This story was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.
Setting: A baseball game
“President Trump attended this year’s Superbowl in New Orleans. The NFL replaced its traditional End Racism endzone logo with Choose Love. Which one is the better commercial?”
“At Fenway, the Red Sox privilege the message Black Lives Matter. It doesn’t mean white lives don’t. It means in American history, Black Lives haven’t mattered, and they should, equally. Should we replace Black with All?”
“Doesn’t All Include Blacks? If we all chose love, wouldn’t that end racism?”
“Doesn’t Love and All divert our attention from what is still a problem in America?”
“Can’t we take politics out of our games?
“No.”
Note: This article provides some background on the NFL’s decision to replace End Racism with Choose Love.
I’m 75, and my body refuses to lie. As I type, the age spots flash. Two weeks ago, I fell and lost consciousness for a short time. The culprit was likely an inner ear malfunction or possibly my heart, which my doctor reminded me was as old as I was.
Two days ago, Rebecca and I walked upwards to enjoy this view of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where we spent January.
Photo by the author
We walked 14,386 steps total, from a starting point about a mile high, on a day with poor air quality. On the way up, we stopped three times to catch our breath. On the way down, we rewarded ourselves with ice cream sundaes.
Next January, will we hike skyward to see the El Charco Ingenio Botanical Garden or take a taxi?
In May, we’ve signed up for a safari in Namibia. It will be a small group led by a friend who assures us we can do it, even though we are decades older than our trek mates.
When Brian asked us about Africa a few months ago, we said, “It’s now or never.” Would we be able to go on safari at 80?
*
My funny-looking age spots started appearing 25 years ago, and I had my first inner ear collapse in 2018. We met a couple at least ten years younger at the botanical garden who took a taxi because of the poor air quality. The Namibia itinerary looks doable for anyone who can walk a few thousand steps daily. Why would we think we couldn’t do that in five years?
That’s the admonition of two of my favorite Medium writers, Gary Buzzard and Trisha Faye, who suggest that we should not automatically blame advancing years for whatever afflicts us.
Gently, Gary and Trisha, urge us seniors to think less about age. They caution against putting a ceiling on our activties or ambitions too soon.
Last night we bedded in St. Louis on our return from San Miguel to our home in Iowa. Two airline take-offs and landings. As we descended into Lambert International Airport, I thought about the 67 souls lost in the Washington, D.C. jet helicopter crash, many very young, none expecting or could have foreseen what would happen.
Today, we’ll load up and drive six hours to northeast Iowa. These trips tire us more than they used to. Age matters. But the future is too unpredictable. And it will come soon enough.
I’ve tilted this personal photo of Martin Luther King’s Lorraine Motel assassination site because this period in my country’s history unnerved my innocent early adulthood vision of the United States — that my country was good and only did good in the world. It was truly exceptional and guileless. Slavery was an aberration; the Indians were the bad guys. God — Blessed America.
By this period, I mean 1968 and 1969, and these events.
March 3, 1968: James Earl Ray murders Martin Luther King, Jr.
June 5, 1968: Sirhan Sirhan murders Robert Kennedy.
August 26–29, 1968: Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police beat protesters.
Fall 1969: Seymor Hersch published a story about the My Lai massacre by soldiers of the United States that happened in the spring of 1968.
Many other things happened inside and outside U.S. borders in the late sixties, but these discombobulated me at the time. I know that because two memories are so easily recalled.
*
“What is happening to America?” my father exclaimed the day after Robert Kennedy’s death. It was the summer after my first year of college. I was 19, and my dad had just come home from work. I had never heard him speak with such emotion, and I could sense the uncertainty in his voice. Two assassinations. When your father is unsettled, you are unsettled; at least I was.
The second recollection occurred a year later, in the fall of 1969. I was a college junior majoring in Sociology. After a class with Keith Fernsler, my favorite professor, I had just joined a group of friends. One friend, Joe, said, “Paul, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Our Sociology class had just been discussing Hersch’s article on the My Lai Massacre, and I hadn’t realized our class’s discussion of the killing of a hundred civilians had visibly affected me.
King and Kennedy were dead. American soldiers gunned down women and children. If we looked closer, what else would we find?
Photo by the author
Three years later, Watergate and a corrupted Presidency; five years later, defeated, America withdrew from Vietnam.
*
I’m a romantic. I want Romeo and Juliet to live happily ever after. The same is true for my country. After WE re-elected Barack Obama in 2012, I thought — probably mostly felt — America had loosened itself from its exclusionary past. Imperfect as it had been, it had finally lived up to its ideals. The WE now included so many voices that had been silenced. The USA could be one large, loud, chaotic, multiethnic family — finally, a Democratic model for the world.
My favorite Martin Luther King jr quote has always been, of course, a romantic one.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
It turns out it’s a long arc. And it’s been flattening.
*
Today is the first full day of Donald Trump’s second term. Among other things, he pardoned all 1500 January 6th insurrectionists.
Romeo and Juliet died by suicide.
My beloved country may be doing the same.
Innocence narcotizes and blinds. And has nowhere to hide in Trump’s America.
But the bigger story was the stellar medical care I received
Photo of MAC by the author
This story is mostly about them. They work here, at Hospitales MAC in the hills of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Rebecca and I spend January. I’ll start at the beginning, with my head lying bleeding on the bathroom floor — beautifully glazed bricks, but hard, very hard. My part will be brief. I’m the object and not the subject of this story.
Photo by the author
Tuesday, AM
It’s 2 am last Tuesday, and I’ve collapsed. I remember being dizzy, disoriented, and nauseous as I walked through the bathroom door. And I have an image and sensation of my face on this floor. That’s it until Rebecca found me sitting on our bed with my head bleeding. She cleaned the wound and me and then determined I was out of immediate danger as I began to answer her questions, for example, “What year is it?” correctly.
Rebecca managed a doctor’s clinic for decades. As she monitored me, she was in texting contact with a physician friend. She was my angel of mercy who knows and knows people who know.
Eight years ago, I experienced a similar episode but without a fall. Again, early in the morning, I was wobbly on the way to the bathroom and sick to my stomach. There’s a fancy name for this condition: Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. The physical therapy treatment can be straightforward and includes head positioning to reorient chrystals in the inner ear. (source)
Who woulda thunk? Chrystals in the ear, and Bam!
Tuesday, PM
At breakfast, after looking at my head wound about two inches northwest of my right ear, Rebecca said it would be best to see a doctor. Fortunately, Theresa, our landlord, listed vital contact names and phone numbers on the refrigerator, including Dr. Leslie Maria Flores.
Rebecca made the call as she has improved her Spanish proficiency using Duolingo for two years. I’m stuck at Hola. Victor answered and set a same-day appointment time for noon. Other than a headache, I’m of sound 75-year-old mind and body. Because Victor spoke English, we decided I could embark on this adventure alone as Rebecca went to a Lifelong Learning class we had been looking forward to.
Taxi driver Carlos dropped me off at the entrance you see in the first photo. The lobby was small and spotless.
Photo by the author
After sitting outside Room 211 for a few minutes, Victor came out the door with the Christmas wreath and asked if I was Paul.
Photo by the author
He took my vitals inside an ante-room. “Your blood pressure is high,” he said. It was 160 over something. “That’s a lot higher than usual,” I replied, “I guess I’m nervous.”
Dr. Leslie Marie Flores, MD, poked her head out of a back room and said to come in. Two comfortable chairs sat in front of her desk. Through a door to a third room, I saw an examination area with windows looking out at the Bajio Mountains surrounding San Miguel.
Her consultation lasted about forty minutes. During it, she asked specific questions about what had happened to me the previous night. She honed in on a faint red spot over my left eyebrow: “I don’t think you raised your hands to block your fall. I think you blacked out. That worries me. We should do an EKG.”
After she cleaned my head wound, an emergency room physician who happened to be available arrived to suture the two-inch gash. He was about sixty and Flores forty or so. In Spanish, she summarized the details of my incident, including her recommendation for an EKG, with him nodding and gesturing approval. He then closed the cut with three medium-sized stitches.
Wednesday, AM
The taxi driver, Carlos, dropped me off the following day for two more appointments: the EKG and an ear cleaning for the pesky inner ears.
After the EKG, the technicians motioned me into the office of Dr. M. Karina Cruz Madrigal, cardiologist. One comfortable chair facing middle-aged Dr. Madrigal behind her desk. Her English was better than mine. “Your EKG is normal, but tell me the fall details.” I did.
“I’m worried you didn’t put your hands up to protect your face.” She put a heart model before me and said, “The heart is like a light bulb. As it ages, sending an electrical current from here to there takes longer. Your light bulb is 75 years old. Why did you black out?”
She recommended a three-day heart monitor because “the EKG only tests the heart for 20 seconds.” I said I would make an appointment with my Decorah physician when we returned to the USA in early February. And then I remembered my father got a pacemaker when he was 65. Yesterday, I made that appointment.
I’ve had my ears cleaned out so many times I even wrote a story about it.
Dr. Karla Lidia Chávez Vaca ushered me from my chair in the hallway into her office. By now, I was used to explaining why I was hanging around MAC. She listened attentively, asked very specific questions, and said, “let’s take a look inside your ears.”
“Yes, there’s plenty of wax in each.”
What followed was the most gentle, thorough removal of the cerumem build-up in memory. She then printed off eye exercises for vertigo she wanted me to do for a month followed by her What’s App number to conact her with any questions.
Friday, AM
I’ll bet you are interested in how much this care cost. First, I paid a fee at each office. Second, the total was $331, including three prescriptions.
As I write this story four days after falling, I feel immense gratitude toward my loving partner Rebecca and her physican friend Bill.
And to the four professionals at MAC Hospital in San Miguel.
My father was born on January 13, 1921. He died early on March 1, 1993, of sinus cancer, diagnosed too late. He was a chemical engineer who worked on the United States space program in the 1960s, retiring at 58 when the moon landing ended America’s full-bore commitment to space.
Here he is in the middle 1960s, with engineer colleagues.
Photo by the author of a newspaper article from a Gardner family album
Not one to let grass grow under his feet, Dad set up a bakery in his and mom’s basement. Applying his engineering mind to the development of bread products, it took him several years to perfect his baking technique. Eventually, he created several multigrain products that he sold at farmer’s markets in the late 1970s, well ahead of that health trend.
Photo of Dad with a customer at a farmer’s market
You would see contentment and delight over a big order on his face if you knew him as I did.
Two days ago was his 103 birthday. How do I honor such a man?
I sit here in the early morning, pecking out another Medium story — this will be number 491. Last week, in San Miguel, Mexico, where Rebecca and I are spending January, I taught a Lifelong Learning course on the U.S. 2024 presidential election. That’s seven courses to mature students since I retired in 2018, with another one planned for 2026. I’m three years older than my father. Where do these efforts come from?
Nature or nurture?
My money is on nurture. To prove my point, I’ll tell you a story. You can then multiply that by 1000 to calculate the impact of this man on my life.
Which is why a good father matters.
I was 12, a gang member, and a criminal. Vinnie and Mark joined me in a pact to steal one item each from Smith’s Drug Store a few blocks from our neighborhood. I chose a bottle of aspirin.
Mr. Smith, no fool, spotted one or more of us pilfering and called Mrs. Cleveland, a neighborhood busybody who ratted to my mother. You should know that this was my second offense in three years — what our gang of nine-year-olds pilfered is lost to time.
My dad knocked on my bedroom door the night we were tattled on. Peter, who was two years younger and with whom I shared I shared the bedroom, was somewhere else. I felt that something was fishy as my dad sat on my bed.
He told me about Cleveland’s phone call. “It will take some time before your mother gets over this,” he said calmly. He meant my mom would not speak to me for a while — It turned out to be a week. I still remember the morning she broke her silence. It was breakfast time. I was sitting at our kitchen table, and she was at the refrigerator, “Would you like some orange juice, Paul?”
Dad took a different approach. The day after his bedroom visit, he came home from work early. He never, ever came home early.
“Paul,” he said, “let’s go for a ride.”
In the car, silence.
He drove us downtown along the 4th Street east-west one-way to the Davenport Police Station. We exited the car, and I followed him through the front door. Still, no words, including by me.
I kid you not, an officer sat at a high desk, just like in the movies. He came down and approached us. My Dad introduced me, and the officer’s hand grasped mine and said, “Come with me.”
I followed him through several doors, with officers everywhere. We ended up in a room with several empty cells. I don’t remember what, if anything, he said on our journey. He soon returned me to my Dad, who was waiting in the lobby.
Silence all the way home.
Do you have time for another story? I’ll make it short. It involves the third Gardner boy, Pat, who is six years younger than me. Pat is 70 this year and 19 when he and Dad met late one Friday afternoon at a bar in West Davenport. In the 1960s, this part of town housed many factories.
Pat was a so-so high school student but a great athlete with a powerful left arm. He was so good that he got a baseball scholarship from a local community college. But he never went to class.
As Pat told the story, after they had settled at a table with a couple of beers, Dad looked at him and said, “Look at the guys at the bar. Many of them are here every night. Just sitting.”
Soon after, Pat got a job selling paint at Sherwin-Williams. He never finished school but became a regional manager at Sherwin over the decades, retiring a few years ago. Today, in retirement, he transports donated organs to hospitals around the area.
Character is built from the accumulation of stories like these. It’s like a sand timer hourglass, from father to son.
Looking back, I ask, How did I become the man I am?
This is Rebecca and my second January in San Miguel, a central Mexican city of 75,000, much more than a respite from the USA Iowa cold.
How can I capture what I mean for you?
We walk sidewalks like this every day.
Photo by the author
Which requires constant attention to the person coming toward you — and she to you. Because we’re 73 and 75, more often than not, it is we who are accommodated. Regardless of who makes the first move, it’s ego-deflating to think every moment about the other. And then be grateful for their pivot.
Of course, some hold their ground.
Photo by the author
For a gentle stroke.
The weather, you ask?
Photo by the author from the balcony of our apartment
Generally sunny and around 70 Fahrenheit by mid-afternoon, dipping to 45 degrees at night. Unfortunately, climate change has shortened San Miguel’s brief rainy season, causing severe water shortages. (source)
Are we making things worse with our jet-fueled arrival and departure, daily showers, and eight glasses of water? In San Miguel’s case, the WE is considerable as around 10,000 ex-pats, primarily Canadian and USAers live here.
Last night, we attended a literary reading on a packed cafe patio. Four American authors read from their work, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist. On Sunday, we couldn’t get tickets to an interview with Margaret Atwood by Martin Fletcher, a retired British journalist who we used to watch on PBS. Instead, we enrolled in a Lifelong Learning course on writing and storytelling, which Martin will teach next week.
This week, twenty-five mature students joined me for a course I taught on the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, also a part of the Instituto Allende Cultural Center’s LLP. Volunteers run this 19-course program. No one is paid. During our last week, we’re taking “Jung’s Map of the Soul,” which should help us recover from the election.
Speaking of civic renewal, sometimes art captures a feeling, externalizes it, and helps one move beyond. Say hello to my therapist, who works for free in the San Miguel Public Library’s cafe.
Photo by the author
There are art galleries everywhere in San Miguel. Our favorite is the Fábrica La Aurora in a renovated textile complex, where I found this piece titled “The Search for Truth.”
Photo by the author
Sometimes, a different environment can tweak what should be a constant quest in our lives. What is the truth about Donald Trump’s re-election? What is the essence of 10,000 North Americans descending on a Central American country? And why do I feel safer in a cartel-infested nation than in my own country?
Before I leave you, let me show you our accommodation. You’ve seen the view from the third-floor terrace. Here’s the gated front entrance common area.
Photo by the author
The complex has four apartments. Rebecca is working at our dining room table. Just to her left, is a galley kitchen.
Photo by the author
We have three small patios.
Photo by the author
Where we ponder life’s truths in this phenomenal country.
This story was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.
The story will be based on the image of a nicely garnished tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich.
*
She still feels guilty, every Friday.
Today, a Friday, lunch will be fish sticks. Later, coincidence or not, Father John will say mass in the common room. She’ll attend the Unitarian service Sunday morning.
She raised her children in the Faith, as did her mother. But Kathy hated anything orange and Peter said those crusty filets looked too much like fingers. And Bob — how she misses him — was a Protestant.
So it started with hambugers on Friday. And ended with priests covering up for other priests.
This tale was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.
This story is based on this image.
I’m not like Silver, Trigger or even Mister Ed. They were famous horses.
And full of themselves. All glitter, colorful bows, and pretty wrapping. Fragile. Easily shattered. And now, forgotten.
What does Thoreau say? Most live lives of quiet desperation.
Whether horse or human.
You’re like me, I’ll wager. No one would ever wrap you up and put you under a Christmas tree. Life has taught you to see through all that.
Now, at this ripe age, we’ve become friends with unrequited desire.
Disappointment doesn’t destroy us. Common wears well; fits comfortably, like an old saddle.
This story was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.
The last line is Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.
It’s a monstrous responsibility.
There’s something different about this night, even for nonbelievers.
Can you hear it? The silence. Wars have stopped, all too briefly. Yesterday, I overheard two old friends greet each other after years of separation, hugging with a heartfelt Feliz Navidad.
Everyone carries a little bit of childhood throughout life. And a lot of pain. I can’t make the suffering go away. But I’m part of the world’s magic — a cool breeze on a hot day.
A photo of another aunt, Sister Marilyn Thomas, and me in 1957 from a family album
Why couldn’t it have happened to this aunt, Sister Marilyn Thomas? She had worldly and other-worldly protection. Besides, this cowboy had just returned from protecting Davey Crockett, alias Fess Parker, at the Alamo. He would have lassoed or caught it in his coon skin cap.
But it didn’t. More on Sister Marilyn and my unlucky Maryalice shortly.
The year is 1957, and a lot is happening outside the Gardner household: Sputnik, the Little Rock 9, Elvis on Ed Sullivan, and the Cuban Revolution.
Inside, on a typical day, my father, Paul, worked as an engineer at Bendix Corporation. My mother, Dody, managed three children: myself, eight; my brother Peter, six; and my other brother Pat, three. There’s also a one-year-old beagle, Sam, who Santa placed in a squirmy turkey box the previous Christmas.
As you can see in the photo, Dody had been busy taping Christmas cards on the living room wall. Did she stand on a step ladder? Did my Dad help her? Did I? I have no memory of the process.
She would live in this house for 65 years, hosting Christmas’ for roughly half a century. Fortunately, she gave up the card wall after this incident. Violence and change were afoot, not only in Cuba.
Mom died in 2017 at the age of 96. I never asked her where the idea for the Christmas card wall came from. Or why the out-of-your-sight Aladdin lamp-shaped purple glass planter that lay to the right of the cone-shaped thing on the mantel under the cards sat too close to the edge?
*
Uncle Al, Aunt Maryalice, and cousins Jim, Dan, and Terri arrived from Des Moines late one morning, a few days before Christmas. Sister Marilyn, whom we called Fawny, had come from Dubuque the day before. She got the name Fawny because little brother Al couldn’t pronounce Florence, her given name.
Fawny was staying with her mother, also Florence. My maternal grandfather, Al Sr., had died of a heart attack in 1944.
Before I return to the foreshadowed event, I must say something about my mother. Normally high-strung, the string tightened when high-maintenance Al visited. They were cut from the same mold. Each married a calming presence. Maryalice was a red-haired, sweet woman who died of diabetes at 42 in 1970. My father, who exuded equanimity, died of sinus cancer at 71 in 1993. Interesting. Edgy Al lived to 88, my mother — no sense repeating myself.
Sister Marilyn, who refereed the Dody and Al matches, died in 2019 at 103. She had been a BVM (Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin) for 75 years. A traditionalist, she wore the square coif headdress long after other BVMs had changed to a rounded one.
My family only used the living room during Christmas when Dad lit a fire from logs piled in the garage. In the photo, you can see a corner of a fire screen to my left. You can’t see a handle or damper that opens and closes the chimney flue. Dad needed both hands to turn the damper, which he would do before dropping the first match.
On this day, Aunt Maryalice sat on the floor with her back to the fire guard. When Dad cranked the damper, the vibration moved up the brick wall to the mantel, nudging the triangular front of the heavy glass purple planter off the ledge where it glanced off the top of the fire screen onto my aunt’s head.
*
My WW II Coast Guard medic Dad retrieved his usual assortment of bandaids, cotton, and turpentine and treated her wound while my mom picked up the unharmed planter and took it to another room. I don’t think she ever put it back on the mantle. Uncle Al helped Aunt Maryalice to a chair across from the fireplace. I noticed a little blood, but otherwise, she seemed OK, if a little stunned.
The cousins waited patiently for the signal to attack the gifts under the tree.
Whenever I recall this incident, I wonder why Mom didn’t see the danger. The mantle was her territory, and everything was in its place. But the planter must have nudged out just enough that all that was needed was a little jolt. My mom was a worrier who always erred on the side of caution. Under normal circumstances, she would have put it somewhere else or suggested that Maryalice not sit under it.
It must have been because she was so distracted: three young boys, a challenging brother, a cloistered sister, an aging mother who lived alone, and organizing those cards. But there was one additional thing.
Our family always celebrated two Christmases, one Protestant and one Catholic. On Christmas Day, we traveled forty miles to my dad’s Protestant parents’ farm in Tipton. Paul Sr. and Edith hosted their five grown children and families. Christmas Eve was with my mom’s Catholic side.
Mom always felt underappreciated by her mother-in-law because of the religious difference. And she always resented that her mother had never been invited to spend Christmas Day at the farm.
She must have been stewing over all this, so she never noticed the purple planter was waiting to fall on Aunt Maryalice.
By the evening of that day, this incident would begin its journey in Gardner family lore.
Without it, would anyone remember the Christmas of 1957?
