paulmuses

Color is integral to our stories.

DEAR BLOG READER: THIS STORY HAS BEEN COPIED FROM MEDIUM, AN ONLINE WRITING PLATFORM. THE HIGHLIGHTING IS FROM MEDIUM. Unfortunately, the links do not work.

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A reader responded to a recent story with this comment: “I wish niceness were colorblind.” I thought about her comment and wrote a follow-up piece.

I understand the reader’s sentiment. For much of American history, people selected winners and losers based on the color of their skin. Ridding ourselves of this bias seemed a form of progress.

But upon further reflection, and prodded by another reader, I wondered whether being colorblind makes sense. This led me to this analogical tale.

*

Rebecca and I selected each kitchen item in the photo for its colors.

The white backsplash contrasts nicely with the grey-speckled granite countertop. The tiles’ teak grout augments the top’s porcelain flecks.

The framed picture’s cream road complements the backsplash. Its sage green countryside enhances the emerald flower leaves on the French butter dish.

When the butter dish opens, its bright yellow contents enrich the picture’s mustard matting and mango bicyclist shirt.

Color matters.

Color shadings are important.

*

When we look at each kitchen feature, we see its complexion.

Pigmentation is part of the value of each.

To be colorblind makes no sense.

But we don’t see only color.

Each element has stories.

Sometimes these stories are connected to their colors.

Rebecca is a bicycling devotee. She found a print of Giuliana Lazzerini’s woodcutting The Race at London’s Tate Modern Museum’s bookshop. She loved the yellows and greens. They reminded her of fall and summer colors throughout our community’s Trout Run Bike Trail.

Sometimes not.

Rebecca loves the rider’s hunched focus. It embodies her approach to this sport. For this aspect, the rider’s shirt color is irrelevant.

*

We’ve had the French Butter Dish for about a year. It’s ingenious. You tightly pack cold and softened butter sticks into the container on the right in the photo. It is placed over the left receptacle with an inch of salt water. This connection forms an airtight, oxygen-free vessel that keeps the butter fresh for about a month.

Unless you forget to replace the salt water every week. Something I did last week when Rebecca was on a weeklong biking trip.

When the butter morphed into the tinge of The Race’s matting.

*

We value each kitchen component for its colors. We see different hues as complementary, not as competitive.

But color forms only part of their identities. It sometimes connects to their identity, sometimes not. The funky French Butter thingy works regardless of its outer clothing. Its character matters most.

Each has stories worth telling and hearing.

Our butter dish works for us because of its character and color.

Identity is never just one thing.

For a dish or a human.

Caring about someone or something requires seeing all parts of them.

As the first step toward valuing and then understanding.

And overcoming shame

*

We were a month into the fall semester of 1987. It was my second year teaching at Luther College. As usual, I arrived fifteen minutes early, full of nervous energy. I wrote a couple of announcements on the chalkboard and sat in the chair by the window.

The twelve students enrolled in The Legislative Process drifted in and settled with books, pens, and notebooks arrayed around the table.

I started with a mini-lecture to develop the context of that day’s subject matter and reading. Then I asked them a question about the reading assignment. This was a reticent group, even though they were all 3rd and 4th-year students. Their quietness frustrated me. After the second question, with no response, I asked, “How many of you haven’t read the assignment.” Four raised their hands.

“I’ll see you four next class. Please come with the assignment read. I expect everyone to come to class ready to discuss the reading. That’s the only way we can learn together,” I explained.

The guilty four silently gathered their belongings and filed out.

Dreams and a regret

I regretted what I had done before they left the room. In my ten years as a teacher, first in middle school and then in college classrooms, I had never kicked a kid out. I hadn’t planned to kick them out. My job was to teach, and I couldn’t do that if they were not in class. I felt I had failed them. They deserved better. I vowed never to do this again.

This event troubled me so much that for over 30 years, I have had a recurring dream of four students filing past me as they left a classroom. I had this dream a few nights ago. When I woke up this time, I remembered one of the students from this class lives in town. He works as a chiropractor, and I frequently walk by his building.

“Why not contact David?” I thought. So I found his email and reached out to him, asking if he remembered that day.

He responded.

“I remember the entire events of that day. If you’d like me to relate them to you. I would be OK to sit with a coffee and talk about them. I was fortunate enough to have done the reading!”

Reconnecting

David met me with his hand extended as I entered the coffee shop. He was dressed in black scrubs. We ordered coffee and settled into a corner table.

“Thanks for being willing to meet me,” I said. “I’ve never forgotten that day. I always felt I failed those students.”

“Actually, I liked what you did,” he said. “I thought you did the right thing. You showed us through your actions what it means to be a serious student. And that actions have consequences.”

We then spent two hours catching up. What a gift it was to talk with a former student at midlife about how his life had turned out! His daughter had just graduated from Luther. My son, also a Luther graduate, now works at the Co-op. David told me he was the first chiropractor to join one of Decorah’s regional health clinics. I said I was still teaching Life Long Learning courses.

The time flew by.

As we left, we shook hands and agreed to stay in touch.

Urgency of closure

One of the joys of being 73 is the urgency of closure. It’s easy to put things off when you are young. Less so at this point in life. My shame over kicking those students out had dogged me for decades. Holding on to it festered. My recurring dream would not let me off the hook. It was like a good friend sitting on my front porch, encouraging me to face my fear and neglect.

All along, I could have reached out to David. Once I did, he offered another way to look at this event. That balanced my harsh judgment. He reminded me to be kinder to myself. And reconnecting with David encouraged me to think of other wounds that need resolution.

What about you?

Do you have a regret that might benefit from another point of view?

If there is a conversation you have been putting off, take a chance. Reach out. Be bold. Seize the opportunity.

You won’t regret it!

A Lesson in Humility from America’s Greatest Coach

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

THANK YOU FOR READING MY BLOG.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michelle Scorziello

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

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

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

What do I do about that fact?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good notes in good order was not enough for Salieri.

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

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

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

This image always makes me smile.

And brings me back to the task at hand.

The production of which is good enough for me.

What about you?

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

THANK YOU FOR READING MY BLOG. PAUL

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about you?

*

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

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

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

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

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

To stop the cruelty.

What if, today, war is the only answer?

More cruelty to stop the cruelty.

Yet I believe Gandhi was right when he said:

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

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

Alas, the world will not bow to ONE ANSWER.

*

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

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

I’m a 73-year old white male.

This is my response to the reader’s comment.

*

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

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

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

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

We had other concerns, but not that one.

*

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

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

We had other concerns, but not that one.

*

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

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

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

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

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

But not by the police.

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

*

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

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

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

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

I needed to stop and ask for directions.

But I saw only black people.

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

Of course, my worry did not bear fruit.

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

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

*

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

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

Or younger?

A reader wishes for kindness to be colorblind.

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

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

BUT

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

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

It’s a kind of innocence.

That can be another form of blindness.

_____________________________________________________________________________

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

*

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

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

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

We’ve been close ever since.

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

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

Out of sight.

I’m not so different from my dated mower.

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

Still in sight but fading away.

Palm 90:10 says:

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

Soon, I will be gone.

Just like my lawnmower brother.

It’s the way of the world.

*

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

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

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

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

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

Helicopter parenting, I thought.

A helicopter is always close by.

Hovering.

Lunar Landers are different

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Adults who no longer need a Lunar Lander or helicopter.

My mom and dad discovered one of those paths.

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

*

This is our front porch.

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

On the busiest street in town.

Here is our back porch.

*

It borders a less busy street.

Also, set back from the side walk.

And sits a few feet off the ground.

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

*

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

You know who you are.

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

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

You can do the same.

We wave.

Chit chat.

“A beautiful day for a walk.”

“Is she your grandchild?”

“What kind of dog is that?”

*

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

We’d still have problems

But we’d all be friends

Treating your neighbor like he’s your next of kin

You know, like weird Uncle Albert.

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

Today, we think we know our neighbors.

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

WE KNOW THEIR GOD.

WE KNOW THEIR POLITICS.

WE KNOW THEIR STRANGENESS.

But we don’t.

We’ve never been closer or farther away.

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

No, that’s not the whole truth.*

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

It’s live and let live.

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

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

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

Those are hard truths.

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

But necessary civic habits.

For Americans in the 21st century.

*

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

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

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

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

Give me a head with hair

Long, beautiful hair

Shining, gleaming

Steaming, flaxen, waxen

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t.

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

Unless I trimmed & trimmed & trimmed.

What is it about men and their hair?

Below are my grooming instruments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what if forensic science is wrong?

Fortunately, my #1 reason still envelops.

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

Hair-Raising.