I hope you don’t mind if I rest for a moment. I’ll leave something that will help your grass grow. I’ve heard you are one of the good ones who set a proper example for your children.
I try to do the same with mine. They’re across the street, enjoying Ed and Carol’s garden and that phenomenal stone arch. I tell them not to take more than they give. Some are only takers; a few, the enlightened ones, give and give and give. I believe in moderation, the best most of us can do.
What do you think?
By the way, we live in Palisade Park. We’ve noticed that you walk through it every day and are very respectful of our turf. Not everyone is.
Rebecca and I rotate, every month, a home-cooked dinner with Maggie and Mike. They moved to Decorah ten years ago. We met at a retirement party Maggie’s daughter, Carly, organized for me. She hoped the four of us would hit it off. And we did.
Last night, it was their turn. Mike began with a precisely prepared cocktail. A Black Manhattan that was dark, strong, and with a licorice taste. He takes his role very seriously, and it’s fun to watch the careful preparation from this retired engineer.
Maggie, formerly an activities director at a nursing home, served a summer-themed meal on their back patio of chicken salad, corn on the cob, and the honey wheat bread you see in the photo. Mike scooped ice cream for dessert.
Three hours later, she tucked a loaf wrapped in moist white paper into my hands.
After my dad died in 1993 of sinus cancer, my mother decided to become a little more active in her Catholic Church, St. Paul’s, to take her mind off her sadness. The priest asked if she would take responsibility for the breakfast after the 6 a.m. Mass. This would require her to get to the church hall to set everything up around 5:30.
That was no problem as she was always an early riser. She didn’t catch a worm but did make many new friends in the decade she performed this service.
She passed this morning chronotype gene to her oldest son, who has been getting up around 4 am for half a century.
This morning my eyes popped open at 3:45 and saw those numbers on the ceiling from the new projection alarm clock. I haven’t needed a wake-up device since Richard Nixon. Oh, for those halcyon days of only one corruption story a month.
After putting on the backyard lights, I walked the garbage out and said good morning to Mr Owl. I’m writing these words at 4:30 after my first cup of coffee.
My night chronotype friends refer to my perverse rising time as insomnia disguised. Otherwise, they think, why would I do it?
They get up around 9.
They can’t help themselves, either. My wee-hour habit fits my natural endowment. It’s no more a part of character development than my obsessive neatness. Or your tendency to pile the mail on the kitchen counter, read after midnight, or say good night to Mr Owl.
That’s what I feel, three days after my friend Rick Brown died. He was 83 and went fast, with bone and lung cancer. So quickly that his final email to me, two weeks ago, said, “No good health news, early next week will work, your house.” Soon after, his wife Melissa told me he began home hospice care.
Rick, a Marine, saw combat in Vietnam and, eventually, became a substance abuse counselor. He was a practicing Catholic and Buddhist.
We knew each other well for about a decade, each taking turns hosting two-hour discussion sessions that wore me out.
Deep, deeper, deepest.
Politics, religion, soccer, and Truth, with a capital T, and by that he meant the continual search for how to Love better. Until we get that right, he taught, as individuals and as a people, we are lost.
First, I tore the thin plastic bag off its mount. Next, slightly tilting my head upward, I checked which end had a seam. I then moved my thumb and forefinger back and forth, hoping friction would produce an opening. When it didn’t, I wet both digits and repeated the movement. Defeated, I used the bag as a glove to pluck the donuts.
As I waited to pay, I thought about complaining to the counterwoman, who had smiled and said “Good morning” when I entered the store, about the flimsy pouches.
But I didn’t because the symptoms are limitless for someone 75, one year older than Walter Matthau when he starred in Grumpy Old Men.
No part of me, including my mildly neuropathetic mitts, works like it used to. As my cardiologist said, after plopping a model heart down on her desk, “You know, Paul, your heart is 75 too.”
Yesterday, I changed the sheets, vacuumed the two front rooms, and washed and dried a few days’ worth of dirty dishes. Rebecca’s returning from a week-long bike ride across Iowa.
With earbuds secured, I got to work.
Each task took, give or take, 17 minutes, the running time of Bob Dylan’s 2020 song Murder Most Foul, which can be found on page 688 of the book of his lyrics you see in the photo.
On page 941 of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, also in the picture, and the textbook used in a 1972 college class, from Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, is this line from the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the old King, who was assassinated by Hamlet’s uncle,
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder
That I underlined 54 years ago.
So we’re in the land of spirits, Dear Reader, which is exactly where Bob placed us with his epic creation.
My story is short, as I hope you will spend some of your valuable time with this most extraordinary track. Whether a fan or not, I believe it will be minutes well spent. One of Dylan’s themes is that America, on that day, never recovered, “that the soul of a nation been torn away,” and that this crime still affects the USA.
I’ve linked the lyrics to the song’s title, Dylan’s performance here, and Timothy Hampton’s (author of Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work) analysis of Murder Most Foul here.
If you’re around my age, 75, you likely remember where you were on November 22, 1963. I was in a Catholic high school study hall as a freshman student when the announcement came over the loudspeaker. What Dylan gives us, according to Hampton, is a way to
Grasp and make legible what an event feels like, what it means, from the inside.
Last Saturday, I did a 1–4 serving shift in the Rotary Pork Chop on a Stick booth during Decorah’s Nordic Fest celebration — 1000s of visitors and 100s of chop lovers. I volunteered to manage the money, still comfortable counting up sixty years later.
Because the chops were $8, there were lots of ‘two makes ten’ and ‘four makes twenty’ returns and one ‘92 makes 100 ‘. An hour into the experience, I felt 16 again. Two hours later, I felt every bit 76, my age.
Once a teenager was more than enough.
Fortunately, I had help from a lot of people, especially these three.
Wendell
My Social Security account tells me my first year of official earnings was 1965, $585. So by the summer of 1966, I was a veteran ice cream scooper at Baskin-Robbins, used to the scowls of my first boss, Wendell, the owner, who said to me on my first day a year earlier,
Paul, wherever you are in the store, I can see you.
Wendell was a friend of Del Riefe, owner of Riefe’s restaurant, where my engineer father and his friends ate lunch. My dad had mentioned to Del that his oldest son, a high school junior, was looking for a part-time job, and Del relayed the message to Wendell, who said I should come in and fill out an application.
Two years later, Del would recommend me to Pierre, the chef at the Davenport Country Club, who was looking for someone to manage the pool snack bar during the summer; two years after that, Del hired me as a weekend short-order cook while I was in college.
Early in my life, I got used to standing on shoulders. And I also began my inoculation against the silliness of America’s self-made men myth. No one treks alone.
I don’t remember my first interview with Wendell, but I do recall his three uncompromised expectations: that each scoop be precisely 3.5 ounces and that as we excavated the ice cream from the three-gallon containers, we do it evenly across the top. Even today, when I walk into the local parlor, the first thing I look at is the tubs under the glass casings, and what do I see? A lunar landscape of deep crevices. Tut Tut.
The third requirement was that we count up, not down, from the 13¢ charge for one scoop on a pointed cone to the dollar the customer gave me; flat or cake cones were the same. Try it. You’ll understand why Wendell was right.
Sharon
The lessons I learned from a demanding boss were the second best thing about my first job. The prize was my first girlfriend, who happened to be Wendell’s daughter, Sharon, who also worked at her father’s store.
By the time I was 16, I liked the theory of a girlfriend. Playboy pinups had replaced Parent Trap’s Hayley Mills in my after-dark, under-the-cover fantasies. My friend Jim shared his brother John’s used copies that we hid in the woods a block from my house.
But a real girl? She was more complicated than scooping Chocolate Mint, leveling a tub, or counting out money. The magazine models seemed so welcoming, always smiling. How do you even start with an actual person?
Fortunately, late one Saturday night, Sharon was closing up her father’s store when she discovered her car would not start, and her parents were at a movie. Desperate and seeing my phone number in her father’s office behind the large freezer, she called.
At this point in the story, I need to tell you something. I’ll make it short. A few months earlier, Sharon and I had our first date. The longer story is here. It didn’t go well. Hey, even Willie Mays struck out at first. Who does things right the first time?
Regardless, that night, when I picked her up, we sat and talked in my parents’ Pontiac, in the shopping center parking lot.
Soon after we had a second date, then a third…
Mom
When I was 12, I attended a Saturday morning school for boys who wanted to umpire youth baseball games. For whatever reason, I didn’t go back the next Saturday.
At 13, I went to the first of five sessions to become a lifeguard. During a pretend drowning, the victim elbowed me in the face, and I panicked. I didn’t return for session two.
At 16, after my first week under Wendell’s whip, I told my mom I wanted to quit. She said,
It’s too easy to quit hard things.
I didn’t.
She also said, a year later, “You know, you and Sharon can’t really get serious because she’s Jewish. You need to stop seeing her.”
Photo of a 50-year college reunion of friends by an unknown neighbor. The author is in the second row, second from the right.
I will lose another good friend too damn soon. Cancer, of course. Rick and I have known each other for about ten years, with monthly seminars in our homes — that’s the only way to describe them — where we discuss the world. His lively mind and commitments as an active Catholic and Buddhist tired me out, in the best way imaginable.
Two hours of Trump castigating at the highest level! I don’t take any of my friends for granted, not at 76.
That includes you, my Medium pal. You know who you are. You hang out in my neck of the woods and make regular visits to my online abode. I drop by your place but not as often as I should. You live across the USA and Canada, especially, with a strange (in the sense of I wouldn’t have predicted the down-under phenomenon) coterie in Australia and New Zealand.
Meeting my partner Rebecca at 60 brought another group of friends into our lives as we divided our time between two communities, new friends for each of us in each. We just spent a few days with six of them in Colorado.
Settling into one community will bring friendship gains and losses.
Our decision three years ago to spend Januarys in San Miguel introduced us to yet another chance to meet and get to know wonderful people like Rick and Julie.
Photo from January 2026 of Julie, Rick, Rebecca, and me by a bystander from England
Yesterday, I had coffee at 1 pm at a local coffee shop with a group of seven headed by Lyle, who formed this political koffe-klatch band a few years ago. Tim, Shelly, Craig, Steve, Doug, Lyle, and I met for about an hour, focusing primarily on how Iowa might tilt slightly purple this year. Hope springs eternal.
Tomorrow, I’ll meet with an older men’s book group to discuss Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, a book about the multigenerational consequences of slavery. We’ll meet at Jim’s house, who will provide the eats. Earlier in the day, I’ll play golf with Mike, Mike, and Steve as part of a regular summer Wednesday foursome. As the holes progress, the gimme putts get longer.
On Thursday, I’ll have breakfast at another coffee shop with a group of retired professors from the local college we all taught at for decades, none of whom hung out with each other while working. Will, at 93, is the oldest. I’m pretty sure I’m the youngest.
Finally, on Saturday, Rebecca and I will have dinner with Ed and Carol, who live across the street. We do this every six weeks or so, and we do something similar with Mike and Maggie.
Thanks to Peter Mammitzsch for his prompt about meeting Medium friends. A few years ago, Rebecca and I met an online friend, Peter, and his wife, Mary, in their home in upstate New York. Peter and I met as part of a crew of 10 blues and 10 reds who met monthly to listen to the other side’s political perspective. Our Braver Summit was part of a national organization called Braver Angels.
Rebecca and I were visiting her daughter and family in Boston and decided to make the few-hour trip to have lunch with Peter and Mary. It was a gratifying experience, including seeing the physical setting, chair, and backdrop for when Peter joins our virtual group. And Peter and Mary were so gracious in their beautiful home in the woods.
However, it reminded me of when my 6th-grade class visited a local TV station and saw the set where the afternoon kids’ show was staged. I remember being slightly disappointed that everything was smaller than it looked on TV.
Some vision of mine had been punctured. Afterward, I never watched that show in the same way. In a way, it was like seeing the wizard behind the curtain. Part of me preferred the myth.
So perhaps, just perhaps, I’m really OK with not visiting your home and seeing where you write your Medium stories. I prefer you to remain as you are in my imagination, Hemingway or Smiley at their desks.
Of course, if you’re ever in my northeast Iowa vicinity, you are welcome to stop by. I’ll even let you sit in my writing chair.
Photo of Switzerland vs. Argentina at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City
Around this time last year, the host cities for the 104 matches of the 2026 Men’s World Cup were announced. The USA, Canada, and Mexico were the sponsor nations, with Kansas City and its Arrowhead Stadium as one of the sites, six driving hours from our home.
I’ve been a soccer fan for 25 years, learning the game during a year my family spent in England in 1999. From that point, I’ve watched the matches on TV for every quadrennial event for both men and women.
It was time, I thought, that I go to Lionel Messi instead of him coming to me. Of course, when I purchased a ticket for the July 11 quarterfinal game three months ago, I didn’t know one of the teams would be defending World Champion Argentina, with the by-consensus game’s greatest player, and that Switzerland would be the opponent.
Sport has always been important to me. I grew up playing baseball, starting with wiffle ball. It accompanied me through my growing-up years and has tagged along as I have aged. My friend Steve and I still play catch.
Photo of me on the left and Steve by his daughter, Nikki
But baseball has always been more than a game to me. Two years before I was born, in 1947, Jackie Robinson claimed his rightful place at second base.
My only black friends growing up were baseball teammates, who my decent father, a man of his times, wouldn’t let me play with when they came over to my yard for a game of catch.
Today, Japan’s Shohei Ohtani is my country’s National Pastime’s biggest star, with Latino and Hispanic players making up 30% of major leaguers. The world has come to the game that is in my blood, even as Donald Trump and his masked minions round up, deport, and, intermittently, murder brown-skinned residents, while goose-stepping at our borders, bellowing NO ENTRY.
That’s why, on Saturday night, I loved sitting amidst a contingent of Argentinian fans.
Selfie
For the 39 days of the 2026 World Cup, the world has also come to this beautiful game. It’s a terrible reminder of what my country was and could be again.
After the game, won by Argentina in extra time, I took an Uber back to my accommodation, a 45-minute ride in heavy traffic. By accent, the driver was from Eastern Europe. It gave me time to reflect on this peak experience, which was everything and more than I imagined, and on my country.
In soccer, a player earns a red card for an egregious offense against his opponent and the rules of the game. The punishment is banishment. In this game, the referee changed a card ruling after a video review of the incident, from an Argentine player to a Swiss player.
In American democracy, elections are a form of red card to the loser.
The itch has been with him for 60 years, since Mr. Kemp rolled a funny-looking ball across the gym floor when he was a sophomore in high school.
It couldn’t be a volleyball; that was for girls. And there were no girls in his gym class or in Algebra, where Sister Laurent would again remind the sweating boys to close their knees. Maybe he’ll see Mary in the library if he can weasel a pass from Father Schmidt, who went to school with his mother.
Mr. Kemp told them he had spent the summer in England and learned about a new game that was mostly played by short guys like him.
Earlier in the week, Coach Deroin had posted the names of the fifteen boys who had made the sophomore basketball team on the gym wall.
At 5’7″, he would have been the shortest, exactly the height of Lionel Messi, whom he’ll watch tonight.
