For a number of years right after college, I had very little money. My apartments were dumps; I usually had no car. I worked odd jobs (e.g., highway crew flagman, Kelly girl, library desk clerk, backpacking store employee). For two reasons, I never looked upon it as a problem. One, it felt normal, as most of my friends were in the same situation. Two, I didn’t have a real job partly because I didn’t want a real job. I felt that my relative poverty was self-imposed and temporary.

I look back at those years not only as a happy time, but as a period of personal growth. So why am I reluctant to let my daughter have similar experiences?

Last week I was in Madison for other business, but I was able to see Clare for about an hour in the late afternoon. Before leaving town, I drove her to an auto repair shop to pick up her car. As I hugged her to say goodbye, I said, “I don’t want you stressing about money. If this brake job is going to wipe you out, let me know.”

Even as I said those words, I realized that they contradicted my belief that Clare should be entirely on her own. Since Clare’s birth, my plan had been to help Clare pay for college and then financially cut her loose. Clare is now three years out of school, doing fine, yet I stepped in the moment she had an unexpected expense. Why did I do this?

The answer to that question is that the urge to help my daughter is stronger than my belief that I shouldn’t. Clare is my first priority, I have discretionary income, so it is easy for me to intercede whenever her finances get tight. I want Clare’s early adult life to be easier than mine, even if mine wasn’t difficult. Maybe more significantly, I am not optimistic about the future, and I justify my continued financial support by telling myself that the turning points in my daughter’s life will not be about money.

Clare is an independent woman, and she and I have an unspoken agreement. I offer to pay some of her bills, and she declines my offers. It’s all good.

Manyu has been dealing with a stomach ailment for the past couple of months. The primary treatment is a diet so restrictive that she and I now eat separately. The one exception is breakfast, where each morning she prepares a double batch of oatmeal with poached eggs and brings me a bowl while I write. I don’t care for egg in my oatmeal, but Manyu needs it as her morning source of protein.

The diet Manyu is on does not include dairy or sweeteners or anything else that tastes good, so my oatmeal is usually bland. Today, however, I was hopeful because it showed up with a purple tint. I assumed that Manyu had tossed blueberries into the cereal while it simmered, and while blueberries are no substitute for brown sugar or maple syrup, they were bound to add a little sweetness to the gruel.

The first spoonful was disappointing. There was a new flavor I could not identify, but it definitely wasn’t blueberry. I sifted through the oatmeal with my spoon and brought up chunks of purple sweet potato. Sweet potatoes are as misnamed as blueberries; one is not blue, and the other isn’t sweet. I got through my bowl of purple oatmeal by noting that 1) the concoction must be nutritious and 2) I would be reaching into our leftover Halloween candy come lunchtime.

Writing about hot cooked breakfast cereal is a good indication that the past week was uneventful. The only other highlight of the last few days has been finding out that our public library now has a tool library and its collection includes a twenty-foot long tree pruner. Without ever stepping on a ladder, I was able to lop off three tree branches that were hitting the roof of my house. Would it be ungracious of me to borrow the library’s tree pruner and then point out that the money spent on DIY tools could have been used to buy hard copies of the novels the library currently carries only as eBooks?

I state that very little happened last week but, of course, the election took place on Tuesday. I’ve been living as a hermit ever since, but am discovering that blocking out politics means missing out on other things as well. I will hole up, hunker down, and stay ignorant a bit longer, but eventually may have to come out of my self-imposed isolation.

Three weeks ago I mentioned in my blog that I exercise at the recreation center on the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus. The facilities are for the students, but currently employed and retired staff can pay an annual fee and use the weight room and the running track. I usual go mid-morning, which is not a popular time for most non-students. On some days I am 45 years older than everyone else in the building.

My usual routine is to work on a few exercise machines in the weight room and then go up to the second floor for an hour on an elliptical. The second floor is primarily an indoor running track, but there are StairMasters, treadmills, stationary bikes, and ellipticals along the track’s perimeter. I wish I could jog around the track instead of running in place on the elliptical, but my knees can no longer handle the pounding of a run.

After I finish my workout, I usually rest on a bench for a few minutes before heading into the locker room for a shower. One day I didn’t even find a bench, but instead sat on the floor in an open space behind the exercise machines. I must have sat there too long, because one of the students came over to make sure that I was all right. He saw that I had earbuds in (just like everyone else in the place), so he didn’t say anything. He just put on a quizzical face and gave me two thumbs up. I told him that I was fine, so he smiled and walked away.

I came away from this small event with two realizations. One, some of the most well-intentioned people I know are UWL students, and this kid was doing the right thing by looking out for the wellbeing of a stranger. Two, there were two other people sitting on the floor not twenty feet away from me, but I was the one who looked like he needed help. 

I have chosen to commend the young man’s good intentions and ignore the fact that he thought I might be someone who couldn’t get up off the floor. For the record, I can get off the floor on my own. It is climbing out of my kayak after an afternoon on the river that gives me problems.

Every fall semester I meet (via Zoom) with fifteen to twenty graduate students from Western Carolina University. I always enjoy doing it, as the students, all majoring in experiential and outdoor education, remind me of me fifty years (a half century!) ago. Some of them are classroom teachers, but most are naturalists, environmental educators, or wilderness trip leaders trying to better understand the educational philosophy behind the work that they do. I am always encouraged when I meet young adults who still care about this stuff.

Class this semester was unlike previous years, as the planned date of my visit was cancelled due to Hurricane Helene. I suggested to Paul Stonehouse, instructor of the course, that we skip our meeting altogether, but he asked if I could appear at a later date for just a few minutes. The students read my book Rediscovering Dewey for class, and even if it is just a quick encounter, Paul thought that the students got something from interacting with the author of one of their required texts.

After getting online with the students, I thanked them for reading my book and followed up by telling them that Rediscovering Dewey, more than anything else I’ve ever written, was something I’d like to have back for a major revision. I’ve thought this for a long time, but last week was the first time I’d told anyone. I think that the reason for mentioning it now has much to do with this year’s Presidential election.

When I wrote Rediscovering Dewey I wanted to accomplish two things. One, I wanted to study John Dewey for myself. For much of my professional career I’d gone back and forth on whether my own educational philosophy coincided with Dewey’s, and I sometimes felt that my uncertainty was due to an incomplete understanding of Dewey’s basic educational tenets. Secondly, I wanted to put Dewey’s writings into plain English as a way to make them accessible to those who find Dewey confusing and/or too academic. I succeeded in my first objective, but fell short on the second. I did restate Dewey’s philosophy of education more simply than the original texts, but I didn’t take it far enough. As a result, Rediscovering Dewey works well with graduate students in experiential education, but comes nowhere close to appealing to a general audience.

None of this would matter except for the fact that Dewey’s educational philosophy is inseparably linked to education for democracy. Dewey believed that if even one generation of young Americans was not taught how to think for themselves, democracy would fail to function properly. Oligarchs with power, money, and access to the media would seize the opportunity to indoctrinate Americans to a particular way of thinking. The great American experiment in democracy would die.

I fear that Dewey’s warning may be coming to fruition. I realize that readership for all of my books is small and the impact they make is negligible, but I still wish I’d written a more accessible book.

Fishing on the Upper Mississippi River was lousy all summer. Then, right around the autumn solstice, it started to pick up. The month of October has been outstanding. If 2024 is like other years, the fishing will continue to be good for a few more days and then come to a sudden stop. I used to think that the fish went lethargic when the river turned (i.e., the warm surface water cools, becomes more dense, and mixes with the cold water below), but sometimes the good fishing ends before the cold weather hits, so I am not sure why the fish are active late September/early October only to quit biting sometime around Halloween. All I know is that I want to make hay while the sun is shining.

I tell myself that I fish more for the solitude than for the action, but I know that that is wishful thinking. I focus on solitude when the fishing is bad; I focus on catching fish when the fishing is good. That is not to say that solitude is not important to me whenever I venture out. I stay away from my favorite fishing spots if there are other boats there, and I move away from my favorite spots if other boats show up. Still, there is no question that I go out on the river more often when the fishing is good, and I pay less attention to my surroundings when the perch, bluegills, and bass are hitting.

This year, more than in past years, I have come to realize that fishing two or three times a week is exhausting. I like to fish out of my kayak in places where motorboats seldom go, so I sometimes paddle a mile or two before I even put a line in the water. This alone is work. I also have to lift the boat on and off the roof of my car (which gets progressively more difficult with each passing year). My back gets sore sitting in a kayak for four or five hours, and the pain worsens when I hunker over a cutting board to fillet my catch. By the time I step into a hot shower to warm up and scrub the smell of fish off my hands, I wonder if the day will come when the difficulties of fishing from a kayak will keep me from going out at all. I suppose it is like I just said: I need to keep making hay while the sun is shining.

Last Monday I stepped out of the locker room of the university recreation center and saw four men in black suits staring up at the rafters. I then went to leave the building, and there were four more suited men checking out the exits. My first thought was that I could not remember the last time I’d seen even one person at the rec center wearing a suit, and now there were eight. My second thought was that these guys were either Men in Black looking for aliens or Secret Service agents prepping for a visit from either Harris or Trump.

When I got home I checked Kamala Harris’ schedule and found out that she was going to be in La Crosse on Thursday. The exact location of the rally was undisclosed, but apparently I’d stumbled across some inside information.

Harris’s website had a link for registering for the rally. I’ve seen Presidents (Clinton, Obama) and Presidential candidates (Mondale, Gore) in person, so I knew that attending the rally would entail a long wait. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to use the better part of a day to hear a stump speech, but Manyu wanted to go. I registered both of us, although I had to sign us up as individuals and not as a group of two.

When I finished the online form, I was told that registration did not guarantee admission. If I was admitted, I’d receive an email Thursday morning explaining where to go and what to do. About 8am on Thursday I received an admission letter. Manyu did not. At 9am, Manyu got a phone call from the Wisconsin Democrats saying that they were short a few volunteers for the rally and she could still attend if she was willing to work at it. She declined, realizing she’d been avoiding large groups ever since COVID and probably shouldn’t have registered in the first place. I’d recently recovered from a bout with COVID and felt largely immune.

My instructions were to bring a photo ID and go to Tent B sometime between noon and 2pm. I bicycled to the Rec Center and went to the end of a line that was around the block and down the street. After five minutes, a volunteer came by and shouted that anyone in Groups A, B, or C should step out of line and go directly to their respective tents. I left, found Tent B, and discovered only five people in front of me. A volunteer put a green band around my wrist, and two minutes later I was in the building.

Once inside, various volunteers saw my wrist band and told me to keep walking. After making a big loop around the main crowd, I wound up on the bleachers directly behind the podium. All of the attendees had a three hour wait ahead of them, and I was one of very few people who didn’t have to stand the whole time. I asked those sitting around me if they knew what we’d done to merit a prime location, but no one knew.

While I waited, I had plenty of time to assess the crowd and the stage. The crowd was predominantly white. Most of them were either college students or senior citizens. Middle-aged people, i.e., those with jobs and/or young children, must have had other places to be in the middle of the day. There were a half dozen people on the stage. Three were Secret Service, and three were campaign staff. The broad-shouldered Secret Service agents wore stereotypical scowls and barely moved. The campaign workers were much slighter in build and darted onstage/offstage like nervous squirrels. The campaign workers took their duties as seriously as the Secret Service people, but as far as I could tell, were accomplishing nothing at all. Between the three of them, the height of the microphones at the podium got checked at least eight times.

The speakers, in order of appearance, were the La Crosse mayor, a UW-La Crosse student, Mark Cuban, another student, and Harris herself. Of the five, I was most moved by the second student. He nervously said that his mom was an immigrant who worked two jobs to support her family, he was the first person in his family to go to college, and now he was about to introduce the Vice President of the United States.

Harris herself was fine. Except for a jab at Trump’s recent comment that January 6 was “a day of love,” she didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard before. The two surprises were 1) she looked fresh and seemed to genuinely enjoy campaigning, and 2) while I left the venue before Harris was finished working the crowd after her speech, I had the impression she was going to stay to shake the hands of everyone who wanted to personally meet her.

I am glad I saw Harris, but I now realize that I am not good rally material. I don’t like Trump, but didn’t feel compelled to boo every time his name was mentioned. I clapped whenever Harris said something I agreed with, but because I was situated directly behind her, I think I was supposed to hold up and frantically shake the “Harris Walz” placard that one of the volunteers had given me. I am pretty sure that one of the times I did hold up the sign I had it upside down. 

After never having called 911 ever in my life, I recently called twice in two days. I thought that the second time was an accident, but I have come to learn that there is no such thing as an accidental 911 call.

The first call happened in Madison. After attending a small wedding celebration at a restaurant a block from the Capitol, I went to retrieve my car from a nearby parking ramp. As I turned on the headlights to pull out of my parking space, I noticed a metal briefcase dangling from a small hook on one of the ramp’s concrete support pillars.

I paid for my parking, exited the ramp, and was heading up East Mifflin Street when I decided that a 15” x 20” metal box abandoned in a parking ramp was too suspicious not to report. I called 911.

The 911 attendant seemed uninterested in my call. At first, she didn’t understand why I was calling. Eventually she took down my name and asked which ramp I’d parked in. I was the one who suggested that I tell her where in the ramp the box was located. I hung up and never learned what happened.

The next day I was back in La Crosse. Late that morning I went to exercise at the recreation center on the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse campus. I listen to a playlist during my workouts, so I had my phone with me. After an hour in the gym, I went to take a shower. I tossed my phone into my locker, and the instant it landed on an extra towel I had lying on the bottom of the locker, it rang. I answered, and a voice said, “This is 911. What is your emergency?”

I apologized and said there was no emergency. I explained that I’d called 911 the night before and must have bumped the recall button. The woman on the end of the line had me reconfirm that there was no emergency and then said, “I still need to record the call. What is your name, and what is your location?”

I told her, we hung up, and I went to take a shower. Ten minutes later, I stood in front of my locker with a towel around my waist. A campus cop entered the locker room, came down my row of lockers, and asked, “Are you Steve Simpson?”

I told him that I was, and he said, “We received your 911 call, and I need to make sure that you are okay. Do you have a form of identification with you?”

I reached into my locker, retrieved my wallet, and handed him my driver’s license. The police officer looked at the license and said, “I thought I knew all of the streets in La Crosse. Where is Huckleberry Lane?

“Hackberry Lane,” I replied.

“Yeah, that’s right” the cop said and returned my license. “Have a good day.”

When I reported a potential bomb threat, no one seemed to care. When I butt called 911, the call was treated as if I’d been abducted. When I stood all but naked in a gymnasium locker room, I looked suspicious enough that a cop had me confirm my identity. And out of the sixty or seventy people working out in the rec center that morning, the cop somehow knew that I was the one who called. Was he somehow able to trace my phone right down to my locker? I wish I would have asked.

My electronic devices have been giving me trouble lately. This week my computer slowed, my Fire Stick died, and my smart tv developed a pink spot in the upper right corner of the screen. Only a week earlier my website crashed, and three weeks ago all of the warning lights on my car’s dashboard lit up for no apparent reason.

Pete, my mechanic of almost thirty years, checked out my car and found nothing wrong with it. He got the warning lights off by rebooting the vehicle’s computer, but was not sure whether a simple reboot solved the problem, He said that if the same thing happened again, he’d bring my car to a younger, more tech-savvy mechanic across town. Rayna, the woman who maintains the server space where I keep my website, helped me get my site back up. She was kind enough to say that I may not have received the email about WordPress’s big upgrade, and if I had, I would have been able to fix the glitch myself. Just last night, after taking more than an hour to link my new Fire Stick to my old tv, I came close to getting Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime all up and running. And as far as the pink spot on my tv, I notice it only if I look at the screen from a particular angle, so I’ve decided to ignore it and hope it doesn’t get bigger or more pronounced.

Most importantly, I got my computer almost up to speed. The biggest improvement came when I emptied my downloads folder, which surprised me because there was not much in it. After trying everything I could think of to create space on my hard drive, I called Clare to ask if she had any other suggestions. She gave me a few ideas, but didn’t think my problem was available space. She told me that old Macs don’t handle new updates well and that my computer, no matter what I did, would progressively get slower. “Someday,” she said, “you’ll have to give up and buy a new one.”

For old guys like me, technical glitches never leave us alone. It reminds me of my years of teaching at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Every autumn I’d attend a training session about the latest campus-wide software upgrades. At the introduction of each of these trainings, Jim, the guy in IT who spoke the best non-geek English, would always start out by saying, “Once you get used to these changes, you’ll like them.” I and most of the senior (i.e., older) staff in the room would immediately think, “No, we won’t,” and we were usually right.

None of these comments are meant to suggest that i am anti-technology. In the early 1980s, technology changed my life for the better, and for that alone, I will always be grateful. I was among the first Ph.D. students to write their dissertations on personal computers. Mine was a Macintosh, a square box about the size of a wastepaper basket with a black and white screen not much larger than a slice of bread. It had almost no storage, so everything went on floppy disks. Everyone in my cohort had their dissertations on multiple floppies and stored those floppies in two or three different locations. We also made dot matrix paper copies as backups to our backups, because none of us fully trusted our ability to use the technology properly. I never lost anything, but a friend of mine accidentally misused an indexing feature in his word processing program and put all of the words of his dissertation in alphabetical order. I’m not sure what he would have done had he not had a backup.

I and probably every 1980s graduate student thought these early home computers were godsends. At the time, and even today, I don’t know how those who went before us wrote and then repeatedly revised their dissertations. I am certain that I would have never finished mine had I had to write it on a typewriter.

In addition to the gremlins in my car, my website, my tv, my computer, and my Fire Stick, my microwave oven died. The new one is a significant improvement over the old one, but  now I have to unlock it each time I want to take something out. Why do I need a lock on my microwave?

On Saturday Manyu and I drove a friend’s teenage son to Decorah, Iowa so he could retake his ACT exam. I am not sure why he couldn’t retake the exam in La Crosse or why he couldn’t drive himself to Decorah, but I didn’t ask and had nothing else planned for the day. I do know that his mom runs a small carryout Chinese restaurant and cannot take Saturdays off. Only three weekends ago Manyu and I drove the boy’s older sister to Minneapolis and helped her move into her first-year dorm at the University of Minnesota. Every time I help the family, the mom makes me a large order of General Tso’s chicken. I’ve had her General Tso’s chicken directly off the menu, and I’ve had it when she makes it special for me. There’s a difference. General Tso’s chicken is a real Chinese dish, but my Chinese and Taiwanese friends all think it is too sweet. It is the Westerners married to Chinese and Taiwanese who like it.

The ACT exam was scheduled to take four hours, so Manyu and I spent the morning wandering Water Street in downtown Decorah. I’ve been told a number of times that Decorah is a hidden gem, but still it exceeded my expectations. All of the buildings were well-maintained; every storefront, as far as I could tell, was occupied by a business that could have been found in Mayberry (i.e., no franchises, no tattoo parlors, no CBD shops). I counted three independently-owned coffee shops within a two-block area. All three were busy on a Saturday morning, and all three looked more inviting than anything in La Crosse.

Most of the people not relaxing in a coffee shop were at the weekend farmer’s market. It was the kind of farmer’s market where I buy stuff I don’t want just to support the vendors. That morning I bought an overpriced jar of jalapeño-laced peach preserves because a cute six-year old girl spent five minutes explaining to me why, among the four flavors her mom was selling, I should get either the peach or the hibiscus.

Decorah is one of several towns in the tri-state corner (Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) where people of the back-to-nature movement went in the 1960s and 1970s. Even though most of them eventually returned to life in Chicago, Madison, or the Twin Cities, the ones who stayed created communities that now attract new generations of people looking for a simpler life. Decorah is especially popular in this regard, because in addition to the small-scale farms, bakeries, and artisan shops, it also is home to a small liberal arts college known for its music programs. Decorah combines rural living with the appeal of a college town.

Manyu and I walked past Decorah’s Democratic headquarters. The double doors were wide open, and two old guys (older than me) called us in and tried to register us to vote. I said, “We are already registered. Besides, we live in Wisconsin.”

“Oh,” said one of the old men, “you live in one of those places where your vote actually matters. Good for you.”

I am skeptical of omens. Even though I am convinced that some events in life cannot be explained logically, I almost always see coincidence where others find symbolism. Having said that, something happened last week that I am choosing to remember as an omen. It’s a good omen.

On Monday, Manyu and I drove to Madison to serve as witnesses at a wedding. The groom is an international student we hosted nearly a decade ago. We have lost touch with most of the international students we’ve helped over the years, but Hanqin remains a good friend. He was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and now is working on a masters degree at the Madison campus. His fiancée recently arrived from China, and because neither Hanqin’s nor Yijun’s parents were able to come to the US for the wedding (passport/visa problems), Manyu and I stood in as surrogates.

The ceremony was held at the offices of the Wisconsin District IV Court of Appeals. I would have thought that the Appeals Court would be downtown near the Capitol, but it is in a modern office complex on the city’s far southside. The complex has a large parking lot, and the parking lot is designed with several islands of green space.

When we returned to our cars after the wedding, I wanted to immediately get out of my suit jacket and dress shirt. Before taking my shirt off in the parking lot, I looked around to make sure I wouldn’t offend anyone standing nearby. It was then that I saw two sandhill cranes feeding beneath a pair of oak trees in one of the parking lot’s green areas. The number of sandhill cranes has increased over the last twenty years, so seeing one or two is not uncommon. This, however, was the first time I’d ever seen any in a heavily populated part of a city. I pointed the birds out to Manyu and then tracked down the bride and groom to show them. The newlyweds were as excited as I was to see the cranes and wanted to get close for a photograph. The two birds briefly looked up as Hanqqin, Yijun, and their photographer approached, but neither bird made any effort to walk or fly away.

Maybe because cranes appear so often in Chinese landscape paintings, I’ve always assumed that they are associated with good luck. I googled it when I got home and discovered that “[cranes] are frequently represented at Japanese weddings as a symbol of honor and loyalty, because cranes often mate for life. In China, cranes symbolize wisdom, nobility, longevity, immortality, and determination. In Vietnam, cranes are a symbol of longevity. In Africa, cranes represent love, long marriage, and happiness.” I immediately emailed my findings to Hanqin.

Two weeks ago I saw an endangered whooping crane for the first time in my life. Now two sandhill cranes show up to help my friends celebrate their wedding. Just as I do not believe in omens, I also doubt that “all things come in threes.” Still, if I have another memorable crane encounter in the next few weeks, I may have to revisit my thinking on both omens and groups of three.

A niece and nephew on Manyu’s side of the family visited last week. One of them is an influencer living in Los Angeles. The other manages a UN refugee camp in South Sudan. If I knew how two kids from the same family ended up with such different careers, I’d write about that – but since they don’t even know how it happened, I need to write about something else. Instead I’ll explain how I tried to introduce these two young, worldly individuals to simple and relatively mundane La Crosse, Wisconsin.

My strategy was to immerse them (literally immerse them) in our one noteworthy resource, the Upper Mississippi River. On their first afternoon in town I took them for drinks on the outdoor deck of the Waterfront Restaurant. The Waterfront’s happy hour includes Wisconsin cheese plates and brandy old fashioneds, the official cocktail of the state of Wisconsin.* More importantly, the deck is only a few feet from river’s edge, so it provides an excellent view of barges, riverboats, and recreational boaters.

The morning after their arrival I took them paddling through an especially peaceful stretch of Upper Mississippi backwaters. I was surprised to find access to the backwater from the main channel completely blocked by a long sandbar. This is actually a good thing, as it means that motorized watercraft cannot enter.  Once we dragged our kayaks over the sand, we had miles of backwater to ourselves.

I never take the Mississippi backwaters for granted, but unless I bring newcomers there, I tend to forget that common sights for me are rare occurrences for others. Eagles, beaver lodges, an acre of lily pads, miles of solitude are big deals to anyone who doesn’t experience them once a week during the non-winter months. Also there is the fact that the Mississippi backwaters almost always offer something new even to its regular visitors. On this trip, the new and unexpected feature was a large bed of traveling clams.

The route we paddled was a four-mile loop. We entered the backwater at one spot along the main channel and exited some distance downstream. Both access points had long sandbars, but whereas the sandbar at the entrance was high and dry, the sandbar at the exit was a few inches below the surface. As we stepped out of our kayaks to float them over this isthmus of submerged sand, we noticed dozens of freshwater clams walking atop the sand. By walking, I mean that they were extending their feet outside their shells, grabbing hold of firm sand, and then pulling their bodies forward a very short distance. This action was exceedingly slow, but I imagined I was seeing movement. More dramatically, the clams were leaving tracks in the sand, some of the trails as long as five feet in length. I don’t know why one spot on the sandbar was better than another, but these bivalves were on the move. Much of the Mississippi River has a slippery muddy bottom, so movement that requires a solid foothold may not always be possible. Maybe these clams, finding themselves on solid ground, were moving simply for the joy of moving. 

I asked Sheela, the influencer, whether her short kayak trip might stay out of her online postings because it runs contrary to her persona as a trendsetting Angeleno. “Steve,” she said, “of course I will use it. Everything is about balance.”

* The brandy old fashioned really is the official cocktail of the state of Wisconsin, listed right alongside our state bird, state flower, and state tree. Our dysfunctional state legislature cannot approve a budget increase for the state university system, but they were able to designate the brandy old fashioned as our official state booze.

On Friday I drove to Dyckesville, a small lakefront community northeast of Green Bay. There’s a bar, a church, an ice cream stand, and a bowling alley. It is also where my mom lives. There is no best way to get from La Crosse to Dyckesville. Depending on my mood, I drive one of three routes. All three routes go through Wisconsin’s pine barrens. No one route is better than the others.

This time I took Highway 21. About halfway through the barrens, I saw a dozen sandhill cranes feeding in a field alongside the road. There is nothing unusual about seeing cranes in these numbers at this time of the year. Paired sandhills keep to themselves during the summer, but then congregate in preparation for the fall migration.

There was also a white blob in the field. At first, I thought it was a piece of abandoned farm equipment. Then it moved, and I assumed it was an unusually small, very white cow. Finally, as I turned my full attention back to the road, the animal that I thought was a grazing cow raised its head and transformed into something tall and sleek. For several seconds, I didn’t know what it was that I had just seen.

The body shape was similar to that of an egret, but it was bigger than any egret. It was at least as tall as the sandhill cranes in the field, but the coloration was wrong. I did not think of it at the time, but in retrospect, the famous Sherlock Holmes quote fit the moment well; “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The truth was that I’d just seen a whooping crane.

My serious birding days are over, but that did not keep my heart from racing when I realized I’d just observed a bird that was once on the brink of extinction. I was stunned, in a bit of a shock, and not in a condition conducive to driving safely. I didn’t pull over, but I did consciously calm myself down. I forced my arms to stop tingling, and because the car was in cruise control, I was able to take my foot away from the accelerator. Other than the one time I saw a California gray whale breach, I don’t remember ever being as excited about seeing a wild animal. It might take a sighting of Sasquatch to top it.

I now regret not having turned the car around. By the time I’d calmed down, realized what I’d just seen, and stopped wondering whether I was the only person to have noticed the rare sight, I was already several miles down the road. This week’s blog has no photo, and that is intentional. The absence of a photograph represents the mistake I made in not going back for a better look (and a potential photo opportunity). I tried telling myself that there was magic in only getting a glimpse of an endangered species, but my logical mind isn’t buying it. I should have turned around.

On Friday I drove to Dyckesville, a small lakefront community northeast of Green Bay. There’s a bar, a church, an ice cream stand, and a bowling alley. It is also where my mom lives. There is no best way to get from La Crosse to Dyckesville. Depending on my mood, I drive one of three routes. All three routes go through Wisconsin’s pine barrens. No one route is better than the others.

This time I took Highway 21. About halfway through the barrens, I saw a dozen sandhill cranes feeding in a field alongside the road. There is nothing unusual about seeing cranes in these numbers at this time of the year. Paired sandhills keep to themselves during the summer, but then congregate in preparation for the fall migration.

There was also a white blob in the field. At first, I thought it was a piece of abandoned farm equipment. Then it moved, and I assumed it was an unusually small, very white cow. Finally, as I turned my full attention back to the road, the animal that I thought was a grazing cow raised its head and transformed into something tall and sleek. For several seconds, I didn’t know what it was that I had just seen.

The body shape was similar to that of an egret, but it was bigger than any egret. It was at least as tall as the sandhill cranes in the field, but the coloration was wrong. I did not think of it at the time, but in retrospect, the famous Sherlock Holmes quote fit the moment well; “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The truth was that I’d just seen a whooping crane.

My serious birding days are over, but that did not keep my heart from racing when I realized I’d just observed a bird that was once on the brink of extinction. I was stunned, in a bit of a shock, and not in a condition conducive to driving safely. I didn’t pull over, but I did consciously calm myself down. I forced my arms to stop tingling, and because the car was in cruise control, I was able to take my foot away from the accelerator. Other than the one time I saw a California gray whale breach, I don’t remember ever being as excited about seeing a wild animal. It might take a sighting of Sasquatch to top it.

I now regret not having turned the car around. By the time I’d calmed down, realized what I’d just seen, and stopped wondering whether I was the only person to have noticed the rare sight, I was already several miles down the road. This week’s blog has no photo, and that is intentional. The absence of a photograph represents the mistake I made in not going back for a better look (and a potential photo opportunity). I tried telling myself that there was magic in only getting a glimpse of an endangered species, but my logical mind isn’t buying it. I should have turned around.

On my first bike ride since recovering from COVID I discovered that a new tent city had popped up along the main bike trail in the La Crosse River Marsh. There have long been homeless people living in the marsh, but until recently their encampments were tucked back in the woods. This is no longer the case. Now there are tents and makeshift shelters not a foot off the trail, and the reason for the relocation is this summer’s unseasonably wet weather.

During June and July, it rained almost every day. The Mississippi, La Crosse, and Black Rivers were at flood stage right up until August. The trails in the marsh, even though they are on elevated berms, were underwater. The homeless enclaves, which are not on berms, were decimated by high water and their residents forced to evacuate. Initially these displaced people moved downtown. Some set up in alleys, others in city parks. Camping is not allowed in any city park, but I was told, although I don’t know this for certain, that the cops were only rousting homeless people out of parks that had playgrounds.

When the rivers receded a couple weeks ago, most of the people living in the alleys and parks returned to the marsh. There they discovered that their former campsites were still soggy. The only dry spots were the berms of the bike trails, so people pitched their tents on them. The trails became gauntlets of homelessness, and running the gauntlets felt like an assault on people who have nowhere else to go.

As far as I know, there has not been a serious confrontation between bikers and marsh residents. My own experience is that a few of the tent dwellers intentionally stand in the middle of the trail when I try to pass. Others say, “Excuse me” and step aside. Some of the people try to stare me down when I make eye contact. Others say, “Hi” or wish me a good day.

If the people in the marsh are a representative sample of La Crosse’s overall homeless population, there is an equal mix of young and old, an equal mix of men and women. Almost everyone is white, which is not surprising. Over 85% of the people living in La Crosse are white. Hmong is the largest racial minority in the city, but I haven’t seen a single Hmong person living in the marsh. Many first generation Hmong Americans residing in La Crosse came here by way of Thai refugee camps, so returning to life in a tent may be the last thing that they want to do.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: I wrote the first draft of this blog on August 26. On August 29 I rode through the marsh, and all of the trailside tents were gone. I deviated from my normal bike route and headed downtown to see whether some of the people from the marsh had gone back to the alleys. I didn’t find any tents, but I encountered two policemen in Riverside Park and a group of anti-war protesters holding signs on the corner of Main Street and Third. I asked both the cops and the protesters about the homeless in the marsh and was told that the City Council had just revised the City’s loitering ordinances to expand the camping ban to include all city property (not just the parks). The police had removed people from the marsh only the day before, and no one was sure where those people had gone. One of the protesters thought that some of them had crossed the Mississippi River into Minnesota and were living in the nearby bedroom community of La Crescent. If La Crescent inherits even a small part of La Crosse’s homeless problem, it will be just a matter of time before its city council also tightens its ordinances on homelessness.  

I am writing this blog on the first day following my self-imposed COVID quarantine. I tested negative yesterday, and today I went on a short bike ride. I feel about 70% recovered. I am still weak, and I still sleep upwards of 12 hours a day, but my brain is not foggy and my appetite is good. I never did lose my sense of taste.

I’ve done pretty much nothing for ten days, and after enduring the first three days of fever, muscle ache, and listlessness, I was more bored than anything else. I would say that, except for one not insignificant thing, it was a wasted ten days.

The one thing that was of significance, although I may be the only one who cares, is a return the way I used to write. Years ago I wrote everything with pen and paper. I’d sit in Jules Coffee Shop, read books and articles on a particular subject, and whenever a particular passage within those readings sparked an idea, I’d stop reading for ten or fifteen minutes to put the idea down on paper. I would not describe the writing as stream of consciousness, although there was some of that. It was simply recording my reactions to a piece of writing, then reading some more and writing some more. On a productive morning, I might wind up with a dozen double-spaced pages of marginally connected thoughts. The majority of what I wrote was worthless, but within the worthless material was some reasonably good prose. The hope was always that I’d eventually be able to extract the good passages from the junk and cobble them together to create a rough draft of a coherent journal article or book chapter. The process was very hit and miss, but the hits were sometimes good.

Over time I gradually shifted to writing exclusively on my laptop. Writing directly to computer made it easier to stay focused on a single topic, easier to edit, and easier to stockpile good passages that, while perhaps inappropriate for the essay at hand, might be usable in the future. When most of my writing was academic writing, this approach made sense. The slight drop in quality was offset by a significant increase in productivity. The total number of words remained the same, but the final product would be a finished manuscript rather than a collection of good sentences that didn’t always mesh. My university was not a publish-or-perish kind of place, but I was expected to publish a couple of journal articles each year. Writing directly to the computer helped me to accomplish that.

Unfortunately my writing loses some of its voice when I write on a computer. For scholarly writing, a lack of voice might actually be good. It takes out some of the subjectivity which, for at least quantitative research, is discouraged. For personal essays, which is the kind of writing I want to do in retirement, lack of voice sucks life out of the prose. A personal essay without a voice isn’t really a personal essay at all.

Yet, out of an unbreakable habit, I continued to write on the computer after retirement. I knew I should do more writing with pen and paper, but seldom did. While I was bedridden with COVID, however, writing on a laptop was physically awkward. It was much easier to lie on my side and handwrite into a notebook. I went back to reading nonfiction and occasionally stopping to record my thoughts. I not only remembered how much I enjoyed this approach to writing, but also saw in my notes several really good ideas that would have been lost had I not jotted them down the moment they came to mind.

Now it remains to be seen whether I will continue to write this way. I think that I will. Also it remains to be seen whether my notebook of marginally connected reflections will fit into the book I am working on. Again I think that it will. Why did it take a bout of COVID to bring me back to my old way of writing?

For almost a week I have been sequestered with COVID. During the first three days (Days 0, 1, and 2 in sequester jargon), my eyeballs ached so badly that I could not read. On the fourth day, which is Day 3 on the COVID-recovery calendar, my symptoms changed and migrated from my head and throat to my chest, and I was able to read large print crime novels. Having nothing else to do, I read four books in three days. Three were recent works of authors I’ve been reading for decades. All three of these established writers used up their best storylines years ago, but they all still know how to write. Their latest books provided me with what I was looking for in my somewhat foggy condition: decent prose and familiarity.

Four novels in three days, however, led to a case of crime fiction overload. I’d breezed through them in a short timespan, but was left with the sense that they hadn’t offered anything different from a dozen other books I’d read in the past six months. I decided to put crime fiction aside for a while and read either literary fiction or nonfiction. I have trouble understanding complicated literary fiction even when I am not sick, so I was leaning toward the latter, at least nonfiction that wouldn’t ask me to think too much. A qualifier that I not think much eliminates philosophy and left me with either current events or popular science. I settled on Frank Bruni’s The Age of Grievance, a book I’d started earlier in the summer, but had put aside for a reason I cannot remember.

Of the four crime novels I read, one was by an author who was new to me. Of the four, I liked it the least. I keep trying new authors in hopes of finding someone unique, non-gimmicky, and good. I don’t expect to relive the excitement of the first time I stumbled across an early Spenser* novel, but I do occasionally find authors who make me want to run out and find what else they’ve written. And while I never expect it, I do on a rare occasion, maybe once every ten years, come across someone who clearly elevates the genre. Tony Hillerman, Michael Connelly, and James Lee Burke fall into that category. The shelves of my public library’s New Book section now carries more readable crime fiction than it ever has, but it gets harder and harder to find something exceptional. Still, it is fun to keep trying.

As far as my bout with COVID, I must be getting better. A few days ago I thought I wouldn’t produce a blog at all. This morning I felt well enough to write, and this is the result. The prose feels a little clunky, but clunkiness captures the way I feel right now. I have no interest in writing about my emergence from COVID hell, so the only topic left to write about is the books I’ve been reading.

* Spenser is the protagonist, not the author. Robert B. Parker was the author. Now that I think about it, most contemporary crime series are referred to by the main character, not the author. Reacher novels, Bosch novels, Spenser novels.

I avoid politics in my blogs. My left-of-center views sometimes find their way into my writing, but I’ve never made a politician or a political issue the main topic in any of my postings. That is until this week. Today I will deviate from my no-politics policy, although I believe that the underlying theme of this blog is not so much politics as it is the democratic process. Last Monday I was involved in a small, but uplifting conversation that reminds me of the way that politics ought to be conducted, and I think I should write about it.

Monday afternoon my front doorbell rang. All of my friends use the backdoor, so when someone comes to the front, it is almost always a stranger. Still I answered, and when I opened the door, there was an elderly man standing on my porch. On my walkway ten feet behind him was a woman of the same age. I assumed she was the guy’s wife, but she might not have been.

‘Hi,” the man said. “We are canvassing your neighborhood to make sure people vote in the primary next week. Also we are encouraging people to  vote for Katrina Shankland for Congress.”

“I will definitely vote next week,” I said, “but, to be honest, I am torn between Shankland and….”

“Rebecca Cooke,” said the woman, finishing my sentence for me.

“Yeah, that’s right,” I replied.

“We like Rebecca, too,” the woman continued. “Do you have a few minutes to hear why we are supporting Katrina?’

“Yeah, I do,” I said. “Come inside. I have the air conditioning on, and it’s cooler inside.”

The couple stepped into the house, but I did not invite them to sit down. I wanted to hear what they had to say, but I wanted the short version. “Are you supporting Cooke because she’s more progressive than Katrina?” the man asked.

“Yeah, mostly,” I answered.

“Well, Katrina’s moderate reputation is one of the reasons we support her,” the man said. “Our first priority is to beat Van Orden, and in our District that requires a moderate.”

Derek Van Orden is our first-term Congressman in the US House of Representatives. He ran as a moderate himself, but turned into a conservative Trump supporter immediately after relocating to Washington. His main claim-to-fame to date has been heckling Biden during the most recent State of the Union Address. Most liberals in my district agree that, other than the race for President, our House seat is the most important item on the November ballot.

“And,” the woman said as she piggybacked on her companion’s comment, “Katrina is almost as liberal as Rebecca. Katrina has a reputation as a moderate because she occasionally sides with Republicans in the State Assembly. She did vote against the latest state healthcare bill, but she did so not because she is against universal healthcare. She voted against it because it would have dismantled some of the agreements that labor unions already have with insurance companies. That bill would have benefited some people, but hurt others. She just wants a better bill.

“Katrina takes heat for some of her Assembly votes, but at least she holds a position where she gets to vote. Rebecca Cooke has never held elected office. The only time she ever ran for office was two years ago when she ran for Congress.”

“I voted for her then,” I said.

“I can see why you would have,” the woman continued, “but why didn’t she run for local office after losing in the primary last time? The big knock on her is that she lacks experience in government, but she didn’t do anything to address that weakness. She just kept running her small business and overseeing her nonprofit until it was time to campaign for Congress again. There is nothing wrong with what she did, but she still doesn’t have experience in government.”

I said, “That was the most intelligent explanation of someone’s support for a candidate that I’ve heard in a long time. Thank you for stopping by.”

The senior couple took my comment as their cue to leave. Just as they were stepping out the door, the man turned to me and said, “And vote “no” on the referendums.”*

“That part I have figured out,” I said.

* All of the August 13 primary ballots in the state of Wisconsin contain two referendums. Both are designed to make it more difficult to vote.

I am now five days into what I thought would be a one day project. If it was just a matter of the time needed to complete all of the work, I might have finished everything in a day, maybe a day and a half. But because it is an undertaking that requires full concentration while performing a repetitive task, I thought it best to break the work down into one-hour blocks. Any more than an hour, I found myself getting sloppy. The job is putting hundreds of reflective dots on all of my north-facing and south-facing windows. East and west don’t seem to be an issue. 

Two weeks ago I asked Craig Thompson, Department of Natural Resources biologist and local bird expert, whether he had heard that more birds than normal were smashing into the windows of people’s houses. He said that he hadn’t.

“I’ve even put falcon silhouettes and reflective leaves on my windows,” I said, “and the birds are still hitting the glass. In the past, it was two or three birds a year, but there have been that many hits in just the past month.”

“Yeah,” Craig said. “Unless you practically cover your windows with silhouettes or reflective leaves, they don’t work. The birds think that they can just go around them. The only thing that really works is dots over the entire window. If the dots are only a couple inches apart, the birds won’t try to sneak through. I have a bunch of dots at home if you want some.”

I accepted Craig’s offer, and a few days later he dropped off a dozen small packages at my house. I had assumed that the dots would come on broad sheets of paper, similar to a roll of wax paper, but they did not. Instead they came in narrow strips only one dot wide. My first thought was that applying the dots to the windows would be a lot of work. Now, after a week of washing windows, climbing ladders, and repeatedly unrolling strips of reflective dots, I can confirm that my initial assessment of the workload was correct.

So far I’ve only done the windows on the south side. There are five windows there, and each window needed thirteen vertical rows of dots. Thirteen rows times five windows meant at least sixty-five trips up an extension ladder, and if I include the times I forgot a tool, dropped a tool, or made some other small error while five feet off the ground, I am sure that I went up and down my ladder a hundred times in the past week. And I’m only half done!

A cruel, but effective way to gauge how much I appreciate a certain species of bird is to find a dead one just outside my picture window. A dead starling hardly bothers me at all; it is, after all, an invasive species. A dead mourning dove saddens me, but only for as long as it takes me to carry it to the trash. A dead ruby-throated hummingbird makes me ill for days, and the first brown creeper I ever saw in La Crosse was a dead one on my front porch. Its death is what led me to try the falcon silhouettes.

I hope the dots on my windows keep away all of the birds.

Upstream of the Upper Peninsula’s Bond Falls is a series of small (approximately 20” x 10”) concrete platforms that, in years past, allowed visitors to easily step from platform to platform and walk across the Ontonagon River. Just upstream of the structure is a hydro dam that controls the flow of water in the river, and immediately downstream is the first set of rapids leading to the falls themselves. In the many years of the platforms’ existence (their design looks very old), some of the cement on the midstream section has cracked and broken away, creating irregular surfaces that were once flat. In two places, the platforms are completely gone. What was once a fun and safe crossing is now an attractive nuisance. There is a new pedestrian bridge not fifty feet away, so no reasonable person would cross the river using the busted up platforms.

I, of course, wanted to try. I walked out as far as the first missing platform. The gap was no more than three feet across, but the opposite platform was higher than the one that I was standing on. A leap to clear the open water would have to be upward as well as outward. As a young man I would have made the jump without hesitation. At age 70, I stopped to assess the situation and concluded I had about a 25% chance of falling into the river. The water was only two feet deep, but it had a flow that would make standing up difficult. I turned around and returned to shore.

The challenge, however, gnawed at me, so I crossed over on the pedestrian bridge and approached the platforms from the opposite side. I again walked out to the first gap to see whether crossing from that direction might be easier. Now the leap would be slightly downhill, but the platform immediately after the gap (the one I would land on if I jumped) was damaged, uneven, and wet. An awkward landing would likely put me in the river.

As I considered my options, I took my wallet and phone out of my pockets. I also removed my wristwatch. I wasn’t going to jump with those items on me, but I had no place to put them. I couldn’t hand them to either Manyu or Clare because they were now on the wrong side of the river. With my hands full of things that shouldn’t get wet, I turned around and again returned to shore.

Standing on shore next to the platforms was a woman not much younger than me. She was holding her phone as a camera, and I think she was planning to videotape my jump and possible fall. Oh,” she said, “I can hold those things for you.”

I handed the woman my valuables, stepped back onto the platforms, and made the crossing without incident. On the other side, my daughter said, “Way to go, Dad. I’m not going to do it today because Mom is here, but I’m going to come back with friends in the fall and we’ll all do it together.” My wife, in all seriousness, said, “I blame my mom for my stomach problems, but I probably got them from you.”

When I went back to retrieve my belongings, the woman holding them offered to send me the video she’d taken. I wish she hadn’t recorded the event or at least hadn’t sent me a copy, because viewing it is disheartening. The fifteen-second clip looks exactly like what it is: an old man clumsily pretending he isn’t an old man.

.

Today Clare starts a new job. I am not sure of her exact job title, but she will be working for the University of Wisconsin’s State Laboratory of Hygiene. Her primary duties will involve the testing of water samples from around the state to determine levels of contaminants. Clare wanted a job with an environmental focus, and she wanted a job that gave her experience in a laboratory setting. Based upon these two criteria, this new position might be ideal.

As an aside to Clare’s job search, I found interesting my friends’ responses to my daughter’s period of unemployment. Clare worked for nearly three years in her first job out of college, but quit before finding something else. It took her nearly three months to land her new position. Some of my friends, upon learning that she’d quit one job before finding another, said, in one form or another, “Good for her.” In their minds, if the entry-level position had run its course, it was time to move on. Other friends were more cautious. They wondered whether I considered Clare reckless for going even a few months without a paycheck.

I, not surprisingly, was in the “good for her” camp. My daughter has a better mind and better social skills than I’ve ever had, and she’ll do well whenever she reaches the interview stage of the hiring process. If I had a concern, it was that this next job was going to be a turning point for her, yet not set her on the path she most wanted. Of the forty-plus jobs she’d applied for, about half were lab positions and half were jobs in college student services. During college, she’d worked for three years as an orientation leader/peer advisor to incoming students in the sciences, and she saw this as a second career option to explore. Clare is thinking about graduate school in three or four years, so this new job likely will be her last job before returning to school. If so, the work may determine her future field of study, and student services would have sent her in a different direction than laboratory work. Her heart resides in the sciences, so I am pleased that she found the job that she did.

Last Wednesday Clare pulled into our driveway with a carload of Manyu’s family. There was Shau-yu, Manyu’s oldest sister. She is visiting from Bangkok. There were also thirteen-year twins who are the daughters of one of Manyu’s nieces. Shau-yu is here for a week and a half. The two girls, Chien-chien and Ing-ing, will be spending the rest of the summer with us before returning to Taipei just before school starts. With Manyu included in the mix, that is five women staying in my house at the same time.

I like my in-laws and, of course, Manyu and Clare are my life, but five people constantly around me is more than I am accustomed to. At bedtime, the twins go into Clare’s room, and Shau-yu sleeps on a couch in the living room. Clare was here only for a short time before returning to Madison, but during her visit, she camped out in the tv room. With Manyu in the master bedroom, that left only the kitchen and the front porch as places of refuge, and the gnats on the front porch this summer have been bad.

Since the twin’s arrival, I have taken them bicycling, hiking, and paddling. The highlight of their stay, however, hasn’t been any of those things. It was discovering the long wall of ice cream freezers at the supermarket. Both Ben & Jerry’s and Haagen Dazs were on sale last week, so Manyu and I gave them carte blanche, and we came home with chocolate chocolate chip, Cherry Garcia, rum raisin, butter pecan, and matcha green tea. I don’t know what matcha is.

In spite of the gnats, I write this blog from the front porch. In addition to my usual coffee and computer, I also brought out a portable fan. If I point the airflow directly at my head, the breeze keeps the bugs out of my hair, my eyes, and my ears. My other option would have been a mesh head net, but since I don’t like wearing a head net in the backcountry I probably wouldn’t like wearing one on the porch.

As I sit here this morning I can gaze up at what might be a Simpson sky. Until a week ago, I’d never heard of the term, but have since learned that a Simpson sky is a smattering of puffy white clouds in an otherwise blue sky. It refers to the cartoon image that appears in the opening credits of The Simpsons tv show. The clouds this morning might be a little too scattered to be a true Simpson sky, but they come close.

At the very back of the grocery store was a small archway, and beyond the archway a greasy spoon restaurant that would not have been out of place in the dingiest parts of Taipei. The walls, once white, were cream colored from years of wok cooking. On those walls were posters, each one announcing a Hmong New Year’s celebration now past. Four rectangular tables filled the small dining area. On the day that Manyu, Clare, and I were there, an old Hmong man sat at one of the tables eating a bowl of pho. At a second table, two middle aged Hmong women waited for their food. This description of the restaurant may read like a low budget martial arts movie script, but it is also what the place looked like.

Along one side of the restaurant was a window counter for ordering, and behind the counter was a kitchen. Alongside and slightly above the window was a banner-sized menu. I stepped up to the window, and a Hmong woman in the kitchen shouted, “What do you want?” Even with my Asian American wife and daughter standing right next to me, she made me feel like I didn’t belong.

“I want to order some food,” I said.

The ordering went well, although I did momentarily stump the woman when I asked whether she had any vegetarian dishes for Clare. After some thought, she suggested the pad thai. Clare then ordered pad thai. I had chicken and rice, and Manyu ordered beef and tripe larb* with sticky rice.

Manyu, Clare, and I sat down at the cleaner of the two unoccupied tables. Fifteen minutes later the old man who’d been eating pho, but now was relaxing after his meal, told me that our food was ready. The woman behind the window hadn’t announced my order or maybe had announced it in Hmong, but either way I wouldn’t have gone to the counter had the man not said something. When I got there, the woman said, “The sticky rice is still cooking. I gave you regular rice. Eat the regular rice now. When the sticky rice is done, I give you that, too.”

As I carried the food to our table, the old man pointed at a twelve-pack of bottled water on a nearby shelf. “Water costs seventy-five cents if you order carryout,” he said, “but it’s free if you eat in.”

“You’re an expert on this place,” I said.

“I eat here a lot,” he replied.

The food was good, but every dish was wrong in some way. First of all, the pad thai wasn’t vegetarian. Fortunately Clare was fine with eating around the chunks of chicken. Second, the larb was much spicier than Manyu had expected, meaning she couldn’t eat it. She likes spicy food, but has a chronic stomach problem that keeps her from eating anything really hot. She put the beef and tripe aside and instead ate a mound of rice along with the chicken from Clare’s pad thai. Third, my order wasn’t there at all. Because Manyu’s beef and tripe was spicy enough to mask the taste of the tripe, I started in on that.

When the woman behind the window let me know that the sticky rice was ready, I asked her when my chicken would be done. “It is done now,” she said and put it on a styrofoam plate as if she hadn’t forgotten to give it to me.

After we finished eating (with enough rice left over for another meal), I went back to the counter to pay. I asked the woman if she accepted Visa. “I think so,” she said. “I take any card the machine lets me take.”

As Manyu, Clare, and I walked back through the grocery store on our way out, Manyu noticed a bin of kabocha squash not far from the door. Japanese kabocha is one of Manyu’s favorite vegetables, but not one that she can always find in the produce sections of regular supermarkets. There wasn’t anyone working in the store, so I had to go back into the restaurant to pay for one squash. The woman behind the window looked at me and said, “Now what do you want?” The words sounded harsh, but she was smiling when she said them.

* Larb is a cold salad of chopped meat, greens, and Southeast Asian herbs. Until recently, I thought a dish needed to have beef in it to be called larb, but Yang’s menu includes a larb made with fish.

The new Asian restaurant I wanted to take Manyu for her birthday was closed. A note taped to the door read “On vacation: back Saturday, June 22.” Manyu’s birthday, of course, is the 21st. Clare had come from Madison to help her mom celebrate, so now my wife, my daughter, and I were on the Northside of La Crosse unsure about where to eat. La Crosse is not a big city, but the Northside of town is still unfamiliar turf for a Southsider like me.

I turned to Manyu and asked, “Didn’t you tell me that Tom and Relenda like a little restaurant in the back of a Hmong grocery store on George Street?” Tom and Relenda were friends of ours. They didn’t live on the Northside either, but they did dine out more often than Manyu and I.

“Tom likes it,” my wife replied. “Relenda thinks it’s creepy.”

“Well,” I said, “it is your birthday. Do you feel like creepy?”

“Sure, but I don’t know where it is.”

Clare immediately spoke up. “I can find it on my phone,” she said. “What is it called?”

“Yang something,” said Manyu. “I think maybe Yang’s Grocery.”

“I got it,” said Clare. “Yang’s Market. It is near George Street, but not right on it. Get on George Street, and then turn left onto Sill.”

I got on George Street and turned left onto Sill. Clare then said, “Okay, now take the first street to the right. Now, now! You already missed it.”

“That wasn’t a street,” I said. “That was an alley.”

“Yeah,” said Manyu. “I think Relenda told me it was in an alley.” This was unexpected. La Crosse doesn’t have many businesses in alleys. I could not, in fact, think of any.

I drove around the block and entered the alley from the back. Yang’s Market wasn’t even on the alley. It was on an alley off the alley. I was liking this place already. After parking the car in one of three available parking slots, we walked up to a pair of doors. One had a sign that read “Employees Only.” The other had a sign that read, “Entrance.”

Manyu, Clare, and I opened the “Entrance” door and stepped into a Hmong grocery store that was indistinguishable from a half dozen other Asian markets in town. Narrow aisles, insufficient lighting, twenty-five and fifty pound bags of rice stacked on pallets in the same way that other markets might display charcoal briquets and water softener pellets. On the wall just inside the door was a pair of signs, both handwritten. One read “No backpacks,” the other “Only three teenagers in the store at a time.” Apparently the proprietor had problems with shoplifting. I was not surprised, as there was no one working the cash register. There was no one in the store at all.

There also wasn’t, as far as I could tell, a restaurant.

To be Continued…

Last week I wrote about the peace and quiet of La Crosse. This week I’ll go in the opposite direction and write about some of the noise. In all instances, the sounds were novel enough to be welcome.

Noisy Event No. 1
On Thursdays and Fridays, my local nature center opens its doors at 8am instead of its usual 11:00 time. If I get there before midmorning on those days, I usually have the large lobby to myself. I pour myself a cup of coffee from the center’s small refreshment counter and write at a table overlooking the marsh.

In the summers, however, the center runs weeklong nature programs. Organized activities don’t begin until 9am, but parents who have jobs can drop their kids off as early as 8:00. From 8am until 9:00, the kids are on their own. My quiet refuge turns into a schoolyard playground.

Last Thursday two of the early arrivals invented a game where the center’s seating area became an oversized pinball machine. They would throw a tennis ball at the legs of one of the chairs and then watch the ball  ricochet off the tables and chairs. One of the kids intentionally aimed her tosses well away from me. The second one had yet to master her awkward sidearm delivery, and neither she nor I had any idea where her throws were going. Precisely at 9am, the kids were called away by the naturalist staff. The building manager then smiled at me and said, “Now both of us can get back to work.”

Noisy Event No. 2
After dinner on the same Thursday as the pinball incident, Manyu and I took Jack for a walk in Riverside Park. Usually our walks are just around the neighborhood, but sometimes we jump in the car and take a short drive to another locale. Riverside Park is La Crosse’s most popular park. It is also the only park in town where the no-dog policy isn’t enforced.

In the summer, Riverside Park hosts Moon Tunes. Every Thursday a local band plays at the band shell, and families, seniors, teenagers, and every other demographic who ordinarily would not be attending the same music venue gather on blankets and lawn chairs to watch the river, listen to the music, and eat the pizza, chili, and sandwiches sold out of a half dozen different food trucks. The quality and the genre of the music vary from week to week, but I don’t think most people even know who is playing before they get to the park. Riverside Park is just a good place to be on a warm summer evening. I listened for over an hour last week, and I can’t tell you the name of the band. I can’t even tell you whether the music was outlaw country or southern rock. I prefer Riverside Park when it is quiet, but I also like it when it rocks.

Noisy Event No. 3
The final big sound of the week was the Blue Angels. For three days each summer, the precision flyers come to La Crosse for an annual air show. The first time that they twist and turn over the city, all of my neighbors step outside to see what’s making all of the noise. After watching the jets make a few passes, most of us go back in our houses, and the roar of the engines becomes almost, but not quite, background noise. Usually the jets fly high, just below the clouds. Sometimes they fly low enough that the sound can be felt as well as heard.

This week the Blue Angels are gone. For the rest of the summer, I will avoid the nature center until the naturalists show up to take the kids away. Most Thursdays Manyu, Jack, and I will go to Moon Tunes. It is one of the sounds of summer.

For almost each of the twenty-plus years I worked at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Manyu and I hosted an incoming international college student. Hosting, in this case, did not mean that students lived with us, but rather that we introduced them to La Crosse and, once they’d acclimated themselves to life in the American Midwest, took them to special events on occasion (e.g., a concert, Thanksgiving dinner). The volunteer group that matches students with their host families always assigned us Mandarin-speaking students, and what the majority of them wanted more than anything was to have Manyu cook them an authentic Chinese meal once or twice a semester. Sometimes they brought so many fellow Chinese/Taiwanese students with them to dinner that I’d forget which one had been assigned to us.

I have lost track of most of these students, but a few have become lifelong friends. One of those friends is Sammi. Sammi received her masters degree from UWL several years ago, found work in the States upon graduation, and never moved back to Taiwan. Last week her mom, brother, and sister-in-law crossed the Pacific Ocean for the first time, and they all stayed with Manyu and me for a couple of days.

Guests from Asia always make the same observation when they wake up after their first night in our house. Sammi’s mom was no exception. She took a short morning walk and returned to tell us that she could not believe how quiet our street was. Manyu and I live on the end of a cul-de-sac, and except for repairmen and delivery guys, there might be no traffic at all. Of all the neighbors living on our circle, all but two are retired, so we don’t even have a morning rush hour.

The reaction of our Asian guests is a reminder to not take the absence of constant traffic for granted. This morning I am sitting outside on my front porch, and I haven’t seen a vehicle for twenty minutes. One neighbor is using a table saw in his garage, but otherwise the only sounds are birds in the trees and traffic noise from two blocks away.

The first Asian visitors to our house nearly thirty years ago were Manyu’s parents. We picked them up at the airport after a long flight from Taipei, and they went to bed soon after they arrived. The next morning I went to work and Manyu went grocery shopping, so no one was home when they first woke up. By the time Manyu returned from the store less than an hour later, they were panicked. In the entire time she’d been away, not a single car or dog walker or kid on a bicycle had passed by. Manyu’s parents thought that there was a tornado or an enemy attack. For them, disaster seemed more plausible than solitude.

There is about a 50/50 chance that Manyu and I have one more move left in us. It might be to Asia, it might be to live closer to wherever Clare settles down. The fifty percent that holds us to La Crosse is the peace and quiet.

Every year at this time hundreds of painted turtles leave the Mississippi River backwaters to lay their eggs. If they all wandered no farther than the beach, there would be no problem. Many of them, however, travel a quarter mile or more and wind up in residential neighborhoods. There I find them hunkered down in street gutters or crossing busy roads. I also see them smashed on the pavement. I don’t know what the correct human response is. 

The rule of thumb is to leave nature alone. Well-intentioned efforts to rescue fawns or baby birds usually result in harming animals that don’t need help at all. A turtle walking down the middle of a road with no lake, river, or pond in sight seems the exception. (After writing a draft of this blog, I googled the question. Consensus is to move turtles only if they are likely to be run over by a car, and never move them more than a few hundred yards from where you found them.)

Part of the uncertainty with turtles out-of-water is that it is difficult to tell which way they want to go. Are they heading away from the water to lay eggs, or have they already laid their eggs and are on their return trip? I can imagine a situation where I take a turtle to the river, and her small reptilian brain thinks, “What the hell? I just spent the last eight hours trying to get away from here, and now this jerk brought me back.”

Yesterday I relocated two turtles. Both were in danger of being run over. In one instance, I stopped traffic, picked up a turtle from the middle of the street, and placed her on someone’s lawn. In the thirty seconds it took me to carry out the task, five cars had pulled up behind me. I didn’t look at all of the drivers who were waiting for me to get back in my car, but the first two gave me a thumbs up.

The second turtle was in the parking lot of the long-term care facility where I go to visit my neighbor Charlie. The facility is not far from the river, but it is at least sixty feet higher in elevation than water’s edge. This turtle might have found her way back to the river on her own, but the shortest route was over a precipice. I decided to put her in my car and take her to a boat landing.

I picked the turtle up and carried her to my car. As I reached across the driver’s seat to set her in the footwell on the passenger side, she peed on my arms and all over the upholstery. Then, when I reached the boat landing to release her, she wasn’t where I’d put her. She’d crawled under the passenger seat and wedged herself among the under-seat hardware in a way that I couldn’t get her out. I was reluctant to move the seat, for fear of hurting her, but eventually was able to protect her with one hand while operating the seat’s power controls with the other. Readjusting a car seat with my hand jammed under the seat probably violates the owner’s manual, but I didn’t think I had a choice.

In my experience, turtles retreat into their shells when I approach, but then try to claw themselves free once I pick them up. It is for this reason that I no longer relocate turtles when I’m riding my bicycle. Keeping one hand on the handlebars means one-handing any turtle I am holding. As soon as one starts to wriggle, I have to pin her to my body to keep from dropping her. Usually my forearm and stomach both get scratched.

Yesterday, after successfully extracting my rescuee from beneath the car seat, I set her on the sand close to the water. I intentionally placed her parallel to the shoreline and then waited to see which way she would turn. After about a minute she hadn’t moved at all. I got back in my car and drove home.

I spent the days on either side of my seventieth birthday at my mom’s house near Green Bay, Wisconsin. On one of those days, my sister, my brother, my sister-in-law, Manyu, and I took a day trip to the small city of Algoma. Once a commercial fishing village on Lake Michigan, Algoma is now a sport fishing destination with a fleet of charter fishing boats. On the afternoon of our visit, the waterfront was experiencing an alewife die-off.* Herring-like fish filled the waters along shore. Thousands were dead, hundreds more were dying. The near dead tried to swim, but the moment they stopped moving their tails, their bodies turned sideways and floated to the surface. The die-off must have been only a day or two old, as none of the carcasses had started to decompose, (i.e, they didn’t stink yet).

Gulls, terns, and pelicans were drawn in by the fish, but the piscivorous birds must have already had their fill. Instead of scarfing up easy prey, they lounged on the wharf’s piers and breakwaters. As a kid growing up in Green Bay, I often
saw gulls and terns, but don’t remember ever seeing a pelican. DDT in the aquatic food chain during the 1960s made it a bad time for the larger species of fish-eating birds. The white pelican population in northeastern Wisconsin, along with that of bald eagles and double-crested cormorants, was decimated. All three birds have staged comebacks, and (so long as the lake’s not frozen) I now see pelicans whenever I visit my mom.

After decades of decline, alewife numbers on Lake Michigan are on the rise. They are not native to Lake Michigan, but they are the main food source for the trout and salmon that were intentionally introduced into the lake to control alewife numbers. The Great Lakes are now such a disturbed ecosystem that I don’t even know whether an upswing in the population of an invasive species is necessarily a bad thing.

*  Alewife commonly suffer summerkill. As oceanic fish that migrated up the Saint Lawrence Seaway, they successfully reproduce in the Great Lakes, but seem intolerant of seasonal temperature changes.

Last night I returned home from my annual fishing trip into a remote section of Ontario’s Lake of the Woods. This year, for the first time, the afterglow of the trip was intermixed with questions about how long old men can handle serious backcountry travel. Five of the seven members of our group are of Medicare age, so climbing in and out of boats, rolling out of small tents, and navigating slippery rocks are getting progressively more difficult.

If the problem was solely arthritic knees and shoulders, I think that I would know when to retire my balaclava and Therm-A-Rest pad. This year, however, everything was complicated by a week of inclement weather. Each inconvenience, each concern was either created or intensified by constant wind, rain, and cold. At the onset of one storm, we had to fight two-foot white caps to move our boats to the leeward side of a peninsula. During a second storm, we had to tie additional ropes to all of the tents and tarps. For most of the week, all of us wore every layer of clothing we’d brought with us and still weren’t completely warm until we crawled into our sleeping bags. Several pieces of equipment blew out of our boats, and one of them was my rain jacket. I would have thought rain jackets would float at least for a while, but mine did not. Nothing happened that we could not handle, but weather affected almost every action.

In spite of the weather, it was again a very good trip. My fishing partners are outstanding companions. The walleye fishing was as good as ever, meaning it will be the best fishing I encounter all year. All of us saw a double rainbow one afternoon and a couple days later watched a litter of eight mink kits bound into the lake for a swim. They were so playful that we initially thought they were otters.

Still the question of age hovers over me. In the past, bad weather during wilderness trips morphed into fond memories. This year I am not sure that will happen. I need to wash my dirty clothes, dry out my tent, and heal my tick bites before I draw any conclusions about the trip, but something feels different. 

* Photograph taken by Tom Spaeth

I thought my FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) days were over, but this winter I helped two high school seniors complete their applications. One of the kids is my nephew (Manyu’s brother’s son). The other is the daughter of a friend. Much has been written in the press about the Department of Education’s failed attempts to simplify the application, but I suspect that the only people to read those articles carefully are people who’ve tried and failed to complete a FAFSA form themselves. The process is a mess.

At first glance, the application process does seem simpler and more straightforward than it used to be. This false impression holds true right up to the point where applicants navigate themselves into a corner. In my nephew’s case, this happened when he completed the income section of the form. After listing the annual earnings for both him and his parents, he was instructed to go no further until the numbers could be confirmed with the IRS database. This was going to take days, not minutes or hours. Three days later, my nephew received an email stating that he’d made a mistake on his application by listing detailed information about his mom, but not his dad. The email was correct; my nephew had listed information on only one parent, but he had done so because the FAFSA instructions had specifically told him to list only one parent if the two of them were living together and had filed a joint tax return. My nephew and I met a second time to add info on his dad to the application, but then had to wait another three days for the form to again link with the IRS. Three days later my nephew received an email stating that the dad’s portion of the application had been rejected. It was rejected because information on the second parent isn’t necessary when the parents file joint tax returns.

My nephew did not know how to proceed, so he and I set up a third meeting to try to resolve the problem. Before we met, however, my nephew received still another email stating that his FAFSA application had been reviewed and accepted. This surprised both of us, because we didn’t think my nephew had completed the last part of the form. We were sure he hadn’t hit any kind of “submit” button.

Helping the daughter of my friend was easier than helping my nephew, but even it had a glitch. When we got to the marital status of the parents, “widow” was not a choice. We tried a couple of other options (e.g., single parent), but in every instance the form wanted financial information about the dad. Out of frustration, I suggested we give the form its three days to link to the IRS on the mom and then try again. When we met four days later, “widow” had been added as an option and the form no longer asked about the dad. The rest of the form went smoothly.

The only reason I was working with these kids on their FAFSA forms was because their parents are first generation Asian Americans with limited English skills. What do other kids in the same situation do if they don’t have a native speaking adult to help them out?

In preparation for my annual Canadian fishing trip, I needed to organize my fishing gear. I went into my garage to inventory my current supply of lures and jigs, only to discover that my tackle box was gone. I hadn’t used it or seen it since last October, and now it was missing.

After rummaging through the garage several times and contacting friends to ask if I’d left a tackle box in one of their boats, I concluded that one of two things had happened. Either someone had stolen my tackle box out of my garage or, more likely, I’d gone fishing last fall and, after strapping my kayak to the roof of my car, drove away with my tackle box still sitting at the side of the road.

Regardless of how my tackle box had disappeared, I now had to replace it and its contents. My first step was to pull out the backup tackle box I kept stashed in the very back of my garage. This box was storage for the lures I no longer used. Most of them were outdated or damaged, some just had rusty hooks. My hope was that, among the junk, I could salvage a few spoons and spinners to start me on my resupply.

When I opened the backup tackle box, I was surprised to discover that it was fully stocked. In fact, it contained everything I thought was missing. Apparently my good tackle box had been neither stolen nor abandoned. Instead I must have broken it (probably snapped off the flimsy latch), moved all of my lures from the broken tackle box into the backup, threw the broken tackle box away, and then forgot everything I had done!

I have come to accept that my short-term memory is not what it once was. Now I must grapple with the fact that my long-term memory is unreliable, too. Maybe this is why I bother to keep a blog at all. Like the guy in the movie Memento, I write down the things I am bound to forget.

The older I get, the less tolerant I am of old people. Any empathy generated by my own mental lapses is more than offset by a serious case of curmudgeonliness. I don’t like the way some old people drive. I don’t like the way some of them remain in political office beyond their expiration dates. Mostly I don’t like the way some of them shop in grocery stores.

I thought I’d already encountered all of the ways that doddering seniors hold up the checkout line. They extract pennies one by one from coin purses, they don’t take out their checkbooks until all of their purchases have been rung up, and they cheerfully tell long-winded stories to the cashier only to argue with the very same cashier when she won’t accept an expired coupon.

Yesterday, however, I encountered a new delay tactic. I was pleased to see that the old woman in front of me at the checkout was going to pay for her groceries with a credit card. Unfortunately the cashier asked the woman if she had a preferred customer number. The woman said, “I do, but I’ve forgotten the number.” She then dug into her purse, pulled out her cell phone, and started scrolling through her contact list. I didn’t think that she would find her customer number that way, but since I don’t know a tenth of what my own phone can do, I had to concede that the old woman might know something I didn’t. After what seemed like a full minute, the cashier told the woman that she could look up the number with a first and last name. It turned out the number was 700. Who can’t remember 700? I might not be able to forget it.

Worse than bringing the checkout process to a grinding halt is the way old people completely block an aisle in the store itself. With two lanes of traffic in any one aisle, they frequently prevent other customers from using either one. They leave their carts unattended in one lane while they stand in the other lane to do their shopping. Yesterday, the holdup was in the coffee aisle. A husband and wife were trying to decide which coffee to buy. The man, standing in the lane that did not have his cart, was holding what looked to me to be two identical containers of Folgers coffee. First he elevated the coffee in his left hand and looked at his wife. Then he elevated the coffee in his right hand and looked at her again. Both times the woman shrugged. Eventually the old man returned one container of coffee to the shelf and put the other one in their cart.

I was trying to figure out what the old couple could have been discussing, when I finally was able to roll my cart up to the Folgers display. It was then that I saw that there really were two choices. All of the containers looked exactly the same from a distance, but once up close I could see that some were marked “Colombian” and others were marked “Black Silk.” These old people had had an actual quandary to resolve. They’ve probably been drinking Colombian or maybe Classic Roast for sixty years, and now effective marketing from the Folgers people had tossed in a new option. Do they stick with the old reliable or give Black Silk a try? Even though the coffee snob in me doesn’t buy Folgers or Maxwell House or Eight O’Clock Coffee, I had to admit that anything called Black Silk would be appealing. I was tempted to track down the old couple and surreptitiously look in their cart to see which coffee they got.

One way for me to avoid pokey senior citizens would be to not shop at warehouse supermarkets at all. Almost everything I need can be found at the local food co-op. Customers at the co-op are just as old as those at the supermarket, but because the smaller store has fewer options, there is less indecision in the aisles. The problem with the co-op is that I can never remember my member number, and I always hold up the checkout line while the cashier looks it up.

My solution to the problem was to kick the can down the road. I rationalized that Part One and Part Two don’t have to be sequential. Rather than posting a weak Part Two immediately after Part One, I decided to wait a week, write an unrelated blog in the interim, and hope inspiration would strike. Now two weeks have passed, and the draft for Part Two remains as unsalvageable as ever. If not for the fact that it is a “Part Two,” it would have found its way to my reject pile days ago.

Here is how I wrote myself into a corner:

After reading James,* Percival Everett’s retelling of Huckleberry Finn, I thought I could compare my writing to Mark Twain’s. More specifically, I saw a parallel between Twain’s writing about the adventures of Huck and Jim to my current writing about the education of my Taiwanese American daughter. I thought, “Here are two white guys trying to understand a subculture different from their own.” 

Why did I think that comparing my writing to Mark Twain’s would be a good idea? I could have just as well compared my bank account to Warren Buffett’s and my good looks to Ryan Gosling’s. (For readers who don’t know my financial situation, my royalty checks for 2023 totaled $157 and I was happy to get them. For readers who don’t know what I look like, I am a distant cousin to Charles Martin Smith and the family resemblance is discernible.)

I think that the best I can do for Part Two is to mention one lesson I gleaned from the forced comparison between Twain and me – and then leave it at that. The lesson is this: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about Huck’s efforts to understand why his moral values differed from those of the people around him. Sometimes he misinterpreted things. If understanding Clare’s bicultural education is important to me, then I should write about it. I should also accept that, in spite of efforts to be accurate, I am going to get some things wrong. I definitely will get some of the Taiwanese/Chinese content wrong. I may even get some of the American stuff wrong. Good writing is not always about what authors know. Sometimes it is about what they are trying to figure out. As Frank Bruni put it in a recent essay, it is about “intelligent questions, not final answers.”** 

There is quite a bit of Huckleberry Finn in me, and I might be wise to let some of it seep into my writing.

* Everett, Percival. 2024. James. New York: Doubleday.

** Bruni, F. April 20, 2024. “The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus.” New York Times.  Found at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/opinion/students-humility-american-politics.html.

After three months in Taiwan, Manyu is finally back in La Crosse. This does not mean we necessarily see each other much. Because of jet lag, my wife’s sleep patterns are like someone on third shift. She falls asleep after lunch and gets up about the time I go to bed. She creeps around the house most of the night, and each morning I wake up to find that another part of the house has been cleaned. Because I am not willing to give up my writing time or my exercise regimen, our uncommitted hours awake barely overlap enough to watch a movie together. Still I’ll take what I can get, as a little bit of time with my wife is better than having her half way around the world.

Our time apart would be easier if I joined Manyu in Taiwan for some of the time she is away, but we both agree that one of us needs to stay home to care for our aging dog. Everything around us (our moms, our dog, our bodies, our home furnishings) is getting old.

One of the perks of Manyu’s travels is that she brings me gifts. This year I actually got two things I like. One is a bottle of Taiwanese single malt whisky called Kavalan. Clare gave me a bottle of Kavalan when she returned from Taiwan two months ago. I said that I liked it, so Manyu’s best friend, A-li, wanted to give me a second bottle. It takes me about a year to go through a liter of hard liquor, so I should be good until early 2026. I mention this gift only because it actually tastes good. When I lived in Taiwan twenty years ago, Taiwanese hard liquor was undrinkable. The most popular brand was a sorghum-based alcohol called Kaoliang. Drinking Kaoliang is like drinking cheap tequila, but without the lemon and salt.

The second gift was a new case for my iPhone13. My old case did not cover the screen, so I was unintentionally calling people at least once a day. I tried to find a better case here in La Crosse, but the tech nerds at Best Buy, Target, and AT&T all told me that they don’t sell accessories for outdated phones. They only carry stock for the most recent model and one model back, so as soon as the 15s came out, everything for the 13s became obsolete. Maybe all of their old inventory got shipped to Asia, because Manyu said that half of the night market vendors in Taipei had exactly what I wanted.

I am writing this blog three days after Manyu’s return. It will be a full week before I get around to posting it. Maybe she’ll be on a normal sleep schedule by then.

I often read two books at the same time. I keep one next to my recliner, the other next to my bed. One is always a novel, the other is usually nonfiction. If one of them, usually the novel, is exceptional, I might put the second book aside. If neither book holds my attention, I might not finish either one. There was a time when I finished most of the books I started, but I don’t do that anymore. The older I get, the more I realize that I need to weed out mediocre books and read only the best ones. 

This week I have been reading the novel James by Percival Everett and a compilation of personal essays titled Asian American X.  James is the retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the slave Jim. Asian American X is a series of personal essays written by young Asian Americans describing what it is like to be Asian American.

Usually the chair-side book and the bedside book have nothing to do with each other. This week is an exception. The books I am reading now mesh together so well that I won’t even call it coincidence (even though I think that it is). In very different ways, both books are about being not white in a white-dominated society.

When I initially glanced at the table of contents of Asian American X, I was drawn to an essay titled “Half and Half.” My daughter is half Taiwanese and half Wisconsinite, so I hoped the essay would offer me insights about Clare. As it turns out, Jenny Chen, the author of “Half and Half” is not mixed race at all. She is 100% Chinese from Taiwan. The title of the essay refers not to the author’s parentage, but to having been sent from Taiwan to America as a middle school student. Chen is half Taiwanese and half American by place of residence, not genetics.

Still Chen’s work hit me personally, but not in the way I was expecting. She surprised me by  summarizing almost exactly the content of the book I am currently writing. Had Chen not written her short essay twenty years before I even had my idea for a book, I would have thought she’d hacked into computer and borrowed heavily from my draft outline. Now it looks like I am the one committing borderline plagiarism. My book, with the working title Tiger Mom and Wisconsin Dad, is about the education of Manyu’s and my biracial daughter. One third of the book is about the values taught to Clare by her first generation Taiwanese American mother (e.g., the importance of studying, respect for her elders), and another third is about all that she’s learned from me (e.g., the importance of play and the need to sometimes question the authority of her elders). The final third of the book is a lengthy discussion about the pros and cons of our daughter’s bicultural upbringing.

Chen’s essay, written when she was in her early twenties, is based upon having spent half of her life in Taipei and half in an upscale suburb of New York City. The heart of the essay is two ten-point lists. The first list consists of lessons for life that were impressed upon her by her Asian parents when she lived in Taiwan. The second list, also lessons for life, describes all that she learned after moving to the US. The only significant difference between Chen’s essay and big sections of my book is that Chen believes she gleaned her American lessons all on her own, whereas I suggest that Clare got hers from me.

I believe nothing written today is entirely new, but that doesn’t mean I enjoyed seeing my best ideas laid out in an old essay written by a woman just out of college. Yet this disturbing realization was on my mind as I started reading James. (To Be Continued…)

* Chen, Jenny.  2004. “Half and Half.” In Asian American X : An Intersection of Twenty-First Century Asian American Voices. (Arar Han and John Hsu, eds.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

** Everett, Percival. 2024. James. New York: Doubleday.

Manyu likes my hair fairly short; I prefer it long. There is a hair length, however, where my hair starts to curl on the ends and then Manyu likes it long. The trick for me is to ignore her suggestions for a haircut until my hair completely covers my ears. She starts suggesting a haircut about two months after a previous trim, then stops around the three-month mark. (Our dog, by the way, is on a similar schedule.)

It just so happens that Manyu’s annual trips to Taiwan last almost exactly three months. I seldom get a haircut while she is away. This gives my hair enough time to pass through a period of shagginess and, at least in Manyu’s eyes, become stylishly long.

Manyu is in Taiwan right now,* and my plan was to not get a haircut until she came home. Then last week, only two weeks before my wife’s return from Asia, I got sick. According to my doctor, I don’t have COVID, I don’t have the flu, and I don’t have pneumonia. His diagnosis is that I have something else. I stayed in bed for four days, and today is the first day I felt well enough to work on a blog. Yesterday was the first day I was able to get out of bed and groggily walk around the house. The feeling of listlessness reminded me of my 2022 bout with COVID. Following that particular illness, I was able to regain my energy and my spirit only by making a conscious effort to get them back. I decided to take the same approach with my current infection.

I started by riding my stationary bike, but couldn’t pedal for more than ten minutes. It was barely better than doing nothing at all. Next I decided to clean myself up. I trimmed my beard and took a long, hot shower. I got out of my pajamas and put on jeans and a teeshirt. When I looked in the mirror and still saw an exhausted old man, I decided to get a haircut.

I drove to the Asian nail salon where Pa, my hair stylist, rents a room in the back. I was told by the nail people that Pa, a Laotian woman who’d spent the first five years of her life in a Thai refugee camp, had gone back to Thailand for a month. I could have taken this as a sign that I wasn’t supposed to get a haircut, but for the first time in my life, I felt compelled to get one. I jumped back in my car and drove to Great Clips. The woman who cut my hair gave me the “child/senior discount” without asking me if I qualified. Because I was sure I looked as old as I felt, I ignored the unintentional insult and made sure my tip more than made up for the reduced price.

Manyu comes back to Wisconsin at the end of the week. She’ll probably think I got a haircut for her.

* My wife was in Taiwan during last week’s big earthquake, and she is fine.

I have never played pickleball, nor am I interested in learning the game. I think I only noticed the announcement because two weeks ago I’d written a blog about pickles.

Somewhere I’d read that the inventor of pickleball named the game after his dog Pickles. Whatever the derivation, it not a good name: not because the game has no pickles and not because I have anything against naming stuff after pets, but because the name’s already been taken. As a kid, my friends and I played a different game called pickle. I’m sure kids still play it. It is just one of things kids do during baseball season when they can’t round up enough kids for a full game.

Pickle is when two kids each stand on a base and play catch with each other. A third kid stands between the other two and tries to steal bases back and forth by timing his or her break with the throws of the other two kids. The runner steals as many bases as possible before getting tagged out. When he or she is tagged out, the kid making the tag becomes the next runner. (In professional baseball games, runners sometimes get caught in a rundown. Pickle is making a game of getting caught in a rundown.)

When I was a kid, the alternative to playing pickle when we couldn’t find enough kids for a neighborhood game was to jump on our bikes and ride to Pickle Park. For the eastside of Green Bay, Pickle Park was one of agreed upon places to go if a kid wanted to get in on a pickup game. Pickle Park wasn’t the park’s real name. It was just what the kids called it.* There was a pickle factory just beyond the right field fence, and the place always reeked of dill. Years after my own playing days were over, the city temporarily closed Pickle Park because it was discovered that the soil beneath the ball field was saturated with brine. I hope the problem with briny soil is that it kills the grass, not that breathing the fumes is a health hazard. If the problem is the fumes, then I’ll add baseball at Pickle Park to the list of dangerous things my friends and I unknowingly did as kids (e.g., chasing the mosquito truck on our bikes and playing with mercury).

* When I was kid, I probably knew the park’s real name, but I’d long forgotten it. For this blog, I googled “Pickle Park Green Bay. ” Pickle Park’s real name is Farlin Park.

Last week Clare visited and discovered Jack can no longer jump up on couches and beds, so she went online and ordered him dog stairs. She told me that I should let Jack try them out and, if they didn’t work well, just send them back.

The stairs arrived three days ago. They were supposed to be eighteen inches high and two feet deep, but came in a box that measured only 9”x16”. Opening the box, I realized the stairs did not come ready-to-use. They came as compressed polyurethane foam wrapped tightly in a small plastic bag. The directions said to remove the bag, give the foam forty-eight hours to expand, and then wrap the whole thing in a zippered corduroy cover.

The simple task of cutting open the bag somehow put me in a handyman frame of mind, so if I had to wait two days to finish the stairs, I needed to find an actual home repair project to occupy part of my morning. I decided to fix the Venetian blinds on the window over my kitchen sink. For months, the blinds have been stuck in the “down” position, and I haven’t been able to slide them up.

I googled “Venetian blinds stuck in the down position.” A short video said the repair would take less than a minute. Step One is to lower the blinds all of the way down, even past the window sill. Step Two is pull the blinds out at a 45º angle and give them a stout tug. This action releases the brake mechanism, and the blinds should slide all of the way up.

I pulled the blinds down as far as they could go and tugged. Nothing happened. Now rather than having Venetian blinds extending to the bottom of the window, they reached all the way to the kitchen counter. I took a moment to bemoan my bad luck (and curse the creators of the video), then decided to take the blinds completely off the window and try to roll them up manually. Maybe I’d at least get them back to where I’d started.

I got a step stool in order to reach the support brackets at the top of the window. The blinds detached easily, but as I stepped backwards from the stool, I missed a step. I didn’t fall, but momentarily lost control of my descent. The blinds caught on the faucet of the sink, and two of the slats snapped in half. This DIY fiasco solved my problem with the defective brake mechanism, because now I had to go out and buy a whole new set of blinds.

Yesterday I finished the dog stairs, and Jack refuses to use them. They will not, however, be going back to the store. I can’t get them back in the box they came in.

I sometimes have more fun writing blogs in the weeks when nothing big happens than in the weeks when something does. Then I am left with a choice. Either I can kick myself for letting a week go by without having a small adventure or I can write about recent events that aren’t adventurous at all. When I do the latter well, I feel like Calvin Trillin.

Last week I wrote about forgetting a pot of potatoes cooking on the stove. I did not mention that the potatoes were to make potato salad as a side dish for the hot dogs I was going to serve at a card game that night. When I went shopping for wieners, buns, and potato salad ingredients, I also bought a small jar of pickles. My plan was to dice a single small pickle to add a little zing to the potato salad.

I cannot remember the last time I bought a jar of pickles. On a whim, I chose gherkins. I’d never purchased gherkins before. I am not even sure I’d ever eaten one. The only thing I knew about that particular type of pickle is that the pompous staff manager in Dirty Dancing offered Baby a gherkin when he caught her sneaking around the dining hall kitchen.

I used only half a pickle for my potato salad, so I ate the other half. It wasn’t bad. Now gherkins can be added to my list of foods that includes frozen peas and romaine lettuce. These are everyday foods that I did not encounter until I was an adult. As a kid, peas (unless they came out of the garden) were canned peas, lettuce was iceberg lettuce, and pickles were dill pickles. I give my parents a pass on the lettuce; in the 1960s, the options for salad greens were limited. I have, however, yet to forgive them, the National Grocers Association, or the entire canning industry for canned peas. As for pickles, I blame myself, as I’ve had fifty years to grab the jar that sits only inches from the baby dills on the supermarket shelf.

I don’t really like pickles. I seldom eat the spear that sometimes comes with a deli sandwich. Another year will pass before I buy another jar. When I do, I might try bread and butter. It can be my adventure for the week.

If anything, attempts at multitasking while writing lead to mishaps. For example, I’ve left pots cooking on the stove at least a half dozen times while writing only twenty feet away. Charred hardboiled eggs are the first debacle to come to mind, but I’ve also boiled away oatmeal, rice, and homemade soup. The day before yesterday I almost ruined potatoes for potato salad.

The potatoes, however, were saved because I had to use the bathroom. In addition to an occasional forgetful mind, I also have an enlarged prostate – and because of the recent nationwide computer hack on the billing system of my supplemental health insurance company, I couldn’t get a refill on my prostate medicine. Without the medicine, I feel the urge to urinate about once an hour. I barely have time to get a complete thought down on paper before I have to get up from my writing table to use the bathroom. That morning, in passing through the kitchen on my way to the bathroom, I noticed the boiling pot at the exact moment the potatoes were at a perfect firmness for potato salad. I couldn’t have timed it better had I’d been paying attention.

No one reading this blog needs to remind me to set a timer for food on the stove or to turn the burner off as soon as eggs come to a boil or to just stay in the kitchen for the ten minutes it takes to cook a simple dish. I know what I am supposed to do. I just don’t always do it.

Yesterday I was able to pick up my prostate medicine. I also enjoyed a side of potato salad that probably could have used a little more mustard. Life is good, and all things are connected.

I replied, “You must have my test mixed up with someone else’s. I didn’t even understand the second question.”  

“No,” he said. “I have it right. You write well, so you have a B grade going for you before you even get around to saying anything.” 

My professor’s simple statement was a small revelation to me. As a teenager, I’d valued good writing. As a college student, I’d come to realize that I was a better than average writer. Until then, however, I hadn’t realized the extent that decent writing had been getting me through college.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that he’d never met a writer who wouldn’t rather be playing music, and I get it. I sometimes think that my writing is a default form of artistic expression. I took a few art courses in college and was not very good. I played camp songs on guitar, but was no musician. I watched my dad express himself in the wood shop, and the few times he tried to involve me were frustrating for both of us.

So I write. I will spend the next two days making this blog as succinct and as clear as my talents will allow, even though I know almost no one will read it. I am pleased to have a couple of friends who sometimes read my blogs, but that’s not why I write them. At one time I wrote to get through college. Later I wrote as part of my job as an academic, and even then I sometimes got published more for the quality of the prose than for the depth of my ideas. Now, because I can’t draw, can’t play music, can’t work in wood, writing is what I do.

Downtown La Crosse

Eau Claire might be more like La Crosse than any other city in Wisconsin. Only ninety miles apart, both places are river towns, both have a state university as a centerpiece, both are politically purple in a state where other communities are either red or blue. Both are predominantly white. Strangers can drive through the respective downtowns and not notice a difference.

Because of these similarities, I was excited when I came across a memoir written by a University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire professor titled Chinese Prodigal. Even though author David Shih is Chinese American and my connection to all things Chinese is through marriage only, I thought I would find aspects of me or at least aspects of my marriage in the stories he had to tell.

The subtitle of Shih’s book is A Memoir in Eight Arguments. The first of these arguments is about the regrets he feels for having missed the chance to say goodbye to his dad when the man was on his death bed in Texas. My own dad died only minutes after I arrived in Green Bay from Minneapolis, and I choose to believe he fought to stay alive until I got there. He didn’t want to die while my mom was alone with him in his hospital room.

Downtown Eau Claire

Shih’s second argument is about his fears of the racism that his biracial kid will face in his lifetime. While I identified with the chapter about his dad, I can’t say the same for the essay about his son. Shih is Chinese from Hong Kong, his wife is white American, so the racial makeup of Shih’s son is not unlike Clare’s. Still, none of my worries about the well-being of my daughter have much to do with race.

Why the big difference? Taking into account that Shih and I live in cities that are culturally identical, the obvious difference is that he grew up Chinese American and I did not. He experienced discrimination firsthand, and I haven’t. I am embarrassed to admit that it’s taken a chapter in a book to get me thinking seriously that my daughter might encounter problems solely because she’s half Taiwanese.

Clare called me on the phone last Thursday, so I asked her if she’d ever had to deal with blatant racism. Her very first comment was that no one can identify her race just by looking at her. If anything, people assume she is white. A couple of times jerks in passing cars have shouted out racial slurs, but each time it was because she was walking alongside a Chinese or Vietnamese friend. She said that as far as she knows, none of her mixed race friends have had problems, whereas most of her friends with two Asian parents have. As I write this blog, I am less upset about potential racist actions directed at my daughter than I am by the fact that it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be an issue.*

* Even if my daughter hasn’t encountered racism, my wife has. In Wisconsin, Manyu has not been directly confronted by anyone, but she has been intentionally ignored by waitresses and store clerks. She thinks that the problem is not that she is Taiwanese, but that she was mistaken for Hmong. In Taiwan, my wife has been ostracized for consorting with a Westerner. None of these incidents are commonplace, none have been physical, but neither are they anything that she should have to deal with.

It has been a quiet week in here in La Crosse. Chinese New Year came and went, but since Manyu and Clare were in Taiwan for the holiday, it passed without me celebrating. I have no current events to write about, so maybe it is a good time to finish a story that I started in a blog a month ago. 

The time was fall of 1974. I’d dropped out of college and was working for Pillsbury in Minneapolis. I and ten other dropouts put in six-hour shifts in the basement of the company’s research and development building. Dressed in full doughboy regalia, we were a small crew hired to make a new product that Pillsbury was market testing in select cities across the Midwest. The product was raw cookie dough in a little plastic tub. It looked more like cookie dough made from scratch than the stuff in the sausage-like tubes, and I thought it was a good idea. Depending on the day, we made either sugar, peanut butter, or chocolate chip cookies.

There were several steps to our cookie-making assembly line. First there were the two “dry” guys. They were in a back room mixing together the dry ingredients. Once they were done, they wheeled out a garbage can-sized container of flour, sugar, dried milk, and dried eggs to the “wet” guy on the main floor. Together the three of them dumped the dry ingredients into a cement mixer. After the dry ingredients had been thoroughly mixed, the wet guy added water and, if appropriate, peanut butter or chocolate chips. After a second mixing, the wet guy fed the finished dough into a corkscrew machine that filled small tubs with dough and sealed the tubs with a clear plastic sheet. These tubs then went onto a conveyer belt where a half dozen workers grabbed them, slapped on lids, and wrapped them in attractive packaging. Now ready for shipping, the last step was to pack the finished product into cardboard boxes and pile the boxes on a pallet to be trucked off to supermarkets in the test cities.

On most shifts I was the wet person, but one evening both dry guys called in sick. I and one of the crew from the conveyer belt were put in the dry room. We’d never even stepped into the dry room before, but the three recipes (sugar, peanut butter, and chocolate chip) were posted on the wall in giant four-inch letters. How hard could it be? 

After the two of us had mixed together four batches of chocolate chip cookies, the researchers from upstairs came down to the basement in a panic. After two years of development and an advertising campaign that included doughboy commercials aired on local tv, they discovered that their recipe might be flawed. Unbeknownst to the worker bees in the basement, the development guys upstairs had been taking one container of dough from each night’s production and baking cookies to see how the finished product looked and tasted. The batch from that night didn’t work.

I immediately realized that the problem probably was not the recipe, but with the two novices in the dry room. I looked at the chocolate chip recipe, reviewed the steps we had taken, and then asked my coworker, “What is albumen anyway?” 

He didn’t know, and I didn’t know, so we ran into the main room to tell the guys from upstairs that the two of us may have misread the recipe. We quickly learned that albumen is egg white, and we’d been putting in double amounts of powdered egg white and leaving out the yolk. By the time the error had been detected, we’d made and boxed over a thousand pounds of defective cookie dough.

I’d never been fired from a job before, and it turned out that I wasn’t fired from this one either. Rather than being angry at me, the researchers were elated. They thought all of their hard work had been for naught and were thrilled to find out that their only mistake had been to hire idiots to mix the ingredients.

In writing this blog, I had to once more track down the definition of albumen. It’s been fifty years since my Pillsbury fiasco, but I still can’t remember whether it’s the white or the yolk.

Ice fishing fanatics in central Wisconsin get on the ice from thin first ice to slushy last ice. The timeframe is usually late November until the middle of March. Less ardent and more cautious fishermen and fisherwomen require thick, consistently firm ice and only fish from Christmastime until the end of February. This year the fanatics’ season has been shortened to the season normally adhered to by the non-fanatics, and the season for the non-fanatics is down to a few weeks.

I am not a fanatic, and I recently realized that if I was going to ice fish at all this year, I better go soon. The parts of the Mississippi River with moving water are already open, and only the calm backwaters still have ice. If the weather forecast for the rest of February is accurate, there will be some refreezing coming up, but I doubt there will be enough new ice to make me excited about getting out. Because I had a choice of either ice fishing immediately or waiting until next winter, I went out twice last week. Neither time was without incident.

Outing No. 1.  When the ice starts to get punky, I often ice fish at Goose Island County Park just south of town. Not only do the lagoons there have little or no current, but some of the better fishing spots are only four feet deep. My preference is to not break through the ice at all, but if I am going to go through, I want it to be up to my armpits and not over my head.

My friend Dennis and I drove to my favorite spot in the park, only to discover a narrow strip of open water right along the shoreline. Someone had laid down a ten-foot plank, and people were using it as a bridge to get from dry land to solid ice. Dennis and I also used the plank, and when I cut my first hole, I saw that the ice away from shore was eight inches thick. Supposedly two inches of ice will support an adult human being, but I need at least six inches to feel comfortable. My friend and I fished until dark and were the last people to leave. He and I walked to the plank, and just as I was about to step onto it, the ice gave way. The water was only up to my knees, but deep enough to fill my boots. I quickly ran up to the parking lot, pulled off my boots, and jumped into Dennis’ truck.

Outing No. 2. Breaking through the ice should have told me not to go back, but on that first outing to Goose Island, Dennis and I watched other fishermen and fisherwomen catch crappies by using minnows as bait. We’d only brought small grubs for bluegills, so a second trip with minnows was inevitable. This time neither of us fell through the ice, but a second mishap awaited me.

This time the problem occurred when I pulled up a keeper-sized bluegill. As sometimes happens, the fish spit the hook as it flopped on the ice. There was tension on the line when the hook came free, and my set up of jig, bait, and small split shot snapped back at me. I wasn’t wearing my mittens at the time, and my fingers were so numb from the cold that I did not feel anything strike my hand. Only after I saw that my fishing line led directly to my pointer finger did I realize that I’d been hooked.

This was the fifth time I’d witnessed a hook in a person, but the first time the person was me. Only after I tried easing the hook out  did I appreciate how deeply it had penetrated. I couldn’t pull it out with my fingers, but was able to jerk it out with a pair of pliers. Going in was painless and bloodless. Coming out hurt and bled. I had no bandaids with me, but I did have a handkerchief. Before wrapping the wound in cloth, I dangled it over my fishing hole. It was dumb, but I thought a few drops of blood might work like chum to attract fish. It did not.

This morning I sit at my writing table. Three days have passed since the injury. The wound is still sore to the touch, but it is healing. I might, however, be done with ice fishing for the year.

When I was 25 years old, I worked in the reading room of the Harvard Law School Library. I worked the evening shift at the circulation desk and spent an hour every night reshelving the dozens of case reporters* that law students used and then did not put back themselves. As monotonous as the job was, two incidents stick out in my mind as fond memories.

One time a law professor called the front desk of the library and asked me to come to his office to collect the library books he’d been hoarding. He said, “Bring a cart. There are lots of them.” I thought a dozen books would be a lot, but it turned out to be sixty or seventy in number. I piled books atop books, so high that I had to hold the books in place with one hand as I wheeled the cart back to the library. I was slowly working my way through the maze of offices in Langdell Hall when I reached a spot where I needed three hands – one to push the cart, one to steady the books, and one to hold open a massive door at the end of a hallway. I was about to lose the whole thing, when I heard someone yell, “Wait, wait. Let me get the door for you.” I turned around to thank whoever was making the offer, and it was Archibald Cox. The man, third only to Bart Starr and Henry Aaron on my list of heroes, was holding the door for me. 

The second incident involved an old woman named Gertie. Gertie was the person who checked IDs when students entered the library. She took her job seriously and required students to show their IDs every time they came in. Unfortunately the bathrooms were just outside the library entrance, so students would sometimes get upset when they left for five minutes to pee and then had to show their IDs all over again. My place at the circulation desk was only ten feet from Gertie’s station, so I became her guardian, reprimanding anyone who gave Gertie an especially hard time.

One day Gertie asked me how much I was paid at the library and then offered me a dollar more per hour to come to her house on Saturdays to do odd jobs. I agreed and, after only my second day at her house, realized that she didn’t care a lick about minor home repairs. She hired me because she was lonely. She would give me a task for the day, then set up a folding chair alongside wherever I was working. My weekends were more valuable to me than the few dollars I was making, but I couldn’t abandon a lonely woman who really didn’t seem to have anyone else. I worked for her from mid-October through most of the winter.

One day my assigned task was to replace sagging wallpaper in her bathroom. I suggested that paint would be a better wall covering in a bathroom than wallpaper, but she’d already purchased a new flowered pattern, and she wanted me to put it up. I’d just started the project, when she asked, “Do you know who Arlo Guthrie is?” 

“Sure,” I said. “I have Alice’s Restaurant and Hobo’s Lullaby in my record collection.”

“Arlo’s my nephew,” she said.

It sounds melodramatic to say that I froze, but that is what happened. Standing on a small stepladder, I was midway through peeling off a section of the old paper, when I just stopped. I looked down at Gertie sitting in her chair next to me and asked, “Are you telling me that Woody Guthrie was your brother?”

“Hell, no!” Gertie shouted. “That son of a bitch used to be married to my sister. We thought he was drunk all of the time, but it turns out he was dying.”

It is a big stretch in my thinking, but I feel that because of Harvard Law School, I am personally connected to Archibald Cox and “that son of a bitch” Woody Guthrie. Pretty cool.

* Case reporters are summaries of court decisions. Lawyers use these decisions to find legal precedents to support their arguments. I worked in the library in the early 1980s, so all of the reporters were only in hard copy.

It’s a jumbled mess, but for the moment, I like it. I can focus if I need to. I can fry an egg without burning myself. I can drive my car on snow-covered roads. The urge to write has actually been heightened. It is just that I come up with a half dozen disjointed ideas when I’d rather focus on one. For the time being I am going with it, writing down snippets and hoping that a few of them will grow into complete thoughts later.

I have narrowed the trigger for this unusual state of mind to one of two things. The first is that I recently read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. It is not the subject matter (i.e., the Vietnam War) that’s set me off, but the quality of the writing. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a book slap me in the back of the head and tell me to write better. It didn’t tell me how to write better, just that I need to. In one of O’Brien’s early chapters, he wrote, “They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack.” If I’ve ever written a sentence this perfect, I didn’t notice it.

The second possible reason for my current condition is my Christmas present from Clare. She bought me a year’s subscription to Spotify and helped me create a playlist on my phone. I listen to my favorite songs for an hour each day while I exercise. Not surprisingly, most of the songs are from a time when music and my life were one and the same. Come Monday, Running on Empty,  LA Freeway, Desperado. The music does not elicit memories during my workout. It shakes them loose to surface later in the day.

Looking out the window from my writing table this morning, I realize there may be a third contributor to my lack of concentration. It is mid-January, and I might have cabin fever.

Manyu has beautiful salt and pepper hair. It is raven black highlighted with individual strands of white. She keeps it barely shoulder-length and carries a classic look that cannot be replicated in a hair salon. Last week she dyed it all black.

Dying hair is an annual event. Manyu does not like going gray any more than I like going bald, but she usually keeps the gray because she knows how much I like it. That all changes whenever she readies herself for a trip to Taiwan. Every winter just before Chinese New Year, she books a flight to Taipei, buys gifts for friends and family, refills her prescription for thyroid medicine, and dyes her hair.

You won’t find many gray heads in Taiwan or China. The majority of Taiwanese/Chinese senior citizens, both men and women, have jet black hair – sometimes so black that it looks like a wig. If you google photos of US presidents meeting Chinese leaders, you will see one head of gray and one head of black. The one exception was Nixon meeting Mao, but I think that’s because Nixon also dyed his hair. I suppose FDR meeting Chiang Kai-shek was also an exception, but that’s only because Chiang had no hair at all. The photo I am posting with this week’s blog was taken from a CNN news story. The headline was not about the many dyed heads in the National People’s Congress, but about Xi Jinping bucking the trend by letting his hair go gray.*

Manyu does not necessarily conform to societal standards, so I asked her why she dyes her hair before going to Asia. She said she does it for two reasons. One is because her mom, all of her sisters, and all of her friends dye their hair (so there is an element of conformity in her decision). The other is an act of filial piety. It would be disrespectful to show the world that her black-haired mom is so old that even her daughter has gray hair.

Neither of Manyu’s answers is generalizable. They don’t tell me why an entire society dyes its hair. For a culture that kowtows to its elders, why wouldn’t people want to show their true age? The only explanation I could find online is an ancient one that probably doesn’t hold true anymore. Apparently the people of imperial China did not object to gray hair so much as premature gray. Prematurely gray hair was an indication of personal anxiety, whereas black hair suggested a sense of peace and contentment. Ancient texts have been found with recipes for hair dyes made from just about anything dark and goopy. Black bean paste, crushed mulberries, and fermented tadpoles are among the ingredients.**

I don’t care whether Taiwanese/Chinese octogenarians dye their hair black. I don’t care whether some Taiwanese/Chinese teenagers dye their hair white, green, purple, or blue. I do, however, hope my wife returns from Taiwan with a touch of gray.

*Jiang, Steven. March 9, 2019. “Gray leap forward: Xi Jinping shows natural hair color in a rare move for Chinese politics.” CNN. Found at: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/xi-jinping-gray-hair/index.html.

** Chang Chiung-fang. July 1997. “Taiwan panorama dye hard: Just a fashion statement? – Abracadabra!” (Scott Williams, trans.). Panorama. Found at: https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/Articles/Details?Guid=8192742b-6f46-44b9-b9ef-f4ba6970411e&langId=3&CatId=11.

As a young man, I might have had a face people trusted. Often I was told I needed to smile more, but smiles, at least fake ones, reveal an underlying dishonesty more than a face that might be described as emotionless. This fact often puts politicians in a bind. When they don’t smile, they come across as unlikable. When they do smile, they come across as phony. The few who can pull it off (e.g, Reagan, Obama) get elected President.

I first noticed I might have a trustworthy face back in college when I hitchhiked home to see my parents. On Friday afternoons in Madison, there were usually five or six students spread out along Highway 151, each trying to thumb their way out of town. To me, we all looked the same, but often I’d be the first one to get a ride. Twice I was picked up by women traveling alone, who then said, “I don’t pick up hitchhikers, but you remind me of my son.”

Then there was my job as a Pillsbury doughboy. I mentioned it in a previous blog. I got that job while standing in a line at an employment office. A dozen people were waiting to speak to a staff member, when a guy walked in who was too well dressed to be looking for minimum wage work. He circled the office a couple of times, then stopped at me and said. “Do you want a job?”

The same thing happened to me at the housing office at Georgetown University. My first wife and I were looking for summer housing in Washington, DC. To help students who left town for the summer and wanted to rent out their apartments, Georgetown had a bulletin board specifically for sublets. This was decades before anyone had cell phones, so people looking for a place to live had to take turns using the one available phone. The rule was one call at a time, so even if Lisa and I got a busy signal or no answer, we had to get back at the end of the line and wait our turn to call the next person on our list. Although it doesn’t make sense to me now, I remember that the line was outdoors and everyone waiting for the phone sat on a sidewalk with our backs against a wall. A guy walked up and down the line a couple of times, then stopped at me and asked, “Do you want to rent my house?”

The final example of a trusting face harks back to my wandering days in the early ‘80s. Two times, once in Chicago and once in San Francisco, I found myself in the financial district during morning rush hour. Rather than fight the crowds with my backpack, I sat on a concrete bench and waited for the sidewalks to clear. Having just come off a Greyhound bus in both cases, I looked rough, but the people heading for work realized that I wasn’t someone living on the streets. Rather than avoiding eye contact, a few actually approached me and asked where I was heading. My answer was that I was in town to visit friends, but didn’t know where I was going afterwards. It was a time in my life when I rarely had more than a hundred dollars to my name, yet strangers envied me.

There are two things in book bios that bother me a bit. One is the mention of pets, even though Jack is curled up next to me as I write this blog. The other is a long, long list of job titles that shows both the remarkable accomplishments and the quirkiness of the author. “_______ is an award-winning actor, director, rodeo cowboy, winemaker, lumberjack, and philanthropist. He, his wife Connie, and their two cats Morris and Mr. Green Jeans split their time between New York City and St. Petersburg.”

After reading an especially long work history on a book jacket, I tried to remember all of the jobs I’ve held. Going all of the way back to grade school, I initially came up with 24 different jobs and have since recalled four more. My bio could read, “Steve Simpson has been a farm laborer, paperboy, fast food cook, ditch digger, furniture mover, flagman, cookie maker, bus driver, lifeguard, wrestling instructor, library assistant, Kelly girl, Social Security claims administrator, store clerk, bartender, naturalist, wilderness trip leader, camp director, museum tour guide, inventor, editor, publisher, columnist, and college professor. He lives in La Crosse, Wisconsin with his wife Manyu and their dog Jack. His writing has yet to receive an award.”

In my younger days, I listed some of these jobs on my résumé. Whenever I interviewed for a new job, potential employers always wondered about my time as a cookie maker. I never asked why that particular line of work caught their attention, although it was one of my more interesting jobs. I’d dropped out of college and worked as a Pillsbury doughboy. I wore white coveralls just like Poppin’ Fresh. Someday I’ll write a blog about the day I misread a recipe and made 2,000 pounds of unusable cookie dough.

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If the definition of writer’s block is the inability to put words to paper, then I don’t have writer’s block. Lately I’ve been putting down lots of words. The problem is that very few of them work well together. For the past two months, I’ve written drafts for three different potential book chapters, and all three remain outside the “good” folder on my computer’s desktop. In all three instances, I tried to bring together disparate concepts into a single essay, only to discover that the connections between the concepts felt forced. For example, just this morning I scrapped 3,000 words where I used the differences between Confucianism and Taoism to introduce the importance of leisure and play. If you asked me today why I thought ancient Chinese philosophy and leisure were closely linked, I wouldn’t have a good answer. Had you’d ask me when I first started the draft chapter, I might have had a reason.

I once read that the parallel stories of Alexandra and Marie in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! were originally written as two separate novellas. At the same time I can imagine this to be true, I also assume Cather must have been surprised and pleased when she realized the two tales were meant to be together. My recent writing efforts have been the opposite of Cather’s. I begin with two topics in a single piece of writing and conclude that they would be better if kept separate.

Much of my difficulty with writing is age. At sixty-nine, my brain doesn’t work as efficiently as it once did. I am now more discerning with my writing than when I was in my thirties, and I finally have ample time to write – but those plusses are offset by the fact that everything takes so much longer. I do not exaggerate when I say that writing takes me five times longer now than it once did. This should not surprise me, as jogging a mile, emptying my bladder, and tying a fishhook onto the end of my line also take about five times longer. Retired people sometimes wonder how we used to fit jobs into our busy days. Partly it’s because we were faster back then.

Last week in his weekly New York Times editorial, Frank Bruni wrote about the importance of writing “gladly, quickly, and nimbly.” For me, only gladly still applies. Fortunately the joy of writing is enough to keep me going. I shouldn’t care how long a single book chapter or blog entry takes. To some extent, I shouldn’t even care whether it’s any good, although some of the joy comes from coming up with a good sentence or paragraph. I don’t feel the need to write, but now my mornings do not feel right unless I do.