paulmuses

No golfer, scholar, or writer is an island.

Published in Medium’s Entertain, Enlighten and Empower

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Golfing

Yesterday, I played golf by myself on an unoccupied course. My usual links buddies were unavailable.

“It happens every year in September. Even on a beautiful day like this, the place is empty,” said the clubhouse guy.

As you can see from the first photo, there is no other living person on site.

Alas, today was not Judgment Day. Or, for fans of the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, imagine the undead moseying up that sidewalk to form my gallery.

I wanted someone around to appreciate the high-arc fade that led to this close-to-the-hole Tigeresque result pictured below. I used a five-hybrid club to hit 150 yards over a valley that bounced two times and rolled up on the green for a gimmie putt if you’re playing alone.

Or to see me try to maneuver my ball between these trees.

I used a five-wood to lift the ball over the first tree on the right. Unfortunately, it tipped an unforgiving top branch and dropped behind the tree’s trunk — one more inch and perfection. As it was, you would have appreciated the vision and the effort.

That shot was as hard as a transition sentence or two in this story between solitary golf and writing. But first, one more audience example.

Studying

I just finished teaching a Lifelong Learning seminar on the American 2024 Presidential Election. The course was attended by 35 mostly retired community members. We met for three hours each Wednesday in September. Below was my freely captured audience.

During my forty-year teaching career, I loved creating new courses. Teaching forced me to keep learning, and my summers were full of days of exploring and preparing.

My college’s Lifelong Learning program helps keep me in the game.

Without it, I’d be like that solitary golfer performing for gravestones.

Writing

Who wonders, “What’s the point without a witness?”

Would I have read all those political books last summer without the promise of a packed room dangling in front of me?

Writers are told to write for their readers. I’ve never understood what that means. But that’s different from the question, would you write if you had no readers? Does writing give you enough sustenance to do it without anyone else paying attention?

I’m not sure golf does it for me. I took many photos during yesterday’s round and subconsciously thought about this story. Two political books are lying unread on my desk, which I did not get to before I finished my class. Maybe I’ll finish them. Maybe not.

Would I complete this story if I knew no one would read it?

This question makes me uncomfortable. Needing an audience seems a baser motive than loving golf, the study of politics, or writing, regardless of externalities.

But is it less pure?

I’m not so sure.

I love the camaraderie of playing golf with one or two friends. So much socializing comes from the game’s challenges, commiserations, and rare opportunities for transcendence, like the shot in photo three and the almost shot in photo four. Perhaps it’s the game that brings us together.

I love the back-and-forth of a diverse group of people collectively thinking about America’s political life. In a way, we’re doing the thing we’re studying.

Finally, I love the possibility of a reader of this story asking herself, “Do I need an audience for whatever I am passionate about?”

Humans are social. So, everything we do can be sparkled by the need to reach beyond ourselves.

No golfer, scholar, or writer is an island.

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Today’s random word is egg.

This story was published in Fiction Shorts as a Drabble.

A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.

Today’s Drabble is 150 words.

Setting: A Denny’s Restaurant in Eugene, Oregon.

Janet: “Have you ever walked out of a movie?”

Bob: “Five Easy Pieces, in 1970.”

“You don’t look that old. What’s your secret?”

“I don’t eat eggs.”

“Who doesn’t eat eggs?”

“It’s the texture — the same with peas. My mom made us eat everything, but I’d gag whenever I put an egg or a pea in my mouth. No egg or pea for sixty years.”

“I loved Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. Why did you walk out?”

“I hated the hold-the-chicken scene in the diner, too out of control.”

“That’s my all-time favorite Nicholson scene, even better than Here’s Johnny in The Shining.”

“I wanted to walk out of that one. But my late wife Donna wouldn’t let me.”

Waitress: “Can I take your orders?”

“I’ll have meatloaf.”

“Chips and beans. Do you have a substitute for the eggs?”

“Peas.”

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I did walk out of Five Easy Pieces in 1970. I’m not sure why. But I suspect twenty-year-old uptight me saw too much truth in Jack Nicholson’s Bobby Dupea character. I loved The Shining and Here’s Johnny. I hate eggs and peas and once, politely but firmly, asked a server in a London pub to take back my fish and chips because the peas, which I had said I did not want, touched the fish. Finally, the Five Easy Pieces diner scene was filmed at Denny’s restaurant in Eugene, Oregon.

Symptoms of aging are everywhere

*

Time is no longer a friend.

It’s early September here in northeast Iowa, and the weather has already turned cool. My father, who lived only to 71, called it a nip in the air.

Where did the summer go?

“Gone to graveyards all,” as Peter, Paul, and Mary sang about soldiers.

In America, it’s been an eventful warm season.

Joe’s debate debacle, the waiting and inevitable decision, Crooks’ fortunate miss of the crook, Kamala’s glorious gripping of the reigns, and the inspired selection of Tim, and, then, the joyful climax.

I would have hated to miss it.

My tears this morning are mostly ragweed-caused.

I guess time is sometimes on my side.

But, dammit, life is sooooo precious, as Oprah would warble.

And I feel it slip-sliding away, as Paul Simon pitched perfectly.

*

This mortality rumination started earlier this summer in this sand trap.

I’m a good enough golfer to connect yardage to the flag to the club in my hand.

One hundred fifty yards into a slight wind meant a five iron.

I struck the ball perfectly, and it plopped into this bunker twenty yards short of the green.

As I settled into the electric golf cart and mentally reviewed how to hit out of the sand, I heard my late mother whisper, “How stupid are you?”

And I smiled.

Even though she scored a hole-in-one sometime in the 1930s, this gentle epithet-memory was not about golf. Mom aimed this phrase at herself whenever she missed something obvious, like when she forgot to put sugar in the Christmas Chocolate Pie.

I played golf as a young man, but not so much in the last thirty years. Yet, I had never adjusted my club yardages downward, even though I’ve been playing from the “senior” tees for a decade and roaming around the links sitting down.

How stupid am I?

*

My mother lived to 96, two years longer than her mother, seven years short of her centenarian sister.

Gene-wise, I’m a lucky winner.

Maybe that’s why aging has snuck up on me. On a good day, I look fifteen years younger.

Here’s a photo taken two months ago. I’m on the right with my golfing buddy Mike. He’s 76.

My dad looked younger until sinus cancer aged him beyond his years, another genetic plus.

A few weeks ago, my partner Rebecca (73) and I spent a week in St. Louis visiting her son Jonathon and his family: Suzanne, Irene (8), and Alice (1). We like to do the dishes after the evening meal, a routine we established years ago. This time, we remarked how much more tired we were at the end of the day than five years ago.

*

Now that I’m no longer stupid — maybe enlightened — I see and feel everyday examples of aging in myself and others.

How much longer will I be able to lug fifty-pound sacks of salt down the cellar stairs to our water softener?

We had our gutters covered with wire mesh two weeks ago, so I would no longer be tempted to climb a ladder.

Rebecca hands me a jar to open, and after a few attempted twists, I look over my shoulder to see if anyone else might be available.

We scrutinize our 80-year-old friends for telltale signs of, well, I’m not sure what. But we never used to pay close attention to those a half-decade older.

On June 27, when he walked out on that stage, we saw our future and Joe Biden’s.

High on my today’s to-do list?

I’ve got to buy a four iron to get over that blasted sand trap.

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A conversation between two Americans

Today’s random word is stick.

*

This Drabble was written for the Medium Publication Fiction Shorts.

A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Your presence here matters. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you

Today’s Drabble requires 150 words. Thank goodness.

*

A whispered conversation at the Auschwitz Exhibit in Boston on a bench looking at the Hitler photo.

Abraham: “I love America.”

Amburo: “How long have you lived here?”

“For forty years, my mother and father came from Israel. You?”

“Twenty years from Rwanda.”

“Tutsi?”

“Yes. But I have Hutu friends. How long have you lived in Boston?”

“15 years. I manage people’s money. Edward Jones. You?”

“Ten years. High school English teacher. No money. Did any of your relatives die?”

“All my grandparents, all but two aunts and uncles. You?”

“My brother and a cousin.

It couldn’t happen here, could it?”

*

“He didn’t have to beat them over the head with a stick. They believed every word — each lie. Look at their faces. They are mesmerized.”

“The Hutu leaders called us cockroaches until many believed we were.”

“Too many were silent.”

“Until it was too late.”

“This exhibit.”

“A warning!”

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This fictional account of a conversation was prompted by my visit yesterday to The Auschwitz Exhibit in Boston. Wikipedia has excellent entries on the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide.

But I am going to tell you my only scar story

*

Do you see it?

It’s a 52-year-old relic.

That is attached to a 75-year-old artifact.

Who earned it for what, thankfully, has become an anachronistic practice.

If two of my mates and I from the Iowa Annie Wittenmyer Home in 1972 were chasing a shark and telling scar tales, this would be mine.

*

Steven was 12 years old. Like all the kids in the cottage, he had been in trouble with the law and taken away from his parents.

I read their case histories at night, toward the end of my 4 — midnight shift. Nothing in my middle-class sheltered life prepared me for their problems.

This was my first job after college. Two staff members, a man, and a woman, cared for twenty children, ten boys and ten girls, during each eight-hour stint. We were unskilled childcare workers whose primary job was to maintain order.

I majored in Sociology and earned a teacher’s certificate after completing student teaching in the spring of 1972. The Wittenmyer job was to tide me over until my first teaching job, which would come five months later. I would be as clueless in that job as I was with these troubled young people.

*

The Annie Wittenmyer facility had been an orphanage during America’s Civil War. By the 1960s, the complex had become a juvenile detention center. I was assigned to a unit with middle-level security, meaning kids could only go outside with permission. There were no guards or guns, but doors were always locked.

When someone misbehaved and did not settle down, we locked them up. Yes, that’s what we did. Worse, this lock-up room was on the second floor, up a narrow set of stairs, and the door opened inside rather than outside. More on that in a moment.

Many of these kids had a problem with impulse control. Someone or something would trigger their anger, which would then escalate. I don’t remember why, but this happened to Steven one day. We had one tool in our kit.

He was average-sized and rotund, with glasses that didn’t fit properly. The poor guy’s face was beet-red. But I couldn’t calm him down. So I wrapped my arms around his torso and lugged him up the stairs while he kicked and screamed. The cell was at the top of the stairs, with the door open to the inside.

I hauled Steven across the hallway and pushed him inside. He lunged toward the door as I pulled my right arm out of the doorway, wedging it shut on my middle finger.

*

It could have been worse.

Ten stitches closed the burst fingertip. I was back to work in two days. After it healed, it tingled for a few years.

Most importantly, Steven was not sent to one of the maximum security units. That often happened after an outburst.

*

I worked at Wittenmyer for a few more months before I took my first teaching job. I don’t remember lugging another kid up those stairs.

I don’t know what happened to Steven. Already, at twelve, he had one strike against him.

A few years later, I met another of my charges outside an employment office in another city. We chatted for a bit. He was now a young man and seemed to be on an upward path. I asked him what he remembered about his time at Wittenmyer. He said it gave him some structure and a few social skills.

Occasionally, I look at the little scar in the middle of my right middle finger.

It reminds me how some scars are more profound than others.

____________________________________________________________________________________

As I ponder the last four weeks in America.

*

I want to know what’s around that metaphorical bend.

Maybe it’s my human evolution.

My distant ancestors needed to guess right about the predator outside the cave.

Or fool themselves into thinking they knew.

Grammarly has joined the confidence crowd.

It slaps my hand whenever I use a word like “maybe” in the second sentence or “perhaps” in the one below.

Given their phenomenal campaign launch in Philadelphia, perhaps Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will defeat Donald Trump and J.D. Vance.

It tells me to drop the perhaps so I will sound more confident.

Grammarly wants us all to feel more positive. Being confident that we can foretell the future will improve our mood.

It’s sure about this.

*

What a bunch of hooey.

Conceivably, it’s helpful nonsense.

Using the language of confidence, I talk myself into believing I know what’s around the bend.

By reading my confident words, you drink the Kool-Aid, thinking you know more about the world than you do.

With arms locked together, we waltz happily into the future.

*

But ponder this, my friend.

If, like me, you wanted Donald Trump to lose the 2024 American Presidential election, the world now seems, if not precisely, more orderly.

Predictable.

With Joe Biden’s recusal after pressure from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others, Kamala Harris’ elevation, the quick coalescing of the Democratic Party around her, her mistake-free debut as a Presidential candidate, and the selection of everyman Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the dominoes seem to be falling in place.

To use my bike trail metaphor, all of this is nicely laid out right around the bend.

Of course, you know where I’m heading with this example. A few weeks ago, few would have predicted any of this.

1. Joe’s withdrawal
2. Because the Democratic Party was a hollow shell with no formal way to influence his thinking.

3. But if Joe did the unexpected, there would be a damaging fight for the nomination, or if he endorsed Kamala, she would not be a stellar campaigner.

4. If Harris became the nominee, she would pick a white male from one of the swing states, Arizona or Pennsylvania. Tim Walz was not on anyone’s list until the “These are weird people” interview.

*

But there’s more.

When the Biden campaign offered a June 27th date for the first debate, it thought this would be to Joe’s advantage. Imagine if the first debate was during the fall campaign when it usually is.

Or, assume the deadly-to-Joe-chances debate occurs on June 27, followed by the Democratic Convention instead of the Republican Convention on July 15. As it was, it took Biden three weeks after the debate to withdraw.

If there had been no debate, there would have been no organized pressure on Joe. Even with the disastrous debate, an early convention would have left no time even for Pelosi and others to work their magic.

Under either circumstance, around the bend offers Biden/Harris vs. Trump/Vance.

Or, on July 14th, in Butler, Pennsylvania, what if Thomas Matthew Crooks’ aim had been three inches more accurate?

*

My favorite website prognosticators, 538, now give the actual Democratic Party ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz a 50/50 chance of beating Donald Trump and JD Vance.

I think Blue’s chances are significantly better. But it’s more a hope and a feeling than anything else.

Holding “this or that” lightly seems a wise template for what might happen.

The unknown world, replete with contingencies, is beyond knowing — before it happens.

Before I travel around the bend.

And an older man book group

*

Our 11-person mature-man book group meets monthly, usually at one of our homes. This month’s meeting was the book American Gun by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson. And the place was at my house.

We’re all in the vicinity of 70. Next month, we’ll meet with a younger-man group for a joint conversation. Baby boomers meet Generation X. I joined this 20-year-old group four months ago after thinking about it for many years.

Did I want to sit around and discuss books? And with only men?

*

We’re a diverse group with college professors, a banker, a high school teacher, an administrator, a physician, an engineer, and a reporter. Most are liberal, but not all. Everyone has a point of view about the books we read.

No one dominates the conversation. No toxic masculinity. Back to that in a moment.

*

I’ve linked to the Amazon page for American Gun so you can read a sample of the reviews. Our group thought it was a terrific book. I couldn’t put it down because the narration was excellent. It’s a cultural history of one facet of America over the past 50 years.

If you want to know why there are so many guns in America, this is the book for you. It’s not an anti-gun book or an anti-AR-15 book. It’s an exploration of why this particular gun became the American Gun.

Our group included a few hunters. However, no one owned or had even touched an AR-15. So we asked our local sheriff and police departments if one of their officers could help us to understand this weapon.

Byron joined us for an hour and brought along two AR-15s. He’s a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and has been in both the police and sheriff’s departments as a firearms instructor.

He laid out the two guns on my dining room table and showed us how they were put together, including the bullets used. Then, he passed them around.

I hadn’t held a gun in over 50 years and never pulled the trigger on the 0.22 I carried that one time while hunting with friends. When I cradled each, I put my finger on the trigger and imagined a target.

I still don’t get it. That’s why I’m glad to have read the book.

*

The pizza arrived when Officer Byron did — and cooled on the kitchen table with the beer waiting in the refrigerator. We peppered him with questions, and he gave thoughtful answers.

I was struck by how he respected the guns and saw them, in his hands, as necessary for our safety. Yet, he wished it had not become the weapon of choice for so many Americans, including Thomas Crooks, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump.

After Byron left, we opened the pizza boxes and the beer. No one cared that the pizza was cold. We had a book to discuss.

About 30 minutes into the conversation, someone, I think it was Jim, raised the issue of toxic masculinity. The authors of American Gun took us into the worlds of several mass shooters, all men, including Stephen Paddock, who killed 60 and wounded 413 in Las Vegas in 2017.

You can read the Wikipedia entry on toxic masculinity here. Another excellent article by conservative columnist David French on the male toxicity of the recent Republican convention here.

I’m providing these resources because our group said nothing particularly enlightening about why men do bad things. Other than this, our sons had gone through the local public school and had become swept up in school groups, including athletics, music, school governance, and drama productions.

They had made connections and learned how to be with others. Indeed, that’s one antidote to the social isolation that is often a symptom of mass killers.

Honestly, our group of long-time men were as perplexed as, perhaps, you are at both America’s gun fetish and the men who use these weapons to kill others and themselves.

*

As I sat in my living room, looking out at this group of aging men, each willing to give up two hours of his time to listen, engage, ponder, probe, open up, and, ultimately, sit with the horrors described in American Gun and the ambiguity of a weapon that destroys and protects, I thought, I’m honored to be a part of this men’s group.

That, in some mysterious way, we’re part of the solution.

The 2024 American Presidential Election

We’ve Known the Water is Warming, and We’ve Been Trying To Get Out of the Pot Before It Boils Over

*

It turns out that frogs try to scramble out of the pot when the cool water starts to warm.

Of course, they do.

I never believed the literalness of the Boiling Frog story nor its application as a metaphor for how too many Americans have gotten used to Donald Trump’s offenses, so worry less about the consequences of a second Trump term.

The pot is slowly boiling, but most of us climbed out of it long ago.

*

I imagine a conversation with my Republican father, who died of sinus cancer at 71 in 1993.

I begin by telling him that his Party just nominated for the third time an adjudicated rapist and convicted felon who had been impeached twice during his first term.

Mr. Trump introduced himself as a candidate in 2015 by saying this aboutSenator John McCain, someone my father admired:

He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured; I like people who weren’t captured.

And, a couple of days ago, in a stump speech to a Christian group of supporters, Trump said

You won’t have to do it anymore…It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore.

Finally, I pulled out my phone and showed him a photo of the Trump-encouraged insurrectionists on January 6, 2021.

*

After exclaiming, “You can talk on that thing? And load photos!” my father said

What has happened to my Party and my country?

My reawakened father is gobstruck by the iPhone’s capabilities and what has happened to American politics. He is the frog placed in boiling water.

But that’s not true for most Americans. We’ve seen the political Mr. Trump up close for almost a decade, and we know the pot has been slowly coming to a boil.

*

In the summer of 2016, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in an interview said:

He is a faker…He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes to his head at the moment. He really has an ego…I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our President.

During the fall of 2016, I taught a Political Science seminar to 20 undergraduate students on the Trump/Clinton presidential campaign. After the Access Hollywood tape, I recall a 90-minute class discussion. Three of the students were men on the Luther College football team. All were self-identified Republicans. One young woman asked the men if they had ever heard locker room talk of the sort Donald Trump engaged in on the tape. Each said no, never, not like that.

At the end of the discussion, another young man in the back of the class raised his hand and said, almost chokingly, precisely my dead father’s imagined response.

I don’t know what is happening in my country.

*

In the 2016 American presidential election, 66 million Americans supported Hillary Clinton and 63 million Donald Trump. Trump won the Electoral College because he carried Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by 79,000 votes. Four years later, Biden flipped those states (by only 44,000 votes) in the national ballot count, 81 million to 74 million.

A majority of Americans have always viewed Donald Trump unfavorably.

The frogs have been climbing out of the warming water for years.

When Democratic Party leaders pressured Biden to withdraw from the race, the number one reason was their fear that he could not beat Donald Trump.

The reason Vice President Kamala Harris was able to consolidate her control over the Democratic Party so quickly was the need for the Party to unify to keep the pot from boiling over.

America is an evenly divided country. Many of my Trump-supporting friends do not believe the pot is even warming. Or that it will boil over with a woke-infused flame.

And our unique Electoral College mechanism, which at this historical moment favors the rural-dominated Republican Party, could produce another Trump victory.

History is full of contingencies. Imagine, for example, if there had been no Trump-Biden debate a month ago or if this year’s Democratic Party convention had been first in July.

President Biden would now be the nominee.

But that didn’t happen. People acted. President Biden bent to the will of not only Nancy Pelosi but the majority of Democrats who have been saying for two years that he is too old.

Like the frogs, we know what we see and feel.

The water is boiling.

It’s time to turn off the burner.

And a way forward in our divided country.

---

Right around the corner

We asked the young woman behind the counter at Ossian’s Silver Springs Golf Club whether they served lunch.

Mike and I had just finished 18 grueling holes, and I needed to hand in the key to our gas-powered cart.

It’s not easy for two mid-seventies guys to get in and out over 90 times each.

Besides, we didn’t just play golf. Mike’s a Republican, and I’m a Democrat, so we talked politics. “What do you think, Mike? Do Democrats or Republicans cheat more on the links?” I asked just before he tried that short putt for the win on number 17.

Ossian, in northeast Iowa, is 11 miles from Decorah, where we live.

Its population is 800, one-tenth of metropolitan Decorah.

The counterwoman said, “No, but Bambino’s is just around the corner. They have great hamburgers.”

So, we got into Mike’s grey Toyota pick-up and headed past the Lutheran Church down to Main Street, where we turned right. Left would have taken us to Calmar.

After three blocks, there was still no Bambino’s, and we were fast-running out of town on the way to Postville. I spotted an older couple coming out of Ace Hardware, and Mike angled the truck up to their car.

“We’re looking for Bambino’s.”

“Turn around, and it’s right around the corner.”

---

Sue and Ron

So, it was. Two junctions down from Ace. We finally spotted the tiny Bambino lettering in the lower left-hand corner of the only window in the brick facade. Bambinos was a bar.

We walked in at 12:30 and out at 2:30, entertained, enlightened, and well-fed.

Co-owner Sue was sitting at the end of the bar that opened into a kitchen area. Her partner and husband, Ron, came over to take our order. Two older guys were sitting at a corner table, and their counterparts were at the other end of the bar.

Fox News, silent, looked down on us from just to the left of Sue. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had just entered the House chamber with the scroll “Democrats boycott the speech.”

I don’t remember exactly when we learned Sue and Ron’s names or that they owned the place, but it was sometime in the first five minutes.

“The young woman at the golf course recommended your hamburgers,” Mike said.

“Where are you guys from?’’ asked Sue.

When we said Decorah, she fired back,

People from Decorah don’t come to Ossian, even when our hamburger was named the best in Iowa.

---

The best hamburger

I liked Sue immediately.

She exuded good-soulness before I knew why.

And her feistiness reminded me of my mom and myself when faced with the perceived superiority of big-city and coastal elites. Many of us in flyover America feel THAT part of Donald’s appeal.

We asked her to tell us their “best hamburger” story while I watched Ron frying our orders off her right shoulder. You can read the official story here.

This is Sue’s shortened version.

By the way, 10 minutes into her narrative, three things happened. Ron delivered our burgers, with mine being the one in the photo. It was as good as it looked. Netanyahu started his speech. And a large picture frame crashed down on the table just vacated by two older guys. Five minutes earlier, it would have been a crime scene. Unflappable, Sue said they’d take care of that later.

When Bambino’s won the award in 2021 against 300 Iowa restaurants, they sold 160 burgers the month before victory and 4600 the month after.

“What was that like?” we asked.

“It was hell. We run this place by ourselves. But we raised our price from $5 to $8. Plus, it allowed me to sell more of my children’s books.”

---

An author

This is Sue’s first book. The second was just published, and the third is almost finished.

Leaning over the counter, she read this one to us, a captivated, not captured, audience.

While Bibi gesticulated on the screen.

Ron began to clean up the mess from the collapsed picture.

Mike purchased both books for his granddaughter, and I bought them for Rebecca’s seventh grandchild, Alice. I’m honored to be a grand friend.

---

A way forward

Even for those of us who live in small Iowa towns, it’s too damn easy to patronize, if not in person, then in thought those who live in even smaller towns.

And America’s politics doesn’t help.

But that lets us off the hook.

We’re, each of us, America’s politics.

The next time you’re in a small town, anywhere, go into that shop, yes, that one, right around the corner.

You might learn something.

---

In 1963, the Beach Boys harmonized their way into mine, and a memory that lingers.

Published in Entertain, Enlighten and Empower.

Memories

Memories are like God. They become real once we give them meaning.

What was it like to be 14? Was his memory of these incidents the same at 21 as it would be at 50? Or today, on the cusp of 75?

Or do memories change, like our perception of God, as did his family’s front lawn after his two brothers and he sold their childhood home after their mother died at 96 in 2017?

Before the new owners built the horror in the photo, the lawn was grass at a 10% gradient.

That required weekly mowing.

A task his dad assigned to his eldest son in his 14th year. His engineer dad had attached a rope to the green Lawnboy mower so he could cut the grass vertically, up and down.

The first time he tried this method, the rope broke. The priests — yes, in 1963, there were three priests at Sacred Heart parish — and nuns — yes, seven Habits in eight elementary years, taught him one version of a God who commanded him to honor his mother and father.

So he discarded the rope, mowed crosswise, and didn’t tumble into the street.

He honored his father by choosing a different path. It would have been a Bar Mitzvah moment if he had been Jewish instead of Catholic.

Later that day, his cousins Jim, Dan, and Terry arrived from Des Moines. When Jim, his teenage contemporary, walked into his bedroom, the room behind the dormer in the photo, The Beach Boys’ new 45 In My Room, was playing on his record player.

Yesterday, 61 years later, when he listened again, the polished harmony of “There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to” came attached to a memory linked to a feeling that has dogged him for six decades.

That feeling has never gone away, even though the evidence from his life would easily convict it by a jury of peers.

But being a boy, despite being flush with the lawnmower victory, he didn’t admit this secret to his room or anyone else.

The bedroom

He didn’t discuss it with Peter, his twelve-year-old brother who shared the bedroom, or with his parents.

Or with Pat, his eight-year-old brother who, for some reason, never understood, had the bedroom behind the other dormer, ALL TO HIMSELF.

The record player lay on a table between Peter and his beds. Next to it, an orange transistor radio sat on his side of the surface. He had gotten it for his 13th birthday. It opened up a private world of rock and roll introduced by disc jockey Lou Gutenberg of KSTT in Davenport, Iowa.

On a table just inside the bedroom door squatted a large window fan. During hot summer nights, the dormer window, two feet from his bed, would be open, the thin cotton drapes fluttering, the fan rumbling, and he would be alone with his thoughts and a single white earphone in his left ear. Lou introduced him to In My Room. It meant something to him because he didn’t have a room alone and didn’t speak out loud about his feelings of inferiority.

Instead, he lied to Jim about General Science.

Track II

Until he took the Graduate Record Exam at 27, he never scored well on achievement tests such as the Iowa Test for Basic Skills. One year, he’d be up and the next down, sometimes way down.

As a result, when he started high school in 1963, he was put in General Science and World History, two Track II courses, for students who likely would not be going to college.

All his friends at his private Catholic school, every single one, were only in Track I subjects. The same was true of Jim at his school in Des Moines.

At 14, he was oblivious to a lot in his little world. But he knew exactly what Track II meant. He felt the II on his forehead as he read about Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne’s A of Shame in Track I English that year.

So when Jim started to talk about his first year in high school, he saw his science notebook lying on his bed. What should he say? After the first few weeks of school, he knew Mr. Jepsen’s Science was easy. And he knew it was easy because school officials and teachers had such low expectations of students like him.

Later in life, he would understand that figuring out how to mow a 10% gradient lawn horizontally and seeing the context of his school’s tracking system would be signs of intelligence.

But all he could muster in that bedroom at 14 was an “I can’t believe how hard my Science class is” as he held his red science notebook up, far enough away so that Jim would not be tempted to snatch it away.

The mystic chords of memory

I no longer believe in the God of my childhood.

The God who commanded me to honor my Father.

However, try as I might, I can’t leave God behind. The religion section of my library includes well-worn covers.

The most worn is the late Protestant theologian Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity, which describes two worldviews, religious and non-religious.

The religious worldview believes there is a nonmaterial level of reality, a MORE.

In my 75th year, the forest is more compelling than the trees.

I attended my high school class of 1967’s 55-year reunion two years ago.

Our graduating class was around 250.

One of my classmates, Diane, approached me and said, “You know, Paul, you and I are the only ones in our class who earned a Ph.D.”

As we chatted, I thought about that 14-year-old kid desperate to hide the shame of not being smart enough from his cousin.

And how that desperation to prove oneself has never gone away.

Next month, a few extended family members are meeting for lunch. Jim will be there.

Whenever we meet, we talk about shared experiences growing up. About a year ago, he told me his father, my Uncle Al, made him pay for his high school education at the private school he attended. So, Jim worked late nights and weekends at the Post Office.

All of a sudden, I saw my cousin in a different light.

In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the “mystic chords of memory.”

My teenage bedroom memories are linked to a chord not so mystic.

Still, they’ve traveled a long way accompanied by a soundtrack.

Lincoln used his interpretation of American history to explain America to its people.

To give them a sense of who they are.

My memories do the same for me.

I hope yours does for you.