229. Reclining Chairs

I have a reclining chair that I really appreciate. It’s getting old and a little worn, a little dirty, but it’s very comfortable. My youngest son who also lives with us has a reclining chair of his own. My wife has a love seat that reclines and we very specifically bought it for her when she was having breast cancer surgery because it is electronic so she could recline without having to use her arms that could have agitated her surgery site. Reclining chairs bring all sorts of comfort to us and we use them so frequently that it seems like they are extensions of ourselves. Needless to say, I love reclining chairs.

There’s nothing more comforting to me than to sit in a reclining chair in the afternoon, perhaps after doing some yard work or going for a run. I will sit there in comfort, recline, and sometimes take a nap. It’s as easy to sleep in as my bed. In fact, when I had my heart surgery I did sleep in it at night for nearly a week. I was so doped up that I slept in it most of the days as well. I can sleep in any easy chair, there’s no doubt—and I often do—but they can’t support your lower back like a bed or recliner, so getting a good nap in a non-reclining easy chair just doesn’t work as well.

My recliner is where I go to other worlds when I watch television or movies or read a book. I learn the news of the world in that chair as I read a newspaper or news magazine or watch the news or listen to news on the radio.

To me, a recliner represents a home. That recliner can be the comfort of anyone’s home and my recliner is particular to my home. Home is a place of comfort, a place of solace, a place of sanctity to the individual. The ultimate place of comfort and solace and sanctity in one’s own home varies with the individual, but for me it is that reclining chair. That’s why I love my recliner.

228. My Stereo

Since I’m starting to realize I have forgotten very basic things for which I am thankful, let me tell you that I am very thankful for my stereo system that I originally bought in 1985. It included a receiver with an equalizer and turntable. I thought about including a CD player, but decided against it because at that time I had none, they were too expensive and the players actually skipped like records if you bumped them which is why the original Sony Walkman was for tapes. Sometime in the nineties I bought a double cassette tape player to go along with it because it seemed crazy that I had tapes that I could only play on a little tape recorder or in my pickup. Of course, I eventually also bought a five CD player that was good enough to match the entire setup. I bought all of this to give me music while I spent time at home grading papers or reading. All of this was very satisfying and I saw no need to have a television. I still loved movies, but I was more than happy to drive to nearby theaters that played the latest blockbusters—places like Coeur d’Alene when I lived in Wallace, or Pocatello when I lived in Malad.

I’ve spent over a year noticing something going out on my stereo system and it’s taken me some time and false purchases of speakers to realize my second receiver is going out. The speakers—at first just one, now both—will just cut out for no apparent reason so I went up to Spokane (it’s very difficult to find stereo component systems anymore) with receiver in tow. We played it and it worked the entire time, so the guy had me fairly convinced it was probably my speakers going out. I bought some new speakers for $700 (I didn’t pay that much for the entire system in the original purchase), brought them home and after a day they, too, began cutting out.

So now I’m planning another trip to Spokane to return speakers and to buy a new receiver, or the recent equivalent… This time it will have blue tooth and Wi-Fi, so not only will I be able to play records, tapes, and CDs, I’ll also be able to stream radio stations and music streaming services either from the device or through my phone via blue tooth. I’ll go back to listen to international radio stations, Spotify, Amazon, Pandora, etc. I haven’t been listening to those streaming services much since I retired and have only a laptop. I don’t know for sure, but it may work for sound while watching streaming movies from my TV without hooking up to a cord, but I will certainly be able to use a cord to the TV if the streaming doesn’t work. This system is definitely going to cost more than I’ve ever spent on the whole thing put together, though probably not so much if I consider inflation (just over the last three months!). I’m excited thinking about it.

I love listening to all the old music from the early part of the 20^th century along with current music. I also just enjoy listening to Classical and Baroque music. I can get lost in the music of Bach and his contemporaries like Vivaldi and Pachelbel. There is something about being surrounded by Baroque music that enhances my ability to focus on a book or studying something. While the classical is best listened to alone since most of my family does not appreciate my period music, they might still find themselves trapped with it every now and then as they always have throughout the years.

I have also been known to rock out to music with the boys when they were little, and even now. Bryson and I used to sing loudly to “Shout it Out” and Forrest loved to be thrown around to “Roll with It, Baby.” I’ve also spent a bit of time just listening to music on the stereo as I contemplate things in life or celebrate the holiday seasons. There are plenty of Bing Crosby Christmas carols and some Gregorian chants that have taken me through sorrow and reminded me of the resurrection. All of that has been brought to my mind with some help from music, music I can play on my stereo system. I definitely love my stereo.

227. Cemeteries

 There is something very pastoral and peaceful about cemeteries. They are almost always in places of quiet beauty and solitude usually on the outskirts of town or on a hilltop out in the country. Often times they are around beautiful old churches with classic or gothic architecture. I know they are typically associated with great sorrow and more often than not people—living people—would rather avoid them than go picnicking there. That isolation could also be part of the appeal to me. Probably the biggest attraction for me at a cemetery is the history quietly tucked away, some of it never to be remembered but much of it memorialized in the tombstones.

I have made it a habit of visiting cemeteries whenever I get the chance. The isolated little town of Riggins, where I grew up, probably helped me escape some sense of cemetery sorrow. There were all kinds of small family plots in the back yards of people’s homes that had originally been old homesteads in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Sometimes I could go hiking up trails near the Salmon River and find a tombstone of some beloved family member whose tombstone long outlasted the homestead that has now been reclaimed by the Forest Service or BLM. I always found this sense of history in a very remote area exceptionally intriguing, just as I found it intriguing that I could hike into alpine lakes that were named after old times that I knew as a child. These remote tombstones were physical connections of my own to the landscape where I lived. They were people whose families I knew even though my own family graves seemed to always be in the cemeteries that, until I was a teen, I never actually went to.

Of course, now some of my visits to cemeteries are specifically to see the graves of those loved ones I have lost in my own life, but that wasn’t always so. As I said, there were several little family cemeteries around where I grew up, but there were also the typical community cemeteries. I think the first of those that began to seem so fascinating were the cemeteries of the several ghost towns in my part of the world—places like Florence, Mount Idaho, Silver City, etc. They often had wooden grave markers and many of them weren’t really all that old now that I think about it (maybe fifty years) because you could sometimes still read them (this was in the nineteen sixties). I wish now that I had known something about cemetery preservation because there is much to be said about a place just by matching a tombstone with a recorded birth or death certificate. Of course, as a child, I had no such notions.

I’ve seen entire community cemeteries where all the old gravestones were in Norwegian or Finnish or Welsh right here in Idaho. In Samaria, Idaho there is a tombstone for the leg of an amputee whose remaining body is also buried across the yard after his subsequent death a few years later. Odd little things like that lend so much character, sometimes humor, and story to a community. In New England, the old slate tombstones from the 1600s and 1700s are more legible than the marble ones from the mid-1800s so that you can gather all kinds of information from the colonial people who were very much aware of the brevity of life as observed on their tombstones with the creepy little death heads, hour glasses, grim reapers and epitaphs. In Deerfield, Massachusetts I saw the stone of a mother and her infant who had died together in childbirth. It was well over 200 years ago, but the clarity of the stone gave me a very real glimpse of the pain that the family suffered from those deaths. While it may be something some would want to shy away from, I find it comforting that these people went through so much pain just so we could exist. And they almost always chose the most beautiful of places to honor and memorialize their living, and I also find that both comforting and fascinating. I truly love cemeteries.

226. Public Schools

It’s hard to believe I’ve waited this long to write about this passion of mine, but it is so obvious that I overlooked it. I love American public schools. I could get specific to Idaho since I spent 35 years teaching in Idaho public schools, but I really love all public schools and their mission—our mission as Americans through our public schools. And I do believe it is our mission. The idea is that we have an independent, critical thinking electorate so that our democracy can thrive. I’m not going to say they are perfect because they are not. I don’t believe there are perfect people and people run our public institutions, including schools. But the aim of public schools is to strive for our “more perfect union.” There are many detractors both obvious and insidious to our schools and those detractors come because we lose sight of the main goal: independent thinkers who know how to get solid, truthful information and put it to use for our democracy, a democracy that is dependent upon debate and compromise rather than strong arming through ideology or autocracy.

All the conflicts that occur in our society are carried out and debated not only in our state legislatures and the halls of congress, but in our public schools. Many people would like religion to be a part of their students’ education but because teaching a particular religion in a school could be conceived (or actually be) indoctrination, religious education has been removed from our schools. I believe a general education of religion would be helpful so that our populace knows what others believe and how their lives are structured, but that has been divorced from our public education, probably because it was done wrong and served, in pockets of the country, to indoctrinate more that educate. I really admire how religious education is done in the UK and I think we could learn a thing or two from our mother country in that regard.

I spent 35 years teaching in public schools, all of those except one, in Idaho, and I still coach cross country at the school I have worked at for the last 29 years. Much of the insight I have about our public-school system is not only from being a student and teacher in that system for over 50 years, but also from teaching abroad in the UK for a year. I love that our schools are more thorough in educating the whole person, though perhaps somewhat weaker than our European counterparts in the religious education aspect. I love that our schools promote critical thinking and independent thinking. I love that our schools encourage creativity through sports and the arts and it drives me crazy that in the past few years we have begun to starve schools of the funding to continue that work at the expense of competitive testing in areas that students naturally feel weak because they ARE weaker due to the nature of their age.

I have been in schools throughout our country and throughout Europe. In general, American students seem happy and they do have strong opinions about their education, feeling they have some voice in it. I think that is important and we need to continue to encourage them. Right now, in Idaho, the tax structure for public schools throughout the state is inequitable for rural and poor school districts and does not meet our constitutional mandate. Our district, along with many other rural districts in the state, is running a levy to go beyond the state funding so that we can continue to offer the full curriculum we do now. I’m going to stand outside a few yards away and ask for signatures for a ballot initiative that would restore corporate income taxes to their original 8% from the current reduced 7.4% to help ensure more equitable funding for public schools in Idaho because I love public schools.

 

 

225. Books

It seems too obvious to me to say this, but I love books. I have a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in English because I love books. I have always loved books from the earliest memories of childhood. I remember children’s books from the late fifties and early sixties with their minimalist color drawings—the kid in Michigan who could never keep from losing one of his red mittens, the little tug boat, the farmer that kept picking up animals in his dump truck. These stories were mostly printed in grays with some red or yellow thrown in. And really? A Michigan winter would be mostly gray with the bright colors of red mittens, wouldn’t it?

As I grew older I went through a spell of not caring so much whether I read or not, so I got stuck on the kids books for awhile because of my little brothers. I remember reading to them once in a while. Dr. Seuss. The Monster at the End of This Book. And then someone directed me toward the Hardy Boys books. I read them like crazy. That meant I had to go to the library. I fell in love with our school library by the time I was in Junior High. Mrs. Clark would lead me to certain books and I would pull them off the shelves and just sit on the shelving stools looking through books until I found the right one and then I would go check it out before going back to class. When I wasn’t looking for a book I would go sit in the library and read during lunch or find a buddy to play chess or checkers with. I just wanted to be in the library surrounded by books, feeling as if their knowledge and adventure would somehow seep into me even if I weren’t reading them. It’s true that I wasn’t such a book nerd that I would take the library over the sunshine, but I got to the point of always having a book in tow. I’m still that way—a book or a magazine.

When it was time to go to college I had a vague notion that I wanted to be a teacher but I didn’t know what to major in. I probably would have majored in library sciences if I even knew what that was, but at that time I did not. I finally settled on English because it meant I could be around books. I took too many English classes at a time and found myself sometimes overwhelmed with books. I learned to read quickly, to skim, and to summarize because I couldn’t possibly read more than one book a day while going to classes, writing papers and working part time. Still, I bought all those novels and anthologies that I still reread and peruse to this day. I have, in fact, amassed a significant library of my own (though I have recently been weeding out books I know I won’t re-read and books I know I’ll never read, because I need space for the new books I’m going to be purchasing.

Something I often do, and missed terribly when my kids were small, is go to bookstores and just look at what’s available. I force myself to not buy more than one for myself, if I buy any at all. I will roam around looking at books—novels, psychology, history, poetry, philosophy, religion, and favorite authors—and find one or two and sit in a chair or just stand with it and read parts of it. If I like it well enough to not be able to put it back on the shelf I’ll buy it. If I can’t decide it means a hard no because I can always get it at the library and read it without adding it to my stacks. But the feel of a book in my hands, the smell of either new or old, perhaps cigarette smoke-stale books seem to send me off into a world I’ve never inhabited before even if I’d read the book before because I have changed.

I love everything about books, that’s really all there is to it.