This week I watched five different DYI videos on three different subjects. The first two were about filleting a walleye. While the demonstrations did not teach me much that I did not already know, they were strong reminders that I don’t get my fillet knives sharp enough. This led me to watching two videos about sharpening fillet knives.

The big question I’ve always had about sharpening knives is whether I should run the edge of my knife toward the whetstone or away from the whetstone. One video did it one way, and the other video did it the other. The two videos did concur on the final step, which is to remove the burr that forms along the cutting edge during the sharpening. If I have ever created a burr while sharpening a knife, I never noticed it.

I won’t fillet a walleye until I catch one, and I probably won’t sharpen my knives until I have a fish to fillet, so the information in those four videos has been mentally put away for future use. The video that I did immediately use was one that showed me how to change the hatchback support struts on a 2011 Subaru Outback.

The video started with a hatchback dropping on its own and hitting a kid in the head. (The kid wore a bicycle helmet for demonstration purposes.) This confirmed that I had the right video. As always, the step-by-step demonstration made the undertaking look like a quick five-minute fix, so I headed to the auto parts store for the necessary parts.

The woman behind the counter at the store hit a few keys on her computer and then asked me whether my Subaru was a station wagon. I’ve had the car for nearly fifteen years, but I never considered it a station wagon. I’m 70 years old. To me, a station wagon is a rusty white Ford with fake wood side panels.

When I said that I didn’t know whether my car was a station wagon, an old guy who was stocking shelves looked out the window of the store and read off my license plate number. The woman plugged the number into her computer and said, “Yeah, you have a station wagon.” Even though I understand that my whole life exists in cyberspace, I was taken aback at how easily a clerk in an auto parts store was able to access my information.*

The woman grabbed two new struts from the shelves behind the counter, but before she handed them to me, she put a big L on one and a big R on the other. She said, “Left and right are different, but there’s nothing anywhere that tells you one from the other.” After I got home, I realized that she was, as far as I could tell, correct.

The video got one thing wrong, and it got one thing very right. It got wrong the removal of the three bolts that held the old struts in place. My socket set didn’t look any different from the one used in the video, but the guy in the video easily slipped his socket wrench over the head of every bolt. My sockets did not fit into the tight space around two of the bolts, so I had to go in sideways with an open-ended wrench. The guy in the video took ten seconds to remove the bolts. I needed ten minutes.

What the video got right was the very last step. The struts are connected to the hatchback by a ball and socket. A ball on the outer edge of the hatchback needs to fit into a socket on the end of the strut. The amount of pressure needed to pop the ball into place was the kind of pressure I associate with breaking something. I don’t think that I would have pushed hard enough if I hadn’t seen the guy in the video do it.

The new struts worked perfectly. I immediately asked Manyu if we needed go grocery shopping. I wanted to experience the joy of putting groceries in the back of my car without propping up the hatchback with my snow brush.

* When I got home, I tried accessing my car online and discovered that the make and model of my car are public record, my name and address are not.

I cannot remember the last time I wrote an essay or a book chapter where the original introduction survived the final edit. I ramble when I write, yet I value concise writing. By the time I get to the heart of a topic, the first several paragraphs of a piece don’t always fit. I needed them to get me to where I wanted to go, but the reader doesn’t need them to come in behind me. Overall I delete more than half of what I put to paper, but it is a necessary part of the process. “The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish you can forget the trap… Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.”* 

From what I have read about book proposals, the proper way to pitch a non-fiction book to a publisher or literary agent is 1) outline the entire book, 2) complete a few chapters, 3) submit query letters, and 4) have a full proposal ready to go should a publisher or agent express interest. The goal is to have a contract in hand before dedicating the next few years to a writing project that might not otherwise see the light of day.

I, however, cannot write that way, or at least I choose not to write that way. First of all, I do not have enough name recognition for a publisher to want a contract with me based simply on an idea. Secondly, if I did find a publisher prior to completion of a manuscript, he or she would hold me to a deadline. Deadlines were fine when I wrote papers in graduate school, but now I want to be the one who decides when a manuscript is ready.

My distaste of deadlines is linked to the fact that the pace of my writing has slowed with age. My best writing today is neither better nor worse than my best writing from forty years ago, but it does take me four to five times longer. I am retired now, so the time factor is largely irrelevant. I do, however, sometimes wonder what would have happened had I started writing full-time back in my prime.

• This Taoist quote comes from the Inner Chapters (Chapter 26) of Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu is the second most important ancient Tao text, second only to the Tao Te Ching itself. The final line of the quote is, “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can talk with him?”

Last week Manyu and I drove Manyu’s brother to Madison for a medical appointment. It was scheduled for 3pm, and the plan was for Clare, who lives in Madison, to grab some carryout Chinese food and join us for an early dinner before we headed back to La Crosse. I’d miscalculated the driving time, and we arrived early. The doctor saw my brother-in-law right away, and we were done at the clinic a full hour sooner than we’d expected.

Manyu immediately called Clare. She was already at an Asian food court near the East Towne Mall, but had yet to place an order. We told her to skip the food, but that we still wanted to see her for a short time before we started on our drive home. Clare said that as long as she was on the eastside of town, she was going to go to Costco. She knew that La Crosse did not have a Costco, so she suggested that we meet her there.

I would have rather gone to a coffee shop, but my brother-in-law and his wife wanted to shop at Costco. On the drive over, I didn’t remember ever having been to a Costco. I should have been more interested in seeing one than I was.

Clare met us outside the main entrance, because customers can’t even go into the store without a membership card. Once she brought us inside, I realized that I had been to a Costco before, but it had been just after my family moved to Taipei in 2008. I’d been to a Costco in Taiwan, but never in the United States.

After Clare gave me a tour of her Costco, I wished La Crosse had one. The aisles were wide, the employees were friendly, and other big box stores would do well to have as many staff members on the floor to help confused shoppers. The seafood looked good, and my sister-in-law got excited when she found octopus.

Manyu bought an oversized bottle of vitamins, and my in-laws half-filled a shopping cart with meat and seafood. Clare picked up a few grocery items that she can’t get elsewhere, and she also got a life-sized Pikachu stuffed toy. Until then, I didn’t know how big a life-sized Pikachu was. I bought a wedge of Jarlsberg cheese and a three-pound container of peanut butter pretzels.

I don’t usually buy peanut butter pretzels, because I tend to eat them until my stomach hurts. Now I have a year’s supply that might last me a month. I consider peanut butter pretzels the best snack food innovation in my lifetime. When I got home that night, I googled peanut butter pretzel and found an old NPR story about their origin. “The technology to make a hard pretzel shell stuffed with peanut butter didn’t even exist until the 1980s… It’s a process called co-extrusion — basically, an outer tube pumps out pretzel dough, while an inner tube pumps out peanut butter filling onto a conveyor belt. The whole thing is then sliced up and baked in a giant 100-foot oven.”* The article did not explain at what point in the process the salt goes on. Maybe that’s common knowledge.

* Found at https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/21/280284547/trader-joes-caught-in-sticky-lawsuit-over-peanut-butter-pretzels.

Manyu does not get overly excited about Christmas, and I’m lukewarm to Chinese New Year. As much as we appreciate each other’s cultures, our love of particular holidays remains tied to our individual childhoods. Clare is both her mother’s daughter and her dad’s little girl, so she gets excited about both.

Clare and her boyfriend Chase came to La Crosse last weekend for Chinese New Year, and we had a total of eleven people at our New Year’s dinner table. (New Year’s was on Wednesday,  but we celebrated it on Saturday so Clare could be there.) There was Manyu and me, Clare and Chase, my brother-in-law’s family of four (an older daughter is back in Taiwan), and three people I’d never met before. A big part of Chinese New Year is the food. Manyu cooked for an entire week, and Clare and Chase brought an ice cooler of egg tarts and vegetarian dishes. I’d recently dropped the four pounds I’d gained over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now I am starting over again.

A tradition of the New Year is to hand out red envelopes containing money to all of the kids in attendance. Manyu gave one to Chase. She explained to him that it would be the only one he’d ever get from her. He was already too old to receive New Year’s red envelopes, but because he was a white guy from Nebraska who’d never been a given a red envelope as a child, she was making a one-time exception.

With a room full of Taiwanese people in my house, I asked them why English-speaking media coverage about Chinese New Year was calling it the Year of the Wood Snake and not just the Year of the Snake. The question stumped them. To their knowledge, none of the Asian news outlets was calling it the Year of the Wood Snake, and they’d never heard the term before. They did say that wood is, along with fire, earth, water, and metal, one of the five “processes,” and 2025 might be both a snake year and a wood year. If it was a wood year, they thought it might be a good thing. Snakes are courageous, but also intimidating and tenacious. Wood is a soft element, so its influence might temper the snake’s aggressive tendencies.

Xīn nián kuài lè. (trans. “Happy New Year”). 

The main loop of northern California’s Muir Woods is a wide and clearly marked trail. The most heavily trafficked sections have split rail fences on either side. The parts that are not fenced have signs reminding people to stay on the trail. Near the entrance is an interpretative sign explaining that the park’s redwood trees have shallow root systems and are susceptible to soil compaction. No reasonable person would threaten the health of some of the world’s tallest trees by stepping off the trail. 

Yet, on my first trip to Muir Woods, I saw a curiously shaped tree fifteen yards off the main pathway, forgot where I was, and walked up to the tree to get a better look. I was a mile down the trail, well away from the crowds, but a National Park Service ranger appeared out of nowhere and told me that I had the choice of either following the park rules or being escorted out of the park.

About six months after my visit to Muir Woods, a hiking companion and I took a bus to Yosemite National Park. We got dropped off in the Valley and immediately asked a park ranger for advice about a good six-day backpacking trip. When she learned that we didn’t have a car to drive to a remote trailhead, she told us to catch the bus to Tuolumne Meadows and hike back to the Valley. “The trip,” she said, “takes only three days if you stay on the trail, so don’t stay on the trail.”

Whenever I go hiking, I stay on the trail at least 90% of the time, but it is important that I am free to venture off trail whenever I want to. Anyone who backpacks knows the feeling that comes with leaving the main pathway and setting off in a direction no one else has gone.

Muir Woods and Yosemite National Park are two very different places, so I would expect them to be managed differently. Muir Woods has over a million visitors a year, yet is smaller than New York’s Central Park. Yosemite, with the exception of Yosemite Valley itself, is underutilized and is bigger than the state of Rhode Island. Still the directives from the two National Park Service rangers sent two distinctly different messages. One ranger basically said, “Nature is right over there, but you can’t get any closer.” The other one said, “If you aren’t going to immerse yourself in untrammeled nature, what you are doing here at all?”

When I was seventeen years old, my girlfriend dragged me to the a movie version of Othello. Only a week earlier I’d made her go to Billy Jack, so it might have been her way of getting back at me. The movie (Othello, not Billy Jack) was two and half hours long, and I was lost for the first half. I got that Iago was a bad guy and that Othello was about to screw up, but otherwise I did not know what was going on.

Midway through the movie there was an intermission, and when the movie resumed after a fifteen minute break, it was if I’d taken a Shakespeare class during the interim. I suddenly understood dialogue that had been gibberish to me only minutes earlier, and I came close to enjoying the movie.

I recalled this old memory, because something similar happened to me last night. For the past week, I’d been struggling with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book The Message. In it, he blends trips to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine with his belief in the power of the written word. I wasn’t buying any of it. The connections he was trying to make felt forced, and I thought the writing was more concerned with the attractive flow of the prose than with saying anything worthwhile. Had Between the World and Me not been one of my favorite books of the past ten years, I would have put The Message aside and grabbed any one of four other books waiting for me on the table next to my bed.

But I stuck with it, and this evening, from the first moment I opened the book, the message of The Message jumped off the page. I was immersed in the content, and I found myself back to my old habit of making comments in the margins. Through the first eighty-five pages, I’d been bored and confused. Starting with page 86, I was hooked. Coates hadn’t done anything differently, so the change had to be me. As with Othello, I needed to adjust myself to a style of writing not familiar to me.

With Othello and The Message, the transition from confusion to comprehension came suddenly. It doesn’t always happen that way. With one of my favorite books of all time, Walden, it came much slower. It, in fact, took years. I’d tried Thoreau’s classic a few times as a teenager and never got past the “Economy” chapter and its lengthy discussion about the price of nails and garden seed. A couple of years later I slogged through the entire book when it was required reading for an American lit course in college. There I liked it better than Sister Carrie and Bartleby the Scrivener, but not nearly as much as Huckleberry Finn. I did however, realize that Walden was not a book to be rushed through as an assigned reading. I gave it another shot the following summer and then again the summer after that. Since then I have read the book another seven or eight times. I pick it up periodically, because 1) it is brilliant in sections, and 2) it is my fallback book each time I unsuccessfully try to understand The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I am still waiting for the day when Emerson makes sense.

Last week I was putting together an early draft of a new essay, and I wrote, “In spite of my blind spot when it comes to Clare, I do not think that my daughter is the best thing to ever come out of Wisconsin.” The sentence was to be the lede for a description of the one thing I do consider the best thing to ever come out the state. That one thing the Wisconsin Idea. In a nutshell, the Wisconsin Idea is the belief that all the teaching and all of the research taking place at public universities need to be shared with more than those fortunate enough to attend college. As a result, the first extension agent in the country, maybe in the world, was hired in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Idea might be the most egalitarian concept to ever come out of higher education. The Morrill Act was designed to allow the common man (and eventually the common woman) to go to college.* The Wisconsin Idea says that the Morrill Act didn’t go far enough.

Composing the sentence about the best things to come out of Wisconsin led me to wonder what other noteworthy accomplishments and ideas had originated in state, and I decided to create a Top Ten List. In a matter of seconds, I came up with six “bests.” Those six, in the order that they popped into my head, were the Wisconsin Idea, my daughter Clare, Les Paul’s solid body electric guitar, John Muir, Earth Day, and A Sand County Almanac. I hesitated for several seconds, but then added the Republican Party. It makes the list because of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, not for any of the regressive politics of the past forty years.

I thought a little longer and then added the Green Bay Packers. The Packers make the list not because so many Wisconsinites live and die with the on-field success of the team, but because the organization is owned by the community and not an egotistical billionaire. In some ways, Packers’ ownership springs from the same value system as the Wisconsin Idea.

That left two slots on the list that I had trouble filling. There are several towns in Wisconsin that lay claim to certain firsts, but I doubt the veracity of any of them. As you drive around the state, you may encounter billboards on the outskirts of towns that welcome you to the home of the ice cream sundae, the home of toilet paper, and the home of the hamburger. If I actually believed that any one of these basic joys of life actually originated in Wisconsin, it would be on my the list. I, however, am skeptical.

I do have two placeholders for the last two slots in my Top Ten List. I am ready to replace either of them as soon as something better comes to mind. One is the first American kindergarten, and the other is the first rails-to-trails bicycle route. If Wisconsin had had the first kindergarten in the world, that would merit a permanent place on my list. Even the first one in the country deserves recognition, but if Margarethe Meyer Schurz hadn’t established the first kindergarten in 1856, someone else in Iowa or Pennsylvania or Kentucky would have replicated the German idea a year or two later.

And as far as rails-to-trails, converting abandoned railroad beds into recreation corridors is one the least appreciated good ideas in all of outdoor recreation management. Someone sometime must have had a revelation and realized, “Hey! Much of what people do in nature is linear. Why do we need to set aside a hundred thousand square miles of land so visitors can hike and bike in a straight line?” That realization was a small and simple stroke of genius.

So here, in alphabetical order, is my list. As a Top Ten List, it’s not particularly impressive, but it shouts Wisconsin.

Clare (my daughter)
Earth Day (thanks to Gaylord Nelson)
the Electric Guitar (Les Paul’s solid body design)
the Green Bay Packers (and their 500,000+ owners)
Kindergarten (the first one in America)
Muir, John (America’s greatest naturalist)
the Republican Party (the early years)
A Sand County Almanac (Aldo Leopold’s environmental classic)
the Sparta-Elroy Bicycle Trail (first rails-to-trails)
the Wisconsin Idea (a surviving remnant of Wisconsin’s Progressive Era)

* Women were not allowed to attend Harvard until 1963. Instead women went to its sister school, Radcliffe. The University of Wisconsin, which had no sister school, opened its doors to women in 1863.

I vaguely remember when my second grade teacher told our class that we would live into the 21st Century. That was in 1961, and my classmates and I could not project that far into the future. At age seven, the 21st Century was six more lifetimes away.*

Last week I typed in the date for my first blog of 2025, and my initial thought was, “Wow! We’re a quarter century into the new millennium, and I’m still here.”

A comparison of a moment from1961 with one from 2025 could have, maybe should have, given me insight about the passage of time. It did not. Even when I intentionally tried to draw meaningful conclusions, I came up with only clichés. Did I think that life was better back in the 60s than it is now? Would I like to go back in time and relive my childhood?

As to Question No. 1, I don’t think that life was better in the 60s than it is now. I do worry about climate change, but otherwise humanity is slowly moving in a good direction. We take just as many steps backwards as we do forwards, but some of the progress gained going forward is retained even when we regress. 

As to Question No. 2, I don’t want to relive my childhood. My overriding recollection of the 1960s was that I was present for them, but missed almost everything. If I went back as a kid in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I’d probably miss the significance of the decade all over again. Conversely, if I was given another shot at the 70s and 80s (i.e., my late teens and all of my twenties), I’d go back in a heartbeat.

Last week I watched three new stand-up comedy specials on tv: Nate Bargatze, Neal Brennan, and Craig Ferguson. The three comedians have different comedic styles, and after having seen several specials from each of them over the years, I would say that their material seldom has anything in common. This time, however, their specials all had the same overriding theme, which was this; none of us who grew up in the 20th Century belong in the present time. Nate Bargatze went so far as to suggest that he has more in common with the Pilgrims than he does with his daughter.

In last week’s blog, I wondered whether I had one more big accomplishment left in me. This week I am thinking that it is time for me to hang up my spikes. I should do what so many other baby boomers seem unable to do, which is to find a hobby, enjoy life, and stay out of the way. With age comes wisdom, but part of wisdom is knowing when to hand over the reins.

• The photo is of Mrs. Van Beek’s 1961 second grade class. I didn’t even remember that such a photo existed, but Chris Zilles, the little girl standing on the far left, brought it to our 50th high school reunion. Between the two of us, we were able to identify all but four kids in the picture. I am standing in the back row, second from the right.

At a recent neighborhood Christmas party, a guy from down the street joked that he worries about me if I am not sitting at my living room window each morning when he heads off for work. Apparently I have become a local fixture, and something’s not quite right if I am not in my spot by 7am.

It occurred to me that if I sat in a chair every morning with nothing in front of me and did nothing more than stare out the window, my neighbors would think that I was a lonely old man. Because I sit at the window with a pen, a notepad, and a laptop computer, they assume I am mentally engaged and that gazing out the window is part of the writing process.

I am far from lonely in my retirement, but I have somewhat withdrawn from the outside world. The surprising part is not the dysfunction that I see at the national and global level, but rather how little all of that dysfunction affects my day-to-day life. When I look out upon my cul-de-sac, I see only pleasantness. Dog walkers wave to me as they pass by, the birds behave as if I’m not there, and the squirrels actually climb up on the window sill to show me their walnuts before they take them to wherever they take them when the ground is frozen. 

When I sit in my writing nook I sometimes make the mistake of checking out the morning news on my laptop. When I do, two annoying thoughts sometimes take me out of my calm. The first is that the major events of the day, while seldom affecting me personally, have or will have an impact on the lives of my daughter and her fellow twenty-somethings. My own adolescence and early adulthood included Vietnam, race riots, Watergate, and the assassinations of our best leaders, but there was always the sense that “this too will pass.” Today’s problems, maybe because they have been sneaking up on us for decades (e.g., climate change, income disparity, xenophobia), feel more engrained and more permanent. 

The second disruption to my peace of mind is the sense that the mess we’re in is partially the result of people like me having stayed out of it. I spent my entire life teaching at various universities. The image of eggheads in an ivory tower is a false one, but that does not mean that college campuses don’t reside in a bit of a bubble. That bubble is one of the reasons I became a professor in the first place. For decades, I told myself that I was fulfilling my obligation to society by helping students define their environmental ethic. It was good work, but none of it ever required personal sacrifice. Taoist writings state that people cannot divorce themselves from the problems of the world. At best, they can hope that their direct involvement won’t be needed. I have gone through life telling myself that I was not needed.

I like retirement very much. Overall I haven’t felt this carefree since graduate school. Still, one of the few things that does bother me at times is the suspicion that, in addition to raising an intelligent and caring daughter, there might be something else I was meant to do or am still supposed to do. Mark Twain said that one of the great days of life is the one where we figure out why we are here. I’m still working on that.