On Saturday, my partner Rebecca and I were hiking in Palisade park, a few blocks from our Decorah home.
The park is full of mountain bike and hiking trails.
We selected the Smeby Trail, ranked advanced, with an elevation of 872 feet.
Along Smeby, we met this car with Buick Eight on its grill.
Wikipedia tells me Buick made the Eight from 1940 through 1958.
Maybe my new friend and I share a birth year, 1949.
Years ago, someone abandoned him.
Put him out of sight because he was no longer any use.
Except as a reminder of what can happen when others define our value.
*
Lately I’ve been wondering whether in 10 years I will be able to do something I’m doing now.
Examples:
Yesterday I carried four bags of 40 pound salt crystals for the water softener into our house and down into the basement.
Last week a colleague and I finished teaching a Life Long Learners course that met for three hours, on four Wednesdays.
In a few hours, Rebecca and I will do a 45 minute kettlebell workout.
What about advanced hiking trails?
I think society prods me to wonder whether I’m soon to be too old to do those things.
My Buick friend shows me where this leads.
*
Someday I will become a human version of this abandoned Buick Eight.
Either above or below the earth.
For now, with yearly maintenance check-ups, regular oil & filter replacements, and an occasional glance under the hood, I should be good for another 100,000 miles.
Or the winter of Our Content — The Literary Version
Harland addresses our group. Photo by Carol A. Gilbertson
“I only want to Live Till the Age of 75”
I’m a hop, skip, and jump from 75 so when I saw this article by Donnette Anglin I needed to take a look.
Captivated by the topic, I googled “wanting to die at 75” and found Ezekiel J. Emanuel’s “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”
Donnette is 52. Ezekiel was 57 in 2014 when his essay was published.
Both authors described the feared and real challenges of the last quarter or the winter of our lives.
I fear them as well.
All of this was on my mind four days ago when I attended an Emeriti Colloquium at Luther College where I taught for three decades and retired from in 2018.
Over 75
The speaker was Harland and he is the fellow in bib overalls in the first picture.
Harland taught English and his talk was about growing up on a farm in northwest Minnesota.
He’s in costume and still teaching.
Harland is 96.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese of a Harland Nelson family photo
That’s Harland in dark glasses at 18 sitting next to his father.
When asked what he was looking at, he answered “I suppose life beyond the farm.”
Will is on the left. Photo by Rebecca Wiese
Will was making a point.
Like his friend Harland, he grew up in the rural upper midwest in the 1930s and 1940s.
He was describing how threshing rings (groups of families) planned card parties and other social gatherings that helped build community.
Will taught Religion and is 90.
Photo of Larry by Rebecca Wiese
Larry was explaining how a 1940s thresher machine worked.
He is a biologist and 88.
Photo of Ruth by Rebecca Wiese
Ruth is intense, even in repose.
She taught French and Italian and is my co-teacher in a Life Long Learning course we will teach this fall on The 1619 Project.
Ruth is 78.
Photo of Dave by Rebecca Wiese
I don’t remember the point Dave, another biologist, was making.
Maybe that’s because 20 years ago, as a college Vice President, he gently chided me for a snarky remark I made about the college’s poo-bahs.
I hope to lose my snark, when I turn 75.
Dave is 85. Thank goodness former administrators never fade away.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
That’s me in the red cap looking and listening.
I’m going to be 73 and my photo-happy partner Rebecca is 71.
Most of those at Harland’s talk were over 75
The Last Quarter is where the game is won
Anglin and Emmanuel are right about the challenges of growing older.
There’s lots to fear.
But name a time in life when that was not so.
Raise your hand if you want to be 16 again.
No one understands the difficulties of life in the last quarter better than those who are still playing.
As I looked at Harland’s crowd, there was evidence everywhere.
Wheel chairs, walkers, canes, drooping heads, and at least one napper–sorry Harland.
Yet
They were all there.
Sill vital.
Sharing wisdom, experience and stories.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
And Presence.
Because no one lives in the moment better than perennials.
Afterword
The phone holder below was carved by Jim, biologist # 3, who started these colloquia eight years ago.
On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, I was teaching in Luther College’s Main 211.
This is what the classroom looks like today.
Except for the raised TV monitor and computer, it looks the same as it did twenty one years ago.
In 2001, Main 211 had a TV but on that day it did not work.
Decorah, Iowa (All times are Central Standard)
I got to my office about 6 AM to prepare for an 8 AM class. I was teaching a new course, Struggles for Freedom, that compared freedom movements in three countries, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and America.
I completed my work in Koren Hall about 7:30 and strolled the 200 yards to Main and my classroom. The sun was to my back, on a clear day in the American midwest.
Main Classroom Building, Luther College
Always restless before class, I wanted to check whether there were enough chairs for the 16 of us.
Also on my mind was where to put the portable lectern to signal to students where I would be sitting. I decided to put it at the end of the table facing the door.
Because I did not plan to use the TV, I did not check whether it was working.
Tuesday, September 11 would be our 5th class meeting.
We started with Northern Ireland and that day’s topic was the role of terrorism in the conflict between Protestant and Catholic Communities.
It was a normal Tuesday morning on the Luther College campus in Decorah, Iowa.
Boston & New York (Times are Central Standard)
At 6:59 AM, American Airlines Flight 11 with 92 people took off from Boston International Airport destined for Los Angeles.
As I was preparing for my day’s work:
Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuiness Jr. were going through their pre-flight routines.
Chief Flight Attendant Karen Martin was overseeing the boarding of passengers along with Flight Attendants Barbara Arestegui, Jeffrey Collman, Sara Low, Kathleen Nicosia, Betty Ann Ong, Jean Roger, Dianne Snyder, and Amy Sweeney.
Among the 81 passengers finding their seats were Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari, Wail al-Shehri, Waleed al-Shehri, and Stam al-Sugami.
About the time I was walking from my office to my classroom:
Flight Attendant Betty Ann Ong notified (7:19 AM) the American Airlines ground crew that Flight 11 had been hijacked. Ong provided information for 25 minutes.
Flight 11 & North Tower
As students began filtering into Main 211, at 7:46 AM
Mohamed Atta guided America Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Decorah
As students were settling into their seats, one mentioned he had heard on the news that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.
Before I asked my first question about that day’s Northern Ireland reading, at 8:03 AM:
Marwan al-Shehri steered United Flight into the South Tower.
In 2001, no one had a phone or personal computer to see news in real time.
Unknowing, we continued class.
Just as Hani Hanjur maneuvered American Airlines 175 into the Pentagon, at 8:37 AM, a student poked her head into our classroom and told us another plane had hit the World Trade Center.
We all looked at her, then at each other. I went to the TV and discovered it was not working.
I then told the class to go and find a find TV. Most scattered but a few stuck around to chat. I said there was a TV in the Administrative Assistant’s Office in Koren.
We walked briskly across campus and climbed the three flights to Chelle Meyer’s office.
We joined Chelle and a couple of student around her little desk TV, at 8:59 AM, and watched in real time the collapse of the World Trade Center’s South Tower.
Seven minutes later the passengers of of United Flight 93 forced Ziad Jarrah to ditch his guided missile into a Pennsylvania field well-short of the targeted US Capital or White House.
At 9:28 AM, two minutes before my Freedom Struggles’ class would have ended, the North Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed.
2712 killed and 6000 injured, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
Why the most memorable day?
9/11 would live in my memory regardless of what I had been doing on that day. Just as November 22, 1963 or those terrible 1968 dates, April 4 and June 6 live on.
But politics, religion, and terrorism — all came together on that Tuesday. Just as they had on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City.
I needed to know more about what was going on in the world that would produce these horrors.
In the summer of 2002, I developed a new course, Terrorism and Democracy.
I had never studied terrorism in graduate school.
I thought it would be a one-off.
I taught Terrorism and Democracy every year until I retired, in 2018.
No, not a group. No, not flowers. No, not senior citizens.
Photo by Mike Cardinal
*
“I don’t want to be a senior citizen,” said Warren Turner.
Me neither. That’s me in the plaid shirt & maroon hat next to my partner Rebecca.
I’m 72 and she is 71, which, by the way, is the average age of the folks in Mike’s photo.
Mike took this picture three days ago at Phelps Park in northeast, Iowa USA.
Rebecca and I live in two Iowa communities, Clarinda in the southwest and Decorah in the northeast.
We invited our southwest Iowa friends to join us for three days of kayaking, biking, and eating.
Photo by Bill Lisle
On Thursday, we kayaked down Minnesota’s Root River.
After Bill took this picture, he lost his phone in a shallow water bank.
Remembering the exact location, the next morning he retraced the three-hour route and recovered his waterproof phone.
In Bill’s photo, I’m in the orange kayak that I would overturn a few moments later.
Another Bill, with the white hat & blue life jacket, and Mike (not in the picture), would spend 30 minutes helping me retrieve & drain the submerged kayak.
In this picture, that’s kayak-rescuer Bill in the colorful shirt, with Rebecca to his left.
Bill, Rebecca and two other perennials joined 15,000 bikers in late July to ride 420 miles across Iowa on RAGBRAI (The Des Moines Register’s Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa).
*
There are 54 million Americans over 65.
If you’ve got to lump us together and attach a label, why not perennials?
Thumbs-down on senior citizen. I wasn’t a junior citizen at 22.
Why call me a senior citizen at 72?
Millennial Sam Tetrault listed perennial as one of several better name-options.
I liked it, particularly when I read Dictionary.com’s definition of a perennial as
An older person whose mindset, interests, or lifestyles does not fit into any specific generational label.
None of us, whether old or young, likes to be seen through the lens of a label.
Categories, even my preferred-perennial, miss what is unique about each of us.
Regardless of age, we all want to be seen.
Not labeled.
Afterword
When our friends left Sunday morning, Rebecca and I took a three-hour nap.
He was Sharon’s father and my boss at Baskin – Robbins.
Scooping ice cream was my first job, after four years of paper-routing.
Wendell took scooping very seriously.
New dippers trained for four days to perfect the technique that would craft the perfect 3 oz spherical portion.
Not only that. We shoveled from large tubs of ice cream and the circular surface had to be evenly lowered.
56 years later I’m an unofficial scooper inspector whenever I walk into an ice cream palace.
I see a moon surface tub and I’m outta there.
My scooping skills satisfied so Wendell hired me in the summer of 65.
On my first day behind the counter, hat and apron in place, Wendell peered at me with his head tilted upward and an impossible-to-read smile and said:
Paul, no matter where you are in the store, I can see you.
An Interlude
Wendell invited me in.
It’s the fall of 1966 and he hasn’t fired me so I’ve passed muster on the ice cream front.
But a date with his daughter? No four day training period for that.
I now see his smile as shy and not enigmatic.
The house was spit-level, popular in America in the 1950s & 60s. I stood in a little entryway, with stairs in front of me ascending to the living room, bedrooms, and kitchen. And stairs to the right descending to a TV room with a door to the garage.
In that TV room, on a couch, the following summer, 1967, a million years from this moment, Sharon and I would be safe from Wendell’s gaze.
And Beverly’s.
Beverly was Sharon’s mom who thought Sharon could do better.
I’d learn that, too, the following summer.
Pretty Sharon followed Beverly down the stairs. It looked to me like they had come from a bathroom, just off the kitchen. They came from on high. That’s what I felt.
Sharon was wearing a green dress with a fishnet pattern on top.
That’s where I was supposed to put the corsage. Somewhere on that mesh.
Without pricking…
Somehow I got it attached.
Phew.
The Middle
“Have fun” said Beverly as Sharon and I slipped into my parent’s car.
Like the out-of-sight TV room and couch, the car’s front bench seats without a center console would be a gift that kept giving, to Sharon and me the following summer. On that night, the gap between us was the size of the Grant Canyon.
On the way to my high school’s homecoming dance, I decided to take side street that paralleled Locust, a busy street.
Thank goodness.
I had just turned left off Jersey Ridge Road onto a quiet residential street and heard a pop followed by a bump-bump from the back right end of the car.
I eased the car to the side of the street, in front of another split-level.
The tire was flat. One month into my Driver’s Permit, I had never opened the trunk let alone fixed a flat.
Thankfully, I think now, no cell phone to call my dad.
I walked up to the split-level, knocked on another door, and asked the guy who answered the door for help. I didn’t know him but four years later he would hire me to work on his yard-work crew.
15 minutes later we were on our way.
The End
Honestly, and I’ve tried, I have no memory of the dance.
Did we dance? A slow dance? Surely not.
But a clue to my teenage psyche that evening lingers.
On the way back to Sharon’s house, the gap between us on that front seat had narrowed not a whit.
I took busy Locust Street as I had just learned in Geometry the shortest distance between two points was a straight line.
Damn. I was on a roll, with green lights at all intersections until we got to Locust & Brady. One of busiest intersections in Iowa, in 1966.
It is that moment I recall as if it IS this moment.
Tom Jones’ Green Green Grass was playing.
I looked over at Sharon, at the alluring fishnet, with the corsage still hanging-in & on, and thought
This photo was taken last fall in the Rarău Mountains in eastern Romania. Florin Floriol was our tour guide on a trip to Romania’s Bukovina Region.
“Let’s engage in the spirit of the forest,” Florin said to Rebecca just before I took this picture.
As my index finger tapped my phone’s photo button, I recall thinking how humbling it is to imagine the natural world has something to teach us. That it has a spirit.
Photo by Florin Floriol
I read somewhere that prayer ought to be for our sake and not for Gods’. Bowing, kneeling, or prostrating are physical manifestations of reverence for something transcendent.
Listening to a tree is a prayer. It’s also a powerful exercise in something else many of us have lost, a sense of awe.
*
An overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful.
Dictionary.com
Awe described my feeling on Monday, when I came upon this sight.
Photo by author
On Sunday, a storm with 65 mph winds pummeled northeast Iowa. No human lives lost but cars overturned and hundreds of trees downed, including this tree at one of the entrances to the Trout Run Trail, three blocks from our home.
You can see my bike just to the right of the woman in yellow.
As I entered the trail, I thought what on earth am I looking at? I dismounted and gawked. Is a chimera just over the embankment dam? And then another damn:
I’d never seen such a big tree torn from its centuries-old home.
I marveled at the size of its roots.
Was this tree planted by the Ho-Chunks who had a village on this land in 1840? Or by the Day family, European-Americans who settled Decorah in 1849, 100 years before I was born.
*
You were one of the longest-living beings on earth
A few days ago I walked into my community’s kettlebell workout facility.
Resting on the desk was a new sign commanding me to
START YOUR DAY WITH YES
Really?
Confronted with something or someone new, my initial response for 72 years has been NO.
Sometimes nay becomes kay, but nada is my starting point.
The late public intellectual William F. Buckley described a conservative as
Someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…
I’m a political liberal, with a conservative personality
To scoot or not to scoot?
That start your day with yes exhortation has been gnawing at me so I’ve been on the prowl for personal examples. Like yours, my days are filled with big and small opportunities to lead with NO or YES.
For example, a few weeks ago e-scooters appeared on the streets, sidewalks, and bike and hiking trails of our 8000 person community.
My first response was faultfinding, particularly when I saw a few discarded on the Trout Run Trail, an 11 mile blacktopped path around Decorah, Iowa.
Critical is a sometimes pretentious way of saying no. That was also my initial posture to e-bikes that appeared about three years ago. Is an electronically-assisted pedal bike really a bike? Won’t it clog-up our non-motorized byways? What will it do to the moral fabric of our community?
I didn’t know I could stand on that soap box while peddling.
A couple of years ago my friend Steve, who shares my 72 years, told me he purchased an e-bike to enjoy the trail regardless of heat or wind. Now he bikes more and only uses the pedal assist up switchbacks.
Travis, owner of a local bike shop, reported e-bikes are half his sales.
Lately, when an e-biker passes me on an incline I think someday I’ll repeat the favor and pass with a wave some whippersnapper.
And I’ve been rethinking my default NO to scooters.
It’s amazing the different modes of moving on our 11 mile avenue: biking, hiking, skating, skiing, strolling, running, and, not least, pulling babies in a bike trailer.
Just off the trail, nature viewing, trout fishing, and, of course, amour.
With all these ing’s going on, why not scooting?
Yes does not mean…
Starting the day with YES does not mean we say yes to everything or everybody.
It’s sensible for me to say NO to the headstand station during our kettlebell workout.
The same, silently, to the owner of the pick-up truck with the Confederate Flag painted on the tailgate I saw yesterday parked downtown.
Saying YES does not mean no judgment about what life presents. Apparently Decorah’s City Council is re-thinking its commitment to the Bird e-scooter program. An Informed YES or NO is a good thing.
As an orientation, Yes is an open door to the world. No is a closed door, with double locks. It can be opened, to an e-thing, but only grudgingly and after too much else is missed.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl has a quote that relates to the theme of this essay. The context was the life-orientation of the despairing person Frankl encountered in Auschwitz and Dachau.
We had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life–daily and hourly.
Starting my day with YES helps me be open to the questions life will pose.
Whether they become haters or not depends upon their parents.
And it’s not easy to teach people to hate.
*
Children notice difference
My mother too often told this story.
When Paul was three [I’m 72], I took him shopping to Walgreen’s Drug Store. We were in the check-out line and Paul turns and sees a Black man for the first time. Paul starts crying and pointing and would not strop until we left the store.
My partner Rebecca’s mom told a similar story about her three-year-old son Mike [Mike died last year at 72]. They were at the State Fair in Illinois and Mike saw a Black man and said over and over “he’s black, he’s black.”
Two years ago Rebecca and I spent three months in Houston, Texas babysitting Irene, one of Rebecca’s five grandchildren.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
One day during the summer of 2020 Rebecca showed Irene a You Tube clip of a friend’s four-year old Chinese granddaughter singing a song. After the brief clip, Irene said “I don’t like her.”
According to Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, humans are programmed to start grouping people–making distinctions based upon physical characteristics–by the age of two.
Little Paul, Mike and Irene did what all humans start out doing. They notice human differences and respond.
I was scared, Mike bewildered, Irene displeased. Yet I did not become a hater. Nor did Mike. Irene, well, let’s just say the chance of Irene becoming someone who hates Chinese people is slim to none.
I first heard the soundtrack to the musical South Pacific in 1958, when I was eight. It was the first record played on the stereo that two men hauled into our living room earlier that day.
For some reason, You’ve got to be carefully taught was my favorite song.
I did not see the film South Pacific until 1980. That’s when I saw the anguish of American Lieutenant Cable and Tonkinese girlfriend Liat. Cable and Liat decide not to marry because love was not enough.
Too many of Cable’s contemporaries had been taught to hate:
People who’s eyes are oddly made and people who’s skin is a different shade
It’s not easy to teach people to hate
There is a hate-formula and the song lays it out.
You’ve got to be taught; to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught; from year to year
It’s got to be drummed; in your dear little ear…
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late; before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives’ hate…
When I was growing up in America in the 1950s & 60s, I don’t remember my parents saying much about race. My mom did not describe the Walgreen’s incident until I was 30.
The only race comment I heard from my father was that the singer Nat King Cole was a “good negro.” Yes, cringe-worthy to today’s ears, but enlightened contrasted to the racial language I occasionally heard from my dad’s father and brother at Sunday dinners on their farm.
My parents taught their sons to respect everyone.
Rebecca’s mother and father spent one year in the 1940s in Georgia before moving back to Illinois to raise their six children. According to Rebecca, her mom told her kids that Blacks in Georgia had to use different drinking fountains and how wrong that was. Throughout the 1960s, Evelyn Franklin would refer to that Georgia experience when talking with her kids about the moral rightness of the Civil Rights Movement.
Irene is now seven years old and has moved from a scooter to a bicycle. She still lives in Houston with her mom Suzanne and dad Jonathan. Houston is one of America’s most diverse cities and Irene’s daycare, school and neighborhood reflect this diversity.
The evening following four-year-old Irene’s “I don’t like her” comment we all played the I Never Forget a Face memory game. All three adults took every opportunity to talk about how different human faces are and how this difference is good.
*
Most people do not become haters because their parents and increasingly the culture that surrounds them send messages into their “little ears” that serve as antidotes to turning the differences children note into fear and then to hatred.
I see differences everywhere in America. And like you I see it up close, 24 hours a day, in my community and on my devices.
There is more of it than at any time in my 72 years. It is both at the root of America’s contentious politics and bigger than politics.
The human animal has been interacting with groups outside her tribe for only 130,000 years. Our brains are trying to keep up with the reality of living with those who look, worship and speak differently.
Hate still sells and not only in America. I will not live to see its sell-by date.
By the way, it took Loudon Wainwright III 15 minutes in 1972 to write Dead Skunk after he ran over one on a highway. He finished the song before it stopped stinkin.
*
When I saw the live skunk, I wanted to rush outside and take a picture. But I didn’t. You wouldn’t have either, for an obvious reason.
Later in the day I talked with my neighbor Craig. He had spotted our Mephitidae invader while up peeing the night before.
Everybody needs a neighbor like Craig.
He called the police who arrived 5 minutes later, a quiet night, human-crime-wise. The cop patrolled the neighborhood inside the safety of her squad car, to no avail.
I asked Craig what the police do when they locate a skunk. You know the answer. The execution is done humanely.
OK, that’s what I wanted. The skunk dead.
But then I thought, should we be putting skunks to death?
Momentarily, and snowflake that I am, my dander was up and my halo straightened.
And then I recalled the slaughter on Water Street that had taken place earlier that day.
*
Photo by author
These are Japanese Beetles on the leaf of one of our Birch trees. When I discovered their invasion of our nine little trees, and with the help of a garden shop expert, I devised a two-pronged strategy to beat back the enemy.
I mixed a solution in a gallon of water and poured it on each of the tree bases. Over time it will be absorbed by the trees’ roots to dissuade future invaders. Think moat around a castle.
I then sprayed a pesticide on the leaves of each tree. Think machine gun.
I slaughtered hundreds of beetles on Water Street.
And not only that. Two weeks ago I vacuumed an equal number of Carpenter ant carcasses after strafing their redoubts.
*
As I was writing this essay, a thought, unbidden and unwanted, was delivered into my consciousness. I will share it with you.
The only good skunk is a bad skunk.
Yes, it made me uncomfortable too. Where did that phrasing come from?
I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are.
Ugh. Even writing these words spoken by someone else 136 years ago, to illustrate a point, creeps me out. If I was still in a college classroom, I might not put Roosevelt’s quote on a slide or the whiteboard.
Why not? Because the idea behind the words contradicts the way we are suppose to feel, do genuinely feel, about American Indians or any other group of humans in our society, in 2022.
And then I had another thought I will leave with you. I will ponder it as well.
Will most people in 2162 condemn my wish for a dead skunk or my slaughter of beetles and ants just as today I condemn Theodore Roosevelt’s attitude toward American Indians?
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