The new foundation for our front porch. Photo by Matt Downing of Ragarack Construction
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Please stay on the page for 30 seconds so your read will count, and you won’t be among the guilty ones. This Drabble was written for Fiction Shorts.
*
Joe strode through the door and settled into the front-row window seat. He placed his pen in the table groove.
Just before the bell, Jim slid into the desk in the back row and slumped down. His cap bill camouflaged his eyes.
Jim had sat in the back of a classroom for as long as he could remember.
Joe always felt comfortable in the front.
At parent-teacher conferences, their mother said her task was to lay the foundation for success.
Message to my readers: This short piece was published in Medium’s Fiction Shorts. It is a Drabble of precisely 100 words using the random word SWEEP. It is written as a “genetic conversation.”
*
Look at the sweep of my hand. Isn’t it beautiful?
What will you do with your hands today?
Applaud my good intentions.
Do your plans include helping others?
Why do you care so much about others?
They are part of your little world; you might need their help someday.
I saw a wheelbarrow full of dirt in Ed’s backyard.
Grab your shovel.
But I passed him on the street yesterday, and he didn’t ask for help.
Maybe he’s like you. And doesn’t have a mirror.
Oh, I could use his ladder to clean out my gutters.
Grammarly doesn’t like that “perhaps.” Too tentative, it tells me.
It’s probably right. Flip’s judge is looking over my other shoulder, nodding its head.
The faces of my internal interlocutors have changed over the years. My mother, 103 in spirit, is still there, occasionally. My dad, not so much. He told me something once and then let it go. Maybe he’s behind the curtain.
Every teacher, coach, mentor, colleague, brother, lover, friend, and American President has taken their turn, except one. No, not him. He’s too busy with real-life judges.
I’ve projected their verdicts onto innocent and not-so-innocent pooches.
And onto you, too. I clapped and commented something nice on your recent story. But really, did it need to be six minutes long?
I’m a little tired of this gavel part of me.
Even Catholic priests retire at 70.
I’ve had 75 years of judging.
Maybe God doesn’t need my help anymore.
It’s long past time for that part of me to recede.
Why do I write stories?
A friend recently asked me why I write stories. It’s a good question. This is Medium story 300.
“It just seems natural,” I replied without much thought.
Of course, with reflection, it’s nothing of the sort for me.
Writing stories came late and coincided with my retirement from teaching Politics in college.
Knowing my friend, I’m guessing he was asking why I write the kind of stories I write, personal reflections, and not essays with the heft of my scholarly expertise.
I know it sounds trite, but I’ve discovered from this three-year 4- 6 a.m. writing routine that it feels good to get things out to you and out of myself.
What kind of things?
Ask yourself:
Do you need another essay on Donald Trump by a so-called expert?
Be honest, wouldn’t you prefer a dog poop story?
With a moral of some sort that may connect to your life.
To Get Over Myself
What about me? What are the things I need to get out of myself?
In a terrific essay I link below, Rick Lewis writes
Life only works when you can get over yourself quickly in the moments that count. Writing is how I get over myself.
To get over my criticality, I need to take it out and see it in the light of day.
Writing helps.
It reinforces awareness.
There it is, on the page.
It’s also over there in how I look at that slightly off-kilter picture frame.
And in my expectations for my son.
It’s everywhere I am.
If I can see it, I can change it.
Judge-Paul, Be Gone.
Third Person Thinking
Some, perhaps my friend, would call this story navel-gazing.
My shirt is tucked in.
But there is a danger.
The late Indian Jesuit priest Anthony De Mello wrote in Awareness about the difference between self-absorption and self-observation.
Self-absorption is self-preoccupation, where you’re concerned about yourself, worried about yourself. Self-observation means to watch everything in you and around you as far as possible, as if it were happening to someone else.
DeMello says the key is not to personalize things.
Even when one is writing about personal things.
Third-person journaling has trained me to distance myself from my anxieties, worries, and problems to manage them better.
I live in the first person.
I write for you in the first person.
But the act of writing helps me think in the third person.
The late sage Jimmy Buffet said laughter helps us through life’s challenges. He wrote my title and placed it at the end of Latitudes and Longitudes, which you can listen to here.
You’ll feel 10% better after you listen.
Steve’s story will bump you another 10.
I hadn’t talked with Steve in fifteen years, but I had seen him walking gingerly around town.
“Are you still playing golf?” I asked during a break in a Lifelong Learning class we were taking.
Yesterday, I sat next to wheelchair-bound Harland Nelson at a lecture.
Last night, I dreamed I was sitting in a Lazy Boy with a quilt over my legs and an empty coffee cup resting on a braided coaster.
All of us were 99.
My college friend John told me his mom Loretta was still sharp as a tack and comfortable in her six months in the nursing home, surrounded by photographs and mementos.
Harland said that lately, he’s been seeing images of his late wife Corinne for the first time since she died five years ago.
In my dream, I’m scrolling through the photos on my phone with a peaceful countenance.
Knowing I have nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no one to see.
This was not a nightmare. I felt at peace, blissful.
That’s what was so weird.
*
I won’t bore you with the details of my retirement schedule.
There’s nothing special about the quantity or quality of what I do: writing, volunteering, reading, walking, bicycling, coffee-klatching, traveling, and, occasionally, thinking.
If you’ve been retired for a while, you have your list.
Something else is on my mind.
I’m 74, and my partner Rebecca is 72.
We’ve been retired for six years.
At the end of most days, we’re pooped.
Even without dog-walking on our daily calendar.
*
My mother lived to 96, and her sister lived to 103.
Genes and lifestyle give me a reasonable chance to reach 99.
Twenty-five more years.
I’ve considered retirement years like the Men’s and Women’s Senior Golf Tours.
After the first ten years, your chances of winning plummet.
So, I’ve tried to fill up my retirement coffee mug in this first decade.
Doing is winning.
In a senior frenzy.
*
A few days ago, I joined another book club. A week earlier, I agreed to teach a Life Long Learning seminar this fall on the 2024 American Presidential election.
Two more things.
At the end of each day, as I settle under the covers, I tell Rebecca I’m glad to be tired.
But I’ve begun to allow another perspective to surface, represented by my dream.
We spend most of our adult lives feeling we have to justify ourselves through what we do.
That’s how we earn our keep.
Six years ago, I discarded my job, but not this notion.
*
I’m not ready to be 99.
For the end of my days.
But I wonder.
When will it become OK just to be?
Can I integrate this perspective into my daily life?
My Medium friend Rodrigo S-C wrote, “A photograph will ask a question.”
I’ve strolled through my 74 years with unanswered questions about many of the 39 million moments of my life. For example, at age nine, did Becky and I hold hands as we walked alone in her backyard in Cedar Rapids, Iowa?
Photos pause moments, allowing the questions to catch up and linger.
When they do, the past comes alive.
But not just for the photographer. Rodrigo also suggests that images can start a conversation.
My partner Rebecca and I spent January in San Miguel, Mexico. It was our first visit. Every moment was precious.
Here are five frozen in time, with questions and stories that awaken memories.
Perhaps, for you as well.
The Aldama two-step: Do these sidewalks help nurture the habit of gentleness?
On our first morning, we walked up Aldama Street from our apartment to San Miguel’s city center, guided by the steeple of the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcàngel Catholic Church, as you can see in the first photo.
After walking these narrow, cobbled sidewalks for about a week, we developed the habit of attention, which required our heads to swivel — up to see who was coming and down to watch that we were not too close to the sidewalk edge.
When you behold, you make room. Since you must share a narrow space, gentleness becomes the norm. Another Medium friend,
Look at the subtle two-step with Rebecca in the cap and her partner making room for the other in that tight space, with a slight tilt of their shoulders.
It was a half-mile up Aldama from our residence to the city center, and we performed that two-step hundreds of times, going up and coming down. It became a habit to accommodate and to be accommodated.
Returning to our apartment late the first Friday afternoon, we followed a Mariachi Band walking single-file down Aldama. The band was at the end of a procession of well-dressed people of all ages who turned into Párque Juarez.
The Wedding Celebration at Parque Juárez: Are you tired yet?
Photo by the author of a wedding party at Párque Juarez
Once inside the park, we accompanied the parade as it stopped four times in its 45-minute public festival. At each pause, the participants formed a circle around the married couple who danced to the accompaniment of the Mariachi Band and the Mojiganga figures.
I’ve never seen anything quite like a Mexican wedding celebration. This article includes an excellent description with a video clip from Párque Juarez.
I took the photo just before the celebration ended. We had watched the couple you see in the middle joyfully twirl around four times, always encouraging others to join them. I tried to understand the couple’s chemistry, how well they fit together, and what the future might bring.
I got lucky.
The answer is in the image.
Jardin Watching: What do you think about tourists and ex-pats?
Photo by the author
The Jardin, a central city park across from Arcángel Church, was one of our daily walking destinations. San Miguel, a central Mexican city of 70,000, has 10,000 expats, primarily from Canada and America, and over a million tourists each year. Most mornings, I observed this lady with the cane watching this favored photograph location in front of the church.
I wanted to ask her what she thought of all these visitors.
In 2018, Rebecca and I traveled to Morocco with college students. Our guide, Mohammed Oujrid, repeated every morning of the eight-day visit,
Be a traveler and not a tourist. Travelers get to know local people.
When I see her next January, I will join her on the bench, at a respectful distance, and ask:
Qué piensas del tourista?
A visit to an Otomi village: Dona Maria, what advice do you have for living a full life?
Photo of Dona Maria by the author
Dona Maria lives in an Otomi village, Augustin Gonzales, 20 minutes outside San Miguel. She is a mother, grandmother, and potter. The 93-year-old showed us a “first-draft” pot and the finished creation on the left in the photo.
The lady extending her arm, part of our Rancho Tour group, knew a bit of the Otomi language, so she was helping our guide, Patrick, in the ball cap with the translation. Patrick moved to San Miguel from Alaska twenty years ago.
On the way back to San Miguel, Patrick told us that if his wife died, he would want to live out his life in this village. He said:
They would take care of me, and I would take care of them.
Dona Maria, a lifelong resident of the town, exuded serenity.
I wondered, what does she know that we don’t?
Serendipity: What do you see, Buzz Lightyear?
Photo by the author
I again got lucky. I wanted an image of Arcàngel Church from its front and how it dwarfs the Jardin and San Miguel’s plaza. Instead, I got a look-alike for my favorite Toy Story character.
When friends asked us what we would do in San Miguel for 31 days, we didn’t know what to say. We’d read Julie Meade’s excellent guidebook but mostly planned to explore.
A few years ago we spent four days in Paris. My favorite story from that visit was that we never, not once, even saw the Eiffel Tower. We had nothing against Paris’ number-one tourist attraction but filled our days wandering its neighborhoods and museums.
The San Miguel moments, photos, stories, and questions I’ve shared with you were unpredictable before we lived them.
Photo by Robert Scriver of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, and dog memorial from Wikimedia Commons
Ignorance is not bliss.
I — Political Science — had just settled in at the retired professor’s breakfast table on Thursday.
Dale, Ruth, Uwe, Alan, Marv, and Dennis — Chemistry, French, Accounting, Communication Studies, History, and Physics — took turns holding court.
I was surprised to see a full plate of sausage, gravy, and biscuits placed in front of me by the waitress with a bare midriff. Fifteen minutes earlier, at the counter and thrown off by her intriguing belly button, I had ordered the full instead of the half portion.
Walking through the restaurant to our reserved breakfast room, I noticed another female server similarly attired and wondered whether I should bring this observation to the group.
Once my sausage, biscuits, and gravy were gobbled, my attention was torn from midriffs to a lively conversation among my colleagues about a person I had never heard of.
Everyone knew about this Shoshone woman who accompanied the explorers Lewis and Clark on their western expedition to map the Louisiana Purchase lands. Not only that, but each added something new to the discussion.
I was dumbstruck.
When I got home, I quizzed Rebecca about Sacagawea. Of course, she gave me chapter and verse.
Photo by UkillaJJ of Cernÿ’s Peeing statue outside Franz Kafka Museum in Prague from Wikimedia Commons
When Rebecca and I met, we were just kids of 60.
Today, I’m 74.
All of me.
This is my problem, not hers.
County Roads
We’ve lived together for many years but have kept our houses in two Iowa communities, in the northeast and southwest, 323 miles apart and 5 hours and 30 minutes by car. I’ve traced our route, which includes many country roads with no pitstops.
Photo by the author of an Iowa road map
I estimate we’ve made 200 cross-state trips. On a typical journey, we stop halfway at a McDonald’s in Story City for a Mocha Frappe and the indoor toilet designated by the blue arrow.
Often, we start in the early coffee-saturated morning. Whether beginning from Clarinda in the southwest or Decorah in the northeast, I’ve got two well-scouted hidden-from-the-road stops shown by the yellow arrows. One is an abandoned building, and the other is a mound of sand. I suppose I’ve used one or the other 50 times, with most times coming in the last five years.
Rebecca holds.
I fold.
Usually, in the boonies.
Two speeding tickets thus far but no citations against Public Decency for Public Defecation and Urination, as defined by Iowa law:
It shall be unlawful for any person to urinate or defecate in or upon any street, alley, sidewalk, bridge, or public place open to public view…
Last week, it struck on a walking trail three blocks from our northeast Iowa home.
A city walking trail
Below is the crime scene defined by Decorah’s city statute, with that now familiar yellow arrow marking my spot.
Photo by the author
The green arrow points to a skateboard park, and the orange to a residential neighborhood.
The pink? Around the corner, two blocks away, sits a Montessori school in a former funeral home. I’ll tell that story someday.
Fortunately, there were no kids on skates, no one on their front porch, no escaped Montessori six-year-old, no other walkers or bikers, and no patrol car.
A friend, Mike, tells the story of being on a bike trail in Missouri, finding tree cover, and finishing up just as a Girl Scout troop appeared around the trail bend.
Phew
I asked another friend, John, who has just retired from forty years of practicing law in a community like Decorah, what the police do when they come upon older guys like Mike and me who break this law. He wrote:
If a person is just urinating because there’s no bathroom in the area, the police will more than likely let him go. For the police it’s basically a good reason just to stop and make an inquiry as to what is going on. Someone our age is 99% likely to not get even an ordinance violation.
So Mike and I can exhale, knowing our age may shield us from public embarrassment. Coincidently, this might lessen our age-related malady.
Two kinds of relief.
However, while researching this story, I encountered an incident that complicated my happy ending.
To preface, Mike and I are also white.
Perhaps you remember the story of the 10-year-old black child last year who was charged with public urination in Mississippi. You can read about it here.
Iowa is not Mississippi.
But it’s still America.
If I’m a 74-year-old black man behind that tree, I’ve now got three problems that require relief, not just two.
It happened at this intersection on a busy Saturday morning in Decorah, Iowa.
I’d just picked up this program and lanyard.
Photo by the author
Five downtown locations served as the venues for 43 free films, including the VFW, two bars, Arthaus, a home for artists, and The Hotel Winneshiek, the headquarters for the four-day event.
Program in hand, the lanyard around my neck, I had just left the hotel’s front doors to wait for the walk signal to cross the redbrick walkway.
Despite the jaywalking in the first photo, my forty-year home is George Bailey’s, Bedford Falls.
We also have an 11-mile bike trail that circles the city, a liberal arts college, five coffee shops, a nighty music scene, a large co-op, and an eagle’s nestbeamed worldwide.
All eight thousand citizens are above average, even the non-Norwegians.
Of course, we don’t all see eye to eye.
Photo by the author
And there is a murder every half-decade.
But we’re usually civil.
Especially while parallel parking on Decorah’s busiest street.
There was that episode ten years ago, also on Water, during the busy Christmas season. I had not quite started my car’s backward move into an open spot in front of our favorite restaurant when I noticed a guy do a quick U-turn to slip into the slot.
On the rare occasion, I do a You-ee on Water Street, it’s only to grab a free spot.
As he exited his car, I hit the button to roll down Rebecca’s passenger side window and said calmly, “So you broke the law to take my spot?” I noticed two young kids in the back of his car and heard someone I took as his better half telling him he should find another place, which he did.
This is how we work out our differences in my adopted community.
Which is why what I witnessed yesterday was so shocking.
The Horns
The incident occurred several hours before I took the first photo. The culprits were long gone.
Here’s the picture again with color-coded lines to help you follow the narrative.
Photo by the author
A blue SUV had just rounded the corner and was through the crosswalk.
A white pick-up truck was starting to edge out of that 3rd parking spot.
The driver of a motor vehicle shall when reasonably necessary to insure safe operation give audible warning with the horn but shall not otherwise use such horn when upon a highway.
I just checked. Decorah plays by the same rule for its streets.
I’m sure you’ve given and received an audible warning. Where’s the horn button on your steering wheel? When you honk, do you use the palm of your hand, a finger, or a thumb?
I couldn’t remember, either, so I checked my Subaru Forester.
By the way, Decorah is the Subaru capital of northeast Iowa. Subaru’s and film festivals go together.
Anyway, the horn button is in the middle of the steering wheel, and I use my thumb.
What’s the longest period you’ve pressed your car’s horn?
To simulate, I took my car outside town to test my tooting tolerance. Naturally, I picked a location far from our eagle neighbors and their new eaglet.
My normal honk is .5 seconds.
Ten times that, five seconds, was my limit.
Blue SUV honked for 15 seconds as it swerved past the White pick-up and then was halted by the red light at the tip of the red arrow. Try keeping your hand on the horn for 15 seconds.
White pick-up reciprocated as it eased into the street behind Blue SUV in a paired, cacophonous quarter-minute bubble.
From a block away, I glanced at the stranger next to me as we shared a look of wonder, shook our heads, and walked across the street inside the red crosswalk boundary.
This morning, I checked our community’s online newspaper, Decorah News, and saw no murders were committed yesterday in Decorah, USA.
Photo of my childhood home taken in 2022 — Author’s photo
Lying has always been hard for me. And, as hard as it is to admit from the vantage point of 74, I was a bit of a mother’s boy. So, lying to my mother came at the cost of round-the-clock guilt. But, hey, I was building a self.
Grass
How do I start my story with “I remembered the sharp scent of freshly cut grass as I waited at the dining room window for Sharon” when the only photo of my childhood home is this one I took five years after my mother died and 58 years after the events I will describe?
You’ll have to imagine a lawn full of grass. It’s almost impossible, I know, given this replacement monstrosity. My story is about the sin of lying. What do you call this trespass?
I wanted you to see the first-floor dining room window on the right, my second-floor bedroom window on the left, the outdoor steps, and the brick street. And smell the grass I had just mowed before Sharon showed up.
I was the oldest of three sons, so mowing the front lawn was my first outdoor chore. At 13, my dad taught me an up-and-down system using a long cloth rope tied around the mower handle as a pulley. The first time I tried it alone, while Dad was at work, the rope slipped under the mower and was shredded. So, I put my Pony League baseball cleats on and pushed the green Lawn-Boy across the lawn without the machine and me rolling into the street.
My first teenage triumph. The second would come three years later.
Sharon
It was an early spring day, and, as you know, the smell of grass was in the air. I was 16, and Sharon and I had just started dating.
I opened the first-floor dining room window on the right to smell my accomplishment, listened for the soft rumble of Sharon’s pale aqua-blue car on the brick, and turned toward my mother.
My brother Peter and I shared a bedroom behind the second-floor dormer window on the left. When I was younger, my dad was often away on business trips. I had the bed closest to the window. On warm nights, I would open it to hear the sound of his car on the brick street turn into the driveway. Then, I would fall asleep knowing my dad was safely home and my mom would be at peace until his next trip.
“You can’t get serious about her, you know,” my mother says from the kitchen across the Sunday pot roast dining room table after I told her I was waiting for Sharon.
Sharon was Jewish and the daughter of my Baskin Robbin’s boss, Wendell. We were Catholic. By we, I mean everyone but my dad, who was raised protestant. My mom would have said the same thing if Sharon had been Lutheran.
I knew this story. Before they married in 1948, Mom talked my dad into going through the Rite of Christian Initiation for adults to prepare for conversion to Catholicism. Dad gave it a try but was treated so poorly by the priest that he eventually said, “No more, not ever again.” Even at 16, I knew the religious difference was a source of tension between them. When Mom said, “You can’t get serious,” I knew she was serious.
Lying
Hearing the honk and saying nothing, I leave my mother and walk out the front door and down the steps.
Sharon and I would date for two years. That was the last time she picked me up in front of my house. And the last time I told my parents what I was up to. A few months later, we started Saturday night drive-in dates. Fortunately, by the mid-1960s, my family had two cars: a mid-size sedan and a small Fiat. The Fiat had bucket seats, so I needed the Pontiac.
I’m picking up Jerry, Ed, Pat, and Mike, and we’re hanging out.
Riding in that same car to Sunday mass burdened me with guilt and fear about whether there was any evidence of my deception.
It was all so easy.
Too easy, as it turns out.
It was early evening at Duck Creek Park’s Little League Diamond #1. My little brother Pat is playing, and my parents are sitting in the bleacher section behind home plate. My dad, in his Fiat, met us at the game. I needed the sedan for a date. I’m sitting next to my mom.
“Can I have the car?”
“Where are you going?”
“Over to Jerry Spaeth’s.”
She turned her head, looked directly at me, and said quietly,
“Paul, I know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t.”
Mothers and sons
Dody Gardner died in 2017 at 96. At the lunch after her funeral, I met one of her long-time friends. I knew John Bishop from the bridge parties my parents hosted. John, a physician, and life-long bridge player, told me my mom was the finest player he knew.
During lunch, I asked a few of Mom’s younger friends, all bridge players, about this, and they nodded. “No one was better,” Peg said.
Even as Mom was sinking into dementia, when playing solitaire, she continued snapping down cards in triumph or disgust.
Good bridge players think strategically. Mom knew my personality, that I could not rebel directly. I needed to lie to grow up. To separate myself from her and my dad. She was confident I would discard the disreputable means when I no longer needed them.
That’s precisely what happened.
The skillful bridge player had won the trick.
Dody and Paul Gardner, 1975, from a family album- Author’s photo
