I’ve got a Green Card to the Country of the Old

*

Welcome to my world.

Let’s call it the country of the old, from William Butler Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium.

It could also be your world. If not today, someday.

I’ve got a Green Card.

Another poet, William Stafford, wrote

A passport costs everything there is.

Some days, I feel old, and some days I don’t

Every few years, I bend over the wrong way, pull the Iliopsoas muscles in my lower back right side, and feel like the old and falling apart tree pictured above.

I asked my friend Alan, 78, who is dealing with a more serious back problem, how this condition influences the way he thinks about himself.

Who am I? Am I the 78-year-old who enjoys playing golf, leading workshops, going to rotary and the film festival, or am I a person whose back pain affects my range of activities and limits my world? I now have two senses of identity; whichever one is dominant is driven by a level of pain.

Alan’s right; pain matters to identity.

So does age. Alan has had a handicap since childhood. Decades of his putting weight on one leg have now resulted in pressure on a sciatic nerve.

I first pulled my SOAS muscles stepping out of a car 40 years ago, at 34. The pain forced me to my knees. Three days later, I was fully recovered.

Now, at 74, the recovery time is two weeks, during which my identity, like Alan’s, focuses on my physical limitations, the limitations of an aged person.

Somedays, I feel old, and some days, I don’t.

This experience and Alan’s thoughtful answer have made me think about how important age is to my identity.

So, I asked other friends.

Here are some excerpts.

Age is everything to my identity. That may be because I am 78, and age and identity seem symbiotic, reflecting the other in everyday life. (Dale, 78)

Being older is not important to my identity at all. I am still working as a university professor. Mentoring students keeps me mentally and psychologically young. (Jim, 67)

Now, on the edge of 80, I live in awe of my age each day, even though many of my 80-year-old friends take their age in stride. (Ruth, 79)

Age is quite important to my identity [because] I have too many regrets and wasted years, [so] having 10–20 years available doesn’t seem the same as it did 20 years ago. (Wade, 67)

Much of my identity at this age is satisfaction in reflecting on all the different things I’ve undertaken and as an explorer of what life has to offer. (Peter, 82)

I’ve gotten to the top of the hill and got perspective. (Rebecca, 72)

Isn’t it a gift to have thoughtful friends?

Like Alan’s reply, my friends’ answers helped me develop two more ideas regarding age and identity.

They may also trigger your thoughts and stories.

Please share them in the comment section.

Chronological and Psychological Age

Jim is a university professor who plans to work for another five years. He introduced me to the distinction between chronological and psychological age.

He writes:

I mentor quite a few students, which helps keep me mentally and psychologically young. Psychologically speaking, I don’t think of myself as 67, probably in my late 40s or early 50s.

And elaborated:

The concept of psychological age is real — Pam [Jim’s wife] and I are chronologically the same age as many of the people with whom we are interacting, but in terms of our behavior and psychological age, we are much younger.

I retired in 2018 at 69 from 40 years of college teaching. At my college’s Christmas party that winter, I looked around at the crowd and, without thinking about it, gravitated toward my younger, still teaching colleagues. That’s who I identified with. I wanted nothing to do with the country of the old — not even their company.

For about a year, I did not enroll or teach in my college’s Life Long Learning program, join retired friends for Thursday breakfast, or attend the monthly emeriti lecture series.

And then, one day, while shaving, I noticed I had kept my sleep t-shirt on while lathering up. I had covered my aging torso.

I was turning away from what?

A part of who I had become. Turning away rarely works.

At that moment, I pivoted toward the country of the old.

That’s me below, in the red hat, a few months ago at a lecture by a retired colleague.

I’m also a student and teacher in Life Long Learning seminars, a regular at the Thursday morning retirees coffee klatch, and at this year’s Christmas party, looked over at my younger colleagues and felt sorry for them.

I like to visit their country occasionally.

But there’s no dual citizenship.

Experience and Wisdom

Why did I feel sorry for my younger colleagues?

My friend Dale, 78, describes one reason.

When I turned 65, my age allowed me to control my life completely.

For Dale, a ceramist, that meant new hobbies, including hiking and fishing.

In the country of the old, trails, streams, and libraries are always crowded.

My friends still in the country of the young have to go to work in the morning.

But there’s something else at play. It’s why I also lament my younger self. My friend Wade wrote about how regret looms large in later life.

Across the breakfast table, my partner, Rebecca, answered the question in the title of this story with the top-of-the-hill quote. I asked her to say more.

My life experiences have solidified my position on many things. I know more things, including that having the wrong position is okay.

Rebecca speaks for many of us.

Not all older people are wise. But many, including me, are more perceptive than we were.

Age builds a free lending library of experience.

Peter weighed in.

I have spent a lot of time in 80+ years exploring what I think the nature of reality is and have sought philosophy and science in that pursuit and with am with the conclusions I have drawn that give me satisfaction if not ultimate truth.

So, being an elder feels good.

“He Was Complete”

Roughly corresponding to my turn toward the country of the old five years ago, I started to read biographies of my sports heroes: Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali, Sandy Koufax, Bill Russell, Buck O’Neil, and Roberto Clemente.

I didn’t think much about why I was doing this until a friend loaned me a book of essays by Roger Angell, Once More Around the Park. Angell died at 99 two years ago and was considered the finest baseball chronicler. In the preface to Around the Park, he’s contemplating the retirement of relief pitcher Dan Quisenberry with these words:

He had closed the book, and in that moment had become fresh and young again, and…wonderfully clear in my mind. He was complete.

I no longer cared about my hero’s athletic accomplishments. I was more interested in the kind of people they had become.

When I get my Country of the Old passport, it will be stamped complete.

By that time, I will have seen it all.

And made sense of my life.

William Butler Yeats’s poem Sailing to Byzantium can be found here.

William Stafford’s poem Waiting in Line can be found here.

The world has turned, and it isn’t turning back

*

Two nights ago, we ate at Aga’s Restaurant in Sugarland, just outside Houston, Texas.

The WE were six white Americans who differed by age, gender, profession, and family status but shared a visible skin tone that differed from the overwhelmingly Indian and Pakistani crowd.

Aga’s advertises itself as the “#1 Indian-Pakistani Restaurant in North America.”

The proof of its claim was in our waiting time (90 minutes), the number of people in Aga’s three serving rooms when we sat down (500), and the excellent, authentic dishes.

Because of that waiting time, I walked through Aga’s three rooms to get to the toilet when we were seated. White faces made up roughly 5% of the patrons.

*

Similarly, Jenny Boucek, who you see in the first photo, is not the only woman coaching in America’s National Basketball Association. Currently, there are six female assistant coaches. (source)

Each of the 30 NBA teams is allowed three assistants. Below are the three Indiana Pacers assistants surrounding Head Coach Rick Carlisle at The Houston Rockets Indiana Pacers game a week ago.

The NBA assistant coaching room seats 90, so Coach Boucek and the five other women coaches make up a little under 6%.

The four Indiana Pacer coaches had just finished barking at a foul called on one of their players by this referee.

Dannica Mosher is one of eight female NBA referees. (source)

Out of 74.

11%

*

I’m a 74-year-old white male, heterosexual as well. I was born in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson stood alone in the batter’s box in American Major League Baseball.

My Catholic compatriot, John F. Kennedy, would break another barrier before I started high school.

When I looked back at my 1967 high school yearbook, I discovered no “girls” sports teams, only this.

Weirdly, I don’t recall a single conversation with friends, parents, or teachers about girls not having teams. Or not being coaches or refs.

Two nights after Obama was elected President of the United States, I sat next to my son, Ben, at a concert listening to Bob Dylan sing Blowin’ in the Wind.

My tears were not the only ones in the concert hall.

*

Whites in a sea of Browns, women amidst men, and a Black man joins an exclusive club.

All in my lifetime.

I felt completely at ease at Aga’s.

Boucek yelled at Mosher, who yelled back.

Obama was reelected.

*

None of this was easy.

Or finished.

And some forces are pushing back.

This competition — about change and inclusion — is now the defining feature of American politics.

But the reactionaries will lose.

Today, too many see all of this and more, not as change but as ordinary.

The way things are.

When I mentioned my Aga and Houston Rockets’ takeaways to a family member a generation younger, he looked puzzled. He didn’t notice either because he sees them all the time.

I notice them because they are new to me.

Bob Dylan, of course, was right in Blowin’. It always takes too damn long to do the right thing.

And he was prescient about all times.

Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

My perspective began to change at 70 on a bus ride in Malta.

*

We begin life needing help for everything.

We’re then taught for two decades to make our own decisions.

A lesson we repeat to our children.

Eventually, fully independent, new choices arise when we are free from kids and jobs.

Finally, we are back where we started, needing help for everything.

When did the worm start turning for you?

Have you changed your perspective about being dependent?

To do what I want, I increasingly need help. This paradox may have been hidden from me throughout adulthood. It’s now come into full view.

With some help from Priority Seating.

*

The second time it happened was on a packed bus in Malta in 2018, about an hour before I took this photo of Rebecca. The bus was so crowded I couldn’t get my hand in my pocket to take out my phone to chronicle the congestion.Malta is a tiny nation in the Mediterranean that accommodates 518,538 people on three islands, about 1/10 the area of Rhode Island. Despite having one car for every person, its public buses are always full.

My employer, Luther College, has a semester program in this former British colony. Rebecca and I supervised the study of 11 students during the spring of 2018. With our students traveling alone this weekend, we hopped a bus in Valletta, Malta’s capital city, for the 78-minute trip across the country to beautiful Dingli Cliffs.

When we eventually found the Cliffs, we could savor this spectacular view.

*

A few weeks earlier, on a crowded London Underground Tube carriage, we first heard these words directed at us by a young woman: “Would you like our seats?” With a nod, her partner seconded the invitation.

“Thanks, but we’re OK,” we replied, as Rebecca had a strap handle and I a pole. We’re both early baby boomers, so we knew chronology fit us into the older, priority seating category. But our younger-than-we-look genes had given us cover. It was shocking to discover that even our disguised selves looked old enough for priority seating.

I didn’t think much about this until we boarded that Malta bus.

Rebecca found a seat, and I, feeling virtuous and spritely, repeatedly declined seat offerings until they stopped coming. The priority seats were monopolized by a couple who appeared a little younger than me, obviously destined for Dingli Cliffs. About an hour into the bone-rattling journey, virtue and sprite long gone, I thought about pulling out my passport to plead my case to the woman who looked saintly.

As I look back, the bone-rattling Dingli Cliffs trip opened the door of dependence, a crack. Toward the end of our four months in Malta, I admitted to Rebecca and myself that I had come to dread our weekend bus trips visiting Malta sites unless I knew I would have a seat. And I didn’t yet feel comfortable grabbing a priority seat or accepting its offer.

For example, we decided not to visit the village of Melleha, the site of the 1980 film Popeye starring Robin Williams, because of the high likelihood of standing for more than an hour.

But what if we had missed Dingli Cliffs?

Or, in London, because of the crowded Underground, this painting by Amedeo Modigliani at The Courtauld Gallery?

So I began to rethink my refusal to accept a seat, to get from A to Beat.

That’s not me, but he looks comfortable and at peace.

How did he get to that place? How could I do the same?

*

In retrospect, I had started this journey on the Dingli Cliffs bus by recognizing my mortality. In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande puts it this way.

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 want to be.

As my body diminishes, I will need help to keep doing what I want to maintain my life’s integrity.

To experience a birds-eye view of the Mediterranean or gaze at an exquisite painting.

Occasionally, this may require you to give up your seat to me.

I will accept it with gratitude and more than a dab of sorrow.

*

Religion divides as much as it unites.

No, I’m not referring to the Hamas-Israel War. Or to the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. However, the latter centuries-old tension is closer to my religious experience growing up.

Religious differences are dangerous in the larger world and the personal world of our families.

I’ll get to my religious worldview in a few minutes. But first, you have to know a little about my family.

Mother

My mother was a devout Catholic. Her father, who died in 1945, four years before I was born, was a Protestant who became the first nonCatholic buried in the Catholic cemetery of my hometown. Albert Thomas sold life insurance to the priests in the Diocese of Davenport, played cards with the Bishop, and was a respected community member.

One of his three daughters, Florence, became Sister Marilyn Thomas, a member of the Sisters of Charity (BVM), until she died at 103 in 2019. Throughout my adult life, I met many of Fawny’s — so named because her brother Al could not pronounce Florence — on lunch visits to the Motherhouse in Dubuque, Iowa. Over seven decades, I grew to love, respect, and honor BVM’s.

That’s me in the first photo with Sister Marilyn in 1957. Notice the Christmas cards on the wall, my mom’s handiwork.

Father

My father and his four siblings were each baptized in a different Protestant church. That’s he and my mom, Dody, on their wedding day in 1948 in front of the altar at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Davenport, Iowa.

After he returned from World War II, my dad courted my mom for two years. He agreed to begin the Rite of Christian Initiation to become a Catholic. As he told the story, he was mistreated by the priest in charge, and Dad quit, never to return to this church except for weddings and funerals.

My dad was a chemical engineer and always spoke of himself as an agnostic, someone who kept his distance from belief in a god. He died of cancer in 1993 at 71. In a final letter to his sister-in-law, Sister Marilyn, he refers to God’s plan. Did he, in the end, believe?

A lifelong Republican, he cast his final vote for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 because Dad hated the growing influence of the Christian Right on the Republican Party.

He also grew to love the BVM’s at Mount Carmel in Dubuque. They prayed for him every day during his seven-year battle with sinus cancer. He returned the favor by throwing the Nuns a pizza party about a year before he died.

Parents

While I was growing up, my dad always had breakfast ready on Sundays when we returned from mass. He had agreed that his children would be raised Catholics. I assume so because his three boys attended Catholic elementary and high schools. But I never heard my parents talk about religion. Or argue about it.

But there was tension. For example, the Protestant Gardner grandparents (Paul and Edith) and my Thomas grandmother Florence never socialized. Our family would spend Christmas Eve with Florence and Christmas Day with Paul and Edith. And my mom told us Edith favored the three Protestant daughters-in-law.

But my mom also taught her oldest son, me, at 16 that he and his first girlfriend, Sharon, could not get serious because she was Jewish. Of course, we did for two years, with me sneaking around.

The event that best encapsulates the strain from my parents’ mixed marriage was something that happened after my dad died when he was beyond personal choice. As our family filed out of the viewing room before the undertaker closed the casket, I took a last look at my dad. What I saw was a rosary wrapped around his helpless hands put there by my mom.

Though she lived for another twenty-five years, I never asked her about this. I wish I had. She must have yearned for my Dad to convert. Maybe we could have talked about her parents’ inter-religious marriage. How religious difference divides.

I’ve also thought about whether, if I could return to that funeral home anteroom, I would remove the Rosary, a symbol of the Catholicism my father rejected in life, from my Dad’s final resting place. I’m of two minds. I don’t know what Dad and Mom discussed in his last days. Perhaps he changed his mind, and the Rosary was faithful to that change.

Yet, I’m doubtful. I want to return to my father’s vote for Bill Clinton. What could turn him against the party he had voted for his entire adult life? It wasn’t just the Christian Right. It was the arrogance of absolutism — the absence of humility. I believe he saw in his final months on earth what could happen — what has happened — when one of America’s political institutions draws too close to one of America’s religious movements.

My Father’s agnosticism was not a failure of belief. It rejected the absolutism of mid-twentieth-century Catholicism and the late-twentieth-century American Evangelical movement.

Perhaps the God he wrote about in his final letter to Sister Marilyn was not the God of any particular religion. Maybe my Dad believed that no religion, particularly in its absolutist state, had a monopoly on God. It may be he was agnostic about religions but not about God.

The More

These uncertainties were my father’s final gifts to me. About ten years ago, I read The Heart of Christianity by the Protestant theologian Marcus Borg. Borg helped me understand my religious worldview and, I believe, my father’s. He wrote:

In the religious worldview, there is a nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality. This view is shared by all the enduring religions of the world. In a nonreligious worldview, there is only the space-time world of matter and energy and whatever other natural forces lie behind or beyond it.

Similarly, William James distinguished between those who believed there was a “More” beyond the material world and those who thought there was only a “This.” The rituals, symbols, and beliefs point to “More” vary by time and culture, but the constancy of the urge toward such guidance is compelling.

Comparative Religions scholar Karen Armstrong writes that religious traditions are

Like fingers pointing to the moon; so very often we focus on the fingers and forget about the moon.

I’ve become comfortable with the Mystery of God and find it unsurprising that there are 4000 religions worldwide.

How could it be otherwise?

My father gave me the gift of uncertainty.

He had felt the lash of religious arrogance and foresaw what it would do to America’s Republican Party.

And we both loved the humility of the BVMs.

Religious absolutism deepens the world’s divisions and is an instrument of hatred.

Religious humility softens the world’s divisions and can be an instrument of love.

A creature was stirring.

Christmas morning, 1956.

*

On Christmas Eve, Grandma Florence brought wrapped presents from Mom’s side of the family, the Thomas’s. She was widowed in 1945. Mom picked her up from her bungalow five miles away.

On Christmas Day, we took wrapped presents to Dad’s side of the family, the Gardners, who gathered at Grandma Edith and Grandpa Paul’s farm.

No Christmas cheer between the Catholic Thomas’s and Protestant Gardner’s.

Santa carefully placed unwrapped gifts in separate bundles under the tree for Paul, Peter, and Pat. A plate with cookie crumbs sat on the new stereo under the mirror.

Dad and Mom, in armchairs, enjoyed from across the room.

Amidst the discoveries, four-year-old Peter stood up, pointed, and said

Hey, look, over in the corner, the box is moving.

Sam, a Beagle pup, scratched, yelped, escaped, and showed us the way.

To young adulthood.

*

You can check if you wish, but I’ve mentioned American President 45 only once in 246 Medium stories, and it was in a tale about a Chocolate Pie.

Presidents Obama and Biden have been equally ignored.

This is odd for someone who taught Politics for 50 years.

After all, for Political Scientists like me, Trump ought to be the gift that keeps giving.

There’s something new every day.

Like yesterday, and the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment.

I’ve even been trolled by Facebook “friends” who think I should write about serious things, not chocolate pie.

They think the half-century gig wasn’t penance enough.

So I’ve been feeling guilty.

More importantly, I’ve got that moon photo.

As I took it a few weeks ago, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising started playing in my head.

Along with visions of Mr. Trump.

Because I’d been reading apocryphal stories like the ones linked below.

So that’s the first thing you ought to do.

Read each of the hyperbolic Trump stories with Creedence as the soundtrack.

The trouble IS on the way, say the experts, with many bad moons rising.

The earth as Jupiter, with its 95 moons.

The second thing, and I say this with heart, head, and gut, born of a lifetime of studying political scholars and pundits, is that no one, not me, not you, no one, has a clue today what will happen on Tuesday, November 5, 2024.

So ignore the elephant in the room. Lift the shade.

He will still be there in the morning. The prognosticators will as well.

Instead, focus on those around you and that wonderful world outside the window.

Where you might see something like this mouse.

*

More fascinating in expiration than Donald is in life.

And have another piece of Chocolate Pie.

————————————————————

Have You Listened Lately to What Trump Is Saying?

He is becoming frighteningly clear about what he wants.

www.theatlantic.com

Opinion | ‘This Is Grim,’ One Democratic Pollster Says

This is what’s keeping the Biden campaign up at night.

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.

There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day. So why is everyone…

www.washingtonpost.com

---

Do you have a favorite food from childhood?

We do.

Dody Gardner made three meals daily for three boys, Paul, Peter, and Pat, and our father, Paul Sr., in the 1950s and 60s.

That’s roughly 24,000 breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.

Our consensus favorite dish was her Chocolate Marvel Pie, which she served on Christmas Eve.

Why Marvel?

That’s the name on this ancient recipe card, carbon-dated to 1953, give or take a year or two.

Her unique cursive handwriting style was taught briefly in Catholic Schools in southeast Iowa in the 1920s.

You are right; it is hard to read. I was 15 before I could fake her signature on my report cards.

The translation is below.

Patience is the pie’s secret ingredient.

And yours, to earn the recipe.

Santa’s watching.

When mom died in 2017, at 96, I said I wanted two things from the estate.

This wax Santa Clause.

And the real McCoy recipe card.

Those are blood stains, by the way, as Pat did not give up the card easily.

He always said I should listen to Donald Trump.

So I did and hired The Donner and Blixon Law firm.

Who uncovered a heretofore unknown precedent.

The oldest son gets first dibs on the pie.

---

Rebecca and I have already served the pie to guests twice this season, and we’re still a week away from Rudolph.

Two Catholic nun friends were in town to see the annual Luther College Christmas pageant. Catholics have the saints; Lutherans have the music. Before my ritual prompt, each said it was the best chocolate pie they’d ever had.

Another couple, skeptical at first, asked for another piece.

“Not a chance,” I said.

Because there is no national pie museum, I will donate Mom’s recipe card to Julia Child’s Kitchen at the National Museum of American History.

Her pie would come out of the refrigerator a little runny on a rare occasion. Whenever that happened, I’d helpfully quote Julia, who said the test was the taste, not the look.

---

Patience was not my mom’s strong suit. Nor mine. This pie requires it. I’m sure Buddha had something to say about pie and waiting.

And you’ve cooled your heels long enough.

The Recipe

Melt and blend 1 cup of chocolate chips, 3 Tablespoons of sugar, and 3 Tablespoons of milk. (We use Nestle Tollhouse semi-sweet and half-and-half).

Cool.

Add 4 egg yokes one at a time, beating well after each. Add one teaspoon of vanilla.

Beat until stiff 4 egg whites.

Fold into chocolate mixture and pour into a 9″ baked pie crust.

Chill for several hours. (Channeling Buddha, we let it sit in the refrigerator overnight)

We garnish with a dollop of fresh whipped cream.

For your forbearance,

I’ve saved the last piece for you.

*

The Suspect saw Mommy kissing Santa.

*

From 50 years distance, it doesn’t feel the same.

*

The Greeks warned us about Pride.

My St. Ambrose University liberal arts education offered that lesson.

But I cut class that day and played pool.

That was my first mistake.

*

Feeling Left Out

All my buddies had dates: Barrie and Mary Ann, Denny and Linda, Ed and Mary.

Each had met his mate the previous year.

All three couples just celebrated their 52nd wedding anniversary.

The fall of 1970 would be our final homecoming weekend at St. Ambrose University.

Kathy had broken up with me a month earlier. She liked my six-foot, blond-haired friend Mike and thought I was too earnest.

You see Mike to my right in the first photo. Who could blame her?

I won the pool match but lost the girl.

A few months later, Kathy would lose Mike to Becky.

Becky and Mike have also been married for 52 years.

Desperation

It wasn’t that funny.

I had asked if any of them were free homecoming weekend.

As you can see, by 1970, the worm had turned at my college, which started accepting women in 1968.

Even dressed up, I struck out.

Wounded pride.

So, I did what any red-blooded Ambrosian male would do.

I started hanging out in the student canteen at Marycrest College, a women’s college about a mile up Locust Street from St. Ambrose.

Marycrest followed St. Ambrose and opened its doors to men in 1969. But in 1970, the competition was still thin.

It was late Friday night, and she was sitting behind a little desk inside the canteen door. I got a Mountain Dew from the pop machine and took a plastic chair on the other side of this small room. Who did she remind me of?

That’s it, Suzanne Pleschette, the doomed teacher in The Birds.

Earnest guys like me never had prepared pick-up lines.

But the two beers had loosened my tongue; no one else was around, and I was desperate.

So, with Dew in hand, I walked over, introduced myself, and probably asked her major. I don’t remember. We chatted a bit — pressure built as the canteen was closing at midnight. Finally, I asked Shari for her phone number.

The Phone Calls

“Why didn’t you ask her to go to Homecoming?” asked Barrie the following day as I cleaned chicken, and he worked the grill at Riefe’s Restaurant, halfway between St. Ambrose and Marycrest.

“There’s no way Suzanne Pleschette does not have a date for homecoming,” I splat.

Today, Barrie lives on the East Coast, just sold his retirement yacht, is, as you know, still with Mary Ann, and was always a step or two ahead of me.

“She didn’t have a date last night,” he rebutted.

I hemmed and hawed all day Sunday.

By Monday afternoon, it was then or never.

There are four things I need to explain. I went to college in my hometown and lived at home with four people: mom, dad, and two younger brothers. We had two phones, one on a counter between the kitchen and family room and another in the TV room upstairs. No privacy.

I never called girls on those phones. Once I started dating, everything, and I mean everything, was secret.

I used a drive-up pay phone three blocks from our house. Shari lived in a dorm where there was one phone for each hall. Whoever answered would find the person.

The cold phone receiver diverted my anxiety. I asked if she would like to attend the Homecoming concert featuring The Association and then dinner.

Silence.

“Let me think about it. Could you call me back on Wednesday?”

So that is what I did.

That was my second mistake.

On Wednesday, Shari said yes.

The Dinner

But first, the concert. That’s The famous Association on a makeshift stage on the gym floor of my high school, Davenport Assumption. St. Ambrose played basketball games at Assumption because its gymnasium was too small. And it had no concert hall.

I have only one memory of the concert.

Thank goodness for the music because Shari and I had nothing to say to each other. We had emptied our conversational tanks a week earlier in the canteen.

I understand now Shari was as desperate as I was. Had she spent Tuesday and Wednesday trying to find a better option? Eventually, she decided something was better than nothing.

We had that in common.

But no chemistry, even before dinner.

At The Plantation.

Yes, in 1970, in Moline, Illinois, there was a restaurant with that name. You can read about its history here. If no tables had been available at the Plantation, my second choice was The Gay Nineties.

The past is a different country.

Something else you might find interesting. Two weekends before homecoming, my sociology professor, Keith Fernsler, took his senior seminar class to Chicago to attend one of Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket meetings. In preparation, we read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Yet to be woken, I wanted The Plantation because my parents, who didn’t know anything about my date, took us to this anachronism once a year when we were kids. It’s where my brother Peter threw up on a waitress.

Foreshadowing.

The waiter started with Shari, who, with no hesitation, said

“I’ll have the lobster.”

Who could blame her?

Good Vibes Club

Humor

Dating

Life Lessons

It Happened To Me

Do you hear them?

*

My first classroom as a teacher was 50 years ago. It reined in 44 sixth graders at St. Johns Elementary School in Burlington, Iowa. Today, it is five stalls in a church parking lot.

Fortunately, my last classroom still exists.

For three decades, it was mine until I retired from Luther College in 2018.

Not only mine, of course, but it was in the building, Koren Hall, that housed my office and department, Political Science.

The Registrar’s Office favored me because I loved early morning classes — demand and supply lines for classrooms crossed midday. So, the early bird got the worm to ease the primetime room shortage.

8 a.m. Monday through Friday. Typically, I taught Terrorism and Democracy on MWF and Global Politics on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Usually, all the seats were taken. A small percentage of students loved early morning. First-light classes freed up the rest of the day.

Who would want to start the day with Terrorism? You’d be surprised. I was. I created this course the summer after Al Qaeda attacked America on September 11, 2001, thinking I would teach it once. Word spread and it became a go-to choice. Of course, Al Qaeda morphed into ISIS, so the subject stayed current. Unfortunately.

When I stepped back into this classroom a few days ago and took my usual pole position, sitting on the left edge of the front of the desk, facing the phantom students, I thought Eduardo Galeano was right. Galeano was a Uruguayan journalist and novelist who wrote this about empty soccer stadiums.

Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators. (Source)

This empty classroom was the same.

Full of sounds.

And memories.

Of how much I had changed as a teacher.

The mellow murmuring before class.

I would usually walk into the classroom about 20 minutes before class started. That’s when students would start arriving. I wanted to see the room fill up and, more importantly, if they would talk with each other. A low murmur was a good sign. That meant they were comfortable in this space and with each other.

Typically, on the first day, before class, I heard few voices but my own, “Good morning, welcome to Political Science 335.” Unless they were sitting next to a friend, no one talked — the nerves of anticipation. I felt the same.

My first task in our first meeting was to help them feel comfortable with me, the course requirements, and each other.

This sounds obvious, but it took me a long time to learn. I recall looking out over one of my first groups of college students in 1985 and thinking I must intimidate them into taking the task of learning seriously.

The only sound I heard was my voice. Full of authority. And myself. Standing at the front of the room, behind a podium, looking out over the crowd, seeing only the subject matter I was there to deliver.

That Professor had been fired long ago.

As I introduced myself and took them through the syllabus, I made eye contact with each person. I wrote the syllabus in easily understandable language with test and paper dates boldened. I explained my expectations regarding reading assignments.

And then, I got to the essential message of the first day. In this class, we will talk a lot about controversial topics with each other. I then randomly assigned them to groups of three.

And asked them to discuss this question:

Was American President Harry Truman’s 1945 decision to drop hydrogen bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima an example of terrorism?

The creaking of wooden desks

For the first 20 years of my college teaching career, I put overhead and PowerPoint slides between myself and the students — the words and images became my Holy Grail. I spent hours crafting these slides, searching for the perfect terms, word order, and pictures to express that day’s material. Going into class, I often felt very pleased with myself.

Of course, you, my writer friends, recognize these as sound scribbler habits: choosing the right words, arranging them correctly, and discovering compelling visuals.

These are good learning practices. They helped me to know the day’s material better. For a long time, I was satisfied the slides were a model of good thinking. I had found the proper endpoint of teaching.

And then, 15 years before I retired, I started to listen carefully to the room as I went through the slide presentation. The chorus was unmistakable.

Instead of Edgar Allan Poe’s beating heart, I could hear nothing but the creaking of desks.

Jenna was right.

Jenna, an A student who had been missing class, cued me to this listening when she told me in a private conference that she had started cutting class because she was bored.

All you do is summarize the material. You faculty hide behind PowerPoint.

The squirming, fidgeting, and creaking were symptoms of a different kind of killing than that of the Old Man by Poe’s narrator.

I needed to find a different way.

To get rid of the creaking desks.

The rumbling of conversations

It took me a year or so to develop a different pedagogical approach. The first decision was the most important — no more PowerPoint.

Eventually, I settled into a combination of mini-lectures that set the context for the day’s conversations, followed by small and large group discussions.

I worked diligently to reduce the day’s content to its essence. And then developed questions whose answers would help the students process the material.

When this process worked, the class conversations would produce a continuous, deep sound, like a rumble.

On these days, as I wandered in and around the cohort groups, occasionally offering insight and, sometimes, a gentle reminder to stick to the task, I would think.

What I’m hearing is

The sound of learning.