An occurrence at Rehm Park

Oak Park, Illinois was in the news recently. The village (yes, this city of 60,000 is, by law, a village) authorities managed to prevent a Lane Bryant store from opening in trendy shopping area at Lake Street and Oak Park Avenue. The story was featured on the Today show some weeks ago with all the righteous indignation that upscale New Yorkers could manage.

Kathleen and I lived in Oak Park for eight years--from 1981 to 1989. We didn't live in the trendy part of town, but in the apartment corridor of Washington Boulevard. Two of our three children were born there. (Our daughter Sarah was born at West Suburban hospital about the time Alice Cooper's daughter Calico was born there. Cooper's father-in-law was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Oak Park. Honest. We never saw Cooper, though.)

In the late spring of 1989, Anne and Sarah were five and four years old respectively, and Kathleen was pregnant with our son James. As often as I could, I'd take the girls to a park so Kathleen could get some well-deserved rest. My favorite place was Rehm Park. It had a conservatory which had some amazing plants, incluting a century plant which had bloomed that winter. (It's called a century plant because that's how often it blooms.) There was a a little railroad in the park-very narrow guage--on which children could ride on handcars. And there was a large sandbox, which the girls liked more than all the other attractions.

I was at the sandbox one day when a young woman struck up a conversation with me. She had three small children with her. Kathleen and I were reading a lot of detective fiction in those days, and I may have had a Rex Stout book with me. In a few minutes we were having a fascinating discussion of the mystery genre--of Stout, Doyle, Christie, Sayers, and others. She was too young to remember the television series, "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes," but she said her father had talked about it. I told her about Max Carrados, the blind detective, and Dr. Thorndyke, the detective who held both law and medical degrees. I don't know how long we talked. There was nothing remotely sexual in this interchange--neither of our spouses had anything to worry about. It was just some intelligent conversation, and I wondered whether she was starved for it.

Kathleen had actually met this woman I'll call Rachel, at Rehm Park, and had a similar conversation about fictional detectives. A couple Kathleen had met through a preschool knew Rachel. They loved Rachel, but couldn't stand her husband. He was a lawyer, and apparently fulfilled all the stereotypes of the lawyer jokes. They were reluctant to have a get-together because Rachel's husband was just too unbearable.

In August of 1989, I accepted an offer to be Amtrak ticket agent in Elkhart, Indiana. Over the years we've lost track of our Oak Park friends. But I still think about Rachel, and our conversation in the sandbox. I hope that her husband has proved worthy of her, and that she's been privy to more intelligent conversation.

Sex and the Singular Church

I've been an Episcopalian since 1978, when I was baptized at Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City. The following spring, on Trinity Sunday, Bishop Walter Righter confirmed me. I hadn't met the good bishop before, but he made a positive impression. His staff was an ordinary wooden shepherd's crook, which had come from a shepherd's supply store in Virgina. He told a little story about a girl who had gone to church by herself, and then returned home. Her parents asked her about church, and she said, "The bishop visited, and I learned what a crook is." I couldn't help but like the man after hearing that line.

In the fall of 1990, Bishop Righter's name showed up in the news. He was no longer Bishop of Iowa, but Assistant Bishop of Newark. And he had ordained a gay man, living in a comitted relationship with another man, to the diaconate. A few years later, Bishop Righter was accused of heresy and put on trial. In a decision that shocked Episcopalians, the church court ruled that neither the doctrine nor the discipline of the Church prohibit the ordination of a non-celibate homosexual person living in a committed relationship.

In the last thirty years or so, whenever the Episcopal Church is in the news, the headlines are usually about sex. Not necessarily what fantasy writer Terry Pratchett calls the "athletic, tumbling, count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two" sense of the word, but what people now call "gender" and "sexual orientation." First it was women's ordination, then the ordination of gays and lesbians. And while this isn't a debate on the nature of Christ or the Trinity, or any of the more traditional reasons to divide Christians, the controversy over the ordination of gays and lesbians seems more likely to divide both the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion than anything else.

Of course, the ordination of women was supposed to split the church, and it did, sort of. A group calling itself the Anglican Church of North America did break off over women's ordination, and it split again over other issues. The ACNA and its successors never managed to achieve the great scism they anticipated. The Antiochian Orthodox Church tried to lure conservative priests away from the Episcopalians. (In the town of Goshen, Indiana, the priest of the very conservative and Anglo-Catholic St. James Church converted to Orthodoxy, splitting the parish and leaving many bitter feelings. ) The Roman Catholics even offered to accept married Episcopal priests into the Latin Rite. In other words, they bent their own celibacy rules in order to accept priests who agreed with them about the ordination of women. (Eastern Rite Catholic churches have always had married priests, so Rome's celibacy rule was never universal.) Neither church effort was very successful.

While the Episcopal Church lost a few members over women's ordination, it was in line with the membership losses for most mainline Protestant churches. And it did not split the worldwide Anglican Communion.

This time, the chances of a schism look much higher. There's just too much enthusiasm for a split on both sides. If the split comes, I will go with Walter Righter and those who support the ordination of gays and lesbians, but I won't do so with any joy. The Anglican Church has sought the "middle way" since the time of Queen Elizabeth I. Then it was a dispute between the Catholic and Protestant wings of the Church. The compromise was to have a very Catholic service (though with a lot of penitential language included, such as "We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table.") and a very Protestant, even Calvinistic Thirty-Nine Articles. In the Episcopal Church, the Articles are now considered historical documents, which reflects the ascendancy of Anglo-Catholicism in the American church.

Over the centuries, the Church has avoided major schism by following the middle way of compromise and inclusion. I hope and pray that such a compromise can happen now.

Confessions of a Christmas-and-Easter Episcopalian

Note--this post is a reworking of an article I wrote for the South Bend Tribune three years ago. I'll follow it with a post about the recent General Convention in Columbus and relations with worldwide Anglicanism.

For the last year I've been very much a marginal Episcopalian--a "Christmas and Easter man." I work the swing shift at the Amtrak ticket office in Normal Illinois--midday on Friday, mornings on Saturday and Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday evenings. And the Episcopal churches in Bloomington and Normal don't have evening services, except for Christmas and Easter. When I do attend church, it's usually at Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, which is within walking distance of my apartment, and offers a Saturday afternoon vigil mass.

When I became an Episcopalian more than a quarter century ago, I was very much an active parishioner. I have served as an acolyte, a lector, and as a member of the vestry (that’s Episcopal for church council—traditionally it met in the room where the liturgical garments, or vestments, were kept).

I had all the enthusiasm of a convert, which I was. The Episcopal Church was within the Catholic tradition, but was also open to change. Every three years, the church holds a general convention, in which representatives of the laity and clergy meet to decide the issues of the national church.
In 1976, three years before my confirmation into the church, the General Convention, meeting in Minneapolis, approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and introduced a new Book of Common Prayer. The fact that it had been willing to make such momentous decisions attracted me to the denomination.

The church went out of its way to accommodate those who could not accept the church’s decision. Bishops who would not ordain women did not have to, so long as they allowed a neighboring bishop to perform the ceremony. The new Book of Common Prayer introduced services in modern English, but gave congregations the option of using the traditional Prayer Book language, such as the following:

“Hear what the Lord Jesus Christ saith: Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

That brief, elegant summation of a Christian’s duty can be found only in the older, (Rite I) version of the Eucharistic liturgy. Had the church refused to compromise with conservatives, we would have lost it as a part of the service.

Three years ago, the General Convention met again in Minneapolis, and made two controversial decisions. It voted to confirm the selection of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as Bishop of New Hampshire. And it agreed to permit American dioceses to continue offering blessings for same-sex unions.

Many Episcopalians, including Bishop Edward Stuart Little of South Bend, were and are adamantly opposed to the convention’s decision. I believe the convention made the right decision. Bishop Little and his allies are sincere and decent Christians, with whom I disagree on this issue. I supported the decision largely from personal experience. When I worked at Amtrak's Chicago call center, many of my co-workers were gay or lesbian, and I had come to respect them. I believe that same-sex partners are entitled to a legal recognition of their partnership, and that a church blessing of such a commitment is appropriate. Sexual orientation, at least according to the most recent science, appears to be determined more by genetics than environment.

I also spent eight years in the Diocese of Chicago, where gay priests were almost the norm, and where there had been at least one gay bishop. Not openly gay, of course. And that was the problem. There was an environment of hypocrisy and deceit which was, to put it mildly, unhealthy for a Christian church. Priests, who were often married and with children, carried on affairs with gay lovers, to the detriment of both their ministry and their families.

“Were there no legislative items on the table in Minneapolis,” wrote Bishop Little in a “pastoral word” explaining his vote against Robinson’s confirmation and the blessing of same-sex unions, “I could easily maintain a holy silence as I walk the pilgrim’s journey with gay and lesbian Christians, allowing God to sort things out in his own wondrously surprising way.”
Bishop Little is a man I admire and respect. But a “holy silence,” maintained by people without the integrity of an Edward Stuart Little, can degenerate into “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

And it’s just possible that God is sorting things out “in his own wondrously surprising way” in the wake of the General Convention. Bishop-elect Robinson, interviewed after his return to New Hampshire, said that he “had any number of people come up to me and say, my son or daughter is going back to church for the first time in years.”

"The past is a foreign country"

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," wrote British novelist L.P. Hartley. It seems obvious enough when that past is centuries ago. But when it is within our memory, the past can also be foreign. In fact, Hartley's novel, The Go-Between, which begins with that memorable sentence, is written in the form of a reminiscence.

Last year I entered the White Wolf Novel contest with an idea for a vampire novel set in part in the Chicago of August, 1968. It didn't make the first cut, but the idea of a fantasy/time-travel novel involving those interesting times stayed with me. And it was better without the vampires or White Wolf's World of Darkness setting. So I've been doing a lot of reading about the 1968 Democratic Convention. I was 16 years old in 1968, and I followed the news very closely. Still, I'm dealing with a foreign country. Take the first paragraph of the Chicago Tribune's August 25, 1968 lead editorial:

"It will probably occasion little surprise among readers that in his former days around the family drug store in Huron, S.D., Hubert Horatio Humphrey was known to the clientele as Pinkie. But if the readers jump to the logical conclusion that this appellation had something to do with Hubert's political coloration, which is socialist, radical, and left-wing, if not precisely Red, they will be wrong. The tag was hung on him simply because of his complexion."

That's what the Trib thought of Humphrey--the Establishment candidate. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern didn't fare any better. While Gene McCarthy was pursuing his noble campaign, the spirit of Joe McCarthy seemed to prevail in the Tribune. More precisely, it was the spirit of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, longtime publisher of the Tribune, who died in 1955. Along with McCormick's right-wing politics, the paper was still promoting his spelling reform--cigaret, thru, tho. I don't know if it still used "frater," for freighter, but it spelled aides "aids," though that would not have meant anything to the 1968 audience. While the paper's editors heaped praise on Nixon and Agnew, they defended Democrat Richard Daley's use of the police to beat "hippies," though they did express objection to the clubbing of Tribune reporters.

I've been listening to oldies radio stations recently. They present the 1960s nostalgically, as though it was some halcyon era. There was great beauty, incredible creativity, and the kind of idealism which may just be blooming in some of today's college students. But at the same time there was the madness of 1968. Writer Jules Witcover called it "The Year the Dream Died." Two assassinations, riots in virtually every major city, the brutality in Chicago, the triumph of Richard Nixon, and behind it all, blatant racism and a shameful American war. While I've heard the oldies stations play Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," about the 1967 Sunset Strip riots, I have yet to hear "Universal Soldier" or "Eve of Destruction," or even the Stones' "Street Fighting Man," which was banned from Chicago radio stations during the '68 convention. Just as Clear Channel and other media giants wouldn't play anti-Iraq war songs (or even the Dixie Chicks), they don't want to remind people of an earlier illegal, immoral war.

And there was a spirit of confrontation which seems almost alien to present times. An excerpt from Paul Schultz's No One Was Killed provides a good example:

"There were a series of confrontations inside the Convention and outside it. The challenger could either turn away from the impending confrontation and hope the gesture would bring about a desired response, depending on the good will of cops and politicians, and it never did, or they could go smack into the confrontation. Every time a confrontation was avoided, in the Convention or on the streets, the challenger, on the terms of his own aspirations, made a mistake. (Emphasis in original, pp. 36-7)

"In another time, another situation, possibly even another convention, this might not be the case. But here in Chicago all the cells of good will and common sense were turned off in The Pig."
And what was "The Pig?" Schultz again:

"The Yippies were running a pig for president, and the cops were pigs, and the politicians were pigs, and the Pig was a proliferating force and growth in the mind and the soul and in the society. Like cancer in the way it grows, the Pig sickens and hardens all cells of common sense, compassion, responsibility and sense of consequence, and turns them to greedy, self-protective, oppressive ends." (p. 34)

A foreign country indeed. If I can re-create the moods, atttitudes, and events of August, 1968, in some (not all) of their complexities, it will be worth the effort.

Coover's Cockroaches and the Power of a Single Incident

I've never read anything by Robert Coover. From what I understand, he's a fine writer. But whenever I think of Coover, I think of cockroaches. In the fall of 1966, I was living with my mother and younger brother on Hudson Street in Iowa City. My parents had divorced the previous year, and my mother was working as an instructor at Iowa while pursuing a Master of Fine Arts. We weren't financially well-off. Hudson Street, which lay right under the flight path of the Iowa City Airport, was an inexpensive place to live, and seemed to attract single parents. The ex-wife of poet W.D Snodgrass and their daughter lived right across the street. For some reason, our rented house either had no stove, or the existing stove no longer worked. The landlord told my mother to buy a used stove, and she'd be reimbursed.

Robert Coover, a visiting faculty member at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, had a stove for sale. I remember that it was a Roper--a brand I had never heard of before. One Saturday he came by with the stove He seemed like a nice guy. My mom bought the stove.

Several days later, we began seeing cockroaches in the kitchen. Hundreds of them. It couldn't have been a coincidence. Robert Coover had sold us a stove with a major roach infestation. To be fair, it's possible Coover didn't realize the stove was full of roach eggs. But because of that one incident, Coover and cockroaches will always be linked in my mind.

Fast forward to the fall of 2002. My daughter Sarah is a senior at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. She's at the student health office to get her medications. An attractive, dark-haired woman comes in from the outside. She's left her rented SUV running while she takes care of her daughter's medications. She's very demanding, and expects special treatment. Because she is Demi Moore, she gets it. Her daughter, Rumer Willis, is a freshman. (She's not at Interlochen now, i.e, 2006). Just about everyone has an opinion of Demi Moore. (When Kathleen saw the cover of Cigar Aficianado showing Moore with a cigar and headlined something like "Demi Moore's secret," she said, "Demi Moore has no secrets.") But for Sarah, Demi Moore will always be the pushy woman who fouled the pristine Michigan air with exhaust fumes.

Another fast-forward, to May, 2003. We're back at Interlochen for Sarah's graduation. Bruce Willis, Rumer's father, is there. I'm prepared to dislike him His movies were mostly violent ones. More important, he had been a vocal supporter of the American invasion of Iraq. Virtually no Interlochen student (including Rumer) supportes the war. But for all that I dislike about him, he's far more likeable than his ex-wife. Sarah's roommate, who wears socks with images from Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings, says Willis complimented her on her socks. Later we see him at the Melody Freeze (the school's ice cream stand), standing in line with everyone else. No pushing, no asserting his privileges--just another parent. At commencement, when the valedictorian makes a strong antiwar statement, he applauds with everyone else (maybe a little too loudly, but I'll forgive that). And when he has to leave early, he does so as unobtrusively as possible.

Single incidents, like first impressions, are sometimes unfair. But they do have staying power.

Radio Days

In the 1960s the closest thing to surfing the Internet was tuning the radio. There was television, of course, but in eastern Iowa before the advent of public broadcasting, the options were pretty limited. But radio, especially in the late-night hours, had so many possibilities. Clear Channel didn't mean a corporation with a near-monopoly on broadcasting, but certain AM radio stations which were allowed to broadcast at the maximum 50,000 watts.

I had a transistor radio which could pick up AM, FM, and short wave. The short wave was fun, but had a limited range. I could pick up the Voice of America and Radio Havana. Radio Havana would tell of every U.S. helicopter the National Liberation Force shot down. If they weren't exaggerating, it made me wonder whether helicopters were just too vulnerable. Voice of America, on the other hand, celebrated every U.S. victory and multiplied the enemy body count to the point that I wondered how there could be any Vietnamese left. It's interesting to hear propaganda for a while, but it gets tiresome.

The really interesting stuff was on the AM band. Talk radio was just beginning, and the king of talk was Joe Pyne. He was an ex-Marine who had lost a leg fighting in the Pacific. People remember him as a conservative, but he was really a Cold War liberal, who supported the Vietnam War but had absolutely no use for racial bigotry. Unlike Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, he didn't cut off people who were getting the better of him in an argument. He could be loud and abusive--the working-class Philadelphia accent made him sound even more abusive--but he didn't hide. A lot of people listened to Pyne, hoping to hear someone get the better of him. And we sided with him when he had a racist for a guest. I had a grudging respect for the guy.

For a liberal, antiwar alternative to Limbaugh, there was Dale Ulmer, who hosted an evening call-in show on WHO Radio in Des Moines. Unlike Pyne, he didn't yell or insult, but used logic and reason in his arguments. People rarely, if ever, got the better of him. Even though WHO was a clear-channel station which could be heard from the East Coast to the Rockies, few remember Dale Ulmer. His tenure as a talk show host was short, and he wasn't outrageous enough to be memorable, except to me, and perhaps a few others.

There were a lot of religious programs, but the strangest one whas hosted by the Reverend Curtis Springer. "This is the Reverend Curtis Springer, coming to you from the shores of Lake Tunedae, in the beautiful Mojave Desert." He spoke in deep but oily voice, in the manner of Senator Edward Dirksen (The Wizard of Ooze), and pronounced Tunedae something like Too-Wenda-Wee. In between recorded gospel tunes, such as "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb," he'd advertise his miracle remedies and invite people to visit his resort. The resort was called Zzyzyx, which Springer claimed was the last word in the English language. It was clear that Springer was a flim-flam artist, but I wasn't aware of the extent of his rascality. His crimes were certainly not on the scale of many of today's televangelists, but he was surely a scoundrel of the first order. (Check the link on his name for details.)

And late at night on weekends, there was Beaker Street, on the KAAY, "The Mighty 1090," a clear-channel station from Little Rock. I was never a great fan of what people later called "Progressive Rock," but I listened to it more for the atmosphere than the music. "This is Clyde Clifford, from Beaker Street," he'd say in his deep, slow, voice. He always sounded stoned, though I suspect he wan't. "That was 'Astronomy Domine,' by Pink Floyd, from their album, Ummagumma." He often played "Friends of Mine," by the Guess Who, which was not great poetry, but did make you listen. Strangely enough, Beaker Street is back on the air, though not on KAAY, which is now a religious station, but on FM, and downloadable on the Web.

AM Radio, with few exceptions, has become the domain of right-wing ideologues and Christian fundamentalists, while most of FM is niche-marketed and controlled by mega-corporations such as Clear Channel. I haven't follwed the "Net Neutrality" debate closely, but I'm wondering whether there are people in the boardrooms who'd like the Internet to be more like what commercial radio has become.

An Easter Message from the Vampire Corner

In spite of what the TV weather people assume, not all of us crave the sunshine. And a lot more of us can't stand the glare of artificial light. In the mid-1990s, when I was working at Amtrak's Chicago Call Center up on the 38th floor of the Mid-Continental Plaza building, those of us who didn't like the glare congregated at the back of the former training room, where most of the overhead lights were turned off. The Vampire Corner, we called it. In those days there were slow times during the early afternoon and most of us vampires got to know each other pretty well.

I worked with a delightful young woman I'll call Julia. We often sat together and had amazing conversations about current events, art, philosophy, and religion. She was a former Roman Catholic who had converted to a fundamentalist sect which believed that the King James Version--and only the King James Version--was the inerrant Word of God. I appreciated the KJV for its poetic images, but preferred the New Revised Standard Version for meaning. We remained friends even though our religious views were poles apart.

One spring, she told me that Easter was actually named for Astarte, the Semitic goddess of fertility. I replied that it had been named for Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. Julia was originally from South America, so I asked her about the Spanish word for Easter. She acknowledged that is was Pascua, or Passover. But she stuck to her belief that Easter was named for the goddess often associated with sexuality, and appropriated by modern Satanists in their rituals.

I never understood why her denomination insisted on associating the principal holy day of Christianity with a pagan fertility goddess. After doing some research, I learned that a number of fundamentalist sects, such as the Restored Church of God, reject Easter as a pagan festival. They celebrate Passover, and believe Christ was resurrected on a Saturday. Their association of Easter with Astarte, or Ishtar, is folk etymology. Eostre is Germanic and Indo-European in origin, while Astarte is Semitic. And while there were cults of Ishtar in Rome and the Hellenic world, they did not exist among Germanic-speaking peoples. The name Easter is a borrowing from pre-Christians, but a rather benign one.

Nonetheless, Julia believed the word Easter was derived from Astarte, and nothing I or anyone else could say would shake her of that belief. In spite of this, she was beautiful person, and brought her spiritual light into that pleasant darkness.

I lost track of Julia after she left the office. The pressure of working at the call center was getting to her. And it was going get worse. The slow times when agents had time to chat were decreasing. She had young children and needed to spend more time with them. Her husband was a Chicago police officer, so she didn't have to worry about losing health benefits. The last I heard, she was working at a small health clinic.

Whenever I want to declare a blanket condemnation of fundamentalist Christians I try to remember her. Julia was a fundamentalist and had what I considered to be wacky beliefs, but was (and, I'm sure still is), a sweet, caring, and altogether wonderful human being.

This does not mean I can't oppose the fundamentalists when they want to tear down Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state, or try to impose their dogmas on the rest of us. It's just a reminder that when we attach labels to people, we can't forget that they're still human beings like ourselves.

Wet Monday

From the Wikipedia article, Dyngus Day:

Dyngus Day or Wet Monday (Polish Śmigus-dyngus, lany poniedziałek or Oblewania) is the name for Easter Monday in Poland. In the Czech Republic it is called Velikonocni Pondeli or Pomlázka.

Both countries practice a peculiar custom on this day. Traditionally, boys will awaken girls early in the morning and douse them with water and strike them about the legs with long thin twigs made from willow, birch or decorated tree branches (palmy wielkanocne). This practice is possibly connected to a pre-Christian, pagan fertility rite, although the earliest documented records of Dyngus Day in Poland are from 15th century, almost half a millennium after Poland adopted Christianity.

Most recently, the tradition has changed to become entirely water-focused, and the Śmigus part is almost forgotten. It is quite common for girls to attack boys just as fiercely as the boys traditionally attacked the girls. With much of Poland's population residing in tall apartment buildings, high balconies are favourite hiding places for young people who gleefully empty entire buckets of water onto randomly selected passers-by.

Here in the U.S., the spanking element has pretty much disappeared, and the liquid most common on Wet Monday is beer. Dyngus Day is mainly an occasion for eating sausage and quaffing brew. In South Bend, it's also the traditional kickoff for political campaigns. In 1968, the last time the Indiana Democratic presidential primary had any significance, Robert Kennedy was at the West Side Democratic Club on Dyngus Day. He won South Bend and Indiana handily.

Tonight, I expect Joe Donnelly to be at that same club. He's running against Chris Chocola, the plutocratic Republican congressman from Indiana's Second District. Two years ago Donnelly, a virtual unknown and without support form the national Democratic party, lost to Chocola by eight percentage points. This year, Democrats are taking the Second District seriously. MoveOn.org has been running ads against Chocola. Donnelly is a fairly conservative Democrat, like former Congressman and 9/11 Commission member Tim Roemer, who represented what was then the Third District from 1991 to 2003. But compared to Chocola, the guy's a godsend.

James Frey and Kenneth Rexroth: Memoir vs. Autobiographical Novel

"One of the most disturbing things about the whole James Frey brouhaha this week is that the book that sold 3.5 million copies was turned down by nearly every major publisher when it was offered as fiction." -Patry Francis, simply wait, January 14, 2006

When I first read about the controversy over James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, I thought about Kenneth Rexroth's An Autobiographical Novel, published in 1964. Rexroth is a far better writer than Frey, but he also blurs the line between fact and fiction. As in Frey's book, some of the questionable incidents take place in what the Chamber of Commerce types call Michiana--north central Indiana and southwest lower Michigan.

From 1998 to 2003, I wrote a column in the Elkhart, Indiana Truth which focused on local history. Rexroth, who was born in South Bend and spent his early years in Elkhart, was a fascinating subject, but An Autobiographical Novel. made research frustrating. For example, Rexroth says both his grandfathers were named George. I spent hours looking for maternal grandfather "George Reed." Finally, I located the obituary for Charles Reed, whose daughter was a Mrs. Charles Rexroth. Had Rexroth forgotten, or was he uncomfortable with the fact that his mother had married a man with the same name as her father? Freud was gospel in those days, and Rexroth may not have wanted to give his mother an Oedipus/Electra complex.

Sometimes Rexroth exaggerates events. A flour mill explosion he claims to have witnessed, "killed everybody in the place." In fact, the explosion took place in the wee hours of the morning, and the only casualty was a cat. He can also make people more interesting. In 1912 Charles and Della (Kenneth calls his mother Delia, though official records list her as Della) lived on South Second Street in Elkhart, two doors down from the Winchester/Knickerbocker mansion, "....the home of an elderly couple named Knickerbocker. They manufactured a galvanic battery health device which made them a fortune." They claimed the device could cure "cholera morbus, rabies, paralysis, galloping consumption, or cancer." The truth was more prosaic. William Knickerbocker was a banker. (After William died in 1937, his widow, Nellie Winchester Knickerbocker, became more interesting. She drove around Elkhart in an ancient electric car, with flowers in vases on either side of the seat. Her ghost is said to haunt the mansion.)

But in spite of all the factual errors, Rexroth's book is provides a fascinating look at Elkhart in the years before the Great War. Chicago in the Twenties, and San Francisco in the Thirties and Forties. Unlike, say, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, or Sherwood Anderson, he sees progressive values in the upper Midwest:

The towns in northern Indiana lying along the Michigan border had been the last stops on the Underground Railway. They had a good many Negro freedmen living in them. Elkhart became one of the centers of the Ku Klux Klan some fifteen years after that, but in my days there if you called a man a nigger in the street a white man would very likely walk up to you and knock you down.

While Frey's memoir is not in the same league with Rexroth's, reading (or rather listening to) it gave me an insight into the mind of an addictive personality. I'm willing to forgive a few factual errors, or even outright untruths. Rexroth, in the preface to the second edition, writes:

How much of it is true? Substantially it's all true. The title was the first publisher's notion of one way of deflecting possible libel suits. Some of the people are divided up into two or three characters and then opportunely die. Now everybody of whom anything the least unpleasant is said really is long dead. Names have been changed throughout to avoid any embarrassment to the character or heirs; otherwise, this is all pretty much the way it actually happened. It will never happen again.

And in one sense he's right. In spite of factual errors, it's one person's memory of times events that "will never happen again." It's unfortunate that Frey's publisher did not subtitle A Million Little Pieces An Autobiographical Novel.

How I Passed Bonehead Math

Just about the only commercial television program I watch is Numb3rs. I like the program in spite of the fact that I've never been good at mathematics. For people like me, math is a very difficult subject to learn, for the perplexing reason that its teachers are good at math. In eighth grade trigonometry, I was totally baffled about what to do with the sines, cosines, and tangents. The teacher would give formulas on how to calculate them, but not what to do with them once calculated. Once I learned how to use them ( as I recall, it involved multiplication), I had no problem. But the math teacher didn't bother explaining things that were obvious to mathematicians. Nor did my math text explain it clearly.

I managed to get through high school math with mostly Cs. When I took the ACT, I did better in math than I expected, but not well enough to test out of the University of Iowa's core math requirement, informally known as Bonehead Math. And a recent episode of Numb3rs reminded me of how I got through the course with a C, thanks to antiwar violence in the 1970s.

The episode began with black-and-white footage of antiwar protesters, then cut to an unidentified person making a bomb. The Hollies' "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" played in the background. The bomb goes off at an Army recruiting office, killing a bystander. It appears to be a copy of a 1971 bombing at an ROTC office, and a retired FBI agent, who worked on the 1971 case, is brought in to assist. I won't get into the details, but math whiz Charlie Eppes uses network analysis to solve both cases.

I took Bonehead Math during the spring semester of 1970. By May, I was still holding on to a C, but I wasn't confident about passing the final. On May 4, the Ohio National Guard opened fire at Kent State University, and four people died. That night, the protests at Iowa turned violent. I was living at home in North Liberty, six miles north of Iowa City, so I didn't witness the rioting. On the morning of May 5, I saw the aftermath. Many of the downtown stores had their windows broken; the legend KENT was writ large on a concrete underpass. The Iowa Highway Patrol arrived later.

After more demonstrations, the University effectively shut down. While the university officially  remained open, virtually all students took the option of taking the grade they had at the beginning of May or taking an incomplete. I had my C, and I had passed the math requirement. Even though I had avoided the final exam, I had a recurring nightmare of having to take it, and being thoroughly unprepared.

Weird Habit No. 5: Violent Movies? I Can't Even Handle Sitcoms.

I didn't realize I was a Highly Sensitive Person until my daughter Anne was diagnosed with the condition. In fact, I had no idea it was a recognized condition. But, after Anne got the label, I took the HSP self-test. I answered yes to all but four of the questions. One of the questions was: I make a point to avoid violent movies and TV shows. That I do. In fact, I even try to avoid situation comedies in which people are embarrassed or are put in emotionally painful situations. Recently, I started watching The Terminal. It was just too upsetting to watch the Tom Hanks character's ordeal. Being of a practical bent, Kathleen asked me if I'd rather wash the kitchen floor. I washed it.

Weird Habit No. 4: I'm Oppositionally Defiant

It's one of those psychobabble terms, but I'm afraid it applies to me. When I hear something, I automatically think of objections to it. It can be maddening for a spouse, for instance, but on the whole, it's served me well. Both my parents were smokers. I never even tried a cigarette. I didn't try the other kind of smoke that some of my friends were doing. Or those other drugs that were supposed to expand the mind. When I lived in Iowa City, one of those places the right-wingers call a "people's republic," a lot of people thought I was a conservative. In Elkhart, Indiana, I seemed to be a radical. (Actually, in both places, I was a liberal Democrat, so maybe oppositional defiance didn't have anything to do with it.)

Weird Habit No. 3: Lost in a Fog

"Like a ship at sea, I'm just lost in a fog," begins that beautiful song by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. I remember listening to a recording of it with Kathleen. (I think it was sung by Connee Boswell.) Whether she pointed at me, or just gave me a knowing look, it was obvious that the song applied to me. Too often I'm just oblivious to my surroundings. In the early 1980s, I worked for CIT Tours, (Compagnia Italiana Turismo) in its Bensenville, Illinois office, as the Rail Coordinator. I finally got to go over to Italy for a familiarization trip, and finagled a way to take Kathleen with me. We were in the Sforza Castle in Milan, when we walked through a room which seemed to be completely empty. I said something to that effect, and Kathleen (probably with a roll of her lovely brown eyes), told me to look up. Of course she, as an art student, knew exactly what was there. Leonardo da Vinci had painted an incredible fresco on the ceiling. I, being lost in a fog, just thought it was an empty room.

Betty Friedan and McCarthyism--What if?

I've become a regular listener to courses on tape and CD. Last week, Kathleen, who works at the library, saw a course she knew I'd love and checked it out for me. It was "American Inquisition: The Era of McCarthyism," presented by Professor Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University. It's part of Recorded Books' "The Modern Scholar" series.

It was one of those odd coincideces that I was listening to Schrecker's final lecture on the legacy of McCarthyism just after the death of Betty Friedan. Schrecker talks about the era's influence on the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the American Left, and feminism. And while she emphasizes that McCarthyism wasn't the only factor in changing these institutions, she makes a persuasive case that was an important one.

During the 1940s, Friedan worked for the United Electrical Workers, writing pamphlets--at least one of which dealt with the double burden of working women who had to work a full day and handle most of the household chores. The Electrical Workers were a left-wing union and a target of the anti-Communist crusade. The union, weakened by the attacks, had to lay off a number of people, including Friedan.

Schrecker points out that when Friedan emerged as the "mother of the second wave of feminism," she was writing and speaking primarily about middle-class housewives and professional women.

It's one of those perplexing "what if" questions. Had there been no McCarthyism, would the second wave of feminism have been more inclusive of working-class women? Too many of America's blue-collar workers have been seduced by the Right, religious and otherwise. Yet there was a time when progressive causes, such as feminism, civil rights, universal health insurance--the list goes on and on--were workers' causes.

It's been a long time since I read The Feminine Mystique, but I remember being impressed with her arguments--especially her comparison of popular women's literature of the 1930s versus that of the 1950s. She certainly left a strong legacy. But still, what if...

Weird Habit No.2: I'm still a hopeless romantic.

A recent post in simply wait shows an Indian wedding with the caption, "come live with me and be my love." Of course, that's the first line of Christopher Marlowe's poem, "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love." I've always loved that poem. And even though I usually read the parody first, and often appreciate it more than the original, I've never much liked Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," which is sort of a parody. Raleigh's heavy dose of stark realism gives me the feeling that he knows it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and he wouldn't have it any other way. The ballad "The Golden Vanity" is based on a broadside naming Walter Raleigh as the heartless captain. Somehow, I have an easy time believing it.

While I grew up reading Bierce, I don't see his cynicism in the same way as I do Raleigh's. While Bierce's Civil War stories are often gruesome and seem to celebrate death, they often show his passion for the beautiful countryside of western Virginia. "A Horseman in the Sky," is a good example. In his later years, Bierce fought the barons of the Southern Pacific, who were trying to get out of repaying a loan to the U.S. Treasury--a noble campaign if there ever was one.

My causes often seem hopeless ones--what Howard Dean called the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," railroad passenger service, and the Episcopal Church (particularly struggling urban parishes like the Memorial Church of St. Luke in Philadelphia and St. Martin's in Chicago). And I've been married to the same woman for 32 years--and I still think she's amazing. I may often sound cynical, but underneath I'm a hopeless romantic.

Weird Habit No.1--I Read the Parody First

Patry Francis, of simply wait, tagged me with the five "weird habits" meme. I pretty much asked for it. I'll start with the one I mentioned in my earlier post--I tend to read the parody before the real thing. This probably comes from finding a copy of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary as a child. I now appreciate Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," but I got Bierce's version first:

The cur foretells the knell of parting day;
The loafing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;
The wise man homewards plods; I only stay
To fiddle-faddle in a minor key.

And like a lot of baby-boomer kids, I subscribed to MAD. Rarely did I see any of the movies it parodied, but in most cases, the parody not only pointed out the flaws, but pretty much explained the film.

Jay Ward and Bill Scott gave me Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales, Tom Slick, and Super Chicken. I'm afraid I saw a lot of the fractured tales before knowing the originals. The same people (I think) produced a show called "Fractured Flickers," which took old silent films, cut them up, and added narration. Hans Conreid was host. Before I saw the classic Lon Chaney "Hunchback of Notre Dame," I saw the fractured version, in which Chaney is the head cheerleader for Stanford University. (At the end, he transfers to Notre Dame).

In 1969, while staying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while my mother did research for Paul Engle, who was writing a book on American women, I discovered the Harvard Lampoon. The issue that summer was a parody of LIFE Magazine, which proclaimed "The End of the World." And there were advertisements for the next issue: "Tolkien Will Never Be the Same." Of course, I had to get Bored of the Rings. The book is as much a satire of America in the late 1960s as it is a parody of Tolkien's trilogy. I finally did read Lord of the Rings--some 30 years after reading the adventures of Frito Bugger, Goodgulf the Wizard, and Stomper (later known as Arrowshirt of Arrowroot).

And I have yet to see "Shakespeare in Love." "George Lucas in Love," I've seen.

My brief stint as an SDS member

SDS is back! The Students for a Democratic Society, which began in the early 1960s as a coalition of liberal and radical students, imploded in the last years of the decade. By 1969, SDS had abandoned its goal of participatory democracy and split into two factions: the Revolutionary Youth Movement, or Weatherman, and a faction affiliated with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party.

The revived SDS appears to be pursuing the ideals of the early organization. I for one, am happy to see they're back. As in the late sixties, the United States is pursuing an undeclared and unjust war. And the influence of multinational corporations and wealthy individuals on government, the environment, and human life itself is now truly frightening. I applaud those of the millennial generation who are taking up the good struggle, as well as those older SDS members who are assisting them.

My own brief SDS membership came in the fall and winter of 1966-67, when I was a sophomore at University High School in Iowa City. Alan Soldofsky, a budding poet (now professor of English and Creative Writing at San Jose State), organized the chapter. There weren't many of us--mostly misfits like ourselves. I attended a couple of University of Iowa SDS meetings. The memorable one happened to coincide with the Military Ball. As the ROTC cadets and their dates left the Iowa Memorial Union, we serenaded them with "We Shall Overcome."

In December, 1966, I went with my mother and brother to to visit family friends in Elgin, Illinois. One day during that vacation, I took the Milwaukee Road commuter train into Union Station, Chicago. I knew the SDS headquarters were on West Madison Street. I figured the easiest way to get there was to take the L (There's a rhyme which begins, "In Chicago El is L"), so I walked up to the Lake Street L, and boarded a westbound train. I didn't know about A and B stops, so I ended up at Lake and California, on the big, bad West Side.

I walked down California to Madison and caught an eastbound bus. The neighborhood changed from black to Asian as the bus rolled along. When I got to my block, most of the faces were white, male, and middle-aged. The SDS headquarters were on the western edge of Skid Row.

It was a second-story walk-up office. I didn't meet Carl Oglesby or any other high honchos of the movement. A young woman was there, too busy to talk. I picked up a few leaflets and a copy of the Port Huron Statement and took the bus back to Union Station. Naive 15-year-old kid that I was, I had just gone through what were reputedly some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago without receiving so much as a sidelong glance.

I wore my SDS button through the spring, but the group was beginning to abandon nonviolent resistance. By the fall of 1967, when I left Iowa City for Cedar Falls, SDS wasn't talking much about participatory democracy.

But my hopes are buoyed by the group's revival--especially since these younger members are looking to the SDS of the Port Huron Statement, with its ideal of participatory democracy, as its grounding.

"That weird shall never daunten me"

Patry Francis, who writes the blog simply wait, was recently tagged with a meme. In genetics (at least as I attempt to understand it), a meme is like a gene, but its traits are passed on socially and culturally. But here in the blogosphere, it’s a sort of cross between a questionnaire and a chain letter. You get a meme, answer the questions, and then send it on to friends/victims. Thanks to the very limited readership of this humble blog, I’ve never been tagged with a meme.
The meme Patry received had just one question: Expose five weird habits. Her answers are fascinating. She correctly interpreted weird to mean odd, unusual, or eccentric. I doubt whether the meme’s author had in mind the word’s traditional meaning.

In the Scottish ballad, “Thomas the Rhymer,” the Queen of Elfland rides up to Thomas while he is lying under a tree. She dares him to kiss her—“If ye dare to kiss my lips, sure of your bodie I will be.” Thomas answers:

Betide me weal, betide me woe,
That weird shall never daunten me.
Syne he has kissed her rosy lips.
All underneath the Eildon Tree.

Here, weird is a noun, and means fate. Fate, with more than a hint of the supernatural. It’s a cognate of the German werden, to become. German uses werden to form the future tense, similar to the way we use will or shall. Back in my university days, when I took German, I asked my professor about the connection between werden and weird. He responded that yes, they were cognates, and that in some parts of southern Germany the future tense was formed with
sollen (cognate of the English shall) because of the pagan, supernatural implications of werden.

As an adjective, before its meaning was diluted, weird was enveloped in the sense of fate and the supernatural. The comic Weird Tales and Jim Morrison’s line, “Weird scenes inside the gold mine,” have held on to the traditional meaning. A few years ago, Kathleen and I were talking about the word, and she quoted from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” an example of something truly weird:

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! As holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Should I be tagged with the meme, unlikely as that is, I could easily come up with five eccentric or unusual habits, such as my propensity for reading the parody before the real thing (I read Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings more than 30 years before I finished Tolkien’s trilogy, for example. I still think of Frito and Spam, not Frodo and Sam.) But in the classic sense of weird, I couldn’t come up with one example. At least I hope not.

When I was Clean for Gene

The news of Eugene McCarthy’s death brought back memories of that hopeful and dreadful year when he challenged Lyndon Johnson for the presidency. I was too young to go off to New Hampshire or Wisconsin to campaign for McCarthy. In the fall semester of 1967-68, my mother had taken a teaching job at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. I would be a junior at Cedar Falls High School.

After two years at University High School in Iowa City, Cedar Falls was a big change. Even though it was part of the Iowa City public school system, U-High was very much an elite institution. I was an outsider—a boy with divorced parents and limited income in a school dominated by professors’ kids.

At first, I had some apprehension about going to a large public high school. But I found more acceptance at Cedar Falls than I ever had at U-High. I wrote for the school paper, acted in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and was part of a clique of political liberals.

Eugene McCarthy declared his candidacy for the presidency on November 30, 1967—my sixteenth birthday. While I didn’t know anything about the man until then, I was very much against the Vietnam war and happy to see someone challenging Johnson. The obvious challenger, Robert Kennedy, had declined to run. But the eccentric senator from Minnesota, who wrote poetry, played baseball, and had been a novice monk, was willing to take on a sitting president.

I went to the Students for McCarthy group at the UNI and agreed to sell “Million for McCarthy buttons. While I sold only ten or twenty, I did contribute to the effort. But the most bizarre event in my personal campaign for McCarthy came at the Cedar Falls High School mock convention.

By the time we had the mock convention, Johnson had pulled out of the race and Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey had jumped in. There weren’t many Humphrey or Kennedy delegates. The two strongest candidates were McCarthy and Wallace. That’s right. George Corley Wallace, unreformed and segregationist. Cedar Falls, with the exception of UNI students, was virtually all white. If you were black, you lived in nearby Waterloo. On the east side, where some of the streets weren’t even paved. A lot of Cedar Falls residents, including many of my fellow students, wanted to keep it that way. And they weren’t embarrassed about supporting the nation’s most celebrated racist.

The mock convention was held in a large classroom, which resembled a small auditorium. It began with the nominations. McCarthy’s began with a Chinese fire drill display, and the announcement that the senator had once led a Chinese fire drill team. The Humphrey and Kennedy nominations were not memorable. But the Wallace nomination, with Confederate battle flags waving and the playing of “The Bonny Blue Flag” (a song glorifying an early Confederate banner) was. The leader of the Wallace contingent—a very bright young man who argued that Wallace had the best interests of blacks at heart—was caught up in the pro-Confederate enthusiasm.

The deliberations and negotiations went on, it seemed, for hours. Some of the Kennedy and Humphrey people came around to the McCarthy side, but not enough for a majority. After several ballots, we realized we had to accept Wallace as running mate. (The alternative would have been to walk out and let the Wallace people win.) Thus our mock convention ended with an oxymoron—a McCarthy-Wallace ticket.

The McCarthy group met at a local restaurant to celebrate, but it was a curious celebration, mainly spent waiting for two very popular and attractive people to show up. We had won, but only by accepting a running mate whose politics we detested. Yes, it was just a mock convention. But in retrospect, it exemplified the polarization of America in 1968.

The issue of the war was secondary in that mock convention—something we McCarthy supporters hadn’t realized. I think we believed, like most northern liberals, that sensible people had overcome race prejudice. I knew there were racists in Cedar Falls, but I thought their cause was on the decline. My family had attended a memorial service for Martin Luther King, jr. at a black church on the east side of Waterloo, where we were welcomed by the parishioners. It seemed to me that blacks and whites would learn to accept each other.

But the riots after King’s assassination, including some disturbances in Waterloo, had frightened too many whites. And in retrospect, the war was a secondary issue in the November election as well. Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, finally broke with Johnson on the war, but still lost the 1968 election. He couldn’t overcome Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which used the race issue to win border states which normally went Democratic, while Wallace, running as an independent, took much of the Deep South from Humphrey.

Had he lived and been nominated, Robert Kennedy might have been able to bring Americans together. McCarthy, with his acerbic wit and professorial air, had little chance of attracting enough middle-of-the-road whites to win the election. But that doesn’t detract from his courage to take on LBJ. For a few months in the winter and spring of 1968, Gene McCarthy gave us the hope of a better world. For that, I’m proud to say I supported him.

Proust's Madeleine from the Portuguese

I hadn't had Rojoes Cominho in a long time. It's pork cubes browned and then braised in garlic, cumin, and white wine, with lemon slices and flat-leaf parsley added at the end. When Kathleen asked me what I wanted for my birthday dinner, I decided on Rojoes Cominho with Portuguese fried potatoes. We used to eat it a lot. Pork was cheap in the 1970s, especially in Iowa, and we had acquired several of the Time-Life "Foods of the World" books, including The Cooking of Spain and Portugal.

In those days we lived in Parklawn Apartments in Iowa City. Today it's a regular dormitory. In 1991 it became infamous as the residence of Gang Lu, the brilliant Chinese physics student who murdered four professors and a rival student, and crippled another student. But during the 1970s it was married student housing. We were lucky to get an apartment there, as the rent was considerably lower than in the private housing market.

At Parklawn was a very sophisticated couple. He was slightly built, and wore a moustache and goatee. She was a red-haired beauty who kept her maiden name. They seemed a bit aloof. But when someone organized a get-together for the residents, which included a potluck dinner, they participated. I decided to make Rojoes Cominho for the potluck. And I was surprised and pleased that the sophisticated husband sought me out and complimented me for making the dish.

That would be the end of the story, except that several months (or perhaps years) later the young man I had thought so urbane made a radical conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. He spent his days on the Pentacrest (the center of the University, on the hill overlooking the Iowa River, and named for the Old Capitol and the four great limestone halls surrounding it) lawn proclaiming the power of Jesus Christ to all who would listen.

I was an an agnostic in those days. Sometimes I still am. But I was shocked and perhaps frightened by this radical conversion. The young man had not lost any of his intelligence, but he now seemed a fool, sermonizing and arguing with all who would listen. It's doubtful he won any converts.

My own conversion took place over years--it's still taking place, sometimes retreating, sometimes advancing. When I learned of Kant's view that people should act as if they are free--whether they're free or not--I applied this to my faith, or lack of it. I try to act as though a benevolent and just God exists, even when my doubts are overpowering. I don't wish for a "blinding light" conversion. But making and eating Rojoes Cominho brought back memories of that young couple, who are, of course, now as middle-aged as I am.

The Great Train Robbery--Coming Soon

“Here I go again, crossing the country in coach trains.”
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Starting from San Francisco.”

If George W. Bush gets his way, tomorrow’s poets won’t have the benefit of Ferlinghetti’s rolling muse. And most of us who care about this form of transportation suspect that it’s not just the wonderful long-distance trains that the Bush Administration wants to snuff out, but all passenger train service. Because they couldn’t kill passenger trains through Congress--even a Republican Congress--the Bush loyalists appear willing to do, in the campaign parlance, “whatever it takes,” to make flying and driving our only transportation options.

David Gunn, who was president of Amtrak until November 9, when the Bush-appointed Amtrak Board of Directors fired him, put it bluntly to Railway Age Magazine: “They have to do a lot of dirty stuff this year, because next year is an election year, and what they’ve got in mind will be very unpopular.” Within the next few months," Gunn said, “there will be a lot of train-offs and other service cutbacks.”

Earlier this fall, the Amtrak board secretly voted to authorize the dismantling of the Amtrak system by selling off the Northeast Corridor. Such a move would have to be approved by Congress and all indications are that even this Congress will not go along.

While Bush loyalists speak the language of “Amtrak reform,” Gunn calls their bluff: “Anything they’ll tell you is bullshit… The Administration is serious about taking this place apart.”
Except in the Northeast Corridor, passenger trains do not seriously compete with the fly-drive culture. But so long as there are passenger trains running, it’s a reminder to the oilmen who dictate Bush's policies that perhaps there is a civilized alternative to fuel-guzzling jets and SUV‘s. They want to nip that possibility in the bud. Hence this backhanded attack.

And when they whine about Amtrak subsidies, they ignore the hundreds of billions “invested” in the airport-airways and highway systems--not all of it from user fees.

But perhaps it’s the very civilized nature of rail travel which offends the Bush administration. The possibility of sitting in your window seat and seeing an America not dominated by Wal-Marts and strip malls. Of riding the Capitol Limited, the quintessential Slow Train, out of Pittsburgh and into the Alleghenies, following the Monongehela, Youghiogheny, and Casselman rivers to the eastern divide, then down the Potomac through Cumberland, Maryland, stopping at Martinsburg, West Virginia, with its roundhouse, and Harpers Ferry (the armory John Brown captured can be seen from the train), past Point of Rocks and its high Victorian depot, and into Washington’s incomparable Union Station. You won’t see these views from the Interstate, or on a flyover.

“Who stole America?” writes Ferlinghetti at the end of his poem. “Myself I saw in the window reflected.” Perhaps, but I'm not convinced. Stealing America isn’t a single act. As the technocrats like to say, it’s a process. And what Amtrak chairman David Laney and his fellow Bush-appointed directors are trying to do is certainly a big part of the process.

Our only hope is a big backlash from Congress.

The Universal Soldier and the Twilight of Democracy

Jana Oliver, a fantasy writer, recently attended the Romance Writers of America convention in Reno, and reported that the conventioneers showed their support for our young men and women serving in Iraq while deploring President Bush and his war policies. And while romance and fantasy writers aren’t exactly a scientific sampling of American society, I believe their viewpoint is the prevailing one in America.

That contrasts with the antiwar movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, in which a substantial minority felt the ordinary soldier was culpable. Perhaps the best summation of that argument can be found in Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song, "Universal Soldier," which concludes:

But without him how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau,
Without him Caesar would have stood alone.
He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can’t go on.

He’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame.
His orders come from far away no more.
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers, can’t you see
This is not the way we put an end to war.

I personally never blamed the ordinary soldier for the Vietnam war. A large number were draftees. Most of those who volunteered believed they were fighting for a good cause. But those who did blame them were reflecting a belief in democracy which is virtually absent from today’s society.

The Students for a Democratic Society called it "participatory democracy," and it is as radical an agenda as anything proposed by Marx, Lenin, or Mao. Many SDS members rejected republican, or representative government, arguing that only pure democracy, with all decisions made by popular vote, was worthy of the name democracy. (Unfortunately, practical application of the idea led to farce, when SDS members in Cleveland would debate for hours on whether to take a dinner break.)

But the ideal of participatory democracy was a powerful one. America was a democracy, or at least a democratic republic. And if "we the people" rule, then we bear responsibility for its failings. In fact, Sainte-Marie went beyond blaming the soldier by saying his orders come "from…you and me." We were all, as members of a democratic society, culpable for the sins of war.

While many of us still believe in the ideals of democracy, few see ours as a democratic society, in which the ordinary citizen has any power to make changes. We all remember the election of 2000, in which Al Gore had won the popular vote, and appeared to have won Florida, giving him an electoral majority. But five members of the Supreme Court stopped the recount and awarded the election to George W. Bush.

In 2004, Democrats nominated one of the most decent people in public life to run for president, but the false and malicious "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" campaign, plus Republican vote suppression and probable voter fraud, gave Bush the victory over John Kerry. After two successive presidential elections which appear to have been won fraudulently, it’s hard to talk about a democratic society.

I’m glad we’re not blaming common soldiers for Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. But we should also remember that one reason we don’t blame them is because we believe that they, like ourselves, are powerless in the face of governments and corporations.

Al Stewart's Question

What if you reached the age of reason
Only to find there was no reprieve
Would you still be a man for all seasons?
Or would you just have to leave
We measure our days out in steps of uncertainty
Not turning to see how we’ve come
And peer down the highway
From here to eternity
And reach out for love on the run
While the man for all seasons
Is lost behind the sun.

Henry Plantagenet still looks for someone
To bring good news in his hour of doubt
While Thomas More waits in the Tower of London
Watching the sands running out
And measures the hours out from here to oblivion
In actions that can’t be undone
A sailor through darkness
He scans the meridian
And caught by the first rays of dawn
The man for all seasons
Is lost behind the storm.

And I should know by now
I should know by now
I hear them call it all around
Oh, they go
There’s nothing to believe in
Hear them,
Just daydreams, deceiving
They’ll just let you down

What if you reached the age of reason
Only to find there was no reprieve
Would you still be a man for all seasons?
Or would you just disbelieve?
We measure our gains out in luck and coincidence
Lanterns to turn back the night
And put our defeats down to chance or experience
And try once again for the light
Some wait for the waters of fortune to cover them
Some just see the tides of ill chance running over them

Some call on Jehovah
Some cry out to Allah
Some wait for the boats that still row to Valhalla
Well, you try to accept what the fates are unfolding
While some say they’re sure where the blame should be falling
You look round for maybe a chance of forestalling
But too soon it’s over and done
And the man for all seasons
Is lost behind the sun

-Al Stewart, "A Man for All Seasons," from Time Passages, 1978

Recently I bought a cassette of Al Stewart’s Time Passages at public radio station WGLT’s "Recycled Music Sale." I knew the title track, of course,with its wonderful refrain, "Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight," but the song I played and replayed was "A Man for All Seasons," which relates the ordeal of Thomas More to present times.

It seems at first that Stewart is simply expressing the futility of life. But if that were all, why is the song so intriguing? My own interpretation is that he’s asking the listener whether he or she can stand up for principle in the face of "no reprieve." It’s too easy in postmodern times simply to disbelieve—in God, or in one’s own principles, rather than face condemnation. Or one can "just leave," washing one’s hands of the whole affair. And while "the man for all seasons is lost," Stewart is imploring his audience to find the man for all seasons in himself or herself in an age where such principled courage is considered passé.

Thomas More went to his death because he refused to sign oaths of allegiance to King Henry VIII, specifically to accept Henry as the head of the Church of England and to recognize his children by Anne Boelyn successors to the throne. More is, in an indirect way, one of the first victims of the Anglican Communion, of which I am a member. But I believe he is very much in the tradition of the great Christian martyrs, as are Anglican bishops Hugh Latimer and Thomas Ridley, who were burned to death during the reign of Catholic queen Mary Tudor.

Unlike some early Christians, few of us aspire to martyrdom. And very few will be put in the situation of Thomas More. But in this postmodern world, we are constantly pressured to betray our beliefs and principles. The voices which call out, "there’s nothing to believe in" are stronger than ever.

Can one still be "a man for all seasons?" I hope and pray one can, even as I hope and pray I will never be put to such a test

The Closet Over the Stairs

So move your fam’ly westward,
Good health you will enjoy,
And rise to wealth and honor
In the state of Elanoy.

-Folk Song, "Elanoy"

No wealth and honor so far, but I’ve found a place to stay in Illinois—a little efficiency apartment near downtown Bloomington. I’ve been rereading the Harry Potter books—actually listening to them on tape on the long weekly drive between Bloomington and Elkhart. At the beginning of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s [Sorcerer’s] Stone, the ten-year-old Harry is living "in the closet under the stairs" at his aunt and uncle’s house on Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey. My apartment, on the top floor of a 1900-era house, is small enough to be called "the closet over the stairs."

It appears the house was converted into apartments sometime in the 1920s, given the "Pullman kitchen" complete with the original gas stove (no pilot light, but the landlord provides a lighter). I have a new refrigerator, as the original one isn’t working.

My neighborhood, the "old east side," appears to be fairly stable, in spite of fact that most of the houses on East Locust have been made into apartments. One block to the north is the Franklin Park Historic District, which includes the onetime home of the first Adlai E. Stevenson, vice president during Grover Cleveland’s second term. A sign in front of the Italianate brick house reads that Stevenson was born in Kentucky in 1835, and attended Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, practiced law in nearby Metamora, then moved back to Bloomington, and was elected to Congress in 1874 and 1878.

Having served two nonconsecutive terms in the House, it was appropriate that he serve in the administrations of the only president elected to two nonconsecutive terms—as first assistant postmaster general from 1885 to 1889, and as vice president from 1893 to 1897.

Another sign honors Letitia Green Stevenson, who was president general of the Daughters of the American Revolution during the years her husband was vice president. That was before the DAR began its successful crusade to alter the Pledge of Allegiance (changing "my flag" to "the flag of the United States of America" to prevent immigrants from pledging to the old country’s flag) or preventing Marian Anderson from singing at their hall. That’s not to suggest that the DAR wasn’t an elitist organization in the 1890s. Any group that requires a pedigree isn’t exactly living up to (lower-case r) republican principles.

Just up the block from Stevenson’s house, another sign marks the residence of Joseph W. Fifer, Republican governor of Illinois from 1889 to 1893. Like Stevenson, he attended Illinois Wesleyan. Perhaps the most fascinating house is across the park from Fifer’s—a red sandstone castle built in the Richardson Romanesque style. The evening I passed it, a tortoiseshell cat was sitting on a low wall, blending into the background.

Another curiosity in the old East Side is the former Moses Montefiore Temple. (Montefiore, in spite of his name, was a British philanthropist.) Its architecture is Moorish, with elements of Greek and Gothic. So we have a former synagogue built in an Islamic style, which later functioned as a Christian church. It's now a private residence. The present temple is out in the subdivisions.

Until last week, I was living out of motels while learning the arcane rules and Byzantine accounting procedures of an Amtrak ticket agent. I remembered that I hated the accounting end of the job, but had forgotten how hellish it was for a mathematically challenged person. I hope I'll get used to it.

The best news I've had is that Classic Trains wants to buy "Magic Summer," an account of my trainriding experiences during the summer of 1967. I recieved an e-mail from Robert McGonigal, the magazine's editor. My wife has decided that he's a distant cousin of Professor Minerva McGonigall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Impressions of Philadelphia

As I prepare to leave the City of Brotherly Love, I'm posting some impressions of the city gleaned (and edited) from my e-mail letters. Anything in italics is added comment.


"Last Week I went to Philadelphia, but it was closed," posted May 31, 2004

W.C. Fields may or may not have said that about his onetime hometown, but the week before last, I did go to South Street in Queen Village, the trendy neighborhood south of Center City Philadelphia, looking for a used bookstore, and it was closed. Actually, it had moved to Old City, the area just east of Independence Hall (or the Old State House, as Philadelphians call it). But since I was in need of exercise, I decided to walk west along South Street to the Broad Street Subway, and I came across one of the most amazing pieces of quirky urban art I had ever seen. It's called The Gardens--a derelict building transformed by mosaics, junk sculpture, and found art. Like all too many wonderful things in this world, it's threatened. For an online look at The Gardens and other works of its creator, click here. The Gardens hasn’t yet been destroyed. Isaiah Zagar has two years to raise $200,000. Though I can’t afford to give, I wish him well.


Mole Street: an oasis of urban beauty, posted June 13, 2004

Last Thursday, after visiting the Free Library off Logan Circle in Center City Philadelphia, I decided to take a different route back to the subway station. I walked east on Race Street (named for a racetrack which was once there, not for Philadelphia's race problem), surrounded by parking ramps, vacant lots, and modern architecture so ugly that it makes my old office building in Chicago seem inspired. (Mystery writer Sara Paretsky described that building--or a fictionalized version of it--as "sixty of the ugliest stories in Chicago.")

But as I crossed Sixteenth Street, I looked across another mostly-vacant lot to what seemed to be a miraculous survival--a block of brick row houses. I crossed Race and found, to my amazement, an oasis of urban beauty among the blight. Here was an entire block of what I guessed to be early nineteenth-century brick row houses. How it survived the "urban renewal" of the '60s and '70s, I don't know. And while I didn't meet anyone while walking down that narrow street, I could imagine that if I lived there, I would have friends on the block. There was a John Kerry sticker in the window of one house; the door of another had a sticker proclaiming, "My Philadelphia Includes Culture."

It was called Mole Street--an apt name for this lovely survival burrowed within one of the ugliest parts of Center City. You can find it between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets. It runs between Race Street on the north and Cherry Street on the south.


Two political rallies: 1972 and 2004, posted September 29, 2004

Political rallies have changed a lot since 1972, when Kathleen and I were at a McGovern rally at the University of Iowa. It was a bittersweet affair, as it happened on the day Henry Kissinger declared that "peace is at hand." While everyone was glad that the war seemed to be coming to an end, the announcement meant that McGovern's extremely slim chances of winning the presidency had just evaporated. The rally took place on the Pentacrest--the spiritual, if not geographical, center of the campus. McGovern spoke from the steps of the Old Capitol, and students crowded the grounds in front of it, while others watched from the windows and ledges of Macbride and Schaeffer Halls--two of the four limestone buildings which, with the Old Capitol, make up the Pentacrest. It was exciting for me not only because of the candidate and the crowd, but because I was with the beautiful, intelligent, and charming young woman I had met only a few weeks before.

The Kerry rally had the energy and excitement, but it was also far more regimented and commercialized. As soon as I emerged from the subway, I was confronted by hawkers of political buttons, bumper stickers, and T-shirts declaring such things as "Somewhere in Texas a Village is Missing its Idiot." (I wonder whether the same people are hawking anti-Kerry paraphernalia at Bush rallies.) The rally was at Hill Field, an area much larger than Iowa City's Old Capitol lawn, but access was both restricted and segregated. Those of us with "white tickets"--those printed off the Internet--were consigned to the outer reaches of the field. The people with the pink, blue, and green tickets issued by campaign headquarters got to stand much closer to the candidate. And we didn't just hear Kerry, but a whole retinue of Democratic candidates and officials, mothers of soldiers in Iraq, and, amazingly, middleweight boxing champion Bernard Hopkins, who presented Kerry with a pair of gloves to "knock out" Bush. He gave a better speech than some of the politicos. And unlike 1972, the candidate has a good chance to win in November.

Ah, back when we had hope for a new day in politics. In the debates, Kerry said we’d be getting “more of the same” under Bush. He was right. The deaths in Iraq keep accumulating, and the place is still a training ground for terrorists.


You Call it Madness, I call it Philadelphia--a trip to the Northern Liberties: March 28, 2005

I recently read Lenny Kaye's book," You Call it Madness: the Sensuous Song of the Croon." Kaye, guitarist for the Patti Smith group, has an incredible knowledge of music. The book focuses on crooner Russ Columbo, along with Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee. Kaye calls them the Holy Trinity of Croon. ("You Call it Madness. I call it Love," was Columbo's signature song. He died in a bizarre shooting accident in 1934, which is one reason he's not so well-known as Crosby and Vallee.) But Kaye will go off into digressions about musicians from Vivaldi to Eminem, and just about everyone in between. Strangely enough, Kaye doesn't mention the wave of Vallee imitatiors in late Sixties, such as "Winchester Cathedral" by The New Vaudeville Band, "Acapulco Gold," by the Rainy Daze, The Beatles' "Honey Pie," and "Loving You Has Made Me Bananas," written by Neal Adams, of comic book fame, and sung by Guy Marks. Its lyrics are, well, unique:

Your red scarf matches your eyes/You’ve closed your cover before stri-i-iking/Your father had the ship fitter blues, /and loving you has made me bananas./You burned your finger last evening/while my back was turned./I asked the waiter for I(o)dine/but I dined all alone.

You can get the essence of "You Call it Madness" by listening to Terry Gross interviewing Kaye on "Fresh Air," which you can find at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4125347 I was so taken with the interview that I had to find the book--even though it meant going to a branch library in a rough Philadelphia neighborhood called the Northern Liberties. Originally, this area was parceled out to veterans of the Revolutionary War. It's now a sort of Third World neighborhood, mixing the poor of various ethnic groups with the wealthy gentrification crowd. Walking west on Girard from the El station, I passed a storefront Albanian mosque, a statue of Don Quixote donated by the government of Spain in 1995, along with the bars, tattoo parlors and sex shops you'd expect. In the center of this mix of urban decay and new condos is a huge Catholic Church, St. Peter the Apostle, where St. John Neumann is buried. In spite of, or perhaps because of the neighborhood, the librarian was the friendliest I've encountered in the Free Library system.

Northeast Philadelphia and the Memorial Church of St. Luke

In the next few weeks I‘ll be able to return to my beloved Midwest. I just accepted an offer to transfer to that most punned city of Illinois, Normal. Even before I received the transfer offer I began putting together highlights of my year (actually year and a half) in Philadelphia. I’ll begin with a look at the Far Northeast Philadelphia, taken from the prologue to a novel I hope to write. The narrator may be a lot like me, but he's still fictional: I came to Philadelphia for financial reasons only. No failed marriage, no love affair, and I'll withhold judgment on the job. But St. Luke's Church has been a refuge for me:

I had come to Philadelphia for escape--to flee a failed marriage, a dead-end job, and the memory of a love affair that had doomed both marriage and career. The city I found was not the Philadelphia of William Penn, Benjamin Franklin or Edgar Allan Poe, but Far Northeast Philly, a vast suburban sprawl which happened to be inside the city limits. That’s not quite true. There was beauty in Northeast Philadelphia. One just had to look for it. There was Pennypack Park, that lovely stretch of forest and stream which meandered through the Northeast. There was of Bustleton, the Civil War-era village now surrounded by post-World War II development. And within Bustleton was the Memorial Church of St. Luke, an English country church in all but location.

St. Luke’s provided solace for me that first year after I left the Midwest for the City of Brotherly Love. I found out quickly that I did not belong on the East Coast--that I was what writer Hamlin Garland called a “son of the middle border.” But the little Episcopal church was a refuge from the stresses of living alone in a strange city.

Like many small urban parishes, St. Luke’s was struggling financially. I regret that I could only afford a few dollars on some weekends and nothing on many. And because the parish didn’t have a lot of money, it had trouble keeping a rector. When the last rector transferred to a wealthier parish, there was a temporary rector, and then a series of visiting priests--retired clergy or priests who worked outside the church.

It was January--the feast of the Epiphany. I was struggling with depression and did not want to get out of bed that morning. But I told myself that this was an important day in the church year, and dragged myself out of bed, ate my usual breakfast of fruit juice, peanut butter toast and instant cocoa, dressed, and walked the six blocks from my apartment over to St. Luke’s.

It was a cold day, but bright, and I began to feel better as I breathed in the crisp air. Walking up Old Newtown Road, I passed the one holdout Victorian house at the corner of Gregg Street, and tried to imagine the neighborhood as it had been when St. Luke’s was built. At the top of the hill, I headed west on Welsh Road, and made my way to the red door of St. Luke’s.

The red door was once a sign of sanctuary. Because Christ’s blood had been shed for all, the red door was a sign that no blood was to be shed within that door. I doubt whether the church would be able to offer sanctuary today, though why such thoughts entered my mind, I didn’t know.

I found my usual pew, just behind the choir, and had time for a brief prayer before the organist began the processional: “Songs of thankfulness and praise, Jesus, Lord to the we raise…” A young black girl led the procession, carrying the cross in front of her. I bowed to the cross as she passed by. The other two acolytes, a white boy and girl followed, and joined the cross-bearer on the altar. Then came the lector, holding the Bible high above her head. The choir followed, filing into the pews in front of me, singing, “Anthems be to thee addrest, God in man made manifest.”

The priest, a woman with graying black hair,was last in the procession. It was only when she turned to enter the pulpit that I recognized a face I had last seen behind the doors of Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City, where she had sought sanctuary from an enemy I did not then understand. As we sang the third stanza, those intense brown eyes focused on me. Was I imagining it, or was she singing it for me--for us?

Manifest in making whole
Palsied limbs and fainting soul;
Manifest in valiant fight,
Quelling all the devil’s might;
Manifest in gracious will,
Ever bringing good from ill;
Anthems be to thee addrest,
God in man made manifest.

Delbert E. Wylder, 1923-2004

My father died last December, but memorial services were not held until Memorial Day weekend. In a recent post, Rexroth's Daughter asks whether I reconciled with my father. The answer is, thankfully, yes. Below is my tribute to him, given at his burial service in Morrison, Illinois, May 26, 2005:

Near the end of a disappointing year, I received the news that my father, Delbert E. “Deb” Wylder had been diagnosed with leukemia and was hospitalized at the Lovelace Clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When I talked to him at the hospital, he told me that instead of the four years he had four weeks. I arranged to get two weeks off work at the beginning of January to see him one more time. There were a lot of things we both wanted to talk about. Sadly, it was not to be. It turned out that he didn’t have four days. My brother, who made a heroic effort to drive from Iowa City to Albuquerque when he learned of the acute nature of our dad's leukemia, didn't make it there in time.

He died peacefully, and while he was looking forward to going home and spending his last days with his beloved wife, Edith Perry Wylder. And he made it to age 81--almost a decade longer than most Wylder males, who typically die at age 72.

He grew up in Morrison, Illinois, where his father worked for the Smith Trust and Savings Bank. After graduating from Morrison High School, he spent a year at Coe College, transferred to the University of Illinois, but interrupted his schooling to join the U.S. Army Air Forces. He saw action as a fighter pilot, flying P-47 Thunderbolts over Italy. He was featured in the 2001 History Channel documentary “The Color of War.”His war experiences also gave me my name--I was named for his wingman, Stephen Verm, who died when his P-47 crashed during a dive-bombing run.

After the war, he went to the University of Iowa, where he was in Paul Engle’s Writers’ Workshop. It was in Iowa City where he met my mother, Jean Williams Wylder, whom he married in 1949. I was born two years later, in Peoria, where my dad had taken a teaching post at Bradley University. The couple returned to Iowa City in 1952. My brother Bill was born there in 1956.

My parents’ marriage was not a successful one, and they divorced in 1965. The same year, my dad married Edith Perry Stamm. They would have been married forty years this June. Edith is a noted Emily Dickinson scholar. She has been a kind and loving stepmother.

Deb Wylder taught English at a number of universities, and mentored many of today’s writers and scholars, including Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham. He was the author of numerous scholarly articles and two books: Hemingway’s Heroes (1969) and Emerson Hough: Twayne’s United States Author’s Series 397 (1981). He was one of the founders of the Western Literature Association.

My dad introduced me to the world of writing and literature, and encouraged me in my freelance writing. When I was a small child and fascinated with trains, he often took me down to the Iowa City depot to watch the Rock Island trains go through.

One of his many friends said, “I can’t imagine a world without Deb.” I can’t either. So long as there are people who have been inspired by his teaching, mentoring, and writing, and touched by his love, Deb Wylder is with us.

American Gothic vs. Stone City

Steven Biel, in his new book about American Gothic, calls it "America's most famous painting." I haven't read the book, but as a former Iowan, I've always been a bit sensitive about Grant Wood's "masterpiece." People outside the Midwest see it as an indictment of or the straight-laced rural Iowa. Ironically, the models for his painting were his sister and his Cedar Rapids dentist--hardly rural rustics.

For me, Wood's masterpiece is Stone City, painted in 1930, the same year he produced his better-known picture. The hard, stern faces of American Gothic contrast with the undulating, sensual landscape of northeast Iowa. And where American Gothic reinforces a stereotype about Iowa, Stone City demolishes the biggest one--that Iowa is flat. The late Laurence Lafore, a Philadelphian who came to Iowa in the 1970s to teach history, wished he could carry "a pocket-sized reproduction of Grant Wood's Stone City, an Iowan version of View of Toledo" whenever anyone said Iowa was flat. ("In the Sticks," Harper's, Oct. 1971.)

Stone City was a quarry town, which lost its main industry after the introduction of Portland cement. Wood had an art colony there in 1931 and 1932. During the late 1940s and early '50s, Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, made it into a summer writers' colony. When his big house there burned down in the late '50s, Stone City's days as an art center were over.

I doubt whether anyone will write a book about Stone City, but for me it remains Wood's masterpiece. It is the truest statement of his love for the Iowa land, and an image which reminds exiles like me exaclty why we consider ourselves exiles.

How Francis Gary Powers changed my life

Walter Cronkite, in an NPR commentary, reminded us that it’s been 45 years since the U-2 crisis. It happened the spring of 1960, and was the first crisis in that decade of crises. Eisenhower was president, and the nation was still reeling from the Soviet Union’s Sputnik and Lunik space missions. Although I was a child at the time, I remember it well, because of the effect it had on my family. In the fall of 1958, my father, frustrated with the low salary of an instructor at the University of Iowa, took a job teaching technical writing at the Sandia Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The job paid well, and my family moved into a nice house in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights. Sandia Corporation was a defense contractor. Its scientists were in the business of designing the nation’s most fearsome weapons. Working for Sandia, my dad had a better idea of how close we had come to nuclear war when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev announced that an American spy plane had been shot down over Russia, and proved it by producing the pilot, Francis Gary Powers.

After the crisis, my parents mortgaged the house to the hilt in order to build a fallout shelter in the backyard. Lots of people in Albuquerque were building fallout shelters--there were at least three on my block. Everyone knew that the city was the Soviets’ Number Seven target, thanks to Kirtland Air Force Base and Sandia Corporation.

There were a number of contractors building fallout shelters in those days, but the best was Powers Construction Company. It was owned, or so my parents told me, by the brother of Francis Gary Powers. I don’t believe anyone thought there was a conspiracy, but it seemed ironic, to say the least, that the terrible luck of one brother would lead to the prosperity of another.

The financial strain caused by the fallout shelter must have put a great strain on my parents’ marriage. Later, my father left Sandia for a lesser-paying teaching post at the University of New Mexico because he didn’t want to contribute to the building of nuclear weapons, however peripherally. And my mother, to try to help the fill the income gap, got her teaching certificate and began teaching high-school English. That should have helped things, but it seemed to drive my parents further apart. There were other strains, the principal one being my dad’s failure to pass the PhD exam at Iowa. One of the professors on his committee had a longstanding grudge against him. And there was an underachieving son named Steve. My father became depressed, talked openly to my mother of suicide, and eventually left the house.

When my parents divorced in 1965, my brother and I went with my mother to Iowa City, where the obsession with nuclear annihilation was far less pronounced, and political liberalism was the norm.

My father found happiness in his second marriage, went on to complete his PhD, and taught English at several universities. He and his wife (also a noted English professor) returned to New Mexico after their retirement. He died last December.

My mother taught English, worked for Paul Engle’s International Writing Program, and eventually became a psychiatric social worker. She also retired to New Mexico, but died in 1989.

So Francis Gary Powers, without knowing it, changed my life when he bailed out of U-2 spy plane and into the national headlines. Would my parents’ marriage have survived had it not been for the fallout shelter? Perhaps not. But it would have broken up at another time and under different circumstances. And I would not be the same.

Wisdom, Sydney Harris, and Laupes

"So, who stays up at odd hours worrying about wisdom? Only you and I, my friend. We are the only ones."
- Abdul-Walid of Acerbia

Sadly, Abdul-Walid has shut down his blog. I don't blame him--he's a newlywed working on a dissertation. So the links in this post don't work.

Recently a friend gave me a copy of Sydney J. Harris's Pieces of Eight. Harris, who died in 1986, was a syndicated columnist based in Chicago. I grew up reading Harris in the Des Moines Register. Wisdom was his stock and trade. You can find Harris on the Web, but usually only in the form of epigrams: a favorite is, "The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers." But rereading the columns from the 1970s and early '80s reminds me of the dearth of wisdom in today's journalism. In 1965, when I was a freshman in high school, the Register also carried Walter Lippmann. I read Max Lerner in Iowa City Press Citizen and listened to the comments of Eric Sevareid on CBS News. For wisdom today, one has to go to the blogs--Abdul-Walid is a must-read, along with the laupes ("A laupe is someone who takes a Literary Approach to the Unorthodox Pursuit of Enlightenment. Most people on my blogroll are laupes [we can pronounce that "LA-oo-pays", right? Or, to simplify things, a rhyme with 'taupe'])."

For the full explanation of laupe, see: are you a laupe

The responses are as much fun to read as the original post. I'm not sure whether I'm a laupe. One of the marks of the original Beat poets was to deny being beat. Gelett Burgess in his 1906 Are You a Bromide, or The Sulphitic Theory, divided people into the imaginative, independent-thinking sulphites and the boring, cliché-spouting bromides. But if people had to wear identifying buttons, the bromides would be choose the red sulphite buttons, and the sulphites would wear the blue bromide buttons. So, I'll put it this way: I'd like to be a laupe.

"May I make a reservation for you?"

Beginning today, when you call 1-800-USA-RAIL, you won't be greeted with a demand for a reservation. Back in the mid-nineties, when Amtrak had money to blow, and a mandate to "run the corporation like a business," it squandered incredible amounts on outside consultants and received virtually nothing in return. A company called CMC Marketing was brought in to conduct training of reservation and ticket agents: it's my understanding that Amtrak paid some $800,000 for the training program and consultation. After CMC was through, reservationists were required to use a standard greeting: "Amtrak (your name), may I make a reservation for you?" It put customers on the defensive from the first, and created an adversary relationship between agents and customers. I, along with others, had urged Amtrak to change the greeting . On April 28, agents received a memo that as of May 1, "May I make a reservation for you?" is finally out, replaced by the friendly, "How may I help you?" Agents are also no longer required to give first and last names--a first name will suffice. I'm happy that management is beginning to think rationally. It may be too late, as Amtrak's board of directors is stacked with Bush appointees who want to privatize, (i.e., kill) rail passenger service.