Rebecca and I have been in San Miguel, Mexico, for four days, arriving at the Guanajuato International Airport, about an hour away, on Thursday. This will be our third January in this central Mexican city of about 175,000, and the second esconced in this apartment. Yesterday, we put down a deposit for 2027.
Here’s a midday view from our rooftop.
Photo by the author
It’s 4:38 AM as I type these words. Rebecca is asleep and will be up around 7. This morning I arose at 3:30, a little earlier than usual. My writing stint is before sunrise, wherever I am.
In the first photo, outside the window over the couch, is a little courtyard with a running water fountain. Beyond the font is a door that leads to the neighborhood you see in the second photo.
Somewhere, outside that door, a dog barks, just as she did yesterday at precisely this time.
On World Introvert Day, Carole Olsen asks whether we are introverts or extroverts.
Carole, I’m in the middle, on a border between thriving with others and needing alone time, according to a therapist years ago, who administered a personality test. When she told me this, I thought, that sounds about right.
The best way to explain what this means is my philosophy on screened porches. Here’s our front porch. It sits on one of our community’s busiest streets, with hundreds of cars and tens of walkers passing each day. When did people start owning more than one dog?
Photo by the author
This is our newish back porch, off a quieter street.
Photo by the author
Good screens make good neighbors.
Photo by the author
The extrovert part of me enjoys being with people, even online, which is itself a natural protection, perfect for someone in the middle. For example, I like the Medium community, which includes not only writers and readers but also regular commentators like Carole.
Lately, several Medium friends have returned having tried Substack. My sense is they’ve come back because they miss the Medium coterie, imperfect as it has become.
So too on a porch. I like being a part of the outdoor life of my neighborhood, offering an occasional hello, and engaging in a rare, more extended conversation. But I also need the subtle barrier, the apartness, and not just from squirrels.
Our good friends Ed and Carol across the street regularly sit on their back patio late in the summer day, as Rebecca and I do the same on our back porch. Once a month or so, we’ll take our drinks across the street to catch up on the latest. We’ll enjoy each other’s company for an hour or so and then return to our little worlds.
However, sometimes there is a threat so significant, so obtrusive, so ubiquitous that even the introverts throw caution to the wind and come out in droves.
When screens, fences, personality traits, and other differences recede into the background.
Mark your calendars, No Kings III is July 4, 2026.
I wrote this story three years ago and, on request, republished it on Medium last week.
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Last night, my partner Rebecca turned on the big attic fan. It produced a deep humming, white noise, perfect for sleep. In the 1950s, my parents put a large fan in my bedroom before they bought the first air conditioner. It made the same sound. I still recall my father coming into the room early to turn the fan switch from high to low — a soft hum that eased us to morning.
So I woke this morning refreshed and thinking about beginnings — and A Beginning.
Beginnings
I’ve always loved beginnings.
Maybe it’s because I’m firstborn. I was there at the start of my parents’ family. I absorbed the specialness of it all. Everything was new, possible, waiting to be experienced.
Seventy-three years later, I arrive at basketball games early to watch warmups. Can I pick out the starters for the visiting teams? How do the coaches interact with their players? Does one group have more energy than the other?
An exciting part of the seven Bob Dylan concerts I’ve attended is watching the crew set up the stage after the warm-up act departs.
Every instrument is placed in a precise place. Because Dylan is famous for changing playlists, I delight in watching the same pony-tailed guy replace one piece of paper with another on whatever surface will be closest to Bob. When all seems ready, the crowd quiets. Waiting. Even the memories give me chills.
Rebecca and I attended a Marine Corps retirement ceremony two weeks ago at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia. Rebecca’s son-in-law, Colonel Jason Schmidt, was retiring. I took this photo a minute before the ceremony commenced.
Photo by the author
A setup crew of young soldiers had placed all 50 state flags on their bases. The tallest made sure the crescent tops were positioned correctly. One top kept sagging, and he kept tightening until it finally obeyed.
About 15 minutes before the start of the ceremony, a Marine quartet played eclectic music. Every musician acted with fidelity as if her task were the most important in the world. And the perfect beginning to Colonel Schmidt’s final salute as an active duty Marine.
I took the opening photo on the Sunday before this year’s Winneshiek County Fair. I love fair time. We live four blocks from the grounds. The streets are bursting with energy. Tattooed carnies walk by our house. Groups of teenagers stroll past in the early evening.
We are bikers, and the Decorah Trout Run Bike Trail borders the grounds. We watch the farm kids and their parents bring animals into the buildings the week before the fair.
However, I don’t visit the swine barn because what I most look forward to when seeing the fair is this:
Photo by the author
A Beginning
As I’ve gone through life, I’ve learned that there are beginnings and then Beginnings.
I will co-teach a Lifelong Learning seminar on Death and Dying this fall. This will be my 51st year of teaching. I retired after 36 years on a college campus in 2018. But my first teaching job was with 44 sixth graders in 1972. I had extended my college deferment by one year to get a teaching certificate to avoid the Vietnam War draft. By then, the need for inductees had abated to put me out of harm’s way.
So I’ve always thought I became a teacher out of circumstance. Without a low draft number, I would have done something else. I never felt I was naturally born.
And then, last Sunday, my sister-in-law Linda showed me this photo at a family gathering.
Photo of me and my younger brother Peter from a family album
That’s me on the left, with my little brother Peter. When Rebecca saw this photo, she said, “I’ve seen this teaching gesture by one of your hands many times.”
Here it is in a Lifelong Learning seminar I taught in the fall of 2022.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
And again, one year earlier, from our apartment in Timișoara, Romania, when I was teaching an online course to Romanian students.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
A New Beginning
There’s no date on that photo of Peter and me. I’m guessing 1955 when I’m six, and Peter is four. We grew up in an era when children were seen and not heard. Who knows what that gesture of mine meant? Or who it was directed at? Maybe my left thumb hurts.
But here’s the thing. I’ve always felt comfortable in front of a group of students. Something was there from the beginning. I didn’t see it.
A talent I thought I had created out of whole cloth was, instead, uncovered.
What difference does this make?
Confidence.
I was not a good student until I was 27 and in graduate school. Most of my colleague teachers were always among the best.
I felt like I didn’t quite belong for half a century.
I might have begun an alternative story if I had seen this photo 50 years ago and taken more chances throughout my career. Less tentative, more decisive.
I eventually became a confident teacher. But I felt I had to outwork everyone else. There’s nothing wrong with this.
Except it builds a habit of defensiveness.
I’m now trying to break with the help of that confident, youthful gesture.
She admitted it in a book. But this is about the salt, isn’t it? Finally, Paul! It’s too dangerous for someone almost 80. I’ve been telling you this for a decade.
I’ve aged out of pulling those 40-pound suckers down those stairs. What are you humming — give me a minute…Yesterday?
Neither Rebecca nor I has slept well this week. The excitement of Santa, you think? Well, of course, that’s part of it. And, Mr. Claus, we liked the stocking caps and that you’ve joined the upcycling clothing movement. Your endorsement was the nudge needed.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
But we won’t need them where we’re going. We’re migrating south to Mexico for January.
Some of our friends wonder why Mexico. Aren’t you going out on a limb? What about the cartels?
We asked ourselves the same question two years ago, before our first exposure to San Miguel. Why leave the comfort and routines of our little nest in northeast Iowa for the unknown?
This central Mexican community is now a little less mysterious, and what we’ve come to glimpse — the people, the climate, the landscape, the food, the culture, the language, even the cobblestone streets — we like.
Mike hosted our older men’s monthly book group. It was not his fault that the pizza was cold. It didn’t matter.
That’s retired physician David modeling how to use the torch he brought to carmelize the sugar on top of his crème brûlées. One of us dropped his ramekin. It also didn’t matter as David brought an extra.
Jim, our leader, said he’d had a request to add a 12th member, someone who’d just retired and was moving to be close to their daughter and grandchildren. “Twelve’s a good number,” offered John.
The book was Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies, a terrific novel set in mid-1970s Boston that included murder, crime, power, racism, and the unforgettable Mary Pat, who, according to another character, was someone “who is irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable.”
“That’s my favorite line in the book,” said Bob, “And I can’t quit thinking about it.”
Before another Christmas departs, I wish goodness to carapace your life.
Perhaps you don’t celebrate Christ’s birth. Me neither. But I do admire his life and teachings, especially to love your neighbor as yourself.
Rick, a friend who is a practicing Buddhist and Catholic, waits until this day to raise the tree and to begin contemplating the meaning of this sacred moment, apart from the material trappings.
You know, it’s not easy to love yourself. That’s because, as one ages, it becomes harder to lie to oneself. Besides, Santa sees all, doesn’t he?
I think people who don’t love their neighbor don’t love themselves. So that’s where the work needs to be done, loving yourself.
And not your false self, the perfect one — that’s gotten me into trouble.
No, that schmuck in the mirror, the one with the misshapen nose, he’s precious.
It’s a frigid Sunday morning in the middle of the USA. Later today, Rebecca and I will host Mike and Maggie, two close friends, around this dining room table.
When they come through the back door at the scheduled time, 5 pm, I’ll say, ‘What took you so long?’
One of them will offer a bottle of wine in an elegant, but slightly worn, gift bag that we will reuse when we return the favor in about a month.
Last month, Maggie prepared beef stroganoff, with a mushroom-free serving for me. Mike offered precisely measured Old Fashioneds with square, cubed ice.
Today, Rebecca has planned salmon, Brussels sprouts, squash, and rice. My task is to remember to take the ham bone out of the freezer for their dog, Shadow.
Their friendship and company, like the wine and reusable tote, are gifts made more precious by this Holiday season.
Language matters and reveals character. If I were to refer to a MAGA supporter as dumb white trash, that would say something meaningful about my temperament. Even if you secretly agreed, you would question my judgment. Many rational people would find me unacceptable as a leader.
In 2015, Donald Trump introduced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States with the words Mexico sends ‘rapists’ to the USA.
One year later, Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave an interview in which she said, “He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego,” thus making him a bad choice to lead a country of 330 million.
Many agreed. Mr. Trump, over the next decade, continued to offer daily examples of language most, including some supporters, consider unacceptable.
Now, here we are, with Trump’s despicable references to a man and a woman murdered by their son. This is not a different Trump. This is only the most recent version. Tomorrow, it will be, hard as this might be to believe, worse.
Am I, in this prediction, suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome?
Justice Ginsburg was vilified for daring to focus on the close connection between what one says and who one is.
I’ll bet you did the same when little Tommy was 4, 8, and especially 16. That’s not derangement. It’s called decency. Something we want in our kids. And used to expect in our Presidents.
When someone is perpetually indecent, responding is a full-time job. Not to counter, not to be “deranged” would be crazy.
In 2025, if you don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you’re not paying attention.
Thank goodness for the red light, the Don’t Walk signal, and my stretch pants that made it easy to retrieve my phone from my left front pants pocket. And for my friend Steve, who last year introduced me to the Ventures’ Christmas Album.
That was playing on my car stereo system via Spotify on the corner of State and Water, two blocks from our house. To believe my story, you need to understand my windows were up
I will also admit to you that I know the lady poised on the pedestrian crosswalk. She’s the unknowing star of this story. But I hadn’t talked with her since last summer, when she told Rebecca and me in the grocery store that a dog had bitten her outside Ace Hardware, across the street.
I do indeed know her husband, although, at the moment, I can’t remember his name. It’ll come to me by the end of the day. He retired from teaching high school about twenty years ago—a nice guy who segued from teaching into counter work at our local public library. I’d go to him when I couldn’t get the printer to work.
You must believe me when I tell you he had nothing to do with the incident I am about to recount. Cross my heart and hope to die.
When I backed my Subaru Forester out of the garage on my way to the liquor store to pick up a bottle of our favorite gin, Plymouth, I was feeling a bit down for two reasons. Normally, I’d walk the five blocks, but not on this day because of a thin coating of ice on the sidewalks that hadn’t yet been cleared.
Plus, Plymouth puts a seal on its twist cap that, every week, reminds me of what my doctor said at my last Medicare check-up: ‘We lose 1% of our muscle strength every year after fifty.’ That’s 25% for me. It’s enough to drive me to drink.
The 1964 Beach Boys Christmas album was playing as I reversed my car onto Williams Street. Subaru makes me wait to change albums until I shift to drive. As you can tell from the album photo, the harmonious quintet and Christmas were an odd mix.
Not so with The Ventures, which I loaded once I regained control of my car’s entertainment system. By the time I got to the intersection where this story began, the twangy quartet was one minute into its first instrumental, Sleigh Ride.
As I looked to my right, the crosswalk lady was moving her wrists and knees, yes, not arms and legs, in perfect synch to the Mosrite guitar sound reverberating through my car’s interior. You can read about the Venture’s phenomenal sound here.
For a perfect instant, on a street corner in middle America, the universe aligned.
