Our Indian friend Rushabh took us to see a cricket game—pardon me, I mean a cricket match—at a local park here in Madison. He was kind enough to explain the game to us as we watched, so now I know all about cricket.
Anybody who has ever played baseball can easily grasp the essence of cricket, which was bequeathed to the Indians and others by the Raj. Americans were exempted from the need to play cricket by our timely exercise of the British Empire’s Early Opt-out Clause.
Look, the game’s simple. I will explain it for you:
A cricket match begins when the umpire drives long stakes called “wickets” into the ground with a ceremonial implement that resembles a cast-iron skillet. Once the wickets are planted, he casts an eye upon them to check their alignment, a process known as “laying the battery.”
Then two groups of men shouting in a mix of English and Gujarati assemble on the grassy field where three giant concentric circles have been drawn around the two distinct wickets.
Now, here is where the game differs ever so slightly from baseball: A baseball diamond is essentially a quarter of a circle, with the batsman at its apex. A cricket ground is a full circle with the batsman more or less in the middle.
There can be no foul balls! Anywhere you pop the thing up, even behind you, could be a home run—which is called a “six” because it scores six points.
Arm-waving inflatable man. Photo by Alex Liivet, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.
In all other respects, it’s just like baseball. For example, the pitcher, who is called the “bowler,” throws the ball toward the batter. Only, he’s allowed, maybe even required, to take a running start and fling his arms around like one of those inflatable tube-like advertising dummies you see on used car lots, before delivering his pitch, er, bowl.
The batsman gets to swing at the ball, after the whirling-dervish bowler lets it go, and his main object is to defend the wicket from the ball, using his bat to deflect it wherever he chooses. There are actually two batsmen, but only one of them gets to defend the wicket. The chief task of the other batsman is to switch places with the first one after the ball is hit.
If the ball slips by the batter and hits the wicket, the batter is out. Likewise, if he hits the ball away from the wicket but a defender catches it in the air, he is also out, just like in baseball. Or if a defender fields a grounder and throws it to the wicket before the two batsmen can change places, the actual batter is out.
Defending the wicket from the nasty old ball. Photo by Acabashi, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Each team is allowed ten outs per inning, but the inning ends in any case after 120 good bowls, even if ten men have not been retired, which by the way they call “dismissed.” Then the other team gets a chance to exceed the first team’s points in the bottom half of the inning. Either they do or don’t, and then everybody goes home. After one inning. One lo-o-ong inning.
Unless, of course, it’s a test match—in which case they play for five days or until the lawn needs mowing, whichever comes first.
In fact, the whole game is a lot like watching grass grow.
Toward the end of an inning the players may become impatient and attack the umpire with their bats, pummeling him to an unconscious heap between the wickets. This is the original British source of our familiar baseball phrase, “struck him out.”
Once the umpire has been struck out, both teams retire to their respective pubs to toast their victory or nurse their grievance for the next five days or until the grass is cut.
There you have it, sports fans. Just thought you’d want to know.
Dear Reader: A writer friend recently asked, “What are the benefits of having a blog?” One could turn the question around and answer, “One of the benefits of having a writer friend who asks about blogs is that it may prompt the production of a blog post.” Read on.
“In my dotage, I am reduced to bloggery.”—King Lear, Act VII, line 4,926. Painting: King Lear and Cordelia, by Benjamin West (1793) / Folger Shakespeare Library, Wikimedia Commons.
When I was young, I did not know what “blog” meant. It didn’t mean anything, yet. Nobody knew what a blog was, because the word hadn’t been invented. The thing hadn’t been invented.
Aw, shucks—computers were giant machines in huge buildings, fed and monitored by teams of scientists in white lab coats. They were used only for Big Problems, like calculating the complete value of π as it will be revealed on the Day of Judgment.
I did know I wanted to be a writer, but that’s as far as it went: wanting to. It may strike you as crazy, Dear Reader, but I had not the slightest idea how to be a writer.
As far as I knew, you would shut yourself up in a room with a typewriter and a ream of paper, and SHAZAM!, something would strike you, and you would write it down, mail it off to Bennett Cerf, and get a million dollars.
Well, it worked for Melville and Hemingway and Louisa May Alcott—why not for me? Never mind that Melville could barely support his family, Hemingway killed himself, and Alcott wrote girly stories: the point was, you had to do your writing all alone, and it was a divine gift, not something that could be learned.
I now believe that writers do NOT produce great works in isolation. Homer’s epics were no doubt recited over and over, to many different audiences, giving him an idea what worked and what didn’t. Shakespeare’s plays, like all plays, were molded line by line as actors spoke those lines and played the parts. The great American pantheon of writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Longellow, Holmes, and the rest—all knew one another, read one another’s work, and functioned as a little New England-based Algonquin Roundtable.
I’ll bet even J.D. Salinger learned something from somebody. He was just too much of a jerk to admit it.
When I finally began aspiring to be a writer seriously, after retirement from other gigs, I knew that I needed to seek out those who could teach me. They included actual writing teachers like Christine DeSmet and Laurie Scheer, but they also included a great many fellow writers. Comrades in arms; sufferers from the writing disease. People who, like me, spent their time down in the trenches of storytelling—looking for ways to make our efforts stand out and attract readers.
I learned that writers like to form little clubs—groups for mutual critique and support. In one of the writers’ groups I joined, Tuesdays With Story, blogs came up in conversation. By this time, blogs had become a thing.
“Blog” is a shortened form of “web log.” But that derivation hardly suggests what they really are. A blog is what happens when somebody gets an address on the internet and starts posting short or extended statements of his or her point of view.
Blogs may be very specific, devoted to one craft, hobby, or special interest. But on the whole, they tend to range a bit wider. A blog can be a window into a writer’s soul.
It was rumored in our group that if one was writing novels and wanted to get them published and read, it was essential to have a “platform”—a basis for public recognition of one’s work. And a blog was a great way to build a platform.
But, Fair Reader, please be advised Your New Favorite Writer did not just fall off a turnip truck. Oh, no. It was immediately apparent that a blog, if it was to be any good, would be just as much work as any other form of writing. If I wanted to have a blog and have that blog represent my work fairly to the world, I would have to put as much time and effort into it as into my novels and short stories. And what would be the point of that?
“Well,” said my friend Jerry Peterson, then the convener of the Tuesday night group, “you might think of a blog as not just a way to promote your work. It might be your work—or at least a significant part of it. After all, you can write whatever you want, and as owner of the web address, you are in a position to present it to the world, without an intervening gatekeeper.”
Oh.
That.
Jerry was suggesting that a blog is essentially a form of self-publishing. In those days, only a few short years ago, self-publishing was not as respected as it is today. Still, it was a way to get my work in front of people. People who might like what I’m doing and hunger for more. Books, for example.
I could see where this was going. I resolved to plunge in, give it a try. That was over six years ago. What you are reading now is the 317th installment of this blog, titled “Reflections.”
BUT WHY THIS BLOG?
Why this, particular, blog?
When I started writing it, I did not know what I was doing. But people whose views I respected said, “Your blog should have a theme, a brand. It should be identifiable as something. You should have some idea what you’re trying to do with it.”
Well, it was to be a means of presenting my writing to the public. Well, that was all to the good. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had something to present to the public. I wasn’t qite sure what, but I was on the trail.
Did I mention, Gentle Reader, that there was a gap of sixty years or so between when I first knew I wanted to be a writer and when I actually started learning how?
I now recognize that long hiatus as being merely the most obvious symptom of the fact that, when I started out, I didn’t have anything to say. But as we age, we acquire experience and even, we hope, wisdom.
Now, I do have something to say. It’s just hard to figure out what it is, and how to say it. But not impossible. And the figuring out is best done by actually writing. Somebody said you have to write a million or so words of bad writing before it starts coming out good. So I’m working on that.
I’ve got something to say. I can say it in writing. It’s just hard.
By the time I launched this blog, I had already figured out that everything I have to say comes out of my deep attachment to the past—my commitment to re-experience the past, to plumb its depths, and to refashion historical knowledge into historical fiction: writing that says, “within an understandable historical context, here is what life may be, at its best or at its worst, but definitely life as best apprehended in the living of it.”
If this is what my writing is about, it’s what my blog should address. I knew that, with a weekly deadline, I would wind up rambling a bit and imprinting my own personal take on what it means to dig into the past and relate it to the present. So I decided to call this blog “Reflections”—a very general kind of label—but to further qualify that with the catch-phrase “seeking fresh meanings in our common past.”
That’s what Your New Favorite Writer has been trying to do every week since then.
What has surprised me is how ccreativity is like a well. In a good water well, you may have to prime the pump, but once you do, it brings up fresh stuff. The well never runs dry. Almost every Tuesday for the last six years I’ve found something to write about, to the tune of a thousand words or so.
Sometimes I miss Tuesday and post a day late (like this week!). Once in a while I have not had time to do a new post and so have re-run an old one. But not very often. It’s just a matter of tweaking my brain a bit, and out it comes.
Some posts are more consequential than others. Some more literary, some more wry, some more snarky. But all have to do, in one way or another, with the passage of time and what that means in the living of life.
They are not full novels, like The Price of Passage or Izzy Strikes Gold!, but they’re well-meant installments in a writer’s quotidian encounter with the stuff inside and the stuff outside. I hope you find some merit in the reading.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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, 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.
In the present scrimmage of ghastliness, mere civility gets trampled underfoot.
Instead, let us speak of forbearance.
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It’s an old word, a good word, the kind of word you might see in a Jane Austen novel.
I don’t recall its ever being spoken in my growing up. Mother never sat me on her knee and said, “Now, Son, remember to forbear.”
My New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary claims that many of the word’s meanings are “Now rare” or “Now chiefly Sc[ottish].” I put it to you, Gentle Reader: If “forbear” is being shipped off, bit by bit, to Scotland, how much longer can it last?
It would be a crying shame to lose the word “forbearance”; if we lose the word, we shall nearly have lost the thing itself.
Forbearance has nothing to do with any of those bears who went before us (“My forebears came over on the Mayflower”). It has much to do with our bearing—with what we bear and how we bear ourselves.
Better to be forbearing than overbearing.
Kindness, care, tact, decency, empathy, compassion are rough synonyms—but forbearance beats them all. Why? Because it includes instructions for its use. You can unpack it to mean: Back off a little. Restrain yourself. Cease bearing down with all your might.
To bear is to carry or hold something, perhaps a weight, as in “I don’t know how I can bear this.” But it can also mean to press, to be the weight, as in “Bear down hard on it.”
The for- at the beginning of “forbear” does not mean “fore,” nor does it mean “for.” Rather, it is a prefix of its own that means “against, out of, away from” or “abstain, neglect, renounce,” as in forgo, forgive, forget, forsake, forswear.
To forbear is to abstain from pressing. It is to relent, to have patience, to wait and see. It is the opposite of maximum pressure; it is the relief valve in society.
True, some definitions of the verb have become rare—or even Scottish—but it gives us a very useful noun, “forbearance.”
1 Abstinence from enforcing what is due, esp. the payment of a debt 2 The action or habit of forbearing; an instance of this 3 Forbearing conduct or spirit; patient endurance, lenity
Forbearance automatically includes a regard for the needs and interests of others. To hold yourself back is to give them space.
Forbearance is the willingness to go a little easier, to have patience with others. Not to make a federal case out of everything.
Life is too short.
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Forbearance seems the opposite of politics. I don’t mean garden-variety, small-town politics, in which forbearance may still play a useful part.
But I’m thinking of big-name, national, every-night-on-TV politicians. And, even more, their acolytes—poor, lost souls who have allowed politics to become their religion. They talk of nothing else, they think of nothing else. It is all-consuming.
You may know a few such people. They never let up, never relent. They bear down, then bear down more. They press each point to its unimaginable limit. They honor no boundaries. If you disagree, or even if you do agree but without enough totality, you are past all hope of redemption.
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Yes, O New Favorite Writer—granted, their conduct is despicable.But we must do the same, don’t you see, or they will win! If I show forbearance, they will use that weakness, ride roughshod over my concerns, and win by the simple force of their absolutism.
Now, Dear Reader, in case you have been wondering for years whether I would ever say anything truly subversive, listen up:
Please try forbearance.
Let them have their precious triumph; it will turn to dust and ashes in their mouths.
Those who forbear, on the other hand, will gain something of far greater worth.
Gain? Gain what, precisely?
They gain self-respect as well as the respect of others.
They gain the infinite satisfaction of sponsoring calm. They become wholesome exemplars of sanity for our world.
Those who make a habit of forbearance, and all who come within their orbits, gain a larger perspective: a glimpse of the fat upland where those things dwell that are more important than politics.
They win the argument by moving beyond it. They rest on eternals, while others remain mired in temporalities.
These are the fruits that come from reclaiming the happy ground of forbearance.
Really, he only called me a “Nazi sympathizer.” But at that level of calumny, how significant is the distinction?
I am neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathizer, and I’m not sure the person who called me one could tell a real Nazi from a Cumberland Presbyterian.
Cumberland Presbyterians, photo by Delmont Wilson for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, 1964. Fair use.
After half a century in which I have purposely abjured political discourse, I found myself squarely in the path of a carelessly tossed mudball. It happened when I challenged a Facebook friend’s casual labeling of certain local officials, by name, as Nazis. They were Nazis, it seemed, because they performed their official duties in a way my Facebook friend did not like.
It’s easy enough to imagine that people who regularly talk politics in public may be Nazified, vilified, and mudslung as a matter of course.
Perhaps they get used to all this besmirchery.
I, however, cannot.
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Karl Marx. Public domain.
Vitriol was routine in our community around 1970. A mob of self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutionaries dominated the UW-Madison campus. On any street corner, you could hear fellow students and not-so-students praising Marx’s theory on alienation of the workers or critiquing the more recent writings of Herbert Marcuse.
They were intellectuals, you see. Nonetheless, they had stingers.
Clinging to ordinary, plain-vanilla political thoughts left over from the 1950s and early -60s, I was drummed out of revolutionary society. When I sought a clarification of intent in an impromptu soviet convened ostensibly to oppose a particular strategem of the Vietnam War, the organizers snickered at me and swiftly moved on to the next speaker.
A small cell of leftist students whom I knew, busy plotting to unionize the employer who had created their part-time jobs, lowered their voices theatrically, loudly noting that “Spy Sommers” was in the room. As if I gave a damn how they amused themselves.
You may not know this, Dear Reader, but Your New Favorite Writer is one of Those Timid People. There are quite a few of us. When attacked, we choose flight, not fight. Over the years, I’ve added layers of bluff and bravado for self-protection, as many of us do, but deep inside the 79-year-old author dwells a shy little boy.
That’s why I withdrew from politics. It frightened me. Besides the avoidance of bruising battles in boring polemical trenches where nothing I prized could be won . . . I have also kept from being wounded.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” Mom said. That sounds comforting, but it doesn’t happen to be true. Words hold power. Words can be wings, bearing you up to a soaring perspective. But words can be weapons. Words can hurt.
For that reason, our parents and teachers, besides giving worthless advice about sticks and stones, also taught kindness and forbearance. Take care, they said, with other people’s feelings. We did not always heed this advice, but we did accept its relevance. I, and possibly you as well, Gentle Reader, grew up in a world where tact and gentleness had a place.
But that world changed very swiftly about 1968.
I returned to college in 1969, after a few years in the uniform of the United States, to find the rules I knew had changed beyond recognition, or were simply dispensed with.
It was now okay to flay your opponents with hateful and slanderous words. This was really nothing more than bullying and intimidation. But as with all topics in those days, it received an intellectual gloss. It was called “the politics of confrontation.”
The politics of confrontation meant this: If someone disagrees with you, even by a trifle—in fact, especially if the disagreement is trivial—then go all scorched-earth on them. Never mind “Come, let us reason together.” Just flame them.
If they stand in your way, use anything up to and including nitrate explosives.
In 1970, after the Kent State massacre on May 4 and the Sterling Hall bombing on August 24, the prospect of bloodshed to overthrow the old order lost a bit of its allure. Our society slipped into a torpid malaise in which old leftists still rumbled and grumbled, but routine commerce and something resembling normality returned to American life.
Yet we never got truly “back to normal.” We never got over the habit of subsituting invective for political discourse. It remains with us to this day. That is one reason politics is so toxic.
This problem is widely acknowledged. Hardly a week goes by without someone’s launching a new, wearily-heralded effort to “restore civility” to our national conversation.
Such attempts are bound to fail, because civility is not the issue. Civility, in the political context, was a permanent victim of 1968.
The only thing that will save us now is human decency.
Many of our fellow-citizens cannot imagine a person-to-person connection being more important than a partisan platform. There are millions, maybe tens of millions, in whose minds politics is the only occupant.
The vacuity of these people’s social and intellectual lives gets filled with formless, reflexive anger, which spills over into vicious utterance. They can’t tell you why you are a Nazi. It’s enough to state that you are one. Or a racist, or whatever. Just offhand, by definition or decree.
It absolves them of any compunction, relieves them of any responsibility for the well-being of others. There is no need to treat anyone with what we used to call kindness or decency.
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Dear Reader, it is clear you are not one of those I am talking about.
Yet I hear a whisper from the back of the hall: “In the face of pure evil, niceties can become irrelevant.”
The thing is, I don’t think we often come in contact with pure evil.
I think, rather, we have grown willing to transgress all boundaries of decency in our outraged harassment of those we disagree with, whom we define as evil to salve our consciences.
That’s what I’m torqued about: The abandonment of those curbs and boundaries—that kindness and forbearance—that once kept our politics in a manageable state.
So sue me.
Oh, by the way, I re-checked my facts just five minutes before posting this and can definitely affirm: (1) I continue to think my ordinary, plain-vanilla political thoughts left over from the 1950s and early -60s—and (2) I’m still not a Nazi.
Dear Reader, it was the kind of moment that keeps this old heart beating.
Literatus & Co., Main and Fourth, Watertown.
I stood by a small table on the way into Literatus & Co. bookstore in Watertown, Wisconsin, with small stacks of my historical novels: The Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold! My agenda was buttonholing passers-by to introduce them to my books and myself.
One young woman and her husband or boyfriend heard my spiel. “I’ve always thought I wanted to be a writer myself,” she said, “but I’ve never done it.”
“Maybe you will,” I said.
She made a meek face. “May I ask . . . how old were you when these books were first published?”
I scratched my head. The Price of Passage first came out in August 2022, Izzy Strikes Gold! only last July. “I must have been in my late seventies,” I said. “I’ll be eighty this June.”
“That’s so encouraging! I still have time!” She flung her arms around me and squeezed long and hard. Of course I squeezed back. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks—I knew they were there but could not see them, so fierce and arresting was her hug. Eventually, she let go.
Not yet forty, she had come close to giving up on her dream of writing.
“Of course you still have time,” I said. “Just write. Don’t look for fame and fortune, but write. You’ll make friends of other writers and maybe get together to read one another’s drafts and offer mutual critiques. You’ll find fellow writers are incredibly generous and supportive.” I said that last bit because I’ve found it to be true.
Someone else who is generous and supportive is independent bookstore owners, like Isabelle Eller and Wesley Crnkovich of Literatus & Co. (The always well-informed Wesley asserts there is an unseen vowel in his last name. Say “CHIRNkovich.”)
Isabelle, left, and Wesley, right, with Your New Favorite Writer in the middle.
It was no random chance that brought about the mutually helpful encounter between me and the young woman who wants to write. It was, rather, part of a careful design.
I love bookstore proprietors like Isabelle and Wesley. They struggle, they care deeply about books and about people, they extend themselves to create islands of happiness and success. In today’s commercial milieu, that’s not always easy, but it’s done with aplomb.
Literatus & Co. stands in an old brick-faced corner at 401 East Main Street, smack in the center of Watertown. Like a lot of main streets in our part of the world, this one has seen more prosperous days. Literatus & Co., since its founding in 2019, has been “dedicated to keeping a thriving book culture alive in Watertown.”
And, boy, are they succeeding.
Wherever you may live, it’s worth the drive to spend a morning or afternoon at Literatus & Co. Let me tell you what you’ll find:
The front window has a dazzling display of books. At present it’s mostly bright-colored picture books for children. Maybe they change that from time to time.
Open the door, and you enter a long, narrow space, two old-fashioned stories high, lined with bookshelves. There are tables in the front end of the store where folks gather in ones, twos, threes, and sixes to meet, chat, and pass the time of day. An intense young man furrows his brows at a laptop computer; three mothers with shopping bags and coffee drinks exchange news while they watch their toddlers; a senior couple peruses books they have just bought or maybe are thinking about buying.
All are enveloped in the comforting smell of book-paper, humanity, and hot food.
Upstairs or downstairs, take your pick. Space for browsing and socializing at Literatus & Co.
Overhead, a railed mezzanine stretches the length of the store, with upstairs tables for two dozen more loungers/loafers/chatters. On ground level, reaching rearward from mid-store, is the hub: A cash register, a case of goodies baked fresh by Isabelle, and a coffee bar cum short-order kitchen where you can get hot and cold beverages, soups, sandwiches, and hot panini made to order.
On any brisk Saturday when customers mill about, Wesley, Isabelle, and one or two part-time employees spend their time ringing up sales and preparing food and drink orders, with a special combination of relaxed chatter and easy attention to detail. The store owners are on a first-name basis with most customers. It’s the place you go for a fix of community spirit when you’re downtown on a Saturday morning.
Browse through the bookshelves—take your time, Gentle Reader—and you’re bound to notice the collection is carefully curated. Books of a feather are shelved together, many turned face-outward so you don’t have to squint at narrow spines to divine what they are. The scope and variety of titles are stunning.
But, as an author flogging his own wares here, I have noticed it’s not only the books that are well-curated. The customer base is just as well-cultivated.
The owners and staff of Literatus & Co. know what they’re about. Their homepage says it: “A setting to gather, discuss, engage and learn—as real people. A place to form human connections and share stories. . . . Most of all—we commit to creating a place where minds are opened, and all ideas are welcome. In short: knowledge, curiosity, and civility.”
Isabelle’s baked goods.
This welcoming space does not just happen by itself. Wes and Isabelle pursue its elaboration with missionary zeal. If you’ve ever met real honest-to-goodness missionaries, you have noticed they don’t foam at the mouth with pet theories. They play the long game, work humbly and steadily to make their animating vision a new reality in people’s lives.
In just six years, Wesley and Isabelle and their helpers have created a place in Watertown frequented by lots of people just looking for coffee or a sandwich or some human warmth, but also by lots of readers—discriminating readers—who come in looking for books, searching the shelves for new offerings, willing to chat and listen to an author who might have something to share.
The booksellers at Literatus & Co. have made this new thing in their community. I am in their debt, and our whole wider Wisconsin literary community is as well.
Answer: When it’s Open House Imports, 308 East Main Street, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin.
Open House Imports, an elvishly decorated Queen Anne-style house on the right as you enter Mount Horeb from Madison, is really a gift shop devoted to all things Norwegian (or even Swedish or Danish). But it’s one of my favorite bookstores!
Here’s why: The owner, Janice Christiansen Sievers, embodies the Norsk concepts of velvaere (well-being) and koselig (coziness). It’s natural for Janice to help out a struggling author by buying and displaying his works, in case any of her customers are interested.
Your New Favorite Writer with Janice Sievers.
That kind of hospitality and openness is a theme we’ll explore repeatedly, Dear Reader. This is the first in a series of posts on bookstores Your New Favorite Writer knows and loves. What they all have in common is owners who care—who relate to authors, and to readers, whole-heartedly and with the joy of the human touch.
Fine examples of Norwegian rosemaling (flower painting).
How did Open House Imports get to be one of my favorite bookstores? Well, my first book, The Price of Passage, is about Norwegian immigrants navigating the social, political, and military challenges of the Civil War era. For years, my wife and I have shopped at Open House Imports, mostly during the Christmas season, when all its lovely wares seem especially relevant to our needs. So I knew that—right along with the rosemaling, Norwegian sweaters, and cooking utensils—the store has a robust display of Scandinavian-themed books.
Guess whose books you can buy there?
So I took the book out to show Janice. I told her the story of how The Price of Passage came to be, and what it means to me. I admit I choked up at one or two places, because the book’s themes are personal with me. I got a grand, koselig hug from Janice to help me through my spiel. She purchased several copies right on the spot, displayed the book in a prominent place, and even ordered more copies through my distributor.
Janice continues to promote my literary career. The last time I stopped in, I mentioned my second book, Izzy Strikes Gold!, a nostalgic trip back to 1957 from the viewpoint of a 12-year-old. Apologetically, I said, “Well, there’s not really a Scandinavian theme or connection in this one. ” Because her store is all Nordic, all the time, and Izzy is just an American kid with no particular national background. Didn’t matter. She wanted Izzy. So now he has a place on her shelves beside The Price of Passsage.
Scandinavian yummies.
Fair Reader: If you don’t yet have your copy of Izzy Strikes Gold! or The Price of Passage, Open House Imports is a great place to get it. While you’re there, you might also pick up one of many other books, fiction and nonfiction, with a Scandinavian flavor. Not to mention Scandinavian cookbooks—or receipe books, as Janice calls them.
By the way, if you’re going to do any cooking out of those cookbooks, you might need utensils, or place settings—or ingredients! Don’t worry, Janice has you covered. Open House Imports has a full range of the things you need for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and snacks that will really ramp up your velvaere in a big way.
Norwegian sweaters.
Did I mention the Norwegian sweaters? And clogs. And tee-shirts. And all manner of essential housewares, from fine crystal to authentic wooden serving dishes decorated with sumptuous rosemaling.
And cards, calendars, knicknacks, figurines of trolls and elves (nisser), postcards, maps, et plenty of cetera. Chances are you can find a great gift for almost anyone you are buying for.
I could go on and on, Gentle Reader, but remember: Best of all, it’s a great bookstore!
Even if you aren’t in need of anything mentioned above, drop in the next time you’re near 308 E. Main Street, Mount Horeb, and introduce yourself to Janice. Have a nice chat. You’ll be delighted. Tell her Larry sent you.
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