paulmuses

A week ago, I popped two tootsie rolls in my mouth, one after another, from a plastic pumpkin bucket at the local bookstore. I didn’t feel the pebble until number two. Tomorrow, my dentist will replace the crown.

Two nights ago, we watched Marathon Man, with Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier, who played a Nazi dentist who tortures Hoffman.

Last night, I clinked goblets with a couple who let slip they were in Mensa.Since it was my second glass of Merlot, a few minutes later, behind closed doors, my phone reminded me you needed a very high IQ to be in that group.

Later in the evening, I approached them and described my fear that once I sit down in the dentist’s chair, all I will think about is Olivier’s evil grin.

“Try not to think about a pink elephant,” both said, skipping no beat.

Precisely, thought I.

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In the first No Kings Day protest in June this year, a speaker asked, “Who is our neighbor?” Below, the crowd is gathering in a Veterans’ Memorial Park across the street from Rebecca’s and my home.

Jay, our Presbyterian minister, suggested a few weeks ago in Sunday school that Jesus gave his answer in the Parable of the Good Samaritan: ‘Undocumented workers were our neighbors.’

Our community’s Food Pantry announces its reply on the wall.

The arrow in the picture below points to our neighborhood’s physical location in Decorah, a town of 8,000 in northeast Iowa. We live in a bowl surrounded by forest and dissected by the Upper Iowa River.

The wood and water diversify our co-residents to include the youngsters in the first photo. And their father, who is keeping watch.

Of course, peaceful intercourse requires boundaries — good screens make good neighbors.

Occasionally, we employ stronger measures, with due process protections in place. Our community’s Animal Protection Officer — yes, that’s what he’s called — returned this raccoon to the wooded wild.

Sometimes, we have to choose who lives and who dies.

We chose our birch trees over the Asian beetles, including the one pictured below, that we transplanted three years ago. It had to be moved because we put in a new sidewalk and back porch. Yes, we felt guilty, but so far, it has survived.

You may wonder, what about our human neighbors?

Ed and Carol live across the street from us. We’ve had many conversations in their backyard and also at monthly dinners at Rubyiats, a restaurant on our street four blocks west.

They frequently babysit John and Stephanie’s three daughters, who live one house to the east of them. When they can’t, Jim and Kathy, across the alley, pinch-hit.

A couple of years ago, we caught the raccoon when, while on the new back porch, I saw a skunk walk under Hazel’s back stoop. Hazel lives next to us to the west. The skunk escaped, but the raccoon, who happened to be pregnant, didn’t.

Hazel is 93 and a force of nature. Her three daughters visit regularly to help keep Hazel in her home. Josh, a single parent of a boy and a girl, who moved from Arizona, lives next to Hazel and also keeps a close watch.

Craig and Sarah live behind us, just to the south. Sarah cuts my hair and Hazel’s. Craig built our garage and is completing their new cottage as they move toward retirement. Camrin, their daughter, will take over Sarah’s business and has purchased the family home.

When we need new lens prescriptions and frames, we walk two blocks west.

Some day, someone will cart us across the street.

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I love my Ice Silver Subaru Forester. It’s logged 70,000 miles and is seven years old.

In 2018, I traded a 2014 version because I wanted the ‘new’ blind spot detector technology.

I shopped around, whittling my choices to a Buick Encore and the Forester. Both had the detector, and to my surprise, the Encore had better gas mileage.

However, when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, all my father’s Republican friends drove Buicks, as did he. Today, some of my best friends are Republicans, and they drive Buicks.

I test drove the Encore. It did everything right and was cheaper.

Could I be a Buick owner? After all, my first Forester’s right rear wheel bearing went out at 40,000 miles, which is unusual.

Yesterday, my mechanic removed this failed left rear wheel bearing.

After replacing the right one three years ago.

At forty thousand miles.

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*

My father never beat me!

That thought settled into my consciousness as I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful missive to his son, Between the World and Me, two days ago.

Even when, at six, I climbed up on the chest of drawers and rode it to the ground with a loud thud. Seven decades later, I see the relief on his face as he flies through the bedroom door and sees me laughing with my brother Peter.

But then, he begins what I would come to know as his anger routine: teeth clamped around a doubled-under tongue and hands unbuckling his black belt.

That time, he pulled the belt out. But that’s as far as he ever went; the belt never touched his sons, neither hand nor fist.

When Ta-Nehisi was six, he wandered away from his parents on a visit to a park. When they found him, “Dad did what every parent I knew would have done — he reached for his belt.”

Later in the book, Coates elaborates.

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father beat me qw if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone has lost a child to, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns.

Between the World and Me is written by a middle-aged African-American man to his son, Samori, about what it’s like to be Black in America.

I read it in one sitting, thinking of all the nevers in my favored 76 years. There are many. I’ll tell you about two others.

For thirty-three years, I sped down College Drive, a busy street on the way to my place of employment, usually traveling at 30 MPH in a 25 MPH zone, never being stopped by the police. My Black colleague, James, was ticketed three times in his first year at the college where we both worked.

And, unlike Trayvon Martin, I never worry about wearing one of my two black hoodies during my 10,000-step daily walk around my community.

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I knew it.

My preferred title, ‘Autumn Leaves,’ had been stolen by a time-traveling poet and used for a song covered by Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. As you’ve probably guessed, it’s about love and regret. Nat’s version captures the pathos.

Relevant, as it turns out, to yesterday’s task, as in most of the year, I love our ten trees, only regretting them in November.

Further, two weeks ago, the local hardware store had a week-long Autumn Special on leaf blowers. Ed and Carol, across the street and to the east, had purchased one last year. They are septuagenarians like Rebecca and me.

Besides, they offered, “When the wind blows from the west, your leaves end up on our lawn and we need help.”

Unfortunately, this year, an easterly gale reversed fortune, with no leaf blower in stock.

So we raked and raked.

The autumn leaves.

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This was written for a Medium publication in honor of National Pickle Day.

*

Humans are always screwing up.

When that happens, who do they call? Me, of course, as in

‘I’m in a pickle, this’; ‘I’m in a pickle that.’ It’s better than being ignored like an eggplant. And it ain’t easy being in brine. The idiom fits.

Lately, I’ve heard even the President of the United States muttering my name over and over again. And it’s not only because he likes me sliced up on his Big Macs.

You know it. I know you know it. All together now. Don’t be shy.

Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and onions on a sesame seed bun.

And they say Americans are divided.

Why, I’ve heard a rumor that soon they’ll be Golden Arches in the White House made of the real thing. The President may erect a sculpture of me in front of the new Trump ballroom.

Where I could be mistaken for a you know what.

He’d then be in another pickle, wouldn’t he?

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My tee shot, a duck hook, caromed off one of the pine trees just beyond the gate and bounced back into the fairway. Mike’s was a pop-up, just beyond the entry road, but down the middle.

When we holed out, both with bogeys, around 11:00 AM, I called Wanda, the clubhouse manager. “We’re starting number seven. Could you put two hot dogs on? Thank you.”

Some days are magic, especially for two old duffers in a gas-fueled cart — cloudless, windless, and 60°.

Even the weiners were perfect.

We each had a few pars and a shot or two we could recollect on a snowy February morning. For Mike, two fifteen-foot putts; for me, a six iron at the pin on number four.

On the last hole, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed two young guys carrying their bags.

I stood at attention and remembered.

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Next fall, I plan to teach a Lifelong Learning course on the 2026 midterm elections in America. It will be my 10th class, with Donald Trump sitting in the back row, wearing his red hat.

In January, I’m doing a two-day seminar on James Baldwin in San Miguel, Mexico, where Iowa snowbirds Rebecca and I spend the early winter. The spirit of Baldwin, who died in 1987, understands perfectly Mr. Trump’s vise-like grip on us.

2026 will be my 54th year teaching.

My students have ranged from 12-year-old Steve Dehring, who, in 1973, threw a chair at me, to centenarian Harland Nelson, who, fifty years later, hurled metaphors. Both became friends.

Strangely, I was a mediocre student in high school and college. However, I loved learning, and from my father, I inherited the curiosity gene. And, again, mysteriously, I always liked my students.

Even Steven.

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Please linger a moment with this line, especially the ‘allowed to be free,’ written for the song Blowin’ in the Wind, by Bob Dylan in 1962.

How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?

Ironic, isn’t it? That’s poet Dylan’s point.

Allow means to give permission. By whom? Who gives permission to be free? More to the point, who needs permission to be free?

This language suggests the source of the problem and reminds me of something James Baldwin said in the film I am Not Your Negro.

“I remember, for example, when the ex-Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable that in forty years in America we might have a Negro president. And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear (and possibly will never hear) the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn with which this statement was greeted.

From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.”

I’m a white man born in America in 1949. I’ve never thought my rights — to speak, to vote, to own property, to walk down the street without fear — have been given to me by anyone.

Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, tells me my rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are self evident and endowed by a Creator, for ALL MEN, meaning everyone. (source)

No person ought need permission.

But, of course, in America, the land of the free, they have. The list is long, and includes a litany of out-groups.

Two years before I was born, Jackie Robinson broke American baseball’s color barrier. In other words, he was allowed by those who controlled the game to join the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In the first sentence in the above paragraph, he acts, but only after he was acted upon.

That, in a nutshell, gives the lie to the myth of America as ‘the land of the free.’

Some needed permission; others didn’t.

Some still do.

How many years!

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We shouldn’t lie, even to ourselves

Oh, to be 60 again and pleading with our 90-year-old mother to consider assisted living. The ‘our’ references my two brothers and me. Pat died two months ago of liver cancer; Peter is in palliative care.

Nothing stays the same. Nothing.

Except, well, except the desire by aging persons to stay in their own home. Thus, the title and image. Put another way, history often repeats itself.

There are two senior complexes in our northeast Iowa community. This is one.

And the other.

I waited for a cloudy day to take the pictures.

Foreshadowing.

Both offer the full range of services, from independent living to memory care. We have friends who are from a half to a full decade older than us in both places. One just moved from independent to assisted living. Another into nursing care, after giving up driving last year. He had lost his peripheral vision.

I’m 76, and my partner, Rebecca, is 74.

This is our senior redoubt. It has everything we need on the ground floor.

You can see the garage in the back, with one slot for each of our cars.

We know our body and mind clocks are ticking. Three days ago, we raked the leaves from our eight trees. Two days ago, we trimmed back the garden growth you see around the front porch. Yesterday, we put away the porch furniture.

We used to do all three tasks one after the other.

Now, we work on one in the morning and nap after lunch.

We have a friend, Jon, who is a little younger and in good health, as far as we know, who sold his house and moved into a condo unit on one of the senior campuses. He didn’t want to be a bother to his brothers when he could no longer care for himself, so he’s taken the first step into the assembly line of services.

For almost two decades, I’ve told myself I will not be like my mother, who, psychologically, chained herself to her home until her sons had no choice, as she had started wandering outside at night.

As I sit here writing this story, in the comfort of my home, I worry that I will be just as vulnerable as she was to not accepting that my aging body and mind have placed me in a region where I need help.

My kindergarten teacher said we shouldn’t lie, even to ourselves, especially when it’s so easy to do.

She was right.

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