A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Please stay on the page for thirty seconds so you will count as a reader. Thank you.
All three of us — cap, gown, and me — show our age. The cap is worn-white at each of the four points, the regalia is wrinkled and has never been dry-cleaned in its 40-year life, and I retired from the college you see behind me six years ago. I knew none of the 358 students who walked across the stage, although I had taught several of their parents.
How did this wanted poster guy get to that gown guy?
Photo of me from the 1971 St. Ambrose College yearbook
A straight-line theory of life
I only remember two things from my high school geometry class. One day, our teacher, Babe Derouin, brought two fully inflated basketballs and a hoop into class and simultaneously put the two smaller spheres through the larger one.
Wow.
Babe was also the basketball coach and seemed agitated that day.
But the second piece of geometric wisdom relates to this story.
Babe said, “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”
Was that also how life, not just geometry, was supposed to work? As far as I knew, my dad had always wanted to be an engineer. And my friend Ed, a history teacher.
From A — — — — — — — — — ->B
Over the years, my professor colleagues have talked about how they had always wanted to be teachers, loved being students, enjoyed school, and felt a passion for their subject matter.
None of that was true for the young college graduate in the second photo.
My path to a 50-year teaching career looked more like this curvy bike trail.
Photo credit: The author
A serendipitous theory of life
In 1969, newly elected President Richard Nixon knew America would have to get out of Vietnam. The war was unpopular, with demonstrations routine across the country.
Nixon and America’s military leaders decided to move toward an all-volunteer army. The first step was the introduction of a yearly lottery that would assign a number to all American males born between 1944 and 1952. Thousands of young men, including me (born in 1949), would now know their chances of being inducted.
Numbers ranged from 1 to 365, and those assigned the lowest numbers had the highest chance of being drafted. In December 1969, I learned my number was 66. All my close college friends had numbers over 250.
However, my college deferment would only lapse once I graduated in the spring of 1971, an eternity to a 19-year-old. So I didn’t think about the draft until May 1971 when I received an order to present myself for a draft physical at the Fort Des Moines Army Base in Des Moines, Iowa.
About 40 of us got on a bus in Davenport for the two-hour trip to Des Moines, had our physicals, and returned late in the evening. I was one of only a handful who passed. The guy beside me failed his physical because he was five pounds too heavy and vowed to lose the weight.
Me? Reality had smacked me up against the head. Soon after, I received orders to report to Fort Des Moines in August.
In desperation, I tried the local National Guard. There were no openings. I thought about Canada. I had marched against the Vietnam War and believed it was a mistake. But to leave country, family, and friends for an unknown life? That was beyond the cautious me. Asking around, I learned of another option.
Although I had graduated and lost my deferment, a provision allowed me to receive one additional deferment year if I was a full-time student pursuing another degree. So, I signed up to get a teaching degree. With America’s involvement in the war winding down, that was enough time to put me out of harm’s way.
I became a teacher to stay out of Vietnam.
But that change in life’s direction, represented by the bike trail’s sharp turn, was only the beginning.
Mystery
You see, I had been a mediocre student until the stay-out-of-Vietnam year. That same geometry high school year, I even failed Civics, a subject I would teach college students for four decades.
Something mysterious began to happen during that fifth year of college. It was more than just getting one year older. Unknown to my conscious self, I had committed and made a start — not only to a profession but to a way of being in the world.
Today, I look back on a half-century of loving teaching, learning, and my subject, politics.
This love slowly grew and matured AFTER I committed myself to each.
Stephen Pressfield in “The War of Art” describes it this way:
Something mysterious starts to happen … a process is set in motion by which, inevitably and infallibly … unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose.
Photo of my father, Paul Gardner Sr., from a family album
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This story was published in Illumination, a Medium Publication.
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The Dream
I’m in the back seat of a car. The light blue vinyl seat is ripped. Outside the window, the sea is visible and rough.
My father is in the driver’s seat, his hands clasped around the steering wheel and looking ahead. All of a sudden, he turns the car toward the water.
I watch as it catapults into a crashing wave. The water seeps into the vehicle through the rusted-out holes at my feet.
In the next scene, I’m in the driver’s seat, and my father is in the rear looking out the window.
I’ve had a version of this dream many times, starting around the age of forty. I’m now 74.
Isn’t it a phenomenal dream?
I wonder if my dad ever had a dream like this.
I’m guessing he did because you can only get out of your son’s way if you’ve become a mature, loving adult.
Who then helps his son move out into the world to become a mature, loving adult.
That’s what the dream means to me.
My Father
You’ve already met my father, Paul Sr.
This was my favorite photo of him. My mother, Dody, snapped it at a Farmer’s Market in the spring of 1984, a few months before he would be diagnosed. Back then, for any above the neck cancer, they extracted teeth before radiation treatment. Though he would live for nine years, radiation and chemo would dramatically change his appearance.
That’s his weekend jacket. Even when he wore a suit every weekday, on Saturdays, when it was nip in the air, he threw on a mid-weight coat as I, the privileged firstborn, followed him out the door on the way to donuts.
My father was a chemical engineer who retired in 1980, set up a bakery in the basement, and began developing a line of bread products. My mom served as his senior financial advisor, as she had done throughout their 45-year marriage. All three sons had left the nest but served as taste testers over the three years it took him to refine his skills and product.
My favorite PJ Gardner’s Fine Bread Product was his breadstick, a perfect blend of crisp and soft.
But my favorite image of my father is sitting across a table and conversing with me. Sometimes, we’d get a little heated, like in 1971, around the family room table, sitting in those orange chairs, and arguing about Vietnam.
But, I just knew, he was listening and taking me seriously.
That’s a precious gift from father to son.
“It all starts from there.”
I’ve been listening to Yusuf Islam’s (Cat Stevens) 1971 song Father and Son. Below, I’ve linked you to the lyrics and an interview.
About the song, Yusuf says
Father and Son is as much about my relations with my father as my relations with society. It’s always been that way…That’s what I want to explain in the song. I talk about a father and a son because in fact it all starts from there.
It’s not easy to become a mature adult. We all need a lot of help to get to the point where we take responsibility for our lives. That’s what my car dream meant to me — being in the driver’s seat translates to this is my life and not someone else’s.
There are two voices in Father and Son: a father who talks to the son and the son who soliloquizes. In the second stanza, the son declares:
How can I try to explain?
When I do, he turns away again
It’s always been the same
Same old story
From the moment I could talk
I was ordered to listen
In the language of my dream, the son is stuck in the back seat. He hasn’t broken free to become the author of his life.
Even when my father and I argued — especially when we argued — he always listened. We need someone to hear us, take us seriously, and give us the heft to stand alone.
Or sit alone, in the driver’s seat.
It’s only when we can do that that we can, in turn, encourage others to become themselves.
It could have been my father’s as he was an inventive engineer.
If only…
In 1960, my parents built a two-room addition to our little house: a first-floor family room and a second-floor bedroom.
Wax Santa commemorated the new family room.
Mom and Dad slept on that hideaway couch for the first decade of their marriage.
That’s where I would watch Captain Kangaroo and, on the rare occasion I stayed home from school, I Love Lucy.
They hauled the couch up the stairs when their new second bedroom was finished. It would serve them for another decade or so. This bedroom doubled as our family’s TV room.
By the early 1970s, my two brothers and I had left the nest. To celebrate, my parents bought a new hideaway.
My father died in 1993, at 71, of sinus cancer.
My mother pulled that old sofa sleeper out every night until early 2015, when my brothers and I had to move her to a memory care unit.
In the house, she had lived in for 60 years.
With the wax Santa appearing every Christmas.
Do you have time for another photo and story?
You may have wondered what I have from my father.
Photo by the author
This is my father’s only material legacy to me. The copyright is 1946. He purchased it in the bookstore at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, where he would use the GI Bill to finish his engineering degree.
1946 was also the year he met my mom.
There may be a curiosity gene.
But my father modeled curiosity for his three sons.
That’s what this well-thumbed, yellowing relic means to me.
Nurture more than nature.
Only Santa and Winston from my mother and father.
Both would understand.
My parents were minimalists. You don’t have to get rid of what you don’t buy.
So, it seems natural to me.
To pare down what little I’ve bought or owned.
I take no moral credit for this.
Mom and Dad made me do it.
Before I started writing this morning, I deleted 40 emails. I’m down to 34, and my daily maximum is 30.
For the last month, I’ve been erasing pictures from my 9000 photo library with the ultimate goal of under 6000.
Why?
It just feels good.
And it could be a time machine back to my parents!
Yesterday, I took five books to the free library down the street. Our community has about ten of these scattered about.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Please stay on the page for 30 seconds so your read will count, and I won’t come back to haunt you.
Today’s random word is nook.
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His book nook — that’s what he calls this spot.
Is this where it happened?
I was surprised. He gets up at 4 am and is always in bed by 8:30.
Tell me exactly what transpired.
We’d just finished Fargo’s Season Five, Episode Nine. It was 8:45. He said: We’ve got to watch the last episode.
I was shocked.
How did he look?
Committed.
So, what did he do when Fargo was over?
This is what’s so strange. He pulled the nook light cord. I didn’t think it even had a bulb.
A white man’s reflection on the O.J. Simpson murder acquittal 29 years later.
Photo by the author
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RAGE
When I was a kid in the 1950s, my parents and three brothers would have dinner on Sundays at Dad’s parents’ farm in Tipton, Iowa. Occasionally, Uncle Jim would use the N-word, but its wrongness did not colonize my innocence until years later in college when I read James Baldwin. Baldwin wrote this line, and it has stuck with me.
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.
This rage accumulates from
The millions of details 24 hours spell out that some lives matter more than others.
Baldwin taught me that in America, race always matters. And that nothing about race was simple.
I taught politics to college students for 40 years and retired in 2018, so I’m conditioned to think, even in retirement, about how best to understand my country — what films to watch and essays to read.
When O.J. Simpson died last week, I set aside 467 minutes to view the 2016 documentary O.J.: Made in America. It’s available on Netflix and worth every minute.
I’m a 74-year-old white man born two years after Simpson.
Author’s photo of an image from the film O.J.: Made in America
This image from the film represents how I and most whites felt in 1995 when he was acquitted of the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. (In 1997, a civil trial jury would hold Simpson responsible for their deaths)
Most blacks felt differently.
Author’s photo of an image from the film O.J.: Made in America
John McWhorter explained in retrospect.
The evidence of Simpson’s deed was overwhelming despite the ineptitude of the prosecution team. The verdict and the response to it among the Black community wasn’t a sign of support for Simpson; it was a protest against a long legacy of mistreatment and even murder at the hands of the police.
The film reminded us of the 1991 beating of Rodney King by four police officers and another acquittal.
With this image of pain.
Author’s photo of an image from the film O.J.: Made in America
AMERICA IN BLACK AND WHITE
My Uncle Jim was not an evil man. He volunteered to coach my brother’s Little League team, where he treated Pat’s African-American teammates kindly, as he did all the kids. He was no better or worse than most white Americans in the mid-20th century. But not all. Photos of civil rights marches always showed whites among the crowd. (source)
Thirty years after those Sunday dinners, Jim had a fatal encounter with a different sickness: brain cancer.
It became too much.
The end that broke my father’s heart came behind the barn on his parents’ farm.
Pain and rage.
America is not unique: Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Israelis and Palestinians, Sunnis and Shia, Tutsi and Hutu. Across time and space, the list is endless. Even God has lost count.
Pain and rage.
I was numb by the 467th minute of O.J.: Made in America.
How do I make sense of this human propensity to divide and destroy?
And then be blind to the consequences?
Back to Baldwin:
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Of course, O.J. did it. Of course, that predominately African-American jury in 1995 found him innocent because America was 400 years guilty.
Of course, people rioted after Rodney King.
And the murder of George Floyd.
The murderous means of Hamas, the IRA, and the Hutu militias came from grievances shared by many who did not accept their terrorist means.
Today, what is the tragedy of Israel/Palestine but the reality of two victim peoples sharing the same tiny, blood-drenched piece of land?
Pain and rage.
AND HOPE
Today, most Americans, black and white, believe African Americans are treated less fairly by the police than white Americans. (source)
This morning, when I think about the Brown-Simpson and Goldman jury’s murder acquittal after only four hours of deliberation, it makes perfect sense to me.
O.J. may be guilty, but America is not innocent.
Justice is complicated.
Perhaps we can control people, but we can’t control their pain.
*Today, America is racially and ethnically diverse. It is more than black and white. The current figures are White: 59%; Hispanic & Latino: 19%; Black 12.6%; Asian 5.9%; two or more races: 2.3%.
Thanks to the careful editing of Malky McEwan for Medium’s Entertain, Empower, and Enlighten.
A Drabble is a concise 100-word story that respects your busy schedule. Please stay on the page for 30 seconds so your read will count, and you won’t be among the guilty ones.
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You’re in.
This is it.
What I’ve been working toward all my life.
It was my dad’s dream.
I made it mine.
Mom took me to practice every day when I was a kid.
They said I was too small.
And not fast enough.
Here I am, about to step on the sacred dirt in my hometown.
In front of family and friends.
And Kathy. Who’s believed in me since high school.
Field of Dreams.
I won’t screw this up.
I’m ready.
“Willie, did you hear me? Go in and take the urine test. And you’ll be batting seventh today.”
A Drabble is a precise 100-word story. This Drabble was written for Fiction Shorts.
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Jim woke up feeling confident.
Unusual.
His mother said good morning to him for the first time in a week and added:
“I’ll pick you up from basketball practice.”
On the bus to school, when he looked at Mary, she met his eyes and smiled.
John asked him for his algebra homework, and Jerry laughed at his joke.
In history class, the minute hand moved every time he blinked.
While waiting in line for lunch along corridor C, Jim saw Joe and Tom pushing Bill’s wheelchair away from the boy’s room. He grabbed Jerry and John and led the charge.
