WITH A LIMIT OF 150 WORDS.
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Naturally, he played Billy Joel’s Piano Man with those lyrics of regret. But tiny Johnny’s Piano Bar in San Miguel, Mexico, was no melancholy place. Maybe it was because it was a Friday and not Saturday night, and 6:30 instead of 9 o’clock.
More likely, it was Maggie and James, half of Rebecca’s Spanish-speaking group that meets weekdays at the Instituto Allende. Maggie, a retired jeweller, recently widowed and 85, suggested Johnny’s. James, 65, is a visual artist with a studio at Fábrica de Aurora. From Connecticut, he’s lived in San Miguel for 18 years.
At 8:30, Maggie took out her phone and dialed Uber. Rebecca followed suit with no immediate success. Looking at me, she said, “Let’s walk, it’s only 30 minutes up Aldama.”
“I’ll walk with you,” offered James, “It will clear my head for work.”
I took this photo of Carla Gutiérrez’s La Frontera (The Border) three days ago at the Fabrica la Aurora art gallery in San Miguel, Mexico. Please form your own judgement. That’s what good artists encourage.
I’ve searched and searched, but I cannot find the creator’s thoughts on this painting. In a couple of references, the title was translated as The Wall. The date is 2024. I’m guessing this picture represents a symbolic insult against the Mexican border policies of the United States.
Would you be surprised to know that the “middle finger” as an epithet originated in Ancient Greece? (source) No teacher would be surprised to find an irate student in the story.
The character Socrates in Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds (423 BC) pesters poor Strepsiades on poetic matters, who finally responds with “of course I know what a dactyl is,” and thrusts in the air a middle finger gesture. Apparently, Greek audiences appreciated penis puns.
As did my 6th-grade student, Steve Dehring, who, in 1973, after school, from across the street, flashed ‘the bird’ at me several times when he noticed me looking at him while I was otherwise busied by bus duty. The next day, when I confronted Steve about this in private, he said I couldn’t do anything to him since he was off school property. He was an angry troubled kid who I grew to understand over the next few months.
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Have you ever given anyone the finger? A few years ago, while driving down my city’s main street looking for a parking place, I spotted a white pick-up truck leaving a spot with a Confederate flag stuck in a slot on its tailgate. Damn, I thought, who is this guy? This is the 21st century, and he’s stuck in 1865.
As he was maneuvering out of the spot, I formed the fuck-you signal with my right hand below the sight line of my car window and held it there until he sped away. At the same time, I gave up just enough room, but not an inch more, for him to exit.
I was angry just as Strepsiades and Steve were. And President Donald Trump was roughly at the same time I was snapping La Frontera when a Ford autoworker called him a “pedophile protector” as Trump walked through a Ford plant. Trump’s response, in a widely available video clip, appeared to be a verbal and visual finger.
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I’m also angry at my President for this immature display of his own anger. He seems completely captured by whatever emotion hits him in the moment.
Just as I was with the confederate flag guy, Steve, with his anger toward me, his teacher, and Strepsiades with Socrates.
Anger is a negative emotion that, for me, is fast approaching its sell-by date. It mostly solves no problems and only creates more.
Of course, you might feel different. I welcome your opinion.
Here’s another politician employing this symbol of insult.
A photo of Vice President Rockefeller gesturing at heckling students in 1974
In our world today, does any of this righteous anger really help? Or does it only worsen our divisions?
Ironically, this reflection came from a painting of a Middle Finger.
And I wonder if Carla Gutiérrez’s La Frontera offers a way forward. Certainly, this work of art comes from anger. But it could not have become art in the middle-finger-moment. That required skill, reason, and objectivity.
The MF moment only erects barriers or worsens the barriers that already exist.
That instance in my car embarrasses me because my own anger was a waste of energy. Worse, after I did my business downtown, I spent about 30 minutes driving the streets of my hometown looking for Mr. Confederate Flag, getting angrier and angrier.
This story was written for The Challenge, a Medium publication.
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My Dad wore button-down shirts to his engineering job at Bendix Corporation. After eight years of retirement from college teaching, a light blue Oxford cloth shirt with tiny collared buttons is still my everyday choice.
Paul Sr. was never without a hat and jacket when the weather turned cool.
Photo of my Dad selling his bread products at a farmer’s market
Neither am I.
He used a lather of hand soap to shave rather than shaving cream. Every few years, I buy a can of shaving gel, and it sits in my bathroom cabinet drawer while the Dove in the soap dish dwindles.
After he retired, my father wrote letters to members of his extended family and friends telling stories about his life.
What are my Medium and blog (paulmuses.com) stories but an incarnation of my Dad’s efforts to draw insights from his life and offer them to a wider audience?
Eight years ago, my cousin Jim told me this story.
Linda was out, so I was alone. I had done a bike ride. I believe that I died. I went to a very crowded place. Lots of people of all Different races and ethnicities waiting in a crowded line. I got in line and gradually we moved ahead to what I can only describe as Gates. At the gates, I was met by your dad. He told me that I must go back. “Your work is not done,” he told me in a commanding voice. Next thing I knew was waking up in an insulin reaction on the kitchen floor. I was able to crawl to the refrigerator and get some orange juice. I tried to tell Linda what happened, but to no avail. She says this is all low Blood sugar.
Jim, 76, is a lifelong diabetic. Linda is his wife. They live in Des Plaines, Illinois. After this incident, Jim talked with his friend Bob, who is a Lutheran Pastor. Jim and Bob were in a Catholic Seminary together in the early 1970s.
My cousin dropped out, studied philosophy, and worked in personnel management for Montgomery Ward for thirty years. In retirement, he tutored math and other subjects at a Chicago-area community college.
Later, Jim told me about Bob and his conversation about my Dad’s otherworldly encounter with him.
When Bob and I talked about your dad, this was our main insight: When he and I were in seminar we were taught that no one gets to heaven Without practicing religion. Neither he nor I thought this made sense. You can be a good person and live a good life and earn a place in heaven Without any religion. You may have the opportunity to develop yourself more. Reincarnation and rebirth are common in some cultures. Your father has obviously made it to another level. And is doing the work he is supposed to be doing. “Your work is not done,” was explicit and very direct to me. I’ll never forget hearing it. What work we are to do is always the question.
My father and Jim’s uncle died in 1993 of sinus cancer, at 71. He was an agnostic, I believe, to the end. That skepticism about traditional religious beliefs, like button-down shirts, hats, and jackets, shaving with hand soap, and writing in retirement, is also something he has passed on to me. Or, perhaps a better way of framing this phenomenon, things he and I have in common that I have chosen to embrace.
On January 13, my Father’s 104th birthday, Lynn L. Alexander asks whether we have a wish. When I started writing this story, my idea was to communicate a longing for an encounter with my Dad, similar to my cousin Jim’s, my skepticism about the possibilities beyond our natural lives be damned.
But I’ve changed my mind. I’ve had my Dad for 76 years. He lives inside me. I can encounter him at a moment’s notice. Lynn’s prompt reminded me of this. Perhaps you feel the same about a deceased parent, someone who is gone but lives on inside you.
And yet, his ‘your work is not done’ to Jim sounds so much like him. Which leads me to wonder exactly what occurred eight years ago on that kitchen floor in Des Plaines, Illinois.
This story was written for a Medium Publication, The Daily Cuppa, with a limit of 150 words. It is a follow-up to another story I wrote for Medium and placed on this site, The Beautiful Mysteries of Teaching.
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Several readers asked for a follow-up to this story that concluded with a young student having coffee with James Baldwin in Paris in 1960.
The student was on a scholarship that funded a year of classes at a French university in Paris. On walks through the French capital, she noticed a black man sitting by himself at an outdoor cafe typing on a Remington.
One day, she introduced herself. He asked her to join him, offering coffee and pastries. In 1960, James Baldwin was 37 and had written two novels, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Notes of a Native Son, a book of essays. He left the United States in 1948, seeking artistic freedom outside the orbit of American racism.
Not really knowing who he was, this young white woman met with him several times, finding Baldwin warm, relaxed, and curious about her life.
Photo by the author of the San Miguel, Mexico classroom. The student at the end of the story was sitting in the chair marked by the arrow.
I’ve been on this side of a classroom for 53 years. With 44 6th graders in 1973, it was about survival, for them and me. Hobbes was right about nations and schoolrooms; without order, nothing good occurs.
My teaching career was a winding yellow brick road of discovery. For too long, I thought I was the wizard.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
San Miguel’s Instituto Allende’s Lifelong Learning classroom is a long way from St. John’s Elementary School in Burlington, Iowa. For my middle schoolers, I’d focus the lesson on kilometers (2783) and miles (1729). For my undergraduates, why does the United States persist with the Imperial System?
For the most recent group of mature learners, the topic was James Baldwin’s United States of America. “Does anyone have a Baldwin story?” I asked.
“In Paris, in 1960, I noticed this young black man typing every day at this outdoor coffee shop. I sat down and…”
My first Superman, played by George Reeves on American television in the 1950s, needed help to catch the bad guys from Daily Planet colleagues Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Perry White.
The Man of Steel I read about in the comics, my two brothers, and I passed back and forth in our family’s station wagon on summer vacations, was sometimes aided by Supergirl and Krypto the Superdog.
My last Superman, seen on the big screen in 2025, was depicted by David Corenswet and succored by Lois, Jimmy, Perry, a Justice Gang including Hawk Girl and Green Lantern, and a super-charged Krypto.
All twelve Superman films, naturally, starred white men in the title role. What do I mean by naturally? In I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin, as a young black man growing up in Harlem, says
Heroes, as far as I could see, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection.
Baldwin uttered those words decades ago. Today, in the United States, our films and other popular culture forms offer many black, brown, and female superheroes. (source)
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates has worked with Warner Bros. on a Black Superman project that, apparently, has been put on hold due to concerns that it is too woke. (source) Baldwin, who died in 1987, wouldn’t be surprised.
I’m thinking about James Baldwin and his language because I’ve just finished one of my top teaching experiences in a half-century-long career. You see me and the course title in the first photo.
My co-stars are below. They’re all there: Perry, Lois, The Justice Gang, even Krypto, who just came in the back door. We’re gathered at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel, Mexico, as part of its Lifelong Learning program.
Photo by the author
But the superstar was Jimmy, and his words, especially his words.
The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story. What can we do? Well, I’m tired…I don’t know how it will come about. I know that no matter how it comes about, it will be bloody; it will be hard. I still believe that we can do with this country something that has never been done before. We are misled here because we think of numbers. You don’t need numbers; you need passion.
So, Rodrigo S-C, when you ask about our superpower, this is my answer. Know enough to organize a learning experience around the ideal person and his words that might have been written yesterday or tomorrow, and the right people will come. And the combination will be magic!
Carol Labuzzetta, MS asks about the coldest place we’ve ever been. Oh, Carol, do I have a story for you!
Perhaps you’re sipping from a mug of hot chocolate in front of a crackling real log fireplace. Or, like me, sitting in a sunny courtyard with a running water fountain in San Miguel, Mexico, where it will be 70° Fahrenheit later today, a disappointing 5° cooler than yesterday.
This is where Rebecca and I escape the January cold in our home state of Iowa, USA.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
My story begins on Sunday, January 5, 2014. When Rebecca and I met several years earlier, we lived 323 miles apart, she in Clarinda, in southwest Iowa, and I in Decorah, to the northeast.
Image created by the author
That year, we spent the holidays at her home. As we were both still working, I needed to drive back to Decorah because my Luther College January term class began the next day. As I got in my car, I set my iPhone GPS.
Photo by the author
And, full of hope, I turned the ignition key of my four-month-old Subaru Forester. Still young, it had never experienced -20° combined with a fifteen-mile-per-hour arctic wind that had loosened from the north. When I heard the first sluggish crank, I knew it was game on.
Since Rebecca and I have lived in Iowa most of our adult lives, we know its weather extremes. My mother and father experienced 118° in 1934, without air conditioning, and I recall the unimaginable -46 ° in 1996 in Elkader, just 30 miles east of Decorah.
Cars are like people in that when cold, all their parts must work harder. So I worried. The current temperature of -20° would be the high of the day. And we’d be fighting a northerly wind most of the way. Usually, a full tank of gas got me to Decorah with around 50 miles to spare, but that day, the cold and into the wind meant I would have to get out of the car to pump gas.
This is a good point in the story to distinguish real temperature from wind chill. Real is actual, and wind chill is what the actual, actually feels like on one’s skin. So, I knew that for around five hours, my Subaru’s thin chassis was the only thing between me and the -46.
As the car warmed up, I thought, How long can a human survive -46?
Life is taking chances, right? Rebecca and I hugged and, per usual, she said ‘safe travel.’ Once I got north of Des Moines, I was able to pick up a Minnesota Public Radio station, which announced that Governor Mark Dayton had just closed all public schools the following day.
I knew my residential college was holding first-day classes, but had also put out word that students should not travel if they felt the conditions were too dangerous.
Sure enough, my car’s gas gauge showed less than a quarter tank remaining about 100 miles from home. I stopped at a small station in Hampton, about two hours from home. When I stepped outside the car, the glacial air hit me immediately.
My gloves were thickish, but no match. I pressed the handle to release the gas I hoped was still liquid, and once I saw the gas pump indicator move, I slipped back in my car.
Once home, I turned on all faucets to make sure water was still running through the pipes.
The next morning, in a toasty classroom, I introduced students to the intricacies of American Politics. Unprecedentedly, at the end of the two hours, no one wanted to leave.
On my way home, I parked on Water Street across from my bank to put a document in my safe deposit box. The temperature was -28, and the wind was 18 MPH, still out of the north. Because there were few cars on the street, I maneuvered mine into a slot 30 feet from the bank’s lobby door. Bundled with thick gloves, a scarf, and a stocking cap pulled low, I exited and started across the street.
After three steps, I froze, pivoted, and retreated to bank another day.
Rebecca and I have been in San Miguel, Mexico, for four days, arriving at the Guanajuato International Airport, about an hour away, on Thursday. This will be our third January in this central Mexican city of about 175,000, and the second esconced in this apartment. Yesterday, we put down a deposit for 2027.
Here’s a midday view from our rooftop.
Photo by the author
It’s 4:38 AM as I type these words. Rebecca is asleep and will be up around 7. This morning I arose at 3:30, a little earlier than usual. My writing stint is before sunrise, wherever I am.
In the first photo, outside the window over the couch, is a little courtyard with a running water fountain. Beyond the font is a door that leads to the neighborhood you see in the second photo.
Somewhere, outside that door, a dog barks, just as she did yesterday at precisely this time.
On World Introvert Day, Carole Olsen asks whether we are introverts or extroverts.
Carole, I’m in the middle, on a border between thriving with others and needing alone time, according to a therapist years ago, who administered a personality test. When she told me this, I thought, that sounds about right.
The best way to explain what this means is my philosophy on screened porches. Here’s our front porch. It sits on one of our community’s busiest streets, with hundreds of cars and tens of walkers passing each day. When did people start owning more than one dog?
Photo by the author
This is our newish back porch, off a quieter street.
Photo by the author
Good screens make good neighbors.
Photo by the author
The extrovert part of me enjoys being with people, even online, which is itself a natural protection, perfect for someone in the middle. For example, I like the Medium community, which includes not only writers and readers but also regular commentators like Carole.
Lately, several Medium friends have returned having tried Substack. My sense is they’ve come back because they miss the Medium coterie, imperfect as it has become.
So too on a porch. I like being a part of the outdoor life of my neighborhood, offering an occasional hello, and engaging in a rare, more extended conversation. But I also need the subtle barrier, the apartness, and not just from squirrels.
Our good friends Ed and Carol across the street regularly sit on their back patio late in the summer day, as Rebecca and I do the same on our back porch. Once a month or so, we’ll take our drinks across the street to catch up on the latest. We’ll enjoy each other’s company for an hour or so and then return to our little worlds.
However, sometimes there is a threat so significant, so obtrusive, so ubiquitous that even the introverts throw caution to the wind and come out in droves.
When screens, fences, personality traits, and other differences recede into the background.
Mark your calendars, No Kings III is July 4, 2026.
