paulmuses

Friends,

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.

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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.

The world has lost a good man, too damned soon.

And why, today, President Trump would cancel my project

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?

The answer came to me in the spring of 2021 when my partner Rebecca and I were touring the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

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.

Including Romanians, in 1989.

I then asked the class:

Why is voice important in a Democracy?

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.

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.

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The Power of idioms to help tell a story

Word phrases age and accumulate a kind of wisdom, just as people do.

Is life a crap shoot, good or bad fortune, without rhyme or reason? I don’t think so. Sometimes, stars align. This is the story of two ordinary people who experienced that in their golden years.

A Hair’s Breadth

We almost didn’t happen. Fifteen years ago, on Christmas morning, I was scrolling through saved eHarmony matches, deleting those outside my arbitrary 300-mile limit that the dating site had ignored. I had easily expunged a trio from Chicago, just a smidgen under my restriction.

MapQuest — remember that ancient mapping service — told me Rebecca lived a long way, most definitely not a stone’s throw, unless you’re Roberto Clemente.

Yet, she was different. There was a sparkle in her eye in the photo with the dog in her lap. I liked her face, hair, and smile. Today, she says there was no picture of her standing in the ocean with her grandson, Ilan. Maybe I imagined her legs, but I don’t think so.

All the profiles said their authors “enjoyed reading” because that was one of my “preferences.” Rebecca was specific, including what she was currently reading, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. Of course, I wasn’t reading Che, but I liked that she was. It was an intriguing tell.

However, her Clarinda home was 323 miles from my Decorah home. My right index finger moved the mouse cursor to the delete button…and I heard “Merry Christmas.”

My visiting mother had poked her head through the kitchen door. “How did you sleep?” I replied.

Later in the day, when the dust had settled, I wrote Rebecca a first email on the eHarmony secret highway. I wish I’d copied it. When I wrote it, I had no idea of its historical value. A week later, she replied with something along the lines of Let’s give this a try and see where it goes.

So, my mother’s intrusion into my musing helped bring Rebecca and me together. Who’d a thunk?

Eyes Wide Open

A couple of months later, our first date was in Ames, Iowa, roughly halfway between our homes, the orange circle on the map. I suggested Panera Bread, as they let people sip endless cups of coffee.

The second photo has been duplicated many times, from our first use of these large backpacks in Italy in 2018. Now they are our go-to suitcases, and they do fit in the airplane overhead compartment.

I’ve always thought the image represented what two sixty-year-olds carried into a relationship. “He comes with baggage” — a metaphor and NOT an idiom, you knew that, dear reader — about the issues someone brings with them. Maybe fear of commitment or some addiction.

However, baggage, to us, has always meant, well, what we carry with us that we need. For example, at that first meeting, not more than thirty minutes into our initial conversation, Rebecca said, “My former husband lives in my basement.” Someday, I’ll write the rest of that story. Rich died last October.

Below is a photo of the Wiese family in April this year at his burial. That’s me in the gray sweater in the middle. The rest are members of my partner’s extended family.

They all — three children, three spouses, seven grandchildren, Rich’s sister and spouse, one of Rebecca’s brothers and wife, fit comfortably inside her red backpack. As does Rebecca’s Clarinda home.

And friends. Who have become my buddies.

My black pack is complete as well, with my son, former wife (who lives four blocks from us in Decorah), friends, and house.

Today, we live most of the time in what has become our home in Decorah.We’ve traveled back and forth over the years, usually together, those 323 miles by my estimate, over 200 times.

Occasionally, when we’re packing for our next trip, one of us will ask if they can put a book, sweater, or pair of shoes in the other’s pack.

Of course, we say, we’ll need them for the journey.

A few weeks ago, I watched an 85-year-old Jack Nicklaus slowly bend over to put a tee in the ground. He was an honorary starter at the Masters Golf tournament, which he won six times.

I thought about Jack as I leaned over to take this photo after first stretching my hamstrings. I’m a decade younger and just purchased my first pair of slip-on shoes. I’m almost afraid to say “they feel like slippers.” I’ve never worn slippers.

But they do.

Worse, they work. Meaning, without hinging, I slip my left foot in, then my right, and start walking without tying the shoelaces.

Ye Gods! Aren’t codger shoes supposed to have straps?

And what happened to my grandmother’s ugly, fabric-stuffed rocking chair?

It’s almost like there’s a conspiracy to make aging cool.

Then, everyone will want to join us.

Even Presidents.

A Lifetime Experience in Namibia

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Are you bored?

Will this be a mission trip?

Why?

When we told friends and family about our upcoming two-week trip to Namibia, these were the responses we received the most. Rebecca and I are in our mid-seventies, and six months ago, when our friend Brian Hesse, owner and guide of Cowabunga Safaris, said he had two slots open for his Namibia safari, we said, “It’s now or never.” And, immediately, began second-guessing.

In the last decade, we’ve visited Malta, Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Morocco, Croatia, France, Romania (three times), the Czech Republic, and Mexico. But not sub-Saharan Africa.

We understood our friends’ bafflement. Our eyes were as closed to the possibilities of this experience as mine were in the first photo.

When asked today about our Namibia excursion, our response is as clear as the Namibian sky.

It was an experience of a lifetime. These ingredients are what made it so.

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Brian and Donovan

On our travels, leaders— Mohammed in Morocco, Michael in Northern Ireland, Stephen in Ireland, and Sergiu in Romania — all provided excellent context, helping us understand what we were observing. Guides are teachers, and their countries serve as their classrooms.

In Namibia, Brian and Donovan joined this litany of excellent mentors.

Brian teaches Political Science at Northwest Missouri State. He brought 30 years of experience in shepherding groups through several countries in southern Africa. His daily energy was infectious. I don’t recall a single question about an animal, plant, or geological formation that he could not answer. He truly made Namibia come alive.

Donovan is a Damara and earned a degree in tourism at the University of Namibia in Windhoek. His mother named him after the British rock star Donovan Leitch. Here he is scouting a herd of elephants with a newborn calf.

It’s not as easy as you would think to find an elephant family that is protective of a new member.

As we were observing this scene from our van, I noticed Donovan paying close attention to the bull, the large elephant in the center. “I’m watching his ears. If they begin to flap, that means he believes danger is close and I’m getting us out of here.”

‘Good Guides Attract Good People’

This is our intrepid group on Namibia’s Atlantic Skeleton Coast, halfway through our 13 days. When we gathered early in the morning on the first day, Brian anointed us Cowabunga. By this point, the adventurous spirit bound us together, even the introverts.

The age range was 14 to 75. It proved true what I read on the testimonial page of the Cowabunga site. Good guides do attract good people, over and over again. Several members of our group had previously visited Tanzania with Brian.

For two weeks, our hearty band of 12 ate together, traveled in two comfortable vans on some very bumpy Namibian roads, thoroughly enjoying each other’s company.

As this was the first time they had worked together, I asked Donovan what he liked about pairing with Brian. “It’s the energy, every day, without fail.”

Cowabunga!

Chills

I thought I was too old.

I’ve seen a giraffe in a Zoo. But never in her backyard.

If there’s water, they will come.

Donovan, “A Black rhino footprint.”

And the rest of him.

Questions

What are these phenomena I’ve never seen before?

A termite mound. Tonight we’ll eat mushrooms nurtured by the moisture at their base. Really. It’s decades old. You’re right, it does feel like concrete. I think I get it. These communities are integral to Namibia’s arid ecosystem.

A social weaver bird nest. It can contain hundreds of apartments for this sociable bird and weigh up to a ton. It is an intricate hut with three levels, designed to protect its inhabitants from occasional rain showers and predators, particularly snakes.

The backdoors are accessible only through the air.

Wow.

Namibia: The Gift of Awe

As a child, I remember coming upon a squirrel that had been hit by a car. I wanted to turn away as its little body was still moist and bleeding. But I didn’t because I had never seen the insides of a creature. I guess I was awestruck by something new.

At 75, this Namibian safari has reignited a sense of wonder, which comes from seeing new things or old things in a new context.

There are so many mysteries in this vast world.

It’s easy to sit on our thrones and think we are the center of the universe.

Namibia reminded me that I am but a small part of something much larger.

My ego shrank, while my imagination soared. And I made new friends, of all sizes and species.

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Note to the reader: When we returned from Namibia, I Googled “Awe” and discovered Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. (Amazon). It’s an excellent book written for a general audience.

THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED IN MEDIUM’S THE CHALLENGED.

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Stephen Dalton asks us to find a current match for the cruel remark about commoners, “Let them eat cake,” allegedly by France’s last queen, Marie Antoinette, before the French Revolution in 1789. Marie may or may not have said this, but it stuck because of her indifference to the plight of those in France who didn’t share her unearned good fortune of being born into the royal family.

Unfortunately, in the America of Donald Trump and MAGA, where cruelty reigns and is the point, there are plenty of examples. (source)

Doubly unfortunate, for citizens of my state, Iowa, Joni Ernst, one of our Senators, served a main dish of heartlessness, which she then followed a day later with a dessert of fecklessness.

You can read a terrific article about both here.

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I appreciate Stephen’s prompt because an equally powerful antidote of compassion must counter every thoughtless cruelty. That’s why I am giving no oxygen inside my story to the stupidities of Senator Ernst. For that’s what cruelty is, ignorance interwoven with indifference.

However, I will tell you a little about Chantel, whose hand is featured in the first photo. She was our guide a week ago on a Living Desert tour in Namibia’s Namib Desert.

Before our group of ten emptied into the desert, Chantel asked us to follow her in a single file. As you can see, it took us a couple of tries and gentle reminders before we synced with her plea to remember that everything under our feet is a home to some animal.

Like the sand gecko in the first photo. And the Namaqua chameleon pictured below.

Upon meeting us, Chantel fist-bumped each, explaining that the oils on our hands would put the animals she touched at risk of their predators, using the phrase she learned two decades ago from Tommy, her mentor:

Anything can be anywhere or not.

It’s difficult to separate the children of immigrants from their parents if you hold the meaning of this sentence in your heart. Or cut America’s Medicaid program (health care for the poor and their children) to give tax cuts to the wealthy, or utter Ernst’s inanities.

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THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN FOR THE MEDIUM PUBLICATION THE CHALLENGED.

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All my life, I’ve been a good little boy. That’s almost 76 years of niceness. Do you know what that does to a person?

Of course, there was that time when, in 8th grade, for some long-forgotten reason, I slugged Tommy Grayden in the back of the classroom. But, me being me, I looked for Tommy at our 60th reunion to apologize. It turns out he had died the year before of a heart attack. Naturally, I felt guilty.

I’ve always wanted to be more forceful, like the tennis shoe lady in the first photo. I’ll bet she never suffered fools. Spoke her mind. Instead, I’m like her partner, who sits there contentedly, after a day of pleasing people.

Like my Medium friend Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, who asks us to write about a bad habit we would like to lose.

Who could turn down Vidya?

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Between you and me, I’ve always wanted to be like this fella. And not just because of the apparent reason, though that’s not irrelevant.

I’m guessing he would be someone truly worthy of Vidya’s prompt, like Nick, a high school friend my father wouldn’t let me hang out with. You knew these yobs, smoking after school in the grove of trees across the football practice field. The guys who always had a date on Friday night. Who strode down the teenage hallways and byways with confidence and purpose, knowing they were the true king of the jungle. And grew up to be the man with the swag in the painting.

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Two weeks ago, I made a new friend. His name is John, and he was one of twelve in a Namibian safari group.

Everyone liked John, including our two leaders, even though on at least two occasions he put his rhino-like foot down and said we needed to do things a little differently. One involved the number of stretch breaks we were taking on the gravel and rut-filled Namibian roads, and the other whether we would eat our lunch in the van or on the side of the road.

“I need a flat surface to eat, what’s our hurry?” said John to guide Brian about three days into our two-week journey.

Each time he did this, my stomach tightened, though I, too, wanted what he did.

I admired his honesty and willingness to risk the displeasure of those in charge, which never came.

In fact, by the end of the trip, John’s forthrightness became one of our tight group’s tropes.

“Was I too cantankerous?” John asked me on our last night, after I had confessed to him that I find it hard to do what he did.

“No,” I replied. “Everyone likes you, particularly those of us who are trying to break a habit of people pleasing.”

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THIS STORY WILL APPEAR IN MEDIUM’S THE DAILY CUPPA.

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That’s Rebecca and me last Saturday in the Namib Naukluft National Park between Swakomund and Solitaire, Namibia. It’s day ten of a two-week exploration of this beautiful southwest African country. 

We’re mid-seventies and reasonably well-traveled for our generation of Americans. For both of us, this was our first exposure to Sub-Saharan Africa. It was an experience of a lifetime that we’re just starting to absorb, that I will share with Medium readers in Namibian darkling beetle-sized chunks over the next few weeks.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we returned to the States, in two elephant-sized steps.

5,037 miles from Windhoek, Namibia, to Frankfurt, Germany, and 4,579 miles to St. Louis.

Twenty hours in the atmosphere and twelve in airport waiting areas. It only seemed like a black rhino’s 15-month gestation period.

We returned home wrinkled and enlivened.

 

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Deanna Bugalski 💋 asks what the next fifty years will look like.

How do you think about a half century?

If you’re in my age territory, 75, you’ve probably got images and stories that make time stand still, an illusion, of course.

Or, perhaps, not!

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That’s a bushy-haired, mustachioed, open-Oxford cloth-shirted me under the red arrow in the first photo. I’m with a group of mostly college students marching in protest, a few days after the killing of four students and the wounding of nine more by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. The Kent State students themselves were part of a resistance against President Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. (Source)

The stern-looking older fellow in the foreground looks vaguely familiar. I’ll let him stand in for my father.

This is me eight days ago before a No Kings Day march objecting to, among other things, President Trump’s ordering the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to quell the protests against his deportation policies. (Source). Evidently, I have one uniform for public outrage.

Here’s our northeast Iowa community’s resisters marching toward the Winneshiek County Courthouse.

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Two massive nationwide demonstrations of NO to a President, fifty-five years apart. 

As our No Kings group of about 1000 strode by a Mexican restaurant — one of hundreds in this MAGA dominant Red state — five Latino employees stood in a side door smiling and applauding.

As I looked at them, I recalled James Baldwin’s lament and call to action, from a half century ago, 

The horror is that America changes all the time without ever changing at all.

The next fifty years?

Protesters age out, Presidents accumulate, and the beneficiaries of reform perennially rise to be counted. I’m guessing that over five decades, our grandchildren will again and again and again assert their right to assemble in protest and petition to extend the Constitutional rights of all citizens to weaker neighbors preyed upon by the Confederate-Legacy demagogues and their supporters, who also refuse to go away.

So it goes.

THIS STORY WAS PUBLISHED ON MEDIUM.

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No day contains only one thing, even in our tiny neck of the woods in the middle of America. Yesterday, we woke to the horrific news of political assassinations in Minnesota, just to our north.

The man who executed Democratic State legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and wounded State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette, attacked all Americans. Assassination is an assault against our community life.

I believe in the possibility of public life, what we call politics. It’s not a pejorative word. It’s how we work through our differences, peacefully. For most of human history, the WE in charge was a singular figure, a Pharaoh, a Pope, or a King.

It was decidedly not The People.

So, in the afternoon, joining millions, and under the protection of the Constitution, we assembled, marched, spoke, and petitioned.

Against a President who is acting unlawfully.

A made-up strongman.