“Freight train,” whispered Rebecca, just as the second act of The Lion King was beginning at the Chicago Cadillac Palace Theater.
A day earlier, we had taken Amtrak from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, to Chicago for several days of sightseeing. During dinner at trendy The Gage, recommended by our Palmer House breakfast server, Doris, we talked about ‘passenger’ and ‘whatchamacallit’ trains. Neither of us could retrieve freight until the curtain was raised on a twenty-something Simba.
“Did you thank Marion?” I asked. Marion was the character in It’s a Wonderful Life who would have become an old maid if Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey had drowned saving his brother when he was a kid.
We’re in our mid-seventies with word retrieval challenges, which, my doctor says, is normal. She added,
Your brain is as old as you are. Sometimes it takes her a while to pull that book off the shelf.
Photo by the author of Grant Wood’s American Gothic from the Chicago Art Institute
*
“Use your room key to access the 21st floor in one of the three elevators at the end of the lobby,” said concierge John, who handed Rebecca the two card keys. We were in Chicago to see art, architecture, and The Lion King.
You must understand, we’re in our seventies with no priors. But a little cranky after a five-hour train ride and a mile hike with travel backpacks from Chicago’s Union Station to the Palmer House Hotel.
As we lingered in a crowd in front of our assigned elevators, a white haired lady of our vintage whispered, “There’s a service elevator right around that corner with two brown mesh swinging doors. It goes right to the top, no stops, follow me.”
Photo by the author
Over three days, we met housekeepers, janitors, food service workers, and a valet with a toothbrush. They all smiled; two winked.
This story was written for a Medium publication, The Challenged.
*
Meet Steven, a grey squirrel who does one thing very well. His winter survival depends upon it. I won’t tell anyone about the hiding place. Besides, I don’t like black walnuts, even though they were my Dad’s favorite nut.
The unexpected wonder of having a father who was a good mentor, in Dad’s case, with everything from hitting a baseball to how to treat the janitor at work, was to be comfortable looking to other creatures as models of how to do something well.
This short tale is about two confidantes, Steve and his namesake.
He’s a persistent bugger, isn’t he? Otherwise, he’ll starve in January.
Photo by the author
I’ll bet you are, too. And that you have a writing routine. Mine is every day, roughly from 4:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., whether I want to or not. This morning, for example, I didn’t. There are too many other things on my mind. Worries. I’m sure you have them as well. Life throws things at us daily. I’ll wager my friend Steve has bad days as well. Another friend, Keith, loves squirrel pot pie. Fortunately, he lives on the other side of town.
Well, you might be wondering what this squirrely story has to do with Barb Dalton’s excellent prompt for today about what creative skill you wish you had but don’t.
In my case, and at my age, 76 in a few days, I worry about losing what another guide calls ‘the magic of making a start.’ Here’s the other Steven, my human guide, Steven Pressfield, from The War of Art.
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meanings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.” (from W.H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition)
After a half-century academic career, I decided to work at this writing gig , to begin to become a writer. My primary outlet was a personal blog site and then, three years ago, Medium. This is story 704.
My marmont friend is driven by instinct.
Me? I’m honestly not sure. Perhaps, it’s something another writer whose name I can’t recall once said when asked what she loved about writing,
I did turn 76 on September 20th. This was written on September 19th.
*
But there are no guarantees.
Still, I prefer to tip the odds in favor of survival. It’s all about probabilities.
So, I’ll buckle my seat belt when, later today, we go to the grocery store to buy broccoli and black beans for our meatless pasta dinner.
On my daily 10,000-step walk, I’ll look both ways twice before crossing our town’s busiest streets and won’t walk in the area of the park where a black bear was sighted last week.
One month ago, at my annual Medicare visit, my doctor said the two blood pressure medicines I’ve been taking for a year have reduced my stroke chances by 15%.
Today, I feel a little knackered. That’s because it’s spring training for my body as it’s preparing for the fall flu and Covid seasons.
I told my manager my left arm is sore, but it’ll be tip-top tomorrow.
Maaya Rive asks whether we’ve ever been trolled on Medium.
*
I’m the 4th goat in the children’s story “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” My biggest brother threw the bad guy off the bridge, freeing me to walk across in safety.
Thousands of comments over three years of stories, and not a single troll sighted.
Well, someone once wrote something that caused me to delete them, but I can’t remember what it was. I think it was more crazy than mean.
And, sometime in my first year on Medium, still naive of its folkways, I made a snarky comment to a writer I liked and read, but who had never reciprocated. He promptly, firmly, and gently tutored me on his Medium world, which made it impossible for him to read everyone who read him.
Point taken. He was a veteran schooling a rookie. I was older even than the wonder-wielding, swinging-for-the-fences 47-year-old Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in The Natural.
*
Maaya’s prompt about harassment on Medium nudged me to think about the rarity of other bad stuff in my life.
Today is number 27,761. In years, that’s 76. I live in a small town in the United States. Over the years, however, I’ve spent hundreds of days in large cities around my country and the world. To my recollection, I’ve been robbed one time, and it wasn’t by a bad guy coming up from under a bridge.
It was a friendly man in a funny hat behind a food truck counter in one of those big cities, Washington, D.C. It was a learning experience.
Sometimes, it’s easy to take for granted the friction-lit world we live in.
Later today, I’ll walk around Palisades Park, about a mile from our house. It’ll take me about an hour to hike the paved trail.
Photo by the author
Occasionally, I’ll meet someone. Or catch a glance of a dog walker or mountain biker. Or smell a campfire. Or hear music. Or see a parked car with its door open like I did yesterday. And my imagination will take off. After all, I’m no spring chicken and, especially at the top, the park is isolated.
For it’s true, even in our little corner of Iowa, trolls do exist.
“I stopped because my mother always used the phrase, ‘He’s a good egg.’ As a kid, I found that strange because I hated eggs. Your car reminded me of her.”
“Did you see the back?”
“The devil made me do it.”
“I used to have an outhouse on the top.”
“A real one?”
“Empty. Before that, a coffin.”
“Did the police ever stop you?”
“I was a cop for forty years, and finished as the chief of a small town a few miles from here.”
“Why the coffin?”
“A warning. Slow down.”
“I slowed down when I saw you today. Say, was your small town in Minnesota, on the border?”
My small community of Decorah, Iowa (population 8,000), is raising $6 million for an athletic complex that will include three baseball/softball diamonds and eight pickleball courts.
My small former employer, Luther College (student body of 1500), where I taught Politics for 33 years, received a gift of $20 million from a former student to build a new basketball arena (for its men’s and women’s teams) and add a wrestling building, again, for both genders. In the past two years, Luther has added three new sports, bowling for men and women, and wrestling for women, for a total of twenty-two, eleven for the women and eleven for the men.
For twenty-five years, I volunteered to do the shot clock for men’s and women’s basketball games. Each team has either 30 seconds (for women) or 35 seconds (for men) to shoot the ball once they gain possession. Someone’s finger must be on the button. It kept me in a game I cherish, even though I was on the sidelines.
I’ve always loved sports, as illustrated by the books inside the pink circle in the photo of our living room library shelves. Soon to join the top shelf are biographies of college basketball’s greatest men’s coach, John Wooden, golf’s first international star, Arnold Palmer, and Iowa’s own Caitlin Clark.
Later today, I’ll join Mike, George, and Butch for two times around one of the five nine-hole courses within twenty miles of our town. You can’t beat golf and Iowa corn.
Photo by the author
*
Of course, money has corrupted so much of sport. In that sense, games have lost their innocence on the big stage. However, I read about sports because everything in our society can be viewed through the prism of athletics, encompassing the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The Caitlin Clark story is not just about an extraordinary athlete, but about the struggle for gender equality. The same is true for Jackie Robinson, who, in 1947, took one small step before Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of others moved us ever so closer toward the equality promised in The Declaration of Independence.
But it isn’t only about big societal themes.
Today, on the little golf course stage in northeast Iowa, it will be an age-old story, me against a foe, a very cunning, implacable, and impersonal foe, like the blank computer screen. As Arnold Palmer said, there’s an art and a craft to golf.
Executing a golf shot is the craft, seeing it is the art.
Isn’t that beautiful? And so very true of so much in life. It’s about the craft, the doing, and the art, the seeing.
In two hours, I’ll practice the blending of craft and art.
Just as I’ve been doing and seeing for the last two hours and twenty-six minutes.
I wrote this a few days ago, also for the Medium publication The Daily Cuppa.
*
That’s Mike, club in fingers, who is 77, one year older than me.
We’re playing with another Mike and Steve, two brothers, who have also aged onto what we used to call the senior tees.
Not to be confused with an English Tea, often enjoyed by tourists to London who want a “relaxed pace adventure.”
After Mike hits, we’ll need to pick up our playing pace a bit, as four mature women, being straight shooters and excellent putters, are breathing down our necks.
For non-golfers, every golf hole begins with a drive off a flat piece of land called a tee box and concludes with a putt on a green into a hole marked by a flag.
Photo by the author
In the first photo, you’ll notice three spheres, blue, white, and red, designating back, middle, and forward launching spots.
I wrote this short story this morning for a Medium publication that limits stories to 150 words. Pat died peacefully in his home with the help of a hospice nurse who kept him comfortable. The diagnosis was a shock. He dealt with the ultimate challenge head-on, having learned from our dad’s battle with sinus cancer thirty years ago. If any of you live in the Davenport area, the service will be at Halligan funeral home at 10 am on Saturday, September 20th.
*
My youngest brother, Pat, died yesterday at 4 am of liver cancer diagnosed six months ago. He was, according to his oncologist, “the healthiest 70-year-old he had ever treated,” except for the three large tumors. The killer cells likely came from a remaining piece of colon left from a colitis operation thirty years ago.
Pat and Sue, at his home hospice side, would have been married 50 years in 2026. Theirs was a bicentennial wedding, brutally hot, as I recall, on that July day.
I was up at 4 yesterday, as usual. Pat, too, was an early riser. After retiring from Sherwin-Williams, he worked a 2 am to 9 am shift transporting organs between donor and recipient hospitals in southeast Iowa. His age and the stage of his cancer made him an ineligible recipient.
And why, today, President Trump would cancel my project
Photo by the author
The Course
In the fall of 2021, I was a Fulbright Scholar teaching in Timișoara, Romania. I retired in 2018 after almost four decades teaching Political Science to American college students.
My academic specialty was American politics. Being selected for the Fulbright Scholar Program in retirement allowed me to ask myself this question:
What stories about America would give Romanians the most comprehensive picture of America’s struggle to live up to its Founding ideals?
Photo of the sculpture by Ghanaian Kwame Akoto-Bamfo at the entrance to the Memorial
I asked our guide, a young African-American man, why he worked at this outdoor museum honoring the 4400 black Americans lynched by other Americans.
He replied:
Because they tried to eradicate us.
This young man gave me the answer to my question.
To understand America, my Romanian students and I needed to read, hear, and see the voices of my fellow countrymen who had been on the receiving end of this kind of hatred.
A hatred I had never experienced. So I created a course with the voices of black artists, intellectuals, politicians, activists, and scholars.
I titled the course The Black Freedom Movement and American Democracy.
On the first day of class, I shared with my students the PowerPoint in the photo above and told them we would:
Read, listen, and watch the work of Black Americans
Langston Hughes, Nina Simone, Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, Steve McQueen (Artists)
James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass (Intellectuals)
President Barack Obama (politician)
Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcom X (activists)
Isabelle Wilkerson, Nicole Hannah-Jones, Richard Johnson, Thomas Holt, Vincent Harding, Ta-Nehisi Coates (scholars)
One student raised her hand and asked:
Why Black Voices?
Why not American Indian voices?
Linda had lived in America and had worked with Native Americans.
I said a good way to learn about a country is to see it from the edge, from people who were not included as full citizens. In America, that list is long and does include Native Americans, women, Latinos, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, and the LGBTQ community.
I chose Black Americans because of the centrality of the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow to the development of American society.
And because of the centrality of the Black Freedom Movement to the development of American Democracy.
And because many liberation movements in America and around the world learned lessons from America’s Civil Rights Movement.
My Romanian students were doing a Master’s Degree in American Studies.
Many were elementary or secondary school teachers; most worked full-time. We met once a week, for 90 minutes. Each student took 6 or 7 courses each semester in this two-year graduate program. All spoke excellent English.
Their parents were part of the first generation that had experienced democracy after almost 50 years of ruinous Communist rule. They were busy, mature, curious, and opinionated.
So I waited for an answer.
Alexandru said
My voice is important because my interests are different from yours.
Bingo. I clicked to the second slide with this quote by Jennifer Richeson, a Yale Psychologist.
My lab is in an old engineering building and there’s exactly one women’s bathroom. No one noticed. And then slowly, Yale began adding women to the department, and they noticed it. They complained. Now there was friction. What had gone unnoticed by those in power in one era was unacceptable to those gaining power in another. When new people show up, they notice things and begin making demands.
Canceling Voices
Below is a photo of the American Fulbright scholars in Romania during the fall of 2021. Rebecca and I are in the left front row, in blue and black coats, briefly without masks, as this was still COVID time. We are standing in front of the Palace of Parliament, the second-largest building in the world, after the American Pentagon.
Photo by a Fulbright staff person
In June of this year, the New York Times reported that the entire Fulbright Board resigned because President Trump’s State Department, which runs the program, cancelled 200 scholarship grants already awarded through a lengthy vetting process, because they were on topics contrary to the positions of President Trump. (source)
Subjects included global warming, gender, ethnicity, and race.
Yesterday, in a social media post about America’s Smithsonian Museums, the President said
The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’ “ Trump said in his post. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been. (source)
In my Black Freedom course, I included President Obama’s speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches. It’s a beautiful blend of two ideas, in tension. How far America has come on race and how far it has to go. Both are essential stories. The voices of Black Americans are necessary to explore the gap between American ideals and the reality of its practices.
When I think about the love I have as an adult for my late parents, a mature love, it is built upon everything I know, including their imperfections. As a kid, I idealized them, an immature, incomplete love. Now, I’m not afraid to see them whole.
The same is true for how I evaluate my progress as a human being. The sanitized version does me no good.
President Trump wants only the sanitized version of America.
He’s not the first to try to shut down voices; it’s an old American story, as my Romanian students would tell you.
