paulmuses

A couple of weeks ago I attended a Luther College Recognition dinner honoring two faculty who were retiring. Tributes to both included former students who wrote about how this person had changed their lives. This is a story of how a faculty person’s life, my life, was changed by my Luther colleagues.

I retired from Luther College in 2018, on the small island nation of Malta. Over the next two years, I applied and was accepted for two Fulbright Scholar awards* to teach about American democracy in Romania. Nothing about the Paul Gardner who arrived at Luther College to teach American politics in 1985 would have predicted these endings.

The Endings

Did you know that 48 Romanian lei buys two tornados?

Last week I used my Romanian Banca Transilvania card for the final time. Although Rebecca and I returned from Romania in January, I wanted to keep alive one tangible link. The bank branch that issued the card in 2020 anchored one end of our Timișoara neighborhood so the card always triggered memories of our two Romanian journeys, in spring 2020 and fall 2021. Nostalgia, however, doesn’t buy ice cream. But a credit card backed by 48 lei does and was just enough for two tornados from Decorah’s Whippy Dip.

I placed the worn-out card on top of this map in a fat folder labeled Two Fulbrights in Romania. We used the map so often it refolded itself. Artifacts, memories, photos together with occasional Facebook, email and Zoom conversations with Romanian friends pointed toward a cumulation of something special. So does the hollowness in my stomach.

I’ve just finished Troubled Water, a terrific travelogue by Jens Muhling, about his one year journey around the Black Sea. At the beginning of the book, Muhling writes “Journeys seldom start where we remember them starting.” When I read that line, I thought of this picture of Rebecca and me in Romania’s eastern Carpathian Mountains. If I could get a mountain-peak view of where our Romanian Fulbright journey began, what would I discover?

The Beginnings

Muhling’s 2018 sojourn started in Russia but began decades earlier under his grandmother’s dinning room table. He heard stories about a distant relative who commanded part of Catherine the Great’s fleets in a Black Sea battle against Turkish gun boats. From that imaginative Romanian mountain top, I see that our Romanian odyssey started with an application for a Fulbright Scholar award. But it began in the summer of 1999, in Nottingham, England.

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 located in this north-central English city. Richard was the previous year’s director and would spend a few days showing me the ropes. I remember standing on a busy corner with a house address in one hand and a bus timetable in the other. And feeling overwhelmed. One year later, on the day before David, the next year’s director was to arrive, I walked from that city center spot to the director’s house, without map or bus schedule.

Two years later, August 2001, Mark faced me across the breakfast table at the Imperial Hotel in London. Mark was the director of Luther’s study abroad office and later that day would join another Luther group touring England. I had come to London and Ireland to spend four days scouting locations for a January 2002 three-week course study course with students. “What’s first on our agenda?,” asked Mark. I looked at him and said “I really have no idea.”

Over the next decade and a half I would learn to lead, plan and execute five January term study-away courses, in 2002, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015. And in the spring of 2018, in my last semester before retirement, Rebecca and I would direct Luther’s semester program in Malta.

Little Jens under his grandmother’s table could not imagine that decades later he would travel around the Black Sea. And write about it. Adult Jens looking back sees a seed beginning to take root, from his grandmother’s stories. These stories helped enlarge his vision for what he could do, for what he could be.

Luther College is full of Johnny Appleseeds

When I arrived at Luther College in 1985, I had never traveled outside the United States. Leading, planning, and executing a study abroad experience for students, let alone myself, was outside my imagination. Yet Luther College was full of Johnny Appleseeds, planting one seed after another. Richard and Mark would eventually be joined by Norma, Jim, Harland, Steve and Deborah. The latter five had done Fulbrights and their gift of Fulbright stories expanded my vision of what I might do.

My Luther-life ended in Malta. My academic-life ended in Romania.

Without Luther colleagues planting and pointing, these endings do not make sense.

__________________________________________________________________________

*The Fulbright Scholar program sends 400 American citizens to 130 countries each year to teach or do research. In spring 2020, I received a scholar award to teach courses on American Democracy at West University in Timisoara Romania. COVID drove us home after only 33 days and so I successfully re-applied for fall 2021.

I need a seat to get from A to Beat

“Would you like our seats,” offered a young woman to Rebecca and me on a crowded London Underground Tube in January 2018. With a nod, her partner seconded the invitation. I had a pole and Rebecca a strap-handle so we said “Thanks but we’re OK.” “Are you sure?” she replied. “Yes, we’re sure. But thanks anyway.”

Two weeks later the other shoe dropped. Another young couple and this time on a crowded bus in Malta, a densely populated island country in the Mediterranean. Again, we politely declined and again were taken aback. Rebecca was born in 1951 and me in 1949 so we knew we were older. But our genes had given us cover. It was a shock to know that even our disguised-selves looked old enough for priority seating.

A second aha moment followed a week later on another packed Malta bus. Our destination was Dingli Cliffs. We boarded in Valleta, Malta’s capital city, for the one hour and 18 minute trip. Rebecca found a seat. I stood, for 78 bone-rattling minutes. And thought, for the first time, “I need a seat, to get from A to Beat.”

Please offer me a seat

A few months before the couple in London offered us their seats, Transport for London began a Travel Kind Campaign. One part of the campaign was a new Priority Seating sign posted in all London buses, trains and trams. Instead of the older signs with symbols of elderly, pregnant or disabled, this sign asks passengers to widen their vision for who might need help to get from A to beat.

And to prepare passengers to be asked to give up their seat. Transport for London has a Transport Accessibility link that describes the resources available for anyone that needs travel help. It includes this statement: “All buses, Tubes, trains, and trams have clearly marked priority seats for anyone who needs them. If one isn’t available, ask if someone will give up a seat.” For those travelers who might be reticent to ask, they can apply for a Please Offer me a seat badge.

Londoner Amanda Jacobs who has a musculoskeletal condition explained why the badge is so important to her.

The badge is so important to me personally because when someone looks up, sees I need to sit down and offers me their seat, I can relax and not worry about being injured and unable to live a full life for several months – just because I couldn’t get a seat on the bus, train or tube and had to stand up. Such a relatively small action by a fellow passenger respecting my needs can therefore have a hugely beneficial influence on my life for months to come.

From Transport for London’s web site

Personal autonomy

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life – to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you ant to be.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, p. 141

Toward the end of our four months in 2018 directing Luther College’s Malta program, I admitted to myself and then to Rebecca that I dreaded some of our weekend bus trips visiting Malta sites. The Dingli Cliffs trip intimidated and influenced what I felt I could and could not do. I was tip-toeing toward the recognition that, like Amanda, to be whole, to live a full life, I needed help.

The signs of our time

A few days ago Spotify delighted me with a song I had not heard for decades, Signs, from 1971, by The Five Man Electric Band. The song was a lament about how America’s signs excluded people, with its thematic line: “Sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside.” 50 years later, whether in London, Malta or America, many of our institutions’ signs waive whatever membership card may have been required in the past.

Instead, these signs welcome those who may have been excluded in the past. They seek, in Atul Gawande’s words, “to maintain the integrity of one’s life.” What has changed is not the goal of personal autonomy. But who gets to make that claim.

Democracy

Democracy is not a state. It is an act.

John Lewis, just before he died on July 17, 2020

When Jackie Robinson resisted Major League baseball’s no black player rule in 1947, he joined millions of his compatriots who had acted throughout American history to repair America’s broken equality promise.

Baseball’s whites only sign was one breach among too many. Democracy begins not with Congress’s or Prime Minister’s but with the people and how we should think about them. And not just about people as voters but people and the games they play. Or can’t play.

This is how I make sense of Jackie Robinson’s impact on America.

The Promise

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among the are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Thomas Jefferson, America’s Declaration of Independence, 1776

America began with a promise about equality. Differences that mattered in Europe – class, gender, race, religion – were to give way to the only thing that was to count in public life: the dignity of each human being.

The Breach

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary…The blessings in which you, this day rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me…This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

Frederick Douglass What to the slave, is the Fourth of July, 1852

In the beginning, America broke its promise by excluding most people from public life. But these exclusions ruptured the promise. So they had to be built upon ideas that served as rationales: those without property were not responsible enough to rule; women were best suited for the household; Catholics were too beholden to the Pope, and blacks were inferior to whites.

Bad ideas succored self-interest and power.

Resistance

The most significant sports story of the century. Baseball and Jackie Robinson have taken up the cudgel of democracy.

A sports reporter about Jackie Robinson’s first professional baseball game, 1946, from Kostya Kennedy, True: The Four Seasons of Jackie Robinson, 2022

America’s equality promise instructed resistance wherever inequality was found. African-Americans resisted America’s home-grown tyranny. Sometimes with white allies, slaves, former slaves, and the ancestors of slaves: fought, organized, wrote, preached, marched, boycotted, protested, rallied, lawyered, prayed, freedom-rode, and died. And migrated, away from terror, toward better lives. From 1890 to 1960, six million black Americans migrated from the American Jim Crow south to Detroit, Chicago, and Pasadena, California. In 1920, one year after Jackie Robinson was born, his mother moved the family from Cairo, Georgia to Pasadena.

Two decades later Robinson strode into America’s consciousness on April 18, 1946 when he played his first professional game as a member of the Montreal Royals, a minor league club affiliated with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Robinson powered, finessed and thought his way to four runs for his victorious team. After homering in his second-at-bat, he bunted safely twice, stole two bases and intimidated two pitchers into balks. 51, 873 fans doubled Newark, New Jersey’s Roosevelt Stadium 25,000 seat limit and saw what one newspaper called The Robinson Experiment.

In 1949 and in his second major league season, Robinson lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to a National League pennant. He topped the league in stolen bases and batting average and was named baseball’s Most Valuable Player. Baseball, mid-20th century America’s national pastime, was a public laboratory of meritocracy. Robinson’s productivity assaulted the lie of black inferiority that America’s whites’ only barriers were built upon.

Democracy as an act of imagination

Democracy begins as an act of imagination about people.

E.E. Schattschneider, Two hundred million Americans in search of government, 1969

America’s Declaration of Independence’s equality promise is built upon an act of imagination about people. It asks us to ignore differences that have always mattered. In favor of what Schattschneider calls the preciousness of each human being.

I imagine that you are like me. You want to be happy. You want to be free. You want to realize your potential.

I imagine all the Jackie Robinson’s who could have played in the major league. Or the Ketanji Brown Jackson’s who could have been a Supreme Court Justice. Or the Barack Obama’s who could have been President of the United States.

The heroes of American democracy are not our presidents or generals but our resisters.

America started with a promise about equality. It immediately broke that promise to most of its inhabitants. That breach had to be repaired. Much of the repair work was done by the excluded many. In 1946, Jackie Robinson joined that illustrious group of resisters.

Resisters know what it is like to be invisible. Thus, they help us see not only them but each other.

Sidney Poitier died on January 6, 2022. His slap of a white man in the 1967 Oscar winning film In the Heat of the Night made a big impression on a 17 year old white kid who was just opening up to the world’s possibilities. The 2022 Academy Award show will always have Will Smith and Chris Rock. I have Virgil Tibbs and Eric Endicott, the 1968 Oscars, and a handshake.

Last fall I taught Romanian students about America democracy, from the perceptive of the black freedom movement. The students watched Spike Lee’s Malcom X and BlackkKlansman, Ava Duvernay’s Selma, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and the two scenes from Heat I will describe.* These scenes, with some context, helped students understand America. They portrayed an America that has struggled, still struggles, to become a better home for its African-American citizens.

The slap

“Got a name, boy,” barks Sparta, Mississippi Sheriff Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) at Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), to jump start the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. Tibbs had been arrested by a deputy who earlier in the evening found the body of an important businessman. Searching for suspects, the deputy encountered Tibbs who was sitting in a train station waiting to return to Philadelphia, PA after visiting his mother.

In his decaying office, Gillespie grilled Tibbs who eventually produced a homicide detective badge tucked inside his wallet. Tibbs called his police chief who ordered him to help with the investigation. The chief told Gillespie that Virgil was his best detective. This sets in motion Heat’s plot. In a small 1960s Mississippi town Poitier’s black Tibbs worked with Steiger’s white Gillespie to solve a murder.

The murder victim was Philip Colbert who wanted to build a factory in Sparta. Tibbs asked locals whether Colbert had enemies. One pointed him to Eric Endicott, owner of Endicott Cotton Planation. He said Endicott believed his company would lose workers, black workers, to Colbert’s new enterprise. Gillespie and Tibbs visited Endicott on his property by driving through a cotton field of black field workers. They found Endicott inside a greenhouse tending his precious orchids.

“What’s your favorite flower?” Endicott asked Tibbs. “Epiphytics” said Tibbs and explained why. Endicott responded with this flower needed special care “because, like the negro, they need care and feedin’ and cultivation,’ and that takes time. That’s something’ you can’t make some people understand. That’s somethin’ Mr. Colbert didn’t realize.”

Earlier in the film Tibbs observed a root substance on the brake pedal of Colbert’s car. So he asked Endicott whether Mr. Colbert was in this greenhouse last night. Endicott was offended at Tibbs’ impertinent question and slapped him across the face. Tibbs reciprocated with a backhanded slap.

When Gillespie did nothing, Endicott told Tibbs “there was a time I could have had you shot.” I have been awed by the power of Poitier’s reciprocal slap. Not only the physical act. But the assertion of equivalence, the momentary dismantling of a racial hierarchy. Look at Endicott’s expression after the slap.

Larry Gates, the actor who plays Eric Endicott, gave the viewer a visceral portrayal of what the Endicotts’ of America were beginning to lose and what the Tibbs’ of America were starting to gain 50 years ago. Losers, however, often strike back.

The 1968 Oscars

On Thursday, April 4, 1968 James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King jr. The 1968 Academy Award Show was scheduled for Monday, April 8. On Saturday, April 6, Gregory Peck, President of the Motion Pictures Association, decided to postpone the Oscar ceremony until April 10, one day after King’s funeral. Bob Hope, emceeing his 17th Oscars, quipped to the audience about the postponement that “it didn’t affect me, but it’s been tough on the nominees,” and “any delay really snarls up programming.”**

On April 10, In the Heat of the Night won best picture and Rod Steiger best actor for his portrayal of Sheriff Bill Gillespie. In his acceptance speech, Steiger says: “I would like to thank Mr. Sidney Poitier for the pleasure of his friendship, which gave me the knowledge and understanding of prejudice in order to enhance this performance. Thank you and we shall overcome.”

As the audience applauds Steiger, Bob Hope returned and introduced Sidney Poitier who will present the next award. In Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris described the moment: “Poitier’s appearance immediately after Steiger’s victory gave the night its emotional climax. Waves of applause, whistles, cheers, and bravos greeted him as he walked to the center of the stage.”

The handshake

In the Heat of the Night was the film that most helps me makes sense of the America of my lifetime. The slap scene represented a changing of the guard. Those who have been pushed aside were beginning to assert themselves. The Civil Rights movement was the nonviolent and political version of this thrust. Gillespie, Hope and James Earl Ray were losing their grip on the country. Loss was hard. Gillespie responded with learned prejudice, Hope with lame quips, and Ray with a bullet.

In the film’s final scene, Gillespie carried Tibbs’ suitcase from the squad car to the train and in parting says to Virgil “take care, you hear.” Virgil turns, smiles, and says “yeah.” In between these vignettes was a handshake.

I am not naive about America. Every forward movement toward extending the Constitution’s blessings of liberty to all has been met with fierce resistance. Those losing power never give it up easily. After Tibbs’ slap, Endicott will send his thugs after Virgil. Even the 1966 filming of Heat butted up against the reality of racism in 1960s America.*** Poitier said he would not go “south of the Mason-Dixon Line” because of an incident with the Klan he and Harry Belafonte had a year earlier in Mississippi.

So Sparta, Illinois became Sparta, Mississippi. The Endicott plantation scene, however, required two days in Dyersville, Tennessee. Poitier, Steiger and a small crew had to stay at a Holiday Inn outside of Dyersville because the main hotel was “whites only.”

That “whites only” America was a different country. Gillespie changed just as America has changed. That handshake was a sign of hope, of the change to come. Smith’s Oscar slap down of Rock was remarkable. What was not remarkable was the presence of two black men on the Oscar stage. Or the Oscar winning film Coda about three deaf members of a family, each played by a deaf actor. Or the remake of another Oscar nominated film, West Side Story, where all the Latino parts are played by Latinos and not, like the 1961 original, white actors in brown face.

For my Romanian students, I used the black freedom movement as a lens through which to see America because I wanted them to see the struggle, for democracy-in-action and not just in words.

Struggle was defined by loss and hope, the slap and the handshake.

______________________________________________________________________________

*In a future blog, I will write about the course I taught in Romania.

**From Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution

***From Norman Jewison & Steven Galloway “In the Heat of the Night at 50,” The Hollywood Reporter, April 5, 2017

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

1 Corinthians 13: 11

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys

Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys

One grey night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more

And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar

From the Lyrics to Puff the Magic Dragon, by Peter, Paul & Mary

Bullies

Vladimir Putin is Russia’s most recent bully. Since Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine on March 24, more than 10 million Ukrainians have fled their homes, villages and cities. That’s 1 out of 4 Ukrainians. If this was America, 80 million people would be on the road. That’s California, Texas and Florida emptied. Numbers can numb but pictures can teach. And preach. Not only the good news.

A friend told me of a friend who lost faith in God because of Putin’s war on Ukraine. I remember another time, another Russian bully, and another kind of loss. It was the fall of 1960. I am 11 and have just finished delivering the afternoon Quad City Times to my 44 customers.

A kid’s story about a bully

Mom told me to go outside and said she would call me when supper was ready. I’m not hungry because I stopped at a bakery to eat two donuts. In school today we had a fun drill. We do this once a month. Sometimes we get in a line and march outside the school and stand around. That’s my favorite. Today, we got under our desks. Our teacher said we needed to practice in case the Russians dropped a big bomb.

I went outside and started kicking a football up on our garage roof to see how many times I could catch it before it hit the ground. I knew the sound was coming, it always did around 5. When the screaming started, I looked toward where I knew the pole with the yellow horn was. I just stood there looking out over the roof of our neighbor’s house, with my arms around my football. Mom knocked on the family room window and I went in to supper.

That night I dreamed a bald, fat man with glasses crashed through our classroom door while me and my classmates were under our desks. I did not like this dream or this man.

Loss of innocence

I don’t know if paperboy Paul ever saw this picture of the Soviet leader but I think he did. My parents took my brothers and me to see John Kennedy and Richard Nixon when they campaigned in the Quad Cities in the fall of 1960. I remember sitting on my dad’s shoulders in front of St. Anthony’s Church in downtown Davenport and spotting Kennedy in an open convertible. My mom and dad talked about politics and the world. I knew mom supported Kennedy and dad Nixon. We usually watched the evening news. And I always looked through one of the 22 papers while I ate donuts, at the half-way point of my route. I must have seen Khrushchev’s raised-fist podium image.

1950s school atomic bomb drills, air raid sirens, and Mr. Khrushchev’s photograph stewed away inside that 11 year old kid and produced a dream that rattled his world. When does a child begin to turn away from childish things? When does Jackie Paper come no more?

I have been puzzled by my 11 year old self on that fall afternoon. Why was I transfixed by the siren? My memory is of a hyperactive kid who was motionless, looking out toward the sound and away from the garage and his childish game. I was teetering, between childhood and adulthood.

The Khrushchev-bully dream was my Jackie Paper moment, when I put away a childish idea, of a world that was as safe as my backyard.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*

Putin’s bullying of Ukraine got me to thinking about another Russian bully who was part of my childhood. Of course, my country, America, has plenty of its own bullies. The Bull in Bull Connor fit. And my country has bullied other countries and its own people. That’s a subject for another blog.

Why I hate war

Dictionary.com defines war as “conflict that is carried out by force of arms.” Its synonyms include: battle, bloodshed, and combat. Even in 2022 war persists around the world. Russia’s war on Ukraine is eight years old and since March 24 has become a full scale invasion. Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan contain ongoing civil wars. America’s Director of National Intelligence lists 25 terrorist groups around the world that are at war with governments, including America’s.

I hate war because it kills, maims and disrupts. “Last week, we had a life. We had plans.” EIena Holitsyna spoke these words a few days ago as she and her daughter Valerie traveled from their home in Kiev, Ukraine to Romania crossing at Sighetu Marmației. Thus far one million Ukrainians have had their lives upset. Ariana, in the picture below, celebrated her 7th birthday yesterday in a refugee camp in Siret, Romania.

Rebecca and I just returned from several months in Romania. We visited Sighetu Marmației and Siret, before Putin’s war brought the world’s attention to these places, now full of victims. Since Syria’s civil war began in 2011, 7 million people have left their homes. Two million lives have been uprooted in South Sudan. Brown University’s Watson Institute estimated that 38 million people across the world have fled war zones. And these numbers do not include the millions of black Americans who fled the American south in 20th century America.

But…

I am not a pacifist. Sometimes war and its horrors are necessary. America’s civil war killed 618, 222 Americans, injured 1.5 million, and upended the lives of thousands. But it also destroyed slavery. And from 1865 to 1877 during Reconstruction the U.S. Army, using force of arms, occupied 11 formerly confederate states to protect the rights of former slaves.

When the army withdrew, the governors, legislators and Klans in those states created through law and terror an American apartheid that would last until the 1960s. As a consequence, six million African Americans between 1890 and 1960 would migrate from their southern homes for northern and western cities.

America’s Black Freedom Movement of the 20th century was nonviolent but resistance to it was not. In 1962, President Kennedy ordered America’s army to protect James Meredith as he became the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Resistance by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett and others required 31,000 troops to quell the riots surrounding the effort to register an American citizen in an American university.

Last year Rebecca and I visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. This place honors the 4075 black Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950. As I walked through the outdoor museum, I asked myself how this happened in my country? And a more difficult question, what could my country’s leaders have done to stop this century-long bloodletting? I am now asking the same question about how Putin can be stopped.

*

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is at war with Ukraine and its people. Governor Barnett was among the last in a long line of southern state governors at war with their black citizens.

People in war inflict cruelties, upon innocents. Human beings force a 7 year old girl to celebrate her birthday in a refugee camp. Human beings forced a young black man to register for college surrounded by a jeering mob.

James Meredith needed other human beings, armed, to register and graduate from the University of Mississippi. Ariana was smiling on her birthday, but she won’t be today or tomorrow, despite the kindness of Romanians. Soldiers and armed civilians are part of the solution to allowing Ariana to return home.

There is no shortage of Putins’ and Barnetts’ in our world. If only we could “build them shelves so they can fight among themselves,” suggested Tim Hardin in Simple Song of Freedom, sung wondrously by Bobby Darin.

But until that day, tragically, we need war or its threat to stop war.

In “The Quiet Joys of the Very, Very Early Morning Club, Jason Gay described the benefits of his two year experience of getting up at 4 am. I have been in this club for 40 years. Gay’s essay prompted this recollection about how my early morning habit started.

Early morning and success

It was January 1976. I was early for a 7 PM meeting. I parked my mustard-yellow 1972 Toyota Corolla next to the only other car outside a bank building in downtown Burlington, Iowa. A light shown from a second floor window. I saw a cardboard sign on a side door. I walked up a flight of stairs to the sign’s twin that pointed me through an open door. A man who looked about my age greeted me and handed me a flier. I looked around the room and spotted a table with cookies, coffee, and circulars. As I closed in on the cookies, the third person in the room appeared, with his hand extended. I recognized the smile. Eleven months later Jimmy Carter would become the 39th President of the United States.

I met Mr. Carter at a time when I was looking toward the future. In How I learned to hit a baseball and love my students, I wrote about how I had become a competent middle school teacher. But I was restless and had begun to think about what I might do next. Though I had no crystal ball about Carter, I decided to read about his life. One story resonated. Jody Powell, the man who gave me the flier, caught Carter’s attention a decade earlier by arriving at work even earlier than Jimmy. Powell directed Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign and would become President Carter’s press secretary. I don’t know why that story about early rising and success stuck, but it did. And was available when something else happened later that year.

The gift of possibility

My Social Security page reminds me I earned $8,384 in 1976. $6,353 was my teaching salary and the rest came from a summer job at the Burlington Tent and Awning Company. Low salaries meant every lay teacher at St. Johns worked full time, from June through August. During my four summers in Burlington, I poured cement, painted houses, sold encyclopedias and, in 1976, sewed tents. One of my sewing companions was a guy a little older than me, like Jody Powell. He had earned a graduate degree from Iowa State University. While his name and degree program have vanished, my summer friend gave me the gift of possibility.

“If he can do it, I can do it,” I thought after a month of break-time conversations. This sounds belittling but I don’t mean it that way. The thought sprung from lack of confidence in myself rather than deficiency in him. My friend was an average guy who had figured out how to do something I thought hard. Maybe I could do it as well. For me, the it would be a graduate program in Political Science. I was at the Carter meet and greet because politics had always interested me. I had worked for political campaigns and even run, unsuccessfully, for the Burlington School Board. But studying politics, as opposed to doing it, seemed a better fit.

Graduate school, really?

Today universities have web sites that provide all the application details. In the summer of 1976, I called the Iowa State Political Science Department and requested an information packet. Today academic departments have Administrative Assistants. In 1976 I talked with a secretary who told me the department did offer an MA in Political Science. A few days later a catalogue arrived that opened a new world to me. I have inhabited the world of higher education for so long it is hard to remember that 45 years ago I knew nothing. My summer-sewing-friend opened the door and I was ready to walk through.

The catalogue told me admission to ISU’s Political Science MA program required a BA, letters of recommendation, and minimum scores on the quantitative and verbal parts of the GRE. I had an undergraduate degree from St. Ambrose University, but my grade point was mediocre and my major was Sociology. My St. Ambrose sociology professor, Keith Fernsler, was a kind man and said in phone conversation that he would write a letter for me because he thought I would be a better graduate than undergraduate student. Over my forty year college teaching career, I wrote hundreds of recommendation letters and never started a letter without first thinking about Dr. Fernsler’s kindness. Even with a solid letter, to get into ISU and to qualify for an assistantship that would pay for tuition and living expenses, I needed strong GRE scores.

The GRE

I hated standardized tests. In grade school we took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Sometimes I scored high and sometimes low, really low. I never understood why, nor did my parents. Even today, knowing my academic story turned out OK, that picture on the right tightens my stomach. And what it represents, judgment based upon a test, still angers me because those tests sucked the life out of my school experience for too long. In 2022 the ISU Political Science Department no longer requires the GRE. But in 1976 it did and that was a problem.

Curious, I spent a few minutes today looking at the GRE online site. I discovered everything is at my finger tips. I can register, prepare, and even take the test, if my computer is up to snuff, without leaving my chair. And if I need help to maneuver around this massive site, Anita, a virtual assistant, is available.

In 1976, ETS, the nonprofit that has administered the GRE since 1947, had a mailing address, phone number, and paper of all sorts. If I wanted to apply to ISU for fall 1977, I needed to take the GRE no later than December 1976. My mail carrier stuffed the GRE packet in my box sometime in June. The closest test location was Iowa City, about an hour from Burlington. So I signed up to take the GRE on a Saturday morning in December, giving me five months to, well, that’s when my Jimmy Carter story became more than a story.

Early morning preparation

The GRE material contained practice tests. I knew the quantitative portion of the test would be my biggest challenge because it had been a decade since my last math class. I decided I would devote two hours a day to working through math practice questions. My tent sewing job meant daytime was out and my body clock had always made night challenging.

In my early teens, I don’t remember ever seeing the end of a Saturday night Creature Feature movie. And that driveway in the picture was the midnight curfew scene of many late teenage near misses and one disastrous night when I pinballed my parents’ car topped-off by nicking a corner of our small garage. It was little consolation to my dad that this incident was late night fatigue and not alcohol.

So in the summer of 1976 I started getting up early to work through math questions. In early 1977 I got my GRE scores. The verbal was higher than expected and the quantitative was good enough. ISU accepted me and awarded an assistantship. The really early mornings, however, did not kick-in for good until my first graduate course exam the fall of 1977. Ross Talbot taught in the Political Science Department for 40 years. Dapper, with a bow tie, this former minor league baseball player made students an offer at least one could not refuse. Two days before the first exam he handed us a list of five essay questions. He would pick three for us to answer the day of the exam, with no notes.

This was a fish or cut bait moment for me. I either become a good student or I don’t. I worked all the first day on the answers to each question. On the day of the exam, in my little dorm room in Buchanan Hall, I got up at 4 am to commit to memory each answer.

I used Professor Talbot’s exam method in my 40 years of college teaching. And I wrote the questions at 4 am and graded the answers at 4 am. Mr. Gay is right about the quietness of the house in the very, very, early morning, with no demands from kids or spouse. In Buchanan Hall I was the only one getting coffee from basement machine. As I finish this blog at 5:23, Rebecca is asleep and quiet is the loudest sound.

The hidden magic of 40 years of 4 am’s

Yet for me the hidden magic of getting up at 4 am has little to to do with time or the absence of distractions. What makes 40 years of 4 am’s magic are the links among the events in this narrative. Not one could be predicted nor its consequences understood, in the moment. It’s only by looking back that patterns are uncovered.

What will happen today that will become the 4 am of tomorrow?

In 1976 I was a 26-year-old middle school teacher, newly competent, after a four year slog. When I walked into my first classroom of 44 6th graders four years earlier, I was full of education course fluff. When I walked out of that first class, and all the classes that followed the first and second years, I vowed never to return. I quit every night for two years. I had three times Mr. Kotter’s sweathogs and all mine were going through puberty. How do I manage this gang?

My dad’s big bat and bag of beans

I had never been a good student. I thought you were born a good, average or bad student, and that was it. Nobody ever told me it was possible to make myself better. That’s not quite true. My father, who knew nothing about baseball, applied his engineer brain and figured out how to transform a 9-year-old-two-inning-a-week-in-right field Little Leaguer into a 12 year old All Star at 3rd base, with some pop in his bat.

When I was 11 my dad came home with an adult baseball bat and a bag of navy beans. I was still a Little League benchwarmer. As he was leaving for work the next day, he took me outside and said I should practice tossing a bean in the air and hitting it with this big stick as it passed my belly button. And to stride forward with my left leg and time the forward movement so that I hit the bean in mid-stride. “Go through the bag,” he said, “hit toward the garage and don’t clobber your mother when she’s hanging the clothes.” I did what I was told and eventually a bag of navy beans was put on the weekly shopping list and by the next year I was knocking the baseball-bean out of the park.

Pony League for 13 and 14 years olds was next and more homers followed. With a little help from my dad and calloused hands, I had become a good baseball player. A different story but the same outcome for golf. However, the lessons I learned on the diamond and fairway – that I could work my way to competence – did not translate to school. In school, many were trying to lead me to the water but I just didn’t want to drink.

Baseball was one thing. School was another.

I always felt overwhelmed in a classroom. I started kindergarten at 4 and my mom always said she wished they had waited a year. Nothing in school ever came easy, even the scripted L. In 3rd grade the night before we were to practice it, I was chased all night by a rope-like monster. High school was no different. B- on my first algebra test and a B- on my last. “Oh for pity’s sake,” my mother said, when she saw a D for typing on my report card. “But I improved from an F on my first test,” was my lame reply. Geometry? Please don’t ask.

When it came to school, I had what the psychologist Carol Dweck labeled the fixed mindset. I believed I was born an average student and that was it. When it came to sports, my dad helped me develop a growth mindset. I improved my baseball and golfing skills through insight and effort. Regarding school, I was fixed in mediocrity.

Sister Mary Ellen’s advice

You need to understand something about that pack of 6th graders I inherited in 1972 at St. Johns in Burlington. I was hired in December because this group had driven their previous teacher to a shot-gun retirement. Sister Nancy, the principal, was desperate and I was available. On the Thursday of my first week, Steve D. threw a chair at me from the back of the classroom. Little Steve was ahead of his time as 10 years later an adult delinquent would do the same against another authority figure.

On the Monday of my second week, the principal summoned the 6th grade parents to an evening meeting to talk about discipline. I sat in the back of the classroom asking myself what I had gotten into. The better question was: what could I do?

I began to search for answers to that question in 1973 at the same time Sister Mary Ellen Schulte set up shop in a classroom across from mine. Mary Ellen taught math. She had also been an Iowa All State basketball player 25 years earlier. We had a new principal, Sister Mary Ann, and she encouraged me to observe other teachers. So during my free period I would walk up and down St. John’s two floors of classrooms listening if the door was closed and looking in if the door was open. Raleigh was a new science teacher and his door was closed all the time. Even through thick walls I could hear the bedlam. From my own experience, I knew Raleigh’s bellowing response was not the answer.

Mary Ellen’s door was always open and her classroom looked and sounded like, well, what I thought a classroom should look and sound like. Even those year-older-6th graders looked not like a gang or a pack but like, well, students. “How do you do it?” I asked. “No secret,” she said. “You have to show them that you love them and then you have to firmly tell them what they can and cannot do. And by firmly I mean you must start out hard and then you can loosen up. You cannot go the other direction.”

My approach the year before was the exact opposite. I started easy, wanting to be their friend, and then tried to tighten up. And when that did not work, I began to hate the job and them. Mary Ellen showed me another way.

Decades later I would meet Sister Mary Ellen at Mount Carmel in Dubuque, Iowa, a retirement community for the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I thanked her for the advice she had given me and said I repeated it to myself before the start of each of my 40 years of teaching. College students were no different from middle schoolers. They too needed love and firmness.

And that she had given me a big bat and a bag of beans and set me off on a journey to become a good teacher who loved his students and his job.

Florin and Pitâr

During my four months in Romania, I met many people who were COVID skeptics. Florin, our Suceava guide, questioned the motivations, incentives, and behaviors of governments, doctors, hospitals, clinics, and vaccine manufacturers. He took the vaccine because his work required it.

Florin got into guiding to supplement the wages he earned as an electrical engineer. And because he loved and knew Romanian culture, history and the land. During a hike in the Rarau Mountains and just before I took the picture on the right, Florin had said to Rebecca, “let’s engage in the spirit of the forest.”

Pitâr, the owner of Homemade, the restaurant we lived over, said protii or rubbish to all of it, COVID science, the vaccines, even masking. University educated, entrepreneurial, and worldly, Pitâr was proud of never masking, even in front of the police. Homemade’s yogurt marinated chicken wings, Tuica, a Romanian plum liquor high in alcohol, and decor made it a place of succor for us.

I remember one night when Rebecca and I hosted a group of Fulbright friends who were visiting Timișoara on the way to Budapest. Pitâr brought out two bottles of wine and asked which we preferred to start with. Rebecca mentioned the Wedding at Cana story about serving the cheap wine last and asked if Pitâr knew that story. He smiled and after gently chiding Rebecca with “Homemade does not serve cheap wine,” Pitâr gave us a brief and, as I discovered later when I checked it out, accurate description of John 2:10.

A funny thing happened to me in Romania

No, Florin and Pitâr did not change my mind. Not even after a glass of Tuica. Maybe after a second glass but I never chanced that experience. My contributions to our conversations were twofold. One, I described why I accepted the evolving science about the efficacy of the vaccines, masking and distancing. And two, I asked questions, such as why don’t you believe the science? Why don’t you accept government restrictions? As I think back on this two-step movement, it is almost too easy to miss. No tightening of my stomach or other signs my body was preparing for battle. Somehow I had relaxed into a mode of curiosity.

Why did these smart, educated and professional Romanians think the way they did? And COVID was not the only conversational flash point with my Romanian friends.

In November, on the way back from Budapest, I asked our tour guide Sergiu what he thought of Hungary’s prime minster Viktor Orban. “I like him,” he said, “he acts for the people, something Romanian leaders do not do.” Initially, I was taken back. I don’t know much about Hungary’s leader but what I do know emphasized his authoritarian actions. So I started asking other Romanians about Orban, including Pitâr. Most gave me a version of Sergiu’s answer.

Since I returned from Romania I have reflected upon why it was so painless for me to loosen my combative disposition on these areas of disagreement. Two answers – I was a guest in their country and was 5000 miles away from Donald Trump which made him more a mouse in the room than an elephant – were true but did not satisfy.

A reminder…

I discovered the answer a few days ago as I was scrolling though our pictures from Romania. I taught my two online West University of Timișoara classes on Saturdays, back to back. One Saturday I asked Rebecca to take a few pictures. You can see one of those pictures on the right.

On this day, I had asked a Fulbright colleague to talk with my students about Romania’s Roma or gypsies.* Ioanida Costache from Stanford University was in Romania to study Roma from a human rights perspective. She was hosted by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Bucharest.

This picture reminded me of what I loved about my almost 40 years in a college classroom. I knew Professor Costache would challenge my students’ ideas about Roma. Mine as well. But what happened during the class – was happening the moment Rebecca snapped this picture – was an exchange between one of my students, Alexandu, and Professor Costache. The exchange was a bit testy as Alexandu was often like the elephant in that picture above and not the mouse. The other 25 students had remained silent during the lecture but Alexandru’s question and comments had given them permission to become engaged. What followed was conversation from different perspectives on Roma, exactly what a teacher wants to happen.

I am not interested in changing your mind

At some point during my teaching career I started telling students on the first day of class that I did not care what their political point of view was. I was not interested in changing their minds. I taught at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. A small liberal arts school of about 2000 students and 180 faculty in a town of about 8000. Although I never posted political signs outside my office door, I did put them in my yard about two miles from campus. And I was the advisor to the Luther College Democrats. So I assumed that if a student paid attention to any of this she knew something about my politics. But I didn’t want a student to worry about whether our political differences might influence his grade. To reinforce this, I asked students to put their Luther ID and not name, on all assignments and exams.

When I said I didn’t care what their politics was, I meant it. I believed my primary classroom task was to teach them how to think about politics not what to think. This meant everything in the class – the reading assignments, papers, exams, and discussion topics – were built around analysis of multiple perspectives.

That’s why I loved the last 30 minutes of that Roma class. And I believe that why it was so easy for me to ease into a curiosity mode when conversing with Florin, Pitâr and Sergiu.

I had to get away from the political heat of America to remind myself there is another way to be in the world. I way I had been as a teacher. Somehow I had lost that.

Do I wish Florin and Pitâr agreed with me on COVID related stuff? Yes. Do I think there is more bad than good about Viktor Orban’s authoritarian grip on Hungary? Yes.

But those wishes are secondary to my understanding that the world is big enough to commend our diversities.

I am not interested in changing your mind, really.

*Gypsy is a pejorative term for Roma.

A reflection on the gold in missing out

I’ve been everywhere, man

I’ve been everywhere, man

Crossed the deserts’ bare, man

I’ve breathed the mountain air, man

Of travel I’ve had my share, man

We’ve been everywhere

Five days ago this refrain from Johnny Cash’s I’ve Been Everywhere taunted me during my plane’s 30 minute descent into the Kansas City International Airport. My travel day had started 24 hours earlier in Timișoara, Romania and included stops in Frankfurt and Washington DC. I used up some of those tedious airport hours inspecting our well-creased Romanian map.

If you look closely at our map pictured on the right, you can see the dark colored Carpathian Mountains that form Romania’s spine. During our 4 months in Romania, Rebecca and I had breathed the Carpathian air many times. And though Romania does not have a desert, it does have a plain that made it vulnerable to invasions by the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg, Austria-Hungary, German and Soviet Empires.* Rebecca and I crossed that plain many a time, either by auto, plane or train.

We’d been to Timisoara, Resita, Arad, Brad, Abrud, Roșia Montană, Alba Iulia, Cluj-Napoca, Turda, Sibiu, Sighișoara, Gherla, Sighetu Marmatiei, Săpanta, Suceava, Brashov, Bran, Reșita, and Bucharest. We’d had our share, folks! However, during the 3 hour DC layover, I began to list where we had not been. By the time we started our descent into Kansas City, Johnny’s refrain had become not a joyful recognition of the places we had been but a taunt, a fear about all we had missed.

But not really everywhere

We spent quality time in 19 Romanian cities but we did not visit Iași in the east on the Moldova border or Constanta on the Black Sea or Târgoviște, a few miles northeast of Bucharest where Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were executed after Romania’s 1989 Revolution. Romania has over 200 cities and towns with populations larger than either Clarinda or Decorah, Iowa where we live. We had been to many but not most of its cities or towns.

Our Romanian home city of Timișoara will be the European Capital of Culture in 2023. The Romanian Revolution of 1989 began here, its City Center includes five beautiful squares, and, my favorite reason, Timișoara’s 36 parks and green spaces. We walked everywhere every day and particularly loved walking along the Bega Canal bordered by many parks. But we never discovered Alpinet Park, pictured below.

Our apartment was in the Elisabetin neighborhood in Timișoara, on Strada Gheorghe Doja. Two blocks from our front door, tucked behind the Church of St. Mary Queen of Peace, a Greek Catholic Church, is the Museum of the Communist Consumer. The picture below shows its basement room. The floor above includes a funky bar with an outdoor patio. That’s what friends told us and on our daily walks we could see part of the patio from the sidewalk. While it was often closed, we never went inside. Nor did we ever wander into the church.

The gold in missing out

I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks. He calculates that human civilization has been around for 310,000 weeks and today the average person lives about 4000. I am at 3764. I was oblivious to all that happened during the 306,236 weeks before I was born and will miss everything after my death. Burkeman’s book reminds me that my existence is finite. I had a beginning and I will have an end.

4000 measly weeks of life seems so unfair. And what about what I will miss during the precious weeks I have? Burkeman is merciless and merciful

Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for–and the freer you are to choose, in each moment what counts the most.

From Four Thousand Weeks, p. 50

Missing out on almost everything is inevitable, outside and inside my existence. I took the picture on the right a couple of weeks ago on my last day trip from Timișoara. I had a free day and choose a gold mine over a visit to Novi Sad just across Romania’s border with Serbia. Rebecca missed this visit to the Roșia Montană gold mine because her 90 day visa was up. This ancient Roman gold mine is now a World Heritage Site and included 63 miles of tunnels. Burkeman writes about how the limits of our lives can seem claustrophobic, like this tunnel.

I have always hated to be in closed-in spaces. Before we entered the the mine, Dorin Rus, our guide, said to give-in to the experience. To not fight it.

That’s also good advice for all that we will miss before, after, and during the precious weeks we are given.

Look again at the tunnel. The walkway represents our lives, with their beginnings and endings. The walls and ceiling express the constraints on our choices. The chiseled veins embody what we choose to experience. Those choices are like gold.

When I look closely, I see the 19 cities we traveled to in Romania, the parks we walked through in Timișoara, and Profi’s, our favorite neighborhood convenience store.