A letter from Romania

A few weeks ago on the way back to Timișoara from Budapest, our Romanian guide Sergiu Dănilă said “on our next trip, we should go to the Maramureș region and see the Merry Cemetery of Săpânta.” Maramureș is tucked into the northwest corner of Romania and a part of Romania Rebecca and me had not yet visited. “Are you comfortable in cemeteries?” he added. We explained that Rebecca lives across the street from one and that we walk through it all the time. It is a good reminder we are not yet ready for permanent residence. “Why is it called Merry?” we asked.

“That’s why you must go and see it,” replied Sergiu. “Seeing the cemetery is the only way you will understand why it is called Merry.” So with Sergiu as our guide we went to see it. And he was right.

The Cemetery

Săpânța is a village of about 3500 residents a few miles from Ukraine. You can see the cemetery surrounding the Romanian Orthodox Church. On the day we visited, the weather was cold and rainy as we walked through what is really an open air museum. Sergiu stopped in front of many grave sites to translate the inscriptions. The one below was my favorite and fortunately I was able to find an image with the translation alongside.

“World I leave you behind so others can live in you.” What a wonderful thought. The dead were still talking to us and to each other. Sergiu told us that’s what “Merry Cemetery” means. Peter Kayafas has written a book on the Cemetery and says all the headstones are written in the first person and present tense so that “the deceased existence continues interrupted but not stopped by death.” But who gives voice to the dead?

The Artist

After spending about an hour at the cemetery, Sergiu asked us if we wanted to meet Dumitru Pop who succeeded the Cemetary’s founder Stan Ionan Pătaș in 1977. Last fall Pop was awarded the title “Living Human Treasure” by Romania’s Ministry of Culture. He is Romania’s first recipient of this award that is “granted to persons who carry, preserve, and transmit elements of intangible cultural heritage.”

Professor Natalia Lazăr wrote the recommendation for Pop: “Dumitru Pop (Tincu) takes up again the original decorative forms and the specific chromatics imposed by the initiator Stan Ion Pătraș at the Merry Cemetery of Săpânța, recreating them, together with the epitaphs with literary valences and accents of Maramureșean vernacular, thus creating a true fresco of the contemporary Maramureșean (Săpânța) village – authentic and original, full of colour and flavour – a cultural space with a well-defined identity.”

I asked this modest-seeming man how long it took him to sculpt a cross, draw the image, and write the epitaph for each cemetery dweller. He said about three weeks. The process begins with a visit with the family who tell him about the deceased. He then creates the tombstone. He has created 17 so far this year including two for Americans and one for a British citizen.

Life and not death

The Merry Cemetery reverses the sense of finality in Western cemeteries… by bringing the personality of the deceased above ground. Vibrant paints and picture-book drawings make the mausoleum a celebration of life.”

From Yoair.com “Anthropology: The Merry Cemetery in Romania’s Tourism Industry

As I walked through Merry on that dreary day, I felt buoyed up by the colors, pictures and words. More important, this cemetery changed my mind about whether I want a headstone. But not any headstone. I would like one that communicates something about me from beyond the grave. Blue is good, a cross is fine, and if I was to write my own epitaph it would begin with “Paul got lucky late in life.”

A letter from Romania

Getting a resident’s permit

“I’ve just come from the Medicine Faculty,” said Diana as she joined me in the queue at the General Inspectorate for Immigration on Strada Andrei Mocioni, Nr. 6. I use queue (k ‘you’) when I want to sound more sophisticated than I feel. Line sounds…so American. Strada, by the way, is the Romanian word for street. And Nr. means number and so Nr. 6 was the building number. We live on Strada Gheorghe Doja, Nr. 40, an address that after two months living in Timișoara has become as familiar as 409 East Water Street.

Diana Pleșca is the International Students’ and Lecturers’ officer in the Department of International Relations at West University in Timișoara. She is the person responsible for shepherding my way through the Romanian bureaucracy toward the holy grail of a resident’s permit that will allow me to stay in Romania beyond the 90 day tourist limit. Without her, I have no chance. With her, as Romanians say, “no problem.”

“What do you mean by Medicine Faculty?” I asked Diana. “It’s my program of study,” she replied, “I am doing a Bachelor of Medicine.” We then talked about how in America the word faculty means a group of teachers or professors. And course is a class and not a field of study, as it is in European universities. Lately I have been feeling like an American in Romania, a bit of a stranger in a strange land. Even the words in English don’t mean quite what I think they should.

Diane’s Medicine Faculty comment reminded me of this as did my walk down Strada Mocioni to Nr. 6. Our time in this wonderful country is fast winding down. Soon we will have only memories. Like the day Diana Pleșca tutored me for three hours on the particularities of the Romanian university system while relentlessly pestering by phone her immigration contact Decebel about our scheduled 10 am resident’s permit interview that took place at 1 pm.

Finding a COVID testing center

“Vorbești engleză?” asked Rebecca. “Nu. Puțin,” said the uniformed man outside a municipal building in Timișoara’s city center. Rebecca had asked if he spoke English and he responded with a shrug, a no and then puțin meaning a little. A few days ago Rebecca and I set out to find the COVID testing center closest to our apartment. We knew we would need a COVID test when we flew back to the USA. We had found an online map of testing centers in Timișoara and the map’s teardrop placed it in the middle of a mass of buildings in the city center, with no street address. We rounded a corner in the general location and spotted the Directia Fiscala a Municipiului tucked into a little alley. Maybe the testing center was inside so we approached the front door.

After “puțin” intrepid Rebecca continued in the Romanian she has been studying for a year, “noi vrem un test pentru COVID unde este COVID clinic?” He smiled, took her arm and walked us to the corner and pointed to the clinic about a block away. He then shook Rebecca’s hand. All this despite the fact we had asked about COVID testing. As Rebecca said afterward, “he did not treat us like pariahs.”

Once inside the clinic, Rebecca works her magic again. Appreciative of her obvious effort to learn Romanian, the staff person behind the protective glass found an English speaking nurse who filled us in on what we could do to get the necessary test.

Living in another country is often hard work. That’s as it should be as it offers experiences to learn that our ways are not the only ways or even the best ways.

What softens this work is the kindness of Romanian strangers. That’s what I will remember most from our time in Romania.

A letter from Romania

Jimmy Buffett is usually right. It was my “own damn fault.”

Nine days ago, on Monday, November 1, I joined 16,000 others in Romania who tested positive for COVID 19. Romania is smack-dab in the middle of its 4th wave, with 500 deaths every day in this country of 19 million. When our Romanian doctor texted us the positive diagnosis, I was shocked. How could this be? I am vaccinated and wear a mask. “I know this is somebody’s fault,” sings Jimmy early on in Margaritaville. And I thought the same thing. In this country where 63% are not vaccinated, blame was easy to find.

It is likely I got COVID on our trip to Cluj and Suceava I wrote about in What we learned on the slow train to Suceava. Yes, I know what you are thinking, about the train and about what we learned. “Sigh”.

At first, Jimmy agrees with others that “a woman’s to blame.” On the Timișoara to Cluj train, there was a young woman and child sans mask. But there were also the three male maskless loggers who got on the Cluj to Suceava train and hung around about 20 feet from us for a few stops. Eventually Buffet gives up the search for blame and accepts, and repeats, its “my own damn fault.” In the song, this wisdom came from a therapist.

For me, it arose from Rebecca.

“You’ve been wearing that cloth mask that really doesn’t protect you.” And “I’ve been telling you that for more than a year now.” This was a Margaritaville-moment for me. For months, whether in the USA or in Romania, Rebecca has worn masks that fit snugly and, like many others, she wears them whenever she is close to others she does not know. In doing this, she is protecting herself, me and others. I have always been sloppy with masks, settling for the comfortable cloth one, often letting it slide down below my nose, and rarely wearing it outside. All the while feeling smug with my two vaccination jabs and half-hearted masking. In doing this, I am neither protecting myself, her or others.

When I opened the refrigerator door this morning and stuck my nose on the bottom door shelf searching for that nauseating smell that I had for a month tried to get rid of – and for the first time in eight days – I caught just a whiff of it. Still mildly disgusting, but now beautiful.

I’ve had no fever for five days. My other symptoms, fatigue and congestion, were mild and are gone as well. I spent one day in bed and mostly tried to manage the symptoms and stay out of Rebecca’s way. The first symptom to appear was congestion, then fatigue and fever, with loss of smell not until the 4th day, one day after I was diagnosed. If smell had been first, I would have gone to to the doctor sooner. We even joked about the refrigerator test.

When we found out I had COVID, we talked about me going to a hotel. Since it was likely I could have infected Rebecca before diagnosis we decided to manage it in our apartment with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. My 14 days of quarantine will be up on Friday.

Pfizer did its duty. It kept me alive and out of the hospital. A Timișoara testing center staff provided efficient and fast service. A neighborhood doctor recommended by a University of West colleague dispensed excellent care. And soon I will get a Romanian resident’s permit and will be able to get the 3rd shot.

Most important, thus far Rebecca has dodged the bullet.

No thanks to me because “it was my own damn fault.”

A letter from Romania

“We’re taking the train from Timișoara to Cluj,” I said, “And then the next day another train from Cluj to Suceava.” He grimaced and offered, “oh, the hunger train.” I looked puzzled so he helped with “there’s no food service on the Suceava train and its seven hours.” “Uh huh, yeah, COVID, of course,” I replied. “The fast trains?” he asked. I smiled, “no, the slow ones,” and added weakly, “the fast trains don’t seem too much faster than the slow trains and we plan to fly back to Timișoara.” My Romanian barber finished my trim and after I paid said “good luck on the slow train to Suceava.”

For a couple of weeks we had told our Romanian friends, acquaintances, students, and my barber, about our plan to take the slow trains to Cluj and then on to Suceava, to see the painted churches of Bucovina and to do a little hiking in the Rarau Mountains in northeast Romania. Each person gave us some version of my barber’s reaction.

On Monday, train 1832 was scheduled to depart from Cluj-Napoca at 9:34 am. It included five cars of passengers. Car number four, our car, was about a quarter full, around 15 people. Our tickets said we had seats 31 & 33 but these were taken by a young woman and her son. Neither worse masks. Most passengers had masks, some, like mine, draped below their noses. We’ve gotten lazy. With rapidly-improving-spoken Romanian, Rebecca asked another passenger about our ticketed seats. He said we could sit wherever we wanted, “no problem.”

We felt the forward lurch at a Swiss-like 9:34 am.

Suceava (Soo cha v’ah) is 322 train-track kilometers (200 miles) from Cluj Napoca. Train 1832 was scheduled to stop at 19 villages along the way. Most of the stops were for 1 or 2 minutes, enough time for a few passengers to get on and off. At every stop I noticed one thing. As the train departed, a local train official, in a blue suit, would stand erect outside the door of the small station building holding a small pole with a circle end piece, green on one side and red on the other. We saw mostly men but Rebecca pointed to one woman, with a uniform of black tights and a black skirt. Most wielding this pole were young. Rebecca suggested that “maybe this was a good, stable job in the village.”

About an hour into our Cluj to Suceava trip we noticed the conductor coming down the aisle toward us talking to a couple of passengers. It turns out car #4 had lost its heating and he was trying to find a passenger who could tell us this and that we could change cars if we wanted. Our car would be replaced in Suceava so if we wanted we could stay. All of this was done with no drama with two passengers explaining the situation to us.

About an hour from Suceava, a middle-aged scruffy looking man gently pulled my aisle seat tray down and placed a worn, typed note on it. Rebecca quickly translated it to say “I am deaf and dumb and could use the help of one lei or 10 lei. Thank you for your kindness.” Lei or Ron is the Romanian currency and is roughly a quarter of an American dollar. So he was asking for 25 cents or $2.50. I watched him walk up the aisle and sit down. I also noticed the conductor followed a few minutes later. We have seen this scene many times in Romania. In a restaurant or in this case a train car, apparently with the tolerance of officials, people who need are allowed to ask or to sell something.

My notes tell me that it was somewhere around the village of Frasin, about 50 kilometers from Suceava, that I had this insight. Romanian trains, even the fast ones, are slow because many Romanians still live in these little villages we passed through from Cluj to Suceava. Many of these places, like many of the small towns in Iowa, where we live, are dying. They are the left behind in our increasingly calloused world.

Slow trains are a humane way to minister to this phenomenon.

1832 pulled into Suceava at 4:28 pm. Five minutes late.

Letter from Romania

Routine

Almost awake, I can almost feel it before I hear it. It begins as a rumble, almost mellow, and finishes its work for me as a whispered thrum. And if I am not quite ready to get up, its twin will come by in a few minutes. The twin is from the other side of the tracks, boisterous, with an insistent clack as it passes our apartment building. I don’t need to set this alarm as I know the men and women who drive Timișoara Trams start work around 4 am.

In Decorah, early morning truck-traffic on Water Street is my alarm signal. We live on a quieter street in Clarinda and so it’s the early bird after that first worm. When we were co-directors of Luther’s semester program in Malta in 2018, outside our 3rd floor flat some guy across the street would start his 15 year old car every morning around 3:30 AM and so for four months a vroom started my day. Except for when we traveled with our students for a week in Morocco and then it was the 4 am Muslim call to prayer from a loud speaker on minaret somewhere in Fez, Rabat and Marrakech.

I am not a natural, traveler that is. Some take to the road or air or tracks with nothing but adventure on their minds. I fret and tighten up as the departure date nears. I did not take my first trip outside the United States until I was 37, in 1986, to England. Since then I have visited or lived in Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Malta, Morocco, France, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Romania.

It is 4:45 am as I finish this blog. Rebecca will be up in an hour or so. I have coffee ready for her in an insulated carafe. And then we are off by train to Cluj and a day later to Suceava to see the painted churches of Bucovina.

Letter from Romania

In the USA, Rebecca and I live in two neighborhoods, in Decorah and Clarinda, Iowa. I know very little about the histories of either Water or Walnut streets. Maybe you are the same. We tend to ignore what happened yesterday, just around the corner from where we live. From the moment we step outside our homes, we take so much for granted. The path is well-worn and we have a lot to do. But curiosity about place intensifies when we travel, at least for me.

Gheorghe Doja street

For the next few months, Rebecca and I are living in Timișoara, Romania. When we step outside our building’s front door, we are on Gheorghe Doja Street. Gheorghe Doja was a Hungarian who became a Romanian hero when he lead a peasant uprising in 1514.

Piața Nicolae Bălescu

Our Timișoara street is bracketed by two squares or Piațas. Piața Nicolae Bălescu is named after Nicolae Bălcescu. He was a leader of the 1848 Wallachian Revolution who, among other things, promoted universal suffrage. The revolution was unsuccessful, rebuffed by both Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires.

As you can see, the square is really more a circle, surrounded by sidewalks and nothing like the open spaces for pedestrians in the many Piațas in Timișoara’s city center. Sacred Heart Church is Roman Catholic and, in this Orthodox city and country, one of two Catholic Churches in the neighborhood.

Piața Sfânta Maria

Piața Sfânta Maria (Șt. Mary’s Square) is at the other end of our block. It is the most famous Piața in Romania because it is where the Romania Revolution of 1989 began. László Tökés was pastor of a Hungarian Reformed Church. The church is inside the building on the right side of the picture. Tökés had given sermons opposing Romanian President Nicolae Ceaușescu’s policy of moving large numbers of Romanians from their villages to the cities. The local government and Reformed Church leaders had decided to remove Tökés from Timișoara and were in the process of evicting him from his apartment, also in the building that housed the church.

In November and December of 1989 students from Timișoara’s many universities and others gathered in the square. Over a few days’ time, the protests moved to a larger square about a half mile away in Timișaora’s city center and then spread across Romania.

Piața Victoriei (Victory Square)

Victory Square 1989

Our Romanian neighborhood

I’m in Romania to teach Romanians about American democracy. And to learn about Romania democracy. This is a two way street, just as when we exit our building we must be careful because Gheorghe Doja hosts cable cars going east and west. But I have noticed there are more cars traveling west than east, just as there is more learning than teaching. It’s really not even close.

From Piața Sfânta Maria, to the end of Communism in Romania.

From Gheorghe Doja to Nicolae Bălesco to László Tökés, evidence of the universality of the yearning for freedom, for all peoples, across time and space.

And this is just one little neighborhood in one Romanian city.

What do you know about your neighborhood?

A letter from Romania

Rebecca and I are in Romania for the next few months. I will write occasional letters about our experiences in this wonderful country. Rebecca will do the same on rebeccamuses.com.

In 2020, Covid took

On Friday, March 20, 2020, Rebecca and I got word from the American State Department and the Romanian Fulbright Commission that we and the 18 other Fulbright recipients in Romania needed to leave the country. Neither could guarantee getting us out if we chose to stay. We felt safe in our new home in Timișoara and worried that traveling back to America would put us at greater risk of contracting COVID. If you remember those days, no one really knew how long COVID would stick around or how widely it would spread. Stay or go, we toggled back and forth all weekend.

On Monday, March 23, I got up about 4 am thinking we needed to get out. Rebecca followed two hours later with the same thought. She called the State Department airline Hotline and an hour later our tickets home were booked, leaving Timișoara for Bucharest later that afternoon. Early Tuesday, March 24, we would begin our journey home. We stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn Bucharest Airport, the only hotel still open in Bucharest. As we left the hotel early Tuesday morning, the manager said the hotel was closing that morning. 36 hours later, after stops in Amsterdam, an overnight in Atlanta, and Kansas City, we were back in Clarinda, Iowa, after 33 days in Romania for me and 21 for Rebecca.

In 2021, Covid gave back

There is so much beauty in Romania to see and experience. And in the spring of 2020 we had only gotten started before we had to leave. I finished up teaching my two University of West courses on American Politics online and Rebecca continued her self-study of the Romanian language. We vowed we would go back, somehow. Then we got word that the Fulbright Program was waiving for the 2019-2020 COVID-cohort the two year waiting period to apply for another grant. Did we want to give it another go? I thought I still had some teaching juice in me and Rebecca’s has a passion for the Romanian language. And we both realized we have only so many travel years left. So in the summer of 2020 I cranked out another 30 page Fulbright application and in January 2021 we found out we were going back to Romania and to Timișoara and, as it would turn out, the same apartment, where I now sit writing this blog.

Covid had taken Romania away and now it was giving Romania back to us. And not just Romania, but Mihai*.

Mihai

America’s Fulbright Program was created by the late Arkansas Senator William Fulbright**and is now 75 years old. Each year the Fulbright Scholar program places around 800 American citizens in 135 countries. And brings another 800 from other countries to the USA. Fulbright scholars teach and do research. But their major responsibility is to connect with the people of the country they reside in. Beyond the details of the individual awards, the various Fulbright programs are cultural exchanges, with the major purpose the deepening of America’s understanding of the world and the world’s understanding of America. Not just America and the world, but Paul, Rebecca and Mihai.

Last night we decided to walk down to Timișoara’s Victory Square (Piața Victoriei) to enjoy a glass of wine and beer at an outdoor cafe. In 1989 the Romanian revolution began in Timișoara and it was in Victory Square that this western Romanian city was declared the first Romanian city free of communism. There were tables outside a nice looking restaurant and so we caught the eye of a waiter and asked if we could sit down. Mihai said, “of course,” and Rebecca ordered a glass of wine and me a beer. When he brought our drinks and because Mihai seemed open and there were no other customers we began to ask questions, mostly about his life.

Mihai was born in 1988 in Timișoara. He told us his parents had been in Victory Square in December 1989. He pointed to bullet holes in the buildings across from Lloyds and said his parents could easily have been among dozens killed in the Timișoara demonstrations against the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. The revolution would quickly spread across Romania and the army and police would kill 1100 across the country before Ceaușescu and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas Day 1989.

“What do your parents think of Romania today,” we asked. “They are disappointed, so much corruption,” Mihai said. “They don’t want to go back to Ceaușescu but they just want a better government, a government that will give them a better life.”

And then we asked what did he think. “I’m going to Florida for seven months where I will be working at a resort outside Orlando, Florida.” Mihai started applying for this Florida job four years ago and finally got a Skype interview with the president of the resort.

“What impressed him about you,” we asked. He pointed to his formal wait-staff suit, acknowledged his excellent English, and declared “I am a hard worker.” He then said “The USA is the greatest country in the world.”

We finished our drinks and said good-bye to our new friend promising to come back before he left for America. On our walk back to our Romanian home, we talked about how sad it is for Romania to lose a young person like Mihai, even for a little while. And how excited his was to go to our country.

And how lucky we are to be back in Romania.

______________________________________________________

*Mihai is not his real name.

**Senator Fulbright was a complicated man and leaves a complicated legacy. I will say more about this legacy in a future blog.

Decorah, Iowa

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 I got to my Luther College office in Koren Hall around 6:00 am. I’ve been a morning person for decades and so had been up since 4 am preparing for a new course I was teaching titled “Struggle for Freedom.” The course compared and contrasted freedom struggles in three countries: Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the United States. The class met two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday, from 8 to 9:30 am.

I completed my work in Koren about 7:30 and walked the 100 yards to Main and my classroom. I strode west with the sun to my back on a clear day in the American midwest. Aways restless before class, I wanted to check whether there was enough chalk for student reports and chairs around the seminar table for the 16 of us. Also on my mind was where to put the portable lectern to signal to students where I would be sitting. I decided to put it at the end of the table facing the door. Because I had not planned to use the classroom TV that day, I did not check whether it was working.

Tuesday, September 11 would be our 5th class meeting. We started with the Northern Ireland case study and that day’s topic was the role of terrorism in the conflict between Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic communities.

It was a normal Tuesday morning on the Luther College campus in Decorah, Iowa.

Boston & New York

At 6:59 am American Airlines Flight 11 with 92 people on board took off from Boston International Airport destined for Los Angeles. I imagine that around the time I got the campus:

Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinnness Jr. were going through their pre-flight routines. Chief Flight Attendant Karen Martin was overseeing the boarding of the passengers along with Flight Attendents Barbara Arestegui, Jeffrey Collman, Sara Low, Kathleen Nicosia, Betty One, Jean Roger, Dianne Snyder, and Amy Sweeney. Among the 81 passengers finding their seats were Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, and Satam al-Sugami.

At 7:19 am Flight Attendant Betty Ann Ong notified the American Airlines ground crew that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Ong provided information for 25 minutes. Two minutes after Ong’s last transmission, at 7:46 am, Mohamed Atta guided American Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Decorah

As the 15 students filed into the classroom one mentioned he had heard on the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Just after we started class, at 8:03 am, Marwan al-Shehhi steered another plane, United Flight 175, into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. As it turned out, around the time Hani Hanjour maneuvered American Airlines 175 into the Pentagon, at 8:37am, a student poked her head into our classroom and told us another plane had hit the World Trade Center. Of course, none of us had smart phones and so we were dependent on radios and TV’s. When we heard about the second plane, I went to the TV in the classroom and discovered it was not working.

The students and I looked at each other and I said “we’ve got to find out what is going on” and so dismissed the class so they could find TV’s. It was about 8:45 am. A few of us chatted for a bit and then walked over to Koren where I knew there was a TV in the administrative assistant’s office. We climbed the three flights of stairs and walked into Chelle Meyer’s office to see the south tower of WTC collapse, at 8:59 am. Seven minutes later Ziad Jarrah flew United Flight 93 into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

At 9:28 am, two minutes before my class would have ended, the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.

19 terrorists, four planes, 265 passengers, and 2712 killed and 6000 injured.

All on a normal Tuesday morning, 20 years ago.

Last spring four friends and I met on Zoom to talk about our 50 year college reunion. We graduated in 1971 from St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa. Because most of us would not be able to attend the official event scheduled for this October, we decided to create our own celebration. We built a list, picked a weekend date, developed an itinerary, and sent out invitations. We called it an Old Friends Reunion. And it took place last weekend.

That’s the planning group on the right. As one of my mates said, “that’s the first time Gardner has ever been in the back row.” Tall Barrie knows me too well having heard too many times the story about how the only reason I made the Sacred Heart Grade School choir was they needed another short guy to fill out the first row. Friends know our vulnerabilities. What trips our triggers. That’s why my planning pals and I went back and forth on one or two nights. We eventually chose two and then added a third, a Thursday night for the planners and their partners.

That’s our group on Friday night. The last time this bunch was together America was divided, by everything it is divided by today: politics, war, race, gender, culture, religion, environment, and sexual orientation. Nothing has changed and, of course, everything has changed.

All summer I worried that America’s hostile political climate, with COVID and masks and vaccinations a propellant, would intrude upon our gathering. I thought “three nights for some, two nights for others, that’s trouble.” On the second night, Jerry said to me “you were uptight last night.” “Yeah,” I said, “I had all these fears about how our differences would come to the surface.” This little back and forth between Jerry and me came in the middle of a quiet and intense conversation about how we were as far apart in politics as it is possible to be.

And then it hit me. Two or three nights gave us all the time and space we needed to get comfortable with each other. Longer was better than shorter. Communication expert David Murray puts it this way, about communication in large doses:

With a little more time to move around in, we’re less noisy and opinionated, more reflective, more relaxed, more honest. And better listeners.

From An Effort to Understand, p. 207

On Saturday night, in the middle of a conversation about religion with Jerry and spouse Mary, my partner Rebecca said “you know, I hold all of my religious beliefs loosely. I do that because there is so much we don’t know. We are so small and the world is so large.”

“Holding our beliefs loosely,” Rebecca’s right. That’s how we maneuver through our genuine disagreements. It’s a path toward being “less noisy, more reflective, and honest.”

That’s what I learned from our old friends’ reunion.

Hold my beliefs loosely

And my friends tightly

And when we hold friends tightly, what happened in Davenport, Iowa last weekend, does not stay in Davenport.

The Des Moines Register’s Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa is the “oldest, largest, and longest recreational bicycle touring event in the world.” It is a peaceful army of around 15,000 bikers, support vehicles, medical teams, bicycle shops, food vendors and Highway Patrol police that every year moves across Iowa from the Missouri to the Mississippi River, with overnights in seven communities. The average daily ride over the 48 RAGBRAI’S was 67 miles.

On Saturday, July 31, my partner Rebecca and Wheel Thing teammates Colleen and Scott completed their 454 mile from Le Mars to Clinton by dipping their bikes in the Mississippi River and in a final triumphant act thrusting their two wheel rides into the air.

Rebecca had trained for Ragbrai by riding 631 miles from April to July mostly in increments of 12 miles around Decorah, Iowa’s Trout Run Bike Trail. More than the number of miles, Decorah’s trail offers many steep switchbacks that are perfect for building up lung, leg, and heart endurance. She had ridden her first full RAGBRAI in 2019 and knew she needed to be better prepared this year.

On the way back to Decorah from Clinton in our four wheel vehicle, I asked Rebecca to sum up her 2021 RAGBRAI experience.

“I owned it,” said Rebecca. “I’m 70 years old and I rode across Iowa.”

Not all journeys need end in Ithaca.