paulmuses

Last night – what we didn’t realize would be our last night in Timisoara for now – we listened to Leonard Cohen’s Going Home. As I write my last blog from Timisoara the words below sit in front of me and capture my mood.

Going home

Without my sorrow

Going home

Sometime tomorrow

Going home

To where it’s better

Than before

We met so many wonderful people in Timisoara and wish we could stay longer. As I returned a few books today to the American Studies library at West University in Timisoara and walked the empty corridors I was struck by how grateful I was to have this chance to spend time in this place with these people and to share this experience with Rebecca. COVID – 19 and its consequences are bigger than any of us and it is time to give in to the reality of the situation and join the many who have had their own experiences cut short or their lives changed in ways they are only beginning to understand.

I am going home “without my sorrow” because this experience will live forever in my heart. It will continue to give back to me and from me to others. Cristina, Ludovic, Karola, Horia, Titsa, Laura, Mihai and…so very many others. I will never look at a map like the one below in the same way.

We are going home “sometime tomorrow.” Early this morning we talked with a travel company working with the Fulbright program. A kind, patient, and very efficient agent put together an itinerary. Tonight we fly to Bucharest and then tomorrow from Bucharest to Amsterdam to Atlanta and to Kansas City, arriving around midnight Tuesday. Friends are bringing Rebecca’s car to the Kansas City Airport and we will drive to Decorah, stopping briefly in Clarinda. And then self-isolating.

“To where it is better than before,” somehow, I think this is so. A mess in America I know, just as it is in Romania, with people out of work, isolated, anxious and fearful. People have died, others will get sick and die. Maybe you, maybe me. I don’t know what to make of all of this. I have no answers so how could home be “better than before?” Except for this, when we go home we know we will have two weeks of self-isolation. Millions of others are doing the same, mostly without anyone following them around to see if they are doing the right thing, meaning the right thing for others as well as for themselves.

We left America as individuals; we are coming home as Americans.

In 2008, America elected Barack Hussein Obama, a racial minority, President. African-Americans make up 13% of America’s population.

In 2014, Romania elected Klaus Werner Iohannis, an ethnic German, President. Romanians of German descent make up less than 1% of Romania’s population.

I asked my two classes of American Studies students if they thought the election in 2014 and re-election in 2019 of Iohannis marked as big a leap forward in Romania as Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories symbolized for millions of Americans, including me. They nodded yes in unison and several talked about how Iohannis’ German ancestry was used against him, especially in the election of 2014.

President Iohannis is the first ethnic minority to be elected President of Romania. Iohannis is also a protestant (a member of the German-speaking Lutheran Church) in a country that is 80% Eastern Orthodox. As I was thinking about how I am connected to two countries that broke with tradition in exceptional ways, I remembered the Luther College Alumni tour to Ireland and Northern Ireland Rebecca and I led last fall. And another tradition-breaking politician popped into my head.

In 2017, Ireland’s first gay Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Leo Varadkar, assumed office. Varadkar’s Hindu father was born in India, Catholic mother in Ireland where Varadkar was raised a Catholic.

I have lived or traveled in three countries this past year, with each collectively deciding to break with the past in ways I consider signs of progress. Race in America, ethnic identity in Romania, and sexual orientation in Ireland are no longer insurmountable obstacles to rising to the top of politics and other professions in each country. This is a better world in so many ways than the world I was born into in 1949. Some things that were considered impossible have now become reality. Racism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia are still with us, but with less-lasting force and mostly in defensive, backs-against-the-wall postures.

Of course, not everyone thinks the Obama, Iohannis and Varadkar stories are good news stories. What some call progress never comes without a struggle and there is always the possibility of backlash. That is the central argument of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. She writes about how when slavery, America’s first racial caste system, ends in 1865 it is followed two decades later by the imposition of Jim Crow laws across the American south. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 end Jim Crow, America declares a war on drugs, a new ‘Jim Crow caste system’ that disproportionately incarcerates African Americans.

Is the election of Donald Trump in 2016 another form of backlash against the two terms of America’s first African-American president? What do you think? It is a question my Romanian students and I will talk about in our next on-line class session. There is no simple answer and I am interested in what you think.

Last Friday, all 500 Fulbright recipients around the world received the following notification from the American State Department.

ECA strongly advises all current U.S. Fulbright participants to make arrangements to depart their country of assignment as soon as possible.

The 500 include 28 in Romania, and five in Timisoara plus dependents and partners. The Romanian Fulbright Commission – located in Bucharest – has handled this situation with candor, transparency, and sensitivity. They have made it clear the decision is up to each of us and they will support us as best they can if and when we decide to leave. Regardless of whether we stay or leave, Fulbright benefits will continue and the expectation is we will fulfill our university and other commitments in whatever ways possible from wherever we are in the world.

For now, Rebecca and I have decided to stay in Romania.

We started out sharing with each other our initial reactions to the notification. We then looked carefully at the Romanian Fulbrighters’ email thread and the reasons given for why others were staying and leaving. Both of our families were brought into the conversation through Whats App, FaceTime and messaging. From many voices and perspectives, we slowly began to coalesce around the ‘stay’ option. Why?

We both have individual projects to complete. Rebecca’s project is to learn Romanian in the best way possible, by interacting with Romanians. She has committed hours of study for months on Duolingo and now is the time and Timisoara and Romania is the place to fulfill this dream, of truly learning a ‘foreign’ language.

My project, for which I also have prepared for months, is to teach Romanian students and other audiences about American democracy. West University of Timisoara has suspended all on-campus classes and other activities until March 22 and the arrangements I had been making with community groups for lectures have also been postponed. On-line teaching will go on and lecturing to community groups could go on, regardless of my location. However, like Rebecca, my project is best done in this place, at this time.

We have a partner-project to complete. We pride ourselves on being travelers and not tourists having been schooled well by wonderful tour guides including Nino Giovanetti in Rome, Mohammed Oujrid in Morocco, Michael Cooper in Ireland & Northern Ireland and Liviu Samoilă in Timisoara. Each reinforced the idea that to be a traveler means to connect with the people in a new place and immerse ourselves in the culture of this new place.

Our individual and partner-projects pull us toward staying in Romania. What magnifies this centripetal force are both the people we have met, welcoming and friendly, and the attitude toward the things that happen in the world that are outside the control of any of us, an attitude described by one of our Romanian friends as “shit happens.” Understandable in a country with Romania’s history, with invader after invader. This is so refreshing to Rebecca and I who, as Americans, tend to be personally offended whenever bad things happen, as if America and its people are immune to history. This humility is an antidote to our reflexive arrogance.

The spectacle of lines at American airports and the slow response to the pandemic by America’s government is a centrifugal force pushing us away. We feel safer here for now. We also know that Americans, not uniquely or even exceptionally, like Romanians, will respond to this crisis in enlightened self-interest ways that will eventually flatten the pandemic-spread curve.

Over the past week or so I have been thinking about one of my favorite stories, about a farmer and his horse. One version written by Dennis Adsit is repeated below.

There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.

“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.

“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy for what they called his “misfortune.”

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

I carry the sense of this story with me wherever I go. It seems especially useful in difficult times. I wonder if the COVID – 19 pandemic will give enough people in the world an experiential opportunity to practice the discipline and sacrifices that will surely be necessary right around the corner, with the looming consequences of global warming. Is the COVID – 19 pandemic only a bad thing? “Maybe”

Rebecca arrived in Timisoara last Thursday and you see her below focused – oh, how focused she gets – learning Romanian on Duolingo. She has been working on this Latin language for several months and has moved through basic, first and second levels into level three on prepositions. Me? Well, read on.

Fortunately, West University at Timisoara is offering a Beginning Romanian course and is generously allowing us to take the class, 6 – 7:30 PM on Thursday and Fridays. We have a phenomenal language teacher who gently chastised Rebecca and I last Friday because she wasn’t sure we were following along on our phones. Did she think we were checking our emails? Since I had not been on this side of the classroom since 1982, this was yet another new experience or, as they say in Romania, o altă experiență nouă.

Last Thursday afternoon a few hours after Rebecca arrived we were walking in a light rain to West University to our first language class. We turned to each other and said, almost in unison, ‘can you believe we are doing this?’ I am sure we said something similar in January 2018 soon after we arrived in Malta to begin our work directing Luther College’s Malta program. For me, there is a kind of terror beneath this question as well as confidence slowly built up over the years, from doing what I did not think I could do. Terror & confidence, what Jung called the tension of opposites.

Somehow I have learned to live with this tension. What does this mean, to live with the tension between negative and positive feelings or the thoughts that produce these feelings? The first week in Romania my mind sent me unbidden questions, such as ‘what if I lost my glasses? or ‘what if the security guard roaming Kaufland’s supermarket stopped me to ask what is in my backpack and because I never finished the basic level of Romanian on Duolingo all I can say is ‘nu știu limbo română?’ The ‘what ifs’ came fast and furious followed inevitably by a tightening in my stomach, which I have come to recognize as my amygdala firing off warning signals. A sense of panic lie just below the surface of my consciousness.

What do you do with anxiety? Or with the negative thoughts that trigger anxious feelings? Distraction can work, for a short time. However, old thoughts come back or new ones appear, as in yesterday I heard from a West University colleague that a university employee had been exposed to COVID – 19 and was staying home from work, but surely there are others and ‘what if…?’

Or you can argue with the thoughts or feelings, as in ‘I shouldn’t feel this way’ or ‘I shouldn’t be afraid’ or ‘Timisoara has 300,000 people and ‘I am unlikely to come in contact with the few who have been exposed.’ Arguing with your mind is arguing with an opponent who is constantly changing shape. You can’t win. Your mind will manufacture counter-argument after counter-argument.

Or you can give in to anxious feelings and stop doing something that brings on anxiety. I know many people who don’t do something they want to do because of anxious feelings. Their lives are constricted. Truth be told, learning a different language was never easy for me and so my mind during my Romanian Duolingo lessons in Decorah was always chattering away usually with the message of ‘you can’t do this.’ So I eventually stopped. When the opportunity to take this Romanian course in Timisoara came along, Rebecca needed to push me. None of what I say below has worked perfectly for me and it won’t for you. But if you are someone who is not doing something you want to do because of anxious thoughts and feelings read on. There is help out there and scientifically proven paths forward. (Please feel free to contact me for additional sources and perhaps some sharing of my own struggles with anxiety that might be useful to you.)

Over the years I have learned a few valuable skills to help me deal with anxious thoughts and feelings. In this blog I will write about my experience with the skill of meditation and describe other skills in future blogs. Investigating the skill of meditation made sense to me once I learned the profound insight that I cannot control my thoughts and feelings. They are unruly, come out of nowhere, and rarely last very long. If you are someone who is burdened by unwanted thoughts and feelings, two books that have been helpful to me are The Worry Trap by Chad LeJeune and Stopping the Noise in Your Head by Reid Wilson.

I started meditating a few years ago, about 10 minutes a day, the kind of mediation where I focus on in-and-out breaths while observing my mind and body at work. After just a few sessions I learned how active especially my mind was, with thoughts coming and going, like planes landing and taking-off at a busy airport. Slowly I came to accept how dynamic this mind and body-work is and thus to fear less any one particular thought or feeling.

Meditation is a skill that easily can become a habit. It is perfect for a perfectionist like me because the point of my little meditation practice is to simply observe my mind and body. I am not trying to change anything but the simple act of observing has gradually taken the scariness out of my thoughts and feelings. This makes it easier to accept the panic I felt during the first weeks in Romania, even to welcome it, and bring it along with me as I do what it is I am supposed to be doing here. A really good book on both the science of meditation and some useful ‘how to’s’ is Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True.

The cognitive insight that one cannot control thoughts and feelings along with the behavioral work of observing this unruly mind and body armors one against the inevitable negative thoughts and feelings that come naturally in this imperfect world we live in.

This insight and the skill of meditation don’t cure COVID – 19 or calm the Stock Market or persuade one’s political adversary or help us learn Romanian but together they are an antidote to the inevitable vicissitudes of the world, wherever you are.

The greatest speech, The Gettysburg Address, by America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, begins with the words

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Lincoln speaks these words in 1863 when America’s Civil War has turned favorably to the North. “Four score and seven years” ago points to the Declaration of Independence (1776) and its words about equality and not the Constitution (1789) and its acceptance of slavery, as America’s key founding document.

It is Lincoln’s way of saying the “We” in the first words of America’s Constitution, “We the people”, is to be expanded to include former slaves. One way to see the history of American politics is to see it as a continuous struggle over the question “who are we?” Today, more groups than ever are part of this struggle to determine the identity of the country.

That’s one major reason for the intensity of America’s current polarization and was on my mind as I walked yesterday through Timisoara’s Piata Victoriei or Victory Square. The Romanian Revolution of 1989 (one.five score one year ago) began in Timisoara and in Victoriei Square on December 20, 1989 Timisoara was proclaimed the first independent city in Romania. Below is what will become Piata Victoriei that day.

Victory Square looks like this today.

The Wikipedia entry on the Romanian Revolution is very good and thorough. Read that entry and then give a look at a nine minute video clip of the last European Communist leader to leave office, Nicolae Ceausescu. General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party Ceausescu is giving what we know is his last speech on December 21, 1989, from the balcony of the Communist Party Headquarters in Bucharest. Below is a comment by one of the clip’s viewers.

This moment right here has fascinated me for years! We all hear and read about how the different regimes of the era came to an end but to see it play out before your eyes is chilling!! This guy was literally “the man” for 24 years and within a matter of seconds it’s all over! To see the look of fear and confusion on his face when he realizes his gig is up is so haunting! It’s just so unique and amazing to watch this unfold right before our eyes and his! Definitely one of the most interesting parts of history during that time!

Every time I see this video clip I respond in the same way as this reviewer. Ceausescu had cut short a visit to Iran when the revolution started in Timisoara several days earlier and spread quickly across the county. Ironically, it started in Timisoara over the regime’s treatment of a Hungarian priest who had criticized the government and was being evicted from his house. Not only was Ceausescu confused as he looks out over Bucharest’ own Victory Square, he tries to buy-off the people, offering increases in wages, pensions and children’s allowances. He is standing on the balcony with his wife Elena who is Deputy Prime Minister, and other Communist Party functionaries and all are trying to quiet the crowd, to no avail.

Romania is now 30 years or one generation into its development as a modern democracy. On this Fulbright adventure, I am tasked with helping Romanians understand the development of America’s own modern democracy. Below are the students in my two classes at West University in Timisoara. All are working toward MA’s in American Studies. Most of them work at least part time and are taking six courses per term. In Romania the undergraduate degree is done in three years. The MA program will take two more.

I asked the students why they were interested in the American Studies program. One young woman gave a very interesting answer that relates in a way to both America and Romania. She said America offers us an opportunity to learn the good and the bad, of what works and what does not. What an intelligent answer! These students do not want a sanitized version of America.

In 1989 democracy and capitalism won the day over communism and socialism, in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. However, neither politics nor economics is working very well for too many in America and I suspect in Romania as well.

I think a close and honest look at American democracy or really any democracy can suggest that once the “we” includes all equally, governing gets harder and not easier. There is no end point to democracy, no finish line. When functioning well enough, it allows communities of people, even very large communities like America and Romania, to live together peacefully, with their differences protected and intact.

1776 in America and 1989 in Romania were the starting points and not the end points. Neither was easy, both were bloody. America’s longer history at democracy ought to suggest humility and not arrogance. This is what we have learned. Perhaps you can learn something from our struggles and apply it to the specific circumstances of your country. Perhaps we can learn from you.

Humility is not possible for the Ceausescu’s of the world. It contradicts the logic of the systems in which they operate. Democracy, on the other hand, as my favorite American political scientist E.E. Schattschneider said, is for those who are not sure they are right.

A year or so before I retired from Luther in 2018 Rebecca and I talked about wanting to visit and if possible to live for a few months in an Eastern or Southern European country, a part of the world neither of us had visited. Romania, a southeastern European country, seemed a perfect geographical fit.

In 2017 I applied for a Fulbright Grant to teach about American democracy in Romania and was unsuccessful. After visiting Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro in 2018 on one of our Malta group trips, Rebecca and I decided I should give a Fulbright Grant to Romania another try and this time my application was successful. I am writing this blog from Timisoara where I will be teaching two courses on American democracy at West University of Timisoara. Timisoara is in western Romania, close to the Serbian border.

The Fulbright program is named after USA Senator J. William Fulbright who said the following about Fulbright grants.

The essence of intercultural education is the acquisition of empathy–the ability to see the world as others see it, and to allow for the possibility that others may see something we have failed to see, or may see it more accurately. The simple purpose of the exchange program…is to erode the culturally rooted mistrust that sets nations against one another. The exchange program is not a panacea but an avenue of hope.

From 1960 to the present, over 3000 Romanian and Americans have participated in one of the Fulbright grant programs. This year there are 15 Fulbright scholars teaching and doing research at Romanian universities around the country, with another 16 American student grantees teaching English. In 2020, there are over 500 Fulbright grantees around the world.

In addition to teaching two courses in American democracy to Masters level graduate students in the American Studies Department at West University, my Fulbright responsibilities include giving presentations on various aspects of American democracy and the presidential election of 2020 to community audiences around the country. Romanians are intensely interested in America and quite aware of the impact of America’s domestic politics on its relation to the world.

Rebecca will be joining me in Timisoara on March 5th, as her time in Romania will be limited to the 90 days allotted to tourists. As a Fulbright grantee, I will apply for a residence permit that will allow me to stay in the country until the end of the spring semester, June 17th.

We look forward to sharing our experience with you and hope to give you an on-the-ground sense of this beautiful country and its friendly people.

Imagine you are at a dinner party. You are sitting at a round table with 8 other guests. Delicious food is being passed. Each guest is lost in their own thoughts. What might your thoughts be? I am thinking something along the lines of whether everything is in order in the room. For example, are the pictures on the walls hung at the proper height and are they straight or crooked?

Twelve years ago I was introduced to the Enneagram (pronounced Any – a – gram). The Enneagram is a system that describes nine types of people or nine perspectives on the world.

Renee Baron & Elizabeth Wagele’s The Enneagram Made Easy is an excellent introduction to the Enneagram. Below is their one or two sentence description of each of the nine types and in capital letters what each type might say at the dinner party.

• 1. Perfectionists are realistic, conscientious, and principled. They strive to live up to their high ideals. NOT ENOUGH FOOD GROUPS REPRESENTED HERE.
• 2. Helpers are warm, concerned, nurturing, and sensitive to other people’s needs. IT’S SO GREAT TO FEEL NEEDED.
• 3. Achievers are energetic, optimistic, self-assured, and goal oriented. I NEED TO EAT AND RUN. I’M SWAMPED.
• 4. Romantics have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive. CHEAP CAVIAR – SHOCKING!
• 5. Observers have a need for knowledge and are introverted, curious, analytical, and insightful. IT’S A TALKATIVE GROUP. GOOD – THAT GETS ME OFF THE HOOK!
• 6. Questioners are responsible, trustworthy, and value loyalty to family, friends, groups and causes. SHE’S LEAVING EARLY. DOESN’T SHE LIKE US?
• 7. Adventurers are energetic, lively, and optimistic. FIRST I’LL EAT, THEN TAKE SOME PICTURE, THEN TO MY CLASS, THEN…
• 8. Asserters are direct, self-reliant, self-confident, and protective. PASS IT DOWN, PASS IT ALL DOWN HERE.
• 9. Peacemakers are receptive, good natured, and supportive. They seek union with others and the world around them. I FEEL SO CLOSE TO EVERYBODY.

In case you are wondering, I am an Enneagram 1. I have found the Enneagram so helpful that I decided several years ago to become certified to teach workshops on this psychological typing system. I taught two January term courses where I incorporated the Enneagram into other personal development material to good success. Students enjoyed discovering their types and, what’s most challenging about the Enneagram, the built-in tools for personal growth.

The four books below are also favorites and highly recommended.

• Jerome Wagner’s Nine Lenses on the World
• Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert’s The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective
• Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile’s The Road Back to You
• Simon Parke’s The Enneagram

Simon Parke nicely summarizes the value of the Enneagram, from the perspective of the Enneagram. “I [Enneagram] understand and describe human difference. Outwardly, our lives appear rather similar and people often talk an act as if we are. Inwardly, however, we live lives in very different ways with quite different perceptions of reality. We’re the same, yet quite different.”

Did Bernie tell Elizabeth that a woman cannot win the presidency? The meeting was behind closed doors with only the two of them. 

If Bernie did say anything that included the words women and winning and presidency I suspect it was along the lines of what I have heard from many, and hear it from myself as well, ‘can a woman win?’ As I repeat ad nauseam, to myself and others, Hillary earned 3 million more votes than Trump but she still lost the WH because among other things of how the electoral college works. Asking: can a woman win? or can a gay win? or can an African American win? and sooner or later surely can an atheist win? is not the same as believing a woman, a gay, an African-American or an atheist should not by president of the United States. 

Perhaps Bernie was just asking a realistic question or maybe he was making a case for his turn, after the defeat of Hillary in 2016. 

Normal conversations between human beings often include nuance, musings, hypotheticals, & counter-arguments. When brought to the light of day, outside the context of the conversation, by one of the participants, the other can seem insensitive or worse. 

Nothing in Bernie’s background suggests he does not believe a woman could and should be President of the United States. 

Putting this whole thing in the best light possible, for both, Elizabeth heard Bernie express some doubt about a woman beating Trump in 2000 and Bernie heard nothing from his words suggesting a woman ought not be president. What I see and what I hear are often different from what you see and hear, even when we are looking and listening to the same things. 

I think it is a fair question to ask why Elizabeth and her campaign brought this conversation up now and in the way they did, with no context and no nuance. The Iowa vote is looming and the Warren campaign is struggling and the stakes are high. Watching “The Two Popes” last night reminded me of what Catholics refer to as lesser or venial sins. This incident includes nothing but lesser political sins by all involved.

Our fast paced media environment and short attention spans are rightly lambasted but sometimes useful.

Rebecca and I just returned from Houston and a visit with Rebecca’s son, Jonathan, and spouse Suzanne and three year old Irene (Inie). In “Cool McCool,” Rebecca writes about another aspect of our most recent visit. In this blog, I want to reflect a bit on how every ‘thing’ and every ‘body’ has a limited number of days.

Every time I visit Houston and see the Astrodome dwarfed by NRG stadium. I remember my dad in 1966 coming back from a business trip to Houston full of wonder about his experience inside what was then called the Eighth Wonder of the World. Today the Astrodome is easy to miss for the thousands of people passing by each day on Interstate 610 and barely registers with anyone under the age of 60. Inevitably that same fate will befall NRG, some day, for its days are numbered as well.

My son Ben re-introduced me to Bob Dylan about 15 years ago and Dylan’s “Mississippi,” with its first verse that contains this blog’s title is my favorite Dylan stanza. Here it is: “Every step of the way we walk the line, Your days are numbered, so are mine, Time is piling up, we struggle and we scrape, We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape.”

The Astrodome’s days are numbers, so are mine. So are yours! As for me, my exact days including today are 25,673. A few years ago I discovered the To Do Institute that offers online courses and other resources on “alternative methods of mental health such as Morita and Naikan from Japan.” The Institute’s journal is called “Thirty Thousand Days: A Journal for Purposeful Living.” The thirty thousand days comes from the average life span in countries like the USA.

One way to live a purposeful life with whatever time we have left is to remind ourselves how close we are to 30,000 days. When I subtract 25,673 from 30,000 not only am I reminded that I learned to subtract so long ago that I now need my phone calculator, but the 4,327 days I may have left remind me I will not live forever. Each of us knows none will get out of this life alive but it is so easy to think ‘I’ just might be the exception.

Rebecca’s house in Clarinda is next to a cemetery and my house in Decorah is down the block from a funeral home. With reflection, each offers an opportunity to move from what Heidegger (this insight comes from Irvin D. Yalom’s Staring at the Sun) called the everyday mode of existence, from HOW things are in the world, to the ontological mode, THAT things are. When I die, the absence of ‘THAT I am’, makes ‘HOW the world is’, no longer relevant.

The late Indian Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello suggested the following meditation in his book Awareness as a way of reminding us of death so as to remind us of the value of our life.

“Imagine that you’re lying flat in your coffin and you’re dead. See the body decomposing, then the bones, the ‘it’ all turning to dust. Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything , doesn’t it? Do this for a minute or so each day and you’ll come alive…When you’re ready to lose your life, you live it.”

One of my favorite films is Ikiru (To Live) by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It is available on Prime and well worth two and a half hours of your time. It is about a middle aged Japanese bureaucrat who learns he has terminal stomach cancer and what he learns about what it means to live in his final months. Ikiru is one of most uplifting films I have ever seen and one that reminds me to live each day to the fullest, with as much kindness and compassion as I can muster.

At ages eight and twelve I joined little neighborhood gangs that had as membership requirements stealing items from a local store.  I was on my way to becoming a thief.  I have little memory of the first incident other than we were caught and my mom was upset.  The second round, a few years later, is clear in my mind and, upon reflection, one of those life-turning points.

Vinnie and Mark were my mates, with the former the leader of the gang.  To be in the gang, each of us had to steal one item from a drug store located a few blocks from our houses.  We all lived in a middle-class neighborhood, on the east side of Davenport, Iowa.  My mom was a stay-at-home-mom as was Mark’s.  I am not sure about Vinnie’s mom as she seemed gone a lot.  Mark’s dad owned an advertising agency, Vinnie’s was a judge, and mine was a chemical engineer.

Vinnie was the leader, the toughest of the three, and had a parent-free house during the day where we planned our shenanigans and reconnoitered with our loot.  Mine was a bottle of aspirin, stolen from a drug store in the Village section of East Davenport that would be knocked down some years later to make room for a Happy Joe’s Pizza Parlor. I don’t remember the items Mark or Vinnie stole.  It was the summer of 1961 and my life was about to change.

The phone call from Mrs. Cleveland who lived next to Vinnie and a few houses down from Mark came in the early evening.  I answered it and she must have given me her name because when I handed the phone to my mom I went up to my room and started worrying.  Mrs. Cleveland was not a friend of my moms, why was she calling?  Our one phone was in the living room, down the stairs from my bedroom.  I could hear my mom’s voice and the conversation seemed to go on for a long time.  Eventually my dad came up to my room and sat next to me on the bed.  He was calm and direct, as was his way.  He told me Mrs. Cleveland had talked to the drug store owner who had observed me steal the aspirin.  I must have ratted out Vinnie and Mark because a few days later Vinnie beat me up and Mark ignored me the rest of the summer. 

My dad told me my mom was very upset and it would take her some time to get over how disappointed she was in me.  And that she would not talk to me for a while.  This was the first silence.  My memory is that my mom did not talk to me for a couple of weeks.  It may have been shorter or longer but one morning as she was closing the refrigerator door she turned to me at the breakfast table and said good morning.  My mom broke her silence.  I was back in her good graces and no longer ostracized.  For a kid not quite a teenager, more on my 13^th birthday later, being back mattered, a lot.

My dad’s silence was different.  A few days after Mrs. Cleveland spilled the beans, a Friday, I think, my dad came home from work and said to me, only me and not also my two brothers, Peter and Pat, ‘let’s go for a ride.’  My dad would often take me, the oldest, to get donuts on Saturday morning so being in the car alone with him was not so unusual.  This was a Friday late afternoon, something must be up, and he did not say anything as we rode together along River Road toward downtown and much to my surprise, the Davenport Police Station. 

We walked together into the station, a first for me, with my dad still not saying anything.  We were met by a policeman who took me, without my dad, through a door and back to an area with cells.  I don’t remember what he said, and there were no prisoners behind those bars, and after a brief tour we were back in the lobby where my dad was waiting.  We got in the car and rode home together, in silence. 

Later that fall my dad would also break his silence on this stealing problem but in way that was about someone else but really was about me.  Again, it started with a phone call from a neighbor who told us someone else was collecting money for the paper I delivered to her.  She gave my dad the name of the kid and my dad and I went to his house to confront him.  The house was a few blocks from our house, very small, dark and a little run down.  I waited just inside the front door while my father went inside to talk with the culprit and his father.  

On the way home, he told me some kids are the way they are because of the kind of family circumstance they come from.  I could tell my dad felt sorry for the kid who tried to steal my paper route money.  But he was also telling me, no, that’s not quite right, he was showing me that my family was different and that I could be different.  

A few days after the paper route incident we celebrated my 13^th birthday.  My mother would make for the first time what would become my favorite cake, a chocolate wafer icebox cake.  Earlier that day, my dad and I got in the car and went for donuts.

I never stole again.