Monthly Archives: May 2025

05.26.25
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Remembrance and Honor

We went to Monona again this year for the Memorial Day Parade. 

Last year, our granddaughter, Elsie, marched in the parade with the Monona Grove High School band, playing her trombone. We were very proud. 

This year she was chosen for the honor of twirling one of the band’s decorative flags, so she donned a special outfit and left the trombone at home. She was not carrying our nation’s colors, you understand—just one of several blue-and-white flags that decorate the band’s arrival as it marches down Monona Drive. She marches ahead of the instrumental players and twirls the flag in a decorative display. We were very proud. 

Elsie twirls the flag. 

This parade is not one of the solemn events of Memorial Day. It’s more like a celebration of community spirit. It starts with a color guard carrying the U.S. and Wisconsin flags. Then everyone in Monona, except spectators, marches or walks down Monona Drive. Many sprinkle items of candy upon the bystanders. Some of them drive old-fashioned cars or huge trucks with elaborate paint jobs. There is a gentleman dressed as Uncle Sam who zips up and down the street on a penny-farthing bicycle. It’s all very grand, and happy.

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Bratwurst on grill. Photo by Dan Fuh, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0

Memorial Day—the Monday observance of the official Memorial Day—is the culmination, here in the Madison area, of a long weekend of food indulgence at The World’s Largest Brat Fest. The event, held on Willow Island near the Memorial Coloseum, features bratwurst sandwiches of all possible descriptions served to enthusiastic consumers in the name of hundreds of worthy charities. It starts on Friday morning with Take Your Brat to Work Day, your annual opportunity to zoom through a quick bratwurst pickup lane and bring a few thousand calories of warm sausages with you to your office, and it ends on Sunday night or whenever the brats run out.

It, too, is a celebration of some kind.

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Veterans—in uniform and with U.S. flags—are integral to both the parade and the brat fest. They show up everywhere, usually being thanked for their service.

As a Vietnam veteran of the U.S. Air Force, I find myself charmed and gratified whenever our fellow citizens thank us for our service. But thoughtful veterans may reflect that not all of us came home to enjoy the blessings of liberty, to chomp the bratwurst, to march in the parade.

Some paid in blood. Some paid the ultimate price. Some laid their lives as a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Memorial Day is about them, about their loss of life, about our loss of their continuing company. It is, on that account, a day of rue and woe.

Franklin
Stanley

I think of my uncles, Stanley and Franklin Sommers, both bomber pilots, both shot down in flames before I was even born. I feel like I know them, even though I never met them.

Billy Harff

I remember Bill Harff, my buddy from the Rattlesnake Patrol in Boy Scout Troop 27, Kenosha, Wisconsin. Billy died of fragmentation wounds near Polei Kleng Airfield in Vietnam in 1968, hit by fragments from a mortar round that burst in the air above him. But I recall him alive and vibrant, pounding tent pegs at a campground or playing a rough-and-tumble Scout game called “British Bulldog.” 

Brian and Ryan in happier days.

I remember Ryan Jopek, the hale, cheery 20-year-old son of my friend Brian. I photographed them, father and son together, before Ryan went off to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2006. He was killed by an improvised explosive device in Tikrit. I know his father feels the loss every day.

There are almost too many to count, yet each one is counted by somebody. Every death is personal to someone. Through blunders of policy or failures of execution, our nation can waste young lives in fruitless battle. Yet those who died in vain cannot be less honored than those who won some clear, unarguable victory. 

They are all ours, they gave their all for us, and the least we can do is remember.

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Don’t get me wrong, Dear Reader. I love my granddaughter, and she looks great in a majorette outfit, twirling a flag. 

For the record, I like brats as well as the next man, maybe even better. 

But we who remember the honored dead ought to say something about their sacrifice, at least once a year.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.20.25
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What Happened Here?

Last week in this space, Dear Reader, I mentioned my trip to the Grand Canyon. A pilgrimage, I called it. But in truth, I just wanted to visit a landmark, to cross an item off my bucket list.

Like everyone else, Your New Favorite Writer knew Grand Canyon from Disney films, National Geographic specials, and the like. But that is not the same as being there. I figured it was about time I joined the park’s visitor list.

I signed up for a week-long Road Scholar tour of the canyon’s North and South Rims. Road Scholar, formerly known as Elderhostel, is an organization that provides educational travel programs for older adults. I’ve taken five of their tours and always found them interesting and enjoyable. This sixth was no exception.

Twenty-four of us, first-timers at the canyon, gathered in Flagstaff, Arizona. Our guides would be Joel Kane and Rocky Sullivan. Joel, a geologist, previously worked seven years as an interpretive park ranger in Grand Canyon National Park. Rocky is a writer and cowboy poet who has also been a hot air balloon pilot and cabinet maker. Their kindness and expertise, and the uniformly warm spirit of the group members, made the trip work.

We spent one day exploring the red rock country of Sedona. The next day, we drove north from Flagstaff past the San Francisco Peaks, through a forest of ponderosa pine, ascending from 6,800 feet elevation at Flagstaff to 7,000 at the South Rim, arriving at mid-morning in a state of high anticipation. 

What would we make of it? Would our reactions echo those of many who have gone before, or is each person’s experience of the place unique?

We stepped off our van at the South Rim Visitors’ Center and walked to the nearby Mather Point overlook. Joel suggested we keep our eyes on the path in front of us and raise them only after arrival at the viewing point. I followed his suggestion.

“All right,” he said. “We’re there. Look up.”

I looked up. 

It was staggering. 

The visual scale was overwhelming. 

This was nothing you could prepare for, nothing I can describe. 

I-Max, eat your heart out.

Charlotte Stone, one of our Road Scholars, views Grand Canyon and visitors from the top of Mather Point.

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For thousands of years, proto-Americans and historic tribes have lived and worked in the depths of the canyon and on its rims. Today’s Hopi, Zuni, Hualapai and Havasupai peoples are thought to descend from earlier peoples who left abundant evidence of their sojourns. National Park Service archeologists have explored less than five percent of the region’s area, yet have found more than two thousand separate sites for study.

The winding green patch in the center of the photo is Havasupai Gardens, a cottonwood oasis once home to Havasupai people until the National Park Service evicted them in 1928. It is now a public campground for Grand Canyon hikers, and belated efforts are underway to pay respect to the Havasupai for past wrongs endured.
John Wesley Powell. Public Domain.

White, European people touched the canyon as early as 1540, when Captain García López de Cárdenas led a small group of Spanish soldiers to the South Rim. But it wasn’t until John Wesley Powell descended the Colorado River in 1869, with ten men in four wooden boats, that the words “Grand Canyon” came into the American vernacular. Until then, the region was unexplored. Powell, a Union officer who had given an arm for his country at Shiloh, put Grand Canyon on the map. Powell led another expedition two years later. 

Fred Harvey. Public Domain.

Then, true to America’s genius for exploiting resources, others began to arrive: explorers, adventurers, fortune-seekers, builders. Many sought gold or other precious minerals. Ralph Cameron built a toll road to the South Rim and filed many mining claims, not so much to extract metal as to snap up choice real estate.

There came developers like the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, which built a spur line from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim; and entrepreneurs like Fred Harvey the railroad restaurateur, who established a grand hotel, El Tovar, on the canyon rim.

El Tovar Hotel.
Vista from Hermit’s Rest, one of Mary Colter’s buildings.

There were artist/explorers like photographers Emery and Ellsworth Kolb, who opened a studio and made the earliest still and motion pictures of the canyon. There were artist/builders like architect Mary Colter, whose structures, often of native Kaibab limestone, defined a new Southwestern aesthetic style.

The lives of these pioneers overflow with remarkable incidents and exploits, enough to fill books and museums in plenty. And the feats of more recent Grand Canyoneers—such as the pipeline across the chasm, which supplies the South Rim’s five million tourists a year with fresh spring water from the less-visited North Rim—are just as remarkable.

The formation known as Wotan’s Throne.

But a question rises in one’s brain as all this canyonesque lore unfolds: What is it about this great vacuity—this vast rancho of open air bordered by extravagant tons of stratified, water-chiseled rock—that re-organizes the people, and even the space, within its realm? 

Maybe it’s something about the geology. Perhaps that’s why Joel, with his bottomless treasury of igneous and sedimentary arcana, is the person best qualified to guide our little expedition. For the canyon seizes one’s attention not just by its hugeness or its sculptural complexity. Rather, it compels one to think about processes. 

The Grand Canyon, 277 river miles long, ten to eighteen miles wide, and more than a mile deep, is the only place on Earth where such a large area of land came to be shaped in this particular way. 

Road Scholars view the canyon from the North Rim.

As we amiable tripmates view the Grand Canyon from hundreds of angles at two dozen different viewing platforms, as we overfly it in a special sightseeing plane, looks of concentration and reckoning pass across the faces of my fellow Road Scholars. This visage is composed in equal measures of disbelief and recognition. It says: 

Something momentous happened here, on a giant stage, over vast reels of time. What was it? What happened here?

Joel explains as much as he can by dramas of uplift, folding, eruption, erosion—thick layers of different kinds of rock laid over one another, then dislocated by earthquakes, floods, and other cataclysms over geologic time. The simultaneous uplift of a huge tract—the Colorado Plateau—all in one piece. And always the irresistible power of water flowing downward. 

Rocky adds human dimensions—a keen knowledge and respect for the lore and practices of long generations of native Americans who have called this place home.

Questions remain, an unsettled feeling. This landscape was shaped by titanic battles among the forces of nature. Yet without us, it’s incomplete. I don’t mean to imply, Dear Reader, that it was all staged for our benefit. But without our presence, without our testimony—without our need to relate to the world where we have been placed—what could it possibly mean? 

Juniper and piñon pine embrace the canyon’s incipient glow at sunset.

We are a part of that we wonder at. If not, then how could we be so moved?

The canyon’s real presence demands some kind of imagination. And then you find your own imagination too small to encompass it. And you wonder, at least I do, what imagination was big enough to create it?

A visit here is a soul event. Maybe it was a pilgrimage, after all.

I can’t write about it yet, Gracious Reader. It’s too big.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.13.25
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On the Road

Given a longevity that borders on surprising, I resolved to offer up, as a form of thanks, a pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon. Dear Reader, Your New Favorite Writer had never been there before, in person. 

I decided to ride Amtrak’s Southwest Chief from Chicago to Flagstaff, Arizona. It’s cheaper than flying, if you forgo a sleeping compartment and settle for a 36-hour ride in a coach seat. But railroad car seats are more spacious than those in airplanes.

Taking the train is old-fashioned and romantic—an enjoyable way to go. You travel across space but also across time.

An inter-city bus brings me to Union Station. It’s a grand old pile of marble that weighs down a full block of real estate beween Canal and Clinton Streets in Chicago. (The passenger concourse and tracks occupy another eight blocks, mostly under other buildings.) I used to ride trains to and from Union Station quite a bit . . . but that was sixty years ago.  

The concourse at Chicago’s Union Station in 1956. Chicago Tribune photo. Fair use.

In those days there was a concourse with a high roof girded by steel columns. It was a dim cavern, crisscrossed at all hours by bustling businessmen, students, soldiers, and starry-eyed kids, their needs met by ticket agents, shops, restaurants, news stands, and kiosks whose lights deflected the gloom up toward a ceiling so distant you had to imagine it. Dozens of dark porters in red caps threaded through the throng, guiding carts piled with leather and Samsonite bags, while in the basement other black men toiled at the Sisyphean task of keeping the men’s room clean—and by the way, you’d better have a dime in your pocket if your needs required opening a stall door.

Travelers besiege Union Station ticket windows on July 8, 1966, after a strike against four airlines operating from O’Hare disrupted flights for thousands of people. Your New Favorite Author, then an airman third class, was somewhere in this throng, not photographed, striving to return to duty in California after a brief home leave. Chicago Tribune photo. Fair use.

Those parts of the station were demolished in 1969 and remodeled into catacombs that may be more utilitarian but are less exciting.

Today’s Great Hall. Photo by Velvet, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Today, Union Station’s Grand Hall—the anteroom, you might say, to the business at hand—is airily majestic, blessed by natural light which filters down from vast skylights. It has benches and waiting areas, an information desk, and miles of clear marble floor that today’s train-riding public is not numerous enough to crowd. It’s a serene, august space. But they still run a lot of trains from there, shooing passengers efficiently through a corridor that leads to the same old shed full of tracks. It’s all grand and functional for the postmodern age, but I do miss the buzz and hustle of the old place and the delicious cheesecake at the Fred Harvey café. 

On this occasion I make do with a quickly gulped BLT club sandwich, french fries, and coleslaw at Lou Mitchell’s, a typical old Chicago diner just down Jackson Street from the station. Then I burrow through the underground tunnel and board the Southwest Chief, Amtrak’s main long-distance train between Chicago and L.A. 

It is an amalgamation of the Santa Fe’s iconic Chief, Super Chief, and El Capitan trains of yesteryear. It follows the old Burlington Route from Chicago into Iowa and Missouri but switches to the Santa Fe main line for the rest of the trip. All these tracks are now owned by the giant BNSF Railway, but back then they were separate companies—the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe—in competition with each other. 

A 1938 postcard view of the Santa Fe streamliner Super Chief. Public Domain.

Famous old Route 66 paralleled the Santa Fe main line through much of the Southweast. Thus, many of our station stops will sound like Bobby Troup’s old song honoring the highway—“Gallup, New Mexico . . . Flagstaff, Arizona . . . Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino . . . .” I’ll be getting off at Flagstaff. 

As the train leaves Chicago, my seatmate is a young man named Max. He’s been in the Windy City on business and is headed home to Fort Madison, Iowa. 

“Fort Madison,” I say. “My mother used to work there, back in the War—the Second World War, that is. She worked at the Sheaffer Pen Company.”

“Yeah,” says Max. “My dad worked for Sheaffer Pen.” I suppose he means his dad worked his whole career at Sheaffer and is now retired. That would make him about my age or maybe as much as a generation younger. Looking at Max, a nice young man in early middle age, I figure the latter is more likely.

“Mom was part of the steno pool there,” I tell Max. 

“Steno pool—what’s that?”

Oops.

I laugh, caught in my ignorance of the passage of time. 

Employees at work in Seattle Municipal engineering department steno pool, 1959. Seattle archives, fair use.

“In those days,” I explain, “companies like Sheaffer—or any big company—hired lots of young women as stenographers, hired them right out of high school. When an executive needed to send a letter, he would call in a girl from the steno pool and speak the letter out loud. She would take it down in shorthand on a notepad. Then she went back and typed it up at sixty-five words a minute, errorless, and brought it back so he could sign at the bottom with his Sheaffer White Dot fountain pen. All the typing was done on a clunky manual typewriter. The job took strong fingers.

“My mother went to Sheaffer’s in 1940, right after graduation, and shared an apartment with three other girls her age. They were in their first jobs and excited to be on their own in the big city.”

“Yes,” Max said. “Fort Madison was bigger back then. But the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Corporation closed a few years back. You can still see their building just as the train crosses the river. It sits empty—nobody’s done anything with it yet.”

A World War II era Sheaffer fountain pen. Image by M Dreibelbis, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

The Southwest Chief rattles down the rails toward familiar Prairie State stops—Naperville, Mendota, Princeton, Galesburg. I feel rattled also by the mere speed of change: how soon a svelte writing instrument lined with a rubber ink bladder becomes a museum piece, how fast the wheels clack over the rail joints, how swiftly Lou Mitchell’s diner and yesterday’s Chicago slip away behind us where the rails come together and vanish. 

On we rush, after dropping Max off in Fort Madison—on toward the high plains of Colorado, the brown sands of New Mexico, and Arizona’s eternal canyon. If the train runs me right, I’ll be in Flagstaff tomorrow night.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

05.06.25
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Ups and Downs

This is a repost of an item that originally appeared November 19, 2024. Although the information is six months out of date, the emotions are still true. Hope you enjoy it.

I’m creeping up on eighty.

At such an age, one ought to have something for the world. Something to leave behind when you go. Wisdom.

Not just any old wisdom, you understand. 

Not just: “Treat people well on your way up, because you might meet them again on your way down.” 

Or: “Don’t neglect to floss; ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.”

Comic Henny Youngman. Public Domain.

Good nostrums both, but I mean something deep. Something universal, touching one’s inner life.

Take emotion. I say that in the Henny Youngman sense: “Take my emotion . . . please!” 

As in, “You can have it. I don’t want it.”

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With me, a little emotion goes a long way. 

In old age, I’ve become a writer of fiction. (See Izzy Strikes Gold! and the soon-to-be-republished Price of Passage.) What we fiction writers principally strive for is to pluck emotional strings in the reader. 

Sure, we want to entertain, we want to inform; but the brass ring on this carousel is moving the reader. Emotion is the gold standard of art.

Ansel Adams. Photo by J. Malcolm Greany. Public Domain.

Ansel Adams, who obsessed over the minute details of photography—lens aperture, depth of field, developer time, characteristic exposure curves of different films and papers, the tonal scale of the finished print—that Ansel Adams, the supreme technician, said: “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” (My italics.) He wanted to express emotion. 

Adams also said, “I give it to you as a spectator, and you get it or you don’t get it, but there’s nothing on the back of the print that tells you what you should get.” He saw that what he strove to express might not strike a resonant chord on another person’s emotional keyboard. But the possibility of doing so was the whole point of his art.

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, one of Ansel Adams’s  most famous photos. Photographed on November 1, 1941, 4:49:20 p.m. local time, as subsequently determined through independent analysis by amateur astronomer Dennis di Cicco. Public Domain.

I show my stories to quite a few people for critique—colleagues, friends, so-called beta readers—before turning it on the public at large. The feedback I most often receive is that my characters seem to lack emotion. They need humanizing. 

Why am I reluctant to inject emotion? 

I happen to like my characters flat and unaffected. Only after several colleagues tell me that a character is too calm and phlegmatic—only then will I revise my work to develop an underlying core of fear, joy, or throbbing pain. 

Once I give in and do that, the work gets stronger and more interesting. From long experience, I know that.

Yet I resist doing so. 

The fact is, Dear Reader, I dislike emotion. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate emotion. I don’t despise it. I don’t abhor it. That would be emotional, which is the last thing I want to be.

I distrust emotion. I look upon it with suspicion. 

Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins. Fair use.

I’m like Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady, as voiced by Rex Harrison: “. . . a quiet living man . . . who likes an atmosphere as restful as an undiscovered tomb . . . a pensive man . . . of philosophic joys who likes to meditate, contemplate free from humanity’s mad inhuman noise.”

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Is it possible to live life free of emotional upset? 

Tilt-a-Whirl. Fair use.

Could it be that life is a teeter-totter, after all? Or maybe a Tilt-a-Whirl?

One Thursday night recently, I dreamed a dream: I drove through pleasant countryside. In the seat beside me was my wife. Only we weren’t married yet. We were still the young people we had been many years before. I sincerely hoped she was enjoying the ride, and liking my company enough to want to do it again. 

But the windshield turned opaque. It grayed out. The car hurtled along the road, but I couldn’t see where it was going. I was terrified. 

I woke up , and it was Friday. 

I dismissed the dream and drove off to Onalaska, about three hours from home, to attend the Wisconsin Writers Association annual conference. There I saw some old friends, made some new ones, and learned a few things about writing and marketing. It was a good conference. 

On the way home Saturday afternoon, I stopped in Mauston for dinner. When I came out of Denny’s half an hour later, night had fallen. I drove south on the highway, into the black.

Strange optical effects vexed the darkness. The sky ahead—which should have been black stippled with small points of light from farms or vehicles—was instead a uniform sheet of gray. It looked like I was approaching a raised concrete overpass, one which kept receding as I drove toward it. 

But the overpass was illusory. In fact, when I did drive under an actual overpass, it caught me by surprise. I didn’t think it was real until it passed overhead. And there, splayed across the windshield before me, hung another overpass—one that I was almost sure was a phantom.

The sides of my vision seemed to be lined with vertical concrete walls, as if the road were passing through a tunnel. You could say I had tunnel vision.

What I actually have, Dear Reader, is macular degeneration—an insidious condition that robs me of sight inexorably, by tiny degrees. These night-time illusions were just the latest symptom. 

Before reaching Sauk City, I decided I will no longer drive at night. At least, not at speed, on rural highways. It’s the first clipping of my wings due to old age. A curtailed freedom.

A day or two later I remembered my odd dream the previous Thursday night. It seems prophetic now.

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Only minutes after my momentous decision to give up night driving, I struck a deer that leapt in front of my car. It was purely coincidental. Because of how it happened, I can say for sure that the deer strike was not caused by my night vision problems. 

Still, it shook me up. But you would hardly know that, Gentle Reader, from the flat, just-the-facts-ma’am, report of it which I posted here last Tuesday.

At any rate, within a space of three days, I had received a fateful prophecy, made a dreaded decision, and incurred major vehicular damage.

Some people might call that a tough weekend.

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One week after the collision with the buck, I traveled to Washington, D.C., in the company of eighty-six fellow veterans, and escorted by my much-loved daughter, Katie,  on Badger Honor Flight Mission 57. I’ve posted that in some detail here and here, so I shan’t belabor it further. 

Stunned by the reception. Photo by Kari Keunzi Randall. Used by permission.

Only: It was something I had never expected to do, an opportunity offered me as if to make up for a decades-old slight from the nation, which I did not grieve at the time. Now that this honor was virtually thrust upon me, I felt such a catharsis of long-withheld gladness—such a glorious rush of love—that I now question the value of this lifelong habit of stuffing my emotions into my back pocket where I can ignore them. 

That’s all.

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Being the Alert and Perspicacious Reader that you are, you will no doubt have noticed an underlying theme to these ruminations: Your New Favorite Writer is getting older. He is tripping over events that may spark strong feelings of a kind that he has little experience of, and little taste for, welcoming in an honest and open way.

You might say a prayer for him, if you’re so inclined.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer