Bright, sunny days. Crisp, chill nights. Views of turning leaves, smells of burning leaves. Football weather. Harvesters’ weather. Apples-mashed-into-cider weather.
I love October. Perhaps because, here in Wisconsin, it’s apt to be the last gasp of glory before the hammer comes down. Cold and snow are just around the corner.
If you’re German, especially if you’re Bavarian, it means beer and pretzels. Oktoberfest is so well loved that it starts in September! The Müncheners like to get, you know, a running start.
Tsar Nicholas II in 1912. Public Domain.
V. I. Lenin in 1920. Photo by Pavel Zhukov. Public Domain.
But suppose you’re Russian? A different story—one which lacks the essential element of gemütlichkeit. October 1905 was the height of Russia’s “first revolution,” which began with workers’ protests the preceding winter and swelled over the following months. By October, Tsar Nicholas II was so weakened that he issued an “October Manifesto,” pledging to create a legislative assembly, halt censorship and violations of freedom of association, and expand the right to vote.
The Tsar’s promises defused the immediate crisis, but revolutionary urges kept on simmering. Partisans who wanted to implement the Tsar’s reforms were called Octobrists. Their opponents were Kadets, or Constitutional Democrats, who sought a fuller reform program. In the ensuing squabbles, all political order broke down until 1917, when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks launched a new revolution in St. Petersburg—the second revolution that year.
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Lenin’s revolution started on 7 November, but since Russia was still on the old Julian calendar, the date has always been commemorated as 25 October. The Octobrists of 1905 were steramrolled by another October only twelve years later. Octobrists turned out to be not the bright dawn of a new order, but the last harrumph of the old.
The new order, which began in October 1917, was not all that happy. It spelled death for tens of millions and great suffering for Russia and many neighboring nations.
Sputnik I, 1957, replica. Image by Soyuz235, Public Domain.
On the bright side, the Communist revolution gave fledgling author Tom Clancy a great title for his debut novel: The Hunt for Red October.
Another October victory for Russia was the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, on 8 October 1957, near the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet state. Perhaps you’ve seen the film October Sky about the “rocket fever” induced in young American students by the successful flight of Sputnik. It’s even referenced in my own middle-grade book Izzy Strikes Gold!
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What about us? Does America have any October phenomena to compare with those of other countries? I nominate the good old American “October Surprise.”
With major elections held in early November, we’ve developed a national tradition of low, desperate trickery. If your candidate trails in October, what beter time to cause public mayhem to which your opponent must respond, or drop some obscure besmirchment on your opponent’s reputation, one that’s difficult to understand or pin down? Dropped late enough in October, the October Surprise works because the targeted candidate doesn’t have enough time to make an appropriate response to the situation or marshal exonerating facts.
The thing is, with large numbers of ballots being cast and submitted in the months before Election Day, the October Surprise is losing a lot of its electoral punch. It may go the way of the dodo bird, and then we’ll have to fall back on Jack-o-Lanterns for fun.
My mother delivered me to the world in Galesburg, a small city in West Central Illinois. I lived for several years in Streator, an even smaller city in Northwest Illinois. My family all hailed from the Galesburg area, and Streator is only eighty miles away.
Having lived the last sixty-nine years in Wisconsin, I have taken to calling Illinois people Flatlanders. From the vantage of Madison, that is certainly what they are.
Western Illinois terrain. Photo by Chris Light, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Note hills in background.
But in old times, when I lived in Illinois, my family and friends and I did not think of ourselves as Flatlanders. The country where we lived did not seem flat to us. The terrain, molded but not steamrolled by ancient glaciers, swelled up into knolls here and there. Gradients, though gentle, were not entirely missing. Almost everywhere you could find little gullies and streambeds. There were wrinkles in the land. So although we lived in a flat country, we hardly deemed it so.
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930. Art Institute of Chicago. Public Domain.
Nor did we think of ourselves as silent, taciturn, or expressionless. Just like physical topography, the scale of social volubility is relative. We would not have called ourselves reserved or close-mouthed, although it must be admitted we did not talk as much, or as rapidly, as big-city people. Or Italians, for example.
Moments of quiet stretched on. Nobody felt the need to puncture them with talk. When something needed saying, we spoke.
Yes, people from elsewhere might have considered us reticent.
Grandpa in 1944.
More to the point, emotions seldom poured out of us in torrents of words. Those impulses which did erupt were more apt to be negative than positive; some people, like my paternal grandfather, seemed to express themselves rather too much—in a cranky, critical vein. I never thought to wonder, until much later in life, whether such outbursts were a random personality trait or whether they might be a form of relief from lives spent in suppressive silence.
The novel I have been working on for the last two or three years is based on the Illinois people I came from. When I shared pages with a few fellow writers, they felt frustrated by the flat affect of my characters. These folks in the novel hardly ever said anything that would give a clue to what feelings were inside them. This lack of emotion was mentioned numerous times, and my instinctive defense was always: “That’s how they were.”
But, recognizing that my colleagues had a point, I have been trying to instill more life into these flat characters. They’re more emotional now than when I first started writing them. It remains possible that some readers may still find them flat and, therefore, unappealing.
I’m afraid at some point, I will still need to fall back on, “But that’s the way they were.”
Maybe that’s what this new book is trying to say. People who seem unexpressive may still seethe with fears, anxieties, resentments, and unexpected wellsprings of joy—which they do not bother, or do not dare, to document with words.
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Silence runs in my family. It lies in deep pools with the bones of long-dead ancestors and creeps forward, generation by generation, infecting the living down to the present day.
I don’t know much about this silence, why it prevails, why it persists. It just is. It always has been.
Dad in 1940.
When we talk, we never seem to mention anything that matters. Even those things which are good and pleasant, we speak of sparingly.
Silence can be warm and beneficial. It can spare an active mind the incessant preoccupation with trivia, liberating it for works of consequence. It can foster equanimity, tranquillity, and peace.
But silence can also be malignant.
When my father grew very old, he became talkative. I learned that he had always, even from childhood, envied and resented his eldest brother. Not that he would have mentioned it to anyone—especially his eldest brother.
Uncle Ed and Aunt Mary around 1940.
Uncle Ed became a senior airline pilot, highly respected, even on occasion heroic. He made good money and fathered three children, who had the advantage of growing up in a series of foreign locales. My father’s sour attitude toward him went back to the days of their youth, when, in his view, “Edward always got the best of things.” To hear Dad tell it, Ed dictated the family’s living place and claimed the town’s most genteel, well-heeled, and sought-after young lady for his bride.
I doubt Uncle Ed ever knew of Dad’s resentment. Of course, he might have discerned something off-kilter in their relationship, had he been a very sensitive person. But that kind of empathy does not run in our family.
Everybody today knows the misery being inflicted on Ukraine by our Russian dictator du jour, Vladimir Putin. Not everyone may be aware of the MILLIONS of deaths inflicted by the Soviet Communists under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s. It’s a tale of barbarous inhumanity and suffering, a lingering scar on the Ukrainian psyche.
A “Red Train” of carts in 1932 takes grain confiscated from the first harvest of a Ukrainian village, depriving the local people of their usual source of food. Ukrainian state archives, photographer unknown. Public Domain.
Borden’s book, The Harvest Keeper, tells that story. Millions starved to death on account of Stalin’s social and agricultural policies—forced collectivization of agriculture and the seizure of crops from the peasants who raised them. The famine came to be called the Holodomor, a Ukrainian word that simply means “death by hunger” but carries a strong whiff of genocide.
Was starvation a deliberate tool to destroy the Ukrainian people and prevent Ukraine from asserting its independence? What if it was merely a result of stupid policies enforced by callous brutality? What would be the practical difference?
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933. Photo by Alexander Wienerberger. Public Domain.
Historians may argue about such questions, but Tammy Borden does something better: She shows us the results in the lives and deaths of the people who experienced it. The Harvest Keeper is a fictionalized yet accurate narrative of Borden’s grandmother, Amalia Tomtschik, and her farming family.
A horse of the Ukraine in 1932-33. Photographer unknown. Public Domain.
This is the best kind of historical fiction, at once sweeping and intimate. It gives an up-close view of horrific events, with an eye to small details that were passed down in family stories. The travails of the fictional Amalia closely depict the life of the real Amalia. Her epic endurance and survival are guaranteed to give the reader an equal mix of anxiety and satisfaction, as well as righteous indignation toward the brutal Stalinist regime.
I highly recommend this book, both for historical content and literary power. Well done, Tammy Borden!
BUT FIRST, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR: This Saturday, September 12, from 10 am to 2 pm,I’ll be at the New Berlin Ale House Book Fair, 16000 W. Cleveland Avenue, New Berlin, Wisconsin. Stop and see me. I’ll have plenty of copies of my books, The Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold! I’ll be happy to sell you one, or more than one, complete with the author’s signature! Two exciting historical novels—one more for adults and one more for children. With Christmas coming up, they’re great gifts for friends and family members. See you there! Now, on with the show:
CHICAGO NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST SIDNEY J. HARRIS, followed by millions in 200 papers during the 1960s and ’70s, would loose upon the public, from time to time, a column that was just a series of unconnected observations—not a whole, structured, 350-word essay, like his typical column.
Harris had two standard slug lines for such divertissements: “Thoughts At Large” and “Things I Learned En Route to Looking Up Other things.” Both categories were usually interesting and worth a read. What I have for you today is more in the former vein than the latter.
The thing is an oxymoron. Artifice is a result of intelligence, not a source of intelligence.
God alone has knowledge. People and animals have intelligence. Computers and other machines have routine operations.
Humans, using intelligence, invented the routines used by the machines. Even if those programs can generate further programs with no further human input, the derivative programs and their output are still not intelligence. They are merely routines.
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This is a good place to consider mortality. I tend to reject it, but that won’t avail in the end.
I may just sit here dissolving and slowly melt into the landscape. But it’s not likely to happen that way. Something is apt to go wrong, and wdespite what doctors may do, and things will likely get worse. I hope it’s not too painful.
Is this morbid? Where’s the line between morbidity and mortality? Actuaries can tell you, but I’m not sure I want to know.
One can’t help thinking about such things. It’s good the world offers other topics to the mind: Grandchildren. Writing projects. A lawn to mow. Good friends, good dogs, good liquor.
My wife grows old along with me, so it’s anybody’s guess who’ll go last. I hope, for my sake, that she survives me. I’m not sure I could live without her. You could file that under torrure.
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What is the goal of theology? I mean the main goal, the top goal, the overriding goal, the only real goal, to which any other goals must be subordinate?
All of these are plausible and perhaps worthy goals, but all of them strike me as resting on a partial or incomplete picture of this “God-Man Reality” in which we live.
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I think a more robust overall goal in my Christian walk is simply to acknowledge the sovereignty of God and my own status as a child of God. I think this is, at bottom, what the Book of Job is all about. It’s worth a read, even though it is long and bewildering.
I place great reliance on the immortality of the soul. I believe we are not bodies who have souls but, rather, souls who have bodies. The body is mortal; it dies and decays. The soul persists in God’s universe, and that soul is in God’s care. So the prospect of going to Heaven when I die is not terribly urgent in my mind, trusting as I do that I—my soul—will of course go where the all-sovereign, almighty God assigns it. And that will be right. I will, in a very real sense, go home.
Everywhere, venom goes about as virtue, umbrage parades as honor, and grievance goes robed in the garb of righteousness. But when rage is our proudest possession, we are bankrupt.
Anger and strife are the path to doom; love is the way of life.
God is love, and love is hope.
Love is the way out of our angst and despair.
God’s love is the great truth and the only hope. Those who embrace it live out their lives in joy and blessedness.
I sit in the World’s Best Spot: the center of my backyard on the West Side of Madison.
My domain.
It’s a perfect August day in South Central Wisconsin—the sky clear, a few puffy clouds, no storm in view or portended. The air carries a sweetness from somewhere and a cool touch to banish undue heat or humidity.
Knox County Fair. Fair use.
My eyes are glazed over with ancient motions, amendments, and speeches from the chronicle of Congregational combat open for perusal in my lap for the sake of a churchy book I hope to write. I set the tome aside, glance at my empty wine glass. A small zephyr stirs my sleeve and brushes my cheek.
The cool, sweet eveningness of the air lofts me back to a wild ice-creamy night, a time almost before memory serves: The Knox County Fair, halfway between Knoxville and East Galesburg, Illinois. It must be 1949; if it were ’50 or ’51, the scene would be clearer, more complete.
Livestock. Public Domain.
I know we walked in golden sun from Grandma’s house in Knoxville, along the dusty road to the Fairgrounds, a bevy of aunts and I—Aunt Jo and Aunt Jean and Aunt Sue and Aunt Linda, and one open-eyed four-year-old boy, fog-bound in girls’ chatter yet off on a great adventure.
Trotters and sulkies. Public Domain.
I don’t recall what happened after that: A snort of horses and cows, a sniff of slit-eyed pigs, a whiff of be-ribboned fruit pies held aloft by grinning old ladies, and the day slid into darkness.
I do remember standing in a night-struck field, between the flashing lights of the midway and the ramp where trotting horses made for the track, pulling sulkies with drivers in parti-colored silks. The grass under our feet was stiff hay-stubble, but what got my attention was the altogether novel taste of a wonderful ice cream they were giving forth in cones from a little booth. It was creamy like vanilla only with some other, exotic flavor I had not words to describe.
First you write. Then you REVISE. Then you edit and publish.
Russian writer Evgeny Chirikov. Painting by Ivan Kulikov (1875–1941). Public Domain.
Because revision is an essential step, many writing gurus today advise: “Write your first draft from beginning to end at blazing speed, just to get it down. Stop for nothing—research, grammar, structure, polish—just get it down. It’s great for your first draft to be total crap. You will fix it in the revision phase.”
Your New Favorite Writer does not buy this. Your New Favorite Writer has never bought this. I know of no way to write but with extreme care, right from the start. Gentle Reader, if I had my way, I would write a perfect first draft and have no need for revision. But I am incapable of such a feat.
Thus I revise, over and over again, while producing the first draft of a novel. I go back, re-read the little bit I have written, and improve it based on new insights. Then I go on and write a little bit more.
Using this method, by the time I complete the “first draft” of my novel, what I really have is a fifteenth draft of the early parts, tenth drafts of other parts, sixth drafts of other parts—and virtually no portion of the work that is fresh off my keyboard as a virgin first draft.
Here I stand. I can do no other. (Luther is reputeded to have said that, and I echo him.)
Once I have this multi-layered apparent first draft—what do you think? It still needs revision! Lots of it. I’m talking about author’s revisions, before we get to copy-editing and proofreading.
Let’s raise a toast to the Revision Phase—99 percent drudgery and 100 percent sheer joy.
How Does it Work?
Here’s how it works:
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I place my cursor at the top of Page One. Then, using the “Find” feature of my word processor, I search for every example of “ly” in the whole manuscript. The two letters “ly” commonly appear at the end of adverbs. There are some adverbs that do not end in -ly, like “slow”, “fast”, “often”, etc. And there are -ly words that do not happen to be adverbs, like “lily” or “family.” But most of the -lys I turn up will be adverbs. I examine each -ly word in the whole manuscript, all 342 of them, checking whether it justifies itself or whether that sentence can be written better.
Why do this? Adverbs can easily sap one’s prose of vitality. It is all too easy to sprinkle your writing with suddenlys, quicklys, smilinglys, and so on. Removing many of these adverbs will make your prose read stronger. Sometimes, you need the meaning of the adverb, but there is a better way to provide it: for example, by choosing a more precise verb. Instead of “He ran quickly to the scene of the fire,” you can write “He raced to the scene of the fire.”
Now, here’s the tricky part: There are adverbs that are necessary and justified. Identifying those, picking them out from the disposable ones, is why we writers are paid, as you know, fabulous sums of money.
Having thrown out every ill-advised -ly adverb in the whole manuscript, I go back to Page One. Now, I insert “ing” into the Find box. As with “ly,” there are innocent words that happen to include “ing,” like “spring” or “harbinger.” But most words that end -ing are gerunds (derivative nouns made from verbs), present participles (derivative adjectives made from verbs), or present progressive verbs (“I’m singin’ in the rain”). Many of these -ing words are accomplices in the mugging of otherwise healthy prose. Once again, I interrogate each one I find, asking, “Are you really necessary? Or can I say this better without you?” Each one, that is, in the whole manuscript, naturally.
Back to Page One to look for ands. Then ors. Then buts. Some are indispensable, but a lot of those conjunctions just force two sentences together that ought to stand alone. Each conjunction must justify itself, OR ELSE.
Next, I scan for “is.” Often, that little linking verb is just a way to change colorful action into pallid assertion. Likewise for all its irregular variants—was, are, were, etc. Each one, in the whole manuscript, must be tracked down and made to answer for itself. I show them no mercy.
Oh, and then sensory words like “saw,” “heard,” “felt,” “tasted,” “knew.”
“What’s wrong with those?” you ask. When positioned to act as filters, they remove the reader from direct immersion in the scene. Compare:
Sam Spade smelled dead fish as he stepped on to the wharf.
OR,
The harbor reeked of rotting cod.
The first is a third-person report of the character’s sensory intake. The second actually delivers the smell, from the character’s perspective. Either approach, in a given context, might be the right one. Your job is to know which one it is, in this particular context. That’s why we authors, of course, achieve fame and glory. You must make this choice for each example of sensory words, in the whole manuscript.
There other kinds of words and expressions I search for, throughout the whole manuscript, in this way. I won’t continue to bore you with them. But I must bore myself with them, because detailed attention to—well, the details—helps make a manuscript great.
The Second Part
Here’s a kind of reward: Having ferreted out all those little word choices and whipped them into shape, I get to do the fun part.
Back to Page One. But now, instead of searching for single words or phrases, I read my book, as a unified whole, from start to finish, for the first time. Now, I feel for the flow of language, the logic of scenes and descriptions, the power of syntax, the credibility of motives, the rhythm of rising and falling tension and conflict. I try to take it all in and improve it as I go along.
After this final pass of revision, maybe, just maybe the book is ready to show to my publisher.
That’s the fun part. Just in itself, it takes a lot of time. But if I do it right, it adds to my riches and fame.
Why Burden You With All This?
At the very least, Your New Favorite Writer finally got this off his chest.
Now, Dear Reader, you have some idea why it takes so long to write a book.
So, when it finally goes to print, please buy a copy. Read it, love it, review it, and sell it incessantly to all your friends. Help me become rich and famous.
Satchel Paige. Bowman Bubble Gum card, 1949. Public Domain.
“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”—Satchel Paige’s Rule #6.
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A few weeks ago, I had a sudden loss in stamina. Suddenly, I was huffing and puffing on the tennis court. I walked my dog around the block and had to rest half an hour afterward. I had to mow my lawn in three separate installments over the course of two days. One drink after dinner knocked me out.
Something was drastically wrong.
“You’re getting older, you know,” said my wife.
“I’d have it checked out, if I were you,” said my daughter.
Out of an abundance of self-solicitude, I went to see my doctor. I explained it all to him.
“It’s not like chronic fatigue syndrome or anything like that, Doc,” I said. “I mean, I don’t feel exhausted all the time. I just get worn out easily whenever I exert myself.”
My doctor, a nice young man who knows far more than anybody half my age ought to know, frowned and pulled on his lip.
He had me get me up on his table, and he listened to my heart and lungs, thumped my back, squeezed my calves.
Then he checked my chart on his computer. “You’ve had blood tests recently, and everything looks okay. I’ll order a test today just to rule out thyroid issues or anemia. But . . . .”
He stared searchingly into his computer screen while he tapped on the keyboard. “You were a smoker, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I quit forty-five years ago.”
“I’m glad you did,” he said.
“Me too.”
“But you were never a . . . heavy smoker?”
“I was a heavy smoker. Two to four packs a day for about fifteen years.”
He scowled into the computer. “Well, I’m just thinking, if there was some lung damage and you’re having shortness of breath—”
“You’re thinking COPD?”
He nodded. “Have you ever used an inhaler?”
I shook my head no.
“I could give you one, for daily use, not for rescue. It would let you get more oxygen.”
“Hmm.”
“We should do a pulmonary function test first. It’s the gold standard, for diagnosing COPD.”
So we scheduled a pulmonary function test.
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I must say I was relieved. Now I had a definite plan. COPD made a lot of sense. My mom had it. My dad may have had it, undiagnosed.
I haven’t smoked in almost fifty years, and I’ve never had any trouble breathing. But if all those cigarettes inhaled in a misspent youth actually caused permanent damage to my lungs, that could be just catching up with me now.
I did not like the idea. But it did fit with the increasing shortness of breath I now feel when I do things.
An inhaler might be just the ticket. Maybe it would help me regain a bit of élan.
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“O new Favorite Writer,” I hear you cry, “say it ain’t so! How could you do such a thing to yourself? Why would a person suck in all that polluted air voluntarily, and pay Big Tobacco thousands of dollars for the privilege? Why did you do something so DUMB?”
Well, I was dumb when I was young, Dear Reader. It took me hundreds of years to get to be the wise guy I am now.
By the way, if you were not born soon enough to have lived in the middle of the last century, you wouldn’t believe what things were like back then.
Everybody smoked. Well, almost everbody.
The meeting must have been well-attended. Photo by Kjetil Ree, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0
More than half of adult men smoked, and almost a third of women. There was no Clean Indoor Air Act. Everywhere you went, the atmosphere was stale and blue. Even if you were one of those who didn’t smoke, you could get cancer just walking through a crowded restaurant.
Oh, yes! Everybody smoked in restaurants. Some people took a break in mid-meal to light up a cigarette. They couldn’t put it off till after dessert. There were ashtrays on the tables.
Streets and sidewalks were littered with cigarette butts. People would simply drop them on the pavement and crushed them out under the sole of their shoe. You wouldn’t want to start a fire.
My mom and dad both smoked. I remember being inside a closed car on a winter day, when I was six or eight years old, both of them smoking cigarettes. I complained loudly that I couldn’t breathe. They told me to be quiet.
How could I be a reliable witness to my suffering? I was just a kid, what did I know? Children should be seen and not heard. That’s the attitude many adults had toward children, even children they loved, back in the good old days.
My parents did not want me and my sister to smoke. “Do as we say,” they said, “not as we do.” They tried to quit the habit many times, unsuccessfully until they were much older.
When I went off to college, most of my classmates smoked. Somehow, it seemed to us the adult thing to do. All those famous intellectuals and movie stars smoked. W.H. Auden didn’t get all those wrinkles from existential doubt.
What about Jean-Paul Sartre? What about Beckett?
What about Edward R. Murrow?
Murrow, screenshot from a 1961 TV documentary. Public Domain.
Humphrey Bogart and Agnes Moorehead in Dark Passage, 1947. Public Domain.
Dylan Thomas lighting up in 1937. Photo by Nora Summer. Public Domain.
As college men and women, we considered ordinary cigarettes like Camels or Luckies or Pall Mall or Chesterfields . . . plebeian. French intellectuals, like French cab drivers, smoked Gauloises. In the college bookstore, we could buy English Ovals or Benson & Hedges. You know, really distinguished smokes.
Anyone who was ever in the military can tell you that when your drill sergeant marched your platoon or flight to someplace where you had to stand around and wait for a while, he would say, “At ease! . . . Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.” Or just the laconic, “Light ’em up.” At least we were expected to police our butts. Military streets were not littered like civilian ones.
I smoked heavily most of the years from age eighteen until my late thirties.
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“With all that incentive to smoke, O New Favorite Writer, how did you ever quit?”
The short answer is that, after many failed attempts, I attended a single smokers’ hypnosis session. The post-hypnotic suggestion I was given seems to have worked.
But there is another factor, which I would be remiss not to mention: Society started leaning the other way. Instead of facilitating cigarette use at every turn, Society—that indefinable beast—started to discourage smoking.
Of course there were the standard nonprofits—the Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Tuberculosis Association, et cetera—sponsoring anti-smoking radio and TV spots. But even more potent, the government weighed in. With a whole succession of measures—a broadcast advertising ban, cigarette package warning labels, state-sponsored clean indoor air acts, and sharp increases in federal and state tobacco taxes, they changed the normal expectation from smoking to nonsmoking over the course of a few decades.
Simply put: At the time I quit smoking, in the 1980s, it was easier than it had ever been in my lifetime to be a non-smoker. And the downside of smoking—the foul air, the bad breath, the traces of ash and tar almost everywhere—were so much more apparent when contrasted with the increasing number of smoke-free islands that were gradually created.
My political instincts are conservative. I tend to distrust government and look askance at their motives. I don’t want the people who are supposed to guarantee our freedom to intrude on it instead. But one would have to be a fool not to acknowledge the enormous benefits we have all derived as a result of government action to make smoking unattractive.
My daughter has never smoked. Neither have my grandchildren. Thank you, God.
Those public environmental actions, in addition to the more general Clean Air and Clean Water acts, have given us all a much cleaner environment. Hats off to the government for these accomplishments.
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Spirometry, NIH drawing. Public Domain.
So, I went and took my pulmonary function test at Meriter Hospital. It consisted of putting my mouth on a tube and alternately sucking air in and then forcibly expelling it. This was all done in a glass booth, with the column of air mysteriously linked to electronic sensors which read the results into a computer program.
I got the results on MyChart within a few hours: Normal lung function. No problems. No COPD.
That’s good news, Dear Reader. Great news, in fact. Despite my years of smoking, I seem to have gotten off scot-free.
That should make me happy. But I am crestfallen.
I have no use for an inhaler now. But I still get short of breath and tire much more easily than only a few months ago.
It was a winding watercourse, an evil stream, a creek, but we called it a crick. Like the wryness that seized your spine after you slept the wrong way—“I had a crick in my neck the whole dadgum day”—only in this usage, it denoted a minor flow of water.
The Stink Crick flowed through a wasteland we called The Bottoms, a ragged jungle between the bluffs of Streator, Illinois, and the Vermilion River some eighty feet below. The crick sent a sulfurous odor through the whole Bottoms, that wild gnarly world through which we roved in spring, summer, fall, and winter.
We never supposed that The Bottoms belonged to anyone in particular, as real estate; it was our playground as if we owned it ourselves. It was like the land the boys traversed in Stephen King’s novella The Body, later made into the film Stand By Me. Only we never found a dead body—oops, sorry about the spoiler.
The subcutaneous parts of Jackie Perisho’s lower leg were revealed, however—and you’ve got to admit that’s something.
In those days, I thought the Stink Crick’s bad smell came from the sewage of cheap houses along the southern reach of its meander, but now I doubt that was the cause. I am latterly inclined to believe the all-pervasive smell was the mere outgassing of dissolved hydrogen sulfide from cold water springs in the surrounding bluffs. At least, I hope so.
The smell did not balk us one bit. We scouted the Stink Crick’s basin, ran up and down its banks, along trails faint and broad, at the very edge of the crick, and up over hillocks, through thickets of sumac, wild raspberry, and nondescript green creepy foliage. The lower parts of The Bottoms were choked with rotting trees and hanging, ropy vines.
But we did not fear; we were masters of the jungle, or at least determined to be so. Against the surrounding spookiness we built forts: Indefensible, symbolic palisades of sticks and woven weeds, held in place by twists of discarded baling-wire dumped by some nameless benefactor beside the old shale road that ran down the middle of The Bottoms.
The shale road ran down from the corner of River Avenue and Court Street, through The Bottoms, crossed the Stink Crick on a small bridge, and ran out of the jungle on to a flat plain, which held an old brickyard to the south and a cornfield to the north.
My best pal, Jon Anders, and I, in company with a few friends from LaSalle Street, thought it would be a good idea to explore that cornfield one day, under a hot August sun. We’d gotten about halfway through it when a deep bellow greeted us. “You goddam kids! Get outta that corn right now! I’m comin’ after ya! I’ll get the cops on ya! I’ll tell your mas and pas!”
We ran like the wind all the way back to the Stink Crick and didn’t stop till we got safely on the other side, breathless. It is stored in my memory as an escape in the dark night, with the angry farmer firing several shotgun blasts, narrowly missing our heads. But in reality it was daylight, no firearms were discharged, and we scampered like panicked field mice. The man probably meant us no harm but simply wanted to protect his hard-won crop from damage by heedless children.
I only mention this incident to show you what stout-hearted, Homeric souls we were, and what adventures we therefore had.
If you didn’t go to The Bottoms via River Avenue and the old shale road, you could get there by simply walking down the hill from our backyard. The hill was long and steep, perfect for sledding, half of it bare and half wooded.
You could ride a sled down the bare side of the hill, of course. But what fun was that, compared with riding the Snake Path—a twisting, tortuous track that threaded through the thicket of trees on the wooded side of the hill? We did this on runner sleds, Gentle Reader—Flexible Flyers and American Flyers—and we made them fly!
You laid yourself down on a slim wooden deck, feet hanging off the back end, body kept six inches off the ground by twin steel runners. Those parallel runners gave a fatal directionality to your swift descent. To disrupt that straight-line plunge, in case there was a tree looming—of which there were many on the Snake Path—you yanked hard on the left or right end of the wooden steering bar while planting a galoshed toe to serve as a pivot point.
Once you learned the six or seven hairpin turns on the Snake Path, you could reach the bottom at a pretty good speed. I don’t know what speed exactly, but fast enough to lift you and the sled into the air from the ramp-like hump of earth at the bottom of the path. You flew eight or ten feet, landed with a THUMP!, and if at that moment you yanked once more, sharply to the right, you could coast down the ice-coated shale road all the way to the little bridge.
It’s too bad there was no medal or ribbon given for this feat, for we all earned it many times over, with multiple oak leaf clusters.
Oak leaf clusters.
That bridge, in fairer weather, became the scene of a more sinister moment when Jon Anders and I happened on a couple of local bullies, Paul Reynolds and Tom McCann. They were huddled by the side of the bridge, smoking cigarettes. We probably said something to them about that, like “You shouldn’t be smoking.” We were goody-goodies, and Boy Scouts to boot.
It must have been Jon who shot off his mouth, because he was the one Paul and Tom started shoving around. They said things like, “Who you gonna tell?” and “Mind your own business.” It got tense for a few moments. I could tell Jon wanted to throw a punch, but he held himself in check. The two bullies were each as big as Jon was, but I was a lot smaller, being two years younger. I reckon he didn’t like the odds in that dust-up. Eventually they went away, and we went on about our adventures.
It seemed like any time we got near that bridge, or crossed the crick, trouble found us.
And not just us. The Bottoms and the Stink Crick had it in for girls, too.
One day I was by myself in a tree halfway down the big hill, practicing how to walk out on a long limb, bending it down and jumping off at the last minute—an essential skill for swashbucklers in those parts. I had nearly reached the end of the branch when Cheryl Marvin came charging up the hill, hollering “Get help! Jackie fell and tore her leg open. It’s real bad.”
“Huh?” I said. “How bad?”
“It’s all open. You can see inside her leg and everything.” Cheryl stopped to huff and puff.
“Where is she?”
“Down by the crick!” Huff, puff. “Hurry, run home and call somebody for help.”
I sprang into action. I jumped off the branch and ran down the hill to find Jackie Perisho and see what Cheryl meant by “her whole leg is open and you can see inside.”
When I got there, Jackie was lying on the ground, on the far side of the crick, looking embarrassed. Maybe even mortified, though I didn’t know that word yet.
“Hi,” I said. “What happened?”
“I fell,” she said. “Caught my leg on a stick, and here I am.”
“Yeah,” I acknowledged.
I mean, yes: there she was, all right.
“Looks pretty bad.” I had never seen living calf muscles inside a person’s leg before. “Maybe you should just lay still until help comes. Cheryl went to get some.”
“I know,” Jackie said.
We continued to converse in like manner for several minutes until the fire department’s first-aid squad and a flock of concerned parents showed up. The first-aiders closed the big flap of flesh over the exposed meat of the leg and wrapped it tight in gauze, then put her on a stretcher and took her away.
I never did mention to anyone the fact that by Cheryl’s plan I was supposed to go for help instead of running down to the crick and comforting the victim while Cheryl, out of breath, was left to trudge up the hill and find a responsible adult. I doubt anybody but Cheryl and I ever knew that. And she never brought it up afterwards, perhaps because she did not expect anything better of me anyhow.
Jackie, by the way, recovered. We never had major tragedies in The Bottoms. Only close calls.
One bright summer day some of our relations came visiting from out of town. I took my Aunt Linda, who is about three years older than I, exploring in The Bottoms. I mean, when you have an outstanding local attraction, you naturally want to show it off.
I took her around and showed her all the forts we had built, and the places where the Court Street Gang had built forts that we had torn down for them. And a lot of other neat stuff besides. On our way back, I took a shortcut—a big old log over the Stink Crick, not far from where Jackie had fallen down and opened up her leg.
I scampered across the log as I always did, but I suppose there was some slippery moss or something of the sort on the upper side of the log. Aunt Linda fell in.
It was not life-threatening, but it was gross. Right at that spot there was a little bend where the water eddied and collected in a stagnant pool, about chest deep on Aunt Linda, that was full of all sorts of slimy, stinky, disgusting blackish substances. Smelly, too.
I may possibly have laughed, because she was quite a sight. But she didn’t think it was funny.
I pulled her out and led her up the hill to our house. We made a beeline for the driveway, where our green garden hose was hooked to the side of the house. I turned it on and hosed her down. Though she was upset to be covered in filthy, disgusting slime, being renched down in ice-cold water did not brighten her outlook any, that I could tell.
In the seven intervening decades she has forgiven me. I think.
I could tell you other adventures that happened in The Bottoms, along the banks of the Stink Crick. But you get the idea.
I pulled together some boyhood memories of the Stink Creek, and sandlot baseball and other such things, in my middle-grade coming-of-age novel Izzy Strikes Gold! I had to rearrange reality in order to make a work of fiction—in which the whole is supposed to add up to more than the sum of its parts—but nevertheless, it’s pretty true to life.
All put together, I don’t suppose my childhood doings amounted to a hill of beans. The only thing to commend them is: this is just the kind of stuff life is actually made of, especially when you are young. Or at least, it used to be.
I do wonder if kids today have places like The Bottoms and the Stink Crick, places that give full scope for their curious, questing selves. I suppose some do have them. But a lot of kids today could never have pointless-yet-formative exploits such as Jon and I and our friends had. Many kids, even my own grandchildren, have all their time programmed and every experience curated to remove risk and add enrichment.
We never got enriched and we were constantly in peril. Not because our parents didn’t care about us, but they were just so busy doing important grown-up stuff that they assumed we could keep ourselves entertained.
From having revisited the terrain in recent years, I can tell you that sledding hill is now only half as long and half as steep, and most of the trees are gone. The Bottoms and the Stink Crick, bulldozed and fenced off by a private contractor, are nowhere to be seen.
They persist in my mind, and perhaps a few other old folk’s minds, for a few more years into the future. Then they’ll just dry up and blow away. As if they were never there.
But it was a great place to be a kid. I pray future generations will find enchantments of like dimension.
Friendship is a place of comfort, like this old pub, The Friendship, in Glossop, Derbyshire, England. Photo by Dominic Nelson, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Cropped for use here.
The last two posts in this space have focused on friendship. Why? Because friendship is the chief of Earthly values.
Not truth. Truth is fickle. You labor and strive to arrive at truth; you find it; you latch on and cleave to it for dear life; you tell yourself IT REALLY IS THE TRUTH! Then some bloke comes along with a different truth. Not only different but incompatible. His truth and your truth cannot both be true. Only one can be true, therefore the other must be false.
Now you’re on the horns of a dilemma. Choose Horn One, and you must gird for battle: work up all the energy, wit, and stamina you possess: wage ideological warfare until long after all the cows are safely tucked in bed. You invest gigawatts of energy just maintaining an unshakable conviction of your truth, not to mention the energy it takes to beat your foe about the head and shoulders with it. At this point, Dear Reader, you’re thinking, “Gosh darn it all, I know what’s true and what’s not, but I didn’t sign up for this!”
Choose Horn Two, and you must cave in; just admit the other guy is right. Whew! What a relief. You avoid all the exertion, as well as the hazard of indefensible wrongness. But if you concede at the outset, why did you spend all that time and energy constructing your truth to begin with?
Entropy is breathing down your neck, Gentle Reader. Truth is fickle. Friendship is not.
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We are social animals. We live in a web of relationships. To navigate for a week or a lifetime, you need friends. You need folks who treat you with respect and affection, people you in turn like and respect. Friendship is the sine qua non of human existence.
It’s the most essential essential.
Making friends is a skill. Keeping friends is a related, yet distinct, skill.
A bit of humility goes a long way. Have you ever noticed those who need to be right all the time, those who are loudest in their inflexibilty, and those who need to be the star of the show, have few friends? Their skills do not include the friendship ones.
Facebook says I have 914 friends today. “Oh . . . Facebook friends,” you say. Yes, but I’m not promiscuous online. I don’t just friend anybody I see on Facebook. I estimate at least 8/9 of those Facebook friends are people I know in real life. Folks I would recognize on the street. People I like and who presumably like me, at least well enough to be Facebook friends. They’re not all bosom buddies, I grant. Some are mere acquaintances. But a lot of them are real, durable friends. More than a couple dozen of them are really, really close friends. And I have a lot of friends who aren’t even on Facebook.
Friendship is solid. It’s constant. It partakes of those qualities Shakespeare attributed to love:
“It is an ever-fixéd mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”
Of course friendship can go sour, but I advise going to great lengths to prevent it.
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“So, let me get this straight, O New Favorite Writer. Are you saying friendship is the cardinal virtue?”
Yes.
“Well, what about honor? Isn’t honor greater than friendship?”
Honor has different definitions. It’s understood in a derivative sense.
If honor, in your view of things, is a function of truth—if you must be right to be honorable—then honor is just as fickle as truth.
If honor is what I think it means: Being honest and upright, having integrity, being a mensch—if that’s what it is, then it includes loyalty in the deepest sense; that is, loyalty to a friend’s best self and highest interests.
That’s not something greater than friendship. It is friendship.
May I tell you a secret? I’ve always been conservative. Even long ago when I was liberal, I was conservative.
Now, in all honesty, Dear Reader, most of my friends are liberals. I also have lots of conservative friends.
I don’t talk politics with my friends, nor do I talk politics with my non-friends. There is no point.
I know what I believe to be true; but whatever the truth may be, I’ve still got friends.
The world keeps getting older. You can’t have too many friends.
Last week in this space I extolled friends, specifically those with whom I share a national church-linked existence. They are wonderful people. I place a high value on their friendship.
But, returning from the church convention in Massachusetts, I came back to my first friend: Teddy.
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Teddy is a bear, seeing his eighty-first summer. He gazes from the dresser top as I do my daily exercises. His chubby legs are splayed just right to support his body, his stubby arms akimbo, black eyes glittering, tongue vacant.
He stares at me. I know I must complete all my twists and turns and arm swings, because I’d hate to let Teddy down.
He was my first friend; I do not remember a time before Teddy. We’ve been together more than fourscore years.
I don’t know what he looked like when I first met him. In my first memories, he was already worn and bedraggled. Mom told me that he once had a flapping tongue made of red felt. I must have torn it off somehow, for he now sports only a small red dot where his mouth should be. Without a real tongue, how can he speak?
Sphinx-like, he looks on from the top of the dresser. Silence is his superpower.
What he lacks in loquacity, Ted makes up in loyalty—a key virtue in a friend. Over the past eighty years, I’ve done many stupid things, manifested many weaknesses, harbored petty grudges and neurotic insecurities. Teddy has seen it all. It would be only natural if he held me in low esteem. But, like the best of friends, he never says a word.
Teddy seems content to have watched my evolution from a brash and conflicted child to a wise, if decrepit, old man. He, on the other hand, never changes.
One day I will shuffle off to my next stop on the way to Eternity. I’ll leave behind friends and lovers, child and grandchildren . . .
. . . and Teddy, the only one who has seen it all.
