215. My Garage and Patio

Here, in Potlatch, we can get quite a bit of snow—nothing extreme like the nearby mountains, but enough to keep you busy shoveling. We’re going to have a white Christmas this year (as we do nine out of ten years) and I’ve just come in from shoveling the drive. Don’t get me wrong, I love the snow, but we have a new two car garage that’s just over a year old and I really love it. Potlatch is a company town built at the turn of the twentieth century so the lumber mill workers would not have had cars and the houses were not built with that in mind. When we bought our house 28 years ago we could not afford to build a garage, so we’ve lived here for 26 years parking on the street, getting plowed in several times a winter and having to dig one to four cars out. (The number of cars we’ve owned might also account for why we couldn’t afford a garage…) Being able to get the drive shoveled and into a snow free car has been a great luxury and pleasure for our retirement. I still have plenty of snow to shovel, so I’m not getting soft in that regard, but I do love my garage.

We built a car port on the house side of the garage that we use as a patio for the most part. Since we live on a hill, we also built an extending deck to the back door of the house so that when needed we have wheel chair access to the house as well as steps down to the back yard and garden. It connects right to the street side ramp that we built for wheel chair access from the street. While wheel chair access wasn’t a concern at all when we bought the place, it is now since our youngest son has a mitochondrial disease and at times has needed his wheel chair to get into the house. This became clear to us when he broke his ankle a few years ago which is why we built the deck ramp from the street. It looks just like a deck that extends into a walkway, so it isn’t at all clunky or emergency-handicap-accessible looking.

Because we built the car port/patio on the side of the garage and our property is on a hill, the roof slope required us to build high. That also means that there is plenty of vertical space inside, so we built storage shelves on both the house and ally sides. They are like lofts and you can walk around on them, though you do have to duck a bit for the beams. You also have to get up there with a ladder. We have our oldest son’s furniture stored up there now while he’s away in medical school. Since the garage replaced an old garden shed, I also use it to store my rototiller, lawn mower, and garden tools. I have a portable work bench that I start seeds on beneath the single window on the southside and it also works as a table on the patio if we so desire. I have a beer fridge and a deep freezer. I store our winter pellets for the stove in there and I also store a little bit of fire wood for our outdoor fire pit. When both cars are parked inside it can be crowded, but that’s when I pull one of both cars out and work while the door is opened.

The patio is wonderful. We bought a patio heater to sit under when the COVID lock down started and we had friends visit outside to be safe. The gas grill is there and I can cook on it at any point in the year if it’s not too cold. While the sun does shine on all parts of the patio at one point or another during the summer, because we have a big maple tree nearby, you can sit at one spot or another at any time of the day and be shaded. It’s become our perfect outdoor living space because of its easy access to the house with wheel chair accessibility and the possibility of heat or shade at any time of the year. I keep it decorated for the seasons as well. In spring and summer, it has hanging planters and in fall I put up corn stalks and pumpkins. Now that it’s Christmas time I have it decked with lights and evergreen boughs. Because I love being outdoors it has become the perfect addition for me. I love my garage and patio.

214. Apples

It’s that time of year when apples are everywhere around here. They are such an ordinary fruit, that like grass you just kind of forget about them. But I really do love apples. I live just a few miles from Washington where the apple is the state fruit and it’s known as the apple state. Apples are also grown all over Idaho, just as potatoes are grown all over Washington. In fact, this little unincorporated place in Idaho called Mesa in the southwest part of the state had the largest apple orchards in the country during World War II. So, like I said, apples are everywhere around here. You find stray apple trees growing all over because it used to be that everyone had at least one apple tree at their home and didn’t rely on orchardists to provide them with the common fruit. I know many people turn their noses up at things that are “common” but I think overlooking the common instead of appreciating it is a great detriment to ourselves. In reality, nothing on this earth is “common” or we would have definitively discovered it on other nearby or distant planets. Everything about us and our earth is uncommon.

Where do I start about what I love about apples? I like eating a fresh apple at lunch time. I love apple pie, especially a la mode. Apples make great desserts like apple crisp or apple dumplings or apple cake. They’re as easy to come by as a potato, so they are easy to go to for a quick homemade dessert. They make a great snack with popcorn or cheese. You can cook them with a roast, poultry or pork. You can process them into applesauce, adding a little sugar and cinnamon—or not, just process them for a good baby food. Most of us probably started eating apples before we were even aware of it.

Pressing apples into cider is a great autumnal activity and there is no more exotic drink than fresh apple cider. I’ve noticed that people are going back to the hard ciders as well. That’s something we lost here in the US during prohibition and it took us a century to get it back. Hard ciders are kind of like beer and wine in that there are such variable flavors based upon the type of apple and the fermenting processes just as beers vary by their hop varieties and wines by their grapes. It is fun to see the cideries experiment and make new flavors. Something as common as the apple can make such varied and unique ciders. The apple is definitely a versatile fruit.

I also live right near Washington State University, a premier university in research and study of the apple (and viticulture as well), so it’s nice to know that the apple isn’t going out of vogue anytime soon, just as the potato is studied at the nearby University of Idaho. The saying of how you can’t compare apples to oranges doesn’t apply to apples and potatoes around here, at least if you consider how they can be used to drive the economy.

I’ve often wondered what I would do if I fell on hard times and had little to no money to buy food. I think I could get around and do some foraging for apples, fish a bit, find mushrooms and other edible plants here where I live and make it just fine. There’s something wonderful about the plentitude of apples and how they have become not only a part of my daily existence, but also a part of my imagination. Clearly my life would be very different without apples. So, what do you think about them apples?

 

213. Gonzaga Men's Basketball

 I love Gonzaga men’s basketball. I like the women’s program a lot too, but I just can’t seem to get enough of the men’s program. We just got home from Seattle yesterday because we had gone over to watch “The Battle in Seattle” that has been on hiatus for a few years. You can’t get into the McCarthy center (“The Kennel”) in Spokane very often unless you already have season tickets because that’s how popular the men’s program is. So, the Zags go to Seattle so more of their local fans can actually watch them live. It’s crazy that I live only an hour from Gonzaga but I have to often travel five hours across the state of Washington to watch them play.

This year they played the Alabama Crimson Tide, so yes, they play very famous teams. They are now one of those very famous teams. Unfortunately, they lost this one, but I’m still glad I got to be part of the 18,048 fans at the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle. The excitement of a Zag game with that kind of crowd is just electric, like you’re about to be struck by lightning at any moment! There was quite a student crowd there and the cheerleaders were there. One thing missing was the band. I have never before been at a game that the Zags lost, but I haven’t been to all that many live games because they’re hard to get into. I’ve been to one men’s game at the McCarthy Center when my oldest son was a student there. His attendance at Gonzaga has made me feel a big part of the Zags because I now have financial investments in that university. 😊

The other live games I’ve been to have been right here at WSU when the Zags used to play the Cougs every year. We also made a trip to Las Vegas one year to watch the West Coast Conference tournament which the Zags handily won. I do sometimes think the intense national spotlight on them can be a bit much. This year they were ranked #1 before they even played a game and now they are #5 or lower after losing to Duke and Alabama.

I have been attached to this program for a long time. I like how so many of the Zags stick to their alma mater in one way or another. Dan Dickau often reports on them on live television broadcasts. Adam Morrison always reports on them on live radio. These two are legends in their own right. So many Zags are playing in the NBA right now that I can’t even keep up with what teams they are on. Cory Kispert, Rui Hachimura, Jalen Suggs, etc. Others are playing abroad like Kevin Pangos and Przemek Karnowski. These guys just keep the magic rolling as they take great pride in the fact that they are Zags. And rightfully so.

Coach Mark Few is largely responsible for all this fame. The best thing about it all is that he stays with Gonzaga where he probably doesn’t make half as much as he would in a larger university. He seems to love Spokane and his job as it is. It’s not about the money for him, but the success of the young men in his program. That’s the kind of guy I admire and the kind of guy I hope I am.

The truth is that I like basketball and Gonzaga has given me a team to pin my hopes to. It’s a small liberal arts college with a faith-based background that strives to help young people become servants to their communities to make this world a better place. Like many, I tend to see athletics as slightly over promoted at the expense of other aspects of education. The joy of the game, the competition and the sportsmanship at any Zag game will show, however, that good things are promoted in friendly competition. Friendships are formed and bonds are made even when we might not know the players or the coach. Gonzaga is achieving its goals of making the world a better place through all of its sports programs and the window into that wonderful university is opened just a little wider through its basketball program. I’m proud to be a part of Zag nation and I love the Bulldogs. Go Zags!

212. Thanksgiving

 

Thanksgiving is a distinctly North American holiday that we Americans celebrate in November and our Canadian cousins celebrate in October in conjunction with what we Yanks call Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day. For we Americans the whole idea is to give thanks for our ancestry and their arrival on these shores along with a bountiful harvest after a difficult period preceding all that. It’s important to give thanks for surviving tempestuous events in our lives. Our Puritan ancestors celebrated what we now call the first Thanksgiving a year after their arrival in Massachusetts Bay. I love that story (highly mythologized) that has natives and colonists celebrating in harmony, but I know that our land has always been a land of tensions and conflict settled by obnoxious human beings bent on extreme tribalism. I’m still thankful for the holiday and grateful that we North Americans celebrate it.

While it’s over this year, my pastor did call it one of the few unsullied holidays. I suspect he meant that it’s unsullied by commercialism. That does seem to be true. About the only commercialism that comes with the holiday is the sale of turkeys, cranberries, and other autumnal foods that we enjoy cooking in a variety of ways. If you’re lucky you might find a few table decorations on sale, but typically those are overwhelmed and hidden between Halloween and Christmas decorations, if they’re even there at all.

This year we went to Seattle to celebrate. We actually ate Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant, something my wife and I had only done once before (before kids). I do, however, remember working at such banquets for Thanksgiving during my four years in college. It meant my own festivities with family had to be squeezed into a portion of the day instead of a full day of eating and being with family. This year the celebrations were just a quiet gathering of the four of us. Of course, we still had plenty of pumpkin and squash for treats and we did cook a turkey before the holiday for leftovers. I think what we ended up doing was extending the holiday to a longer eating festival.

It’s definitely the eating that I like about Thanksgiving. Of course, the gathering of friends and family is super important and fun as well but if it weren’t for the shared need to eat we probably wouldn’t do the big gatherings. In fact, we didn’t do the big gathering thing this year. We did lots of little gatherings here and there with friends and family. To me, that was just as fun because we had already started the everything-pumpkin season and then we added the turkey and cranberries. Now, when you get to the day after Thanksgiving, the crazy commercialization of Black Friday begins. I am not a big participant in Black Friday shopping and this year was no exception, but we did go to IKEA on that Saturday just because we were in Seattle. The shelves had already been cleaned out! It’s ok to do the shopping thing if you go slow, have fun, and remain happy. The whole idea of being thankful should prevail.

It’s not like we haven’t been going through an extended rough patch for the past couple of years with the pandemic, but I still have a lot to be thankful for. I’m thankful that I have remained healthy and been able to keep my family healthy. I’m thankful that I was financially stable and able to retire so that I could keep my family and myself healthy. I’m thankful that I have enough to do and a creative mind so that I am not bored. I’m thankful that my family and friends have weathered this storm of the pandemic fairly well and that we are able to get out and about now. And I’m grateful for this season that has brought me happiness and for Time magazine and its little article that encouraged me to think about what I’m grateful for.

211. Winter

I am particularly fond of winter in the United States, especially here in the mountain west. Here winter has all the joy of snow and winter sports but you can easily get away from all the cold and ice if you are so inclined. I live in northern Idaho, and there is no doubt that all of Idaho is affected by winter. For the mountain west, I don’t live at a particularly high elevation—only 2,500 feet—and I’m on the west side of the continental divide so the warmer Pacific storms keep it from being too cold. We do, however, frequently get the arctic cold coming down to turn all of that Pacific rain into snow and at 2,500 feet the snow can be frequent. I love the snow. I love to ski, especially cross-country ski. I love how the forest turns into a magical place when the snow comes. And because it’s so mountainous here I can easily go higher and find more snow than I have at home. I can also easily go lower and get into a more desert climate and avoid the snow. Those different climates are all within an easy hour’s drive from me, so I have the luxury of enjoying several variations of winter.

Of course, I’m getting older, so all the snow and ice can become a little more difficult to manage. Now days I’m just as happy sitting inside by the fire and watching it snow. I have to get out in it some just to be outside, but I no longer ski downhill because I know how rigid my body has gotten both in its ability to be agile and manage the skiing (because I don’t do it enough) and in its tendency to break because I am not as agile as I used to be. But I’ll still strap on the Nordic skis and replace my run with a XC ski trip.

Growing up, I remember going out in the yard of my grand parents who lived where the snow accumulated greatly over the winter. I would try to see if I could walk across the top of crusted snow and as a boy I often could, but sometimes I would suddenly fall through and have to figure out how to get back out. Far from being panicky, I would relish the challenge since the snow could be anywhere from three to four feet deep. Another thing I enjoyed was taking my runner sled out into the field near our house and sled down the path of the frozen creek. That was crazy because when it was that frozen there usually wasn’t a lot of snow, so when the sled came to an edge I would go flying. I don’t remember ever getting hurt, though.

As a teen and young adult, I took up Alpine skiing and went regularly to Brundage Mountain which was only about twenty miles from our home. I loved that but it always seemed expensive and as a poor young teacher I gave it up. Later I bought Nordic skis and have since turned my winters over to exploring the wonders of the frozen world on my Nordic skis.

And now it’s nearing the winter holidays so all the romance of winter is coming to light even before there is any snow on the ground. I always like to celebrate the first snow with some hot chocolate and Christmas carols, but sometimes the carols can be a bit early if the snow comes in October. That’s the way to discover who the Grinches are. Winter is a beautiful time in this part of the world and I’m glad I get to enjoy it in all its reality and romance. 

Perseverance

November 14, 2021 Grace Community Church, Potlatch, Idaho

Introducing a sermon is difficult for me, and I know I’ve said this before. I think that’s partly because I feel like the scripture is the introduction and that I’m going to expand on that, so who needs an introduction? But I also know that as a person in the congregation, I can find it hard to pay attention to the scripture readings at times, especially if I don’t have them in front of me. I’ve also heard that going to church (this from a Christian) is an art in enforced boredom, and I don’t think that that needs to be true. In fact, if we’re doing what it says in Hebrews, we are “spurring one another on in love and good deeds.” I find it all a bit of a balancing act in how to approach a sermon, let alone know how successful I am at it. But I also think that that’s the point of much of what the scriptures are saying to us today. We are in a balancing act of continual conflict. So, what I want to talk about today is our routine lives, and we all know that as far as we are concerned, those are pretty ordinary and not necessarily the stuff of good stories. We also all know that our lives are made up of conflict because that is part of being human, (good stories have to have conflict), we also all know that we don’t know the end of our story in the sense of just how or when, but we should know that we need to persevere in faith in the author of our story and know that the end is complete and perfect. I guess, in a worldly sense, the buzz words for what I’m going to talk about today are “mental health,” but it’s deeper than that. It’s spiritual health.

            On the surface of the Hannah story in I Samuel I can’t relate. Polygamy has never made any sense to me and I don’t even want to try to make sense of it. But I can understand rivals. I tried never to have favorites as a teacher, at least as much as was humanly possible to avoid that kind of rivalry. Kids still wanted to please. You might personally think you want to be the favorite of someone, but favoritism creates jealousy and Hannah was on the negative end of that jealousy. I Samuel 1: 4 Whenever the day came for Elkanah to sacrifice, he would give portions of the meat to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters. 5 But to Hannah he gave a double portion because he loved her, and the Lord had closed her womb. 6 Because the Lord had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival kept provoking her in order to irritate her. 7 This went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat. 8 Her husband Elkanah would say to her, “Hannah, why are you weeping? Why don’t you eat? Why are you downhearted? Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?” Her husband loved her more than his other wives (so why did he have others???) but she was barren so wife Peninnah had a big opening to just torment Hannah, and torment she did. We’ve all felt similar sorts of conflict with people. People are just hard to get along with, plain and simple. (I don’t remember where I heard this, but someone said that whenever your spouse is not meeting up to your expectations, you should look in the mirror and remind yourself that you aren’t that great of a catch either. 😊 Stay humble.) As people of faith, though, we know we have an advocate, someone who loves us as we are.  Hannah was also a person of faith and she prayed to the point of appearing to be drunk to Eli the priest. I Samuel 1: 10 In her deep anguish Hannah prayed to the Lord, weeping bitterly. 11 And she made a vow, saying, “Lord Almighty, if you will only look on your servant’s misery and remember me, and not forget your servant but give her a son, then I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life, and no razor will ever be used on his head.” And God answered her prayer by giving her a son. She gave birth to Samuel. And in 1 Samuel 2, that we read in our call to worship she gave thanks. 2 Then Hannah prayed and said:

“My heart rejoices in the Lord;
    in the Lord my horn[a] is lifted high.
My mouth boasts over my enemies,
    for I delight in your deliverance.

            Like I said, Hannah’s story is pretty far removed from my life, but the human element of conflict is still there. We all understand that. When we don’t have such a direct personal conflict we have the conflicts of being citizens of this country and this world. In the present time we don’t even have the luxury of one “Walter Cronkite” reliable source of news, so we have to work extra hard to discern which slant on a story is acceptable and there is no longer a “That’s the way it is,” voice to reassure us. Sometimes our conflict is not knowing the “way it is.” And all of us, because of the uncertainties, create our own conflicts because we are, like it or not, human beings with big inclinations toward sin, not trusting the author of our faith. Our conflicts, no matter how they are presented to us, create friction. We get over 40, 50, 60, whatever, it starts building and we end up taking blood pressure medication, getting joint replacement surgeries, stents put in our arteries… I don’t need to tell you any of that. That’s a result of conflict that builds. So:

“My heart rejoices in the Lord;
    in the Lord my horn[a] is lifted high.
My mouth boasts over my enemies,
    for I delight in your deliverance.

            As you know, I taught English for over 35 years, so I am one who loves a good story. No matter how dull our lives may seem to us, we are still the characters of an amazing story. Those conflicts make us who we are. Hannah didn’t just whine about her situation, she prayed and worked to have her conflict resolved. We are called to do the same thing. Anna Vowels sent me a recent NPR article about Julia “Hurricane” Hawkins, a retired teacher from Louisiana who just set the female record for her age category in the 100-meter dash. She crossed the line in a minute, 2.95 seconds. She said she was disappointed because she wanted to break a minute. Julia was the first woman over 105 to run the 100-meter dash. We have to just persevere in living, in praying, in believing. Julia said she wanted to get the message across that you have to stay active and healthy to be happy. You have to work with what you have. As people of faith the question for us isn’t whether or not the glass is half full or half empty, but what to do with all the water flowing out the top. Our cups are overflowing!

“My heart rejoices in the Lord;
    in the Lord my horn[a] is lifted high.
My mouth boasts over my enemies,
    for I delight in your deliverance. (This is worth memorization, a mantra when you’re feeling down.)

            We are in the middle of a story of which we know the ending, but the particulars of getting there have a way of overwhelming us so that we forget. We don’t know all the particulars, so we need to persevere. We need to keep reading the book that is our lives and do it like 105-year-old Julia, staying active and healthy; doing it like Hannah, maybe shedding a few tears but praying fervently.

I’m just going to re-read Hebrews here:

Hebrews 10:11-25

11 Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 12 But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, 13 and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool. 14 For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.

15 The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:

16 “This is the covenant I will make with them
    after that time, says the Lord.
I will put my laws in their hearts,
    and I will write them on their minds.”[a]

17 Then he adds:

“Their sins and lawless acts
    I will remember no more.”[b]

18 And where these have been forgiven, sacrifice for sin is no longer necessary.

A Call to Persevere in Faith

19 Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22 let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

            The last part of that says so much about our perseverance: “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together…” We are doing the right thing by being here. Our job is to share love and good deeds, not worry about all the conflict, which we know is greatly reduced by love and good deeds. I do believe in being responsible citizens, but not worried citizens. I was reading comments at the bottom of an online article (never a good idea) and the person said that the COVID vaccine was the mark of the beast. I will not add more commentary to that.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples that everything is going to be “thrown down” when they were commenting on the amazing structure of the temple. We know that happened in both the sense of the temple being destroyed and Jesus body being crucified. But then (in verse 5), “5 Jesus said to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. 6 Many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and will deceive many. 7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 8 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains.” We’re feeling the beginning of birth pains, but we should not be deceived by crazy rantings in the comment section of online articles.

            I have run several marathons and the worst thing that anyone could ever say to me when I hit the 20th mile was, “Only six more to go!” If you have run 20 miles, the next six are going to be twice as hard as the first 20 so it’s not “only six more.” It might as well be 90 more. Even if we really are close, we have a long, hard way to go. But we’ve got this. And that’s what we need to remember.

Jesus also told the disciples in Matthew 24: 36 “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,[f] but only the Father.” If we get caught up in the difficulty of our conflicts we start looking at our glass and missing the water trickling over the sides, then imagining it to be less than full, that maybe we are running on empty. That is crazy talk. We probably miss this part of the 23 Psalm, but it’s the best part.

4 Even though I walk
    through the darkest valley,  (the valley of the shadow of death)
I will fear no evil,
    for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
    they comfort me.

5 You prepare a table before me
    in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
    my cup overflows.
6 Surely your goodness and love will follow me
    all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
    forever.”

So, like Hannah, we need to pray: “My heart rejoices in the Lord;
    in the Lord my horn[a] is lifted high.
My mouth boasts over my enemies,
    for I delight in your deliverance.

Our job now is to do as the author of Hebrews exhorted us to do: “23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” And why not? We know the end. Our cups overflow! We’ve got this because he’s got this and he’s got us. Amen 

210. Ice Cream

I am a fan of ice cream—good old American ice cream. The standard flavors found in a Neapolitan blend are our tradition—vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry—but we’ve gone way beyond that now. There was a time when I would probably eat it every day, but now I’ve learned to make it more an occasional, celebratory treat because too much of a good thing is probably not the best for you.

Fond childhood memories include summer gatherings with a hand crank ice cream freezer. We would put the creamy mixture of milk and cream and vanilla and sugar in a canister—usually add some huckleberries or chocolate or maybe pureed peaches—put it in the freezer, then surround the canister with ice cubes that had layers of rock salt thrown in, and then everyone would take a turn cranking the freezer until it just couldn’t be turned anymore. The canister would come out of the slush and the paddle would be pulled from the now frozen mixture and it was all like a magic trick with a delicious end result.

At other times ice cream was that wonderful soft serve from the drive-in that would magically swirl into a cone that the server might sometimes dip into a chocolate syrup that would harden over the ice cream. We would walk down the street trying terribly hard to balance our desire to cool down with the cone, our tongues slathered in white, while also eating it just fast enough that not a drop would mar the sidewalk.

It seems like now, in adulthood, that I am the only one in the family with such intense devotion to the frozen treat. Not that everyone doesn’t enjoy their pie a la mode, but none of them seem to relish it quite the way I do. Complaints of it hurting their teeth or freezing their brains seem nearly ludicrous to me.

Now that I’m older I don’t fiddle too much with making ice cream, though I will try it in new ways now and then. More likely I’ll buy a half gallon or go to a shop to get my fill. I have very much enjoyed gelaterias in Italy. They really know how to hit the citrus flavors out of the ballpark and I have not found any gelato here in the states that comes close to those limon and arancia flavors of Italy. But, of course, I seldom go to Italy. Another distant but favorite ice cream shrine for me is Ben and Jerry’s in Vermont. It even has a cemetery of discontinued flavors, making it seem like a real church! But again, how often do I get to Vermont? I get to England more often than I get to Vermont.

My favorite place around here is Ferdinand’s at Washington State University in Pullman. They have the best creamy ice cream I’ve ever had, for a price next to nothing compared to other ice cream shops. You can get a scoop of Cougar Tracks in a dish and have enough to share with a friend. To order two scoops would mean giving up your next meal and calling your cardiologist to set up an appointment for a stent! There’s also another great shop in Moscow and Sandpoint called Panhandle Cone and Coffee that I enjoy, but it’s their flavors that make them unique. You will definitely pay the price of a trendy tourist town when you get there. And I’ll even go for a scoop at Baskin and Robbins if I can find one. I can’t say I’m overly picky, but I do have my favorites. I could never go to Elk River without stopping at the General Grocer and getting some huckleberry soft serve. At any rate, I certainly do love ice cream.

209. Road Trips

Americans love driving and cars and road trips. I am no different. While I don’t go crazy over the cars themselves, I love road trips. As I get older I can’t go the great distances in a single non-stop stretch so I may enjoy the road trip even more because I do have to stop every couple of hours or more to stretch. Those stops make me look around a little more. I see trees that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. I stop at rest areas and observe people (I love to watch people), sometimes talking to them and finding out a little bit about them.

The reason I started realizing I love road trips is because I just went to Boise and back over an extended weekend. That’s a road trip I frequently take and therefore take for granted, but I shouldn’t because Idaho is beautiful. The trip was for the purpose of state cross country and I extended the sty after the meet to celebrate my youngest son’s 23^rd birthday. Every road trip has a purpose, so sometimes you forget to enjoy the drive but I’m not doing that so much anymore.

Road trips are a thing I’ve don all of my life. My parents took me on a road trip to North Carolina from Idaho when I was six months old. I obviously remember none of it. We came back to Idaho when I was three and I don’t remember that road trip either, but that’s probably when I began to view road trips as part of life.

When I was 23 I went on my first cross country road trip, travelling from Idaho to Vermont across the interstate highway system. I saw the Badlands of North Dakota for the first time. I watched the sunset over the Missouri River in Bismarck and was amazed at the extreme beauty of the Great Plains. I saw fields of fireflies in Illinois that looked like Tinker Bell had just sprinkled pixie dust over them. I never remember seeing such a sight before or since. I learned that Pennsylvania really is a vast expanse of forested land and I actually fell in love with a part of the country that I had previously thought over populated. The Green Mountains of Vermont are beautiful and Vermont is every bit as rural as Idaho.

A couple of years later I did another road trip to Vermont and New England with my wife. We saw the Great Lakes for the first time together. We camped in Quebec. We walked through Manhattan holding hands, terrified of being separated, then explored the Museum of Modern Art and the heights of the Empire State building.

In this century I took my family to England where we rented a car and drove to Italy and back. We ferried the English Channel to drive through fields of sunflowers in France. We boated in Venice. We rode a cogwheel train to the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland. We learned how fortunate we are to live in America where people adhere to traffic laws!

Of course, there are countless road trips we do every year. Trips to Boise. Trips to Seattle. Trips through Montana to eastern Idaho. Trips to Oregon to see family. They all have their own stories of bonding, of wild weather, of beauty, of monotony. I love road trips and I have never really thought of it much before, but I’m fortunate to have the chance to drive the open road.

 

208. Halloween

 Halloween isn’t a particularly American holiday, but here in the US it’s celebrated in a unique way unlike any other place in the world. When I wrote my entry about autumn I mentioned that autumn is the time when we recognize the brevity of life but also the abundance of life. On the church calendar November 1 is All Saints Day, so October 31 becomes All Saints Evening or Hallowed Evening or Hallowe’en. I don’t think the average American does much thinking about Halloween as a religious holiday, but it is and it is filled with all of the superstitions that often accompany any of our ancient Christian thought. If the day of remembering the saints is November 1, it naturally follows that the spirits of evil will want to do all they can to interfere with that. The jack-o-lantern is one of the things to ward off those evil spirits. So, we carve pumpkins into scary faces and put candles in them to frighten away evil spirits. Children dress up as all kinds of things—perhaps representing those evil spirits, so to ward off their evil “tricks” we give them candy or trinkets, hence the game of “trick or treat.” It’s a ton of fun and we get all kinds of candy out of the deal, but clearly, we haven’t thought it all out or we wouldn’t want our children parading around as evil spirits. It’s a charade. (Though after teaching for 35 years it does seem appropriate to me. 😉)

Adults have also taken hold of the trick or treating and dress up. It can be a time of overt sexuality—a kind of suppressed desire party time where we can acknowledge our own sense of being “evil spirits.” The timing of the holiday with the weather and the falling leaves is perfect. We also pull a lot of our southern Mexican neighbors Day of the Dead—dio de los Muertos—traditions into our Halloween. They are, of course, both fully a part of All Saints Day.

I like all of that duality of human nature—the idea of spirituality on the brink of evil. I like that we celebrate it in the fall at the end of October when all that life in the trees is falling to the ground in a display of colors. I love taking my recently harvested pumpkins and carving silly faces into them and using them as lanterns around my house—inside and out. I love raking the leaves from the lawn and stuffing them into jack-o-lantern leaf bags to decorate my lawn even more. There’s an impossibly strewn recklessness about the yard with corn stalks tied to posts, leaves all over the place, and the scent of harvested pumpkins and apples blended with spices. For me it’s also the time for coaching my cross-country runners and taking some of them to the state meet, this year in Boise. My youngest son was also born on the 30^th so it’s just a big celebration for my family around Halloween. And I love all the blend of colors in real life and their representation in the ideas of the “quick and the dead,” how we’re all connected through the cyclical nature of life—birth and death. We’re just running around in a flurry of fallen leaves and composting into a rich pumpkin spice or apple cider. I know some people get a little creeped out by all of the supposed evil in it, but I love that it is a true recognition of what we are: a mixed bag of tricks and treats. That’s what I love about the American celebration of Halloween.

 

207. Water

I love water. I know that’s not a particularly American thing, but an earthly thing by which I am haunted. I was born on the shores of Payette Lake in McCall, Idaho and raised on the banks of the Salmon and Little Salmon rivers. The water in Idaho has always had a purity that as I age is gradually being muddied by politics. That makes me angry and I do what I can to prevent it.

The waters where I have lived sometimes bubble forth from the ground in hot springs. In winter as a child I had the privilege of being able to soak in hot baths that were naturally heated in the earth. In summer I was able to swim in lakes and rivers. We used to take tire inner tubes and float down the Salmon and Little Salmon rivers. Sometimes, on trips to Boise, we would float the Boise River as it slowly drifted through all the parks as if we were in a wilderness. Water and the waterways around me have always been akin to freedom of want or worry away from the craziness of human strife. I have spent hours drifting on Payette Lake, Lake Coeur d’Alene, Lake Pend O’Reille, Priest Lake and countless alpine lakes in the mountains of the Northwest and western Canada. A good vacation for me is to go anywhere there is a large body of water.

Of course, I also love to drink water and I find it maddening that anywhere in the United States there would be municipal waters unfit for drinking. What happened in Flint, Michigan is simply criminal and enrages me that such a thing would happen out of negligence or greed in this country.  Yet I am certain it does happen in small towns across the country on a daily basis, not just a one-off boil order that one might not be surprised by after a flood or natural disaster.

I believe in protecting our waters. It amazes me the stories of people in the mining district of North Idaho and their outbreaks of cholera in the early 20^th century. People have known forever that you don’t ingest your own feces, yet they would drink the water downstream from where they knew the privies dropped right into the river? We still do stupid stuff like that to our water only now big corporations or municipal governments hide it because we all know that it is dangerous. So, I try to stay apprised of what is going on with water here in Idaho. I want it to stay clean. While I seldom fish anymore, I still want others to be able to do so. I still want to camp on the shores of Priest Lake and watch for trout. I want Redfish Lake to again turn red with the annual return of Sockeye salmon.

Water in my part of the world is a precious resource because the western part of North America is largely desert and the mountains serve to scrape off the moisture of Pacific storms, preserving it in snow pack and glaciers that thaw in summer to green our otherwise barren lands. I love that. I don’t want to lose that for myself, for my children, or for any of my descendants. I want to be taken to the north shore of Payette Lake during a full moon and swim in the moonlit waters. I want to canoe from the north shores of lower Priest Lake to the upper Priest and watch for bear and moose on the shores. I want to stand on the edge of the Snake River Canyon and feel the mist of Shoshone falls wetting my face. American waters, Northwestern waters, Idaho waters provide me life and haunt my being. I love that. 

206. American Movies

 

American movies are the best. I love going to a big screen cinema, dishing out more money than I should, and being captivated by an entirely different world. That’s something I have missed terribly over the past year and a half, having only attended one movie in all that time. It was Minari and it was really good in spite of all the subtitles.

Movies are funny, terrifying, heartwarming, or intensely sorrowful. Marlon Brando is the most handsome, captivating Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire as he screams out Stella’s name on the streets of New Orleans. Meg Ryan is hilarious as she mimics an orgasm for Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally. Who doesn’t get teary when Liam Neeson, as Oskar Schindler feels terrible that he couldn’t save more people at the end of Schindler’s List? Sure, they’re milking emotions with not only the acting, but the cinematography, but that’s what you’re paying for, never mind that you paid more than four times the amount of money that you should have for the greasy over-salted popcorn. You are sobbing when Bradley Cooper’s character is shot by one of the very PTSD victims he’s trying to help in the more realistic American Sniper. Chris Kyle’s book is more real than ever when you see and hear the emotions of someone torn apart by war. And yes, maybe too many of us are gullible enough to believe some of the hype added by cinema—certainly we all are in the viewing moment. But thank you for letting us escape the underlying fears of pandemics to be escorted with a Korean immigrant family to 1970’s Arkansas.

There are a lot of things in the world that can overwhelm and depress us, but just a few bucks, a dark room, and a flickering screen can momentarily let us forget all that. The movies can be thought provoking, helping us to approach daily life a little better. So many of them are just visual love letters to the world and we are their recipients. Some movies really stand out to me. I love certain actors also. Robin Williams, Billy Crystal and Dustin Hoffman always make me laugh. Meryl Streep and Glenn Close make me think. Marlon Brando, Brad Pitt and Robert Redford have a way of making me simultaneously envious and enthralled. I love A River Runs Through It. It brings my own childhood and life into perspective. Franco Zefferelli has always been able to make Shakespeare seem like a close friend with his films Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. I already told you I love Elia Kazan’s Streetcar Named Desire. I don’t think Stephen Spielberg has ever gone wrong with any move he’s ever made from ET to Schindler’s List.

I’ve made do with my TV and DVD player over the past year and revisited some favorites but the small screen in the living room isn’t quite the same. I look forward to movie releases on the big screen because I’m not one to subscribe to every streaming service that comes out with a new movie that I’d like to see. There are so many old ones out there that I don’t need to be paying extra money for movies I’d prefer to see on the big screen. I really do love the cinema and American movies.

205. Fall

Fall in the US is a favorite season of mine. The thing that makes it different from other places in the world is how we elevate it in stature. All the seasons here are wonderful and when you live in the northern part of the country there are four very distinct seasons, but fall is set aside differently here even in name. Every other country calls it autumn, but we call it either.

Here we get very excited about the change from summer to fall with all of our back to school things that mainly go with our consumer tendencies, most of which I have found very annoying (mostly because I was a teacher and not at all ready for school, let alone clothing and school supply sales). But plenty of other things that I relish come up with the autumnal equinox. Rain and/or snow usually come some time with the equinox to moisten the parched western lands of the US putting out wild fires and clearing the air. You can buy all things pumpkin spice in the stores and coffee shops. The leaves begin to turn into the brilliant golds and reds. The nights get longer and people start to get excited about the unknown spiritual world by promoting Halloween and the Day of the Dead celebrations. And I’m no different. I love all of that.

As a gardener, I begin the final harvest. I decorate my yard and patio with corn stalks and leaves gathered in pumpkin bags. I bake more cakes and cookies with pumpkin, carrots, and squash. I mull cider. I celebrate the hunt that I don’t partake in, but so many of my friends and family do.

Fall is the season of cross country when I coach teen athletes to run their best. It’s when I get in my best shape as a runner and often run my own races. We typically have beautiful Indian Summers here at the end of September and beginning of October when the nights are crisp and cold and the days are sunny and warm. Those sorts of days are made more intensely beautiful by the deep blue skies and the rich autumn foliage. That perfect weather with the fullness of harvest and the hunt makes you want to run and celebrate life.

And celebrating life against the contrast of death is really what an American fall is all about. We recognize the brevity of life in the rituals of Halloween and our Hispanic heritage of Deo de los Muertos, yet we enjoy its fullness in our Thanksgiving celebrations when we roast a turkey and create a gathering of families thankful for the harvest, for food, for each other, for life.

Those are the reasons I love fall. It’s the apex of life and death contrasted deeply by the colors all around and the cold nights and warm days. The contrast brings about a rich celebration that makes me want to get up with the sunrise and stay up into the cold night around a blazing fire with a cup of mulled cider. And American fall just seems like an extended celebration of everything we have with a deep recognition of its brevity. I think it’s the beauty of all of those deep contrasts and the way we recognize them in America that makes me love fall.

 

204. Family

Of course it goes without saying that most Americans love their families. That’s absolutely true for me. Obviously our whole lives revolve around our families, no matter how they function—and it’s different for every one of us. I don’t really believe the term dysfunctional should apply to a family because that would assume an ideal exists which is impossible because each of us is so incredibly different. Those unique quirks we share with our families are what make us stick together as a unit. I have family members that I hardly know and yet the few times we’ve even met it’s like we have an entire lifetime in common.

Case in point: I have lived in this part of Idaho for all of my life with a few meanderings that have introduced me to different regions of the country and world. My family has lived here for four generations before me, so I have relatives all over this part of the state. We might not immediately know we’re related but if we strike up a conversation we know we’ll have common people we know, then we’ll hear names and that’s it: we just know. Suddenly I will note resemblances in eyes, height, hair, or who knows what. I told my great aunt the other day at a family celebration of her sister’s 90^th birthday that I know I’m going blind because I have macular degeneration. She told me I got that from her side of the family and we spent ten minutes talking about her aunt that I remember was blind as a bat when I was just a little boy. We told a few jokes at that aunt’s expense and it oddly enough brought comfort to my own aging process and what I can expect and how I might handle all of that.

My dad is from Connecticut but he grew up here in Idaho. When I was going to graduate school in Vermont it only made sense that I would go visit my dad’s brother in Connecticut whom I had only met once before. Of course I wasn’t surprised that he looked exactly like my dad except for being a few inches shorter, but I was amazed that they had the same wood stove, similar recliners and napping routines yet very different accents. All I could do for the time I was there was talk about those comparisons so I could tell my dad who really didn’t know his brother much better than I did.

I know families are never perfect. Everyone has felt the intense judgement of relatives, sometimes to the point of needing to escape. Everyone has felt the familial punishment and shame. But hopefully most of us have felt the forgiveness and understanding that comes from our family, the intense familiarity. I know my family has a love hate relationship with alcohol and few of us have achieved balance with it (though I hope I have). Some family members have died quite young due to alcoholism and there have been intense family interventions that have brought deep shame and sorrow. We also seem to suffer depression and have felt a great amount of pain at the number of us who have committed suicide. I have no doubt that my family has helped that terrible statistic of gun deaths for Idaho. But while we are here, we understand each other, love each other and try to be around for each other even if it’s only holidays, family reunions, and weddings and funerals. I feel so fortunate to have the great extended family that I do.

203. Coaching

The only thing I’ve ever done longer than teach school has been to coach. I was going to say the only thing that pays, but the salary for coaching high school or junior high school has mainly been a reimbursement for costs associated with the job that I have incurred. But I don’t complain about that because I still love to coach. I know that when I was in school I had some coaches that I really loved and others that I liked well enough but didn’t feel overly inspired by. I suspect I have had kids of both those persuasions under my tutelage.

Of course, the thing I loved in school and the thing I still love to coach is running. I have always loved teaching kids skills that I know, many of which I still practice but obviously not all. I’m pretty worthless at high jumping, shot putting or throwing a discus. I have never been able to pole vault, yet I coached kids based on what I observed and what I knew about jumping and that vicarious knowledge, their trust in me, and their own skills made them successful. That’s what I really love about coaching. It’s very much the same as teaching, except as a coach you almost immediately expect your athletes to exceed your abilities and to rely on you more for your observation skills to guide rather than innate abilities and knowledge. Unlike teaching you expect your tutors to be better at what they are doing than you are at doing it. You expect that almost immediately. That’s what makes it so exciting and challenging.

While coaching is very much the same as teaching, it is a little different in that a coach can’t really be expected to be able to do everything they ask of their athlete. A teacher is supposed to know what they are teaching and be able to do it while a coach may only know how to suggest something, not actually do it. Coaching requires subtly different skills. The coach must know the ins and outs of the athlete as well as the activity they are coaching. The coach is playing a chess game with living, breathing chess pieces. Because of that, coaching is very fascinating. Of course, a good coach loves not only the sport but their athletes as well. That’s how they get the best out of them and that is also why athletes admire their coaches so much. So, of course, some coaches and athletes sync up better than others because of their personal connections. While this is somewhat true of the student teacher relationship, it doesn’t need to be. A student or teacher can be completely indifferent to the other yet learning can occur. It’s very difficult to get the best out of an athlete if there is no sense of personal admiration and investment.

Also, coaches can be odd ducks with one another. There are many who are condescending and not people I would care to spend much time with. I suppose much of that comes from the fact that coaches are somewhat in competition with one another. Teachers, on the other hand, are almost always people that I would enjoy spending time with because they are innately able and willing to accept you as you are. A coach is probably looking for something quite specific and will have no problem giving you a cold shoulder. Not that a teacher can’t do that as well, they have a severe time limitation and might brush you off out of self-preservation rather than a competitive nudge. My experience with coaches has taught me that we can be a different sort, but that’s not a bad thing at all. I might not like every coach I meet, but I love the job of coaching.

 

202. American Youth

I love the youth of America—really the world, but I’ll focus on home. (Having the great privilege of teaching a year in England, I quickly learned that people are really the same wherever you go.) I spent my entire working career investing everything I have in American teenagers and I absolutely love everything about them (including the fact that they grow up and become adults!). Right now my heart aches so much for them because they are living through one of the most terrifying periods of history that is full of anger and fear, so I really can’t let them go just because I’ve retired from teaching. I love the resiliency of young people in spite of society’s constant need to categorize them based on academic test scores. Most kids don’t care one iota about their test scores unless they get something more out of it than societal fear mongering that our country is falling apart and we are failing our youth. Our youth seem to fend very well for themselves. I love that about them.

Young people are alternately suspicious and excited about the adult world. In America we unwittingly encourage that by enticing everyone with alluring ads that make things look far more wonderful than they are and constantly telling our youth that they are too young to engage in such activities. What kids see is a mix of burned out adults strung out on alcohol, tobacco, sex, etc. and they can read through all the garbage of advertising to see the reality, yet sometimes, like all of us, they fall for it. Usually they know exactly why adults tell them they aren’t old enough: because adults are strung out. Youth know the difference between protection and outright lies.

Sure, young people experiment with things and as parents and adults that scares us. We don’t want our kids to be addicts to anything and we shouldn’t. But experimentation leads to knowledge, so our job needs to be guidance, both from experience and a true love for humanity. There is a great deal of joy at all things new with young people, just as there is a great fear of things that are, in the end, meaningless and something that time will eradicate—being bullied because you are different or feeling inadequate because of some feeling that isn’t even real. While all of that joy and fear balled up into one young person is terrifying, it is also inexpressibly beautiful to me and I see its fruition every day when a former student, now an electrician, fixes a light in my home, or a nurse, a former student, helps me with an illness. The beautiful people whom I love are constantly growing up and taking charge. They are America. I am astounded at the beauty and courage of the young people here in my home and very proud to have been a part of their lives in any great or small way.

There’s no doubt that kids in packs can seem sulky, intimidating, and downright frightening as they hang in glowering groups daring you to acknowledge them. Some of them will even seemingly jeer at you. And we will always think today’s kids are worse than when we were kids all while telling stories of horrible things that we did when we were young. The truth is that all that fear of ridicule still resides in us and that kids are the same now as always. The beauty is that they are made of penetrable stuff, that they can see that just as we can, that they are able to move mountains, that they will move mountains. I am enamored of young people. 

201. Scenic Six Park, Potlatch, Idaho

When I started making a list of all the things I really appreciate and love about my country, I started with the big obvious things and after a point I had to get down to the nitty gritty of my daily life to actually explain to myself what it is that makes me tick and appreciate my day to day life that just happens to be in America.

When I moved to Potlatch 29 years ago there was only one little park down below the elementary school, along with a playground that the city and school district jointly shared as what was basically a park. The city acquired land from the Potlatch Corporation (the two, city and company, were originally synonymous) to build a park. The land had an old depot on it that is still there within the newly acquired park land next to Idaho Highway 6. That highway is a scenic byway through the White Pine forests of northern Idaho, so the park was named Scenic 6 Park. The community rallied around that park. It’s a good-sized recreational space for a little town of 800 residents with a walking path along the circumference of the park, just under a mile. There are two baseball/softball fields with lights, a beach volleyball court, a pickle ball court, exercise equipment along the walking path, a disc golf course, a splash pad, and plenty of space. There are also small rental cabins surrounding an RV park that has restrooms, showers, and access to laundry facilities in the depot. The depot also has a full kitchen and group dining area.

This is the park that eventually took the place of the awkward dirt track surrounding the football field and I was the coach who first measured out the distance increments on the walking path. Eventually I gave up coaching track to exclusively focus on cross country and now the park is the place I use for our meets. I go to this park nearly every day to take walks with my wife and son. I have attended community celebrations there, watched little league games there, and ran there. Now there is a pavilion detailing the history of Potlatch near the RV park, so I often direct people there to get an idea of the history of the town and its roll in developing the timber industry of the Northwest. There are trees and benches in the park that have little plaques in memory of the people in the town or classes from the school. There is a little pond that a friend of mine made in honor of his deceased wife and now it also honors his memory after his death. It's filled with gold fish and water lilies and has a little walking bridge to cross it to a small picnic area. When you drive into the park there is a huge flag pole and flag that waves proudly in the breeze and nearby is a memorial for all those who served our country in the military. Just behind that is a little log cabin and privy that honors the pioneers that settled this part of the Palouse well before there was ever a mill town. And, of course, there is a beautiful rose garden beside the walking path and the railroad tracks that is bordered by Iris that bloom beautifully in the late spring. This park now is beginning to have shade from all the trees planted over twenty years ago. I just love this place and how it has become a part of my existence over the past several years.

 

 

200. Poetry

I really love poetry. With poetry you can say hundreds of thousands of things with few words as you evoke images in the minds of readers. I love to read poetry and see what I can of what the author intended. I love to write poetry by just tinkering with thoughts on paper and playing with the words for days on end, perhaps years. While it’s easy to fixate on ideas and images in a poem for a few days it’s also fun to set them aside for a long while and see if you can even remember what the fixation was, see if the poem can bring all of that back or was it as insubstantial as a mist? If it holds some of the ideas you can call it good or you can work with it some more. Poems are living, breathing works of art that gain their life, not from the author alone, but also from the readers. So many poems just wash up on the shore as good as a bit of plastic while others take on new shapes from the beatings of the waves and sand.

American poetry is quite different from other English forms even as it clings to the similarities of the shared language. A favourite poem in Canada may evade any favoritism in the United States, yet another might plant poppies all over the world from Flanders, Belgium to Potlatch, Idaho all because of a Canadian poet who has us weeping for the lost generation of young men over a century ago. That same thing applies to an American poem. Say “Nevermore” anywhere in the English-speaking world and images of ravens will pop into the heads of most of the listeners. All of the practising of writing in England might do nothing for the practicing of writing in the United States, yet it may also bequeath the eternal question, “To be or not to be?” The subtleties of the simple spelling of a word might evoke an accent, a way of seeing things, an Americanism that an American simply won’t notice until it’s pointed out by someone of the same tongue in a foreign land. The lives of the words are made by the lives of the speakers as they write and as they read. It’s truly remarkable, truly beautiful.

I have often written sketchy, bad poems in my journal only to return to a single image that held on to me and caused me to return over and over to the same bad poem just tweaking a word, phrase, or line here or there only to come back and shift it a little more. At the same time that little poem shifts things in me so that I think about something differently than I ever had before. When someone reads a poem and actually hears/sees the poetic presentation their thoughts are likely to change just a little bit as well. Poems do that to people just like the author does it to the poem. The good poems outlive the author and continue to influence others for years, maybe centuries into the future. I’m still being affected by a reclusive woman in Massachusetts who hardly published any of her poems in her lifetime, yet her family had them published after her death and now they are in American high school text books imprinting their images of “Hope is the thing with feathers.” That crazy white-haired dude from New York who traipsed all about the country and mourned bitterly at the assassination of Lincoln, “Oh Captain! my Captain!” still has his voice sounding on Levi’s commercials. And what of the living poets who tweak my thoughts with poems about their Cuban grandmother telling them not to act a certain way? I’m just constantly, daily immersing myself in the lives of poets who are living still, even as the last breaths have expired from their bodies as they left those beautiful little collections of words with me, with us. I simply love poetry. 

199. Clocks

 

I am not an horologist by any means, but I really like clocks and watches. To me, clocks are mesmerizing with their constant ticking and spinning. I love the face of a clock with the numbers, or implied numbers, traditional or Roman, looking at you, reminding you that time is slipping away. Perhaps they are just a softer version of the Grim Reaper symbols on old tombstones, but I like that softer reminder that you need to slow down and enjoy what you have because it won’t last.

The way clocks have changed our language and thinking is also very interesting to me as a student and teacher of language. In the old days time wasn’t spoken of as precisely as it is now. You could tell the hour on a sun dial or by looking at the placement of the sun or stars in the sky but the precise minute or second wasn’t known or even thought about. By the Middle Ages clocks were being put into cathedrals in Europe and if you asked what time it was the response would be, “It is the eighth hour of the clock,” which gradually became shortened to how we speak now saying it is “eight o’clock.” Of course, no one had a clock in their home or a watch on their wrist, they just had to go to the cathedral close or into the cathedral itself to where they would see a clock. Sometimes the face of the clock had all 24 hours and sometimes twelve, so that is also when we began to speak in terms of am and pm. Many of the clocks (most are still there) would have little scenes played out. I know of one in England where two knights are jousting and the defeated one gets knocked off his horse (or maybe he gets his head knocked off?). I admire the stamina because he has kept getting back up for over eight hundred years now.

Of course, I have my own collection of watches to contribute to my fascination. I do not have a terribly large collection of clocks because I’m the only one in my household who enjoys the constant ticking from a collection of clocks. But I do have a few clocks as well. When I was younger in my early teens I wanted a watch but I couldn’t bear to have something on my wrist (that has since changed) so my parents bought me a pocket watch which I still use. When I got my first job as a teacher I bought myself a Casio wrist watch that is digital so that I could have a stop watch for timing my runs and my track athletes. When I got married my grandmother gave me my great grandfather’s pocket watch that I remember him using when I was a child setting on his lap. He would speak Nez Perce to me, though I had no idea what he was saying. Later in life my wife bought me a nice watch for our anniversary and another Casio that is a combination digital and analog for a birthday. I got a watch from the teacher’s union for being the lead negotiator for our first contract. I also have a Mickey Mouse watch from Disney World. I did have a wrist watch for every day of the week, but I gave one away to the new union president upon my retirement—an Idaho Education Association watch that had more meaning as the local president and didn’t seem something to wear anymore. All of my watches have special significance to me, but just the idea of a watch or a clock in general has special meaning to me.

I guess clocks just feel like the comfort of life, the comfort of time in history and the simple passing of each moment that we need to be aware of. I know sometimes they just remind us we are late, but they also remind us that we are. I love clocks.