Rebecca and I just returned from a 44-day journey of six legs: Decorah to St. Louis; St. Louis to San Miguel, Mexico; San Miguel to St. Louis; St. Louis to Boston; Boston to St. Louis; St. Louis to Decorah.
12 stops and 6376 miles.
Let’s call it Odyssey-lite, with no Homer, no Calypso, and no Mediterranean.
But we did experience:
Five Ubers; four seasons and airports; three beds and coffee makers; two snow storms, languages and Cartel executions; one Bidet, Bat Mitzvah and Rotary Meeting; .5 Boston Benji’s, and zero travel delays.
Photo of Benji by the author
The Cartel executions were just to see if you were reading closely — an old teacher’s trick. It happened three blocks from our San Miguel apartment. We know nothing!
Yesterday, we unpacked, sipped gin and tonics, cooked and ate broiled Salmon, were introduced to Bad Bunny, collapsed, and dreamt of terriers, rabbits, and The Godfather.
Yesterday, early morning, but not too early, Aviv came into the kitchen just as I was jackhammering a story. I’d been up for two hours working on a tale I had started the day before. It was what I think of as a constipated product; taking a very long time, with little to show thus far.
“I’ve got a question,” he offered. Oh, oh, I thought. He’s going to ask if I’m interested in going up with him in his single-engine airplane. Or maybe today is the weekday he takes a dip in the frigid Marblehead water. Aviv is Rebecca’s son-in-law, and we are visiting for his daughter Sivan’s Bat Mitzvah.
“Are you and Rebecca interested in going to Rotary with me today?”
“Did you know Rebecca and I joined Rotary a year ago?” I replied.
“Really? Then you know there’s usually a speaker after lunch. Would you guys like to talk to our group?”
“That’s a relief. I thought you were going to ask me to go flying or swimming. Instead, all you want is for us to speak to a group of strangers. Do you have a topic in mind?”
“You travel a lot. Maybe talk about that.”
And that is what we did. Which reminded me of Popeye. More on why in a minute.
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Deanna Bugalski 💋 asks whether we are optimists or pessimists. I think people who create something every day, including writers like you and me, must lean toward the former, hopefulness. Routinely, we bring something into the world that didn’t exist before. That proves, to me, tomorrow can be different from today.
Dissimilar could be worse. However, I believe the movement toward a better world that, at times, seems glacial or, sorry to repeat, constipated, is inexorable. If I knew nothing about the who, what, when, or where I would be born again, I would choose now.
The early 21st century is better in a thousand ways than any other time period. Part of the reason is travel, where people from nation A meet people from nation B. It becomes harder to hate and to fear those whom you have met.
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So yesterday morning, Rebecca and I brainstormed about our travel talk. Among our many destinations was the tiny island of Malta in the Mediterranean, where we spent the spring of 2018 with a group of Luther students and where the 1980 film Popeye was made. Here they are outside the Vatican.
What a phenomenal group of young people, who made this four-month travel experience for Rebecca and me a peak experience. From our Malta base, we took our students to Morocco, Croatia, and Italy.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
Our Rotary 20-minute travelogue, something that hadn’t existed when Aviv came into the kitchen nook, was a hit with our audience of 30, who asked lots of questions and awarded us honorary members of the Marblehead Rotary.
Photo by Allison Richards of me, Rebecca, and Aviv
Our tiny drop into the ocean of human interconnections.
Mindfulness, for example, living moment by moment, gets easier. It’s a matter of survival.
Rebecca and I are visiting her daughter, Emily, and family in Marblehead, Massachusetts, for granddaughter Sivan’s Bat Mitzvah.
Oh, to be 13 again. Or maybe not.
Two days ago, the morning after we arrived, I slipped on the first photo step from the kitchen to the hallway where the guest bedroom resides. Mind you, I didn’t fall but missed the step as my eye was on the door to our room.
Yesterday, I overlooked a similar footfall between the kitchen and the living room because I was watching the window, where I could see the new house going up next door.
Today, Emily asked me to carry two cardtable chairs from the basement to the dining room.
Photo by the author
Before greedily grasping two, I reconnoitered the enemy territory, observing handrails on opposite sides, and adjusted accordingly.
My brother Peter died four days ago, four months after our brother Pat succumbed. Peter was 74 and Pat, 70. Cancer took them both, as it did our father, Paul Sr., at 71 in 1993. Dody Gardner’s body wore out at 96 in 2017.
That leaves me.
Do you remember the scene in Home Alone when eight-year-old Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), tormented by his family, wishes they would disappear?
Of course, they do, with hilarious results, but they come back.
Mine won’t, ever.
The deaths of my brothers have prompted me to think of my parents with gratitude. Here they are in 1952, with Peter and me crawling on the living floor out of sight and Pat on the horizon.
Photo of Dody and Paul Gardner from a family album
How did you do it? Nurture three such different boys to manhood.
Endings are eventually melancholic. It’s the one last standing who ponders the wonder of it all.
To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, four years ago, when I started writing on Medium, I was just a kid of 72 with a dream; a rookie who, like Sergeant Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes, “knew nothing” about this publishing platform.
Fortunately, over the decades, I had learned to search out mentors when entering unfamiliar territory.
What’s Crow’s Feet, I wondered? Frank offered this description: It’s a publication with editors who help writers. Its theme is aging, something I know about. All that sounded, well, professional. Isn’t that what I’m looking for? I also didn’t plan to write for money.
Moreover, I liked Frank’s conversational style. Maybe this forum values that kind of writing. Had I found a kindred soul? Perhaps there are others like him. And he’s 96 and still in the game.
So I shadowed Frank over his final year. And accumulated other guides, followers, and readers.
I’m now 76 and this is Medium story number 786. And, wonder of wonders, I’ve helped more than a few newcomers. Isn’t that what life is all about, playing decency forward.
Later today, I will take an Uber to Hospital MAC in San Miguel, Mexico, where Rebecca and I spend January during the cold Iowa winters. I have, what is likely, a minor health issue related to constipation.
The cause of this condition, also probable, was dehydration, common among what my Mexican friends call adultos mayores, older adults. How many times did my two brothers and I say to our mother, who would live to be Frank’s age, ‘you’ve got to drink more water.’
‘But I’m not thirsty,’ she’d reply. Oh, does that sound and feel familiar. What goes around, comes around to her oldest son, with a vengeance. And why I’ve been thinking about Frank. With the first of eight glasses of water for the day close by.
Photo by the author
One of his themes was the importance of water intake. This story is my favorite and uncomfortably prescient.
James Frank Sanders was the first of many Medium guides. When he was alive, his example was helpful in learning my way around this place and writing the kind of personal story that drew from one’s life in a way that made it useful to others. All Frank’s stories began with a unique anecdote, but ended with a lesson for the reader. In an increasingly solipsistic world, Frank was a giver.
Today, especially today, I’ll think about him every time I raise a glass of this nourishing clear liquid on its journey to work its sofening magic on the banks of my intestines.
Tomorrow? It’s always good to end with things unsaid.
Call Rebecca a Tree Hugger, and she will look you in the eye and say, in a combination of steel and sweet, “Well, thank you very much.”
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I read somewhere that we pray for ourselves and not for God. Bending the knee, bowing the head, or raising the arms to something greater than us is a good way to reduce our human egos.
The same might be true for hugging a tree. This photo was taken in 2021 in the Bukovinian Carpathian Mountains in northeastern Romania, where Rebecca and I spent the fall.
Florin Floriol, our guide, is telling us about the physiological, psychological, and spiritual benefits of a tree hug for humans. You can read about these blessings here.
Rebecca comes from a family of huggers. Here she is with her brother, Mike, and sister, Pat, in 2017.
Photo by the author
I don’t. I never saw my maternal grandmother hug anyone, including my mom, who wasn’t inclined toward a squeeze either. The same for my dad’s parents, Paul and Edith, and their five children, all growing up in the 1920s and 30s.
I’m 76 and have ever so slowly become comfortable embracing humans and nature, both in fact and in heart.
Photo of Rebecca and me by guide Ludovic Satmari on the border of Romania and Bulgaria
Regarding nature, I’m still angry about this act of destruction.
Photo by the author
Six years ago, my neighbor had this beautiful three-crowned tree destroyed. I asked him why. He said it was rotting. I saw no evidence from the leaves or the trunk.
THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED IN MEDIUM’S THE DAILY CUPPA, WITH A LIMIT OF 150 WORDS.
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Naturally, he played Billy Joel’s Piano Man with those lyrics of regret. But tiny Johnny’s Piano Bar in San Miguel, Mexico, was no melancholy place. Maybe it was because it was a Friday and not Saturday night, and 6:30 instead of 9 o’clock.
More likely, it was Maggie and James, half of Rebecca’s Spanish-speaking group that meets weekdays at the Instituto Allende. Maggie, a retired jeweller, recently widowed and 85, suggested Johnny’s. James, 65, is a visual artist with a studio at Fábrica de Aurora. From Connecticut, he’s lived in San Miguel for 18 years.
At 8:30, Maggie took out her phone and dialed Uber. Rebecca followed suit with no immediate success. Looking at me, she said, “Let’s walk, it’s only 30 minutes up Aldama.”
“I’ll walk with you,” offered James, “It will clear my head for work.”
I took this photo of Carla Gutiérrez’s La Frontera (The Border) three days ago at the Fabrica la Aurora art gallery in San Miguel, Mexico. Please form your own judgement. That’s what good artists encourage.
I’ve searched and searched, but I cannot find the creator’s thoughts on this painting. In a couple of references, the title was translated as The Wall. The date is 2024. I’m guessing this picture represents a symbolic insult against the Mexican border policies of the United States.
Would you be surprised to know that the “middle finger” as an epithet originated in Ancient Greece? (source) No teacher would be surprised to find an irate student in the story.
The character Socrates in Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds (423 BC) pesters poor Strepsiades on poetic matters, who finally responds with “of course I know what a dactyl is,” and thrusts in the air a middle finger gesture. Apparently, Greek audiences appreciated penis puns.
As did my 6th-grade student, Steve Dehring, who, in 1973, after school, from across the street, flashed ‘the bird’ at me several times when he noticed me looking at him while I was otherwise busied by bus duty. The next day, when I confronted Steve about this in private, he said I couldn’t do anything to him since he was off school property. He was an angry troubled kid who I grew to understand over the next few months.
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Have you ever given anyone the finger? A few years ago, while driving down my city’s main street looking for a parking place, I spotted a white pick-up truck leaving a spot with a Confederate flag stuck in a slot on its tailgate. Damn, I thought, who is this guy? This is the 21st century, and he’s stuck in 1865.
As he was maneuvering out of the spot, I formed the fuck-you signal with my right hand below the sight line of my car window and held it there until he sped away. At the same time, I gave up just enough room, but not an inch more, for him to exit.
I was angry just as Strepsiades and Steve were. And President Donald Trump was roughly at the same time I was snapping La Frontera when a Ford autoworker called him a “pedophile protector” as Trump walked through a Ford plant. Trump’s response, in a widely available video clip, appeared to be a verbal and visual finger.
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I’m also angry at my President for this immature display of his own anger. He seems completely captured by whatever emotion hits him in the moment.
Just as I was with the confederate flag guy, Steve, with his anger toward me, his teacher, and Strepsiades with Socrates.
Anger is a negative emotion that, for me, is fast approaching its sell-by date. It mostly solves no problems and only creates more.
Of course, you might feel different. I welcome your opinion.
Here’s another politician employing this symbol of insult.
A photo of Vice President Rockefeller gesturing at heckling students in 1974
In our world today, does any of this righteous anger really help? Or does it only worsen our divisions?
Ironically, this reflection came from a painting of a Middle Finger.
And I wonder if Carla Gutiérrez’s La Frontera offers a way forward. Certainly, this work of art comes from anger. But it could not have become art in the middle-finger-moment. That required skill, reason, and objectivity.
The MF moment only erects barriers or worsens the barriers that already exist.
That instance in my car embarrasses me because my own anger was a waste of energy. Worse, after I did my business downtown, I spent about 30 minutes driving the streets of my hometown looking for Mr. Confederate Flag, getting angrier and angrier.
This story was written for The Challenge, a Medium publication.
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My Dad wore button-down shirts to his engineering job at Bendix Corporation. After eight years of retirement from college teaching, a light blue Oxford cloth shirt with tiny collared buttons is still my everyday choice.
Paul Sr. was never without a hat and jacket when the weather turned cool.
Photo of my Dad selling his bread products at a farmer’s market
Neither am I.
He used a lather of hand soap to shave rather than shaving cream. Every few years, I buy a can of shaving gel, and it sits in my bathroom cabinet drawer while the Dove in the soap dish dwindles.
After he retired, my father wrote letters to members of his extended family and friends telling stories about his life.
What are my Medium and blog (paulmuses.com) stories but an incarnation of my Dad’s efforts to draw insights from his life and offer them to a wider audience?
Eight years ago, my cousin Jim told me this story.
Linda was out, so I was alone. I had done a bike ride. I believe that I died. I went to a very crowded place. Lots of people of all Different races and ethnicities waiting in a crowded line. I got in line and gradually we moved ahead to what I can only describe as Gates. At the gates, I was met by your dad. He told me that I must go back. “Your work is not done,” he told me in a commanding voice. Next thing I knew was waking up in an insulin reaction on the kitchen floor. I was able to crawl to the refrigerator and get some orange juice. I tried to tell Linda what happened, but to no avail. She says this is all low Blood sugar.
Jim, 76, is a lifelong diabetic. Linda is his wife. They live in Des Plaines, Illinois. After this incident, Jim talked with his friend Bob, who is a Lutheran Pastor. Jim and Bob were in a Catholic Seminary together in the early 1970s.
My cousin dropped out, studied philosophy, and worked in personnel management for Montgomery Ward for thirty years. In retirement, he tutored math and other subjects at a Chicago-area community college.
Later, Jim told me about Bob and his conversation about my Dad’s otherworldly encounter with him.
When Bob and I talked about your dad, this was our main insight: When he and I were in seminar we were taught that no one gets to heaven Without practicing religion. Neither he nor I thought this made sense. You can be a good person and live a good life and earn a place in heaven Without any religion. You may have the opportunity to develop yourself more. Reincarnation and rebirth are common in some cultures. Your father has obviously made it to another level. And is doing the work he is supposed to be doing. “Your work is not done,” was explicit and very direct to me. I’ll never forget hearing it. What work we are to do is always the question.
My father and Jim’s uncle died in 1993 of sinus cancer, at 71. He was an agnostic, I believe, to the end. That skepticism about traditional religious beliefs, like button-down shirts, hats, and jackets, shaving with hand soap, and writing in retirement, is also something he has passed on to me. Or, perhaps a better way of framing this phenomenon, things he and I have in common that I have chosen to embrace.
On January 13, my Father’s 104th birthday, Lynn L. Alexander asks whether we have a wish. When I started writing this story, my idea was to communicate a longing for an encounter with my Dad, similar to my cousin Jim’s, my skepticism about the possibilities beyond our natural lives be damned.
But I’ve changed my mind. I’ve had my Dad for 76 years. He lives inside me. I can encounter him at a moment’s notice. Lynn’s prompt reminded me of this. Perhaps you feel the same about a deceased parent, someone who is gone but lives on inside you.
And yet, his ‘your work is not done’ to Jim sounds so much like him. Which leads me to wonder exactly what occurred eight years ago on that kitchen floor in Des Plaines, Illinois.
This story was written for a Medium Publication, The Daily Cuppa, with a limit of 150 words. It is a follow-up to another story I wrote for Medium and placed on this site, The Beautiful Mysteries of Teaching.
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Several readers asked for a follow-up to this story that concluded with a young student having coffee with James Baldwin in Paris in 1960.
The student was on a scholarship that funded a year of classes at a French university in Paris. On walks through the French capital, she noticed a black man sitting by himself at an outdoor cafe typing on a Remington.
One day, she introduced herself. He asked her to join him, offering coffee and pastries. In 1960, James Baldwin was 37 and had written two novels, Go Tell It On the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and Notes of a Native Son, a book of essays. He left the United States in 1948, seeking artistic freedom outside the orbit of American racism.
Not really knowing who he was, this young white woman met with him several times, finding Baldwin warm, relaxed, and curious about her life.
